(1) ONCE ON HIS SHELVES. San Diego State University is home to the Edward Gorey Personal Library, which they acquired in 2009.
The Edward Gorey Personal Library is a special collection at San Diego State University library that comprises 26,000 books collected by Edward St. John Gorey (1924-2000). Over 9,000 catalogued volumes, or 35% of the collection are searchable. If you find a book you would like to examine from this collection, please contact Special Collections and University Archives at [email protected], or at 619-594-6791 or visit their service desk in Love Library 150. Books may only be viewed in the Special Collections area.
An American artist, Edward St. John Gorey’s publications include over one hundred books. His most well-known works include The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Doubtful Guest and The Wuggly Ump. Many of his illustrations appear in publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times. Gorey illustrations and book designs enhance editions of works by Charles Dickens, Edward Lear, Samuel Beckett, John Updike, Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Florence Heide and Peter Neumeyer.
And if you’d like to know “What Books Did Edward Gorey Collect?” then click the link. Lots of familiar names there. One jumped out at me – isn’t Franklin W. Dixon the author of the Hardy Boys series?
Police in Scotland said a reported armed man who led to a train returning to a station turned out to be a Star Wars cosplayer on his way to a comic book convention.
The man, known as the Grampian Stormtrooper on social media, was dressed in his Imperial Stormtrooper costume “with a Scottish twist” — a kilt — when he boarded a ScotRail train to Dundee at the Aberdeen train station.
The train returned to the station shortly after departing and the man was approached by a guard who escorted him to waiting police officers.
The cosplayer wrote on Facebook that he was “met by two firearms officers, three Police Scotland, two British Transport police, and had to chat to them all in an office.”
The man learned that he had been reported for carrying a “firearm” on the train, and he explained to police that his “blaster” was a plastic prop….
Shapers of Worlds Volume V will feature stories by Brad C. Anderson, Edo van Belkom, J.G. Gardner, Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, Chadwick Ginther, Evan Graham, M.C.A. Hogarth, M.J. Kuhn, L. Jagi Lamplighter, Kevin Moore, Robin Stevens Payes, James S. Peet, Omari Richards, Lawrence M. Schoen, Alex Shvartsman, Alan Smale, Richard Sparks, P.L. Stuart, Brad R. Torgersen, Hayden Trenholm, Brian Trent, Eli K.P. William, Edward Willett, and Natalie Wright.
Backers’ rewards offered by the authors include numerous e-books, signed paperback and hardcover books, Tuckerizations (a backer’s name used as a character name), artwork, one-on-one writing/publishing consultations and mentorships, audiobooks, opportunities for online chats with authors, short-story critiques, and more.
The campaign goal is $12,000 CDN. Almost all of those funds will go to pay the authors, with the rest going to reward fulfillment, primarily the editing, layout, and printing of the book, which will be published in January 2025 in both ebook and trade paperback formats
…The jury remains out on whether [director] Phillips can repeat the trick with Joker: Folie à Deux. After all, there is likely a very good reason that nobody ever made a sequel to Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy, in the format of a musical. But even if the new film fails miserably, it is likely to give us more intriguing ideas to take the comic book movie genre forward than any number of the new episodes currently being put together by new DC boss James Gunn, brilliant (in a common-or-garden superhero flick kind of way) as these may well end up being….
(5) RONDO NOMINEE FOR BEST ARTICLE OF THE YEAR. The deadline for the public to vote in the Rondo Awards is April 16 at midnight. Email votes (with your name & e-mail address) to David Colton, c/o [email protected].
(6) TURBOLIFT TO HIT BOTTOM ON LOWER DECKS. It is the end, my friend, says The Hollywood Reporter: “‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ to End With Season 5”. (However, Strange New Worlds will get another season.)
Paramount+ has made two big decisions about its Star Trek universe.
Strange New Worlds has been renewed for a fourth season, whileLower Decks will end with its previously announced upcoming fifth season, expected to air sometime this year.
Lower Decks creator Mike McMahan and executive producer Alex Kurtzman posted a statement on the Star Trek website about the decision to conclude the animated series: “While five seasons of any series these days seems like a miracle, it’s no exaggeration to say that every second we’ve spent making this show has been a dream come true. Our incredible cast, crew and artists have given you everything they have because they love the characters they play, they love the world we’ve built, and more than anything we all love love love Star Trek. We’re excited for the world to see our hilarious fifth season which we’re working on right now, and the good news is that all previous episodes will remain on Paramount+ so there is still so much to look forward to as we celebrate the Cerritos crew with a big send-off. … We remain hopeful that even beyond season five, Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford and the whole Cerritos crew will live on with new adventures.”
Your career has spanned so many incredible projects, even just looking at television, from Beauty and the Beast in the ’80s to Resident Alien now and Stranger Things coming up. It must feel like a radically different landscape now.
It does, and it’s been kind of a pleasure to ride that long wave. I have seen things, and certainly can remark upon the changes in all areas of film and television, but mostly TV, I think. I’m not sure the studio system really has much longer. Things are changing faster now than they ever changed in the history of Hollywood, in terms of product and streaming and just so many new jobs that are created because of what we get to shoot. People who are contact lens specialists and people who are nail specialists when you do a show like Claws, and intimacy coordinators, and the sensitivity training, the HR, and then there’s the actual filmmaking and the special effects and the Volume for all the special effects, which is now on Stranger Things. I’m like, “What the hell? Where am I?” It’s like, okay, we’ll do a scene and then [you hear], “ball and chart,” and it’s some special effects magic that they come in and do at the end of every shot. So yes, it’s changing.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 12, 1973 — J. Scott Campbell, 51. J. Scott Campbell is a comic books artist best known for his work on Wildstorm Comics. Scott actually got hired by Wildstorm by submitting a package that included a four-page WildC.A.T.S story. Before that however his first work was on Homage Studios Swimsuit Special at age twenty. It’d get a PG-13 rating today. If that.
J. Scott Campbell at the 2023 Comic-Con. Photo by Gage Skidmore.
So did you know that Marvel did a Swimsuit issue as well? It was an annual magazine-style publication from 1991 to 1995. One issue said “Take Wakanda Wild Side” on the cover. Really it did.
His subsequent work for Wildstorm included some illustrations in WildC.A.T.S Sourcebook and Stormwatch #0. I love the idea of #0 issues. Why so?
Now do you remember Gen13?He created the series along with Jim Lee and Brandon Choi as the series came out of Team 7, a series that Lee and Choi created. The series involved a group of spandexed clothed metahuman teens. I like that series but it wasn’t nearly as fun as Danger Girl, his next series.
That series followed the adventures of a group of female secret agents, made the most of Campbell’s talents which involved very well-endowed women, in the firm of three sexy female well weaponized secret agents — Abbey Chase, Sydney Savage and Sonya Savage and over the top action sequences.
Twenty years ago I read Danger Girl: The Ultimate Collection, which is a bit of an overstatement as it’s only two hundred and fifty-six pages long, but it’s still a lot of a fun. Yes, it’s still available.
Danger Girl has been continuously published since it was first came out twenty-six years ago, so there’s a lot of it now. I’ve read quite a bit of it over the years and it’s been pretty consistent in its quality. However only the first seven-issue series is illustrated by Campbell.
Campbell illustrated the covers to the Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash six-issue limited series.
Eighteen years ago, Marvel Comics announced that he had signed an exclusive contract to work on a Spider-Man series with writer Jeph Loeb. Yes he did just covers, not interior work.
The potential use cases for smart contacts are compelling and varied. Pop a lens on your eye and monitor health metrics like glucose levels; receive targeted drug delivery for ocular diseases; experience augmented reality and read news updates with displays of information literally in your face.
But the eye is quite a challenge for electronics design: With one of the highest nerve densities of any human tissue, the cornea is 300 to 600 times as sensitive as our skin. Researchers have developed small, flexible chips, but power sources have proved more difficult, as big batteries and wires clearly won’t do here. Existing applications offer less-than-ideal solutions like overnight induction charging and other designs that rely on some type of external battery.
Now, a team from the University of Utah says they’ve developed a better solution: an all-in-one hybrid energy-generation unit specifically designed for eye-based tech.
In a paper published in the journal Small on 13 March, the researchers describe how they built the device, combining a flexible silicon solar cell with a new device that converts tears to energy. The system can reliably supply enough electricity to operate smart contacts and other ocular devices….
(11) PUT YOUR METAL TO THE BIPEDAL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Now, I’m not a huge sport fan but if I had to pick one then it’d be Rollerball. The original, not the new-fangled 21st century one. Great audience chant….
Generating robust motor skills in bipedal robots in the real world is challenging because of the inability of current control methods to generalize to specific tasks. Haarnoja et al. developed a deep reinforcement learning–based framework for full-body control of humanoid robots, enabling a game of one-versus-one soccer. The robots exhibited emergent behaviors in the form of dynamic motor skills such as the ability to recover from falls and tactics such as defending the ball against an opponent. The robot movements were faster when using their framework than a scripted baseline controller and may have potential for more complex multirobot interactions.
An analysis published in Nature has predicted that melting ice caps are slowing Earth’s rotation to such an extent that the next leap second — the mechanism used since 1972 to reconcile official time from atomic clocks with that based on Earth’s unstable speed of rotation — will be delayed by three years.
“Enough ice has melted to move sea level enough that we can actually see the rate of the Earth’s rotation has been affected,” says Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and author of the study.
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Zach and Kelly Weinersmith talk about — and demonstrate — why living on Mars is a bad idea. “The Mars crisis, explained by 2 experts” at Hard Reset.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Dan Franklin, Danny Sichel, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day BGrandrath.]
Halloween has been one of my favorite holidays my whole life. As a child the idea of dressing up that one day and going house to house to collect candy was magical. Back then, no one worried about being poisoned or razors in fruit. I felt stronger and magical in costume then in regular clothes. The thin awkward kid who read books all the time and didn’t talk much could become a powerful witch, one of my favorite costumes, and no doubt the easiest for my mother to create, since there were nine of us….
(2) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] So, when I emailed Mike yesterday’s update, I told him that that would be the last of the big daily updates, and anything in the future would just be ad hoc submissions. Unfortunately the real-world had other ideas.
Con reports: Jiang Bo, SF Light Year and Nicholas Whyte
This pair of Chinese reports posted to Weibo are coming from different perspectives; one from a Hugo finalist in the Best Short Story, the other from a high profile fan.
Jiang Bo
This one is a bit awkward to report on, as whilst it was published on Weibo, the latter sections are only visible to logged in users, and creating a Weibo account – from the UK at least – is a Kafkaesque nightmare of “you need to verify via a code sent by SMS/sorry, we can’t send you an SMS, try again tomorrow/rinse and repeat”. Fortunately a kind person on Twitter was able to provide me with the full text; I’ll see if there’s some way of getting the full text available more easily.
In terms of events at the con, he mostly writes about “businessy” and writerly stuff, which he seems to have enjoyed. The selected extracts below are about more humdrum stuff, but which I think Filers would maybe relate to more. In the interests of full transparency, it seems that these aspects were less enjoyable for him, and it would not be an unreasonable accusation to say I’m giving a negative spin on his overall experience.
(Via Google Translate, with minor manual edits.)
It was only when I landed that I learned some big news: the hotel I was staying at, the Wyndham Hotel, was far away from the venue, and the organizer had arranged a shuttle bus to solve the transportation problem. As a rule of thumb, the hotel is usually next to the venue, and you can enter the venue just a short walk away. The shuttle bus takes about thirty minutes to get to the venue, and it leaves on time. This poses a challenge to the conference schedule, and is also the reason why I will be quite tired in the next few days – I have to catch the early morning bus to the conference venue every day…
The name of the venue is Nebula, and the largest hall inside is called Hugo. If you add some text to it, wouldn’t it mean that Nebula is greater than Hugo? I wonder if Americans will quarrel about this. However, a Chinese venue is too far away and the sound cannot be transmitted even if there is a noise…
There was an episode where I went back and forth for fifteen minutes just to find the Hall of Mars. This venue is very unique. The halls on the second floor are basically isolated from each other. They are small halls. You must find the correct elevator to go up. When you first arrive, it’s easy to get confused…
Speaking of eating, there are no restaurants around the huge Xingyun Hall. There is only one storefront on the first floor, which houses three or four fast food restaurants, including Subway, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. If everyone wants to solve the problem of eating in the venue, they can only find these three or four restaurants. There are so many people there, it’s almost like a restaurant in Disneyland. It’s hard to find tables and chairs, so just find a place to eat…
“Hanging by a Thread” [aka “On the Razor’s Edge”] won the Galaxy Award for Best Short Story, which was a surprise. On returning to the hotel, I was interviewed by a Chengdu TV station for almost an hour, and it was almost midnight. Then I chatted with the producer Lao Wu about creative matters, and it was already 1 a.m. when we finished talking. It felt good to chat with Lao Wu and talk about pure creation. It’s just that the schedule of the World Science Fiction Convention is too tight. If we don’t seize this time, we may not have the chance to have a good chat…
In order to get to the venue before 10 a.m., I took the 9 a.m. bus. The opening hours of science fiction convention venues are actually 9:30, so there will generally be fewer people attending the 9:30 morning session. In fact, at 10 a.m., there were still very few people, especially on weekdays. So the audience at our panel seemed very minimal, especially since it was located in the road show area, a corner that is difficult for tourists to reach. We started with the same number of people on stage and off stage. Fortunately, as time went by, the number of listeners gradually increased, and finally it was like a decent press conference…
After the press conference, I started thinking about eating again. The afternoon activity was at the Sheraton Hotel. After looking at my guest card, I had a bold idea, why not try the Sheraton?
The Sheraton Hotel is right next to the venue and can be reached on foot in about fifteen minutes. The Sheraton housed VVIPs, who are some important international friends and more important domestic guests. Although you needed to show your room card to eat at the Sheraton, what if you only needed to show your card during the conference?
I contacted the contact person and they replied that I could only have lunch at the hotel where I am staying. But I still set foot on the road to the Sheraton Hotel with hope…
The smooth lines of the Nebula Pavilion are natural, and equally smooth are the queues waiting for autograph signings. That’s right, this afternoon happened to be Liu’s autograph signing. The signing line stretched from the third floor to the first floor, and then meandered along the lakeside. I was shocked when I saw such a long line, and quickly took out my mobile phone to take pictures… I was both admiring and envious at the same time: I wish I could have such a long signing queue one day!…
Something strange also happened at SF Night [a reception jointly organized by Science Fiction World and Saifan Space]. The security of this science fiction conference was extremely strict. Xia Jia and several other authors were stopped outside. Even organizers like Sun Yueraz were stopped from entering again after leaving. I met Xia Jia when I went out after the event. He was sitting at a table outside the security gate, looking relaxed and comfortable, chatting with others. Some things are changing, and some things remain unchanged…
The signing event went much better than expected. For at least an hour, there was a steady stream of people coming to get my signature. This is the power of the World Science Fiction Convention. It gathered a large number of people and brought some traffic to us authors. One of the fans took out the journal where I first published my novel, the April 2003 issue of The End Game, which had a photo of me on it. Compared to that time, my hair volume is a bit anxious. After all, people only have so many good days, and youth never comes back once it’s gone…
[Extracts from the acceptance speech he prepared] Thank you to all readers who voted for me and for recognizing this work.
Thank you to all readers who voted for the Hugo Awards. Anyone who is willing to spend money to vote is true love. Your support is the driving force behind this award continuing to this day….
The last thing I want to thank is this great era. In the past few decades, China has developed from an agricultural country to an industrial country, and has continuously made progress in economy and science and technology. This great process must be reflected in the writer’s thinking. Without this era and the Chinese Space Station, stories like “Hanging by a Thread” would not have been possible.
As for me, I would like to quote Mr. Carl Sagan’s epitaph to illustrate, “He never grew up, but he never stopped growing.” I hope that I can continue to grow in science fiction. Share this with everyone.
Thank you everyone, thank you to everyone who loves Chinese science fiction.[end of his acceptance speech].
Finally, the lottery was drawn, and the pie did not fall on my head. When my boots hit the ground, I felt calm. This is probably the closest I’ve ever been to a Hugo Award. If I miss it, I won’t get it again. Life always has its ups and downs. But after all, I never had the chance to say this. Writing it down is also a kind of record and will not be forgotten.
After the awards ceremony, there was a reception on Hugo night. It was held on the large terrace of the Nebula Pavilion, and you needed a ticket to enter, have a drink and chat. Generally speaking, I still chat to people I know. The organizer also arranged some programs. Many foreign friends gathered to watch, but domestic people seemed not very interested.
I came out before the reception ended and happened to meet [SF World editor, Hugo Editor finalist, concom member] Yao Haijun. I took his car back to the hotel and enjoyed the VVIP red flag car treatment…
I felt very sleepy after the conference. For the two days after I came back, I felt like I couldn’t wake up every day. Maybe I had a dream. Dreams are easy to be forgotten, so I have to fix them with words. This is probably the only thing that short-lived humans can struggle with in the face of the infinite world.
Jiang Bo is second from rightThe Galaxy Awards ceremonyThe queue for Cixin Liu’s signing sessionJiang Bo is second from leftJiang Bo
SF Light Year
SF Light Year (aka 科幻光年/Kehuan Guang Nian aka Adaoli) is an influential Chinese fan, with 370k followers on Weibo. He has been mentioned in several earlier Chengdu updates, and has commented here a few times. Disclosure: he was also my co-conspirator in a plan to exchange fanzines and signed books between the UK and China, in order to give them as surprise gifts to some Hugo finalists, a couple of whom went on to win in their categories. I also get namechecked in the second of the three parts of this report posted to Weibo. As such, I’m not an impartial reporter of his comments. Note also that Mike and File 770 also gets briefly mentioned in the first part.
Note: Because these three posts are so long, the “Translate content” links that appear at the bottom of posts timed out for me. I ended up having to copypaste the text into Google Translate. I did ask him if I could upload the translated text (e.g. to Pastebin or similar) for everyone’s convenience, but didn’t get a reply due to it being night in China when I asked that question.
