Next month, Marvel Comics celebrates Black History Month! In addition to Storm: Lifedream, a special one-shot honoring the legacy of Earth’s Mightiest Mutant, Marvel proudly presents two collections of variant covers: Star Wars Black History Month Variant Covers featuring Black Heroes of the galaxy far, far away and Black History Month Variant Covers spotlighting Marvel super heroes Black Panther and Captain America.
Here are the 8 heroes spotlighted this year and where to find them.
Black Panther, legendary super hero and King of Wakanda. T’Challa can currently be seen taking charge in Jed MacKay and Farid Karami’s hit run of Avengers.
Captain America (Sam Wilson), whose latest high-flying adventure kicked off last week in Evan Narcisse, Greg Pak, and Eder Messias’ Sam Wilson: Captain America.
Frenzy, the former villain who now lends her super strength to the government’s officially sanctioned mutant team in Mark Russell and Robert Quinn’s X-Factor.
Gold Tiger, a mysterious new Wakandan hero who debuted this week in Steve Foxe and Ivan Fiorelli’s New Champions!
Power Man, or rather a version of him from the far future! Be there when this future Luke Cage and his awe-inspiring array of powers arrives in the modern Marvel Universe next month in Collin Kelly, Jackson Lanzing, and Bernard Chang’s Power Man: Timeless!
Spider-Man (Miles Morales), Brooklyn’s own web-slinger who’s currently enjoying a celebrated run by Cody Ziglar, Luigi Zagaria and more where he’ll soon face off against Deadpool for the first time in the upcoming “Pools of Blood” crossover!
Storm, Earth’s Mightiest Mutant and one of Marvel’s most groundbreaking super heroes. Celebrating 50 years of storytelling this year, the iconic X-Men leader currently stars in both Avengers and her own solo ongoing series by Murewa Ayodele and Lucas Werneck.
Temper, one of the X-Men’s most promising students. The young temperature-controlling mutant was recently promoted to the flagship X-Men team, following Cyclops’ leadership in Jed MacKay and Ryan Stegman’s X-Men.
Following the jump, check out 7 of the covers now. For more information, visit Marvel.com.
Professor X’s escape from Graymalkin Prison sends the X-Men’s world into chaos in X-Manhunt, an eight-part X-crossover this March.
The saga kicks off when Professor X breaks out of Graymalkin Prison, sowing division and discord among the different mutant factions. Bringing the current ongoing X-titles together for the first time this era, X-Manhunt will have chapters in Uncanny X-Men, Nyx, Storm, X-Men, X-Factor, and X-Force along with a tie-in issue of Exceptional X-Men, before concluding in X-Manhunt Omega, a double-sized finale one-shot.
For his crimes against humanity at the end of the Krakoan Age, Charles Xavier remains a heavily-guarded inmate at a mutant detention center built at his former school, a cruel punishment he was willing to accept—until now! Driven by mysterious new purpose, Professor X frees himself from captivity to undertake a mission of personal significance. He has no time to lose as a telepathic virus wreaks havoc on his mind—and those around him! The hunt for the most dangerous mutant in the world begins, and Professor X desperately calls on his X-Men. Some are ready to forgive. Others are not. And while his once loyal followers clash to decide his fate, the X-Men’s founder will be forced to reckon with his tarnished legacy once and for all!
Following the jump, read on to learn more about all eight X-Manhunt issues.
In an August 1967 editorial in Galaxy titled “S.F. as a Stepping Stone”, Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) voiced his extreme disapproval of the New Wave movement as “‘mainstream’ with just enough of a tang of the not-quite-now and the not-quite-here to qualify it for inclusion in the genre” (4). He concludes: “I hope that when the New Wave has deposited its froth and receded, the vast and solid shore of science fiction will appear once more and continue to serve the good of humanity” (6). The implication is clear: there is a Platonic science fiction form that exists (and that he writes) that must be rediscovered.
Fellow “classic” author Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988) offered a different, and far more inclusive, take at his Guest of Honor speech at Norescon 1 (Worldcon 1971). In an environment of “shrill” disagreement between various New Wave and anti-New Wave camps, Simak celebrated science fiction as a “forum of ideas” open to all voices (148)….
(2) BITE ME. At Black Gate, Neil Baker happily tells readers what’s lacking in this bunch of simply jaw-ful movies: “Jumping the Shark, Part I”. First on his list:
Apex Predators (2021) Prime
What kind of shark? Stock footage and a rubber dorsal fin.
How deep is the plot? There is no plot.
Anyone famous get eaten? No
Let me preface this by saying I have a lot of respect for anyone who tries to make a feature film (having tried myself), however, I have not one ounce of respect for Dustin Ferguson, who wrote, directed and edited this utter shit show.
Everything about it is dire, an utter waste of time, and let’s talk about that time. It has a run time of 74 mins. I like a film that keeps its runtime down and packs it full of action and plot. However, this film contains approximately 18 minutes of action and/or ‘plot’. The rest of the time is padded out with stock footage of fish, or shots of characters walking along doing fuck all….
(3) MURDERBOT GIVES CHARITY A BOOST. Martha Wells has pointed readers at the sale of authored Murderbot merch from Worldbuilders, which raises funds for charities like Heifer International, Mercy Corps, First Book etc. Here’s the link: Worldbuilders Market. Wells says, “This is the ONLY licensed Murderbot seller.” The things available include Murderbot pins, a Sanctuary Moon t-shirt, and signed books.
Here’s one of the pins available ($16).
(4) CURSED CHOW? Eater commentator Jaya Saxena, in “We Don’t Have to Do a Harry Potter Baking Show”, contends that “By creating ‘Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking,’ Food Network is condoning its creator’s transphobia. It’s also just plain lazy.”
The Food Network has produced yet another formulaic competition show, but this is not news. This is what the channel has been reduced to at this point — for every Chopped, which still holds its charm, there seem to be dozens of one-off holiday challenges and pumpkin carving competitions to serve as background noise for whoever fell asleep while Netflix was running.
But Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking is different. Premiering last week, the competition features all things Harry Potter. It’s hosted by James and Oliver Phelps, who played the Weasley twins in the films, and features cameos by a host of other secondary characters. It’s shot on the original sets of the films. And competitors are expected to make fantastical creations inspired by the series, for the opportunity to win a Wizards of Baking Cup and appear in a forthcoming Harry Potter cookbook. Carla Hall is there too.
This sucks.
Food Network could have made a generic wizard-themed baking show — no one owns the concept of magic. But being an official Harry Potter property means the show was licensed in some way by its creator, J.K. Rowling, a woman who has so thoroughly dedicated her public persona to promoting transphobia that even Elon Musk is telling her to cool it….
(5) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] Wednesday’s episode of Jeopardy! had a whole SFF category in the Double Jeopardy round, entitled “The Worlds of TV”. The contestants went through the category in order, top to bottom:
$400: Even though it sounds like the Ewok planet, this show is named for Diego Luna’s character Challenger Drew Wheeler was able to come up with “What is Andor?”
$800 (accompanied by a picture all filtered in red of a hazy figure among frightening spikes, with a jet of fire in the background): It’s the name of the menacing dimension on Stranger Things Returning champion Kevin Laskowski replied, “What is the Upside Down?”
$1200: According to Gene Roddenberry, this home planet of a USS Enterprise officer orbits a star called 40 Eridani A Drew knew it was Vulcan.
$1600: On a SyFy miniseries, James Hook finds a magical orb that takes him, Peter, and the Lost Boys to this one-word title world Julia Schan guessed “What is Neverland?” and was correct.
$2000: Geralt of Rivia travels across a landmass simply known as The Continent on this show Kevin got “What is The Witcher?”
Winners have just been announced for this year’s Pittsburgh Shorts Film Festival (November 21-24), and we’re pleased and proud to announce that THE UGLY CHICKENS took home the Jury Award for Best Live Action Short Film.
Mark Raso was in Pittsburgh to represent us, and accept the prize of behalf of our cast and crew and dodo lovers everywhere. Felicia Day starred in the film, while Mark directed. Michael Cassutt wrote the script, adapted from Howard Waldrop’s classic short story, winner of the Nebula and World Fantasy Award in 1980-1981.
Pittsburgh Shorts is one of the premiere short film venues in the country, and the competition is always tough. It is a real honor take home the trophy, and I know Howard would have been thrilled as well.
Mulling over whether 2024 me agrees with what 1984 me thought about 1974 me reminded me getting the gig to write Marvel’s Bullpen Bulletins Page was both the best and worst thing that ever could have happened, why my willingness to burn bridges by writing an Ethics column for The Comics Journal shouldn’t be confused with bravery, which comic book art recently caused me to reach out to Robert De Niro, Stan Lee’s all-caps cover critique, the day Larry Hama verified Tony Isabella was right and I was wrong, and more.
Below is an installment of Scott’s ethics column. (Click for larger images.)
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Anniversary: Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (1986)
Christmas long ago was the memory of a dream that seemed never to end. But somewhere in the middle of that dream, I always did wake up, just in time to attend the Christmas party. — Opening lines as said by the adult Clara in E.T. Hoffman’s The Nutcracker
So let’s talk about a most unusual Nutcracker that had the blessing to get filmed. Nutcracker: The Motion Picture, also known as Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker or simply Nutcracker, it was produced thirty-eight years ago by the Pacific Northwest Ballet.
What makes this one worth knowing about? Two words that form an oh-so-wonderful name: Maurice Sendak.
Choreographer Kent Stowell, the artistic director of the Pacific Northwest Ballet, had invited author-illustrator Maurice Sendak to collaborate on a Nutcracker production in 1979 after his wife and another colleague had seen a Sendak design for a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
(I saw those his creations when they were stored away when I was in Seattle. Quite amazing even just there.)
Sendak initially rejected Stowell’s invitation, later explaining why he did so:
The Nutcrackers I’ve seen have all been dull. You have a simpering little girl, a Christmas party, a tree that gets big. Then you have a variety of people who do dances that seem to go on and on ad nauseam. Technically it’s a mess, too; Acts I and II have practically nothing to do with each other. … What you don’t have is plot. No logic. You have lots of very pretty music, but I don’t enjoy it because I’m a very pedantic, logical person. I want to know why things happen.
He later accepted provided that he could write it so it was in tune with the themes in Hoffmann’s original story. It was extremely popular and it was the annual Christmas show for thirty-one years.
For reasons too complicated to explain here, I got invited on a personal tour of the backstage area of the Pacific Northwest Ballet building where the scenery and other materials that Sendak had designed for this were stored. To say these were magical is an understatement. And just a tad scary up close.
Two Disney executives attended the premiere and suggested it’d make a splendid film. Sendak and the Director of the Ballet resisted at first preferring to just film the ballet. But both finally decided to adapt it to a film. That meant Clara’s dream had to be clarified; large portions of the choreography were changed; some of the original designs underwent revision, and Sendak created additional ones from scratch.
It was shot in ten days on the cheap and critics weren’t particularly kind about the result as they could see the necessary shortcuts taken. Ballard, the Director here as well, responded to criticism about the editing in a later The New York Times interview, noting that the editing was not what he had initially planned, but was because of the tight filming schedule.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by JJ.]
