That is, of course, the real name of “James Tiptree, Jr.” I can’t recall seeing Sheldon’s name standing alone before. Even the linked article, about this weekend’s Tiptree symposium at the University of Oregon in Eugene, identifies the writer by both her pseudonym and real name.
Yet SF Signal’s usage of “Sheldon” is not a mistake. And it made me begin to wonder if someday in the future scholars and fans will routinely use Sheldon’s name by itself?
I ran the question past Jeanne Gomoll, long associated with the Tiptree Award as a member of its Motherboard.
Jeanne Gomoll: I will leave for Eugene tomorrow morning and am looking forward to the Symposium … but I think it’s going to feel more like an academic conference than a con to fans. On the other hand, it may also feel a little strange to the academics, especially when the Tiptree Motherboard opens the party Friday night.
At the conference, I expect people to use both Tiptree’s and Sheldon’s names. I tend to use “James Tiptree, Jr” when speaking of her stories and about the public author. But I use “Alice Sheldon” when speaking about the private person and her relationships with people who knew her true identity. It’s complicated, especially when you include her other pseudonym, “Raccoona Sheldon,” but that very complexity is what makes her work so interesting and so appropriate for the award that was named after her. I don’t ever expect “Tiptree” to replaced by “Sheldon” — she will remain ineluctably BOTH female and masculine.
The James Tiptree, Jr. Symposium (December 4-5) celebrates the acquisition of the James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon) literary papers by the University of Oregon’s Special Collections and University Archives. The archive also holds the Ursula K. Le Guin Papers, the Joanna Russ Papers, the Sally Miller Gearhart Papers, and the Suzette Haden Elgin Papers.
The keynote talk will be given by Julie Phillips, author of the biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon. There will be a panel discussion with other writers who corresponded with Tiptree, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas and David Gerrold. A panel about the Tiptree Award will be held on Saturday afternoon.
An exhibit based on the Tiptree Papers and featuring the Tiptree Quilt will be in Knight Library.
The Tiptree Quilt is based on James Tiptree, Jr.’s science fiction novel, Brightness Falls from the Air, which tells the story of humans and aliens who witness the spectacular passing of a fiery wave-front, and the incineration of the planet Damien, caused by the nova of The Murdered Star. 1,248 squares of fabric were used to construct this 100-[inch] x 121-[inch] textile painting of this fantastic scene. Except for two small pieces, the swirling image is constructed with only straight-cut pieces. If you look closely you can see female signs in the planet below. Work spanned ten years and the combined effort of 65 people from around the world, many of whom had never quilted before. Elspeth Krisor directed and coordinated work on the quilt; Jeanne Gomoll and Tracy Benton designed it.
After visiting London for Jeanne Gomoll’s guest of honor appearance at the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention, the Quilt has been donated to the feminist science fiction archive at the University of Oregon at Eugene.
I have been the Museum’s acquisition archivist for almost 26 years, and during that time over 3,200 archival collections have been entrusted to us. Most of these materials have been personally delivered or shipped, but it has sometimes been necessary for me to travel to obtain a collection, whether to California, New York, or South Dakota. Sri Lanka has certainly been the furthest I’ve travelled for a collection.
What emerges from a first review of his papers is a deeply thoughtful man shaped by and creatively responding to his time—with World War II and the first decades of the Cold War as critically formative. From his early 20s through the rest of life he possessed a remarkably consistent vision and purpose of what was important to him: to make sense of a world experiencing tremendous advances in science and technology, the result of which, in his view, augured potentially radical changes in the fabric of social and cultural life. In the years after the war, this dynamic seemed especially insistent, making the idea and reality of the “future” a critical problem in need of understanding. Through his career, this challenge led Clarke to advance his three laws of prediction (easily found via an internet search), an attempt to make serious the future as a shared, collective human concern but do so with a light touch.
