25 Where Did The First Pixels Come From?

Posted on February 23, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) BRAM STOKER FINAL BALLOT. The Horror Writers Association released the 2024 Bram Stoker Awards Final Ballot today. Click through to see the complete list on File 770.

(2) NCAAP IMAGE AWARDS. The “NAACP Image Awards 2025 winners list” at Deadline features several works of genre interest.

Outstanding Costume Design (Television or Motion Picture)

“Wicked” – Paul Tazewell (Universal Pictures)

Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance (Motion Picture)

Blue Ivy Carter – “Mufasa: The Lion King” (Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture)

Outstanding Original Score for Television/Film

“Star Wars: The Acolyte (Original Soundtrack)” – (Walt Disney Records)

Outstanding Performance by a Youth (Series, Special, Television Movie or Limited Series)

Leah Sava Jeffries – “Percy Jackson and the Olympics” (Disney+)

Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series

Rapman – “Supacell – ‘Supacell’” (Netflix)

Outstanding Short Form (Live Action)

“Superman Doesn’t Steal”

(3) LOST GENERATION? A Guardian writer sounds the alarm: “BBC radio drama is in grave danger. Without it we may lose the next generation of writing talent”.

The BBC’s output of new original and adapted drama has more than halved since 2018 – a cut that amounts to hundreds of lost hours, although precise figures are hard to come by. At a time when interest in audio content has never been higher – the number of existing podcasts is somewhere between 3m and 4m; a hit series is downloaded millions of times a month (The Rest Is History: 29m!) – the BBC’s audio drama output is at an all-time low. As a career radio dramatist, whenever I am gloomily dwelling on this fact, the football phrase “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” comes to mind. Because in this new era of audio storytelling and podcast ubiquity, the BBC’s incredible track record in radio drama should have proved a fabulous advantage. Instead, we are facing the possibility of extinction.

It all began with the 60-minute Friday Play (decommissioned in 2010). This was followed by The Wire (Radio 3) in 2014. The 15-minute drama in Woman’s Hour was lost in 2021. Radio 4’s Friday afternoon play became 30 minutes rather than 45 soon after. Its 60-minute Saturday play – once a weekly event – has been steadily whittled down to 12 new original dramas a year. The latest cut – Radio 3’s Sunday night drama, the UK’s last remaining 90-minute slot – has generated some press, and a petition from the likes of Judi Dench and Ian McKellan, but it is only the latest in a series of losses…

(4) DAVE MCCARTY DISCIPLINED AGAIN. At Chicago’s Capricon earlier this month Dave McCarty reportedly ran an unauthorized room party which led to the loss of his membership. The committee did not respond to File 770’s question about the incident. One person has gone public about it on Bluesky, however.

(5) SLIPPING A MICKEY. [Item by Steven French.] Oscar wining Director Bong Joon Ho is interviewed about his upcoming movie, Mickey 17 a sci-fi ‘crime caper starring Robert Pattinson: “Bong Joon Ho: ‘I wish I had Ken Loach’s energy, but I’m just thinking about nap time’” in the Guardian.

… Mickey 17, which might best be described as a blackly comic, satirical sci-fi-crime caper. It stars Robert Pattinson as the dopey and desperate Mickey Barnes, who signs up to work a dangerous job on a space-colonising mission, led by a despotic ex-congressman (Mark Ruffalo) and his unhinged wife (Toni Colette). Then, whenever one of Mickey’s assignments results in his death – which is often – he is simply cloned, using “reprinting” technology and sent straight back to work. This is a notion Bong seems to find particularly discomfiting. “Y’know, there’s an HP printer right here in this room, as we’re doing this interview,” he says, eyeing the machine warily. “To think that, like, my head and my arms and legs would just be printed out of this printer, like a piece of paper …”

(6) VERTEX ARTIST REMEMBERED. Joachim Boaz celebrates “Adventures in Science Fiction Art: Rodger B. MacGowan’s Approachable New Wave Art, Part I” at Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations. MacGowan died February 22.

Rodger B. MacGowan (1948-2025), best known for his wargame art and design, passed away yesterday.¹ Most of the memorial posts I’ve seen on social media focus on his later career paths in the board-gaming world. Thus, I thought it would be worthwhile to narrow in on his contribution to science fiction art. After graduating UCLA, where he studied art, motion pictures, and graphic design, MacGowan found work at an advertising agency and an opportunity to create art for one of their accounts, the short-lived Vertex science fiction magazine…

MacGowan’s interior art for part two of William K. Carlson’s “Sunrise West” in Vertex: The Magazine of Science Fiction (December 1974)

(7) BLOOKS. “These Books Are Absolutely Unreadable. That’s the Point” explains the New York Times (link bypasses the paywall) in an article about the Center for Book Arts’ exhibition “The Best Kept Secret: 200 Years of Blooks”.

A benign quirk of humanity is that we are delighted by things designed to look like other things. A bed shaped like a swan. A sauna shaped like a garlic bulb. A toilet brush shaped like a cherry. The designer Elsa Schiaparelli made fashion history with her acts of surreal mimicry, creating buttons in the form of crickets, a compact that looks like a rotary phone dial, a belt buckle of manicured hands.

The trick is hardly new. Medieval cooks molded pork meatloaf to look like pea pods and massaged sweet almond paste into hedgehogs. No matter the scale or edibility of the object, we’ve always relished a material plot twist — a one-liner in three dimensions.

Inclusion in the category requires design intention, so the “night stand” that is actually a pile of unread books by your bed doesn’t count, no matter how nicely it accommodates a pair of reading glasses and a jar of melatonin gummies. But how about a transistor radio painstakingly designed to mimic a leather-bound book? Or a hand-held lantern shaped like an open volume, complete with marbled exterior and gilt-stamped spine? Or a tiny dust-jacketed “book” with a functional cigarette lighter where the pages ought to be? Yes, yes and yes….

(8) CAS AWARDS 2025. Sff was sparse among the winners of the “Cinema Audio Society awards” reported by Deadline. However, CAS presented its 2025 Filmmaker Award to the Dune franchise’s Denis Villeneuve.

These were the winners of genre interest.

MOTION PICTURES – ANIMATED

The Wild Robot
Original Dialogue Mixer – Ken Gombos
Re-Recording Mixer – Leff Lefferts
Re-Recording Mixer – Gary A. Rizzo CAS
Scoring Mixer – Alan Meyerson CAS
Foley Mixer – Richard Duarte

MOTION PICTURES – DOCUMENTARY

Music by John Williams
Production Mixer – Noah Alexander
Re-Recording Mixer – Christopher Barnett CAS
Re-Recording Mixer – Roy Waldspurger

(9) MARK R. LEEPER OBITUARY. Evelyn C. Leeper announced the death of her husband today, and permitted File 770 to publish the obituary she has written: “Mark R. Leeper (1950-2025)”.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

February 23, 1932 — Majel Barrett Roddenberry. (Died 2008.)

By Paul Weimer: “The First Lady of Star Trek”

Her contributions to Star Trek have been broad and varied. Shall we begin with Majel Barrett Roddenberry as the original Number One in the pilot episode (and seen in “The Menagerie”)? Perhaps having a woman as second in command was too much for 60’s television. So, she became Nurse Chapel and “the voice of the computer” for most of the Star Trek TV series up to her death in 2009.

I didn’t twig until the Next Generation who “that voice was”, when of course she showed up in several episodes as the irrepressible Lwaxana Troi, mother of Counsellor Troi on the Enterprise-D. What could have been a one-note one-time joke character developed into someone with real personality, drive, and spirit under her interpretation of the role. Hearing the computer voice and Lwaxana in the same episode, it finally dawned on me that they were both one and the same. I wound up trying to figure out a headcanon that would explain it, and never quite managed it.

My second favorite small role for her outside of Star Trek has to be as the robotic hard drinking madam of the brothel in the movie Westworld. The movie does have an inconsistency in it thanks to her. We see her swigging drinks from a bottle during the barroom brawl in between the chaos…but later at the end of the movie, when a different robot is offered water, it destroys her. Maybe she was one of the relatively few humans working in the park? (In which case, she probably died during the robot virus uprising). It’s never made absolutely clear, and of course, until they turn murderous, not being able to tell the difference between the robots and humans IS part of the point

But of course, she also appeared in one episode of Babylon 5 as the wife of the now dead Emperor. She has psychic powers and can foresee the future. And Londo, foolish Londo, spends a lot of resources and pull in order to get into her presence and get a prophecy from her. It’s not a great prophecy, and much digital ink was spilled early in the days of the internet trying to interpret just what she meant by her cryptic pronouncements. Oh, and of course announcing that both Vir and Londo would be Emperor.

She passed away in 2008. Requiescat in pace.

(11) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Remembering “Our Man Bashir” Episode, Deep Space Nine

Since Amazon now owns the Bond franchise and we know how lovingly they handled the Tolkien franchise, I thought I’d look at the time the writers of Deep Space Nine decided to riff off of James Bond with the “Our Man Bashir” episode in November of 1995 and got in deep shit with one of the holders of that franchise.

So deep that’s it’s been held by fans of the Deep Space Nine that the episode has never been aired after the initial airing as a settlement with one of the producers of a certain film otherwise they would’ve been sued by them. Rest assured that if you go to Paramount+ right now as I did, it’s there with the rest of the Deep Space Nine series.

It was directed by Winrich Kolbe from a story that originated with a pitch from Assistant Script Coordinator Robert Gillan which was turned into a script by Producer Ronald D. Moore.

Although the episode takes its title from Our Man Flint, a major inspiration for the story was the James Bond films. This obvious influence resulted in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer complaining to Paramount about it as they had GoldenEye coming out.

Though why they thought it would affect the success of the film is a mystery as it was the best Pierce Brosnan Bond film and the most successful of his films. And why they were concerned anyways that a SF TV episode would affect the box office of a major film makes no sense at all, does it?

It was well-received at the time and has not been visited by the Suck Fairy which I hold is true of the entire series. Charlie Jane Anders at io9 considers it one of goofiest Deep Space Nine episodes, and Keith DeCandido at Tor.com says “holy crap is it fun”.

From beginning to end, it’s absolutely fun. They sometimes didn’t handle humor wonderfully and as a result it came off as strained not here they had the perfect touch. And remember Bashir does become a secret agent in Section 31 of Trek in the novels though definitely not a Bond-style secret agent.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Between Friends thinks writer’s block isn’t all bad.
Loose Parts forgot the switch.
Nancy’s aunt organizes her books.
Pluggers knows how to add to a story.
The Argyle Sweater personalizes exercise goals.
Wumo copyedits as badly as I do.

(13) ASTEROID MINING PRECURSOR. “Earth’s 1st Asteroid Mining Prospector Heads to the Launchpad” reports the New York Times (behind a paywall).

The dream of mining metals in deep space crashed and burned in the 2010s. AstroForge’s Odin mission to survey a potentially metallic asteroid is packed and ready to lift off.

A private company is aiming to heave a microwave oven-size spacecraft toward an asteroid later this week, its goal to kick off a future where precious metals are mined around the solar system to create vast fortunes on Earth.

“If this works out, this will probably be the biggest business ever conceived of,” said Matt Gialich, the founder and chief executive of AstroForge, the builder and operator of the robotic probe….

(14) BEWARE OF FALLING ROCKS. [Item by Steven French.] The world’s oldest Sunday newspaper opines about the possibility of an asteroid impact: “The Observer view: when an asteroid is hurtling to Earth, do you head for the pub or the church?”

How to feel about this lump of rock hurtling towards us at 38,000mph? To pinch from The Simpsons Movie, is it the pub or the church for you? (Faced with catastrophe, the patrons of Moe’s Tavern run from bar to church, while the congregation of the latter sprints in the opposite direction, desperate for a stiff drink.) Most of us will keep calm and carry on, whatever the percentages. Seven years is a long time: you’ll be a size 10 by then – that, or getting divorced.

