Tag Archives: Atari

Pixel Scroll 7/22/25 John Pixel’s Not The Boogieman. He’s Who You Send To Scroll The Boogieman

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(1) GURATHIN FAN. Leah Schnelbach says, “I Didn’t Expect Dr. Gurathin To Be My Favorite Part of Murderbot” at Reactor. Beware spoilers.

If you want to make me love your work, take a scene or a character who could have been flat or cliche or basic, and write them a wildly new direction. In Murderbot, to my surprise and delight, it was what the Weitzes did with the character of Dr. Gurathin. In the books, Gurathin is the one member of the PresAux team who’s a little more suspicious of their assigned SecUnit. He clocks that Murderbot is acting weird, and he questions it in front of the rest of the group to figure out whether they’re in danger. Once they figure out that it’s autonomous, he needles Murderbot occasionally just to make sure it’s not going to go rogue and kill them all. This is brave of him, from a certain point of view, but also stupid, and Dr. Mensah mostly seems to be annoyed when he does it.

When I learned that David Dastmalchian had been cast in the Murderbot adaptation, I figured he was playing Dr. Gurathin, and that Gurathin’s role was going to be expanded a bit. My first thought was that he would be the Dr. Smith of the group, which would have been fun, but nowhere near as meaningful as the path they took….

(2) LIBRARY POLICIES AND USE. “EveryLibrary Releases Legislative Update and Library Use Survey” – Publishers Weekly gives an overview.

Advocacy organization EveryLibrary has shared some of its latest research on the status of library-related policymaking and patrons’ library usage across the U.S. In a summary titled “Codifying Censorship or Reclaiming Rights? The State-by-State 2025 Legislative Landscape for Libraries,” EveryLibrary compiles an eye-opening stack of bills that have been passed, enacted, vetoed, or left to wither on the vine. The document also details how coalitions are forming in support of intellectual freedom nationwide.

The legislative update concludes that library advocates “must actively build coalitions across our own sectors,” including outreach to “legitimate conservative or libertarian organizations.” EveryLibrary observes that coalitions “tend to skew older,” necessitating outreach to Gen Z free speech activists too. The emphasis on expanding partnerships echoes a pillar of the American Library Association’s new strategic plan.

Separately, in this year’s Freckle Project report, supported by EveryLibrary and generated annually since 2019, consumer survey data indicates that library visits and print circulation have declined more than 50% since 2011, while digital circulation has risen from 8% to 45% in the past decade. Though digital is up, the report also attests that patron demand for “more nonfiction and more backlist” print titles is going unmet.

The first six months of this year has brought 133 “negative bills” in 33 states, threatening public libraries, school libraries, librarianship, and the rights of readers, according to EveryLibrary’s “Codifying Censorship” white paper. Concurrently, another 76 bills in 32 states aim to protect or extend library services and intellectual freedom. In all of 2024, only 121 such “bad bills” came under consideration, and only 36 right to read bills were proposed….

(3) MEET ISIS ASARE. SFWA’s new Executive Director Isis Asare, announced last month, is featured in today’s Shelf Awareness.

Isis Asare has been named executive director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. She is the fifth executive director and the first African-American executive director of the association, and will work with SFWA board president Kate Ristau and operations director Russell Davis (the previous interim executive director) to implement the strategic direction set by the SFWA board of directors.

SFWA described Asare as “a queer Afrofuturist, technology entrepreneur, Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia alum, and the CEO/founder of Sistah Scifi, the first Black-owned bookstore focused on science fiction and fantasy in the U.S.,” which is located in Oakland, Calif. She was honored as Norwescon 47’s special guest of honor and served as executive director of Aunt Lute Books, the nonprofit press that has a history of championing underrepresented authors.

Asare aims, SFWA wrote, to “cultivate a space at SFWA where more conversation can happen, and where consensus on next steps can be achieved through a thoughtful inclusion of different points of view. SFWA is home to both traditional and transformative forms of SFF, and that wide array of approaches to the genre is not a source of schism. Rather, it is the rich foundation of creative practice on which the next phase of our advocacy journey–and our community uplift–will unfold.”

Asare said, “Continuing the legacy of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association is a true honor. It was a privilege to present the Nebula Award for Best Novel to John Wiswell for Someone You Can Build a Nest In, and I cheered as A.W. Prihandita became the first Indonesian to win–or even be nominated for–the prestigious Nebula Award for Best Novelette, for ‘Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being.’ It is a joy to celebrate the work of speculative fiction writers that inspire all readers to imagine futures beyond our wildest dreams.”

(4) CHARACTERS COUNT. The New York Times recounts “A Professor’s Search for the MingKwai, a Lost Chinese Typewriter”. (Behind a paywall.)

…Dr. Mullaney’s mania for clunky text appliances began in 2007, when he was preparing a talk on the disappearance of Chinese characters and found himself contemplating the disintegration of everything.

Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language — around 100,000, by some estimates — there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce. They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost.

Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Dr. Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole.

It would have been physically impossible to build a typing machine to include all the characters that were historically written out by hand, he thought. Some characters must have made the cut, while others were left behind. He sat back in his chair and asked himself: Could he recall ever having seen a Chinese typewriter?

Two hours later, he was lying on the floor of his office, looking at patent documents for such devices. There had been, over the last century and a half, dozens of different Chinese typewriters made. Each one was an inventor’s take on how to incorporate thousands of characters into a machine without making it unusable — a physical manifestation of their ideas about language. Never plentiful, the typewriters were now increasingly rare, gone the way of most obsolete technology.

Dr. Mullaney was fascinated.

That evening turned into months of research, which turned into years of searching, as Chinese typewriters became one of his areas of historical expertise.

He cold-called strangers and left voice mail messages for private collectors, people whom he suspected, from faint traces left on the internet, of having typewriters. He pored over Ancestry.com, looking for the next of kin of the last known owner of a particular machine. He called museums and asked, “Do you, by any chance, have a Chinese typewriter?”

Sometimes, they said yes. A private museum in Delaware happened to have a surviving IBM Chinese typewriter, of which only two or three were ever made. Someone at a Chinese Christian church in San Francisco got in touch with him to say they owned a typewriter that they were trying to get rid of. Dr. Mullaney took it off their hands.

Then there was the fellow in Northern California who had held on to two Japanese typewriters, as rare as the Chinese varieties, for some decades. “He looked at me and said, ‘Is your trunk big enough?’” Dr. Mullaney recalled. It was, just.

Dr. Mullaney took home those typewriters, and the typewriter in London and others like them, because it had begun to dawn on him that he might soon be one of the only people alive who knew what these machines were, who really understood their stories. He might be the last thing standing between these machines and oblivion….

(5) IN THE DAYS OF ‘KIM’. Francis Hamit has accumulated over a thousand books in his Intelligence and Espionage Research Library. At his new Substack he will be reviewing some of them for his “Intelligence Bookshelf” feature – which will be a free feature, not behind the paywall. Hamit’s starting with Spying For Empire: The Great Game In Central And South Asia, 1757 to 1947 by Robert Johnson (Greenhill Books, 2006) in “The Real World Spies In Kipling’s KIM”.  

… Spying For Empire explores the reality behind Kipling’s novel, beginning with the British conquest of India by both military and diplomatic means. Spies were needed for tactical military intelligence, but also to explore the lands beyond the frontier. The main adversary then, as now, was Russia, with an expanding empire of its own. Between lay Persia (now Iran), Afghanistan, Tibet, and the edge of China, another empire. Lone agents, often in disguise, were posted in market towns to gather information and hired correspondents known as “pundits” to write reports that were sent back to London….

(6) IS THIS NUTS, OR WHAT? The New York Times takes us “Behind the Squirrel Scene That James Gunn, ‘Superman’ Director, Says Almost Got Cut”. (Link bypasses paywall.)

…James Gunn’s new take on “Superman,” in theaters now, has its fair share of flight scenes and they’re all convincingly done. But the movie’s mission statement has more to do with a pure spirit than a special effect: In the middle of one frenetic action sequence, after noticing a tiny squirrel is in danger of being crushed by debris, Superman leaps into action to rush the animal out of harm’s way.

Sure, you’ll believe a man could fly. But would you believe that man would go to the trouble of saving a squirrel?

“The squirrel moment is probably one of the most debated,” Gunn told me recently. In early test screenings, some audiences were confused about why Superman (David Corenswet) would prioritize a tiny critter when all of Metropolis was in jeopardy. But to Gunn, that was exactly the point: His cleareyed, upbeat incarnation of Superman prizes saving every life, human or not.

“A lot of people were anti-squirrel. They thought it was too much,” he said. “And I think it really comes down to, do you like squirrels or not?”

Gunn’s own answer to that question should come as no surprise, given the empathy he extended to a raccoon in his “Guardians of the Galaxy” trilogy.

“I love squirrels,” he said. “If a monster’s tail was coming at the squirrel, I would save the squirrel if I could. I’ve done it before: Every day, I’m honking at squirrels on the road.”

Even though he stripped the squirrel moment from one early cut of the film, Gunn ultimately decided that keeping it was fundamental to understanding his main character, who had been portrayed in a much darker fashion by Henry Cavill in recent films like “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” When Corenswet’s Superman saves the squirrel, the message couldn’t be clearer: This is not that.

(7) TALES OF GALACTIC PEST CONTROL FROM AMAZING SELECTS. The containment fields are holding, the exterminator bots are standing by, and the newest anthology from Amazing Selects has officially landed! Tales of Galactic Pest Control is now available for purchase.

It’s crawling with weirdness (in the best way). Edited by science fiction legends David Gerrold (The Trouble with Tribbles) and Tom Easton (Analog), this one-of-a-kind anthology features 34 original stories about the unglamorous, underappreciated, and utterly essential job of pest control… in space.

List of authors:  Stephen Antczak, Sarah Arnette, Lauren Taylor Bak, Marleen S. Barr, Charles Barouch, Reginald Bretnor, Pete Carter, Jenny Perry Carr, Stephen Chappell, Dave Creek, Tom Easton, David Gerrold, Galen Gower, Dana Gricken, Nissa Harlow, Henry Herz, Liam Hogan, S. E. M. Ishida, Leonid Kaganov, John Leahy, Edward M. Lerner, Nicola Lombardi, Brian K. Lowe, Jeff Parsons, Matt Rouse, Steven H. Silver, Al Sirois, Sarah Smith, Ryk E. Spoor, Allen Steele, Ian Randal Strock, Alex Shvartsman, Matt Thompson, Joe Weintraub, Jay Werkheiser

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary (1923) 

One hundred and two years ago, Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary was published in the United Kingdom by The Bodley Head, a young company then just thirty-six years of age. The novel introduces Tommy and Tuppence who will be featured in three more novels and a collection of short stories. The five Tommy and Tuppence books would span Christie’s writing career.

The story here is that the Great War is over, and jobs are almost impossible to find, so childhood friends Tommy Beresford and Prudence “Tuppence” Cowley decide to start their own business as The Young Adventurers. In this novel, they are hired for a job that leads them into many dangerous situations, and meeting allies as well, including an American millionaire in search of his cousin.

The critics liked it. The Times Literary Supplement said it was “a whirl of thrilling adventures” and the Daily Chronicle was very happy with it: “It’s an excellent yarn and the reader will find it as impossible as we did to put it aside until the mystery has been fathomed.”

It would be the second Christie work to be turned into a film as it would be made in Germany by the Orplid Film company in 1929 as a silent movie which ran for 76 minutes. Thought to be lost, it wasn’t and was shown at the National Film Theatre in 2001.

The novel was adapted twice for television, in 1983 and in 2014. Significant changes were made to story. A graphic novel was done.  Several theatre productions were staged. It’s been made into an audiobook, errr, at least twenty-three times according to what I see over at Audible.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal surprises no one by revealing that people who don’t read have literary opinions.  
  • Thatababy flunks a pop comics quiz. 
  • The Argyle Sweater complains about the menu. 
  • Wumo has a race car with a spoiler. For some values of spoiler. 
  • xkcd reports on the plants and birds most often mentioned in the U.S.  

(10) DOCUMENTARY LOOKS AT A FANDOM. “‘Thomas the Tank Engine clung to me like a disease’: the film about the choo-choo’s global superstardom” – the Guardian explains why its grown-up fans have issues.

‘I kept it a huge, dark secret,” says Matt Michaud. “I tried to push people away. I wouldn’t call it shame. I wasn’t sure if it was right or wrong. I wasn’t sure if it was something I could share with other people.”

It is curious to hear these words spoken at the outset of a disarmingly sweet documentary. What kind of perversion, or even crime, is twentysomething Michaud confessing to in his own living room? A glimpse behind him provides a clue to his obsession and anxiety: displayed on a table is a collection of toy locomotives and model railway books. And the centrepiece is a model of Thomas the Tank Engine.

In one of his letters to the Corinthians, St Paul wrote that when he became a man he put away childish things. Brannon Carty’s documentary, called An Unlikely Fandom: The Impact of Thomas the Tank Engine, is a rebuke to that philosophy. It celebrates the men (and the fans Carty interviews are overwhelmingly male) who have found friendship, community and creativity in what, as far as I can judge, is the most wholesome of subcultures.

Yet a sense of shame pervades Thomas the Tank Engine fandom. “Aside from a handful of people,” says Carty, “no one’s really out and proud about it – because it’s socially unacceptable, especially here in the States.” Why? “I think Thomas gets looped in with Sesame Street and other preschool TV shows over here, whereas in the UK it’s seen more as a children’s show.”

(11) APPROPRIATE. The actor who plays Freddy Krueger will be added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Halloween.

(12) X MARKS THE SPOT. “Elon Musk devotees camp out for hours to get a glimpse of new Tesla diner” reports NBC News. (Running this item because John King Tarpinian and I remember eating there when it was a Shakey’s.)

Tesla enthusiasts began lining up outside Elon Musk’s long-awaited Tesla Diner & Drive-In in Hollywood early Monday, eager to get their first glimpse of what’s inside.

But with little clarity about when the gates would open, some of Musk’s most ardent fans waited hours before they were finally allowed in at 4:20 p.m., a classic reference Musk often makes to marijuana.

Built in the bustling Hollywood location where a Shakey’s Pizza used to be, the retro-futuristic diner, which also doubles as a drive-in movie theater, is filled with Tesla technology — including its humanoid robot, Optimus — and merch, such as Cybertruck-themed food containers.

The menu, created by chef Eric Greenspan, featured diner staples, such as fried chicken & waffles, grilled cheese and tuna melts, as well as some themed items, such as the “Tesla Burger” with “Electric Sauce.” Prices range from $4 for a side of fries to $15 for biscuits & red gravy.

As they entered the facility, guests were greeted by servers on roller skates, who rolled up with ice cream samples. The drive-in projector played the 1960s animated sitcom “The Jetsons,” which depicted life in the 21st century and featured flying cars and a housekeeper robot. Guests could order items from a kiosk at the counter….

(13) THE GRAVE OF MISFIT GAMES. Wikipedia invites us to remember the “Atari video game burial”. File 770 followed that story step by step. Here’s the whole journey in one article.

… Excavation started on April 26, 2014 as an open event to the public. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial designer Howard Scott Warshaw, Ready Player One author Ernest Cline, and film director Zak Penn attended the event as part of a documentary about the burial,[43] as did local residents such as Armando Ortega, a city official who was reportedly one of the original children to raid the dump in 1983. Ortega stated that although he and his friends found dozens of quality games, they gave the E.T. cartridges away because the “game sucked … you couldn’t finish it”. James Heller, the former Atari manager in charge of the original burial, was also on hand at the excavation. Heller revealed that he had originally ordered the site to be covered in concrete. Contrary to the urban legend that claims millions of cartridges were buried there, Heller stated that only 728,000 cartridges were buried.

Remnants of E.T. and other Atari games were discovered in the early hours of the excavation, as reported by Microsoft’s Larry Hryb. A team of archaeologists was present to examine and document the Atari material unearthed by excavation machinery: Andrew Reinhard (American School of Classical Studies at Athens), Richard Rothaus (Trefoil Cultural and Environmental), Bill Caraher (University of North Dakota), with support from video game historian Raiford Guins (Stony Brook University) and historian Bret Weber (University of North Dakota)…

(14) THESE WERE THE JOKES, MY FRIEND. The Guardian says “Edinburgh funniest fringe joke award scrapped for 2025”. Here’s the kind of thing we’ll be missing.

…The award was launched in 2008 and has been held every year since apart from during the Covid-19 pandemic. Last year, Mark Simmons won for his nautical one-liner “I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship but I bottled it”. The shortlist of jokes was chosen by a panel of UK comedy critics and comedians, then submitted anonymously to 2,000 members of the public who were asked to pick their favourites. Upon winning last year’s prize, Simmons said: “I needed some good news as I was just fired from my job marking exam papers, can’t understand it, I always gave 110%.”…

…Lorna Rose Treen, the second woman to win the award, triumphed in 2023 for the joke “I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah.”…

(15) ALL SHOOK UP. “Android Phones Can Detect Earthquakes Before the Ground Starts Shaking” – Gizmodo tells how it works.

… Researchers in the U.S. and Germany have tested a global earthquake detection and alert system that makes use of a device many people already own, including in less developed countries—Android smartphones. According to their study, published today in the journal Science, the Android Earthquake Alerts (AEA) system’s efficacy rivaled traditional seismic networks in its ability to detect seismic activity and deliver alerts.

“The global adoption of smartphone technology places sophisticated sensing and alerting capabilities in people’s hands, in both the wealthy and less-wealthy portions of the planet,” the researchers, including Richard Allen from the University of California in Berkeley’s Seismological Laboratory, wrote in the study. “Although the accelerometers in these phones are less sensitive than the permanent instrumentation used in traditional seismic networks, they can still detect the ground motions and building response in hazardous earthquakes.”

According to the study, 70% of the world’s smartphones are Android phones, which by default come with the aforementioned sensing and alerting capabilities. From 2021 to 2024, the AEA system detected an average of 312 earthquakes per month across 98 countries. The earthquakes had a magnitude between 1.9 and 7.8, and the system alerted users of earthquakes at or over a magnitude of 4.5, averaging around 60 events and 18 million alerts per month.

The AEA system also collected user feedback, revealing that 85% of users who received alerts experienced shaking, with 36% receiving the alert before, 28% during, and 23% after the shaking began….

(16) GRUMPY AND DOC. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Former Doctor Who script writer of nine episodes, Mark Gatiss  (who helped bring the show back) has tried to support the current season of the show stating that ‘grumpy old’ fans need to realize that the present-day show is not for them but a younger audience. He said that old fans have fallen in to a ‘space-time trap’.

Right. Let’s get this straight. The new season is aimed at new younger fans and so older fans should not complain.  And this explains the UK viewing figures for Gatwa in 2025 halving compared to the three-episode Tennant reprise in 2022, exactly how!???

“’It’s Not for You Any More’: Mark Gatiss Takes Aim at ‘Grumpy Old Doctor Who Fans’ and Nostalgia” at DoctorWhoTV.

Mark Gatiss must have a new show to promote, because he’s been making a lot of headlines lately. Now he’s turned his attention to calling out “grumpy old Doctor Who fans” and warning that nostalgia is holding the show back.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Radio Times, the writer and actor looked back on his time working on the series, highlighting the importance of looking forward.

“The actual process of trying to make a modern show for a new audience is not about nostalgia,” Gatiss explained. “And I think that’s the great difference. You have to get right. Why is this going to work now? It doesn’t really matter what worked for Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. It’s about now.”

Gatiss, who wrote nine episodes for the revived series, noted the recurring temptation for both writers and fans to fall back on the familiar…

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

Pixel Scroll 6/22/25 Pixel Nine From Outer Scroll

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(1) MALKA OLDER Q&A. CrimeReads interviews “Malka Older on Using Genre to Explore New Ideas”.