Born November 30, 1952 — Jill Eastlake, 72.
By JJ: Jill Eastlake is an IT Manager, Costumer, Conrunner, and Fan who is known for her elaborate and fantastical costume designs; her costume group won “Best in Show” at the 2004 Worldcon.
A member of fandom for more than 50 years, she belonged to her high school’s SF club, then became an early member of NESFA, the Boston-area fan club, and served as its president for 4 years.
She has served on the committees for numerous Worldcons and regional conventions, co-chaired a Costume-Con, and chaired two Boskones.
She was the Hugo Award ceremony coordinator for the 1992 Worldcon, and has run the Masquerade for numerous conventions.
Her extensive contributions were honored when she was named a Fellow of NESFA in 1976, and in 2011 the International Costumer’s Guild presented her with their Lifetime Achievement Award.
She and her fan husband Don (who is irrationally fond of running WSFS Business Meetings) were Fan Guests of Honor at Rivercon.
Jill Eastlake
(9b) TODAY’S OTHER BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born November 30, 1906 — John Dickson Carr. (Died 1977.)
As you know, we don’t do just sff genre Birthdays here and so it is that we have here one of my favorite mystery writers, John Dickson Carr. Indeed, I’ve listened to The Hollow Man, one of his Gideon Fell mysteries, and it’s quite superb.
He who wrote some of the best British mysteries ever done was not British himself, being American. Oh the horror. He did live there for much of the Thirties and Forties, marrying a British woman.
Dr. Fell, an Englishman, lived in the London suburbs. Carr wrote twenty-seven novels with him as the detective. I’m listening to The Hollow Man because it’s considered one of the best locked room mysteries ever done. Indeed, Dr. Fell’s discourse on locked room mysteries in a chapter has been reprinted as a stand-alone essay in its own right.
All of the Fell novels are wonderful mysteries. The detective himself? Think of a beer-drinking Nero Wolfe who’s a lot more outgoing. Almost all of the novels concern his unraveling of locked room mysteries or what he calls impossible crimes. Of these novels, I’ve read quite a number and they’re all excellent.
Now let’s talk about Sir Henry Merrivale, created by “Carter Dickson”, a pen name of John Dickson Carr. (Not sure why he bothered with such a thinly-veiled pen name though.) Merrivale was like Fell an amateur detective who started who being serious but, and I’m not fond of the later novels for this, became terribly comic in the later novels. Let me note that Carr was really prolific as there were twenty-two novels with him starting in the Thirties over a thirty-year period. One of the finest is The White Priory Murders which was a Wodehousian country weekend with yet another locked room mystery in it.
He also, as did other writers of British mysteries, created a French detective, one by the name of Henri Bencolin, a magistrate in the Paris judicial system. (Though I’ve not mentioned it, all of his mysteries are set in the Twenties onward.) Carr interestingly has an American writer Jeff Marle narrating the stories here and he describes Bencolin as looking and feeling Satanic. His methods are certainly not those of the other two detectives as he’s quite rough when need be to get a case solved.
There are but four short stories and five novels of which I think The Last Gallows is the best.
With Adrian Conan Doyle, the youngest son of Arthur Conan Doyle, Carr wrote some Sherlock Holmes stories that were published in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes collection. Not in-print but used copies available reasonably from the usual suspects.
He was also chosen by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1949 to write the biography of the writer. That work, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is in-print in a trade paper edition.
John Dickson Carr
(10) COMICS SECTION.
Dog Eat Doug finds more than one team on a planet leads to a dramatic problem.
Free Range discovers the relatives of Edvard Munch’s subject.
The best Marvel Comics covers of all time may be a matter of personal taste – but there are all-time classic illustrations which are instantly recognizable, and which evoke a specific time and place in the Marvel Universe.
We’ve pored over decades of covers dating back to the ’30s, and while it’s impossible to include every great and memorable cover in Marvel Comics history, these are the 25 that we feel best represent the Marvel Universe.Our criteria include a cover’s quality, its recognizability, and its influence, including how many other covers and artists have paid homage to it, like with these recent Fantastic Four variant covers that recreate other classic Marvel images….
In first place is –
1. X-Men #1 – Jim Lee and Scott Williams
If there’s one single cover, one magnum opus image that sums up everything Marvel Comics is about, it has to be Jim Lee’s timeless cover for 1991’s X-Men #1, which draws on classic influences going all the way back to Jack Kirby’s Uncanny X-Men #1 cover and pulls them into a thoroughly modern piece of superhero art. This cover not only sums up decades of previous art and storytelling into one evocative drawing, it has become so definitive that it has itself informed decades of covers since – including more recreations and homages than you can shake your adamantium claws at.
The news from the National Literacy Trust this month was bleak. Their annual report revealed that just one in three eight- to 18-year-olds enjoy reading in their free time – the lowest level in almost two decades of research. Boys and young people in secondary school in particular are turning away from books, with steep declines in reading recorded for both groups….
…So, how do we get children back to books and turning those pages again? We have to give them ways to discover the joy of reading in ways that matter to them. Let your children read what they want – within reason, without pressure. Please don’t tell them you were reading weighty tomes at their age, it’s not helping. Resist that urge, relax your rules, let them read….
(13) BEWARE OF NUCLEAR WASTE. It’s going to be around for a long time. One group wants to learn “HOW TO SEND A MESSAGE 10,000 YEARS INTO THE FUTURE” that will warn people long after our languages and cultures have expired.
This is The Ray Cat Solution:
1. Engineer cats that change colour in response to radiation.
2. Create the culture/legend/history that if your cat changes colour, you should move some place else.
And, of course, buy the merch for everyone you know. For example, one of these t-shirts.
Fascinated by the problem of designing warnings for people 10,000 years in the future, New Hampshire Institute of Art’s Type 1 class has joined forces with Bricobio and The Raycat Solution to help insert Raycats into the cultural vocabulary. While Bricobio works towards genetically altering cats so they change color when in the presence of radioactive material, the NHIA Type 1 class is working to insert the idea that if a cat changes color, that space might be dangerous to others.
A report from Bloomberg this week suggests that Sony is working on a new portable PlayStation device. As someone who still has a PlayStation Vita languishing in my desk drawer because I can’t quite bear to put it in the attic, this is an exciting prospect. It has been almost 13 years since Sony released the Vita, its last portable console, and it’s such a wonder of a thing, with its big crisp screen and dinky little sticks. I wish more people had made games for it – paper-craft adventure Tearaway and topsy-turvy platform-puzzler Gravity Rush remain underrated.
Actually, apart from the lovely and extremely niche Playdate, nobody has bothered to release a dedicated handheld games console in over a decade. Both the Nintendo Switch and Valve’s Steam Deck are hybrids that can be played handheld and connected to a big screen.
There’s a reason for this: firstly, smartphones have snapped up almost the entire market for portable games, offering endless free or cheap games on a device that everybody already has. And secondly: having handheld and home consoles on the market once would split development resources. Only Nintendo was successful enough at selling handhelds to weather several generations of splitting its talent between creating games for the DS and the Wii, or the 3DS and Wii U, which has led to the Switch being a contender for the cleverest business decision of its history.
Approximately 1.5 million years ago, two human relatives belonging to two distinct species made their way along the shore of an ancient lake. Researchers know this because the hominins’ footprints fossilized in the mud, alongside the prints of giant birds that occupied the paleoenvironment….
…The footprints were made by Homo erectusand Paranthropus boisei, long-extinct species that shared eastern Africa in the ancient past. Together, the footprints are a remarkable window into the lives of our nearest relatives and ancestors. The prints show how hominins overlapped as they eked out existence in ancient Africa; according to the research team, if the hominins who made the prints didn’t overlap at the site, they crossed it within hours of one another. The team’s research was published today in Science….
(16) A BOOST FOR THE HOLIDAYS. NASA has created the “Rocket Engine Fireplace” to give you warm holiday thoughts – for eight hours!
Just what you need for the holidays… the coziness of a crackling and roaring rocket engine! Technically, this fireplace packs the heat of the SLS rocket’s four RS-25 engines and a pair of solid rocket boosters – just enough to get you to the Moon! (And get through the holidays with your in-laws.) This glowing mood-setter is brought to you by the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket that launched Artemis I on its mission around the Moon and back on Nov. 16, 2022. 8.8 million pounds of total thrust – and a couple glasses of eggnog – might just be enough to make your holidays merry.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Lise Andreasen, David Goldfarb, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]
“Has there been an alternate universe as alternate as this universe? Will people accept a story where the universe is this weird?” —Ted Chiang Celebrated science fiction writer Ted Chiang takes the Appel Salon stage us to discuss his beloved short story collections. In conversation with Kelly Robson on October 24, 2024. Please note that this video will only be up until December 2, 2024.
(3) FRONT ROW. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4’s art show Front Row has had an SFnal edition. First up was an interview with the makers of the new Christopher (Superman) Reeve documentary. Next was an interview with author Samantha Harvey whose book, Orbital, has been short-listed for this year’s Booker. It is set on the International Space Station. Apparently, it is not SF but ‘space realism’.
Directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui talk about their new documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, which uses never-seen-before family archive to tell the story of the famed Superman actor. He became a champion of disability rights after being left paralysed from a horse riding accident.
The final of Front Row’s interviews with the authors on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist – Samantha Harvey on her novel Orbital.
Those of you who know Lezli Robyn know that she has had a terrible run of medical bad luck for years now, from near-blindness to an excruciating case of occipital neuralgia which requires her to have nerve blocks every two months in order to function. She also had to have her thyroid radiated/fried several years back due to a thyroid storm that nearly took her life, and now unfortunately she’s facing the opposite problem: extreme hypothyroidism.
She was admitted to the hospital on Wednesday October 30 for myxedema — doctors said she was at severe risk of going into a myxedema coma, which is life-threatening….
…She went to the ER with severe tiredness, stroke-like symptoms and an almost-inability to move her left side. She was remarkably chipper mentally for all of this, because her spirit is strong, but myxedema means that your organs are essentially shutting down because they’re out of fuel. Myxedema also results in swelling from the buildup of carbohydrate and sugar compounds in the skin and tissue….What is certain is that the swelling contributed to a freak case of Quincke’s disease, which is when your uvula swells up and obstructs your breathing, meaning that she has had to puree her food to eat it and was constantly choking. It was terrifying to listen to my lovely Lezli rasping and choking as she fought that off.
She IS fighting, but this is all very debilitating and as you may recall from earlier this year she’s already been put through the wringer like no one else I have ever seen. She’s managed to edit and travel for work, and is definitely still her lovely, down-to-earth, and funny self, but can’t work during the current situation.
What’s the financial situation? She won’t even let me tell you all of it, but I’m sure you can imagine how expensive the many hospitalizations were before the new insurance kicked in. There will still be high expenses associated with this new six day hospitalization….
(5) WON’T BE MISSED. Ember Wars author Richard Fox has been banned from Author Nation’s annual Las Vegas event for violating its Code of Conduct reports crusading journalist (and Fox’s friend) Jon Del Arroz.
