Tag Archives: The Boys

Pixel Scroll 12/3/23 Mount You-Could-Look-It-Up

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(1) SMOFCON COMING TO SEATTLE. [Via Petréa Mitchell.] Last night Seattle won the right to host next year’s Smofcon, the international travelling con for people who run cons. It’ll be December 6-8 at the SeaTac Doubletree.

Attending memberships are $60 through sometime Tuesday. See more at the Smofcon 41 website.

(2) INDIE INK AWARDS. [Item by Dann.] The new Indie Ink Awards are trying to get off the ground.  

Traditionally published books do not corner the market on great works. Amazing works are produced by small press and self-published authors, and they often go unrecognized because their budgets for marketing are often smaller. So WriteHive, Inked in Gray Press, and Indie Story Geek joined together to celebrate great works of fiction published by small press and self-published authors, giving them the recognition they deserve.

There are 24 award categories with half being devoted to identitarian interests.  The remaining categories are for various facets of a book, but none are dedicated to just “best novel”.

M.V. Prindle was notified that his book, Bob the Wizard, was nominated in a handful of categories.

(3) LUKYANENKO IN CHENGDU UPDATES. [By Ersatz Culture.] As of Sunday 3rd, he has appeared at two more events.  The Saturday one is covered in this Weibo post.  I think that’s SF World editor and member of the Chengdu concom Yao Haijun sitting on the left of the panel.

The Sunday event also has a couple of Weibo posts, here and here.  He seems to be wearing a badge with the Worldcon panda logo on, although it’s not one I recall seeing from the event itself, so perhaps it’s unrelated?

Tomorrow (Monday 4th) he will be appearing at a university; this post lists an email address where people can send a question to him.

Saturday
Sunday

(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to snack on spanakopita with Neil Clarke in Episode 213 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

This time around you’re invited to dinner with Neil Clarke, who’s best known as the editor and publisher of the Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning Clarkesworld magazine, launched in October 2006. Clarkesworld has been a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine four times (winning three times), the World Fantasy Award four times (winning once), and the British Fantasy Award once (winning once).

Neil Clarke

Neil himself is also an eleven-time finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Editor-Short Form (winning twice), three-time winner of the Chesley Award for Best Art Director, and recipient of the 2019 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award from SFWA. In the seventeen years since Clarkesworld Magazine launched, stories that he’s edited have been nominated for or won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Locus, BSFA, Shirley Jackson, WSFA Small Press, Stoker, and various other awards.

He also edits Forever — a digital-only, reprint science fiction magazine launched in 2015. His anthologies include: Upgraded, Galactic Empires, Touchable Unreality, More Human than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, The Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His latest anthology, New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction (co-edited with Xia Jia — who was a guest of this podcast way back in Episode 50 — and Regina Kanyu Wang), was published in July.

We discussed how Clarkesworld was born (and what he wishes he’d known back when the magazine launched), the motivation behind his unrivaled response times, the irresponsible impact of AI on science fiction and what he’s doing to help ameliorate it, how he proactively analyzes submission data to make sure he receives stories from diverse voices, the differing effect of the pandemic lockdown on first time vs. established authors, why it’s hard for people to sell him a time travel story, his problems with Star Trek‘s transporter, the true meaning of rejections, why reading science fiction in translation is so important, Lester del Rey’s prophetic warning about the provincialism of U.S. fandom, and much more.

(5) PLAGIARISM. [Item by Andrew Porter.] First several minutes of the video concern Harlan Ellison and Ben Bova, and case they won: “Plagiarism and You(Tube)”. Via Sandra Bond.

What is plagiarism? Where did plagiarism come from? Who made plagiarism? Where am I, plagiarism? Can you help me?

(6) MARK SHEPPARD SURVIVES HEALTH EMERGENCY. [Item by Cat Eldridge.]He also was in Warehouse 13 as Regent Benedict Valda, in  Doctor Who’s  “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day of the Moon” playing  Canton Everett Delaware III. “’Supernatural’ Star Mark Sheppard Survives Massive Heart Attacks” in Deadline.

Mark Sheppard, best known as “Crowley” on Supernatural, revealed on Instagram Saturday that he somehow survived six heart attacks.

