Tony Lewis at the 2019 Boskone. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
“Dr. Tony Lewis, one of the last surviving founders of NESFA, Chairman of Noreascon, and longtime Press Czar of NESFA Press passed away yesterday at home,” announced Gay Ellen Dennett on Facebook on February 12. “Both Suford and Alice [his wife and daughter] were by his side.”
Anthony R. Lewis, called Tony, was a leader who helped organize and grow Boston sf fandom in the Sixties. While earning a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he joined MITSFS. Although the science fiction club had formed in 1949, more than a decade passed before the club finally became actively connected with fandom – their motto was “We’re not fans, we just read the stuff.” They read a lot more of it after Tony Lewis became the club librarian in 1961: within a few years their library grew to over 10,000 volumes. He also served as MITSFS’ Onseck, and he was known as the Evil Dr. Lewis, a title he relished.
Fancyclopedia 3’s entry adds this story about his MIT years:
When he was in grad school, he witnessed a test nuclear explosion in New Mexico (he told the story that he was possibly the only fan injured by an atomic bomb: he stood up too quickly after the blast and was knocked on his rear by the ground shock.) He spent most of his career in a “safer” industry, computers, as a technical writer then technical writing manager for Prime Computer.
Boston fandom’s growth was seen in the Sixties at the first Boskones, and in a joint attempt by BoSFS (which ran the con), MITSFS, and the University of Massachusetts Science Fiction Society to bid for the 1967 Worldcon. Although they lost, local fans were energized to create a group to supersede BoSFS, named the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA). In 1967 Tony Lewis became the first President of NESFA. Among the officers was the editor of Instant Message, NESFA Clerk Susan Hereford. She became Susan Hereford Lewis in April 1968 when she married Tony — which Instant Message phrased: “ARL announced that to consolidate power he will annex the Clerk on April 7th.” By the beginning of 1969, Susan became known in fandom as Suford Lewis.
The ambition to bring a Worldcon to Boston continued to burn in a few hearts. In 1968 Charlie Brown, Ed Meskys and Dave Vanderwerf created Locus to promote the (ultimately successful) Boston in ’71 Worldcon bid. The first trial issue was scheduled for May of 1968; it featured news of Suford Lewis’ auto accident – 10 days after her marriage to Tony. That first issue was run off in the Lewis’s living room in Belmont, MA on Tony’s AB Dick mimeograph.
Tony Lewis in the 1970s. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
While continuing as NESFA President and chair of Noreascon, the 1971 Boston Worldcon, Tony somehow found time to launch himself as a professional sf writer. His first published story, “Request for Proposal”, appeared in the November 1972 Analog. It is written in the form of interoffice memos about using nuclear warheads for slum clearance and urban renewal. The story’s dry political satire was so successful that it has been reprinted in five collections. In future years Tony had stories in themed anthologies edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Mike Resnick. Also, for over thirty years he contributed a calendar of upcoming events, such as sf conventions, to every issue of Analog. He was an active member of SFWA.
At the 1997 Worldcon, Mike Resnick’s panel of contributors to his Alternate Worldcons anthology (published 1994), Tony reminisced about the basis for his story “Keep Watching the Skies” — an actual Highmore, SD bid with one co-chair, Richard Harter, who gave a “speech.” Asked, “Would you like to say anything?”, Harter answered, “No.” Also, George Flynn, wearing a paper bag over his head, came up and read a piece in Frisian, which is why nobody realized it was in foul language.
Tony Lewis was active for many years in compiling the NESFA Index to Science Fiction Magazines. He invented the term “recursive SF” (any sf story that refers to sf) and wrote An Annotated Bibliography of Recursive Science Fiction (NESFA Press).
He was twice a Hugo finalist, for Space Travel by Ben Bova and Anthony R. Lewis from Writer’s Digest Books, nominated for the 1998 Best Non-Fiction Book Hugo, and Concordance to Cordwainer Smith, Third Edition by Anthony R. Lewis from NESFA Press was nominated for the 2001 Best Related Book Hugo.
Among his many talents he was a well-known (and skilled) auctioneer.
Tony and his daughter Alice Lewis as a toddler. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
Lewis is generally credited with coming up with the name of the NASFiC (the North American Science Fiction Convention run when the Worldcon is outside North America).
“I was on the committee that made the report to the business meeting that set it up and I named the damn thing to keep George Nims Rayben from calling it the USCon,” he said.
Appropriately, Tony and Suford Lewis were the Fan GoHs at the Buffalo 2024 NASFiC. Prior to that they were GoHs at Conebulus (1978), and Windycon VI (1979). Tony was GoH at Lunacon 42 (1999), and Arisia ’03 (2003).
Suford and Tony Lewis at the Buffalo 2024 NASFiC. Photo by Rich Lynch.
Tony did not put himself forward as a fan humorist, being someone who always appeared wrapped in a certain amount of dignity, but he could surprise with his readiness to “unwrap” if there was an opening for a good line.
I remember at Magicon (1992) the highlight of “The Spanish Inquisition” panel of worldcon bidders was an exchange between NESFAns. Tony Lewis said a 1998 worldcon in Boston “is not going to be Noreascon 3 mark 2.” Anne Broomhead agreed, “Mark wouldn’t stand for it.” Deb Geisler said, “We won’t make the same mistakes.” Tony Lewis enthusiastically agreed, “We’ll make a whole new lot of mistakes, in new areas. We’re going to be the first people to make mistakes in these areas.”
Someone planning to kick off his new music blog by interviewing Paul Kantner of Jefferson Starship, whose Blows Against the Empire was a Hugo nominee in 1971, asked Tony Lewis, that year’s Worldcon chair and Hugo administrator, about the relationship between fandom and rock at the time. Tony provided this insight: “I was never really into rock myself, preferring baroque and bagpipe music.”
And when the Outer Space Treaty declared that the Moon belongs to all mankind, science fiction fandom did not take this lying down. At a December 1970 meeting of the New England Science Fiction Association, “[Tony Lewis] showed the moon map from the Nov 1970 issue of Sky and Telescope. Hugo Gernsback crater was identified, as were Wiener, Ley, Verne, Wells, etc. As a result of this increase in cultural knowledge it was [moved, seconded and passed] that the Moon be designated NESFA’s Moon and that the Aerospace Cadets protect it.” NESFAn Harry Stubbs, then a Lt. Col. in the Air Force, was named commander of the Aerospace Cadets, holding the title “Lord of the Wings.”
NESFA has kept a close eye on its property ever since. When there was a total eclipse of the Moon in July 1982, Tony Lewis wrote a letter protesting the unauthorized use of NESFA’s Moon. The club voted him responsibility for preventing the occurrence of any further unauthorized eclipses.
A visitor to NESFA wrote a 2007 article for Bostonist about slowly realizing that Tony was kidding them:
…The jokes can get more complicated. Wednesday, as NESFA members collated the “Instant Message” newsletter by hand (a process involving a continuous procession around a table), a visitor asked about the “Fanzine Control Number” (71-58837 791) printed at the bottom of each page. Nobody had a clue, and the matter was referred to Tony Lewis, a founding member.
“I can’t remember which President it was,” he explained, “but in the fifties there was widespread worry about the proliferation of fanzines and fanzine material. The Fanzine Control Number was introduced to limit the spread of fanzines.”
The visitor, looking for the Fanzine Control Number on his copy of Science-Fiction Five-Yearly, finally realized that Lewis was putting him on….
Andrew Porter, Suford Lewis, Tony Lewis at the 2019 Boskone. Photo by Daniel P. Dern.
However, Tony’s significance as a friend and mentor extended beyond Boston. When File 770 ran its 20th Anniversary Poll in 1998, one of the questions asked people “to name three fans who had the most influence on your fanac.” Lewis was named by four people – which was substantial given that seven was the highest number received by anyone.
His home club, where people got to see and work with him regularly, gave him their highest honors. He received the Skylark Award in 2021, given by NESFA to “some person, who, in the opinion of the membership, has contributed significantly to science fiction, both through work in the field and by exemplifying the personal qualities which made the late E. E. “Doc” Smith well-loved by those who knew him.” It is “an award for being both a pro and a ‘good guy’”.
