Pixel Scroll 3/8/24 The Pixels Are All Tucked In Their Scrolls For The Night

(1) THERE WILL BE NO 2023 HUGO LONGLIST ANTHOLOGY. David Steffen says, “With all of the complications of this year’s nomination list, Diabolical Plots has decided not to produce a new volume of the Long List Anthology this year.”

Instead, Hal Y. Zhang, with assistance from Chelle Parker and David Steffen, have produced a set of reading recommendations, “The 2023 Hugo Award Nomination List (With Links!)”.

We do still want to help boost readership for the amazing authors involved, however, so in lieu of the anthology, we have done our best to compile the most comprehensive list of links to the works from this year’s Short Story and Novelette categories that we could.

(2) MORE MURDERBOT ACTORS. “’Murderbot’ Casts Sabrina Wu, Tattiawna Jones, Akshay Khanna & Tamara Podemski”Deadline has the story.

The Apple TV+ series Murderbot is rounding out its leading cast with Sabrina Wu (Joy Ride), Tattiawna Jones (Orphan Black: Echoes), Akshay Khanna (Polite Society) and Tamara Podemski (Outer Range). The quad will star opposite Alexander Skarsgård, who also executive produces.

Based on Martha Wells’ bestselling Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning book series The Murderbot Diaries, the 10-episode series Murderbot centers on a self-hacking security android who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable “clients.” Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe….

(3) SANDERSON SETS BACKERKIT RECORD. Publishers Weekly is there as “Brandon Sanderson Raises $16 Million, Breaking Records Again”.

Brandon Sanderson, the bestselling author known for his epic fantasy novels, has already raised more than $16 million on crowdfunding platform BackerKit since launching it earlier this week.

The campaign is to fund a leatherbound edition of Words of Radiance, the second book in Sanderson’s fantasy series, The Stormlight Archive. The leatherbound edition will feature premium materials and illustrations, as well as a new “secret project,” Sanderson has teased. Add-ons include an audiobook, which Sanderson says will also be available on Audible, suggesting he has come to an agreement with the audiobook giant . (Sanderson had been in negotiation with the company for better terms for authors).

Sanderson’s BackerKit campaign, which has 55,000 backers and runs through March 30, is the most successful fundraising effort on the platform thus far. This follows Sanderson’s previous record-breaking Kickstarter campaign in March 2022, which raised $41.7 million from 185,341 backers, setting a new record for the most funded Kickstarter in the platform’s history. That campaign supported the release of four books.

(4) CHANGE AT KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel have updated the readers for their March 13 event. Christopher Rowe has suffered a death in the family. Therefore, Richard Butner will take his place, joining Moses Ose Utomi.

(5) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to nosh pastrami with Glenn Hauman in Episode 220 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

When I realized Glenn Hauman, with whom I’ve been crossing paths for decades on the con circuit, was going to be a guest at Farpoint, I thought it was about time I captured some of his wit and wisdom for you. Here’s just a small taste of what Glenn’s been up to over the years —

Glenn Hauman.

He’s an electronic publishing pioneer who founded BiblioBytes in 1993, which resulted in him being dubbed a “young Turk of publishing” in The New York Observer. He was an editorial consultant to Simon & Schuster Interactive for many years, during which time he contributed to many Star Trek CD-ROMs, such as the Star Trek Encyclopedia, the Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, and the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, plus additional projects for many other properties. He’s published fiction in the Star TrekX-Men, and Farscape franchises.

The particular piece of fiction which has probably brought him the most fame is Star Trek: Starfleet Corps of Engineers: Creative Couplings, co-authored with Aaron Rosenberg, which featured the first Klingon/Jewish wedding ceremony, and ended up getting him mass media coverage from outlets such as NPR and the Jewish weekly newspaper The Forward. In 2011, Glen teamed up with Peter David, previous guest of the podcast Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, and Aaron Rosenberg to launch an electronic publishing endeavor called Crazy 8 Press. He’s also a columnist over at ComicMix.

We discussed how he shook things up during the earliest days of electronic publishing, the embarrassing high school newspaper writings of Ted Chiang, the way the assembly-line nature of comics keeps many creatives from seeing the big picture, why he’s nobody’s first choice for anything but everybody’s second choice for everything, his pre-teen encounters with another pre-teen fan who became a Marvel Comics Executive Editor, the philosophical question he asked actor Michael O’Hare just before Babylon 5 began to air, the lunch that led to his first published short story being about the X-Men, what visiting Don Heck’s house at age 12 taught him about artists and taking an art class from John Buscema at age 13 taught him about himself, the plot of the Warren Worthington novel he never got a chance to write, the free speech lawsuit which had him going head to head with the Dr. Seuss estate, plus much more.

(6) GIBSON READING. Space Cowboy Books will host an “Online Reading and Interview with Adrian M. Gibson” on Tuesday, March 12, 2024 at 6:00 p.m. Register for free with Eventbrite at the link.

BLADE RUNNER, TRUE DETECTIVE and HANNIBAL meld with the weird worlds of JEFF VANDERMEER in Adrian M. Gibson’s fungalpunk noir debut novel.

TWO YEARS AFTER a devastating defeat in the decade-long Spore War, the island nation of Hōppon and its capital city of Neo Kinoko are occupied by invading Coprinian forces. Its Fungal citizens are in dire straits, wracked by food shortages, poverty and an influx of war refugees. Even worse, the corrupt occupiers exploit their power, pushing the native populace toward the brink of civil unrest.

As a winter storm looms over the metropolis, NKPD Detective Henrietta Hofmann begrudgingly partners up with mushroom-headed patrol officer Koji Nameko to investigate the mysterious murders of Fungal and half-breed children. Their investigation drags them deep into the seedy underbelly of a war-torn city, one brimming with colonizers, criminal gangs, racial division and moral decay.

In order to solve the case and unravel the truth, Hofmann must challenge her past and embrace Fungal ways. What she and Nameko uncover in the midst of this frigid wasteland will chill them to the core, but will they make it through the storm alive?

(7) THOMAS SADLER (1946-2023). Alexiad editor Joseph T. Major shared recently-learned news of the death last year of Thomas Sadler, longtime editor of the fanzine The Reluctant Famulus.

Thomas “Tom” David Sadler, age 76, of Owenton, KY, passed away on Wednesday, February 1, 2023, at his home. Tom was born on March 3, 1946, in Piedmont, AL, the son of Thomas and Elizabeth (Tanner) Sadler. On October 8, 1966, he married Ruth Underhill, and she survives. He had been employed with the City of Adrian before moving to Kentucky. Tom was a published author, and enjoyed reading, writing, and gardening.

Sadler is survived by his wife, Ruth, their children, and grandchildren.

(8) AKIRA TORIYAMA (1955-2024). Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama died March 1. The New York Times tribute says a statement by his manga and design production company, Bird Studio, and Capsule Corporation Tokyo, attributed his death to acute subdural hematoma, when blood collects between the skull and brain. It did not specify where he died.

The Dragon Ball comic series debuted in 1984. It follows a boy named Son Goku in his quest to collect magical dragon balls to defend Earth against alien humanoids called Saiyans.

 … Mr. Toriyama’s absurd concepts and sense of caricature “sparked a real joyful hysteria” in Japan, Matthieu Pinon and Laurent Lefebvre wrote in their 2023 book, “A History of Modern Manga.”

In 1982, Mr. Toriyama married a former manga artist who published under the pen name Nachi Mikami, Mainichi Shimbun reported. Besides his wife, he is survived by his children, according to the local news media.

When “Dragon Ball” was first published in 1984, it was an immediate hit, becoming one of the best-selling manga series of all time. The adventure story sold more than 260 million copies worldwide, according to the studio that produced the anime adaptation, Toei Animation.

The manga was serialized in the Japanese magazine Weekly Shonen Jump until 1995. In the year after the series ended, the magazine lost about one million of its six million readers, according to “A History of Modern Manga.” The story lived on through anime, such as “Dragon Ball Z,” and video games, including the “Dragon Quest” series for which Mr. Toriyama designed the characters….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 8, 1921 Alan Hale Jr. (Died 1990.) Let’s talk about Alan Hale Jr. — son of Alan Hale Sr. who played Little John in the Robin Hood a century ago with Douglas Fairbanks and Wallace Beery, reprised the role in The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone, then played him once more in The Rogues of Sherwood Forest. We agreed that Robin Hood is genre, didn’t we? 

Alan Hale Jr.

Now we come to Alan Hale Jr.’s Captain Jonas Grumby as he was referred to only in the Gilligan’s Island pilot, better known as The Skipper, which we’ve also agreed is genre. He’s owner and captain of the S.S. Minnow which ends up in the genre based lost island setting with its passengers and sole crew member.

Counting the pilot, it ran for ninety-nine episodes over three seasons sixty years ago. There would later be three television sequels in the late Seventies and early Eighties in color. I don’t remember any of them, do any of you remember them? 

There are two Filmation-produced animated sequel series which I’ve mercifully never seen. They were The New Adventures of Gilligan and Gilligan’s Planet, both short lived. Yes, he voiced his character.

Other genre appearances included Fantasy IslandMy Favorite MartinThe Wild Wild West and ALF for television series, whereas films were The Giant Spider Invasion,  The Fifth Musketeer, and well, and I didn’t see anything else but if I missed anything I’m sure I’ll hear about it. 

(10) RINGO AWARDS 2024 NOMINATIONS NOW OPEN. The Mike Wieringo Comic Book Industry Awards return for their sixth year on Saturday, September 21, 2024 as part of The Baltimore Comic-Con. Access the Ringo Awards 2024 Nominations ballot at the link.

Unlike other professional industry awards, the Ringo Awards include fan participation in the nomination process along with an esteemed jury of comics professionals. 

More than 20 categories will be celebrated with top honors being given at the awards ceremony in September.

Fan and pro-jury voting are tallied independently, and the combined nomination ballot is compiled by the Ringo Awards Committee. The top two fan choices become nominees, and the jury’s selections fill the remaining three slots for five total nominees per category. Ties may result in more than five nominees in a single category. Nominees will be listed on the ballot alphabetically. Nomination ballot voting is open to the public (fans and pros) between March 8, 2024 and May 23, 2024.

New in 2024, we have changed two categories based on juror, publisher, and voter submissions: The “Best Inker” category has been combined with the “Best Artist or Penciller” category to form a combined “Best Artist or Penciller/Inker Team” category. This update reflects the changing way comics are being created, with more artists working digitally and going directly to inks. When a nominated Penciller/Inker Team wins the final ballot, both individuals will receive separate awards.

Final Ballot Voting

After processing by the Ringo Awards Committee and Jury, the Final Ballots are targeted to be available to comic creative professionals for voting on July 24, 2024 and will be due by August 21, 2024 for final tallying. Presentation of the winners will occur at the Baltimore Comic-Con on the evening of Saturday, September 21, 2024.

(11) STRANGER IN NEW YORK. “’Stranger Things’ Play: Broadway Opening Eyed With New York Casting”Variety has the story.

Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” the prequel play to the popular Netflix series, looks to be headed to the Great White Way after debuting in London.

Broadway World was the first to report that equity casting notices were posted on Thursday seeking New York City-based actors and stage managers for the show with a 2025 start date. There is no venue specified yet for the show. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Stephen Daldry is listed as the director of the New York City production.

Stranger Things: The First Shadow” was written by Kate Trefry, from an original story by the Duffer Brothers, Jack Thorne and Trefry. The play debuted at the Phoenix Theatre on the West End on Nov. 17, 2023 in previews, with an official opening date of Dec. 14, 2023. Daldry also directed the West End version….

(12) MOST-WATCHED OSCAR WINNING FILMS. JustWatch has published a new report covering the most popular Best Picture winners. JustWatch wanted to see if tastes have shifted to more modern titles, or if the classics have had a lasting impact on audiences. They ranked all of the Best Picture winners since the first Oscars ceremony in 1929. 

Key Insights: Modern titles like “Everything Everywhere all at Once” and “Parasite” ranked highest in our study. Meanwhile, classic titles like “Titanic” and “Forrest Gump” managed to break into the top 10. The genres of the top 10 varied between thrillers, dramas, and even one romance.  

We created this report by comparing the Best Picture Oscars winners from 1929-2023. JustWatch Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity, including: clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as ‘seen’. This data is collected from >40 million movie & TV show fans per month. It is updated daily for 140 countries and 4,500 streaming services.

(13) SUCCESSFUL NETFLIX SFF LAUNCHES? JustWatch has also assessed how well three of Netflix’ anime live action remakes did right out of the gate.

Netflix has seen a lot of success with this format, and as their latest production, Avatar: The Last Airbender, is probably their most anticipated release to date, we wanted to see how it stacked up against previous attempts. 

Developments relevant to this report include Netflix’s release of Avatar: The Last Airbender and One Piece’s second season announcement in September 2023.

Key Insights:

  • Death Note topped the charts in almost 3x more countries than One Piece, and 10x more than Avatar: The Last Airbender 
  • Avatar has an above average rating, but by far the least ‘successful’ launch
  • One Piece had a lower popularity score, but the highest rating out of all three titles

(14) FLOOD WARNING US. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] My reportage of the coastal flood risk to US homes yesterday was a bit dry as I jumped straight to the research paper. This is what comes of speed scanning the electronic version of the journal.  When I got home and saw the paper edition, I found its cover story was that very research and it came with a far more readable descriptor…

The cover shows homes under threat from rising sea levels in Summer Haven, Florida. In this week’s issue, Leonard Ohenhen and colleagues suggest that a considerable amount of land in 32 US coastal cities could be at risk of flooding by 2050. Combining models of changes in land elevation with projected rises in sea levels, the researchers estimated the flooding risk in the cites, including Boston, New Orleans and San Francisco. They note that a combination of coastal subsidence and rising sea levels could put an additional 1,006–1,389 km2 of land at risk of flooding by 2050, which could affect up to 171,000 properties. As a result, they call for improvements to flood defences and subsidence control to bolster current coastal protection.

The original research is here.

(15) TWO, COUNT ‘EM, TWO! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] “TWO Earth-like planets found in the HABITABLE ZONE (just 6% bigger than Earth!)”. This news has been covered elsewhere, but Dr Becky (Smethurst)   — the Oxford U. based astrophysicist — is rather good. Her YouTube channel has just shy of three-quarter of a million subscribers and — thanks to YouTube income has just moved house…

The holy grail of exoplanets research is to find an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone around its star (where it’s not too hot and not too cold for life to exist) and then study its atmosphere with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to determine if life is present there. But to do that, we have to find these planets first. This is where the TESS mission comes in; this month a research paper was published claiming to have found TWO possible Earth-like planets in the habitable zone. The hope is that we can use JWST to study at least one of them.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. From the Late Show, “Is ‘Dune’ A Perfect Movie? Neil deGrasse Tyson And Stephen Colbert Agree To Disagree”. The Hollywood Reporter tells some of the things they disagree about in “Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Colbert on Dune 2 Sandworms Accuracy”. Because Neil is like your fannish friend who knows why the movie you love is impossible!

…Tyson explained that the film takes place in the sand dunes on the planet of Arrakis. The dunes are home to massive, very hungry sandworms that will appear wherever a thumper — a device that sends repeated vibrations through the sand — is placed.

“Somebody didn’t do the research on that,” he stated. When Colbert asked if that’s because that’s not how sandworms — which are fictional creatures — actually behave, Tyson said, “I’m saying you can’t thump sand.”

He noted that if someone hits sand repeatedly, it’s not audible because it’s sand. “You can’t hear it, but a sandworm can. They hear things differently than we do, Neil Tyson,” Colbert retorted, jokingly. “If you wanted to insulate yourself acoustically from your surroundings, fill the volume with sand,” the astrophysicist responded. “No one will hear you. I’ve got to let it go because there’s no movie without it.”…

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Robin Anne Reid, Ryan H., Joseph T. Major, 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 Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 3/7/24 Files Scroll In Where Pixels Fear To Thread

(1) WILL THE DOCTOR APPROVE WHEN BBC MARKETING DEPARTMENT USES AI TO PROMOTE DOCTOR WHO? [Item by Ersatz Culture.] The BBC media centre published an article by the “Head of Media Inventory: Digital” earlier today, about their plans to use AI to promote Doctor Who.  It leads:

Experimentation is at the heart of how we approach marketing at the BBC. Testing and learning on how we let audiences know what BBC content is most relevant to them and we know they might love underpins our digital marketing strategy. However, experimentation in marketing typically requires more time spent on the creative work to make extra assets. Generative AI offers a great opportunity to speed up making the extra assets to get more experiments live for more content that we are trying to promote.

We’re going to take it one step a time, starting simple and learning as we go. We have chosen to start with Doctor Who, as it is a joint content priority for both BBC Public Service UK and BBC Studios marketing teams. There’s a rich variety of content in the Whoniverse collection on iPlayer to test and learn with, and Doctor Who thematically lends itself to AI which is a bonus.

We will be creating human-written marketing copy for a Doctor Who push notification, email subject line and in the promotional rail on BBC Search – then we will be using generative AI to suggest copy variations which are then reviewed and approved by our marketing team before being shown to the audience. Their success will be measured by click- rates, open-rates, and post-impression conversion-rates across each channel.

The article also provides details about how the BBC proposes to have human oversight and review of this process.

One fan pointed out that the 1979 story “City of Death” had already depicted the Doctor’s attitude towards computer-generated content.

(2) CHILDREN’S BOOK AUTHORS SIGN OPEN LETTER ABOUT GAZA. Publishers Weekly reports on an open letter to the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators signed by children’s book creators in “SCBWI Addresses the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza”.

… Hundreds of children’s and YA creators including Jason Reynolds, Elizabeth Acevedo, Brendan Kiely, Sabaa Tahir, and Maggie Tokuda-Hall added their names to the petition, which features an illustration—“We Feel Your Silence”—by Egyptian-born picture book artist Hatem Aly….

The full text of the open letter is at the link. The letter begins:

Dear Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators,

Our community of kids’ book creators and readers is calling out for solidarity and transparency.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is the deadliest for children in modern history. UNICEF, among other leading human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, recognized that “there is no safe place for children in Gaza” and that this is a war against children.

As the preeminent global community for children’s book creators whose mission is to, in part, “establish a more imaginative and inclusive world through the power of children’s literature,” many active, past, and prospective members of the community are struggling to feel a sense of inclusion and belonging when SCBWI remains silent.

Currently, over a million children are being actively starved while the Israeli government refuses to permit aid into the Gaza strip. Children are being carpet bombed and sniper-attacked in the Israeli government designated safe zone, Rafah, with nowhere to escape. Thousands of children have been orphaned, wounded, undergone surgeries and amputations without anesthesia, and disabled. Palestinian libraries, schools, universities, and publishing houses have been decimated….

