26 Time Flies Like A Pixel, Fruit Files Like A Scroll

Posted on May 20, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) HALF POUND OF THE RINGS. BBC celebrates the “‘Precious’ features of 50p marking Lord of the Rings film anniversary”. (Subscription required for readers outside UK.)

The one ring coin is the first of seven commemorative Lord of the Rings coins to be released in the next three years

A new coin marking 25 years since Peter Jackson’s first Lord of the Rings film has some “precious” features, including a golden “one ring”, Elvish script and an all-seeing Eye of Sauron “emerging” from its centre.

“Forged not in the fires of Mount Doom but in Wales,” said the Royal Mint in Llantrisant, Rhondda Cynon Taf, of its tribute to the Academy Award-winning film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

It called the design, which allows the eye of the JRR Tolkien villain Sauron to be seen on some of the 50p collectables, “a UK coinage first”.

The Royal Mint said it will release seven coins in the series, marking the 25th anniversaries of the second and third films.

“It’s the kind of craftsmanship even the Elves of Rivendell would admire,” the Royal Mint added….

… A selection of the 50p coins will also include what the Royal Mint called a “groundbreaking caustic feature”.

“When light strikes the surface of the coin,” it said, “a hidden image is revealed, the all-seeing eye of Sauron, emerging from the negative space at the centre of the Ring…

(2) INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE. A non-genre work, “’Taiwan Travelogue’ Wins International Booker Prize”. Publishers Weekly has details.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, was announced as the winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize during a ceremony at Tate Modern in London on Tuesday night.

The book is the first translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the prize, and its U.K. publisher, Sheffield-based independent press And Other Stories, is the first publisher to win the award in consecutive years, following its 2025 win with Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi.

The book was first published in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s Golden Tripod Award, the country’s highest literary honor. Lin King’s English translation, published in the U.S. by Graywolf Press, won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024. King is the first Taiwanese-American translator to win the International Booker, and Yáng is the first Taiwanese author to take the prize. The £50,000 award is split equally between author and translator.

The book masquerades as the translation of a rediscovered 1938 travel memoir by a Japanese writer on a culinary tour through occupied Taiwan, accompanied by a local interpreter, who shares a similar name and serves as a cook, guide, and romantic interest. The structure of the book is metafictional, offering an introduction and numerous afterwords, all of which PW’s review said added up to a “dizzying” and “alluring” work….

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to savor Singapore Vermicelli with Charles Stross in Episode 282 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Charles Stross, an 18-time Hugo Award-nominated writer who’s won three times for his novellas. I’ve been reading him for nearly four decades, ever since his first Interzone short story publication in 1987, but he really blew me away with his 2001 Asimov’s novelette “Lobsters,” which seems to have made an impression on the rest of the world as well, for it went on to become the first of his stories to be nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula.

He’s also won Locus Awards for both Best Novel and Best Novella, and has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His novels have also won the Kurd Lasswitz and Italia Awards. The Regicide Report, the final book in his Laundry Files series, was released in January. His other series include Merchant Princess and the Singularity. Plus he’s got a whole new series in the works, one for which I got an advance peek, and you’ll hear us talk all about it in the conversation which follows.

We discussed the twelve “novel-shaped objects” he wrote before making his first professional sale, what changed in his life which meant instead of taking three years to write one novel he could write three novels in one year, why back at the beginning of his career he considered himself the “failure to launch” of the Interzone generation of writers (and how that changed), how to best take the temperature of critique group criticism, why it was time to wrap up his Laundry Files series (and who he had to become in order to be able to write that finale), the way the opening sentence of an as yet unfinished novel became the seed for a new series in progress, how his love for Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat novels ties into his next project, the evolving nature of convention-going for long-time attendees, and much more.

(4) NEW SOURCES. Jason Collins tells SFWA Planetside readers about “Unearthing Timbuktu’s Legacy: Using West African Manuscripts in SFF Worldbuilding”.

…Today, writers in the science fiction and fantasy genre should thank all those who worked to preserve the great works of Timbuktu, as many of these West African manuscripts could be the blueprints for new imaginative tales.

These manuscripts reveal that African civilizations were theorizing law, cosmology, and ethics concurrently with European traditions. They also depict worlds where spirituality and science coexisted rather than collided and where libraries served as political and moral centers of society.

Drawing from Timbuktu’s archives is to engage with an alternative intellectual lineage that redefines what “ancient knowledge” might look like in speculative fiction. The desert city was built on scholarship, where the true currency was knowledge and where literacy was a civic duty and a spiritual pursuit. With Timbuktu’s manuscripts, a talented speculative writer can build societies that think, argue, and evolve on their own terms, not according to what’s already well established in the genre….

…By leaning on Timbuktu’s knowledge, a writer could create an expansive society that bucks the norm, where might is not reliant on a sword, and a book of star maps is as prized as the business end of a blade. Where scholars wield influence through their mastery of astronomy and jurisprudence. Writers could go so far as to replace knights and castles with mathematicians and libraries who strive for a just cause, shifting the emotional center of a story from conquest to inquiry.

The manuscripts themselves suggest near-endless narrative possibilities that reach beyond how a world could look. They feature astronomical treatises that map lunar cycles, medical texts with herbal remedies, and legal and ethical writings. This could guide a writer to imagine a world in which priests measure destiny through planetary alignments, healers blend faith and science with a touch of magic, or a civilization develops a justice system that is as complex as their speculative world. The opportunities are endless….

(5) PROPOSED COMPENSATION FOR PUBLISHER FAILURE. “Authors Guild Calls For Info on Books Without Copyright Registration” reports Publishes Lunch.

The Authors Guild is soliciting information from any author whose publisher did not register their book’s copyright, “and that they believe they were excluded from the Bartz v. Anthropic class action settlement because of that.” The AG wants to “assess the scope of the issue,” ceo Mary Rasenberger said, and encourage authors to look at their contracts to see if publishers were required to register, and in what timeframe. Some contract language only indicates that the publisher “may” register the copyright, while other boilerplates more clearly state that the publisher “shall” register.

“We think that publishers should pay authors $1500 for each title published before upload dates of July 2021 or August 2022 that were not registered but where the contracts required registration,” Rasenberger said. (That is approximately half of the roughly $3,000 per title that the Anthropic settlement is expected to pay out, after deducting lawyers fees—which still requires the judge’s final view and approval.) “We think that is the fair thing to do whether or not we know for sure that the books were uploaded.”

To date, Macmillan is the only publisher that has agreed to reimburse any author who was excluded from the Anthropic settlement because their copyright was unregistered, and fix the workflow that allowed the gaps to happen.

(6) CANNED WRITER. Gizmodo has heard that “Damon Lindelof Equates His ‘Star Wars’ Firing to the Franchise’s Biggest Issue”.

Even with a new Star Wars movie opening in theaters this week, the future of the franchise is very much up in the air. Three years after announcing three different films at Star Wars Celebration in 2023, none of them have seen any significant public movement. Odder yet, the two movies that have progressed are completely unrelated. So what’s the deal? Someone who was there, on the inside, has an idea, and it may be why he’s no longer on the inside.

Damon Lindelof, one of the writers behind Lost, Watchmen, the upcoming Lanterns, and more, was recently on House of R to talk about this week’s The Mandalorian and Grogu as well as Star Wars as a whole. Eventually, Lindelof felt the need to address “the bantha in the room,” which was the fact that he was fired from a Star Wars movie. That movie, which would’ve been directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, was believed to be an early iteration of a Rey-centric New Jedi Order story set after the events of The Rise of Skywalker.

“They asked me, ‘What do you think a Star Wars movie should be?’ And I said, ‘Here’s what it should be.’ And they said, ‘Great, you’re hired.’ And then two years later, I was fired. And so I was wrong. At least through that prism,” Lindelof said. “What we were attempting to do, my partner Justin Britt-Gibson and Rayna McClendon and I, was to have this conversation [that he was currently having on the podcast] in the movie, which is to say there is a force of nostalgia and there is a force of revision and and they are at odds with one another and let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars and and it didn’t work. […] The conversation that the fandom is having without winking and looking at the audience… that didn’t feel necessarily that risky.”

The issue, according to Lindelof, is that there was no clear vision of the movie’s purpose, which slowed things down considerably. So he thinks that had more to do with his firing than anything else.

“I may have been fired, they seem to like the premise, just the writing was really hard. It was slow. The tone. Getting it right. Where it was inside of the canon? What its relationship was with to Episode IX? Is it starting a new trilogy? All of those things. They’re so massive. They’re so big. It’s sort of the tanker equation which is you turn the wheel and it takes 5 minutes before it turns a little bit like this,” he said….

(7) VERDICTS ON SHORT SFF. C. Wolf weighs the fiction in a recent semiprozine: “Short Fiction Review: Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue 457” at Item 202. Here’s an excerpt:

“Slayer of Dreams” by Auston Habershaw [12520 words]

In the city of Avissos, the Onierarch, or Dream Tyrant, taxes the dreams of its citizens whether asleep or awake. By day the city exists solely to witness glorious arena battles between champions and gorgons – monsters of fire and steel. The barbarian witch Katatha returns to the city for revenge, years after escaping enslavement by the Dream Tyrant. She intends to use the city’s greatest champion, Hargeas, as her tool against her enemy in hopes of freeing the people of the city from its grasp.

Habershaw is a sturdy and seasoned SFF author, and this shows in both the elements of his worldbuilding and steadily rising tension of the narrative. Grotesque details like the shape-changing, fire-spitting gorgons; the creepy way the Onierarch puppets its adherents; the bottles of “champion sweat” people hang around their necks or on doorframes as talismans. Ultimately, I couldn’t decide if I wanted the piece to be longer or shorter, to revel in its minutia or tell a tighter, terser story. Perhaps it falls just short of balancing the two. Otherwise, a solid and imaginative tale.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

May 20, 1928 — Shirley Rousseau Murphy. (Died 2022.)

Now we come to a woman who wrote about cats who talked and understood human speech, Shirley Rousseau Murphy. How could I resist such a writer? Certainly the Pixels wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t celebrate her, would they?

The series that I’m interested is the Joe Grey series which involves a number of felines in a small coastal California town with a thriving tourist trade who develop the rather unusual ability not only to understand human speech but to talk it as well. No, it’s not explained, nor should it be. It is just is as all such things should be.

In first novel, Cat on the Edge, Joe Grey, our central feline and mostly the narrator here and in all of the novels, is the only witness to a murder. As the author says on her website, “Escaping the killer, he becomes the hunted, and he’s one scared tomcat–until he meets green-eyed Dulcie, a charmer with talents to match his own.” He also discovers shortly there’s the aforementioned talents. Weirded out at first, he’s delighted eventually.

The writing here is better than just decent with some quite unexpected plot developments that add considerable depth to the story. Joe Grey as a cat seems a feline in his behavior, the setting is charming and makes sense, and the mysteries are reasonably good though I wouldn’t call them particularly deep. I should admit I find that true of nearly every mystery I read. If characters are interesting, the plot fascinating and the setting well crafted, I don’t care that the mystery is slight at best, which they more often than not are.

It obviously sold well as there were twenty-one novels before she stopped with the last, Cat Chase the Moon, published after her death. A novella, Cat Chase the Moon, which I think is a prequel also has been published only by the usual suspects.

So all of these novels in this series I suspect based on listening to the first eight and a number of the latter to date are all like any series of this sort such that you could read any or all of them and be entertained by what you read. Is there an explicit order to them? No idea though I do know the last one does wrap up the series.

She has a number of other works, none of which I’ve read.

The Fontana Duology is a paranormal series involving Satan Himself with cats again prominently involved based on the really cute orange tabbies on both covers, and also the titles are The Cat, the Devil, and Lee Fontana and The Cat, the Devil, the Last Escape.

Tired of cats yet? You’re out of luck if you are as she wrote went on to pen The Catswold Portal where a young girl could transform herself into, oh guess. She actually notes on her website that she describes each cat in detail so this is a small calico.

Ok, I promise no more cats, so finally I’ll stop with dragons that I consider to be akin to cats. I really do. They probably like having their bellies tickled. Carefully.

The Dragonbards trilogy which has as its story a sleeping dragon who awakens only to find her beloved land ruled by an evil despot and the only one who can save is a bard who is not be found. It’s a YA series that got very, very good reviews.

Well I should say that she did unicorn fiction as well. Her story is “Starhorn” which is found in The Unicorn Treasure which she edited in the hardcover first edition from Doubleday cover art and illustrations by Tim Hildebrandt.

(I am not looking at her children’s fiction which would take many more paragraphs. Really it would. And there’s horses there.)

Cats, dragons, unicorns. Is that the Holy Trinity of fantasy fiction? If not, it should be.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Free Range makes reading sound like flying, in a way.
Speed Bump has an inside publishing joke.
The Argyle Sweater shows the advantage of a large customer base.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal sets off alarms.

Tom Gauld plays with an idea that reminds me of Valente’s Space Opera.

(10) GERROLD CONTRIBUTES TO TREK 60TH COMIC. “Star Trek 60th Anniversary Comic To Feature 10 Stories; Writers Include Mike McMahan And David Gerrold” reports TrekMovie.com.

This year, IDW has been celebrating the 60th anniversary of Star Trek with new series and one-shots, and we just got details on the jam-packed anniversary special comic they have planned for September. The super-sized one-shot will have a total of ten stories from across the franchise with a star-studded lineup that includes Star Trek: Lower Decks creator Mike McMahan and TOS writer David Gerrold. We have the full lineup and lots of covers for the special comic…

(11) MURDER IN STYLE. Camestros Felapton’s robot series arrives at “RF:Ph04:Ch63: Doctor Who and The Robots of Death”.

…In the story [The Robots of Death], The Doctor (Tom Baker) and his new companion Leela (Louise Jameson) arrive via the Tardis on board a giant futuristic sand mining vehicle. They quickly become embroiled in a murder mystery in which the crew of the sand miner are murdered one by one.

If you haven’t seen it then “crew of the sand miner” is accurate but misleading. This is not a story with the aesthetics of Alien. When we are introduced to the crew they are lounging around and the interior of the sand miner is more like the BBC’s attempt at a futuristic hotel. All of the human crew wear fabulous outfits, and several of them have large headpieces. Commander Uvanov has a particularly notable headress that is sort of like an art-deco bishops mitre. They all have complex face make up, and the implication is they are the product of a decadent society.

So if the crew are not coded as working class miners, who is? The clue is in the title. The sand miner is run by robots, and these robots are absolutely gorgeous. They are such a clever design, that it is astonishing they were just used for this one serial. The people playing the robots are dressed in metallic padded clothing which is suggestive of a servants uniform. What really makes the design is the full head mask, which is a metallic face in a kind of sculpted style. The back of the head is covered in a similar scultped design intended to suggest stylised hair in stacked waves. The faces and clothing style of all the robots are the same but they come in different colours…

(12) STALK AROUND THE CLOCK. BFI wants you to know about “10 great Japanese time-travel films”.

At the 48th edition of the Japan Academy Film Prize (also known as the Japanese Academy Awards), the big winner was A Samurai in Time (2023) from writer-director Jun’ichi Yasuda, which picked up best film. The low-budget feature has not only been a major awards triumph in Japan but a financial one too, passing the 1 billion yen mark at the domestic box office. Yasuda’s movie is an indie success story, but it’s also just one recent example of inspiration and innovation concerning the device at the film’s centre: time travel.

With animated blockbusters like Your Name (2016) and Mirai (2018) and a wave of independent films making a splash at home and internationally, Japanese filmmakers across the last decade, in particular, have made commercial and critical hits out of creative approaches to time travel – whether their characters are people stuck in time loops, separated romantics trying to reach each other across timelines, or a child meeting past and future versions of his family.