The following excerpts are via Google Translate, with minor manual edits.
(from first post)
Every time I attend various science fiction conferences and meet authors and fantasy fans, I am always happy and excited. What gives me good memories of the Chengdu World Science Fiction Conference is not the gorgeous venue but every sincere science fiction fan and person who laughed, cried, got angry, and was moved. I will remember every moment in my heart. But this long article is dedicated to recording my disappointment with the Chengdu World Science Fiction Conference, as a small supplement to a grand narrative, because it is important to us science fiction fans, to our science fiction community, and to our internal and external science fiction. Communication can have far-reaching consequences. I’d love to be that little kid who calls out that the Emperor has no clothes.
After the successful bid to host the Chengdu World Science Fiction Conference in 2021, the organizing committee promised that fantasy travelers will “enter as VIP guests, enjoy VIP treatment, and all tickets to the conference will be free of charge.” The actual situation of the conference is that these so-called VIP guests (who are also members of WSFS) are different from the guests separately invited by the organizing committee. They did not automatically receive the right to participate in the opening and closing ceremonies and the Hugo Award ceremony… Those who purchased event tickets (non-members) also needed to participate in the lottery for access to one of the three ceremonies. Some fellow WSFS members were not even able to get admission to any of the ceremonies…
On the other hand, public news shows that as early as April 2022, an internal meeting in Pidu District arranged the event planning plan for the 81st World Science Fiction Convention in that district. Real estate developers also used the venue of the Pidu District convention as a selling point to make plans for nearby properties. [Real estate developer] Vanke also once put up a big sign announcing the countdown to the World Science Fiction Conference at the sales office, but it was later removed at the request of the organizing committee. In the tug-of-war of the balance of forces among all parties, the interests of this group of college student application groups were the first to be sacrificed.
Because he had been tracking the venue confirmation and conference information posted on Weibo from very early on, which revealed the venue change to Pidu District before the official announcement, Yao Chi [from the con team, I think this is the same person as Joe Yao] once contacted me and asked me to remove the relevant article. My response was that if Pidu District took down their announcements, I would also take down my posts on Weibo…
(from second post)
… Wu Miao mentioned that his book signing was actually a mess: although the book sold well in the two days, part way through, the con removed copies of his book, and the readers who went in the afternoon were all empty-handed and could not buy the book. I took four customers everywhere to look for books, but none of the exhibition staff had any explanation or follow-up. His autograph signing was arranged for the first two days (non-weekends) when there were few people. The on-site booth was borrowed from Booker Bookstore because the conditions of the venue were very poor… His publisher also stated that the conference did not consider the interests of exhibitors and “there will be no next time.” Similar lack of coordination occurred repeatedly. Several guests told me that they were suddenly informed that there was a signing, or that there was a time conflict between the signing and the panel schedule. The book sales were located on the first floor, but the book signings were on the third floor. It was very inconvenient for readers to buy books and sign books, and the process of selecting and finding books was very unfriendly.
On October 14, 2023 in our online science fiction group, a hearing-impaired person attending the conference, who has a disability certificate, told us about the accessibility request email she sent to the conference. She had asked what kind of help will be provided to the hearing-disabled people if they need it, and what materials should be applied and prepared for in advance. Her email was returned undelivered… We found that the contact address given on the official website was wrong. However [after this was pointed out on Weibo and the address got promptly fixed] our disabled member sent another email to the correct address, but there was no reply or official contact instructions until the end of the conference. For such an important communication channel, it seemed that the accessibility service department was just a fiction, which is disappointing especially when the organizing committee clearly knew from reading Weibo that someone had applied for accessibility services. Fortunately, she was always accompanied by enthusiastic fans during the conference.
The lack of communication was also reflected in the coordination of volunteers. The organizing committee announced the recruitment of volunteers through different processes more than once. I submitted forms and emails twice, stating that my specialty was Japanese and that I could be a volunteer, but there was no response to any emails from the beginning to the end. Many times in various groups, I encountered netizens complaining and asking me about the same situation. Later, I learned that the government had arranged a bidding process for volunteer service projects [1], and the volunteers and training procedures were determined through other methods. However, all offline applications were not responded to and followed up, which is indeed inappropriate…
Many Hugo Award finalists, including those from China, were told they would stay at the Sheraton [close to the venue], but were eventually downgraded to Wyndham [much further away]. In terms of differential treatment, I would like to mention that Ling Shizhen, who was also a Hugo Award finalist for the Zero Gravity fanzine, was not initially given permission to attend the opening and closing ceremonies or the Hugo Award Ceremony. (His badge only had the number 3/5, which was the minimum permission for all invited guests, only allowing entry to the Science Fiction Museum and the Sheraton hotel). He was very angry about this. After contacting the organizing committee, he had to travel back and forth between the con venue and the hotel to coordinate, until finally he was allowed to enter the ceremony hall, and eventually went on stage to receive the Hugo Award.
(from third post)
On the opening day of the conference on October 18, 2023, we passed by the venue and found that the newly established “food truck area” at the Nebula Campground (renovated from dozens of buses) at the Science Museum and Sheraton Road was blocked off. and not open to the public. The news circulating in our group was that “the food in the food trucks was not classy and would affect the image” and therefore it was cancelled….
Regarding the sudden need to control the number of attendees at the reception held at the Sheraton during the conference, which resulted in a large number of invited domestic and foreign guests being unable to enter, breaking up unhappy or even causing disputes, we will not discuss this for the time being….
Enthusiastic netizens have compiled a complete breakdown of the amount related to the venue construction, tens of millions related to conference preparation and venue. For example, the winning bid amount for the Hugo Trophy, just for the design was as high as 570 thousand yuan [approximately $80,000 USD]…
Basically, this World Science Fiction Convention was held in a situation that was both open and closed, rich and barren. If you were interviewing foreign guests, especially several World Science Fiction Convention officials or important guests – the venue has a distinction between VVIP and VIP arrangements for volunteers – there were elaborate arrangements for the support of various celebrities, free travel, meals and accommodation for two people, and special personnel to coordinate and arrange access, and enjoy exquisite meals. [Regular] Guests who have participated in dozens of conferences never enjoyed such support, even though participating in the Chengdu World Science Fiction Conference would be their highlight moment. According to Nnedi Okorafor herself, “I was treated like a queen.”…
On the other hand, I came into contact with front-line staff from the exhibition organizers who were exhausted due to internal friction in coordination and communication, relevant leaders who frankly said they no longer wanted to bid for the World Science Fiction Convention, guests who canceled their panels because they were angry that the promised venue control would not cooperate, as well as guests who continued to attend the convention…
In every sense of the word, this is an unforgettable World Science Fiction Convention. This was the first time it was held in China. I don’t know if there will be a second time.
[1] This might explain a Xiaohongshu post I saw yesterday, which was a group selfie of some volunteers, who were all employees of (IIRC) a construction company. At the time I just assumed it was a group of colleagues who’d decided to do a good deed, but now I wonder if there was more to it.
SF Light YearSF Light Year, Robert J. Sawyer, Neil Clarke.
A week ago today, there was an indication that the statistics might be published on the Friday just gone. That hasn’t happened, and as far as I know, there has been no further status update.
I think lots of us are very interested in finding out where certain books that seemed like dead certs – or as close as you can get to it in the Hugos – ended up in the nominations.
…Now horror is emphatically back, and it is no longer a dirty word. Publishing imprints such as Titan and Nightfire are devoted almost entirely to the genre, small presses are helping to introduce new names, and a thriving online community of readers, writers, critics and commentators champion literature’s most sinister impulses.
Such insatiable appetite is forcing change. From the Argentinian new wave to British neo-folk, from the Asian-inflected horror of authors such as Chinese-Canadian writer Ai Jiang to the African heritage of British-Nigerian Nuzo Onoh, writers across the world are pushing outwards, creating space for new perspectives. Horror is rapidly evolving from what was once a white, male and highly Anglocentric genre into something more diverse and much more reactive.
A new US book is testament to this progress. Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horroris edited by film director Jordan Peele, who made Us and the electrifying Oscar-winner Get Out. Peele writes in his introduction: “I view horror as catharsis through entertainment. It’s a way to work through your deepest pain and fear.” But, he suggests, that isn’t possible for Black people “without the stories being told in the first place”.
For Peele, this collection, compiled with co-editor John Joseph Adams, was a chance to commission “the very best Black authors in fiction,” he tells me over email. “I hoped that, when prompted to create a personalised nightmare, their ‘monsters’ might be representative of some previously unnamed truths. What you get are stories that feel like they couldn’t or wouldn’t have been told a few years ago.”
NK Jemisin’s contribution examines police brutality through surrealistic body horror, while Tananarive Due imagines a moment from the civil rights movement that reads like an unearthed piece of folk history. But it’s interesting how many of the tales in Out There Screamingeschew overtly racialised horror – in particular, the tight focus on trauma that has long been a thorny issue in the Black horror community….
Nineteen writers contributed to the story collection, including N.K. Jemisin, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Tochi Onyebuchi and Tananarive Due. Initially Jemisin declined to participate, although she was pleased to be approached. “I like writing stories, but I’m very slow to write them and I don’t do well with commissions,” Jemisin said in a phone interview. “I don’t have any interest in writing to order, basically. I said, if something inspires me, sure, I’m on it, but otherwise don’t count on anything.”
Jemisin had a change of heart on a vacation in the Outer Banks: “Next door to us was a family of cops, apparently, who hung a thin blue line flag and partied all weekend and made a great deal of noise, knowing full well nobody was going to call the cops on them.”
She went on, “Nothing overt happened. We were fine. But we were on this trip with some teenagers and we told them, ‘Do not go out by yourselves because this doesn’t feel like a safe place to be a bunch of young Black folks.’”
Instead of going to the beach, Jemisin started writing “Reckless Eyeballing,” the story that now opens “Out There Screaming.” It’s about Carl Billings, a Black highway patrol officer with a habit of “roughing up” people he pulls over — a broken arm here, a baton to the teeth there. His white supervisor is on to him, and then a video of one of his traffic stops goes viral. But worst of all is Carl’s unsettling vision of oncoming headlights as eyeballs, blinking and veined, watching. He can’t get away from them…
…How come you initially lost your nerve? We’re in an age of first-person veracity. By some bizarre spasm of fate, I’m doing a radio interview next month alongside Tim Peake. I’m filled with anxiety: why would anyone care what some woman in Wiltshire has to say about what it might be like to be in space, when she’s sitting alongside Tim Peake? Maybe the answer is that there’s somewhere the imagination can go that experience can’t. Nasa’s website has hundreds of fascinating but quite humdrum journals that astronauts have written while in space. I was thinking, there’s a gap here – a sort of metaphysical gap, a magical experience that isn’t being documented the way I’d like to document it.
Did you want to write against more plot-driven space narratives? I like Alien as much as anybody else. I never saw this novel as being against sci-fi, but I didn’t see it as having an awful lot in relation to it either. I thought of it as space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space, with a slightly nostalgic sense of what’s disappearing. Not just on Earth, but also the ISS itself, this really quite retro piece of kit which is going to be deorbited after 23 years of rattling around at 17,500 miles an hour….
…DS:Right. Let’s talk a little bit about the Strange New Worlds crossover episode. You teased it when we spoke last August. It was a fantastic episode.
MM: Thank you.
DS:The animation held its own against a well-designed visual effects-driven show. It did both worlds proud. It fit. It wasn’t too gaggy, but it was funny. I was really impressed because I had no idea what to expect. And of course, Commander Riker [Jonathan Frakes] directed it. So, tell me about your involvement. And how tough was it to pull that off?
MM:Strange New Worlds allowed me to get to somewhere where it was a little funnier than they’re used to and a little more strange new worlds than I’m used to. I was a tool that they were using. So, they used me on multiple script passes in the edit, helping conceive of the episode and all that stuff, but I can’t take any credit for that. It really was an amazing thing that they wanted to do because it was so different. And they’re only in their second season. I don’t think I would’ve had the balls to do that on a second-season show. But what it really came down to is we all had a blast, and that really comes through when you watch the episode.
And I could have made that a feature-length episode and added way more Orion pirates and all sorts of stuff. But at the end of the day, what it really highlighted was character, and I think that was really smart, that Tawny and Jack are fucking amazing. But you know who else is? Everybody on Strange New Worlds. So, getting to see them all mixed together the whole episode, it’s just such a party. It’s just such a Star Trek party that, if you’re watching this era, that is a crazy encapsulation of what makes you feel good. It’s like what you like about Trek….
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 29, 1906 — Fredric Brown. Author of Martians, Go Home which would be made into a movie of the same name. He received compensation and credit from NBC as their Trek episode “Arena” had more than a passing similarity to his novelette which was nominated for Retro Hugo at CoNZealand. Interestingly, a whole lot of his Edgar Award-winning mysteries are being released on the usual suspects in December. (Died 1972.)
Born October 29, 1935 — Shelia Finch, 88. She is best remembered for her stories about the Guild of Xenolinguists which aptly enough are collected in The Guild of Xenolinguists story collection. She first used it her 1986 Triad novel. The term would later be used to describe the character Uhura in the rebooted Trek film. Her Reading the Bones novel, part of the Guild of Xenolinguists series would win a Nebula.
Born October 29, 1938 — Ralph Bakshi, 85. Started as low-level worker at Terrytoons, studio of characters such as Heckle and Jeckle and Mighty Mouse which I adore. His first major break would be on CBS as creative director of Mighty Mouse and the Mighty Heroes. Fast forwarding to Fritz the Cat which may or may not be genre but it’s got a foul-mouthed talking cat when should make it genre, yes? Genre wise, I’d say Wizards which features voice work by Mark Hamill and whose final name was Wizards so it wouldn’t be confused with you know what film. It was nominated for a Hugo at IguanaCon II when Star Wars won. Next up was The Lord of the Rings, a very odd affair. That was followed by Fire and Ice, a collaboration with Frank Frazetta. Then came what I considered his finest work, the Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures series! Then there’s Cool World…
Born October 29, 1941 — Hal W. Hall, 82. Bibliographer responsible for the Science Fiction Book Review Index (1970 – 1985) and the Science Fiction Research Index (1981 – 1922). He also did a number of reviews including three of H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzy books showing he had excellent taste in fiction.
Born October 29, 1954 — Paul Di Filippo, 69. Ciphers: a post-Shannon rock-n-roll mystery was his first work. He is, I’d say, an acquired taste. I like him. I’d suggest first reading you don’t know him should be The Steampunk Trilogy and go from there. His “A Year in the Linear City” novella was nominated at Torcon 3 for Best Novella, and won the 2003 World Fantasy Award and the 2003 Theodore Sturgeon Award. Oh, and he’s one of our stellar reviewers having reviewed at one time or another for Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Fiction Eye, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Interzone, Nova Express and Science Fiction Weekly.
Born October 29, 1954 — Kathleen O’Neal Gear, 69. Archaeologist and writer. I highly recommend the three Anasazi Mysteries that she co-wrote with W. Michael Gear. She’s a historian of note so she’s done a lot of interesting work in that area such as Viking Warrior Women: Did ‘Shieldmaidens’ like Lagertha Really Exist? And should you decide you want to keep buffalo, she’s the expert on doing so. Really. Truly, she is.
Born October 29, 1971 — Anna Dale, 52. Scottish writer whom many reviewers have dubbed “the next JK Rowling” who’s best known for her Whispering to Witches children’s novel. It was based on her masters dissertation in children’s writing. She has written two more novels of a similar ilk, Spellboundand Magical Mischief.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
The Flying McCoys explains why a Charles Schulz tradition came to an end.
Not even a superhero could save two of Los Angeles’s oldest comic book stores.
Torrance’s Geoffrey’s Comics and Hi De-Ho Comics in Santa Monica are closing at the end of the year.
Owner Geoffrey Patterson II said that ever since the pandemic, many comic book fans moved from purchasing their comics in person to online. For his stores, that meant losing half of his customer base and more than half of the profits.
But the pandemic was just the last straw.
“It’s also just as it has become mainstream, that other places are now selling comic books that weren’t selling them before,” he said, citing big retailers like Target. “It went from being only in comic book stores to everywhere. So the customers now have 100 choices for where they pick up a comic book story, and that just kept shrinking and shrinking our customer base.”…
Premiering today, Friday, October 27, Curses!, from DreamWorks Animation, hits Apple TV+ just in time for Halloween. In the all-new animated, spooky adventure-comedy series for kids, when a generations-long family curse turns Alex Vanderhouven to stone, it’s up to his two children, Pandora and Russ, and his wife Sky, to return artifacts stolen by their ancestors to their rightful homes to finally lift the curse for good….
Curses! began as a collaboration between creators Jim Cooper and Jeff Dixon. The two had never written together before; they met when their children started school together, and after dropping them off, they’d walk home and discuss their writing careers. “Jeff was mostly in horror, and I was mostly in family animation,” Cooper shares. “Sometime over the years, we thought, ‘Hey, it would be cool to combine the two.’ We hit upon the idea of Curses! after discussing what we call my ‘family curse.’ That got us thinking about other family curses and their causes, and things just sort of went from there.”
“It started with Coop telling me the story of his ‘family curse,’ Dixon adds. “He told me that all the men on one side of his family died young, generation after generation. After he showed me a photo of his grandfather as a baby holding an actual human skull, we started thinking, ‘Holy hell, that skull must somehow be the origin of the curse!’ Then our imaginations started spinning out of control thinking about curses and what happens to later generations when a family line is cursed because of something their ancestors did, to no fault of their own. And it only grew from there.”…
Carl BarksLuck of the NorthDonald Duck Painting Original Art (1973). Though this rollicking scene is based on one of the “Good Duck Artist’s” most famous yarns, this is the only painted version of it that he ever did. Carl Barks based this colorful calamity on his 1949 Donald Duck adventure from Four Color #256. This mirthful masterwork was published on Page 169 (as color plate 49) of The Fine Art of Walt Disney’s Donald Duck, where Barks noted: “In that northern lights effect at the top, I found pictures of the northern lights in some National Geographics and I kind of stole some. I find water very difficult to paint. It’s hard work, but I worked at this until I got it to look halfway authentic. I generally just plunged right in on an idea whether I was going to have trouble or not. I’d start out with a simple idea, and keep on elaborating on it until I had a real complex thing going.”
