(1) HAO JINGFANG AI AUTHORSHIP CONTROVERSY. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

Source:  (Japanese)

阿井幸作 on X: “「折りたたみ北京」でヒューゴー賞を受賞した中国の有名なSF小説家・郝景芳が、自身の児童向けSF小説『銀河学院』(中国版ハリーポッターと呼ばれているらしい)シリーズの新作にAI執筆が50％含まれていると告白。

X.com machine translation’s rendition of that text:

Chinese renowned science fiction writer Hao Jingfang, who won the Hugo Award for “Folding Beijing,” has confessed that 50% of the writing in the new installment of her children’s science fiction novel series “Galactic Academy” (apparently being called the Chinese version of Harry Potter) was done by AI.

The Chinese blog/news post image from that tweet is shown below, along with a Google Translate rendition, the text of which is as follows (minor pronoun fixes by me):

Hugo Award-winning author’s new book sparks controversy! She admits that half of the writing is AI-generated – Artificial Intelligence

Daily news excerpts

June 16, 11:13

Recently, renowned science fiction writer and Hugo Award winner Hao Jingfang revealed in a media interview that in her latest children’s science fiction series, “Galaxy Academy,” published this year, the proportion of content written using artificial intelligence has reached as high as 50%. This public statement immediately caused a huge stir online and quickly spread across major social media platforms.

Ironically, Hao Jingfang also revealed that the publisher’s editors had previously praised the book’s quality, even repeatedly commending her for writing well this year. She also admitted that once the book is published and enters the market, ordinary readers simply cannot distinguish which parts were written by AI.

(2) ROLLACRIT WILL LAUNCH A KICKSTARTER FOR A NEW CON BAG OF HOLDING! [Item by Daniel Dern.] Rollacrit, which in 2024 brought out an updated, improved version of the original Thinkgeek Messenger Bag of Holding (see my File770 Scroll on this) (Rollacrit’s staff includes some ThinkGeek alums), has just announced their new Con Bag of Holding (improving on the ThinkGeek Con Survival Bag of Holding), more specifically that they will be launching a Kickstarter for it in Fall 2026. (I’m ready to order two!) Scroll with more deets (I’ve got a few questions to ask ‘em) to follow, ideally within a day or two.

(3) MEMORIES OF THE MAKERS OF LABYRINTH. “’David Bowie was a crazy workaholic’: Labyrinth at 40 – an oral history” – the Guardian put it together.

…Soon after the release of 1982’s The Dark Crystal, director, animator and puppeteer Henson was keen to follow up with a film that combined human actors with quirky puppets. Terry Jones of Monty Python fame was hired to write the script, while George Lucas served as executive producer.

Brian Froud, conceptual designer and costume design: We’d just had a showing of The Dark Crystal in San Francisco. In the back of the limousine, Jim said: “Should we do another one?” I said: “What about goblins?” Jim’s eyes lit up. Then into my head came a labyrinth and I had a vision of a baby surrounded by goblins. He said: “That’s great” – and that was it….

… [Brian Froud]: A few days before we started the film, I met David in his dressing room and gave him a little flute as a present. He took it, leapt up on to the counter in front of the mirror and played it. It was astonishing. I thought: “Oh, this is gonna really work.”

[Brian Henson]: David was a crazy workaholic, just like my dad. They were both people who were used to being creative every waking moment of their life. So for David, doing Labyrinth was like being on vacation. He was a really wonderful spark of a person.

[Karen Prell]: He was really fascinated by the process with the puppets. He would also hang around the puppet workshop and just see how things were built and performed. He was very down to earth and game for anything. He would go and have a pint in the studio pub with the crew….

(4) THE PERFECT IS THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD PLACE. The Guardian’s Stephen Poole analyzes an intellectual history of imagined paradises that takes readers from Thomas More to Ursula K Le Guin. “The Uses of Utopia by Joad Raymond Wren review – can the ideal society ever exist?”