Some signers from the sff community whose names jumped out at me are: Alaya Dawn Johnson, Alex Brown, Alyssa Wong, B. Sharise Moore, Daniel José Older, Jacqueline Woodson, Natalie C. Parker, Olivia A. Cole, Raina Telgemeier, and Tochi Onyebuchi.

SCBWI’s Executive Director has responded with a message on Instagram:

According to Publishers Weekly —

…Responses were mixed, and executive director Sarah Baker engaged with several commenters directly. Various community members thanked SCBWI “for supporting the voices of all authors and illustrators… while acknowledging this horrendous war and humanitarian crisis.” Others called the letter “performative” and “disappointing,” some said they would not renew subscriptions, and one called the approach “genocidal apologism.” SCBWI has more than 22,000 members around the world….

(3) URSA MAJOR AWARDS DITCH MUSIC CATEGORY. The Ursa Major Awards for anthropomorphic literature and arts announced March 6 they have dropped the Music Category.

No further explanation was given. Commenters seem to believe the decision was in response to a specific instance of ballot stuffing, or a finalist’s use of AI to create art.

(4) JACK WILLIAMSON LECTURESHIP. David Sweeten has circulated the schedule for the 47th Annual Jack Williamson Lectureship, being held at Eastern New Mexico University from April 11-13 in Portales, NM. The guest of honor is Martha Wells, with emcee Connie Willis.

Below is a brief rundown of the events as they stand, but some items are still in development. Generally, the main events of the Lectureship will take place on Friday, but please let me know if you can make the dinner on Thursday. Also, Connie’s workshop on Saturday is always a delight.

  • Thursday, April 11th: 
    • 3 pm: a forensic talk from Cordelia Willis.
    • 5-7 pm: Opening event in the Greyhound Lounge (CUB basement) with activities run by ENMU student organizations (including the History Guild doing a presentation on Jack Williamson, the Clayhounds [ENMU ceramics club] bringing scifi themed pottery and paint-and-takes, and more)
    • 7-9 pm: Lectureship participant dinner for authors, the committee, and academic presenters (please email me if attending so I can update the catering)
  • Friday, April 12th: 
    • 8:30 am: Academic Panel (CUB, Zia room)
    • 10 am: Guest of Honor Reading from Martha Wells (CUB, Zia room)
    • 12 pm: Keynote lunch with remarks from Connie Willis, keynote address from Martha Wells, and scifi/fantasy trivia 
    • 1:30 pm: Tour of Special Collections, including Jack’s Office and the Science Fiction Special Collection (GSSC, Special Collections)
    • 1:30 pm: Board Game Session (GSSC, Presentation Area)
    • 3-6:30 pm: Author Panels (JWLA)
    • 7 pm: Dinner at Asplunds’ house, Potluck
  • Saturday, April 13th: 
    • 8:30 am: Academic Panel (JWLA)
    • 10 am: Connie’s Writing Workshop (JWLA)

(5) TERRY CARR ON THE DILLONS. In January we reported the sale of Leo and Diane Dillon’s original art for the cover of The Left Hand of Darkness (see Pixel Scroll 1/27/24 item #2). Le Guin’s book was part of the Ace Specials series edited by Terry Carr.

Yesterday I happened upon an article Carr wrote for the fanzine Focal Point in 1971 (see page 6) right after he had to “fire” them because he was told their covers weren’t helping to sell the books. Though he reassured everyone:

…Don’t weep for Leo and Diane. They’re among the most sought-after artists in the book field, and they make a lot more money from the work they do for Time-Life Books or Fawcett Premier than we could ever pay them at Ace. When you visit them and look in on their studio you find incredibly beautiful sketches and partially finished paintings there. ’’That one was due last Tuesday,” says Diane, ’’and we were supposed to have twenty-five double-page spreads done for a history of Hawaii last month.” For the Dillons, the SF Specials were an extra job every month that they didn’t need and which they did for less money than they could get anywhere else. They did them out of friendship and love for the freedom to paint what they wanted….

Carr’s Focal Point column continues with several pages of detailed commentary on the covers they painted for the Ace series.

Ironically, just two issues later, Focal Point reported that Terry Carr himself had been let go by Ace.  However, they said Carr would continue editing the Ace Specials, working from home. The last Ace Special in the first series was released in August 1971. Carr would go on to enjoy a highly honored career as a freelance editor. And, in fact, in the Eighties he came back to Ace and edited a second series of Ace Specials.

(6) HOLY CATS, BATMAN! “Lego unveils 4,200-piece set celebrating 85 years of Batman: See the $300 creation” at Yahoo!

Fans of Lego and “Batman: The Animated Series” will have a chance to own a piece of history as Warner Bros. Discovery and DC celebrate 85 years of the Caped Crusader with a new brick set.

Lego Group on Thursday unveiled the Batman Gotham City Skyline set, an “amazing recreation of Gotham City as it appears in ‘Batman: The Animated Series.'”

The Lego press release adds:

…The 4,210 piece set is a Batman fan’s dream as every tower and building meticulously recreates iconic locations from Warner Bros. Animation’s “Batman: The Animated Series” including the Gotham City Court, Arkham Asylum, the classic Batwing and Bat Signal. The set is also full of Easter eggs and beloved characters including Catwoman, The Joker, Harley Quinn and Batman himself. In addition, parts of the set open up to reveal more intricacies inside.

The perfect set for DC fans, the Gotham City Skyline set is a stunning display piece which can be wall-mounted or placed on a shelf….

(7) GOTHAM AFTER DARK. Get an R-rated look at Gotham when The Gotham Follies of 1939: A Dark Night Parody come to Los Angeles on June 1. Tickets go on sale March 13; waitlist at the link.

Experience the allure of Prohibition-era Gotham City in The Gotham Follies of 1939—a captivating parody blending vaudeville, burlesque, cabaret, and contemporary entertainment from the creator of The Empire Strips Back. Step into a world where the Dark Night’s universe comes alive on stage, promising an unforgettable night of laughter, danger, and pure escapism at The Montalbán this summer.

Read the FAQS, ma’am.

(8) NOTES ON A CAREER. In this video from Variety, “Star Wars & Harry Potter Composer John Williams Reveals How He Came Up With Cinemas Biggest Scores”.

Musical genius, John Williams, takes us through his incredible career and shares how the soundtracks for some of the biggest movie franchises such as Star Wars, Harry Potter and Jurassic Park were brought to life.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 7, 1944 Stanley Schmidt, 80. This Scroll I come to speak of an editor that I really like, Stanley Schmidt. Starting in 1978, his longest tenure as an editor was at Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine for an extraordinary thirty-four years. I’m reasonably sure that he was nominated a record twenty-nine times before winning a Best Editor, Short Form at LoneStarCon. That Award came just before his retirement from Analog, nice timing indeed.

But let’s go back in time now. 

Stanley Schmidt accepts the Solstice Award. Photo by Kathi Overton.

He started out as a writer with his first short story being “A Flash of Darkness” being published in Analog in September of 1968.  Likewise his first novel, The Sins of the Fathers, serialized in Analog from November 1973 to January 1974. So one could, well I will, say that his editing of Analog was well rooted in his own history with it. 

Now where was I? Oh there. The Sins of The Fathers is an amazing work and would’ve made a stellar series but Schmidt was not, shall I say a prolific writer with just three novels and I count thirty-two short stories, so that didn’t happen. However the Lifeboat Earth collection of nine stories does continue what was started here, so do get it and read them if you enjoyed this novel.

He edited a lot, and I do mean a lot, of Analog anthologies taken from the material he edited in those years he was there. I can’t say which you should read as they’re all likely to have excellent reading in them, aren’t they?  

He only edited four other anthologies of which I’ve only read one, having a decided jones for alternate history of all sorts: Roads Not Taken: Tales of Alternate History, co-edited with Gardner Dozois. Turtledove, Silverberg and Resnick, to name but a few, have stories here… Great stories all of course.

Before I take your leave, I should note that he had the honor of winning the Robert A. Heinlein Award which is given for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space.

(10) THE FEDERATION RETURNS. Camestros Felapton declares “I finally watched Star Trek Discovery Season 4” and delivers a season overview.

…Yes, it is nice that this crew gets to have a season in which they are actually part of a Star Fleet that is not trying to kill them (or is barely functioning) and eventually story elements fall into place that pull things together both thematically and as a genuinely interesting science-fiction story….

(11) FREE GAME. “Indie developer says Warner Bros is “retiring” his game from official platforms, so he’s giving it away for free instead” reports GameRadar+. Download it for free at Fire Face – Games.

Owen Deery, an indie developer behind the puzzle game Small Radios Big Televisions, has stated that Warner Bros. will soon be “retiring” the game from digital storefronts. In response, Deery is giving away the PC version for free to everyone. 

Small Radios Big Televisions released back in 2016 on Steam and PS4, published by the Warner Bros. subsidiary Adult Swim Games. The puzzler has you collect cassette tapes found in abandoned factories and explore the virtual worlds within them. However, Deery says it will soon be unable to buy, and that it will be removed from storefronts “within the next few weeks.”…

(12) MEET THE EMPEROR. Vanity Fair learns why at age 80 “Christopher Walken Still Rules: On ‘Dune: Part Two,’ ‘Star Wars’ and True Power”.

Truly intimidating power, Walken says, doesn’t have to announce itself. That’s his explanation for why the long-ruling emperor doesn’t feel obliged to dazzle with his appearance. “There is something about getting older that you’re sort of not inclined to get out of your pajamas,” he tells Vanity Fair. “He maybe doesn’t take a shower as often as he should. There’s a little bit of ‘the hell with it’ at a certain point.”…

…None of that will help a humble earthling get into the mindset of a galactic overlord. “I can tell you that it’s probably better not to think about it,” Walken says. “When I was young, I had to play a king in something. I was in a Shakespeare play. It was Henry II. And an older actor said to me, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He said, ‘If the director sets it up so that people treat you like the king, you don’t have to do much.’ And I sort of trusted that to happen.”

The show of power and wealth is all around Shaddam IV, so Villeneuve and Walken believed it didn’t have to be piled on top of him as well. “The emperor’s got the trappings, he’s got the court, he’s got the costume, he’s got the bodyguards. And so I figured I’d just let them call me the emperor,” Walken says.

This withholding approach to the intimidating power broker is actually foreshadowed in another iconic Walken performance, in which he delivered an intimidating speech about a lion who reigns as “king of the jungle,” but tolerates the other animals nipping at him, taking food from his domain, and encroaching on his territory—“until one day…that lion gets up and tears the shit out of everybody.”…

(13) ARMORER GUILTY IN RUST VERDICT. AP News reports in Santa Fe, NM, “’Rust’ armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed convicted of involuntary manslaughter”.

A jury convicted a movie weapons supervisor of involuntary manslaughter Wednesday in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer by actor Alec Baldwin during a rehearsal on the set of the Western movie “Rust.”

The verdict against movie armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed assigned new blame in the October 2021 shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins after an assistant director last year pleaded no contest to negligent handling of a firearm.

Gutierrez-Reed also had faced a second charge of tampering with evidence, stemming from accusations that she handed a small bag of possible narcotics to another crew member after the shooting to avoid detection. She was found not guilty on that count.

Immediately after the verdict was read in court, the judge ordered the 26-year-old armorer placed into the custody of deputies. Lead attorney Jason Bowles said afterward that Gutierrez-Reed will appeal the conviction, which carries a penalty of up to 18 months in prison and a $5,000 fine.

(14) USE THE CHURCH KEY, LUKE. Stephen Colbert rounded up some more examples of old Cristal beer product placements inserted in Star Wars films for the opening minutes of his Late Show monologue.

(15) PITCH MEETING. It’s an old movie but apparently a new Pitch Meeting – “Ghostbusters (1984)”.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “The hate monologue” from the I have no mouth and I must scream animation.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Kathy Sullivan, N., Ersatz Culture, Dann, Danny Sichel, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn, with an assist from Braxis.]

Pixel Scroll 1/23/24 Tribbles, Like Pixels, Only Cuter

(1) TAKING THE CURSE OFF ADVERBS. Philip Athans is here to liberate us: “Adverbs Are Fine!” declares Athans at the Fantasy Author’s Handbook.

…Everyone tells you adverbs are bad, bad, terrible words! In On Writing Stephen King wrote that famous line:

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

I even found a web site that said you can only use one adverb per 300 words, which is just bizarre. That’s not even a little bit a thing. This came from one of those goofy “writing” apps that count the number of adverbs in your manuscript so you can feel bad about yourself in a new and pointless way based on a software engineer’s lack of understanding of creative writing. Or, anyway, maybe not totally embarrass yourself in work emails….

Adverbs are fine!

Why say that to ourselves? Because it’s true. Adverbs are a perfectly acceptable, even necessary part of speech and blindly deleting them from a manuscript because an app told you to is the sign of an amateur. Learning how to use them properly is the sign of a writer.

You might be surprised by Athans’ choice of novel from which to draw his example texts:

…I pulled out some examples from Perry Rhodan #19: Mutants vs. Mutants by Clark Darlton, translated by Wendayne Ackerman and published by Ace Books in 1972… 

However, they’re pertinent to his interesting discussion. And in the end he reminds writers:

…Adverbs are words and as authors we get to use all the words. We even get to make some up from time to time. And there’s nothing special about adverbs. Use them—just like you use adjectives, nouns, and verbs—with care and thought and in service to your characters and the story they’re sharing with your readers.

The same discussion is also available as a YouTube presentation.

(2) CAN YOU HEAR ME MAJOR TOM? “Tin can alley: the return of the Sad Man in Space”, a Nicholas Barber column in the Guardian.


The Sad Man in Space is back! He was last seen orbiting our cinemas five years ago, when the average big-screen astronaut was less inclined to explore strange new worlds or fight bug-eyed monsters than to sit in a tin can feeling sorry for himself. Ryan Gosling was grief-stricken in First Man, Brad Pitt had issues in Ad Astra, Robert Pattinson was in low spirits in High Life, and Matthew McConaughey sobbed his eyes out in Interstellar, to name just four of the men who were lost in space in more ways than one. Floated around in zero gravity, but weighed down by their woes, they were so common that critics coined the terms “Sad Man in Space”, “Sad Dad in Space”, and “Sadstronauts” to describe them, while various articles traced the sub-genre back to Tarkovsky’s Solaris via Duncan Jones’s Moon. Being thousands of miles from home, separated from every other living being by cold, dark emptiness … this, film-makers realised, was a handy metaphor for being a bloke.

Now another Sadstronaut is on the launchpad. Earlier this week, Netflix debuted the first trailer for Spaceman, a science-fiction drama that premieres at the Berlin film festival in February. Adapted from Jaroslav Kalfar’s novel, Spaceman Of Bohemia, it stars Adam Sandler as Jakub, the titular astronaut – and you know it’s one of Sandler’s serious outings, because he’s got a beard….

…Where has the Sad Man in Space been since Gosling, Pitt and co were doing their intergalactic brooding? The answer, I’d argue, is that he fell to Earth, and now he’s everywhere. Countless major films in the last 12 months have revolved around masculinity in crisis: men without purpose, men perplexed by relationships, and men being generally depressed about being men. This has been the year of the Sad Man in Cinema….

(3) DIAMOND DAGGERS. The Crime Writers Association (CWA) of the United Kingdom will honor two writers this year: “Lynda La Plante and James Lee Burke share Diamond Dagger lifetime award” in the Guardian.

Lynda La Plante and James Lee Burke are the joint recipients of this year’s award, which is administered by the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) and recognises sustained excellence in the genre.

“By an extraordinary quirk of fate, due to our new voting process, this year’s Diamond Dagger is, for the first time in seven decades, being awarded to two authors,” said Maxim Jakubowski, chair of the CWA Daggers’ committee. “If the Booker prize can do it, so can we!”

La Plante is best known for writing the Prime Suspect and Widows television and novel series. Her other series include Lorraine Page, Anna Travis and Trial And Retribution. In 2008, she received a CBE for services to literature, drama and charity. Her memoir is expected to be released later this year.

…James Lee Burke’s series about detective Dave Robicheaux spans more than 20 novels. Burke said he was “honoured and humbled” to receive his award. “It is also an honour to have my name among the best mystery and crime writers in the world,” he added….

(4) GLORIOUS EDITION OF LONG WAY. Becky Chambers announced The Folio Society’s limited edition of her book The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet will be available beginning January 25.

…Yes indeed, that’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, complete with full-color artwork from award-winning illustrator Zoë van Dijk. Each copy is signed by both me and her, and there’s a new introduction written by yours truly. It’s got a folding box and cloth binding and lemon-gold foil and all other manner of fancy materials besides, but…the artwork. The artwork knocked me off my feet. I spent years living in that spaceship inside my head. What a wild thing, to see someone evoke it so perfectly….

(5) HEAR YE. Episode 53 of Phil Nichols’ Bradbury 100 podcast is about “Ray’s Fanzine, Futuria Fantasia. Listen to it at the link.

…The first issue of Futuria Fantasia, published when Ray was eighteen years old, catches him just before he heads off to New York for the first-ever World Science Fiction Convention. In that first issue, he is very much focused on “Technocracy”, a movement which promised to turn science fiction into political reality. The issue includes an essay on Technocracy by Bruce Yerke, followed by an early piece of Ray Bradbury science fiction: “Don’t Get Technatal”, a satirical look at how boring it will be to live in a utopia!

“Don’t Get Technatal” was Ray’s third piece of published fiction, although he hid behind the pseudonym of Ron Reynolds. I read it in full in the podcast, along with Ray’s other contributions to FuFa No. 1. (I also read selections from the writings of the other contributors.)

If you want to read the whole magazine, it’s freely available, since the copyright on FuFa expired decades ago. The best place to find it – and the other three issues that Ray published – is via the links at science fiction history site FANAC.

So, come with me now to the world of 1939, where fans of “scientifiction” enthusiastically support the bright future offered by the Technocracy movement, perhaps oblivious to the impending likelihood of world war…

Or to quote Ray: “But, Mr. Smith, how do you explain that gyro-statistic-electromagnetiosonomonator on the radiostuntomotor?”

(6) IT’S A TWISTER AUNTIE EM! Stephen Colbert opens the CBS vault to discover a lost segment from The Twilight Zone, where legendary host Rod Serling shares twist endings that were filmed but never aired. The Late Show Presents: “The Twilight Zone: Just The Twists”.

(7) GARY GRAHAM (1950-2024). Actor Gary Graham died January 23 at the age of 73. The Deadline tribute details his genre roles.

…Graham began making appearances on episodic TV in the mid-1970s, including one-off roles in Eight Is Enough, Starsky and Hutch, Police Woman and The Incredible Hulk.