“You’re not going to believe this! Was on my way to an appointment yesterday when I collapsed in my kitchen,” Sheppard began. The 59-year-old actor wrote that he had “six massive heart attacks” and was “brought back from [the] dead 4 times,” before learning that he “had a 100% blockage in my LAD” (left anterior descending artery.)”

Sheppard called the event “The Widowmaker,” and expressed his thanksto his medics….

(7) THINKING ABOUT ROME. “’The Boys’ Season 4 Trailer Is a Bloody Good Time” according to The Mary Sue.

…The Boys teaser trailer gives us a glimpse of the chaos ahead. Two new female supes, Sister Sage and Firecracker, join the Seven to replace Starlight and Queen Maeve. It looks like much of the focus will be on the battle between Starlight and Homelander. Sister Sage tells Homelander to let the masses tear themselves apart over the supe war, then he can swoop in and save them. Since Homelander is probably one of those guys always thinking about Rome, he says he can be “just like Caesar.” Jeffrey Dean Morgan makes his first appearance in a suit while talking to Billy Butcher. There will be so much to unpack in the new season. Our most burning question: will The Deep find love with a new octopus?…

(8) FAN FAVORITE ENDS RUN. Radio Times tells us “Doctor Who’s Wild Blue Yonder marked Bernard Cribbins’ final appearance”. I don’t know if the following is a spoiler of any kind, so let’s be safe and post a spoiler warning anyway.

Doctor Who fans were delighted to see the late Bernard Cribbins reprise his role as Wilfred Mott, beloved grandfather of Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), in the episode Wild Blue Yonder.

Having escaped a terrifying adventure in space, the Doctor (David Tennant) and Donna shared an emotional reunion with Wilf, who then warned them of a new menace threatening the Earth.

Speaking on companion show Doctor Who Unleashed, showrunner Russell T Davies confirmed that Cribbins’ scene in the special would mark his final appearance as Wilf.

(9) KEEP HOPE FROM ESCAPING. [Item by Steven French.] Kim Stanley Robinson gets a shout out in a Guardian editorial in utopian fiction (!): “The Guardian view on utopias: news from nowhere can help us here and now”.

… But it would be nice to think that, at some point, dystopia’s sunnier other half – the cultural tradition that gave us Thomas More’s Utopia, News from Nowhere by William Morris and the early feminist visions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman – might make a comeback…

…So, in our own time, does the climate fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson, which speculatively explores the social and economic transformations that could help humanity to cope with the consequences of the climate emergency.

The intimidating scale of contemporary crises, interrelated and ranging from the economic to the environmental, is today accompanied by a widespread conviction that prevailing orthodoxies are inadequate to the task of meeting them. A sense of the ominous defines the zeitgeist, running through the pages of books such as Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Lynch’s portrayal of political darkness enveloping one unfortunate family mines the same seam, giving eloquent expression to what he describes as a “tragic perspective”. But at a time when societies could desperately do with some imaginative headroom, it would be uplifting to see a new generation of authors following in the footsteps of Morris and Robinson as well….

(10) SPEAK, MEMORY. Adweek says “Apple’s Film is a Hopeful Fable About Speech Accessibility”.

…The tech brand released “The Lost Voice,” directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Taika Waititi and coinciding with International Day of Persons With Disabilities Dec. 3. The film unfolds as a narrated children’s story, with magical creatures and a journey through beautiful landscapes. 

The tale begins when a young girl meets a rabbit-like creature with white and pink fur. Curiously, she asks him, “Why are you so quiet?” and offers to help the animal find his voice. 

… At the end, it is revealed that the narrator is a dad with speech loss who is reading a bedtime story to his child using Apple’s latest accessibility feature, Personal Voice. 

The brand introduced Personal Voice on iOS 17 earlier this year. The feature uses secure on-device machine learning to sample and re-create people’s voices, helping those who lose their ability to speak due to conditions such as muscular dystrophy or motor neurone disease….

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 3, 1958 — Terri Windling, 65. I first encountered her writing through reading The Wood Wife, a truly extraordinary fantasy that deserved the Mythopoeic Award that it won. (The Hole in the Wall bar in it would be borrowed by Charles de Lint with her permission for a scene in his Medicine Road novel.) I like American edition with Susan Sedona Boulet art much better than I do the British edition with the Brian Froud art.

