25 (Light) Years To You, Space Family Robinson, Earworms Love You More Than Etaoin Shrdlu

Posted on April 26, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) CEMETERY DANCE KERFUFFLE HAS CONSEQUENCES. StokerCon today announced on Facebook a punitive action against small press Cemetery Dance in response to publisher Richard Chizmar’s exchange with an author who wrote to him seeking overdue royalties.

Due to recent information coming to light, Cemetery Dance will not be allowed to hear pitches during StokerCon. The Horror Writers Association stands up for the rights of its members, including the right to receive royalties as contracted, to have their works published as contracted, and to have its members treated with civility and respect. Cemetery Dance appears to be lacking in all of these areas.

Todd Keisling is the author whose experience at the hands of Cemetery Dance publisher Richard Chizmar led to HWA’s action. It seems he did finally get paid.

Screencaps of the exchanges were posted by Keisling in comments on Facebook after Chizmar doubled down on calling Todd a funny little man and then did a “dirty delete” of the comment.

Several authors have followed up with comments about having to dun Cemetery Dance for payment.

(2) MAURICE BROADDUS’ BOOKSHELF. Shelfies, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin, “Takes a unique peek each week into one of our contributors’ weird and wonderful bookshelves.” A recent entry was “Shelfies #33: Maurice Broaddus”. Photo at the link.

The why I do what I do shelf. This is the shelf of books that have inspired me or push me to do what I do. Futureland (Walter Mosley) was the first book that made me re-think my writing trajectory. When I read it, I thought to myself “we can do that?” It was the first sf book I read that had characters who looked like me, that had worldbuilding done through a different cultural lens….

(3) TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, CHAPTER 37. Victoria Strauss introduces Denise Beck-Clark’s writeup before turning over the microphone in “Guest Post: My Twenty-Four Hour Dream” at Writer Beware.

I’ve written many scam case studies and investigations on this blog, all of which reference and/or describe writers’ direct experiences (while protecting their identities, as Writer Beware always promises to do). But when the essay below landed in my inbox this week, it presented the perfect opportunity to offer a different perspective: a writer’s own first-person description of her encounter with a scammer.

The scam in question is an extremely common one: out-of-the-blue contact from someone claiming to be a well-known film producer/famous movie director/executive with a major production company supposedly eager to turn the writer’s book into a movie. The essay details all the typical elements of this often-elaborate fraud: praise and promises carefully calibrated to manipulate the writer’s hopes and dreams (and ego), contracts and other items that lend a veneer of authenticity, even a phone call from the famous director attached to the project! But also warning signs, which this writer didn’t ignore but too many writers do–such as American movie people speaking with strong foreign accents.

Denise Beck-Clark has kindly given me permission to use her name and bio (at the bottom of the post). Hopefully her experience will help other writers recognize and avoid this type of scam. (My favorite part of the story: when the scammer recommends using Writer Beware.)…

(4) JOSH ROUNTREE Q&A. “Nuts & Bolts: Author Josh Rountree on Transitioning From Short Stories to Novels” on the Horror Writers Association blog.

Q: How is writing a novel different from writing short fiction?

A: I don’t think there’s one perfect answer for this, but in general I think short stories and novels require us to access different parts of our writer brains.

Being a short story writer, my brain is always telling me to tighten, tighten, tighten. Leave nothing in the story that’s not important to character, advancing plot, etc. You try to make every sentence you write do double duty.

When I transitioned to working on a novel, I felt that same instinct, and I had to remind myself that it’s okay to let things breath. I can go deeper into the characters, their personal stories, and figure out who these people are on a deeper level. I still want every sentence to work hard, advancing the story and building the character, but I can be a bit more leisurely about it.

Some people are skilled at one form and not the other. I think I’m one of them. Short stories come easily to me, but novels are much more challenging. I wrote a half dozen novels that will never see the light of day, for good reason. Books that I thought were wonderful at the time, but with hindsight I can see they’re a mess. As much as I love short story writing, I did want to prove to myself I could write a novel, but the process became discouraging with each new failure.

Finally, I decided to split the difference and see if I could write a novella. I told myself it was really nothing more than a longer short story. I was consciously trying to trick myself, and ultimately it worked.

(5) ALEXANDER SKARSGÅRD Q&A. There are four Murderbot questions near the end: “Alexander Skarsgård: The Empire Interview” at Empire Online.

How did you approach that evolution, of portraying a machine that is becoming a bit more human?

Ironically, I found Murderbot more relatable than most characters I’ve ever played.

(6) NEW AI COPYRIGHT SUIT. “Publisher of PCMag and Mashable Sues OpenAI” reports the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.) “Ziff Davis, which owns more than 45 media properties, is accusing the tech company of infringing on the publisher’s copyrights and diluting its trademarks.”

… In a 62-page complaint filed in federal court in Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, Ziff Davis says the tech company has “intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of Ziff Davis works,” infringing on the publisher’s copyrights and diluting its trademarks. It claims that OpenAI used Ziff Davis content to train its artificial intelligence models and generate responses through its popular ChatGPT chatbot.

“OpenAI has taken each of these steps knowing that they violate Ziff Davis’s intellectual property rights and the law,” the complaint says.

The company is seeking at least hundreds of millions of dollars in its lawsuit, according to two people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for OpenAI said in a statement that its models were “grounded in fair use,” referring to the legal standard for use of copyrighted material….

(7) COLONEL MUSTARD IN THE MOVIE THEATER WITH THE CASH REGISTER. CrimeReads says it’s time to praise this 1985 movie: “The Clues, the Clueless, and the Critics: Appreciating Clue” at CrimeReads.

…[It] is this latter element of the film (the board game come to life) that all its contemporary critics found both equally vexing and ingenious. The film, written and directed by Johnathan Lynn, features three different endings. Three different outcomes to the mystery, just as is possible in the board game. There is no motive in the board game, so one must be supplied for the film to have any meaning. That is, if it strives for meaning. It doesn’t. Instead, it embraces the randomness of a shuffled card deck, offering three random endings that might satisfy the clues in the story as well as the next.

This is what Ebert in referencing in the aforementioned quote, the start of his review of the film—an element that, on its own, he found brilliant. “The way Paramount is handling its multiple endings,” he wrote, “is ingenious. They’re playing each of the endings in a third of the theaters where the movie is booked. If this were a better movie, that might mean you’d have to drive all over town and buy three tickets to see all the endings.” He concludes, though, “[w]ith ‘Clue,’ though, one ending is more than enough.”

But he was correct in finding creative merit in this aspect of Clue. Writing in 2021, the scholar Milan Terlunen noted that “Clue lays bare the inner workings of all detective stories. Clue‘s multiple endings aren’t just a clever cinematic translation of the board game’s structure — they reveal something crucial about the nature of clues in general.” He goes on to explain that the very point of “solving” a mystery is “the process of distinguishing clues from red herrings… [t]here’s always too much evidence in a detective story, which fits beautifully with the general too-muchness of Clue.”…

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 26, 2010 — Iron Man II

Fifteen years ago the sequel to the highly successful and quite popular Iron Man se premiered in select markets before opening nationwide on May 7.

Titled just Iron Man 2, it was directed by Jon Favreau who had done the first film, and written by Justin Theroux, who had not done the first film (which had been written by a committee of Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway. Hey it worked, didn’t it?) The first film got nominated for a Hugo at Anticipation.

Iron Man 2 premiered at the El Capitan Theatre, a fully restored movie palace in Hollywood. This theater and the adjacent Hollywood Masonic Temple (which are now known as the El Capitan Entertainment Centre) are owned by the Disney Company and serve as the venue for a majority of the Disney film premieres.

Although fandom is very fond of saying it did substantially worse than the first film at the box office that’s a lie as it actually did better. Iron Man did five hundred and eighty million against one hundred and forty million in costs, whereas this film took in six hundred and thirty million against the same production costs.

So how was it received by critics at the time? Anthony Lane at the New Yorker liked it better than its competitors Spider-Man and Superman: “To find a comic-book hero who doesn’t agonize over his supergifts, and would defend his constitutional right to get a kick out of them, is frankly a relief.”

Roger Ebert writing for the Chicago Sun-Tribune was impressed: “Iron Man 2 is a polished, high-octane sequel, not as good as the original but building once again on a quirky performance by Robert Downey Jr.”

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a rather good seventy-two percent rating.

It is of course streaming where all things Marvel are which is Disney+. I am going to have to subscribe, aren’t I?

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Birdbrains chooses super teams.
Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee tries the find out part of time travel.
Cornered finds value on sale.
Fowl Language can’t get credit for having a trait in common with a superhero.
Off the Mark fears a tangled danger.
Pearls Before Swine takes advice for improving a script.
Speed Bump brings work home.

(10) ANTI-RULES. Karl K. Gallagher has done an interesting thought experiment on X:

(11) BATTLING THE BLAHS. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s Luke Holland considers the declining fortunes of assorted TV ‘super-franchises’ and comes up with some radical suggestions for reviving their fortunes: “May the force be with you! How to save every tired TV superfranchise, from Star Wars to Game of Thrones”.

It’s amazing to think that, not so very long ago, people were actually excited at the prospect of a new Star Wars show. Or when it emerged that a fresh Lord of the Rings saga was, through some kind of Gandalfian wizardry, being squeezed on to the small screen, the reaction was one of giddy awe. Even the faintest whisper of another trip to Hogwarts would have set the whole internet ablaze. And now? Well, here’s a test: there’s a new Harry Potter series coming out soon. How does that make you feel? Exactly.

There’s no doubt about it – a worrying number of what used to be the world’s most untouchable franchises are in trouble. But how did they arrive at this point of terminal audience ennui? And is there any route for them back into our hearts?

(12) TATOOINE-ALIKE. “Rare exoplanet orbits twin stars in ‘Star Wars’-like twist” reports Phys.org.

Astronomers have discovered a planet that orbits at a 90-degree angle around a rare pair of strange stars—a real-life ‘twist’ on the fictional twin suns of Star Wars hero Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine.

The exoplanet, named 2M1510 (AB) b, orbits a pair of young brown dwarfs—objects bigger than gas-giant planets but too small to be proper stars. Only the second pair of eclipsing brown dwarfs known—this is the first exoplanet found on a right-angled path to the orbit of its two host stars.

An international team of researchers led by the University of Birmingham made the surprise discovery using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The brown dwarfs produce eclipses of one another, as seen from Earth, making them part of an “eclipsing binary.”

Publishing their discovery in Science Advances, the researchers note that this is the first time such strong evidence for a “polar planet” orbiting a stellar pair has been collected.

Thomas Baycroft, a Ph.D. student at the University of Birmingham who led the study commented, “I’m particularly excited to be involved in detecting credible evidence that this configuration exists.’…

(13) TRAILER PARK. “Love Death + Robots Volume 4”. Extreming May 15 on Netflix.

The Emmy-winning anthology of twisted tales from strange worlds returns, with stories featuring MrBeast and the Red Hot Chili Peppers

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

Pixel Scroll 3/21/25 Listen: There’s A Hell Of A Good Scroll Next Door; Let’s Go

Posted on March 21, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) SLAIN ISRAELI HOSTAGE SFF COLLECTION UP FOR AUCTION. Going by the photo, there’s a lot of David Weber and other Baen authors in the stacks. “Tel Aviv store to auction slain hostage Nadav Popplewell’s sci-fi book collection” – The Times of Israel has details.

A collection of several hundred science fiction and fantasy books owned by slain British-Israeli hostage Nadav Popplewell is to go up for auction on Sunday, with the proceeds going to the families of hostages held in the Gaza Strip.

The collection is being offered in an online sale from the Green Brothers bookstore in Tel Aviv.

Ilai Green, who owns the store along with his twin brother Alon-Lee, told The Times of Israel that there are some 700 volumes in the library gathered by avid reader Popplewell.

A collection of several hundred science fiction and fantasy books owned by slain British-Israeli hostage Nadav Popplewell is to go up for auction on Sunday, with the proceeds going to the families of hostages held in the Gaza Strip.

The auction is to be held online via the Bidspirit website on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. Israel time, with a starting bid of $500. Proceeds will go to the families of hostages held by terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

Nadav Popplewell, 51, was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from Kibbutz Nirim on October 7, 2023, along with his mother, Channah Peri.

His brother, Roi, was murdered the same day in the kibbutz during the Hamas-led onslaught, when over 5,000 terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting 251 to the Gaza Strip.

Channah was released from captivity six weeks later.

.. Green told The Times of Israel that a volunteer in the kibbutz recently contacted the store and said that Popplewell’s library was available. Green said he understood that the offer was being made with the blessing of Popplewell’s family and that the kibbutz needed to find somewhere for the books after it cleared out his home.

Under the impression that there would be no more than “a few crates of books,” Green described his surprise when the collection arrived.

“I didn’t know how many there were until they brought in crates and crates,” he recalled….

(2) MARCON COMES TO AN END. Dale Mazzola announced on Facebook today that Marcon is closing. Mazzola is chair of the nonprofit corporation, SOLAE, that hosts Marcon. The Columbus, OH sff convention, so far as available history shows, was last held in 2023.

Yes, The Marcon Science Fiction and Fantasy convention is closing.

I hated deciding that and writing that out really hurts. There were many reasons behind that statement. What the decision came down to was based off a couple of factors, Primarily, expenses, which included hotel, expenses, storage and supply costs have all gone up. Additionally, memberships are down across the board for fan run regional conventions.

SOLAE is a 501c3 that is the owner of the Marcon trade name, Marcon was/is an event organized through SOLAE. While we were still getting memberships to Marcon there were not enough to maintain it.

Going forth we are doing the following;

First, we are getting an inventory of our current assets and equipment looking towards offering it up for sales to other events and conventions. So, if you know of other events or conventions in need of equipment, please feel free to have them reach out to me at dale.mazzola@solaecons.org for inventory info.

Second, I will be reaching out to the hotels we have used in the past to work out any remaining bills we owe to them.

Third, if we are unable to reach an agreement with our creditors, I will engage with a Lawyer to see what our options are.

Regarding the Shed and its inventory, we will be able to maintain it until May 31st of 2025, After that we will see what happens. I’m hoping that we can get enough of the large equipment that is taking up about 50% of the space removed and we will condense down to a smaller unit.

(3) WRITER BEWARE. Victoria Strauss hears about “Author Complaints at Clear Fork Press” at Writer Beware. Full details at the link.

In early February, author Vanessa Keel published a long, cautionary blog post about her experience with one small publisher. It was not a happy tale: an absent editor, little marketing support, a non-standard wholesale discount that discouraged bookseller orders, problems with royalty statements and payments, and much more. The result: few sales, crushing disappointment, and, ultimately, a rights reversion.

Vanessa didn’t name the publisher, but she did mention the title of her book. So it was easy to confirm that the publisher in question was Clear Fork Press (CFP), a children’s book publisher that publishes under four imprints: Spork, Blue Whale Press (formerly an independent publisher, acquired by CFP in 2020), &MG, and Rise. Per Amazon, CFP has a catalog of around 150 titles, most released via the Spork imprint (though you’d never know it from looking at the CFP website–more on that below)….

… I don’t generally write about publishers based on one complaint: it can be difficult to know whether the complaint represents a pattern or a single bad experience, something that can happen even in the best of circumstances. I kept the 2018 complaint on file, as I do all complaints I receive, assuming that if there were wider problems, other reports would follow.

They did–though it took a while. Over the past few months, I’ve heard from multiple CFP authors and illustrators who report problems similar to those identified by the 2018 complainant and also by Vanessa Keel….

(4) ANOTHER UNEXPECTED MENTION OF PULP SF. [Item by Rich Horton.] This one is weirder and WAY less respectable than C. L. Moore!

Richard Shaver (yes, of “Shaver Mystery” fame, from Ray Palmer’s Amazing in the 1940s) gets written up in The Paris Review: “’A Threat to Mental Health’: How to Read Rocks”.

Richard Sharpe Shaver, born 1907 in Berwick, Pennsylvania, became a national sensation in the forties with his dramatic accounts of a highly advanced civilization that inhabited Earth in prehistoric times. An itinerant Midwesterner, he’d been employed as a landscape gardener, a figure model for art classes, and a welder at Henry Ford’s original auto plant. He gained public attention as a writer who asserted that descendants of those early beings still live in hidden underground cities, where they wield terrifying technology capable of controlling thoughts. Many readers agreed with Shaver, and a splashy controversy ensued.

