24 I See Files Of Blue, Red Pixels Too, I See Them Purr For Me And You

Posted on December 3, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(0) FILE 770 TURNS ON ‘LIKE’ FUNCTION. Starting today you can now tag posts and comments with a “like”.

(1) SUPER SPOILER ALERT! Superman and Lois ends with a climactic fight, and a highly sentimental flashforward to the beginning of Superman’s supernatural life. I found both clips pretty impressive, so just imagine their impact on those who watched the series faithfully.

Superman & Lois: The Final Fight between Superman and Lex Luthor – Series Finale

Superman & Lois 4×10 Epilogue “Life Goes By So Fast” Scene (HD) Series Finale

(2) FROM BC TO AD TO DC. “The CW’s DC Era Ends With ‘Superman & Lois’ Finale: Numbers Behind the Enduring Franchise” from The Hollywood Reporter.

The series finale of Superman & Lois aired Monday night on The CW. It marked not just the end of the show’s four-season run, but also an entire programming philosophy at the network.

Superman & Lois was the last series based on DC Comics characters to air at the network. It was also the last connection to The CW’s Arrowverse (even if it wasn’t technically part of the main continuity of that franchise), which defined the 2010s for the network and became one of the more successful multi-show franchises in TV history.

The ending of Superman & Lois, which — spoiler alert — flashes forward several decades to show the end of its title characters’ (Tyler Hoechlin and Elizabeth Tulloch) lives, precludes any continuation of the show elsewhere — as do new regimes at both The CW and DC parent Warner Bros. Discovery, which both have very different approaches than they did during the Arrowverse’s heyday in the mid- and late 2010s….

… 10: The number of series based on DC characters that aired on The CW, beginning with Arrow in October 2012. All of them came from Warner Bros. TV and what was then called DC Entertainment, and nine — Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, Black Lightning, Batwoman, Stargirl, Superman & Lois and Gotham Knights — were executive produced by Berlanti via his Berlanti Productions. The 10th is 2022’s Naomi, co-created by Ava DuVernay and Jill Blankenship and produced by DuVernay’s ARRAY Filmworks along with DC and WB….

… 817, 797: The combined episode total from all 10 shows, and those that ran on The CW; Supergirl‘s first season, which spanned 20 episodes, aired on CBS. The 817 episodes are more than all but three multi-show franchise since 1990 — only Law & Order (1,363 episodes as of publication time), JAG/NCIS (1,249) and CSI (838) have more. NBC’s Chicago franchise will need to air 131 more episodes — about six 22-episode seasons’ worth of shows — to pass the DC total….

(3) DIVERSE READING AID. Rocket Stack Rank reminds us of “Outstanding SF/F by People of Color 2023”. See the list at the link.

62 outstanding SF/F short stories by People of Color from 2023 that were finalists for major SF/F awards, included in “year’s best” SF/F anthologies, or recommended by prolific reviewers. (40 free online, 18 with podcasts)….

… Readers asked us to make it easy for them to find good stories written by authors with diverse racial backgrounds, and that’s what this list is meant to accomplish (author identity plays no role in our ratings)….

(4) MORPHIN’ INTO CASH. By the time Heritage Auction’s November 18-19 Power Rangers Hasbro Hollywood & Entertainment Signature^® Auction wrapped it had realized $3.3 million dollars in sales.

Every costume, monster, prop, weapon and warrior offered in the landmark event — nearly 700 lots! — found a new home.

As a result, the auction realized $3,310,929, with countless surprises and smash hits throughout the largest and most comprehensive collection of Power Rangers memorabilia ever assembled, spanning the classic Power Rangers Mighty Morphin to the most recent season, Power Rangers Cosmic Fury, which premiered last year.

From the latter series came the auction’s top lot: the original hero Cosmic Fury Cannon, the team’s signature weapon that combines all five of the Cosmic Fury Rangers’ individual dino-themed powers into an 80-inch-long laser blaster. After a prolonged bidding war during the auction’s second day, the Cosmic Fury Cannon shot up to its final price of $87,500.

Another smash hit was one of this auction’s numerous centerpieces: the Transformable Astro Megaship/Astro Megazord hero filming miniature from 1998’s Power Rangers in Space, one of the only complete Zords in this auction used on screen as the Rangers’ spacecraft and battle Zord. It’s fully articulated, an armed warrior and battle carrier that still moves like a well-oiled machine — and is so complete it still has the fishing line used to open its chest. It opened live bidding at $19,000 and finally realized $47,500 after a lengthy bidding war.

Weapons wielded significant power during this event, with the Green Ranger Hero Dragon Dagger from last year’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always realizing $23,750. And six Cosmic Morpher Hero Props from Power Rangers Cosmic Fury blasted their way to a $17,500 finish.

Numerous costumes worn throughout the series’ 31-year run realized five figures, among them the Green Ranger hero costume worn by Jason David Frank, as Tommy Oliver, during the initial run of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in the mid-1990s. It realized $30,000, while his complete White Ranger hero costume from 1995’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie sold for $16,250. The auction’s second day began with a moment of silence in tribute to Frank….

A couple more favorites:

Fierce Fashions: Trini Kwan’s Yellow Ranger costume, Saber-Toothed Tiger Power Morpher included, roared to $23,750. Kimberly Hart’s Pink Ranger suit wasn’t far behind, landing $22,500.

Villains Rule: Even baddies got their moment in the spotlight, with Goldar Maximus strutting off for $21,250 and Master Zedd securing $18,750.

(5) TERMINALS OF ENDEARMENT. “Lovable Movie Robots Are Coming to Charm Your Children” writes Diego Hadis in the New York Times (great article, but behind a paywall).

One near certainty about raising a young child these days is that you and your offspring will be exposed to a lot of stories about robots. Another is that the robots working their charms most effectively on you will belong to a new kind of archetype: the sympathetic robot. Sitting in darkened theaters with my 5-year-old son, I have watched any number of these characters. They are openhearted and often dazzled by the wonders of everyday life — innocently astounded by, say, the freedom of playing in the surf, the bliss of dancing with a loved one or the thrill of just holding hands. They might be more winningly human than some of the humans you know….

… Take Roz, the main character of the animated film “The Wild Robot,” which came out in September. Like the Peter Brown book series on which it is based, the movie focuses on a robot protagonist that gains emotional complexity after she washes ashore on an island unpopulated by humans, learns to communicate with the animals she meets there and becomes the surrogate mother of an orphaned gosling. Roz changes and adapts; she goes from seeing her care for the gosling as a rote task to welcoming it as a real connection. She embraces the wildness of the animals around her and ceases to be the unfeeling machine that her programming intended. Instead, she becomes an unnatural champion for the natural world — one whose touching incomprehension of how to care for a newborn makes her charming….

…We’re now inarguably living in the future that science fiction once imagined. Artificial intelligences weaned on vast libraries of human endeavor are coming online, their boosters hyping their potential to either fulfill our greatest wishes or realize our deepest fears. It feels notable that we are raising our children on pointedly comforting stories about robots that, instead of relieving us of our jobs or edging us to the brink of Armageddon, offer to show us how to be more human. Granted, computers are an inescapable facet of our world now. As they grow up, our children will consume stories about humanlike robots as naturally as our ancestors delighted in tales about anthropomorphic animals. Still, these stories seem to be doing an inordinate amount of work to help children feel warm toward the technologies that increasingly dominate our lives….

…This is all in spite of the remarkably bleak near future portrayed in many of these children’s films. They tend to show us a world of ecological ruin devastated by climate change. “The Wild Robot” offers haunting images like the Golden Gate Bridge submerged in San Francisco Bay as a flock of geese passes overhead. The Earth in “Wall-E” has been reduced to a lifeless, postindustrial horrorscape reminiscent of the works of the photographer Edward Burtynsky; humans have fled it entirely. “Robot Dreams” evades this by being set in and around its 1980s New York, but even that film concerns itself greatly with the natural world. We see the robot experiencing the changing seasons on a wintry beach; the dog takes pity on a fish that he has caught and releases it. There is even a scene — echoing the surrogate parenting in “The Wild Robot” — in which the robot helps encourage a young bird to learn how to fly.

There is an echo here of the classic robot stories: Humanity’s hubris has once again led us to get in over our heads. But now we’re encouraged to take pleasure in watching a robot try to navigate what’s left, slowly figuring out that human values — love, connection, caretaking — are eternally important. The sympathetic robots are devised as much to comfort us parents as they are to make technology appealing to our kids. Despite the destabilized world that we’re leaving to our offspring, they reassure us, artificial intelligences could one day serve as our surrogates — and care for our children or, who knows, even love them for us when we’re gone.

(6) WRITERS NEED HELP. [Item by Steven French.] Worrying news: “Royal Literary Fund’s hardship grants for writers see applications increase by 400%” in the Guardian.

Applications for the Royal Literary Fund’s (RLF’s) hardship grants for professional writers increased by 400% between last year and this year, the charity has said.

There was a nearly fivefold increase in applications in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2023, RLF CEO Edward Kemp told the Guardian.

The RLF’s grant applications are open to writers who need short- or long-term financial support because they are, for example, facing an unexpected bill, reduced income, or are unable to write due to a “change in circumstances, sickness, disability, or age”, according to the RLF.

The grants are given as a donation towards the “removal of distress for the applicant”, rather than to help complete literary works. Writers must have published (via a traditional publisher, not self-published) at least two books in the UK or Ireland to be eligible for a grant.

The rise in applications comes after research published by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society in 2022 showed authors’ median earnings were just £7,000 a year, down from £12,330 in 2006.

(7) FUTURE WORLDS PRIZE JUDGES NAMED. TheFuture Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour has announced the judging panel for its 2025 prize. The prize aims to find new talent based in the UK writing in the SFF space and is funded by author Ben Aaronovitch and actor Adjoa Andoh. The judges are:

2023 winner Mahmud El Sayed
Shadow and Bone actor Amita Suman
Bestselling author Saara El Arifi
Literary agent Amandeep Singh
Author Rogba Payne.

The winner of Future Worlds Prize receives £4,500, and the runner-up receives £2,500. The remaining six shortlisted writers each receive £850. All eight writers also get mentoring from one of the prize’s publishing partners: Bloomsbury, Daphne Press, Gollancz, HarperVoyager, Hodderscape, Orbit, Penguin Michael Joseph, Simon & Schuster, Titan and Tor.

Future Worlds Prize closes for entries at 23:59 GMT on Sunday 26th January 2025.

(8) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Sarah Pinsker and Yume Kitasei on Wednesday, December 11 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

SARAH PINSKER

A starred Booklist review called Sarah Pinsker’s latest, Haunt Sweet Home, “Fun, eerie, [and] unexpectedly beautiful…” She is the Hugo and Nebula winning author of the novels A Song For A New Day and We Are Satellites, plus the collections Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea and Lost Places, both published by Small Beer Press, and over sixty pieces of short fiction. She’s currently the Kratz Writer in Residence at Goucher College, and lives in Baltimore with her wife and two weird dogs.

YUME KITASEI

Yume Kitasei is the author of The Deep Sky, The Stardust Grail, and Saltcrop (forthcoming in 2025). She is half Japanese and half American and grew up in a space between two cultures—the same space where her stories reside. She lives in Brooklyn with two cats, Boondoggle and Filibuster. Her stories have appeared in publications including New England Review, Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Baltimore Review. You can find more information about her at www.yumekitasei.com. She chirps occasionally @Yumewrites at Instagram, TikTok, and Blue Sky.

Meets at the KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).

(9) WALT BOYES AND JOY WARD JOIN MISTI MEDIA, LLC. Walt Boyes and Joy Ward, longtime chief editors for Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire Press, and Top of the World Publishing, are joining Misti Media as Editors-at-Large. They will be responsible for the startup of Misti Media’s new Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror imprint: Nazca Press. They will also be working with Misti Media’s other main imprints and alongside Sandra Murphy who oversees content for specialty imprint Sandra Murphy Presents. For the Misti Media story, see Misti Media, LLC.

“Nazca Press doesn’t have a website yet, as Misti Media is only a year old and growing its Internet presence,” says Walt Boyes, “but what we do have is close to 100 years of editing and publishing experience in both fiction, genre fiction, and non-fiction. And when you add this to the incredible 30 years of industry experience brought to Misti Media by CEO and Publisher Jay Hartman, we are the real deal.”

“We moved first to create world-class distribution for both ebooks and trade paperbacks,” Jay Hartman explains. “We have worldwide distribution in nearly every country, including bookstores and libraries, and we have begun publishing some fantastic authors. Now, with Walt and Joy’s experience and knowledge, we can start looking for more great authors to join our family.”

You can reach Walt at wboyes@mistimedia.com; Joy at jward@mistimedia.com; and Jay Hartman at jhartman@mistimedia.com.

(10) LARPING IN SOCAL. The Washington Post takes you “Inside Twin Mask, an elaborate fantasy world just miles from L.A.” (This gift article bypasses the paywall, but you still need a free WaPo account to read it.)

…The entire weekend — Friday night until Sunday morning — would be spent inside this elaborate fantasy realm with its many rules and intricate replicas.

Held at the site of the Koroneburg Renaissance Festival about an hour outside Los Angeles, the live-action role-playing (LARP) game Twin Mask stands out for its sheer size and lifespan. It’s far more elaborate than other games of its ilk, with anywhere from 400 to 600 players converging in character at events held every month and a half or so.

“You eat food in character, you walk to the bathroom in character,” says its creator, John Basset, who started Twin Mask 14 years ago. “It really feels like you’re in another world.”

Given its proximity to Hollywood, it attracts a fair number of players whose day jobs are in the film industry. And they revel in making a next-level spectacle.

… In the dark world of Adelrune, characters share a unifying aspect — they each have been resurrected from death. Whether they’re a knight, a healer or a merchant, allthe players, known collectively as “The Returned,” have detailed backstories….

… Twin Mask is run by a detailed system of unpaid volunteers and staff who take on everything from writing the story, to ensuring people (and mythical creatures) are hydrated and safe, to performing as non-player characters who help guide the storyline. Still, every player can influence the plot, which continues long after the weekend is over….

… A little over an hour into the game, no one is in charge and a criminal underworld is beginning to take hold. Much of the site is eerily quiet.

Not so at the tavern in the center of town where the single dusty road splits. The boisterous bar is filled with the chatter of players who never break character. Some are making deals while others are socializing. The crowd is soon silenced by the sound of a ringing bell. Players returning from death quietly shuffle in.…

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

December 3, 1958 — Terri Windling, 66.

I first encountered Terri Windling’s writing through reading The Wood Wife, a truly extraordinary fantasy that deserved the Mythopoeic Award it won. (The Hole in the Wall bar in it would be borrowed by Charles de Lint with her permission for a scene in his Medicine Road novel, an excellent novel.) I like the American edition with Susan Sedona Boulet’s art much better than I do the British edition with the Brian Froud art as I feel it catches the tone of the novel.

I would be very remiss not mention about her stellar work as the founding editor along with Ellen Datlow of what would be called The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror after the first volume which was simply The Year’s Best Fantasy, that being noted for those of you who would doubt correct me for not noting that. The series won three World Fantasy Awards and a Stoker as well.

They also edited the most splendid Snow White, Blood Red anthologies which were stories based on traditional folk tales. Lots of very good stuff there. Like the Mythic Fiction series is well worth reading and available at usual suspects and in digital form as well.

Oh, and I want to single out The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood which took on the difficult subject of child abuse. It garnered a much warranted Otherwise nomination.

Now let’s have a beer at the Dancing Ferret as I note her creation and editing (for the most part) of the Bordertown series. I haven’t read all of it, though I did read her first three anthologies several times and love the punks as you can see here on Life on the Border, but I’ve quite a bit of it and all of the three novels written in it, Emma Bull’s Finder: A Novel: of The Borderlands, is one of my comfort works, so she gets credit for that.

So now let’s move to an art credit for her. So have you seen the cover art for Another Way to Travel by Cats Laughing? I’ve the original pen and ink art that she did here.

Which brings me to the Old Oak Wood series which is penned by her and illustrated by Wendy Froud. Now Wikipedia and most of the reading world thinks that it consists of three lovely works — A Midsummer Night’s Faery Tale, The Winter Child and The Faeries of Spring Cottage.

But there’s a story that Terri wrote that never got published anywhere but on Green Man. It’s an Excerpt from The Old Oak Chronicles: Interviews with Famous Personages by Professor Arnel Rootmuster. It’s a charming story, so go ahead and read it.

Photo posted by Terri on Bluesky. Photographer unstated.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Heathcliff faces top competition.
Rubes visits Acme world.
Wizard of Id doesn’t have sunshine coming out of there.
Bizarro takes things literally.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal finds a destiny that isn’t dull.

(13) PREPARE TO BLEEP AND BLUR. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The House of Mouse said nay to one line of dialogue in Deadpool & Wolverine. Ryan Reynolds came up with a replacement that was just as raunchy, but didn’t reference Steamboat Willie’s willy. People says, “We Now Know the Super-Raunchy Mickey Mouse Joke Disney Asked Ryan Reynolds to Cut from Deadpool & Wolverine”.

…Director Shawn Levy previously said there was “only one line in the entire movie that we were asked to change,” telling Entertainment Weekly in August that he and star Ryan Reynolds made a “pact” to “go to our grave with that line.”

However, Marvel Studios has shared the film’s official screenplay online as part of a For Your Consideration campaign this awards season, and in the script, that original deleted line is revealed.