If you go back through the decades (without the need for a time machine), Japan has long delivered some of the more fascinating, technically ambitious and thrilling time-travel stories, across very different genres. The particular mode of A Samurai in Time is a fish-out-of-water comedy that successfully swerves into existential drama, as an Edo period samurai is struck by lightning and transported to mid-2000s Japan, finding work as a stunt performer in TV dramas depicting the era from which he came….

Here’s one example:

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020)

Director: Junta Yamaguchi

The second film on this list written by Makoto Ueda, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes has proved one of the major Japanese indie success stories of recent years. Part of that is due to the microgenre it belongs to, alongside fellow cult sensation One Cut of the Dead (2017): nagamawashi films, in which the entire story is seemingly filmed in one single, unbroken shot – appropriately enough for a time-travel tale, you’d have to revisit Junta Yamaguchi’s movie multiple times to pinpoint the barely perceptible cuts.

Filmed over just seven nights, this intricate, lively comedy sees a café worker, Kato (Kazunari Tosa), discover that the PC monitor in his bedroom is projecting a video transmission from himself in the future, but only two minutes ahead and seemingly from the café TV downstairs. In investigating, Kato unwittingly performs actions described by his future self, and soon recruits his clueless colleagues to try stretching how far forward they can view the café’s upcoming events.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended has the corrected script ready: “How Super Mario Galaxy Should Have Ended”.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/12/26 The Scrolls Are Afile With A Round Of Pixels

Posted on May 12, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) AI BEST PRACTICES FOR WRITERS. “Authors Guild Issues Updated AI Best Practices for Writers” reports Publishers Weekly. (Here is the direct link to The Authors Guild’s “AI Best Practices for Authors”.)

As questions continue to swirl around how to ethically and legally use AI in the writing and publishing of books, the Authors Guild has updated its guidance to help authors better navigate the changing landscape.

The revised guidelines feature two new sections that break down the specific legal and professional risks writers should be aware of when using AI tools, along with a framework for understanding that not all AI use raises the same concerns, according to the announcement released by the Guild.

The Guild first published best practices for AI use by writers in February 2024. The newly updated best practices—the result of conversations with many writers and deliberations by the Authors Guild Council—”seek to add some context and clarity around the best practices and are provided in response to the many inquiries we have received around AI issues,” the Guild writes in its “AI Best Practices for Writers” advisory, adding “these are guidelines, not rules.”

The revised guidelines are broken down into four short sections: Guiding Principles; Risks to Be Aware of When Using AI; Categories of Use; and Recommended Best Practices.

In its Best Practices section, the Guild, which has been very active in backing legal action where it believes AI companies are engaged in copyright infringement, notes “that every major commercially available large language model has been trained on books and other writing without the authors’ permission, compensation or control over the downstream use.”

Among the most important legal issues authors need to consider are that “AI-generated text is not copyrightable, and knowingly failing to disclose AI-generated content in a copyright registration application can constitute fraud on the Copyright Office.” The Guild also warns that “many book contracts also include warranties that the manuscript is the author’s original work, meaning undisclosed inclusion of AI-generated text may put a writer in breach.”….

(2) NIBBIES. The British Book Awards (“Nibbies”) have announced their Science Fiction & Fantasy Winner 2026. These awards are a bit different from most reported by File 770. Literary merit is just one of three criteria for winning.

The Book of the Year Awards are unique in that they reward authors, illustrators, and the wider team behind a book’s journey. The three criteria our judges consider are:

Literary merit
Sales success
Publishing excellence

Here is the SFF winner, and the reasons given for its triumph:

Alchemised

Sen Lin Yu

MICHAEL JOSEPH

SenLinYu’s dark fantasy Alchemised is the inaugural winner of this category. The novel’s intricate worldbuilding, unique magic system and devastating plot made it a standout read for the judges. “What Sen has accomplished in this one book is phenomenal,” said one. “A true feat of the imagination,” stated another, adding that it was “deeply moving, haunting and gripping”.

Penguin Michael Joseph’s sensitive and impactful campaign created a “unique” strategy that “helped build incredible hype” for the book, without spoilers. No proofs were offered to the public; instead, the team held a secret influencer event where the first chapter was revealed. The buzz continued to build. Michael Joseph organised 15 authorless events to mark publication and followed it with a sold-out post-publication tour. Alchemised made history as the fastest-selling UK debut ever and became the imprint’s biggest fiction hardback. “Clever publishing” paired with a “truly gifted storyteller” put Alchemised on top.

(3) TELL TCHAIKOVSKY THE NEWS. It’s Hugo time, so Rich Horton is catching up on the novels he didn’t read yet. Here’s his review of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shroud: “Hugo Shortlist Review: Dark Communication”.

… After an ecological disaster has largely ruined Earth, humans survive as part of “Concerns”, which send slower than light starships to planets, largely for resource extraction, though occasionally longer term colonies are established. The narrator, Juna Ceelander, has been awakened from hibernation to serve with the Special Projects team trying to understand Shroud, a greater than Earth-sized Moon of a gas giant in the Prospector413 system. Drones sent to the very dark and cold surface of the moon reveal some very strange things, including what seems to be life. They prepare “pods” to potentially send humans down in — and before they are quite ready, an accident results in two of the pods crashlanding on Shroud….

(4) EASTERCON CONTINUED. The next installment of Cora Buhlert’s epic Eastercon report has posted: “Cora’s Adventures at Iridescence, the 2026 Eastercon in Birmingham, Part 2: Good Friday at the Con”. It includes anecdotes about all the interesting people she met while volunteering at the Brisbane in ’28 table.

…Once I had my badge, I went up to my room again to pick up the bag with all the chocolate I’d brought to give away at the Brisbane in 2028 Worldcon bid fan table, since I didn’t want to lug the bag to breakfast. Then I went in search of the dealers room and the Brisbane in 2028 fan table….

…I did get a few people stopping by the table, including Dutch fan and conrunner Paul Van Ark, who actually went on unofficially helping us out at the various Worldcon bid tables, handing out flyers, postcards, ribbons, etc… Paul told me that he actually attended Heicon ’70, the 1970 Worldcon in Heidelberg, Germany, and still has lots of photos, which would have been useful when I compiled my Heicon ’70 report for Galactic Journey. Later that weekend, I also met a Scottish fan who’d attended Heicon ’70 as well, bringing my tally of Heicon ’70 members I’ve met up to four (the two I met at Eastercon plus Robert Silverberg and Betsy Wollheim). Supposedly, there was a third Heicon ’70 member at Iridescence, but I didn’t meet them….

Cora Buhlert, in a She-Ra shirt, representing the Brisbane in 2028 Worldcon bid, Farah Mendlesohn, representing Brisbane and the Edmonton in 2030 Worldcon bid, Carolina Gomez-Lagerlöf, representing the Montreal Worldcon in 2017 and the Nuremberg in 2028 Worldcon bid, Amanda Wakaruk, co-chair of the Edmonton in 2030 Worldcon bid, Florian Bailey, co-chair of the Nuremberg in 2028 Worldcon bid and Tammy Coxen, representing the Nuremberg in 2028 and Edmonton in 2030 Worldcon bids.

(5) COSTUME DESIGN BCE. “Christopher Nolan Defends ‘The Odyssey’ Armor and Casting Travis Scott” in Variety.

…In a series of interviews with Time magazine, Nolan and his creative team opened up about the making of “The Odyssey” and addressed the wave of online criticism regarding the armor of his warriors, which many online felt resembled Batman’s more modern-looking Batsuit.

“There are Mycenaean daggers that are blackened bronze,” Nolan said. “The theory is they probably could have blackened bronze in those days. You take bronze, you add more gold and silver to it and then use sulfur… With Agamemnon, Ellen [Mirojnick], our costume designer, is trying to communicate how elevated he is relative to everyone else. You do that through materials that would be very expensive.”…

(6) BOMBS AWAY. The New Yorker takes us to a museum exhibit devoted to “The Anatomy of a Failure”. (Behind a paywall.)

“Why not come up with a condom that fits the man, rather than vice versa?” a German entrepreneur named Jan Vinzenz Krause once asked. His solution, the spray-on condom, which involves coating a penis with liquid latex, made it to the prototype stage only to encounter a fatal problem: the latex took up to three minutes to fully dry. Pfffffft. This is just one among hundreds of cautionary case studies awaiting visitors to “Flops?!,” an exhibition at Paris’s Musée des Arts et Métiers focussing on the “failure, bust, bomb, fiasco, debacle.” Behold the V-shaped keyboard, the hydrogen helicopter, the roller-skating Barbie that sets the rug on fire.

“We thought it would be interesting to show that which we never show,” Marjolaine Schuch, who co-curated “Flops?!,” explained recently. “All the stuff that gets shoved under the carpet.” The show originated at a design museum in Saint-Étienne; Musée des Arts et Métiers has supplemented it with lemons from its permanent collection, such as the ten-hour decimal-time clock, used during the French Revolution.”….

…“In France, we never talk about these steps, this groundwork, these impasses,” Schuch said. “This was an opportunity to demystify and de-dramatize failure, this idea that making a mistake is something rather serious from which one doesn’t necessarily recover.”

Not every downfall has an upside, as early adopters of Tho-Radia, a line of thorium- and radium-based face creams, promoted by Dr. Alfred Curie—no relation to Marie—soon learned. And then there’s London’s “Walkie-Talkie” building: a skyscraper whose convex shape caught the sun like a magnifying glass, melting cars. In addition to such “dangerous flops,” the exhibit features inventions that fizzled because they were expensive and unnecessary (the Juicero juicing machine), poorly designed (the Vasa, a Swedish warship that sunk on its maiden voyage), or simply ahead of their time (La Jamais Contente, a speedy electric car that came out in 1899). “Everybody forgets that electric vehicles were invented at the same time as combustion-powered vehicles,” Schuch said. A case nearby contained an old Michelin guide, listing charging stations in every city.”…

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge]

Suzy McKee Charnas’ “Beauty and the Opéra or the Phantom Beast” (1989)

Suzy McKee Charnas was one of our most amazing writers. She would win a Hugo at ConFiction for her “Boobs” short story, and more than a handful of other awards.

So this Scroll we have her “Beauty and the Opéra or the Phantom Beast”, a story first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in their July 1989 issue.

If you’re looking to read it now, it’s in her Stagestruck Vampires & Other Phantasms collection published by Tachyon. It’s got eleven of her eighteen short fiction works. And yes, it’s available from the usual suspects.

And now get ready for a most metafictional Beginning. I really mean that…

As of this writing, I have not had the pleasure of meeting Suzy McKee Charnas face to face. She lives in the sunny desert paradise of Albuquerque (or, as Homer Simpson once charmingly and perhaps fittingly referred to it, “I’ll be quirky”), while I inhabit the benighted non-Euclidean warrens of Providence. I suspect that one day sooner or later we will meet, given the melting-pot allure of the science-fiction and fantasy convention circuit, and I fully expect that encounter to be a pleasant one, with its share of mutual surprises and confirmations. But right now, despite a lack of non-virtual time together, I still feel I can describe Ms. Charnas to you well enough that you’ll be able to recognize her, should you chance to bump into her.

Suzy McKee Charnas is a human-sized sentient female lizard named Walter Drake who boasts a human lover.

She is a lonely tarot-card expert named Edie, charged with shepherding a child messiah through peril. She is a nervous housewife named Fran who is obsessed with a strange circle of mushrooms on her lawn.

She is a young girl nicknamed “Boobs” Bornstein who finds herself transformed into a vengeful supernatural entity.

She is a misshapen recluse living beneath the Paris Opéra house with an abducted child bride. She is a middle-aged psychiatrist named Floria who finds herself forming a fatal identification with a patient named Dr. Weyland, a man who believes he is a vampire.

And perhaps most vividly, she is Dr. Weyland himself, immortal, anguished, jaded, violent, a curse to humanity and his own peace of mind.

But wait, I hear you protest: these are only Charnas’s characters, not her true self. Charnas is the historically locatable woman who debuted in the SF world some thirty years ago, with her excellent post-apocalypse novel Walk to the End of the World (later followed by three sequels). She’s the writer who’s won a Hugo and a Nebula and a Mythopoeic Society Award, the one who has had successes in the theater. That’s the gal we need you, as introducer, to describe.

Well, I reply, if your interest is that shallow, I imagine you can find pictures of Charnas easily enough, on her various dustjackets or with the help of Google. But those photos won’t help you identify what’s really unique and important, the inner essence of Charnas, the soul-glow that will allow you to spot her amidst a mob much more readily than by knowing mere tilt of head or jut of jaw, curve of lip or wrinkle of brow. No, those inner qualities are only apprehendable by diving into her stories and getting acquainted with her characters. For what is an author if not the composite of those she chooses to write about?

David Gerrold, Ursula K. Le Guin and Suzy McKee Charnas. Photo used by permission.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Jerry King invented a new time machine.
Mother Goose and Grimm has an unexpected reason for a refund.
Savage Chickens shares bot poetry.
Speckticles has something at stake.
Wondermark keeps analyzing.
xkcd tries a new form of energy.

(9) COMMEMORATING JACK KIRBY. “Jack Kirby Was a Kid From the Lower East Side Who Became the ‘King of Comics’ and Made Superhero Mythology. Now, New York City Has Named a Street After Him” at Smithsonian Magazine.

At the corner of Delancey and Essex Streets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a new sign will read: “Jack Kirby Way.” This is where the comic book legend was born Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917. As a child, he lived in a tenement building, growing up in a neighborhood that was once among the most densely populated on Earth.

He went on to become Jack Kirby, artist and co-creator alongside the likes of Joe Simon, Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Don Heck, who helped give the world Marvel heroes such as Captain America, Black Panther, X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor and Iron Man. He also designed many characters and concepts beyond superheroes.

“He had a once-in-a-generation talent and ability to capture anything in his mind, from abstract cosmic deities and explosive super heroic battles to more relatable, yet powerful, character moments, and breathe life into them on every page,” says Dan Buckley, head of Marvel Comics and Franchise, in an email. “His designs and vision of how to tell a story are a foundational part of our legacy.”…

(10) HOW LONG DO TECHNOLOGICAL CIVILISATIONS EXIST IN OUR GALAXY? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The search for extra terrestrial intelligence is definitely genre-adjacent. In the Drake Equation the number of technological civilisations in our Galaxy is proportional to the average longevity of the said technological civilisations: civilisations in the Galaxy rise and fall but the longer they spend in existence means that there are more existing in our Galaxy at any one time. This brings us on to a new flying-a-kite paper…

The physicist Sabine Hossenfelder over at her YouTube Channel has been looking at the paper being published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In it, the two researchers argue that argue that under ‘optimistic’ assumptions about the probability of life and intelligence emerging on Earth-like planets, the absence of contact with extraterrestrial civilisations imposes limits on their lifespan. They note that our current light cone encompasses the entire Galactic history over the past roughly 100,000 years, making the lack of detected signals particularly puzzling for long-lived civilisations. That any technological civilization that broadcast electromagnetic signals anywhere in the Galaxy within the last 100,000 years should, in principle, have those signals reaching us now. The absence of detected artificial signals despite decades of SETI searches and all-sky surveys therefore imposes particularly strong constraints on the prevalence and longevity of technological civilisations.

They then take a fairly reasonable set of assumptions (they say ‘optimistic’ assumptions) and plug these into the Drake equation, do a bit of standard algebra and add in some other assumptions (such as exploring the Galaxy at 10% of light speed) and off they go.

