(1) CANADIAN’S VIEW OF U.S. TARIFF THREATS. Silvia Moreno-Garcia spotlights the issues writers in Canada and the US are going to face if tariffs between these countries are implemented in “Bookish and world woes” on Patreon.
The threat of tariffs against Canada has made my travel more fraught. Stories about issues with border agents spike my anxiety. I love going to book festivals and conferences and meeting with fans. At this point, I am not cancelling the engagements I committed to last year (which include dates for a book tour that has yet to be publicized), but I am pausing any new travel to the USA. I figure I committed to stuff in 2024 and need to maintain my commitments, but that means I’m not going to make it to Worldcon in Seattle, which I was hoping to visit, as I did not book that trip last year.
Just a couple of days ago the US government blocked Canadians from accessing the front door of the Haskell Free Library in Stanstead, Quebec and Vermont. Built in 1904, this heritage site that serves both American and Canadian patrons is considered a symbol of harmony between both nations. Now, I supposed it’s a symbol of strife.
The situation for writers in both Canada and the US is going to be dire this year. As indicated in a story by Publishers Weekly, cross border tariffs will affect the price of paper. The US imported $1.82 billion of uncoated paper, which is used in books, in 2023, with 67% of that paper coming from Canada. American book manufacturers may not have enough capacity to take over the production of books that are currently printed in China. This may create increases to book costs….
…Meanwhile, in Canada, bookstores and libraries might face a catastrophic scenario if tariffs are applied to books. Many books sold in Canada, including my own, are printed and stored in the USA, then shipped to bookstores across Canada. A 25 percent tariff increase would put many bookstores out of business, and restrict library collection purchases….
… And then, of course, there is the problem of decreased collaboration and exchanges between writers of our countries. If fewer Canadians are traveling to the US because they are afraid to fly there, then we have less face to face exchanges and chances to talk to each other, share knowledge and build communities.
(2) BBC OVERSEAS UPDATE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] OK, a bit of confusion this end – not from me, the BBC Radio 4 news folk themselves are a little uncertain, as to the plans the BBC (a.k.a. ‘auntie’, Beeb and even ‘B Beeb Ceeb’) have for overseas access.
The situation seems to be this. If you are not based in the UK then at some point (they don’t know when) you will no longer have access to BBC Sounds. However, you will be able to use a BBC app to access BBC local radio, BBC Scotland, Radio 4 Plus and a few other services, but this will cost money (a subscription I guess?) You will not be able to access the BBC mainly music radio channels (Radio 1 that has pop music, Radio 2 vintage pop, Radio 3 and its classical music, and Radio 6 Music). This is because the BBC pays for music rights and does not have the right to re-sell these broadcasts. If you are a British subject, then you can download for free an app to your smartphone or lap top in the UK and then take that abroad with you when you go on holiday. I understand Brits will have a month a year allowance for free overseas listening. Nobody from outside Britain will be able to download this app. (Though I suspect if you brought your phone/laptop to the UK you could download it and then get a month of free access back in N. America. This you could consider a free trial to entice you to subscribe properly….?)
My understanding, from the BBC Radio 4 news folk, is that overseas citizens will still be able to listen to BBC Radio 4 live broadcast through the internet and also the Radio 5 Live live broadcast, Radio 4 Extra as well as the BBC World Service. However, I am not sure that you will be able to access Radio 4 programmes once they are aired (only live as they are broadcast). If this last is true then the links I occasionally provide Mike for BBC Radio 4 programmes will not work. We will have to wait and find out.
I guess much depends on how many regular File-ers will pay for the overseas citizens’ BBC app? If many do then it will be worthwhile my still providing links. But I suspect we will have to see how things pan out.
Apparently, the BBC already makes £300 million (about US$366m) from licensing content overseas. This provides added income to that the BBC gets from British subjects paying the licence fee. The licence fee is currently £169.50 (US$207) per household per year (I have just paid mine) that has all household occupants under 75 and not receiving ‘pension credit’ (a government benefit for those with minimal income). Over 75s households on pension credit get a discounted rate (might even be free, I’ve never checked)). The BBC gets roughly £4 billion (US$4.9bn) this way. In addition, there are special TV licence rates for pubs and hotels to show programmes to their patrons (in pubs this is mainly football matches). (‘Football’ by the way is original football and is what you US-folk call ‘soccer’, which I understand from physicist (don’t hold that against him) Sheldon Cooper that some in Texas consider to be a communist plot. (But I wouldn’t know about that, comrade.))
