Richard Man tries to correct the characterization about one of those people in this Facebook post.
A number of well-known sff figures comment on the two posts.
(2) LACON V REVEALS FIRST SPECIAL GUEST. The 2026 Worldcon committee, LACon V, has announced Tracy Drain as the convention’s first Special Guest.
Tracy Drain is a flight systems engineer who has helped to develop, test, and operate a variety of robotic spacecraft for deep space exploration over the past 25+ years. Her passion for space grew from an early love of science fiction – she soaked up Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica, plus sci-fi and fantasy books by the armload. With her eye on a career in space, she studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kentucky and interned at the NASA Langley Research Center. After earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, she landed a full-time position at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2000.
As a systems engineer, Tracy works with teams of engineers and scientists to ensure all the parts of a spacecraft (telecommunications, thermal, power, software, etc.), the science instruments, and the mission (spacecraft/instruments, ground data system, mission design and navigation, etc.) are designed to work well together to accomplish the mission goals. Her previous missions have included the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Kepler mission (an Exoplanet hunter), the Juno mission (orbiting Jupiter) and the Psyche mission (now on its way to study an asteroid). She is currently the Chief Engineer in operations for the Europa Clipper mission which successfully launched in October 2024 and is now on its 5.5-year cruise to Jupiter. After arrival in the Jovian system, Clipper will study Europa – one of the most scientifically exciting moons in our solar system!…
(3) LACON V OPENS PROGRAM PARTICIPANT INTEREST SURVEY. The Program Division for LAcon V, the 2026 Worldcon, will be co-managed by Helen Montgomery and Dr. Meg MacDonald. Montgomery chaired Chicon 8, the 2022 Worldcon. MacDonald was co-Division Head for Promotions for Glasgow 2024 – A Worldcon for Our Futures.
Our Program Suggestion Form is for anyone who wishes to submit an idea for a program item. This can be a panel discussion you want to see, a workshop you want someone to run, a discussion group about your favorite book or movie franchise – maybe you just have a cool panel title, or perhaps a fully formed description of a panel but no title. It’s all okay to submit! No idea is too big or too small; we want to hear them all!
And then there’s our Program Participant Interest survey, which is for anyone who is interested in being a program participant, be it on site in Anaheim or online through our virtual offerings. We expect and need hundreds of program participants. Some may be professionals in their field; others may be hobbyists or fans. No matter what, we want to know more about you! Filling out the form does not guarantee that you will be accepted as a participant, but it is the first necessary step in the process, and we’re excited to hear from you.
….It appears Worldcon leadership only learned that ChatGPT was used in this manner after the fact, when the person on the vetting team revealed what they’d done and said that there was no other way to complete the vetting with so few volunteers on the team. While Worldcon leadership had concerns about the use of generative AI, because ChatGPT had already been used – and because of the lack of needed volunteers on the vetting team – they decided to retroactively accept its use.
What came after is now well known: Word about the use of ChatGPT quickly spread among Worldcon volunteers and the larger genre community.
I’m told the person on the vetting team who originally decided to use ChatGPT is no longer involved in the vetting process….
Unfortunately, none of the quoted sources was willing to go on the record as a source.
(6) DAVE RATTI OBITUARY. [By Becky Veal.] David Ratti, long time Orlando fan, passed away on May 15, 2025. He had been suffering prolonged illnesses, but the cause of death is initially listed as pneumonia and sepsis.
I don’t know when Dave first got into fandom, but I met him at Necronomicon in 1983. I was pushing my infant son Sean in a stroller when someone came up to me and tried to start a conversation. I remember thinking “another fat jerk“. And thus I met my best friend of 40 years.
Dave was a founding member of the Orlando Science Fiction Society and the convention Oasis. We worked together editing the bid progress reports for the 1992 Orlando Worldcon, MagiCon. We ran more convention offices and other departments than I can count.
I will write a better obituary later, as I’m sure others will. I’m too exhausted with grief to do more. Dave was unique and special and wonderful in his own way. There will be many tears shed by many fans and friends, including myself.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Liō series (2006)
Nineteen years ago on this date, one of the most unusual strips to come into existence did so in the form of Mark Tatulli’s Liō. It was very easy to market globally as it had almost no dialogue except that spoken by other people in the parodies that I’ll mention in a minute as Liō and the other characters don’t speak at all, and there were no balloons or captions at all giving it a global appeal.
Liō, who lives with his father and various monsters, i.e. Ishmael a giant squid and Fido a spider, various animals like Cybil a white cat (of course there’s a cat here, a very pushy feline indeed), aliens, lab creations, and even Liō’s hunchbacked assistant. Why there’s even Archie, Liō’s psychopathic ventriloquist’s dummy. Liō’s mother is deceased. Though why she’s deceased is never stated. Definitely not your nuclear family here.
An important aspect of the strip is that it will riff off other strips, and lots of them: Blondie, Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes (my favorite strip ever), Cathy, Garfield, Opus, Peanuts, even Pearls Before Swine (definitely not one of my favorite strips I will readily admit) will become fodder for parody by this strip. That’s where the only dialogue is spoken.
Tatulli on the Mr. Media podcast back a decade or so said “It’s really a basic concept. It’s just Liō who lives with his father, and that’s basically it, and whatever I come up with. I set no parameters because I didn’t want to lock myself in. I mean, having no dialogue means that there is going to be no dialogue-driven gags, so I have to leave myself as open as possible to any kind of thing, so anything basically can happen.”
There a transcript of that podcast here as the audio quality of that interview is, as the interviewer admits, rather awful. He says that he got better after that first interview by him.
