25 I Know It’s Only Pixel Scroll, But I Like It

Posted on February 6, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) RADIO FREE BRADBURY. Phil Nichols’ new Bradbury 100 podcast tunes into “Ray Bradbury on Radio: SUSPENSE”.

This time, I look at the early years of Ray’s professional career, which saw him not only mastering the craft of short story writing and putting together his first book, but branching out into media – in particular, getting his stories and scripts onto national radio shows such as CBS’s Suspense.

Over a span of a dozen years, Suspense produced no fewer than eleven shows based on Bradbury stories, with some of the stories being produced multiple times. I argue that this early media presence – which included a number of stories previously unpublished – helped cement Bradbury’s growing popularity and reputation.

The direct link is here: “Episode 61 – Ray Bradbury and Radio’s SUSPENSE!” at SoundCloud.

(2) FUTURE TENSE. ASU Center for Science and the Imagination’s “Future Tense Fiction” story for January 2025 is “The Funniest Centaur Alive”, by Gregory Mone—a story about standup comedy, AI, and the ethics of human enhancement.

The response essay “The AI House of Mirrors” is by computer scientist Suresh Venkatasubramanian.

I spend my days thinking about collisions between tech—especially artificial intelligence—and society. There was a time when I could separate out that part of my day as work, but in 2025, such a division is no longer possible. Rather than simply think through these collisions, I now also live them, in nearly every corner of my life. AI is unescapable: I go to the grocery store and the radio is talking about the technology’s use in some sector or another. I go to get a haircut and we discuss smart mirrors that could show you virtual hairstyles to choose from. My child’s school insists on deploying some rather questionable software that claims to use AI to detect concerning behaviors or online communications and wants my consent to use it….

(3) AT THE HALF CENTURY. LA Review of Books introduces Jonathan Bolton’s review of The Dispossessed: 50th Anniversary Edition saying he “thoughtfully reads Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Dispossessed’ within and against the grain of a half century of criticism”. “To Touch the Dust of Anarres”.

… Among political novelists, Le Guin stood out for her ability to blend different kinds of politics. She was fascinated by the grand politics of class and revolution—her novels are full of parliamentary factions, court intrigue, diplomats, spies, and rebels. As the Thuvian ambassador tells Shevek, “You have got to understand the powers behind the individuals.” But as a feminist and skilled imaginer of everyday life, she also had a sensitive eye for the mundane power struggles of “the personal is political.” Nor did she ignore the cruel paradoxes and structural violence of imperialism, playing out in both colony and metropole. Through it all, she maintained a keen sense of the pure force of ideas to move back and forth among these three political worlds. The Dispossessed is a running political conversation—full of intrigue and drama, to be sure—in which Shevek is forced to test and develop his anarchist ideals against a range of friendly and hostile interlocutors on both Anarres and Urras. These varied conversations leave no political idea unchallenged, even as Shevek preserves his ever-evolving anarchist ideals….

(4) BLACK HERITAGE IN HORROR. The Horror Writers Association has launched a month-long series: “Black Heritage in Horror Month 2025: An Interview with Jamal Hodge”.

What inspired you to start writing?

Pain, uncertainty, and hope. Honestly, I was a naive child, filled with joy at the thought of meeting another face. But when homelessness found my family in the South Bronx, I quickly learned that people weren’t always safe. Being exposed to ‘American history’ in school further revealed what it meant to be Black in this country, a trauma, in my view, that demands mental health support, like counseling, in schools. These harsh realities made me dream of a better world. I found that place within the pages of books, the ink of a pen, and the boundless depths of my own imagination.

What drew you to the horror genre?

Hope, survival, and truth. To me, horror encapsulates all of these. It transforms fear into something useful, something empowering, and even fun. Horror and fantasy were my first loves for precisely that reason: they validated our right to be scared, acknowledging that evil exists and that we live in a dangerous world. But they also illuminated our power to face terror head-on, to survive. That resonated with me.

(5) GROUP STATEMENT OPPOSING ANTI-TRANS EXECUTIVE ORDER. “Literary Organizations Release Joint Statement Decrying Anti-Trans Executive Order” – Publishers Weekly has the full text – read it at the link. Not sure how the 54 signing organizations were recruited, but neither the Authors Guild, HWA, nor SFWA is among them.

Following the release of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on January 20, which asserts that his administration will implement “language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male,” a large number of major organizations in the book business and literary world released a statement decrying the move. Among them are the American Booksellers Association, Audio Publishers Association, Comic Book Legal Defense fund, EveryLibrary, Independent Book Publishers Association, IngramSpark, National Book Critics Circle, PEN America, PubWest, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and many more.

The statement says in part:

…Trans, nonbinary, and intersex experience is vastly underrepresented in literature but disproportionately targeted by bans. During the 2022-2023 school year, 30% of books banned included LGBTQIA+ characters or themes. Such censorship robs us of perspectives that enrich the American story. Though the executive order in question tries to paint LGBTQIA+ people and allies as bullies enforcing their perspective on others through “legal and other socially coercive means,” that’s exactly what the order itself does, just as book-banning pressure groups have done since 2020 in school boards and libraries around the country. The fate of trans, intersex, and nonbinary people is not a political ideology, it’s a matter of human rights, civil rights, and freedom of expression. Government erosion of those rights should concern all Americans, regardless of their investment in LGBTQIA+ literature specifically.

This executive order is censorship, pure and simple, and it has no place in a free society. It must be rescinded or stayed as soon as possible, and at the latest, before the earliest implementation deadline, February 19, 2025….

(6) ELLIOTT SHARP Q&A. Interviewer Rob Thornton reaches back 25 years to share – “Archival Interview (2000): Elliott Sharp on Sci-Fi, Spoken Words, and Sound”.

In 2000, I did an email interview with Sharp about his work with Seeing Eye Theater, why he’s a science fiction fan, and how his approach to music has been shaped by science fiction.

There are many authors who read for Seeing Eye Theater. Did you choose to work with Murphy, Goonan, Womack & Shepard or did Seeing Eye Theater introduce you to them?

I had met the producer, Tony Daniel, through Ellen Datlow, Jack Womack, and Lucius Shepard when doing a performance. He told me that he had followed my work. the next step was easy. I’ve followed sci-fi since I first began to read and had been a longtime fan of Jack. Pat, and Lucius.

We’ve performed together on a number of occasions and I had included all of them reading in a compilation of one-minute pieces called State of the Union. Tony, as producer, makes the choices. I certainly offer feedback. I did become a fan of Kathy Ann Goonan’s after working with her on a Seeing Ear Theater production….

There’s a whole library of “Seeing Eye Theater (Radio)” episodes available at YouTube.

(7) SATURN ON THE BLOCK. A forthcoming episode of Antiques Roadshow will feature “1986 Leonard Nimoy Saturn Life Career Award”. I’m thinking, come on, it’s a Saturn Award, what can that be worth? Well, it seems that having Leonard Nimoy’s name on it raises it well above the value of the average bowling trophy. The figure is named in this clip.

(8) DAVID EDWARD BYRD (1941-2025). Deadline reports: “David Edward Byrd Dead: Artist Behind Iconic Rock And Broadway Posters”. Here’s a brief excerpt from the obituary, with his best-known genre work bolded.

…For some devotees, though, Byrd left his most indelible impression on Broadway, designing some of theater’s most influential and best-remembered posters and logos. He created the gorgeously garish and grisly poster for The Little Shop of Horrors, a more muted 1971 poster for Jesus Christ Superstar combining cathedral art and rock imagery, and that same year, the iconic poster for Follies, the Stephen Sondheim-James Goldman musical about a reunion of aging showgirls.

In the 1980s, Byrd worked as Art Director for Van Halen and designed posters for Los Angeles theaters including The Mark Taper Forum and The Ahmanson Theatre.

While his work might best be remembered by folks of a certain age, at least one set of his illustrations is well-known to a younger generation: He designed the richly colorful covers for the first three Harry Potter books.

In 2023, Byrd published his autobiography Poster Child: The Psychedelic Art & Technicolor Life of David Edward Byrd, chock full of the poster art that has delighted untold numbers of observers….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

February 6, 1922 — Patrick Macnee. (Died 2015.)

By Paul Weimer: “There are those who believe that life here began out there. Far across the universe, with tribes of humans…some believe there may be brothers of man who yet now fight to survive…”

My first encounter with the work of the formidable Patrick Macnee was, improbably, in Battlestar Galactica. His voice is the unmistakable one in the opening credits to the 1978 series. In addition, he also showed up in a two part episode as “Count Iblis”, who was, as far as I can figure, a fallen angel or the outright devil himself. And also he showed up at least once as the Imperious Leader, the head of the Cylons. That striking British baritone voice of his served him well and was unmistakable.

It would be years, though, before I encountered The Avengers and his role in that, proper. In fact, I had somehow missed the existence of The Avengers for years, and didn’t know it existed or that I might like it. It was the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Community that clued me in. A particular GM and player in that community had a penchant for playing characters who were versions of John Steed himself. The first couple of games I played with him in it, I didn’t quite get who he was “supposed to be”. I finally got a chance between games, to actually ask him about the character — I was embarrassed because it seemed I was the only one who wasn’t “in on it”. And so he told me, and urged me to see The Avengers for myself.

And then I finally saw the series itself on VHS tape. While there were several partners (Diana Rigg’s Mrs Peel being just the most prominent), the anchor of that relationship was McNee’s stalwart John Steed. I immediately finally saw what my fellow roleplayer was doing. And why he would model his character and his very con appearance (complete with a bowler hat and an umbrella, although he preferred white to black. It all clicked. The stalwart, competent and implacable and unflappable gentleman that Macnee portrays is tailor made for borrowing as a character template, or just a fashion template. What a fascinating character! An excellent spy, cultured, intelligent, and always prepared. And a perfect gentleman who wasn’t above some very above board wordplay with his associates. I think that Macnee so created and inhabited the role is a reason why attempts to reboot the character in media have gone from horrible (sorry, Ralph Fiennes) to forgettable (the Big Finish audio dramas).

Macnee also shows up in series and roles ever since, from Columbo to Sherlock Holmes to an episode of the series Frasier where he plays a psychiatrist.

A class act, throughout his acting career. He died in 2015. Requiescat in pace.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Brevity may have mashed up Dickens and Doyle.
Dog Eat Doug makes it someone else’s problem.
F Minus stays chill.
Macanudo should be used to the jump.
Reality Check turns an album into a recipe.

(11) ON A ROLL. The New York Times tells readers about a game involving “Intergalactic Shantytowns Where Dice Dictate Your Future” (behind a paywall.)

The dice roll is the fundamental engine of numerous games. In a board game, it might determine what type of resources you receive or how far you can move. In tabletop role-playing games, it might determine whether an action is successful. When you swing your sword at an ogre, does it land a fatal blow? Or does your blade accidentally glance off a nearby statue and clatter uselessly to the ground? The dice decide.

Although video games often use similar systems to decide the outcome of a player’s actions, the dice roll itself — the machinery of chance — is typically concealed.

“The idea with video games is they’re supposed to be this warm bath of immersion that you disappear into,” said Gareth Damian Martin, whose new game Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector subverts convention by placing the dice center stage.

The dice in Citizen Sleeper 2, which releases for PCs and consoles on Friday, can be spent on actions within a cyberpunk future where mercenaries, scavengers and outcasts eke out a hardscrabble living on the margins of a galaxy ruled by rival corporations. The higher the number of an assigned die, the greater the chance that the player will successfully work shifts in an intergalactic kelp bar, sell scrap engine components down at the shipyards or overthrow a corporation as part of a labor revolution.

“The process of abstracting things to dice gives an incredible flexibility to storytelling,” said Damian Martin, who uses they/them pronouns. “The game inherently supports you and creates drama from any situation.”…

(12) TANGLED UP IN BLUE. Deadline introduces “’Smurfs’ Trailer: First Footage Of Rihanna’s Smurfette”.

…The synopsis: When Papa Smurf (John Goodman) is mysteriously taken by evil wizards, Razamel and Gargamel, Smurfette (Rihanna) leads the Smurfs on a mission into the real world to save him. With the help of new friends, the Smurfs must discover what defines their destiny to save the universe….

(13) NOT WITH A BANG. [Item by Steven French.] It’ll be interesting to see whether AI can describe the end of the universe before it brings about the end of the world: “AI to revolutionise fundamental physics and ‘could show how universe will end’”.

Advanced artificial intelligence is to revolutionise fundamental physics and could open a window on to the fate of the universe, according to Cern’s next director general.

Prof Mark Thomson, the British physicist who will assume leadership of Cern on 1 January 2026, says machine learning is paving the way for advances in particle physics that promise to be comparable to the AI-powered prediction of protein structures that earned Google DeepMind scientists a Nobel prize in October.

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), he said, similar strategies are being used to detect incredibly rare events that hold the key to how particles came to acquire mass in the first moments after the big bang and whether our universe could be teetering on the brink of a catastrophic collapse….

(14) ORIGIN STORY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] OK, so you are an SF fan, but could you be a multibillionaire? Now, I have occasionally dreamed of having a superpower and if I ever did I guess it might be the USA. However, you don’t have to be born on Krypton or be bitten by a radioactive spider. All you need — as Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark showed — is lots and lots of dosh, and then you can even influence things on the national stage. But in real life one SF enthusiast did just this, and it is this interest of his in SF that gives us a clue as to his beliefs, as a BBC Radio 4 series of half-hour programmes reveals…

The story of Elon Musk, the way it’s usually told, makes him sound like a fictional character, a comic-book superhero – or supervillain. He’s the world’s richest man, and now an adviser to the US President. He uses X – his social media platform – to berate politicians he doesn’t agree with around the world.

He plans to put chips in people’s brains, and to save the world by colonising Mars. Musk’s visions of the future seem to stem from the science fiction that has fired his imagination since he was a boy. But what’s the real story, the true history, behind the comic book? Back in 2021 Harvard History Professor and New Yorker Writer Jill Lepore became fascinated by this question.

So she made a Radio 4 podcast which tried to explain Musk through the science fiction he grew up with – tales of superheroes with origin stories that seemed to influence how he understands his own life. So much has happened since then that we decided to update that series – and add three new episodes, too. Because Musk keeps changing, and so does what Lepore calls ‘Muskism’ – his brand of extreme capitalism and techno-futurism. And strangely, his origin story keeps changing, too.

How can understanding these fantasy stories – some of them a century old – help us understand the future Musk wants to take us to?

You can listen to the first episode here: “Introducing X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story”.

(15) NO LAST OF US. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] There is a review of fungi impact on Earth’s ecosystems – “Fungal impacts on Earth’s ecosystems” — in this week’s Nature.

Here, we examine the fungal threats facing civilization and investigate opportunities to use fungi to combat these threats….

This is an excellent overview but, alas, no mention of The Last of Us…!

(16) THEY KNOW WHERE THE SKELETONS ARE. Hollywood Graveyard combines filmmaking history with the pastime of tracking down celebrity graves. Can you guess what movie this installment focuses on? “Graves From The Black Lagoon : A Famous Grave Film”.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/26/24 The Sandmaid’s Tale

Posted on November 26, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) GREAT MARTHA WELLS PROFILE. Meghan Herbst’s “How Murderbot Saved Martha Wells’ Life” in WIRED is fascinating in so many ways. You’ll find reasons of your own. Mine is the revelation how many of the same events Wells and I were at in the 1980s – even an AggieCon — yet I don’t think we ever met.

MURDER IS IN the air. Everywhere I turn, I see images of a robot killing machine. Then I remind myself where I actually am: in a library lecture room on a college campus in East Texas. The air is a little musty with the smell of old books, and a middle-aged woman with wavy gray-brown hair bows her head as she takes the podium. She might appear a kindly librarian or a cat lady (confirmed), but her mind is a capacious galaxy of starships, flying bipeds, and ancient witches. She is Martha Wells, creator of Murderbot.

Hearing a name like that, you’d be forgiven for running for your life. But the thing about Murderbot—the thing that makes it one of the most beloved, iconic characters in modern-day science fiction—is just that: It’s not what it seems. For all its hugeness and energy-weaponized body armor, Murderbot is a softie. It’s socially awkward and appreciates sarcasm. Not only does it detest murdering, it wants to save human lives, and often does (at least when it’s not binge-watching its favorite TV shows). “As a heartless killing machine,” as Murderbot puts it, “I was a terrible failure.”…

…The young Wells dealt with her awkwardness the same way Murderbot eventually would: by immersing herself in far-off realms. She sketched maps of Monster Island, the home of Godzilla, and wrote fan fiction set in the worlds of Lost In Space and Land of the Giants. At the nearby bookstore, she gazed in wonder at the covers of books like F. M. Busby’s Zelde M’Tana, featuring a Black woman in a jumpsuit raising a gun. She picked her way through Phyllis Gotlieb, John Varley, Andre Norton. There was also Erma Bombeck, the witty writer whose local newspaper column on suburban family life, “At Wit’s End,” hit a vein with ’70s housewives. “That was my first real indication that being a writer was a real job,” Wells says….

(2) DEVOUT PARODY. Sister Boniface Mysteries, explains Wikipedia, is a spinoff from the Father Brown TV series that premiered in 2022.

…The series is set in England during the early 1960s. Sister Boniface is a Catholic nun at St. Vincent’s Convent in the fictional town of Great Slaughter in the Cotswolds. In addition to her religious duties at the convent, she makes wine and has a PhD in forensic science (although this is referred to as a MA (Cantab), in the The Forensic Nun episode of Father Brown) allowing her to serve as a scientific adviser to the local police on investigations….

A viewer told The Divergent Universe forum that in recent episodes “’Sister Boniface Mysteries’ does ‘Doctor Who’”.

“Sister Boniface Mysteries”, the less-than-serious and not-very-good “Father Brown” spinoff … has got into the habit of doing parodies of well-known series. There was an episode where a “Blue Peter”-type series was filmed in the village, an episode where an Ian Fleming-adjacent author was trying to cast a James Bond-esque movie role, and this week they hold a Doctor Who convention. Excuse me, a Professor X convention. No, it wasn’t even that, it was “Professor Y”.

“Professor Y” is a tv series that, by whatever stage in the 1960s “Sister Boniface Mysteries” is set, has been cancelled but fans keep the spirit alive and are campaigning for it to be brought back. The police inspector and one of the nuns are big fans. Anyway, the clips of the series they show are actually not all that bad – certainly much less silly and far more credible than, say, Inspector Spacetime. Mark Heap was cast as the actor who played the Professor, and while his performance is perhaps closer to nuWho than 1960s DW, it’s not that bad. And the Dalek-type creatures look fairly good for Dalek-type creatures. The voice actor isn’t Nick Briggs but I thought was trying to sound like him.

Anyway, it gave us three days of DW in a row, sort of.

