Tag Archives: Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore

Pixel Scroll 4/15/24 No, cats do not have magical powers. Really they don’t. Would they lie?

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(1) TODAY’S 40,000. [Item by Anne Marble.] A little Warhammer news… The official Warhammer Official X.com account just posted “In regards to female Custodians, there have always been female Custodians, since the first of the Ten Thousand were created.”

(It was in response to (this question in a longer thread.)

It’s fascinating to read the responses to this. Many fans are demanding they show them where this is shown in the lore. They are debating the official account.

Fans like these make me think, “Don’t make me have to feel sympathetic toward Games Workshop!”

From what I understand, this probably is retconning. But Warhammer is no stranger to retconning. They’re famous for retconning.

Angry fans are declaring that Games Workshop is going to kill the existing fanbase over this. They’ve accused them of “gaslighting” the fans. They are crying about “woke.” Some are claiming that they are returning the merchandise they were just about to buy all because of this. (Sure…)

People are predicting this is the “end” of Games Workshop. (They’ve been predicting this ever since 3D printing made it easier for people to make their own models.) Some are even blaming this stance on the fact that Vanguard and Group and BlackRock are now among the investors in Games Workshop.

But these are also the types of fans who do a lot of gatekeeping. If a fan has a different opinion, they call that fan a “tourist.” One dude was calling the people behind official lore “tourists.”

According to an older post by one of their well-known writers (Aaron Dembski-Bowden), this bit of lore was up for discussion years ago. But a “former IP overlord” said the characters couldn’t be women because the minis had already been produced, and they were all male.

The lore does say there are no known women Space Marines — and there are various theories about why. But Space Marines are also so altered that they are very different from what some would consider a stereotypical man. From what I have read, the Space Marines are sterile and asexual and chemically castrated.

Some people have been collecting screencaps of the responses. Also here. Here’s a selection:

The Fandom.com definition of a Warhammer 40k Custodian says Custodians are part of the Adeptus Custodes — the elite altered bodyguards of the Emperor. In comparison, the famous Space Marines the defenders of all humanity. And the Custodians are more powerful than them.

Also, while there is a lot of lore about the Space Marines, there is less lore about the Custodians.

For another perspective, I found some women fans who were upset because they thought it was badly done — and some who believed it was pandering to them. But most of the opposition seems to come from guys who use “woke” a lot. Some want to contact the Warhammer Community Outreach Manager about the change. Does that mean they are asking for the manager?

Disclaimer: I’m not a Warhammer player. However, I’ve been fascinated by the gaming system ever since I ran across a Warhammer Fantasy book called Warhammer City. I found Warhammer 40K even more fascinating because it’s so over-the-top. (It’s supposed to be.) So I ended up buying some of their novels.

(2) DON BLYLY MEDICAL UPDATE. Bookseller Don Blyly’s celebration of Uncle Hugo’s fiftieth anniversary was followed by a trip to the hospital, but he’s back at work already as he explained in his latest How’s Business? newsletter.

The week of the 50th Anniversary Sale was “interesting”.  For many years I heard the warnings about chest pains, and for many years I’ve had chest pains, but not quite like the medical advice described them.  Often, the pain seemed to be between my ribs, more often on the left side, but I didn’t think the pains were accurately reporting on where the problem was located.  And often I would let out a couple of large burps or farts and the chest pains would completely go away, so it seemed like the pains were not related to my heart. 

On the Monday after the anniversary I had a different kind of chest pain, a kind of pressure in the center of my chest, and it did not go away (but became somewhat less) after a couple of belches, and I started worrying a bit.  But Ecko had a doggie dental appointment Wednesday morning to have a tooth pulled that it had taken a month to set up, so I thought I’d get through that first if my pain didn’t get any worse.  My chest pain stayed about the same through Wednesday, and Ecko got through the extraction and was ordered to only have soft food for 2 weeks.  Thursday morning my chest pain was worse, so I went over with the staff of the store what to do if I had to go to the emergency room.    Just before noon the order of new t-shirts and sweatshirts arrived, a couple of weeks earlier than expected, and I wrote the check to the shirt guy.  Before I could start unpacking the 5 large cases of shirts, the pain became so bad that I decided to drive Ecko home, made arrangements for my son to pick her up at home after he got off work, and drove to the Abbott-Northwestern emergency room. 

It seems that one of the arteries in my heart was 99% blocked, and they quickly put in a stent.  The other arteries were partially blocked, but not enough to justify any more stents.  Swallowing a fist full of pills every day for the rest of my life is supposed to clear the other arteries and prevent a repeat of the heart attack.  After a couple of days they ran an echo-cardiogram to determine how much my heart had been damaged.  The doctor who interpreted the results told me that my heart was functioning at 45-50%.  I said that I didn’t feel that bad.  She said that nobody’s heart functions at 100% according to the standard used for the test–a perfectly healthy heart functions at 55% on the test, and that I would be back to 55% within a couple of months.  So, no permanent damage, but I’m supposed to take it easy for a while. 

About 48 hours after the stent was installed I got out of the hospital, and about an hour later got to the store to see how things were going.  A LOT of mail orders had come in while I was in the hospital, and Jon had pulled all the books and put them in piles so that I wouldn’t have to run all over the store finding them to process the orders.  And a lot of boxes of new books had arrived.  It took several days to get through all of that, and even longer to get through all the e-mails that had piled up.  But for several days I mostly sat in front of the computer and didn’t even think about going to the basement.

The hospital has been dribbling out the bills to the insurance company, and the insurance company has been letting me know how much I’m responsible for.  So far, the hospital has billed over $110,000, and so far I’m only responsible for $200….

(3) TUNES FROM THE TARDIS. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Not surprisingly given (some of) what I watch/listen to on YouTube, the YouTube Music app on my phone (which I’m not sure I’ve previously used, certainly not recently or muchly) burped up this (below) amusing item. I’m not enough of a Whovian to appreciate all the references, but enjoyed it natheless, and no doubt some of you more so. (And it turned out to be part of a playlist, which rabbit hole I timesinkedly explored, and will share my faves here, in days to come.) Doctor Who playlist.

(4) PAYING IT FORWARD. Gabino Iglesias shares some wisdom about anthologies in an X.com thread that starts here. Some excerpts follow:

(5) HIGH-PRICED DETECTIVE. From Newser we learn a “Handwritten Sherlock Holmes Draft Could Fetch $1.2M”

A rare, handwritten manuscript of the Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of the Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is up for sale this June at Sotheby’s, and it’s expected to fetch up to $1.2 million, breaking past sales records of his works. It’s the only handwritten copy of Conan Doyle’s second novel in existence, Smithsonian Magazine reports, and how this particular work was commissioned comes with a fun bit of history. According to CNN, the story begins in 1889 with Conan Doyle having dinner in London with JM Stoddart (an editor of US literary magazine Lippincott’s Monthly) and fellow author Oscar Wilde.

When Stoddart asked what the writers were working on, Conan Doyle committed to publishing a second Sherlock Holmes novel for the magazine, while Wilde said he’d submit his work in progress, The Picture of Dorian Gray. “It’s hard to think of two contemporary authors who might be less similar than Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde,” Sotheby’s book specialist Selby Kiffer tells CNN. “And yet there they are at a dinner table together and talking about what they’re currently working on.”…

(6) SENDAK EXHIBITION IN LA. The Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles will host “Wild Things Are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak” from April 18-September 1.

Wild Things Are Happening is comprised of more than 150 sketches, storyboards, and paintings by Sendak drawn from the collection of The Maurice Sendak Foundation. Presented alongside landmark pictures for Sendak’s own books will be examples of artwork he created for such celebrated publications as The Bat-Poet by Randall Jarrell, A Hole is to Dig by Ruth Krauss, the Little Bear series by Else Holmelund Minarik, and Zlateh the Goat by Isaac Bashevis Singer. 

Designs for many of Sendak’s opera, theater, film, and television productions are also featured. His impact on the broader world of the performing arts is illuminated through his collaboration and friendship with directors, composers, playwrights, and visual artists, such as Carroll Ballard, Frank Corsaro, Spike Jonze, Tony Kushner, and Twyla Tharp. The exhibition will also highlight Sendak’s love of Mozart and the way the composer’s life and work influenced not only Sendak’s designs for Mozart’s operas, such as The Magic Flute, but also key books including Outside Over There and Dear Mili. As Sendak stated, “I love opera beyond anything, and Mozart beyond anything.”

This groundbreaking exhibition also adds new depth to audiences’ understanding of Sendak’s life—as a child of Jewish immigrants, a lover of music, someone with close personal relationships—and how it dovetailed with his creative work, which drew inspiration from writers ranging from William Shakespeare to Herman Melville. From portraits that he made of loved ones to archival photographs of family members to toys he designed as a young adult, the exhibition brings Sendak and his work to life in three dimensions….

Interior art for Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life. Originally published in 1967.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 15, 1933 — Elizabeth Montgomery. (Died 1995.) The beauty of these Birthdays is that I can decide that one series that a performer did is enough to be worthy of a write-up. So it is with Elizabeth Montgomery and her ever-so-twinkly role as the good witch Samantha Stephens on the Bewitched series.

I loved that series and still do. Bewitched is one of those series that the Suck Fairy keeps smiling every time she comes near it. Obviously she too has very fond memories of it. 

Sol Saks in interviews said that the Forties film I Married a Witch based on Thorne Smith’s partially-written novel The Passionate Witch, and John Van Druten’s Broadway play Bell, Book and Candle, adapted into a 1958 film of the same name, were his inspirations for the pilot episode. These films were properties of Columbia Pictures, which also owned Screen Gems, the company that would produce Bewitched. 

Bell, Book and Candle is the prime story source as that has the good witch Gillian Holroyd, played by Kim Novak, casting a love spell on Shep Henderson as played James Stewart to have a fling with him but she genuinely falls for him.

Bewitched debuted sixty years ago this Autumn. It would run on ABC eight seasons, for two hundred and fifty episodes. 

Let’s discuss the other cast of Bewitched. Dick York was Darrin Stephens, her husband and I thought that he was a perfect comic foil for her. Dick Sargent would replace the ailing York for the final three seasons.  It’s been too long since I’ve seen the series but I think I remember his chemistry with her being a little less smooth.

So the next major cast member was Agnes Moorehead as Endora, Samantha’s mother. She worked fine in her role which was that she disapproved of her daughter’s decision to marry a mortal. She often times casts spells on Darrin for her own amusement, but mostly to try to drive Darrin away from Samantha. (It didn’t work. At all.) Despite that, she is the most frequent houseguest and one of the most loyal members of Samantha’s family who dotes on her grandchildren, Tabitha and Adam. 

Then there’s his boss, Larry White, who was played by David Tate, and he was well cast in that role, and many crucial scenes took place at the Madison Avenue advertising agency McMann and Tate where Darrin worked.

So that brings us to Elizabeth Montgomery. She began her performing career in the the Fifties with a role on her father’s Robert Montgomery Presents television series. She’d also be a member of his summer theater company. 

She turned out to be very popular and was kept busy performing consistently from there on. She’d have two genre roles prior to Bewitched, the first being as Lillie Clarke on One Step Beyond in “The Death Waltz” and, because everyone seemingly has to be in at least an episode of it, on The Twilight Zone as Woman in “Two”. The only other actor here is Charles Bronson as, oh guess, Man. It’s a piece of pure SF by Montgomery Pittman who also wrote the scripts for “The Grave” and “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank”. 

So now we come to her in Bewitched,  and the role that she was perfect for.  It’s hard to write her up here without noting sexism of the time as her beauty was definitely the attraction for many of the viewers as opposed to her talent according to some of the news articles at the time. Or so said the critics. 

But talented she was, displaying a deft comedic touch that I’ve seen in few female performers since her as she never overplayed her role, something that would’ve been oh so easy to do. She was Samantha Stephens, the very long-lived witch who defied witchery tradition and married a mortal. 

Do note that it openly depicted them sleeping together and sexually attracted to each other. No separate beds here.

The first episode, “I Darrin, Take This Witch, Samantha” was filmed a short while after she gave birth to her first child. 

She was intelligent, not reserved and depicted as more than a match for anyone who might get in her way. Unusual for a female character of that time. 

I have over the years rewatched many of the episodes, and they do hold up rather well provided you like Sixties comedy. I think this along with such shows as My Favorite Martian and The Munsters are some of the finest comic genre work done.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] This is a little belated, but I thought you might like to hear about SFF or genre-adjacent clues on last Thursday’s Jeopardy! episode.

In the first round:

Unreal Estate, $800:

The English village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh is where this animal lover has his medical practice

Alison Betts tried “What is James Herriot?” but it was Brian Hardzinski who had the correct response, “Who is Doctor Dolittle?”

Abbreviated Television, $400:

In the ‘90s we had “ST: DS9”

Brian: “What is Star Trek: Deep Space 9?”

$800:

Don’t space out (or do) with “FAM”

Triple stumper, nobody made the attempt. This was Apple TV+’s alternate history space show, “For All Mankind”.

“T.P.”, $400:

Kyle MacLachlan was the clean-cut FBI agent investigating a murder in the very strange title town of this series

Returning champion Lee Wilkins gave us, “What is Twin Peaks?”

Unreal Estate, $400:

On his third voyage, this man travels to the flying island of Laputa, where the people are so lost in thought they notice little else

Alison: “Who is Gulliver?”

Double Jeopardy round:

Some Timely Words, $1200:

This 6-letter word means to go back in fictional time & rewrite the past of a character or narrative for a new work

Brian: “What is retcon?”

Final Jeopardy: Space Shuttles

2 space shuttles were named for craft commanded by this man, who died far from home in 1779

Lee: “Who is ?” — no answer.

Brian: “Who is Cook?” Correct. The vessels: Discovery and Endeavour.

Alison: “Who is Cook?” She was the game’s winner.

(10) MAS ECLIPSES. “Meet The Country About To Have Three Solar Eclipses In Three Years” – Forbes arranges the introduction.

What if your country suddenly had three major solar eclipses in three years? As the world’s attention fades from Monday’s “Great American Eclipse,” there’s a realization that there’s not another one in the U.S. until 2033. So where is the next eclipse?

It’s in Spain. Then Spain again, and again.

A few years ago, Argentina and Chile staged two total solar eclipses—one a glorious sight and another a rain-affected, COVID-affected event—but it’s another Spanish-speaking country that is about to take the eclipse baton….

(11) USE THE FORCE. The Guardian’s Harry Cliff submits “The big idea: are we about to discover a new force of nature?”

… There are four forces that we already know about. Gravity governs the grandest scales, marshalling the planets in their orbits and shaping the evolution of the universe as a whole. Electromagnetic force gives rise to a vast range of phenomena, from the magnetic field of the Earth to radio waves, visible light and X-rays, while also holding atoms, molecules and, by extension, the physical world together. Deep within the atomic nucleus, two further forces emerge: the vice-like “strong force”, which binds atomic nuclei, and the “weak force”, which among other things causes radioactive decay and enables the nuclear reactions that power the sun and the stars.

Studying these forces has transformed our understanding of nature and generated revolutionary new technologies. Work on electromagnetism in the 19th century gave us the electric dynamo and radio broadcasts, the discovery of the strong and weak forces in the 1930s led to nuclear energy and atomic bombs, while understanding gravity has made it possible to put astronauts on the moon and to develop GPS satellites that can tell us our location anywhere on Earth to within a few metres. Uncovering a fifth force would be one hell of a prize.

Hints that physicists may be on the brink of making such a breakthrough have been accumulating over the past decade. The first tranche of evidence comes from particle physics experiments here on Earth, the results of which appear to conflict with our current best theory of fundamental particles, the standard model.

Notwithstanding its rather uninspiring name, the standard model is one of humankind’s greatest intellectual achievements, the closest we have come to a theory of everything, and has passed almost every experimental test thrown at it with flying colours. So far at least.