JDA continues, “he [Fox] received a call later in the evening after filling out the form. He was told the ‘ethics and safety committee’ removed him from the panel.”
The fifth and final season of “Stranger Things” will debut in 2025, Netflix announced on Wednesday. To celebrate Nov. 6, 1983, a.k.a. “Stranger Things Day” — the day Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) was abducted into the Upside Down — the streamer also released a video revealing the titles for the final eight episodes, which will conclude the supernatural story of Hawkins, Indiana.
The episode titles are “The Crawl,” “The Vanishing of…,” “The Turnbow Trap,” “Sorcerer,” “Shock Jock,” “Escape From Camazotz,” “The Bridge,” and “The Rightside Up.”…
… The most delightful detail in the video is arguably the reveal that the season takes place in the fall of 1987, four years after the events of the first season — which debuted eight years ago, in 2016.
Netflix will delist just about all of its interactive shows and films as of December 1st, the company confirms to The Verge. Netflix’s “Interactive Specials” page lists 24 titles, but only four will remain: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend, Ranveer vs. Wild with Bear Grylls, and You vs. Wild.
The removal of the titles marks a disappointing conclusion to Netflix’s earliest efforts into interactive content. The company first launched the interactive titles in 2017 with Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale, and I remember being wowed (and horrified) by paths in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
In addition to specials based on franchises like Carmen Sandiego and Boss Baby, Netflix also tried ideas like a daily trivia series and a trivia game you could play with a friend. But the relatively few titles available suggests the format wasn’t much of a hit — Puss in Book has apparently been gone for a while….
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 6, 1914 — Jonathan Harris. (Died 2002.)
Jonathan Harris was the ever not-to-be-trusted Doctor Zachary Smith, of course, on Lost in Space. But before we get to that role, we should mention several of his previous genre roles.
Well, I would but it turns out that all he had was two minor roles on Twilight Zone. If Zorro is genre adjacent which is really stretching it, he was Don Carlos in Disney’s Zorro.
So, Doctor Zachary Smith.
In the pilot, not seen by the general audience until the late Nineties, there was no Doctor Smith. The marooning of the Space Family Robinson and their spaceship, the Jupiter 2, came about as the result of a meteor storm. The staff came to feel that an antagonist was needed, and so certain scenes were re-filmed with Smith having snuck aboard, with his extra weight having thrown the delicately-balanced ship badly off course.
An outright villain on a small craft was a bad story idea and Jonathan Harris very well knew that such a villain would not be tolerated or kept around for very long, even if he were not killed off. Fond of the role as written for him, not to mention staying as a cast member, he and the writing staff kept rewriting his story as the series went so he’d be much, less evil, more sympathetic and even comical.
However, it is my opinion, and that of many reviewers, that this change resulted also in a change in the show, turning the series from a mostly SF series to more much lighter series, more comical in tone.
He remained typecast as a villain showing up as such as Mr. Piper on Land of the Giants, The Ambassador on Get Smart and the voice of Lucifer on the original Battlestar Galactica. He did play an occasional lighter role such as Johann Sebastian Monroe on Bewitched in the “Samantha on the Keyboard” episode.
Worth noting is he played Commander Isaac Gampu, the head of the Space Academy, on the children’s series of the same name. It was produced by Filmation and aired Saturday mornings on CBS for just one season of fifteen episodes in 1977.
He did so many voices on so many animated shows that I couldn’t even begin to list them all here. It made up the bulk of the work that he did with A Bug’s Life, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, My Favorite Martian, Spider-Man and Toy Story 2, ones where I recognized his voice.
The fourth movie in the Captain America series, Captain America: Brave New World, is set to release on February 14, 2025, which is going to arrive faster than you think. LEGO is getting us prepared with the first wave of sets for the film. The lineup includes a new Captain America Construction figure, the Captain America vs. Red Hulk Battle set, and two LEGO Brickheadz figures of Captain America & Red Hulk….
Captain America Construction Figure (76296): Stands at 11-inches tall and made of 359 pieces, this Construction Figure is also poseable like a regular action figure! / $34.99 / Pre-order here at LEGO.com
Captain America vs. Red Hulk Battle (76292): This battle set includes multiple mini-figures: Captain America and Falcon (both with opening wings), Red Hulk and Ruth Bat-Seraph. The jet also includes an operable cockpit that fits any of the mini-figures and two stud blasters. 223 pieces. / $54.99 / Pre-order here at LEGO.com
Captain America & Red Hulk Figures (40668): This Brickheadz set is 202 pieces with each figure measuring about 3-inches. Captain America includes his wings and shield. / $19.99 / Available for pre-order on December 1st at LEGO.com
This set will be packed with details like a Cerebro element, switchable Danger Room items, an exploding cupola, a motorcycle for Wolverine, as well tons of graphical nods to the X-Men franchise. As noted, it will also include a buildable Sentinel and 10 minifigures, 5 of which are all-new for this set. These figures include Professor X in his wheelchair, a new variation of Jean Grey, Gambit, Iceman and Bishop. There’s also Magneto, Storm, Wolverine, Cyclops, and Rogue.
…Vulcans also have a bit of an edge and a reputation for being direct to the point of being rude. And Star Trek’s latest Vulcan, Gabrielle Ruiz, understands this paradox perfectly.
“There’s a menace to their honesty,” Ruiz tells Inverse. “They’re such snobs. They’re just so sophisticated and snobby that you just want to be a part of the clique, I think.”…
… Since the Season 2 episode “Wej Duj,” Ruiz has voiced the no-nonsense Vulcan T’Lyn on the animated comedy, Star Trek: Lower Decks.
Like many Vulcans in Star Trek canon, T’Lyn is often the funniest character in any given scene, and part of that stems from that relentless honesty Ruiz says is essential to playing Vulcans. Sometimes Vulcans are trying to be funny, and sometimes they’re funny by accident. But in Ruiz’s opinion, it’s all down to looking at the template created by the actors who came before her.
“My rule is simple,” Ruiz says. “I literally say it’s equivalent to ‘What would Jesus do?’ It’s How would Leonard Nimoy say it? How would Spock say it?”…
The world’s first wooden satellite has been launched into space as part of study on using timber to help reduce the creation of space junk.
Scientists at Kyoto University expect the wooden material to burn up when the device re-enters the atmosphere – potentially providing a way to avoid generating metal particles when a retired satellite returns to Earth.
These particles may negatively affect the environment and telecommunications, the developers say….
(13) THAT OTHER REASON FOR THE SEASON. The mission to save Christmas comes to theaters November 15. Red One Official Trailer 2.
Apple TV+’s dystopian thriller returns for season 2 on Friday, Nov. 15, but you don’t have to wait until then to find out what happens to Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) after she finally ventured outside her home silo only to discover the existence of other silos close by. We’ve got the beginning of the premiere for you to watch right… now….
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
Gail Simone and David Marquez are bringing the X-Men home in a new run of Uncanny X-Men which started last month. In the wake of Krakoa’s fall and Professor X’s imprisonment, the series sees Rogue take on the responsibility of leader by reuniting a core team of X-Men at a new home in New Orleans. It’s a new era for one of the most groundbreaking titles in comic book history. These were the stunning covers on the first issue.
Among the covers are exciting shots of the new team lineup by acclaimed artists Leinil Francis Yu, Andy Kubert, Stephen Segovia, and series artist Marquez; the first in a series of team member spotlights by Luciano Vecchio; and a gorgeous Negative Space Variant Cover of Jubilee by best-selling cover artist John Tyler Christopher. Plus, enjoy a throwback to one of Rogue’s most memorable tales in a Hidden Gem Variant Cover by the legendary Jim Lee. Also available is the third part of Scott Koblish’s epic Wraparound Connecting Variant Cover that will test even the most diehard X-Fan’s knowledge, an eye-catching collage piece by Mr Garcin, and a logo variant cover.
In today’s world, mutants need the X-Men more than ever. With Professor X gone, Rogue reluctantly finds herself as the X-Man designated to keep the team together. Rogue, Wolverine, Gambit, Nightcrawler, and Jubilee forge a new home in a New Orleans, and when four mysterious young mutants show up at their doorstep, that home becomes a haven. Protecting mutants from a world that hates and fears them, and using their powers to ensure there’s a future worth living in. They are the Uncanny X-Men.
(1) CLARION WEST 2025 INSTRUCTORS. The instructors for Clarion West’s 2025 Six-Week Summer Workshop have been named: Maurice Broaddus, Malka Older, Diana Pho, and Martha Wells. It will be an online workshop running from June 22-August 2. Applications planned to open December, 2024. Scholarships available.
(2) ALL GLORY IS FLEETING. T. Kingfisher’s Chengdu 2023 Hugo arrived in pieces, but at least they all arrived at the same time.
(3) PROCESS OF ELIMINATION. Zoë O’Connell created colored graphs to illustrate the flow of votes in the Hugo Awards automatic runoff process. Thread starts here on Mastodon.
Visualising the #Worldcon #Hugo2024 voting results.
Alternative Title: Why ranked voting matters.
As a quick explanation, the last placed candidate in each round is eliminated and their votes transferred to the next candidate on each ballot.
Here’s the graph for Best Fanzine. Two other finalists held the lead before finishing behind the winner Nerds of a Feather. (Click for larger image.)
(4) SLOWLY, THE STARS WERE GOING OUT… Variety reports the squeeze is on: “Paramount Television Studios Shut Down by Paramount Global Cost Cuts”. Last week, company leaders announced that they would reduce Paramount’s U.S.-based workforce by 15% in an effort to save $500 million in annual costs. Several genre/related projects will move from the Paramount TV studios brand to under the CBS Studios umbrella.
…All current series and development projects made under the Paramount Television Studios umbrella will move to CBS Studios.
Paramount Television marked the second time Paramount Pictures tried to move into the TV business — separate from the storied shingle that was built on the Desilu production studio founded by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. That studio, which backed such TV treasures as “I Love Lucy” and “Star Trek,” eventually became the center of Paramount Studios after an acquisition by Gulf + Western, and would be inherited by CBS after its split from the company formerly known as Viacom Inc. in 2005….
… Under its aegis, the company produced “The Offer,” an insider tale of the making of the landmark movie, for Paramount+; and series based on Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character for Amazon Prime Video. Other series it produced include “The Spiderwick Chronicles for Roku and a revival of the Terry Gilliam movie “Time Bandits” that is now a series on Apple’s streaming service….
Warner Bros. Discovery has updated Cartoon Network’s website to remove basically everything and turn it into a page pointing to the Max streaming service. Before the change, the website let you watch free episodes of shows like Adventure Time and Steven Universe. The switchover appears to have happened on Thursday, Variety reports, and follows Warner Bros.’ announcement last week that it would be shutting down Boomerang, its streaming service for classic Warner Bros. cartoons.
“Looking for episodes of your favorite Cartoon Network shows?” reads a message that pops up on Cartoon Network’s website. “Check out what’s available to stream on Max (subscription required).”…
(6) A DISH OVERSERVED COLD. Sarah A. Hoyt is seeing so much “Vengeance” fiction she tried to apply the brakes at Mad Genius Club.