In multiple interviews, Tatulli has said the two major contemporary influences on his style are Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams.
It’s good at offending people as this strip demonstrates.
Currently, the strip runs daily globally in more than two hundred and fifty papers. Lio is also available in collections, many of them, found in paperback and digital formats. They display rather well on an iPad.
(8) MORE MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
May 15, 2015 — Mad Max: Fury Road
By Paul Weimer: I briefly mentioned Mad Max Fury Road in my recent retrospective of George Miller, but the movie deserves a bit of its own space as well.
It came out in 2015. Thirty years after the previous entry, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. I had figured that the franchise had had its end. The creation of Fury Road was a delight, and, 30 years after seeing the last Mad Max movie in a theater, I vowed to see this one, too. And so I did, one fine afternoon in May.
I was blown away. Tom Hardy makes an excellent Mad Max, taking up Gibson’s old mantle. But the thing that struck me immediately is how little he is a part of his own movie. This is a movie about a community, and about an Imperator (Charlize Theron) and a struggle against patriarchal tyranny. Max is only a piece of his own titular film…and yet it works. What I remember about this film isn’t Max so much as Immortan Joe, and his Boys. And Furiosa. And the War Rig.
And the spectacle. Seeing this on a movie theater screen was revelatory. The scale and size of the movie, especially in the “dust storm” sequence, astonished me. My jaw hit the floor when we got to that sequence. And then we get the musician on the attacking vehicle, and a fantastic action sequence. We get moments of intimacy, and care. And utter tragedy, when Furiosa realizes her paradisiacal home is gone forever. The fiercely anti-patriarchal nature of the script. “We are not things!”
It won six academy awards, and was also up but did not win Best Picture and Best Director. Entirely deserving, Mad Max Fury Road felt (until the recent movie Furiosa) as a capstone to the world of Mad Max. In a way, I feel like it is the one essential Mad Max movie because, as noted above, Mad Max is almost a walk-on in his own titular movie. The movie is much bigger, bolder and larger for not having Max front and center, and possibly why it is so successful. It’s the one essential Mad Max movie. It takes every theme of the previous films, adds new ones and puts it all together in a stunning performance all around.
Carol Gyzander and Daryl Gregory read from recent work to a full house, despite the dreary weather.
(11) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 134 of the Octothorpe podcast, “In the Framework of Linear Time”, they “discuss the recent Seattle 2025 controversy, and also read out some letters of comment from various listeners, before getting into the real meat of the podcast: roguelikes.” An uncorrected transcript is here.
JustWatch’s latest Why-To-Watch feature spotlights acclaimed director and animator Tim Miller, the visionary behind Netflix’s genre-defying anthology Love, Death + Robots, which premieres its fourth season today (May 15, 2025). In an exclusive quote shared with JustWatch, Miller speaks to the show’s groundbreaking creative freedom and its potential to convert even the most hesitant viewer into an animation devotee.
The show’s Director Tim Miller says:
This show will make you an animation fan
There’s something for everyone [in “Love, Death + Robots”]. If you want to see artists performing at the top of their game across a variety of genres and styles, and you’re an animation fan, it’s a must-watch. If you’re not an animation fan, this is the show that might make you one.
Engineers at NASAsay they have successfully revived thrusters aboard Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, in the nick of time before a planned communications blackout.
A side effect of upgrades to an Earth-based antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, the communications pause could have occurred when the probe faced a critical issue — thruster failure — leaving the space agency without a way to save the historic mission. The new fix to the vehicle’s original roll thrusters, out of action since 2004, could helpkeep the veteran spacecraft operating until it’s able to contact home again next year.
Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, usesmore than one set of thrusters to function properly. Primary thrusters carefully orient the spacecraft so it can keep its antenna pointed at Earth. This ensures that the probe can send back data it collects from its unique perspective 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space, as well as receive commands sent by the Voyager team.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, N., Becky Veal, John Coxon, Steven H Silver, Lis Carey, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
Walton says she would prefer for the LAcon V committee to abandon its Anaheim, CA location and move outside the country. Setting aside that the bid was seated by a democratic site selection process, they’ve also made legal and financial commitments to secure their 2026 facilities. Breaking those contracts would involve paying large penalties. How much? Remember that when Arisia 2019 decided the principled stance was to move the con away from two strike-affected hotels they were planning to use that triggered approximately $150,000 in cancellation fees and anticipated attrition charges. Even under the settlement negotiated by Arisia’s lawyers they still had to pay over $40K, much of the money donated by fans to Arisia’s fundraising campaign.
(2) MAY THE BEST APE WIN. [Item by Olav Rokne.] The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog is advancing a bit of an off-board pick for the Best Dramatic Hugo, but it’s a beguilingly bonkers and beautiful little movie. And I will maintain to my last breath that any movie in which there are 100,000 chimpanzees fighting with swords is at the very least magical realism, and consequently a genre work: “The Ape Star”.
In the climactic moment of Better Man, an anthropomorphic chimpanzee named Robbie Williams takes the stage at the Knebworth Festival in front of 125,000 fans to sing his pop anthem, “Let Me Entertain You.” Nearing the end of the song, he spots in the audience dozens — then hundreds — of younger and angrier chimpanzee versions of himself. Leaping into the crowd, he begins fighting them one-by-one, with each showdown getting bloodier and more outlandish.
With the leaping chimpanzees, the soaring camera work, and the colourful cinematography, it is as if the Battle of Isengard had been set on the Planet of the Apes and directed by Speed-Racer-era Wachowskis….
