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Pixel Scroll 1/15/24 The Hypoteneuse of the Squares Of The City Is Equal To The Fifths Of The Other Two Scrolls

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(1) BRINGING UP THE REAR. Cora Buhlert’s latest Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre story is “In Exile”.

… “And then I said, ‘With all due respect, Your Majesty – not that I think you’re due any – you can kiss my…”

“Malcolm, please tell me you didn’t tell the King to kiss your arse?”

“Oh, I was very polite. I said butt.”

“Sigh. Malcolm, you’re unbelievable.”…

(2) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books presents episode 71 of the Simultaneous Times podcast. Stories featured in this episode:

“Cynscout” by KC Grifant with music by Phog Masheeen

“The Almost-Activation of Ruby Valentine’s Catastrophe Machine” by Jenna Hanchey with music by Fall Precauxions

(3) A NEIGHBORHOOD OF DOCTORS. [Item by Steven French.] An interview with the 12th Doctor: “’The government has been too terrible to make fun of’: Peter Capaldi on satire, politics and privilege” in the Guardian.

…Capaldi became famous as the permanently angry spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the BBC comedy The Thick of It, which ran from 2005 to 2012 and, after that, between 2013 and 2017, he played the sternest, least imp-ish Doctor Who in decades. In his new Apple TV show, a police procedural called Criminal Record, which Capaldi co-produced with his wife, Elaine Collins, he stars as an ageing detective: another scowler. Now, coffee in hand, he smiles affectionately. So, did he bump into any other Doctor Whos this morning? “David [Tennant, 10th Doctor] used to live in Crouch End, near me. Matt [Smith, 11th Doctor] lives around here. Jodie [Whittaker, 13th Doctor] is nearby, Christopher [Eccleston, 9th Doctor] too, I think.” But no, no encounters with his fellow alumni this morning, Capaldi says….

(4) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [By Ersatz Culture.] A few recent-ish Chengdu-related items ahead of the release of the Hugo nomination statistics.  NB: with a couple of exceptions, all of the links below are to Chinese language pages.

Chengdu con reports posted by Zero Gravity

A couple of days ago, RiverFlow posted updates to Twitter about the next issues of the Hugo winning fanzine, Zero Gravity.

https://twitter.com/heliu79457845/status/1745951117052453156

Several of the reports which (presumably) will appear in the upcoming issues have already been posted online.  Whilst I don’t think there are any previously-unheard revelations, they do provide further insight into the varying experiences that domestic attendees had.  In the order that they’ve been published online:

The last item isn’t really a con report as such; it’s more of an article about Brian Aldiss’ relationship with China.  It has an interesting tidbit that in 1979 Aldiss was part of a British delegation that had an audience with future-leader Deng Xiaoping.  This meeting was apparently captured on video, and the author ponders whether the recording might still be lurking in a vault somewhere.

The author on left with Ling Shizhen, co-editor of Zero Gravity in the middle.
Chao Xia (right) with Best Artist winner Enzhe Zhao
Dongfang Mu with Robert J. Sawyer
Mo Xiong (left) with Cixin Liu
Sun Saibo in front of a street sign reading ‘Science Fiction Avenue’
Members of Beijing Normal University Science Fiction Society
The Uganda Worldcon bid table

WSJ China features science fiction in their review of the year

In December, the Chinese edition of The Wall Street Journal published the first of a series of articles about notable events in 2023, entitled “Recording the ‘Year of Science Fiction’: Is this year really a new starting point for Chinese science fiction?”  It opens (via Google Translate, with minor manual edits):

In years to come, when people look back on 2023, they will surely notice the weight of science fiction in it.

Since the beginning of the year, there has been the popularity of the movie “The Wandering Earth 2” and the [Chinese, not Netflix] TV adaptation of “The Three-Body Problem”.  “Journey to the West” with only a 2 million yuan [around $300k USD] budget unexpectedly earned over 60 million yuan [around $8.4m USD] at the box office. Phenomenal movies, topics such as the universe, the metaverse, and artificial intelligence continue to gain popularity. Science fiction themes in literary creation are experiencing a “big explosion” in China. People are increasingly talking about the impact of the Internet on everyday life.  Consider the changes that the rapid development of science and technology has had on people…

This year, following Liu Cixin and Hao Jingfang respectively winning the Hugo Awards for Best Novel in 2015, and Best Novelette in 2016, there was once again a Chinese winner, Hai Ya, who won this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Winning [a Hugo] is highest honor for international science fiction writing.

People can’t help but wonder, did the golden age of European and American science fiction end in the last century? Has the secret to its resurrection been found in China today?

The core focus of the piece is the Chengdu Worldcon, and there’s a fair bit about the Chinese Hugo winners – although Enzhe Zhao is seemingly ignored – but the absence of any details or photos from the event makes me think that the author of the article was not in attendance.  There’s also a fair amount about the wider Chinese SF publishing industry.

New Year’s Day run in the vicinity of the con venue

January 1st saw a “welcome run” take place in the grounds of the SF Museum that was the venue for the Worldcon, as reported on Weibo by the Sports Chengdu account.  To the best of my knowledge, there have been no activities in the actual museum itself since the con – other than the Lukyanenko visit covered in a couple of earlier Scrolls – and no future events have been announced, other than the Chinese Nebula/Xingyun conference, previously covered in the December 12th Scroll.

(5) HOWARD WALDROP (1946-2024). Writer Howard Waldrop, creator of many brilliant short sff stories, died of a stroke on January 14 at the age of 77. Howard Waldrop’s classic “The Ugly Chickens” (1980) won a Nebula and World Fantasy Award. Waldrop was also recognized with a World Fantasy lifetime achievement award.

He was a wildly popular program participant at cons. His presentation “Howard Waldrop’s Condensed Cream of 1950s Science Fiction Movies” involved acting out key scenes from a lot of the movies. For 3-D movies, he hid under the table and threw wadded-up paper at the audience. He also was an unsurpassed live reader of his own stories.

Lawrence Person’s Waldrop obituary is especially recommended. However, there is no better introduction to Howard than the one he wrote himself for the now-shuttered SFF Net.

Are they science fiction? Are they fantasy? Are they alternate history? Are they from Mars or from Venus?

In the 1970s and 1980s, Howard Waldrop’s disorientingly strange/familiar stories made him a famous unknown writer.

They racked up best-of-the-year inclusions and award nominations, sometimes several stories a year in different categories. “Custer’s Last Jump” and “Mary Margaret Roadgrader” were nominated for the Nebula in 1977. In 1980, “The Ugly Chickens” captured both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award, and narrowly evaded the Hugo. In 1983, “Ike at the Mike” was up for the Hugo. In 1986, two Waldrop stories, “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” and “Heirs of the Perisphere,” were nominated for the same Nebula award, placing hardcore Waldrop fans in a schizophrenia-inducing double-bind.

Amid such celebrity, Waldrop himself continued to live below poverty level, volunteering for a top-secret study that helped determine the nutritional limits of using integrity as hamburger helper. As part of this historic experiment, he once pulled a story that had already sold to a big-bucks market in order to place it elsewhere for half the price.

Occasionally stories slipped through to higher-paying markets — Playboy, Omni, and the like. Howard compensated for these lapses of vigilance by selling his books only to very-high-quality small presses or to publishers who could be counted on not to distribute them.

Award nominations kept racking up: 1987, “The Lions are Asleep This Night,” for the Nebula. 1988, “Night of the Cooters” for the Hugo. 1989, “Do Ya, Do Ya Wanna Dance” for the Nebula, and 1990, “A Dozen Tough Jobs,” for the same.

And now, SFF.NET, bless its heart, has brought Howard Waldrop to the World Wide Web. So thanks to the wonders of cyberspace, to Howard’s uniquely contrarian marketing savvy, and to his inability to keep his stories off the awards short-lists, Howard Waldrop is now a legendary unknown writer.

Nor should it be forgotten that Waldrop wrote what became the Wild Cards universe’s origin story, “Thirty Minutes Over Broadway” (which I think of as “Jetboy’s Last Adventure”). Bradley Denton got Howard to tell how that happened in “Fifty Minutes Over Manchaca (now Menchaca) Road!”

…HW:  You’ll recall in “The Annotated Jetboy,” where I talk about Danny Deck writing the biography of Jetboy?  Danny Deck is the hero of Larry McMurtry’s novel All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers.  And of course he writes Godot Is My Co-Pilot: A Life of Jetboy.

…Anyway, I was gonna do the Jetboy story about the A-bomb for Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and either Lew or Bud (sf authors Lewis Shiner and Walton “Bud” Simons, both Austin-based at the time, like Howard), I can’t remember which, said, “You should talk to George.  George and that bunch in New Mexico have been playing a superhero role-playing game, and they’ve spent so much time and money on it that they’re trying to find a way to turn it into a book.  You oughta tell him about this Jetboy thing, because it sounds like something that would fit in there.”  If it was Lew I was talkin’ to, he told me to call Bud, and if it was Bud I was talkin’ to, he told me to call Lew.  One or the other of ‘em knew more about it than the other one did, right?

See, I didn’t even know about this.  George hadn’t mentioned it to me in a letter or anything.  So I wrote to George, and I said, “I’ve got a story that might fit with whatever goddamn thing you’re doing.  You should tell me about it.”

So he sent me the prototype Cut and Shuffle, which was all about what was going on in the Wild Cards world before anyone else even knew what it was.  And I said, “Yeah, that sounds about right, I can work with that.  But your timeline is all wrong.”  See, they were gonna start it in the 1980s, with the world having gone on for thirty years.

BD:  Oh, so they weren’t initially going to do an origin story?  They were going to jump into the world of Wild Cards three decades on?

HW:  Right, exactly.  I said, “That’s all wrong!  You gotta tell how all this came about!”  So I got them to tell me all the stuff about Dr. Tachyon, and the virus, and the whole thing, y’know.  And I stuck it sideways into the Jetboy/A-bomb story, and sent it to George.

And of course George says, “When we send you stuff, you should read it!  You got all this stuff wrong!”  I said, “Ah, that’s your job!  You can fix that!”

And he did!

Howard Waldrop

(6) TOM PURDOM (1936-2024). Tom Purdom died January 14. He was 85.

His first published short story, “Grieve for a Man”, appeared in the August, 1957 Fantastic Universe. His first novel was I Want the Stars (1964). His other novels include Five Against Arlane, and The Barons of Behavior. His literary memoir, When I Was Writing, appeared in installments in The New York Review of Science Fiction.

From 1990 to 2023 he had almost three dozen short stories published in Asimov’s.

He served as a Vice President of SFWA in its early years.

His wife, Sara, predeceased him in 2006. He is survived by his son, Christopher.

Filer Mark Roth-Whitworth knew him, and shared these memories on Facebook:

I’ve known the Purdoms since the late Sixties. He was a constant in Philly fandom. In the late seventies, he and his late wife Sara had house parties, as did Winona and her ex, Tom Smith and Viv, and later, when my ex (Morgan’s mother) and I bought a house in the area, we all rotated – was it every Friday but second (the PSFS meeting) having an open house. Michael Swanwick would show sometimes, and then there was the late David Sherman. Not sure when, but Tom built a small harpsichord from a kit.

And he was always there, his loud baritone… and now he’s gone.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 15, 1974 — Shaun Tan, 50. Australian-born and resident Shaun Tan’s one of my favorite artist and writers. Not just for his work which is extraordinarily wonderful, but for being a really nice individual. Tan was an easy choice for the Birthday for this Scroll.

His fiction is all YA. It’s all illustrations with words. Or not, sometimes. Think school libraries as where you’ll find it in Australia. Children love him. School librarians adore him just as much.  

So now some selected works by him that I’ve enjoyed.

The Haunted Playground also known as The Playground would do Stephen King proud if King wrote children’s literature (I don’t think he’s written any, has he?) with one male encountering a larger group of males on a playground that are not what they seem to be. Truly chilling. 

The Arrival has a man coming from a city that might or might not be in Eastern Europe to what might or might not be New York City. The city is awesomely depicted as steampunk. Did I mention that it has no spoken narrative?

The Lost Thing is set in the near future, a dystopian Melbourne. It’s  is a story about Shaun, a kid who doesn’t quite fit in anywhere. And he found something that doesn’t fit in either. (SPOILER ALERT. GO AWAY FOR A AWHILE.) There’s a secret utopia out there. Really there. (YOU CAN COME BACK BACK NOW.) 

It was adapted into a fifteen-minute animated short film which was directed him and Andrew Ruhemann and narrated by Tim Minchin. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Short.

One he didn’t do himself as creator is The Stray Cat, a tale of the supernatural horror by writer Steve Paulsen with rather macabre illustrations by him. The cat, a black cat of course, is scarily drawn.

Librarians have constantly praised Tan for understanding children and being willing to give generously of his time to meet with them. 

Those illustrated works are an excellent representation of his works. Now let’s talk about his Awards. Usually I mention Hugos first but I want to note the Awards that the folks who in children’s books gave him.

No, I forgot an Award, what was it! Ahhhh that one. He won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council, considered by everyone in children’s literature to be the major Award in the field.

In our community, he got the Hugo for Best Professional Artist at Aussiecon 4 (nice to win at home, isn’t it?), again at Renovation, nominated for two more at Anticipation and Denvention 3.  

There were three World Fantasy Awards first Best Artist and another nomination. I can’t count the number of Ditmar Awards and nominations that he received. Seriously it’s that many.

Shaun Tan accepts Astrid Lindgren Award.

(8) IT IS THE END, MY FRIEND. “Peregrine moon lander and its cargo will likely burn up in Earth’s atmosphere” reports Engadget.

It looks like the Peregrine lunar lander’s final resting place will be back at home where it started. The doomed spacecraft, which experienced an anomaly shortly after launch and has been leaking propellant ever since, is expected to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, Astrobotic wrote in an update on X this weekend. The company plans to host a press conference with NASA on Thursday January 18 at 12PM ET to discuss the lander’s fate.

And when that happens, all the SFnal cremains aboard will burn up on re-entry. LiveScience lists the notables whose DNA is aboard: “Peregrine moon lander carrying human remains doomed after ‘critical loss’ of propellant”.

Controversially, the spacecraft is also carrying human remains, including those of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke; Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry; Roddenberry’s wife, Majel Barrett; and Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan and DeForest Kelley, who played Nyota Uhura, Montgomery Scott and Dr. Leonard McCoy, respectively, on the classic sci-fi show. Stored alongside these remains are samples of DNA of the U.S. presidents George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/16/23 To Say Nothing Of The Pixels

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(1) THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF MURDER. James Davis Nicoll assigned the “Young People Read Old SFF” panel a series of Hugo finalists to read. We’ve reached the end:

The final installment1 in Young People Read Old Hugo Finalists is Lois McMaster Bujold’s 1989The Mountains of Mourning. One of Bujold’s popular Miles Vorkosigan stories, Mountains is a murder mystery. Through Miles’ eyes, Bujold explores certain aspects of Barrayaran life generally kept off-stage thanks to the series’ focus on the aristocracy. 

Mountains won the Best Novella Hugo, beating The Father of Stones by Lucius Shepard, A Touch of Lavender by Megan Lindholm, Time Out by Connie Willis, and Tiny Tango by Judith Moffett. I’ve not read the other finalists so I cannot compare them to the winner. I can say that Mountains was the first Bujold I read. It is the reason I have a shelf full of Bujold novels.

Fans liked it. I liked it. But did the Young People like it?…

Nicoll says the next project, debuting in 2024, is Young People Read Old Nebula Finalists. 

(2) THEY LIVE! Galaxy is also being resurrected by the same company that has announced the relaunch of Worlds of IF. “Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1951 (FIRST-EVER WEBZINE REISSUE + new bonus content!)” at Starship Sloane Publishing.

I am happy to announce that this magazine, like its sister publication, Worlds of IF, is also being revived and relaunched by Starship Sloane Publishing Company, Inc.

This might be a slow process, as we are wonderfully busy with the booming relaunch of Worlds of IF already, and I have no desire to make things overly frenetic. The idea is to methodically breathe new life into Galaxy. It seems only fitting that these two magazines should walk hand in hand once again. I will be keeping this celebrated magazine skinny, minimalist in style, and highly selective. The quality of work will speak for itself….

… I do this for the love of creativity and science fiction. But I also strive for simplicity. If something becomes a self-imposed, burdensome form of work, I reevaluate. I will not place stressful expectations on myself here. A strict publishing schedule? Very unlikely. But semiannually sounds about right, I suppose…. 

(3) GONE IN POINT SIX SECONDS. The MinnPost believes people should be concerned with “Protecting physical media in an age of streaming”.

It’s been repeated, echoed and understood ad nauseam that we live in the streaming era.

We get it. Something that streamers may not understand, however, is that nobody owns their digital media.

The $12.99 spent through Amazon Prime Video to purchase “Barbie” is not “your” copy of the film. A person only has access to it until Amazon decides it doesn’t want to support the licensing anymore. This concept is not new or nuanced, but it is lost. The constant shuffling of online media between major streaming conglomerates has resulted in physical media’s futility in the eyes of the general public. We indeed live in the streaming age, but it’s also an age where the cultural impact of art preservation is needed more than ever.

