Great Britain’s Royal Mail issued a stamp series on May 22 celebrating the publication of the first novel in C.S. Lewis’ fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published in 1950, 75 years ago.
One set of four stamps is based on the original book illustrations by Pauline Baynes, and a second set features eight new illustrations by artist Keith Robinson, reimagining key moments in the series from Lucy Pevensie’s first glimpse of Narnia to the epic finale of The Last Battle.
The stamp artwork and an interview with artist Robinson follows the jump.
(1) AURORA DEADLINE APPROACHES. Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association members have until April 5 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern to submit nominations for this year’s Aurora Awards.
You can find all eligible works via either via CSFFA’s public eligibility list page or from the nominating page when you log into your account. On the public page, most works have links so you can get more information about them.
(2) FREE READS AT ANALOG AND ASIMOV’S. Analog Science Fiction and Fact has revealed the 2024 Analytical Laboratory Finalists. The magazine has also made many of these stories available to read either in part or whole.
I have had a special fondness for The Martian Tales by Edgar Rice Burroughs ever since I first read them in my early teens. That is also when I first did drawings based on them, and I even used some of my illustrations to help win acceptance to the Rocky Mountain School of Art at age fifteen.
Once I became a professional illustrator, the eleven-book series was among the assignments I hoped to do…someday.
Figuring that if the chance to do the covers ever came my way it would be after decades of work in the field, I was surprised and thrilled to have been offered them after only three years as a professional.
I was so enthusiastic about the project that after the first call from Judy-Lynn del Rey, I immediately got started rereading the books, making extensive notes, and compiling a supplementary catalog of every visual reference I could find. My aim was to do the most accurate depictions of Burroughs’ Barsoom yet realized….
It is possible to celebrate aspects of Britain that everyone who lives here can share; that are not co-authored by our peers in Europe; that stimulate our senses with a materiality more enduring than the abstract precepts of a civics lecture. (And I’m not talking, like the wretched “Life in the UK” test, about fish and chips.) A new set of stamps for Royal Mail is not going to transform a nation’s self-image, but it should inspire us. What we have in common with each other, and with every other human being who has set foot on these islands, is no more and no less than our experience of place….
he eight-strong set of Royal Mail Myth and Legends stamps
Pedro Pascal might be getting a new coffee order soon…one made with mushrooms. In a surprising but fitting collaboration, The Last of Us (yes, the hit HBO Max series based on the popular zombie video game) has partnered with Four Sigmatic, the leading brand in mushroom-based products, to create their very own cup of joe.
In case you missed it, The Last of Us follows a group of survivors navigating a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by a zombie outbreak, caused by the cordyceps fungus. And in a bit of clever irony, TheLast of Us x Four Sigmatic coffee is made with none other than that same fungus.
While cordyceps may turn people into flesh-eating, undead creatures on the show, it doesn’t cause any of those symptoms in real life. In fact, the fungus is packed with tons of nutritional value. The coffee blend also includes lion’s mane, Vitamin B12, and coffee bean extract—ingredients designed to “increase mental focus and energy,” according to the product’s website….
… While I’m not exactly a fan of the undead, I can certainly appreciate this fun coffee and zombie moment. Though, no amount of cordyceps coffee beans will get me to face a horde of zombies anytime soon.
(6) NEW GERROLD NOVELLA. Starship Sloane has just published a new novella, The Man Without a Planet by David Gerrold, with cover art (titled Falling) by Bob Eggleton.
The Man Without a Planet is a science fiction reimagining of the classic tale, The Man Without a Country—Redmonde had found his niche in the glitterships of high society, reveling in the opulence and gamesmanship it afforded, until a sudden regime change leads to his permanent exile in the far reaches of space aboard starships building a network of portals through the cosmos. He will never be allowed to see his home world again and escape would seem to be an impossibility—but when the opportunity presents itself, Redmonde disappears into legend.
“In The Man Without a Planet, David Gerrold has given us an ambitious reinterpretation of a classic. In this engaging science fiction retelling of The Man Without a Country, we find the main character, Redmonde, negotiating the sharp edges of his quarantined banishment in deep space and the intersection of his personal belief system with the sledgehammer of an imposed political ideology.” —Katerina Bruno, science fiction poet and 2022 SFPA Dwarf Stars Award finalist
(7) KEN BRUEN (1951-2025). Irish mystery author Ken Bruen died March 29 at the age of 74. Bruen was the recipient of many awards: the Shamus Award in 2007 (The Dramatist) and 2004 (The Guards), both for Best P.I. Hardcover; Macavity Award in 2005 (The Killing of the Tinkers) and 2010 (Tower, cowritten by Reed Farrel Coleman), both for Best Mystery Novel; Barry Award in 2007 (Priest) for Best British Crime Novel; the Grand Prix de Literature Policiere in 2007 (Priest) for Best International Crime Novel.He was also a finalist for the Edgar Award in 2004 (The Guards) and 2008 (Priest), both for Best Novel.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Item by Cat Eldridge.]
March 30, 1930 — John Astin, 95.
Ahhh, John Astin. I know him best as Gomez Addams in The Addams Family series, which was on the air shorter than I thought, lasting just two seasons and a little over sixty episodes. (I’m delighted to say that it streaming on Prime.) He played him again in Halloween with theNew Addams Family (which I’ve not seen and is not streaming) and voiced him thirty years later in The Addams Family, a two-season animated series which is not streaming. I’ll admit I’m not interested in animated series based off live series. Any live series.
Oh, did you know he was in West Side Story? He played Glad Hand, well-meaning but ineffective social worker. No, you won’t find him in the credits as he wasn’t credited then but retroactively, he got credited for it which was good as he was a lead dancer. Brilliant film and I’ve no intention of watching the new version, ever. It’s streaming on Disney+.
I’d talk about him being in Teen Wolf Too but let’s take the advice of Rotten Tomatoes reviewers and steer way clear of it. Like in a part of the multiverse where the Pixels are contently napping by the Gay Deceiver. Same for the two Killer Tomatoes films. I see he’s in Gremlins 2: The New Batchas a janitor but I can’t say I remember him, nor much of that forgettable film.
So, series work… I was going to list all of his work but there’s way too much to do that, so I’ll be very selective. He’s The Riddler in two episodes of Batman and a most excellent Riddler he was. That series rather surprisingly is not streaming anywhere.
But that was nothing when compared to his role on The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. as Prof. Albert Wickwire. He’s a charming, if somewhat absent-minded inventor who assists Brisco with diving suits, motorcycles, and even grander creations such as rockets and airships. Dare I say that this was an element of steampunk in the series? It was a great role for him. This is another series I surprised to find isn’t streaming anywhere.
Finally, he has a recurring role as Mr. Radford (the real one) as opposed to Mr. Radford (the imposter) on Eerie, Indiana. A decidedly weird series that was unfortunately cancelled before it completed. It is streaming on Prime.
The trend of using Open AI’s ChatGPT to create AI images in the distinctive style of Studio Ghibli probably should have ceased the moment the official White House X account hopped aboard. But there’s a new wrinkle in the story today, as one of the trend’s proponents posted a cease and desist notice they claimed to have received from Studio Ghibli representatives—which fellow social media users immediately called out as being as fake as the “art” that inspired it.
Along with the (fake) letter, X user teej used the platform to defend what they’d done, writing in part: “AI creators deserve protection, not punishment. Expression is sacred. Imagination is not illegal. If I have to be a martyr to prove that, so be it.”
It’s hard not to chuckle at this response to, let’s see, typing a prompt into a program so that it can create an AI image blatantly ripping off hours of hard work and creativity from actual human artists, including the great Hayao Miyazaki and his Ghibli team….
Space journeys that stretch far beyond home are on the horizon. Crews heading for Mars will face conditions quite different from those on Earth, and researchers have been working to figure out what might happen to the human body during these extended voyages.
Kidneys have been a big question mark. Recent work reveals that these important organs could face more trouble than previously assumed, including a higher risk of stones and lasting damage.
Several studies have hinted at health concerns for astronauts ever since humans first ventured outside Earth’s protective zone, but the new findings shed light on why such problems arise in the kidneys.
Dr. Keith Siew from the London Tubular Centre, based at the UCL Department of Renal Medicine, and his colleagues have pieced together a detailed picture of what happens when living beings – human and otherwise – experience space-like conditions for weeks to years….
…The latest study was conducted under a UCL-led initiative involving over 40 institutions on five continents.
The team considered data from 20 different research cohorts and samples linked to over 40 Low Earth orbit missions to the International Space Station, plus 11 simulations with mice and rats.
The work is described as the largest analysis of kidney health in spaceflight so far and includes the first health dataset for commercial astronauts.
It also involved seven simulations in which mice were exposed to radiation that mimicked up to 2.5 years of cosmic travel beyond Earth’s magnetic field.
Findings revealed that the structure and function of the kidneys are altered by spaceflight, with galactic radiation causing permanent damage that would jeopardize any long-distance mission…
A newly identified parasitic wasp that buzzed and flew among dinosaurs 99 million years ago evolved a bizarre mechanism to snare other creatures and force them to unwittingly shelter its young, according to new research.
Paleontologists studied 16 specimens of the tiny wasp preserved in amber dating back to the Cretaceous period that was previously unearthed in Myanmar. The previously unknown species, now named Sirenobethylus charybdis, had a Venus flytrap-like structure on its abdomen that could have allowed it to trap other insects, the researchers reported Thursday in the journal BMC Biology….
… However, the researchers reasoned that the wasp likely did not intend to kill with the bizarre grasping structure.
Instead, they theorized that the wasp injected eggs into the trapped body before releasing it, using the creature as an unwitting host for its eggs. Its larvae then started their lives as parasites in or on the host’s body and likely ended up eating the host entirely, Vilhelmsen said. The host was likely a flying insect of a similar size to the wasp, he added….
Avengers: Doomsday promises to unite the biggest names from Marvel’s multiverse, but is this epic crossover a dream come true or a chaotic mess waiting to happen? With an all-star cast and potential for multiversal mayhem, I break down the confirmed cast list, rumored plot points, and ask the ultimate question: Can Marvel balance spectacle with storytelling?
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. We announced the other day that Kermit the Frog will be UMD’s 2025 Commencement Speaker, but John King Tarpinian has discovered a cute video UMD made to promote the appearance.
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip Williams.]
(1) IT COMES IN THE MAIL*. Whenever David Langford air mails me a paper copy of Ansible there’s always a colorful assortment of British postage stamps on the envelope. I was struck to see on the most recent arrival a singular image – the smile of the Mona Lisa. The smile alone. And without a caption. (But do we need one?)
I wondered if this was a current issue and checked with Langford. He replied that it’s from the Royal Mail’s 1990 “Smiles” set, which also includes Stan Laurel and the UK Dennis the Menace.
Isn’t this a collectible? Not exactly, he explained. “People used to buy commemorative stamps in bulk as an investment, but the bottom dropped out of that market some time ago: there’s at least one UK dealer who acquires these accumulations on the cheap and sells at less than face value to cheapskates who actually use them for postage. As you say, it makes for interesting envelopes!”
Paul Graham Raven: Okay. What’s your elevator pitch, on the rare occasion you meet someone who doesn’t know who you are already? What do you tell them you do?
BS: I would tell them nowadays that I’m the art director of a technology art fair in Turin, Italy….
PGR: As I understand it, that’s almost a kind of return to something you were doing very early on. You were very involved in, I don’t think it was called that then, but the tech-art scene in Austin [Texas] when you were younger, right?
BS: Yeah, I used to hang out with a lot of robotics guys and engineering people, software people and hardware people. I mean, my father was an engineer, so I have a long lasting interest in material culture and how things are made. It was very rare of me to actually do any of that. But now in later life—I mean, this year I turned 70, and I’m actually giving in and doing a lot more hands-on… well, I don’t even like to call it creative work, really.
But I’m very involved in studies of luxury multi-tools. [brandishes multi-tool] This is the Leatherman Free from the USA; as an American in Italy, it’s kind of like a crusade of mine to try to explain to people why an object like this existed, why you might want to use it, and why an American invented it in Eastern Europe. We’re known for distributing tools to our guests and the core of creative artists that surrounds our festival. I found that I could give them like a futuristic lecture about what to do, but they were much, much more interested if I just said to them, “if I gave you this, what would you do with it,” right?. I mean, I’ll put it in a bag—you can have ten! And then they come back and we put what they did on display.
That’s just an intervention that the Turinese invited me to do, and nobody in Austin would have asked me to do such a thing. But in Italian design circles, they have the atmosphere, or the motto really, “proviamo”: give it a shot, prove it, try it out. And proviamo is never just a lecture; proviamo is always a thing. It’s a process or a tool—you know, make a lamp out of plastic bags, make a chair out of styrofoam. That’s a proviamo, very Italian design-centric situation. So I do a lot of that.
