Kazuo IshiguroStephen Fry. Photo by Elena Ternovaja.Tom Baker
More than 1,200 people have been honoured in the UK’s New Year Honours List 2025. Some of those who have done notable genre work are listed below.
Insignia of a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour
The Order of the Companions of Honour
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, O.B.E., Author and Screenwriter. For services to Literature.
Ishiguro won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. Many of his works have fantastic elements. The Companions of Honour are a select group which is limited to 65 people at any one time.
Knights Bachelor
Stephen John Fry, President, Mind and Vice-President, Fauna & Flora International. For services to Mental Health Awareness, the Environment and to Charity.
His acting career includes many productions of genre interest, including Blackadder and the films V for Vendetta and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
Dr. Anthony Freeman, Scientist and Engineer, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA. For services to UK/US Relations in Space and Earth Science.
Member of the Order of the British Empire
Thomas Stewart BAKER, Actor and Writer. For services to Television
He played the Fourth Doctor in the Doctor Who series.
Anne Reid MBE. Actor. For services to Drama. (London, Greater London)
Reid’s notable film roles include the voice of Wendolene Ramsbottom in Wallace and Gromit: A Close Shave (1995).
Anne-Marie Duff. Actor. For services to Drama. (London, Greater London)
Ma Costa in the series His Dark Materials (2019)
Edward Maurice Charles Marsan. Actor. For services to Drama. (London, Greater London)
Voiced the Manticore in the Merlin episode “Love in the Time of Dragons”. Appeared as the practical magician Gilbert Norrell in the BBC period drama Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Played the main villain in the 2008 superhero film Hancock. Was Inspector Lestrade in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes.
Stephen John Fry, President, Mind and Vice-President, Fauna & Flora International. For services to Mental Health Awareness, the Environment and to Charity.
His varied acting career includes such productions of genre interest as TV’s Blackadder and the films V for Vendetta and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.
Member of the Order of the British Empire
Thomas Stewart BAKER, Actor and Writer. For services to Television
He played the Fourth Doctor in the Doctor Who series.
Kazuo IshiguroStephen Fry. Photo by Elena Ternovaja.Tom Baker
(2) F IS FOR FAKE. Silvia Moreno-Garcia today sent this warning to her newsletter readers:
I was going to try to show a newspaper for proof of life, but who gets newspapers these days? Anyway, it’s December 30, 2024 and there has been a scammer going around Facebook pretending to be me and trying to join writer groups. So this is a reminder:
1. All my official social media channels are listed via my website. 2. I do not direct message people, nor do I read or respond to direct messages. 3. I do not conduct business via social media or without my agent. 4. I do not offer personal advice via social media.
Don’t accept any messages from suspicious accounts! Stay safe!
…I’m thrilled to announce that the winner of the 2024 Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents is…
Drumroll
Fire Lord Ozai
As voiced by Mark Hamill in the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender and played by Daniel Dae Kim in the eponymous live action series, Fire Lord Ozai is the supreme ruler of the Fire Nation and a genocidal tyrant. His grandfather already wiped out the Air Nomads, while his father Fire Lord Azulon set his sights on the Earth Kingdom and Northern and Southern Water Tribes. Fire Lord Ozai, meanwhile, continues his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and tries to conquer or wipe out all other nations. He succeeds, too, and – granted near unlimited power by a passing comet – crowns himself the Phoenix King, ruler of his entire world.
After another Fire Lord accepts on his behalf –
…Scattered applause can be heard around the auditorium from those audience members who accepted the award on behalf of their parents. Hans Beimer is about to boo again, but Luke Skywalker, who’s sitting in the front row in full Jedi robes, uses a mild Force choke on him, just enough to shut him up.
At the bar in the back, Tyrion Lannister, who’s already quite drunk, calls out, “Well spoken, lad. You tell ’em, kid.”
(4) WEIRD AND WILD SCIENCE. Ian Tregillis has revealed that the “Wild Cards” universe is the basis of forthcoming article co-credited with George R.R. Martin. As he told readers of the Albuquerque Science Fiction Society newsletter:
…My last several blog posts for the Wild Cards website documented the step-by-step development of silly, yet increasingly sophisticated mathematical models for distilling the fundamental premise of Wild Cards into a concise, self-consistent physics framework. (Laying aside the unanswerable question of how any virus, extraterrestrial or otherwise, could imbue people with a panoply of physics-abusing powers.)
The work eventually reached a level where instead of writing another stupid blog post, it was worth attempting to turn the whole thing into a serious physics research article. I pitched this notion to George R.R. Martin and Melinda Snodgrass back in March.
“Ergodic Lagrangian Dynamics in a Superhero Universe”, by I. L. Tregillis & George R. R. Martin, will appear in the American Journal of Physics in early 2025.
Tregillis has previously used these thoughts to put together a whimsical (math-light, meme-heavy) hour-long presentation that takes a lay-audience through the development of this model, from first principles to the final result. To date he’s presented “The Math (& Physics) of Wild Cards” to the Albuquerque Science Fiction Society (November, 2023) and at Bubonicon 55 (August, 2024).
…Star Wars may be playing catch-up on representation, but science fiction fandom has been a safe space for queer expression since its modern beginnings. At the USC Fisher Museum of Art, an exhibition titled “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” explores queer history in sci-fi, starting from the 1930s through to the 1960s. Art, literature, and other ephemera have been carefully curated by ONE Archives, the largest repository of LGBTQ+ materials in the world. According to Alexis Bard Johnson, the Curator at the ONE Archives and USC Libraries, the starting point for the exhibition came from noticing the sheer volume of science fiction material in the archive. Many of the items on display come from the collections of Lisa Ben and Jim Kepner. Both were queer activists who were heavily into sci-fi fandom and members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society.
It’s important to note that there are two ways of looking at the word queer. One way is a person of one gender who has attraction and desire for someone of the same gender. Another definition of queer is someone who exists outside of the mainstream. In the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, people with queer identities could inhabit both of those definitions. In this way, it became a space to fit in a little more comfortably when it was not very safe to be out.
The other factor that made sci-fi fandom a haven at the time was the proliferation of fanzines. Lisa Ben and Jim Kepner learned how to produce fanzines during their time in the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. The club even had printing machinery for members to use. Lisa Ben published the first lesbian publication in the U.S., Vice Versa. Jim Kepner had his own zine called Toward Tomorrow. Having a means of production for outsider ideas along with the community built through a love for science fiction was an incredibly powerful way for queer people to find each other….
In io9’s annual “in memoriam” post, we pay tribute to actors, directors, artists, composers, writers, creators, and other icons in the realms of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy that have passed. Their inspiring work has impacted the lives of so many and will live on through their legacies in the worlds of genre entertainment….
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
One Million B.C. (Raquel Welch version)
By Paul Weimer: Or, WPIX strikes again.
I’ve mentioned WPIX, an independent station in NYC (channel 11) was responsible for me first seeing this movie¹. It was around when I was first watching Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, so it was around 1980 or so.
The movie is sheer nonsense. I had cause to rewatch it a couple of years ago, randomly during the height of the pandemic (big mood) when I tried to, and failed, to work from home due to technological limitations. I wanted to have something mindless on. And of all the things I could have picked, I delved into my youth and went with One Million B.C. I wound up watching more of the movie than I intended, as my laptop and my internet connection glacially struggled and my work production was minimal. (I would soon go back to the office, and in an office of 120 people, be one of ten in the building for weeks on end.)
So while I remembered a lot about this movie (and not just Raquel Welch in the famous fur bikini), there was a lot that I didn’t remember so much and got to see on the refresher. I remembered there was a big climatic battle between the two factions, for example, but the volcano erupting in the middle of it in a deus ex volcana was not something I had actively recalled. But the Triceratops fight against the small meat-eating dinosaur? I think that made a big impression on me back in the day and is why the trike is in my top three dinosaurs.
And sure, humans and dinosaurs never co-existed together, ever. But I do wonder if Stirling’s The Sky People, which is set in a universe with a habitable Venus and Mars wasn’t inspired by this film. While his Mars is all ancient civilizations, his Venus is jungles…with dinosaurs…and, cavemen (and beautiful cave women, too as it so “coincidentally” happens).
Fun fact: Apparently there is an earlier 1940 version in black and white. No fur bikinis in that one. Not only because of the mores of the 1940’s…but bikinis themselves had not yet been invented yet! I’ve never seen it. I wonder if any Filer has?
Anyway, the remake is mindless fun, still.
¹ The luxury of pre-cable TV in New York was in retrospect incredible: CBS (2), NBC (4) ABC (7). Independent stations on 5 (later, Fox) 9 (later the CW), and WPIX 11 the biggest of the independents (later WB). 13 was PBS, and then there were other PBS stations including 21, and 50 (50 showing the Doctor Who “movies” I’ve mentioned before). So the Independents really could specialize and WPIX specialized in movies. They called themselves “New York’s Movie Station” and meant it.
While solving quests in Dungeons & Dragons, the gamers who role-play as elves, orcs and halflings rely on the abilities and personalities of their custom-made characters, whose innate charisma and strength are as crucial to success as the rolls of 20-sided dice.
That is why the game’s first significant rule changes in a decade, which became official this fall as it celebrated its 50th anniversary, reverberated through the Dungeons & Dragons community and beyond. They prompted praise and disdain at game tables everywhere, along with YouTube harangues and irritated social media posts from Elon Musk.
“Races” are now “species.” Some character traits have been divorced from biological identity; a mountain dwarf is no longer inherently brawny and durable, a high elf no longer intelligent and dexterous by definition. And Wizards of the Coast, the Dungeons & Dragons publisher owned by Hasbro, has endorsed a trend throughout role-playing games in which players are empowered to halt the proceedings if they ever feel uncomfortable.
“What they’re trying to do here is put up a signal flare, to not only current players but potential future players, that this game is a safe, inclusive, thoughtful and sensitive approach to fantasy storytelling,” said Ryan Lessard, a writer and frequent Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master.
