(1) SLAIN ISRAELI HOSTAGE SFF COLLECTION UP FOR AUCTION. Going by the photo, there’s a lot of David Weber and other Baen authors in the stacks. “Tel Aviv store to auction slain hostage Nadav Popplewell’s sci-fi book collection” – The Times of Israel has details.

A collection of several hundred science fiction and fantasy books owned by slain British-Israeli hostage Nadav Popplewell is to go up for auction on Sunday, with the proceeds going to the families of hostages held in the Gaza Strip.

The collection is being offered in an online sale from the Green Brothers bookstore in Tel Aviv.

Ilai Green, who owns the store along with his twin brother Alon-Lee, told The Times of Israel that there are some 700 volumes in the library gathered by avid reader Popplewell.

A collection of several hundred science fiction and fantasy books owned by slain British-Israeli hostage Nadav Popplewell is to go up for auction on Sunday, with the proceeds going to the families of hostages held in the Gaza Strip.

The auction is to be held online via the Bidspirit website on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. Israel time, with a starting bid of $500. Proceeds will go to the families of hostages held by terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

Nadav Popplewell, 51, was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from Kibbutz Nirim on October 7, 2023, along with his mother, Channah Peri.

His brother, Roi, was murdered the same day in the kibbutz during the Hamas-led onslaught, when over 5,000 terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting 251 to the Gaza Strip.

Channah was released from captivity six weeks later.

.. Green told The Times of Israel that a volunteer in the kibbutz recently contacted the store and said that Popplewell’s library was available. Green said he understood that the offer was being made with the blessing of Popplewell’s family and that the kibbutz needed to find somewhere for the books after it cleared out his home.

Under the impression that there would be no more than “a few crates of books,” Green described his surprise when the collection arrived.

“I didn’t know how many there were until they brought in crates and crates,” he recalled….

(2) MARCON COMES TO AN END. Dale Mazzola announced on Facebook today that Marcon is closing. Mazzola is chair of the nonprofit corporation, SOLAE, that hosts Marcon. The Columbus, OH sff convention, so far as available history shows, was last held in 2023.

Yes, The Marcon Science Fiction and Fantasy convention is closing.

I hated deciding that and writing that out really hurts. There were many reasons behind that statement. What the decision came down to was based off a couple of factors, Primarily, expenses, which included hotel, expenses, storage and supply costs have all gone up. Additionally, memberships are down across the board for fan run regional conventions.

SOLAE is a 501c3 that is the owner of the Marcon trade name, Marcon was/is an event organized through SOLAE. While we were still getting memberships to Marcon there were not enough to maintain it.

Going forth we are doing the following;

First, we are getting an inventory of our current assets and equipment looking towards offering it up for sales to other events and conventions. So, if you know of other events or conventions in need of equipment, please feel free to have them reach out to me at dale.mazzola@solaecons.org for inventory info.

Second, I will be reaching out to the hotels we have used in the past to work out any remaining bills we owe to them.

Third, if we are unable to reach an agreement with our creditors, I will engage with a Lawyer to see what our options are.

Regarding the Shed and its inventory, we will be able to maintain it until May 31st of 2025, After that we will see what happens. I’m hoping that we can get enough of the large equipment that is taking up about 50% of the space removed and we will condense down to a smaller unit.

(3) WRITER BEWARE. Victoria Strauss hears about “Author Complaints at Clear Fork Press” at Writer Beware. Full details at the link.

In early February, author Vanessa Keel published a long, cautionary blog post about her experience with one small publisher. It was not a happy tale: an absent editor, little marketing support, a non-standard wholesale discount that discouraged bookseller orders, problems with royalty statements and payments, and much more. The result: few sales, crushing disappointment, and, ultimately, a rights reversion.

Vanessa didn’t name the publisher, but she did mention the title of her book. So it was easy to confirm that the publisher in question was Clear Fork Press (CFP), a children’s book publisher that publishes under four imprints: Spork, Blue Whale Press (formerly an independent publisher, acquired by CFP in 2020), &MG, and Rise. Per Amazon, CFP has a catalog of around 150 titles, most released via the Spork imprint (though you’d never know it from looking at the CFP website–more on that below)….

… I don’t generally write about publishers based on one complaint: it can be difficult to know whether the complaint represents a pattern or a single bad experience, something that can happen even in the best of circumstances. I kept the 2018 complaint on file, as I do all complaints I receive, assuming that if there were wider problems, other reports would follow.