Their conclusion that for Earth not to have been visited in 200,000 years of modern human biological existence, means that the longevity of alien civilisations can only be less than 5,000 years (which in turn means they would have only explored 500 light years from their home star in our 100,000+ light year diameter galaxy).

Their estimate of average technological civilisation life-span of less than 5,000 years is a tad depressing.

Sabine Hossenfelder in her recent video critiques the paper on the grounds that the paper assumes that we would detect aliens interstellar electromagnetic (radio and so forth) signals but she figures that they would use some other communications method of which we are unaware.

As it happens, elsewhere Sabine has nailed her colours to the mast saying that she believes that instantaneous communication is possible – in effect the Le Guin ansible (Dave Langford says, ‘Hi’). You can see her older video on this here and Steven French over at SF² Concatenation has pointed out that Sabine’s view does not follow the current science orthodoxy and that physicists are currently limited as to what they can test in this area.

My own criticism of the new paper is more fundamental than Sabine’s. The paper says ‘our current light cone encompasses the entire Galactic history over the past roughly 105 years, making the lack of detected signals particularly puzzling for long-lived civilisations. And this misses the point…

Yes, we have been doing modern astronomy for a century or so, but we have not been looking that hard. SETI projects have so far – in terms of volume of space and electromagnetic frequencies analysed – searched less than one fifteen-millionth of our own Milky Way galaxy. That’s not a lot.

My other issue is with current SETI technology. As it stands for a civilisation similar as ours unintentional leakage from everyday radio/TV is weak and would likely only be detectable to us within a few light-years (less than 10). Conversely Planetary Radar (e.g., Arecibo-type) are better: these are the most detectable. A similar civilisation could detect our strongest radar signals from up to 12,000 light-years away. Even so, that is not much for a galaxy that is 100,000+ light year in diameter. So I don’t buy that just because we have not yet detected them that they aren’t there: we simply don’t know one way or the other.

The new, techno-civilisation lifetime paper is Rahvar, S. & Rouhani, S. (2026) Constraints on the Lifespan of Intelligent Technological Civilizations in the Galaxy. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. vol. 548.

Sabine’s critique video (7 minutes long) can be seen below:

The Fermi Paradox is the question of why we haven’t been contacted by any extraterrestrial species. In a recent paper, astrophysicists analysed the paradox by instead examining how civilisations with the ability to send signals through space might develop. Unfortunately for us, their findings are quite bleak – but let’s take a look anyway.

(11) LEST DARKNESS FALL. “Japan wants to build an 11,000-kilometer solar ring around the Moon and beam clean energy back to Earth, an idea that sounds impossible until engineers explain the plan” at Ecoticias.

Solar power keeps getting cheaper, but it still has a basic problem. The sun sets and output drops right when people get home and turn things on. What if your electric bill could be backed up by sunshine that does not care about nightfall?

A concept from Japan imagines building a huge ring of solar panels around the Moon. It aims to send electricity to Earth using energy beams, but it is still a proposal with no public funding plan. Big promise, bigger hurdles.

The “Luna Ring” concept would wrap the Moon’s equator with solar panels. The goal is to keep at least part of the system generating power as sunlight moves across the surface.

One outline describes a band that runs about 6,800 miles around the Moon and could be up to about 250 miles wide. It would build a base from lunar soil, cover it with panels, and send power to Earth using microwaves or lasers aimed at receiving stations….

(12) TRAILER PARK. Animation World Network is there when “Illumination Drops ‘Minions & Monsters’ Trailer #2 and Poster”.

The next absurd outing in the silliest global animated franchises is on the horizon, featuring all-new characters, some film noir, and… a Minion clown with a chainsaw. And, there’s a new trailer and poster as well for Universal and Illumination’s Minions & Monsters.

The 3DCG comedy tells the rambunctious, ridiculous and totally true story of how the Minions conquered Hollywood, became movie stars, lost everything, unleashed monsters onto the world and then banded together to try and save the planet from the mayhem they had just created….

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Andrew (not Werdna), Cora Buhlert, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]

Pixel Scroll 4/22/26 To Scroll In Ignorance Of Pixels Is To Scroll Badly. To Scroll Knowingly In Pixels Is To Become Invisible. To Scroll Knowingly In Opposition To Pixels Is To Have Your Own File

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) WHEN FANDOMS COLLIDE. Publishers Weekly’s “Image of the Day” —

Brandon Sanderson and his arch-nemesis John Scalzi took the stage in Decatur, Ga., for a lively q&a and conversation before a sold-out crowd of more than 1,000 fans, organized by Eagle Eye Book Shop and Dragonsteel, Sanderson’s specialty publishing company.

(2) ASTRA BOOK AWARDS. And on Monday, John Scalzi learned he is the winner of one of the inaugural Astra Book Awards: “When the Moon Hits Your Eye the Winner of the Astra Book Award for Best Science Fiction Novel”.

The award’s 17 categories include 6 of genre interest:

Best Comic Book

Absolute Wonder Woman #1 – Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, Jordie Bellaire & Becca Carey

Best Fantasy Book

The Midnight Carousel – Fiza Saeed McLynn

Best Horror Book

Dollface – Lindy Ryan

Best Romantasy Book

Alchemised – SenLinYu

Best Science Fiction Book

When the Moon Hits Your Eye – John Scalzi

Book of the Year

Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros

(3) WOMEN’S PRIZE SHORTLIST. The 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist dropped today. However, none of the three books of genre interest on the longlist advanced to the shortlist.

(4) STATE OF AMERICA’S LIBRARIES REPORT. “Book bans and attempted bans remain at record highs, with ‘Sold’ topping the list” – Yahoo! runs the numbers.

Book bans and attempted bans remain at record highs, according to the American Library Association. And efforts to have titles removed have never been more coordinated or politicized.

The ALA on Monday issued its annual list of the books most challenged at the country’s libraries, part of the association’s State of America’s Libraries Report. Patricia McCormick’s “Sold,” a 2006 novel about sex trafficking in India, topped the list for 2025. Others targeted include Stephen Chbosky’s high school novel “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir “Gender Queer” and Sarah J. Maas’ romantasy favorite “Empire of Storms.”

The ALA usually features 10 books, but this year has 11, with four tied for eighth place: Anthony Burgess’ dystopian classic “A Clockwork Orange,” Ellen Hopkins’ sibling drama “Identical,” John Green’s boarding school narrative “Looking for Alaska” and Jennifer L. Armentrout’s paranormal romance “Storm and Fury.”

Objections include LGBTQ+ themes (“Gender Queer,” “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”), sexual violence (“Sold” and “A Clockwork Orange”) and use of alcohol and cigarettes (“Looking for Alaska”). Overall, the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom recorded challenges to 4,235 different works, topped only by 4,240 in 2023 since the association began keeping track more than 30 years ago.

The association defines a challenge as “an attempt to have a library resource removed, or access to it restricted, based on the objections of a person or group.” Monday’s list arrives during National Library Week, which runs through April 25….

(5) PROTECTING UNPUBLISHED WORK. The Authors Guild has devised contract language to address the use of AI in publishing workflows: “Authors Guild Statement on Use of AI in Publishing and New Model Contract Clause”.

The Authors Guild is concerned about reports that some publishing professionals are uploading manuscripts and authors’ personal information into consumer-facing AI systems for uses such as generating summaries, assessments, and marketing copy without permission from the authors or adequate guardrails to ensure that the manuscripts are not used by AI companies for training.

Uploading or inputting a copyrighted work or an author’s personal information into AI systems without permission may constitute a violation of the author’s copyright or right of privacy, and it puts the author’s intellectual property and personal information at risk. Editors, agents, and others in the industry who have access to authors’ works should not upload any manuscript to or otherwise prompt consumer-facing chatbots with any author’s works without first getting the author’s written permission. Where consumer-facing chatbots are used in workflows, publishers and other industry professionals should ensure that they opt out of having the work used for training. All of the common chatbots provide this option in their user settings. Publishers should also take care that any internal AI systems are sandboxed models with guardrails to prevent the manuscripts or author information from being used as inputs for training.

Further, to prevent injecting any AI-generated text into an author’s work, publishers should not use AI to edit a manuscript with the exception of basic spelling and grammar- checking applications.

The Authors Guild calls on publishers and others in the industry to enforce strict policies with their staffs to ensure that authors give written permission before their work is uploaded into any AI and to ensure that authors’ works and personal information are not used for training.

The Authors Guild recommends including the following clauses in publishing agreements to prevent objectionable uses.

“No Uploading Author’s Personal Information or Manuscript to Commercial AI

“Publisher shall not upload the Work or any of Author’s personal information to consumer-facing AI systems for purposes such as generating summaries, assessments, or marketing copy without written permission from the author or as otherwise agreed to hereunder; and when such permission is granted, it shall ensure that the manuscript is not used by third-party AI companies for training, such as by opting out of allowing training in user settings.

“No Substantive Editing with AI

“Publisher agrees and warrants that it will not use AI to substantially edit a manuscript (excepting the use of basic spelling and grammar-checking applications).”

(6) SHOCKED, I TELL YOU. “Why Are There So Few Movie Or TV Adaptations Of Harlan Ellison’s Work”. Despite Looper’s headline, even they know the answer is no mystery:

…A precise history of why people haven’t flocked to adapt Harlan Ellison’s work doesn’t exist, because it’s hard to catalog things that haven’t happened. However, a likely reason for entertainment industry folks generally steering away from Ellison adaptations is simple: Harlan Ellison was a difficult, even combative man.

The author, who died in 2018 at age 84, was a proud disruptor and overall agent of chaos who was known for his quick litigiousness and his clashes with other industry notables. His most famous feud is probably the one over a classic “Star Trek: The Original Series” episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever.”

Ellison’s original script was heavily revised and rewritten by “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and others, prompting years of bad blood between Ellison and Roddenberry. As late as in 2009, Ellison had filed a lawsuit for residuals regarding the episode. Another notable court case was over James Cameron’s 1984 sci-fi classic “The Terminator,” which Ellison argued was based on his previously-adapted story, “Soldier.” The case was ultimately settled and Ellison received an “inspired by” credit.

Apart from bigger fish like “Star Trek” and “The Terminator,” Ellison was also known for suing comic book publishers, websites, and suchlike for reasons ranging from logical to “what the hell, man.” From a prospective filmmaker’s viewpoint, all of this would likely be plenty of reason to avoid adapting Ellison’s work, as opposed to more amenable authors….

(7) EKPEKI INJURY UPDATE. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, who suffered a spinal fracture after being struck by a delivery cyclist in February (see GoFundMe for details: “Help Award-Winning Author Ekpeki After Near-Fatal Accident”), was interviewed about his experience on Channels Television. See the video on Facebook.

I spoke on Channels Television with Soonest Nathaniel about delivery safety, accountability, and the Chowdeck rider accident that left me with a spinal fracture two months ago and also affected Purity Addereth. This is not just about one incident, it’s about how these systems affect Nigerians. Apart from the initial medical payment in the first few days, there has been no further support or resolution. So far, engagement has been through legal representatives, and I have not had direct communication with Chowdeck decision-makers. We deserve better. I remain open to a fair and realistic resolution.

(8) LOTR-THEMED GOODBYE GIFT. “Jake Tapper gives ‘Lords of the Rings’ fan Stephen Colbert a very precious gift” – Entertainment Weekly shares the story.

Jake Tapper made sure to give Stephen Colbert a precious sendoff.

The CNN anchor appeared on The Late Show this week, and knowing it was likely his final time guesting before Colbert signs off, he brought a gift for the J.R.R. Tolkien superfan, whose next gig happens to be writing a Lord of the Rings film.

“I was thinking about how special you are to me, and how special this show [is],” Tapper said to Colbert, who he described as “tough to shop for.”

So he opted to make a gift instead. Apparently Tapper was an art minor in college and “dabbles” in painting, so he began brainstorming what he could paint for Colbert. When a staff member suggested a Hobbit or wizard because of his passion for Lord of the Rings, Tapper sought the counsel of Colbert’s wife, Evelyn.

“She was like, ‘He’s got plenty of those. He doesn’t need another ‘Stephen Colbert as a Hobbit.’ He doesn’t need another ‘Stephen Colbert as a wizard,'” Tapper shared.

Saying he wanted to stick with the Middle-earth theme, Tapper then unveiled his masterpiece: Colbert as the ring-loving Gollum.

“It’s beautiful,” Colbert declared, before dropping Gollum’s famous line, “My precious.”

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 22, 1992 — Quantum Leap’s “The Curse of Ptah-Hotep”

Razul: You are a student of Egypt, but you are not one of its sons. And until you have heard what I have heard and seen what I have seen, I would not expect you to believe that such a thing as a curse could be true, but it is.

Sam: 3500-year-old dead men don’t just get up and walk around.

Thirty-four years ago this evening, Quantum Leap’s “The Curse of Ptah-Hotep” first aired on NBC. Sam leaps into the body of Dale Conway, an American archaeologist at a dig in Egypt, in 1957 just as he and his partner Ginny Will discover the tomb of Ptah-Hotep. A sand storm traps them deep in the tomb’s inner chambers.

You think that they made up this particular Egypt royal person but no, he was quite real. Ptahhotep, sometimes known as Ptahhotep I or Ptahhotpe, was an ancient Egyptian vizier during the late 25th century BC and early 24th century BC Fifth Dynasty of Egypt.

The curse that forms the story here was evidently a real one that affected a number of archeological digs undertaken here. Or possibly not.

And it is worth definitely worth noting that Sam, throughout the entire series, thoroughly disbelieves in the supernatural, except for the force has him leaping around and that could be science. He frequently tells Al not to be superstitious about anything. But here he certainly seems to take the resurrected mummies in this episode as a given.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bob the Squirrel has a reason for being unhelpful.
Dinosaur Comics claims to quote Batman.
Strange Brew is no longer self-propelled.
Waynovision does a removal.
xkcd expands into decorative mapping.

(11) BAFTA GAMES COMMENTARY. [Item by Steven French.] Keza MacDonald enthuses over the Games BAFTAs in the latest “Pushing Buttons” newsletter: “The Bafta games awards showed me again that honouring art over commerce is a win for all” om the Guardian.

The 22nd Bafta game awards were on Friday, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took the biggest game prize. This makes it only the second game ever (after Baldur’s Gate 3) to win top prize at all five of the main awards shows: the Dice awards in Vegas; the Game awards in LA; the public-voted Golden Joysticks in the UK; the Game Developers Choice awards in San Francisco; and now London’s Baftas, the final event to celebrate the gaming output of 2025.

I’ll be honest: I was hoping for a different winner. Blue Prince, an eight-year project by the visual artist and former film-maker Tonda Ros, is the most extraordinary thing I played last year. It’s the game where you inherit a sprawling mansion that changes shape every day, and you must navigate its ever-shifting blueprint to find its secret room. I went so deep on this game that I was still playing it and thinking about it weeks after solving its initial mystery, piecing together bits of opaque lore from Reddit threads. I think it deserved at least one best game award (apart from ours).

At least it won the game design award, and seeing Ros pick up his trophy was rather moving. A late convert to video games, in his acceptance speech he thanked everyone else in the room for making things that showed him how interesting games could be. Indeed, as is the case most years, due to its unique shortlisting process, the Baftas showcased the widest range of games of all the year’s awards shows. I always enjoy seeing less celebrated fare such as And Roger (an extremely sad game about navigating dementia) and Despelote (winner of the Game Beyond Entertainment award) on the same nominations lists as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Ghost of Yōtei….

(12) THINK BIGGER. Space.com reports “The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA’s next great observatory, is finally complete”.