Public fascination with his writings subsided during the fifties, but Shaver continued searching for evidence of a great bygone civilization. In about 1960, while living in rural Wisconsin, Shaver formulated a hypothesis that would captivate him for the balance of his life: some stones are ancient books, designed and fabricated by people of the remote past using technology that surpasses anything known today. He identified complex pictorial content in these “rock books.” Images reveal themselves at every angle and every level of magnification and are layered throughout each rock. Graphic symbols and lettering also appear in what he called “the most fascinating exhibition of virtuosity in art existent on earth.”

Frustrated that the equipment needed to fully decipher the dense rock books was lost to time, Shaver undertook strategies to make at least a fraction of the books’ content clearly visible. Initially, he made drawings and paintings of images he found in the rocks, developing idiosyncratic techniques to project a slice of rock onto cardboard or a wooden plank. Shaver also produced conventional black-and-white photos using 35 mm film, often showing a cross section of rock alongside a ruler or a coin to indicate scale. Sometimes he highlighted imagery by hand coloring the prints with felt pens. He attached photos to typewriter paper where he added commentary: he describes the rock books, interprets images, details his photo techniques, and expresses disappointment at the conspicuous lack of academic or journalistic interest in his findings…

(5) BUGS OR FEATURE? The Guardian’s Ben Child asks, “Is Hollywood really going to ditch the anti-fascist satire in its Starship Troopers remake?”.

If there is a modern day equivalent in Hollywood to Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, he or she must be hiding in the nearest underground space bunker, desperately praying that irony makes a comeback. Verhoeven arrived at a time when transgressive “video nasties” were just fading into irrelevance, a period in which filmgoers were just as likely to head to the cinemas for schlocky thrills as they were for biting sci-fi allegory. With films such as 1987’s RoboCop, 1990’s Total Recall and 1997’s Starship Troopers, Verhoeven managed to combine a high-energy, hyper-kinetic thrust that has rarely been achieved since. He remains one of the most subversive and controversial film-makers of his generation – which is why it’s so depressing that Hollywood keeps churning out substandard remakes of his best work….

… Studios have been trying to rework this thing since at least 2016. The latest attempt, according to the Hollywood Reporter, will see District 9’s Neill Blomkamp, once the coming man of sci-fi, taking the reins.

You might think that Blomkamp, with his flair for gritty dystopia and penchant for socially conscious sci-fi carnage, would be the perfect film-maker to reignite the spirit of gleeful nihilism that infected Verhoeven’s best work from the 80s and 90s. And you wouldn’t be far off, except that studio Sony, AKA Columbia Pictures, appears to have decided (according to reports) that the only way to bring this one back to the big screen is to jettison the subversive tone and instead lean in to the Riefenstahlian chest-thumping militarism of the original source novel by Heinlein.

Is this the legacy of Trump’s return to power infecting Hollywood boardrooms in 2025? Have the studios really decided that the smartest way to reboot Starship Troopers is to just go all in on the laser-soaked Nazi space opera vibes? Heinlein’s 1959 novel is all about a society in which people need to get battling the alien space bugs that are threatening Earth quick sharp or face a future without voting rights, basic human dignity or the faintest hint of a social safety net – because nothing says “civic duty” quite like strapping on a flamethrower and mowing down intergalactic cockroaches to prove you’re worthy of democracy. It’s hard not to imagine Verhoeven wondering how his cynical parody of militaristic nationalism ended up being remade as a sincere recruitment video for totalitarian space marines.

Moreover, why get Blomkamp involved if this is the plan? Is he really the right director to helm a fascist fantasy epic when his entire career has been built on scrappy, anti-establishment sci-fi that makes you want to riot against the nearest dystopian overlord? …

(6) SAY IT AIN’T SO! Grammaticus Books is highly peeved about the proposed remake for rather different reasons: “IS SONY Studios about to DESECRATE HEINLEIN?!?!”

A rant about Sony Studios plan to remake the Robert A. Heinlein’s seminal science fiction novel, Starship Troopers. For the first time since Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers, Sony will reboot the franchise with their new director Neil Blomkamp. But will they desecrate the memory of Heinlein by painting Starship Troopers as a pro-fascist book?!?!

(7) IF NOBODY SEES AN APPLE TV+ SHOW DROP… [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian also wonders: “Big stars, little shine: is anyone actually watching Apple TV+ shows?” Despite Severance, Apple TV is in trouble, apparently.

…According to the Information, TV+ is currently the only Apple subscription service that isn’t profitable. This is said to be down to a number of factors. The first is that despite having 45 million subscribers, Apple blows through a $5bn production budget every year. And when a lot of it is being spent on blockbuster movies that squander every scrap of their potential – like the $200m spy disaster Argylle – then all this expense starts to look like bad financial sense. The report claims Apple TV+ is losing $1bn annually.

Another factor is that despite all those subscribers, very few people actually seem to watch anything on Apple TV+. The Information reports that Apple shows constitute less than 1% of total US streaming service viewing. In other words, while an Apple subscription ($8.99 a month) might be half the price of a Netflix subscription ($17.99 a month), people still watch eight times more Netflix than they do Apple….

(8) SAFE HABOR DESTINED TO END? “Bipartisan Effort to Sunset the ‘26 Words That Created the Internet’ Is on the Way” reports Gizmodo.

Section 230, the linchpin law that has dictated how online platforms have been regulated for decades, appears destined to come to an end. According to The Information, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and Republican Lindsey Graham are planning to introduce a new bill that will set an expiration date for the law and encourage tech companies to offer alternatives as to what should replace it.

Per The Information, the bill could be introduced as early as Monday, March 24, and is expected to have bipartisan support from Republicans Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn and Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and Amy Klobuchar, who are reportedly ready to co-sponsor the bill. It’s also a modified version of a proposal made last year in the House by Republican Cathy Rodgers and Democrat Frank Pallone, Jr., so there is some juice for this thing throughout Congress. The proposal would effectively sunset Section 230, setting January 1, 2027, as a drop-dead date for the law that so many tech companies have leaned on to duck legal challenges.

The gambit that Durbin and Graham appear to be attempting is to force tech companies to the table and talk about Section 230 alternatives. By setting a deadline, the message is basically, “Come help us write the replacement law or lose this protection in its entirety.” The latter should be basically an intolerable outcome for tech firms, as it would leave them extremely exposed to legal challenges.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, as it stands, essentially grants companies legal immunity from being held legally liable for the content posted on their platforms by users. It is often referred to as the “26 words that created the internet” because it created a framework for user-generated content. But its legal protection of companies has come under fire from both major political parties for very different reasons.

Democrats have come after Section 230 for allowing Big Tech companies to be derelict in their duties to remove harmful and hateful content, falling short of the “Good Samaritan” standard of good faith moderation. Scrutiny from the left turned up during the COVID pandemic when misinformation was rampant on platforms like Facebook and some Democrats wanted the company to do more to address the issue. Republicans, meanwhile want Section 230 repealed because they believe tech companies have been overzealous in removing content and think their viewpoints have been “censored.” It’s here where you can see the cracks start forming in this bipartisan effort….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 21, 1968 — Planet of The Apes film

On this day in the United Kingdom fifty-six years ago, Planet of The Apes premiered. It was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. The screenplay was by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling and was based loosely upon Pierre Boulle‘s La Planète des Singes.

It starred Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, James Whitmore, James Daly and Linda Harrison. Roddy McDowall had a long-running relationship with this series, appearing in four of the original five films (absent only from the second film of the series, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, in which he was replaced by David Watson in the role of Cornelius, no idea why as I can’t find the reasoning), and also in the television series.

I never saw the TV series. I don’t know why as it must’ve been shown on reruns eventually. So how was it? As good as the films? Well, the early films. I didn’t think they held up that well as they went along.

It was met with critical acclaim and is widely regarded as a classic film and one of the best films of that year. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said that it was “much better than I expected it to be. It is quickly paced, completely entertaining, and its philosophical pretensions don’t get in the way.” And Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times exclaimed that it was, “A triumph of artistry and imagination, it is at once a timely parable and a grand adventure on an epic scale.”

It did exceedingly well at the box office costing less than six million to make and making more than thirty million in its first year of screening. One dollar in 1968 is equivalent in purchasing power to about nine dollars now, so that’s been a very successful film!

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it an eighty-six percent rating with over a hundred thousand watchers having expressed an opinion!

Most of the later Planet of the Apes films are streaming somewhere, on Disney + or Hulu mostly but not this. Nor Beneath the Planet of The Apes or Conquest of the Planet of The Apes which are out on DVD as it is. I’ve got a suspicion that streaming rights were never negotiated on these and apparently can’t be.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bob the Angry Flower explains action scenes.
Brewster Rockit learns the staff must answer the official question, “What did you do last week?”
Brewster Rockit goes with his second draft.
Brewster Rockit adds Vader’s explanation.
Reality Check tries to Bat-upgrade.
Rubes conveys Yoda’s dietary advice.
Calvin and Hobbes from 1995 has a tinge of sff to it.
A cartoon from The New Yorker explains why business is bad.

(11) THE BIONIC WOMAN. “50 Years Ago, One Iconic Sci-Fi Show Sneakily Launched a Much Better Spinoff” at Inverse.

Today, the idea of secret cyborgs may sound like the set-up for the villains in a sci-fi show or movie, but in the 1970s, secret cyborgs were superheroes. Starting in 1973 with The Six Million Dollar Man, the titular hero was rebuilt with cyber-strength following a near-fatal NASA flight test crash. As former astronaut Steven Austin, Lee Majors starred as the titular man who was now worth $6 million thanks to all of his bionic enhancements. Based on the 1972 Martin Caidin novel Cyborg, the series was a hit for ABC. But, arguably, its best development didn’t come until two years later, when The Six Million Dollar Man launched a backdoor pilot for an even better cyborg show: The Bionic Woman.

Fifty years ago, on March 16, 1975, The Six Million Dollar Man dropped a two-parter called “The Bionic Woman,” which was destined to be its own ongoing sci-fi TV series. And, in terms of quality and staying power, the eponymous Bionic Woman herself, Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) became, over the decades, a much bigger deal. Mild spoilers ahead.

Just like her high school sweetheart Steve, Jamie also suffers a huge accident, this time involving skydiving, which leads to her bionic enhancements. Although these kinds of ‘70s and ‘80s soft sci-fi shows might seem fairly wholesome now, nearly all of them (like Knight Rider) had grisly origin stories for their heroes, which again, feels closer to supervillain origin stories in other contexts. Arguably, all of these tropes are deeply ableist now, but what made Jamie Sommers so important was that unlike other female-led action shows of the era (Charlie’s Angels debuted in 1976) she wasn’t a seductress, or scantily clad in order to be awesome…

(12) THE STARS MY PUNCTUATION. “Thunderbolts* Director Addresses What The Asterisk Means While Florence Pugh Reveals She Actually Knows” at ScreenRant. And at File 770 Mike Glyer reveals he doesn’t really care.

The mysterious asterisk in Thunderbolts* continues to dominate the conversation about the next MCU movie, and in the lead-up to its release, director Jake Schreier and actress Florence Pugh have teased what they know. It isn’t long before answers to all the mysteries surrounding Thunderbolts* are revealed as the movie nears its May 2 release date. Until then, fans can only speculate over how the titular team will deal with the challenge of the Void in the apparent absence of the comparatively more powerful Avengers…

(13) WHEN FAILURE WAS AN OPTION. “In event of moon disaster: ‘The speech that never was’”. The BBC’s Witness History tells about the speech that – fortunately – didn’t have to be delivered.

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.”

These are the opening lines of the ‘In Event of Moon Disaster’ speech, written in 1969 in case the moon landing astronauts did not make it home.

They were composed by President Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, William Safire, who died in 2009, at the age of 79.

The speech continued: “These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.”

Using archive from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and NASA, Vicky Farncombe tells the story of “the speech that never was”.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/9/25 Scrollopoly: Do Not Stalk Gods, Do Not Collect 200 Zorkmids

Posted on March 9, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) LADY GAGA PROMISES NOT TO DO JOKER 3 ON SNL. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] During the opening monologue on last night’s Saturday Night Live, Lady Gaga showed a sense of humor about winning a Razzie Award. “‘SNL’: Lady Gaga Mocks ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ for Winning Worst Sequel Razzie Award” in The Hollywood Reporter.

Lady Gaga kicked off her Saturday Night Live episode with some jokes about her movie Joker: Folie à Deux.

“Anyway, I’m an actor now,” the Oscar and Grammy winner says during her opening monologue before quipping, “I select films that would showcase my craft as a serious actor, films such as Joker 2. Apparently, people thought it was awesome. Joaquin [Phoenix] and I even got nominated for a Razzie, which is an award for the worst films of the year. So we won worst onscreen duo.”

She continues, “But jokes on them. I love winning things. My Razzie brings me one step closer to an EGORT. It’s like an EGOT, but it’s hurtful.”

Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to 2019’s Oscar-winning Joker, was nominated for seven Razzies after bombing at the box office last year. The movie ultimately won the Razzies for worst screen combo of Phoenix and Gaga and worst sequel.

Lady Gaga later adds, “Tonight, I promise to act, to sing and to not do Joker 3.”…

(2) REPURPOSED MINE HOSTS CON. Cora Buhlert attended a retro comic/toy/gaming con in the town of Dorsten in the Ruhrgebiet. The venue was a former coal mine and really cool. She took lots of photos, and wrote a three-part blog post about it.

A closer look at the row of chains in the washing hall of the Fürst Leopold mine. Also note the bench running along the curtain of chains. These benches were now used by exhausted con goers to sit down.

(3) NEUKOM AWARDS TAKING ENTRIES. Play submissions are open for the 2025 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards through May 1.

The Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College is accepting play submissions for the 2025 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards.

The seventh annual Neukom Award for Playwriting will consider full-length plays and other full-length works for the theater that address the question “What does it mean to be a human in a computerized world?”

Playwrights with either traditional or experimental theater pieces, including multimedia productions, are encouraged to submit works to the award program.

The award comes with a $5,000 honorarium as well as a week-long workshop and public reading produced by Northern Stage (https://northernstage.org/) in early 2026.

Works that have already received a full production are not eligible for the competition.

The deadline for all submissions is May 1, 2025 at 5pm. The award will be announced in the fall of 2025.

(4) WITHOUT EXCEPTION. Steve J. Wright is quite taken with the Starship Troopers motto “Everybody works, everybody fights.” The new US Secretary of Defense sounds like he is, too. But how does it work out in practice? “Marching on Its Stomach”.

…(There is no response from behind the door, but, nearby, a small hatch opens in the deck, and a STOKER‘s head pops out. The STOKER is a small man, dressed in coveralls like the PILOT, but much grimier.)

STOKER: Oi! What’s all the noise about? You stop that or you’ll wake the ship’s cat – besides, the head stoker’s got a hangover, he doesn’t want all this racket.

PILOT: Sorry, I – wait a minute, since when do starships have stokers?

STOKER: Since Rebel Moon: The Scargiver, that’s since when.

PILOT: … Whatever. Look, I’ve got a delivery here for the MI, and I can’t get a peep out of them. Called them on the radio, tried the intercom, nothing.

STOKER: The Mobile Infantry? Well, you’re out of luck there, mate, you’ll have to wait. They’re out.

PILOT: What do you mean, they’re out?

STOKER: Call to action, innit? Soon as they get that, they get into their little capsules and off they pop, down to the planet, kicking some E.T. arse….

(5) TARGET RICH ENVIRONMENT. Victoria Strauss asks, “Are Writers Uniquely Vulnerable to Scams?” at Writer Beware.

This is a question that sometimes comes up when I do interviews. Writer Beware has been in operation for more than 25 years, yet it’s still so busy. There seem to be so many scams that target authors. Are writers somehow more vulnerable to fraud than other creatives?

In my opinion, no.

Writing scams aren’t unique. There are similar frauds in every creative industry. Headshot scams for models. Talent agency scams for actors. Representation scams for illustrators. Pay-to-play venues for musicians and artists. They may not be as numerous as writing scams, but they are widespread, and they use the same tricks and techniques to lure and ensnare victims.

Why are there so many writing scams, then?

Because (again in my opinion) there are so many writers.