From this vantage, Clarke’s interest in science fiction, as is evident throughout his papers, was not merely incidental but central: It was his essential tool, perhaps the best one, for sorting through and understanding this condition and educating readers about the time in which they were living.
(2) In a podcast for Creature Features, Walter Murch, writer and director of Return to Oz, “discusses the long genesis of the 1985 fantasy film, how personal a project it was for him, how tumultuous it became at times, and how happy he is with it after 30 years.”
I also ran off the program — about 250 copies of a single page, as I recall — for Dave Kaler’s NY Comic Convention, held in 1965 at the Hotel Broadway Central (an impressive pile in Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie”) on my Ditto machine.
(5) The University of Oregon Libraries will celebrate the acquisition of the James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon) literary papers with a two-day symposium at the Eugene, Oregon campus on December 4-5, 2015.
The acquisition of the Tiptree Papers enriches Special Collections and University Archives’ growing collection of feminist science fiction manuscript collections, which include the Ursula K. Le Guin Papers, the Joanna Russ Papers, the Sally Miller Gearhart Papers, and the Suzette Haden Elgin Papers.
The symposium will kick off with a keynote talk by Julie Phillips, author of the biography: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon (St. Martins, 2006), and will also feature a panel discussion with other writers who carried on lively and engaging correspondence with Tiptree, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas and David Gerrold.
SUVUDU: Updraft has some of the most original worldbuilding I’ve ever come across – could you tell us a little bit about your process for creating the details of this city built out of bone towers and its residents?
FRAN WILDE: That’s wonderful to hear! The city of bone towers was born late one night at a writing workshop following many cups of coffee. I realized that I wanted to write a story set in a living city with a focus on engineering and flight. (I wasn’t drinking Red Bull, I swear.)
What emerged from that writing session was a short story that had elements of Milton’s Paradise Lost, The Codex Seraphinianus, China Mieville’s short stories about living cities in Looking for Jake, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities as ancestors. The story contained the man-made wings, bridges, and bone towers that exist today, but the characters and conflict were different. After reading it, Gordon Van Gelder of Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine wrote me to suggest I look at other high-altitude megastructure stories like Steven Gould’s “Peaches for Mad Molly” and K.W. Jeter’s Farewell Horizontal as well.
So my process from the first draft involved a lot of reading. In the end, when the short story had grown into a novel, and the very spare sketch of bone towers and wings had grown into a world, the process also involved getting into a wind tunnel to go indoor skydiving, and talking to cloud and weather experts about wind shear near steep, high-altitude objects, and to biologists about bone growth. I also researched scarcity societies, high-altitude food production, and cephalopods, among other things.
Le Guin’s peculiar gift, though, is to make the ordinary feel as important as the epic: mundane questions about who’s cutting firewood or doing the dishes share space with rune books and miscast spells. Her Earthsea has less in common with Narnia, Hogwarts, and Percy Jackson’s Camp Half-Blood than it does with medieval romances and Icelandic sagas, where dragons and death keep company with fishing yarns, goat-herding woes, and village quarrels.
JP: And has it always been clear to you which category your books fall into?
UL: Oh no. When I started it was all mushed up together! My first three novels are kind of science fantasy. Rocannon’s World (1966) is full of Norse myth barely disguised. But I began to realize there was a real difference between these two ways of using the imagination. So I wrote Earthsea and Left Hand of Darkness. From then on I was following two paths.
In Left Hand of Darkness I was using science fiction to come at a problem that I realized was very deep in me and everybody else: what is gender? What gender am I? A question we just hadn’t been asking. Look at all the answers that are coming out now. We have really deconstructed it. We really didn’t even have the word “gender” back then. Just, “What sex are you?” So in some respects we really have come a long way, and in a good direction, I think.
(8) Gregory N. Hullender says, “No one seems to have commented on it yet, but I think the December 2015 Analog is unusually strong. After a really weak year, maybe they’re getting their act together.” He has more to say on Reddit.