In a new report out today called “Cover to Cover,” PEN America provides a comprehensive analysis of the 4,128 unique titles that it determined were removed from public schools nationwide during the 2023–2024 academic year—the result of more than 10,000 instances of school book bans over that time period. With this latest look at its data from 2023–2024, PEN America builds on the findings it released last fall with a goal of better understanding the wide-reaching impacts of this educational censorship being driven by politics and coordinated, well-funded groups.
For the “Cover to Cover” report, PEN’s team of staff researchers, expert consultants, and author volunteers reviewed each banned title across 37 variables. What they learned was that certain marginalized identities are “being removed from library shelves en masse.” The reviewers found that 36% of the books banned during the 2023–2024 school year feature characters or people of color and 25% include LGBTQ+ people or characters. Of those banned titles with LGBTQ+ representation, 28% feature trans and/or genderqueer characters.
PEN’s researchers noted that in terms of identity erasure, the numbers are even more stark within the different genres and formats of the banned books. For example, they found that 73% of banned titles that fall into the graphic and illustrated titles category feature LGBTQ+ representation, people or characters of color, or discussions of race/racism. Sixty-four percent of banned picture books depict LGBTQ+ characters or stories; and 44% of banned history and biography titles feature people of color.
“When we strip library shelves of books about particular groups, we defeat the purpose of a library collection that is supposed to reflect the lives of all people,” Sabrina Baêta, senior manager for PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, said in a statement. “The damaging consequences to young people are real.”…
(4) KATHLEEN KENNEDY REPLIES. She’s not retiring. In Deadline, “Kathleen Kennedy clarifies Lucasfilm future, Star Wars plans”. After Mike Fleming, Jr. takes the media to task for what was reported, he walks Kennedy through a Q&A session which begins:
DEADLINE: We’ve read all these speculative reports that you are out, that there’s a frenzy for the next person who’s going to take over Lucasfilm. What is the truth?
KATHLEEN KENNEDY: The truth is, and I want to just say loud and clear, I am not retiring. I will never retire from movies. I will die making movies. That is the first thing that’s important to say. I am not retiring. What’s happening at Lucasfilm is I have been talking for quite some time with both Bob and Alan about what eventual succession might look like. We have an amazing bench of people here, and we have every intention of making an announcement months or a year down the road. We are in lockstep as to what that’s going to be, and I am continuing. I’m producing Mandalorian the movie right now, and I’m also producing Sean Levy’s movie, which is after that. So I’m continuing to stay at Lucasfilm and looking very thoughtfully with Bob and Alan as to who’s stepping in. So that is all underway, and we have every right to make that announcement when we want to make it….
(5) OCTOTHORPE. John Coxon thought of something, Alison Scott is educational, and Liz Batty reads contracts in Episode 129 of the Octothorpe podcast. They discuss the Belfast Eastercon, Alison shakes her cane at John and Liz, and they talk a little about WSFS things before getting into picks. Listen here: “Deep in Annex A”. An uncorrected transcript is available here.
Description: FANAC History Zoom: February 2025: Named to the Filk Hall of Fame in 1996, and a long time officer of the Filk Foundation, Margaret Middleton has been instrumental in the shaping of modern filk, as well as a mainstay of Arkansas fandom. She’s published multiple fanzines, including Kantele, and was a founder of the first specialized filk convention, Filkcon 1. In Part 1 of this 2 part recording, we learn about her introduction to conventions and fandom, including a delightful story of the Icon elevator that may have changed her life.
Margaret starts at the beginning, with her entry to fandom and how she started writing filk, and continues to the four bearded guys and how she came to pub her ish. A traveling fan with many convention stories, this Part 1 includes the origin story of Roc*Con in the grand fannish tradition, as well as tales of Big Mac (MidAmericon, 1976 Worldcon), and reminiscences of some of the filkers of the time (incuding the “Great Broads of the Galaxy”). The talk moves on to filkzines, specialized filk conventions, and filksing styles. It’s great fun, especially for those of us that remember filking in those days. Full Disclosure: the interviewer (me) is one of those people.
A new theatre in London’s Canary Wharf will open with the delayed world premiere of The Hunger Games, based on Suzanne Collins’ bestselling 2008 novel and the hit 2012 film version.
Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s adaptation of the dystopian adventure, which follows teenagers fighting to the death in a televised spectacle, will begin previews on 20 October. The purpose-built, 1,200-seat Troubadour Canary Wharf theatre is operated by the company behind the venue for the successful Starlight Express reboot in Wembley Park, where singing roller-skaters whiz among the audience. The Hunger Games has been similarly designed to place theatregoers amid the action.
Tristan Baker and Oliver Royds, joint CEOs and founders of Troubadour Theatres, said the show would offer “a transportive, electrifying experience that fully captures the scale, intensity and spectacle of Suzanne Collins’ world. Every element – from the staging to the technology – has been tailored to transport audiences right into the heart of the Games like never before.”…
(8) GENE HACKMAN (1930-2025). Actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, were discovered dead in their Santa Fe, NM home yesterday. Authorities are investigating their deaths, with Deadline’s most current information summarized here: “Gene Hackman & Wife Suffered ‘No External Trauma’, Police Say”.
…No cause of death has been determined so far for Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa, but New Mexico police say the situation “remains an open investigation.”
With affidavits, search warrants and statements calling the death of the two-time Oscar winner, his wife and their dog late Wednesday “suspicious enough in nature,” the Santa Fe Sheriff’s office is reiterating Thursday that “there were no apparent signs of foul play.”…
…“An autopsy was performed. Initial findings noted no external trauma to either individual,” they added. “Carbon monoxide and toxicology tests were requested for both individuals. The manner and cause of death has not been determined. The official results of the autopsy and toxicology reports are pending. This remains an open investigation.”