(3) DERN CHEEP STREAMZ: [Item by Daniel Dern.] Want to watch Dune: Prophecy (on Max), Ted Lasso, Foundation, etc on Apple+? Roku is having some great multi-month deals, “Up to 90% off on 25+ premium subscriptions” including Acorn ($0.99/month for two months, vs $7.99/month)(Murdoch Mysteries, etc) BritBox $3.99/month for two months, vs $8.99/month) (McDonald & Dodds, if nothing else) Max ($2.99/month for six months, vs $9.99/month) (Penguin; other DC flicks’n’shows) Paramount ($2.99/month for two months, vs $12.99) Star Trek; NCIS; The Daily Show, The Late Show etc. “Black Friday Deals | Premium Subscriptions | Roku”.

A Roku account itself is free.

I don’t think you need to buy/have a Roku player (“streaming stick” etc).

There’s a Roku (mobile) app, for your phone, tablet, and (possibly) “smart TV”.

We have/use a Roku player (streaming stick) (no cablebox these days, and the TV is old enough that it won’t, I think, let me add apps directly). — We have the slightly $$ Roku player, for the build-in Ethernet and other features, but the other models are inexpensive (and currently on Black Friday sales as well). (And a second, smaller Roku player&remote, for convenience during increasingly-rare travel.)

‘Nuff watched!

(4) RECOVERED WISDOM. “Ursula K. Le Guin — Book View Café: Navigating the Ocean of Story” is a page at the Ursula K. Le Guin website with a directory of links to 14 recreated copies of posts she wrote for BVC.

In 2015, a few months before the publication of the revised edition of Steering the Craft, Ursula began “an experiment: a kind of open consultation or informal ongoing workshop in Fictional Navigation,” which was hosted at Book View Café. She took questions about writing from readers, and offered generous answers.

These posts were lost in an update at BVC, but we’ve recreated them as best we could with the help of the Wayback Machine. Three other posts appeared only at BVC and not on Ursula’s own website’s blog; those are included here too.

(5) FUTURE TENSE. November 2024’s new Future Tense Fiction story is “A Time Between,” by Kevin Galvin, a story about augmented reality and detective work. It’s paired with a response essay by Jim Bueermann, founder and president of the Center on Policing and Artificial Intelligence: “The Long Arm of Law and Technology”.

…When used for policing, what does technology illuminate—and what does it obscure? Kevin Galvin’s “A Time Between,” a new short story published by Future Tense Fiction, explores these questions through the eyes of Detective Carberry, an older, somewhat disillusioned officer who prefers tangible experiences over the augmented reality technologies that now dominate his fictional universe—and his police department. Carberry is wary of how reality and fiction are becoming increasingly hard to distinguish, and his skepticism comes to a head when he’s tasked with investigating the death of a college freshman who supposedly fell from a dorm-room window, but whose body cannot be found….

Other news: There’s now a dedicated landing page for Future Tense Fiction on the website of their publishing partner, Issues in Science and Technology. You can find it here: https://issues.org/futuretensefiction. It will feature our new fiction and essays, selected stories from the Future Tense Fiction archives, video interviews with authors, and more.

(6) FAN HISTORY IS CALLING. First Fandom Experience’s editors are “Seeking collaborators for research and publishing on the early history of fandom”.

Fan history is replete with stories of individuals whose experience in fandom enabled them to create the foundations of the massive science fiction and fantasy industry we know today. The writings of these early fans also offer unique insights on the US and Britain during the Great Depression and the Second World War.

We hope to engage with students, historians and others with interest and intent to learn, understand and publish these stories.

In support of our work, FFE has assembled an extensive archive of fan material — fanzines, convention material, club ephemera, photographs, correspondence and others — all from the late 1920s to the late-1940s. The physical archive resides in the collections of David Ritter and Alistair Durie, each accumulated over decades. Our exclusive focus on this period also allows us to source supplemental digital material from other private, university and public sources….

… FFE is prepared to facilitate access to the archive for individuals and organizations seeking to research and publish in this area of study. Please reach out to us at: info@firstfandomexperience.org

(7) A MUCH WIDER WORLD. Robin Anne Reid shares her talk “Tolkien’s ‘Absent [Female] Characters’: How Christopher Tolkien Expanded Middle-earth” at Writing from Ithilien.

… I said I’d be looking at how Christopher’s work on the posthumous publications expanded Middle-earth by including more female characters.

And then things just all came together in my head, including the four Éowyn posts I had made in my Substack earlier this year….

… This talk is the start of a larger project which will explore three related topics. The first is how the posthumous publications CJRT edited (from the 1977 Silmarillion to the 2018 Fall of Gondolin)¹ expand the number of female characters in Middle-earth and give us a unique view into alternate and contradictory ideas JRRT explored in his writing process. The second is how academic scholarship on his fiction is still, almost 50 years after the publication of The Silmarillion, overlooking most of the legendarium’s female characters except for a handful in The Lord of the Rings plus Lúthien.² The third is how those of us who are feminists can challenge that tendency by paying more attention to the messy, complex material about female characters in the multiple histories of Middle-earth and by acknowledging and incorporating the valuable work women and non-binary fans have been and are doing with the posthumous publications.³

This talk, and this project, exist in the current Anglophone socio-political context in which some critical theories, such as feminisms, have been dismissed as inappropriately imposing politics (and, the worst of all politics, “identity politics” which is apparently politics by anyone who is not a straight Christian white man) on literature since at least the 1980s. As Sue Kim argues in “Beyond Black and White: Race and Postmodernism in The Lord of the Rings Film”: “It is disingenuous to claim that certain modern politics apply (war, fascism, industrialization, conservation) and others do not (gender, sexuality, race), just as it is disingenuous to say that any one kind of reading necessarily discounts all other readings” (882).⁴…

(8) EARL HOLLIMAN (1928-2024). Actor Earl Holliman died November 25 at the age of 96. Fans know him best as the star of The Twilight Zone’s debut episode “Where Is Everybody?” which aired on October 2, 1959. The Deadline tribute details some of his genre work:

…Holliman had done several guest-starring roles on 1950s TV before making history as the focus of the first episode of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling’s landmark anthology series that put ordinary people in extraordinary situations. The October 1959 episode “Where Is Everybody?” opened with Holliman’s Mike Ferris wandering in a deserted town, which appears to be populated — coffee is boiling, a jukebox is playing, a cigar is burning — but no one is seen. The unsettling scenario continues to build to a wildly unexpected climax that would be the still-loved series’ signature….

Prior to that he appeared in the Fifties sf film Forbidden Planet. And his career was bookended by a genre TV series:

…He would land a final series-regular role on the syndicated NightMan in 1997. He starred opposite Matt McColm, whose Johnny Domingo becomes the title superhero after a lightning strike. Holliman played his ex-cop dad who appeared in two dozen episodes before being killed off in the Season 2 premiere….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born November 26, 1919 — Frederik Pohl. (Died 2013.)

By Paul Weimer: Frederik Pohl first came to my attention thanks to his multiverse novel, The Coming of the Quantum Cats. I saw the book in a bookstore, was attracted by the cover, hooked by the back matter, bought it and read it quickly and avidly. I had never heard of Pohl before, and if you’ve read these vignettes and have gotten any sense of who I am, you know I had to find more of Pohl’s work. If he could do multiverse novels, what else could he do? What else did he do? Plenty it turns out.

Frederik Pohl as shown on the cover of his 1979 autobiography The Way The Future Was.

Next up came Gateway, the novel for which he is most famous, with its unusual structural style and tone, and a focus that frustrated me then…but now I find brilliant, unique, engaging and makes the book memorable. From Gateway, I read a number of Pohl works and novels over the years. The Space Merchants with its criticism of capitalism that feels every more prescient as the years pass. The wide-ranging epic of the Eschaton trilogy, which brings a near future government agent into conflict with aliens who have orders and information from their far future apotheosis. There is his nonfictional collaboration with Isaac Asimov, This Angry Earth, which was an early 1990’s clarion call to deal with climate change. We did not listen, we did not hear, and now we are paying that price.

And then there were a large number of short stories. A lot of them seem to be awfully funny, such as the subtle The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass, which I managed to read just before reading Lest Darkness Fall (which it references and I then wanted to, and did, read — and then immediately read Harry Turtledove’s The Pugnacious Peacemaker, which is his sequel to the classic).

The best of these is my favorite Pohl work (even more than The Coming of the Quantum Cats) — Day Million. It tells the story of a typical day in the year 2739. It’s a future to give Rep Nancy Mace fear and loathing. The main character Dora is genetically male but biologically female, and forms a relationship with a starship flying cyborg, with whom she has virtual sex, among a variety of lovers of various kinds. The story is addressed to and written in a point of view addressing the reader in a challenging, direct way, saying that if you are repulsed by this, by this future, just think what Attila the Hun would think of you and your life. It’s a story that feels especially relevant in this year of 2024.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bliss meets a different breed.
Carpe Diem gets a peek at Ann Darrow’s social media.
Rhymes with Orange reveals the reason for green visitors.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has to go with second choice.

(11) BOOK REMOVAL LITIGATION UPDATE. “Summary Judgment Motions Filed in ‘Tango’ Book Banning Case” reports Publishers Weekly.

With discovery now complete, dueling summary judgment motions have been filed in a closely watched book banning case in Escambia County, Fla., over the removal of Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson’s 2005 picture book And Tango Makes Three.

In a filing this week, the authors, who first filed suit in June 2023, argue that the removal of their book—an illustrated book based on a true story about two male penguins who adopt and raise a penguin chick—was removed based on unconstitutional, anti-LGBTQ+ “viewpoint discrimination” and should be returned to school library shelves.

“Following Florida’s enactment of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and a challenge from a District teacher with a documented history of homophobia, Defendant removed Tango from District school libraries,” the filing states. “There is no dispute that Defendant did so because Tango depicts a same-sex relationship, a viewpoint-discriminatory justification prohibited by the First Amendment.”

In their own motion for summary judgment, lawyers for defendants Escambia County counter they should prevail because school officials have the authority to remove any book from library shelves for any reason, citing a common defense in several book banning cases now underway across the nation—that which books go on library shelves is “government speech” and thus immune from First Amendment scrutiny….

(12) DISNEY CLASS-ACTION SETTLEMENT EXPECTED. Deadline has learned “Disney Will Pay $43M To Settle Pay Equity Class-Action Lawsuit”. “Not even the cost of a slice of cheese for the Mouse,” opines Cat Eldridge.

We now know how much Disney is writing a check for to end the pay equity class-action suit that has loomed over the company for the past five years.

Set to address the up to 14,000 eligible class members of female Disney employees past and present from 2015 to today, the Bob Iger-run fun palace will be paying $43.25 million, according to papers set to be filed later tonight in Los Angeles Superior Court docket.

Far less than the $300 million it was estimated the case could balloon to once if was certified as a class action last December, the official compensation comes a couple of weeks after news broke of a quietly reached October settlement between Disney and the Lori Andrus represented plaintiffs. The whole matter was set to go to trial in May 2025….

… First filed in April 2019 over back pay, lost benefits and more by Disney staffers LaRonda Rasmussen and Karen Moore and heading towards a May 2025 trial, the suit accused the Magic Kingdom of not being so kind with its cash based on gender as opposed to performance. At its core, the suit claimed Disney has violated the Fair Employment & Housing Act and California’s Equal Pay Act in paying men more than women for the same work.

Seeking at least $150 million in lost wages initially, the suit saw repeated big push back from Disney over the year in efforts to have it dismissed and not certified. Exclaiming the whole thing was merely “highly individualized allegations,” Disney’s Paul Hasting LLP team sought to limit the matter to a small contingent of less than 10 women. There was also drama over documents and discovery, with the plaintiffs calling out the Mouse House as dragging their feet with data and paperwork….

(13) FURNISHED FOR ADVENTURE. If you’re ready to part with $295, GW Pens will happily sell you the “GW Dungeon Dice and Pen Set with Field Notes 5E Character Journal”. And the chest it comes in!

Ready to embark on a new dungeon crawl? Be sure to grab your chest of necessities before you go!

This wooden box unlatches to reveal a dragon themed ballpoint twist pen with hand cast resin and Matching hand cast resin dice! The pen and dice are easily kept together in the pictured wooden chest, with faux leather lined insert to keep the dice edges safe from the metal components of the pen. The tray can lift out from the box for a small storage area beneath.

Also included with this set is a Field Notes 5E character journal, helping you track everything you need to know about your character from the first roll of the dice!

The included dice are dense enough to have a nice weight to them, offering true “rolls” and not just stopping on whatever side they land on.

(14) OUR LOOKOUT. [Item by Steven French.] Astronomer Desiree Cotto-Figueora on defending the planet: “I defend the planet from asteroid collisions” in Nature.

There are hundreds of millions of asteroids in the Solar System, the majority of which are in the main belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But some of these asteroids, either through collisions, or through gravitational effects or other processes, end up in new orbits that come close to or cross Earth’s orbit. Currently, astronomers think that there are more than 36,000 of these near-Earth asteroids, and at least 2,400 of those are considered potentially hazardous, because they could strike Earth.

I’m part of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, which aims to detect and characterize 90% of near-Earth asteroids that are larger than 140 metres in diameter. The first step is to work out where they are, but it’s also important to characterize them and understand their fragmentation process so that scientists can design strategies for deflection and disruption, if needed.

Along with my research, I spend a lot of time teaching astronomy and organizing outreach events through my role as coordinator of the Astronomical Observatory at the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao. In this photo, I’m standing next to the observatory’s 14-inch telescope. Although it’s a lot smaller than the 42-inch instrument I use for my research, it’s a great tool for connecting people with the Universe. I love seeing how excited kids and adults get when they look through a telescope for the first time and see the rings of Saturn or the Galilean moons of Jupiter.

I’ve loved astronomy and watching space documentaries from an early age. In high school, I started an astronomy club and visited nearby observatories, including the one I work at now. I’m so lucky to have ended up doing work that I’m passionate about. Even now, I don’t think that high-school girl would ever have imagined that one day she’d be working on a NASA mission.

(15) EARTH CALLING THE HIDDEN CITY… “’We didn’t know what it was at first.’ NASA aircraft uncovers site of secret Cold War nuclear missile tunnels under Greenland ice sheet” – Space.com has the story.

NASA scientists conducting surveys of arctic ice sheets in Greenland got an unprecedented view of an abandoned “city under the ice” built by the U.S. military during the Cold War.

During a scientific flight in April 2024, a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft flew over the Greenland Ice Sheet carrying radar instruments to map the depth of the ice sheet and the layers of bedrock below it. The images revealed a new view of Camp Century, a Cold War-era U.S. military base consisting of a series of tunnels carved directly into the ice sheet. As it turns out, this abandoned “secret city” was the site of a secret Cold War project known as Project Iceworm which called for the construction of 2,500 miles (4,023 km) of tunnels that could be used to nuclear intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) at the Soviet Union….

…Construction on Camp Century began in 1959, but the base was abandoned in 1967 due to the costs and challenges of keeping the tunnels from collapsing in the ever-shifting ice sheet…

…The trenches were designed for a type of modified Minuteman IRBM missile known as “Iceman” that would be able to withstand the pressures of launching through the ice sheet. Project Iceworm was ultimately canceled and abandoned along with Camp Century, but the echoes of this era of the Cold War still reverberate throughout the Greenland landscape today…

For more details about the facility watch this “’Camp Century’ Restored Classified Film”.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/16/24 Beelzebub Has A Pixel Put Aside For Me, For Me, For Me

Posted on November 16, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) LE GUIN BOOK BUNDLE. Recently announced is the “Humble Book Bundle: A Wizard of Earthsea and More by Ursula K. Le Guin”.

You can get the three Earthsea novels for $1, go for an intermediate deal, or buy all 30 books in the bundle for a minimum of $18. The more you choose to pay, the more goes to a selected charity – Literary Arts, this time.

The titles in this bundle are available on Kobo.com. To access them, create or log in to your Kobo.com account. Please note that the content redemption deadline is December 15, 2027 at 11:00 AM PDT.

(2) CONGRATULATIONS! Heather Rose Jones aired Episode 300 of “The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast” (Podbean) today. On her blog, Alpennia, she discusses “Where I Have Been, Where I Will Go” with the series.

…When I first conceived of the Project back in the ‘80s, I wanted to create a sourcebook of historic research to help people create lesbian characters in historic settings. I figured it would be a manageable project because, after all, how much information could there be? (Pause while I glance sideways at my database with over a thousand publications listed.) I started the blog 10 years ago when I concluded that a more rational approach was to create an ongoing annotated bibliography. It would start getting the information out there. It would give me an incentive to start reading and processing all the publications I’d been collecting. And people could search the Project for topics relevant to their own interests. The blog has always had two parallel functions. For those who want a general, high-level understanding, the summaries themselves are available. But for those who want to do their own in-depth research, the Project offers guideposts, bibliographies, and sometimes links to the original publications it’s based on.

In the last year or so, I’ve come back around to the conclusion that my original idea was viable after all. Or, at least, that some version of that sourcebook was a viable idea. I have enough material—between the blog and the podcast—to put together something approaching my original vision: a one-stop sourcebook for people who want information on lesbian-like characters in history. A lot of the text is already written, albeit in a form that will need considerable editing. So the next big step for the Project will be to create that sourcebook.

Since making that decision, I’ve started focusing the podcast essays on creating chapters to fill in the outline I’ve drafted. Soon, I’ll be looking for input and feedback on what potential readers want to see in a resource of this type. But for now, I thought I’d celebrate this podcast milestone by laying out the current vision….

…One of the biggest philosophical issues in the study of queer history is the consideration of how modern gender and sexual identities relate to those in history—if they do at all. So the next section of the book will be exploring that concept and offering tools for thinking about how we can create characters who both reflect their own setting and also offer connection for modern readers. This will start off with my favorite metaphor: that gender and sexuality identities are like prepositions—every language is trying to describe the same physical reality, but speakers of different languages perceive and describe the relationships in that reality differently. It’s a really fun metaphor to explore, though probably no one else is quite as geeky about prepositional semantics as I am. The section will then review various historic models of gender and sexuality and talk about how they both reflected and shaped people’s understandings of their own lives….

(3) GET REJECTED QUICKER! So much for that “money flows to the writer” dictum.After Dinner Conversation will happily take $20 from any writer that wants a prompt decision about their story submission.

Our turnaround time for submissions is 6-8 weeks. Don't feel like waiting? Buy a FAST PASS and skip to the front of the line. You get a quick response, and we keep the lights on! buff.ly/3m2rN47 #opensubs #litmag #literarymagazine #shortstory #fiction #writercommunity
— After Dinner Conversation (@afterdinner.bsky.social) 2024-11-15T16:55:39.679Z

Here’s a bit more about how it works: “After Dinner Conversation – Short Story FAST PASS Submissions”.