Other creative pursuits have boundaries and requirements that create bars to entry. Musicians need training, not to mention instruments. Actors and singers may have limited venues in which to practice their craft: there isn’t a casting call around every corner. Painters and sculptors need often-costly materials. Models must conform to various standards of physical appearance–much broader these days than in the past, but still restrictive.

But writing: writing is just words. Everyone has those. If you can speak, you can write, and all you need to follow your impulse is an idea and a computer, or pen and paper if you prefer….

(6) NO PRESSURE. [Item by Steven French.] A nice idea! “Silence please: how book clubs without the chat help focus the mind” in the Guardian.

It’s commuter hour on a late-summer morning and the sun is still stretching through the leafy canopy of Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens. In the cool, concrete sanctuary of MPavilion – the city’s annual architecture installation/event space/public shelter – a small group of people sit reading. Some recline on beanbags, some perch on stools; others lean against the fluted concrete wall, breeze running through their hair. For close to an hour, nobody speaks; they just read.

This is Silent Book Club, where there is no required book list, no entry fee, no organised discussion. Just reading, quietly, in company.

Billed as “book clubs for introverts”, Silent Book Club was started in 2012 when a couple of friends in San Francisco felt traditional book clubs involved too much pressure – to read a particular book in a certain amount of time, to “have something smart to say” – so they started their own kind of club, where neither was required. Silent book clubs have become global since then, with chapters opening on every continent….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

The Return of Captain Nemo series (1978)

Forty-seven years ago this weekend, The Return of Captain Nemo aired on CBS. It was, need I say, based quite loosely off Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The three-part series was one hundred eighty minutes long; a very much truncated theatrical version was released overseas, The Amazing Captain Nemo, running only one hundred two minutes.

Now the series was originally planned as run four sixty-minute episodes but CBS changed its mind and at the last moment told Allen that it’d be three instead.

It was written by a lot of screenwriters which included Robert Bloch. Robert Bloch and his fellow writers fleshed out producer Irwin Allen’s premise that after a century of being in suspended animation, Nemo is revived in modern times for new adventures.

It was intended as the pilot for a new series which didn’t happen obviously, another project by Irwin Allen widely considered as an attempt to follow-up on the success of his Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea series. A series didn’t happen. It was his last attempt to produce a series.

It had a very large cast but, in my opinion, the only performer that you need to know about is José Ferrer as Captain Nemo. He made a rather magnificent if very, very hammy one. Of course, a few years later he’d get to chew on scenery again in Dune where plays Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. And oh, did he chew it up there as well. I still like that film not matter how bad it really is, or is it?

Nemo was aired over three nights with Bloch writing the final script of the finale. That episode which initially co-written with Larry Alexander is titled “Atlantis Dead Ahead”.

Later the miniseries would get condensed as I noted previously, rather choppily as reviewers criticized, into a film called The Return of Captain Nemo which generated one of the best review comments: “Best line in the film was when Hallick says Captain Nemo was a figure of fiction, and Ferrer says that Jules Verne was a biographer as well as a science fiction writer. From there get set for some ham a la mode.”

So, let’s let IGN have the final word: “If one comes to an Irwin Allen-produced adventure seeking a thoughtful, challenging film, they’ve come to wrong place.”

Need I say that is still under copyright by Paramount, so any copies at YouTube and elsewhere are illegally there and therefore links to them will be immediately assigned to the deepest ocean?

It is not, as near as I can tell, streaming anywhere.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Alley Oop discovers an alien can’t keep his story straight.
Brevity finds a monster’s snack.
Brewster Rockit corrects the clock.
Frank and Ernest are misled by book titles.
Luann has a nightmare.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal describes the end of the world.

(9) A RECENT MONGOLIAN TRANSLATION. [Item by Mikael Thompson.] You should be pleased by this: a recent Mongolian translation of Ray Bradbury’s Machineries of Joy. Here’s the cover and the table of contents.

(10) FREE AUDIO STORIES. Listen to George Clayton Johnson read his stories “The Hornet” and “Your Three Minutes Are Up” at the Lott W. Brantley III and Associates Motion Picture Literary Management website.

(11) POP PARODY. From eight years ago, but it might be news to you: “Jedi Jedi (Louie Louie parody)”.

(12) VIDEOS OF THE DAY. “Brian Keene’s Secret Histories: Running With the Devil”.

In this series, I’ve been going through my books in chronological order, and talking about their origins — where I got the idea, how it was written, what was going on in my life at the time, how the public responded to the book, what positive or negative impact it had on my career (if any), and other factors. This week, I focus on IN DELIRIUM and RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/2/25 Don Simpson And The Escaped Typos

Posted on February 2, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) FANTASY TAKES CENTER STAGE. The Guardian’s “Bookmarks” newsletter says, “Fantasy appears to be having a ‘moment’ (quite a long one as it happens)”

“Increasingly fantasy has moved more from the fringes towards the centre”, with a rise in writers operating in the genre, says Irenosen Okojie, who founded the afrofuturist festival Black to the Future and whose books include Curandera.

Why is the genre thriving? Readers “need escapism right now in ways that truly speak to our imagination”, says Okojie, and they “like these richly imaginative worlds that explore our lived experiences in dynamic, transformative ways”. Fantasy is also “invested in projecting how worlds different from our own might flourish”, says Matthew Sangster, a professor of romantic studies, fantasy and cultural history at the University of Glasgow.

However, even though the “success of the likes of George RR Martin and Nnedi Okorafor” show fantasy is a “thriving space”, says Okojie, it “always has been”: look at the likes of Ursula K Le Guin and Samuel R Delany.

George Sandison, managing editor at Titan Books – which publishes VE Schwab and Veronica Roth – agrees. Though he often hears that a particular genre is “having a moment”, when it comes to fantasy, he feels as though “that moment has lasted my entire career in fiction, my entire life before that, and for the countless generations required to produce all the work that lit up my brain as a child!”

Fantasy “is arguably at the root of all literature”, he says – even Virginia Woolf. Every work of fiction “imagines a whole new reality”, fantasy “just has a lot more fun with those mental images, turning them into dragons and talking cats, giving them magic powers, and breaking them free of our planet’s geography”. He sees the publishing industry’s categorisations of fantasy as simply telling readers what metaphors and tropes to expect, “to try to sell more books”….

(2) CTHULHU IS ON THE LINE. Christopher Lockett, in “China Miéville and the Banality of Weird”, has a Lovecraft quote from almost a century ago that is still capable of launching discussions:

…Once again, the best articulation of this premise is the opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu,” which functions as about as perfect a Lovecraftian mission statement as you’ll find:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (139)”

To be fair to Lovecraft, he was writing in the 1920s and 30s, and he died before the outbreak of WWII. He wrote during the post-WWI crisis of spirit and the more general collapse of faith in such prewar verities as the invariably positive nature of scientific and technological progress. His work shares the alienation and disillusion present in the critical mass of modernism, alongside its often desperate pursuit of meaning in arcana.³ His fascination with and nominal devotion to science, along with his militant atheism, coexisted with his figurations of occultism in a manner entirely consonant with the historical moment: science and technology shorn of utopianism by the horrors of the Western Front, seeming to hint at vaster horrors beyond human ken.

In that respect he was not wrong: the war he didn’t live to see ended in the unthinkable. The Holocaust and Hiroshima would seem to represent the “terrifying vistas of reality” warned of in the passage above and allegorized by such Old Gods as Cthulhu and his monstrous kin. But if those unthinkable events have shown us anything, it’s the basic flaw of Lovecraft’s premise: far from going “mad from the revelation” or fleeing “from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age,” humanity has demonstrated instead an apparently bottomless capacity to make the unthinkable thinkable. Indeed—with the benefit of time, self-rationalization, mythologization, and a massive dose of delusional euphemism—to render the unthinkable banal….

(3) OLD SCAM, NEWLY HATCHED. Victoria Strauss warns about “USA Pen Press: The Ghostwriting Scam of a Thousand Websites” at Writer Beware.

… Ghostwriting scams pose as publishing service providers. Like the similar similar-seeming publishing/marketing scams from the Philippines, they are based overseas, primarily in Pakistan and India, and offer menus of publishing and marketing services designed to attract writers looking to self-publish or to market their books.

Also like the Philippine scams, they frequently take writers’ money and run, or deliver substandard quality, or treat whatever package or service the writer initially buys as a gateway to the writer’s bank account, relentlessly pressuring them to hand over more cash….

… It didn’t take long on USA Pen Press’s website for me to identify it as a ghostwriting scam. Many of the typical markers are there: the prominent advertising of ghostwriting services, of course, but also an array of trad-pubbed book covers to falsely imply USA Pen Press had something to do with them, a header image (see above) with even more false references to famous writers, “testimonials” that all sound alike and in one case reference a different company, awkward English (“How Do the USA Pen Press Work on the Book Covers?” “What the process of Ghostwriting includes?”), and false claims (they say 10+ years in business but as of this writing, their web domain is just 119 days old)….

(4) IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES. [Item by Steven French.] Another day, another piece on Dick and dystopias: “The PKD Dystopia” by Henry Farrell at Programmable Mutter.

This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by environmentally friendly technologies. Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies.

Dystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees all, knows all, and controls all. And our world is indeed one of ubiquitous surveillance. Phones and household devices produce trails of data, like particles in a cloud chamber, indicating our wants and behaviors to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Yet the information thus produced is imperfect and classified by machine-learning algorithms that themselves make mistakes. The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations.

This does not look like totalitarianism unless you squint very hard indeed. As the sociologist Kieran Healy has suggested, sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.

Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping)….

(5) READING BINGO. If Reddit’s “OFFICIAL r/Fantasy 2024 Book Bingo Challenge!” ends up on the Hugo ballot, that will be because its creators are drumming up support in posts like this: “For Your Consideration: r/Fantasy’s 2024 Bingo Challenge is Eligible for a Hugo Nomination for Best Related Work”. Apparently, they’ve been doing these challenges for ten years. Everybody does eligibility posts now – and you might find the challenge an item of interest in its own right.

(6) ROBERT BLOCH RARITIES. Here’s “What’s New at the Robert Bloch Official Website.

Read the first two pages of an operatic Libretto Bloch wrote for Gaston Leroux’s novel, The Phantom of the Opera.
IN 1980, Bloch penned a script for the pilot of a proposed weekly TV spinoff series of the (Stephen King) Salem’s Lot TV movie that recounted the further adventures of Ben Mears and Mark Petrie. Sadly, what we have is not the complete script (of 54 pages), rather a random sampling, the only pages available, captured during an auction of the script. Still, an interesting find!

(7) TODAY’S DAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Today in the UK is National Yorkshire Pudding Day. Learn more from the Yorkshire Post’s 2020 article “When is it, origins of the side dish, and the best Yorkshire Pudding recipe”. Note, the article includes a recipe.

Depending on who you ask, where you search, or how you feel about it, Yorkshire Pudding and popovers either are or aren’t the same thing, although they’re clearly related. Here’s some of those opinions (and more recipes):

(8) JAY SMITH OBITUARY. Costuming fan Jay Smith died January 27, 2025. The International Costumers Galley announced on Facebook:

Jay Smith was a costumer, attending conventions primarily in California, going back to Equicon. He was an actor and worked Renaissance Fairs and The Great Dickens Christmas Fair, where he was known for his portrayal of Father Christmas. He was beloved for his portrayal of the character for decades at many events.

At the link is a photo of Smith wearing a “Redesign of Superman” from Equicon 1985 by Civi Poth.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Buck Rogers serial (1939)

Eighty-six years ago, the Buck Rogers serial, produced by Universal Pictures, first was in the theaters. It starred Buster Crabbe (who had previously played the title character in two Flash Gordon serials and would return for a third.) Buster was sometimes billed as Larry Crabbe as well as you will note in the poster below.

I don’t think I need to say that it’s based on the Buck Rogers character as y’all know that as created by Philip Francis Nowlan but for the sake of the few Filers who will nitpick if I don’t I will.

It was directed by Ford Beebe was Saul A. Goodkind as written by Norman S. Hall, Ray Trampe and Dick Calkins. It would run for twelve chapters of roughly twenty minutes each.

As I said Buck Roger was Larry “Buster” Crabbe with Constance Moore as Wilma Deering, and Jackie Moran as “Buddy” Wade, an original character who was based on the Sunday strip character Buddy Deering.

It had a really small budget and re-used film footage from the futuristic Thirties musical Just Imagine.

In 1953, it was edited into the film Planet Outlaws and twelve years later it was edited again into Destination Saturn, and not to stop there, the late Seventies saw the latter release of the latter as Buck Rogers. All three were feature films.

Not surprisingly, you can watch it online as it’s public domain — here is the first chapter

(10) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater makes a different sound of music.
Carpe Diem reveals there’s wi-fi in Mordor.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal wonders whether AI is the biggest threat. Maybe.

(11) HOLD YOUR BREATH FOR A COUPLE OF MONTHS, PLEASE. Popular Science learns that in Poland a “Fire-breathing dragon sculpture not allowed to breathe fire”.

A famous dragon sculpture that spits out real fire is going to be a little less dramatic this month. The Wawel Dragon–or Smok Wawelski–in Krakow, Poland will have to hold its fiery breath so that authorities can see why it has been guzzling too much fuel lately.

Krzysztof Wojdowski, spokesman for Krakow’s road infrastructure office, told the Associated Press that officials will inspect the gas lines and pipes that feed the 19-feet metal dragon to look for ways to reduce energy bills. The sculpture is expected to begin to breathe fire again by March, pending the investigation….

(12) PWNING THE LIBS? The New York Times reports “E.V. Owners Don’t Pay Gas Taxes. So, Many States Are Charging Them Fees.” (Behind a paywall.)

Owners of electric cars in Vermont recently got a letter from the Department of Motor Vehicles with some bad news. Starting Jan. 1 they would have to pay $178 a year to register their cars, twice as much as owners of vehicles with internal combustion engines.

In imposing the higher fee, Vermont became the latest state to make people pay a premium for driving electric. At least 39 states charge such annual fees, including $50 in Hawaii and $200 in Texas, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That’s up from no states a few years ago.

Now, as President Trump rolls back Biden administration measures to promote electric vehicles, Republicans in Congress are considering imposing a national fee to bolster the fund used to finance roads and bridges, a fund that is in dire shape.

The fees are an attempt to make up for declining revenue from gasoline taxes that electric cars, for obvious reasons, don’t pay. They’re an example of how governments are struggling to adjust to technological upheaval in the auto industry.

Environmentalists and consumer groups agree that electric vehicle owners should help pay for road maintenance and construction. But they worry that Republicans, who control Congress, would set the fee at extremely high levels to punish electric vehicle owners, who tend to be liberals…

And yet somehow not all owners of companies that make electric cars are liberals….

(13) THIS IS THE DROID YOU’RE LOOKING FOR. Cool. And really expensive. “RoboCop – ED-209 1/3 Scale Statue”. Price tag: $3,100.

Wikipedia explains:

The Enforcement Droid Series 209, or ED-209, is a fictional heavily armed robot that appears in the RoboCop franchise. It serves as a foil for RoboCop, as well as a source of comic relief due to its lack of intelligence and tendency towards clumsy malfunctions.

The sales pitch says:

Premium Collectibles Studio presents their ED-209 1/3 Scale Statue. Hailing from the sci-fi classic RoboCop, this piece stands nearly 35 inches tall. Featuring every rivet, plate, and movie-accurate feature of the iconic Enforcement Droid, the finish is in a slate gray and matte black. Included is a pedestal base with the OCP logo, making it a striking addition for any RoboCop fan.

(14) I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU. Ryan George does a hilarious Tolkien-themed “When Your Friend Won’t Admit He’s Wrong” bit which some might say is NSFW, though really just for the last couple seconds, and not even then if you work for Frederick’s of Hollywood….

(15) FANGS FOR THE MEMORIES. Once upon a time actor Jonathan Frid, Dark Shadows’ Barnabas Collins, appeared as a celebrity guest on What’s My Line – vampire dentures and all.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Rich Lynch, John Hertz, 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 John Hertz.]

Pixel Scroll 1/3/25 Never Send A Pixel To Do A Scroll’s Job

Posted on January 3, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to split a pastrami sandwich with Martha Thomases in Episode 244 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast. Edelman adds, “Those not interested in my conversation with a comics guest because they only care about science fiction should know I devoted seven minutes of the intro to eulogizing Barry Malzberg.”

