Tag Archives: The Martian Chronicles

This Year Santa Is Bringing Everyone A Ray Bradbury Roundup

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(1) THUMBS UP, THUMBS DOWN. GameRant has opinions: “Ray Bradbury’s Novels: Best & Worst Film & TV Adaptations”. The list starts with one Ray personally downchecked.

… Not every adaptation has been perfect, of course, and even when the movie or show is a decent product other things can go wrong to make it less than successful. Bad publicity, a low budget, or disagreements between the director and studio can bring a whole production down even if the story and cast are on point. Bradbury’s work as it appears on screen can go either way depending on the viewer’s personal opinion of the original, and the author himself didn’t mince words when offering his own thoughts on the matter.

6. The Martian Chronicles (1980)

This BBC miniseries had all the marks of a successful adaptation, at least in the beginning. It had a cast with big names like Rock Hudson and Bernadette Peters, an original soundtrack with more than 30 songs, more than decent production values, and it was an adaptation of a novel of the same name by a popular author with literary clout.

However, things started to go awry when Ray Bradbury himself described the show as “boring” at a solo press conference. Although he and screenwriter Richard Matheson had worked together on the adaptation, Bradbury was disappointed with the result, which deviated significantly from his original story. Even though the show was finished in 1979, this poor marketing was enough to delay the release for a year, but fans and critics ultimately gave The Martian Chronicles a positive reception.

(2) HAVE YE READ THE GREAT WHITE WHALE. “Ray Bradbury, Moby Dick and the Irish connection” in The Irish Times.

… One part of the Bradbury story that may be less well known, however, is his Irish connection. This had its origins when in 1953 director John Huston recruited him to write the screenplay for his film of Moby Dick. Though the two men had expressed a wish to work together, Huston’s offer came to Bradbury as a bit of a shock, possibly because at the time he had yet to read Melville’s novel.

But, of course, this was an offer he couldn’t refuse. So, the night of Huston’s proposal, Bradbury – by his own account – stayed up till dawn making good his omission, a feat that smacks of Ahab’s whale-tussling or some such epic fiction. And, by morning, the account continues, Bradbury had knocked enough skelps off the thing to believe he was the man for the screenwriting job. It turned out that he’d signed up for a stormy voyage – but the money was good: $12,500 for the script, plus another $200 a week living expenses.

At the time, Huston was living in Courtown House near Kilcock, Co Kildare and intended to direct Moby Dick with this as his base. Obviously Bradbury had to be on hand as well. So in September 1953, with his wife, their two small children and a nanny, he trekked from Hollywood by land and sea (Bradbury could imagine space travel but wouldn’t board a plane for God or man) to Dublin’s Royal Hibernian Hotel on Dawson Street (where the arcade is now)….

(3) POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE. Bradley J. Birzer highly praises Jonathan R. Eller’s biography Becoming Ray Bradbury in “Ray Bradbury’s First 33 Years” at The Imaginative Conservative.

…In terms of Bradbury’s politics, he was immensely complicated. As a very young man, he embraced—to a rather shocking degree—ideas of technocracy, believing that the future of America, especially through the Great Depression, and even into World War II, resided in economic and scientific efficiency. Everything, he thought, was tied to the ideas of energy production and output. However, at a meeting of technocrats, all adorned in their matching grey suits, Bradbury suddenly realized that his affection for their policies, was akin to loving either Mussolini or Stalin. He moved toward the mainstream parties. Though a Stevenson Democrat in 1952, Bradbury found himself, again, disillusioned with the presidential candidate, especially after Stevenson refused to address directly either the Korean War or Joseph McCarthy’s scandalous witch hunts. Famously (or infamously, depending on one’s point of view), Bradbury took out a large ad in Variety, “To the Republican Party,” challenging them to disown McCarthyism as well as refrain from claiming that anyone in the Democratic Party was a Communist. In the spring of 1953, Bradbury published in The Nation one of his most famous essays, “Day After Tomorrow: Why Science Fiction,” a defense of the much maligned literary genre. Later that year, Bradbury’s masterfully anti-consumerist but deeply libertarian novel, Fahrenheit 451, appeared, perhaps solidifying the author’s anti-authoritarian reputation….

(4) FLAME ON. The opening panels from this 1984 computer game can be viewed at the Internet Archive: “Fahrenheit 451 : Byron Preiss Video Productions, Inc., Trillium Corp.”.

In a not so distant future, books have become illegal. As Fireman Guy Montag, the player’s role is not to save houses, but to burn them for the books inside. However, Guy becomes passionate about books and becomes a rebel, pursued by the authorities. With the help of the Underground, he must survive and save books from complete extinction.

The game acts a sequel to Bradbury’s novel. Following the imposition of martial law Montag finds the young woman who inspired his resistance to the established order. With her help he can now track down 34 microcassettes which hold the contents of the New York Public Library, then pass them on to underground members who will memorise the texts.

(5) CENSORING AND BOWDLERIZING 451. From the Wikipedia’s article on Fahrenheit 451.

Expurgation
Starting in January 1967, Fahrenheit 451 was subject to expurgation by its publisher, Ballantine Books with the release of the “Bal-Hi Edition” aimed at high school students.[58][59] Among the changes made by the publisher were the censorship of the words “hell”, “damn”, and “abortion”; the modification of seventy-five passages; and the changing of two incidents.[59][60]

In the first incident a drunk man was changed to a “sick man”, while the second involved cleaning fluff out of a human navel, which instead became “cleaning ears” in the other.[59][61] For a while both the censored and uncensored versions were available concurrently but by 1973 Ballantine was publishing only the censored version.[61][62] That continued until 1979, when it came to Bradbury’s attention:[61][62]

In 1979, one of Bradbury’s friends showed him an expurgated copy of the book. Bradbury demanded that Ballantine Books withdraw that version and replace it with the original, and in 1980 the original version once again became available. In this reinstated work, in the Author’s Afterword, Bradbury relates to the reader that it is not uncommon for a publisher to expurgate an author’s work, but he asserts that he himself will not tolerate the practice of manuscript “mutilation”.

The “Bal-Hi” editions are now referred to by the publisher as the “Revised Bal-Hi” editions.[63]

Then there’s this example where someone rewrote the book without permission: “Fahrenheit 451 As Childrens Book” at Slideshare.net.

(6) PRESCRIPTION 451. And yet the American Medical Association says that Bradbury book is good for what ails you: “5 fantastic novels doctors recommend for your summer reading list”.

Reading can boost your vocabulary, sharpen your reasoning, expand your intellectual horizons and improve memory. But reading for fun can also help in the battle against physician burnout.

Here, in alphabetical order by book author, are five novels that AMA members who have participated in the “Shadow Me” Specialty Series recommend reading….  

Fahrenheit 451

By Ray Bradbury

“This book speaks to teen idealism and offers a wealth of wisdom about maintaining perspective, understanding history, valuing art and literature and remembering to live life,” said Kanani Titchen, MD, a pediatrician and adolescent medicine physician.

Battling burnout… Wait, I get it!!

(7) FINGERPRINTS. “The Twilight Zone: Ray Bradbury’s Influence Is All Over Six Degrees of Freedom” — Den of Geek tells readers where to look for it.

The following contains spoilers for The Twilight Zone, “Six Degrees of Freedom.”

If the latest episode of the newly rebooted Twilight Zone — “Six Degrees of Freedom” — feels old school to you, you’re not crazy. For bookish types, the most obvious Easter egg in the episode comes pretty early; the Mars-bound spaceship central to the story is called“Bradbury Heavy,” a kind tribute to Elon Musk putting the word “heavy” after the names of rockets, but also, of course, the iconic author of The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury. And, even if the screenwriters of this Twilight Zone episode (Glen Morgan and Heather Anne Campbell) weren’t intentionally homaging Ray Bradbury’s writing, his ghost haunts this creepy episode in surprising ways…. 

(8) BRADBURY AWARD HONOREES. In 2022, The Portalist called these “The 10 Best Movies That Have Won the Ray Bradbury Award”.

Ray Bradbury was, among many other things, a celebrated screenwriter. He wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s 1956 adaptation of Moby Dick, as well as teleplays for some 59 episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater, to name just some of his credits. And in 1992, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) inaugurated the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation in his honor.

Presented at the same time as the SFWA’s Nebula Awards, the Ray Bradbury Award was not initially considered a Nebula. It was chosen not by a vote from members of the SFWA, as the Nebulas are, but by the organization’s president. In that format, it was presented in 1992, 1999, 2001, and 2009. At the same time, there was also a Nebula Award for Best Script, which was given out in the ‘70s and brought back in the 2000s. 

After 2009, the two were rolled into one….

The list includes:

Gravity

Known for being absolutely stunning, among other things, Alfonso Cuarón’s flick about stranded astronauts played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney managed to nab a whopping seven Academy Awards, including Best Director. It was nominated for Best Picture, but lost to 12 Years a Slave. 

Gravity‘s competition for the Bradbury was less stiff, though it did still beat out Pacific Rim, the Hunger Games sequel, Spike Lee’s Her, and others….

(9) WHERE IDEAS COME FROM. In “Ray Bradbury on feeding your creativity”, Austin Kleon reminds people about Ray’s three-point plan:

(10) WICKED GOOD. Jack Butler of National Review Online has nice things to say about Somethng Wicked This Way Comes. “Halloween Explored in Literature”.

…This year, it’s Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. The book, which tells the story of a mysterious carnival’s arrival to and malevolence in a small town, is a master class in supernatural suspense:

The carnival, populated by a grotesquerie of characters against whom the boys, at first alone, contest, comes to life in vivid, unsettling descriptions. At the center of it all is Mr. Dark, “the illustration-drenched, superinfested civilization of souls.” His designs assail the boys through time-manipulating carousels, witch-piloted hot-air balloons, blood-drenched fists that drip onto boys hiding below a sewer grate, stealthy pursuits through endless stacks of books and infinite mazes of mirrors, and more. (In a 1983 adaptation, Mr. Dark is chillingly depicted by a young Jonathan Pryce.) At first, the boys alone perceive the carnival’s malevolence, as it operates through the town, preying on citizens’ desires and sins while trying to enfold the boys into its plots as a means of shutting them up. Anyone looking for an eerie and gripping Halloween read will find plenty that’s satisfying in Something Wicked This Way Comes.