However, the BaBar experiment in California, the Belle experiment in Japan and the LHCb experiment at Cern have all spied exotic fundamental particles known as “beauty quarks” behaving in ways that go against the predictions of the standard model. Meanwhile, just outside Chicago, Fermilab’s Muon g–2 experiment has been busily studying another type of fundamental particle called a muon, finding that it emits a slightly stronger magnetic field than expected.

The most exciting explanations for these anomalies involve hitherto unknown forces of nature that subtly alter the way beauty quarks transform into other particles or mess with the muon’s magnetism. …

(12) SF2 CONCATENATION SUMMER SEASON EDITION. [Item by Jonathan Cowie.] SF² Concatenation has just posted its seasonal edition of news, articles and reviews. A couple of the articles may be of interest to those attending the Glasgow Worldcon later this summer….

v34(3) 2024.4.15 — New Columns & Articles for the Summer 2024

v34(3) 2024.4.15 — Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Reviews

v34(3) 2023.4.15 — Non-Fiction SF & Science Fact Book Reviews

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]  I have a feeling in my water (never a good sign) that this might be based on a Blake Crouch novel…?  I have to confess I have a shameful weakness for Blake Crouch and have read four or five of his novels.  They are light reads, more thrillery, but most have a decided SF riff which are great fun (if careful not to look at plot too closely).  Anyway, see what you think…

A man is abducted into an alternate version of his life. Amid the mind-bending landscape of lives he could’ve lived, he embarks on a harrowing journey to get back to his true family and save them from a most terrifying foe: himself.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/26/24 I’ve Been Yeeted, Been Mistreated, When Will I Be Faunched

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(1) UNCLE HUGO’S WILL CELEBRATE 50TH ANNIVERSARY. Don Blyly’s How’s Business newsletter invites everyone to mark your calendar — Uncle Hugo’s turns 50 this weekend.

Don Blyly readies the new Uncle Hugo’s for business. Photo (c) by Paul Weimer.

Uncle Hugo’s opened for business on March 2, 1974, which makes this coming Saturday our 50th anniversary.  Uncle Hugo’s 50th Anniversary Sale is Friday, March 1, 2024 through Sunday, March 10, 2024, with an extra 10% off everything at Uncle Hugo’s/Uncle Edgar’s. If you have an Uncle Hugo’s discount card, you get 20% off everything. With a $200.00 purchase, we’ll throw in a free 50th anniversary mug (while supply lasts). The sale only applies to in-store purchases, not to mail orders.

But there continue to be a few bumps on the road to that celebration. Blyly says this happened to him recently:

A customer that I had never done business with before ordered a $30.00 book through AbeBooks, and I sent it off to him.  About a week later he sent me an e-mail saying that the book had a small ding on the top edge of the page block that was not mentioned in the description, and he enclosed a photo of the ding.  He wanted me to refund part of the price for the ding or else he would return the book for a refund.  I checked on what other people were charging for the same book and saw that even with the ding he was getting a good price, but I agreed to refund him $5.00 for the ding.    He wrote back that I would have to refund at least $15 or he would return the book.  I told him to return the book.  The next day he started the AbeBooks process for returning the book.  But the day after that he told AbeBooks that he had never received the book and that they should refund his full purchase price without having to return the book he had never received–the book that he had already sent me a photo of to try to get me to cut the price in half.

The original Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s
The new location – 2022.

(2) SPIRIT AWARDS. Two items of genre interest were winners of 2024 Independent Spirit Awards. (The complete list is at the link.)

BEST BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE IN A NEW SCRIPTED SERIES

  • Keivonn Montreal Woodard, The Last of Us

BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMANCE IN A NEW SCRIPTED SERIES

  • Nick Offerman, The Last of Us

Deadline reported quotes from the actor’s acceptance remarks — “Nick Offerman Slams ‘Homophobic Hate’ Aimed At His Episode Of ‘The Last Of Us’ In Indie Spirit Awards Speech”.

At Sunday’s Independent Spirit Awards, actor Nick Offerman addressed “homophobic hate” aimed over the past year at “Long, Long Time,” the stand-alone episode of HBO‘s post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us that he starred in with Murray Bartlett and that earned Offerman a win today for Best Supporting Performance in a New Scripted Series.

“Thank you so much, Film Independent. I’m astonished to be in this category, which is bananas,” Offerman began while onstage to accept the prize. “Thanks to HBO for having the guts to participate in this storytelling tradition that is truly independent. Stories with guts that when homophobic hate comes my way and says, ‘Why did you have to make it a gay story?’ We say, ‘Because you ask questions like that.’”

Added an impassioned Offerman: “It’s not a gay story, it’s a love story, you a**hole.”…

(3) BEST CANADIAN. R. Graeme Cameron reviews Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, Volume One at Amazing Stories. After discussing a great many of the works individually, he gives this overall endorsement:

… I must say editor Stephen Kotowych has excellent taste and judgement. What I reviewed is a real powerhouse of quality fiction sparkling with originality, brilliant perception and sophisticated subtlety; the kind of reading session which leaves me feeling inspired and excited.

I frankly assume the rest of the works in this anthology are just as good….

…In my opinion this volume of The Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science fiction belongs on every Canadian reader’s bookshelf. The second volume is underway. I’d like to see it become an annual tradition. As many readers of my reviews are aware, there is a lot of excellent genre fiction being written in Canada. May this series become the definitive annual sample. If all are good as this one, I can see them becoming textbooks for high schools and universities. Makes sense to me. You owe it to yourself to purchase it for your bookshelf.

(4) DIGITAL LOSS COMPENSATION. The Verge opines that “Funimation’s solution for wiping out digital libraries could be good, if it works”.

The president of Crunchyroll, Rahul Purini, announced that the company is working to compensate customers who will lose their digital libraries in the upcoming Funimation / Crunchyroll merger on April 2nd. 

“[We] are working really hard directly with each [customer] to ensure that they have an appropriate value for what they got in the digital copy initially,” Purini tells Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel during this week’s Decoder podcast. “As people reach out to us through customer service, we are responding and handling each of those requests as they prefer.”

When asked what “appropriate value” meant, Purini said, “So it could be that they get access to a digital copy on any of the existing other services where they might be able to access it. It could be a discount access to our subscription service so they can get access to the same shows through our subscription service.”

These options haven’t been formally announced or detailed, and Purini went on to say that it was something Crunchyroll customers are currently taking advantage of. My attempts to secure the “appropriate value” for some digital copies have, so far, been unsuccessful….

(5) YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK. Deadline reports “’Star Wars’ Pic ‘The Mandalorian & Grogu’ Lands California’s Largest Tax Credit Ever”.

The Star Wars franchise is coming to shoot a film entirely in California for the first time with The Mandalorian & Grogu movie, and the Golden State is paying out its weight in tax incentive gold to have the bounty hunter saga made within state lines.

To be specific, that is a total tonnage of $21,755,000 in conditional tax credits for the Jon Favreau directed film. With a new Fantastic Four, Gladiator 2 and a new season of The Last of Us on his dance card, it is unclear right now if SAG Award winner Pedro Pascal will be resuming his role of Din Djarin and teaming back up with the charming Baby Yoda for the Mandalorian movie.

What is known is that $21,755,000 in tax credits is one of the biggest allocations in the California Film Commission run program’s history.

Put another way, Mandalorian & Grogu won’t be getting the $22.4 million that Transformers spinoff Bumblebee scored back in 2017, but it tops the more than $20.8 million that Captain Marvel was awarded seven years ago, and the $20.2 million that Quentin Tarantino’s supposed last film #10 received last September.

Estimated to be hiring 500 crew members, 54 cast members, and 3500 background players for 92 filming days in California this year, The Mandalorian & Grogu is expected to generate a record-breaking $166,438,000 in qualified expenditures and below-the-line wages….

(6) A FAIRY TALE TAKEOFF. Atlas Obscura Experiences’ “Transforming Fairy Tales With Anca Szilágyi” is a four-session course that starts March 4. Details at the link.

This class invites beginners and experienced writers alike to use concepts from fairy tales as a launch pad for new writing. Drawing from Max Lüthi’s The Fairy Tale as Art Form and Portrait of Man, we’ll play with archetypes and motifs (and explore how motifs play with us), consider how far a fairy tale can be stretched into something new while still retaining some glimmer of recognition, and contemplate how the trope of the tiny flaw can serve as a source of tension in a story. We’ll look at work by authors such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Cunningham, Sofia Satmar [sic, Samatar], and more. In our final class, students will exchange drafts for peer and instructor feedback in a supportive environment.

While this class is designed for folks of all experience levels who are interested in fairy tale writing, it can also serve as an appropriate complementary course for students who have previously taken courses with Anca.

(7) APEX ANNOUNCES LH MOORE COLLECTION. Apex Book Company has acquired first North America English rights to LH Moore’s short story collection Breath of Life.

Breath of Life is a collection of the works of author and poet LH Moore, whose history- and Afrofuturism-inspired speculative short fiction, poetry, and essays move between and blur the genres from horror to science fiction to fantasy. With themes of family and identity, rooted solidly in history and imagining the unknown—both here on Earth and beyond—Breath of Life is an exploration of the unexpected.

Writer, poet and historian LH Moore’s Afrofuturism- and history-inspired speculative fiction and poetry have been in numerous publications and anthologies, such as all three groundbreaking Dark Dreams anthologies of Black horror writers; Bram Stoker Award Finalist anthology Sycorax’s Daughters; Black Magic Women; Chiral Mad 4 and 5, SLAY, Conjuring Worlds, StokerCon 2019, Humans Are the Problem anthologies; and Fireside, Apex, and FIYAH magazines.

(8) HANDHELD WILL CLOSE. Fantasy Hive announces the coming demise of “Handheld Press (2017-2024)”.

Handheld Press will be publishing their last books in July 2024, and cease trading in June 2025. Handheld Press was founded by Kate Macdonald in 2017, specifically with the aim of bringing brilliant but overlooked works by women writers back into print. With their striking cover art and gorgeous design, Handheld Press titles were immediately recognizable on sight. And the reader could rest assured that the contents would match the packaging – Handheld had a knack for choosing exciting and surprising novels and collections and matching them with introductory essays by experts and comprehensive notes on the text….

…One only had to look at the sections of descriptors on Handheld’s website to get a firm idea of their priorities – Women’s Lives, LGBT+ and Disability rub shoulders with Fantasy and Science Fiction, Crime/Thriller and Biography. Macdonald’s mission, which she has pursued with vigour and enthusiasm over the past eight years, has been to recover lost voices from the past, perspectives that are in danger of being forgotten by the largely white, straight and male traditional writers of literary history…. 

(9) BRITISH BOARD OF FILM CLASSIFICATION RULES ON DISNEY CLASSIC. “’Mary Poppins’ Age Rating Raised In UK Over ‘Discriminatory Language’” – Deadline has the story.

Mary Poppins has been deemed potentially unsuitable for children.

That’s the verdict of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), which last week increased the age rating on the Julie Andrews classic because it contains “discriminatory language.”…

…It did not specify the language in question, but the Daily Mail newspaper reported that the warning refers to the movie’s use of the word Hottentots.

Now regarded as racially insensitive, the word was used by Europeans to refer to the Khoekhoe, a group of nomadic herders in South Africa.

Reginald Owen’s Admiral Boom utters the slur twice in Mary Poppins, including using it to describe chimney sweeps, whose faces are blackened with soot.

The BBFC has been contacted for comment. It told the Mail that a lack of condemnation for the admiral’s language was considered to be a reason for raising the age limit.

The organization said: “We understand from our racism and discrimination research… that a key concern for… parents is the potential to expose children to discriminatory language or behaviour which they may find distressing or repeat without realising the potential offence.”

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 26, 1918 — Theodore Sturgeon. (Died 1985.) This is not a comprehensive look at Theodore Sturgeon. This is my look at what I truly like.

It is an understatement to say he was a prolific writer. There would be eleven novels, more than one hundred and twenty short stories, and those scripts for Star Trek. And he wrote some four hundred reviews. Keep in mind that he that he only lived to be sixty-seven years old.

Theodore Sturgeon. Photo by Carol DePriest.

I think I’ll start with his Trek scripts as even before I knew that he was the scriptwriter for them, I liked those episodes, “Amok Time” and “Shore Leave”, the latter which is easily in my top ten episodes of this series. I’m not sure how much of his script survived the rewriting first by Coon and then obsessively by Roddenberry. Is his original script published anywhere?

Theresa Peschel notes that he wrote that the screenplay for Studio One’s 1952 adaptation of They Came to Baghdad, a novel that Agatha Christie had written the previous year. She notes “Yet it’s not listed anywhere, including on the semi-comprehensive website devoted to him whose name I can’t remember.”

Now let’s consider his Ellery Queen mystery which was The Player on The Other Side. I’ve read it and it’s quite excellent. It was written from a forty-two page outline by Frederic Dannay, half along with Manfred Bennington of the original Ellery Queen writing alias. I didn’t know if this was the standard practice for these ghostwritten novels but it certainly would make sense if it was so. 

It is said that his “Yesterday Was Monday” story was the inspiration for the rebooted Twilight Zone’s “A Matter of Minutes” episode but given that Harlan Ellison and Rockne O’Bannon wrote the script I doubt much of his original story made it to the screen.  My opinion of course only. 

A second, “A Saucer of Loneliness”, was broadcast in 1986 and was dedicated to his memory. This was directly off a story by him, which first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction in the February 1953 issue.

The Dreaming Jewels which was nominated for a Retro Hugo at The Millennium Philcon for best novella is uneven but worth reading novel none-the-less. I think More Than Human is a much better with more interesting character and a story that actually makes sense all that way through. And other novels I like, well that it’s. I have read others but those are the only ones I liked. 

I’ve read more than enough of his short fiction to say that he’s a wonderful writer at it. Noel Sturgeon and Paul Williams have published The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, all thirteen volumes.

So tell what you like from his fiction.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) NEW HINTS ABOUT DISNEYLAND EXPANSION. “DisneylandForward – New Details on $2.5 Billion Disneyland Expansion Master Plan” at Mickey Visit.

…Disneyland hopes to make land changes:

  • Establish a new parking structure off the East Side Harbor Blvd entrance to the theme parks
  • Build a new entertainment/shopping facility on the current site of the Toy Story Parking Lot across the street from the Anaheim Convention Center a block down Harbor Blvd – the plans also list this as the potential for theme park use
  • Expand Downtown Disney, Disneyland, and Disney California Adventure into the current grounds of the Paradise Pier Hotel, Disneyland Hotel, and surrounding parking lots – this is the area that would be the most newsworthy and change the offerings of the resort!

On January 23, 2024 Disney announced a new set of details around the proposed investment that would be aligned with the DisneylandForward zoning approvals. While discussing the proposed investment Disney again teased the recently opened World of Frozen and Zootopia lands as potential inspirations for expansion at Disneyland. They also mentioned potential expansions based on Marvel’s Black Panther, Coco, Tangled, Peter Pan, Toy Story, and Tron according to the OC Register.

As part of the new investment proposal, Disney will invest a minimum of $1.9 billion in the resort over the next ten years. The amount could reach $2.5 billion and beyond. If the investment does not reach $2.5 billion within 10 years Disney pays an additional $5 million in street and transportation improvements. 

(13) IT COULD HAVE BEEN SMOOTH. [Item by Steven French.] One for the hovertrain enthusiasts: “Forgotten Grumman TLRV – Pueblo, Colorado” at Atlas Obscura.

IN DOWNTOWN PUEBLO, COLORADO, TWO futuristic hovertrains sit idly next the road, looking absurdly out of place next to any cars that happen to drive by, like a forgotten piece of rail travel’s ambitious past.

One is a Grumman Tracked Levitation Research Vehicle (TLRV), an air-cushion transportation prototype that was built to reach speeds of up to 300 miles per hour. The hovertrain was intended to glide along the track without wheels on what was essentially a cushion of compressed air, which was squeezed through tubes along the train’s body then pushed downward. It was meant to be a revolutionary form of rail travel….