This sentiment is not a condemnation against people using services like Netflix and Spotify. The convenience factor of these platforms is undeniable. However, combing through records, DVDs and books at local businesses should become something other than ancient practice.

Art preservation is at the forefront of this streaming puzzle because of the cultural significance of owning physical media. Much like artifacts, art has been replaced, lost and not protected. Now, instead of encouraging ownership of your favorite titles, businesses that still champion the physical media medium are fighting an uphill battle.

With all the revenue that floods in through streaming platforms, physical media becomes a nuisance to the profit margins of online Fortune 500s.

So, when a seemingly neglected and inevitable problem like this presents itself, the starting point of where to spark the renaissance can get blurred. Viewers, listeners, patrons and readers should look to local shops that allow physical media literacy to return to the mainstream….

(4) REVIEWERS’ PROTEST. Courtney Tonokawa told review blog readers ”I’m Participating in the St. Martin’s Press Reviewer Boycott!” in November at Courtney Reads Romance.

This is a brief post throwing my support behind the ongoing St. Martin’s Press reviewer boycott, which started in late October (as far as I’m aware; if anyone has more conclusive timeline information, please let me know). It is in response to a few major issues, like the general favoritism of white reviewers for ARCs over reviewers of color and, more recently, the behavior of a marketing employee in response to recent escalation in violence between Israel and Palestine, with said employee spewing Islamophobic and queerphobic rhetoric on their socials. All receipts and a more thorough recap of events can be found at the “Readers for Accountability” website here, along with a list of the boycott demands, screenshots, graphics, and all other relevant information.

But until those demands are met, in short addressing the actions of their employee and their action plan for the future, I am joining my fellow reviewers in withholding reviews and any other promo for St. Martin’s Press, and invite anyone else interested to join. 

As Courtney’s post says, the allegations are documented at the “Readers for Accountability” website. Their overview of the complaints follows:

The boycott of St. Martin’s Press, Wednesday Books, and other related imprints is a direct response to the publishers lack of accountability regarding one of their employees. This employee, who we will not name here, posted Islamophobic, Queerphobic, and anti-Palestinian content on their personal social media. This content was shared in Instagram stories and was brought to our attention by Palestinian activist and BookToker @vivafalastinleen. Leen noted that while she is on the St. Martin’s Press influencer list, she never seemed to receive any of the ARCs she requested. Additionally, Leen noticed that her white counterparts would receive ARCs regularly. She began to question if this was a symptom of the employee’s bigotry when she was sent screenshots of a marketing Islamophobic employee sharing racist, Islamophobic pink washing content to their stories.
Leen attempted to reach out to St. Martin’s Press when the employee’s posts came to light, but struggled to receive a response and was largely ignored. Other influencers and content creators reached out as well with similar results. However, Leen did eventually receive email from Brant Janeway. However, the response was dismissive and defensive with no action being taken to investigate.

The boycott was officially enacted after ten days of radio silence from St. Martin’s Press and Wednesday books. During those ten days, content creators were emailing, DMing, commenting, and making videos to demand that St. Martin’s Press make a statement to no avail. As such, Leen created a video that provided other creators with context for the boycott. This video also included a large amount of screenshots and context into why those screenshots are so dangerous. Twitter likes were also included so as to provide evidence of how deep the employee’s bigotry runs. Demands were issued for St. Martin’s Press and Wednesday Books in hopes and readers will continue to boycott the publishers and related imprints until those demands are met.

(5) WHO IS NUMBER ONE? Kim Ju-sŏng tells Guardian readers “’I repeatedly failed to win any awards’: my doomed career as a North Korean novelist”.

…I believe the reason my writing received poor evaluations lay primarily in my choice of genre. All of my stories took place in Japan, or had zainichi as the main characters. In North Korea these were dismissed as “foreign works”, the catch-all term for anything about the wider world. Like anywhere, in North Korean literary circles there is a fair amount of specialisation, and each writer has his or her own style and character.

The most highly regarded genre, it goes without saying, is No 1 literature – that is, works about members of the ruling Kim family. This is not a genre that just anybody can write. In order of esteem, the genres of North Korean literature are:

1) No 1 works: stories about the achievements and personalities of the Kim family.

2) Anti-Japan partisan works AKA revolutionary works: stories set within the colonial-era independence movement.

3) War works: stories set during the Korean war.

4) Historical works: stories set during the Yi, Koguryo or Koryo dynasties.

5) Real-life works: stories about ordinary society from the postwar to the present.

6) South Korean works: stories set in South Korea.

7) Foreign works: stories set anywhere outside Korea.

I was involved with foreign works. Aside from No 1 works, writers had free choice of any genre, and we were also free to move around and experiment between genres. But only the most elite, accomplished writers were permitted to produce No 1 works….

(6) STRANGER THAN FICTION (BUT NOT FOR LONG). [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] People have seen me complain that I didn’t sign up to live in the cyberpunk dystopia we live in now, and thought I was exaggerating.

Nope.

Brian Krebs is probably the premier computer security journalist in the US. As I understand it, he had a column in the Washington Post, until the Post’s editors got freaked out by the number of what the police, and perhaps the FBI, considered “credible death threats”. My favorite story is from one of his investigations, the FBI followed the target, then suckered him to travel from eastern Europe to Guam, where he was arrested, extradited, and spent several years in US jails.

If you want to see the kind of thing he does… “Ten Years Later, New Clues in the Target Breach” at Krebs on Security.

Then tell me I’m exaggerating.

I’ve actually got a short story based on him that I’ve been trying to sell, but I guess it’s not “character-driven” enough (that I sincerely hope never happens, although he and his family have been swatted several times).

(7) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books presents episode 70 of the Simultaneous Times podcast. Stories featured in this episode:

“I Hope I Call You Back” by Tara Campbell – Music by Phog Masheeen – Read by Heather Morgan

“The Escape” by Jean-Paul L. Garnier – Music by Fall Precauxions – Read by the author

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 16, 1917 — Arthur  C. Clarke. Sir Arthur C. Clarke is one of one of my of all time favorite writers, however, this will be not be an all-inclusive look at him, but what I like for his films and writings. So let’s me get started now…

As regards short works, Tales from the White Hart is without doubt the stories I like above all others. Like Niven’s Draco Tavern stories or those of Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers, I adore stories told in a bar setting, and these are quite splendid.

Those are hardly his only great short stories. NyCon II would give him Hugo Award for “The Star” story which is wonderful, “The Nine Billion Names of God” got a well-deserved Retro Hugo at Noreascon 4, and Loncon 3 likewise honored “How We Went to Mars”.  And I loved “A Meeting with Medusa” as well. 

Arthur C. Clarke receives Hugo Award from chairman Dave Kyle at the 1956 Worldcon, NyCon II.

Which collection you pick up is your choice — The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke currently being published legitimately in ebook format by Open Road Media has somewhere around ninety stories in it and is an excellent choice. It has “The Nine Billion Names of God” in it, another story of his I should note I love.

Novels? Well let’s start with The Fountains of Paradise if only because I got to actually got to see the setting in Sri Lanka that it’s based off of. Every bookshop there had copies of it. And it certainly deserved the Hugo it got at Noreascon Two.

I also have on my reading list the Hugo-nominated A Fall of Moondust, one of the better lunar colonization novels ever written; and likewise The Sands of Mars is a worthy look at using and that planet. 

Now we come to Rendezvous with Rama which won a Hugo at DisCon II. Damn that’s a fascinating novel. I re-read maybe a decade back and I’m please to say that the Suck Fairy broke her toe trying to tarnish its reputation. 

So films. Well it in my mind’s eye, there is but one film only and that is 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ve seen it in cinema once, many times on a small screen. It’s wonderful. Yes, it got a Hugo at St. LouisCon.

That’s it for him. Have a good evening. 

Alice Turner and Arthur C. Clarke. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld remembers a school tradition.
  • And Gauld finds an ability to predict the future can have bittersweet results.

(10) TUTTLE ROUNDUP. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” for the Guardian includes The Reformatory by Tananarive Due; The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow; Him by Geoff Ryman; and Audition by Pip Adam

(11) CURATED HORROR. Gabino Iglesias picked “The Best Horror Books of 2023”  for the New York Times. The column begins:

There were a ton of amazing horror books published in 2023, and as a genre, horror delivered so much — from fresh takes on vampire stories to historical works that looked at racism and misogyny. That made selecting just 10 titles for this list a formidable task. So consider this a personal pantheon of favorites from 2023.

Some of the books on this list are easy reads and some will challenge you. Some are long and multilayered while others have a great sense of humor or unfurl at breakneck speed. Some adhere to a classic understanding of horror and others aim to redefine it. The important thing is that they are all outstanding.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is known for her ability to stylishly jump from genre to genre, and in SILVER NITRATE (Del Rey, 318 pp., $28), she goes full-blown horror. The book follows Montse, a sound editor navigating the macho culture of the film industry in Mexico City in the ’90s, and her best friend, Tristán, a soap opera star whose career is withering, as they help a horror director shoot a scene that’s really a ritual to break an awful curse. It’s a creepy, fast-paced tale filled with Nazis on the run and more. The novel is also Mexican to the core — it celebrates the country’s history, culture and films. This book pulls you in with its lovable, deeply flawed characters and gripping plot, and wows you with its eerie atmosphere and deft blend of historical fiction, horror and black magic….

(12) THE HOLE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Science journal there is an interesting piece that may explain the dark matter conundrum. Could tiny, primordial black holes made during the Big Bang, hiding in stars account for the missing mass??? “Do tiny black holes from cosmic dawn hide within giant stars?”

“…Might itty-bitty black holes from the dawn of time be lurking in the hearts of giant stars? The idea is not so far-fetched “

This month, an enormous dark and cool spot, known as a coronal hole, opened up on the Sun’s surface—almost as if it were being swallowed by a black hole.

(13) CHRISTMAS SF BOOKS.  [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It’s that time of year again to remind folk seeking SF/F books for themselves or as Christmas presents for others that the SF2 Concatenation seasonal news page has forthcoming Science Fiction and forthcoming fantasy book listings from the major SF/F book imprints over here in Brit Cit. Back when last season’s news page was posted, these titles were all forthcoming but now, with the festive season fast approaching, most of these are now out. With just six shopping days to Christmas, there’s just time to order from your favourite genre bookshop. Happy Crimble…

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

Pixel Scroll 10/15/23 I’m Still Big; It’s The Pixels That Got Small

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(1) CHARTING THE DECLINE OF SFF MAGAZINES. Steve Davidson of Amazing Stories has shared a graph on Facebook showing decade-by-decade the number of sff magazine titles and issues since 1923. The numbers really drop off as they approach 2023, as you might guess. Now you can see it, too.

Steve followed up with a deep dive into the costs of producing a print magazine today, something both fascinating and sobering.   

(2) PREVIOUSLY UNSUSPECTED PRATCHETT. A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories is a new collection of Terry Pratchett shorts. Where did they come from? Big Issue has the inside story: “Terry Pratchett: Remarkable way lost stories were found by fans”.

…Following the posthumous release of his final few novels, there could never again be a new Terry Pratchett book.

Until now.

A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories, published this week, compiles short tales written by Pratchett for newspapers in the ’70s and early ’80s and not republished since. It’s not the first such collection – before he died, Pratchett himself approved several volumes of his early tales, originally published in the Bucks Free Press newspaper where he wrote children’s stories under the inherited nom-de-plume ‘Uncle Jim’. The Lost Stories are different, though – until last year, nobody knew they existed.

 “It always puzzled me why his inspiration for writing short stories dried up in the mid ’70s”, says Colin Smythe, Pratchett’s friend and publisher, who would become his literary agent when the Discworld novels found success in the ’80s. “It turns out it had not.”…

(3) REVIEW OF ‘THE LOST STORIES’. SF author Adam Roberts analyzed the collection for the Guardian: “A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett review – newly discovered early stories”.

…The best stories have sparks of originality that, the reader wishes, could have been kindled into greater length. The Fossil Beach starts from the premise that putting a fossilised seashell to your ear enables you to hear a prehistoric ocean, spinning a neat and funny little time-travel comedy from that notion. The collection’s final story, The Quest for the Keys, is the best as well as the longest. It opens in “Morpork” – not exactly the Discworld’s Ankh-Morpork, but a more thinly rendered “evil, ancient, foggy city” – where a disreputable wizard, Grubble the Utterly Untrustworthy, sends the none-too-bright warrior Kron on the titular quest. It rattles along, and is liable to remind the Pratchett fan of The Colour of Magic. But it only confirms what the collection as a whole says: that this is a writer on his way somewhere more interesting….

(4) COSTLY VANITY. Victoria Strauss warns “Vanity Radio and TV: Think Twice Before Paying for Interviews” at Writer Beware.

… What’s vanity radio/TV? In the “writer beware” context, it’s radio or television air time that you, the program guest, have to pay for. Such schemes have been around forever in various forms, aimed at experts and creatives of all kinds, from services that explicitly sell pay-to-play interviews, to show hosts that charge interview fees to defray the fees that they themselves have to pay their platforms.

The main selling point is the promise that your interview will be heard by a large and eager audience, giving wide exposure to you and your book (see the pitches screenshotted below).

In reality, though, vanity radio primarily means local AM/FM stations (not national radio), often in obscure time slots; or internet radio broadcasts and podcasts delivered via platforms like Blog Talk Radio, Spreaker, and streaming services such as iHeart Radio. Internet radio listenership has steadily risen over the last decade and a half, but unless there are subscriber lists (as on YouTube, for instance), there’s usually no way to determine the audience for any given host or show–or to authenticate any listenership claims the show may make.

Ditto for vanity television: interviews may appear on local channels–again, often at times when viewership may be low–but are most often delivered via “sponsored content” internet stations such as The Spotlight Network, or proprietary online “channels” like Daily Spark TV, or “cable alternative” apps like TikiLIVE, which provide no reliable way of verifying audience.

Bottom line: lots of people may be tuning in…or no one at all. Which means that that the only benefit authors can be sure they’ll receive for their money is an audio or video clip they can post to their websites and social media accounts.

Whether that’s worth it when it costs $99 or $150 or $200 is debatable enough. But when the price tag is four figures?…

(5) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

Crowdsourced spreadsheet of panel members

This Chinese-language online spreadsheet shows in red the members of panels/events, where those people or organizations have publicly posted about them.  The Weibo post announcing it indicates that it is open to submissions for the missing information – if anyone has info, if you post a comment here, it will be seen and added to that spreadsheet.  NB: the information may not be 100% correct due to late cancellations and the like.

CSFDB activities at the Worldcon

A weixin.qq.com post by the Chinese Science Fiction Database linked from the aforementioned Weibo post provides full details of their activities, including a panel whose members include Sanfeng (aka Feng Zhang) and Arthur Liu, both of whom have contributed posts or commented here at File 770.  The post states (via Google Translate):

Note: Translation and video recording will be provided for this event, and we will produce a Chinese and English subtitled version after the event.

I asked Arthur Liu, and he said those recordings and subtitles are something that the CSFDB team are providing off their own back.  It’s still unclear what exactly the con will be providing via official streams and the like.

34th Galaxy Awards shortlist

I’m not sure if this shortlist is new information, but it doesn’t look to have been previously covered on File 770.  Hugo Best Short Story finalists “On the Razor’s Edge” and “The White Cliff” both make an appearance, as do the western works Love, Death and Robots (an anthology of the adapted stories, I think), Ken Liu’s Good Hunting (I think this is a collection including the titular story), Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries and a Roger Luckhurst non-fiction book.

The award ceremony is on Thursday 19th at the Sheraton across the lake from the Worldcon site.

Successful lottery applicants have been notified

My searches for relevant Xiaohongshu posts today were dominated by successful applicants to the lottery for the three ceremonies.  From this incredibly unscientific sample set, it seems like the Hugo ceremony was most popular, followed by the opening ceremony.  I only found one post showing attendance for the closing ceremony.

Another view of the Hugo rocket decoration

This Xiaohongshu post has a few images of the interior of the museum, including a wider angle view on the Hugo rocket that was in yesterday’s Scroll.  It doesn’t look that impressive at first glance, until you notice the tiny human figure under it…

Venue video

The Chengdu Worldcon committee has posted a video on Facebook with many interior views of the décor of the building where the con will be held.

(6) OVERSIGHT. Hugo Administrator Dave McCarty has arrived in Chengdu and on Facebook has shared photos of the view of the Chinese Science Fiction Museum from his hotel room window.

(7) WE HAVE LIFTOFF! And Chris Barkley took off for China this morning after sending us this photo message: “Well, it’s HAPPENING. Tell my fellow Filers that I will be safe and I’ll TRY to behave.” 

(8) ICONOCLASTS. Michael Cava tells Washington Post readers that “Art Spiegelman didn’t expect to become a book challenge warrior”. Much of the interview is in comics form – art and word balloons.