They decided to collaborate on ‘Imaginary Fred’ due to a chance meeting in New Zealand.
“We were there for the Auckland book festival and we met up at a story slam competition,” Mr Colfer said.
“We were giggling like schoolboys at each other’s stories, and at the end of the night we said let’s do something together.”
‘Imaginary Fred’ tells the story of Fred, who becomes the imaginary friend of Sam, a boy in need of company.
The two embark on a series of adventures together, but when Sam meets Sammi, a girl with an imaginary friend of her own, Fred has to move on from Sam.
The story, unusually, is told from Imaginary Fred’s point of view.
“I like to do that with my books,” said Mr Colfer.
“To take what is often a secondary character and make them the main character because they’re a lot more interesting to me.”
(10) An event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Marion E. Wade Center on October 29 at 7 pm Central time will be livestreamed. The Wade is a focal point of Inklings scholarship. Featured speakers will include the Wade’s former director, Dr. Lyle W. Dorsett, poet Luci Shaw, and Dr. Leland Ryken, who is currently at work on a book length history of the Wade Center. The dedication of the new Bakke Auditorium will be part of this special evening. Watch the proceedings online via WETN.
Join us as we celebrate our newest Artist on the Stairwell! Illustrator George Cwirko-Godycki presents a limited edition poster show inspired by the works of Ray Bradbury. The show is the first in Vroman’s Artists on Authors series in the stairwell where visionary artists interpret the works of renowned authors. The first 25 attendees will receive a signed catalog of the exhibition that details the process of creating this unique show from start to finish. George is based in San Francisco where he provides concept illustration for the entertainment industry and teaches figure drawing at the Academy of Art University.
Ultimately, the neatest feature at Pathmark for a youngster may have been a huge paperback section featuring an amazing array of bestsellers and non-fiction books. Pathmark was where I bought some of my very first books on the history of movies, including, in my monster-loving youth, a biography of Boris Karloff!
From its inception in Franklin Square, Pathmark had tried to be unique. At the back of the store was a section invoking the classic Horn and Hardart cafeterias in Manhattan, famous for all the food, sandwiches and cakes and the like, being offered through slots in the wall protected by a glass cover. If you put coins in the apparatus, you could lift the cover and take your treat. Horn and Hardart was famous for the quality of its offerings, and for being a very affordable place for any New Yorker to put together a decent meal. More than one location also became known as a writers’ hangout, with some of the best-known reporters and talent of the era sitting for a long while, sipping their coffee, and enjoying the conversation.
Beginning in the 1970s, Pathmark also had a long running series of television commercials, starring James Karen. Most of us probably presumed he was a Pathmark executive, until he also began popping up as an actor in horror movies like “Poltergeist” and “The Return of the Living Dead.”
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but, when it comes to the best old-time radio horror, each word is worth a thousand pictures.
By using voices, sound effects, and snippets of music, masters of radio terror turned what could’ve been a disadvantage of the medium—we can’t see what’s happening—into their greatest asset.
Radio writers and actors spawned monsters that the technology of the time couldn’t have realistically portrayed on film. They suggested depravity and gore that screen censorship would’ve banned. And they could manipulate the imagination so that listeners themselves collaborated in the summoning of their worst fears.
In case you can’t tell, I adore old-time ratio (OTR) horror. After countless hours poring over archives of old shows, I’ve selected 31 bloodcurdling episodes, from 1934 all the way up to 1979, for your pleasure.
Millions of Star Wars fans may have eagerly devoured the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, due out on December 18, but William Shatner—captain of the starship Enterprise and star of the original Star Trek series—wasn’t among them. “To me there isn’t a controversy,” the actor tells Newsweek. “Star Trek is far superior to Star Wars.”