Alex Dueben: Before we get into your new book, I’m curious about where this series started. Was it the design of the world? Was it the characters?

Malka Older: There were two starting points. A long time ago, I had this sort of “what if” thought that is the beginning of a lot of fiction– and science fiction—which was, how would humans inhabit a gas giant planet? I had this idea of platforms that would be on a ring that was geosynchronous, so it would be revolving. At the same time, I had this idea that people would want to have some interaction with animals and so, there would be this zoo that existed there. That was a long time ago, and it didn’t go anywhere immediately….

(2) THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE. Drum roll! Rich Horton rolls out his rankings for “The 2025 Hugo Best Novel Ballot”.

…I’m going to list the novels in the order I plan to put them on the ballot. I will say that my first-place choice is fixed, and my last-place choice is fixed — but in all honesty the four novels in the middle could have gone in any order. I’ll also link to my reviews of the books — just click on the titles. At the end I’ll share my personal nomination ballot — which had only one book on it that made the final ballot. That said, the four books in the middle of my nomination list might possibly have vied for a couple of spots between them on my list of nominations….

(3) MATS STRANDBERG WILL MISS ARCHIPELACON. [Item by Nina Törnudd.] Unfortunately, Archipelacon 2 has had a Guest of Honour cancel his participation. A member of Mats Strandberg’s family is ill, and he is therefore unable to travel to Mariehamn.

Mats will be participating in two programme items remotely. 

A teaser for a TV series based on his book Färjan (Blood Cruise) has been released this weekend by SVT, the Swedish national broadcasting company. The series will be out later this year, I suspect sometime around Halloween. 

(4) HUMANITY’S NEXT MIXTAPE. “Hey aliens, here’s our new album! How do you follow up a 50-year-old record that’s hurtling through space?” asks the Guardian.

It’s almost 50 years since one of the strangest records ever made was launched – not into the pop charts but into the farthest reaches of outer space. Known as the Golden Record, this 12-inch, gold-plated copper disc was an album compiled by astronomer Carl Sagan featuring everything from classical music and spoken-word greetings to the sounds of nature and a blast of Chuck Berry’s Jonny B Goode. Humans could enjoy it, of course, but they weren’t the target audience. Rather, a copy was placed on Voyager 1 and 2, the two space probes launched in 1977, in the hope that they would one day be discovered and listened to by an alien life form.

The Golden Record came with various diagrammatic instructions on how to play it correctly. But as to what aliens might make of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto, the sounds of humpback whales and a greeting in the Chinese dialects Wu, we will never know. Both Voyager probes are still intact, currently hurtling through the Kuiper belt in interstellar space, but we are likely to lose contact with them in around a decade’s time. This means we will miss the Golden Record’s first realistic chance of being discovered – when it’s expected to pass within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445 in 40,000 years’ time.

And yet the record continues to inspire. It’s certainly the key influence behind Earth Rising: Messages from the Pale Blue Dot, the first in a series of three audio works by arts organisation Artangel that are being released on digital platforms in the run-up to the Golden Record’s 50th anniversary….

… The result is a collection of poems and experimental compositions that grapple with our present moment. Sebastián Riffo Valdebenito creates a track from the sounds of rock carving at the petroglyph site of Valle del Encanto in Coquimbo, Chile, while Michel Nieva contributes The Alien Mother, a short story set in a future where humanity has colonised Mars. Elsewhere, there are poems about US turmoil, ethereal songs created using just the human voice, and what is described as a “sonic invocation” that honours the calabash, a hard-shelled type of fruit used to make instruments. It’s almost as diverse and confounding as the Golden Record itself which, along with its various audio recordings, featured 115 images encoded in analogue form (a circle, a track athlete, etc) and a condensed recording of Sagan’s wife’s brainwaves, captured while she thought deeply about the Earth’s history and various human experiences such as falling in love (I’d like to see you work that one out, aliens!)….

(5) WILBUR SMITH WRITING PRIZE NEWS. The shortlist for the 2025 Wilbur  Smith Adventure Writing Prize was announced June 4. The six novels and their authors in the running for the £10,000 award.

  • Babylonia by Costanza Casati (Penguin Michael Joseph)
  • Sycorax by Nydia Hetherington (Quercus)
  • Redemption by Jack Jordan (Simon & Schuster)
  • A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay (Dialogue Books)
  • Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao (Bantam, Transworld, Penguin Random House)
  • Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Publishing Group)

Babylonia, Sycorax, and Water Moon are works of genre interest.

(6) LOCKED ROOMS LOCKED SLADEK OUT OF MYSTERY MARKET. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Martin Edwards, who is a big deal in the UK crime and mystery scene (he is the president of the Detection Club, consultant to the British Library’s Crime Classics reprint series, and former Chair of the CWA) reviews one of John Sladek’s forays into the mystery genre and also explains why Sladek only wrote two mysteries – because the type of mysteries he preferred to write were unfashionable at the time and didn’t sell well:  “Forgotten Book – Black Aura” at ‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’

Timing is everything in the world of writing, as so often it is in many walks of life. John Sladek’s misfortune was to demonstrate a mastery of the locked room mystery at a time when that delightful form of detective fiction was deeply unfashionable. He was primarily a science fiction writer, but he published two books of this type before giving up on mysteries.

As Sladek said in an interview with David Langford in 1982, ‘those two novels suffered mainly from being written about 50 years after the fashion for puzzles of detection. I enjoyed writing them, planning the absurd crimes and clues, but I found I was turning out a product the supermarket didn’t need any more – stove polish or yellow cakes of laundry soap. One could starve very quickly writing locked-room mysteries like those. SF has much more glamour and glitter attached to it, in these high-tech days.’ How lucky we fans of detective fiction are that the wheel has turned full circle, and locked room puzzles (genuine locked room puzzles, as well as the ‘closed circle’ mysteries that are similarly if erroneously badged) are all the rage….

(7) DR. SEUSS EXPANDS ON YOUTUBE. “Dr. Seuss Enterprises CEO On YouTube Growth & ‘Seuss Circle Time’ Show” reports Deadline.

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose,” goes the famous Dr. Seuss refrain – and the late author’s universe of characters are steering directly towards YouTube.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises is today launching Seuss Circle Time, an eight-part YouTube summer takeover series that supports early learning through storytelling, singing, dancing and interactive play. This is part of a major investment into the company’s YouTube channel following a massive spike in viewership.

The show will be hosted by presenters Ziggy and Tizzie and Dr. Seuss’ characters, with each 30-minute episode featuring music, games and learning activities in imaginative settings such as the Circle Time House and Truffula Forest, before hour-long episodes begin in September….

…The series comes after the Dr. Seuss YouTube channel relaunched with new investment in July 2024, leading to subscriber growth of 1,084% and viewing up 993%, according to its own analysis….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

June 22, 1947 — Octavia Butler. (Died 2006.)

By Paul Weimer: The first Octavia Butler story I encountered caused me not to read more of her work for over a decade afterwards.

The year was 1984. I was a young SF reader. Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine was one of the things I read as part of my SF education. June 1984 had a striking cover image for Octavia Butler’s story Bloodchild that drew my eye right away. I had to Know More!

But then I read the story itself. A hard-hitting Butler with an emphasis on biology, and the idea of human men becoming part of a life cycle of aliens’ breeding, I was, to say the least, a little traumatized at the idea of someone being a host for parasitic alien eggs! I got right away the parallels Butler was making and as a reader I was poleaxed.

I decided that Butler was Not for Me (or, Too Much For Me) and did not read her again for years. 

Finally, I was persuaded to give Butler another go, and I picked up Wild Seed. This experience was completely and rather different.  I was absolutely struck by the power and grace of her imagination, her consummate writing skill, and (yes) her ability to make me feel. I didn’t mind that I had started the series out of order, I was sucked in right away and was absorbed by the book, its pair of main characters, and the world Butler has made.

I then went on to other books in the Patterrnist sequence, the Parable novels, and in general, steadily consumed her oeuvre ever since. One of the best SF writers of all time? I don’t think that’s a stretch. Taken from us too soon? Absolutely yes, no question. (Recall that she won a MacArthur Award Genius grant, in addition to her SFF awards and nominations)

And yes, I have given Bloodchild another read…and yes, it STILL freaks me out. Some things never do change. 

While I think her Parable books are the most timely books for today (and the ones I would push into the hands of interested readers), my favorite Octavia Butler piece might not be a novel at all, but rather the short story “Speech Sounds”. It focuses on her biological SF concerns, describing the aftermath of a plague which renders nearly everyone unable to speak. For those who still can talk…life is not precisely pleasant in the post-plague Los Angeles. But the bonds and the character development and worldbuilding packed into the short space of the story show just what Butler could do as a writer.

For those interested, I recount in even more detail my experience with Octavia Butler and her work in an essay in the anthology Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal (Twelfth Planet Press, 2017). One of the weirdest things I’ve ever had as a SFF person is someone wanting me to sign my essay in their copy of the book. I attribute that to the power Octavia Butler has, not mine own modest talents.

Octavia Butler

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) 4E IN THIS MONTH’S MEGAZINE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This month’s Judge Dredd Megazine (no. 481) is just out with much that is splundig from the Dredd-verse. Included in the mix is a story in the occasional series ‘Tales From The Black Museum’. These concern artefacts the Justice Department came across in their various investigations. Notable for SF fans in this month’s ‘Black Museum’ story is Forrest (4E) Ackerman being name-checked. Well, he was a notable collector and this month’s story is all about collectors fighting over an item.  See below….

(11) FITTED FOR SPACE. [Item by Steven French.] Cori Winrock juxtaposes the lunar astronauts spacesuits with Emily Dickinson’s famous white dress in The Paris Review and recalls whose expertise was eventually called upon to stitch the former: “Dickinson’s Dresses on the Moon”.

How many worlds can a garment inhabit at one time? Let me reverse some of its stitches. In the city where I will be born an inventor will begin a humble company making latex bathing caps and swimwear. The company will grow larger, move cities, divide itself into different cells, some for the war effort and some for more commercial manufacturing. After the war, women from surrounding towns will be hired to work on the lines at a newly announced division, Playtex, stitching bras and diaper covers and latex-dipping “living” girdles. Twenty plus years into the future, it’s seamstresses at Playtex who are initially tapped to move over to the handcrafting of space suits for the NASA astronauts.

Every other company’s proposal for dressing and encasing the interstellar body in a military-engineered solution will fail. Their armor-like designs incapable of mimicking the human form or allowing a body to move with enough grace in low gravity. Hard-shell relics unsuited to carrying anyone to the moon. Playtex’s flexible rubber girdle and the bra’s nylon tricot was, is, and will be the secret to fitting women’s earthly bodies into the restrictive garments of Dior’s postwar New Look and the astronaut’s bodies into space suits. A garment that holds both a future and a past body in its fabric. An impossible, other-worldly, fantastical body achievable only through an adept understanding of how to alter the figure underneath the architectural lines of the clothing. In other words, through the illusion technology of undergarments.

Much of the language for the technical components and construction of the lunar space suits will be of the body: bladder, ribbed rings, webbing, joints. A language of intimacy and interiority. A language the seamstresses will already understand. Closer to earlier forms of embodiment in which we clothe a spirit with a body—a space suit: both an embodied body and an intervention of the body. The interior of the space suit touching the exterior of the body. The exterior touching endlessness. Each latex-dipped component a well-guarded technique to a fragile body dazzling us while bouncing through airlessness. Each of the space suit’s seventeen concentric sheets of mylar glued by the seamstresses, thinner than single-thread lace. A body kept safe in the vastness of space through couture handiwork—a reseau of women rendering the moon possible with precision stitching and cutting and gluing. An abundance of hours.’

(12) DOUBLE YOUR PLEASURE, DOUBLE YOUR FUN. [Item by Steven French.] Spoiler alert: two possible candidates for Planet Nine appear to have been spotted: “The solar system’s greatest mystery may finally be solved” reports Phys.org.

For years, astronomers have been searching for a mysterious ninth planet lurking in the dark outer reaches of our solar system. Now, a team of researchers have taken a completely different approach to this cosmic detective story—instead of looking for reflected sunlight, they’re hunting for the planet’s own heat signature.

The story begins with a puzzle in the outer solar system. Scientists noticed that small icy bodies called Kuiper Belt Objects, which orbit far beyond Neptune, seem to be clustered together in unusual ways. Their orbits are aligned in patterns that shouldn’t exist by chance alone. The leading and most tantalizing explanation…. a massive, undiscovered planet (dubbed “Planet Nine”) is gravitationally shepherding these distant objects into their strange orbits.

If it exists, Planet Nine would be a true giant, roughly 5–10 times the mass of Earth, orbiting somewhere between 400–800 times farther from the sun than our planet does. At such an enormous distance, it would be incredibly faint and nearly impossible to spot with traditional telescope searches that rely on detecting reflected sunlight.

This is where the new research gets ingenious. Led by Amos Chen from the National Tsing Hua University, the team realized that searching for Planet Nine’s heat signature could be far more effective than looking for its reflected light. Here’s why: When you double the distance from the sun, reflected light becomes 16 times fainter (following what scientists call an inverse fourth-power relationship). But thermal radiation, the heat that all objects naturally emit, only becomes four times fainter when you double the distance….

(13) REAL TIMEY-WIMEY STUFF. “New theory proposes time has three dimensions, with space as a secondary effect” – Phys.org has the story.

Time, not space plus time, might be the single fundamental property in which all physical phenomena occur, according to a new theory by a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist.

The theory also argues that time comes in three dimensions rather than just the single one we experience as continual forward progression. Space emerges as a secondary manifestation.

“These three time dimensions are the primary fabric of everything, like the canvas of a painting,” said associate research professor Gunther Kletetschka at the UAF Geophysical Institute. “Space still exists with its three dimensions, but it’s more like the paint on the canvas rather than the canvas itself.”

Those thoughts are a marked difference from generally accepted physics, which holds that a single dimension of time plus the three dimensions of space constitute reality. This is known as spacetime, the concept developed more than a century ago that views time and space as one entity.

Kletetschka’s mathematical formula of six total dimensions—of time and space combined—could bring scientists closer to finding the single unifying explanation of the universe.

(14) GAY ASTRONAUTS STILL STRUGGLE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] There is a new documentary film out, SALLY directed by Cristina Costantini, which is a biography of NASA space shuttle astronaut Sally Ride. She started basic astronaut training in 1978. In 1981, she was the capsule communicator based at Houston Mission Control with second and third space shuttle flights. In 1982, she was selected to fly on the Challenger shuttle the next year.  Reporters then asked Sally questions such as how she would manage to wear a bra in space, or whether she would cry under strain?  Not surprisingly, she kept her sexuaІιty secret, even marrying fellow astronaut Steve Hawley 11 months before her first space flight.

Sally twice flew on Challenger but then in 1986 it exploded shortly after launch without her onboard but killing all seven onboard including four of her 1978 astronaut classmates. Aware that the shuttle programme would not restart, she retired from NASA in 1987 and around then divorced Steve.  She then reconnected with her old friend (fellow teenage tennis compatriot), writer Tam O’Shaughnessy who became her partner for many years.  It was only after Sally died that it was revealed, in an obituary of her, her relationship with O’Shaughnessy.

NASA’s other LGBTQAI+ astronauts have also remained closeted.  One naval pilot, Wendy Lawrence, revealed the existence of her wife only years after she retired from NASA. Test pilot Anne McClain was unintentionally outed in 2019 during a messy divorce from her wife while Anne herself was on the International Space Station.  No astronaut from European, Chinese, Soviet or Russian space programmes is known to be LGBTQAI+

After a 20th January 2025 executive order from US President Trump to purge government programmes from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, NASA began telling employees not to display pride flags at work.  It has also reportedly (I have not checked) its longstanding promise to send the first woman to the Moon.

Given that of the hundred-plus NASA astronauts to venture into space, only three, all women, have acknowledged LGBTQAI+ relationships, and none willingly while employed by the Agency, it would seem that LGBTQAI+ may really be the final frontier!

SALLY can be streamed on Disney+ and Hulu.  This item was based on a review in Nature: Witze, A., (2025) “Sally Ride biopic highlights the struggle of gay astronauts”. Nature, vol. 642, p566-7.

Sally Ride monitors controls on the Challenger in 1983.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Pixels! It had to be pixels! “Atari 2600 Raiders of the Lost Ark 1983 TV Commercial”.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is an action-adventure game created for the Atari 2600 based on the film of the same name. The game was designed by Howard Scott Warshaw. The player controls Indiana Jones as he searches for the lost Ark of the Covenant. The game requires the player to use two different controllers: controller 2 moves Jones and its button uses an item; Controller 1 selects the item to use and its button drops the item.

The video game is set in the city of Cairo in 1936, represented by an entrance room and a marketplace. From the entrance room, the player can blast a hole in the wall with a grenade and enter the Temple of the Ancients. Two paths await inside the Temple, both of which contain various dangers, after which the player will, at last, find the treasure room. Gold and artifacts can be picked up in the treasure room which will help the player later in the game. The player must cross a mesa, on the other side of which lies the Map Room where the location of the Lost Ark is revealed. South of the Map Room is a Thieves’ Den and a Black Market. The Black Market contains various figures, such as two sheikhs, a Tsetse fly and a lunatic, and items needed to win the game (most notably a shovel).

After acquiring all the needed items from the various rooms, the player returns to the mesa and jumps off using a parachute. The player goes inside the mesa, via a small hole at the end of a branch, and digs up the Ark, after dodging more thieves.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/16/25 Scroll Titles Considered As A Matrix Of Silly Fannish Puns

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(1) ELGIN AWARDS NEWS. Members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) have until May 31 to nominate books for the 2025 Elgin Awards.

The Elgin Awards, named for SFPA founder Suzette Haden Elgin, are presented annually by SFPA for books published in the preceding two years in two categories, Chapbook and Book. 

2025 Elgin Chair: Juleigh Howard-Hobson

Only books of speculative poetry first published during 2023 and 2024 are eligible. Books containing fiction as well as poetry are not eligible. More than half of the poems in the book must be unequivocally speculative as determined by Chair. Translations into English are eligible.

(2) PETER DAVID FUNDRAISER. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Peter David, in addition to having written many fine issues and runs of comics (Hulk, Young Justice, Spider-Man, Supergirl, etc.), and sff (including Star Trek novels), and TV episodes (including Babylon 5) and games, wrote a wonderful, informed-and-informative opinion column “But I Digress…” for the Comic Buyers Guide (which, I see, there are two book collections of).

Now he (and his family) need our help! I see that the GoFundMe has already done remarkably…but it hasn’t yet reached its goal. As of 6:30PM ET today (Sunday, March 16), it’s reached around 55% of its goal.

Here’s the link — “Help Peter David” at GoFundMe.

And here’s the CBR.com article where I saw it – “Comics Icon Peter David Needs Our Help” — with (my) caveat that this article’s link to the GoFundMe has got lots of tracking/etc stuff in their link… I’m planning to use the link I provided just above to make my own donation, later tonight.

(3) CLIPPING STILL WORKING IN SFF. From the Guardian: “Daveed Diggs’ sci-fi rap trio Clipping: ‘We are at war all the time. It’s one of the great tricks of capitalism’”.

As a child, Daveed Diggs and his schoolfriend William Hutson drew pictures inspired by the space-age album covers of funk legends Parliament, filled with gleaming UFOs and eccentric interplanetary travellers. Diggs would grow up to become an actor, winning a Tony award as the first person to play the roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton. He’s since voiced Sebastian the crab in The Little Mermaid’s live-action remake and appeared in Nickel Boys, which was nominated twice at this year’s Oscars. But away from Hollywood and Broadway, he’s still dreaming up fantastical sci-fi worlds with Hutson – now through one of the most imaginative, harrowing projects in underground rap.