His signature role came in 1989, when he was cast in the starring role of Detective Matthew Sikes in the television series Alien Nation. The series lasted only one season, but Graham would reprise the role in TV movies Alien Nation: Dark Horizon (1994), Alien Nation: Body and Soul (1995), Alien Nation: Millennium (1996), Alien Nation: The Enemy Within (1996), and Alien Nation: The Udara Legacy (1997).

Graham became part of the Star Trek universe in 2001 when he was cast in Star Trek: Enterprise in the recurring role of Vulcan Ambassador Soval (Graham had appeared as a different character in a 1995 episode of Star Trek: Voyager). He appeared as a character named Ragnar in the 2007 video Star Trek: Of Gods and Men, and reprised that role in the series Star Trek: Renegades….

(8) DAVID EMGE (1946-2024). He had only one hit role, but it made David Emge unforgettable: “David Emge Dead: Zombie Pilot In Horror Classic Dawn Of The Dead Was 77” reports Deadline.

…[George] Romero cast Emge as helicopter pilot Stephen “Flyboy” Andrews, an accident-prone but well-meaning news pilot who escapes the undead apocalypse to find safety with a few other survivors in a suburban shopping mall.

Emge’s character manages to avoid a zombie fate for much of the movie, but eventually falls victim.

A photo of Emge’s dead-eyed, blood-spattered Zombie Stephen would become the most famous image from the film, used in promotional material and capturing the lasting attention of generations of horror fans, among them a young Simon Pegg, future star of the 2004 horror-comedy Shaun of the Dead.

“I would stare at the image of David Emge’s zombified flyboy character,” Pegg wrote in his 2011 memoir Nerd Do Well. “The film became something of an obsession for me.”

Emge appeared in only two films after Dawn of the Dead – 1990’s Basket Case 2 and 1992’s Hellmaster – but years later he’d become a favorite at horror conventions for his role as Stephen….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 23, 1950 Richard Dean Anderson, 74. I’ve liked Richard Dean Anderson from the very first time I saw him playing Lt. Simon Adams in the one-season Emerald Point N.A.S., which befitted him more than his first acting job playing Dr. Jack Webber on the General Hospital daytime soap opera, as this was a military soap opera of the first degree.

Going from the short-lived and uniformed Emerald Point N.A.S. role, he got arguably the most interesting acting role of his career of his performing career, the lead in MacGyver. Was it genre? I think so. I enjoyed it immensely.

Richard Dean Anderson in 1985.

It had a very lean regular cast with Dana Elcar as Peter Thornton, MacGyver’s immediate supervisor at the Phoenix Foundation, and Bruce McGill as Jack Dalton, MacGyver’s best friend, the whole supporting cast. There were a few other performers that showed on up a recurring basis plus a legion of background characters.

Remember Heinlein’s “Specialization is for insects” quote from Time Enough for Love? Well MacGyver comes as close in his problem solving to that as any individual could. And with a sense of humor to boot. Something I sometimes suspect Heinlein characters of lacking.

It lasted seven seasons comprising 139 plus two films. The seventh was short as it was cancelled but as Anderson noted in a later interview, “The only reason it went off the air was that everybody was ready to move on. I was physically exhausted and had no life.”

As it’s streaming on Paramount+, I know what I’ll be watching soon! 

So having survived, and by his own admission mostly enjoyed, a long running series, what came next for him? Well you take a half decade off before getting involved in a series that was even a lot longer lasting than MacGyver turned out to be! 

Oops, my bad. I almost forgot about the series he did in between the two most important, that being Legend, all twelve episodes. Yes, you heard me. Twelve. He played Ernest Pratt, a hard-drinking writer who created Nicodemus Legend, the main character in pulp novels. The only other ongoing character was a Tesla ripoff by the name of Janos Bartok played by John de Lancie. Think SF western and you’ve got it. It was fun, it had absolutely no audience and it was cancelled apparently before it aired. Oh well.

So now for his longest running series. I loved Stargate, I really did. So when I heard a series was being made from the film I was definitely intrigued. And I was pleasantly surprised how well Stargate SG-1 worked. Stargate wasn’t really a developed reality, Stargate SG-1 was. So comparing the Jack O’ Neil character that he plays there to the character played Kurt Russell once and done makes no sense, really it doesn’t.

It was a great role that Anderson was allowed to develop I assume as an Executive Producer of the series. So how the long did it last? An amazing ten seasons, 214 plus two films. And he shows up elsewhere in the Stargate Universe unsurprisingly. 

So two-long running roles, 357 between them. Quite impressive I would say. 

He retired from acting a decade ago.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) TELL FRIENDS YOU STOLE THEM FROM YOUR SCHOOL DINING HALL. A vendor on Amazon offers “Harry Potter Hogwarts House Logos 16-Piece Ceramic Dinnerware Set”. Take your choice of any of the four Houses:

Magical Mealtime: Entertain your guests with this gorgeous 16-piece Harry Potter Dinnerware Set. Featuring themed designs inspired by the Wizarding World, the fine detailing and gold edging make this a must-have dish set.

Elegant Styling: Each dinnerware place setting depicts a unique Hogwarts House: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. The Sorting Hat’s poem is also featured on the plates and bowls, tying all the pieces together in a cohesive style.

(12) CLOSING TIME. “Pioneering nuclear-fusion reactor shuts down: what scientists will learn” in Nature.

Scientists have begun to decommission one of the world’s foremost nuclear-fusion reactors, 40 years after it began operations. Researchers will study the 17-year process of dismantling the Joint European Torus (JET) near Oxford, UK, in unprecedented detail — and use the knowledge to make sure future fusion power plants are safe and financially viable….

…The thorniest part of decommissioning the JET site will be dealing with its radioactive components. The process of fusion does not leave waste that is radioactive for millennia, unlike nuclear fission, which powers today’s nuclear reactors. But JET is among the tiny number of experiments worldwide that have used significant amounts of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Tritium, which will be used as a fuel in future fusion plants including ITER, has a half-life of 12.3 years, and its radiation, alongside the high-energy particles released during fusion, can leave components radioactive for decades.

Decommissioning a fusion experiment doesn’t have to mean “bulldozing everything within sight into rubble and not letting anyone near the site for ages”, says Anne White, a plasma physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Instead, engineers’ priorities will be to reuse and recycle parts. This will include removing tritium where possible, says Buckingham. This reduces radioactivity and allows tritium to be reused as fuel. “The sustainable recycling of this scarce resource makes economic sense,” he says…

(13) YOU’RE FROM THE SIXTIES. Is that a robot duking it out with a Dalek in this 1967 video? Sure, but that’s not the big secret of Robot Boy. Beware spoilers. Yes, even a 90-second video can have spoilers.

Several shots show a home-made ‘Robot Boy’ and a Dalek in a suburban back garden. The maker, Victor Sherlock, sits with some young boys on the back doorstep; one of the boys is sitting inside a model spaceship. The robot is apparently worked by remote control; Victor sits with a remote control box that he seems to be speaking into. The robot walks towards a lawnmower, then Victor makes some adjustments to the robot’s head. He then lifts the head off to reveal that his son, Peter, is inside the robot suit.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Avatar: The Last Airbender live action series arrives February 22 on Netflix.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/11/24 Scroll, Pixel, Scroll, Upon Your Mystery Ship

(1) BITTER KARELLA (“MIDNIGHT PALS”) Q&A. The Horror Writers Association blog continues its “Nuts & Bolts” series in an “Interview With Bitter Karella, Creator of The Midnight Pals”.

The Midnight Pals microfiction series started as a simple but inspired running gag on Twitter. Storytellers gather around a campfire a la Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark?, except they’re real-life horror authors past and present — Stephen King, Clive Barker, Mary Shelley, etc.

Its author, Bitter Karella, has managed to find surprising depths in that premise, delivered almost entirely in dialogue. Midnight Pals features complex, interweaving storylines, recurring characters, and trenchant social commentary, all while remaining consistently hilarious….

Q: Humor aside, it’s impressive how Midnight Pals manages to convey entire narrative arcs using little but snippets of dialogue. Do you have any pointers on story-telling?

A: One of the most powerful parts of storytelling is leaving things unsaid. A well-timed pause or a deflection can say so much —  about what a character is thinking, their emotional state, what they want to say but can’t for some reason, what inner demons they refuse to confront, what blind spots they’re not even aware of. These are the moments that really let the reader ponder what’s going on in a character’s brain and I think letting the reader try and figure out for themselves what is going on gives the whole affair a bigger impact than if the writer just spells everything out for them. Because we live in a social media world where we’re all understandably nervous about getting yelled at online, I think many writers today feel uncomfortable with the idea that a reader might misunderstand them and they feel compelled to answer every question before it’s asked. I struggle a lot with that as well … when I write a punchline, I want to write it so that there’s no ambiguity about what’s happening, so that everyone can get it. But sometimes the phrasing that hits best is also going to be the phrasing most ripe for misinterpretation or sometimes it’s just funnier (or more interesting) to leave something out. You just have to trust your reader to connect the dots for themselves, sometimes!

(2) AUTHOR BIO ADVICE. Nicola Griffith makes recommendations: “Author Bios: Saying the quiet part out loud”.

…Nobody really talks about about Author Bios. Consequently, when I was first asked to write one (in the late 80s, for Interzone, or maybe Iron Women) I hadn’t a clue where to begin. If I’d thought about them at all I probably assumed somebody else wrote them. After all, as my English, trained-to-not-blow-my-own-horn inner voice reminded me, If you have to tell people you’re important/interesting, you’re not. Looking back, I’m glad I was clueless about this kind of self-promotion. I might never have begun this writing thing if I’d had any idea how much being a working novelist depends on blasting out your own brassy fanfares all the time, about everything: not just social media but essays, interviews, panels, readings, think pieces, puff pieces, listicles, blog posts, podcasts… It’s a very large part of the job. And all those things rest on the bio—usually between 500 and 1,000 words for your own website (the Inside Bio), and anything from 25 to 200 words elsewhere (the Outside Bio)1

(3) LEARNEDLEAGUE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Two SFF-related themed quizzes were featured this week on LearnedLeague. Here’s a link to “Spaceballs: The One-Day Special!” and here’s one to “The Sandman“.

I’ve actually never seen Spaceballs, so I didn’t take that quiz. Sandman, by contrast, I’ve been reading since 1988. I got 12/12 right on that one fairly easily (I did need the embedded hints in one question) but wasn’t in the winners’ circle because the scoring involves guessing what questions will be the hardest, and I failed at that. My old friend Tom Galloway got a perfect score, though.

(4) SHADE TREK. “Star Trek Series Erased From Existence By Sci-Fi Show, Is It Revenge?” asks Giant Freakin Robot.

Star Trek definitely exists in the universe of Ronald D. Moore’s Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, but does every show from the franchise exist? A recent episode has fans speculating that Moore is purposefully suggesting that Star Trek: Voyager wasn’t made in the For All Mankind universe.

If true, it seems like Moore would be throwing some slight shade toward screenwriter Brannon Braga, whom Moore had a falling out with, causing him to leave Voyager.

For All Mankind takes place in an alternate reality where there is a global space race, and one of the interesting aspects of the show is seeing the slight differences in the timelines from our reality. The Star Trek: Voyager theory popped up when a Reddit user pointed out that the character Danielle (Krys Marshall), the first African-American woman in space, sent a message to her stepson Isaiah about the birth of his daughter.

In the scene, Danielle says, “I know you hate Star Trek, but you better get used to it, because I’m gonna make sure my grandbaby is a full-blown Trekkie,” adding, “That’s right, we’re gonna watch all the series, all three of them.”

While that statement may seem innocuous enough, the scene takes place in 2003, when there were six series in the franchise, including The Original SeriesThe Animated SeriesThe Next GenerationDeep Space NineVoyager, and Enterprise….

(5) SCRIPT OF THE UNMADE DUNE SEQUEL. Max Evry tells Ars Technica “I found David Lynch’s lost Dune II script”. That the 1984 Dune movie was low-earning and brutally reviewed is part of the reason it was lost.

… During the two years I spent putting together my book A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune—An Oral History, I had no luck uncovering Lynch’s script for Dune II, despite Frank Herbert telling Prevue magazine in December 1984 that he possessed a copy and was advising Lynch on it. “Now that we speak the same ‘language,’ it’s much easier for both of us to make progress, especially with the screenplays,” Herbert told the publication. Then, in July 2023, within the Frank Herbert archives at California State University, Fullerton, I came across a slim folder with a sticky note declaring “Dune Messiah script revisions,” addressed to the second floor of VFX man Barry Nolan’s office in Burbank where Lynch supervised the final effects shoots and editing on Dune….

… Of the many differences between Dune Messiah in novel form and David Lynch’s script, the biggest lay in the opening pages, which detail what happens in the aftermath of the scene in the first Dune movie when the Harkonnens bombed the Atreides’ fortress in Arrakeen, the capitol of the desert planet Arrakis. In the hallway where Duncan Idaho (Richard Jordan) was shot in the head, his shielded dead body still floats on the floor, humming and sparking.

From out of the shadows emerges a familiar face: the Baron’s Doctor (Leonardo Cimino). Thought to be the only speaking part created specifically for Dune by Lynch, we learn this Doctor was actually Scytale, a shape-shifting “face dancer” crucial to the plot of Herbert’s second book. Going back to Dune ’84, you may not have noticed Cimino’s Doctor accompanied Baron Harkonnen during the Arrakeen attack. The Doc is absent after that, even as the Baron yells creepily, “Where’s my doctor?” That’s because Doc/Scytale absconded with Duncan’s body. This Easter egg is Lynchian world-building at its best.

Scytale’s 12-year odyssey reanimating “dead Duncan Idaho” into the ghola named Hayt on the nightmarish Bene Tleilax world (mentioned by Paul in Dune) constitutes the entire opening 10 minutes of the script. Lynch calls the planet Tleilax “a dark metal world with canals of steaming chemicals and acids.” Those canals, Lynch writes, are lined with “dead pink small test tube animals.” Initiating Dune II with a focus on Scytale foregrounds him to primary antagonist, unlike Herbert’s book where myriad conspirators work against Paul….

(6) TURN OUT THE LIGHTSABER, THE PARTY’S OVER. And speaking of unmade sequels – which two famous producers did in The Hollywood Reporter interview: “David Benioff, Dan Weiss Reveal Their Star Wars Movie: The First Jedi”.

…On the Star Wars front, the duo confirm media reports from 2019 that they were looking at the early days of the Jedi, but added some details.

“We wanted to do The First Jedi,” Benioff says. “Basically, how the Jedi Order came to be, why it came to be, the first lightsaber …” 

“And we were annoyed as hell when [Rian Johnson, the duo’s longtime friend and 3 Body Problem producer] called his movie The Last Jedi,” Weiss says dryly. “He completely destroyed the obvious title for what we were working on.” 

Asked what went wrong, Benioff says, “[Lucasfilm] ended up not wanting to do a First Jedi story. We had a very specific story idea in mind, and ultimately they decided they didn’t want to do that. And we totally get it. It’s their company and their IP, but we weren’t the droids they were looking for.”

The duo were far from the only ones that had their Star Wars movie taken away. Lucasfilm also decided against making Star Wars projects from top creatives like Kevin Feige, Patty Jenkins and Damon Lindelof….

(7) BRITISH LIBRARY RECOVERY. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] The British Library announced that some of their major services will begin to be available again starting next week, following last October’s crippling cyber-attack. “Restoring our services – an update”. There is still much work to be done.

As we begin a new year, I’m pleased to confirm that – as promised before Christmas – next Monday 15 January will see the return online of one of the most important datasets for researchers around the world: the main British Library catalogue of over 36 million records, including details of our printed books, journals, maps, music scores and rare books. Its absence from the internet has been perhaps the single most visible impact of the criminal cyber attack which took place at the end of October last year, and I want to acknowledge how difficult this has been for all our users.

When the catalogue returns it won’t be in quite the form that long-standing users will be familiar with. Most notably it will be ‘read-only’, so although you will be able to search for items as before, the process for checking availability and ordering them for to use in the Reading Rooms will be different. We’ll be providing more detailed information and practical guidance when the catalogue goes online on Monday….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 11, 1961 Jasper Fforde, 63. I, like most folk I suspect, first discovered the somewhat eccentric charms of his writing in the Eyre Affair, the first of his novels with Tuesday Next, the  Special Operation Network, Literary Detectives (SO-27) who could literally enter the great and not so great works of English literature. 

Bidder and Stoughton published it twenty-three years ago. I’d like to say the Eyre Affair was a much desired literary property but he says there were seventy-six publisher that he sent his manuscript to. I’m surprised there were that many publishers in the U.K. that would have been interested…

Jasper Fforde in 2012.

There would be six in the series in all — this novel followed by Lost in a Good BookThe Well of Lost PlotsSomething RottenFirst Among SequelsOne of our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot. I won’t say that they were consistently great as they weren’t and the humor sometimes wore more than a bit thin, but overall I like the series considerably.

Next up, and I wasn’t eggspecting to like it, yes I know bad pun there, is The Big Over Easy which is set in the same universe as the Thursday Next novels though I don’t remember any overlapping character twenty years after reading them. It reworks his first written novel, which absolutely failed to find any publisher whatsoever. 

Its original title was Who Killed Humpty Dumpty? Errr, wasn’t there a novel involving a rabbit by almost that name?  It had a sequel of sorts in The Fourth Bear. Both are quite more than bearably good. 

I have not read his dystopian novel Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffronwhich is about a future Britain where everyone there is judged by how they perceive colors. Suspect someone with color blindness like myself wouldn’t be welcome there. A friend who did read it like it a lot. 

His Dragonslayer series, also known as The Chronicles of Kazam, are a YA affair and a great deal of fun indeed. 

He’s got several one-offs but I know absolutely nothing about them.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) STRACZYNSKI Q&A. “Hope and Strange: PW Talks with J. Michael Straczynski” at Publishers Weekly.

You’ve said before that, with established mainstream comics characters, you view your job as asking unlikely questions. Could you expand on that approach?

[JMS]: Spider-Man is a good example of that. For 50-plus years, we’ve known that Peter Parker got bit by a spider and got his powers. I like to look under the hood and say, oh, wait, hang on a second. The spider was irradiated—we know that part of it. But did the spider have the powers from the radiation, and therefore gave it to Peter, or was that spider bringing the powers to him in the first place, and had to get to him before the radiation killed it? Because the second question implies intent. And the moment you put intent into that equation, it changes everything. It opens up whole new possibilities of storytelling. Out of that one question came the Spider Totem idea, but also the Spider-Verse. All the things you’ve seen since then from the Spider-Verse, the characters and movies, and the animated stuff, all that came from that one unlikely question—that implied intent….