(9) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES.  Space Cowboy Books has launched Episode 68 of the Simultaneous Times podcast. Stories featured in this episode are:

  • “This is an Optimistic Science Fiction Story About the Future” by Marie Vibbert. Music by Fall Precauxions
  • “Space Radio” by Michael Butterworth. Music by Phog Masheeen
  • “Space Age Mermaid” by Tonya R. Moore. Music by Phog Masheeen.

And theme music by Dain Luscombe

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 15, 1911 — James H. Schmitz. Writer of short fiction in a space opera setting, sold primarily to Galaxy Science Fiction and Astounding Science-Fiction. His “Lion Loose” was nominated for a Short Fiction Hugo at Chicon III, and The Witches of Karres was nominated for Best Novel at NyCon 3. Sources laud him for his intelligent female characters. His collections and novels are available at the usual suspects. (Died 1981.)
  • Born October 15, 1919 — E.C. Tubb. A writer of at least one hundred forty novels and two hundred twenty short stories and novellas, he’s best remembered I think for the Dumarest Saga. His other long-running series was the Cap Kennedy stories. And his short story “Little Girl Lost” which was originally published in New Worlds magazine became a story on Night Gallery. He novelized a number of the Space: 1999 episodes. Somewhat surprisingly he’s never been nominated for or won any awards. (Died 2010.)
  • Born October 15, 1923 — Italo Calvino. Writer and Journalist who was born in Cuba, but grew up in Italy. His works range widely across the literary spectrum, across realism, surrealism, and absurdism. As a genre writer he is best known for his “cosmicomics”, linked stories which explore fantastical speculations about subjects such as mathematics, evolution, and human perception. At the time of his death in 1985, he was the most-translated Italian author, and he was recognized with a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. (Died 1985.)
  • Born October 15, 1926 — Ed McBain. Huh, I never knew he ventured beyond his mystery novels where he was best known for his 87th Precinct novels but he published approximately twenty-four genre stories and six SF novels between 1951 and 1971 under the names S. A. Lombino, Evan Hunter, Richard Marsten, D. A. Addams, and Ted Taine. ISFDB has a list and I can’t say I know any of them. Any of y’all read them? Some are distinctly pulpier in nature such as Find The Feathered Serpent. (Died 2005.)
  • Born October 15, 1935 — Ray “Duggie” Fisher. Editor, Conrunner and Fan, who chaired the 1969 Worldcon in St. Louis, was on the committee for several other conventions, and was a founding member of the Poplar Bluff Science Fiction Club and the Ozark Science Fiction Association. His fanzine ODD was a finalist for a Best Fanzine Hugo. His contributions to fandom were, sadly, cut short by his death at age 52 due to complications of diabetes. (Died 1988) (JJ)
  • Born October 15, 1942 — Lon Atkins. Editor, Conrunner, and Fan who chaired a DeepSouthCon and was editor of numerous fanzines and apazines, including eight years as co-editor of Rally! He was Fan Guest of Honor at a Westercon, and a recipient of Southern Fandom’s Rebel lifetime achievement award. He was also a ferocious Hearts player. (Died 2016.) (JJ)
  • Born October 15, 1954 — Linnea Sinclair, 69. Merging romance, SF and paranormal into, well, damned if I know. She’s here solely because I’m really tickled by the use of her SJW credentials as Games of Command and the short story “Of Cats, Uh, Furzels and Kings” feature telepathic feline creatures called ‘Furzels’. Sinclair has stated that these are inspired by her two cats. 
  • Born October 15, 1968 — Jack du Brul, 55. A writer of somewhat SF novels that EoSF says of “the Philip Mercer sequence featuring a geologist who – not entirely unlike Steven Spielberg’s similarly scholarly Indiana Jones – has physical gifts extending beyond the probable.” He also co-wrote, and continued after Clive Cusler passed on, The Oregon Files.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) LEARNEDLEAGUE: SFF ONE-DAY SPECIAL. [Item by David Goldfarb] The LearnedLeague is in its off-season, which as usual means single-topic one-day quizzes. There was one recently about the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender. You can read its questions here.

(13) TRIBUTE TO B MOVIE MAKER. “Roger Corman at Beyond Fest: ‘I love making motion pictures’” in the Los Angeles Times.

Beyond Fest and the American Cinematheque saluted producer Roger Corman on [September 30] with a four-film marathon followed by a conversation with some of the directors who began their careers working for the now-legendary genre icon….

…“The vast majority of people can’t tell good from bad,” said [Amy Holden] Jones. “You get notes on cuts that don’t particularly make sense, to get reshoots that aren’t fixing what’s actually the problem. But mainly the executives can’t tell good from bad. And Roger knew it immediately.”

“I’ll never be working for anybody again who knows as much about movies as Roger did when I was starting out,” said Dante, who went on to make the “Gremlins” movies. “Unfortunately, the problem is that the more movies you make, and the more executives you meet, the more you realize that there are almost none who know as much about movies as you do. And so they are no help.

“In fact, they’re a hindrance and you spend a lot of time trying to please people who don’t know what they want,” added [Joe] Dante. “And if they did, they wouldn’t know how to express it anyway. So I think all of us feel that the best years of our creative lives were spent working for somebody who knew more than we did. And that was Roger.”

[Allan] Arkush pointed to Corman when he said, “The profound thing is, this is the only person to run a studio who knows how to make a movie.”…

(14) PARTY LIKE IT’S 1998. “Lost In Space Forever” – a skit with Jonathan Harris and Bill Mumy.

The end of this 1998 documentary features a short skit with Will, Dr. Smith and the Robot on the Jupiter 2.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Gareth Jelley, Jennifer Hawthorne, David Goldfarb, Steven French, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 9/30/23 Pixels Are Those Which, When You Stop Believing In Them, Don’t Scroll Away

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(1) MEDICAL UPDATE. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki told Facebook readers he had a health emergency this week:  

Was very sick day before yesterday. Had a health emergency, was fighting for my life all the previous night and that morning after being checked into the accident and emergency wards. Near died several times. Been discharged from the hospital now and I am on the mend. Had to incur several expenses in the process though. So I am in need of and welcome any assistance, towards sorting out my medical bills and other expenses I needed to survive the ordeal, towards the tune of about $500 dollars. If you want to chip, you can send something to this Paypal address and it’ll get to me. [email protected]

(2) RECORDS BREAK UNDER THE HAMMER. “Two Books Break Book Sales Records At Christie’s Auction — Here Are The Most Expensive Books Ever Sold” reports Forbes.

A pair of books by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle once owned by English musician Charlie Watts broke individual records for the beloved authors at Christie’s auction house in London Thursday, months after an 800-year-old copy of the Bible earned the title of the most expensive book ever sold.

The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie sold for $63,968, breaking her personal record of a $50,641 copy of The ABC Murders, which sold two years ago.

The $226,555 sale of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle on Thursday set a new world auction record for a printed book by the renowned Sherlock Holmes creator, previously set at $201,600 when a copy of The Sign of Four sold in 2022. …

(3) MUSEUM PIECE. “The Oldest Living Torrent Is 20 Years Old” — Hackaday blows out the candles.

Twenty years ago, in a world dominated by dial-up connections and a fledgling World Wide Web, a group of New Zealand friends embarked on a journey. Their mission? To bring to life a Matrix fan film shot on a shoestring budget. The result was The Fanimatrix, a 16-minute amateur film just popular enough to have its own Wikipedia page.

As reported by TorrentFreak, the humble film would unknowingly become a crucial part of torrent history. It now stands as the world’s oldest active torrent, with an uptime now spanning a full 20 years. It has become a symbol of how peer-to-peer technology democratized distribution in a fast-changing world.

In the early 2000s, sharing large files across the internet was a mindbogglingly difficult problem to solve. In the Southern Hemisphere in particular, home internet connections were often 56 kbit dialup modems at best. Most email services limited attachments to 2 MB at most. Services like MegaUpload weren’t on the scene yet, and platforms like YouTube and Facebook were yet to materialize. 

(4) “HE DISTINCTLTY SAID ‘TO BLAVE’…” “LIAR!” “Patrick Stewart Shares the ‘Original’ Ending to Picard, Hopes for a Follow-up Film” at IGN. Beware spoilers.

…Stewart revealed that as the years passed since his appearance in Star Trek: Nemesis in 2002, the lines between the actor and Picard had become blurred.

“If I have found true love, shouldn’t he?” he asked.

Stewart married his wife, Sunny Ozell, back in 2013, and had since decided it was time for Picard to find love, too. The final scene they came up with would have confirmed this… but it still left a little to the imagination.

“The writers came up with a lovely scene,” he revealed. “It is dusk at Jean-Luc’s vineyard. His back is to us as he takes in the view, his dog at his side. Then, off-screen, a woman’s loving voice is heard: ‘Jean-Luc? Supper’s ready!’”

Who was that voice? That never would have been confirmed. However, Stewart’s real wife Sunny would have made her Star Trek debut.

(5) OBAMA’S FEEDBACK TO FILMMAKER. Variety tells movie fans that “Barack Obama Sent Script Notes to Sam Esmail for ‘Leave the World Behind’”.

Netflix’s upcoming disaster movie “Leave the World Behind,” based on the 2020 novel of the same name by Rumaan Alam, marks the first fictional movie from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions company. Barack included the novel on his 2021 summer reading list and was personally invested in perfecting the film adaptation, so much so that he sent script notes to writer-director Sam Esmail (best known as the creator of “Mr. Robot” and “Homecoming”).

“Leave the World Behind” stars Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as a couple vacationing in Long Island when a world-threatening disaster takes place. Mahershala Ali plays the owner of the home the couple is renting. The owner shows up seeking refugee from the disaster with his daughter (Myha’la Herrold), forcing the two families to trust each other as the world potentially comes to an end.

“In the original drafts of the script, I definitely pushed things a lot farther than they were in the film, and President Obama, having the experience he does have, was able to ground me a little bit on how things might unfold in reality,” Esmail recently told Vanity Fair about the script notes he received from the former President. “I am writing what I think is fiction, for the most part, I’m trying to keep it as true to life as possible, but I’m exaggerating and dramatizing. And to hear an ex-president say you’re off by a few details…I thought I was off by a lot! The fact that he said that scared the fuck out of me.”

Per Vanity Fair: “The filmmaker was more reassured when the Obamas suggested some of his potential plot points were too bleak or unlikely. Most of the former commander in chief’s notes, however, stemmed from what he’d observed about human nature, particularly the way fissures form between people who might otherwise find common cause.”…

(6) BOOK-INSPIRED KIDS SPACE. “Publisher L’École des Loisirs Opens New ‘House of Stories’ for Kids” at Publishing Perspectives.

The independent L’École des Loisirs, one of the largest children’s publishers in the country, is starting off the school year with a new space called La Maison des Histoires (House of Stories) in which children seven and younger can discover and consolidate their knowledge of L’École des Loisirs’ books.

The 58-year-old publishing house owns Chantelivre, a children’s bookshop nestled among luxury boutiques in Paris’ 6th arrondissement. Last winter, the 400-square-meter shop (4,305 square feet) underwent a renovation which included installing the 150-square-meter (1,614 square feet) Maison des Histoires just behind the bookshop in a former storage area. Its soft launch was held in May, before it closed for the summer holidays.

La Maison des Histoires has nine themed spaces, all based on books published by L’École des Loisirs. Co-founder and associate director Camille Kiejman came up with the idea, inspired by museums she’d see dedicated to children’s books in Nordic markets, such as Junibacken in Stockholm.

(7) ADDED TO THE OFFICIAL ROBERT BLOCH WEBSITE. “A Conversation with Robert Bloch” is the latest addition to the Bloch tribute website.

Happy to present excerpts (with kind permission) from David J. Schow’s 1991 interview with Bloch at the first World Horror Convention in 1991.This interview first appeared in Cemetery Dance magazine, #31.

DJS: How long have you been going to these things, Bob?

BOB: 1946 was the first year; and I arrived after Ackerman left. That was the PacifiCon, held in Los Angeles—kicking and screaming—and it had a small attendance, as I recall, but that attendance included A.E. Van Vogt, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, and others too humorous to mention.

FORREST J ACKERMAN (from audience): Remember the story you told, Bob, about the “three great sales” that made it possible for you to come to the convention?

BOB: Oh, yes—my typewriter, my hat, and my overcoat. That was also the first convention I traveled to, and from then on, I was hooked. I discovered it was a very practical thing to go from convention to convention, because it’s difficult to hit a moving target….

(8) MICHAEL F. FLYNN (1947-2023). Author Michael F. Flynn’s daughter Sara announced on Facebook that he died on September 30.

I’m sorry to tell you that my father passed away this morning. He was sleeping peacefully in the childhood home that he loved, the home his father built. We will share more details when we have them. Thank you.

He was honored with the Robert A. Heinlein Award for his career work in 2003. His short story “House of Dreams” won the 1998 Theodore Sturgeon Award, while his book In the Country of the Blind won the 1991 Compton Crook Award for best first novel and a 1991 Prometheus Award.

Flynn’s alternate history story “Quaestiones Super Caelo et Mundo ”  picked up the 2008 Sidewise Award – Short Form.  Although he never won a Hugo, one of his seven nominees was the novel Eifelheim which in Japanese translation received a 2011 Seiun Award.

His fame rests on all these works, however, for personal reasons I am partial to the book he co-authored with Niven and Pournelle, Fallen Angels, another of his Seiun Award winners (1998), which Tuckerized or otherwise based its characters on about 130 fans. You can guess who one of those fans was…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 30, 1924 — Elinor Busby, 99. In 1960, she became the first woman to win a Hugo Award for Best Fanzine editing at Pittcon for Cry of the Nameless along with F. M. Busby, Burnett Toskey and Wally Weber. She was awarded a Fan Activity Achievement Award for fan achievements, presented at Corflu in 2013. She was on the committee of Seacon. Busby is noted in Heinlein’s Friday, and her husband is likewise in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. 
  • Born September 30, 1933 — Jonathan Gash, 90.  Look I loved the Lovejoy series, both the novels themselves and the series starring Ian McShane but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how ISFDB lists them as being genre. Him being an antiques divvy didn’t make it fantasy, does it? He did write The Year of the Woman which is a fantasy with a ghost as a central figure in it.
  • Born September 30, 1946 — Dan O’Bannon. Screenwriter, director, visual effects supervisor, and actor.  He wrote the Alien script, directed The Return of the Living Dead, provided special computer effects on Star Wars, writer of two segments of Heavy Metal, Soft Landing and B-17, co-writer with Ronald Shusett and  Gary Goldman of the first Total Recall. That’s not complete listing by any stretch! (Died 2009.)
  • Born September 30, 1947 — Michael B. Wagner. Though best remembered for his work on Hill Street Blues and deservedly so, he’s co-created with Isaac Asimov, produced and wrote several episodes for the one-season ABC series Probe. He provided the story for two episodes of Next Generation, “Bobby Trap” and “Evolution” and wrote another, “Survivor”. (Died 1992.)
  • Born September 30, 1950 — Laura Esquivel, 73. Mexican author of Como agua para chocolate, Like Water for Chocolate in English. Magic realism and cooking with more than a small soupçon of eroticism. Seriously the film is amazing as is the book. ISFDB says she’s also written La ley del amor (The Law of Love) which I’ve not read. 
  • Born September 30, 1951 — Simon Hawke, 72. His first major SF series was Timewars which I need not tell you what it’s about. He’s since written a lot of fiction off media properties including off Battlestar Galactica. Friday the 13th, Star Trek, Predator 2 and Dungeons & Dragons. He does have a mystery series, Shakespeare & Smythe, involving, well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?
  • Born September 30, 1953 — S. M. Stirling, 70. My favorite work by him is The Peshawar Lancers. The audiobook version is quite stellar. Other than that, I’ll admit that I’ve not read deep on him beyond In the Courts of the Crimson Kings and The Sky Prople.
  • Born September 30, 1960 — Nicola Griffith, 63. Writer, Essayist and Teacher. Her first novel was Ammonite which won the Tiptree and Lambda Awards and was a finalist for the Clarke and BSFA Awards, followed by The Blue Place, Stay, and Always, which are linked novels in the Ammonite universe featuring the character Aud Torvingen. In total, SFE has won the Washington State Book Award, Nebula Award, James Tiptree, Jr. Award, World Fantasy Award and six Lambda Literary Awards. Her novel Slow River won Nebula and Lambda Awards. With Stephen Pagel, she has edited three Bending the Landscape anthologies in each of the three genres Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror, the first of which won a World Fantasy Award. She latest novel is Spear which just came out. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in March 1993. She lives with her wife, author Kelley Eskridge, in Seattle.
  • Born September 30, 1972 — Sheree Renée Thomas, 51. Writer, Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems and Sleeping Under the Tree of Life; Editor, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora which won a World Fantasy Award, and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones which also won a World Fantasy Award. She’s also written a variety of poems and essays including “Dear Octavia, Octavia E. Butler, Ms. Butler, Mother of Changes”. In 2020, Thomas was named editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) OFFBEAT HEROES AND VILLAINS. “DC Announces New Visual Encyclopedia With Foreword By James Gunn” – Comicbook.com has details.

