Tag Archives: Tigrina

Pixel Scroll 4/28/25 We Have Scrolled Our Birthfile For A Mess Of Pixels

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(1) HARLAN’S HUGE SCRAPBOOKS. J. Michael Straczynski told the Harlan Ellison Facebook Club about his latest archival project. And when you get to the end don’t worry, people have already pointed him at Fanac.org.

With the first phase of Harlan’s publishing program done and the next one in progress; with the house almost entirely repaired now, and the paperwork formally begun to declare the place a historical/cultural landmark, we’re moving forward in other areas.

As part of that, we’re in the process of scanning the contents of Harlan’s scrapbooks. These are beasts. The eleven books are about four feet long and three feet wide, with an average of 150 pages with anywhere from 5-10 photos, letters, reviews, articles and other items covering the span of Harlan’s life and career. (So about 1,650 pages with a tick over 13,000 individual items.)

(We are having a trusted firm that does scans of legal documents, house blueprints and other items where discretion and professionalism are forefront, do the scans of each full page of each scrapbook. The files are then given to me, which I’m currently going through to crop each and every item into a separate image, label/annotate them, date them, organize them, and color-correct those that are faded or damaged.)

This process will probably take a full year to complete, and really can’t be delegated because if I hire somebody they won’t know the references or history, so I’d have to go through them anyway. When they’re all in hand, we will include them as an aspect of a website that is nearly completed, about which more soon.

The reason I’m telling you all this: it’s not a secret that Harlan was deeply involved in fandom in his early years. What I didn’t realize, until I started to get very granular about the files, is just HOW deep the rabbit hole went. Not only was he attending conventions and fan events back in the 50s, he often wrote for the convention newsletter/magazine, took tons of photos, wrote reviews of some of the cons and had this whole years-long catalog of what are essentially first-person narratives about the early days of fandom.

For historical value, it feels like something specific to fandom should be done with at least some of this information, but I’m not sufficiently au courant about that world to even know where to begin….

(2) MURDERBOT CLIPS. “Murderbot — An Inside Look”. “Killer instincts. Zero social skills”. Murderbot premieres May 16 on Apple TV+.

In a high-tech future, a rogue security robot (Alexander Skarsgård) secretly gains free will. To stay hidden, it reluctantly joins a new mission protecting scientists on a dangerous planet…even though it just wants to binge soap operas.

(3) GOOD OMENS QUOTE. “’Good Omens’ Star David Tennant Shares His Thanks for Being Able To Deliver Closure To Fans” at Movieweb.

David Tennant has finally addressed returning for a third and final outing for Good Omens, the Amazon and BBC fantasy series based on the works of the once beloved and now highly controversial author, Neil Gaiman . While Good Omens was initially slated for a third season, following a series of allegations of sexual assault and misconduct, the series will instead return for a final 90-minute episode to wrap things up.

Tennant recently took part in The Assembly, which sees members of the public being given the opportunity to ask a celebrity any question they like. During Tennant’s turn, a group of autistic, neurodivergent, and learning-disabled participants were given the chance to question the former Doctor Who star, with one asking him, “Someone you’ve worked with, a friend, has been canceled for some quite serious allegations. How has that affected you?” After requesting clarification, the interviewer replied, “He worked on Good Omens, and that’s been stopped, and how has it affected you?”

While avoiding saying his name, Tennant did address a change of “personnel,” and is ultimately grateful that they have been given the opportunity to finish the Good Omens story.

“We’re doing ‘Good Omens’ again. We’re going back to do the final. We’re doing a final. There’s been a slight rejig with the personnel. But we still get to tell that story which I think, it would have been very difficult to leave it on a cliffhanger. So, I’m glad that’s been worked out.”…

(4) AKA LISA BEN. [Item by Andrew Porter.] “Meet the 1940s secretary who used office time to produce the first lesbian magazine” at NBC News. Known in fandom as “Tigrina.”  Note: in 1947, seriously doubt the zine was reproduced “by photocopier.” Thanks to Moshe Feder for the link (posted on Facebook).

In 1947, Edythe Eyde was a secretary working at RKO Radio Pictures in Los Angeles. A speedy typist who often completed work ahead of schedule, her boss told her: “Well, I don’t care what you do if you get through with your work, but … don’t sit and read a magazine or knit. I want you to look busy.” 

The literary-minded lesbian saw an opportunity. Gay culture was largely underground, and it was difficult for “the third sex” to meet like-minded others. Using a Royal manual typewriter and carbon paper, making six copies at a time, the 25-year-old launched Vice Versa — “a magazine dedicated, in all seriousness, to those of us who will never quite be able to adapt ourselves to the iron-bound rules of Convention.”…

… Though not identifying as a SciFi writer, Edye was an enthusiastic consumer of horror stories and fantasy; a card-carrying member of the Fourth World Science Fiction Convention Society; and, to the delight of the modern admirer, can be seen in a 1945 photo in a bikini top reading the pulp magazine Weird Tales….

(5) MARTIAN CHRONICLER. “75 Years Ago, The Martian Chronicles Legitimized Science Fiction” writes Bradbury biographer Sam Weller at Literary Hub.

“I recall Midwestern summer nights, standing on my grandparents’ hushed lawn,” Ray Bradbury told me in 2010, “and looking up at the sky at the confetti field of stars. There were millions of suns out there, and millions of planets rotating around those suns. And I knew there was life out there, in the great vastness. We are just too far apart, separated by too great a distance to reach one another.”

For the young Bradbury, who would grow up to make that great vastness feel, to many, as almost as tangible as home, there was one celestial body more captivating than any other: Mars.

Mars: The fourth planet from our sun, some 140 million miles from us on average. The only planet in our solar system, other than our own, deemed by scientists and stargazers over the centuries to be—possibly, at one time—hospitable to life.

The planet has been part of our collective imagination for centuries, from the tales of ancient mythology, to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, to David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars. Ray Bradbury may have been yet another in a long line of artists dreaming about Mars, but he was the first science fiction writer to elevate the planetary tale beyond the marginalized gutter of “genre fiction,” with his 1950 story cycle The Martian Chronicles…

(6) TAKING THE FUTURE BACK. “To ‘Reclaim Future-Making’, Amazon Workers Published a Collection of Science Fiction Stories”. Link is to the Slashdot story (with comments), and there’s a link to the zine itself.

Its goal was to “support workers to reclaim the power of future-making“. A 2022 pilot project saw over 25 Amazon workers meeting online “to discuss how science fiction shed light on their working conditions and futures.” 13 of them then continued meeting regularly in 2023 with the “Worker as Futurist” project (funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, according to an article by the project’s leaders in the socialist magazine Jacobin). “Our team of scholars, teachers, writers, and activists has been able to pay Amazon workers (warehouse workers, drivers, copy editors, MTurk workers, and more) to participate in a series of skill-building writing workshops and information sessions….”