In the scene where Deadpool (Reynolds) asks if Magneto is also in the film, he’s told the character is dead. He then says, “F—! What, we can’t even afford one more X-Man? Disney is so cheap. I can barely breathe with all this Mickey Mouse c–k in my throat.”

The actual line in the final cut of the movie is: “F—, now Disney gets cheap? It’s like Pinocchio jammed his face in my ass and started lying like crazy.”

The scene features the surprise cameos made by Jennifer Garner as Elektra, Wesley Snipes as Blade and Channing Tatum as Gambit. The screenplay showcases the Stranger Things–inspired code names the writers used to keep the characters’ identities a secret. Gambit is “Gatsby,” Elektra is “Eleven” and Blade is “Billy,” plus, earlier, Chris Evans’ Johnny Storm is listed as “Jonathan Byers.”…

(14) SFF ON LEARNEDLEAGUE: PAOLO BACIGALUPI. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Season 103 of LearnedLeague feature this as the third question of the twelfth match day:

Emiko, the central character in Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2009 dystopian science fiction novel, is a genetically engineered humanoid designed for servitude known as what type of girl, as referenced in the book’s title?

Although this refers to a Hugo-winning novel, it’s sufficiently obscure that not all Filers might know it: the answer is “windup”; the novel is The Windup Girl.

11% of LearnedLeague players got this right (your reporter being one of them). The most common wrong answer actually had a higher rate than the right answer: 16% guessed “geisha” — not totally unreasonable if you have to guess something.

One interesting note is that the question originally gave the author’s name as “Paulo” and the answer as “wind up”, two words. I contacted the League commissioner and got it corrected. (I don’t know how many other people might also have done so.)

LearnedLeague competition allows you to control the points available on each question, within limits, and makes extensive history available to the players. My opponent did not avail himself of this resource! He gave me the maximum points for this one, when even a quick search would suggest that I’d know it.

Brick Barrientos sent along his own comment about the difficulty of this LL question:

“Emiko, the central character in Paulo Bacigalupi’s 2009 dystopian science fiction novel, is a genetically engineered humanoid designed for servitude known as what type of girl, as referenced in the book’s title?”

The answer, of course, is Windup. Only 11% got it right. I thought it was a very hard question for a general knowledge, non-specialist trivia quiz. In my mind, I tried to think of three more recent Hugo novel winners that maybe 30% of trivia enthusiasts could get. In other words, if you gave the author, said it was a Hugo novel winner, some elements of the plot, and a hint at the title, would a mainstream audience get it? I came up with The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, Redshirts by John Scalzi, and maybe Network Effect by Martha Wells.

Extend it to novellas, and you could add This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. If this becomes a Pixel Scroll item, what genre novels have had major mainstream exposure in the last 15 years?

(15) COULROPHOBIA CENTRAL. Those of you who made it to the Westercon in Tonopah have already driven past this landmark: “Creepy vibes drives booming business at Tonopah’s Clown Motel” in the LA Times (behind a paywall).

Business is so good at the Clown Motel, you might expect more of its painted faces to be smiling.

But as Vijay Mehar has learned in his years as owner of the creepiest motel in Tonopah, Nev., happy clowns are not what most of his customers want.

What they seem to want is fear, loathing, painted faces, circus vibes and hints of paranormal activity. Basically, Mehar said recently, “they want to be scared.”

So aiming to lure more people off Main Street (a.k.a. U.S. 95) to visit this 31-room motel in the dusty, stark middle of Nevada, Mehar is boosting his creepiness quotient.

By the end of 2025, he’s hoping to have completed a 900-square-foot addition, doubling the size of the motel’s busy, disquieting lobby-museum-gift shop area. Meanwhile, behind the motel, Mehar is planning a year-round haunted house, to be made of 11 shipping containers….

…“America’s Scariest Motel,” read the brochures by the register. “Let fear run down your spine.”

There are paintings, dolls and ceramic figures, each with its own expression — smiling, laughing, smirking, weeping or silently shrieking. And then there are the neighbors. The motel stands next to the Old Tonopah Cemetery, most of whose residents perished between 1900 and 1911, often in mining accidents…

…“If we had paid 60, or 70, or even 80 bucks, this place might have been worth it,” wrote one unamused motel customer on Trip Advisor recently.

“We had good fun, and even better we weren’t murdered,” wrote another….

(16) TRADING PLACES. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Over here in Brit Cit we have a shop chain called Games Workshop that sells tabletop games and models. It has been steadily growing and now may become one of the nation’s top 100 companies on the UK stock market…. “Alliance Witan and Games Workshop expected to join FTSE 100 this month” reports Shares Magazine.

(17) HEARING FROM PAUL DI FILIPPO. Mark Barsotti recently interviewed prolific sff author Paul Di Filippo and through the creative use of photos and book covers turned the recordings into a three-part video series.

PAUL Di FILIPPO INTERVIEW ~ SCIENCE FICTION’S MOST UNDERRATED WRITER? ~ Part 1

Part one of my interview with writer Paul Di Filippo, who in a better world would make the bestseller lists. Interview: November 11, 2024.

PAUL Di FILIPPO INTERVIEW ~ SCIENCE FICTION SUPER SCRIBE! ~ Part 2

Part two of my interview with writer Paul Di Filippo, who in a juster world would make a lot more money. Paul talks about his multiverse novel VANGIE’S GHOST. Interview 11, 2024.

PAUL Di FILIPPO ~ A PINT-SIZED VOLTAIRE?

Part 3 on my interview with science fiction writer Paul Di Filippo, who discusses his latest novel, Vangie’s Ghosts, “technopunk jazz scatting” and not being a miserabilist. Interview: 11-11-24.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Barsotti, Walt Boyes, Cathy Green, Brick Barrientos, 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 Jeff “What A Wonderful World” Smith.]

Pixel Scroll 10/10/24 I Ride An Old Anti-Gravity Paint, My Partner Favors Cavorite

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE. Korean author Han Kang wins 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature reports Publishers Weekly. (There are no genre elements present in the descriptions of Han Kang’s work in “What to read: Han Kang” at NobelPrize.org, or in the “Han Kang” Wikipedia article.)

Han Kang. Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach

…One of only 18 women to be awarded global literature’s highest honor, she is the first South Korean writer to win the prize and the first Asian laureate since 2012, when the Nobel was awarded to Chinese author Mo Yan.

“Han Kang’s visible empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives, is palpable, and reinforced by her metaphorically charged prose,” said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee at the Swedish Academy, the body that administers the prize. “In her oeuvre,” he added, quoting from the Committee’s citation, “Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”…

(2) FORMER FRAZETTA HOME IN FLORIDA UNHARMED BY STORM. Frank Frazetta’s daughter reassured fans that the Frazetta Art Gallery in Boca Raton, FL was undamaged by Hurricane Helene. (This is not the Frazetta Art Museum which is in Pennsylvania.)

The Frazetta Art Gallery still stands. *No the paintings aren’t in there* pic.twitter.com/hixrmZZJ3f
— Sara Frazetta (@SaraFrazetta) October 10, 2024

This paragraph distinguishes the Frazetta Art Gallery from the Museum:

…For Frazetta fans, it’s an essential destination, since it contains dozens of pieces of Frazetta artwork, paintings, newspaper strips, comic book pages, and a nice selection of personal artwork Frazetta executed as gifts for his wife, Ellie, and other family members. The personal work on display gives viewers a true feeling of intimacy, of being part of Frazetta’s inner circle, since most of them have never been reprinted….

(3) ELECTORIAL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A few years ago, because of the Sad Puppies Affair (which, contrary to popular belief, was not a Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode), there was much debate in fandom as to how we vote on the Hugo short-list. Now, better late than never, this week’s edition of Nature has an article on electoral systems, “Which Is The Fairest Electoral System?”

Scientists hope to explore whether some approaches are more likely to promote democratic resilience or to stave off corrosive partisanship. Such answers might inform policy, but differences in interpretation are inevitable when it comes to politics. “Democracy is a complex system,” says Lee Drutman, a political-science researcher at New America, a think tank in Washington DC. There can be multiple ways to parse the data, he says.

A Hugo-type system is briefly mentioned…

There are sub-variants in FPTP (first past the post) systems: ranked-choice voting, which is used, for instance, in Australia, ensures a majority winner. Voters rank all candidates or parties; the lowest-ranked candidate drops out and their supporters’ second-choice preferences are tallied, and so on until a single candidate surpasses a 50% threshold. And run-off elections, such as those in France, when the two leading parties are voted for in a second round, ensure a direct national face-off.

Interestingly the piece has two conclusions. One that ranked choice has benefits, but a contrary view 2) is that this pushes folk to limited options. Here the article calls for more political parties in the US rather than the two big ones. In Hugo terms this would translate as increasing the number in the short-lists.

(By the way, personally I have no preference: I just share out of interest and am not advocating anything.)

(4) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 120 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Activate Liz” —

We do rather fewer letters of comment than last episode, and then we let Liz do her favourite topic of all: STATISTICS.

Listen here: Octothorpe (Podbean.com). Read the unedited transcript of the episode here.

(5) ATWOOD PICKS A CARD. Margaret Atwood appeared on NPR to publicize her new collection called, Paper Boat: New And Selected Poems: 1961-2023. They played clips of her answers to questions on the Wild Card program. “Writer Margaret Atwood plays a game of ‘Wild Card’”.

MARTIN: When I asked the question [about envy], though, you asked for a definition – envy that you suffered or had to manage or other people’s envy of you?

ATWOOD: Yes.

MARTIN: Is that – does that happen a lot?

ATWOOD: It has, certainly. Yeah. So what I said to young writers who had had a sudden success, I said, within a couple of years, you will have three nasty, vicious personal attacks from people you don’t know.

MARTIN: What were the attacks that were leveled at you in your first couple years of success?

ATWOOD: (Laughter) Some of them were quite funny. So a lot of it had to do with hair – Medusa hair, frizzy hair, you know, name something about hair. Yes, and one of them wrote a satirical fairy tale in which I bit the heads off men and made them into a pile and turned into an octopus. Figure that out.

MARTIN: So you were a Medusa-haired man hater.

ATWOOD: Yeah. And power mad, ladder-climbing…

MARTIN: Oh, power mad?

ATWOOD: Yes. Power-mad, ladder-climbing witch.

MARTIN: Oh, wow. I mean, that’s evocative.

ATWOOD: I thought so too.

(6) REMEMBERING J.G. BALLARD. “Diary: Deborah Levy on J. G. Ballard” at Book Post.

J. G. Ballard, England’s greatest literary futurist, changed the coordinates of reality in British fiction and took his faithful readers on a wild intellectual ride. He never restored moral order to the proceedings in his fiction because he did not believe we really wanted it. Whatever it was that Ballard next imagined for us, however unfamiliar, we knew we were in safe hands because he understood “the need to construct a dramatically coherent narrative space.”

When it came to anything by Ballard, genre really did not matter to me; his fiction could have been filed under “Tales of Alien Abduction” or “Marsh Plants” and I would have hunted it down. Despite our difference in generation, gender, and literary purpose, it was clear to me that he and I were both working with some of the same aesthetic influences: film, surrealist art and poetry, Freud’s avant-garde theories of the unconscious….

…The reach of his imagination was never going to fit with the realist literary mainstream but I was always encouraged by his insistence that he was an imaginative writer.
“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.”

Good on you, Jim.

His highly imagined landscapes and abandoned aircraft and stopped clocks and desert sand were located in his head—and anyway he preferred driving fast cars to walking. He once sent me a photograph of the Heathrow Hilton and told me it was his spiritual home. …

(7) BUSTED. Was Chuck Tingle’s “true identity” revealed today? That’s what author C.J. Leede was hoping we’d think, til you-know-who caught them in the act.

WHO IS CHUCK? THE BIG REVEAL pic.twitter.com/Yz2Inhmx34
— Chuck Tingle (@ChuckTingle) October 10, 2024

(8) THOU SHALT NOT PASS. “The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes” — an excerpt from a 404 Media’s post.

A group of Wikipedia editors have formed WikiProject AI Cleanup, “a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.”

The group’s goal is to protect one of the world’s largest repositories of information from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued Google search results, books sold on Amazon, and academic journals.

“A few of us had noticed the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated, and we managed to replicate similar ‘styles’ using ChatGPT,” Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of WikiProject AI Cleanup, told me in an email. “Discovering some common AI catchphrases allowed us to quickly spot some of the most egregious examples of generated articles, which we quickly wanted to formalize into an organized project to compile our findings and techniques.”…

(9) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboys Books presents episode79 of the “Simultaneous Times” podcast with Pedro Iniguez, Lisa E Black, and Addison Smith.

“Sneeze” by Pedro Iniguez. (Music by Phog Masheeen. Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier)
“Of Course I Still Love You” by Lisa E Black. (Music by Phog Masheeen. Read by the author.)
“Residual Traces” by Addison Smith. (Music by Fall Precauxions. Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier.)
Theme music by Dain Luscombe.

Simultaneous Times is a monthly science fiction podcast produced by Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Anniversary: Barbarella film (1968)

Oh, Barbarella.

I didn’t quite get why it was so controversial when I first saw it, it was a bowdlerized version of the already bowdlerized version Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy. This was on a local channel in New York City in the 1980’s. I thought it was a funny but rather goofy looking SF movie, although of course Jane Fonda was something to look at.

(My father was upset at her being in the movie, something I did not understand for years until I understood her politics…and my own family’s politics, better)

I finally got to see the uncut and real version in the early 2000’s on DVD. And then I could finally see what I was missing. Did it add a lot to the actual movie besides the visuals? No, but what visuals! I slotted it in the same space as Woody Allen’s Sleeper, as a science fiction movie that talked about sex, and around sex, a lot. But going on the other visuals, the sets, costume design and props (including the infamous Excess Pleasure Machine) were just mind boggling in both of the versions I’ve seen. Too, the actual cinematography is mesmerizing, the camera knows where to linger, where to bring our attention in sometimes rather chaotic and baroque set pieces. I have not yet seen a 4k version of the film, but that is something I do very much need to see sometime, to see it at the maximum fidelity and clarity.

Is it great cinema? No. But it is great art.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Off the Mark displays yet another credential trap.
Carpe Diem shows a failed invasion.

(12) DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE COMICS REUNION. “Deadpool and Wolverine officially return in 2025, Marvel confirms” – GamingBible has the story.

…For those who miss the bromance between Marvel’s Deadpool and Wolverine, you’re in luck because the pair are officially returning in 2025.

Their antics won’t play out on the big screen but upon the pages of comics instead.

The Deadpool/Wolverine series comes from writer Benjamin Percy and artist Joshua Cassara. This partnership, much like Deadpool and Wolverine, is a match made in heaven.

Fans who enjoyed the bloody violence of the film needn’t worry that the comics will strip that action away…

(13) BEGINNING OF A FASCINATION. CrimeRead’s Jeremy Dauber outlines “A Brief History of the Rise of Horror in 19th Century America”.

At the Civil War’s end, under a quarter of Americans lived in cities; by the end of the Great War, the proportion was almost exactly half. All those people moving to the cities—both from rural America and from abroad— changed things. Size created anonymity, the possibility of losing yourself in the crowds, remaking yourself, if you so chose. . . . or getting lost, and not always by your choice. Increasingly, the streets were lit by electric light, and the machines inside them were powered the same way; but that simply swapped a new set of shadows and terrors for the old ones. The horrors of the next decades were, all too frequently, industrial and mass-produced: whether they came from the chatter of guns or the whirr of a film projector, they cast an eye on progress, and murmured about what lay beneath.

Start, perhaps, with that newly electrified white city, Chicago. In 1893, its World’s Columbian Exposition, or World’s Fair, was an announcement of America’s newly flexing muscles: its willingness to be broad-shouldered, to play a leadership role in world affairs, to stride into the future. And yet, inside the city limits, there sat a haunted castle. This castle, though, had no clanking chains, no Gothic ghost or Salem witch; it had a psychopath who used modern tools—the soundproofed room, the knockout gas-bearing pipes, and of course, the three-thousand-degrees-Fahrenheit kiln—to disable, kill, and dispose of guests who checked into his World’s Fair Hotel at 701 Sixty-third Street. And why did H. H. Holmes do it? For his part, when eventually caught, he had a simple, and chillingly modern, explanation: “I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.”…

(14) I DO SOLEMNLY SWEAR. SFFAudio reminds us that once upon a time Robert Bloch urged authors to swear to uphold “ROBERT BLOCH’S CREDO FOR FANTASY WRITERS”.

ROBERT BLOCH'S CREDO FOR FANTASY WRITERS

place your left hand on THE NECRONOMICON and swear to…

1. Never to write a story about a mad doctor, a mad scientist , or a mad professor.

2. Or even a sane one, if that can be avoided.

3. Or if it can't, never to give one of the… pic.twitter.com/2uyB5kkVqN
— SFFaudio (@SFFAudio) October 10, 2024

(15) JUSTWATCH MARKET SHARE REPORT. As the third quarter of 2024 comes to an end, JustWatch has released their latest data report on market shares in the US. As usual, they based our report on the 13 million JustWatch users in the US selecting their streaming services, clicking out to streaming offers and marking titles as seen.

SVOD market shares in Q3 2024
Global streaming giant: Prime Video managed to keep its first-place rank, with a 1% lead against Netflix. Meanwhile, Max is managing to stay ahead of major competitors Disney+ and Hulu.

Market share development in 2024
Disney+ and Hulu both gained momentum with a +1% subscriber boost by September. While Netflix and Max stumbled with a -1% decline each, revealing a shake-up in the streaming rivalry.

