Due to government orders prohibiting large gatherings having been extended into July 2020, Westercon 73 in SeaTac WA has been obliged to postpone their event. After consultation with Westercon 74 in Tonopah NV and with the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, the two conventions have agreed to postpone both of their events for one year. Westercon 73 will now be held in 2021 and Westercon 74 in 2022. There will be no Westercon held in 2020.
Sally Woehrle, chair of Westercon 73 SeaTac, said that Westercon 73 could not take place as originally scheduled in 2020 due to Washington state’s COVID-19 restrictions on large group events. The SeaTac Doubletree Hotel has agreed to move Westercon 73 to 2021. Current hotel reservations have been cancelled and can be rebooked after July 20, 2020. Westercon 73’s new dates are Thursday, July 1 through Sunday, July 4, 2021.
Westercon 74’s new dates are Friday, July 1 through Monday, July 4, 2022 at the Tonopah Convention Center, Mizpah and Belvada Hotels, and other area hotels in Tonopah, Nevada. Hotel reservations were not yet open for the convention’s original dates. Westercon 74 will announce plans for hotel reservations later. Membership rates previously announced as increasing in July 2020 will be frozen at their current level until July 2021.
No bids filed the necessary documents to appear on the ballot for Westercon 75 by the original April 15, 2020 deadline. Site Selection for Westercon 75 will now be for the year 2023 and will be still be conducted by Westercon 73. All deadlines for site selection for Westercon 75 will be postponed one year from the originally published dates.
Kevin Standlee, chair of Westercon 74 Tonopah, said that Tonopah’s facilities were very flexible and were willing to reschedule Westercon 74 to take place a year later. He cited the town’s flexibility regarding hosting Westercon as a major factor in allowing both conventions to be rescheduled.
The two seated Westercons consulted with the LASFS Board of Directors (owners of the Westercon service mark), who agreed that the “Westercon Two-Step” was the best plan for ensuring continuity of Westercon operations and minimizing overall disruption to both seated conventions.
Both conventions will contact their members directly with additional details about their respective postponements. For questions about specific impacts upon each convention, contact Westercon 73 through their web site, www.westercon73.org, and Westercon 74 through their web site, www.westercon74.org.
[Thanks to Kevin Standlee for the story. And for rapidly updating the Tonopah logo!]
The Wall Street Journalreported Tuesday that members of Manhattan’s Community Board 5 are objecting to parts of the plan from Warner Bros. to open a Harry Potter–themed exhibit and store in a landmarked building in the Flatiron District. The studio has proposed opening a roughly 20,000-square-foot store called Wizarding World at 935 Broadway, the former home of upscale furniture brand Restoration Hardware.
Crain’s first reported in September that Warner Bros. had reached a deal with the building’s landlord, Shefa Land Corp., for the store.
Design firm Studio Superette unveiled plans for the store at the hearing Tuesday. The design calls for adding a fiberglass dragon with a clock, two backlit Harry Potter signs and six flagpoles, designed to look like wands, to the building’s facade, the Journal reported.
The changes require approval from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which refers such requests to community boards for a recommendation before making a decision.
Members of the community board’s landmarks committee said the design ideas represent “inappropriate signage,” according to the Journal, and voted unanimously to recommend against approval.
The full community board will vote on the proposal later this month before sending its recommendation to the city landmarks commission, according to the report.
(2) A SHOCK. Steve Stiles, one of fandom’s all-time most
popular artists, revealed
sad news on Facebook saying, “So the word is: I’ve got a few months, more
or less.”
(4) NO MORE FEUDIN’, FUSSIN’, AND FIGHTIN’. David Gerrold’s
explanation
why he didn’t write a rant is certainly no less interesting than if he’d indulged
the impulse. He begins —
I was going to write a rant about how writers should be supportive of each other.
Then I realized …
I’m naive. ….
(5) KGB. The Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen
Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Richard Kadrey and Cassandra Khaw on Wednesday,
January 15, 7:00 p.m.at the KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street, 2nd Floor, New York).
Richard Kadrey
Richard Kadrey is the New York Times bestselling author of the Sandman Slim dark urban fantasy series. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime,” and is in production as a feature film. Some of Kadrey’s other books include The Grand Dark, The Everything Box, Hollywood Dead, and Butcher Bird. In comics, he’s written for Heavy Metal, Lucifer, and Hellblazer. He’s currently partnered with Winterlight Productions for his original horror screenplay, Dark West.
Cassandra Khaw
Cassandra Khaw is a scriptwriter at Ubisoft Montreal. Her fiction has been nominated for the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award, and her game writing has won a German Game Award. You can find her short stories in places like F&SF, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. Her novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth is coming out from Nightfire, the new Tor horror imprint in 2021.
We’re looking at Canada’s 2020 vision. How do we move forward together? These books inspire readers to think twice about the lens through which they see themselves and Canada.
The
final five books will be revealed on January 22.
January 8, 1958 — Teenage Monster premiered and you can see the trailer here. It was produced and directed by Jacques R. Marquette, and starred Anne Gwynne (who was a scream queen in the Forties but past her prime now) and Stuart Wade. It played as double bill with The Brain from Planet Arous which is a story unto Itself.If you saw it on television, It was called Meteor Monster. We can find reviews of it at the time (not unusual) and It has no ratings at Rotten Tomatoes. The Fifties is littered with similar films.
January 8, 1967 — It’s About Time aired “To Catch A Thief.” It’s here today because we’ve never heard of this series before. It was created by Sherwood Schwartz, and used sets, props and the music bits from his other television series shooting at the time, Gilligan’s Island. Its cast was Frank Aletter, Jack Mullaney, Imogene Coca, Joe E. Ross, Cliff Norton and Mike Mazurki. It lasted but one season and twenty six episodes, considerably shorter than his other show did. This futuristic spaceman meet cavemen comedy bombed in the ratings after the first few episodes.
January 8, 2006 – The BBC’s Hyperdrive enjoyed its premiere. The series was written by Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley, directed by John Henderson and produced by Alex Walsh-Taylor. The cast was Nick Frost, Kevin Eldon, Miranda Hart, Stephen Evans, Dan Antopolski and Petra Massey. BBC ran it for two seasons and twelve episode. It’s a comedy with a decidedly scatological and crude sexual bent.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 8, 1908 — William Hartnell. The very first Doctor who first appeared when Doctor Who firstaired on November 23, 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. And yes you can see him here as Flash Gordon. (Died 1997.)
Born January 8, 1941 — Boris Vallejo, 79. 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? He also guest starred in Futurama 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 next shows up in The Hunger, an erotic and kinky film worth seeing. He plays The Shark in Yellowbeard, a film that Monty Python could have produced but didn’t. Next up is the superb Labyrinth where he was Jareth the Goblin King, a role perfect for him. 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 AgentPhillip Jeffries, 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. Ok, what did I am leaving y’all to mention? (Died 2016.)
Born January 8, 1956 — Jack Womack, 64. Ok, I was trying to remember what I’d read by him. I realized it was his excellent Ambient novel when it first came out and that I hadn’t kept up with his later writings. So what do y’all think of his later novels? I know, he stopped witting essentially a generation ago except for his Flying Saucers Are Real! non-fiction release. Non-fiction?
Born January 8, 1977 — Amber Benson, 43. 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, 41. 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.
Free Range jokes about studying fantastic beasts in Oz.
…Cogo Guebara rushed over to the motorized police officer and pushed its emergency alert button on seeing the brawl break out in Salt Lake Park, Los Angeles, last month. But instead of offering assistance, the egg-shaped robot, whose official name is HP RoboCop, barked at Guebara to ‘Step out of the way’. To add insult to injury, the high-tech device then rolled away while humming an ‘intergalactic tune’, pausing periodically to say ‘Please keep the park clean.’
The explanation turned out to be disgustingly simple:
Local Police Chief Cosme Lozano says the robots, which cost between $60,000 and $70,000 a year to lease, are still in a trial phase and that their alert buttons have not yet been activated.
This is neither the closest hotel to the Tonopah Convention Center nor the largest of the hotels in Tonopah, but for some reason it seems to get a lot of interest.
(12) FANTASTIC NATURE. “Natural
History Museum will showcase ‘fantastic beasts'” – BBC shows how the
museum will complement and compete with Rowling. The show will run for seven months before heading out on an
international tour.
It’s one of the more remarkable specimens taken into London’s Natural History Museum. It’s certainly one of the most “fantastic”.
The horn comes from an Erumpent, a fictional beast created in the mind of author JK Rowling.
It’s going to feature in a major new exhibition at the South Kensington institution this spring, in which the extraordinary creatures of the Harry Potter universe are used to shine a light on some of the “magical” animals that exist in the real world.
The NHM is describing the show as its most ambitious to date.
…The exhibition will put 50 specimens from the museum’s world famous collections next to props from the Potter movies. Interactive displays will compare and contrast different animals.
“You’ll recall the Erumpent’s mating dance from Fantastic Beasts. We’ll be making comparisons with the peacock spider, which has its own extraordinary movements that it uses to attract a mate,” explained the NHM executive.
(13) ROBOTS ON DISPLAY. Through February 9, the Dundee branch of the Victoria and Albert
Museum is having an exhibit called “Hello,
Robot: Design Between Human and Machine”,
which has many, many robots.
From the robots we know and love, to the robot in your pocket, explore the fascinating future of robots at work, at home and in the blurring boundaries between human and machine.