But he will also find more than that, as I argue in my piece, which you can read here….

(11) CELEBRITY BRUSH. In the Season 5 opening episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel there is a fictional variety show she writes for. They announce the evening’s guests, “Angie Dickinson and the novelist Ray Bradbury.”  Best part of the episode.

(12) NEWSMAKER. Here’s a clip from Ray Bradbury’s talk at the San Diego Comic Con in 1974 hosted on CBS 8 San Diego’s YouTube channel.

August 1, 1974 Devotees of comics strips and comic books gathered in a convention today at El Cortez Hotel where one of the major attractions was the famous writer, Ray Bradbury. He is noted as one of America’s leading science fiction authors, but is also a poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, and creator of musical productions. Bradbury has been a fan of the comics since boyhood. Today I asked him (Harold Keen) if he considers comic books and newspaper comic strips genuine American art form. Bradbury said he is planning to adapt some of his short stories into a comic magazine of his own.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Martin Morse Wooster for these stories.]

The Next Bradbury Roundup

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Is due in five…four…three….

(1) MEET THE MARTIANS. Nicholas Whyte’s quick notes about “The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury” begin “Gosh. I had forgotten quite how good this is.”

(2) FREE RANGE MARS STORIES. But wait, there are more! In Bradbury 100 episode 30 Phil Nichols takes up “Bradbury’s OTHER Mars Stories”.

This episode looks at Ray Bradbury’s OTHER Martian stories, stories about Mars and Martians which are NOT included in his THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES.

I review each of the un-chronicled martian tales, and figure out where they fit into the mythos of The Martian Chronicles. Be ready for some surprises!

(3) COMPARE AND CONTRAST. YouTuber Robert Bacon analyzes “A Twilight Zone Episode Turned Into A Kids Movie”.

The Electric Grandmother is a made for TV movie that was based on a short story by Ray Bradbury that itself was based on a Twilight Zone episode that Bradbury wrote. The film was originally aired on NBC, but most people saw it when it was distributed to classrooms. No idea why this was considered educational, but I don’t think anyone cared. The Electric Grandmother (1982) Director: Noel Black Writer: Ray Bradbury Starring: Maureen Stapleton, Edward Herrmann, and Paul Benedict Plot: A trio of children and their father, get a very special robot grandmother to assist them.

(4) THE MELODY LINGERS ON. Screen Rant’s Spencer Bollettieri finds that Disney’s animated hit resonates with a Bradbury classic: “Encanto: How Mirabel’s Powers Struggle Mirrors A 76-Year-Old Fantasy Story”.

Encanto is a beloved tale of an enchanted family with supernatural power, but it’s not a new one; it actually mirrors a story originally written 76 years ago by late horror author Ray Bradbury. Both are timeless tales about what it means to be human in an extraordinary family and the drama they face when confronted with collapse. Although Bradbury claimed he was unable to predict the future, he somehow reflected it in ways even the Madrigals couldn’t foresee.

In 1946 Ray Bradbury first chronicled the story of the Elliott family, a clan of gothic creatures who adopted a human boy named Timothy, who they found strange. Inspired by Bradbury’s real-life experiences, he wrote a 50-year collection of short stories compiled into a single narrative titled From the Dust Returned. Although not as recognized as gothic icons such as The Addams Family, many considered it a beautifully macabre novel and found the Elliott family resonated with them….

(5) WHEN BRADBURY WAS 89. Kenneth Strange says “You’ll Never Guess Who Kissed Me” – but I will bet you can.

..During the signing, I handed my book to Ray Bradbury but decided to crouch like a baseball catcher so I could whisper a word to him at eye level. As he scribbled his name in the book and closed it, I leaned in and opened my heart, “Mr. Bradbury. Many years ago I discovered you in a small library in Brooklyn, New York. Your books made such a difference in my life…thank you for that.” His eyes began to water and I suppose mine did as well. A spontaneous gesture from this playful man of “gentle humanity” followed as he pulled me toward him and kissed me on the cheek.

I’m a lucky man. Some might prefer being kissed by Bo Derek. Not me….

Ray Bradbury’s 89th Birthday Cake. Photo by John King Tarpinian.

(6) DRINK UP. For a short time, Mary Robinette Kowal is offering a limited edition Bradbury Base mug for all new and existing subscribers at $25 or above to her Patreon.

(7) CENTER FOR RAY BRADBURY STUDIES. There was a changing of the guard last year.

Former Director Dr. Jonathan R. Eller retired on February 1, 2021 and Dr. Jason Aukerman stepped into the role. During his career at IUPUI, Dr. Eller co-founded the Bradbury Center with the late Dr. William Touponce, became a Chancellor’s Professor of English, and touched countless lives through his work as a teacher and scholar. Without Dr. Eller, there would be no Bradbury Center, and even though he is now retired, Dr. Eller and Debi Eller maintain a close relationship with Center staff, serving as volunteers, consultants, and friends. We thank the Ellers for their passionate leadership and continued support!

(8) FOURTH ANNUAL WRITER’S LECTURE. The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies has posted a video of the 2021 Ray Bradbury Visiting Writer’s Lecture With Maurice Broaddus presented this past November.

Maurice Broaddus is the resident Afrofuturist at the Kheprw Institute and librarian at the Oaks Academy Middle School. His work has appeared in places like Lightspeed Magazine, Black Panther: Tales from Wakanda, Asimov’s, Magazine of F&SF, and Uncanny Magazine, with some of his stories having been collected in The Voices of Martyrs. He’s also an editor at Apex Magazine!

(9) REASONS TO READ. Amit Majmudar promotes Ray Bradbury: Novels & Story Cycles, the Library of America’s inaugural Bradbury volume. “Ray Bradbury: Prophetic visionary, ‘word-wizard,’ and next-door neighbor”.

Mention Ray Bradbury, I’ve found, and faces light up. Strangers reach out to you on Twitter with testimonials. A voice changes on the phone, as if you just mentioned a childhood best friend. This is something beyond fondness and beyond admiration. The name conjures up poignant wonder; the name exhilarates the imagination. No one seems to be just “familiar with his work.” You’ve either never read him, or you love him.

 One place to read his best work (his stories are as innumerably luminous as stars) is in Library of America’s new omnibus, which contains The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes…

(10) PEDALING THE COLLECTION. Anne Farr Hardin spent most of her life collecting Bradbury books, and corresponding with him, too – and all of it will be preserved: “Ray Bradbury collection finds new home at the University of South Carolina” reports the Greenville Journal.

…The exhibit features a full case on Bradbury’s most famous novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” a couple of cases exploring the author’s lifelong fascination with the planet Mars and a representative range of the collection’s other holdings. Taken together, they provide an intriguing window on 20th-century book and periodical publishing, particularly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction.

But what’s on display is just a hint of the many treasures tucked into Hardin’s vast collection, which also chronicles a decades-long correspondence and friendship Hardin enjoyed with the famous writer. 

Bradbury devotees who take the time to dive into the holdings will discover every edition of classics like “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles” and “Dandelion Wine”plus vividly illustrated mid-century pulps like “Amazing Stories” and “Weird Tales,” mainstream magazines or “slicks” like “Mademoiselle,” “McCall’s” and “Good Housekeeping,” plus small-run fanzines predating the author’s international fame and acclaim.

In other words, it’s about as complete as complete gets — the collection even includes one of Bradbury’s bicycles — and it’s all the result of Hardin’s tireless literary sleuthing, which stretches back more than four decades….

(11) GOLDEN TONES. From LeVar Burton Reads, “’The Great Wide World Over There’ by Ray Bradbury”.

A visitor’s arrival delivers both wonder and heartache to a rural community. This story appears in Ray Bradbury’s collection THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN. Thanks to our presenting sponsor Audible. 

(12) HOT NUMBER. Extra Credits episode “Fahrenheit 451 – Dystopias and Apocalypses” can be viewed on YouTube.

Ray Bradbury not only cautions against censorship (the primary theme of Fahrenheit 451), but offers interesting commentary on who censors works at all, and why humans do it anyway.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for these links.]

Pixel Scroll 6/13/21 I’ll Take A Sheet of Cities In Flight On the Edge Of Forever Stamps, Please

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(1) HERE COMES THE SUN (STAMPS). On June 16 the United States Postal Service will release a series of stamps highlighting images of the Sun captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Order them online here.

…The 20-stamp set features ten images that celebrate the science behind NASA’s ongoing exploration of our nearest star. The images display common events on the Sun, such as solar flares, sunspots and coronal loops. SDO has kept a constant eye on the Sun for over a decade. Outfitted with equipment to capture images of the Sun in multiple wavelengths of visible, ultraviolet, and extreme ultraviolet light, SDO has gathered hundreds of millions of images during its tenure to help scientists learn about how our star works and how its constantly churning magnetic fields create the solar activity we see.

“Just don’t stare at them directly,” says Daniel Dern.

(2) DAS Q&A. “Interview: Indra Das, author, science fiction and fantasy novels” in the Hindustan Times.

How did the idea of The Devourers, your last novel, take shape?During my undergraduate years, I attended a baul mela in Kolkata, and, while intoxicated, had a vision (not quite literally, but almost) while protecting a kitten in the mela ground from a circling pack of dogs, of being in the same spot hundreds of years earlier, listening to minstrels around a campfire in the dark wilderness, while monsters hunted us. When I returned from winter break to college, I turned that into a short story in a Creative Writing class, which eventually turned into the first chapter of The Devourers a while later, when I was in grad school.

(3) ALL THE KING’S PUBLICISTS. Stephen King wrote the adaptation of his book Lisey’s Story that’s coming to Apple TV+, and is getting a lot of coverage about it. The New York Times interviewed him: “Stephen King on Why ‘Lisey’s Story’ Was One He Had to Adapt Himself”.