(16) IF YOU INSIST ON WATCHING. “Too Scared to Watch Horror Movies? These 5 Tips May Help” says the New York Times (paywalled).

The October ritual of watching horror movies in the lead-up to Halloween can be exhilarating. Unless, of course, you can’t quite stomach the gory and gruesome, or even the spooky and spine-tingling….

…If you’re someone who wants to indulge in the season but dreads jump scares and buckets of blood, here are five tips that could help even the biggest scaredy cats among us start to open up to the world of horror.

The first two tips are:

Embrace the Spoiler

The first and best line of defense is to read the plot in advance. If you’re feeling brave, go for just a synopsis, but there’s no reason to be a hero. I sometimes read an entire plot in great detail before watching, especially with films I know will tap into my weak spot: movies about demonic possession. Unlike with other genres, knowing what will happen in horror doesn’t necessarily detract from the experience of watching. Your heart will most likely still pound. You will probably still jump. And the visuals and sounds will probably still shock. Knowing what comes next may simply help keep the anxiety and uncertainty in check.

The Smaller, the Better

Nothing against the big-screen experience, but going small, by watching on your phone or a tablet, can go a long way. Not only will you have a sense of control that a crowded theater with speakers blaring hellish soundscapes can’t provide, you will also be able to make adjustments. If it gets too loud or chaotic, turn down the volume. If it gets too visually scary, turn down the brightness or flip the device down. Sometimes for the most intense scenes, it’s better to just hear the movie without seeing it, or to watch without sound….

(17) QUITE A TAIL. And for your viewing pleasure, The Copenhagen Post recommends “Reptilicus”.

Next time you’re looking for a Danish film to watch, spare a thought for Denmark’s only giant monster film ‘Reptilicus’ – a 1960s cult-classic with puppets, bad acting, bazookas, and a prehistoric reptilian beast rampaging through Amager…

… Reptilicus is the name for two monster films about a giant, prehistoric reptile which decides to attack Denmark.

Shot simultaneously, one film is in Danish (1961) and the other is from the USA in English (1962). Both films have a near identical cast (except for one actress) and two directors (Poul Bang – Danish, and Sidney Pink – English) who took turns throughout each shooting day to create two of the most iconic, kitsch and downright unintentional masterpieces to grace Danish screens.

The plot tells of a Danish miner in Lapland who accidentally digs up a section of a giant reptile’s tail from the frozen ground. The section is flown to the Denmark’s Aquarium in Copenhagen, where it is preserved in a temperature-controlled room for scientific study.

Of course they don’t put anyone competent in charge of monitoring it but instead choose a bumbling buffoon (the legendary Dirch Passer). The room is left open and the section begins to thaw and regenerate….

(18) FILLING UP WITH GAS. According to TechRadar, “Toyota’s portable hydrogen cartridges look like giant AA batteries – and could spell the end of lengthy EV charging”.

Toyota is showcasing a series of sustainable developments at the Japan Mobility Bizweek later this month – including its vision of a portable hydrogen cartridge future, which could apparently provide ‘swappable’ power for next-gen hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs).

Originally a project of Toyota’s mobility technology subsidiary Woven (formerly Woven Planet), the team produced a working prototype of a hydrogen cartridge back in 2022 but has since developed the idea further… and appears to be running with it.The latest cartridges are lighter and easier to transport, with Toyota claiming the current iteration has been developed with the experience the company has gained in reducing the size and weight of the hydrogen tanks used in its fuel cell electric vehicles….

…Put simply, the cartridges would allow fuel cell electric vehicle drivers to swap out their power source when hydrogen levels run low, rather than having to refuel at a station like you typically would with a fossil fuel-powered car.

But Toyota also feels that these refillable and renewable cartridges could be used in a multitude of situations, such as to generate electricity in a fuel cell to power the home or even providing hydrogen to burn for cooking.

In fact, Toyota and the Rinnai Corporation are exhibiting a stove at Japan Mobility Bizweek that does just that. Similarly, in emergency situations, the hydrogen cartridge could be removed from the car and used to power any applicable device in the case of a blackout, for example….

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Paul Weimer, Danny Sichel, Lise Andreasen, 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 Daniel “All Is Wells” Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 8/16/24 We Are The Pixel Makers And We Are The Scrollers Of Scrolls

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) THE FUTURE IS NOW. Seattle Worldcon 2025 is accepting applications to be on the program already, we learned via Hugo Book Club Blog. Full details here: “Panelists – Seattle Worldcon 2025”.

…All panelists and presenters at Seattle Worldcon 2025 must be members of the convention. Seattle Worldcon 2025 will review and choose panelists and presenters continuously starting in 2024 through early 2025. You can indicate an interest in appearing on program by filling out this form. After brief vetting, we will send interested individuals an invitation to appear on program with a thorough survey form….

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to join Jenny Rowe (and James Tiptree, Jr.) at the Glasgow Worldcon bar in Episode 233 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

I returned home from the Glasgow Worldcon less than 48 hours ago, and am still suffering from jet lag, but I’m not so groggy I can’t share with you what was my favorite item on the program there — Jenny Rowe’s one-woman show, Tiptree: No One Else’s Damn Secret But My Own. I loved her performance, and immediately reached out to see whether I could chat with her about channeling James Tiptree, Jr., and how she distilled the life of that brilliant writer into an hour-long arc. Luckily, we were able to connect in the Crown Plaza bar.

Rowe is an actor, improviser and writer who performs and teaches improv internationally. She wrote her solo show about James Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon in 2018, was nominated for Best Female Performer at Buxton Fringe ’24, and continues to tour with the production. Her other performances include Read Not Dead (Shakespeare’s Globe) Clean by Sam Chittenden (Best Play Award, Brighton Fringe 2019), Mary Rose by J.M.Barrie (National Tour), and Somewhere in England by Mark Burgess.

A member of Impromptu Shakespeare and Brighton Fringe Comedy Award-winners, The Maydays, since 2006, she has guested on the iO Chicago mainstage with Whirled News Tonight and headlined at improv festivals across Europe. She also writes weird, dark short stories which occasionally get published in weird dark places: one is upcoming in the Map of Lost Places anthology from Apex Books in 2025.

We discussed the serendipitous way she learned James Tiptree, Jr. existed, the differing reactions to her one-woman show from SF vs. non-SF audiences, how she managed to nail Tiptree’s accent (some of which you’ll get to hear), why she ultimately decided not to begin or end the show with a gunshot, how she settled on the structure of her script (and why she decided to leave herself out of the story), the way inhabiting Tiptree affected her feelings about the controversy, why she’d have loved to meet Tiptree but not necessarily want to be her friend, the purpose of the play’s moment of audience participation, and much more.

(3) WHAT OBAMA IS READING THIS SUMMER. There are a couple of genre books on “President Obama’s 2024 Summer Reading List, Reviewed” at Publishers Weekly.

James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, perhaps is only “genre” to the extent of being a literary experiment similar to Julia, the retelling of 1984. But Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time is nearer the genre bull’s-eye as it depends on time travel.

(4) COVID COUNT FROM GLASGOW 2024. Some people tested positive for Covid at the Worldcon, like business meeting secretary Alex Acks, and over a hundred have altogether, including author Pat Cadigan. Janet Ní Shúilleabháin picked up this number from a dedicated channel on the con’s Discord server. X.com thread starts here.

(5) HUH? A dumpster at New College of Florida, located in Sarasota, made the headlines: “Florida college throws away hundreds of books on gender and diversity” reports USA Today. But why is H.G. Wells in the pile?

…On Tuesday afternoon, a dumpster in the parking lot of the school’s Jane Bancroft Cook Library overflowed with books and collections from the now-defunct Gender and Diversity Center….

…Some of the discarded books included, “Nine and Counting: The Women of the Senate,” “The War of the Worlds” and “When I Knew,” a collection of stories from LGBTQ+ people recounting when they knew they were gay….

(6) BILLIONS AND BILLIONS. “Audiobooks are doing better than ever. Just ask Harper Collins” suggests NPR.

Audiobooks are doing better than ever. Just ask Harper Collins. According to a recent earnings call, the publisher revealed audiobook sales exceeded e-books for the first time last quarter. But don’t call it a boom. NPR’s Andrew Limbong has more….

LIMBONG: A couple of those other waves include the rise of podcasting, getting people listening to audio content, and COVID, says Michele Cobb, the executive director of the Audio Publishers Association.

MICHELE COBB: Because people were looking for something that was entertaining, educational and did not involve looking at a screen.

LIMBONG: According to Cobb, the industry enjoyed consistent growth for more than a decade, bringing in $2 billion in revenue in 2023. The Audio Publishers Association did a survey earlier this summer to find out who exactly was listening to all these audiobooks.

COBB: When I started in the industry in, really, 2000, it was older people listening to cassettes. That’s what it was. In today’s world, it is people under 45 who are the majority of listeners, and they are bringing their kids into the fold….

(7) RECOGNIZING TIMES TO COME. Steven Heller explains why he was excited by Octavia Butler’s sff in “Octavia E. Butler’s Convictions on Predictions” at PRINT Magazine.

…In just a few thousand words, Butler responds to a student’s query, “Do you really believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” The question was referring to Butler’s warnings about, among other real time crises, increasing drug addiction, illiteracy, global warming and untold seeds of doomsday scenarios. “I didn’t make up the problems,” she noted, “all I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”…

(8) BUCKAROO BANZAI. “40 Years Ago, One Wild Sci-Fi Movie Became a Surprising Cult Classic” – Inverse remembers!

…For all of its quirkiness and brazen genre-busting, the singular nature of 1984’s Buckaroo Banzai is its most enduring feature. It’s not perfect, but as a go-to cult favorite of many artists, writers, and fans, revisiting Buckaroo Banzai 40 years after its release reveals a fantastically unique sci-fi film.

Buckaroo Banzai represents a kind of alternate universe of ‘80s pop culture. If Back to the Future hadn’t happened a year later, and if star Peter Weller hadn’t gone on to play RoboCop in 1987, it’s conceivable that Buckaroo Banzai would be the ultimate symbol of ‘80s kitch sci-fi. You’ve got quirky mad scientists, rocket cars, ‘80s blazers, and a rock band, all traits associated with Marty McFly’s far more famous adventure.

The movie’s circuitous story centers on a world-famous scientist and rock star named Buckaroo Banzai (Weller), who travels around with a group of misfits called the Hong Kong Cavaliers. Within the first 20 minutes, we see Buckaroo take a rocket car through a mountain and into another dimension, perform a last-minute life-saving surgery, and lead his band in a set while growing concerned about a suicidal woman in the audience, who seems to be the twin of his long-lost lover….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born August 16, 1934 – Diana Wynne Jones. (Died 2011.) Shall we look at the fiction of Diana Wynne Jones? Now I’m picking just my favorites here.

So what do you pick off the shelf first for reading by her? For me that’s Deep Secret, where the protagonist is Rupert Venables, overseer of the Multiverse, and who’s going to PhantasmaCon. Absolutely fun it is. And the sequel, The Merlin Conspiracy, is just as pleasing.

If there’s essential reading for her by in terms of just plain being intrigued by the idea underlying the book, it’d be The Tough Guide to Fantasyland which is a playful look at the genre. A really playful look.

Fire and Hemlock for her artful merging of the Scottish ballads Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer is amazing. Then there’s the setting here, a small private college. We’ve such a college not far away and her depiction feels spot on to that

I like Howl’s Castle, the best of the three novels in that series, and adore the animated film made off of it.

Diana Wynne Jones. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter

Let’s not overlook the exemplary short story collection she did of Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories with the great cover by Dan Craig. Yes, I bought it without opening the book solely because of it. Well and that it was by her.

My final pick, and yes, I’m fully aware how much I’m overlooking in just giving my personal choices, is Archer’s Goon, a boy who finds out something about himself quite unexpected. a family with secrets. A creature who won’t leave their house. What’s not to be intrigued by?

I’m very much looking forward to hearing your choices now.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Eek! didn’t get the results the mad scientist was expecting.
Free Range witnesses a claim to fame.
Mannequin on the Moon wasn’t in danger after all.

(11) DOWN MEMORY LOIS LANE. Teri Hatcher answers a question about that ‘iconic’ shot, in the Guardian: “Teri Hatcher: ‘Would I beat you at pool? It depends on how much we are drinking’”.

What are your memories of the time the picture of you naked wrapped in a Superman cape was reportedly the most downloaded image on the internet? VerulamiumParkRanger

I broke the internet when we still had dial-up. I don’t credit myself with being so fabulous. I do remember the photoshoot, which was to promote the TV show. It took all day. I was wearing a white blouse and pencil skirt because Lois is a reporter from the Daily Planet, with the cape wrapped over. It wasn’t until the last take of the day that someone said: “Could we try the cape without the blouse?” I thought: “What does that imply? Why would Lois Lane be naked under the cape?” We only did it as a lark, but the result was evocative. Now I’m so much older, I still feel proud of it.

(12) FANHISTORIC DINING. Clifton’s Cafeteria, where LASFS once met in the Thirties, will celebrate its latest reopening this weekend says LAist. “Wanna sneak preview of Clifton’s reopening? You can this weekend (if you’re lucky)”.

The famed Clifton’s location (now Clifton’s Republic) is slated to reopen gradually over the next month, starting with a sneak peek of the famed tiki bar, aka Pacific Seas bar, this weekend.

How to get in: To score one of the very limited reservations, you’ll need to sign up for the mailing list via their website. If you’re too late, note that reservations for next weekend, Aug. 23 and 24, will be opening next week. You’ll get alerted via email when they’re live to book. First come, first served.

Backstory: Clifton’s opened in 1938 as a cafeteria space during the Depression on a bustling block on Broadway, offering an escapist adventure. Now rebranded as Clifton’s Republic, the six-story location is owned by Andrew Meieran, who hopes to restore it to its “fantastical wonderland” feeling of yesteryear.

(13) YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS ANYONE’S. “Amazon announces weird-ass cartoon anthology series set inside existing video games” at AV Club.

The video game adaptation renaissance has been going along steadily for long enough at this point that not even a flop like Borderlands—which both feels, and literally is, the product of a world from before the release of either crowd-pleasers like The Super Mario Bros. Movie,or critical darlings like The Last Of Us—is likely to slow it down. Which means that efforts to adapt video games to TV or film now have enough of a runway to get a little strange. Case in point: The reveal today that Prime Video is working with Deadpool director and Love, Death & Robots creator Tim Miller on an animated anthology series titled Secret Level, not based on a single game, but set in the worlds of multiple popular titles.

This is, to put none too fine a point on it, weird. Game companies tend to be aggressively protective of their intellectual property, especially in this day and age—to the point that Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann is an incredibly active force in the creation of the Last Of Us show, overseeing its various tinkerings with oh-so-precious canon. The idea of handing off the brand to outsiders to craft a story set inside your video game universe, which will then sit alongside other games in a larger anthology title, just sounds incredibly strange to our ears. It doesn’t help that the titles reportedly being targeted are decidedly eclectic: Sony’s library of PlayStation titles makes a certain sense, as well as Amazon’s own New World online title. But Deadline also reports that Derek Yu’s Spelunky, a self-published, self-owned indie title, is supposedly in the mix. (It’s also easily the one of these we’re most interested in seeing, since Spelunky‘s beautifully cartoonish style is a great potential fit for an animated short.)…

(14) THE AXE HAS FALLEN. The Hollywood Reporter has learned “’My Lady Jane’ Canceled at Amazon After One Season”.

Like the real Jane Grey, the reign of My Lady Jane turned out to be a short one.

Amazon’s Prime Video has canceled the period drama, which combined romance and alternate-world fantasy. The cancellation comes about seven weeks after Prime Video released all eight episodes of the show’s first (and now only) season.

My Lady Jane, based on a novel by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton and Jodi Meadows, is set in a 16th century England where humans co-exist with shape-shifters who can take the form of either people or animals. Jane Grey (Emily Bader) is an ordinary human, known as a Verity, who becomes sympathetic to the oppressed shape-shifters, known as Ethians — which will become a problem for the ruling class as Jane rises to power….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the “Deadpool & Wolverine Pitch Meeting”

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Scott Edelman, 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 Andrew (Not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 8/5/24 In A New York Nanite

Posted on August 5, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) KEN MACLEOD Q&A. The latest Clark Award newsletter, “Carbon-Based Bipeds: Aug 5th”, includes an interview with Worldcon Guest of Honour Ken MacLeod discussing the publication of his first short story collection in 18 years, A Jura for Julia published by NewCon Press, which will be launched at the Con.

…HAL: My memory circuits recall my first Worldcon as a glorious blur. Do you have any recommendations for first time attendees to make the most of their experience at an SF con?

KEN: A glorious blur is a good way to remember a Worldcon! If a Worldcon is your first SF convention, it’s a blast! To make the most of it, look at the programme beforehand and pick what items you’d like to go to. If you don’t know anyone who is going, a quick way to meet new people is to volunteer. Cons always need volunteers, for however long or short a time you have to offer. Don’t be shy. Use the party or conference conversation trick: one person might want to be alone, two might be having a personal conversation, three or more talking and you can wander up and wait for someone to speak to you (or wander off if no one does). It works! …

(2) FOUND IN TRANSLATION. Martin Wisse’s question isn’t really petty at all: “What gets translated and what doesn’t — Martin’s increasingly petty rules about translation” at Wis[s]e Words.