Earlier today, the local coroner’s office said it could be 4-6 weeks before a full report on the 95-year-old Hackman and the 63-year-old Arakawa is complete….
…With that, the deaths of Hackman and Arakawa become all the more complicated by what wasn’t addressed in the latest statement by the Santa Fe police. While the late Wednesday night affidavit for a search warrant on the couple’s property mentioned both bodies being on the floor of the house in different rooms and a “pill bottle being opened and pills scattered next to the female,” there was zero mention of that in this afternoon’s release…
The actor won Oscars winner for his work on 1971’s The French Connection and 1992’s Unforgiven. Hackman and classical pianist Arakawa married in 1991.
His work of genre interest included playing Lex Luthor in multiple Superman films, appearing in Young Frankenstein, Marooned, and in one episode of TheInvaders TV series. He also voiced a character in the animated movie Antz.
Thirty-one years ago this evening TekWar: TekLab, the third of the TekWar episodes, aired. Created by William Shatner, the novels credited initially to him were actually ghost-written by Ron Goulart. I don’t know how much input Goulart had into the TV series. TekWar would be developed for television by Stephen Roloff who earlier had done the same for Friday the 13th: The Series and Beyond Reality which I liked, also filmed in Toronto, the site of other series such as Forever Knight.
TekLab would take our detectives to London attend a ceremony at the Tower of London which marks the start of a campaign to restore the British monarchy. Before the film ends, much will happen including the appearance of Excalibur.
The primary cast was Greg Evigan as Jake Cardigan, Eugene Clark as Sid Gomez, William Shatner as Walter Bascom, Michael York as Richard Stewart, Laurie Winger as Rachael Tudor and Maurice Dean Winter as Lt. Winger.
I can’t say most critics loved this William-Shatner-created affair as they mostly did not, with who I’ll not quote by name to protect the guilty saying of the series that it was “bargain basement science fiction with a stale protagonist, a convoluted murder mystery, and a narrative that feels incomplete.” Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give this film specifically a thirty-six percent rating.
It ran two seasons for a total of 22 episodes, films as well. Supposedly in production, there was an adult animated TekWar film (whatever the hell they meant by that and I’m definitely not speculating) which was announced five years ago but I can’t find any proof of it existing.
Unlike most of the critics, I liked this series as the lead protagonist, Jake, was developed enough to be a good character in that crucial story role and even Shatner in the role he was in was likable enough to be generally not annoying, the supporting characters made sense, the stories weren’t exactly the best science-fiction ever done, but they weren’t bad either and the setting made sense for what it was.
It is streaming, well, nowhere. It aired originally on the USA network before repeating on the Sci Fi network. The USA network is owned by NBC Universal, parent company of Peacock as well, so I’m surprised it is not there at least.
(12) BERLITZKRIEG. This bilingual joke has to have been around for a long time but today is the first time I’ve seen it. “Yo” is the Spanish counterpart to the English pronoun “I”.
The Spanish-language version of Asimov's sci-fi classic I, Robot sounds a lot more street.
(13) OUR MEGAFAUNA NEIGHBORS. TL;DR version: It took longer for humans to eat the last of them than previously thought. P.S. The article says that idea is actually wrong, no matter how much I like it. “Giant Megafauna Lived Alongside Humans As Recently As 3,500 Years Ago” says IFLScience.
….For a long time, the overall consensus has been that mammalian megafauna – giant mammals that roamed the Earth in the past, including species like mammoths, giant sloths and sabertoothed tigers – went extinct at the start of the Holocene. This is our current geological epoch, which started around 11,700 years ago, at the end of the last major glacial age.
However, some recent studies have obtained fossil evidence that challenges this consensus. In particular, the discovery that woolly mammoths were still alive 4,000 years ago helped undermine this idea. Now researchers have found other megafauna specimens, including giant sloths and camel-like animals, that survived in South America up to around 3,500 years ago.
This evidence raises questions about what really led to the planet’s most recent large animal extinction while also showing that it was not a homogenous event….
(15) THE TECHNICAL TERM IS….[Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] And you want to know why AI shouldn’t replace people? “’Emergent Misalignment’ in LLMs” at Schneier on Security.
“Abstract: We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment. We call this emergent misalignment. This effect is observed in a range of models but is strongest in GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct. Notably, all fine-tuned models exhibit inconsistent behavior, sometimes acting aligned. Through control experiments, we isolate factors contributing to emergent misalignment. Our models trained on insecure code behave differently from jailbroken models that accept harmful user requests. Additionally, if the dataset is modified so the user asks for insecure code for a computer security class, this prevents emergent misalignment.
“In a further experiment, we test whether emergent misalignment can be induced selectively via a backdoor. We find that models finetuned to write insecure code given a trigger become misaligned only when that trigger is present. So the misalignment is hidden without knowledge of the trigger.
“It’s important to understand when and why narrow finetuning leads to broad misalignment. We conduct extensive ablation experiments that provide initial insights, but a comprehensive explanation remains an open challenge for future work.”
The emergent properties of LLMs are so, so weird.
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Olav Rokne, John Coxon, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Olav Rokne.]
(1) SIDEBAR. Cat Rambo has some of the most insightful comments yet offered about the harassment spawned by Jason Sanford’s report on Baen’s Bar, as well as Mercedes Lackey’s response to others’ claims made about her history with the Bar, in “Opinion: When Writers Punch – Up, Down, or Sideways” at The World Remains Mysterious.