From his work on The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker to his current job co-running DC Studios, James Gunn has helped highlight some of the weirdest and best characters of DC’s comic canon. As Gunn announced in a tweet on Tuesday, he will play a new role in spotlighting the DCU’s heroes and villains with the help of a new official book. The book, titled Strange and Unsung All-Stars of the DC Multiverse: A Visual Encyclopedia, will be a visual encyclopedia written by Nubia and the Amazons and Wakanda comic writer Stephanie Williams. The book will also feature a foreword by Gunn himself, and is now available to preorder ahead of a November 7th release date.

“Many know I have a special fondness for the wilder corners of DC comics – the forgotten or outlandish characters who I grew up laughing with or at but who in every case fired up my imagination & my love of outcasts & oddballs,” Gunn’s tweet reads. “Now there’s finally a book for folks like me (yes, including a forward BY me), 240 pages of guilty goodness, with Arm-Fall Off Boy, Colonel Computron, the Mod Gorilla Boss, and so, so many more.”

(12) FREE ONLINE GARY PHILLIPS Q&A. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA will host an “Online Reading & Interview with Gary Phillips” on Tuesday October 10 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific.

Award-winning author, screenwriter, and editor Gary Phillips gathers his most thrilling, outlandish, and madcap pulp fiction in an 17-story collection that straddles the line between bizarro, science fiction, noir, and superhero classics. Aztec vampires, astral projecting killers, oxygen stealing bombs, undercover space rangers, aliens occupying Los Angeles, right wing specters haunting the ’hood, masked vigilantes and mad scientists in their underground lairs plotting world domination populate the stories in this rip-snorting collection. In these pages grindhouse melds with blaxploitation along with strong doses of B movie hardcore drive-in fare. Phillips, editor of the Anthony Award-winning The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir, and author of One-Shot Harry, and Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem, said this about pulp. “The most common definition of pulp is it’s fast-paced, a story containing out there characters and a wild plot. There is that. But certainly, as we’ve now arrived at the era of retro-pulp, these stories have elements of characterization…not just action but a glimpse behind the steely eyes of these doers of incredible deeds.” As an added bonus, Phillips resurrects Phantasmo, a Golden Age comics character created by Black artist-writer E.C. Stoner in an all-new outing of ethereal doings.

Get your copy of The Unvarnished here.

Register for free here.

(13) HIGH FIDELITY. “Police Showed Up During ‘Saw X’ Editing After Neighbors Reported ‘Someone’s Being Tortured to Death in Here’: ‘I’m Just Working on a Movie!’” at Variety.

Just how grisly is one “Saw X” scene? Apparently enough to get the cops called on the film’s editor, Steve Forn. In an interview with NME, director Kevin Greutert revealed that police showed up to Forn’s editing suite in North Hollywood after neighbors reported noises of someone being tortured to death. Forn was in the middle of editing a scene depicting the “eye vacuum trap,” in which a character must escape Jigsaw’s game or lose his eyesight. A lot of screaming ensues.

“There was a knock at the door,” Greutert said. “We have the doorbell [camera] video of the police walking up, [Forn answering the door] and the police saying, ‘The neighbors [have been] calling and saying someone’s being tortured to death in here.’ And he was like, ‘Actually, I’m just working on a movie…You can come in and see it if you want?’”

“The cops started laughing!” the director continued. “They said, ‘We want to but, you know, you’re all right.’ It must have been a pretty realistic performance! It’s a pretty funny story…Plus Steve is such a mild mannered guy. I can only imagine the look on his face when he realized what was happening!”

Mike Kennedy couldn’t decide which headline he liked best. Here are the other candidates:

  • Sound Scares
  • Audible Aggravation
  • Noise Complaint 
  • Noisy Neighbor 
  • Saw Sound
  • Sawing Legs
  • Torture Tones
  • Eyes on the Prise

(14) BABYLON THREE TWENTY-TWO. “3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet is world’s first trigonometry table” – Upworthy explains.

…Most historians have credited the Greeks with creating the study of triangles’ sides and angles, but this tablet presents indisputable evidence that the Babylonians were using the technique 1,500 years before the Greeks ever were.

Mansfield and his team are, understandably, incredibly proud. What they discovered is that the tablet is actually an ancient trigonometry table.

Mansfield said:

“The huge mystery, until now, was its purpose – why the ancient scribes carried out the complex task of generating and sorting the numbers on the tablet. Our research reveals that Plimpton 322 describes the shapes of right-angle triangles using a novel kind of trigonometry based on ratios, not angles and circles. It is a fascinating mathematical work that demonstrates undoubted genius.”…

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Isaac Arthur’s latest has a titular Heinlein riff… “Have Space Suit – Will Travel”.

Space is often called the final frontier, a place of billions and billions of worlds awaiting explorers and pioneers. But what will those journeys be like, and what gear will people need for them, and perhaps most importantly of all, what sort of people will make those travels?

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Lise Andreasen, Rich Lynch, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 9/29/23 Only You Can Prevent Pixel Scrolls

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(1) WHEN GRAVITY DOESN’T FAIL. “NASA Wants Ideas for How to Destroy the International Space Station”. Really. SYFY Wire explains why.

…At present, Roscosmos has committed to continued use and maintenance of the station through 2028 while the other four agencies will remain through 2030. After that, unless there’s another extension, everyone will come home, and the station’s life will end. Of course, we can’t just leave the largest spacecraft we’ve ever built unattended and uncontrolled. Instead, all five agencies share responsibility for bringing the ISS down in a controlled and safe way. No easy task.

Previous plans relied on Russian Progress vehicles to reduce the station’s orbit and push it into the atmosphere. Now, NASA is looking for a bespoke craft to do the job more efficiently. To that end, NASA has released their final Request for Proposals (RFP) for a novel deorbit vehicle to aid in the destruction of the International Space Station.

Interested parties must submit proposals by November 17. A virtual pre-proposal conference is planned for October 3 at 12:00 p.m. Central.

If you’ve ever wanted to destroy an orbiting science laboratory, this is probably your best chance. Who knows when we’ll have another station that needs vaporizing.

(2) WOLE TALABI INTERVIEW. “A Conversation With Wole Talabi” at the Hugo Book Club Blog.

… Talabi’s novelette A Dream of Electric Mothers was published in Africa Risen (edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight), which was one of the first anthologies published by a North American publisher focusing on science fiction and fantasy from African authors. He says the public response to the novelette — which explores identity, memory, and culture through artificial intelligence in an alternate history setting — has been gratifying.

“Some people have messaged me to ask if it’s a far-future science fiction story, and I enjoy telling them that it isn’t. It’s an alternate history story,” Talabi says. “I don’t make that obvious because the story uses the traditional Yoruba calendar, not the Gregorian calendar. It actually takes place in an alternate 2021 in a timeline where essentially European colonization of Africa never happened and they formed an intellectual partnership instead … that’s why it seems like a far-future story. Because we’ve made more progress by not fighting.”,,,

(3) WARNING. Ansible® 435, the October issue released today, warns fans:

Ripoff Alert. The US dealer Fifth Generation Books is selling Rob Hansen’s TAFF-benefit paperback Bixelstrasse: The SF Fan Community of 1940s Los Angeles on the Walmart website for $43.50 (allegedly discounted from the wholly made-up figure of $50.50), presumably filling orders by buying copies at $22.50 from the official Ansible Editions/Lulu sales page (linked from ae.ansible.uk/?t=bixel). They reproduce the AE blurb in full, including the assurance IN CAPITAL LETTERS that all proceeds will go to TAFF, but somehow one has one’s doubts. [RH]

(4) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

Some Worldcon guests/speakers announced — https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/trpOJYSgoWertsvyoPE5JQ

Yesterday (28th) a couple of panels were announced, I think by a children’s book publisher.  Most of the names weren’t known to me, but ones that were are academic and author Wu Yan, and Hugo Best Novelette winner Hao Jingfang.

Ground level views of the con venue — http://xhslink.com/kK7e1u

A few photos seemingly taken by a member of the public in the area around the venue were posted to the Xiaohongshu social network earlier today.  I think these give a better idea of what it looks like in-person, compared to a lot of the images that have appeared before now.

Reminder that you need to press Submit on your Hugo votes — https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/111149676161220869

This was something I didn’t realize when I did my votes yesterday, and looking at the reposts, I suspect I’m not the only one.

Translated video about Chengdu publisher 8 Light Minutes Culture — https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1aT411n7NS/

This 6:45 video from the Chengdu_Plus channel on the Bilibili video site dates from April, and doesn’t directly reference the con or Hugo Awards.  However, Best Editor (Short Form) finalist Yang Feng is interviewed, along with a bit about her Best Related Work finalist.  The issue of Galaxy’s Edge magazine that features Best Novelette finalist The Space-Time Painter is also shown. Usefully, it has English subtitles and narration.

Note: Sergei Lukyanenko and his work are discussed at the 4 minute mark.

(5) SPACE COWBOY BOOKS CO-HOSTS BANNED BOOKS EVENT. A “Banned Books Reading with Desert Split Open”, co-hosted by Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA is an in-person event that will take place October 1 from 5-7 p.m. Pacific.

The Desert Split Open and Space Cowboy Books will again celebrate Banned Books Week. Let’s meet at the Sun Alley stage, behind the bookstore (61871 29 Palms Hwy, Joshua Tree, CA). We will read from books that have been challenged or banned. What some attempt to silence, we will amplify. All are welcome at this free community event.

The sudden increase in book challenges motivated us to hold last year’s Banned Books Week event. This year, the situation is worse:

“The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom documented 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources in 2022, the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data more than 20 years ago. … Censors targeted a record 2,571 unique titles in 2022, a 38% increase from 2021. Of those titles, the vast majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community or by and about Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color.” (ala.org)

This is not just an issue for “Red” states – in fact, in 2022, California saw 32 attempts to restrict access to 87 different titles. The most challenged title in CA was a tie between Gender Queer: A Memoir and Beyond Magenta.

Now, more than ever, we must speak up – not just against censorship but in favor of diverse voices and stories.

Here’s a list of the most challenged books of 2022

Register for free here.

(6) DON’T TAKE THE MASK OFF THE OLD LONG RANGER. “Oscar Meyer again renames its mobile back to Wienermobile” reports Yahoo! [The typo above is intentional.]

Slotted in between items on a recent Associated Press news round-up that mentioned the impeachment inquiry into President Biden and the looming government shutdown was the report that the Oscar Meyer brand was again changing the name of its famous…vehicle.

The Wienermobile was renamed the Frankmobile only four months ago. But the meat-maker, apparently caving to pressure from the Hotdoggers—those who drive the thing and were upset by the change—has reverted the name back to Wienermobile.

Roll out the bun puns. Like, “I guess Frankmobile didn’t cut the mustard.”

…Today, Oscar Mayer maintains six of the 23-foot-long motorized sausages across the US. The custom-made fiberglass dog sits atop a lightly toasted fiberglass bun on a converted Chevrolet chassis with a 300-horsepower Vortec V8. It was designed by the General Body Company of Chicago….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 29, 1934 — Stuart M. Kaminsky. Though best remembered as a very prolific mystery writer for which I single out the Toby Peters series about a private detective in 1940s Hollywood and the Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov series about a Moscow police inspector, he does have genre works. He did two Kolchak the Night Stalker graphic novels, plus wrote the scripts for two Batman stories, “The Batman Memos” and “The Man Who Laughs”. As an editor, he’s responsible for the On a Raven’s Wing: New Tales in Honor of Edgar Allan Poe anthology. (Died 2009.)
  • Born September 29, 1947 — Scott Baker, 76. His first novel, l’Idiot-roi (Symbiote’s Crown), won the French Prix Apollo Award. In addition, he won the World Fantasy Award for his “Still Life with Scorpion” short story. All three of his short story collections and his one anthology are French only, though all of his novels are in English.
  • Born September 29, 1952 — Lou Stathis. During the last four years of his life, he was an editor for Vertigo. He had a fascinating work history including collaborating with cartoonist Matt Howarth by co-writing the first few issues of Those Annoying Post Bros. (Kindle has them available.) He was also a columnist and editor for Heavy Metal and a columnist for Ted White’s Fantastic magazine during the late Seventies through early Eighties. His fanwriting included the “Urban Blitz” column for OGH’s Scientifriction (the first installment appearing in 1977, Issue 9, page 29). (Died 1997.)
  • Born September 29, 1954 — Shariann Lewitt, 69. First, let me commend her for writing one of the better Trek novels in Cybersong set in the Voyager verse. Bravo, Shariann! Most of her fiction, be it Memento Mori or Rebel Sutra is definitely downbeat and usually dystopian in nature. Well written but not light reading by any means.
  • Born September 29, 1961 — Nicholas Briggs, 62. A Whovian among Whovians who started out writing Who fanfic. First off he’s the voice of the Daleks and the Cybermen in the new series of shows. Well not just them as he also voices the Judoon, the Ice Warriors, the Nestene Consciousness, the Jagrafess and the Zygons.  Second he’s the Executive Producer of Big Finish Productions, the audio drama company that has produced more Doctor Who, Torchwood and other related works that you’d think possible. Third he did act twice in the Whoverse. Once on Torchwood as Rick Yates on “Children of Earth: Day Four” and The Sarah Jane Adventures as Captain Tybo in “Prisoner of the Judoon” episode. Fourth he’s appeared as himself in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. 
  • Born September 29, 1968 — Stephen Deas, 55. British writer. He is most known for his fantasy franchise, the Memory of Flames which is set in a fantasy world inhabited by dragons. Yes, more dragons! Though dragon free free, I highly recommended his Thief-Taker’s Apprentice series as well. Good fantasy doesn’t always need dragons, does it?

(8) BEHIND THE SCENES. “Doctor Who Is Restoring Tradition Canceled 12 Years Ago with David Tennant’s 60th Anniversary Episodes”.

…The excitement doesn’t just stop at the return of Tennant. A cherished post-show tradition is making a grand comeback after a long hiatus of 12 years. As whispers and wonders swirl around, an official post from BBC Three’s Instagram has put all speculation to rest. Yes, the behind-the-scenes specials are back! Giving fans an intimate look into the creation and the intricate details, the series, aptly named Doctor Who: Unleashed, is all set to satiate the curiosity of aficionados and novices alike….

(9) BOOK REVIEW. From the New York Times: “Empire Of The Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, by Keith Houston”. Daniel Dern notes, “I don’t necessarily feel the need/urge to read the book, but I love the title (which called to mind JG Ballard’s book Empire of the Sun, and while that book is not itself sf, Ballard of course wrote lots of sf, in case one wants a modicum of sfnality for items beyond simple, ‘an amusing pun.’).”

(10) PRODIGAL INSIGHTS. “Star Trek: Prodigy Featurette Clip Shows How Stories Go From Script to Screen (Exclusive)” at Comicbook.com.

Star Trek: Prodigy‘s final Season 1 comes to Blu-ray and DVD tomorrow, and ComicBook.com has an exclusive look at one of the home media set’s bonus features. Star Trek: Prodigy: Season 1 – Episodes 11-20 is available to pre-order now on Blu-ray and DVD from Amazon and features more than 45 minutes of features diving into Star Trek: Prodigy‘s creation and place within the Star Trek franchise. The “Creating New Wolrds” clip sees series creators Kevin Hageman and Dan Hageman discussing how consistently impressed they are with the Star Trek: Prodigy art team’s ability to go beyond their expectations, with director Ben Hibon chiming in toward the end. You can watch the clip above….

(11) A LOT OF DOLLAR SIGNS. “Mars Sample Return got a new price tag. It’s big” reports the journal Science. “Independent review finds mission could cost as much as $11 billion and pushes NASA to delay or rethink program”.

NASA’s audacious Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission has serious technical flaws and “unrealistic” assumptions about its budget and timetable, an independent review found in a report released yesterday. Originally estimated to cost some $4 billion, the reviewers found that NASA’s share of the mission could end up costing between $8 billion to $11 billion, and that launch could happen no sooner than 2030, 2 years later than now planned.

A joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), MSR would gather rocks collected by the Perseverance rover, which has been drilling samples since it landed on Mars in 2020. MSR would then rocket the samples off the planet and ferry them to Earth, where scientists would study them for signs of past life and planetary evolution. The top priority of planetary science for several decades, it remains a worthy goal and one still worth pursuing, especially in light of similar sample return plans for Mars planned by China for later this decade, according to the review report, which was commissioned by NASA.

(12) MEASURING DELAYS CAUSED BY STRIKES. After 5 months, the writers’ strike has come to an end. On that note, JustWatch summarized how it influenced the number of delays of movies and TV shows of original productions of various streaming services.