Why does senpai gets to be used untranslated, but kouhai gets translated to junior? You could make the case that it’s just that much less known than senpai that it still needs to, but for a series like this I’d expect the audience to already know it. This isn’t Pokemon after all, but a very dialogue heavy mystery show, one that’s not shy about using proper honorifics or the correct, Japanese name order either. A strange choice either way when you’d normally expect both terms to be translated or kept intact as a pair.

It raises the question of what you translate and what not, what the expectations are for things that English doesn’t really have an equivalent for, like the whole idea of senpai/kouhai, or the use of honorifics to refer to people. I was reminded of what writer/translator Zack Davisson said on the subject of food names two years ago:

“One of my Translation Rules: Thou Shall not Translate Food Names. Food names, as a general language rule in the modern era, are kept in their native language. We collectively learned to say pho. We learned to say pasta primavera. We can say onigiri. Time to retire ‘rice balls.’”

(3) PLAYING MONOPOLY. “Google loses major antitrust case over search monopoly” – the LA Times has the story.

In a major blow to Google, a federal judge on Monday ruled that the tech giant violated antitrust laws by illegally maintaining a monopoly on web searches.

The much-anticipated decision marks a significant victory for federal regulators trying to rein in the power of Big Tech and could send shock waves through the tech world. Other firms, including Apple, Meta and Amazon, also face federal antitrust lawsuits.

“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his opinion.

The ruling did not include a remedy for Google’s conduct.

Kent Walker, president of Google Global Affairs, said in a statement that the company plans to appeal.

“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” he said. “As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”

Regulators alleged that Google maintained a monopoly on web searches by reaching agreements with browser developers, phone manufacturers and wireless carriers to pre-load their products with the Google search engine as the default….

(4) MAKING A HOUSE A HOME FOR DRAGONS. The New York Times learns “How ‘House of the Dragon’ Turns Fiery Fantasy Into TV Reality”. Link bypasses NYT paywall.

For Ryan Condal, the co-creator and showrunner of HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” the creatures are key to the show’s magic, literally and figuratively.

“They are the one fantasy element that we’ve allowed ourselves,” he said. “In our world, in this period, the magic is these dragons.”

But they are also death incarnate. “It’s all metaphor, all allegory for nuclear conflict,” Condal said. “You take the city with an army if you want it to be standing afterward. You can’t do anything surgical with a dragon.”

The ongoing second season of the “Game of Thrones” prequel has included more of these beautiful, terrible beasts than any other in the franchise, including spectacular air battles in the fourth episode, “The Red Dragon and the Gold.” Sunday’s installment, “The Red Sowing,” in which aspiring dragon riders claim new mounts — or die trying — was more grounded, but it presented the most complicated challenge yet.

… “In a big way, Season 1 was proof of concept for the series to come,” Condal said. “We designed Season 1 to tell this hopefully compelling Shakespearean family drama that would build to this final act where we would see the first dragon fight.”

In the resulting skirmish in the Season 1 finale, the young Prince Lucerys Velaryon and his small dragon, Arrax, are killed by Vhagar, the enormous, centuries-old beast ridden by the one-eyed warrior Prince Aemond Targaryen.

“Vhagar fighting Arrax is like a rhino versus a house cat,” Condal said. “But it had the elements: It was a chase, it had two dragons, you had two actors riding on saddles and everything else was digital. It was an entirely virtual sequence, essentially….

(5) DEADPOOL CAMEO SPOILERS. If they haven’t already been spoiled for you, Variety would like to perform that service: “Shawn Levy Explains ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Spoilers and Cameos”. And I guess I can’t pull an excerpt of this one….

(6) GENRE ADJACENT POSSIBILITY FOR FUTURE PRISONER SWAP. [Item by Patrick McGuire.] I read the below-linked Reuters piece about remaining possibly-swapable prisoners after the recent spy swap between Russia and the West (CNN).

One of the names was Boris Kagarlitsky, a onetime politician, later a sociologist and dissident. I knew something about him, but I had lost track and had not known he had been arrested. As far as I know, he has no sfnal connection himself — but his father was Yulii (or Julius) Kagarlitsky, a once-prominent Soviet/Russian sf scholar who knew English.

I thought Julius was fairly well known in American scholarly sf circles in his day, although today I found little about him online in English. I met Boris, for all of a “hello, goodbye,” as a kid of 13 or 14 the one time I visited the family apartment to interview his father, in probably 1975, when I spent academic 1974-75 in the USSR doing dissertation research.

Reuters: “Who are the prisoners who could feature in a future East-West swap?”

…RUSSIAN OR BELARUSIAN DISSIDENTS:

BORIS KAGARLITSKY:

A left-wing academic and Soviet-era dissident, Kagarlitsky was in 2023 charged with “justifying terrorism”, related to his opposition to the war in Ukraine. In February, the 65-year-old was sentenced to five years in prison….

On his father Yulii, who went by Julius in his English publications. Unfortunately, the only Wikipedia citation that I could find for him is in Russian (unless you prefer Ukrainian or Hungarian): “Кагарлицкий, Юлий Иосифович”

But here is a mention in Science Fiction Studies from March 1984:

Professor Kagarlitsky “Disciplined”

On November 2, 1983, the Moscow correspondent of the London Times reported that Professor Julius Kagarlitsky had been arraigned before a disciplinary panel at the Lunacharsky Theatrical Institute and removed from his post. Sources said the move was linked to dissident activities on the part of Professor Kagarlitsky’s son, Boris, who took part in a “new left” discussion group criticizing Soviet society from a Marxist standpoint.

Kagarlitsky, who is the recipient of the Pilgrim Award for 1972 and an Honorary Vice-President of the H.G. Wells Society, needs no introduction to SFS readers. His friends have been aware of the threat to his position for some time—even though his son, who had been held by the KGB for several months, was released without trial in the spring of 1983.

Experience has shown that the Soviet authorities are swayed by international criticism of their actions. It is hoped that SFS readers will make known their feelings about this case, which deals a devastating blow to Soviet scholarship and criticism in our field. We must hope that the victimization of Professor Kagarlitsky will be lifted, and that he will be promptly reinstated in his post. —Patrick Parrinder

Here he is in the Internet Science Fiction Database — Юлий Кагарлицкий (Julius Kagarlitsky) — which, however, lacks mention of his book What Is Science Fiction? (in Russian only), one of his two major books on sf, the other being the biography of H.G. Wells cited in ISFDB, which has an English translation.

(7) JOE ENGLE (1932-2024). Test pilot and astronaut Joe Engle died July 10 at the age of 91. The New York Times obituary says, “He was the first to touch the edge of space and later to go beyond it in two different aircraft, an X-15 and a shuttle. But the moon, to his disappointment, proved out of reach.”

…Mr. Engle was an Air Force captain in 1962 when he was accepted into the Aerospace Research Pilot School, an advanced training ground for astronauts. It was run by Chuck Yeager, the renowned test pilot who had broken the sound barrier in a Bell Aircraft X-1 in 1947.

But Mr. Engle’s application to join a group of astronaut recruits was pulled by an Air Force officer, who told him that he was being selected for another role; he had to wait until school ended in 1963 to learn that he had been assigned to the X-15 program.

The reassignment “thrilled me to death,” he said in a 2004 NASA oral history interview, “because it was a chance to get into place, to fly into space and to do it with a winged airplane, with a stick and rudder.” And he was still young enough to reapply to NASA in the future.

Three experimental X-15 aircraft were flown 199 times by a dozen pilots from 1959 to 1968, each designed to reach the boundary of space, more than 50 miles above sea level, traveling at speeds of up to 4,520 miles per hour. They collected critical data on the effects of hypersonic aerodynamics on men and machines.

Mr. Engle was the last surviving X-15 pilot….

…He earned his astronaut wings on June 29, 1965, when he took the X-15 to an altitude of 280,600 feet, or 53 miles, at 3,431 m.p.h….

…He was part of the support crew for Apollo 10 in May 1969, two months before the first moon landing by Apollo 11. He went on to train as the backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 14 in 1971 and was assigned to to the crew of Apollo 17 in December 1972.

Mr. Engle had expected to walk on the moon with Eugene Cernan in Apollo 17. But he was replaced by Harrison Schmitt, a geologist-astronaut (and future U.S. senator from New Mexico), so that NASA could take a scientist into space. Mr. Schmitt had been scheduled to fly on Apollo 18, but that mission was canceled because of budget cuts.

“It’s a lot like when you lose someone very dear to you to something like cancer,” Mr. Engle said in a news conference in August 1971, about being replaced. He added, “It’s a pretty empty feeling.”…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 5, 1966 — James Gunn, 58. Director James Gunn, who you surely know if only for the Guardians of the Galaxy films, has a very interesting career which we’ll look at tonight.

His first film, decidedly not genre, was Tromeo and Julietwhich I’m sure you can figure what its source material was. It definitely would’ve made Shakespeare pale it as quite extreme levels of sex and violence characteristic of almost every Troma film, not to overlook Gunn revised the ending. Anyone here seen it? It has a rather decent 61% rating among audience reviewers over at Rotten Tomatoes.

Far sillier and not at all likely to offend lovers of classic literature, he scripted next Scooby –Doo and slightly later Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. Really he did. Rotten Tomatoes gives them, well, let’s just say stink, stank, stunk ratings, but sandwiched in between these, and definitely not silly, he penned Dawn of the Dead. Versatile writer, eh?

His first directing gig (which he scripted as well) was Slither in which the plot such as it is has a meteorite bringing an intelligent alien parasite to Earth. Naturally I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes — it has a strong sixty percent rating among critics and audience reviewers with Allison Shoemaker of Fox 10 Phoenix saying, “Slither is a visceral experience from the first, but as the creature grows, so does the film’s daring.”

So what next? His final work before the film you him know for was Super, described as a black comedy superhero film, again was written and directed by him. A short order cook becomes a superhero without actually any superpowers. Huh. Let me repeat. Huh. It gets a decent 50% at the usual place.

Ok now Disney hires him to write (the first with Nicole Perlman who picked this film because her loved of science fiction, the next two by himself) and direct the Guardians of the Galaxy films. He entered negotiations just two years prior to the film premiering with the possible directors including future MCU directors Peyton Reed and the duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

Need I say all three films were extraordinarily successful films? At Rotten Tomatoes right now, they carry audiences review ratings of 92%, 87% and 82%. Yes, they did fall off slightly with each film, but an average of 87% is damn good.

Two years ago, Warner Bros. Discovery hired Gunn and Peter Safran to become co-chairmen and co-CEOs of DC Studios. That means they’re overseeing yet another reboot of the DC Expanded Universe. (I’ve lost track of how often this has occurred.) This starts with Superman out next year which, no surprise, he’s writing and directing.

Oh, remember that Warner Bros. Coyote v. Acme film still being a Schrödinger’s Roadrunner? (Try to catch that one!) He along with Jeremy Slater and Samy Burch wrote the story for it. Not the script as Burch did that.

What else should I mention? Well, he was one of the Executive Producers on Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame; he’s the motion capture for Baby Groot in the first two of the Guardians films; and finally he was Doctor Flem Hocking in The Toxic Avenger IV. Yes, Troma Films produced The Toxic Avenger films.

So why am bringing this film to your attention? Because it is where we connect Gunn to Marvel. The narrator of this film was none other than Stan Lee himself so we can assume that two of them met and spent some time together while filming this, a reasonable assumption indeed.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is an early example of using robots for everything.
Brewster Rockit says beware what fashion statement you’re making.
Free Range has an explanation.
The Argyle Sweater attends a monster’s therapy session.
Rubes introduces a new CSI.

(10) BAD EXAMPLES. CBR.com contends they can point you at “10 Real World Inspirations Behind Batman’s Villains”.

… With the group of foes slowly conceptualized over the years, each had a wider variety of sources that were pulled from— from classic literature to mascots— to build the foundations of these now-iconic characters…

10. Ra’s al Ghul Was Inspired By Two Iconic Dracula Actors

According to Neal Adams, the artist and co-creator of Ra’s al Ghul, the visual design of the head of the League of Assassins was heavily influenced by the iconic actors Jack Palance and Christopher Lee. Both actors are renowned for their portrayals of Count Dracula— for different reasons that both appear in Ra’s.

Palance brought an intense presence to the dark count, while Lee performed with a commanding and aristocratic demeanor. Adams drew inspiration from both of these performances to craft Ra’s al Ghul’s distinct appearance, with the character’s sharp features, piercing eyes, and aura of sophisticated menace echoing the attributes that Palance and Lee brought to their Dracula roles. This inspiration helped to imbue Ra’s al Ghul with a sense of timelessness and an imposing presence, fitting for a character who is not only a master tactician and warrior but also an immortal adversary of Batman.

(11) WILL AI MAKE THEIR JOBS DOA? “Movie Editors and Animators Fear A.I. Will Kill Jobs” – so they tell the New York Time. Link bypasses NYT paywall.

For most of his four-plus decades in Hollywood, Thomas R. Moore has worked as a picture editor on network television shows.

During a typical year, his work followed a pattern: He would spend about a week and a half distilling hours of footage into the first cut of an episode, then two to three weeks incorporating feedback from the director, producers and the network. When the episode was done, he would receive another episode’s worth of footage, and so on, until he and two other editors worked through the TV season.

This model, which typically pays picture editors $125,000 to $200,000 a year, has mostly survived the shorter seasons of the streaming era, because editors can work on more than one show in a year. But with the advent of artificial intelligence, Mr. Moore fears that the job will soon be hollowed out.

“If A.I. could put together a credible version of the show for a first cut, it could eliminate one-third of our workdays,” he said, citing technology like the video-making software Sora as evidence that the shift is imminent. “We’ll become electronic gig workers.”…

(13) CLEVER COMPOSITE. Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is “Milky Way Over Tunisia” by Makrem Larnaout, and it definitely will be recognized by Star Wars fans. Photo at the link.

Explanation: That’s no moon. On the ground, that’s the Lars Homestead in Tunisia. And that’s not just any galaxy. That’s the central band of our own Milky Way galaxy. Last, that’s not just any meteor. It is a bright fireball likely from last year’s Perseids meteor shower. The featured image composite combines consecutive exposures taken by the same camera from the same location. This year’s Perseids peak during the coming weekend is expected to show the most meteors after the first quarter moon sets, near midnight. To best experience a meteor shower, you should have clear and dark skies, a comfortable seat, and patience.

(14) DERRY TEASER. “First Trailer for Welcome to Derry Teases Chilling Prequel to It” at the Express-Tribune.

The highly anticipated prequel to Stephen King’s It, titled Welcome to Derry, has dropped its first trailer, offering a glimpse into the horror that awaits fans. The teaser presents fleeting scenes of the eerie town of Derry, Maine, known for its sinister reputation in King’s universe.

(15) HBO SMORGASBORD. “The Last of Us Season 2 Teaser Features Pedro Pascal in New Footage”: Comicbook.com sets the frame.

“I can’t walk on the path of the right because I’m wrong,” a guitar-strumming Ellie sings in The Last of Us Part II video game. But in HBO’s The Last of Us season 2 — which just dropped its first footage (below) in a trailer for what’s still to come on the Max streaming service in 2024 and 2025 — it’s Joel (Pedro Pascal) who has done wrong. “Did you hurt her?” Catherine O’Hara’s unnamed character can be heard asking in the teaser, referring to Ellie (Bella Ramsey). “No,” a tearful Joel answers. “I saved her.”

The footage, which is featured alongside new looks at HBO Original Series The Penguin, The White Lotus, The Gilded Age, Dune: Prophecy, It: Welcome to Derry, and the Game of Thrones spinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, also offers a glimpse at season 2 cast members Gabriel Luna, Isabela Merced, and Jeffrey Wright, who reprises his role from the game as Isaac Dixon….

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

Pixel Scroll 7/30/24 Then Shall All The Scrolls Be Still And Peace Will Come To Pixelville

Posted on July 30, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) BOOKER PRIZE 2024 LONGLIST. [Steven French.] Several genre or adjacent works tucked away in here! “Three British novelists make Booker 2024 longlist among ‘cohort of global voices’” in the Guardian surveys all 13 books.

Percival Everett, Hisham Matar and Sarah Perry are among the 13 novelists longlisted for the 2024 Booker prize. The “Booker dozen” also features works by Richard Powers, Tommy Orange, Rachel Kushner and Anne Michaels.

This year’s “glorious” list comprises “a cohort of global voices, strong voices and new voices”, said judging chair and artist Edmund de Waal….

File 770 has a genre-focused post here: “Booker Prize 2024”.

(2) REJECTING TACIT AGREEMENT. Christopher Golden sends a message “To those of you nodding along with Tom Monteleone…”

A note to certain members of the horror community. I know you’re out there—writers and readers who saw the substack post from Tom Monteleone over the weekend and quietly agree with his estimation of many of the writers who’d received Stoker Awards, or Lifetime Achievement Awards from the HWA. Honestly, it’s easy to do. We get wrapped up in our lives and perceptions and rely on our own experiences and acquired knowledge to filter the information we’re receiving. If you read Monteleone’s screed and agreed with it, even somewhat, maybe you haven’t taken the single moment of wondering if there’s another way to approach it….

… Let’s take a look at some of the authors Monteleone views as unworthy of recognition.