Martha Thomases is a freelance journalist who has been published in the Village Voice, the New York Daily News, High Times, Spy, the National Lampoon, and more. She’s a VP of Corporate Communications at ComicMix.com as well as a weekly contributor there. From 1990-1999 she was Publicity Manager at DC Comics. She also worked as a researcher and assistant for author Norman Mailer on several of his books, including the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Executioner’s Song, On Women and Their Elegance, and Harlot’s Ghost. She created Dakota North with Tony Salmons for Marvel. Next year, A Wave Blue World will publish Second-Hand Rose, her graphic novel with Richard Case.

We discussed her theory that your popularity in high school determines whether you’ll move to New York, why she was into DC rather than Marvel at the start of her comics fandom, Denny O’Neil’s explanation of the true difference between Metropolis and Gotham City, the realization she had at 35 as to the true reason her parents allowed her to read comics, the weirdness of Little Lotta and Baby Huey, why she was more nervous meeting Denny O’Neil than she was meeting Norman Mailer, how Dakota North was born, our mutual love for the She-Hulk TV series, selling comics to comics fans vs. selling them to potential readers who don’t yet know they’d like comics, and much more.

(2) WRITER BEWARE. Victoria Strauss has full details of legal charges against scammers and what they did in “Karma’s a Bitch: The Law Catches Up With PageTurner Press and Media” at Writer Beware.

…The CEO and VP of one of the worst publishing scams of the past few years have been arrested in California.

Some background. The scam in question is PageTurner Press and Media, one of the biggest and most brazen of the vast array of publishing/marketing/fake literary agency/impersonation scams operating out of the Philippines….

…PageTurner operates as a type of pig butchering scam (where victims are tricked into handing over their assets via escalating demands for money). The most elaborate of its schemes involve multiple false identities and company names, with victims handed around between them. Most writers I’ve heard from were fleeced to the tune of low- to mid-four figures, but many lost substantially more–tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands in some cases. The largest payout I know of was extracted from an author who was recruited to buy costly re-publishing packages, then pressured into paying for hugely expensive marketing schemes, and ultimately targeted by one of PageTurner’s fake film companies and convinced to purchase a screenplay, treatment, PR campaign, and more, all for eye-popping amounts of money. All told, this author lost in excess of $600,000….

…On December 9, 2024, Sordilla was arrested in California, along with Innocentrix VP Bryan Navales Tarosa (who, like many individuals involved in these scams, started his career as a sales rep for Author Solutions). Sordilla and Tarosa are both residents of the Philippines, but were visiting the USA at the time.

One day later, authorities arrested Gemma Traya Austin, a US resident and PageTurner’s registered agent, who according to an August indictment in the US Court of the Southern District of California of all three individuals on charges of mail and wire fraud, was responsible for PageTurner’s US bank accounts. (These have been seized; they reportedly contained nearly $5 million.)…

(3) MORE RICHARD MORGAN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Having got through to the semi-finals of the BBC’s Christmas University Challenge a few days ago, SF author, Richard Morgan’s Queen’s College Cambridge team last night (2nd January) faced Churchill College Cambridge (that’s twice they have faced a fellow Cambridge college). This time they did not get it so easy as the two teams of alumni (the regular University Challenge has teams of current students) were more even matched. Indeed, Richard’s performance was not so sure-footed. There was even one SF/F book related question on horror to which Richard gave the answer ‘Arthur Machen’ when in fact it should have been M. R. James….

And the competition was close, ending in an almost nail-biting-down-to-the-elbows 95-95 draw. This necessitated a tie-breaker question and Queen’s won! This means that we will see Richard and his team in the finals tonight. “University Challenge Christmas 2024 E09 – Churchill, Cambridge v. Queens’ Cambridge”.

(4) DIGITAL D&D SLOT MACHINE ON THE WAY. “Wizards of the Coast Goes All In On New D&D Gambling Game” at Dungeons and Dragons Fanatics.

In news which came as a surprise to many Dungeons & Dragons fans, Hasbro recently announced a licensing deal with the gambling company Global Games to produce a number of new products. This includes an upcoming digital slot machine entitled Dungeons & Dragons: Tales of Riches, which will be hitting casinos and online iGaming platforms sometime in early 2025.

It’s a somewhat controversial move for Hasbro given the often negative connotation of gambling among many consumers, but also speaks to some of the growing financial pressures Hasbro is facing and the value of licensing global intellectual properties like D&D….

… It’s not entirely clear why Hasbro has decided to license out the Dungeons & Dragons brand to a global online casino distributor, but like many business decisions it likely comes down to dollars and cents. Global gambling is a highly lucrative market and the potential licensing revenue could be significant (although neither Games Global or Hasbro has provided any information on the financial details)….

(5) TOUR DE FORCE. Visit another writer’s bookshelves in “Shelfies #17: David Agranoff”. (Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.)

…My office is designed so that when I am sitting at the desk I can reach and grab any resource material or actual Philip K. Dick novel without getting up.

You can see that I have the books in three stacks. Between the stacks, I have the seven books I most often use or reference. (Pot-Healer, Time Slip, Scanner Darkly, Eye in the Sky, High Castle, Do Androids, and my favorite, Three Stigmata)….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born January 3, 1892 — J.R.R. Tolkien. (Died 1973.)

By Paul Weimer: If Isaac Asimov (see January 2nd’s scroll) was one of the two midwives of getting me into science fiction. J.R.R. Tolkien was one of the two midwives of getting me into fantasy (the other, absolutely no surprise to any of you, was Roger Zelazny). I think I’ve told the story before of how I got into his work. The next weekend, the newest issue of TV proclaimed that they were going to show all three Tolkien movies — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Return of the King. I had a week, friends as a ten-year-old reader of genre to read the extant Tolkien canon.

I read The Hobbit, and then blitzed through The Lord of the Rings in short order. I bounced off of The Silmarillion and would not try it again for another decade. But I felt armed and ready for the animated movies.

Lord, I was not ready for “Where there’s a Whip, there’s a Way”. But, then, no one really is.

But back to Tolkien himself, he was in fact, my ur-Epic Fantasy as well as being the ur-Epic Fantasy for most of modern fiction. I measured a lot of the epic fantasy of the 80’s and 90’s by the roads of Middle Earth. His worldbuilding, his prose, his iconic and mythic writing draws me in again, and again, and again.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

xkcd teaches us how to fold an Origami Black Hole. (Don’t miss the note that appears when you mouse over the cartoon.)
Bizarro knows late night thoughts.
Candorville bridges the generational divide.
Curses did everything but the work.
Heart of the City learns about fanfiction.
Thatababy has a strangely logical explanation.
Brewster Rockit finds out who replaced Baby New Year.

(8) SFF ON JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] This was the final of the “Second Chance” tournament, in which 9 players who had come in second in regular play were brought back to compete for a spot in the upcoming Wild Card tournament. The first round of play had a category “Sci-Fi Fill In”. The players took it in reverse order.

$1000: Richard K. Morgan’s tale of cyberwarriors: “Altered ___ “

Kaitlin Tarr responded correctly: “What’s ‘Carbon’?”

$800: By Ursula K. Le Guin: “The Left Hand of ___ “

Colleen Matthews gave us “What is ‘Darkness’?”

$600: Rick Deckard is on the hunt: “Do Androids Dream of ___ ___ “

Colleen knew it was ‘Electric Sheep’.

$400: A Harlan Ellison classic: “I Have No Mouth & I Must ___ “

Will Yancey tried “What is ‘Speak’?” but of course this was wrong. Colleen and Kaitlin didn’t know this either, so it was a triple stumper. (Honestly I think this was a misstep by the clue-setters in terms of difficulty.)

$200: A full-course meal available from Douglas Adams: “The Restaurant at the End of the ___ “

Colleen got it: “What is ‘the Universe’?”

(9) KEEPING DOCTORS AWAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Apple+ is free this weekend (Jan 3-5):

https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2024/12/get-a-free-all-access-pass-to-apple-tv-the-first-weekend-of-2025

And this article covers a bunch of other (all legit) ways to get Apple+ free. (We’re currently halfway through the free-with-Roku 3-month deal.)

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/apple-tv-plus-free-trials

Here’s the BestBuy URL, which I suspect is (non-Roku-users) best bet (other than Apple’s 1-week free trial):

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/apple-free-apple-tv-for-3-months-new-or-qualified-returning-subscribers-only/6484512.p?skuId=6484512

My A+ rec’s include Ted Lasso; Shrinking (with Harrison Ford), Slow Horses. (None of which are sf, FWIW).

BTW, Apple offers the first episode of each series free, without having to subscribe first.

(10) HADFIELD Q&A. “Business Daily meets: Astronaut Chris Hadfield” – hear the interview at BBC Sounds.

Colonel Chris Hadfield is a former fighter pilot who became an astronaut and served as a commander of the International Space Station (ISS). While in orbit he became a social media star, posting breath-taking pictures of earth, as well as videos demonstrating practical science and playing his guitar.

These days, the Canadian invests in businesses and has written several best-selling fiction and non-fiction books.

In this programme, Chris Hadfield tells Russell Padmore how he was influenced by Star Trek, and the Apollo missions to the moon, as a child. He outlines why he welcomes private investment in space and he explains how he has become known for being the musical star in orbit.

(11) I TAKE MY T. REX ON ROUTE 66. “How did dinosaurs travel millions of years ago? Prehistoric highway may hold answers” on NPR’s “Morning Edition”. (Linking to this story again as an excuse to use Dern’s title.)

The discovery of a “prehistoric highway” in the United Kingdom could reveal more about how dinosaurs traveled millions of years ago.

(12) WHY WASN’T I TOLD? The New York Times says there’s Broadway production of Our Town with Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager, and it’s closing January 19. The supporting cast includes some other notables from TV like Richard Thomas and Katie Holmes.

Kenny Leon brings Thornton Wilder’s microcosmic drama back to Broadway, starring Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”) as the Stage Manager. Zoey Deutch and Ephraim Sykes play the young lovers, Emily Webb and George Gibbs, with Richard Thomas and Katie Holmes as Mr. and Mrs. Webb; Billy Eugene Jones and Michelle Wilson as Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs; Donald Webber Jr. as Simon Stimson and Julie Halston as Mrs. Soames. (Through Jan. 19 at the Barrymore Theater.) Read the review.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/17/24 Pixelbot Murderscrolls

Posted on November 17, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) DON’T FALL FOR IT. Writer Beware’s Victoria Strauss sends out a warning: “Dogging the Watchdog Redux: Someone Else is Impersonating Writer Beware”.

…A bit over a year ago, a scammer (I never was able to determine which one, but it’s highly likely it was someone on this list) sent out a large number of emails under my name, using a fake address (writerbewaree@gmail.com), offering to provide “guidance” to authors to protect them against scams and help them “connect with well-known traditional publishing houses”.

The aim, it turned out, wasn’t to rip anyone off, but to troll me. Since trolling isn’t any fun unless the trollee knows about it, the scammer also sent the emails directly to me (twice), with the subject line “Writer Beware, the Watchdog and Dog Victoria Strauss” (hence the title of my post about the episode, which also used the graphic above). Maybe because I didn’t respond, or maybe because I mocked them publicly, the troller never dogged me again and I never got any other reports of those particular fake Writer Beware emails.

Unfortunately, there’s now another Writer Beware/Victoria Strauss impersonation attempt. And this one seems designed not just to troll, but to defraud….

Strauss goes into detail about how this fraudster operates. The victim took things at face value, only suspecting they’d been deceived after forwarding the first thousand dollars requested. Then came another request for money.

…In this case, the writer avoided being fully poached. They simply didn’t have the extra cash, and told Fake Victoria so. That was the last they heard from her. Since they didn’t contact me about the scam until nearly two months later, I’m guessing that they held out hope for a while that Fake Victoria would deliver, but eventually became suspicious enough of her silence to google Writer Beware. At which point they realized they’d been hoodwinked….

Strauss has a hypothesis about the scammer’s identity, which you can read at the link. She concludes:

…Why wouldn’t a scammer decide to use my/Writer Beware’s good reputation to steal money from unsuspecting authors and give me the middle finger while they’re at it? Honestly I’m only surprised it hasn’t happened more often….

(2) PKD VS. HEGEMONY. [Item by Steven French.] In this provocative essay in The Paris Review, Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel, among others, discusses Philip K Dick, especially the latter’s Martian Time-Slip and its portrayal of the Bleekmen, current attitudes towards Palestinian people and the importance of considering alternative modes of existence: “’Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist’: Philip K. Dick and Palestine”.

…When Dick became my chosen writer, at age fourteen, in 1978, with Martian Time-Slip, one of my two or three favorites among his novels, the presence of the Israeli settlement on Mars didn’t resound in any particular way. My initial responsiveness to Dick’s work was to delight in his mordant surrealist onslaught against the drab prison of consensual reality—he was punk rock to me. It took me a while to grasp how Dick’s novels, those of the early sixties especially, function as a superb lens for critiquing the collective psychological binds of the postwar embrace of consumer capitalism. Yet to say that he seems to devise his critiques semiconsciously, by intuition, is an understatement. Dick thought he was bashing out pulp entertainment, and he sometimes despised himself for doing it. At other times—and Martian Time-Slip was one of those times—he injected his efforts with the aspiration to raise his output to the condition of literature, employing all the thwarted ambition of a young novelist with nine or ten literary novels (or, as an SF writer would put it, “mainstream” novels) in his trunk, which his agent had been unable to place with New York publishers.

Dick had an extrasensory power, however; he was a freaked-out supertaster of repressive and coercive elements lurking inside the seductive and banal surfaces of Cold War U.S. culture and politics. This meant that science fiction opened up his particular capacity for fusing ordinary experience—the emotional and ontological crises of his human characters—to the implications of the hegemonic power of the U.S., which coalesced in the period in which Dick wrote, and which defines our present century. Reality’s surface shimmers open beneath Dick’s gaze. It’s this that led Fredric Jameson to compare him to Shakespeare. This wouldn’t have happened had he stuck to the earnest social realism of his unpublished novels….

(3) ARTIST SAYS ONE THING, DISNEY SAYS ANOTHER. “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur Episode Allegedly Scrubbed Over Trans Storyline” – Gizmodo has the details.

One of the remaining episodes of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur set to release in 2025 will now allegedly no longer make it to air, according to since-deleted comments on social media from crew who worked on the Marvel and Disney animated series, claiming concerns over the developing political climate in the U.S. in the wake of the 2024 presidential election.

The remaining episodes of Moon Girl‘s second and final season were set to air on the Disney Channel sometime in 2025, but now at least one episode produced for the Marvel series—adapting the titular young comics heroine, aka Luna Lafayette, and her adventures alongside the giant T-Rex-esque creature Devil Dinosaur—may not make it to air, supposedly due to revolving around a plotline involving the topic of trans kids involved in school sports.

“One of the projects (episode) I worked on is getting shelved because of which party that won the recent election,” Derrick Malik Johnson, a storyboard artist who worked on Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur said in a recent, since-deleted post on the social media platform Bluesky. “It breaks my heart knowing this impactful and amazing [episode] is now about to be consider a lost media episode.”

In a thread on the Moon Girl subreddit about Johnson’s post, someone claiming to have worked on the series alleged that the episode revolved around the character Brooklyn, a teen volleyball player who attends Luna’s school in the series. “If you put attention [sic] to details about the character, you can figure out about what theme [the episode was based on] and why it was canned,” the user wrote in a now-deleted comment thread.

io9 was not able to independently verify the veracity of the above posts on Bluesky and Reddit, but when reached out for comment, a Disney source familiar with the matter confirmed that while the episode had been pulled from release, the decision was made over a year ago, and unrelated to concerns over the current political climate.

The source further described the reason for the episode’s cancelation–specific to the episode itself, rather than Brooklyn as a character, who has appeared elsewhere in Moon Girl–as part of a regular review process the company makes with all of its kids content, with the intent to ensure material doesn’t potentially push ahead discussions around social issues before families can have them themselves….

(4) BRIAN ASMAN Q&A. The most recent episode of David Agranoff’s podcast Postcards from a Dying World is an “Interview with Brian Asman”.