… Alone, but not: It’s a theme that courses through King’s sweeping body of work, and it returns for several characters across layers of time and space in “Lisey’s Story,” which begins Friday on Apple TV+. Julianne Moore stars as Lisey Landon, the widow of Scott Landon, a famous novelist (played by Clive Owen) whose childhood traumas drove him to forge a connection to a transdimensional world called Boo’ya Moon.

As vividly depicted in the show, Boo’ya Moon is a place of tranquil beauty, like a Pre-Raphaelite wonderland. But it’s also menacing terrain, where cloaked figures sit silently inside a massive amphitheater awaiting resolutions to earthly traumas…

SYFY Wire talked to the producer: “J.J. Abrams on Lisey’s Story and why Stephen King adaptations are booming right now”.

… Even among the many other King adaptations that have recently emerged or are set to arrive in the near future, the Apple TV+ series based on King’s 2006 novel feels especially important, because King himself has said so. He counts Lisey’s Story among his personal favorite works, and holds it so dear that he took it upon himself to script all eight episodes of the miniseries for director Pablo Larrain (Jackie)….

Hear King himself speak about it on today’s CBS Sunday Morning.

(4) LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. Hear author of Light of the Stars Adam Frank in a free webinar co-sponsored by the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination – register and maybe win a book: Adam Frank Webinar & Giveaway.

The search for life in the Universe is undergoing a profound renewal. Thanks to the discovery of thousands of planets orbiting other stars, the introduction of new observing technologies, and increased support from both public and private sectors, a new science of searching for “techno-signatures” is emerging.   

In this talk Dr. Frank will unpack this frontier area, discussing what counts as a techno-signature; how to be systematic in thinking about exo-civilizations and their evolution; what techno-signatures can tell us about our own future. He believes that within the next few decades we will likely have actual data relevant to the question life, perhaps even the intelligent kind, in the Universe. 

Dr. Adam Frank is a leading expert on the final stages in the evolution for stars like the Sun, but his current work also focuses on life in the universe. His research group at the University of Rochester has developed advanced supercomputer tools for studying how stars form and how planets evolve. His most recent book is Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth, which won the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Award for Science. He has written two other books, The Constant Fire: Beyond the Religion and Science Debate, and About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.  He is the co-founder of the blog 13.8 on BigThink.com and an on-air commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered.

(5) ON THE AIR. A half hour segment of The Martian Chronicles is part of the WAMU’s “The Big Broadcast: June 13, 2021”.

We’re celebrating 5 years tonight of Murray Horwitz as host of The Big Broadcast! Join us for some of our favorites, including Orson Welles, Fred Allen, Lucille Ball and The Whistler — as well as our usual Dragnet, Yours Truly Johnny Dollar and Gunsmoke….

7:30 p.m. Dimension X    “Martian Chronicles” (Original air date August 18, 1950. NBC network.) (Running time 30:19)

(6) SFF AND THE BIG QUESTIONS. “Exploring Tomorrow: Meaningful Science Fiction and Life’s Big Questions” is Mikel J. Wisler’s podcast:

Can science fiction save the world? Author and filmmaker, Mikel J. Wisler, explores the themes and ideas presented in a wide range of sci-fi movies and books from various time periods. Convinced that sci-fi is the most naturally philosophical genre, Wisler invites everyone from die-hard fans to casual observers to dive into meaningful conversations about how sci-fi helps us think about our future, brings up challenging scenarios, and forces us to ask big questions.

Astounding author Alec Nevala-Lee is interviewed in Episode 25.

(7) NED BEATTY (1937-2021). Actor Ned Beatty died June 13 at the age of  83. Best known for his work in Deliverance and Network, his genre roles included Lex Luthor’s (Gene Hackman) bumbling sidekick Otis in Superman (1978) and its 1980 sequel.  He was in  Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). He voiced Lotso in Toy Story 3 (2010) and The Mayor in Rango (2011). And he has another two dozen lesser genre credits.

(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • June 13, 1980 —  On this date in 1980, The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything premiered in syndication as distributed by Paramount Television. Based on the John D. MacDonald novel of the same name, it was written by George Zateslo and directed by William Wiard. Myrl A. Schreibman Was the producer. It starred Robert Hays, Pam Dawber, Zohra Lampert, Jill Ireland, Ed Nelson and Maurice Evans. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 13, 1892 — Basil Rathbone. He’s best remembered for being Sherlock Holmes in fourteen films made between 1939 and 1946 and in a radio series of the same period. For films other than these, I’ll single out The Adventures of Robin Hood (all Robin Hood is fantasy), Son of Frankenstein and Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet. (Died 1967.)
  • Born June 13, 1893 — Dorothy Sayers. ISFDB often surprises me, and having her listed as writing four stories in the genre did it again. All of them were written in the Thirties and here they are: “The Cyprian Cat”, “The Cave of Ali Baba”, “Bitter Almonds” and “The Leopard Lady”. So, who here has read them and can comment on them being genre or not? (Died 1957.)
  • Born June 13, 1903 — Frederick Stephani. Screenwriter and film director who is best remembered for co-writing and directing the 13-chapter Flash Gordon serial in 1936. He directed Johnny Weissmuller‘s Tarzan’s New York Adventure (aka Tarzan Against the World). He was also an uncredited writer on 1932’s Dracula. (Died 1962.)
  • Born June 13, 1943 — Malcolm McDowell, 78. My favourite role for him was Mr. Roarke on the rebooted Fantasy Island. Of course his most infamous role was Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Scary film that. His characterization of H. G. Wells in Time After Time was I thought rather spot on. And I’d like to single out his voicing Arcady Duvall in the “Showdown” episode of Batman: The Animated Series.
  • Born June 13, 1949 — Simon Callow, 72. English actor, musician, writer, and theatre director. So what’s he doing here? Well he got to be Charles Dickens twice on Doctor Who, the first being in “The Unquiet Dead” during the time of the Ninth Doctor and then later during “The Wedding of River Song”, an Eleventh Doctor story. He’d also appear, though not as Dickens, on The Sarah Jane Adventures as the voice of Tree Blathereen in “The Gift” episode. I’ve not watched the series. How is this series? He was also The Duke of Sandringham in the first season of Outlander. 
  • Born June 13, 1953 — Tim Allen, 68. Jason Nesmith in the much beloved Galaxy Quest. (Which of course won a much deserved Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation at Chicon 2000.) He actually had a big hit several years previously voicing Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story which would be the first in what would become a long-running film franchise.
  • Born June 13, 1963 — Audrey Niffenegger, 58. Her first novel was The Time Traveler’s Wife. She has stated in interviews that she will not see the film as only the characters in the novels are hers. Good for her.  Raven Girl, her third novel about a couple whose child is a raven trapped in a human body, was turned into performed at the Royal Opera House. 
  • Born June 13, 1969 — Cayetana Guillén Cuervo, 52. She’s got the role of Irene Larra in El Ministerio del Tiempo (The Ministry of Time), a Spanish SF series which sounds fascinating but which I’ve not seen. Anyone here seen it? Not fond of captioning, but I’d put up with it to see this. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) JEMISIN & COMPANY. DC Comics tells what makes its latest Green Lantern exceptional: “Jo Mullein and Far Sector Are Out of This World”.

…Sojourner “Jo” Mullein’s impact is not defined by the fact that she’s the first Black, queer woman to ever hold the mantle of Green Lantern. Or by the fact that N.K. Jemisin, Jamal Campbell and Deron Bennett are one of the first all-Black creative teams to helm a Green Lantern title. Those are huge factors in just what makes the book special, of course, but what truly makes Far Sector and its hero feel so groundbreaking is the imaginative exploration of what it means to be a Green Lantern and the innate understanding of how that very imagination is at the core of what makes the hero great. Where some Green Lantern stories feel stymied by a lack of the thing that gives the Power Ring its magic, Far Sector pulses with imagination on every page….

(12) NEW HANDS AT THE HELM. “‘The Lord Of The Rings’ Goes On: Anime Film ‘The War Of The Rohirrim’ In Works At New Line” – Deadline has the story.  

The J.R.R. Tolkien franchise is heading back to the big screen in a fresh New Line and Warner Animation anime title The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.  I’m told that the Oscar-winning feature architects Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh are not involved with the project as we speak, but that will be determined down the road. Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings: Return of the King scribe Philippa Boyens will be a consultant on the new project directed by Kenji Kamiyama. The pic is being fast-tracked with animation work done by Sola Entertainment. Voice casting is currently underway. Pic will be distributed around the globe by Warner Bros. Pictures.

The War of the Rohirrim focuses on a character from the book’s appendix, the mighty King of Rohan, Helm Hammerhand, and a legendary battle which helped shaped Middle-earth heading into LOTR. The anime pic will expand the untold story behind the fortress of Helm’s Deep, delving into the life and bloodsoaked times of Hammerhand. Overall, the movie is a companion piece to New Line’s LOTR trilogy and is set roughly 250 years before that movie during the third age (Note Amazon’s upcoming Lord of the Rings mini-series is set during the second age).

Kamiyama has been behind such anime projects as Blade Runner: Black Lotus and the TV series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Joseph Chou (Blade Runner: Black Lotus) will produce. Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews (The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance) are writing….

“This will be yet another epic portrayal of J.R.R. Tolkien’s world that has never been told before. We’re honored to partner with much of the incredible talent behind both film trilogies, along with new creative luminaries to tell this story,” said Sam Register, President of Warner Bros. Animation. “And so it begins.”

(13) TOURISTS, ASSEMBLE! See a replay of the Avengers Campus Opening Ceremony from Disney California Adventure park.

[Thanks to JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Daniel Dern, Rich Lynch, Darrah Chavey, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 10/9/20 Green Scroll The Pixels O!

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(1) A REAL STEMWINDER. BBC America’s Pratchett-inspired series The Watch was teased during today’s virtual New York Comic Con.

Welcome to Ankh-Morpork. Expect dragon sightings. ‘The Watch’, an all-new series inspired by characters created by Sir Terry Pratchett and starring Richard Dormer as Vimes and Lara Rossi as Lady Sybil Ramkin, premieres January 2021 on BBC America.