Also, the editors of the NESFA Press book Ingathering dedicated it, “To Tony Lewis who created NESFA in his own image.”
During the 1993 Worldcon at “The Asimov Memorial Panel” Robert Silverberg offered many warm reminiscences of Isaac. Tony Lewis asked Silverberg, “Will you say nice things about me at my memorial?” Silverberg agreed, “Certainly, but don’t make it too soon. It’ll take a long time to think up nice things.” That was a humorously-meant exchange, of course, however, today everyone is finding it easy to think of nice things to say about Tony Lewis, especially on Facebook – on his personal page, the Boskone page, and individual tributes by David Gerrold and Michael A. Burstein.
(1) KRESS Q&A. Asimov’s “From Earth to the Stars” department brings us a “Q&A With Nancy Kress”
AE: What is your process? NK: For any story with real science (or rather, real-to-a-point science; if it were all real it wouldn’t be science fiction), I research first. The characters, like Kenda and Dayson, might already be in my mind, but characters have to actually do things, and the majority of those things should be connected in some way to the science. So I begin with reading, note-taking, and playing with the concepts and details of the science, be it genetic engineering, stellar physics, or—in this case—the Earth’s geomagnetic sphere (which is not a sphere but an elongated shape that extends from the center of the Earth to several hundred miles into space.) Because I knew next-to-nothing about geomagnetism, this involved a lot of study, a lot of going “Huh?” and then “Huh!” Also a lot of cursing; I am not trained as a scientist. Research not only grounds a story in actual science, it can also suggest plot ideas, and I ended up with as many pages of story ideas as research facts. Next all this gets reviewed and a loose outline emerges. Actually, to call it an “outline” is to vastly overstate. It’s one or two pages labeled MASTER SHEET which pretty much ends up mastering nothing, but at least it’s something to point out which direction I am hypothetically going and a few possible pathways to get there. Not so much GPS as a faded, dog-eared, slightly outdated Atlas roadmap that lacks all the new roads, collapsed bridges, and accidents on Interstate 90.
(2) GREENE’S REPLY. YouTuber Daniel Greene has responded in a 1-minute video to the sexual assault allegations reported in yesterday’s Scroll: “In Response To Naomi King’s Allegations”. Here is the transcript:
Hello, my name is Daniel Greene. This is an important message in response to various false allegations made against me by Naomi King of alleged sexual assault in a campaign launched on YouTube and more.
Let me be clear: I had consensual sex with Naomi King. Yes it was an affair that my then girlfriend and now fiance took several years to move on from. I also have clear and convincing evidence to prove everything was consensual.
Myself and my team are now planning to sue Naomi King in a court of law. The communication Naomi King has inaccurately used against me online has greatly damaged me and others to date. I also have many other pieces of evidence which prove my innocence.
Look for more communication from me based on truth and fact in the near future. Naomi King took time to launch a campaign against me and I will need time to communicate my truth as well more soon.
A commenter with the handle @ndrew7707 left these exceptionally worthwhile remarks after Greene’s video:
I doubt you’ll read through these comments, but just in case: I’ve never SA’d anyone, but I have cheated and sexually harassed people. I am a survivor of SA, though, and one that looked a lot like the situation described. Between this Naomi’s video about the cease and desist letter, it’s pretty clear to me that this is, in fact, a pattern of behavior that you’ve been denying for a long time. And I get it. Painful is an understatement for how it feels to fully admit to yourself the kind of person you’ve turned yourself into by following that impulse time and time again and learning new ways to hide it and justify it to yourself. So, please, take this from someone who does want you to get better: DO NOT sue them. Not just for their sake, but yours, and all the people you’ve hurt before this and the people you will hurt in the future if you don’t make real changes. Get out of the public eye, get into a treatment program, find a therapist that’s a social worker so that they can walk you through the change process and help you construct barriers to these thoughts and actions, including people who fully know the extent of what you’ve done and are willing to work with you to keep them in check. You cannot do this on your own. I know this comment section is full of people calling you a terrible person, and I don’t blame them. What you did is terrible, disgusting, all those things. But the most terrifying part of this is that you are not fundamentally, irredeemably bad. Very few people, if any, are. You are just a person who’s made a lot of bad decisions, and you are fully capable of making better ones. So, please, from one person who has unlearned abusive behavior: do not try to save your channel, your reputation, your career. Take the stability you’ve been able to build for yourself and actually get help. That is a privilege that should not be taken lightly. You might feel like you’re dying, but that’s normal. Feel that shit fully. Ask yourself for the rest of your life how you make certain you never treat someone else like that again. There is life to be lived on the other side of this, but you gotta figure out what that looks like without this attention, manipulation, and ill-gotten satisfaction you are clearly addicted to. And it is an addiction. Codependents Anonymous helped me tremendously for this reason, but I’d suggest some one-on-one treatment first before putting yourself in any group situation which will undoubtedly have survivors in it. I unsubscribed, but I’ll be back to remind you if you keep trying to do this. It’s bullshit, we all know it. It’s ok if the channel falls apart, it really is. There are a million other things one can do with the gift that is our one, finite, human life. Don’t waste yours on excuses.
…To younger fans (and by “younger” here I mean, “People in their 30s and 40s”) the Fifth Doctor has undergone a bit of a memetic evolution. Among the Doctors of the classic series, he was the Young One. We see him being chummy with David Tennant in the Children in Need “Time Crash” short, and hanging out with Tegan in “The Power of the Doctor”, and we watch Peter Davison in “The Five-ish Doctors” and he seems… nice. A bit grumpy. Definitely not on a par with the likes of McCoy, Ecclestone and Capaldi when you need a Doctor to go dark.
Yet what you forget about Tegan is that she’s the companion who left the TARDIS in “Resurrection of the Daleks” because it was too fricking violent. If you watch this charming collection of times the Doctor has shot someone to death with a gun, the Fifth Doctor is better represented than most – especially when you consider that in context, the Fourth Doctor is being framed in most of his scenes, and the Second Doctor is carrying a couple of big torches.
The show had been on the air for 20 years, and a battle was raging over whether it was going to be dark and grown-up and edgy now its audience was growing up, or be a kids’ show forever. And one of the definitive strikes in that battle was “Earthshock”, where the show killed off Adric. Sure, Adric will never rank well in our “Top 10 Least Annoying Doctor Who Companions” listicle, but if Star Trek: The Next Generation murdered Wesley Crusher, it’d still be considered a dark move.
It set the tone that would eventually lead to the All-Time-Favourites-List regular, “Caves of Androzani”….
A Lancaster teen was sentenced to four years in prison after making more than 375 hoax calls that included threats to detonate bombs, conduct mass shootings and “kill everyone he saw,” authorities said.
The calls targeted high schools, colleges and universities, places of worship, government officials and individuals across the United States, according to prosecutors.
The serial swatter, 18-year-old Alan W. Filion, pleaded guilty to making interstate threats to injure others, which frequently led to massive law enforcement responses and rendered officers unavailable to assist with other emergencies, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. He made hundreds of calls from August 2022 to January 2024, according to his plea agreement.
Filion was both a recreational swatter and a swatter-for-hire who advertised his services of mass disruption on social media platforms, prosecutors said.
In a January 2023 social media post, he claimed that when he swatted someone, he usually got police “to drag the victim and their families out of the house cuff them and search the house for dead bodies.” In some instances, officers entered the targeted buildings with their weapons drawn and detained individuals who were inside, prosecutors said.
He was arrested in January on Florida charges connected to a threat he made to a religious organization in Sanford, Fla., prosecutors said. Filion threatened to commit a mass shooting at the site and claimed to have an illegally modified AR-15, a Glock 17 pistol, pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails….
Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the United States.
In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor, finding that the company’s copyright was indeed infringed by Ross Intelligence’s actions.
“None of Ross’s possible defenses holds water. I reject them all,” wrote US District Court of Delaware judge Stephanos Bibas, in a summary judgment….