By definition, utopia cannot exist. In 1516, educated readers of Thomas More’s Utopia would have appreciated a tension between two possible derivations of this novel word: the Greek “eu-topos”, meaning good place, and “ou-topos”, meaning not a place at all. It might have been a compact warning that one should never attempt to turn utopias into reality. Those who have tried usually witnessed the model societies they founded devolving into grungily dysfunctional communes, weird sex cults, or both.

In this richly diverting intellectual history of the idea, we begin, as we must, with Plato, and the zany prescriptions of his Republic (“we should neutralise the poets’ influence on mothers”). Passing in silence over the potentially utopian aspects of Jesus’s thinking, we arrive at More’s utopia, where “nothing is private”, and so “the common affairs be earnestly looked upon”. The great Renaissance scientist Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis portrays a utopia of rational scientific experimentation – which, Wren suggests ingeniously, might have inspired Wakanda in the Marvel Black Panther films. The 17th-century duchess Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World imagines the author as a goddess elected by a world of human-animal hybrids who like science. In the 18th century, Sarah Scott’s Millenium [sic] Hall imagined an ideal society of women without men, as did Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland during the first world war.

Some patterns emerge: many utopias employ a framing device in which the narrator is accidentally or fantastically transported to a new land, and then subjected to reams of expository monologue about how it all works. Families are often abolished, with children raised in common. And in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 fantasy Looking Backward, Wren explains straightfacedly, “there are no law schools or lawyers, abolished here as in most utopias”….

(5) SHELDON COOPER WAS WRONG: WHETHER TO TRY NEW DISHES HAS A BENEFIT AND A MATHEMATICAL SOLUTION! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Sheldon Copper of The Big Bang Theory has a strict rota for his weekly meals: he never tries new ones. However, in the real world we regularly do decide when going to a restaurant whether or not to strict to a tried-and-tested dish or to try something new off of the menu. Scott Edelman and his guests must come across this a lot in his Eating the Fantastic podcast. (Though visitors to Brit Cit arguably might want to make a point of firmly avoiding Nandos. Seriously.)

This ‘problem’ was made famous by Richard Feynman. In the late 1970s, the physicist Richard Feynman sat down for lunch with his friend Ralph Leighton at a Thai restaurant called Indra in Glendale, California. Leighton was trying to decide whether to order his running favourite (the ginger chicken), or try something new that had a chance of being even better. Feynman turned the dilemma into a math problem – and solved it. Unfortunately, Feynman never published the detail of how he came to his analysis but we do have his equation and how he derived that.

The optimal policy specifies decreasing thresholds for switching from exploring new dishes to exploiting the best, with thresholds varying based on the distribution of the quality of dishes.

Which brings us to today and British and US researchers have decipher the problem and solution from Feynman’s notes, and prove that Feynman’s solution is optimal. They generalised his result and find closed-form solutions for other distributions, and then turn to ask the question of how humans actually solve such decision-making problems. In a preregistered experiment with 2,520 participants, we find definitive evidence that humans use a decision threshold that decreases linearly with the proportion of trials remaining, achieving performance remarkably close to the optimal solution found by Feynman.

See the primary research Christian, B. et al (2026) Resolving Feynman’s restaurant problem reveals optimal solutions and human strategies. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., vol. 123 (23), e2509612123 and the comment item  Castelvecchi, D. (2026) Feynman’s Solution To ‘Restaurant Dilemma’ Holds Firm. Nature, vol. 654, p309-310.

(6) THIS PHOENIX NOT EXPECTED TO RISE. “Phoenix magazine to cease publication after 43 years” reports BBC. (Subscription required by readers outside the UK.)

The Phoenix magazine, seen by some as Ireland’s version of Private Eye, is to cease operations after 43 years.

Irish broadcaster RTÉ reports the magazine’s publisher, Penfield, is believed to be entering voluntary liquidation.

The last edition of the magazine was published on 5 June.

The magazine is no longer taking new subscriptions, with a message on the phoenix.ie website saying it is “unable to offer” online or print subscriptions “at this time”.

Edited by Paddy Prendiville, the magazine had been published every two weeks.