(2) DOOMED TO REPEAT. K. Tempest Bradford lists year-by-year the harassment, accessibility, and programming diversity issues that have stalked World Fantasy Con since 2011. She then comments at length about her interactions with the 2020 committee in “World Fantasy, the Convention That Keeps On Failing”. In winding up a detailed 6000-word post Bradford says:

I want people to realize how serious, deep-seated, and currently intractable WFC’s problems are, both with this convention and with the organization as a whole. I want people to understand that this org has been given chance after chance, great piece of advice after great piece of advice, and example after example of how to do well, and this still happened. It is time to stop giving benefits of the doubt, or worrying over the social consequences of speaking up, speaking out, removing yourself from programming, or tossing your membership altogether.

What has kept WFC going all these years is the continued attendance of all those vaunted professionals [2020 chair] Ginny [Smith] mentioned. Luminaries that include writers and editors and agents and publishers. Even as con-goers (mostly women) were harassed without consequence, and people with disabilities were made to feel unwanted or as if they were a burden to accommodate, and as an environment of oppression and bigotry against BIPOC flourished, many people still paid several hundred dollars to attend and be on panels and give readings and network.

But they were gonna change it from the inside, doncha know!

(3) IN COMMUNITY. Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko, a Slovenian-born writer and translator currently living in Maine, guests on Sarah Gailey’s Pesonal Canons series with “Personal Canons: Dinotopia”.

…Dinotopia is one of the few books I have read in both Slovenian and English, a fact which speaks to the level of popularity it enjoyed at the peak of the dinosaur renaissance in the early nineties. Like so many other beloved children’s books, Dinotopia is essentially a portal fantasy, in disguise as the journal of Arthur Denison, a scientist from Boston, who is shipwrecked with his twelve-year-old son William in 1862. Rescued by dolphins and delivered to the uncharted continent of Dinotopia, the two are gradually integrated into a society in which dinosaurs live side-by-side with humans.

Classic portal fantasies—Narnia foremost among them—often take the form of white saviour narratives. Dinotopia averts this trope from the start. Gurney’s lavish illustrations spend as much time on minor details of Dinotopian society as they do on the Denisons. Nor are our protagonists especially privileged by virtue of their status as “dolphinbacks”: when Will declares he wants to become a Skybax (pterosaur) rider, his newcomer status is neither boon nor hinderance. He’s warned that no dolphinback has ever been one; then he’s given a course of study, a route by which he might achieve his dream. There are no shortcuts here. It takes a few timeskips to get him to his goal, and when he gets there, when he and his Dinotopian friend Sylvia ask the instructor Oolu for permission to fly as full-fledged Skybax riders, Oolu replies, referring to their pterosaur partners: ‘You don’t need my permission: you have theirs.’

(4) CONGRATULATIONS. [Item by Dann.] Rebecca F. Kuang is graduating from Oxford with distinction.

https://twitter.com/kuangrf/status/1314550159401988096

(5) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites everyone to cross the pond for pappardelle with Priya Sharma in Episode 129 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Priya Sharma

Priya Sharma has published fiction in Interzone, Black Static, Nightmare, The Dark, and other venues. “Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. “Ormeshadow,” her first novella, won a Shirley Jackson Award. All the Fabulous Beasts, a collection of some of her work, won both the Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award. She’s also a Grand Judge for the Aeon Award, an annual writing competition run by Albedo One, Ireland’s magazine of the Fantastic.

We discussed the best decision she made about her debut short story collection All the Fabulous Beasts, how the cover to that book conveys a different message in our COVID-19 world, why we each destroyed much of our early writing, a surprising revelation about the changed ending to one of her stories, who told her as a child “your soul is cracked,” the two of us being both longhand writers and defenders of ambiguity, what it’s like writing (and not writing) for theme anthologies, the most difficult story for her to write, how the pandemic has affected our writing, and much more.

(6) ALAN MOORE SPEAKS. A rare Garbo-like sighting. Tom Grater, in the Deadline story “Alan Moore Gives Rare Interview: ‘Watchmen’ Creator Talks New Project ‘The Show’, How Superhero Movies Have ‘Blighted Culture’ & Why He Wants Nothing To Do With Comics”, says that Moore, promoting his new film The Show, says that he doesn’t care about comics anymore, and the last superhero movie he saw was Tim Burton’s Batman, but he is enjoying calling his grandchildren and reading stories to them.

DEADLINE: You said you feel responsible for how comics have changed, why?

MOORE: It was largely my work that attracted an adult audience, it was the way that was commercialized by the comics industry, there were tons of headlines saying that comics had ‘grown up’. But other than a couple of particular individual comics they really hadn’t.

This thing happened with graphic novels in the 1980s. People wanted to carry on reading comics as they always had, and they could now do it in public and still feel sophisticated because they weren’t reading a children’s comic, it wasn’t seen as subnormal. You didn’t get the huge advances in adult comic books that I was thinking we might have. As witnessed by the endless superhero films…

(7) CHOPPED. The seven-foot-tall bronze sculpture of “Medusa With The Head of Perseus” being installed across the street from 100 Centre St., Manhattan’s criminal courthouse this weekend has been called a commentary on the #MeToo movement (see image here).

Many have tweeted support for the idea. Courtney Milan, however, has voiced a strong dissent. Thread starts here.

https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/1314602783459303425
https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/1314604814794276866
https://twitter.com/courtneymilan/status/1314607035430838272

(8) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.

1975 — Forty-five years ago, the first World Fantasy Award for Best Novel went to Patricia A. McKillip for The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. It was published by Atheneum Books in 1974 with the cover art by Peter Schaumann. It was her second novel after The House on Parchment Street and was nominated also for a Mythopoeic Society Award but it went to A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson.  Thirty-three years later, she would garner a much deserved World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born October 9, 1863 – Elaine Eastman.  Superintendent of Indian Education for the Two Dakotas.  Married Dr. Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux, first American Indian to graduate from medical school and become a physician; with him Wigwam Evenings, Sioux folktales; eight other books by him, a dozen by her.  Her collected poems, The Voice at Eve.  Her memoir Sister to the Sioux published posthumously.  (Died 1953) [JH]
  • Born October 9, 1900 – Harry Bates.  First editor of Astounding.  Under a different name, with D.W. Hall, a novel and five shorter stories of adventurer Hawk Carse; eight more stories with DWH; ten more under HB’s name and others.  Not one but two stories in the great Healy-McComas Adventures in Time & Space.  “Farewell to the Master” unsurpassed.  (Died 1981) [JH]
  • Born October 9, 1935 – Celia Correas de Zapata, 85.  Directed the 1976 Conference of Inter-American Women Writers, one of the earliest.  Edited Short Stories by Latin American Women: the Magic and the Real (2003), also pioneering.  Professor of literature at San Jose State U.  [JH]
  • Born October 9, 1937 – Margo Herr.  Fifty covers for us.  Here is Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?  Here is Analog 9.  Here is Down Here in the Dream Quarter.  Here is Shadows of Doom.  Much more outside our field; Website here.  (Died 2005) [JH]
  • Born October 9, 1948 — Ciaran Carson. Northern Ireland-born poet and novelist who is here, genre-wise at least, for his translation of the early Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, which he called simply The Táin. I’m also going to single him out for penning the finest book ever written on Irish traditional music, Last Night’s Fun: About Time, Food and Music. It’s every bit as interesting as Iain Banks’ Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram is. (Died 2018.) (CE) 
  • Born October 9, 1952 – Steven Popkes, 68.  Four novels, forty-five shorter stories.  In Caliban Landing humans arrive on a planet, start mapping, told from the viewpoint of a female alien there.  [JH]
  • Born October 9, 1953 — Tony Shalhoub, 67. Two great genre roles, the first being Jack Jeebs in Men In Black, the second being I think much more nuanced one, Fred Kwan in Galaxy Quest. Actually, he’s done three great genre roles as he voiced Master Splinter in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. (CE)
  • Born October 9, 1956 — Robert Reed, 64. Extremely prolific short story writer with at least two hundred tales so far. And a number of novels as well, such as the superb Marrow series. I see a won a Hugo at Nippon 2007 for his “A Billion Eves” novella. And he was nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer as well. (CE) 
  • Born October 9, 1961 — Matt Wagner, 59. The Grendel Tales and Batman / Grendel Are very good as is Grendel vs. The Shadow stories he did a few years back. His run on Madame Xanadu was amazing too. Oh, and I’d suggest both issues of House of Mystery Halloween Annual thathe did for some appropriate Halloween reading. (CE) 
  • Born October 9, 1964 — Jacqueline Carey, 56. Author of the long-running mildly BDSM-centered Kushiel’s Legacy Universe which also includes the Moirin Trilogy. (Multiple Green Man reviewers used this phraseology in their approving reviews.) Locus in their December 2002 issue did an interview with her called “Jacqueline Carey: Existential BDSM”.  She did several stand-alone novels including the intriguingly entitled Miranda and Caliban. (CE)
  • Born October 9, 1964 — Guillermo del Toro, 56. Best films? Hellboy, Hellboy II and Pan’s Labyrinth which won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form at Nippon 2007. Hellboy II is watchable over and over just for the Goblin’s Market sequence.  Worst films? The Hobbit films. (CE)
  • Born October 9, 1976 – William Alexander, 44.  Six novels, sixteen shorter stories.  Interviewed in Lightspeed.  He calls this in Strange Horizons about Le Guin’s Earthsea a revisionist history.  [JH]

(10) SHH! IT’S A SECRET! Let 13th Dimension tell you about “The Goofy Charm of 1950’s ATOM MAN VS. SUPERMAN”.

… Atom Man vs. Superman opens with a series of robberies that are plaguing Metropolis. It is, of course, the work of Lex Luthor, who threatens to destroy a nearby bridge if he and his gang don’t receive all the money from the Metropolis Trust Company. He turns a destruction ray on the bridge, but luckily Superman arrives to keep it in place while police rescue some stranded motorists. The Man of Steel then finds Luthor, arrests him, and the arch-criminal is sent off to jail. A year later, everyone is perplexed by a second crime wave, since Luthor is in solitary confinement!

What they don’t know is, Luthor has created a machine that can teleport people short distances, activated by small coins pressed by the user (which sound like the Looney Tunes music starting up). He has been “beaming” in and out of his jail cell, back to his hideout, where he has been masterminding his gang and their numerous robberies.