And when it was over, “the participants were supported to draft the stories they wanted to tell about The World After Amazon….”

Six months ago they held the big launch event for the book’s print edition, while also promising that “you can read the workers’ stories online, or download the book as a PDF or an ebook, all for free.” The Amazon-worker stories have tempting titles like “The Museum of Prime”, “The Dark Side of Convenience”, and even “The Iron Uprising.” (“In a dystopian future of corporate power, humans and robots come together in resistance and in love.”)

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

April 28, 1948 — Terry Pratchett. (Died 2015.)

By Paul Weimer: Sir Terry Pratchett. How does one talk about one of the greatest fantasy writers in the modern history of the genre? As is my wont here as I do these birthdays, I will do it from a personal perspective. 

I first came across Pratchett’s work in the early 90’s, as his works had started making their way across the Atlantic. I read The Colour of Magic and found it funny, but slight. I did follow up with The Light Fantastic and Sourcery and decided I was done with Pratchett.  And I was, for about a decade.

Enter my friend Scott. 

Scott, part of the Amber Diceless Community and inarguably my best friend for a good long period while he was alive, had a number of fandoms over which he enthused. Amber, of course. Tolkien. Michael Scott Rohan. And, as it so happens, Terry Pratchett. So one fine day, we got to discussing it and I told him of my experience and how I had stopped.  He considered this a challenge to be overcome and pushed Guards! Guards!, Pyramids (his personal all time favorite) and others from his collection into my hands.

It was then that I started to “get” Pratchett, once he was out of his relatively early phases. I highly enjoyed the adventures of the Watch, and the Librarian (L-Space for the win).  The witches are fun but not my all time favorite. But I kept up reading the Pratchett, finally caught up, and read them all the way to Unseen Alchemicals. Scott, his family and I watched a couple of the movies and at that point were able to critique and understand where they deviated from the books and why.

I became a Pratchett fan, in the end. 

He was taken from us far too soon. In Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, in that verse, he wrote much longer and created a new civilization as counterpoint to Ankh-Morpork, popular enough to have people engage in a VR version of it in the mid 21st century.  I wish those novels could have been written, or if I could sneak a shadow or two over from ours and grab them and bring them back to our world (although his daughter might have strong opinions on that). 

Pratchett’s works, once he matured into his full powers, are full of social commentary, insightful observations, fantastic writing, and a lot of heart. Since everyone has an opinion on where to start the Discworld novels, I will offer mine. Guards! Guards!.  It is his earliest in his “full flowering” of writing. If you don’t like it, Pratchett is not for you. If it is… happy reading to you. You have a lot of fun in store. 

Requiescat in pace, Mr. Pratchett. May your work survive the great winnowing and be enjoyed by generations to come.

Terry Pratchett

(8) COMICS SECTION.

A Jane Austen cartoon for @theguardian.com

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-04-27T16:54:02.204Z
  • Tom Gauld also made the English language do tricks.

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-04-28T10:09:15.299Z

(9) JACK KIRBY AT THE MUSEUM. The “Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity | Skirball Cultural Center exhibit opens May 1 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Delve into the six-decade career of legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby (1917–1994). This exhibition goes beyond the page, featuring original comic illustrations, fine art, and commercial art—many on view for the first time—and his experiences as a first-generation Jewish American whose faith remained important throughout his life.

Captain America. The Fantastic Four. The Avengers. OMAC. The X-Men. The Black Panther. Mister Miracle. The Incredible Hulk. The New Gods. These iconic superheroes are among the best-known of the many characters first brought to life by comic book artist Jack Kirby (1917–1994). Over the course of an extraordinary six-decade career, Kirby created some of the most enduring characters and storylines in the history of American comics. Along the way, he expanded the emotional and intellectual horizons of the comic book medium, championed diversity, and helped establish the visual vocabulary of modern popular culture.

Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity traces his experiences as a first-generation Jewish American born to immigrant parents in Manhattan’s storied Lower East Side, a soldier who fought in World War II, a successful commercial artist who worked in marginalized creative industries, a mentor to a generation of younger comic creators, a resident of New York and Los Angeles, and a proud family man whose Jewish faith remained important throughout his life. This exhibition features original comic illustrations alongside Kirby’s other works, many on view for the first time, considering his fine art and commercial art as equally significant and worthy of recognition.

Today, Kirby remains a pivotal figure in American popular culture, and his influence in the worlds of comics, film, animation, graphic design, and pop art is evident more than thirty years after his passing.

(10) TRAILER PARK. Inverse introduces a new Alien trailer with the hook, “46 Years Later, An Iconic Sci-Fi Franchise Just Gave Its Origin Story A Horrific Rewrite”.

…In a new trailer called “Gestation,” we get the inside view of how the xenomorph grows into a facehugger, its first stage after it emerges from its egg. No previous version of Alien has shown this process in such detail, and while the various images of cells dividing and reforming feel very much like the show’s possible opening credits, we’re also seeing how the series is visualizing its defining biological process….

“Alien: Earth Season 1 Teaser | ‘Gestation Complete’”. Coming to FX on Hulu in Summer 2025.

When a mysterious space vessel crash-lands on Earth, a young woman (Sydney Chandler) and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a fateful discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet’s greatest threat in FX’s highly anticipated TV series Alien: Earth from creator Noah Hawley.

(11) CLICK (AND SQUAWK) BAIT. “Google Is Training a New A.I. Model to Decode Dolphin Chatter—and Potentially Talk Back” reports Smithsonian Magazine.

Dolphins are clever communicators. The animals use complex clicks, squawks and whistles to call out to each other, fight and attract a mate. Now, Google says it is developing a large language model (LLM) that can make better sense of those vocalizations—and, maybe, allow humans to talk back.

Over the last 40 years, researchers at the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP) have collected audio and video of a community of Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis) in the Bahamas. The new artificial intelligence model, called DolphinGemma, is trained on that database. It listens to the dolphins’ vocalizations, identifies patterns and predicts what comes next, just as LLMs do with human language.

Using A.I. “could give us the opportunity to see patterns that, from a human perspective, we may not look at,” says Thea Taylor, who manages the Sussex Dolphin Project in England and is not involved with Google’s work, to Melissa Hobson at Scientific American. Relying on the LLM can also speed up the data analysis process, which would take a human more than 100 years by hand.

Researchers with Google, the WDP and Georgia Tech are also working on a device called CHAT, or Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry. The wearable technology will allow researchers to generate dolphin-like sounds made up by A.I. to refer to specific items that dolphins enjoy, like seagrass or sargassum.