On this episode I welcome Brian Asman author of Man, Fuck That House and his debut novel Good Dogs. It is hard for me to think of this as being the first novel for Brian Asman. I suppose you could say this is the first proper novel, published with an established publisher, but Asman has been publishing for a few years, but those have been novellas published in a DIY punk style have even produced a viral book release. I mean with a title like “Man, Fuck this House.” Asman already has a signature release. The novellas range from funny to weird and the last Our Black Hearts Beat as One could be argued is a short novel, or would have been considered a novel in the past.

We talk about Brian’s career path and Good Dogs without spoilers for about 40 minutes before a spoiler Warning and then we go under the hood.

(5) IMPERIALISTS IN MARTIAN DISGUISE. [Item by Steven French.] Richard Flanagan’s book Question 7 is up for both fiction and non-fiction awards and tracks the chain of events leading from Rebecca West kissing HG Wells to Hiroshima; here he recalls the first time he read War of the Worlds: “Richard Flanagan: ‘I’m not sure that I will write again’” in the Guardian.

Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds is pivotal to the narrative. Do you remember the first time you read it?

I thought I knew the story – yet when I first read it, perhaps 20 years ago, I was staggered to learn in Wells’s introduction that it was inspired by the extermination of Aboriginal Tasmanians. It isn’t a hokey Edwardian set piece. It’s an indictment of English imperialism.

If you read to the end you can also mourn for Flanagan’s hilarious parrot, Herb.

(6) FLAME ON. The New York Times tells about “One City’s Secret to Happiness: The Annual Burning of a 50-Foot Effigy”. “Every year, Santa Fe incinerates a giant puppet of Zozobra — a ritual meant to purge anxiety and promote a reset.” (Behind a paywall.)

For most of the millions of travelers who make the trek each year, there is no reason to go to Santa Fe except to go to Santa Fe. Just about everything that needs doing can and should be done somewhere else, someplace easier to get to than this tiny city 7,000 feet in the air, whose airport terminal is a fraction of the size of a typical American grocery store. But this town of 90,000 residents strives to ensure that its singularity is reason enough.

Which makes it remarkable that Santa Fe’s most distinctive motif is left inscrutable to outsiders. A towering ghoul points down from a mural on one of the city’s busiest streets with no context. At a local confectionery, a scowling white figure in a cummerbund is rendered in chocolate — why? Even if you clock that the big-eared goblin tattooed on the biceps of a local electrician is the same creature depicted (being consumed by flames) on the cab of a municipal fire truck, you will encounter nowhere an explanation of who or what this monster is — unless you happen to be in Santa Fe on the one evening a year when locals construct a building-size version of this thing and set it on fire.

The explanation is a touch nonsensical: This is Zozobra, a beast who lives in the mountains nearby. The people of Santa Fe invite him into town every year on the pretext of a party in his honor. He arrives at the party dressed in formal attire, thrusts the town into darkness and takes away “the hopes and dreams of Santa Fe’s children,” whom he also kidnaps. The townspeople try and fail to subdue him with torches. But then the Fire Spirit, summoned by an atmosphere of cooperation among the town’s citizens, appears and, flying high off the good vibes, battles Zozobra until he is consumed by fire.

If you are fortunate enough to be around on the exactly right night in late summer — the Friday before Labor Day — you may find yourself surrounded by, and even join in with, the screaming citizens of Santa Fe as they string up this enormous, writhing pale-faced humanoid on a pole on a hill overlooking their homes and burn him while he moans until dead.

“Burn him!” demand the children onstage. “BUUUURN HIIIIIM!” roar the adults from the crowd, a portion of whom are inebriated. Unseen, a local judge howls into a microphone, providing the voice of a gargantuan puppet being cooked alive. It is possible that, one century ago, the forebears of the current population discovered the violent secret to happiness in their high, dry town — and that it is annual, ritualized killing by flames. Just in case that’s right — in fact, proceeding on an assumption that it is — the local citizenry have recommitted the monstrous puppet’s murder every year for 100 years straight, so far. The aim is to incinerate their gloom….

… The monster is still stuffed with slips of paper bearing woes (“glooms” in event parlance). But these days there are virtually no limits to what the public may cram inside Zozobra’s body and set aflame: wedding albums; medical bills; report cards; loved ones’ ashes; parking tickets; pictures of Osama bin Laden (popular in 2002); a pristine guitar; many varieties of gown (wedding; hospital; according to local lore, a few belonging to Marilyn Monroe that an acquaintance was adamant would never go to auction); etc. The show still follows its original script….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary, Justice League animated series (2001)

Twenty-three years ago on this evening, the Justice League animated series premiered on the Cartoon Network. It was the seventh series of the DC Animated Universe. The series ended after just two seasons, but was followed by the Justice League Unlimited, another series which aired for an additional three seasons. There really wasn’t any meaningful difference between the two series save a larger number of characters. Really there wasn’t.

It’s largely based off the Justice League created by editor Sheldon Mayer and writer Gardner Fox in the Sixties.

It has a stellar primary voice cast of George Newbern as Superman / Clark Kent, Kevin Conroy as Batman / Bruce Wayne, Michael Rosenbaum as The Flash / Wally West, Phil LaMarr as Green Lantern / John Stewart, Susan Eisenberg as Maria Canals-Barrera as Hawkgirl / Shayera Hol, Carl Lumbly as Martian Manhunter / John Jones and Susan Eisenberg as Wonder Woman / Princess Diana.

In a neat piece of later casting, Lumbly will be J’onn J’onnz’s father M’yrnn in the Arrowverse and on Supergirl. That changes the story as it was here, where John J’onnz was the very last Martian. No. I am not dealing with every fluid story in the comics. I am not.

It lasted for fifty-two episodes and featured scripts from such writers as John Ridley, Dwayne McDuffie, Pail Dini, Butch Lukic and Ernie Altbacker.

One of my favorite episodes, “Chaos at the Earth’s Core”, was written by Matt Wayne, a DCU writer of the time, with the world of Skytaris and its inhabitants are all taken from Mike Greil’s Warlord comics from the Seventies. Yes, he’s properly acknowledged as the source.

It received universal acclaim and IGN lists it among the best animated series ever done with its successor series being second. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a near perfect ninety-nine percent rating.

Streaming on Amazon Prime.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gets around the grawlix.
Thatababy chose the option package.
The Argyle Sweater can mash ‘em, boil ‘em, or stick ‘em in an Egyptian history book.
Cul de Sac provides negative inspiration.
Wumo shows an editor at work.
Tom Gauld shows what it means to work cheaper.

https://twitter.com/tomgauld/status/1858108931849240820

(9) EISNER ART ON THE BLOCK. Heritage Auctions will hold “The Art of Will Eisner Comic Showcase Auction” on December 12. View the artwork in all the lots at the link. Includes this back cover from The Spirit Coloring Book.

(10) ROCKY ROAD. Idolator says it’s time to deconstruct that well-known Stone Age family. “20 Things That Didn’t Make Sense In ‘The Flintstones’ That We’re Still Thinking About”.

Set in the stone age, The Flintstones follows a modern prehistoric family that always seems to get into unlikely situations. And while it was a popular animated sitcom when it premiered on ABC in 1960, there are many aspects of the series that don’t really make sense, and we’re not just talking about a pet dinosaur who’s allowed to hang around babies!

Tiny points such as Fred getting gas for his foot-powered car and how time-traveling has no butterfly effect on the Flintstones’ actual timeline leave people saying yabba dabba, huh? And those aren’t even the most confusing points!…

Here’s one of the nits they pick.

What Is Wilma’s Maiden Name?

When it comes to popular long-running shows, one would hope the screenwriters could keep their characters’ names in check. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen for one Mrs. Wilma Flintstone. If you recall, the show mentions Wilma’s maiden name a few times, but depending on which episode you’re watching, it could be one of two names.

Wilma’s maiden name flip-flops between Pebble and Slaghoople, in what most likely is nothing more than a continuity error on the writer’s part. And, to quote Tony Stark, “[they] didn’t think we’d notice; but we did.”…

(11) BIRD BRAIN COVER STORY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Nature has as its cover story a paper reporting the discovery of a well-preserved (around 85–75 million years old), fossil skull of an early off-shoot of the dinosaurs that went on to become the birds we know today. Past fossils of early birds have not had such well-preserved skulls and so palaeontologists may have underestimated their brain size. Could these early-birds be nearly as bright as some birds are today?

The paper is Chiappe, L. M., et al. (2024) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08114-4 “Cretaceous bird from Brazil informs the evolution of the avian skull and brain” Nature, vol. 635, p376-381.

Now, the thing is that if early birds were brighter earlier than thought, what does this say about the rise of early intelligence that ultimately leads to full-blown intelligence capable of putting people on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth without the use of Cavorite? My personal musing is that if intelligence arises multiple times and in different ways, does this speak to it being an ‘easy’ evolutionary step? If so what are the prospects for intelligent life elsewhere in the Galaxy? And if so, will they serve decent beer? These are the important questions….

Of course, intelligence takes many forms. Let’s not forget the octopus or, for that matter, dolphins (so long and thanks for all the fish). I have always been wary of dinosaurs and have never really forgiven them for what they did to Raquel Welch…

(12) SSSSSSSSSSS. “NASA Believes International Space Station Leak Can Be ‘Catastrophic’” reports People.

NASA has growing concerns about an ongoing air leak on a Russian section of the International Space Station (ISS) that has been going on since 2019.

According to SpaceNews, Bob Cabana, a former NASA astronaut who now chairs the ISS Advisory Committee, raised the issue during a meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 13.

“While the Russian team continues to search for and seal the leaks, it does not believe catastrophic disintegration of the PrK [module] is realistic. NASA has expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the PrK and the possibility of a catastrophic failure,” said Cabana….

… The news comes after NASA identified an increase in the leak rate in February, per the report. The rate at which air was leaking peaked at 3.7 pounds per day in April but was reduced “by roughly a third” with repairs, according to Space.com.

The ISS Program and Roscosmos officially met in May and June to discuss heightened concerns, elevating the leak risk to the highest level in its risk management system, per the report….

(13) CHINESE SPACE SHUTTLE PLANNED. “China Shows Off Reusable Space Shuttle” – Futurism has a rundown.

China has shown off a reusable shuttle that it intends to use to ferry cargo to and from its Tiangong space station.

As Space.com reports, the project — dubbed Haolong — recently won the state-owned Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute a government contract to develop a low-cost space station cargo spacecraft.

The country’s human spaceflight agency selected two proposals last month as part of its efforts to regularly resupply its three-year-old space station….

…Not unlike NASA’s retired Space Shuttle, the winged spacecraft would launch atop of a rocket and land much like an airplane on a runway. It measures 32 feet long and 26 feet wide.

“With a blunt-nosed fuselage and large, swept-back delta wings, it combines the characteristics of both spacecraft and aircraft, allowing it to be launched into orbit by a carrier rocket and land on an airport runway like a plane,” Haolong chief designer Fang Yuangpen explained in a video by state-owned broadcaster CCTV….

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

Pixel Scroll 9/22/24 The Only Living Scroll In New Crobuzon

Posted on September 22, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) SOMETHING HE LEARNED FROM BILBO. Peterson Pipe Notes reminds pipe smokers “Today is Hobbit Day!—Tolkien & Peterson”.

Today (September 22nd) is Hobbit Day, marking the beginning of Tolkien Week 2024. Many observe the day with a birthday cake—in honor of Bilbo and Frodo, whose birthdays are today. I’m thinking just as many celebrate with a tankard of beer from the Prancing Pony (yes, it comes in pints) and as many more with a pipe of good tobacco.

It’s fairly common knowledge that one of the dharma doors to pipe smoking of the past 50 years or so is The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It was in fact mine, when in my first nine weeks of high school I was marooned at home with mononucleosis. After finishing my day’s academic work—which took about 90 minutes—I’d spend the remainder reading at whim. That reading was drawn mostly from Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which included books by such greats as Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, E. R. Eddison, David Lindsay, George MacDonald, and of course Tolkien. I was so taken with Middle Earth that I knew I needed to learn to smoke a pipe. My dad, a very irregular pipeman at the time, had two Kaywoodies in a drawer in the living room. Armed with one of them and some Cherry Royale (from Ted’s Pipe Shoppe in Tulsa), I took my first steps on the road….

(2) THE BRADBURYS. “On Maggie Bradbury, the woman who ‘changed literature forever.’” at Literary Hub.

Ray Bradbury met his first girlfriend—and his future wife—in a bookstore. But they didn’t lock eyes over the same just-selected novel, or bump into each other in a narrow aisle, sending books and feelings flying. It was a warm afternoon in April 1946, and 25-year-old Ray Bradbury—an up-and-coming pulp fiction writer—was wearing a trench coat and carrying a briefcase while he scanned the shelves at Fowler Brothers Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. Naturally, Marguerite McClure—Maggie—who worked at the bookstore, “was immediately suspicious.” Someone had been stealing books, but hadn’t yet been caught. So she struck up a conversation. “I expected him to slam his briefcase down on a pile of books and make off with a few,” she said. “Instead, he told me he was a writer and invited me to have a cup of coffee with him.”

Coffee became lunch became dinner became romance; Maggie was the first woman Ray had ever dated, but he managed all right, and they were married on September 27, 1947.

“When I got married, all my wife’s friends said, ‘Don’t marry him. He’s going nowhere,’” Bradbury said in his 2000 commencement address at Caltech. “But I said to her, ‘I’m going to the moon, and I’m going to Mars. Do you want to come along?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ She said yes. She took a vow of poverty, and married me. On the day of our wedding, we had $8 in the bank. And I put $5 in an envelope, and handed it to the minister. And he said, ‘What’s this?’ I said, ‘That’s your pay for the ceremony today.’ He said, ‘You’re a writer, aren’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘You’re going to need this.’ And he gave it to me. And I took it back.”…

(3) STAND UP TO AI. SF Standard takes notes as “Comedian John Mulaney roasts SF techies at Dreamforce”.

“Let me get this straight,” John Mulaney said. “You’re hosting a ‘future of AI’ event in a city that has failed humanity so miserably?”

Everyone inside the auditorium at the Moscone Center groaned. Any notion that the award-winning comedian would play the corporate gig safe (and clean) were thrown out the window Thursday, when Mulaney, closing the Dreamforce festivities, started roasting his host, Salesforce, and the audience sitting right in front of him…

… The comedian rounded out his Dreamforce appearance by thanking attendees “for the world you’re creating for my son … where he will never talk to an actual human again. Instead, a little cartoon Einstein will pop up and give him a sort of good answer and probably refer him to another chatbot.”…

(4) AMAZING AND FANTASTIC SIXTIES REVIVAL. In “Fantastic Fiction: The Amazing and Fantastic Cele Goldsmith” at Seattle Worldcon 2025, Cora Buhlert introduces us to a historic prozine editor.

By the 1950s, the once venerable Amazing Stories, the oldest science fiction magazine, and its sister magazine Fantastic were deep in the doldrums. Both magazines were bottom-tier markets, publishing formulaic stories by the same handful of authors under various pen names.

All this changed in 1955, when a young Vassar graduate named Cele Goldsmith arrived at Ziff-Davis Publishing to work as an assistant to Howard Browne, the editor of Amazing and Fantastic, and his successor Paul Fairman. When Fairman left in 1958, Cele Goldsmith found herself editor of two ailing SFF magazines at the age of only 25….

(5) THEME PARK TURNAROUND. [Item by David Doering.] Here’s the latest on the resurrection of Evermore. “Name revealed for new fantasy-themed venue at former Evermore Park property” reports ABC4.com.

As new owners have taken over the former home of Evermore Park, they’ve been hatching excitement through an interactive experience that slowly unveils information about the future of the venue. In the latest reveal, the owners announced what the new venue’s name will be — “The Realm Town.”

Michelle and Travis Fox, bought the 13-acre property from Brandon Fugal earlier this year after the owners of Evermore Park shut its gates in April. Since then, the Foxes launched the “Hatch the Egg” initiative, where participants complete quests through an app, much like Pokémon Go. As players solve clues, details for the future plans of the park are revealed as its undergoing renovations. Players also join in on the opportunity to win prizes and join in on special in-person events….

(6) TOUCHPOINT WILL CLOSE. A press has made an agreement with the Authors Guild to address complaints that drew the attention of Writer Beware: “Authors Blast TouchPoint Press for Unethical Business Practices” at Publishers Weekly.