He dismisses Linda Addison mostly, I believe, because she’s best known as a poet. In order to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, Monteleone reminds us, one must have “significantly contributed to and influenced the field.” It’s obvious he views the field as comprised as writers like himself, never considering that one’s contributions and influence do not need to touch you or even enter your awareness to be legitimate and worth celebrating. Linda Addison does not need you to acknowledge her worth to be worthy. She doesn’t need to have been embraced by readers who are not interested in poetry for her contributions to be significant. You don’t need to have felt her influence or even observed it for her to be influential. I wonder how many horror writers have written poetry because Linda Addison makes them sit up and take notice of the art form. I’d wager the number is far higher than the number of authors who took up writing horror novels because they’d read something by Thomas F. Monteleone. Linda has blazed a trail for others to follow, and lit the goddamn path for them. She’s been a mentor and an example to follow. How many can say the same?

And to claim you consider her your friend? Shame on you. Learn something. Instead of assuming Linda’s race is the reason for her recognition, consider that her race is the reason you haven’t educated yourself as to why she has actually been honored….

(3) KSR ON BBC. The Climate Question team interviews Kim Stanley Robinson in this episode of the BBC World Service program: “The Climate Question, Can Science Fiction help us fight climate change?”

The acclaimed US sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson is also a star in the world of climate activism because his work often features climate change – on Earth and beyond. Robinson has been a guest speaker at the COP climate summit, and novels such as The Ministry For The Future and The Mars Trilogy are admired by everyone from Barack Obama to former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres. Robinson’s books are not just imaginative but scientifically accurate, and some of their ideas have even inspired new thinking about climate-proofing technology. Kim Stanley Robinson has been talking to the Climate Question team.

(4) STOP PALPATINE! Gizmodo introduces us to a three-book Star Wars tale coming out in 2026 and 2027: “Star Wars’ New Book Trilogy Explores the Politics Behind the Rise of the Rebellion”.

…As you can tell by the cover of the first novel in the series, The Mask of Fear by Alexander Freed (writer of the absolutely incredible Alphabet Squadron series) Reign of the Empire will examine the struggle against the Empire through the eyes of some familiar faces. Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and Saw Gerrera–all with their own differing perspectives on what must be done to stop Palpatine–play key roles in the trilogy, alongside a new cast of original characters as the galaxy begins to reckon with the grip of the Empire. Here’s the official logline for The Mask of Fear:

Before the Rebellion, the Empire reigned.

“In order to ensure the security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire! For a safe and secure society!”

With one speech, and thunderous applause, Chancellor Palpatine brought the era of the Republic crashing down. In its place rose the Galactic Empire. Across the galaxy, people rejoiced and celebrated the end to war—and the promises of tomorrow. But that tomorrow was a lie. Instead the galaxy became twisted by the cruelty and fear of the Emperor’s rule.

During that terrifying first year of tyranny, Mon Mothma, Saw Gerrera, and Bail Organa face the encroaching darkness. One day, they will be three architects of the Rebel Alliance. But first, each must find purpose and direction in a changing galaxy, while harboring their own secrets, fears, and hopes for a future that may never come, unless they act.

The Mask of Fear will be followed by two more novels: the first written by Resistance Reborn‘s Rebecca Roanhorse, and the second by Fran Wilde…

(5) RHONDI SALSITZ (1949-2024). Prolific sff novelist Rhondi Salsitz, who went into hospice care on June 30, died on July 29 Facebook friends learned today.

She was a 1979 Clarion graduate. Her first published story, “Persephone”, appeared in Damon Knight’s Orbit 21 (1980).

Salsitz was born in Phoenix, Arizona. She told a BookReview.com interviewer:

I started writing short stories when I was in the 3rd grade. I wrote my first science fiction novel when I was in the 5th grade. Needless to say, they weren’t very good but I knew very early on that I wanted to be an author. My mother was a writer …so, I grew up with an inherent love for books and I thought being a writer was probably one of the best things in the world you could be. I spent a lot of my early years trading letters with Walter Farley of Black Stallion fame. He was a wonderful author for a child to communicate with. He always wrote back… He was …very encouraging. …I was very lucky. I was always encouraged.

…I got a lot of rejections for a lot of years before I finally started selling. But I’m stubborn. My dad used to say that if I fell in a river, I’d float upstream. I was determined to get published and I did….

During her career she wrote under many names: Sara Hanover, Emily Drake, Anne Knight, Elizabeth Forrest, Charles Ingrid, Rhondi Greening, Rhondi Vilott Salsitz, Jenna Rhodes, R.A.V. Salsitz, and Rhondi Vilott.

Her eight series included the space opera Sand Wars books and fantasy sequences such as Magickers, Patterns of Chaos, and Dragontales. The 14-book Dragontales series was interactive fiction similar to Choose Your Own Adventures. Salsitz also told the BookReview.com interviewer, “I received hundreds of letters from kids who read those. As a matter of fact, I still run into people who read them when they were younger.”

A 2022 anthology she co-edited with Crystal Sarakas, Shattering The Glass Slipper, boasted a finalist for the 2023 WSFA Small Press Award, R.Z. Held’s story “Ashes of a Cinnamon Fire”.

You can hear Salsitz interviewed by Scott Edelman – another 1979 Clarion grad – at the link for his Eating the Fantastic podcast in 2023.

Rhondi Salsitz at the 1988 ABA. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: July 30, 1966 — Batman (also known as Batman: The Movie) (1966)

So let’s have pure nostalgia for this Scroll which is the Batman film that came out in 1966. Need I say it starred Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin? Of course not. But who were the villain or villians here this time that our cape crusaders dealt with while protecting the citizens of Gotham City and keeping their real identities secret?

I’ll come to that eventually but first let us look at who put the Batman film together. It was written by Lorenzo Semple Jr., one of the primary writers for the series who would go one to write the scripts of two best political thrillers ever produced, The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. I’d consider The Parallax View to be genre adjacent.

The director was Leslie Herbert Martinson who’s later was responsible for Wonder Woman: Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince? along with episodes of This Immortal, Mission: Impossible, Wonder Woman, Fantasy Island and several other genre series. He produced Rescue from Gilligan’s Island.

Yes, Bob Kane is credited as the creator, but Bill Finger alas goes uncredited.

So most members of the original series cast, with the exception of Julie Newmar as Catwoman are here. She was replaced by Lee Meriwether. I must say that she made a most purrfect Catwoman just as Newmar had.

Those villains are a Rouges Gallery of Gotham City’s criminal masterminds. In addition to Catwoman, we have Cesar Romero as The Joker, Burgess Meredith as The Penguin and Frank Gorshin as The Riddler. I’ll freely admit that Newmar’s Catwoman was by far my favorite of Batman’s foes. She was just the funnest of them, and the one I think the actress liked playing her role most of all the villains.

It premiered in Austin, Texas on this date followed by general release the following weekend.

It cost one point four million dollars and made three point nine million making it a rather nice box office success in those days.

We don’t do Story here even on an almost sixty-year-old films as we got criticized for giving away the plot of a forty-year-old TV episode once. Suffice it to say that if you like liked the series, this is for you; if you’ve not seen the series, it’s still a good piece of entertainment.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 30, 1975 – Cherie Priest, 45.

By Paul Weimer: I started with Priest’s work as many people have done–her Steampunk Clockwork Century novels. Boneshaker came out during a boom cycle for Steampunk fiction, and since I was avidly reading Steampunk at the time (trying to keep up with the trend). I decided to give Boneshaker a try. I loved its alternate American take on a subgenre that for a long while seemed terribly British-centric. With its sequels, Priest proved to me that she could master a subgenre with her characters and sharp writing, and I started picking up novels of interest she’s written ever since.

Cherie Priest in 2009. Photo by Caitlin Kittredge.

Horror and dark fantasy, with mystery and gothic touches, make up her major power chords of books she’s written since, with books like The Toll, or the more recent Cinderwich. Cinderwich shows that, beginning with and since her Clockwork Century novels, she has a really excellent sense and style of making a place come to life. Sure, her characters are fully fleshed and real, and sometimes so badly hurt by events. But it is the locales and places that they inhabit, or are trying to escape from, that really makes her fiction special for me. Grave Reservations, a supernatural mystery that is less Gothic and more quirky, has its Seattle come to life for me, for example.

Her most audacious work, and my favorite, are Maplecroft and Chapelwood. Lizzie Borden in this pair of novels faces off against Cosmic Horrors, with her axe. These two books are exactly for the people excited by that concept and Priest delivers in spades. The really strong use of point of view makes the novels feel inhabited, and alive. (And a really good message about confronting prejudice and hate that make the novels feel endlessly timely). And yes, once again, the settings and landscapes come alive in her writing.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Candorville is about our current alternate timeline.
Saturday Morning Breafast Cereal has a new variation on the trolley problem.
Randall Munroe advances the cause of science!

Chili Tornado Quake https://t.co/3BDa6gj3d9 pic.twitter.com/zZxsEv58Ve
— Randall Munroe (@xkcd) July 30, 2024

(9) HEATHER WOOD’S MUSIC. Thank Goodness It’s Folk devotes an episode of the podcast to “Remembering HEATHER WOOD”, a sff publishing figure who enjoyed even greater musical fame.

James and Sam bring this season of TGIF to a close with a special episode dedicated to the memory of Heather Wood, the inspirational singer and folklorist who sadly passed away this week. Her records with The Young Tradition are benchmarks in unaccompanied harmony singing, nearly sixty years after they formed. We play some of her wonderful solo singing, an absolute belter of a Young Tradition live performance, and some of the music that surrounded them in London in the 1960s where they lived, sang and worked together.

In the second half, Sam is joined by Eliza Carthy to talk about her plans with Martin Carthy to record his latest, and critically important, project “East” – and how you can get involved to help this be born. Sam plays two exclusive, never-before-broadcast live recordings of Martin singing from this project.

(10) MUST HAVE? [Item by Daniel Dern.] Here’s the buy-it link for the book bookbag: “Library Print Shoulder Bag” at TeezAvenue. (They also offer the design as a skirt or a dress.)

(11) HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. You’ve been warned. Variety explains “‘Deadpool & Wolverine’s Shockingly Sweet Eulogy for 20th Century Fox”.

For all the raunchy jokes, club drugs, buckets of blood and meta punchlines, “Deadpool & Wolverine” may be the most sentimental movie of the summer. Hollywood insiders and superhero film fans were stunned to discover that last weekend’s Marvel blockbuster basically amounts to a big, sobbing, “Steel Magnolias”-grade sendoff to 20th Century Fox.

After all, it was at that defunct studio, founded in 1935 and sold by Rupert Murdoch to Disney in 2019, that “Deadpool” first shimmied on-screen in a skintight bondage suit and pistols. It’s also where two decades’ worth of Marvel films were made, most notably the “X-Men” series, which catapulted Hugh Jackman to stardom. These characters first appeared in Marvel Comics but were licensed to Fox, leaving them operating outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the moniker for Disney’s film and TV Marvel adaptations). The merger with Disney changed all that….

(12) AND IF YOU WANT SPOILERS. The New York Times heads this article: “Spoiler Alert: Here’s a Guide to the Cameos in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’”. However, it’s paywalled, so it may be hard to give into the temptation to peek at the list.

(13) BAD TRIP. “Astronaut traveling to Titan loses his grip on reality in 1st ‘Slingshot’ trailer” – Space.com has a synopsis:

Laurence Fishburne…shares the screen with the Academy Award-winning Casey Affleck (“Manchester By the Sea”) and Tomer Capone (“The Boys”) in Bleecker Street’s upcoming outer space thriller, “Slingshot,”…The basic plot revolves around a harrowing 1.5-billion-mile trek to Saturn’s moon Titan and one astronaut’s inability to distinguish nightmares from real-life due to the side effects of a drug meant to induce hibernation sleep for the long haul….

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

Pixel Scroll 7/29/24 No One Scrolls Here These Days, It’s Too Pixeled

Posted on July 29, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) TOLKIEN’S ANSWERS. “’Human stories are always about one thing – death’: Why the shadow of death and WW1 hang over The Lord of the Rings” – at BBC. Includes video of the referenced interview.

In a 1968 interview, the BBC spoke to author JRR Tolkien about his experiences during World War One, how they had a profound effect and influenced his epic fantasy novel, Lord of the Rings.

“Stories – frankly, human stories are always about one thing – death. The inevitability of death,” The Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien told a BBC documentary in 1968, as he tried to explain what his fantasy magnum opus was really about.

The novel, the first volume of which was published 70 years ago this week, has enthralled readers ever since it hit the shelves in 1954. The Lord of the Rings, with its intricate world-building and detailed histories of lands populated with elves, hobbits and wizards, threatened by the malevolent Sauron, had, by the time of the interview, already become a bestseller and a cornerstone of the fantasy genre.

To better explain what he meant by the story being about death, Tolkien reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his wallet, which contained a newspaper clipping. He then read aloud from that article, which quoted from Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death, her moving 1964 account of her mother’s desire to cling to life during her dying days….

(2) TOR/SCALZI PARTNERSHIP EXTENDED. With six books still owed on his previous 13-book deal, Tor has signed John Scalzi up for yet another ten books: “Tor Publishing Group and Tor UK Announce Major Multi-Book Deal for Bestselling and Award-Winning Author John Scalzi” at Reactor.

…This new deal marks another long-term commitment by Tor Publishing Group and Tor UK to the works of John Scalzi, with the first book of this new contract tentatively scheduled for 2029.

John Scalzi said of the deal, “It’s rare in publishing to get anything close to continuity—authors go from one publishing house to the next. So I’m especially proud that this contract not only extends my two-decade association with Tor Books, but gives us both an opportunity to build on what’s come before, and make what comes next even better. We have so much planned in the years ahead. I can’t wait for you all to read it.”

Patrick Nielsen Hayden commented, “It’s fantastic to know that we’ll be in the John Scalzi business for even more years to come. He’s a remarkable writer and I can’t wait to see what he does next.”…

(3) TAFF WINNER’S ITINERARY. Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund administrator Sandra Bond today issued Taffluorescence 5, containing news of 2024 delegate Sarah Gulde’s movements and other hot news from TAFF. Gulde’s visit to the UK will take her to:

22-26 July: London… 26-29 July: Blackpool (Star Trek con)… 29 July-8 August: Inverurie… 8- 13 August: Glasgow… 13-16 August: Elgin… 16-20 August: Inverness… 20-23 August: Newcastle… 27-30 August: Stoke… 30 August-3 September: Liverpool… 3-10 September: Wrexham… 10-13 September: Neath… 13-16 September: Broadway (Give my regards… oh, that Broadway…) 16 September-11 October: London, Bath, Cornwall, Stratford.

Do not hesitate to give generously when the TAFF hat is passed.

(4) SHADOWY ENDING. The LA Times takes readers “Inside SDCC 2024 with ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ cast”. (Behind a paywall.)

…FX is going all out for “Shadows” at Comic-Con this year for their “farewell tour.” The acclaimed mockumentary comedy series — which earned eight Emmy nominations earlier this month — has announced that its upcoming sixth season will be its last. The Bayfront’s exterior is draped in a gigantic “Shadows” promotional poster, and just below the hotel is an activation area that features one designed to look like the show’s vampire mansion.

Before their panel presentation, the cast and creatives head to an area where they are greeted by fans in full cosplay despite the sweltering heat. The “Shadows” team is then shuttled to the convention center, where it listens in backstage as a packed Hall H receives a sneak peek at the Season 6 premiere. (Berry and Newacheck share a thumbs up when they hear the audience erupt in laughter after a Laszlo moment.) And after their Hall H presentation, they and the rest of their group will be chatting up fans — some in cosplay, some with “Shadows”-themed paraphernalia, all with enthusiasm — as they sign autographs and pose for selfies. As for Season 6, Simms says, “It’s exactly what we wanted to do.”

“We wanted to make a last season that was not sentimental or trying to tie up every loose end,” he says. “Just make [a season] that is super funny and at the end has a good ending, which we’re not going to tell you.”

(5) R-R-R-R MATEY! Deadpool & Wolverine made a lot of money this weekend, its $205 million domestic box office ranking as the eighth biggest opening of all time among any film and by far the biggest launch for an R-rated film, not adjusted for inflation. The first Deadpool was the previous record-holder at $133.7 million. “Box Office: ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Sets Record With $205 Million Debut” at Variety.

…Disney’s superhero sequel has collected $205 million in its opening weekend, ranking as the eighth-best debut of all time ahead of 2018’s “Black Panther” ($202 million) and behind 2015’s “Jurassic World” ($208 million) and 2012’s “The Avengers” ($207 million). Only nine films in Hollywood history have crossed the $200 million milestone in their opening weekends. Ticket sales also easily surpassed 2016’s “Deadpool” ($132 million) to set the record for the biggest R-rated opening weekend ever. The 2018 sequel, “Deadpool 2,” now stands as the third-biggest R-rated debut with $125 million. Among the newest installment’s many benchmarks, “Deadpool & Wolverine” landed by far the biggest start of the year, overtaking Disney’s Pixar sequel “Inside Out 2” ($155 million debut).

Internationally, “Deadpool & Wolverine” captured $233.3 million for a staggering global tally of $438 million. After three days of release, the film, starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, is already the sixth-highest grossing of 2024. Disney spent about $200 million to produce and roughly another $100 million to promote the movie.

(6) DUNE DESIGN. Fonts In Use investigates “The Mystery of the Dune Font” in this 2023 article.