(12) VAMPIRE HUNTER D. The Animation Explorations Podcast has dropped the first episode of their second year. For the spooky season they take a look at the 1985 adaptation of Hideyuki Kikuchi’s first novel in “Vampire Hunter D (1985)” series.
Call me chief priestess for the moon goddess,” says Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock when I ask whether she prefers to be known as an astronomer, physicist or space scientist. She is, after all, entitled to all of them because before presenting The Sky at Night on the BBC she trained as a physicist, then an engineer and is now the nation’s go-to woman for all things space. But it seems that she really has her eye on the job of a 4,300-year-old Sumerian religious leader.
“I was giving a talk in the Scottish parliament,” she explains when we meet at a photographer’s studio hidden in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it alleyway in east London, “and I mentioned En Hedu’anna, the first female scientist who was known as chief priestess for the moon goddess of the city of Ur [in ancient Mesopotamia].” After the talk, the chair suggested they vote to bestow on Aderin-Pocock the title of chief priestess for the moon goddess of the city of Edinburgh. “That’s what I would like on my business card,” she says with a delighted clap of the hands and the kind of irresistible enthusiasm that viewers of The Sky at Night will be familiar with.
Forgotten or uncredited scientists, such as En Hedu’anna, feature prominently in Aderin-Pocock’s new book, The Art of Stargazing, a practical guide to identifying and understanding the 88 constellations…
…[Why] is outdated ancient science from long-dead civilisations still important? “When I grew up, there were many kids who looked at science and thought: ‘Well, someone like me doesn’t do that because it’s not my culture, it’s not for me – I don’t have a history of this.’ Diversity is about bringing different ideas and people into science because if it’s all just done by the European white guys, we get a very blinkered view of the world. That’s why access to the history of astronomy is important for everyone.’…
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Steven French, Alexander Case, Ersatz Culture, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
…Driven by visual social media and digital reading innovations, book cover design is reclaiming significance. Publishers are investing more in illustrated covers over text-dominant designs. Authors are regaining control over cover direction. Book cover reveals have become standalone social media events driving buzz. In many ways, we are witnessing a renaissance in the aesthetics and art of book covers. Let’s examine the forces driving this comeback.
…. Another paradoxical force spurring the comeback of print-style covers is the rise of e-books. With e-readers like Kindle gaining adoption, publishers feared print covers would lose significance. But an unexpected opposite effect occurred.
E-readers triggered innovations in e-book cover design that looped back to influence print covers. Interactive e-book covers came to life through animation and video. Digital-first elements like neon textures or holographic finishes became popular. E-book-first series that went viral, like ambitious illustrated covers for epic fantasy novels, crossed back over to print.
Reading ecosystem convergence is also elevating covers. Services like Amazon Matchbook give e-book copies of print purchases, keeping hardcover artwork relevant. Companies popularized custom dust jackets as consumable cover accessories. Display-worthy book boxes and monthly subscription book packages rely on striking cover reveals….
…“As a prospective writer, I would urge you to not only read good books. Read terrible books as well, because they can be more inspiring than the good books,” Moore says in a clip taken from his BBC Maestro online storytelling course.
“If you are inspired by a good book, there’s always the danger of plagiarism, of doing something that is too much like that good book,” Moore says in the video. “Whereas, a genuinely helpful reaction to a piece of work that you’re reading is, ‘Jesus Christ, I could write this sh*t!’ That is immensely liberating — to find somebody who is published who is doing much, much worse than you.”
Moore also believes that being exposed to bad writing can help you learn from other writers’ mistakes. Knowing why something doesn’t work can be as valuable as understanding why something succeeds….
…On the PBS website for American Masters, several notable artists were put on the record as to their fandom of Serling’s show. One might easily guess that Jordan Peele was a fan of “The Twilight Zone” as he served as executive producer and narrator for the 2019 revival. It will also shock no one to learn that Stephen King and Guillermo delt Toro are massive fans. King said in Marc Scott Zicree’s sourcebook “The Twilight Zone Companion” that he was inspired by Matheson in particular, while del Toro, although a “Twilight” fan, was more fond of Serling’s follow-up series “Night Gallery.”
One might be a little more surprised to learn that comedian Mel Brooks was a fan. Brooks, of course, had taste in entertainment that extended far beyond the comedies he was known for writing, as the maker of “Blazing Saddles” also produced films like “The Elephant Man” and “The Fly.” Brooks clearly had a thing for the unusual and the macabre and was impressed by Serling’s mastery over his production. In Mark Dawidziak’s 2020 book “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone: A Fifth-Dimension Guide to Life,” Brooks offered the following observation:
“The greatest lesson I learned is that you need to reserve judgment and seriously buy into the creation and design of the filmmaker. You’ve got to give it all up and go along with the magic. Every time I watched ‘The Twilight Zone,’ I was completely ready to surrender to it. That’s what the mystery of creation is all about. Give yourself over to that wonderful, wonderful mystery.”…
Every child wishes they could be a superhero, right? On Saturday, kids had the opportunity to take part in the action, as part of Eli’s Block Party.
Children were inspired and had some fun with superhero characters for the free family-friendly event hosted by Athens-Limestone Tourism for childhood cancer research.
The special day was established in 2011 for Eli Williams, who fought medulloblastoma for almost six years. In 2017 Williams passed away and his mother, Kristie Williams remains a vital part of keeping his memory alive through the organization, Eli’s Block Party.
“The goal for Superhero Day is to honor this decade-long annual event by preserving it and continuing it,” said Tina Morrison, Athens-Limestone County Tourism Association Event Coordinator. “This kids event makes a positive change for children by providing a fun, free environment for all kids of all economic backgrounds. While having fun, they will also learn the importance of serving in their community, the importance of saving and donating money, and the opportunity to inquire with caring, professional adults about becoming community leaders when they grow up.”…
(5) A RED LETTER DAY. The date of next year’s LA Vintage Paperback Show has been set: Sunday, March 17, 2024.
Even though they’re often mocking their source material, sci-fi parodies can be as good as the franchises they’re based on. The Orville is better than modern Star Trekto some fans, and similar series have actually contributed to the genre as a whole with fun plots, memorable characters, and engaging visuals, with a moral lesson or two for good measure. Far from spoofing George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy, movies like Spaceballs actually elevate it, making its rich lore and world-building come across as even more distinct and iconic within the pop culture zeitgeist.
Unexpectedly in first place:
1. Star Trek: Lower Decks
Star Trek: Lower Decks focuses on the goings-on of the lower decks of Starfleet’s USS Cerritos, an unimportant vessel often called upon to engage in extraordinary adventures despite the mediocre nature of its crew. This animated series is actually a part of Star Trek canon but does an ingenious job of subverting it with humor. Everything fans have made fun of about the franchise for years is lovingly incorporated into jokes about cleaning bodily fluids from the holodeck, and this sci-fi parody is now touted as one of the best new Star Trek series of the last ten years.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 10, 1914 — Robert Wise. Film director, producer, and editor. Among his accomplishments are directing The Curse of The Cat People, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Haunting, The Andromeda Strain and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Though not at all genre, he also directed West Side Story and edited Citizen Kane, two exemplary accomplishments indeed. (Died 2005.)
Born September 10, 1952 — Gerry Conway, 71. Writer who’s best known for co-creating with John Romita Sr. and Ross Andru the Punisher character and scripting the death of Gwen Stacy during his long run on The Amazing Spider-Man. (ThePunisher comic is far, far better than any the three films is. I broke my vow of not watching anything I like and deeply regret it. I really mean that.) I’m also fond of his work on Weird Western Tales at DC. A truly odd and deeply entertaining series. At DC, he created a number of characters including Firestorm, Count Vertigo and Killer Croc. Not genre at all, but he wrote a lot of scripts for Law and Order: Criminal Intent, one of my favorite series.
Born September 10, 1953 — Pat Cadigan, 70. Tea from an Empty Cup and Dervish is Digital are both amazing works. And I’m fascinated that she co-wrote with Paul Dini, creator of Batman: The Animated Series, a DCU novel called Harley Quinn: Mad Love. In many ways, it was better than the damn series is which I’ll discuss with anyone here.
Born September 10, 1955 — Victoria Strauss, 68. Author of the Burning Land trilogy, she should be praised for being founder along with AC Crispin for being founder of the Committee on Writing Scams. She maintains the Writer Beware website and blog.
Born September 10, 1958 — Nancy A. Collins, 65. Author of the Sonja Blue vampire novels, some of the best of that genre I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. She had a long run on Swamp Thing from issues 110 to 138, and it is generally considered a very good period in that narrative. She also wrote Vampirella, the Forrest J Ackerman and Trina Robbins creation, for awhile.
Born September 10, 1964 — Chip Kidd, 58. Graphic designer. And isn’t that an understatement. He did Batman: Death by Design which was illustrated by Dave Taylor, and there’s his amazing homage to Plastic Man with Art Spiegelman, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits. He also created the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton design for the original Jurassic park novel which was later carried over into the film franchise. Neat. Really neat.
Born September 10, 1968 — Guy Ritchie, 55. Director of Sherlock Holmes and its sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, both of each I rather liked, and the live-action Aladdin. He did also directed / wrote / produced the rebooted The Man from U.N.C.L.E. which got rather nice reviews to my surprise as well as King Arthur: Legend of the Sword which apparently is quite excellent as audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a seventy percent rating.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
In case you wondered, Tom Gauld shows it’s harder to find the right book than the right porridge.
…The novel is told primarily from the POV of Welga Ramírez, with a number of chapters from the POV of her sister-in-law Nithya. It is set in 2095, and its themes are stated to some extent in extracts from the Machinehood Manifesto, a document issued during the action of the novel. The first two declarations from the manifesto we see are: “All forms of intelligence have the right to exist without persecution or slavery.” and “No form of intelligence may own another.” We are quickly aware that this is a significant issue in this future, as the society is heavily reliant on bots of various forms — a fairly obtuse vendor bot is immediately introduced — and by WAIs, or “weak artificial intelligences”, such as Welga’s personal aide Por Qué. A key issue, clearly, is “what is intelligence?” (The Machinehood defines it very expansively.) Another issue, already fraught for this future society, is labor rights — the economy is largely a gig economy, and humans have struggled to compete for jobs as many jobs are performed by bots or WAIs….
…I have been speaking in terms as if this were a historical novel rather than an actual piece of non fiction, and I do think that this book really does borrow a lot from the novel tradition. The tradition expansive and sometimes dry history book of the past that turned off as many or more readers than they drew in is not so much a thing in modern history and non fiction. The rage these days is for the microhistory, for the history of sometimes not even just a particular person, but a moment in time, a decision, a small aspect of the world that can be illuminated, described and brought to life. Capturing Suleyman the Magnificent at the beginning of his reign, when he rising to his power and the crest of his reign (and arguably the height of the entire Ottoman Empire) is definitely in that microhistorical frame….
(11) ANOTHER SIDE OF TOM GAULD. In “Microreview: Mooncop” at Nerds of a Feather, Alex Wallace shows “Tom Gauld has more up his sleeve than just funny cartoons.”
…Mooncop is a slim volume; I read it in a single sitting, and I think most people could do it in a rather short amount of time. It is, in a sense, exactly what it says on the tin, being about a policeman on a lunar colony sometime in the not-too-distant future. Even the title feels like Gauld, in some way, with a bluntness that only obscures the greater depths of the work with a seeming irreverence towards standard titles….
…Both studies used state-of-the art AI technology. Months after one study proclaimed that the so-called de Brécy Tondo, currently on display at Bradford council’s Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, is “undoubtedly” by Raphael, another has found that it cannot be by the Renaissance master.
In January, research teams from the universities of Nottingham and Bradford announced the findings of facial recognition technology, which compared the faces in the Tondo with those in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna altarpiece, commissioned in 1512.
Having used “millions of faces to train an algorithm to recognise and compare facial features”, they stated: “The similarity between the madonnas was found to be 97%, while comparison of the child in both paintings produced an 86% similarity.”
They added: “This means that the two paintings are highly likely to have been created by the same artist.”
But algorithms involved in a new study by Dr Carina Popovici, a scientist with Art Recognition, a Swiss company based near Zurich, have now returned an 85% probability for the painting not to be painted by Raphael….
The Pirate Bible is a full translation of the Bible (including Old and New Testaments). It was translated using a complex algorithm and artificial intelligence to create a realistic translation of the Holy Book while striving to maintain content accuracy. We hope it inspires you to engage with the Bible in new and meaningful ways.
What’s the difference? Compare how the King James Version and the Pirate Bible render this verse:
Matthew 6:3 (KJV)
But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:
Matthew 6:3 (Pirate Bible)
But when ye scuttle booty, let not yer port hand know what yer starboard hand be doin’!
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]
In the past year, the #BookTok hashtag has grown more than 160% to over 138 billion views – and shows no sign of stopping! The #BookTok community of authors, readers and fans is transforming the publishing world: propelling new authors into the mainstream, reviving much loved classics, inspiring a new generation of bookworms and helping to boost print book sales.
In celebration and recognition of the titles, authors, content and creators that have made the unique BookTok ecosystem what it is, we are proud to launch our very own TikTok Book Awards for the UK and Ireland. For the first time, we’re creating a true people’s choice book award – giving our community the chance to vote for the winning books, authors and creators in-app….
The award categories will be: BookTok Creator Of The Year, BookTok Book Of The Year, BookTok Author Of The Year, Best BookTok Revival, Indie Book Shop Of The Year, Best Book to End A Reading Slump, Best Book I Wish I Could Read Again For The First Time, BookTok Cover of The Year, and BookTok Livestreamer of The Year.
A panel of judges is creating the longlist (they are named at the link). The final winners will be decided by the TikTok community in the UK and Ireland, through an in-app vote that will go live in July, with all winners being crowned in August.
(2) INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE. The International Booker Prize 2023 winner was announced May 23 – Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel. It is not a genre work, although that may not be your first impression after reading the description:
Time Shelter becomes the first novel originally published in Bulgarian to win the prize. In the book, a ‘clinic for the past’ offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. But soon the past begins to invade the present.
Masha Gessen, the prominent Russian-American writer who has documented Russia’s decline into authoritarianism, has resigned as vice-president of PEN America after the organisation cancelled an event last week with Russian dissidents after objections from Ukrainian participants.
The group, which was founded in 1922 and describes itself as “stand[ing] at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression,” was plunged into controversy after it acknowledged that it had called off an event at a literary festival in New York after Ukrainian writers on a separate panel had threatened to pull out.
… In a statement released by PEN America on Tuesday, the group admitted it had made “mistakes” and misunderstood a requirement from two Ukrainian participants, Artem Chapeye and Artem Chekh, who are also serving soldiers, that they could not be involved in PEN’s World Voices festival if Russian writers were involved in any way.
While Gessen – who uses they/them pronouns – was born in Russia but lives in the US is seen by many as an “American writer,” the presence of the two others on the panel complicated the issue with Chapeye telling the Atlantic, which first broke the story, he could not make distinctions between “good” Russians and “bad” Russians.
“Until the war ends,” he added, “a [Ukrainian] soldier can not be seen with the ‘good Russians.’”…
(4) RE-DISCOVERY LIT ANNOUNCED. Open Road’s new imprint Re-Discovery Lit has 200 titles slated for its inaugural list. Their use of a “similarity engine” to scout reprints doesn’t sound at all creepy, does it? “Imprints: Open Road’s Re-Discovery Lit” at Publishers Lunch.
Open Road has launched an imprint devoted to republishing out-of-print and reverted titles, Re-Discovery Lit. They expect to reissue about 200 titles a year, publishing primarily in ebook format, though titles will be available in print-on-demand editions as well. Mara Anastas, who is publisher of the imprint, says in the announcement, “Agents and writers everywhere have been excited to learn of this new opportunity for out-of-print and reverted works.”
Authors on the list include Barbara Delinsky, Clifford D. Simak, Roger Angell, Alan Dean Foster, and Ronald Malfi. An agreement with Alloy Entertainment brings back series including Melinda Metz’s YA Fingerprints series and Eileen Goudge’s Who Killed Peggy Sue? series.
For acquisitions, Open Road is drawing on the “similarity engine” technology to assess titles and use predictive analytics to see if they are a good match for the company’s marketing levers. “If it isn’t a fit, we’ll say to the rightsholders, ‘This is not a book we can help lift,'” ceo David Steinberger noted, and for titles that do align they can present a clear marketing plan for the republication.
(5) TINA TURNER. (1939-2023). One of the most successful singers ever, Tina Turner died May 24 at the age of 83. Her legion of hit performances impacted sff with “We Don’t Need Another Hero“ from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, from the film in which she also played the character Aunty Entity, and the theme song for 1995 Bond film GoldenEye. She appeared as The Acid Queen in Tommy (1975) and The Mayor in Last Action Hero (1993). The New York Times obituary is here.
(6) MEMORY LANE.
2012 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Frances Hardinge’s A Face Like Glass is where the Beginning is from this Scroll. It was published eleven years ago by Macmillan Children’s Books.
She was nominated for a the Kitschie Awards’ Red Tentacle for Best Novel, an Award sponsored by Blackwell’s, the specialist bookstore.
Though she’s considered a children’s writer, I’d say that any of you would find her fantasies well-worth reading.
This Beginning gives us an excellent look at her writing style…
Prologue
The Child in the Curds
One dark season, Grandible became certain that there was something living in his domain within the cheese tunnels. To judge by the scuffles, it was larger than a rat and smaller than a horse. On nights when hard rain beat the mountainside high above, and filled Caverna’s vast labyrinth of tunnels with the music of ticks and trickles and drips, the intruding creature sang to itself, perhaps thinking that nobody could hear.