The key thing about Armageddon is that it’s always in the future, as the followers of myriad cults have found to their cost down the years. Let us trust the experts – remember them? – to sort it out. A few years ago, Nasa significantly changed the orbit of an asteroid. The Dart spacecraft slammed into a 150-metre asteroid moon at speed, changing its orbital period by more than 30 minutes – a result that could be replicated, if planning began now.

A few, should the predictions get worse, may go full survivalist, filling their bunkers with tinned carrots. But their number will be small. The news cycle is hardly relaxing at the moment, the old order as frangible as digestive biscuits. A person has the capacity for only so much terror, and now may not be the time to start worrying what will happen to Birmingham if YR4 turns out to be West Midlands-bound.

The year 1998 came with its share of global calamities, but the notion of a world war seemed far away compared with today, which may be one reason why two big films about asteroids then played to packed cinemas.

In Deep Impact, a comet on a collision course with Earth hits, causing a tsunami that destroys the US east coast, a mission by the Messiah spacecraft having failed to alter its path. In Armageddon, a rogue asteroid is broken into fragments by a nuclear bomb that is somehow inserted into it by, among others, an oil driller played by Bruce Willis – though it’s not all good news: Shanghai is obliterated by another meteor strike along the way. No prizes for guessing which film did better at the box office….

(15) A BITING WIND. The “Author Forecast: Weather Worth Reading Kickstarter”, which offers “your local weather told using quotes from books”, is taking pledges through February 28. (But it’s a done deal – they’ve already raised 20 times their target amount.)

I wish I could say how many sff quotes are in the mix – this one from Dracula is alone among the samples shown in the publicity. You might find the product amusing anyway!

(16) WEDNESDAY. Netflix dropped a new “Wednesday Season 2 Trailer” this week.

Wednesday Addams’ preference for the color black has often been an important character trait in Addams Family adaptations, with Wednesday taking this quality to the next level as Jenna Ortega’s iteration requires a black substitute for Nevermore Academy’s purple uniform. Both Wednesday and Catherine Zeta-Jones’ Morticia wore only black throughout season 1 to pay homage to their characters’ iconic styles from past franchise entries, but Wednesday season 2 is making some adjustments to the Addams’s color palettes. Not only is Pugsley donning Nevermore’s purple jacket, but Morticia is seen wearing a dress that breaks away from her black-clad franchise history.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/17/25 We All Need Somebody To Scroll On

Posted on February 17, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) DOCTOR WHO EARLY DAYS. Charlie Jane Anders’ recent Happy Dancing newsletter, titled “Hope Is Important, But So Is Curiosity”, shares some discoveries made while reading The Doctor Who Production Diary: The Hartnell Years by David Brunt.

…Brunt managed to get access to all the paperwork on the making of Doctor Who from 1963 to 1966, the earliest years when people endlessly debated whether the show could last another 13 weeks or just be canceled immediately.

I’ve just been reading about the turmoil the Doctor Who team went through in 1964, around the time they were making “The Dalek Invasion of Earth.” This is a super important story, because it’s where the Daleks really cement themselves as epic villains — but also because it sees the show’s first departure: the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan leaves the ship, not entirely by choice.

I had never known that Terry Nation, the story’s writer, had included a new character in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” to replace Susan aboard the TARDIS. This would have been Saida, “a beautiful Anglo-Indian girl, who will eventually replace Susan.” At the end of the story, in Nation’s original scripts, the Doctor leaves Susan behind on Earth, only to be startled to find “a bright and smiling Saida” has snuck aboard the TARDIS. Imagine if Doctor Who had introduced its first BIPOC companion, over forty years before Martha Jones. Alas, the character of Saida was aged up and turned into a white woman named Jenny, who does not join the TARDIS crew after all.

Also, around that same time, William Hartnell, William Russell and Jacqueline Hill were all asking for money — and there was talk about either canceling the show or writing Ian and Barbara in the same episode as Susan. One BBC higher-up even suggested putting the show on a short hiatus and replacing the entire cast, including Hartnell, with new actors. This doesn’t seem to have gone far, but it still boggles the mind. Would the Doctor have regenerated in 1964, two years early? Or would they have found another way to recast the role? It’s hard to imagine.

I clicked the link to the book and found more things you will discover in it:

Which future Doctor Who scriptwriter was the first person approached to write for the series?
How major was the overhaul to the BBC Drama Department under Sydney Newman in 1963, and who first suggested the idea before he even joined the BBC?
How did the series manage to get made, when several people inside the BBC tried to get it cancelled before it even went into production?
How many people turned down the offer of becoming the series’ producer before Verity Lambert was hired?
How long before he appeared as Steven Taylor was Peter Purves contracted for the role?
Was Vicki going to appear in ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’?
Was Katarina originally going to survive that same story?
When was Vicki planned to be burned as a witch?
Was Anne Chaplet going to appear in ‘The Celestial Toymaker’?
On what date was it first decided to write out William Hartnell as the Doctor?
Exactly when was Patrick Troughton contracted to replace him?

(2) MELBOURNE CLUB FINDS NEW MEETING PLACE. Melbourne Science Fiction Club President Alison Barton delivered “Some exciting news for the MSFC” to the group on Facebook today.

We are moving to a new home soon!

As regular members and readers will know, the MSFC was forced to move from its much beloved West Brunswick location about 10 years ago. At the time the (quite extensive) library went into storage, an arrangement which we thought would be temporary. Finding a venue that was willing to home us *and* the library proved to be much more difficult than imagined however. The library has often been a focal point for members, both socially, but also in that “Hey wow, I’ve been wanting to read the final volume in this series for years, but it’s out of print everywhere!” kind of way.

With much thanks to Terencio (whom some might recall as our trivia master extraordinaire of some year), we have settled on a deal with a new location that will enable us to bring the whole library out of storage once more. I’m sure this will be welcome news to many.

Not wanting to leave the library in ‘limbo’ has been one of the reasons I have continued on as President of the club for such a long time, but as mentioned above, I didn’t think it would take quite this long. I announced at last year’s AGM that I would be stepping down at this year’s AGM (which will be held in July), as I need to focus more time on other things. I was a little sad that I might be stepping down before we accomplished this particular goal, so I am very very pleased to know that by the time I leave the library will be in full swing once more.

Please stay tuned for further information about the new venue address and meeting dates. Until we get everything finalised we will continue to meet at St Augustine’s Church Hall, 100 Sydney Rd, Coburg on the third Friday of each month so please keep watching for announcements so that you don’t turn up at the wrong place sometime.

(3) SEATTLE 2025 RATE HIKE MARCH 1. Adult attending membership rates for Seattle Worldcon 2025 are set to increase by $30 on March 1, to a total of $280 ($50 WSFS membership + $230 attending supplement).

Full registration information and a link to the registration portal can be found on the membership page on their website.

(4) SEATTLE 2025 COMMUNITY FUND. Seattle Worldcon 2025 has completed the first round of grants from their Community Fund which offers eligible people memberships and financial stipends to help defray the expenses of attending this year’s Worldcon.

Their news release also said:

If you have applied and haven’t yet been awarded a grant, you are still in consideration for future rounds. The next round of grants will be awarded in March.

We are still accepting applications. You can find details about our focus groups and the application link on our Community Fund web page.

In order to help as many fans as possible attend the event from the Pacific Northwest and around the world, the community fund is still accepting tax deductible donations. You can donate when you register, or by this direct donation link. Thank you to everyone who has donated so far. You are making a difference!

(5) FURTHER REPLY BY DANIEL GREENE. While Naomi King’s YouTube videos charging Daniel Greene with sexual assault have been taken down, Greene has used his archival copies of some of her videos to produce another denial titled “Proving Naomi King Lied With Their Own Words”.

(6) FILMGOERS ASSEMBLE. Apparently, somebody’s surprised. The New York Times reports “Marvel’s New ‘Captain America’ Is No. 1, Despite a Backlash and Poor Reviews”. (Behind a paywall.)

So Disney slowed the pace. Last year, Marvel released one movie (the megasuccessful “Deadpool & Wolverine”) and two Disney+ series. To compare, in 2021 Marvel churned out four movies (with mixed results) and five Disney+ series.

Factory problem fixed?

Maybe: Marvel’s “Captain America: Brave New World” was a runaway No. 1 at the global box office over the weekend. The movie, which cost at least $300 million to make and market worldwide, was on pace to sell roughly $100 million in tickets from Thursday through Monday in the United States and Canada, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. Moviegoers overseas were poised to chip in another $92 million or so.

Maybe not: “Brave New World” received the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s lowest-ever grade (B-minus) from ticket buyers in CinemaScore exit polls. Reviews were only 50 percent positive, according to Rotten Tomatoes, which resulted in a “rotten” rating from the site. Just two Marvel movies rank lower on the Rotten Tomatoes meter, and both quickly ran out of box office steam after No. 1 starts that were driven by die-hard fans and marketing bombast.

“Brave New World” outperformed analyst expectations amid a racist backlash from some internet users and right-wing pundits, who criticized Marvel’s decision to refresh the “Captain America” franchise by giving the title role to a Black actor. (A “D.E.I. hire,” they maintained in numerous X posts, a reference to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.) Anthony Mackie, who took over the character from Chris Evans, also came under attack as “anti-American” for a comment he made while promoting the film overseas….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

February 17, 1912 — Andre Norton. (Died 2005.)

By Paul Weimer: I blame my own eagerness to get to the adult’s book as the reason why I neglected reading Andre Norton for a long long time.

Back in the days of yesteryear, when I first got a library card, I was always clamoring to be allowed out of the children’s section and to be able to get into the adult section. I made such a racket about it that my parents and the librarian consented, and so for years, I went to the adult section of the New Dorp Public Library and left the children’s section behind.

As a result, a number of genre books and entire authors were missed by me. I didn’t read most of the Heinlein juveniles for years, because they were, unbeknownst by me, in the children’s section, and once I had gotten out of that small section of the library, I was not going to go back.

And so, too, Andre Norton.

So I did not come to Andre Norton as a teenager, it wasn’t until I was an adult, and kept hearing her name and seeing references to her work that I started picking it up and reading it. The Time Traders was in retrospect a great place for me to start her work, because it let me scratch my love of history at the same time. So I hunted her work.

I picked up Star Man’s Son 2250 AD, which was actually in the adult section, because of the title, and the image of this poor guy pushing a raft. How could I not want to know what had happened to the world to reduce it to its parlous state? I found it an amazingly detailed, immersive and striking post-apocalyptic story with mutants, a clan looking to claw its way back to prominence and power with the ruined remnants of the old, implacable foes, and a big cat companion all in the bargain.

I read a fair swath of Norton’s novels at that point, enjoying her characters, her worlds, and her ideas (even as recently as a couple of years ago, I am still catching up on her oeuvre now and again to try and plug the gaps.

But the novel that remains with me the most is not a science fiction, or time travel, or fantasy, or post apocalyptic novel at all. And no, not even the expansive and sprawling Witch World novels, which are cromulent science fantasy fun (we all know my love of that subgenre by now, yes?) No, in the heady days of the early 1990’s when I was branching out into historical fiction, sometimes with some fantasy (hello Judith Tarr), it was a historical fictional fantasy novel that poleaxed me in a good way.

I think my interest in the Roman Empire (in a non ironic way, I do think about the Roman Empire frequently) helped fuel my interest (especially the striking cover) of Norton’s co-written Empire of The Eagle novel . I didn’t realize it was one of a series, because the story is so expansive in its self containment. Quintus is a tribune of the empire in the mid 40’s BC. He goes off with the army of Crassus to fight the Parthians. If you know your history, you know that army got pummeled at Carrhae and the army destroyed and Crassus killed. But was that the entire story? Norton invents a march of the survivors far to the east, to China, and a new life for the remnant soldiers. Quintus wants to regain the lost Eagle, but in the meantime he and his comrades need to make a new life impossibly far away from Rome, and deal with the dangers and problems there, including a dread sorcerer. There is magic, a reincarnation romance, and a lot of historical detail, and it wasn’t until I encountered Howard Lamb that I encountered any historical fiction set in this fascinating area. (I would many years later get Historical Atlases of Central Asia and trace Quintus adventures).