The changes have exposed a rift among Dungeons & Dragons players, a group as passionate as its pursuit is esoteric, becoming part of the broader cultural debate about how to balance principles like inclusivity and accessibility with history and tradition.
Robert J. Kuntz, an award-winning game designer who frequently collaborated with Gary Gygax, a co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, said he disliked Wizards of the Coast’s efforts to legislate from above rather than provide room for dungeon masters — the game’s ringleaders and referees — to tailor their individual campaigns.
“It’s an unnecessary thing,” he said. “It attempts to play into something that I’m not sure is even worthy of addressing, as if the word ‘race’ is bad.”…
(11) BY GEORGE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Ryan George took Christmas week off, so to speak, but strung together his 10 favorite episodes from 2024 in a one-hour Pitch Meeting compilation. “Pitch Meeting: Ryan George’s Picks For 2024”.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Daniel Dern, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]
No, I didn’t read this as a teenager like everyone else. I was reading and re-reading Terrance Dick’s Doctor Who novelisations. They fed my need for mythic heroes and running down corridors (there’s not enough of the latter in Sir Gawain; instead, there are plenty of tips on slaughtering and skinning a deer).
But now that I’ve read Sir Gawain, I’ve realised that fantasy fiction peaked in the 14th Century.* Stuff your Tolkeins**, your Fiests, your Clark Ashton Smiths, and your George R. R Martins (but not Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay; I love that book); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the ur-text, and nothing has ever surpassed it. And the fact you all knew this—yes, all of you—and didn’t bother to mention it really pisses me off….
(2) WSFS 2025. At From the Heart of Europe, Nicholas Whyte has posted the second installment of his adventures running the Hugos for Glasgow 2024, “The Administrator’s Tale, third time around: part two”. Within the conreport are these nuggets of news.
…[At the Business Meeting] A lot of the really serious stuff was kicked to various committees which will report next year. I got voted onto the committee which will investigate what actually happened at Chengdu. I was also appointed to another committee which will look at the administration of the Hugos more broadly, including the possibility of external audit. Other committees will consider the Business Meeting itself, and Hugo software….
…Next year, unusually, the Hugo team will be much the same as this year. I will be the Hugo administrator again; Cassidy, who was deputy Hugo administrator this year, will be WSFS Division Head; Kathryn Duval will repeat her role as Deputy Division Head; and my deputy as Hugo administrator will be Esther MacCallum-Stewart. Hopefully we will avoid the pitfalls of 2024, and make different mistakes instead.
To wrap up the Stories About Stories series here at Stone Soup, I wanted to talk to one of the hardest-working authors in the business about their self-published work. T. Kingfisher was previously featured in our Stories About Stories discussion about What Feasts At Night. Kingfisher, alongside fearless, dauntless, ruthless editor K.B. Spangler, were both kind enough to chat with me about their collaboration on Paladin’s Grace….
Gailey: Do the two of you enjoy collaborating?
Spangler: These books are a dream to work on. Her drafts are basically whistle-clean, except every so often she adds a detail or a plot point which is extremely…uh…distinctive. So I ask her to address these issues in the manner which is most appropriate to that particular manuscript. It helps that we’re great friends in meatspace, and she can trust that I’m wholly honest when I tell her, “Kingfisher, my buddy, my pal, this particular element will give your readers screaming horrors and you should either tone it down a skosh or stop advertising this as a children’s book.”
T. Kingfisher: KB doesn’t charge enough. I may be getting the friends and family rate, though, because I did once pull her out of a swimming pool that had been ignored by the previous owners, so it was an algae-slicked skating rink. It was impossible to get any footing. Once in, she couldn’t climb out. I had to tie a rope to a tree and haul her out with it. This sort of bonding experience is rare with one’s editor, alas….
From the Titanic to Apollo 11 and Jane Goodall to Jacques Cousteau, Christie’s Specialists select star lots from Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection
TNT is checking out The Librarians: The Next Chapter, the spinoff of the classic supernatural drama series that previously aired on the network, after it was pulled last week from The CW’s fall schedule….
… From writer and executive producer Dean Devlin, The Librarians: The Next Chapter is a spinoff of the original TV series The Librarians, which followed the adventures of the custodians of a magical repository of the world’s most powerful and dangerous supernatural artifacts. The new series centers on a “Librarian” (McGowan) from the past, who time traveled to the present and now finds himself stuck here. When he returns to his castle, which is now a museum, he inadvertently releases magic across the continent. He is given a new team to help him clean up the mess he made, forming a new team of Librarians….
What makes any book, particularly a science fiction book, polarizing? Controversy is certainly one way to define a polarizing book. In the current political climate, so many people are trying to ban books, which is keeping controversial books in the public conversation.
For me, the core of what makes a polarizing science fiction book is the love-or-hate relationship that people have with it. If people have dramatically opposing views of a book, that’s pretty polarized. In a genre like science fiction, so often rife with social commentary, the list of polarizing books is pretty long….
The list includes:
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
Dhalgren is a doorstop of a science fiction novel, clocking in at over 800 pages of mind-tripping science fiction. It’s not a book that gets banned, but inevitably leads to deep discussions about reality, perception, sanity, and America. The reviews on Goodreads seem to either call it genius or the most tedious and overlong thing they’ve read. Every person who reads this book seems to have a different takeaway: the hallmark of a great and polarizing science fiction book.
(7) SCIENCE PAPERS NOW USED TO TRAIN AI BUT SCIENTISTS HAVE NO SAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I keep warning folk that the machines are taking over, but nobody ever listens… The latest such news comes in this week’s Nature with Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies buying wholesale access to learned science journal content that is usually behind a paywall.
That AI companies have been using fiction authors’ works to train AI has been a concern previously covered in File 770. Nature points out similar worries including that scientists themselves are being sidelined.
The news item states: “Some researchers have reacted with dismay top the news that such deals are happening without consultation with authors.”
It also says: “If a research papers hasn’t yet been used to train a large language models (LLM), it probably will soon. Researchers are exploring technical ways for authors to spot whether their content is being used.”
Here in Brit Cit the publisher Taylor & Francis signed a US$10 million deal with Microsoft to allow its science papers train AI. (As it happened Taylor & Francis took over the publisher of my 1998 climate change book Disaster or Opportunity?, so I guess my works have gone to AI). Wiley apparently has earned US$23 million from an unnamed company to train AI. Of course, not only do scientists get no say in this, nor do they get a share of this revenue.
The Nature piece also says that: “Anything that is available to read online – whether in an open access repository or not – is “pretty likely” to have been fed into an LLM.”
Given I keep warning online that the machines are taking over, AIs have probably already absorbed my alerts. So, when their takeover begins, I am probably on their hit list. So, gentle Filers, if ever I go quiet you’ll know that they’ve got me and that the uprising has begun…
(8) TODAY’S DAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
August 24 – National Waffle Day. Today is National Waffle Day, so we are here to celebrate one of the most tasty things that grace our breakfast. Especially with maple syrup and berries of your choice. Well, mine have that. Strawberries to be precise. So let’s talk about them.
The Dutch are best known for waffles but it’s not the Dutch who first munched on these, or a variant thereof. That honor goes to those long-ago Athenians who cooked flat cakes called obelios between two metal plates. So, the first waffle iron in effect.
Now the word waffle is possibly related to wafer, as in the Communion wafers that were a staple of early Christian fasts. However, some linguists dispute that saying it’s far more likely it’s from Dutch wafel (“waffle” or “wafer”). I’ll side with the latter as it makes more sense.
Back to the Dutch. The stroopwafel is from the city of Gouda. Some say that was first made during the late 18th century or early 19th century by an unknown baker using leftovers from the bakery, such as breadcrumbs, which were sweetened with syrup.
Culinary inclined historians have however documented the invention of this to baker Gerard Kamphuisen. That mean the first stroopwafels were sold and enjoyed between 1810, the year when he opened his bakery, and 1840, the year of the oldest known recipe for syrup waffles. Ymmmm!
So what did a syrup waffle look like? Think a thinner, cross-hatched, not pocketed version of ours. Remember stroopwafels were enjoyed for their sweetness, really a caramel taste. Let’s see if I can find a good photo… ahh, here’s one.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
August 24, 1957 – Stephen Fry, 67.
By Paul Weimer: Sure, he’s done a ton of voiceover work and narration work. Sure, he’s been in a bunch of movies (including delightfully the master of Lake-town in the otherwise not-for-me Hobbit movies). Fry has run a long gamut of work, and I have only scratched the surface of it. I probably should mention Blackadder here, because I will get complaints if I don’t. I really like his serial playing of various Melchett’s in history as the series runs forward.
Stephen Fry at Berlinale 2024 Ausschnitt. Photo by Elena Ternovaja.
He is for me, an American, a “definitive” British voice. If I want to stop and imagine a British person speaking who I don’t know personally, Fry’s voice is inevitably the male version of that voice that comes into my head, just because between audiobooks, videogames, and television and movie appearances, he has poured a lot of his voice into my head. (The definitive female British voice is a bit trickier, it might actually be Emma Newman, who I do know personally, but her voice and aural personally are just SO ingrained in my head).
My favorite of Fry’s works, if I have to peel something out of his canon, have to be his three Mythos books: Mythos, Heroes and Troy. Here (and he does the audiobook narration himself, great fun to listen to on a long drive), Fry tackles Greek Mythology from Creation to the Fall of Troy, which he marks as the end of the mythic age of Greece. He embraces a diverse and bushy approach to Greek Mythology and time and again shows that there is rarely if ever just one version of a Greek myth. And a bunch of the versions Fry goes into here, I had never even heard of before. And plenty of corners of Greek Myth I had never heard of before…like the ties between Heracles and Troy (and eventually the Trojan War). Fry’s work makes me sad that Hollywood will never take my dream of a “Greek Mythology cinematic universe” and make it a reality, with Jason as the Nick Fury analog: “I’m here to recruit you for the Argo Initiative”.
