Tag Archives: Wandavision

Pixel Scroll 7/14/21 Still Crazy After All These Light-Years

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(1) F&SF COVER PREVIEW. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction shared an advance look at the cover of its July/August 2021 issue by artist Alan M. Clark.

(2) A PERSPECTIVE ON AFRICAN SF. Marta Mboka Tveit discusses how “The rise of African Speculative Fiction and other exciting cultural production indicates that modernity is not an exercise in ‘catching up’ with Europe, but an entirely new condition” in “Makeshift modernity” at Africa Is A Country.

…First off, let me argue how excellent the rise of ASF is for everyone, but most importantly for us, the people of African descent. “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it,” said James Baldwin. To make it, one must first imagine it; to make change, one must first imagine a different kind of future. ASF can be linked to the decolonization of the mind in many ways: we must break the molds of colonial prescriptions, education, and decisions about Africa’s place in the world, much like speculative fiction breaks the mold of what can and cannot exist.

ASF points to an insistence on partaking in the technology-steeped global future and represents a push to actively influence that future. Furthermore, publishing and sharing tales and ideas about the future shows a new kind of optimism and self-confidence. Newfound confidence also arguably comes from stronger and more frequent connections with cousins from another planet—those in African America—facilitated by modern communication technology and faster cultural exchange. Africa is looking to African America for cool self-confidence, and African America is looking to Africa for roots and authenticity. This has been going on for a long time. Increasingly, however, African American interest has given cultural expressions from the continent a boost onto the global stage. After five centuries of the rest of the globe telling Africa its cultures and inputs are useless, those cultures and inputs suddenly find themselves at the forefront of global “cool.” But this time around, we might actually gain something from it….

(3) SCORCHED EARTH. Elaborate attempts to sabotage Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Reddit “Ask Me Anything” yesterday prompted Paul Weimer to connect the dots, saying “the trolls are trying to ruin my life and the lives of those even lightly connected to me” in “A Quick Post on Trolls Again” on his Patreon. He attributes the attack to his having retweeted the author’s announcement of the AMA.

… So what they did is, just before her AMA, they set up a fake account very similar to her name (one letter changed to the number one) and set up their OWN AMA.  So, not only were they impersonating here (with plenty of comments and stuff about my supposed perfidy), Nicole could not actually do her own AMA at first.

And when THAT got sorted and she started her real AMA, the troll account started answering questions posed to her in the real AMA, until the moderators finally banned them from the AMA…. 

And the trolls also subjected Paul to a new round of harassment at work and by trying to get into some of his online accounts.

Nicole Kornher-Stace tweeted a thread of her own about the experience that starts here. A few excerpts —

And here’s a screencap of the Reddit moderator’s announcement while they were trying to manage the trollish invasion of the real AMA.

(4) ADA HOFFMANN BOOK LAUNCH. Ada Hoffmann’s The Fallen, the sequel to her debut, The Outside, was released yesterday. The author will be in conversation with Janelle Shane in a free online event on July 15 (3pm MDT/5pm EDT/10pm BST) on Facebook and YouTube

Released to immediate acclaim in 2019, The Outside was nominated for both the Philip K. Dick Award and the Compton Crook Award, so the follow-up, continuing the story of scientist Yasira Shien as she faces off against awesome AI gods and angels, is hotly anticipated to say the least!

Excitedly, to mark the next book in this eldritch-horror-meets-space-opera universe, Ada will (very appropriately) be in conversation with Janelle Shane, optics and AI researcher, host of the AI humor blog AIWeirdness.com, and author of the 2019 popular science book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You! 

(5) I HAVE NO CATNIP AND I MUST SCREAM. Camestros Felapton presents “A Message From: The CattimothyTech Dept.” It was a great ride while it lasted. Which wasn’t long!

…Dear valued subscriber,

Thank you for joining us on the amazing journey into freedom. It has been a truly inspiring five thousand and forty seconds in which we came together in the spirit of unity that shaped our great nation. When our founder, CIO, CFO and CEO Timothy the Talking Cat outlined his vision for a truly free and anti-elite tech platform for all Americans, we were inspired by how many of you rallied around his cause to break free of the shackles of facebooktwittergoogle. …

(6) WHAT ABOUT. Space.com is actually complaining that the Emmys neglected genre despite the huge haul of nominations for The Mandalorian, WandaVision, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Lovecraft Country —“’The Mandalorian’ receives 24 Emmy nominations, including Best Drama Series”.

…Sadly, the sci-fi genre wasn’t well represented in this year’s nominations, which were announced Tuesday  (July 13). Again. It seems only the big franchise names received any kind of attention. There was nothing for “The Expanse” on Amazon Prime Video or “For All Mankind” on Apple TV+ or HBO’s “Raised By Wolves” — and while that show gradually descended into insanity as Season 1 concluded, the actual performances were outstanding. And what about SyFy’s “Resident Alien” in the Comedy category? The eligibility period for 2021 submissions was from June 1, 2020 to May 31, 2021, so all of those shows could’ve been recognized….

(7) DON’T TAKE IT FOR GRANTED. On the other hand, WandaVision’s team is a little surprised: “How ‘WandaVision’ Went From ‘Totally Bananas’ Underdog to Emmy Juggernaut” at Vanity Fair.

…Not that the WandaVision team expected it to happen, at least like this. “Honestly, I was like, if we have one nomination, we will have won,” says series showrunner Jac Schaeffer, who also earned a writing nomination. “The cards are kind of stacked against the superhero space when it comes to recognition and awards.”

By the time nominations morning arrived, Schaeffer may have been the only one—most pundits were betting big on WandaVision, though maybe not 23 nominations big—but when it started, WandaVision really was an underdog. It became the first Marvel project on Disney+ basically by accident, when the pandemic delayed production on other shows, meaning that the bright new future of Marvel on television was being introduced by a defiantly oddball story about grief, sorcery, and classic television. “I felt very secure early on sort of occupying this little corner of the sandbox,” Schaeffer says. “The idea was that Falcon and the Winter Soldier would go first and, and that we could be weird in this little space.”

Instead, WandaVision debuted in mid-January at the peak of a world-altering pandemic, which many viewers had spent stuck at home and, like Wanda Maximoff herself, filtering their realities through television. “There was sort of an element of kismet to it,” Schaeffer says. “The content of the show itself ended up being a reflection of what so many people were doing in their own homes, you know, retreating into their favorite shows as a form of comfort.”

On Emmy nominations morning, both Olsen and Schaeffer were busy sharing the celebration with the rest of the team, though it wasn’t easy to take in the scope of the success….

(8) DOUBLE UNDERLINE. Meanwhile, Adweek declares “Streaming Has Officially Taken Over TV Awards Season”.

No matter how you look at the nomination breakdowns released Tuesday, the story is clear: If it wasn’t already a sure thing that streaming is the future of television, the 2021 Emmy nominations have officially cemented it.

Streaming services accounted for four of the five top nominated outlets, with HBO Max (paired with HBO) and Netflix overwhelmingly dominating in terms of total nominations. Disney+, less than two years old, beat out every broadcast and cable network in terms of nominations and came in third overall.

Apple TV+, which isn’t even a breakout streamer (parent company Apple has mostly given it away for free since its launch), received more nominations (34) than all the broadcast networks aside from NBC. 

(9) WHAT’S AHEAD FOR AMERICA. James Davis Nicoll curated these “Five Speculative Visions of a Future America” for Tor.com. I was pleasantly surprised to find I’m not the only fan who remembers this one —

Rosinante Trilogy by Alexis Gilliland

Crisis and political necessity led to the formation of the North American Union, encompassing the United States, Mexico, Canada, and a few other nations. The formative crisis having past, the Union is held together largely thanks to the determination of a cabal of conservatives, the Creationist Coalition. The central figures in the Administration are determined to not let their power and influence slip away. Their resolve proves the North American Union’s undoing.

The Administration is long on steadfast purpose, but short on foresight. Assassinating a Hispanic populist governor alienates Hispanic North Americans. Paranoid attempts to capture a suspected Old Regime sympathizer force the sympathizer to see the Union as his enemy. Each move undertaken to ensure the Union’s stability instead undermines it, with the inevitable result that the North American Union collapses into independent nation states.

(10) EFFECTS HISTORY. BBC Radio 4 has aired the second installment of Unreal: The VFX Revolution – “Digital Realms”.

How visual effects changed and how they changed the movies. Oscar winner Paul Franklin explores how film entered the digital realm.

The 1970s saw the very first onscreen digital effects in films like Westworld. Those first pioneers of CGI already spoke of digital humans, indeed of entire films being made within the computer, but Hollywood was unconvinced. By 1979, some of those visionaries like Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, later founders of Pixar, were working for filmmaker George Lucas, who primarily wanted new digital tools for editing and compositing and to explore computer graphics. Their first all-digital sequence created life-from lifelessness with the Genesis effect for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Meanwhile Disney itself was creating TRON, a spectacular mix of state-of-the art animation and pioneering digital effects that took audiences into cyberspace for the first time. In their different ways these two films were the true harbingers of the digital revolution that would bring profound change to moviemaking within little more than a decade. And then came Terminator 2’s chrome shape shifter-the T1000. The revolution was underway.

(11) MEMORY LANE.

  • 2006 – Fifteen years ago, Catherynne M. Valente would win the Otherwise Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature for The Orphan’s Tale: In the Night Garden. (It would also be nominated for a World Fantasy Award.) Two years later, she won a second Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature for The Orphan’s Tale: In the Cities of Coin and Spice.  Both volumes are available from the usual suspects for just five dollars and ninety-nine cents. 

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born July 14, 1904 — Zita Johann. She’s best known for the lead performance in Karl Freund’s 1932 film, The Mummy which also featured Boris Karloff. She wouldn’t show in another horror film for another fifty-four years when she was in Raiders of the Living Dead as a Librarian as her original career only lasted three years. She quit film to work in theater where she where she was a partner of John Houseman, her husband, who she was married to from 1929 to 1933, and with Orson Welles as well. She also taught acting to people with learning disorders. (Died 1993.)
  • Born July 14, 1906 — Abner J. Gelula. One of the many authors* of Cosmos, a serialized novel that appeared first in Science Fiction Digest in July 1933 and then has a really complicated publication that I won’t detail here. It was critiqued as “the world’s most fabulous serial,” “one of the unique stunts of early science fiction,” and conversely “a failure, miserable and near-complete.” The entire text, chapter by chapter, can be read here. *To be precise,  Earl Binder, Otto Binder. Arthur J. Burks,  John W. Campbell, Jr., Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. Ralph Milne Farley, Francis Flagg, J. Harvey Haggard, Edmond Hamilton, David H. Keller, M.D., Otis Adelbert Kline, A. Merritt, P. Schuyler Miller, Bob Olsen, Raymond A. Palmer, E. Hoffmann Price and Edward E. Smith. Gulp!  (Died 1985.)
  • Born July 14, 1926 — Harry Dean Stanton. My favourite genre role for him? The video for Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”. No, I’m not kidding.  He also played Paul of Tarsus in The Last Temptation of Christ, Harold “Brain” Hellman in Escape from New York, Detective Rudolph “Rudy” Junkins in Christine, Bud in Repo Man, Carl Rod in Twin Peaks twice, Toot-Toot in The Green Mile, Harvey in Alien Autopsy and a Security Guard in The Avengers. He didn’t do a lot of genre tv, one episode of The Wild Wild West as Lucius Brand in “The Night of The Hangman” and a character named Lemon on Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the “Escape to Sonoita” episode. (Died 2017.)
  • Born July 14, 1939 — Sid Haig. Best remembered as having a lead role in Jason of Star Command as the villain Dragos. He had one-offs in Batman, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, Get Smart, Fantasy Island, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and MacGyver. His Trek appearence was First Lawgiver in “The Return of the Archons”, and someone in casting at Mission: Impossible liked him as he had nine different roles there. He was Royal Apothecary twice on Batman, not a role I recognize. (Died 2019.)
  • Born July 14, 1943 — Christopher Priest, 78. This is the Birthday of the One and True Christopher Priest. If I was putting together an introductory reading list to him, I’d start with The Prestige, add in the Islanders (both of which won BSFAs)and its companion volume, The Dream Archipelago. Maybe Inverted World as well. How’s that sound?  
  • Born July 14, 1949 — Brian Sibley, 72. He co-wrote (with Michael Bakewell) BBC Radio 4’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. He also adapted The Chronicles of Narnia, and Titus Groan and Gormenghast for the same. Print wise, he’s responsible for such works as The Lord of the Rings Official Movie Guide and The Lord of the Rings: The Making of the Movie Trilogy. His only Award to date is a Sir Julius Vogel Award which is given by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand (SFFANZ) and the National Science Fiction convention for Weta Digital: 20 Years of Imagination on Screen.
  • Born July 14, 1964 — Jane Espenson, 57. She had a five-year stint as a writer and producer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer where she shared a Hugo Award at Torcon 3 for her writing on the “Conversations with Dead People” episode, and she shared another Hugo at Chicon 7 for Games of Thrones, season one. She was on the writing staff for the fourth season of Torchwood and executive produced Caprica. And yes, she had a stint on the rebooted Galactica.
  • Born July 14, 1966 — Brian Selznick, 55. Illustrator and writer best known as the writer of The Invention of Hugo Cabret which may or may not be genre. You decide. His later work, Wonderstruck, definitely is. The Marvels, a story of a travelling circus family is magical in its own right though not genre. His next work, Kaleidoscopic, due out this autumn looks to just as fantastic. 

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • Gasoline Alley, after a week or so following a colander-hat-guy “hearing ghost voices,” solves the mystery.
  • Broom Hilda needs a proofreader just as much as I do.

(14) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. Is Jason Cordova trying to suggest John Scalzi ripped off two of his novels? Here’s a screencap of Cordova’s Facebook post.

What seems clear to Cordova might not seem so clear to anyone else. Scalzi’s “Preservation Society” in his title phrase sounds like it’s about a rather different subject than Cordova’s “Urban Revitalization Project.” And Cordova’s own title resonates with a line from Godzilla 1985 (as quoted in the Wikipedia) — “That’s quite an urban renewal program they’ve got going on over there” – a coincidence that would be of no more than trivial interest but for Cordova’s complaint.  

As for Cordova’s The Corruptor – the Amazon blurb says this is what the book is about:

…The single greatest advance in computer technology since the invention of the microchip, the Warp is a virtual reality gaming system so advanced that players aren’t just in the game, they are the game. And inside the Warp lies the most cunning of all games, the de facto king of online gaming. It is the one game said to be unbeatable: Crisis.

The Warp was flawless, and the game was perfect. Until something went terribly wrong, trapping Tori Adams and her friends inside it, unable to log off and free their minds from the uploaded virus in their brains. With no other options available and time running out, they must do the one thing that has never been done before—what experts say can’t be done—they must beat Crisis in order to save their lives.

I have read Scalzi’s Lock In but not Cordova’s book, however, from the latter’s description they appear to have about the same degree of overlap as Ready Player One and The Matrix.

(15) HYPE TIME. Two members of the MCYouTube react to the upcoming film FreeGuy featuring Ryan Reynolds and Taika Waititi. “Deadpool just slipped into the MCU early, to make fun of Ryan Reynolds”.

…like so many other studios, Disney is facing the question of how to goose up active interest in a film it’s been teasing since 2019. The apparent solution: Bring in Deadpool, dump him into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and have him promote the film.

(16) GAIMAN ON SCREWTAPE. Brenton Dickieson shares “Neil Gaiman’s Introduction to The Screwtape Letters, Marvel Comics Edition” at A Pilgrim in Narnia.

… someone sent me a snapshot of the introduction to an edition that is slightly different than my own gifted copy of the Marvel Comics version of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. This other edition does not reproduce Lewis’ own 1941 preface as mine does. Instead, it has a special introduction written by Neil Gaiman.

As readers will know, Gaiman is not simply a giant in the fantasy world–outside of the horror genre, I think American Gods is the most important work of fantasy on the continent–but one of the new generation pioneers of the graphic novel medium. He is also a lifelong Narnia fan–and, we discover here, a lover and appreciative reader of Screwtape. Leaving beside any technical matters you might normally find in an introduction, Gaiman still manages to orient the reader to the book in their hands while giving us a sense of what he loves about Screwtape as a theologically interested but not specifically religious reader.

Besides some good swipes at the American Christian culture war (the ’90s one, not the current one) and a perceptive description of Narnia, Gaiman draws the reader to Screwtape for entertainment, delight, and wisdom. Gaiman’s perspective of Screwtape‘s impact has reminded me of that larger group of readers of Lewis that keep coming back to his works….

(17) MIGHT BE ON YOUR BOOKSHELF. Fonts In Use looks back at the design of “Philip K. Dick paperback covers (Panther Science Fiction)” from the Seventies.

Roslyn Gothic arguably saw its most extensive and iconic use on the paperback covers with works by Philip K. Dick as published by Panther Books.

Designed by Harry Winters, Roslyn Gothic was released by Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC) in 1972, to be used with their Photo Typositor, a popular display typesetting machine of the phototype era. There were three styles; Medium, Bold, and Outline. The sans serif of condensed proportions is infused with some traits that seem to harken back to Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil: counters in d, g, or p are tear-shaped, e has a diagonal bar while the top arm of K is vertical, some stems in m, n, u are slightly curved, A is asymmetrical, and G is pointed at the bottom. Several of these features can also be found in German typefaces from around 1900, like Sezessions-Grotesk or Skulptur. By giving his design a large x-height and tight letterspacing, Winters turned these influences into a quintessential 1970s display typeface. With its punchy yet slightly alien-looking shapes, Roslyn Gothic became a popular choice on book covers in the science fiction genre.

(18) SPEAKER FOR THE TREES. No, we’re not talking about the Lorax. In this video of “Trees, Chainsaws, and the Visions of Paradise in J.R.R. Tolkien” from 2002, Tom Shippey discusses Tolkien’s relationship to trees, the literary function of forests, and the under-rated sophistication of Hobbit poetry. This quote comes from the YouTube transcript —

…Perhaps the best example of this comes from a colleague of mine now a professor of Harvard who tells this anecdote which I shall rapidly pirate. He said that some it must have been at least thirty years ago when he was a student backpacking his way around Europe he found himself in Oxford and he went to the University parks and he found a bench there and took his backpack off and sat down on the bench and looks at the parks for a bit. And at this point I’m an old guy came up very well-dressed and he came along and he sat down on the bench and he started to talk about trees. Trees, how beautiful they were, trees, some particularly beautiful trees, trees, now some trees he was personally fond of, trees, the awful things people did to trees, trees, how awful people were who did these awful things to trees trees, what we ought to do to these awful people in the world. But at this point my colleague said he was beginning to get rather nervous, picks his backpack up and edged away reflecting that you know they haven’t got all the weirdos locked up yet by any means. But next morning he got the local paper and discovered a picture of the old weirdo in it and it was of course the distinguished professor talking who was in the paper because he’d been collecting an honorary doctorate… 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Gordon Van Gelder, Anna Grace Carpenter, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 6/9/21 Self: Deaf Ents

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(1) WITH THANKS. John Wiswell, Nebula winner for ”Open House on Haunted Hill,” has made his touching “Nebula Awards 2021 Acceptance Speech” a free post on his Patreon.

…Saying that, there’s one other author I cannot end this speech without thanking. It’s a little gauche, but I hope they’re listening.

Because my story, “Open House on Haunted Hill,” was rejected several times before Diabolical Plots gave it a chance. And in my career my various stories were rejected over 800 times before I won this award tonight. And that’s why I hope this author is listening.

You, who think you’re not a good enough writer because you don’t write like someone else.

You, who haven’t finished a draft because your project seems too quirky or too daunting.

You, who are dispirited after eating so many rejection emails.

You, who are going to write the things that will make me glad I’m alive to read them.

What the field needs is for you to be different, and to be true to your imagination….

(2) GOMEZ Q&A. In “A Point of Pride: Interview with Jewelle Gomez”, the Horror Writers Association blog continues its Pride Month series.

Do you make a conscious effort to include LGBTQ material in your writing and if so, what do you want to portray?

Because my life as a lesbian/feminist of colour is my context I don’t have to remind myself to include Queer material. That’s where I begin. There are, of course, other types of characters in my writing but my experience is centralised. I have a Queer social and political circle and they are easily represented in my work. For so long women, lesbians and people of colour were told our stories weren’t important, other (white) people wouldn’t be interested in them. Now we know that was just another way to dominate our experience. I long for the day that non-Queer writers and non-Black writers feel sensitive enough to do the research and include authentic characters in their work who don’t look like them.

(3) KIRK AT WORK. Thomas Parker revisits the history-making calendar at Black Gate: “First Impressions: Tim Kirk’s 1975 Tolkien Calendar”.