…Notably, Judge Bibas ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor on the question of fair use. The fair use doctrine is a key component of how AI companies are seeking to defend themselves against claims that they used copyrighted materials illegally. The idea underpinning fair use is that sometimes it’s legally permissible to use copyrighted works without permission—for example, to create parody works, or in noncommercial research or news production. When determining whether fair use applies, courts use a four-factor test, looking at the reason behind the work, the nature of the work (whether it’s poetry, nonfiction, private letters, et cetera), the amount of copyrighted work used, and how the use impacts the market value of the original. Thomson Reuters prevailed on two of the four factors, but Bibas described the fourth as the most important, and ruled that Ross “meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute.”…
(6) TONY LEWIS (1941-2025). “Dr. Tony Lewis, one of the last surviving founders of NESFA, Chairman of Noreascon, and longtime Press Czar of NESFA Press passed away yesterday at home,” announced Gay Ellen Dennett on Facebook today. “Both Suford and Alice [his wife and daughter] were by his side. Further information will be posted when known.”
Tony Lewis
Fancylopedia notes Anthony R. Lewis co-founded the New England Science Fiction Association in 1967. He chaired the Boston Worldcon of 1971, Noreascon.
He was active for many years in compiling the NESFA Index to Science Fiction Magazines. He invented the term “recursive SF” (any sf story that refers to sf) and wrote An Annotated Bibliography of Recursive Science Fiction (NESFA Press).
Space Travel by Ben Bova and Anthony R. Lewis from Writer’s Digest Books was nominated for the 1998 Best Non-Fiction Book Hugo and Concordance to Cordwainer Smith, Third Edition by Anthony R. Lewis from NESFA Press was nominated for the 2001 Best Related Book Hugo.
Among his many talents he was a well-known (and skilled) auctioneer.
He was an active member of SFWA.
Tony is survived by his wife, Suford (they married in 1968) and daughter Alice.
File 770 will post a fuller tribute later this evening.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
“Ill Met in Lankhmar” (1970)
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser faced each other across the two thieves sprawled senseless. They were poised for attack, yet for the moment neither moved.
Each discerned something inexplicably familiar in the other.
Fafhrd said, “Our motives for being here seem identical.”
“Seem? Surely must be!” the Mouser answered curtly, fiercely eyeing this potential new foe, who was taller by a head than the tall thief.
“You said?”
“I said, ‘Seem? Surely must be!'”
“How civilized of you!” Fafhrd commented in pleased tones.
“Civilized?” the Mouser demanded suspiciously, gripping his dirk tighter.
— “Ill Met in Lankhmar”
Fifty-four years ago at the first Noreascon, Fritz Leiber would win the Hugo for Best Novella with “Ill Met in Lankhmar”, a Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser tale. It was also be awarded a Nebula Award for Best Novella.
The other Hugo nominees that year were “The Thing in the Stone” by Clifford D. Simak, “The Region Between” by Harlan Ellison, “The World Outside” by Robert Silverberg and “Beastchild” by Dean R. Koontz.
It was first published in the April 1970 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. A prequel to the series, Leiber had by that time been chronicling the pair’s adventures for some thirty years.
The story is the third one in Ace’s 1970 Swords and Deviltry paperback collection. It is available from the usual sources as are the later volumes. Audible has them as well.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
February 12, 1950 — Michael Ironside, 75 .
I most remember Michael Ironside for his role as Lieutenant Jean Rasczak in Starship Troopers. There wasn’t much great about that film but I thought that he made much of that character.
Do I need to say that I’m not covering everything he’s done of a genre nature? Well most of you get that. Really you do. So let’s see what I find interesting.
Scanners is one weird film. It really is. And he was in it as Darryl Revok, the Big Baddie, a role he perfectly played.
Next he got cast as the main antagonist in another of my favorite SF films, this time as Overdog McNab in Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. Who comes with these names?
Then there was Total Recall where he was Agent Richter, the ruthless enforcer of Cohaagen, the source of everything corrupt on Mars. Great role that fit his gruff voice and frankly even gruffer looks absolutely perfectly.
One of his major ongoing roles was in the V franchise, first as Ham Tyle, a recurring role in V: The Final Battle, and then playing the same character in all episodes of V: The Series.
Now we come to my favorite of his roles, in one of my favorite series, seaQuest 2032, where he was Captain Oliver Hudson. Great series and an absolute fantastic performance by him! Pity it got cancelled after thirteen episodes.
Finally, he has one voice acting role I loved. In the DC universe, he was Darkseid, the absolute rule of Apokolis. He voiced him primarily on Superman: The Animated Series, but also on the Justice League series as well, and to my surprise on the HBO Harley Quinn series as well.
Unhappiness is a dreaded condition in the Civilization game series. Unhappy citizens stop working, stop researching scientific pursuits and, worst of all, start rioting.
In the new Sid Meier’s Civilization VII, which introduces three historical ages and a mounting series of crises during the transitions between them, my ancient Persian empire was running smoothly and expanding with ease. Then, suddenly, things struggled to feel cohesive. The game declared that my empire had fractured “as once-loyal settlements seek their own path forward.”
The unhappiness in my cities and towns grew so severe that several outlying settlements began trashing their districts and looking to outside civilizations for support. While I worked at putting out fires started by rioters, my neighbor Napoleon swooped in and quickly conquered one of my towns. This started a territorial war that only deepened the unhappiness of my population. Soon, half my towns were in revolt.
While following your chosen civilization’s path in Civilization VII, from the rough-hewed settlements of the past to the glistening megalopolises of the future, you move through ages that transform not just your technologies, government and civic policies, but also the broader identity of your civilization itself.
With its precipitous rises and falls, Civilization VII, which will be released on Tuesday for PCs, Macs and consoles, is a departure for the series. Although past iterations have had revolts, diplomatic incidents and civic upset, they tend to feel less closely connected to the ways that historical forces can boil over into crisis and conflict.
The violent and chaotic cuts here accurately reflect a world history where many things can happen all at once and often with surprising swiftness. History doesn’t always move forward in the routine, turn-based lock step of the 4X genre (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) that Civilization popularized. More often, root causes like financial instability, cultural changes and oppressive hierarchies stay below the surface until emerging in a cacophony of war, revolution and natural-disaster-fueled chaos….
A new test of nuclear propellant fuel under space-like conditions has been hailed as a success by NASA and General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS), in what is considered one more step on the road to nuclear-powered rocket engines. Such designs have long been suggested as a more efficient method of space travel and could cut interplanetary voyages down to just a few weeks.
While this latest test doesn’t make nuclear-powered rocket engines viable just yet, it’s an important step on the journey. This latest batch of tests was conducted at the compact fuel element environmental test (CFEET) facility at NASA MSFC, as per Space.com. It cycled the nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) fuel up to 2600 Kelvin (4,220 Fahrenheit) and back down again several times, using superheated hydrogen…
Faced with the (very low probability) threat of an incoming asteroid impact, NASA is bringing out the big guns. The agency will employ its powerful Webb space telescope to monitor newly discovered asteroid 2024 YR4, which has a small chance of hitting Earth in 2032.
Based on current estimates, asteroid 2024 YR4 has a 2.1% chance of impact on December 22, 2032. Although the odds are still in our favor, there are currently no other known large asteroids with an impact probability above 1%, according to NASA. The space agency tends to take these matters quite seriously, which is why it plans to collect additional observations of the space rock using the Webb telescope in March to refine the current estimates, NASA revealed in a recent update.
The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Chile discovered the asteroid on December 27, 2024. Shortly after its discovery, the impact probability of the asteroid was set to 1.3%. However, additional observations increased the asteroid’s chances of crashing into Earth to 2.3% as of yesterday, before dropping slightly to 2.1% this morning. These odds are preliminary, and more observations of the asteroid are desperately needed….
A completely made-up scientific term is making the rounds in academic journals, and instead of being “oops!” one major publisher is basically saying “this is fine!”
As reported in Retraction Watch, A sharp-eyed Russian chemist (going by the extremely cool pseudonym “Paralabrax clathratus”) spotted the weird phrase “vegetative electron microscopy,” which makes about as much sense as “photosynthetic hammer” or “reproductive calculator.” The term has somehow snuck into nearly two dozen published papers, including one whose senior author is an editor at prestigious publisher Elsevier.