It was founded in 1983 by the late journalist and publisher John Mulcahy and peaked in term of sales in the early 1990s.

The magazine combined humour, satire and political and business coverage.

(7) STOP THE STEAL. “Publishers Sue Pirate Site WeLib for Copyright Infringement” – Publishers Weekly has details.

Fresh off of last month’s victory against pirate web site Anna’s Archive, 13 publishers across all segments of the industry have allied to sue yet another pirate site, WeLib, for copyright infringement.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, charges that the operators of WeLib “ copied the source code and most of the contents of” Anna’s Archive.”

The plaintiffs include the Big Five, Cengage, Elsevier, McGraw Hill, Pearson, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley.

“Defendants boast that they have reproduced ‘an endless collection of literature, research papers, and education materials,’ none of which they own or have licensed,” the complaint alleges.

According to its website and repeated in the lawsuit, WeLib hosts over 43 million books and 98 million papers, and its stolen collection of literary works has purportedly attracted over 80,000 active monthly users. According to the website, WeLib’s users have illegally accessed over 51 million books in the last month alone, or an average of over 1.7 million books per day.

Although the owners of WeLib claim to be a library of sorts, publishers say that they have created a mechanism to cash in on the pirated content.

According to the complaint, download speeds for free users are typically very slow, but in exchange for a “donation,” users receive “fast downloads” and avoid waitlists. …

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

June 16, 1896 — Murray Leinster. (Died 1975.)

By Paul Weimer: Murray Leinster. Not many people get an award named after one of their stories, but Murray Leinster managed that feat.  

I read his “Sidewise in Time” (for which the Sidewise Award for Alternate History is named) decades ago. I read it as part of my first full on dunking into Alternate Histories back in the 1980s, when I was trying to read every bit of AH I could get my paws on.  Unlike a lot of those stories and worlds, Murray Leinster instead gives us a sort of a multiverse of worlds, The sheer variety of worlds crammed into the story, a story where temporary conjunctions of parallel worlds throws a bevy of people into alternate worlds, and things from those worlds into our own, showed the pulp sensibilities of Leinster in full.  When I would later read Frederik Pohl’s “The Coming of the Quantum Cats”, I saw the homage to Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time” straightaway.

Alternate history is hardly Leinster’s only badge of honor of prediction, or as a forerunner in the science fiction field. “A Logic Named Joe”, in a time when computers were in their infancy, depicted a world with an internet. In these days with AI and the perils of information on the internet, the story and its plot seems more relevant than ever. But as off kilter as the logics go in that story, even Leinster didn’t predict an internet that, tainted by AI, would offer recipes for pizza that involve glue.

“The Runaway Skyscraper”, one of his earliest stories (and written before “Sidewise in Time” by over a decade) didn’t invent the time travel story. However, it helped give it a form in a 20th Century vein.  For reasons beyond understanding, a skyscraper slips several thousand years in the past, and the building occupants must come together to figure out how to survive…and how to return to their modern day, if they can. 

Leinster is a writer who started in the pulps and kept writing into the 1950’s and 1960’s, managing a transition that very few writers of his era were able to accomplish. His staying power isn’t super dense characterization, it’s his vivid imagination and ideas that he scatters like candy throughout his work. Take his story “Exploration Team” which has an amazing wild alien planet for the protagonist to cross…accompanied by his animal companions, including uplifted bears! 

Oh, and the spaceship in the opening scenes of Starcrash is named the Murray Leinster. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Dog Eat Doug makes you hear the line.
• Free Range does a favor for a passenger.
• Loose Parts’ theme park ride delivers a true love experience.
• Wondermark speed reads.

(10) DARK HORSE EMPLOYEE CUTS. “Layoffs begin at Dark Horse, but union means it’s complicated” reports ComicsBeat.

The proposed layoffs include three people in IT and six in the warehouse, with some employees notified of upcoming layoffs on June 10th, just days after Dark Horse management voluntarily recognized the Dark Horse Workers Union on June 3rd. 