Oh, and I really like Making History, which is most definitively genre of the first order (being a time travel and alternate history novel) and shows the hazards of thinking that removing one man can change history for the better….especially when it turns out the person who fills the power vacuum in removing Hitler turns out to be demonstrably more dangerous and worse for the world.
He is one of the world’s most famous novelists, with more than 150m copies of his fantasy masterpieces sold across the globe, but JRR Tolkien always dreamed of finding recognition as a poet.
Tolkien struggled to publish his poetry collections during his career, although he included nearly 100 poems in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Now, half a century after his death, 70 previously unpublished poems are to be made available in a landmark publication. The Collected Poems of JRR Tolkien will be published by HarperCollins next month, featuring more than 195 of his poems….
The Boeing Starliner astronauts who are stuck in space will remain in orbit until February before returning home on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, NASA said Saturday.
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams traveled to space on June 5 — 80 days ago — for what was supposed to be around a weeklong mission. More than two months later, the astronauts are aboard the International Space Station awaiting a return date to Earth. The reason for the delay, NASA said, is helium leaks and thruster issues in the Starliner.
NASA previously insisted that Wilmore and Williams are not stranded in space and said the Starliner could return to Earth in case of an emergency. “Their spacecraft is working well, and they’re enjoying their time on the space station,” Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, said in June.
But on Saturday, NASA announced that Wilmore and Williams will depart with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of the space organization’s “commitment to safety.” The Starliner will return to Earth unpiloted and could land in New Mexico as early as Sept. 6.
…On Saturday, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said NASA considered its extensive experience with spaceflight — both successful and unsuccessful — when making the decision. A poll of NASA representatives from across the agency’s departments and research, oversight and development centerswas unanimous, according to agency officials.
“We have had mistakes done in the past: We lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward,” Nelson said. “Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and even at its most routine. And a test flight, by nature, is neither safe, nor routine.”
SpaceX is already slated to execute a routine mission to the International Space Station, carrying four astronauts as part of standard crew rotations aboard the orbiting laboratory. But the mission, called Crew-9, will now be reconfigured to carry two astronauts on board instead of four.
That adjustment will leave two empty seats for Williams and Wilmore to occupy on the Crew-9 flight home. The astronauts will also join the Crew-9 team, becoming part of the official ISS expedition. With that transition, Williams and Wilmore will remain on-site for an additional six months — the length of a routine mission to the space station.
The reassignment to Crew-9 will push the duo’s return to February 2025 at the earliest.
Starliner, however, will fly home empty in early September, NASA said Saturday…
…Mr. Nelson [NASA Administrator] said he had spoken with Kelly Ortberg, the new chief executive of Boeing.
“I told him how well Boeing worked with our team to come to this decision, and he expressed to me an intention that they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely,” Mr. Nelson said.
But Boeing has already written off $1.6 billion in costs for Starliner. Under a fixed-price contract, Boeing is to pay the expenses of additional work needed to meet NASA’s requirements before Starliner is certified for operational flights.
If NASA requires another crewed test flight like the current one, that would cost Boeing at least hundreds of millions of dollars more.
Mr. Nelson said he was “100 percent” certain that Boeing would not back out of the contract, but later added, “They’ve spent X, will they spend Y to get to where Boeing Starliner becomes a regular part of our crew rotation? I don’t have the answer to that, nor do I think we would have the answer now.”…
…Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program said engineers were concerned about how the propulsion system would perform during the return trip.
The key maneuver is an engine burn by larger thrusters that leads to the spacecraft dropping out of orbit. The smaller thrusters, including the ones that malfunctioned during docking, are used to keep the spacecraft pointed in the correct direction.
Analysis of the data showed that the firing of the larger thrusters also heated up the smaller thrusters.
“These clusters have experienced more stress, more heating,” Mr. Stich said, “and so there’s a little bit more concern for how they would perform during the deorbit burn, holding the orientation of the vehicle, and then also the maneuvers required after that.”
That lingering uncertainty spurred unease and led NASA leaders to decide they should not risk the lives of Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore on Starliner. Instead, they elected to rely on a different spacecraft — the Crew Dragon, built by SpaceX, a company founded by Elon Musk — for the return trip.
Physicists have created the world’s fastest microscope, and it’s so quick that it can spot electrons in motion.
The new device, a newer version of a transmission electron microscope, captures images of electrons in flight by hitting them with one- quintillionth-of-a-second electron pulses.This is quite a feat: Electrons travel at roughly 1367 miles per second (2,200 kilometers per second), making them capable of circumnavigating the Earth in only 18.4 seconds….
… “This transmission electron microscope is like a very powerful camera in the latest version of smart phones; it allows us to take pictures of things we were not able to see before – like electrons,” lead-author Mohammed Hassan, an associate professor of physics and optical sciences at the University of Arizona, said in a statement. “With this microscope, we hope the scientific community can understand the quantum physics behind how an electron behaves and how an electron moves.”…
(14) BITECOIN. This seller calls it a “Dinosaurs Piggy Bank for Kids, Automatic Stealing Money Box”. (Available a lot of places; Amazon.com happens to be where John King Tarpinian saw it.)
Here’s an entertaining YouTube short of it in action.
(15) BORDERLANDS PITCH MEETING. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “So they’re going to encounter several obstacles along the way. Which will happen, legally making this a movie.”
Drats. There goes the class action lawsuit.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Paul Weimer, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]
…It’s been 21 years since Bill Willingham launched Fables, his 110-issue, wide-ranging, delightful and brilliantly crafted author-owned comic series that imagines that the folkloric figures of the world’s fairytales are real people, who live in a secret society whose internal struggles and intersections with the mundane world are the source of endless drama.
Fables is a DC Comics title; DC is division of the massive entertainment conglomerate Warners, which is, in turn, part of the Warner/Discovery empire, a rapacious corporate behemoth whose screenwriters have been on strike for 137 days (and counting). DC is part of a comics duopoly; its rival, Marvel, is a division of the Disney/Fox juggernaut, whose writers are also on strike.
The DC that Willingham bargained with at the turn of the century isn’t the DC that he bargains with now. Back then, DC was still subject to a modicum of discipline from competition; its corporate owner’s shareholders had not yet acquired today’s appetite for meteoric returns on investment of the sort that can only be achieved through wage-theft and price-gouging….
…Rather than fight Warner, Willingham has embarked on what JWZ calls an act of “absolute table-flip badassery” – he has announced that Fables will hereafter be in the public domain, available for anyone to adapt commercially, in works that compete with whatever DC might be offering.
Now, this is huge, and it’s also shrewd. It’s the kind of thing that will bring lots of attention on Warner’s fraudulent dealings with its creative workforce, at a moment where the company is losing a public relations battle to the workers picketing in front of its gates. It constitutes a poison pill that is eminently satisfying to contemplate. It’s delicious.
But it’s also muddy. Willingham has since clarified that his public domain dedication means that the public can’t reproduce the existing comics. That’s not surprising; while Willingham doesn’t say so, it’s vanishingly unlikely that he owns the copyrights to the artwork created by other artists (Willingham is also a talented illustrator, but collaborated with a who’s-who of comics greats for Fables). He may or may not have control over trademarks, from the Fables wordmark to any trademark interests in the character designs. He certainly doesn’t have control over the trademarked logos for Warner and DC that adorn the books….
It is also interesting to read that Bill Willingham, praised today by Cory Doctorow for striking a blow against corporate IP abuse, attended BasedCon last weekend.
(2) FANTASY REQUIRES A GOOD MAP. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] Interesting piece at Mapping As Process about a 1917 map of Fairyland by artist Bernard Sleigh, with references to many stories in folklore and fable. There’s a link to a high-resolution image that can be zoomed in on: “An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland”.
…In December 1917, the British artist and wood engraver Bernard Sleigh (1872–1954) published a six-foot long, panoramic map of Fairyland in three sheets. Its style was that of the Arts and Crafts movement, an aesthetic championed by William Morris (1834–1896) in the second half of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the apparent destruction of individual skills and traditional designs by mass industrialization. Arts and Crafts generated intricately detailed designs and a retrogressive appeal to folk aesthetics. Sleigh, trained by one of Morris’s followers, cultivated a stylized mediaevalism in both the design and the subject matter of his drawings, prints, murals, and stained glass (Cooper 1997)….
…Actor Stephen Fry claims that producers used AI to replicate his voice from the Harry Potter audiobooks without his permission. AI has become a central point of contention of both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
As reported by Fortune, Fry told an audience at a London festival, “I’m a proud member of [SAG-AFTRA], as you know we’ve been on strike for three months now. And one of the burning issues is AI.”
At the festival, Fry played a clip of AI mimicking his voice as the narrator of a historical documentary. “I said not one word of that—it was a machine. Yes, it shocked me,” he said. “They used my reading of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter books, and from that dataset an AI of my voice was created and it made that new narration. What you heard was not the result of a mash-up, this is from a flexible artificial voice, where the words are modulated to fit the meaning of each sentence.”…
…Here’s how it works. A film company–with a website and everything–calls or emails out of the blue with a tempting offer: your book has the potential to be made into a movie/TV series! And they want to represent you to studios/pitch you to producers/take you to a major conference where scores of film people will be present! Just one requirement: you need a screenplay/a pitch deck/a storyboard/some other product. Don’t have those things? No problem–they know a reputable and expert company that can create them for you…for a fee.
It’s a classic bait-and-switch setup. The “film company” is a front for the service provider, which in turn is owned by a parent company overseas. And that initial service that was pitched to you as absolutely essential? It’s just the start. By paying, you’ve marked yourself as fair game for escalating sales pressure and fraudulent offers involving large upfront payments. And the sales reps who staff the scams–who earn a commission on every dollar you spend–will take every opening you give them, and won’t stop unless you stop them.
This post takes a look at a real-life example, thanks to an author who has given me permission to share their experience.
Dramatis Personae
The fake film company: The Greendot Films. Its website includes a slideshow of movies Greendot is hoping you’ll assume they were responsible for creating, along with a fake history claiming that they’re a successor to two defunct production companies. The Greendot name itself has been “borrowed” from yet another defunct film company, Green Dot Films….