When called out on this obvious nonsense, Elsevier basically said “No no, it’s fine! It’s just a shorter way of saying ‘electron microscopy of vegetative structures'” which is like saying “vegetative car” is a dandy way to describe “a car that drives past vegetables.”…
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Christian Brunschen, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
First panel of the final day of the convention was John Hertz’s book discussion of Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones. It’s from 1952, right in the middle of RAH’s Golden Age of SF juveniles. RAH didn’t choose to depict technology much beyond that which existed or was reasonably plausible for the early 1950s, so instead of a suspension of disbelief the reader obtains a creation of belief. The book is a good example of Heinlein’s expertise in using a socioeconomic basis to create a sense of humanity in his fiction. It’s still readable.
“TIME TRAVEL IN THE MEDIA” PANEL
(L-R) Elektra Hammond, Maria, Chuck Rothman, and Daniel Kimmel
An anthology panel, be it an interesting one that included brief deconstructions and plot analyses, that consisted of shout outs to fan favorites like Quantum Leap and Doctor Who, and some lesser-known shows like The Lazarus Project. My suggestions, when it came time for Q&A, were The History of Time Travel (find it and watch it, it’s worth it) and an old favorite, ‘The Orb’ story arc of The Adventures of Bristol County, Jr. There were so many possibilities for discussion that the panel could have gone on for hours.
CLOSING CEREMONIES
Seated at podium, left to right: Alan Dean Foster, Suford Lewis, Tony Lewis, Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio, Nilah Magruder. Chair Wayne Brown at lectern.
Short and sweet. The guests all had praise for the concom. And the convention got through its four days without any disasters. Special thanks went out to Chuck Rothman who developed the program. I can second and even third that, as there was no lack of interesting panels to attend. Let’s do it again someday!
(L-R) Bill Horst-Kotter, D.G. Valdron, Devo Spice, and Chuck Rothman
I was handicapped by not having seen many of the Ncuti episodes. So here are a few random thoughts from the panelists: Jodie Whittaker era was mostly done in by lots of meh writing. The new Russell T. Davies era hasn’t “hit its stride” yet. “The Space Babies” episode was a lot of “okay” at best. And everybody was really tired of episodes where the fate of the entire universe was at stake. But hey, it’s still a great series!
SUFORD AND TONY – THEIR HOUR
Suford and Tony Lewis: It was a pleasant stroll through their many years in fandom.
IT’S ALIVE! IT’S ALI-I-I-VE!!
The fanzine lounge now exists. After a long and at times strange journey, John Hertz arrived in Buffalo late last night, and today spent a couple of hours breathing life into what had been a cold, empty room. Now all it needs is some convention attendees who are interested in fanzines to stop by.
THE “HOW I FOUND FANDOM” PANEL
(L-R) Jilibean, David Kushner, Tony Lewis, Daniel Kimmel, Jeanne Mealy, and D. Cameron Calkins
An interesting blend of recollections which we can probably all mostly identify with. The most usual doorway still seems to be from being a science fiction reader, but science fiction on TV and in the movies seems not far behind. How different things would be if Bjo had not taken it upon herself to start a campaign to save Star Trek.
THE CONVENTION’S NAME BADGE
Here it is. Mine is numbered “S 1329”, and when I asked the con registration folks what the “S” meant (everybody’s badge has that feature), nobody knew.
Also, I checked what the current registration totals were and found out there were 475 pre-reg and (as of this evening) 509 people in attendance.
Nobody was able to explain to me why my badge number is 1329.
PARTY TIME
Only one party last night (Montreal in 202-whenever) and it appeared to have run out of food after about an hour-and-a-half. Lots more options this evening.
Here’s what the New Orleans CONtraflow DeepSouthCon 2025 had to offer. Yum!
PARTY #2
The Capricon party also has lot of good stuff to eat, but next to nobody has figured out where it is yet.
NO TROUBLE AT ALL FINDING THIS PARTY
Minneapolis in 2073 had lots of good ambience, pretty good food, and friends to talk to. Hurry up with those longevity drugs!
I may have to walk that “good food” comment back a bit… featured snack food is Peeps.
OPENING CEREMONIES. Wayne Brown on stage. Alan Dean Foster (in straw hat) said this is the first convention of any kind he’s been to in ten years.
GoHs seated at podium, left to right: Suford Lewis, Tony Lewis, Nilah Magruder, Kaja Foglio, Phil Foglio, Alan Dean Foster.
VIRTUAL GUEST IS INTRODUCED. Cheryl S. Ntumi, all the way from Ghana.
And yeah, the real time closed captioning was (as usual) doing wonky things.
PANEL: EARLY FANDOM. Late afternoon panel about “Early Fandom in Upstate New York”. David Ritter of the First Fandom Foundation described the 1943 Schenectacon and the 1944 Buffalocon, including mini histories of many of the fans from that era. About a dozen in the audience, and we were all fascinated and entertained.
PANEL: ARE TRADITIONAL SF CONS DYING? Short answer: probably.
Randy Hoffman, Michael Ventrella, Tony Lewis, and David Stephenson expound on the topic.
HYBRID PANEL: An entertaining one: “Science Fiction in 60s Comics”.
Left to right: Stephen Wilk, Chuck Rothman, D.G. Valdron and (virtually) Martin Shoemaker
The bid for Buffalo, NY – the only bid filed for the 2024 NASFiC – today was officially announced the winner of the site selection vote at a business meeting held during Pemmi-Con in Winnipeg. The WSFS Constitution provides for a NASFiC (North American Science Fiction Convention) to be held in years that the Worldcon is held outside North America, as it will be again next year.
Buffalo NASFiC 2024 will be held July 18-21 at the Hyatt Regency Buffalo and the Niagara Convention Center. The con will be chaired by Wayne Brown. Their website is here.
Alan Dean Foster’s writing career began when August Derleth bought a long Lovecraftian letter of Foster’s in 1968 and much to Foster’s surprise, published it as a short story in Derleth’s bi-annual magazine The Arkham Collector. Sales of short fiction to other magazines followed. His first attempt at a novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, was bought by Betty Ballantine and published by Ballantine Books in 1972. It incorporates a number of suggestions from famed SF editor John W. Campbell.
Since then, Foster’s sometimes humorous, occasionally poignant, but always entertaining short fiction has appeared in all the major SF magazines as well as in original anthologies and several “Best of the Year” compendiums. His published oeurve includes more than 120 books.
NILAH MAGRUDER – YA/COMICS GUEST OF HONOR
Nilah Magruder
Nilah Magruder is based in Maryland. She is the author of M.F.K., a middle-grade graphic novel and winner of the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity, HOW TO FIND A FOX, and WUTARYOO. She has published short stories in Fireside Magazine and the All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages anthology. Nilah has also written for Marvel Comics, illustrated children’s books for Disney-Hyperion, Scholastic, and Penguin, and works as a writer and storyboard artist in television animation. She is currently making graphic novels for middle-grade and young adult readers. When she is not working, Nilah is baking, gardening, and snuggling with her assortment of cats and dogs.
KAJA FOGLIO & PHIL FOGLIO – ARTIST GUESTS OF HONOR
Kaja FoglioPhil Foglio
Kaja Foglio is a Seattle-based writer, artist and publisher. She founded Studio Foglio, LLC in 1993 as a venue for her Magic the Gathering art prints, but quickly expanded into publishing. She co-writes the comic series Girl Genius with her husband Phil, and is the chief graphic designer and Web mistress for Studio Foglio and Airship Entertainment, and masterminded their stunningly successful transition to webcomic form. She won a Hugo award in 2009, 2010 and 2011 for Girl Genius along with her husband, Phil. You can read Girl Genius comics online at www.girlgenius.net.
Phil Foglio got his B.F.A. in Cartooning the same year he won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist back in 1977 and 1978 and is still waiting for the wealth and unlimited power he was told this would bring. In the meantime, he has made a career as a writer and artist because he liked the idea of commuting fifty feet to his office. Over the years he has worked in the fields of science fiction, comics, and gaming. His current project is the Hugo award winning comic book series Girl Genius, which he works on with his wife, Kaja. His hobbies include travel, gardening, and waiting.