Along with Hutson’s college roommate Jonathan Snipes – who had a similar childhood experience, inspired by the otherworldly paintings adorning classical albums – the friends formed Clipping in Los Angeles in 2010. Over Hutson and Snipes’s production, Diggs weaves blood-soaked horror stories about racial violence or fables of enslaved people in outer space. On their new album Dead Channel Sky, he raps with mechanical precision over warped rave music, creating a noirish cyberpunk world of hackers, clubgoers, future-soldiers and digital avatars.

Their music has earned them nominations for sci-fi’s highest honour, the Hugo awards, and it’s made all the more distinctive by Diggs’s decision to avoid using the first person in his lyrics. “In an art form that is so self-conscious, is it still rap music if we take that out?” he says on a video call alongside his bandmates. “We discovered pretty quickly that it is, but that it also opened possibilities.” His raps feel like cinema or musical theatre, narrating action and voicing dialogue with characters of – generally – ambiguous gender and race. “What we’ve found from fans is that, because we don’t have much to do with these characters ourselves, it has allowed people to put a lot of themselves into them, to come up with reasons why this stuff is happening, and make links between songs we didn’t think of.”…

(4) GRRM ON FRANK HERBERT. “’I Think He Was a Little Bothered That All They Wanted Was Dune’: George R.R. Martin Discusses ‘Dune’ and Frank Herbert” at Collider.

During the interview, Martin mentioned that he wanted to see his novel Fevre Dream adapted. He also admitted that there were potential issues that might hinder it getting made, especially as it is a historical horror novel about vampires on a steamboat set in the 1850s. However, Martin maintained that, as long as the source exists, the stories can still be told. “But Frank Herbert probably didn’t think Dune would ever be made. Well, they made it, but you know what happened there,” Martin said, implying the 1984 film’s mixed reception. “If Frank had lived long enough and seen what they’re doing now, that would be great, but he’s gone.”…

…Martin recalled his brief interactions with Frank Herbert and the Dune author’s own experience with his wildly popular series, saying:

“Frank made Dune, which was one of the great, great books in the history of science fiction. But I know him a little, not a lot, just over conventions, and I think he was a little bothered that all they wanted was Dune. ‘Give us another Dune. Give us another Dune. Give us another Dune.’ He wrote other good books. He wrote Under Pressure, a deep-sea novel about exploration. He wrote The Santaroga Barrier. That’s all of us writers. We want our other children to get some attention, too.”…

(5) TEXAS GOVERNOR LIES ABOUT FURRIES. “Greg Abbott cites debunked furries claim in latest school voucher push” reports the Houston Chronicle.

Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday resurrected debunked rumors that public schools were putting litter boxes in classrooms for students dressed as cats, amplifying right-wing criticism of some educators as he pushes for a statewide private school voucher program. 

The Texas Republican told a gathering of pastors at a Baptist church in Austin that the so-called furries trend is “alive and well” in communities across the state, and that lawmakers needed to ban it. 

He endorsed newly filed legislation by state Rep. Stan Gerdes called the “Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education (F.U.R.R.I.E.S) Act,” which would prohibit any “non-human behavior” by a student, “including presenting himself or herself … as anything other than a human being” by wearing animal ears or barking, meowing or hissing. The bill includes exceptions for sports mascots or kids in school plays.

Gerdes’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The bill didn’t have any immediate cosponsors.

Abbott’s remarks appeared to call back unfounded rumors from 2022 that public schools across the country were catering to students who identified as animals. In one instance, the GOP chair in Williamson County falsely claimed Round Rock schools were lowering cafeteria tables for furries…. 

(6) KEN LIU Q&A. “Pantheon: Sci-Fi Author Ken Liu Discusses TV Series Adaptation & More” at Bleeding Cool.

Pantheon, the animated TV series that adapts stories by Hugo award-winning Science Fiction author Ken Liu, is one of the most ambitious Science Fiction series on television. It depicts the Singularity from the point of view of a grieving young girl and her family as they discover her late father has been illegally uploaded into a digital consciousness as part of a tech corporation’s plans for the next step in human evolution. Pantheon is a complex and ambitious Science Fiction series, covering topics like the uploading of human consciousness, The Singularity, Quantum entanglement, and the moral, ethical, philosophical, and existential questions that come with it, along with a commentary on capitalist exploitation…

Congratulations on the complete story of “Pantheon” finally becoming available. Can you take us back to how you came up with the original stories that ended up in “The Hidden Girl and Other Stories”? Did you just start with one before you felt inspired to explore the ideas further?

[Ken Liu] Thank you! It’s such a pleasure to talk about Pantheon. The show is based on seven stories I wrote: “The Gods Will Not Be Chained,” “The Gods Will Not Be Slain,” “The Gods Have Not Died in Vain,” “Carthaginian Rose,” “Staying Behind,” “Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer,” and “Seven Birthdays.” Collectively, I refer to them as the “Singularity” stories. Six of them can be found in my collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.

The three “Gods …” stories were originally written for the Apocalypse Triptych anthologies edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. From these, you get the basic plot line of Maddie and her dad and the uploaded “gods.” The other stories are set in the same universe and explore the world before, after, and during the apocalypse of UIs taking over the world.

However, I didn’t write the three Apocalypse Triptych stories first. I’ve been exploring the concept of consciousness uploading in fiction for over two decades (the very first story in this universe, “Carthaginian Rose,” was my first published story, all the way back in 2002).

Why have I been writing about this subject so much? The idea of uploading minds is old and quite popular among some groups in Silicon Valley (for whom the success of uploading always seems to be just about a decade or so away). On the one hand, from a materialist perspective, it seems easy to accept the idea that human consciousness can run on different hardware, including upgraded hardware that could unlock our full potential. On the other hand, it also seems that if you “upload” in the manner described in my stories, the uploaded version would not be a “continuation” of you, at least not from the perspective of the you that dies in the process. The premise, uniting boundless hope with existential horror, is irresistible to the imagination. Stories that explore this theme, such as Pantheon and the video game SOMA, tend to generate a lot of debates among fans precisely because of this paradox.

(7) WE HAVE LIFTOFF. “From Start to Finish, Framestore Visualizes ‘Wicked’” at Animation World Network.

Leading VFX and animation studio Framestore had the recent good fortune of working from previs to postvis to final on Jon M. Chu’s award-winning hit musical adventure, Wicked. On the film, Framestore Pre-Production Services devised the camera angles and movements for sequences involving Nessarose Thropp’s levitating wheelchair, Elphaba taking flight, and Doctor Dillamond.

“The chorography is similar, from action scenes through to musical numbers,” notes Christopher McDonald, Visualization Supervisor, Framestore.  “A great starting point is to look at storyboards to get a representation of whether it’s a set or location and then block out the action literally from a top-down perspective. That’s a strong basis because it’s always something you can refer back to once you’ve got that basic blocking in place.  On “Defying Gravity,” in particular, we worked quite closely with the stunt team, which had a bunch of tests that were done with the various rigs.  They had all of these concepts for movements that Elphaba was going to perform at certain points during the song.  Then it was a case of figuring out how do we fit this in? How is it going to look? How are we going to shoot it?  Those are the building blocks for scenes like that.” …

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cora Buhlert.]

March 16, 1961 — Todd McFarlane, 64.

By Cora Buhlert: Todd McFarlane, comic creator, toymaker and noted baseball fan, was born on March 16, 1961, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He fell in love with both comics and baseball at an early age. His attempts to become a professional baseball player never worked out. His attempts to become a professional comic artist did. 

I first became aware of McFarlane’s work – no, not via Spider-Man or Spawn – but via the obscure DC Comics series Infinity Inc. which featured the children of DC‘s golden age superheroes, the Justice Society of America, engaging in some superheroing of their own. The series ran from 1984 to 1988, McFarlane provided the art from 1985 to 1987. 

I was always more of a Marvel fan and bought my first issue Infinity Inc. by accident, because I mistook a green-skinned woman on the cover of an issue for She-Hulk.The green-skinned woman turned out to be Jennie-Lynn Hayden a.k.a. Jade, daughter of the golden age Green Lantern Alan Scott, but this comic I had bought by accident nonetheless intrigued me enough that I started reading the series regularly. I loved the premise of the kids of established superheroes forming their own group as well as the soap operatic antics, particularly the love triangle between Fury, Nuklon and Silver Scarab. The dynamic and engaging art by the then unknown Todd McFarlane certainly didn’t hurt either.

The love triangle I had followed with bated breath eventually concluded with Fury and Silver Scarab marrying, which annoyed me, because I was team Nuklon, and I moved on to other comics. So did Todd McFarlane. First, he worked on Batman: Year Two and then moved over to Marvel to work on The Incredible Hulk. 

In 1988, Todd McFarlane got his big break, when he took over pencilling duties on The Amazing Spider-Man. The friendly neighborhood web slinger was a perfect match for McFarlane’s overly detailed art style. McFarlane depicted Spider-Man swinging in mid-air in dynamic, contorted poses and turned his webbing, usually depicted quite plainly, into an elaborate tangle of individual strands.

 The highly detailed art style of Todd McFarlane and other artists who came up in the late 1980s like Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld or Erik Larsen was much criticized in later years – not without reason, because McFarlane was much better at covers and splash pages than at visual storytelling. But in the late 1980s this style felt like a breath of fresh air, because it was so different from anything that had gone before.

 The career trajectories of the superstar comic artists of the late 1980s and early 1990s – Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld – are remarkably similar. All three took over a mainstream Marvel title – The Amazing Spider-Man, The Uncanny X-Men, The New Mutants – and gained lots of acclaim for their work on these already popular titles. They created characters popular to this day – McFarlane’s most famous Marvel creation is Venom – and achieved superstar status. In response, Marvel relaunched these titles with a flashy number one issue with multiple variant covers that became some of the bestselling American comic books of all time and also launched the comic speculation bubble of the 1990s. 

 But trouble was brewing behind the scenes. The young superstar artists wanted more creative control on the titles they were working on and also clashed with veteran Marvel writers and editors. Marvel made concessions in order to keep their most popular artists happy, gave them co-creator credit on certain characters and also let them take over writing duties, whereby it quickly became apparent that McFarlane, Lee and Liefeld were much better artists (and even that is debatable, given the notable weaknesses particularly of Rob Liefeld) than writers. In McFarlane’s case, Marvel editors were not happy with McFarlane’s increasingly dark and violent art and storylines for Spider-Man, traditionally a more light-hearted character.

 These simmering issues exploded in 1992, when Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Erik Larsen, Whilce Portaccio and Jim Valentino left Marvel to form Image Comics, an umbrella publisher for independent comic creators. McFarlane’s launch title for Image was Spawn, based on a character McFarlane had created as a teenager. Spawn No. 1 was a huge success and sold 1.7 million copies, making it the bestselling independent US comic of all time. McFarlane is still president of Image Comic to this day. 

As a teenage comic reader, I knew nothing about the behind the scenes clashes at Marvel. All I knew was that all my favorite artists all left at the same time and started new titles, while over at Marvel the X-Men and Spider-Man books began their long decline. I did buy several Image titles, but very few of them appealed to me as much as the Marvel work by those same artists did. Spawn I dropped after a few issues, because it didn’t appeal to me at all. Other problems quickly became apparent as well with comics delayed for weeks and months. Spawn was one of the more consistent Image titles and came out with relative regularity. And because McFarlane realised that he was a better artist than writer, he hired various well-regarded writers for Spawn.

Todd McFarlane gradually lost interest in the ongoing Spawn comic and expanded into other fields. He made headlines by spending huge amounts of money on collectible baseballs and tried to enter the film business with led to a Spawn movie in 1997. In 1994 he also founded Todd Toys, renamed McFarlane Toys after Mattel insisted that they owned the rights to the name “Todd”, which was also the name of Barbie’s younger brother (who was ironically discontinued shortly thereafter). McFarlane Toys started off by producing action figures based on the Spawn comic series and branched out into action figures based on videogames, music, sports, horror films, anime and many other franchises. In 2018, McFarlane Toys also took over the DC Comics license from Mattel. 

Once again, Todd McFarlane made a huge splash with his entry into the toy industry. Like his artwork, his action figures were a lot more detailed and realistic than action figures had been up to this point. Ironically enough, they also shared many of the same weakness, because while the figures were beautiful, they were also stiff and hard to pose. The character selection was lacking as well. For example, the DC Multiverse action figure line from McFarlane contains endless variants of Batman and Superman, including offbeat designs such as a Batman figure with an electric guitar, but lesser-known characters, particularly female characters (which McFarlane claims don’t sell and also turn little boys into serial killers – yes, really) were few and far between. Even a classic looking Wonder Woman was nigh impossible to find, let alone characters like Huntress or Jade, to whom I’d been introduced by McFarlane’s artwork almost forty years ago.

 McFarlane’s biggest impact on the toy world, however, was indirect. Because in 1999, Jim Preziosi, Eric Treadway, H. Eric “Cornboy” Mayse and Chris Dahlberg, four sculptors working at McFarlane Toys to bring those beautiful action figures to life, left the company to form Four Horsemen Studios, an independent toy design company which designed the Masters of the Universe 200X and Classics lines as well as the DC Universe Classics line for Mattel, the Marvel Legends line for ToyBiz, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles line for NECA as well as the Mythic and Cosmic Legions lines for their own company. Many of the toys in my collection were designed by them.

Todd McFarlane is the subject of much criticism, a lot of it well deserved. However, he also changed the industries in which he worked – both comics and toys – forever. Image Comics broke through the stranglehold of Marvel and DC on the US comic market and offered a home for creator owned comics, while McFarlane Toys turned action figures from toys for kids into collectibles for adults, a market toy companies had barely explored before.   

Todd McFarlane

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) CREEPERS, FICTIONAL AND REAL. [Item by Steven French.] Interesting interview with Róisin Lanigan who has ‘remade’ the haunted house genre for the rental age in her new novel (and cites The Amityville Horror, of course): “Róisín Lanigan: ‘I moved to London and got bedbugs’” in the Guardian.

Why was horror the right approach?

I’m a big horror fan. I was reading a lot about haunted houses, and thinking about how all haunted house stories are essentially about owning property and the huge burden that places on you psychologically. And then I was thinking, I wonder what the equivalent is for us, as millennials who rent? Alongside that, I was seeing a lot of my friends – and myself – beginning to live with their partners much earlier than we had been conditioned to think you might do so, for financial reasons.

That then brings complications, if you’re not quite ready to make that step. So the book is a ghost story set in the rental crisis, but it’s also about this young woman’s experience of a situation that she finds increasingly intolerable, and how she has no outlet to express that….

(11) BLACK HAIR ANIMATION UPGRADE. “An animation breakthrough makes it possible to more accurately illustrates Black hair” at NPR.

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

Whether it’s video games or animated movies and TV, you may have noticed that Black characters have matching hairstyles time and time again – often flat, two-dimensional and straight up unrealistic hairstyles. And this isn’t a coincidence. While advancements in depicting straight hair have been happening by leaps and bounds, Black hair animation has been stuck, until now.

A.M. Darke, an artist, game maker and professor in UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Performance, Play and Design, co-authored algorithms last month that animate three major characteristics of Black hair. Professor Darke joins us now to talk about her research. Thanks so much for being here.

A M DARKE: Thank you so much for having me.

RASCOE: What are these three attributes that could be illustrated in animation?

DARKE: So I’ll start by saying that whenever you’re tackling a research problem, you get to define, you know, what features matter and are important. So with straight hair, there have been certain features that say, oh, OK, if we hit this look, then we’ve got it, right? We’ve succeeded. For Black hair, that hadn’t happened. My part in this research is defining those targets. So the three targets that I defined to say, OK, these are essential features of Afro-textured hair was phase locking, switchbacks and period skipping. So I want to break that down.

RASCOE: Yeah, let’s start with the first one.

DARKE: So, phase locking is what we’re calling the kind of spongy matrix that happens when you have coilier and kinkier hair textures. So before the hair actually turns into sort of a defined curl, you kind of have this matrix of hair that – I say it’s kind of spongy because it’s sort of like each strand is sort of going in different directions.

RASCOE: Well, that’s my hair under my wrap right now.

DARKE: (Laughter).

RASCOE: That’s what my hair is. It is spongy, and it is not quite curled and then going in all different directions. And then what’s the next thing?

DARKE: Switchbacks – they’re the – sort of a secret sauce for adding a level of realism. For those of you who are old enough, we used to have telephone cords, and they were stretchy, and you might stretch the telephone cord, and it gets a kink in it. And so that is a switchback. It’s just when the curl doubles back on itself before rejoining or going in a different direction.

RASCOE: And then what’s that final third thing that you came up with in the paper?

DARKE: Period skipping – so this was another essential feature. And to simplify it, period skipping is really the frizz factor. So if you think about a coil and each sort of wave, we’ll call those periods. In clumped curls, all of the hairs are spiraling in the same direction, and that’s what we see as a defined curl. But as we know, curly hair very rarely just falls in line, and so you’ll have hairs that break out of the pattern, and so they skip the period. That is what gives the appearance of, like, frizzy or undefined hair….

(12) OLD SPICE SUPERHERO SCENTS. I must have missed these when they came out. The Batman and Superman variants are mainly offered on eBay and through some Amazon vendors. On the other hand, “Krakengard” is currently available as part of the Old Spice Wild Collection..

“Krakengard Wild Collection deodorant”

  • Old Spice Krakengard men’s deodorant overpowers even the burliest stink with good-smellingness for a full 24 hours
  • Krakengard deodorant smells like citrus, fresh herbs, and the unspeakable power of the ancient ocean
  • Emerge from the open ocean smelling like the man-nificent beast you are

(13) THE FIRING NEXT TIME. Late with this too. From Gizmodo in January: “This Atari Asteroids Watch Shoots at Space Rocks to Tell the Time”. The manufacturer’s website — Nubeo Watches – has sold out of most but not all the variations. eBay has some, including “pre-owned”.

Traditional mechanical watches have a timeless quality only matched by the ageless, simple joy of classic arcade titles like Asteroids. To celebrate the 45th anniversary of Asteroids, Atari, and watchmaker, Nubeo released a slate of limited-edition wristwatches with a watch hand in the classic triangular, alien-blasting spaceship.

Atari and Nubeo’s Asteroids collection includes five styles with similarly colored bands. Each watch face features a classic scene from the original 1979 arcade hit, including a field of vector graphics-style asteroids and flying saucers. The spaceship doesn’t move across the screen, but it spins in the center while constantly firing at an incoming alien bogey.

(14) HOMEWARD BOUND. “Crew arrives on ISS to replace astronauts ‘stranded’ in space for nine months” reports NPR.

A four-person crew entered the International Space Station early Sunday morning, part of a mission to relieve two astronauts who will now return to Earth after a protracted stay on the orbital base.

The arrival of the replacement crew means that NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore can now go home after more than 9 months in space. Their trip to the ISS in June was supposed to last just over a week, but it morphed into a much longer expedition when their Boeing Starliner spacecraft ran into technical problems and was sent back to Earth without a crew.

NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers — as well as Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov — floated through the ISS hatch at 1:35 a.m. ET. Sunday morning….

…Williams and Wilmore — along with fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — are set to depart the ISS for Earth no earlier than Wednesday, depending on weather conditions….

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

Pixel Scroll 5/30/23 Wouldn’t You Love To Teach The File To Scroll In Pixel Harmony?

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(1) MEMORIAL DAY CONTINUED. Rob Hansen forwarded the link to a Find-A-Grave page devoted to PFC Alden L Ackerman (1924-1945), Forry’s brother, who died in the Battle of the Bulge.

He also sent this link to the Fancyclopedia page on War, which at the bottom has a list of fans and writers who died in World War II that we know of.

Sam Moskowitz paid tribute to them at Newarkon II (1946) the first post-war con: Fantasy Times 12. Read his speech at the link.