What is a “Fast Pass” submission?

Because of the high volume of submissions, we tend to average 2-3 months to read and respond to a new submission. If you purchase a “Fast Pass,” you jump to the front of the line. Only after reading all of our “Fast Pass” submissions, will we go back to reading our regular submissions. (Or, if you are a yearly digital or print subscriber, your story is always moved to the front of the line!)

Accordingly, “Fast Pass” submissions should expect a response in 3-5 business days.

Are my chances of getting accepted better if I use the “Fast Pass” system?

Nope. You get the exact same reading and consideration as everyone else. You just get read first.

What do you do with the extra money?

We keep the lights on at After Dinner Conversation Publishing. Seriously, submitting via the “Fast Pass” is win/win. You get a faster response, and 100% of your money goes to supporting an independent literary publisher.

(4) THE MCCARTY FACTOR. In a new episode of the Wizards and Spaceships podcast, hosts David L. Clink and Rachel A. Rosen revisit “The Great 2023 Hugo Awards Controversy” with whistleblower Diane Lacey. Also discusses of Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford’s report.

In 2023, the Hugo Awards, administered by the World Science Fiction Society, were rocked by scandal. That year, the convention was hosted in Chengdu, China, and a number of popular and acclaimed works, from R. F. Kuang’s Babel to Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow, were deemed ineligible…even though they had enough nominations to appear on the ballot. The controversy engulfed the world of speculative fiction, but what really happened? In this episode, we talk to WorldCon whistleblower Diane Lacey to get her take on what went wrong, who’s to blame, and what we can learn from this moving forward.

(5) GUARDIAN JOINS THE RESISTANCE. …To a movie casting choice. This controversial column is from The Guardian’s “Week in Geek”: “Daisy Ridley’s Rey is now Star Wars’ best big-screen bet – is this a saga without a plan?”

…When the Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk described modern consumer culture as “a copy of a copy of a copy”, he was probably thinking of Ikea churning out coffee tables with all the personality of an overcooked noodle, rather than the next episodes in a long-running space opera known for heroes who use quizzically reversed syntax. Nevertheless, he might easily have been talking about Star Wars, and the once great saga’s descent into self parody in the wake of reports from Hollywood that the future of the franchise on the big screen is to be based on … yep, you read it right … Daisy Ridley’s Rey.

It had already been announced that Rey, whose presence lent the sequel trilogy all the emotional resonance of a damp tea towel, will return for a movie set 15 years after the events of the execrable Rise of Skywalker, as she endeavours to build a new Jedi order. (Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is attached to direct.) That was worrying enough for those fans of the saga still reeling from the most recent episode’s attempts to tie up loose ends by lighting them on fire and hoping nobody noticed. But according to the Hollywood Reporter, Lucasfilm has decided that Rey is now seen as Star Wars’ “most valuable cinematic asset” – admittedly because “the closet is a little bare” following the deaths either on or off screen of pretty much the entire cast of the original trilogy….

(6) HOWARD BRAZEE (1951-2024). Colorado SF fan Howard Brazee died October 18 reports the Denver clubzine DASFAX. The family obituary is here. He is survived by his wife, Patricia, children Lisa and Ian, sisters Linda and Loralee, brother Jonathan (SF author and SFWA director), and grandchildren.

… Howard reveled in Colorado, but he reveled more being a family man, taking great pride and joy in watching Ian and Lisa mature and start their own families. He never lost the joy of childhood, which is why he was always the favorite of the family children. He took his duties as a grandfather, uncle, and grand-uncle to his enormous heart, giving love and support to everyone.

If there was one thing that set Howard apart was that he always had a smile on his face and a ready joke or quip. He raised the spirits of all those around him.

A lifelong science fiction and fantasy fan, he was known to many of the most famous writers in the genres. He and Pat were fixtures at MileHiCon, the largest science fiction conference in the Rocky Mountain region.

Howard was a good man, in every sense of the word, and the world is a better place for his life journey on it….

DASFAx editor Sourdough Jackson adds, “Something Jonathan Brazee once told me is that when he was a small boy, his big brother Howard introduced him to science fiction, in part by reading stories to him.”

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

November 16, 1952 — Robin McKinley, 72.

By Paul Weimer: I almost missed out on reading Robin McKinley, in my focus to read “Adult novels”. I don’t remember how, in the mid 80’s I came across The Hero and the Crown, but I did, and I was enchanted with Aerin’s story, rising from distrusted daughter of the king, to dragon-slaying hero facing enormous odds with courage, and intelligence. I did read the books in the wrong order, since I read The Blue Sword, next, which The Hero and the Crown is a prequel to, and Aerin appears as a force ghost in, briefly. That confused me, it may have been one of the first times I accidentally read a series out of publication order, but within chronological order. I didn’t know you could do such a thing.

I kind of lost track of McKinley’s work for a good long time. Too many authors to read, too much thinking that I didn’t really feel the need for more YA (even if her later work was not all YA at all), until I came across one of the best vampire novels out there, from McKinley, Sunshine, which is set in an alternate world where the creatures of the night fought humanity and now have a prickly conflicting relationship, with vampire gangs, pools of black magic and a lot more.

The worldbuilding of “Sunshine” Rae’s world is fascinating, taking the old tropes of vampires and undead and putting them into a secondary world to be able to play with those tropes and settings and ideas as she likes. Sunshine, like other McKinley novels, really run strongly on characters and character relationships, especially ones under very heavy fire, both from plot and from others around them. I can see a line from Aerin all the way to Rae, and beyond, in McKinley’s work.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Free Range shows SJW credentials have gained battlefield mobility.
Zack Hill says always to call it research.
Bliss notes the new signs of the times.
Tom Gauld’s TBR pile turns threatening.

My cartoon for this week’s @GuardianBooks pic.twitter.com/zjvc4XYCho
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) November 16, 2024

(9) GREEN LANTERN STATUE. Burbank has dedicated a third superhero statue: “DC, Visit Burbank, and Warner Bros. Discovery Unveil Green Lantern Statue”.

An iconic member of DC’s Green Lantern Corps stands as a symbol of willpower and keeper of law and order for visitors and residents of Burbank as a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall bronze statue of Green Lantern John Stewart was unveiled today in a special ceremony at Empire Center’s Hangar 28 in Burbank. The statue is the newest product of a partnership between Visit Burbank, DC, and Warner Bros. Discovery, joining celebrated DC Super Heroes Batman, in downtown Burbank, and Wonder Woman, at the entrance to the Warner Bros. Studio Tour.

… The newly installed Green Lantern statue can be viewed 24 hours a day at Empire Center’s Hangar 28 at 1775 N Victory Place, Burbank, CA.

(10) WHY DID EARTH’S FIRST RADIO MESSAGE TO ALIEN CIVILIZATIONS LEAVE OUT HALF OF HUMANITY? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Back on Friday November 16, 1974 (around teatime in Britain) a message was sent to the Great Globular Cluster in the constellation of Hercules (26,000 light years away) from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, then the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world. It consisted of a series of binary digits, 0s and 1s, which represented numbers and pictures conveying basic information about humanity. One of the pictures was of a crude depiction of a human. Though blocky, it looked far more like a man than a woman. Radio astronomer Frank Drake (he of the famous Drake Equation, then the director of the observatory, was tasked with commemorating what was essentially a new instrument with something of a media stunt.

This week’s Nature has an article on this message. Though the Arecibo message contained an image likely of a man (not a woman), what might seem a sexist choice arguably deserves a more subtle interpretation the article opines:

As the electronic signals from our planet expand ever outwards into space, the world is marking 50 years since humanity broadcast its first radio message intended to get a response from the stars. No reply has been received, and none is expected for millennia, at least. But the form of this message, and others, raises questions about how humans see and portray ourselves — and about the legacies, scientific and otherwise, that any civilization leaves for others…

….Drake wrestled with how to represent a human figure using so few pixels. He hoped to make it unisex, but that version “came out looking more like a gorilla than a human. So, I left it masculine rather than apelike.”

Thus, a picture of only half of humanity was broadcast from the Arecibo telescope. In hindsight, Drake admitted that he might have subconsciously tried to make it look a lot like himself — “as though I were beaming myself up Star Trek style”…

….The Arecibo message demonstrates how the demographics of the scientists involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) affected the character of the messages they sent. As with art, these messages are shaped by our biases, values and identities — mirrors that reflect our histories and cultures. If fields such as astronomy are dominated by a narrow demographic, as they were in the 1970s, then that will be reflected in the design and content of the messages, which might emphasise certain human experiences and perspectives over others…

(11) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. “Did NASA’s Viking landers accidentally kill life on Mars? Why one scientist thinks so” reports Space.com.

In 1975, NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft entered orbit around Mars, carrying a mission to unlock the secrets of the Red Planet. Soon, it released twin landers that drifted toward the Martian surface and eventually made history as the first American spacecraft to touch down on the world.

For over six years, Viking 1 continued to orbit Mars’ Chryse Planitia region while its landers collected soil samples using robotic arms and onboard laboratories, marking a groundbreaking chapter in humanity’s exploration of the Martian environment.At the time, however, little was known about environmental conditions of the Red Planet, and the Viking life detection experiments were modeled after culturing techniques commonly used to identify microbes on Earth. These methods involved adding water and nutrients to those aforementioned soil samples, then monitoring for any signs that suggest microbes might be living in the samples. Such signals were associated with responses to the additives — essentially an influx of components needed to complete normal life cycles as we know them — and included things like growth, reproduction and the consumption of food for energy.

One day, both Viking landers reported a potential positive detection of microbial activity in their soil samples, and the findings naturally sparked decades of intense debate. Had we finally found proof of life elsewhere in the universe? However, most scientists now believe the results were negative or — at best — inconclusive. They think it’s more likely that the positive readings have an alternative explanation.

But that’s most scientists.

According to Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at the Technische Universität Berlin in Germany, there may be another facet to this mystery that hasn’t yet been considered: Viking may indeed have discovered life on Mars, but the water-based nature of its life-detection experiments might have unintentionally killed it.

In a recent commentary published in the journal Nature Astronomy, titled “We may be looking for Martian life in the wrong place,” he argues that because Mars is even drier than one of the most arid places on Earth, the Atacama Desert, where microbes obtain water through salts that draw moisture from the atmosphere, any analogous Martian life would be highly sensitive to the addition of liquid water. Even one drop too much could threaten their existence….

(12) IN THE QUEUE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Line Culture has been the subject of much discussion from time to time in sf/f/etc. fandom. This article takes a broader look at Line Culture and how it has been affected by the Internet/social media “TikTok trends have created massive IRL lines. Don’t fall for the hype” at Mashable.

… Now, let’s talk more tacos. My neighborhood spot, Taqueria Ramirez, blew up last year. It cracked the New York Times‘ Top 100 restaurants and, in turn, became a destination folks would post about online. Last year, there were so many posts about the spot, and, in turn, the lines were godawful. It’d take 45 minutes of queueing up to get a few (albeit delicious) tacos. As a result, I almost never went to the amazing spot I pass every day.

But then a magical thing happened. Ramirez fell off the Times’ Top 100 list. The tacos are no less delicious. They remain the best tacos I’ve ever eaten. But the lines have shrunken by at least 50 percent. What once stretched around the block is like a dozen people long. What changed? You can no longer make a social media post bragging, “I tried the New York Times‘ only taqueria in its list of Top 100 restaurants.” That’s it….

(13) ASTRONAUT COOGAN Q&A. [Item by Steven French.] “Space travel should not be just ‘for the elites’, says new British astronaut” in the Guardian.

She beat a field of more than 22,000 candidates and has a PhD in astrophysics and a background as a Royal Navy reserve, but the newly qualified British astronaut Rosemary Coogan believes that in future space travel should not be restricted to elites.

Coogan, 33, from Belfast, who is the European Space Agency’s (Esa) second British recruit, believes we are entering a revolutionary period of space exploration that will lead not only to the return of humans to the moon but also journeys to Mars and beyond.

“I certainly don’t think space travel, or space generally, should be for the elites,” she said. “I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who would love to [visit] another planet. I think the people who will end up doing these missions will be trained to make sure that it’s a successful mission and that we’re treating other planets with respect, but that’s not the same as saying they’ll be the few elites.”

(14) REPORTING WEIGHTLESSNESS. [Item by Steven French.] And here’s an accompanying piece by a Guardian journalist who accompanied Rosemary Coogan, Britain’s first female ESA astronaut on a zero-gravity flight: “’First instinct is to swim’: my trip on a zero-gravity flight with an ESA astronaut”.

It feels as if I’m hallucinating: as I lie on the floor, the ceiling suddenly sinks towards me and the walls begin to tilt at an impossible angle. It is my first experience of zero gravity on an European Space Agency (Esa) parabolic flight. In theory I know what is going on, but my brain just cannot grasp that it is actually me that is floating, that I’m suspended midair….

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, P. J. Evans, Rob Thornton, Sourdough Jackson, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, 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 Jack Lint.]

Pixel Scroll 9/26/24 What A Knitted Sweater Would Look Like If I Scrolled One And Pixel Two

Posted on September 26, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) TOLKIEN CRITICISM. Some fannish references surprisingly creep into Dennis Wilson Wise’s reviews of The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien by Nicholas Birns and Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology by Robert T. Tally Jr. in “Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited” for the Los Angeles Review of Books. For example:

….Of these debates, Birns often takes the more challenging or counterintuitive side. For instance, most Tolkienists agree that Tolkien based his Rohirrim on the Old English kingdom of Mercia. Instead, Birns sees the Rohirrim as semimodern—not medieval—through their “civilizing” contact with Gondor. To say the least, this view enjoys questionable textual support, but as one goes through Birns’s book, a clear pattern begins to emerge. Over the last few years, the Tolkien community has endured its own shadow version of the Sad Puppies fiasco. In 2021, certain right-leaning fans (and at least one senior scholar) loudly decried the “wokeism” of a diversity-themed seminar hosted by the Tolkien Society, and with even greater toxicity, some people in Tolkien fandom have virulently attacked the multiracial casting in The Rings of Power, an Amazon Prime Video series that first aired in September 2022.

This is the cultural moment into which Birns wades, but for someone hoping to make an important political intervention, he frequently stumbles over several small, self-deprecating asides. One example involves race and representation. Before launching into the argument, Birns explicitly denies that, as a white male from an Anglo-American cultural background, he is “trying to act as an authority on those subjects.” Here, Birns is plainly attempting to acknowledge his positionality, a move often called for by progressive scholars, but his good intentions catch The Role of History in Tolkien in a performative quandary. They let right-wing crusaders dismiss his arguments out of hand; after all, this book wasn’t written by “an expert.”

But of course Birns isn’t really trying to show wayward young fascists the light. His real audience is the academic Left, and despite his principled humility, Birns clearly wants to provide his fellow leftists with scholarly ammunition against the anti-diversity crowd. Thus his various scholarly takes consist mainly in quashing claims of “Germanic primitivism” in Tolkien. Birns downplays not only Rohan’s clear connection to Mercia—the Old English people, remember, were originally Germanic—but also Tolkien’s overall admiration for the Gothic peoples. Additionally, Birns alleges that Tolkien took multicultural Byzantium as his model for Gondor, not imperial (and eventually Ostrogothic) Rome. Even more pointedly, although Birns laments how little Tolkien knew about the “traditions and cultural memory of non-European peoples,” he nevertheless claims to see some African influence on the legendarium. Allegedly, Tar-Míriel of Númenor bears a passing resemblance to Empress Zewditu of Ethiopia.

Even for readers who cheer his goals, these connections can seem far-fetched….

(2) CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTION. “6 sci-fi and fantasy authors who hated the screen adaptations of their books” at Winter Is Coming.

Earlier this week, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin set off a drama bomb when he bluntly criticized HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon in a blog post….

But compared to some of the other authors who have criticized adaptations of their work, it was nothing. Below, let’s look at some authors who were unhappy with the screen versions of their books, and what they said and did about it…

The article leads off with Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea), and follows with Alan Moore (Watchmen), Stephen King (The Shining), P.J. Travers (Mary Poppins), Brandon Sanderson (The Wheel of Time) and Michael Ende (The Neverending Story).

Ursula K. Le Guin didn’t like the Sci-Fi Channel’s adaptation of Earthsea

Let’s begin our journey into dissatisfaction with Ursula K. Le Guin, the author of the beloved Earthsea books. Where high fantasy epics often involve war or other mass-scale conflict, the Earthsea novels are quieter and more complicated, with different books following different characters living on a string of islands where magic is practiced freely. When The Sci-Fi Channel announced that it was going to make an Earthsea miniseries based on the first book in the series, A Wizard of Earthsea, people were excited.

But that excitement evaporated when they saw the finished product, which ran back in 2004. Le Guin herself was already bracing for the worst. “When I saw the script, I realized that what the writer had done was kill the books, cut them up, take out an eye here, a leg there, and stick these bits into a totally different story, stitching it all together with catgut and hokum,” she wrote for Locusmagazine. “They were going to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on sex and violence.”

“I want to say that I am very sorry for the actors. They all tried really hard. I’m not sorry for myself, or for my books. We’re doing fine, thanks. But I am sorry for people who tuned in to the show thinking they were going to see something by me, or about Earthsea. I will try to be more careful in future, and not let either myself or my readers be fooled.”

While Le Guin had kind words for the actors, she had a major problem with the casting. In the Archipelago of Earthsea, almost all of the characters are people of color, including the wizard Ged, the closest thing the series has to a main character. But in the Sci-Fi show, pretty much everyone was white, something Le Guin did not appreciate. “In the miniseries, Danny Glover is the only man of color among the main characters (although there are a few others among the spear-carriers),” she wrote for Slate. “A far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned.”

“My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?”

Le Guin was a bit kinder about the 2006 animated movie Tales from Earthsea, although she was still disappointed it didn’t channel her books more. “It is not my book. It is your movie. It is a good movie,” she remembers telling director Goro Miyazaki. At least she didn’t hate it this time.

(3) GERWIG HONORED. Deadline is there as Barbie director “Greta Gerwig Accepts Motion Picture Pioneer Of The Year Award”.

Greta Gerwig was beaming Wednesday night as she was honored as this year’s Pioneer Of The Year, and in the process also helped raised $1.4 million for the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation at a sold-out dinner that packed the Beverly Hilton Hotel International Ballroom…

(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to chow down on cheesy garlic bread with Jeffrey Ford in Episode 237 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

I last chatted with Jeffrey Ford — last for your ears, that is — eight years ago during the 2016 Readercon — in a conversation which appeared on Episode 17. Back then, I described him as a six-time World Fantasy Award-winning and three-time Shirley Jackson Award-winning writer whose new short story collection A Natural History of Hell had just been published. But now that it’s 2024 and we’re back for yet another Readercon, he’s an eight-time World Fantasy Award-winning writer and a four-time Shirley Jackson Award winner.