How does the old saying go? “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” It’s often true that the first encounter has an ineradicable effect, whether the meeting is with a person, a work of art, or a world. It’s certainly true in my case; I had my first and, in some ways, most decisive encounter with Middle-earth before I ever read a word of The Lord of the Rings. My first view of that magical place came through the paintings of Tim Kirk, in the 1975 J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar, and that gorgeous, pastel-colored vision of the Shire and its environs is the one that has stayed with me. Almost half a century later, Kirk’s interpretation still lies at the bottom of all my imaginings of Tolkien’s world.

(4) CASTING THE MCU. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] I listened to this podcast Leonard and Jessie Maltin did with casting director Sarah Finn – “Maltin on Movies: Sarah Finn” Finn has cast every role in every film and TV series on Disney+ in the MCU, so she has a lot of inside knowledge.  Among her goals is to find actors who enjoy playing superheroes and like working with each other.  She also discusses why it was a gamble to cast Robert Downey, Jr. as Iron Man and why Vin Diesel was cast as Groot because of his voice work in The Iron Giant.

She also reveals Dwayne Johnson’s secret for success:  he is genuinely a nice guy who even volunteered to do the dishes after a casting call!

Finn also discusses her work as casting director on The Mandalorian and her work for Oliver Stone, including the gamble of having Eli Wallach play a substantial role at age 95 on Wall Street:  Money Never Sleeps.

This was a very informative podcast.

 (5) ONE SHOT. “Elizabeth Olsen Says WandaVision Won’t Have a Second Season: ‘It Is a Limited Series’” reports Yahoo!

Elizabeth Olsen has weighed in on the future of WandaVision – and sadly, fans shouldn’t expect there to be a second season.

“No, that’s easy for me to answer. It is a limited series. It’s a fully beginning, middle, end, and that’s it kind of thing,” she told PEOPLE in January ahead of the Disney+ show’s premiere. 

During a recent virtual chat with Kaley Cuoco for Variety‘s Actors on Actors series, Olsen once again echoed her comments about the series likely not returning for season 2…. 

(6) PRO TIP. Tade Thompson triages his email:

https://twitter.com/tadethompson/status/1402546049017864193

(7) GRANTS AVAILABLE. The Ladies of Horror Fiction review site are offering nine 2021 LOHF Writers Grants. Applications must be submitted by August 31.

Nine recipients will receive the LOHF Writers Grant in the amount of $100. The Ladies of Horror Fiction team will announce the recipients of the LOHF Writers Grant on September 15, 2021.

The LOHF Writers Grant is inclusive to all women (cis and trans) and non-binary femmes who have reasonably demonstrated a commitment to writing in the horror genre. All grant provided funds must be used in a manner that will help develop the applicant’s career.

The grants are funded by Steve Stred, Laurel Hightower, Ben Walker, S.H. Cooper, Sonora Taylor, and several anonymous donors.

(8) TEN FOR THE PRICE OF FIVE. Two entries from James Davis Nicoll from the pages of Tor.com:

“Five SFF Characters You Should Never, Ever Date”.

Science fiction and fantasy are rich in characters who deserve (and sometimes find) rewarding personal relationships. There are also characters that other characters should never, ever date. Ever. Here are five fictional characters from whom all prospective love interests should run screaming…

“Five SF Books About Living in Exile”.

Few calamities sting like being driven from the land one once called home. Exile is therefore a rich source of plots for authors seeking some dramatic event to motivate their characters. You might want to consider the following five books, each of which features protagonists (not all of them human) forced to leave their homes….

(9) CORA ON CONAN. Cora Buhlert’s latest Retro Review is of one of the less known Conan stories that was not published in Howard’s lifetime: “Retro Review: ‘The God in the Bowl’ by Robert E. Howard or Conan Does Agatha Christie”.

…Unlike the two previous stories, “The God in the Bowl” remained unpublished during Howard’s lifetime and appeared for the first time in the September 1952 issue of the short-lived magazine Space Science Fiction. Why on Earth editor Lester del Rey decided that a Conan story was a good fit for a magazine that otherwise published such Astounding stalwarts as George O. Smith, Clifford D. Simak and Murray Leinster will probably forever remain a mystery.

As for why I decided to review this particular Conan story rather than some of the better known adventures of our favourite Cimmerian adventurer (which I may eventually do), part of the reason is that the story just came up in a conversation I had with Bobby Derie on Twitter. Besides, I have been reading my way through the Del Rey Robert E. Howard editions of late and realised that there are a lot of layers to those stories that I missed when I read them the first time around as a teenager.

(10) INSIDER WADING. The next Essence of Wonder With Gadi Evron will be abouts “Future of the HUGO, ASTOUNDING and LODESTAR Awards: Worldcon Insiders Discuss the History and Trends”. Register at the link.

Three Worldcon insiders, Tammy Coxen, Nicholas Whyte, and Vincent Docherty will join Gadi and Karen to discuss the Hugo, Astounding, and Lodestar awards, their history, and current trends.

Like last year, we will be interviewing category nominees in the next few months, with this show as the opening segment.

(11)  GAME WRITING ARCHIVE. Eatonverse tweets highlights of the UC Riverside’s Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Today’s rarity is from Marc Laidlaw —

https://twitter.com/EatonVerse/status/1402379102540099584

(12) HERE THEY COME AGAIN. Those pesky aliens.Invasion launches on October 22 on Apple TV+.

(13) MEMORY LANE.

  • 1971 — Fifty years ago at Noreascon 1 which had Robert Silverberg as its Toastmaster, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction won the Hugo for Best Professional Magazine. It was its third such Hugo win in a row, and seventh to that date.  

(14) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born June 9, 1911 – J. Francis McComas.  With Raymond Healy (1907-1997) edited the pioneering and still excellent anthology Adventures in Time and Space – and got Random House to publish it.  Thus although not having planted the crops, he knew to harvest: they also serve who only sit and edit.  With Anthony Boucher (1911-1969) founded The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the best thing to happen among us since Astounding.  Half a dozen stories of his own.  Afterward his widow Annette (1911-1994) edited The Eureka Years; see it too.  (Died 1978) [JH]
  • Born June 9, 1925 – Leo R. Summers.  Twenty covers for Fantastic, eight for Amazing, six for Analog; six hundred interiors.  Here is a Fantastic cover; here is one for Analog; here is an interior for H.B. Fyfe’s “Star Chamber” from Amazing.  A fruitful career.  (Died 1985) [JH]
  • Born June 9, 1925 — Keith Laumer. I remember his Bolo series fondly and read quite a bit of it. Can’t say which novels at this point though Bolo definitely and Last Command almost certainly. The Imperium and Retief series were also very enjoyable though the latter is the only one I’d re-read at this point. The usual suspects  have decent though not complete ebooks listings for him, heavy on the Imperium and Retief series and they’ve just added a decent Bolo collection too. (Died 1993.) (CE)
  • Born June 9, 1930 — Lin Carter. He is best known for his work in the 1970s as editor of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. As a writer, His first professional publication was the short story “Masters of the Metropolis”, co-written with Randall Garrett, in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1957. He would be a prolific writer, average as much as six novels a year. In addition, he was influential as a critic of the fantasy genre and an early historian of the genre. He wrote far too much for me to say I’ve sampled everything he did but I’m fond of his Castillo, Great Imperium and Zarkon series. All great popcorn literature! (Died 1988.) (CE) 
  • Born June 9, 1931 – Joanie Winston.  Vital spark of Star Trek fandom; co-founder of the first Trek convention, got Gene Roddenberry to attend; co-organized the next four; became a sought-after guest herself.  Reported in The Making of the Trek Conventions, or How to Throw a Party for 12,000 of Your Most Intimate Friends, got it published by Doubleday and Playboy.  Appreciation by OGH here.  Quite capable of playing poker at a 200-fan relaxacon rather than bask in glory at a Trek megacon the same weekend.  (Died 2008) [JH]
  • Born June 9, 1934 — Donald Duck, 87. He made his first appearance in “The Wise Little Hen” on June 9th, 1934. In this cartoon as voiced by Clarence Nash, Donald and his friend, Peter Pig (also voiced by Nash), lie their way out of helping the titular little hen tend to her corn. Donald Duck was the joint creation of Dick Lundy, Fred Spencer, Carl Barks, Jack King and Jack Hannah though Walt Disney often would like you to forget that. You can watch it here. (CE)
  • Born June 9, 1943 – Joe Haldeman, age 78.  Two dozen novels, eighty shorter stories; ninety published poems.  Seven Hugos, five Nebulas; three Rhyslings; Tiptree (as it then was); Skylark.  Edited Nebula Awards 17.  Pegasus Award for Best Space Opera Song. SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) Grand Master.  Science Fiction Hall of Fame.  Guest of Honor at – among others – Windycon I and 20, Disclave 21, Beneluxcon 7, ConFiction the 48th Worldcon.  Wide range has its virtues; he’s told how one story sold at a penny a word and five years later was adapted for television at five times as much; also “I don’t have to say Uh-oh, I’d better get back to that novel again; I can always write a poem or something.”  [JH]
  • Born June 9, 1954 — Gregory Maguire, 67. He is the author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West based off of course the Oz Mythos, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister retelling the tale of Cinderella and Mirror, Mirror, a revisionist retelling of the Snow White tale which is really excellent. Well you get the idea. He’s damn good at this revisionist storytelling. (CE) 
  • Born June 9, 1963 — David Koepp, 58. Screenwriter for some of the most successful SF films ever done: Jurassic  Park (co-written with Michael Crichton), The Lost World: Jurassic Park, War of The Worlds and, yes, it made lots of money, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. He won a Hugo for Jurassic Park which won Best Dramatic Presentation at ConAdian. (CE)
  • Born June 9, 1966 – Christian McGuire, age 55.  Co-chaired eight Loscons.  Chaired Westercon 63, Conucopia the 7th NASFiC (N. Am. SF Con, held when the Worldcon is overseas), L.A.con IV the 64th Worldcon.  A founder of Gallifrey One; chaired or co-chaired its first 12 years.  Fan Guest of Honor at Baycon 2002, Westercon 51, Capricon 29, Loscon 36.  Evans-Freehafer Award (L.A. Science Fantasy Soc.; service).  [JH]
  • Born June 9, 1967 – Dave McCarty, age 54.  Chaired three Capricons.  Chaired the 70th Worldcon, Chicon 7, which by our custom means the seventh Worldcon in the same town with continuity from the same community.  No one else has managed this, or come close; the nearest have been Noreascon Four (62nd Worldcon), L.A.con IV (64th), and Aussiecon 4 (68th). Also served as Hugo Awards Administrator, and on the World SF Society’s Mark Protection Committee, two of our least conspicuous and most demanding tasks.  Fan Guest of Honor at Windycon 28, Capricon 38.  [JH]
  • Born June 9, 1981 — Natalie Portman, 40. Surprisingly her first genre role was as Taffy Dale in Mars Attacks!, not as Padme in The Phantom Menace. She’d repeat that role in Attack of The Clones and Revenge of The Sith. She’d next play Evey in V for Vendetta. And she played Jane Foster twice, first in Thor: The Dark World and then in Avengers: Endgame. She’ll reprise the role in Thor: Love and Thunder in which she’ll play both Jane Foster and Thor. That I’ve got to see. (CE) 

(15) PET SHOP. “’DC League of Super-Pets’ Cast: Kevin Hart, Keanu Reeves, More Join Dwayne Johnson” reports Deadline.

The cast for the upcoming animated movie, DC League of Super-Pets, includes Dwayne Johnson as Krypto and Kevin Hart as Ace. The cast also features Kate McKinnon, John Krasinski, Vanessa Bayer, Natasha Lyonne, Diego Luna, and Keanu Reeves. The movie will be released May 20, 2022.

(16) LIGHTS ON LANGFORD. Cora Buhlert continues her Fanzine Spotlight by interviewing David Langford about his famed newzine: “Fanzine Spotlight: Ansible”.

Who are the people behind your site or zine?

In theory it’s just me. In practice I couldn’t keep going without all the correspondents who send obituaries, interesting news snippets, more obituaries, convention news, too many obituaries, and contributions to such regular departments as As Others See Us and Thog’s Masterclass. The first collects notably patronizing or ignorant comments on the SF genre from the mainstream media, with special attention to authors who write science fiction but prefer to pretend they don’t (Margaret Atwood once explained that SF was “talking squids in outer space” and since she didn’t write /that/ she had to be innocent of SF contamination). Thog’s Masterclass is for embarrassingly or comically bad sentences in published fiction, not always SF — as well as the usual genre suspects, the Masterclass has showcased such luminaries as Agatha Christie, Vladimir Nabokov and Sean Penn.

(17) TAKES TWO TO TANGO. Galactic Journey’s Gideon Marcus tells the good and the bad news about the latest (in 1966) US space mission: “[June 8, 1966] Pyrrhic Victory (the flight of Gemini 9) – Galactic Journey”.

…Scheduled for May 17, 1966, Gemini 9 was supposed to be the first real all-up test of the two-seat spacecraft.  Astronauts Tom Stafford (veteran of Gemini 6) and Gene Cernan would dock with an Agena and conduct a spacewalk.  If successful, this would demonstrate all of the techniques and training necessary for a trip to the Moon. 

The first bit of bad luck involved the Agena docking adapter.  Shortly after liftoff on the 17th, one of the booster engines gimballed off center and propelled rocket and Agena into the Atlantic ocean.  The two astronauts, bolted into their Gemini capsule for a launch intended for just a few minutes after, had to abort their mission.

Luckily, NASA had a back-up: the Augmented Target Docking Adapter (ADTA).  The ADTA was basically an Agena without the engine.  A Gemini could practice docking with it, but the ADTA can’t be used as an orbital booster for practice of the manuever that Apollo will employ when it breaks orbit to head for the Moon.

ADTA went up on June 1, no problem.  But just seconds before launch, the Gemini 9 computer refused navigational updates from the Cape.  The launch window was missed, and once again, Tom and Gene were forced to scrub.  Stafford got the nickname “Prince of the Pad.”…

(18) CULINARY FAME IS FLEETING. The New Yorker’s Jason Siegel and Maeve Dunigan take up the tongs as “A Food Critic Reviews the Swedish Chef’s New Restaurant”.

When I heard that the Swedish Chef from “The Muppet Show” was opening a Chelsea location of his celebrated bistro, Dorg Schnorfblorp Horganblorps, I was skeptical. I’m always hesitant to believe the hype surrounding celebrity chefs, especially when they’re made of felt. While the city was abuzz, calling Mr. Muppet the new Jean-Georges Vongerichten, I was certain that this newcomer was nothing more than a passing fad, a Swedish Salt Bae. But, after such a tough year for restaurants, I was curious about how this mustachioed madman’s gimmick had sustained its popularity. Eventually, I decided that I had to go see for myself—could the Swedish Chef’s bites ever live up to his bark, or bork?

Dorg Schnorfblorp Horganblorps has been open for only three months but already has a wait list that extends to the end of the year. I was amazed that anyone could get a reservation at all, considering that the restaurant’s Web site contains no helpful links or information, only a gif of a turkey being chased by the chef wielding a tennis racquet, captioned, “Birdy gerdy floopin.”…

(19) WHO THAWS THERE? Mike Wehner reports “Scientists revived a creature that was frozen in ice for 24,000 years” at Yahoo!

It sounds like the plot from a cheese science fiction movie: Scientists unearth something that’s been buried in the frozen ground of the Arctic for tens of thousands of years and decide to warm it up a bit. The creature stirs as its cells slowly wake up from their long stasis. As time passes, the animal wakes up, having time-traveled 24,000 years thanks to its body’s ability to shut itself down once temperatures reached a certain low. It sounds too incredible to be true, but it is.

In a new paper published in Current Biology, researchers reveal their discovery of a microscopic animal frozen in the Arctic permafrost for an estimated 24,000 years. The creature, which would have lived in water during its previous life, was revived as the soil thawed. The discovery is incredibly important not just for the ongoing study of creatures found frozen in time here on Earth.

The tiny creature is called a bdelloid rotifer. These multicellular animals live in aquatic environments and have a reputation for being particularly hardy when it comes to frigid temperatures. They are obviously capable of surviving the process of being frozen and then thawed, and they’re not the only tiny animal to have this ability….

(20) HAVE AN APPLE, DEARIE. Atlas Obscura would like you to “Meet the Appalachian Apple Hunter Who Rescued 1,000 ‘Lost’ Varieties”. Daniel Dern sent the link with two comments: “1: I don’t know whether any of these are better at keeping doctor away. 2: Have they been tested for ‘putting people to deep-sleep’?”

AS TOM BROWN LEADS A pair of young, aspiring homesteaders through his home apple orchard in Clemmons, North Carolina, he gestures at clusters of maturing trees. A retired chemical engineer, the 79 year old lists varieties and pauses to tell occasional stories. Unfamiliar names such as Black Winesap, Candy Stripe, Royal Lemon, Rabun Bald, Yellow Bellflower, and Night Dropper pair with tales that seem plucked from pomological lore.

Take the Junaluska apple. Legend has it the variety was standardized by Cherokee Indians in the Smoky Mountains more than two centuries ago and named after its greatest patron, an early-19th-century chief. Old-time orchardists say the apple was once a Southern favorite, but disappeared around 1900. Brown started hunting for it in 2001 after discovering references in an Antebellum-era orchard catalog from Franklin, North Carolina….

(21) TEFLON CRUELLA. The New York Times speculates about “The Surprising Evolution of Cruella De Vil”:

From a calm socialite, she morphed into an unhinged puppy kidnapper and then a vindictive glamourpuss. Why don’t we hate her?

And for dessert, here’s a Cruella parody video.

(22) CAN YOU MAKE A WALL OF TEXT? The Lego Typewriter has some moving parts that simulate a real typewriter but, no, you can’t produce copy with it. At the link is a video of the assembled 2000+ piece project.

(23) BREAKING INTO THE MCU. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “The Marvel Character Tutorial” on Screen Rant, Ryan George plays Marvel screenwriter “Richard Lambo,” who says if you are trying to sell a screenplay to Marvel, make sure he or she has plenty of abs (four will do, but a six-pack is best) and leave plenty of room for snark!

(24) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Game Trailers: Returnal,” Fandom Games says that Sony’s new game puts you “in a Gigeresque sci-fi setting” where your goal is “to kill all the wildlife” in a game so depressing that Sony should “just throw away the game and have someone come over and kick you in the scrotum” to achieve the same painful effect. (Or “slamming your face into a brick wall” is mentioned at another place, if the first option isn’t available.)

[Thanks to John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, James Davis Nicoll, Daniel Dern, Gadi Evron, Cora Buhlert, JJ, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Niall McAuley.]

2021 MTV Movie & TV Awards

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The 2021 MTV & TV Awards were announced in a ceremony aired on Sunday, May 16.

Genre dominated the night with Disney+’s WandaVision taking four awards, including Best Show, while The Falcon and the Winter Soldier won two.

Here are the winners of genre interest. The complete list is here.

BEST SHOW

  • WandaVision

BEST PERFORMANCE IN A SHOW

  • Elizabeth Olsen – WandaVision

BEST HERO

  • Anthony Mackie – The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

BEST VILLAIN

  • Kathryn Hahn – WandaVision

BEST FIGHT

  • WandaVision – Wanda vs. Agatha

MOST FRIGHTENED PERFORMANCE

  • Victoria Pedretti – The Haunting of Bly Manor

BEST DUO

  • The Falcon and the Winter Soldier – Falcon (Anthony Mackie) & Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan)

Pixel Scroll 5/5/21 Soon May The Filerman Come To Bring Us Books And Cats And Rum

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(1) SPEAK FRIEND. Guy Gavriel Kay will deliver the 2021 J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature, an annual lecture on fantasy literature held at Pembroke College, Oxford. The digital lecture will take place on Tuesday, May 11th, 6 PM BST (1 PM ET).

Kay has published fourteen novels which have been translated into 30 languages and have appeared on bestseller lists around the world. He is also the author of the poetry collection, Beyond This Dark House. His most recent work is A Brightness Long Ago.

Before beginning his career as a novelist, Kay was retained by the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien to assist in the editorial construction of The Silmarillion, the first and best-known of the posthumously published Tolkien works. Called to the Bar of Ontario in 1980, he has also been principal writer and associate producer for the CBC’s award-winning crime-drama series, The Scales of Justice. 

Register to attend on Zoom, or watch the livestream on their YouTube channel. Zoom capacity will be limited but YouTube capacity is not. Both Zoom and YouTube will broadcast at the same time.

(2) WHEN EVERYONE GOES BLISSFULLY ASTRAY. Yahoo! reports two LOTR actors are starting a podcast in May. “’The Lord Of The Rings’: Dominic Monaghan & Billy Boyd Launch Podcast”.

The pair, who played hobbits Merry and Pippin in The Lord of the Rings, are launching a podcast about the hit film franchise.

The duo are launching The Friendship Onion with podcast producer Kast Media and the series will premiere on May 18. They will bring banter, stories and comedy to the podcasting space, each week digging into the latest in pop culture, put fans’ Lord of the Rings knowledge to the test, reveal exclusive stories from filming and maybe even welcome surprise drop-ins from famous faces.