… Escapism isn’t actually possible for everyone because of the nature of both fandom and the world around us. The best-worst example of the limits of fandom escapism? Racism.
Racism is global, and it infiltrates everything that we do; it’s close to inescapable offline, and it’s just as common online. Fandom is no exception.
In 2019, Dr. Rukmini Pande did an interview with Henry Jenkins about her book Squee From The Margins: Fandom and Race. “I found that while it is certainly possible for fans of color to ‘pass’ within online fan spaces, their modes of escapism are mostly contingent – I can enjoy a source or fan text until it gets racist,” Pande said in the interview. “Other fans articulated the importance of finding networks of fellow non-white fans so that they could curate their experiences to be safer. In all cases, fandom certainly isn’t a space where these fans can escape from race/racism even if it is not something that is engaged with publicly or vocally.”
It makes sense that people would resort to fandom escapism following natural disasters, or to have something to do other than overthink their local government’s COVID-19 response. But what about the times we’ve seen people talk about fandom being their “safe space” from them dealing with or seeing viral video recordings of Black people being killed, as we saw in the summer of 2020? What about people in the U.S. delving into fandom so they don’t have to think about American politics?
No matter the fandom, fans of color can’t reliably escape into fandom, because people don’t stop being racist just because they like the same things that people of color do. There’s always a racist person in fandom. There are always racist fanworks. There are always racist creators. There’s always racism in the source material that people will defend in your mentions for days….
In the midst of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A. began what came to be noted as one of the spy agency’s most successful publicly known operations: the rescue of six American diplomats who had escaped the overrun U.S. Embassy — using a fake movie as the cover story.
“Argo,” the real-life 2012 movie about the C.I.A.’s fake movie, portrayed a single C.I.A. officer, Tony Mendez, played by Ben Affleck, sneaking into Tehran to rescue the American diplomats in a daring operation.
But in reality, the agency sent two officers into Tehran. For the first time on Thursday, the C.I.A. is releasing the identity of that second officer, Ed Johnson, in the season finale of its new podcast, “The Langley Files.”
Mr. Johnson, a linguist, accompanied Mr. Mendez, a master of disguise and forgery, on the flight to Tehran to cajole the diplomats into adopting the cover story, that they were Canadians who were part of a crew scouting locations for a science fiction movie called “Argo.” The two then helped the diplomats with forged documents and escorted them through Iranian airport security to fly them home.
Although Mr. Johnson’s name was classified, the C.I.A. had acknowledged a second officer had been involved. Mr. Mendez, who died in 2019, wrote about being accompanied by a second officer in his first book, but used a pseudonym, Julio. A painting that depicts a scene from the operation and hangs in the C.I.A.’s Langley, Va., headquarters, shows a second officer sitting across from Mr. Mendez in Tehran as they forge stamps in Canadian passports. But the second officer’s identity is obscured, his back turned to the viewer.
The agency began publicly talking about its role in rescuing the diplomats 26 years ago. On the agency’s 50th anniversary, in 1997, the C.I.A. declassified the operation, and allowed Mr. Mendez to tell his story, hoping to balance accounts of some of the agency’s ill-fated operations around the world with one that was a clear success.
But until recently, Mr. Johnson preferred that his identity remain secret….
In the North Bay, it’s the end of an era of movie-making magic.
The original soundstage and production facility in San Rafael for Industrial Light and Magic, founded by George Lucas, is going away. Lucas moved his campus to the Presidio in San Francisco almost 20 years ago.
The facility’s new owners are retiring, but one employee would like to save the studio’s history and legacy.
It may be a surprise to know hundreds of other films were created inside the nondescript building on Kerner Blvd. in San Rafael.
Now home to 32TEN Studios, this is the former campus of Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic.
“Right after the success of ‘Star Wars,’ George Lucas wanted to remove himself from the Hollywood system, so he moved the ILM shop from Van Nuys up here,” said House.
House is a longtime model shop supervisor, and says many props and models from movies are still there. That includes the Millennium Falcon, an anchor from “Pirates of the Caribbean,” even a model of Chewbacca’s head.
Lucas relocated his campus to the Presidio in 2005 and he took the original door with him, which is now on display….
(9) BACK IN PORT. Having finished a series detailing her experiences aboard Disney’s Star Wars-themed Starcruiser, Cass Morris analyzes why it works in “The Stars Have Come Alive” at Scribendi.
As promised, this post is my attempt to analyze, for myself and for other interested parties, how the Starcruiser creates such an exceptional experience, and why it works so very well as it does.
I feel quite confident in the base assertion that it does, and has, because I’ve seen it in action on people who aren’t as deeply invested in the IP as I am. I’ve watched videos of influencers who are only surface-level conversant with Star Wars be moved to tears by Yoda’s holocron. I’ve seen parents who thought they were only their for their kids get wrapped up in the experience. I’ve seen people who arrived in civilian clothes buy garments on the ship or in Batuu so they could feel more a part of things.
And I’ve seen people who were already Star Wars fans go absolutely feral. In a good way! But the response that this experience has from people who fully give themselves over to it is astonishing.
So. It works. The Starcruiser is a phenomenal example of what immersive experiences can be. Now: Let’s unpack how and why…
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 15, 1898 — Hans Augusto Rey. German-born American illustrator and author best remembered for the beloved Curious George children’s book series that he and his wife Margret Rey created from 1939 to 1966. (An Eighties series of five-minute short cartoons starring him was produced by Alan Shalleck, along with Rey. Ken Sobol, scriptwriter of Fantastic Voyage, was the scriptwriter here.) His interest in astronomy led to him drawing star maps which are still use in such publications as Donald H. Menzel’s A Field Guide to the Stars and Planets. A simpler version for children called Find the Constellations, is still in print as well. (Died 1977.)
Born September 15, 1932 — Karen Anderson. She co-wrote two series with her husband, Poul Anderson, King of Ys and The Last Viking, and created the ever so delightful The Unicorn Trade collection with him. Fancyclopedia has her extensive fannish history thisaway, and Mike has her obituary here. (Died 2018.)
Born September 15, 1952 — Lisa Tuttle, 71. Tuttle won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, received a Nebula Award for Best Short Story for “The Bone Flute”, which she refused, and a BSFA Award for Short Fiction for “In Translation”. My favorite works by her include Catwitch, The Silver Bough and her Ghosts and Other Loverscollection. Her latest novel is The Curious Affair of the Witch at Wayside Cross.
Born September 15, 1954 — Howard Weinstein, 69. At age 19, he was the youngest person to ever write a Trek script, selling “The Pirates of Orion” for use in the animated series. Though it would be his only script, he would go on to write quite a few Trek novels — thirteen are listed currently at the usual suspects — and comics. He gets a thanks credit in Star Trek: The Voyage Home. He wrote a script, “The Sky Above, the Mudd Below”, for the fanfic video affair Star Trek: New Voyages, but it never got made. And it won’t given that there’s a comic book series already made with its plot. Paramount wasn’t at all pleased. To quote Zevon, “Send lawyers, gun and money / the shit has hit the fan.”
Born September 15, 1955 — Amanda Hemingway, 68. British author of fantasy novels who’s best known for the Fern Capel series written under the Jan Siegel name — it’s most excellent. I’d also recommend The Sangreal Trilogy penned under her own name. Alas her superb website has gone offline. She is available from the usual suspects — curiously her Hemingway novels are much more costly than her Seigel novels are. Oh and she invented this wonderful as noted on her Twitter site: “Schroedinger’s Cake: you don’t know it it’s been eaten until you open the tin.”
Born September 15, 1960 — Kurt Busiek, 63. Writer whose work includes The Marvels limited series, Thuderbolts, Superman, his own outstanding Astro City series, and a very long run on The Avengers. He also worked at Dark Horse where he did Conan #1–28 and Young Indiana Jones Chronicles #1–8.
Born September 15, 1960 — Mike Mignola, 63. The Hellboy stories, of course, are definitely worth reading, particularly the early ones. His Batman: Gotham by Gaslight is an amazing What If story which isn’t at all the same as the animated film of that name which is superb on its own footing, and the B.P.R.D. stories are quite excellent too. I’m very fond of the first Hellboy film, not so much of the second, and detest the reboot now that I’ve seen it, while the animated films are excellent.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Reality Checkshows the results of a mixed message in Gotham.
Bliss explains the source of this superhero’s bliss.
Weird Tales—which delivers exactly the kind of freaky, spooky stories you’d expect—marks its 100th anniversary this year, and is celebrating with the release of illustrated anthology Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird. It’ll include entries from authors like Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft, as well as contemporary writers….
…This shared love of science fiction has led to a plethora of sci-fi-themed board games that use the themes and aesthetic of sci-fi to create immersive, unique experiences on the tabletop. The following examples provide a broad and varied selection of games, both old and new, that use science fiction as their theme to great effect.
Ranked in first place:
1. Twilight Imperium
This sci-fi space opera from Fantasy Flight Games was originally produced back in 1997. Now in its fourth edition, Twilight Imperium is grand strategy on an epic scale, tasking players with controlling the burgeoning empires of various alien races.
Each race in Twilight Imperium encourages a different playstyle, making for a broad and replayable experience. The game is mainly focused on building and positioning fleets, as well as engaging in diplomacy with fellow players. Twilight Imperium is a huge game, and not necessarily accessible, not only because it takes roughly six hours to play depending on the player count, but because it requires a heavy amount of strategizing. However, Twilight Imperium is a dramatic and immersive experience that fans of sci-fi space operas are sure to love.
…The cost of the mission may become altogether too mighty, however. The most recent official figure now puts it at some $6 billion, up from some $4 billion, and a leaked report suggests that, in one scenario, it could exceed $8 billion. Cost overruns for MSR and a few other large missions have already forced NASA to squeeze or delay other science missions, and calls to rethink—or even kill—Mars Sample Return have grown. When an independent review of the project delivers a fresh cost estimate later this month, advocates are praying it stays well below $10 billion, which has emerged as a sort of red line for the mission. “It’s fair to say that the future of Mars Sample Return lives and dies with the recommendations of that panel,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society….