With new technological developments being made every day, it has never been more important to explore our relationships with robotics.
Explore the influence of robots through four galleries that draw you into a conversation with simple but thought-provoking questions.
Trace our fascination with the science and fiction of robots before delving into an evolving world of industry and work. Consider the role of robots as companions and helpers and explore what the future may hold as we find new ways to tackle social and environmental problems. Would you live in a robot? And can they make us better than nature intended?
Michael Thorn, Fox’s president of entertainment, shared his thoughts on the matter with The Wrap. “Any time we look at one of our classic titles, if there’s a way to reinvent it for today so it’s as resonant now as the original was, and is, to the fans, we’re wide open,” he said.
“I loved ‘Firefly,’ personally, and I watched every episode. I didn’t work on it, but I loved the show. It had come up before, but we had ‘The Orville’ on the air and it didn’t make sense for us to have, as a broadcast network who is very targeted, to have two space franchises on our air.”
The Orville now airs on Hulu, but [Firefly executive producer Tim Minnear] is allegedly currently tied up with a number of other projects.
Astronomers have discovered a vast structure in our galaxy, made up of many interconnected “nurseries” where stars are born.
The long, thin filament of gas is a whopping 9,000 light-years long and 400 light-years wide.
It lies around 500 light-years from our Sun, which is relatively close by in astronomical distances.
…An international team analysed data from the European Gaia space telescope, which was launched in 2013.
The monolithic structure has been dubbed the Radcliffe Wave, in honour of Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“What we’ve observed is the largest coherent gas structure we know of in the galaxy, organized not in a ring but in a massive, undulating filament,” said co-author Joao Alves, from the University of Vienna, Austria, and Harvard.
…Co-author Prof Alyssa Goodman, from Harvard, commented: “We were completely shocked when we first realised how long and straight the Radcliffe Wave is, looking down on it from above in 3D.”
‘Scenes in the Square’ is a new installation at London’s Leicester Square next month that will include eight dynamic statues – which means they will be integrated into the existing landscape of the Square, rather than actually move or anything. Regarded as the home of cinema in Britain, Leicester Square has had a statue of Charlie Chaplin for many years. From February 27th, he will be joined by statues of Laurel and Hardy, Bugs Bunny, Gene Kelly, Mary Poppins, Batman, Mr Bean, Paddington and Wonder Woman, sculpted by David Field.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock,
Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Olav Rokne, Hampus Eckerman, SF
Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories.
Title credit goes o File 770 contributing editor of the day rgl.]
(1) RETRO RESOURCES. Cora Buhlert has started a recommendation spreadsheet for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The shortlink is bit.ly/RetroHugo1945
Cora hopes Filers will fill it in, “Especially since there are
whole areas I know very little about. For example, the fan categories are
completely empty so far.”
(2) SPFBO SAMPLER AVAILABLE. Fantasy Book Critic announces
“The
SPFBO Sampler Available Now!” (SPFBO
is the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off, an annual competition hosted by Mark
Lawrence.)
Today we’re thrilled to announce the official launch of The SPFBO Sampler! Looking to dive into the world of indie fantasy novels, but don’t know where to start? Here’s the perfect place to get a taste of the works of over 70 self-published authors from all around the world. Go get your copy today, and let all these incredible authors transport you into their worlds and beyond.
This huge undertaking has been organized by indie author Jon Auerbach, its gorgeous cover created by indie author and cover artist and designer Luke Tarzian, and includes a foreword by the accomplished and best-selling SFF author Mark Lawrence. This is one you surely cannot miss.
(3) TONOPAH GOING UP. Membership rates for the 2021
Westercon in Tonopah, NV will rise
on March 1.
The cost of an attending membership in Westercon 74 will increase to $50 effective March 1, 2020. In addition, the $10 conversion-to-attending rate for those people who voted in the 2021 Westercon Site Selection in Utah expires at the end of February 2020. Membership rates for Young Adult and Child members remain unchanged.
(4) EREWHON LIT SALON. Louis
Evans and Sarah Pinsker will be the readers at the Erewhon Literary Salon on January
9. The event takes place in the office of Erewhon Books in the Flatiron/NoMad
district of Manhattan. For full information and policies, and to RSVP, click here. Event address and information will be emailed to those who
have RSVPed a few days before the event.
LOUIS EVANS is a writer recently returned to his native NYC from a half-decade spent in the SF Bay. His work has been published in Analog SF&F, Escape Pod, The Toast, Third Flatiron Anthologies, and Write Ahead/The Future Looms. He’s a two-time winner of Zach Weinersmith’s Bad Ad-hoc Hypothesis Festival and the Shipwreck SF bad erotic fanfiction competition. He is a founding co-producer of Cliterary Salon, a feminist and queer literary show in the SF Bay.
SARAH PINSKER is the author of over fifty works of short fiction, including the novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road,” winner of the Nebula Award in 2016. Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” was the Sturgeon Award winner in 2014. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Uncanny and in numerous anthologies and year’s bests. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, and Italian, among other languages, and have been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, Eugie, and World Fantasy Awards.Sarah’s first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories was published by Small Beer Press in March 2019, and her first novel, A Song For A New Day, was published by Penguin/Random House/Berkley in September 2019.
(5) FUR FRIENDLY. Rolling Stone speculates whether “Will
Furries Ever Go Mainstream?” (Hey, they’ve made it into Rolling
Stone, that must count for something.)
…The mainstream media has historically painted furries as sex-crazed, socially maladjusted freaks who enjoy rubbing up against each other in giant bunny costumes. This is essentially false. Like most subcultures, the furry fandom is a largely internet-driven phenomenon, providing a label for a preexisting feeling that has always lived, dormant and unnamed, inside a select number of people. While there is a contingent of furries who do derive sexual pleasure from the subculture, the fanbase is much more broad than that.
Maybe you really liked drawing wolves during eighth-grade homeroom. Maybe you’ve always felt an inexplicable affinity with Tony the Tiger. Maybe you’ve long thought it would be rad to buy a $10,000 curvy hippo costume and enter a breakdancing competition. If you fall into any of these categories, then furries are your kind of people, and FurFest the place to unleash the human-sized sergal (a fictional rabbit/shark/wolf amalgam) within. As the voiceover to an intro presentation for FurFest sonorously boomed over a dubstep beat, “You know you are more than a human…now you are the beast that slept inside your mind.”
MFF is widely touted as the biggest furry con in the world, and its attendance has increased exponentially in recent years: While the con only saw about 1,000 attendees in 2005, it reported more than 10,900 guests in 2018, and Matt Berger, media relations lead for MFF, estimates that 12,000 were in attendance this year. That’s in part due to the increasing number of younger children and their families who are gravitating to furry culture — during my time at Midwest FurFest, I saw children as young as seven attending dance competitions and meet-and-greets accompanied by their parents, having stumbled on the fandom via YouTube or TikTok.
In so keeping with its increasingly family-friendly image, the fandom has become intent on promoting itself as a beacon of acceptance and inclusivity, and MFF is no exception….
(6) KEEPING SCORE. In “Asimov’s
Empire, Asimov’s Wall”, Alec Nevala-Lee spotlights Isaac Asimov’s epic
track record of harassment.
…In the end, however, another number might turn out to be equally meaningful. Over the course of many decades, Asimov groped or engaged in other forms of unwanted touching with countless women, often at conventions, but also privately and in the workplace. Within the science fiction community, this is common knowledge, and whenever I bring it up in a room of older fans, the response is usually a series of nods. The number of such incidents is unknown, but it can be plausibly estimated in the hundreds, and thus may match or exceed the long list of books that Asimov wrote.
“An unpreserved Vesuvius, an overnight ruin” — that’s how Sean Adams describes Los Verticalés, the fictional setting of his engrossing debut novel The Heap. Adams is not speaking figuratively. Los Verticalés, nicknamed The Vert, was once a leviathan 500-story building, erected in the American desert, that housed an entire metropolis’ worth of apartments, residents, and businesses. But years ago it suddenly collapsed, leaving a gargantuan pile of rubble and bodies called The Heap. That “overnight ruin” is now surrounded by a loose community of mobile homes called CamperTown, and the denizens of CamperTown dig through the debris, searching for the dead and whatever modest treasure might be salvaged.
One of these Dig Hands, as they’re known, has a higher motivation: Orville Anders is the brother of Bernard Anders, a radio personality who is the last known survivor of The Vert’s collapse. Bernard, however, is still trapped beneath the rubble, miraculously alive and broadcasting his daily radio talk show from somewhere in the bowels of The Vert’s vast corpse. Bernard, living in darkness, subsists on rats and a trickle of water coming down a wall; Orville digs desperately every day in search of his buried-alive, increasingly unstable brother, keeping in touch by calling in to his radio show every day, hoping not only to find Bernard but to strengthen a fraternal bond that’s grown frayed and distant over the years. It’s a numbing, heartbreaking task, and it’s made all the more difficult when Sundial Media — the owner of WVRT, the radio station that Bernard is still technically employed by — saddles Bernard with a moral dilemma: Would he be willing to brand and commercialize his exchanges with his brother as a kind of podcast-meets-reality-show?