…No matter how angry people are, feeding on a straight diet of revenge fantasies will just make it worse and worse and worse.
Okay, so you’re not a missionary, and you just want to make money, what do you care if you’re making people crazier.
Because you’ll train yourself to write very bad fiction. And because a lot of it is very very bad fiction which no one really wants to read, no matter how furious they are.
Particularly because — trust me — it’s disproportionate and worse, it doesn’t make for a good story. Even worse, unless you are an experienced author who knows precisely how to convey how mad you are and how much these evil people deserve their comeupance, revenge is not an easy plot to write.
It seems easy, because it’s a strong emotion. And if you feel the need to see someone being sliced to little bits, and aren’t picky about who it is, particularly if the person being sliced up is entirely fictional….
(7) TED TALK. I believe I missed this issue…. In 1964, Theodore Sturgeon wrote a story for Sports Illustrated: “How To Forget Baseball”. [Via Paul Di Filippo.]
Once upon a possible (for though there is only one past, there are many futures), after 12 hours of war and 40-some years of reconstruction; at a time when nothing had stopped technology (for technological progress not only accelerates, so does the rate at which it accelerates), the country was composed of strip-cities, six blocks wide and up to 80 miles long, which rimmed the great superhighways, and wildernesses. And at certain remote spots in the wilderness lived primitives, called Primitives, a hearty breed that liked to stay close to nature and the old ways. And it came about that a certain flack, whose job it was to publicize the national pastime, a game called Quoit, was assigned to find a person who had never seen the game; to invite him in for one game, to get his impressions of said game and to use them as flacks use such things. He closed the deal with a Primitive who agreed to come in exchange for the privilege of shopping for certain trade goods. So…
(8) ROMANTASY ON THE MATURE SIDE. The New York Times hypothesizes “Why Romantasy Readers Pine for 500-Year-Old ‘Shadow Daddies’”. “Disappointed by swipe culture and, perhaps, reality, some readers pine for the much (much) older ‘shadow daddies’ of romantasy novels”. Gift article link bypasses NYT paywall.
… With the arrival of megahits like “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” a series by Sarah J. Maas, romantasy has garnered a huge fan base. Many readers dissect characters like Feyre Archeron, the protagonist in “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” who is about 19 when she meets her 500-year-old “mate,” a mysterious faerie; they swap theories; and they rate sex scenes on a “spiciness” scale. Among them, there has been a recurring point of debate: Is it acceptable for a 19-year-old to date a 500-year-old?
Some say it is not only acceptable — it’s aspirational.
“I’ve made poor decisions with regular men,” said Asvini Ravindran, 31, a social media specialist who lives in Toronto and has a TikTok about books, including romantasy. “Why not make them with an immortal man with magical powers?”
Fans of the genre refer to such ancient love interests as “shadow daddies.”…
The One Ring from The Lord of the Rings had many supernatural abilities; it could render its wearer invisible, extend the lifespan of those in its presence, corrupt even the noblest hearts, and most importantly, dominate the other Rings of Power. Yet its bizarre physical properties were just as significant. The One Ring was practically indestructible, as it did not bend, break, scratch, or lose its shine, even after spending thousands of years at the bottom of a river. The only way to harm the One Ring was to melt it, and even then, no ordinary fire or even the breath of a great dragon like Smaug would suffice; it could only melt when dropped into the lava of Mount Doom, where the Dark Lord Sauron forged it. Additionally, it could change its size and weight at will, an ability it used to slip on and off the fingers of its wearers….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born August 14, 1965 — Brannon Braga, 59. Brannon Braga was, not at the same time or always, the writer, producer and creator of the Next Gen, Voyager, Enterprise, The Orville, as well as of the Generations and First Contact films. He written quite a number of the Trek films — Generations, First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis.
Those four films he’s written. Is that more than anyone else? I could look it up, but I figure I’d ask the great pool of Trek fans here instead.
Brannon Braga
Confession time — I’ve still not watched The Orville. Now that it’s been canceled, shall I go ahead and watch all of it? Opinions please.
He has written more episodes of the many Trek series than anyone else — four hundred and forty-four to date, many of course co- written. I really don’t think he’ll be writing any more as his last scripts were for Enterprise.
He was responsible for the Next Generation series finale “All Good Things…” which won him a Hugo Award at Intersection for excellence in SF writing, along with Ronald D. Moore.
He was nominated at LoneStarCon2 for Star Trek: First Contact for the screenplay along with Ronald D. Moore, and the story by Rick Berman and Ronald D. Moore; Torcon3 saw him pick up two nominations for Enterprise stories — first for the “Carbon Creek” story along with Rick Berman and Dan O’Shannon, and the wonderful “A Night in The Sick Bay” with Rick Berman.
(Digression. Ok, I like Enterprise a lot. For me, everything there worked. And the Mirror Universe finale worked for me though it got a lot of criticism.)
Aussiecon 4 saw him pick up only his non-Trek related Hugo nomination or Award. It was for writing FlashForward’s “No More Good Days” with David S. Goyer.
There’s a great quote by him after he stopped being Roddenberry’s replacement as head of the Trek franchise: “It’s not an easy task. On the other hand, I have nothing to be ashamed about. We created 624 hours of television and four feature films, and I think we did a hell of a job. I’m amazed that we managed to get 18 years of the kind of work that everyone involved managed to contribute to, and it’s certainly more than anyone could have asked for.” (Star Trek Magazine)
(12) IN X-CESS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Just what we all need, another list of somebody’s opinion about “best of…“ The Hollywood Reporter gives us “Best X-Men Movies, Ranked”. And as you might expect, it’s more fun to pan than to praise.
13. X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
Brett Ratner was never anyone’s first choice to direct an X-Men film. And from the film itself, and the stories that followed, it’s not hard to see why. The Last Stand smashes together Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s The Dark Phoenix Saga, widely considered to be the best X-Men story, along with the Gifted storyline from Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s then-more recent Astonishing X-Men. The film doesn’t serve either story well, and it all too hastily kills off Cyclops (James Marsden), sidelines several mainstays like Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) and Rogue (Anna Paquin), and introduces a bunch of new characters audiences had been clamoring to see — Kitty Pryde (Elliot Page), Beast (Kelsey Grammer), Angel (Ben Foster) and Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones), none of whom get much time to shine (although Grammer’s Beast is a welcome addition).
Famke Janssen does well with what the film decides to do with the Phoenix, which is to make her into a kind of demonically possessed powerhouse, and Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen all remain stalwarts of the franchise. A third act that features Magneto lifting the Golden Gate Bridge and Logan professing his love for Jean, while she tries to incinerate him, are highlights, along with John Powell’s score. But all in all, there’s just something a bit too studio-mandated and manufactured about it.
(13) NEW ISSUE OF SF COMMENTARY. Bruce Gillespie has released SF Commentary 117, July 2024. Covers by Alan White and Dennis Callegari. Poems by Alan White. Articles by Janeen Webb and Cy Chauvin. Columns by Bruce Gillespie, Colin Steele, Anna Creer, Tony Thomas, John Hertz. Reviews by John Litchen and William Sarill.
(14) THAT’S ALL, FOLKS. R. Graeme Cameron accepted the Auora Award for Best Fan Writing and Publication for Polar Borealis, its fifth win, then announced on Facebook that he is recusing the publication from future Aurora consideration.
…The purpose of the Auroras is to celebrate the diversity of Canadian talent in as inclusive a manner as possible. Five is a good, solid number. It’s time to make room for others, especially the new talent coming along.
Therefore, I state for the record that I am requesting CSFFA to no longer consider Polar Borealis for nomination or ballot status from this date forward.
Not that I am adverse to winning further Aurora awards for other things….
…Main thing is for Polar Borealis to stop hogging the limelight.
(15) AN ARCHITECTURAL TRIUMPH. You can take an online tour of the fabulous McKim Building that houses the Boston Public Library. It’s gorgeous!
…The McKim Lobby, from its Georgia marble floor inlaid with brass designs to its three aisles of vaulted ceilings, continues a grand procession into the heart of the building. The ceilings, clad in mosaic tile by Italian immigrant craftsmen living in Boston’s North End, bear Roman motifs and the names of thirty famous Massachusetts statesmen.
The mosaic ceiling tiles clad vault work by Rafael Guastavino, a Spanish builder who specialized in Mediterranean-style ceramic tile-vaulted ceilings that were lightweight, fireproof, self-supporting, and strong. Guastavino’s collaboration with Charles Follen McKim throughout a number of ceilings in the Central Library represented his first major American commission, the starting point for a company that would go on to construct vaults in over 600 buildings throughout the country….
(16) RINGS OF POWER RETURNS. “War is coming to Middle Earth,” begins the final pre-launch trailer before The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 drops on August 29.
Co-directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg explain all the details on Sir Paul McCartney’s transformation to a pirate.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Paul Di Filippo, 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 Andrew (not Werdna).]
By Tim Marion: This one has left me so unsatisfied that I feel obligated to spoil it. Oh yes, there will be spoilers!
The X-Men cartoon in the early 90s was incredibly beautiful, and a bit complicated in the storylines when they would time travel and change events in the past. This Fox cartoon was so successful that it lasted for several seasons and every season I collected faithfully onto VHS tapes, the outside shell of which I decorated with graphics from TV Guide and elsewhere. I still have all of those tapes and those (and ones of other Marvel Comics characters) are definitely ones I intend to keep. I was delighted when they all became available on DVD. Rewatching them was a lot of fun.
The new cartoon from Disney+, X-Men ’97, was a delight visually, seeing the Disney animation applied onto what was already a beautiful, realistic art style. However, it feels like the creators of this cartoon were totally out-of-touch with the characters.
(X) Magneto looked completely bizarre. The artist(s) put extraneous lines all over his face, apparently in an effort to make him look older or evil or whatever, even though he wasn’t presented as being an all-evil character when the original series ended.
(X) Magneto’s outfit was also bizarre. When he takes over leadership of the X-Men (in the absence of Charles Xavier, who everyone says is dead, but really he’s the Royal Consort on the homeworld of the Sh’iar), he suddenly has a new outfit which looks insufferably feminine. This outfit includes a bright, red-purple tanktop with matching tight gauntlets (really, evening gloves) going all the way up his arms, baring his shoulders. What’s he going to do? Be a mutant mastermind or break a flashdance?? Bleah. Seldom ever seen a worse superhero or villain outfit.
(X) Then, Magneto and Rogue’s ability to have a relationship, despite the fact that Rogue’s touch depletes one of one’s powers and even personality, is explained away as if it was magic, and as if it had never been explained before. Indeed, the writer and creator of this new series, who has since been fired (wonder why?), even claimed that was never explained, but it was in the very comics story arc which is being referenced! In the comics, Magneto was almost as much a genius at mutant science as was Charles Xavier. Magneto had an entire laboratory hidden in the Savage Land (Marvel’s version of Pellucidar) where he experimented on creatures and turned them into mutates. This story occurred during the last few issues of the original run of The X-Men and was gorgeously illustrated by the late (sob) Neal Adams (arguably the best penciller in comics at the time) and Tom Palmer (unarguably the best inker ever), and even if the writer had not been born at the time, these are important, popular, seminal stories which have been reprinted almost 10 times! Magneto was, of course, defeated by the X-Men and friends, but later makes a more innocuous home for himself there when Rogue visits him (seeking help because she’s overwhelmed by her powers). It was obvious (from the dialog and before all the smooching) that he used his lab and his smarts to scientifically modify their powers so that Rogue’s touch was not lethal to him. Are these new writers just somehow not able to understand or remember details from stories which they claim they are referencing? Maybe that writer only remembers Magneto smooching a grateful, rag-clad Rogue (dressed appropriately for the barbaric Savage Land, I guess, while Magneto, of course, kept on his usual red togs) and, like this fanboy in his 30s at the time, fantasized himself as Magneto and forgot everything else?