I would be very remiss not mention about her stellar work as the founding editor along with Ellen Datlow of what would be called The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror after the first volume which was simply The Year’s Best Fantasy, that being noted for those of you who would doubt correct me for not footnoting it. It won three World Fantasy Awards and a Stoker as well.

They also splendidly edited a series of Snow White, Blood Red anthologies which were stories based on traditional folk tales. Lots of good stuff there. All available at the usual suspects now at very affordable prices. Like the Mythic Fiction series is excellent reading and available at usual suspects. 

Oh, and I want to single out The Armless Maiden which took on the difficult subject of child abuse. It garnered a much warranted Otherwise nomination.

Now let’s have a beer at the Dancing Ferret as I note her creation of the Bordertown series. I haven’t read all of it but I’ve quite a bit of it and one of the three novels written in it, Emma Bull’s Finder: A Novel: of The Borderlands, is one of my comfort works, so she gets credit for that. 

So now let’s move to an art credit for her. Some of you have seen the cover art for Another Way to Travel by Cats Laughing? That’s a hearse with the band posed in front of it. I’ve the original pen and ink art that she did here. 

Which brings me to the Old Oak Wood series which is penned by her and illustrated by Wendy Froud. Now Wikipedia and most of the reading world thinks that it consists of three lovely works — A Midsummer Night’s Faery Tale, The Winter Child and The Faeries of Spring Cottage. 

But there’s a story that Terri wrote that never got published anywhere but on Green Man. It’s an Excerpt from The Old Oak Chronicles: Interviews with Famous Personages by Professor Arnel Rootmuster. It’s a charming story, so go ahead and read it.

Terri Windling

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) DOGGONE IT. Marvel Mutts #1 launched December 1 on Marvel Unlimited in the exclusive Infinity Comic format.

Join Marvel’s Mightiest Mutts in their very own Infinity Comic! When Ms. Marvel and Kraven the Hunter crash through the Best Buds animal shelter, Kamala discovers an adorable ally and new best friend. 

This six-part series from creators Mackenzie Cadenhead, Takeshi Miyazawa, and Raúl Angulo is the latest drop from Infinity Comics’ “Friday Funnies,” the line of humor titles designed for fans of all ages. And in MARVEL MUTTS it all goes to the dogs: The pooches of the super-powered are now the stars of their own Marvel Unlimited-exclusive series, and they’ll get in all kinds of cute, cuddly, and (sometimes) mischievous adventures while they show newbie, Mittens, what it’s like to roll with a pack.

(14) STEELY MAN. “’Fallout’ series first-look images reveal Power Armor and Ghoul” and Entertainment Weekly has a photo.

…Fallout stars Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets) as Lucy, an optimistic Vault Dweller with an all-American can-do spirit, whose idealistic nature is tested when people harm her loved ones. Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks) plays Hank, the Overseer of Vault 33 and Lucy’s father, who is eager to change the world for the better. Aaron Moten plays Maximus, a young soldier hiding his tragic past as he serves in a militaristic faction called Brotherhood of Steel. He believes in the nobility of the Brotherhood’s mission to bring law and order to the Wasteland and will do anything to further their goals. Walton Goggins (The Righteous Gemstones, Justified) stars as the Ghoul, a pragmatic and ruthless survivor who trawls the Wasteland as a bounty hunter. Irradiated Ghouls are one of the most recognizable elements of the Fallout franchise, and here, Goggins combines their iconic look with a Westworld-esque cowboy outfit….

(15) A COINCIDENCE. On the day that the Hugo final round voting statistics came out, Chris Barkley was delighted to see what was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered this afternoon: “Ranked choice voting is being touted as a cure-all for U.S. deep partisan divides”. Audio at the link; no text transcript.

(16) THE MULTIVERSE IS REAL! [Item by Mike Kennedy.] A bride-to-be went shopping for wedding dresses and had their photo taken with an iPhone. Each photo with modern phones is made using computational photography. Among other things, that means the device takes multiple exposures each time the shutter is pressed and tries to stitch together the best image using portions that are least blurry, etc.

The bride appears three times in the photo; once in “real life“ from the rear, and twice in front and side views in separate mirrors. Not knowing that those are the same person, the phone used different versions for each of them when performing the computation. The bride was moving their arms when the photo was snapped, so they appear to be in three different poses simultaneously.