(11) UNCANNY MAGAZINE’S SUBMISSION SCORECARD. A little peek behind the scenes at a leading sff magazine.

(12) MORE AI FAKERY ON AMAZON. “Scammy AI-Generated Book Rewrites Are Flooding Amazon” reports WIRED.

When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI’s impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom—with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, in an apparent scheme to profit off her work. It looks like another example of the ecommerce giant’s ongoing problem with a glut of low-quality AI-generated ebooks.

Mitchell learned that searching Amazon for her book surfaced not only her own tome but also another ebook with the same title, published last September. It was only 45 pages long and it parroted Mitchell’s ideas in halting, awkward language. The listed author, “Shumaila Majid,” had no bio, headshot, or internet presence, but clicking on that name brought up dozens of similar books summarizing recently published titles.

Mitchell guessed the knock-off ebook was AI-generated, and her hunch appears to be correct. WIRED asked deepfake-detection startup Reality Defender to analyze the ersatz version of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, and its software declared the book 99 percent likely AI-generated. “It made me mad,” says Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. “It’s just horrifying how people are getting suckered into buying these books.”…

(13) ELFQUEST SCRIPT IS GO. “’Elfquest’ Animated Series Based On Comics In Works At Fox” reports Deadline.

Fox has given a script commitment to Elfquest, a one-hour animated drama series based on the epic fantasy adventure comic series created by Wendy and Richard Pini, from Rodney Rothman and Adam Rosenberg’s Modern MagicSusan Hurwitz Arneson (The Last Amazon) will pen the series adaptation and serve as showrunner and executive producer.

Created in 1978, Elfquest, published by Dark Horse Comics, is a fantasy story about a community of elves and other fictional species who struggle to survive and coexist on a primitive Earth-like planet with two moons….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] The fan-relevant part starts at 3:53 into the video, “Stephen [Colbert] Plays ‘Ick Or No Ick’ With Taylor Tomlinson, Host Of “After Midnight”. Listen through Colbert’s follow-up to Tomlinson’s response, until he closes with a plug for her new show.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Daniel Dern, David Goldfarb, Kathy Sullivan, Michael J. Walsh, Bruce D. Arthurs, Jim Janney, 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 Mark J. McGarry.]

Pixel Scroll 4/19/23 Tick, Tock, Said The Pixel, Just Keep Scrolling

(1) F&SF. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction’s May-June 2023 cover art is by Maurizio Manzieri.

(2) INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE. The International Booker Prize 2023 Shortlist of 6 works was released on April 18. The one longlisted item of genre interest has survived to make the shortlist, Cheon Myeong-Kwan’s Whale. The winner will be announced May 23. Publishing Perspectives breaks down the amount of the prize.

…The focus of this Booker is translation, and its £50,000 prize (US$60,734) is to be split into £25,000 (US$30,367) for the author and £25,000 for the translator—or divided equally between multiple translators. There also is a purse of £5,000 (US$6,072) for each of the shortlisted titles: £2,500 (US$3,036) for the author and £2,500 for the translator or, again, divided equally between multiple translators….

(3) DIGGING OUT FROM THE MUDSLIDE. Yesterday Larry Correia posted “A Letter To Epic Fantasy Readers: I Know Rothfuss And Martin Hurt You, But It’s Time To Get Over It And Move On” [Internet Archive], a cruel rant blaming a couple of well-known fantasy writers for allegedly crushing the nascent careers of other fantasy novelists by failing to finish their series and creating reader resistance to new writers’ series. (Then, finding he had mud left over, he deposited some on a third author who has an unfinished sf series.)

Today Mark Lawrence decided a few things needed to be said in response in a blog post, “Faith and blame”, which concludes:

…In short: 

i) Authors who delay a book in a series, be it for 10 years, or 50, or forever, are not lazy sacks of shit.

ii) The high profile authors who have delayed may be cited in some cases as a reason for readers not picking up a newly published book 1 — but I feel the reasons behind that reluctance are far deeper and considerably wider than two or three writers, however well known. Some portion of the reason (I do not say blame) may reside with them, but I think this would be happening even if book 3, 4, & 6 had turned up a year or two after their predecessors.

iii) It’s easy to give the reason for this problem a face – someone to call an apathetic sack of shit. It’s human nature to want a simple answer and a person to blame. But it’s more complicated than that.

Readers – have faith in your writers, that faith will be overwhelmingly rewarded. And when it’s not – the only thing that author has done is disappointed you, not tanked the entire publishing industry.

(4) DON’T LOOK FOR THIS BOOK ON THE RIVER. “Lydia Davis refuses to sell her next book on Amazon” – the author explains why to the Guardian.

Prize-winning author Lydia Davis’ new collection of short stories will not be sold on Amazon, with the author saying she does not “believe corporations should have as much control over our lives as they do”.

Our Strangers will be published by Canongate on 5 October, and is the seventh collection of fiction from Davis, who won the Man Booker international prize in 2013, when the award chose a winner based on a body of work, rather than a single book.

Due to be published just before Bookshop Day on 7 October, Our Strangers will only be sold in physical bookshops, Bookshop.org and selected online independent retailers.

Davis said: “We value small businesses, yet we give too much of our business to the large and the powerful – and often, increasingly, we have hardly any choice.

“I am all the more pleased, now, that Canongate, with its long history of independence and its high standards, will be publishing Our Strangers and doing so in a way that puts my book on the shelves of booksellers who are so much more likely to care about it.”…

(5) GROWING PROSPECT OF WRITERS STRIKE. Leaders of the Writers Guild of America secured a strong showing of support from members. “Writers strike looms after members vote to shut down film and TV production” reports CNN Business.

…The vote announced Monday afternoon showed 97.9% of participating union members voting to approve a potential strike.

If a strike happens, it would be the first in the industry since 2007, and it would bring production on many shows and films to a halt. The 2007 strike lasted 100 days.

The Writers Guild of America, the union that represents the writers, says it needs to make substantial changes to the way that writers are compensated because of the shift to streaming services from traditional films and cable and broadcast networks….

(6) AFRICANFUTURISM. Nnedi Okorafor did her own cover reveal yesterday. Preorder here.

(7) PICARD. NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour” panelists respond as “’Picard’ boldly goes into the history books”. Beware spoilers.

[ERIC] DEGGANS: Well, you know, I wrote a review before the show debuted. I love, love, love this. And the reason I love this is because I’ve always felt that Paramount Plus’ new “Trek” series have erred by being so careful about trying to blaze their own path and tone down the references to past “Trek” stuff. And I understand that, especially with “Discovery,” the very first series to step out, they wanted to blaze a new trail. But there is a reason why this franchise has survived for nearly 60 years.

To have – especially “Star Trek: Picard,” in its first two seasons, really suffered from not being willing to look back and acknowledge the reason why people love Jean-Luc Picard in the first place. So it is just so great to see this series emerge as this love letter to not just “The Next Generation” but all those Trek series that kind of debuted in that 1990s, early 2000s era. So “The Next Generation,” “Deep Space Nine,” “Voyager” – there’s all kinds of Easter eggs and references that, if you don’t know the shows, you don’t need to worry about. But if you do know the shows, it is just so much fun and so much extra pleasure to watch this unfold.

(8) GET READY FOR “MRS. DAVIS”. “Mrs. Davis Co-Creator Tara Hernandez On Crafting Peacock’s Wild New Sci-Fi Series” at Slashfilm.

One might not imagine that one of the writers of “The Big Bang Theory” and “Young Sheldon” would be behind one of 2023’s most anticipated, high-concept sci-fi shows, but that’s exactly the situation we find ourselves in. Hailing from Tara Hernandez, “Mrs. Davis” debuts on Peacock later this month, with Damon Lindelof, of “Lost” and “The Leftovers” fame, serving as co-creator on the series alongside her….

I’ve not seen a ton of the show, admittedly, but this feels like the kind of thing where, especially because I know Damon got into some of this with “Lost” years ago where they just were chasing their tails, so how long would you ideally see this going? Is this a one season show? Is it a four season show? Do you have a rough idea of where you guys would like it to go?

Yeah, I think we really, and just my personal tastes, I really love a great season of television. I love a story that’s introduced. I love a nice conclusion on it. I think we had to know where we were ending up. We pitched the show, when we pitched it, it was very important to have the landing place.

That is nice to hear.

Yes. It has a landing place. We had to know what the North Star was, especially in a show that can feel like, “Is this going to go off the rails? Are they just going to be chasing their tails?” Just my personal preference about storytelling, whether that comes from really loving feature films or just loving a hero’s journey that’s a really closed-loop narrative, I think the world of “Mrs. Davis” is such that it has legs, but I think it is a great eight episodes. If that’s what it is, it’s just a really nice story. And people will be satisfied.

(9) GET YOUR RED HOT CAT BOOKS. Kristine Kathryn Rusch has curated The 2023 Cattitude Bundle for StoryBundle and it’s available for the next three weeks.

My cats have gotten out of control. During the lockdown, I promoted a series of projects using my co-workers as a hook. The only co-workers I had at the time were the the cats who boss me around: The Mighty Cheeps, and his buddy Gavin, a.k.a The Boys.

I’d post a picture of them on Facebook, write a funny or wry bit about their terrible office behavior, and end with a bit of promotion.

Little did I realize that the demand for the antics of the staff at Promotion Central would become the highlight of my Facebook page. I’ve learned if I don’t include a photo of the Boys, or our new(ish) third cat, Angel, no one reads the posts. Those cats are more popular than I am.

It shouldn’t surprise me. Cats and the internet go together like chocolate and peanut butter. You can live with either one, but once someone combined them, well, there’s no separating them. Ever.

Of course, we’re going to take advantage of that. Cats and the internet becomes cats in ebooks. Since cats in books have always gone hand in glove (have you ever met a bookstore dog?), it seems only natural to put cat books into a StoryBundle.

The best thing about cat books? It’s easy to find good ones because all of the best writers live with cats…. 

Here’s the deal:

For StoryBundle, you decide what price you want to pay. For $5 (or more, if you’re feeling generous), you’ll get the basic bundle of four books in .epub format—WORLDWIDE.

  • Too Big to Miss by Sue Ann Jaffarian
  • Familiarity – A Winston & Ruby Collection by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
  • A Cat of a Different Color by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith
  • October Snow by Bonnie Elizabeth

If you pay at least the bonus price of just $20, you get all four of the regular books, plus six more books for a total of 10!

  • The Captain’s Cat by Stefon Mears (StoryBundle Exclusive)
  • Haunted Witch by T. Thorn Coyle
  • The Intergalactic Veterinarian of the Year! by Ron Collins & Jeff Collins (StoryBundle Exclusive)
  • Death by Polka by Robert Jeschonek
  • Single Witch’s Survival Guide by Mindy Klasky
  • Road of No Return by Annie Reed (StoryBundle Exclusive)

(10) NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER. “Oh please, no.  Just no. And you may quote me,” says Cat Eldridge. The Hollywood Reporter says “Galaxy Quest TV Series in the Works at Paramount+”. The article also chronicles several failed attempts to adapt it for TV in the previous decade.

Galaxy Quest is going from a fictional series to an actual TV series. 

Paramount+ is teaming with its studio counterpart, Paramount Television Studios, for a live-action adaptation of the 1999 cult favorite sci-fi spoof. Sources say the project is in the early development stages and a search is underway for a writer to pair with Mark Johnson, the Breaking Bad alum who exec produced the film and is returning for the scripted update. Johnson and his Gran Via Productions banner are the only execs currently attached to the project….

Ars Technica’s Jennifer Ouelette also has doubts that this is a good idea: “That Galaxy Quest TV series might finally be happening and we have mixed feelings”.

… Honestly, I have mixed feelings about a spinoff series from one of my all-time favorite movies. On the one hand, I love and cherish every character and every line of dialogue in Galaxy Quest. On the other, how do you improve on perfection? As Enrico Colantoni, who played Thermion leader Mathesar, told io9 in 2014, “To make something up, just because we love those characters, and turn it into a sequel—then it becomes the awful sequel.”…

(11) MEMORY LANE.

2015[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

I’m trying to remember what the first work of Holly Black’s that I read, so I went to ISFDB and researched her work. It appears it’s Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale which I read some twenty years ago. Fascinating novel. 

 Now, without doing the no-no of spoilers, The Darkest Part of The Forest is the work of a much more mature writer. Her grasp of what makes a character worth our time to be invested in is really improved a lot as has her ability to actually write an interesting story. 

The Darkest Part of The Forest was published by Little, Brown eight years ago. It was nominated for a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. 

The Darkest Part of The Forest is, I think, deliciously dark as you can see in The Beginning which you can read here. Beware apparently young boys with pointed ears in glass coffins… 

Down a path worn into the woods, past a stream and a hollowed-out log full of pill bugs and termites, was a glass coffin. It rested right on the ground, and in it slept a boy with horns on his head and ears as pointed as knives. 

As far as Hazel Evans knew, from what her parents said to her and from what their parents said to them, he’d always been there. And no matter what anyone did, he never, ever woke up. 

He didn’t wake up during the long summers, when Hazel and her brother, Ben, stretched out on the full length of the coffin, staring down through the crystalline panes, fogging them up with their breath, and scheming glorious schemes. He didn’t wake up when tourists came to gape or debunkers came to swear he wasn’t real. He didn’t wake up on autumn weekends, when girls danced right on top of him, gyrating to the tinny sounds coming from nearby iPod speakers, didn’t notice when Leonie Wallace lifted her beer high over her head, as if she were saluting the whole haunted forest. He didn’t so much as stir when Ben’s best friend, Jack Gordon, wrote IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS in Sharpie along one side—or when Lloyd Lindblad took a sledgehammer and actually tried. No matter how many parties had been held around the horned boy—generations of parties, so that the grass sparkled with decades of broken bottles in green and amber, so that the bushes shone with crushed aluminum cans in silver and gold and rust—and no matter what happened at those parties, nothing could wake the boy inside the glass coffin. 

When they were little, Ben and Hazel made him flower crowns and told him stories about how they would rescue him. Back then, they were going to save everyone who needed saving in Fairfold. Once Hazel got older, though, she mostly visited the coffin only at night, in crowds, but she still felt something tighten in her chest when she looked down at the boy’s strange and beautiful face.

She hadn’t saved him, and she hadn’t saved Fairfold, either. “Hey, Hazel,” Leonie called, dancing to one side to make room in case Hazel wanted to join her atop the horned boy’s casket. Doris Alvaro was already up there, still in her cheerleader outfit from the game their school lost earlier that night, shining chestnut ponytail whipping through the air. They both looked flushed with alcohol and good cheer.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 19, 1907 Alan Wheatley. Best remembered for being the Sheriff of Nottingham in The Adventures of Robin Hood, with Richard Greene playing Robin Hood. In 1951, he had played Sherlock Holmes in the first TV series about him, but no recordings of it are known to exist. And he was in Two First Doctor stories as Temmosus, “The Escape” and “The Ambush” where he was the person killed on screen by Daleks. (Died 1991.)
  • Born April 19, 1925 Hugh O’Brian. He was Harry Chamberlain in Rocketship X-M. (It was nominated in the 1951 Retro Hugo Awards given at The Millennium Philcon but lost out to Destination Moon.) He would later play Hugh Lockwood in Probe, not the Asimov Probe, the pilot for the sf TV series Search. His only other genre appearance I think was playing five different roles on Fantasy Island. Though I’m absolutely sure I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong (smile). (Died 2016.)
  • Born April 19, 1935 Herman Zimmerman, 88. He was the art director and production designer who worked between 1987 and 2005 for the Trek franchise. Excepting Voyager, in that era he worked on all other live-action productions including the first season of Next Gen, the entire runs of Deep Space Nine and Enterprise, as well as six Trek films. As Memory Alpha notes, “Together with Rick Sternbach he designed the space station Deep Space 9, with John Eaves the USS Enterprise-B and the USS Enterprise-E. His most recognizable work though, have been his (co-)designs for nearly all of the standing sets, those of the bridge, Main Engineering (co-designed with Andrew Probert) and Ten Forward for the USS Enterprise-D in particular.” Not surprisingly, he co-wrote the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual with Rick Sternbach and Doug Drexler. 
  • Born April 19, 1936 Tom Purdom, 87. There’s very little on him on the web, so I’ll let Michael Swanwick speak for him in the introduction to his Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons collection: “How highly do I regard Tom’s fiction?  So highly that I wrote the introduction to the collection — and I hate writing introductions.  They’re a lot of work.  But these stories deserve enormous praise, so I was glad to do it.”  He’s written five novels and has either one or two collections of his stories. He’s deeply stocked at the usual digital suspects. 
  • Born April 19, 1946 Tim Curry, 77. Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, of course, but it’s not his first genre appearance. He’d appeared a year earlier at the Scottish Opera in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Puck. And yes, I know that he appeared in the live show which was at the Chelsea Classic Cinema and other venues before the film was done. Other genre appearances include playing Darkness in Legend, an outstanding Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers, a most excellent genre film, Farley Claymore in The Shadow (great role), another superb performance playing Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as The Player, Gomez Addams in Addams Family Reunion, and Trymon in TV’s Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Darkness. And others too numerous to list.
  • Born April 19, 1952 Mark Rogers. He’s probably best known for writing and illustrating the Adventures of Samurai Cat series, a most excellent affair. His debut fantasy novel Zorachus was followed by The Nightmare of God sequel. His novella “The Runestone” was adapted as a film of the same name. And his art is collected in Nothing But a Smile: The Pinup Art of Mark Rogers and The Art of Fantasy. (Died 2014.)
  • Born April 19, 1967 Steven H Silver, 56. Fan and publisher, author, and editor. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer twelve times and Best Fanzine seven times. In 1995 he founded the Sidewise Award for Alternate History and has served as a judge ever since. He has published the fanzine, Argentus, edited several issues of the Hugo-nominated Journey Planet. His debut novel After Hastings came out in 2020.
  • Born April 19, 1978 K. Tempest Bradford, 45. She was a non-fiction and managing editor with Fantasy Magazine for several years, and has edited fiction for Fortean BureauPeridot Books and Sybil’s Garage. She’s written a lot of short fiction and her first YA novel, Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion. She was a finalist for three Ignyte Awards, the Ember Award for unsung contributions to genre, and twice for the Community Award for Outstanding Efforts in Service of Inclusion and Equitable Practice in Genre. With Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward she shared a 2020 Locus Special Award to Writing the Other for Inclusivity and Representation Education.

(13) COMICS SECTION.

The future used to be better.

The future before.

The future now.

(14) BIG GREEN NUMBERS. Book Riot wants to discuss “The Bestselling Comics of All Time” – however, they don’t want the answer to be too easy.