Grandible immediately suspected foul play. His private tunnels were protected from the rest of the underground city by dozens of locks and bars. It should have been impossible for anything to get in. However, his cheesemaker rivals were diabolical and ingenious. No doubt one of them had managed to smuggle in some malignant animal to destroy him or, worse still, his cheeses. Or perhaps this was some ploy of the notorious and mysterious Kleptomancer, who always seemed determined to steal whatever would cause the most chaos, regardless of any personal gain.
Grandible painted the cold ceiling pipes with Merring’s Peril, thinking that the unseen creature must be licking the condensation off the metal to stay alive. Every day he patrolled his tunnels expecting to find some animal curled comatose beneath the pipes with froth in its whiskers. Every day he was disappointed. He laid traps with sugared wire and scorpion barbs, but the creature was too cunning for them. Grandible knew that the beast would not last long in the tunnels, for nothing did, but the animal’s presence gnawed at his thoughts just as its teeth gnawed at his precious cheeses. He was not accustomed to the presence of another living thing, nor did he welcome it. Most of those who lived in the sunless city of Caverna had given up on the outside world, but Grandible had even given up on the rest of Caverna. Over his fifty years of life he had grown ever more reclusive, and now he barely ventured out of his private tunnels or saw a human face. The cheeses were Grandible’s only friends and family, their scents and textures taking the place of conversation. They were his children, waiting moon-faced on their shelves for him to bathe them, turn them, and tend to them.
Nonetheless, there came a day when Grandible found something that made him sigh deeply, and clear away all his traps and poisons.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 24, 1925 — Carmine Infantino. Comics artist and editor, mostly for DC Comics, during the late 1950s know as the Silver Age of Comics. He created the Silver Age version of the Flash (with writer Robert Kanigher) and the Elongated Man (with John Broome). He also introduced Barbara Gordon as a new version of Batgirl. Infantino wrote or contributed to two books about his life and career: The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino and Carmine Infantino: Penciler, Publisher, Provocateur. (Died 2013.)
Born May 24, 1953 — Alfred Molina, 70. His film debut was on Raiders of The Lost Ark as Satipo. He was an amazing Doctor Octopus on Spider-Man 2 and in Spider-Man: No Way Home, and he also provided the voice of the villain Ares on the outstanding 2009 animated Wonder Woman. Oh, and he was a most excellent Hercule Poirot in the modern day version of Murder on the Orient Express. I know, not genre, but one of my favorite films no matter who’s playing the character.
Born May 24, 1960 — Michael Chabon, 63. Author of the single best fantasy novel about baseball, Summerland which won a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. His other two genre novels, Gentlemen of the Road and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, winner of Best Novel at Denvention 3, are stellar works in themselves. He was Showrunner for the first season of Picard and was Executive Producer for the second season. He also did revisions to the script for Disney’s John Carter.
Born May 24, 1960 — Doug Jones, 63. I first saw him as Abe Sapien on Hellboy, an amazing role indeed. To pick a few of my favorite roles by him, he’s in Pan’s Labyrinth as The Faun and The Pale Man (creepy film), a clown in Batman Returns, the Lead Gentleman in the “Hush” episode of Buffy and Commander Saru on Discovery.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
Free Range demonstrates a good reason why logic is no use against childhood fears.
Dee Fish shows a Jedi in action. Or trying to be. Lise A says the lesson is, “The important thing is to face all threats without fear and to act fast.”
In a move sure to cause surprise throughout the comic book industry, Image Comics — the third largest single-issue comic book publisher in the North American market, after Marvel and DC — has announced that it has signed a worldwide exclusive distribution deal for comic store distribution with Lunar Distribution, to take effect this fall.
What does this mean for Image Comics customers?
The new deal — which specifically covers distribution to the comic store ‘direct market,’ as opposed to digital, bookstores, and other outlets — means that, for the first time in the publisher’s existence, single issues will not be carried directly by Diamond Comic Distributors, which has been Image’s exclusive distribution partner since April 1995. Instead, Lunar, which has been DC’s primary distribution partner to North American comic book stores since 2021, will take over all duties relating to the ordering and shipping of single issues and collected editions to comic stores inside the United States as well as internationally. The changeover will happen effective with Image’s September releases, which will open for retailer orders on June 14.
…The new trailer for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, premiering on Paramount+ this June 15, brings with it our first look at the big crossover event. Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome, who voice the animated characters Beckett Mariner and Brad Boimler on Star Trek: Lower Decks, will embody their characters in live-action form.
“Surprise!” Newsome’s Mariner tells a perplexed Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and Spock (Ethan Peck), alongside a noticeably purple-haired Boimler….
…When Heroes premiered on NBC in 2006, the first season was a huge hit. This was pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the idea of an exciting, sprawling superhero universe on TV was an instant draw. Season 1 focused on a group of characters, including the ostensible protagonist Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia), as they came to terms with the mysterious superpowers they had acquired and rushed to “save the cheerleader, save the world.”
Season 2 was not beloved in the way that Season 1 was. It’s not necessarily fair or accurate to say that the shortcomings of the sophomore season were all due to the 2007-2008 WGA strike — creator Tim Kring admitted that there were several problems with the season — but the fact that the strike made it so they only produced 11 out of a planned 24 episodes certainly didn’t help. The show rushed to wrap up the season early in an attempt to bring things to a conclusion rather than leave the season abruptly unfinished….
(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In this Christopher Plummer plays Vladimir Nabokov lecturing on Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”.
This is a short TV movie based on Nabokov’s lecture at Cornell upon “Metamorphosis,” Kafka’s bizarre story about a man who wakes up one morning to discover he has turned into a giant bug. This was filmed at 1989 by Peter Medak, and Christopher Plummer is portraying Vladimir Nabokov.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Hampus Eckerman, Lise Andreasen, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bonnie McDaniel.]
Christopher T. Fan (CF): In a later chapter of How to Live Safely, there’s another father-son scene, where the father is trying to impart knowledge to the young protagonist. He’s opening a pack of graph paper, peeling off the cellophane—it’s very tactile. He says, “Choose a world, any world,” as he opens up this graph paper and presents it to his son. Can you say more about that sense of optimism? How graph paper leads to a world?
Charles Yu (CY): In my dad’s office, he had these thick pads of graph paper with this very pleasing feel. They were pretty squishy because the paper was thick, and they had these very light green lines. It wasn’t perforation, it was like they were wax. You just tore a page off, and there was a sound that the pad would make as you tore off a nice sheet. I usually wouldn’t tear off the page I was working on, because you’d want the feeling of all the sheets underneath the top one. I was just playing with the idea.
No matter what else is going on, no matter if you’re an immigrant making your life in a foreign country, or if you’ve got all this work pressure and money pressure, or you’re trying to refinance the house because you’re maxed out on all your credit cards—whatever is going on in your life at that moment, you think, OK, we have math, we have a universe. I draw the X axis, I draw the Y. We’re in the Cartesian plane—here we are. To be able to go to that plane, anytime, just like that.
(2) NBA FINALISTS. The 2022 National Book Awards finalists were announced October 4 by the National Book Foundation. There are two works of genre interest. The complete list of finalists is here.
National Book Award 2022 Finalists: Translated Literature
(3) WIKI BARS THE DOOR. [Item by Paul Weimer.] Author Gwenda Bond has been denied a Wikipedia for extremely sketchy reasons. Thread starts here.
Including a NYT bestseller and IPs involving huge franchises? Leading an anti-sexual harassment pledge in kidlit effort that was covered in major media? But not worthy of a @Wikipedia entry. pic.twitter.com/U4mXFe1kxu
— Gwenda Bond ?????The Frame-Up????? out now (@Gwenda) October 6, 2022
I feel like a monster whenever some kid contacts me for a book report and can’t find basic info. Wait. I will put my own not-Wikipedia entry on my website. At some point. Donezo.
— Gwenda Bond ?????The Frame-Up????? out now (@Gwenda) October 6, 2022
(4) THE TANK HAS BEEN REFILLED! Chris Garcia just released his Drink Tank Chicon 8 / Chicago issue — The Drink Tank 441 – Chicon! It’s 84 pages of words and pictures from Alissa McKersie, Chuck Serface, and Chris Garcia, joined by Dave O’Neill, Paul Weimer, Fred Moulton, Vanessa Applegate, Juan Sanmiguel, Phoenix Data Art, Bill Rowe, Thad Gann, Ron Oakes, Steven H Silver, Espana Sheriff, DALL*E 2, Midjourney, and WOMBO Dream.
The Drink Tank’s “Crime Fiction – 1950 to 2000” issue should be out in a week or so, but there’s still time to submit for the up-coming looks at “Welcome to Nightvale” (Deadline Dec. 1) and the “Grant Morrison” issue (November 1).
… “Ahem and why are we capturing Man-at-Arms, boss?”
“So he can build machines and weapons for us, Trap Jaw. And tell me all about the secrets of Castle Grayskull and how to kill He-Man, while he’s at it.”
“Uhm, I’m pretty sure Tri-Klops won’t like that, boss. After all, he is our tech guy.”
“I don’t care what Tri-Klops thinks. If he doesn’t want to be replaced, maybe he should come up with inventions that actually work.”…
…The show, a Game of Thrones prequel, takes place 200 years before the events of the original series and focuses on the wheelings and dealings of the Targaryen dynasty. This means that while there was one recurring platinum blonde Targaryen wig on Game of Thrones, pretty much everyone on House of the Dragon gets to rock one—and, along with it, the half-ponytail. (It’s so excessive that Vulture published an entire House of the Dragon half-ponytail ranking.) By the time I saw Matt Smith stride onto screen as the bad boy prince Daemon Targaryen—complete with a fancy little half-ponytail he apparently meticulously styles in between waging wars, riding his dragon, and macking on his niece—I realized that the look was far bigger than Westeros. It’s become the go-to hairstyle to telegraph: “This guy’s in a fantasy series.”
So where did its reign start? The ur-fantasy-half-ponytail, down to the blonde dye job, seems to belong to Legolas in the early aughts Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elven prince had previously been depicted on paperback covers or in the 1978 animated Ralph Bakshi adaptation with more of a cocaine chic shag situation going on. But in the Jackson films, Orlando Bloom emerges with long silky blonde locks, tied back in a half-pony. (Where were you when, in 2001, you discovered what Bloom’s actual hair looked like?) Every prominent modern half-ponytail in fantasy—Henry Cavill in The Witcher, Daemon in House of the Dragon—owes a debt to this one.
Curious about how it originally came to be, I called up the Academy Award-winning hair designer for the Lord of theRings trilogy, Peter Swords King (yes, really). He told me that he didn’t consult any previous aesthetics when developing the hair for Legolas. “We spent weeks experimenting with different things and came up with that. Then Peter Jackson said, ‘Oh, I really like that. That looks great,’” King recalled. “Legolas had two fishtailed braids on the other side of his head and that kept it back off his face. And then there was a tiny bit at the top by the back that was pulled into a ponytail.” (“Elves cannot have messy hair,” King added. “Lots of other characters can, it’s fine. But elves can’t. It’s not elvish to be messy.”)
King also worked on Jackson’s three-part adaptation of The Hobbit and pointed out that he gave a more rugged version of the style to Luke Evans when he played Bard the Bowman. “He was going to have all his hair down at one point and I went, ‘No, no I’m going to just try it half up, half down once,’” he said. “And I did that and said, ‘That’s it. That’s perfect. We want to see that hair moving when he runs and fights, but we don’t want it in his face.’” The issue with the hair all down was that “as soon as he started fighting, even with product in it and everything, it kept getting in his face. It looked bad. He looked messy.”
(7) MIYAZAKI ON STAGE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Financial Times behind a paywall, Sarah Hemming interviews My Neighbour Totoro, based on the film by Hayao Miyazaki, written by Tom Morton-Smith and with music by Joe Hisaishi (who also did the music for the film). It is playing at the Barbican Theatre (barbican.org.uk) through January 21.
Morton-Smith “describes his task as ‘translation as well as adaptation’ He’s expanded several scenes, brought forward some characters and increased the dialogue. But he adds that, although the story doesn’t confirm to convention expectations, it does have defined sections and a narrative journey…
Finding a stage language for this delicate story has meant drawing together a high-powered international team. Hisaishi has been closely involved and his original score will be played live. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop is building the puppets, designed by Basil Twist, and Phelim McDermott, expert in improvisation and puckish invention is directing. The show is produced in collaboration with English theatre company Improbable and Japan’s Nippon TV.
(8) ALBERT COWDREY (1933-2022). Author Albert Cowdrey died August 21 at age 88. According to the family obituary, “He wrote Elixir of Life, a historical novel, Crux, a science fiction novel, and more than sixty published short stories, many in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He was the only writer to receive awards from both the American Historical Association (Herbert Feis Award, 1984) and the World Fantasy Convention (World Fantasy Award, 2002).” The WFA was for his short story “Queen for a Day”.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
1923 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Ninety-nine years ago this month in Black Mask’s October 1923 issue, Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op private detective first appeared. He’s employed as an operative of the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco office, hence his nickname. The stories are all told in the first person and his actual name is never given.
He may be the earliest hardboiled detective to appear in the pulp magazines. Note I said maybe. It’s still in matter of debate among pulp magazine historians.
He appeared in thirty-six short stories, all but two of which appeared in Black Mask. Some ofHammett’s short stories in Black Mask were intended to be the basis for his novels, so for example “Black Lives”, “Hollow Temple”, “Black Honeymoon” and “Black Riddle” would become The Dain Curse. The novels differ substantially from the stories as they were revised by an editor at Alfred A. Knopf.
There are but two novels in the series, The Dain Curse and Red Harvest. The latter was originally called The Cleansing of Poisonville and it sums up the novel damn well. Red Harvest, like The Dain Curse, started life as linked stories in Black Mask.
The Library of America’s Complete Novels includes both Red Harvest and The Dain Curse as printed by Knopf. The companion collection Crime Stories and Other Writings uses the original pulp magazine texts.
Of course there have been video adaptations.
The Dain Curse was made into a six-hour CBS television miniseries in 1978 starring James Coburn. Here The Op was named Hamilton Nash which was his creator’s name ‘spelled sideways’.
Four years later, Peter Boyle played the Continental Op in the opening of Hammett in which Hammett as played by Frederic Forrest is writing a story about the detective character.
And finally thirteen years later, Christopher Lloyd played The Continental Op in “Fly Paper” in season two, episode seven of the Fallen Angels anthology series adapted from Hammett’s short story of the same name.
Blackstone has done a most exemplary audio productions of the novels which I know are on Audible and probably everywhere else as well.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and JJ.]
Born October 5, 1905 — John Hoyt. His first genre role was in When Worlds Collide as Sydney Stanton, and the next in Attack of the Puppet People as Mr. Franz, bookending the Fifties. He starts off the Sixties in The Time Travelers as Varno. He appeared twice during the second season of The Twilight Zone in the episodes “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” and “The Lateness of the Hour”. And he had roles in many other genre series, including as the KAOS agent Conrad Bunny in the Get Smart episode “Our Man in Toyland”, and General Beeker in Voyage to theBottom of the Sea’s episode “Hail to the Chief”, and Dr. Philip Boyce in the original pilot episode of Star Trek (“The Cage”). In the Seventies he appeared in Flesh Gordon as Professor Gordon. Yes, Flesh Gordon. (Died 1991.)
Born October 5, 1919 — Donald Pleasence. He was Doctor Samuel Loomis in the Halloween franchise and the President in Escape from New York. He also had a plethora of parts in other genre properties, a few of which include the main role in the movie Fantastic Voyage which was novelized by Isaac Asimov, roles in episodes of the The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and The Ray Bradbury Theater, a part in George Lucas’ first foray into filmmaking, THX 1138, John Carpenter’s The Prince of Darkness, and the role of Merlin in the TV movie Guinivere. My favorite film title for a work he was in? Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie in which he played the dual roles of Victor Frankenstein and Old Baron Frankenstein. (Died 1995.)
Born October 5, 1949 — Peter Ackroyd, 73. His best known genre work is likely Hawksmoorwhich tells the tale of a London architect building a church and a contemporary detective investigating horrific murderers involving that church. Highly recommended. The House of Doctor Dee is genre fiction as is The Limehouse Golem and The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein. I thought Hawksmoor had been turned into a film but it has not. But he has a credit for The Limehouse Golem which is his film work.
Born October 5, 1952 — Clive Barker, 70. Horror writer, series include the Hellraiser and the Book of Art, which is not to overlook The Abarat Quintet which is quite superb. Though not recent, The Essential Clive Barker: Selected Fiction published some twenty years ago contains more than seventy excerpts from novels and plays and four full-length short stories. His Imaginer series collects his decidedly strange art. There has been a multitude of comic books, both by him and by others based on his his ideas. My personal fave work by him is the Weaveworld novel.
Born October 5, 1945 — Judith Kerman, 77. Can we call her a polymath? She’s a translator, publisher, academic, anthologist and poet. All of her poetry, collected in Uncommonplaces: Poems of the Fantastic, is well worth your time. She did two non-fiction works of which I’m recommending one, “Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, as I’ve a Jones for that literature.
Born October 5, 1959 — Rich Horton, 63. Editor of three anthology series — Fantasy: Best of The Year and Science Fiction: Best of The Year, merged into The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy in 2010. He wrote a review column for Locus for twenty years, signing off this past February. His Strange at Ecbatan blog includes reviews, criticism, and a well-received series that proposes Hugo finalists to fill in the old years when only winners were announced, or even before the award was created.
Born October 5, 1971 — Paul Weimer, 51. Writer, Reviewer, and Podcaster, also known as @PrinceJvstin. An ex-pat New Yorker living in Minnesota, he has been reading science fiction and fantasy for over 30 years and exploring the world of roleplaying games for more than 25 years. A three-time Hugo finalist for Best Fan Writer (2020-2022), he is a prolific reviewer for Nerds of a Feather. He also contributes to the Hugo-nominated fancast The Skiffy and Fanty Show and the SFF Audio podcast. He was the 2017 Down Under Fan Fund delegate to the Australia and New Zealand National Conventions, and his e-book DUFF trip report, consisting of more than 300 pages of travel stories and stunning photographs, is still available here.