…Named for NASA’s first chief of astronomy and the first woman to hold an executive position at the agency, this space telescope should turn out to be yet another valuable tool in our species’ hunt to understand the true nature of the universe. It’ll stand among the ranks of our other powerful robotic eyes on the sky — famed instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), SPHEREx, the Euclid Space Telescope and even the aged but always impressive Hubble. Except, as is the case with each of those landmark observatories, this new one has its own specialty. We’ll get into some of those specs soon….

…Above all, now projected to launch in September 2026 — eight months ahead of schedule, and under budget — the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (or “Roman” for short) has the potential to show us pockets of the cosmos we’ve yet to touch….

…According to NASA, Roman’s primary mirror measures about 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) wide, which is similar to Hubble’s. However, Roman has the ability to take images that capture a patch of the sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble can.

“Its surveying capabilities are over 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and can chart 200 times more sky in a single image,” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during the conference. “What would take Hubble 2,000 years to process, Roman can do in a year — the images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them.”

To put that into context, over its approximately 35 years of service so far, Hubble has gathered about 400 terabytes of data; once fully operational at its workstation in space, Roman should be able to create 500 terabytes of data per year….

(13) COYOTE VS. WARNER BROS. The coyote won. Trailer for Coyote vs. ACME, in theaters August 28.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, N., Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Tom Becker.]

Pixel Scroll 3/4/26 This Scroll Fights Lords of Sith

Posted on March 4, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) AUTHORS GUILD’S ‘HUMAN AUTHORED’ CERTIFICATION PROGRAM. The Authors Guild has officially launched its Human Authored certification program. Previously available as a beta program for members, it is now open to the public.

Authors can register to use the Human Authored certification mark to distinguish their human-written books from AI-generated books. Certification costs $10 per book for non-Guild members and is free to members. Next week, the Guild will open the program up to U.S. publishers to purchase certifications in bulk.

According to Authors Guild:

Human Authored is a certification mark owned by the Authors Guild that may be used to indicate that a book was written by a human and not generated by AI. The mark, illustrated below, consists of the words Human Authored in a circle around a human silhouette. To use the Human Authored certification mark, an author or publisher must register the works they wish to certify as Human Authored and agree to the terms of the license.

The certification mark may only be used in connection with literary works for which the text itself was fully authored by one or more human beings and not generated by AI, except for a de minimis amount (such as through the use of AI-powered spelling and grammar check applications). Use of generative AI to create a table of contents, indices, or other auxiliary parts of a book, or for researching, brainstorming, outlining, or any purposes other than generating text does not disqualify a work from being Human Authored.

The complete usage guidelines can be found here.

(2) CALL FOR JOURNEY PLANET SUBMISSIONS. LAcon V approaches, as does an issue of Journey Planet celebrating the city, region, and concept of Los Angeles.

We’re interested in history, cultures, food, architecture, literary and artistic impacts, your personal experiences, you name it.

Send your articles, artwork, photography, poetry, stories, and other printable media to Christopher J. Garcia at [email protected] or to Chuck Serface at [email protected]. The deadline is April 2, 2026.

(3) JOHN HERTZ SAYS THE ADDRESS IS GOOD. Responding to yesterday’s Scroll, John Hertz writes, “My current mailing address is public (so is my telephone number; voice & voice-mail only); publish if you like.”

Hertz
236 S. Coronado St., No. 409
Los Angeles, CA 90057

(213) 384-6622

This, however, is the address people have been using.

John comments, “The U.S. Postal Service handles 100 billion pieces of mail a year. If 99 44/100 % pure, USPS would make just under a billion mistakes. Thank Roscoe, USPS is better than that.”

By the way, John challenges my usage in yesterday’s Scroll: “’Contact’ is not a verb.”

(4) LAGNIAPPE. The March 2 Scroll title by Daniel Dern – “The Ringworld May Crumble, The Discworld May Tumble, Even Though At Least One’s Made Of Scrith, But This Scroll Is Here To Stay” – playing off the Gershwin tune “Our Love Is Here to Stay”, inspired another verse by Andrew (not Werdna), and this additional parody verse by John Hertz:

I too want none of blood-wine.
Drinking their life
Would leave me conscience-rife
When I’ve so much fanac to do.
But I get a kick out of you.

(5) BEST OF WORLD SF VOL. 1. A Deep Look by Dave Hook visits “’The Best of World SF: Volume 1’, Lavie Tidhar editor, 2021 Ad Astra/Head of Zeus”. Here’s his short take; the long analysis is at the link.

The Short: I read The Best of World SF: Volume 1, Lavie Tidhar editor, 2021 Ad Astra/Head of Zeus, a few years ago. It’s a fairly hefty anthology of mostly reprinted world SF, with a generous and interesting introduction by Tidhar, 26 stories and story introductions by Tidhar. The stories range from short stories to novellas, with 588 pages. My favorite is “Prime Meridian“, a science fiction novella by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2017 Innsmouth Free Press chapbook. My overall, average rating for the stories is 3.77/5, or “Very good”, but the editorial content and international material push it to “Great” for me. It’s part of a series. Recommended.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 4, 1946 — Patricia Kennealy-Morrison. (Died 2021.)

Patricia Kennealy-Morrison as she later called herself was hand-fasted to Jim Morrison in a Celtic ceremony in 1970. It would be by no means a traditional relationship and that’s putting it mildly.

So it shouldn’t surprise you that much of her writing would be Celtic-tinged. The Keltiad, a fantasy series, was set far, far away. I mean really far away, possibly in another galaxy. There are eight novels in the series and one collection of short stories. She intended more works but the publisher dropped it when sales fell off.

So how are they? Well, maybe I’m not the best judge of literary style. Think clichéd SF blended ineptly with Celtic fantasy.

Now when she decides to write in a more a traditional fantasy vein she is quite fine, as in her Tales of Arthur trilogy which is The Hawk’s Gray Feather, The Oak Above the Kings and The Hedge of Mist. It’s actually pretty good Arthurian fiction.

Now the last thing I want mention about her is not even genre adjacent. She did two mystery series, the best of which are The Rock & Roll Murders. All but one are set at music events such as Go Ask Malice: Murder at Woodstock and California Screamin’: Murder at Monterey Pop. The era is nicely done by her and the mysteries, well, less evocative than the people and the setting but that’s ok.

The other mystery series, the Rennie Stride Murders, involves and I quote online copy here, “She’s a newspaper reporter whose beat is rock, not a detective, and her best-friend sidekick is a blonde bisexual superstar chick singer.” It’s set in LA during the Sixties and is her deep dive in that music world according to the reviews I came across.

They have titles, and I’m not kidding, like Daydream Bereaver, Scareway to Heaven and Go Ask Malice. No idea how they are, this is the first time I’ve heard of them.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Balbo tells a better story.
Brevity has a new kind of sale.
Dinosaur Comics honors the oldest story, but thinks adding Batman would improve it.
Fowl Language cautions about when to read things to kids.
Savage Chickens needed a better half.
The Argyle Sweater needs a listener.

(8) THRONES PROLIFERATION. The Guardian reports “Game of Thrones film adaptation in the works at Warner Bros”.

A Game of Thrones film is set for the big screen, with Warner Bros officially developing a prequel set in the world of Westeros.

House of Cards showrunner and Andor writer Beau Willimon has been recruited to write the script based on George RR Martin’s fantasy series.

According to a recent Hollywood Reporter cover story on Martin, it seems that the movie will be a “Dune-sized feature film” based on King Aegon Targaryen’s conquest of Westeros, which united six of the seven kingdoms about 300 years before the events of HBO’s Game of Thrones pilot. HBO is simultaneously developing a rival TV series inspired by the same story….

(9) THEY’RE ALL WET. The New York Times is reporting, “Sea Levels Are Already Higher Than Many Scientists Think, New Study Shows”. (Article is behind a paywall.)

New research has found that scientists studying sea-level rise have been using methods that underestimate how high the water already is. One result is that hundreds of millions more people worldwide are already living dangerously close to the rising ocean than Western scientists had previously estimated.

The new study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, has found that the vast majority of scientific studies have made this mistake. Coastal sea levels are, on average, eight inches to a foot higher than many maps and models of the world’s coastlines indicate, the research found.

The discrepancies are much bigger in certain regions, like Southeast Asia and Pacific nations, where ocean dynamics are more complex. There, coastal sea levels are up to several meters higher than commonly estimated.

The new findings don’t mean that these studies are wrong in their broader conclusions about the rate of sea-level rise or the damage it might cause. Coastal sea levels are rising as the world warms. What the new findings mean is that scientists have often been working from the wrong starting point when calculating what land and populations might be affected in the future.

In the simplest of terms, they were underestimating where coastal sea levels already are….

(10) MARTIAN HOP. The New York Times says “Experiment Shows Possibility of Martian Microbes Hitching a Ride to Earth”. (Article is behind a paywall.)

No one really knows how life started on Earth, but one theory is that microbes hitched a ride on meteorites, and we’re the descendants of those tiny vagabonds. They may have even come from Mars.

“We have Martian meteorites” that made it to Earth after prehistoric asteroid strikes on the red planet, said K.T. Ramesh, an impacts expert at Johns Hopkins University. It’s easy to imagine one suffused with microbes plunging through Earth’s primeval skies.

This theory, known as lithopanspermia, remains unsubstantiated, not least because evidence of extinct alien life remains elusive on Mars. But Dr. Ramesh and his colleagues were curious if it was at least possible for microbes to hop between planets. Could bacteria survive if they were flung off a planet’s surface by an asteroid strike?

The team’s lab experiment offers compelling evidence that such a scenario is possible. Published Tuesday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences NEXUS, the team’s results have implications for how planets like ours might have been seeded with life.

No one is seriously claiming that we might have Martian ancestors. But this research shows that microbes cannot only brush off one of the most violent processes in the cosmos, but also take advantage of it to sail across the stars….

…Scientists have long wondered if microbes can survive meteorite impacts. After all, plenty of organisms known as extremophiles survive high temperatures, extreme acidities and extraordinary salinities — sometimes all at once — on Earth. Others manage to persist in the face of intensive spaceflight clean-room protocols and make it all the way to space, clinging to the insides of spacecraft and even the outside of the International Space Station….

(11) DON’T PANIC – BLACK HOLE ON LOOSE! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A ‘runaway’ black hole ejected from its host galaxy is barrelling across space — and leaving behind a wake of newborn stars.

A 2023 paper reported the discovery of a bright, straight feature that the authors suspected to be the wake of a black hole that had ‘escaped’ its home galaxy. But the feature’s identity could not be pinned down.

Now light spectra taken with the James Webb Space Telescope show that this feature, which is some 62 kiloparsecs (200,000 light years in real money) long, is the trail left in the intergalactic medium by a black hole; a big boy at least 10 million times as massive as the Sun. At the tip of the feature is an intense shockwave, which reveals that the object is moving at nearly 1,000 kilometres per second. Other observations show the signatures of young stars, which can be born in cosmic shockwaves, according to Pieter van Dokkum at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and his colleagues.

The authors of the new paper say that this is the first conclusive evidence of a runaway black hole.

Primary research here here.

(12) SCIENCE COVER STORY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Science journal cover story is one for stars in their eyes…

This composite image of the interacting galaxies VV 340 shows x-rays in purple and different optical wavelengths in red, green, and blue. Bright points with diffraction spikes are foreground stars. Multiwavelength observations of the edge-on spiral galaxy VV 340a (top) show that it hosts a wobbling galactic-scale jet of plasma, launched by a supermassive black hole. This jet drives an outflow of gas from the galaxy, affecting the gas reservoir from which stars form. See page 911.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/23/26 The Pixel That Shouted Scroll At The Heart Of The World

Posted on January 23, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) NO MORE TEASING. “Cora’s Thoughts on the Actual Masters of the Universe Trailer”. The full 2+-minute trailer has dropped and Cora discusses it in loving detail. Here are a couple of excerpts.

Now, you can read my thoughts on the actual trailer, which was released today. But first, let’s have a look at the full trailer below:

Okay, have you all watched it? Then here are my thoughts:

The trailer opens with a sweeping view of Eternia and Zoar flying over the land. There’s a cut and we see Zoar flying towards Eternos. Then there’s another cut and the camera zooms up towards Castle Grayskull and the open jawbridge. It’s notable that the bridge leading towards Castle Grayskull is partly damaged….

And later….

…Adam’s obsession with sword and nerd stuff may not look good to human resources, but Adam clearly isn’t going to give up, because we see that he is looking for the Power Sword, posting a sketch of the sword online and asking if someone has seen it. And then he gets a message that someone has.

Next we see Adam going into a collectibles shop and then there is the shot from the teaser where Adam has that deer in the headlights look, while there are statues and action figures on a shelf behind him. As for why Adam had that deer in the headlights look, the Power Sword is in that shop, in the hands of a life-size muscular statue.

We later see that the statue is Vikor, a character based on an early sketch by Mark Taylor which was long believed to have been an early He-Man concept, though it’s more likely that it was intended for a never produced Conan toyline….

(2) SHOCKED, HE TELLS US. Meanwhile, Entertainment Weekly has been taken in by Jon Del Arroz’ clickbait about the trailer: “He-Man’s pronouns in ‘Masters of the Universe’ trailer spark conservative outrage”. And the tweets are flying thick and fast on X.com.

Is He-Man afflicted with the woke mind virus?

Conservative audiences watching the new Masters of the Universe trailer seem to think so.

The new look at the fantasy adventure film sees He-Man (Nicholas Galitzine) undercover in the real world, and a brief visual gag shows his nameplate at his desk as he works an office job. The nameplate reads “Adam Glenn,” with “He/Him” emboldened underneath the warrior’s alias.

While certain viewers saw the “He/Him” moment as a joke — a play on the protagonist’s redundantly masculine name, perhaps — others were offended by those five unassuming letters, as they interpreted the pronouns as a political statement.

“Now they’re making a Masters of the Universe and giving He-man pronouns,” conservative author Jon Del Arroz wrote on X. “These people won’t stop until they ruin everything.”

(3) KINUKO Y. CRAFT ART AVAILABLE. [Item by Colleen Doran.] Kinuko Craft’s agent has officially shut down, and while her prints went on sale over awhile ago, her original art is 70% off until end of January. Kinuko turned 86 this month. “From the Archives of Kinuko Y. Craft”.

Over the past few months, we’ve been honored to offer a rare glimpse into Kinuko Y. Craft’s personal archives—a collection of original paintings that span her storied career. From iconic fairy tale illustrations to visionary standalone pieces, each work reflects Kinuko’s unmatched mastery of myth, magic, and imagination.

Now, as we prepare to part with our final inventory, we’re offering an unprecedented opportunity.

In addition to the 50% savings already reflected on our website, you can now enjoy an extra 20% off with coupon code: KYC20.

This extraordinary offer is available only through January 31, 2026, and only while our remaining archive works last.

(4) HOW POSTER RESTORATION IS DONE. PRINT Magazine interviews “Fourth Cone Restoration on their Process of Restoring Vintage Posters”.

Fourth Cone Restoration is in the business of bringing old posters back from the dead. Or at least back from the weathered, worn, torn, faded, folded, and wrinkled. Co-founders and partners Katie Dimond, Melissa Scott, and Chelsea Scheller started the business 12 years ago after all meeting at a previous restoration job.

With a studio in Canoga Park, CA just outside of LA, they’ve honed meticulous techniques to make vintage posters look good as new. Process videos on their Instagram reveal just how incredible these transformations are, and the level of care and detail that goes into their process….