I mean, I’m the judge, I’m the art director for our fair. And people come up with these proviamo “innovations”, or just hacks, really. Interventions, you might call them. And I have to judge them and decide whether to show them to the Turinese public, right? So in order to do that, I have to have an aesthetic, and I have to have some idea of what’s worth showing to the public. I mean, we’re publicly funded art fair, you know—it’s my job, really. And so I do a lot of writing for this festival; I write all our pamphlets, do a lot of basically behind-the-scenes art-world politics.
But, you know, I found that this suits me—I find it less tiresome than actually going out and doing futurism for people and getting paid for it. I mean, that situation, which I’ve done a lot, it is like politics, but it’s also kind of psychoanalytic; you’re dealing with people who are in trouble, and you’re trying to sort of gently bend their worldview so they could see some way out of their difficulty. Whereas something like brandishing a Leatherman Free multi-tool on an Italian actually gets to the point, and it stays in his pocket when you leave the room….
…Ryan Reynolds has shared a new holiday video in support of the SickKids Foundation, this time appearing as Deadpool alongside Kidpool and Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter to ask for donations for The Hospital for Sick Children. Reynolds and his wife, Blake Lively, will match all donations up to $500,000 made before midnight on December 24th….
… Due to the characters’ R-rated nature, Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter comes in. Plenty of hilarious DC references follow, including nods to Henry Cavill, Batman, Wonder Woman’s classic costume change by spinning, and more….
An online battle over video game reporting entered the real world on Wednesday, after one well-known reviewer filed a lawsuit in the Eastern District of New York against a rival, accusing him of orchestrating a harassment campaign that led to her losing her job.
Brooklyn writer Alyssa Mercante, formerly a senior editor at the game review website Kotaku, is seeking damages from California YouTuber Jeff “SmashJT” Tarzia, alleging that Tarzia created hundreds of false and inflammatory posts and videos designed to provoke hate towards Mercante and Kotaku.
Screenshots in Mercante’s lawsuit purport to show Tarzia making comments like “How many times do I need to teach these crazy bitches this lesson?” Other allegations include that Tarzia falsely stated Mercante engaged in prostitution, a crime in New York, and that Tarzia helped to accuse Mercante of antisemitism – a charge that ended with her compelled resignation.
Mercante also seeks to have the court recognize “stochastic terrorism” as a new residual liability tort, defined in the suit as a pattern of escalating harassment. A court in Washington has previously recognized this tort, according to the suit.
Tarzia, in response, is fundraising for a legal defense, and claims Mercante is attempting to silence him through the suit. “Mercante has retained activist lawyers with a clear agenda to bring this ridiculous case against me, and the video game industry to it’s [sic] knees […] This case isn’t just about me. It’s about all gamers,” Tarzia wrote in a post on the conservative crowdfunding website GiveSendGo.
The feud stems from the “GamerGate” controversy, a long-running and vicious online debate – linked to the rise of the alt-right – over the politics of video games. Self-identified GamerGate supporters, including Tarzia, accuse developers and journalists of left-wing bias and favoritism. Opponents, meanwhile, including Mercante, say that those supporters are in reality an organized hate mob, focusing primarily on targeting women and seeking to punish opponents for their political views. Mercante’s former employer, Kotaku, has long been a lightning rod for this debate. The suit claims Tarzia’s campaign began following the site’s publication of an article by Mercante on a popular conspiracy theory.
The suit also touches on the separate, and equally loaded, internet battle over the game streaming website Twitch and the war between Israel and Hamas, in which several observers, including U.S. Rep. Richie Torres, have accused the site of platforming antisemitic creators. Mercante has been previously accused of antisemitism in connection to Twitch, centered around her positive coverage of controversial streamer Hasan Piker and an alleged retweeting of an X post skeptical of reports of rape occurring during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year. According to Mercante, Tarzia’s amplification of the antisemitism claim led to multiple individuals contacting Kotaku’s owners with these accusations, resulting in parent company G/O Media pressuring her to resign.
Mercante is seeking a jury trial in the suit, as well as damages in excess of $75,000.
(5) SCI-FI LONDON IS BACK! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Good news for SF film lovers in Brit-Cit…If Glasgow’s programme of wall-to-wall panels and sparse film stream (it was the first British-hosted Worldcon not have any film screenings) failed to hearten, then fret not, the Sci-Fi London film fest is back! (Sci-Fi London were the people who co-organised (with the British Film Institute) the Loncon 3 film programme.)
This year’s (2024) event was greatly slimmed-down to a single day of short films, nonetheless some great stuff was in there. The reduction came about due to a cinema chain deciding to close the Stratford community cinema that had been SFL’s home. However, the latest news is that in 2025 there will be a four-day fest just outside of central London in Finsbury Park around the corner (literally) from its rail and tube/metro station.
As usual, the Fest firmly focuses on screenings with many of the feature films having their first British airing and, if true to form, there should be a few World premieres in the mix. There will also be some two-hour short SF film sessions and the results of the 48-hour film challenge. This last takes place earlier in the year in which amateur film makers are given a couple of lines of dialogue and a prop to include and then just two days in which to turn in a film… One Gareth (The Creator; Star Wars: Rogue One) Edwards was a past SFL 48-hour challenge winner. The Fest itself sees the short-list screened and winner announced.
If it the same as previous years, then you pay for each film you see but if you are seeing more than several it may be cheaper to get an all-Festival pass.
For those coming from afar wishing to attend, there are nearby hotels including some mid-range budget hotels such as the local Travelodge which provides a good base for central London tourism.
More details as and when on sci-fi-london.com. The dates are June 19-22, 2025. The venue is the Picturehouse Cinema, Finsbury Park.
Stand-by for action. Anything can happen in these four days…
(6) CINEMA TOOTHSOME. In “Jumping the Shark, Part II” at Black Gate, Neil Baker continues to wonder why these movies bite.
…A new watch-a-thon, this one based on a handful of the 500+ shark movies that I haven’t seen (or gave up on). I’m not holding out much hope for these – shark movies are, on the whole, awful, but I know for a fact that some of these are among the worst films ever made. This 20-film marathon is me just trying to understand why they get made, bought and streamed….
Here’s one of his subjects:
Shark Exorcist (2014) Tubi
What kind of shark? A rubbish CG chonk and some possessed ladies.
How deep is the plot? The depth of a small pail.
Anyone famous get eaten? Nope.
Just going by the title, you know this going to be rubbish, but what KIND of rubbish? Actually, this is a step up from the usual rubbish.
Normally, a film with this premise, shot on a camcorder, with acting that ranges from earnest to ironing board, would be acutely aware of their own daftness, and play it for laughs. But Shark Exorcist, bless it, takes itself seriously, and it’s not a hateful experience. I’m not recommending it, but I’m also not tracking down every last copy with a hammer.
His novels have always channelled ideas about time and quantum reality, and he is keen to elide distinctions between art and science: working with Jodrell Bank on what he calls “Operation Melting Snow”, and today describing maths as philosophy, philosophy as a game, creativity as play. What Garner knows for sure is that “I don’t write set books. I keep coming back to the distinction between mysterious, which is OK, and mystical, which is not OK. The thing that ties all creativity together is not something that universities should analyse, but people should just accept as wonder.”
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
December 14, 1978 — Superman the Movie
By Paul Weimer: I had heard about Superman the Movie which premiered on this date before I ever saw it, and the first time I saw it was on television in a network television cut. Even then, DC characters were never my primary comic interest, that was marvel. But when Christopher Reeve came on screen, he became Superman for me, in a way that blew away, I must admit, the black and white Superman 1950’s series episodes I had seen. Even with all of the Supermen since, he still is my default mental image.
And to this day Reeve is still Superman for me. It’s the acting, really in the movie. Sure, on the face of it, everyone should recognize Clark Kent as Superman, or so you’d think. But Reeve’s…call it full body performance as Kent and as Superman are so completely different, so completely alien to each other, that you can watch both people and not believe they were remotely the same person. (Just watch Kent and his body language in the newsroom versus any of the Superman scenes. It’s night and day and it’s a testament to Reeve’s skill as an actor.
And then there is Margot Kidder as Lois Lane. She is Lois Lane, and I will not be taking any other questions at this time. She does the body language thing as well–compare Lane doing her job versus when she is with Superman. It’s more subtle but it is surely there.
And then there is Lex Luthor as played by Gene Hackman. He is the Luthor that for years was the Luthor that others reacted to. He brings his A-game to this role, and is every inch Reeve’s equal. It’s kind of amazing to have a supergenius Lex Luthor to be so pedestrian, like the worst used car salesman on the planet, but with enormous resources. But claiming that version of Luthor himself resulted, as I say, in having everyone else react to that portrayal, which just highlights his portrayal all the more.
And yes, the time travel bit of Superman is absolutely nonsense. I can forgive the movie for it. A movie that has Marlon Brando, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, and Christopher Reeve can be forgiven that misstep.
What they’re saying: “When you go into a bookshop, you do pick up books that you like the look of … there’s power behind good cover design because it will draw people in before even the blurb,” Alcaino tells Axios Latino.
“So please, judge away,” she jokes.
State of play: Alcaino has come up with covers for popular authors like Isabel Allende and Jennifer Saint, and she has also done special editions of massive series, like George R. R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire,” and collectible editions of Leigh Bardugo’s “Six of Crows” duology.
She was a finalist for Best Professional Artist at the 2024 Hugo Awards, and was shortlisted for Designer of the Year at the British Book Awards after having already won the latter in 2022….
(11) BEST SCIENCE PICS OF THE YEAR. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Nature has just posted its science pics of the year. In the mix: the Etna volcano blowing rings; a Pratchett-like turtle but instead of carrying the world….; a neat picture of Jupiter taken by the Juno probe; meteors over Stonehenge; and Jaws…
These pics will appear in Nature’s double Christmas edition on Thursday December 19. Apparently, in that edition the correspondence page features a letter from one wag known to Filers… 😉 [Click for larger images.]
(12) PERSEVERANCE CLIMB. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Perseverance has just climbed 500 metres out of Jezero Crater on Mars reaching the top on 11th Dec to get quite a view. See video below. “Perseverance Rover Panorama of Mars’ Jezero Crater”.
Travel along a steep slope up to the rim of Mars’ Jezero Crater in this panoramic image captured by NASA’s Perseverance just days before the rover reached the top. The scene shows just how steep some of the slopes leading to the crater rim can be.
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. A multiplied Muppet performs “Ode To Joy”. Now we know why Beethoven didn’t score it for electrical instruments.
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Paul Weimer, David Langford, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
(0) …Shall Ever Medicine Thee To That Sweet Sleep Which Thou Scrolledst Yesterday
(If I make the headline too long, Jetpack definitely won’t send a subscriber notice. It may be too long as it is! But what a wonderful title.)
(1) FILE 770 MEETUP AT GLASGOW ON SUNDAY. Cora Buhlert on her first day at the Worldcon met several Filers — Chris Barkley, Christian Brunschen, Ingvar, Standback a.k.a. Ziv, but thinks it would be great to have a semi-official Filer meet-up in Glasgow.
Cora proposes that Filers meet her on Sunday at 3:00 p.m.at the free library in Hall 4 and then find someplace to sit down. There are several tables and chairs in the area.
Please take pictures!
(2) SEATTLE 2025 MEMBERSHIP SALE. Through Monday the Seattle 2025 Worldcon is giving a $10 discount on memberships. The deal was announced on Facebook.
In honor of Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon For Our Futures, we have a $10 membership discount that is good from today (Thursday) through Monday!
Go to https://reg.seattlein2025.org/ and click on “Add New Registration”. After you fill out the information, go to “Review and Pay”. Next to “Total Cost”, you will see a button marked “Add Coupon”. Click on it and enter “Glasgow” in the text box.
You’ll go back to “Review and Pay” and the total cost will be adjusted.
This issue was edited by Emanuel Ježić-Hammer, Jelena Janjić, Vedran Ilic-Dreven and Mila.
In this issue we present a story from the most recent fantasy collection Project Tulip, and two winners of the SPera Prize for Story, from 2019. in 2024 Here’s a review of events on the local SF scene since 2009. years (there we stopped in one of the older numbers), and one film, to show the Americans and English that we also have power armour for the race. Reports and gossip from Glasgow and Rotterdam caught in one of the following issues!
(5) SUPPORT FAN FUND AUCTIONS AT WORLDCON. Courtesy of David Langford, here are the catalogues for two fan fund auctions being held at Glasgow 2024. In person and online bidding is available. One auction is Saturday evening local time, and the other closes on Sunday. The catalogs tell how to bid online.
(6) SAYONARA. [Item by Dave Doering.] After almost 20 years as an institution in fan events in Utah, Anime Banzai abruptly announced it closing down less than two months before its October edition: See their home page, the only heads up on the cancellation: Anime Banzai – Utah’s Premier Anime Convention.
Anime Banzai family
Utah Anime Promotions has been considering the fate of Anime Banzai 2024 after the convention meeting held on 4 Aug (including the harsh realities that shutting down an event like this entail), but events have outpaced that consideration. The problems are too deep to address long term, and while we had hoped to patch things up internally to still successfully run Anime Banzai 2024 as a farewell for attendees and staff, that is no longer possible.