Either that, or the Multiverse is real. “A bride discovers a reality bending mistake in her iPhone camera” at Apple Insider.

…A U.K. woman was photographed standing in a mirror where her reflections didn’t match, but not because of a glitch in the Matrix. Instead, it’s a simple iPhone computational photography mistake.

Thanks to technological advancements, photography has come a long way from flash bulbs and film. Every time the iPhone shutter button is clicked, billions of operations occur in an instant that results in a photo….

(17) RIGHT OF WAY. “Largest iceberg in the world, 40 miles wide, is now heading into the open ocean” reports NPR.

Ships plying the frigid waters near the Antarctic Peninsula, south of South America, will need to keep an eye on their radar for a floating island of ice: “The largest iceberg in the world, A-23a, is on the move into open ocean!” as the British Antarctic Survey recently announced.

“It’s a trillion tons of ice. So it’s hard to comprehend just how big a patch of ice this is,” Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, told NPR.

Iceberg A23a measures 40 by 32 nautical miles, according to the U.S. National Ice Center. For comparison, Hawaii’s island of Oahu is 44 miles long and 30 miles across. And New York City’s Manhattan Island is about 13.4 miles long and spans around 2.3 miles at its widest point….

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Via Geri Sullivan, “A Holiday to Remember”. Admittedly, it’s a 5-minute Chevy commercial. Say what you like, I’m finished crying anyway.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Kevin Standlee, Ersatz Culture, Dann, Lise Andreasen, Steven French, Cat Eldridge, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 4/21/19 A Scroll Without A Pixel Is Like A Walrus Without An Antenna

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(1) LITERARY DIVE. Juliette Wade and her Dive Into Worldbuilding team interview “Caroline Ratajski”. There’s a detailed synopsis you can read at the link, and a video recording you can see on YouTube.

…We asked how writing a chapter every two weeks for an audience affects her writing process. It does put certain limits on her. She can’t revise anything that came before. She needs to give events a runway, wants to avoid writing a specific year when events occurred, etc. She has an outline, and she has an outline of how the characters should interact and grow over time. She also has a sense of how she wants the garden to develop, and what she wants the climax to look like.

Carrie [Caroline] described this as the “fanfic model of writing.” She used to write fanfic, so it works for her. The response of the audience buoys her. She says this has all the advantages of fanfic, and also The Secret Garden is out of copyright, so that saves a lot of trouble. Patreon is a good vehicle for serial storytelling. Carrie said she wasn’t reinventing anything. The original book was also a serial that was collected into a book. Carrie explained that she is not echoing the chapter structure, but following the narrative beats pretty closely. Lennox does meet her cousin in secret. She does have a somewhat combative relationship with her maid, though in the retelling, the maid is not Dickon’s sister.

(2) PRE-WEDDING ALBUM. Kurt Erichsen, 2002 Rotsler Award winner, has published a collection of his strips in Murphy’s Manor – the 30-Year Wedding.

Of all the cartoon projects I’ve drawn, by far the biggest is my LGBT comic strip, Murphy’s Manor. It was syndicated in local Gay and Lesbian newspapers from 1981 to 2008 – 1,183 comic strips total.

I’m happy to announce a new collection of Murphy’s Manor comic strips in a self-pub book, distributed through Amazon. The title is Murphy’s Manor – the 30-Year Wedding. It includes cartoons about gay relationships, ultimately leading to marriage, with or without approval of the government. All told, there are 120 comic strips: 98 from the strip’s original run, and 22 new ones. Front and back covers are in color; the interior comic strips are black and white.

In 2015 when John and I were able to get married legally, I decided to proceed with the book. It was slow going – can you believe it took me nearly 4 years to put it together?? Most of which was in production of the new cartoons. I used to produce 4 strips a month!

Click on this link: Murphy’s Manor – the 30 Year Wedding. I am also working on an eBook (Kindle) version. This is a new format for me, and working out all the kinks could take a bit of time. Hopefully not another four years.

(3) TINTINNABULATION. Open Culture reveals“How Andy Warhol and Tintin Creator Hergé Mutually Admired and Influenced One Another”. Bet you didn’t know about that.