They did–though it took a while. Over the past few months, I’ve heard from multiple CFP authors and illustrators who report problems similar to those identified by the 2018 complainant and also by Vanessa Keel….

(4) ANOTHER UNEXPECTED MENTION OF PULP SF. [Item by Rich Horton.] This one is weirder and WAY less respectable than C. L. Moore!

Richard Shaver (yes, of “Shaver Mystery” fame, from Ray Palmer’s Amazing in the 1940s) gets written up in The Paris Review: “’A Threat to Mental Health’: How to Read Rocks”.

Richard Sharpe Shaver, born 1907 in Berwick, Pennsylvania, became a national sensation in the forties with his dramatic accounts of a highly advanced civilization that inhabited Earth in prehistoric times. An itinerant Midwesterner, he’d been employed as a landscape gardener, a figure model for art classes, and a welder at Henry Ford’s original auto plant. He gained public attention as a writer who asserted that descendants of those early beings still live in hidden underground cities, where they wield terrifying technology capable of controlling thoughts. Many readers agreed with Shaver, and a splashy controversy ensued.

Public fascination with his writings subsided during the fifties, but Shaver continued searching for evidence of a great bygone civilization. In about 1960, while living in rural Wisconsin, Shaver formulated a hypothesis that would captivate him for the balance of his life: some stones are ancient books, designed and fabricated by people of the remote past using technology that surpasses anything known today. He identified complex pictorial content in these “rock books.” Images reveal themselves at every angle and every level of magnification and are layered throughout each rock. Graphic symbols and lettering also appear in what he called “the most fascinating exhibition of virtuosity in art existent on earth.”

Frustrated that the equipment needed to fully decipher the dense rock books was lost to time, Shaver undertook strategies to make at least a fraction of the books’ content clearly visible. Initially, he made drawings and paintings of images he found in the rocks, developing idiosyncratic techniques to project a slice of rock onto cardboard or a wooden plank. Shaver also produced conventional black-and-white photos using 35 mm film, often showing a cross section of rock alongside a ruler or a coin to indicate scale. Sometimes he highlighted imagery by hand coloring the prints with felt pens. He attached photos to typewriter paper where he added commentary: he describes the rock books, interprets images, details his photo techniques, and expresses disappointment at the conspicuous lack of academic or journalistic interest in his findings…

(5) BUGS OR FEATURE? The Guardian’s Ben Child asks, “Is Hollywood really going to ditch the anti-fascist satire in its Starship Troopers remake?”.

If there is a modern day equivalent in Hollywood to Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, he or she must be hiding in the nearest underground space bunker, desperately praying that irony makes a comeback. Verhoeven arrived at a time when transgressive “video nasties” were just fading into irrelevance, a period in which filmgoers were just as likely to head to the cinemas for schlocky thrills as they were for biting sci-fi allegory. With films such as 1987’s RoboCop, 1990’s Total Recall and 1997’s Starship Troopers, Verhoeven managed to combine a high-energy, hyper-kinetic thrust that has rarely been achieved since. He remains one of the most subversive and controversial film-makers of his generation – which is why it’s so depressing that Hollywood keeps churning out substandard remakes of his best work….

… Studios have been trying to rework this thing since at least 2016. The latest attempt, according to the Hollywood Reporter, will see District 9’s Neill Blomkamp, once the coming man of sci-fi, taking the reins.

You might think that Blomkamp, with his flair for gritty dystopia and penchant for socially conscious sci-fi carnage, would be the perfect film-maker to reignite the spirit of gleeful nihilism that infected Verhoeven’s best work from the 80s and 90s. And you wouldn’t be far off, except that studio Sony, AKA Columbia Pictures, appears to have decided (according to reports) that the only way to bring this one back to the big screen is to jettison the subversive tone and instead lean in to the Riefenstahlian chest-thumping militarism of the original source novel by Heinlein.

Is this the legacy of Trump’s return to power infecting Hollywood boardrooms in 2025? Have the studios really decided that the smartest way to reboot Starship Troopers is to just go all in on the laser-soaked Nazi space opera vibes? Heinlein’s 1959 novel is all about a society in which people need to get battling the alien space bugs that are threatening Earth quick sharp or face a future without voting rights, basic human dignity or the faintest hint of a social safety net – because nothing says “civic duty” quite like strapping on a flamethrower and mowing down intergalactic cockroaches to prove you’re worthy of democracy. It’s hard not to imagine Verhoeven wondering how his cynical parody of militaristic nationalism ended up being remade as a sincere recruitment video for totalitarian space marines.