I would like to deeply apologize directly to Artemis and Warky who were spoken of in this meeting, and clearly state that Utah Anime Promotions vehemently rejects all negative claims made against either. The Board has been in communication with you both since then to discuss the situation, and would like to thank that both of you have continued to express a hope that Anime Banzai 2024 could be provided for attendees, even under these circumstances. Hope can be a hard choice to make, and I regret that we won’t be able to assist with that.
Anime Banzai has always operated on a shoe-string budget, with funds diverted back into running each next event and the expenses that lead up to it. Without a convention in Oct where most of the convention funds are generated, we’re honestly not sure what it will look like to take care of outstanding expenses including pre-registration, vendors, etc. While we’re not sure what this path will look like, we will do our best to make things right.
Utah Anime Promotions has let the community down by not being attentive enough to the signs that manifested over time. As years continued, patterns of complacency and detachment grew. Some members of staff pointed this out over time; I’m sorry we didn’t pay better attention.
We have had many great people involved with Anime Banzai over time; inspiring experiences with energetic guests, panelists eager to share their passions with attendees, cosplayers sharing their delight for costuming and embodying characters they love, editors marrying audio and visual for anime music videos, and staff and volunteers who have worked long and hard hours to help things going. Thank you for the uplifting joy, and I hope people can hold on to more of those positive experiences than be burdened by the negative.
This convention was started by a local group of friends, who had the idea of “How hard would it be to start a convention ourselves?” while on a road trip back from a convention in a nearby state. Anime Banzai grew from that seed with the enthusiasm and joy from the community. As Anime Banzai shuts down, I hope that anime fans in Utah can continue that positive spirit. You have been the best part of Anime Banzai; always remember that, and you can continue to be better, shine brighter, day to day.
Utah Anime Promotions: Steven Jones, Daniel Bentley
They say when refunds will be issued on a first-come, first-served basis.
(8) MORE LEARNEDLEAGUE SFF: BRANDON SANDERSON, OCTAVIA BUTLER, STUDIO GHIBLI, SPECULATIVE BIOLOGY. [Item by David Goldfarb.] We’re in the middle of what’s called the “off-season” in LearnedLeague, when in between regular seasons we have specialty quizzes for one day, and “mini-Leagues” that are more topic-oriented and go for 12 days.
Yesterday we had a One-Day Special about Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere. Follow the link for the questions, but be warned that they are for serious Sanderson fans. I’ve read every book published in the Cosmere (and a couple that haven’t!) and I got only 8/12. At 56 I don’t have the memory for small details that I used to.
In day 10 of the just-concluded California mini-league (technically “California 2” because there was a previous one on the same topic back in 2007), we had this question:
Give the title of the prescient 1993 dystopian novel by Pasadena-born Octavia E. Butler that has as its protagonist Lauren Olamina, a young woman who creates a religion called Earthseed in a speculative 2024 California, ravaged by climate change and social inequality.
This had a 33% get rate, with no single wrong answer getting to the 5% threshold to be shown.
Filers might also find of interest 1DS’s about Studio Ghibli (the animation studio behind Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Howl’s Moving Castle, among many others) and Speculative Biology (based on books such as Dougal Dixon’s After Man, taking a look at how life on Earth might evolve in the future if humanity were to vanish).
(9) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman keeps the wheel turning even while he’s away at the Worldcon, inviting listeners to breakfast with Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam in Episode 232 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam is the author of the horror novel Grim Root, which was officially released two days after our chat. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in over 90 publications, such as Popular Science, Lightspeed, and LeVar Burton Reads. Her short story collection Where You Linger & Other Stories and her horror novella Glorious Fiends were both published in 2022.. She’s a two-time finalist for the Nebula Award. By day, she works as a Narrative Designer writing games for a mobile game company.
We discussed how her new horror novel toys with the tropes of reality TV, the importance of balancing multiple POVs in a novel to keep them all equally interesting, our differing views on the revision process, the three years she spent writing 1,000 words per day (and why she stopped), the message she took from her two Nebula nominations, the importance of community, what she learned about herself by rereading her short stories to assemble a collection, why we both believe in ambiguous endings, and much more.
(10) SUPES ON![Item by Daniel Dern.] Some Dern current recommendations on TV/streamers:
(a) The Umbrella Academy is re-opened for business: Season 4, the six-episode final season of The Umbrella Academy, dropped on Netflix on Thursday, August 8, 2024. Having so far watched Episode 1, I’m in.
And here’s the amazing Footloose Dance-Off! segment from Season 3, which I don’t think is in any way a spoiler (btw, there’s a nice short making-of documentary somewhere online):
(b) Orphan Black: Echoes (on Prime Video/AMC, Apple+, etc), starring Krysten Ritter (previously in, among other things, Marvel’s Jessica Jones series). This is a 37-years-later (in the show timelines, set in 2052) follow-up to Orphan Black (which starred Tatiana Maslany (who was on the recent HBO/MAX Perry Mason, and was Jennifer Walters in the (great) Marvel TV series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law).
We’re 7 episodes in, and we’re enjoying it. (I’m sure it makes more sense if you’ve seen Orphan Black; since we’ve seen Orphan Black, I can’t speak to that.)
(c) Season 5 of The Boys (over on Amazon) was, unsurprisingly, good. (Met expectations on the lotta violence, cussing, sex, violence, drugs, politics — note, this was all written and filmed several years ago — more violence and cussing, and great acting.)
ET: adorable interstellar tyke or nightmarish space demon? As a four-year-old in a multiplex in Aberystwyth, west Wales, I was in the latter camp. From the moment he scuttled out of an eldritch mist like the Demogorgon’s weirdo little cousin, my blood curdled. There were tears, almost instantly. What was this monster? This boggle-eyed gonad? This sentient hammer wrapped in flayed human flesh? And other questions I wouldn’t have had the vocab to ask.
She possibly pointed out that my two-year-old sister was such a fan of ET that every off-camera moment left her yelling: “Where TV?” I forget the exact details – all I remember is the sweet relief of being nowhere near the cinema screen. We left shortly after – not quite the pleasant Welsh holiday movie jaunt my parents had hoped for….
In Arthur C Clarke’s short story The Nine Billion Names of God, a sect of monks in Tibet believes humanity has a divinely inspired purpose: inscribing all the various names of God. Once the list was complete, they thought, he would bring the universe to an end. Having worked at it by hand for centuries, the monks decide to employ some modern technology. Two sceptical engineers arrive in the Himalayas, powerful computers in tow. Instead of 15,000 years to write out all the permutations of God’s name, the job gets done in three months. As the engineers ride ponies down the mountainside, Clarke’s tale ends with one of literature’s most economical final lines: “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”
It is an image of the computer as a shortcut to objectivity or ultimate meaning – which also happens to be, at least part of, what now animates the fascination with artificial intelligence. Though the technologies that underpin AI have existed for some time, it’s only since late 2022, with the emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, that the technology that approached intelligence appeared to be much closer. In a 2023 report by Microsoft Canada, president Chris Barry proclaimed that “the era of AI is here, ushering in a transformative wave with potential to touch every facet of our lives”, and that “it is not just a technological advancement; it is a societal shift”. That is among the more level-headed reactions. Artists and writers are panicking that they will be made obsolete, governments are scrambling to catch up and regulate, and academics are debating furiously….
Over the past 18 months, Big Finish has undergone a transformational change. We have introduced several new systems which control the essential business functions of Big Finish.
These systems, which include stock control, dispatch and shipping tracking, payment gateways and accounting, email and customer service tools, replaced older software that had reached the end of its life.
They were vital upgrades, needed to ensure that we could continue to fulfil orders to our customers, and all the new “behind the scenes” systems have been tested for many months and are working seamlessly.
The final action of this transformation was the rolling out of our new “shop front”, the Big Finish website and app.
Unfortunately, it is very clear that here a number of mistakes have been made. In particular, the migration of customer data has not gone as planned, and the browsing experience of the website and app is proving to be a frustration. I sincerely apologise to everyone who has encountered difficulties accessing their purchase library since the relaunch, or who feels let down by how we have managed the process.
I know from seeing the many messages coming in via email and social media that these updates are a cause of worry and concern to many listeners. I would like to reassure each and every customer that no purchases will be lost, all the data is safe, and we are committed to improve the functionality, accessibility and reliability of the website, whatever it takes.
If you haven’t yet had a chance to do so, I would urge you to read the new “How tos” page which explains how to reset your password and update address information the first time you visit the site. We could not carry across any of these details in the upgrade due to the requirements of data protection law. It is not possible to browse your purchased items or order new releases without completing these steps.
The team will keep updating the “Work in progress” page with known issues and our timetable for improvements. As you might imagine, the Big Finish customer service team is currently inundated with messages but they will do their best to answer all queries. I thank you in advance for your patience, understanding and loyalty, and for sticking with us during this difficult period.
Finally, please let me just restate how deeply sorry I am for the inconvenience so many of our loyal listeners are experiencing at the moment. I completely recognise the very valid frustrations being expressed and I hope that you can bear with us as we try our utmost to find the best solution to bring you the best website and app experience at Big Finish.
(15) SKILL TREE EPISODE: SIGNS OF THE SOJOURNER. ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination has released another episode of CSI Skill Tree, their series examining how video games envision possible futures and build thought-provoking worlds. In this episode, they discuss “Signs of the Sojourner”, a deckbuilding game set in a hazily sketched post-crash version of the southwestern U.S. that explores themes of community resilience, trust, and the dynamics of conversation.
The guests are Leigh Alexander, a speculative fiction author, critic, and narrative designer for video games including Reigns: Game of Thrones and Neo Cab, and Mia Armstrong-López, a journalist and editor working on issues of science, health, and justice, and managing editor for our Future Tense Fiction series.
Also, here’s a YouTube playlist with all 16 of Skill Tree episodes thus far.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Ersatz Culture, Dave Doering, David Langford, Scott Edelman, Joey Eschrich, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
(1) SURVIVING THE TIMES. N.K. Jemisin tells Esquire readers “We Need Speculative Fiction Now More Than Ever” in this commentary excerpted from her introduction to Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer.
…Enter the Southern Reach books. At the time I first read Annihilation—during the run-up to the 2016 election—it was a welcome breath of fungal, fetid air. Other fiction of the time seemed determined to suggest there was no need for alarm, things couldn’t be so bad, anything broken could be fixed. Could it, though? As I watched my country embrace a stupid, incompetent, and blatantly criminal fascist while insisting that his spiteful, privileged sycophants somehow had a point…well. When you’re already queasy, sweet smells make the feeling worse.
It helped to read instead about the smells—and sights, and horrors, and haunting beauty—of Area X. It helped me to imagine that creeping, transformative infection, warping body and mind and environment and institution, because that was the world I was living in. It helped to meet the twelfth expedition’s nameless women, who were simultaneously individuals with selfish motivations and archetypes trapped in their roles: the biologist, driven by the loss of her mate and the need to integrate into a new ecosystem; the psychologist, a human-subjects ethics violation in human(?) flesh. We are dropped into danger with these women, immediately forced to confront an existential threat with courage and perseverance…and this, this, was what I needed from my fiction. The second book, Authority, was even more of what I needed. As we watched Control slowly realize he’s never been in control, and that things were a lot worse than his complacency allowed him to see, it just resonated so powerfully. His over-reliance on procedure and the assumed wisdom of his predecessor, his dogged refusal to see the undying plant in his office as a sign of something wrong… There was nothing of 2014’s politics overtly visible in the book, yet they were all over it, like mold….
The U.S. Postal Service is honoring late “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek with a new forever stamp and celebrated the pop culture icon in a dedication ceremony Monday.
The new stamps will be available in a set of 20 designed to resemble a “Jeopardy!” game board with its eye-catching, signature blue video screens. Each stamp features a clue, prompting collectors and letter-senders with the query, “This naturalized U.S. citizen hosted the quiz show ‘Jeopardy!’ for 37 seasons.” Its answer, “Who is Alex Trebek?” also appears underneath the clue in upside-down print….
(3) THE ATOMIC WAY. [Item by Jim Janney.] Ars Technica has a long article on the new NASA/DARPA combined research project for nuclear powered space ships, and includes a history of previous efforts starting in the 1950s. “We’re building nuclear spaceships again—this time for real”.
One of the plot points of Miss Pickerell Goes To Mars is that the crew member responsible for navigating the ship, and doing the essential calculations, gets left behind. They muddle through anyway, with the help of some sensible advice from Miss Pickerell and because, as one of the crew cheerfully says, “Don’t have to worry about that. Using atomic fuel.” Reading that in 2024 caused me to roll my eyes a little (and the question of reaction mass is never discussed), but it’s more plausible than I realized.
Phoebus 2A, the most powerful space nuclear reactor ever made, was fired up at Nevada Test Site on June 26, 1968. The test lasted 750 seconds and confirmed it could carry first humans to Mars. But Phoebus 2A did not take anyone to Mars. It was too large, it cost too much, and it didn’t mesh with Nixon’s idea that we had no business going anywhere further than low-Earth orbit.