Adams’ imaginative scope is staggering. The intricately wrought details of The Vert serve as the substructure of The Heap, contained in interstitial chapters that sketch a blueprint of the fallen building as a monument to modern technology as well as a chilling social experiment. The Vert’s inner core of apartments comprised the lower classes, since they were isolated from the outside of the building and therefore didn’t have windows; in their place, UV screens broadcast moving images of the real world as a kind of analogy of Plato’s cave wall. Reality began to warp inside The Vert as friction grew between The Windowed and The Windowless, to the point where the building’s physical collapse is symbolic of its civic collapse.
I’ve come to an agreement with Jack Vance’s son, John, that I will be writing a sequel to Jack Vance’s iconic Demon Princes series. A contract is being drawn up.
I’m not an outliner, but I’ve sketched out an idea for the story: a young person, not sure yet if it’s male or female, returns to the world called Providence and the community of Mount Pleasant. This was the site of a slave-taking raid by the five megacriminals known collectively as the Demon Princes, whom Kirth Gersen devoted his life to tracking down and killing.
The returnee has escaped from slavery and come to reclaim the family property – as well as something precious buried there.
But the ghost town has been repopulated by sinister people – I’m thinking maybe a cult or some kind of radical political organization. So my underdog has to undergo trials and tribulations.
I’m very much looking forward to this.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.
January 7, 1961 — ITV premiered The Avengers. Original cast was Ian Hendry and Patrick Macnee. Hendry left after the first series; Steed with becoming the primary male character, partnered with a succession of female partners. The series would last for six seasons and one hundred and one episodes. We of course have our favorite female partner but that’s not for us to say here. After it ended in 1969, John Steed would be paired with two new partners on The New Avengers, a series that ran for two seasons in the mid-Seventies.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 7, 1912 — Charles Addams. Illustrator best known for the Addams Family which he first drew in 1932 and kept drawing until his death. Needless to say there has been a number of films using these characters of which The Addams Family is my favorite. (Died 1988.)
Born January 7, 1924 — Eugene Lee Coon. Showrunner on Trek for much of the first and second seasons. Responsible in some part for thirteen scripts for the show. Outside of this show, he had little in the genre save writing one episode each of The Wild Wild West and The Immortal, and later scripting The Questor Tapes. (Died 1973.)
Born January 7, 1926 — Graham Stone. Australian fan, bibliographer, collector, and small press publisher. Founder of the Australian Science Fiction Society and member, as well, of the Futurian Society of Sydney. He wrote with his co-author Royce Williams, Zero Equals Nothing. Winner of an A. Bertram Chandler Award. (Died 2013.)
Born January 7, 1928 — William Peter Blatty. Novelist and screenwriter best known for The Exorcist though he was also the same for Exorcist III. The former is by no means the only genre work that he would write as his literary career would go on for forty years after this novel and would include Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing: A Fable which he renamed Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing: A Hollywood Christmas Carol and The Exorcist for the 21st Century, his final work. (Died 2017.)
Born January 7, 1950 — Erin Gray, 70. She’s best known as Colonel Wilma Deering Buck Rogers in the 25th Century series. Would it surprise you that she shows up in as Commander Grey in Star Trek Continues, one of those video Trek fanfics
Born January 7, 1955 — Karen Haber, 65. Wife of Robert Silverberg. I fondly remember reading her Meditations on Middle Earth anthology. And the three Universe anthologies she did with her husband are most excellent. I don’t remember reading any of her novels but that’s hardly a certainty that I didn’t as even when my memory was a lot better than it is now I hardly remembered all the genre fiction I read.
Born January 7, 1957 — Nicholson Baker, 63. Ok ISFDB lists him as having two SFF novels, The Fermata and House of Holes. The Wiki page him lists those as being two out of the three erotic novels that he’s written. Not having read them, are they indeed erotic SFF? I see that ESF say they’re indeed SFF and yes are erotic. H’h.
Born January 7, 1961 — Mark Allen Shepherd, 59. Morn, the bar patron on Deep Space Nine. Amazingly he was in Quark’s bar a total of ninety-three episodes plus one episode each on Next Gen and Voyager. Technically he’s uncredited in almost all of those appearances. That’s pretty much his entire acting career. He’s also an abstract painter whose work was used frequently on DS9 sets.
Born January 7, 1966 — Heidi Elizabeth Yolen Stemple, 54. Daughter of Jane Yolen, sibling of Adam Stemple. She and Yolen co-wrote the Mirror, Mirror: Forty Folktales for Mothers and Daughters to Share anthology. ISFDBsays they did two chapbooks as well, A Kite for Moon and Monster Academy.
Born January 7, 1971 — Jeremy Renner, 49. You know him as Hawkeye in those MCU films but he’s also in a number of other SFF film including Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Arrival.
Born January 7, 1980 — Tom Harper, 40. Director of such British series as Demons, Misfits and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. He’s also done some SFF film work such as The Woman in Black: Angel of Death and The Borrowers.
Born January 7, 1983 — Ruth Negga, 37. She was Raina in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. but she left that show as she got a leading role being Tulip O’Hare in the Preacher series. She was also Nikki in Misfits, Queen Taria In Warcraft and a WHO Doctor In World War Z.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Bizarro suggests one of Stan Lee’s mottos was a bit naïve.
Grant Snider’s Incidental Comics is about Beginning,
Who is the most popular Star Trek captain of all time? This age-old — and extremely fraught — Trekkie debate has arguably been settled. The impending release of Star Trek: Picard seems to prove that, overwhelmingly, fans love Captain Jean-Luc Picard more than any other Trek captain ever. Yes, hardcore Trekkies will tell you they celebrate all captains equally (even Scott Bakula), but the zeitgeist seems to tell a different story.
We love Picard a lot, and surely, we love him more than Captain James T. Kirk. This wasn’t always the case, but we’ve been living in a Picard-first world for a long time now. Here’s when it happened….
(13) WONDER
WOMAN. The Warner Bros. UK Twitter account has dropped four
pics from the upcoming June 5 release Wonder Woman 1984:
“Travel back to 1984 with these new stills from #WW84.” They include
scenes set both on The Mall and in a mall.
Who? – You! We need outgoing, creative, friendly, enthusiastic, graduating college seniors who have an appetite for adventure and are willing to see the country through the windshield of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. Applicants should have a BA or BS, preferably in public relations, journalism, communications, advertising, or marketing, though applicants are not limited to these degrees.
Anneliese Nielsen, who owns a cannabis brand in Los Angeles, used a strain of weed calibrated for relaxation, but found herself unable to relax in a dark theatre illuminated by the ghastly cat face of Corden. ‘I’m 35 and announced, ‘I’m scared!’ to my fellow moviegoers at least seven times,’ says Nielsen, who called the film ‘a special kind of evil.’
The Alamo Drafthouse chain has special ‘rowdy’ showings of CATS where patrons are encouraged to consume adult beverages and loudly comment on the film.
Facebook has announced it will remove videos modified by artificial intelligence, known as deepfakes, from its platform.
Deepfakes are computer-generated clips that are designed to look real.
The social media company said in a blog that these videos distort reality and present a “significant challenge” for the technology industry.
While deepfakes are still relatively uncommon on the internet, they are becoming more prevalent.
AI software creates deepfakes of people – often politicians or celebrities – by merging, replacing, or superimposing content on to a video in a way that makes it look real.
Facebook said it would remove videos if it realised they had been edited in ways that weren’t obvious to an average person, or if they misled a viewer into thinking that a person in a video said words they did not actually say.
“There are people who engage in media manipulation in order to mislead,” wrote Monika Bickert, vice president of global policy management at Facebook in the blog.
Facebook staff and independent fact-checkers will be used to judge a video’s authenticity.
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Looney Tunes–Behind The Lines: A Conversation With Tex
Avery” on YouTube is an interview with the great animator Tex Avery that
is undated, but probably from the late 1970s.
[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Andrew Porter, N.,
Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Olav Rokne, and Chip Hitchcock for some of
these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel
Dern.]
Videos from the “Fannish Inquisition” held at SMOFCon 37 in Albuquerque NM on December 7 have been posted. They capture the questions and answers posed to representatives of seated WSFS conventions (Worldcon and NASFiC), and bids for future Worldcons and NASFiCs.
The makers put them up with this caveat: “This is raw video
for the future SMOFCons and seated WSFS conventions taken from the camera
without editing. Because the camera records files of a maximum length, then
starts a new file, segments may begin or end in mid-word.”
SMOFCon 37 Fannish Inquisition – SMOFCons/Seated WSFS Conventions – Part 1 of 7
SMOFCon 37 Fannish Inquisition – SMOFCons/Seated WSFS Conventions – Part 2 of 7
SMOFCon 37 Fannish Inquisition – SMOFCons/Seated WSFS Conventions – Part 3 of 7
SMOFCon 37 Fannish Inquisition – SMOFCons/Seated WSFS Conventions – Part 4 of 7
SMOFCon 37 Fannish Inquisition – SMOFCons/Seated WSFS Conventions – Part 5 of 7
SMOFCon 37 Fannish Inquisition – SMOFCons/Seated WSFS Conventions – Part 6 of 7
SMOFCon 37 Fannish Inquisition – SMOFCons/Seated WSFS Conventions – Part 7 of 7
SMOFCon 37 Fannish Inquisition – Worldcon Bids
The “Fannish Inquisition” held at SMOFCon 37 in
Albuquerque NM on the evening of Saturday, This is the final segment of the
Fannish Inquisition, consisting of presentations from and questions to bids for
future World Science Fiction Conventions.
Kevin Standlee also has posted videos of the Westercon Fannish Inquisitions.