Monaghan, who is also known for his role on Lost, played Meriadoc ‘Merry’ Brandybuck in the films, close friend to Frodo Baggins, and along with Peregrin ‘Pippin’ Took, played by Boyd members of the Fellowship of the Ring.

The Friendship Onion will be available weekly on Spotify and across all podcast platforms, including video simulcast episodes on YouTube….

(3) STRANGE AT ECBATAN THE QUIZ. Rich Horton has challenged readers with a 17-question quiz: “Quiz: Images of Aliens in SF”.

Following is a quiz I wrote for an online trivia league I am in. The subject matter is aliens in SF books, movies, TV, or comic books. Each question is accompanied by an image of the alien. The quiz ran over the weekend. Some of you may know the winner, David Goldfarb, who was prominent on the great Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written back in its glory days. Tom Galloway, another prominent fan known for his trivia knowledge, also did very well.

I need to thank Steven Silver and John O’Neill (as well as several members of the trivia league) for helping me improve the question set, including some excellent proposed questions.

I will post the answers in a day or two. If you want, you can post your guesses in the comments.

1. There are many aliens depicted in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This alien race may be hard to depict definitively, as they are shapeshifters, but they do have a typical form. They appeared in Captain Marvel in the MCU, and in the comics as early as an issue of Fantastic Four in 1962. What is the name of this alien race? Click here

2. What’s the common name for this cowardly species featured in many of Larry Niven’s Known Space stories? The name is perhaps ironic as this species doesn’t seem to have the appendages normally used by the human performers known by that name. Click here …

(4) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Rebecca Roanhorse and Angela Slatter in a YouTube livestream on May 19 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Link to come – check back at the KGB site.

Rebecca Roanhorse

Rebecca Roanhorse is NYTimes bestseller and an award-winning speculative fiction writer. Her latest novel, Black Sun, was recently nominated for the Nebula award for Best Novel of 2020. She has short fiction published in Apex Magazine, Uncanny, and multiple anthologies. She has also written for Star Wars, Marvel , and for TV. She lives in Northern New Mexico.

Angela Slatter

Angela Slatter in a multi-award-winning Australian writer of dark fantasy and horror. Her latest publications are the gothic fairytale novel All the Murmuring Bones from Titan, and the mosaic collection The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales from Tartarus Press. She has a PhD, teaches for the Australian Writers’ Centre, and is trying to finish a new gothic novel, Morwood.

(5) REHABILITATING “SOLO”. Mike Ryan, the senior pop culture reporter at UpRoxx makes a credible argument in favour of everyone’s most forgotten Star Wars movie: Solo. “You Know, ‘Solo’ Is Actually A Lot Of Fun”.

if you haven’t watched Solo in a while, away from all the drama and (maybe for you) bad lighting, give it another shot. It might just be the most pure fun Star Wars movie we’ve gotten from this era so far.

(6) SUE BURKE Q&A. Nerds of a Feather’s Andrea Johnson supplies the questions for “Interview: Sue Burke, Author of Immunity Index”.

NOAF: Secret sisters, a geneticist studying illegal technology, and a deadly virus. What inspired this story, and how did all those elements get into the story?

SB: The initial central question of the story is identity. What makes us the same and different? Some of it is genetics, and some of it is life experiences. What makes those differences stand out? People show their true nature in a disaster. Because the story is about genetics, I brought more genetics and more disaster into it. The elements posed a lot of questions, and the story resulted from one set of answers.

(7) ASIMOV’S SF EDITOR HAS THE ANSWERS. The Odyssey Writing Workshop shares “Odyssey Podcast #138: Sheila Williams”.

Award-winning editor Sheila Williams was a guest lecturer at the 2020 Odyssey Writing Workshop. In this excerpt from a question and answer session, she answers questions about her editorial process, story endings, and what differentiates a good story from a story that she buys.

Sheila is the multiple Hugo Award-winning editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. She is also the winner of the 2017 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community.

(8) COSINE COMING BACK. COSine, the Colorado Springs, CO convention, will be held in person once more next January 14-16.  

Last June we had to make the difficult decision to postpone COSine 2021. After that we put ourselves into suspended animation until such time as a vaccine for COVID was available and an appropriate supply of lemon-soaked paper doilies could be acquired.
 
Well, the doilies arrived, and most of us have aching arms, so it looks like we are on track for COSine 2022:

Guest of Honor: C.J. Cherryh
Artist Guest of Honor: Jane Fancher
Special Guests: Connie Willis & Courtney Willis

Our lowest rates for registration are available through the end of October, but if you want to sign up now, you can beat the Halloween rush! At the very least, please make sure that we are on your calendar.

(9) HORROR UNIVERSITY. It’s time to enroll for the virtual Horror University, part of the Horror Writers Association’s StokerCon coming May 20-23. See the session schedule at the link. One session, $55/members, $65/nonmembers; multiple-session discounts available.

Horror University is one of the most successful and popular aspects of StokerCon™. We are proud to present another great series of workshops for StokerCon™ 2021. Horror University furthers the Horror Writers Association’s focus on education with a curriculum run by some of the best and brightest in the horror field.

HORROR UNIVERSITY offers a series of 90 minute to two-hour workshops. They are not your typical workshop experiences—they are hands-on, intensive classes that include interactive activities and exercises. Workshop registration will open April 12. Workshops for this year’s Horror University will be virtual, part of Horror University Online. All HU courses will be run through the Horror University School on Teachable.com and require separate registration and additional payment as has been the practice at all past StokerCons.

All workshops are in Eastern Standard Time. Click the workshop titles in the table below for more detailed information about each workshop and instructor. Pricing is provided below.

(10) THEY DIDN’T ABANDON HOPE. Sarah Gailey’s new “Building Beyond” writing prompt is “See You In Hell”. Amanda Hamilton and Brendan Williams-Childs play along.

Hell is an urban metropolis in the middle of a sprawling agrarian underworld. You’ve just moved to a farm about six hours upstate from Hell.

Amanda Hamilton (she/her) is a chaos scheduler for her spouse, daughter and myriad pets. She’s also a fundraising professional, primarily focused on corporations and foundations these days. When not managing various and sundry to-do lists, she likes to read and nap and read some more.

Gailey: What is it about Hell that made you decide to move?

They always said that if you could make it in Hell, you could make it anywhere. Well, after a decade of (barely) making it, I was done…. 

(11) PREDICTING THE PRESENT. Salon did a Q&A with Andy Weir and put one of his quotes in a headline: “’I don’t want to be L. Ron Hubbard’: Andy Weir on writing escapism & new book ‘Project Hail Mary’”.

…At its core, science fiction as a genre reflects the fears, anxieties, politics, events, and mood of the present. Thus, the immediate question: What type of science fiction (and speculative fiction more broadly) will the Age of Trump and its aftermath produce?

In an effort to answer that question I recently spoke with author Andy Weir whose first best-sellling novel “The Martian” was adapted by Ridley Scott into a 2015 blockbuster feature film of the same title starring Matt Damon. Weir’s other work includes the novel “Artemis” and the beloved short story “The Egg.”…

What type of science fiction writing and other works – and creative arts more generally – do you think are going to come out of this moment?

My book “Project Hail Mary” was finished before the pandemic. The story involves an alien microbe. It may seem that “Project Hail Mary” is somehow-pandemic related, but that is just pure coincidence. Moreover, this microbe does not infect humans; it infects stars in outer space.

I honestly do not know what is going to come out of this.

I do not think that there is going to be quite as much disease-related science fiction, as one might suspect. We are all going through this pandemic, and when it’s over, it will be a common experience. It is not really something we are going to enjoy reminiscing about. We will never forget the experience with the pandemic, but it is not something we are going to want to mentally relive.

My instinct is that the pandemic experience is not going to impact science fiction very much because science fiction and fantasy are on a basic level about escapism. Spend some time in the world of this book so that you can enjoy yourself away from the world that you live in. The last thing anybody wants is for a book to drag them back to the world that they live in.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born May 5, 1856 – W.W. Denslow.  First illustrator of Baum’s Wizard of Oz; also illustrated Baum’s Father Goose and Dot and Tot of Merryland.  Designed the sets and costumes for the 1902 stage version of Wizard.  Illustrated Denslow’s Mother Goose, Denslow’s “Night Before Christmas”, 18-vol. Denslow’s Picture Books.  Comic strip Denslow’s Scarecrow and Tin Man.  Newspaper reporter, editorial cartoonist, poster artist.  Designed books and bookplates.  (Died 1915) [JH]
  • Born May 5, 1907 – Pat Frank.  Wrote what I’ve long thought the best-made atomic-bomb-and-after novel Alas, Babylon; two more novels, one shorter story for us; two other novels; memoir; journalism.  Office of War Information overseas correspondent during World War II.  American Heritage Foundation Award.  (Died 1964) [JH]
  • Born May 5, 1942 — Lee Killough, 79. Author of two series, the Brill and Maxwell series which I read a very long time ago and remember enjoying, and the Bloodwalk series which doesn’t ring even a faint bell. I see she’s written a number of stand-alone novels as well – who’s read deeply of her? (CE)
  • Born May 5, 1943 — Michael Palin, 78. Monty Python of course. I’ll single him out for writing the BFA winning Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and co-writing the BSFA winning Time Bandits with Terry Gilliam. And it might be at least genre adjacent, so I’m going to single him out for being in A Fish Called Wanda for which he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. (CE) 
  • Born May 5, 1944 – Dave Locke.  Active fanziner, e.g. Awry; electronic zine Time and Again.  Loved by some, annoyed others (can this surprise you?), or both.  Among his best, What do birds of a feather do?  Dave Locke.  More here.  (Died 2012) [JH]
  • Born May 5, 1944 — John Rhys-Davies, 77. He’s known for his portrayal of Gimli and the voice of Treebeard in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, General Leonid Pushkin in The Living Daylights, King Richard I in Robin of Sherwood,  Professor Maximillian Arturo in Sliders, a most excellent Hades in the animated Justice League Unlimted series, Hades in Justice League and Sallah in the Indiana Jones films. Oh, and voicing Macbeth in the exemplary Gargoyles animated series too.(CE) 
  • Born May 5, 1957 — Richard E. Grant, 64. He first shows up in our world as Giles Redferne in Warlock, before going on to be Jack Seward in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. On a lighter note, he’s Frederick Sackville-Bagg in The Little Vampire, and the voice of Lord Barkis Bittern in Corpse Bride. He breaks into the MCU as Xander Rice in Logan, and the Star Wars universe by being Allegiant General Enric Pryde in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. (CE) 
  • Born May 5, 1958 – Ingrid Nielson, age 63.  Drawings pp. 15, 21, Program Book for ConFederation the 44th Worldcon; see here (PDF).  Photo of her & Andre Norton here.  Moderated panel “ASFA [Ass’n of Science Fiction & Fantasy Artists of America] and the Chesleys” at Chicon VI the 58th Worldcon.  2010 Chesley “for work on the Chesley Awards for 20+ years”.  [JH]
  • Born May 5, 1961 — Janet Brennan Croft, 60. She’s published any number of works on library science, but she is concentrated her research on Tolkien, winning the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inkling Studies for War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language, and Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien. I’d also like to single her work, Baptism of Fire: The Birth of the Modern British Fantastic in World War I. (CE)
  • Born May 5, 1963 – Michelle West, age 58.  Twoscore novels, fifty shorter stories (some as M. Sagara); book reviews for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; interviewed in Challenging Destiny, Lightspeed, Northern Dreamers.  Within a 4-page single-space rejection letter from Lester Del Rey was a curmudgeonly line of encouragement, and off she went.  [JH]
  • Born May 5, 1975 – Tanya Tagaq, age 46.  Canadian Inuk throat singer.  Six albums; also collaborator with Kronos Quartet, Buffy Sainte-Marie (here is TT’s cover).  Polaris Prize, Canadian Folk Music Award, two Junos, Western Canadian Music Award.  Novel for us Split Tooth won Indigenous Voices Award.  [JH]
  • Born May 5, 1979 — Catherynne M. Valente, 42. My favorite work by her? Oh, by far that’d be the two volumes of The Orphan’s Tales which I go back to fairly often — stunning writing. If you’ve not read them yet, here’s her telling “The Tea Maid And The Tailor” as excerpted from In the Night Garden which is from Green Man. (CE) 

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • Non Sequitur lives up to its name while depicting the first land-walking creatures.

(14) GETTING THE WORD OUT WITH PICTURES. [Item by Rose Embolism.] Jem Yoshioka, creator of the science fiction romance webcomic Circuits and Veins was tapped for the New Zealand Covid information campaign! The poster is seriously lovely!

(15) IF IT DIDN’T HAPPEN, IT’S NOT A SPOILER, RIGHT? In Brian Hiatt’s article for Rolling Stone, “Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr. Strange Almost Appeared in ‘WandaVision’”, Kevin Feige explains that Dr. Strange was going to appear in the last episode of WandaVision but he thought having Dr. Strange show up “would take it away from Wanda” so Benedict Cumberbatch was written out of the script. This is a preview of a big oral history of WandaVision in Rolling Stone that has yet to appear.

The story of WandaVision‘s main character, Wanda Maximoff, a.k.a. the Scarlet Witch (played by Elizabeth Olsen), is set to continue in 2022’s Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, but the two projects were almost linked much more directly. As Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige reveals in Rolling Stone‘s upcoming, extensive oral history of WandaVision, Marvel struck a deal with Benedict Cumberbatch to appear in the final episode of the show as Dr. Strange. But late in the process, they wrote him out.

“Some people might say, ‘Oh, it would’ve been so cool to see Dr. Strange,’” says Feige. “But it would have taken away from Wanda, which is what we didn’t want to do. We didn’t want the end of the show to be commoditized to go to the next movie — here’s the white guy, ‘Let me show you how power works.’” That meant the Dr. Strange movie, too, had to be rewritten. In the end, Feige says, Marvel’s process is “a wonderful combination of very dedicated coordination, and chaos. Chaos magic.”… 

(16) WHAT A CROCK. BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime brings you “Cookie Jar by Stephen King” in three parts.

After his mother’s untimely death, Rhett inherits a cookie jar which proves to have some very unusual properties…

‘I had sort of a peculiar childhood, because my mother was peculiar. Not outright crazy, but very, very peculiar. Stories were her way of staying sane… A way to cover that hole in reality the way you might cover a well with boards so no one would fall in. But her stories stopped working for her. Because the thing she was afraid of was in the house with her all along.’

From ‘The Bazaar of Bad Dreams’, Stephen King’s story adapted in three parts. Read by Colin Stinton.

(17) OUT TO LAUNCH. SpaceX posted about yesterday’s launch:

On Tuesday, May 4 at 3:01 p.m. EDT, SpaceX launched 60 Starlink satellites from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This was the ninth launch and landing of this Falcon 9 first stage booster, which previously launched Telstar 18 VANTAGE, Iridium-8, and six Starlink missions.

(18) BOARDING PARTY. Insider lets you “Watch Royal Marines Explore Storming a Ship at Sea With Jet Packs”.

The British military been exploring the possibility of boarding ships at sea with futuristic jet packs that let wearers fly over the water like Iron Man.

The “Jet Suit” was made by Gravity Industries. The company released a video Sunday that showed its operators wearing jet packs and working with the Royal Marines to launch from rigid inflatable boats and land aboard the Royal Navy Batch 2 River-class offshore patrol ship HMS Tamar.

(19) BAD LOOK? Politico has details as “Pentagon watchdog opens new probe into military’s handling of UFOs”.

…But one former top Pentagon intelligence official who has lobbied Congress to take more action on such sightings said on Tuesday that the IG’s involvement is a positive step to compel the military to take the issue more seriously.

“You are looking at how is it possible that restricted military airspace is being routinely violated for months and years and nobody is informed in the Defense Department or the Congress and there is a complete system breakdown,” said Christopher Mellon, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence. “That’s a valid thing for them to investigate.”

(20) RIDING ALONG. Sean D. serves up a “Microreview [Book]: Black Water Sister by Zen Cho” at Nerds of a Feather.

Our bodies can often seem possessed. To most people, that possession occurs in a metaphorical sense. Dogma possesses us, as it’s hammered down from society until it sticks, nailed down to our core whether we like it or not. And that dogma can deviate from what we want deep down, like how family values dictate who we can and can’t love. Black Water Sister explores that possession, and with clever skill, it combines it with literal possession. A family spirit inhabits the protagonist, while they’re dealing with family interference from all sides. It’s a compelling story that’s quality is heightened by witty dialogue, a pacey second half, and vibrant characters….

(21) NOT SF BUT WEIRD. The Canadian census has a soundtrack: “2021 Census soundtrack”.

As Canada’s statistical portrait, the census is a reflection of who we are and what makes us Canadian. Listen to our Spotify and YouTube playlists while you complete your 2021 Census questionnaire to experience the different facets of Canadian culture through the sounds of our celebrated musical talent. If these songs aren’t already among your favourite tracks, we hope that you have the opportunity to discover something new as you fill out your questionnaire online in May.

Get comfortable, press play, and let’s experience Canada’s musical talent together.

(22) BUTT OF THE JOKE. Left over from May the Fourth, the “R2-D2 & C-3PO 1980 Star Wars Anti Smoking PSA”.

R2-D2 and C-3PO from “Star Wars” in a 1980 anti-smoking public service announcement. Aired in 1984 on Milwaukee’s WVTV.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, James Davis Nicoll, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, and Rose Embolism for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 4/22/21 Do Jedi Name Their Lightsabers?

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(1) FREE ON EARTH DAY. Yes, it’s F.O.E. Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, in honor of Earth Day, has published Everything Change, Volume III, a free digital anthology of climate fiction featuring the winner and finalists of their 2020 global climate fiction contest. Edited by Angie Dell and Joey Eschrich, the book is available in a variety of digital formats. View the 10 original illustrations created by Brazilian artist João Queiroz at the book’s webpage (scroll down).

The title Everything Change is drawn from a quote by Margaret Atwood, our first Imagination and Climate Futures lecturer in 2014. The contest and anthology are presented by the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative at Arizona State University, a partnership of the Center for Science and the Imagination and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

Stories by: Barakat Akinsiku, Amanda Baldeneaux, J.R. Burgmann, Mason Carr, Scott Dorsch, Sigrid Marianne Gayangos, Kathryn E. Hill, Jules Hogan, Anya Ow, Natasha Seymour

(2) PENNSIC WAR DELAYED AGAIN. The Society for Creative Anachronism’s Pennsic War will not happen again in 2021, however, a non-SCA event called Armistice will be run at the same site. Here are excerpts from the official explanations:

From the Mayor: Pennsic War 49

G’Day Everyone When taking office in the position of Mayor for Pennsic 49 I made a promise to everyone. That promise was that above all else, I would endeavour to run a fiscally responsible and safe Pennsic 49. It was my dear friend and mentor Viscount Sir Edward that said to me “The people that attend this event are Pennsic, take care of them.” I promised him I would. Then COVID 19 hit and the entire world was plunged into a crisis, the like of which we have not witnessed in our lifetimes. Over the past few months, I have been in constant discussions with The Pennsic Seneschals Group (PSG), The President of the SCA Inc, Coopers Lake Management and my Pennsic Senior Executive Group. In addition, I have seen the comments from many of you and listened to the comments from my Deputy Mayors and their staff. I have kept you all updated as much as possible so that you all understand my decision-making process and so that you understand the path I am walking when I make decisions. Although change is happening and things are getting better, I must deal with the now, rather than what I think it may be like in 3 months’ time and unfortunately our vendors needs for commitment and certainty are requiring us to make commitments earlier than we originally intended. As Mayor of Pennsic 49, I was entrusted with, the welfare and safety of the entire Pennsic Family. It is therefore with great sadness that I must inform you today that, I have decided to Postpone Pennsic 49 for another 12 months to 2022. The new dates for Pennsic 49 will be 29 July 2022 – 14 August 2022. This has been an exceedingly difficult decision to make but I trust you understand the reasoning behind it.
…Yours in Service, Sir Gregory of Loch Swan Mayor Pennsic 49

To explain a little further, I just want to put a couple of ‘Myths” that are circulating to bed and for people to clearly understand a few things that have and are happening behind the scenes.

Please understand that SCA, Pennsic staff, and Coopers management are jointly working together to find a solution. A separate, non-SCA event Armistice was the best joint solution that solved the issues of liability, allowed the business to survive, and provided an event for folks.

1. We needed to make a decision earlier because as PA (Just talking about our PA based Support services) started to emerge from the pandemic and slowly ramp up their businesses to pre-pandemic levels over the next 6 months, vendors need some certainty about their future commitment for everything from Portaloos to Waste Disposal bookings. We could not commit to that as the Pennsic War considering the current rules the SCA has in place today for SCA events. That was one consideration in our decision.

2. …All these decisions were made in concert with the SCA, the Pennsic Financial Committee, and the Coopers management working together to determine the best path forward for this summer.