The field of Tintin enthusiasts (in their most dedicated form, “Tintinologists”) includes some of the best-known modern artists in history. Roy Lichtenstein, he of the zoomed-in comic-book aesthetic, once made Tintin his subject, and Tintin’s creator Hergé, who cultivated a love for modern art from the 1960s onward, hung a suite of Lichtenstein prints in his office. As Andy Warhol once put it, “Hergé has influenced my work in the same way as Walt Disney. For me, Hergé was more than a comic strip artist.” And for Hergé, Warhol seems to have been more than a fashionable American painter: in 1979, Hergé commissioned Warhol to paint his portrait, and Warhol came up with a series of four images in a style reminiscent of the one he’d used to paint Jackie Onassis and Marilyn Monroe.

(4) <ROLLEYES>. Dear Simon & Schuster, There is no such thing as a Hugo Award for Best New Writer.

(5) PULP BOWIE. “Artist Reimagines David Bowie Songs as Old Pulp Fiction Book Covers” at My Modern Met.

When LA-based screenwriter Todd Alcott isn’t writing for feature films, he’s working on his artistic side project. He merges his love of pulp fiction with music to create David Bowie-inspired vintage comic book covers.

Alcott uses pre-existing vintage paperbacks as his starting point, before digitally altering the text and parts of the image to create his mashup prints. These once loved, now tattered and worn books have been given a new lease on life, and Alcott has chosen no better subject to grace their covers than the equally beloved Starman. And best of all, Bowie’s fascination with sci-fi, his outlandish fashion, and his love of the antihero make him a natural fit as a graphic novel protagonist.

(6) A COMING OF AGE STORY. Middle age, that is. Past TAFF winner Jim Mowatt’s confession begins —

My wife often teases me about my being associated (married) with a woman who has attended an Oxbridge institution, is the daughter of a civil servant and eats avocado. A fruit that has become so closely associated with privileged millennials. To provide his wife with the foodstuffs she desires, working class Jim from Leeds has to creep into a supermarket, buy an avocado and escape from the store without been seen in the possession of this pompous fruit.

However, I now wonder whether I am reaching the stage where I must embrace the fact that I’m no longer Jim from the block and that I have reached that rather unnerving state of being that enables me to buy ridiculous fruit, not always worry about the price of things and enjoy gentle middle England humour. It’s a terrifying thought but maybe I should just relax and drown in the crocheted gentility of it all.

(7) D&D. In “How Dungeons & Dragons somehow became more popular than ever”, Washington Post writer Gendy Alimurung discusses how Dungeons and Dragons has evolved to attract Millennials, including finding other players through Meetup groups, and having the fifth edition of the D&D manual in 2014 attract more women by being less sexist (women’s strength is no longer always less than men’s and no “sexist artwork–no more armored bikinis, no more monsters with breasts, no more topless ladies (unless her character really, really calls for it” that ensures that 38 percent of D&D players are now women.

(8) BOWEN OBIT. The English writer John Bowen (1924-2019) reportedly died April 18 at the age of 94. Matthew Davis sent this tribute:

Bowen wrote numerous offbeat thrillers (in a territory between Angus Wilson and Patricia Highsmith), and “After the Rain” (1958) is about an apocalyptic flood, but he has a small cult reputation in British fantasy and science fiction television. His 1970 TV play “Robin Redbreast” has been rediscovered and championed as a contemporary folk horror equal to “The Wicker Man”. He wrote half of the episodes of the outstanding 1971 Orwellian dystopian TV series “The Guardians”, and also contributed several fine ghost stories during the form’s 1970s TV heyday. Not Sfnal at all are the episodes he wrote of the TV mystery series “Hetty Wainthrop Investigates” – the original book was written by his partner David Cook