But what is the bestselling comic of all time? Well, that depends on how you define comic.

Are we talking about single issues, or “floppies?” And if so, are we talking about the sales of one issue, or the series as a whole? Does that include collected editions and reprints? How do you account for changes in the retail market, from newsstands to specialty shops to digital, and the different reporting (or lack thereof) of each? How do you take into account the cultural changes since the ’40s, when over 90% of children read comics, compared to today’s globalized, media-saturated world? Should you account for the differences in population between America (331.9 million potential readers) versus Japan (125.7 million) versus, say, Finland (5.5 million)? Isn’t it apples and oranges to compare One Piece to X-Men to Peanuts, anyway?…

When it comes to the best selling single issue, the list begins at number five –

5. BATMAN: THE 10 CENT ADVENTURE BY GREG RUCKA AND RICK BURCHETT (MARCH 2002)

Most of the comics on this list are stunts of some sort, and selling a comic for literally just a dime in 2002 absolutely qualifies (most comics were $2.25 then). It’s actually a good story, kicking off the excellent Bruce Wayne: Murderer? plot line, but it was that nostalgic price point that sold 702,126 copies.

(15) BROWSING FOR DOLLARS. Untapped New York ranks the “10 Most Surprising Finds at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair”. The treasures include Billie Holiday’s bar tab, and something a bit closer to being of genre interest —

9. A 17th-Century Celestial Atlas

Along with books, maps are a popular item to find at the antiquarian book fair. The book featured above is one of the most sought-after celestial atlases in existence. Produced by Dutch cartographer Andreas Cellarius in 1661, Harmonia Macrocosmica is priced at a whopping $395,000.

Considered Cellarius’s magnum opus, this map was made to illustrate competing theories of celestial mechanics, or how the solar system worked. The universe’s heavenly bodies are depicted in vibrant colors throughout 29 extremely detailed, hand-colored, double-page engraved plates in the book. The images take theories put forth by great thinkers and scientists like Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, Nicolaus Copernicus, as well as lesser-known figures such as Aratus of Soli, and present them in an accessible way through images.

(16) BOOKSTORE SLEEPOVER. Zoos and museums have hosted them – now a downtown LA bookstore: “I spent the night at the Last Bookstore. Things got spooky” in the LA Times. The owner tried to make it a bit of a paranormal experience.

…Soon enough, Powell was recalling the spookiest things he’d seen in his years at the store. He described coworkers who’d heard or glimpsed figures moving around the corners, and instances where people watched books fly off shelves for seemingly no reason.

“That corner is where books fall off sometimes, in sci-fi, for some reason,” he said.

As we passed the portal, a hidden nook where my partner and I had signed up to sleep, we realized it was both secluded in the back corner of the store with books on U.S. history and located closest to the “haunted” shelves that books fall off of. We quickly decided we wouldn’t be sleeping there….

(17) THE MUSIC OF THE NIGHT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Deep in a disused mind in Sardinia, scientists are assembling an experiment to find out just how much nothing weighs. Using an exquisitely sensitive balance beam and interferometric techniques cribbed from gravity wave detectors, they plan to switch on and off the Casimir effect using small temperature variations and measure the resulting change in the number of virtual particles that can exist between metal plates. If all goes well, they will have established a tight constraint on the energy of the vacuum. “How Much Does ‘Nothing’ Weigh?” at Scientific American.

It does something to you when you drive in here for the first time,” Enrico Calloni says as our car bumps down into the tunnel of a mine on the Italian island of Sardinia. After the intense heat aboveground, the contrast is stark. Within seconds, damp, cool air enters the car as it makes its way into the depths. “I hope you’re not claustrophobic.” This narrow tunnel, which leads us in almost complete darkness to a depth of 110 meters underground, isn’t for everyone. But it’s the ideal site for the project we are about to see—the Archimedes experiment, named after a phenomenon first described by the ancient Greek scientist, which aims to weigh “nothing.”…

…Geologically, Sardinia is one of the quietest places in Europe. The island, along with its neighbor Corsica, is located on a particularly secure block of Earth’s crust that is among the most stable areas of the Mediterranean, with very few earthquakes in its entire recorded history and only one (offshore) event that ever reached the relatively mild category of magnitude 5. Physicists chose this geologically uneventful place because the Archimedes experiment requires extreme isolation from the outside environment. It involves a high-precision experimental setup designed to investigate the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics—the amount of energy in the empty space that fills the universe….

… Researchers can calculate the energy of the vacuum in two ways. From a cosmological perspective, they can use Albert Einstein’s equations of general relativity to calculate how much energy is needed to explain the fact that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. They can also work from the bottom up, using quantum field theory to predict the value based on the masses of all the “virtual particles” that can briefly arise and then disappear in “empty” space (more on this later). These two methods produce numbers that differ by more than 120 orders of magnitude (1 followed by 120 zeros). It’s an embarrassingly absurd discrepancy that has important implications for our understanding of the expansion of the universe—and even its ultimate fate. To figure out where the error lies, scientists are hauling a two-meter-tall cylindrical vacuum chamber and other equipment down into an old Sardinian mine where they will attempt to create their own vacuum and weigh the nothing inside….

(18) NOBODY SURVIVES THE FLAME TRENCH. [Item by Mike Kennedy.]On this past Monday’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Josh Groban talked about his visit to NASA, where, among other things, he received a tour of the “flame trench.”

Fellow space enthusiasts Stephen Colbert and Josh Groban geek out over the details of Groban’s trip to NASA’s Artemis mission launch pad. Check out Groban’s latest role as the lead in “Sweeney Todd,” playing now at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, JJ, Gordon Van Gelder, Rich Lynch, Lise Andreasen, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 4/12/23 What Is It You Plan To Scroll With Your One Filed And Pixelled Life?

(1) COVID OUTBREAK AMONG EASTERCON ATTENDEES. Fans who attended last week’s Eastercon in the UK (“Conversation”) have been self-reporting positive Covid tests and symptoms to the con’s Facebook community group, or to the con’s Discord server, now closed, which reportedly had more than 70 positive tests. Masking is no longer mandatory in the UK, however, the con’s own Covid policy asked people to test before coming, stay home if they tested positive (or had symptoms of an infectious disease), and to wear a mask in program items and crowded areas. There is much discussion of how many people complied with their masking policy, as well as the load on the venue’s ventilation system in places like the bar.

Today one author put it rather dramatically:

(2) FANZINE PILGRIMAGE. Marcin “Alqua” Kłak today published a conreport about “Corflu Craic – my first fanzine convention” at Fandom Rover. The event was held in Belfast the weekend before Eastercon.

…Did I enjoy Corflu? Oh yes! I certainly want to repeat the experience (although next year the con will be held in Nevada so outside of my reach). The atmosphere, the friendliness, the conversations – It was pretty awesome. Eating meals together and discussing fannish topics was memorable.

I got a lot of reading materials. Firstly items I bought at the auction at previous Corflu were given to me. They came with some additional stuff (including the Programme Book from 2022). Then each person coming to Corflu Craic got a random set of fanzines from the chair’s own supplies. Then I got many zines people produced for this year or took them to the con to give away. And at last I bought two publications. The first was 1957 The First UK Worldcon edited by Rob Hansen (which at the end of the con got an award). The second one was a TAFF trip report from Sue Mason. I cannot complain for the lack of fanzines to read this year (and probably next too!). The challenge wiI be to write a few LoCs though (and I don’t have too much experience!).

(3) KSR AT UCSD. On April 19 The School for Global Policy and Strategy and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego will host an in-person discussion with Kim Stanley Robinson, engaging with several UC San Diego researchers, about the bidirectional patterns of influence between climate research and science fiction narrative, and what both suggest about the Earth’s future, and our own. Free admission, register here.

Earth’s Future: A Discussion with Kim Stanley Robinson. April 19, 2023, 12:30p – 1:50p. Institute of the Americas, Hojel Auditorium, UC San Diego

Internationally renowned writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction has long been engaged with the tradition of utopian thought: how do we imagine a better society? His most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, has been hailed as a masterpiece and held up as a roadmap to climate policy and action, and how his characters navigate the next hundred years of climate catastrophe and cascading political and social effects toward a better future have inspired numerous projects that engage with related ideas in political economy, technology and engineering, climatology and ecology, and urban design.

Featuring:

Kim Stanley Robinson: American novelist, widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of science fiction.

Introduction by Patrick Coleman, Asst. Director, Clarke Center for Human Imagination

Moderated by Jennifer Burney (Professor; Marshall Saunders Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Global Climate Policy and Research, UC San Diego)

Panelists:

Kate Ricke (Assistant Professor, School of Global Policy and Strategy and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego)

Teevrat Garg (Assistant Professor of Economics, School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego)

John Ahlquist (Professor and Associate Dean, School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego)

(4) SECOND GUESS SFF. GameRant’s Kristy Ambrose says these “Sci-Fi Movies That Almost Had Different Endings”.

…It’s not uncommon for sci-fi movies to have several endings before the director and the studio decide on the one that will hit the theatres. The fans can only hope to catch a glimpse of the alternative cuts on DVDs or Blu-rays. As it happens, these highly successful sci-fi films almost ended differently, and if they had been cut today, their stories might have concluded differently….

Here’s an example – beware spoilers. (If you wonder, “how could they spoil an ending that wasn’t made?” – well, they have to compare it to the actual ending, and there you are, spoiled!)

6. LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1986)

Here’s an example of a dark but comical ending that might have been retained had Little Shop of Horrors been made in another era. Instead of successfully defeating Audrey II, the killer plant that fed on human blood, it eats both Seymour, the main character, and his love interest, the original Audrey. It’s then strong enough to replicate, and the final scenes include several giant killer plants tearing apart the city.

Test audiences weren’t too keen on the ending, however, which sees our downtrodden but plucky protagonist turned into plant food. An alternative ending was used instead, in which Seymour manages to electrocute Audry II before it can do any more damage and stop the global carnage before it even starts.

(5) MEMORY LANE.

1975[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Our Beginning this Scroll is that of Gardner Dozois’ “The Visible Man” noveletteHe was a prolific author of short fiction, for which he won two Nebulas, and also wrote four novels. Though his fiction won no Hugos despite five nominations, he won myriads as Professional Editor, Short Fiction.

Now for “The Visible Man” novelette. It was first published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, the December 1975 issue. It got printed as part of The Visible Man collection several years later. Baen has the rights to it now and they last published as an ebook a decade in Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois. It’s a nicely done look at him as a writer. So let’s get to that Beginning… 

GEORGE ROWAN’S ONLY chance of escape came to him like a benediction, sudden and unlooked for, on the road between Newburyport and Boston. 

They were on old Route 1, the Newburyport Turnpike, and there was not another car in sight. The fully automated Route 95 guideway was just a few miles west of here, running almost parallel to Route 1, but for reasons of his own the sheriff had preferred to take the old secondary road, even though he had to drive the car himself and couldn’t possibly get up to guideway speeds. Perhaps he simply enjoyed manual driving. Perhaps it was some old State regulation, now solidified into tradition, that prohibited the transportation of prisoners on automated roads. Perhaps it was just some more of the expected psychological torture, taking the slowest possible route so that Rowan would have time to build up a greater charge of fear and dreadful anticipation for what awaited him in Boston. 

For Rowan, the trip had already become interminable. His memory of the jail in Newburyport, of his crime, of his hasty trial, of his past life—all had become hazy and indistinct. It seemed as if he had been riding forever, on the road, going to Boston for the execution of his sentence. Only that was real and vivid: the slight swaying motion of the car, the seat upholstery sticking uncomfortably to his sweat-soaked back, the ridged rubber mat under his feet. The countryside they drove through was flat and empty, trees, meadows, cultivated fields, little streams, sometimes a boarded-up gas station or a long-abandoned roadside stand. The sky was a flat, washed-out blue, and the sunlight was thick and dusty. Occasionally they would bump over a pothole or a stretch of frost-buckled pavement—the State didn’t spend much anymore to keep up the secondary roads. The car’s electric engine made no sound at all, and the interior of the car was close and hot with the windows rolled up.

Rowan found himself reluctantly watching the little motions of the steering wheel, apparently turning all by itself, driverless. That made him shiver. He knew intellectually, of course, that he was sitting on the front seat between the sheriff and the deputy, but he couldn’t see them. He could hear them breathing, and occasionally the deputy’s arm would brush against his own, but, for Rowan, they were invisible. 

He knew why they were invisible, but that didn’t make it any less spooky. When the State’s analysis computers had gone down into his mind and found the memories that proved him guilty, they had also, as a matter of course, implanted a very deep and very specific hypnotic injunction: from now on, George Rowan would not be able to see any other living creature. Apparently the injunction had not included trees and other kinds of vegetation, but it had covered animals and birds and people. He assumed that when he “saw” through invisible people—as he now “saw” the portions of the car that should have been blocked from sight by the sheriffs body—it was because his subconscious mind was extrapolating, creating a logical extension of the view from other visual data in order to comply with the spirit of the injunction. Nothing must be allowed to spoil the illusion. Nor could Rowan break it, although he knew what it was and how it had been created. It was too strong, and planted too deep. He was “blind” in a special and insidious way….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 12, 1884 Bob Olsen. He wrote stories for Amazing Stories, from 1927 to 1936, many of them said to be of humorous inclination. He was one of the first writers to use the phrase ‘space marine’ in a two-story Captain Brink sequence consisting of “Captain Brink of the Space Marines” (November 1932 Amazing) and “The Space Marines and the Slavers” (December 1936 Amazing). I’m fairly sure that he wrote no novels and less than twenty-four short stories. I do know that severe arthritis curtailed his writing career in 1940. (Died 1956.)
  • Born April 12, 1915 Emil Petaja. An author whose career spanned seven decades who really should be remembered as much for his social circles that included early on as H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and August Derleth which later expanded to include Anthony Boucher, Frank M. Robinson, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick and Robert A. Heinlein.  It should not be overlooked that he did write seven novels and around forty short stories during his career with the stories appearing in Weird TalesFantasy and Science FictionFantastic AdventuresWorlds of Tomorrow, Future Science Fiction Stories and other venues as well. (Died 2000.)
  • Born April 12, 1921 Carol Emshwiller. I think her short stories are amazing and The Start of the End of It All and Other Stories collection won a World Fantasy Award. She’d later receive a Life Achievement from the group of judges chosen by the World Fantasy Awards Administration. I’ve not read her novels, so which would you recommend I read? (Died 2019.)
  • Born April 12, 1916 Beverly Cleary. One of America’s most successful authors, almost a hundred million copies of her children’s books have been sold worldwide since her first book was published in seventy years ago. Some of her best known characters are Ramona Quimby and Beezus Quimby, Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, and Ralph S. Mouse. (Died 2021.)
  • Born April 12, 1958 Elizabeth Klein-Lebbink, 65. An LA-resident con-running fan. She has worked on a variety of conventions, both regionals and Worldcons, frequently in the art shows. She is has been a member of the Dorsai Irregulars. She is married to fellow fan Jerome Scott. Works for NASA where she writes such papers as ‘Measurements of Integration Gain for the Cospas-Sarsat System from Geosynchronous Satellites’.
  • Born April 12, 1936 Charles Napier. Well let’s meet Adam on the Trek episode of “The Way to Eden”. Oh, that’s a horrible outfit he’s wearing. Let’s see if he had better genre roles… well he was on Mission: Impossible twice in truly anonymous roles, likewise he played two minor characters on The Incredible Hulk and he did get a character with a meaningful name (General Denning) on Deep Space 9. I surprised to learn that he was General Hardcastle in Superman and Justice League Unlimited series, and also voiced Agent Zed for the entire run of the Men in Black animated series. (Died 2011.)
  • Born April 12, 1979 Jennifer Morrison, 44. Emma Swan in the Once Upon a Time series, and Winona Kirk, mother of James T. Kirk in Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness. She also paid her horror dues in Urban Legends: Final Cut as Amy Mayfield, the student videographer whose film goes terribly wrong. I’m intrigued to see that she’s the voice actor for the role of Selina Kyle / Catwoman in the Batman: Hush, a film that needs a R rating to be told properly and indeed did so.

(7) CAN YOU GUESS? “Russell Crowe doesn’t like horror movies. Why the hell is he playing The Pope’s Exorcist?” asks Entertainment Weekly.

Russell Crowe does not like scary movies.

“No, I’m not really a horror film fella,” the Oscar winner tells EW. “I like to sleep deeply at nighttime.”

Crowe is hoping to give cinemagoers interrupted slumbers with his new film The Pope’s Exorcist (in theaters April 14). In this purportedly inspired-by-real-events horror movie, the actor plays Father Gabriele Amorth, the Diocese of Rome’s chief exorcist who investigated thousands of possession cases starting in the late ’80s. Directed by Julius Avery (Overlord), the film finds Franco Nero’s Pontiff sending Amorth to investigate the strange happenings at a Spanish castle which are tormenting an American family, played by Laurel Marsden, Peter DeSouza-Feighoney, and, as the clan’s matriarch, Doctor Sleep actress Alex Essoe….

(8) HARRY POTTER AND THE REGISTER OF CASH. Variety reports “’Harry Potter’ TV Show Adaptation Ordered at HBO Max”. Each season will be based on one of the books.

A “Harry Potter” TV series is officially moving forward at HBO Max.

The announcement was made during Warner Bros. Discovery’s presentation to press and investors on April 12, during which it was announced that HBO Max and Discovery+ are officially being combined into a new service dubbed simply Max.

News of a show based on the megahit J.K. Rowling book series first leaked on April 3, but details have now been confirmed.

Each season of the show will be based on one of the books in the franchise, with Warner Bros. Discovery describing the show as a “decade-long series.” It will feature an entirely new cast from the films.

(9) OUT OF THE DOGHOUSE. Not without protest, however,“The NYPD is bringing back its robot dog”The Verge has the story.

The New York Police Department is reenlisting Digidog, the four-legged robot that the city faced backlash for deploying a few years back, as reported earlier by The New York Times. NYC Mayor Eric Adams announced the news during a press event on Tuesday, stating that the use of Digidog in the city can “save lives.”

Digidog — also known as Spot — is a remote-controlled robot made by the Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics. It’s designed to work in situations that may pose a threat to humans, helping to do things like perform inspections in dangerous areas and monitor construction sites. However, Boston Dynamics also touts its use as a public safety tool, which the NYPD has tried in the past.

… City officials say that the NYPD will acquire two robot dogs for a total of $750,000, according to the NYT, and that they will only be used during life-threatening situations, such as bomb threats.