3. For the Pennsic War to survive for another 20+ years, we need to support the main business that has supported us over these many years, Cooper’s Lake Campground and many of the smaller businesses and merchants that rely on Pennsic for part of their yearly income.  They have survived 18 months of no business income and forced closure. That is tough for any business, let alone one, like Coopers Lake,  that solely depends on campers and events. To that end we have been in discussions with the Coopers Lake Management for weeks about their options to survive. Armistice is that option.

4. Armistice “IS NOT” taking over from the Pennsic War. The Coopers Lake Management don’t want that at all. This is a one off event to help them through another tough year and is supported by Pennsic War and many Pennsic staff will be working to make Armistice event successful. It’s an option that gives those that wish to camp and relax with friends in PA, under PA health Guidelines the option to do so in a relaxed medieval environment.

5. We are all adults. Many have asked how to support the Coopers, well I’d suggest that this is a way of doing that, even if you can’t attend the event. I registered even though it is likely I won’t be able to attend, given current international travel rules.

6. This “Is Not” an SCA event. It is a Coopers Lake event run under their rules and insurance.

I hope that clears up some of the questions. Simple language, we knew about this alternate event, were consulted and even offered our expertise to support it. I know, there will be those that want to see some hidden secret SMOF type agenda, but those that know me, know that isn’t the case….  

(3) TONY STARK, COME FORTH. “Marvel Fans Rent Billboard Campaigning For Iron Man To Be Brought Back To Life” – CinemaBlend has the story.

…The above image comes to us from a now-deleted Twitter post, which was shared a few hundred times ahead of its mysterious disappearance. Both the social media account and said billboard encourage Marvel fans to use the hashtag #BringBackTonyStarkToLife on April 24th, marks the two-year anniversary of Avengers: Endgame.

…It seems the Marvel fans behind the campaign want to see Iron Man/Tony Stark get a happy ending in the MCU. A number of characters fell throughout Infinity War and Endgame, including Black Widow. But Tony’s death hit especially hard, and his funeral scene was an emotional one considering Pepper Potts and their daughter Morgan.

While both Natasha and Tony died in Avengers: Endgame, Captain America was given a chance at a happy ending. After returning the Infinity Stones to their proper place in the timeline, Steve went back and lived his happy ending with Peggy Carter. It’s likely due to this that fans want to see Iron Man get the same treatment.

Still, it seems unlikely that Tony Stark would somehow be brought back to life in the MCU. The Russo Brothers have spoken about the importance of real stakes, and that includes death scenes. Tony Stark’s death wrapped up the character’s arc, and showed the real sacrifices that come with saving the galaxy.

(4) FIYAHCON PLANS. FIYAHCON 2021, a virtual convention centering the perspectives and celebrating the contributions of BIPOC in speculative fiction, will be held September 16-19.

…The event is hosted by FIYAH Literary Magazine and carries a variety of entertaining and educational content surrounding the business, craft, and community of speculative literature. The inaugural event took place in October of 2020 to great acclaim, and we look forward to doing it all again this year!

Get ready for three-point-five days of dynamic, entertaining content with BIPOC at the center of speculative literature discourse! The event takes place September 16-19, 2021 and includes panels, presentations, games, office hours, write-ins, workshops, kickbacks, and more.

Where the magazine is focused specifically on the elevation of Black voices in short speculative fiction, FIYAHCON seeks to center the perspectives and experiences of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color). The reasoning is that Black voices are not the least represented in the field, and we don’t want to exclude groups who are already systemically excluded from other spaces….

(5) THE THAWED LEFTOVER EQUATIONS. [Item by Cliff.] The premise for this movie sounds strangely familiar…. “Stowaway review – a devastating dilemma drives tense Netflix sci-fi” in the Guardian.

Ever since Sandra Bullock MacGyver’d her way from mid-orbit chaos back down to earth in Alfonso Cuarón’s show-stopping thriller Gravity, we’ve seen a rise in briskly efficient sci-fi competency porn. It’s a subgenre of films working off the thrill of watching high-stakes problem-solving, of professionals using their reality-rooted smarts to deal with fantastical situations. We’ve since seen Matt Damon use botany in The Martian, Amy Adams use linguistics in Arrival, Natalie Portman use cellular biology in Annihilation and Chris Pratt use Jennifer Lawrence in the unintentionally creepy Passengers. Just a few months after Netflix ventured into similar territory with George Clooney’s business first, emotion later drama The Midnight Sky, they’re taking us up into the stars with Stowaway, a late-stage acquisition title that should scratch that itch a little more successfully….

(6) TUBERS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the April 21 Financial Times, gaming columnist Tom Faber discusses the rise of virtual YouTubers, or “VTubers.”

CodeMiko is a video game character without a game.  The pink-haired avatar lives on Twitch, the live streaming platform owned by Amazon, where she chats with her half-million fans and interviews internet personalities in a signature style marked by absurdist humour and non sequiturs.  Her videos are immensely enjoyable, and they might just signal the next frontier of digital entertainment.

Controlling Miko is a human actress and programmer wearing a motion capture suit, known only as ‘The Technician.’  When The Technician moves or speaks, the Miko avatar mimics her precisely on screen.  This set up is a variation on the virtual YouTuber, or VTuber, a phenomenon where live streamers host videos as fictional characters, masked behind cutesy anime avatars..  As of last October, VTuber streams on YouTube were wracking up more than 1.5bn views a month.  It may seem curious that audiences choose animated figures over real humans, but the VTuber concept offers striking advantages to both streamers and viewers.

(7) THE PRESSURE IS ON. James Wallace Harris asks “Will Climate Change Crush Our Science Fictional Dreams?” at Classics of Science Fiction.

… Elon Musk might get people to Mars but we’ll discover two things. Living on Mars will not be the romantic fantasy that science fiction fans have always dreamed, and leaving Earth won’t save us. We’ll probably also return to the Moon, but we’ll discover trying to colonize it will be nearly impossible and we’ll learn the true value of the Earth and its biosystem that was so perfect for us.

As the years progress and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases and the percentage of habitable land decreases I believe our desire for space travel will wane. We won’t have to wait for dramatic sea level rise for everyone to be convinced, heat waves will start to kill millions. Just read the first chapter of The Ministry for the Future to understand. I expect events like it will come true sometime this decade. We won’t need to see drowned cities to know the disciples of Ayn Rand have doomed us. Increasing weather catastrophes, declining food production, and mass migrations of refuges will make it plain enough we made the wrong decisions and believed the wrong people….

(8) CON WILL REQUIRE ATTENDEES BE VACCINATED. Blerdcon, to be held July 16-18 in Washington, D.C., announced on Facebook they have decided to make Blerdcon 2021 “a vaccine mandated event (even if you HAD covid and recovered).”

…Only those having received their completed vaccine regiment and showing their Covid-19 Vaccination Record Card at registration will be admitted into the convention. This extends to all staff, volunteers, vendors, contractors and sponsors.

The community simply has too much to lose and nothing to gain by taking on any unnecessary risks, even as we anticipate low infection/high vaccination rates for mid-July. So we are adding this to our other anti-covid measures: outdoor parties and events, spaced seating in all panel rooms, mask mandate for all indoor spaces, sanitation stations, nightly cleaning.

(9) CAPTAIN JACK IS IMMORTAL – YOU ARE NOT. Radio Times thinks they have found some Secret Information in the advertising for a comic book: “Doctor Who leaks | Will time windows and Captain Jack be in series 13?” If you don’t want to know a possible spoiler – don’t blink click!

… The synopsis was originally found on the official Penguin Random House website, and while it has since been removed it is still publicly available to view on other sites. When contacted by RadioTimes.com, the BBC declined to comment on “speculation.”

(10) POWELL OBIT. Costume designer Anthony Powell died April 18 at the age of 85 reports Deadline. Powell won multiple awards for non-genre productions — a Tony Award for the costumes of 1963’s School for Scandal, and Oscars in 1972 for Travels with My Aunt  1978 for Death on the Nile and in 1979 for Tess. He received the Costume Designers Guild’s Career Achievement Award in 2000. For genre work he earned Academy Award nominations for Pirates (1986), Hook (1991) and 102 Dalmatians (2000) (for the costumes of Glenn Close’s Cruella de Vil). His other credits included Sorcerer, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 101 Dalmatians, The Avengers, The Ninth Gate and Miss Potter, the 2006 Beatrix Potter biopic.

(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • April 22, 2005 — On this day in 2005, Star Trek: Enterprise went where the original series and Deep Space Nine had gone before as they ventured into the Mirror Universe with “In A Mirror Darkly”  with the first part of a two-part adventure in the program’s fourth season. (Star Trek: Discovery would later retcon itself into this universe.)  It was written by Mike Sussman who got his start on Star Trek: Voyager and wrote nearly thirty Trek episodes across the two series.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born April 22, 1887 – Kurt Wiese.  A score of covers, many interiors for Walter Brooks’ Freddy the Pigbooks.  Among much else, here is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; Caldecott Honor for You Can Write Chinese.  (Died 1974) [JH]
  • Born April 22, 1899 – Vladimir Nabokov.  Scientist, poet, translator, critic, teacher, fiction author, memoirist.  Said he didn’t like SF but wrote some anyway, e.g. “Lance”.  Superb treatment of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “Metamorphosis” in Lectures on Literature.  (Died 1977) [JH]
  • Born April 21, 1902 — Philip Latham. Name used by Robert Shirley Richardson on his genre work. His novels were largely first published in Astounding starting in the Forties, with the exception of his children’s SF novels that were published in Space Science Fiction Magazine. He also wrote a few scripts for Captain Video, the predecessor of Captain Video and his Video Rangers. His Comback novel starts this way: ‘ When Parkhurst heard the announcement that climaxed the science fiction convention, he found that he’d been right, years ago when he had faith in science-fictionists’ dreams. But, in another way, he’d been wrong . . .’ It’s available at the usual digital suspects for a buck. (Died 1981.) (CE) 
  • Born April 22, 1928 – Robert Schulz.   Two dozen covers.  Here is The Sword of Rhiannon.  Here is The Caves of Steel.  Here is Space Tug.  Here is Beyond Time and Space.  (Died 1978) [JH] 
  • Born April 21, 1937 — Jack Nicholson, 84. I think my favorite role for him in a genre film was as Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick. Other genre roles include Jack Torrance in The Shining, Wilbur Force in The Little Shop of Horrors, Rexford Bedlo in The Raven, Andre Duvalier in The Terror, (previous three films are all Roger Corman productions), Will Randall in Wolf, President James Dale / Art Land in Mars Attacks! and Jack Napier aka The Joker in Tim  Burton’s The Batman. (CE) 
  • Born April 21, 1977 — Kate Baker, 44. Editor along with with Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace of the last two print issues of Clarkesworld .  She won the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine twice, and the World Fantasy Award (Special Award: Non Professional in 2014, all alongside the editorial staff of Clarkesworld . She’s a writer of three short genre stories, the latest of which, “No Matter Where; Of Comfort No One Speak”, you can hear it here. Warning it has as subject matters abuse and suicide. (CE)
  • Born April 21, 1984 — Michelle Ryan, 37. She had the odd honor of being a Companion to the Tenth Doctor as Lady Christina de Souza for just one story, “Planet of the Dead”.  She had a somewhat longer genre run as the rebooted Bionic Woman that lasted eight episodes, and early in her career, she appeared as the sorceress Nimueh in BBC’s Merlin. Finally I’ll note she played Helena from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in BBC’s Learning project, Off By Heart Shakespeare. (CE) 
  • Born April 22, 1943 – Louise Glück, age 78.  Her poem “Circe’s Power” is anthologized here.  In The Wild Iris flowers talk with a gardener and an “unreachable father”.  Pulitzer Prize, William Carlos Williams Award, Bollingen Prize, U.S. Poet Laureate 2003-2004, Nat’l Humanities Medal, Nobel Prize.  Professor at Yale.  [JH]
  • Born April 21, 1944 — Damien Broderick, 77. Australian writer of over seventy genre novels. It is said that The Judas Mandala novel contains the first appearance of the term “virtual reality” in SF. He’s won five Ditmar Awards, a remarkable achievement. I know I’ve read several novels by him including Godplayers and K-Machines which are quite good. (CE) 
  • Born April 22, 1966 – Marie Javins, age 55.  Editor-in-chief at DC Comics.  Has done Marvel too, e.g. prose adaptation of graphic novel Iron Man: In extremis; with James Gunn, The Art of “Guardians of the Galaxy”.  Colorist.  Travel writer.  Website.  [JH]
  • Born April 22, 1989 – Catherine Banner, age 32.  Three novels for us, the first when she was 19; another outside our field well received.  Lives in Turin.  “I underwent a shift, as all writers who continue writing beyond adolescence probably do, from thinking ‘What story shall I write?’ to asking, instead, the more pertinent question, the one which can sustain a lifetime of work: ‘How can I do justice to this story I feel I must tell?’”  [JH]

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bizarro reveals the surprise ending to a crime story.

(14) THE HOSTS WITH THE MOST. “’Jeopardy!’: Robin Roberts, LeVar Burton & George Stephanopoulos To Guest Host” says Deadline. A different source reports LeVar Burton’s episodes will air July 26-30.

Jeopardy! has unveiled the final group of season 37 guest hosts, with Robin Roberts, LeVar Burton and George Stephanopoulous among the TV personalities set to lead the  popular trivia game.

Executive producer Mike Richards revealed that David Faber, who is a former Celebrity Jeopardy! champion,  and Joe Buck will also step up to the lectern to wrap up the game show’s 37th season. Previous season 37 guest hosts, who have stepped in for the late longtime host Alex Trebek, include Anderson Cooper, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Savannah Guthrie, Bill Whitaker, Mayim Bialik, Katie Couric and Aaron Rodgers.

(15) RITE GUD. Raquel S. Benedict has released more Rite Gud podcast episodes. (Previously identified in this space by her initials, she is now going by her full name.)  

What makes a writer? Is it coffee and cats? Is it a good author photo? Is it having a screenname like @JaneDoeWrites? Is it in your soul, in your bones, in your DNA? Is it collecting photos of books and sharing writing memes and penning endless posts about writing (specifically, about how much you hate it)?
In this episode, Carmilla Mary Morrell joins us to talk about the dark secret of being a writer: you have to fucking write. We also discuss the problem of defining people by rigid identities and the Doctrine of Dog Cum.

If you’ve spent any time talking about geek culture, you’ve probably seen one word come up over and over again: gatekeeper. To be a gatekeeper is bad. To be a gatekeeper is exclusionary and harmful and discriminatory.

The internet was supposed to get rid of gatekeepers and usher in a new, democratic era of content, an era free of inequality or bias or those evil old boogeymen called gatekeepers. But is it really? Are we really getting rid of gatekeepers, or are we just replacing the old gatekeepers with new ones?

In this episode, Colin Broadmoor joins us to talk about fandom, The Monk, and why fiction should hurt.

If you’re into science fiction and fantasy, you might have heard of something called hopepunk. Hopepunk, according to its supporters, is a creative movement that believes that producing and consuming optimistic fiction will make the world a better place. But does hopepunk really offer meaningful hope and revolution, or is it just a way to numb yourself and hide from the world?

In this episode, Sid Oozeley gets on the mic to talk about how all fiction is escapist: the only question is, what are you escaping from?

(16) PINBALL WIZARDRY. SYFY Wire tells what players what to expect when “Star Wars Pinball, Resident Evil go VR in Oculus virtual reality gaming showcase”.

With Baby Yoda and Din Djarin as ringside spectators, you might think there’d be galactic levels of pressure not to foul up a task — even if it’s something as casual as a game of Star Wars Pinball. But in Oculus’ big quest (pun intended) to bring the galaxy far, far away and other big-name game franchises to its family of VR platforms, it all actually ends up feeling pretty fun….

For its VR upgrade, Star Wars Pinball isn’t just replaying the classics, it’s also roping in newcomers to Lucasfilm’s ever-expanding galaxy. In addition to familiar tables based on the original films, watch for a pair of new themes created specifically for VR, as well as franchise newcomers straight out of The Mandalorian. While Oculus unveiled the new look, its Quest platforms aren’t the only place you’ll be able to hone your virtual skills; in addition to Oculus Quest 1 & 2, Star Wars Pinball is also headed to Steam VR and PlayStation VR on April 29….

(17) BUTLER RESEARCHER. In “How Octavia Butler Created Her SciFi Worlds” at Jezebel. Joyzel Acevedo interviews Lynell George, author of A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler.

Originally, it was Lynell George’s mother who was the Octavia Butler fan. A Los Angeles-based English teacher for 30 years, George’s mother would hand Butler’s books to students who didn’t like reading; “‘What are you interested in? Who are you? Oh, here, this is for you’,” she recalls. Once, she brought George along to a Butler reading in Pasadena, California, and George describes the awe she felt seeing Butler in person for the first time: “There was something very powerful about this tall, Black woman walking to the bookstore and sitting inches away from me—it was a small store—to talk about her work, to talk about writing.”…

(18) ZOOM WITH OKUNGBOWA. Powell’s Books presents Suyi Davies Okungbowa in conversation with S. A. Chakraborty on May 18, at 5:00 PM Pacific. Register for the Zoom webinar here.

From Suyi Davies Okungbowa, one of the most exciting new storytellers in epic fantasy, comes Son of the Storm (Orbit), a sweeping tale of violent conquest and forgotten magic set in a world inspired by the precolonial empires of West Africa. In the ancient city of Bassa, Danso is a clever scholar on the cusp of achieving greatness — only he doesn’t want it. Instead, he prefers to chase forbidden stories about what lies outside the city walls. The Bassai elite claim there is nothing of interest. The city’s immigrants are sworn to secrecy. But when Danso stumbles across a warrior wielding magic that shouldn’t exist, he’s put on a collision course with Bassa’s darkest secrets. Drawn into the city’s hidden history, he sets out on a journey beyond its borders. And the chaos left in the wake of his discovery threatens to destroy the empire. Okungbowa will be joined in conversation by S. A. Chakraborty, author of The Daevabad Trilogy.

(19) CAN’T BEAT THAT. The Guardian’s Alison Flood celebrates a new edition of the author’s first book in “Terry Pratchett’s debut turns 50: ‘At 17 he showed promise of a brilliant mind’”. There’s a 2-minute audio clip at the link.

In November 1971, a debut novel from a young author was published, to a small but not insignificant splash. Set in a world of tiny people who live in a carpet, it was described by the book trade journal Smith’s Trade News as “one of the most original tots’ tomes to hit the bookshops for many a decade”, while Teachers’ News called it a story of “quite extraordinary quality”.

The unknown author was Terry Pratchett, and the book was The Carpet People. This week, publisher Penguin Random House Children’s is releasing a 50th-anniversary edition, with Doctor Who and Good Omens star David Tennant reading the new audiobook.

“Terry would have loved knowing that David was going to do it,” said Rob Wilkins, Pratchett’s former assistant and friend who now manages the Pratchett estate. “David was a Doctor Who that really mattered in the Pratchett household, so he would have been so thrilled.”…

(20) VENISON WITH A VENGEANCE. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert shows what happens when you mess with nature in “Bambi Returns: The Clone Wars”.

(21) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “How WandaVision Should Have Ended” on YouTube, the How It Should Have Ended Team thinks WandaVision would be better with the addition of several DC superheroes, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves! QUITE POSSIBLY SPOILERS.

[Thanks to Peer, John Hertz, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, N., Andrew Porter, Cliff, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, JJ, Raquel S. Benedict, IanP, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 3/16/21 I Want To Be In The Scroll Where It Pixels

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(1) HUGO NOMINATING DEADLINE IMMINENT. DisCon III, the 2021 Worldcon, told Facebook readers yesterday that 674 people have submitted Hugo Awards nominations so far. Don’t miss out! The deadline to cast your nominating ballot is this Friday March 19 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific.

(2) OR OH, SO NICE. James Davis Nicoll finds “Five SF Stories in Which Kindness Prevails” for Tor.com readers.

There are many people in the world who seem to agree that the correct reaction to impediments, setbacks, and personal affronts is a firm, unambiguous response. After all, how are people to understand that “its” and “it’s” are two different words if their homeworld is not immediately reduced to a lifeless cinder? But there are enough of us who prefer kinder, gentler responses that we form an audience for writers who give us protagonists who are kind… and still manage to prosper. Could the power of niceness possibly prevail in the real world? Perhaps not, but niceness makes for comforting reading….

(3) WHO’S SORRY NOW. Cruella De Vil is not “oh, so nice” – this sneak peek from Emma Stone’s forthcoming Disney movie shows some of the reasons why.

(4) A MYSTERIOUS IMPROVEMENT. Kim Neville, in “How Reading Mystery Novels Made Me a Better Fantasy Writer” on CrimeReads, says that reading mysteries helped her plot and structure her first novel, The Memory Collectors.