The TV licence gives British households the right to access the BBC by any means (including through the internet), and also FREEVIEW services which includes the BBC and other independent public service broadcasters. (Currently there are about 60 or so FREEVIEW TV channels and an additional score or so duplicates that broadcast with a one-hour time delay, and there are also a score or so radio channels).
I understand that arrangements for BBC World Service will remain unchanged. I am not sure what the score is for the Brit Box television streamer outside Britain or even if it is still going, but then you folk the other side of the Black Atlantic will be more clued up on that. More news when things are firmed up.
(3) BACK IN BUSINESS. Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego reopened on Sunday March 23 they told Facebook readers. They had been forced to close in February for several weeks to repair extensive flooding damage to the store.
(4) HELP IS ON THE WAY. DAW Books has released the cover for Jim C. Hines’ Slayers of Old, which will release on October 21, 2025.
Perfect for fans of cozy mysteries and Buffy, the OG vampire slayer, this humorous standalone fantasy by Jim C. Hines, serves up a fun, funny, and heartwarming story, about second chances, bookshops, and witchery at the Second Life Books and Gifts in Salem, MA where three former Chosen Ones have joined together to spend their retirement in peace and quiet. Until some of the locals start summoning ancient creatures best left where they were . . .
These ex-heroes may have thought they were done, but if they want to finish their retirement in peace, they’ll have to join together to save the world one last time.
(5) A DESTROYER NAMED HEINLEIN. [Item by Tim Kyger.] There’s a letter-writing campaign in progress asking the new Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, to name a future DDG-51 Flight III destroyer for Robert A. Heinlein. See full details at the U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein website.
It is the prerogative of the Secretary of the Navy to name Navy vessels. Navy policy is to name destroyers for deceased members of the Navy. We want the new Secretary of the Navy – John Phelan — to name a future DDG-51 Flight III destroyer for Robert A. Heinlein. This would happen if lots of people write asking him to name a future Arleigh Burke-class destroyer for Heinlein. The U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein.
Phelan’s address is: The Honorable John Phelan Secretary of the Navy Room 4E686 Defense Pentagon Washington, D.C. 20301
What To Do — Write John Phelan; ask him to name a U.S. Navy vessel the U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein. Get as many others as you can to do the same! Spread the information on the Campaign as far and as wide as you possibly can!
(6) HAPPY DAIS. “Kermit the Frog announced as UMD’s 2025 commencement speaker” reports The Diamondback.
Kermit the Frog will be the University of Maryland’s 2025 commencement speaker, according to a university news release on Wednesday.
University alum and renowned puppeteer Jim Henson founded The Muppets, a fictional musical ensemble that includes Kermit, in 1955. Henson performed Kermit from 1955 until he died in 1990.
Kermit appeared on The Muppets Show and Sesame Street and was later in Muppet movies and several television series.
“Nothing could make these feet happier than to speak at [this university],” Kermit said in the release. “I just know the class of 2025 is going to leap into the world and make it a better place.”
Henson graduated from this university in 1960 with a home economics degree, according to Wednesday’s news release. Henson also attended Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, his website said….
… “I am thrilled that our graduates and their families will experience the optimism and insight of the world-renowned Kermit the Frog at such a meaningful time in their lives,” university president Darryll Pines said in Wednesday’s news release. “Our pride in Jim Henson knows no bounds, and it is an honor to welcome Kermit the Frog to our campus.”
American puppeteer Matt Vogel has most recently performed as Kermit since 2017.
The 2025 commencement ceremony on May 21 at 6 p.m. in SECU Stadium will celebrate summer 2024, winter 2024 and spring 2025 graduates, the news release said….
(7) OCTOTHORPE. Octothorpe 131 is here! “We’re Performance Before We’re Interest”. John Coxon is moderating, Alison Scott is auctioning, and Liz Batty is lecturing. An uncorrected transcript of the episode is available here.
We discuss the Seattle Worldcon, the upcoming Belfast Eastercon, the BSFA Awards, and then we talk about the fan funds and handwriting. Also, John actually had a pick in advance this episode.
(8) HUNGER GAMES PREQUEL SELLS MILLION-PLUS. Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins’ new Hunger Games prequel, sold 1.5 million English-language units across all formats in its first week, with US sales exceeding 1.2 million units reports publisher Scholastic. Two-thirds of these were hardcovers.
Sunrise on the Reaping has sold twice as many copies its first week on sale domestically as The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in 2019 and three times as many copies as Mockingjay in 2010.