But it wasn’t NASA that first called for rockets with nuclear engines. It was the military that wanted to use them for intercontinental ballistic missiles. And now, the military wants them again….
…DARPA’s website says it has always held to a singular mission of making investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. What does a nuclear-powered spaceship have to do with national security? The military’s perspective was hinted at by General James Dickinson, a US Space Command officer, in his testimony before Congress in April 2021.
He said that “Beijing is seeking space superiority through space attack systems” and mentioned intelligence gathered on the Shijian-17, a Chinese satellite fitted with a robotic arm that could be used for “grappling other satellites.” That may sound like a ridiculous stretch, but it was enough get a go-ahead for a nuclear spaceship.
And the apparent concern regarding hypothetical threats has continued. The purpose of the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) project, stated in its environmental assessment, was to “provide space-based assets to deter strategic attacks by adversaries.” Dickinson’s worries about China were quoted in there as well.
“Let’s say you have a time-critical mission where you need to quickly go from A to B in cislunar space or you need to keep an eye on another country that is doing something near or around the Moon, and you need to move in very fast. With a platform like DRACO, you can do that,” said DARPA’s Dodson….
(5) HISTORIC BLOCH PHOTOS. The Robert Bloch Official Website has announced a big update: an entirely new, second gallery page. All photos supplied courtesy of Robert Unik, Elly Bloch’s great nephew. “Gallery 2”.
(6) FOR THE COAL BITERS AMONG US. [Item by Danny Sichel.] When he was in graduate school, earning his doctorate in Scandinavian Studies, Jackson Crawford took the time to compile a work called “Tattúínárdǿla saga”: Star Wars as an Icelandic saga. True, this was in 2010, but if you haven’t seen it, then it might as well be new.
…Tattúínárdǿla saga tells of the youth of Anakinn himingangari, beginning with his childhood as a slave in Tattúínárdalr, notably lacking the prolonged racing scene of the MHG version, and referring to the character of “Jarjari inn heimski” only as a local fool slain by Anakinn in a childhood berserker rage (whereas in the MHG version, “Jarjare” is one of “Anacen’s” marshals and his constant companion; Cochrane 2010 suggests that this may be because the MHG text is Frankish in origin, and “Jarjare” was identified with a Frankish culture hero with a similar name). After this killing, for which Anakinn’s owner (and implied father) refuses to pay compensation, Anakinn’s mother, an enslaved Irish princess, foresees a great future for Anakinn as a “jeði” (the exact provenance of this word is unknown but perhaps represents an intentionally humorous Irish mispronunciation of “goði”). This compels Anakinn to recite his first verse…
[Translation] “My mother said/ That they should buy me/ A warship and fair oars,/ That I should go abroad with Jedis,/ Stand up in the ship’s stern,/ Steer a magnificent X-Wing,/ Hold my course till the harbor,/ Kill one man after another.”
The etymology of “xwingi” (nom. *xwingr?) is unknown; numerous editors have proposed emendations, but none is considered particularly plausible. It is likely to be another humorous Irish mispronunciation of a Norse word….
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
July 24, 1895 – Robert Graves. (Died 1985).
Robert Graves
By Paul Weimer: Graves for me has always sat at the intersection of myth, mythology and ancient (secret) history. I first came across his work, although I didn’t know that he was the ultimate author of it, when I watched the BBC adaptation of his novel I, Claudius, which purports to tell the “True” story of Claudius and his ancestors from the perspective of the titular character. It gave me a somewhat distorted opinion, as well as a great appreciation, of the strangeness and wild nature of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and helped cement my interest in Ancient Rome for good. It would be a decade before I read the actual novel It took me years, after reading the book, to come to a better and more balanced opinion of Livia than what Graves inadvertently taught me. In similar fashion, his Count Belisarius gave me a skewed but interesting perspective on the titular Byzantine General. This novel once again (a bad theme in his work) gave me a skewed opinion and view of Belisarius’ wife Antonia. It’s well written (just like I, Claudius and Claudius the God) but is it good history? No, no it is absolutely not. The novels (all of them) should be taken with a huge heaping of salt.
Where Graves hits science fiction circles more directly is The White Goddess and his interest in Celtic spiritualism, myth and mythology. It’s most certainly a response and extension of Frazer’s The Golden Bough. By the time I came across The White Goddess (when I was studying all sorts of myth and mythology), I had had enough grounding in Graves and his work to be able to read it critically. Is it history? Is it at all accurate and represents real belief systems and systems of thought?
No.
Instead, The White Goddess, I felt, is an individualistic and idiosyncratic, and poetic and mythopoetic point of view on this Celtic flavored belief and spirituality. It has no actual value in exploring the real belief systems of the past, it’s not quite a fantasy so much as a demonstration of how one can construct and use belief systems. In that sense, it functions to show how one could go about worldbuilding a belief system for a secondary world fantasy setting based on iconography and interpretation and imagery. In that sense, as a tool for thinking about spirituality and how it might be created, The White Goddess is far more successful, and is on far firmer ground, than an actual depiction of ancient beliefs in any way whatsoever. I think the strong poetic writing of Graves, the keenness of word choice and imagery, here and elsewhere, gives his work a power that still resonates.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
Eek! reminds us that Star Wars is no Field of Dreams.
(9) MARS IN POPULAR CULTURE ONE-DAY SPECIAL. [Item by David Goldfarb.] LearnedLeague is at it again, with a One-Day Special quiz about “Mars in Popular Culture”. You can find the questions by following this link. As you might expect from the subject, it has a great deal of SFF content. I got 9 of the 12 questions right, and somewhat unusually for me, managed to pick the five questions that would play the toughest and so got the best possible score given those 9.
(10) KEEP THOSE DOGIES ROLLING. [Item by Daniel Dern.] (With a tip of the hat to the Firesign Theatre), “And there’s hot dogs [or perhaps, for scansion, “frankfurters”] all over the highway!” “Oscar Mayer Wienermobile rolls in crash on Chicago-area highway” at AP News.
An Oscar Mayer Wienermobile got into a pickle on a Chicago highway.
The hot-dog shaped Wienermobile hit a car Monday morning along Interstate 294 and its driver lost control and overcorrected, causing it to roll onto its side near the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, Illinois State Police said.
No injuries were reported after the crash, which prompted the closure of the right lane of northbound I-294 for more than an hour, officials said.
Scientists in Brazil have come up with the first evidence that sharks are being exposed to cocaine.
Rachel Ann Hauser Davis, a biologist who worked on the study at Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, told NPR that they dissected 13 wild sharpnose sharks caught near Rio de Janeiro. All tested positive for cocaine in their muscles and livers.
“The key findings of the study are the presence of cocaine in sharks,” Hauser Davis says. “The actual high levels of cocaine detected in muscle is indicative of chronic exposure.”
Narcotraffickers being chased in the high seas often toss bales of cocaine overboard. But Hauser Davis says it’s more likely the sharks in the study were exposed to Rio de Janeiro wastewater contaminated with the drug.
“Probably the main source would be human use of cocaine and metabolization and urine and feces discharge, and the second source would be from illegal refining labs,” she says….
(12) WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE. [Item by Steven French.] “Inventors on hunt for way to make clean water on moon” says the Guardian. One of the ‘contestants’ is the British Interplanetary Society whose former Chair was of course the inimitable Arthur C!
Inventors hope to crack how to create a reliable clean water supply on the moon – and it may involve a microwave oven from Tesco.
The goal to set up a crewed lunar base was launched many moons ago but has yet to come to fruition. With reliance on water supplies from Earth risky and expensive, one of the many challenges is how to extract and purify water from ice lying in craters at the lunar south pole.
Such a supply would not only provide a resource for drinking and growing crops, but the water could also be split into hydrogen, for use as rocket fuel, and oxygen for residents to breathe.
Now the UK Space Agency has announced that it is awarding £30,000 in seed funding, with expert support, to each of 10 UK teams who are vying to solve the problem….
As part of NASA’s commitment to foster responsible exploration of the universe for the benefit of humanity, the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy (OTPS) is funding space sustainability research proposals from five university-based teams to analyze critical economic, social, and policy issues related to Earth’s orbit and cislunar space.
The new research awards reflect the agency’s commitment identified in NASA’s Space Sustainability Strategy to ensure safe, peaceful, and responsible space exploration for future generations, and encourage sustainable behaviors in cislunar space and on the lunar surface by ensuring that current operations do not impact those yet to come.
Three of the five awards will fund research that addresses the growing problem of orbital debris, human-made objects in Earth’s orbit that no longer serve a purpose. This debris can endanger spacecraft, jeopardize access to space, and impede the development of a low-Earth orbit economy.
The remaining two awards focus on lunar surface sustainability and will address key policy questions such as the protection of valuable locations and human heritage sites as well as other technical, economic, or cultural considerations that may factor into mission planning. ….
A panel of NASA experts selected the following proposals, awarding a total of about $550,000 to fund them:
Lunar surface sustainability
“A RAD Framework for the Moon: Applying Resist-Accept-Direct Decision-Making,” submitted by Dr. Caitlin Ahrens of the University of Maryland, College Park
“Synthesizing Frameworks of Sustainability for Futures on the Moon,” submitted by research scientist Afreen Siddiqi of Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Orbital Debris and Space Sustainability
“Integrated Economic-Debris Modeling of Active Debris Removal to Inform Space Sustainability and Policy,” submitted by researcher Mark Moretto of the University of Colorado, Boulder
“Avoiding the Kessler Syndrome Through Policy Intervention,” submitted by aeronautics and astronautics researcher Richard Linares of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Analysis of Cislunar Space Environment Scenarios, Enabling Deterrence and Incentive-Based Policy,” submitted by mechanical and aerospace engineering researcher Ryne Beeson of Princeton University
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Jim Janney, Ersatz Culture, Rich Lynch, Danny SIchel, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]
(1) ENTER WORLDWIDE AWARD FOR SFF SERIES. The Sara Douglass Book Series Award is accepting entries through September 30, 2024. The Sara Douglass Book Series Award is administered through the Aurealis Awards but is a separate, special award conferred during the ceremony (like the Convenors’ Award for Excellence).
This year, the Sara covers series ending (in original publication anywhere in the world) between January 2021 and December 2023. Full details at the link.
GENERAL ELIGIBILITY
For the purpose of the Sara Douglass Book Series Award, a “series” is defined as a continuing ongoing story told through two or more books, which must be considered as ending in one of the years covered by the judging period.
This award is to recognise that there are book series that are greater as a whole than the sum of their parts – that is, the judges are looking for a series that tells a story across the series, not one that just uses the same characters/setting across loosely connected books. It is anticipated that shortlisted works will be best enjoyed read in succession, with an arc that begins in the first book and is completed in the last.
The series may be in any speculative genre within the extended bounds of science fiction, fantasy or horror (that is, if a book would be considered on an individual basis for one of the novel, or possibly novella, categories in the Aurealis Awards, the series may be considered here).…
…[Una] McCormack argues that McIntyre’s writings weren’t just about feminism. “She was extremely ahead of the curve in the representation of disability, or ‘other-bodied-ness,’” McCormack says. “In ‘The Exile Waiting’ [McIntyre’s first novel], we see a huge diversity of shape and form that humanity can take. So I think she’s ahead of the curve on a lot of things.”…
…“Little Sisters and Other Stories” by Vonda N. McIntyre is set for release on May 21. Clarion West is presenting “The Roots and Future of Feminist Science Fiction,” a free virtual panel discussion focusing on McIntyre’s work and other major influences on the genre, at 11 a.m. PT on Saturday, June 8. In addition to [Una] McCormack, the panelists include Nicola Griffith, SJ Groenewegen and Nisi Shawl. Advance registration is recommended.
…He had some valid reservations about the dragons’ portrayal in the original show, which he believed improved in the prequel series, House of the Dragon. According to Martin, Game of Thrones’ dragons lacked “personality” and were all too similar to one another.
… In House of the Dragon, viewers are introduced to a whole new array of dragons as companions to the Targaryen family, each with their own unique traits and quirks. Thus, this gave the creators of the Game of Thrones prequel a good opportunity to improve their creature effects this time….
(4) UNION EFFORTS SCORE VICTORY. “Disneyland Character Workers at California Park Vote to Unionize” reports the New York Times. “The vote determined whether 1,700 workers who play characters such as Mickey and Minnie Mouse and who dance at parades could join the union representing other workers at the park in Anaheim, Calif.” Most of the resort’s work force was already unionized.
… The Actors’ Equity Association, the national labor union that represents more than 51,000 professional actors and stage managers, said it had exceeded the threshold it needed in a vote overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, winning a 79 percent majority with 953 yes votes and 258 no votes, according to a statement.
Among the key issues that brought workers together to fight for representation in future negotiations with the company were securing improvements in safety and scheduling and demanding “a living wage,” as well as other workplace benefits, the union said….
(5) TORGERSEN CRITICIZES SANDERSON. [Item by Kevin Lang.] Brad Torgersen decided to publicly attack Brandon Sanderson on both Twitter and his Facebook page over perceived religious differences involving the Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS). Both instances are still publicly viewable.