TONY & SUFORD LEWIS – FAN GUESTS OF HONOR
Suford LewisTony Lewis
Suford Lewis was active in LASFS and appeared in Westercon masquerades before going to Radcliffe in 1961 and joining MITSFS. Now in Boston, she is a founding member of the New England SF Association, has chaired Boskone, and was a member of TAPA. She is a computer scientist. Since 1968, she has been married to Tony Lewis, a physicist who is also a fan.
Tony Lewis is a longtime Boston fan who was born in Gotham City Hospital (he claims no relation to the Wayne family). He joined MITSFS in 1957 and was very active in the club while he earned a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics from MIT, including serving as Librarian and Onseck. He was known as the Evil Dr. Lewis, a title he relished.
(1) THE TROUBLE WITH KIBBLES. With Camestros Felapton 63 chapters into Debarkle, a chronicle of how the Sad/Rabid Puppies were the sff genre’s reflection of broader right-wing movements, John Scalzi shares his own retrospective “Thoughts on the ‘Debarkle’” at Whatever.
1. It really does seem like so long ago now. The nonsense the Sad/Rabid Puppies (henceforth to be referred to as “the Pups”) perpetrated is largely contained in the years of 2014 – 2016, and while that’s not actually all that long ago — a mere five years since MidAmericon II, where new Hugo nomination rules were ratified to minimize slate nominating, and NK Jemisin won the first of her three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards — it feels like a distant memory now, a kind of “oh, yeah, that happened,” sort of event.
There are reasons for that, but I think the largest part has to do with the fact that the Pups, simply and bluntly, failed at every level that was important for their movement. The bifurcated goals of the Pups were to champion science fiction with a certain political/cultural point of view (i.e., largely white, largely conservative), and to destroy the Hugos by flooding the nominations with crap. They did neither very well. Toward the former, the material they slated was largely not very good, and with respect to the latter, the Hugos both still persist and remain a premier award in the field.
Their strategy was bad because it was addressing a problem that largely did not exist and was arrived at in a backward fashion, and their tactics were bad because they exploited loopholes and antagonized everyone who was not part of their clique, activating thousands of dormant Hugo voters against them. They were routed through a simple mechanism for which they had not accounted (“No Award”), and once their slating tactic was blunted by a nomination rule change, they flounced entirely.
When your only track record is that of complete failure, it’s not surprising you don’t have much of an impact….
John Lorentz says in a comment there:
As the 2015 Hugo Administrator, I can tell you that five years (or six years since it affected me directly), is not nearly enough to for me to forget it.
I used to enjoy administering the Hugos (I’ve done it four times)–2015 was a shit show that destroyed any joy I had regarding the Hugos. in the long run, the Puppies didn’t affect the field, but they sure affected me.
Also:
It was, however, the only thing I’ve ever been involved with that has show up both as a question on Jeopardy and a song on Doctor Demento.
…Like that original story, and like the other stories in that anthology by other authors, the central characters in the universe that Jennings has constructed here and the central characters are women (and note the name of Velocity’s ship). Given the preponderance of men as leads of a lot of space opera to this day, Jennings’ work is a refreshing rebalancing of that. The novel is a two-hander, with Velocity Wrachant, captain and owner of the Susan Calvin, and Brontë, a young woman who is far more than she first appears.
The story’s point of view focus on both Velocity and Brontë, although we do not see the latter’s point of view until her hijacking, and even then, it is initially months in the past. I didn’t like her at first: after all, she HAD hijacked Velocity’s ship, and I thought at first that the flashbacks from her point of view were merely to flesh her out and give us perspective and point of view to sympathize with her, however grudgingly so. As the back half of the narrative continued to build and events in the present continued, I saw the careful crafting of plot, and the central mystery at the heart of Fault Lines….
During her 30 years of working for a range of campaigning bodies and NGOs, my wife, Judith Hanna, who has died aged 67 of liver cancer, saw concern about the environment go from a fringe issue for community activists to a mainstream subject with a professionalised career structure.
Her life and career embodied the principle of “being the change you want to see”, through such local activities as organising annual seed swaps, promoting community gardens, calling for traffic calming measures in residential streets and, at national level, working for nuclear disarmament and better public transport. In her final role, as a social evidence principal specialist at Natural England, she promoted the now widely accepted health benefits of everyday contact with the natural world….
That day, the Guardian published a remarkable interview with Frank Oz, Jim Henson’s longtime collaborator and the puppeteer behind Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, and other classic Muppets. Oz hasn’t been involved with the Muppets since 2007, three years after Disney purchased the franchise. He tells the Guardian: “I’d love to do the Muppets again but Disney doesn’t want me, and Sesame Street hasn’t asked me for 10 years. They don’t want me because I won’t follow orders and I won’t do the kind of Muppets they believe in. He added of the post-Disney Muppet movies and TV shows: “The soul’s not there. The soul is what makes things grow and be funny. But I miss them and love them.” As a lifelong Muppets fan, I have to agree: There were delightful moments in the Muppet reboots of recent years, but they were a little too pale, the chaos and the order a little too calculated.
But I think that there’s a way to bring the Muppets back, one that could also—and here comes the Future Tense agenda—help spark smart discussions about scientific ethics, especially around what it means to be human and how to approach innovation responsibly. We need Frank Oz to helm a Muppet Frankenstein….
“When you realize you are mortal,” the poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan wrote while regarding a mountain, “you also realize the tremendousness of the future.” A decade earlier, shortly before a heart attack severed her life-time, Hannah Arendt observed in her superb Gifford Lectures lectures on the life of the mind that our finitude, “set in an infinity of time stretching into both past and future, constitutes the infrastructure, as it were, of all mental activities.” While Arendt was composing these thoughts and silent cells were barricading one of her arteries, Ursula K. Le Guin was composing her novelistic inquiry into what it means to live responsibly, observing: “If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it.” A generation before her, Borges had formulated the ultimate declaration of our temporal creatureliness, declaring: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”…
(6) SCANNERS IN VAIN. Tony Lewis, reporting on behalf of the NESFA Press in Instant Message #979, told about some problems encountered with their republication of Zenna Henderson’s Ingathering: The Complete People Stories collection.
An Amazon customer who bought our Ingathering ebook reported 58 typos in it. Amazon took down the book, which had been on sale for a year, until we could fix the typos. A number of NESFA Press proofers have spent the past three weeks going over the Ingathering ebook. We have found more than 400 typos, nearly all caused by unproofed OCR used to create the ebook. We also found that approximately 20 of those 400+ typos existed in the original hardcover. This proofing project is expected to be finished the week after the August Business Meeting.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
1976 — Forty-five years ago at MidAmeriCon where Wilson Tucker was the Toastmaster, Roger Zelazny would win the the Best Novella Hugo for “Home is The Hangman”. It was published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, the November 1975 issue. The other nominated works were “The Storms of Windhaven” by George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle, “ARM” by Larry Niven, “The Silent Eyes of Time” by Algis Budrys and “The Custodians” by Richard Cowper. It would also win a Nebula Award. It’s in one of the three stories in My Name is Legion which is available from the usual digital suspects.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 12, 1897 — Walter B. Gibson. Writer and professional magician who’s best known for his work creating and being the main writer of the pulp character The Shadow. He used the pen-name Maxwell Grant, wrote 285 of the 325 Shadow stories published by Street & Smith in The Shadow magazine of the Thirties and Forties. He also wrote a Batman prose story which appeared in Detective Comics #500 and was drawn by Thomas Yeates. (Died 1985.)
Born September 12, 1914 — Desmond Llewelyn. He’s best known for playing Q in 17 of the Bond films over thirty-six years. Truly amazing. Live and Let Die is the only one in the period where Q was not in it. He worked with five Bonds, to wit Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan. Other genre appearances include The Adventures of Robin Hood, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Curse of the Werewolf and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (Died 1999.)