A pair of divers wearing the CHAT device will swim alongside a dolphin, “asking for” an object with the made-up sound and passing it back and forth. Then, if a dolphin mimics the sound that corresponds to seagrass, for example, a researcher will reward them by handing it over.

“By demonstrating the system between humans, researchers hope the naturally curious dolphins will learn to mimic the whistles to request these items,” notes a statement from Google. “Eventually, as more of the dolphins’ natural sounds are understood, they can also be added to the system.”

Taylor tells Scientific American that the researchers will need to make sure they aren’t unintentionally training the dolphins. Even if the animals repeat the sound, she says, “we have to think whether that’s actually an understanding of language—or whether it’s the same as teaching a dog to sit because they get a reward.”

(12) WATCH THE WATCH. Last week Neil Armstrong’s Gold Omega Speedmaster sold for US$2,125,000 with RR Auction.

This rare “Tribute to Astronauts” edition (No. 17) is one of just 26 pieces presented to NASA astronauts. It features an engraved caseback commemorating Neil Armstrong’s Gemini 8 and Apollo 11 missions. Personally owned and worn by Armstrong, the watch remains unpolished and in excellent condition and carries the added distinction of being one of the very first gold Speedmaster.

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

Pixel Scroll 6/27/24 Please Polish Pixels With Moon Dust Only. Mars Dust Is Too Granular

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(1) EVERYONE MAKES MONEY BUT THE ARTIST. “He Illustrated the ‘Harry Potter’ Cover for $650. It Just Sold for $1.92 Million” (unlocked). The New York Times asks the artist how he feels about it.

The original cover art for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” sold for $1.92 million at auction on Wednesday, becoming the most expensive item related to the series, decades after its illustrator was paid a commission of just $650.

The watercolor painting, which depicts the young wizard Harry going to Hogwarts from Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station, was part of the private library of an American book collector and surgeon, Dr. Rodney P. Swantko, whose other rare items were auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York this week.

The year before the novel came out in 1997, its publisher, Bloomsbury, hired a 23-year-old from England who had just graduated from art school to design the book jacket, the auction house said. The artist, Thomas Taylor, would go on to establish the world’s conception of Harry Potter, with his iconic round glasses and lightning bolt scar.

“It’s kind of staggering, really,” he said about the sale of his painting in an interview on Thursday. “It’s exciting to see it fought over.”…

(2) LIBICKI Q&A. The Comics Journal interviews “Miriam Libicki on VanCAF, bannings, and political protests”.

The saga of Miriam Libicki and the Vancouver Comic Art Festival began on Friday, May 31, with a message posted to the comic festival’s social media accounts. Libicki is an American-based cartoonist whose best-known works include Jobnik! and Toward a Hot Jew, both of which explore her time as a volunteer soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces after moving to Israel and obtaining dual citizenship in her 20s.

Libicki had, from VanCAF’s inception in 2012 up through 2022, been a fixture at the festival’s tables. But on the 31st, VanCAF announced via an unsigned public message that an unnamed “exhibitor” matching the description of Libicki and her works had received a lifetime ban from exhibiting at the convention. The statement apologized for this individual’s past attendance, on the grounds of “this exhibitor’s prior role in the Israeli military and their subsequent collection of works which recounts their personal position in said military and the illegal occupation of Palestine.”

The post, since removed, was termed an “accountability statement”… 

… Rabiroff: So that takes us into the 2024 festival. Tell me what happened with that. 

Libicki: So in 2024, because they had said apply again next year, the same day that applications were open, I applied with my new book that came out with the Holocaust survivor, David Schafer. And when acceptances were going out, they emailed me and they said, “We cannot offer you a space. Please let us know if you have any questions.” And right away I was like, “Yes, I do have a question. My question is why?” And then they didn’t get back to me for like a week. And then they said, “Well, we made this decision as a board, because there has been an incident, and there’ve been complaints. And also we want people with new work and you don’t have new work.” 

So I got very upset at that because those reasons did not seem valid to me. Because number one, I did have new work. And number two, as far as I know, there was just the one incident, and that was an incident of people who hadn’t read the book. There were no substantive complaints about me, the content of my work, or my conduct at the festival. So it took a long time to get them to really respond. They kind of started to ignore my emails until I said in an email that you need to address this. If I don’t get a response from you, I am going to take actions to hold VanCAF accountable….

(3) ADD THIS HIDDEN GEM TO YOUR TBR. Self-Published Science Fiction Competition’s judging team ScienceFiction.news, led by rcade, reveals: “Our Hidden Gem for SPSFC 3 is Woe to the Victor”.

One of the traditions of the SPSFC is for judging teams to pick their hidden gem, a book that deserved to go further in the contest than it did. For the third SPSFC, which just concluded, our team is choosing Nathan H. Green’s Woe to the Victor as our gem.

Woe to the Victor was one of the two semifinalists selected by our team, but it did not advance to the finals — to our surprise. When we sampled all of the books in our initial allocation, we were high on this novel from the opening chapters.

Green’s a corporate lawyer in Canada putting his aerospace engineering degree to use on hard SF.

His book finds humanity on the eve of total annihilation. An invading fleet of Maaravi has completely wiped out the outer colonies and come to Earth for the finishing strike. This is not a fair fight. There’s nothing cocky or confident left in our protagonists. The fighter pilot Lewis Black knows that at best all he can accomplish is to buy a few extra minutes so that the humans chosen for colony ships might escape through a Vortex Generator and start over on distant planets to prolong the species. But like everyone else, Black lacks belief his mission will succeed….

(4) CON OR BUST WORLDCON GRANTS OFFERED. The Dream Foundry’s Con or Bust is making available grants for Palestinians to attend the Worldcon. Use the application at the link.

Are you a Palestinian or member of the Palestinian diaspora planning to go to Worldcon 2025 in Seattle? Would you be planning to go if you had funding covered? If so, applications for funding are now open. The preferred application window for applications is 27 June 2024 – 21 October 2024. Applicants who apply within this window will be considered together, and hear about their funding amounts in early November. Applications received outside this window will be considered on a first-come-first served basis for as long as funding remains.

We are also still accepting applications for attending the 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow. To apply for either, use the regular Con or Bust Application form and check the box to indicate that you qualify for grants from the Goldman Fund.

(5) NEW HOLE IN THE INTERNET. “Comedy Central, MTV News, CMT, TV Land Online Archives Purged By Paramount Global” reports Deadline.

In an enormous cultural loss reminiscent of the degaussed tapes incidents in the early days of television, Paramount Global has removed the online archives to ComedyCentral.com, TVLand.com, MTVNews.com, and CMT.com from public access.