(2) GETTING THERE IS HALF THE FUN. Cora Buhlert is still working on her Metropol Con report. However, she has completed her post about her adventures in Berlin before the con began. Includes a visit to an awesome bookstore: “Cora’s Adventures at Metropol Con in Berlin, Part 1: Pre-Con Wanderings”.

…In many ways I was reminded of one of my first visits to Berlin in the spring of 1990, when the Wall was already open, but East Germany still existed as a state. At the time, we decided to walk from the Victory column in (West) Berlin to the Brandenburg Gate. Because the Wall and the Gate were open, we just walked through and had our passports stamped by the friendliest East German border guard I’ve ever seen and just kept walking into East Berlin, walking along famous streets and buildings we knew existed, but had never actually seen, until we reached Alexanderplatz (BTW, I tried to walk that memorable route again from the other side and gave up halfway through, because it’s a very long walk and I’m no longer 16), got tired and decided to take the train back to West Berlin. So we went to Friedrichstraße station and looked at the network plan on the platform, only to find a huge gray hole where West Berlin should be. So I went to a train attendant and told him, “We need to go back to West Berlin to Uhlandstraße station [at any rate, I think it was Uhlandstraße], but West Berlin doesn’t exist on your map, so which train do I need to take?” The East Berlin train attendant apologised for the maps – they hadn’t gotten around to replacing them yet – and told me which train to take….

(3) THE CWCU. Literary Hub’s Joel Cuthbertson is a fan: “In Praise of Sci-Fi Legend Connie Willis’s Cinematic Universe”.

Whenever a film buff brings up The Philadelphia Story, I like to shock them with blasphemy. A foundational Hollywood picture, the 1940 film stars Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Katherine Hepburn at the height of their powers, a nuclear trio of contrasting charms, the suave versus the folksy versus the imperious. My sin is that I prefer its slick remake. Released in 1956, High Society is not as edgy, complicated, or electric. The star trio—Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Grace Kelly—still radiates, but gently and casually. Aside from adding musical numbers, the film’s main goal is to capture an echo of interwar charm in Technicolor.

If this is an elaborate way to introduce Connie Willis, sci-fi’s queen of time travel fiction, we find ourselves already close to the heart of her work, which thrives on unlikely crossovers. A devotee of Golden Age cinema, Willis has authored at least ten standalone novels and dozens of novellas and short stories. She’s the kind of movie enthusiast guaranteed to have an opinion on Bing versus Cary and Grace versus Katherine, and the kind of novelist to include the debate as a plot point.

Her newest, The Road to Roswell (out June 27th from Del Rey), is an ode to westerns, road trip movies, late-night creature features, and any scene where a guy and a gal share a look and know they’re in love. But it’s only the latest in a long line of film-loving fiction. In 1995, her sci-fi satire Remake took aim not only at Hollywood’s IPO vampirism but its faddish moralism as well. This was before there was a single Star Wars prequel….

(4) NO SEX, PLEASE, WE’RE FANNISH. At Vox.com, Aja Romano talks about the rise of Puritanism in fanfiction and elsewhere on the internet: “Fandom, purity culture, and the rise of the anti-fan”.

How did the internet become so puritanical? On social media, outspoken anti-sex advocates increasingly cry “gross” at everything from R-rated rom-coms to fictional characters and queer people having sex to consenting adults with slight age gaps to dating short people. They see oversexualization in just about everything. They often accuse the things they dislike of being coded fronts for pedophilia, and the people who enjoy those things of being sexual predators. These social media users frequently form enclaves that turn as nightmarish and troubling as the things they’re ostensibly trying to police.

This dovetails with what we’re being told right now about Gen Z and sex: They’re having less casual sex, they hate dating, they’re more reserved about relationships in general. It’s easy to pigeonhole online anti-sex police as being teens and young adults, a.k.a. “puriteens.” Because so much of this comes down to carnal horror, you might assume that everyone who’s horrified is a teen who just hasn’t arrived at a mature view of sex and other adult activity. Such anti-sex zeal increasingly forces sex-positive communities back into the internet’s underground. It also aids and abets the larger cultural shift toward regressive attitudes and censorship of sexual minorities and sex-positive content.

Yet overwhelmingly, the common thread among this new generation of “antis” — a broad label for people who are opposed to sexual content in media — isn’t that they are minors who are scared of sex. It’s that none of them distinguish between fictional harm and real-world harm. That is, regardless of their ages, they believe fiction not only can have a real-world impact, but that it always has a real-world impact.

(5) TURNING THE PAGE ON A NEW SEASON. Amal El-Mohtar picks new sff novels for summer by authors Fonda Lee, Martha Wells, Nick Harkaway, Kelly Link and Emma Törzs: “The Magic (and Malaise) of Families” in the New York Times.

….Emma Törzs’s INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE (William Morrow, 407 pp., $30) is astonishing and pristine, the kind of debut I love to be devastated by, already so assured and sophisticated that it’s difficult to imagine where the author can go from here.

In Törzs’s world, books of magic, all written in human blood, can do incredible things when someone feeds them a drop of blood and reads them aloud. Abe Kalotay collected these books to protect them from falling into the wrong hands, and raised his daughters, Joanna and Esther, as stewards of a beautiful and dangerous library that had to be kept hidden at all costs; in Esther’s infancy, her mother was murdered by powerful people who wanted the books….

(6) SCENE PAST ITS OFF-SALE DATE. “’Monty Python’ Star John Cleese Says ‘Life Of Brian’ Scene Won’t Be Cut Despite Modern Sensitivites” reports Deadline.

The Monty Python crew always looked on the bright side of life when it came to its classic film parody, The Life of Brian.

But Monty Python star John Cleese insists he never said that he would remove a politically incorrect scene from a stage adaptation of Life of Brian, even though the film’s 1979 sensibilities will not draw quite the laughs it once did, owing to the rise of trans issues awareness.

Cleese claims it was “misreported” that he was planning to cut the “Loretta” scene for an upcoming stage adaptation of the religious satire film. Instead, he said he has “no intention” of removing it.

The scene in question features a male character declaring that he wants to be woman named “Loretta,” and wants to have a child. Cleese’s character tells the man that the notion is ridiculous, while another suggests that they all advocate for his right to childbearing.

“I want to be a woman. … It’s my right as a man,” the character claims “I want to have babies… It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.” After Cleese’s protest, the character snaps, “Don’t you oppress me!”

Obviously, times have changed the impact of that humor….

(7) BOOK ‘EM, DANNO. “Wake Up Besties, the Barbie and Ken Mugshot Meme is Everywhere”. People have been running with it, creating their own version using other characters.There’s a roundup of several dozen of these tweets at Gizmodo.

After an eagle-eyed Twitter user (@kojironanjo) realized that the Barbie trailer was ripe for meme-ification, Twitter fandom did what fandom does best, and immediately took the joke to the extreme. Reaching all corners of the world, fandoms immediately drew their favorite pairings using the Barbie mugshot screenshots as inspiration. With Margot Robbie’s concerned Barbie and Ryan Gosling’s cheesing Ken, the absurdity was truly just too good.

The key is having one character look slightly terrified and utterly baffled and possibly regretting every choice that has ever led to them getting their mugshot taken and the second character has to be a complete and total himbo, just an absolute dummy, no thoughts, just vibes….

Here’s an example:

(8) MEMORY LANE.

2013 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria is the source of our Beginning this time.

It was published by Small Beer Press, the source of oh so many wonderful publications, a decade ago. It’s now available from the usual suspects. Josh Hurley’s the narrator of the outstanding audio version. 

It was her first novel and it won the William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, the BFA Robert Holdstock Award and the World Fantasy Award. She won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer the same year.

She has now published two genre novels. Oh, and The White Mosque A Memoir by her is outstanding. It’s about a trip to Uzbekistan in search of the followers of a century-gone Russian Mennonite religious leader. (Her bio says she’s Somali and Mennonite.) 

And now for the Beginning…

Childhood in Tyron

As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call “the breath of angels” and is said to cure heartsickness and bad lungs. Beyond this is the Balinfeil, where, in the winter months, the people wear caps of white squirrel fur, and in the summer months the goddess Love is said to walk and the earth is carpeted with almond blossom. But of all this I knew nothing. I knew only of the island where my mother oiled her hair in the glow of a rush candle, and terrified me with stories of the Ghost with No Liver, whose sandals slap when he walks because he has his feet on backwards.

My name is Jevick. I come from the blue and hazy village of Tyom, on the western side of Tinimavet in the Tea Islands. From Tyom, high on the cliffs, one can sometimes see the green coast of Jiev, if the sky is very clear; but when it rains, and all the light is drowned in heavy clouds, it is the loneliest village in the world. It is a three-day journey to Pitot, the nearest village, riding on one of the donkeys of the islands, and to travel to the port of Dinivolim in the north requires at least a fortnight in the draining heat. In Tyom, in an open court, stands my father’s house, a lofty building made of yellow stone, with a great arched entryway adorned with hanging plants, a flat roof, and nine shuttered rooms. And nearby, outside the village, in a valley drenched with rain, where the brown donkeys weep with exhaustion, where the flowers melt away and are lost in the heat, my father had his spacious pepper farm.

This farm was the source of my father’s wealth and enabled him to keep the stately house, to maintain his position on the village council, and carry a staff decorated with red dye. The pepper bushes, voluptuous and green under the haze, spoke of riches with their moist and pungent breath; my father used to rub the dried corns between his fingers to give his fingertips the smell of gold. But if he was wealthy in some respects, he was poor in others: there were only two children in our house, and the years after my birth passed without hope of another, a misfortune generally blamed on the god of elephants. My mother said the elephant god was jealous and resented our father’s splendid house and fertile lands; but I knew that it was whispered in the village that my father had sold his unborn children to the god. I had seen people passing the house nudge one another and say, “He paid seven babies for that palace”; and sometimes our laborers sang a vicious work song: “Here the earth is full of little bones.” Whatever the reason, my father’s first wife had never conceived at all, while the second wife, my mother, bore only two children: my elder brother Jom, and myself. Because the first wife had no child, it was she whom we always addressed as Mother, or else with the term of respect, eti-donvati, “My Father’s Wife”; it was she who accompanied us to festivals, prim and disdainful, her hair in two black coils above her ears. Our real mother lived in our room with us, and my father and his wife called her “Nursemaid,” and we children called her simply by the name she had borne from girlhood: Kiavet, which means Needle. She was round-faced and lovely, and wore no shoes. Her hair hung loose down her back. At night she told us stories while she oiled her hair and tickled us with a gull’s feather.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born May 30, 1908 — Mel Blanc. Where to begin? Yes, he delightfully voiced Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and a multitude of other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. Blanc made his debut in 1940 “A Wild Hare”. Did you know that he created the voice and laugh of Woody Woodpecker but stopped doing it after the first three shorts as he was signed then to an exclusive Warner contract? His laughs did continue to get used however. Blanc, aware of his talents, fiercely protected the rights to his voice characterizations contractually and legally. (Died 1989.)
  • Born May 30, 1914 — Bruce Elliott. His fifteen stories in The Shadow magazine in the late Forties are generally held in low esteem by Shadow fans because of his handling of the character, best noted by the three stories in which the Shadow does not appear at all in his costumed identity. Oh, the horror! He also wrote three genre novels — The Planet of Shame, Asylum Earth and, errr, The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck. And he had stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction including “Wolves Don’t Cry” and “The Last Magician”. (Died 1973.)
  • Born May 30, 1919 — Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes. British author best known for his ghost and horror stories though his first published work was the SF novel The Man from the Bomb in the late Fifties. The Monster Club, a series of linked tales, is a good place to start with him if you’ve not read him and it became a film with Vincent Price co-starring John Carradine. He won the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement, and also a British Fantasy Society Special Award. (Died 2001.)
  • Born May 30, 1922 — Hal Clement. I’m reasonably sure Mission of Gravity was the first novel I read by him though I’ve not re-read it so the Suck Fairy not been tested. Much to my surprise, his only Hugo was a Retro Hugo for a short story, “Uncommon Sense” which he got at L.A. Con III. He did get the First Fandom Award. My favorite novel by him is Mission of Gravity, and I’m also fond of The Best of Hal Clement which collects much of his wonderful short work. He’s reasonably well stocked at the usual suspects. (Died 2003.)
  • Born May 30, 1936 — Keir Dullea, 87. David Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact. I know I saw 2001 several times and loved it but I’ll be damned if I can remember seeing 2010. He’s done a number of other genre films, Brave New World, Space Station 76, Valley of the Gods and Fahrenheit 451. And lest we forget he was Devon in Starlost. 
  • Born May 30, 1952 — Mike W. Barr, 71. Writer of comics and sf novels. Created along with Jim Aparo Looker (Emily “Lia” Briggs), a hero in the DC Universe. She first appeared first appeared in Batman & the Outsiders #25. He worked for both major houses though I’d say most of his work was at DC. He wrote the “Paging the Crime Doctor” episode of Batman: The Animated Series. 
  • Born May 30, 1971 — Duncan Jones, 52. Director whose films include Moon (2009) which won a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation-Long Form and a BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer, and Source Code (2011) which was nominated for both a Hugo and a Ray Bradbury Award. He also directed Warcraft (2016), which up to that year was the highest grossing video game adaptation of all time. He is totally not best known for being David Bowie’s son. (Alan Baumler)

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) JOCULARITY. In the New York Times, Paul Rudnick reveals “What Would Happen if a Robot Tried to Write ‘Law & Order’?” – and a number of other shows.

As the strike by unions representing thousands of film and TV writers approaches its second month, the role that A.I. might play in writing scripts remains one of the biggest issues. While the Writers Guild of America has expressed a willingness to work with A.I. as a tool, some producers are dreaming bigger: They want to replace humans with chatbots. What might A.I.-written scripts look like? Here’s a guess:

Prompt: An episode of any “Law & Order” series.

Scene 1

DETECTIVE: Someone has killed this dead body.

Scene 2

DETECTIVE: Did you kill that dead body?

CRIMINAL: No! I’m not a criminal!

Scene 3

DISTRICT ATTORNEY: Did you kill that dead body? And remember, you’re under oath.

CRIMINAL: No! Yes! But it was during a double-cross over a deal for buttcoin.

JUDGE: Spell check!

(12) COSPLAY, BOOKS, AND SCIENCE ALL IN ONE PLACE. The Baltimore Banner has a gallery of photos from last weekend’s convention: “Welcome all aliens to Balticon”. Includes a photo at the autograph table with a kind of what-was-strange-about-the-dog-in-the-night caption that tells about Adam Stemple (often mentioned here on File 770) but doesn’t name the other person in the picture – who happens to be John Scalzi.

Welcome, aliens! Balticon 57 is the area’s oldest science-fiction convention and by far the largest. It’s also the first of such conventions each year.

Balticon can be described as a “Big Tent” four-day celebration of science fiction and fantasy hosted by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society at the at Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel….

(13) TINY TYRANOSAURS. At Vanity Fair, Anthony Breznican has a great article about the making of the alien invasion TV show V: “The ‘V’ Files: The Shocking Legacy of an ’80s Sci-Fi Cult Classic”.

Even 40 years later, V is still getting under people’s skin. The writer, producer, and director Kenneth Johnson has never stopped getting fan mail about the miniseries he created back in 1983, which rattled America with its depiction of cold-blooded authoritarians conquering the world. The invaders in red jumpsuits, dark glasses, and ball caps were actually beings from another planet, but Johnson intended the sci-fi drama to be more than mere escapism. To him, it was a warning.

When he gets new letters from viewers, Johnson opens them hoping they got the message, which seems as obvious to him now as it did back then. “I got to thinking, God, how would everyday people feel if suddenly there was a sea change in our life that turned it all around, if suddenly some hyper power rolled over us, just like the Nazis rolled into Europe?” he says. But in recent years, far-right conspiracy theorists, QAnon followers, and garden-variety lunatics have instead homed in on the fact that V’s extraterrestrials were secretly reptilians disguised as humans to mislead us. Many harbor a sincere belief that a reptoid cabal really does control the world. “I’ve gotten emails over the years and letters from people on the fringes who say, ‘Oh, you get it!’” Johnson says. “‘You know that there are lizards among us!’”…

(14) CAN YOU IMAGINE? Collections Etc. brings you a Fully-Functioning Tiny Arcade Atari 2600 Console – how bizarre!

Fully functional, detailed mini replica of the Atari 2600 game has all the classic features of the system you loved in the 80s! 10 games include Combat, Warlords, Millipede, Tempest, Centipede, Pong, Missile Command, Asteroids, Breakout, and Pac-Man! Includes hi-res TV with adjustable screen, iconic 2600 joystick and classic game console. Req. 3 “AAA” batteries (sold separately). Plastic. Ages 8 years & up. TV is 6″L x 5″W x 4″H.

(15) UNSEEN MENACE. Fear The Invisible Man will be released in the UK on June 13.

Outline: In an intriguing narrative, a youthful widow from Britain offers sanctuary to a former medical school comrade who has mysteriously acquired the ability to render himself unseen. As his seclusion intensifies and his mental stability unravels, he plots to unleash a merciless wave of slaughter and dread throughout the city, with the widow serving as the sole harbinger of his existence.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Rob Hansen, Cora Buhlert, Michael J. Walsh, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Dan’l Danehy-Oakes.]

Pixel Scroll 6/25/21 Pixelin’ Files And Feelin’ Scrolly

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(1) MORE CONTEXT FOR SFF HISTORY. Niall Harrison’s “Accelerated History: Chinese Short Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century” at Vector notes that 2021 is the tenth anniversary of the publication of the translated Chinese short story that became the foundation for Clarkesworld’s ongoing collaboration with Storycom. And he has been inspired to work up a chronology of Chinese short sf in English, including a nifty diagram.

…What I hope that looking at the original chronology of stories does do, however, is provide another angle on the portrait of Chinese SF that has been presented to readers in English. To a limited extent it also makes it possible to contrast what was happening in English-language and Chinese-language SF at the same time; to think about the conscious and perhaps less-conscious choices made in the filtering process; and, most optimistically, to notice gaps, and provide a tentative framework within which future translations can be understood. In that spirit, in place of the original collections, I’ve organised my discussion into some rough periods, but I will revisit the books themselves at the end.

2. Liu Cixin Era

There’s nothing Liu Cixin likes more than a big picture, so let’s start there. With two single-author collections in the pile — The Wandering Earth (2013 / 2017 retranslations) and Hold Up The Sky (2020) — it’s not a surprise that he is the most-represented author, accounting for one-third of collected stories. In fact the skew is greater the earlier the period you look at. He accounts for over half of the 49 stories that first appeared before August 2011, and nearly three-quarters of the 28 stories that were first published in 2005 or earlier. In English, the story of Chinese SF in the early twenty-first century is overwhelmingly the story of Liu Cixin….

(2) BACK SPACE. James Davis Nicoll introduces Tor.com readers to “Five SF Travel Methods That Offer an Alternative to Starships”. (Holy cow, there’s a Langford novel on this list!)

Starships are all very nice—who among us has not wanted to own a Type-S Scout with the upgraded life support system?—but not all authors stick with that well-tested method of getting their characters from A to distant B. Ponder these five novels, each of which posits a new way of traversing the gulfs of space.

The Space Eater by David Langford (1982)

Project Hideyhole’s geniuses gave America Anomalous Physics. Anomalous Physics let Americans tweak the laws of physics to their taste. Thus, dimensional gates that facilitated an American colony on Pallas, a world that is many light-years from Earth. Thus, the inadvertent destabilization of six percent of the stars across the Milky Way and beyond. Thus, the inadvertent megamegaton explosion as Hideyhole stumbled across total conversion of matter to energy. Thus, the global thermonuclear exchange that followed thanks to the US assumption the explosion was a Soviet attack.