So, according to Brandon Sanderson’s own web site, he’s signed on with Wokeness, vs. the official gospel principles of the LDS church. As expressed in documents like the Proclamation on the Family. Even though Brandon professes to be an LDS member in good standing. This is something the church is really gonna have to decide what to do about: these multiplying numbers of LDS Utah artists especially, who’re publicly proclaiming their support for politics and social causes which are in direct conflict with church doctrine. Either the church just keeps ignoring it, or a whole bunch of people are going to wind up being excommunicated. I honestly have no idea which way the church will go. I know which way they should go. But will it happen? Lately, I have my doubts. Too many people far too in love with being “nice” than actually making members accountable for supporting, espousing, and promoting anti-gospel ideas, groups, and movements. If Brandon and Co. are truly the ascendant voices of a new church majority, a genuine schism is inevitable. They want to remake the LDS church into just another soft Christian denomination that embraces sexual deviancy and sin, while adorning itself in rainbow fruitcake paraphernalia.
(6) TOMLINSON GETS HIS CHAIRS BACK. Patrick S. Tomlinson’s online appeal succeeded in getting his lawn furniture returned after trolls hoaxed people into thinking it was being given away.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 20, 1928 — Shirley Rousseau Murphy. (Died 2022.) Now we come to a woman who wrote about cats who talked and understood human speech, Shirley Rousseau Murphy. How could I resist such a writer?
Shirley Rousseau Murphy
The series that I’m interested is the Joe Grey series which involves a number of felines in a small coastal California town with a thriving tourist trade who develop the rather unusual ability not only to understand human speech but to talk it as well. No, it’s not explained, nor should it be.
In first novel, Cat on the Edge, Joe Grey, our central feline and mostly the narrator here and in all of the novels, is the only witness to a murder. As the author says on her website, “Escaping the killer, he becomes the hunted, and he’s one scared tomcat–until he meets green-eyed Dulcie, a charmer with talents to match his own.” He also discovers shortly there’s the aforementioned talents. Weirded out at first, he’s delighted eventually.
The writing here is better than just decent with some quite unexpected plot developments that add considerable depth to the story. Joe Grey as a cat seems a feline in his behavior, the setting is charming and makes sense, and the mysteries are reasonably good though I wouldn’t call them particularly deep.
It obviously sold well as there were twenty-one novels before she stopped with the last, Cat Chase the Moon, published after her death. A novella, Cat Chase the Moon, which I think is a prequel also has been published only by the usual suspects.
So all of these novels in this series I suspect based on reading the first three are all like any series of this sort such that you could read any or all of them and be entertained by what you read. Is there an explicit order to them? No idea.
She has a number of other series, none of which I’ve read. The Fontana Duology is a paranormal series involving Satan Himself with cats again prominently involved based on the really cute orange tabbies on both covers, and also the titles are The Cat, the Devil, and Lee Fontana and The Cat, the Devil, the Last Escape.
Tired of cats yet? You’re out of luck if you are as she wrote went on to pen The Catswold Portal where a young girl could transform herself into, oh guess. She actually notes on her website that she describes each cat in detail so this is a small calico.
Ok, I promise no more cats, so finally I’ll stop with dragons that I consider to be akin to cats. I really do. They probably like having their bellies tickled.
The Dragonbards trilogy which has as its story a sleeping dragon who awakens only to find her beloved land ruled by an evil despot and the only one who can save is a bard who is not be found. It’s a YA series that got very, very good reviews.
Need I say that she did unicorn fiction as well? I think not.
Harry Lives With His Aunt And Uncle Over The Summers
One of the more unfortunate recurring aspects of the Harry Potter timeline is Harry’s time staying at the Dursleys. Harry’s aunt and uncle, Vernon and Petunia Dursley, raise Harry for the first eleven years of his life until he leaves to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Though Hogwarts quickly becomes the place Harry thinks of as his true home, he spends at least a couple of weeks at the Dursleys’ house in every single Harry Potter book.
The Dursleys never treat Harry particularly well, but unbeknownst to them, Harry’s ability to call the Dursleys’ residence home kept him protected from Voldemort until his 17th birthday, making his stays at the Dursleys’ crucial to his survival throughout the series. Harry might loathe every moment he’s forced to spend with his abusive relatives, but his time there in each Harry Potter book is quietly very important to the series.
… all graduating students, must step forward and be tapped on the head with an object he calls “the medieval space bonnet.”…
…The University of Edinburgh’s Sorting Hat-style graduation ceremony has been in place for at least 150 years, in which time the bonnet has tapped the heads of over 100,000 graduates. But the round silk and cloth bonnet is rumored to be much older than that. Legend has it that the bonnet was made from a pair of trousers that belonged to 16th-century Scottish Reformation leader John Knox….
… Beyond its ceremonial duties, the bonnet has also been to space—well, at least a part of it. In 2006, astronaut and Edinburgh alumnus Piers Sellers contacted then-principal Timothy O’Shea and asked for permission to take the Geneva Bonnet with him to the space station. While O’Shea was open to the idea, he says that university officials told him it would be “an act of extraordinary madness to take the sacred bonnet into space!” As a compromise, Sellers took a small patch of velvet embroidered with the university crest with him on his mission. This patch was later sewn into the ceremonial hat, leading to the nickname “the medieval space bonnet.”…
…Although J.K. Rowling has never acknowledged the similarities between this ancient tradition and her famous Sorting Hat, it’s clear that some graduates of the university like to think of this as their very own sorting ceremony.
Leave it to the French to find a way to pack the aroma of a freshly baked baguette into a postage stamp. La Poste, the French postal service, is out with scratch-and-sniff stamps of their best-known bread with art from Paris-based artist Stéphane Humbert-Basset. The stamps depict a baguette wrapped in a blue, white, and red ribbon and the text “La baguette, de pain française,” for “The baguette, the French bread.”
The “bakery” scent is made using microcapsules, according to the Le Carré d’encre, a Paris stationary shop. “The difficulty for us is to apply this ink without breaking the capsules, so that the smell can then be released by the customer rubbing on the stamp,” printer Damien Lavaud told the BBC.
(12) SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE SEASON FINALE. Here are a couple of genre adjacent sketches from Saturday Night Live’s season-ending show.
(And also, separately at the con, Spider Robinson — see the first item here, for my report notes along a video of one song from his set (posted with permission: “Dern: My Final Report From the Dublin 2019 Worldcon”.)
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Daniel Dern, Kevin Lang, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]
(1) SPECIAL DINO DELIVERY. Royal Mail’s “The Age of the Dinosaurs” special issue features eight new stamps showing different prehistoric species and their habitats. The stamps are in collaboration with the Natural History Museum and also celebrate 19th-century paleontologist Mary Anning. (Click for larger images.)
(2) WICKED WORLD’S FAIR MELTDOWN. Stephen Beale, editor of The Steampunk Explorer, offers an “Inside Look: What Happened at Wicked World’s Fair?” The post first appeared on March 7 and has been updated half a dozen times with additional sources. Beale provided this synopsis of the post for File 770:
The event, Wicked World’s Fair, took place in February in Pennsylvania.
The organizer (Jeff Mach) is a highly controversial figure who previously ran the Steampunk World’s Fair, which was one of the largest steampunk events in the U.S. It collapsed in 2018 following misconduct allegations. The Daily Beast had a story about it.
The short version of this latest event is that he significantly overbooked vendor spots, so they ended up in spaces intended for panels and other non-vendor activities.
The sound crew for concert performances walked out due to non-payment.
There was a $35-per-head tea party, for which he sold 88 tickets, but due to overcrowding of vendors, there wasn’t enough capacity for all the ticketholders.
Requests for refunds via Eventbrite were declined. He’s blaming Eventbrite, but it appears that he just didn’t have the funds to cover his expenses.
My sources for the story include the former vendor coordinator and the former operations manager, both of whom worked as volunteers.
Some widely circulated videos show a confrontation between Mach and the vendors. One has 1.2 million views on Facebook. In some videos, one of his associates is seen standing in front of a vendor and reaching for a sword.
Since the event, vendors formed a private Facebook group called Disgruntled Wicked Vendors. It has around 100 members, though not all were actual vendors.
Following the SPWF collapse, many steampunk vendors, performers, etc. have vowed to avoid participating in Jeff Mach events. It appears that many vendors at WWF were not aware of this history. They’re trying to raise awareness of him so others are forewarned.
Godzilla Minus One had an incredibly strong box office run at the movie theaters and fans flocked to the cinemas to watch it. That theatrical run has ended and now Toho is teasing the upcoming Blu-ray and DVD release of the film.
The home video teased below will be made available for Japanese consumers, but I think it’s safe to say that the United States will get something very similar.
The movie will be released in both its color and Black and White versions. The home release of Godzilla Minus One is set to hit shelves in Japan on May 1st. There’s no word on when the movie will hit home video in the United States….
(4) FAREWELL, MY DARLING, NEVER. Philip Athans is determined to keep them alive! “Don’t Kill Your Darlings” at Fantasy Author’s Handbook.
There’s good writing advice, interesting writing advice, iffy writing advice, and then there’s terrible, awful, spirit- and creativity-destroying writing advice, and the worst example of the latter category is “Kill your darlings.” What makes this nonsense so bad is how often and irresponsibly it’s repeated.
Often attributed to Dylan Thomas, sometimes William Faulkner (who, if he followed this advice himself would have killed The Sound and the Fury in its entirety), and then repeated by other teachers and authors including Stephen King. In reality the concept seems to have first been belched forth by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in a series of Cambridge Lectures about 110 years ago. Never heard of him? Neither have I. Maybe that’s because of his darling-free writing.
Whoever started it, it goes something like this:
“If you find you’ve written something you just love, that makes you feel as though you were born to do this, that you’ve found the heart and soul of it, delete that immediately and without further consideration because if you love it that much it can only be self-indulgent crap that no one else but you will like.”
What a spectacular load of bullshit….
(5) PROPSTORE. Craig Miller told about his evening at the Propstore auction on Facebook.
Propstore is an auction house based in London with an office here in Los Angeles. Their specialty is, as their name suggests, props from movies and television. Though, of course, they go well beyond that. (They’re the main auction house I’ve used to sell some of my collectibles.)
Last night was a reception and preview for their current auction, held on the penthouse level of the Peterson Automotive Museum in the Miracle Mile section of Los Angeles. (The auction starts today and goes for a total of three days and around 1500 items.) Herewith a few photos.
I have just a couple items in this auction. Alas, none of the really high-ticket items. I think solely a couple of pre-production paintings from “Return to Oz”. They weren’t on display.
What was on display were items including a Stormtrooper helmet from “Return of the Jedi”, an iconic dress worn by Lucille Ball on “I Love Lucy”, the Ten Commandments tablets from Cecil B. DeMille’s epic of the same name, and so much more. You can see a bunch on the Propstore Facebook page or on their webpage, where the auction is carried live (with on-line bidding, of course).
Propstore does these previews once a year and I frequently run into friends at them. Last night was no exception. It was nice to chat and spend a little time with Melissa Kurtz, Shawn Crosby, Chris Bartlett, among several others.
Perhaps best of all, because it’s been so long since I’ve seen or spoken to them, also present were Howard Kazanjian, producer of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Return of the Jedi”, and Anthony Daniels, known the world over for being the man inside C-3PO….
…Though Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis were the star investors best associated with the restaurant, Planet Hollywood was THE biggest star of them all. Millions would flock there to see items appearing on the silver screen, and sometimes even see one of Hollywood’s A-list coming to open the restaurant. Before emails and cell phones, before digital effects and Instagram, it was the closest we could get to being close to the movies we all know and love….
Designed to hold and preserve dinosaur embryos for 36 hours, the can is highly visible early in the film as Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) meets with his Biosyn contact, Lewis Dodgson (Cameron Thor), who gives him the can and explains its features while devising a plan to steal dinosaur DNA samples from John Hammond’s (Richard Attenborough) InGen. Later in the film, Nedry uses the can as he infiltrates the cold storage facility on Isla Nubar and secures the DNA samples. The can is ultimately lost as it falls from Nedry’s jeep, washed away in churning mud when the deceitful computer programmer meets his demise in the jaws of a Dilophosaurus. Chosen by Art Director John Bell, the Barbasol brand can was a perfect fit for its aesthetics and instant recognizability which would help it stick out in its scenes and draw the audiences’ eyes. Since the film’s 1993 release, Barbasol, and their can’s classic design, have become synonymous with the Jurassic Park franchise. Exhibits production and display wear with scuffing to the finish, oxidation across the metal components, color fading, and adhesive loosening to the vial’s labels. Vials contain remnants of the clear yellowish liquid used to fill them during production, with the “PR-2.012” vial missing its cap. Comes with a COA from Heritage Auctions.