(X) Rogue is actually one of the toughest, strongest X-Men, due to her once siphoning the powers of a female Captain Marvel. But towards to end of this 10-episode series, the technology-controlling mutant Bastion is choking her to death (before he is stopped by someone else). Why couldn’t she siphon off his powers when he was doing that? Not explained. On with the drama…
Rogue, Cyclops, Jubilee, Bishop.
(X) Then, when all else fails, and Magneto is out of control and destroying the world, Wolverine pops his claws right thru Magneto’s chest. Does Magneto die? No. Does he even look wounded? No. Instead, they reprise a scene from the comicbooks and have Magneto very dramatically withdraw all of the adamantium (indestructible steel coating) out of Wolverine’s skeleton. Magneto doesn’t even have a cough from having his chest punctured in 3 places. None of that is explained. On message boards, no one seems to notice it. For me, it was just the last claw. I mean, straw.
(X) And there are tons of other things which don’t make sense. Morph was a character created just for the cartoon in the early 90s; he was never a comicbook character. This was so they could have a character die early in the series who would not be a fan-favorite. But somehow, here he is back, and if that was explained in the old series, I forget. Not only is he back, but somehow, when he changes his appearance to that of other super-powered characters, such as Quicksilver or even The Hulk, he also acquires their powers! For how long, I don’t know; this isn’t explained. But that seems so unrealistic even within their own fantasy milieu, which is supposed to have a scientific basis. This would actually make him one of the most powerful Marvel characters, right in the range of the Mimic (whom the writer probably never heard of) or Apocalypse. Yet all of this is trotted out very casually and without explanation.
Part of the problem here is that the live action movies, as well as this cartoon, are the brain children of young men in their 30s who were probably in their early teens when they first encountered the comics or the previous cartoons, and thus they have different sensibilities and feelings about these characters than I do. Even if they invest a lot of thought into those characters, those thoughts frequently seem wacky, illogical, and inappropriate.
In short (I know: it’s too late already), this wasn’t really a continuation of the previous cartoon, except maybe in appearance. It was more the vision of an individual fanboy who couldn’t correctly remember the stories he was claiming to reference and adapt and is too young to have read other seminal stories. Altho the previous series was complicated, if episodes were watched again and paid attention to carefully, they made sense. This series makes no sense. It is just confusion, chaos, and sensationalism; a proverbial “tale of sound and fury.”
Well, whatever, I’m glad I watched X-Men ’97 just because I would have felt like I was Really Missing Out if I hadn’t. But, despite how beautiful this cartoon was, I doubt that I will feel inspired to watch any future ones, or any possible cartoons of heroes whose cameos they featured.
Then, I attempted to watch a new, touted animé on Disney. Commercial before it started. 3-5 minutes into it, a set of commercials. I stopped it and cancelled the service. “Too many commercials!” I told them. “For this amount of commercials, I should see the programming for free!”
(1) THREAT ASSESSMENT. The U.S. State Department issued a “Worldwide Caution” for Americans overseas today, warning about potential threats to LGBTQ+ travelers and other violence.
Location: Worldwide
Event: Due to the potential for terrorist attacks, demonstrations, or violent actions against U.S. citizens and interests, the Department of State advises U.S. citizens overseas to exercise increased caution. The Department of State is aware of the increased potential for foreign terrorist organization-inspired violence against LGBTQI+ persons and events and advises U.S. citizens overseas to exercise increased caution. U.S. citizens should:
Stay alert in locations frequented by tourists, including Pride celebrations and venues frequented by LGBTQI+ persons.
(2) HELP RETURN AN ITEM. Is this yours? Marcia Kelly Illingworth would like to return an item that was given to her at the 1996 Worldcon.
Sorry to call on you for something so insignificant, but it’s important to me, and to at least one other fan out there. In order to be sure this gets in the right hands, there will be some detail left out.
My first Worldcon dealing experience was in 1996 in Anaheim/Los Angeles. I was beginning to make my own jewelry at that time, and felt very flattered when a woman came to me with a treasured memento of a beloved pet, and asked me to make it into a piece of jewelry for her. I agreed, and dutifully took her details and the item.
This was all during the time that I was burning up the airways, back and forth between Tennessee and London, which eventually turned into a happily ever after, and a long term move. During all of this, the details became separated from the item, and I didn’t know how to contact the owner. I hoped every year that she would return to a table where I was dealing. That hasn’t happened.
Some of you may be aware that after the 2016 MidAmericon, I had a catastrophic illness, which landed me in emergency surgery to remove my colon, during which I arrested and had to be resuscitated, and in critical condition on a ventilator. I’m apparently too stubborn to even stay dead, but I digress. I went on to survive breast cancer and a bilateral mastectomy four years later.
What I haven’t been as open about is the toll it has taken on my life. My lungs were damaged, leaving me with ongoing breathing issues. My brain was affected, more than I was willing to admit, leaving me with memory deficits and personality changes. These appear to be progressing, unfortunately, so I’m trying to tie up as many loose ends as possible.
I have intentionally not said what the sentimental item is, so that the right person is the one who contacts me for its return. You can reach me through Facebook Messenger. I’m still, as far as I can ascertain, the only Marcia Kelly Illingworth there is. Please help me finish this task.
Longtime listeners will have heard Lesley’s voice way back in 2017 on Episode 53 when she took part in a Horror 101 roundtable. Back then, she shared the microphone with five other creators, but a lot has changed for her over the past seven years, and now that she’s the Chief Editor at Apex magazine, I thought she deserved a spotlight of her own.
Lesley Connor and Scott Edelman.
You’ll understand why Lesley was the right dining companion for such a place just from the titles of the anthologies in which her fiction has appeared — all horror-focussed such as Mountain Dead, Dark Tales of Terror, Big Book of New Short Horror, Ruthless, and A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre. Her horror novel The Weight of Chains was released in 2015. In addition to being the Chief Editor over at Apex magazine, she’s also co-editor of the anthologies Do Not Go Quietly and Robotic Ambitions, as well as of the upcoming The Map of Lost Places.
We discussed why horror is where she feels the most comfortable as a writer, how her role at Apex magazine grew from Social Media Manager to Chief Editor, her “Price is Right” method of filling out an issue’s word count, why she hardly ever reads cover letters, the trends she’s seen in the slush pile and what they mean, the key difference between editing magazines vs. anthologies, her longtime obsession with serial killers, how to go on writing after one’s writing mentor passes away, and much more.
Join us online for an evening of short science fiction readings (1000 words or less) with authors KC Grifant, Laura Blackwell, and Denise Dumars. Flash Science Fiction Nights run 30 minutes or less, and are a fun and great way to learn about new authors from around the world.
(5) GETTING AHEAD. Kathryn Adams is working through this year’s finalists a piece at a time. Here’s an excerpt from the first of her very good reviews of “Three More Novelettes” at Pixelated Geek.
The last three of the 2024 Hugo-nominated novelettes go from dystopian to near-utopian (with a lot of work from devoted neighbors), to a fantasy set in the outskirts of the jazz area.
I AM AI – Ai Jiang
…AI has found a surprising niche in order to make a living as a writer and pay off her parents’ and aunt’s debt: pretending to be an AI herself. Working anonymously in an internet cafe on the outskirts of the city, she scrapes together paying jobs by undercutting the fees that actual AI’s charge and churning out content that has the “surprisingly human for an AI” feel that AI subscribers are looking for.
Ai has to keep up a relentless pace, and she’s been gradually replacing parts of herself with tech so she can work a little faster, keep writing for a little longer into the night….
The Librarians are ready to make some noise again, by way of a spinoff coming to The CW — and TVLine has your exclusive first look at the brand-new team, above.
A spinoff of TNT’s three movies-and-four seasons franchise, The CW’s The Librarians: The Next Chapter centers on Vikram Chamberlin (played by Jamestown‘s Callum McGowan), a protean genius, swashbuckler and Librarian from the year 1847 who accidentally time-travels to present-day Central Europe and now finds himself stuck here. When Vikram returns to his castle, which is now a museum, he inadvertently releases magic across the continent. He in turn is given a team of talented young people to help him clean up the mess he made by reclaiming magical artifacts from those who would abuse them.
The Librarians are ready to make some noise again, by way of a spinoff coming to The CW — and TVLine has your exclusive first look at the brand-new team, above.
A spinoff of TNT’s three movies-and-four seasons franchise, The CW’s The Librarians: The Next Chapter centers on Vikram Chamberlin (played by Jamestown‘s Callum McGowan), a protean genius, swashbuckler and Librarian from the year 1847 who accidentally time-travels to present-day Central Europe and now finds himself stuck here. When Vikram returns to his castle, which is now a museum, he inadvertently releases magic across the continent. He in turn is given a team of talented young people to help him clean up the mess he made by reclaiming magical artifacts from those who would abuse them.
The question is: Will Vikram keep his oath to the Library (and his new team), or will he attempt to travel back to his own time where unfinished business — and his heart — remain?…
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 17, 1955 — Bill Paxton. (Died 2017.) Let’s talk about Bill Paxton. He worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, The Terminator and True Lies. I know only The Terminator is genre but I actually like the other films as well. He’s also in Predator 2 but Schwarzenegger went walkabout by then on hunting those aliens.
Bill Paxton at Wondercon in 2014. Photo by Gage Skidmore.
None of those roles were as major as the next role I’m going to mention which is his Alien one as Hudson, a boastful but ever so panicky Colonial Marine private. He’s known for this choice piece of dialogue, after the team’s dropship is destroyed, he exclaims, “That’s it, man! Game over, man! Game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?”
He’s Chet Donnelly in John Hughes’ wonderfully offbeat Weird Science. Of course everything John Hughes does is either offbeat or just plain weird. This film I think stayed on this side of the former.
Slipstream has him co-starring with Mark Hamill in post-global apocalypse bounty hunter thriller. It gets a decent rating at Rotten Tomatoes at forty-three percent audience approval rating.
Yes, he had a lead role in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 as Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise. It’s a really stellar film.
Finally he had a recurring role in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as John Garret. He was a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who was left for dead, only to survive as he became the first Deathlok. Let’s just say his story becomes even more complicated from there.
No, I forgot one role, though it’s definitely not genre. He was in my beloved Tombstone as Morgan Earp, the Tombstone Special Policeman present at that gunfight where he helped his brothers Virgil and Wyatt, as well as Doc Holliday, confront the outlaw Cochise County Cowboys.