Ave Atque Vale, Andre Norton.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

February 17, 1989 — Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure released

By Paul Weimer: I admit to having slept on Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure when it came out in the theaters back in 1989. That was senior year in High School and I had other concerns on my mind at the time that winter. So it was not until many years later and DVDs became a thing that I was even tempted to try and catch up on it.

And the reason why I did wasn’t even the original movie, but the sequel, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. A friend of mine told me that, despite all appearances, Bogus Journey actually showed some clever use and thought in time travel, doing the things that you wondered why people with time machines never thought to do, especially in the middle of conflicts and fights. So I dutifully put in both movies into my Netflix queue and watched both back-to-back. The fact I was living in California at the time only added to the surrealism of watching these two Southern California slackers be seemingly the basis of future society was all the more surreal for me as a viewer.

Also, this was after The Matrix, so I was, in effect, looking back at the early work of Keanu Reeves that I had missed in the process. Whoa, right?

I found Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure to be a lighthearted and extremely funny comedy that never takes itself too seriously, but its inclusive message is one solely needed in this day and age. It wasn’t high art in the least, but the sight gags, the purposefully caricatured portrayals of historical figures, to comedic effect (Napoleon at Waterloo!) and the sense of fun the entire cast was having meant that I watched both movies a couple of times over before returning them. And I kept renting it again and again every couple of years. There is a weird innocent magic to the movie (the sequel is very good but a slightly different kettle of fish) that makes me think of movies like Time Bandits, except for a slightly older target audience.

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is coming to Prime in a couple of weeks as of the time of the writing of this. I think a rewatch is in order, don’t you?

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Birdbrains finds what everybody’s been looking for.
Bizarro regrets a name change.
Carpe Diem checks in.
Close to Home finds when you’re from Oz it can be hard to get through security.
Reality Check follows police procedure.

(10) WEDNESDAY’S CHIA. Why yes, this is a real product, hard as it is to believe: “Addams Family Wednesday Chia Pet®”.

(11) TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A recent issue of Nature’s cover story looks at asteroid detection and how it’s improving. Bruce Willis would be impressed… “Sight Unseen”.

The detection and monitoring of asteroids is key to protecting Earth from impacts. Large bodies (1 kilometre or more) in the main asteroid belt are relatively easy to spot and monitor but smaller objects (those down to 10 metres in diameter), which have the potential to move closer to Earth more frequently, are far more elusive. In this week’s issue Artem Burdanov, Julien de Wit and colleagues report the detection of 138 small asteroids in the main belt that were previously invisible to standard detection methods. The researchers made use of the JWST’s infrared capabilities that, when combined with synthetic tracking techniques such as merging multiple images, allowed them to spot the unidentified asteroids. The team suggests the JWST’s ability to monitor and study objects that have the potential to strike Earth, such as asteroid 2024 YR4, could make it an important part of future planetary-defence efforts.

The primary research is here.

What they have observed is a distribution of a range of asteroid sizes. All fair enough, but there is an apparent break in sizes at those with a diameter of about 100 metres. This, the researchers say, is suggestive of “a population driven by collisional cascade”.

(12) HELP WANTED. And as a result of such information as that in the previous item, the Guardian reports, “China opens recruitment for ‘planetary defence force’ amid fears of asteroid hitting Earth”.

China has begun recruiting for a planetary defence force after risk assessments determined that an asteroid could conceivably hit Earth in 2032.

Job ads posted online by China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) this week, sought young loyal graduates focused on aerospace engineering, international cooperation and asteroid detection.

The recruitment drive comes amid increasing focus on an asteroid with a low – but growing – likelihood of hitting earth in seven years. The 2024 YR4 asteroid is at the top of the European and US space agencies’ risk lists, and last week analysts increased their probability assessment of it hitting Earth from 1.3% to 2.2%. The UN’s Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, comprising countries with space programs including China, have been meeting regularly to discuss a response.

The ads, posted to WeChat earlier this week, listed 16 job vacancies at SASTIND, including three for a new “planetary defence force”. They invited applications from recent graduates aged under 35, with professional and technical qualifications and “a firm political stance” supporting the Chinese Communist party and an ideology aligned with its leader, Xi Jinping…

(13) GIVE A DOG A BAD NAME. Nature considers “From viral variants to devastating storms, how names shape the public’s reaction to science” in the What’s in a Name podcase.

Categorizing things is central to science. And there are dozens of systems scientists have created to name everything from the trenches on the sea bed to the stars in the sky.

But names have consequences. In our series What’s in a name we explore naming in science and how names impact the world — whether the system of naming species remains in step with society, how the names of diseases can create stigma, or even how the names of scientific concepts can drive the direction of research itself.

In episode two, we’re looking at how the names chosen by scientists help, or hinder, communication with the public.

Well chosen names can quickly convey scientific concepts or health messages — in emergency situations they can even save lives. We’ll hear how the systems of naming tropical storms and Covid-19 variants came to be, and how they took different approaches to achieve the same outcome.

We’ll also consider the language used to talk about climate change, and how the ways of describing it have been used to deliberately introduce uncertainty and confusion….

(14) YOUR CELESTIAL CALENDAR. The Late Night With Seth Myers host is watching the skies, and shares what he expects to see this year in “Seth Lays Out 2025’s Major Astronomical Events”. Many of these will be really happening. Some are facetious….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “David Tennant on playing an evil character in Jessica Jones and geeks out on Doctor Who” on YouTube.

David Tennant rolls the BAFTA dice to break down some of the iconic characters he’s played so far in his career including the Doctor in Doctor Who, The Purple Man in Jessica Jones and Alec Hardy in Broadchurch as well as … himself.. David looks back on how his acting methodology has evolved, which of his characters would vibe the most together and develops a brand new Pet Detective TV show (reluctantly) featuring Michael Sheen.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/4/23 My Chief Pixel Has Told Me To Scroll And Fifth This File

Posted on February 4, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) SHEREE RENÉE THOMAS LIBRARY EVENT. A Contemporary Conversations program with Sheree Renée Thomas will be held on Thursday, February 23 from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the Rockville (MD) Memorial Library. The in-person event will also be offered via live streaming. Register here.

New York Times bestselling, two-time World Fantasy Award-winning author and editor Sheree Renée Thomas will talk about Afrofuturism & Diversity in Sci-Fi.

Thomas has been a 2022 Hugo Award Finalist, and her collection, Nine Bar Blues, is a Locus, Ignyte, and World Fantasy Finalist. She edited the groundbreaking Dark Matter anthologies that introduced a century of Black speculative fiction, including W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction stories. Thomas wrote Marvel’s Black Panther: Panther’s Rage novel (Oct ’22), adapted from the legendary comics, collaborated with Janelle Monáe on The Memory Librarian and is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949 and Obsidian, founded in 1975. In 2022 she co-curated Carnegie Hall’s historic, citywide Afrofuturism Festival.

(2) AUSTRALIAN YA WINS AWARDS. A pair of YA fantasy novels were among the winners of the Victorian premier’s literary awards in Australia: “Melbourne author Jessica Au wins $125,000 for ‘quietly powerful’ novella” in the Guardian.

Lystra Rose, a writer of the Guugu Yimithirr, Birri Gubba and Erub nations and Scottish descent, won the Indigenous writing prize for her debut young adult fantasy fiction novel The Upwelling, which weaves the language and practices of the Yugambeh people into the narrative.

The young adult prize was won by New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based writer Kate Murray for her debut novel We Who Hunt the Hollow, also a fantasy novel.

(3) WRITERS MARKET SITE SHUTTERED. Ralan.com, one of the two big sites for writers looking for markets, now closed. Joe Stech of Compelling Science Fiction reached out to Ralan and received this statement for publication:

Ralan.com was started on 5 December 1996 and provided organized and up-to-date market listings that only accepted submissions of speculative genres, or at least elements of such. As this information was shared, other writers soon started helping back, pointing out new markets, and noting changes in active listings. Many publishers and editors were also actively involved, and this three-way interaction continued until the website closed on 1 February 2023, after 26 years & 57 days. Other sites provided a similar service, but arguably Ralan.com, at least in the speculative genres, had one of the most up-to-date market listings. Add to this the how-to-submit articles page, an extensive list of non-functioning markets, and a writing link page second to none. I offer my deepest thanks to all who helped along the way, and wish everyone the very best future.

Stech added, “And if you, dear reader, are looking for another place to discover short fiction markets, try the Submission Grinder.”

(4) A USEFUL CRITICISM. Samuel Delany regaled Facebook readers about his friendship with Judith Merril and Algis Budrys and their intersection with an edition of Nova.

Here is the back of a 12th printing of the Bantam Books edition of my 1968 novel *Nova* (May, 1983). I began it in Athens, Greece, June ’66, and finished it NYC, in May of ’67.) The two critics quoted on the back are A. J. Budrys (the way I am called Chip, most people called him A. J.) and the other is Judith Merril. (To her friends, old and young, she was Judy.) I think of both as my friends, but we were friends in very different ways ….

…. Dick [Entin]’s response was that the ending needed to be stronger—and that’s always good advice. He also objected to one page-and-a -half-section in the MS, which he found “over-the-top” and unbelievable. His exact words were, “Chip—businessmen just don’t do things like that.” So I took the passage out.

In his *Galaxy* review, Budrys had realized that *Nova* was a pretty carefully structured book. “What happened to Bryan?” he asked. The young man’s absence at the end registered, to him, as a hole in the tale’s basic pattern.

It was.

As soon as I read the question, I realized that the pages I’d removed had, among other things, answered just that question. If the Doubleday editors, Larry or Mark, had asked the same thing, I would have returned those pages as well. But A. J. was the first one who did. Also I realized that my putative villain wasn’t simply a modern businessman; he was a sociopath, if not a psychotic—of the sort who sometimes take charge of a big business or even a country.

Between the first Double and Co. edition and the first Doubleday Bookclub edition, I reinserted the pages (yes, I ran them through the typewriter again, and made some cosmetic improvements), but in every subsequent edition they were back in place. As well, I was very thankful for A. J.’s pointing it out to me, even though he had to do it in public….

(5) BLASPHEMIPEDIA? “Pakistan blocks Wikipedia for ‘blasphemous content’” – BBC News was unable to learn what material was in question.

…[Pakistan Telecommunication Authority] spokesperson Malahat Obaid said Wikipedia failed to respond to “repeated correspondence” over the removal of “blasphemous content”.

“They did remove some of the material but not all,” he added, confirming that the website would remain blocked until “all the objectionable material” was removed.

Details of the material in question have not been revealed.

The Wikimedia Foundation said if the ban continued it would “deprive everyone access to Pakistan’s knowledge, history, and culture”.

Free speech campaigners have raised concerns over the move, saying there seemed to be “a concerted effort to exert greater control over content on the internet”.

“The main purpose is to silence any dissent,” said digital rights activist Usama Khilji.

“A lot of times blasphemy is weaponised for that purpose,” he added….

(6) MELINDA DILLON OBITUARY. Actress Melinda Dillon died January 9 reports Variety: “Melinda Dillon Dead: A Christmas Story, Close Encounters Actor was 83”. She played many genre roles – in addition to those listed below, she also was in a Twilight Zone episode.

…Dillon is celebrated for her role as Jillian Guiler in Steven Speilberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), for which she earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actress. She received a second supporting actress nomination in 1982 for her role as Teresa in Sydney Pollack’s “Absence of Malice” (1981). In 1977, she received a Golden Globe nomination for acting debut in a motion picture for Hal Ashby’s “Bound for Glory” (1976).