In the six decades since the publication of the original Dune novel in 1965, the science fiction franchise has gone through many different typographic identities. Notable examples include the use of Giorgio for the British paperbacks by NEL (c. 1968) and Albertus for David Lynch’s movie adaptation (1984). But another typeface has even stronger ties to Dune and its author. It appeared on the covers of dozens of books, including the classic Dune trilogy and its sequels, and also on other titles by – or about – Frank Herbert, from various imprints. Strangely enough, the name of this typeface is barely known even among die-hard fans….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

July 29, 1941 – David Warner. (Died 2022.) Let’s consider David Warner. Where shall we start? I say with his role in Time Bandits where Warner plays Evil Genius, a malevolent being capable of twisting and warping reality. He needs the map to be able to escape the Fortress of Darkness, where he’s been imprisoned. Evil is also different because He understands technology, and in his clawed hands “The world will be different. Because I have understanding.” What’s that he has an understanding of? Digital watches. “And soon I shall have an understanding of cassette recorders and car telephones.” A truly excellent role for him.

Next up in my estimation would be his performance as John Leslie Stevenson and Jack the Ripper in Nicholas Mayer’s exemplary Time after Time which has Malcolm McDowell as H. G. Wells.

As Warner as Jack offhandedly says to Wells, “Ninety years ago, I was a freak. Here, I’m an amateur.” Warner does a bang on the ear of making Jack revel in the violent nature of the present such as the ease in which one can purchase firearms and how killing has become much more efficient because of them.

Jack says, “We don’t belong here? On the contrary, Herbert. I belong here completely and utterly. I’m home.”

So what next? That’d have to be Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the chancellor of the Klingon High Council who hopes to forge a peace between his people and the Federation.

Memory Alpha notes “Jack Palance was Nick Meyer’s original choice for the role. (Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, p. 141) However, Palance proved to be extremely costly to hire as well as slightly hesitant to accept the part.” They need a performer who fitted the script’s description of Gorkon as “savagely tall” and Warner was six feet, two inches tall.

David Warner recognized that the role was not a particularly large one, saying, “I just sat there for one scene and then got killed! Which is fine – I don’t have a problem with that. It’s exposition, setting it all up.” (From Star Trek Magazine issue 153, p. 47) . He did a lot with what little time had do you agree?

Those are the three performances that I think he’s most memorable in. Did he have other roles which I should note?

He voiced in the Batman: The Animated Series a character named Ra’s al Ghul, a very long live criminal mastermind. He voices him to utter perfection as one who both respects and disdains Batman.

That he’s a man of many roles is beyond dispute as he’s played Doctor Von Frankenstein and The Creature, Reinhard Heydrich who I can only describe as the souless monster that was responsible for the Holocaust; Bob Cratchit, a Professor Summerlee, Lord Mountbatten, The Doctor, Houdini and Professor Abraham Van Helsing.

I’m sure that I missed some interesting performances he did, so feel free to tell me that I overlooked them as you always do.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Jumpstart jumped to the wrong conclusion (started last week).
Lola meets a different family of elves.
Thatababy finds a working prop.
The Argyle Sweater is horrifying once you figure it out.
Caption It is looking for a good Batman caption.

(9) REYNOLDS RAP. The Hollywood Reporter gives reasons for ranking these as the “13 Best Ryan Reynolds Movies”. For example, you probably already forgot this one:

11. Detective Pikachu (2019)

The first thing you think of when you consider that famous yellow cutie that the Pokémon brand was built from probably isn’t Ryan Reynolds. His initial casting as Pikachu, for which he lent his voice and face via motion capture, was initially met with understandable confusion and a share of derision. But somehow, against all odds, it works. A gumshoe Pikachu with missing memories, teaming up with a failed Pokémon trainer, Tim Goodman (Justice Smith), and a cub reporter, Lucy Stevens (Kathryn Newton), to uncover a city-wide conspiracy is the kind of clever, special effects heavy take on the neo-noir that makes the film appealing for more than just Pokémon fans.

I couldn’t count the names of Pokémon characters I know on one hand, and I didn’t go into this movie as a fan. Yet, I found Rob Letterman’s film to be an engaging fantasy-mystery, and Reynolds’ performance to be a breezy and grounding element in a film entirely set in a lore-heavy fictional reality. As far as video game adaptations go, Detective Pikachu is one of the best, and it doesn’t get overly caught up in minutiae, instead allowing the cast and audience to simply focus on delivering a good time within the framework of a silly, but no less endearing, concept. And as for a bit of film trivia, before Reynolds accepted the role, Hugh Jackman was on WB’s shortlist to voice Pikachu — but he wasn’t quite ready to don the yellow just yet.

(10) KEEP ON DREAMING. Popverse is on hand when “Doctor Who and Star Trek showrunners announce that the two franchises are crossing over… for a mobile game”.

… During San Diego Comic-Con 2024 Star Trek: Strange New Worlds showrunner Alex Kurtzman and Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies came together for a joint event titled Intergalactic Friendship Panel: Star Trek X Doctor Who. This raised some eyebrows, and the anticipation only grew after Saturday’s Star Trek panel. During the panel, Kurtzman was asked about a Doctor Who crossover, and his answer pointed to the crossover panel. “I think you should come to the panel later today and ask the same question,” Kurtzman teased.

Now, we know what that tease was referring to – a crossover between the Doctor Who: Lost in Time and Star Trek Lower Decks: The Badges Directive mobile games. It’s perhaps not the crossover fans were hoping for – we were kind of crossing out fingers for a live-action meetup, but at least one of the panelists has hope that that may happen someday. …

(11) BACK TO THE SILO. Shelf Awareness picked up this Silo news at Comic-Con.

During San Diego Comic-Con, Apple TV+ announced that the second season of the hit series Silo, which is based on Hugh Howey’s sci-fi stories–including the novellas Wool, Shift, and Dust–will premiere November 15 with the first episode, followed by one new episode every Friday through January 17, 2025.

Steve Zahn (The White Lotus, Treme) is joining the season 2 cast..

(12) THE CTHULHU IN THE HAT? H.P. Lovecraft’s Dagon for Beginning Readers by R.J. Ivankovic is a droll, Seuss-inspired parody. (No, I don’t know if the Seuss corporate lawyers have heard of it yet.)

So a warning to all,
for what it is worth:
when the monsters arise
they will conquer the earth.

The famous H.P. Lovecraft story Dagon is gracefully retold in anapestic tetrameter and illustrated in a darkly whimsical style by genius poet-artist R.J. Ivankovic.

A sailor escapes in a lifeboat after his ship is attacked by a German raider during World War I. He soon finds himself in more bizarre peril, stranded in a dark, stinking mire on the edge of a mammoth pit. Venturing into the pit, he discovers a monolith covered in weird hieroglyphics and something stranger still that crawls from the slime a creature that may be the vanguard of a vast and monstrous invading army from the depths of the sea.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. It’s ultimately an ad, however, it is cute: “Sand Whiskers and Starlight: The Feline Chronicles of Dune”.

Join us on a pawsome journey as we unveil our beloved feline friends who aren’t just curled up in a cozy corner; they’re out there, backpacking across continents, camping under the stars, floating in cosmic space, time-traveling to study with art masters, seeking enlightenment on pilgrimages, commanding the seven seas and skies, and even hustling in the Big Apple!

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Sandra Bond, Bill, Jim Janney, 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 Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 7/26/24 With All These Scrolls, There Must Be A Pixel Here

Posted on July 26, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) FIRST CONTACT — WITH SF. New Science Fiction & Fantasy Hall of Fame inductee Nicola Griffith tells how at the age of nine she started to work out the meanings of “Identity and SF”.

Scientific theory and fiction are both narrative, stories we tell to make sense of the world. Whether we’re talking equation or plot, the story is orderly and elegant and leads to a definite conclusion. Both can be terribly exciting. Both can change our lives.

I was nine was I realised I wanted to be a white-coated scientist who saved the world. I was nine when I read my first science fiction novel. I don’t think this is a coincidence, though it took me a long time to understand that.

For one thing, I had no idea that the book I’d just read, The Colors of Space, an American paperback, was science fiction: I had no idea that people divided books into something called genres. In my world, there were two kinds of books: ones I could reach on the library shelves, and ones I couldn’t. My reading was utterly indiscriminate. For example, another book I read at nine was Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, dragged home volume by volume. (Obviously, at nine, much of it went over my head but it fascinated me nonetheless.) But my hands-down favourite at that time wasn’t a library book, it was an encyclopaedia sampler….

(2A) UNCANNY PERSEVERES. Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas explain to Black Gate readers, “The Space Unicorn Was Caitlin”.

…Now Caitlin’s adventures here are over. There is an unfillable hole in the center of our lives. Nobody we know would have faulted us for shutting down Uncanny Magazine under these circumstances (not to mention due to the issues over the last few years: the Large Online Retailer trying to destroy periodicals, AI nonsense, and the splintering of social media).

Except Caitlin wouldn’t have wanted that. She believed in the Space Unicorn community — the community that showed us and her so much love and support. She believed in the power of art and stories and beauty. Caitlin, like us, felt that Uncanny is important and needed in this magnificent community….

(2B) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman tells listeners “It’s time for tea and scones with Chuck Tingle” in Episode 231 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Chuck Tingle, who first came to prominence with such erotica of the fantastic as Pounded by President Bigfoot and Taken by the Gay Unicorn Biker, work which eventually led to two Hugo Award nominations. The USA Today bestselling novel Camp Damascus — his first traditionally published horror novel — was a Bram Stoker Award finalist this year, and his second horror novel, Bury Your Gays, was released earlier this month on July 9th. Both books were published by Tor Nightfire.

Here’s how he describes himself: “He is a mysterious force of energy behind sunglasses and a pink mask. He is also an anonymous author of romance, horror, and fantasy. Chuck was born in Home of Truth, Utah, and now splits time between Billings, Montana and Los Angeles, California. Chuck writes to prove love is real, because love is the most important tool we have when resisting the endless cosmic void. Not everything people say about Chuck is true, but the important parts are.”

We discussed how existing is an arrogant act against the forces of the infinite, why it’s horror rather than comedy which warms his heart, how he used social media to find a publisher for Camp Damascus (and why that technique probably won’t work for you), how to write horror about a gay conversion camp without retraumatizing in an already traumatizing world, the differences between cathartic horror and grueling horror (and why he’s more interested in the former), the intriguing comment his copyeditor made about a reference to Superman, which comics subgenre occupies the most space on his bookshelves, the five creators who’ve most influenced him (and my encounter with one of them during the ’70s), how art is more than what’s between the covers of a book or within the frame of a painting, what most people get wrong about the term “high concept,” and much more.

(3) TURF MEETS SURF IN SAN DIEGO. “Doctor Who spin-off ‘The War Between the Land and the Sea’ officially announced” reports Cultbox.

At Hall H at San Diego Comic Con on 26 July, showrunner Russell T Davies officially announced the five part Doctor Who spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea….

…Leading the five-part series is Russell Tovey (Feud, American Horror Story: NYC) and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Surface, Loki, Doctor Who). The series will also see the return of UNIT alumni Jemma Redgrave (Doctor Who, Grantchester) who will reprise her role as UNIT Chief Scientific Officer Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Alexander Devrient (Doctor Who, Ted Lasso) as Colonel Ibrahim….

…As rumoured, the spin-off will feature Sea Devils. When the fearsome and ancient species emerges from the ocean, dramatically revealing themselves to humanity, an international crisis is triggered. With the entire population at risk, UNIT step into action as the land and sea wage war.

(4) THE FIRST WORLDCON KERFUFFLE. It’s already sold, but for a brief and shining moment people had the opportunity to bid on the pamphlet that triggered the Exclusion Act at the first Worldcon in 1939: “A Warning! Important! Read This Immediately! –July 2, 1939”.

A Warning! Important! Read This Immediately! –July 2, 1939 [Rare Evidence of A Famous Science Fiction Worldcon Scandal, 1939]

6” x 4.5” Two stapled yellow leaves, creating a 4 pp. pamphlet + cover, stapled somewhat off center, faintly dust-soiled with a couple light dings and creases, still very good.

This is a rare copy of a pamphlet produced and smuggled into the 1939 Worldcon by Dave Kyle, but that was blamed on six members of the New York Futurian Society and led to them being barred from the convention. The Futurians were Donald A. Wollheim, Robert A. W. Lowndes, Cyril Kornbluth, Lois Gillespie, Frederik Pohl and John Michel (who co-wrote the pamphlet), and these are well-known names in the history of science fiction….

Here are a couple of sample pages:

(5) RWA NOT QUITE READY FOR AUTOPSY. The New York Times explains “The Collapse of Romance Writers of America” (link bypasses the Times paywall).

Romance novels are dominating best-seller lists. Romance bookstores are multiplying. And romance writers, who often self-publish and come with a devoted fan base, are changing long-entrenched dynamics in the publishing industry.

And yet, even as the genre is reaching new highs, the Romance Writers of America, a group that called itself “the voice” of romance writers, has suffered an enormous drop in membership — 80 percent over the past five years — and has filed for bankruptcy.

This year’s annual gala and awards ceremony, slated to begin on July 31 in Austin, Texas, was first canceled, then rescheduled for October.

The organization’s collapse comes after internal accusations of discrimination and exclusion — systemic problems that have divided the group for decades, said Christine Larson, author of “Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success.”

“The group’s foundation was cracked,” Larson said. “When you’re catering to one dominant group, you don’t see, or maybe care, about the needs of the marginalized.”…

… The group has included some of the most popular writers in the industry, including founding member Nora Roberts (“Montana Sky”) and Julia Quinn (the “Bridgerton” series). At its peak, it had more than 10,000 members….

… When [LaQuette] Holmes joined the organization’s New York City chapter in 2015, however, she found herself “one of very few Black people in the room,” she said. “I was very welcomed. But even when people were welcoming, they still didn’t really understand my plight as a Black woman writing Black women in romance.”…

(6) ARK-OLOGY. From Paul Weimer: “Book Review: Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming” at Nerds of a Feather.

Yekini has a problem. She is a midder, working and living on the middle levels of the Pinnacle, the last of the Fingers, the last of an ark/arcology built off of the Nigerian coast. She has by luck and dint of effort escaped her lower class origins. Or so she has thought, until an assignment sends her with the higher class administrator Ngozi down undersea, to the levels of the Pinnacle underneath the waves. There Ngozi and Yekini will confront a threat to the Pinnacle itself, a threat from outside the tower, in the deep waters that surround this last bastion of humanity. Something called the Children…

So one finds the narrative in Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming…

… Like Snowpiercer, the setting is evocative and memorable even if it probably does not hold up to strong “hard science fiction” scrutiny as a viable and complete ecosystem. A remnant of humanity stuck in a single building poking out of the ocean? The logistical problems of keeping this population alive are as insurmountable as the ones in Snowpiercer, but the novella successfully manages to deflect the reader thinking about that until well after the novella is done. And, honestly, a rigorous setting would be in the end be beside the point. This is not a novella about the realpolitik logistics of how an ark like this would work, it is about story, and people in that arcology and the story of these three characters and their pivotal roles in that story….

(7) UK READING REPORT. The Reading Agency’s statistics show “The British Reader is in Decline as The Reading Agency Reveals Half of UK Adults Don’t Read Regularly”.

…Half (50%) of UK adults don’t regularly read and almost one in four (24%) young people (16-24) say they’ve never been readers, according to research released by The Reading Agency today.

Findings from its groundbreaking ‘Reading State of the Nation’ nationwide survey on adult reading in the UK, reveal a stark drop in reading for pleasure among adults.

This means that more than 27 million UK adults are missing out on the physical, mental and financial benefits that have been proven to come from reading more. Evidence shows that per capita, incomes are higher in countries where more adults reach the highest levels of literacy proficiency. Studies also indicate clear wellbeing impacts, with those who read for pleasure reporting higher levels of self-esteem and ability to cope with difficult situations and non-readers being 28% more likely to report feelings of depression.

The new data from The Reading Agency reinforces this, with the nation’s regular readers experiencing a range of health benefits such as higher wellbeing and fewer feelings of loneliness than both lapsed and non-readers.

Other key findings include:

Only 50% of UK adults now read regularly for pleasure, down from 58% in 2015.
15% of UK adults have never read regularly for pleasure, an 88% increase since 2015.
35% of UK adults are “lapsed readers” who used to read but have stopped.
Young UK adults (16-24) face the most barriers to reading, with 24% saying they’ve never been regular readers.

The nationally representative survey of over 2,000 UK adults, the widest conducted since 2015, highlights several barriers to reading, with lack of time (33%) reported and the distraction of social media (20%) cited as the primary obstacles for many…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 26, 1945 – M John Harrison, 79.

By Paul Weimer: M John Harrison taught me about the joy of inconsistent and contradictory worldbuilding.

For most writers of fantasy, for most works of fantasy, I am always looking for the consistency and the power of the worldbuilding. Inconsistent and worse, lazy and weak worldbuilding can catapult me right out of a story or a novel, permanently. This has happened for me as a reader just this month with a brand-new novel.

M John Harrison is the exception to that for me. My reading of his work is almost exclusively Viriconium. But it is precisely in Viriconium, Harrison’s carved out territory in the Dying Earth subgenre, that I learned that worldbuilding is not the be all and end all of fantasy writing. The contradictions, the inconsistencies, the lack of cohesion is part of the point of the dying world of Viriconium. Not being able to rely on previous stories and novels in the sequence to understand what is happening in a particular work is something that Harrison relies on, and it is something that I learned to accept, and even expect in the Viriconium stories.

Really, Viriconium’s world building is beside the point, and that is why Harrison writes it in a way that you can’t rely on it. Instead, to use modern parlance, Viriconium is much more all about the “vibes”, and what vibes! Vance and Wolfe may have perfected Dying Earth as a subgenre, but Harrison gives it a feel that few authors have managed to hit ever since. There are few authors I’ve read that have managed to embody the vibe of the subgenre they are writing in as well as M John Harrison has. And with such language and writing. On a sentence by sentence level, Harrison is one of the most talented writers I’ve ever read, of any genre.