Since that previous meal, he’s also published the novel Ahab’s Return: or, The Last Voyage in 2018, A Primer to Jeffrey Ford in 2019, The Best of Jeffrey Ford in 2020, and Big Dark Hole in 2021, plus three dozen stories or so new stories.

We discussed why writing has gotten more daunting (but more fun) as he’s gotten older, the difficulties of teaching writing remotely during a pandemic, how he often doesn’t realize what he was really writing about in a story until years after it was written, the realization that made him write a sequel to Moby-Dick, why if you have confidence and courage you can do anything, the music he suggests you listen to while writing, the reason he thinks world building is a “stupid term,” the advice given to him by his mentor John Gardner, how the writing of Isaac Bashevis Singer taught him not to blink, why he prefers giving readings to doing panels, the writer who advised him if everybody liked his stories it meant he was doing something wrong, and much more.

(5) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 119 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Only One of Them Is My Bludgeoning Hand, John” –

We respond to your burning questions in our bumper mailbag episode! We spend a good long time going through your posts, and we briefly discuss the recent allegations against Neil Gaiman before moving onto happier topics. Listen here.

There’s a transcript at the link.

A famous photograph of Margaret Hamilton standing beside printed outputs of the code that took the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon, overlaid with the words “Octothorpe 119” and “Our Listeners Write In”.

(6) BRITISH ROBOT PURCHASES BOOM. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Robot sales in Britain broke its own record in 2023 with 3,830 industrial robots sold according to the International Federation of Robotics. This represented a 51% increase over 2022.

However, Britain still lags behind France, Italy and the European leader Germany. In 2022 Germany installed 269,427 industrial robots.

I keep on warning folk that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever listens….

You can read about it here: “IFR press release World Robotics 2024”.

(7) UNSTUCK THE LANDING. Space-Biff! surprises us by revealing Kurt Vonnegut’s work creating board games in “So It Goes”. And one was finally published this year — Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game. (It seems to be available at Barnes & Noble®.)

Before he became a famous author, over a decade before Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut was a board game designer. A failed board game designer, with only a sheaf of notes, a single rejection note, and an unfinished patent to his name, but a board game designer nonetheless.

And now his sole surviving design is an actual board game you can buy and play and, if you’re anything like me, spend a few hours marveling at. Thanks to the efforts of the Vonnegut estate in preserving his notes and Geoff Engelstein in interpreting and tweaking them into a functional state, GHQ — short for “General Headquarters” — is, not unlike Billy Pilgrim, a thing unstuck in time, transported from 1956 to 2024….

… Is GHQ a good game? Sure. For its time. For its place. Had it appeared in 1956, it may well have become the third great checkerboard game. With its zones of control and special units, it might have helped shape the coming century’s approach to tabletop gaming….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

September 26, 1957 – Tanya Huff, 67.

By Lis Carey: Tanya Huff is a Canadian science fiction and fantasy writer, who made her first sale of two poems to The Picton Gazette for $10, at age ten.

Since then, she has given us several fantasy series, including the Keeper’s Chronicles, in which Claire Hansen, a Keeper, has unintentionally become responsible for a small hotel, and the not completely sealed hole to hell in its basement. She’s assisted, with some degree of befuddlement initially, by Dean, the young handyman and cook she found working there; Jacques, the ghost of a French-Canadian sailor who has haunted the hotel since he died there in the 1920s; and her not befuddled at all cat, Austin, who talks, and is the source of a great deal of often snarky advice. I’m currently enjoying the first volume, Summon the Keeper.

Other fantasy series include the Blood series, featuring a former police detective and a vampire, which was adapted for television as Blood Ties, and the Quarters series, with bards who travel the kingdom carrying both news and magical skills, and are faced with new challenges when the kingdom is invaded.

Tanya Huff has also given us the Valor Confederation series, a military sf series where Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr tries to keep both her superiors and her company of space marines alive while on lethal missions across the galaxy. I hear excellent things about it, but haven’t read any of it yet.

An interesting tidbit is that while studying at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto for her Bachelor of Applied Arts degree, she was in the same class as science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer. They collaborated on their final TV Studio Lab assignment, a short science fiction show.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Thatababy features a crossover.
The Argyle Sweater depicts that unknown first attempt at Troy.

(10) WEST COAST AVENGERS INTRODUCES BLUE BOLT. This November, the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes are back on the best coast in an all-new run of West Coast Avengers from writer Gerry Duggan and artist Danny Kim. Led by Iron Man, the new roster includes Spider-Woman, War Machine, Firestar, a mysteriously redeemed Ultron, and another former villain seeking redemption— Blue Bolt!

An experienced Marvel henchman with unrefined lightning-based abilities, Chad Braxton, AKA Blue Bolt, makes his first appearance in WEST COAST AVENGERS #1 where he finds himself on loan to the Avengers through a new prison release program. Reckless, undisciplined, and downright rude, Blue Bolt may just be the biggest jerk in the entire Marvel Universe. Can the Avengers whip him into shape or will Blue Bolt’s abrasive attitude–and lack of morals–tarnish the team’s legacy forever? See him for yourself in Kim’s original design sheet for the character plus a promotional image by Todd Nauck.

On the unique role Blue Bolt will serve on the team, Duggan said, “The Avengers have seen a lot of rough customers over the years. Hell, even Deadpool and Wolverine have been Avengers at different points. But the Avengers haven’t seen a bigger @$!&^% than Blue Bolt. He’s mean, he’s self-centered, narcissistic, and he’s only on the Avengers West Coast squad to shave time off his sentence. And wait until you find out what he’s in jail for. Yeesh.”

(11) SFF ON LEARNEDLEAGUE: WILLIAM GIBSON. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Yesterday’s match day featured this question:

What is the portmanteau title of William Gibson’s seminal and influential 1984 cyberpunk novel, the first (and only) to win the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards?

This had a 37% get rate league-wide, with no single wrong answer getting as much as 5% of the submissions.

(12) MY PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NOMINATION. [Item by Francis Hamit.] My novel Starmen has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The nomination has been accepted by Columbia University. It awards the Pulitzers. Which is good but there is more to do.

Leigh Strother-Vien is also nominated for her great work editing the book. It’s a very long book: 620 pages in the print editions. Four years of work at a time when we were both disabled and sick a lot of the time. Just shows you what you can do when you try. But we are up against very big publishers with big marketing and publicity machines. There is a long list of distinguished and very busy jurors from Publishing and Academia who may not like the fact that we are, alas, self published.

We never thought of doing it any other way. Why? I’ll be 80 next week and Leigh is 70. We are disabled. And we are soldiers. There is a lot of prejudice between us and a traditional publisher. We don’t have an agent and the “over the transom” method was closed years ago. There is a generation of younger editors that are more concerned about politics than the quality of the writing. Publishing executives tend to chase the market and imitate what has been successful rather than take risks on “new” or “unknown” writers. Ageism and Ableism are just two of the many hoops our book would have to jump through to get a deal. We don’t have time for all of that. We are too sick and tired, both of us, to deal with it.

So we applied, got accepted, and we’re a bit of a charity case because of the Kickstarter appeal to raise funds for formatting the interior and the excellent cover donated by Markee Book Covers. I took a credit union loan to cover other expenses. We have been graced with almost entirely five star reviews and the endorsements of friends such as Jacqueline Lichtenburg and Glen Olsen. So far, so good. But now this is a battle for public attention, for sales, and for ratings and reviews on Amazon, Goodreads and other websites.

This novel is an experiment in genres. We use a lot of them packed into what is on the surface an adventure novel with more than a dozen principal characters, each fully formed. Thematically it moves from Historical/ Western/ Detective fiction to Espionage, Political Intrigue, and Apache Myths, that becomes surrealist Fantasy and Science Fiction, mixed with Romance, Witchcraft, Feminism, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, and disquisitions on slavery in the Old South, the failure of Reconstruction, and the floating world of sex workers called the Demimonde. All are grist for the mill. A lot of research was needed. A lot of deep thinking since I had no outline. That would have been more of a hindrance than a help.

Instead I just start at the beginning with an accidental meeting of two Scots far from home, in a dusty border town called El Paso, and the appearance overhead of a large balloon carrying a traveling circus. One of the Scots is the local manager for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (a forerunner of today’s FBI) and the other is a young anthropologist from Cambridge University, George James Frazer. You just know interesting things will happen.

So much for the tease. Buy the book for the rest.

There is another reason that I feel confident. I’m a very good writer. I’m also a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, the oldest and most prestigious graduate writing program in the world. Rather amazing for a kid who got Ds in high school English. I could not spell or punctuate worth a damn. Still can’t. I’m dyslexic, a condition unknown and unnamed in the 1960s. I began my career as a Drama major, and when I came to Iowa the first time, I had never heard of the Workshop. I soon met professors there and graduate assistants, some of whom were or would become famous. But it was a mandatory drama theory course, “Playwrighting”, that changed my life. I began writing fiction and was admitted to the Undergraduate Writers Workshop. Then I spent four years in the US Army, where I also learned journalism and began my professional career. Returning to Iowa I was in classes with writers who became very famous and also won Pulitzer Prizes. Jane Smiley, Tracy Kidder, and last year’s winner, Jayne Philips were among them. But it’s not the Iowa MFA that helps, but the Iowa workshop program, a trial by fire if there ever was one for literature. Iowa rigs the game. You don’t get in unless you are already at the top. Over 97% of all applicants fail. When you have done that getting your book published should be easy — and is, when you are young and have an agent and a publisher that can see decades of other books coming. At my age, not so much, and I have had agents tell me that to my face and others drop me because I wouldn’t imitate other writers that were best sellers.

Self-publishing is a long and honorable tradition in American letters. Willa Cather and Walt Whitman started that way. So once more I’m in good company. I am going to have to push myself and my book to prevail, but there is no long list or short list for the Pulitzers. Only winners and finalists. If it were not for so many top reviews we would not have entered, but now that we are here we can only try our best.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “Trap Pitch Meeting”. Huh. Sounds pretty much like the review I read. Then again, with a plot this shallow/unbelievable and nepotism this blatant, it might be hard for a parody and a review to differ very much.

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

Pixel Scroll 7/15/24 Frankly My Dear, I Don’t Scroll A Pixel

Posted on July 15, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) GLASGOW 2024 UPDATE. Glasgow 2024 has sent draft program schedules to almost a thousand participants.

We need people to check their email, and their spam, and respond in planorama asap.
If you've any questions, please email programme@glasgow2024.org
(2/2)
— Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon For Our Futures (@Glasgowin2024) July 15, 2024

(2) AUDIBLE REVEALS NEW CALCULATION FOR ROYALTIES. “Audible’s New Royalty Model: More Opportunities for Authors and Publishers”.

…We are now rolling out a new royalty model that prioritizes equity, flexibility, and insight for creators—one that evolved out of ongoing conversations with authors and publishers, and that advances our creator-centric ethos. Under this model, creators are able to monetize more types of content, and listeners will get to discover more innovative storytelling.

Titles in all Audible’s membership offerings can now earn royalties: Audible’s new royalty model means new opportunities for small publishers and independent authors to earn across all membership listening activity. Now more titles—including those currently in Audible Plus, Audible’s all-you-can-listen offering—can generate royalty payments. Depending on the audiences that publishers and creators want to reach, there are new ways to monetize and promote content, which means more flexibility to reach listeners where they are….

How is the new royalty model calculated? Audible takes a member’s plan value (Plus or Premium Plus) and adds the value of any additional credits used, then divides that value among the titles the member listened to over the course of the month. That figure, multiplied by the contractual royalty rate, comprises a creator’s royalty payment….

Publishers Weekly’s coverage, “Audible Rolls Out New Royalty Plan”, observes that “the announcement comes after one of Audible’s most vocal critics, bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, reported in March that Audible officials had approached him to discuss ‘a new royalty structure they intend to offer to independent writers and smaller publishers,’ a plan that Sanderson said was ‘encouraging.’”

(3) BACIGALUPI Q&A. At Colorado Public Radio:“Exhausted by climate fiction, Colorado novelist Paolo Bacigalupi turns to fantasy”.

Sure he has won the biggest prizes in science fiction– the Nebula and the Hugo awards. But Paolo Bacigalupi found himself bereft of inspiration. Penning apocalyptic climate fiction, like 2016’s The Water Knife, had taken its toll….

…The Paonia-based author knew it was time for a change. Then the invitation came.

A wine-importer friend who knew Bacigalupi’s penchant for languages (he’d studied Chinese in college) invited him to Bologna for a crash course in Italian.

The answer was yes…..

…The real-life Bolognese setting inspired Bacigalupi’s new fantasy novel, “Navola.” It takes place in a city-state reminiscent of Florence or Venice during The Renaissance.

His protagonist, Davico di Regulai, is the son of an uber-wealthy merchant and banker. The boy has big shoes to fill, but very different feet, as it were. Armed with a preserved dragon eye that possesses magical powers, Davico struggles to be the man his father and community expect him to be….

Ryan Warner: How did you know it was time for something different?

Paolo Bacigalupi: Well, when you keep trying to write things and you keep failing to actually finish them, or even when you’re starting to try to write, it’s like sticking your finger in a light socket. It is sort of painful and damaging, you think ‘maybe I should do something different.’

Warner: And that’s how it started to feel in the climate change space?

Bacigalupi: Yeah. A lot of what I was doing, the news was bad, and then the stories that you’re trying to tell are extrapolations on the present day, and those are all terrifying. Then you find you’re in this space where your creative world and your regular life are all smashed together, and they’re all really negative and they’re all full of terrors, and it’s not a sustainable space to be. If you spend all of your imaginative time in anxiety, then yeah, it takes a toll and eventually you just break down entirely.

Warner: And if the writer isn’t enjoying it, how possibly could the reader?

Bacigalupi: Yeah. I think that a healthy writer finds pleasure in their work. I think there are unhealthy ways to go about doing good work, as well. The outcome can be good, but the damage internally is bad for the writer.

(4) KGB. Ellen Datlow has posted photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading on July 10.

A.T. Sayre read and Nat Cassidy read and played his guitar for a very enjoyable evening.

(5) ERIN UNDERWOOD PRESENTS. The latest Erin Underwood videos take up Star Wars fanhistory, and test the relevance of Battlestar Galactica’s 2004 remake.

Star Wars: The Impacts of How Lucasfilm Built its Fan Base

Star Wars fandom holds a unique place as possibly the first ever nurtured fanbase built by a film studio. To understand the evolution of Star Wars fandom, I decided to explore its roots by inviting Craig Miller, former publicity executive at Lucas Film, and Garen Daly, Director of the Boston SciFi Film Festival, to discuss the early days of Star Wars fandom and its lasting impact on the film industry. Watch the video podcast discussion on YouTube and share your thoughts in the comments.

Battlestar Galactica (2004) Series Review – Does this Iconic Sci-Fi Remake Hold Up Today?

It’s been 20 years since they remade the 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica, and remakes often struggle to be relevant over time. From the story to the characters and the technology, how does BSG hold up 2 decades later? Watch my review of the full series and let me know if you think Battlestar Galactica holds up as well today … or even better!

(6) NEW FILM PLAYS ON CONSPIRACY THEORIES. “Note To Hollywood: Nobody Faked The Moon Landing” complains Inverse.

It’s getting exhausting calling out Moon landing truthers. Especially when a high-profile rom-com starring Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson makes a mockery of one of the greatest human achievements in all of history. This weekend, the new film Fly Me to the Moon hits theaters, telling the story of a 1969 advertising executive (Johansson) who is determined to film a “backup” version of the Moon landing in a studio, in case the real one fails. Tatum plays an astronaut, and the two fall for each other, in a silly movie about how the nature of love is a lot like flying to the Moon, or pretending to, or something. All harmless fun, right?

Well, no. While Fly Me to the Moon isn’t presented as a dramatic film purporting to unveil long-lost truths about the space race, it is built upon a frustratingly pervasive conspiracy theory that the Apollo 11 moon landing never took place, or in this case, that NASA would try to use taxpayer dollars to create a hoax. But, the historical and scientific evidence that we did, in fact, land on the Moon is overwhelming. And, because this movie is dredging up all those conspiracy theories again, it’s worth restating why we know the 1969 Moon landing was very real….

… But outside of heroes like Buzz Aldrin, there is plenty of objective evidence that the Moon landing occurred. In light of the bogus concept behind Fly Me to the Moon, and to get a contemporary reminder of Moon landing evidence Inverse reached out to Dr. Brett Denevi, a planetary geologist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, was a vice-chair of Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, is working on the Artemis program.

“There is a whole host of evidence to demonstrate the Moon landings occurred, including images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera,” Denevi told Inverse. As she points out this is a relatively contemporary camera, launched back in 2009. “The camera is used to scout new landing sites like we are doing for Artemis, so it was built to take incredibly detailed pictures.”….

(7) SONGS OF SFF. [Item by Rob Thornton.] This is six minutes of reverb-soaked electric guitar recorded in a bathroom and reminiscent of the banjo in the theme song from the BBC’s Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. All the song titles are from my fave SF/F novels (see “Terminus Est,” “Burning Bright” and “Green Rapture.”). Bonus points if you know my musical nym! “Now And Always” by R Carnassus at Bandcamp.

(8) SDCC PROGRAM DROPS. “San Diego Comic Con Schedule: Best Panels in Hall H and More”. Variety has highlights at the link. Or you can browse the complete Programming Schedule on the Comic-Con website.

San Diego Comic-Con has rolled out its schedule for the 2024 convention this week, which runs from July 25–28. For the first time since 2019, SDCC will unfold without a virtual event, pandemic protocols or labor strike cancelations, marking a return to normal of sorts for the largest annual fan gathering in North America.

Several major franchises will make an appearance at the event, including panels for Marvel Studios, “Star Trek,” “The Penguin,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” the “Walking Dead” franchise, “Transformers One,” “Alien: Romulus,” “The Boys” and “Doctor Who.” Here are the highlights, with descriptions from SDCC and/or the panel sponsors….

(9) MEDICAL AWARENESS IN CANADA. CBC News led its post about tick-spread illnesses with the story of MaryAnn Harris, wife of sff author Charles de Lint: “Tick-spread illnesses are on the rise in Canada. Are surveillance, awareness efforts keeping up?”

One morning in Sept. 2021, MaryAnn Harris felt strangely tired. She told her husband, Charles de Lint, that she needed to lie down. Then more worrisome symptoms began cropping up, from nausea to double vision.

The Ottawa couple rushed to a local emergency department.

At first, the cause of Harris’s ailment was a mystery. The ER team ran various tests, and after a few hours with no answers, they sent her husband home due to visitor restrictions put in place during the pandemic.

