Tag Archives: supernova

Pixel Scroll 3/24/24 When Pixels Run in Titles, It’s A Very, Very, Scroll World

Posted on by
19

(1) NORTHUMBERLAND HEATH SF HAD ITS MONTHLY MEET. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] No big deal in itself but the meet saw Nicki receive a copy of her father’s collected fan writings: A Vince Clarke Treasury. 

Vince, of course, being a long-standing BritCit fan from the days of Ken Bulmer, Tedd Tubb and — no relation – Arthur C. Clarke. Vince was GoH at the 1995 Glasgow Worldcon, Intersection. Here’s Vince’s conreport. (Click for larger image.)

Nicki is, roughly third from left next to husband in blue shirt.

(2) O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN. “William Shatner: ‘Good science fiction is humanity, moved into a different milieu’” – so he tells a Guardian interviewer.

…In the case of his time on Star Trek, for instance, an inevitable subject of discussion with the former Captain Kirk: “It was three years of my life, you know?” It gladdens him to see how much joy the series has brought its many fans, but the richest rewards came in his introduction to science fiction, which activated and nurtured a lifelong curiosity about our species. He reminisces about meeting the great writers of the genre fondly yet frankly, honest enough to sort Ray Bradbury into “the category right below friend, I think”. He devoured their novels and developed a fascination with the principle of defamiliarization, that concepts taken for granted can be understood anew when viewed through the vantage of a stranger in a strange land. “Good science fiction is humanity, moved into a different milieu,” he says. “Great stories are great stories. You put human beings on a spaceship or a deserted planet, and we’ve got another way to see ourselves.”…

(3) KAIJU AROUND THE CLOCK. Collider tells where you can “Celebrate Godzilla’s 70th Birthday Party with a 24-Hour Franchise Marathon”.

…  the Music Box Theatre in Chicago is hosting a 24-hour Godzilla marathon in June as a part of an almost week-long event.

From June 7 to June 13, 2024, the Music Box Theatre has partnered with the Japanese Art Foundation to host a slew of events in honor of Godzilla’s historic reign. Opening night (June 7) will be a double feature of the last two Toho Godzilla films, Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One. This is followed by a panel discussion entitled “Godzilla: The Atomic Age Anti-Hero” led by Saira Chambers of the Japanese Culture Center/Japanese Arts Foundation and Dr.Yuki Miyamoto of DePaul Humanities Center. June 8 is when the 24-hour Godzilla marathon will be taking place. This will feature 15 films from the character’s Showa-era. Then, June 9, a rare I.B. Technicolor 35mm print screening of the underrated Godzilla (1998) starring Matthew Broderick will be shown. Other screenings that will be shown throughout this monstrous event will include the original Godzilla from 1954, The Return of Godzilla, and Godzilla vs Biollante.

(4) 2024 WATERSTONES CHILDREN’S BOOK PRIZE. “Botanical fairytale set in Kew Gardens wins the Waterstones children’s book prize” reports The Guardian.

Kew Gardens features a hidden magical door in the winning book for this year’s £5,000 Waterstoneschildren’s book prize.

Greenwild: The World Behind the Door by Pari Thomson was voted the winner by Waterstones booksellers. The book “is a spellbinding triumph that will make children fall in love with the world they are reading about, and with reading itself,” said Bea Carvalho, head of books at Waterstones.

The book follows Daisy as she searches for her missing mother and discovers another world behind a hidden doorway in Kew Gardens. She soon learns that the new realm, filled with plants and magic, is under threat, and she bands together with a botanical expert, a boy who can talk to animals and a cat to save the green paradise.

Thomson lives near Kew Gardens – a place “full of sparkling glasshouses and carnivorous plants and lily pads big enough to take a nap on”, she said. “I have always felt that nature was a little bit magic – and Kew made me ask, what if it was true? What if the natural world all around us was brimming with magic? Greenwild is the answer to that question.”…

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 24, 1930 – Steve McQueen. (Died 1980.) I know that Steve McQueen had but one SF role as Steve Andrews in The Blob. He received three thousand dollars in the late Fifties for that his first starring role, now thirty thousand if it was adjusted for inflation.

He had turned down a first offer for a  much smaller up-front fee in return for a ten percent share of profits, thinking the film would never make money, a reasonable assumption on his part. 

As later biographies noted, he needed this money immediately to pay for food and rent. However, this film ended up being a major hit, grossing four million at the box office after costing just one hundred and ten thousand to make, ten thousand under budget. 

I’ve seen it and he was quite excellent in it. Certainly I think he did better than the reviews of the time indicated such as the New York Times which said “the acting is pretty terrible” and or the Variety that proclaimed, “Neither the acting nor direction is particularly creditable.” Humph.

Steve McQueen in The Blob
McQueen in The Great Escape

So one genre film, right? Now let’s look at what else that I like that he was in.

Two years later, he’d be in The Magnificent Seven. Yes, it’s a remake of a Japanese film but it feels all American. And the cast, oh my — other performers included Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn and James Coburn. It’s considered one of the greatest films of the Western genre and deservedly so. 

The Thomas Crown Affair, released a decade later, was a most extraordinary heist film that he headed with Faye Dunaway. The perfect crime takes place. And then again and possibly deadly consequences. Oh it’s wonderful. He’s definitely a much better performer here, not surprising really. 

Now let’s see… Anything else?  Yes, one last film worth, in my opinion to note.

He’s the lead in The Great Escape as Captain Virgil Hilts which tells the story of the escape by British prisoners of war from German POW camp Stalag Luft III. Well, a highly fictional version of course. 

(6) COMICS SECTION.

  • Candorville explains once again that sf jokes are hard.
  • Tom Gauld presents a double feature.

(7) GENTLEBEINGS, BE SEATED. At Sci-Fi World Museum in Santa Monica, CA, “The restored Star Trek Enterprise-D bridge goes on display in May” – Ars Technica has the story.

More than a decade has gone by since three Star Trek: The Next Generation fans first decided to restore the bridge from the Enterprise-D. Plans for the restored bridge morphed from opening it up to non-commercial uses like weddings or educational events into a fully fledged museum, and now that museum is almost ready to open. Backers of the project on Kickstarter have been notified that Sci-Fi World Museum will open to them in Santa Monica, California, on May 27, with general admission beginning in June.

It’s not actually the original set from TNG, as that was destroyed while filming Star Trek: Generations, when the saucer section crash-lands on Veridian III. But three replicas were made, overseen by Michael Okuda and Herman Zimmerman, the show’s set designers. Two of those welcomed Trekkies at Star Trek: The Experience, an attraction in Las Vegas until it closed in 2008.

The third spent time in Hollywood, then traveled to Europe and Asia for Star Trek: World Tour before it ended up languishing in a warehouse in Long Beach. It’s this third globe-trotting Enterprise-D bridge that—like the grit that gets an oyster to create a pearl—now finds a science-fiction museum accreted around it. Well, mostly—the chairs used by Riker, Troi, Data, and some other bits were salvaged from the Las Vegas exhibit….

(8) TWO THUMBS. Collider remembers “The Time Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel Stood Up For Star Wars”.

…[John] Simon’s opinion is highly unusual, as most critics who have reviewed the original Star Wars films are generally complimentary of the visual effects, which are often praised as being extremely convincing and for blending practical techniques with computer-generated work. For example, in his original review of Return of the Jedi for The Chicago Tribune, Siskel remarked that, “for the professional moviegoers, it is particularly enjoyable to watch every facet of filmmaking at its best.” In their response to Simon, Ebert disagreed with the idea of the prominence of the special effects being indicative of poor quality, saying, “I think all movies are special effects. Movies are not real. They are two-dimensional. It’s a dream. It’s an imagination,” alluding to the idea that since all films are brought to life with a combination of effects, what matters is whether said effects work in convincing ways and immerse viewers in a given story….

(9) BANG THE GAVEL SLOWLY. Then in the present, Judge John Hodgman has been called on to remedy a genre-related dispute: “My 60-Year-Old Brother has Never Seen ‘Star Wars.’ Help!” in the New York Times. Here’s the problem – see the answer at the link.

Erin writes: My brother Joel is 60, and I’m 52. But despite growing up in the ’70s, Joel never saw the original “Star Wars.” Now he refuses to, because “sci-fi is dumb.” Please order that he watch it with me on his next visit. I will even provide the gummies if needed!…

(10) BURRRP! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Nature has a cover with a decidedly SFnal theme about stars that destroy worlds.  ‘Death Stars’ if you will….

The cover shows an artist’s impression of a planet being captured and ingested by one of the stars in co-moving pairs of stars. In this week’s issue, Fan Liu and colleagues present evidence suggesting about 1 in 12 stars might have ingested a planet. The chemical composition of a star can change when it engulfs a planet, so the researchers looked at binary star systems in which the two stars were born at the same time. By comparing the spectral signatures of the stellar twins, they were able to identify instances in which one of the stars had ingested a planet. They identified 91 pairs of close ‘co-natal’ stars and found evidence of planetary ingestion in about 8% of them.

(11) HORSES FOR COURSES? HANDICAPPING THE ECLIPSE. Atlas Obscura tells how “Eclipse Maps Entered a Golden Age Thanks to Edmond Halley”.

In 1715, Edmond Halley published a map predicting the time and path of a coming solar eclipse. Today the astronomer is most famous for understanding the behavior of the comet now named for him, but in his lifetime he was a hotshot academic, elected to the Royal Society at age 22 and appointed the second Astronomer Royal in 1720. He was fascinated with the movements of celestial bodies, and he wanted to show the public that the coming event was not a portent of doom, but a natural wonder….