After hearing from dozens of authors about the poor business practices of TouchPoint Press, the Authors Guild said Friday that it has reached a deal with TouchPoint founder Sheri Williams, under which Williams agreed to pay authors overdue royalties and revert rights back to any author who has not yet received them. In addition, according to Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger, Williams has agreed to close the press, which bills itself as a “traditional royalty-paying publisher” of adult and children’s books.

Rasenberger said that, over the last two years, 35 to 40 authors have contacted the Guild with concerns about TouchPoint’s failure to fulfill its contractual obligations and that, as of last week, there were 26 open cases. Problems about TouchPoint had also been raised by Writer Beware, whose Victoria Strauss who says she started receiving “a handful of complaints” as far back as 2015….

(7) TRANSCENDENCE: BAH, HUMBUG. Mark Roth-Whitworth found a lot to challenge in Isaac Arthur’s video about “Transcendence”. He shared his criticisms at his blog in “Transcendence, and a response”, including this one:

…Then let’s consider very advanced aliens. Remember, I mentioned how close technologically to us they needed to be? Suppose they were so advanced that they glanced at us, thought “seen that before thousands of times, ignore them till they reach the point where they have something to say beyond our equivalent of “run, Spot, run”. Maybe they have whatever they’re perceiving in their transcendence that’s far more interesting or important than primitives like us? Why should we matter, if they’re that advanced? If they have nothing we need, like the remote tribes in the Amazon who are being attacked by illegal loggers, miners, and farmer, why would they pay attention to us?

Then there’s the idea of transcending the universe. What evidence do we have that there is a beyond this one? Perhaps some immensely advanced beings might want to skip the Big Crunch as the universe is recreated in a new Big Bang….

(8) CROSS-GENRE NOIR. “Spooky Sleuthing: 5 Noir and Detective Films That Feature the Supernatural” at CrimeReads.

… As the days grow shorter and we head into spooky season—the Halloween decorations are on sale at Costco, in any case—it’s a good time for fans of detective and noir fiction to consider supplementing their viewing list with a few movies that combine the best parts of their favorite genre with the weird and occult. Here are some recommendations:…

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996): How did Quentin Tarantino end up scripting a vampire movie that’s like nothing else in his extensive filmography? Legend has it that special makeup effects Robert Kurtzman needed a horror script for his up-and-coming effects studio, KNB EFX Group, and paid a young Tarantino $1,500 plus the makeup effects (re: buckets of blood) for the latter’s “Reservoir Dogs.” But Kurtzman couldn’t find a studio willing to fund the film with him as the director, and eventually Tarantino, his fame on the rise, guided the script into the hands of his buddy Robert Rodriguez….

(9) A PEEK INTO NEW WORLDS AT 60. “Michael Moorcock is Back: New Worlds 60th Anniversary Issue Global Exclusive Video”. Information about ordering a copy is at the link.

Steve Andrews previews the 60th Anniversary issue of New Worlds magazine, celebrating MM taking on its editorship in 1964 and with a cast of groundbreaking contributors, changing SF and Literary Fiction for the better, forever. At the time of posting this video, not even Moorcock himself has seen a finished copy, but you see one here!

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born September 22, 1971 — Elizabeth Bear, 53.

By Paul Weimer: I knew Elizabeth Bear before she broke big in genre. That’s not a boast, per se, that’s an observation that she was part of the small and intense community of people who were involved in the fandom of the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, based on the work of Roger Zelazny. Bear attended many of the same small cons as I did revolving around the game. (Other authors in the “Secret Amber Cabal” (as named by Scott Lynch) include people like Genevieve Cogman, Jane Lindskold, and I guess, myself.)

But back to Bear. Her ambitions and efforts to be a writer were something I was both aware and interested in, from the very beginnings of her career. I loved her novel trilogy debut that started with Hammered. I was delighted and not surprised when her Whiskey and Water series eventually brought a Marlowe as a character on the screen. Her ability to write fantasy and science fiction in equal measure has always enchanted me. The Eternal Sky fantasy novel series. Carnival, which was once the “if you must read one Bear novel, read this one) book (nowadays, that might be Machine or Ancestral Night).

Bear’s novels are accompanied by a strong short fiction oeuvre as well, although I think she works better for me as a writer at the longer lengths. Although I admit her Hugo awards (one for short story and one for novelette) might make me less than completely accurate in that regard. But I think the longer lengths, especially in hitting the marks in completing series (such as recently, the Origin of Storms, which completed the Lotus Kingdoms books VERY fantastically) proves that she works the long form best.

Bear is also one of the leaders of one of my local cons, 4th Street Fantasy, and so helps foster the genre conversation for her fellow readers, writers and fans.

And she is a very good friend. Happy birthday Bear!

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Eek! has a credential-caused delay.
Frank and Ernest have lined up the top talent.
The Argyle Sweater features obscure equipment from Sesame Street.
Tom Gauld wonders who will break the bad news to them.

My latest cartoon for @newscientist pic.twitter.com/85h5MsMbGO
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) September 15, 2024

(12) MAD ABOUT YOU. CBS News’ Sunday Morning show visited the exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum: “How Mad Magazine’s humor created a revolution”.

Nestled the rolling hills of rural Massachusetts. swathed by manicured grounds, sits the Norman Rockwell Museum. And there, side-by-side with the wholesome works of America’s most beloved illustrator, is the world’s dumbest cover boy: Alfred E. Neuman.

“It’s sacrilegious! It’s an outrage!” laughed political cartoonist Steve Brodner. “But I do think if Norman Rockwell were here, he’d laugh his head off. He’d think this was fantastic.”

(13) LOST COMPLETELY. “10 best episodes of ‘Lost’ ranked for 20th anniversary” by Entertainment Weekly. If you watched the series, maybe you have an opinion, too.

It’s been 20 years since Oceanic flight 815 crash landed on a mysterious island, and TV has never been the same. Cue the blurry title card, because it’s time to celebrate two decades of Lost.

When the ABC drama premiered Sept. 22, 2004, it introduced a large ensemble of compelling characters and intriguing mysteries portrayed cinematically in ways that had never been attempted before on TV. And as the series continued for six seasons, it raised more questions than it answered as the mythology got more and more complex — flashbacks became flash forwards and then flash sideways, and don’t even get us started on the frozen donkey wheel. Debates still rage amongst fans about whether the castaways were dead the whole time, what was up with those cursed numbers, and what the island really was….

4. “Pilot” (season 1, episode 1-2)

From the very first moment Jack opened an eye in the middle of a mysterious jungle up to the final seconds with Charlie’s iconic and chilling delivery of, “Guys, where are we?,” Lost debuted a pitch-perfect TV pilot. Introducing an ensemble this large and a mystery this complex in only two episodes of broadcast TV should have been impossible. But J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof hooked viewers immediately — and ultimately changed the TV landscape forever. The Emmy-winning episode featured juicy, head-scratching twists (An unseen, but definitely heard, violent monster! A polar bear in the tropical jungle! A French distress call looped for 16 years!) and continued to raise the intense stakes as the survivors learned help may not be coming at all … because they crashed over 1,000 miles off-course, so any rescue attempt would be looking in the wrong place. The flashbacks also subverted expectations as viewers learned the castaways aren’t who they first appeared to be with the reveal that it was actually leading lady Kate who was the handcuffed prisoner onboard the flight. Like the survivors, we truly had no idea what was in store from the rest of the series after these two episodes, but the premiere instantly made it clear that this was no ordinary sci-fi/fantasy thriller.

(14) THE LITTLE DUCK. Beware! This Disneyland Paris commercial from 2018 may wring your heartstrings! (Or put a crimp in your gizzard – I know about some of you….)

(15) GET READY FOR WEDNESDAY. “’Wednesday’ Season 2 Trailer, Release Date on Netflix, Jenna Ortega” – TVLine has the rundown.

… Catherine Zeta-Jones, who plays Wednesday’s mother Morticia Addams, promises that “Season 2 is going to be bigger and more twisted than you can ever imagine.” And don’t feel bad that you only get to see bits and pieces: “If we showed you any more, your eyes would bleed,” Ortega warns in a perfect Wednesday deadpan. “And I’m not that generous.”…

(16) PORTRAIT OF JENNIE. [Item by Andrew Porter.] I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen this romantic fantasy, beginning when I was a kid, and watched it on Channel 11 in NY—and called the station, begging them to show all the film, including the final segments which were tinted, and a scene in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in Technicolor.

That final scene included, uncredited, Nancy Davis, Anne Francis, and Nancy Olson, as teenagers! “Portrait of Jennie (1948) Filming Locations”.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 9/20/24 It’s Not A Cookbook, It’s A Pixel Scroll!

Posted on September 20, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) BIG DEAL. Marie Vibbert counsels writers about “Playtesting Card Games” at the SFWA Blog. One bit of advice will sound very familiar.

Immolate Your Darlings

You’ve perhaps heard writers talk about “Murdering their darlings,” which refers to the agony of having to cut a beautiful sentence, scene, or even a sub-plot that you love but doesn’t serve the overall arc of the story. I once twisted five drafts of a novel around a scene I absolutely adored before I realized that it had to go. Ow, it hurt.

The same thing happens in games. There might be a mechanic, a special card, an illustration, a subtle joke…and you love it, but it has to go. It’s worse when you have this nice physical card you made for the mock-up.

Even your game’s theme, which might seem the most essential part of it, must be disposable. On the off chance your game is picked up by a publisher, one of the most common things they want to do is re-theme it, probably for some big franchise. (In case you thought someone set out to create the Go Bots 50th Anniversary Card Game.)

You cannot grow attached before completion. The game is in flux. Consider every part expendable in service to the greater whole….

(2) SFF ART UP FOR AUCTION. [Item by Sandra Miesel.] I’ve put some of my sf collection up for sale at RipleyAuctions.com The live auction is October 5 and registration is free. My pieces include: the Kelly Freas’ DAW cover painting for Soldier, Ask Not by Gordon R. Dickson and its preliminary sketch, Kelly’s Analog interior illustration for “The Second Kind of Loneliness” by George R.R. Martin; Kelly’s Laser Books sketch for The Extraterritorial by John Morrissey; Richard Powers’ cover painting for Far Out by Damon Knight; John Schoenherr’s Analog interior illustrations for “And He Fell into a Dark Hole” by Jerry Pournelle, “The Demon Breed” by James Schmitz, “Spaceman” by Murray Leinster, and the ultimate prize: Schoenherr’s scratchboard Analog illustration for the very first installment of “Dune World”. Sandra Miesel at Ripleyauctions.com.

Frank Kelly Freas, American (1922 – 2005), Soldier, Ask Not book cover

(3) REMEMBERING THE FAHRENHEIT FIFTIES. Heritage Auctions has an interesting item on the block – a volume of Fahrenheit 451 inscribed by Bradbury to Hugh Hefner.

40th Anniversary Edition. PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED AND SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR TO HUGH HEFNER: “For Hef! Who published this when almost everyone else was afraid! With gratitude! Ray Bradbury. Nov. 3, ’93. 40 years later!”

Fahrenheit 451 was first published by Ballentine Books, Inc., in 1953, as a revision and expansion of his fifty-six-page novella, “The Fireman.” The novel was sold to Hugh Hefner’s new magazine, Playboy, which published the story in three installments in its fourth, fifth, and sixth issues (March 1954 to May 1954).

(4) SPOTLIGHT ON MAD MAGAZINE. [Item by Steven French.] If you happen to be in Massachusetts over the next month, check out “What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine,” an exhibition running until October 27 at the Norman Rockwell Museum.

It covers the full 72-year history of Mad, highlighted by the stretch from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, when the magazine pilloried mass culture—television, movies, politics and more—in a way that introduced satire to kids raised on tamer entertainment like “Leave It to Beaver.”

The Smithsonian article on it is an interesting read in its own right! “The Madcap History of Mad Magazine Will Unleash Your Inner Class Clown”.

… Mad magazine had its beginnings in 1947, when publisher Maxwell Gaines’ death in an upstate New York boating accident left his Educational Comics company to his 25-year-old son, William Gaines. Under Maxwell, the comics featured stories of science, animals, history and Picture Stories From the Bible. When William took over, he quickly shifted gears to “Entertaining Comics” (EC for short) and started publishing romance, westerns, science fiction, war and horror stories, most notably Tales From the Crypt. Gaines the younger had more than laughs and frights on his mind, however; woven into EC Comics were progressive ideals around racial equality, pacifism, environmentalism and the existential nuclear-age dread rarely spoken of in the placid, conformist 1950s.

In 1952, a comic book poking fun at other comic books debuted, but it would take four issues for Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD to take off. That fourth one featured the parody “Superduperman,” a blueprint for making hay of pop culture and politics. Amid a panic over youth corruption, inspired in part by EC’s other publications, editor Harvey Kurtzman convinced Gaines to retool Mad from a comic book into a magazine, and in July 1955 (Issue No. 24), a future mockery machine emerged….

(5) LITIGATION IS IN THE CARDS. “Cards Against Humanity sues SpaceX, alleges ‘invasion’ of land on US/Mexico border” – Ars Technica has the story.

Cards Against Humanity sued SpaceX yesterday, alleging that Elon Musk’s firm illegally took over a plot of land on the US/Mexico border that the party-game company bought in 2017 in an attempt to stymie then-President Trump’s attempt to build a wall.

“As part of CAH’s 2017 holiday campaign, while Donald Trump was President, CAH created a supporter-funded campaign to take a stand against the building of a Border Wall,” said the lawsuit filed in Cameron County District Court in Texas. Cards Against Humanity says it received $15 donations from 150,000 people and used part of that money to buy “a plot of vacant land in Cameron County based upon CAH’s promise to ‘make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for Trump to build his wall.'”

Cards Against Humanity says it mowed the land “and maintained it in its natural state, marking the edge of the lot with a fence and a ‘No Trespassing’ sign.” But instead of Trump taking over the land, Cards Against Humanity says the parcel was “interfered with and invaded” by Musk’s space company. The lawsuit includes pictures that, according to Cards Against Humanity, show the land when it was first purchased and after SpaceX construction equipment and materials were placed on the land….

…Cards Against Humanity also set up a website to publicize its lawsuit. “We have terrible news,” the website says. “Seven years ago, 150,000 people paid us $15 to protect a pristine parcel of land on the US-Mexico border from racist billionaire Donald Trump’s very stupid wall. Unfortunately, an even richer, more racist billionaire—Elon Musk—snuck up on us from behind and completely fucked that land with gravel, tractors, and space garbage.”

The website claims that SpaceX made a “lowball offer” to buy the land after Cards Against Humanity complained….

(6) WRITER BEWARE. “Wolves in Authors’ Clothing: Beware Social Media Marketing Scams” says Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware.

For authors, one of the (these days, increasingly few) positives of social media is connecting with other authors. Especially if no one else in your family/social circle is involved in the arts (raises hand), it’s great to be able to find a community where you can discuss craft, business, the ups and downs of querying, the challenges of self-publishing–both sharing your own experiences and learning from others’.

But…what if that friendly author who just DM’d you on one of your social media accounts isn’t actually a writer, but someone who wants to sell you worthless “marketing” services?

… Oooh, conversion enhancement campaign! That’s some sexy jargon right there.

The name on the marketer’s Instagram account (which no longer exists) was Ashley Wallace of Ashley Digitals. You can see the author’s conversation with her–including an unconvincing excuse for why her website URL doesn’t work, an elaborate sales pitch, and false claims about clients….

(7) FOUR-PAGE GOTHAM GAZETTE INSERT IN THURSDAY NYT. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Our household gets the New York Times in the classic physical flattened-dead-tree version; I was bemused to discover the Thursday, September 19 edition included a four-page insert, the Gotham Gazette.

As part of HBO/MAX’s promotion of its new Penguin live-action show, which has just started. I/we haven’t yet tried it (but we just finished, and enjoyed, the first two episodes of Agatha All Along, over on Disney+, which, perhaps-arguably, is bat-adjacent via Walt’s round-eared mascot.)

Here’s some article links — note, the first link has readable images of the four-page insert. Wak, wak, wak.

“The Penguin: Gotham Gazette Offers Interesting Post-The Batman Details” at Bleeding Cool. This article has readable images of full four online pages. The others below have some partial shots.