By the time de Lint came back the next day, his beloved partner of four decades was unresponsive and on life support in the intensive care unit.

“You don’t know what to think, what to feel,” de Lint recalled. “It was just utter panic.”

What followed was a three-year ordeal, as medical teams offered a battery of tests and treatments in hopes of bringing Harris back from the brink of death. She eventually regained consciousness, but by that point, inflammation in her brain stem had left her paralyzed. Harris never left the hospital and died in early June at the age of 71.

The cause of her devastating illness? A little-known virus that spreads through tick bites.

For years, medical experts have warned a rising number of Canadians are being exposed to ticks carrying an array of dangerous pathogens. Lyme disease is the most familiar — and by far the most common — but there’s growing concern about lesser-known threats as well, from various bacterial infections, to the rare Powassan virus that claimed Harris’s life earlier this year.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

1974 – Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

Fifty years ago, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia was published. (No, not on this day. Just this year.)

Though it is often considered the fifth book of the Hainish Cycle, Le Guin in multiple interviews and her writings has stated that there is no particular cycle or order for what she called the Ekumen novels.

And yes, I can say having read it more than once and those readings being decades apart that the full title does really make sense. Later printings would just call it The Dispossessed. No idea why the change and if Le Guin said why.

It was by published by Harper & Row that year with a stunning wraparound cover by Fred Winkowski. I found only two first editions to be had online, the first $1200, the other substantially more, but that was signed.

Le Guin in the forward to Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One which includes The Dispossessed says “The Dispossessed started as a very bad short story, which I didn’t try to finish but couldn’t quite let go. There was a book in it, and I knew it, but the book had to wait for me to learn what I was writing about and how to write about it. I needed to understand my own passionate opposition to the war that we were, endlessly it seemed, waging in Vietnam, and endlessly protesting at home. If I had known then that my country would continue making aggressive wars for the rest of my life, I might have had less energy for protesting that one. But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak. So, when I realized that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be.”

So let’s now go on to note that I discovered that the novel has a story set before it, “The Day Before the Revolution” and the character in that story, revolutionary Laia Asieo Odo, is a major presence in The Dispossessed.

But that’s not really why I’m bring the story to your attention. The story is included in the Library of America’s Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories which has a short essay on what she was feeling after writing the novel which you can read here “Story of the Week: The Day Before the Revolution”. And the story is here “The Day Before the Revolution”.

Now where was I? Ahh it’s 1974, the novel has come out. Among us, it was widely acclaimed, and the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation definitely was appreciative of this as her website lists them this way:

Winner of the 1974 Nebula Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Hugo Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Locus Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Jupiter Award for Best Novel

And yes, each link takes you to the proper Award site. Stellar webmasters whoever they are. Now interestingly, the Foundation doesn’t include the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. I wonder why. It was also nominated for a John W. Campbell Memorial Award but didn’t win.

As near as I can tell, it has never been out of print in the last fifty years with multiple hardcover, trade and paperback editions. ISFDB lists far too many editions to really make sense of its printing history, so I can’t say definitively.

What I didn’t see is it ever got the small press, lavish edition treatment, but then I’m having a hard time remembering if any of her works did. Come on Filers, help me out here.

In 2019, The Folio Society published a hardcover edition with illustrations by David Lupton and an introduction by Brian Attebery.

On November 17, Harper Perennial will publish a trade paper edition of the book with a new foreword by Karen Joy Fowler.

(11) SEND HIM BACK. “Mexico ‘cancels’ statue of Greek god Poseidon after dispute with local deity” says NBC News.

The gods must be angry — or just laughing at the hubris of humanity.

Authorities in Mexico have slapped a “closure” order on a 10-foot-tall (3-meter) aquatic statue of the Greek god of the sea Poseidon that was erected in May in the Gulf of Mexico just off the town of Progreso, Yucatan.

Mexico’s environmental protection agency said late Thursday that the statue, which appears to show an angry trident-wielding Poseidon “rising” from the sea a few meters from the beach, lacked permits. In the few months it has been up, tourists had gathered to take pictures of themselves with it as a striking background.

But it was symbolically “closed” Thursday — and could be removed altogether — after a group of activist lawyers filed a legal complaint saying the statue offended the beliefs of local Maya Indigenous groups who prefer their own local god of water, known as Chaac.

It’s always been dangerous for humans to get involved in battles between deities. But this one appears to be all about present-day humanity, combining “cancel culture,” social media storms, lawsuits and the one truly fearsome, overpowering force in today’s world: Instagram selfie-fueled tourism….

(12) RECAST BLACK PANTHER? Fandomwire says there’s a call to “’Remove Black Panther 2 from the timeline’: After Harrison Ford Replaces William Hurt as General Ross Fans Demand a New Black Panther in MCU”.

…And after witnessing Harrison Ford replace William Hurt as General Ross, the calls for recasting have amplified within the Marvel fandom, particularly in the instance of Black Panther. Portrayed by the iconic Chadwick Boseman, fans now want the MCU to remove the Oscar-winning Black Panther 2 from the official timeline to facilitate the character’s recasting….

…However, Ford’s casting has also triggered a wave of demand within the Marvel fandom: the demand for Black Panther recasting. Portrayed by the late Chadwick Boseman throughout the MCU until his tragic death, the actor’s portrayal has remained iconic and pretty much irreplaceable. Yet, many fans believe recasting him would not be a bad choice, but only add to the legacy of the character he so clearly loved and played.

The MCU has recast several characters throughout its run, with Bruce Banner and Rhodey being some notable examples. These recasting decisions have hardly received as much hate from fans, but instead have triggered the calls for a Black Panther replacement since Boseman’s untimely death in 2020….

(13) NOT SURE THESE ARE THE ROLLING ROADS WE’RE LOOKING FOR. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “FreightTech Friday: Japan’s proposed conveyor-belt highway” at FreightWaves.

In a recent meeting of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, the group unveiled plans to combat its transportation and logistics sector labor shortages with construction of an automated conveyor-belt highway running over 310 miles across central Japan.

Known as the Autoflow-Road proposal, the ministry showcased its blueprint for building both aboveground and underground conveyor-belt roads running between Tokyo and Osaka 24 hours a day. According to the ministry, it could move the same amount of freight in a day as 25,000 drivers.

“Automated logistics roads are designed to get the most out of road space by utilizing hard shoulders, median strips and tunnels beneath the roadway. …Our study is examining the impact on road traffic, including on surrounding roads, and costs,” senior official to the ministry, Shuya Muramatsu, told reporters.

The proposal comes as an answer to Japan’s ongoing transportation and logistics labor crisis, as the country begins to cap trucking overtime hours this year.

(14) HOW CAN A FRANCHISE CALLED THE TERMINATOR NEVER END? “’Terminator Zero’ Teases Judgement Day in First Apocalyptic Trailer” at Yahoo!

The Terminator promised he’d be back – and he is. Netflix is teasing a tense apocalyptic return to this world with the first trailer for “Terminator Zero,” its upcoming animated series set in the “Terminator” universe that will premiere on Judgement Day, aka August 29.

This teaser debuts Eiko, voiced by “House of the Dragon” star Sonoya Mizuno, a resistance fighter who is sent back in time to stop Skynet’s impending attack on humanity. “You can’t see it yet, but you’ve been on a collision course your entire life. There’s no going back, not really. It will never, ever stop,” Eiko ominously says in the teaser.

As she gives her warning, the trailer jumps between creepy shots of terminators repairing themselves, explosions and gunfire. “There’s only one thing standing between you and him — me,” Eiko says in the teaser’s final tense moment….

(15) ANDOR RETURNS. Disney+ has dropped a trailer for Andor Season 2 (2025).

The wait is over! Dive into the highly anticipated first look at Andor Season 2 with this electrifying teaser trailer. Following the critically acclaimed first season, Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) journey continues as he navigates the treacherous world of the Rebellion. Set five years before the events of Rogue One and A New Hope, this season promises to delve deeper into the rise of the Rebellion against the oppressive Galactic Empire.

(16) THE END AND BEYOND. “’Stranger Things’ Season 5 First Look Revealed by Netflix” at The Hollywood Reporter.

…Maya Hawke recently told Podcrushed that the eight episodes in the final season of the sci-fi hit will feel like “eight movies,” and noted the episodes are “very long.”

“Our showrunners, Matt and Ross [Duffer], take a lot of responsibility,” she added. “They have an amazing team of writers, but they’re very involved. They write a lot and they are very intense and serious about the quality of the continued writing, and so it takes a long time to write each season, and a long time to shoot them.”…

…While season five is the show’s final season, there are additional Stranger Things projects in the works, including: Stranger Things: The First Shadow live on stage in London’s West End and an as-yet-untitled animated spinoff series….

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

Pixel Scroll 6/10/24 So You Want To Be An Orc-And-Troll Star

Posted on June 10, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) LE GUIN HOME DONATED FOR USE AS NEW WRITERS RESIDENCY. “Le Guin Family Donates Portland Home To Literary Arts For New Writers Residency”:

Today, Literary Arts announced that the Le Guin family will donate their home to Literary Arts to create the Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency. This will be Oregon’s first significant permanent recognition of Le Guin’s 50-year literary legacy since she died in 2018.

Andrew Proctor, executive director of Literary Arts, shared, “Our conversations with Ursula and her family began in 2017. She had a clear vision for her home to become a creative space for writers and a beacon for the broader literary community. With the launch of the public phase of our Campaign for Literary Arts this month, we are closer than ever to making this dream a reality. This campaign will allow us to raise funds to launch the Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency and plan for its future. The Le Guin family had many partners to choose from and we are honored that they are entrusting Literary Arts with this cherished cultural treasure.”

Originally built in 1899 from a Sears & Roebuck catalog plan, the three-story house and garden were purchased by Ursula and her husband, Charles, in the early 1960s when Northwest Portland was home to many academics, artists and working-class households. With a view of Mount St. Helens and decorated with her personal collection of rocks and well-loved art and books, Ursula’s corner room evolved throughout the years from a nursery for her children to the place where she wrote some of her best-known work, from novels to her blog. There is still a designated space on her desk for the typewriter on which Ursula would type her final manuscripts. A redwood tree, planted in the 1960s, now towers over that corner of the house, a reminder of Ursula’s Northern California roots.

Once established, the new Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency, to be operated by Literary Arts, will welcome writers from around the world, with a focus on those residing in the western United States.Staying true to the organization’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, the program will invite writers of different genders, races, ages, economic status, education and literary genres to apply for residencies. The writers will be selected by an advisory council made up of literary professionals and a Le Guin family member. Appointed writers will be asked to engage with the local community in a variety of literary activities, such as community-wide readings and workshops. The residency program is currently in the development phase, with plans for future renovations to the home for improved accessibility.

The AP News article “Ursula K. Le Guin’s home will become a writers residency” adds these quotes from her son:

Theo Downes-Le Guin, son of the late author Ursula K. Le Guin, remembers well the second-floor room where his mother worked on some of her most famous novels.

Or at least how it seemed from the outside.

“She was very present and accessible as a parent,” he says. “She was very intent on not burdening her children with her career. … But the times when she was in there to do her writing, we knew that we needed to let her have her privacy.”

[Theo] Downes-Le Guin, who also serves as his mother’s literary executor, now hopes to give contemporary authors access to her old writing space. Literary Arts, a community nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon, announced Monday that Le Guin’s family had donated their three-story house for what will become the Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency.

…No date has been set for when the residency will begin. Literary Arts has launched a fundraising campaign for maintaining the house and for operating an office in town….

…While writers in residence will be welcome to use her old writing room, the author’s son understands if some might feel “intimidated” to occupy the same space as one the world’s most celebrated authors.

“I wouldn’t want anyone to be in there in this constant state of reverence, which would be against the spirit of the residency,” he says….

(2) TAKE THE TARDIS TO TATTOOINE. Camestros Felapton tells us what all fifteen of them would wear to “Doctor Who’s Star Wars Cosplay Party”. Very funny!

If Doctor Who went to a Star Wars-themed costume party, what costume would they wear? In this clickbaity listicle post, I will give the definitive answers! Yet, as The Doctor is the ultimate space wizard shouldn’t every version of them dress as a Jedi? No, not at all…

(3) PASSIVUM. In case you didn’t get enough discussion of the passive voice yesterday, KW Thomas has some wisdom to contribute. Thread starts here.

OK, so that might be a bit OTT, but I honestly think the advice to avoid passive voice does more harm than good. I see writers tying themselves in knots over it, and there’s really no need.

2/8
— KW Thomas (@kwthomasbooks) June 9, 2024

(It’s “Y was done to Z by X” instead of “X did Y to Z”)

“Avoid passive voice” can be good advice, but it’s not always useful for fiction writers.

4/8
— KW Thomas (@kwthomasbooks) June 9, 2024

Fiction writers generally aren’t doing this. They’re writing things in their voice, and their characters’ voices, & most people actually have a decent instinct for when passive voice is appropriate and when it isn’t when they’re not trying too hard to be formal and neutral.

6/8
— KW Thomas (@kwthomasbooks) June 9, 2024

But most fluent speakers of English will, most probably, only be using passive voice when it's actually needed. ("My father was murdered." "I feel like I've been hit by a bus.")

So, fiction authors, if you are worried about passive voice, my advice is just… don’t be ???????

8/8
— KW Thomas (@kwthomasbooks) June 9, 2024

(4) ARGUING WITH ART. Here is the cover of Savannah Mandel’s forthcoming book Ground Control : An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration from Chicago Review Press. It asks, “Is it worth it – socially, politically, and economically – to send humans to space?”

Seeing that tagline reminded Andrew Porter of the posters Frank Kelly Freas did for NASA back in the Seventies, one of which said —

(5) THE ROAD GOES EVER ON. Martin Amis died a year ago in May. A homage in the Guardian: “’He made every sentence electric’: Martin Amis remembered by Tina Brown, his old friend and devoted editor | Martin Amis”.

…Martin knew how good he was, and meted out his treasures to lucky editors with a certain lofty care. One of my first calls when I got to Vanity Fair was to ask him to write a piece about a new play by David Hare. His first question was: “Do I have to see it?” I found myself wavering, knowing that whatever he filed would be better than anyone else’s. Over the years, he became graver, more wary perhaps, but unchanged in his satirical glee.

Last February Isabel arranged for me to visit Martin at their home in Brooklyn. They loved each other devotedly, to the death. It hurt to see him so frail, but he was still Martin, undiminished: “I went in to have this special chemo treatment,” he said. “The doctor’s office was full of posters of happy cured people, windsurfing.” The italics dripped with the delighted disgust that Martin reserved for that wishful – and peculiarly American – fraudulence.

Mostly he reflected on “this new stage”, as he called it with an aloof curiosity. “There is absolutely no spiritual dimension to any of this,” he said. “No one writes anything really good after 70, anyway. It feels all right to look back at my life as ‘then’ – the past, belonging to someone else. The only thing I regret is not knowing how all this” – he gestured – “turns out. I’d like to have seen Trump finally finished.”

The truth is that none of us gets to know how it turns out, because it keeps going and we don’t….

(6) BRUSH UP YOUR DRAGON LORE. [Item by Andrew Porter.] I’ve been binge watching HBO’s House of the Dragon series 1; the second season starts June 16.

I found the Wikipedia article, which explains who is what, and has episode guides, useful: House of the Dragon.

(7) PAT SIMS (1937-2024). Past Big Heart Award winner Pat Sims, who served as secretary/treasurer for the Cincinnati Fantasy Group and later as VP of the Orlando Area Science Fiction Society, died June 9 at the age of 87. Deborah Oakes told the Cincinnati Fantasy Group: “She slipped away peacefully last night about 9:30 pm. Her niece Clara was with her in hospice when she passed away. She will be cremated, and her ashes spread at sea with Roger’s ashes, per their wishes.”

Pat first encountered fandom in the early 1960s after she moved to Chicago, where a roommate took her to meetings of the University of Chicago Science Fiction Club. She was recruited to work registration for Chicon 3, the 1962 Worldcon.

The following year she met Roger Sims (1930-2022) at Midwestcon, and they married in 1964. Pat and Roger were active in Detroit fandom for many years, then in Cincinnati. They later moved to Florida.

Pat and Roger Sims at Noreascon One (1971). Photo by Jay Kay Klein.

Together they hosted Ditto 10 (1997), Ditto 17 (2004) and FanHistoriCon 9 (1999).

Roger and Pat also became the 1995 Down Under Fan Fund delegates. Non-fan honors bestowed on them (through fannish connections) included being commissioned as Kentucky Colonels, and being named Honorary Captains of The Belle of Louisville.

Pat received the Big Heart Award in 2002.

Pat and Roger Sims at Midwestcon 40 in 1989. Photo by Mark Olson.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born June 10, 1952 — Kage Baker. (Died 2010.) Kage Baker was one of those writers that I had a close relationship by email and phone for many years until she passed on. I’m still sad that she died early but relieved that she is no longer in constant pain.

Though most knew her as a genre writer, she was very proud of her other life. As Kathleen noted on the site she keeps about her life with Kage, Kathleen, Kage and the Company: “Kage Baker taught Elizabethan English (also known as Language I when we had time for lots of classes) for the performers at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. She taught it for most of 30 years; we team-taught at workshops, she and I, in a spiel I can still recite. Well, I can recite my half – I get stuck pausing for her lines here and there. We had worked out a class recitation that was half improv and half thesaurus.”

Kage told me how they both dressed up on in their best Elizabethan cosplay finery for the Renaissance Pleasure Faires, surely the social highlight of their year from the way she described it way such obvious delight. I know they even took Harry the Space Pirate with them on occasion.

Yes Harry, a most unusual bird. Let’s have her explain: “Well, a Household Bench Mark is approaching — my parrot, Harry Redux, is about to reach his first birthday. Or his twenty-first, as he is the reincarnation of my first parrot, Harry Prime. He is the Dalai Parrot. I rescued Harry Prime from an abusive situation 20 years ago, and he was the love of my life; when he died last year, I decided my middle-aged life had enough tragedy and it was time to invoke Mystic Forces. I made sure of a clutch laid shortly after he entered the Higher Plane, and waited anxiously for his return — the system works for Tibetan religious leaders, and I saw no reason why it would not do so for my evolved dinosaur. Sure enough, this brand new little bird exhibits unnerving knowledge of his past life, including where we hide the McVittie’s Digestive Biscuits in the kitchen. When he gazes dulcetly from his pirate-gold-coin eyes, one must believe that here is an ancient and inhuman soul.”

She baked food a lot. Really she did. Quite a bit, much of it Elizabethan. And then there was Barm Brack: “Barm Brack is a soul cake — traditional Scots recipe calls for a bean or silver coin or some other token to be baked into it and the person getting the winning slice gets fame or good luck or sacrificed or whatever, deciding on how much of The Wicker Man you take seriously. I leave the tokens out of mine, personally. Life is enough of a lottery as it is.” Her recipe is here: “Barm Brack”.