… With each eclipse to pass over the British Isles, publishers became more savvy about promoting the event to the public. In 1737, mathematician and astronomer George Smith published a predictive eclipse map in The Gentleman’s Magazine, which is thought to be the first eclipse map published in a popular publication (as opposed to as a stand-alone broadside). By 1764, wrote historian Alice N. Walters in a 1999 paper published in History of Science, “so many eclipse maps were on the market—each with a different prediction—that one commentator likened the competition between them and their producers to an event quite familiar to the English public: a horse race.”…

(12) A DAYTIME VISIBLE NOVA. Another predictable but even rarer celestial event is coming up soon: “Stellar explosion: What to know about T Coronae Borealis nova” at Yahoo!

…It’s not exactly new but there will be an extra star in the sky that will be visible to the naked eye in the coming months in Northern California. T Coronae Borealis is a binary star system comprised of a cool red giant and a hot white dwarf star 3,000 light years away. The smaller white dwarf has been stealing matter from the red giant and appears to be getting ready to emit a burst of energy which will make it visible for at least a few days. It is known as a recurring nova where matter, mostly hydrogen, is collected by the white dwarf until enough mass is reached, creating a fusion reaction. That will then emits a burst of energy, which includes visible light. This process has been going on for a long time and occurs about every 80 years in this system….

(13) AS THE WORM TURNS. And one more reason to keep watching the skies – “Here’s how to see the upcoming worm moon lunar eclipse”

A glowing worm moon will light up the sky on Monday with a celestial performance in store for people venturing out in the early morning hours — a penumbral lunar eclipse.

March’s full moon, referred to as the worm moon by the Farmers’ Almanac due to its proximity to the spring equinox, will be at its fullest at 3 a.m. ET.

A few hours earlier, starting at 12:53 a.m. ET, according to EarthSky, the moon will be almost perfectly aligned with the sun and Earth, causing the outer edge of Earth’s shadow, known as the penumbra, to be cast onto the glowing orb.

The greatest eclipse will be at 3:12 a.m. ET, when the moon will appear to be slightly darker than usual, said Dr. Shannon Schmoll, director of the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University….

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, 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 Soon Lee.]

Pixel Scroll 6/15/23 Where Do Pixels Come From? They Are Born Of Scrolls. Where Do Scrolls Originate? Go Ask Mike

Posted on by
13

(1) BLACK MIRROR CREATOR. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show yesterday was devoted to Charlie Brooker. You can download the episode here.

Brooker in SF terms is best known for being the writer behind the Black Mirror whose first two seasons were on Britain’s publicly-owned but self-financed Channel 4 before it migrated behind Netflix’s pay wall. (Netflix could afford the show a bigger budget.)

Charlie Brooker is one of the most influential satirists working today. Having started out as a cartoonist, his razor sharp writing on culture and the media made his TV columns for The Guardian, begun in 2000, essential reading for many. It wasn’t long until his acerbic and frequently absurd world view found a home on BBC Four in the form of the TV review show, Screenwipe. He’s also behind acclaimed comedies like Nathan Barley. But he’s found global fame with the series Black Mirror, which has entered the lexicon for a singular form of technology-enhanced dread. In the week that the new season launches, Charlie Brooker joins</I> The Media Show <I>to look back at his career.

(2) WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION. The 2023 winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction is Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which despite the thrilling sound of its title is a non-genre work.

(3) 2023 KAYMAR AWARDS. The National Fantasy Fan Federation has named Will Mayo and Justin E. A. Busch the winners of the 2023 Kaymar Awards. Each is a posthumous award, a first for the N3F.

The Kaymar Award recipient is selected by a committee consisting of previous winners who are still in the N3F, from nominations submitted by members.

The award, unlike many other awards in fandom, can be awarded only once. It is not given for talent or for popularity, but for work — work for the benefit of the club and its members. The award is a memorial to K. Martin Carlson [1904-1986], who originated, maintained, and financed it for 25 years. Carlson was a long-time N3F member who held many positions in the club, including club Historian. He went by the fan name of Kaymar.

(4) ELIO. Here’s a teaser for next year’s Pixar release, Elio.

Disney and Pixar’s 28th feature film is “Elio”. Jameela Jamil and Brad Garrett join previously announced America Ferrera and Yonas Kibreab in the intergalactic misadventure that is scheduled to take off next spring—March 1, 2024.   For centuries, people have called out to the universe looking for answers—in Disney and Pixar’s all-new movie “Elio,” the universe calls back! The original feature film introduces Elio, an underdog with an active imagination who finds himself inadvertently beamed up to the Communiverse, an interplanetary organization with representatives from galaxies far and wide. Mistakenly identified as Earth’s ambassador to the rest of the universe, and completely unprepared for that kind of pressure, Elio must form new bonds with eccentric alien lifeforms, survive a series of formidable trials and somehow discover who he is truly meant to be. 

(5) UPLIFTER. Steven Barnes showed Facebook readers his latest recognition, The Uplifter Ghost of Honor Award.

(6) ANOTHER COMPANION. “Doctor Who’ Casts BAFTA-Winner Lenny Rush As Morris” reports Deadline.

…Lenny Rush, the BAFTA-winning star of BBC comedy Am I Being Unreasonable?, has joined the iconic sci-fi series as Time Lord companion Morris. No further details were given about his role.

Rush, 14, won Best Male Performance for Daisy May Cooper’s Am I Being Unreasonable? last month. He has previously appeared in shows including A Christmas Carol and Dodger.

Showrunner Russell T Davies said: “This is what Doctor Who‘s all about, brand new talent from the next generation, and no one’s more talented than Lenny. He joins the TARDIS team just in time for the Doctor’s greatest nightmare, so hold on tight.”

(7) IT’S A GAS. [Item by Steven French.] “Blending science and the supernatural, high art and gothic horror, Hamad Butt made work that was literally dangerous, in one case sparking fears of a gas leak. He is one of the stars of Tate Britain’s rehang”. “’Dicing with death’: the lethal, terrifying art of Hamad Butt – and the evacuation it once caused” in the Guardian.

But where’s the genre interest, you ask? The work being showcased at the art gallery is Transmission which features a circle of glass books displaying etchings of John Wyndham’s triffids.

…One particularly exciting addition is the little-known Pakistani-born artist Hamad Butt, whose striking 1990 installation Transmission has been given a whole room.

Created at the height of the Aids epidemic in Europe and the US, Transmission evokes multiple terrors. Donning safety goggles at the entrance, you encounter a darkened space with nine open glass books, lit by UV lamps, arranged in a circle on the floor as if for some cabalistic ritual. Through the eerie glow, an etching looms on each book of a triffid, the giant carnivorous plants that overrun Earth after a blinding meteor shower in John Wyndham’s 1951 sci-fi novel The Day of the Triffids. On the wall, nine cryptic statements pronounce things like: “We have the eruption of the Triffid that obscures sex with death” and “We have the blindness of fear and the books of fear”. The piece explores fears of the foreign invader, of deadly desire (through the distinctly phallic-looking triffid), of literal blindness as well as blind faith, the open tomes recalling a madrasa or a witch’s coven….

(8) ROBERT GOTTLIEB (1931-2023). Robert Gottlieb, an influential editor who worked at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker during his career, died June 14 reports the New York Times. He was 92. He edited many successful books “by, among many others, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing and Chaim Potok; science fiction by Michael Crichton and Ray Bradbury; histories by Antonia Fraser and Barbara Tuchman; memoirs by former President Bill Clinton and Katharine Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post; and works by Jessica Mitford and Anthony Burgess.”

(9) MEMORY LANE.

2001 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

If memory serves me right, the first thing that I read by  Kelly Link was something in an early issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet that she and Gavin Grant sent to Green Man of Small Beer Press for review.

They also edited the last four years of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror that Datlow and Windling founded. Same anthology, different tastes under their editorship. 

Our Beginning this Scroll comes from the Nebula-winning “Louise’s Ghost” novelette which is in the Stranger Things Happen collection which is where it was originally published twenty-two years ago. The entire collection being her writing is wonderful. 

And now for her Beginning here…

Two women and a small child meet in a restaurant. The restaurant is nice—there are windows everywhere. The women have been here before. It’s all that light that makes the food taste so good. The small child—a girl dressed all in green, hairy green sweater, green T-shirt, green corduroys and dirty sneakers with green-black laces—sniffs. She’s a small child but she has a big nose. She might be smelling the food that people are eating. She might be smelling the warm light that lies on top of everything. 

Hit

None of her greens match except of course they are all green.

“Louise,” one woman says to the other.

 “Louise,” the other woman says. 

They kiss.

The maitre d’ comes up to them. He says to the first woman, “Louise, how nice to see you. And look at Anna! You’re so big. Last time I saw you, you were so small. This small.” He holds his index finger and his thumb together as if pinching salt. He looks at the other woman. 

Louise says, “This is my friend, Louise. My best friend. Since Girl Scout camp. Louise.” The maitre d’ smiles. “Yes, Louise. 

Of course. How could I forget?

Louise sits across from Louise. Anna sits between them. She has a notebook full of green paper, and a green crayon. She’s drawing something, only it’s difficult to see what, exactly. Maybe it’s a house. 

Louise says, “Sorry about you know who. Teacher’s day. The sitter canceled at the last minute. And I had such a lot to tell you, too! About you know, number eight. Oh boy, I think I’m in love. Well, not in love.” 

She is sitting opposite a window, and all that rich soft light falls on her. She looks creamy with happiness, as if she’s carved out of butter. The light loves Louise, the other Louise thinks. Of course it loves Louise. Who doesn’t?