Having sat out WWIII, the EEC places very sensibly limits the use of AP. The problem is the American colony on Pallas, which has been isolated since WWIII. The Europeans detect that the Pallasians are dabbling in Anomalous Physics. Someone must be dispatched to convince Pallas to drop this research before more stars—stars like the Sun—are destabilized. The problem: a full-scale gate of the width needed for an adult male like unfortunate voluntold Forceman Ken Jacklin could well set off more novas. A smaller gate—1.9 cm, say—may be safe. The first step towards Pallas is going to be very, very hard on poor Forceman Jacklin, but this is a sacrifice his superiors are willing to make.

(3) YOUR TURN. Martin Morse Wooster got a kick out of a flash fiction story “Mozart Made A Tsunami, Most Likely By Accident” by Jeff Ronan at Sci Phi Journal. (Which really is too short to excerpt.)

(4) CUE THE SAND. From Yahoo! we learn that “DUNE Has a New Release Date!” But before that, Eric Diaz recaps the entire history of “cursed” efforts to bring this book to the screen.

When Does Dune Arrive In Theaters?

Dune was scheduled for release on December 18, 2020. And though the film will debut at the Venice Film Festival in September (via Variety), it won’t arrive in theaters until October 22, 2021 (this is delayed from October 1).

(5) UNDERGROUND ART. Two resources with images and histories about the artwork in Lewis Carroll’s books.

The Public Domain Review presents “Lewis Carroll’s Illustrations for ‘Alice’s Adventures Under Ground’ (1864)”.

“[W]hat is the use of a book”, asks Alice in the opening scene to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “without pictures or conversations?” This question from Alice is at once a critique of her sister’s pictureless tome, and a paving the way for the delight of words and images to follow. Indeed, John Tenniel’s famous illustrations — for both the first edition of Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass — have become integral to how we experience the story, in both books and film. Tenniel, however, was not the first to illustrate the tale. That honor belongs to Carroll himself, whose original manuscript of the story (then titled “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground”) is littered with thirty-seven of his own sepia-ink drawings. It seems this entwining of word and image — so important to the published version — was there from the beginning….

“John Tenniel and his illustrations” at Alice-in-Wonderland.net.

…Carroll had Tenniel alter his illustrations several times, for example when he was not happy with Alice’s face – even when the woodblocks were already engraved, which meant also the woodblock had to be (partly) re-done.

That doesn’t mean Tenniel’s illustrations were exactly what Carroll described they should be. Tenniel had quite a lot of freedom to give his own interpretation to the illustrations. On several occasions, Carroll was very much willing to accept the artist’s ideas, and in the illustrations the typical style of Tenniel is recognizable. Tenniel had some freedom in selecting the scenes to be illustrated (Hancher), and when Tenniel complained about having to draw a Walrus and a Carpenter, Carroll was willing to change the characters of his poem for him….

(6) WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE EDITOR. E. Catherine Tobler, editor of The Deadlands, found she actually had to spell it out:

https://twitter.com/ECthetwit/status/1394739548861698054

(7) JACKIE LANE (1941-2021). Actress Jackie Lane, who played the companion of the First Doctor Who, has died at the age of 79 reports Radio Times.

…The sad news was confirmed by Fantom Films on Twitter last night, with a post reading “It is with deep regret that we announce that actress and friend Jackie Lane has sadly passed away. We pass on our sympathies to her family and friends. Jackie was best known to Doctor Who fans as companion Dodo Chaplet. RIP 1941 – 2021″

… Another fan wrote, “Despite appearing on-screen for just 19 weeks in 1966 as a hastily developed & consistently underserved character who exited the series as strangely & suddenly as she arrived, it’s really heartwarming to see all the love for dear Jackie Lane on #DoctorWho Twitter tonight. RIP.”…

(8) MEMORY LANE.

  • 2019 — In Dublin 2019, fifty-one years after she got her first Hugo at Heicon ‘70 for The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin (who died in 2018) won her final Hugo for The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition. It was not awarded a Best Novel Hugo but instead was awarded Best Art Book with its illustrations being by Charles Vess who won Best Professional Artist that same year. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born June 25, 1903 — George Orwell. George Orwell, born Eric Blair in 1903. I’m not sure if Animal Farm counts as fantasy, but 1984 is clearly Science Fiction, and it may hold the record for the most neologisms added to English by a single SF book. Orwell was mostly known as a journalist and essayist, including his spats with H.G. Wells, most notably in “Wells, Hitler and the World State”. (Died 1950.) (Alan Baumler)
  • Born June 25, 1925 — June Lockhart, 96. Maureen Robinson on Lost in Space which amazingly only ran for three seasons. She has a number of genre one-offs including Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Greatest American Hero and Babylon 5. She appeared in the Lost in Space film as Principal Cartwright. 
  • Born June 25, 1935 — Charles Sheffield. He was the President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and of the American Astronautical Society. He won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards for his novelette “Georgia on My Mind” and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel for Brother to Dragons which is an amazing read. Much of his fiction is in his Heritage Universe series; the linked short stories of space traveller Arthur Morton McAndrew are a sheer comic delight. (Died 2002.)
  • Born June 25, 1956 — Anthony Bourdain. That’s a death that hit me hard. Partly because he’s round my age, partly because, damn, he seemed so interested in everything that I couldn’t conceive him committing suicide. And yes, he was one of us with three works to his credit: Get Jiro! (with Joe Rose and Langdon Foss), Get Jiro: Blood and Sushi (with Joe Rose and Ale Garza) and Hungry Ghosts (with Joel Rose, Alberto Ponticelli, Irene Koh, Paul Pope). The first two are on DC, the latter‘s on Berger Books. I’m also going to strongly recommend, and it’s not remotely genre, note his Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations: Iceland Special Edition just because it’s so damn fun to watch complete with fermented shark. (Died 2018.)
  • Born June 25, 1960 — Ian McDonald, 61. Now here’s an author that I’ve read a lot of starting with his first novel, Desolation Road, and following through to his most recent, The Luna series. I do have favorites — the aforementioned Desolation Road and the other Mars novel, Ares Express, plus the India in 2047 series and The Dervish House are the ones I like the best. Chaga I think is the one I need to read again as I was annoyed by it the first time. 
  • Born June 25, 1981 — Sheridan Smith, 40. She makes the Birthday list for being Lucie Miller, a companion to the Eight Doctor in his Big Finish audio adventures starting in 2006 and running through at least this year. Her only video genre work was being in The Huntsman: Winter’s War as Mrs Bromwyn.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Farcus makes clear why a student is anxious about a visit to the principal.

(11) HELP WANTED. Looking for work in England?“Cambridge to Hire Archivist to Catalog Stephen Hawking Collection” says Mental Floss.

… Last month, it was announced that the University of Cambridge—where Hawking got his Ph.D. and worked for decades—would house the archive in its library. Now, as BBC News reports, Cambridge is looking for an archivist to “arrange, describe, audit the physical condition, rehouse, and review” all 10,000 or so pages. Their main task is to digitize every document so researchers around the world can access them online.

Applicants should have archiving experience; and since they’ll be operating out of Cambridge University’s library, they also need to be allowed to live and work in the UK. The gig is set to last two years, and it’ll pay somewhere between £30,942 and £40,322 (about $43,000 to $56,000). If you’re an avid archivist who’d like to have a hand in preserving Hawking’s legacy, you can apply online here.

(12) HEAD’S UP. The New York Times reports “Discovery of ‘Dragon Man’ Skull in China May Add Species to Human Family Tree” (registration required.) And there’s “A Virtual Reconstruction of a New Homo species, H. longi” at YouTube.

(13) DRUMROLL, PLEASE. “UFO report: US intelligence community releases long-awaited report” at CNN. (And CNN has the full text here.) Don’t they release these things on Friday so nobody will be in the office the next day and have to take questions?

The US intelligence community on Friday released its long-awaited report on what it knows about a series of mysterious flying objects that have been seen moving through restricted military airspace over the last several decades.

In short, the answer, according to Friday’s report, is very little, but the intelligence community’s release of the unclassified document marks one of the first times the US government has publicly acknowledged that these strange aerial sightings by Navy pilots and others are worthy of legitimate scrutiny.

The report examined 144 reports of what the government terms “unidentified aerial phenomenon” — only one of which investigators were able to explain by the end of the study. Investigators found no evidence that the sightings represented either extraterrestrial life or a major technological advancement by a foreign adversary like Russia or China, but acknowledge that is a possible explanation….

(14) HARD TO BELIEVE? Chris Carter tells the New York Times: “I Created ‘The X-Files.’ Here’s Why I’m Skeptical of the New U.F.O. Report.” (Registration probably required.)

…The plot of “The X-Files” was built on a conspiracy theory: The government is lying to you about the existence of U.F.O.s and extraterrestrials. Do I believe the government lies to us? Absolutely. I’m a child of Watergate. Do I believe in conspiracies? Certainly. I believe, for example, that someone is targeting C.I.A. agents and White House officials with microwave radiation, the so-called Havana syndrome, and your government denied it.

Will the new report, or any government report, give us clear answers? I’m as skeptical now as I’ve ever been.

In 1996 I was invited to the clinic of the Harvard psychiatrist John Mack to witness the regression hypnosis of a self-professed alien abductee. I first met Dr. Mack, who studied and ultimately believed in alien abduction, when he came to Fox Studios to discuss his work. I had used a Roper survey he was involved in (a poll of 6000 Americans on their belief in the existence of extraterrestrials) to sell “The X-Files” as a TV show in 1992, and later read his book, “Abduction.” So I knew something about what I was going to see. I went in doubtful, unprepared for the drama of a woman sitting next to me in tears and in terror over the encounter with aliens that she described, on a beach in Mexico. The experience turned out to be powerful and not a little unsettling….

… But the prosecution raises a good question: Where is the Deep Throat of the U.F.O. world? Why no credible deathbed confessions? As Nobelist Enrico Fermi’s famous paradox asked, if aliens are out there, why haven’t we seen them? Could the government actually be telling the truth? That it really doesn’t know what to make of the phenomena? Or is the truth above top secret?…

(15) YOU’D BE INCONSOLABLE. Vice recommends to players of vintage games: “Don’t Piss Off Bradley, the Parts Seller Keeping Atari Machines Alive”.

Every old video game console dies eventually. Moving parts seize-up, circuit boards fail, cables wear out. If a user needs a replacement connector, chip, ribbon, gear, shell—or any of the thousands of other parts that, in time, can break, melt, discolor, delaminate, or explode—they’re usually out of luck, unless they have a spare system to scavenge.

But there is an exception to this depressing law of nature. In San Jose, on a side street next to a highway off-ramp, inside an unmarked warehouse building, is part of the world’s largest remaining collection of factory-original replacement Atari parts — a veritable fountain of youth for aging equipment from the dawn of the home computing and video gaming era. This is the home of Best Electronics, a mail-order business that has been selling Atari goods continuously for almost four decades.

But if you’d like to share in Best’s bounty, as many die-hard Atari fans desperately do, there’s a very important piece of advice you need to keep in mind: whatever you do, don’t piss off Bradley.

Almost everyone who spends enough time loving, collecting, and using Atari products eventually finds their way to the Best Electronics website. And many of them quickly develop strong feelings about Bradley Koda, Best’s proprietor, who, by outlasting most of his competition, has become a sort of one-man Atari-parts powerhouse….

(16) RUH ROH! Straight Outta Nowhere: Scooby Doo Meets Courage the Cowardly Dog is a straight-to-video feature.

An original animated feature so exciting it’s scratching at the door! Comedy is unleashed when Scooby-Doo, your favorite mystery-solving mutt, teams up for the first time with Courage the Cowardly Dog. The canine colleagues sniff out a strange object in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas, the backwoods hometown of Courage and his owners, Eustace and Muriel Bagge. Soon, the mysterious discovery puts them on the trail of a giant cicada monster and her wacky winged warriors. Fred, Velma, Daphne and Shaggy know that this job is too big for a flyswatter. They’ll need the help of the doggy duo to piece together the puzzle. Can Scooby and Courage overcome their jitters and defeat the insect army before the whole world bugs out? Try not to get scared. We double-dog dare you!

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, James Davis Nicoll, Daniel Dern, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little.]

Pixel Scroll 5/3/21 The 770 File Cabinets Of Dr. Credential

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(1) LEARNING ABOUT RUSSIAN SFF. Clarkesworld presents “A Brief History of Russian Science Fiction” by Alex Shvartsman.

It’s telling that the Russian term used to describe speculative fiction doesn’t distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. The word is fantastika —the literature of the fantastic. It is used equally to reference the Three Laws stories of Asimov and the Middle Earth tales of Tolkien. It is this lack of distinction—combined with Russia’s rich heritage of fairy tales and its rigorous education in mathematics and the sciences—that may be responsible for so many genre-bending tales penned by Russian-speaking authors, which have become classics of world literature. The history of Russian fantastika is inseparable from the history of Russia itself, and the political, economic, and social forces that have shaped it over the course of the twentieth century….

(2) WORLDCON FUNDAMENTALS. The World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) – unincorporated – is the umbrella organization that awards the right to host Worldcons and sets the Hugo rules. Cheryl Morgan asks “Is WSFS Fit for Purpose?” at Salon Futura.

…The problem is that WSFS suffers from what we in the Diversity & Inclusion business called “Status Quo Bias”. When the existing system happens to favour one particular segment of a population over others, that system will be seen as grossly unfair. There will be pressure for change. And if change is impossible within the system, the aggrieved parties will look to leave that system for an alternative, or to destroy it.

The accepted wisdom is that if you want to change WSFS then you have to do so through the Business Meeting. But the way that works, with the time commitment and necessity of understanding Parliamentary Procedure, is itself a form of Status Quo Bias. Kevin [Standlee] can help people who want to create a new Hugo Award category, but I suspect that no amount of help will be enough for people who want to recraft the entire governance process of the Society.

Furthermore, mollifying upset fans is not the only reason why this should be done. We live in an increasingly corporate world. WSFS is not a corporate animal, and other corporations simply don’t know how to deal with it. Relatively simple things such as selling advertising in the souvenir book, or soliciting sponsorship, become much more complicated than they need to be because WSFS itself has no corporate existence, and external organisations have to deal with a different company each year. Being proudly unincorporated is all very well, but it makes it hard to do business….

Just one note before leaving this open to discussion – when the Worldcon is held in the U.S. the “different company each year” has for many years been a nonprofit corporation organized by the bidders under state corporation and federal tax laws.

(3) ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST. James Davis Nicoll’s Young People Read Old SFF panel take on Robert Bloch’s “That Hell-Bound Train.” And are young people impressed by this 1958 Hugo-winning short story? You’re kidding, aren’t you?

(4) STORY OF A LATE ADOPTER. Debarkle is Camestros Felapton’s work-in-progress chronicle of the history and consequences of the Sad Puppy/Rabid Puppy Kerfuffle. He’s added a chapter that does a good job of capturing what I’ve tried to do with File 770 since issue #1: “Debarkle Chapter 29: Dramatis Personae — Mike Glyer & File 770”. For instance:

…The point is not that the fanzine was a paragon of feminism or even progressive politics but rather that a newszine had a responsibility to engage with issues of the day and in the process, the editor had to get to grips with those issues also….

(5) D & DEITY. James Davis Nicoll’s busy day continues with “Five Fantasy Novels Featuring Gods and Religious Sects” for Tor.com.

In the days of yore, if I wanted to buy a table-top roleplaying game, I had to travel to Toronto, the nearest major city. If I wanted inked dice, I had to hand-ink them myself. If I wanted fellow gamers, I had to shape mud into human form and breathe life into my golems (oops, no, I couldn’t do that, sometimes I just wished I could).

In those days, most TTRPGs treated gods as a sort of theological ConEd for wandering clerics. Gods had different names and superficial attributes, but otherwise their cults were much of a muchness, with no actual doctrinal differences.

One notable exception was Chaosium’s RuneQuest, particularly those supplements set in Greg Stafford’s gaming world of Glorantha….

(6) ABOUT THOSE FREE FANZINES. When David Langford learned that the N3F had started including copies of Ansible among the fanzines they were emailing to their distribution list it was news to him. And not welcome news, as Langford made clear:

Dear N3F President,

I’m told that the N3F is distributing PDF copies of Ansible in a bundle of “Free Fanzines from the N3F” without having asked my permission. Permission is not granted. You are welcome to circulate links to individual issues on the Ansible site at news.ansible.uk, but not to copy the issues themselves to others.

N3F President George Phillies wrote back an apology. That probably puts the matter to rest.

(7) JUNG OBIT. Actor Nathan Jung died April 24 at the age of 74. Deadline has the story —  

Jung began his acting career in 1969 with a role as Genghis Khan in “The Savage Curtain” episode of the original Star Trek.

In the 1990s, he had stints on Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman…His other [genre] film credits include Big Trouble in Little China, Darkman, The Shadow….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born May 3, 1896 — Dodie Smith. English children’s novelist and playwright, best remembered for The Hundred and One Dalmatians which of course became the animated film of the same name and thirty years later was remade by Disney as a live action film. (Saw the first a long time ago, never saw the latter.) Though The Starlight Barking, the sequel, was optioned, by Disney, neither sequel film (101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure and 102 Dalmatians) is based on it. Elizabeth Hand in her review column in F&SF praised it as one of the very best fantasies (“… Dodie Smith’s sophisticated canine society in The Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Starlight Barking…”) she had read. (Died 1990.) (CE) 
  • Born May 3, 1901 – John Collier.  Three novels, twoscore shorter stories for us; poetry; screenplays, teleplays; two dozen short stories adapted for television by others.  Collection Fancies and Goodnights won an Edgar and an Int’l Fantasy Award.  (Died 1980) [JH]
  • Born May 3, 1928 — Jeanne Bal. In Trek’s “The Man Trap” episode, she played Nancy Crate, a former lover of Leonard McCoy,  who would be a victim of the lethal shape-shifting alien which craves salt. This was the episode that replaced “The Cage” episode which the Network really didn’t like. She also had one-offs in Thriller and I-Spy. (Died 1996.) (CE) 
  • Born May 3, 1939 — Dennis O’Neil. Writer and editor, mostly for Marvel Comics and DC Comics from the Sixties through the Nineties, and was the Group Editor for the Batman family of titles until his retirement which makes him there when Ed Brubaker’s amazing Gotham Central came out. He himself has written Wonder Woman and Green Arrow in both cases introducing some rather controversial storytelling ideas. He also did a rather brilliant DC Comics Shadow series with Michael Kaluta as the artist. (Died 2020.) (CE) 
  • Born May 3, 1946 – Elizabeth Horrocks, age 75.  Three novels for us.  Won at the British television programme Mastermind, her subjects Shakespeare’s plays, works of Tolkien, works of Dorothy L. Sayers.  [JH]
  • Born May 3, 1951 – Tatyana Tolstaya, age 70.  One novel, three shorter stories for us available in English; for others outside our field, see here; hosted a Russian television-interview show a dozen years.  Great-grandniece of literary giant Leo Tolstoy.  [JH]
  • Born May 3, 1962 – Stephan Martiniere, age 59.  Two hundred seventy-five covers, fifty interiors.  Artbooks Quantum Dreams, Quantumscapes, Velocity, Trajectory.  One Hugo, two Chesleys; two BSFA (British SF Ass’n) Awards.  Here is Heavy Planet.  Here is Dozois’ 22nd Year’s Best SF.  Here is Betrayer of Worlds.  Here is The Three-Body Problem.  Here is The Poet King.  [JH]
  • Born May 3, 1969 — Daryl Mallett, 52. By now you know that I’ve a deep fascination with the nonfiction documentation of our community. This author has done a number of works doing just that including several I’d love to see including Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to the Awards and Their Winners written with Robert Reginald. He’s also written some short fiction including one story with Forrest J Ackerman that bears the charming title of “A Typical Terran’s Thought When Spoken to by an Alien from the Planet Quarn in Its Native Language“.  He’s even been an actor as well appearing in several Next Gen episodes (“Encounter at Farpoint” and “Hide and Q”) and The Undiscovered Country as well, all uncredited. He also appeared in Doctor Who and The Legends Of Time, a fan film which you can see here if you wish to. (CE) 
  • Born May 3, 1980 – Jessica Spotswood, age 41.  Three novels, one shorter story, one anthology (with Tess Sharpe) for us.  Works for Washington, D.C., Public Library.  Has read five Anne of Green Gables books, three by Jane Austen, The Strange History of the American Quadroon, The Crucible, We Should All Be Feminists.  [JH]
  • Born May 3, 1982 — Rebecca Hall, 39. Lots of genre work — her first role was as Sarah Borden in The Prestige followed by being Emily Wotton in Dorian Gray and then as Florence Cathcart in The Awakening which in turn led to her being Maya Hansen in Iron Man 3. Next up? Mary in Roald Dahl’s The BFG. Is she done yet? No as next up is the English dub of the voice of Mother of Mirai no Mirai.  She might’ve wanted to have stopped there as her most recent role was Dr. Grace Hart in Holmes & Watson which won an appalling four Golden Raspberries! (CE) 
  • Born May 3, 1984 – Ian Bristow, age 37.  Four novels, two shorter stories, a dozen covers.  Here is The Interspecies Poker Tournament.  Here is Contact.  Here is The Gaia Collection.  [JH]
  • Born May 3, 1985 — Becky Chambers, 36. I’m currently listening to The Galaxy, And The Ground Within which is most excellent. Her Wayfarers series won the Best Series Hugo at Dublin 2019: An Irish Worldcon. (A Closed and Common Orbit was on the final list at WorldCon 75 for Best Novel but lost out to another exemplary novel, N. K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate. Record of a Spaceborn Few would be on the ballot at Dublin 2019 but lost out to yet another exemplary novel, Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars.) (A digression: The Wayfarers are the best series I’ve listened to in a long time.) “To Be Taught, if Fortunate” was a finalist at ConZealand in the Best Novella category but lost out to “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. (CE) 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Non Sequitur follows an outfit that knows their truth is out there. Maybe.
  • Heathcliff doesn’t look very superheroic – that’s what makes him so dangerous.
  • Maximumble shows why not all AI want to be more like humans.