…When I started writing The Memory Collectors, the task of holding an entire, novel-length plot in my head seemed impossible. I’d had some success with short fiction, but the ability to manage the intricacies of a larger story, with multiple characters and subplots, seemed its own kind of magic. I didn’t understand how other authors did it. My strengths lay in beautiful descriptive passages and character explorations. Over time, I’d learned to craft effective dialogue and individual scenes. Where I struggled most was with overall story structure. My previous attempts at novels were a jumble of interesting characters and intriguing hooks that led…nowhere.   

I knew I needed help, so I turned to the masters, and to those books where plot shines most brilliantly. I started reading mystery, crime and psychological thrillers, everything from Agatha Christie to the latest Karin Slaughter… 

(5) THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN, ER, WINTER SOLDIER. Io9’s James Whitbrooktells how the “Falcon and Winter Soldier Final Trailer Tackles Cap’s Legacy”.

… The “final” trailer—cutting it a bit tight, considering the six-episode series begins this week!—gives us a better look at the Flag Smashers and their mysterious leader, Karli Morgenthau (played by Solo: A Star Wars Story’s Erin Kellyman). In the comics, Flag-Smasher (there have been two to hold the mantle, Karl Morgenthau and Guy Thierrault) was, uh…an anti-nationalist terrorist pushing back against the idea of countries as a concept, particularly American exceptionalism as a foe of Captain America?…

(6) LIBRARY OF HORROR CLASSICS. The next volume being added to the Horror Writers Association’s Haunted Library of Horror Classics is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite and Other Tales of Terror, “Nine spine-tingling stories from the creator of Sherlock Holmes.” Ships May 4. Available for pre-order at the link.

Mournful cries in an ice-bound sea, a potion that allows the user to commune with ghosts, an Egyptian priest who cannot die, and a mesmerist of unrivaled power. Brace yourself for these and other chilling encounters in The Parasite and Other Tales of Terror. Even before he created Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle terrified and delighted readers with tales of suspense, haunted by mysterious forces that defy rational explanation. These stories capture the unique draw of the uncanny and the curiosity that compels us all to ask, “Could it be true?”

Presented by the Horror Writers Association, and introduced by award-winning author Daniel Stashower, this collection illuminates Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s talent for the macabre and the supernatural. The Parasite and the other stories in this collection showcase Conan Doyle at his most inventive, sure to entertain both new readers and his most dedicated fans.

(7) SPOILERVISION. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Spoiler alert, don’t watch this Honest Trailers video until you’ve finished watching all 9 episodes of WandaVision, because spoilers galore. (As with many of these things, they’re often not wrong about criticisms, but that’s show biz.)

(8) YOU CAN HELP. Katrina Templeton, who commented here as Katster, is asking for help — “Fundraiser by Katrina Templeton : Mom is dying. We need help with expenses.” At this writing they’re raised $2,900 of the $5,000 goal.

I wish I never had to make this post. My mom is dying and it looks like we’re going to need help with the funeral expenses. My mom was my scout leader as a kid, my fiercest advocate, and my sounding board. It hurts to have to type this up. I’m sure Jill would say the same thing and Dad — well, Dad is just destroyed by the whole thing. We’ve always struggled a bit — the best gift my mom might have given us is how to keep surviving and fighting even when the odds are stacked against us.

We’re going to need these funds as soon as possible, because the timeframe Mom’s got left isn’t very long. So if there’s any way you can help, I’d appreciate it. We might not make the full number here, but anything can help. Jill and I are handling the funeral expenses, so any money I get is going to be put into my savings account until the point we need them.

(9) KOTTO OBIT. Actor Yaphet Kotto (1939-2021) died March 14 reports Comicbook.com.

Alien star Yaphet Kotto has died. A statement shared to his official Facebook page by his wife reveals the actor passed away Sunday night due to unknown causes. Though Kotto was best known for his role as technician Dennis Parker in Alien, the actor appeared in other mainstay hits throughout the 1980s and 1990s, such as NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street, [the Bond movie] Live and Let Die, and The Running Man. He was 81.

Kotto also was in The Puppet Masters (1994).

(10) DARROW OBIT. Actor Henry Darrow (1933-2021) died March 14 at the age of 87. Although by 1965 he had already been in episodes of The Outer Limits and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, it was while appearing that year in the stage production of Ray Bradbury’s The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles that he was seen by the producer who would cast him in the Western series The High Chapparal, his most famous role. Darrow later appeared in the vampire-Western Curse Of The Undead, The Invisible Man (1975), Halloween With The New Adams Family, Beyond The Universe and The Hitcher. He was the first Latino actor to portray “Zorro” on TV (over three different shows). His other genre work included The Wild Wild West, Rod Serling’s Night Gallery (as “Dr. Juan Munos” in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Cool Air’), Kung Fu (‘The Brujo’), The Six Million Dollar Man, Gemini Man, Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, The Incredible Hulk, Knight Rider, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Time Trax, Star Trek: Voyager, Babylon 5, Nightman and Beyond Belief: Fact Or Fiction.

(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • March 16, 2003 –Eighteen years ago on this date, Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune first aired on the Sci Fi Channel. Based on Frank Herbert’s novels Frank Herbert’s  Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, it was the sequel to Frank Herbert’s Dune. It was directed by Greg Yaitanes off a screenplay by John Harrison, executive producer of the forthcoming Dune film. It starred James McAvoy, Alec Newman, Julie Cox,  Daniela Amavia, Alice Krige and Susan Sarandon. Both it and its predecessor are two of the highest rated series ever broadcast on the network, and both hold an eighty percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. 

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born March 16, 1920 — Leo McKern. He shows up in a recurring role as Number Two on The Prisoner in  “The Chimes of Big Ben”, “Once Upon a Time” and “Fall Out”. Other genre appearances include Police Inspector McGill in X the Unknown, Bill Macguire in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Professor Moriarty in  The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, The Voice of Gwent in “The Infernal Machine” episode of Space: 1999. (Died 2002.) (CE) 
  • Born March 16, 1926 – Edwar al-Kharrat.  Two novels for us available in English.  Nahguib Mahfouz Medal (although Rama and the Dragon was later translated).  Al-Owais Cultural Award.  Translator into Arabic of Keats, Shelley, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy.  “I want there to be something in … everything I write … which will make even a single reader lift his head proudly and feel with me that in the end the world is not a desolate, meaningless landscape….  I write because the world’s a riddle, a woman is a riddle and so is my fellow man.  All creation is a riddle.”  See here.  (Died 2015) [JH]
  • Born March 16, 1935 – Olga Larionova, age 86.  A novel and a score of shorter stories, only three available in English that I know of, which is too bad, since she won the Aelita Prize and several others, one of few successful Russian women SF authors.  [JH]
  • Born March 16, 1943 — Susan Bay Nimoy, 78. Wife of that actor. She portrayed Admiral Rollman in two episodes of Deep Space Nine: “Past Prologue” in the first season and “Whispers” in the second. Her only other genre appearance I believe was in the Mr. Merlin series. (CE) 
  • Born March 16, 1948 – Margaret Weis, age 73.  Twoscore novels, as many shorter stories, two poems, with Tracy Hickman; five novels and four shorter stores with Don Perrin; six novels and a shorter story with Robert Krammes; a few others; MW & TH created the Dragonlance game world, to which much of this writing relates; MW says her Star of the Guardians series is her favorite; however, she says, she does not read fantasy books.  Twenty-five million copies sold.  Website.  [JH]
  • Born March 16, 1951 — P. C. Hodgell, 70. Her best known work is the God Stalker Chronicles series with By Demons Possessed being the current novel. She has dabbled in writing in the Holmesian metaverse with “A Ballad of the White Plague” that was first published in The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes as edited by Marvin Kaye. All of the God Stalker Chronicles series are available from the usual suspects. (CE) 
  • Born March 16, 1952 — Alice Hoffman, 69. Best known for Practical Magic which was made into a rather good film. I’d also recommend The Story Sisters, a Gateway story, The Ice Queen, an intense riff off of that myth, and Aquamarine, a fascinating retelling of the mermaid legend. The Rules of Magic was nominated for Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature Award.  (CE) 
  • Born March 16, 1955 – James Warhola, age 66.  Fourscore covers, seventy interiors.  Fantasy art trading cards.  Here is The Persistence of Vision.  Here is Unicorn Variations.  Here is Stranger in a Strange Land.  Here is Jack of Shadows.  Related to Andy Warhol; Int’l Reading Ass’n Award for Uncle Andy’s.  Contributes to Mad.  [JH]
  • Born March 16, 1957 – Joseph DeVito, age 64.  A hundred covers, twoscore interiors.  Fantasy art cards.  Here is Voice of Our Shadow.  Here is Psycho (he did another one later).  Here is The Stepford Wives.  Here is the Winter 99 Amazing.  Here is Six Scarlet Scorpions.  Here is his bronze Centennial Tarzan.  Website.  [JH]
  • Born March 16, 1971 — Alan Tudyk, 50. Hoban “Wash” Washburne  in the Firefly universe whose death I’m still pissed about. Wat in A Knight’s Tale. (Chortle. Is it genre? Who cares, it’s a great film.)  He’s K-2SO in Rogue One and yes he does both the voice and motion capture. Impressive. He also had a recurring role on Dollhose as Alpha, he voiced a number of characters in the Young Justice series streaming on HBO Max, and he was a very irritating Mr. Nobody on the Doom Patrol series also on HBO Max. (CE)
  • Born March 16, 1974 – Aimee Lane, age 47.  Two novels and a short story, two covers, for us: here is Belfield’s Blue Moon.  Of herself she says “With an MBA and a degree in Applied Mathematics, there’s absolutely no reason she should be writing romance novels.”  Has read a Complete Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Where the Wild Things Are, both of Carroll’s Alice books, Les Misèrables, The Count of Monte Cristo, A Tale of Two Cities.  [JH]

(13) COMICS SECTION.

  • Candorville has a strategy for avoiding an AI takeover.
  • Macanudo suggests another fantasy writer unfairly ignored by the Nobel committee!

(14) LOVES JLA. Gail Simone tells about DC’s Justice League concept – but promises no #SnyderCut spoilers. Twitter thread starts here.

(15) STARGIRL’S NEXT OPPONENT. “Get a look at Stargirl’s Season 2 big bad Eclipso” at Lyles Movie Files.

I really enjoyed Stargirl’s first season as it finally leaned in on the legacy of the DCU in a way no other live-action property has really ever done. In the season finale, we got a tease of Season 2’s villain Eclipso and now we get our first look at him courtesy of TVLine….

Eclipso’s character description sounds promising:  “[an] ancient entity of corruption and vengeance, who is described as physically imposing and frightening. Brimming with a cold, terrifying darkness, Eclipso exploits the flaws of others, reveling in the impure and sinful, sadistically feeding off the dark side of humanity.”

The design is a pretty solid translation of more modern takes on Eclipso. Stargirl has done a fantastic job with the costumes so I wasn’t worried about that in the slightest and the show’s fantastic track record continues.

(16) DON’T STAND UNDERNEATH WHEN THEY FLY BY. The Conversation’s article“How do astronauts go to the bathroom in space?” comes with a dramatic finish —

…If you’ve ever seen a shooting star, it might have been a meteorite burning up in Earth’s atmosphere – or it might have been flaming astronaut poo. And the next time you have to pee or poop, be thankful that you’re doing it with gravity’s help.

(17) MOSTLY HARMLESS. Although you might prefer to take your chances with astronaut poo if this is the other choice: “ISS Ditches 2.9-Ton Pallet of Batteries, Creating Its Most Massive Piece of Space Trash” reports Gizmodo.

Weighing 2.9 tons and traveling 4.8 miles per second, this heap of old batteries is now the heaviest single piece of garbage to be jettisoned from the International Space Station.

The pallet is packed with nickel-hydrogen batteries, and it will stay in low Earth orbit for the next two to four years “before burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere,” according to a NASA statement. SpaceFlightNow reports that the pallet is the “most massive object ever jettisoned from the orbiting outpost.”

NASA spokesperson Leah Cheshier confirmed this as being the case.

“The External Pallet was the largest object—mass-wise—ever jettisoned from the International Space Station at 2.9 tons, more than twice the mass of the Early Ammonia Servicing System tank jettisoned by spacewalker Clay Anderson during the STS-118 mission in 2007,” wrote Cheshier in an email.

NASA’s ballistics officers “indicate no threat” of the pallet smashing into other space objects, but “this item, like all, will be tracked by U.S. Space Command,” she added.

It wasn’t the original plan for the pallet to be discarded like this. The failed launch of a Soyuz rocket in 2018, in which NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were forced to make an emergency landing in the Kazakh steppe, caused a disruption to the spacewalking schedule, leading to the leftover pallet….

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “HISHE Dubs – Justice League (Comedy Parody)–Theatrical Version” on YouTube, the How It Should Have Ended crew make fun of the theatrical version of Justice League in preparation for taking on the Snyder Cut.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Rich Horton, Michael Toman, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Daniel Dern, Mike Kennedy, JJ, and John Hertz for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Lorien Gray.]

Pixel Scroll 3/13/21 If You Like Antikythera, And Getting Caught In The Rain

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(1) WHAT MONEY CAN’T BUY. ALLEGEDLY. “’Batman Is Ours Alone to Exploit.’ DC Comics Warns Against Using Its Characters in NFTs” – Yahoo! Finance has the story. (Does that headline remind you of “All These Worlds Are Yours, Except Europa. Attempt No Landing There” – or is it just me?)

Publisher DC Comics, a subsidiary of Warner Bros, itself a unit of Time Warner, is unhappy with artists using its intellectual property (IP) in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and said it has its own plans for characters.  

In a letter sent to freelancers employed by the firm Thursday, Jay Kogan, DC Comics’ senior VP of legal affairs, stressed it is against company policy to sell digital images featuring DC’s IP with or without NFTs.

… Recently NFTs have become a craze with millions of dollars being spent on rare or desirable digital artworks. On Thursday, a piece of digital artwork or NFT by crypto artist Beeple was sold for a record $69.3 million by the auction house Christie’s….

What is a non-fungible token? Wikipedia says:

A Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a digital file whose unique identity and ownership are verified on a blockchain (a digital ledger). NFTs are not mutually interchangeable (see fungibility). NFTs to things such as a digital artwork are commonly auctioned at online NFT marketplaces. The token can be bought with cryptocurrency and resold.

NFTs are used to commodify digital things, such as digital art, video game items, and music files. Access to any copy of the original file, however, is not restricted to the owner of the token.

(2) WHO STARTED THIS SUBGENRE ANYWAY? Jeff Somers goes looking for “The Untold Truth Of The Origins Of Cyberpunk” at Grunge. (Even if you lived this history, a refresher course might be helpful just the same.)

These days, the word cyberpunk conjures up images of Keanu Reeves and, per Gizmodo, terribly, horribly broken video games.

Cyberpunk, a sub-genre of science fiction that explores a counter-cultural and anti-authoritarian worldview through the lens of a dystopian, technologically-advanced, and dehumanized future, has proved to be prescient. No other genre of speculative fiction has remained as relevant and useful over the course of decades. Cyberpunk stories are as powerful as ever, and examples dating back decades remain evergreen in a way that most sci-fi can’t manage….

…In the early 1980s, two short stories clarified the fact that this wasn’t just a loose collection of themes and tropes, but rather a distinct sub-genre of science fiction. As noted by The Verge, the first was “Burning Chrome” by William Gibson, published in 1982. Not only did this story literally introduce the word “cyberspace” to our vocabulary, it’s often identified as the first true example of cyberpunk. It tells the story of two hackers who use sophisticated software to steal a criminal’s fortune, only to be left bereft and heartbroken.

The word “cyberpunk” didn’t exist yet, however. As reported by the Encyclopedia Britannica, that happened when Bruce Bethke published a short story in 1982 that (per Infinityplus) was literally titled “Cyberpunk.” According to Neon Dystopia, Bethke purposefully invented the word to describe a future generation that would combine the nihilism and violence of angry teenagers with technical proficiency….

(3) FANHISTORY ONLINE. Joe Siclari provides a roundup of the incredible number of recent additions to The Fanac Fan History Project website in Fanac Newsletter 15 [PDF file]. A big part of their work is scanning fanzines and securing permission to host them online.

…The reason for digitally archiving fanzines is to make them accessible to fans everywhere. When someone hears how wonderful a storied fanzine like Quandry or The Acolyte was, they can use the archive to read the issues instead of just wonder what they were like. Originally, in the 1990s, we started retyping issues (and hey, thanks Judy Bemis!). In the 2000s we started putting up JPGs of each page, so readers could just click their way through. Now, we’re putting up searchable PDFs. One of our projects is to replace those fanzines that were accessible in typed or JPG form with searchable PDFs. Since the last newsletter, we have replaced our complete runs of the following titles with searchable PDFs: Aporrheta (H. P. Sanderson), Bane (Vic Ryan), Double Bill (Bill Bowers and Bill Mallardi), Fanscient (Donald Day), Fantastic Worlds (Edward Ludwig and Sam Sackett), Granfalloon (Linda Bushyager), Hyphen (Walt Willis and Chuck Harris), Innuendo (Terry Carr), Mota (Terry Hughes), Slant (Walter A. Willis), Stellar (Ted White and Larry Stark), Toto (Walt Willis et al), and Void (Jim and Greg Benford, Ted White). We’ve also replaced all the issues we have of: Cry of the Nameless (134 issues, F. M. Busby, Wally Weber, et al), Outworlds (70 issues, Bill Bowers, except for a one page flyer), and Spanish Inquisition (8 issues, Jerry Kaufman and Suzle Tompkins).

The latest newsletter includes two short and rather interesting articles about applying genealogical research to answer fanhistorical questions.

  • “Other people’s genealogy” by Leah Zeldes

…Transferring the list of names, I realized at least a third of the pre-reg members of Chicon, the 1940 Worldcon, were fictitious — alter egos of some of the others. Forry Ackerman accounts for at least seven of them…

  • “Using Genealogical Records to Find More Information on (Mostly Dead) Fans” by Laurie Mann

… Recently, I’ve started to give Mark Olson & Leah [Zeldes] Smith a hand with research for Fancyclopedia 3. We were trying to straighten out how some attendees of the 1939 Worldcon, Nycon 1, were related. There were a few attendees with the same last name (https://fancyclopedia.org/Nycon_1_Membership_List). Were they related? Multiple Nycon 1 registrants had last names like Alberti, Racic, Sykora, & Unger. I searched in the 1930 census through ancestry.com to see what I could find….

(4) DRACULA HAS QUESTIONS. In the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri says Dracula has been a good citizen and has been hiding in his castle, but now that the vaccine is coming, he wants to know if the vaccine has garlic in it and if he flies around as a bat during the day, does he have to wear a mask? “I have not left my castle in ages, and I have some questions about post-vaccine guidelines”.

…Yes, CDC, I have been living in seclusion for some time, unable to go out and about and enjoy all the delicacies of taste that I would wish. So my questions for you are legion. First: Should I get the vaccine? The only doctor I know, Van Helsing, counseled strongly against my receiving the vaccine at all, but in the past he has tried to stab me through the heart with a sharpened wooden stake, and I fear he does not have my best interests in mind….

(5) HE DID THE MASH. “Hergé’s heirs sue artist over his Tintin/Edward Hopper mashups” – The Guardian has the story.

A French artist who imagines romantic adventures for the boy adventurer Tintin in the landscapes of Edward Hopper has been sued by the Tintin creator Hergé’s heirs, who said it was not funny to take advantage of Tintin by putting him in an erotic universe, especially as Hergé had chosen not to caricature women.

In Breton artist Xavier Marabout’s Hergé-Hopper mashupsTintin is variously painted into Hopper’s Road and Houses, scratching his head as he greets a woman in a car; looking disgruntled in a version of Hopper’s Cape Cod Evening, 1939; and kissing a girl in a car, in a spin on Hopper’s Queensborough Bridge, 1913. On his website, Marabout describes his work as “strip art”, in which he “strips distant artistic universes to merge them together” in a style where “parody [is] omnipresent”….

(6) CROWN RESTORED. “’Avatar’ once again highest-grossing film of all time at the box office” — CNBC explains how the 2009 movie regained the record.

…Over the weekend, James Cameron’s sci-fi epic was rereleased in China and garnered enough in ticket sales to overtake “Avengers: Endgame” for the record.

“Avatar” first became the top-selling global release of all time in 2010 when it usurped Cameron’s “Titanic.” In 2019, “Avengers: Endgame” won the title with a $2.797 billion box office haul.

As of Saturday, “Avatar’s” box office gross surpassed $2.802 billion, allowing it to earn back its crown…

(7) CAT WITH NO HAT. “Sam and Bucky Debate If Doctor Strange Is a Wizard in Comedic Sneak Peek” at Yahoo! Entertainment.