(1) MATCHLESS
PROSE, WE HOPE. Will
Frank (scifantasy), Vice-Administrator of the 2016 Hugo Awards and Administrator of
the 2021 Hugo Awards, who also identifies himself as a fanfiction writer on AO3
and a trademark attorney, is
trying to pour some oil onto the stormy waters that separate parts of the
Worldcon community from parts of the AO3 community: “HugO3”. (Please
don’t strike a match.)
…If the Worldcon-running community doesn’t police use of the phrase, someone else–someone with less humorous, less celebratory, less free-spirited intent–might be able to plausibly argue that he can call his self-published book a Hugo Award Winner just because it was fanfic, or he has an AO3 account, because the term has lost all of its significance by not being protected.
Is that likely? Who the hell knows. Is it something the Worldcon-running community wants to risk, especially so soon after a concerted effort to undermine the award, not by fanfiction authors in celebration of their validation but by a group of politically-motivated writers with an axe to grind? Definitely not.
(I’ve also seen some people saying that there isn’t any prestige in a Hugo Award given some of the historical winners, and…well, get in line behind the Oscars and the Grammys and the others, I guess. The fact is that “Hugo Award” on the cover of a book does indeed help sales. It matters. There is still cachet in being a Hugo Award winner. Or even a finalist!)
So, no, the Worldcon-running community is not saying “Hey, don’t have fun.” It is saying, “please, don’t undermine our ability to stop people with malicious intent from poisoning the term Hugo Award.”
I’m not even telling you that you have to think I’m right. But at least, please know that this isn’t just a matter of “don’t have fun.” It’s a plea for your help.
(2) HEINLEIN’S OTHER VERSION. The Number of the Beast versus
Pursuit of the Pankera – not the same book at all. Arc Manor would be
delighted for you to put the claim to a test — http://www.arcmanor.com/as/Comparison.pdf
It is a different book. Of the 187,000 words in the new book, it shares the first 28,000. But then is totally different. The separation occurs in chapter XVIII and here is a side by side comparison of the chapters in the two books with the point of divergence clearly marked.
Wendy Pini does it all. In the 1970s Wendy used to hit the cons dressed as Sonja. She was born in San Francisco in 1951, and from an early age demonstrated the talents later to come to fruition as a professional illustrator, and eventually as the creator of Elfquest.
(4) CHANGES AT TOR. Shelf Awareness is reporting a couple
of promotions at Tom
Doherty Associates:
Theresa DeLucci has been promoted to senior associate director of marketing of Tor Books, Forge, and Nightfire.
Renata Sweeney has been promoted to senior marketing manager, Tor.
(5) ELLEN VARTANOFF INTERVIEW. From Small Press Expo 2017
(but just posted on YouTube today.)
Rusty and Joe talk to Ellen Vartanoff about her decades in the comics field and the early days of comic conventions!
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY.
September 19, 1952 — “Superman On Earth” aired as the pilot episode for The Adventures of Supermantelevision series starring George Reeves.
September 19, 1961 — On a return trip from Canada, while in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Betty and Barney Hill claimed to have been abducted by aliens.
September 19, 1986 — The Starman series debuted with Jeff Bridges replaced in the role of The Starman with Robert Hays. The series lasted for twenty-two episodes.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born September 19, 1867 — Arthur Rackham. English book illustrator who is recognized as one of the leading literary figures during the Golden Age of British book illustration. His work can be seen on genre fiction ranging from Goblin Market to Rip Van Winkle and The Wind in the Willows. Derek Huson’s Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work is one of the better looks at him and his art. (Died 1939.)
Born September 19, 1911 — William Golding. Though obviously best known for the Lord of The Flies novel, I’m more intrigued by the almost completed novel found in draft after his death, The Double Tongue which tells the story of the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi. (Died 1993.)
Born September 19, 1922 — Damon Knight. Author, critic, editor. He is the author of “To Serve Man”, a 1950 short story which became a The Twilight Zone episode. It won a 50-year Retro-Hugo in 2001 as the best short story of 1950. Wiki says “He ceased reviewing when Fantasy & Science Fiction refused to publish a review.” What’s the story here? (Died 2002.)
Born September 19, 1928 — Adam West. Best known as Batman on that classic Sixty series, he also had a short role in 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars as Colonel Dan McReady. The less said about his post Batman films, including a softcore porn film, the better. (Died 2017.)
Born September 19, 1928 — Robin Scott Wilson. Founder, with Damon Knight and others, of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop. He edited Clarion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction and Criticism from the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Clarion II and Clarion III. He wrote one genre novel, To the Sound of Freedom (with Richard W. Shryock) and a lot of short fiction. Alas, neither iBooks nor Kindle has anything by him available. (Died 2013.)
Born September 19, 1933 – David McCallum, 86. Gained fame as Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and has rounded off his career playing medical examiner Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard in another TV series that is known by its initials, NCIS.
Born September 19, 1940 — Caroline John. English actress best known for her role as scientist Elizabeth “Liz” Shaw in Doctor Who as companion to the Third Doctor. She’d repeat her role in Dimensions in Time, a charity special crossover between Doctor Who and the EastEnders that ran in 1993. Her only other genre role was playing Laura Lyons in The Hound of the Baskervilles. (Died 2012.)
Born September 19, 1947 — Tanith Lee. I hadn’t realized that she wrote more than ninety novels and three hundred short stories in her career. And even wrote two Blake’s 7 episodes as well. I was more fond of her work for children such as The Dragon Hoard and The Unicorn Series than I was of her adult work. (Died 2015.)
Born September 19, 1952 — Laurie R. King, 67. She’s on the Birthday Honors List for the Mary Russell series of historical mysteries, featuring Sherlock Holmes as her mentor and later partner. She’s also written at least one genre novel, Califia’s Daughters.
Born September 19, 1972 — N. K. Jemisin, 47. Her most excellent Broken Earth series has made her the only author to have won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years.
(9) UNIDENTIFIED WALKING OBJECTS. Aliens have landed at the
convention hotel (a couple years early) reports the Tonopah
Nevada in 2021 for Westercon 74 page – see the photographic evidence there!
Starting to see some out of this world stuff in honor of Alien Weekend… these aliens came all the way from Michigan to check out the happenings…
Emergency sirens wailed on Hawaii’s Oahu and Maui islands Wednesday evening, warning of a tsunami, but the alert turned out to be a mistake, sparking anger from residents who recalled a similar false warning last year of an imminent ballistic missile attack.
Within minutes of the alarm going off shortly after 5 p.m. local time (11 p.m. ET) authorities were trying to calm the public by getting out word of the mistake.
The National Weather Service in Honolulu tweeted: “***NO TSUNAMI THREAT*** We have received phone calls about sirens going off across Oahu, but we have confirmed with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center that there is NO TSUNAMI THREAT.”
Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell also took to Twitter. “Mahalo to everyone for taking appropriate action & tuning into local media,” he tweeted, adding that the sirens had been “inadvertently triggered” during Honolulu Police Department training.
… Burger King has decided to remove all plastic toys from its kids’ meals. Not only that but the initiative, created by agency Jones Knowles Ritchie and starting this week in the U.K., is also calling for people to drop plastic toys from meals past in “plastic toy amnesty bins” at Burger King locations to be melted down and recycled into things that are actually useful, like play areas and surface tools, which can be recycled many times over.
People in the U.K. who bring in toys to melt down next week will get a free King Junior meal when they buy any adult meal. To promote the project, Burger King has created a cast of melted-down plastic toy characters, including Beep Beep, a jeep-driving bunny, which the brand has installed a giant melting version of on London’s South Bank to promote the project.
Despite their giraffian proportions, giant azhdarchid torso were relatively tiny. Witton and Habib (2010) noted that, like many pterodactyloid pterosaurs, their torsos were probably only a third or so longer than their humeri, suggesting a shoulder-hip length of about 65-75 cm for an animal with a 10 m wingspan. That’s a torso length not much larger than your own, although they were considerably more stocky and swamped with muscle. Azhdarchid shoulders, in particular, are well endowed with attachment sites for flight muscles, as are (for pterosaurs) their pelves and hindquarters.
(13) JURASSIC SHORT. Battle at Big Rock on YouTube is an eight-minute video, set in the Jurassic
World universe one year after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen
Kingdom that premiered on FX last night and was put online today.
(14) BRADBURY INTERVIEW. Here’s a 9-minute video of Ray
Bradbury’s 1978 appearance on the Merv Griffin Show.
The always brilliant Ray Bradbury, one of the greatest sci-fi writers in history, talks with Merv about the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, Steven Spielberg, his mission as a writer, the future of mankind, and ends by reading from his poem “If Only We Had Taller Been” from his collection “When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.”
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchccock, JJ, Mike Kennedy, Kevin Standlee, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day JJ.]
By John Hertz:Spikecon combined Westercon LXXII (regional)
and the 13th NASFiC (North America S-F Con, since 1976 held when the Worldcon
is off-continent – this year’s Worldcon was in
Dublin, Republic of Ireland), plus a 1632 Minicon (fans of
Eric Flynt’s 1632 series) and Manticon 2019 (fans of David
Weber’s Honor Harrington series, with its Royal Manticoran
Navy, i.e. Space navy). This was a first.
Chair,
Kate Hatcher; attendance, about 800; in the Art Show, sales about $20,000 by
about 60 artists.