The move takes away a quarter century or more of online content. It is unclear if the content has been saved for future use.

In a statement, a Paramount Global spokesperson said the takedowns came as part of a broader website strategy across Paramount. “We have introduced more streamlined versions of our sites, driving fans to Paramount+ to watch their favorite shows.”

The writers, editors and videographers on the sites were apparently given no warning of the changes, sparking outrage that their work has now vanished.

…The comedycentral.com website hosted clips from all episodes of The Daily Show since 1999, and bits of Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report, among other content.

A notice on Comedy Central’s website states, “While episodes of most Comedy Central series are no longer available on this website, you can watch Comedy Central through your TV provider. You can also sign up for Paramount+ to watch many seasons of Comedy Central shows.” A similar notice appears on TVLand.com….

The Wrap has more responses: “MTV News Writers Lament Site Shutdown: ‘Infuriating,’ ‘Beyond Depressing’”.

…Reaction was swift and strong: “Infuriating is too small a word,” former MTV News Music Editor Patrick Hosken said on X. He lamented, “Eight years of my life are gone without a trace. All because it didn’t fit some executives’ bottom line.”

Although he noted the existence of the Internet Archive, which has been documenting now-dead sites for decades, he wrote, “This is a huge loss not for just me (obviously) but for the dozens & dozens of hardworking people who built MTV News, who made it THE music news voice through the years.”…

(6) TEDDY HARVIA. The importance of an action figure being accurate increases when the subject is a demon!

(7) DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN. Abigail Nussbaum discusses a “Recent Movie: I Saw the TV Glow” at Asking the Wrong Questions.

…For a certain kind of nerdy, pop culture-obsessed millennial, watching Jane Schoenbrun’s I Watched the TV Glow is an exercise in constant reference-spotting. The suburban setting, down whose late night, empty streets the emotionally-troubled Owen wanders, encountering strange figures and inexplicable occurrences, seems lifted straight out of Donnie Darko. The premise, in which teenagers in the 90s bond over their obsessive love for a quasi-fantastical, quasi-soapy television series that starts to make incursions into their reality, is familiar from Kelly Link’s novella “Magic for Beginners”. And, as any 90s nerd will sense the first time they see Isabel stride across the screen, ready for battle in a purple satin prom dress, the show-within-the-movie is a mirror of that pop culture stalwart, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Other references include The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and The Secret World of Alex Mack.)

The first hour of the movie sometimes feels like a game designed purely for people of my age and pop culture interests, constantly courting a feeling of recognition….

(8) MY LATE DUTCHESS. I recommend Karen Myers Mad Genius Club post “I don’t remember any of this…” about the challenge of reminding readers about series continuity.

One of the features of a long series in a created world is that you have room to build an elaborate and convincing place with a bunch of interesting characters.

One of the drawbacks is that the readers forget it all in each new entry, or are bored by having it explained to them all over again….

(9) TEACH YOUR LITERARY AGENT WELL. American Songwriter’s article about “Neil Young’s Sci-Fi Novel and His Hilarious Response About His Ongoing Project” was published just the other day, however, it relies heavily on a 2018 interview for quotes. But since it was news to me I ran with it…

The multi-talented folk rocker Neil Young’s sci-fi novel has been in the works since around 2017, and his commentary on the ongoing project is just what you’d expect from a musician who has made a career out of being unapologetically original and to the point….

“It’s a f***in’ mess,” Young admitted to Rolling Stone in 2018. “I have an agent in New York working with me on it right now. We’re just finishing it. It’s kind of a sci-fi thing about a guy who gets busted for a crime. He works for a power company, and there’s corruption in the power company, and he wants to expose it. So, he figures out a way to expose it and shuts down the grid a couple of times. He gets busted for doing that, and the cops come and take him out of his office, put him in a van, drug him, and he goes to a hospital somewhere. Then, he wakes up, and he’s on a mission to pay his debt to society. That’s all he cares about.” 

Young elaborates on the more dystopian aspects of Canary, including glasses that broadcast someone’s real-time perspective to an authoritative group miles away and a new energy system that involves developing new animal species. (In typical sci-fi fashion, the animals escape, of course.) “It’s a long story,” Young adds.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

June 27, 1986 — Labyrinth film. Much to my surprise, I had not written up Labyrinth which premiered thirty-eight years ago in the States on this date. 

Just consider to begin with that it was directed by Jim Henson with George Lucas as executive producer. Now consider also that the film was a collaboration between Henson and Brian Froud following a similar undertaking on The Dark Crystal.  

This was in the period when Lucas was taking a hiatus from directing but was credited as executive producer and sometimes story writer for such undertakings as Ewoks: Caravan of Courage, Ewoks: Battle for Endor, Willow, The Land Before Time,  the Young Indiana Jones television prequel series and Howard the Duck to name some genre projects of his. 

This would be the last film that Jim Henson was involved in as he died less than four years later. 

The final principal player here was Brian Froud who had worked with The Dark Crystal four years earlier. If you’ve not seen it, go see it now. Though it was supposed to a children’s film, it was dark enough that the British film ratings board, the British Board of Film Classification, got more than its fair share of complaints about it. Oh those gelfs! 

(Remember we’d later have the four pieces of art by Froud that Charles de Lint, Midori Snyder, Patricia McKillip and Terri Windling were supposed to base entire novels on.)

So we have the principal players, now we need a writer, don’t? How about Terry Jones of Monty Pythons fame, will he do? So he wrote primarily the first draft of a script off Froud’s sketches rather than earlier material that he had.

Well that screenplay didn’t survive contact with the meat grinder of producing a film. We know from later stories written about the making of this film that, at a very minimum, Dennis Lee, George Lucas, Laura Phillips and Elaine May were responsible for the final script. None got credited as only Jones was listed in the end. 

The puppetry for Labyrinth, as it was in Dark Crystal, is the work of Froud. It’s definitely lighter in tone I feel than Dark Crystal was and the puppets here reflect that. The gelfs in Dark Crystal were the stuff nightmares were woven out of. I don’t think there’s really any darkness here at all which is reflected in it being rated a children’s film. Yes, it was, and the British Board of Film Classification at the time received virtually no complaints. 

Henson in news stories noted that Jim Henson’s Creature Shop had been building the puppets and characters required for around a year and a half, prior to shooting, but that it really only came together in the last few months. It was a tremendously complicated undertaking he said. Some of the puppets needed as much as five puppeteers, and the voice work was difficult as it didn’t come out of the mouth but elsewhere. 