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 21, 1928 — Dee Hartford, 91. Miss Iceland, companion of Mister Freeze in two episodes of the Sixties Batman show.  Also had appearances on Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, Land of The Giants, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Yes, she was very pretty and that really counted in that time.
  • Born April 21, 1939 — John Bangsund, 80. Prominent Australian fan in the Sixties through Eighties. A major force with Andrew I. Porter behind Australia winning the right to host the 1975 Aussiecon, and he was Toastmaster at the Hugo Award ceremony at that convention.
  • Born April 21, 1945 — Takao Koyama, 74. Japanese anime scriptwriter. He is one of the most influential individuals in anime, due to his seminal scripts and his teaching of the next generation of writers. Works that he’s done scripts for which are available with subtitles include The Slayers, Dragon Ball Z and Spirit Hero Wataru.
  • Born April 21, 1954 — James Morrison, 65. Lt. Col. Tyrus Cassius ‘T.C.’ McQueen on the short-lived but much remembered Space: Above and Beyond series. Starship Troopers without the politics. He also appeared as Warden Dwight Murphy in the third season of Twin Peaks.  He’s got far too many one-off genre appearances to list here, so do your favorite.
  • Born April 21, 1965 — Fiona Kelleghan, 54. Author of the critical anthology The Savage Humanists In which she identifies a secular, satiric literary movement within the genre. She also did Mike Resnick: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Work. A work in progress by her is Alfred Bester, Grand Master: An Annotated Bibliography.
  • Born April 21, 1979 — James McAvoy, 40. In the Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune series, he was Duke Leto II Atreides. Later roles included Mr. Tumnus in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men film franchise, Victor Frankensteinin Victor Frankenstein and Bill Denbrough in It – Chapter Two. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Free Range has Scully and Mulder pursuing the truth about Easter.

(11) A CAT NAMED GOOSE. Dana Marquez tells Sideshow readers “Everything You Need to Know About Captain Marvel’s Cat”. Feel free to eavesdrop.

So what’s up with the Goose the cat anyway? Unless you’ve followed the comics, the film may have lost you there when it introduced the flerken’s surprise powers and alien backstory. She’s not just Nick Fury’s soft spot; she’s a beast- literally! Read along for more information on Goose’s true comic origin and to find out just what the heck a flerken really is.

(12) BAY WATCH. BayCon 2019 is a month away:

(13) LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITY. This crimebreaking headline comes from SYFY Wire: “Norwegian police ‘arrest’ Night King on grounds of animal cruelty and destruction of property”.

In a parody Facebook post from a few days back, the upstanding police officers of Trondheim, Norway proudly announced that they had apprehended the White Walker leader on grounds of animal cruelty and appalling rumors of wall destruction. These are obvious references to the villain’s actions in Season 7, where he killed one of Dany’s dragons (before turning it into an ice zombie) and destroyed The Wall, allowing his undead army to march into the territory of living humans.

“This particular post was meant to be funny; these kind of posts generate a lot of attention and new followers for us. That’s useful when we later ask for help i.e. solving crime or search for missing persons,” the Trondheim police told SYFY Wire in a statement. “Behind the mask is one of our younger officers, handpicked for the job.”

In addition, the post included photos of the Night King (dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, of course) posing for a mugshot and being led into a solitary jail cell. The arresting officers, jokingly referred to as Trondheim’s night’s watchmen, also accused the Night King of turning once-fruitful regions into desolate wastelands.

(14) HUGO REVIEWS. Steve J. Wright has completed his Hugo Short Story Finalist reviews (and they are excellent reviews, as usual).

(15) NOT COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN. Todd Mason sends along  “Friday’s ‘Forgotten’ Books and More: the links to the reviews: 19 April 2019” – you’ll find links to all these reviews in his post (reviewer’s name first, title and author/editor’s name last).

This week’s books and more, unfairly (or sometimes fairly) neglected, or simply those the reviewers below think you might find of some interest (or, infrequently, you should be warned away from); certainly, most weeks we have a few not at all forgotten titles…