(8) BONUS BIRTHDAY. [Item by Lis Carey.]
Born May 17 — Mark Leeper.
Avid and active sf fan Mark Leeper became enraptured by TV’s Commando Cody at the age of six, and never looked back. He’s been publishing movie reviews online since 1984, and began attending conventions with Boskone VI in 1969. In the years since, he has been on panels and conducted popular origami workshops at many conventions. Mark and his wife Evelyn founded a science fiction club at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1978, and maintained it until their retirement in 2001. Their fanzine, the MT VOID, also began in 1978, and is still being published—pretty impressive for a zine published weekly. Along with Mark’s editorials and reviews, it also features reviews and comments by others.
Mark has been an active fan for decades, and is still contributing to our community. Wish him a happy birthday!
I only got around to watching the X-Men97 finale yesterday. It was tremendous and ridiculous fun. Lots of angst, weird morality and piles of people fighting each other with mutant and techno-virus super-powers. As a series, it just got better and better but so much of it was weaponising nostalgia as its mutant superpower. The story morphed from nostalgia about the original cartoon to nostalgia for how the comics at the time felt but using the same chopping up of comic plot lines into its own story….
(11) ORDER IN THE FOOD COURT. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Sfnal it aint…but it does address certain aspects of one of the major burning issues of our time. Just what is a sandwich? “Are tacos and burritos sandwiches? A judge in Indiana ruled yes.” reports the Washington Post.
… Are tacos considered sandwiches?
According to one judge in Fort Wayne, Ind., the answer is yes. And he says burritos are sandwiches, too.
Allen County Superior Court Judge Craig J. Bobay wrote in a ruling Monday that tacos and burritos are “Mexican-style sandwiches.” Bobay made the decision in a case reviewing whether a restaurant, “Famous Taco,” could open a new location at a Fort Wayne shopping center.
The zoning policy for the property prohibits fast food, but allows exceptions for restaurants whose primary business is to sell “made-to-order” or Subway-style sandwiches. A city commission denied the request.
But Famous Taco, Bobay ruled, is allowed at the shopping center because it would serve “Mexican-style sandwiches,” and the zoning policy “does not restrict potential restaurants to only American cuisine-style sandwiches.” Hypothetically, other restaurants that serve made-to-order items, including “Greek gyros, Indian naan wraps or Vietnamese banh mi,” would also be allowed, Bobay wrote in his decision….
…With that, at least for now, the judge seems to have wrapped up the sandwich beef in Fort Wayne.
(12) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.]. Another day, another round of reporting on SFF on Jeopardy! and Jeopardy! Masters. I’m covering the regular game on Thursday, May 16, and Masters for Wednesday the 15th, and there was a fair amount.
Jeopardy! 5/16/2024
Single Jeopardy round:
Here Be Monsters, $1000: 1939’s “Son of Frankenstein” was the third in the series to feature the monster, and the last with this actor playing the role
Returning champion Grant DeYoung asked: “What’s Karloff?” (Like Matt Amodio, he seemed to just use “What’s” for all responses.)
Here Be Monsters, $200: In one of his many big-screen battles for Earth’s survival, he fought against Hedorah, the smog monster
Grant got it again: “What’s Godzilla?”
Anagrammed Authors, $400: Author born Eric Blair: gore lower leg
Grant was in again with “What’s George Orwell?”
Double Jeopardy round:
TV “Q”, $1200: On “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”, this Ferengi bar owner was up, then down as his flavorful crew unionized
Still Grant! “What’s Quark?”
TV “Q”, $800: This NBC reboot tapped Raymond Lee to play time-traveling physicist Ben Song
Other contestants did buzz in sometimes, but you wouldn’t know it from reading this: Grant responded, “What’s ‘Quantum Leap’?”
Jeopardy! Masters 5/15/2024
In Game 1, the Double Jeopardy round:
Music in Books, $2000: The sinfonietta by Czech composer Leos Janaček features prominently in this Murakami book partly set in a world with 2 moons
Yogesh Raut came up with, “What is ‘1Q84’?”
Movie Memes: Who Said It, $2000: 2001: “One does not simply walk into Mordor”
Matt Amodio got it right: “What’s Boromir?” Ken noted, “Lord of the Rings!”
In Conceivable (i.e., words you can make using the letters in the word “conceivable”), $1200: In “Foundation” Isaac Asimov pithily wrote that this “is the last refuge of the incompetent”
This was a triple stumper! I’d expect most Filers to know this, but just in case I’ll say that the “this” is violence.
Movie Memes: Who Said It, $1200: 2002: “I don’t like sand”
Yogesh knew that it was gritty and gets everywhere: “Who is Anakin?”
Ken Jennings expanded on this: “Yes, in Star Wars!”
Movie Memes: Who Said It, $400: 1993: “Life finds a way”
Yogesh: “Who is Dr. Ian Malcolm?” Ken Jennings: “In ‘Jurassic Park’. You got it.”
Game 2:
The Single Jeopardy round had a whole “Science Fiction” category. I’ll present the clues in the order they were encountered.
Science Fiction, $600: Takeshi Kovacs has his consciousness downloaded into a new body in this “organic” Richard K. Morgan book from 2002
Victoria Groce successfully responded, “What is ‘Altered Carbon’?”
Science Fiction, $800. The Daily Double in the round, which went to Victoria, who bet all of the $1400 she had amassed. In novels by Dan Simmons, the planet Hyperion has a capital named for this poet who wrote an epic about the sun god Hyperion.
Victoria got it right: John Keats.
Science Fiction, $1000: The title virus in this Neal Stephenson cyberpunk classic affects users offline & online, but Hiro Protagonist is on the case
Amy Schneider got in ahead of Victoria with, “What is ‘Snow Crash’?”
There was one bit of SF-adjacent content in another category:
Floating on a Stream of TV, $600: We’d watch this Netflix title character deal with life and death(s) at Nevermore Academy any day of the week
Victoria asked, “Who is Wednesday?”
Science Fiction, $400: The title hero of this 1985 novel is a boy genius (last name Wiggin) on his way to Battle School & who might just be Earth’s savior
Amy got this one: “What is ‘Ender’s Game’?” (Which technically is not the response to the clue, but was accepted.)
Science Fiction, $200: In an 1897 H.G. Wells tale, these invaders were killed by “disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared”
Mattea Roach got in on this one. I wondered whether “What is ‘The War of the Worlds?” would be accepted, but in the event she responded to the clue as given with “Who are the Martians?”
(13) LEFT ON THE DRAWING BOARD. “A mega egg in Paris, a hovering hotel in Machu Picchu, an hourglass tower in New York, a pleasure island in Baghdad … we reveal the architectural visions that were just too costly – or too weird.” “How the world could have looked: the most spectacular buildings that were never made” – an architecture commentary in the Guardian.
…Did you know that, if things had gone differently, the Pompidou Centre could have been an egg? In the 1969 competition for the Paris art centre – ultimately won by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, with their inside-out symphony of pipework – a radical French architect called André Bruyère submitted a proposal for a gigantic ovoid tower. His bulbous building would have risen 100 metres above the city’s streets, clad in shimmering scales of alabaster, glass and concrete, its walls swelling out in a curvaceous riposte to the tyranny of the straight line.
“Time,” Bruyère declared, “instead of being linear, like the straight streets and vertical skyscrapers, will become oval, in tune with the egg.” His hallowed Oeuf would be held aloft on three chunky legs, while a monorail would pierce the facade and circle through the structure along a sinuous floating ribbon. The atrium was to take the form of an enclosed globe, like a yolk.
“Between the hard geometries,” Bruyère added, “comes the sweetness of a volume [with] curves in all directions, in contrast to these facades where the angle always falls right from the sky, always similar. So, the egg.” Sadly, it wasn’t to be. His ovular poetry didn’t impress the judges and Paris got its high-tech hymn to plumbing instead.
L’Oeuf de Pompidou is one of many astonishing schemes to feature in Atlas of Never Built Architecture, a bulging compendium of dashed hopes and broken dreams that charts a fascinating alternative universe of “what ifs”. It is a world of runners-up and second bests, an encyclopaedia of hubristic plans that were too big, expensive or weird to make it off the drawing board….
A Canadian city’s attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people dressed as dinosaurs was disqualified due to the unexpectedly high turnout.
Travel Drumheller, the tourism organization for the Town of Drumheller, Alberta, said in a Facebook post that the April 27 record attempt in the city’s downtown attracted more than 3,000 people in dino-dress, but officials “could not obtain an exact measurement” of participants.
Keri Looijen, marketing manager for Travel Drumheller, said a Guinness World Records adjudicator was present during the attempt.
“He recorded 3,000 people through numbered bracelets or wristbands, which far exceeded what we had originally thought,” Looijen told CBC News.
She said photos and videos from the attempt indicate there may have been “close to double” that number of people, but an accurate count could not be obtained due to officials being unprepared for such a massive turnout.
“We weren’t entirely prepared for that many people to come,” Looijen said. “Guinness said that there were people that they had witnessed leaving the area after they had been wrist-banded, so they weren’t following what the volunteers had told them by staying in the space. They had to be all together in the area for one solid minute.”
The attempt was disqualified, despite very handily beating the current record of 252 people, which was set in Los Angeles in 2019.
Looijen said the city is hoping to make the “Jurassic Jamboree” an annual event, and it will be better prepared for the next official world record attempt.
(15) CONTINUED PROGRESS IN LONG MARCH TO FUSION POWER. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]Abundant, clean energy is something of an SF trope powering civilizations of the future and a post-scarcity society….
This week’s Nature sees a rather dry paper but one that is still of importance as progress continues to be made in the long march to develop fusion power.
A group of largely US-based researchers have theoretically created tokamak plasmas with a line-averaged density approximately 20% above the Greenwald density and an energy confinement quality of approximately 50% better than the standard high-confinement mode.
Human made fusion power works by confining a plasma, creating such high plasma densities that atoms fuse to release energy with the creation of helium.
The confinement is done through a magnetic bottle. The very simplest confinement would be a tube with electric coils creating a magnetic field. However, such a simple arrangement would see the plasma leak out of each of the tube’s ends.
To get around this you can turn the linear tube into a circular tube joining the former tube’s ends together, which gets rid of end-of-tube leakage as there are now no ends from which leakage can take place.
Such a circular ring, or donut-shaped ring, is the basis of the Tokamak design, which is what the researchers used.
Fusion power is oft ridiculed because it has long been predicted to be available to us in a few decades time but never seems to happen: tomorrow never comes. This is a little unfair as in the last decades of the 20th century a road map to commercial fusion was created and funding pledges made by various nations. However, successive governments from various nations were repeatedly slow to provide this funding. Further, there were bureaucratic, administrative hurdles. I recall around the turn of the millennium, that while the land in France for the US$22-billion ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) – scheduled to be operational next year – had been slated, the current landowners refused surveyor access!). This reactor will be the world’s largest Tokamak: it will weigh 23,000 tonnes and is designed to generate 10 times the power that it consumes.
We are getting there, albeit slower than we all had hoped. Meanwhile, this is another milestone.