(11) AND IN THE DARKNESS. Admittedly this story’s from The Sun, but anyway:  “Lord of the Rings TV series slammed for ‘trying to rip off Game of Thrones’ with nudity and sex scenes”. (Incidentally, Stephen Colbert also devoted a couple minutes of his show to the item.)

THE Lord of the Rings TV series has been slammed by fans for ‘trying to rip off Game of Thrones’ with nudity and sex scenes.

Amazon’s new version of the fantasy saga is set to tell the story of Middle Earth before the events of the three Lord of the Rings films.

And according to TheOneRing.net a casting call has been put out for New Zealand-based actors who are “comfortable with nudity.”

The news followers earlier reports that an intimacy coordinator had been brought onto the production team.

Fans of JRR Tolkien’s stories have been quick to express their dismay at the prospect of nudity in the much-loved fantasy stories.

Twitter user Autumn Fox wrote: “Something I’ve always loved about Tolkien is that he portrayed love as containing infinite permutations, none of which depended on sex to be compelling and interesting.”

(12) MINI LTUE. The Life, The Universe, and Everything crew will run a free virtual mini-event on October 10 from 6-9 p.m. MDT. Full information here.

Life, The Universe, and Just a Few Things features all the things you love about LTUE in a mini one-night event. There will be 3 streams running side-by-side for 3 hours, giving you 9 great events to choose from, including panels, presentations, and more! Simply head to our website on the 10th and click the stream you want to join. We will also soon have a Discord for further discussions with attendees. We look forward to having you with us!

(13) BRADBURY’S MARS. Phil Nichols will present “Artsfest Online: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles at Seventy” on November 10.

…In this illustrated lecture, Phil Nichols recounts the history of The Martian Chronicles, and shows how this short-story collection masquerading as a novel has constantly evolved with our changing times. He considers the long shadow the book has cast over television, radio and film science fiction, and shows how Bradbury’s unscientific book has nevertheless inspired several generations of real-life scientists and astronauts.

(14) FLAME ON. Some Jeopardy! contestants obviously need to sign up for Phil Nichols’ classes. Andrew Porter watched tonight’s panel stumble over the last, Bradbury-themed hurdle. Only the returning champion got it right.

Final Jeopardy: Books of the 1950s.

Answer: A special edition of this 1953 novel came with an asbestos binding.

Wrong questions: What is “Invisible Man?” “What is Brave New World?”

Correct question: “What is Fahrenheit 451?”

(15) SHARP CLAUS. Fatman is coming December 4. Maybe you’ll be lucky and theaters will still be closed when this movie gets released. (Although it looks like Walton Goggins is playing another character of the type he did on Justified, so that could be interesting.)

To save his declining business, Chris Cringle (Mel Gibson), also known as Santa Claus, is forced into a partnership with the U.S. military. Making matters worse, Chris gets locked into a deadly battle of wits against a highly skilled assassin (Walton Goggins), hired by a precocious 12-year-old after receiving a lump of coal in his stocking. ‘Tis the season for Fatman to get even, in the action-comedy that keeps on giving.

(16) KNOT JUST A MODERN PHENOMENON. “The grim reality behind sea-serpents of old”. Nature relates these research highlights – 

‘Sea serpents’ spotted around Great Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century were probably whales and other marine animals ensnared in fishing gear — long before the advent of the plastic equipment usually blamed for such entanglements.

The snaring of sea creatures in fishing equipment is often considered a modern phenomenon, because the hemp and cotton ropes used in the past degraded more quickly than their plastic counterparts. But Robert France at Dalhousie University in Truro, Canada, identified 51 probable entanglements near Great Britain and Ireland dating as far back as 1809.

France analysed 214 accounts of ‘unidentified marine objects’ from the early nineteenth century to 2000, looking for observations of a monster that had impressive length, a series of humps protruding above the sea surface and a fast, undulating movement through the water. France says that such accounts describe not sea serpents but whales, basking sharks (Cetorhinus maximus) or other marine animals trailing fishing gear such as buoys or other floats.

Such first-hand accounts could help researchers to construct a better picture of historical populations of marine species and the pressures they faced, France says.

(17) NOT THE LAND OF 10,000 LAKES, BUT A FEW AT LEAST. Will The Martian Chronicles be followed by the Martian barnacles? All that water must mean something. Nature is keeping tally: “Three buried lakes detected on Mars.”.

Two years ago, planetary scientists reported the discovery of a large saltwater lake under the ice at Mars’s south pole, a finding that was met with excitement and some scepticism. Now, researchers have confirmed the presence of that lake — and found three more.

This adds to the possible detection of a polar subsurface  lake in 2018, covered at the time by SF2 Concatenation.

(18) INDUCTOR PROGRESS. [Item by Jonathan Cowie.] Nature tells how “Inductors enter the world of quantum magnets” [PDF file]. This may seem a little esoteric for Filers but actually it is quite important.

Inductors are coils of wire that impede changes in current and they are key components of electrical circuits. The problem is that their effectiveness is proportional to their cross-sectional area (size) and this is a pain if the goal is to miniaturise.

Researchers have now managed to create inductance using magnetic moments (spins) in a magnet to create a quantum mechanical inductor or an emergent inductor. In addition to reducing their size – which has obvious integrated circuit benefits – this new inductor can quickly switch between positive and negative which normal inductors cannot.

However, there is one big problem.  These new inductors need to be super cool. Yet if this can be solved then there will be a revolution in electronics.

(19) DUST TO DUST. [Item by Jonathan Cowie.] Nature reports the latest ideas about “Early onset of planetary formation” [PDF file].

Several very young stars (only around a million years old) that still have their surrounding dust cloud, have been seen to have planetary formation as the protoplanets sweep out a circular path in the dust about the young star.

It is thought that planets from by dust, clumping into pebbles, then into boulders and so build their way up into planets.

However modelling this process and it seems to take too long.

This problem may have been solved by astronomers who have now seen patterns in a condensing dust cloud that is in the process of becoming a star.  These patterns are rings that could indicate the presence of an orbiting protoplanet.  The key thing is that this star is so young that it has not yet even properly got going.  This means that planet formation may begin even before the star properly ignites (starts fusion).

(20) EARTHSHOT PRIZE. Vanity Fair shares a glimpse as “Prince William Previews His TED Talk: ‘The Shared Goals For Our Generation Are Clear’”.

Prince William has recorded his first TED talk, an 18-minute speech—recorded at Windsor Castle— discussing climate change and his vision of the Earthshot Prize, the ambitious initiative he announced yesterday. The TED Talk will air on Saturday as part of the Countdown Global Launch, the first-ever free TED conference that will be available on YouTube.

The Duke joins a number of high profile people for the event devoted to climate change, including Pope Francis, Al Gore, Chris Hemsworth, Jaden Smith, Jane Fonda, Christiana Figueres, and Don Cheadle.. In the preview clip William says, “The shared goals for our generation are clear — together we must protect and restore nature, clean our air, revive our oceans, build a waste-free world and fix our climate. And we must strive to do all of this in a decade. If we achieve these goals, by 2030 our lives won’t be worse and we won’t have to sacrifice everything we enjoy. Instead, the way we live will be healthier, cleaner, smarter and better for all of us.”

(21) VIDEO OF THE DAY. John King Tarpinian says, “If nothing else the closing credits are worth it.” Ray Bradbury’s The Homecoming” Ben Wickey’s 2016 CalArts Film.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, JJ, Dann, John Hertz, Rich Lynch, Mike Kennedy, N., SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

A Bradbury Avalanche

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Thanks to bloggers’ outpouring of interest in his work we again can celebrate “all Bradbury all the time” here at File 770.

(1) SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO. First Fandom Experience has announced a remarkable project: “Coming Soon: The Earliest Bradbury & More”.

This year (2020) marks the centenary of Bradbury’s birth, and we at First Fandom Experience hope to honor him by contributing to the extensive body of literature that surrounds him. Building on our work for The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom, Volume One: The 1930s, we are on schedule to publish a volume titled The Earliest Bradbury, an exploration and celebration of his earliest writings as a science fiction fan, ahead of his centennial in August.

Like The Visual History, The Earliest Bradbury explores history by wrapping an archive in a story. We use original artifacts from the past, such as fanzines, letters, and photographs, to tell the story of Bradbury’s journey as a young fan and author. Although we discuss his more well-known works, such as Futuria Fantasia and Hollerbochen’s Dilemma, we pay special attention to the often overlooked articles, letters, and stories Bradbury published as a teenager and young adult, and tease out the relationships that influenced the young Bradbury and launch his career as a professional author. As with The Visual History, many of the artifacts reproduced in The Earliest Bradbury are rare and difficult to find as originals or reproductions.

They’ll publish a deluxe, hard-bound edition of The Earliest Bradbury in July, which will be available through the FFE website. 

(2) AT NINETEEN. This month Wil Wheaton released his reading of one of Bradbury’s fanzine stories – the kind of thing we may expect to see in the FFE collection: “Radio Free Burrito Presents: Luana the Living by Ray Bradbury”.

Actor & writer Wil Wheaton (Star Trek, The Big Bang Theory, and Stand by Me) read Bradbury’s “Luana the Living” on an episode of his podcast, Radio Free Burrito. Wheaton describes this story of an explorer’s harrowing experience in the jungles of India as “*exactly* the kind of book I would have picked up from the spinning rack of fifty cent paperbacks in the drugstore.”

Published in 1940 in the fanzine Polaris when Bradbury was 19 years old, “Luana the Living,” offers a rare glimpse into the writers’ earliest works.

(3) HIT PERSON. In the tenth post of a series at BradburyMedia, Phil Nichols reviews the title story in the Bradbury’s Small Assassin collection: “Lockdown Choices – The Small Assassin”.

…It’s classic Bradburyan paranoia of the type we have seen in “The Crowd”, “The Wind”, “Skeleton” and “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl”. And as with most of those stories, the paranoid protagonist turns out to be justified in their paranoia. Bradbury, in his classic horror period, was never one to leave the reader to decide; he nearly always set things up to make you think the hero is crazy, then make you empathise with them, and then vindicate them….