… When a writer publicly calls someone out, they need to be aware of all of the implications, including the fact that the more popular the writer, the more devastating the results can be, not due to any intrinsic quality of the writer, but the number of fans. The more fans, the more likely it is that the group will contain people who, emboldened by the idea of pleasing a favorite writer, can — and will — go to lengths that go far beyond the norms of civil, and sometimes legal, behavior.
This played out recently with reactions to Jason Sanford’s piece on a specific forum within the Baen’s Bar discussion boards administered by Baen Publishing, which have included web posts doxxing Sanford and calling for complaints to be made to a lengthy list of people at Sanford’s placement of employment about the post he made on his free time on a platform that has nothing to do with his employment.
As I’ve said earlier, I have a great deal of respect for Baen and hope it emerges from this watershed moment in a way that suits the bigheartedness of its founder. But in the fray, a lot of writers have been egging their followers on to do shitty things in general, and what has emerged include the above specifics.
It’s not okay to point your readers at someone and basically say “make this person miserable.” It is okay to vote with one’s pocketbook. To not buy the books of people you don’t support. That is called a boycott, and it is an established tactic. (One of my consistent practices throughout the years, though, is to read a book by each one before I make that decision, so I know what I might be missing out on. So far, no regrets.) Going beyond that is, in my opinion, is the act of someone who’s gotten carried away and is no longer seeing their target as a fellow human being, and who needs to stop and think what they are doing….
(2) COMMENTING ON THE UNSTOPPABLE. Harper Campbell reviews Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead in “An Indigenous sci-fi moment” at The Ormsby Review.
…It really matters that so much space is being created by Native writers to tell Native sci-fi stories. Science fiction has seeped into the cultural subconscious of the world, providing our basic frame of reference for each successive wave of technological change. We understand that we have entered an age of technological modernity, and it isn’t enough to see the future as simply an extension of the past. Science fiction is what helps people all over the world make sense of a “normal” that is in perpetual change.
It is a serious shortcoming of science fiction, then, that it tends to gloss over colonialism and imperialism. The implicit view of most science fiction, after all, is one in which colonizers are the true vehicle of world-historical change. Science fiction is always saying — look how far we’ve come, look how much we’ve accomplished, see how unstoppable we’ve been. And what they mean is, look how unstoppable colonialism has been.
And like colonizers, the implicit perspective of science fiction tends to see the cosmos as a field of pure resource. The tendency is to insist that the earth, our beloved green and blue earth, is after all just one planet, theoretically interchangeable with any other that could support life. And why stick to just one planet? Like Cecil Rhodes, the arch-imperialist, sci-fi aspires to annex the stars.
So when an Indigenous writer starts to put down the first words of a science fiction story, they must already be grappling with nothing less than the significance of the history of the world and what it will mean for the future. They must wrestle with the cosmic dimension of colonialism from the other side, from a perspective that could never say “Look how unstoppable we’ve been.”
Five things you can touch, whispers Rose, and I touch: duvet, her hand, my own hair, the rough plaster of the wall, and my device. It wakes up, a rectangle of soft light in our dark bedroom.
Four things you can hear, she says, and I listen for the tap-tap of water from somewhere in the kitchen, the rhythm of a neighbor’s music through the floor, the rustling of bedsheets and my pounding heart.
In grad school, I remember reading about—or at least, I think I remember reading about—a new browser plug-in designed to capture your internet click trails for later re-searching. The promo materials visualized this as a beautiful network of interconnected websites, making it possible to refind any page, article, recipe, meme etc. I am easily distracted and spend approximately 18 hours a day on the internet, so this sounded like a dream come true: Never again would I waste time retracing my digital steps to find something vaguely remembered reading but neglected to bookmark! I signed up to beta test this tool immediately. Or at least I think I did. I never heard anything about this widget again, and my attempts to remember its name have all been in vain. I’ve searched through my email, browser history, Twitter likes: nothing. I may have imagined this thing. Looking for it made me feel like a character in a Borges story: wandering the library stacks in search for the one book that will tell me what stacks I’ve already been in….
On Thursday, March 4, at noon Eastern, author Leigh Alexander and Andrea K. Thomer, information scientist and assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, will discuss this story in an hourlong online discussion moderated by Punya Mishra, professor and associate dean of scholarship and innovation at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. RSVP here.
(4) THE NEXT GRANTVILLE GAZETTE. On March 1, 2021, 1632 Inc. will release Issue 94, March 2021 of The Grantville Gazette at www.grantvillegazette.com.
The Gazette is a SFWA-approved venue for professional writers, and pays professional rates. The Gazette is published every other month, and has been published since 2007. It is available in several different electronic editions, including Kindle, ePub, PDF, and more. It can be downloaded directly from the Gazette website, or from our distributor, Baen.com.
This issue features works by best-selling authors Virginia DeMarce, Iver P. Cooper, and Edward M. Lerner, as well as columns by Kristine Katherine Rusch and Walt Boyes.
Edited by Walt Boyes, with Bjorn Hasseler as managing editor, and Garrett Vance as Art Director, the Gazette offers fiction and fact, both from the 1632Universe and from the UniverseAnnex, which is designed to provide a venue for general SFF.
More than 160 authors have had their first professional sale to The Grantville Gazette, through the medium of critique and workshops, both for 1632 fiction and general SF. Some of these authors have gone on to successful careers as writing professionals.
(5) LAPL FUNDRAISER. Charles Yu will be one of the Honorary Chairs for “The Stay Home and Read a Book Ball” on March 7, hosted by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.
WHEN: Anytime, and for as long as you choose to celebrate on Sunday, March 7, 2021.
WHERE: Stay safe and read in the comfort of your home, bed, or even in the bathtub! Or mask up and go for a walk with an audiobook from the Library!