Global streaming giant: Netflix is the most affected by the writer’s strike with 3x more production delays than Apple TV+. Other major US streaming services: Max, Prime Video and Disney+ all suffer, collectively taking up 27% of the total content disruption for streaming platforms in the country.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The Wrap explains the “Argylle Trailer: Henry Cavill and Dua Lipa Are Spies in Meta Comedy”.

The first trailer for “Kingsman” and “X-Men: First Class” filmmaker Matthew Vaughn new spy film “Argylle” has arrived, and it’s hardly what anyone expected. The trailer begins as a standard spy thriller with Henry Cavill and Dua Lipa getting into some sexy spy shenanigans, but then the story pulls back to reveal they’re characters in a book written by a spy novel author played by Bryce Dallas Howard.

The problem? What she thinks is fiction is actually happening, and now real-life spies are after her for outing their dealings…

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Dan Bloch, Bill, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 9/15/23 I Can Scroll Up Pixels From The Vasty Deep

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(1) TOP HORROR AUTHORS OFFER FREE CONVENTION. “Christopher Golden’s House of Last Resort Weekend” will be held January 18-21 in Portsmouth, NH. Admission is FREE with weekend hotel room reservation.

Spend a weekend with your favorite scary authors in a unique, intimate setting! This one-time-only event features Christopher Golden, Brian Keene, Mary SanGiovanni, Victor LaValle, Owen King, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Eric LaRocca, V. Castro, Cynthia Pelayo, Ronald Malfi and many more.

If you’d like to join us at the convention hotel, see below and book your room at a discounted rate. Whether or not you will be staying with us, please click [on the link above] to register for the event.

(2) CHENGDU ADDS TO HUGO VOTER PACKET. Ersatz Culture reports the two missing voter packet categories – Fanzine and Fan Writer — have been added to the downloads on the Worldcon site.

(3) CHENGDU SCIENCE FICTION MUSEUM CONSTRUCTION VIDEO. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] This link to another video of the Chengdu Worldcon venue shows the current under-construction state of the interior. The post on Xiaohongshu rather than Weibo, an Instagram-like site. The date of the video is not apparent from a machine-translation of the post. There is untranslated Chinese text in the video which may say more.

There’s also a very short video posted to Weibo by 云上深夜快递 — which seems to be a Chengdu TV and radio station — about the “sky tunnel” that leads to the convention center. They highlight that the roof has some sort of lighting effect to look like the night sky, although it doesn’t really come across in the video.  It looks like the tunnel is for vehicles only, not pedestrians.  

The Starry Sky Tunnel simulates the “starry sky” through decorative lights on the top of the tunnel, such as swimming in the vast Milky Way, the starry sea and the brilliant universe in the dome will provide citizens with a beautiful immersive landscape experience. The reporter saw at the scene that at present, the lights and streamers in the tunnel have entered the final commissioning and acceptance work. After the tunnel is officially opened to traffic, it will further narrow the distance between the main urban area of Pidu and the main venue of the science fiction convention

(4) NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS FICTION LONGLIST. The 2023 National Book Award Fiction Longlist includes one work of genre interest, Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

(5) CORN EXCHANGE HOSTS A COMIC-CON. James Bacon reviews “NICE 2023 – an amazing comic con!” for Downthetubes.net.

There’s a lovely welcoming atmosphere at NICE in Bedford and I got that feeling of regret… Why did I not go to this amazing comic con in previous years? NICE is, actually, really blooming… er, nice!

The promise of a good weekend began in a nearby bar as fans, professionals and dealers gathered on Friday for the weekend. There was great chat, laughter and the meeting of old friends, and the opportunity to meet new people. It’s been a few years for some, and this was evident, but also it was friendly – and I got the chance to meet established writers and artists for the first time. 

This spirit continued to the queue outside the cracking venue in the heart of Bedford, the Corn Exchange, a traditional hall that was filled with tables, all about comics. There were quite a number of dealers selling a lot of comics: a great variety from 50p and £1 boxes, to key Silver Age and some really lovely to see Golden Age comics. 

The range of writers and artists was just impressive….

(6) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA has released episode 67 of Simultaneous Times, a monthly science fiction podcast. This one is done in collaboration with Radon Journal. Theme music by Dain Luscombe,

Stories featured in this episode:

  • “Hello This is Automatic Antigrief” by Jenna Hanchey; with music by Fall Precauxions; read by Zara Kand
  • “Lost in Transcription” by Abigail Guerrero; with music by Phog Masheeen; read by Mark Soden Jr., Pedro Iniguez, Jean-Paul Garnier, and Zara Kand.

(7) ROBERT BLOCH WEBSITE. Robertbloch.net announced its Non-Fiction page has been significantly expanded to now include interviews, introductions/forewords/etc., and more.

(8) BEWARE SPOILER. Watch out, the spoiler is in the headline:“DC Comics Blue Beetle Ted Kord Has Died Four Times — Does It Matter Anymore?” at CBR.com

Writer Josh Trujillo just blindsided fans in the newest Blue Beetle comic series by killing off the fan-favorite second Blue Beetle, Ted Kord, when the mysterious new supervillain ‘Blood Scarab’ made his debut and impaled the hero in his lab. As shocking as this is, Ted Kord is no stranger to death.

Each time a superhero dies, it matters a little less. Ted Kord has died numerous times in DC Comics. While Kord’s latest demise is obviously meant to bring some emotional weight to the new Blue Beetle series, it’s hard for it to really matter after Maxwell Lord killed him in 2006. Comic book deaths are always associated with diminishing returns. When a supposedly carefree hero like Blue Beetle has died so many times, it makes it hard for fans to care….

(9) IT WILL CHANGE YOUR WORLD! ALLEGEDLY. The Hollywood Reporter unpacks the “Monsters of California Trailer: Aliens Exist in Tom DeLonge Film”.

DeLonge, the Blink-182 rocker and noted champion of UFO research, helmed and co-wrote the film that Screen Media launches theatrically and on-demand Oct. 6….

Monsters of California centers on Dallas (Samson) and his outcast group of high school friends attempting to shed light on a paranormal conspiracy in Southern California that the political powers that be have kept under wraps….

“They don’t want you to know anything,” Kind says ominously in the footage. “This is going to shatter any idea you have about reality.”

The trailer shows Dallas working to use his father’s clandestine research to help shed light on the family’s mysterious past. “I’m literally about to find out what happened to Dad after all these years,” he exclaims. “I’m this close.”…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 15, 1890 — Agatha Christie, or to give her full name of Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller). I’m here to praise her for my favorite work by here which is Murder on The Orient Express but anything involving the fussy little Belgian detective is worth reading. The best use of her in genre fiction is the Tenth Doctor story, “The Unicorn and The Wasp” with her involved in a Manor House mystery. (Died 1976.)
  • Born September 15, 1940 — Norman Spinrad, 83. I’ll admit that the only novel I’ve read by him is Bug Jack Barron which I really do like. My bad. And I was fascinated to learn he wrote the script for Trek’s “The Doomsday Machine” episode which is an amazing story. So how is that he’s never won a Hugo? 
  • Born September 15, 1943 — John M. Faucette. He published five novels and one short story. He left seven unpublished novels in various states of completion at his death. Two of his novels; Crown of Infinity and Age of Ruin, were published in the Ace Doubles series. None of his works are in print in digital or paper format currently including his Black Science Fiction anthology which he as an African-American SF writer was very proud of. (Died 2003.)
  • Born September 15, 1946 — Howard Waldrop, 77. I think that the The Texas-Israeli War: 1999 which he wrote with Jake Saunders is my favorite work by him. His short fiction such as “The Ugly Chickens” which won The World Fantasy and Nebula Awards is most excellent. A generous selection of his short fiction and novellas are available at the usual suspects.
  • Born September 15, 1952 — Loren D. Estleman, 71. You’ll have noticed that I’ve an expansive definition of genre and so I’m including a trilogy of novels by this writer who’s better known for his mainstream mysteries featuring Amos Walker. These are set in the Sherlock Holmes Metaverse, and are Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. I think it was Titan Book that maybe a decade ago republished a lot of these Holmesian pastiches of which there are more than I want to think about. ISFDB lists two other novels by him as genre, Journey of the Dead and The Eagle and the Viper.
  • Born September 15, 1956 — Elton T. Elliott, 67. Editor, publisher, reviewer. His solo fiction debut was “Lighting Candles on the River Styx” in Amazing (March 1991). His early novel-length work appeared in the 1980s in collaboration with Richard E. Geis under the pseudonym Richard Elliott. He edited Science Fiction Review from 1990 to 1992 which, yes, I remember reading at the time. 
  • Born September 15, 1962 — Jane Lindskold, 61. My first encounter with her was the Zelazny novel she finished, Donnerjack. It’sexcellent though how much is Zelazny is open to vigorous debate. Of her own novels, I recommend The Buried Pyramid, Child of a Rainless Year and Asphodel as being very good. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Far Side might be described as saying “we come in peace”, but not loudly enough.

(12) EXCEPTIONAL COLLECTIBLES. Scott Edelman is auctioning off some rarities to fund new equipment for his Eating the Fantastic podcast. One of them is his personal DC Comics baseball jacket circa 1980, the back of which is decorated with the iconic bullet icon from that period. Scott says, “I’ve never seen one on the secondary market.” Here’’s the direct link. Another dozen or so items up there can be seen at his eBay store link.

(13) THIS JUST IN 55 YEARS AGO. CBR.com tells “How Lord of the Rings Inspired Led Zeppelin”.

…Led Zeppelin was formed in 1968 with Robert Plant as the lead singer and lyricist. Plant was also a known Lord of the Rings fan. Thanks to his influence as a songwriter, many of Led Zeppelin’s songs had themes of mythology and mysticism, which are prominent within The Lord of the Rings series. Over time, the band’s songs began to reflect more of Plant’s life and experiences, such as lost romance and political protests. In a few select songs, Plant weaves his interest in Lord of the Rings with details of his life as a treat for the series’ fans among the Led Zeppelin audience. Some of LOTR‘s key moments and iconic characters lend themselves well to Led Zeppelin’s unique and otherworldly storytelling….

Here’s one example:

The song Ramble On was released in 1969 on the album Led Zeppelin II. The song mentions Gollum and Sauron hiding in Mordor and stealing Plant’s girl.

Mine’s a tale that can’t be told, my freedom I hold dear

How years ago in days of old, when magic filled the air

‘Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor, I met a girl so fair

But Gollum and the Evil One crept up and slipped away with her

Ultimately, this song is about a man finding his perfect girl and traveling the world to find her. However, some fans have theorized that this song is actually about Aragorn having to choose between staying with Arwen or searching for Gollum before Sauron finds him. Others theorize the song references Frodo’s journey to destroy the One Ring; the girl in the song is the Ring. Plant was quoted in an interview as embarrassed by the LOTR reference since Mordor has no beautiful women, and Gollum wouldn’t even be interested in them if they were.

(14) POP QUIZ. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Apocalyptic fiction is an established trope of SF. So arguably of interest to us know-it-all fans is Nature’s challenge, “Do you really know the way the world is heading? Take this quiz on plans to save humanity.”

The United Nations has ambitious aims to end poverty and clean up the planet by 2030. See whether you know how the world is faring…

(15) AI: WHO CARES? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The BBC Global News Podcast (updated several times a day) has created a special episode on Artificial Intelligence with opinions and analysis from different perspectives including the public. “Special Edition – Artificial Intelligence – who cares?“

What is AI? What can it do and what are its current limitations? A tool for good – or should we be worried? Will we lose our jobs? Are we ready to be cared for by machines? Our Tech Editor, Zoe Kleinman, and a panel of international experts explore AI’s impact on healthcare, the environment, the law and the arts in a special edition recorded at Science Gallery London.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Here’s the final trailer for The Creator, coming to theaters September 29.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Rich Lynch, Lise Andreasen, Scott Edelman, Ersatz Culture, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Dan’l Danehy-Oakes.]

Pixel Scroll 9/9/23 My Mother Did-A Tell Me That I Go Pixel Scroll, And Read All The File Seven

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(1) WHERE HAVE YOU GONE JOE DIMAGGIO? PrimaMedia.ru says on October 9 “Science fiction writer Sergey Lukyanenko will open the visiting session of LiTR-2023 in Harbin”. Harbin is a city in China. The author will proceed there from another literary event in Vladivostok. But so far there is no coverage on Lukyanenko’s blog or in his social media about his role as a GoH of the Chengdu Worldcon during the week of October 18-22. Speculation whether he is really coming has been fueled by the minimal publicity the Worldcon has given him compared to its other GoHs. However, since Lukyanenko will be crossing the border into China to do something just 10 days before the Worldcon, perhaps he will be there.  

The Sixth Pacific International Festival “Literature of Pacific Russia” (6+), dedicated to the literary heritage of the country and the Far East, and the Fair-Festival of Book and Urban Culture “Red Square. Far East” (6+), a project created by the team of the Moscow International Fair of Intellectual Literature non / fictioN and the Book Festival “Red Square” (6+), will be held in Vladivostok on October 6-8, 2023.

Popular Russian science fiction writer Sergey Lukyanenko will not only traditionally take part in the sixth LiTR, but will also be part of the international delegation of the festival and will take part in the visiting session of the event (6+), which will be held on October 9 in Harbin (China), at the Institute of the Russian Language of Heilongjiang University, reports IA PrimaMedia.

…Of course, I will communicate in Russian with an interpreter, because, unfortunately, I do not speak Chinese. In general, I have been published in China quite often, especially lately. Just the other day, several novels were published. And I think that in Harbin there will be a sufficient number of readers who came not just to look at such an outlandish foreign guest, but to talk with the author they read…. 

(2) STAR TREK IN CHINA. “’Star Trek’ boldly goes to Beijing for first fan event” reports Yahoo!

Fans of the space adventure franchise “Star Trek” assembled in Beijing on Saturday for the first official activity of its kind to be held in mainland China.

Paramount’s multimedia sensation has a niche following in China, although interest in the science-fiction genre has grown with the recent success of several domestic hits.

“Star Trek Day” is celebrated each year on September 8 to commemorate the 1966 debut of the original US series, which has an ardent global fanbase.

AFP spoke to several fans who gathered at the venue in a central Beijing mall, many clad in the brand’s galactic travel uniforms or the pointed ears of its fictional “Vulcan” species.

“I think it has a kind of space utopia feeling,” said Ma Yuanyuan, 36, a translator and long-time fan.

She said the main appeal of “Star Trek” was the nostalgia it evokes for the early days of space exploration….

(3) STAR TREK ON THE PICKET LINE. NPR is there when “’Star Trek’ stars join the picket lines in Hollywood”.

Photo from NPR.

As Hollywood actors and writers continue their strike against major studios, one special picket line honored Star Trek and its many spinoffs. Castmates from the various generations of the show met on the picket line outside the gates of Paramount Pictures, where they once taped episodes.

Among them was OG Trekker George Takei, who played Lieutenent Sulu in the original 1960s series. He stood alongside LeVar Burton, who played Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation in the 1990s. Burton had a message for studio executives who they’ve been on strike against:

“Y’all are losing profits, hand over fist. And I know that there are meetings happening in backrooms all over this town,” Burton said, adding “greed isn’t good for any of us. So let’s get real. Let’s come back to the table. Let’s make a fair and equitable deal and let’s get back to work.”

Takei said actors are struggling to make a living in the changing entertainment industry. “We’re here to ensure that the young actors coming up, building their careers, will have the incentive to keep on keeping on, rather than giving up and opening up a restaurant or something,” he said. “We want them to be able to survive on their art of acting. We’re here in solidarity to support their careers so that they can enjoy the career that LeVar and I have enjoyed.”

Actor Wil Wheaton, who grew up acting in Star Trek: The Next Generation was also on the picket lineand also talked about supporting up-and-coming actors, who are on strike for higher pay, more residuals and protections from artificial intelligence.

“Star Trek teaches us that we can create and sustain a world where everyone works together, where everyone has equal access and equal opportunity,” Wheaton said. “I am out here today to do for the future of my industry what SAG and WGA did for me back in the ’60s. I have a pension and health care and I was able to receive residual checks during the years that I did not work on camera. That really kept me going. And actors are coming up today in a world with streaming. And AI is really a threat that needs to be looked at and negotiated and managed.”…

(4) NEW ‘FREEDOM TO READ’ STATEMENT COMING. Publishers Weekly reports “ALA Seeks Member Input on Freedom to Read Statement Revision”. The schedule is at the link.

When it was first adopted some 70 years ago, the Freedom to Read Statement was considered a landmark document—a pointed response to the censorship running rampant in the McCarthy era. Now, in the midst of another historic attack on the freedom to read, the American Library Association has announced a series of “listening sessions” which could lead to a revision of the statement.

The review will include five virtual sessions, organized by theme and facilitated by an Intellectual Freedom Committee task force focused on revising the statement, which will gather ALA member input throughout the fall of 2023 and submit their findings to the Office of Intellectual Freedom for consideration. ALA leaders are “strongly encouraging” members to attend one or all of the upcoming listening sessions….

(5) SPACE COWBOY BOOKS. The Joshua Tree, CA bookstore has two online events in the coming days.