Fans of The Big BangTheory and Star Trek can rejoice because an upcoming episode the geektastic TV sitcom will feature a guest appearance from the son of Mr. Spock himself, Adam Nimoy! Plus, we have an exclusive first look at the episode, which airs on Thurs., Nov. 5 at 8/7! In “The Spock Resonance,” recurring guest star Wil Wheaton will appear alongside Adam, an accomplished writer and director in real life, who asks Sheldon Cooper to be in a documentary about his beloved father, Leonard.
The final progress report from World Fantasy was emailed to members this evening. It included the harassment policy, which is legalistic and is essentially useless. For posterity, here it is…
[Thanks to Bill Menker, Michael J. Walsh, Andrew Porter, Bill Burns, James H. Burns, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
Orange Mike Lowrey. Photo credit: Kat Tanaka Okopnik.
During the Tiptree Award fundraising auction last night at WisCon 39 they passed the hat and sold to the audience assembled the right to decide whether Orange Mike Lowrey’s beard (in its 25th year) and long hair (“‘flying my freak flag’ since the Carter Administration”) should be “Saved” or “Shaved.” The vote was heavily for “Shaved.”
“But we collected $543.69 for the Tiptree fund,” says Lowrey, “so, it was worth it.”
And he assures everyone, “Yes, I’d gotten prior permission from Cicatrice (my wife) and Kelly (our daughter).”
aka “How Well I Remember the Days Before Puppies Were All the Rage” – James H. Burns
If you’re very new to File 770 this may be the first time you’ve seen Snapshots, the zine-within-a-zine.
In honor of the 150th edition, here are 35 developments of interest to fans.
(1) Even Kimball Kinnison’s swearing “By Klono’s brazen balls!” may be a leetle too strong in these refined times. What kind of cursing remains fashionable? Matthew Bowman tells all in “Frakking Goram Smegger! (Swearing in Fiction)” at Novel Ninja.
While swearing serves an important function in real life, at least for the person doing the swearing, it doesn’t have the same effect on other people. It winds up being a great stress relief for the speaker, but over time there’s a diminishing return in terms of effectiveness, leading to people using it more and more to get the same effect. To the people around the speaker, though, all they get is the “more and more.”
The use of swearing in fiction has the same problem. There are really only two uses, and the audience only experiences the second use: shock value. Shock too much, and there’s no value to it. On the face of it, you might want to avoid swearing.
Well, no. Not entirely.
(2) With the Anagrammer I can turn my own name into a colorful curse. Like, “Ye Chiller Mag!” Or, “Rimly Geek!”
Spotted at New York Toy Fair 2015: This talking George R.R. Martin doll from Factory Entertainment, which the Game of Thrones creator himself recorded dialogue for. One of the ten things he says is “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.” One of the things he doesn’t say, I assume, is “f*ck you.”
There’s not the slightest doubt if there was a Harlan Ellison doll it would.
(4) On May the Fourth many ballparks honor the little movie franchise that’s been around for four decades. At Fenway Park, Darth Vader showed up and inexplicably agreed to do an interview.
And not in our video/panel rooms. Find a bed or the floor of someone’s hotel room. At least a few hours. Please? Conventions are exhausting enough without trying to operate without sleep.
And it seems as time goes by fewer of the embedded anime gifs work for me – here’s hoping you have better luck.
As spotted by Quartz, a ‘Live Long and Prosper’ hand symbol emoji has been found in the test versions of both Apple’s OS X and iOS Mac and iPhone/iPad software, which should be released sometime later this year. Apple has yet to confirm that all the new emojis in its beta software will be in the upcoming official releases. Among them are the much-awaited multi-ethnic smileys and figures.
With Apple’s new emoji picker, you should be able to send the Live Long and Prosper salute in different skin shades once it hits devices. You can visit Emojipedia.org to see what all the versions look like.
The Vulcan Salute was introduced to the Unicode system last June, and like any other symbol available in the universal emoji consortium, it’s now just waiting for software-makers to build it into their operating systems and keyboards, which Apple certainly looks to be doing.