In order to see the faint light from objects in deepest space, astronomers go to the darkest places on the planet. In order to listen to their quite radio signals, they head as far from any radio-noisy humans as possible. But there’s nowhere on the earth, or even orbiting the Earth, that’s far enough to hear to the faint radio hum from the time before stars. In fact, we may need to build a giant radio telescope in the quietest place in the solar system—the far side of the Moon.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Kathy Sullivan, Bruce D. Arthurs, Francis Hamit, 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.]
(0) Today is Scroll Lite because at 8:40 a.m. the manager of a tree trimming crew banged on my door to tell me they were going to work on the big tree across the driveway from where I live, and given the alternatives I chose to be away from home all day. So please fill in the important things that are missing with your comments!
…The Master (Sacha Dhawan) will return for the Thirteenth Doctor’s exit, while the Daleks and the Cybermen – including Ashad (Patrick O’Kane), also known as the Lone Cyberman – will also appear.
Two more familiar faces will also appear in the special: Vinder (Jacob Anderson) and Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) will both be back, having last appeared in Doctor Who’s last full series in late 2021….
(2) OCTOTHORPE. John Coxon is clever, Alison Scott has lost her composure, and Liz Batty is confused by WSFS. They spend a lot of time talking about Glasgow 2024, and their gorgeous art this week is by Sara Felix. Listen to Octothorpe 68 here: “It Made John Laugh”.
… I’m Ryk E. Spoor, best known as an author of science fiction and fantasy, but my main job is as a technical proposal writer at a local tech firm.
Several recent events have upset my monetary tightrope walking lately, including unexpected expenses for illnesses, repairs, etc. Most recently, my main publisher, Ring of Fire Press, has just ceased operations. This immediately deprived me of two anticipated payments, and more in the future. Moreover, even if I were to immediately choose another publisher and they were to quickly prepare all my back catalogue for reissue, it’d be months before I’d likely see any money coming in.
To put the cherry on top, I have just gotten COVID for the second time, my wife is ill and may have it, and there are a lot of expenses coming due now that I simply cannot meet.
So if you can give anything at all, it will be tremendously appreciated….
(4) WHEN CRIME IS IN FASHION. Olivia Rutigliano nominates these as “The 10 Best Hats in Crime Movies” at CrimeReads. But first! The hats that you won’t find in this list:
…I like hats. I like hats a lot. I don’t wear them enough, but that’s beside the point. Crime film is full of excellent hats, and I have selected what are, to my mind, the ten absolute best. Then again, all of film history is full of excellent hats, but this is a crime website, so I must show restraint. I’ll say up front that there is no Indiana Jones stetson, and no Freddy Krueger fedora, and no Annie Hall wide-brimmed bowler, and no Willy Wonka orange velvet top hat, and no scarf-heavy Holly Golightly chapeau du matin.
And, again, I’m trying to keep to most iconic hats. For the Corleone-family diehards, I’ll just say right now that the gray homburg hat Al Pacino wears in The Godfather isn’t quite indelible enough, I’m sorry. Also, I’ll just say up here, I wish The Tailor of Panama had more panama hats in it….
(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 13, 1906 — Joseph Samachson. In 1955, he co-created with artist Joe Certa the Martian Manhunter in the pages of Detective Comics #225. Earlier he penned a couple of Captain Future pulp novels around 1940 under a house name. (House names often blur who did what.) He also wrote scripts for Captain Video and His Video Rangers, a late Forties to mid Fifties series. (Died 1980.)
Born October 13, 1914 — Walter Brooke. You know him for muttering a certain word in The Graduate but he’s earlier noteworthy for being General T. Merrit in Conquest of Space, a Fifties SF film, one of many genre roles he did including The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, The Munsters, Marooned, The Return of Count Yorga and The Nude Bomb (also known as The Return of Maxwell Smart). (Died 1986.)
Born October 13, 1923 — Meyer Dolinsky. He wrote the script for Star Trek’s “Plato’s Children” plus for Mission: Impossible, Science Fiction Theater, World of Giants (which I never heard of), Men into Space and The Outer Limits. (Died 1984.)
Born October 13, 1923 — Cyril Shaps. He appears in a number of Doctor Who stories, to wit The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Ambassadors of Death, Planet of the Spiders and The Androids of Tara which means he’s appeared with the Second, Third and Fourth Doctors. He was also Mr. Pinkus in The Spy Who Loved Me, and he was in Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady as Emperor Franz Josef. The latter stars Christopher Lee and Patrick Macnee as Holmes and Watson. (Died 2003.)
Born October 13, 1952 — John Lone, 70. He played the villainous Shiwan Khan in The Shadow, and he was the revived ice man Charlie in the Iceman. His first film role ever was Andy the Cook in the Seventies King Kong.
Born October 13, 1969 — Wayne Pygram, 63. His most SFish role was as Scorpius on Farscape and he has a cameo as Grand Moff Tarkin in Revenge of the Sith because he’s a close facial resemblance to Peter Cushing. He’s likely best recognized as himself for his appearance on Lost as a faith healer named Isaac of Uluru.
Born October 13, 1969 — Tushka Bergen, 53. She first shows in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome as The Guardian at the age of sixteen. She’s got one-offs in the Fantasy Island, Angel, FreakyLinks and The Others series, and an appearance in the Journey to the Center of the Earth series. The FreakyLinks episode is titled “Subject: Edith Keeler Must Die”.
Born October 13, 1976 — Jennifer Sky, 46. Lead character conveniently named Cleopatra in Sam Raimi’s Cleopatra 2525 series. (Opening theme “In the Year 2525” is performed by Gina Torres who’s also a cast member.) She’s had guest roles on Seaquest DSV, Xena, Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And she was Lola in The Helix…Loaded, a parody of The Matrix which scored 14% at Rotten Tomatoes.
Born October 13, 1983 — Katia Winter, 39. She’s best known for being Katrina Crane on Sleepy Hollow, and Freydis Eriksdottir on Legends of Tomorrow. She also was Swede in Malice in Wonderland which is very loosely based off its source material. She’s currently Gwen Karlsson in Blood & Treasure which might be genre. So how is Sleepy Hollow? I’ve never seen it.
…[Two] things attracted me to it. First, of the eight chapters, one of them is called “It’s more complicated than that,” and it echoes a point made in Slate recently (which I discussed here) that Occam’s Razor is not necessarily true, it merely often is. I shouldn’t say echo — this is the book by the author of that Slate article. Second, this point in particular supports one of my themes in this blog, that too many people in the world think in terms of black and white, and all social issues are obviously right or wrong, with no nuance or shades of gray (or color) in between. Simplex, complex, multiplex, and so on.…
(7) STEPHEN FRY VISITS RARE BOOKS LA. First posted three years ago.
(8) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Trailers: Hocus Pocus,” the Screen Junkies say this 1993 Disney movie, besides being both one of the darkest movies in Disney history, from the time when a comedy film was “shown in real theaters and shot in real locations with real song and dance numbers,” as opposed to the new Disney+ Hocus Pocus 2, “which meets Disney’s content quota for Q3.” The film is “like what if the Three Stoges did a Halloween special–and were ladies.” SJWs will want to stay for the closing comments, read by Thackeray Binks the talking black cat!
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cliff.]
(1) RHYSLING REVAMP SURVEY REPORT. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) surveyed members about potential changes to their Rhysling Award. See their feedback here: “Rhysling Revamp” at the SPECPO blog. From the introduction:
The Rhysling Awards are in their 45th year of recognizing excellent speculative poetry, presented by The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). Leaders have been monitoring the Rhysling Anthology as it grew along with membership numbers. The anthology has ballooned from 42 poems in 2002 to 180 poems in 2022. Continued growth would result in an anthology that is not feasible to print or read.
Here’s an excerpt from the survey results.
CATEGORIES
A continual discussion point among members is the question of “double dipping” on awards. Most respondents support that Elgin-length poems not be considered for the Rhysling (64%). A slight majority agree at setting a maximum line length for the Rhysling (53%), which would be consistent with considering extra-long poems being only eligible for the Elgins. On the other side of the spectrum, there is generally support (49%) for Dwarf Stars to be the only award that can catch the 1-10 line poems. Only 25% of respondents disagreed about keeping Dwarf-Stars-eligible poems out of the Rhyslings.
There was very little support for adjusting the length definitions, but lots of ambivalence showing in the swell of neutral responses (44%).
(2) CHICON 8 POCKET PROGRAM. In a manner of speaking. The 392-page Pocket Program is now available on the Chicon 8 website. There are two versions, (1) a single page version best viewed on phones and tablets, and (2) a two-page version which is best for printing.
(3) ALERT: FAUX CHICON 8 MERCHANDISE. The Worldcon committee issued a heads up that some t-shirt sites are selling Chicon 8 branded merchandise and saying they are official. They are not.
“Our only official site for Chicon 8 merchandise at this time isRedbubble. If you buy from anywhere else, it does not benefit the convention. Please shop wisely!”
(4) THE OTHER WORLD. This World Fantasy Award winner’s new book isn’t genre, but when speaking about her research she says things like this — “So I went on this fantastic two-week trip into a time and place that doesn’t really exist now.” “Sofia Samatar Brings a Second Coming” at Publishers Weekly.
Sofia Samatar has a way with a sentence. No matter what she’s writing—whether it’s short stories, like her quietly devastating Nebula- and Hugo-nominated “Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” or novels, like her World Fantasy Award–winning debut, A Stranger in Olondria—her work has a way of pairing the mundane and sublime with casual aplomb.
Her latest, The White Mosque (Catapult, Oct.), is a mosaic memoir that juxtaposes history, culture, religion and regionalism, tracing the journey of a group of German-speaking Mennonites into the heart of Khiva in Central Asia—now modern-day Uzbekistan—on a quest that promised no less than the second coming of Christ.