Now there was the cast. They needed a fourteen-year-old girl, a properly  English lass. But instead they chose an American why so?  Henson says why in the actual production dairy, so let’s have it explain the decision… 

“Selecting the actress who could play the role of Sarah was one of Henson’s first major decisions. He auditioned hundreds of applicants before selecting JENNIFER CONNELLY. “I wanted a girl who looked and could act that kind of dawn-twilight time between childhood and womanhood,” Henson says. “And Jennifer was perfect. It was even more incredible that she was the same age as Sarah was intended in the script.”

So now let’s consider the Goblin King.  There was no else consider for the as the film dairy says

From the very beginning, director Jim Henson envisioned Bowie as the lead of this major new fantasy film production. “Way back when we first started working on the story, we came up with this idea of a Goblin King,” Henson explains. “And then we thought; ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have music and someone who can sing?’ David was our first choice from the very beginning. And he liked the idea. So the whole thing was really written with him in mind.”

And Bowie was equally enthusiastic 

What attracted Bowie to the role? “Jim gave me the script, which I found very amusing,” he says. “It’s by Terry Jones, of Monty Python, and it has that kind of slightly inane insanity running through it. When I read the script and saw that Jim wanted to put music to it, it just felt as though it could be a really nice, funny thing to do.”

So we’ve got the King, we’ve the girl he’s enamored with, so who else do we need?  Seriously that’s the film’s story. There are three other  human characters — Toby Froud as Toby Williams, Sarah’s half-brother, Shelley Thompson who plays  Irene Williams, Sarah’s stepmother and finally Christopher Malcolm as Robert Williams, Sarah’s father. But the story here is very much just between the Goblin King and Sarah. Or at least that’s my interpretation. )

I like it, I think it’s a lovely story. And no I’ve not watched the new series as I see absolutely no reason to do so. I like my memories unsullied by revisions, by expansions. 

So how did it do? Not well here. Maybe it’s just too British. It did do exceptionally well on its home shores so it made thirty-nine against twenty-four million in production expenses, and has done extremely well in television rights, cassette and now DVD sales, and it’s streaming free right now on Peacock as is the Dark Crystal and The Storyteller. I really, really love that series. That dog seems real. 

Now for those critics  I’d say this review by Joss Winning of the Radio Times sums up the feeling of the vast majority of critics both in Britain and here: “More traditionally structured than Henson’s previous fantasy outing, The Dark Crystal, yet sharing its mysticism-meets-Muppets DNA, Labyrinth is a wholly unique dark fairy tale that enchants from start to finish.”  

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a seventy-seven percent rating, a most excellent one I’d say. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) SHE WAS ALSO A LASFSIAN. [Item by Steven French.] “Who Was ‘Lisa Ben,’ the Woman Behind the U.S.’s First Lesbian Magazine?” is an interesting article in The Smithsonian on Edyth D. Eyde who as “Lisa Ben” published the first lesbian magazine in the US but which makes no mention of the fact that as “Tigrina” she was active in SFF fandom, remaining friends with Forrest J Ackerman for many years (she is featured as The Lesbian Pioneer in Rob Hansen’s Beyond Fandom: Fans, Culture and Politics in the 20th Century, available here.

In the summer of 1947, Edythe Eyde, a secretarial assistant at RKO Pictures in Los Angeles, started covertly publishing a tiny journal she called Vice Versa, subtitled “America’s Gayest Magazine.”

Now recognized as the first lesbian magazine in the United States, Vice Versa appeared at a time when sodomy laws banning “unnatural sexual acts” criminalized same-sex activity across much of the country. To protect her safety and livelihood, Eyde—who later adopted the pen name Lisa Ben, which doubled as an anagram for “lesbian”—published her magazine anonymously….

…The free, rather plain publication featured no bylines, no photos, no ads and no masthead. It had a blue cover and consisted of typed pages stapled together. Eyde passed it around to friends, who then passed the copies on to other friends. She also mailed copies to a small number of people and gave out issues at gay bars. Overall, Vice Versa probably had no more than 100 readers, Faderman says…

(13) DON’T SPILL THAT BLOOD! Gizmodo has been reading the trade papers and learned “Vampire Hunter Van Helsing to Lead CBS’ Latest Crime Show”.

…Deadline reports that CBS’s latest addition to its wild collection of procedural crime shows is Van Helsing. Yes, everyone’s favorite vampire hunter is coming to CBS. This version, however, will be “a contemporary take on the monster hunter Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, who uses his uniquely inquisitive mind working alongside his ex, relentless FBI special agent Mina Harker, to solve New York City’s most harrowing cases.”

Do those “harrowing cases” involve vampires and other monsters? They damn well better! Otherwise, why the heck make a Van Helsing show? Syfy had pretty solid success with the property from 2016 to 2021, after all. And who can forget the 2004 Hugh Jackman movie with Kate Beckinsale—besides everyone, forever and always?…

(14) WHERE TO LOOK FOR THE DAMAGE. Nature says, “Misinformation Might Sway Elections – But Not in the Way That You Think”.

…Although the problem is undoubtedly real, the true impact of misinformation in elections is less clear. Some researchers say the claimed risks to democracy posed by misinformation are overblown. “I think there’s a lot of moral panic, if you will, about misinformation,” says Erik Nisbet, a communications and policy researcher at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. A body of research suggests that it is notoriously difficult to persuade people to change their vote, for example. It’s also far from clear how any one message — true or false — can penetrate amid the media chaos.

Still, as others point out, misinformation does not have to change minds about politics to have an impact. It can, for example, mislead people about when and where to vote, or even whether they should do so at all. Furthermore, just knowing that misinformation is out there — and believing it is influential — is enough for many people to lose faith and trust in robust systems, from science and health care to fair elections.

And even if misinformation affects only small numbers of people, if it drives them to action, then that too can have an amplified impact. “We might not expect widespread effects across the whole population, but it might have some radicalizing effects on tiny groups of people who can do a lot of harm,” says Gregory Eady, a political scientist at the University of Copenhagen, who studies the effects of social media…

(15) DO WE REALLY NEED TO ASK? Marissa Doyle asks “Was Waterloo Necessary?” at Book View Café.

…In 2015 British biographer Andrew Roberts published an enormous and quite readable biography of Napoleon. In it he wonders if the Battle of Waterloo was really necessary. Roberts argues that after returning to France from temporary exile in Elba, Napoleon had changed.

He was now in his mid-forties and beginning to feel his age and the years of hard campaigning, and according to a letter sent to the Allied governments still meeting at the Congress of Vienna, had given up on reconstituting his empire and simply wanted to concentrate on continuing his reforms and modernizations within France. He set about instituting a new constitution which included something approximating a legislature, and started in on further building projects in Paris and reopening several cultural institutions that Louis XVIII had closed during his brief return to the throne….