HOW: Choose a book (or many!) and let the pages transport you! Have a ball while reading at home, and show your support for the Los Angeles Public Library by donating what you would have spent at an annual gala or a night out.
Share photos of your literary festivities on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and tell us what you’ll be reading – tag #StayHomeandRead to let others know how you are celebrating!
ATTIRE: Choose formal or warm and fuzzy – anything goes when you’re having a ball at home.
FOOD & DRINK: Feast on lobster and champagne, milk and cookies, or wine and cheese.
Kindly RSVP by visiting LFLA.org/StayHome, or text the word LIBRARY to 41444.
Bryan Stewart: I’m curious what’s your favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox? Do you think we’ll make first contact in our lifetimes?
[AT] I have become more pessimistic about this as I’ve got older (and the personal element of that ‘in our lifetimes’ necessarily becomes shorter). I do believe life is common in the universe, but the universe is very big so that can still produce colossal, uncrossable vistas between any two species that might appreciate each other’s’ existence. On a bad day I feel that a sufficiently advanced civilization is likely to destroy itself rather like we’re in the process of doing ourselves. On a good day I suspect that our attempts to find life are predicated far too much on that life being like us, and that we may simply not be sifting unusual alien signals from the background hiss, or may be looking in the wrong place.
Ten and twenty years ago I used to play a minor parlor trick; I wonder if it would still work. When asked my favorite writer, I’d say “Shirley Jackson,” counting on most questioners to say they’d never heard of her. At that I’d reply, with as much smugness as I could muster: “You’ve read her.” When my interlocutor expressed skepticism, I’d describe “The Lottery”—still the most widely anthologized American short story of all time, I’d bet, and certainly the most controversial, and censored, story ever to debut in The New Yorker—counting seconds to the inevitable widening of my victim’s eyes: they’d not only read it, they could never forget it. I’d then happily take credit as a mind reader, though the trick was too easy by far. I don’t think it ever failed.
Jackson is one of American ?ction’s impossible presences, too material to be called a phantom in literature’s house, too in-print to be “rediscovered,” yet hidden in plain sight….
(8) FANCASTS TO CONSIDER. Cora Buhlert has expanded her Fanzine Spotlight project to fancasts, of which these are the latest entries. She says, “I’m really enjoying this project, though it has upset my Hugo ballot, because there are so many great podcasts out there I never knew about.”
The Journey Show is an outgrowth of Galactic Journey, our time machine to 55 years ago in fact and fiction. That site has been around since 1958…er…2013, and the conceit is that we are all fans living in the past, day by day, reviewing all the works of the time in the context of their time.
On our podcast we like to explore how narrative helps people to envision and achieve a better future. In turn, we like to talk to writers, editors, activists, gamers, and anyone else who helps us imagine those worlds. We consider our podcast to be linked thematically with HopePunk. Our interpretation of HopePunk takes a stance of hope through resistance to the current norms. Emphasis on the PUNK. Any given podcast discussion can range from a specific novel or story, to a guest’s career, politics, religion, music, writing tips, and ttrpgs. Guests often include editors, traditionally published writers, and Indie writers.
Some other previous guests have included folks like Bill Campbell, Tobias Buckell, Malka Older, P. Djeli Clark, and James Morrow, Janet Forbes (founder of the world building platform World Anvil), and Graeme Barber (writer and ttrpg critic).
[Alasdair Stuart] I had it gently and affectionately pointed out to me that there was no reason not to. I’d had a lot of frustrations with freelance projects at that point (multiple projects paid years late, another company going insolvent, etc). So one day I made a joke about what my newsletter would be and 50 ‘I’d read that’ emails later I realised I had an audience if I wanted to do it. And I did. I took Matt Wallace’s words about building your own platform to heart and started building mine.
Sisters Alice Baker and Ann Spangler have set themselves the goal of reading and discussing all Hugo and Nebula winning novels.
Why did you decide to start your podcast or channel?
Alice: For me, it was because I was looking for a way to connect with my sister who I do not often get to see in person. We both have a love of the genre (although Ann likes Fantasy more), and since we were going to be discussing it anyway, I thought we should record them. I have some previous experience on the Educating Geeks podcast. Also, I find it difficult to read for hours like I used so I am trying to retrain myself.
Why did you decide to start your podcast or channel?
Way back in 2014, Andi was live-tweeting her first time through Star Trek, Grace was podcasting on All Things Trek, Jarrah was blogging at Trekkie Feminist, and Sue was podcasting and blogging at Anomaly Podcast. At different points in time, Andi, Jarrah, and Sue had all been guests with Grace on All Things Trek on TrekRadio – sometimes with each other, sometimes individually. Having been connected through podcasting, and with that show coming to a close, Andi proposed that we start our own. After much planning, Women at Warp launched as an independent podcast in 2015.
When Paul Verhoeven adapted Starship Troopers in the late 1990s, did he know he was predicting the future? The endless desert war, the ubiquity of military propaganda, a cheerful face shouting victory as more and more bodies pile up?
But the scene that left perhaps the greatest impact on the minds of Nineties kids—and the scene that anticipated our current cinematic age the best—does not feature bugs or guns. It is, of course, the shower scene, in which our heroic servicemen and -women enjoy a communal grooming ritual.
On the surface, it is idyllic: racial harmony, gender equality, unity behind a common goal—and firm, perky asses and tits.
And then the characters speak. The topic of conversation? Military service, of course. One joined for the sake of her political career. Another joined in the hopes of receiving her breeding license. Another talks about how badly he wants to kill the enemy. No one looks at each other. No one flirts.
A room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war.