The project is aimed at celebrating the 50th anniversary of “Star Trek,” which aired for the first time on Sept. 8, 1966. Zachary Quinto, who portrayed the Spock character in last two “Star Trek” films, will narrate the documentary.
(8) It’s not that I’m breathlessly awaiting Sharknado 3, I just think we’re all thrilled to take a break from science fiction’s relentless parade of kerfuffles. So as a public service I am informing you that David Hasselhoff has been cast in the film despite a bum knee.
Needless to say, The Hoff has been quite busy, and in the midst of his crazy schedule Hasselhoff says he had to get “some knee work done.”
The injury even affected his role in “Sharkando 3,” the third installment in the hit Syfy franchise, co-starring Ian Ziering and Tara Reid. In the upcoming TV movie — called Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!” — Hasselhoff plays Gilbert Sheperd, the dad of Ziering’s character, Fin Shepard. You can expect to see a lot of Hasselhoff in the film; it’s not just a cameo, he says.
“I hobbled through them [my scenes],” said Hasselhoff. “You’ll see me hobbling through ‘Sharknado 3’ because I said, ‘My character now has a limp!’ I wrote it in — that I jumped on a grenade during Vietnam and saved the entire platoon except for one person. I thought that was a funny line to put in and they allowed me to put it in.”
The folks at Original Content London are hot to trot, thanks to their latest invention, the Trotify. For about $32 USD, the flat-packed laser-cut wooden contraption fits on the front brake mount of your bike and with a little assembly, a coconut, and a sense of humor, can create the sound of a trotting horse as you pedal. Able to amuse or confuse those with very poor eyesight, the Trotify is a great gift for those cycling nuts who have every accessory on the market or for those who are a little too short on cash to become real equestrians.
Warning – you can’t actually buy this from the vendor linked in the article, even though they have been trying to market the concept since 2012.
Though I seldom long for my native culture when abroad, when the need for a hit of Americana does arise (and I say this currently writing from Seoul, South Korea), I fill my iPod with old time radio. Many shows from America’s “Golden Age” of wireless broadcasting can fill this need, but one could do much worse than Dimension X, the early-1950s science-fiction program we featured earlier this month, or its late-1950s successor X Minus One, whose episodes you can also find at the Internet Archive. Both showcase American culture at its mid-20th-century finest: forward-looking, temperamentally bold, technologically adept, and saturated with earnestness but for the occasional surprisingly knowing irony or bleak edge of darkness. That last comes courtesy of these shows’ writing talent, a group which includes such canonical names as Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein.
There’s an old trick in psychology. If you’ve experienced trauma, do something new that has no relation to the context of said trauma. You generate new memories for your brain to chew on. Improv fit that pistol, and was life-saving. In writing, I abandoned the dead god of novels and moved to comic book scripts. I love comics, but had never attempted them because . . . if you think making money with novels is tough, it’s Shangri La compared to becoming a “professional” comic book writer. But I didn’t care about money, or a career. I had now stabilized my income to a degree where I felt comfortable easing off the gears of work and spending some time writing. I learned comic script format for fun. I found artists to work with, which was fun. And I failed all over the place as I learned the art, the business, and the challenge of working with artists. Some of this sucked bunnies, but I didn’t care. So long as I learned and got better, I enjoyed the challenge.
(14) Beware offering advice. Jim C. Hines offers breakdown of the topic in “The Advice Checklist”.
Are you more concerned with helping or with fixing the person so they’ll stop making you uncomfortable?
Hint: People talk about their problems for a range of reasons. To vent, to process their own feelings, to connect with others and know they’re not alone… If you genuinely want to help, great—but in many cases, giving advice isn’t the way to do that.