In a statement, Spielberg praised Dillon, saying, “Melinda was generous of spirit and lent such kindness to the character she played in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’… We will all miss her.”

Dillon also played the matriarch of the Parker family in Bob Clark’s holiday classic “A Christmas Story” (1983) and went on to appear in “Harry and the Hendersons” (1987), “Captain America” (1990) and “Nightbreaker” (1989). Her most recent appearances were in “Heartland” in 2007, and before that in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” (1999) as Rose Gator, the wife of a game show host with a terrible secret….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1958 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

There are some Beginnings that are as perfect as the story that follows and one of them is that starts off Robert Bloch’s “That Hell-Bound Train” which many decades after reading it remains my favorite piece of fiction by him.

It was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in September of 1958.

I’d stick a spoiler alert in here but surely every Filer here knows the story of Martin, a hobo, who one dark night has a large black train pulls up beside him. The conductor says Martin can have anything he wants in exchange for which he will “ride that Hell-Bound Train” when he dies. He hands Martin a watch which he tells him will stop time when Martin reaches he perceives to be the absolute perfect moment in his life.

Y’all know what that moment turns out to be…

It would win the Hugo Award at Detention in a field of nominees far too large to list here. Really it was.

I love every word of the story from what Martin does with his life until he finally stops time. It is indeed a sterling story.

William Tenn says in Immodest Proposals: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn, volume 1, that he helped shape the story while at the magazine as it was “an absolutely fine piece of work that just didn’t have a usable ending”. He had come to the magazine after Boucher retired.

So here’s that wonderful Beginning… and I wondering did anyone write a filk off of it?

When Martin was a little boy, his daddy was a Railroad Man. Daddy never rode the high iron, but he walked the tracks for the CB&Q, and he was proud of his job. And every night when he got drunk, he sang this old song about That Hell-Bound Train.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 4, 1922 — William Phipps. He started off his genre career by being in both The War of The Worlds and Invaders from Mars. He’d later be in Cat-Women of the Moon, The Snow Creature, The Evil of Frankenstein, and the Dune series. He’d have one-offs in Batman, Green Hornet, The Munsters, Wild Wild West and a lead role in the Time Express series which would last four episodes according IMDB. (Died 2018.)
Born February 4, 1936 — Gary Conway, 87. Best remembered I’d say for starring in Irwin Allen‘s Land of the Giants. He was also in How to Make a Monster, a late Fifties horror film which I’m delighted to say that you can watch here as it is out of copyright. He’s the Young Frankenstein in it.
Born February 4, 1940 — John Schuck, 83. My favorite SF role by him is as the second Draal, Keeper of the Great Machine, on the Babylon 5 series. I know it was only two episodes but it was a fun role. He’s also played the role of Klingon ambassador Kamarag in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. He guest starred in Deep Space Nine as Legate Parn in “The Maquis: Part II”, on Star Trek: Voyager as Chorus #3 in the “Muse” episode, and on Enterprise as Antaak in the “Divergence” and “Affliction” episodes. Oh, and he was Herman Munster in The Munsters Today. Now that was a silly role! Did you know his makeup was the Universal International Frankenstein-monster makeup format whose copyright NBCUniversal still owns?
Born February 4, 1951 — Patrick Bergin, 72. If he had done nothing else, he’d make the Birthday list today for playing Robin Hood in the 1990 Robin Hood which for my money is the finest such film made. Go ahead and argue, I’ve all night. Now as it turns out he has a very long career in this community starting after playing Robin Hood by being in Frankenstein as Victor Frankenstein, then Benjamin Trace In Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (a film universally despised), George Challenger in The Lost World, Treasure Island as Billy Bones, Merlin: The Return as King Arthur, Dracula as, well, Dracula Himself, Ghostwood as Friar Paul and Gallowwalkers as Marshall Gaza.
Born February 4, 1959 — Pamelyn Ferdin, 64. She was in the “And the Children Shall Lead” episode of Trek. She’ll show up in The Flying Nun (as two different characters), voicing a role in The Cat in The Hat short, Night Gallery, Sealab 2020 (another voice acting gig), Shazam! and Project UFO. She’d have a main role in Space Academy, the Jonathan Harris fronted series as well.
Born February 4, 1961 — Neal Asher, 62. I’ve been reading and enjoying his Polity series since he started it nearly twenty years ago. Listing all of his works here would drive OGH to a nervous tick as I think there’s now close to thirty works in total. I’m listening to The Line War right now and it’s typically filled with a mix of outrageous SF concepts (Dyson spheres in the middle of a hundred thousand year construction cycles) and humans who might not be human (Ian Cormac is back again). As I said several years ago, he is the sort of writer that I think drives our Puppies to madness — literate pulp SF pumped out fast that readers like.
Born February 4, 1962 — Thomas Scott Winnett.. Locus magazine editorial assistant and reviewer from 1989 to 1994. He worked on Locus looks at books and Books receivedas well. In addition, he wrote well over a hundred reviews for Locus. He died of AIDS-related pneumonia. (Died 2004.)

(9) VIEW DORAN ART. “Colleen Doran Illustrates Neil Gaiman” will be on exhibit at the Society of Illustrators in New York beginning March 22 and running through July 29.

In the midst of a long career drawing comics for such titles as Wonder Woman and Legion of Super-Heroes, Colleen Doran has found her artistic Holy Grail in her series of adaptations of Neil Gaiman short stories published by Dark Horse, including her latest masterpiece Chivalry, the Eisner and Bram Stoker Award winning dark fantasy Snow Glass Apples, and The Troll Bridge, a spooky coming-of-age story.

A lifelong enthusiast of Arthurian mythology, Doran longed to adapt Gaiman’s 1998 short story Chivalry, the story of Mrs. Whitaker, a British widow who finds the Holy Grail in a thrift shop and the knight who offers her priceless relics in exchange so he can win the Grail and end his quest. Like the Illuminated manuscripts that inspired her colors and layout, Doran’s lush hand-painted pages for Chivalry are full of symbolism taken from her personal life, world history, and Arthurian legend. Her jewel-toned color palette and detailed drawing make viewing the original artwork a special experience.

Also on view will be several pages from Snow Glass Apples, Doran’s version of Gaiman’s chilling retelling of the Snow White story, drawn in an intricate style influenced by the Irish artist Harry Clarke. The exhibit, curated by Kim A. Munson, editor of the Eisner nominated anthology Comic Art in Museums and 2022 Eisner Awards Judge, will also include works from other Doran/Gaiman titles such as The Sandman, American Gods, Norse Mythology, and others.

(10) PINKWATER DOES CAR TALK. “#2309: Circumferentially-Challenged: The Best of Car Talk” on NPR. Andrew Porter says, “The Daniel Pinkwater part comes at 27 minutes into this episode. And it’s hilarious!”

From the Daniel Pinkwater files comes a tale of unexpected advice buried deep inside a BMW owner’s manual. The boys also contemplate why men never pay for anything with coins, helmets for drivers and, oh yeah- some actual car problems! All on this episode of the Best of Car Talk.

(11) HISTORIC FIND. The New York Times reports a remarkable discovery: “Metal Detector Hobbyist Finds a 500-Year-Old Pendant Linked to Henry VIII”.

Charlie Clarke, a 34-year-old cafe owner in Birmingham, England, was feeling down about losing his dog to cancer, so he went over to a friend’s place in the countryside to take a stroll and get some fresh air. He brought his metal detector with him, gear for the new hobby he had picked up six months earlier.

When he heard the unusually loud beeps emitted while he walked on his friend’s property in nearby Warwickshire, he thought he had probably come across a soda can. Instead, about a foot down into the earth, he happened upon a treasure that has electrified researchers, and could very well change the course of his family’s future.

Mr. Clarke pulled up a gold chain and heart-shaped pendant, adorned with symbols his friend recognized as connected to Henry VIII and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. At first, he thought it must have been from a costume, but it seemed far too heavy for that, he said in an interview on Friday.

“I knew it was special,” he said.

The pendant itself was an ornate spectacle: The front was decorated with a pomegranate bush, an emblem of Katherine, and an entwined, double-headed Tudor rose, which was employed by the Tudors starting in 1486. On the other side, the letters H and K — for Henry and Katherine — were written in Lombardic script and connected by a ribbon….

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Courtesy of Netflix, here’s the “Wednesday Official Blooper Reel”. Wednesday usually is spooky, except when she’s breaking herself up.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/30/23 Many Scrolls And Files Knew What It Was To Be Roasted In The Depths Of The Pixels That Day, I Can Tell You

Posted on January 30, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) PUBLISHING CONTROVERSY REVISITED. Pamela Paul, former New York Times Book Review editor, returned to the three-year-old American Dirt controversy in an op-ed for the New York Times: “The Long Shadow of ‘American Dirt’”.

…From the moment Cummins’s agent sent “American Dirt” out to potential publishers, it looked like a winner. The manuscript led to a bidding war among nine publishing imprints, resulting in a game-changing, seven-figure deal for its author. In the run-up to publication, as the editor of The New York Times Book Review, I asked attendees at Book Expo, then the most significant annual publishing conference, which upcoming book they were most excited about. The answer was as unanimous as I’ve ever heard: “American Dirt.” Publishers, editors, booksellers, librarians were all wildly enthusiastic: “American Dirt” wasn’t only a gripping novel — it brought attention to one of the most vexing and heartbreaking issues of our time, the border crisis. This, its champions believed, was one of those rare books that could both enthrall readers and change minds.

But in December 2019, a month before the novel’s release, Myriam Gurba, a Latina writer whose memoir, “Mean,” had been published a couple of years earlier by a small press, posted a piece that Ms. magazine had commissioned as a review of “American Dirt,” and then killed. In her blog post and accompanying review, Gurba characterized the novel as “fake-assed social justice literature,” “toxic heteroromanticism” and “sludge.” It wasn’t just that Gurba despised the book. She insisted that the author had no right to write it.

A central charge was that Cummins, who identifies as white and Latina but is not an immigrant or of Mexican heritage, wasn’t qualified to write an authentic novel about Latin American characters. Another writer soon asserted in an op-ed that the “clumsy, ill-conceived” rollout of Cummins’s novel was proof that American publishing was “broken.” The hype from the publisher, which marketed the book as “one of the most important books for our times,” was viewed as particularly damning. Echoing a number of writers and activists, the op-ed writer said it was incumbent upon Mexican Americans and their “collaborators” to resist the “ever-grinding wheels of the hit-making machine,” charging it was “unethical” to allow Oprah’s Book Club to wield such power. More than 100 writers put their names to a letter scolding Oprah for her choice….

Dana Snitzky takes issue: “This Week in Books: It’s Pamela Paul Week”.

…American Dirt was merely criticized. Criticized, probably most famously (yet not by any means initially) in the pages of the New York Times Book Review. The New York Times Book Review as edited by Pamela Paul. Yes, friends, you heard correctly—as Max Read and others online have pointed out, Pamela Paul’s powers of discourse are such that she has established a vertically integrated outrage machine, seeing the process through from initial cancellation to reactionary backlash….

Silvia Moreno-Garcia addressed Paul’s op-ed in an extended Twitter thread that starts here. A few of her comments are:

https://twitter.com/silviamg/status/1618700650937987073

https://twitter.com/silviamg/status/1618703856724246530

https://twitter.com/silviamg/status/1618739635634724864

(2) ELSEWHERE MONTELEONE KEEPS DIGGING THE HOLE DEEPER. It was taken down today, however, yesterday YouTube’s Hatchet Mouth posted their “Tom Monteleone Interview”, an extended opportunity for Monteleone to deliver more remarks in the vein of his now-removed Facebook post. He belittled a past Horror Writers Association award winner in derogatory racial terms (while making every effort to assign the wrong ethnicity to the person being insulted), and gave the same treatment to the woman who called for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer to be renamed (as it was). Copies of the YouTube auto-generated transcript are floating around. In fact, I made my own if you need to see one…

(3) BACK TO THE DINOSAURS. Apex Publishing’s Jason Sizemore, responding to a particular thread within the Monteleone kerfuffle, told Facebook readers what was wrong with the latest attack on an award-winning story.