Elie Berger, evp, president, Scholastic Trade, said, “After nearly a year of anticipation, sales for Sunrise on the Reaping have exceeded all expectations, as has the overwhelmingly positive critical and fan response to the book across the world.”
(9) CLIVE REVILL (1930-2025). The original voice of Emperor Palpatine, actor Clive Revill, died March 11 says The Hollywood Reporter: “Clive Revill Dead: Emperor Palpatine in ‘Empire Strikes Back’ Was 94”. He also appeared in many other films and TV shows of genre interest.
Clive Revill, the New Zealand native who after being recruited to be an actor by Laurence Olivier starred on Broadway, appeared in two films for Billy Wilder and provided the original voice of the evil Emperor Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back, has died. He was 94.
Revill died March 11 at a care facility in Sherman Oaks after a battle with dementia, his daughter, Kate Revill, told The Hollywood Reporter.
The extremely versatile Revill played cops in Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), starring Olivier, and Jack Smight’s Kaleidoscope (1966), starring Warren Beatty; not one but two characters (a Scotsman and an Arab) in Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966); and a physicist investigating strange goings-on at a haunted mansion in John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973), starring Roddy McDowall.
…. For Wilder, he portrayed a man representing a Russian ballerina in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) — his character is led to believe that Holmes (Robert Stephens) and Dr. Watson (Colin Blakely) are gay — and the besieged hotel manager Carlo in Avanti! (1972), which earned him a Golden Globe nom….
…For Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back (1980), director Irvin Kershner called upon Revill — the two had worked together on the 1966 film A Fine Madness — to record a couple of menacing lines in a Wilshire Boulevard studio in Los Angeles.
They would be used in the pivotal scene in which Darth Vader (James Earl Jones) communicates with the emperor (as a holographic projection).
Revill’s voice would be replaced on the 2004 DVD release of the film by Ian McDiarmid’s, who went on to play the character in Return of the Jedi (1983) and the franchise’s three prequels — but he had his fans nonetheless.
“They come up to me, and I tell them to get close and shut their eyes,” he said in a 2015 interview. “Then I say [in the emperor’s haunting voice], ‘There is a great disturbance in the Force.’ People turn white, and one nearly fainted!”
…He could play all manner of ethnicities, and his big-screen body of work included The Double Man (1967), Fathom (1967), The Assassination Bureau (1969), A Severed Head (1970), The Black Windmill (1974), One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975), Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) and The Queen of Spain (2016).
Revill portrayed an Irishman in 1978 on Peter Falk’s last episode of the original Columbo series and showed up on everything from Maude, Hart to Hart, Dynasty, Remington Steele, Murder, She Wrote and Babylon 5 to Magnum, P.I., Newhart, MacGyver, Dear John, The Fall Guy and Star Trek: The Next Generation….
(10) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Quantum Leap series (1989)
By Paul Weimer.
[Editor’s note: Spoiler warning for end of original series.]
Dr. Sam Beckett, theorizing one could time travel within their own lifetime, stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator, and vanished.
So began Quantum Leap, one of the iconic SF shows of the late 80’s and early 90’s. With excellent chemistry between Scott Bakula as Beckett and Dean Stockwell as Al, the show got to explore recent American History by mostly telling the small stories, stories of individual people, not usually famous ones, and changing the world for the better. (It seems interesting to me that Beckett has problems when he tries to change big events in history (the Lee Harvey Oswald episodes really show this in spades) but his goal is to make small changes in the timeline to make the world better. It became clear to me somewhere along the line that the timeline of the Quantum Leap show wasn’t our own, but that the changes were aligning it with our own reality. The idea of our world being the best of all possible worlds is one that had a lot more plausibility then, than it does now, I am afraid.
With a few exceptions to show his own range, this really is a masterpiece of a Bakula vehicle, playing basically the same character every week–and yet not, having to inhabit a new character every week in his ceaseless efforts. While I at first always wanted more allohistorical content (like, say, Voyagers), the show wasn’t for that. The show was about the small changes, the small moves, to make things better.
I still don’t quite understand the last episode. Was the bartender God? Could Beckett ever return home whenever he wanted? Was he always really on a mission from God? I don’t know. I suppose with a series like this, one shouldn’t even try to find definitive answers, and when you get them they are unsatisfactory at best.
I was amused, years later, during Enterprise, when Bakula, as Captain Archer, encounters an alien played by Dean Stockwell. They do NOT get along together at all. That was a neat tip of the hat to Quantum Leap.
I have not seen the two-season remake.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
- Brewster Rockit finds spring cleaning universal.