Born October 5, 1975 — Kate Winslet, 47. A longer and deeper genre record than I thought starting with being Prince Sarah in A Kid in King Arthur’s Court before playing Ophelia in Branagh’s Hamlet a few years later. She shows next as Clementine Kruczynski in the superb Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and was Sylvia Llewelyn Davies in the equally superb Finding Neverland. She’s Jeanine Matthews in Divergent and Insurgent, and is slated to be Ronal in the forthcoming Avatar 2. She’s the voice of Miss Fillyjonk in the English dub of the Swedish Moominvalley series. Finally, I’d like to note she narrated the audiobook version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda.
The Sanctum Secorum is pleased to announce a special episode of Sanctum Secorum Live with guest Michael Moorcock. In honor of the forthcoming release of the newest book in the Elric saga, The Citadel of Forgotten Myths, Mr. Moorcock will be talking live about Elric, his new book, and more. Perhaps more importantly, he will also be taking questions from you, our viewers!
… When I think of Maine cuisine, I think of red hot dogs in spongy Nissen rolls, slow-baked beans (with a big chunk of pork fat thrown in), steamed fresh peas with bacon, whoopie pies, plus macaroni and cheese (often with lobster bits, if there were some left over). I think of creamed salt cod on mashed potatoes—a favorite of my toothless grandfather—and haddock baked in milk, which was the only fish my brother would eat. I hated it; to this day I can see those fishy fillets floating in boiled milk with little tendrils of butter floating around in the pan. Ugh.
As the twig is bent the bough is shaped, so they say, and my tastes have remained simple and unrefined. I like nothing better than a couple of blueberry pancakes for breakfast, floating in maple syrup. (Folks think of Vermont when they think of maple syrup, but the Maine variety is just as good.) There’s nothing like a chunk of fried fish with vinegar for lunch, and a New England boiled dinner for supper—corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots. (“You must zimmer very zlowly,” my mother liked to say.) Add some strawberry shortcake (Bisquick biscuits, please) for dessert, and you’ve got some mighty good eatin’….
… While it might seem like a no-brainer to stick with die-hard fans, the writers who were new to the “Trek” universe brought something special to the table, too:
“The original ‘Star Trek’ was made by people who had never seen ‘Star Trek’ because they were creating it. I wanted that feeling of brains that didn’t know ‘Star Trek’ as well, but were just thinking about the characters and the comedy. … [The new writers] find things that are super funny that they love, and you’re like, ‘Oh, right, that was normal to me because I’ve seen it my whole life, but that is an amazing, weird, funny thing.'”
As it turns out, McMahan’s unconventional decision paid off. The show has been a breath of fresh air, which was almost certainly the result of getting fresh eyes in the writers’ room. …
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] How It Should Have Ended took a pause this summer, but they are back with guest voice Jon Bailey (the “epic voice guy” form Honest Trailers)
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Paul Weimer, Cora Buhlert, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lis Carey.]
By Michaele Jordan: About a month ago, when I posted my first file here on File 770, I was delighted to discover that I was not alone in my fondness for Korean SF/F. (Thank you all!) I immediately started collecting material for a post about fox spirits. (I adore kitsune.) But I had barely started jotting down titles and checking the spelling of Korean actors’ names, when the Hugo ballots were announced.
Of course, everything in the world stopped, while I rushed to order books from the library and line up titles on Netflix, et alia. I particularly noted the anime titles. Several were familiar to me, but I have to admit I the Star Trek titles caught me off guard. I had never even heard of them. So, naturally, my sweetie and I curled up with some snacks, and tuned our electronic hearth to Paramount.
We started with Star Trek: Lower Decks. My first impression—and I mean immediately, like within about 3 frames—was that it looked an awful lot like Final Space. Final Space, alas, did not make it onto the Hugo ballot, although the third season aired on TBS between March and July in 2021. (I like to think it might have been a close race.) It was created by Olan Rogers who then developed it with David Sacks. Officially ShadowMachine in Los Angeles was responsible for the animation but they outsourced it to a Canadian studio, Jam-Filled, who used Toon Boon Harmony software and NASA space images.
If that sounds like more about the animation process than you really wanted to hear, my apologies. I spent an embarrassing amount of time on the research. Because, as I said above, Star Trek: Lower Decks really, really looked like it had been drawn by the same people. Except it wasn’t. The Star Trek show was animated by Titmouse. Creator Mike McMahan (who I hold in high esteem for his work on Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites) specifically wanted a look reminiscent of shows from the turn of the millennium.
Star Trek: Lower Decks main characters.
You could even say the two shows had much in common. Both featured everyman heroes, goofy guys who, despite belonging to a glamorous interstellar military, didn’t have a lot going for them, except their good intentions. Yet they always managed to rise to their occasions, because—if nothing else—they believed in the dream. Unfortunately, Final Space did it a lot better than Star Trek: Lower Decks.
It’s not that I don’t love Star Trek. I’ve been watching it since 1966. (I missed the pilot—or rather, “Mantrap,” which was the first episode aired. I started with “Charlie X.”) My very first convention, back in 1973, was not an SF con, but the International Philadelphia Star Trek Convention. (My boyfriend took me. He had a press pass from the Doylestown Courier—his first job.) But Star Trek is almost as old as I am. It now has rules, and protocols, and boundaries. It is entrenched within its own mythology. You can sit down at any new Star Trek creation, confident that you know exactly what’s going to happen. That’s not what I came to SF/F looking for. Every frame in Final Space was unexpected. But Star Trek: Lower Decks was very predictable, not to mention snarky and sophomoric,
Mind you, I’ll still watch all the new shows, episodes and movies. For instance, we went straight on from Star Trek: Lower Decks to watch Star Trek: Prodigy. My hopes were high. For starters, instead of boring you with production details, I’ll just say it was computer animated. And it is beautiful. Be it aliens or alien worlds, star ships or kitchen tools, every image is gorgeous. If you are wondering why anime fans are, well, anime fans, go look at Star Trek: Prodigy. Anime fans want their field of vision to be filled with wonder. Star Trek: Prodigy does that.
The story starts out a bit darker than I expect of Star Trek. The protagonists are not just a rag-tag band of outcasts, but desperate orphans. They escape from a hellish world/culture by stealing a star ship from their gangster boss. They don’t even know that it’s a Federation ship—they barely know what the Federation is. The only flaw in their escape is that the gangster boss’s little daughter has snuck on board, hoping to stop them.
From there on, the story is a bit more traditional. It turns out that, since this is a Federation vessel—and a prototype, at that—it is equipped, not just with a holodeck, but a whole cast of Star Fleet holograms. Foremost among these is Captain Janeway, who appears immediately and designates them as cadets. So our damaged naïfs have someone to train them, protect them from themselves, and, most of all, to care about them. Let the adventures begin!
While I was roaming around, looking for Hugo nominated anime, I stumbled upon (or rather bumped into the widely advertised) Samurai Rabbit. This is not on the Hugo ballot, for the simple reason that it is brand new. But I have high hopes of seeing it on next year’s list of nominees. It is based on the much-admired Dark Horse comic, Usagi Yojimbo, which relates the adventures of Miyamoto Usagi. (Usagi is Japanese for rabbit.) The character is a light-hearted reimagining of the great Japanese ‘sword saint’, Miyamoto Musashi, (1584-1645).
Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles,
I confess that I have never followed the comic. But I am, due to a complicated series of odd chances, in possession of the first issue. I am told it is valuable, and have never dared take it out of its plastic wrapper. So I cannot say how closely the anime follows the comic—I am told there are some significant changes. I can say that, aside from a more three-dimensional imagery, the anime looks very much like the comic.
And it is utterly delightful! The imagery—the sentient animals, the period costumes, the temples, the flying boats, the magic!—is awesome! (Although my husband complains with every episode that the fox should not have her tail growing out of the back of her head.) There is lots of action, and lots of silliness. Please, friends, give it a watch (it’s easy to find—it’s on Netflix) and consider nominating it for next year.
Michaele Jordan was born in LA, educated in New York, and lives in Cincinnati. She’s worked at a kennel, a Hebrew School and AT&T. Now she writes, supervised by a long-suffering husband and two domineering cats. She has numerous stories scattered around the web, and her novel Mirror Maze is available on Amazon. Her website, www.michaelejordan.com, is undergoing reconstruction, but just grab a hard hat, and come on in.
Update: We’ve been contacted by CBS Studios, and they’ve sent us a statement about our story:
“At Star Trek: Mission Chicago, we inadvertently displayed posters with Spock and M’Benga’s names that were incorrect. Sometimes when you work at warp speed, mistakes are made. While Spock and M’Benga do indeed have first names, they have yet to be revealed.”
Barbara Hambly, whose novel is the source of what was announced as Spock’s complete name, responded on Facebook:
Well, fooey. My 15 minutes of fame seems to have lasted about 18 hours. Evidently – so Randy Carter informs me on a comment to my post – Paramount has now walked back on that announcement and said that the poster was in error and they haven’t yet revealed Mr. Spock’s real name.
So it all remains to be seen. But it did make me smile.
But for one brief and shining moment, it was Camelot.
Meanwhile, discussion of Spock’s real name continues unabated in social media and has prompted several funny replies, like these two.
The reason they never gave Spock a first name before was because they thought it’d be confusing. His real full name is James T. Spock.
Free speech defender PEN America this week released a new report that seeks to put numbers to the current wave of book banning across the nation. The report titled Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students’ First Amendment Rights includes an Index of School Book Bans, a spreadsheet that documents “the alarming spike in censorship of books in school districts across the country over the past nine months” with 1,586 book bans and restrictions in 86 school districts across 26 states, targeting some 1,145 unique book titles.
In its report, PEN also found that the vast majority of book bans, some 98%, did not adhere to established guidelines and best practices in place for challenging materials is school and on library shelves….
The U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties marked National Library Week this week by holding a three-hour hearing April 7 to discuss the recent spike in book bans in school classrooms and libraries across the country.
While the speakers were sincere in relating their personal experiences with book banning and its impact upon them as students, teachers, librarians, parents, the proceedings at times veered into political theater, with subcommittee members springboarding from book bans to Hunter Biden’s laptop, the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and subcommittee member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)’s complaint that conservatives are victims of “cancel culture.”
After calling the meeting to order an hour late, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) provided a short history of court cases in the U.S. that addressed relevant First Amendment issues.
Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is returning for Season 13, and this time the MST3K crew are self-distributing new episodes via their own platform dubbed the Gizmoplex. New episodes premiere May 6-8, 2022.
… Returning for the next season are the Mads – Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day), loyal henchman Max (Patton Oswalt), and grandmother Pearl Forrester (Mary Jo Pehl) – as well as a few other familiar faces.
1955 — [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Again tonight, I’m reaching back into early days of the genre in broadcast terms by talking about the television premiere of Science Fiction Theatre which sixty-seven years ago started off in syndication. It would end rather quickly two years later on the sixth of April with a total of seventy-eight episodes over the course of just two seasons. The first season was in color but to save money the second was not.
It was the product of Hungarian born Iván Tors who had earlier done the Office of Scientific Investigation trilogy of SF films (The Magnetic Monster which recycled footage from a German horror film, Riders to the Storm and Gog which average twenty percent among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes). He’s also responsible for Flipper and Flipper’s New Adventure which surely are genre adjacent, aren’t they?
Hosted by Truman Bradley, a radio and television announcer and a Forties film actor, its schtick, snd I use that Yiddish word in its fullest sense, was that they were doing a quasi-documentary series that what Ifs of modern science. Now mind they were to a great extent re-using the stories that had been earlier on Dimension X, so they were recycling existing stories. Or so say several sources.
The program never aired over a network. All seventy-eight twenty-six minute episodes were syndicated across the country in package deals of thirty nine episodes each with Bradley doing custom commercials for each market. If you watched it later on PBS, you got the entire episode, but when the Sci-fi channel broadcast them they were cut by five minutes to cram in more blipverts, errr, I mean advertisements.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 9, 1913 — George F. Lowther. He was writer, producer, director in the earliest days of radio and television. He wrote scripts for both Captain Video and His Video Rangers and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. You can see “The Birth of The Galaxy” which he scripted for the first show here as it is in the public domain. (Died 1975.)
Born April 9, 1921 — Frankie Thomas. He was best remembered for his starring role in Tom Corbett, Space Cadet which ran from 1950 to 1955. He had been slated as a special guest of L.A.con IV (2006) but died before the convention. Though definitely not genre or genre adjacent, he was in the Nancy Drew film franchise that ran in the late Thirties. (Died 2006.)
Born April 9, 1935 — Avery Schreiber. He’s had a long history with genre fiction starting with Get Smart! and going from there to include More Wild Wild West!, Fantasy Island, Faerie Tale Theatre: Pinocchio, Shadow Chasers, Caveman, Galaxina, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Animainiacs in which he voiced Beanie the Brain-Dead Bisonand, of course, The Muppet Show. (Died 2002.)
Born April 9, 1937 — Marty Krofft, 85. Along with Sid, his brother, are a Canadian sibling team of television creators and puppeteers. Through Sid & Marty Krofft Pictures, they have made numerous series including the superb H.R. Pufnstuf which I still remember fondly all these years later not to forget Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Land of the Lost and Electra Woman and Dyna Girl.
Born April 9, 1949 — Stephen Hickman. Illustrator who did done over three hundred and fifty genre covers such as Manly Wade Wellman’s John the Balladeer and Nancy Springer’s Rowan Hood, Outlaw Girl of Sherwood Forest. His most widely known effort was his space fantasy postage stamps done for the U.S. Postal Service which won a Hugo for Best Original Art Work at ConAndian in 1994. (Died 2021.)
Born April 9, 1954 — Dennis Quaid, 68. I’m reasonably sure that his first genre role (but as always I stand by to be cheerfully corrected if I’m wrong) was in Dreamscape as Alex Gardner followed immediately by the superb role of Willis Davidge in Enemy Mine followed by completing a trifecta with Innerspace and the character of Lt. Tuck Pendleton. And then there’s the sweet film of Dragonheart and him as Bowen. Anyone hear of The Day After Tomorrow in which he was Jack Hall? I hadn’t a clue about it.
Born April 9, 1955 — Earl Terry Kemp. Author of The Anthem Series: A Guide to the Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Weird Specialty Publishers of the Golden Age and The Anthem Series Companion: A Companion to The Guide to the Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Weird Specialty Publishers of the Golden Age. He did publish several databases devoted to the same including The Golden Age of Pulps: SF Magazine Database: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (1890-2009). No idea what happened to those after his passing. (Died 2020.)
Born April 9, 1972 — Neve McIntosh, 50. During time of the Eleventh Doctor, She plays Alaya and Restac, two Silurian reptilian sisters who have been disturbed under the earth, one captured by humans and the other demanding vengeance. Her second appearance on Doctor Who is Madame Vastra in “A Good Man Goes to War”. Also a Silurian, she’s a Victorian crime fighter. She’s back in the 2012 Christmas special, and in the episodes “The Crimson Horror” and “The Name of the Doctor”. She’s Madame Vastra, who along with her wife, Jenny Flint, and Strax, a former Sontaran warrior, who together form an private investigator team. Big Finish gave them their own line of audio adventures which I really should listen to soon.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
xkcd turns this “Frankenstein Captcha” into a Gotcha.
(9) MAJOR LEAGUES. MLB.com noticed a fashion trend among pro ballplayers on opening day: “Xander Bogaerts wore Wolverine-inspired X-Men cleats” – see photos of the various comics and movie-inspired footwear at the link.
Xander Bogaerts, the Red Sox’s longest tenured player, has a pretty simple nickname: X-Man. When your first name starts with an X and you have enough talent to be considered a superhero, it just makes sense. So, for Opening Day against the Yankees on Friday, Bogaerts put on the most fitting cleats possible, even giving himself Wolverine-style claws.
…Bogaerts isn’t the only Red Sox player with some flashy feet, though. Christian Vazquez joined in with a pair of Toy Story cleats. He’s got one shoe for Woody and another for Buzz Lightyear. Sadly, Rex has been overlooked again.
(10) SHOW BIZ. Long before Virginia Gerstenfeld married Robert Heinlein, before she ever joined the Navy, she was part of a local Brooklyn drama troupe. If you’re curious, view this clipping from the Brooklyn Eagle’s 1939 profile of the Tophatters (located by Bill).
(11) JEOPARDY! On last night’s episode of Jeopardy!, reports Andrew Porter, a contestant may have confused Clark Kent with Philip José Farmer.
Category: What kind of place is this?
Answer: Smaller than it sounds, this Illinois place was designated “Home of Superman” in 1972
Wrong question: What is Peoria?
Right question: What is Metropolis?
(12) STINKERS. BuzzFeed lists “21 Laughably Bad Sci-Fi Films” – but you probably don’t need their help to come up with that many.
… I’ve assembled 21 of these out-of-this-world sci-fi duds with the “can’t look away” quality saved for the most laughably half-witted of the genre….
18. Solarbabies
This over-the-top post-apocalyptic film feels like a second-rate Mad Max with a group of rollerblading orphans, but has achieved newfound popularity as a long-lost “so-bad-it’s-good” gem.
The term vertical farm was popularized by Dickson Despommier, a professor emeritus of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. Vertical farming is expected to grow to $9.7 billion worldwide by 2026, from $3.1 billion in 2021, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com, a data analysis firm. Pitchbook, a financial data and software company in Seattle, tracked 33 deals worth nearly $960 million in 2021, up from $865 billion the year before and $484 million in 2019.
AppHarvest, a greenhouse grower, recently went public via a merger with Novus Capital. And in August, BrightFarms, another greenhouse operator, was acquired by Cox Enterprises in Atlanta.
Scientists caution that technology has limitations, with LED lights, sensors and operating systems adding to utility costs. “They don’t want to be warehouses, they want to be food production facilities,” Professor Giacomelli said. “And food production facilities have never had this kind of money.”
The money is creating demand for warehouse space. Kalera, a vertical farm company based in Orlando, Fla., harvests greens and culinary herbs there and in Houston and Atlanta. Farms in Denver, Seattle, Honolulu and St. Paul are opening later this year, and one in Columbus, Ohio, is planned for 2023. Farms are also open in Munich and Kuwait.