  • Patricia Abbott: News of the World by Paulette Jiles
  • Barbara Barrett: The Edge of Tomorrow by Howard Fast
  • Joachim Boaz: New Worlds SF, April 1964, edited by John Carnel
  • John Boston: Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction Stories,  May 1964, edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli
  • Ben Boulden: “Hawksbill Station” (novella version) by Robert Silverberg
  • Brian Busby: The March of the White Guard by Gilbert Parker
  • Susanna Calkins: Death and the Joyful Woman by “Ellis Peters” (Edith Pargeter)
  • Martin Edwards: Marion aka Murder Off the Record by John Bingham
  • Peter Enfantino: (Proto-Marvel) Atlas Horror Comics, March 1952
  • Will Errickson: Dead White by Alan Ryan
  • José Ignacio Escribano: La berlina de Prim (“Prim’s Carriage”) by Ian Gibson
  • Curtis Evans: The Cases of Lieutenant Timothy Trant by “Q. Patrick” (Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler); “Mrs. B’s Black Sheep” by “Q. Patrick”; Speaker of Mandarin by Ruth Rendell
  • Olman Feelyus: Frankincense and Murder by Baynard Kendrick
  • Paul Fraser: Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1943, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. 
  • John Grant: A Line of Blood by Ben McPherson
  • Aubrey Hamilton: The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth
  • Rich Horton: Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis; The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting; Reduction in Arms and The Barons of Behavior by Tom Purdom; Rachel Swirsky’s short fiction; The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines; Gene Wolfe, 1931-2019; Fandom Harvest and other fannish writing by Terry Carr
  • Jerry House: The Vanguard of Venus by Landell Bartlett; Eh!, November-December 1954 (Charlton Comics’ first imitation of Mad)
  • Kate Jackson: The Noonday Devil by Ursula Curtiss; Love Lies Bleeding by Edmund Crispin
  • Tracy K.: The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell; Entry Island by Peter May
  • Colman Keane: Deep Cover and Recoil by Brian Garfield
  • George Kelley: The Best of Li’l Abner by Al Capp
  • Joe Kenney: The Great God Now by Edward S. Hanlon; American Avenger #1: Beat a Distant Drum by “Robert Emmett” (Robert L. Waters)
  • Rob Kitchin: IQ by Joe Ide
  • B. V. Lawson: Death on Remand by “Michael Underwood” (John Michael Evelyn)
  • Evan Lewis: “The Ghost of Dutch Emil”  and “Right Hook to Tokyo” by Ed Lacy (prose content in Rangers Comics August 1946 and December 1945 respectively)
  • Steve Lewis: “Murder, 1986” by P. D. James (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1970, edited by Frederic Dannay); “A Madonna of the Machine” by Tanith Lee (Other Edens II edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock); Spit in the Ocean by Shelley Singer; “Long Shot” by Vernor Vinge (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, August 1972, edited by Ben Bova); The Saint in New York by Leslie Charteris; Spider-Woman, June 1978, written and illustrated by Marv Wolfman, Carmine Infantino and Tony DeZuniga; “Skin Deep” by Kristin Kathryn Rusch (Amazing Stories, January 1988, edited by Patrick Price)
  • Lawrence Maddox: the Assignment: novels by Edward S. Aarons
  • John F. Norris: Dangerous to Me by “Rae Foley” (Elinore Denniston)
  • John O’Neill: The Nightmare and Other Stories of Dark Fantasy by “Francis Stevens” (Gertrude Barrows Bennett)
  • Matt Paust: Smoke Detector by Eric Wright 
  • James Reasoner: Captain Shark #2: Jaws of Death by “Richard Silver” (Kenneth Bulmer)
  • Richard Robinson: G Stands for Glory: The G-Man Stories by Norvell Page  
  • Gerard Saylor: Directorate S by Steve Coll
  • Jack Seabrook and Peter Enfantino: DC War Comics, October 1974
  • Steven Silver: “Build Your Own A-Bomb and Wake Up the Neighborhood” by George W. Harper (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, April 1979, edited by Stanley Schmidt)
  • Victoria Silverwolf: Worlds of Tomorrow, April 1964, edited by Frederik Pohl
  • Dan Stumpf: The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown
  • Kevin Tipple: …A Dangerous Thing by Bill Crider, “TomCat”: The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, V. 1 by D. L. Champion; “An Urban Legend Puzzle” by Rintaro Norizuki (translation by Beth Cary), Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 2004, edited by Janet Hutchings; The 3-13 Murders by Thomas B. Black

(16) POWERS NOT USED FOR NICENESS. The Boys premieres on Amazon July 26, 2019.

THE BOYS is an irreverent take on what happens when superheroes, who are as popular as celebrities, as influential as politicians and as revered as Gods, abuse their superpowers rather than use them for good. Subscribe to tvpromosdb on Youtube for more The Boys season 1 promos in HD!

[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Bonnie McDaniel, Matthew Davis, Chip Hitchcock, Rich Lynch, Hampus Eckerman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Todd Mason, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip WIlliams.]