- Close to Home reveals the true test of psi power.
- Dinosaur Comics discusses Sherlockian deductions.
- F Minus is about to meet the family.
- Ink Pen knows a good team name is important.
(12) NASA ERASURE. “NASA Deletes Comic Book About How Women Can Be Astronauts” reports Futurism.
NASA has deleted two comic books about women astronauts from all its websites, NASA Watch reports, in what appears to be the latest victim of the Trump’s administration’s purge of “DEI” content from federal agencies.
The online comics, titled “First Woman: NASA’s Promise for Humanity,” and “First Woman: Expanding Our Universe,” tell the stories of young women training to become astronauts, in anticipation of NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions, which had been set to see the first female astronaut to set foot on the lunar surface. Oh, except that promise has been dropped, too….
(13) CENTRALIZING POWER. Joachim Boaz takes a timely look at “Science Fiction in Dialogue with The Great Depression: Frank K. Kelly’s ‘Famine on Mars’ (1934)” at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.
… Kelly renders a hyperviolent microcosm of Great Depression-drenched despair within an adventure story package. Its protagonists might attack each other with bizarre and futuristic physical and chemical weapons in a transparent space station but the real focus is on the fate of “million dark faces convulsed by the same agony and torn by the same unspent desire” for a drop to drink on the surface of Mars” (79).
The Lay of the Generic Landscape
Frank K. Kelly (1914-2010) lived a varied life. He was born in 1914 in Kansas City, MO. When he was sixteen, he published his first science fiction story–“The Light Bender” (1931)–in Wonder Stories (June 1931). Of his ten published short fictions between 1931-1935, the first six appeared in Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, which at the time was overseen by managing editor David Lasser (1902-1996). Due to his efforts to “bring some realism to their fiction,.” Lasser is considered a “much neglected revolutionary in science fiction” and under his tutelage the genre “started to mature.” Ashley describes Kelly as “the best exponent of this hard realism” and while his earliest stories might have lacked polish they made up for it in their bleak depiction of life in space….
… Simultaneously drawing on the rise of fascism in Europe, Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” creates an even more draconian governmental manifestation. Earth’s government, The Combine, acts as a genocidal and malevolent political entity that brainwashes its inhabitants in the name of “the brotherhood of man” (79). His use of “combine” evokes two interrelated images of monolithic and mechanical power: new 1920s harvesters pulled by tractors instead of mules and a combination of both political and economic powers. Like a new-fangled tractor-driven thresher, the Combine mechanizes society diminishing its human concerns. Kelly suggests the working class in this future receive numerical names while political elite received standard nomenclature….
(14) SOUTHERN FANDOM CONFEDERATION NEWS. Randy B. Cleary announced that the March 2025 issue of the SFC Bulletin can be downloaded here [PDF file].
(15) TIME IS NOT ON OUR SIDE. Lorna Wallace considers “Five Stories Exploring the Pitfalls of Time Travel” at Reactor.
If Marty McFly has taught us anything, it’s that messing with the past can lead to some pretty serious and harmful consequences in the future, but there are some time travel stories where the sci-fi concept is fairly harmless. In Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold (2015), for instance, the focus is on healing personal relationships, rather than causing problems with the established timeline. Then there are the many wonderful time travel romances, where the stakes are also often limited to the individual level (more “will falling in love free me from this time loop?” and less “will the entire universe collapse in on itself?”).
But let’s consider the time travel stories that explore the various ways in which time travel can go very wrong and/or be incredibly dangerous—think people being trapped in deadly situations and whole timelines being erased or irrevocably changed. Here are five such stories….
One of them is —
“Through the Flash” (2018) by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
There’s been plenty of debate over how long Phil is trapped in his time loop in Groundhog Day (1993); most estimates fall somewhere within the 10 to 40 year range. This is enough time for Phil to be driven to desperate measures, attempting to end it all via various painful methods out of despair. But imagine being just 14 years old when you became trapped in a time loop… and then imagine it going on and on forever.
That’s the situation that Ama finds herself in, but she isn’t alone in the loop, with the rest of the residents in her neighborhood also being subjected to the same strange timey-wimey phenomenon. At the end of each day a nuclear explosion—known as the Flash—wipes everyone out and the day resets. You might think that having other people to share in the hellish experience would ease the mental burden, but the characters in “Through the Flash” are there to prove you wrong. And yet, for all of the external violence and internal strife in the short story, it ends on a relatively hopeful note.
[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Joachim Boaz, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat “First Edition” Eldridge.]