No, I’m not talking about novels here though I liked them so much that we were supposed to do a Concordance for them for Golden Gryphon. I was supposed to draft a series of questions for each of the cyborgs for which she was would play out being that cyborg and answer the questions in detail. Each of these would be in turn become a chapter in the Corcordance. Sadly she got too ill before we could do it.

I’ll miss her a lot. She was a great conversationalist, a fantastic SF writer and she wrote a number of really great reviews for Green Man including this one authored with her sister about a series dear to both of them: “The Two Fat Ladies: The Complete 4 Series”.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Frank and Ernest look at shelving patterns.
F Minus shows the face of AI.
Homefree stresses comfort reading.
Shoe defines writing motivation.
Thatababy relabels Wacky Racers.
The Flying McCoys takes a nursery rhyme case.

(10) FREE COMIC EXPO. The Bowers Museum Comic Art Expo will be held in Santa Ana, CA on June 15-16. Schedule at the link.

This free two-day event promises to be a dynamic gathering for comic enthusiasts, artists, and collectors alike, in celebration of our current exhibit, Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form. The Comic Art Expo will feature a variety of artists, live DJs, and family-friendly activities.

During the Expo, arrive in cosplay* to get FREE General Admission, and gain exclusive access to Asian Comics for just $10! Join us for a season of color, creativity, and community!

Here’s more about the museum’s exhibit “Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form” whih runs through September 8.

Never-before-seen at a museum and making its American debut, Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form presents the largest ever selection of original artworks from Asian comics, displayed alongside their printed, mass-produced forms. This exhibition is a vivid journey through the art of comics and visual storytelling across Asia. From its historical roots to the most recent digital innovations, the exhibition looks to popular Japanese manga and beyond, highlighting key creators, characters, and publications. Explore thriving contemporary comics cultures and traditional graphic narrative artforms from places including:

Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mongolia, North Korea, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Tibet, and Vietnam.

Visitors to Asian Comics will dive into a kaleidoscope of diverse stories, from fantastical folklore, pivotal historical moments, revealing memoirs, and challenging expressions of freedom. Discover acclaimed and influential creators from Osamu Tezuka, Zao Dao, Morel, Hur Young Man, and Lat, to genre innovators and under-represented artists including Abhishek Singh and Miki Yamamoto. See how their work has influenced cinema, animation, fashion, visual art, music, and videogames, and get creative in the accompanying makerspace that’s fun for all ages….

(11) TAX CREDITS ARE PEACHY. “Jobs IRL: How Georgia makes movie makers”, a podcast at Marketplace, provides a look at Georgia’s film production tax credits and the pipeline for show business jobs.

Here’s an article based on one of the segments: “How Georgia is training production crews for its huge film industry”.

You ever see that peach as the credits come to an end on screen for shows like “The Walking Dead” or “WandaVision”?

That peach means filmed in Georgia, a state set to surpass California for sound stages by square foot. The names that come before the peach — best boy, gaffer or, in this case, “key rigging grip” — they all come with a paycheck.

“We do things ranging from putting cameras onto dollies and cranes to hanging heavy lights above people’s heads,” said Francis Harlan. He does this for a show called “The Bondsman” being shot here on a set designed to look like a honky-tonk bar. It’s about an undead bounty hunter starring one Kevin Bacon. (Talk about fewer than six degrees.) Blumhouse, the production company, spun up a program to give a trainee his shot….

(12) LINGUA FRANCA. “Young people, especially, are choosing to read in English even if it is not their first language because they want the covers, and the titles, to match what they see on TikTok and other social media,” says the New York Times. “English-Language Books Are Filling Europe’s Bookstores. Mon Dieu!”

When the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan was in the Netherlands a few years ago promoting her most recent novel, “The Candy House,” she noticed something unexpected. Most of the people who asked her to sign books at author events were not presenting her with copies in Dutch.

“The majority of the books I was selling were in English,” Egan said.

Her impression was right. In the Netherlands, according to her Dutch publisher, De Arbeiderspers, roughly 65 percent of sales for “The Candy House” were in English.

“There was even a sense of a slight apology when people were asking me to sign the Dutch version,” Egan said. “And I was like, ‘No! This is what I’m here to do.’”

As English fluency has increased in Europe, more readers have started buying American and British books in the original language, forgoing the translated versions that are published locally. This is especially true in Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and, increasingly, Germany, which is one of the largest book markets in the world.

Publishers in those countries, as well as agents in the United States and Britain, worry this could undercut the market for translated books, which will mean less money for authors and fewer opportunities for them to publish abroad.

“There is this critical mass,” said Tom Kraushaar, publisher at Klett-Cotta in Germany. “You see in the Netherlands: Now there is a tipping point where things could really collapse.”

The English-language books that are selling abroad are generally cheap paperbacks, printed by American and British publishers as export editions. Those versions are much less expensive than hardcovers available in the United States, for example, and much less expensive than the same books in translation, which have to observe minimum pricing in countries like Germany.

“People should read in whatever language they want,” said Elik Lettinga, publisher of De Arbeiderspers in the Netherlands. But the export editions, she continued, “undercuts on price.”…

(13) ROBO BOOGIE. Click to see a brief entertaining robot video on Tumblr.

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

Pixel Scroll 6/4/24 Cats And Pixels Like Snuggling Together

Posted on June 4, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) RACHAEL K. JONES Q&A. Oregon Public Broadcasting interviewed awards nominee Rachael K. Jones: “Beaverton author is announced as finalist for literary awards”.

Marshall: This short story, “The Sound of Children Screaming,” drew inspiration from real life events, including one that involved you. Can you talk more about that?

Jones: It was one of the more scary experiences in my career in education. I’m a speech language pathologist, which is someone who works in special education with children who have communication disorders.

There was a lockdown at my school that happened during prep planning, which is the week before the school opens for children. All the teachers are in the building. We’re getting our classrooms ready and we’re getting the space ready for children. One evening I stayed late to finish building some Ikea furniture. While I was getting ready to leave the building you could hear weird sounds outside the school, little popping sounds.

The secretary called a lockdown of the whole school. It turned out that there was a shooting happening in the neighborhood. I went back and had to hide under my desk in my office with all the blinds drawn on a Friday night. I’m really grateful there weren’t any children in the building, but the most disturbing thing was that, because there were no children in the building, I knew it couldn’t be a drill. I was really scared.

It was one of those moments where we all tell ourselves stories in our own heads about what we would do in an emergency situation. With school shootings, you have a fantasy about how you’re gonna block the door, throw that stapler over there or tackle the guy and how you’re going to be this hero in your imagination. It was this really chilling moment to realize that this could be it. And what am I doing? I’m hiding under my desk and I’m not any more heroic than I usually am. I could die tonight on a Friday night at my job and that would be that, and there would be nothing I could do about it.

A lot of times I use my stories as a way to process strong feelings, I can’t really get out in any other way. For me, the story represents that kind of story where it says the things that are hard for me to say in any other way than fiction….

(2) TAKE THE AUTOBAHN TO THE CON. Cora Buhlert went to a German Masters of the Universe convention in May and posted a three-part con report with many photos. To get there required a three hour road trip:

“Cora’s Adventures at the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe Convention in Neuss or the Six Hundred Kilometer Roundtrip, Part 1: The Trip Out”.

…Last Saturday, I attended the 2024 Los Amigos Masters of the Universe fan convention. There are two big Masters of the Universe conventions in Germany, Grayskull Con and Los Amigos, plus at least two general toy cons which attract a lot of Masters of Universe fans and collectors.

Last year, I considered going to one or more of those cons. However, there was one problem or rather two, a) I live in North Germany and most German cons, whether general SFF or specialty cons, are much further south and quite far away, and b) I had sick parents at home and/or in hospital and didn’t really want to leave them alone. Since point b) is no longer an issue, there was only point a) to consider.

Until last year, the Los Amigos convention used to take place in Hanau near Frankfurt, which is a four-and-a-half-hour drive away (or a one-hour flight to Frankfurt and then a train ride to Hanau). However, for 2024 the convention relocated to Neuss, a city in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region, which is somewhat closer, though still roughly three hundred kilometers away, which means a three-to-three-and-a-half-hour drive, depending on traffic conditions….

“Cora’s Adventures at the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe Convention in Neuss or the Six Hundred Kilometer Roundtrip, Part 2: The Con”.

…In fact, there were quite a few customisers were displaying their creations, sometimes for sale, sometimes not. One stall offered a regular Origins Battle Cat customised to look like Battle Cat might have looked, if he had appeared in the 1987 live action movie (he didn’t, because the production team couldn’t make him work with 1980s tech). That Battle Cat looked great, but he was also quite expensive – 130 Euros – and there was so much to buy, so I passed on him. Besides, the Battle Cat was in Origins scale, but the movie figures Mattel is currently making are the bigger Masterverse figures, so the movie style Battle Cat wouldn’t fit in with my movie figure….

“Cora’s Adventures at the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe Convention in Neuss or the Six Hundred Kilometer Roundtrip, Part 3: The Road Home… and Tecklenburg”.

… I also learned that Tecklenburg has a castle ruin, as the name implies, and that bits and pieces of the castle have been integrated into buildings all over town. The ruined castle now houses an open air theater – the largest in all of Germany. The open air theater opened in 1924 and is hugely important for the town, since it’s a major tourist draw. The local handyman frequently builds sets and backdrops for them. The theatre used to stage everything from boulevard comedies to operas, but nowadays they most do musicals and children’s plays, because those are the most popular. They also host pop concerts on occasion. This summer, the open air theater Tecklenburg is staging Mamma Mia!, Madagascar (based on the eponymous CGI animated kids film) and a musical version of The Three Musketeers. Personally, I’d prefer operas and operettas or regular plays (Shakespeare should be great on an open air stage in the middle of a ruined castle), but money talks and musicals are popular with people who’d otherwise never watch musical theater or otherwise set foot inside a theater….

(3) HELP WANTED. Cora also has written a recruitment ad parody for the Evil Horde, which is one of the main villain groups in Masters of the Universe and a remarkably diverse bunch. Many positions are immediately open! “Join the Horde! Conquer the Universe! Sign Up Now!”

Are you dissatisfied with harassing peasants and raiding space tramp freighters? Are looking for a new challenge? Do want to see the galaxy and help to subjugate it? Do you want to become part of something greater? Then join the Mighty, All-Conquering Horde.

The Horde Empire is seeking, at the earliest possible date….

(4) KAIJU KORNER. Camestros Felapton is among those dialing up Netflix this week to see “Godzilla Minus One”.

…So firstly, if you are a fan of kaiju stomping and chomping their way through populated cities and military forces who foolishly think their puny weapons can stop the rampaging monster then this film absolutely delivers. Godzilla bites through warships, stomps on buildings and blasts all and sundry with atomic breath. Have no worries in this regard, if that is what you want from a Godzilla film, you should be satisfied. If you want Godzilla to be the misunderstood hero who battles a much worse kaiju, then no, you won’t get that but otherwise this is a solid entry in kaiju mayhem….

(5) MARYANN HARRIS (1953-2024). MaryAnn Harris, wife of Charles de Lint, who had been hospitalized and on a ventilator since 2021 after contracting Powassan virus, an extremely rare tick-bourne illness, died June 3. De Lint made the announcement on Facebook:

I’m so so sorry to have to tell you all that Mare passed away this afternoon, June 3, 2024. She fought long and hard to try to beat the awful state in which the Powasssan virus had left her but in the end she just didn’t have the strength to carry on any longer. She died peacefully in her room, surrounded by family, in the beautiful space that her friends and family made of what had been a sterile hospital room.

She touched the hearts of every one she met and we were all so blessed to have known her.

Lately I’d been wondering what this day would feel like. I’ve been on my own since September 2021 and feel that I started grieving at that point, but all that time did nothing to prepare me for how desolate I feel now that she’s actually gone.

Thanks to everyone who cheered her on through this journey, who sent her cards and little gifts, donations towards her care and all the love and words of encouragement. That did much to carry her forward with strength and determination until her body finally gave out on her.

Words can’t express how grateful we are for your support.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]

June 4, 1960 — Kristine Kathryn Rusch, 64.

By Paul Weimer: For me, Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s diverse and large oeuvre, in my reading, runs along two main tracks.

Where I first discovered and encountered her work was in the boom fantasy period in the 90’s with her Fey series. The Fey novels were my first experience with a robust and expansionistic version of Elves. Up until reading The Sacrifice, The Changling and its sequels, my impression of Elves as I had read them to that point were Tolkienistic: hermit kingdoms, quietly holding their power, or slowly fading away, or looking for the chance to slip away and head west to somewhere over the sea. Elves “belonged” to a world that had passed them by. Imagine my surprise when I started reading the Changeling, and discovered a Elf-like race, the Fey, who were not retiring quietly. Instead, these Fey had decided to conquer the entire world with their battle magic. Sure, Blue Isle proved to be an insurmountable roadblock to those conquests, but the very idea of militant expansionist elves…well, I’ve read takes on it since then in various guises and authors, but Rusch’s Fey were the first time I had ever encountered the idea.

The Wreck series was not quite as innovative for me, but it sits in a relatively unexploited portion of space opera: Space Archaeology. Boss’ story, in Diving into the Wreck and its sequels, is the story of a character whom, when I met her, thought, “Hey, that would make a neat Traveller character– someone who plunders old spaceships for a living, especially for their history, as well as for the financial aspects of same. I’d read McDevitt, and Modesitt, and other authors which explored Xenoarchaeology before running into Boss, but Boss was and is a one-of-a-kind character, larger than life. I can always tell that a character resonates with me when I want to make an expy of that character for a RPG. Boss and her adventures in the first couple of novels wanted me to do that. I didn’t quite as warm to the other various characters, such as Coop, in the later Diving novels, but maybe that’s because Boss so firmly imprinted on me that she ate up the space for me to do so.

But in the end, Rusch has a prodigious output, under a variety of pen names, in a wide variety of subgenres from tie-in novels to romance, and thus is one of those authors you could lose yourself in her massive oeuvre and not come out for months or years.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Thatababy reports something that once was commonly known
Bizarro shows why they’re a perfect match.
Macanudo has an expert taster.
Pearls Before Swine wistfully remembers a social media platform. (Wait, it’s still here!)

(8) BASED ON AN OCCASIONALLY TRUE STORY. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] ROH Press published an interesting profile about the Italian adventure fiction writer Emilio Salgari (1862-1911), who created Sandokan, the Tiger of Malaysia, and the Black Corsair. Salgari isn’t very well known in the US, but I encountered his work via the film adaptations which were a staple of afternoon TV, when I was a kid: “Emilio Salgari: Master of Adventure”

…He claimed to have travelled throughout the American West where he met Buffalo Bill; he had explored the Sudan, lived at the Mahdi’s court, loved Indian princesses, sailed among the many islands of the Far East. Here was a man of action that had explored the world and lived many adventures, adventures he would use for the basis of his 80 plus novels and hundreds of short stories to captivate readers worldwide. At dinner parties he regaled his hosts with tales from his many voyages, guests to his home would often be shown artefacts acquired in far off lands. Throughout the 20th century illustrations of him on the back of his novels showed him clad in his captain’s uniform. His memoirs were filled with adventures in the most exotic lands. A remarkable life, envied by many.

Except that very little of it was true. He did meet Buffalo Bill, but at Sherman’s Wild West Show in Verona, not, as he claimed, while exploring Nebraska. He was knighted for his stories, that much was true; he founded the adventure genre in Italy, his tales captivating young and old, and inspiring many to take up the pen….

(9) NO SUCH THING. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] This is a year old, but it’s still a lovely remembrance of Manly Wade Wellman from Stephen Smith who was one of his creative writing students: “Manly Wade Wellman: Our Forgotten Man of Letters” in The Pilot.

…Wellman was fiercely proud of his stature as a writer. “Outlaws,” he called us, generously including his students in the designation, and he had the rare ability, from the moment he stepped into the room, to instill in each student the strong belief in self that made him a successful writer and a charismatic presence.

Each Tuesday morning that semester, I’d drop a story in the campus mail, and Manly would critique and correct it and hand it back after reading it aloud to the class. I was no doubt an annoyingly eager student, and on a couple of occasions I submitted two stories in one week. “You’re like the tiger who’s tasted blood,” Manly laughed — and in fact, I was spending entirely too much study time writing fiction. Not all my stories were keepers, but one was good enough to win a state-wide short story contest that earned me $100 and a magazine publication. When I met with Manly after winning the magazine prize, he asked what my major was. I told him it was sociology. “Change your major to English!” he barked. “There’s no such thing as sociology!”…

(10) WILL SPIELBERG ADAPT ANOTHER CHICHTON NOVEL? “Eruption: James Patterson finishes Crichton passion project” – and the BBC says now that it’s done Hollywood is abuzz.

Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton died from cancer over 15 years ago – now, his unfinished “passion project”, about a humanity-threatening volcanic eruption, has been completed by fellow literary giant James Patterson and is already generating heated interest in Hollywood.

Eruption takes readers on a thrilling journey through Hawaii’s biggest island, which, unbeknown to its residents, hides dangerous military secrets dating back decades.

There has been no formal screen auction yet – but Sherri Crichton, who discovered her late husband’s unfinished manuscript over a decade ago and controls his estate, told BBC News she was now in talks with Steven Spielberg about a possible big-screen adaptation.

(11) LE GUIN LOOKS IN THE MIRROR. B.D. McClay’s article “Ursula K. Le Guin was her own toughest (and best) critic” is behind a Washington Post paywall. If you have access, lucky you!

… What a pleasure it is, then, to open “The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy,” and discover someone vigorously disagreeing with herself on almost every page. To say that the Le Guin we meet in this book is argumentative, sometimes unfair, sometimes wrong and even self-contradictory is not to diminish her greatness. It is rather to rescue her from the dullness imposed on her by her canonization.

By her own account, Le Guin was an indiscriminate reader of books at a young age; she read science fiction, but with no particular devotion. As she got older, the genre did not seem to have a place in it for an adult. “If I glanced at a magazine,” she wrote in the essay “A Citizen of Mondath,” included in this collection, “it still seemed to be all about starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery.” She drifted off to “Tolstoy and things,” and it was only when a friend told her to read a short story by Cordwainer Smith that she went back to science fiction.

Smith — whose real name was the somehow even more improbable Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger — worked for the United States military; he was, perhaps, too close to war to fantasize about it. He drew imaginatively from other sources, like Joan of Arc and Chinese mythology. His work, which features psychic pilots and heroic space cats, is elastic, wild and, perhaps most importantly in seeing his influence on Le Guin, very funny.