… This cinematic trend reflects the culture around it. Even before the pandemic hit, Millennials and Zoomers were less sexually active than the generation before them. Maybe we’re too anxious about the Apocalypse; maybe we’re too broke to go out; maybe having to live with roommates or our parents makes it a little awkward to bring a partner home; maybe there are chemicals in the environment screwing up our hormones; maybe we don’t know how to navigate human sexuality outside of rape culture; maybe being raised on the message that our bodies are a nation-ending menace has dampened our enthusiasm for physical pleasure.
Eating disorders have steadily increased, though. We are still getting our bodies ready to fight The Enemy, and since we are at war with an abstract concept, the enemy is invisible and ethereal. To defeat it, our bodies must lose solidity as well….
(10) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
February 27, 1994 — On this date in 1994, the TekWar episode TekLab first aired. Though created by William Shatner, it was actually ghost-written by writer Ron Goulart. This extended episode was directed by Timothy Bondoff the the story by Westbrook Claridge which was developed into a teleplay by? Chris Haddock. As always the lead character was Jake Cardigan played by Greg Evigan, and yes, Shatner was in the series as Walter Bascom. Torri Higginson, of later Stargate fame, got her start on this series. The series doesn’t far well with the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes where it currently has a dismal thirty six percent rating.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born February 27, 1807 – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Taught at Bowdoin and Harvard. First American translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy; better known to many for “Paul Revere’s Ride” and Hiawatha, whose accessibility had better not blind the thoughtful. Book-length poems, novels, plays, anthologies, a dozen volumes of poetry. “What a writer asks of readers is not so much to like as to listen.” (Died 1882) [JH]
Born February 27, 1850 – Laura Richards. Ninety books addressed to children; fifty stories ours, at least (what should count can be unclear with “children’s”). LR’s mother Julia Ward Howe wrote the words to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; 1917 Pulitzer Prize for biography of JWH by LR & sister Maud Howe Elliott “assisted by [sister] Florence Howe Hall”. LR also wrote biographies of Abigail Adams, Florence Nightingale, Joan of Arc; 5 others. Maybe best known for “Eletelephony”. (Died 1943) [JH]
Born February 27, 1934 — Van Williams. He was the Green Hornet (with the late Bruce Lee as his partner Kato) on The Green Hornet and three Batman cross-over episodes. He would voice President Lyndon B. Johnson on the Batman series, show up in an episode of Mission Impossible, and also do a one-off Quinn Martin’s Tales of the Unexpected and that’s it. (Died 2016.) (CE)
Born February 27, 1938 — T.A. Waters. A professional magician and magic author. He appears not terribly well-disguised as Sir Thomas Leseaux, an expert on theoretical magic as a character in Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy fantasy series and in Michael Kurland’s The Unicorn Girl in which he also appears as Tom Waters. He himself wrote The Probability Pad which is a sequel to The Unicorn Girl. Together with Chester Anderson’s earlier The Butterfly Kid , they make up Greenwich Village trilogy. (Died 1998.) (CE)
Born February 27, 1944 — Ken Grimwood. Another writer who died way too young, damn it. Writer of several impressive genre novels including Breakthrough and Replay which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed and Into the Deep and Elise which are listed in ISFDB but which I’m not at all familiar with. So what else is worth reading by him? (Died 2003.) (CE)
Born February 27, 1960 — Jeff Smith, 61. Creator and illustrator of Bone, the now complete series that he readily admits that “a notable influence being Walt Kelly’s Pogo”. Smith also worked for DC on a Captain Marvel series titled Mister Mind and the Monster Society of Evil. He’s won a very impressive eleven Harvey Awards and ten Eisner Awards! (CE)
Born February 27, 1945 – Hank Davis, age 76. Nine short stories in e.g. Analog, F&SF, not counting one for The Last Dangerous Visions. A dozen anthologies. Correspondent of SF Commentary, SF Review. Served in the Army in Vietnam. [JH]
Born February 27, 1951 – Mark Harrison, age 70. Two hundred sixty covers, fifty interiors. British SF Ass’n Award. Here is The Story of the Stone. Here is Valentine Pontifex. Here is the Mar 93 Asimov’s. Here is the Mar 95 Analog. Here is Mercury. Artbook, Dreamlands. [JH]
Born February 27, 1964 — John Pyper-Ferguson, 57. I certainly remember him best as the villain Peter Hutter on The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. but I see that he got he got his start in Canadian horror films such as Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II and Pin: A Plastic Nightmare. His first major SF role was in Space Marines as Col. Fraser which turns only such role. And though he has an extensive one-off career in genre series with over two dozen appearances, his occurrence as a repeated cast member is not uncommon as he’s Agent Bernard Fainon the new Night Stalker for the episodes, shows up as Tomas Vergis on Caprica for six episodes and I see he’s had a recurring role on The Last Ship as Tex Nolan. (CE)
Born February 27, 1970 – Michael A. Burstein, age 51. Twoscore short stories. Served a term as SFWA Secretary (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America), simultaneously Vice-President of NESFA (New England SF Ass’n). Campbell Award (as it then was) for Best New Writer. President, Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet. Fanzine (with wife Nomi Burstein), Burstzine. [JH]
Born February 27, 1976 — Nikki Amuka-Bird, 45. The Voice of Testimony in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Doctor story, “Twice Upon A Time”. She’s shown up quite a bit in genre work from horror (The Omen), space opera (Jupiter Ascending), takes on folk tales (Sinbad and Robin Hood) and evening SF comedy (Avenue 5). (CE)
Born February 27, 1993 – Ellen Curtis, age 28. Three novels (with Matthew LeDrew), three shorter stories; four anthologies (with Erin Vance). Has read The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Castle of Otranto, The Name of the Rose, a Complete Stories & Poems of Lewis Carroll, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales. [JH]
(12) REDISCOVERING ‘UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY’. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Looking back on the final voyage of the original Star Trek crew, Escapist scribe Darren Mooney makes a compelling argument for the subtext of the movie. He reads the movie as a rejection of nostalgia, and the need to hear new voices within genre fiction. It’s an article that’s relevant to several of fandom’s ongoing internecine struggles: “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Rejected Franchise Nostalgia in a Way Impossible Today” at Escapist Magazine.