There’s another old white male author who has found offense at the award recognition of non-white, non-male writers by the HWA. It’s been all over my FB feed.

Inevitably, the usual cadre of traditionalists and self-anointed old school sci-fi readers rallied around this writer rehashing the same tired arguments that showcase a poor understanding of capitalism, reality, and the depth of fiction they bemoan.

Apex Magazine was accused of catering to reactionary and psychotic (not my words) people.

“If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky was evoked. Again. This story came out in March of 2013….

(4) BUFFY SLAYS TROLLS & SLIMEBALLS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Working now from a position of earned respect and power, Sarah Michelle Gellar expressed her opinions on mistreatment of women in visual media. In an interview with the Guardian, she takes shots at both the trolls who sit in front of the screen and certain slimeballs who reside behind the cameras. “’A lot of the demons seem a little cheesy now’: Sarah Michelle Gellar on Buffy, her burnout and her comeback”.

…For all its similarities to Buffy, Wolf Pack has one key difference: this time Gellar is in a position of influence, as an executive producer as well as the lead.

The title can be almost meaningless, a way to sweeten the deal for a star, but Gellar says she told Davis: “I’ve been doing this for 40 years. I have a lot of experience, and I have a lot to bring to the table. If you’re just looking for an actor that just wants to have the credit, I’m not your person. I’m going to have ideas, and I’m going to be vocal about them.”…

(5) IN MEMORIAM 2022. Steven H Silver’s list “In Memoriam: Those We Have Lost in 2022” has been posted at Amazing Stories.

(6) LISA LORING OBITUARY. TV’s original Wednesday Addams, Lisa Loring, died January 30 at age 64 reports the BBC.

…Her daughter, Vanessa Foumberg, told The Hollywood Reporter she died of a stroke caused by high blood pressure.

“She went peacefully with both her daughters holding her hands,” Foumberg said.

The actress had been on life support for three days, her friend Laurie Jacobson posted on Facebook.

“She is embedded in the tapestry that is pop culture and in our hearts always as Wednesday Addams,” she said in her post.

The Addams Family, which was the first adaptation of Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoons, ran from 1964 to 1966 on ABC.

Ms Loring also appeared in the soap opera “As the World Turns” and the sitcom “The Pruitts of Southampton.”…

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1987 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

And now we come to the end of the genre quotes (at least for now) with a most splendid one from Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners novel. As y’all know, it’s the first work of the Riverside series which continues in The Fall of the Kings, was co-written with her wife Delia Sherman, and finished in The Privilege of the Sword.

Yes, it’s one of my favorite novels, and the series as well, to re-read. Preferably on a cold winter’s night. I do think that Swordspoint is the best of the novels though The Privilege of the Sword is quite tasty as well.

And you have to love a society where chocolate is the drink of choice among everyone.

BY MIDDAY, MOST OF THE NOBLES ON THE HILL COULD be counted on to be awake. The Hill sat lordly above the rest of the city, honeycombed with mansions, landscaped lawns, elaborate gates, and private docks on the cleanest part of the river. Its streets had been built expressly wide and smooth enough to accommodate the carriages of nobles, shortly after carriages had been invented. Usually, mornings on the Hill were passed in leisurely exchange of notes written on colored, scented, and folded paper, read and composed in various states of dishabille over cups of rich chocolate and crisp little triangles of toast (all the nourishment that ought to be managed after a night’s reveling); but on the morning after the garden duel, with the night’s events ripe for comment, no one had the patience to wait for a reply, so the streets were unusually crowded with carriages and pedestrians of rank.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 30, 1911 — Hugh Marlowe. First let me note that he was first to play the title character in the very first radio version of The Adventures of Ellery Queen. No, it’s not even genre adjacent but neat nonetheless. As regards genre roles, he’s Tom Stevens in The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Dr. Russell A. Marvin in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. He was also Harold McPherson in Seven Days in May if you want to count that as genre which I definitely think you should. (Died 1982.)
Born January 30, 1920 — Michael Anderson. English Director best remembered for Around the World in 80 Days, Logan’s Run, and perhaps not nearly as much for, Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Yes, I saw it. It was, errrr, interesting. He also directed The Martian Chronicles series. (Died 2018.)
Born January 30, 1924 — Lloyd Alexander. His most well-crafted work is The Chronicles of Prydain. Though drawn off Welsh mythology, they deviate from it in significant ways stripping it of much of its negativity. To my belief, it is his only genre writing as I don’t hold the Westmark trilogy to actually be fantasy, just an alternative telling of European history. Splitting cats hairs? Maybe. He was also one of the founders of Cricket, an illustrated literary journal for children. The late illustrator Trina Schart Hyman whose art I lust after, errrr, adore was another founder. (Died 2007.)
Born January 30, 1926 — Peter Brachacki. Set designer for the very first episode of Doctor Who. Everything I’ve been able to read on him says that he was not at all interested in working on the series and did so reluctantly under orders. Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert would later recount that she was impressed with Brachacki’s work on the TARDIS interior even though she personally did not like him at all. His design elements persist throughout the fifty years the series has been produced. His only other genre work that I’ve been able to find was Blake’s 7 and a short series called the The Witch’s Daughter done in the late Seventies. The BBC wasn’t always great at documenting who worked on what series. (Died 1980.)
Born January 30, 1941 — Gregory Benford, 82. His longest running series is Galactic Center Saga, a series I find a little akin to Saberhagen’s Beserker series. I’ve not read enough of it to form a firm opinion though I know some of you of have done so. Other novels I’ve read by him include Timescape (superb) and A Darker Geometry: A Man-Kzin Novel which was actually was quite excellent. Yes I do read Baen Books.
Born January 30, 1955 — Judith Tarr, 68. I’m fond of her Richard the Lionheart novels which hew closely to the historical record while introducing just enough magic to make them fantasy. The novels also make good use of her keen knowledge of horsemanship as well. Her Queen of the Amazons pairs the historical Alexander the Great, with a meeting with the beautiful Hippolyta, who is queen of the Amazons. Highly recommended.
Born January 30, 1973 — Jordan Prentice, 50. Inside every duck is a self-described person of short stature. His words, not mine. In the case of Howard the Duck from the movie of the same name, one of those persons was him. He’s not in a lot of SFF roles after his performing debut there though he shows up next as Fingers Finnian in Wolf Girl, playing Sherrif Shelby in Silent But Deadly, Napoleon in Mirror Mirror and Nigel Thumb in The Night Before the Night Before Christmas.
Born January 30, 1974 — Christian Bale, 49. First enters our corner of the mediaverse in a Swedish film called Mio in the Land of Faraway where he plays a character named Yum Yum. Note though that he doesn’t speak in this role as his Swedish voice is done by Max Winerdah. So his playing Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is his first speaking role. Next up is American Psycho in which he was Patrick Bateman, that was followed by a role in Reign of Fire as Quinn Abercromby. He was John Preston in Equilibrium, and he voiced Howl in Howl’s Moving Castle, a film well worth seeing. Need I say who he plays in Batman Begins? I thought not. He’d repeat that in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. Amidst being Batman, he was also John Connor in Terminator Salvation. His last genre role to date was voicing Bagheera in Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle asked off Kipling’s All the Mowgli Stories. He’s got a television genre credit, to wit Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island off the Robert Louis Stevenson of that name.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Candorville shows a dad telling his shrink about trying to get his kid to watch Star Trek.
Foxtrot’s “Goodnight Doom” adapts the verses of a children’s book to a kid’s computer.

(10) ALTERNATE OVAL OFFICES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Welcome to an alternate universe. Actually, six different ones.

Have you ever wondered what the White House Oval Office would look like if it were outfitted completely in IKEA furniture? Or perhaps another home furnishing brand? House Fresh will be glad to show you.

Some of the choices are breathtaking; albeit perhaps not in the way a President might desire. “If 6 Iconic Home Brands Redesigned The Oval Office” at HouseFresh.

Consider the Pottery Barn version….

(11) THE BIRD HAS THE WORD. “’An Ostrich Told Me the World Was Fake’ Director Discusses Oscar Nom” in Variety.

…The short film follows a young telemarketer named Neil who is confronted by a mysterious talking ostrich who tells him that the universe is actually stop-motion animation. Neil, voiced by Pendragon, then tries to convince his colleagues about the discovery….

Let’s talk about “An Ostrich Told Me the World Was Fake” and its journey. Where did it begin?

It was part of a doctorate in visual arts program at film school. It had to come from a research perspective. The project needed to have a level of innovation and something that you were doing differently that you could write about and talk about. I wanted to do something on stop-motion because it’s something that I love doing, but I hadn’t thought too much about it yet. There was so much potential about what could be done and explored.

I wanted to look at the handmade quality of stop-motion animation and ensure they were as apparent as possible. That led me down this path of doing something that breaks the fourth wall and deconstructs it, so that the audience could be watching the behind-the-scenes as they were watching the film. I thought it was entertaining because it would show all that goes into making this kind of film. But then on the other side, it’s like, how do I make sure that it’s not too distracting that you can still connect with these characters? Finding that balance was difficult….

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Honest Trailers – Snakes on a Plane” shows that if you steal ideas from enough different places it’s not plagiarism. But first, you also have to steal enough special effects snakes.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/8/23 “Repent, Harlan!” Said The Pixelman

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) COSINE COMMUNITY. COSine 2023, the Colorado Springs Science Fiction Convention, will be held January 20-22. Guests of honor include author Martha Wells, science guests Drs. Louise & James Gunderson, Experts in Robotics & Artificial Intelligence, artist Kyle Crutcher, a Retro-Futurist Potter, and special guests Connie Willis and Courtney Willis.

Their latest news letter also calls attention to the needs of their Artist Guest of Honor from 2020, Peri Charlifu, who is having some health issues. Although he (and his amazing pottery) will still be at COSine this year, it looks like he is going to be dealing with a lot in 2023. There is a GoFundMe running for those who’d like to help out: “Peri’s Medical Support Fund ~ Stage Four”.

In late December 2022, Peri shared with us that “I have been dealing with kidney failure for a while now. My last trip to the nephrologist was not a great one. She’s moved me into stage four renal failure and I’m looking at dialysis soon, maybe as soon as next year. I have some options, but in any case, it will mean a pretty big change to my life. Whatever kind of dialysis I elect to pursue, I will need some sort of surgery, and if I can get a transplant, I will also need major surgery. This will critically impact my work schedule, I will be unable to work in my studio and I will not be able to throw or do any type of kiln or glaze work. So I need to make as much inventory now as I can, so I have something to send to shows while I’m convalescing. Because of this, I will not be as active at conventions, in programming or in running the art shows. I hope you all understand. Thank you, I’m optimistic that I’ll eventually be OK.”

(2) ADVICE FROM THE STARS. The LA Review of Books says “Hurray for Inventing New Genres or Whatever: On Dr. Moiya McTier’s ‘The Milky Way’”.

LOOKING FOR a New Year’s resolution? According to Dr. Moiya McTier, the Milky Way galaxy has a few for you: “Ask questions about the world around you and find real answers to them. Decide you deserve better and fight to clean your sky of all kinds of pollution — trust me, I’m worth it. Or make beautiful art that people can talk about long after you’ve shuffled off your particular mortal coil.”

If that seems like a lot for one year, don’t worry. The Milky Way is on a tight schedule, so it has condensed a galactic lifetime of advice and insight into a compact book entitled The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy. “My telling you this story — my story — is a gift,” the Milky Way reminds its readers, “[i]t’s like Beyoncé taking time out of her ‘busy’ schedule to personally give you singing lessons.” But who is the Milky Way galaxy to invoke Beyoncé, tell us how to live, or, for that matter, talk at all? And why is it speaking out now?