“I believe that technology is here; we cannot be afraid of it,” Mayor Adams said during Tuesday’s press conference. “A few loud people were opposed to it, and we took a step back — that is not how I operate. I operate on looking at what’s best for the city.”…

(10) AL JAFFEE TRIBUTE. Stephen Colbert paid tribute to Al Jaffee on The Late Show last night.

Stephen takes a moment to honor one of the true giants of his childhood, MAD Magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee, who died Monday at the age of 102.

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Appropriate for the Easter season: bunnies… “Is Watership Down Science Fiction?” is a question posed by Moid Moidelhoff over at Media Death Cult. Only touching briefly on actual definitions of SF (it arguably defies precise definition) it is the first Media Death Cult video to take place on location at the real Watership down. Join Moid – who’s occasionally known to be a bit of a wag and a tease – for this nine-minute video….

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

Pixel Scroll 3/11/23 Please Send In Two Hypercube Tops As Proof Of Ob, To Receive Your Free Pixel Scroll Title

(1) SPARKS FROM A GOOD CONDUCTOR. Somtow Sucharitkul proudly announces, “I ranted in my Facebook page and the Hollywood Reporter picked it up as an Op-Ed!” Beware spoilers. “Tár Ending is Not Cate Blanchett’s Character’s Downfall: Consultant” in The Hollywood Reporter.

The closing shot of Todd Field’s Oscar-nominated drama has been taken to represent the final fall from grace of the film’s eponymous heroine. But maybe we’ve got the whole thing backwards, writes Thai conductor Somtow Sucharitkul….

Well before Todd Field’s Tár opened in Thailand, I got my first review of the film from my friend, director Paul Spurrier. Paul had seen the film while in Los Angeles for the American Film Market.

“So we have here a mad genius conductor, who is kicked out of a major European orchestra after an act of violence, has rather ambiguous dealings with some young prodigies, ends up in Southeast Asia conducting a youth orchestra in a tawdry venue …,” he began.

“Oh!” I said, “You went to a screening of our film?” Because Paul was giving me the exact plot of our own film, The Maestro: A Symphony of Terror, a horror fantasy we made two years ago, which I wrote and starred in as the aforementioned “mad genius” conductor.

“Actually, no,” he said. “I just saw Tár.”

Since, I too have seen Tár and, as it turns out, Paul wasn’t wrong. Field’s movie does have a similar plot to The Maestro. Alas, I am a poor substitute for the incomparable Cate Blanchett, and our film is wholly different in substance anyway, being a modest little tribute to the horror films of the 1980s. In any case, the fall of the mighty, from Prometheus to the present, has always been the very essence of what we mean by the word tragedy….

(2) GUNN CENTER BOOK CLUB. Everyone is invited to the Gunn Center for the Study of SF’s (CSSF) monthly virtual book club happening on Friday, March 31, 2023, at noon (Central Time). Register here

For the month of March, the Center has chosen Donna Barbra Higuera’s The Last Cuentista. A comet has hit Earth and now Petra Peña’s world is collapsing. Petra, her family and hundreds of others venture to another planet to continue the human race. Petra awakes on a new planet 100 years in the future, and she is the only one who remembers the history of her people. Winner of the Newberry Medal and the Pura Belpré Award in 2022, Higuera infuses Mexican folklore with interplanetary elements to highlight the importance of preserving the history and culture through storytelling.  All ages are welcome to join.

(3) KGB PHOTOS. Ellen Datlow shared her snapshots from the March 8 Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series with Scott Lynch and Elizabeth Bear: KGB March 8, 2023 at Flickr.

(4) I’LL BE STABBED! “Using ChatGPT to Rewrite ‘Game of Thrones’? OpenAI Co-Founder Says ‘That Is What Entertainment Will Look Like’”The Hollywood Reporter has the story.

… “That is what entertainment will look like,” Brockman said at a Friday panel at SXSW. “Maybe people are still upset about the last season of Game of Thrones. Imagine if you could ask your A.I. to make a new ending that goes a different way and maybe even put yourself in there as a main character or something.”

Hollywood creatives have already begun considering the potential impact — both good and bad — that ChatGPT could have on the TV and filmmaking process. As The Hollywood Reporter examined in January, organizations like the Writers Guild of America West have said they are “monitoring the development of ChatGPT and similar technologies in the event they require additional protections for writers,” though screenwriters interviewed by THR said they could see ChatGPT as a tool to aid the writing process, rather than replacing the work of writers….

(5) MOVIE REVIEW. The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibberd says “SXSW: ‘Mrs. Davis’ Is a Perfectly Timed Warning About A.I. Madness”.

What if ChatGPT, but too much? Too popular, too omniscient, and far too nefarious than today’s cutting-edge chatbots?

That’s the premise of Mrs. Davis, an ultra-ambitious series from Big Bang Theory veteran Tara Hernandez and Watchmen creator Damon Lindelof. Mrs. Davis, premiering at SXSW before its April 20 streaming debut on Peacock, tells the story of a heroic, street-savvy nun (three-time GLOW Emmy nominee Betty Gilpin) battling an omnipresent AI and its legion of obsessed fans who will do anything to please their tech deity (called Mrs. Davis), which is supposedly striving to make the world a better place. Oh, and there’s also a quest for the Holy Grail, possible Nazis with butterfly nets, nefarious magicians and a teary make-out session with Jesus — and that’s just in the first two episodes. As Gilpin’s character, Simone, says at one point: “It’s a lot.”…

(6) OFFICIAL FILTERS CHALLENGED. George Packer argues “The Moral Case Against Equity Language” in The Atlantic.

The Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide discourages using the words stand, Americans, blind, and crazy. The first two fail at inclusion, because not everyone can stand and not everyone living in this country is a citizen. The third and fourth, even as figures of speech (“Legislators are blind to climate change”), are insulting to the disabled. The guide also rejects the disabled in favor of people living with disabilities, for the same reason that enslaved person has generally replaced slave : to affirm, by the tenets of what’s called “people-first language,” that “everyone is first and foremost a person, not their disability or other identity.”

The guide’s purpose is not just to make sure that the Sierra Club avoids obviously derogatory terms, such as welfare queen. It seeks to cleanse language of any trace of privilege, hierarchy, bias, or exclusion. In its zeal, the Sierra Club has clear-cut a whole national park of words. Urbanvibranthardworking, and brown bag all crash to earth for subtle racism. Y’all supplants the patriarchal you guys, and elevate voices replaces empower, which used to be uplifting but is now condescending. The poor is classist; battle and minefield disrespect veterans; depressing appropriates a disability; migrant—no explanation, it just has to go.

Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington. The words these guides recommend or reject are sometimes exactly the same, justified in nearly identical language. This is because most of the guides draw on the same sources from activist organizations: A Progressive’s Style Guide, the Racial Equity Tools glossary, and a couple of others. The guides also cite one another. The total number of people behind this project of linguistic purification is relatively small, but their power is potentially immense. The new language might not stick in broad swaths of American society, but it already influences highly educated precincts, spreading from the authorities that establish it and the organizations that adopt it to mainstream publications, such as this one.

Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people. They are handed down in communiqués written by obscure “experts” who purport to speak for vaguely defined “communities,” remaining unanswerable to a public that’s being morally coerced. A new term wins an argument without having to debate. When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors replaces felon with justice-involved person, it is making an ideological claim—that there is something illegitimate about laws, courts, and prisons. If you accept the change—as, in certain contexts, you’ll surely feel you must—then you also acquiesce in the argument….

(7) ANOTHER IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME. Ever notice how often two movies with the same general idea reach theaters in the same year? Now ask how it comes to pass than two movies based on the same book might do so. Gizmodo looks ahead to when “Cixin Liu’s Novel Supernova Era Will Explode Into Theaters”.

…For those who want to see Liu’s work on the big screen, good news—his 2003 novel Supernova Era is coming to theaters.

In fact, two Supernova Era movies are technically on the way, and possibly a TV series as well. Conquerer Entertainment, which has the adaptation rights to the novel, has announced a Chinese-language version of the movie, which will be simultaneously produced with an English-language version. If you don’t know the book (which Tor Books released in English in 2019), it’s got a (somewhat literally) killer premise. Here’s the official synopsis:

Eight light years away, a star has died, creating a supernova event that showers Earth in deadly levels of radiation. Within a year, everyone over the age of thirteen will die.

And so the countdown begins. Parents apprentice their children and try to pass on the knowledge needed to keep the world running.

But when the world is theirs, the last generation may not want to continue the legacy left to them. And in shaping the future however they want, will the children usher in an era of bright beginnings or final mistakes?

“The book has captured my interest due to Liu’s imaginative world-building and thought-provoking themes such as the fragility of civilization, the importance of leadership, and the role of technology in shaping society,” Conquerer co-founder Vasco Xu told Deadline. “It also raises questions about the nature of power, the relationship between science and morality, and the implications of different forms of administrations. Due to its futuristic setting and the presence of a significant global event at its core, the book has the potential to be adapted into two enthralling productions that would appeal to both the domestic Chinese audience and the global market.”

Assuming both movies get made, it’ll be very interesting to see how they compare and contrast. But we likely won’t get a chance to do so until 2026 at the earliest.

(8) RED DWARF NEWS. Radio Times reports ”Red Dwarf’s future confirmed after legal dispute resolved”.

…The future of Red Dwarf has finally been confirmed after a legal dispute between its creators, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor.

It’s no secret that the writers, who co-created the comedy series, haven’t always seen eye to eye, dissolving their partnership in the 1990s.

Naylor continued to write the Red Dwarf TV series but, in 2021, launched a High Court action against Grant over the rights to the show.

The dispute has now been resolved and it’s been confirmed that both of the writers will continue separately working on Red Dwarf in different media.

A statement reads: “Rob Grant and Doug Naylor are delighted to announce that the ongoing dispute over the Red Dwarf rights has been resolved.

“Moving onwards and upwards, Rob and Doug hope to launch separate iterations of Red Dwarf across various media, working again with the cast and other valued partners, and wish each other the very best.

“Smoke a kipper, Red Dwarf will be back for breakfast!!”…

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1970[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

This is something rather different for a Beginning.Jefferson Starship’s Blows Against the Empire would be nominated for a Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo fifty-two years ago at the first Noreascon. It wouldn’t win and it’s the only album nominated until the Splendor & Misery recording by Clipping was nominated at Worldcon 75 for a Hugo in the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category. That didn’t win either. 

It is the first album to use Starship instead of Airplane, this under Kantner alone who produced the album, a name which Kantner and Slick would use for the Jefferson Starship that emerged after Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen left Jefferson Airplane. 

Kantner claimed that the inspiration for the album was the work of Heinlein, particularly Methuselah’s Children where a group of people hijack a starship. Kantner even quotes the novel in the opening song, “Mau Mau (Amerikon)”: “Push the button, pull the switch, cut the beam, make it march”. 

After listening to the album, I’ll be frelled if I can see how it relates to Methuselah’s Children at all. And I’d love to hear why it was nominated for a Hugo. Was it the Heinlein connection?

1974’s Dragon Fly was I think a much better SF album with “Hyperdrive” alone being one of the best SF songs done. 

So I’ll pick the Beginning stanza of “The Baby Tree”

There’s an island way out in the sea
Where the babies they all grow on trees
And its jolly good fun To swing in the sun
But you gotta watch out if you sneeze-sneeze
You gotta watch out if you sneeze

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born March 11, 1921 F. M. Busby. Together with his wife and others he published Cry of the Nameless which won the Hugo award in 1960. Heinlein was a great fan of him and his wife — The Cat Who Walks Through Walls in part dedicated to Busby and Friday in part to his wife Elinor. He was a very busy writer from the early Seventies to the late Nineties writing some nineteen published novels and myriad short stories before he blamed the Thor Power Tools decision for forcing his retirement. (Died 2005.)
  • Born March 11, 1925 Christopher Anvil. Pen name of Harry Christopher Crosby, a Campbellian writer through and through. He was a staple of Astounding starting in 1956. The Colonization Series that he wrote there would run to some thirty stories. Short stories were certainly his favored length as he only wrote two novels, The Day the Machines Stopped and The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun. He’s readily available at the usual digital sources. (Died 2009.)
  • Born March 11, 1935 Nancy Kovack, 88. She appeared as Nona in Trek’s “A Private Little War”. She also showed up in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.The Invaders, as Medea in Jason and the ArgonautsBatman (twice as Queenie), Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, I Dream of JeannieTarzan and the Valley of Gold,  Marooned, Get Smart! and The Invisible Man
  • Born March 11, 1952 Douglas Adams. Another one who died way too young. I’ve read and listened to the full cast production the BBC did of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but have absolutely no desire to see the film. Wait, wasn’t there a TV series as well? Yes, there was. There’s also the Dirk Gently series which is, errr, odd and its charms escape my understanding. He and Mark Carwardine also wrote the most excellent Last Chance to See, their travels to various locations in the hope of encountering species on the brink of extinction. It’s more upbeat than it sounds. (Died 2001.)
  • Born March 11, 1961 Elias Koteas, 62. Genre appearances include the very first (and I think best of the many that came out) as the sports-crazed vigilante Casey Jones in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (I did warn you, didn’t I?), Cyborg 2 (just don’t, really don’t), Gattaca, Skinwalkers, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Haunting in Connecticut.
  • Born March 11, 1963 Alex Kingston, 60. River Song in Doctor Who. She’s in a number of different stories with a number of different Doctors.  I don’t see a lot of other genre work from her but she was in Ghost Phone: Phone Calls from the Dead, as Sheila and she was Lady Macbeth in the National Theatre Live of Macbeth. Now the latter I would have really to seen!  Oh, and she’s in the Arrowverse as Dinah Lance, in FlashForward as Fiona Banks and recently shows up as Sara Bishop on A Discovery of Witches, a series based off the stellar Deborah Harkness All Souls Trilogy series of the same name.
  • Born March 11, 1989 Anton Yelchin. Yes another way too early death. Best known for playing Pavel Chekov in Star TrekStar Trek Into Darkness, and Star Trek Beyond. He also was in Terminator Salvation as Kyle Reese, in the Zombie comedy Burying the Ex as Max and voiced Clumsy Smurf in a series of Smurf films. Really he did. (Died 2016.)

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Arlo and Janis work a genre reference into a strip about tonight’s change to daylight savings time.

(12) YOU’VE GOT MAIL. Not sff, but the New York Times tells about a fascinating project that’s started to sift the centuries-old impounded mail taken to from prize ships during England’s colonial wars: “Long-Lost Letters Bring Word, at Last”. At the article are quotes from these old letters.

… None of those lines ever reached their intended recipients. British warships instead snatched those letters, and scores more, from aboard merchant ships during wars from the 1650s to the early 19th century.

 While the ships’ cargoes — sugar from the Caribbean, tobacco from Virginia, ivory from Guinea, enslaved people bound for the Americas — became war plunder, the papers were bundled off to so called “prize courts” in London as potential legal proof that the seizures were legitimate spoils of war….

…For centuries since, the bulging boxes of those undelivered letters, seized from around 35,000 ships, sat neglected in British government storage, a kind of half-forgotten dead letter office for intercepted mail.

Poorly sorted and only vaguely cataloged, the Prize Papers, as they became known, have now begun revealing lost treasures. Archivists at Britain’s National Archives and a research team at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany are working on a joint project to sort, catalog and digitize the collection, which gives a nuanced portrait of private lives, international commerce and state power in an age of rising empires.

The project, expected to last two decades, aims to make the collection of more than 160,000 letters and hundreds of thousands of other documents, written in at least 19 languages, freely available and easily searchable online.

Many of the papers haven’t been read in centuries, and many letters remain sealed and unopened….

(13) THAT’S WHO. At Galactic Journey, Jessica Holmes provides commentary on the very latest (in 1968) Doctor Who story arc. “[March 10, 1968] The Best Laid Plans (Doctor Who: The Web Of Fear [Part 2])”.

The latest serial of Doctor Who tempers the base-under-siege formula with an infusion of ‘whodunnit’, but is this a fresh take on the format or are the mystery elements just a red herring? Let’s take a look at the latter half of The Web Of Fear….

(14) BREAK IT TO HIM GENTLY. “What $27.2 billion buys NASA — and more space stories you may have missed this week” at Yahoo!

Tom Cruise, if you’re reading this, you may want to sit down

Back in October, the head of Universal Pictures made waves by hinting that an upcoming film led by none other than Tom Cruise could literally be heading to outer space. Now, at the time, it seemed a little outlandish, but given Cruise’s career of going to increasingly extreme lengths to pull off elaborate stunts, going to space didn’t seem like too much of a giant leap.

But, unfortunately, it appears someone already beat him to it. On Wednesday, a trailer for “The Challenge,” which was produced by Channel 1 Russia in partnership with Roscosmos and partially filmed aboard the International Space Station, was released. The story is said to follow a surgeon who’s taken aboard the ISS to perform an emergency procedure on an injured cosmonaut. No word on if “The Challenge” will see an official release in the United States, although Tom Cruise likely still hopes to one-up that production by becoming the first civilian to do a spacewalk outside the ISS. And you know what? I think there’s a pretty good chance he’ll actually try to do it….

(15) PUT ON YOUR THINKING CAPS. “To Save Physics, Experts Suggest We Need to Assume The Future Can Affect The Past” contends a writer for Science Alert.

…The quantum threat to locality (that distant objects need a physical mediator to interact) stems from an argument by the Northern Ireland physicist John Bell in the 1960s.

Bell considered experiments in which two hypothetical physicists, Alice and Bob, each receive particles from a common source. Each chooses one of several measurement settings, and then records a measurement outcome. Repeated many times, the experiment generates a list of results.

Bell realized that quantum mechanics predicts that there will be strange correlations (now confirmed) in this data. They seemed to imply that Alice’s choice of setting has a subtle “nonlocal” influence on Bob’s outcome, and vice versa – even though Alice and Bob might be light years apart.

Bell’s argument is said to pose a threat to Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which is an essential part of modern physics.

But that’s because Bell assumed that quantum particles don’t know what measurements they are going to encounter in the future. Retrocausal models propose that Alice’s and Bob’s measurement choices affect the particles back at the source. This can explain the strange correlations, without breaking special relativity.

In recent work, we’ve proposed a simple mechanism for the strange correlation – it involves a familiar statistical phenomenon called Berkson’s bias (see our popular summary here).

There’s now a thriving group of scholars who work on quantum retrocausality. But it’s still invisible to some experts in the wider field. It gets confused for a different view called “superdeterminism”….

(16) READY FOR MY CLOSE UP. “NASA spacecraft beams back tantalizing images of volcanic world Io” at MSN.com.