(15) Thanks to YouTube, people don’t have to be old enough to have seen commercials like “Cheerios, the ‘Terribly Adult Cereal’ w/Stan Freberg” – they can click and experience that bit of pop culture history immediately.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, the age of robotic graffiti was born. KATSU, a well-known graffiti artist and vandal, used a hacked Phantom drone to paint a giant red scribble across Kendall Jenner’s face on one of New York City’s largest and most viewed billboards. By all accounts, it is the first time that a drone has been deployed for a major act of public vandalism.
(17) Pat Cadigan was scheduled to speak about cancer – instead, she has to fight it.
It took me a long time to be taken seriously as a writer, and to be seen as the writer I was trying to be––i.e., a hard science-fiction writer. A few years ago, Greg Benford turned to me in the course of a conversation and said, “Pat, you’re a hard science fiction writer…” I can’t remember the rest of the question, just Greg calling me a hard science fiction writer. I figure Greg would know the difference. So I got bonafides.
That’s what cyberpunk always was to me––hard science fiction, taken out of a wish-fulfilment setting where everything would be all right if we could just develop the right technology, and re-imagined in the real world, where things could go wrong and people could get hurt.
And so it goes. I should have been at USC talking about what was, what is, and maybe what’s coming, but things went wrong and I got cancer.
Actually, now that I’ve written it out, it’s kinda funny. I can see why our plans make God laugh. She’s got a wicked sense of humour. But then, I do, too.
More than 6,000 students at a Turkish university have signed a petition calling for a Jedi Temple on campus “to bring balance to the Force.”
The Change.org petition, which had more than 6,000 signatures Thursday, was created by students at Dokuz Eylul University amid controversy stemming from an announcement last month from Istanbul Technical University rector Mehmet Karaca that his school would be getting a “landmark mosque” after a petition calling for a mosque on campus received nearly 200,000 signatures.
The ITU announcement also led students at that school to start a petition to found a Buddhist temple on campus, a request with more than 20,000 signatures.
Every college archive has a mass of material awaiting sorting and cataloguing, much donated by former college members, and Keble is no exception. Leonard Rice-Oxley went up to Keble to study history in 1911, and became the college’s tutor in English in 1921. After graduating from Keble in 1915, Rice-Oxley had served as 2nd Lieutenant in the London Irish Rifles, before being promoted to Lieutenant, and posted to serve on the staff of No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion in 1917. During this time, Rice-Oxley produced a booklet Oxford in arms: with an account of Keble College, intended for the use of officer cadets stationed at Keble. A copy of this booklet was contained in the material given to the college archives by Rice-Oxley, along with an album of photographs.
Not long after her arrival at Keble, the new Archivist & Records Manager (Eleanor Fleetham) was asked by the College Librarian (Yvonne Murphy) to organize an exhibition of material from the Archives to commemorate Keble’s contribution to the First World War. One of the items on display was Rice-Oxley’s photo album, which contained a photograph of “E” Company, No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion, taken by an unknown photographer in the summer of 1917. A college undergraduate – Sebastian Bates (2014, Law) – noticed the photograph, and suggested that one of the people in the photograph was none other than C. S. Lewis.
(20) Michael Swanwick covered Samuel R. Delany’s retirement party, celebrating the end of his career at Temple University, in an aptly named post — Goodbye, Mr. Chip.
(21) It warms my heart to realize my antique File 770 webpage from the old Compuserve Ourworld days is still in the internet archives.
The Ballantines believed in science fiction as a literature of ideas, not gadget porn for ham-radio buffs, so when they opened their doors in 1952 they thought of Powers. His modernist sensibility, steeped in things seen at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, set him apart from the pulp-magazine style—astronauts rippling their pectorals at bug-eyed aliens while space babes cowered in fear—that had dominated the genre for decades. “One of the things that appealed to me about science fiction,” he says, in The Art of Richard Powers, “is that it was possible to do Surrealist paintings that had validity … in their own right, and not necessarily functioning as the cover of a book.”