… Our field is special in that we are always working with art that was meant to deteriorate. Posters were intended for one-time use— they’re usually made with the cheapest materials possible. Cheap paper often has a high acid content, which means it breaks down over time, turning brown and brittle. In some of the older posters, the paper was made with straight-up river water! The cheapest materials will change from time to time, so it’s difficult to predict how best to stabilize each poster. Fortunately, we have been in this business long enough to recognize most types of printing and paper. And when we don’t recognize the poster, we follow a strict protocol to test the paper for possible reactions.

What are the main tools and techniques you all use at Fourth Cone Restoration?

FCR Team: When a poster comes to us, our first order of business is to stabilize the paper. If it’s safe, we wash it with water and a mild detergent. If the paper has mold or mildew, or if it’s discolored, we perform a bleaching treatment. If the poster is getting linen backed, we apply an archival adhesive and mount it to a stretched canvas lined with acid-free paper. We let that dry for a few days, and then the poster is removed from its temporary frame and trimmed so that it has an extra margin. With some types of posters, we will do a gelatin resizing treatment instead of linen backing. This involves applying archival gelatin sizing to the back of the piece while the paper is still wet and temporarily adhering it to an aluminum board. It’s then left to dry before removing it from the board. The gelatin acts as an invisible strengthening agent. We do have other alternatives for backing and treating paper, but these are the two main ones.

Once a poster has been backed, many of the visual problems will have been solved. With glossy posters, especially, the change will be dramatic. The glare from all the ridges and waves in the paper can really confuse the eye. Once the paper is flat, you’ll be able to see what the poster actually looks like. Many clients prefer to stop there and keep all the remaining blemishes visible as part of the poster’s history. This is totally a matter of taste, and we don’t have any opinion as to whether it’s better to restore or not to restore. However, our expertise in restoration has been honed over decades, and it’s one of the skills we’re known for….

(5) EARL KEMP INTERVIEW. Jason Sanford has posted his “Genre Grapevine interview with Earl Kemp on the intersection of the SF/F and porn genres in the 1960s and ’70s” at Patreon. (For more biographical context, I recommend my 2020 obituary “Earl Kemp Dies”.)

JS: I’ve long wondered if one reason so many SF/F writers and editors worked in both fields is because back then both the porn and the SF/F genres were looked down on by intellectuals and so-called “mainstream” society. Any thoughts on if this is a correct or wrong view?

[EARL KEMP]: You could have a point here but also that “pulp” writing was considered to be worthless and should be ignored by publishers so they could produce more meaningful products. (There was a constantly ongoing effort on the part of some persons to “clean up” publishing, make it all Pollyannaish and meaningless.) Note especially Charles Keating and Citizens for Decent Literature (an illiterate man and a profoundly stupid organization) but it got Keating on Nixon’s side as his personal helper/friend earning him a position and instructions to “destroy” President Johnson’s Porn Committee before Keating himself turned major criminal and robbed Lincoln Savings and Loan of all those retiree’s hard-earned cash in order to build THE PHONECIAN ultra lavish and expensive resort for his Republican moneygrabbers. All criminals…all directly related to or sponsored by Nixon. Yetch!

(6) NESFA KICKSTARTER FUNDS. NESFA announced today that their “Dubious Pleasures: Original short stories by Greg Cox” Kickstarter surpassed its goal. New donors can still get perks.

Our kickstarter was a huge success, gaining more than our set goal! Thanks to everyone who donated, shared the page, and volunteered for us. While the project has now been funded, you can still get perks like a bookmark with original artwork with a $5 contribution, an ebook with a $15 contribution, and artwork and a hard copy of the book for larger contributions. If you really want to splurge, you can also get yourself featured in an upcoming book for $500 or access to a Boskone mixer with both Cox and Urbach for $250. These perks are exclusive to Kickstarter and can’t be purchased anywhere else. The kickstarter page will be available for about two more weeks, ending on January 27th.

Stay tuned, as we may add a stretch goal for some fun at the end!

(7) DO THESE RECAPS INFRINGE? “Authors Guild Raises Concerns About Kindle’s New ‘Ask This Book’ AI Feature”.

The Authors Guild has significant concerns with Amazon’s new “Ask this Book” feature, which has been available since December 11, 2025, on certain Kindle devices and the Kinde iOS app. It is the most recent in a suite of new AI Kindle features, which also includes a “Recaps” feature summarizing prior books in a series and expanded AI-based translation. The Guild is looking into whether the feature, which was added without permission from publishers or authors, might infringe authors’ and publishers’ rights.

Ask this Book, which is slated for a wider rollout in 2026, allows readers to query an AI chatbot about books they have purchased or borrowed. So far there is no way for publishers or authors to opt their books out of the feature, though as of this writing the feature is not available for all ebooks. It allows a reader to highlight text and click on an “Ask” icon to ask the AI to “explain” the selected text or enter their own question in the chatbot. All responses are generated from the book itself.

The Guild is concerned that Ask this Book turns books into searchable, interactive products akin to enhanced ebooks or annotated editions—a new format for which rights should be specifically negotiated—and, given Amazon’s stronghold on ebook retail, it could usurp the burgeoning licensing market for interactive AI-enabled ebooks and audiobooks.

Amazon’s Response

We reached out to Amazon with our concerns and they reported to that “The feature only uses content from the book as a prompt which is not retained or used to train the underlying AI model.” An Amazon spokesperson explained that Amazon considers the feature to be “a natural language expansion of the search functionality that already exists in Kindle apps and for which no license is required.” Amazon further reasons that “readers have been asking these questions through internet searches for years and that this feature is more native, spoiler-free, and helps customers keep reading as opposed to coming out of the book, which is the case today with all other ways to answer questions about the book you’re reading.”…

(8) EVOLUTION IN ACTION? Gary Westfahl was pleased to tell me that his essay “To Learn the Cause of Autism, Ask Darwin”, although declined for publication here, was posted ny John Clute at The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. It begins —

…Well, respected scientists have been researching this subject for decades with no definitive results, and quacks relying on other quacks to reach questionable conclusions will never persuade the scientific community, which has already rejected Trump’s and Kennedy’s proclamations. But I have my own theory about the rise of autism, which is relatively simple: it represents the process of evolution, operating in its usual fashion.

That is, as Charles Darwin explained long ago, when a favorable mutation arises in a species, it tends to become more common, because beings with that mutation tend to be more successful, and produce more offspring, than beings lacking that mutation. Autism, I argue, represents one such mutation that has become increasingly advantageous over the centuries, accounting for its modern prevalence….

(9) ‘UNCLE FLOYD’ HAS DIED. [Item by Andrew Porter.] The Uncle Floyd Show had “A Day in the Life of a Food,” which usually ended with the food screaming in agony as it was washed, cut, and.. It was weird!!! “Longtime N.J. comedian, pianist ‘Uncle Floyd’ has died, family says” at NJ.com.

“With a heavy heart I am sad to announce the passing of my brother and everybody’s favorite uncle, Floyd Vivino. After a two-and-a half year battle with ongoing health issues his curtain peacefully closed at 6:05 p.m. on Thursday January 22,” Vivino’s brother Jerry Vivino wrote on in a Facebook post early Friday.

Vivino was born in Paterson and grew up in multiple towns, including Glen Rock, where he attended high school. The local TV star rose to fame with his “Uncle Floyd Show.” The show featured Vivino’s piano stylings, celebrity guests and musical performances as well as a cast of sidekicks (puppet and human), and had everyone in the New York-New Jersey area, including David Bowie and John Lennon, tuning in starting in the 1970s.

Uncle Floyd had fans far and wide, including Bowie, who paid tribute to the comedian in 2002.

“Back in the late 70’s, everyone that I knew would rush home at a certain point in the afternoon to catch the Uncle Floyd show,” Bowie said. “He was on UHF Channel 68 and the show looked like it was done out of his living room in New Jersey. All his pals were involved and it was a hoot.

“It had that Soupy Sales kind of appeal and though ostensibly aimed at kids, I knew so many people of my age who just wouldn’t miss it. We would be on the floor it was so funny. I just loved that show.”…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 23, 1950 — Richard Dean Anderson, 76.

I’ve liked Richard Dean Anderson from the very first time I saw him playing Lt. Simon Adams in the one-season Emerald Point N.A.S., which befitted him more than his first acting job playing Dr. Jack Webber on the General Hospital daytime soap opera, as Emerald Point was a military soap opera of the first degree.

Going from the short-lived and uniformed Emerald Point N.A.S. role, he got arguably the most interesting acting role of his career of his performing career, the lead in MacGyver. Was it genre? I think so. I enjoyed it immensely.

It had a very lean regular cast with Dana Elcar as Peter Thornton, MacGyver’s immediate supervisor at the Phoenix Foundation, and Bruce McGill as Jack Dalton, MacGyver’s best friend, the whole supporting cast. There were a few other performers that showed on up a recurring basis plus a legion of background characters.

Remember Heinlein’s “Specialization is for insects” quote from Time Enough for Love? Well MacGyver comes as close in his problem solving to that as any individual could. And with a sense of humor to boot. Something I sometimes suspect Heinlein characters are lacking.

It lasted seven seasons comprising 139 episodes plus two films. The seventh was short as it was cancelled but as Anderson noted in a later interview, “The only reason it went off the air was that everybody was ready to move on. I was physically exhausted and had no life.”

As it’s streaming on Paramount+, I know what I’ll be watching soon!

So having survived, and by his own admission mostly enjoyed, a long running series, what came next for him? Well you take a half decade off before getting involved in a series that was even a lot longer lasting than MacGyver turned out to be!

Oops, my bad. I almost forgot about the series he did in between the two most important, that being Legend, all twelve episodes. Yes, you heard me. Twelve. He played Ernest Pratt, a hard-drinking writer who created Nicodemus Legend, the main character in pulp novels. The only other ongoing character was a Tesla ripoff by the name of Janos Bartok played by John de Lancie. Think SF western and you’ve got it. It was fun, it had absolutely no audience and it was cancelled apparently before it aired. Oh well.

So now for his longest running series. I loved Stargate, I really did. So when I heard a series was being made from the film I was definitely intrigued. And I was pleasantly surprised how well Stargate SG-1 worked. Stargate wasn’t really a developed reality, Stargate SG-1 was. So comparing the Jack O’ Neil character that he plays there to the character played Kurt Russell once and done makes no sense, really it doesn’t.

It was a great role that Anderson was allowed to develop I assume as an Executive Producer of the series. So how the long did it last? An amazing ten seasons, 214 plus two films. And he shows up elsewhere in the Stargate Universe unsurprisingly.

So two-long running roles, 357 episodes between them. Quite impressive I would say.

He retired from acting a decade ago.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Bob the Squirrel finds astronauts in his water dish.
Dinosaur Comics wonders about what makes a fan.
Ink Pen should learn not to taunt other superheroes.
Yaffle does the heavy lifting.

(12) GET READY FOR A TREK MARATHON. TrekMovie.com tells readers “Gates McFadden, Tawny Newsome, And Robert Picardo Are First Guests Announced For Trek Talks 5 In March”.

The Trek Talks online marathon has become a yearly highlight, always featuring a variety of panels with Star Trek luminaries from behind and in front of the camera, deep dive episode discussions, and a fascinating combinations of guests. Plus, it’s all to benefit the Hollywood Food Coalition. This year, the Trek Talks 5 day-long event will be on Saturday, March 28, once again streaming on YouTube. Today, we have some of the first panel announcements….

…Planning is still underway, but the first two panels were just confirmed:

From the VO booth to the writers room

Gates McFadden talks with Tawny Newsome about her journey from voicing Lower Decks’ Mariner to a seat in the writers room of Starfleet Academy as she reflects on her own struggles getting her voice heard in the TNG writers room… and how things have changed for the better.

Star Trek: Voyager‘s “Critical Care”

In an era when affordable medical care in the United States is less attainable than it’s been in years, we’re taking a closer look at “Critical Care,” which takes place on a world where medical treatment decisions are based on the patient’s social standing. The discussion will focus on the episode itself with star Robert Picardo and writer Ken Biller, plus the way it connects to the present with infectious disease expert (and Trekkie) Dr. Elizabeth Hudson.

(13) MASH ‘EM, BOIL ‘EM, STICK ‘EM IN A STEW. AP News says this is “Why Rhode Island may ditch its Mr. Potato Head license plates”.

It’s been no small potatoes that Rhode Islanders have been able to choose the image of Mr. Potato Head as a specialty license plate for decades.

Yet with Hasbro’s decision to move its headquarters from the smallest state in the U.S. to Boston, two lawmakers say it’s time to hash out whether Rhode Island should continue promoting one of the company’s most iconic characters.

Under the proposal introduced earlier this month, Rhode Island’s Division of Motor Vehicles would stop providing Mr. Potato Head as an option for a specialty license plate. Currently the plate costs around $40, with half of that amount going to help support the Rhode Island Community Food Bank….

This image provided by Rhode Island DMV shows the Rhode Island specialty license plate. (Courtesy of Rhode Island’s Division of Motor Vehicles via AP)

(14) GAS MASS. “This ‘Galaxy That Wasn’t’ Never Bore Any Stars” – the New York Times offers an explanation. (Behind a paywall.)

The universe continues to surprise those who study it. This week, astronomers announced the discovery of a new kind of cosmic object, something that is very nearly a galaxy, save for one crucial, missing ingredient: stars.

The almost-galaxy is about 14 million light-years from Earth. It was the ninth cloud found to be associated with a nearby spiral galaxy, leading to its serendipitous name: Cloud-9. The object is starless, consisting of only a haze of hydrogen gas that astronomers believe is swaddled in a much more massive clump of dark matter, the invisible substance that permeates the cosmos and shapes its overarching structure.

“There’s nothing like this that we’ve found so far in the universe,” Rachael Beaton, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix on Monday.

“It’s basically a galaxy that wasn’t,” she added.

Cloud-9 is the first confirmed example of what astronomers call a RELHIC, short for Reionization-Limited H I Cloud and pronounced “relic.” Such objects are rich in gaseous hydrogen but devoid of any stars. They are failed galaxies thought to be nearly as old as time itself, primordial fossils that can help astronomers understand the conditions required for galaxies to grow.

Studying such objects will also help astronomers better understand the nature of dark matter, including what type of particle it may or may not be. Such research could also help explain how exactly dark matter influences the shape of the universe that can be seen.

The leading theory for cosmic structure and evolution posits that structures of dark matter, known as halos, are abundant across the universe. Above a certain mass, the gravity of these halos can attract enough gas to ignite the creation of stars, eventually forming a galaxy.

But the theory also predicts that dark matter halos of a slightly lighter mass can exist, and that these objects can accumulate gas without bearing stars. Because they produce no starlight, astronomers searching for these objects instead try to detect radio waves emitted by the gas itself….

(15) TRAILER PARK. This trailer reminds me of stories about someone in the audience who yells a warning at the screen. Dracula In Space Official Trailer. “Don’t open it!”

A bold new sci-fi horror movie that reimagines the legendary vampire myth in the cold darkness of space. Blending gothic horror with futuristic sci-fi, this upcoming film delivers blood-soaked suspense, cosmic terror, and cinematic spectacle in stunning 4K.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Colleen Doran, Gary Westfahl, Jeffrey Smith, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Greg Hullender.]

Pixel Scroll 10/9/24 As You Know, Boba

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) WIN A DOCTOR WHO SCREENING. Doctor Who’s upcoming Christmas is getting a special early release for selected fans. As part of Doctor Who and Star Trek’s “Friendship is Universal” collaboration fans in the US and the UK are eligible to enter a competition to see the episode screened in their local movie theater for them and 30 others. Enter here: “Friendship Is Universal – a Festive Special Competition”.