Muppet Treasure Island(Buena Vista, 1996), Kermit the Frog “Captain Abraham Smollett” Ensemble. Original (11) piece ensemble including (1) black frock-style coat with gold stitching, (1) ivory waistcoat with gold stitching, (1) pair of black breeches, and (1) long-sleeved ivory shirt with ruffled cuffs. The accessories included are: (1) black tricorn hat with gold stitching, (1) pair of ivory boots with button and buckle closures, (1) black cravat-style necktie, (1) black and red striped waist tie, (1) brown leather belt, (1) 19th century-style gray wig with ponytail and black bow, and (1) Kermit-sized sword with gold basket hilt that has some green coating from oxidation. This outfit is worn by Captain Abraham Smollett (Kermit) throughout the film as he captains the ship, “Hispaniola.” Ensemble displays some production wear. Obtained from Jim Henson Productions. Comes with a COA from Heritage Auctions.
Universal and DreamWork’s animated adventure “Kung Fu Panda 4” topped the domestic box office, earning a solid $58.3 million from 4,035 theaters in its opening weekend.
It marks the biggest debut of the franchise since the original, 2008’s “Kung Fu Panda” ($60 million), overtaking the start of the two prior entries, 2016’s “Kung Fu Panda 3” ($41 million) and 2011’s “Kung Fu Panda 2” ($47.6 million), not adjusted for inflation….
…Although “Dune: Part Two” relinquished its box office crown to “Panda,” the sci-fi sequel had another strong outing with $46 million from 4,074 venues. It marks a 44% decline in ticket sales from its debut (an impressive hold for a blockbuster of this scale) and brings the film’s North American total to $157 million. Globally, the big-budget follow-up has generated $367.5 million.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 12, 1925 — Harry Harrison. (Died 2012.) So let’s talk about Harry Harrison who I’d say is best known for his extraordinarily excellent Stainless Steel Rat series. James Bolivar diGriz, aka “Slippery Jim” and “The Stainless Steel Rat” is one of the most interesting characters I ever had the pleasure to read.
The Stainless Steel Rat showed up, not surprisingly in a story called “The Stainless Steel Rat” sixty-seven years ago in Astounding in their August issue.
Harry Harrison. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
There are 12 works in the Stainless Steel Rat series, of which I’m absolutely certain that I’ve read and immensely enjoyed the first one, The Stainless Steel Rat, and after that is where it gets complicated. I’m looking now on the other iPad at the list of the novel titles and I can’t say that I remember any of them. I know that I’ve read at three or four of them, and liked reading them, but can’t tell you which, but I’m betting that they were the earlier ones.
I do know that I read all of three of the Deathworld series with Jason dinAlt, a professional gambler, as the central character. They’re fun SF pulp, all three originally written as serials in the Sixties. A fourth, Return to Deathworld, for the Russian market was co-written with two Russian authors and hasn’t been translated into English.
His third series, Bill, the Galactic Hero, first appeared in the “Starsloggers” novella in sixty years ago in the December issue of Galaxy. Bill the character is among the silliest that I’ve ever read about. I’m really fond of truly silly SF, however, though I read the first one I didn’t go beyond that.
Of course, worth noting is that Alex Cox directed an animated version of Bill, the Galactic Hero which was created with his students at the University of Colorado at Boulder, completed and released a decade ago. You can see it here.
Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!became Soylent Green with Charlton Heston. I’ll confess I’ve not read the novel, nor ever seen the film. I see the film was nominated first a Hugo at Discon II and won a Nebula for the film.
I’m only going to note two other Awards, one is Sidewise Award for Best Long Alternative History, the Hammer and the Cross trilogy, and a Grand Master Nebula.
I’ll admit I’ve not read enough of his shorter works to form an informed opinion, so I’ll let y’all tell me about that aspect of his fiction.
Should the X-Men change their name? Ove the past few years, there has been some discourse around the name of Marvel’s iconic mutant team. The name has been around since the team’s first appearance in X-Men #1 (1963), but the world has changed since the 60s. Why does the team have a male-centric name when some of their most iconic members are female?
Chris Claremont, a writer famous for his 16-year X-Men run, has some thoughts on the discussion. During a discussion at the Uncanny Experience event, Claremont mused about the topic. “Calling them X-Men is so 1960s,” Claremont said, after referring to the team as the X-Group.
Claremont circled back to the topic during a question-and-answer session later in the discussion. When he was asked about changing the name, the writer revealed that it had been on his mind for years. “I tried that,” Claremont said. “I spent about 10 years referring to them as the X. The X being the unknown. It was pointed out to me that X-Men is trademarked, which apparently is a whole different kettle of fish. You can’t argue with legal people. When I came to work for Marvel, it was one or two guys, Apparently the Mouse House has much more than that. There are some fights you can’t win.”…
This film finally made me a convert to the Chris Pine fan club. I know, I’m very late. Honestly, the whole cast is great, with Michelle Rodriguez getting better material than she usually gets and Justice Smith proving that he is an utterly brilliant actor. Not to mention Hugh Grant as a wonderfully oily villain. Like a lot of the other comedies on this list, Dungeons & Dragons manages to go way over the top while still having a lot of sympathy and respect for its characters, which is a tough balancing act. I appreciate any comedy whose characters seem to be genuinely trying to be better people, while screwing up over and over again. Also, the CGI monsters and other effects help tell the story instead of being a gaudy distraction!
IN JANUARY OF 2021, A New Jersey teenager brought a piece of an antique Fiestaware plate to a high-school science class. The student had received a Geiger counter, an instrument used to measure radiation, for Christmas, and wanted to do an experiment. When the plate registered as radioactive, someone at the school panicked and called in a hazmat team. The entire school was evacuated, and those in the nuclear science field were aghast….
…Prior to World War II, and well before its potential for energy or weaponry was recognized, uranium was commonly used as a coloring agent in everything from plates, glasses, and punch bowls to vases, candlesticks, and beads. Uranium glass mosaics existed as early as 79 AD.
Also known as canary or vaseline glass, uranium glass is typically yellow or green in color and glows bright green under a black light. Shades can range from a translucent canary yellow to an opaque milky white depending on how much uranium is added to the glass, from just a trace to upwards of 25 percent. Uranium was also used in the glaze of orange-red Fiestaware, also known as “radioactive red,” prior to 1944, and was once a common sight in American kitchens.
Although uranium glassware does register on a handheld Geiger counter, the radiation amounts are considered negligible and on par with radiation emitted from other everyday items such as smoke detectors and cell phones….
(12) FANCY A BEER? IT’LL KILL YOU. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Isaac Arthur departs from his usual Futurism for one of his “Sci-fi Sundays.”
This time it’s a shorter-than-usual edition at just 15 minutes because it is an impromptu one. This time the SFnal topic is of alien beer, specifically Alien Beer To Die For.
Now of course, I myself am unlikely to ever sample alien beer for the simple, factual reason that I live in Brit Cit, and have roots in Cal Hab and the Caledonian rad wastes, and am close to many of the best real ale hostelries in the spiral arm.
(Neat, huh? See some of you in Cal Hab this summer.)
A look at the possible effects of alien food, drink, and microbes on us or our ecosystem.
…The 138-second short starts with said girl losing her mind when Godzilla (or perhaps more accurately, someone in a Godzilla costume) shows up at her door. She hits the deck, starts hyperventilating, and becomes hysterical. Which isn’t traditionally how a great date starts. But then it all becomes rather lovely.
They go shopping. Then have a picnic in the park, before a trip to the beach where this decidedly odd couple wrestle on the sand. The date ends with them kissing each other as the sun sets (well, mainly her kissing Godzilla as the monster’s mouth can’t move)….
[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Todd Mason, Stephen Beale, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
Over the years the Dungeons & Dragons brand has appeared in countless places, with everything from t-shirts and playing cards to video games and big screen Hollywood films. Now, the legendary RPG is coming to an envelope near you as a series of exclusive DnD stamps from the United States Postal Service (USPS) that are being released to commemorating the 50th anniversary of the legendary TTRPG.
So get ready to roll a saving throw versus shipping and handling, as we take a closer look at these unique collectibles.
Dern quips: “One of the USPS’s packaged sets will come with special dice that you can use when bringing D&D-stamped letters, packages, etc to a post office counter, for the opportunities including of free upgrade to a higher (faster) service delivery level; reduced total price (for packages, etc); even getting back 1 or 2x fresh stamps. (However, unlucky rolls can delay or fail delivery, damage your package, etc.)”
Additionally, when these stamps are used, the USPS is inserting phrases [1] to its (unofficial) [2] motto (which, I’m assuming, isn’t a guarantee):
…nor dragons, illithids, quicksand, vortexes, Balrogs, orcs, triffids, feral flat cats, time storms, falling space elevators, sandworms, Black Bolt sneezing, hamburglers, or dramatic readings by Harlan Ellison, [shall etc.]
[1] I’m not a D&Der, though continue to play NetHack, so I’m drawing from my more general sf/comics reading, etc.
…The imagination of Bram Stoker gave life to one of literature’s most enduring terrors, Count Dracula. But the Irish-born writer’s mind was not only full of flapping cloaks, dripping fangs and creaking coffins. Stoker, it can now be confirmed, also had a strong vein, or shall we say streak, of bureaucratic efficiency running through his personality.
Researchers working for the Actors’ Benevolent Fund, the charity that supports actors and stage managers in need, have discovered that the minutes of its founding meeting, back in 1882, were taken by Stoker. It has now been confirmed that the handwriting matches documents held by the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, with images of the notes released this weekend….
(3) OLD SPARKY. Author Gareth L. Powell looks at the damage solar activity could wreak on terrestrial infrastructure in “Sci-Fi Eye: The wrong kind of sunshine” at The Engineer.
… When the charged particles from a coronal mass ejection hit the Earth’s atmosphere, they cause a geomagnetic storm that can disrupt radio transmissions and damage power lines. The most famous recorded example of this is the Carrington Event of 1859, which disabled the US telegraph network, causing fires and electric shocks. More recently, in 1989, a geomagnetic storm disrupted power distribution in Quebec and caused aurorae as far south as Texas.
If another large coronal mass ejection hit the Earth today, our satellites would most obviously be at risk, and the intense radio emissions and magnetic effects could disrupt our satellite-based communication, weather, and GPS networks. At the same time, the energetic ultraviolet radiation would heat the Earth’s atmosphere, causing it to expand and increase the drag on those satellites, shortening their orbital lifetimes.
A severe event could also knock out power and disrupt electronic hardware, perhaps even causing errors and data loss as charged particles flip ones to zeroes and vice versa.
According to New Scientist, the most powerful solar storm ever to have hit us may have occurred 14,300 years ago, leaving a huge spike in radioactive carbon in tree rings from the time. So far, evidence has been discovered for nine more of these ‘Miyake’ events. Should one occur today, it could destroy all our satellites and potentially disable energy grids for months….
(4) QUITE A HANDFUL. Lisa Tuttle reviews these five books for the Guardian’s“The best recent science fiction and fantasy – reviews roundup”: Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley; The Glass Woman by Alice McIlroy; The Principle of Moments by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson; The Knowing by Emma Hinds; Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf.
Unusually among the most influential TV shows, Peter Watkins’ simulation of a nuclear attack on the UK – made at the peak of the cold war – was not shown for 19 years. BBC bosses feared it would show viewers the futility of preparations for armageddon and its physical reality: evaporating eyeballs, rats outnumbering people in the streets. Counterintuitively, the show’s banning – supposed to reduce mass panic – led Britons to suspect that atomic war must be even worse than they had thought….
Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die (BBCTwo, 2011)
A major debate of the next few years will surely be the right to elective death for the terminally ill. Celebrities recently joining this campaign – Esther Rantzen, Susan Hampshire – would acknowledge that they follow the brave trail of Terry Pratchett, the great fantasy novelist, who faced the harsh reality of death in an impeccable documentary in which he travelled to meet people intending to manage their exits and, with a terminal diagnosis of his own, examined the options. Because of Pratchett, this film will be seen as moving the dial on the question of self-determination….
(6) NASA NOT SCREWED AFTER ALL. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] After more than three months, NASA has finally managed to open the OSIRIS-Rex sample return cylinder from asteroid Bennu. They had to invent, and test, a new tool to safely remove a couple of screws as a workaround for the stuck top of the container. “NASA can finally touch the ‘rarest’ rocks on Earth” – and Mashable breathes a sigh of relief. (Photos at the link.)
Two little screws almost ruined the ending of NASA‘s seven-year space journey to asteroid Bennu and back.
But after more than three months of trying to pry the lid off a can containing the bulk of rocks and dust from the asteroid, engineers have finally done it. To remove the stuck top, they made and tested new tools that could safely unscrew the fasteners without damaging the precious sample.
So far the science team has only seen grainy cell phone pictures of the sample, said Andrew Ryan, a co-investigator on the NASA mission, but better photos are expected next week….
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 13, 1977 — Orlando Bloom, 47. Speaking of The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings, let’s talk about Orlando Bloom who I think magnificently played Legolas here and in the other five Jackson Tolkien films. Mind you this is one of the reasons I didn’t watch The Hobbit films as he wasn’t in the novel, was he?