…In the wake of the events of Avengers: Endgame, Sam and Bucky will team up for “a global adventure that tests their abilities — and their patience.” The six-episode spinoff is set to be a “cinematic experience” in which the pair navigate a world post-Steve Rogers’ Captain America. Expect plenty of action and more pop culture references.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born March 13, 1855 – Percival Lowell.  Founder of the Lowell Observatory.  Three books he meant as nonfiction, Mars, Mars and Its Canals, Mars as the Abode of Life; posthumously published poem “The Canals of Mars”.  Honorary degrees from Amherst and from Clark.  Prix Jules Janssen.  Traveled in and wrote about Japan and Korea.  Better data later showed his astronomical life-work was mistaken, but let us not minimize him.  (Died 1916) [JH]
  • Born March 13, 1911 – L. Ron Hubbard.  Never aspiring to great literature, he may have achieved it with Fear; he sought to be, and was, a first-rate yarn-spinner; his stories sold, among us and in Westerns, aviation, travel, romance.  So fluent he used many pseudonyms.  I’ve always liked the Ole Doc Methuselah stories, comedy on the science fiction – fantasy border; look for the Edd Cartier illustrations.  H toward the end of his life turned out another dozen novels in the old pulp style.  Battlefield Earth, the first of them, has a hero who loves his horse more than his girl; when he’s beaten the evil aliens, we get to wonder who was behind them, which proves to be interstellar bankers – sharkmen.  (Died 1986) [JH]
  • Born March 13, 1928 — Douglas Rain. Though most of his work was as a stage actor, he was the voice of the HAL 9000 for 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel. He’s in Sleeper a few years later as the voices of the Evil Computer and Various Robot Butlers. (Died 2018.) (CE) 
  • Born March 13, 1932 — Richard Lawrence Purtill, He’s here because EoSF lists him as the author of Murdercon, a 1982 novel where a murder is discovered at a SF Convention. I’ve not heard of it but was wondering if y’all had heard of this work. (Died 2016.) (CE) 
  • Born March 13, 1933 – Diane Dillon, age 83.  Widow of Leo Dillon; they worked together so intimately they sometimes said their graphic art was by a third person made of them both; anyway among our very best, likewise outside our field.  A hundred sixty covers, two hundred twenty interiors for us.  No. 10 here has my note on LD.  More? certainly: here is Mother Goose, Numbers on the Loose; here is Le Morte d’Arthur; here is To Every Thing There Is a Season; here is The People Could Fly; here here is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  [JH]
  • Born March 13, 1934 – Barry Hughart.  Lovable for Bridge of Birds (World Fantasy Award, Mythopoeic Award) and two sequels, set in “an Ancient China that never was”, or as one of us said, “filled with Chinese legend, mostly invented by the author…. [its] verisimilitude demonstrates the care with which Hughart studied actual Chinese folklore and history”, hello Steven.  Also worked on eight movies (will films pass out of use, or continue like hang up the telephone?).  So far this Website can still be viewed.  (Died 2019) [JH]
  • Born March 13, 1944 – Bonnie Dalzell, age 77.  Four covers, thirty interiors.  Here is the Apr 76 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  Here is the May 77 Galaxy.  Here is a Pierson’s Puppeteer; here is a bandersnatch.  Official Artist at Boskone 12.  Contributor to Mythologies.   [JH]
  • Born March 13, 1950 — William H. Macy Jr., 71. I’ll start his Birthday note by noting that he was in the superb Pleasantville as George Parker. He’s shown up in a lot of genre works including but limited to Somewhere in Time, Evolver, The Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue, The Night of the Headless Horseman, Jurassic Park III, Sahara and The Tale of Despereaux. (CE) 
  • Born March 13, 1956 — Dana Delany, 65. I’ve come today to praise her work as a voice actress. She was in a number of DCU animated films, first as Andrea Beaumont in Batman: The Mask of The Phantasm, then as Lois Lane in Superman: The Animated Series, Superman: Brainiac Attacks and Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox. (That’s not a complete listing.) Remember that Wing Commander film? Well there was an animated series, Wing Commander Academy, in which she was Gwen Archer Bowman. And though definitely not genre or even genre related, i must single out her role in Tombstone. (CE) 
  • Born March 13, 1959 – Steve Davies, age 62.  Chaired Eastercon 50.  Member, RSFG (Reading SF Group, i.e. of Berkshire, England; it ‘has a proud tradition of not organising things’).  Chaired Birmingham Univ. SF Soc.  Active in the PLOKTA (Press Lots Of Keys To Abort, ‘the journal of superfluous technology’) Cabal, thus part of two Nova awards and a Hugo for Best Fanzine. Composes filksongs (linking to Fancyclopedia III although I still think the Wikipedia article with E. Bull and P. Nielsen Hayden is swell).  [JH]
  • Born March 13, 1966 — Alastair Reynolds, 55. As depressing as they are given what they lead up to, The Prefect Dreyfus novels are my favorite novels by him. That said, Chasm City is fascinating. The only ones by him that I absolutely failed to have any enthusiasm for is his Revenger Universe series which leaves me cold. His next novel in the Revelation Space series, Inhibitor Phase, is out this July. (CE) 
  • Born March 13, 1967 — Lou Anders, 54. A Hugo-winning editor. He’s has been editorial director of Prometheus Books’ SF imprint Pyr since its launch fifteen years ago. He’s a crack editor of anthologies. I’ve very fond of his Live Without a Net,  Sideways in Time and FutureShocks anthologies. I note that he has a fantasy trilogy, Thrones and Bones, but I’ve not heard of it til now. (CE) 
  • Born March 13, 1986 – Ashley Christman, age 35.  Three novels.  “Grace Caldwell [is] so intimately connected with death that it frightens her….  Vampires are afraid of her and the Sidhe are confused by her….  her ex-boyfriend, FBI agent Jack Montgomery, blackmails her into helping him solve [omitted – JH].

(9) START THE PRESSES! “Marvel is going back to print on comics that sold out thanks to WandaVision craze” reports Yahoo! (In a way, Gene Wolfe would be shocked. He used to say – sarcastically – that the difference between a professional publisher and a fanzine editor is that if a faned sells out his zine he’ll print more.)

Never doubt Wanda Maximoff’s power to change reality. Her starring role in the Disney+ series WandaVision didn’t just dominate pop culture discourse for the past few months, it also has created a huge run on many of the most relevant Marvel comics featuring Scarlet Witch and the Vision.

EW has confirmed that Marvel has been going back to press for new print runs of Vision by Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta, Scarlet Witch by James Robinson and various artists, and Vision and Scarlet Witch by Steve Englehart and artists like Don Heck and Bill Mantlo, among other comics. House of M, the 2005 event series in which Wanda changed the entire reality of the Marvel Universe to one where her adoptive father Magneto ruled over mankind, had its print stock depleted “almost overnight” in the wake of WandaVision‘s premiere.

(10) SECRET IDENTITIES. “This Jewish female artist from the comic book golden age was overlooked for decades” at Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Like the comic superheroes they invented, the Jewish creators of the characters often had secret identities – at least different names. Superman creators Joe Shuster and Jerome Siegel used the pseudonyms Joe Carter and Jerry Ess. Bob Kane, born Robert Kahn, created Batman. Jack Kirby, the pen name of Jacob Kurtzenberg, concocted Captain America.

Although lesser known, the comic book heroine Señorita Rio was Hollywood starlet Rita Farrar by day and Nazi-fighting secret agent by night. The artist who drew Rio’s action-packed panels in the 1940s, and signed as L. Renee, lived a sort of double life, too.

“Everybody assumed I was a man,” artist Lily Renee Phillips has said of the fan mail she received at the time, which was always addressed to “Mr. Renee.” Fans knew neither Renee’s gender nor her incredible origin story, which rivaled the plotline of Señorita Rio. 

In the New York offices of Fiction House, the comic book publishing firm where Renee worked, she was a scrappy immigrant who worked her way up from erasing pencil marks to drafting her own heroines. Outside work she was a Vienna-born Holocaust survivor who fled Austria after the 1938 Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria. She escaped to England on a Kindertransport and reunited with her parents in New York in 1940….

(11) WORLDBUILDING IS CHARACTER BUILDING. In “The Mystery Is The Human Psyche: On Shakespeare, Crime, and Human Motivation” on CrimeReads, E.J. Beaton discusses how she studied Shakespeare’s use of psychology in her DAW fantasy novel The Councillor.

…If Julius Caesar were simply a retelling of political events, it wouldn’t be so compelling. The real drama lies not in how the assassination is arranged, but in why the main characters commit their crimes. Both Cassius and Brutus have feelings about Caesar as a person, and both have ideas about power and justice. One man prioritizes his envy, and the other lets his ideals override his friendship: that is where the humanity lies. We all choose between emotion and logic in our daily lives, and even high-ranking politicians question their loyalty to their leaders, oscillating between personal values and collective order….

Another dimension of Beaton’s novel is discussed in “My Favorite Bit: E.J. Beaton Talks About THE COUNCILLOR” at Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog.

…While I worked on my debut novel The Councillor, I realised that I wanted my main character, Lysande, to live in a world where being bisexual is normal. Because The Councillor is a fantasy novel, I had the chance to create a world where Lysande’s sexuality is not only accepted, but utterly unremarkable. She has a parcel of secrets to conceal, but in the realm of Elira, where the story is set, her sexuality isn’t one of those. I tried to people the story with other queer characters, and to include casual references to same-sex couples, too.

By the time I finished the novel, a word for these kinds of societies was floating around fantasy book spaces – “queernorm.” The power of that word rings in its very sound. Queerness is, by definition, strangeness, and in most societies, queer people are positioned as other to the cultural norm of straightness. So for queer to be norm sounds like a revolution. It feels like a sudden leap into full sun, hart-swift, with no going back.

(12) BE CAREFUL OUT THERE. CrimeRead’s Cynthia Pelayo says “Fairy Tales Are Dark For a Reason—They’re Trying to Warn Us About Danger”.

…It’s thought that the brothers [Grimm] kept much of the grim and gore, even heightening it a bit, because it stoked reader’s interests. Murder and mayhem sells. It’s also thought then that situations like mentions of pre-marital sex, like in Rapunzel, where her young suitor climbs into her tower, was omitted—or quickly glossed over.

So why did the brothers leave in so much terror, and I suppose why did Walt Disney find these tales suitable to adapt into childhood fantasy? Perhaps the horrible things were left in as a warning. That is all that most of us can assume right now, because in many fairy tales it is clear to interpret who is the protagonist and who is the villain. The lines are usually clearly drawn between good and evil, and in fairy tales, very often that evil is by chance—just like in life.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “System Error” from DUST.

George works at a convenience store, desperately hoping for a friend. But George is a robotic service unit, and robotic service units do not have friends. Not yet, anyway.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, JJ, Michael Toman, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, and John Hertz for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editors of the day Bill and Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 3/12/21 All Unshielded Surfaces

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(1) 2021 FAAN VOTING DEADLINE. FAAn Awards Administrator Nic Farey reminds everyone that today is the last day of voting – it closes tonight — March 12 — at midnight Pacific time. Guidelines and the ballot are available in The Incompleat Register 2020 [PDF file]

(2) SOLVING FOR PIE. Scott Edelman invites listeners to “Grab a slice of pie with Gil Roth” on Episode 140 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Gil Roth

I’ve been wanting to bring Gil to you for awhile, and had been hoping we’d be able to sneak away for a meal during either Readercon or the Small Press Expo, but neither occurred last year, at least not outside of a virtual space, and both will be virtual again this year. So as you listen, I’d like you to think of yourself as being with us at one of those cons, and tagging along as we head off to chat and chew.

We discussed his surprising (and my unsurprising ) guest with the greatest number of downloads, the advice John Crowley gave him about his potential writing career, how a guy who used to memorize X-Men comics got turned on to Love & Rockets, the way we process the deaths of former guests, the song he wants played at his memorial service, how to get often-interviewed guests not to regurgitate their favorite soundbites, why no comic book movie beats the first Superman, how he became the publisher of every letter Samuel R. Delany wrote in 1984, why during his days reviewing for The Comics Journal readers thought he was the secret identity of another writer, the Italo Calvino quote which has kept him going through the pandemic, and much more.

(3) YOUR IMAGINARY FRIENDS WHO WANT A PERCENTAGE. Victoria Strauss posted another Scam Alert at Writer Beware: “Paper Bytes Marketing Solutions and its Stable of Imaginary Agents”.

…To go with its brand-new name, Paper Bytes has initiated a brand new scam: a stable of imaginary literary agents. It’s an unusually detailed endeavor, with actual websites for each agent (albeit not very good ones) that include photos–some stock, some stolen–as well as made-up bios and false claims about who/what they represent. All share the email address @bookliteraryagent.com, which no doubt is convenient for the interchangeable roster of Paper Bytes marketers who inhabit these agent personas, but also makes them easier to track and expose.

I’ll list them all below. But first, How It All Works!…

…How to protect yourself?

1. Know how things work in the publishing world. Real literary agents don’t sell services to potential clients, or refer them to companies that do. Real agents don’t commonly contact writers out of the blue. The warnings at the Writer Beware website can help you recognize non-standard or predatory practices.

(4) ZIGGY STARDUST’S BROTHER BIGGY? Mental Floss recalls when “David Bowie Tried to Turn George Orwell’s ‘1984’ Into a Musical”.

The track list for David Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs offers a couple obvious clues about one source of inspiration: song titles include both “1984” and “Big Brother.” But Bowie didn’t just want to use themes from George Orwell’s 1984 on the record. As Open Culture reports, he initially hoped to turn the 1949 dystopian classic into a full-fledged musical of its own.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/x2xfpMMQIJ8 What form that musical was ultimately meant to take isn’t totally clear. According to Christopher Sandford’s biography Bowie: Loving the Alien, the adaptation would’ve been “a West End musical, with an accompanying album and film.” But in a Rolling Stone interview with William S. Burroughs from February 1974—just months before the release of Diamond Dogs—Bowie himself mentioned he was “doing Orwell’s 1984 on television.” It’s possible the project went through several iterations when the “Space Oddity” singer was still brainstorming it. But thanks to Orwell’s widow, Sonia (believed to be the basis for 1984‘s Julia), the musical never progressed past the incubation stage.

“My office approached Mrs. Orwell, because I said, ‘Office, I want to do 1984 as a musical, go get me the rights,’” Bowie explained in 1993, according to David Buckley’s Strange Fascination: David Bowie, the Definitive Story. “And they duly trooped off to see Mrs. Orwell, who in so many words said, ‘You’ve got to be out of your gourd, do you think I’m turning this over to that as a musical?’ So, they came back and said, ‘Sorry, David, you can’t write it.’” Since Bowie had already started “putting bits of it down” in the studio, the surprise rejection forced him to pivot quickly. His ill-fated musical became a concept album with Orwellian overtones.

(5) IT’S NEWS TO SOMEBODY. The publication of Matthew Yglesias’ article “Oh, the intellectual property rights you’ll extend” at Slow Boring has caught up with the already-played-out week-old Twitterstorm. Nevertheless, at the link you can read him make a case about copyright law, triggered by the Dr. Seuss controversy. 

…Regardless, under U.S. law, the copyrights last for the duration of their creator’s life plus 70 years — i.e., until 2061.

That’s a big change from how we did things in the Founders’ era, when copyrights lasted 14 years with an option to renew the copyright for an additional 14 years.

Since then, not only has Congress repeatedly extended the duration of copyright terms, they’ve even extended them retroactively, basically preventing Mickey Mouse (created in 1928) or Superman (created in 1938) from ever entering the public domain the way that 19th century characters like Frankenstein1 or Sherlock Holmes have.

I bring this all up because I think it’s relevant policy context for the recent controversy over Seuss Enterprises withdrawing six books from publication that were deemed problematic. Right-wing agitators have responded to this as if it’s the government censoring Dr. Seuss, and so out of solidarity with Dr. Seuss, they are buying non-canceled classics like “Green Eggs and Ham” in droves. But this is just not factual. Dr. Seuss has been dead for nearly 30 years. His heirs — likely these two stepdaughters, though that’s not entirely clear — canceled the books, and now are the ones reaping the financial rewards from the backlash to their own actions….

(6) BEHIND WANDAVISION. Marvel Entertainment dropped a trailer for “Marvel Studios’ Assembled: The Making of WandaVision”, a behind the scenes look at the series.

(7) MORE BINDING. The Verge reports on a trend toward “Making fanfiction beautiful enough for a bookshelf”.

… Lesure spends hours making sure each book looks unique and regal, but she has to be careful not to use any specific imagery that could land her in trouble.

That’s because the books Lesure crafts contain works of fanfiction, and she’s found an entire community of avid readers looking to turn their unauthorized digital favorites into physical treats.

Nothing about the process is simple. There are “literally hundreds of moments where I could do something wrong and everything falls to shambles,” Lesure, a student who started bookbinding during a gap year in 2019, told The Verge. Her process includes typesetting, redoing the typesetting, doing that again and again until it’s right, printing, folding, sewing, making the cover, and finally putting it all together.

Fanfiction has traditionally been confined to online sites like Archive of Our Own (AO3) and FanFiction.Net, but some of the most prolific artists within the space have found a way to help people enjoy their favorite titles in new ways: binding the stories into physical novels designed to read better and stand out on bookshelves. The crafts have helped bring some of the most popular unofficial stories set in Harry Potter, Star Wars, and other universes onto shelves where they can sit right alongside their authorized counterparts.

(8) OUR BRIGHT FUTURE. The New York Times takes stock of the city’s inescapable barrage of LED sign advertising: “Am I in Manhattan? Or Another Sequel to ‘Blade Runner’?”

…Adrian Benepe, the former New York City Parks Commissioner and current head of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, sees “creeping Blade Runner syndrome” everywhere, from the clogged skies over Manhattan to the subways, which he rides to work every day from his home on the Upper West Side.

“They’re empty,” Mr. Benepe said. “I’ve been alone many times at rush hour. It’s eerie as hell.” He also finds the movie prescient in its depiction of a world saturated by intrusive, omnipresent advertising.

“Places in New York that used to not have advertising now have ads,” he said. “You can’t get away from it. It’s in the subways, it’s on the streets, it’s on barges. You never stop being assailed.”

Giant screens are nothing new, of course. But New York’s streetscape had been permeated as never before with twitchy, adhesively catchy LEDs, a trend that has only accelerated during the pandemic, with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announcing last summer the addition of 9,000 screens broadcasting “Covid-relevant safety information.”

(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.