(16) SF’S FUTURE OF PAST WARFARE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It is said that today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.  Of course, SF is not in the prediction business: it has far more misses than hits. Yet, load a blunderbuss full of a hodgepodge of SFnal concepts and fire it at a barn, and a few will inevitably hit the door. 

And so we come to a recent YouTube post by Grammaticus Books. His 8-minute video notes that despite some stonkingly brilliant novels (Heinlein, Haldeman and even a novel by an author whose name does not begin with an ‘H’) when it comes to warfare prediction many military SF books get it wrong.

However, Grammaticus has found one SF novel that seems to have hit the mark when it comes to the future of warfare: Fred Saberhagen’s series of Berserker Wars (from 1967).  It is a bleak, dark vision with artificial intelligence, drones and even coordinated fleets of A.I. drones on the modern battlefield. Grammaticus says that you could see this in Syria in 2015/6 and now today in Ukraine with individual drones hunting down human soldiers. He envisions that soon we will be seeing autonomous A.I. controlled drones because they can react faster than a human.

However, he comes with a caveat in the form of a 1965 classic novel…

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

Pixel Scroll 6/1/23 Three Little Muad’Dibs From Sand Are We

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(1) FORD PERFECT. Ryan D’Agostino has a tremendously entertaining profile of “Harrison Ford on ‘Indiana Jones,’ ‘Star Wars,’ Career” in Esquire.

….What you don’t know is what happens when they mess up Harrison Ford’s eggs. The plates come, two Farmer’s Breakfasts. Mine’s good: over easy. As Ford cuts into his first poached egg, I’m asking, “So would you say the character of Indiana Jones has some of your own boyhood—”

He lays down his fork and knife. His shoulders droop in defeat.

The egg white is rubbery, the yolk chalky. He looks up at me.

“You couldn’t have been clearer,” I say.

The waiter, seeing a problem, scurries over, eager and recoiling at the same time. Ford just looks up at the poor guy, not with anger but with something worse: disappointment. It’s not a mean look. It’s a look that says, “We can do better, friend.”

The waiter is smiling and trying to speak, and he looks as if he might cry. “Are they . . . not soft?” He slinks away. Ford tries to refocus….

(2) INDY BEGINNING. And if you have Disney+, Slashfilm says these are “The Essential Young Indiana Jones Episodes You Need To Stream On Disney+”.

…Since these revised mini-Indy movies are appearing on Disney+ for the first time, we picked out the six most important episodes you might want to watch as you count down to “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” … though it must be said that every episode is worth your time…

Their list begins with —

My First Adventure

Exactly as the title says, “My First Adventure” is the first adventure of the young Henry Jones, Jr. It begins with a nine-year-old Indy living at Princeton with his parents when his life gets turned upside down when he has to accompany them on a journey around the world. The family heads to Oxford first, where Indy picks up his tutor, Ms. Seymour. They find themselves in Egypt and Indiana Jones helps T.E. Lawrence (yes, the “Lawrence of Arabia”) solve a murder mystery. Then, they travel to Africa, where Indy learns a lot about colonialism, slavery, and languages. It’s a good taste of what the younger side of Indy’s adventures will hold for audiences and an essential introduction to the series.

(3) ANOTHER FIRST FOR EKPEKI. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is the first Black winner of the Asimov’s Science Fiction Readers Award editor Sheila Williams told him today. Part of the reason, she adds, is that they published Octavia Butler’s stories, which won major awards, before the Asimov’s SF Readers Award was created.

(4) IT’S REAL! I’M ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN OF IT! [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Prepare for a barrage of proclamations that this is a real ET message, and the government is just covering things up by pretending it’s a test. Pfffft!

In what may be the first piece of interplanetary performance art, a message crafted by an artist to look like an extra terrestrial broadcast is coming from a Mars orbiter. Now people are trying to decipher it. “The Race Is On to Crack an Artist’s ‘Test’ Signal From Aliens” in WIRED.

For decades, a dedicated international band of researchers has searched the skies in the hopes of finding some sign that humanity is not alone in the universe. They’re engaged in SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. So far, the hunt for an alien signal has turned up only false positives. But that hasn’t stopped anyone from speculating about how people might respond to a real communication attempt. Now, Daniela de Paulis, an artist in residence at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, is simulating just such an alien message to see how humans react and whether they can figure out how to decipher it. 

Her group’s project, A Sign in Space, began last week by transmitting a mysterious radio signal from the Trace Gas Orbiter, a European Space Agency craft that’s orbiting Mars. Participating astronomers at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the Allen Telescope Array in California, and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station in Italy received the signal, removed the telemetry data, and posted the remaining encoded message on the project’s website for anyone to download. Now it’s up to the people of Earth to crack the code, interpret the message, and—de Paulis hopes—make some art. She and her colleagues are leading a series of online workshops to encourage people to discuss the concept of alien communication, including an event she hosted yesterday at which people shared thoughts and artwork inspired by the project so far….

(5) THE MAN FROM GONDOR. A classic fanfic is now available on the ConChord website, The Tenth Nazgul Affair by William Baker Glass, with illustrations by Richard Paul Glass. Barry Gold has made it available in HTML and EPUB formats.

Napoleon and Illya are engaged in a firefight with several T.H.R.U.S.H. agents when Illya is struck by lightning and ends up in Middle Earth. He helps King Elessar Telcontar (aka Strider) fight off Shelob and one extra Nazgul that somehow survived the destruction of the One Ring.

(6) SOMETHING NICE TO SAY ABOUT AI. Rob Hansen says he’s recently begun using A.I. for extrapolated reconstruction of old photos and sent links to work done on pictures of Forties LASFS members. Bill Burns found the online site to do this and produced this enhanced Tigrina image. Then Hansen  followed with Art Joquel and Sam Russell.

Rob adds, “These are extrapolations rather than reconstructions, of course, but I think the results are pretty remarkable. Using A.I. for good; who’da thunk it?”

(7) EARLIEST RAY. Phil Nichols has launched a “Chronological Bradbury!” sequence with the latest episode of his Bradbury 100 podcast.

The idea is to work through Ray Bradbury’s fiction output in the order of publication, discussing each item as we go.

In this first “Chronological Bradbury”, I start right at the beginning, with a discussion of Ray’s earliest published works, which appeared in amateur magazines in 1938.

(8) FUTURE TENSE. The May 2023 entry in the Future Tense Fiction series from Future Tense and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination is Tara Isabella Burton’s “I Know Thy Works”, about an AI designed to compute and uphold our preferred moral systems.