Friendship is Universal is a celebration of the companionship and camaraderie that is at the heart of Doctor Who, both in the characters we love, and the heart (or hearts!) of every fan of the Whoniverse. Why not honour the friends and friendships you hold dear by entering this competition?

You could win the chance to bring Doctor Who to your local cinema this Christmas for an exclusive screening of the festive special, before it airs. Plus, you can invite your friends and family too!

To enter, please submit your details before 23:59 pm (BST) on 13 October 2024. Good luck!

(2) SF 101. Phil Nichols and Colin Kuskie tell listeners “Let’s Go Ape” in Episode 47 of the SF 101 podcast.

It’s fifty years since the TV series of Planet of the Apes debuted, enlivening the childhood of millions around the planet of the humans. Phil and Colin enjoyed the show as kids, but now undertake a celebratory rewatch, reviewing the adventures of Virdon (the blond one), Burke (the dark-haired one), and Galen (the hairy one).

We also have a Planet of the Apes quiz, and our usual round up of recommendations of past, present and future SF.

(3) MAKING A SALE OR SELLING OUT? “Can a Start-Up Help Authors Get Paid by A.I. Companies?” The New York Times finds The Authors Guild thinks “Yes”. (Article is paywalled.)

…The Authors Guild, the largest and oldest professional organization for writers in the United States, is teaming with a new start-up, Created by Humans, to help writers license rights to their books to artificial intelligence companies.

The partnership, announced Wednesday, comes as authors and publishers are wrestling with the rapid incursion of artificial intelligence into the book world. The internet is already flooded with books generated by A.I., and sophisticated chatbots can instantly generate detailed summaries of books and spew out material in the voice and style of popular writers.

The Authors Guild has taken an aggressive stance against the unauthorized use of books by A.I. companies to train large language models, which power chatbots that can generate complex and often evocative text. Last year, it brought a class-action lawsuit on behalf of authors against OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, arguing that using books to train Chat GPT’s chatbot without licensing the rights amounts to copyright infringement. (The Times also sued OpenAI and Microsoft last year, claiming copyright infringement of news content used by A.I. systems.)

By endorsing Created by Humans’ platform, the Authors Guild is in a sense acknowledging that there is no avoiding the disruption that A.I. has unleashed on the book business. Through their partnership, the Authors Guild will help Created by Humans develop informational webinars for authors that will explain how licensing works and what their options are.

“What’s good about licensing is it gives the author and the publisher control, as well as compensation, and it gives you the ability to say no,” said Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of the Authors Guild, who will serve on Created by Humans’ advisory board. “Right now, it’s the A.I. companies that just went and crawled pirate websites and swept all that material in.”

Several A.I. companies have already registered interest in licensing book content through the platform, said Trip Adler, the co-founder and chief executive of Created by Humans. Adler declined to name the companies, citing nondisclosure agreements….

(4) NPR ON OCTAVIA BUTLER’S 2024. A 31-minute NPR article discusses “The Power And Prescience Of Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable Of The Sower’’ at the link.

It’s 2024. Extreme weather events due to global warming have overwhelmed parts of the United States. Water is increasingly scarce. The mass migration of people in search of more livable conditions has caused political tension and border closures. A drug epidemic spreads across the country. And a candidate for president promises he can fix the country’s problems with more religion and fewer regulations.

That’s the premise of Octavia E. Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, which was published in 1993.

The novel contains a powerful and poignant vision of the United States of the future, one that rings scarily true in the present. The 2024 of Butler’s 1993 work isn’t so far away from the 2024 in which we’ll all currently living. Butler published a sequel, Parable of the Talents, in 1998. Both feature a protagonist named Lauren Olamina, a young woman trying to survive and make a life for herself….

(5) CRANIUM STRAINIUM. Camestros Felapton’s intelligence is not artificial but he’s still managed to give us this: “An image was put in my head & I can edit photos so now you get to see it as well”.

At File770 the eminent host replied to a post about the musical nature of the recent Joker film:

PJ Evans: Imagine the Arthur Freed Joker with Gene Kelly as Joker, Judy Garland as Harley Quinn, and let’s throw in Fred Astaire as the Riddler! “You made me love you”…”

(6) EXPANDED UNIVERSE. Dennis Wilson Wise, who served as a research consultant for PBS’ recent “Judy-Lynn del Rey: The Galaxy Gal” episode of Renegades, tells more of her story in a short article at The Conversation: “The woman who revolutionized the fantasy genre is finally getting her due”.

…Over the course of her career, del Rey earned a reputation as a superstar editor among her authors. Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” called her the “most brilliant editor I ever encountered,” and Philip K. Dick said she was the “greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins,” the legendary editor of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

She got her start, though, working as an editorial assistant – in truth, a “gofer” – for the most lauded science fiction magazine of the 1960s, Galaxy. There she learned the basics of publishing and rose rapidly through the editorial ranks until Ballantine Books lured her away in 1973.

Soon thereafter, Ballantine was acquired by publishing giant Random House, which then named del Rey senior editor. Yet her first big move was a risky one – cutting ties with Ballantine author John Norman, whose highly popular “Gor” novels were widely panned for their misogyny.Nonetheless, del Rey’s mission was to develop a strong backlist of science fiction novels that could hook new generations of younger readers, not to mention adults. One early success was her “Star Trek Log” series, a sequence of 10 novels based on episodes of “Star Trek: The Animated Series.”

But del Rey landed an even bigger success by snagging the novelization rights to a science fiction film that, at the time, few Hollywood executives believed would do well: “Star Wars.”…

Unfortunately, this scholar of fantasy literature doesn’t understand that it wasn’t a “Hugo committee” but Hugo voters who were responsible for her getting the award — the one Lester threw back in our faces, of course.

…Yet despite these accolades, Del Rey’s reputation continued to suffer from its own commercial success. Notably, Judy-Lynn del Rey was never nominated for a Hugo Award for best professional editor. When she died in 1986, the Hugo committee belatedly tried granting her a posthumous award, but her husband, Lester, refused to accept it, saying that it came too late….

(7) 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY. [Item by Steven French.] Gamer wins Nobel Prize! Well, Hassabis started out as a games designer before developing Deep Mind’s AlphaFold programme which has helped scientists make major strides towards predicting complex protein structures (looks like AI is on a roll with this year’s prizes!)

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 goes —

One half to David Baker (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA) “for computational protein design”

and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind, London, UK “for protein structure prediction”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about proteins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential….

The Guardian did a feature about “Demis Hassabis: from video game designer to Nobel prize winner”.

Most 17-year-olds spend their days playing video games, but Britain’s latest Nobel prize winner spent his teenage years developing them.

Sir Demis Hassabis, who was jointly awarded the chemistry prize on Wednesday, got his big break in the tech world as co-designer of 1994’s hit game Theme Park, where players create and operate amusement parks.

Born in London to a Greek Cypriot father and Singaporean mother, Hassabis went on to gain a double first in computer science at Cambridge University, launch his own video game company, complete a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and then co-found the artificial intelligence startup DeepMind, which Google bought for £400m in 2014.

The 48-year-old was knighted for services to AI this year….

(8) EAGLE CON 2024. Eagle Con 2024 will take place on Tuesday, October 15 and Wednesday, October 16 on the 3rd floor of the Cal State LA University Student Union in Los Angeles.

Space Cowboy Books owner Jean-Paul L. Garnier will take part in a panel of speculative poets as part of Eagle Con 2024 “Unfrakking the Future”, along with Wendy Van Camp, Pedro Iniguez, and Denise Dumars. The event is open to students and faculty. The panel runs on Wednesday Oct 16 from 12:20-1:25 p.m. Pacific.

Also on October 16, from 4:35– 5:40 p.m., will be the Prism Award Presentation to Edward James Olmos (University Student Union 3rd Floor Los Angeles Room 308).

The Prism Award is given to creators who have made outstanding contributions to diversity in speculative genres across media. This year we honor legendary actor and Cal State LA alumnus Edward James Olmos. Among his many acting credits, Olmos has been a central character in two of the most important science fiction stories of all time: he was Gaff in the film Blade Runner (1982) and Admiral William Adama in the series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009). Come hear him discuss his illustrious career and his life at Cal State LA.

Awardee: Edward James Olmos, actor (Blade Runner, Battlestar Galactica, Stand and Deliver, Mayans M.C., Miami Vice)

Moderator: Dr. Stephen Trzaskoma, Dean of the College of Arts and Letters

(9) DONA SADOCK DIES. Norman Spinrad today announced the death of his partner Dona Sadock.

Dona Sadock’s body has just died. But her great spirit will allways be immortal.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Mike Glyer.]

Born October 9, 1964 – Guillermo del Toro, 60. Here at File 770 we’re big fans of filmmaker, director, and author Guillermo del Toro. And not just because of the great work he’s done – including Pan’s Labyrinth (he wrote its Nebula-winning script), The Shape of Water (which won him an Oscar as Best Director while the film took Best Picture), Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (an Oscar for Best Animated Feature), plus two Hellboy movies, and Pacific Rim. He’s also an impressive and generous person.

Guillermo del Toro in 2023. Photo by Boungawa.

As John King Tarpinian, reporting on the del Toro signing at Mystery & Imagination in 2013, told us: “Guillermo is a kind, unassuming, down to earth man. When he heard a local bookshop, Mystery and Imagination, was just getting by in this age of internet sales and big box book stores he volunteered to do what turns out to be his only official signing of his new book, Pacific Rim, as a fund raiser… Once the event got started Guillermo was more than affable with all in attendance. He spoke with everybody, shook everybody’s hand. Guillermo was great with kids, a few of which had drawn their versions of the Kaiju. He’d stop and look at the drawing showing real appreciation at their attempts….”

He’s been inducted to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame (2017), and naturally has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (2019).

However, he tells interviewers that there’s a price to pay for his work:

“I think the main sign of a good story for you is that it has to hurt. It has to dig deep into who you are … I jokingly say that Hellboy is autobiographical, but it is. The way I think about myself, and the way I think about my story with my wife, everything is in there, and Pan’s Labyrinth was incredibly personal, to the point where I showed it to my wife and she turned to me after seeing the movie complete and she said, ‘You felt that bad?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I felt that bad.’

His latest project, a Frankenstein movie for Netflix, recently finished filming.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Thatababy gets tips on the future.
The Flying McCoys show anger management at work.
Bizarro gives way to AI.
Baby Blues has an ageless joke.
Existential Comics says the way to defeat Sauron is with…philosophy!

(12) HOW COOL IS THIS? The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) now has badges that Elgin Award winners can put on the covers of their books.

(13) UM, ACTUALLY. “Online Rent-a-Sage” Bret Devereaux disputes the notion in some fantasy literature that systems of magic would be reduced to a kind of science and its practitioners would resemble engineers. The fifteen-post thread begins here.

Its an understandable but incorrect modern assumption to assume that basically all knowledge is scientific in nature.

But human beings have experienced matter, energy and chemicals for hundreds of thousands of years.

Physics and chemistry are far younger. 2/
— "Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) October 8, 2024

Instead, people in the past mostly had what we might call 'craft knowledge' – knowledge of *what* worked, absent knowing *how* it worked.

This becomes hilariously clear reading ancient writers like Pliny the Elder or Theophrastus, who haven't a clue how a lot of nature works. 4/
— "Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) October 8, 2024

And later…

Even moreso of course if that magic *doesn't* work on physics-like principles. What if usually spells work, but sometimes, randomly, for reasons no one understands, they don't?

I'd expect an orthopraxy response – "well, you must have done it wrong, do it again!" 13/
— "Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) October 8, 2024

(14) ROCK’N SFF. [Item by Steven French.] As is well known, Jimi Hendrix was a huge science fiction fan and this essay in Classic Rock looks at how his SF reading shaped his second album, Axis:Bold as Love: “Jimi Hendrix: the story of the Axis: Bold As Love album”.

If you were to write a science fiction novel set in the year 1967, it would be hard to imagine a more captivating cosmic messenger than Jimi Hendrix. With a wild afro that looked like a shock of electrical wires, psychedelic duds streaked with hues from the Crab Nebula and a strange language that was part-philosophical rambling, part screaming Stratocaster, he came to London, dropping jaws wherever he went. And since aliens always arrive on earth with a manifesto to help humanity, Hendrix’s was called, with futurist bravado, Axis: Bold As Love.

He’d already grabbed everyone’s attention early that year with his band The Experience’s debut Are You Experienced. So the second album seemed the ideal vessel for a message. Axis was recorded in fits and starts amidst a hectic tour schedule that included over 180 international dates (including package outings with such strange bedfellows like The Monkees and Englebert Humperdinck), many TV appearances, and a landmark appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival. It was seen by Hendrix’s manager Chas Chandler and Jimi’s labels Track in the UK and Reprise in the US as a quick follow-up release, a way to keep the conversation going with fans and critics. Considering it was followed less than a year later by Jimi’s double-album masterwork Electric Ladyland, it’s not surprising that Axis has suffered from a kind of middle child syndrome. But middle children can go to extremes to get attention, and this one often sounded like it was tuned to a radio station on another planet.

Not to belabor the extraterrestrial, but Hendrix even described the album as “science fiction rock ‘n’ roll,” and on the opener Up From The Skies, he sings from an alien’s point of view: “I wanna know about the new mother Earth, I wanna hear and see everything.” That fascination was there from his childhood. As a boy, Jimi claimed he saw a UFO, and he was obsessed with TV show Flash Gordon, even insisting that his family call him “Buster,” after the serial’s star Buster Crabbe.

(15) MOVING PICTURE OF THE DAY. Possibly inspired by Steve Vertlieb’s article “Hermann and Hitchcock: The Torn Curtain” posted on File 770 today, Andrew Porter sent this GIF.

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

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

Posted on September 22, 2024 by Mike Glyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born September 22, 1971 — Elizabeth Bear, 53.

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

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

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

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

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

(11) COMICS SECTION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. “Pilot” (season 1, episode 1-2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixel Scroll 8/29/24 Swamp Thing! You Make My Haploid Graveyard Heart Sing!

Posted on August 29, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) BRIAN KEENE INSTALLS A NEW BASKET AT HIS BOOKSTORE. Patrick Tomlinson somehow thought he was entitled to call out Brian’s purity. Anybody could have told him what happens when you yank Brian’s chain.

(2) FLORIDA SUED. “John Green and Jodi Picoult Join Publishers, Authors and Advocates in a Lawsuit Against Florida Book Bans” – People has the story.

A group of book publishers and renowned authors — along with students, their parents and The Authors Guild — are suing the state of Florida for its decision to implement the state’s book-banning law.

On Thursday, Aug. 29, Penguin Random House announced in a press release that it — along with Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster and Sourcebooks — would be filing a suit against the state to challenge House Bill 1069.

Also joining the suit are two students, two parents, the Authors Guild and the individual authors Julia Alvarez (The Cemetery of Untold Stories) Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak), John Green (The Fault in Our Stars), Jodi Picoult (By Any Other Name), and Angie Thomas (The Hate U Give).

Back in 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 1069 into effect, giving parents a say in what books schools can and can’t have in their libraries. The Associated Press reported at the time that the law would require Florida schools to provide a searchable list of all books in their libraries, and school boards have to give notice to the public if adding in new reading materials….