(14) KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER? “A college is removing its vending machines after a student discovered they were using facial-recognition technology” says Business Insider. The article includes statements from the companies that own and service these machines denying that they collect the information, or that the information violates GDPR regulations. Take your pick.

A university in Canada is expected to remove a series of vending machines from campus after a student discovered an indication they used facial-recognition technology.

The smart vending machines at the University of Waterloo first gained attention this month when the Reddit user SquidKid47 shared a photo. The photo purportedly showed an M&M-brand vending machine with an error code reading, “Invenda.Vending. FacialRecognition.App.exe — Application error.”

The post drew speculation from some users and caught the attention of a University of Waterloo student whom the tech-news website Ars Technica identified as River Stanley, a writer for the local student publication MathNews. Stanley investigated the smart vending machines, discovering that they’re provided by Adaria Vending Services and manufactured by Invenda Group. The Canadian publication CTV News reported that Mars, the owner of M&M’s, owned the vending machines.

(15) I’LL BE DAMMED. Nothing to do with sff, still, quite interesting: “I Knew Something Big Was Happening: A Guest Post from Leila Philip” at B&N Reads.

…I discovered beavers by accident. I was heading back from a walk through the woods with my dog, Coda, when I heard a loud bang. I literally jumped, thinking a gun had gone off, then I looked out and saw that the dry marshy area I was walking by was now brimming silver – curiously it was filled with water!  Then came another bang and I saw a small brown head moving fast. A beaver had built a dam there and was swimming back and forth, slamming her tail to try to scare us away.  I was transfixed. Over the next few weeks, I watched the shallow woodland valley become a pond. Soon I was seeing and hearing the rustling and movements of so many birds and animals. Mornings, the whole area rang with a complexity of bird song I’d never heard before. I knew something big was happening I just didn’t know yet what it was. Thinking back now I would describe my encounter with the beaver that day as a moment of awe, an experience when I was shifted out of my self and connected to something much larger that I hadn’t been in touch with just moments before. That was the book’s start….

(16) GOOD NEWS FROM THE MOON. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The chances were slim and none. Slim was the winning bet! Is this the real SLIM Shady?

The Japanese Moon lander that fell over on touchdown last month (as opposed to the American Moon lander that fell over on touchdown this month) is back online. JAXA was very pessimistic about SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) surviving the super cold Lunar night. However, it did, and the solar cells have provided enough juice to charge the battery and reestablish communication.

Which is not to say SLIM is 100% OK. In fact, the heat of the sun has so far made it inadvisable to restart any of the scientific instruments. Things are expected to cool off in a few days as the sun angle lowers, hopefully allowing more observations to be made before night once again falls. “Japan Moon lander survives lunar night” at the BBC.

Japan’s Moon lander has survived the harsh lunar night, the sunless and freezing equivalent to two Earth weeks.

“Last night, a command was sent to #SLIM and a response received,” national space agency Jaxa said on X.

The craft was put into sleep mode after an awkward landing in January left its solar panels facing the wrong way and unable to generate power.

A change in sunlight direction later allowed it to send pictures back but it shut down again as lunar night fell.

Jaxa said at the time that Slim (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) was not designed for the harsh lunar nights.

(17) POTTERO SOUTHERNALIUS FIO. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] You might have to be Southern to get some of the references, or at least to know why they’re so funny. “If Harry Potter Was Southern” with Matt Mitchell.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the “Madame Web Pitch Meeting” Beware spoilers.

[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Don Blyly, Kathy Sullivan, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 4/23/23 File The Pixels, Lest They Squeak Or Scroll

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(1) ICG LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD. Congratulations to John and Christine O’Halloran, who were presented with this year’s International Costumers Guild Lifetime Achievement Award at Costume-Con 39 on April 22.

(2) AUDIOPYROMATRONICS. Maleficent Dragon caught fire during last night’s performance of Fantasmic! at Disneyland.

(3) FUNNY BUSINESS DATABASE. “Fictional Brands Archive” is just what it says it is.

Fictional Brands Archive is a collection of many fictional brands found in films, series and video games. It is structured according to the principles of brand identity design and aims to provide a comprehensive view of each fictional brand, framing them in their own fictional context and documenting their use and execution in the source work.

This website was developed as part of a Master’s thesis in Communication Design at Politecnico di Milano, supervised by Professor Francesco E. Guida, titled Fictional Brand Design.

The Research section contains the theoretical foundations upon which the project is based: it is a summary of several chapters of the thesis and is intended to serve as an informative compendium for anyone interested in learning more about fictional branding.

For example:

ACME
Name: ACME
Featured in: Looney Toons
Sector: Private
Category: Manufacturing
Medium: Series, Animated
Genre: Comedy
Year: 1920

The Acme corporation spans across several TV series, cartoons and films. The company is perhaps best-known for its appearance in the Looney Tunes universe. Its name is derived from the Greek word “acm”, which means peak or prime, but also refers to a common practice, in the era of the yellow pages that were written alphabetically, of naming companies with the initial “A” to make it appear at the top of lists. Acme seems to be a conglomerate which makes incredibly dangerous products that are known to fail at the worst of times.

Acme doesn’t have a consistent branding system, it’s logo appears in a multitude of serif, sans serif and stencil typefaces.

(4) ADVENTURES IN BOOKSELLING. In addition to everything else, Don Blyly has to combat the elements to keep Uncle Hugo’s & Uncle Edgar’s Bookstores open as he explained in his latest “How’s Business?” newsletter.

…People have been asking about the flood I wrote about last time.  When this building was built in the 1920s, Minneapolis had a single sewer system for both sanitary sewage and storm sewage, and the roof of the building was slanted so that all the rain water flowed to the center of the roof and then down through a large pipe to the sewer pipe in the basement.  With the single sewer system, every major summer rain storm effectively “flushed” the entire sewer system, resulting in untreated sewage flowing into the Mississippi and into some basements.  About 40-45 years ago Minneapolis created a second sewer system to handle only storm sewage (primarily dumping the rain water into the city lakes instead of taking it to the sanitary sewage treatment plant), and all buildings were forced to divert the rain water from their roofs away from

the sanitary sewage system.  For this building, all the water still collected in the center of the roof, but then went through a cast iron pipe around 6 inches in diameter across the ceiling of the first floor, through the side of the building, and dumped into the alley to make it to the storm sewer system on the street.  The part of the pipe outside the building is wrapped with electrical thermal tape, and then wrapped in fiber glass insulation, which is then wrapped with an aluminum-foil like coating.  This system had kept the outside pipe from freezing through all of the below zero days all winter long, but the insulation blanket had slipped down a couple of inches over the winter, so that the water no longer dripped directly onto the alley–it instead sprayed onto the bottom of the fiber glass, froze over night in the fiber glass, and then the ice started creeping up the pipe.    At the time the flood took place, there was a column of ice reaching down to the alley and reaching up the pipe for an unknown distance.  I knock away the column of ice, and nothing happened.  I then got a hammer and chisel and started breaking off pieces of ice within the pipe.  Eventually, water started dripping from the bottom of the pipe.  After more chiseling, all the ice came out of the pipe and water started gushing into the alley and stopped coming through the ceiling.  I removed the fiber glass that had slipped down over the end of the pipe, and we’ve had no water problems since.    Of course, there have been insurance problems.    When I reported the flood, I was promised that I would be contacted by an adjuster within 2 days.  Two weeks later I called again, talked to somebody who tried to claim that the water pouring through the ceiling had to have been caused by a sewer backup in the basement.    An on-site adjuster came out a few days later, did a good examination of the situation, took lots of photos of the floor, the section where part of the ceiling fell, and the water-damaged books, and agreed with me that the sewer in the basement had nothing to do with the ice dam in the alley.  A few weeks later I received a check for part of the estimated cost of repairing the floor, but nothing for repairing the ceiling.  The insurance company also wants a title-by-title inventory of every book that got wet, and I haven’t had time to do that yet….

(5) KEEP ON TREKKIN’. The Star Trek: Strange New Worlds second season teaser trailer is online.

The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise boldly returns for new adventures full of new life and new civilizations, and, of course, exploring strange new worlds.

(6) TODAY’S THOUGHT EXPERIMENT. CBR.com asks “What if Treebeard Found Sauron’s Ring in Lord of the Rings?”

… After Sauron lost his Ring, it came into contact with a number of powerful figures. Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel could have claimed the One Ring as their own, and each of those hypothetical situations would have ended badly. Their natural power — combined with the power of the One Ring — may not have been enough to conquer Sauron, but it would have doomed Middle-earth. But what would happen if Treebeard had happened upon the One Ring? Would it have corrupted him too, or would he have been oblivious to its effects like the powerful Tom Bombadil?…

(7) CELEBRITY BRUSH. “Students dressed as Gandalf on pub crawl meet Burnley’s Ian McKellen”. The video can be viewed at the Lancashire Telegraph link.

A hilarious video has emerged of the moment students on a Lord of the Rings pub crawl bumped into an East Lancashire actor who starred in the real movies.

22-year-old student, Ben Coyles, was dressed as Lord of the Rings character Gandalf for his birthday pub crawl in Bristol, on April 13.

Little did he know that he would end up bumping into the Burnley-born actor who played Gandalf in the movies, Sir Ian McKellen.

In the video, which has been viewed more than 3.5million times on video sharing platform TikTok, Ben can be seen posing for a picture and chatting with the legendary actor.

Scarlet Learmonth, who posted the video and was on the pub crawl, said: “It was such a shock but also a beautiful and magical moment….

(8) COSTUMERS MEMORIAL VIDEO. The Costuming Community Memorial 2023 video was shown this weekend at Costume-Con 39.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1976 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

This is the Beginning of Bob Tucker’s “The Survey” that he wrote for  Science Fiction Five-Yearly in their sixth issue which was in 1976.

Wilson “Bob” Tucker was a member of First Fandom, coined the term space opera, and lent his name to the practice of tuckerization.   

He won the Heicon ’70 Best Fan Writer Hugo and the 1954 Best Fan Writer Retro Hugo, and was nominated for the 1951 Best Fan Writer Retro Hugo and the 1946 Best Fan Writer Retro Hugo.

And now for your considerable amusement is the Beginning of “The Survey”…

I have a weakness for fan history, and somebody made a joke about rubber chicken. It may have been Robert Bloch because he has this weakness for chickens. Preferably chicks in showers.

I wondered if it were true that all fan convention banquets served rubber chicken? For many years the allegations were rife, the references many, the jokes extensile. Were fan banquets all rubber chicken banquets? The question itself was enough to light a mental fire, enough to cause me to spring from my rocking chair and dash quickly to the bookcase to consult Harry Warner. (The elapsed time from rocking-chair-spring to bookshelf arrival was thirty-five minutes, but then this is a wide room and I did become entangled between feet and beard on the first upward spring.

I was astonished and disappointed at what I did not find in Warner’s All Our Yesterdays. I realized at once the omissions were the fault of Ed Wood and George Price, who labored many hours extracting the index which appears at the back of the book, but nevertheless Warner must share in the guilt, if only by association. The index does not have an entry “Rubber Chicken.” Nor does it have a “Chicken, rubber.” There isn’t so much as a “Banquet” entry. I know very well the fans who attended conventions in the 1940s ate something, because I was among them and I remember eating — but here, in supposedly living history, was no mention of that fact.

Still unbelieving, I turned to the text itself and discovered that Harry had mentioned worldcon banquets but did not often reproduce the menus. Of Chicago, 1940, he said: “They got free meeting rooms (in the hotel) in return for staging a banquet at which they needed to guarantee only fifty dinners at one dollar each.” And later: “The banquet that night had food in quantities approximating the cost of the meal.” Nothing about chicken, rubber.

I was at that banquet but creeping senility has long since robbed me of the memory of what was served. (However, I doubt that it was hamburgers or hotdogs.)

Of the 1941 Denver worldcon, Warner reported that bread was the banquet entree: “There were forty fans on hand for the banquet. After the breaking of bread, there were many informal talks.” It should be noted that again, Wood and Price failed to include an entry for “bread” in the index, and I’m not aware of any stale jokes about rubber bread in fandom — not even from Bloch.

But now, at last, a partial success! The Pacificon, 1946, served chicken. Yes, they did. Read Warner on page 262: “More than ninety fans and pros ate thin soup and halves of chicken, and mulled a lot of statistics that Don Day gave …” Note that. The first admission of chicken appears in history, together with a convention menu: thin soup, halved chicken, mulled statistics. No doubt a satisfactory meal for the $2.50 fee charged in that year. (Also please note the alarming rate of inflation: the official banquet had rocketed from only one dollar per person in 1940, to two and one-half in 1946. Remember this when someone blames Nixon for inflationary pressures.) I shouldn’t have to state at this point that Wood and Price are again remiss. The index carries no mention of soup, chicken, statistics….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born April 23, 1879 — Talbot Mundy. English-born, but based for most of his life in the United States, he also wrote under the pseudonym of Walter Galt. Best known as the author of King of the Khyber Rifles which is not really genre and the Jimgrim series which is genre, much of his work was published in pulp magazines. (Died 1940.)
  • Born April 23, 1923 — Avram Davidson. Equally at home writing mystery, fantasy or science fiction, he wrote two splendid Ellery Queen mysteries, And on the Eighth Day and The Fourth Side of the Triangle. I’m fond of his Vergil Magus series if only for the names of the novels, like The Phoenix and the Mirror or, The Enigmatic Speculum. There was a 2020 audiobook edition of The Avram Davidson Treasury: A Tribute Collection edited by Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis, first published in 1998, with afterwords by Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, and intros by many other sff writers. (Died 1993.)
  • Born April 23, 1935 — Tom Doherty, 88. Once publisher of Ace Books who left that in 1980 to found Tor Books. Tor became a subsidiary of St. Martin’s Press in 1987; it became part of the Holtzbrinck group, now part of Macmillan in the U.S. Doherty was awarded a World Fantasy Award in the Lifetime Achievement category at the 2005 World Fantasy Convention for his contributions to the fantasy field.
  • Born April 23, 1946 — Blair Brown, 77. Emily Jessup In Altered States (based on the Paddy Chayefsky novel) was her first genre role. Later roles include Nina Sharp, the executive director of Massive Dynamic, on Fringe, an amazing role indeed, and Elizabeth Collins Stoddard in the 2004 television remake of Dark Shadows. Her last genre role I think was Kate Durning on Elementary.
  • Born April 23, 1955 — Paul J. McAuley, 68. Four Hundred Billion Stars, his first novel, won the Philip K. Dick Award, Fairyland which I adore won an Arthur C. Clarke Award and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel. His short story, “The Choice”, won a Sturgeon Award, and “Pasquale’s Angel” won a Sideways Award. He was Toastmaster along Kim Newman at Interaction.
  • Born April 23, 1962 — John Hannah, 61. Here for being Jonathan Carnahan in The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, and there was apparently a third film as well though let’s not talk about it please, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. In a more meaty role, he was the title characters in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and of late he’s been Holden Radcliffe on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series. Though not even remotely genre adjacent, he was Rebus in the BBC adaptation of the Ian Rankin series. 
  • Born April 23, 1973 — Naomi Kritzer, 50. I saw that her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” had been a Hugo Award winner at MidAmeriCon II, so I went and purchased Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories off Apple Books so I could read it. It’s since been expanded continued in two more novels, Catfishing on CatNet, which won the Lodestar Award, and the Chaos on Catnet. DisCon III saw her nominated for two Hugos, one for her “Monster” novelette and one for her most excellent “Little Free Library” short story. She also picked up a nomination at Dublin 2019 for her “The Thing About Ghost Stories” novelette. 
  • Born April 23, 1985 — Angel Locsin, 38. She starred as the superhero in the epic 170-episode Darna series on her country’s television. Her character looks suspiciously like Wonder Woman. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Close to Home shows The Wizard of Oz gang examining one character’s Ancestry.com results.

(12) A CRITIC’S CHOICE. Abigail Nussbaum shared “The 2023 Hugo Awards: My Hugo Ballot” at Asking the Wrong Questions. Makes a good reading list.