…McTier, the author behind the Milky Way’s voice, became the first Black woman to earn her PhD in astronomy at Columbia after majoring in astrophysics along with folklore and mythology at Harvard. She has since built a career in science communication and storytelling that includes collaborations with PBS and Disney. In an interview for this publication, McTier described the Milky Way as a “larger-than-life character” who “looks at us and sees a homogeneous group.” She elaborated that “the idea that there are different types of humans is absurd to the galaxies,” but to McTier, who grew up in a log cabin in rural Pennsylvania, this idea was a formative influence. The autobiography’s foreword reveals how, in a community that “had only ever seen a Black person on TV,” McTier looked to the sun and moon as her imaginary parents and emotional support system. …

(3) UPHILL ALL THE WAY. The Washington Post looks at “Why it took 43 years to bring ‘Kindred’ to TV”.

Fans and critics can’t yet decide on the success of FX’s take on Octavia E. Butler’s “Kindred,” calling it “thrilling” but “uneven,” “provocative” yet “skimpy.” But there’s one thing they do agree on.

“It’s about damn time,” said author and film historian Tananarive Due, echoing the long-bottled frustration of Butlerphiles who have been waiting patiently (and somewhat hesitantly) for one of her most popular stories to make the leap from page to screen. Nearly 43 years after the novel’s publication and 16 years after Butler’s untimely death at 58, “Kindred’s” arrival on Hulu last month was a result of political movements, box-office trends, and a bit of luck.

Since its debut in 1979, Kindred has been “optioned” — industry parlance for the nascent stage of adaptation — in one form or another. Almost 20 years later, celebrated playwright Branden Jacob Jenkins discovered the novel as a tween on a shelf at Sister Space, a D.C. indie bookstore centering Black female authors and stories. It’d be another two decades before Jacob Jenkins, the series creator, would see his interpretation of Butler’s work available to binge on Hulu. The process wasn’t just long, it was Sisyphean.

“I like to say it’s a miracle whenever a Black property makes it to the screen because Hollywood is very risk adverse,” explained Due, who has firsthand knowledge of the improbability of the book-to-TV pipeline. Back in the mid-2000s, Due pitched an adaptation of her novel “The Good House,” about family history entwined with a haunted house. During one such meeting, an executive asked if the Black characters centered in her story “had to be Black.”

“That’s what Octavia was up against,” Due said. “No matter how much her work was beloved, the gatekeepers were not looking for stories in the speculative realm featuring Black characters. No one was asking for that. Hollywood was always an uphill climb and a hard sell.”

(4) SPELL CHECKING. It’s a big trend — “Spellbound: why ‘witch lit’ is the hottest new genre on our bookshelves” — and the Guardian looks for answers.

Someone, or something, shadowy has put a strong spell on popular literature aimed at women, once cheekily labelled “chick lit”. This perky genre, packaged in bright covers, jauntily titled and so long a mainstay of the publishing industry, has been slowly transforming into something darker and rich with sorcery, with 2023 set to be a new high point in a growing “witch lit” trend.

“Witches are definitely a big thing, which is exciting and fun,” said Phoebe Morgan, a publisher at Hodder Fiction, “but it also has something to do with a sense that women’s rights are in danger of being stripped away again, with things like the overturning of Roe v Wade in America. These books are often concerned with pregnancy, abortion and abuse, as well as magic.”

Several big forthcoming titles in the adult women’s market are concerned with witches and witchcraft, with female persecution developing as a main theme. Next month, Emilia Hart’s much-heralded Weyward will hit bookshops, telling an epic story of three generations of women entangled with magic. But space around the bubbling cauldron is already crowded. Kirsty Logan’s Now She Is Witch will already have staked its place, with publication this week….

(5) FREE READ. Sunday Morning Transport offers a free story by Sarah Rees Brennan, “Tears Waiting to Be Diamonds: Part One”.

… “Make haste, my prince,” warned Hrim. “Your uncle has risen against your father and usurped the throne. Your father and brothers met axe blades in the dark, wielded by the lovers your uncle placed by their sides. Your sisters’ nurses were bribed, their defenses are breached. You’re the last hope.”…

(6) DOT’S ALL, FOLKS! Clive Thompson discusses “What I Learned About My Writing By Seeing Only The Punctuation” at Medium, and shared an online gadget where you can run your own tests — just the punctuation. (An item via Steven H Silver that dates to 2021.)

…I love this concept! And he’s right — when you look at those writers’ punctuation, you can see, in a quick glance, how different they are.

They’re also gorgeous graphics — you want to print them up, hang them on your wall, tweet them out. Calhoun himself was originally inspired by a series of posters that stripped out the punctuation of famous novels and arrayed them in a spiral. When I tweeted about Calhoun’s project last month it quickly spread far and wide — I realized that a lot of people find punctuation-analysis both revealing and beautiful….

Here’s what was distilled from a couple pages of my own fanwriting.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

1907 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.] L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz

Today’s essay is upon an extended quote from L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz: A Record of Her Adventures with Dorothy Gale of Kansas, Billina the Yellow Hen, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger; Besides Other Good People Too Numerous to Mention Faithfully Recorded Herein. Yes, that is the actual title. Forty words I believe. Somebody tell Scott Edelman.

It was published on July 30, 1907 by Reilly & Britton who published all of the Oz novels. It was officially the third book of Baum’s Oz series. It was the first in which Baum was indicated that there would be a series of Oz novels of which there would eventually be fourteen.

The book was illustrated lavishly in color by John R. Neill.

Did you know Reilly & Lee, the American publisher who was very desperate to keep the series going, selected Ruth Plumly Thompson to continue the series? So she wrote another nineteen, followed by three Oz books written by John R. Neill, two by Jack Snow and one each by Rachel Cosgrove Payes and by Eloise Jarvis McGraw & her daughter. Wow.

It bears this dedication: “To all the boys and girls who read my stories – and especially to the Dorothys – this book is lovingly dedicated.”

And here’s the quote I selected which is a delightful look at lunch box trees:

One was quite full of square paper boxes, which grew in clusters on all the limbs, and upon the biggest and ripest boxes the word “Lunch” could be read, in neat raised letters. This tree seemed to bear all the year around, for there were lunch-box blossoms on some of the branches, and on others tiny little lunch-boxes that were as yet quite green, and evidently not fit to eat until they had grown bigger.

The leaves of this tree were all paper napkins, and it presented a very pleasing appearance to the hungry little girl.

But the tree next to the lunch-box tree was even more wonderful, for it bore quantities of tin dinner-pails, which were so full and heavy that the stout branches bent underneath their weight. Some were small and dark-brown in color; those larger were of a dull tin color; but the really ripe ones were pails of bright tin that shone and glistened beautifully in the rays of sunshine that touched them.

Dorothy was delighted, and even the yellow hen acknowledged that she was surprised.

The little girl stood on tip-toe and picked one of the nicest and biggest lunch-boxes, and then she sat down upon the ground and eagerly opened it. Inside she found, nicely wrapped in white papers, a ham sandwich, a piece of sponge-cake, a pickle, a slice of new cheese and an apple. Each thing had a separate stem, and so had to be picked off the side of the box; but Dorothy found them all to be delicious, and she ate every bit of luncheon in the box before she had finished.

“A lunch isn’t zactly breakfast,” she said to Billina, who sat beside her curiously watching. “But when one is hungry one can eat even supper in the morning, and not complain.”

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 8, 1908 — William Hartnell. The very first Doctor who appeared when Doctor Who originally aired on November 23rd, 1963. He would be the Doctor for three years leaving when a new Showrunner came on. He played The Doctor once more during the tenth anniversary story The Three Doctors (aired 1972–73) which was the last thing he filmed before his death. I scanned through the usual sources but didn’t find any other genre listing for him. Is that correct? (Died 1975.)
Born January 8, 1925 — Steve Holland. Did you know there was a short lived Flash Gordon series, thirty-one episodes in 1954 – 1955 to be precise? I didn’t until I discovered the Birthday for the lead in this show today. Except for four minor roles, this was his entire TV career. Biography in “Flash Gordon: Journey to Greatness” would devote an entire show to him and this series. (Died 1997.)
Born January 8, 1941 — Boris Vallejo, 82. Illustrator whose artwork has appeared on myriad genre publications. Subjects of his paintings were gods, hideous monsters, well-muscled male swordsmen and scantily clad females. Early illustrations of Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian and Doc Savage established him as an illustrator.
Born January 8, 1942 — Stephen Hawking. Y’all know who he is, but did you know that Nimoy was responsible for his appearance as a holographic representation of himself in the “Descent” episode on Next Gen? He also guest starred in Futuruma and had a recurring role on The Big Bang Theory. Just before his death, he was the voice of The Book on the new version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series. (Died 2018.)
Born January 8, 1947 — David Bowie. First SF role was as Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth. He plays The Shark in Yellowbeard, a film that Monty Python should have produced but didn’t. Next up is the superb Labyrinth where he was Jareth the Goblin King, a role perfect for him. There’s a sixty scale figure from Hot Toys that is stellar. He shows up again in The Hunger later on as The Host. From that role, he went on to being Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ, an amazing role by the way. He was in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me as FBI Agent Phillip Jeffries, a role which was his last role when he appeared later in the Twin Peaks series. He also played Nikola Tesla in The Prestige from Christopher Priest’s novel of the same name. (Died 2016.)
Born January 8, 1977 — Amber Benson, 46. Best known for her role as Tara Maclay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Her post-BtVS genre credits are scant with a bit of work on Supernatural, a Sci-fi Channel film called Gryphon, a web series called The Morganville Vampires and, I kid you not, a film called One-Eyed Monster which is about an adult film crew encountering monsters. She is by the way a rather good writer. She’s written a number of books, some with Christopher Golden such as the Ghosts of Albion series and The Seven Whistlers novel which I read when Subterranean Press sent it to Green Man for review. Her Calliope Reaper-Jones series is quite excellent too.
Born January 8, 1979 — Sarah Polley, 44. H’h what did I first see her in? Ahhhh she was in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen! Let’s see what else she’s done… She’s been in the animated Babar: The Movie, Existenz, No Such Thing (which is based very loosely on Beowulf), Dawn of the Dead, Beowulf & Grendel (well sort of based on the poem but, errr, artistic license was taken) and Mr. Nobody.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

That’s Doctor to you — Eek!

(10) APES THAT PULL RUGS. “Mutant Ape Planet NFT developer charged with fraud in Brooklyn federal court”, and the Brooklyn Eagle is there.

A developer of the NFT known as Mutant Ape Planet was charged in the Eastern District of New York for allegedly defrauding investors of $2.9 million. Aurelien Michel, a 24-year-old, French national who lives in Dubai, was charged with defrauding purchasers of his non-fungible token (NFT), a type of digital asset, of more than $2.9 million. Michel was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday night and appeared before Magistrate Judge James Cho on Thursday.

… Rug pulls have become a common scheme for sellers of NFTs, but this would be one of the biggest ever as it would potentially be bigger than the Big Daddy Ape Club, that allegedly cost investors $1.3 million at the time, the Baller Ape Club, that allegedly cost investors $2.6 million….

(11) IT’S NOT PRINCE SPAGHETTI DAY. No matter how saucy it gets. Vulture is delighted to report, “’Wednesday’ Season 2 Renewed at Netflix: What We Know”.

Get ready to dance, dance, dance with your hands above your head, Wednesday fans. The Jenna Ortega–led show has officially escaped Netflix’s one-and-done cancellation curse and been renewed for a second season. “It’s been incredible to create a show that has connected with people across the world. Thrilled to continue Wednesday’s tortuous journey into season two,” showrunners and executive producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar confirmed to Tudum.com. “We can’t wait to dive head first into another season and explore the kooky spooky world of Nevermore. Just need to make sure Wednesday hasn’t emptied the pool first.” Below, what we know about the goth girl’s next semester at Nevermore Academy, straight from Enid’s gossip blog….