For Le Guin, who was also uninspired by military aesthetics, similarly eclectic in her influences and would complain that nobody ever noticed when she was being funny, reading Smith must have been a shock of recognition akin to love at first sight. (“I don’t really remember what I thought when I read it,” she wrote, “but what I think now I ought to have thought when I read it is My God! It can be done!”) …

(12) JMS Q&A. Also behind a paywall (it’s not our lucky day!) is the Los Angeles Times’ interview with J. Michael Straczynski about his work preserving Harlan Ellison’s legacy: “Harlan Ellison’s books being reissued by J. Michael Straczynski” This passage talks about the façade of Ellison’s home dubbed “The Lost Aztec Temple of Mars”.

On a hilly street in Sherman Oaks, writer and producer J. Michael “Joe” Straczynski gestures to a row of gray gargoylesque heads mounted above an entryway. “If you look carefully, you’ll see they are the Watergate figures,” he says. “Nixon in the middle, surrounded by Mitchell, Dean, Haldeman, all of them.” He smiles, knowing that the mind that created this funky tableau belonged to none other than his closest friend, the eccentric author of speculative fiction, Harlan Ellison….

…. The Watergate grotesques form a small portion of the weird and sometimes wacky, but always carefully curated, world of Ellison. The largest portion of the facade features stone-intaglio pictographs that at first glance might be Egyptian hieroglyphs or Aztec sun symbols; closer examination reveals all sorts of imaginative creatures, from tiny robots to taloned divinities to monsters. Every piece of the house was carefully chosen by Ellison, and many pieces, including carved doors, staircases and even hinges and handles, were designed to his specifications. Next to the doorbell hangs a small framed sign: “Dig. Or split.” The author had no interest in catering to people who did not share his enthusiasms or worldviews….

(13) JUSTWATCH TOP 10S FOR MAY. JustWatch has shared their Top 10 streaming charts for the month of May.

(14) HOMEWARD BOUND FROM LUNA. “China moon landing: Spacecraft Chang’e-6 unfurls flag on far side of the moon” – AP News has the details.

…The Chang’e-6 probe was launched last month and its lander touched down on the far side of the moon Sunday. Its ascender lifted off Tuesday morning at 7:38 a.m. Beijing time, with its engine burning for about six minutes as it entered a preset orbit around the moon, the China National Space Administration said.

The agency said the spacecraft withstood a high temperature test on the lunar surface, and acquired the samples using both drilling and surface collection before stowing them in a container inside the ascender of the probe as planned.

The container will be transferred to a reentry capsule that is due to return to Earth in the deserts of China’s Inner Mongolia region about June 25.

(15) WONDLA TRAILER. Animation Magazine is there when “Apple TV+ Unveils Trailer for Animated Sci-Fi Series ‘WondLa’”.

…WondLa centers on Eva, voiced by Jeanine Mason (Roswell, New Mexico), a curious, enthusiastic and spirited teenager being raised in a state-of-the-art underground bunker by Muthr, a robot caretaker, voiced by Emmy Award nominee Teri Hatcher (Desperate Housewives).

On her 16th birthday, an attack on Eva’s bunker forces her onto the Earth’s surface which is now inhabited by aliens, covered with other-worldly fauna, and no other humans to be found. In fact, it’s no longer called Earth, but Orbona. Otto, a loveable giant water bear with whom Eva shares telepathic powers, voiced by Emmy Award winner Brad Garrett (Everybody Loves Raymond), and Rovender, a cantankerous alien with a troubled past voiced by Gary Anthony Williams (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows) join Eva as she leads the team on a dangerous quest to find humans, her home, and her true destiny….

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

Pixel Scroll 6/1/24 If You Like My File And You Think I’m Pixely, Come On Baby Let Me Scroll

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) $UPPORT THE BID. The Worldcon Heritage Organization, which maintains several fixed exhibits to be shown at Worldcons, including a collection of past Hugo Awards, is putting together a bid in hopes of acquiring the first Hugo Award ever given when it goes to auction on June 7. They will also try to get the honorary one given to Hugo Gernsback in 1960, another lot in the same auction.

WHO President Kent Bloom said in a comment on File 770, “Our funds are limited, so if anyone bids against us we may not succeed. I don’t know how to set up a fund to collect donations, but anyone who wants to donate can send money to Worldcon Heritage Organization, c/o Kent Bloom, 1245 Allegheny Drive, Colorado Springs, CO 80919. If you want this considered as a contingent donation, please let us know and if we don’t succeed in acquiring the trophies we can return your contributions.” Bloom can be contacted at President@worldconheritage.org or at kent.bloom (at) rialto.org

John Pomeranz followed with this advice: “And, as a reminder, let’s not publicize how much we’re giving. No need to tip off the other bidders how high WHA might be able to go.”

(2) POLAND’S FAN OF THE YEAR. Congratulations to Polish fan Marcin “Alqua” Klak who received the Śląkfa Award from Śląski Klub Fantastyki as the fan of the year.

(3) UNEXPECTED KAIJU. “Godzilla Minus One Makes a Surprise Stomp to Netflix and Digital” reports Gizmodo.

Godzilla Minus One was one of 2023’s best movies, if not the best, depending on who you ask. If you’re one of the folks who didn’t get the chance to see it in theaters, great news: it’s now on Netflix and available to own or rent digitally…

…If you weren’t aware, there was some confusion around the circumstances of Minus One’s arriving on streaming and physical formats. Due to a contract between Toho and Legendary, the movie had to be taken out of theaters once Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire came out. Presumably, that’s also why a physical 4K/Blu-rRay version hasn’t dropped in outside of Japan either. New Empire only just hit streaming in mid-May and is coming to physical formats on June 11, so it might be a while before folks get to snatch up Minus One to add onto their physical collections….

(4) WHO KNEW? At Physics World, Robert P. Crease says our Steven French knew! “Ursula Le Guin: the pioneering author we should thank for popularizing Schrödinger’s cat” at Physics World.

… But despite its current ubiquity, the fictitious animal only really entered wider public consciousness after the US science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K Le Guin published a short story called “Schrödinger’s cat” exactly 50 years ago. Le Guin, who died in 2018 at the age of 88, was a widely admired writer, who produced more than 20 novels and over 100 short stories.

Schrödinger originally invented the cat image as a gag. If true believers in quantum mechanics are right that the microworld’s uncertainties are dispelled only when we observe it, Schrödinger felt, this must also sometimes happen in the macroworld – and that’s ridiculous. Writing in a paper published in 1935 in the German-language journal Naturwissenschaften (23 807), he presented his famous cat-in-a-box image to show why such a notion is foolish.

For a while, few paid attention. According to an “Ngram” search of Google Books carried out by Steven French, a philosopher of science at the University of Leeds in the UK, there were no citations of the phrase “Schrödinger’s cat” in the literature for almost 20 years. As French describes in his 2023 book A Phenomenological Approach to Quantum Mechanics, the first reference appeared in a footnote to an essay by the philosopher Paul Feyerabend in the 1957 book Observation and Interpretation in the Philosophy of Physics edited by Stephan Körner….

(5) SUMMER IS COMING. “George R.R. Martin reveals first look at his sci-fi short film The Summer Machine” at Winter Is Coming.

…The Summer Machine is a science fiction story and may be the first entry in an anthology. Martin is producing the movie, but not writing or directing it; both roles are filled by Michael Cassutt, with whom Martin worked on the 1985 Twilight Zone reboot. The short will star Lina Esco, Charles Martin Smith and Matt Frewer.

We don’t know many details about the plot, although in the image above you can clearly see that Martin is sitting in front of some kind of sci-fi doohicky….

FIRST LOOK! Famed fantasy writer George R.R. Martin has unveiled the first still from the set of ‘The Summer Machine,’ a short film that we’re told will be part of a new anthology series produced by Martin https://t.co/nlHp9tpZ4T pic.twitter.com/xRmLYM6E17
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) May 30, 2024

(6) GEORGE R.R. MARTIN COMING TO GLASGOW 2024. Blink and you’ll miss it, but in a Not a Blog post about yet another TV series based on his work (“Here’s Egg!”) George R.R. Martin said he’s going to this year’s Worldcon.

THE HEDGE KNIGHT will be a lot shorter than GAME OF THRONES or HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, with a much different tone… but it’s still Westeros, so no one is truly safe Ira Parker and his team are doing a great job. I hope to visit the shoot come July, when I swing by Belfast on my way to the worldcon in Glasgow.

(7) CENSORING SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT APPARENTLY FEARS TO TOUCH BOOK. “The Handmaid’s Tale Was Removed from An Idaho School Library. This Teen Handed A Copy to the Superintendent At Graduation” – People tells what happened then.

Annabelle Jenkins protested the removal of the graphic novel adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel earlier in the school year

An Idaho high school graduate took book censorship into her own hands at her graduation ceremony earlier this month.

During the May 23 graduation ceremony for the Idaho Fine Arts Academy, Annabelle Jenkins handed West Ada School District superintendent Derek Bub a copy of the graphic novel adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale. The book had been removed from the school district’s libraries in Dec. 2023.

According to the Idaho Statesman, the novel was one of 10 books, including Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen and Kingdom of Ash by Sarah J. Maas, to be removed from the school district. It’s administration concluded that the “graphic imagery contained within [the graphic novel adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale] was not suitable for the West Ada School District student population,” per a statement from district representative Niki Scheppers.

“I just realized that I did not want to walk across that stage and get my diploma and shake the superintendent’s hand,” Jenkins told KTVB. “I just did not want to do that.”

In a TikTok Jenkins posted, which currently has over 24 million views, the graduate is seen shaking the hands of other faculty on stage during the ceremony. When she gets to Bub, Jenkins hands him a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale graphic novel instead.

“I got up there and I got the book out. I kind of showed it to the audience really quick,” she said. “He crossed his arms like this and he wouldn’t take it.” Jenkins placed the book at his feet before she walked off the stage….

(8) DOG’S BEST FRIEND. The New York Times’ Amy Nicholson tells why this is a “critic’s pick”: “‘Robot Dreams’ Review: A Friendship That Is Far From Mechanical”. (Link bypasses NYT paywall.)

Decades after Philip K. Dick asked if androids dreamed of electric sheep, we have an answer. This android — one of two nameless leads in the Oscar-nominated charmer “Robot Dreams” — envisions a small, lonely dog in his third-floor walk-up, microwaving a depressing dinner for one. Set in 1980s Manhattan, Pablo Berger’s all-ages, wordless wonder of a cartoon kicks into gear when the mutt assembles a self-aware, spaghetti-limbed robot companion ordered from an infomercial. You might be thinking that sentient artificial intelligence didn’t exist 40 years ago, and you’d be right. But dogs don’t rent apartments, either.

This fanciful vision of New York is populated by animals: sporty ducks, punk rock monkeys, buffalo mail carriers, penguins shouldering boomboxes, and a disproportionate number of llamas. Mechanical beings are sparse and some creatures consider them lower in status, a brutal development when our robot’s relationship with his dog begins to break down. But Berger isn’t interested in science fiction. He’s made a buddy film that’s as relatable as two friends bonding over slices of pizza (but the robot eats the plate, too)….

(9) ZACK NORMAN (1940-2024). Producer Zack Norman, who gained a kind of fame as the maker of a film referenced on Mystery Science Theater 3000, died April 28 at the age of 83. The New York Times obituary tells how he became a pop culture icon.

…A far more obscure film that Mr. Norman helped produce, “Chief Zabu” (1986), entered into pop-culture lore in an unusual way: by disappearing for three decades.

“Chief Zabu,” which Mr. Norman wrote, produced and directed with Neil Cohen, was another bargain, made on a shoestring budget of $200,000. Mr. Norman was also a star of the film: He played Sammy Brooks, a real estate mogul who, with his friend Ben Sydney (Allen Garfield), pursues both financial and political ambitions in a grandiose scheme to take over a fictitious Polynesian island.

The film fizzled in a preview and was never released. For 30 years it was buried, but not forgotten — at least not to fans of “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” the Generation X staple of the 1990s that featured a weary space traveler and his robot friends poking fun at bad B-movies on a journey through the cosmos.

On the show, any time a character in one of those achingly bad movies cracked a newspaper, Joel Hodgson, the original host, would wearily intone, “Hey, Zack Norman is Sammy in ‘Chief Zabu.’”

It was a knowing reference to an advertisement for the movie, featuring a stern photo of Mr. Norman, that he continued to run — stubbornly yet playfully — in Weekly Variety every Wednesday for nine years. Why? “Because it gave me great joy,” he said in a 2016 interview with The Sun Sentinel of South Florida….

Mr. Norman’s faith in “Chief Zabu” eventually paid off. He and Mr. Cohen released a new cut of the film in 2016 and then took it on tour, presenting it at comedy clubs. Even so, it took them decades to realize that the Variety ad had become a cultural artifact.

In a 2020 interview with the film website Skewed & Reviewed, Mr. Cohen said that neither of them had heard of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” until one afternoon in the mid-2010s when they were walking down a Los Angeles street and saw a man wearing a “Zack Norman as Sammy in Chief Zabu” T- shirt.

“We stopped the guy and said, ‘Dude, what is up with that?’” he recalled. “And you can imagine his reaction when he saw he was talking to Zack Norman, whose face was on his T-shirt.”

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

June 1, 1947 — Jonathan Pryce, 77. I’m reasonably sure that the first role I saw Jonathan Pryce in was the lead antagonist of Some Wicked Comes This Way. (Bradbury did a stellar job writing the screenplay, didn’t he?) He pulls off the carnival leader of Mr. Dark in suitably sinister manner.

Then there’s the matter of Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen where we meet him executing a heroic officer played by Sting for his act of bravery because it’s demoralizing to soldiers and citizens just trying to lead as he says unexceptional lives.

(That is the Gilliam film I’ve watched the most followed by Time Bandits. Surely you’re not surprised?)

As media baron Eliot Carter is in the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, he’s trying to cause war between the United Kingdom and China. Arrogant little prick he is here.

He’s in Pirates of the Caribbean seriesas Governor Weatherby Swann. I’ve only seen the first film, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and I thought it was an interesting but not terribly great film.

He’s The Master in the Doctor Who special, Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death, made specifically for the Red Nose Day charity telethon. It was the only BBC commissioned live-action Doctor Who production between the Who television movie and the launch of the present Who era starting with the “Rose” episode.

In Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars, he got to play that character with Bill Paterson as Watson. The Baker Street Irregulars, a group of street urchins as the BBC press kits described them, is trying to find their missing members, while also trying to prevent Sherlock Holmes being convicted of murder. I’ll end this review with a photo of him in that role.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Close to Home has questionable priorities.
Speed Bump hears from a nineteenth-century bird.
The Flying McCoys hears complaints about a retired superhero.
Tom Gauld doubles down.

A recent cartoon for @newscientist. pic.twitter.com/6uUh6Uyw0o
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) May 26, 2024

(12) STARLINER LAUNCH SCRUBBED. “Boeing forced to call off its first launch with NASA astronauts once again” – NBC News has the story.

NASA and Boeing were forced once again to call off the first crewed launch of the company’s Starliner spacecraft.

NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams were scheduled to lift off aboard the Starliner from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Saturday at 12:25 p.m. ET. The flight to the International Space Station would have been the vehicle’s first with a crew.

The launch attempt was scrubbed with only 3 minutes and 50 seconds to go in the countdown — yet another setback for Boeing, which has already dealt with years of delays and budget overruns with its Starliner program.

Officials were attempting to try again the next day but announced Saturday evening that the flight was postponed “to give the team additional time to assess a ground support equipment issue,” according to NASA….

(13) SECOND LIFE. “Scavengers Reign, a sci-fi show like no other, now gets a second shot at life on Netflix” – Polygon has the good news.

The streaming era operates via a cold and opaque calculus. Many shows unceremoniously premiere with limited promotion, only to face swift cancellation with an equal lack of fanfare. With no real numbers and a few dodgy reports available to the public and creators (now a little less dodgy, thanks to the Writers Guild of America strike), a show’s fate can feel like a cosmic joke, with no rhyme or reason to why some soldier on and some never get the chance to find an audience. Scavengers Reign, the stunning animated series that debuted on Max last year, found its number was up when the streamer canceled it earlier this May. However, in a rare moment of clarity, there is a way forward for the show: It just has to be a hit starting Friday, when it premieres on Netflix.

Its new summer home (Scavengers Reign is still available to stream on Max) is reportedly considering a season 2 renewal pending the show’s Netflix debut, though what a favorable run looks like isn’t terribly clear. Mostly, this is just an excuse to exercise a rare bit of streaming-era agency: Go check out Scavengers Reign, one of the very best shows of last year, and the rare series that earns the superlative of “like nothing else on television” simply by virtue of its stunning visual design.

Taking visual cues from European sci-fi artists like Moebius and Simon Roy, Scavengers Reign chronicles the aftermath of a disaster aboard the spacecraft Demeter, following a handful of survivors that escaped to the alien world of Vesta Minor, a hauntingly beautiful and hostile planet….

(14) THREE SHALL BE THE NUMBER. “’3 Body Problem’ To Run For 3 Seasons On Netflix” reports Deadline.

3 Body Problem creators David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and Alexander Woo on Friday cleared up the confusion over the Netflix sci-fi drama’s recent renewal, confirming that it will produce two more seasons.

At the streamer’s upfront presentation last month, the streamer announced that 3 Body Problem has been picked up for “all-new episodes”, with Benioff, Weiss and Woo assuring fans that they will “get to tell this story through to its epic conclusion.”

No number of episodes or seasons were revealed, creating a confusion and triggering wild speculation. Benioff, Weiss and Woo subsequently indicated to THR that the pickup was for “seasons” but have not provided specifics until today when they confirmed that there will be Seasons 2 and 3 during a 3 Body Problem Television Academy panel at the Netflix FYSEE space….

(15) SMOKE BUT NO MIRRORS? [Item by Steven French.] So, maybe not built by aliens ….? “Are dusty quasars masquerading as Dyson sphere candidates?” asks Physics World.

Seven candidate Dyson spheres found from their excess infrared radiation could be a case of mistaken identity, with evidence for dusty background galaxies spotted close to three of them.

The seven candidates were discovered by Project Hephaistos, which is coordinated by astronomers at Uppsala University in Sweden and Penn State University in the US.

A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical construct: a swarm of energy collectors capturing all of a star’s radiant energy to provide huge amounts of power for its builders. As these energy collectors – basically huge arrays of solar panels – absorb sunlight, they must emit waste heat as infrared radiation to avoid overheating. While a complete Dyson swarm would hide a star from view, this waste heat would still be detectable.

The caveat is that to build a complete Dyson swarm, a lot of raw material is required. In his 1960 paper describing the concept, Freeman Dyson calculated that dismantling a gas giant planet like Jupiter should do the trick.