The deadline for nominating work for the 2023 Hugo awards is a week away. If you’re eligible to nominate, you should have received an email from the Chengdu Worldcon (if not, you can query them here). This year’s nominations are likely to be unusual due to the high number of Chinese Worldcon members—it’s entirely possible, and even likely, that the ballot will include Chinese-language work that hasn’t received an English translation, which will render the voting phase somewhat tricky. Still, it’s not as if I’m used to seeing my taste reflected perfectly by this award even in years when there is no language barrier, so I see no reason not to continue as I’ve always done, nominating the things I thought were excellent last year, and calling attention to them in the hopes that others, too, find them worthy. 

In compiling my nominations this year, I made great use of two tremendous resources, the Locus Recommended Reading List and the Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom. I also appreciated all the authors and critics who have posted their own award recommendations on their blogs and on twitter. The conversation about awards eligibility posts was settled long ago on the “pro” side, and I have no problem with people who try to promote their own work. But I always pay more attention to (and get more utility out of) the people who recommend the things they loved and would like to see nominated as well as the things they’ve published….

(13) VIDEO’S FOREVER HOME. Polygon shows that “Anime Blu-rays and DvDs are more popular than ever”. “Blu-rays are great collectibles — and you never have to worry about your favorites disappearing from streaming”

… Calculating anime home video sales is complicated. The market for it in Japan has been declining almost yearly for the past decade — coinciding with the worldwide move to digital platforms — but specific releases, like the first Demon Slayer film, can inspire greater interest. That movie has both the highest box office in Japanese history, and sold over a million copies on Blu-ray and DVD within the first three days of its release. To put that kind of success in perspective, only three American blockbuster films in 2022 sold more than a million copies throughout the entire year.

But the hunger for anime has only grown in the U.S., to the extent that in August 2022, Sony acquired Right Stuf Anime, a distributor established in 1987 that expanded into selling anime, live-action releases, toys, manga, and all manner of collectibles. (Sony also owns Crunchyroll, an anime streaming service.) In an era where anime home video was far from ubiquitous — one might find an ad in the back of a magazine here, a vendor with a massive collection at a convention there, and a smattering of opportunities among message boards — Right Stuf’s mission was to give the anime consumer “everything in one place” and a trusted system of delivering it to them. It was a fruitful operation. At this point, Right Stuf says it’s the largest online seller of anime in North America….

(14) HEADED FOR TOUCHDOWN. “A daring company is about to try landing on the moon. You can watch it.” Mashable tells how.

Other space ventures and spacefaring nations have tried and failed before.

Undeterred by previous flops, a Japanese company will attempt to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon. If it succeeds, ispace could claim the first commercial lunar landing in history.

The company will broadcast the event live at 11:40 a.m. ET April 25, 2023, giving viewers a peek behind the curtains at mission control in Tokyo as engineers oversee the challenging feat. Lunar landings are rare in and of themselves, let alone opportunities for the public to watch them unfold in real time.

The mission, known as HAKUTO-R(opens in a new tab), is one of several commercial lunar missions happening soon. Others in the pipeline are an outgrowth of NASA‘s Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, established in 2018 to recruit the private sector(opens in a new tab) to help deliver cargo to the moon. ispace(opens in a new tab), a startup specializing in landing vehicles, couldn’t directly participate in the NASA program because it isn’t an American company, but it is collaborating on a contract led by Draper Technologies based in Massachusetts to land on the moon in 2025….

(15) CLEANING UP AFTER. Here is more about the local impact of the other day’s Starship explosion. “SpaceX’s Starship went down in a blaze of glory—and left a mess for locals who warned about the impact” at Yahoo!

…It resulted in an explosion that caused residents near the launch site in South Texas to notice ashy particulates falling from the sky and vibrations in their classrooms and homes.

The city of Port Isabel said there is no immediate concern for people’s health and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk declared the fireworks show a victory, saying SpaceX “learned a lot for the next test launch in a few months.”

But for the community near the site, it will take time to clean up from this one—a nearby road was covered in debris and temporarily closed and teams dedicated to protecting the bays and estuaries of the Texas coastal bend are busy surveying the damage. It’s an area where shorebirds have had their habitat disrupted from prototypes that exploded after previous test launches, and at least two species have stopped or reduced nesting in recent years, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

It’s these concerns that drew residents to release a statement before the launch, blasting SpaceX and elected officials for declining to meet about Starship and often cutting off their access to the beach.

“Whenever Elon Musk and his accomplices, the Cameron County Commissioners and Texas General Land Office, close Boca Chica beach for his pet project SpaceX, they destroy our native life ways.” wrote Juan B. Mancias, Carrizo Comecrudo Tribal Chairman.

The local community’s clash with SpaceX to protect and access their beach and wildlife represents a striking contrast to the company’s grand vision for the future. SpaceX wants to make humans a multi-planetary society, and Musk has shared his thoughts that getting humans to Mars and the “greater Solar System” could protect us if large-scale devastation happened like an asteroid hitting Earth….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. New and improved! Someone has figured out “How Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania Should Have Ended”.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Stuart Hall.]

Pixel Scroll 2/28/23 Have You Met Lydia, Lydia The Tatooine Lady?

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(1) UNCLE HUGO’S NEEDED A DIFFERENT KIND OF BAIL-OUT. As Uncle Hugo’s & Uncle Edgar’s Bookstores owner Don Blyly explains in the latest “How’s Business” he’s lucky he didn’t need to invest in gopher wood, build an ark, and start gathering the Baen authors two-by-two.

I came to the store Sunday morning and started doing payroll, and a few minutes late I saw a small wet spot on the floor, far from any books, and assumed some snow had fallen off my boots and melted.  About 5 hours later I noticed that the small wet spot was slightly larger and I saw a drop of water hit it from a drip from the ceiling.  Before closing on Sunday Jon put a bucket under the occasional drip, and it seemed safe to go home.   

In the early morning hours, the rain started.  When I got to the store around 7:30 Monday morning, water was pouring from a large area of the ceiling, primarily near the new bookshelves that contained the used sf hardcovers and trade paperback with authors “R” through “W”.  Much of the water was hitting the floor and then bouncing up onto the bottom shelf of books.  I pulled all the books from the bottom shelves and moved them to safer locations, grabbed some buckets to put under the bigger streams of water,  and then headed to the nearest hardware store to pick up a better mop and some plastic drop cloths.   

When I got back to the store I couldn’t find any duct tape, and the flooding had spread, so I drove over to Target to buy duct tape and a bunch of plastic “under-bed storage units”, which were much cheaper than buckets, plus being rectangular instead of round.  Back to the store, and I spread the storage units under a lot more drips.  I then tried to tape the plastic drop cloths to the top of the bookshelves to protect the books that had yet been damaged–and immediately discovered that duct tape does not stick to wet wood.  Fortunately, I had a lot of cans of ginger ale in the refrigerator, and a series of cans of soda managed to hold the drop cloths in place.  A couple of hours later Ken and Marie showed up and joined the fight against the water.  Ken was swinging the mop handle so energetically that he knocked the thermostat off the wall in 3 pieces. 

Given the rate at which we were emptying buckets, I estimate that between 20 and 30 gallons of water were coming through the ceiling every 15 minutes, and a lot of it leaked through the floor into the basement..  The rain finally ended around noon, and about an hour later the flood slowed a little.  A customer made a suggestion of a solution, and about two hours later I was finally able to get his solution to work.  Around 3:30 the flood turned into a bunch of drips.  (Supposedly there is about an 8 inch layer of insulation above the ceiling, so I expected the drips to continue to drain from the insulation long after the water stopped coming in from the roof.)   

I was delighted not to spend the entire night at the store, emptying buckets every 15 minutes, as I had feared I would.  We did some cleaning up before closing (removing water-logged flattened cardboard boxes and replacing them with dry flattened cardboard boxes, mopping the floor on the ground level, using a snow shovel to push water in the basement towards the floor drain, etc.).  I came back to the store at 6:30 this morning and continued cleaning up.  All the buckets and storage containers are put away, all the wet cardboard is thrown out, the plastic drop cloths are removed from the bookshelves and put away.  I started going through the piles of books from the bottom shelves, looking for undamaged books to put back on the shelves, while the damaged ones will have to either be thrown away or have their prices dropped and descriptions changed.  I found that the section of shelving that contained David Weber, Margaret Weis, and H. G. Wells got wet from the top shelf to the bottom shelf, with the books so swollen that it was hard to get them off the shelves.  Several hundred books were damaged, but they will have to dry out more before I can figure out which ones can be salvaged.  Some of the floor boards have warped, and I don’t know if the warping will decrease after the boards finish drying.

Fortunately, the new wooden bookshelves don’t seem to have warped.  The thermostat has been repaired, so we have heat again.

This week there will be another good reason to drop by the store. Thursday, March 2, 2023 is Uncle Hugo’s 49th anniversary. Blyly will he be holding an anniversary sale from Thursday, March 2 through Sunday, March 5, with an extra 10% off everything in the store.  With a discount card, you can get 20% off everything during the sale. The sale only applies to in-store purchases, not to mail orders.

(2) HAPPY ANNIVERSARY! On “Scout’s Progress Book Day!” and Sharon Lee and Steve Miller celebrate the anniversary re-issue of their book – part of a duo that begins the chronology of the Liaden Universe® series. (As I understand it. Which if I don’t please let me know.)

… Returning to 1993, we had no expectation that Scout’s Progress – or Local Custom – would ever be read by anybody but us. They were therefore written to amuse – us. Things that amuse us particularly are word-play; dry, understated humor; a certain grace – of manner and of person – protagonists with a strong sense of honor and right action, who are competent, though they may be flawed.

Improbably, Local Custom and Scout’s Progress were published in February 2001, as original omnibus Pilots Choice, from Meisha Merlin Publishing.

It’s apparently Traditional on occasions such as these for authors to reflect on what they would have done differently, were they writing the work being celebrated today.

And our answer is? Nothing….

(3) DON’T SALUTE THIS FLAG. Writer Beware’s Victoria Strauss helps writers see the problems: “When Your Publishing Contract Flies a Red Flag: Clauses to Watch Out For”.

…In this article, I’m going to focus on contract language that gives too much benefit to the publisher, and too little to the author. Consider these contract clauses to be red flags wherever you encounter them. (All of the images below are taken from contracts that have been shared with me by authors.)

First on her list:

Copyright Transfer

Unless you are doing work-for-hire, such as writing for a media tie-in franchise, a publisher should not take ownership of your copyright. For most publishers, copyright ownership doesn’t provide any meaningful advantage over a conventional grant of rights, and there’s no reason to require it. Even where the transfer is temporary, with rights reverting back to you at some point, it doesn’t change the fact that for as long as the contract is in force, your copyright does not belong to you.

Copyright transfers usually appear in the Grant of Rights clause. Look for phrases like “all right, title and interest in and to the Work” and “including but not limited to all copyrights therein.”…

(4) WHICH SECRETS CAN BE REVEALED? “’The Mandalorian’ Returns: Jon Favreau’s Exclusive Tour of the Secret Set” in Vanity Fair.

The Mandalorian returns this week with Pedro Pascal’s masked antihero sharing words of wisdom with his adopted son, Baby Yoda (a.k.a. Grogu): “Being a Mandalorian is not just about learning how to fight. You also have to know how to navigate the galaxy. That way, you’ll never be lost.”

Jon Favreau, the creator of the show and the writer of those lines, found his own way to navigate this universe’s disparate worlds. He brings all of the planets to him, storing them inside an otherwise nondescript California soundstage. By now, it’s not a secret that the show makes use of Industrial Light & Magic’s StageCraft technology, which creates photorealistic alien landscapes on a colossal curved LED wall called a volume. But not many outsiders have ever stepped within the reality-bending walls. 

Favreau, a stickler for secrecy, welcomed Vanity Fair to the set during the making of the new episodes, asking only that we not reveal too much about the scene playing out. Outside the doors of the soundstage, Favreau scratches at his beard, trying to decide what can be revealed about the setting sprawled across the 20-foot digital walls. “What should we call it? It’s a good question,” he says, settling on: “A cavernous atrium. With…tech elements embedded.”

He laughs. “And if you think that’s not going to be a sentence that launches a thousand YouTube videos…”

(5) ASHE Q&A. The Horror Writers Association’s “Black Heritage in Horror” series continues: “Interview with Paula Ashe”.

Paula D. Ashe (she/her) is an author of dark fiction. Her debut collection — We Are Here to Hurt Each Other — was released in early ‘22 by Nictitating Books….

What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?

Since childhood I’ve been drawn to things that have a dark bent to them. I feel like horror is the most honest genre and it’s a place where I can tell some painful and usually private truths. I also just really enjoy disturbing the shit out of people….

(6) RICOU BROWNING (1930-2023). [Item by Steve Vertlieb.] Sad to learn of the passing of the wonderful Ricou Browning yesterday at age 93. Here are the original “Creatures From The Black Lagoon”… Ben Chapman (the land creature) on the left, and Ricou Browning (the proverbial “Sea Beast”) on the right, with an even more Monstrous “victim” wedged between them. He was both a cinematic icon, and a delightfully aquatic gentleman. Rest In Peace amongst the “stars.”

The Hollywood Reporter tribute is filled with anecdotes from his career.

… Browning was charged with showing the area of Wakulla Springs, Florida, to location scouts from Universal who were seeking filming locations for Creature From the Black Lagoon. He also did some swim moves for them, and that led to his Gill-Man gig. (Ben Chapman played the beast on land in the first movie.)

“The lips of the suit sat about a half-inch from my lips, and I put the air hose in my mouth to breathe,” he said in a 2019 interview. “I would hold my breath and go do the scene, and I’d have other safety people with other air hoses to give me air if I needed it. We had a signal. If I went totally limp, it meant I needed it. It worked out well, and we didn’t have any problems.”

Browning said he filmed his scenes in wintertime, and it was pretty cold. “The crew felt sorry for me, so somebody said, ‘How would you like a shot of brandy?’ I said, ‘Sure,’” he recalled. “Another part of the crew [also] gave me a shot of brandy. Pretty soon they were dealing with a drunk creature.”…

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1969 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley is a novel that I’ll admit that I do like. 

It was published first in 1969 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The cover art (which I think is utterly wrong for the novel) is by Jack Gaughan. 

I did not know until now that a shorter novella length version of this was first published in the October 1967 issue of Galaxy. Who here can tell me how significantly different the two versions are? That novella is in The Last Defender of Camelot collection which unfortunately has not made it to the usual suspects.

And now the Beginning in which we meet Hell Tanner.

The gull swooped by, seemed to hover a moment on unmoving wings. 

Hell Tanner flipped his cigar butt at it and scored a lucky hit. The bird uttered a hoarse cry and beat suddenly at the air. It climbed about fifty feet, and whether it shrieked a second time, he would never know. 

It was gone. 

A single white feather rocked in the violent sky, drifted out over the edge of the cliff, and descended, swinging, toward the ocean. Tanner chuckled through his beard, against the steady roar of the wind and the pounding of the surf. Then he took his feet down from the handlebars, kicked up the stand, and gunned his bike to, life. 

He took the slope slowly till he came to the trail, then picked up speed and was doing fifty when he hit the highway. 

He leaned forward and gunned it again. He had the road all to himself, and he laid on the gas pedal till there was no place left for it to go. He raised his goggles and looked at the world through crap-colored glasses, which was pretty much the way he looked at it without them, too. 