  • March 12, 1927 –On this day in 1927, Metropolis premiered in Germany. It was directed by Fritz Lang. It was written by Thea von Harbou in collaboration with Lang. It  stars Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge and Brigitte Helm. The film’s message is encapsulated in the final inter-title of “The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart.” In 2001 the film was placed upon UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, the first film so distinguished. It is considered one of the greatest films ever made, and has a 92% rating among audience members at Rotten Tomatoes.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • March 12, 1879 — Alfred Abel. His best-known performance was as Joh Fredersen in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.  It wasn’t his only genre as Phantom, a 1922 German film, was fantasy, and my German is just good enough for years I studied it to see how much of work could be considered genre or genre adjacent. (Died 1937.) (CE) 
  • March 12, 1886 — Kay Nielsen. Though he’s best known for his work with Disney for whom he did many story sketches and illustrations, not least for Fantasia and The Little Mermaid be it thirty years after his death, I’d be remiss not to note his early work illustrating such works as East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Hansel and Gretel and Andersen’s Fairy Tales. (Died 1957.) (CE) 
  • Born March 12, 1911 – Edmund North.  Major in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II.  Served a term as President of the screen branch of the Writers Guild of America.  A score of movies; co-winner of the Best Screenplay Oscar for Patton; for us, screenplay for The Day the Earth Stood Still – which, despite its staggering difference from Bates’ “Farewell to the Master”, I think a classic.  Coined Klaatu barada nikto.  (Died 1990) [JH]
  • March 12, 1914 — John Symonds. Critic of Alistair Crowley who published four, yes four, books on him over a fifty year period starting in the Fifties: The Great Beast, The Magic of Aleister Crowley, The King of the Shadow Realm and The Beast 666. Needless to say the advocates of Crowley aren’t at all happy with him. Lest I leave you with the impression that his only connection to our community, he was a writer of fantasy literature for children including the feline magical fantasy, Isle of Cats  with illustrations by Gerard Hoffnung. (Died 2006.) (CE) 
  • Born March 12, 1916 – Richard Dorson, Ph.D.  Pioneering and possibly great folklorist – thus our neighbor; pioneering because, in his day, commercial and even arguably artistic success of retellings like Davy Crockett and inventions like Paul Bunyan were clouding the mind.  Coined urban legend and fakelore.  General editor, Folktales of the World.  Two dozen books, including a 1939 one on Crockett; Folk Legends of Japan; African Folklore.  “Suspicious of attempts by other disciplines –anthropology, sociology, and psychology, among others – to co-opt folk culture for their own … purposes…. emphasized the necessity for the accurate collection and documentation of folk materials” (quoted from this).  (Died 1981) [JH]
  • March 12, 1925 — Harry Harrison. Best known first I’d say for his Stainless Steel Rat and Bill, the Galactic Hero series which were just plain fun, plus his novel Make Room! Make Room! which was the genesis of Soylent Green. I just realized I’ve never read the Deathworld series. So how are these? See OGH’s post on the Alex Cox animated version of Bill, the Galactic Hero here. (Died 2012.) (CE)  
  • March 12, 1933 — Barbara Feldon, 88. Agent 99 on the Get Smart series. Other genre credits include The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and reprising her character on the short-lived follow-up to this series, Get Smart, done twenty years later. She didn’t have that much of an acting career though she did show up in the pilot of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. (CE) 
  • Born March 12, 1936 – Virginia Hamilton.  National Book Award, Newbery Medal (first black to win it), Hans Andersen Award, Wilder Award.  Amer. Lib’y Ass’n King-Hamilton Award named for her (and Coretta Scott King).  Eight novels (including Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed), thirty shorter stories, four collections for us; twoscore books all told.  (Died 2002) [JH]
  • March 12, 1952 — Julius Carry. His one truly great genre role was as the bounty hunter Lord Bowler in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. – oh, but what a role it was! Over the course of the series, he was the perfect companion and foil to Bruce Campbell’s Brisco County, Jr. character. He did have one-offs in The Misfits of Science, Earth 2, Tales from the Crypt and voiced a character on Henson’s Dinosaurs. (Died 2008.) (CE) 
  • Born March 12, 1955 – Jim Mann, F.N., age 66.  Living in Pittsburgh, hard-working member of NESFA (New England SF Ass’n) for whose NESFA Press he has edited a dozen books including The Compleat Boucher and The Rediscovery of Man (Cordwainer Smith).  Chaired Boskone 25 (with wife Laurie Mann) and 47.  Fan Guest of Honor (with LM), ArmadilloCon 27.  Fellow of NESFA (service award).  [JH]
  • Born March 12, 1963 – David B. Coe, Ph.D., age 58.  A score of novels, as many shorter stories (some under another name). Crawford Award for LobTyn Chronicle (trilogy).  Reviews and Robots called Time’s Children Best Fantasy Novel of 2018.  Interviewed in Strange Horizons, Teleport.  “We … construct our worlds twice…. for ourselves [and] again … digestible and entertaining and unobtrusive, not to mention elegant, poetic, even exciting….  all the necessary material – and not an ounce more….  [after we] have unraveled their mysteries … decided which elements … are most important to our stories.”  [JH]
  • Born March 12, 1971 – Rob St. Martin, age 50.  Six novels, one novelette, anthology Ages of Wonder (with Julie Cznerneda).   Has read Pride and Prejudice, The Phantom Tollbooth, A Tale of Two Cities, Moby-Dick, Romeo and Juliet, Curious George.  [JH]

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) GUARDIAN ANGLE. Lisa Tuttle has a new installment of “The best recent science fiction and fantasy – reviews roundup” at The Guardian in which she reviews Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley; Birds of Paradise by Oliver K Langmead; The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey; A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel; and A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine.

(13) GEARING UP. I’m always ready to read more about the Antikythera mechanism: “Scientists may have solved ancient mystery of ‘first computer’” in The Guardian.

…The battered fragments of corroded brass were barely noticed at first, but decades of scholarly work have revealed the object to be a masterpiece of mechanical engineering. Originally encased in a wooden box one foot tall, the mechanism was covered in inscriptions – a built-in user’s manual – and contained more than 30 bronze gearwheels connected to dials and pointers. Turn the handle and the heavens, as known to the Greeks, swung into motion.

Michael Wright, a former curator of mechanical engineering at the Science Museum in London, pieced together much of how the mechanism operated and built a working replica, but researchers have never had a complete understanding of how the device functioned. Their efforts have not been helped by the remnants surviving in 82 separate fragments, making the task of rebuilding it equivalent to solving a battered 3D puzzle that has most of its pieces missing.

Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, the UCL team describe how they drew on the work of Wright and others, and used inscriptions on the mechanism and a mathematical method described by the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, to work out new gear arrangements that would move the planets and other bodies in the correct way. The solution allows nearly all of the mechanism’s gearwheels to fit within a space only 25mm deep….

(14) ROCKET’S RED GLARE. “Green Run Update: NASA Targets March 18 for SLS Hot Fire Test – Artemis”.

NASA is targeting Thursday, March 18 for the second hot fire of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s core stage at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

After performing tests to demonstrate that a recently repaired liquid oxygen pre-valve was working, the team has continued to prepare the core stage, its four RS-25 engines, and the B-2 test stand for the second hot fire at Stennis. Later this week, the team will power up the core stage again and do a final check of all its systems. Then, on March 16, two days before the test, they will power up the stage, starting the clock for the second hot fire….

(15) YOU ARE NUMBER SIX. Paul Weimer meets the challenge of reviewing the sixth book in a series: “Microreview [book]: Out Past the Stars by KB Wagers” at Nerds of a Feather.

… This is in many ways a very different book than the previous book, Down Among the Dead. Reading it in quick succession after the second book might give some emotional whiplash, it certainly is a gear shift. It’s much more like the first book of the Farian War trilogy, There Before the Chaos, in the sense that it builds up to a big set piece finale of a conflict. Unlike that first book, though, this book is much more about the action beats. 

This shows the range and power of the author across the three books, and sets them apart from the first trilogy as well, which is more adrenaline filled….

(16) TIGER TIGER. Elsewhere at Nerds of a Feather, Sean D assesses a novella by Aliette de Bodard: “Microreview [Book]: Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard”.

…This novella constantly shifts from plot point to plot point, that kept me on my toes without unmooring me into confusion. The craft involved with implementing poetic language that benefits the atmosphere, pacey scenes that never lose focus, and characters that I felt like I knew inside out by the story’s conclusion, deserves kudos. Mostly because the novella juggles a small, insulated cast of characters with subterfuges and violence that impact other kingdoms. Fireheart Tiger is like an expansive web that leaves the reader in the center of it, while also skillfully and pithily letting them know of all its disparate parts.

(17) ELDRITCH SCIENCE. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert couples an alarming report with a Cthulhu reference. “Quarantinewhile… Please Stop Reviving Ancient Pathogens From The Sea Floor”.

Quarantinewhile… In “Hey, maybe don’t do that” news, Japanese scientists are experimenting on 100-million-year-old bacteria that wake up from their slumber when brought to the surface and provided with food.

(18) PIPING AT THE GATES OF DAWN. And speaking of Lovecraft –

[Thanks To John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, rcade, Nic Farey, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, Michel Toman, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Rob Thornton, and John Hertz for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]

Pixel Scroll 3/10/21 If I Could Save Time In A Jay Kay Klein Bottle

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(1) A SECOND MEOW. Geoff Carter, in “Inside Meow Wolf’s immersive Omega Mart art installation in Las Vegas” at the Las Vegas Weekly, reports on the second Meow Wolf installation, “Omega Mart,” which opened last month in Las Vegas.  It apparently starts as a pretend supermarket and gets much weirder! Their first permanent space, in Santa Fe, is in an old bowling alley purchased for their use by George R.R. Martin.

Omega Mart is Meow Wolf’s second permanent installation—arriving after Santa Fe’s House of Eternal Return—and their second entry into Las Vegas; the group took over the Life Is Beautiful festival’s Art Motel space in 2017. If you were there, you have some idea what Meow Wolf has to offer: laser harps, portals to the unknown, room-size bowls of “ramen.” The collective has a unique talent for producing and soliciting works of maximalist art, collecting them in warehouse-size spaces with innocuous facades and tying all those artworks together through inventive visual segues and mystery-box narrative.

“Our work is for people that don’t necessarily go to art galleries and art museums, who feel like they want to see artwork and have it [as] an important part of their lives, but might feel a little alienated by the art world,” says Corvas Brinkerhoff, Meow Wolf’s executive creative director. “We’re trying to build a bridge to those people and say, look, art is valuable. And all this brilliant work that all these artists are making deserves to have a place where it can be seen, and where the artists can be supported in the process of making it….”

…Brinkerhoff notes that there are several giant stories unfolding within the space, including those of a shadowy corporation (Omega Mart’s parent company “Dramcorp”). Brinkerhoff says it’s “trying to save humanity from itself” by experimenting with what looks like alien technology. A zealous resistance group—shades of Meow Wolf’s beginnings here—is standing against these corporate overlords wielding what little it has.

There are RFID-accessed computer terminals and old-fashioned phones scattered throughout that yield clues to the mystery (Brinkerhoff says the phones mostly deliver recorded messages, though “you also might get a live human”), and videos that advance the story—about three hours’ worth of original footage….

(2) LEARNING FROM PRATCHETT. Ziv Wities’ project “Story Structure Lessons From The Discworld.” is a series of videos aimed at readers and writers, where he talks about “what structure is, how you spot it in what you read and watch, how you choose it and build it up in your own work.” Why Discworld? “The Discworld subseries aren’t just about different characters and different events. They’ve got different structures; they’re each built differently. So Discworld is a single series, but it tells many shapes of stories — which makes it a perfect example to learn structure from.”

Structure is fundamental to fiction. So often, though, we lack basic terms and ideas to talk about story structure. We have trouble getting past basic intuition. What *is* structure? What makes structure “good”? When one story is better-structured than another — what is the actual difference? To answer these questions, we’re using Terry Pratchett’s wonderful Discworld novels. Because one interesting thing about the Discworld is how it’s divided into sub-series — different books following different characters and different story arcs. Throughout these videos, we’ll see that the Discworld sub-series not only follow different characters — they follow different structures. By comparing and contrasting, we’ll understand what those structural differences are — and how to think about story structure in what we read, and in what we write.

(3) GET READY TO HAVE A BLAST. [Item by David K.M. Klaus.] Everybody who registered with TWA and PanAm for moon tickets back in 1969 has another chance. Another eight names will be drawn from a dimensionally transcendental (*) hat for a trip on SpaceX’s mis-named “Starship” (since technically it’s not a starship, but merely a spaceship) and there’s no initial mention of an age/health requirement so maybe even D. D. Harriman could go. Inverse has the story: “SpaceX Moonshot: How to win a seat on Yusaku Maezawa’s trip to the Moon”.

You can’t win if you don’t enter, and even if you wind up like the crews of Shuttle Orbiters Challenger and Columbia, you’ll still be part of Earth history not to be forgotten.  You will be remembered.

(*) Doctor Who reference, Tom Baker years

HOW TO APPLY TO GO TO THE MOON

According to the new video, the way to enter into the competition is not as straight-forward as putting your name in the hat, as it were. But it does start that way.

  1. Go to the dearMoon website, the site set up to release new information regarding the project.
  2. There, people are invited to preregister with the mission by giving their name, country of origin, and email.
  3. Entrants are also asked to upload an image of themselves.
  4. Entrants are also asked to select which of Maezawa’s many social profiles they follow, too.

“Everyone who pre-registers will receive an email about the selection process,” the dearMoon site reads. They will also receive a “crew candidate” certificate with their name and picture on it, according to the site.

(4) DOCTOR WHO MARKS THE DAY. “Doctor Who female stars discuss International Women’s Day 2021” – a Radio Times from March 8.

Mandip Gill – actor, Yaz Khan in Doctor Who

International Women’s Day to me is a day to celebrate women’s progression politically, socially and economically. It’s also a day for us as a whole to recognise the further improvements needed. Ultimately it’s about the celebration of women.

Doctor Who saw what most people could see, in that it wasn’t an equal playing field.  They absolutely took a stand in changing the space to one much more equal by having Jodie as the Doctor. This challenged things that were just a given and showed the audience why we should continually challenge these structures and roles.

From the first meeting I knew the significance of this change to Doctor Who history and knew I wanted to be a part of that change. You could feel the significance and positive energy of what was to come from my first audition with Jodie.

Personally, I love the weight of being a south Asian female companion and do hope young people take inspiration from my role in Doctor Who as I did watching the cast of Goodness Gracious Me.

(5) WORK V. ARTIST. Essence of Wonder with Gadi Evron discusses “Can We Read Their Books While Not Forgiving Them?” on Saturday March 13 at 3 p.m. Eastern. Register here.

P. Djèlí Clark, Stephen Llano, and Alan Bond will join Gadi and Karen to discuss the challenges faced by the community when considering problematic authors and how to treat their works.

(6) BEING PROFESSIONAL. [Item by N.] Show creator Owen Dennis offers insights about marketing and how creators have to keep mum about a lot of details regarding the future of their shows/projects in this Twitter thread.

https://twitter.com/OweeeeenDennis/status/1362526915555332098
https://twitter.com/OweeeeenDennis/status/1362526917249822721
https://twitter.com/OweeeeenDennis/status/1362526918843662338

The previous day he’d announced this –

https://twitter.com/OweeeeenDennis/status/1362112679045783553

(7) THROUGH ALIEN EYES (OR WHATEVER THEY USE). James Davis Nicoll isn’t surprised that most sff is told from a human viewpoint, however, it certainly isn’t limited to doing so: “Five Classic SF Novels. Written From an Alien Perspective”

Pride of Chanur by C. J. Cherryh (1982)

The Compact comprises seven technologically sophisticated species, each shaped by its own evolutionary history. In spite of sometimes profound communication problems, the seven coexist peacefully enough that violence is retail, not wholesale.

At Meetpoint Station, Tully, a hairless primate of a new, unfamiliar species , takes refuge in the hani trading ship Pride of Chanur. For reasons that made sense at the time, Pyanfar Chanur grants the furless, blunt-fingered alien sanctuary. In so doing, she offends the kif Akkhtimakt. In Akkhimakt’s eyes, Pyanfar has stolen Akkhimakt’s property. The kif do not forgive affronts. Pyanfar’s act of mercy makes her ship the target of a kif vendetta.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

  • 1981 — Forty years ago, Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth by J.R.R. Tolkien won the Mythopoetic Fantasy Award. (From 1971 until 1991, they gave but one award for all fantasy literature. Starting in 1992, they expanded to this award into two: one for adult literature and one for children’s literature.)  It was published by  George Allen & Unwin Publication in 1980. This is yet another collection of tales edited by Christopher Tolkien. It would also win a Balrog Award from the Intentional Fantasy Gamers Society.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born March 10, 1891 — Sam Jaffe. His first role was in Lost Horizon as the High Lama and much later in The Day the Earth Stood Still playing Professor Jacob Barnhardt. Later on we find him in The Dunwich Horror as Old Whateley, voicing Bookman in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, playing The Old-Man in The Tell-Tale Heart, and in his last film, appearing in Battle Beyond the Stars as Dr. Hephaestus. John Sayles wrote the script for the latter surprisingly enough. (Died 1984.) (CE) 
  • Born March 10, 1918 — Theodore Cogswell. He wrote almost forty  science fiction stories, most of them humorous, and was the co-author of a Trek novel, Spock, Messiah!, with Joe Spano Jr. He’s perhaps best remembered as the editor of the Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies in which writers and editors discussed their own and each other’s works.  A full collection of which was published during 1993 except, as EoSF notes “for one issue dealing with a particularly ugly controversy involving Walter M Miller”.  Having not read these, I’ve no idea what this entails. (Died 1987.) (CE) 
  • Born March 10, 1938 — Marvin Kaye, 83. Formerly the editor of Weird Tales, he has also edited magazines such as H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror and Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. His Cold Blue Light novels with Parke Godwin are quite superb. The Fair Folk anthology which is most excellent and which he edited won a World Fantasy Award. He writes the “Marvin Kaye’s Nth Dimension” for the Space and Time website. (CE) 
  • Born March 10, 1958 — Sharon Stone, 63. Damn she’s the same age I am. She’s been in three genre films, her first being the original Total Recall where she played the deservedly ill-fated Lori Quaid. Her next was Sphere where she was cast as Dr. Elizabeth “Beth” Halperin, and last was in, errr, Catwoman where she was Laurel Hedare, an assassin. (CE) 
  • Born March 10, 1977 — Bree Turner, 44. She’s best remembered for her role as Rosalee on Grimm. She also starred in the pilot episode (“Incident On and Off a Mountain Road”) of Masters of Horror. She was in Jekyll + Hyde as Martha Utterson. Confession time: I got through maybe three seasons of Grimm before giving up as it became increasingly silly. (CE) 
  • Born March 10, 1979 — Fonda Lee, 42. Her Jade City novel was a finalist for a Nebula Award for Best Novel and won the World Fantasy Award. It’s sequel, Jade War, was published last year. And her Cross Fire novel was named Best YA Novel at the 2019 Aurora Awards for best Canadian speculative fiction. (CE) 
  • Born March 10, 1913 – Carlos Ochagavia.  Three dozen covers, a few interiors.  Here is A Scanner Darkly.  Here is Universe 8.  Here is The Best of Keith Laumer.  Here is Dream Park.  (Died 2006) [JH]
  • Born March 10, 1920 – Boris Vian.  Author of prose, poetry, plays, music, criticism; actor; translator; inventor, engineer.  Active in French jazz, among other things liaison for Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, commenter for Le Jazz Hot, trumpeter at Le Tabou (yes, that’s “The Taboo”); also, it seems, wrote the first French rock ’n’ roll songs.  Strange books, e.g. L’ecume des jours variously tr. as Froth on the Daydream, Mood Indigo (twice), Froth on the Daze; half a dozen ours, anyway; fifty shorter stories, still few available in English but «Le bons élèves» appeared 2010 as “Honor Students”.  Some fiction attributed to a fictitious Vernon Sullivan whom BV supposedly translated.  (Died 1959) [JH]
  • Born March 10, 1955 – Walter Riess, age 66.  Five dozen covers, mostly for Anticipatia (which is SF in Romanian, just as Anticipation was the 67th Worldcon in Montreal).  Here is The Einstein Intersection.  Here is A Time for Changes.  Here is The Demolished Man.  Here is the 1999-2000 Anticipatia Almanac.  [JH]
  • Born March 10, 1962 – Amy Casil, age 59.  One novel, two dozen shorter stories.  Studied at Chapman under James Blaylock.  Poem “Joshua Swims in the Ocean of Dreams” in Mythic Delirium.  Three terms as SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) Treasurer, including while John Scalzi was President and Mary Robinette Kowal was VP, hello, you two – or three: Amy, do you read this?  Outside our field, biographies of Buzz Aldrin and John Dewey.  Recent collection, The Instrumentality of Women. [JH]
  • Born March 10, 1972 – Lynette Mejía, age 49.  A score of short stories, three dozen poems, recently in Liminality.  Interviewed in Redstone.  “When I’m not working, I mostly read, think, and talk to trees.  Every once in a while, they talk back.”  Website – which, possibly because of her Louisiana connections, has a section “lagniappe”.  [JH]
  • Born March 10, 1975 – Claire Merle, age 46. Four novels.  Shadow Weaver won a B.R.A.G. (Book Readers Appreciation Group Medallion.  Be independent!  [JH]

(10) PLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MOA. Polygon finds a way to make your hunger pangs extinct: “Pringles releases Halo potato chips that taste like Moa Burgers from Halo Reach”.

Microsoft has teamed up with chip-maker Pringles for a new flavor of potato chip: Moa Burger. As in the Moa, the flightless bird indigenous to the planet Reach (and also the name of an extinct species of bird here on Earth), from Halo: Reach.

In the Halo fiction, Moa were a source of food on Reach, and were served in wing, nugget, and burger form. Pringles’ new Moa Burger aims to approximate what a quadruple hamburger made of ground space bird, plus cheese, pickles, lettuce, onions, and an unidentified sauce, would taste like. They are artificially flavored, naturally.

(11) GALAXY OF THE MONTH CLUB. Galactic Journey’s Gideon Marcus comes up with an eye-opening hook to begin his review of the latest – in 1966 – issue of Galaxy: “[March 10, 1966] Top Heavy (April 1966 Galaxy)”.

Stacked

For as long as I can remember, American culture has really liked people who have extra on top.  Whether it’s Charles Atlas showing off his wedge-shaped physique or Jayne Mansfield letting herself precede herself, we dig an up front kind of person.

So I suppose it’s only natural that this month’s issue of Galaxy put all of the truly great material in the first half (really two thirds) and the rest tapers away to unremarkable mediocrity (though, of course, I’m obligated to remark upon it).

(12) WANDAVISION DEBRIEFINGS. Two semi-dissatisfied customers tell what they think WandaVision’s shortcomings were. NATURALLY THERE ARE SPOILERS.

Abigail Nussbaum discusses “America’s Sweetheart: Thoughts on WandaVision” at Asking the Wrong Questions.

…It’s impressively weird, in other words, and as if that weirdness weren’t enough, every now and then, strange occurrences interrupt the domestic idyll and gentle comedy. Some of the Westview residents experience alarming fugue states. A voice on the radio urgently calls out to Wanda. Out of place items and people—a colorized helicopter toy; a man in a beekeeper outfit—appear with no explanation. The “show” is interrupted by sinister commercials with obvious relevance to the events of Wanda’s life—a Stark toaster that beeps ominously, like the bomb that took her parents’ lives; Lagos-brand kitchen towels with which to mop up blood-red liquid, a reference to her failure to prevent a Hydra bombing in Captain America: Civil War.