See Phil Nichols’ entire slate of Lockdown Choices in “Reading at Home”.

Phil Nichols, historian, educator, and creator of Bradburymedia, offers his series of suggestions for the best Bradbury stories to enjoy at home while the world is engaged in social distancing.

Nichols also recounts Bradbury’s avalanche of productivity in the decade of the Fifties in his post titled “The Breathless 1950s”.

If you’ve been following my posts of late, you will know that I have been working through each of Ray Bradbury’s books in order of original publication, explaining a bit about how each book came about, and selecting the best stories and adaptations from each one.

So far, I have covered all the books from the 1940s and 1950s. And what a breathless decade(-and-a-bit) it’s been.

By the end of 1959, Bradbury had published nine books: three novels (or packaged to appear like novels), five short story collections, and one children’s book.

By the end of 1959, at the age of thirty-nine, he had been publishing short stories for twenty-two years, and had totalled 249 of them. That’s an average of 11.3 per year, but with a peak of 24 stories in 1950….

(4) THE FUTURE OF RACE. Kathryn Ross’ Pasadena Now opinion piece “Why Race Still Matters in a Post-Race Universe” takes a Bradbury story as a key text to lead up to this conclusion about representation; “Will race still matter then? Will it matter after we’ve discovered extensive space travel and aliens and new worlds and parallel universes? Perhaps not. But does it matter right now for audiences like myself and Andre? and my parents to see black people belonging as integral parts of these fantastical narratives? I think it does. However far into the future we’re reaching, it matters.”

June 2003. The American south is still segregated, blacks are employed by wealthy whites and treated like the lowliest of servants in an effect reminiscent of the Mammys, Bucks, and “boys” of old Hollywood, lynching is an after-dinner pastime, and use of the n-word in casual conversation abounds.

Celebrated sci-fi literary giant Ray Bradbury paints this raw and oftentimes hard-to-read picture as the context within his short story, “Way in the Middle of the Air.” Bradbury imagines a mass exodus of all the black people in America —not back to Africa as one white character suggests, but to the planet Mars— to escape the racial tyranny of Earth. This short appears in Bradbury’s famous first novel, The Martian Chronicles, first published in 1950.

From Bradbury’s 1950s viewpoint, June 2003 is the farthest reach of the future, and in this future, racism is still alive and as virulent as ever. To be clear, Bradbury is not writing as pro-racist. Rather, he is musing on what would happen to the racists if their prey could —and did— just leave, far beyond where they could reach. 

(5) A MATCH MADE IN HELL. Christina Dalcher, in “The Dystopia At Home” on CrimeReads, looks at five dystopian novels (including Fahrenheit 451) for what they say about families.

You work hard all day, setting books on fire, waving your portable blowtorch around at anything that might be read, and when you come home, all you want is a little hug. Forget it, brother. Your wife is permanently glued to the largest boob-tube ever invented: the parlor wall, so stuck on it that she can barely remember your name. You start having second thoughts about your chosen trade, you want someone to talk to, and you turn to that one person who’s supposed to be your life partner, your sounding board in all things intimate. She tunes you out. You try reading a book, just for fun, and end up being locked out of the bathroom while your wife swallows enough pills to bring down a bull elephant.

Ah, marriage.

(6) GAIMAN AND WELLER ON BRADBURY. On May 9, as part of the Big Book Weekend programme, award-winning Bradbury biographer and writer Sam Weller joined in a spirited discussion with Neil Gaiman about Ray Bradbury’s inestimable influence and enduring popularity, and how it has inspired their own work.

The Big Book Weekend is a 3-day virtual festival, taking place on MyVLF.com (My Virtual Literary Festival), that brings together the best of the British book festivals cancelled due to coronavirus. The festival is sponsored by BBC Arts and The Arts Council, among others.

The program can still be viewed, however, free registration is required at https://myvlf.com. Other panels and discussions from various different genres are also available.

A transcript of the Weller/Gaiman discussion is accessible here. The URL seems to work if I’m not logged in, too, but no guarantees.

(7) DOING SOME WEEDING. If Bradbury hadn’t named a book after it I might never have heard of dandelion wine – now I even have a recipe for making it.

What started as a poor man’s wine in Europe slowly made its way into a tradition on the Great Plains of North America. Settlers found patches of the weed and started fermenting it into a sweet drink to enjoy after working in the fields all day.

Along with having a bit of alcohol, dandelion wine is also a medicinal drink. Dandelion flowers are packed with vitamins A, B, C, and D and are great for digestive health because they clean the kidneys and liver.

Today modern homesteaders make the wine at home and relish in its taste. Ever wanted to give winemaking a try? Now’s your chance to try homebrewing all those dandelion blossoms you have in your yard.

…While this dandelion wine recipe does take months to make, you’ll be happy you created it once you take the first sip of your very own homemade dandelion wine. In the meantime, read Ray Bradbury’s novel, Dandelion Wine, a 1957 novel that uses the flower petal wine as a metaphor for packing all of the joys of summer into a single bottle.

(8) COVERED IN ART. Anna Felicity Friedman explains how “Ray Bradbury Understood the Narrative Power of Tattoos” at LitHub.

…Tattoos and perceptions of them have transformed enormously from 1950­–51 when Esquire first published Bradbury’s short story in July of 1950, followed by the author using the character again as a frame device for the prologue and epilogue to The Illustrated Man collection. Tattooing was mired in a dark time in its history then, perhaps at its lowest point of popularity in modern times.

The heyday of the circus sideshow had passed, tattooing was mainly relegated to skid-row areas and near military bases, and, aside from macho characters like the soon-to-be-conceived Marlboro Man, tattoos were not for everyday people. By the 1950s, tattooed men held little appeal—especially compared to tattooed ladies—and Bradbury masterfully captured the pathos of being a washed-up tattoo performer, despite still being an extraordinary work of art, in his portrayals of Mr. William Philippus Phelps.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Michael O’Donnell, and Martin Morse Wooster for these stories.]

Bradbury In All His Glory

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A new post to reacquaint File 770 readers with our mottos. No, not the one about the hive! This one — “All Bradbury, All the Time.”

(1) OUT ON A LIMB. Jonathan Stone, in “7 Transformational Books To Read in Your Treehouse” on CrimeReads, discusses seven books he read as a kid in his treehouse.  One of the seven is The Martian Chronicles.

(2) THE LAST OF LIFE, FOR WHICH THE FIRST WAS MADE. Jonathan R. Eller’s Bradbury Beyond Apollo is the conclusion to the trilogy that began with Becoming Ray Bradbury and Ray Bradbury Unbound. It will be released in August, and is available for preorder now from the University of Illinois Press.

Celebrated storyteller, cultural commentator, friend of astronauts, prophet of the Space Age—by the end of the 1960s, Ray Bradbury had attained a level of fame and success rarely achieved by authors, let alone authors of science fiction and fantasy. He had also embarked on a phase of his career that found him exploring new creative outlets while reinterpreting his classic tales for generations of new fans.

Drawing on numerous interviews with Bradbury and privileged access to personal papers and private collections, Jonathan R. Eller examines the often-overlooked second half of Bradbury’s working life. As Bradbury’s dreams took him into a wider range of nonfiction writing and public lectures, the diminishing time that remained for creative pursuits went toward Hollywood productions like the award-winning series Ray Bradbury Theater. Bradbury developed the Spaceship Earth narration at Disney’s EPCOT Center; appeared everywhere from public television to NASA events to comic conventions; published poetry; and mined past triumphs for stage productions that enjoyed mixed success. Distracted from storytelling as he became more famous, Bradbury nonetheless published innovative experiments in autobiography masked as detective novels, the well-received fantasy The Halloween Tree and the masterful time travel story “The Toynbee Convector.” Yet his embrace of celebrity was often at odds with his passion for writing, and the resulting tension continuously pulled at his sense of self.

The revelatory conclusion to the acclaimed three-part biography, Bradbury Beyond Apollo tells the story of an inexhaustible creative force seeking new frontiers.

Eller is director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at IUPUI.

(3) BE YOUR OWN GUIDE. At IUPUI’s Center for Ray Bradbury Studies you can “Visit Bradbury’s home office and library!”

One highlight of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies is its recreation of Ray Bradbury’s basement office and library as it evolved in his Los Angeles, California, home for more than half a century.

The contents of Ray Bradbury’s office and library include more than 100,000 pages of published and unpublished literary works stored in thirty-one of the author’s filing cabinets, forty years of his personal and professional correspondence (over 10,000 pages), author’s copies of his books, including extensive foreign language editions, and his working library (a combined 4000 volumes). The broader collection of papers includes manuscripts, typescripts, screenplay and teleplay drafts, story concepts, photographs, correspondence, scrapbooks with original drawings and printed comic strips from his youth, and ephemera he collected documenting his travels, and more. Also preserved is Bradbury’s original furniture, including his writing desk, paint table, bookshelves, and chairs.

The site also hosts a Virtual Tour of Bradbury’s office. A companion piece is a text-based version of the tour (HTML). Visitors to the site are encouraged to use the text-based version as they navigate the virtual environment. 

(4) THE REDISCOVERED COUNTRY. The Paris Review commissioned an interview with Ray Bradbury in the 1970s but it wasn’t completed at the time. Someone found the text in Bradbury’s files, completed the interview, and The Paris Review finally published it in 2010: “Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203”.

INTERVIEWER

The Martian Chronicles, your first major success, was called a novel, but it’s really a book of short stories, many of which had appeared in pulp-fiction magazines during the forties. Why did you decide to collect them as a novel? 

BRADBURY

Around 1947, when I published my first novel, Dark Carnival, I met the secretary of Norman Corwin, a big name in radio—a director, writer, and producer. Through her I sent him a copy of Dark Carnival and wrote a letter saying, If you like this book as much as I like your work, I’d like to buy you drinks someday. A week later the phone rang and it was Norman. He said, You’re not buying me drinks, I’m buying you dinner. That was the start of a lifelong friendship. That first time he took me to dinner I told him about my Martian story “Ylla.” He said, Wow, that’s great, write more of those. So I did. In a way, that was what caused The Martian Chronicles to be born.