Born September 12, 1921 — Stanislaw Lem. He’s best known for Solaris, which has been made into a film three times. The latest film made off a work of his is the 2018 His Master’s Voice (Glos Pana In Polish). The usual suspects have generous collections of his translated into English works at quite reasonable prices. (Died 2006.) [Note: In three instances “L” has been substituted because WordPress doesn’t support the correct special character.]
Born September 12, 1922 — John Chambers. He’s best known for designing Spock’s pointed ears, and for the prosthetic make-up work on the Planet of the Apes franchise. Some of those character creations, including Cornelius and Dr. Zaius from the Planet of the Apes series, are on display at the Science Fiction Museum. He worked on the Munsters, Outer Limits, Lost in Space, Mission Impossible, Night Gallery and I-Spy along with uncredited (at the time) prosthetic makeup work on Blade Runner. (Died 2001.)
Born September 12, 1940 — John Clute, 81. Critic, one of the founders of Interzone (which I avidly read in digital form) and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (with Peter Nicholls) that I use every day for these Birthdays, and of the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (with John Grant) as well as writing the Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction. All of these publications won Hugo Awards for Best Non-Fiction. And I’d be remiss not to single out for praise The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror which is simply a superb work.
Born September 12, 1942 — Charles L. Grant. A writer who said he was best at what he called “dark fantasy” and “quiet horror”. Nightmare Seasons, a collection of novellas, won a World Fantasy Award, while the “A Crowd of Shadows” story garnered a Nebula as did “A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn’s Eye novella. It would also be nominated for a Hugo at SunCon. And the “Temperature Days on Hawthorne Street” story would become the Tales from the Darkside episode “The Milkman Cometh”. The usual suspects have an outstanding selection of his works including Nightmare Seasons and Shadows, another excellent collection. (Died 2006.)
Born September 12, 1952 — Kathryn Anne Ptacek Grant, 69. Widow of Charles L. Grant. She has won two Stoker Awards. If you’re into horror. Her Gila! novel is a classic of that genre, and No Birds Sings is an excellent collection of her short stories. Both are available from the usual suspects.
Born September 12, 1962 — Mary Kay Adams, 59. She was Na’Toth, a Narn who was the aide to G’Kar in the second season of Babylon 5, and she would show up as the Klingon Grilka in the episodes “The House of Quark” and “Looking for par’Mach in All the Wrong Places” in Deep Space Nine. Her first genre role is actually an uncredited role in The Muppets Take Manhattan. No idea what it is.
(10) SHORTS SUBJECT. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, Michael Cavna has a piece about the “masterpieces” John Oliver is lending to museums in return for a $10,000 grant. He talks to the heads of the Judy Garland Museum and the Cartoon Art Museum and how the Garland Museum said they could only accept the paintings if the mousehood of the “vermin-love-watercolor-on-paper” drawing by Brian Swords of nude cartoon mice was covered up. “John Oliver is helping museums through the pandemic — by lending them rat erotica”.
Melanie Jacobson was on the hunt for covid-relief cash in October when she happened to flip to HBO. As fortune would have it, “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver was announcing a contest to offer financial help to museums in need. The catch was, they had to be willing to exhibit his freshly acquired collection of three “masterpiece” paintings: a still-life of ties,a portrait of TV host Wendy Williams eating a lamb chop, plus— his “pièce de résistance” — amorous rats in the buff.Jacobson is a board member for theJudy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minn. — right where a star was born. Her catch was, the institutionshares a building with the very G-rated Children’s Discovery Museum, which meant that “I knew we would not be able to show the rat painting with certain private parts,” she said by phone this week.
So with blessing from board leadership, Jacobson submitted a proposal to the “Last Week Tonight” contest with one stipulation, she recalled: “I’m going to have to put pants on the rat.” ….
We’re still flying high off the news of Dairy Queen’s fall Blizzard lineup. After all, the Pumpkin Pie is back, folks. But it’s not the only flavor on our radar as of late. In fact, DQ employee-slash-TikToker @thedairyqueenking shared a secret menu item that’s going to wow Harry Potter fans.
The soft serve insider took to the video-sharing platform with the chain’s hush, hush Butterbeer Blizzard, which boasts vanilla syrup, butterscotch syrup, Butterfinger pieces, and a healthy swirl of whipped cream topping, mirroring the fan-favorite beverage from the books….
…But Nick Pope, a former UFO investigator for the Ministry of Defence, is not convinced and thinks that Godfrey is genuine. “He had a lot to potentially lose by coming out with this and yet stuck to his guns.”
Doesn’t a hallucination explain what he saw? “I get that people do have hallucinations, but they tend to be the result of either mental illness or some sort of hallucinogenic substance, and this guy was on duty and was, by all accounts, rational. And so those explanations don’t seem to apply – I’m stumped when it comes to that particular case. Ask yourself: how many times have you been tired and come to the end of a long day? We’ve all been in that situation, and we don’t suddenly construct bizarre narratives about spacecraft and aliens.”
Is it time to start taking these stories more seriously? “I’m not saying that I believe it’s literally true that these are alien spaceships,” says Pope. “But at the very least, these people who were previously disbelieved and ridiculed should be listened to and given a hearing….
I started my blog, Stuff I Like, nearly eleven years ago with a plan of writing about swords & sorcery. When I reviewed “The City of Madness” by the late and greatly-missed Charles Saunders, I discovered he had co-edited a new story collection called Griots (2011). I bought it and found it to be one of the best batches of fantasy stories I’d read in years. It introduced me to the term sword & soul, as well as some very good writers, such as Carole McDonnell, P. Djeli Clark, and Milton Davis himself….
(14) CLASH OF THE TITANS. In the Washington Post, Christian Davenport says the battle between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos over NASA contracts is getting increasingly personal, with Musk’s SpaceX ahead on technical issues but Bezos fighting back not only on NASA contracts awarded to Space X but also trying to block Space X’s plan to build thousands of small satellites for Internet communications. “Elon Musk is dominating the space race. Jeff Bezos is trying to fight back”.
For years, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have sparred over the performance of their rockets and space companies in a simmering feud that flared during a fight over who could use a NASA launchpad and which company was the first to successfully land a rocket.
But now the two billionaires, among the world’s richest men, are waging an increasingly bitter battle that pits two enormous business empires in clashes that are playing out in the courts, the Federal Communications Commission and the halls of Congress in what’s become one of the greatest business rivalries in a generation….
…Boston Dynamics has uploaded videos like this for more than a decade, cataloging the progress of its creations as they grow more lifelike, and more unsettling. One of its models is a robotic dog called Spot, with four legs and, sometimes, a “neck” topped with a camera “head” — an android’s best friend.
Although the company maintains that its creations are research projects, it does sell Spot and has leased one to the N.Y.P.D. It could have been used to accomplish tasks too risky for a living being, such as delivering food in a hostage situation or checking areas with high amounts of radiation. But its appearance accompanying police officers during an arrest in public housing sparked enough public backlash for its trial to be prematurely terminated. People found the robodog both wasteful and chilling, especially in the possession of the institution most likely to use force against them. It surely didn’t help that the robodog looked quite similar to the horrific killer machines in an episode of the show “Black Mirror” called “Metalhead” — probably because the show’s creator Charlie Brooker, who wrote the episode, was inspired by previous Boston Dynamics videos.
We can ask the same question of the Atlas: What is it for? The video only shows us what it can do. For now, the robots don’t want anything; apart from not falling over, they await a reason for being. The company says the goal is to create robots that can perform mundane tasks in all sorts of terrain, but the video contains no such tasks; we see only feats of agility, not the routine functions these robots would be back-flipping toward. Through this gap enter the tendrils of sinister speculation…..
(16) BOOKS IN SIGHT. Marie Powell’s adventures in castle-hopping across North Wales resulted in her award-winning historical fantasy series, Last of the Gifted.Spirit Sight (Book 1) and Water Sight (Book 2). An omnibus volume of the two books is coming out in October. And the audiobook of Spirit Sight is available from Kindle, Amazon.ca, Audible, and Apple.
Two siblings pledge their magic to protect their people from the invading English, with the help of the last true Prince of Wales—after his murder.
Welsh warrior-in-training Hyw can control the minds of birds and animals.