The
Westercon and NASFiC each had Guests of Honor. The Utah Fandom
Organization (yes, that spells –) brought two more; eight other sponsors
brought nine more.
It
all happened at Layton, Utah, 4-7 July 2019, fifty miles from where the Final
Spike was driven completing the Transcontinental Railroad 150 years
earlier.
Layton
(population about 70,000) is twenty-five miles from Salt Lake City, where
Westercon LXVII had been – the first in Utah.
We
used the Davis County Conference Center and five hotels.
Studying
available space I hadn’t seen anywhere to put a Fanzine
Lounge. Hatcher said “How about a fanzine party in the Hospitality
Suite?” With Hospitality Suite chief Dorothy Domitz’ agreement we settled
– if that word may be used in fandom – on Friday night, 7-10 p.m.
Craig
Glassner, who had hosted the Fanzine Lounge at the 76th Worldcon in 2018, was
my co-host for the fanzine party. We were both on-site by Wednesday
and went shopping with Chris Olds the Party Maven. I made a flier.
Also
I was Chief Hall-Costume Judge. Decades ago hall
costume was settled for the costumes some people wear strolling the
halls. Marjii Ellers called them “daily wear from alternative
worlds”.
Stage
costumes are meant to be seen at a distance; hall costumes are meant to be
met. To acknowledge them a gang of judges prowls the con and,
spotting a good one, awards a rosette on the spot.
The
con had made disks with Spikecon – Hall Costume Award;
while shopping I looked for lace, or like that, to go round
them. JoAnn Fabric & Crafts didn’t have spools enough in any
appealing style, but on the way out I saw some red-white-and-blue-striped cake
cups (for cupcakes, right?): it was the Independence Day
weekend. We got those.
Selina Phanara hadn’t
anything ready to exhibit in the Art Show, but luckily I was able to borrow the
Selina Phanara Sampler from fellow Phanara fans Elizabeth Klein-Lebbink &
Jerome Scott, a vertically (“portrait”?) laid out banner with color
reproductions and her name and E-mail address. Art Show chief Bruce
Miller proved to have space for it.
Friday. The
first of three Classics of SF discussions
I led, on “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (which just won the Retrospective Hugo for Best Novelette of 1943), was at 12:45 p.m. Regency dancing had to be at 3:15 – another time and space problem. The Chesley Awards(by the Ass’n of SF Artists) and Art Show Reception were at 7. So after “Mimsy” I hustled back to my room, changed, sauntered to the Conference Center for dancing – can’t hustle in Regency clothes – then met my fellow Art Show judges to decide and turn in the Art Show Awards before the Reception, then back to my room for conventional garments, and hustled to the Hospitality Suite where Glassner had started the fanzine party.
But
we trespass upon chronology.
About
“Mimsy”. A.J. Budrys, one of our best authors and critics both,
taught “Always ask, Why are they telling us this?” Why
do Kuttner & Moore tell us Jane Paradine, the children’s mother, is very
pretty? Remember a woman is co-writing; K&M always said that
everything they published, under any name (they used many; “Mimsy” appeared as
by Lewis Padgett), was by the two of them together.
Discussion
considered Sexism? – or Mere sexism? (whatever
that may mean, about which there was also talk) – or Sexism
unconsciously or otherwise adopted by a 1943 woman?
Beyond
or beneath or beside this we human beings are drawn to beauty; think not only
of an attractive man or woman, but also “I saw
young Harry … gallantly armed, / Rise from the ground … and vault … with
such ease into his seat / As if an angel dropped down from the clouds, / To
witch the world with noble horsemanship” (Henry IV Part 1, Act 4 scene
1).
At
different points in “Mimsy” K&M invite us to feel for the parents
– for the children.
Note
also the sneaky ironic foreshadowing of “The only people who can understand
philosophy are mature adults or kids like Emma and Scotty.”
Does
Rex Holloway, the psychologist, help or hurt? Does Paradine suggest paradigm;
does Holloway suggest hollow way?
Is
“Mimsy” tragic – in the classical sense, grievous and revealed to result from a
fault of the recipient even if – or because – that fault had been thought
insignificant? Why?
Why
does the story end with the telephone ringing? Who did K&M tell
us is calling? Why?
Since
Unthahorsten is “a good many million years in the future”, what happens to Emma
and Scotty?
About
Regency dancing. Maybe you already knew my article in Mimosa,
or maybe you followed the link to it above. I hold Jane Austen one of the
greatest authors in the world, and yes, that means I rank her with Aeschylus,
and Shakespeare, and Lady Murasaki. But she – since I’m talking to
SF fans here – is, like them, a Martian writing for other
Martians. She doesn’t explain. Georgette Heyer, writing
two centuries later, like an SF author introduces us to the world she
portrays. So it’s she I recommend, to start with anyhow; luckily
she’s a superb author herself.
I’ve
said Cross-cultural contact is homework for SF. Mike
Ford said history is our secret ingredient. Theodore Sturgeon said
science fiction is knowledge fiction. Not all knowledge is
data. Some of it is doing. I learn a lot from this hobby
that grew out of a hobby.
The
Hospitality Suite was in the Garden Inn, attached to the Conference Center, not
in the Homes2 Suites across a driveway, which had been planned as the
Party Hotel. As it turned out, the Hospitality Suite could stay open
until 2 a.m.; the Homes2 shut down parties at midnight. Could that
have been discovered in advance, maybe even worked around? For ways
that are dark, and tricks that are vain, our hotel negotiations are peculiar.
Glassner
and I had each brought a handful of fanzines, some recent, some from years
past. People looked and talked. I’d also printed the opening
page of Bill Burns’ efanzines.com. That gratified some, and was
news to others. Obviousness is relative. After our
three hours we donated what remained of our food and drink, also two little
tables I’d bought to spread fanzines on.
The
Hospitality Suite may be the best part of an SF convention. You’re
welcome whether you’re a fan or a pro or both; whether or not you’re in with
some in-crowd. Conversations happen. You meet people you
didn’t know you wanted to meet.
Sometimes
it’s called the Con Suite because the con itself hosts it, unlike say a SFWA
Suite (SF Writers of America).
In
the Homes2 lobby later, half past midnight or maybe one, I found a surprisingly
large crowd, and a spread of refreshments along a center table. Thus
I learned parties were being shut down. People had gravitated, and
brought leftovers. It was Lobbycon.
Here
I heard Match Game SF had been fun, as usual. Of course it had to
happen. Kevin Standlee, his wife Lisa Hayes, and their friend Kuma
Bear, were Westercon’s Fan Guests of Honor. For a dozen years
they’ve been mounting this adaptation of the oft-revived television panel-game. At
the Worldcon they’d be nose-deep in the Business Meeting, and like that;
Spikecon was the moment. Until they started this, who
knew Standlee had a game-show host in him?
Standlee, Hayes, and Kuma are fen of many talents.
Hayes does the tech. I think Kuma is the producer.
Rocket Ship “Galileo” at the crack of dawn, i.e. 10:15 a.m. I was not alone
in wanting to celebrate the Glorious 20th; the U.S. Postal Service had issued a
stamp.
Two
decades before humankind actually did it, Heinlein wrote this
speculation. It’s the first of his “juveniles” – they have
young-adult protagonists – books which some of us think his best: they’re gems.
“Galileo” is reasonable science for 1947. Heinlein said he’d only
compressed the time and the number of people. Note that it isn’t a
rocket ship built in a back yard.
Look
how he manages the characterization – sparely but tellingly. The
books on the shelf in the clubhouse – Ross Jenkins’ parents (the one-word
utterance “Albert.” in Chapter 4!) – “Going to put her down on manual?” and
what follows. Look how characterization also advances the plot
– like setting up Art’s speaking German.
The
very points we might hang fire on are things Heinlein needs for what I’ve
called the C.S. Lewis One-Strange rule: an extraordinary person in ordinary
circumstances, or an ordinary person in extraordinary
circumstances. Boys taking apart almost anything mechanical from alarm
clocks to souped-up jalopies. “Cigarette,
Doctor? Cigar?” These are verisimilitude at the time of
writing.
Were
you looking for the Heinlein Double Surprise – something strange happens, then
something really strange happens? There it is!
The
Art Show tour I led was at 11:30. I didn’t invent these tours, but I
often arrange them, and usually lead one myself. Why me? When
Kelly Freas first told a con to get me for one, I went to him. He said,
“You seem to be able to say what you see.”
I’ve
never forgotten that. When I’m arranging the tours it’s what I ask tour
leaders to do.
I
used to say “docent tours”. Docent is the right word,
but I found people didn’t know what it meant, and didn’t look it up, so it put
them to sleep.
The
Art Show was one of the strengths of Spikecon.
Here was Mark Roland, one of few who does etching; his “Persistence of Memory” won 1st Place Monochrome (if you follow the link, scroll down, 3rd image; you’ll see he says these are limited-edition fine art prints, hand-wiped and printed on rag paper in his studio).
Here
was Elizabeth Berrien, whose “Cloud Unicorn” in aluminum wire won Best 3-D; she
has not exhibited with us for a while, being distracted with airports and hotel
lobbies. Her Website is worth a look. At a
party, or a panel discussion, you’ll see her listening or contributing to the
conversation, all the while twisting wire. She must carry the whole
in her mind, like Michelangelo saying “I just get a block of marble and chip
away anything that doesn’t look like a Madonna and Child.”