So what else for genre work? Well there’s being Will Turner in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series. I’ve seen just the first but I immensely enjoyed it and thought he was quite good in it.
Orlando Bloom in 2013.
Carnival Row which sounds like someone read Bill Willingham’s Fables and crossed it with a police procedural has him as Rycroft “Philo” Philostrate, an inspector of a Constabulary. It’s on Amazon, and I’d checking out.
He was the Duke of Buckingham in The Three Musketeers. Yes, I consider it genre.
He was Tommy Hambleton was in Needle in a Timestack, script by John Ridley from the Robert Silverberg story which first was published in the June 1983 issue of Playboy.
He has a single mystery to his name, a Midsomer Murders, “Judgement Day” in which he plays Peter Drinkwater, a petty thief who gets murdered. I mention this because acting on that series is a coveted affair indeed in Britain.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
Pickles discusses what C.S. Lewis used to call “chronological snobbery.”
Although there’s been a fair amount of ink spilled, over the last few years, about the ways Disney’s Star Wars movie franchise kind of fell off a cliff in the immediate aftermath of The Rise Of Skywalker, it’s worth remember that Star Trek has had it a hell of a lot worse. Although Trek’s television fortunes are doing pretty great at the moment—four series and counting, mostly well-received, right now—the series has been in retreat at the box office for fully eight years at this point, after the under-performance of 2016’s Star Trek: Beyond. (To the point that franchise star Chris Pine—a Major Movie Star!—has said more than once than he has absolutely no clue whether he still has that job, for all that the official line is that “Star Trek 4” is still in “active development.”)
But in the wake of Star Wars making noises this week indicating that it’s getting back into the movie-making tauntaun saddle with a film based on its beloved Mandalorian characters, we guess Star Trek needed to remind everybody that it’s still out there, potentially dominating the box office, too. Per Deadline, Paramount has let it be known that it’s started working with J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot on a new Star Trek movie, even poaching some talent from the competition by hiring Andor’s Toby Haynes to direct. (Seth Grahme-Smith is writing, although details about the plot/concept/etc. are, unsurprisingly, zilcho at the moment.)…
Fargo creator Noah Hawley’s FX anthology series is just wrapping up its fifth critically acclaimed season. He still has more ideas for the show, and in spite of the ongoing upheaval in Hollywood, Hawley says he believes gifted creators will always be able to tell their stories.
“Every generation has its masterpieces. You know, we had masterpieces before the golden age of television, and we’ll have masterpieces afterwards. It’s our responsibility to make them and to trick these corporations into paying for us to make them, right?” Hawley says.
The Emmy-winning writer also talks to Eric Deggans about his upcoming television adaptation of Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise, and explains why he thinks people are getting tired of densely plotted shows on TV — including season 4 of Fargo, which had 23 main characters.
Lilton Stewart III, award-winning American filmmaker and creator of November 11th Pictures, has teamed with producer Lucinda Bruce on Oswald Down the Rabbit Hole, a film that will capture the magic of iconic cartoon characters through the lens of horror. The feature, described as Who Framed Roger Rabbit meets Nightmare on Elm Street, is set to begin filming in Spring 2024, with an announcement teaser trailer releasing this month.
Oswald follows main character Art and some of his closest friends as they track down his long-lost family lineage. When they find his Great-Grandpa Oswald’s abandoned home, they are transported to a place lost in time, shrouded by dark Hollywood Magic. The group finds that they are not alone when the cartoon Rabbit, a dark entity, comes to life. Art and his friends must work together to escape their magical prison before the Rabbit gets to them first….
“Much like Pooh, Tigger, and Mickey Mouse, the Oswald character entered the public domain on January 1, 2023. Originally owned by Disney, control of the cartoon rabbit shifted to Universal in 1928, leading to the creation of Mickey Mouse to compensate for the loss. Nothing says ‘copyright expiration’ like a horror reimagining!”
The urban core of the Sangay archaeological site shows artificial earthen platforms and dug streets distributed along the edge of the cliffs flanking the Upano River. Recent investigation revealed a dense system of pre-Hispanic urban centers in the Upano Valley of Amazonian Ecuador, in the eastern foothills of the Andes. This discovery changes the perception of the Amazon’s ancient human past.
When intact, the Amazonian forest is dense and difficult to penetrate, both on foot and with scanning technologies. Over the past several years, however, improved light detection and ranging scans have begun to penetrate the forest canopy, revealing previously unknown evidence of past Amazonian cultures. Rostain et al.describe evidence of such an agrarian Amazonian culture that began more than 2000 years ago. They describe more than 6,000 earthen platforms distributed in a geometic pattern connected by roads and intertwined with agricultural landscapes and river drainages in the Upano Valley. Previous efforts have described mounds and large monuments in Amazonia, but the complexity and extent of this development far surpasses these previous sites.
…Collaborators from the University of Glasgow say they have debuted the first successful, unsupported autophage (Latin for “self-eating”) rocket engine prototype. Revealed earlier this week during the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics SciTech Forum, the Ouroboros-3—named after the ancient Egyptian symbol of a snake eating its own tail—utilizes its own body as an additional fuel source. In a video of the tests, the Ouroboros-3 can be seen shrinking in length as its body is burned away during a simulated launch….
(14) FIND OUT WHAT YOU MISSED IN 2023. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Northern hemisphere’s academic year’s, spring edition of SF2 Concatenation is now up.
New , SF2 Concatenation has its spring* season edition. It includes the season’s full news page, with its Film News; Television News; Publishing News; General Science News and Forthcoming SF Books from major British Isles SF imprints for the season, among much else. Separately SF2 Concatenation has a couple of stand-alone articles and convention reports. Plus there is the usual tranche of stand-alone book reviews. Something for every SF enthusiast and/or science bod. * ‘Spring’ season here being the northern hemisphere, academic year spring.
In the news page mix SF2 Concatenation has its annual bit of fun with our selection of ‘Best SF’ books and films of the previous year, 2023. This is also on SF2 Concatenation’sBest SF Books and Films archive, so you can see whether any of their previous years’ choices went on to win major SF awards. (Of course it is too early to see how our latest – 2023 – selection fares.)
Time to sit down at the PC, open the lap top or pad and explore the news page and its links to trailers and videos as well as science papers.
For details of / links to the new content, scroll down to beneath ‘Most recently added‘ below.
FORTHCOMING
Mid-March will see the first of the zine’s four ‘Best of Nature ‘Futures’ short, short SF stories of the year. If you want to check out past stories in this series the Best of Nature ‘Futures’ archive is here.
Most recently added
v34(1) 2024.1.15 — New Columns & Articles for the Autumn 2024
[Thanks to, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Kathy Sullivan, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
(1) TEXAS LIBRARY ASSOCIATON ASKS TINGLE FOR DO-OVER. Today the Texas Library Association’s executive director Shirley Robinson published a “TLA Statement Regarding Author Chuck Tingle” which says they want him to reconsider participating in their annual conference, although it says nothing one way or the other about him going masked.
As you may know, the Texas Library Association is currently planning and securing speakers for our annual conference in April. Last fall, we extended an initial invitation to author Chuck Tingle to participate as a panelist at our Evening with Authors event. We later offered Mr. Tingle the opportunity to participate in a different conference event.
This was a misstep that we regret, and it is counter to our mission to ‘unite and amplify voices…through intentional equity, diversity, and inclusion.’
I contacted Mr. Tingle’s publisher today to apologize and to ask whether or not he might reconsider participating in our Evening with Authors event. I hope Mr. Tingle will accept, and we can discuss what has transpired so that we may all come to a place of greater understanding.
TLA has spent the last two years fighting for the freedom to read and freedom of knowledge in school libraries, and we are always on the side of authors. We set a high standard for ourselves, and in this instance, we did not meet it. In the future, we will be more diligent in our processes and clearer and more thoughtful when discussing opportunities with potential speakers at our events. I am sorry for this mistake. We will learn from this and do better in the future.
(2) FOR FAN MAIL. The US Postal Service will have a Dungeons & Dragons-themed stamp issue this year: “USPS Reveals Additional Stamps for 2024” at American Philatelic Society.
This stamp release marks the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, described by its owners as the World’s Greatest Role-playing Game, that has become a cultural phenomenon. By inviting participants to imagine themselves as wizards, warriors and other adventurers in exciting and treacherous fantasy worlds, Dungeons & Dragons opened doors to whole new universes of creativity for generations of players. The pane of 20 stamps features 10 different designs that highlight characters, creatures and encounters familiar to players of the game. Greg Breeding, an art director for USPS, designed the stamps and pane with existing illustrations.
…Their joint novel is titled The Book of Elsewhere and is set in the world of the BRZRKR comic book series created by Reeves, first published in 2021. It follows an immortal warrior on a millennia-long journey to understand his immortality.
The novel is due to be published on 23 July by Penguin. Reeves, who is best known for his roles in The Matrix and John Wick franchises, said it was “extraordinary” to work with Miéville. “China did exactly what I was hoping for – he came in with a clear architecture for the story and how he wanted to play with the world of BRZRKR, a world that I love so much. I was thrilled with his vision and feel honoured to be a part of this collaborative process.”…
…“Sometimes the greatest games are those you play with other people’s toys,” said Miéville on the collaboration. “It was an honour, a shock and a delight when Keanu invited me to play. But I could never have predicted how generous he’d be with toys he’s spent so long creating,” he added….
…Upon its release, BRZRKR, created with writer Matt Kindt and artist Ron Garney, became the highest-selling original comic book series debut in more than 25 years. The comic will also be adapted into a live-action Netflix film starring Reeves and an anime series….
(4) ON THE ROAD AGAIN. Annalee Newitz soon will be touring to promote their far-future epic The Terraformers. Check the venue website to reserve free tickets.
NPR’s Ari Shapiro speaks with author Naomi Alderman on her new novel, The Future, which asks whether the giants of technology more likely to save humankind or accelerate its end.
…ALDERMAN: When I heard about these billionaires building their bunkers, I immediately thought of Lot. So this is a story that is about how you cannot escape from a terrible situation. If you think that, oh no, I’m powerful; I can escape; I can go to my bunker; I’m going to be all right, you just have to know that you take it with you. On a more broad level, I think Bible stories, particularly the stories of Genesis – I grew up reading them in the original Hebrew because I grew up very religious Jewish. And it seems to me that those stories are the foundations of what we might call Western civilization now, and we have sort of ceded them to religious education. So you learn those stories if you have a strong biblical schooling where you’re maybe taught that all of this is literally true, but actually, they’re incredibly important stories.
SHAPIRO: So, like, everybody can talk about the lesson of Icarus. Don’t fly too close to the sun.
ALDERMAN: Right…
(6) HE FOUGHT THE LAW AND THE LAW LOST. AND SO DID HE. Norman Spinrad’s latest “Norman Spinrad at Large” tells why he hasn’t had a new novel out for years.
…When I read that I am “One of the Four “Great Speculative Writers of the Past” I feel that I’m reading my own obituary. Sometimes when I am asked about things of my history I feel like I’m writing it.
Which, I suppose, is one good reason to let my Wikipedia answer such questions instead of myself. When I’m interviewed I’m much more interested in talking about what I’ve written about than talking about myself.
And another reason is that I don’t have time for much of such pondering of my past. I am indeed still crazy after all these years. Since my last new published novel THE PEOPLE’S POLICE in 2017 I’ve written dozens of my On Books column in Asimov’s. Songs. Journalism. This and that in the arts world. Political screeds. Published short stories and novellas, some of which are waiting to become a novel. Even a full first draft of a novel which needs a proper publisher with a good editor.
So why have I not published a new novel since THE PEOPLE’S POLICE in 2017?
That’s a story you won’t find in my wikipedia. That’s a story that is still going on.
There is a lot of talk today that because of the Woke vs. Maga literary political war, white male writers are finding it unfairly difficult getting their work published. Well, I confese that I am a white man, but I don’t think that is what had happened to me.
What Tor books did to THE PEOPLE’S POLICE is why I haven’t been able to publish a novel ever since. My editor on it there was the great David Hartwell. I was so confident of what he would do for the publication that Dona and I went to New Orleans on our own money to shoot promotional video for the book, knowing of course that Tor itself would not pay for any such thing.
But when we came back to New York, the shit hit the fan. David Harwell died in an accident, which among other things, turned THE PEOPLE’S POLICE into what is called a orphan book, meaning no one in Tor championed its publication. A horrible cover of a black cop and a white cop back to back on the hardcover against what the novel was actually hopefully about.
No one showed me the cover until it was too late to change,, telling me that David had approved it while he was still alive without showing it me, which he never would have done, and Tor refused to do anything at all with the videos that we had fronted with several thousand dollars of our money or even spend any at all on promoting the book.
What with the cover and the refusal of Tor to spend anything at all, what could have been a big seller at least in the South, the hard cover sanked. As you might imagine, I was not amused, but I thought a good cover, a just conver, could be put on the trade paperback, and Tor would have the freebee video for nothing.
Instead I was told that there would be no trade paperback. Well I was already crazy and did what most writers were not crazy enough to do. I went to war with Tor. And I won it. I got back my novel away from them so that I could at least create my own trade paperback on Amazon where it still is the only place you can find it.