Details are hard to come by because the farms closely guard their intellectual property, growing system designs, material and structures….
(14) NOW ARRIVING AT THE I$$. In the Washington Post, Christian Davenport launched the first crew of private citizens towards the International Space Station, including three entrepreneurs who paid $55 million to secure their slots and Axiom Space vice-president Manuel Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut, as pilot. “SpaceX launches first all-private mission to International Space Station”.
… A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 11:17 a.m., carrying three wealthy entrepreneurs, each of whom paid $55 million for the mission, and a former NASA astronaut, who is serving as their guide. While private citizens have for years flown to the space station on Russian rockets, the mission — which was commissioned by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company — is the first all-private mission to the station. It also is the first time private citizens have flown to the station from American soil.
The international crew is composed of Larry Connor, the managing partner of an Ohio real estate group; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of a Canadian investment firm; Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli Air Force Fighter pilot; and Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who serves as an Axiom vice president. They are expected to reach the station Saturday at approximately 7:45 a.m. Eastern. They will spend eight days on the station before coming home in SpaceX’s autonomous Dragon spacecraft….
… Revealed at this weekend’s Star Trek Mission Chicago, the first trailer for the new season shows our quartet of screw ups get ready to hijack their ship, which is noticeably missing its outer plating now that it’s been grounded….
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Lise Andreasen, Bill, John Hertz, Larry Hansen, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Danny Sichel.]
Hello, friends and subscribers! I’m starting a newsletter, because Twitter is like drinking from a firehose, Patreon costs you money, and I rarely have the braincells to blog these days. (Plus, when all your presence is on someone else’s platform, they can delete you at any time and leave you floundering in the social void.)
I promise that if you subscribe, I will not bother you too much. Also, I have no intention of charging for this thing, although apparently “newsletter” now means “thing you charge money for” and I don’t know what to call a thing that used to be a newsletter but now isn’t? (Free newsletter? I dunno. May need to workshop that.)
Anyway, let’s give this a try and see what happens!
The theme of Issue #1 is “So I’ve Started GMing…”
…Our game hook is that all the players are interns from the Church of the Good Boy, an all-dog temple established in our previous campaign. So they are all dogs, except for the rogue, who has paperwork stating that he is a dog, despite suspiciously cat-like ears…
(2) PUBLISH LIKE A PIRATE DAY. This might be the topic of Red Wombat’s next newsletter:
Can somebody see if their live chat is currently working and if they’ve just banned me? I of course do not condone threats or abuse. Courteous disapproval should be fine, though.
(3) CSI SKILL TREE. The CSI Skill Tree series examines how video games “envision possible futures, build rich and thought-provoking worlds, and engage people as active participants in unfolding and interpreting stories.”
The next event in the CSI Skill Tree series will be on Wednesday, February 23, from 1:00-2:15 p.m. Eastern and feature Cloud Gardens, a 2020 gardening game about using plants to overgrow and transform abandoned post-industrial landscapes. The guest speakers are SFF author and translator Ken Liu and game designer Liz Fiacco, who has worked on titles including The Last of Us 2 and Pillars of Eternity. The event is virtual, free, and open to everyone. Here is the registration page.
The event is cohosted with Orion Magazine, a quarterly publication working at the convergence of ecology, art, and social justice, and attendees will receive a code for 20% off a subscription to Orion.
Join the Center for Science and the Imagination and Orion Magazine, an ad-free, quarterly print publication at the convergence of ecology, art, and social justice, for our latest event, featuring “Cloud Gardens,” a 2020 gardening game about using plants to overgrow and transform abandoned post-industrial landscapes. At once soothing and cryptic, “Cloud Gardens” uses pastel colors and calming music to raise questions about the boundaries we construct between organic and built environments, the human and the nonhuman, the sublime and the dystopian.
For “Discovery,” that means it will return for a fifth season. The show is due to resume its fourth season on Feb. 10. “Lower Decks” will now be back for a fourth season, with Season 3 of the animated comedy set to debut this summer.
“Strange New Worlds” has yet to debut its first season, which will drop on Paramount Plus on May 5.
(5) MINUTES OF THE WORLD SQUEECORE CONGRESS. Sure, you could run your own Twitter search for the latest “squeecore” tweets – but these are curated tweets. You know, like a cooking show where the chef does marvels by adding pancetta or Calabrian chiles. (People are now looking around, asking, “So why don’t I see anything Mike added?”)
CAT RAMBO
"Squeecore" seems like such a dismissive and loaded title for some really positive overall trends in SF, like diversity across a number of axes, a rejection of 'the chosen one,' and attention to interactions between people other than competition or romance.
6. Are you squeecore? 7. Are you not squeecore? 8. Why the hell did we have to bring Joss Whedon back into discourse. 8.a. is it because he is a model of squeecore. 9. Is it neoliberal? 10. Is it dominated by middle & upperclass whites?
— ???? Laura Diaz de Arce, a Writer ???? ???? (@QuetaAuthor) January 18, 2022
— Nick Buy My Book Mamatas ??????????????? (@NMamatas) January 18, 2022
DR. AMANDA DILLON
The whole 'Squeecore' thing is just a reminder that those who have been ostracised so often go on to ostracise, a pattern that SFF exhibits again and again. Just let people like what they like, for the love of words.
In all seriousness, this "anti-squeecore" thing and the bigger SF/F movement it's a part of have the same root impulse as the political conflict in the U.S. over voting rights and claims of "stolen elections":
The inability to accept other people's preferences/votes as valid.
Someone has just alerted me to the fact that there is such a thing as 'squeecore' and now I want to purge it with fire from all my social media feeds. pic.twitter.com/TCggb9vmQb
(6) FOWL BAWL. Was it a slow news week? Having nothing more pressing to do, TIME Magazine ripped Donald Duck as one of the “Top 10 Worst Awards-Show Hosts” for his work on the 1958 Oscars.
We love classic cartoons as much as the next kid disguised as a grownup, but given the star power of the glittering 1950s, Donald Duck probably didn’t need to co-host the 30th Academy Awards. Bob Hope, Jack Lemmon, David Niven, Rosalind Russell and James Stewart also ran the 1958 show. Donald appeared on film rather than, as is preferable for most hosts, in person. Still, he wasn’t completely out of his element: 15 years earlier, his short Der Fuehrer’s Face won an Oscar.
(7) CHUCK SHIMADA OBIT. LASFS member Charles Shimada passed away peacefully in his sleep on December 26, 2021, Calvin Ogawa reported on Facebook. LA-area fans remember Chuck for doing a lot of the Audio/Video technical setup for many conventions over the years – including the 1996 Worldcon I chaired.
Much earlier, at the 1975 EquiCon, Chuck let me run the projector as we showed Star Trek episodes. These were Gene Roddenberry’s personal 16mm prints. And while I was rewinding one of them, I noticed to my horror that I had not closed the reel lock — the reel was starting to do a high-frequency wobble. What would happen when it reached the end? OMG! Was it going to fly off and unspool irreplaceable film all over the fans sitting in front of the projection stand? What would happen to my hand if I grabbed the reel to stop it spinning? I found out. Nothing, fortunately; film saved; I lived to volunteer another day.
(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
1973 — [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Forty-nine years ago, The Six Million Dollar Man premiered this evening on ABC. It was based on Martin Caidin’s Cyborg. Executive Producer was Harve Bennett, who you will recognize from the Star Trek films. It was produced by Kenneth Johnson who would later do The Bionic Woman spin-off and the Alien Nation film.
Its primary cast was Lee Majors, Richard Anderson and Martin E. Brooks. Majors had a successful second series shortly after this series was cancelled, The Fall Guy, about heart-of-gold bounty hunters. The Six Million Dollar Man would run for five seasons consisting of ninety-nine episodes and five films. The Fall Guy would run five seasons as well.
Reception by media critics is generally positive. Phelim O’Neil of The Guardian says, “He was Superman, James Bond and Neil Armstrong all rolled into one, and $6M was an almost incomprehensibly large amount of money: how could anyone not watch this show?” And Rob Hunter of Film School Reviews states “The story lines run the gamut from semi-believable to outright ludicrous, but even at its most silly the show is an entertaining family friendly mix of drama, humor, action, and science fiction.”
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 18, 1882 — A.A. Milne. Talking fat bears obsessed with honey. Bouncing tigers, err, tiggers. Morose, well, what is he? It’s certainly genre. And though it isn’t remotely genre, I wholeheartedly recommend Milne’s The Red House Mystery, a Country House Mystery that’s most excellent! (Died 1956.)
Born January 18, 1932 — Robert Anton Wilson. I think I first encountered him in something Richard E. Geis wrote about him in Science Fiction Review in the Eighties. Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy is just weird and might or might not be a sequel to Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy co-authored with Robert Shea. But the absolutely weirdest thing he did might be an interview titled Robert Anton Wilson On Finnegans Wake and Joseph Campbell. (Died 2007.)
Born January 18, 1933 — John Boorman, 89. Director who’s responsible for one of the best SFF films ever done, Excalibur, and one of the worst, Zardoz. (He wrote the novel for that one as well.) (I know some Filers like Zardoz. Oh well.) He also directed the rather nifty Emerald Forest which Holdstock did a far better than merely good job of novelizing.
Born January 18, 1937 — Dick Durock. He was best known for playing Swamp Thing in Swamp Thing and The Return of Swamp Thing and the following television series which ran for three seasons. His only other genre appearances were in The Nude Bomb (also known as The Return of Maxwell Smart) and “The First” of The Incredible Hulk. He shows up in Die Hard with a Vengeance in a subway scene. No, it’s not genre, I just like that film. (Died 2009.)
Born January 18, 1953 — Pamela Dean Dyer-Bennet, 69. Her best novel is I think Tam Lin though one could make an argument for Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary which Windling calls her favorite fantasy novel. Her Secret Country trilogy is also a great deal of fun to read. Much of her short stories are set in the Liavek shared universe created by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly. All of the Liavek anthologies are now available on all major digital platforms. According to the files sitting in my Dropbox folder, there’s eight volumes to the series. They’re wonderful reading. End of plug.
Born January 18, 1955 — Kevin Costner, 67. Some of his genre films are Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Waterworld, The Postman and the recent Dragonfly, but I really like his Field of Dreams — his acting in it as Ray Kinsella is quite excellent. Not quite as superb as he was as “Crash” Davis in Bull Durham but damned good. Bull Durham is one of my go-to films when I want to feel good. He also was Jonathan Kent in both Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Born January 18, 1964 — Jane Horrocks, 58. Her first SFF genre role was Pattern in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, scripted off the Joan Aiken novel. A year later, she showed up in the most excellent The Witches, scripted off the Raoul Dahl novel playing Miss Susan Irvine. She voices Black Widow / Mrs. Plum in Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride, and voiced Hannah in the late Ninties Watership Down.
(10) IRISH COMIC NEWS AWARDS SHORTLISTS. Congratulations to James Bacon who has been nominated for the Irish Comic News’ ICN Awards 2021 in the Best Irish Writer (Non-Fiction) category for his work on File 770. (James also edits and writes for Journey Planet.) The complete list of nominees is here.
As I mentioned in a year-end roundup, James uses his descriptive abilities and camera to allow Filers to accompany him to exhibits and events in vivid and enjoyable reports.
His round table interview with N.K. Jemisin about her work on Green Lantern was great fun to read. And he constantly reviews comics from off the beaten track which deserve our attention. His work last year on File 770 was considerable —
I wish him and all other nominees the best of luck.
(11) EFFICIENCY EXPERT. I can see that Michael Carroll’s sense of humor is part of his appeal – here’s how he introduces his list of Rusty Staples’ “Most Popular Posts of 2021!”
…As I promised in last year’s look back at the previous year, I ditched my plan to post at least one entry every week: doing so freed up a lot of time that I was able to divide between idly daydreaming about winning imaginary arguments with jerks, and needlessly wallowing in unwarranted self-pity. So, time well-spent, I think….
(12) MOON KNIGHT. Disney+ dropped a trailer for their new streaming series with Oscar Isaac yesterday. The series will premiere on March 30.
Microsoft on Tuesday announced plans to acquire Activision Blizzard in a blockbuster deal worth nearly $70 billion. It’s one of the biggest acquisitions in the tech industry in recent years, one that will boost Microsoft’s standing in the growing gaming industry but could be complicated by recent concerns about Activision’s toxic culture.
The all-cash transaction is valued at $68.7 billion, and Microsoft says it will make the company the third-largest gaming company by revenue, after Tencent and Sony.
Bobby Kotick, the controversial CEO of Activision Blizzard, will continue in his role, according to a press release detailing the announced acquisition. Activision employees had previously staged walkouts and called on Kotick to step down for having allegedly been aware of widespread harassment and discrimination problems at the company for years….
(14) DOCKING MANUVER. Here we are outside 104 E. Providencia Ave in Burbank in 1964. I hope somebody explained parallel parking to Mr. Sulu later!
(15) A ROBERT PICARDO APPEARANCE. Jonathan Cowie reports that at the last Novacon they screened a short film based on a story by Chris Priest – here is a trailer for it: The Stooge.
(16) A REAL INCENTIVE. JDA truly understands the audience for his comics.
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Cath Jackel.] Here’s a BBC Reel about How to ride a pterosaur, according to science. Includes a saddle mockup inspired by How to Train Your Dragon.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Jamoche, Joey Eschrich, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
(1) ALL THAT JAZZ. Elle M. has a fascinating commentary on the difference between worldbuilding and lore. Thread starts here. A few quotes follow —
Ok because the TL is shaping up this way I think we need to talk about the difference between worldbuilding and lore because they're not the same things at all
For example: plenty of people across the world have never been to New Jersey. For some, New Jersey is as faraway & fictional-sounding as Gondor or whatever.
But if I wrote a story taking place in New Jersey, you wouldn't expect me to include a glossary of every state governor
Lore is details that, while definitely interesting, are not relevant to the story. Lore is background information that doesn't really impact the characters and their plots. Lore is the stuff ppl who only read the book or saw the movie wouldn't really know
And this is fine!! Some people really like this stuff!! And authors have a lot of fun releasing like, fake history books regarding their worlds. That's fine!! I'm in no way denigrating this, and I want to make it clear: lore is fine
They also use the author of Harry Potter as a compelling example of where lore gets injected at the expense of worldbuilding.
(2) TRENDY PLACES. Sarah Gailey’s Stone Soup blog is hosting “Building Beyond,” an “ongoing series about accessible worldbuilding. Building a world doesn’t have to be hard or scary — or even purposeful. Anyone can do it. To prove that, let’s talk to both a writer and a non-writer about a worldbuilding prompt.” For “Building Beyond: Robot Dating”, editor Brian J. White and writer Suzanne Walker imagine where they’ve gone on a date with a giant robot.
Gailey’s dry synopsis should make you very curious to read the post:
…Brian’s date is the foundation of a story about a robot who is learning to live in the world, and who just so happens to be inhabiting a city of decadences. Suzanne’s date is the beginning of a world in which robots and humans regularly go out together, and frogs have learned to cater to the complicated ecosystem of needs that arise in such relationships.
Constance Grady: I have a hard time working out exactly how I feel about volume two of this trilogy. Harrow the Ninth is a trickier book than Gideon the Ninth, in the same way that bitchy, conniving Harrow is a trickier protagonist than sweet basic jock Gideon.
First of all, there’s the problem of tone. Gideon mined enormous amounts of tension and humor out of the contrast between its lurid goth world and Gideon’s straightforward “it looks like a sword, I want to fight it” worldview and her dirty jokes. That’s part of what helps puncture the grandiosity of Muir’s worldbuilding and keep everything feeling accessible and human-scale, no matter how complicated the mythology might be.
But Harrowhark worships all the lurid skeletal nonsense around her with a religious intensity, and she considers boning jokes prurient. So the easy laughter of the first volume fades away: The jokes are meaner in Harrow than they were in Gideon, and darker….
(4) MRS. PEEL, WE’RE NEEDED. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the January 23 Financial Times, Peter Aspden writes about the 60th anniversary of British TV series The Avengers, which was first broadcast in January 1960.
The plots (of The Avengers), in the meantime, got crazier. In 1967’s ‘Epic,’ from the fifth season, Peel is kidnapped by a Teutonic film director named ZZ von Schnerk, who is filming a movie called The Destruction Of Emma Peel, for which he needs to kill her in real, or reel, life. The self-referntiality was off the scale, now. ‘Gloat all you like, but I am the star of his picture, says captive Peel to the villiainous director, and anyone interested in meta-texts.
Like so many of the fashions of the 1960s, Rigg only lasted a couple of seasons. She left to star in her own Bond Film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in which she showed that her range extended further than understated self-mockery (in fairness, she had also already played Cordelia opposite Paul Scofield’s Lear) by providing one of the franchise’s few genuinely heartbreaking endings. Peel’s farewell to Steed was itself a rare poignant moment, a peck on the cheek with a final piece of womanly advice: ‘Always keep your bowler on it times of stress. And watch out for diabolical masterminds.’
(5) SPLATTERPUNK AWARDS. [Item by Dann.] Nominations are open for the 2021 Splatterpunk Awards through February 14. Brian Keene and Wrath James White have been experiencing….ummm…difficulties in getting valid nominations. Someone nominated HP Lovecraft who, being dead, is ineligible. Also, he hasn’t published anything new in the last year. Also, also, he hasn’t published anything that is close to being Splatterpunk.
Midnight Pals over on Twitter has the theoretic exchange where Brian and Wrath try to explain how this is supposed to work. (I’m pretty sure that Dean Koontz didn’t nominate HP Lovecraft.)
Keene: uh no dean Keene: it has to be new work Keene: and it also has to be Keene: it has to be splatterpunk Koontz: yes Keene: like it says in the name Koontz: yes Keene: the name of the award Koontz: I nominate arthur machen
Keene: see the rules are: it has to be new, it has to be splatterpunk, and you can't nominate me or Wrath Koontz: ok! Koontz: i nominate Brian Keene Keene: White: Koontz: Wrath James White? Keene: White: White: he's just listing names he knows Keene: yeah i'm gathering that
The awards will be presented during a ceremony at the 2021 Killercon Convention, taking place in Austin, Texas.