Moreover, why get Blomkamp involved if this is the plan? Is he really the right director to helm a fascist fantasy epic when his entire career has been built on scrappy, anti-establishment sci-fi that makes you want to riot against the nearest dystopian overlord? …

(6) SAY IT AIN’T SO! Grammaticus Books is highly peeved about the proposed remake for rather different reasons: “IS SONY Studios about to DESECRATE HEINLEIN?!?!”

A rant about Sony Studios plan to remake the Robert A. Heinlein’s seminal science fiction novel, Starship Troopers. For the first time since Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers, Sony will reboot the franchise with their new director Neil Blomkamp. But will they desecrate the memory of Heinlein by painting Starship Troopers as a pro-fascist book?!?!

(7) IF NOBODY SEES AN APPLE TV+ SHOW DROP… [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian also wonders: “Big stars, little shine: is anyone actually watching Apple TV+ shows?” Despite Severance, Apple TV is in trouble, apparently.

…According to the Information, TV+ is currently the only Apple subscription service that isn’t profitable. This is said to be down to a number of factors. The first is that despite having 45 million subscribers, Apple blows through a $5bn production budget every year. And when a lot of it is being spent on blockbuster movies that squander every scrap of their potential – like the $200m spy disaster Argylle – then all this expense starts to look like bad financial sense. The report claims Apple TV+ is losing $1bn annually.

Another factor is that despite all those subscribers, very few people actually seem to watch anything on Apple TV+. The Information reports that Apple shows constitute less than 1% of total US streaming service viewing. In other words, while an Apple subscription ($8.99 a month) might be half the price of a Netflix subscription ($17.99 a month), people still watch eight times more Netflix than they do Apple….

(8) SAFE HABOR DESTINED TO END? “Bipartisan Effort to Sunset the ‘26 Words That Created the Internet’ Is on the Way” reports Gizmodo.

Section 230, the linchpin law that has dictated how online platforms have been regulated for decades, appears destined to come to an end. According to The Information, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and Republican Lindsey Graham are planning to introduce a new bill that will set an expiration date for the law and encourage tech companies to offer alternatives as to what should replace it.

Per The Information, the bill could be introduced as early as Monday, March 24, and is expected to have bipartisan support from Republicans Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn and Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and Amy Klobuchar, who are reportedly ready to co-sponsor the bill. It’s also a modified version of a proposal made last year in the House by Republican Cathy Rodgers and Democrat Frank Pallone, Jr., so there is some juice for this thing throughout Congress. The proposal would effectively sunset Section 230, setting January 1, 2027, as a drop-dead date for the law that so many tech companies have leaned on to duck legal challenges.

The gambit that Durbin and Graham appear to be attempting is to force tech companies to the table and talk about Section 230 alternatives. By setting a deadline, the message is basically, “Come help us write the replacement law or lose this protection in its entirety.” The latter should be basically an intolerable outcome for tech firms, as it would leave them extremely exposed to legal challenges.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, as it stands, essentially grants companies legal immunity from being held legally liable for the content posted on their platforms by users. It is often referred to as the “26 words that created the internet” because it created a framework for user-generated content. But its legal protection of companies has come under fire from both major political parties for very different reasons.

Democrats have come after Section 230 for allowing Big Tech companies to be derelict in their duties to remove harmful and hateful content, falling short of the “Good Samaritan” standard of good faith moderation. Scrutiny from the left turned up during the COVID pandemic when misinformation was rampant on platforms like Facebook and some Democrats wanted the company to do more to address the issue. Republicans, meanwhile want Section 230 repealed because they believe tech companies have been overzealous in removing content and think their viewpoints have been “censored.” It’s here where you can see the cracks start forming in this bipartisan effort….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 21, 1968 — Planet of The Apes film

On this day in the United Kingdom fifty-six years ago, Planet of The Apes premiered. It was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. The screenplay was by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling and was based loosely upon Pierre Boulle‘s La Planète des Singes. 

It starred Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, James Whitmore, James Daly and Linda Harrison. Roddy McDowall had a long-running relationship with this series, appearing in four of the original five films (absent only from the second film of the series, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, in which he was replaced by David Watson in the role of Cornelius, no idea why as I can’t find the reasoning), and also in the television series. 

I never saw the TV series. I don’t know why as it must’ve been shown on reruns eventually. So how was it?  As good as the films?  Well, the early films. I didn’t think they held up that well as they went along.