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 15, 1942 — Sondra Marshak, 81. Author of multiple Trek novels including The Price of the Phoenix and The Fate of the Phoenix, both co-written with Myrna Culbreath. She also wrote, again with Myrna Culbreath, Shatner: Where No Man …: The Authorized Biography of William Shatner which of course naturally lists Shatner as the third co-author. Finally she’s co-writer with Jacqueline Lichtenberg, and television producer Joan Winston of Star Trek Lives!
  • Born June 15, 1947 — David S Garnett, 76. Not to be confused with the David Garnett without an S. Author of the Bikini Planet novels (Stargonauts, Bikini Planet and Space Wasters) which should be taken as seriously as the names suggests. Revived with the blessing of Michael Moorcock a new version of New Worlds as an anthology. Last work was writing Warhammer novels.
  • Born June 15, 1960 — William Snow, 63. He is best remembered as Lord John Roxton on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. (Yes, that’s its official title.) He also had the lead as David Grief on the Australian series Tales of the South Seas which had Rachel Blakey from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World as Isabelle Reed. It was definitely genre. 
  • Born June 15, 1960 — Sabrina Vourvoulias, 63. Thai-born author, an American citizen from birth brought up in Guatemala, but here since her teens. Her novel, Ink, deals with immigrants who are tattooed with biometric implants that are used to keep track of them no matter where they are. I’m assuming that the “Skin in the Game” story which appeared first on Tor.com is set in the future. Fair guess that “The Ways of Walls and Words” which also appeared on Tor.com is also set there.
  • Born June 15, 1963 — Mark Morris, 60. English author known for his horror novels, although he has also written several novels based on Doctor Who and Torchwood. Given his horror background, these tend to be darker than many similar novels are, I recommend Forever Autumn and Bay of the Dead if you like a good chill. 
  • Born June 15, 1973 — Neil Patrick Harris, 50. His first genre role was not Carl Jenkins in Starship Troopers, but rather Billy Johnson in Purple People Eater, an SF comedy best forgotten I suspect. Post-Starship Troopers, I’ve got him voicing Barry Allen / The Flash in Justice League: The New Frontier and Dick Grayson / Nightwing in Batman: Under the Red Hood. He also voiced Peter Parker and his superhero alias in Spider-Man: The New Animated Series. Finally he’s Count Olaf in A Series of Unfortunate Events which he also produces. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Eek! reveals something about smartphones and the undead.

(12) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA has released episode 64 of its monthly science fiction podcast Simultaneous Times. The stories featured in this episode are:

  • “The Runner” by Jonathan Nevair (with music by Phog Masheeen)
  • “The Last AI Editor on Planet Earth” by Toshiya Kamei (with music by Patrick Urn)

(13) DOES SOMEBODY OWE YOU $7.70? From the New York Times: “Google Might Owe You Money. Here’s How to Get It.” “As part of a legal settlement, Google agreed to pay $23 million to users who clicked on a search link from 2006 to 2013. Individual payments are estimated to be less than $8.”

Anyone who clicked on a Google search result link from October 2006 to September 2013 is entitled to a piece — however small — of a $23 million settlement that the tech giant has agreed to pay to resolve a class-action lawsuit.

The settlement’s administrators set up a website for people to submit claims. According to the site, the estimated individual payout stands at $7.70. But that figure can fluctuate based on the number of people who make valid claims.

Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., agreed to the settlement in August. The consolidated class-action lawsuit filed in 2013 accused the company of “storing and intentionally, systematically and repeatedly divulging” users’ search queries and histories to third-party websites and companies….

(14) ROCKS AROUND THE CLOCK. Smithsonian Magazine can help you find “Seven Ways to Explore Space Without Leaving Earth”.

…Just up the road from the Cinder Hills is Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, another astronaut training site. In the early 1970s, commander Gene Cernan and geologist Jack Schmitt trained here before Apollo 17. The mission for this final lunar landing was to find evidence of volcanism on the moon. The two astronauts used the jagged Bonito lava flow, along with surrounding cinder fields and cones, to test equipment and practice geological survey techniques.

In December 1972, Cernan and Schmitt landed in a valley of the Taurus mountain range in the Sea of Serenity. Satellite imagery had suggested these lunar highlands might be volcanic in nature. The pair’s first extravehicular activity—as astronauts call such trips outside their spacecraft—turned up mostly breccias, conglomerate rocks created by the meteorite impacts that actually formed most lunar mountains. But halfway through their second excursion, Schmitt became ecstatic when he spotted something unusual: orange soil. Analysis back on Earth proved the mission a success. They had found remnants of volcanic glass. The eventual theory was that billions of years ago, the moon was a magmatically turbulent place, where lava explosively burst from the low-gravity surface to great heights before raining down as tiny grains of orange glass.

Today, the 3,138-acre Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument offers an excellent way to experience the Arizona landscape that once simulated the lunar environment. A series of short trails allow you to explore some of the volcanic processes that Artemis astronauts may search for when they return to the moon in coming years….

(15) QUANTUM COMPUTER HITS THE MARK. “IBM quantum computer passes calculation milestone” – Nature explains the significance.

‘Benchmark’ experiment suggests quantum computers could have useful real-world applications within two years.

“Four years ago, physicists at Google claimed their quantum computer could outperform classical machines — although only at a niche calculation with no practical applications. Now their counterparts at IBM say they have evidence that quantum computers will soon beat ordinary ones at useful tasks, such as calculating properties of materials or the interactions of elementary particles.”…

(16) WHAT IS A SAFE DISTANCE FROM A SUPERNOVA? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] You know me… I do worry so.  So much so that it is a wonder I get any sleep.

Among many troubling concerns is the end of the world.  Now, I have to admit liking the end of the world: it is great fun, but with the firm proviso that is that it is firmly in science fiction.  The real deal is the thing that gets me.

So Matt O’Dowd (he’s a physicist but don’t let that put you off) in this week’s PBS Space Time is sort of re-assuring (only sort of) as to one way the world might end… being caught in the blast of a supernova…

(Best make a calming cup of tea before viewing.)

The deaths of massive stars results in one of the most beautiful and violent events in the universe: the supernova. They are so luminous we can see them here on Earth and historical records show that we can even see them into the day. But supernovas release deadly and violent radiation that could destroy our atmosphere. So how far away do these supernova have to be for humanity to be safe? And when will the next supernova occur…

Nobody panic…

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

Pixel Scroll 6/14/23 A Whiter Shade Of A Pail Of Air? Probably Too Much Dry Ice – Better Scoop A Few Feet Lower

Posted on by
17

(1) CHENGDU WORLDCON ON HUGO DELAY. The Chengdu Worldcon yesterday confirmed on Twitter what Hugo co-Administrator Dave McCarty said a week ago on his Facebook page concerning when to expect the ballot:

(2) SWIPER STOP SWIPING. Music conglomerates are asking for a quarter billion dollars:“Twitter Lawsuit: Music Publishers Claim ‘Massive Copyright Infringement’”. The Hollywood Reporter has full details.

Twitter’s longstanding refusal to secure music licensing rights has come to a head with a lawsuit accusing the company of mass copyright infringement.

The three major music conglomerates — Universal, Sony and Warner — joined by a host of other publishers on Wednesday sued Twitter for at least $250 million over the alleged infringement of roughly 1,700 works for which it received hundreds of thousands of takedown notices. They allege the company “consistently and knowingly hosts and streams infringing copies of music compositions” to “fuel its business.” Twitter has rebuffed calls for it to obtain the proper licenses, according to the suit.

Twitter is the lone major social media platform without music licensing deals, which permits those sites to legally host videos and other content featuring publishers’ music. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat have all entered into agreements that compensate creators of musical compositions for use of their work….

(3) AVENGERS LEGAL ENDGAME. The Hollywood Reporter reports new court filings as “Marvel Winds Down Fight Over Avengers Characters”.

Marvel has made a major move toward ending the battle for the rights to its most iconic characters — including the Avengers — but the fight isn’t over.

Back in 2021, Marvel filed a series of lawsuits in response to copyright termination notices from Larry Lieber and the estates of Gene Colan, Steve Ditko, Don Heck and Don Rico.

U.S. Copyright Law gives authors or their heirs the ability to essentially claw back copyrights after a certain period of time. It doesn’t cover works made for hire, which has been Marvel’s primary argument in these matters.

At issue are the rights to titles including Amazing Fantasy, The Avengers, Captain America, Daredevil, Iron Man, Journey Into Mystery, Marvel Super-Heroes, Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense and Tomb of Dracula.

In addition to the specific art and stories in the comics, the termination notices also targeted “any character, story element, or indicia reasonably associated with the Works.”

Collectively, an extremely long list of characters has been involved, including Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch.

Marvel, represented by Dan Petrocelli and Molly Lens of O’Melveny, has apparently reached deals that resolve four of the fights, as the parties have filed joint stipulations for voluntary dismissal.

There’s one exception: No such notice has been filed in the fight over Steve Ditko’s works…. 

(4) THE PTAO. “Pratchett and Philosophy: The Tao of Sir Terry” is related by J. R. H. Lawless at Tor.com.

…This is not an exhaustive survey of those various viewpoints and concepts. Rather, this essay is an attempt to provide a flying machine’s-eye overview of just a few of the major philosophical underpinnings of Pratchett’s Tao, or “way.” Let’s jump in…

(5) ASTEROID CITY GOES BICOASTAL. SYFY Wire tells fans how to “Visit Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City Pop-up in NYC and LA”.