There was another reason. In 1949, my wife Maggie became pregnant with our first daughter, Susan. Up until then, Maggie had worked full-time and I stayed home writing my short stories. But now that she was going to have the baby, I needed to earn more money. I needed a book contract. Norman suggested I travel to New York City to meet editors and make an impression, so I took a Greyhound bus to New York and stayed at the YMCA, fifty cents a night. I took my stories around to a dozen publishers. Nobody wanted them. They said, We don’t publish stories. Nobody reads them. Don’t you have a novel? I said, No, I don’t. I’m a sprinter, not a marathon runner. I was ready to go home when, on my last night, I had dinner with an editor at Doubleday named Walter Bradbury—no relation. He said, Wouldn’t there be a book if you took all those Martian stories and tied them together? You could call it “The Martian Chronicles.” It was his title, not mine. I said, Oh, my God. I had read Winesburg, Ohio when I was twenty-four years old, in 1944. I was so taken with it that I thought, Someday I’d like to write a book like this, but I’d set it on Mars. I’d actually made a note about this in 1944, but I’d forgotten about it.

I stayed up all night at the YMCA and typed out an outline. I took it to him the next morning. He read it and said, I’ll give you a check for seven hundred and fifty bucks. I went back to Los Angeles and connected all the short stories and it became The Martian Chronicles. It’s called a novel, but you’re right, it’s really a book of short stories all tied together.

(5) MARS AT LAST. Librarypoint covered “A History of Science Fiction: Ray Bradbury & Arthur C. Clarke” in a 2018 article. Its remarks about The Martian Chronicles conclude:

…The final story, “The Million-Year Picnic,” has one of the most powerful images in science fiction: the father of a small family, after burning every document connecting them to their Earthly existence, promises to show his sons “Martians” and introduces them to their own reflections in the canal. The mystery and otherworldly quality of Mars, after being pushed back and civilized for so long under the colonists, is preserved as the immigrants lose their Earthly identity and become the new Martians. 

(6) TATTOO ART. All of Me is Illustrated from Rosetta Books matches Bradbury’s fiction and photos of tattooed bodies.

All of Me Is Illustrated is the first book to feature Ray Bradbury’s treasured stories “The Illustrated Man” and “The Illustrated Woman” together alongside the most stunning tattooed bodies of today. Bradbury’s prose reminds us so wonderfully — and at times violently and humorously — how foolish it is to assume the origins and meanings behind a person’s tattoos. Just as with Bradbury’s characters, the motivations of the featured collectors and artists to ink (or be inked) vary. What is undeniable is that their illustrated bodies are a source of pride, wonder, titillation, and beauty, whether depicting the grotesque or the mundane.

…Photographs of renowned tattoo artists and their intricate living pieces are breathtaking companions to Bradbury’s illuminating tales of relationships upended or enriched by the ancient art form. Featured artists include Jessa Bigelow, Paul Booth, Steve Butcher, Ryan Ashley Malarkey, Yomico Moreno, Andy Pho, TeeJ Poole, Duke Riley, DJ Tambe, Tatu Baby, Carlos Torres, Dmitry Troshin, Jess Yen, Popo Zhang. With an introduction by tattoo collector and scholar Anna Felicity Friedman, the result is a book that showcases masters of their craft.

(7) THEATER OF THE MIND. In the Washington Post, Rebecca Powers has a piece on the sounds of travel that has a Ray Bradbury reference. “Even when you can’t travel, you can still bring the sounds of a far-off city to you.”

“In Ray Bradbury’s book, Dandelion Wine, a dying man longs to hear the sounds of Mexico City.  He calls a friend there and asks him to hold the phone to an open window so he can hear the ‘hot yellow noon’ of a populated place he once knew.  Metal horns, squealing brakes and ‘the calls of vendors selling red-purple bananas and jungle oranges’ travel through the phone line.”

(8) NEWS FROM ME. Mark Evanier introduces videos of his 2004 Bradbury interview on stage at San Diego Comic-Con in this post from 2019. The pair did a Q&A session at several different Comic-Cons. (See also John King Tarpinian’s report and photos of “Ray Bradbury at Comic-Con 41” in 2010.)

…Sometimes, he’d run into an old friend like Julius Schwartz, Forrest Ackerman or Stan Freberg and they’d embrace and catch up on things. If you noticed and recognized him, he was glad to sign whatever you wanted signed and to talk about whatever you wanted to talk about. I’m sure there are many, many folks out there who still treasure those encounters. He had a way of shifting the topic from himself to you. You’d ask him about The Martian Chronicles and wind up talking about what you did or wanted to do for a living.

If you were passionate about something, especially if it was to someday be a writer or artist, he would tell you that you reminded him of himself at your age. That was a powerful feeling he had at the con and he expressed it in so many ways.

…I learned that everything went best when I recalled or researched a great story he’d told many times before and then led him into it. Shortly before the chat below, he’d appeared on a little-watched cable show that Dennis Miller was hosting. Ray started telling a story that was too long for the time remaining so Miller rushed him through it, then cut him off before the punch line. Late in this conversation, I got Ray to tell it in full. Whenever I could steer him into the right tale, it was magic. I just sat there in the best seat in the house and enjoyed Ray Bradbury talking, sometimes at great length. Even at his advanced age, he was one of the best public speakers I’ve ever seen.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, and Martin Morse Wooster for these stories.]

Pixel Scroll 2/6/20 Yondah Lies The Pixel Of My Filer

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(1) OVERLOOKED MARKETING WIZARD. The Hollywood Reporter wonders: “He Was ‘Star Wars’ ‘ Secret Weapon, So Why Was He Forgotten?”

Ashley Boone Jr., the first black president of a major Hollywood studio, helped make George Lucas’ quirky space opera a hit in the 1970’s — yet chances are you’ve never heard of him: “He was way ahead of his time.”

When thousands gathered Dec. 16 in Hollywood for the world premiere of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — supposedly the last Skywalker film — they heard Bob Iger, Kathleen Kennedy and J.J. Abrams thank everyone from creator George Lucas to the actor who played R2-D2. But one name was not so much as whispered, despite this person’s critical 1970s role in launching what would become the most successful movie franchise of all time: the all-but-forgotten Ashley Boone Jr….

(2) WHERE TO LOOK FOR MIDDLE-EARTH. The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-earth by John Garth, “an illustrated look at the locales familiar to J. R. R. Tolkien, the creator of Middle-earth,” will be released by Princeton University Press on June 2.

Garth identifies the locales that served as the basis for Hobbiton, the elven valley of Rivendell, the Glittering Caves of Helm’s Deep, and many other settings in Middle-earth, from mountains and forests to rivers, lakes, and shorelands. He reveals the rich interplay between Tolkien’s personal travels, his wide reading, and his deep scholarship as an Oxford don. Garth draws on his profound knowledge of Tolkien’s life and work to shed light on the extraordinary processes of invention behind Tolkien’s works of fantasy. He also debunks popular misconceptions about the inspirations for Middle-earth and puts forward strong new claims of his own.

(3) BRADBURY ON STAGE. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Ray Bradbury’s birth, Caltech Theater celebrates the prolific science fiction writer by producing a series of his one-acts and adapted stories: Bradbury 100. (Ticket prices at the link.)

The creative team of Bradbury 100 is drawn from Caltech undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, Caltech community and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), to celebrate the legacy of Bradbury and his connection with Caltech that began over fifty years ago.

FIRST WEEKEND
Friday & Saturday, February 21 & 22 at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, February 23 at 2:30 p.m.

All Summer in a Day. directed by Aditi Seetharaman
Marionettes, Inc., directed by Barbie Insua
The Martian Chronicles, directed by Brian White

SECOND WEEKEND
Friday & Saturday, February 28 & 29 at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, March 1 at 2:30 p.m.

The Flying Machine (in Mandarin w/English subtitles), directed by Miranda Stewart
A Sound of Thunder, directed by Doug Smith
The Martian Chronicles, directed by Brian White

On Friday night of the second weekend (2/28/20) H/SS Professor Chip Sebens will discuss Bradbury’s science fiction and the paradoxes of time travel and on Saturday night (2/29/20) one of Ray’s daughters Ramona Bradbury and her two daughters Claire and Julia Handleman will make appearances on stage to share personal stories of their father and grandfather.

(4) CALIFORNIA HERE YOU GO. Isaac Butler interviews Kim Stanley Robinson about science fiction, utopia, and the reissue of his Three Californias trilogy in “Three Californias, Infinite Futures” at Slate.

So it’s a few years later, you’re writing The Wild Shore, the first in the trilogy—do you remember how you worked out the post–nuclear apocalypse world of it?

I went back into the history of science fiction and read other after-the-fall novels: Earth Abides by George Stewart, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, a couple of Philip K. Dick—especially Dr. Bloodmoney. I also got to study with the California poet Gary Snyder at UC–Davis. In terms of these Three California novels, Snyder is as important as anybody in terms of my teachers, because he was the one that established what a California writer ought to be doing: facing Eastern Asia, getting interested in Buddhism, kind of getting rid of the European influences. I began thinking of myself as a poet in the Snyder tradition before I discovered the science fiction. That was always underlying every sentence.

(5) BCS STAYS ABOVE EVENT HORIZON. Beneath Ceaseless Skies met its goal of attracting enough Patreon support to keep their pay rate for short stories at 8c/word, which is the new higher SFWA “pro” pay rate. BCS was able to institute the new rate when it went into effect last September, but there had since been some contraction in their Patreon support. BCS is now back on target.

(6) EVALUATING THE LOCUS LIST. Rocket Stack Rank’s annual “Annotated 2019 Locus Reading List for Short Fiction” is now online.

The merge lets us analyze the Locus list to see which stories that were broadly recognized as outstanding were left out, which publications stood out, which authors did particularly well (or not), how many were eligible for the Astounding Award, and how RSR‘s own recommendations stack up with Locus reviewers in general.

Eric Wong adds, “As with all RSR lists, you can flag and rate stories on the page, see the recommendations earned by each story (reviewer, award, year’s best anthology), get links to the story, author, and other reviews (if online), and group stories by length (default), publication and author.”