All the old irons were gone from his jacket, and he missed the swastika, the hammer and sickle, and the upright finger, especially. He missed his old emblem, too. Maybe he could pick one up in Tijuana and have some broad sew it on and … No. It wouldn’t do. All that was dead and gone. It would be a giveaway, and he wouldn’t last a day. What he would do was sell the Harley, work his way down the coast, clean and square, and see what he could find in the other America.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 28, 1913 — John Coleman Burroughs.  Known for his illustrations of the works of his father, Edgar Rice Burroughs. At age 23, he was given the chance to illustrate his father’s book, Oakdale Affair and the Rider which was published in 1937. He went on to illustrate all of his father’s books published during the author’s lifetime — a total of over 125 illustrations. He also illustrated the John Carter Sunday newspaper strip, a David Innes of Pellucidar comic book feature and myriad Big Little Book covers. I remember the latter books — they were always to be found about the house during my childhood. (Died 1979.)
  • Born February 28, 1928 — Walter Tevis. Author of The Man Who Fell to Earth. Yes, that novel. It obviously served as the basis for the 1976 film by Nicolas Roeg, The Man Who Fell to Earth, with Bowie as star, as well as a later television adaptation which I’d never heard of. He also wrote Mockingbird which was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novel. James Sallis reviewed both novels in F&SF. He wrote the best novel about chess ever published, Queen’s Gambit, which was made into a much praised Netflix production.(Died 1984.)
  • Born February 28, 1947 — Stephen Goldin, 76. Author of the Family d’Alembert series which is based on a novella by E.E. “Doc” Smith. I think the novella is “Imperial Stars” but that’s unclear from the way the series is referred to. Has anyone read this series? How does it match up to the source material?
  • Born February 28, 1957 — John Barnes, 66. I read and like the four novels in his Thousand Cultures series which are a sort of updated Heinleinian take on the spread of humanity across the Galaxy. What else by him do y’all like?
  • Born February 28, 1966 — Philip Reeve, 57. He is primarily known for the Mortal Engines and its sequels. I read Mortal Engines, Predator’s Gold and Infernal Devices before deciding that was enough of that series, it’s a fine series, it just wasn’t developing enough to warrant me reading any more of it.
  • Born February 28, 1970 — Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler), 53. He’s the author of several children’s books, also serving as the narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events. I’ve read the books, they’re very popular I’m told at my local bookstore. It has been turned into a film, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and into a Netflix series as well which is named, oh you guess. 
  • Born February 28, 1977 — Chris Wooding, 46. If you read nothing else by him, do read the four novel series that is the steampunkish Tales of the Ketty Jay. Simply wonderful. The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray plays off the Cthulhu Mythos that certain folk don’t think exist and does a damn fine job of doing so.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Candorville just wants to say it out loud so badly – but that would sound nuts!
  • Dustin has a sort of Walter Mitty moment.

(10) SIGNOFF. Author Karl Drinkwater explains why “Karl Is Antisocial” in a 2021 article.

I’m a full time author. I am part of professional networks, and have colleagues and friends that are authors. One of the maxims is that an author needs a platform. That platform includes social media. If you don’t use them you will face obscurity and poverty.

This post is the culmination of a number of decisions. One of them: I’m planning on leaving social media.

Those who know me won’t be so surprised. They know I am a non-conformist. That I question everything (including myself). That I’m the kind of person who would email my audiobook narrators and offer to sign all my royalties over to them as part of me leaving Amazon. (I did that this morning.) That I would stop using Windows after 20 years and switch to Linux. (I did that last week.)

Those who don’t know me will just think I’m bat-shit crazy.

But I do have my reasons, however strange they may appear at first….

…I don’t like the idea of social media being a kind of untargeted shotgun blast out at the universe, with everyone shouting to be louder than everyone else, hoping that by screaming they will get more attention. And so you just get a cacophonous wall of noise. I don’t like the impersonality of much of it.

And do I really need to be on there? My business is already unconventional. I don’t do paid adverts on Amazon and Facebook. Yet people find me and my work, and they buy it. And, more often than not, they love it. Another convention is for books to have a copyright page telling you everything you are not allowed to do. I’m the opposite. I want readers to have more rights. Certainly more than the law currently allows. So some of my books have a copyright page saying it’s fine to convert my e-books between formats, and to save a copy as a backup (I don’t add DRM). To copy or quote up to 50% of a print book. To give print books away or sell them on….

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

Pixel Scroll 11/23/22 I’ve Read Through The Pixel On A Scroll With No Name

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(1) ARISIA CHAIR TURNOVER. The acting Arisia 2023 convention chairs Alan and Michelle Wexelblat have resigned. Melissa Kaplan has stepped up as acting con chair in their place. The Arisia board says “details of the handoff and relevant ongoing efforts at Arisia will be forthcoming after the holiday break.”

(2) UNCLE HUGO’S / UNCLE EDGAR’S GET THEIR NAMES OUT FRONT. Don Blyly says, “The new awnings were installed last Friday afternoon, making it much easier to find the new location for the first time.” Until then, his bookstores’ new location still had the previous tenant’s name out front.  

(3) SUSPECT IN WOOSTER DEATH. Martin Morse Wooster was killed by a hit-and-run driver on November 12, however, his name did not appear in news reports until yesterday on WAVY in an update that says Virginia State Police have identified a suspect.

…State Police had said it was looking for witnesses who may have been driving in the area around Bypass Road prior to or after the incident.

Sgt. Michelle Anaya with the Virginia State Police said it has identified a suspect, and it is investigating and working with the Commonwealth’s Attorney. The incident, she said, is still under investigation, with charges pending….

(4) A GHOSTLY REALITY. Cora Buhlert’s new “Non-Fiction Spotlight” introduces readers to “A Haunted History of Invisible Women – True Stories of America’s Ghosts by Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes”.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Leanna: I’ve been writing since I was a kid and didn’t consider pursuing it professionally until my first job out of college. I had gotten a BFA in theatre performance with a focus study in the Victorian Era. I worked in the professional regional theatre circuit for a few years before moving to New York City and ended up at a Broadway callback where all I could think about was the book that would end up becoming my debut Gothic, Gaslamp Fantasy series, Strangely Beautiful. I stopped auditioning and solely focused on my novel about a girl who sees, talks with, and helps ghosts. Spectral subjects have been part of my creative process since childhood. I got my NYC tour guide’s license my first years in New York as I knew I wanted to incorporate real history into my fiction and eventually write non-fiction. Being a tour guide is a great way to make history second-nature. I feel like A Haunted History of Invisible Women is the culmination of everything that’s ever been important to me.

Andrea: I’m a writer and a New York City tour guide. I founded my own walking tour company, Boroughs of the Dead, in 2013….

(5) BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP. Sarah A. Hoyt offers some practical encouragement to writers in “The Best Beginning” at Mad Genius Club.

The best beginning is the one you can do.

This applies both to the beginning of novels, and “simply” to starting to write, or to establishing a writing schedule.

There are all sorts of books and instructions on how to start any of those, but what they leave out is: just begin any way you can. The rest will follow.

With novels, there are all kinds of ways to begin, including setting the tone of the book in the first paragraph. The theme in the first page. Make sure you start with the character who is central to the conflict, because readers are like ducklings, they imprint on the first moving thing they see.

However, you can always fix it in post. You can always go back and fix that beginning so it points the right way. You can lose the first fifty pages (beginning writers consistently start fifty pages too early.) Etc….

(6) PICARDO ASKS DOCTOR WHO WHO IS THE DOCTOR. But he is one only in an emergency, right?

(7) NEW ORLEANS IS HIS BEAT. Rich Horton lets us look over his shoulder in “Convention Report: World Fantasy 2022”; from Strange at Ecbatan.

…Mary Ann and I had decided to use Sunday afternoon to visit the French Quarter. We took the streetcar down there — it’s very easy and convenient. We were going to get lunch and I was determined to get a muffeletta, which is one of my favorite sandwiches. I wanted an authentic muffuletta from New Orleans — which I got at Frank’s, which advertised the “original muffuletta”. Alas, it might be the original, and it was fine, but you can get one just as good at, for example, C. J. Mugg’s in my town of Webster Groves. We should have eaten at the French Market Restaurant instead! We also, of course, went to Cafe du Monde to try beignets, and, hey, they were actually very good. (The line was long but went quickly.)…

(8) THE TRISOLARIANS ARE COMING. ScreenRant publicizes the release date for Bilibili’s animated adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. Beware spoilers.

The award-winning science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem has been adapted into an anime series by the Chinese online video and anime platform Bilibili, and the first episode is set to premiere on December 3, 2022.

…Normally, an adaptation is a testament to the popularity of the work in the public’s mind. This is particularly so with The Three-Body Problem. In addition to Bilibili, two other powerful film and television operations, namely Netflix and the Chinese tech giant Tencent have also produced their own live-action adaptations of the story. Fittingly, the world-famous story has its own version of the three-body problem….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1986 — [By Cat Eldridge.] Peter S. Beagle’s The Folk of The Air

So let’s talk about one of the underappreciated novels by Mister Beagle, The Folk of The Air which was published thirty-six years ago by del Rey / Ballantine in hardcover.

It had a long, long gestation period as it took nearly twenty years from the time he started work on it until the time the final version was done. 

SPOILERS ARE HERE NOW. I SUGGEST MULLED WINE WOULD BE APPROPRIATE TO DRINK WHILE I DISCUSS THIS NOVEL? 

Joe Farrell, a musician who’s whiled away most of his post-college time in a sort of hippie style, travelling the country and avoiding any possibility of settling down, has returned at last to his Bay Area hometown of Avicenna, Beagle’s fictional version of Oakland.

Everything has changed — his closest friend is living with a woman who has immense magical powers in a house that keeps changing itself; another acquaintance is involved up with the League of Archaic Pleasures, a group that has taken to itself the events and manners of medieval chivalry, sometimes way, way too seriously; and he sees a teenage witch successfully summon back a centuries-old demon.

That Demon could tear asunder all that exists now and only his closest friend’s girlfriend can stop him but she’s gone walkout into a room in their house that nobody can find.

DID YOU LIKE THE MULLED WINE? I THINK THAT IT IS MOST EXCELLENT. 

I think it’s a most splendid novel, though Peter has reservations about it as he told me once that he considered revising it. He never said what about it that he’d change, just that he thought it could use some more work. Even SFReviews.net reported that saying “Beagle has never been fully satisfied with The Folk of the Air, and is currently reported to be working on a revision to be retitled Avicenna.” Mind you his Editor and closest friend tells me that she never heard of this existing either. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 23, 1908 — Nelson S. Bond. Writer, Editor, Critic, and Member of First Fandom who also wrote for radio, television, and the stage, but whose published fiction work was mainly in the pulp magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. He’s remembered today mainly for his Lancelot Biggs series and for his Meg the Priestess tales, which introduced one of the first strong female characters in SF back in 1939. As a fan, he attended the very first Worldcon, and he famously advised Isaac Asimov, who kept arguing with fans about his works in the letter columns of magazines, “You’re a writer now, Isaac. Let the readers have their opinions.” He was named a Nebula Author Emeritus by SFWA in 1998. (Died 2006.) (JJ) 
  • Born November 23, 1951 — David Rappaport. I remember him best as Randall, the leader of the gang of comically inept dwarves in Time Bandits who steal the map to the Universe. I’m reasonably sure that it’s the only thing he’ll be remembered for of a genre nature having looked up his other works and found them to be decidedly minor in nature. Most of them such as The Bride, a low budget horror film, were artistic and commercial disasters. It is said that his death by suicide in 1990 is one of the reasons cited by Gilliam for there not being a sequel to Time Bandits.  Well, now there is as Apple TB with the cooperation of Gilliam, there will Time Bandits series that Taika Waititi will co-write with Gilliam and direct, since it’ll shield in New Zealand. (Died 1990.)
  • Born November 23, 1966 — Michelle Gomez, 56. Best known genre role is Missy, a female version of The Master on Doctor Who from 2014 to 2017, for which she was nominated for the 2016 BAFTA TV Award for Best Supporting Actress. I admit having grown up with Roger Delgado as The Master so later performers playing this role took a bit of getting used but she made a fine one. She is also Mary Wardwell in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. She plays Talia Bauerin in Highlander: The Raven which apparently is a very short-live spinoff from the Highlander series. And she shows up in the Gotham series for two episodes simply as The Lady. She is now playing Madame Rouge on the Doom Patrol.
  • Born November 23, 1992 — Miley Cyrus. She’s had three genre appearances, each ten years apart. She was in Big Fish as the eight-year-old Ruthie, she was the voice of Penny in Bolt and she voiced Mainframe on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. And there’s the matter of A Very Murray Christmas which is at least genre adjacent…

(11) SEEN THIS IN YOUR DICTIONARY? FilmSchoolRejects introduces a video about “The Existential Comforts of Cyberpunk”.

…There isn’t a succinct definition of cyberpunk. Its origins can be traced back to the late 1960s and the New Wave sci-fi movement, with writers like J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Harlan Ellison. As a sci-fi sub-genre, cyberpunk is keenly interested in speculative technology and urban dystopias; which together provide fertile breeding grounds for vice, drugs, nefarious corporations, corruption, and social upheaval.

…I can think of a lot of ways to describe how cyberpunk worlds make me feel (sad, artificial, and lonely spring to mind). But “comforting” isn’t one of them. The following video essay argues that, if you tilt your head the right way, cyberpunk cities offer a kind of relief. Somewhere, on the other side of all that existential anxiety and angst … there’s a sense of bliss and relief. Amidst all the urban bustle and the sea of cables, you don’t mean a thing. Thank god….

(12) FAKING IT IS MAKING IT. Is artificial intelligence equal to the challenge of writing about Timothy the Talking Cat? Find out in Camestros Felapton’s post “AI-generated writing”.

…I’ve experimented with MidJourney to make images but how is the world of AI-generated text going? I’m trying out the LEX, a cross between a Google docs wordprocessor and an AI text generator….

(13) FIRST FIVE. Joe Stech of Compelling Science Fiction is ready to tell you his picks for the top science fiction short stories published in August.

These are the top 5 out of the 26 stories I read. August was a lighter month than July because some of the bimonthlies aren’t out in August…

“Polly and (Not) Charles Conquer the Solar System” by Carrie Vaughn is the winner.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. While Camille DeAngelis was in LA for a screening of Bones and All, the film adaptation of her vegan subtext cannibal novel, she and Henry Lien made this video about why they love being vegan and how Henry has a magical fridge: “Henry Lien and the Narnia Fridge”.

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Patrick McGuire, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 10/19/22 The Music Slan

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Illo by Teddy Harvia

(1) UNCLE HUGO’S NEWS. Don Blyly’s latest email says a sign for Uncle Hugo’s has finally been installed on the west side of the building. He hopes the new awnings will be installed on the front of the building within the next few weeks, replacing the ones with the old tenant’s name.

Blyly also pointed out that a couple of the local TV stations have done reports on the Uncles re-opening. “You can see the new building, Ecko acting as store dog, and me explaining things to the camera.”

Minneapolis TV station KARE 11 has the text on its website, and the video on YouTube: “The Uncles are back: After burning to the ground, beloved Minneapolis bookstores find new home”.

“I had more and more people who were saying, ‘Please, please reopen. We can’t find anything like what you were offering,'” Blyly said.

Blyly originally opened Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore in 1974. While attending law school and reading constitutional law in the library, Blyly decided he needed something fun to do as a pastime. He had about $1,500 in student loan money left and decided to use it to open a bookstore.

After opening Uncle Hugo’s, customers came to him requesting the same type of concept but for mysteries. When Blyly couldn’t find anyone interested in doing it, he opened Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore at a separate location in 1980.

Eventually, both bookstores were housed in the same building off of Chicago Avenue. That remained the Uncles’ home until the building burned down in the early morning hours of May 30, 2020.

Here’s the report aired by Minneapolis CBS affiliate WCCO: “Beloved sci-fi bookstore, in business since the ’70s, reopens”.

(2) FANTASTIC FICTION AT KGB FUNDRAISER. Matt Kressel says the “Fantastic Fiction reading series at the KGB Bar” Gofundme needs a push to get over the finish line.

Thank you to all those who’ve donated so far! We’re more than two-thirds of the way to our goal of funding the series for three more years! We have just under $2,000 left to go. Can you help us reach our goal this week?