It was met with critical acclaim and is widely regarded as a classic film and one of the best films of that year.  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said that it was “much better than I expected it to be. It is quickly paced, completely entertaining, and its philosophical pretensions don’t get in the way.” And Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times exclaimed that it was, “A triumph of artistry and imagination, it is at once a timely parable and a grand adventure on an epic scale.” 

It did exceedingly well at the box office costing less than six million to make and making more than thirty million in its first year of screening. One dollar in 1968 is equivalent in purchasing power to about nine dollars now, so that’s been a very successful film! 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it an eighty-six percent rating with over a hundred thousand watchers having expressed an opinion!

Most of the later Planet of the Apes films are streaming somewhere, on Disney + or Hulu mostly but not this. Nor Beneath the Planet of The Apes or Conquest of the Planet of The Apes which are out on DVD as it is. I’ve got a suspicion that streaming rights were never negotiated on these and apparently can’t be. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

• Bob the Angry Flower explains action scenes.
• Brewster Rockit learns the staff must answer the official question, “What did you do last week?”
• Brewster Rockit goes with his second draft.
• Brewster Rockit adds Vader’s explanation.
• Reality Check tries to Bat-upgrade.
• Rubes conveys Yoda’s dietary advice.
• Calvin and Hobbes from 1995 has a tinge of sff to it.
• A cartoon from The New Yorker explains why business is bad.

(11) THE BIONIC WOMAN. “50 Years Ago, One Iconic Sci-Fi Show Sneakily Launched a Much Better Spinoff” at Inverse.

Today, the idea of secret cyborgs may sound like the set-up for the villains in a sci-fi show or movie, but in the 1970s, secret cyborgs were superheroes. Starting in 1973 with The Six Million Dollar Man, the titular hero was rebuilt with cyber-strength following a near-fatal NASA flight test crash. As former astronaut Steven Austin, Lee Majors starred as the titular man who was now worth $6 million thanks to all of his bionic enhancements. Based on the 1972 Martin Caidin novel Cyborg, the series was a hit for ABC. But, arguably, its best development didn’t come until two years later, when The Six Million Dollar Man launched a backdoor pilot for an even better cyborg show: The Bionic Woman.

Fifty years ago, on March 16, 1975, The Six Million Dollar Man dropped a two-parter called “The Bionic Woman,” which was destined to be its own ongoing sci-fi TV series. And, in terms of quality and staying power, the eponymous Bionic Woman herself, Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) became, over the decades, a much bigger deal. Mild spoilers ahead.

Just like her high school sweetheart Steve, Jamie also suffers a huge accident, this time involving skydiving, which leads to her bionic enhancements. Although these kinds of ‘70s and ‘80s soft sci-fi shows might seem fairly wholesome now, nearly all of them (like Knight Rider) had grisly origin stories for their heroes, which again, feels closer to supervillain origin stories in other contexts. Arguably, all of these tropes are deeply ableist now, but what made Jamie Sommers so important was that unlike other female-led action shows of the era (Charlie’s Angels debuted in 1976) she wasn’t a seductress, or scantily clad in order to be awesome…

(12) THE STARS MY PUNCTUATION. “Thunderbolts* Director Addresses What The Asterisk Means While Florence Pugh Reveals She Actually Knows” at ScreenRant. And at File 770 Mike Glyer reveals he doesn’t really care.

The mysterious asterisk in Thunderbolts* continues to dominate the conversation about the next MCU movie, and in the lead-up to its release, director Jake Schreier and actress Florence Pugh have teased what they know. It isn’t long before answers to all the mysteries surrounding Thunderbolts* are revealed as the movie nears its May 2 release date. Until then, fans can only speculate over how the titular team will deal with the challenge of the Void in the apparent absence of the comparatively more powerful Avengers…

(13) WHEN FAILURE WAS AN OPTION. “In event of moon disaster: ‘The speech that never was’”. The BBC’s Witness History tells about the speech that – fortunately – didn’t have to be delivered.

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.” 

These are the opening lines of the ‘In Event of Moon Disaster’ speech, written in 1969 in case the moon landing astronauts did not make it home. 

They were composed by President Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, William Safire, who died in 2009, at the age of 79. 

The speech continued: “These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.” 

Using archive from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and NASA, Vicky Farncombe tells the story of “the speech that never was”.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Moshe Feder, Rich Horton, Lise Andreasen, Jeffrey Smith, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]