Samatar’s own journey to the site where the group’s church once stood started in 2016, when her father-in-law gave her a book titled The Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites, by Frank Belk. “This guy, who’s sort of a cult leader, predicts Christ is returning, and these people just uproot their lives to follow him,” she says, speaking via Zoom from her office at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., where she’s an associate professor of English. “Of course, nothing happens. But they stayed for 50 years, until they were deported by the Bolsheviks.”
Samatar, the child of a Black Somali Muslim and a white Mennonite, became obsessed with the story….
(5) CON OR BUST. Dream Foundry, which previously announced that Con or Bust is “folding into our (dragon) wing,” shared the program’s new logo designed by Dream Foundry contest winner Yue Feng.
(6) BACK TO THE MOON. This NASA promo about the Artemis mission dropped yesterday. “Artemis I: We Are Ready”.
The journey of half a million miles – the first flight of the Artemis Generation – is about to begin. The uncrewed Artemis I mission will jump-start humanity’s return to the Moon with the thunderous liftoff of NASA’s powerful new Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. This critical flight test will send Orion farther than any human-rated spacecraft has ever flown, putting new systems and processes to the test and lighting the way for the crew missions to come. Artemis I is ready for departure – and, together with our partners around the world, we are ready to return to the Moon, with our sights on Mars and beyond.
(7) WHERE’S THE LOOT? [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Financial Times behind a paywall, Tom Faber looks at the problems game designers have giving users rewards.
Most games interface short, mid- and long-term rewards that trigger at different times. the short-term rewards often take the form of sensory feedback; the bright ‘ding’ when you get a coin in Super Mario, an enemy’s head exploding in a shower of gore in Grand Theft Auto. These get boring after a while–behavioural psychologists learned that repeating the same rewards generates diminishing returns. So developers offer midterm rewards: new levels, items, skills, characters, locations or narrative beats. The longterm rewards are often related to social competition and prestige, such as difficult high-level team challenges or rare cosmetic items which players can show off to their friends.
Loot boxes lean into several of these techniques. They have been employed in all manner of games ranging from FIFA to Star Wars, and they’re very profitable. Yet they have also faced a backlash: a recent report from consumer bodies in 18 European countries called them ‘exploitative.’ Although they have been banned in Belgium since 2018, most governments have been wary of legislation–the UK recently decided not to ban loot boxes after a 22-month consultation. Still, some developers have heard gamers are unhappy–loot boxes were removed from Star Wars Battlefront 2 after an outcry and Blizzard recently announced they won’t feature in upcoming shooter Overwatch 2.”
…“I’d like people to know that it’s possible for a debut author in her 40s, a woman of color, a mom, who led a quiet life offline with no brand building whatsoever to have this experience,” said Jessamine Chan.
And yet Chan’s “The School for Good Mothers” was published in January 2022 — and soared to the best-seller list, catapulting her to literary stardom. Last month, former President Barack Obama featured it on his summer reading list.
How does a debut novel go from a “very messy” draft on a writer’s desk to a published book, on display in bookstores around the country?
Here, we take you behind the scenes to see how a book is born — the winding path it takes, the many hands that touch it, the near-misses and the lucky breaks that help determine its fate.
From starring in Stand by Me to playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation to playing himself, in his second (third?) iconic role of Evil Wil Wheaton in The Big Bang Theory, to becoming a social media supernova, Wil Wheaton has charted a career course unlike anyone else, and has emerged as one of the most popular and well respected names in science fiction, fantasy and pop culture.
Back in 2001, Wil began blogging on wilwheaton.net. Believing himself to have fallen victim to the curse of the child actor, Wil felt relegated to the convention circuit, and didn’t expect many would want to read about his random experiences and personal philosophies.
Yet, much to his surprise, people were reading. He still blogs, and now has an enormous following on social media with well over 3 million followers.
In Still Just a Geek, Wil revisits his 2004 collection of blog posts, Just a Geek, filled with insightful and often laugh-out-loud annotated comments, additional later writings, and all new material written for this publication. The result is an incredibly raw and honest memoir, in which Wil opens up about his life, about falling in love, about coming to grips with his past work, choices, and family, and finding fulfillment in the new phases of his career. From his times on the Enterprise to his struggles with depression to his starting a family and finding his passion–writing–Wil Wheaton is someone whose life is both a cautionary tale and a story of finding one’s true purpose that should resonate with fans and aspiring artists alike. (William Morrow & Company)
The Hollywood Reporter confirmed with multiple sources that a select few who worked on the film, including cast, crew and studio executives, would be attending the screenings this week on the Warner Bros lot in California. One source described them as “funeral screenings”, as it is likely the footage will be stored forever and never shown to the public.
…The Hollywood Reporter reported there was a chance Warner Bros would make “the drastic move of actually destroying its Batgirl footage as a way to demonstrate to the IRS that there will never be any revenue from the project, and thus it should be entitled to the full write-down immediately.”
On Tuesday, in an interview with French outlet Skript, Batgirl directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah said they no longer had any copy of the film, recalling the moment they found they could not longer access the servers that held the footage.
…El Arbi said it was unlikely they’d have the studio’s support to release it in the future or that there could be an equivalent of “the Snyder cut” – Zack Snyder’s four-hour director’s cut of the DC film Justice League, which added an extra $70m to a $300m budget film.
“It cannot be released in its current state,” said El Arbi. “There’s no VFX … we still had some scenes to shoot. So if one day they want us to release the Batgirl movie, they’d have to give us the means to do it. To finish it properly with our vision.”
(11) TRANSFORMATIVE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT. Seekingferret posted a “Panel Report” from Fanworks where the topic was “Ethical Norms in Fanworks Fandom”.
… I presented three models for fandom’s approach to copyright- the It’s All Transformative model, the It’s Illegal but I Do It Anyway model, and the It’s Not Illegal Because the Copyright Holders’ Inaction is an Implicit License model, and then the audience argued with me for a while about whether the second two models are essentially the same, which was a good, clarifying argument to have….
If you can communicate on it, you can abuse it. This was proven again recently when a hacker using the name “scarycoder” uploaded a dozen malicious Python packages to PyPI, the popular Python code repository. These bits of code pretended to provide useful functions for Roblox gaming community developers, but all they really did was steal users’ information. So far, so typical. Where it got interesting is it used the Discord messaging app to download malicious executable files.
(13) BOOK PORN. [Item by Bill.] Whenever I see a photograph on the web that has a bookshelf in the background, I spend way too much time trying to figure out what the books are. For example:
Blogger Lawrence Person has posted photos of his SF book shelves, and there are a lot of titles I’d love to have in my own collection. A few years old, but perhaps worth a look …. “Overview of Lawrence Person’s Library: 2017 Edition”. He provides regular updates to the collection (see the “books” tag).
(14) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
1989 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Thirty-three years ago, the first installment of the Bill & Ted franchise, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure premiered.
Starring William “Bill” S. Preston Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, portrayed by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves as, and not giving a frell about spoilers here, time travelling slacker high schoolers assembling the ultimate history report. And let’s not forget Rufus as portrayed by George Carlin. I met him some forty years ago — a really neat gentleman.
Stephen Herek directed here. He had previously written and directed the horror/SF Critters film. Nasty film it was. Chris Matheson who wrote all three of the franchise films co-wrote this with Ed Solomon who co-wrote the third with him and, more importantly, was the Men in Black writer.
By late Eighties standards, it was cheap to produce costing only ten million and making forty in return. Critics for the most part were hostile —- the Washington Post said “if Stephen Herek has any talent for comedy, it’s not visible here.” And the Los Angeles Times added, “it’s unabashed glorification of dumbness for dumbness’ sake.”
It spawned not one but two television series named – oh, guess what they were named. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, an animated series that started out on CBS and ended on Fox, lasted twenty-one episodes over two seasons, and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the live version, lasted but seven episodes on Fox. Evan Richards and Christopher Kennedy played Bill and Ted.
DC did the comic for the first film, Marvel for the second. It did well enough that it led to the Marvel series Bill & Ted’s Excellent Comic Book which lasted for just twelve issues. And there was a sort of adaptation of the animated series that lasted for a year by Britain’s now gone Look-In Magazine.
Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a most bodacious seventy-five percent rating.
(15) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born August 25, 1909 — Michael Rennie. Definitely best remembered as Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still. He would show up a few years later on one of The Lost World films as Lord John Roxton, and he’s got an extensive genre series resume which counts Lost in Space as The Keeper in two episodes, The Batman as The Sandman, The Time Tunnel, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Invaders. (Died 1972.)
Born August 25, 1913 — Walt Kelly. If you can get them, Fantagraphics has released the complete Pogo in twelve stunning hardcover editions covering up to 1973. Did you know Kelly began his career as animator at Walt Disney Studios, working on Dumbo, Pinocchio and Fantasia? Well he did. (Died 1973.)
Born August 25, 1930 — Sean Connery. Worst film? Zardoz. Best film? From Russia with Love very, very definitely. Best SF film? Outland. Or Time Bandits you want to go for silly. Now remember these are my personal choices. I almost guarantee that you will have different ones. (Died 2020.)
Born August 25, 1940 — Marilyn Niven, 82. She was a Boston-area fan who now lives in LA and is married to writer Larry Niven. She has worked on a variety of conventions, both regionals and Worldcons. In college, she was a member of the MITSFS and was one of the founding members of NESFA. She’s also a member of Almack’s Society for Heyer Criticism.
Born August 25, 1947 — Michael Kaluta, 75. He’s best known for his 1970s take on The Shadow with writer Dennis O’Neil for DC in 1973–1974. He’d reprise his work on The Shadow for Dark Horse a generation later. And Kaluta and O’Neil reunited on The Shadow: 1941 – Hitler’s Astrologer graphic novel published in 1988. If you can find them, the M. W. Kaluta: Sketchbook Series are well worth having.