ITER experimental fusion reactor.
OK, so we are not there yet. The researchers themselves point out that their experimental theory does not take into account the metal walls to carry away the heat used for electricity generation. Nor can it deal with the helium waste. But it is still a significant progress that should help ITER operation.
The researchers themselves say: “The operating regime we report supports some critical requirements in many fusion reactor designs all over the world and opens a potential avenue to an operating point for producing economically attractive fusion energy.”
Their paper itself concludes with: “The experimental achievement and the increased understanding reported in this paper may open a potential avenue to an operating point for producing economically attractive fusion energy.”
You can see the primary research paper here. Though no-one seems to have picked up on this paper, Nature has made it open access (most research papers in Nature are not open access.)
What is the value of curiosity? Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with William Shatner to explore the nature of spacetime, Star Trek, human curiosity, loneliness, and more. How would warp drive work? What is William Shanter’s favorite Star Trek episode? Learn about the question Stephen Hawking had for Bill and the secret power of science fiction. Bill talks about what it was like to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon after Star Trek was originally canceled. We discuss Artemis, our return to the moon, and how we can create a base there. Will there be enough water on the moon for people to use? Neil breaks down how water can be used for fuel and how humans have harnessed the power of physics. We discuss Bill’s new documentary You Can Call Me Bill and some philosophical points about science. Are electrons lonely? We explore the difference between being lonely and being alone and the nature of curiosity. Is human curiosity a double-edged sword? Is there anything left on Bill’s bucket list? Plus, Bill asks if living beings like mycelia could be analogs for the universe’s structure. Why is it spacetime and not space and time separately? What is the vacuum of space made of? Discover virtual particles and how the fabric of spacetime may be a web made of wormholes. We break down dark energy and dark matter, and why their names may be misleading. To end, we discuss old age and wisdom: do they go together?
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, David Goldfarb, Lis Carey, Marcia Kelly Illingworth, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
The dystopian spot, titled “Crush,” shows several instruments, including a guitar and piano, being crushed by a hydraulic press. Also among the items being smashed flat are balls that look like emojis and an Angry Birds statue….
Apple CEO Tim Cook posted the spot on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday (it also was posted on YouTube). His post and the YouTube video are still up, but the spot won’t run on TV, according to Ad Age.
“Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create,” Cook wrote….
[One of the many negative comments was,] “Crushing symbols of human creativity and cultural achievements to appeal to pro creators, nice. Maybe for the next Apple Watch Pro you should crush sports equipment, show a robot running faster than a man, then turn to the camera and say, ‘God is dead and we have killed him.’”
Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create. pic.twitter.com/6PeGXNoKgG
(2) KGB. Ellen Datlow has posted photos from Wednesday night’s Fantastic Fiction at KGB session where John Wiswell and Anya Johanna DeNiro read from their recent novels.
In this episode, she shares her experiences and insights on convention attendance, from choosing the right ones to the art of mingling without the cringe. Plus, she tackles the ever-present concern of COVID safety in crowded spaces.
Whether you’re a cosplayer or a casual attendee, Mur advises on how to present yourself professionally, connect with industry pros, and enjoy the con experience while staying true to your comfort level. And for those not ready to dive back into the physical con scene, she discusses the merits of virtual conventions and how they can be a great alternative.
Warner Bros. will release the first of its new batch of live-action “The Lord of the Rings” films in 2026, which will focus on Andy Serkis’ Gollum.
Original “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy filmmaker Peter Jackson and his partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens are producing the movie and “will be involved every step of the way,” Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said during an earnings call Thursday.
The project is currently in the early stages of script development from writers Walsh and Boyens, along with Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou, and will “explore storylines yet to be told,” Zaslav said.
In a press release from Warner Bros. later Thursday morning, the studio revealed that the working title for the film is “Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum,” and it will be directed by and star Serkis in his iconic titular role….
…A separate, animated Middle-earth movie, “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” is due on Dec. 13 via Warner Bros. and director Kenji Kamiyama. That movie is set 200 years before the events of “The Hobbit.”…
(6) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 109 of the Octothorpe podcast, “But Also a Worrying One”, John Coxon is middle, Alison Scott is even sadder, and Liz Batty is sorry.
We have a bumper mailbag in Octothorpe 109, and we continue our discussion about accessibility in Eastercon before segueing into a discussion of money and privilege with respect to conventions. We also mention the latest news out of Chengdu. Massive thanks to Ulrika O’Brien for the gorgeous cover art this week!
…Not long after he returned from the war in 1946, Serling attended Antioch College on the G.I. bill. There, in his early 20s, he penned “First Squad, First Platoon,” a short story which is being published for the first time Thursday in The Strand. It was one of his earliest stories, starting a writing career that Serling once said helped him get the war “out of his gut.”
“It was like an exercise for him to deal with the demons of war and fear,” said his daughter, Jodi Serling. “And he sort of turned it into fiction, although there was a lot of truth to it.”
The story is set on Leyte Island in “heavy jungle foliage” and a “hostile rain that caked mud on weapons, uniforms, equipment.” Each of the five chapters in the 11,000-word story is about a different soldier and how they died….
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 9, 1936 — Albert Finney. (Died 2019.) I’m very, very fond of British performers and among them is Albert Finney. So let’s look at the career of this most talent actor.
His first genre performance is as Ebenezer Scrooge in Scrooge. Scrooge is my favorite Albert Finney film and it is benefitted immensely by the many extraordinary strong performances by actors like him. To give a good sense of him in that role, I feel obligated to show him in his full Victorian regalia.
That’s followed by being Dewey Wilson in Wolfen, a deeply disturbing film. Wolfen to me is the perfect werewolf film as it is a police procedural firmly within the horror genre. His character here Detective Dewey Wilson along with Diane Venora as Detective Rebecca Neff unraveled the grisly murders that turn-out to be based in First Folk reality.
He plays Edward Bloom, Sr. Big Fish in the wonderful Big Fish. He’s central character here. He is a story-teller but his only son, Will, doesn’t enjoy them because he believes they are simply not true. Of course, they are, but they’re just exaggerated. Or are they being so?
He voices Finis Everglot in Corpse Bride. Now I’d love to tell how he was in that role but I’ll confess and say that I’ve not see that film as I am not a big fan of Tim Burton’s animated work at all.
He was Kincade in Skyfall. He’s the gamekeeper of Skyfall Lodge and the ancestral Bond family estate in Scotland. He’s got a major role in that film.
He was Maurice Allington in The Green Man based on Kingsley Amis’ novel of the same name. He’s the somewhat inebriated owner and landlord of The Green Man, an inn that he says is haunted by ghosts. He tells tales of these to scare guests as it amuses, or trying to seduce them to no avail as he’s not at all handsome. But it may be that The Green Man is truly haunted and those ghosts are happy with him… it’s a great role for him and he play it quite well.
Lastly, I’ll wrap up with Murder on the Orient Express, the 1974 version. I have that poster, an original, not a reproduction, framed and hanging here as I truly love this film. Christie, who lived just long enough to see the film get released and be a box office success, said that Murder on the Orient Express and Witness for the Prosecution were the only movie versions of her books that she liked although she expressed disappointment with Poirot’s moustache as depicted here was far from the creation she had detailed in her mysteries.
She’s misremembering her detailing of that moustache which I confirmed checking the many such novels I have on hand in Apple Books. Most novels have no detailed description at all, and this in The Mysterious Affair at Styles being typical: “Poirot seized his hat, gave a ferocious twist to his moustache, and, carefully brushing an imaginary speck of dust from his sleeve, motioned me to precede him down the stairs; there we joined the detectives and set out for Styles.”
Finney made a most excellent Poirot though many later critics compared him to David Souchet who they consider the definitive version of the character. I always wondered what Dame Christie would have thought of Souchet.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
Free Range might not be teaching what the student wants to learn.
Carpe Diem has an unexpected Egyptian traffic sign.
Heathcliff’s latest in a week-long series of guest appearances comes from Star Wars.
(10) GLIMPSE THE NEXT CHAPTER OF NEIL GAIMAN AND MARK BUCKINGHAM’S GROUNDBREAKING MIRACLEMAN SAGA. Miracleman By Gaiman & Buckingham: The Silver Age #1-7 is now available as a complete collection. Catch a glimpse of the action in the new trailer, featuring artwork from all seven issues.
In THE SILVER AGE, Miracleman has created a utopia on Earth where gods walk among men and men have become gods. But when his long-dead friend Young Miracleman is resurrected, Miracleman finds that not everyone is ready for his brave new world! The story that ensues fractures the Miracleman Family and sends Young Miracleman on a stirring quest to understand this world — and himself. It’s a touching exploration of the hero’s journey that ranges from the top of the Himalayas to the realm of the towering Black Warpsmiths — and into the secret past of the Miracleman Family!
(11) X-MEN ONE-DAY SPECIAL ON LEARNEDLEAGUE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] LearnedLeague just had a One-Day Special quiz about the X-Men. It focused more on the comic books than the various adaptations, which suited me just fine. I’m currently scored at 11/12, but I’ve submitted an appeal on the one answer where I was marked wrong. We’ll see if that goes through.
You can find the questions behind this link, although nearly all of them have pictures that people who aren’t LL members won’t be able to see. None of the pictures are absolutely necessary, but at least a couple of them have valuable clues.
“Harold Halibut” is a new sci-fi video game set in an underwater space colony. But it’s got a novel look; all of the characters and sets in the game were made by hand, then 3D scanned and animated digitally….
… “The aim was to get a high resolution view of this most mysterious piece of biology that each of us carries around on our shoulders,” said Jeff Lichtman, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. “The reason we haven’t done it before is that it is damn challenging. It really was enormously hard to do this.”
Having sliced the tissue into wafers less than 1,000 times thinner than the width of a human hair, the researchers took electron microscope images of each to capture details of brain structure down to the nanoscale, or thousandths of a millimetre. A machine-learning algorithm then traced the paths of neurons and other cells through the individual sections, a painstaking process that would have taken humans years. The images comprised 1.4 petabytes of data, equivalent to 14,000 full length, 4k resolution movies.
“We found many things in this dataset that are not in the textbooks,” said Lichtman. “We don’t understand those things, but I can tell you they suggest there’s a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.”
In one baffling observation, so-called pyramidal neurons, which have large branches called dendrites protruding from their bases, displayed a curious symmetry, with some facing forwards and others backwards. Other images revealed tight whorls of axons, the thin fibres that carry signals from one brain cell to another, as if they had become stuck on a roundabout before identifying the right exit and proceeding on their way…
(14) INSULIN PUMP ISSUE. “FDA Warns on Insulin Pump Problem” at MedPage Today. “This has been a plot point in several movies and tv shows lately,” says Chris Barkley.
A mobile app used with an insulin pump that led to 224 injuries was recalled by Tandem Diabetes Care, the FDA announced today.
The recall is for the 2.7 version of the Apple iOS t:connect mobile app, used in conjunction with t:slim X2 insulin pump with Control-IQ technology, the agency said.
The FDA identified the action as a Class I recall, the most serious type. The recall is a correction, not a product removal, and was prompted by a software glitch that may cause the pump battery to drain sooner than expected. Users are being urged to update the app to the latest software….