And Mr. Pertwee – Sean, that is – certainly lived a life suitable to the son of a Time Lord. Mr. Pertwee recalled long stretches spent on Euro-billionaires and party-animals playground Ibiza, a “mad island…this weird eclectic bunch of people that ran away and lived in this sort of hedonistic paradise.” Many people know the name Elmyr de Hory as the master art forger of the 1960’s, and subject of the Orson Welles film F for Fake — Mr. Pertwee called him godfather. He experienced a youth surrounded by, in his words, “draft dodgers, murderers…actors.”
Pertwee stars as Alfred Pennyworth, a tough-as-nails ex-marine from east London who loyally serves the Wayne family. In the wake of their tragic deaths, he is fiercely protective of the young Bruce Wayne — the boy who will eventually become Batman
Sean is set to appear as a lead role, Alfred Pennyworth the unflappable butler, in the new Warner Bros. series of Gotham, which follows the story behind Commissioner James Gordon’s rise to prominence in Gotham City in the years before Batman’s arrival.
(25) If Disney had done cruise ships in the 1950s would they have added a Ben-Hur theme where kids could row like hell and ram a Roman warship? We’ll never know, but pretty soon young voyagers on the company’s passenger liners will get to head into hyperspace with the Millennium Falcon.
The Disney Dream will head into dry dock in October and emerge with two new interactive youth areas, one inspired by the interior of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, and the other based on the popular Disney Infinity video game.
As you can see from the concept art above, the Millennium Falcon is a pretty good recreation of Han Solo’s ship. Kids will be able to sit in the cockpit, participate in Star Wars-themed crafts and activities, watch episodes of Disney XD’s animated Star Wars Rebels on large screens, or play video games.
The Disney Dream is also bringing on board the popular Jedi Training Academy, in which young Padawans learn from a Jedi Master how to use a lightsaber, and then face Darth Vader in a final test.
(25) Jill Pantozzi on The Mary Sue draws attention to J.K. Rowling’s new tradition of apologizing for killing off her characters. Before it was Florean Fortescue. Now —
.@Brieuc26Rankin I thought I might apologise for one death per anniversary. Fred was the worst for me, so I started with him.
Watchmen is a classic comic book written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, published in 1986. It’s set in an alternate history where the existence of superheroes changed American politics, culture and everyday life. I’ve described it panel-by-panel for blind and low-vision readers, including the supplementary material at the end of each chapter.
To Alice’s professed surprise, Campbell bought one of the stories, “Birth of a Salesman.” A new science fiction writer was born, one who would, in the space of just a few years, make a tremendous impact on the genre (as two Hugos, three Nebulas, and a World Fantasy Award attest, to say nothing of the James Tiptree Jr. Award, which is given to works which expand or explore our understandings of gender).
Alice Sheldon never looked back. She also never let anyone know that James Tiptree Jr. wasn’t a man; all of her many contacts and correspondents in the SF field assumed that the courtly “Tip” who had had such a wide-ranging life and wrote such witty letters was an all-American male. (Who wouldn’t take phone calls or meet anyone — including his agent — in person and would never show up to accept any awards. What began as a joke became, without Alice’s really planning it, an elaborate deception worthy of… well, of the CIA, and a banana peel that countless readers and critics would embarrassingly slip on.)
One of the reasons I have any audience at all is that I blog about my insane burblings of social anxiety, and how hard it is for me to go to conventions. I’d say about one out of every five people who’ve come to see me read from Flex and sign books has that hesitant smile when they approach me, and I know that the only reason they crept out into such a whirlwind social situation is because I’ve lent them strength at some point by sharing my own tearful fears, and that they and I are intertwined with the same terrors.
They’re braver than I am.
I couldn’t come out to see me.
(30) Author Jon Scieszka interviews Norton Juster, author of The Phantom Tollbooth, about writing the classic children’s novel with longtime friend Jules Feiffer after a screening of the documentary The Phantom Tollbooth: Beyond Expectations.