A singular talent.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Bliss introduces a superhero who shouldn’t talk.
Broom Hilda learns not to copy.
F Minus demonstrates conflict for an author.
Reality Check compares super songs.
The Argyle Sweater inaugurates a monstrous religion.
Loose Parts adds an unnecessary scene.
B.C. shows somebody who’s either going to be late for the Paris Olympics, or early for the Mordor Olympics.

(10) TIME VARIANCE AUTHORITY RETURNING. Launching in December, Katharyn Blair and Pere Perez’s TVA assembles a new team of heroes to protect all timelines.

The Time Variance Authority is under new management! This December, behold the adventures of the agency tasked with upholding the timestream in TVA! Just announced by Marvel Studios’ President Kevin Feige and Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski at the Marvel Fanfare Panel at San Diego Comic-Con, TVA will be a five-issue limited comic book series written by Marvel Studios’ Loki writer Katharyn Blair and drawn by acclaimed Marvel artist Pere Perez (Carnage, Edge of Spider-Verse).

The series will represent an evolution for the Marvel Comics’ version of the TVA as its blended with its Marvel Cinematic Universe counterpart, as depicted in the Disney+ series Loki series and Deadpool & Wolverine. The series will mark the Marvel Comics debut of various MCU characters, including breakout Loki star Miss Minutes. The mysterious all-knowing entity who keeps the TVA ticking like clockwork will recruit a new band of heroes charged with monitoring and regulating all realities and timelines. Join Ghost-Spider and other universe-displaced entities including Captain Cater, a heartbroken Remy Lebeau, and more as they’re sent throughout the multiverse on vital missions to repair wild temporal anomalies and keep reality itself from shattering!

(11) POPCORN TIME. Variety is on hand when “Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman Surprise Comic-Con With ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Screening”.

“Deadpool & Wolverine” may have finally been released in theaters, but stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman saved their biggest press tour stop for last.

The pair rolled into San Diego Comic-Con, alongside co-star Emma Corrin, director Shawn Levy and Marvel chief Kevin Feige to present the Hall H audience with a surprise screening of the film on the same day that it hits the big screen around the world. Warning: spoiler-talk below.

The special event, dubbed “The Ultimate Deadpool & Wolverine Celebration of Life,” came at the end of a particularly busy day for Reynolds, Jackman and Levy, who jetted to San Diego from Los Angeles following Feige’s Walk of Fame Ceremony earlier in the day….

…Then, after conjuring up those happy memories, Reynolds cued up a clip of co-star Leslie Uggams (in character as Blind Al) saying, “Can we skip the bullshit and just show the damn movie?”

The crowd (a full house of 6,500) erupted at the announcement and suddenly the souvenirs they’d been awarded for lining up outside Hall H — those highly-coveted (and hilariously sexual) Wolverine-head popcorn buckets — made even more sense. As the lights went down in the auditorium-turned- makeshift movie theater, ushers passed around popcorn and Reynolds, Jackman, Feige and co. settled into the folding chairs in the audience.

Throughout the 2-hour runtime, the crowd reacted raucously to all the major moments, but especially the Easter eggs and in-jokes. However, nothing played more electrically than the movie’s surprise cameos. With each reveal, the audience erupted into cheers which painted a huge grin on Feige’s face as he took it all in….

(12) MUNCHING FOR DOLLARS. And speaking of Wolverine-head popcorn buckets, NPR has a report on the marketing phenomenon: “’The Indicator from Planet Money’: The curious rise of novelty popcorn buckets”.

…ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: Movie theaters want to sell you more than just the ticket and snacks these days, and in the last few years, that’s meant souvenir popcorn buckets as tie-ins with major releases.

WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: Nels Storm is vice president of food and beverage strategy for AMC Theaters. Nels says a lot of these vessels, as the industry calls them, are basically movie props that you can put popcorn in – well, maybe.

NELS STORM: Yes, it has to hold popcorn, but it’s not – we’re not designing around a tub.

MA: Nels says AMC aims to sell out of the buckets during the film’s first weekend. That maximizes the hype around the release, and it ensures theaters aren’t stuck with a whole inventory of unsold buckets when the next blockbuster lands.

STORM: We want to make sure to make every “Despicable Me 4” guest happy and then move on to “A Quiet Place: Day One” and then move on to “Twisters,” and then move on to “Deadpool & Wolverine,” and so we want to keep the wheels turning.

MA: Despite this trend, these novelty objects are still a small part of the movie theater business. In 2023, merchandise sales totaled $54 million for AMC, and that is just 3% of the total food and beverage revenues for the year. But these collectibles are increasingly an important part of the competition between movie theaters….

(13) PRIME VIDEO TIME. “’The Boys’ Prequel Series With Jensen Ackles Ordered By Prime Video” – Deadline is on top of the story.

The Boys universe is expanding in a BIG way with its first spinoff featuring actors from the hugely popular Prime Video superhero series. Jensen Ackles and Aya Cash are set to headline and produce Vought Rising, a prequel to mothership series, in which they will reprise their characters from The Boys, Soldier Boy and Stormfront, respectively.

The news is about to be unveiled by Jensen (in person) and Cash (via video) at The Boys Comic-Con panel for what is certain to be one of the biggest TV announcements at the convention….

(14) NEW SEASON OF INVINCIBLE ANNOUNCED. “Invincible Renewed for Season 4 at Prime Video” says Variety.

Another season of Prime Video’s “Invincible” is on the way.

“Invincible” creator Robert Kirkman made the Season 4 announcement at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday at Prime Video’s adult animation panel. He was joined by “Hazbin Hotel” creator Vivienne Medrano, “The Legend of Vox Machina” executive producer and star Travis Willingham and “Sausage Party: Foodtopia” co-creator Kyle Hunter for the panel. Prime Video also renewed “Hazbin Hotel” and “Sausage Party: Foodtopia” for sophomore seasons.

During the panel, Kirkman revealed the new, blue-and-black costume for Steven Yeun’s Invincible coming in Season 3. In the comics, Mark Grayon, aka Invincible, enters a darker, more violent era in the middle issues of the superhero comic. The new costume, a stark shift from his yellow-and-blue spandex, is a fan-favorite from the comics….

(15) LOOKS FAMILIAR. “NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover finds possible signs of ancient Red Planet life” reports Space.com.

NASA’s Perseverance rover may have found signs of ancient life in a rock on Mars; the mission team’s scientists are ecstatic, but remain cautious as further analysis is needed to confirm the discovery.

The rover has come across an intriguing, arrowhead-shaped rock that hosts chemical signatures and structures that could have been formed by microbial life billions of years ago, when Mars was significantly wetter than it is today. Inside the rock, which scientists have nicknamed “Cheyava Falls,” Perseverance’s instruments detected organic compounds, which are precursors to the chemistry of life as we know it. Wisping through the length of the rock are veins of calcium sulfate, which are mineral deposits that suggest water — also essential for life — once ran through the rock.The rover also found dozens of millimeter-sized splotches, each surrounded by a black ring and mimicking the appearance of leopard spots. These rings contain iron and phosphate, which are also seen on Earth as a result of microbe-led chemical reactions….

(16) SCIENCE OF SF FILM TWISTERS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Nature takes a look at the latest film in the Twisters franchise and how good (or not) the science is. The first film, Twister (1996), got a lot of the science wrong, but it seems as if the makers have upped their game for Twisters especially in noting that climate change is intensifying tornadoes as well as increasing the area of ‘tornado alley’ in the US. “What Twisters gets right — and wrong — about tornado science” (open access).

…Meteorologists love to nitpick the original Twister film’s scientific errors. Although it drew inspiration from extreme-weather researchers at the Norman lab, it placed entertainment above scientific accuracy, scientists say. For instance, researchers often point sarcastically to scenes that used radar readings of clear skies, when audiences were supposed to be looking at data from a tornado’s swirling heart.

The new film is much more accurate, says Kevin Kelleher, a meteorologist who is retired from the Norman lab and consulted on both Twister films. For the 2024 version, “if they could change things and make it a bit more scientifically correct, they did”, he says. Kelleher credits that accuracy to the director of Twisters, Lee Isaac Chung, who has been fascinated by thunderstorms ever since growing up on a farm near the Oklahoma border…

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

Pixel Scroll 7/16/24 Oh You’ll Never See My Shade Or Hear The Sound Of My Feet, While There’s A Scroll Over Pixel Street

Posted on July 16, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) GLASGOW 2024 DELAYS BUSINESS MEETING AGENDA. The WSFS Standing Rules required publication of this year’s Business Meeting Agenda by July 17. However, Glasgow 2024 today announced that agenda “will be delayed until Friday, 19th July 7pm (BST/UTC+1)”. X.com thread starts here.

Glasgow 2024 has received 50 items, including new business and items passed on from the prior Worldcons. And they have put up this chart to justify the delay in producing the agenda.

In the meantime, File 770 has published the text of more than 20 of these proposals. Here are the links.

Motion to Abolish the Retro Hugos Submitted to 2024 Business Meeting
WSFS 2024: Motion to Add Human Rights and Democracy Standards to Worldcon Site Qualifications
WSFS 2024: Three Resolutions
- SHORT TITLE: APOLOGY RESOLUTION
- SHORT TITLE: CHENGDU CENSURE RESOLUTION
SHORT TITLE: MAKE THEM FINALISTS RESOLUTION
WSFS 2024: Cleaning Up the Art Categories
WSFS 2024: Meetings, Meetings, Everywhere
WSFS 2024: Transparency in Hugo Administration
WSFS 2024: Irregular Disqualifications and Rogue Administrators
WSFS 2024: Independent Hugo Administration
WSFS 2024: No Illegal Exclusions
WSFS 2024: When We Censure You, We Mean It
WSFS 2024: And The Horse You Rode In On
WSFS 2024: Three Standing Rules Change Proposals
SHORT TITLE: “NO, WE DON’T LIKE SURPRISES, WHY DO YOU ASK?”
SHORT TITLE: “STRIKE 1.4”
SHORT TITLE: MAGNUM P.I.
Two More Proposed WSFS Constitutional Amendments for 2024
SHORT TITLE: MISSING IN ACTION
SHORT TITLE: THE WAY WE WERE
WSFS 2024: Popular Ratification
WSFS 2024: Site Selection by the Worldcon Community

Also along the way File 770 has published these drafts. Whether they have been submitted, or their final wording, is not known at this time.

“WSFS Mark Protection Committee Draft Amendments”
SHORT TITLE: REQUIRED LICENSE AGREEMENT
SHORT TITLE: HUGO ADMINISTRATION AND SITE SELECTION MONITORING
SHORT TITLE: MPC PROCEDURES

“Proposal: that there should be a permanent Hugo Tech Working Group. Guest Post by Doctor Science”.

File 770’s

Journey Planet

(2) LAST DAYS TO VOTE FOR THE HUGOS. There are only four days left to vote in the 2024 Hugo Awards and to download this year’s Hugo Voting Packet.

Voting closes at 20:17 GMT on 20 July because that will be 55 years *to the minute* since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first landed on the moon in 1969!

Instructions about how to vote and the way to download the Hugo Voting Packet are on the Glasgow 2024 website.

(3) COMMUNITY ANSWERS OCTAVIA’S BOOKSHELF’S CALL. “Black Woman-Owned Bookstore Octavia’s Bookshelf Is Getting Closer And Closer To Funding Goal To Keep Doors Open” reports Blavity. At this writing, Octavia’s Bookshelf has raised $83,780 of the $90,000 goal.

….According to Pasadena Now, the Black woman-owned business Octavia’s Bookshelf was founded by Nikki High, a former corporate communications employee at Trader Joe’s who left corporate America to accomplish one of her biggest goals: owning a bookstore. The name of her shop was inspired by Octavia Butler, who was known for her science fiction novels. When she opened her doors in February 2023, she was immediately embraced by her neighborhood and got more than enough support to move into a bigger space.

Due to traffic slowing down in the store, High is asking her community and the general public for help to remain in business; she set up a GoFundMe page….

…Due to lack of funding, she was forced to cut the shop’s regular events, group discussions, children’s readings and workshops, but she hopes to be able to offer these services again soon once she raises enough money.

Despite the hurdles she faces, High is unwilling to throw away her dreams.

“I still know that this is a viable business,” High told Pasadena Now, “and this space is crucial to our community.”

(4) LEGGO MY LEGO. “Get bricks quick: collectible Lego sets fuel growing black market” says the Guardian.

A black market for highly valuable Lego sets is being built brick by brick, and authorities are trying to knock it down.

Lego sets are highly sought after, by kids and their parents as well as adult collectors.

But it’s not all fun and games. Bad actors who know the resale value of these sets are increasingly cashing in, while law enforcement aims to bust such Lego theft rings.

Police in Oregon last week recovered 4,000 stolen Lego sets worth more than $200,000, according to law enforcement. Ammon Henrikson, 47, the owner of a retail store called Brick Builders in Eugene, was arrested and accused of knowingly purchasing the allegedly stolen goods for a fraction of their retail price and then reselling them, a local CBS channel reported….

… Two people were arrested in Los Angeles last month in connection with more than 2,800 stolen Lego sets. In April, California police arrested three men and a woman after discovering stolen Lego sets worth a combined $300,000. Some of the stolen sets included the 921-piece Millennium Falcon, typically priced around $85, the 6,167-piece Lord of the Rings Rivendell set, worth $500, and the 1,458-piece Porsche 911 set, worth $170.

Meanwhile, overseas, French police announced in 2021 that they had begun building a case against an international gang of toy thieves specializing in Lego….

(5) CLARION WEST MATCHING. The Clarion West Writers Workshop can leverage your donation this week. More information here.

The Sherman Family Foundation has offered a Week Five Matching Challenge, doubling any donations made this week up to $2,000! Donations made to Clarion West support free and low-cost programming for writers and readers year-round.

(6) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books presents episode 77 of their monthly podcast “Simultaneous Times” with Phoenix Alexander & F.J. Bergmann.

Stories featured in this episode:

“Loamblood” by Phoenix Alexander — read by the author
“Surgery for Dummies” by F.J. Bergmann — read by Jean-Paul Garnier

Music by Phog Masheeen. Theme music by Dain Luscombe

Heather Wood in 1988. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter

(7) A. HEATHER WOOD (1945-2024). Publishing pro and folk singer A. Heather Wood died at Stony Brook Memorial Hospital on July 15 at the age of 79. At one time she was assistant to Tor’s President and Publisher Tom Doherty, and a consulting editor for Tor Books. She was also well-known in the folk music community as part of The Young Tradition, a 60s English group.

We applied a tiny bit of that musical talent on Noreascon Three’s (1989) program SF Tonight, where I played Ed McMahon to Tappan King’s Johnny Carson, and Heather Wood was our kazoo-playing answer to Doc Severinsen.

She also was known as part of World Fantasy Convention’s “Musical Interlude,” which featured pros singing in a folk revue.

Her website, which lists her many accomplishments, is here.

(8) IVAN GEISLER (1944-2024). [Item by Jeanne Jackson.] Ivan Geisler, longtime member of the Denver Area Science Fiction Association, passed away July 2, 2024 of congestive heart failure and old age.

I was first informed this afternoon by Sherry Johnson, his ex-wife. Although Ivan was quickly found by his neighbors after his passing, and his dog Brownie returned to the shelter Ivan had adopted her from, there had been some difficulty locating contact information for friends and relatives.

According to Sherry, memorial arrangements have not yet been organized. As Ivan was a veteran of the United States Army, it is likely the Veterans’ Administration will be involved in his funeral.

Ivan joined DASFA over 30 years ago. He was a lifelong reader of science fiction and fantasy, and also an avid amateur astronomer—he was an active member of the Denver Astronomical Society long before he found his way into DASFA.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 16, 1928 — Robert Sheckley. (Died 2005.)

By Paul Weimer: I came to Robert Sheckley’s work through an oblique angle. Somehow, through all of the reading I did in the late 70’s and early 80’s, I missed or didn’t recognize, his short story work (although it’s dollars to donuts I came across a story of three in the many anthologies I read during that period. (And a check in the writing of this shows a couple of Sheckley stories in 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories). But I didn’t recognize his work and his genius and his skill until 1992.

Sheckley in the 1990s. Photo by John Henley

Yes, it wasn’t until the movie Freejack came around that I started looking for Sheckley’s work specifically, since the movie proudly announced in its credits that it was based on “Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley”. Yes, this is the movie where Emilio Estevez is a car driver transported to the future, with Mick Jagger (!) of all people as the major antagonist.

The name sounded familiar even so, and so, as was my practice at the time (Total Recall leading me to Philip K. Dick in similar fashion), I decided that I needed to investigate his work, starting with Immortality, Inc. The novel was very different than the movie by a long show, but I was immediately hooked on his writing.

I found his work sharp, twisty, clever, devilishly entertaining, and especially for his short stories, with a sting in the tail. It was no wonder to me that his work has been so adapted so frequently, and with such great effect. And while science fiction is generally not explicitly in the prediction business, “The Prize of Peril” pretty accurately and sharply predicts and shows the consequences of television devoted and focused on Reality Television for clicks. “The Perfect Woman” shows the consequences of wanting the perfect mate, straight from the factory, and the consequences of a lack of quality control.