Wes Anderson fans in New York City and Los Angeles, get yourself suited up and head to the exclusive Asteroid City Pop-Up activations at the Landmark Theatres Sunset and Alamo Drafthouse Lower Manhattan. Both theaters cater to the cinephile crowd and are celebrating Wes Anderson’s Focus Features sci-fi / dramedy, Asteroid City — out in limited theatrical release on June 16 and wide release on June 23 — by turning both theaters into the dusty little town.

… As the Landmark was still under renovation, Holloway said it was the perfect time for Focus to swoop in and wrap the whole lobby with signage, wallpaper and lighting grabbed straight from the film. Actual costumes and props featured in film are included in the display.The Pop-Up covers two floors of the cinema. Plus, there are social media-worthy photo ops, including reproductions of the two cabins where Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) and Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) have their deep conversations, and the podium where General Grif Gibson (Wright) hosts the Junior Stargazer awards….

(6) A WRITER’S HEALTH MEMOIR. Madeline Ashby shares vulnerably while introducing a recipe for “Betty’s Summer Surprise Fruit Dessert” at Sarah Gailey’s Stone Soup.

…My illness enjoyed hiding behind my successes. It hid inside my carry-on and my hardshell. It hid under my gel manicure. It was a deceptively-worded clause in yet another contract I had failed to sign and scan until long after the work was done. Occasionally others glimpsed it peeking out from behind my glasses, which is, I imagine, why, in the greenroom at SXSW 2018, Bruce Sterling suddenly turned to me with the dread weight of his perceptiveness and asked, “But are you okay? Really?”

Reader, I was not.

A lot of my day was spent watching loops of soothing videos. There was something democratizing about video platforms, then. People were still nervous on camera. I listened to soft-spoken men explaining crypto and whispering women explaining crystals. What I was really listening to were people talking about the beliefs which had seen them through times of crisis. This is how I found the recipe I am about to share with you…

(7) JOHN ROMITA SR. (1930-2023). Legendary comic book artist John Romita Sr., who worked on The Amazing Spider-Man, and co-created Mary Jane Watson, Wolverine and the Punisher, died June 12 at the age of 93 reports Deadline. See also the New York Times’ obit:

…Mr. Romita’s interest in drawing was encouraged at home and in school, according to a 2007 biography by Sue L. Hamilton. In 1938, he purchased two copies of the first Superman comic, keeping one safely in a bag while using the other as a drawing guide.

After graduating from high school in 1947, Mr. Romita began working as a commercial artist. But a chance meeting with a friend and former high school classmate, who worked for Stan Lee, the comic book revolutionary, led to his first big break. Mr. Romita began secretly sketching comics in pencil for his friend, who would later go over them with ink and pass them off as his own work.

Mr. Romita took his career into his own hands in the 1950s and revealed the arrangement to Mr. Lee, who in turn gave him the opportunity to work, Mr. Romita said in an interview with The Comics Reporter in 2002….

The Guardian’s David Barnett adds these details: “John Romita Sr: the Spider-Man artist was a titan of the comic-book world”.

… Spider-Man, of course, wasn’t Romita’s first comics work; not even his first chance to stamp his mark on the Marvel Universe. The man often billed in the comic credits in Stan Lee’s Barnum-esque fashion as “Jazzy” John had started work in comics in 1949, aged just 19.

His first work was uncredited, a 10-page gangster story for Timely Comics, which was the forerunner of Marvel. He cut his teeth on war, horror, science fiction and romance comics throughout the 1950s, and then late in the decade moved to DC Comics where he worked mainly on the hugely popular teen romance titles such as Young Love, Heart Throbs and Girls’ Romances.

Hearing that Romita was thinking of getting into commercial illustration after DC pulled the plug on many of its romance titles as the genre declined in popularity, Stan Lee, ever the comic book puppetmaster, met him for a three-hour lunch and persuaded him to take on Daredevil, with issue 12 of the blind superhero’s title which came out in January 1966. It’s hard not to imagine Lee quietly moving the pieces around the chessboard of his masterplan as he wrote a Daredevil issue later that year with Spider-Man (who had debuted in Amazing Fantasy issue 15 in 1962) as a guest star, to see how Romita would handle the character who – by accident, or more likely Lee’s design – was shortly to become Marvel’s flagship superhero….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

2018 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Sam J. Miller has been nominated for multiple Nebula Awards along with the World Fantasy and  Sturgeon Memorial Awards with one of his two Awards to date  is a Shirley Jackson Award for his “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides” story. 

By my count, he’s written nearly fifty stories and his stories have appeared in publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed and Uncanny Magazine along with being reprinted in over fifteen year’s best collections.

The other is the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Blackfish City: A Novel which is our Beginning this time.

And now for that Beginning..

People would say she came to Qaanaaq in a skiff towed by a killer whale harnessed to the front like a horse. In these stories, which grew astonishingly elaborate in the days and weeks after her arrival, the polar bear paced beside her on the flat bloody deck of the boat. Her face was clenched and angry. She wore battle armor built from thick scavenged plastic.

At her feet, in heaps, were the kind of weird weapons and machines that refugee-camp ingenuity had been producing; strange tools fashioned from the wreckage of Manhattan or Mumbai. Her fingers twitched along the walrus-ivory handle of her blade. She had come to do something horrific in Qaanaaq, and she could not wait to start. 

You have heard these stories. You may even have told them. Stories are valuable here. They are what we brought when we came here; they are what cannot be taken away from us. The truth of her arrival was almost certainly less dramatic. The skiff was your standard tri-power rig, with a sail and oars and a gas engine, and for the last few miles of her journey to the floating city it was the engine that she used. The killer whale swam beside her. The polar bear was in chains, a metal cage over its head and two smaller ones boxing in its forepaws. She wore simple clothes, the skins and furs preferred by the people who had fled to the north when the cities of the south began to burn or sink. She did not pace. Her weapon lay at her feet. She brought nothing else with her. Whatever she had come to Qaanaaq to accomplish, her face gave no hint of whether it would be bloody or beautiful or both.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 14, 1908 — Stephen Tall aka Compton Crook. Stephen Tall was the most common pseudonym of American science fiction writer Compton Newby Crook. He wrote two novels, The Ramsgate Paradox (in his Stardust series) and The People Beyond the Wall. The Stardust Voyages collects the short stories in that series. The Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial Award was established by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society in his name for best first novel in a given year. (Died 1981.)
  • Born June 14, 1909 — Burl Ives. No, I’m not including because of being him voicing Sam the Snowman, narrator of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in that film though I could argue it is genre. No, I’m including him because he was on The Night Gallery (“The Other Way Out” episode) and appeared in several comic SF films, Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon and Earthbound. He also appeared in The Bermuda Depths which is more of a horror film. (Died 1995.)
  • Born June 14, 1914 — Ruthven Todd. He’s here for his delightful children’s illustrated quartet of Space Cat books — Space Cat, Space Cat Visits Venus, Space Cat Meets Mars and Space Cat and the Kittens. I’m pleased to say they’re available at all the usual digital suspects and yes I’ve read them. He also wrote Over the Mountain and The Lost Traveller which are respectively a lost world novel and a dystopian novel.  Side note: he was an editor of the works of William Blake which must have a really interesting undertaking! (Died 1978.)
  • Born June 14, 1921 — William L. Hamling. Author and editor who was active as an sf fan in the late 1930s and early 1940s. His first story “War with Jupiter”, written with Mark Reinsberg, appeared in Amazing Stories in May 1939. He’d write only short stories, some nineteen of them, over the next twenty years. Genre adjacent, his Shadow of the Sphinx is a horror novel about an ancient Egyptian sorceress. He would be the Editor of two genre zines, Imagination for most of the Fifties, and Imaginative Tales during the Fifties as well. He published four issues of the Stardust fanzine in 1940, and contributed to the 1940 Worldcon program. He was best known for publishing adult magazines and books, which led to First Amendment litigation, and also a criminal prosecution that resulted in a jail term. (Died 2017.)
  • Born June 14, 1949 — Harry Turtledove, 74. I wouldn’t know where to begin with him considering how many series he’s done. I’m fairly sure I first read novels in his Agent of Byzantium series and I know his Crosstime Traffic series was definitely fun reading. He’s won two Sidewise Awards for How Few Remain and Ruled Britannia, and a Prometheus for The Gladiator. Hugos? Well there was one.  ConAdian saw him win for his “Down in the Bottomlands” novella, and his “Must and Shall” novelette picked up a nomination at L.A. Con III, and Chicon 2000 where he was Toastmaster saw his “Forty, Counting Down” honored with a nomination. 
  • Born June 14, 1955 — Paul Kupperberg, 68. Scripted more a thousand stories of which I’ll only single out a very few: The Brave and the Bold, Green Lantern, Justice League of America,  House of Mystery, Justice League of America, and Star Trek. One of my favorite scripts by him was his work on The Phantom Stranger (with Mike Mignola and P. Craig Russell). 
  • Born June 14, 1958 — James Gurney, 65. Artist and author best known for his illustrated Dinotopia book series. He won a Hugo for Best Original Artwork at L.A. Con III for Dinotopia: The World Beneath, and was twice nominated for a Hugo for Best Professional Artist. The dinosaur Torvosaurus gurneyi was named in honor of him.

(10) INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT FOR WGA STRIKE. Variety checks in around the world: “’Screenwriters Everywhere’: Writers Strike Gets Global Support”.

From Argentina to New Zealand, support for the Writers Guild of America is officially going global.