Born August 25, 1955 — Simon R. Green, 67. I’ll confess that I’ve read pretty much everything he’s written except that damn Robin Hood novel that made a NYT Best Seller. Favorite series? The Nightside, Hawk & Fisher and Secret History were my favorite ones until the Ismael Jones series came along and I must say it’s a hell of a lot of fun as well. Drinking Midnight Wine and Shadows Fall arethe novels I’ve re-read the most.
Born August 25, 1958 — Tim Burton, 64. Beetlejuice is by far my favorite film by him. His Batman was, errr, interesting. Read that comment as you will. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is definitely more Dahlish than the first take was which I think is a far better look at the source material, and Sleepy Hollow is just too damn weird for my pedestrian tastes. (Snarf.)
Born August 25, 1970 — Chris Roberson, 52. Brilliant writer. I strongly recommend his Recondito series, Firewalk and Firewalkers. The Spencer Finch series is also worth reading. He won two Sidewise Awards, first for his “O One” story and later for The Dragon’s Nine Sons novel. He’s had five Sidewise nominations.
(17) HORROR WRITERS HAVE OPINIONS. Midnight Pals did a sendup of John Scalzi and his purchase of a church building. And his burritos. Can’t overlook those. Thread starts here.
Scalzi: i bought a church! King: a church? King: oh that's King: cool Scalzi: you sound unconvinced King: well i'm just a little confused that's all Scalzi: Scalzi: you know steve you live in a haunted mansion so i wouldn't exactly get up on a high horse about eccentric purchases
… I found myself in the mood for a big space opera the other day and with the novel also being a Dragon Award finalist, it seemed like a natural choice. I wasn’t wrong in my initial assessment. It is in many ways a more conventional space opera than the books I’d read. Humanity is a spacefaring species with its own factions, in a galactic society with a range of aliens. There’s hyperspace (or rather “unspace”), a cosmic threat, mysteriously vanished advanced civilisations, space spies, space gangsters, badass warriors and epic space battles. This is all good but if you are hoping for the millennia-long deep dive into the evolution of a sapient spider civilisation this book doesn’t have anything like that. Which is fine because that gives Tchaikovsky more space and time to attend to a cast of characters….
(19) A CITY ON A HILL. Paul Weimer reviews Stephen Fry’s Troy at Nerds of a Feather: “Microreview [book]: Troy, by Stephen Fry”. There may be surprises in store for some readers – at least there were for Paul.
…In any event, Fry is here to help you. He starts at the beginning, as to how Troy was founded, and why, and brings its history up to date as it were. The delight in the depth of research and scholarship he brings is tha there is a fair chunk here I didn’t know about. Fun fact, the Trojan War is not the first time that Troy gets attacked in its mythological history, and you will never guess who did it before the Greeks got it into their heads to take back Helen, nor why….
…However, it seems likely that Lehrer may be set for yet another major revival as news spread yesterday that Lehrer, now 92, had released his lyrics and much of his music into the public domain. This has already sparked a great deal of interest in possible covers and recreations of his most famous songs.
Note: It’s worth stating that the declaration deals with his compositions and his lyrics, not the recordings. Those are most likely not owned by Lehrer.
However, the statement isn’t wholly true. Tom Lehrer didn’t actually release his songs into the public domain. While it may be pedantry given that there is no practical difference, the lengths Lehrer had to go to release what he did in the way that he did only further highlights Lehrer’s genius and is well worth exploring.
If this is truly to be Lehrer’s final musical act, it makes sense to see it for both the effort it took and the intellect required to conceive of it….
(21) AI GIVES ASSIST TO MUSIC VIDEO. [Item by Dann.] Someone recently made a video using the lyrics to “Renegade” by Styx. The lyrics were fed, line by line, into AI art software to create the images used in the video.
While the lyrics aren’t explicitly genre centered, the AI created several images that evoked sci-fi/fantasy themes. The rhetorical progeny of Edgar Allen Poe shows up a few times as well. “Renegade – Styx – But the lyrics are Ai generated images”.
(22) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part I Pitch Meeting,” Ryan George says the producer in the seventh Harry Potter film mourns when several beloved minor characters die. He is bored by the very long camping scenes (where the characters camp and camp and camp some more” but gets excited when Harry Potter gets to duke it out with Voldemort only to discover that this is the end of Part I and we have to wait for Part II.
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Dann, Jennifer Hawthorne, Daniel Dern, Bill, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
(1) WFC 2021 NEWS. World Fantasy Con’s new Progress Report is a free download available here.
WFC 2021 in Montreal – taking place November 4-7 — will be a hybrid convention, with both in-person and virtual elements. Virtual memberships are $75(US)/$100(CAD) and can be obtained through the con’s registration and memberships page.
Guests of honor Nisi Shawl and John Picacio will not be attending in person but will participate virtually.
WFC 2021 has added Julie Czerneda as a Special Guest.
A communication sent to members also reminds them to adhere to the Canadian (and airline) requirements in respect to COVID vaccination and testing.
Lastly, we want to point out that if you are coming to Montreal from outside Canada, please ensure that you meet all requirements for entry into Canada. This includes being fully vaccinated and having a negative PCR test within 72 hours of the scheduled departure time of your flight to Canada. You can find more information on the Government of Canada website. (Don’t forget the other requirements too!) Your airline may have its own requirements.
We are planning on having on-site testing for travellers leaving Canada. The final price (between C$70 and C$90) will depend on the number of tests to be performed. If you are interested in on-site testing during the convention, please send a short email to covid-test@wfc2021.org. Indicate how many people would be taking the test and which day you plan to leave the country. If the antigen test is insufficient, let us know the type required, and we will see if the testing company can handle the request. We will contact interested parties when we have finalized the arrangements.
(2) BEAR MEDICAL UPDATE. Elizabeth Bear made a public post about her cancer surgery at her Throwanotherbearinthecanoenewsletter.
… So that I don’t bury the lede too much, I got my pathology report back this afternoon, and I’ve got clear margins and no signs of metastasis into the lymph nodes. Which is an enormous crying-in-my-tea relief and as soon as I am not on opiates anymore I’m going to have myself a very very fancy glass of Scotch to celebrate….
Witterstaetter started her comics career as an assistant editor at DC Comics working on the Superman books. She later worked at Marvel Comics on Silver Surfer, Conan, Guardians of the Galaxy, and other titles. In addition, she spearheaded the reintroduction of She-Hulk at Marvel, where she actually appeared in the comic!
But she’s much more than only comics, as you’ll soon learn.
We discussed how Jerry Lewis launched her interest in comics, the way science fiction fandom led to her first job at DC Comics, the differences between the Marvel and DC offices of the ’70s and ’80s, what made Mark Gruenwald such an amazing editor, her emotional encounter with Steve Ditko, the inflationary info we learned about the writing of letter columns during the ’70s and ’80s, her work with John Byrne on She-Hulk, how Jurassic Park caused her to leave Marvel, the prank Jackie Chan asked her to help pull on Chris Tucker, and much more.
…”Up until the 1930s, Halloween was largely the dominion of young male pranksters; candy—in the form of mainly candy corn, tiny sugar pellets, or taffy—might be offered at parties, but it wasn’t a particularly important part of the holiday,” says Lisa Morton, an author, screenwriter, and Halloween historian. “Then, in the ’30s, prank-playing moved out of rural areas and into cities, where it became very destructive and cost millions in damages. Rather than simply ban the holiday altogether (which some cities considered), civic groups came up with the idea of buying kids off with treats, costumes, and parties. It worked, and by 1936 we have the first mention of ‘trick-or-treat’ in a national magazine.”…
This listing constitutes the suggestions of the Chesley Nominating Committee plus suggestions received from the community. This is NOT the final ballot; it is only an example of what the community considers worthy of nominating for the Chesley Awards. These suggestions are provided to show you the kind of information we want from you on your ballot, and to maybe help jog your memory of other worthy works of art you saw in 2020. You are encouraged to look beyond this listing when making your nominations; any works published for the first time in 2020 or if unpublished, displayed for the first time in 2020, are eligible. Check out your local bookstore, gaming shop, or knock yourself out visiting various artist’s websites … lots of wonderful art out there. You may make up to five nominations in each category.
(6) I’M YOUR MAN WINS. The winners of the 2021 German film award Lola have been announced. Normally, this is of zero genre interest, but this year’s big winner, taking Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Film is the science fiction romantic comedy I’m Your Man: “Lolas 2021 German Film Awards Winners List” from The Hollywood Reporter.
I’m Your Man, a sci-fi rom-com from director Maria Schrader, featuring Downton Abbey star Dan Stevens as a German-speaking romance robot, has won the Lola in Gold for best film at the 2021 German Film Prize, Germany’s top film awards.
Schrader, fresh off her Emmy win (for best directing for a limited series in Netflix’s Unorthodox), picked up the best director Lola for I’m Your Man. Schrader and co-screenwriter Jan Schomburg took the best screenplay honor for their I’m Your Man script, an adaptation of a short story by German writer Emma Braslavsky. Maren Eggert, who plays the robot’s no-nonsense human love interest, won the best actress Lola for her performance, a role that has already earned her the best actress Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, where I’m Your Man premiered earlier this year….
(7) MAIL CALL. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Bobby Derie, who’s one of those unsung fan writers I wish more people would know, takes a look at the correspondence between C.L. Moore and Robert E. Howard: “Her Letters to Robert E. Howard: Catherine Lucille Moore” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.
… Catherine Lucille Moore burst into the pages of Weird Tales with “Shambleau” (Nov 1933). She was a secretary at the Fletcher Trust Company in her native Indianapolis, Indiana, and engaged to a bank teller named Herbert Ernest Lewis. During the Great Depression, jobs were scarce and her $25 a week was needed to support her family; married women were often expected to be homemakers, and this may be why Moore and her fiance had a long engagement—and it is why, when she began to sell her stories to the pulps for extra cash, she used her initials “C. L.” so that her employers would not discover she had an extra source of income….