This glut of strange, disparate details is incredibly enticing, inviting audiences to parse references and spot easter eggs….

Film Crit Hulk’s “Watercoolering With WANDAVISION – Season One Finale” is a free Patreon post.

So. The finale, as a finale, does the things that finales are supposed to do. We wrap up our general story, we send some bad people to their respective fates, and we send some good people on their respective ways, all with a series of lessons seemingly learned. Because of this, I imagine that there are many who are satisfied with the overall experience. Especially as it did not make any egregious surface-level errors that have often plagued other finales (especially those that tend to treat their audience with more hostility). But Wandavision aimed for safety and it delivered on the base promises of the narrative itself. It even delivered on some genuinely nice beats in the process. And so, all seems well.

My personal feelings are little bit different.

Because my experience with the finale was one where I felt like I was constantly rocked back and forth between the positive and negative aspects of certain choices. Because of this, I want to take a different approach and single out the things where I was like “oooh, neat!” along with all the things where I really got tripped up. Because when you really, really look at some of those moments, something more problematic emerges….

(13) DIDN’T SEE THIS COMING. Vox Day’s own Castalia House blog reviewer likewise criticized WandaVision, calling it “acceptably mediocre,” prompting Day to write a dissenting post in which he said that what the other reviewer called shortcomings hadn’t affected his own enjoyment of the series — “In which I disagree” [Internet Archive link].

…While I always hesitate to share an opinion that is massively less-informed than a genuine expert’s perspective, what I think we have here is a distinction between an informed Marvel fan’s perspective and an uninformed non-Marvel non-fan’s perspective on the series. Unlike Dark Herald, I didn’t watch Wanda Vision from the perspective of someone who knew considerably more about the subject than having seen less than half of the MCU movies, most of which had only been viewed in order to learn how to write superhero movie scripts.

And at least from the ignorant, non-Marvel non-fan’s perspective, Wanda Vision was a surprisingly good, surprisingly powerful story about a woman wrestling with horrific grief. The alternative interpretations and possibilities that were not pursued are meaningless to me, because I didn’t know anything about the various historical storylines from the original comics, and therefore the production pyrotechnics with the evolving TV sitcom styles were presented were sufficiently intriguing to hold my interest in that regard.

There was, of course, an amount of the usual Marvel SJW nonsense, but it was minimal by today’s standards and did not conflict with the storytelling….

(14) A LOT OF LOTR. “Colbert and Andy Samberg Get Real Geeky About LORD OF THE RINGS” — Yahoo! previews the video clip.

…In keeping with his usual vibe, Samberg maintained a sense of humor about Colbert showing him up in Tolkien knowledge; likewise, Colbert copped bashfully to his proclivity for long-winded rants when it comes to these stories. All in all, the two comics enjoyed a fun nerd sesh about one of the nerd world’s favorite topics.

(15) JEOPARDY! Genre stumped two contestants again on tonight’s Jeopardy. Andrew Porter shares his notes.

Category: Characters in Children’s Lit.

Answer: When Wendy first meets Peter Pan, he’s flown into her room searching for his lost this.

Wrong questions: What is a thimble?; what is childhood?

Correct question: What is his shadow?

(16) SPACE COMMAND. Showrunner Marc Scott Zicree has made available Space Command Episode One – “Mira Furlan’s Last Great Role” – to YouTube viewers.

(17) SUPER RESULTS. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert featured a very positive report from the North Carolina bookstore owner featured in the show’s small-business counterpart to the kind of celebrity-laden commercials aired during the Super Bowl: “Sales Triple At Foggy Pine Books After Receiving The Colbert Small Biz Bump” – video at the link.

The “Colbert Bump” is real! Just ask the owner of Foggy Pine Books in Boone, North Carolina, who enjoyed a huge surge in sales after being featured on our Super Bowl special.

(18) OF COURSE HE GETS WET.  The original cast of the 1984 movie Gremlins is reunited to plug Mountain Dew. “Gremlins Mountain Dew Commercial: Gizmo & Zach Galligan Return”.

Gizmo’s all grown up and still getting into some mischief in Mountain Dew’s new Gremlins commercial featuring the return of our favorite furry friend and star Zach Galligan in the fun new ad.

[Thanks to N., John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, Andrew Porter, JJ, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Ziv Wities, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. This mashup title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 3/9/21 Forty And Twenty Novels Added To The To-Read Piles

Posted on by

(1) MONSTROUS EMOTION. Sonny Bunch, in a Washington Post opinion piece, says “‘WandaVision’ punted on its most interesting idea about grief”. BEWARE SPOILERS.

In the eighth episode of “WandaVision,” the Disney Plus series featuring Marvel Cinematic Universe witch Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), her resurrected partner and android, Vision (Paul Bettany), and a lot of clever riffs on classic sitcom tropes, one line seems to have struck a chord: “What is grief, if not love persevering?” After a year of living under the threat of a pandemic, it seems viewers were looking for art that dealt with loss — and didn’t involve putting in the work of reading Russian literature.But the rhapsodizing over that bit of dialogue concealed a larger, more difficult, point. In the end, “WandaVision” punted on its most interesting idea about grief: that wallowing in it can turn people into monsters….

(2) HYBRID OF DESTINY. “How Octavia E. Butler Reimagines Sex and Survival” by Julian Lucas in The New Yorker.

…The nineties were a breakout decade. Frustrated by publishers’ refusals to send her on book tours, she signed with an independent press, which promoted her work to Black and feminist booksellers. “Parable of the Sower” won critical acclaim, and in 1995 Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur grant. The honor coincided with a growing interest in how Black writers, artists, and musicians drew on the dislocation of the past in critically reflecting on the future. The critic Mark Dery called it “Afrofuturism,” and Butler has become its most widely recognized literary avatar.

Perhaps her greatest talent was the clear evocation of thinking in a crisis. The thrill of her fiction lies in its learn-or-die urgency, conveyed in a streamlined prose of situational awareness. The brinkmanship of the Reagan era inspired her standout Xenogenesis trilogy, collected in the volume “Lilith’s Brood.” (Ava DuVernay is producing a TV series based on the first installment, “Dawn.”) It begins in a womblike cell on a living spaceship, where Lilith Iyapo, one of the only survivors of a nuclear war, waits for her captor-saviors to show themselves. They are part of a galactic diaspora of tentacled bipedal “gene traders,” the Oankali, who propose a merger of the species. The scheme is not only the price they exact for repopulating Earth but a biological necessity. “We are committed to the trade as your body is to breathing,” one explains. “We were overdue for it when we found you. Now it will be done—to the rebirth of your people and mine.” Lilith is to be the first mother of this hybrid species, and an evangelist for Oankali-human interbreeding to fellow-survivors, many of whom consider her a traitor….

(3) JUSTICE LEAGUE TRAILER PARK. Comicbook.com introduces the video: “Zack Snyder’s Justice League Cyborg Trailer Released”.

HBO Max has revealed the new trailer for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, this time spotlighting Cyborg. This latest trailer follows previous trailers focusing on Batman, Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and The Flash. 

https://twitter.com/snydercut/status/1369301981991419904

(4) SUPERTROOPER. Christine Feehan, in “Six Movies (and One TV Show) Featuring Genetically Engineered Soldiers” on Crimereads gives her recommendations for favorite works with bionic supersoldiers.

…The soldier or hero who can rush in and save the day because of his super skills is a common trope in film. I’d like to share with you my top five favorite characters from stories about super soldiers whose ultra-abilities have been the result of DNA experiments, secret government training, or a means of surviving the situation they find themselves in….

(5) JUSTER OBIT. Norton Juster, best-known as author of The Phantom Tollbooth (illustrated by Jules Feiffer), died March 8. The Independent is one of many outlets with the AP story: “Norton Juster, ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ author, dead at 91”.

Norton Juster, the celebrated children’s author who fashioned a world of his own in the classic “The Phantom Tollbooth” and went on to write such favorites as “The Dot and the Line” and “Stark Naked,” has died at 91.

Juster’s death was confirmed Tuesday by a spokesperson for Random House Children’s Books, who did not immediately provide details. Juster’s friend and fellow author Mo Willems tweeted Tuesday that Juster “ran out of stories” and died “peacefully” the night before.

Andrew Liptak paid tribute at Tor.com – “The Phantom Tollbooth Author Norton Juster Has Died at the Age of 91”

…While beloved as a children’s book author, Juster’s primary vocation throughout his life was architecture, telling an interviewer that “I grew up in architecture, my father was an architect, my brother, who is four and a half years old, was training and then became an architect. I had no idea I was every going to be a writer or anything like that.” After attending college, he joined the US Navy’s Civil Engineer Corps, which he described as a “terrific experience,” but in which “a lot of your time is wasted.” To help pass the time, he began drawing and writing, and was chastised by his CO for it.

After leaving the Navy, he joined a New York architectural firm, and began to think about writing a book that would teach children about cities. He ultimately got a grant for the project, and began writing. It didn’t go well: “I started with great energy and enthusiasm until I found myself waist-deep in stacks of 3-by-5 note cards, exhausted and dispirited,” He told NPR in 2011. “This is not what I wanted to do.” He began to think about another story, and “The Phantom Tollbooth came about because I was trying to avoid doing something else.”

While looking for that other story, he was inspired by a conversation he had with a boy about the notion of infinity, and began writing the story that would ultimately become The Phantom Tollbooth….

The New York Times report is here. (Their full obituary is promised later.)

“Most books advertised for ‘readers of all ages’ fail to keep their promise,” Ann McGovern wrote in her review in The New York Times in 1961. “But Norton Juster’s amazing fantasy has something wonderful for anybody old enough to relish the allegorical wisdom of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and the pointed whimsy of ‘The Wizard of Oz.’”

Publishers Weekly includes more details of Juster’s later years: “Obituary: Norton Juster”.

…Juster retired from teaching in 1992 and from his architecture practice in 1996, though he continued writing. He wrote two picture books illustrated by Chris Raschka and inspired by his granddaughter: The Hello, Goodbye Window (Hyperion/Michael di Capua, 2005), for which Raschka won the 2006 Caldecott Medal, and a sequel, Sourpuss and Sweetie Pie (Scholastic/Michael di Capua, 2008). In 2010, Juster and Feiffer reunited for the picture book The Odious Ogre (Hyperion/Michael di Capua, 2010). At the time, Juster quipped, “We realized it was such fun working together that we made a pact: we are prepared to do a new book every 50 years.” The duo spoke with PW then about what it was like teaming up again.

Juster’s wife of 54 years, Jeanne, died in 2018. He is survived by his daughter Emily and granddaughter Tori, both of Amherst. A celebration of Juster’s life is being planned for a later date….

(6) ENGELBERG OBIT. Dr. Michael Engelberg, an oncologist at Cedar-Sinai in Los Angeles and a film producer, recently died. He was executive producer of The Puppet Masters (1994). Among the other films he tried to develop was one based on Wild Cards.

George R.R. Martin wrote an affectionate memoir on his blog: “Covid Claims Another Friend”.

…A PRINCESS OF MARS was his passion project, but by no means the only one he worked on.    There was a time back in the 90s when I had four — yes, count ’em, four — films in active development at Hollywood Pictures, and Dr. Michael Engelberg was the executive producer and guiding hand on all of them.   Besides PRINCESS, Melinda and I were also developing WILD CARDS as a feature film, collaborating on a screenplay built around our own most iconic characters, Dr. Tachyon and the Great and Powerful Turtle.   Michael also picked up the rights to FADEOUT, an original SF screenplay I had written for a small independent that had gone bust.    For a time there was talk of attaching Sharon Stone to that one, but when that fell through, so did the project.  And Hollywood also optioned my historical horror novel, FEVRE DREAM.  I was so busy with other work — the aforementioned PRINCESS, WILD CARDS, FADEOUT, as well as three television pilots, the Wild Cards books, and this fantasy novel I had started in 1991 — that I did not get around to writing the screenplay for FEVRE DREAM for a while, alas.   Big mistake.   By the time I turned in the script, Hollywood Pictures was on its last legs and had lost all interest in steamboats and vampires.   They put the script in turnaround the day after I turned it in.

None of that was Dr. Michael’s fault.   He was as frustrated as any of us by the vagaries of development hell.   Maybe more so.   I loved working with him, maybe because he had a trufan’s reverence for the original material.  Whether dealing with ERB, RAH, or GRRM, he always argued for staying with the book and doing faithful adaptations.

Melinda Snodgrass also mourns his loss: “In Memoriam”.

There have been four men in my life who I have considered to be beyond brilliant. One was my father, the second a professor at my law school, another an inventor and space visionary, and the fourth was my friend, Dr. Michael Engelberg. I first met Michael at what would become our traditional meeting at Hop Li Seafood Restaurant in L.A.’s Chinatown.

Michael was an oncologist at Cedar’s Sinai, a brilliant physician, but he was also a movie producer. He had made Heinlein’s Puppet Masters for Disney, and he absolutely loved the Wild Cards series. That’s how we ended up meeting because he wanted to make a Wild Cards movie. It’s because of Michael that George and I got to pitch directly to Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born March 9, 1918 — Mickey Spillane. His first job was writing stories for Funnies Inc. including Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman and Captain America. Do note these were text stories, not scripts for comics. Other than those, ISFDB lists him as writing three genre short stories: “The Veiled Woman“ (co-written with Howard Browne),  “The Girl Behind the Hedge” and “Grave Matter” (co-written with Max Allan Collins).  Has anyone read these? (Died 2006.) (CE)
  • Born March 9, 1934 – Yuri Gagarin.  First human being in Space, April 12, 1961.  (Died 1968) [JH]
  • Born March 9, 1937 – Robin Johnson, age 84.  Chaired Aussiecon the 33rd Worldcon, first in Australia; Fan Guest of Honour at Aussiecon 4 the 68th.  In between, Fan GoH at the 10th Australian natcon (i.e. national convention); at Syncon ’78; Swancon 7; ARCon.  Chaired Thylacon 1-3.  Succeeded Leigh Edmonds as editor of Norstrilian News.  Ditmar Award for contributions to fandom.  Big Heart (our highest service award).  [JH]
  • Born March 9, 1940 — Raul Julia. If we count Sesame Street as genre, his appearance as Rafael there was his first genre role. Yeah I’m stretching it. Ok, how about as Aram Fingal In Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, a RSL production off the John Varley short story? That better?  He later starred in Frankenstein Unbound as Victor Frankenstein as well. His last role released while he was still living was in Addams Family Values as Gomez Addams reprising the role he’d had in The Addams Family. (Died 1994.)  (CE)
  • Born March 9, 1945 — Robert Calvert. Lyricist for Hawkwind, a band that’s at least genre adjacent. And Simon R. Green frequently mentioned them in his Nightside series. Calvert was a close friend of Michael Moorcock.  He wrote SF poetry which you read about here. (Died 1988.) (CE)
  • Born March 9, 1947 – David Emerson, age 74.  Chaired ReinCONation 5-6, also Not-a-ReinCONation (of course there was one, consider Minneapolis fandom).  Served a term as editor of Rune.  In several performances of The Mimeo Man; co-director of Midwest Side Story.  [JH]
  • Born March 9, 1952 – Jim Shull, age 69.  One of our best fanartists.  Four FAAn (Fan Activity Achievement) Awards.  Fanzine, Crifanac (“critical fan activity”); co-editor of The Essence.  Here is some of his work in Outworlds 15; here is some more.  Here is his cover for Prehensile 6.
  • Born March 9, 1955 — Pat Murphy,66. I think her most brilliant work is The City, Not Long After. If you’ve not read this novel, do so now. The Max Merriwell series is excellent and Murphy’s ‘explanation’ of the authorial attributions is fascinating. And The Falling Woman by her is an amazing read as well. She’s reasonably well stocked at the usual digital suspects. (CE)
  • Born March 9, 1957 – Diann Thornley, age 64.  Three novels, four shorter stories.  Two dozen years in the U.S. Air Force; finished Ganwold’s Child at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near my alma mater Antioch.  Two drawings in The Leading Edge, hello Dave Doering.  [JH]
  • Born March 9, 1965 — Brom, 56. Artist and writer whose best work I think is Krampus: The Yule Lord and The Child Thief. The Art of Brom is a very good look at his art. He’s listed as having provided some of the art design used on Galaxy Quest. (CE)
  • Born March 9, 1978 — Hannu Rajaniemi, 43. Author of the Jean le Flambeur series which consists of The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince and The Causal Angel. Damn if I can summarize them. They remind me a bit of Alastair Reynolds and his Prefect novels, somewhat of Ian Mcdonald’s Mars novels as well. Layers of weirdness upon weirdness. Quite fascinating. (CE)
  • Born March 9, 1990 – Delson Armstrong, age 31.  Three novels (one with Rishabh Jain).  Likes Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, wishes he could manage to play piano more.  Travels between New York and Bombay (as, he confesses, he still calls it; he was born there).  Has read The Iliad, four Shakespeare plays, Paradise Lost – and Siddhartha, aiee; dare we ask how it looks to him? [JH]

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Argyle Sweater finds a place where that timepiece takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

(9) BEAM UP ANOTHER CANDLE. “William Shatner to celebrate 90th birthday with ‘Star Trek’ event in Upstate NY” reports NYup.com. March 22 is his birthday.

Captain James T. Kirk is boldly returning to Upstate New York.

William Shatner will celebrate his 90th birthday with a special event at the “Star Trek Set Tour” exhibit in Ticonderoga, N.Y., on the weekend of July 23-24, 2021.

Trekkies, or Trekkers, can book a number of options, including an early bird general admission price of $49.99 (regular price $80), $499 for a tour with Shatner himself, $160 for a photo, $80 for an autograph, or $1,500 for a “VIP All-Inclusive Package” featuring a dinner gala with Shatner plus the tour, photo, autograph and a “Bridge Chat.”…

(10) BLACKWOOD. Eugene Thacker analyzes how “How Algernon Blackwood Turned Nature Into Sublime Horror” at Literary Hub. His primary text is Blackwood’s 1901 article “Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe”: 

…Already this is the stuff of Blackwood’s many stories of supernatural horror. But what gives scenes like this their ambiance of otherworldliness is not that there are menacing monsters in the night, but rather that the entire environment—the mountains, sky, river, trees—are somehow alive, and alive in an impersonal but sublime way that far exceeds the taxonomies of the naturalist or the theories of the biologist. At one point in the journey, Blackwood makes note of a scene that, in itself, has nothing supernatural about it—circling crows, swaying trees, crepuscular sky—but it is precisely its naturalism that gives Blackwood the sense of “a something alive”:

“Big grey hawks circled ever over head and grey crows by the thousand lined the shores. That evening, after crossing and re-crossing the river, we found a sheltered camp on a sandy island where pollards and willows roared in the wind. As if to show the loneliness of the spot an otter, rolling over and over among the eddies, swam past us as we landed. About sunset the clouds broke up momentarily and let out a flood of crimson light all over the wild country. Against the gorgeous red sky a stream of dark clouds, in all shapes and kinds, hurried over into the Carpathian mountains…”

In short, a landscape without human beings—except, of course, for the enigma of the solitary observer Blackwood himself, bearing witness to the absence of all humanity….

(11) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter witnessed proof that some of tonight’s Jeopardy! contestants know their Ray Bradbury.

Final Jeopardy; category: Science Fiction

Answer: In a 1962 sci-fi story, a time traveler returning to the present finds a dead one of these insects on his shoe.

Wrong question: What is a cockroach?

Correct question: What is a butterfly? (2 contestants got it right)

The temporary host, Katie Couric, mentioned that the Ray Bradbury story gave rise to the term “The Butterly Effect.”

Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter

(12) FROM COLLECTIBLE TO CONTRABAND. One item on Mental Floss’ list of “The TSA’s 10 Weirdest Confiscations From 2020” is genre-related.

…a set of knives concealed in a secret compartment in a copy of Brian W. Aldiss’s science fiction novel Helliconia Summer. The cavity was created in part by cutting out pages from a chapter called “A Way to Better Weaponry.”

See it at the 18-second point in this video:

(13) DRUMMING UP INTEREST. At the link is a scan of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s pre-con coverage of the “1953 World Science Convention”. Andrew Porter also sent along this image of the postage stamps referenced in the article.

(14) YOUR LACK OF FAITH IS DISTURBING. In “Warp Drive News. Seriously” on YouTube, Austrian physicist and sf fan Sabine Hossenfelder explains how new discoveries in physics show that warp drives are possible by manipulating space-time.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Trailers:  Kung Fu Panda” on YouTube, the Screen Junkies say this film is a good choice if you don’t want to spend $30 for Raya And The Last Dragon and if your kids won’t understand Soul.  They say the film is “better than it has a right to be” and its victory over Wall-E in the Annie Awards caused Disney to boycott the Annies for 10 years.

[Thanks to Jennifer Hawthorne, Rich Lynch, Olav Rokne, Mike Kennedy, Michael Toman, Andrew Porter, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, John Hertz, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]