(10) FAMILY TIME. Get your tissues ready. “Marvel Studios Celebrates The Movies” on YouTube is something Marvel Studios put together (with words by Stan Lee) about the importance of seeing MCU movies in theatres, along with a list of forthcoming MCU releases for the next two years.

The world may change and evolve, but the one thing that will never change: we’re all part of one big family.

(11) THE FATES OF THREE GENRE SHOWS. SYFY Wire says don’t change that channel – unless you want to watch Pennyworth: “The CW renews Stargirl & Kung Fu; HBO Max eyes Pennyworth pick-up”.

Stargirl will continue to shine bright on The CW with a third season, the network announced Monday. The DC show’s renewal also came with the news that Christina M. Kim’s Kung Fu reboot has scored a second, butt-kicking season. Stargirl‘s sophomore season is scheduled to kick off this summer, while Kung Fu is in the middle of airing its debut batch of episodes (the premiere garnered over 3.5 million audience members when it first dropped in early April)….

“STARGIRL SEASON 3!!!” Brec Bassinger, Stargirl‘s leading lady, wrote on Twitter. “I get to go be with my star fam another year.”

“Thank you to everyone who has been tuning in to our little show,” tweeted Olivia Lang, who headlines Kung Fu. “We hope we’ve made your lives brighter and brought joy into your homes.”

Elsewhere, Epix’s Batman prequel, Pennyworth, could score a third outing of its own, but not on Epix. According to a new report from Deadline, HBO Max is mulling over a decision to pick up the DC-inspired series about a young British spy (Jack Bannon) who will one day become the butler of Wayne Manor…. 

(12) THE PAST THROUGH TOMORROW. Brett Molina reviews the updates Atari: “Remember Atari? We played its latest video game console, Atari VCS” at Yahoo!

It is 2021, and I’m not playing on an Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo Switch. I’m playing Atari.

This isn’t an old Atari 2600 previously collecting dust in a closet or an emulator I found online. It’s a fresh home video game console: the Atari VCS.

Having spent some time playing Atari VCS, it’s easy to get trapped by the nostalgic feelings of popping in my “Asteroids” or “Missile Command” cartridges. However, the VCS delivers plenty of modern touches such as wireless, rechargeable controllers and Wi-Fi support for downloadable games.

The Atari VCS is available to preorder for $399.99 and includes the console, a wireless modern controller and a wireless classic joystick.

(13) REAL HANDWAVIUM. The New York Times reports “These Materials Could Make Science Fiction a Reality”.

Imagine operating a computer by moving your hands in the air as Tony Stark does in “Iron Man.” Or using a smartphone to magnify an object as does the device that Harrison Ford’s character uses in “Blade Runner.” Or a next-generation video meeting where augmented reality glasses make it possible to view 3-D avatars. Or a generation of autonomous vehicles capable of driving safely in city traffic.

These advances and a host of others on the horizon could happen because of metamaterials, making it possible to control beams of light with the same ease that computer chips control electricity.

The term metamaterials refers to a broad class of manufactured materials composed of structures that are finer than the wavelength of visible light, radio waves and other types of electromagnetic radiation. Together, they are now giving engineers extraordinary control in designing new types of ultracheap sensors that range from a telescope lens to an infrared thermometer.

“We are entering the consumer phase for metamaterials,” said Alan Huang, the chief technology officer at Terabit Corporation, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, who did early research in optical computing during his 12 years at Bell Labs. “It will go way beyond cameras and projectors and lead to things we don’t expect. It’s really a field of dreams.”

The first consumer products to take advantage of inexpensive metamaterials will be smartphones, which will improve their performance, but the ability to control light waves in new ways will also soon enable products like augmented reality glasses that overlay computerized images on the real world….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Mortal Kombat (2021) Pitch Meeting” on ScreenRant, which has spoilers, the producer explains he’s heard of the Mortal Kombat video game because “you mash a lot of buttons and someone’s spine explodes.  Then you need a lot of therapy.”  Also one character’s laser eye powers are discovered “by arguing about egg rolls” with another character.

[Thanks to Michael Toman, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Andrew Porter, Kendall, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, John Hertz, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 9/23/19 But That Was Very Long Ago, And Oh, So Far Away

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(1) A MATTER OF RESPECT. Edmund Schluessel has returned from Fantasticon 2019, in Copenhagen, Denmark with a burden: “I attended as a Special Guest this weekend in Copenhagen. There has been discussion within the Nordic countries’ fan community about the event’s poster and some other issues of insensitivity and I discuss those here.” — “Saints and people who do not think like us (Fantasticon 2019)”.

…Nisi [Shawl] was talking about altruism. They talked about being a saint. They talked about sacrifice, even putting yourself in harm’s way to protect someone who would do harm to you. 

The Chair gave an impromptu speech just afterward. The poster was excellent, he told us all, and complaints about it all came from “people who do not think like us.”

Then started the filk sing-a-long. Only quick action by an observant program participant kept the projector screen from telling the whole banquet room that we’d be singing along to the tune of “The Darkies’ Sunday School.” That quick action did not prevent the flippant reference to rape in the lyrics. “It was like something from the ’70s,” that quick intervenor said later.

Why am I amped up to 11 about all this? At a fundamental level, fandom is about storytelling. And something I’ve seen in every single fan community I’ve interacted with, going back something like 25 years now, is that the story fandom always tells best is when it’s telling itself “we are tolerant, we are open, we accept everyone.” Too often that story is a myth.

The Afrofuturist authors whose work and ideas this convention we’re supposed to be celebrating — if we won’t listen to their message, are they “people who do not think like us”? The convention members who saw something wrong with the poster, whether or not they could clearly articulate it — are they not part of “us”? Am I not part of “us”? You put my name on the damned poster!

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Where do you go for a Javanese dinner? For Lisa Tuttle and interviewer Scott Edelman the answer was: Dublin. Join them in Episode 105 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Lisa Tuttle

My guest this time around is the award-winning writer Lisa Tuttle, who I caught up with one night after she was done with a 7:30 p.m. reading, which meant that by the time we began our meal it was a later than usual dinner (for me, at least). We hopped in a cab and took off for at Chameleon, an Indonesian restaurant I’d found via Eater’s list of 38 essential Dublin restaurants. The restaurant offers set menus from various regions, including Sumatra and Bali. We decided to go with Java, but added to that some pork bell bao, and the 10-hour Javanese anise short rib of beef, a signature dish of theirs which turned out to be my favorite thing eaten all weekend.

Lisa and I both had wonderful experiences 45 years ago at the 1974 Worldcon in Washington, D.C., me because it was my first Worldcon, she because of winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She’s accomplished a lot in the 4-1/2 decades since, including being awarded the 1982 Nebula for Best Short Story for “The Bone Flute.” She’s published seven short story collections, starting with A Nest of Nightmares in 1986 and most recently Objects in Dream in 2012, plus more than a dozen novels, the first of which was Windhaven (1981), written in collaboration with George R. R. Martin, who was my guest back in Episode 43. She was nominated for an Arthur C. Clarke award for her novel Lost Futures. She edited the pivotal anthology Skin of the Soul: New Horror Stories by Women (1990) as well as Crossing the Border: Tales of Erotic Ambiguity (1998).

We discussed the amusing series of mishaps which prevented her from learning she’d won the 1974 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer as early as she should have, the first thing Harlan Ellison ever said to her, how the all-male table of contents for a major horror anthology inspired her to edit her classic female horror anthology Skin of the Soul, the way emigrating from the U.S. to the UK affected her writing, why an editor said of one of her submitted novels, “I love this book, but I could no more publish it than I could jump out the window and fly,” how she and George R. R. Martin were able to collaborate early in their careers without killing each other, what she’d do if she were just starting out now as a writer, the reasons contemporary acknowledgements sections of novels should be shortened — and so much more.

(3) SPEED IS OF THE ESSENCE. He likes to get paid, too — “Chuck Yeager sues Airbus for writing ‘Yeager broke the sound barrier’” at Ars Technica.

In 2017, Airbus published a promotional article promoting an Airbus helicopter.

“Seventy years ago, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier,” said Guillaume Faury, CEO of Airbus Helicopters. “We’re trying to break the cost barrier. It cannot be ‘speed at any cost.'”

The 96-year-old Yeager wasn’t happy. Last week, he filed a lawsuit in federal court, arguing that Airbus had infringed his rights by using his name without permission.

“By using Yeager’s name, identity, and likeness and federal registered trademarks in the infringing material, Airbus impaired the ability of General Yeager to receive his established earning potential,” Yeager’s lawyers wrote.

Yeager says that he visited Airbus in 2008 and told Airbus it would cost at least $1 million to use his name and likeness in promotional materials. Airbus refused his offer.

(4) VISUAL CONREPORT. Roberto Quaglia shares some great views in his video “Glimpses of an Irish Worldcon – Dublin 2019.”

(5) HARD SF. Here’s Rocket Stack Rank’s annual “Outstanding Hard Science Fiction of 2018” with 27 stories that were that were finalists for major SF/F awards, included in “year’s best” SF/F anthologies, or recommended by prolific reviewers in short fiction.

Included are some observations obtained from highlighting specific recommenders and pivoting the table by publication, author, awards, year’s best anthologies, and reviewers.

(6) NOT ALL TROLLS. “Neil Gaiman On The Good Kind of Trolls”  at Literary Hub is his introduction to The Complete and Original Norwegian Folk Tales of Asbjørnsen and Moe in which Gaiman discusses his love of Norway and Norwegian folklore.

You will meet youngest sons and foolish farmers, clever women and lost princesses, adventurers and fools, just as in any collection of folk stories from anywhere in Northern Europe. But the Norwegian Folktales come with trolls, and if Asbjørnsen and Moe did not see them, as Kittelsen did, then they got their stories from people who had, people who had seen the trolls walking in the mist at dawn.

(7) EMMY REMEMBRANCES. The 2019 Primetime Emmys included an Memoriam segment. Some of the names of genre interest: Jan-Michael Vincent, James Frawley, Ron Miller, Cameron Boyce, Rutger Hauer, Stan Lee, and Rip Torn.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • September 23, 1846 — Planet Neptune was discovered.
  • September 23, 1962 — The Jetsons debuted its very first episode, “Rosey the Robot”. The series which was produced by Hanna-Barbera would run for three seasons.
  • September 23, 1968 — Charly was released, starring Cliff Robertson and Claire Bloom. Based on “Flowers for Algernon” which is a sf short story and a novel by Daniel Keyes. The short story, written in 1958 and first published in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1960. The novel was published in 1966 and was joint winner of that year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel with Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17. 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 23, 1897 — Walter Pidgeon. He’s mostly remembered for his role in the classic Forbidden Planet as Dr. Morbius, but he’s done some other genre work being in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea as Adm. Harriman Nelson, and in The Neptune Factor as Dr. Samuel Andrews. (Died 1984.)
  • Born September 23, 1908 — Wilmar House Shiras. Her story “In Hiding” was submitted in 1948 to Astounding Science Fiction, where it was published. She published two sequels in the magazine: “Opening Doors”, and “New Foundations”. The three stories would become the first three chapters in the novel, Children of the Atom. Other than a handful of short fiction, I think it’s her only work. Neither iBooks or Kindle carry anything by her. (Died 1990.)
  • Born September 23, 1920 — Richard Wilson. Not a writer of much genre fiction at all. His really major contribution to fandom and to Syracuse University where he worked as the director of the Syracuse University News Bureau was in successfully recruiting the donation of papers from many prominent science fiction writers to the Syracuse University’s George Arents Research Library.  The list of those writers includes Piers Anthony, Hal Clement, Keith Laumer, Larry Niven and Frederik Pohl. And, of course, himself. It has been called the “most important collection of science fiction manuscripts and papers in the world.” (Died 1987.)
  • Born September 23, 1944 — Anne Randall, 75. She was Daphne, a servant girl in the original Westworld which if memory serves me correctly also had Yul Brynner in it. She’ll show also in Night Gallery  in the “Tell David” episode as Julie. 
  • Born September 23, 1956 — Peter David, 63. Did you know that his first assignment for the Philadelphia Bulletin was covering Discon II? I’m reasonably sure the first thing I read by him was Legions of Fire, Book 1—The Long Night of Centauri Prime but he’s also done a number of comics I’ve read including runs of Captain Marvel , Wolverine and Young Justice.
  • Born September 23, 1959 — Frank Cottrell-Boyce, 60. Definitely not here for his sequels to Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. (Horrors!) He is here for such writing endeavors as Goodbye Christopher Robin, his Doctor Who stories, “In the Forest of the Night” and “Smile”, both Twelfth Doctor affairs, and the animated Captain Star series in which he voiced Captain Jim Star. The series sounds like the absolute antithesis of classic Trek. 
  • Born September 23, 1963 — Alexander Proyas, 56. Australian director, screenwriter, and producer. He’s best known for directing The Crow (which is superb), Dark City, I, Robot  (nor so superb) and Gods of Egypt. His first, shot in Australia of course, was Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds. It’s genre. Has anyone seen it? 
  • Born September 23, 1957 — Rosalind Chao, 61. She was the recurring character of Keiko O’Brien with a total of twenty-seven appearances on Next Generation and  Deep Space Nine. In 2010, a preliminary casting memo for Next Gen from 1987 was published, revealing that Chao was originally considered for the part of Enterprise security chief Tasha Yar.

(10) BURNING COLD. The second official trailer for Frozen 2 dropped today.

(11) FLASH GORDON. Film School Rejects thinks this movie has lessons to teach today’s creators despite its reputation: “What Today’s Sci-Fi Should Learn from ‘Flash Gordon'”.

Take, for example, the 2017 flop Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Luc Besson’s film, which is itself based on comics originating in the 1960s, spends way too much time explaining stuff that never becomes relevant. The eponymous City of a Thousand Planets is a space station broken down into multiple districts, as the exposition explains, but the action of the film barely takes place in any of them.

Flash Gordon, meanwhile, understands that drama is built between characters and then focuses on them. Everyone in the movie, from Flash to Ming to Flash’s larger-than-life ally Prince Vultan, has their own distinct wants, and the story emerges from these characters interacting and trying to reconcile these wants. This movie gets at the humanity behind these characters, even if they happen to be aliens

(12) ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Pursuing a thought experiment inspired by a list of 21st Century books, Peace Is My Middle Name started a hypothetical list of “100 best books of the Twentieth Century” as if it had been compiled in 1919. Their titles are in a comment and ought to have been mentioned yesterday, except the comment landed in the spam and wasn’t spotted for hours. Well worth your time.

(13) FOR YOUR EARS. Several episodes of a reading of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments are available for listening at the BBC.

In this brilliant and long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalised readers for decades. In The Testaments, set fifteen years after the events of her dystopian masterpiece, the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. Now the testimonies of three different women bring the story to a dramatic conclusion. Today we hear from the infamous Aunt Lydia, and Agnes, a young girl who has only known life in Gilead.

(14) NOT ARISTOTLE. “Euclid space telescope to study ‘dark Universe’ makes progress” – BBC has the story.

Europe’s space mission to uncover the secrets of the “dark Universe” has reached a key milestone.

The test model of the Euclid telescope has just emerged from a chamber where it was subjected to the kind of conditions experienced in orbit.

It was a critical moment for engineers because the successful trial confirms the observatory’s design is on track.

Euclid, due for launch in 2022, will map the cosmos for clues to the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

These phenomena appear to control the shape and expansion of the Universe but virtually nothing is known about them.

The €800m venture, led by the European Space Agency (Esa), will be one of a group of new experiments to come online in the next few years.

Scientists are hopeful these next-generation technologies will provide the insights that have so far eluded them.

(15) ATARI 2600. BBC fathoms “The mysterious origins of an uncrackable video game”.

With the digital equivalent of trowels and shovels, archaeologists are digging into the code of early video games to uncover long forgotten secrets that could have relevance today.

“You and your team of archaeologists have fallen into the ‘catacombs of the zombies’.” A miserable situation, to be sure. But this was the chilling trial that faced players of Entombed, an Atari 2600 game, according to the instruction manual.

The catacombs were an unforgiving place. A downward-scrolling, two-dimensional maze that players had to navigate expertly in order to evade the “clammy, deadly grip” of their zombie foes. An archaeologist’s nightmare.

Released in 1982, Entombed was far from a best-seller and today it’s largely forgotten. But recently, a computer scientist and a digital archaeologist decided to pull apart the game’s source code to investigate how it was made.

…Like intrepid explorers of catacombs, Aycock and Copplestone sought curious relics inside Entombed. But they got more than they bargained for: they found a mystery bit of code they couldn’t explain. It seems the logic behind it has been lost forever.

Into the labyrinth

Maze-navigating games were very common back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but the method used to generate a maze varied, depending on the programmer. In the age of Atari, games had to be designed with incredible skill because the computer systems that ran them were so limited. (Read more about the mind of a maze-builder.)

Although the blocky, two dimensional mazes from entombed might look simple by the standards of today’s computer graphics, in 1982 you couldn’t just design a set of mazes, store them in the game and later display them on-screen – there wasn’t enough memory on the game cartridges for something like that. In many cases, mazes were generated “procedurally” – in other words, the game created them randomly on the fly, so players never actually traversed the same maze twice.

But how do you do get a computer program to avoid churning out a useless maze with too many walls, or an otherwise impenetrable floorplan?

(16) SNOWPIERCER BACKSTORY. On September 24, Titan Comics will release Snowpiercer The Prequel: Part 1: Extinction, a brand-new prequel graphic novel set before the extinction incident that led to the events of the original Snowpiercer graphic novel trilogy. It’s written by Matz (Triggerman, The Assignment), with art by the original Snowpiercer graphic novel artist Jean-Marc Rochette, shown in this promotional video creating an iconic scene from the book.