(3) SEAT OF FAME. Richard Wilhelm offers Facebook readers the opportunity to claim a piece of history.

Is anyone interested in owning a piece (actually, three pieces) of Science Fiction history? We have a couch and two matching chairs to give away to someone. They are a set from the 30s; overstuffed with mohair upholstery and carved wood arms. They were owned by my folks, authors Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight, since the 1960s, and just about every author you’ve heard of from the realm of Science/Speculative Fiction mid-century forward, has sat in these at one time or another. Yes, there’s a caveat… They all need TLC to bring them back to excellent condition. Plus, you’d need to pick them up in North Portland.

(4) DISNEY V. FRANCE. The Guardian explains why Disney is resisting France’s protective regulations. “Disney threatens to bypass French cinemas unless release rules are relaxed”.

Disney is to release Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in French cinemas next month but has warned that future blockbusters may go straight to its streaming service, Disney+, unless France relaxes film distribution rules….

…Earlier this year, Disney took a stance against the French “windowing” system, which is designed to protect its industry and national TV industries, sending the animated action adventure Strange World straight to Disney+.

Films that are not released in French cinemas are not subject to the restrictive windowing regulations. In January, French film authorities shortened the window between film release and availability on subscription streaming services to 15 months but Disney was not a signatory of the new deal.

Disney said it had decided to push ahead with the cinema release of the Black Panther sequel because the French authorities have acknowledged that the windowing system “needs to be modernised”….

(5) EMIGRATING TO MARS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] This is from an interview with Elon Musk by Financial Times editor Roula Khalaf, behind a paywall in the October 8 Financial Times.  X is Elon Musk’s son.

Musk’s biggest worry is the preservation of life beyond Earth.  His solution is to populate Mars. ‘Something will happen to Earth eventually, it’s just a question of time.  Eventually the sun will expand and destroy all life on Earth, so we do need to move at some point, or at least be a multi-planet species,’ he says.  ‘You have to ask the question:  do we want to be a space-flying civilisation and a multi-planet species or not?’  I’m not sure what i think but Musk is emphatic.  ‘It’s a question of what percentage of resources we should devote to such an endeavour?  I think if you say 1 per cent of resources, that’s probably a reasonable amount.

Would Musk himself join the pioneering colony on Mars? ‘Especially if I’m growing old, I’ll do it.  Why not?’ he says.  But how useful would he be to Mars if he’s too old?  ‘I think there’s some non-trivial chance of dying, so I’d prefer to take that change hen I’m a bit older, and saw my kids grow up.  Rather than right now, when little X is only two-and-a-half.  I think he’d miss me.’

(6) HANDMADE BY MARTIANS. Meanwhile, the Guardian observes artists who are exploring what life might be like if a human colony was established on Mars. “An other-worldly art project: the artists furnishing a Martian house”.

There is a “Martian guitar” manufactured out of recycled pieces of wood and metal with an amp fashioned from a coffee pot. A surprisingly comfortable chair, plus rug and curtains, have been created out of the sort of parachute material a Mars landing craft may have used.

The bedding in the sleeping pods has been decorated with dyes from plants, while a “mist shower” has been made using bits of hose and garden irrigation sprays.

Over the last 10 weeks, the people of Bristol have been taking part in an other-worldly art project – to furnish a “Martian house” that materialised, golden and gleaming, on the harbour-side in Bristol during the summer only using recycled and repurposed objects….

(7) THE PLANET WITH PUMPKINS. The previous two items perhaps set the mood for us to link to Library of America’s “Story of the Week”, Ray Bradbury’s “The Emissary”. It’s a Halloween tale, not a Mars story, so the segue isn’t completely smooooth.  Here’s an excerpt from the introduction.  

“Halloweens I have always considered wilder and richer and more important than even Christmas morn,” Ray Bradbury wrote in an article for the October 1975 issue of Reader’s Digest. “1928 was one of the prime Halloween years. Everything that was grandest came to a special climax that autumn.”

Ray Bradbury was eight years old that year, and his beloved Aunt Neva, 19 years old and recently graduated from high school, owned a Model-A Ford. Sometime around October 20, he recalls in his essay, she said to Ray, “It’s coming fast. Let’s make plans.” She drove him and his brother, Skip, around the countryside to collect pumpkins, corn sheaves, and other decorations to embellish their grandparents’ house for the upcoming festivities. “Then, everything set and placed and ready, you run out late from house to house to make certain-sure that each boy-ghost remembers, that each girl-become-witch will be there.” The big night arrived . . . and then it was over.

“365 darn days until Halloween again. What if I die, waiting?” Ray complained.

“Why, then,” Skip responded, “you’ll be Halloween. Dead people are Halloween.”

(8) STAND BY FOR SCIENCE FICTION IN REAL LIFE. “Next pandemic may come from melting glaciers, new data shows” – the Guardian has the story.

The next pandemic may come not from bats or birds but from matter in melting ice, according to new data.

Genetic analysis of soil and lake sediments from Lake Hazen, the largest high Arctic freshwater lake in the world, suggests the risk of viral spillover – where a virus infects a new host for the first time – may be higher close to melting glaciers.

The findings imply that as global temperatures rise owing to climate change, it becomes more likely that viruses and bacteria locked up in glaciers and permafrost could reawaken and infect local wildlife, particularly as their range also shifts closer to the poles.

For instance, in 2016 an outbreak of anthrax in northern Siberia that killed a child and infected at least seven other people was attributed to a heatwave that melted permafrost and exposed an infected reindeer carcass. Before this, the last outbreak in the region had been in 1941.

To better understand the risk posed by frozen viruses, Dr Stéphane Aris-Brosou and his colleagues at the University of Ottawa in Canada collected soil and sediment samples from Lake Hazen, close to where small, medium and large amounts of meltwater from local glaciers flowed in….

(9) EDGAR ALLAN POE NEWS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] This is a group that is trying to create a national theater for Poe’s works and is having a performance as a fundraiser in Baltimore. They have a trailer! “Poe’s Blood, Sweat & Fears”.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

1990 — [By Cat Eldridge.] Ray Bradbury Theater’s “And the Moon Be Still as Bright” (1990)

It was so cold when they first came from the rocket into the night that Spender began to gather the dry Martian wood and build a small fire. He didn’t say anything about a celebration; he merely gathered the wood, set fire to it, and watched it burn.  — opening words of “And the Moon Be Still as Bright”

Ahhhh Bradbury. So have I mentioned that I’m madly in love with the fiction that he wrote? Well I am. Damn great stuff it is. And he himself was a wonderful individual as well.

So this Scroll we’re looking at the Ray Bradbury Theater’s production of “And the Moon Be Still as Bright” thirty-two years ago. It was first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in the June 1948 issue where it would’ve cost you twenty cents, and three dollars today adjusted for inflation, still a bargain I’d say. It would become part of The Martian Chronicles when that was first published by Doubleday two years later. It was the lead story there. 

OK SPOILERS LIKE AUTUMN LEAVES ABOUND NOW. 

This is the third of the Mars expeditions and they find nothing but leaves. Leaves that are actually the ashes of the Martins all killed by a human disease. One member of the expedition is so outraged by this as he thinks that he can foresee how humanity and its culture will supplant all which remains of Mars.

He being an archaeologist vows to become a Martian himself so he goes off to a nearby town to study what he thinks is Martian culture and wage a one-man war against humanity. Of course the only humans are his fellow crew whose defilement of Mars he hates. He kills several when he returns to them. 

Studying the other is a long passion in archaeology and anthropology as Le Guin as noted more than once. It’s interesting to Bradbury use it here in telling a story. And yes it often ends this badly.

END OF SPOILERS. JOIN ME BY THE FIRE FOR SOME MULLED CIDER. 

David Carridine as Spender is absolutely perfect here though the rest of the cast are really little than barely sketched out. The production values are ok but it really didn’t convince me that they were anywhere but on a backlot in California. But then Star Trek with a much higher budget didn’t either. 

Look I think Bradbury is one of the great writers and be forewarned that this is one of his more brutal undertakings from start to finish. It’s not one of his comfortable stories at all. 

Want to watch it? You’re spoiled for streaming choices as it is on Amazon, Freevee, Peacock, Pluto and Vudu which might well be a record. 

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 19, 1921 — George Nader. In 1953, he was Roy, the leading man in Robot Monster (a.k.a. Monster from Mars and Monsters from the Moon) acknowledged by him and others to be the one of the worst SF films ever made. He showed up in some decidedly low budget other SF films such as The Human Duplicators, Beyond Atlantis and The Great Space Adventure. Note: contrary to popular belief, Robot Monster is not in the public domain. This movie is under active copyright held by Wade Williams Distribution. (Died 2002.)
  • Born October 19, 1940 — Michael Gambon, 82. Actor of Stage and Screen from Ireland who is best known to genre fans as Professor Albus Dumbledore from the Hugo-nominated Harry Potter films (a role he picked up after the passing of Richard Harris, who played the character in the first two films). He also had roles in Toys (for which he received a Saturn nomination), Mary Reilly, Sleepy Hollow, and the Hugo finalist Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. He has had guest roles in episodes of The Jim Henson Hour, Doctor Who, and Tales of the Unexpected, and played an acerbic storyteller and possibly tomb robber in Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. He has also done voice roles in animated features including Fantastic Mr. Fox, Paddington, and The Wind in the Willows, in which he voiced very nicely The Badger. 
  • Born October 19, 1943 — L.E. Modesitt, Jr., 79. Writer of more than 70 novels and 10 different series, the best known of which is his fantasy series The Saga of Recluce. He has been Guest of Honor at numerous conventions, including a World Fantasy Convention. He won a Neffy for his Endgames novel, and a Utah Speculative Fiction Award for his Archform: Beauty novel. 
  • Born October 19, 1943 — Peter Weston. Writer, Editor, Conrunner, and Fan from England who founded the Birmingham Science Fiction Group (the longest-lived fan group in the U.K.), and chaired several conventions, including the 1979 Worldcon. His fanzines Zenith and Speculation received 8 Hugo nominations, and his memoir With Stars in My Eyes: My Adventures in British Fandom was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Related Book. He was the TAFF delegate in 1974, was Guest of Honor at several conventions, was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the long-running fanzine convention Corflu, and received the Doc Weir Award (the UK Natcon’s Life Achievement Award). (Died 2017.) (JJ)
  • Born October 19, 1945 — John Lithgow, 77. He enters SF fame as Dr. Emilio Lizardo / Lord John Whorfin in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. He’ll later be in Santa Claus: The Movie, Harry and the Hendersons, Shrek, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Interstellar and the remake of Pet Sematary. Oh, and he voiced The White Rabbit on the Once Upon a Time in Wonderland series! He of course is Dick Solomon in 3rd Rock from the Sun.  And for true genre creds, he voiced the character of Yoda in the NPR adaptations of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
  • Born October 19, 1946 — Philip Pullman, 76. I’ll confess that I like his Sally Lockhart mysteries, both the original versions and the Billy Piper-led series, far more than I enjoy the Dark Materials series as there’s a freshness and imagination at work there I don’t see in the latter. Oh, some of the latter is quite good — I quite enjoyed Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon a Time in The North as the shortness of them works in their favor.
  • Born October 19, 1948 — Jerry Kaufman, 74. Writer, Editor, Conrunner, and Fan who, while in Australia as the DUFF delegate, created a Seattle bid for the Australian Natcon which actually won the bid (temporarily, for a year, before it was overturned and officially awarded to Adelaide). He was editor of, and contributor to, numerous apazines and fanzines, two of which received Hugo nominations. With Donald Keller, he founded and ran Serconia Press, which published criticism and memoirs of the SF field. He served on the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and served as Jurist for the James Tiptree, Jr., Memorial Award. He has been Fan Guest of Honor at several conventions, including a Westercon. (JJ) 
  • Born October 19, 1990 — Ciana Renee, 32. Her most known genre role is as Kendra Saunders / Hawkgirl on Legends of Tomorrow and related Arrowverse series. She also showed up on The Big Bang Theory as Sunny Morrow in “The Conjugal Configuration”, and she played The Witch in the theatrical production of Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions.  She was also Elsa in the theatrical production of Frozen.

(12) THE QUEER ANTICAPITALIST AFROFUTURIST HIP HOP MUSICAL EXTRAVAGANZA YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR. [Item by Olav Rokne.] Look, I’ll admit it, I’m full-on campaigning to see Neptune Frost get shortlisted for a Hugo Award. It’s a supremely complex, layered, and challenging piece of cinema. It tackles a wide variety of social justice issues that need to be addressed within fandom (human rights, exploitation, the marginalization of the Global South). And it is the product of creative voices who have all-too-often been silenced in fandom and in broader discourse. 

Put bluntly, this isn’t the feel-good Hollywood corporate refined product that often ends up on awards ballots. This is a raw anarchic kaleidoscope of narrative art that takes work to understand and appreciate. I’ve seen it three times, and keep finding new layers to appreciate. Like, I’m still mentally chewing on the line “To imagine hell is a privilege.”

Honestly, it’s kind of great.

The four of us from my blogging group who watched it all argued about the content for most of a year before being able to craft a review: “A Unanimous Gold Mine Of Subtext” at the Hugo Book Club Blog.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if Sun Ra and Samuel R. Delany had tried to make The Matrix, the answer is something like Neptune Frost….

(13) NIGHTMARE AT 351,000 FEET. This excerpt from Shat’s memoir discusses his trip into space aboard Blue Origin. “William Shatner: My Trip to Space Filled Me With Sadness” in Variety.

So, I went to space.

Our group, consisting of me, tech mogul Glen de Vries, Blue Origin Vice President and former NASA International Space Station flight controller Audrey Powers, and former NASA engineer Dr. Chris Boshuizen, had done various simulations and training courses to prepare, but you can only prepare so much for a trip out of Earth’s atmosphere! As if sensing that feeling in our group, the ground crew kept reassuring us along the way. “Everything’s going to be fine. Don’t worry about anything. It’s all okay.” Sure, easy for them to say, I thought. They get to stay here on the ground.During our preparation, we had gone up eleven flights of the gantry to see what it would be like when the rocket was there. We were then escorted to a thick cement room with oxygen tanks. “What’s this room for?” I asked casually.

“Oh, you guys will rush in here if the rocket explodes,” a Blue Origin fellow responded just as casually.

Uh-huh. A safe room. Eleven stories up. In case the rocket explodes.

Well, at least they’ve thought of it….

(14) IMMERSIVE MIYAZAKI. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, three reporters led by Michelle Ye Hee Lee visit the Studio Ghibli theme park which has just opened. “We visited Studio Ghibli’s long-awaited theme park. It’s a sensory delight.”

… Don’t expect rides or human-sized characters posing for photos. The vision for the 494-acre park is unique to the vision of Hayao Miyazaki, the studio’s 81-year-old co-founder, and is an homage to his legacy as a groundbreaking animator and creator. (The idea came about in 2017 after Miyazaki made what seemed to be his final retirement announcement, though he is now working again.)

The result is believed to be Japan’s first “hybrid park,” built around an existing public space to minimize harm to the environment. Mindful of sustainability, its creators sourced as many materials as possible locally. The main attraction — Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse — is converted from an indoor pool attached to an indoor skating rink.

As with Ghibli films, you cannot help but appreciate the nature surrounding you. It’s designed so that you feel like you are living in an actual Ghibli world, rather than visiting a fantasy. The result: a sensory overload that is peaceful at the same time….

(15) NAME THAT DECADE. I was looking at a fanzine recently added to the archives at Fanac.org. Can you guess the decade when this evergreen argument was uttered?

Why do you consider that those readers of science fiction who might vote if they didn’t have to join the Worldcon to do so would add so much to the validity of the voting? Like most award contests (though not all of them) the HUGO election is a popularity contest, and all sorts of factors come into play to influence the voters — including when he gets around to voting, what his friends are touting, and even what particular temperament he is in that morning — rather than merely the literary merit of the book under discussion. So the addition of one more pack of popularity selectors is not going to raise the quality very much. Might as well give the con members the voting privilege so they’ll help the con in its early money-raising stages.