Harry wasn’t a bad person. You just couldn’t take him too seriously, that’s all. Whatever Harry said, whatever Harry did, whatever Harry put down as his meta-ethic, this week, on his Arete profile, be it the ends justify the means or the greatest happiness for the greatest number or do what thou wilt be the whole of the law, Harry never meant a word. Harry changed his meta-ethic more often than he changed his clothes….

It was published along with a response essay “Why it’s so hard to compute ethics” by computer scientist Suren Jayasuriya.

…There’s debate over whether the trolley problem is really the right framing to interrogate ethical choices (specifically whether decisions made in the simulation really reflect what you would choose in real life), and the experiment itself has also been criticized for both its setup and assumptions. But the Moral Machine does provide a fascinating example of an algorithm that observes your ability to make decisions in a handful of tense driving situations, and then spits out a bulleted list of your preferences for saving babies over dogs, and how that compares with the rest of the world (or at least the rest of the people who have taken the test)….

(9) TOOLS FOR FORESIGHT. On Wednesday, June 14 from 12-1 p.m. Eastern, ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination will be hosting a free virtual event, “Reimagining the Future of [X],” exploring how to build collective visions of the future using science fiction and foresight tools.

The event is the fourth and final in the series for the Applied Sci-Fi Project, which seeks to understand the influence of science fiction on technology and the people who build it, and to study the ways that sci-fi storytelling can a tool for innovation and foresight.

We’ll be joined by our opening speaker, science fiction and nonfiction author Annalee Newitz (The Terraformers, Four Lost Cities) and four special guests: sci-fi author and futurist Tobias Buckell (Arctic Rising, “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance”); policy expert, foresight consultant and sci-fi author August Cole (Ghost Fleet, Burn-In); anthropologist Amy Johnson, who researches the use of speculative futures techniques at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center; and Tory Stephens, climate fiction editor at Grist Magazine. The panel will be moderated by CSI’s managing editor Joey Eschrich, who will also share his perspective on CSI’s own “Future of X” book anthologies, contests, and other projects. 

(10) MEMORY LANE.

1998 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Tricia Sullivan is the writer responsible for our Beginning this time. 

A US-born author who moved to the United Kingdom in 1995. Four years later, she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novel Dreaming in Smoke which is where we get this Beginning. To date, it’s her one Award won. 

She writes SF under her own name and fantasy as Valery Leith. She is a very prolific novelist, writing thirteen novels over a period of twenty-two years.

She’s written a double handful of fiction. Interestingly she stopped getting published six years ago. And she stopped updating her blog seven years ago. There’s a story there, isn’t there? 

Dreaming in Smoke is a Meredith Moment at the usual suspects.

So here’s our Beginning…

my man’s gone now

The night Kalypso Deed vowed to stop Dreaming was the same night a four-dimensional snake with a Canadian accent, eleven heads and attitude employed a Diriangen function to rip out all her veins, then swiftly crocheted them into a harp that could only play a medley of Miles Davis tunes transposed (to their detriment) into the key of G. As she contemplated the loss of all blood supply to her vital organs it seemed to her that no amount of Picasso’s Blue, bonus alcohol rations, or access privileges to the penis of Tehar the witch doctor could compensate for having to ride shotgun to Azamat Marcsson on one of his statistical sprees with the AI Ganesh. She intended to tell him so–as soon as she could find her lungs. Ganesh was murmuring through her interface. 

KALYPSO, IT’S GETTING TOO LOOSE AND KINKY IN HERE.

 ‘Did you hear that, Azamat? Keep it off my wave!’ she sent, annoyed at being reduced to verbing. She simply didn’t have the resources to image him, for by now the snake had decomposed into a flight of simian, transgressive bees, which were in the process of liquefying her perception of left and right. Everything seen through her right eye became negative and sideways. The alarming part was that it didn’t seem to make any difference.

Marcsson’s response came back as a series of pyrotechnical arrays, which, loosely translated, meant, ‘Relax. It’s only math.’ 

I DON’T WANT TO BE YOUR ABACUS, said Ganesh. KALYPSO, GET YOUR DOZE UNDER CONTROL OR I WILL. 

The AI had a point. Kalypso mustered her wits and started cutting sensory intake to the Dreamer, feeling a little defensive about Miles Davis. Maybe she shouldn’t have been listening to the jazz Archives; maybe if she’d endured the boredom of monitoring the feeds between Ganesh and Marcsson she could have cut off the sudden explosion of parameters in the Dream the instant it began. But she had been shotgunning Marcsson for a long time, and he had always been safe. Marcsson had been Dreaming since before Kalypso was even born–he knew what he was doing with the AI, which could take data and weave them into Marcsson’s sensory awareness while he floated in a state of semi-conscious, lucid thought. He could immerse himself in literalized math through Dreams that improved a hundred-fold on the raw visions that humanity had experienced in its sleep for eons. He could be secure in his own safety because he had technique.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 1, 1914 — George Sayer. His Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times won a Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inkling Studies and is considered one of the best looks at that author. He also wrote the liner notes for the J. R. R. Tolkien Soundbook, a Cadmeon release of Christopher Tolkien reading from excerpts from The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings. (Died 2005.)
  • Born June 1, 1926 — Andy Griffith. His most notable SFF genre credit is as Harry Broderick on the late Seventies Salvage I which lasted for two short seasons. Actually that was it, other than a one-off on The Bionic Woman. It’s streaming for free on Crackle whatever the Frelling that is. (Died 2012.)
  • Born June 1, 1928 — Janet Grahame Johnstone, and Anne Grahame Johnstone. British twin sisters who were children’s book illustrators best remembered for their prolific artwork and for illustrating Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians. They were always more popular with the public than they were with the critics who consider them twee. (Janet died 1979. Anne died 1988.)
  • Born June 1, 1940 — René Auberjonois. Odo on DS9. He’s shown up on a number of genre productions including Wonder Woman, The Outer Limits, Night Gallery, The Bionic Woman, Batman Forever, King Kong, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Enterprise, Stargate SG-1 and Warehouse 13. He’s lent both his voice and likeness to gaming productions, and has done voice work for the animated Green Lantern and Justice League series. He directed eight episodes of DS9. And he wrote a lot of novels, none of which I’ve read. Has anyone here read any of them? (Died 2019.)
  • Born June 1, 1947 — Jonathan Pryce, 76. I remember him best as the unnamed bureaucrat in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. He’s had a long career in genre works including Brazil, Something Wicked This Way Comes as Mr. Dark himself, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End as Governor Weatherby Swann, The Brothers Grimm, in the G.I. Joe films as the U.S. President and most recently in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote as Don Quixote. 
  • Born June 1, 1950 — Michael McDowell. Screenwriter and novelist whose most well-known work is the screenplay for Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice. He also did work on Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas though he’s not listed as the scriptwriter. He wrote eleven scripts for Tales from the Darkside, more than anyone else. And he wrote a lot of horror which Stephen King likes quite a bit. (Died 1999.)
  • Born June 1, 1965 — Tim Eldred, 58. Author and illustrator of Grease Monkey, a most excellent humorous take on space operas and uplifting species.  As an illustrator alone, he was involved in Daniel Quinn’s superb The Man Who Grew Young
  • Born June 1, 1966 — David Dean Oberhelman. Mike has an appreciation of him here.  The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America: From H.P. Lovecraft to Leslie Marmon Silko which he co-wrote with Amy H. Sturgis was published by The Mythopoeic Press. ISFDB lists just one genre essay by him, “From Iberian to Ibran and Catholic to Quintarian”, printed in Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays on a Modern Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy. (Died 2018.)