[Thanks to bill, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Edmund Schluessel , Eric Wong, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day OGH.]

Pixel Scroll 6/2/18 I Can’t Pixel That – It’s More Than My Scroll’s Worth

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(1) BEA ACCESS ISSUE. Black comic book artist Tee Franklin, an invited Book Expo America panel participant who uses a wheelchair, arrived at today’s item and found there was no ramp allowing her to get on the platform with other panelists. She wrote a Twitter thread about the experience — it starts here:

The moderator — who probably should have been aware in advance of the panelists and their backgrounds, who the panelist says knows her, and knows that she’s disabled — wasn’t paying attention and didn’t think as soon as they arrived to call the con management and say “we need a ramp in this room, STAT”.

Here’s one of the many tweets in support.

Franklin adds that this is chronic occurrence:

(2) YOUNG PEOPLE RETURNS! James Davis Nicoll launches a new round of Young People by having them listen to a radio adaptation of Frederik Pohl’s “The Tunnel Under The World”.

Welcome to the first installment of Young People Listen to Old SFF, an experiment to see if old science fiction and fantasy radio shows aged better than old science fiction and fantasy. Unsurprisingly, my first selection is from that classic old time SF radio show, X Minus One.

To quote from my tor dot com piece: NBC’s Dimension X (1950-1951) and X Minus One (1955-1958) shared a network, some staff and initial source material for scripts. The first fifteen scripts for X Minus One were repurposed Dimension X scripts. Although the shows began by adapting stories from Astounding, X Minus One turned to more sophisticated material from Galaxy Magazine. I prefer X Minus One over Dimension X, so I’ve snagged two episodes from the first and none from the second. As I’ve said before, DX had the all time best ad lib: immediately after a character in one play made an impassioned plea for world peace, the news broadcasters broke in to announce the outbreak of the Korean War.

Among other things, the panel says this show failed the Bechdel Test!

(3) SILENCED, Heather Altfeld explains how “Every Day, Another Language Dies” at Lit Hub.

…Recent broadcast from the terrarium of sadness and destruction: it will take between ten and fourteen days from now for another of the world’s 6,900 languages to die out. So let’s say that today the last speaker of something somewhere is dying.

Exhibit A: Alban Michael. Out of the 7,700,000,000 people on earth, he was only one left who could speak Nuchatlaht. He lived near Nootka Island, he spoke to his parents in dreams, as there was no one left to speak to him. And then one year ago, he was gone, himself a dream, his language buried with him….

(4) POLITICS IN SF? YES. The Village Voice’s Carol Cooper is “Catching Up With the Next Generation of Sci-Fi Writers”.

…Surely in a community that attracts atheists, Wiccans, CIA agents, physicists, semioticians, libertines, libertarians, and unrepentant Trotskyites, one might anticipate a few political debates. More recent controversies have centered on fears that “political correctness” is taking the field too far away from the kinds of themes and characters that ruled SF in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Evidently, gay, non-white, and feminist themes and writers were getting too much attention in the 21st century, leaving straight, white protagonists with conservative plot lines unfairly ignored. But gathering to learn and play at regional and national conventions is one way these schisms in the larger SF community are addressed and eventually healed.

At Nebula Con, we discussed these questions of diversity in SF on panels like “How to Decolonize Your Fiction” and “Collaborations: More Than the Sum of Their Parts.” For the former, book agent DongWon Song asked a roundtable of non-white authors if it’s possible to write fiction free of the influence of Western imperialism and white supremacy. Bill Campbell, a middle-class, half-Jamaican author and publisher, described how after a white agent accidentally told him his work “wasn’t ghetto enough,” he reacted by self-publishing the satiric Koontown Killing Kaper, a gumshoe fantasy in which vampire crack babies are accused of murdering local rappers. Frustrated by the overly narrow expectations of existing publishers, he started Rosarium Publishing in 2013 as a home for multicultural SF, comics, nonfiction, and crime fiction that doesn’t pander to the “white gaze” and disregards stereotypical assumptions….

(5) THE COCKY CROWS. Here’s the Authors Guild update on “Cockygate” — “Authors Guild and RWA Prevail in Court Defending Authors in “Cocky” Trademark Dispute”.

The Authors Guild and the Romance Writers of America (RWA) joined forces in this case to defend the principle that no one should be able to own exclusive rights to use a common word in book or book series titles. In ruling against the author Faleena Hopkins, who claimed exclusive rights to “cocky” for romance titles, Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York, stated that he did not believe that Hopkins was likely to succeed on the merits.

…When Hopkins’ trademark registration was issued in April, Hopkins sent notices to multiple authors telling them to change the titles of their books and asked Amazon to take down all other cocky-titled romance books (not just series).

That is when the Authors Guild stepped in to defend the authors whose books were targeted. The Guild and the RWA separately requested that Amazon put the books back up, since the trademark claims were disputed, and it promptly complied. The two groups then jointly hired the Authors Guild’s outside counsel, Cowan Debaets Abrahams & Sheppard, to write a letter to Hopkins on behalf of Tara Crescent, author of another “Cocky” book series (and an Authors Guild member).

In response, Hopkins filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against three people: Crescent, author and lawyer Kevin Kneupper (who challenged Hopkins’ trademark registration), and book publicist, Jennifer Watson. In doing so, Hopkins asked for a temporary restraining order to prevent the May 26th publication of a collection of stories by different authors, entitledCocktales: The Cocky Collective (Hopkins incorrectly named Watson as the publisher). The Guild’s attorneys prevailed in court last Friday the 25th to prevent the temporary restraining order and again today in a hearing on Hopkins’ motion for a preliminary injunction.

We opposed the attempt to block publication of a book, arguing: “Any order that restricts creative expression in favor of promoting the tenuous (at best) purported rights of a single author is simply contrary to the public interest in freedom of expression.”

Judge Hellerstein agreed and found that Hopkins was not likely to succeed on the merits because the word “cocky” is a common and weak trademark, there was no evidence of actual confusion, and romance readers are sophisticated consumers—meaning that they are not likely to confuse Hopkins’ and Crescent’s books.

You can read our papers here, filed jointly with attorneys for Kneupper and Watson.

(6) GRIDLOCK. The Ogden UnCon takes place June 7-9, 2019 in Ogden, Utah. That means there are three general SF cons scheduled within the same month — UnCon, FyreCon, and Westercon — all within 10 miles of each other.

(7) NOT TAKEI TOO? Washington Post op-ed writer Eric Berkowitz considers “The case against George Takei was always weak. Why were we so quick to believe it?”.

… But there was always a lot wrong with the Brunton story. Unlike Weinstein, C.K. or Spacey, Takei had never been known — even in whispers — for sexual misconduct. And Brunton’s tale didn’t quite hang together. He didn’t accuse Takei of drugging him until days after he first contacted the media, and, as detailed in a recent Observer article , he hadn’t even suspected that Takei had spiked his drink until years after the incident, when he read about the accusations against Bill Cosby. According to Shane Snow’s reporting, if Brunton had been given one of the date rape drugs in use back then, he probably would have no memory of what happened. Finally, Brunton told the Observer that he didn’t recall any touching by Takei. What began as an accusation of sexual assault was now, for Brunton, “a great party story” and “just a very odd event.” Takei responded to the Observer article with relief, tweeting, “I wish him peace.”…

The result is that we are too ready to believe that George Takei committed sexual assault and to assume that gay men are prone to it. We don’t know exactly why there was a rush to judgment against Takei — in the immediate wake of #MeToo, there were so many accusations being hurled, it was hard to keep track — but we can reflect on why so many of us are inclined to think the worst.

(8) DABNEY OBIT. NPR reports “Ted Dabney, Co-Founder Of Atari And Video Game Pioneer, Dies At 81”. He also co-founded the ancestor of Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Dabney, who generally went by Ted, and Nolan Bushnell had been working together at an electronics company called Ampex back in the mid-1960s, and Bushnell had an idea for a “carnival-type pizza parlor,” Dabney recalled in 2012.

“It’s one of these things, you have these ideas and no way you could ever make it happen,” he told the Computer History Museum. “I mean, you could barely afford the pizza, much less buy a pizza place.”

Turns out he was right — they couldn’t afford to start a pizza place, at least not then. But those conversations did start a tumultuous partnership that would, within just a few years, go on to create Atari, introduce Pong as a cultural phenomenon and help blaze a trail for the very medium of video games as we know them today.

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • June 2, 1977  — Capricorn One premiered

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

  • Born June 2, 1915 – Lester Del Rey, sf author
  • Born June 2, 1945 – Jon Peters, Executive Producer of Batman Returns, Producer of Batman, The Witches Of Eastwick and the Wild Wild West film.
  • Born June 2, 1977 – Zachary Quinto, the new Mr. Spock
  • Born June 2, 1978 — Dominic Cooper (Jesse in Preacher, Howard Stark in Agent Carter and  Captain America: The First Avenger and a role in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.)

(11) HIRSUTE KNOWLEDGE. Camestros Felapton has posted the answers to his sff author beard identification quiz. How did you score?

(12) A FRIGHT AT THE OPERA. Broadway World says a Bradbury-inspired opera will open this summer: “Sci-Fi Opera THE BRADBURY TATTOOS To Premiere This July”.

In the nearly 70 years since late author Ray Bradbury published “The Illustrated Man,” various short stories in the classic science fiction anthology have been adapted for film, stage and television. Now, four of them serve as the basis for “The Bradbury Tattoos,” an ambitious new rock opera, scheduled to premiere July 13 and 22 at Memorial Hall in Cincinnati.

Written by composer Zac Greenberg and librettist Michael Burnham, “The Bradbury Tattoos” will be presented by concert:nova, a contemporary-classical ensemble founded by musicians from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Partial funding for the production is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

“The opera is in four movements,” Greenberg explained. “The first three movements happen simultaneously, in different rooms. The audience moves from room to room, and then everyone comes together in the main hall for the grand finale.”

Stylistically, the movements range from classical string quartet to avant-garde classical, folk and big band. Though the stories are different, they share a common theme of humans coping with a frightening future:

  • “Kaleidoscope” – The crew of a disabled spacecraft reflects on their lives, while drifting toward death.
  • “Zero Hour” – Children play a game called “Invasion,” which turns out to be more than a game.
  • “The Highway” – A husband and wife who live near a highway help refugees fleeing a nuclear war.
  • “The Last Night of the World” – A married couple goes about their normal routines, despite realizing that the world is about to end

(13) CAREFULLY TAUGHT. The BBC asks: “Are you scared yet? Meet Norman, the psychopathic AI” — another demo that data matters when teaching an AI.

Norman is an algorithm trained to understand pictures but, like its namesake Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, it does not have an optimistic view of the world.

When a “normal” algorithm generated by artificial intelligence is asked what it sees in an abstract shape it chooses something cheery: “A group of birds sitting on top of a tree branch.”

Norman sees a man being electrocuted.

And where “normal” AI sees a couple of people standing next to each other, Norman sees a man jumping from a window.

The psychopathic algorithm was created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as part of an experiment to see what training AI on data from “the dark corners of the net” would do to its world view.

(14) SCARE THE HELL INTO YOU. The hype machine says “Hereditary: The ‘scariest film for years’ is coming”.

It’s been described as “the singularly most terrifying horror film in years” and “a new generation’s The Exorcist”.

Horror movie Hereditary has become one of 2018’s most eagerly anticipated releases after scaring and impressing critics in equal measure.

Actress Toni Collette is coming in for particular praise as a woman whose family has demons in its DNA.

Bustle said it’s “truly unlike anything you’ve seen before”, while The AV Club called it “pure emotional terrorism”.

The film is released in the US on 8 June and in the UK a week later.

(15) CAT HELP WANTED. In San Diego a “Beloved book store closing after 53 years” – and the bookstore cat, Bartleby, is unemployed!

It’s the end of an era on Adams Avenue in Normal Heights. After 53 years, the Adams Avenue Book Store is set to close its doors.

(16) ROAD ROCKET. Messy Nessy shares its photo album of “Fantastic French Publicity Caravans of Yesteryear”, which begins with this epic vehicle:

My wormhole began with this photo of the world’s first (possibly only) vehicle-shaped pen, the BIC mobile, photographed at the Tour de France in 1953. I’ve never been an avid follower of the annual cycling race that was created in 1903 by a French newspaper as a gimmick to sell more papers– but this? Give me a parade of the wackiest concept cars and publicity vehicles, and you’ve got my attention!

[Thanks to Robin Reid, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, JJ, David Doering, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Greg Hullender, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]

Pixel Scroll 6/18/17 ‘Twas Pixel And The Filey Scrolls Did Fifth And Godstalk ‘Neath The Wabes

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(1) FILIAL PROS. “For Father’s Day, 9 famous writer dads and their awesome authorial offspring” – the LA Times feature includes a segment on Stephen King, and sons Joe Hill and Owen King.

(2) BAD MARVEL DADS. Hidden Remote considers “Who is the worst dad in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?”

Before we break down who the worst dad is, let’s give an honorable mention and round of applause to the very few awesome fathers and father-figures in the MCU!

  • Uncle Ben — He didn’t only step up and raise Peter to be good and kind, but he also taught us all that “With great power, comes great responsibility.”

And the winner (loser?) as worst dad? It’s a tie!

Guys, this one is a toss up. Ego and Thanos are both so terrible, we’re not sure which is the most wicked. But, personally, I believe Ego is the worst of the worst.

(3) WISCON REPORT. Claire Light at Literary Hub tells what it was like “At the World’s Preeminent Feminist Speculative Fiction Convention”.  

The way this 5-day, 1000-attendee, multigenerational festival plays out is not quite what you might expect from a bunch of futurist nerds. Public bathrooms (separated genders—to be determined by the user—and all-gender bathrooms alike) have bottles of Dr. Bronner’s at each sink, for the chemically sensitive. The convention reserves a quiet place for those with a tendency to become overwhelmed by sensory input, as well as “safer spaces” dedicated to trans/genderqueer people, people of color, and people with disabilities. WisCon’s accessibility policies are a model of thoughtfulness.

…Other events founded at WisCon and becoming convention staples include the Floomp, an annual queer dance party, which started out seven years ago as “The Gender Floomp” to bring a new generation of queer and genderqueer issues to the forefront in a fun and celebratory way. As WisCon has come to increasingly demarginalize queerness, the Floomp has been folded into the traditional social programming of the convention and is now its primary and most popular party.

There’s also the POC dinner, once a table for 11 at a restaurant, and now an annual organizational headache for short story writer and Angry Black Woman blogger Tempest K. Bradford, who has to find a room to fit nearly 10% of the convention’s attendees every year. And last year, a group of Asian attendees got shabu shabu together; as they’ve already repeated the dinner once, it’s already well on its way to becoming a new tradition.

(4) CARRYING A TUNE. Charlie Jane Anders speaks from firsthand experience about “The Wild Magic of Karaoke” at Tor.com.

And yes, if you can’t sing at all, that just means more wild spoken-word stylings. Take a page from the master of songcraft, William Shatner, whose singing ability remains somewhat theoretical but who has recorded the definitive renditions of countless songs at this point.

The point is, karaoke is magic. It’s taking songs that we all know, and turning them into something ephemeral and wonderful and frequently a bit bizarre. Karaoke is a chance for everybody to expose his or her own inner avant-garde pop diva, and let the musical insanity burst out for everyone to see.

When I was teaching Clarion West back in 2014, I had some amazing times with my students, and I like to think we bonded a lot in general—but I really didn’t get to know them, and discover the full range of their personalities, until we went to this weird nautical-themed karaoke bar where half the decorations were mermaids and the other half were signs explaining that the bartender didn’t need to put up with your s—-t. Some of science fiction’s most promising new writers busted out with renditions of Lady Gaga, Madonna, and The Cars that stay with me to this day.

(5) WHAT ATWOOD THINKS. While authors always have opinions about adaptations of their work, they’re not always willing to talk about them publicly – here’s a rare instance: “‘The Handmaid’s Tale’: Margaret Atwood on the 5 Biggest Differences Between the Book and the TV Series”.

Her Name Is June

In the novel, the heroine is given the name “Offred” by her captors at the Red Center, where fertile women are retrained to be Handmaids: breeders who are assigned to the ruling families in the hopes of bringing new babies into this fertility-challenged world. That name translates as “Of Fred,” the identity of the man whose home she lives in, and who rapes her on appointed nights every month. We are pointedly never told Offred’s pre-Gilead name. For the show, Miller made the conscious choice to give Offred a distinct identity for the flashbacks to the era before America fell and picked the name June, confirming a long-held fan theory.

Atwood says: “The readers have already decided that’s her name, and who am I to disagree with them? It wasn’t in my mind, but there wasn’t any other name in my mind either. It fits because in the first chapter, the women exchange names and all those names show up again later on except June. So by default that would have to be her name! That’s a pretty good deduction and I’ll go with that. This is June, and she really does have an identity; it’s forbidden, but it’s there. I’ve told fans before, if it works for you, go for it.”

(6) IX GALLERY. “IX Gallery Opens Its Virtual Doors”. Gallery’s inaugural online art show just went live on Thursday. This first show is exhibiting about 120 pieces of art from some of the most recognizable SF&F artists working today. It appears that they have already sold 3 pieces of artwork since Thursday afternoon.

The IX Gallery Inaugural Show runs June 15-August 14.

IX Gallery, a division of IX Arts, is the first online-only gallery dedicated exclusively to contemporary imaginative realism. As a natural extension of IX’s reach and solidly established inspiration value, this year-round effort is designed to provide gallery curation and structure in an online-only environment that allows for the widest possible access while reducing the burden on artists for participating.

It is structured like a normal gallery – rotating shows that are a combination of group and solo efforts, rather than a constant online inventory or catalog, and we do not “rep” any of the artists in the show. Everything is handled on a show-by-show basis to allow the artists maximum flexibility in their participation.”

Click for a list of coming Exhibitions. These artists are listed as part of the inaugural show.

Linda Adair, Samuel Araya, Julie Bell, Shaun Berke, Brom, Armand Cabrera, Jeremy Caniglia, Dan Chudzinski, Kinuko Y. Craft, Felipe Echevarria, Bob Eggleton, Craig Elliott, Jody Fallon, Scott Fischer, Teresa N. Fischer, Marc Fishman, Annie Stegg Gerard, Justin Gerard, Donato Giancola, Lars Grant-West, Rebecca Guay, John Harris, Michael C. Hayes, James Herrmann, Richard Hescox, Stephen Hickman, Greg & Tim Hildebrandt, Greg Hildebrandt, Luke Hillestad, Patrick Jones, Rich Klink, J. Anthony Kosar, Jota Leal, Vanessa Lemen, Don Maitz, Gina Matarazzo, Matt Mrowka, Aaron Nagel, Tran Nguyen, Ryan Pancoast, Lucio Parrillo, Colin & Kristine Poole, Colin Poole, Mark Poole, Rob Rey, Tooba Rezaei, Forest Rogers, Laurence Schwinger, Dave Seeley, Hajime Sorayama, Matthew Stewart, Bryan Mark Taylor, Vince Villafranca, Chet Zar, and Dariusz Zawadzki.

(7) ON EXHIBIT IN LONDON. “‘Anime Architecture’: windows on dystopia” is En Liang Khong’s review in Financial Times of Anime Architecture: Backgrounds of Japan , an exhibit at the House of Illustration in London that has lots of illustrations for cyberpunk anime movies, including Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor: The Movie, and other examples of “real-kei”, “where futurity is set in counterpoint with realism.”

Anime Architecture at London’s House of Illustration traces the production design behind these cyberpunk anime — “noir” films reimagined for the future — in which specialist artists pioneered a visual language that drew on the booming Asian megacities of the early 1990s in order to broadcast a vision of future dystopias.