…One of the attorneys representing the group of plaintiffs, Dan Novack said in the press release that the law’s “complex and overbroad provisions have created chaos and turmoil across the state, resulting in thousands of historic and modern classics — works we are proud to publish — being unlawfully labeled obscene and removed from shelves.”…

(3) MAKING A LIVING AS A WRITER (FOR SOME VALUES OF LIVING). Jeff Reynolds applies inflation to sf magazine pay rates of years gone by to argue “The Past Is Not as Rosy as You’ve Been Led to Believe” at the SFWA Blog.

… You could make an excellent living selling shorts during the pulp era. But there’s a truckload of ifs tied to that could. If editors liked you; if you wrote decently; if you churned out work fast enough that your fingers bled; if you didn’t mind being hungry. Being a pulp writer during the Depression years was downright murderous.

I limited my research to pulp’s heyday, the mid-1920s through mid-1930s, and left out the type of magazines referred to as slicks in order to maintain a close comparison with modern genre writers who publish short stories. By 1934, there were as many as 250 monthly pulps operating, publishing stories on topics ranging from war, science fiction, romance, westerns, mysteries, and so on.

The majority of pulps paid one cent per word or less. A few paid two or three cents, and some paid even more for writer exclusivity. But to get to that level, you had to be talented and charming. You also had to write enormous quantities of stories….

(4) GOLDMAN FUND. Dream Foundry’s “Con or Bust” program is taking applications for funding to bring Palestinians and members of the Palestinian diaspora to the 2025 Worldcon. Apply at the link.

Our preferred application window for funding is now open until October 21, 2024 for Palestinians or members of the Palestinian diaspora planning to go to Worldcon 2025 in Seattle. Applicants who apply within this window will be considered together, and hear about their funding amounts in early November. Applications received outside this window will be considered on a first-come-first served basis for as long as funding remains.

We’d love to reach as many Palestinian fans and creators as possible.

(5) THE WATERMELON GRANT. The Watermelon Grant offers $2000 USD in unrestricted funds to an emerging Palestinian creator in the field of speculative arts. The 2025 grant considers works of speculative fiction and poetry. Full guidelines at the link.

The roots of Palestinian and Black American solidarity are deep and storied, stretching back decades and centered in the works, writings, and movements of James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Toni Morrison. In keeping with FIYAH’s pledged solidarity with the Palestinian people, The Watermelon Grant aims to assist emerging Palestinian creators working in speculative artforms throughout the world.

This grant is funded by L. D. Lewis and administered by Dream Foundry’s Incubator Program. To support an expansion of the project, through a donation to the Match Me campaign, tap here.

The Watermelon Grant offers $2000 USD in unrestricted funds to an emerging Palestinian creator in the field of speculative arts. A panel of three judges with expertise in a given year’s accepted format review in full all applications entered through an electronic submissions portal. Applications are judged on a criteria which considers artistic merit and potential impact. One grant is awarded annually (two if our Match Me campaign funds)….

WHAT ARE “SPECULATIVE ARTS?”

Speculative Arts are here defined as works of imagination based in concurrent, alternate, invented, or emerging realities. Works of memoir or nonfiction would be considered ineligible. Rather than just being based in speculative literature, the grant cycles through eligible media every year allowing artists beyond those who work in prose or poetry to enter portfolios of visual media (illustration, photography, etc) or those pertaining to performance arts.

(6) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 117 of the Hugo-winning Octothorpe podcast, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty discuss the recent Worldcon, Glasgow 2024. Listen here: “You Made That Joke Last Time, John”.

We talk mostly about registration, attendance, and programme. Spoiler: we quite liked it, listeners.

There’s an uncorrected transcript at this link.

Three photographs dominate the centre of the image. The left-hand photograph is of a prototype Hugo made of rough wood and cardboard; the centre photograph is of a rough-ish wood base and tin foil rocket but with the actual acrylic and etching, and the right-hand photograph is of the finished Hugo Award. Text below the photos reads “protoprototype”, “prototype”, and “2024 Hugo”. Above, the words “Octothorpe 117” appear.

(7) OCTOTHORPE RECUSES FROM 2025. After winning the Best Fancast Hugo at Glasgow, the Octothorpe crew say they are recusing “for at least the 2025 Hugos”.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

August 29, 1954 — Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 70.

By Paul Weimer: I first encountered Kube-McDowell ‘s work in a quasi tie-in novel, Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Odyssey. This was part of a series of novels that Asimov commissioned in the titular city, set somewhere in his Robot-Empire timeline. It started off in the classic amnesia case, with a man on the run and not remembering why, and easing readers into the setting Asimov had created for Kube-McDowell to explore in this and subsequent books. It was entertaining enough that I started to look for other works of his. I came across some stories here and there (especially a couple that wound up as Tales from the Darkside)

And then I struck gold when I found Alternities.

Alternities stands as one of the classic parallel world novels. Walter Endicott, clearly not from our world, stumbles from our world, suddenly, into a world not his own. The singular universe has now fractured into a kaleidoscope (the novel uses the word maze) of alternate realities. The novel, like many alternate history multiverse novels of the period (before and since) heavily thinks about the branch points, the jonbar points, the decisions that lead to each of the major color-coded worlds that we see in the book. There is a lot of speculation as to why the worlds split as they did, and a surprising answer and conclusion, as well. The novel shows his erudition not only in science but in general communication of popular knowledge. Kube-McDowell’s columns and articles on everything from the space program to the idiocy of “scientific creationism” are a testament to his knowledge, curiosity, and ability to explain and bring ideas to his reading audience both in fiction and nonfiction alike.

And he’s a filker on top of all that. Quite the Renaissance man indeed.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Speed Bump shows if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
Thatababy exposes the inner workings.
The Argyle Sweater is present at the creation of a famous saying.
Rubes complains about a superhero theme song.

(10) KBG. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Alaya Dawn Johnson and Sarah Beth Durst on Wednesday, September 11 starting at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).

Alaya Dawn Johnson

Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of Trouble the Saints, winner of the World Fantasy Award; Reconstruction, her debut short story collection; and The Library of Broken Worlds, recent winner of the BSFA award for Fiction for Young People. Alaya has lived in Mexico for the last decade, where she’s sung in a blues band, gotten her master’s degree, produced a documentary, written novels, fooled around and fell in love. She and her filmmaker partner can normally be found in rural Oaxaca on a haunted mountaintop, where they have half a house, seven dogs and a mare.

Sarah Beth Durst

Sarah Beth Durst is the New York Times bestselling author of over twenty-five books for adults, teens, and kids, including cozy fantasy The Spellshop. She’s been awarded an American Library Association Alex Award, as well as a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. Several of her books have been optioned for film/television, and her novel Drink Slay Love was made into a TV movie and was a question on Jeopardy! She lives in Stony Brook, New York, with her husband, her children, and her ill-mannered cat. Visit her at sarahbethdurst.com.

(11) EBERT’S TEN WORST SF MOVIES. Roger Ebert died in 2013 and missed seeing some stinkers that might belong on this list; however, he probably thought the field of candidates was already pretty crowded: “10 Worst Sci-Fi Movies of All Time, According to Roger Ebert” at Collider.

The science fiction genre asks audiences to suspend belief in the name of scientific and sometimes extraterrestrial wonders. This demands intricate premises that rely on logic and enough of a fictional leap to seem plausible in a world that exists apart from reality.The worst movies of the genre are unable to do any of these things, many of them falling victim to the merciless reviews of the esteemed Roger Ebert. In his reviews of what he deemed the worst sci-fi movies of all time, Ebert cuts through the convoluted and scolds the special effects.

First and worst is Battlefield Earth. Trailing in second place is —

2. ‘Jason X’ (2001)

Directed by James Isaac

With Ebert’s incredible distaste for the Friday the 13th movies, it’s only fitting that he gave the slasher franchise another scathing review for its sci-fi chapter. The tenth installment in the series, Jason X takes place in the year 2455 where a cryogenically frozen Jason Vorhees is transported from the now-research facility at Camp Crystal Lake to space. Aboard the ship, he thaws out and begins terrorizing the crew. The formulaic horror movie swaps the nooks and crannies of the summer camp for a spaceship where the promiscuous crew sneaks away only to be met by the masked slasher.

In one moment of the movie, Jason’s iconic hockey mask and garments are replaced with metallic armor. Jason X calls upon the rules of its former films but also strays so far with its dive into sci-fi. Ebert’s one-star reviewcalled the movie a “low-rent retread” of the Alien franchise but was dismally optimistic there would be a follow-up movie. Laughably terrible and so far out of its element, Jason X is easily considered one of the worst sci-fi movies of all time.

(12) TREKKIN’ TO GONDWANALAND. “Matching dinosaur prints were found an ocean apart in Africa and South America” – NPR follows a prehistoric trot.

Tens of millions of years ago, South America and Africa were part of the same land mass, an ancient supercontinent called Gondwana.

At some point, the two continents we now know started to pull away from each other until there was just a thin strip of land at the top holding them together.

A group of scientists say in new research that matching dinosaur tracks found in modern-day Brazil and Cameroon were made 120 million years ago along that narrow passage before the continents separated.

“There was just a neck of land connecting the two, and that neck of land is the corridor that we’re talking about,” said Louis Jacobs, a professor emeritus of earth sciences at Southern Methodist University.

(13) DRESS REHEARSAL FOR LUCIFER’S HAMMER. Scitechdaily covers the biennial exercise: “NASA Confronts 72% Asteroid Impact Probability: A Planetary Defense Test (scitechdaily.com)

…Asteroid Impact Preparedness

A large asteroid impacting Earth is highly unlikely for the foreseeable future. But because the damage from such an event could be great, NASA leads hypothetical asteroid impact “tabletop” exercises every two years with experts and decision-makers from federal and international agencies to address the many uncertainties of an impact scenario. The most recent exercise took place this past April, with a preliminary report being issued on June 20.

Designing Realistic Impact Scenarios

Making such a scenario realistic and useful for all involved is no small task. Scientists from the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which specializes in the tracking and orbital determination of asteroids and comets and finding out if any are hazards to Earth, have played a major role in designing these exercises since the first 11 years ago.

“These hypothetical scenarios are complex and take significant effort to design, so our purpose is to make them useful and challenging for exercise participants and decision-makers to hone their processes and procedures to quickly come to a plan of action while addressing gaps in the planetary defense community’s knowledge,” said JPL’s Paul Chodas, the director of CNEOS.

…The Impact Scenario

This year’s scenario: A hypothetical asteroid, possibly several hundred yards across, has been discovered, with an estimated 72% chance of impacting Earth in 14 years. Potential impact locations include heavily populated areas in North America, Southern Europe, and North Africa, but there is still a 28% chance the asteroid will miss Earth. After several months of being tracked, the asteroid moves too close to the Sun, making further observations impossible for another seven months. Decision-makers must figure out what to do.

Leading the exercise were NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), the Federal Emergency Management Agency Response Directorate, and the Department of State Office of Space Affairs. Over the course of two days in April, participants gathered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which hosted the event, to consider the potential national and global responses to the scenario.

(14) THE MAN WHO SOLD THE SUN. [Item by Daniel Dern.] HotHardware.com has learned “California Startup Wants To Sell Sunlight After Dark Using A Giant Space Mirror” Dern ponders, (a) what’s the potential (bad) impact on global warming, and (b) could we use this to sell dark during the day? And c) If earth gets invaded by giant cats, this might be useful.

…Nowack remarked at the International Conference on Energy from Space, “The problem is that solar energy is not available when we actually want it. It would be really great if we could get some solar energy before the sun rises and after sunset, because then you could actually charge higher prices and make a lot more money.” He added, “And we think that reflector-based technologies can solve this problem.”

Reflect Orbital, a California-based startup, wants to send 57 small satellites into low-Earth orbit with 33-square-foot ultra reflective mylar mirrors that would, in theory, bounce sunlight back down to solar farms on Earth. The company made a video (see above) that uses a hot-air balloon to simulate how the technique is supposed to work. If successful, the satellites could provide an additional 30 minutes of sunlight to the solar farms during peak demand times.

There are some possible pitfalls to the idea, however. Thick clouds and stormy weather could potentially block the sunlight from reaching its destination. Seasonal changes that alter the amount of sunlight in certain areas of the world could also present challenges, and the possible environmental impacts of this light reflection have also not been discussed thus far.

The company’s orbital mirror project is scheduled to launch sometime in 2025, and interested parties can “apply for sunlight” over the next few months ahead of the launch….

(15) SCIENTIST BEWARE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] You’ve heard of ‘writer beware’, well now scientists beware as there are some who are out to build up a fake profile. It seems there is a citation black market. Reported in this week’s Nature.

Research-integrity watchers are concerned about the growing ways in which scientists can fake or manipulate the citation counts of their studies. In recent months, increasingly bold practices have surfaced. One approach was revealed through a sting operation in which a group of researchers bought 50 citations to pad the Google Scholar profile of a fake scientist they had created.

The scientists bought the citations for US$300 from a firm that seems to sell bogus citations in bulk. This confirms the existence of a black market for faked references that research-integrity sleuths have long speculated about, says the team.

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

Pixel Scroll 6/7/24 As Godstalk As My Scrollness, I Thought Pixels Could Teleport

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) FRENCH CONVENTION WITH UKRANIAN FEATURE. [Item by Michael Burianyk.] The 2024 edition of Nice Fictions – Recontres de l’Imaginaire takes place this weekend (7, 8, 9 June) in Nice, France. This is a festival of the imagination – Science Fiction, Fantasy, Art, Gaming, Comics, Manga and Cosplay. It is a very inclusive event and this year it features Speculative Fiction and art from Ukraine.

On Friday will be a panel presentation of the Embroidered Worlds anthology of Ukrainian SFF in English translation with Michael Burianyk, Atthisarts publisher, E.D.E. Bell and editor Valya Dudycz Lupescu. They will discuss the genesis and evolution of this project. This will be in ENGLISH – Friday, 7 June at 17:30 Central European Summer Time (Nice) or 11:30am Eastern Daylight Time (New York). This will be a simultaneous in-person and YouTube broadcast event. For anyone actually in Nice, note that the book the book Embroidered Worlds will be on sale (€20) on site on Friday and Saturday.

On Sunday Mykhailo Nazarenko (renown literary critic from the University of Kyiv) will be conversation with Jean-Louis Trudel to discuss “Ukrainian speculative fiction: from Romantic to Post-Modern and colonial to post-colonial”. This will be in ENGLISH– Sunday, 9 June at 17:30 Central European Summer Time (Nice) or 11:30am Eastern Daylight Time (New York). It will only be a virtual event only, broadcast on YouTube.

Note that if you miss the actual presentations, they will have been recorded and stored on YouTube and accessed via the links above.

On Friday and Saturday, prominent Ukrainian sculptors Yehor and Mykyta Zigura will exhibit some of their work on site.

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to dig into duck with Alex Jennings in Episode 227 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

In a different world, I’d be in Pasadena right now for the Nebula Awards conference, but in this world, I’ve just survived two consecutive weekends of conventions — first Balticon, then StokerCon — and there’s such a thing as too much fun, even for an extrovert like me. So instead, I’m at home, inviting you to take a seat at the table with the first of three guests I hosted while in Baltimore — Alex Jennings.

Jennings is the winner of the 2023 Compton Crook Award for his debut novel, The Ballad of Perilous Graves. His writing has appeared in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, New Suns, and Current Affairs, and many other venues. Some of his short fiction was published in the 2012 collection Here I Come and Other Stories.

He also writes a regular speculative poetry review column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction titled “Chapter and Verse.” In 2022, he was the inaugural recipient of the Imagination Unbound Fellowship at Under the Volcano, a writing retreat held annually in Tepoztlan, Mexico. He is also an instructor of fiction and popular fiction at The University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program.