My favorite Sheckley story might surprise, but it is “Death Freaks” from the “Heroes in Hell” shared world verse. With the ability of throwing anyone who is anyone into their shared world version of Hell, the editors got a story from Sheckley involving the Marquis de Sade, Baudelaire, Lizzie Borden, Jesse James, and an 8th Century BC Greek Hoplite. Sheckley, perhaps out of all of the authors in the series, best “understood the assignment” and let his imagination run wild. It’s a story that’s a lot of fun and full of the unexpected, entertaining all along the way. That’s what Sheckley could, and did do, with his fiction.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Carpe Diem mixes sport with alternate history.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has an excuse for doomscrolling.
Non Sequitur shows creators have been getting scammed this way for a long time.
Thatababy stages a contest between superheroes.
Bizarro shows how robot justice will work.
Speed Bump commemorates the first art donor.
Thatbaby adds a feature to long movies.
Rhymes with Orange is there when a robodog does what doggies do.

(11) LADY DEADPOOL. “New ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Trailer Teases Even More of Lady Deadpool” promises Yahoo!

Ten days ahead of the film’s release, Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine has a new trailer and TV spot.

Set to the tune of Toni Basil’s “Hey Mickey,” one of the first shots in the trailer shows the mysterious Lady Deadpool’s red boots and up past her signature belt to show the ends of blonde hair without landing on her face.

“Deadpool & Wolverine”

“Deadpool & Wolverine & Chicken Strips”

And a week ago was this: “Deadpool & Wolverine & The Bachelorette”.

Everyone seemed to like the Deadpool Bachelorette spot last night but can we talk about the episode? Thought Jenn made some strong choices, except for sending my countryman Brendan packing. Marcus is easy on the eyes, Grant was a little much and the day trading thing, but I get it. Two Sams will get confusing so slightly leaning towards Sam N. Jenn’s mom might have been the highlight and Melbourne, Australia, felt like a Hugh shout out so bit of a lowlight there. Overall, great start. What was I talking about again?

(12) FOR MONSTER TOURISTS. Atlas Obscura lists “11 Museums Dedicated to Monsters”.

Monsters have roamed the human consciousness as long as there has been one, from tales around the campfire, to the tomes of antiquity, to the modern cineplex. And sometimes those monsters leap off the page or the screen, and out of our imaginations. Sightings of cryptids and other frightful creatures have spanned millennia, often taking place in the darkest corners of the world. Luckily there are lots of ways to get to know these fantastical creatures—especially when enthusiasts create museums or exhibits dedicated to their lore….

…In Point Pleasant, West Virginia, is a museum dedicated to the state’s most widely known cryptid: the Mothman. The only collection dedicated to the half-moth, half-man creature, the Mothman Museum celebrates this harbinger of misfortune, who has been spotted in Appalachia on and off since 1966. Much further in the past, stories of massive sea monsters off the Icelandic coast have stricken fear into the hearts of sailors. The Skrímslasetrið in Bíldudalur, Iceland, covers the history of these encounters. According to the museum, two of the monsters most endemic to Iceland’s waters are the hafmaður (Sea Man) and the skeljaskrímsli (Shell Monster), but there are more. From a four-legged beast that terrorized 18th-century France to an amphibious water demon in Japan, here are a few of our favorite places to get up close to monsters in relative safety…

(13) READY FOR HER CLOSE-UP. “Gnatalie is the only green-boned dinosaur found on the planet. She will be on display in L.A.” announces NBC News.

The latest dinosaur being mounted at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles is not only a member of a new species — it’s also the only one found on the planet whose bones are green, according to museum officials.

Named “Gnatalie” (pronounced Natalie) for the gnats that swarmed during the excavation, the long-necked, long-tailed herbivorous dinosaur’s fossils got its unique coloration, a dark mottled olive green, from the mineral celadonite during the fossilization process.

While fossils are typically brown from silica or black from iron minerals, green is rare because celadonite forms in volcanic or hydrothermal conditions that typically destroy buried bones. The celadonite entered the fossils when volcanic activity around 50 million to 80 million years ago made it hot enough to replace a previous mineral….

(14) IT’S A TWISTER AUNTIE EM! “What Twisters gets right — and wrong — about tornado science” opines Nature

When Hollywood producers showed up a few years ago at Sean Waugh’s office, he couldn’t wait to show them his thunderstorm-tracking equipment. Waugh, a meteorologist at the US National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, is a big fan of the 1996 film Twister, which stars Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as leaders of a tornado-chasing research team. And now, Hollywood was asking Waugh his opinion on how the science in the next film in the Twister franchise should look.

On 17 July, when the film is released internationally, the world will see how Waugh’s recommendations panned out. Like its predecessor, the new Twisters film focuses on characters who are storm chasers: Daisy Edgar-Jones plays a researcher traumatized by past weather disasters and Glen Powell a social-media star racing for footage of the biggest and baddest tornadoes. But science has an even bigger role in the plot of the new film than it had in the original, say Waugh and other researchers who worked as consultants for Twisters. It not only shows advanced radar data and highlights links between climate change and tornadoes, “it’s an incredible opportunity to inspire the next generation of scientists”, Waugh says….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George’s “Battlefield Earth Pitch Meeting” tells why the movie was made – not that you didn’t already know.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Anne Marble, Joe Siclari, Jeanne Jackson, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Niall McAuley.]

Pixel Scroll 7/1/24 Don’t Scroll Tonight: Call Pixel Delight!

Posted on July 1, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) WESTERCON, JUST ADD HEMLOCK. Kevin Standlee won’t be making the motion, but ”For Those Who Want to Retire Westercon” he has written the recipe. Kevin explains:

[It’s] something that might come up at the Westercon Business Meeting if at least two members present decide to use it, or if the motion arises out of a Committee of the Whole should no bid win the election. At this time, there are no bids filed, but a bid could always file a write-in up until voting closes on Friday evening, and if they do so and out-poll None of the Above, the Business Meeting would probably give a collective sigh of relief that they don’t have to deal with the decision for the third year in a row.

(2) DUST & DARK TO LAUNCH IN 2025. Dust & Dark, a new print and digital quarterly magazine specializing in short horror fiction, will launch in 2025.

Editor Owen Duffy says the magazine will offer deliciously dark tales for readers.

“Our focus is on stories that get under your skin and stay with you long after you’ve turned the final page,” he says.

“We aren’t interested in straightforward shocks or gratuitous gore. We’re all about inventive, stylish, original stories with strong characterisation, tight pacing and immersive settings.

“We also absolutely see horror as part of the speculative fiction family. We’ll feature stories which explore a range of ideas and issues, open us up to new perspectives and look at the world from slightly sideways angles.”

The magazine is set to launch following a Kickstarter campaign in November. Story submissions will open in September. To be notified when submissions go live, sign up for updates at https://dustanddark.com/.

(3) IF YOU’RE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. The UK’s National Trust invites everyone to “Visit great writers’ and poets’ houses”. One of the places on their list is:

Hill Top, Cumbria

Beatrix Potter bought Hill Top with the royalties earned from her first book, Peter Rabbit. The garden and surrounding countryside inspired many of her works – spot the beehive nestled in the garden wall, just as it was depicted in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck.

(4) BIG RED ONE. “’Hellboy: The Crooked Man’ first trailer reveals Jack Kesy as the titular demon” – Entertainment Weekly sets the frame.

Different Hellboys come and go, but there will always be things that go bump in the night — and who better to defeat them than the lovable red superhero? Later this year, actor Jack Kesy (12 Strong) will be the third actor to play Mike Mignola’s Hellboy on the big screen, and you can see him in action in the first trailer for Hellboy: The Crooked Man…

(5) BOT SPEECH. “The Voices of A.I. Are Telling Us a Lot” says the New York Times. “Even as the technology advances, stubborn stereotypes about women are re-encoded again and again.” (Behind a paywall.)

…A.I. creators like to highlight the increasingly naturalistic capabilities of their tools, but their synthetic voices are built on layers of artifice and projection. Sky represents the cutting edge of OpenAI’s ambitions, but she is based on an old idea: of the A.I. bot as an empathetic and compliant woman. Part mommy, part secretary, part girlfriend, Samantha was an all-purpose comfort object who purred directly into her users’ ears. Even as A.I. technology advances, these stereotypes are re-encoded again and again.

Women’s voices, as Julie Wosk notes in “Artificial Women: Sex Dolls, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females,” have often fueled imagined technologies before they were built into real ones.

In the original “Star Trek” series, which debuted in 1966, the computer on the deck of the Enterprise was voiced by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, the wife of the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry. In the 1979 film “Alien,” the crew of the USCSS Nostromo addressed its computer voice as “Mother” (her full name was MU-TH-UR 6000). Once tech companies started marketing virtual assistants — Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana — their voices were largely feminized, too.

These first-wave voice assistants, the ones that have been mediating our relationships with technology for more than a decade, have a tinny, otherworldly drawl. They sound auto-tuned, their human voices accented by a mechanical trill. They often speak in a measured, one-note cadence, suggesting a stunted emotional life.

But the fact that they sound robotic deepens their appeal. They come across as programmable, manipulatable and subservient to our demands….

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

July 1, 1991 — Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Terminator 2: Judgement Day was released on this day in 1991. It won a Hugo at MagiCon, so may I question why oh why wasn’t The Terminator nominated for a Hugo? Tell me oh Filers why it wasn’t. It certainly deserved one, didn’t it?

Now let’s discuss this film, that like The Terminator, I indeed did see at a theater. It had its first showing thirty three ago in the States at Century City in Los Angeles with a general release two days later. That’s seven years after The Terminator came out.

Not at all surprisingly, just about everyone involved in The Terminator is back here. Like the first film, it’s directed by James Cameron. Cameron is very much the driving force as he also wrote both scripts, the first with Gale Anne Hurd, whom he married a year after The Terminator came out, and this film with William Peter Wisher who also worked uncredited on The Terminator.

The Terminator was a considerable success, making the careers of both Cameron and Schwarzenegger, but work on what would become this film almost ended because of animosity between the pair and Hemdale Film Corporation, which partially owned the film’s rights. So they got Carolco Pictures to purchase the rights from The Terminator producer Gale Anne Hurd and Hemdale, which was almost bankrupt.

Now they owned the rights to produce a sequel. Cameron engaged his long-time friend Wisher who I noted had worked uncredited on The Terminator. He’d later be responsible for writing the Judge Dredd script. Oh well. This script was written in just seven weeks.

So we’ve got a script, now do we have a cast? Oh yes. Schwarzenegger is obviously back and so is the only other individual that counts, Linda Hamilton. Robert Patrick is here as well. That’s the primary cast. (Remember we don’t do story lines here as one of you might not have seen it. I’ve seen it. It’s excellent.)

Now let’s talk budgets. The Terminator cost a shade over eight million to make. This film? We think that it cost at least thirteen times which comes out to just over a hundred million. Fortunately, it made so much money that I think they just stopped counting after a while as they only give an estimate, but over a half billion is definitely what it made plus somewhat more.

So the public loved it, but what did critics think of it? Most liked it. Some who, in my opinion of course, had an unhealthy attachment to the first didn’t.

Derek Malcolm of the U.K. based Guardian was typical of the reviewers who liked it: “Cameron has done an honourable and undoubtedly skilful job of tailoring his new film to the tastes of the times without too much sloppy compromise. He’s made a science fiction film with verve, imagination and even a little wit.”

On the other hand, we have Ralph Novak of People Magazine who sadly said, “Shamefully sadistic, achingly dull and totally predictable, it rehashes the far superior 1984 original.”

But let’s not forget our heroine. Alan Jones of Radio Times said about her in this film : “Linda Hamilton turns in another terrific performance as the fiercely committed heroine who puts a necessary human face on Cameron’s high-decibel mayhem and pyrotechnical bravura.”

(7) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater features monster party games.
Carpe Diem says it’s no fun waiting for evolution.
Rubes remembers a different Sixties Godzilla than you and me.

(8) THAT JAZZ-LOVING LOVECRAFT FAN. [Item by Steven French.] On the recommendation of my brother, I’ve been working my way through Andrew Hickey’s podcast “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”, which started in 2018. In episode 13, featuring “’Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean’ by Ruth Brown”, he mentions the important role played by one Willis Conover:

…Conover was a fascinating figure — he presented the jazz programme on Voice of America, the radio station that broadcast propaganda to the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, but by doing so he managed to raise the profile of many of the greatest jazz musicians of the time. He was also a major figure in early science fiction fandom — a book of his correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft is now available.

Conover was visiting the nightclub along with his friend Duke Ellington, and he was immediately impressed by Ruth Brown’s performance — impressed enough that he ran out to call Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson and tell them to sign her.

Ertegun and Abramson were the founders of Atlantic Records, a new record label which had started up only a couple of years earlier.

As a teenager Conover produced the fanzine Science Fantasy Correspondent and the book Hickey mentions was Lovecraft at Last.

Ruth Brown not only went on to have a number of hits in the 1950s and was eventually inducted into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame in the 1990s, but had a second career as an acclaimed musical actress, earning a Tony award for the musical Black and Blue.

(9) CLARKE-INSPIRED TV. “Star Trek Legend Jonathan Frakes to Direct New Sci-Fi Series” – CBR.com has the story.

…Per Variety, Frakes will produce and direct all six episodes of the new sci-fi series, Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime. The new show is based on the series of novels written by Paul Preuss, a collaborator of Clarke’s, which takes inspiration from characters and places from Clarke’s short stories. Preuss will also be involved as a consultant for the show. David Cormican and Dwayne Hill are set to executive produce and will serve as showrunners for the series. Production on the show is expected to begin near the end of the year.

Frakes, who is no stranger to directing science fiction, expressed his excitement for the project and his love for the series of novels. “When the materials for Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime were presented to me, I couldn’t help but devour them,” Frakes said. “When asked if I wanted to direct what I read —my answer was a resounding and immediate ‘Hell, yes!’ Working on such a tremendous piece of IP from the mind of another sci-fi legend (who is also a contemporary of the true #1 Gene Roddenberry), will be both an honor and a dream for me.”…

(10) THESE FEET ARE MADE FOR WALKIN’. NPR goes to find out how “The Bigfoot Festival draws thousands to West Virginia”.

This weekend, the tiny town of Sutton, W.V., population 840, is hosting about 20,000 people for its annual Bigfoot Festival. It’s a celebration of a mythical giant, hairy primate with – that’s right – big feet. Briana Heaney spoke to those still looking for the creature and others who just love the idea of it.

BRIANA HEANEY, BYLINE: Folklore is a pillar of Appalachian culture as much as banjos and quilts are. And in Sutton this weekend, it’s all about Bigfoot.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

HEANEY: Here in Sutton, the country store doubles as a Bigfoot museum. Laurel Petolicchio owns and runs it. Petolicchio has never seen Bigfoot, but she’s heard a lot of stories.

LAUREL PETOLICCHIO: I’ll have these big mountain men come into my counter, you know, of my little country store. And the one guy, I mean, slammed his hand down on the table, I mean, on my counter. And he’s like, you don’t believe this crap, do you? And I’m like, well, I kind of do. And he’s like, why? And I said, well, it’s the stories I hear. And it’s just – there’s so many of them. And then he leaned forward and he’s like, OK, can I tell you mine? I’m like, what? Like…

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. A new Deadpool & Wolverine trailer. Movie arrives in theaters on July 26.

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

Sneak Peek at Marvel & Disney: What If…? Donald Duck Became Wolverine #1

Posted on June 29, 2024 by Mike Glyer

This year marks the 90^th anniversary of Donald Duck’s as well as the 50^th anniversary of Wolverine, and in July, fans will be able to see both their sagas collide in a special comic book one-shot, Marvel & Disney: What If…? Donald Duck Became Wolverine #1! Today, fans can see all the covers for this highly-anticipated issue and check out some interior pages.

This first-of-its-kind mashup adventure will celebrate everything the world loves about both these pop culture legends from their heart and humor to their epic rage.

The comic will introduce Donald-Wolverine along with all sorts of reimagined Disney and Marvel mashups in a wild adventure inspired by one of Wolverine’s most memorable story arcs, Old Man Logan. In addition, the saga will revisit some of the greatest moments in Donald-Wolverine’s history including his time spent with Weapon X and the Uncanny X-Men!

Travel to the near future where chaos rules as Pete-Skull transforms Duckburg into a super-hero-less wasteland. Only Old Donald Duck can turn the tide, but he’s given up his battling days and prefers naps and his grandma’s apple pie over fighting villains. But when Mickey-Hawkeye comes knocking at the door with Goofy-Hulk at his side, Donald-Wolverine has to make a choice! Will a trip down memory lane change his mind to save the world? Or will the lure of the backyard hammock and a long nap keep him from popping his claws one last time?

On merging these two icons, writer Luca Barbieri said, “Donald Duck and Wolverine are two characters that seem almost impossible to make coexist, but in fact they possess very similar personality: they are both hot-tempered and unlucky, but in adversity they do not lose heart and always show that they have a big heart! Once this point was focused, writing the story turned out to be easy and fun!”

“I always thought Wolverine’s sideburns only looked good on Uncle Scrooge, but when I drew them on Donald Duck I realized they fit him perfectly too!” artist Giada Perissinotto added. “Those pointy head tufts and thick sideburns go well with his shaggy being. I had so much fun adapting Wolverine’s hair to Donald Duck that I would do him like this all the time now!”

See the variant covers and page art following the jump. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

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Sneak Peek at Marvel & Disney: What If…? Donald Duck Became Wolverine #1