In addition to the Splatterpunk Awards, author John Skipp will receive this year’s J.F. Gonzalez Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the field.
…Try as I might, I have great difficulty thinking of this novel as a science-fiction story. It could be conceived of as a psychological thriller, but no one dies except a mouse. It is deeply psychological and delves as far into the brain as anyone can get right now, accepting Freudian analysis as routine, while it is Jung’s “individuation” that the main character, Charlie Gordon, seeks without a guide except for his reading.
…I recommend this book, no matter its genre, and hope that anyone who reads it finds him- or herself touched by the plight of both those who are “exceptional” on the low end and those “exceptional” on the high end.
What will you see in it?
I see five stars.
(7) TAPPING INTO TED WHITE. Fanac.org posted a second installment of Ted White’s livestreamed interview, conducted by John D. Berry.
Ted White has been a science fiction fan for over 70 years, as well as an artist, fanzine editor and publisher, professional writer, editor and jazz critic. Interviewer John D. Berry has known Ted for more than 50 years.
In part 2 of the January 23, 2021 interview, Ted talks about how he began writing professional science fiction, and the influence of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Terry Carr, Bob Tucker and others. There are anecdotes of the New York Fanoclasts and of how the bid for the 1967 NyCon3 came about.
Ted discusses “The Club House” column in Amazing Stories, responsible for bringing many into fandom in the early 1970s, and speaks of his many fanzine collaborations, along with challenges along the way. This Zoom interview was very well received by all the attendees, who clamored for more. Look for the next part of the interview.
…Pitched as humorous, adult-orientated animated series in the Star Trek universe, the series creator is Mike McMahan, a lead writer from Rick and Morty. However, the show’s humour is both less crude and less imaginative than that show, indeed overall it pitches itself at ‘amusing’ rather than ‘funny’. The obvious comparison is with The Orville, rather than Galaxy Quest or John Scalzi’s Redshirts….
(9) IMAGINARY PAPERS. ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination has published the fifth issue of Imaginary Papers, a quarterly newsletter on science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and imagination. (Use this link to subscribe for future issues.)
Issue #5 features writing from games critic Emma Kostopolus, on the space opera game Mass Effect 3 (2012), and writer and educator Malik Toms, on John Sayles’ The Brother from Another Planet (1984), as well as a piece from me about the collection Scotland in Space (2019).
(10) MEMORY LANE.
2000 — Twenty one years ago at Chicon 2000, Galaxy Quest, a DreamWorks film, would win the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation. It would edge out The Matrix (which lost by just three votes), The Sixth Sense, Being John Malkovich and The Iron Giant. It was directed by Dean Parisot. Screenwriters David Howard and Robert Gordon worked off the story by David Howard. It’s considered by many Trekkies to the best Trek film ever made.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born January 28, 1820 – Vilhelm Pedersen. First illustrator of Hans Christian Andersen; a hundred twenty-five in the five-volume 1849 edition. Indispensable like Tenniel’s for Lewis Carroll. Here is “The Top and Ball”. Here is “The Flying Trunk”. Here is “Hyldemor”. Here is “Thumbelina”. (Died 1859) [JH]
Born January 28, 1834 – Sabine Baring-Gould. Anglican priest, author of fiction, folklorist. Grandfather of the Holmes scholar. Wrote “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (music by Sir Arthur Sullivan). This edition including Curious Myths of the Middle Ages and Were-wolves appeared recently. (Died 1924) [JH]
Born January 28, 1929 — Parke Godwin. I’ve read a number of his novels and I fondly remember in particular Sherwood and Robin and the King. If you’ve not read his excellent Firelord series, I do recommend you do so. So who has read his Beowulf series? (Died 2013.) (CE)
Born January 28, 1931 – Komatsu Sakyô. (Personal name last, Japanese style.) Leading Japanese SF author. Most famous for Japan Sinks. Two shorter stories in this collection. Author Guest of Honor at Nippon2007 the 65th Worldcon – of which, incidentally, you can see my report here (PDF). (Died 2011) [JH]
Born January 28, 1957 – Joanne Findon, Ph.D., age 64. Assistant Professor of English at Trent Univ. (Peterborough, Ontario). Two novels for us. “I blame my two lifelong passions – writing fiction and studying the past – on … Lloyd Alexander.” More here. [JH]
Born January 28, 1959 — Frank Darabont, 62. Early on, he was mostly a screenwriter for horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, The Blob and The Fly II, allminor horror films. As a director, he’s much better known as he’s done, The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist. He also developed and executive-produced the first season of The Walking Dead. He also wrote Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that I like a lot. (CE)
Born January 28, 1961 – Michael Paraskevas, age 60. Illustrator and animation producer. With his mother Betty, books and television Maggie and the Ferocious Beast, Marvin the Tap-Dancing Horse. MP encouraged BP, which I think is cool. A score of books, some with her, some not. Spaceships and many other things at MP’s Website. [JH]
Born January 28, 1981 — Elijah Wood, 40. His first genre role is as Video-Game Boy #2 in Back to the Future Part II. He next shows up as Nat Cooper in Forever Young followed by playing Leo Biederman In Deep Impact. Up next was his performance as Frodo Baggins In The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit films. Confession time: I watched the very first of these. Wasn’t impressed. He’s done some other genre work as well including playing Todd Brotzman in the Beeb’s superb production of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. (CE)
Born January 28, 1985 — Tom Hopper, 36. His principal genre role was on the BBC Merlin series as Sir Percival. He also shows up in Doctor Who playing Jeff during the “The Eleventh Hour” episode which would be during the time of the Eleventh Doctor. He’s also Luther Hargreeves in The Umbrella Academy which is an adaptation of the comic book series of the same name, created by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá. (CE)
Born January 28, 1986 – Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill, age 35. This historic champion track & field athlete has recently written half a dozen children’s fantasies with Elen Caldecott, may the name be for a good omen. Here’s the latest I know of. [JH]
Born January 28, 1998 — Ariel Winter, 23. Voice actress whose shown up in such productions as Mr. Peabody & Sherman as Penny Peterson, Horton Hears a Who!, DC Showcase: Green Arrow as Princess Perdita and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns as Carrie Kelly (Robin). She’s got several one-off live performances on genre series, The Haunting Hour: The Series and Ghost Whisperer. (CE)
(12) COMICS SECTION.
At xkcd Randall Munroe has a couple more installments on his living in a scaled world series:
The poll will be open from January 11 to February 8, after which we’ll announce the results. We’re excited for you to share which Uncanny stories made you feel!
A snazzy certificate will be given to the creator whose work comes out on top of the poll!
(14) CON CALLS ON FANS FOR HELP. “Otakon Discusses Future, Asks for Donations” reports the Anime News Network. Their 2021 event is scheduled to be held at Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. from August 6 to 8. Last year’s Otakon was cancelled.
Otakorp president Brooke Zerrlaut announced in a newsletter on Thursday that the organization is requesting donations for the first time. The Otakon convention’s staff are continuing to evaluate plans for 2021 and noted that the event may “potentially close” permanently.
The newsletter explained that Otakorp, a volunteer-run non-profit organization, runs the annual Otakon convention dedicated to Asian culture. Because of the cancelation of Otakon 2020 due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization is in a “precarious position.”
(15) A WRITER’S BEGINNING AND END. Book and Film Globe in“The Tragedy of Karl Edward Wagner” reviews a documentary about the acclaimed fantasy writer and editor.
The makers of the new Vimeo documentary, The Last Wolf: Karl Edward Wagner, have trained their lens on an elusive horror and fantasy writer with a cult following. Besides the stories of supernatural and psychological terror collected in In a Lonely Place (1983) and Why Not You and I? (1987), Wagner spun tales about Kane, a hero sometimes compared to Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, who wanders and fights his way through a fantasy realm peopled with brigands, thieves, sorcerers, monks, and shapeshifters. This body of work exceeds the better-known Conan mythos in its sexuality and violence, tropes that Wagner used with uneven results.
Wagner was also a longtime editor of the Year’s Best Horror Stories series, showcasing the work of Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, Brian Lumley, Elizabeth Hand, David J. Schow, T.E.D. Klein, Charles L. Grant, Dennis Etchison, and dozens of others in the field. A few of these scribes appear in The Last Wolf, with especially vivid remembrances coming from Campbell and Etchison. Peter Straub, who wrote a foreword to In a Lonely Place, also has a lot to say.
…The sources interviewed in The Last Wolf render a portrait of an ambitious youth who collected paperbacks, became well known to the staff of a used bookshop in Knoxville through constant visits, and liked to freak out his nephews with spooky tales as they lay in their beds by an open window. While still in high school, Wagner meets a charming young woman, Barbara Mott, on a double date. He later marries her. His career enters high gear in the 1970s as he churns out stories, but not novels, and he stays busy writing and editing through the 1980s and 1990s, almost right up to his death.
“The Fourth Seal” is about a scientist looking to cure cancer. Wagner became the victim of something comparable its destructiveness. The Last Wolf doesn’t skirt around the plunge into alcoholism that drew growing concern on the part of Wagner’s peers in the weird field and led to the end of his marriage. Some of the recollections are hard to take.
Our Author of the Month for February is the American Science Fiction writer Octavia E. Butler.
In her many sometimes interlocking works Butler asks questions about race, gender and, pre-eminently, hierarchy in startling ways, and to offer equally startling versions of possible futures, often dystopian, that are uncannily like the present. This is extraordinary writing, written against the grain of gender and race prejudice and against the grain of Butler’s own persistent writer’s block.
Start with her masterpiece Kindred. We’re next to certain you won’t stop there.
(17) A GLIMPSE OF SF HISTORY. Samuel R. Delany reminisced about Judith Merril in a Facebook post.
Judith Merrill [sic] (Boston, 21 Jan 1923—Toronto, 12 Sept 1997), was—for the last years of her life, one of my best friends in the science fiction world, and thus, like all of her friends, to me she was “Judy” and I—to her—was “Chip.” We could never quite agree about where we met. During the time I was sharing a room with my friend, Bob Aarenberg, at the St. Marks Arms, on West 113th St., in NYC, and in our upstairs neighbor Randy Garrett took me to a party in Greenwich Village, where I met her and talked with her quite a while. But a few years later, she had no memory of that meeting. But as a kid I’d read her collaborations with C. M. [K]ornbluth (the Gunner Cade books), and thoroughly enjoyed them; I’d read a handful full of her stories—”Only a Mother,” which I felt was okay, but also “Dead Center” which I felt was much stronger (and still do after several rereadings of both and others)—but the writings of hers that meant most to me was her critical work….
(18) BUT THEY DID. James Davis Nicoll remembers “Five SF Empires That Seemed Too Big to Fail”, by authors Andre Norton, Phyillis Eisenstein, John Scalzi, Walter Jon Williams, and H. Beam Piper.
…The Simultaneous Times Newsletter started when the pandemic lockdowns started. Usually I’m at my bookstore six days a week, and since we specialize in science fiction, most of my conversations center around the genre. Immediately I began to miss the conversations and my customers, so I started the newsletter as a way to stay connected with science fiction fans. Since then it has just grown. But we still give free subscriptions. I thought people would prefer to get a letter in the mail over receiving an email.
What format do you use for your site or zine (blog, e-mail newsletter, PDF zine, paper zine) and why did you choose this format?
Several members of my team, including myself, have a background in radio. When we all started talking about starting a podcast we decided that we wanted to produce the program the way that radio shows were produced in the past. Really take the radio arts approach instead of going with modern trends in podcasting. Since then we’ve even teamed up with the radio station KZZH 96.7 in Northern California, so our program did end up on the air.
The Newsletter is print because I wanted to put something physical in people’s hands, especially during this time of not being able to see each other. That being said, I have started to put the back issues on our website, so the archive is available to everyone
(20) IT’S PEOPLE! Shiv Ramdas comments on a trending topic. Thread starts here.
So Subway's tuna is apparently not tuna but it is also not fish and this is after a UK court ruled that their bread is not actually bread and I think we're going to find out soon that Subway itself is not Subway and the real Subway is tied up in a closet somewhere
(21) THE SINS OF STARSHIP TROOPERS. [Item by Dann.] The guys at Cinema Sins have “Everything Wrong With Starship Troopers in 19 Minutes or Less”. (Parenthetically, I’m not looking for the 5,681st iteration of “The book is better than the movie” or the 12,259th iteration of “Verhoeven never read the book!”. I like ’em both for different reasons. And the Cinema Sins guys are great.)
…In recent years, Amazon’s e-books market has nurtured a flourishing cottage industry of self-published romance and erotic literature –and the Trump years have inspired many to put pen to paper. The most successful authors (most write under pseudonyms) are known for their prolific publication, thesaurus-aided descriptions of the human anatomy, and responsiveness to current events.
The surreality of the past four years was particularly generative of their creative juices. With the Trump era now drawn to a chaotic close, we decided to review four of the most memorable entries in this niche literary genre.
I’m strangely drawn to the title “My Antifa Lover”, although slightly disappointed that Conroy opted to review Chuck Tingle’s Pounded In The Butt By The Handsome Physical Manifestation Of Tromp’s [sic] Twitter Ban That Should’ve Come Years Sooner But Fine Now That It’s Here High Five rather than the frankly superior Domald Tromp [sic] Pounded In The Butt By The Handsome Russian T-Rex Who Also Peed On His Butt And Then Blackmailed Him With The Videos Of His Butt Getting Peed On. No, I have no idea how the internet got us here either, really.
I feel compelled to note that the reviewer gave Tingle’s work 5/5.
(23) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In the 1780s, a charismatic healer caused a stir in Paris. An amusing video about the history of Mesmer’s methods and how he influenced medicine in the late 18th Century. Vox recalls The phony health craze that inspired hypnotism”.
Scientific progress in the 18th century in Europe, a period known as the “Age of Enlightenment,” was demystifying the universe with breakthroughs in chemistry, physics, and philosophy. But medical practices were still relying on centuries-old treatments, like leeching and bloodletting, which were painful and often ineffective. So when Franz Anton Mesmer, a charismatic physician from Vienna, began “healing” people in Paris using an alternative therapeutic practice he called “animal magnetism,” it got a lot of attention. Mesmer claimed that an invisible magnetic fluid was the life force that connected all things and that he had the power to regulate it to restore health in his patients. He was a celebrity figure until the King of France, Louis XVI, commissioned a group of leading scientists to investigate his methods in 1784. Benjamin Franklin headed the commission, and they debunked the existence of the magnetic fluid in the first-known blind experiment. Mesmer was ruined, but “mesmerism” didn’t end there. The report also acknowledged that Mesmer’s methods were making his patients feel better, which they attributed to the power of the human imagination. This experiment ultimately laid the groundwork for our understanding of the placebo effect and inspired an evolution of Mesmer’s practice into something more recognizable today: hypnotism.
[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Dann, Andrew Porter, Cora Buhlert, Cat Eldridge, Michael Toman, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Mlex, Joey Eschrich, Rob Thornton, Michael J. Walsh, PhilRM, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer, who has ridden the fourth horse once before.]
(1) SHARKE SIGHTING. Nina Allan has been doing an interesting series of posts on both Hugo nominees and Clarke Award nominees; she wrote one on all of the Hugo-nominated novellas, for example. Her most recent is on Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade. “Weird Wednesdays #9/Clarke Award #3: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley”.
…What a ride, what a charge. Kameron Hurley was last shortlisted for the Clarke Award back in 2014, for her debut novel God’s War. I enjoyed and admired God’s War, but had fallen somewhat out of touch with Hurley’s work since, so I was pleased to have the opportunity to read her latest within the context of the Clarke. What a delight it is to see a writer fulfilling her potential. What I loved most about God’s War and the short fiction from Hurley that I’d read in the interim was its densely textured language, and The Light Brigade is immediately, thrillingly identifiable as by the same hand. Time (and increasing fame) has done nothing to slow or flatten the vividness and immediacy of Hurley’s approach, nor compromise its intelligence or conceptual ambition.
… Although The Light Brigade works perfectly well as a standalone novel – you don’t need to have read any of Hurley’s other work or even any science fiction to get on board – it is important to note the many and clever ways in which it is directly in conversation with older works of SF. …
(2) SUBSCRIBE TO ASTROLABE. Aidan Moher will launch a new newsletter— Astrolabe — on Friday
Aidan Moher
Astrolabe covers all the stuff I love—from science fiction and fantasy, to retro gaming, parenting, and personal news about my work. It’s about talking my stuff and professional news, but also building a community of readers, and sharing the love by highlighting and sharing all the other great work and books I come across.
You know how sometimes people say, Oh, it’s okay. You don’t have to read the first book in this series to dive right into the second.
This is not that kind of book
You know how sometimes people say, It’s like everything you loved about the first book, only MORE.
This is not that kind of book.
Last year, Tamsyn Muir absolutely owned the lesbian-necromancers-in-space genre. She created a crumbly, dusty, deeply haunted and wonderfully goopy horror-universe with Gideon the Ninth, peopled it with creepy, sepulchral wizards, dipped it all in the reverential tones of quasi-Catholic religious fanaticism, wrote it like a science-fantasy parlor romance full of murder and then gave it to us, still warm and dripping, like a cat bringing home a particularly juicy mouse.
…I loved Gideon. Loved everything about it. It was just so much of a book — so strange, so full, so lush, so double-bats*** crazy and so unerringly cool — that I didn’t think anything could top it.
And Harrow the Ninth, second in the series, doesn’t.
Because it is not that kind of book.
Gideon was the perfect surrogate through which to experience Muir’s creation — a brash, foul-mouthed, anarchic guide who was just as wonderstruck as we were by the gory weirdness happening at every other breath, but never so serious about it that any piece of the story felt logy with funereal detail.