…Three decades later, it’s impossible to imagine a major franchise demonstrating this level of introspection without provoking a fandom civil war. The Undiscovered Country provides a contrast with films like The Rise of Skywalker, in that The Undiscovered Country is about an older generation learning that they need to step aside and make room for those that will follow, while The Rise of Skywalker is about how the older generation is never too old for a joyride in the Millennium Falcon….
(13) SLIPPED DISC. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Talking of mysterious bronze age artefacts, here is an article about the archeological dispute involving the famous Nebra sky disc: “Archaeologists Are Caught Up in an Intense Fight Over Just How Important the Mysterious Nebra Sky Disk Really Is” at Artnet News. Even if the sky disc is not as old as previously assumed, it is still an intensely cool artefact. I was lucky enough to see it in person a few years ago, since I have family in Halle/Saale, the town where it’s kept.
… In September, Rupert Gebhard, director of the Munich’s Bavarian State Archaeological Collection, and Rüdiger Krause, an early European history professor at Goethe University in Frankfurt, published a paper in the German journal Archäologische Informationen arguing that the artifact—which features images of the sun, the moon, and the Pleiades star cluster—is not the remarkable earliest-known depiction of astronomical phenomena that it had been heralded as.
“It’s a very emotional object,” Gebhard told the New York Times. He believes that the looters who discovered the disk before it was recovered in 2002 moved it from its original site and reburied it with real Bronze Age artifacts to make it appear older and more valuable.
Now, a competing paper put forth by experts including Harald Meller, director of the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Germany, which owns the disk, has fired back….
Cryptography in seventeenth-century England was not just the stuff of spies and traitors, a fact that became a major plot point in The Sign of the Gallows, my fifth Lucy Campion historical mystery. While ciphers had grown more complex between the 16th and 17th centuries with the development of new mathematics, the actual practice of secret and hidden writing occurred in different domains of everyday life. Merchants might send messages about when and where shipments might occur out of fear of theft. Leaders of non-conformist religious sects like the Quakers might communicate with their followers in code, informing them of their next meeting. Friends and merry-makers might write riddles and jests using ciphers to entertain one another, in a type of pre-parlor game. Lovers, especially those unacknowledged couples, might write amorous messages that could not be read if discovered by jealous husbands or angry parents….
5. PLACES IN THE ATTACK THE BLOCK ARE NAMED AFTER FAMOUS BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AUTHORS.
The movie takes place in a fictional neighborhood. The main council block in the film is called Wyndham Tower in honor of John Wyndham, the English science fiction writer famous for novels such as The Day of the Triffids (1951) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). Other locations include Huxley Court (Aldous Huxley), Wells Court (H.G. Wells), Moore Court (Alan Moore), Ballard Street (J.G. Ballard), and Adams Street (Douglas Adams). Just after the movie title appears, the camera pans across a map of the area, showing the various names.
(16) WORSE THAN THE DIET OF WORMS. Antonio Ferme, in “George A. Romero’s Lost Movie ‘The Amusement Park’ Comes to Shudder” at Variety, says that Shudder will show Romero’s 1973 film The Amusement Park which was believed lost until it was found and restored in 2018. The film was commissioned by the Lutheran Society to showcase problems of elder abuse but suppressed because the Lutherans thought it was too gory.
… “Amusement Park” stars Lincoln Maazel as an elderly man who finds himself increasingly disoriented and isolated during a visit to the amusement park. What he initially assumed would be an ordinary day quickly turned into a hellish nightmare filled with roller coasters and chaotic crowds….
(17) NOTHING SECEDES LIKE SUCCESS. In the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri interviews residents of Potatopia about their threat to secede if Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head became gender-neutral. “Opinion | An oral history of the Mr. Potato Head secession”.
… Helen Helenson, first applicant for asylum in Potatopia: The minutes when I thought I would have to look at a brownish plastic oval and not clearly know what gender it was were some of the most frightening of my life. I started to sob. I thought, what will they come for next? Soon I won’t know what gender any of the plastics are around my home….
(18) STREAMLINED FELINE.Gizmodo’s Andrew Liszewski sounds quite revolted by the whole idea: “Meet Flatcat, the Creepiest Robot We’ve Ever Seen”. Question: is the writer aware of that term’s sf roots? He doesn’t acknowledge them in the article.
…To make Flatcat more endearing so people will actually want to touch and interact with it, its creators at a Berlin-based robotics startup called Jetpack Cognition Lab have wrapped it in soft, fluffy fur so that it looks more like a cat—or at least a cat that somehow survived repeated run-ins with a semi-truck. In reality, Flatcat is more like like a ThiccFurrySnake, or maybe a FlattenedCaterpillar. Calling it a cat is certainly a stretch….
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “That Mitchell and Webb Look–Holmes And Watson” on YouTube, British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb play two actors who keep fighting over who gets to play Holmes and who gets to play Watson.
[Thanks to John Hertz, Cora Buhlert, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, Kurt Schiller, Mike Kennedy, Michael Toman, JJ, Walt Boyes, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