… Io is tortured because it’s stuck in a relentless “tug-of-war” between the massive Jupiter and two of Jupiter’s other big moons, Ganymede and Europa — a world that might harbor a sizable ocean. This powerful push and pull creates profound heat inside a world that’s a little larger than our moon. All this heat seeks to reach the surface, resulting in molten lava and extreme volcanism. It’s extremely unlikely a world swimming in lava could host conditions for even the hardiest of life to evolve. But other moons in our solar system could potentially contain suitable conditions for life to evolve in their subsurface, like the Saturnian moons Enceladus and Mimas (and, of course, Europa).

Scientists like [mission director Scott] Bolton use these images to, among other things, identify new volcanoes. The darker spots are often places where eruptions have occurred, and other recent NASA imagery shows that this volcanism is incessant. A looming question is whether a global magma ocean oozes inside Io, or if there are just giant pockets of molten rock.

When the Juno spacecraft gets nearer to Io, it’s not directly approaching the moon, but veering by the moon’s orbit, as shown in the graphic below. During each orbit, Juno will snap pictures at the closest approach before it once again whips around the gas giant Jupiter. By the end of December 2023, Juno’s orbit (PJ 58) will bring it within some 930 miles of Io. It’s a much-anticipated event.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Stephen Colbert interviews Steven Spielberg about a now-ironic complaint about Spielberg’s Night Gallery episode. “Spielberg’s ‘Appalling, Irresponsible’ Contribution to the Horror Anthology, ‘Night Gallery’”.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Kathy Sullivan, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 1/17/23 A Stone Soup Of Pixels Served Up With Buttered Toasted Scrolls

(1) PLAYING THE TRUMPS. “Stephen Colbert to Produce ‘Chronicles of Amber’ TV Series Adaptation” reports Variety.

Stephen Colbert is joining the team that is adapting Roger Zelazny’s “The Chronicles of Amber” for television [under his Spartina production banner].

… “George R.R. Martin and I have similar dreams,” Colbert said. “I’ve carried the story of Corwin in my head for over 40 years, and I’m thrilled to partner with Skybound and Vincent Newman to bring these worlds to life. All roads lead to Amber, and I’m happy to be walking them.”

“The Chronicles of Amber” follows the story of Corwin, who is said to “awaken on Earth with no memory, but soon finds he is a prince of a royal family that has the ability to travel through different dimensions of reality (called ‘shadows’) and rules over the one true world, Amber.”…

(2) MORE LORE. Season 3 of The Mandalorian airs 3 March 1 on Disney+.

The journeys of the Mandalorian through the Star Wars galaxy continue. Once a lone bounty hunter, Din Djarin has reunited with Grogu. Meanwhile, the New Republic struggles to lead the galaxy away from its dark history. The Mandalorian will cross paths with old allies and make new enemies as he and Grogu continue their journey together.

And according to Dark Horizons:

…A fourth season of the series is already in development, whilst this arrives ahead of both “Star Wars: Ahsoka” and “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew”, both due to arrive on the Disney+ service later this year. Filming on “Star Wars: The Acolyte” and a second season of “Star Wars: Andor” are both underway in the UK at present….

(3) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Simultaneous Times SF podcast episode 59 has been released. Listen to it here. Stories featured in this episode:

  • “Three to Go” by Ria Rees. Music by Phog Masheeen. Read by Jean-Paul Garnier 
  • “Ghosts” by Michael Butterworth. Music by Julie Carpenter. Read by the author.

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

(4) FIFTIETH DAY OF HARPERCOLLINS STRIKE TOMORROW. Supporters of the strike against HarperCollins will rally January 18. Publishers Weekly has details: “HarperCollins Union Plans Rally at News Corp Offices in Manhattan”.

As unionized employees at HarperCollins Publishers prepare to mark their 50th day on strike next week, union representatives announced that a rally is planned outside the publisher’s parent company, News Corp, in Manhattan at 12:30 p.m. on January 18. Since November 10 of last year, labor negotiations between the union and company executives have been stalled, and union representatives are hoping to put pressure on the publisher to return to the bargaining table.

Local 2110 of the UAW represents more than 250 HarperCollins employees in editorial, sales, publicity, design, legal, and marketing departments. Union representatives said negotiations have stalled over higher pay, a greater commitment to diversifying staff, and stronger union protection. Negotiations started in December 2021 and unionized employees have been working without a contract since April 2022….

(5) WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW, THEY SAY. [Item by Bill Higgins.] Kenneth Hite, a Chicago author, game designer, and podcaster, was shot in the leg last week by armed robbers near his Hyde Park home.  Fortunately, he’s going to be fine.  Furthermore, he sold an account of the experience to the UK magazine The Spectator.  Because Ken Hite is a true professional. “Trigger warning: how it feels to get shot”.

… But at 3.10 a.m. on Friday, I was walking home from a late-night writing session at a colleague’s apartment a block from my house. (I work as a games designer.) A car pulled up, and two guys with guns jumped out and aggressively requested my 2014 MacBook Air.

I wish I could say I carefully considered whether my life was worth more than a nine-year-old computer and (more importantly) a manuscript I hadn’t backed up, but I acted without thinking and ran. After six or seven shots, I felt a hard thump on the back of my right calf. Then the two geniuses remembered that stuff about the third-largest armed force in Illinois, jumped back into their car and tore off. I counted my blessings and let myself into my house.

It was then that I noticed an awful lot of blood on the floor around my foot. The gunshots had, it turned out, awakened my wife Sheila, who wondered if I knew what had happened. Suddenly I did. ‘I’ve been shot in the leg,’ I told her. She called 911 and both sets of police – University of Chicago and Chicago Police Department – showed up almost immediately. In between questions, one of the cops put a tourniquet on my leg. I’ve heard since that if the tourniquet doesn’t hurt more than the bullet wound, it’s not on tight enough. This one was on tight enough….

(6) COVID STALKS AWARDS SHOWS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Following the Golden Globe Awards, several celebrities (including some particularly big names) tested positive for COVID. Apparently in response, the Critics Choice Awards instituted a COVID test policy. “Several celebrities test positive for COVID after Golden Globes” at ABC News.

In the wake of the Golden Globes last week, several celebrities said they have tested positive for COVID-19.

At least four stars, including Jamie Lee Curtis and Michelle Pfeiffer, revealed they contracted the virus following the awards show.

In response, the Critics Choice Awards, which was held on Sunday, announced that all attendees would be required to submit a negative COVID-19 test before entering the venue, according to Deadline.

Public health experts said the news of actors and actresses falling ill is not surprising due to the relaxed regulations and people gathering indoors.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1992 [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]  Mexican food liked you’ve dreamed of

Tonight’s essay concerns Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies. It was published by Doubleday in Mexico in 1992 as Como agua para chocolate.  Yes, the English language title is a lot longer.

Perfection Learning published the first edition in 1995. The film actually came out here in 1993 before the book was published here because though shot in Mexico, it had simultaneous English and Spanish language versions. 

So let’s talk about the book. And a magical book it is. Even in the English translation! The original Spanish version, Como agua para chocolat, was the top-selling book in Mexico in 1990. As a work of Latin magical realism, it can’t be topped by any other work to date. I unfortunately don’t know Spanish so I read the English translation which is quite excellent.

Now it’s here because a recurring theme of both the book and the film that came out is is food, which is used to represent all aspects of the vibrant, if troubled, Mexican culture. Hardly a scene goes by without someone eating or preparing a meal, and some of the more tasty chapters/scenes involve truly awesome banquets. Both in the book and in the film, there’s a real feeling that food is more than just something one eats. Food here is a celebration of the helix of life and death, of consuming and being consumed.

It’s is possibly the most erotic film ever made. Truly it is. Even the baking of bread becomes an act of eros. 

Now here’s an exquisite example of the food scenes herein

She felt so lost and lonely. One last chile in walnut sauce left on the platter after a fancy dinner couldn’t feel any worse than she did. How many times had she eaten one of those treats, standing by herself in the kitchen, rather than let it be thrown away. When nobody eats the last chile on the plate, it’s usually because none of them wants to look like a glutton, so even though they’d really like to devour it, they don’t have the nerve to take it. It was as if they were rejecting that stuffed pepper, which contains every imaginable flavor; sweet as candied citron, juicy as pomegranate, with the bit of pepper and the subtlety of walnuts, that marvelous chile in the walnut sauce. Within it lies the secret of love, but it will never be penetrated, and all because it wouldn’t feel proper.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 17, 1899 Nevil Shute. Author of On the Beach. It originally appeared as a four-part series, The Last Days on Earth, in the London weekly Sunday Graphic in April 1957. It was twice a film. He has other SF novels including An Old Captivity which involves time travel and No Highway which gets a review by Pohl in Super Science Stories, April 1949. There’s In the Wet and Vinland the Good as well. (Died 1960.)
  • Born January 17, 1910 Carol Hughes. Genre fans will no doubt best recognize her as Dale Arden in Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe from sixty years ago. Other than The Red Dragon, a Charlie Chan film done in the Forties if I remember correctly, I’m not seeing anything that’s even genre adjacent for her though I’m assuming that the Fifties Ghost Buster short she was in should be a genre production. (Died 1995.)
  • Born January 17, 1927 Eartha Kitt. Though you’ll have lots of folks remembering her as Catwoman from the original Batman, she appeared in but four episodes there. Genre wise, she was in such series as I-SpyMission: ImpossibleMatrix, the animated Space Ghost Coast to Coast and the animated My Life as a Teenage Robot. Film wise, she played Freya in Erik the Viking, voiced Bagheera in The Jungle Book: Mowgli’s Story and was Madame Zeroni In Holes.(Died 2008.)
  • Born January 17, 1931 James Earl Jones, 92. His first SF appearance was in Dr. Strangelove as Lt. Lothar Zogg.  And I think I need not list all his appearances as Darth Vader here. Some genre appearances include Exorcist II: The HereticThe Flight of DragonsConan the Barbarian as Thulsa Doom and I actually remember him in that role, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, did you know the 1995 Judge Dredd had a Narrator? Well he’s listed as doing it, and Fantasia 2000 as well. In 2022, his voice was used via software for Darth Vader in the Obi-Wan KenobiDisney+ miniseries. Jones signed a deal with Lucasfilm authorizing archival recordings of his voice to be used in the future to artificially generate the voice of Darth Vader. Jones said later that all Vader voicing would using AI software. 
  • Born January 17, 1935 Paul O. Williams. A poet won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 1983 after publishing The Breaking of Northwall and The Ends of the Circle which are the first two novels of his Pelbar Cycle. I’ve not read these, so be interested in your opinions, of course. (Died 2009.)
  • Born January 17, 1962 Jim Carrey, 61. His first genre film is Once Bitten whose content is obvious from its name. The ‘dorable Earth Girls Are Easy was next followed up by Batman Forever in which he played a manic Riddler, then there’s the The Truman Show which stretches genre boundaries I think. May we not talk about How the Grinch Stole Christmas? And is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind genre?,  who’s seen Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events?, Horton Hears a Who! (FUN!), A Christmas Carol  of which I know nothing, Mr. Popper’s Penguins (well it sounds cute) and, I’m not you, Sonic the Hedgehog. Busy, isn’t he?
  • Born January 17, 1970 Genndy Tartakovsky, 53. Like Romulan Ale, animation style is a matter of taste. So while I like his work on Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars, I can understand why many SW fans don’t as it’s definitely an acquired taste.  He also is responsible for directing the animated Hotel Transylvania franchise. 

(9) THE SKY’S THE LIMIT. “Should We Block the Sun to Counter Climate Change?” – an opinion piece in the New York Times.

Last month, a two-person start-up company by the name of Make Sunsets claimed that it had launched weather balloons filled with reflective sulfur particles into the sky somewhere over the coast of Baja California. More provocation than experiment, the launch was a first-of-its-kind field test of a climate intervention known as geoengineering: a branch of speculative technology that promises to counteract and even reverse global warming by altering Earth’s atmosphere.

Long a taboo idea among climate experts thought too dangerous even to research, geoengineering is becoming increasingly mainstream. In 2019, Congress gave the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration $4 million to research techniques like the one Make Sunsets just tested, and it has since drawn interest from the Biden administration.

As the world continues to fall short of the goals of the Paris agreement and the costs of climate change mount, is geoengineering an idea worth taking seriously, or is it a world-historically reckless distraction from the global effort to transition away from fossil fuels? Here’s a look at the debate….

(10) A CELLER’S MARKET. [Item by Christian Brunschen.] A company literally calling themselves “SciFi Foods” are using CRISPR gene editing to develop “scalable beef cell lines” for cultivation — with the CEO claiming inspiration from Ian M. Banks’ The Player of Games. (They’re by far not the only cultivated-meat company out there of course.) “The first CRISPR gene-edited meat is coming. This is the CEO making sci-fi a reality” at Fast Company.

…Cost parity with traditional meat is every founder’s goal, one that sets a seemingly unattainable target. (In 2022, the average price of ground beef was $4.81/lb.) SciFi is betting that the only way to economically scale cultivated meat is with CRISPR, and that by making iterative tweaks they can create dependable cell lines with rich, meat-y flavor. “We have an eventual target of $1 per burger at commercial scale,” March says.

Once harvested, beef cells will be formulated into a blended burger that is mostly like the plant-based burgers you may already know—soy protein and coconut oil. SciFi’s secret sauce is adding a small percentage of SciFi cells (5% to 20%, according to March) to reward our taste buds with the beef-y notes we may think are missing from competitors like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. Blood-quickening, salivatory, tempting….

(11) TRIVIAL TRIVIA. The TV adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story, “The Electric Grandmother”, first aired on this day in 1982.

(12) EXTRA CREDIT. Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part 2, “A sequel 40 years in the making.” A four-night event, streaming March 6 on Hulu. John King Tarpinian declares, “I can hardly wait.”

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Honest Trailers — Demolition Man” sends up another Sylvester Stallone science ficton movie.

…One of the few R-rated action sci-fi films that’s remembered more for its clever writing than its shootouts. But kids today will never understand the significance of this movie just like my ex-wife will never understand the significance of the John Spartan mannequin I bought from a Planet Hollywood estate sale….

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Christian Brunschen, Bill Higgins, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 1/7/23 Farmers Market In The Sky

(1) IT WASN’T THE HOBBIT. What turned Stephen Colbert into a voracious reader? Science fiction. Specifically, Niven, Asimov, Heinlein, Pohl and more. See “Team Hobbit or Lord of the Rings?” on TikTok.

(2) SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT. Concerning a Slate critic’s claim about Tolkien’s elves, here’s Kalimac’s response from “Ross Douthat writes a fantasy novel”.

…Tolkien’s elves…. only … “essentially good” in the … sense in which they’re broadly good, they’re more good than bad, they aspire to goodness. Read the Silmarillion and you’ll find plenty of elves behaving extremely badly, and a few who are evil the way that Saruman in Lord of the Rings is evil. The reason you don’t find elves like that in Lord of the Rings is that the elves are chastened by their earlier experiences, the ones recounted in the Silmarillion, and aren’t going to make the same mistake again….

(3) SPECULATIVE POETS AT COLLAGE. [Item by Denise Dumars.] Science Fiction and Fantasy fan? Poetry fan? Why not try both together? You will get to do so when members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association  (SFPA) read their work and discuss the topic at Collage: a place for Art and Culture. You’ll also learn how to join the SFPA and how to find markets for your own poetry in the genres by writers who have published in numerous journals both print and online. Come join us on Sunday, January 15, at 2:00 p.m.. Collage is located at the south end of the Harbor Freeway, at 731 S. Pacific Ave., San Pedro, CA, 90731.   

Speakers:  

  • Wendy Van Camp: Poet Laureate of Anaheim, CA, and Convention Coordinator for the SFPA, Wendy is an award-winning writer who has edited Eye to the Telescope, the online journal of the SFPA, and is currenly nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She edits the Eccentric Orbits series of SF/F poetry anthlogies, and the current issue is nominated for Best Anthology Award. Find her at https://wendyvancamp.com/.  
  • Ashley Dioses: Award winning dark fantasy poet and fiction writer, with books of poetry published by Jackanapes Press and Hippocampus Press, Ashley has been nominated for the Rhysling and Elgin awards for SF/F poetry as well as appearing in such well-known journals as Cemetery Dance and Weirdbook. She blogs at fiendlover.blogspot.com.  
  • Denise Dumars: Columnist for Star* Line, the Journal of the SFPA, and widely published and award-winning poet and short fiction writer, Denise has been a college English instructor and a literary agent. Author of several poetry books and chapbooks, she has been nominated multiple times for the Rhysling, Elgin, and Dwarf Stars awards and is a current nominee for the Pushcart Prize. Find her at www.DeniseDDumars.com.  
  • Jean-Paul L. Garnier: Editor of Star*Line, the Journal of the SFPA, he is the owner of Space Cowboy bookstore, winner of the Critters Best Bookstore award for 2021. His podcast is Simultaneous Times, and he is an independent publisher of SF poetry and fiction. He is a five-time nominee for the Elgin award with several books in print. He contributes to dreamfoundry.org. Find him at https://spacecowboybooks.com/.

(4) PIEZOELECTRIC BOOGALOO. A New York Times writer says, “‘M3GAN’ Makes Us Ask (Again): Who’s Afraid of Dancing Robots?”

…“When you see the Boston Dynamics robots dancing in perfect unison,” Johnstone said, “it’s almost like them looking at us and saying, ‘We can do what you do, and we can do it better,’ in the most obnoxious way.” He chuckled. “Like they’re going to sashay their way toward the extermination of all humanity.”

M3GAN’s ice-cold, ruthlessly calculated “performance” stands in contrast to the human dancing in some recent horror films, where flesh-and-bone bodies reach states of overheated delirium. The choreographer, director and writer Jack Ferver, who worked on the coming horror movie “The Parenting,” said dance horror is effective when the person dancing “transcends their personhood.”

But what does that mean for a nonperson? Robots aren’t dead behind the eyes because they’re in some kind of ecstatic trance; they’re dead behind the eyes because they’re not alive….

(5) MEMORY LANE.

1964 [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.] Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

No. We are not here to talk about the stellar Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory film but rather about the source material that inspired it, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory novel. It was first published in the U.K. by George Allen & Unwin in 1964 with this edition illustrated by Faith Jaques. (Yes, the US edition was first but we think this one should be considered the true first for reasons below.) 

She was renowned for her work as a children’s book author, illustrator, artist, stamp designer and a very fierce advocate of artists’ rights for control of their work. She was chosen to do the British edition following the controversy over the depiction of the Oompa-Loompas in the US edition of the book where they were African pygmies. Racism at its very worst.

In this edition, as well as the subsequent sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, was written by Dahl in 1971, the Oompa-Loompas were drawn as being white and appearing similar to hippies and the references to Africa were deleted. All other editions followed this convention.