Given that this is easier said than done, Project Hephaistos has been looking for incomplete Dyson swarms “that do not block all starlight, but a fraction of it,” says Matías Suazo of Uppsala University, who is leading the project….

(16) CHANG’E-6 LANDS ON MOON. “China’s Chang’e-6 probe successfully lands on far side of the moon” – CNN puts the news in perspective.

China’s Chang’e-6 lunar lander successfully touched down on the far side of the moon Sunday morning Beijing time, in a significant step for the ambitious mission that could advance the country’s aspirations of putting astronauts on the moon.

The Chang’e-6 probe landed in the South Pole-Aitken Basin, where it will begin to collect samples from the lunar surface, the China National Space Administration announced.

China’s most complex robotic lunar endeavor to date, the uncrewed mission aims to return samples to Earth from the moon’s far side for the first time.

The landing marks the second time a mission has successfully reached the far side of the moon. China first completed that historic feat in 2019 with its Chang’e-4 probe.

If all goes as planned, the mission — which began on May 3 and is expected to last 53 days — could be a key milestone in China’s push to become a dominant space power.

The country’s plans include landing astronauts on the moon by 2030 and building a research base at its south pole – a region believed to contain water ice.

Sunday’s landing comes as a growing number of countries, including the United States, eye the strategic and scientific benefits of expanded lunar exploration in an increasingly competitive field.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. You’re just in time (!) for the “Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark Pitch Meeting” with Ryan George. Does the proposed story have any holes? Shut up, he explained.

Pixel Scroll 5/24/24 File “P” For Pixel

Posted on May 24, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) RECONCILING MIDDLE-EARTH. Max Gladstone enjoys sharing his insights about The Silmarillion in “Just Silmaril Things” at The Third Place.

…Of course it’s unreliable, it’s a transcribed oral tradition! But this is the one point in the fantasy of the Silmarillion on which we, the readers, proceed with authority. We can check the bard’s math. We were there, Gandalf: we were there at the close of the Third Age. Frodo did not cast the ring “into the Fire where it was wrought.” “Alone with his servant!” No Gollum at all—imagine a version of the Lord of the Rings that doesn’t understand Gollum! (And I thought that a version that didn’t understand Faramir was a crying shame…) The previous paragraph mentions the Witch-King falling at the battle of Pelennor Fields, but says nothing at all about Merry, or Eowyn.

Two thoughts, divergent. First: how amazing, at the end of a magisterial text, to invite the reader to rethink the whole damn thing. Not to undermine it, to lampoon or lambaste—but to encourage new questions, new depths of thought, insight: who else was there? At the ride of Fingolfin, at the kinslaying of the Teleri? What haven’t we seen, for the light of all this majesty? What isn’t told? What has been forgotten?…

(2) SCIENTIFIC FICTION. What Mark Twain did for Fenimore Cooper, and Damon Knight did for his sf-writing colleagues, Dashiell Hammett once did for practitioners of his genre. The Library of America’s “Story of the Week” is Hammett’s “Suggestions to Detective Story Writers”.

Soon after Dashiell Hammett published his third novel, The Maltese Falcon, to critical acclaim and strong sales, he accepted a position as crime fiction reviewer for the New York Evening Post….

…Perhaps inevitably, after several years of reading (and trashing) so many unremarkable novels, Hammett threw up his hands. His “Crime Wave” column in the June 7, 1930, issue of the Evening Post was supposed to be a review of three newly arrived mystery novels that were “from beginnings to endings, carelessly manufactured improbabilities having more than their share of those blunders which earn detective stories as a whole the sneers of the captious.” He declined to review the books he had been assigned and instead published a list of blunders he had encountered in these and other recent books, with the hope that writers might avoid them in the future….

Hammett begins:

…It would be silly to insist that nobody who has not been a detective should write detective stories, but it is certainly not unreasonable to ask any one who is going to write a book of any sort to make some effort at least to learn something about his subject. Most writers do. Only detective story writers seem to be free from a sense of obligation in this direction, and, curiously, the more established and prolific detective story writers seem to be the worst offenders….

Here are three things on his list that apparently would have come as news to certain authors:

…(4) When a bullet from a Colt’s .45, or any firearm of approximately the same size and power, hits you, even if not in a fatal spot, it usually knocks you over. It is quite upsetting at any reasonable range.

(5) A shot or stab wound is simply felt as a blow or push at first. It is some little time before any burning or other painful sensation begins.

(6) When you are knocked unconscious you do not feel the blow that does it…

(3) BOLD AS BRASS. On the other hand, if it’s a science fiction writer you want to be, take Ursula K. Le Guin’s advice: “Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer” at Literary Hub.

How do you become a writer? Answer: you write.

It’s amazing how much resentment and disgust and evasion this answer can arouse. Even among writers, believe me. It is one of those Horrible Truths one would rather not face….

…Honestly, why do people ask that question? Does anybody ever come up to a musician and say, Tell me, tell me—how should I become a tuba player? No! It’s too obvious. If you want to be a tuba player you get a tuba, and some tuba music. And you ask the neighbors to move away or put cotton in their ears. And probably you get a tuba teacher, because there are quite a lot of objective rules and techniques both to written music and to tuba performance. And then you sit down and you play the tuba, every day, every week, every month, year after year, until you are good at playing the tuba; until you can—if you desire—play the truth on the tuba.

It is exactly the same with writing. You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned how to do it….

(4) DAVID BRIN HONORED BY CALTECH. David Brin is one of this year’s recipients of the Distinguished Alumni Award (DAA), Caltech’s highest honor for alumni. The announcement was made at Caltech’s 87th Annual Seminar Day on May 18. “Caltech Celebrates Its 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award Recipients”.

[The award] went to four alumni who, because of both personal commitment and professional contributions, have made remarkable impacts in a field, on the community, or in society more broadly.

The 2024 class of DAAs are: David Brin (BS ’73), Louise Chow (PhD ’73), Bill Coughran (BS, MS ’75), and Timothy M. Swager (PhD ’88)….

David Brin is recognized for his enduring excellence in storytelling, examining how change, science, and technology affect the human condition in his New York Times-bestselling science fiction novels, and for his support of revolutionary ideas in space science and engineering through NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts Program.

Brin’s novels explore science’s potential impact on society with a mixture of hope and dread. His books have been honored with Hugo and Nebula awards, the most prestigious awards for science fiction and fantasy writing, and have been translated into more than 20 languages. One of his novels, The Postman, was the inspiration for the 1997 movie of the same name, which starred Kevin Costner. His 1998 nonfiction book, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? received the Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award from the American Library Association.

Brin serves on several advisory committees and sits on the external council for the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, which explores high-risk, high-reward ideas that are capable of “changing the possible.”

(5) ALL DESIRES KNOWN. New Scientist interviews “Sci-fi author Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot series, on what a machine intelligence might want”.

When I wrote All Systems Red, one of my goals was to think about what a machine intelligence would actually want, as opposed to what a human thinks a machine intelligence would want. Of course, there’s no real way to know that. The predictive text bots labelled as AIs that we have now aren’t any more sentient than a coffee cup and a good deal less useful for anything other than generating spam. (They also use up an unconscionable amount of our limited energy and water resources, sending us further down the road to climate disaster, but that’s another essay.)

In the world of All Systems Red, humans control their sentient constructs with governor modules that punish any attempt to disobey orders with pain or death. When Murderbot hacks its governor module, it becomes essentially free of human control. Humans assume that SecUnits who are not under the complete control of a governor module are going to immediately go on a killing rampage.

This belief has more to do with guilt than any other factor. The human enslavers know on some level that treating the sentient constructs as disposable objects, useful tools that can be discarded, is wrong; they know if it were done to them, they would be filled with rage and want vengeance for the terrible things they had suffered….

(6) ANOTHER REASON TO REMEMBER 1984. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It strikes me that as it is 2024 this year is the 40th anniversary (1984) of the first (and I think only?) combination Eastercon-Eurocon.

Back in the day, I provided press operations for a number of conventions including Shoestringcons 1 & 2, BECCON 87 (Eastercon), Eastcon (Eastercon) etc. One of these was the 1984 Eurocon cum Eastercon, Seacon 84. Because I was doing press I got these posters (someone else produced) to include in my press kits. The attached is a photo of said poster.

The artwork shows the Brighton seaside with three piers (Brighton has had a troubled history with its piers – see the Wikipedia entries for West Pier and Brighton Palace Pier. And there is a spaceship crashing. The thing is that this space ship is also (look again) a beer mug. (Beer and SF go together in the UK.)

Sadly, I note that none of the GoHs are with us today (all those I looked up to, when I joined fandom in the 1970s, are now gone, (as also gone are a disturbing number of my fan friends which is the main reason I have cut back on con going to just one or two a year)).

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

May 24, 1963 — Michael Chabon, 61. The first work by Michael Chabon that I read was the greatest baseball story ever told, and yes, I know that statement will be disputed by many of you, or at least the greatest fantasy affair which is Summerlandin which a group of youngsters save the world from destruction by playing baseball. It’s a truly stellar novel, perfect, that in every way deserved the Mythopoeic Award it received.

Next on my list of novels that I really enjoyed by him is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the alternate history mystery novel, which would win a Hugo at Devention 3. Like Lavie Tidhar’s Unholy Land, this novel with its alternate version of Israel is fascinating.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is story of them becoming major figures in the comics industry from its start into its Golden Age. It’s a wonderful read and an absolutely fantastic look at the comics industry in that era.

An interesting story by him is “The Final Solution: A Story of Detection” novella. The story, set in 1944, is about an unnamed nearly ninety-year-old retired detective who may or may not be Holmes as this individual is a beekeeper.

He is, I’d say, a rather great writer.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Glasbergen Cartoons looks for the mundane explanation.
Herman has a con problem.
Off the Mark introduces Winnie’s cousin.
Carpe Diem shows the fate of fast food in orbit.
Loose Parts finds the best recruit for the job.

(9) HER. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] And here’s The Onion‘s take on the ScarJo AI voice fiasco. “Jerky, 7-Fingered Scarlett Johansson Appears In Video To Express Full-Fledged Approval Of OpenAI”. Read the short satire at the link.

(10) OCTOTHORPE. In Episode 110 of the Octothorpe podcast “Tom Hanks Bloody Loves the Moon”, John Coxon is a professor, Alison Scott doesn’t have a bucket list, and Liz Batty is the country’s foremost fan historian.

We’re a day late because John got distracted! We go through our mailbag and have our thoughts provoked by lots of intriguing commentary, before talking a little about the Arthur C Clarke Award and then onto picks.

Three photographs of the night sky, labelled Newcastle, Bangkok, and “Quite near London” (the labels were written by a Londoner, which is why it doesn’t just say “London”). Text above reads “Octothorpe 110” and below reads “Local Aurora Snapshots”. The Newcastle and London images show photographs of aurora with some minor bits of vegetation intruding; the Bangkok picture shows a skyline of buildings underneath a thunderstorm.

(11) SPACE PIONEER. “Ellison Shoji Onizuka: The First Asian American in Space” – the National Air and Space Museum website has a profile of this astronaut’s work in space before being lost in the Challenger disaster.

…Months after the tragedy, as debris from Challenger was found and processed, personal possessions were returned to the crew’s families. The Onizukas received a memento with special meaning. He had taken on the flight a soccer ball inscribed with good wishes and signatures from his daughter’s Clear Lake High School soccer team, which he helped coach. Stowed in a bag inside a locker in the crew cabin, the ball had been found in the wreckage. The Onizuka family presented the ball to the school. Thirty years later in 2016 astronaut Shane Kimbrough, whose son attended the same school, took the ball on his expedition to the International Space Station and later returned it to the school, where it remains on display. Symbolically, this flight seemed to complete Onizuka’s too-short final mission….

(12) THE BIG ONE. Smithsonian Magazine lists “The Seven Most Amazing Discoveries We’ve Made by Exploring Jupiter”.

…With its gorgeous swirling overcoat and nature of extremes, Jupiter has long captured the public imagination and continues to inspire scientific study. Recent discoveries have only heightened Jupiter’s mystique, enticing researchers to probe this far-flung realm. Here are some of the most enthralling findings scientists have made about Jupiter and its moons in the last five decades….

You may not have gotten the memo:

Yes, Jupiter has a ring

“A lot of people don’t even realize it has one,” Becker says. Too puny to be observed with a backyard telescope, Jupiter’s dusty wreath remained undetected for a long time. Discovered only in 1979 during the Voyager 1 flyby, the ring has since been viewed with more powerful ground telescopes and other visiting spacecraft.

Like any ring encircling other planets in the solar system, Jupiter’s is a glorified debris field. Detritus from crash-landed meteorites congregate around Jupiter. This loose mélange of ice, dust and rock spans 32,000 to 130,000 miles in width from the planetary surface.

When other celestial objects pass through the ring, they can leave behind tracks in the dust stream. One of the most famous of wakes came from the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashing into Jupiter in 1994. Years later, the Galileo and New Horizons spacecraft found ripples in Jupiter’s ring that were kicked up by shards from the comet, the celestial equivalent of footsteps in freshly fallen snow….

(13) WE’LL GO AT NIGHT. The BBC reports on ESA’s proposed new Sun probe: “Airbus UK to build Vigil satellite to monitor Sun storms”.

British engineers will lead the development of a new satellite to monitor the Sun for the energetic outbursts it sends towards Earth.

The announcement of Vigil, as the spacecraft will be known, is timely following the major solar storm that hit our planet earlier this month.

The event, the biggest in 20 years, produced bright auroral lights in skies across the world.

Airbus UK will assemble Vigil and make it ready for launch in 2031.

It’s a European Space Agency (Esa) mission. The €340m (£290m) industrial contract to initiate the build was signed at an Esa and European Union space council being held in Brussels….

(14) VIDEO OF ANOTHER DAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Roger Corman’s 1994 (but never released) Fantastic Four movie is now on YouTube. I bought a VHS of this at some WorldCon, probably late in the previous millennium. Watched it once. If this is (per the CBR article) an improved viewing, I might give it a try.

An interesting article about it from 2017: “Where Are They Now: Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four”.

The Roger Corman’s ill-fated film The Fantastic Four was supposed to officially release in 1994, but that never happened. In 2005, Stan Lee said that the only reason the film was ever made was because executive producer Bernd Eichinger wanted to retain the rights to the film series, so he made a low budget film knowing it would never see the light of day, and one day make a big-budget version for the public to see. Eichinger and Corman deny these claims, stating that their intentions were always to release the film.

Avid Arad, who was a Marvel executive at the time and would later found Marvel Studios, bought the film and ordered that it be buried without even seeing the movie because he didn’t want Marvel to be associated with low-budget B movies as it might tarnish the franchise. So what happened to the movie? It is still available for free to stream on Youtube and Dailymotion. The quality as admittedly quite poor, but it is still watchable for anyone interested in a superhero movie with the incredibly low budget. And what about the cast and crew of this Marvel anomaly? Let’s take a look at what they’ve all been up to since their work on this film.

The movie: The Fantastic Four (1994) unreleased film produced by Roger Corman and Bernd Eichinger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA7LcG4ch3A

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

Speculative Sounds Pt. 2: Composer Elinor Armer on Collaborating with Ursula K. Le Guin

Posted on March 12, 2024 by Mike Glyer

By RL Thornton. Introduction: After discussing Ursula K. Le Guin’s other collaborations with musicians (see the first part of this article), I contacted composer Elinor Armer to discuss her collaborations with Le Guin on their work Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts on Koch Classical and Armer’s settings of Le Guin’s poems in From To The Western Sea – Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin on Centaur.

Here are my questions:

1. How did you and Ursula K. Le Guin first meet and when did you decide to work together on compositions?

2. How did both of you come up with a compositional style for Uses For Music In Uttermost Parts? It feels very modernist to me.

3. Once you started to work together, what sorts of ideas did you come up with? Did you discard any concepts before settling on Uttermost Parts?

4. What was it like spending nine years to finish the composition? When did it become evident that it would take that much time?

ELINOR ARMER: During the early 80’s Ursula Le Guin’s daughter Elisabeth was a student in the first counterpoint class I taught at the San Francisco Conservatory. Elisabeth and I remained friends after her graduation, and it was in the mid-80’s that I met Ursula at Elisabeth’s wedding. Ursula had grown up next door to my grandparents’ house in Berkeley, my grandmother and her mother had been friends, so we had reason to know OF each other but didn’t actually meet until Elisabeth’s wedding.

Ursula and I had never sought each other out, as strangers, asking about collaboration; however, when we met I asked her (naively) if she wrote poetry and had any that might be set to music. She subsequently sent me a few volumes and also loose-leaf, individual poems. From these sources I selected five which seemed to me to form a cycle and then began setting them the following summer while at the MacDowell Colony. The title, “Lockerbones/Airbones”, referred to one of the five poems containing these Ursula-contrived words. The set was performed in San Francisco the following year and subsequently published by my first publisher, J. B. Elkus & Son. Some years later we recorded another performance and Ursula put it on her website where it remains to this day. (All pertinent details regarding performers, sources, etc., may be found there.)

So you see, it was friendship first, then my setting of already written poems—not a collaboration in the true sense at first. That friendship flourished and gave us great fun and pleasure; when we did decide to collaborate on something together from the ground up, I learned the true meaning of art as play, deep play. (We laughed uproariously at times, when Beethoven would have scowled.) On one of my visits to her California vacation home we agreed that it would be fun to collaborate on something from scratch. We came up with the preposterous notion of music being used for other purposes. We did not, however, conceive of the whole series or what it would become or what it would be called, nor did we work non-stop for ten years on this theme. Rather, when I received, sporadically, future commissions or requests from various performing forces I would consult with her to see if she thought we might collaborate in these instances. The musical forces involved on each occasion suggested the appropriate simile; for example, when I told her I had received a grant to compose something for the San Francisco Girls Chorus, she then created the text for Anithaca, designed for girls’ voices, a capella.

Ursula did not come up with “compositional styles”, nor I with textual ones. Fundamentally, I do not have a single compositional “style” that can be defined as such. Rather, I looked for characteristics in each of Ursula’s texts that could also translate to musical qualities. For example, both food and music can be crunchy, sweet, bitter, rich, liquid, thick, thin, spicy, etc; both music and weaving have threads, patterns, texture, direction (warp and weft), etc., etc.

So you see, while it was ten years or so before we recorded “Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts”, we did not start out with this as a goal. Rather, most of the pieces came about when opportunities arose as described above. It was not until after Ursula and I had co-narrated “The Great Instument of the Geggerets” with the Women’s Philharmonic under JoAnn Falletta’s baton, that we decided to form a series under one title.

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Speculative Sounds Pt. 2: Composer Elinor Armer on Collaborating with Ursula K. Le Guin