It comes from Bruce Pelz’ Rache 6 published in March 1962.

(16) ON THE TUBE IN BRITAIN. Some all-time classics included here.“From the Triffids to Blake’s 7 and Ghostwatch: the BBC’s greatest cult classics”. The Guardian makes its picks.

The Beeb has seemingly spent a century trying to scar the nation. Here are its most influential – and most terrifying – cult hits so far.

R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1927 on radio, 1938 on TV)

Sadly nothing survives of either production beyond the listings in the Radio Times, but in February 1938 an excerpt of Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) was broadcast on the BBC’s fledgling television service. The play gave the English language the word “robot” and is widely credited as the first ever piece of television science-fiction. The BBC made a radio version in 1927, and would remake the play several times over the years in both mediums, including in 2022.

(17) LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN. Netflix dropped a vignette in which Wednesday stars Jenna Ortega, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar discuss the creative genius that Tim Burton brings to the series.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Trailers: She-Hulk, Attorney-At Law,” the Screen Junkies say that She-Hulk “fights the half of humanity Thanos forgot to worry about — men,” including “dating-App dinguses” who think “How much do you dead lift?” is a good line for picking up She-Hulk. The show “isn’t as bad as the Twitter-bashers made it out to be, but isn’t good enough to defend.” But after that statement, Epic Voice Guy faces his greatest foe — the YouTube algorithm!

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Olav Rokne, Jeffrey Smith, Steven French, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 9/30/22 To Every Thing, TRON, TRON, TRON

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(1) AUTHORS SIGN LETTER SUPPORTING INTERNET ARCHIVE LIBRARY IN LAWSUIT. Several genre authors, including Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, Annalee Newitz, and Aimee Ogden signed an open letter opposing publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive. “Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow And Other Authors Publish Open Letter Protesting Publishers’ Lawsuit Against Internet Archive Library” – Deadline has the story.

A group of authors and other creative professionals are lending their names to an open letter protesting publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive Library, characterizing it as one of a number of efforts to curb libraries’ lending of ebooks.

Authors including Neil Gaiman, Naomi Klein, and Cory Doctorow lent their names to the letter, which was organized by the public interest group Fight for the Future.

“Libraries are a fundamental collective good. We, the undersigned authors, are disheartened by the recent attacks against libraries being made in our name by trade associations such as the American Association of Publishers and the Publishers Association: undermining the traditional rights of libraries to own and preserve books, intimidating libraries with lawsuits, and smearing librarians,” the letter states.

…The letter also calls for enshrining “the right of libraries to permanently own and preserve books, and to purchase these permanent copies on reasonable terms, regardless of format,” and condemns the characterization of library advocates as “mouthpieces” for big tech.

“We fear a future where libraries are reduced to a sort of Netflix or Spotify for books, from which publishers demand exorbitant licensing fees in perpetuity while unaccountable vendors force the spread of disinformation and hate for profit,” the letter states.

…Author Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, was originally on the list of signatories to the letter but withdrew his name on Wednesday evening. No explanation was given, but some of his works are among those cited by the publishers in their lawsuit against Internet Archive….

(2) REMEMBER THE HYDRA CLUB. Here’s the famous (within fandom anyway) drawing of a meeting of the Hydra Club in New York City from the November 1951 issue of Marvel Science Fiction [Internet Archive] (via Roy Kettle).

The Hydra Club was a group of New York writers — Frederik Pohl was one of the nine heads who founded it. Dave Kyle says in “The Legendary Hydra Club” (Mimosa 25) that a banquet photo Life published was taken at the Hydras’ New York Science Fiction Conference of July 1-3, 1950. Hydras organized it and invited ESFA members to participate, too.

(3) DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE. The 2022 winners of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize have been announced. (The lone genre finalist wasn’t one of them.) Given for both fiction and nonfiction, the prize honors writers whose work uses the power of literature to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding. Each winner receives a $10,000 cash prize.

Fiction Winner

The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (HarperCollins): This intimate yet sweeping novel, with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, and The Water Dancer, chronicles the journey of one American family from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.

Nonfiction Winner

How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith (Little, Brown):   This compelling #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives.

(4) SPSFC2 WINNING COVER. The administrator of the Self-Published Science Fiction Competiton posted a Q&A with the winners of the cover contest, author Dito Abbott and cover designer Kirk DouPonce from dogeareddesign.com and fictionartist.com. 

Kirk: I read and enjoyed Dito’s manuscipt, there was no lack of imagery to work from! The story is a bit on the complex side, what I had originally contemplated for the cover changed many times. Often I’m able to read a manuscript and have the concept solidified in my head before starting. But not this time. So many possible directions! At some point I remember looking at his map and thinking “well duh, there’s the cover”. The map art had the perfect whimsical flavor the story was begging for. Almost as if the artist knew the story intimately.

(5) A DIFFERENT CHEKHOV IN SPACE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Financial Times behind a paywall, Sarah Hemming reviews a sf adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard which is playing at the Yard Theatre through October 22.

Vinay Patel’s inventive version pitches the story into the future.  Here the action unfolds o a spaceship spinning towards an elusive destination.  We are hundreds of years into the mission:  the ship is crewed by cloned humans (all of south Asian heritage) who never saw the E and various, now antiquated, bits of AI:  Firs, the ancient retainer of the original, has become Feroze, a glitchy android servant, brilliantly played by Hari Mackinnon.

The cherry orchard still exists, but in an arboretum.  It constitutes a link back to Earth, as does the ship’s rigid social hierarchy, which keeps the lower deck workers toiling in the dark.  But the mission has become sclerotic:  tensions are brewing between the decks, and the discovery of a nearly habitable planet brings everything to a head.  As in the original, pragmatic engineer Abinash Lenka (Lopakhin in Chekhov) urges Captain Ramesh to change course but ends by taking charge himself.

(6) GODSTALK! P. C. Hodgell will be signing at Uncle Hugo’s on Saturday, October 15, from 1-2 p.m. for Deathless Gods ($16.00), the 10th novel in the Chronicles of Kencyrath series.  

(7) HOIST BY THE PETARD THEY OWN. “NASA May Let Billionaire Astronaut and SpaceX Lift Hubble Telescope” reports the New York Times.

If you’ve got a telescope in danger of falling out of orbit, who are you going to call?

The United States Space Force? Nope.

NASA? Maybe not.

Billionaires? Apparently, that is indeed a possibility.

The billionaires in question are Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, and Jared Isaacman, a technology entrepreneur who led an all-civilian trip to orbit in a SpaceX spacecraft last year.

NASA announced on Thursday that it and SpaceX had signed an agreement to conduct a six-month study to see if one of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsules could be used to raise the altitude of the Hubble Space Telescope, potentially further extending the lifetime of the 32-year-old instrument….

(8) ROUGH LANDING. Cora Buhlert writes, “Turns out that my Hugo rocket was also damaged [not just the base], because the tip is chipped, which I only noticed yesterday, when I took it from the shelf to show it off. I honestly wonder what you have to do to chip a piece of a Hugo rocket, considering they’re stainless steel.

I still had some fun with the damaged Hugo trophy and had my brand-new Flash Gordon, Phantom and Ming the Merciless (in the look of the Defenders of the Earth cartoon) action figures fight over the trophy, because it looks like something from a vintage Flash Gordon comic:

(9) MEMORY LANE.  

1966 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Star Trek’s “Naked Time” aired 56 years ago yesterday in the USA on NBC. (Yeah I forgot. My bad.) it was the fourth episode of the first season and it was written by John D F Black who was given story credit idea when D C Fontana who the sequel, the Next Generation’s ‘The Naked Now”.

Surely everyone here knows the story of a strange, intoxicating infection, which lowers the crew’s inhibitions, spreads throughout the Enterprise. As the madness spreads, the entire ship is endangered. Really you have not watched it? You know it’s on Paramount +? 

Did you know this was the first appearance of the Vulcan nerve pinch? Though of course this being TV, it was actually filmed first in “The Enemy Within”, but “The Enemy Within” would be broadcast a week after “Naked Time” was. 

My favorite scene? Sulu’s half naked sword fight of course? However Takei had never use a sword at all so hurriedly learned to. He frequently mentions in interviews his much he likes his episode, saying it’s his favorite one, and devotes a entitle chapter on it in his autobiography.

It was meant to be a two-parter, with this episode ending with the Enterprise going back in time. The ending was revised so it would become a standalone episode. What would have been part two eventually became the episode, “Tomorrow is Yesterday”.

It is the only time Lt. Uhura, Yeoman Janice Rand and Nurse Christine Chapel all appear in the same episode.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 30, 1924 — Elinor Busby, 98. In 1960, she became the first woman to win a Hugo Award for Best Fanzine editing at Pittcon for Cry of the Nameless along with F. M. Busby, Burnett Toskey and Wally Weber. She was awarded a Fan Activity Achievement Award for fan achievements, presented at Corflu in 2013. She was on the committee of Seacon (1961). Busby is noted in Heinlein’s Friday, and her husband is likewise in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. 
  • Born September 30, 1931 — Angie Dickinson, 91. She was Dr. Layla Johnson in The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler, the Dragon Queen in the genre adjacent Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen and Abbie McGee inThe Sun, the Moon and the Stars. 
  • Born September 30, 1932 — Antoinette Bower, 90. I’ll start off with her being Sylvia in the classic Trek episode of “Catspaw” written by Robert Bloch. She had a previous genre appearance in a Twilight Zone story, “Probe 7, Over and Out” in which she was Eva Nord. It’s a shaggy God story as so termed by Brian Aldiss. She also had one-offs in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West, Mission: Impossible, Get Smart and The Six Million Dollar Man.
  • Born September 30, 1947 — Michael I. Wagner. Though best remembered for his work on Hill Street Blues and deservedly so, he’s co-created with Isaac Asimov, produced and wrote several episodes for the one-season ABC series Probe. He provided the story for two episodes of Next Generation, “Bobby Trap” and “Evolution” and wrote another, “Survivor”. (Died 1992.)
  • Born September 30, 1950 — Laura Esquivel, 72. Mexican author of Como agua para chocolate, Like Water for Chocolate in English. Magical realism and cooking with more than a small soupçon of eroticism. Seriously the film is amazing as is the book. ISFDB says she’s also written La ley del amor (The Law of Love) which I’ve not read.
  • Born September 30, 1951 — Simon Hawke, 71. Author of the quite superb Wizard of 4th Street series as Well as the TimeWars series.He has written Battlestar Galactica, Trek, Friday the 13th, Predator and Dungeons & Dragons novels as well as the genre adjacent Shakespeare & Smythe mysteries which bear titles such as Much Ado About Murder. 
  • Born September 30, 1959 — Debrah Farentino, 63. She has a lead role in Earth 2 as Devon Adair, and she was the deliciously duplicitous Beverly Barlowe on Eureka.
  • Born September 30, 1960 — Nicola Griffith, 62. Writer, Essayist and Teacher. Her first novel was Ammonite which won the Tiptree and Lambda Awards and was a finalist for the Clarke and BSFA Awards, followed by The Blue Place, Stay, and Always, which are linked novels in the Ammonite universe featuring the character Aud Torvingen. In total, SFE has won the Washington State Book Award, Nebula Award, James Tiptree, Jr. Award, World Fantasy Award and six Lambda Literary Awards. Her novel Slow River won Nebula and Lambda Awards. With Stephen Pagel, she has edited three Bending the Landscape anthologies in each of the three genres Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror, the first of which won a World Fantasy Award. She latest novel is Spear which just came out. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in March 1993. She lives with her wife, author Kelley Eskridge, in Seattle.
  • Born September 30, 1972 — Sheree Renée Thomas, 50. Writer, Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems and Sleeping Under the Tree of Life; Editor, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora which won a World Fantasy Award, and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones which also won a World Fantasy Award. She’s also written a variety of poems and essays including “Dear Octavia, Octavia E. Butler, Ms. Butler, Mother of Changes”. In 2020, Thomas was named editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) THEY GO HARD. Ursula Vernon stands up for Waffle House. Thread starts here. A few of the tweets —

(13.5) HOCUS POCUS? BOGUS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] This Disney+ sequel seems to completely misunderstand the material of the 29-year old original. “Hocus Pocus 2 review – belated Halloween sequel is far from bewitching” in the Guardian. As the reviewer says:

At times it feels more like an extended, if joke-free, SNL skit than a real movie, giving us the iconography we want but without any of the soul, propulsion or bare necessity we need to go with it, something that exists because it could rather than should….

This coming Halloween, it’s likely that many families will be watching Hocus Pocus 2 together, excited by the prospect of a tradition shift. Next Halloween, I doubt they’ll be watching it again.

(14) MAKES YOU WANT TOSS. If the very thought of pumpkin spice makes you want to throw autumn-themed products away, here’s the bag to throw them in: “Limited Edition Hefty® Cinnamon Pumpkin Spice Ultra Strong™ Trash Bags”.

On September 30th, pumpkin spice enthusiasts can visit HeftyPumpkinSpice.com to purchase their own limited edition trash bags. Now, fall lovers can keep their pumpkin spice obsession going strong on this National Pumpkin Spice Day and beyond by giving their garbage the cozy fall upgrade they never knew they needed.

(15) EARTH R.F.D. [Item by Steven French.] From Physics World: photometric microlensing uses the magnification of light from background stars caused by gravitational lensing to detect exo-planets. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) we live too far out in the galactic ‘burbs where there are few background stars, for technologically adept aliens to spot the Earth. “Earth is ‘well-hidden’ from extraterrestrial civilizations hunting for habitable planets”.

… To have a good shot at spotting us, Kerins explained, an alien civilization would need to be positioned such that there were a lot of background stars behind us, as to give the Earth a good chance of deflecting the light from one. “The best position for an observer to be is right at the edge of our galaxy with us on a line of sight towards the galactic centre,” he noted, adding: “But there are very few stars at the edge of our galaxy and so presumably few observers.”…

(16) MARS ROCKS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Today’s issue of Science has a Mars cover story.

Two samples of rock (top and bottom holes) were collected by the Perseverance rover from this outcrop of the Séítah geologic formation in Jezero crater (see cover), Mars. Also visible are a discarded sample attempt (middle hole), a rock abrasion patch (lower left depression), and the rover’s tracks and shadow. Analysis of the Séítah formation shows that it consists of igneous rocks modified by liquid water

Primary research papers here.

The overall, bottom line conclusion of Perseverance’s explorations of the floor of Jezero crater explored by Perseverance consists of two distinct igneous units that have both experience reactions with liquid water. 

Second primary research paper here.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Nina Shepardson, Todd Mason, Steven French, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 9/8/22 Bright Scrolls, Big Pixels

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(1) CHICON 8 COVID UPDATE. The Chicon 8 committee has notified attending members that another 19 people present at the 2022 Worldcon last weekend have tested positive for Covid. (The first email listed 8 cases.)

Where known, it includes information about the locations and times that the people were before they tested positive. Some have allowed Chicon 8 to release their names.

(2) 1946: ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING! First Fandom Experience is taking a victory lap today: “1946 Project Wrap-Up: We Had Fun!”

During Chicon 8, First Fandom Experience had the privilege of organizing the 1946 Project. The program track encompassed sixteen panels and presentations….

…To inform our program, we published a series of blog posts with historical context on SFF and fandom in 1940:

The last one, about Ray Bradbury, also posted today.

In 1946, Ray Bradbury — then age 26 — saw seventeen of his stories in print. His tales appeared in ten different professional magazines. Six were genre pulps. Four were mainstream “slicks.”…

(3) TROUBLE WITH REDBUBBLE. The Glasgow 2024 Worldcon announced yesterday their Redbubble merchandisde account has been suspended.

We’ve just been made aware that our Redbubble account has been suspended.

We are investigating this at the moment and thank you in advance for your patience.