Harrow, though? Harrow is all black crepe and rosaries. She’s that one goth girl from high school gone full dark supernova with her sacramental face paint and unfathomable necromantic powers. A bone witch (and don’t think Muir doesn’t have some fun with that), she can construct a skeleton from a chip of tibia and have it tear your arms and legs clean off. She vacillates wildly between breathless (though exceptionally prudish) teenage passion for a corpse (that would take pages to explain), fervent prayer and drear musings on death — her own and everyone else’s. At one point, she carefully (and explosively) poisons someone with a soup made from her own bone marrow and it’s passed off like, Oh, that’s just Harry, exploding one of God’s own hit men at the dinner table, the kooky kid!
[Question] … I have been telling all my friends that Alecto the Ninth is going to be a heist novel. Can you please confirm this, and if so, also confirm that there will be many heart crimes. Thank you for writing these books, they are fantastic….
I had to go back and look to see if I’d ever mentioned that I wanted a heist in Alecto, because otherwise you are 1. psychic or 2. hiding in my drywall — there IS actually a heist in Alecto. It’s not the world’s greatest heist, and is undertaken by idiots, but there’s a heist. If you’re in my house, can you tell me if turning off the boiler at night has helped the pipes? I assume you’re between the walls.
The prospect of spoofing Star Trek represents nothing new under the (binary) sun(s). The franchise has become an institution, and mocking institutions remains a thriving American cottage industry. Saturday Night Live started taking whacks at Trek way back in the ’70s, as did MAD magazine, and the short-lived sitcom Quark. As a piece of cultural furniture, Star Trek’s ubiquity, driven by multiple television series, movies, books, games, comics and fan-fiction, means its tropes have entered the collective consciousness, and have thus become easy to recognize — and to make fun of.
Why, one could even construct an entire, very-good movie just by riffing on Trek (1999’s Galaxy Quest), as well as an entire, not-very-good television series (FOX’s mystifying The Orville).
The difference between all these previous efforts and the one represented by Star Trek: Lower Decks, premiering Thursday August 6th on CBS All Access, is a simple one:
This time, the comm signal is coming from inside the house.
True, the franchise has poked the gentlest of fun at itself, over the years — a throwaway line here, a winking reference to previous Trek series there. But Star Trek: Lower Decks is an official Trek property, its yuks are both nerdily meta and rigorously in-canon, and they go — more broadly than boldly, it must be said — where no Trek has gone before.
The premise is such stuff as comedy sketches are made on: Starships are huge, and staffed by hundreds of officers and crew members, so why does every Trek story need to revolve around the bridge, and the same 7 or so characters? Why not focus instead on the grunts doing the tedious, everyday work?
Creator/showrunner Mike McMahan made his bones on the animated series Drawn Together and Rick and Morty — shows whose darker, more cutting humorous sensibilities would seem to clash with Trek’s traditional commitment to ennobling, optimistic uplift. But that disconnect turns out to work for the new series, in most respects. For the nerds, in-jokes and easter eggs abound, testifying to the creators’ fondness for the source material, while viewers who don’t know a nacelle from a Jeffries Tube will likely appreciate the show’s sheer joke-density — and the fact that, as an animated series, it comes outfitted with an unlimited special effects budget.
That’s important, because despite its bright, broad, cartoony look, the planets of Lower Decks can appear legitimately otherworldly, instead of all looking like the Vasquez Rocks outside of Santa Clarita, California. Alien races can look alien — obviating previous series’ need to, as one wag (me) once put it, “Grab a dayplayer, slap a hunk of spirit gum between their eyebrows, paint ’em Prussian blue and shove ’em in front of the camera”.
Alan Menken composed the song “Prince Ali,” memorably sung by Robin Williams in Disney’s 1992 animated feature Aladdin, while sitting at the lyricist’s hospital bed. His friend, Howard Ashman, was dying.
“His life was pitifully cut short, unfortunately, as were many at that time,” says Menken. “But Howard’s [death], for me, is the most personally difficult and his spirit remains very, very present still; there’s something about Howard that is not just a statistic in the battle against AIDS. But as an artist, he’s extremely vital — even now.”
Howard, a documentary about Ashman and his work as an award-winning lyricist, is coming to streaming August 7 on Disney+. It also shows the friendship between Ashman and Menken, who met in New York City in the 1970s, where Ashman was the artistic director of a black box theater, the WPA, near Union Square. Menken had been working as an accompanist for singers and writing songs for Sesame Street, and they immediately gelled like Rodgers and Hammerstein. Together they wrote the musicals Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and the unlikely hit, Little Shop of Horrors — a monster mash parody of American musical comedies, which won several Drama Desk Awards and was adapted into a film in 1986 – before going on to work for Disney.
The documentary tracks Ashman’s rise from a theater-obsessed kid in Baltimore, to his musical highs and lows (including the ill-fated Broadway show Smile with composer Marvin Hamlisch), and to his untimely death. It’s told through archival photos, song demos, new interviews with family and friends and a filmed recording session from Beauty and the Beast — a Disney-lover’s treasure trove….
“In general,” writes Nevala-Lee, “Asimov chose targets who were unlikely to protest directly, such as fans and secretaries, and spared women whom he saw as professionally useful.”
I have to take exception to this. In the mid-1980s I was serving my first term as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), the first woman to hold that office, and attended the Boskone convention, as did Dr. Asimov. He showed up in the organization’s suite and I thought it proper to introduce myself, so at a suitable break in the conversation, I held out my hand for a shake and tried to say, “Dr. Asimov, I’m Marta Randall, the president of SFWA.” I didn’t make it to the second syllable of his title before he grabbed my hand, jerked me to him, and tried to stick his tongue down my throat. We were in a suite run by our professional organization, but apparently it never occurred to him that his actions might be inappropriate. Luckily a number of members who knew me pried him off of me before I tried to deck him.
We met again years later, when I was protected by carrying a baby on my back. He was perfectly cordial, but never apologized, if he even remembered the assault.
The man was a pig.
(8) VIRTUAL OXONMOOT. The UK’s Tolkien Society will hold “Oxonmoot Online” from September 18-20. Full details at the link.
…Clearly Oxonmoot Online will be a very different event from a normal Oxonmoot, but our aim is to bring you a busy and engaging weekend of Tolkien related activities. In addition, the online nature of the event offers new opportunities for international members who are normally unable to travel to Oxford to take part….
…Thanks to the actions of Ar-Pharazôn at the end of the Second Age, we find ourselves living on a round world – which means we have to deal with the complexities of time zones. To make the event as accessible as possible to as many of our members as we can, the “core” time for the keynote events and larger activities will be 18:00-22:00 UK time.
Outside these hours, we will run an engaging programme of talks, papers, activities and social gatherings – the exact timing of which will depend on the offers we get from you, our members. We intend to record talks and papers so that delegates can watch the presentations which are delivered at a time which is difficult in their time zone…
(9) THE GOAL IS MONEY. Trailer for the Korean sff movie Space Sweepers. “Are lots of trash worth a fortune?”
(10) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
August 6, 1955 — Science Fiction Theater’s “The Stones Began to Move” first aired. Starring Truman Bradley, Basil Rathbone, and Jean Willie, a discovery inside the just-opened tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh may hold a clue as to the construction of the pyramids, but a murder is committed to keep that secret from being revealed. You can watch it here,
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born August 6, 1809 – Alfred, Lord Tennyson. (His name was Alfred Tennyson; he was later made 1st Baron Tennyson.) Poet whose engagement with quest and fantasy point us to him (“To follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought” – speaking of which, don’t neglect the highly strange Frank Belknap Long story “To Follow Knowledge”, 1942). See “Ulysses”, “Tithonus”, Idylls of the King (the Matter of Arthur). (Died 1892) [JH]
Born August 6, 1874 — Charles Fort. Writer and researcher who specialized in anomalous phenomena. The term fortean is sometimes used to characterize such phenomena. No, not genre as such, but certainly an influence on many a writer. The Dover publication, The Complete Books of Charles Fort, that collects together The Book of The Damned Lo!, Wild Talents and New Lands has a foreword by Damon Knight. L. Sprague de Camp reviewed it in Astounding Science-Fiction in the August 1941 issue when it was originally published as The Books of Charles Fort. (Died 1932.) (CE)
Born August 6, 1877 — John Ulrich Giesy. He was one of the early writers in the Sword and Planet genre, with his Jason Croft series He collaborated with Junius B. Smith on many of his stories though not these which others would call them scientific romances. He wrote a large number of stories featuring the occult detective Abdul Omar aka Semi-Dual and those were written with Smith. I see iBooks has at least all of the former and one of the latter available. Kindle has just the latter. (Died 1947.) (CE)
Born August 6, 1911 — Lucille Ball. She became the first woman to run a major television studio, Desilu Productions, which is where Star Trek was produced. Her support of the series kept it from being terminated by the financial backers even after it went way over budget in the first pilot. (Died 1989.) (CE)
Born August 6, 1917 – Barbara Cooney. Author and illustrator of a hundred children’s books, some fantastic. Two Caldecott Medals. National Book Award. Here is a picture that might simply be entitled “Fantasy”. Here is a cover for Snow White and Rose Red. Here is Where Have You Been?Here is “The Owl and the Pussycat” (note the runcible spoon). (Died 2000) [JH]
Born August 6, 1955 – Judith Bemis, 65. Co-chair (with husband Tony Parker), Tropicon 8-9. Fan Guest of Honor (with Parker), Concave 16. Treasurer of MagiCon (50th Worldcon), Noreascon 4 (62nd). Active getting fanzines into FANAC.org database. [JH]
Born August 6, 1955 –Eva Whitley, 65. Chaired Paracon 1, Disclaves 26 & 34. Widow of Jack Chalker; says ”Possibly the only person in fandom to meet spouse by making him GoH (Paracon 1)”. Fan Guest of Honor at Balticon 17 (with Chalker) & 21, Norwescon XXII (with Chalker). Active in WSFA (Washington [D.C.] SF Ass’n) and BSFS (Baltimore SF Ass’n). [JH]
Born August 6, 1962 — Michelle Yeoh, 58. Ok, I have to give her full name of Yang Berbahagia Tan Sri Dato’ Seri Michelle Yeoh Choo-Kheng. Wow. Her first meaningful genre roles were as Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies and Yu Shu Lien in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I actually remember her as Zi Yuan in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the first film of a since cancelled franchise. And then there’s her dual roles in the Trek universe where she’s Captain Philippa Georgiou and Emperor Philippa Georgiou. The forthcoming Section 31 series will involve one of them but I’m not sure which one… (CE)
Born August 6, 1969 – Álvaro Enrigue, 51. Novel Sudden Death for us, Herralde Prize. Six novels, three collections of shorter stories and one of essays. Mortiz Prize. Carlos Fuentes said E’s novel Perpendicular Lives “belongs to Max Planck’s quantum universe rather than the relativistic universe of Albert Einstein, a world of co-existing fields … whose particles are created or destroyed in the same act.” Translated into Chinese, Czech, French, German. [JH]
Born August 6, 1972 – Paolo Bacigalupi, 48. Six novels, a score of shorter stories, translated into French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Romanian, Spanish. Interviewed in Electric Velocipede, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Interzone, Lightspeed, Locus, NY Review of SF, SF Research Ass’n Review. First novel The Windup Girl won Hugo, Nebula, Campbell (as it then was) Memorial, Compton Crook, Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, Ignotus, Laßwitz, Prix Planète, Seiun; also a Printz, a Sturgeon, another Seiun. Toastmaster at MileHiCon 42; Guest of Honor at ArmadilloCon 33, Capclave 2014. Williamson Lectureship, 2014. [CE and I found two different dates for his birthday; since he’s done and won much, we decided to let both notes stand – JH]
(13) US IN FLUX. The latest story from the Center for Science and the Imagination’s Us in Flux project is “Tomorrow Is Another Daze,” a story of Aztlán, creative reuse, and making technology work for you by Ernest Hogan (an Arizona-based writer, often called the father of Chicanx science fiction).
Lalo was in the middle of making Huevos Rancheros Microöndas when the doorbell rattled. The microwave buzzed less than a second after. Yet another quarantine for yet another virus was going on, so he wasn’t eager to answer the door. For all he knew it could be a terminal case, long past the early stages that are said to be similar to what they used to call future shock: the disorientation and hallucinations, the convulsions, foaming at the mouth, about to drop dead on his porch under the decorations his wife insisted on putting up, requiring the services of a hazmat team….
On Monday, August 10 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern, they will have another virtual event on Zoom, with Ernest and scholar, author, and editor Frederick Luis Aldama. Register at the link.
(14) EAR TO THE GROUND. Michelle Nijhuis, in “Buzz Buzz Buzz” at New York Review of Books, discusses four recent works about human responsibilities towards animals.
…The scholarly emphasis on negative rights, along with the work of animal-rights and animal-welfare activists, has arguably improved the treatment of domesticated animals in North America and Europe. Public opposition to animal cruelty is now widespread, and recent laws and policies have banned animal blood sports. The insights of advocates such as Temple Grandin have helped us imagine how other species experience the world, and begin to curb some of the most brutal factory-farming practices.
None of these advances, however, has changed our fundamental relationship with animals—which is hardly sustainable, ethically or otherwise. In Slime, when one of the translators finally succeeds in communicating with a bump-nosed parrotfish from the Pacific Ocean, the message is stark, delivered in dramatic terms: “Youare helping Slime to kill us You You You Land Monsters!!! Why? Stop? Why? Change your swimming!Change your swimming!Change your swimming!!!!” Were Slime written today, it might include a line from a pangolin or a bat, warning that our heedless exploitation of animals carries deadly risks for all.
… That animals are in this sense political actors is an underrecognized and, to my mind, potentially powerful point of convergence between the animal-rights and ecological-protection movements: both traditions hold that animals have needs and wants that humans are more than capable of understanding, and should attend to.
(15) BE CAREFUL OUT THERE AMONG THEM ENGLISH. James Davis Nicoll was pleased to get some egoboo from the letters to the editors in the August 4 Sydney Morning Herald:
Hold the phonics
Each of your “o’s”, Kevin Harris, represents different sounds because of the consonants in each word that have individual phonetic sounds; always have and always will (Letters, August 5). Otherwise, we’d all be speaking French, where half the letters aren’t ever pronounced. John Kingsmill, Fairlight
Thirty years ago, one James Nicoll observed that “English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary”. With that has come disparate rules of pronunciation, to the annoyance of Kevin Harris’ five-year-old and countless others. For English, basic phonics works for about 40 per cent of words, enough to make it a useful tool. For the rest, plenty of guided reading will make up most of the deficit. Richard Murnane, Hornsby
Hollywood bosses have been censoring films to placate the film market in China, a report has suggested.
The lengthy report says US film companies want to avoid losing access to China’s lucrative box office market.
It said casting, content, dialogue and plotlines were increasingly being tailored to appease censors in Beijing.
The report, compiled by the free speech charity PEN America, claimed China was therefore influencing movies released in cinemas around the world.
China holds the world’s second largest box office market behind the US.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, American films earned $2.6bn (£2bn) in China last year, with Disney’s Avengers finale, Endgame, making $614m (£466m).
PEN is a non-profit organisation that campaigns on free speech and it sponsors the Pinter Prize for literature.
The report said that Marvel’s 2016 superhero film Dr Strange whitewashed a major Tibetan character for fear of jeopardising the title’s chances of success in China.
The forthcoming Top Gun sequel, Maverick, was also criticised for the “mysterious disappearance of the Taiwanese flag” in a 2019 trailer.
“Our biggest concern is that Hollywood is increasingly normalising pre-emptive self-censorship in anticipation of what the Beijing censor is looking for,” said James Tager, author of the report.
Scientists found that attaching small weights to pigeons causes them to shoot up in the social hierarchy. The finding is important because scientists often attach trackers to pigeons.
STACEY VANEK SMITH, HOST:
It turns out there is a social hierarchy among pigeons, and it definitely pays to be the big bird on campus.
STEVE PORTUGAL: Being top of the dominance hierarchy basically gives you preferential access to everything. It means you get priority access to food, priority access to mates.
SHAPIRO: That’s Steve Portugal, a zoologist and biologist at Royal Holloway, University of London. And contrary to what you may have heard about the early bird getting the worm, in the case of pigeons, it is heavier birds that get all the perks.
VANEK SMITH: So Portugal and his colleagues wondered what would happen if you made lighter pigeons feel heavier. If you beefed them up, would they punch above their weight?
SHAPIRO: They tested their theory in a captive flock of homing pigeons. They identified the birds in the bottom half of the hierarchy and loaded them up with tiny weights – little bird backpacks, actually.
PORTUGAL: And sure enough, when I did that, they became much more aggressive, started much more fights and won many more fights as well.
A number of Star Trekactors lent their voices to the animated series Gargoyles. The showfollowed the adventures of gargoyles, nocturnal creatures who turned into stone during the day. After being transported from their home in Scotland to New York City, the clan were awoken from their 1000-year-long magical slumber and took on the responsibility of protecting the city. The children’s series originally ran from 1994 until 1997, but has been finding new audiences thanks to Disney+.
… Like Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis was a main character on both Star Trek: TNG as well as Gargoyles. Sirtis played Deanna Troi, the empathetic, chocolate-loving counsellor onboard the USS-Enterprise. Troi is half-Betazoid, which grants her empath abilities — which often came in handy in dealings with other alien races. Also like Frakes, Sirtis played a villainous role on Gargoyles:her character Demona despised humans, and is possibly the most dangerous of all remaining gargoyles. She aligned herself with David Xanatos, and was largely responsible for him resurrecting the Wyvern clan, whom she had hoped would join her on her quest for vengeance.
(19) BEEB TRIVIA. Nicholas Whyte told the SMOFs list where they could see this Hugo-related feat:
The UK quiz show University Challenge had three questions about the Hugo Awards for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form last night, all correctly answered by the team from Strathclyde University – which, as it happens, is in Glasgow.
[Thanks to PhilRM, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Cat Eldridge, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Peer Sylvester, Martin Morse Wooster, Joey Eschrich, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day, verified, blue check Andrew.]