Jessica
Douglas’ “Ghost Leviathan”, worked up from the page into bas-relief with layers
of color, and found objects, won 1st Place Color. She has
recently been at Orycons.
“Always”
by Elizabeth Fellows won 2nd Place Monochrome. Looking straight at it you
saw vertical strands of dark yarn on a field of white. Fellows
didn’t, so the Art Show did, mount a sign Look at it
sideways. You then saw a face – which I think was Alan Rickman
as Severus Snape from the Harry Potter movies – but wasn’t his
word “Forever”? Where are my notes?
I was
particularly glad Bjo Trimble, her husband John, and their daughter Kat, were
at the con; as it turned out they were sponsored by Ctein (pronounced “k-TINE”;
yes, that’s his full name; while we’re at it, there should be a circumflex over
the j in Bjo, an Esperantism indicating
pronunciation “bee-joe”).
In the photo you can see Bjo’s “Aslan” (from The Chronicles of Narnia), which won 3rd Place Monochrome, over her head. Kat’s “Mariposa” (which you can’t quite see in the photo) was a Judges’ Choice.
Ctein
is one of few photographers in our Art Shows. Photos are necessarily
of things actually existent; what’s the SF element? We get some
neighbors, like astronomicals, or the spacecraft so far built; and indeed Ctein
shoots them. But his other pictures too have a quality of marvel.
The art of photography includes the mind of the artist. Ctein
being one of the judges, and also exhibiting, he insisted that nothing by a
judge should get an award.
No picture-taking is our Art Show rule, but Jan Gephardt was allowed to shoot this panel of her own (you can just make out
some of her paper sculptures at upper left).
Saturday
night, the Masquerade. Decades ago this was a dress-up party;
it’s now a costume competition – with a stage, lights, and sound, if we can
manage. The Masquerade Director was Tanglwyst de Holloway; Master of
Ceremonies, Orbit Brown; judges, Dragon Dronet, Theresa Halbert, Kitty Krell.
Entering
as a Novice, and winning Best in Show – which is quite possible, I’ve been a
judge at Worldcon Masquerades where we did that – was Hanna Swedin, “Snaptrap”
(Re-Creation, from Five Nights at Freddy’s 3; Re-Creation entries
are based on known images, Original entries are not; the Novice, Journeyman,
and Master classes allow entrants to compete against others with their own
level of experience if they wish, but anyone can “challenge up”, and experience
isn’t everything).
Sunday
brought the Site-Selection results. Columbus, Ohio, won unopposed
for the 14th NASFiC in 2020 (the 78th
Worldcon will be at Wellington, New Zealand, in
2020). Tonopah, Nevada, beat Phoenix, Arizona, 82-51, for Westercon
LXXIV in 2021 (Westercon LXXIII will
be at Seattle, Washington, in 2020).
This
is a noteworthy outcome. In contrast with Phoenix, Tonopah is an
unincorporated town of population 2,600; no air, rail, intercity-bus service;
it’s halfway between Reno and Las Vegas (each about 200 miles, 250 km,
away). Probably not even the best crystal-gazer would venture to say
what lurks in the minds of fen, but “Why Tonopah?” from the bid committee to its parent organization, all
explained again at Spikecon in conversation, bid parties, and the exercise
we call the Fannish Inquisition, may be instructive.
A
quarter to one p.m., October the First Is Too Late. As
always I asked who’d read it recently or had it fresh in mind, who even if
having read it didn’t have it fresh in mind, who hadn’t read it, who hadn’t
heard of it; most always there are some of each (hadn’t heard of it may
prove to be but I hear these discussions are fun, which I’ll take).
By
way of reminding people to look things up I pointed out that “bacon” for an
Englishman is nearer to what United States people call “Canadian bacon” than to
what U.S. people call “bacon”. If this is what you’re living on while
camping, it makes a difference.
What’s
all the music for? Is it mere window-dressing? Well, it
shows the mind of the narrator. It sets up the exploration of art
and technology, human and mechanical possibilities, with the future (though we
must beware of that word with this book) keyboard instrument in Chapter 13.
And
music, at least as we understand it, is about time, and time is the theme, the
endoskeleton, of the book: one of the more brilliant observations I heard all
weekend.
What
about the framing story? What about “someone, or something, was
using the Sun as a giant signaling device”? Does it tell us anything
about the fourth-millennium people? The narrative doesn’t take us to
it again – or does it, in the last chapter, with “a higher level of perception
than our own”?
Are
we to be uncertain about the certain uncertainty of the people we meet at the
end, like Sir Arthur Clarke’s “It is well to be skeptical [or as he spelled it,
sceptical] even of skepticism”?
At
Closing Ceremonies the joined Westercon and NASFiC had to
disjoin. When Kate Hatcher ended Spikecon, the Westercon gavel went
to Sally Woehrle for Westercon LXXIII; but the NASFiC is an entity of the World
Science Fiction Society, so the WSFS gavel went to a courier for the 77th
Worldcon which would need it before the 14th NASFiC.
Luckily
Standlee, Hayes, and Kuma were present, being Fan Guests of Honor for Westercon
LXXII, and Linda Deneroff was present, being Fan Guest of Honor for the 13th
NASFiC, all experienced in Business Meeting fandom, so we managed.
Afterward
in the course of helping take down and clean up I found my roommate Kevin Rice
carrying a box of leftover plastic train-whistles. He’d made them by
3-dimensional printing, gosh: six inches long with two pipes, the top one
marked “Spikecon 2019” and the bottom one “Layton, UT”. They were in
various colors.
I
knew there would be a Dead Dog party (until the last dog is –), and separately
a Dead Dog Filk, so that’s where
I went with them. More of the filkers being of the
musical-instrument type, they took more.
(1) ON THEIR WATCH. In The Guardian, Amal El-Mohtar
answers the question “Why
are there so many new books about time-travelling lesbians?” Tagline: At a time when historical amnesia is
making itself widely felt, these stories show how readily the past can be
rewritten.
…Mascarenhas has said of her novel that time travel “[makes] you constantly think of what stories people leave behind”. Every time we recover a female author, scientist, doctor, activist, every time we affirm that black people lived in medieval Europe, that queer people have always existed and often led happy lives, we change history – not the past, crucially, but history, our story about the past, our narratives and paradigms. And as we change history, we change the future. I’d worried that our book wouldn’t be relevant – it turns out all of us were right on time.
(2) WORLDCON DINING. Now is when this massive project pays
off – Dublin 2019 Eats – compiled by Guest of Honour Diane Duane and Peter Morwood.
…For a lot of years now, SFF conventions have often had local restaurant guides to help their attendees find out what the local food options were. With this concept in mind, and as a way of assisting our thousands of convention visitors in finding their way around the Dublin food scene, in 2018 we came up with the concept of this casual online guide to food that’s either in the immediate area of the Dublin Convention Centre, the Worldcon’s main venue, or accessible from that area via public transport. Your two site managers — locally-based science fiction and fantasy novelists and screenwriters Peter Morwood and Diane Duane — have between them some seventy years of experience at the fine art of tracking down and enjoying great Dublin food.
For the purposes of this guide, our attention is focused mostly on food located near the city’s fabulous Luas tram system — mainly the Red Line that serves the DCC, but also the Luas Green Line that connects to it.
We have a focus on affordable food — because we, like a lot of our Worldcon guests, have often had to spend enough just getting to the venue to make the cost of eating an issue.
(3) INTERESTING TIMES. Abigail Nussbaum returns to the Lawyers,
Guns & Money blog with a commentary on Russell T. Davies’s recent miniseries
about the times to come: “A
Political History of the Future: Years and Years”.
…The result is a show suffused with anxiety. When discussing Years and Years, I’ve found that people tend to reference its big dramatic moments, such as the ending of episode 1, in which an air raid siren alerts the gathered family to the fact that the US has dropped an atomic bomb on a Chinese military base (Davies doesn’t try too hard to ground his predictions in carefully-reasoned reality, but his speculation that Donald Trump would do something like this on his final day in office is scarily plausible). Or that of episode 4, in which Daniel and Viktor board an overloaded inflatable raft in a desperate attempt to cross the handful of miles separating Calais from England. But I think the scene that will hit a lot of viewers where they live is actually the end of episode 2, in which Stephen and Celeste race to their bank to try to retrieve even some of their money, and find themselves in a crowd of people hoping to do the same, all equally doomed. The first two are things that you can imagine happening, but maybe not to you. The second feels like exactly the sort of calamity that the comfortably middle class people the show has been aimed at are most likely to experience in the coming decades….
Renowned for his beloved and acclaimed children’s books, Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) was also an avid music and opera lover. In the late 1970s, he embarked on a successful second career as a designer of sets and costumes for the stage. Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet will be the first museum exhibition dedicated to this aspect of his career. It will include storyboards, preparatory sketches, costume studies, luminous watercolors, and meticulous dioramas from Mozart’s Magic Flute, Janá?ek’s Cunning Little Vixen, Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, and an opera based on Sendak’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are.
The exhibition will include nearly 150 objects drawn primarily from the artist’s bequest to the Morgan of over 900 drawings. Sendak borrowed gleefully from a personal pantheon of artists, some of whom he encountered firsthand at the Morgan. Several such works, by William Blake, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Domenico and Giambattista Tiepolo, will be displayed alongside his designs. Although less well known than his book illustrations, Sendak’s drawings for the stage embody his singular hand, fantastical mode of storytelling, keen—sometimes bawdy—sense of humor, and profound love of music and art history.