“How the New York Times became the Gotham Gazette for a day” at Fast Company. Including “But if you pass through Grand Central Station today, or Little Italy, or Times Square, you’ll see old-school newspaper hawkers schlepping copies of the Gotham Gazette” [also, according to the ComicBook.com article listed below, at Times Square, Penn Station]

“The Penguin Takeover Heads to New York City to Celebrate Premiere” at Comicbook.com. This article includes deets on the “Penguin take-over” events in NYC and elsewhere:

HBO and Max are gearing up for the premiere of The Penguin with a takeover of the Big Apple. The spinoff of The Batman brings Colin Farrell back as Oz Cobb, aka the titular Penguin and foe of the Dark Knight. The Penguin has started a global campaign leading to the premiere on Thursday, September 19th, with one of its first stops at San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. The Penguin Takeover will involve exclusive merchandise trucks all across New York City, along with the lighting of iconic landmarks and collaboration with local businesses using Penguin’s signature plum purple hue….

Max is continuing The Penguin’s presence internationally following the Iceberg Lounge’s success in San Diego. The Penguin will bring the iconic Iceberg Lounge to select locations in France, Spain, The Netherlands, and Thailand, along with other local promotions in the APAC, EMEA, and LATAM regions. Fans might also spot The Penguin’s purple Maserati in the streets of São Paulo, Paris, and other major cities.

The Penguin Takeover will feature the Feast of San Gennaro, the New York Latino Film Festival Block Party, early fan screenings at Alamo Drafthouse, and specialty menu items at participating businesses as Gotham comes to life. The takeover will extend beyond New York, with The Penguin’s iconic Iceberg Lounge and other experiences in select cities worldwide.

Also coverage at MSN.com: “The Penguin makes The Gotham Gazette real for one day only as the Max series takes over The New York Times to explain everything that’s happened since The Batman”.

And Looper: “HBO’s Penguin Confirms Where Batman Is (Or Isn’t)”.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979)

Forty-five years ago on this evening, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century first aired on NBC.

It is of course based on characters created by Philip Francis Nowlan. It started out as a comic strip that first appeared in daily U.S. newspapers on January 7, 1929, subsequently appearing in Sunday and international newspapers, then there were books, a radio adaption, comic books, a serial film. You get the idea.

So after all of that came this series. It was developed by Glen Larson who created Battlestar Galactica and Leslie Stevens who created Outer Limits.

It lasted but two seasons in total comprising thirty-seven episodes. A feature-length pilot episode for the series was released as a theatrical film, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. It did spectacularly well at the box office as it cost just three and a half million and made eighteen point seven more than that!

The film was narrated as was the first season by William Conrad who had found stardom as a detective in the two series, Cannon and Nero Wolfe. Yes, he played Wolfe though briefly as it lasted but fourteen episodes. Who here saw him as Wolfe?

The only cast that counts was Gil Gerard as Captain William “Buck” Rogers and Erin Gray as Colonel Wilma Deering. Oh, and Mel Blanc in the first season voicing Twiki. Felix Silva would voice him in the second season. Other cast members I’ll note are Tim O’Connor as Dr. Elias Huer, Pamela Hensley as Princess Ardala and Henry Silva as Kane. Andrew Thom Christopher as Hawk, a bird man with the most comical feather for hair I’ve ever seen!

Later interviews with Gerard and Gray as well as the directors say that neither got along with the other as they thought each was getting more lines and better stories. Oh well.

Buster Crabbe who played Buck Rogers in the original thirties Buck Roger’s film serial would play Brigadier Gordon in an episode here. Yes, a nod to his other film series.

The casting director had a fondness for one of our favorite series. Many of the actors who had played villains in the Batman series guest-starred here such as Frank Gorshin, Roddy McDowall, Julie Newmar and Cesar Romero.

It’s worth noting that the series re-used most of the props, star fighters, stages, some of the effects film and even costumes from Battlestar Galactica. The network obviously being keen on keeping costs down at all costs.

Ratings were fine for the first season, but dropped drastically in the second season and cancellation was decided by mid-season.

It has streamed on Amazon and on Peacock, not surprisingly on the latter as that’s owned by NBC, and Prime, but not is not currently streaming anywhere.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Close to Home has high delivery expectations.
Eek! has an unimpressed internist.
Rhymes with Orange comments on visiting relatives.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal in effect updates a classic Mark Twain joke.

(10) SQUID GAME RETURNS. “’Squid Game’ Season 2 Trailer: New Players, New Game” – Variety introduces the trailer.

“Squid Game” is back and Netflix has released the first teaser for its hotly anticipated second season. The footage comes as the final reveal of the streamer’s annual Geeked Week fan event.

The teaser picks things off right after Season 1’s finale, when Seong Gi-hun abandoned his plans to go to the U.S. and instead started a daring chase with a newfound motive. In the short teaser, he appears back in his 456 uniform amid a crowd of new contestants. Another massive cash prize awaits them, with a quick look at the games to come.

The globally successful Korean series follows financially struggling individuals competing in deadly games for a chance to win a life-changing prize, revealing the dark depths of human desperation and resilience…

(11) THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME. “Scientists discover weird new kind of shape found in nature” reports Boing Boing.

Mathematicians have identified a new class of shapes that “tile space without using sharp corners.”

From bathroom floors to siding on buildings, it’s common to cover areas without gaps by arranging shapes with straight edges and flat surfaces. In the natural world though, those kinds of shapes are rare. Patterns like those in muscle tissue are created with flowing curves, rounded surfaces, and almost no sharp angles. But the mathematics of these “soft shapes” have been a mystery until now.

“Nature not only abhors a vacuum, she also seems to abhor sharp corners,” says University of Oxford mathematician Alain Goriely who, with colleagues from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, discovered the new shape class called “soft cells.”

From Oxford University:

In 2D, these soft cells have curved boundaries with only two corners. Such tiling patterns are found, among others, in muscle cells, zebra stripes, the shapes of river islands, in the layers of onion bulbs, and even in architectural design.

In 3D, these soft cells become more complex and interesting. The team first established that, in 3D, soft cells have no corners at all. Then, starting with conventional 3D tiling systems such as the cubic grid, the team showed that they can be softened by allowing the edges to bend whilst minimising the number of sharp corners in this process. Through doing this, they found entire new classes of soft cells with different tiling properties.

Professor Gábor Domokos said: ‘We found that architects – including Zaha Hadid – have constructed these kinds of shapes intuitively whenever they wanted to avoid corners.

(12) TRANSCENDENCE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The concept of transcendence or subliming (the term used in Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels) is a minor, but recurring SF trope by which a civilization evolves to a point when they leave our space-time continuum for a ‘higher’ plane of existence. I think I first came across this half a century ago reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Anyway, Isaac Arthur over at Isaac Arthur Science Futurism this week takes a bit of a dive into this concept…

Many seek a path to enlightenment through study and meditation, but what does science tell us about transcendence? And could entire civilizations seek to leave this reality behind?

(13) FROM THE CRYPT, ER, ARCHIVE. The Paul Lynde Halloween Special of 1976 has a highly eclectic cast – like Margaret Hamilton and Betty White vamping together!

Bringing Witchypoo from HR Pufnstuf and Wizard of Oz’s wicked Witch of the West together but only Paul Lynde could give you the band KISS and Donny and Marie Osmond in the same show.

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

Pixel Scroll 7/28/24 If You Come To A Scroll In The Road, Click On It

Posted on July 28, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) CONFICTION FINAL FAREWELL PARTY. The 1990 Worldcon will host a bash at Glasgow 2024.

(2) TIANWEN RESURFACES. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] From the Red Star News on July 26: 面向全球发出邀请：首届“天问”华语科幻文学大赛在蓉举办新闻发布会. Google Translate: “Invitation to the world: The first ‘Tianwen’ Chinese Science Fiction Literature Competition held a press conference in Chengdu”. [Via SF Lightyear.]

Relevant bit via Google Translate, my emphasis:

The first “Tianwen” Chinese Science Fiction Literature Competition is chaired by Wang Meng, a famous contemporary Chinese writer, scholar, former Minister of Culture, and winner of the national honorary title of “People’s Artist”. At the same time, the competition has established a review committee with Alai, vice chairman of the China Writers Association, as chairman, Su Tong, member of the presidium of the China Writers Association, Liu Cixin, director of the Science Fiction Literature Committee of the China Writers Association, and relevant members of the World Science Fiction Association Brand Protection Committee as vice chairmen, who are fully responsible for the selection of entries.

I don’t know whether “relevant members” (plural) could just as easily be “relevant member” (singular), given Chinese (and Japanese) don’t generally make distinction.

(3) CAN’T PHONE HOME. “A Smartphone Can’t Help You Now: How Horror Movies Solve Their Cell Problem” in the New York Times. (Paywalled, unfortuntately.)

A cellphone lies in a rustic Airbnb, smashed by an intruder. Then, when another is procured, a faulty connection interrupts a call to 911.

A navigation map on a smartphone glitches as a driver plunges deep into the woods.

Criminals on a kidnapping job are ordered to surrender their phones “to be completely certain that you can’t be tracked.”

An exasperated partyer in rural Ontario wonders aloud to a member in his group, “How long is it going to take for you to realize there’s no reception out here?”

These are some of the ways that recent horror movies have gotten around what is at this point an age-old problem: the cellphone. In working order, they can render predicaments more solvable and certain situations easier to escape — potentially. Before the late ’90s, there was little need to make such a show of connectivity failure. Lines would go down or get cut, sure, but isolation in the age before mass cellphone usage was easier to come by and therefore easier to believe onscreen. Back then, the tropes didn’t have to trope so hard.

Then came the cell, and movies like “House on Haunted Hill” (1999) and “Jeepers Creepers” (2001) featured characters realizing they were holding useless plastic flip-bricks as their situations grew hairy. (In the former, the possessed house kills the signal before any of its inhabitants; in the latter, young adult siblings bicker over a low battery notification after witnessing what turns out to be a winged demon.) With smartphones, there was even more to neutralize, like GPS maps and internet searches. Movies taking pains to explain away cellphones were so prevalent that by 2009, I could collect more than 40 clips for a supercut exploring this development in the previous decade or so….

At least you can watch the supercut free on YouTube:

(4) STOLEN VALOR – AND MONEY. Nature says, “Hijacked journals are still a threat — here’s what publishers can do about them”.

Late last year, Liverpool University Press (LUP), a UK-based publisher, received a concerning e-mail. A prospective author had contacted the editors asking how much it would cost to publish an article in one of its journals, the International Development Planning Review (IDPR).

This raised suspicions among the editors, because the IDPR doesn’t charge any publication fees. The message also contained a link to the IDPR’s website — but the URL was incorrect. When the editors clicked it, they discovered a counterfeit website with the journal’s branding and an e-mail address that they’d never seen before. The journal had been hijacked.

Hijacked journals are a form of cybercrime in which a malicious third party creates a cloned website to impersonate a legitimate publication. The forgery replicates the original journal’s important details, from its title to its archive and international standard serial number, a code that identifies the publication. The purpose of a hijacking is to generate money quickly by charging illegitimate article-processing fees to unsuspecting researchers. Although the hijackers often publish papers that have been submitted to the fraudulent site, these works are not peer-reviewed nor considered legitimate.

A blogpost in April presented the challenges that LUP faced as a result of the hijacking, including the burden placed on its small editorial team. The intention, according to Clare Hooper, director of journals publishing at LUP, is to alert researchers to the “growing problem of copycat journal websites”….

(5) WRITER BEWARE. Victoria Strauss offers advice about “Evaluating Publishing Contracts: Six Ways You May Be Sabotaging Yourself” at Writer Beware. The intro and first of six bullet points are excerpted below:

These issues are as relevant now as they were years ago, if not more so. I hear all the time from writers who’ve been offered seriously problematic contracts and are using various rationalizations to convince themselves (sometimes at the publisher’s urging) that bad language or bad terms are not actually so bad, or are unlikely ever to apply. For example, I recently evaluated a contract with multiple questionable terms, including net profit royalties and a life-of-copyright grant without adequate provision for termination and rights reversion; the writer shared my concerns with the publisher, which responded with a long explanation for why none of it was actually a problem. The writer chose to sign the contract.

Here are my suggestions for changing some potentially damaging ways of thinking.

Don’t assume that every single word of your contract won’t apply to you at some point. You may think “Oh, that will never happen” (for instance, the publisher’s right to refuse to publish your manuscript if it thinks that changes in the market may reduce your sales, or its right to terminate the contract if it believes you’ve violated a non-disparagement clause). Or the publisher may tell you “We never actually do that” or, more cagily, “We’ve never actually done that” (for example, edit at will without consulting you, or impose the termination fee that’s the price of getting out of the contract early). But if your contract says it can happen, it may well happen…and if it does happen, can you live with it? That’s the question you need to ask yourself when evaluating a contract….

(6) FREE READ. To encourage subscriptions, Sunday Morning Transport has posted “Artists and Fools”.

For July’s fourth, free, story, Paolo Bacigalupi brings us a tale from the world of his new fantasy novel, Navola. We hope you enjoy meeting Pico the artist as much as we have!

(7) ROBERT BLOCH OFFICIAL WEBSITE UPDATE. Two essay contributions from Bloch historian/bibliographer, Randall D. Larson, have been added to the Robert Bloch Official Website’s “By Others” page.

The Cthulhu Mythos Fiction of Robert Bloch – Randall D. Larson details Bloch’s body of work involving Lovecraft’s mythos
On “The Feast in the Abbey” – Randall D. Larson examines Bloch’s story and the influence of Lovecraft

(8) GENRE LODGINGS. This 2022 article from Travel & Leisure lets you visit “9 Magical ‘Harry Potter’-themed Airbnbs Around the World” – photos at the link. One of them is:

The Common Room: British Columbia, Canada

Are you a full-fledged Gryffindor? Come stay in The Common Room, modeled after the Gryffindor common room at Hogwarts. The home comes with all the amenities one would need for an ideal getaway, including a kitchen, lofted bed, and Wi-Fi, but it also has the added perk of looking just like the movie set, with framed photos of Snape, a magic broom, and of course, plenty of Harry Potter DVDs for a night in. Book it now starting at $148/night.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

1944 – The Canterville Ghost.

Eighty years ago, The Canterville Ghost premiered. It was somewhat loosely on the 1887 short story by Oscar Wilde of the same name as published in two parts in The Court and Society Review, a British literary magazine only published between 1885 and 1888. That wasn’t unusual as a lot of those literary and not so literary magazines failed after a few months, and not an insignificant number lasted just a single issue.

I should note before we go any further that I stopped counting when I found at least nine films had been made of this tale, and at least two series. I’ll only mention one of these, a film in the Nineties with a certain naturally-bald Starship Captain, yes Patrick Stewart, given long flowing hair and a beard as the ghost. So how could I resist showing you him in that role?

The first version is a film very much of its time. The plot had Charles Laughton as a ghost doomed to haunt an English castle, and Robert Young as his distant American relative called upon to perform an act of bravery to redeem him. No one would get hurt in the story, no surprise at all.

Yes, there is redhead here as well in the winsome form of the six-year-old Margaret O’Brien who was born Angela Maxine O’Brien. O’Brien is of half-Irish and half-Spanish ancestry. She was one of the most popular child stars in cinema history and would be honored with a Juvenile Academy Award as an outstanding child actress the year this film came out.

I was looking for a particularly cute photo of her with Simon and I think that I indeed found in it in this one of her sitting on the stairs with him off to the right also sitting. What do you think? Am I right?

Here she plays the Lady Jessica de Canterville, Robert Young is Cuffy Williams and Charles Laughton is the ghostly Sir Simon de Canterville.

The motion picture was shot at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios with outdoor shots filming done at Busch Gardens in Pasadena, California. Busch Gardens was the almost forty acres of gardens owned by Adolphus Busch. The Hollywood film industry would use the gardens in many films shot in the Thirties onward such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein and Gone With the Wind.

It was directed by Jules Dassin with additional directing by Norman Z. McLeod who went uncredited, The only film I know I’ve seen by Dassin is Night and the City, a stellar British noir work. Now the screenplay was by Edwin Blum who went on to script Stalag 17, an entirely grimmer affair. It was produced by Arthur Fields, just one of three films that he did.