But the future is fleeting, constantly outdated by our own shifting socio-political fears and dreams. Wandering through the rooms of Anime Architecture is a reminder of how quickly visions of the future can become old, spooky and elegiac. And there is poignancy to these images: the artists represented here come from the last generation of Japanese animators who still believed in drawing by hand.

(8) COHEN OBIT. Morton Norton Cohen (1921-2017), an American author and scholar, hdied June 12. He was a Professor Emeritus of the City University of New York. He is best known for extensive studies of children’s author Lewis Carroll including the 1995 biography Lewis Carroll: A Biography.

(9) MEADOWS OBIT. Author Patrick Meadows (1934-2017) died April 22. A graduate of Florida State University with a Degree in English, he had lived in Majorca since 1969. His first published story, “Countercommandment” appeared in Analog in 1965. His other four published stories appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction later in the Sixties, and three of them have been digitized and made available on his website. [Via Gordon Van Gelder.]

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • June 18, 1983 — Sally Ride became the first American woman in space.

(11) SHY. Wil Wheaton – a star on the outside, is still a shy guy on the inside.

https://twitter.com/wilw/status/876133804695486466

(12) HOL-RY COW! Screenwriter James Gunn told his Facebook followers that “‘Scooby-Doo’ wasn’t supposed to be a kids’ movie”.

Gunn added the film would have looked completely different if he had it his way.

“And yes, the rumors are true — the first cut was rated R by the MPAA, and the female stars’ cleavage was CGI’d away so as not to offend,” he wrote. “But, you know, such is life. I had a lot of fun making this movie, regardless of all that. And I was able to eat, buy a car, and a house because of it.”

(13) READY, AIM. The Traveler from Galactic Journey tweets an ad from 1962.

(14) VISITING THEIR FUTURE. By the way, here is a photo of Professor Elliott and The Traveler from their visit to Wondercon.

(15) BEAUTIFUL MACHINES. “If memory serves me correctly (and it alas doesn’t always),” says Cat Eldridge, “Gibson typed Neuromancer on a typewriter.” Snopes suggests the old technology still has appeal — “Call it a Comeback: Old-School Typewriters Attract New Fans”.

Typewriter enthusiasts gather at an Albuquerque restaurant to experiment with vintage Smith Coronas. Fans in Boston kneel in a city square and type stories about their lives during a pro-immigration demonstration. A documentary on typewriters featuring Tom Hanks and musician John Mayer is set for release this summer.

In the age of smartphones, social media and cyber hacking fears, vintage typewriters that once gathered dust in attics and basements are attracting a new generation of fans across the U.S.

From public “type-ins” at bars to street poets selling personalized, typewritten poems on the spot, typewriters have emerged as popular items with aficionados hunting for them in thrift stores, online auction sites and antique shops. Some buy antique Underwoods to add to a growing collection. Others search for a midcentury Royal Quiet De Luxe — like a model author Ernest Hemingway used — to work on that simmering novel.

(16) ATARI RISES AGAIN. But Rhett Jones at Gizmodo says “Atari’s New Console Sounds Like a Bad Idea”.

“We’re back in the hardware business,” Atari’s CEO Fred Chesnais told VentureBeat in an interview at E3 2017. Beyond that, Chesnais offered no other information aside from saying it will be based on “PC technology” and that it will be revealed at a later date. The teaser video claims that the “Ataribox” is a “brand new Atari product years in the making.”

This is the online ad that triggered Jones’ article.

The ad reminds John King Tarpinian “In the first Bladrunner movie there was an ATARI Fuji logo-shaped building in the city.”

(17) A TOUCH OF HARRY IN THE NIGHT. For those of you near Pasadena, here’s something for you to do September 9 — “Eat See Hear Outdoor Movie: Harry Potter & The Sorcerer’s Stone”. Food trucks. Dogs welcome.

“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”

This is the tale of Harry Potter, an ordinary 11-year-old boy who learns that he is actually a wizard and has been invited to attend the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry is snatched away from his mundane existence by Hagrid, the grounds keeper for Hogwarts, and quickly thrown into a world completely foreign to both him and the viewer. Famous for an incident that happened at his birth, Harry makes friends easily at his new school. He soon finds, however, that the wizarding world is far more dangerous for him than he would have imagined.

(18) BESTSELLING TOY PREDICTED. The generations have run from Chatty Cathy to Prattling Peter: “Sphero’s Adorable Spider-Man Toy Will Make You Forget BB-8”.

Rumored in late March, the app-enabled superhero was officially unveiled this morning with a video that reveals what’s essentially a chatty Amazon Echo (“Alexa!”) with Peter Parker’s attitude and sense of humor.

Featuring emotive LCD eyes, not unlike the mask in Spider-Man: Homecoming, this adorable little wall-crawler (it’s about 9 inches tall) has its own Spider-Sense, enabling it to detect and react to movement. He can tell jokes, relate stories, wake you up and even patrol for “intruders.” More intriguing, perhaps, is that Spider-Man can talk kids through more than 100 storylines, and allow them to make their own plot-altering decisions in a Choose Your Own Adventure fashion. Don’t worry about running out of stories, though, as Sphero plans to add more through the device’s web connection.

(19) MINDGAMERS TRAILER. Here’s your grim future. Or is it present?

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Sean R. Kirk, Andrew Porter, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jabberin’ Joe H.]

Pixel Scroll 4/9/16 Little Old Lady Got Nominated Late Last Night

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(1) HERE’S THE PLOT. Ursula Vernon cultivates history in her garden. Read “Sowing History: A Gardener’s Tale” at Tor.com.

When people think of gardeners, many of them tend to picture little old ladies in straw hats with bright green gloves, pottering among the roses.

When people think of gardeners who are also children’s book authors, they go straight to Beatrix Potter and assume that not only are these little old ladies in straw hats pottering among the roses, but they are also greeting the friendly woodland creatures by name—“Hello, Mister Robin! You’re looking very feathery today!” “Why, Missus Tiggywinkle, how have you been?” “Oh dear, that naughty little cottontail has been at my lettuces again!”

Well, I am a gardener and a children’s book author. I am also under forty, tattooed, and the owner of a mostly black wardrobe, and when I greet a happy woodland creature by name, there is an excellent chance that the sentence will end with “touch that and I will end you.”

(2) THE FIRST STAR WARS FANS. The Skywalking Through Neverland podcast discusses “The Early Days of Star Wars Fandom with Craig Miller”.

Our spe­cial guest Craig Miller was the Pub­li­cist and Direc­tor of Fan Rela­tions for Lucas­film dur­ing the hey-day of the 70’s and 80’s. Ever won­der how fans knew what was going on in fan­dom before social media? Whose job was it to tell the world about this new movie called Star Wars? Craig shares some awe­some stories.

 

episod116square Craig Miller

(3) KAMERON HURLEY. Asked where his inspiration came from, lyricist Sammy Cahn said “When the check arrives.” Kameron Hurley’s check has arrived, but she explains what else she needs besides, in “Kameron Hurley: Cultivating Inspiration on Deadline” at Locus Online.

Instead of spending all that time feeling guilty about what I wasn’t doing and scrolling through Twitter, I needed to release myself from the ‘‘I should be writing’’ mentality and let my brain start connect­ing things on its own. I found that the more I actively thought about plot problems, the less my brain wanted to fix them. It kept trying to avoid the problems I’d put to it. For instance, instead of fixing a plot problem on my current book, my brain recently offered up a solution to a subplot problem in the next book I’ll be working on. At some point I have to give in and let my brain make the connections it needs to make, without getting in its way. More and more, I have to let my brain go more than I’m used to, or it just retreads the same old story paths.

I would like to tell you that giving up everything to write is the only way to write. I enjoy spouting that whole ‘‘fall on your sword’’ advice time and time again. Giving up activities that waste your time while you should be writing is beneficial, but I can only burn hard like I have for so long before the flame gutters out. I don’t want to be that writer who just writes the same story over and over again.

(4) A LECKIE FANTASY. Rachel Swirsky’s April 8 Friday Fiction Recommendation is “Marsh Gods” by Ann Leckie.

I’m a fan of Ann’s fantasy universe in which gods must be careful to speak the truth, lest they lose their power. I hope we get longer work in it someday, or at least more. (Publishers: Hint, hint.)

Read “Marsh Gods” at Strange Horizons, or listen at PodCastle.

(5) WRITERS OF THE FUTURE. There was a bit of drama during “Day 5 – Writers of the Future Volume 32 Workshop”.

First up was Liza Trombi from Locus Magazine, the foremost professional publication in science fiction and fantasy literature. She discussed Locus, and then moved on to the vagaries of self-publishing, traditional publishing, and going hybrid. Liza recommended trying traditional publishing before attempting self-publishing. She also mentioned that publishing your first novel is rare, and that the best thing you can do for your future writing career is to always be writing a new book.

Robert J. Sawyer was up after Liza. With fresh copies of Locus in the winner’s hands, Robert took the opportunity to point out that his latest book, while having been well reviewed by Publisher’s Weekly and the Washington Post, was disliked by Locus. And while the book is doing extremely well, the reality is that someone will always dislike your work. He stressed that you should never write to please everyone because you never will. Your job, he says, is to identify what it is you do. You should know what your brand is as a writer, and write to please those people.

(6) WRITERS OF THE PRESENT. The bestselling authors are walking between the raindrops at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend.

Stan Lee kept dry.

Other ornaments to our genre were on hand.

No Scalzi food photo today, but it played an important part on the program.

He also found time to practice his starship hijacking skills, on a modest scale.

(7) BINDER FULL OF LETTERS. Doug Ellis shares a few more historic letters in his post “Otto Binder on H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard” at Black Gate.

In late December 1935, science fiction author Otto Binder moved from Chicago to NYC to represent Otis Adelbert Kline’s literary agency. Among the authors he represented for Kline’s agency was Robert E. Howard. Binder had been to NYC previously, in late June and early July 1935, with his friends Clifford Kornoelje (better known in SF circles as Jack Darrow) and Bill Dellenback.

As I’ve mentioned before, back in 2001 I bought a few boxes of correspondence from Darrow’s estate, including dozens of letters that Binder had written to Darrow over the course of many decades. In going through them last month, I pulled this one and thought I’d post it today.

Once in NYC, Otto quickly resumed his friendships with Mort Weisinger and Charles Hornig, and rapidly met more figures involved in the local science fiction community. Less than two weeks after he’d arrived, he was invited to a gathering at Frank Belknap Long’s place, which was held on Friday, January 3, 1936. Binder and Long were fellow Weird Tales authors, with Binder and his brother, Earl, having sold WT some stories under their Eando Binder penname.

Among the others at the party were Donald and Howard Wandrei, Kenneth Sterling and, most interestingly of all, H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft impressed Binder greatly, as he relates in this letter to Darrow dated January 12, 1936. That would have been some gathering to attend!

(8) HAMPUS, IS THAT YOU? Not a toll-free call! CNN has the story: “The Swedish Number: Random Swedes are waiting to hear from you”.

Are you there, Sweden? It’s us, the world.

To mark the 250th anniversary of Sweden’s abolition of censorship, the Swedish Tourist Association has launched a phone number connecting global callers with random Swedes.

Think Chatroulette meets the United Nations.

Sweden’s new ambassadors don’t receive any training and their time is voluntary. They simply download the Swedish Number app, register their number, and signal their availability by switching themselves on or off.

As for the cost of ringing up, it’s charged as an international call so check with your provider before chatting with your new Swedish buddies late into the night.

There have been nearly 14,000 calls since the service launched on April 6, with nearly a third coming from the U.S. and a fifth from Turkey.

(9) GAME MAKER YIELDS. Crave reports “Baldur’s Gate Developer States They Will Change Trans Character and Remove GamerGate Joke”.

After an inexplicable amount of press was placed upon their team by angry gamers, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear‘s developer Beamdog has stated that they will be altering the dialogue of transgender character Mizhena in a future update, along with removing a reference to GamerGate.

In the game, which is an expansion to the original Baldur’s Gate, there is a line of dialogue in which minor NPC Mizhena explains the origins of her name, revealing to the player that although being born a boy, she and her parents “came to understand [she] was truly a woman” later in life. This entire exchange, which is limited to four sentences, led to the game being bombarded with negative user reviews online, despite critical reviews of the game being positive. Another point of contention for its detractors was a line at the expense of GamerGate, in which popular character Minsc says “really, it’s all about ethics in heroic adventuring.”

(10) CARPENTER ON GALAKTIKA PAYMENT OFFER. Anna Grace Carpenter, who surfaced the story (“Galaktika Magazine: Theft on a Massive Scale”) expresses her views about Galaktika’s response in “Galaktika Magazine: By Way of Explanation”.

Let me pause for a moment and say that the offer of compensation is a step in the right direction. However, neither Mr. Burger or Mr. Németh have addressed the underlying issue.

This is a chronic and widespread issue of theft. It is not just the stories published in 2015 (of which there are many), but work that was published as far back as 2008….

This pattern is more than a lack of diligence or caution or speed on the part of the publishing staff at Galaktika. It is not an occasional oversight or misunderstanding of previous contracts. This is habitual theft.

Remember that the vast majority of these authors never submitted their work for consideration, there was no implication of giving their permission for the translation and publication of their stories in Galaktika. Rather, their work was copied from other, paying publications online without any attempt to contact the original publisher, editor or author, and then printed for profit in Galaktika. That is not a mistake, that is theft.

Cat Rambo, current president of SFWA, said she is still trying to obtain a copy of István Burger’s statement in English and there are still questions to be answered. (How soon can authors expect to receive payment? Will authors be able to request their work be pulled from Galaktika? Will Galaktika contact all those involved to arrange compensation or will they put the responsibility on the individual to contact them and make a claim?)

And the question remains, what will Mr. Burger and Mr. Németh do going forward?

(11) DRAGON AWARDS DISCUSSION CONTINUES.

Deby Fredericks on “The Dragon Awards” at Wyrmflight.

One of the distinctions I believe Dragon Con is trying to make, is that the existing prestigious awards are decided by a limited number of people — a jury, members of a particular convention or group — while the Dragon Awards will be nominated and voted by all fans. This sounds fair and noble, but I’m remembering that time when DC let fans vote on whether Robin should be killed by the Joker. They were aghast that fans wanted Robin dead. Was the outcome fair? Perhaps. But was it noble?

Already, some in the community responsible for the Hugo Awards Kerfluffle have been heard to gloat that now they will win because no bunch of snobs can vote them down. As you probably can tell, I’m a little tired of hearing privileged majorities play the dismartyrdom card. We’ll all find out in time.

I don’t necessarily agree that SF/media/everything needs another set of awards. However, I do believe Dragon Con is a large enough and inclusive enough organization to credibly present such an award. It will be interesting to see the outcome, and where it aligns or doesn’t align with the other awards.

Brian K. Lowe posted about “The Dragon Awards” at Graffiti on the Walls of Time.

“Another trophy,” you say, possibly enthusiastically, perhaps dismissively, maybe with a touch of boredom. Or maybe you say it with an appraising tone, as do we authors who think, “Hey, there’s another award I can aspire to (and probably never win)…” Regardless of your personal reaction, the awards are here and presumably they’re going to stick around a while. (America’s thirst for awards ceremonies is almost as impossible to slake as its thirst for reality shows, or sleazy political drama. If it ain’t a competition, we’re not interested.)

All of these reactions are quite understandable. What I don’t understand is those who believe that this development somehow spells trouble for the Hugo Awards given out every year by the aforementioned Worldcon.

Cirsova takes the whole thing rather less than completely seriously in “Genrefication and Dragon Awards”.

This isn’t a victory, unless your aim is creating genre ghettos.

In response, I propose an alternative.  If I ever get the reach to make such an endeavor feasible, I will give you the Brackett Awards:

  • Categories will include, but are not limited to, in Long and Short Form:
  • Best Space Princess/Classiest Dame
  • Most Dashing Swordsman/Gunman
  • Creepiest Monster/Alien
  • Most Exotic/Erotic Xeno-hominid
  • Best Explosion
  • Coolest Spaceship
  • Best Empire (domineering, crumbling or otherwise)

Will these categories end up punishing certain books under the SFF umbrella?  Probably, but not the most awesome ones.

Ian Mond says live and let live at Hysterical Hamster.

And a day or so ago Dragon Con launched its own genre awards.  To reflect the size of the con there’s about fifty billion categories ranging from best Apocalyptic fiction (my personal favourite) to Best episode in a continuing science fiction or fantasy series, TV or internet (take a deep breath).  I don’t begrudge any organisation, individual or entity organising and administering their own awards.  More power to them.  Personally though, I think I’ll give this one a miss.

Martin C. Wilsey’s sentiments about “The Dragon Awards” are shorter but not as sweet.

Well it was bound to happen. The Hugo Awards process corruption scandal has finally led to the inevitable conclusion. A new award that has fairness baked in. The Dragon Awards.

–Let’s hope that this award is all about quality of the fiction.

(12) RECAP. I don’t watch Sleepy Hollow so it’s hard to explain how I got sucked into reading this spoiler-filled recap of the final episode. This paragraph will give you the gist of what SciFi4Me felt about it:

Bloody Hell. I don’t know what they are thinking. And I don’t know how a show based on such a flimsy premise could jump the shark, but they did.

(13) DEAN KAMEN. The inventor of the Segway is the son of E.C. Comics’ Jack Kamen. Read about “Inventor Dean Kamen’s Big Ideas” in the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Kamen, 65, is known for coming up with the Segway (the two-wheeled electric vehicle), the iBot (a stair-climbing wheelchair) and a portable dialysis machine. He considers the First Robotics Competition, now in its 25th season, one of his best ideas yet…

In the competition, teams of students have six weeks to build a robot from scratch. The robots must then complete various tasks, working in teams. In this year’s challenge, they have to get through their opponents’ fortifications and take over territory in a space set up to look like a medieval battlefield with castles and towers. More than 400,000 students are competing this year, up from about 100 in 1992. “More and more, kids are starting to see that technology is cool. It’s not for nerds,” he says.

Mr. Kamen grew up a self-described nerd in New York’s Long Island, the son of a comic-book illustrator and a teacher. His engineering career started early; in high school, he earned more than $50,000 a year for designing and installing light and sound systems for musicians and museums.

Mr. Kamen, who is unmarried and doesn’t have children, spends most of his time working. “I get up in the morning, and I start working, then I keep working until I can’t work anymore, then I fall asleep,” he says. His idea of a vacation is going from one project to another when he’s stuck.

(14) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • April 9, 1833: First tax-supported U.S. public library founded, Peterborough, New Hampshire
  • April 9, 1959: NASA introduced first seven astronauts to press.

(15) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born April 9, 1926 – Hugh Hefner.

(16) KEEPING THE HARD IN HADRON. Ladies and gentlemen, the LEGO Particle Accelerator! JK Brickworks says —

This is a working particle accelerator built using LEGO bricks. I call it the LBC (Large Brick Collider). It can accelerate a LEGO soccer ball to just over 12.5 kilometers per hour.

 

(17) A CASE OF PHYSLEXIA. As most of you already guessed, I picked the previous item’s headnote because it references a typo that made news this week.

The BBC get overexcited by the world’s largest atom smasher.

 

(18) ATARI FLASHBACK. RPF Pulse brings us “The Art of ATARI Book Preview Images”.

Co-written by Robert V. Conte and Tim Lapetino, The Art of Atari includes a comprehensive retrospective collecting game production and concept artwork, photos, marketing art, with insight from key people involved in Atari’s rich history, and behind-the-scenes details on how dozens of games featured within were conceived, illustrated, approved (or rejected), and brought to life!

Includes a special Foreword by New York Times bestseller Ernst Cline, author of Armada and Ready Player One, soon to be a motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg.

Atari is a touchstone for many people. Their games and game system exposed many to video games for the first time. Whether you’re a fan, collector, enthusiast, or new to the world of Atari, this book offers the most complete collection of Atari artwork ever produced!

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ,and Soon Lee for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]