The story was said to based on Dahl’s experience of chocolate companies including Cadbury during his schooldays sending packages to the schoolchildren in exchange for their opinions on the new products. Popular belief was that the companies sent spies into each other’s factories to scope out new chocolates. 

Because of these practices, companies became highly protective of their chocolate making. It was a combination of this secrecy and the elaborate, often gigantic, machines that looked fantastical to a child that inspired him to write this novel.

There are several editions, each with a different illustrator — Joseph Schindelman (first and revised US editions); Faith Jaques (first UK edition); Michael Foreman (1985 US edition); and Quentin Blake (1995 edition). 

The book as you know as been adapted into two major motion pictures: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory just several years after it was published, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that came out about twenty years ago. A prequel film, Wonka, a musical fantasy film, exploring Willy Wonka’s origins will be released in 2023. Timothée Chalamet is Willy Wonka. Really, he is.

Eric Idle narrated the audiobook version of the American Edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 7, 1899 F. Orlin Tremaine. He was the Editor of Astounding from 1933 to 1937. It’s said that he bought Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness without actually reading it. Later as Editor at Bartholomew House, he brought out the first paperback editions of Lovecraft’s The Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Dunwich Horror. He wrote a dozen or so short stories that were published in the pulps between 1926 and 1949. (Died 1956.)
  • Born January 7, 1912 Charles Addams. Illustrator best known for the Addams Family which he first drew in 1932 and kept drawing until his death. Needless to say there have been a number of films and series using these characters of which The Addams Family is my favorite. Linda H. Davis’ Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life is well worth seeking out and reading. (Died 1988.)
  • Born January 7, 1913 Julian S. Krupa. Pulp cover and interior illustrator from 1939 to 1971 who graced Amazing Stories and Fantastic. In the Thirties, he also contributed art to fanzines, including Ad Astra. His grandson said that “his Grandfather did all the illustrations for the training films for the first Nuclear Submarines and was a friend to Admiral Rickover. And then continued to do early training films for NASA.” (Died 1989.)
  • Born January 7, 1928 William Peter Blatty. Novelist and screenwriter best known for The Exorcist though he was also the same for Exorcist III. The former is by no means the only genre work that he would write as his literary career would go on for forty years after this novel and would include Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing: A Fable which he renamed Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing: A Hollywood Christmas Carol and The Exorcist for the 21st Century, his final work. (Died 2017.)
  • Born January 7, 1955 Karen Haber, 68. Wife of Robert Silverberg. Author Of the Fire In Winter series (first co-written with Robert) and the War Minstrels series as well. With Robert, she edited three of the exemplary Universe anthologies that Terry Carr had created. Her Meditations on Middle Earth, her essay collection on J.R.R. Tolkien is quite superb. And of course her prequel Thieves’ Carnival to Leigh Brackett’s The Jewel of Bas is stunning.
  • Born January 7, 1962 Mark Allen Shepherd, 61. Morn, the bar patron on Deep Space Nine. Amazingly he was in Quark’s bar a total of ninety-three episodes plus one episode each on Next Gen and Voyager. Technically he’s uncredited in almost all of those appearances. That’s pretty much his entire acting career. I’m trying to remember if he has any lines. He’s also an abstract painter whose work was used frequently on DS9 sets. For all practical purposes, this was his acting career. Do note that we saw more Lurians on Discovery showing that the species is still around even in the 32nd century. 
  • Born January 7, 1971 Jeremy Renner, 52. You know him as Hawkeye in those MCU films but he’s also in a number of other SFF film including Hansel and Gretel: Witch HuntersMission: Impossible – Ghost ProtocolMission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Arrival.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

  • Catching up with Tom Gauld –

(8) THEY MADE MARVEL. CBR.com contends these are “The 10 Most Important Comics In Marvel History”. For example —

8/10 Fantastic Four #1 Brought The Heroes Back

As the superhero boom died out in the late 1940s, Timely switched to other genres, including romance, teen books, and comedy titles. In 1951, a year after Captain America was canceled, Timely became Atlas News Company and it seemed like the heroes would be gone for good.

But according to legend, a decade later Martin Goodman was playing golf with Jack Liebowitz, the then head of DC Comics when Liebowitz bragged about the company’s success with their new superhero titles, most notably the Justice League of America. Goodman turned to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to give Atlas their own superhero team, and from that discussion, the Fantastic Four, and “The Marvel Age of Comics,” were born.

(9) HE’S A POE MAN FROM A POE FAMILY. “Dudley did right: Harry Melling on his evolution from Harry Potter to Edgar Allan Poe” is explained by in a Yahoo! profile.

…He first appeared at 10 years old in Sorcerer’s Stone as the hero’s tortuous, spoiled cousin, Dudley Dursley, and would maintain the part into his 20s.

Unlike his contemporaries, he found life on set to be quite isolating at times. “My experience was unique in terms of I wasn’t in it throughout the entire shoot,” the actor, 33, tells EW over Zoom from Los Angeles — now much taller and leaner compared to the plump, rosy-cheeked child with a haughty smirk movie-goers have been used to. “The earthly sequences would very much be an isolated filming block. So, I dipped in, and then I went back to school and normal life.”

Melling never felt as if people would recognize him on the streets of London. “Which I kind of loved,” he quickly adds. To him, fame feels like noise. He counts himself lucky that he hasn’t become traditionally “famous.” “Sometimes it’s nice to just concentrate on the work and what excites you,” he says.

Melling has been able to do just that with his life post-Potter, from his early run in theater to playing chess champ Harry Beltik in the Netflix hit The Queen’s Gambit. However, one role would create a different kind of noise, the kind that would get his industry peers to notice him, if not the public. Seeing Melling as the limbless artist in 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs would inspire director Scott Cooper (Out of the FurnaceAntlers) to cast the Englishman as a young Edgar Allan Poe in The Pale Blue Eye, Melling’s most impressive on-screen role to date.

“I was struck by that performance,” Cooper tells EW of Melling’s work in Buster Scruggs. “I felt, ‘My God! He would be a really terrific Edgar Allan Poe.’ And as we say in Virginia, he kind of favors Poe. He looks like him.”….

Melling also was interviewed by NPR: “Harry Melling on playing Edgar Allan Poe in the new movie ‘The Pale Blue Eye’”.

…SIMON: The film is set in 1830. But I got to begin by asking, what’s Edgar Allan Poe doing at West Point?

MELLING: I know. That’s what I thought, right? He was there in real life, which is extraordinary….

(10) DOOR HANGER. Found hanging on the internet…

(11) BE FREE. JUNG_E debuts on Netflix on January 20.

Humanity’s hope and ultimate weapon A.I. combat warrior JUNG_E Watch her break free.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Andrew (not Werdna), Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 12/14/22 Scroll My Pixeling Down, Sport

(1) LOCUS CROWDFUNDING NEARS FINISH LINE. The Locus Magazine Indiegogo campaign wraps up tomorrow. Backers have pledged $73,015 of $75,000 as of this afternoon – they may make it!

Sarah Gailey interviewed Locus’ publisher and editor-in-chief at Stone Soup: “Liza Groen Trombi Asks Better Questions”.

…Locus is a hub of genre community news, collecting stories about publishers, awards, conferences, publishing rights, deaths, and so much more. You encounter a massive volume of information every day — you’ve mentioned elsewhere that Locus receives as many as 80-100 emails in an hour. How do you process that avalanche into such a concise and informative package?

Practice, practice, practice. We have a lot of systems to gather info, an amazing senior editor who sifts through hundreds of emails every day pulling out news and all the important bits and bobs (Tim Pratt – we all bow down to his speed and competence), another who indexes all of our incoming books, many of which we hear about in email at this point (Carolyn Cushman), another who is constantly chasing up new titles and hunting down info  (Arley Sorg)… and we also know we aren’t going to cover everything, catch every bit of news. So then a little self-compassion helps a lot….

(2) THE SUN IN A JAR. In “Fusion? We’ve Seen This Movie Before”, the New York Times tells how popular culture is setting viewers’ expectations for a scientific breakthrough.  

…You probably already have some familiarity with fusion thanks to movies.

At the end of the 1985 sci-fi classic “Back to the Future,” Dr. Emmett Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd, soups up his tricked-out time-traveling DeLorean by feeding trash into a canister called the Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor attached to the top of the car. And in “Spider-Man 2,” from 2004, the well-meaning scientist Dr. Octavius (a.k.a. Doc Ock, played by Alfred Molina) creates a fusion reactor with an artificial sun at the center. But when it gets out of control, so does he, transforming into a villain who aims to re-create the dangerous machine.

Pop culture’s fascination with fusion goes beyond a process that sustains robotics and machinery; our culture’s collective dreams of safe, unlimited energy have even been epitomized by some of our heroes….

(3) MAPPING THE OUTER DARKNESS. Sunday Morning Transport marks “Reader Favorite Wednesday” by posting as a free read Yoon Ha Lee’s “Nonstandard Candles”.

Why hasn’t Yoon Ha Lee won all the awards? His writing is always smart, inventive, and above all compelling—everything you want Science Fiction to be. This story, about making maps through the darkest of spaces, is just one example, and especially apropos given everything going on in the world right now.

(4) TWISTED SISTERS CREATOR REMEMBERED. The Comics Journal reports “Diane Noomin’s Memorial Service at SVA, November 10, 2022”, a profile of the artist with a full a transcript of the remarks by her husband Bill Griffith (excerpted below).

… Diane was my partner in so many ways, from our mutual love for comics and art to a decades-long, behind the scenes collaboration on what we produced, and as aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, and friends to our extended family. But here’s the thing to remember. We were each other’s creative editors on every project we worked on, on her Twisted Sisters anthologies, on her career-spanning Glitz-2-Go book, on her recent landmark book, Drawing Power, and especially for me, on my four graphic novels, the last one still in progress. Diane’s fingerprints are all over every page of all of those books. I can’t begin to count how many times, after reading a few of my pages as I created them, she’d say, “Put more feeling into it. Get under the character’s skin, bring out the emotion. Put in some backstory.”

These books wouldn’t be the same without Diane. I can only hope I absorbed enough of her spot-on insights and continuity expertise to keep me on the straight and narrow in the future….

(5) RICHARD MILLER (1942-2022).  Industrial Light and Magic sculptor Richard Miller died December 8 at the age of 80. Deadline led with his work creating Princess Leia’s gold bikini costume for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, and followed with a long list of credits of his work on other Hollywood films, many of which were genre.

His work was used in films like Willow (1988), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Body Wars (1989), Back to the Future Part II (1989), Back to the Future Part III (1990), Backdraft (1991), Rocketeer (1991), Hook (1991) and Death Becomes Her (1992).

Other movies his work was featured in were The Flintstones (1994), Baby’s Day Out (1994), The Mask (1994), Casper (1995), Congo (1995), Jumanji (1995), Mission Impossible (1996), Spawn (1997), Flubber (1997).

Miller returned to the Star Wars universe when his sculptures were used in the three prequels of the saga. His credits also included films like The Mummy (1999), Space Cowboys (2000), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Planet of the Apes (2001), Hulk (2003) and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003).

Some of his last work was on the Pirates of the Caribbean series of films.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

2007? [By Cat Eldridge.] The Ent in Birmingham 

Yes, there’s an Ent in Birmingham. Well, there’s supposed to be.

Let’s start at the beginning with the solicitation: “In honour of JRR Tolkien, a Treebeard type Statue is going to be built for the centre of Moseley, the place where he grew up as a child and where he puts his inspiration down to. In this area, very close to his second childhood home in what was the hamlet of Sarehole (now part of Moseley) are the amazing places of Moseley Bog, the Dell and Sarehole Mill. These 3 places, alongside the River Cole have been preserved and protected, allowing the writer to experience what it must have been like for JRR and his brother Hilary as children.” 

They raised the cost by selling leaves, to wit “Under ‘him’, will be a bed of leaves on which you can have a personalised dedication engraved and so be associated with this most famous of writers. We are offering 30 large bronze leaves at a fixed price of £2000.” 

So far, so good. The twenty foot tall stainless steel structure is off Treebeard and it up in Moseley Village Green, near J. R. R. Tolkien’s childhood home in Birmingham. It will eventually be made by the author’s great-nephew Tim Tolkien.

Let me now quote the sculptor at length from an interview in 2007: “The ‘Ent’ idea was the one that was most liked. There was some negative criticism but enough positive, too, for planning permission to be granted.  

The design stage is complete now. It took probably about two to three years; the time was spent considering different ideas and going through the process of getting planning permission.  A model was made and used to create mock photos, which people thought were very realistic. I’ve had people ring to see if the statue has been moved, because they’ve seen the mock photos then gone to visit, but I haven’t started making yet. I won’t until all the money is there.  It will take about six months to construct the statue; I will build it in pieces then put it together on the site.”

In the meantime, local opposition has mounted several campaigns to get the local authorities to rescind their approval for it going there with one group claiming that Tolkien is not a major British literary figure and therefore this is an improper usage of that space. Yes, they really did say that.

Yes, there are digital models as it’ll appear placed there so here’s one. It might indeed be up but I can find no proof that it online. On the other leaf, it might never actually have happened. The Google Maps photo of the proposed location shows nothing but lawn.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born December 14, 1916 Shirley Jackson. First gained public attention for her short story “The Lottery, or, The Adventures of James Harris” but it was her The Haunting of Hill House novel which has made her legendary as a horror novelist as it’s truly a chilling ghost story.  I see that she’s written quite a bit of genre short fiction — has anyone here read it? And yes, I know there’s at least one series made off The Haunting of Hill House novel but you already know my opinion on such matters. (Died 1965.)
  • Born December 14, 1920 Rosemary Sutcliff. English novelist whose best known for children’s books, particularly her historical fiction which involved retellings of myths and legends, Arthurian and otherwise. Digging into my memory, I remember reading The Chronicles of Robin Hood which was her first published novel and rather good; The Eagle of the Ninth is set in Roman Britain and was an equally fine read. (Died 1992.)
  • Born December 14, 1949 David A. Cherry, 73. Illustrator working mostly in the genre. Amazingly he has been nominated eleven times for Hugo Awards, and eighteen times for Chesley Awards with an astonishing eight wins! He is a past president of the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists. Oh, and he’s is the brother of the science fiction writer C. J. Cherryh (“Cherry” is the original spelling of the last name of the family) so you won’t be surprised that he’s painted cover art for some of her books such as The Cherryh Odyssey and The Kif Strike Back! as well as books for Robert Asprin, Andre Norton, Diane Duane, Lynn Abbey and Piers Anthony to name but a few.
  • Born December 14, 1954 James Horan, 68. One of those actors that had roles across the Trek verse, having appeared on Next GenerationVoyager, Deep Space Nine and Enterprise. He also voiced a character on Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, and showed up on Highlander, Charmed and Lost. Like so many Trek alums, he’s also been on The Orville
  • Born December 14, 1959 Debbie Lee Carrington. Actress who was an ardent advocate for performers with disabilities. She was the performer inside the Howard the Duck costume, a Martian rebel named Thumbelina in Total Recall, an Ewok in Return of the Jedi (and in the TV movies that followed, a Drone in Invaders from Mars, Little Bigfoot in Harry and the Hendersons, an Emperor Penguin in Batman Returns and a Chucky double in Curse of Chucky. (Died 2018.)
  • Born December 14, 1966 Sarah Zettel, 56. Her first novel, Reclamation, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award in 1996, and in 1997 tied for the Locus Award for the Best First Novel. Writing under the alias of C. L. Anderson, her novel Bitter Angels won the 2010 Philip K. Dick award for best paperback original novel. If you’ve not read her, I’d recommend her YA American Fairy Trilogy as a good place to start.
  • Born December 14, 1968 Kelley Armstrong54. Canadian writer, primarily of fantasy novels since the early party of the century. She has published thirty-one fantasy novels to date, thirteen in her Women of the Otherworld series, another five in her Cainsville series. I’m reasonably sure I listened to the Cainsville series and would recommend it wholeheartedly.

(8) INVESTIGATING CONSCIOUSNESS. The Hugo Book Club Blog reviews “The Tentacle of Empathy” by Ray Nayler.

…The novel’s depiction of semi-functional future geopolitics and extreme forms of predatory capitalism are sadly believable, but written with interesting nuance. Nayler’s background working in the foreign service has given him a perspective and a knowledge that lends the story credibility.

But at its core, the strength of the novel is in how richly it explores the ways in which humans interpret experiences, how different sensoria and neurological architecture might construct individual understandings of the world, and how artificial intelligences might evolve and what that could mean for their sentience. It’s impossible to know what’s going on in another being’s head, nor whether depicting these processes can ever be accomplished, but we suspect that Nayler has done this about as well as possible….

The author was pleased —

(9) BLOOD SCIENCE. “World-First Trial Transfusing Lab-Grown Red Blood Cells Begins”ScienceAlert has details.

…The world-first trial, underway in the UK, is studying whether red blood cells made in the laboratory last longer than blood cells made in the body.

Although the trial is only small, it represents a “huge stepping stone for manufacturing blood from stem cells,” says University of Bristol cell biologist Ashley Toye, one of the researchers working on the study.

To generate the transfusions, the team of researchers isolated stem cells from donated blood and coaxed them into making more red blood cells, a process that takes around three weeks.

In the past, researchers showed they could transfuse lab-grown blood cells back into the same donor they were derived from. This time, they have infused the manufactured cells into another compatible person – a process known as allogeneic transfusion….

(10) SOME LIGHTNING FOR THUNDER LIZARDS. 65 comes to movie theaters March 10. SYFY Wire explains the premise.

…The new film, written and directed by A Quiet Place creators Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, opens with a very familiar premise. Commander Mills (Adam Driver), a starship pilot, is sending out a distress signal after his ship crashed on an uncharted planet. With his means of escape ripped to shreds and just one human survivor (Arianna Greenblatt) to co-exist with on this new world, he has no choice but to simply work to survive until some form of help can arrive. What he doesn’t know, of course, is that he’s crashed somewhere very familiar, not to him, but certainly to us.

That’s right, the “65” of the title is for “65 million years ago,” pitting Driver’s character against all manner of prehistoric creatures who’ve never seen the likes of him before, and setting up some very interesting implications about the early history of Earth….

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “’A Very Cold War Christmas’ – A Late Show Animated Holiday Classic”.

It’s Christmas eve, and after Vladimir Putin demands Ukraine for Christmas, Santa must defend the North Pole against a Russian invasion. President Biden delivers much needed aid to Santa via bicycle drawn choo-choo train, and then sends an elite elf squadron of North Pole’s best to the Kremlin in a Top Gun style mission culminating in an epic face off in Red Square. Are you ready to “Ride into the Manger Zone?”

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Olav Rokne, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]