Wednesday marks an International Day of Solidarity for the writers strike that is being branded “Screenwriters Everywhere,” with events taking place in major cities including Paris and London.

The Writers Guild of America has enlisted members from the International Affiliation of Writers Guilds, Federation of Screenwriters in Europe and UNI Global Union to demonstrate global support for the union’s strike against Hollywood’s largest producers. The unprecedented rallying behind the WGA is especially relevant during this strike given the globalization of content, and the fast-growing international outposts of many “struck” companies, such as Netflix and Prime Video….

In London —

Titans of television turned up for the U.K. rally in support of WGA: “Black Mirror” creator Charlie Brooker, “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong, “Doctor Who” showrunner Russell T. Davies and “His Dark Materials” writer Jack Thorne were among those who came to show solidarity with their U.S. counterparts.

Russell T Davies said:

…Russell T Davies was typically forthright about why he had made the effort to come down to London for the rally. “This is a fight to the death for drama,” he told Variety. “We’re looking at processes and software and attitudes and hostility that could drive these people into other jobs. These could be teachers and clerks and shop assistants in a few years time because our jobs are being erased. Absolutely erased with a happy smile on the accountants’ faces.”…

(11) STARFIELD. Forbes contributor Paul Stassi tries to wrap his brain around an elaborate video game that arrives in three months: “I Don’t Even Understand How ‘Starfield’ Exists”.

Microsoft promised that after all this time, we would finally get a proper look at Bethesda’s Starfield, set to be released in just over three months. No more in-engine footage, no more brief previews. Starfield instead did a showcase that was nearly as long as Xbox’s entire show. And I don’t think anyone expected it to be as wild as it was.

Very clearly, Starfield is using elements of No Man’s Sky as a base. A thousand planets, instead of infinite ones, but the same concept: exploration. Plus mining, plus cataloguing wildlife, plus building homes and finding ships to sail the stars.

But soon enough, the similarities stop, and you remember that oh wait, there’s also an entire mainline Bethesda RPG layered on top of this, and also, they are doing some things that almost sound too insane to be real….

Believe me, I understand how AAA video game hype works. We all remember being fooled by early looks at Cyberpunk 2077 or the aforementioned No Man’s Sky. But this feels different, namely because this game comes out in three months. This is not some years-early preview, and Bethesda has famously barely shown us anything about the game to this point outside of a few scarce minutes of gameplay and proofs of concept. What we’re seeing here is what the game is. Nothing is going to be cut or reduced in scale at this point.

There are questions, sure. How many of the thousand planets will have two neat buildings and then you move on? Or is there true exploration to be found? And just how buggy will this game launch, given that A) it’s this absolutely massive and B) it’s a Bethesda game, home of the most voluminous and hilarious bugs in the industry?

But it is hard not to be blown away by what was shown yesterday….

(12) DIDJA SEE THAT?! Inverse says “A Nearby Supernova Could Be Our Chance to Hear From Aliens”.

… The trick, of course, is that interstellar communication isn’t quick. Imagine there’s a three-car pileup on your street; you look out your window and see it, then yell downstairs to your neighbor, telling them to go take a look. All of that can happen within a matter of seconds.

But the space version takes a lot longer. Let’s say a star 21 million light years away explodes; it takes 21 million years for the light to reach you so that you can see the explosion. You send a radio message to your interstellar neighbor about 100 light years away, but that message will take 100 years to reach them.

Meanwhile, you’ve got to consider how far from the supernova your interstellar neighbor lives. Will the light from the explosion have reached them by the time they can hear your radio message?

As an example, Cabrales suggested that 32 star systems should already have seen the bright afterglow of SN 1987A, a supernova in our own Milky Way galaxy that lit up Earth’s skies in (you guessed it) 1987. If there’s anyone manning radio telescopes and transmitters on a planet around any of those stars, they’d have had time to see it and send a signal, and that signal would have had time to reach us here on Earth….

(13) MOVE OVER HABITABLE ZONES. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] When considering the possibility of extraterrestrial life (exobiology) around other stars, astronomers often use the concept of the star’s ‘habitable zone’. There is now a new proposal put forward by three astrophysicists and a microbiologist all of whom are based in the US. This new concept is what they call the ‘photosynthetic habitable zone’.  

The ‘photosynthetic habitable zone’ is the overlap between two other zones: the ‘photosynthetic zone’ and the ‘habitable zone’. The ‘photosynthetic zone’ is different from the ‘habitable zone’.  The former, as the researchers define it, is where Earth-biology-type oxygen generating photosynthesis can take place, while the latter is where liquid water can exist on the planetary surface. (I mention Earth-biology-type photosynthesis which uses two non-oxygen generating photosynthetic systems – one gives a leg up to the other to get the energy to split water – as it has been hypothesised that a three photosystem mechanism might evolve around slightly redder stars than our own but the researchers do not include this.)

The photosynthesis zone is actually bigger than the habitable zone (as, for example, on Earth there are microbes that can photosynthesise while living in snow and ice).  So what you need to do is to look at the overlap between the two to get the ‘photosynthetic habitable zone’.

The researchers have done this plotting graphs for planets of varying atmospheric thickness (the thicker the atmosphere the less light reaches its surface for photosynthesis) with one axis of the graph being the star’s size and the other the distance of the exoplanet’s orbit from its star.  The graph shown here is for planets whose atmospheric thickness is similar to Earth’s.  There is a further refinement in that the planet should not be tidally locked to its star. (In the graph the upper limit is for those planets that take a billion years to become tidally locked.)

The researchers have plotted photosynthetic zone and habitable zone exo-planets on the graph. They identify just five that are in the photosynthetic habitable zone (PHZ) that are not tidally locked: Kepler-452b, Kepler-1638b, Kepler-1544b, Kepler-62e, and Kepler-62f, that are consistently in the PHZ. Of these, Kepler-452b seems to have conditions most like Earth. Kepler 452b was discovered in 2015. It is around 1,400 light years away (430 parsecs away) from Manchester’s Festival of Fantastic Films and a decent pint of beer. It is suggested that Kepler-452b be the focus of study looking for biosignatures. However, it is a long way off.

The primary research paper proposing this new concept is Hall, C. et al (2023) “A New Definition of Exoplanet Habitability: Introducing the Photosynthetic Habitable Zone”. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol. 948, L26.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George knows what it’s like to be going through airport security before the crack of dawn. You probably know, too. So how come you didn’t make this video instead of him? “Early Flights When You’re Not A Morning Person”.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/19/23 I Have Always Depended On The Chimeras Of Strangers

Posted on by

(1) DECREASE YOUR PILE. Matt at Runalong the Shelves has unleashed “The 2023 Booktempter’s TBR reduction challenge” with 12 sets of different monthly themes to trim that backlog of things you’ve picked to read.

After a lot of people enjoyed last year’s challenge then I am going to give you some more little monthly prompts. Some familiar and some new to help get that TBR pile reduced! I care you see!

It has three simple rules

1 – It applies to your TBR pile as per 23.59 31/12/2022 no new books post this date can be used (but of course you can subsequently add more to your TBR piles I am not cruel)

2 – If you are a book blogger no ARCs! Sorry, but this is to cut down your own self-induced TBR.

3 – You can do one challenge a month (or more if you fancy my stretch goals) but you only have to do twelve in a year and while I am applying some very loose monthly themes. You could do this in a sprint or just when you feel like it ?

For example, the “January TBR Reduction Challenge”:

January’s Challenge is fairly standard – you have my permission to read the last book you bought!

This is how TBRs form – we buy book; then place on shelf; read another book instead. This month – is no longer about delayed gratification. No book diet for us in January. Pick that tale up and allow yourself the pleasure of reading it. Who knows this could become a habit to start the rest of the year!

(2) OF ALL THE BRASS. “England’s Booker Prize Asks Public To Name Its Trophy” — and Publishing Perspectives boosts the signal. There’s a jury assigned to winnow the suggestions, so don’t expect to see “Prizey McPrizeface” on the shortlist.

… The public is being asked now to put forward ideas for the statuette’s name. And even in naming a trophy, yes, there will then be a shortlist of six names. Chosen by a jury. This must be how even the daily lunch menu is decided in the offices of our myriad publishing and book awards….

(3) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 75 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Optimus Prime But for Books” —

John Coxon wants to play, Alison Scott has met lots of authors, and Liz Batty is a womble. We discuss Locus and Amazon’s decisions about Kindle Publishing for Periodicals before diving into the bewildering state of the Chengdu Worldcon. Listen here!

(4) NYRSF READINGS. The New York Review of Science Fiction readings series resumes online with guest author Jonathan Carroll. Long into host Jim Freund’s YouTube page on Sunday, January 22 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern.

Jonathan Carroll is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labeled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy. He has lived in Austria since 1974, hence this month’s Sunday matinee in NYC, which will be 7 PM in Vienna.

Carroll’s short story, “Friend’s Best Man”, won the World Fantasy Award. His novel, Outside the Dog Museum, won the British Fantasy Award and his collection of short stories won the Bram Stoker Award. The short story “Uh-Oh City” won the French Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. His short story “Home on the Rain” was chosen as one of the best stories of the year by the Pushcart Prize committee. Carroll has been a runner-up for the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo, and British Fantasy Awards.

Jonathan Carroll

(5) TO THE BONE. “ComiXology Gutted by Amazon Layoffs, Former Staff Worry For the Service’s Future” reports CBR.com.

Social media conversation around ComiXology erupted on Jan. 18 after major redundancies were reported at the Amazon-owned company.