It’s important to us that our art and artists are recognised and we would ask that you only buy Glasgow 2024 merchandise from our official accounts.

The same thing happened to Chicon 8, and their account is still down.

Ron Oakes wrote a good commentary about this problem on Facebook. 

…I am not up on the exact reason that Redbubble has given for the suspension, but comments surrounding the announcements have indicated that both of these cases have involved having the artwork that the conventions had licensed from the artists and then to Redbubble being stolen and used to produce knock-off convention merchandise….

…As fans, please ensure that you get your convention merchandise from a genuine source. This may not always be the convention, as some conventions allow other vendors to utilize their name on some merchandise – usually only at the event. And generally, make sure that any artwork you buy online comes from the actual artist or license holder.

Herman Ellingsen commented there:

…Redbubble do absolutely nothing to stop people from stealing art on their page.

If they would reduce the quality of the artwork on their web page, and/or add watermarks, and/or use web codes that makes it difficult to download the artwork, stealing artwork on redbubble would be more difficult….

(4) THE MAN FROM UNCLE’S. Minneapolis CBS affiliate WCCO reports that Uncle Hugo’s is back: “Beloved sci-fi bookstore, established in ’70s, reopens after burning down during unrest”. There’s a 2-minute clip of the aired news report at the link.

…Blyly almost called it quits, but it was the regulars who convinced him to start over.

Insurance money from the fire, as well as selling books online during the pandemic, went a long way toward allowing Blyly to reopen.

It took him 18 months to find his new location, a building one block from what was the Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd Precinct headquarters, and across the street from Moon Palace Books.

“Probably 95% of the used books here on the shelves are from my own personal collection,” Blyly said…

(5) ANOTHER SIDE OF DAW. Reviews of the documentary Casa Susanna intersect with the life of science fiction figure Donald A. Wollheim: ” … Betsy Wollheim, the daughter of science-fiction writer Donald, who recounts her discovery after his death of his life as a cross-dresser. (Donald’s experience is also recounted via excerpts from a book he wrote under a pseudonym, A Year Among The Girls.)”

Yahoo! — “’Casa Susanna’ Review: A Lost Chapter of Queer History Comes to Life”.

In the tireless drive toward progress, it’s easy to forget the past. When it comes to queer history, discrimination and fear of persecution discouraged, if not actively erased, the documenting of queer life. Queer historians have had to fight tooth and nail to reclaim countless writers, artists, and musicians, even if they lived quite openly during their lifetimes. After all, if Emily Dickinson could write her “hot and feverish” letters to Susan without academia recognizing her queerness until recently, what chance was there for everyday queer people of yore?

Brilliantly, a nearly lost chapter of queer history has been delicately excavated in “Casa Susanna,” a sumptuous documentary about an oasis where trans women and crossdressing men found community throughout the 1950s and ’60s…. 

…The film gently navigates the shifting mores and language around gender expansive identities, allowing the older trans women to self-identify and using their language as a guidepost. It’s not too often you hear the words crossdresser, transvestite, and transsexual these days, but it only adds to the film’s appeal as a rare time capsule. Fascinatingly, Casa Susanna was strictly for “straight men,” and their wives often accompanied them on their weekends upstate. The fear of being outed as gay followed them, creating strict divides….

Screen Daily: “’Casa Susanna’: Venice Review”.

…Memories are placed front and centre as the director approaches the story of Casa Susanna — an unassuming house in New York’s Catskills where men could freely adopt a female identity — from the perspective of some of those who found refuge there or whose lives were touched by extension. The power of recollection is evident from the start as octogenarian Katherine Cummings makes a pilgrimage back to the Catskills and begins to tell her story with the warmth of memory infusing every word. Her journey not only includes a ship voyage from Australia to North America but a decades-long interrogation of her own identity that was helped by the friendships she found at Casa Susanna.

Joining her is Diana Merry-Shapiro, who crossed paths with Katherine at Casa Susanna while on her own journey from a Lutheran upbringing to gender-affirmation surgery, and Betsy Wollheim, the daughter of science-fiction writer Donald, who recounts her discovery after his death of his life as a cross-dresser. (Donald’s experience is also recounted via excerpts from a book he wrote under a pseudonym, A Year Among The Girls.)…. 

… There’s a fair bit of myth-busting here, as while some might expect flamboyant drag, home video from the Casa shows how those who visited wanted to emulate upper-middle-class feminine elegance. There’s also a real sense of the fear people like Betsy’s father had about their ”secret” getting out. Lifshitz takes time to explore these stories, letting conversations or remembrances flow freely. They run from joy at acceptance so profound it is likely to move you to tears, to sadness at the impact on Donald’s daughter of what seems to have been unresolved unhappiness, as the story of what happened to the Casa and its owners is also gradually revealed….

(6) NERFS IN SPACE. Gizmodo makes sure we know “Hasbro’s Next Wild Nerf Gun Is a Star Trek Phaser”.

Hasbro’s Nerf “LMTD” crossover has given us foam dart versions of everything from the Aliens pulse rifle to The Mandalorian’s rifle—and now it’s boldly going into a very peculiar collaboration with Star Trek.

Hasbro has revealed that its next project in the crossover lineup is a Star Trek mashup to give us not one, but two of the franchise’s most iconic hand-held weapons—the Starfleet Type 3 (that’s the phaser rifle) and Type 2 (the standard phaser seen in TNG, DS9, and Voyager) phasers….

(7) MEMORY LANE.  

1973 – [By Cat Eldridge.] All of you I suspect remember the Ray Walston fronted My Favorite Martian series that lasted three seasons on CBS for one hundred and seven episodes. But likely, you may have forgotten that forty-nine years ago that there was an animated series called My Favorite Martians (noted the “s”) that lasted a wee bit shorter, well a lot shorter as CBS pulled it after just sixteen episodes.

That might have had something to do with the fact that Ray Walston refused to participate in it as the money offered him was quite appalling. So they got Jonathan Harris of Lost in Space fame to do his role. And no, Bill Bixby wasn’t around either for similar reasons.

Howard Morris voiced Tim O’Hara, Detective Brennan and Andromeda. Jane Webb did Katy O’Hara and Lorelei Brown.

It did poorly in ratings and was quickly cancelled. The series used a number of scripts from what would have been season four of the live series. Jack Chertok Television co-owned it, with the Chertok company retaining all merchandising rights to the show. Jack Chertok Television had developed My Favorite Martian.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 8, 1911 – Byron Morrow. He’s the first original Trek Admiral appearing as an Admiral in two episodes, Admiral Komack, in “Amok Time” and as Admiral Westervliet “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”.  Other genre appearances include Cyborg 2087, Mission Impossible, Colossus: The Forbin Project, Panic in Year Zero!, The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler, Rollerball and Fantasy Island. (Died 2006.)
  • Born September 8, 1925 — Peter Sellers. Chief Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films which are genre. Of course, he had the tour de force acting experience of being Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley and Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. He also took multiple roles (even the Queen) in The Mouse That Roared. Amusingly he was involved many folk tale productions in various mediums (film, radio, stage) including Cinderella, Tom Thumb, Mother Goose and Jack and The Beanstalk. (Died 1980.)
  • Born September 8, 1945 — Willard Huyck, 77. He’s got a long relationship with Lucas first writing American Graffiti and being the script doctor on Star Wars before writing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. And he was the writer and director on Howard the Duck which, yes, is a Lucasfilm. It’s the lowest ever production scored on Rotten Tomatoes by Lucasfilm production ever did at 15% followed by Radioland Murders, the last script he’d write for Lucasfilm which would be a not quite so dismal twenty four percent.
  • Born September 8, 1937 — Archie Goodwin. Comics writer and editor with a very long career. He was the writer and editor of the horror Creepy and Eerie anthologies, the first writer on the Iron Man series, wrote comic book adaptations for Marvel of the two Star Wars sequels and edited the Star Wars line for them. For DC, he edited Starman which Robinson said he was inspiration for. (Died 1998.)
  • Born September 8, 1948 — Michael Hague, 74. I’m very fond of East of the Sun and West of the Moon retold by him and his wife Kathleen. Not to be missed are his Wind in The Willows and The Hobbit which are both lovely takes on those tales. 
  • Born September 8, 1952 — Linda D. Addison, 70. First Black winner of the Stoker Award which she has won five times. Amazingly, the first two awards were for her poetry collections Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes and Being Full of Light, Insubstantial. Indeed all five of her Awards were to be for poetry collections. She also is the author of the story “Shadow Dreams”, published in the Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda anthology.
  • Born September 8, 1954 — Mark Lindsay Chapman, 68. Sorry DCU but the best Swamp Thing series was done nearly thirty years ago and starred the late Dick Durock as Swamp Thing and this actor as his chief antagonist, Dr. Anton Arcane. Short on CGI which wasn’t really needed when the scripts were brilliant. Chapman has also shown up in Poltergeist: The Legacy, The New Adventures of Superman, The Langoliers and Max Headroom to name a few of his genre appearances.
  • Born September 8, 1966 — Gordon Van Gelder, 56. From 1997 until 2014, he was editor and later publisher (which he still is) of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for which he was awarded twice, and quite well deserved they were, the Hugo for Best Editor Short Form. He was also a managing editor of The New York Review of Science Fiction from 1988 to 1993, for which he was nominated for the Hugo a number of times. 
  • Born September 8, 1975 — C. Robert Cargill, 47. He, along with Scott Derrickson and Jon Spaihts, worked on the script for Doctor Strange. More intriguingly they’re writing the script for The Outer Limits, a movie based on the television show. The film, produced by MGM, will be adapted from just the “Demon with a Glass Hand” episode begging the question of what they’re writing for a script given that Ellison did write the Writers Guild of America Awards Outstanding Script for a Television Anthology script. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Frank and Ernest say Robin Hood is getting some questionable applicants to work with him.

(10) MAGICALLY DELICIOUS? [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] I saw this in the supermarket.  But I didn’t buy it! “Kellogg’s Introduces New Disney Hocus Pocus 2 Cereal” at Chew Boom.

(11) THE PLANE OF JARS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, John Kelly discusses a contest Burma-Shave ran in 1958 where they offered a free trip to Mars for anyone who turned in 900 bottles of the stuff and what they did when Arliss French actually did it. “Remembering the grocer who convinced Burma-Shave to send him to ‘Mars’”. Registration is required to read the full article there, however, Neatorama covered it about a decade ago:

…The company also posted two promotional offers on their signs; the first one (“Free offer! Free offer! / Rip a fender off your car / mail it in / for a half-pound jar / Burma-Shave”) resulted in some actual fenders being mailed to the company, which made good on its promise.  The second promotion (in the title of this post) stimulated the imagination of Arliss French in Appleton, Wisconsin.

French managed the town’s Red Owl supermarket and offered to pay customers 15 cents for every empty Burma Shave jar they brought in. He ran a full-page ad in the paper reading, “Send Frenchie to Mars.” As the empties accumulated in his store, he telegraphed the company, “Please advise where to ship the jars.”

The folks at Burma Shave scrambled to avoid embarrassment. Thinking he would decline, they offered to send him to the village of Moers, Germany (which they insisted was pronounced, “Mars”) if he would wear a space suit for the trip. He agreed.

French and his wife departed New York at the company’s expense on Dec. 2, 1958. He wore a football helmet and a silver costume emblazoned with the Red Owl logo. When he arrived in Moers two days later, all 78 residents turned out to greet him….

(12) SECOND SLICE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] I regard Knives Out as fandom-adjacent so here is the sequel. “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”.

(13) SLITHER IN. [Item by Michael Toman.] Does the world (or your automobile?) need another new bumper sticker? “I BRAKE FOR VENOMOUS SNAKES”.  From MSN.com: “Officials Close Illinois Road for Mass Migration of Venomous Snakes”.

The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) is closing three miles of a road in southern Illinois this September and October due to heavy traffic…of snakes. The closure is meant to protect snakes undertaking a biannual migration in the Shawnee National Forest, 90 miles southeast of St. Louis.

…Meanwhile, tourists travel from around the country to observe and photograph the phenomenon. “You’ll see a surprising number of out-of-state license plates,” Vucovich said. He advises that visitors drive carefully. But if they venture to where the snake traffic is thickest—typically along a 2.7-mile stretch of Great River Road—they’ll have to walk carefully because that section of the road will be closed to motorized vehicles. “Forest Road 345 is the number,” said Vukovich. “Everybody knows it as Snake Road. It’s just a great place to come watch snakes.”…

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Olav Rokne, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Chris S.]

Uncle Hugo’s and Signs of the Times

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Copyright © David Dyer-Bennet

The soft reopening of Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s Bookstores in Minneapolis has been a success, and Don Blyly says in his latest “How’s Business?” newsletter that following Labor Day the stores will begin keeping their regular hours.

We’ve been open to the public since August 14 at 2716 E. 31st St., but at reduced hours, and we have been accepting donations of books but have not been buying used books.  About 90% of the new books we ordered have arrived, but lots of them have gone up in price over the last 2 years.  …The day after Labor Day we will go to our regular hours of 10 am to 6 pm Monday through Saturday, noon to 5 pm Sundays. 

Blyly also told readers what used books he will and won’t be interested in buying.

We will also start buying used books, but with certain exceptions.    We will not be buying magazines (and probably never will, lacking space to display them) .  We will not be buying mystery hardcovers or trade paperbacks (having about 150 cases of donated mystery hardcovers and trade paperbacks in the basement and not enough time yet to start running them through the computer) but we will eventually resume buying them after we figure out what we already own.

Because the new store only has about 80% of the retail space of the old store, we are not going to buy certain books that did not sell well the last few years at the old store, such as paranormal romances (urban fantasy yes, paranormal romance no, even though there is sometimes a slim difference between the categories), men’s action adventure series (Mack Bolen, Able Team, Executioner, etc.), submarine adventure novels, and we’ll pass on a lot of true crime books.           

And he explained why there isn’t a new sign on the building yet.

Some people have complained that they couldn’t find us, often calling from their car which was in front of the store.  Several have suggested that we needed a sign (as if I would not have thought of that on my own), so let me explain what has been going on.  Several months ago I hired the sign painter who last painted the sign at the old location, since it still looked very good 20 years later.  He expected to be able to do the sign around the end of July.   

Then I heard about a grant that would pay about 25% of the cost of signage, so I applied for the grant.  I was told that no work could be done until the grant was approved and the final paperwork signed.  It took longer than I expected for grant to be approved, but eventually I was able to tell the sign painter that he could start work.  He had me send him a check for half the cost so that he could buy the paint and other supplies.  After he got the check and went to buy supplies, he sent me an e-mail that he had just come down with covid, and this was obviously going to delay things. I looked into changing the black awnings for Glass Endeavors on the front of the store, and was told that it would be a big mistake to try to cover over the old painting on the old canvas.   

It would be far better to get new awnings with the awning company printing the Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s signage on new canvas, but the best way to do that would be for the sign painter to send computer files to the awning company for them to print from–but he can’t do that until he finishes the new sign.  I hope that sometime in September the new Uncles sign will be on the west wall and sometime in October the new awnings will be installed.    Until then, look for the Glass Endeavors signage to find the Uncles.

Copyright © David Dyer-Bennet

Uncle Hugo’s Is Back!

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Don Blyly’s Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s Bookstores held a successful soft opening of their new location at 2716 E. 31st St. in Minneapolis on August 14.

David Dyer-Bennet took photos and shared them on Facebook. He has generously given permission for File 770 to repost them.

Don Blyly behind the counter. Copyright © David Dyer-Bennet
Copyright © David Dyer-Bennet
Copyright © David Dyer-Bennet
Copyright © David Dyer-Bennet
Copyright © David Dyer-Bennet
WPA painting, directly on the plaster/ Copyright © David Dyer-Bennet
Copyright © David Dyer-Bennet
Copyright © David Dyer-Bennet
Don doesn’t have signage up yet, so you’ll see the old tenants on the awnings. Copyright © David Dyer-Bennet
Copyright © David Dyer-Bennet
Copyright © David Dyer-Bennet