(7) FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION. Asimov’s and Analog have made the short fiction on the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2019 available as free reads – in PDF files linked from the Locus list. That’s seven stories altogether. [Via Rocket Stack Rank.]

(8) ‘DIVERSE EDITIONS’ SUSPENDED. “Books pulled over ‘literary blackface’ accusations” – BBC has the story.

The largest bookseller in the US has pulled a new series of “culturally diverse” classic book covers after facing widespread criticism.

Barnes and Noble launched the new Diverse Editions on Tuesday, featuring new covers illustrating the main characters as people of colour.

But the initiative to mark Black History Month received a swift backlash with authors calling it superficial.

The bookseller said it had acknowledged the criticism and suspended the series.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Moby-Dick and Frankenstein were among the titles included.

On the back of the redesigned covers, the company said: “For the first time ever, all parents will be able to pick up a book and see themselves in a story.”

But the move faced a barrage of criticism.

“This is essentially literary blackface,” tweeted author Frederick Joseph.

(9) RUSS AND LE GUIN.  Joanna Russ and her relationship with feminism and science fiction is chronicled by author B.D. McClay in a New Yorker profile “Joanna Russ, the Science-Fiction Writer Who Said No”.

[The] rift between Russ and Le Guin was a different sort of disagreement. Even before the symposium, the two writers had begun to distinguish themselves from each other, though Russ seems to have been more invested in these differences than Le Guin was. In public, Russ had written a harsh review of Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed,” characterizing some of the book’s central conceits as “a fancy way of disguising what we already know” and its anarchist society as poorly realized. Privately, to mutual friends, Russ accused Le Guin of being accommodating to men, of refusing to write as a woman. In some ways, Le Guin conceded the argument—she claimed to write under the influence of her male “animus”—but in other ways she resisted. After all, wasn’t her freedom not to write “as a woman” precisely the point?

At stake in this disagreement was not simply the sorts of struggles that feminists have always had with one another. There was also a question of what science fiction was for and what it should ultimately do. For Russ and Le Guin both, science fiction represented the possibility of telling a genuinely new story. Science fiction, Russ once wrote, was poised to “provide myths for dealing with kinds of experiences we are actually having now, instead of the literary myths we have inherited, which only tell us about the kinds of experiences we think we ought to be having.” The form aspired not to fantasy but to reality.

The search for that reality led Russ and Le Guin in different directions, and, though the latter has become, in the years since, the face of women in speculative fiction, it would be a mistake to regard Russ as overshadowed.

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • February 6, 1974  — Zardoz premiered. Starring Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling and Sara Kestelman. It was written, produced, and directed by John Boorman. It was made on a shoestring budget of one point six million and made one point eight million at the Box Office. Critics praised its special effects but thought both the acting and story fell rather flat. It holds a 50% rating among reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 6, 1922 — Patrick Macnee. He was best known as the secret agent John Steed in The Avengers, a tole he reprised in the New Avengers. He made his genre debut as Young Jacob Marley in Scrooge. He then starred as Derek Longbow in Incense for the Damned (also released as Bloodsuckers, Freedom Seeker Incense for the Damned and Bloodsuckers, Freedom Seeker and Doctors Wear Scarlet). Next up is an uncredited role voicing Imperious Leader on the original Battlestar Galactica.  He played Captain John Good R.N. in King Solomon’s Treasure based rather loosely on the H. Rider Haggard source material. What else? Let’s see… he shows up in The Howling as Dr. George Waggner, as Dr. stark in a film as alternative title is, I kid you not, Naked Space and Spaceship. It’s a parody apparently of Alien. Next up for him is another toff named Sir Wilfred in Waxwork and its sequel. Yes, he wears a suit rather nicely. At least being Professor Plocostomos in Lobster Man from Mars is an open farce.   His last film work was genre as well, The Low Budget Time Machine, in which he started as Dr. Bernard. (Died 2015.)
  • Born February 6, 1927 — Zsa Zsa Gabor. Her first venture into SF was the Fifties very camp Queen of Outer Space which she followed up by being in Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie. She had a cameo in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. She’s Erika Tiffany Smith on Gilligan’s Island, and Minerva on Batman. One of her last appearances was as herself on The Munsters Today as she retired from acting in late Nineties. (Died 2016.)
  • Born February 6, 1931 — Mamie Van Doren, 89. She made but two SF films, the first being The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (a.k.a. Monsters of the Night and The Night Crawlers), and the second being Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. 
  • Born February 6, 1932 — Rip Torn. First genre work that comes to mind is of course RoboCop 3 and his Men in Black films. His first dip into our world comes as Dr. Nathan Bryce in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Yeah that film. Actually, if you count Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he’s been a member of our community since his twenties. He also shows up on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Died 2019.)
  • Born February 6, 1943 — Gayle Hunnicutt, 77. I’m giving her Birthday Honors as she was Irene Adler, opposite Jeremy Brett, in the first episode of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, “A Scandal in Bohemia”. She also shows up in The Martian Chronicles, The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Legend of Hell House, Fantômas (a French series) and Tales of The Unexpected. 
  • Born February 6, 1943 — Fabian, 77. Bill Dexter in Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (which the Italians got boring by naming it Le spie vengono dal semifreddo, literally “The spies who came in from the cool”.) He doesn’t have much of a genre resume appearing only once on Fantasy Island, plus being in Kiss Daddy Goodbye. The latter would be shown on Movie Macabre, Elvira’s early Eighties movie show.
  • Born February 6, 1947 — Eric Flint, 73. Definitely a Good Guy for both being on Baen Books and fighting against the Sad Puppies who thought he’d be on their side because he was, well, on Baen Books. They really should’ve looked at his work history. Now fiction-wise, I really like his Assiti Shards series, and the Heirs of Alexandria as well.
  • Born February 6, 1958 — Cecily Adams. She played Ishka (aka Moogie), mother of the Ferengi brothers Rom and Quark, in four of her five appearances on Deep Space Nine. (Andrea Martin played her the first time.) Most of her genre experience was in such concerns as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Flash Forward, Lost on Earth, Bone Chillers and 3rd Rock from The Sun. (Died 2004.)

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Speed Bump tells us why we don’t know about Pinocchio’s brother.

(13) YOU SHALL NOT PASS (THE BAR). Food & Wine suggests everyone “Eat Gandalf-Themed Corn Dogs at This ‘Lord of the Rings’ Pop-Up Bar”.

After ending 2019 with a magical Harry Potter Christmas pop-up, Chicago’s Replay Lincoln Park bar is back with another franchise theme targeting a devout fanbase. Last weekend, the space transformed into a Lord of The Rings wonderland, …and it has everything from meals named after Frodo to photo opps with a Ring Wraith and the Balrog…

To fuel your quest, Replay has once again partnered with Zizi’s Cafe, a local restaurant, to create a LOTR-inspired menu. Think Gandalf’s Corn Staff (aka, two corndogs), Pippin’s Popcorn, Beef Lembas, Frodo’s Dolma, Fried Po-Tay-Toes, and Lord of the Wings—plus, the Onion Ring to Rule Them All, if you’re not prone to the ring’s temptations. 

(14) SPACEFLIGHT RECORD. “Christina Koch: Nasa astronaut sets new female space record”.

The Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying Koch parachuted down to the grasslands of Kazakhstan at around 09:12 GMT.

She spent 328 days on the International Space Station (ISS), surpassing the previous record held by fellow American Peggy Whitson.

Her stay is just 12 days short of the all-time US record set by Scott Kelly, who was on the ISS from 2015-2016.

“I’m so overwhelmed and happy right now,” she told reporters as she sat outside the capsule, shortly after it touched down in the snow.

Ms Koch surpassed the 289-day record set by fellow American Ms Whitson on 28 December last year. But her return to Earth sets the marker for future space travellers to beat.

Whitson still holds the record for most time spent in space by a woman, accrued over the course of three spaceflights from 2002-2017.

(15) FORTY-FIVE CALIBER STORIES. Cora Buhlert continues her look at Retro-Hugo eligible work in “Retro Review: ‘The Monster Maker’ by Ray Bradbury”.

“The Monster Maker” by Ray Bradbury is a science fiction short story, which appeared in the spring 1944 issue of Planet Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found here….

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

(16) RIVERDALE EPISODE RECAP: BEWARE SPOILERS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] I saw Riverdale last night and thought Filers would like to get up to speed on what’s happening with Archie and the gang.

We learned that Archie’s uncle, Frank, was a mercenary who had other mercenaries chasing him.  One of the mercenaries fights Archie in a high school men’s room and throws Archie into a sink which is smashed.  The rogue mercenary is captured shortly thereafter.

Jughead is in a chess death match with the president of the Quill and Skulls fraternity.  In the middle of the match action is stopped because an alarm goes off at the fraternity.  The fraternity president finds that Betty and a friend have discovered a secret trove of VHS sex tapes which the fraternity compiled for use against the frat’s many enemies. The chess match resumes, but soon ends when Jughead deliberately causes a checkmate and I’m not sure why.

Veronica and her friend Katy Keene decide to go out, and Veronica asks her friend, ‘Do you like drag?’

(17) STORMQUAKES. NPR did a segment on “Discovering ‘Stormquakes'”:

Seismologist Wenyuan Fan explains the accidental discovery — buried deep in seismic and meteorological data — that certain storms over ocean water can cause measurable seismic activity, or ‘stormquakes.’ He says this phenomenon could help scientists better understand the earth below the sea.

The original paper Wenyuan co-authored on stormquakes is here.

Transcription of the NPR interview is here.

…As Wenyuan and his colleagues outlined in their paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, stormquakes all come down to waves.

FAN: Because when you have large storms, it will couple with the ocean and make high waves.

SOFIA: Gotcha.

FAN: And by doing the cross-examination of the ocean waves and the seismicity, we start to see a clear correlation between the occurrence of stormquakes and also the high-wave conditions.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Dinosaurs In Love” on Vimeo is a song by Fenn Rosenthal about what happens to dinosaurs when they fall in love.

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chris Castro, Eric Wong, Mike Kennedy, Nina, Martin Morse Wooster, Rob Thornton, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, N., and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]