His sister Catrin can see the future in a drop of water.
Now Hyw and Catrin must stretch their gifts to stand between their people and the ruthless army of Edward I (a.k.a. Longshanks). When the prince is slain, Hyw’s gift allows him to meld with the prince’s spirit, to guide them in fighting back against the English invaders.
This award-winning medieval fantasy combines magic, mythology, and historical legends with the realities of 13th Century Wales.
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Michael Toman, Joyce Scrivner, Cora Buhlert, Ruth Berman, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]
The New England Science Fiction Association honored the winners of two annual awards at Boskone 58 on February 13.
SKYLARK AWARD
Anthony Lewis
The Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction (the Skylark) is presented annually by NESFA® to some person, who, in the opinion of the membership, has contributed significantly to science fiction, both through work in the field and by exemplifying the personal qualities which made the late “Doc” Smith well-loved by those who knew him.
Skylark Award winner Anthony Lewis in 2002.
GAUGHAN AWARD
Hilary Clarcq
The Gaughan Award honors the memory of Jack Gaughan, a long-time friend of fandom and one of the finest SF artists of the 20th century. Because Jack felt it was important to encourage and recognize new blood in the field, The New England Science Fiction Association, Inc., presents the Gaughan Award annually to an emerging artist (an artist who has become a professional within the past five years) chosen by a panel of judges.
Clarcq’s website, with images of many more works, is here.
Gaughan Award winner Hilary Clarcq
I'm very grateful that "Clearing" sold yesterday through @everydayorig 🙂 Here are several compiled process images, from abstract monoprint to final oil painting. pic.twitter.com/y0EeYDeD7z
(1) TREADING THE BOARDS. Should things go better than seems likely right now, the Bloomington Playwrights Project, “the only professional theatre in the entire state of Indiana focused solely on new plays,” will be putting on a genre play during the first week in May: The Absentee.
THE ABSENTEE
Woodward/Newman Drama Award Winner
MAY 1 – MAY 9
Written by Julia Doolittle Directed by Kate Bergstrom Sponsored by Susan & David Jones
Far out in the Milky Way, “Beacons” serve as lighthouses for warping spaceships around the galaxy. When a U.S. Space Forces ship explodes near Beacon 44.AR.90, its Operator finds herself alone in deep space with only her ship’s AI for companionship. That is, until a persistent canvasser calls, desperate to convince her to vote absentee in the 2088 election.
…The Woodward/Newman Drama Award is an exclusive honor offered by Bloomington Playwrights Project, remembering the many great dramas Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman performed in together.
It presents the best unpublished full-length drama of the year with a cash prize of $3,000 and a full production as part of the BPP’s Mainstage season, along with travel reimbursement.
(2) GERROLD INTERVIEW. What would you like to know?
Troy Parkins from Triton Leadership Coaching talks to Hugo Award winning author, David Gerrold about transformation, Star Trek, and the Sleestaks.
…Few of his works, however, hinge more closely on doors than does The Trial. Seemingly overnight, Kafka’s novel has become our trial. Not only do doors open and close for the protagonist Josef K., but they are now opening and closing for all of us struggling to understand our changing world. For the most part, the light is as dim on one side as the other. It is all very, well, Kafkaesque.
…Since late January, the term “Kafkaesque” has metastasized in the traditional and print media. The odds are good that this week you’ve read an account in the media that uses or quotes someone using the word. Most often, it is used to describe the federal, state, or local bureaucracies that the sick and those trying to care for them confront in seeking tests or treatment. The word has festered as quickly as the virus, with Merriam-Webster reporting a dramatic uptick of people looking up its meaning.
For someone who doubled over in laughter while reading aloud parts of The Trial to his friends, Kafka would probably get a chuckle over this factoid. There are, of course, as many definitions of the Kafkaesque as there are readers of Kafka. There are also those readers who admit they cannot define it but know it when they see it — or know it when they see it in someone else’s definition. As one of those readers, I find that one of Kafka’s many biographers, Frederick R. Karl, seems to get it right. We enter the Kafkaesque, he writes, when “we view life as somehow overpowering or trapping us, as in some way undermining our will to live as we wish.”
…Moorcock is a grandfather now, and recalls that at a family meal in a restaurant a few years ago one of his grandsons said loudly, “Grandpa, please don’t give my mummy any more weed!” To which his response was that he’d never given his daughter drugs… he’d always sold them to her.
Notting Hill had a large West Indian population then, and was often the focus of right wing attention. Moorcock and a friend famously infiltrated a fascist organisation that turned out to be run by a white haired old lady who poured tea from a pot and held forth with her opinions on Jews and people of colour. It further turned out that absolutely everyone else in the gathering aside from the elderly host were also left-wingers who had infiltrated the group. Moorcock joined the Race Relations Council and lobbied for legislation to make racism against the law.
He was being a father, and a husband, and editing magazines and writing novels. He was writing novels at a terrific pace. He wrote his Corum books in just three days apiece. He didn’t have time to read them before sending them off to his editor, who didn’t have time to read them before sending them to the printer.
Bad news. I just heard from Larry Wood that his mother JoAnn Wood has died. JoAnn was active in Ohio fandom, was an early member of NESFA. In later years she lived in Texas. Her husband Ed was one of the partners in Advent: Publishers and I remember her being involved in packing books for shipment. She is survived by a son, daughter-in-law, and two granddaughters.
JoAnn Wood started the Connecticut Valley SF Society in Hartford, CT in 1969. She was one of the bidders for 7 in ’77 (nucleus of the group that ended up running the 1977 Worldcon in Miami) and Hawaii in 1981 (which lost to Denver).
(6) RAMSEY OBIT. Veteran effects creator Rebecca Ramsey died March 7. Deadline’s notice begins:
Rebecca Ramsey, whose dozens of visual effects credits include Watchmen, The Hunger Games and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, has died. She was 53. Ramsey passed on March 7 from complications related to a fall in her home, according to her longtime friend, Jenny McShane.
Ramsey was a producer and EP of VFX, VR/AR/MR, 3D stereo, design and motion graphics for features, TV, titles, commercials and new media. She was a board member for the Visual Effects Society for several years and a longtime member of the Producers Guild.
(7) TODAY’S DAY.
April 5 — Fans of Star Trek celebrate First Contact Day on April 5 to mark the day in 2063 when humans make their first contact with the Vulcans.
#FirstContactDay is trending on Twitter. Pick the best tweets accordingly.
Why did the writers of First Contact choose April 5th as First Contact Day? Writer Ronald D. Moore made that decision. He told StarTrek.com, “The short answer on First Contact Day is that it’s my oldest son, Jonathan’s birthday. And that’s the only reason the date was chosen.”
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.
April 5, 1940 — One Million B.C. premiered. It is also known as Cave Man, Man and His Mate, and Tumak. Directed by Hal Roach and Roach Jr. it was produced by Hal Roach from a script by Mickell Novack, George Baker and Joseph Frickert. It starred Victor Mature, Carole Landis And Lon Chaney Jr. The film was a popular success and was nominated for two Academy Awards for its special effects and musical score which was by Werner R. Heymann. Neither it, nor the Sixties remake with Raquel Welch for that matter, are held in great liking by the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. This one gets a 34% rating, the remake a 37% rating. You can see the original here.
April 5, 1992 — Mann & Machine premiered on 1992. It would last for only nine episodes. Starring David Andrews, Yancy Butler and S. Epatha Merkerson, it was a Dick Wolf production, he of the eventually myriad Law & Order series. Yancy Butler would go on to be the lead a decade late in Witchblade. It has no audience rating at Rotten Tomatoes but the critic rating there is 20%. NBC has the pilot available here for your viewing.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 5, 1916 — Gregory Peck. You might remember him for his genre role as Robert Thorn in The Omen and definitely should remember him as Josef Mengele in The Boys from Brazil, thoughhis ‘purest’ SF role was Charles Keith in Marooned. (Died 2003.)
Born April 5, 1909 — Albert Broccoli. American film producer responsible for all the Bond films up to License to Kill, either by himself or in conjunction with others. He also was the producer of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and executive produced The Gamma People which is in the public domain so you can see it here. (Died 1996.)