During the production of Star Wars: Ahsoka, Adam Savage visited the miniatures filming stage set up at Lucasfilm to watch the practical model of Ahsoka’s T-6 Jedi Shuttle being filmed. Modelmaker John Goodson and machinist Dan Patrascu spent four months building the 30-inch model of that T-6 ship for the show–an incredible hero ship model not only equipped with lights, but was fully mechanized with a rotating wing!
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Lise Andreasen, David Goldfarb, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
(1) TOMLINSON CRITICIZES PENGUINCON FOR CAVING TO HIS CYBERSTALKERS. In “PenguiCon 2024 Postmortem or How Not to Handle Cyberstalking”, Patrick S. Tomlinson explains how he was disinvited from a convention – one he didn’t originally apply to present at, until he was contacted by the committee about a proposal submitted by a cyberstalker.
…Now we can fast forward to this year, specifically February. I didn’t apply to attend PenguiCon in 2023 because my wife and I were traveling internationally too close to the convention to make it work logistically. So, I was surprised and happy to receive an email from the person who’d invited me in 2022 asking about scheduling for 2024. The surprise quickly turned to confusion when they asked if I’d submitted a panel suggestion “Alien Crabs and Dragonpox: How STDs are depicted in SFF and why we need more sex-positive representation.”
Reader, I had not. I’m all for sex positivity, but no I didn’t want to run a panel on space herpes.
What had actually happened was a member of the stalking cult had impersonated me to abuse the convention’s unsecured panel suggestion form. I politely declined to run their panel but offered to do another presentation of my own choosing. My counteroffer was quickly accepted and a presentation “Why not Venus?” about terraforming our closest planetary neighbor was put on the official schedule. I booked my room and set to work researching, preparing, and practicing the presentation, an intermittent process which took a total of about two weeks.
Again, I need to reiterate the organizers of this convention were not only aware of the cult stalking us, but had previous experience identifying, confronting, and mitigating their criminal harassment to the benefit of all involved. I therefore approached the coming convention confident any stalker attacks would be properly wrangled, which is why what happened next caught me so completely off guard.
Two Mondays ago, just hours after putting the finishing touches on my presentation, the same person who had booked me was tasked by the PenguiCon board to inform me I’d been disinvited from the convention because the cult stalking my family had sufficiently harassed and threatened other attendees through social media and other vectors to the point I learned later a Guest of Honor was forced to withdraw out of concern for their safety….
I wanted to handle this privately, I really did. Both to try and salvage the relationships and to help everyone involved avoid embarrassment. But between the PenguiCon board ceasing all communication with me, and these libelous statements being made public by our stalkers as a result of poor OpSec on the part of at least one board member, I’ve been forced to present the facts and refute the false narrative being presented by both our stalkers AND the PenguiCon board itself, even if accidentally….
…I want to reiterate that all of this was a known issue that PenguiCon had prior experience with and had handled professionally and competently the last time around. Which is why I find the results and fallout from this year, which again I didn’t even sign up to appear at initially, so incomprehensible. I realize this means my chance of appearing at future PenguiCons now hover near absolute zero, and I’m genuinely upset about that. They have a great con with a unique blend of creators and builders from diverse disciplines that encourages conversation and cross pollination. And as someone who’s hand sold thousands of books, their co-op style bookstore for attending authors should be a model for conventions everywhere.
But for everything they do well, the way they handled cyberstalking, especially for a convention focused on sci-fi and tech, needs to be held out as an example of what not to do for other con runners and boards. Our situation is an extreme example, but when you’re working with guests who are quasi-public figures or even celebrities like authors, artists, and actors can be, you need awareness of the potential for cyberstalkers and have policies and procedures in place.
Policies which do not include victim-blaming their targets and rewarding their criminal behavior.
(3) PULITZER PRIZES. The 2024 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced today. The complete list is at the link.
The lone winner of genre interest is film critic Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times, for his writings about sff movies. The Pulitzer Prize website cites the reviews listed below. Unfortunately, you will probably find them paywalled.
(4) ON THE TRACK OF MIDWEST FURFEST GAS ATTACK. Fur and Loathing has dropped the first of six episodes in a “Furry True Crime podcast of six episodes, releasing weekly”. Connect at the link.
Think you’ve heard everything about the 2014 chemical attack on Midwest Furfest? Wait until you hear this.
The intentional release of chlorine gas sent 19 people to the hospital. It was one of the largest chemical weapons terrorist attacks in American history.
Who did it? And… why?
The targets deserve to know, because they were lucky to survive. The weapon’s deadly potential was only avoided by fast response. The level of crime fell just behind the 2001 anthrax attacks, but strangely, nobody was ever charged for it. The story faded into underreporting, disrespect towards the community, murky rumors, and hopes that it won’t happen again. There’s pride in resilience — but 10 years later, justice wasn’t served. It’s the biggest cold case in furry fandom.
The case revived when investigation by Dogpatch Press drew journalist Nicky Woolf and Project Brazen to seek FBI records, identify suspects, and fly across America to interview sources. Nicky is a journalist who reports on internet culture, with stories in The Guardian, and his original podcast series Finding Q and The Sound: Mystery of the Havana Syndrome. Nicky and Brazen’s series Fur And Loathing delivers never-before reported findings to empower the community….
…When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – “relentless” (Bezos’s original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented “one click checkout” – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent
But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.
But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like “fairness” or “grievance…
Vanity Fair’s May cover star Chris Hemsworth takes our infamous lie detector test. Between him and Matt Damon, who usually pays the bill? Does he think he’s fashionable enough to be a co-chair for the 2024 Met Gala? Is it true that his little brother Liam also auditioned for “Thor”?
(7) THEY’RE THE TOPS. MoovitApp ended up with a list of 30 titles as they went about “Ranking The Most Popular and Beloved Books Of All Time”. Works by Hemingway, Tolkien, Harper Lee, and Nabokov are here – would you like to guess in what order?
It’s hard to say exactly what makes a book great; they are after all, pieces of art that are just as subjective as anything else. However, there are some books that seem to endure for longer and resonate with more readers. Whether or not you’re a fan of literature, these are the stories that some might consider required reading. So, did you read all the best ones, and did your favorite make the list? Read on and see!…
(8) ROGER BOZZETTO (1937-2024). French academic and literary critic Roger Bozzetto died March 20. His passing was reported on Facebook.
The specialist in science fiction and fantastic literature was one of the most important and relevant European SF&F critics and theoreticians.
He was Professor Emeritus of general and comparative literature at the University of Provence, France.
He was also a member of CERLI (Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur les Littératures de l’Imaginaire/Center for Studies and Research on the Literatures of the Imagination, founded in 1979, the pool of great SF&F specialists of the last three decades in the French university landscape).
(9) JEANNIE EPPER (1941-2024). Stuntwoman Jeannie Epper, who worked on myriad films, many genre or genre-adjacent, died May 5 at the age of 83. The Hollywood Reporter paid tribute:
Jeannie Epper, the peerless, fearless stunt performer who doubled for Lynda Carter on Wonder Woman and swung on a vine across a 350-foot gorge and propelled down an epic mudslide as Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone, has died. She was 83.
Epper died Sunday night of natural causes at her home in Simi Valley, her family told The Hollywood Reporter.
Just one member of a dynasty of stunt performers that Steven Spielberg dubbed the “Flying Wallendas of Film” — starting with her father, John Epper, there have been four generations of Eppers in show business since the 1930s — she worked on 150-plus films and TV shows during an astounding 70-year career.
In 2007, Epper received the first lifetime achievement honor given to a woman at the World Taurus Awards and ranks among the greatest stuntwomen of all time.
Known for her agility, horse-riding skills and competitiveness, the 5-foot-9 Epper also stepped in for Linda Evans on the ABC shows The Big Valley in the 1960s and Dynasty in the 1980s. When Evans’ Krystle was engaged in one of those knock-down, drag-out catfights with Joan Collins’ Alexis, chances are it was Epper you saw mixing it up.
Epper also put herself in harm’s way for Kate Jackson on Charlie’s Angels, for Lindsay Wagner on The Bionic Woman, for Angie Dickinson on Police Woman, for Jessica Walter in Play Misty for Me (1971), for Jill Clayburgh in Silver Streak (1976) and for Nancy Allen in RoboCop (1987).
… Epper worked for Spielberg (as director or producer) on eight films, among them Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), 1941 (1979), Poltergeist (1982), Catch Me If You Can (2002) and Minority Report (2002)….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born May 6, 1969 – Annalee Newitz, 55. By Paul Weimer: Newitz’s work for me has been far less about their science fiction and much more about their non fiction writing. Sure, Autonomous is a solid novel with a lot of things to say about autonomy, slavery, and a heck of a lot about economics and the free market, and gender dynamics. But it is Newitz’s journalism at i09, Gawker, Gizmodo and elsewhere, writing about society and technology that really drew my attention to their work. That would also include the podcast Our Opinions are Correct, which Newitz co-hosts with Charlie Jane Anders. While I don’t always agree with them and their opinions, I have always found Newitz’ point of view (as well as Charlie Jane’s) to be interesting, strongly reasoned and worthy of engaging in and thinking about.
Annalee Newitz in 2023. Photo by Scott Edelman.
Newitz’s book Four Lost Cities, to date, is my favorite of their works. Strongly grounded in their journalism chops, the book looks at four cities that have fallen into decay and ruin: Çatal höyük, one of the very first and earliest of cities, Pompeii, perhaps the most famous and well known of the four cities, Cahokia, the Mound city whose mounds still remain on the other side of the Mississippi from St. Louis, and finally, Angkor Wat. The last, particularly, was a revelation for me, as I didn’t quite realize the hydraulic engineering that went into and kept Angkor Wat running. Given Newitz’s interest in science and engineering, Newitz is particularly interested in how and when circumstances caused that engineering to slip. And consequently, just how the city’s inhabitants had to face a slow motion collapse and apocalypse. The fall of cities due to internal and external factors definitely loom over the other three cities in the volume as well, but Angkor Wat, as their capstone, definitely is where the themes of the book, and perhaps of a lot of Newitz’s concerns in general, really come to the fore and in full flower and their full powers.
We dive into the Star Wars sequel that could have been, Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye.The novel written by Alan Dean Foster.
(15) LEGO STAR WARS. And here’s some more Star Wars that should never be – but which Gizmodo tells us is going to get its own four-part Disney+ animation: “Darth Jar Jar Strikes in Lego’s Crazy New Star Wars Series”. (Can anything including Jar Jar really be called “intellectual property”?)
The Star Wars Universe gets turned upside down in Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy, a fun what-if style series. When ordinary nerf-herder Sig Greebling (Gaten Matarazzo) unearths a powerful artifact from a hidden Jedi temple, the galaxy as we know completely changes.
In the four-part special debuting on Disney+ September 13, the good guys are bad, bad guys are good, and it all falls on Sig’s shoulders to become the hero the galaxy needs to put everything back together….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Michaele Jordan, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern. (Daniel was inspired by this Allan Sherman parody.]