There is a lot of back and forth in Rabiroff’s reporting, but the shorter version is that although Dark Horse management was planning layoffs prior to the unionization, layoffs must now be part of the arbitration process between the union and the company. 

Based on many conversations with past and present Dark Horse employees over the years, they all expressed the opinion that Dark Horse has a huge staff, much larger than publishers who put out a similar number of books. Some of those workers were involved with the retail end of the company, including both the shuttered TFAW.com and the soon-to-close brick and mortar Things from Another World stores. 

I’ve been told many times that as Dark Horse parent Embracer Group underwent layoffs in most of their units, it was only a matter of time until the budget cuts hit Dark Horse. There were a handful of layoffs last year, but nothing sweeping. 

However, with Mike Richardson no longer in the picture, everyone expected more layoffs to hit; the unionization effort, which took five years to organize, has may goals, but making sweeping staff cuts a lot harder to implement must have been one of them.  

(11) SEEKING SETI. [Item by Steven French.] This offers an interesting take on an old chestnut by framing alien colonisation in terms of ‘artificial infection’. The conclusion is both surprising and dismaying (to some, anyway): “David Kipping has new take on the existence of advanced life in the universe and the numbers are not encouraging” says Phys.org.

“The firmest conclusion we can say is that if infections spawn more frequently than 1 in 100,000 galaxies, then 99.9% of the universe would be infected for a 0.1c infection wave speed. If we take it as a given that this is inconsistent with observation/experience, then this requires that less than 1 in 10 quadrillion star systems have ever spawned an infection. That’s a staggeringly tight observational constraint on alien behavior; it’s by far the strongest statistical statement we can make in all of SETI.”

There are possible explanations for this that don’t involve the nonexistence of intelligent life beyond Earth, as Kipping notes. For what Sagan described as “contact optimists,” a natural explanation would be that despite there being a large population of ETCs in our universe, the odds of them ever spawning an infection, i.e., sending out probes or ships, are astronomically small. However, this is difficult to consider if one rejects the idea of uniformity in behavior and motivation. As David Brin argued in his 1983 paper, “The “Great Silence’: the Controversy Concerning Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life,” it only takes one species to break the pattern for a proposed resolution to become untenable.

In contrast, the contact pessimist has a much easier job explaining the apparent lack of evidence for ETCs, either by stating that they don’t exist or employing the Great Filter argument. But as Kipping stated, this explanation is also difficult to maintain: “If the filter is behind us, then where? Life started so early that it strongly indicates abiogenesis is a rapid and easy process. Perhaps some evolutionary steps are hard and very rarely transpire, but evolutionary biologists have argued against this recently. Or perhaps it’s ahead of us, and we won’t last another century needed to develop infection technologies.

“But then it’s hard to imagine how such a future Great Filter is so potent that it can suppress the odds at the level needed here. We can imagine many ways in which humanity continues, so surely someone, somewhere, especially those civilizations with greater wisdom than our own, would sail past the challenges we face today without annihilation.”

Consider “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” the famous science fiction tale that chronicles the collapse of human civilization, its rebirth and, spoilers, its imminent collapse again toward the end. Or Foundation, where the collapse of the Galactic Empire (à la The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) is inevitable, but is not a permanent condition. In short, the data support no conclusions, something that Kipping acknowledges.

“Frankly, I don’t have a good answer for this,” he tells us. “I suspect I will be wrestling with this question for the rest of my life in frustration and wonder.” The same may apply to the rest of us, and humanity as a whole….

(12) TREK AHOY. “’Strange New Worlds’ Season 4 Trailer Teases the Journey to the Beginning of ‘Star Trek’” – Gizmodo has details.

The future of Star Trek on TV isn’t terribly optimistic, but the new season of Strange New Worlds—its fourth, ahead of a shortened fifth and final outing—looks stuffed full of excitement and wonder. Paramount just shared the latest trailer ahead of the show’s return in July, featuring a meaningful chat between future dynamic duo Spock (Ethan Peck) and Captain Kirk (Paul Wesley).

…Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season four begins July 23 on Paramount+. It runs weekly, with new episodes arriving Thursdays through September 24.

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