…The emotional dynamism of Delany’s sentences has been perhaps less acknowledged than his world-building, or the sweep of his vision. But when asked to speak about writing as a practice, Delany himself often turns to the art ofsentences, and of how to imbue words with such “ekphrastic force” that they summon the material presence of an imagined world. When Korga and Marq return to themselves they are awe-struck, struggling to narrate the intensity of their own transformative experience. It is impossible not to hear in that a metatextual echo of the obsession of Delany’s practice: that of creating the most immersive possible aesthetic experience for us, his readers and devoted enthusiasts….
…Not long ago I was reading a collection of essays by Hilaire Belloc titled One Thing and Another, and, as is sometimes the case when I read other people’s essays, I got the idea of writing this one. The “idea,” such as it was, had nothing to do with the subject matter of any of the forty essays contained in Belloc’s book; what struck me was that the pages smelled as if they had been soaked in gasoline. I remembered abruptly that it had smelled that way when I’d bought it, and although it has sat on the shelf in my study for twenty years, waiting to be read, the odor hasn’t diminished. It could be fatal to light a match anywhere near it.
This olfactory discovery sent me off in a nostalgic search for my copy of Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney, which Phil gave to me in 1975. My wife, Viki, and I took off on a road trip a few days later in our old Volkswagen Bug, and I brought the book along. It mysteriously disappeared early one rainy morning in central Canada, and I didn’t find it again until a year later, after the car’s battery died. The VW’s battery was under the back seat, and when I pulled out the seat to get at the battery, there was Dr. Bloodmoney, its cover partly eaten by battery acid. I was monumentally happy to find it. The book is inscribed to “Jim Blaylock, a hell of a neat dude,” the only existing written evidence of that allegation….
Built in 1907, the Mizpah Hotel in haunted Tonopah has many spirits supposedly roaming its halls, including Rose, a prostitute murdered by a jealous gambler. Guests report items that mysteriously move and an old elevator whose doors randomly open and close.
…Also, I’ve only ever seen one scene from the entire movie, when a hooded figure wielding a hook stabs a dude in the stomach and blood starts coming out of that man’s mouth. I have watched hundreds of horror films since, but stop me in the street and ask me: What’s the scariest movie you’ve ever seen? and I will unwaveringly answer “I Know What You Did Last Summer, because I was a seven-year-old wuss who had never seen a grown man run through with a sheep hook in a gas station lot before.”
What I’m saying is, “scary” is a silly metric by which to measure a horror movie’s quality, especially if it’s the only one you use. Not to get all “I own a thesaurus” on you, but there are distinct differences between something that’s scary, spooky, threatening, shocking, dreadful, et cetera. The new big horror release, Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark, for example, writes a check the movie needs to cash. It’s right there in the title…
(9) TODAY’S DAY. [Item by Hampus Eckerman.] Moomin Day today:
But not everyone is happy. Here are demonstrators from
last weeks manifestation against the placement of a new Moomin theme park in
the Swedish city of Karlstad. Anti-Moonin feelings are running high. The
picture says it all: “Flera
hinder för Mumin”
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY.
August 9, 1930 — Betty Boop debuted in the animated film Dizzy Dishes.
August 9, 1989 — James Cameron’s The Abyss premiered on this day.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born August 9, 1899 — P.L. Travers. Yes, she’s genre. A flying nanny is certainly fantasy. Did you know there are total of eight books? I’m sure I’ve seen the film but it’s been so long that I remember ‘nought about it. Anyone here seen the new film? (Died 1996.)
Born August 9, 1920 — Jack Speer. He is without doubt was one of the founders of fandom and perhaps the first true fan historian having Up to Now: A History of Science Fiction Fandom covering up to 1939 as well as the first Fancyclopedia in 1944. Fannish song-writing (before the term “filk” was coined) and costume parties are also widely credited to him as well. Mike has a proper remembrance here. (Died 2008.)
Born August 9, 1927 — Daniel Keyes. Flowers for Algernon was a novel that I read in my teens. Two of the teachers decided that SF was to be the assigned texts for that school year and that was one of them. I don’t now remember if I liked it or not (A Clockwork Orange was another text they assigned and that I remember) nor have I ever seen Charly. I see he has three other genre novels, none that I’ve heard of. (Died 2014.)
Born August 9, 1944 — Sam Elliott, 75. Weirdly the source for this Birthday thought he’d only been in one genre role, General Thaddeus E. “Thunderbolt” Ross in the 2003 Hulk film, but he’s got many other roles as well. His first was Duke in Westworld followed by being Luke Peck in Time Bandits, Flik Whistler in The Thing and Lock in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. He’s the Phantom Rider in Ghost Rider and Lee Scoresby in The Golden Compass. His latest genre is as the lead in The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot as The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot.
Born August 9, 1947 — John Varley, 72. One of those authors that I’ve been meaning to read more of. I read both The Ophiuchi Hotline and Titan, the first novels respectively in his Eight Worlds and the Gaea Trilogy series, but didn’t go further. (See books, too many to read.) If you’ve read beyond the first novels, how are they as series? Worth pursuing now?
Born August 9, 1949 — Jonathan Kellerman, 70. Author of two novels in the Jacob Lev series (co-authored with Jesse Kellerman), The Golem of Hollywood and The Golem of Paris. I’ve read the first — it was quite excellent with superb characters and an original premise. Not for the squeamish mind you.
Born August 9, 1968 — Gillian Anderson, 51. The ever-skeptical, well most of the time, Special Agent Dana Scully on X-Files. Currently playing Media on American Gods. And she played Kate Flynn in Robot Overlords. Did you know she’s co-authored a X-File-ish trilogy, The EarthEnd Saga, with Jeff Rovin?
Without two Cleveland kids from Glenville High School, Superman never would’ve taken flight.
Those two kids, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, fought for decades to get the recognition they deserved for creating the Man of Steel, which became a huge moneymaker for DC Comics- but not for them.
Now their story of financial hardship is the subject of a graphic novel, told specifically from the point of view of the artist in “The Joe Shuster Story” by writer Julian Voloj and illustrator Thomas Campi….
…In Queen of Crows, author Myke Cole explores the burning question: Now what? A blow for freedom has been struck, yes, but the Sacred Throne, and in particular, the Inquisition-like Order is not going to take this lying down. Heloise may well be a saintly figure, possibly even a holy Palatinate, but her actions are not an unalloyed good. The Empire will, indeed, Strike Back, and it is only a question of time before overwhelming force is brought to bear on Heloise and the people she has sworn to protect. This leads to Heloise and her people going on the road, meeting others who have not done well under the Empire’s tyranny, and asking hard questions about oppression, revolt, tyranny, resistance, prejudice, and at the same time providing solid medieval fantastic action….
(14) SILENCE OF THE TWEETS. Jon Del Arroz is in Twitter jail again.
(15) AT GEN CON. Brian’s “Pop Up Gen Con!” report for Nerds of a
Feather begins with an intriguing summary of “We’re
Doomed,
a game where the world is ending and the governments of the world (each
government is a player) need to jointly construct a rocket ship.”
(16) CHOW QUEST. In “Military
Logistics for Fantasy Writers” at the SFWA Blog, Mollie M.
Madden, holder of a Ph.D. in medieval history, challenges authors to explain how
the big armies of their imaginations avoid starving to death.
We all know ‘an army marches on its stomach,’ but it’s not like Napoleon discovered something new. Vegetius (De re militari) and Sun Tzu (The Art of War) were well aware of this concept, as was Alexander the Great (Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, 1980). And it wasn’t news to them, either. Pre-modern military commanders knew this; they planned for this. They paid attention to logistics.
A U.S. court has ruled that Facebook users in Illinois can sue the company over face recognition technology, meaning a class action can move forward.
The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals issued its ruling on Thursday. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, it’s the first decision by a U.S. appellate court to directly address privacy concerns posed by facial recognition technology.
“This decision is a strong recognition of the dangers of unfettered use of face surveillance technology,” Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said in a statement. “The capability to instantaneously identify and track people based on their faces raises chilling potential for privacy violations at an unprecedented scale.”
Facebook told NPR that the company plans to ask the full circuit court to review the decision of the three-judge panel. “We have always disclosed our use of face recognition technology and that people can turn it on or off at any time,” said Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman. Information about its facial recognition technology is available in the company policy online.
The case concerns Facebook users in Illinois who accused the social media giant of violating the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act.
Facebook argued that the users had experienced no concrete harm. But the 9th Circuit panel noted that intangible injuries can still be concrete, and it noted the Supreme Court has said advances in technology can lead to more personal privacy intrusions.
The appeals panel decided that Facebook’s technology “invades an individual’s private affairs and concrete interests.”
Amazon has pledged to investigate allegations that hundreds of teenagers are working illegal hours at a Chinese factory producing its Echo devices.
A new report by China Labor Watch claims more than 1,500 “interns” were manufacturing the smart assistants at a factory run by supplier Foxconn.
The teenagers, aged between 16 and 18, were reportedly pressured into work 60 hours a week and night shifts.
Foxconn has blamed local managers and vowed to improve monitoring of staff.
The company, which makes products for a number of technology giants, has allegedly fired two senior staff members at the site in Hengyang, Bloomberg reports.
It is the latest in a string of controversies surrounding working conditions at the manufacturer, which is headquartered in Taiwan.