(31) Writing to Robert E. Howard during the Depression, H. P. Lovecraft said he never spent more than $3 a week on food. What were H. P. Lovecraft’s economical favorites? The list includes —
Beans
“Incidentally—not many doors away, on the other side of Willoughby St., I found a restaurant which specialises in home-baked beans. It was closed on Sunday, but I shall try it some time soon. Beans, fifteen cents, with pork, twenty cents. With Frankfort sausages, twenty-five cents. Yes—here is a place which will repay investigation!” (to Mrs. F.C. Clark, 20 May 1925)
“…in New England we are very fond of baked yellow-eye beans…” (to J. Vernon Shea, 10 November 1931)
Why are you participating in the Cultivating Thought series?
My work with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees really opened my eyes to the fragility of the world. I thought it might be a good thing to open other eyes.
Tell us about your two-minute read.
I wrote about the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan; the state of people who have left everything, and gone through hell to escape an intolerable situation. What they went through, what they survived.
(32) Ray Bradbury, one of the greatest sci-fi writers in history, talks with Merv about the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, Steven Spielberg, his mission as a writer, the future of mankind, and ends by reading from his poem “If Only We Had Taller Been” from his collection “When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.”
(33) For those who can’t get enough of Benedict Cumberbatch, news services have released video of his reading of a poem by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy at the memorial service for Richard III.
6) Pub sign Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of Pratchett’s former watering holes in Wincanton, Somerset, was decorated with recently decorated with a tribute in the form of a Discworldified pub sign.
This pub sign, amended to feature the noted Ankh-Morpork pub, The Mended Drum, was commissioned before Pratchett’s death, and hung as a memorial shortly afterwards.
It was painted by illustrator Richard Kingston, who, along with Pratchett, was a regular patron of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Wincanton is already slightly unusual in that it was twinned in 2002 with a fictional Discworld city, Ankh Morpork.
In 2009, the developer George Wimpey named two streets in its new housing development after Ankh-Morpork’s, including Peach Pie Street and Treacle Mine Road.
(35) And finally, this rare reveal of how they do things in Tinseltown.
some just don't understand how hard it is, working with back-end stuff, getting shit to work right pic.twitter.com/zRoEEd3OVP
After 20 years as WisCon’s Tiptree auctioneer, Ellen Klages is passing the torch. She recalls how it all began in a nostalgic post on the convention’s blog:
In 1994, on the weekend of my 40th birthday, I was in Worcester, Massachusetts, for Readercon, the guest of my friend, Pat Murphy. Ursula LeGuin was the Guest of Honor, and Nicola Griffith was the winner of the Tiptree Award. I knew nothing much about all that, just that the prize was given by an organization that Pat had founded.
One of the committee members in charge of the evening’s banquet and awards ceremony told Pat that some generous people had donated a few items — t-shirts, a handful of books — to benefit the Award, and asked if Pat was willing to auction them off.
Pat was already emceeing the awards and interviewing Ursula, so she said, “No, but I bet my friend Ellen will do it.”
“Sure,” I said. What the heck? It sounded like fun.
And so it was that, at the end of a very long evening, I got up on stage in a hotel ballroom for an impromptu performance, convincing an audience to buy random objects for startling sums of money. Forty-five minutes later, the Tiptree coffers had a thousand dollars, and I was suddenly, accidentally, notorious.
A man asked Spike, “Who is she?”
A total stranger came up to me. “Where else in Worcester are you performing?”
It was a heady experience.
She also pays tribute to some of the people whose handling of the logistical chores has made it all possible.
Jeanne Gomoll — a national treasure — was, for a long time, the person accepting donations, setting up the display of items, and making sure the trains ran on time. Scott Custis hauled boxes down from their attic every year. Jim Hudson, a mensch if there ever was one, handled the accounting, a most important part of any fundraiser. In recent years, Nevenah Smith streamlined the process and added her own flair to the event.
Klages actually concedes she may participate in future Tiptree Auctions — but not as a solo act.