More torture is coming. Lucky you. pic.twitter.com/t11LptFk7e
— Wednesday Addams (@wednesdayaddams) January 6, 2023

(12) ON SF CONS. [Item by David Doering.] A question to muse: are the decades of cons and the resulting con-fostered SR/F community why we won the culture war?

In terms of global culture, SF cons are a rather unique expression–amateur-run, passion driven–over other fields of interest. Yes, there’s been fraternities and clubs for all kinds of interests. But none seem to have had such an impact with what you and I have seen over the last 50-60 years.

Going from the despised and avoided, con-energized fans now are the drivers of culture worldwide. Interesting, no?

(13) REVEALED FIGURE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Scientific American weighs in on the true meaning of 42. “For Math Fans: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Number 42”.

… The author’s choice of the number 42 has become a fixture of geek culture. It’s at the origin of a multitude of jokes and winks exchanged between initiates. If, for example, you ask your search engine variations of the question “What is the answer to everything?” it will most likely answer “42.” Try it in French or German. You’ll often get the same answer whether you use Google, Qwant, Wolfram Alpha (which specializes in calculating mathematical problems) or the chat bot Web app Cleverbot.

Since the first such school was created in France in 2013 there has been a proliferation of private computer-training institutions in the “42 Network,” whose name is a clear allusion to Adams’s novels. Today the founding company counts more than 15 campuses in its global network. The number 42 also appears in different forms in the film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Many other references and allusions to it can be found, for example, in the Wikipedia entry for “42 (number).”

The number 42 also turns up in a whole string of curious coincidences whose significance is probably not worth the effort to figure out. For example:

In ancient Egyptian mythology, during the judgment of souls, the dead had to declare before 42 judges that they had not committed any of 42 sins.

The marathon distance of 42.195 kilometers corresponds to the legend of how far the ancient Greek messenger Pheidippides traveled between Marathon and Athens to announce victory over the Persians in 490 B.C. (The fact that the kilometer had not yet been defined at that time only makes the connection all the more astonishing.)…

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the “Clash of the Titans Pitch Meeting” – which begins by straightening out the boss about the fact that there are no Titans in the movie.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Todd Mason, Jennifer Hawthorne, David Doering, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Tom Becker.]

Pixel Scroll 8/17/22 Tell Me Of Your Homescroll, Pixel

Posted on August 17, 2022 by Mike Glyer

(1) SECRETS OF PKD’S SUCCESS. David Samuels bids you “Welcome to Philip K. Dick’s dystopia” at UnHerd.

…What made Dick a literary genius, then, was not any special talent for predicting hand-held personal devices or atom bombs the size of a shoe which might have led him to a job in Apple’s marketing department. His gift was for what might be called predictive psychology — how the altered worlds he imagined, whether futuristic or merely divergent from existing historical continuums, would feel to the people who inhabited them. Dick’s answer was, very often: “Not good.”
Dick’s dystopian-psychological approach marks him less as a conventional science fiction writer than as a member of the California anti-utopian school of the Sixties, whose best-known members include Robert Stone, Thomas Pynchon, Ken Kesey, Joan Didion and Hunter Thompson. Seen from this angle, Dick was perhaps the most powerfully and sweepingly paranoid of a group of writers whose stock-in-trade was conspiracy and paranoia, the hallmarks of a society marked — at that moment, and this one — by violent street crime, drug-induced psychosis, and visionary promises gone terribly wrong. Of his anti-utopian peers, Dick’s sci-fi genre background made him the only one who had any particular feel for the proposition that technology was inseparable from, and would therefore inevitably alter, our idea of the human….

(2) BUILDING WITH WORDS. “Author R.F. Kuang Talks Magic and What’s Lost in Translation” in a Goodreads interview.

…GR: The magic system is always a critical part of world-building in fantasy, and I thought yours was so fascinating—magic that is powered by the tension and friction in the act of translating from one language to the other.

RFK: There are a lot of fantasy novels that deal with the power of words and language and naming. I think Ursula Le Guin has done this a lot. I know Samantha Shannon is very interested in etymology and wordplay in her novels as well. I think my innovation is coming at it from the translation angle instead.

There were two things I wanted to convey about translation that were at the forefront of my mind. First, it was very important to me that the magic system felt like a real historical facet of the world. I wanted the characters to talk about it and use it the way that they would have used any number of Victorian implements.

The second thing is that translation can function as a metaphor for difference. It’s my way of talking about difference at large. Translation is just trying to make yourself understood by other people. We’re all translating ourselves to the world. Even if we’re not bilingual, we’re all trying to put our thoughts and feelings and experiences into words, and hoping that somebody else gets it.

And there are so many things that can interfere with that—obviously racism, colonialism, malicious intent. So in that sense, translation becomes a way to talk about prejudice and the avarice of the British Empire in the 1830s. But even unintentionally, there are all these things that cause us to refuse to listen to each other. It’s just the intersection of how different people engage with one another….

(3) VIDEO GAME UPDATE PROVIDES RELIEF. In the Washington Post, Gene Park looks at how playing Cyberpunk 2077 has provided comfort for him as he battles his cancer. “As a cancer patient, ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ frees me from my mental prison”.

I was diagnosed with cancer in early June. For some reason, since then, I haven’t been able to stop playing CD Projekt Red’s “Cyberpunk 2077,” a story about how you must navigate or defy terminal illness.
The terminal illness facing V, the game’s protagonist, is the all-but-certain erasure of their soul. Their personality, memories and cognitive functions are being overwritten by an artificial intelligence, Johnny Silverhand, a rocker and branded terrorist brought to virtual life by Keanu Reeves. They can only deny or accept their fate; either grasp at some way to sever their connection as Silverhand takes over, or leave this world on their own terms.
…It wasn’t always this easy to be carefree in Night City. The game’s infamous release in December 2020 redefined the term “cyberpunk” to mean “unfinished, buggy and unplayable video game.” As I wrote in my final review of the game in 2021, “Cyberpunk 2077” used to barrage the player with phone calls and notifications about new activities, with the resulting information overload destroying any sense of spatial immersion, and strangling the pace of the game’s otherwise compelling narrative arc.
This older, more unpleasant version of “Cyberpunk 2077” reminds me of my current situation. My phone is constantly buzzing with concerned texts and phone calls from friends, family, ex-girlfriends, former co-workers and long lost acquaintances. Everyone talks about the myriad challenges of cancer, but one of the least discussed is the emotional burden placed on the patient as they navigate, soothe and buckle under the overwhelming grief projected by their loved ones. I value and often need the support and concern from my family and friends, but there’s the lingering sense that none of this would need to be said if not for my cancer. Words meant to soothe me often just remind me that I’m fighting for my life.
Five months ago, developer CD Projekt Red released its 1.5 update, which brought along a host of stabilization fixes, new features, and most importantly to me, the ability to ignore those carping in-game texts and phone calls….

(4) HWA CONDEMNS ATTACK ON RUSHDIE. The Horror Writers Association Board of Trustees issued a “Statement on Salman Rushdie attack”.

The Horror Writers Association is outraged and saddened by the reprehensible attack on author Salman Rushdie. The assault on Mr. Rushdie is an assault on all writers. The HWA strongly condemns the attack and supports writers’ freedom of expression without fear of reprisal or violence. We look forward to his speedy recovery and his continued work as a voice for freedom.

(5) AS DOES GRRM. George R.R. Martin discusses the attack and the underlying issues in “Let His Voice Be Heard” at Not a Blog.

…Along with the rest of the world, I read of the turmoil around THE SATANIC VERSES and the fatwa declared against him by the ayatollahs of Iran.     For the “crime” of writing a book that some people did not like, he was forced to spend a decade in hiding, surrounded by guards, wearing disguises when he dared leave his house. Through it all, he displayed courage, compassion, and grace under fire, while holding firm to his principles and yielding not an inch to the haters.    In more recent years, the danger finally seemed to have ebbed, and Rushdie was once again able to speak and travel and appear in public.
He emerged as one of the world’s leading defenders of free speech, which only deepened my admiration for him.   Freedom of speech is a central pillar of our democracy, and every other democracy in the world.   There is nothing, but nothing, that I believe in more strongly.
And these days freedom of speech needs defenders, for when I look around, I find it under attack everywhere.   Blacklisting, cancel culture, libraries being closed or defunded, classic works of literature being banned or bowdlerized or removed from classrooms, an ever growing list of “toxic” words the mere utterance of which is now forbidden no matter the context or intent, the erosion of civility in discourse.   Both the Rabid Right and the Woke Left seem more intent on silencing those whose views they disagree with, rather than besting them in debate.    And the consequences for those who dare to say things deemed offensive have been growing ever more dire; jobs lost, careers ended, books cancelled, “deplatforming.”
And now, it seems, attempted murder….

(6) SPACE COWBOY BOOKS PRESENTS. Swarms of nanobots! A pregnant male Supreme Court Justice! The stories featured in this episode of the Simultaneous Times podcast are:

“Reaction Shot” – by Todd Sullivan – https://www.samjokomagazine.com/
Music by Phog Masheeen – https://phogmasheeen.com/
Read by Jean-Paul Garnier

“The Two-Faced Miracle of Justice Father Win” – by Susan Rukeyser http://susanrukeyser.com/
Music by RedBlueBlackSilver – https://redblueblacksilver.bandcamp.com/
Read by the Author & Jean-Paul Garnier

(7) RIDE ‘EM. Ursula Vernon has been crowdsourcing some research about saddles. I never realized how much there is to know about the topic. Thread starts here.

Twitter horse peeps! Our dashing hero, Alex Easton, is visiting America. They are used to a European cavalry saddle, which is basically a Hussar saddle. They encounter a Western saddle for the first time.

What do they think?
— Kingfisher & Wombat (@UrsulaV) August 15, 2022

(8) THE URGE TO MERGE. Amanda S. Green makes the trial a little more entertaining in “DOJ vs Randy Penguin Soap Opera Continues” at Mad Genius Club.

It’s going to be a while before we hear the final verdict–and probable appeals–in the tale of Penguin Random House’s desire to “merge” with Simon & Schuster. What we’re getting in the meantime is a ringside seat to the lengths those folks at Randy Penguin and their hand-picked editors and agents (yes, agents) will go to make traditional publishing even smaller. Frankly, there’s not enough popcorn to get through the trial and I know my IQ drops every time I read some of the so-called justifications for the merger.
One of Randy Penguin’s so-called justifications for the merger centers on Amazon and on self-publishing. Now, the Amazon part shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us. After all, Amazon is the big evil in the minds of so many in traditional publishing, even though much of publishing’s problems can and should be laid directly at the feet of the publishing houses. As for self-publishing, Randy Penguin doesn’t like the fact authors like Brandon Sanderson–who still traditionally publishes–can go to Kickstarter and finance the publication of books that for whatever reason didn’t go to the publisher.
Boo-freaking–hoo….

(9) AUTHOR GROUP SUPPORTS MENTAL HEALTH. The Horror Writers Association recently launched the HWA Mental Health Initiative, “a coordinated roll-out of events, resources, and activities intended to promote positive mental health, foster the concept of hope, and challenge the stigma of mental illness in the horror genre.” The initiative, run by the organization’s Wellness Committee, debuted in June 2022 and will form part of an ongoing program.