Born April 5, 1917 — Robert Bloch. His Wiki Page says he’s best known as the writer of Psycho, but I’ll guarantee that only film geeks and many of y’all know that. I know him best as the writer of the Trek “Wolf in the Fold” episode. His Night of the Ripper novel is highly recommended by me. And I know that “That Hellbound Train” which won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story is the piece of fiction by him that I’ve read the most. He handed OGH two Hugos while emceeing the award ceremony at the 1984 Worldcon. His fiction is not well represented at the usual digital suspects. (Died 1994.)
Born April 5, 1926 — Roger Corman, 94. Ahhhh popcorn films! (See popcorn literature for what I mean.) Monster from the Ocean Floor in the early Fifties was his first such film and Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf on Syfy just a few years back was another such film. He’s a man who even even produced such a film called, errr, Munchies. A Worldcon guest of honor in 1996.
Born April 5, 1950 — A.C. Crispin. She wrote several Trek and Star Wars novelizations and created her series called Starbridge which was heavily influenced by Trek. She also co-wrote several Witch World novels, Gryphon’s Eyrie and Songsmith, with Andre Norton. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Price of Freedom was her last novel prior to her death. (Died 2013.)
Born April 5, 1950 — Anthony Horowitz,70. He wrote five episodes of Robin of Sherwood, and he was both creator and writer of Crime Traveller. He’s also written both Bond and Holmes novels. If you can find a copy, Richard Carpenter’s Robin of Sherwood: The Hooded Man is a very nice fleshing out of that series in literary form.
Born April 5, 1965 — Deborah Harkness, 55. She’s the author of the All Souls Trilogy, which consists of A Discovery of Witches and its sequels Shadow of Night and The Book of Life. I listened to the Jennifer Ikeda narrated audiobooks which are an amazing experience. Highly recommended as Harkness tells a remarkable story here. I’m not even fond ’tall of vampires in any form and hers actually are both appealing and make sense. I’ve not seen the series made from the novels.
Born April 5, 1982 — Hayley Atwell, 38. Agent Carter with her as Peggy Carter I’ll freely admit had been the only series or film in the MCU repertoire save the first Iron Man and Avengers films being the ones that I’ve flat out enjoyed so far. Even th,e misogyny of the males though irritating in that setting made sense. Oh, and I’m interested to see her in Christopher Robin as Evelyn Robin.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Foxtrot has the scoop on life after climate change.
This week on The Full Lid, I take a look at the different versions of Jean Luc Picard the just concluded first season of his show explored. I also talk to author Marieke Nijkamp about their excellent graphic novel The Oracle Code and listen to the first episode of new speculative thriller/romance/mystery/awesome podcast Null/Void. We round things off with a Signal Boost section so large it’s basically a kettle bell, crammed full of amazing things. Finally, the triumphant return of The Magnus Archvies is celebrated with a raft of Magnus-themed interstitial pieces. Enjoy:)
The space agency said the retro-looking logo will be stamped on the side of the Falcon 9 rocket that will carry astronauts to the International Space Station as part of SpaceX’s Demo-2 flight, presently scheduled for mid to late May. NASA says there’s a good chance you’ll see the logo featured in other missions, too.
The change was driven by the space agency’s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, who told Ars he is a “huge fan” of the worm symbol.
…”The digital revolution we have seen in all kinds of movies, television, games – probably no one made more of the difference to that then Ed and Pat,” says David Price, author of the book The Pixar Touch.
To make Toy Story and other computer-animated films possible, Dr Catmull, Dr Hanrahan and their teams had to develop ways to get computers to visualize three-dimensional objects.
During his postdoctoral studies, Dr Catmull created a way to make a computer to recognize a curved surface. Once developers had a mathematically defined curve surface they could begin to add more features to it – like texture and depth.
“Step by step you figure out what kind of lighting should be applied. Then you begin to put in the physics of it because plastic reflects light one way and metal reflects it in a very different way,” Dr Catmull explains.
Dr Catmull had always had an interest in animation and film.
After earning, his doctorate and working in a graphics lab in New York, he eventually became the head of computer division of Lucasfilms, founded by George Lucas. The creator of Star Wars and Jurassic Park saw the potential of computer animation in movies.
But Dr Catmull’s says his dream to make a feature-length computer-animated film was still seen as “wildly impractical”.
“Most people dismissed the idea as an irrelevant pipe dream.”
(14) SPECIES JUMP. A few weeks ago, conservationists were worried that endangered populations of gorillas would be sickened, but the BBC reports “Tiger at US zoo tests positive for coronavirus”.
A four-year-old female Malayan tiger at the Bronx Zoo has tested positive for the coronavirus.
The Bronx Zoo, in New York City, says the test result was confirmed by the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Iowa.
Nadia, her sister Azul, as well as two Amur tigers and three African lions, had developed a dry cough and all are expected to fully recover, it says.
The cats are believed to have been infected by a zoo keeper.
“We tested the cat [Nadia] out of an abundance of caution and will ensure any knowledge we gain about Covid-19 will contribute to the world’s continuing understanding of this novel coronavirus,” the zoo said in a statement on Sunday.
The big cats did have some decrease in appetite but “are otherwise doing well under veterinary care and are bright, alert, and interactive with their keepers”.
(15) EMERALD CITY WITHOUT PITY. From the New York Review of Books archives, Gore Vidal’s 1977 article “On Rereading the Oz Books”.
In the preface to The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum says that he would like to create modern fairy tales by departing from Grimm and Andersen and “all the horrible and blood-curdling incident devised” by such authors “to point a fearsome moral.” Baum then makes the disingenuous point that “Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wondertales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.” Yet there is a certain amount of explicit as well as implicit moralizing in the Oz books; there are also “disagreeable incidents,” and people do, somehow, die even though death and illness are not supposed to exist in Oz.
I have reread the Oz books in the order in which they were written. Some things are as I remember. Others strike me as being entirely new. I was struck by the unevenness of style not only from book to book but, sometimes, from page to page. The jaggedness can be explained by the fact that the man who was writing fourteen Oz books was writing forty-eight other books at the same time….
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Simon Pegg Offers Coronavirus Advice in Shaun Of The Dead Spoof” on YouTube, Pegg tells his friend Nick Frost that even though they survived the zombie apocalpyse on YouTube by hiding the Winchester pub, it’s better now to stay at home now that Britain has closed all the pubs for the duration of the pandemic.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, JJ, Darrah Chavey, Chip Hitchcock, Michael Toman, Mike Kennedy, N., and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kendall.]
Brian Aldiss being serenaded with “Happy Birthday” at LonCon 3 in 2014. Photo by Francis Hamit.
Jovian Awards were sent anonymously to the 2015 Hugo nominees who finished second to No Award (Pixel Scroll 12/17, item 14). Warren Buff, in a comment to Andrew Trembley on Facebook, said “Part of me would love to see them track down the equivalent data for the previous five No Awards and do the same there.”
All past No Awards occurred in years before the rules were changed to require a report of voting statistics, however, committees sometimes announced the ranking of the finalists.
Somewhat inconsistently, the 1959 Worldcon committee did announce Brian W. Aldiss as the writer who finished second to No Award, and they gave him a plaque. (See Michael Ashley, in Transformations: The Story of the Science-fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970.) Of course, Aldiss still could be given a Retro Jovian, and he might even enjoy it.
Who finished second to No Award in 1971 needs to be resolved. The Long List of Hugo Awards for 1971 says it was Colossus: The Forbin Project – a film that is getting some love in the current SF Movie Bracket. But Tony Lewis, chair of the 1971 Worldcon, who also tallied the Hugo votes, told File 770 in 2009 that No Award got a majority of votes while Jefferson Starship’s Blows Against the Empire received the largest number of votes of any nominated work. Somebody should be able to reconcile these two answers.
1977 – Dramatic Presentation: No Award
According to the Long List of Hugo Awards for 1977 this was another year where the final rankings were not disclosed. The nominees were –
Carrie
Logan’s Run
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Futureworld
I leave the rest as an exercise for DIY trophy makers…