But I paid a high price for my victory. I lost my agent because no agent can fight on the side of his writer against a publisher, and indeed shouldn’t for the sake of his other writers. And by then, it was becoming just about impossible get a proper publisher to even look at a novel except through an agent. And thusfar there has been no agent willing to take a chance on “One of the Four Great Speculative Writers of the Past.”…
(7) DARRAH CHAVEY OBITUARY. Wisconsin fan Darrah Chavey died January 6, 2024 from complications of heart surgery.
He was a mathematics professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin, teaching Computer Science, Ethnomathematics, and Ballroom Dancing.
He was a member of the Beloit Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. He was an active volunteer in putting on WisCon for a number of years, including running the “Internet Lounge”.
As a contributor to the Internet Science Fiction Database, one of his specialties was SF by women authors, especially works before the mid-80’s. Some of his research was captured on the SF Gender page.
He is survived by his wife Peggy Weisensel Chavey and other family members.
(8) TERRY BISSON (1942-2024). Author Terry Bisson died January 10 at the age of 81. He was especially well-known for short stories including “Bears Discover Fire”, winner of the Hugo and Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial awards, and ”They’re Made Out of Meat”. His story “macs” also won a Nebula (2001), as well as French and Spanish sff awards.
…He sold his first science-fiction novel, “Wylrdmaker,” to the publisher David Hartwell in 1981, for fifteen hundred dollars. The novel was pulp: it told the story of Kemen of Pastryn, a satirical futuristic version of Conan the Barbarian. It wasn’t the book Bisson wanted to write, he told me, but “it was the smartest thing I ever did. That’s when I discovered you didn’t have to be fucking Hemingway or Fitzgerald to write a novel.” His second novel, “The Talking Man,” was more of a passion project—it was a fantasy novel set in the rural South, with junkyards instead of castles…
He also wrote many film novelizations, including William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic; Virtuosity; The Fifth Element by Luc Besson; Alien Resurrection; Dreamworks’ Galaxy Quest; and The Sixth Day, and three Jonny Quest novels, plus other media tie-in novels.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
1987 — Sharyn McCrumb’s Highland Laddie Gone, published in hardcover by Avon Bokks thirty-seven years ago, is the third of the Elizabeth MacPherson mysteries and I think can safely discuss the setting of this novel and the prime character.
Sharyn McCrumb I’ve covered before, looking at several of her Ballad novels here as well as the genre Jay Omega series as well.
These novels are apparently her take at Agatha Christie as she has told interviewers. Now I don’t see that when I it read them but none-the-less Elizabeth MacPherson, forensic anthropologist, who’s from Scotland is a delightful central character.
Most of these novels are set in the mid Atlantic region of the States, and this one was no exception. The mystery is set at a Highland Games of which there are some hundred in the US alone. Now consider men wearing kilts, haggis on a stick, far too many bagpipes (and I like them) and way too much Scottish themed junk for sale. And everyone is of course Scottish for the day. Now she, our writer, manages to find the humor in all of that and make it quite interesting.
(Yes, I’m part Scottish. Scotch-Irish on my maternal side. No, not Scottish-Irish as I had to explain to more one person who said Scotch was a drink. Scotch-Irish are descendants of Ulster Protestants who emigrated from Ulster to North America during the 18th and 19th centuries. And I’m Welsh on the paternal side.)
MacPherson has to solve her mystery while dealing with the eccentric culture of the Highland Games. I think that McCrumb did a spot-on job of capturing the feel of those games.
Here’s our Beginning…
CLAN CHATTAN
Dear Elizabeth, How are you? It’s been ages! Due to a security leak in your organization (your mom), I have obtained your address and am writing to ask a favor. (In business school they teach us to come to the point in the first paragraph.) Did you know that I’m getting my MBA at Princeton! The folks are so thrilled about it—Daddy’s plastered bumper stickers on every vehicle we own, even the riding lawn mower. It’s quite sweet, really, to see them so happy. Your mother didn’t say what you were doing.
Haven’t seen you at the Highland games festivals since high school. You really ought to come to one. Surely you’re not still upset about the dance competition. Goodness, there’s so much more to a festival than that! There’s the hospitality tent, and the nametag chairman. Not everybody is meant to be graceful, you know.
Anyway, I hope I can persuade you to come to the Labor Day games (see enclosed brochure), because there is something that I need a volunteer for. You remember Cluny, don’t you? He’s fine, as reserved as ever. For the past two years, I’ve been the person in charge of him for the festivals. You know how they like a pretty girl to show him off. Well, this year I simply can’t come! I’ll be in Europe during term break with my flatmate. So, I need someone to take my place. Buffy and Pax and Cammie-Lynn were all booked up, so I’m hoping that you’ll show the old Clan spirit and volunteer for the job. But if you can’t afford it, do say so, and I’ll understand.
Please let me know soon about this. I’m off to Europe next week. Oh, and what have you been doing lately? Teaching? Got to run!
Mary-Stuart Gillespie
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 10, 1957 — George Alec Effinger. (Died 2002.) I first experienced him when I read the Marîd Audran novels (Gravity Fails, A Fire in The Sunand The Exile Kiss). Though he set them in a 22nd-century Middle East, the setting isn’t really faithful to that reality but reflects more the city of New Orleans where he lived much of his life. Truly exceptional novels.
He started work on a fourth Audran novel, Word of Night, but died before that work was completed. The existing two chapters of Word of Night that he did complete are now available in Budayeen Nights, along with the other Budayeen stories and some other short stories as which was edited by Marty Halpern at Golden Gryphon.
The “Schrödinger’s Kitten” novelette won a Hugo at Noreascon 3, it also garnered a Sturgeon and Nebula too; his “Marîd Changes His Mind” novella was nominated for a Nebula but was withdrawn for a Hugo after the nomination was declined.
He wrote a lot, and I do mean a lot, of novels besides the Marîd Audran works but I’ll confess that I’m largely unfamiliar with most of them. I’ve immensely enjoyed The Red Tape War co-written with Resnick and Jack L. Chalker, but that’s it. Anyone care to give an opinion on the rest of his novels?
I see he did the scripts for about a dozen comics, one of which was “The Mouse Alone!” in which he created the character of a young Gray Mouser. Huh. That was the Sword of Sorcery #5 issue, DC Comics, Nov.-Dec. 1973.
And I was surprised to learn he did a Sandman story as well, “Seven Nights in Slumberland” which ran in The Sandman: Book of Dreams. I must’ve read it at some point as I read that anthology. It’s a very good anthology too.
Planet of the Apes novels? Really? Anyone here read these?
George Alec Effinger in 1988. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
(11) ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION.
[Item by Cat Eldridge.]
2001–So this date was when The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring film was premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in London twenty-three years ago.
I don’t as a rule watch films or series based off literary works that I deeply, madly love. That’s because I’ve got in my mind’s eye my own vision of what each character looks like already, what the landscape is and so forth. So I’m usually disappointed by what is visually created by even the best of our video creators. Not their fault of course.
I cannot begin to remember the number of times that I’ve read The Fellowship of the Ring as it is a novel that I both deeply loved and found to be one that I find always is fresh when I read it. Forty years on since by my first reading of it and now I’m listened to being the tale narrated by Andy Serkis, and I was once again deeply and fully delighted by this story as written by Tolkien.
The very first words of “When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton” were enough to draw me and they’ve drawn me ever since. The rest of the novel is just as good.
So did Peter Jackson do that to me? Very much not at all. He was faithful to the source material as he much as could be given the difference in story telling mediums, and the script as written by him, his wife Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens (they were the writing team for all of the Tolkien films) was quite delightful indeed.
The actors? Stellar they were, one and all in creating the feel that characters of this novels had come alive. I can’t possibly detail all of them here. I really can’t. My favorites? Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins, Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins, Ian McKellen as Gandalf and John Rhys-Davies as Gimli. Those are my favorite actors the first time that I watched it and they remained so with repeated reviewings.
McKellen it is said by several sources was the fourth choice as the first three approached to play that role turned it down because of ill health — Patrick McGoohan, Anthony Hopkins and Christopher Plummer.
Oh and the universe they inhabited. John Howe and Alan Lee were deeply involved as conceptual artists throughout the project, Lee mainly on the architecture such as creating Hobbiton; Howe on characters such as Gandalf, the Ents and the Balrog. Weta was responsible first such things as armour, miniatures and weapons.
Oh those Ents. They were just what I expected them to be, perfectly realised to be what was in my minds eye. I did look for a nicely crafted one after the film came out even then they were they were running well several hundred dollars unfortunately. Still want one to have who will sit among my plants here.
So let’s not forget the New Zealand landscape standing in for Middle-earth. It worked magnificently as it has on oh so many occasions for other series and films now. I felt like I was seeing Middle-earth made real.
So I fell in love with it and have stayed so. And therefore I’m not at all surprised that it won at Hugo at ConJosé. It certainly deserved that Hugo.
After years of stops and starts, Paramount is making a step toward returning Star Trekto the big screen. Toby Haynes, who directed episodes of of the Star Wars series Andor, will helm a new feature, with Seth Grahame-Smith writing.
This would mark the first feature for Haynes, who helmed the dark, celebrated Star Trek-inspired episode of Black Mirror, “USS Callister.”
Deadline’s article adds, “Insiders add that the final chapter in that main series, Star Trek 4, remains in active development.”
…Ahsoka‘s renewal is welcome, if unsurprising. The series premiere got 14 million views in the first five days following its premiere, and the series holds an 86% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Ahsoka joins Andor, which is also getting a second season.
Ahsoka stars Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano, a former Jedi Padawan apprenticing under Anakin Skywalker. Dawson first played the character in season two of The Mandalorian followed by an appearance in The Book of Boba Fett. The first season of Ahsoka premiered on Disney+ in August 2023 with 8 episodes….
(15) EXPOSURE. The LA Public Library announced a way for indie authors to submit their e-books for circulation. The info doesn’t discuss any payment for authors.
The Los Angeles Public Library is partnering with BiblioBoard to bring the Indie Author Project public library e-book discover service to L.A. residents.
Indie Author Project provides L.A.’s self published authors a wonderful opportunity to submit their e-book for circulation at LAPL, libraries throughout California, and possibly libraries nationwide. This is a great way to reach a wider reading audience and build buzz on your book.
Indie Author Project also provides adventurous readers access to exciting new literary voices in a variety of genres. Discover a great new author before they make it big!
Click here if you are interested in submitting your title and read the terms of agreement.
Submissions must be in the epub or pdf file format—here are a few sites that provide simple free tools to convert files from MS Word to epub: Online-Convert; Zamzar. Or, use our free Pressbooks tool to create a professional quality formatted ebook file.
(16) ARTIST INTELLIGENCE. [Item by Steven French.] What do you do when you don’t have a photo to go with a creepy story about a Tennessee ghost or an Aboriginal Australian cryptid? You ask an illustrator for an equally spooky image of course! Atlas Obscura shared its best illustrations of the year: “In 2023, We Illustrated the Darkest Corners of the Human Imagination”.
At Atlas Obscura, we’re always curious about the unusual, and that doesn’t always lend itself to photos. So we turn to an amazing army of illustrators to bring readers into our stories. This year, we noticed that many of our favorite illustrations were commissioned to depict the dark and the mysterious—pretty on-brand for us—whether it’s of menacing creatures of the spring, un-jolly characters of Christmas, or myths of the Egyptian underworld. Our artists around the globe took on the art direction challenges with spooky glee, and brought these unearthly stories to life with bewitching visuals….
…Illustrator Harshad Marathe generally enjoys working on otherworldly subject matter, such as mythology, or creatures, demons, and dieties. So he took naturally to the Egyptian sun god, on a boat towed on snakes, in a desert. He conceived other trippy and colorful scenes for our series on Egypt’s netherworld, a highlight of our annual month-long Halloween bacchanalia….
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The trailer has dropped for Monolith, available in theaters and on digital beginning February 16.
While trying to salvage her career, a disgraced journalist begins investigating a strange conspiracy theory. But as the trail leads uncomfortably close to home, she is left to grapple with the lies at the heart of her own story.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Ita, Kathy Sullivan, Carl, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jeff Smith.]
The UK’s Royal Mail today shared images of the eight Special Stamps they are issuing to celebrate Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, marking the 40th anniversary of The Colour of Magic, first book in the series. The stamps can be pre-ordered now, and will be available for general purchase on August 10.
The stamps feature Rincewind, The Librarian, Granny Weatherwax, Sam Vimes, and Great A’Tuin, as well as specially commissioned artworks of Death and Mort, Tiffany Aching and Moist von Lipwig, all by artist Paul Kidby, who was Pratchett’s preferred illustrator for the Discworld. (Click for larger image.)
A Terry Pratchett’s Discworld First Day Cover featuring all eight new stamps cancelled with the alternative postmark that will be available for order from August 10.
Also offered is a presentation pack with explanatory text and a set of the stamps.