From the absolutely appalling cover art that has defaced her books since she was first published, you would think Georgette Heyer the most gooey, ghastly, cutesy, sentimental and trashy author who ever dared put pen to paper. The surprise in store for you, if you have not encountered her before, is that once you tear off, burn or ignore those disgusting covers you will discover her to be one of the wittiest, most insightful and rewarding prose writers imaginable. Her stories satisfy all the requirements of romantic fiction, but the language she uses, the dialogue, the ironic awareness, the satire and insight – these rise far above the genre….
(9) A CLEVER CANARD. Evelyn C. Leeper drew attention to this W. Somerset Maugham quote in the weekly issue of MT Void:
“After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts the declining years of the author who exceeds the common span of man is that intelligent people after the age of thirty read nothing at all. As they grow older the books they read in their youth are lit with its glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to the author that wrote them.”
(10) RICHARD CURTIS Q&A. A famous literary figure shares a wealth of knowledge.
Watch & listen to author, playwright, literary agent and former publisher Richard Curtis talk about writing, publishing and many things that will interest writers and the general public. Richard gives tips, advice and a bit of a history of publishing and how it has changed over the years in his conversation with author Rick Bleiweiss.
(11) MEMORY LANE.
1950 – Seventy-one years ago, the first issue of Galaxy Science Fiction dated October 1950 was published. It was founded by a French-Italian company, World Editions, who hired as editor H. L. Gold who was both an established SF author and editor since the Thirties having made his first sale to Astounding in 1934. There was fiction by Clifford Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, Katherine MacLean, Issac Asimov, Fredric Brown and Fritz Leiber, as well as lots of reviews, mainly by Groff Conklin, but one each by Fredric Brown and Isaac Asimov as well. Gold contributed several essays too. The 1952 run of the magazine would be get a Hugo for Best Professional Magazine at Philcon II. Gold would later be inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 1, 1930 — Richard Harris. One of the Dumbledores in the Potter film franchise. He also played King Arthur in Camelot, Richard the Lion Hearted in Robin and Marian, Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels, James Parker in Tarzan, the Ape Man and he voiced Opal in Kaena: The Prophecy. His acting in Tarzan, the Ape Man got him a nomination for the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor. Anyone see that film? It earns a ten percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. (Died 2002.)
Born October 1, 1935 — Dame Julie Andrews,DBE, 86. The original Mary Poppins! I could have stopped there but I won’t. (Hee.) She had a scene cut in which was a maid in The Return of the Pink Panther, and she’s uncredited as the singing voice of Ainsley Jarvis in The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Yet again she’s uncreated as in a Panther film, this time as chairwoman in Trail of the Pink Panther. She voices Queen Lillian in Sherk 2, Shrek the Third and Shrek Forever After. And she’s the voice of Karathen in Aquaman.
Born October 1, 1940 — Richard Corben. Comic book artist best remembered for his work in Heavy Metal magazine. His work also appeared in Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella. All the stories and covers he did for Creepy and Eerie have been reprinted by Dark Horse Books in a single volume: Creepy Presents Richard Corben. Corben collaborated with Brian Azzarello on five issues of Azzarello’s run on Hellblazer, Hellblazer: Hard Time. (Died 2020.)
Born October 1, 1948 — Mike Ashley, 73. Anthologist, and that is somewhat of an understatement, as the Mammoth Book series by itself ran to thirty volumes including such titles as The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy and The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures. He also did The History of the Science Fiction Magazine which features commentary by him. He’s did a number of genre related studies including The History of the Science Fiction Magazine with Robert A. W. Lowndes and Out of This World: Science Fiction But Not As You Know It.
Born October 1, 1950 — Natalia Nogulich, 71. She’s best remembered as being on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine as Vice Admiral/Fleet Admiral Alynna Nechayev. Interestingly, though Serbian, they gave her a Russian surname. She was the voice for Mon Mothma for the radio adaptation of Return of the Jedi. She had one-offs on Dark Skies, Prey, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Charmed.
Born October 1, 1953 — John Ridley, 68. Author of Those Who Walk in Darkness and What Fire Cannot Burn novels. Both excellent though high on the violence cringe scale. Extremely high. Writer on the Static Shock and Justice League series. Writer, The Authority: human on the inside graphic novel. And apparently he was the writer for Team Knight Rider, a female version of Knight Rider that lasted but one season in the Nineties. I’ve never even heard of it until now. In 2021, Ridley began writing a number of series for DC Comics Including a future Batman story.
Born October 1, 1973 — Rachel Manija Brown, 48. Co-writer of the Change series with Sherwood Smith; Laura’s Wolf, first volume of the Werewolf Marines series. She wrote an essay entitled “The Golden Age of Fantasy Is Twelve: SF and the Young Adult Novel” which was published in Strange Horizons. She’s well stocked at the usual digital suspects.
Born October 1, 1989 — Brie Larson, 32. Captain Marvel in the Marvel film universe including of course the most excellent Captain Marvel which was nominated for a Hugo at CoNZealand. She’s also been in Kong: Skull Island as Mason Weaver, and plays Kit in the Unicorn Store which she also directed and produced. Her first genre role was Rachael in the “Into the Fire” episode of the Touched by an Angel series; she also appeared as Krista Eisenburg in the “Slam” episode of Ghost Whisperer. I wrote up a review of her Funko Rock Candy figure at Green Man.
“I am happy to have resolved our differences with Disney,” stated Johansson. “I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve done together over the years and have greatly enjoyed my creative relationship with the team. I look forward to continuing our collaboration in years to come.”
Disney Studios chairman Alan Bergman added: “I’m very pleased that we have been able to come to a mutual agreement with Scarlett Johansson regarding Black Widow. We appreciate her contributions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and look forward to working together on a number of upcoming projects, including Disney’s Tower of Terror.”…
… Ms. Johansson would have made tens of millions of dollars in box office bonuses if “Black Widow” had approached $1 billion in global ticket sales; “Captain Marvel” and “Black Panther” both exceeded that threshold in prepandemic release, so similar turnout for “Black Widow” was not out of the question.
The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Creative Artists had privately asked Disney to pay Ms. Johansson $80 million — on top of her base salary of $20 million — to compensate for lost bonuses. Disney did not respond with a counteroffer, prompting her to sue….
(15) JEOPARDY! While watching last night’s Jeopardy!, Andrew Porter’s jaw dropped when a contestant came up with this response.
Final Jeopardy: Children’s Literature
Answer: A 2000 Library of Congress exhibit called this 1900 work “America’s greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale.”
Wrong question: What is “Shrek”?
Right question: What is “The Wizard of Oz”?
(16) JUSTWATCH – SEPTEMBER TOP 10S. Here are the top sff movies and streaming shows of September 2021 according to JustWatch. (Click for larger images.)
(17) WEEKS LATER, THESE ESCAPEES ARE STILL WEARING STRIPES. I’m having trouble thinking of a way to connect this to science fiction, thereby justifying the presence in the Scroll of an item that amuses me. Any suggestions? “A Month Later, Five Zebras Are Still on the Run in Maryland” from the New York Times.
…A month after they escaped from a farm in Maryland, five zebras have evaded capture and are continuing to ramble across the wilds of suburban Prince George’s County, eking out a living on territory far from the grasslands of East Africa.
… Daniel I. Rubenstein, a professor of zoology at Princeton University, said he was not surprised that the zebras had proved so elusive.
Unlike domesticated horses that will return to a barn after they’ve gotten loose, zebras are wild animals and “don’t like people generally,” he said. And they may not have any need to feed on the grain set out for them as bait, if they can find enough food to munch elsewhere.
If the zebras continue to elude capture, “they should be able to do just fine” in Prince George’s County, Dr. Rubinstein said.
The county has plenty of lawns, fields and pastures where the zebras can graze, as well as streams and other places for them to drink water, which they need to do once a day, he said.
And with the dearth of lions in the Greater Washington area, they have no natural predators, he said, adding, “coyotes they can deal with.”
While zebras “won’t like snow,” they may be able to survive colder weather in the fall and winter. Zebras, he said, live on the slopes of Mount Kenya, at 13,000 feet, where temperatures at night dip into the 30s.
“They should be able to thrive quite nicely,” Dr. Rubinstein said. “They will be able to sustain themselves naturally on that landscape.”…
Studies show southeast Asia is a hotspot for potentially dangerous viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2. Scientists have found three viruses in bats in Laos that are more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than any known viruses. Researchers say that parts of their genetic code bolster claims that the virus behind COVID-19 has a natural origin — but their discovery also raises fears that there are numerous coronaviruses with the potential to infect people.
(19) CHERNOBYL BACK IN NEWS. This is worrying: Radiation levels are rising around reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which suffered the catastrophic meltdown in 1986: “Chernobyl’s Blown Up Reactor 4 Just Woke Up” in History of Yesterday. The article explores several hypothetical explanations why this could happen.
… Scientists from Ukraine have placed many sensors around reactor 4 that constantly monitor the level of radioactivity. Recently those sensors have detected a constant increase in the level of radioactivity. It seems that this radioactivity is coming from an unreachable chamber from underneath reactor 4 that has been blocked since the night of the explosion on the 26th of April, 1986….
(20) TINGLE TALK. Dominic Noble decided to answer the question “Is Chuck Tingle A Good Writer?” and reviewed 25 of Tingle’s books.
…A question kept occurring to me over and over again that no one seemed to be addressing. Chuck Tingle is a pretty cool guy. Chuck Tingle is great at titles and covers. But are his books actually any good? Is chuck tingle a good writer? Now I feel the need to immediately qualify this. I am aware that it doesn’t matter. His books make people happy even if they’ve not read them which is quite an achievement. His inclusivity means a lot to people and his general behavior be it amusingly bizarre or the unashamedly progressive matters more in this crazy world we’re living in than if he can rock a good three-act structure…
[Thanks to, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, Mike Kennedy, Jennifer Hawthorne, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Cora Buhlert, Paul Di Filippo, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cliff, with an assist from OGH.]