  • Flash Science Fiction Night Online Event – Online Flash Science Fiction Reading

Tuesday September 12th 6pm PT. Register for free here.

Join us online for an evening of short science fiction readings (1000 words or less) with authors Pedro Iniguez, Tonya R. Moore, and Renan Bernardo. 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.

  • Online Reading & Interview with Eliane Boey

Tuesday September 19th 6pm PT. Register for free here.
Other Minds is a collection of two bold new novellas from Chinese Singaporean speculative fiction author, Eliane Boey

Signal\Tracer
A near-future cyberpunk story set in the digital world of Lion City, ruled by the Administration, for which two agents, Xi and Wei, must regulate an immersive mirror of their decaying Eastern city. That is, until Xi finds avatars controlled by dead users. The more she digs, the more questions are raised about her identity, the system, and her friendship with Wei.
Carrier
Ten years after her flagship project (the deep space hauler, Solar Endeavour) split in half while in orbit, aerospace designer Ming Wen is back, test-flying her new intelligent luxury orbiter, the Infinite Dream. The Dream is her chance at redemption, but also a chance at reconciliation with her estranged twenty-year-old daughter, Cora, who has joined the crew on the voyage. The launch is successful, but the mission might be doomed from the start. An uncanny presence has stowed away aboard the ship and now haunts Ming Wen. But on the Infinite Dream, there is no escape.
Get your copy of Other Minds here.

(6) BROUGHT TO YOU IN LIVING DEATH. Max Gladstone, in  “Conan and the City of the Extremely Online”, finds these Robert E. Howard stories remind him of something. Could it be – the Internet?

…Finally, after substantial eeriness, our heroes encounter Ms Exposition 1933, in this case a tall beautiful princess from prehistoric not-Egypt named Thalis. Conan asks what gives in this weird city. Thalis answers, well, here, I’ll type it out for you:

“Much of the time these people lie in sleep. Their dream-life is as important—and to them as real—as their waking life. You have heard of the black lotus? In certain pits of the city it grows. Through the ages they have cultivated it until, instead of death, its juice induces dreams, gorgeous and fantastic. In these dreams they spend most of their time. Their lives are vague, erratic, and without plan. They dream, they wake, drink, love, eat, and dream again. They seldom finish anything they begin, but leave it half completed and sink back again into the slumber of the black lotus. That meal you found—doubtless one awoke, felt the urge of hunger, prepared the meal for himself, then forgot about it and wandered away to dream again.”

I’ll admit that “vague, erratic, and without plan” got me feeling… targeted with uncomfortable directness. But it was the bit where the guy heats up a meal, then wanders off to check his email, where I felt keenly that Howard was @ me across the decades….

(7) YAEL GOLDSTEIN-LOVE Q&A. “Berkeley author wrote her way through postpartum anxiety by embracing a sci-fi multiverse” in the San Francisco Chronicle.

…Q: So in a way your homesickness and postpartum anxiety led you into this sci-fi multiverse. Were you already a science fiction fan, or did it take you by surprise?

A: It took me completely by surprise. I had always written straight literary realism, and I never anticipated writing in this mashup of genres. But I’ve always read eclectically and I’m a tremendous fan of sci-fi, so in a way it’s predictable that I landed on this idea: What if at the moment of birth the laws of nature briefly change so that different possibilities not only exist side by side, but also affect each other? 

Once I said that, I felt, this is how it actually feels and now I can make sense of it in writing.

Q: Was there something in particular about the postpartum experience you thought sci-fi could explain better than realism?

A: The existential stakes of loving a person the way a parent loves a child. We are saddled with this existential urge to protect our kids, but there’s this profound gap between what we want to do and what we actually can do because we are human and our children are subject to chance. That was the No. 1 thing I wanted to capture with this sci-fi metaphor.

I also see psychotherapy patients, and the thing that most interests me in both careers is the human mind’s infinite depths and surprises. I feel like there are ways in which you can get at the utter strangeness of how our minds work so much better when you aren’t bound by the conventions of realism. Now that I’ve started writing that way, I feel like I’ll never stop….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 9, 1900 — James Hilton. Author of the novel Lost Horizon which was turned into a film, also called Lost Horizon by director Frank Capra. It is best remembered as the origin of Shangri-La. Definitely not genre, but I was intrigued to discovered that he wrote Goodbye, Mr. Chips which as you know became a 1939 film starring Robert Donat (who won an Oscar for his performance), and a 1969 remake with Peter O’Toole and Petula Clark. (Died 1954.)
  • Born September 9, 1922 — Pauline Baynes. She was the first illustrator of some of J. R. R. Tolkien’s lesser known works such as Farmer Giles of Ham and Smith of Wootton Major and of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. With the help of cartographers from the Bordon military camp in Hampshire, Baynes created a map that Allen & Unwin published as a poster in 1970. Tolkien’s was generally pleased with that, though he didn’t at all like her creatures especially her Shelob. (Died 2008.)
  • Born September 9, 1935 — Topol. He’s best remembered for his role of Tevye the Dairyman in Fiddler on the Roof, on both stage and screen, but that’s not why he’s getting a Birthday.  No, that’s because it’s because he was Dr. Hans Zarkov in the 1980 Flash Gordon film. He’s got just two other genre appearances, once in Tales of the Unexpected as Professor Max Kelada  in the “Mr. Know-All” episode, and in the Bond film, For Your Eyes Only. (Died 2023.)
  • Born September 9, 1943 — Tom Shippey, 79. Largely known as a Tolkien expert, though I see he wrote a scholarly 21-page introduction to Flights of Eagles, a collection of James Blish work, and under the pseudonym of John Holm, he is also the co-author, with Harry Harrison, of The Hammer and the Cross trilogy of alternate history novels. And early on, he did a lot of SF related non-fiction tomes such as Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative (edited with George Slusser). 
  • Born September 9, 1949 — Jason Van Hollander, 73. A book designer, illustrator, and occasional author. His stories and collaborations with Darrell Schweitzer earned a World Fantasy Award nomination. It was in the Collection category, for Necromancies and Netherworlds: Uncanny Stories. I’m fairly sure he’s done a lot of work for Cemetery Dance which make sense as he’d fit their house style.
  • Born September 9, 1952 — Angela Cartwright, 71. Fondly remembered as Penny Robinson on the original Lost in Space. I rewatched several of them recently and the Suck Fairy was kind to them overall from a nostalgic viewpoint. She, like several of her fellow cast members, made an appearance in the Lost in Space film as a reporter, and again in the rebooted series as Shelia Harris in the “Echoes” episode. She appeared in the Logan’s Run series in “The Collectors” episode as Karen, and in Airwolf as Mrs. Cranovich in the “Eruption” episode.  
  • Born September 9, 1954 — Jeffrey Combs, 69. Though no doubt his best known genre role was as Weyoun, a Vorta, on Deep Space Nine. However, his genre portfolio is really, really long. it starts with Frightmare, a horror film in the early Eighties and encompasses some forty films, twenty-six series and ten genre games. He’s appeared on Babylon 5, plus three Trek series, Voyager and Enterprise being the other two, the Enterprise appearance being the only time an actor played two distinct roles in the same episode.  He’s played H.P. Lovecraft and Herbert West, a character by that author. Each multiple times. 
  • Born September 9, 1958 – Frank Catalano, 65. Half a dozen short stories in F&SF, Analog and others, plus a book review column in Amazing with Buck Coulson and stints as SFWA secretary and Nebula Awards Report editor. Better known for a later 25 years as a tech columnist (1994-2019) plus writing about science fiction for GeekWire, Seattle Times and others. Toastmaster and emcee at several cons, including several Norwescons, plus one fan GoH spot at Rustycon 4. 

(9) OATES ARTICLE. “Joyce Carol Oates on Women and the Roots of Body Horror” at CrimeReads, from the introduction to the anthology A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers edited by Joyce Carol Oates.

Of mythological figures of antiquity, none are more monstrous than harpies, furies, gorgons—Scylla and Charybdis, Lamia, Chimera, Sphinx—nightmare creatures representing, to the affronted male gaze, the perversion of “femininity”: the female who in her physical being repulses sexual desire, rather than arousing it; the female who has repudiated the traditional role of submission, subordination, maternal nurturing. Since these fantasy figures have been created by men, we can assume that the female monster is a crude projection of male fears; she is the embodiment of female power uncontrolled by the male, who has most perversely taken on some of the qualities of the male hero—physical prowess, bellicosity and cunning, an appetite for vengeance and cruelty. As in the most lurid male fantasies of sadism and masochism, the female monster threatens castration and something even more primeval: humiliation….

(10) RECOMMENDATIONS. Lisa Tuttle’s latest installment of “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” for the Guardian covers The Circumference of the World by Lavie Tidhar; Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis; The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord; Bride of the Tornado by James Kennedy; and The Land of Lost Things by John Connolly.

(11) IS IT A TWISTER TOP? Mano’s Wine offers another specialty bottle: “The Wizard of Oz Tornado Etched Wine”. The favorite of flying monkeys who own corkscrews.

Embark on a mesmerizing journey with our Wizard of Oz wine bottles. Expertly deep-etched and lovingly hand-painted, these enchanting collectibles capture the essence of the beloved film. Sip from the elixir of nostalgia and let the magic unfold with every pour. Raise your glass to the Emerald City and indulge in a taste of cinematic splendor….

(12) LIGHTSABERS, CAMERA, ACTION! Cass Morris continues sharing her adventures on Disney’s Star Wars-themed Starship Halcyon in “Day Two on the Halcyon, Part 3: Coaxium”.

… 6:30pm: I had been invited to a special meeting down in the Lightsaber Training Pod. The blueshirt outside was asking everyone if they were here for the “advanced lightsaber training” and checking them against a list of the invitees. It’s very intimate — I think there were only about 12 of us in there. (They run this scene several times, I think, so more people than that experience it overall).

Inside, we find not only Saja Tycer, but SK-620 and Rey! I was so glad to see that SK was safe. Rey was so wonderful with this one little girl in particular, giving her the MacGuffin to hold on to during this scene. Saja Tycer introduced us as “the students I’ve been telling you about” and then told us that we’d found a truly incredible Jedi relic down on Batuu: a holocron.

None of us could open it alone. But all of us together, using the Force, got it to open.

And this was another part that was for 11-year-old Cass. The girl who used to stand on her head and try to move objects with her mind. And yes, there’s a metric ton of atmospheric manipulation happening in that room. The lights, the background music, the sound… it’s all perfectly designed to elicit a huge emotional reaction. And it works!…

(13) RECITE AFTER ME. [Item by Scott Edelman.] I was at the AFI Silver Theatre last night watching the world premiere of Married to Comics, a documentary about underground cartoonists Justin Green and Carol Tyler, and spotted this sign over the sink in the men’s room in place of the traditional signs suggesting you sing happy birthday while washing your hands.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Dann.] “I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings….” John Gillespie Magee Jr in High Flight.

Between Earth and outer space is a nebulous line where our atmosphere slips away into nothingness.  Beyond that point lies the playground of the stars, the workplace of astronauts, and the dreams of humanity as demonstrated by thousands upon thousands of movies, books, poems, and songs.

Thin air whips around the Earth just below making flight impossible for all except the most carefully designed of aircraft.  Few winged aircraft ventured into that rarified air.  One of which was the U-2 Dragonlady.  The now venerable reconnaissance aircraft once flew around the world providing valuable intelligence for the American military.

Photographer Blair Bunting had the rare opportunity to not only fly in one of the few remaining TU-2S trainer aircraft, the Air Force arranged for a 2-airplane flight so that he could photograph a second U-2 in flight at high altitude.  His story and a collection of images are presented by The Drive.  He couldn’t touch it but he could see the heavens just a short distance away.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Rob Thornton, Scott Edelman, Dann, Steven French, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Danny Sichel.]

Pixel Scroll 9/8/23 Pixel? I Don’t Need A Pixel, My File Is On The Bandstand, My Scroll Is On The Floor

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(1) ATTACKING THE KILLER TOMATOES. “The most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked,” says Vulture, nevertheless, “Rotten Tomatoes Still Has Hollywood in Its Grip”.

…“The studios didn’t invent Rotten Tomatoes, and most of them don’t like it,” says the filmmaker Paul Schrader. “But the system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.”

In a recent interview, Quentin Tarantino, whose next film is reportedly called The Movie Critic, admitted that he no longer reads critics’ work. “Today, I don’t know anyone,” he said (in a translation of his remarks, first published in French). “I’m told, ‘Manohla Dargis, she’s excellent.’ But when I ask what are the three movies she loved and the three she hated in the last few years, no one can answer me. Because they don’t care!”

This is probably because Rotten Tomatoes — with help from Yelp, Goodreads, and countless other review aggregators — has desensitized us to the opinions of individual critics. Once upon a time, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert turned the no-budget documentary Hoop Dreams into a phenomenon using only their thumbs. But critical power like that has been replaced by the collective voice of the masses. A third of U.S. adults say they check Rotten Tomatoes before going to the multiplex, and while movie ads used to tout the blurbage of Jeffrey Lyons and Peter Travers, now they’re more likely to boast that a film has been “Certified Fresh.”…

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to munch on a monstrous fish sandwich with Michael Bailey in Episode 206 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Michael Bailey

This might be my most horrific conversation yet! Not merely because of my guest — but because certain scenes from Night of the Living Dead were shot in the basement of our chosen venue, The Original Oyster House!

Michael Bailey is an award-winning writer and editor, having been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award nine times, winning once for the anthology The Library of the Dead, and a four-time Shirley Jackson Award nominee. His novels include Palindrome Hannah (2005) and Phoenix Rose (2009). His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Birthing Monsters: Frankenstein’s Cabinet of Curiosities and Cruelties, Lost Highways: Dark Fictions from the Road, Canopic Jars: Tales of Mummies and Mummification, and most recently Hybrid: Misfits, Monsters and Other Phenomena.

Many of these stories have been gathered in the collections Scales and Petals (2010), Inkblots and Blood Spots (2014), Oversight (2018), and The Impossible Weight of Life (2020). He’s the owner of the small press Written Backwards, which has published many excellent anthologies, and I’m not calling them excellent simply because my own short stories have appeared in many of them. He’s currently the screenwriter for the documentary series Madness and Writers: The Untold Truth. Maybe?, which all of us in the horror community are looking forward to seeing.

We discussed his Stoker Award-nominated poetry collaboration with Marge Simon (and how they managed not to kill each other during the writing of it), how he knows when a poem is a poem and not a short story, what reading other anthologies taught him that made his own anthologies better, the economics of small press publishing, how to lose awards gracefully, the way getting an early story torn apart by Douglas E. Winter at Borderlands Boot Camp gave him the boost he needed, why his novel Psychotropic Dragon took 16 years to transform from an idea into a book, how one of the joys of writing is never knowing the end until you get there, his new obsession of making chocolate from fruit to bar, our shared love of revising continually, and so much more.

(3) SAAVIK JUSTICE WARRIOR. Charlie Jane Anders is back with “7 Hot Takes About Star Trek” at Happy Dancing. I second this motion:

4. We need a Saavik TV show or movie.

I understand why Jean-Luc Picard became the first Star Trek character to headline a TV series — because after all, Patrick Stewart is a beloved figure, even to extremely casual Trek fans. But when I think about Star Trek characters who both need and deserve to be explored further in long-form storytelling, my mind goes to Saavik. Even in a film as overstuffed with goodness as Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan, Saavik stands out as one of the most interesting characters: an ambitious young Vulcan who looks up to Spock while also striving to embody the Starfleet values that Kirk often overlooks (because they come in the form of regulations.) Later, there are hints that she’s half-Romulan. The treatment of Saavik after Wrath of Khan is one of the worst travesties in Star Trek history: first, she helps the rejuvenated but rapidly-aging Spock through a slew of pon-farrs, then she’s tossed aside. Saavik is basically transformed into one of many plot devices in a clunky movie that only exists to bring Leonard Nimoy back to the franchise he’d been so eager to escape. Saavik was supposed to return in Star Trek VI as a traitor to the Federation, but she was replaced by Valeris. I have so many questions about this character: Does she have Spock’s baby? Why didn’t she go with Kirk and the others in Star Trek IV? How does she approach her return to the Federation after everything she went through? Justice for Saavik!

(4) DRAWN THAT WAY. BBC Culture analyzes “The legacy of Star Trek: The Animated Series, 50 years on”.

On a remote planet, the Guardian of Forever sits, a passageway through time to other realities, locations, dimensions. All of a sudden, Captain Kirk comes through the portal, with Spock close behind him, fresh from an adventure observing the beginnings of the Orion civilisation. There’s just one problem: Dr Bones McCoy has no idea who Spock is – and neither does anyone else on the starship USS Enterprise.  

This scene, from an episode called Yesteryear, doesn’t feature in any of the five core Star Trek series. The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise are modern classics that contain unending nostalgia for fans, but there’s another early Star Trek show that many people overlook – Star Trek: The Animated Series. It ran for just 20 episodes. Its status, and specifically whether it’s considered part of the “canon”, is uncertain. But it has an important legacy, bringing animation in as a key part of the franchise as well as keeping Star Trek in people’s minds during an in-between era, much like the one we’re entering now….