According to Amazon journalist Jason Del Ray, Amazon retail CEO Doug Herrington issued a note notifying employees of the layoffs in the morning, emphasizing that it was “an important part of a wider effort to lower our cost to serve so we can continue investing in the wide selection, low prices, and fast shipping that our customers love.” While ComiXology was not specifically mentioned in the report, employees of the digital comics company clarified on Twitter that they had been affected. ComiXology founders David Steinberger and John D. Roberts chimed in, noting that they were saddened over the loss of jobs.

… Scott McGovern, who previously worked as a program manager at ComiXology for a decade, posted a Twitter thread in the aftermath of the layoffs. McGovern estimated that “at least 50% of the staff have been let go,” and added that the number might be as high as 75%. McGovern also wrote that he was “not optimistic” about the future of digital comics at Amazon despite the best efforts of ComiXology staff…

(6) UTTER CHAOS. “Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Will Introduce a New Computer Voice” warns Gizmodo.

Since Majel Barrett sadly passed in 2008, Star Trek has turned to a plethora of alternatives to create new voices to match her iconic role as generations of computers across the Trek franchise. But now as Picard pulls us more and more into the 25th century timeline, it’s leaving Barrett’s legacy behind.

Speaking on Twitter recently, showrunner Terry Matalas confirmed that Picard’s final season—which will bring us the further into an early 25th-century timeline that, aside from Discovery slingshotting far into the future, none of the other contemporary Trek shows have explored yet—will introduce not one, but two new computer voices. One will be the voice of civilian systems, and another will become the de facto Starfleet computer voice across the Federation….

(7) A RARE KIND WORD ABOUT AI. “’Jung_E’ on Netflix: A Beautifully Heartrending Sci-Fi Thriller” is CNET reviewer Jennifer Bisset’s verdict.

A dash of class warfare and a heartrending parent-child connection brought a unique spin to 2016 zombie horror Train to Busan. Now South Korean director Yeon Sang-ho is turning his hand to a sci-fi thriller, setting Jung_E in a dystopian Earth marshaled by AI robots. In a similar vein to his zombie offering, Yeon is mainly focused on the human heart amid the action. This mother-daughter tale is driven by sacrifice, unanswered questions and the tragic price of survival.

That core preoccupation leads to an almost poetic — and moving — take on the creation of AI robots….

(8) LEE EMMETT (1942-2023). Lee Emmett, wife of author John Varley, died of cancer on January 13. It had spread to many parts of her body before it was discovered fairly recently – “The oncologist said she may have had cancer with no symptoms for as long as a year,” wrote Varley in an email to subscribers.

…On Thursday Mary-Beth and Lee’s son, Tom, got me into the hospital and to her room in a wheelchair. Her grand-kids had been in earlier. We talked for a while. She said she loved me, and I said I loved her back. And less than 24 hours later, she was gone…

He also said:

…I have no idea what I’m going to do now. There are a million things that need doing, and I don’t have the enthusiasm for any of them. I guess time will soften the blow, but there are no signs of it yet.

I’m not going to ask for money. I still remember how many of you came through for me after my heart surgery, and thank you, one and all. But I will point out that there is a yellow button on the home page at www.varley.net that says DONATE. It’s there because Spider Robinson said he had such a button on his page, and from time to time it had come in handy at a bad time. So it has been with me. I am retired now, and my collected works bring in little enough at this stage in my career. We have been getting by on social security and small donations here and there. Now Lee’s SS will be gone. I know I’ll make it, one way or another. Know that I am grateful to all you faithful readers, and always will be. My life has been good, and I still have a little ways to go.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1984 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.] Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume

New Orleans is featured in any number of genre novels and I’m sure that I’ll be featuring yet more quotes here from those novels here. One of my favorite culinary  quotes about this city comes from Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume, a novel first published by Bantam thirty nine years ago.

Though it takes place in multiple eras and locations, two of its memorable passages are set in New Orleans including the reason that gives the novel its title.

A stage production of Jitterbug Perfume was produced in Seattle at Cafe Nordo fourteen years ago.

Now here’s the quote I like…

The minute you land in New Orleans, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off. That means beignets and crayfish bisque and jambalaya, it means shrimp remoulade, pecan pie, and red beans with rice, it means elegant pompano au papillote, funky file z’herbes, and raw oysters by the dozen, it means grillades for breakfast, a po’ boy with chowchow at bedtime, and tubs of gumbo in between. It is not unusual for a visitor to the city to gain fifteen pounds in a week–yet the alternative is a whole lot worse. If you don’t eat day and night, if you don’t constantly funnel the indigenous flavors into your bloodstream, then the mystery beast will go right on humping you, and you will feel its sordid presence rubbing against you long after you have left town. In fact, like any sex offender, it can leave permanent psychological scars.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 19, 1809 — Edgar Allan Poe. I’ve got several sources that cite him as an early root of SF. Anyone care to figure that out? Be that as it may, he certainly wrote some damn scary horror — ones that I still remember are “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” (Died 1849.)
  • Born January 19, 1930 — Tippi Hedren, 93. Melanie Daniels in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds which scared the shit out of me when I saw it a long time ago. She had a minor role as Helen in The Birds II: Land’s End, a televised sequel done thirty years on. No idea how bad or good it was. Other genre appearances were in such films and shows as Satan’s Harvest, Tales from the Darkside, The Bionic Woman, the new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Batman: The Animated Series, 
  • Born January 19, 1932 — Richard Lester, 91. Director best known for his 1980s Superman films. He’s got a number of other genre films including the exceedingly silly The Mouse on the Moon, the stellar Robin and Marian which may be my favorite Robin Hood film ever, and an entire excellent series of Musketeers films. He also directed Royal Flash based on George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novel of that name which Kage was very fond of. 
  • Born January 19, 1940 — Mike Reid. He’s a curious case as he’s been in a number of SFF roles, usually uncredited, starting with a First Doctor story, “The War Machines” and including one-offs for The Saint, The Champions and Department S.  He is credited as playing Frank Butcher in Doctor Who: Dimensions in Time. (Died 2007.)
  • Born January 19, 1958 — Allen Steele, 65. Best, I think, at the shorter length works as reflected in his three Hugo wins: the first at LA Con III for his “The Death of Captain Future”, the second for his “…Where Angels Fear to Tread” at BucConeer and his third for “The Emperor of Mars” at Renovation. Not to say that you should overlook his novels and future history series beginning with The Jericho Iteration, which is well-worth your time. 
  • Born January 19, 1961 — Paul McCrane, 62. Emil Antonowsky in RoboCop whose death there is surely a homage to the Toxic Avenger.  A year later, he’d be Deputy Bill Briggs in the remake of The Blob, and he played Leonard Morris Betts in the “Leonard Betts” episode of the X-Files. 
  • Born January 19, 1981 – Bitsie Tulloch, 42. She’s best known for her role as Juliette Silverton on Grimm. (I saw the first three seasons I think. It’s rather good.) She played Lois Lane in the Elseworlds event which she reprised during the Crisis on Infinite Earths event a year later on Flash and the other series.
  • Born January 19 — Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki. Nebula winner for “O2 Arena” (2022) and Otherwise Award winner for “Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon”  (2021), Ekpeki is an African speculative fiction writer and editor in Nigeria. He has also been a finalist for multiple Hugos, and a nominee for many other awards. He edited and published the Bridging Worlds anthology, the first ever Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction anthology (2022 World Fantasy Award winner), and co-edited the Africa Risen and Dominion (2021 British Fantasy Award) anthologies. He founded Jembefola Press and the Emeka Walter Dinjos Memorial Award For Disability In Speculative Fiction. (OGH)

(11) ON THE SINISTER SIDE. Publishers Lunch reports the acquisition of an interesting-sounding mystery pastiche.

NYT bestselling author Claudia Gray’s THE PERILS OF LADY CATHERINE DE BOURGH, the first of two new mysteries set in the world of Jane Austen’s England featuring the son of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy and the daughter of Catherine and Henry Tilney, who have grown up to be amateur sleuths in the vein of Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, and who are summoned by the imperious Lady Catherine to investigate sinister attempts on her life.

(12) SCRAMBLED IN STONE. Gizmodo knows where to look for a Mesozoic breakfast: “Nearly 100 Titanosaur Nests, Complete With Fossilized Eggs, Found in India”.

…Besides conjuring the idea of a double-yolked titanosaur omelet (was I the only one thinking about that?), the pathological eggs indicate titanosaurs may have produced eggs sequentially, like modern birds….

(13) ALL THAT REMAINS. “Star graveyard revealed in super-clear image of the Milky Way” in Nature.

Astronomers have discovered the remains of nearly two dozen exploding stars in the Milky Way, thanks to detailed radio observations that could unveil many more such events in the Galaxy.

A star in the Milky Way is expected to explode as a supernova roughly at least once every 100 years. These violent explosions — the dramatic final throes of massive stars as they exhaust their fuel — can eject vast clouds of dust and gas to locations many light years from the star. Such ‘supernova remnants’ can persist for thousands of years before dissipating. Studying these remnants can reveal useful information about the Galaxy, because they often contain heavy elements that give rise to other stars, planets and even life itself.

Hundreds of such remnants have been found across the Milky Way, but astronomers think that they have observed only about one-fifth of the total number….

(14) I SCREAM, YOU SCREAM. Scream 6 will be released in theaters on March 10.