No idea how it did as I can find no box office or production costs for it.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Breaking Cat News recommends reading to beat the heat.
Broom Hilda finds a reason to worry about cons.
Eek! encounters a knight who never surrenders. (Not named “The Knight Who Says ‘Eek!’” – a missed opportunity.)
Free Range illustrates how some parenting techniques go way back.
Red and Rover achieves a childhood dream – oops!
The Flying McCoys has a monster complaint.
The Argyle Sweater remembers these dud video games.
The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee hates snacks with automatic updates.

(11) DEADPOOL DIES? No sooner does his movie make a mint than Marvel Comics announces Deadpool’s daughter, Ellie, will take over as Deadpool following Wade’s death this October in Deadpool #7!

Deadpool is dead—long live Deadpool! It was previously revealed that Wade Wilson will meet his end at the hands of new super villain Death Grip this October in DEADPOOL #6. Following this shocking turn of events, his daughter, Ellie Camacho, will step up as the all-new Deadpool starting in November’s DEADPOOL #7! Just revealed at the Diamond Retailer Lunch at San Diego Comic-Con, Ellie’s new role is the latest twist in what’s been writer Cody Ziglar’s roller coaster of a run. To welcome the new Merc with a Mouth, Ziglar will be joined by guest artist Andrea Di Vito and co-writer Alexis Quasarano in her Marvel Comics debut.

Wade has fallen, and his daughter Ellie has taken up the mantle! Taskmaster continues her mercenary training, but what she really wants is vengeance. And to get that, she’ll need Princess’ help. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

DEADPOOL #7

Written by CODY ZIGLAR & ALEXIS QUASARANO. Art by ANDREA DI VITO.

Cover by TAURIN CLARKE

Variant Cover by MARK BAGLEY

(12) SPOILER, MAYBE? About a Deadpool & Wolverine cameo. “Blake Lively Recalls Meeting Ryan Reynolds on Set of ‘Green Lantern’”. No excerpt. Because spoiler, maybe.

(13) IT IS HIS DOOM. The Hollywood Reporter picks up more news at San Diego Comic-Com: “Robert Downey Jr. Back as Doctor Doom for Two ‘Avengers’ Movies”.

Robert Downey Jr. is set to return to the film franchise as classic Fantastic Four villain Doctor Doom for the newly titled Avengers: Doomsday, due out in May 2026, and Avengers: Secret Wars, bowing in May 2027. Kevin Feige also officially confirmed the Russo bros. will direct these next two Avengers films.

Downey became one of the biggest movie stars in the world after launching the Marvel Cinematic Universe with 2008’s Iron Man. His work helped propel the MCU to become the highest grossing film franchise of all time — and he was handsomely rewarded, earning $50 million paydays in the process. Downey retired from the role of Tony Stark/Iron Man with 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, in which his character died saving the universe. It’s been a challenge for Marvel to find a protagonist to replace the large hole left by Downey, giving Saturday’s announcement all the more meaning.

“New mask, same task,” Downey told the audience from the stage.

Downey was revealed in an almost religious ceremony as about two dozen olive-robed men with metal, Doctor Doom-like masks walked on stage, joining Feige and the Russo Bros. “If we’re going to bring Victor Von Doom to the screen — he is one of the more complex characters in all of comics … this is potentially one of the more entertaining characters in all of fiction,” said Joe Russo. “If we’re going to do this … then we are going to need the greatest actor in the world.”…

(14) PEACEMAKER RELOADED. “’Wynonna Earp Vengeance’ Reunion Movie Trailer, Streaming Soon on Tubi” – TVLine supplies the introduction:

A frightful phone call and a deadly threat lures Peacemaker’s wielder back to Purgatory in the full trailer for Wynonna Earp: Vengeance, the 90-minute reunion special coming “soon” to Tubi.

(15) HMS SURPRISE. While in town for Comic-Con, Naomi Novik visited the Maritime Museum of San Diego.

I have finally made it on to the HMS Surprise! ????
This replica of a Royal Navy tallship was used in Master & Commander, the film adaptation of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin series – one of the sparks behind Temeraire. ????Now at the @sdmaritime pic.twitter.com/lEKLR3fGBP
— Naomi Novik (@naominovik) July 27, 2024

(16) CITIUS, ALTIUS, FORTIUS, MINIONUS. “Minions get into the Olympic spirit during Opening Ceremony” from NBC Sports. The video can only be viewed on YouTube – bastards!

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

Pixel Scroll 7/5/24 Shhhh, The Pixels Are Resting Right Now, Let’s Not Disturb Them

Posted on July 5, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) SHERYL BIRKHEAD’S FANZINE COLLECTION. [Item by Rich Lynch.] I’m sad to report that my friend Sheryl Birkhead unfortunately is now in the midst of severe vascular dementia. This is resulting in her being relocated from her house into an assisted living situation. As a result, her house (in Montgomery County, MD) will be put up for sale soon, and in the near future there will need to be a disposition of her extensive collection of fanzines, many of which are historically valuable.

So, on her behalf, I am looking for indications of interest from university libraries which have existing collections of fanzines. Sheryl’s collection will be a significant and valuable addition to one of these library collections.

If you have a contact with a university library fanzine collection curator, please pass this information on to him/her. I am the point of contact and I can be reached at rw_lynch@yahoo.com

Your assistance is appreciated in helping to preserve this valuable collection.

(2) FRANKENSTEIN AND BILBO COMMAND BIG BUCKS. A first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein sold for $843,000, and a first edition presentation copy of The Hobbit went for $300,000 in Heritage Auctions’ The William A. Strutz Library, Part I, Rare Books Signature^® Auction yesterday. “One For the Books: Inaugural Auction Featuring Selections from William Strutz’s Celebrated Library”.

Frankenstein was published in three volumes on January 1, 1818, by a small London publishing house, Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, with a small print run of 500 copies. The first edition appeared anonymously, and featured an unsigned preface by Percy Shelley, and a dedication to Mary’s father, philosopher William Godwin. Mary Shelley didn’t publicly claim her novel until four years later, when her novel was adapted into a popular play.

Also:

…what is now the most valuable Hobbit in the world, a presentation copy of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel that realized $300,000.

Bidders also fought over a first edition presentation copy of Tolkien’s 1937 The Hobbit, featuring a dust jacket — likewise the creation of Tolkien — so brilliant-bright its snow-capped mountains seem to burst out of its famously verdant landscape. Tolkien gifted this copy to dear friends, writing inside, “Charles & Dorothy Moore / from. / J.R.R.T / with love / September 1937.”

(3) THE SOUNDEST BITES. The Big Think excerpts Guy P. Harrison’s Damn You, Entropy! 1,001 of the Greatest Science Fiction Quotes: “31 genius sci-fi quotes that offer real-world wisdom”.

…Science is our most effective tool or process for discovering and understanding reality. It also enables us to create technologies with godlike powers. Unfortunately, this comes with the risk of placing too much trust in scientists and too much reliance on technology. The question of who gets to control and benefit most from deadly, invasive, or dehumanizing technology is a common science-fiction theme.

“When a population is dependent on a machine, they are hostages of the men who tend the machines.” — Robert A. Heinlein, “The Roads Must Roll,” 1940 short story

“Aren’t these the people who taught us how to annihilate ourselves? I tell you, my friends, science is too important to be left to the scientists.” — Carl Sagan, Contact, 1985 novel

“It has undoubtedly occurred to you, as to all thinking people of your day, that the scientists have done a particularly abominable job of dispensing the tools they have devised. Like careless and indifferent workmen they have tossed the products of their craft to gibbering apes and baboons.” — Raymond F. Jones, This Island Earth, 1952 novel

On the other hand, prominent astronomer Fred Hoyle wrote a science-fiction novel in the 1950s that contained the suggestion that scientists don’t have enough power.

“Has it ever occurred to you, Geoff, that in spite of all the changes wrought by science—by our control over inanimate energy, that is to say—we still preserve the same old social order of precedence? Politicians at the top, then the military, and the real brains at the bottom.” — Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud, 1957 novel…

(4) SCAM I AM. Victoria Strauss investigates “The Curious Case of Fullers Library and Its Deceptive Link Requests” at Writer Beware.

…All of the websites targeted for Fullers’ link suggestions include resource pages or otherwise offer lists of outbound links, and each suggested link is seeded across multiple recipient sites: for example, a websearch on the rain garden article yields six pages of results, with many different “student” names supposedly responsible for recommending it. The articles are, for the most part, like Nora’s: superficial but not overtly bogus, just the kind of thing that you could believe an enthusiastic young student might find helpful.

As for the sites to which the suggested links direct, in some cases they are a semi-plausible match for the articles they host (for example, an article on paper bag crafts hosted at a printing company, and an article on pickleball hosted at a playground equipment vendor), but more often it’s like the examples above: the article has zero relevance to its host, and isn’t accessible from the host menu. Many of these hosts–some of which are pretty shady-seeming–are home to multiple Fullers-recommended articles.

In other words, Fullers is running a link building scam….

(5) SFF AUDIO DRAMA. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The BBC’s Radio 4 (formerly the Home Service) airs some excellent audio dramas with some solid SF in the mix. The latest such offering is The Skies Are Watching.

Heather Haskins went missing two years ago. Discovered aboard a flight without a ticket or identification, she now believes she’s a woman named Coral Goran, it’s 1938, and that she was abducted on the night of Orson Welles’ infamous</I> War of the Worlds <I>broadcast. Her family struggles to come to terms with this turn of events while searching for answers…

Episode 1 airs Friday, July 5 and can for a month be accessed here.

(6) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 5, 1957 — Jody Lynn Nye, 67.

By Paul Weimer. I mainly know the work of Nye as a collaborator and facilitator, working with other people’s work. Sure, she has written a slew of short stories, and several novels of her own. But when I think of her work, I don’t think of those as much as I should. Instead, I think of her work with Robert Asprin, and Anne McCaffrey.

Neither is a surprise. One of the strong arrows in Nye’s quiver is humor, and collaboration with Asprin on some of the later works in the MYTH series must have seemed natural to both of them when they decided to do it. Both engage in both broad humor and subtle wordplay, laugh out loud at the moment, and later poleaxing bits of humor as profound as they are funny. And coming in as she did late in the series, it provided a fresh infusion of ideas for the MYTH series at the time and helped extend the series into the 2000s.

And then there is Anne McCaffrey. The first thing I read by Nye is not her standalone novels, or MYTH, but rather her guide to Pern. Even then, intensely interested in worldbuilding, of COURSE I had to pick this one up (it would be one of several I picked up, including one on Julian May’s Pliocene exile, the Visual Guide to Castle Amber, et cetera). I only in retrospect realized that the Nye who wrote this would be the one who collaborated with McCaffrey in the other arena McCaffrey is known more: The Ship Who Sang. That original novella, way back in the 1960’s led to Nye and McCaffrey collaborating on more stories and novels about a sentient spaceship. Nye also continued the series on her own, as did other authors like S M Stirling. (In point of fact, Nye seems to like to do that, to continue on series. She did it with MYTH and with some other series as well, extending and building them outward.

And then there is the odd collaborative/shared world Exiled Claw, which is an alternate earth where intelligent bipedal cats (think Kzinti but not as stupidly aggressive ) take on intelligent dinosaurs in a bronze age/early iron age technology verse. Nye shows off yet another arrow in her quiver in those two volumes. Pity they stopped after two volumes and not even Nye has had the opportunity to write any more. Alas!

It would be a Mythstake, indeed, to discount Nye’s work in the SFF field as “merely” being collaborative. (She also teaches at DragonCon every year, too). Collaborations and working in other people’s sandboxes is hard, not easier, than original ideas, and Nye has a talent (and clearly, a proclivity) for it.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Free Range shows a budding mad scientist.
Non Sequitur discovers a literary first.
Dog Eat Doug introduces catificial intelligence.
The Far Side does not have the brightest detectives on the case.

(9) SCIENCE EXHIBITION IN LONDON. [Item by Steven French.] If anyone happens to be in London over the weekend, there’s some neat stuff going on at the Royal Society: “Summer Science Exhibition 2024”.

Discover cutting-edge research and innovation at the Royal Society’s unmissable Summer Science Exhibition, taking place from 2 – 7 July 2024, an interactive experience open to everyone with a curious mind. This is a free event and no ticket is required.

This year, visitors can get hands-on with personal brain scanners, hear real ice core samples from Antarctica, marvel at a chandelier made from a waste product, or learn how stem cells are revealing secrets of the embryo. Find out more about the 14 main exhibits and plan your visit.

One of the exhibits is about “DUNE: The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment”.

DUNE, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, is a cutting-edge experiment developed by the international neutrino physics community to study a broad range of science, including neutrino oscillations, neutrinos from nearby supernovae, and proton decays.

The Near Detector of the experiment will be hosted by Fermilab, IL, USA, with its Far Detector 1300 km away in South Dakota at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). Surprisingly, no tunnel is needed for the neutrinos to travel through because these ghostly particles pass easily through soil and rock as they rarely interact with matter. The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LNBF) at Fermilab will deliver a neutrino beam of unprecedented power, which is needed for the detailed measurements DUNE is due to take of such elusive particles.

Probably the most well-known goal of the experiment is to study neutrino oscillations. This has driven the large-scale design of the experiment as neutrinos need to travel a large distance for oscillation to take place. This will help solve some fundamental questions, such as why the Universe is made of matter and not antimatter, and provide more information about the masses and nature of neutrinos….

(10) CHINA SMASH! [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Not satisfied, one supposes, with the NASA effort to redirect asteroids in the DART mission, China claims they will one up that by “smashing“ a 30-meter asteroid by 2030. (It might be noted that the smaller asteroid, (Dimorphos) of the double asteroid NASA targeted—the one actually impacted—was ~170-meters and thus much more massive than China’s target.)

All that said, having two nations working on planetary defense is much better than having only a single nation doing so. “China Planning to Smash Asteroid in Planetary Defense Test” at Futurism.

China is planning to launch a spacecraft with the aim of smashing a nearby asteroid, in an impact designed to test the feasibility of protecting against any Earth-threatening asteroids like the one that killed off the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago.

Researchers outlined their plans in a recent paper published in the Journal of Deep Space Exploration and spotted by The Planetary Society, saying that a test mission should happen before 2030 and that an asteroid with a diameter of about 30 meters will be the target….

(11) A BOON FROM ARES. The LAist gets a scientist to explain to us “Why a new method of growing food on Mars matters more on Earth”.

That led to a career in space agriculture, figuring out how to grow food on other planets. She credits time later spent living among the Kambeba, an Indigenous tribe in the Amazon rainforest she is descended from, for her conviction that it is essential that she do more than explore distant worlds. She wants to preserve this one, too.

“It’s a very conscientious topic within the world of space agriculture science,” said Gonçalves, noting that “every single piece of research that we produce must have direct benefits to Earth.”

That ideal makes her latest research particularly timely. She and a team at the Wageningen University & Research Centre for Crop System Analysis found that an ancient Maya farming technique called intercropping works surprisingly well in the dry, rocky terrain of Mars.

Their findings, published last month in the journal PLOS One, have obvious implications for the possibility of exploring or even settling that distant planet. But understanding how to grow crops in the extraordinarily harsh conditions on other planets does more than ensure those colonizing them can feed themselves. It helps those here at home continue to do the same as the world warms.

“People don’t really realize [this], because it seems far away, but actually our priority is to develop this for the benefit of Earth,” said Gonçalves. “Earth is beautiful, and it’s unique, and it’s rare, and it’s fragile. And it needs our help.”…

Intercropping, or growing different crops in close proximity to one another to increase the size and nutritional value of yields, requires less land and water than monocropping, or the practice of continuously planting just one thing. Although common among small farmers, particularly across Latin America, Africa, and China, intercropping remains a novelty in much of the world. This is partly because of the complexity of managing such systems and largely unfounded concerns about yield loss and pest susceptibility. Modern plant breeding programs also tend to focus on individual species and a general trend toward less diversity in the field….

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Host David Agranoff is joined by Alec Nevala-Lee and Seth Heasley on Postcards From A Dying World #148 to discuss “SF Hall of Fame #6 Nightfall by Isaac Asimov”.

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

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Tag Archives: Writer Beware

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Pixel Scroll 7/5/24 Shhhh, The Pixels Are Resting Right Now, Let’s Not Disturb Them