(5) BAD REVIEWS. Mark Roth-Whitworth’s “Bad reviews, good and bad” is about what make a bad review poorly written — it’s not about the review, it’s about style and form.

…I’ve always heard that any publicity is good publicity, but that’s not always the case… and not all bad reviews are equal….

…A legitimate bad review follows the kind of review that most are, dealing with things like writing, worldbuilding, etc. The bad review I looked at violated two basic rules…

(6) DEEP DIVE ON AI AND COPYRIGHT. “Potential Supreme Court clash looms over copyright issues in generative AI training data” at VentureBeat.

… The question is: How did we get here? How did the trillions of data points at the core of generative AI become a toxin of sorts that, depending on your point of view and the decision of the highest judicial authority, could potentially hobble an industry destined for incredible innovation, or poison the well of human creativity and consent?…

… But whether AI researchers creating and using datasets for model training thought about it or not, there is no doubt that the data underpinning generative AI — which can arguably be described as its secret sauce — includes vast amounts of copyrighted material, from books and Reddit posts to YouTube videos, newspaper articles and photos. However, copyright critics and some legal experts insist this falls under what is known in legal parlance as “fair use” of the data — that is, U.S. copyright law “permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder.”… 

… However, the concept of “fair use” is based on a four-factor test — four measures that judges consider when evaluating whether a work is “transformative” or simply a copy: the purpose and character of the work, the nature of the work, the amount taken from the original work, and the effect of the new work on a potential market. That fourth factor is the key to how generative AI really differs, say experts, because it aims to assess whether the use of the copyrighted material has the potential to negatively impact the commercial value of the original work or impede opportunities for the copyright holder to exploit their work in the market — which is exactly what artists, authors, journalists and other creative professionals claim. 

“The Handmaid’s Tale” author Margaret Atwood, who discovered that 33 of her books were part of the Books3 dataset, explained this concern bluntly in a recent Atlantic essay: 

“Once fully trained, the bot may be given a command—’Write a Margaret Atwood novel’—and the thing will glurp forth 50,000 words, like soft ice cream spiraling out of its dispenser, that will be indistinguishable from something I might grind out. (But minus the typos.) I myself can then be dispensed with—murdered by my replica, as it were—because, to quote a vulgar saying of my youth, who needs the cow when the milk’s free?”…

(7) MISSION IMPERTURBABLE. Here are links to four more installments of Cass Morris’ diary from her adventures on Disney’s Star Wars-themed Starship Halcyon.

…Noah and I started at Weapons, which was simple but very satisfying: I was aiming, Noah was firing. I really can’t overstate how cool it is to play the game on that enormous viewport. It’s very easy to forget you’re not actually in space, firing lasers. From there we moved to Shields (I think; I may have steps 2 and 3 backwards in my brain), which is essentially playing Pong, but it’s also so satisfying. We both liked this station best — which apparently is an unusual choice? But we were very good at it. (This would be important later). Loaders was a bit like weapons, with one of us moving and the other grabbing cargo out of space. Then Systems was the hardest by far — but I think my second-favorite station. The display tosses up a sequence of positions that the console’s various dials, buttons, and toggles need to be in, and you have to match it as fast as possible to keep the ship in good repair. That station was manic. There are so many buttons. It was genuinely hard to keep track of them! But hard in a fun way….

Followed by —

(8) EXERTING A SPELL. The one book that makes the £50,000 Wolfson Prize Shortlist worth noting here is Portable Magic A History of Books and their Readers.

Portable Magic unfurls an exciting and iconoclastic new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over us. Gathering together a millennium’s worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith reveals that, as much as their contents, it is books’ physical form – their ‘bookhood’ – that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic. From the Diamond Sutra to Jilly Cooper’s Riders, to a book made of wrapped slices of cheese, this composite artisanal object has, for centuries, embodied and extended relationships between readers, nations, ideologies and cultures, in significant and unpredictable ways.

Exploring the unexpected and unseen consequences of our love affair with books, Portable Magic hails the rise of the mass-market paperback, and dismantles the myth that print began with Gutenberg; it reveals how our reading habits have been shaped by American soldiers, and proposes new definitions of a ‘classic’-and even of the book itself. Ultimately, it illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal – and more turbulent – than we tend to imagine.

(9) BROOKLYN SCIFI FILM FESTIVAL. The 135 short and feature length films selected for screening at this year’s Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival are listed at the link above. The festival runs October 9 through the 15, and fans from around the world are welcome to join this one-of-a-kind event as all films will be made available online for streaming and rating through Brooklyn SciFi’s Netflix style festival platform. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 8, 1925 — Peter Sellers. Chief Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films which are genre. Of course, he had the tour de force acting experience of being Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley and Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. He also took multiple roles (even the Queen) in The Mouse That Roared. Amusingly he was involved many folk tale productions in various mediums (film, radio, stage) including Cinderella, Tom Thumb, Mother Goose and Jack and The Beanstalk. (Died 1980.)
  • Born September 8, 1937 — Archie Goodwin. Comics writer and editor with a very long career. He was the writer and editor of the horror Creepy and Eerie anthologies, the first writer on the Iron Man series, wrote comic book adaptations for Marvel of the two Star Wars sequels and edited the Star Wars line for them. For DC, he edited Starman which Robinson said he was inspiration for. (Died 1998.)
  • Born September 8, 1945 — Willard Huyck, 78. He’s got a long relationship with Lucas, first writing American Graffiti and being the script doctor on Star Wars before writing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom before being the writer and director on Howard the Duck which, yes, is a Lucasfilm. It’s the lowest rated on Rotten Tomatos Lucasfilm production ever at 15% followed by Radioland Murders, the last script he’d write for Lucasfilm.  
  • Born September 8, 1952 — Linda D. Addison, 71. First Black winner of the Stoker Award which she has won five times which is rather amazing. Equally amazing, the first two awards were for her poetry collections Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes and Being Full of Light, Insubstantial. Indeed all five of her Awards were to be for poetry collections. She also is the author of the story “Shadow Dreams”, published in the Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda anthology.
  • Born September 8, 1954 — Mark Lindsay Chapman, 69. Sorry DCU but the best Swamp Thing series was done nearly thirty years ago and starred the late Dick Durock as Swamp Thing and this actor as his chief antagonist, Dr. Anton Arcane. Short on CGI, but the scripts were brilliant. Chapman has also shown up in Poltergeist: The Legacy, The New Adventures of Superman, The Langoliers and Max Headroom to name a few of his genre appearances.
  • Born September 8, 1965 — Matt Ruff, 58. I think that his Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy is his best work to date though I do like Fool on The Hill a lot. Any others of his I should think about reading? And of course there is the adaptation of Lovecraft Country which I’ve not seen as I don’t have HBO. He won an Otherwise Award for Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, and an Endeavour Award for The Lovecraft Country.
  • Born September 8, 1975 — C. Robert Cargill, 48. He, along with Scott Derrickson and Jon Spaihts, worked on the script for Doctor Strange. More intriguingly they’re writing the script for The Outer Limits, a movie based on the television show. The film if ever happens, produced by MGM, will be adapted from just the “Demon with a Glass Hand” episode begging the question of what they’re writing for a script given that Ellison did write the Writers Guild of America Awards Outstanding Script for a Television Anthology script. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Flying McCoys shows the doctor is surprised by results of Dracula’s medical test.

(12) THREE PINTS OF PLOT IN A TEN GALLON HAT. The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage is not an Ahsoka fan: “Oh dear, George Lucas! Why the Star Wars universe is going from bad to worse”.

It must be very complicated being George Lucas. On the one hand, you get to wake up inside a vast Scrooge McDuck money vault every morning. On the other, you have to live with the absolute mess Disney has made of your life’s work. To be George Lucas must be to know that you are indirectly responsible for allowing something as soggy and aimless as Ahsoka to seep into the world.

Ahsoka has now reached its halfway point, with four of its eight episodes aired, and it’s fair to say that literally nothing has happened. We know what’s going to happen, because the characters won’t stop talking about it – they’re going to meet a new baddie who has been banished to a different galaxy and represents an enormous existential threat – but the show is plodding towards it so glacially that it feels as if we may never actually get there. It’s almost (almost!) as if Star Wars realises it has spread itself too thin and is doling out plot one measly quarter-portion at a time….

(13) FILL UP THE THIRD. Simultaneous Times Vol.3, a science fiction anthology, is now available from Space Cowboy Books. Edited by Jean-Paul L. Garnier, with cover art by Austin Hart (Critters Award Winner).

Sixteen wonderous stories of science fiction by authors from all over the world! From alien invasions to sentient plants to intergalactic travelers, this book has it all. Featuring stories from the 2023 Laureate Award winning, and two-time Hugo Award longlisted podcast Simultaneous Times, as well as stories appearing for the first time, this collection spans multiple generations of award-winning science fiction authors and covers a wide variety of SF styles and themes.

Stories by: Jonathan Nevair (Indie Ink Award Finalist); F. J. Bergmann (Writers of the Future Winner); Brent A. Harris (Sidewise Finalist); Gideon Marcus (Hugo Finalist); A. C. Wise (Sunburst Winner); Tara Campbell (Robert Gover Story Prize Winner); David Brin (Hugo Winner); Robin Rose Graves (Laureate Award Finalist); Renan Bernardo (Argos & Utopia Award Finalist); Christopher Ruocchio (Manly Wade Wellman Winner); Toshiya Kamei; Todd Sullivan; Susan Rukeyser; Ai Jiang (Nebula Finalist); Cora Buhlert (Hugo Winner); Michael Butterworth (Laureate Award Winner).

(14) THE TWO-EDGED SWORD OF TRUTH. Talya Zax introduces readers to “The Woman Who Reimagined the Dystopian Novel” in The New Yorker.

…The world of the Swedish writer Karin Boye’s little-known 1940 novel, “Kallocain,” is a close cousin to those depicted in “We” and “Brave New World.” Like Zamyatin’s and Huxley’s dystopias, Boye’s underground World State is a centralized authoritarian society whose inhabitants’ lives are tightly controlled. And, as in these earlier novels, Boye’s closed state is destabilized by the experience of awe. That wonder, however, is sparked by a contact not with the unpredictable and ungovernable external world but with the equally unpredictable and ungovernable reality of human experience—and, specifically, female experience. The women characters in many classic twentieth-century dystopias tend to be flat, mere foils to male protagonists. But in “Kallocain” it is the inner lives of women that come to illustrate both the state’s power over its citizens and their own power to resist….

… Dystopias weaponize what they fear. The World State of “Kallocain” fears truth, and therefore weaponizes truth. It fears familial bonds, so it weaponizes them, too. In her description of that process, Boye articulates a deceptively simple idea: when the state creates a weapon that requires human coöperation, it opens the door to that weapon being used against it….

(15) NOT JUST MOURNING COLORS. “To dye for: why Victorian Britain was more colourful than we think” explains the Guardian.

…A decade earlier, the flamboyant purple dresses made fashionable by the style leader Empress Eugénie of France were the preserve of the fabulously wealthy. Yet in just a few years, colours once made with expensive vegetable dyes were being industrially produced cheaply, thanks to an accidental discovery by an 18-year-old chemistry student William Henry Perkin. While attempting to synthesise quinine from aniline, a derivative of coal tar, Perkin realised the intense purples this colourless chemical produced could be used as a dye. He quickly established a factory for his new “mauveine”, as he called this early synthetic dye and chemists across Europe soon followed suit, expanding the synthetic colour palette. “The modern world of ubiquitous colour begins at this point,” says Winterbottom. “London’s streets and train stations are covered in brightly printed posters. People wear brightly coloured clothes. Everything from books to postage stamps becomes colourful.”

This rainbow transformation affected the entire social spectrum, from a working class who were now able to afford bright colours to members of the social elite rethinking their wardrobes. “Women asserted a more emboldened identity through colour,” says Winterbottom. In addition to loud dresses, ankles sporting coloured and striped stockings could be flashed thanks to newly swinging steel-hooped crinoline petticoats, which replaced the layers of fabric that previously helped to fill out skirts….

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Francis Hamit, Jeff Smith, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jeff Smith.]

Pixel Scroll 8/18/23 Let’s Do The Time Lord Again

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(0) Short Scroll today – no reason, just not as many things I wanted to include.

(1) LE GUIN’S BEST BOOKS. The New York Times takes a look at why Ursula K. Le Guin matters: “Her powerful imagination turned hypothetical elsewheres into vivid worlds governed by forces of nature, technology, gender, race and class a far cry from our own.” “The Essential Ursula K. LeGuin”.

In her 2009 essay “On the Frontier,” Ursula K. Le Guin took stock of an abstraction endemic to both the American West, where she was raised, and her chosen genre of science fiction. Interplanetary wars, galaxy-spanning empires, brave men bounding toward their next conquest — all this action rests on a notion of the future as inchoate, waiting to be made. But that’s never been true, she argued, in America or her fiction. “The future is already full,” she wrote. “It is much older and larger than our present, and we are the aliens in it.”…

(2) THE TRIMBLES. Maggie Thompson posted this photo taken at Comic-Con showing her flanked by John and Bjo Trimble. Bjo recently turned 90.

(3) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA has released episode 66 of Simultaneous Times, a monthly science fiction podcast. Stories featured in this episode are:

  • “Cost of Living” by Mike Morgan; with music by Fall Precauxions
  • “We’re All Family Here” by Mark Soden Jr.; with music by Phog Masheeen

Available on all podcast players or at Podomatic.

(4) THE GODS THEMSELVES. “’Percy Jackson’ Series Gets Teaser, Premiere Date on Disney+” reports Variety.

After a decade of waiting, “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” fans will finally get an author-backed screen adaptation of the beloved young adult novels on Dec. 20. The series will arrive on Disney+ with two episodes, followed by weekly drops….

The teaser opens with voiceover from Virginia Kull as Percy’s mother, Sally Jackson. “The stories that I have told you about Greek gods and half-bloods — they are real,” she says over images of Camp Half-Blood, Percy on the elevator to Olympus, Ares (Adam Copeland) and different confrontations with monsters….

Here’s the teaser trailer: “We’ve Been Expecting You”.

Percy Jackson & The Olympians tells the fantastical story of a 12-year-old modern demigod, Percy Jackson, who’s just coming to terms with his newfound supernatural powers when the sky god Zeus accuses him of stealing his master lightning bolt. Now Percy must trek across America to find it and restore order to Olympus.

(5) DON’T WALK A MILE IN HIS SHOES. “Minnesota man indicted over theft of Judy Garland’s ‘The Wizard of Oz’ slippers” – CNN has the story.

US authorities have charged a man in connection with the theft of a pair of ruby red slippers worn by actress Judy Garland as Dorothy in the 1939 classic movie “The Wizard of Oz” nearly 20 years after they were stolen from a museum in Minnesota.

On Tuesday, a federal grand jury indicted Terry Jon Martin on one count of theft of a major artwork for allegedly stealing “an object of cultural heritage from the care, custody, or control of a museum,” according to court documents filed in the US District Court of Minnesota. The slippers were valued at least $100,000, court documents stated….

BBC Sounds has recording of the Witness History interview with John Kelsch, one of the people who founded the Judy Garland Museum from which the slippers were taken in 2005: “The Wizard of Oz: The stolen ruby slippers”.

(6) CHRIS CALLAHAN (1944-2023). Chris Callahan, an active Washington Science Fiction Association member in the 1990s and earlier, died June 10. Rich Lynch notes, “She was one of the many people who worked on the 1998 Baltimore Worldcon and I am especially grateful to her for volunteering as a proofreader for the Souvenir Book.  She saved me from many embarrassing typos, and had some valuable insights on how it ended up being put together.”