…On one level, this constant release of tension from individual incidents is quite nice – no need to worry about Chekov’s gun on the mantlepiece, in this universe it’s going to stay right where it is. However, it also means that the link between individual incidents and the emotional arc of the novella – as the characters grapple with their place in the universe, without a link to Earth calling them back – is either subtle or non-existent, depending on how generous one feels….
A £5m footbridge to a dramatic, wind-battered headland that is at the heart of Arthurian legend will this weekend finally open to the public.
The bridge, one of the most ambitious, complicated and at times controversial heritage projects seen in the UK in recent years, will, says English Heritage, restore the lost crossing of Tintagel Castle in north Cornwall.
Sugary cereal, toys inside the box, Disney characters—does it get any more nostalgic than this? FunkO has announced the latest additions to its cereal portfolio, and my inner child is pumped.
Disney fanatics will want to get their hands on the Ursula (from The Little Mermaid) cereal, a purple version of the FunkO multigrain O’s. Tim Burton devotees and former mall goths will obviously need to try the Oogie Boogie—of The Nightmare Before Christmas fame—version, a green take on the breakfast treat. Insider reports that both cereals will come with Pocket Pop! versions of the characters’ figurines. Considering that FunkO’s Pop! figures are established as cool collectibles, these cute minis are a pretty great prize to get in your cereal box.
[Thanks to Hampus Eckerman, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge,
Chip Hitchcock, Top Elf, PhilRM, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Michael J.
Walsh, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title
credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
NASFiC 2020: Ben Yalow, Spikecon Site Selection Area Head,
reported the results of the 2020 NASFiC site selection voting held at the joint
NASFiC/Westercon.
The information was shared as a courtesy at the Westercon business meeting on July 6, there being no WSFS business meeting at a NASFiC. The complete Westercon 72 Business Meeting minutes are posted here.
Columbus ran unopposed. Yalow said 100 votes were cast.
Candidate
Mail
Thu
Fri
Total
Columbus,
OH
7
46
34
87
Grantville, WV
1
1
2
Tonopah, NV
2
2
OVFF
1
1
Arcosanti
1
1
Minneapolis in ‘73
1
1
Peggy Rae’s House
1
1
None of the Above
1
1
Total With Preference
10
49
37
96
No preference
1
1
2
Invalid
2
2
Total votes cast
100
With 87 votes, Yalow
declared that Columbus had won the 2020 NASFiC.
2021
Westercon Site Selection: Ben Yalow also
presented the results of the Site Selection for Westercon 74. With 140 votes
cast, 68 votes were required to declare a winner.
Candidate
Mail
Thu
Fri
Total
Phoenix, AZ
3
11
37
51
Tonopah,
NV
9
32
41
82
Both
1
1
None of the Above
0
Total With Preference
134
Needed to Elect (Majority)
68
No preference
6
6
Total votes cast
140
With 82 votes, Tonopah was
declared the winner of the 2021 Westercon.
A video of the Westercon business meeting is available:
Kevin Standlee posted the
unofficial 2021 Westercon Site Selection vote count, showing the Tonopah
bid strongly outpolled Phoenix for the right to host Westercon 74. The results
were to become official once accepted by today’s Westercon business meeting at
Spikecon.
The unofficial pending results were Tonopah 82, Phoenix 51, Write-ins 1. That’s 134 votes with preference, so 67 votes (a majority) were needed to win. In addition, there were 6 No Preference (abstention) votes that do not count toward the total for the purpose of determining a majority.
The Tonopah bid leadership team is Kevin Standlee, Lisa Hayes, and Kuma Bear. The guests of honor have not yet been posted online (if, indeed, they have been announced). The bid website is here.
By John Hertz: (reprinted from No
Direction Home 12) Indeed there
was rejoicing on Friday 10 May at Promontory, Utah.
That’s
40 miles from Layton, site of this year’s combined Westercon LXII [West
Coast Science Fantasy Conference – oh, all right, it’s been in Colorado and
Texas, and Alberta] and 13th NASFiC [North America Science Fiction Convention,
held when the Worldcon is overseas] (also, for good measure, combined with the
1632 Minicon – Eric Flint’s 1632
shared-universe stories – and the Manticon – David Weber’s Honor Harrington
stories with their Royal Manticoran Navy), to be held 4-7 July.
A hundred fifty years ago at Promontory, on May 10, 1869, the final spike
was driven into the final rail-tie completing six and a half years’ work to
create the Transcontinental Railroad.
Travel – of passengers or freight – from New York to San Francisco was
shortened, not in space but in time, from six months to ten days.
So our convention will be Spikecon.
We s-f fans are to some extent students of technology. Here was some.
Thousands attended the 150th-anniversary celebration, from 49 of the 50 States and from Canada, China, Germany, Japan, Switzerland.
The Central Pacific railroad had built from the west, the Union Pacific
from the east. In a famous photograph –
more technology – the Central’s steam engine No. 60 and the Union’s No. 119
met, cowcatcher to cowcatcher, two 60-ton machines great in their day, the
Union’s burning coal, the Central’s burning wood. They were represented on this anniversary by
restorations.
Who
first sang “Who built the Ark?” I’ve
traced it to 1892 and it was well known then (The Dental Register v. 46, p. 603).
Thousands of Chinese helped build the Transcontinental in the west,
thousands of Irish in the east.
Daniel
Mulhall, ambassador from the Republic of Ireland, was present for this 150th,
and raised a toast. The ambassador from
the People’s Republic of China, whose name in courtesy to him I had better
spell Cui Tiankai and not Ts‘ui T‘ian-k‘ai, said in a recorded message the
Transcontinental was a “telling example of how the Chinese and American people
can come together to get things done and make the impossible possible.”
Elaine
Chao, United States Secretary of Transportation and the first Chinese-American
of Cabinet rank, said “The Central Pacific needed industrious, tireless
workers, and Chinese answered the call with great skill and dedication.” A multiracial theater troupe performed a
musical retelling in the wrong kind of Chinese peasant hats. Lance Fritz, head of the Union Pacific, which
now hauls far more freight than passengers, said the railroad laborers, in
12-hour days and sometimes brutal conditions, changed America forever.
Herman
Wouk (rhymes with “oak”; May 27, 1915 – May 17, 2019) died ten days short of
his 104th birthday. He became famous
several times.
His
first novel Aurora Dawn (1947) was a
Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His
third, The “Caine” Mutiny (1951), won
the Pulitzer Prize, was adapted into a Broadway play The “Caine” Mutiny Court-Martial (1953) and a motion picture with
Humphrey Bogart (E. Dmytryk dir. 1954).
His
next, Marjorie Morningstar (1955),
put him on the cover of Time magazine
and was made into a movie with Gene Kelly (I. Rapp dir. 1958). His sixth, Youngblood Hawke (1962), which he denied basing on Thomas Wolfe
(1900-1938), was serialized in McCall’s
and made into a movie (D. Daves dir. 1964) with James Franciscus.
His
eighth and ninth, The Winds ofWar (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978), were made into television mini-series
(D. Curtis dir. 1983, Winds; 1988-89,
Remembrance) with Robert Mitchum.
A Hole in Texas (2004) is
science fiction; what if, years after U.S. President Clinton canceled the
Superconducting Supercollider, the Chinese announced finding the Higgs boson? In fact no one found it until 2012.
The inside jacket of Hole says Wouk “exercises his deep
insight and considerable comic powers to give us a witty and keen satire –
about Washington, the media, and science, and what happens when these three
forces of American culture clash.”
That’s true.
Like a good satirist he is
fundamentally concerned with human nature, our foibles and – Sarcasm is in anger, satire is with love
– our fortes. Like a good s-f writer he
illuminates by means of possible, fictional, science. He realizes, as Sturgeon said, that Science fiction is knowledge fiction.
Winds and
Remembrance together are 1,800 pages.
Hole is 280.
A word to the wise is sufficient. This
is problematic for satirists. What if
people in the audience – including, perhaps, the satirized – aren’t very wise?
Lafferty made Thomas More (1478-1538)
the eponym of his marvelous Past Master
(1968). Poor Sir Thomas, if one may use
that expression, pulled five hundred years into the future, keeps crying “Utopia [1516] is a satire!”
We haven’t yet reached the setting of Past Master – and I certainly hope we
shan’t – but fifty years after Past
Master was published we still don’t see that about Utopia.
You may jib at Hole’s explanation, chapter 5, thinking “It would have been better
if Wouk had read more s-f.” You may
dislike, as the book goes on, what seems to be increasingly fundamental
masculine sexism.
Should those befall, you will be lucky
if you remember the superb management of what characters and readers must know
in Marjorie Morningstar, and the
devastating treatment of masculine and feminine romantic sex fantasies there
and in Youngblood Hawke.
Maybe you won’t. Maybe you won’t have read them. In that case, and if nothing else helps you
first, wait till the end of Hole,
when the bubble bursts, the man is crashingly shown not so smart, and – satire is with love – everything
nevertheless comes right.
Marjorie Morningstar may be Wouk’s best. It may be great. I have yet to meet anyone who was awake to it – what’s the author’s name?? – but time may tell.
The
National Book Foundation making it a finalist said Marjorie was “released from
the social constraints of her traditional Jewish family, and thrown into the
glorious, colorful world of theater….
[a] paean to youthful love and the bittersweet sorrow of a first
heartbreak.” O Sir Thomas!