…Activities planned for 2022 include establishing a dedicated webpage for resources on the HWA website, publication of Of Horror and Hope, a downloadable anthology of poems, flash fiction, and personal reflections on mental health by HWA members, “Holistic Horrors” a monthly column in the organization’s newsletter, several panel sessions, as well as articles and blogs published in the wider genre community.
“The HWA should be commended for being bold in its approach to tackling the stigma of mental illness in the genre,” says Wellness Committee Co-chair, Dave Jeffery, who spent 35 years as a mental healthcare professional in the UK’s National Health Service. “To my mind, it is the first time such an initiative, with a specific focus on hope and recovery, has been developed for the horror community, and there are currently discussions as to how the Wellness Committee can develop further resources over the coming years.”
Jeffery’s co-chair, New Zealander Lee Murray, agrees: “Our intent is to promote positive images of mental health in horror and to create an environment of understanding and compassion. For me, as a sufferer of anxiety and depression, inclusion is extremely important—that notion of lifting something up to the light, so we realize that many of us experience the same things and that we’re not alone.”…

(10) THE DISADVANTAGE OF BEING EARNEST. Namwali Serpell has a critical review of Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man in the September Atlantic: “A World Without White People”.

…Even if you’re unfamiliar with this tradition of stories about race transformation, you’ll suspect what’s coming. Distinguishing between those born dark and the newly transformed will become fraught. Violence will erupt. Some will come to believe that a genocidal conspiracy is to blame; some will kill themselves; some will kill others. “Militants” will take over, emitting fear and hate like a musk. Love will blossom. Heightened scenes of interracial sex and awkward perusals of genitals will follow. In the end, skin color will be shown to be meaningless for identity, a mere construct. Yet it will prove almost atavistically fascinating as an aesthetic surface and a conductor of feeling.
Tone above all distinguishes Hamid from these precursors. Whereas most of these writers bend race transformation toward satire, offering us topsy-turvy and hysterical tales, Hamid is deeply earnest about his conceit. The novel is that wan 21st-century banality, a “meditation,” and it meditates on how losing whiteness is going to make white people feel. Mostly sad, as it turns out….
…If Hamid’s novel were a self-aware satire of this ideology of whiteness and its violent effects, it would be pitch-perfect. But The Last White Man’s structure affords us no way to know if this is what Hamid intends: It includes no higher judgment, no specific history, no novelistic frame against which to measure the reliability of the narration, no backdrop across which irony can dance….

(11) MEMORY LANE.

2006 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Almost everyone I know who is a Hellboy fan thinks that there are but two films, Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Well there’s actually four, (well five if you could count the bonus animated short in the Hellboy: Blood and Iron DVD), as there were two most excellent animated films, Sword of Storms (2006) and Blood and Iron (2007).

Ron Perlman reprises his role here. Selma Blair and John Hurt also reprise their roles here. Doug Jones did not provide the voice of Abe for the first film which was done by an uncredited David Hyde Pierce who was psychiatrist Dr. Niles Crane on Frasier. Jones returned for the second film. The only meaningful new character is Kate Corrigan who is voiced by Peri Gilpin.

The first film, Hellboy: Sword of Storms, has them in Japan on a mission to face down demons who want a sword that will free them and allow them to destroy the world. Meanwhile Hellboy has ended up in another dimension with a fox as his guide. (It’s a great character.) Both stories are very well done, and I’ll say nought else about them. (Both are available on iTunes for a mere ten bucks.) Eventually the stories will merge into a single story. Of the two films, this is my favorite by far.

The second, Hellboy: Blood and Iron concerns Professor Trevor Bruttenholm’s experience with a vampiress in the Balkans 1934 and the present day in upstate New York as a movie mogul has recreated her estate in the Balkans by purchasing the ghoulish artefacts from there. Hellboy also faces off against Hecate and Her Sisters. The story, and again I’ll not say much about it in case someone haven’t seen it, struck me as much weaker as a script than the first. It just felt flat.

The critics like it both films. Common Sense Media said of the first that “Dark, fun ghost story for older kids and adults” and the second got this comment from DVD Clinic: “Fans of the Hellboy property, particularly younger ones, should find enough to enjoy here.”

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes gave the first a fifty-six percent rating and gave the second a sixty-eight percent rating.

Oh, as for the short, I think five or so minutes animated film called “Iron Shoes” set in Ireland where Hellboy chased a demon immune to iron. It’s quite cute actually.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born August 17, 1917 — Oliver Crawford. Screenwriter who overcame the Hollywood blacklist during the McCarthy Era of the 1950s. He wrote three scripts for Trek, “The Cloud Minders”, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” and “The Galileo Seven”. He also wrote for The Outer Limits (“The Special One”), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (“The Lost Bomb”) and The Wild Wild West (“The Night of the Cossacks” and “The Night of Sudden Death”). (Died 2008.)
Born August 17, 1930 — Harve Bennett. The individual who gave us Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Really he did. He would then serve as producer on the next three Trek films, The Search for Spock, The Voyage Home and The Final Frontier. In the latter he made his only on-screen appearance in the series, as Starfleet Chief of Staff. No, that’s not everything Harve Bennett. He produced or wrote (or both) for TV’s The Invisible Man, Gemini Man, The Bionic Woman, The Powers of Matthew Star, Time Trax, Salvage 1, and Invasion America. (Died 2015.)
Born August 17, 1945 — Rachel Pollack, 77. She’s well known for her run of issues 64–87 (mid-nineties) on DC’s Doom Patrol which took it to its cancellation. She also had a run on the New Gods, the Jack Kirby created mythos. Two of her novels won major Awards — Unquenchable Fire won the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Godmother Night won the World Fantasy Award.
Born August 17, 1956 — John Romita Jr., 66. If you’ve read Spider-Man since the Sixties, it’s very likely that you’ve seen his artwork as he had six stints on it between 1980 and 2009. He worked on a number of other titles on Marvel and DC including Superman, Ghost Rider, Hulk, All-Star Batman, Eternals, Captain America and Daredevil to name but a few he illustrated. He also worked with Mark Miller at Image Comics on Kick-Ass, and did the one-shot Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights.
Born August 17, 1962 — Laura Resnick, 60. Daughter of Mike Resnick. She is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction. She’s written an amazing of amount of short fiction — I think it is over seventy pieces. She’s the author of the Esther Diamond series, and I’ve not read her Manhattan Magic series so I’m interested to know what y’all think of it. She’s readily available on the usual suspects.
Born August 17, 1966 — Neil Clarke, 56. Editor in Chief of Clarkesworld Magazine which won a impressive number of Best Semiprozine Hugos and a World Fantasy Award before crossing the threshold to become a prozine. He’s a nine-time Best Editor – Short Form nominee. SFWA also gave him a Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. He edits The Best Science Fiction of the Year series for Night Shade Books.
Born August 17, 1973 — Rae Carson, 49. She’s done ten novels including one in the Star Wars universe. (I’m tempted to say who hasn’t?) Quite impressively, her debut novel, The Girl of Fire and Thorns, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Award and the Andre Norton Award. And she is married to Charles Coleman Finlay.

(13) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater posits a bit of Transformers sibling rivalry. But Rich Horton comments, “I will say, Amazon Prime may not have saved the world, but he gives us The Boys and Westworld in addition to free shipping, so that’s something!”

(14) FOUND AND FOUND. “The Oakland Public Library Puts Online a Collection of Items Forgotten in Library Books: Love Notes, Doodles & More” – Open Culture shares the links to this collection and others.

…Sharon McKellar, the Teen Services Department Head at the Oakland Public Library, collects ephemera she and other staffers find in books returned to the OPL’s 18 locations.
It’s an impulse many share.
Eventually, she began scanning them to share on her employer’s website, inspired by Found Magazine, a crowdsourced collection of found letters, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do lists, handwritten poems, doodles, dirty pictures, etc….

(15) YOU’VE BEEN WARNED. VentureBeat claims to show “How being a science fiction fan can get you a job at a metaverse company” in its interview with Jamil Moledina. But guess what? It doesn’t!

GamesBeat: The title of this interview can be “How being a science fiction fan can get you a job at a metaverse company.”
Moledina: It very well could be. To me that’s the framing that I simply can’t shy away from. I suppose that if I were more of a suit and tie guy, I’d come up with another way to frame it. But for me, this is it. This is stepping into the next frontier. This is the next opportunity in front of us. Not only is it an opportunity for the platform itself, but it’s an opportunity for anyone that loves entertainment, that loves commerce.
There are so many incredible ways to open up to participate. A lot of the ways that we interact with each other in the real world are increasingly challenging, especially in wave after wave of pandemics. And yet if you set that aside, there are so many new ways that people can come together in a virtual world that are really impractical from a real-world standpoint. A big part of Neal’s vision is altruism. How do we provide ways for human beings to come together to improve the world? With Neal and Peter, both of them have this interest in making sure that the application of blockchain to the metaverse is one that results in real impact, real value, and a net improvement on what came before.

(16) TRUE CONFESSION. It’s not always easy to apply the wisdom gained from experience, as Jim C. Hines observes in this example.

Have I learned over the years not to artificially withhold information from the reader to try to create tension? Yes.

Do I continue to do it in my first drafts even though I theoretically know better? Also yes.
— Jim C. Hines (@jimchines) August 15, 2022

(17) ARCHERY. Ross MacDonald explains his theory about “The Writer As Detective Hero” in a 1965 reprint at The Stacks Reader.

A producer who last year was toying with the idea of making a television series featuring my private detective Lew Archer asked me over lunch at Perino’s if Archer was based on any actual person. “Yes,” I said. “Myself.” He gave me a semi-pitying Hollywood look. I tried to explain that while I had known some excellent detectives and watched them work, Archer was created from the inside out. I wasn’t Archer, exactly, but Archer was me.
The conversation went downhill from there, as if I had made a damaging admission. But I believe most detective-story writers would give the same answer. A close paternal or fraternal relationship between writer and detective is a marked peculiarity of the form. Throughout its history, from Poe to Chandler and beyond, the detective hero has represented his creator and carried his values into action in society.
Poe, who invented the modern detective story, and his detective Dupin, are good examples. Poe’s was a first-rate but guilt-haunted mind painfully at odds with the realities of pre-Civil-War America. Dupin is a declassed aristocrat, as Poe’s heroes tend to be, an obvious equivalent for the artist-intellectual who has lost his place in society and his foothold in tradition. Dupin has no social life, only one friend. He is set apart from other people by his superiority of mind….

(18) TO THE MAX. Comicbook.com says these DC TV shows have survived the massacre: “The Fates of DC’s HBO Max Shows Reportedly Revealed”.

The DC TV universe still has a future on HBO Max after Warner Bros. Discovery’s cost-cutting measures axed Max movies Batgirl and Wonder Twins. Post-merger CEO David Zaslav announced a DC course correction during Warner Bros. Discovery’s Q2 earnings report earlier in August, confirming Batgirl was scrapped despite Warner Bros. sinking some $90 million into the straight-to-streaming movie. As the merged company focuses on producing big-budget, “high-quality” DC Comics adaptations for theaters — including the upcoming Black Adam and The Flash — a new report reveals the DC shows still moving forward as Zaslav looks to shave off $3 billion in cuts.
According to Deadline, the DC series “moving along” include Season 2 of Peacemaker, the hit Suicide Squad spinoff created by director James Gunn; the Penguin spinoff series starring Colin Farrell that is set within the world of Matt Reeves’ The Batman movie; and Green Lantern Corps, the new series from Greg Berlanti, the prolific producer who oversaw The CW’s Arrowverse.

(19) WEDNESDAY ON WEDNESDAY. What other day of the week would the Wednesday Addams official teaser trailer drop?

WEDNESDAY, an upcoming Netflix series from the imagination of Tim Burton. WEDNESDAY — starring Jenna Ortega in the title role, alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones, Luis Guzman, Gwendoline Christie, Christina Ricci and more — is a sleuthing, supernaturally infused mystery charting Wednesday Addams’ years as a student at Nevermore Academy. Snap snap.

(20) STOP, IN THE NAME OF LOVE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Trailers: Jurassic World: Dominion,” the Screen Junkies say the sixth Jurassic Park movie has the “Obligatory really big T-Rex,” the “obligatory evil science company” that is so dumb “that it built an Apple Store in Dinosaur Canyon,” and the “obligatory moment where you can stop any dinosaur from attacking you by making the stop sign with your hand.” But new this time, “Locusts”.

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

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