Callahan was part of the WSFA Players who performed Alexis Gilliland’s parody musical “2001 A Space Opera” at the 1974 Worldcon.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born August 18, 1925 — Brian Aldiss. Much honored, he’s was named a Grand Master by SFWA and inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. I’ll single out his Helliconia series, Hothouse and The Malacia Tapestry as my favorites. He won a Hugo at Chicon III for “The Long Afternoon of The Earth”, another at Conspiracy ’87 for Trillion Year Spree which he co-authored with David Wingrove. He’s well known as an anthologist and SF writer with Space, Time and Nathaniel, a collection of short stories being his first genre publication. He’s edited far too many collections to know which one to single out, but I’m sure that the collective wisdom here can make recommendations. (Died 2017.)
  • Born August 18, 1931 — Grant Williams. He is best remembered for his portrayal of Scott Carey in The Incredible Shrinking Man though he will have the role of the psychopathic killer in Robert Bloch’s The Couch. Of course, he shows in Outer Limits, he plays Major Douglas McKinnon in “The Brain of Colonel Barham”.  And he’s Major Kurt Mason in The Doomsday Machine. (Died 1985.)
  • Born August 18, 1934 — Michael de Larrabeiti. He is best known for writing The Borrible Trilogy which is noted by several sources online as being an influence by writers in the New Weird movement. Ok folks, I’ve not read so please explain how The Borrible Trilogy influences that literary movement as it doesn’t seem like there’s any connection. (Died 2008.)
  • Born August 18, 1954 — Russell Blackford, 69. Writer resident in Australia for awhile but now in Wales. Author of Terminator 2: The New John Connor Chronicles, and editor of the Australian Science Fiction Review in the Eighties. With Van Ikin and Sean McMullen, he wrote Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction. And he wrote Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination: Visions, Minds, Ethics.
  • Born August 18, 1955 — Tom Flynn. Journalist who edited Free Inquiry magazine from 2010 until his death. He waged a decades-long crusade against Christmas. Seriously he wrote a book titled The Trouble with Christmas. His only work was his Galactic Rapture/Messiah Games space opera which ran to six volumes. Only one volume, The Destroyer’s Creed, is available from that company shall be named and it’s quite expensive. (Died 2021.)
  • Born August 18, 1958 — Madeleine Stowe, 65. She’s in the Twelve Monkeys film as Kathryn Railly, and she’s in the Twelve Monkeys series as Lillian in the “Memory of Tomorrow” episode. Her other genre work was a one-off in The Amazing Spider-Man which ran for thirteen episodes nearly forty years ago where she was Maria Calderon in “Escort to Danger” in that series, and she also played Mia Olham in Impostor which was scripted off Philip K. Dick’s “Impostor” story. 
  • Born August 18, 1966 — Alison Goodman, 47. Australian writer who’s won three Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Speculative Fiction for Singing the Dogstar Blues, The Two Pearls of Wisdom and Lady Helen and the Dark Days Pact. The Two Pearls of Wisdom was nominated for an Otherwise Award. 
  • Born August 18, 1967 — Brian Michael Bendis, 56. He’s both writer and artist, a still uncommon occurrence. Did you know he’s garnered five Eisner Awards for both his creator-owned work and Marvel Comics? Very impressive! He’s the primary force behind the creation of the Ultimate Marvel Universe, launching Ultimate Spider-Man which is an amazing series which I read on the Marvel Unlimited app. 

(8) QUEER LODGINGS. Robin Anne Reid’s latest Writing from Ithilien introduces readers/listeners to Queer Lodgings: a Tolkien Podcast

Queer Lodgings is a queer-led podcast covering all things Tolkien. Join Alicia, Grace, and Leah (and sometimes Tim), a group of fans and scholars, semi-monthly as we discuss Middle-earth from a lgbtq+-focused, intersectional, antiracist, and non-christian perspective.

They’re beginning to post transcripts of some episodes, and Reid provides in this issue of her Substack.

(9) FLY LIKE IT’S 1999. Plans are afoot for “The Eagle Has Landed” Documentary which will explore the legacy of the iconic Eagle Transporter from Space: 1999. The project’s director/creator Jeffrey Morris is launching a Kickstarter campaign on August 28 to bring it to life.

Meet the Visionaries: Icons of the Eagle Legacy

Click here to learn more about who will join Jeffrey Morris in the documentary, including:

Brian Johnson: Visual Effects Artist / Creator of the Eagle
Nick Tate: Captain Alan Carter in Space: 1999
Barbara Bain: Dr. Helena Russell in Space: 1999
Charles Duke: Astronaut / Apollo 16 Lunar Module Pilot
Kevin J. Anderson: Bestselling Sci-Fi Author / Space: 1999 Fan
Bill George: Visual Effects Supervisor
Robert Meyer Burnett: Filmmaker / Film Culture Podcaster

See a preview video here.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Jean-Paul L. Garnier, Olav Rokne, Rich Lynch, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 7/15/23 I Went Looking For A Scroll And All I Found Was This Lousy Jetpack

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(1) IT WON’T BE FREE. “Steven Soderbergh is releasing a surprise sci-fi series starring Michael Cera next week” and EW tries to find out why.

Steven Soderbergh is no stranger to experimentation. In 2006, he released Bubble simultaneously on cable and in theaters before that was commonplace. He shot Unsane and High Flying Bird using an iPhone. Now, he’s dropping a sci-fi series starring Michael Cera and Roy Wood Jr. on his own website, Extension765. 

The mysterious project, which follows his new Max series Full Circle, is called Command Z, and EW can confirm Soderbergh directed the series in addition to producing. He shot the comedy — the name of which is the computer keystroke for undo — “in secret,” according to an announcement from his Extension765 website. Command Z will stream via the site on July 17, though EW can confirm it won’t be available for free.

“This very morning, our fearful leader explained that in three days (July 17th for those who don’t want to do the math) we will be ‘dropping’ a series of some sort called Command Z,” reads a letter on Soderbergh’s website, written by a possibly fictional figure named Fabrizia del Dongo. “If I seem hedgy, it’s because A) None of us have seen it; and B) It’s apparently about ninety minutes long, but there are eight episodes of varying length, so is it an actual series or just a movie cut up into pieces?”…

(2) ON STRIKE. Variety reports that SAG and the AMPTP even dispute what some of their disagreements are. This article tries to identify all the sticking points: “SAG Actor Strike: Talks Stalled Over AI, Streaming and Pay Hikes”.

SAG-AFTRA and the major studios remain at odds on a dizzying array of issues, as film and TV actors hit the picket lines Friday for the first time since 1980.

According to sources on both sides, the biggest sticking point is the union’s demand for 2% of the revenue generated by streaming shows. The two sides also remain far apart on basic increases in minimum rates, with the studios offering 5%, 4% and 3.5% across the three years of the contract, while the union is demanding 11%, 4% and 4%.

But that only scratches the surface. The parties are at odds on dozens of issues, only a handful of which have been publicly reported.

In some cases, the two sides don’t even agree on what the disagreements are. They engaged in a rare public back-and-forth Thursday over the use of artificial intelligence to replicate background actors.

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union’s executive director, alleged that the studios want to pay an extra for one day of work to be scanned, and then reuse that likeness forever. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers hotly disputed that, saying that its proposal explicitly limits the reuse to the project for which the extra was hired….

(3) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books has released Simultaneous Times episode 65. Listen to the episode here.

Simultaneous Times Episode 65

Stories featured in this episode:

  • “The Sport of Snails” by F.J. Bergmann; with music by Phog Masheeen
  • “Hollow Hearts” by Eric Fomley; with music by Fall Precauxions

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(4) DEVELOPMENT HELLIONS. JoBlo asks “WTF Happened to Johnny Mnemonic?” “We take a look at the making of one of the biggest flops of the 1990s, the Keanu Reeves cyberpunk adaptation Johnny Mnemonic.”

…One of the early challenges had been expanding Gibson’s original 1981 story, which was a mere 22 pages, to a satisfying feature film length. The story’s broad strokes would remain – a courier carrying crucial encrypted data in a cranial hard drive, a double-crossing handler, a monowire-twirling Yakuza assassin, a cyborg dolphin, an outcast group called Lo-Teks. 

To stretch the story, Gibson borrowed liberally from his own work like VIRTUAL LIGHT and introduced new plot points and “cinematic pacing”, with the data in Johnny’s overloaded brain storage now both a proverbial ticking time bomb and the invaluable cure to a global pandemic called Nerve Attenuation Syndrome. This mysterious disease, also known as the “black shakes”, is a result of constant exposure to the omnipresent technology that has become the world’s addiction. PharmaKom, the corporate owner of the sensitive data wants it returned so they can maximize profits, and they dispatch assassins to literally collect Johnny’s head.

There was one story complication arising from Gibson’s own prominence, however. The film rights to Neuromancer were already held by another studio, which meant the shared character of capable razor-fingered mercenary Molly Millions was off-limits for his own adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic. In her place would be a desperate bodyguard wannabe named Jane, who suffers from the “black shakes”.

But the movie would linger in development hell under Carolco, until the company ultimately imploded for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the notorious flop Cutthroat Island. One former Carolco executive still wanted to make Johnny Mnemonic and pitched it to various studios, but to no avail. The project would eventually find support through Canadian company Alliance… and around 20 different international financiers. Sony’s Tristar Pictures entered the mix and would distribute the movie in America, and the studio would invariably make creative demands and revisions that proved maddening for the writer and director….

(5) MEMORY LANE.

1988 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

A writer I really enjoy is Jane Yolen. Indeed, she’s on the chocolate gifting list, preferring no more that no more than seventy percent dark. And I’ve got a personally signed copy of The Wild Hunt here. 

Now eighty-four, she’s been both an author and editor who is responsible for close to four hundred books existing.  Short stories? Well, she’d fill dozens of collections if publishers were so willing. Not One Damsel In Distress: World Folktales for Strong Girls shows you her strong feminist bent and Meow: Cat Stories from Around the World gives you a look at her love of our companions. 

She has garnered three Mythopoeic Awards, another three World Fantasy Awards, and a hat trick was completed with three Nebulas. She also won a Skylark, and a bunch of Awards for her poetry. 

So, Mike selected the Beginning of Sister Light, Sister Dark, the first novel of the Great Alta saga, for this Scroll. It was published thirty-five years ago by Tor with the cover art by Dennis Nolan. It was nominated for a Nebula. It was followed by White Jenna and The One-Armed Queen. 

And now her Beginning of this Saga…

THE MYTH: 

Then Great Alta plaited the left side of her hair, the golden side, and let it fall into the sinkhole of night. And there she drew up the queen of shadows and set her upon the earth. Next she plaited the right side of her hair, the dark side, and with it she caught the queen of light. And she set her next to the black queen.RN

“And you two shall be sisters,” quoth Great Alta. “You shall be as images in a glass, the one reflecting the other. As I have bound you in my hair, so it shall be.” Then she twined her living braids around and about them and they were as one. 

THE LEGEND: 

It happened in the town of Slipskin on a day far into the winter’s rind that a strange and wonderful child was born. As her mother, who was but a girl herself, knelt between the piles of skins, straddling the shallow hole in the earth floor, the birth cord descended between her legs like a rope. The child emerged, feet first, climbing down the cord. When her tiny toes touched the ground, she bent down and cut the cord with her teeth, saluted the astonished midwife, and walked out the door. 

The midwife fainted dead away, but when she came to and discovered the child gone and the mother dead of blood-loss, she told her eldest daughter what had happened. At first they thought to hide what had occurred. But miracles have a way of announcing themselves. The daughter told a sister who told a friend and, in that way, the story was uncovered.

The tale of that rare birthing is still recounted in Slipskin—now called New Moulting—to this very day. They say the child was the White Babe, Jenna, Sister Light of the Dark Riding, the Anna.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 15, 1918 — Dennis Feltham Jones. His first novel Colossus was made into Colossus: The Forbin Project. He went on to write two more novels in the series, The Fall of Colossus and Colossus and the Crab, which in my opinion became increasingly weird. iBooks and Kindle have the Colossus trilogy plus a smattering of his other works available. (Died 1981.)
  • Born July 15, 1931 — Clive Cussler. Pulp author. If I had to pick his best novels, I’d say that would be Night Probe and Raise the Titanic, possibly also Vixen 03. His real-life National Underwater and Marine Agency, a private maritime archaeological group found several important wrecks including the Manassas, the first ironclad of the Civil War. (Died 2020.)
  • Born July 15, 1944 — Jan-Michael Vincent. First Lieutenant Jake Tanner in the film version of Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley which somehow I’ve avoided seeing so far. Is it worth seeing? Commander in Alienator and Dr. Ron Shepherd in, and yes this is the name, Xtro II: The Second Encounter. Not to mention Zepp in Jurassic Women. (Don’t ask.) If Airwolf counts as genre, he was helicopter pilot and aviator Stringfellow Hawke in it. (Died 2019.)
  • Born July 15, 1951 — Jesse Ventura, 72. He’s actually been in far more genre films that I thought. His first film was Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe which audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give a rating of twenty percent. After that, he’s been in Predator, Running Man, Demolition Man and Batman & Robin. 
  • Born July 15, 1961 — Forest Whitaker, 62. His best-known genre roles are Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as Saw Gerrera and in The Black Panther as Zuri. He’s had other genre appearances including Major Collins in Body Snatchers, Nate Pope in Phenomenon, Ker in Battlefield Earth for which he was nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor, Ira in Where the Wild Things Are, Jake Freivald In Repo Men (anyone see this?) and he was, and Host of Twilight Zone. 
  • Born July 15, 1963 — Brigitte Nielsen, 60. Red Sonja! What a way to launch your film career. Her next genre roles were 976-Evil II and Galaxis… Oh well… She starred as the Black Witch in the Nineties Italian film series Fantaghiro, and played the Amazon Queen in the Danish Ronal the Barbarian. 
  • Born July 15, 1967 — Christopher Golden, 56. Where to start? The Veil trilogy was excellent as was The Hidden Cities series co-authored with Tim Lebbon. The Menagerie series co-authored with Thomas E. Sniegoski annoyed me because it never got concluded. Straight On ‘Til Morning is one damn scary novel.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

  • Off the Mark has a sarcastic playlist for Storm Troopers.
  • Bliss will be twice as funny if you’ve been around long enough to recognize the graffiti artist.

(8) FIRST ENCOUNTERS OF THE CLOSE KIND. DC’s Joshua Lapin-Bertone tells us about the first time “When Superman Met Lois Lane” – a story which really has no consistent beginning!

I don’t know about you, but I love hearing about how a couple first met….

So how did Lois and Clark first meet, really? Let’s start from the beginning…

Their first encounter in Action Comics #1 was replayed in the Superman comic strip.

1939 – Superman Newspaper Strips

Clark Kent notices Lois Lane for the first time when he enters the Daily Star looking for a job. He hears Lois arguing with her editor, and remarks that she has spunk. Lois meets Superman for the first time when he rescues her from some thugs.

The sequence is almost identical to the one in Action Comics #1, but since it’s running in a daily newspaper it’s dragged out. For example, the thugs throw Lois from a plane, where Superman catches her. Then she winds up in quicksand, where he has to save her again. You can’t say he’s not devoted to her.

(9) INFO DUMPER. “Foundation’s showrunner explains why big book adaptations start so dang slow” in The Verge.

Adaptations of big, complex books tend to start slow — and that’s usually because there’s just so much to explain. It was true of Game of Thrones and The Rings of Power, and it was especially true of Foundation on Apple TV Plus, which took Isaac Asimov’s novels and turned them into prestige television. With unusual concepts like psychohistory (a kind of math that can predict the future) and a genetic dynasty (a never-ending line of clone emperors who rule the galaxy), the first few episodes of season 1 were bogged down by exposition.

According to David S. Goyer, showrunner on Foundation, there really wasn’t a way to avoid that. “I felt like the first three episodes of season 1 were so exposition heavy, but — trust me — we tormented ourselves trying to figure out a way around it,” he explains. “We just decided, screw it, we have to explain this stuff and hope the audience is still around.” He believes that might just be a necessary evil of this kind of adaptation, though. “A lot of the really worthwhile shows that I ended up loving took a while to get going,” Goyer says. “Maybe that’s just what one has to do when you’re doing a big ambitious, novelistic show.”…

(10) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] On Friday’s Jeopardy! episode, the first round of the game had a full category of “Modern Fantasy Lit”. The contestants took the questions in reverse order, so that’s how I’ll present them.

$1000: This “Remains of the Day” author wrote fantasy with “The Buried Giant”, set years after the death of King Arthur

Challenger Alison Madson knew it was Kazuo Ishiguro.

$800: In P. Djéli (sic) Clark’s “Ring Shout”, Klansmen summon demons during a viewing of this 1915 D.W. Griffith film

Returning champion Ittai Sopher: “What is ‘Birth of a Nation’?”

(Checked this with Google’s help: it should be Djèlí.)

$600: S.A. Chakraborty’s “City of Brass” has Nahri team up with Dara, one of these mystical creatures whose name starts with a silent “D”

Alison responded correctly.

$400: In a book by Gail Carson Levine, obedience is the curse of this title girl, “Enchanted”; she also pines for Prince Charmont

Daniel Moore said, “Who is Ella?”

$200, last clue of the round: Monza Murcatto, thrown from a great height & left for dead, later gets revenge in Joe Abercrombie’s “Best Served” this

Daniel: “What is cold?”

(11) FINAL JEOPARDY! And Andrew Porter noted the night’s last stage also included something of genre interest.

Final Jeopardy: category: Books & Authors

Answer: In 1930 this author wrote “Murder at Full Moon”, a horror-mystery novel set in a fictional town in central California.

Wrong question: Who is Jack London?

Correct question: Who is Steinbeck?

(12) SIDE EFFECTS. FirstShowing.net sets up the official trailer for Aporia:

…Since losing her husband, Sophie has struggled to manage her grief, her job, and parenting her devastated daughter, but when a former physicist reveals a secret time-bending machine, Sophie will be faced with an impossible choice. He offers her a chance to restore her previous life, but of course, this kind of attempt to change history always comes with other dangerous consequences….

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