Following the latest Ghostface killings, the four survivors leave Woodsboro behind and start a fresh chapter. In Scream VI, Melissa Barrera (“Sam Carpenter”), Jasmin Savoy Brown (“Mindy Meeks-Martin”), Mason Gooding (“Chad Meeks-Martin”), Jenna Ortega (“Tara Carpenter”), Hayden Panettiere (“Kirby Reed”) and Courteney Cox (“Gale Weathers”) return to their roles in the franchise

(15) ON THE ROAD AGAIN. Here’s a trailer for The Wandering Earth 2, announced as “coming soon” to the U.S. and Canada.

​​In the near future, after learning that the sun is rapidly burning out and will obliterate Earth in the process, humans build enormous engines to propel the planet to a new solar system, far out of reach of the sun’s fiery flares. However, the journey out into the universe is perilous, and humankind’s last shot at survival will depend on a group of young people brave enough to step up and execute a dangerous, life-or-death operation to save the earth.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/22/22 Credentials On Your Knee, Pixel, Scroll And Ray

Posted on by

(1) EASTERCON WANTS YOUR DRABBLES. The UK’s national science fiction convention, Eastercon, aka Reclamation 2022, is running April 15-18 at the Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre London Heathrow. Guests of Honor are Mary Robinette Kowal, Phillip Reeve, Tasha Suri and Nicholas Whyte. Here’s how you can join in the fun, wherever you may be.

We wanted to do something a little different with Reclamation and so are resurrecting an age-old fannish tradition of drabbling. Depending on how many we receive, we may make posters to display round the convention, and publish them in the convention readme booklet. We’re looking for tiny, standalone speculative fiction tales, of exactly 100-words each.

What is a drabble?

A drabble is a piece of fiction that is exactly 100 words long, excluding its title. If you imagine a novel to be a full three-course meal, a drabble is more of an amuse-bouche: a single, bite-sized delight that gets your taste buds primed for the next course.

For more information, go to: https://reclamation2022.co.uk/drabbles/

(2) YOUR NEXT TBR. Amal El-Mohtar is back with a batch of reviews in “Otherworldly” at the New York Times.

…Delilah S. Dawson’s THE VIOLENCE (Del Rey, 498 pp., $28) takes place in a post-Covid Florida, on the cusp of a very different pandemic. It’s 2025, and Chelsea Martin lives an apparently idyllic life in a gated community with her wealthy husband, two daughters and small fashionable dog. In reality, Chelsea’s husband is physically and emotionally abusive, and has systematically cut her off from any friends or support systems apart from her cruel and self-absorbed mother. But as a new disease called the Violence spreads — causing brief, individual episodes of amnesiac rage during which the infected beat the nearest living thing to death — Chelsea sees an opportunity to free herself and her daughters….

(3) ROLL ‘EM, ROLL ‘EM, ROLL ‘EM. Head ‘em up and move ‘em out! The Hollywood Reporter says Paramount is determined to have a Star Trek movie for Christmas 2023 but they don’t have a script and no stars are attached to the project. “Why Paramount’s ‘Star Trek’ Sequel Reveal Surprised Its Own Stars”.

On Feb. 15, Paramount (nee ViacomCBS) announced that it would boldly go where it hasn’t managed to go before — a fourth iteration in a stalled 21st century feature strategy for the Star Trek franchise. During the Paramount investor day, producer J.J. Abrams — who rebooted the sci-fi franchise for the big screen in 2009 — revealed that the USS Enterprise was being readied for a new flight. “We are thrilled to say that we are hard at work on a new Star Trek film that will be shooting by the end of the year that will be featuring our original cast,” Abrams said.

The proclamation came as a surprise, not just to observers who have been watching the movie studio haltingly try to revive Trek on the big screen for years but to the actors and their representatives as well.

Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that most, if not all, teams for the franchise’s primary players — who include Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldaña and John Cho — were not aware that an announcement for another film was coming, much less that their clients would be touted as a part of the deal, and certainly not that their clients would be shooting a movie by year’s end. Insiders say that Pine, who plays Captain Kirk, is the first to enter into early negotiations as he is the lynchpin to the project.

The hope is to begin filming in the fall in order to make the Dec. 22, 2023, theatrical release. The script is still being worked on, according to sources, and there is no green light or budget in place. In fact, the budget will now likely have to account for talent deals that may be supersized. Industry insiders say that Paramount let go of negotiating leverage in order to have a key chess piece as it courts Wall Street investors.

(4) CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR. On the Jeopardy! National College Championship, Friday, Andrew Porter witnessed a contestant miss this one:

Category: Science Fiction

In this “colorful” author’s “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing,” alien sculptures called the Carls pop up all over the Earth.

Wrong question: Who is John Green?

Correct question: Who is Hank Green?

(5) THE INVENTOR OF BOOKS ON TAPE. The Los Angeles Times paid tribute to the late Duvall Hecht, whose daily grind to L.A. led to Books on Tape – he died February 10 at the age of 91.

Duvall Hecht was somewhere between his banking job in Los Angeles and his home in Newport Beach when he realized he’d heard the same song for the third or fourth time. On the news stations, the daily report had grown stale and repetitive. The commercials were numbing and endless.

It was, he told The Times years later, the most “deadly two hours” in his day, a grinding commute devoid of any intellectual stimulation.

In a flurry of entrepreneurial magic, he sold his 1965 Porsche, hired a college drama coach and created what would become volume No. 1 in the soon-to-be-massive Books on Tape catalog, a recording of George’s Plimpton’s football tale, “Paper Lion.”

“It never once seemed like a wacky idea to me,” he said in 2001, shortly after selling his startup to Random House for an estimated $20 million.

Hecht, a man of varied interests, died Feb. 10 at his home in Costa Mesa, his wife, Ann Marie Rousseau, said. He was 91.

… Customers would rent book tapes for 30 days, and since Hecht didn’t charge a deposit, they were on an honor system to return them. For the most part, he said, customers held up their end of the bargain and mailed back the tapes.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

1993 — [Item by Cat Eldridge]  

Babylons one, two and three were sabotaged and destroyed. Number four vanished without a trace twenty-four hours after becoming operational. To this day no one knows what happened to it. — John Sinclair to Lyta Alexander in Babylon 5: The Gathering 

Twenty-nine years ago on PTEN, Babylon 5: The Gathering aired, the first of six feature length films that would happen in the franchise. And thus J. Michael Straczynski’s vision of this SF series came to be. This was written by him and directed by Richard Compton who had minor acting roles in Trek’s “The Doomsday Machine” and “The Enterprise Incident”.  Really minor acting roles. 

It was executive produced by Douglas Netter and Straczynski. Netter would between the third and fourth seasons of Babylon 5 found Netter Digital, a CGI special effects company. Unfortunately Straczynski was his only client, so the end of the Babylon 5 related projects such as Crusade meant the end of the company. 

Actual production was by Robert Latham Brown and John Copeland. The former has worked with Mel Brooks, George Lucas, Paul Verhoeven and Steven Spielberg. The latter really hasn’t done anything interesting outside of the Straczynskian universe. 

Babylon 5 always had a sprawling cast and this was no exception — here we had Michael O’Hare, Tamlyn Tomita, Jerry Doyle, Mira Furlan, Peter Jurasik, Andreas Katsulas and Patricia Tallman as the principal performers. 

It is said that following the success of the movie, Warner Bros. Television commissioned the series for production in May of that year, as part of its Prime Time Entertainment Network. The series would go on the air the next air in January. 

The pilot was quite different from the series. For example, Patricia Tallman who played Lyta Alexander here was replaced by Andrea Thompson as Talia Winters but would return later in the series, first as a recurring character and then as a regular. And the First Officer who was Laurel Takashima as played here by Tamlyn Tomita was replaced for the series by Claudia Christian who played Susan Ivanova. 

Straczynski later rejiggered it into a different version which is longer and adds footage that was obviously not seen in the original version including Kosh briefly speaking to Sinclair.

Reception by critics at the time was not overwhelming. The Boston Globe reviewer who saw it said that “Great special effects do not make for great science fiction. Writing is what makes TV series cook. Unfortunately, writing is the single biggest problem haunting Babylon 5.” And Variety said “It’s going to be a close call whether to make “Babylon 5” a series or just leave it as this one-shot telefilm. As a stand-alone, “Babylon 5” falls short of the mark, but it’s a serviceable first episode.”

It currently holds a sixty-eight percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. 