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • Poorly Drawn Lines’ Astronaut Bill shows friendship is the best. (And if you go to the link, preceding this date are four or five really great cartoons about various other characters.)

(13) MARRIAGE IS WHAT BRINGS US TOGETHER. Actor Alex Kingston remembers her time on Doctor Who as the Doctor’s enigmatic time-travelling wife in “Alex Kingston on 15 Years of River Song”, a feature in the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine. This excerpt appears at the link.

“I spoke to Steven [Moffat] on the phone and he said, ‘I’ve got this idea and I need to know if you’re available for it, because if you’re not I can’t write this.’ I let him know when I was available and he told me the outline, but I had to swear not to tell anyone. I’m very good at keeping secrets. Matt, Karen and Arthur had guessed I knew something and tried to persuade me to tell them, but I wouldn’t! Even when we had the script for that episode, the reveal wasn’t in it. They kept those pages out so the crew didn’t know. The actors were given the single pages – I’m not even sure when. And even on shooting day, the pages weren’t there and it was only then, at the last minute, that the crew saw the reveal. They managed to keep the secret and avoid any leaks at all. That takes a lot of doing.”

The season climaxed with THE WEDDING OF RIVER SONG (2011), a game-changer that, despite its title, left the status of the relationship between the Doctor and River up to the viewer’s interpretation. “I still get people going, ‘You’re not really married to him because he was a Teselecta!’” Alex laughs, referring to the shape-shifting craft that had taken on the Eleventh Doctor’s form. “I’m like, ‘Thank you very much, I was married to him. I’m his wife!’”

(14) CLIMBING MT. TBR. Lifehacker advises on “How to Actually Read the Books You Buy”. It may be something you already do or it may be news to you. (The actual advice is at the link. Fair is fair.)

…The problem with all of these items is that they are quick to purchase, but take a long time to use. You can add a game to your Steam collection in minutes, but chances are most will take you 20 hours or more to play. (Howlongtobeat.com says Tears of the Kingdom takes 52 hours for the main story alone.)

How many more games will you impulse-buy before you’ve finished that one? How many skeins of yarn will you snap up (they were on sale! And so soft!) before you’ve finished the sweater you’re currently knitting? It’s the same problem as the TBR pile, really. And I promise, there is a solution…

(15) BEFORE 1984. The Guardian reviews “Orwell by DJ Taylor review – a very English socialist”.

…The key to his reading of Orwell is what happened to him in Spain. Though married to Eileen only six months before, he was determined to fight for the Republican cause (“Good chaps, the Spaniards, can’t let them down”) and on his return became far more politically engaged: “at last [I] really believe in Socialism, which I never did before”. But he’d seen bullying and infighting too. For the rest of his life and in his two great novels, this was the war he fought, on behalf of a wholesome, English, sweetly C of E brand of socialism, as opposed to Stalinist totalitarianism….

(16) STRIKES HINDER SCI-FI LONDON. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Sci-Fi-London film fest is now go… But sadly rails strikes made its opening day Wednesday difficult for fans to attend except by bus. Rail strike also on Saturday. Nonetheless hoping to make Sunday’s two sessions of shorts and there’s a free cyber tech exhibition and demonstration there too…. 2023-Hackstock.

(17) JAWS: THE OVERBITE. Check out the WTF! photo of a Goblin Shark at the National Geographic.

Swishing through the deep sea, a goblin shark notices a small, yummy-looking squid. The animal inches toward its prey. But as the fish closes in, the snack starts to dart away. So the shark thrusts its jaw three inches out of its mouth! (The jaw is connected to three-inch-long flaps of skin that can unfold from its snout.) The predator then grabs the squid in its teeth. After scarfing down the meal, the shark fits its jaw back into its mouth and swims off….

(18) TURKISH DELIGHT. “Superman towers over the Kremlin: Reiner Riedler’s best photograph” – see it in the Guardian.

…This photo is part of my Fake Holidays series. At the beginning of the project, more than 15 years ago, I went to Lara Beach in Antalya, Turkey, where there is one luxury five-star hotel after another, all along the coastline. On the other side of the road were the tents of the workers who had built the hotels. Luxury hotels are like little ghettoes. You take your plane and your taxi, then you are in the middle of an isolated luxury area.

The Kremlin Palace hotel, where this photo was taken, has an exact copy of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, Moscow. I have been to Moscow and seen the original church, which is a focal point – all tourists take a picture there. But here in Turkey, there is a swimming pool in front of the cathedral. I was fascinated. There were many Russian tourists.

I saw a weird guy, an astronaut, walking around the pool. “What’s happening here?” I asked. It turned out the hotel had a huge room with costumes for the entertainers who perform for the tourists. Superman was one of them. I found him by the pool and immediately asked to take his picture. I took about three shots. I chose the photo point, in front of the church with the pool between us, then asked Superman to jump. It was a very childish approach, perhaps, but he did it. The way he jumped was perfect. I felt in the moment: “That’s the picture.”…

(19) IT’S A GUSHER. “James Webb telescope: Icy moon Enceladus spews massive water plume” and BBC News has the photos.

…The new super-plume was spied by the James Webb Space Telescope. Previous observations had tracked vapour emissions extending for hundreds of kilometres, but this geyser is on a different scale.

The European Space Agency (Esa) calculated the rate at which the water was gushing out at about 300 litres per second. This would be sufficient to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in just a few hours, Esa said.

Webb was able to map the plume’s properties using its extremely sensitive Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument.

The instrument showed how much of the ejected vapour (about 30%) feeds a fuzzy torus of water co-located with one of Saturn’s famous rings – its so-called E-ring.

“The temperature on the surface of Enceladus is minus 200 degrees Celsius. It’s freezing cold,” commented Prof Catherine Heymans, Astronomer Royal for Scotland.

“But at the core of the moon, we think it’s hot enough to heat up this water. And that’s what’s causing these plumes to come out.

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