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 22, 1917 — Reed Crandall. Illustrator and penciller best known for the Forties Quality Comics‘ Blackhawk (a DC property later) and for stories in myriad EC Comics during the 1950s.  In the late Sixties, he did the illustration work on King Features Syndicate’s King Comics comic-book version of the syndicate’s Flash Gordon strip. He’s been inducted into Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame. (Died 1982.)
  • Born February 22, 1925 — Edward Gorey. I’m reasonably sure that his animated introduction to the PBS series Mystery! was my first encounter with him. I will recommend Gorey Cats, The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas and The Doubtful Guest. Ok if he’s not genre but if he’s still fun and delightfully weird. Oh, and do go read Elephant House: Or, the Home of Edward Gorey, with superb photographs and text by Kevin McDermott. (Died 2000.)
  • Born February 22, 1929 — James Hong, 93. Though not quite genre, he became known to audiences through starring in The New Adventures of Charlie Chan in the late Fifties. Genre wise, his first role was in Godzilla, King of the Monsters! voicing Ogata/Serizawa. He then pops up in The Satan Bug as Dr. Yang and next is seen playing Ho Lee in Destination Inner Space. You’ll no doubt recognize Colossus: The Forbin Project where he’s Dr. Chin but I’ll bet you’ve never heard of, oh wait you have, Blade Runner in which he’s Hannibal Chew and Big Trouble In Little China which I love in which he’s wizard David Lo Pan. It’s back to obscure films after that with next up being Shadowzone where he’s Dr. Van Fleet and Dragonfight where he’s Asawa. He’s next in The Shadow as Li Peng and he’s Che’tsai in Tank Girl.  He’s Mr. Wu in the very loose adaption of the classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. 
  • Born February 22, 1930 — Edward Hoch, The lines between detective fiction and genre fiction can be awfully blurry at times. ISFDB listed him but I was damned if I could figure out why considering he’s known as a writer of deceive fiction who wrote several novels and close to a thousand short stories. It was his Simon Ark character who was the protagonist of Hoch’s first published story and who was ultimately featured in thirty-nine  of his stories that made him a genre writer as Ark is the cursed by God immortal doomed to wander forevermore and solved crimes. (Died 2008.)
  • Born February 22, 1937 — Joanna Russ. Is it fair to say she’s known as much for her feminist literary criticism as her SF writings? That The Female Man is her best known work suggest my question really isn’t  relevant as there may be no difference between the two. She was for a long time an influential reviewer for Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction where I think it would fair to say that you knew clearly what she thought of a given work. (Died 2011.)
  • Born February 22, 1953 — Genny Dazzo, 69. She attended the first Star Trek Convention in New York. She was later involved in the local SF con, Lunacon. Moving out to LA, she was on the committee for all of the LA Worldcons as well as many Westercons, Loscons, and AnimeLA. Fan Guest of Honor at DeepSouthCon 31 and Loscon 27 (with husband Craig Miller).
  • Born February 22, 1972 — Duane Swierczynski, 50. Though a mystery writer by trade, he’s also worked as a writer at both DC and Marvel on some very impressive projects. He did writing duties on the second volume of time traveling soldier Cable, penned the Birds of Prey as part of The New 52 relaunch and wrote an excellent Punisher one-off, “Force of Nature”.

(8) REMEMBER THE BOSS. Last November, a Mark Twain Signed Copy of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court went for $68,750 at auction. Interestingly, bidding started at only $2,400 – there’s a video but it’s not a very visual experience.

Signed on front pastedown, “Taking the pledge will not / make bad liquor good, but it will improve it. / Mark Twain / Oct / 06.”

(9) SUBGENRES. At CrimeReads, Richard Thomas explains what “New Weird and “hopepunk” fiction are all about in “Time to Discover Your New Favorite Sub-Genre of Fiction”, which you might not have guessed are areas of expertise for an author whose forthcoming collection is titled Spontaneous Human Combustion.

As a reader, and viewer, of contemporary dark stories, I’m most drawn to work that does not sit nicely in the middle of a major genre. I’m drawn to the periphery, the edges, the shadows, and cobwebbed corners. And these three subgenres—neo-noir, new-weird, and hopepunk—all have those traits in common. They are looking to pull us in with techniques, tropes, rules, and histories that are familiar–so we’ll know how to access these works, how to set up our expectations. And then…they subvert those expectations. Not with deus ex machina twists that come out of nowhere, but with unique moments, surprises that feel fated, and endings that are earned. And I think it’s okay to be polarizing, too. As a writer, I’d rather have half my audience hate what I did and the other have love it, then have 90% think it was just okay. And I think the films coming out from A24 and Neon, television shows like Squid Game and Midnight Mass, and books being written by award-winning authors such as Stephen Graham Jones, Usman T. Malik, A. C. Wise, Brian Evenson, and Kelly Robson are doing the same thing. They are honoring the past, pouring themselves into the work, and then taking us someplace new, inspired, and unsettling. And isn’t that why we’re here?…

(10) STAPLEDON ON FILM. Chicago Reader’s Maxwell Rabb praises “Last and First Men”.

Before his untimely death, the prophetic Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhansson completed his first and final film, exploring a delicate space between the literary and the cinematic for a science fiction classic. Last and First Men is the composer’s reimagined narrative of Olaf Stapledon’s triumphant sci-fi novel by the same name. Jóhansson’s haunting adaptation facilitates a chilling link between two distinct humanities spanning across two billion years…. 

(11) HOME IMPROVEMENT. “Now Witness the Power of This Armed and Fully Operational Space Toilet” – John Scalzi explains his bathroom upgrade at Whatever. How can you not read a post that has such a perfect headline?

Last year Krissy decided that she wanted to upgrade our bathroom suite, and not in just a “new hand towels and shower curtain” way — a whole revamp. I was fine with this, I said, if I got what I wanted out of it: a supercool space age “intelligent toilet” with all the bells and whistles. It took a while, because 2021 was The Year of Supply Chain Issues, but the new bathroom is 90% completed and the Space Toilet is now installed and operational….

(12) THE STARS MY DETONATION. “A supernova could light up the Milky Way at any time. Astronomers will be watching” promises Nature.

Masayuki Nakahata has been waiting 35 years for a nearby star to explode.

He was just starting out in science the last time it happened, in February 1987, when a dot of light suddenly appeared in the southern sky. This is the closest supernova seen during modern times; and the event, known as SN 1987A, gained worldwide media attention and led to dramatic advances in astrophysics.

Nakahata was a graduate student at the time, working on what was then one of the world’s foremost neutrino catchers, the Kamiokande-II detector at the Kamioka Underground Observatory near Hida, Japan. He and a fellow student, Keiko Hirata, spotted evidence of neutrinos pouring out of the supernova — the first time anyone had seen these fundamental particles originating from anywhere outside the Solar System.

Now, Nakahata, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, is ready for when a supernova goes off. He is head of the world’s largest neutrino experiment of its kind, Super-Kamiokande, where upgrades to its supernova alert system were completed late last year. The improvements will enable the observatory’s computers to recognize when it is detecting neutrinos from a supernova, almost in real time, and to send out an automated alert to conventional telescopes worldwide….

(13) THEY CAN DIG IT. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] At The Space Review, John Strickland looks at the logistics of Elon Musk’s Mars plans, including Musk’s claim that he will have to take one million tons of stuff to Mars to make the mission work and how large Martian farms would have to be to supply enough food for the mission. “Building Musk’s path to Mars”.

…Partial self-sufficiency depends heavily on two issues: energy production and food production, which itself depends on energy production. In addition, both depend on the ability to build industrial facilities to make fuel and materials, and to construct pressurized habitats to house crew and provide growing areas for food plants.

Most people greatly underestimate the effort it will take to build growing areas and grow food crops on Mars or in space. On Earth, a one-square-kilometer (247-acre) farm gets a maximum of about a one gigawatt of sunlight on a clear day, at noon in midsummer. Much less than this gets to the plants due to clouds, etc., and the plants only use about 1% of what they get to make plant tissue, only part of which is actually edible food. To create one square kilometer of pressurized growing space will require a huge amount of structural materials, and most of that will need to be made locally. Even so, Elon Musk estimates that he will need to transport one million tons of cargo to Mars before a settlement is relatively self-sufficient.

It is important to realize how large the SpaceX cargo capacity to an operating Mars development base will be. Most NASA concepts envision barely enough mass—typically a few tens of tons—to support a crew for one short mission. The high SpaceX mass transport capacity will allow a large amount of industrial equipment to be sent. This would include equipment designed to smelt Mars minerals into metals, alloy them, and then to turn the structural metals into pressurized habitats, drill rigs, and other kinds of equipment. Large amounts of other artificial materials, such as plastics and polymers, will also be produced. Tunnel boring and lining equipment would also be included. Operations will be limited more by manpower than by lack of equipment and supplies.

Musk has a goal of building the large fleet of Starships needed to carry the required amount of equipment and supplies to get a settlement going. If an advanced Starship stage can carry 200 tons of cargo to the surface of Mars, 5,000 trips of such vehicles to Mars would be able to carry the one million tons. Ignoring the prior build-up phase, if he had 500 Starship stages with the tankers to support them, he would be able to transport that much during just ten Mars launch windows or in about 22 years. In actuality, the number of flights would be increasing from year to year, as the 500 stages could carry 100,000 tons during each window, and the existing crew would not be able to handle such a large volume of materials without a carefully planned ramp-up sequence….

(14) BIG BIRD. “Scottish fossil of flying reptile leaves scientists ‘gobsmacked’” says Yahoo!

A fossil jawbone peeking out from a limestone seashore on Scotland’s Isle of Skye led scientists to discover the skeleton of a pterosaur that showed that these remarkable flying reptiles got big tens of millions of years earlier than previously known.

Researchers said on Tuesday this pterosaur, named Dearc sgiathanach, lived roughly 170 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, soaring over lagoons in a subtropical landscape and catching fish and squid with crisscrossing teeth perfect for snaring slippery prey.

Its scientific name, pronounced “jark ski-an-ach,” means “winged reptile” in Gaelic.

With a wingspan of about 8 feet (2.5 meters), Dearc was the Jurassic’s largest-known pterosaur and the biggest flying creature that had inhabited Earth to that point in time. Some pterosaurs during the subsequent Cretaceous Period achieved much greater dimensions – as big as fighter jets. But Dearc shows that this scaling up had its origins much earlier….

(15) RELIEF PITCH ON THE WAY. Ryan George came out with his first Pitch Meeting in a month for a film that isn’t genre (Uncharted Pitch Meeting) and says at the end that he is leaving Screen Rant – but it’s barely an inconvenience! He’s starting his own channel on March 10.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Trailers: Encanto,” the Screen Junkies say the newest Disney animated film has “so many characters that even the characters can’t keep up with the characters” and at least the fifth villain in a Disney cartoon named Bruno.  And how did it take Disney this long to find out that capybaras are adorable?

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brown Robin.]