We discussed his dream which commanded him to move to New Orleans (plus his brother’s dream which supported that decision), how writing his debut novel transformed him into the kind of person he needed to be in order to write his debut novel, how Octavia Butler invited him into the field, which artist he wishes would draw the comic book adaptation of his novel The Ballad of Perilous Graves, what China Miéville taught him at Clarion about the deadly nature of “second order cliches,” how joy is revolutionary in and of itself, the way his experience as a standup comedian helps him help you care about the multiple POVs of his novel, which issue of Uncanny X-Men was the first comic book he ever read, the nature of his quasi-mystical approach to writing, and much more.

(3) SFF/H REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s latest “Best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” for the Guardian takes in You Like It Darker by Stephen King; Tomorrowing by Terry Bisson; Freakslaw by Jane Flett; The Mark by Fríđa Isberg; and Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay.

(4) AUTHORS GUILD ON RWA BANKRUPTCY. The Authors Guild posted this yesterday: “AG Statement on Romance Writers of America Bankruptcy Filing – The Authors Guild

The Authors Guild was saddened to learn of the Romance Writers of America‘s recent bankruptcy filing. While we are aware of the issues that led to the RWA’s loss of membership, we regret the difficulties suffered by an organization that supported authors for more than 40 years and has been a valuable ally in our advocacy efforts.

The RWA has been an active member of the Authors Coalition of America alongside the Authors Guild, and we have collaborated on various initiatives. It has been a part of our AI coalition and collective bargaining efforts, having signed many advocacy letters and regularly attending our meetings. Additionally, the Guild has worked with the RWA in filing amicus curiae (or “friend of the court”) briefs in a variety of cases, most recently in the appeal of Hachette v. Internet Archive to the Second Circuit, supporting the publishers’ argument that the Internet Archive’s “fair use” defense is without merit.

The romance genre is a large one, with a predominantly female authorship, many of whom are self-published. We understand that the RWA plans to continue serving these authors regardless of its financial restructuring, and we sincerely hope they will be able to do so. The Authors Guild remains committed to supporting the RWA and its members during this challenging time, as we believe in the importance of united advocacy for the betterment of all authors.

(5) THE NEXT CHAPTER AFTER ELEVEN. In “Romance Writers of America has filed for bankruptcy. What’s next?” Literary Hub’s Brittany Allen inquires about times to come.

…I spoke to Christine Larson, a journalist and labor historian who studies the romance writing community, in search of a little more context. How did a collective founded on a love for love stray so far from its better angels?

And what’s next for the romance community?

…. In her upcoming book, Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success, Larson argues that the romance community is inherently nimble, despite the shambling of its largest institution. Over a decade of study, Larson observed that authors in “Romancelandia” (to use the preferred nomenclature) are uniquely group-minded. She noted unusual working behavior, not seen in traditional publishing—like the fact that advice moves fluidly among romance authors. Established writers talk to newbies, and vice versa.

“A super important thing to take away here is that romance writers have the strongest writing community that I have ever seen,” Larson insisted. And no bungling board can quash that. Even if the larger irony here—that a community so inherently nimble, diverse, and vanguard has been tethered to an organization as blind-spotty as any found in Old Publishing—isn’t lost on anyone.

From here, Larson sees three ways forward for RWA: 1) the org could rebuild itself (“But I think that’s an outside possibility”); 2) it could reconstitute as a much smaller, perhaps local organization with smaller goals; or 3) romance writers seeking a professional collective may flock to the Authors Guild, whose membership has grown 45% over the past five years….

(6) BJO COA. Bjo Trimble’s daughter Lora told her Facebook friends in a public post, “We have moved mom up to West LA and here is her new Address”:

Betty Trimble
E115-L
West Los Angeles Veterans Home
11500 Nimitz Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90049
United States

(7) CHRISTMAS CAPER. That’s when BBC News says to tune in: “Wallace and Gromit return to face penguin nemesis Feathers McGraw”.

Wallace and Gromit will face their arch-enemy, the evil penguin Feathers McGraw, when they return in a new full-length feature film this Christmas, the BBC has confirmed.

The 70-minute adventure, titled Vengeance Most Fowl, will see the iconic duo face off against their nemesis who was last seen in the 1993 Oscar-winning short film The Wrong Trousers.

Wallace and Gomit creator Nick Park said he decided to bring back McGraw after fans asked if the character would ever return.

Made by Aardman Animations, it will be the first outing by the pair since 2008’s A Matter of Loaf and Death.

Wallace and Gromit films are a staple of the Christmas TV schedule, with the debut picture, a Grand Day Out – about Wallace deciding to fly to the moon (believing it to be made out of cheese) – appearing for Channel 4 on Christmas Eve 1990.

(8) FAKE FROM SOUP TO NUTS. Victoria Strauss takes Writer Beware readers through every step: “From Motionflick Studios to Snow Day Film: The Evolution of a Book-to-Film Scam”.

…Everything about this email said “bogus”, from the solicitation itself (solicitation, as regular readers of this blog know, is one of the first signs of fraud these days), to the implausibly large option fee, to the absurd notion that an established Hollywood figure like Paul Dano would be personally creating pitch decks.

Other signs of bogosity: Motionflick appeared to be brand new, with a web domain registered on June 25, 2023, just days before the solicitation was sent….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

June 7, 1962 — Lance Reddick. (Died 2023.) The series where I first saw Lance Reddick was decidedly non-genre. He played Cedric Daniels, lieutenant in the Baltimore Police Department’s Narcotics Unit on The Wire series, undoubtedly one of best such series ever done.

Now his best performance in a genre role I believe was on Fringe, another stellar series, where as Phillip Broyles, the Homeland Security Special Agent who is head of the Fringe division which was established to investigate a series of terrorist incidents which may or may be not just be unexplained phenomena.

When the 2022 Netflix Resident Evil series was done, Lance Reddick was chosen to be the character, the first person of color to do so. The showrunners did not want to limit themselves to actors who resembled Wesker’s in-game appearance. Lance in Syfy Wire noted, “This Wesker, although very very much based on the Wesker in the games, isn’t exactly him.”

He showed in a brief recurring role on Lost as Matthew Abaddon, where he “was an agent of Charles Widmore whose job was to get people to “where they needed to be”. His name, Abaddon, comes from the Bible’s reference to the Angel of the Bottomless Pit, whose job it is to take souls to their destination in the Last Judgement, corresponding to his role in the series.” That description is courtesy of Lostpedia, the Lost Encyclopaedia.

Remember the terribly good Jonah Hex film? He’s is an acquaintance of Hex, where he’s a blacksmith and inventor who equips Jonah with his one-of-a-kind specialized weaponry essentially a sort of Q though I might be stretching that comparison.

The last role of his I want note is as Charon in the John Wick films. He’s the concierge of the Continental Hotel in New York City. He often interacted with John Wick in his position as the concierge of the hotel, offering John various services. He will appear in the fifth film, John Wick Presents: Ballerina, and the last film before his death.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

F Minus has a further twist.
Lola meets a famous character.
Off the Mark mispronounces a song.
Speed Bump involves some very light reading.
Diamond Lil had a week of Hercules films, starting with this link, and ending with this link.

(11) I COULD DROP A LOG. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] The Poozeum, a new museum in Williams, Arizona dedicated to coprolites, might be of interest to the F770 audience: “Poozeum: Fossilized poop museum opens in Williams, AZ”. AZ Central is on the spot.

…Today we bring you news of a new free museum in Williams, Arizona, that is all about poop.

Specifically, coprolite, which is fossilized poop.

Here’s how to visit the new Poozeum, devoted to dinosaur poop and what we can learn from it.

…”There are pieces that are truly one of a kind, including a dinosaur bone that has a coprolite on it, showing that an animal pooped on a dinosaur bone, and they fossilized together.

“There is also a gar fish that has poop lodged in its teeth – both fossilized together, indicating that it intentionally or accidentally ate poop prior to death.”

Over the years, Frandsen’s collection has grown to 8,000 pieces and they’re all on display at the Poozeum, which opened on May 18, 2024 and calls itself “the world’s premier dinosaur poop museum and gift shop.”…

So I had to see what you’d find in the shop there. Here’s one example:

(12) JUSTWATCH REPORT: AUDIENCE PREFERENCE TOWARDS STREAMING TITLES. After looking at Netflix’s most watched movies and TV shows of 2023, JustWatch decided we wanted to look at how those titles hold up with audiences. Now that we are halfway through 2024, we can see if the mega-platforms most watch titles have had any lasting impact on audiences, and how their IMDb scores have affected long term viewership.

JustWatch took a look at IMDb scores and compared those to the most clicked titles on JustWatch’s Netflix page. They saw that even though Lucifer is the most popular title with JustWatch users browsing Netflix titles, it has the lowest IMDb score. Overall, this has not affected audience preference for the series.

If you want to learn more about Netflix’s content, check out JustWatch’s newest page: Netflix Statistics. The page features insights into Netflix’s market share, content, and finances.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the Pitch Meeting for The Divergent Series: Allegiant.

The YA craze took the world by storm for several years, only to die a quick and uncereminous death with the Divergent series, which saw it’s third part perform so badly that they never even finished making them. Allegiant definitely raises some questions. Like what’s up with Tris’ hair? How many section councils are there? Why is all their technology borderline magic? To answer all these questions, check out the pitch meeting that led to Allegiant!

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Michael Burianyk, Kathy Sullivan, 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 Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 9/11/23 Pixels Are A Scroll’s Best Friend

Posted on September 11, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) USE THESE EMAILS FOR SUBMISSIONS TO WSFS BUSINESS MEETING. Donald Eastlake III, Presiding Officer of the 2023 WSFS Business Meeting, announced that if anyone is having trouble sending email to businessmeeting (at) chengduworldcon.com, there is an alternative email address available for the submission of new business: ChengduNewBusiness (at) pobox.com.

The general deadline for new business is September 19, Chengdu time.

(2) GET IA TO TAKE DOWN YOUR BOOKS. From the Authors Guild: “Update: How to Tell Internet Archive to Remove Your Books”. “The court’s decision in the Open Library lawsuit made it clear that making full-text copyrighted books available for free without permission is copyright infringement. Here’s how any author can demand the Internet Archive take down any titles that are still on its website.”

In March, four major publishers scored a resounding victory in their copyright lawsuit against Internet Archive and its so-called Open Library program. The court decisively ruled that Internet Archive’s practice of scanning books and making them freely available on its website is copyright infringement and does not constitute fair use. While the Authors Guild was not a party to the lawsuit, we supported the publishers throughout the litigation and welcomed the court’s clear rejection of Internet Archive’s “Controlled Digital Lending” theory.

Following the decision, the court directed the parties to propose specific steps that Internet Archive must take to remedy its infringement. The parties agreed, in a proposed consent judgment, that Internet Archive should be subject to a permanent court-ordered injunction barring it from making the publishers’ books available online. We have heard from some authors who are concerned that the injunction is limited to books in which the four publisher plaintiffs hold copyrights and does not cover books whose copyrights are owned by the author or a smaller publisher. Unfortunately, this case was not a class action, and therefore only the actual parties in the case can be bound by the court’s order. We were surprised and disappointed, however, that the court adopted Internet Archive’s proposal to limit the injunction to books that the publishers have made available in electronic form. As we explained, limiting the injunction in this way fails to recognize that the author has the right to decide in what formats they wish to make their books available, and that the market for a print book can be harmed by an unauthorized electronic edition as easily as the market for an ebook can.

But regardless of the scope of the injunction, the court’s decision on the main legal issue remains in place: Making full-text copyrighted books available for free on the open internet without permission is copyright infringement. That is just as true for books owned by self-published authors and micro publishers as it is for the books owned by the publishers in this case.

We therefore expect Internet Archive to comply with demands by authors who hold copyrights in their books (e.g., self-published authors and where rights are reverted) to take down any titles that are still on its website….

A model takedown letter and full directions are at the link.

(3) IT MEANS MORE THAN SIMPLY NAMING A CRATER. BBC Radio 4 program “Seek the Light, Out of the Shadows” is available online for the next few weeks.

Singer, story teller and seven-times Radio 2 Folk Awards winner, Karine Polwart brings together her love of science, history and the natural world.

Karine looks up into the dark for a story of discovery, diversity and the righting of a historical wrong.

When young geologist turned planetary scientist Annie Lennox surveyed the night sky of her Aberdeenshire home, little did she realise that one day she’d be giving names to landmarks on our closest neighbours in the solar system. In 2021, while studying for her PhD, Annie discovered an enormous 50km wide crater near Mercury’s southern pole. An area that had never been seen in sunlight until until the Messenger mission of 2015.

The crater’s distinctive spectral colour and shape caught her eye. As the first person to see it, Annie has the honour of naming it. An accomplished singer and harpist, Annie named it ‘Nairne’ after the 17th-century Scottish poet and songwriter Lady Carolina Nairne.

All the craters of Mercury are named after famous artists, Burns and Pushkin are there along with Bach and Boccaccio. And it was this dominance of white men that Annie wanted to challenge. The International Atstonomical Union’s naming conventions around new discoveries have proven themselves inherently sexist and exclusionary and Annie felt compelled to do waht she could to rebalance it. In her lifetime, Lady Carolina Nairne was responsible for such staples of Scottish folk singing as ‘Charlie is my darlin’ and ‘Caller Herrin’, yet she’s largely unknown, publishing much of her work anonymously or under pseudonyms. Now there is a corner of the universe that will forever be a testament to her talents.

(4) MAXIMUM PEEVATION. James Davis Nicoll actually got paid to tell Tor.com readers about his “Five Readerly Pet Peeves (That Have Nothing To Do With Storytelling)”

…A bugaboo I discovered when I began collecting the books published by the otherwise exemplary Haikasoru imprint has to do with the orientation of the book’s title on the spine of the book with respect to the text inside the book. In short, if the title on the spine is right way up, I expect the words on the page to be right way up when I open the book. Opening the text to discover I am holding it upside down kicks me out of the reading experience. Haikasoru eventually stopped orienting their titles in an idiosyncratic way, yay…but until then it was a distraction.

Don’t let that stop you from running out and buying every book in the Haikasoru line. The works themselves earned their places on my shelves….

(5) PUBLISHER FUNDRAISING AUCTION. “Award-Winning Indie Publisher Hosts Auction To Stay Open Amid Book Bans Targeting Poc, LGBTQ+ Youth Lit” at The Mary Sue.

Award-winning indie publisher Levine Querido is hosting an auction to stay open as book banning takes a toll on publishers. Unfortunately, Levine Querido is exactly the type of publisher most likely to be badly impacted by the rise of book banning across the United States. This isn’t only because it’s an independent publisher with less support and resources than major publishers like HarperCollins or Penguin Random House. It also has to do with the kinds of books LQ specializes in, which feature marginalized writers and artists….

The full list of auction items is here.

(6) PROPOSED LAW ABOUT CLOTHING IN CHINA. The New York Times reports “China May Ban Clothes That Hurt People’s Feelings. People Are Outraged.” Andrew Porter wonders how such a law would affect cosplay.

…Now the government is proposing amendments to a law that could result in detention and fines for “wearing clothing or bearing symbols in public that are detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese people and hurt the feelings of Chinese people.” What could be construed as an offense wasn’t specified.

The plan has been widely criticized, with Chinese legal scholars, journalists and businesspeople voicing their concerns over the past week. If it goes into effect, they argue, it could give the authorities the power to police anything they dislike. It would also be a big step backward in the public’s relationship with the government.

Under the rule of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, the government has been fixated on control — how people think, what they say online and now, what they wear.

In July, an older man on a bus berated a young woman, on her way to a cosplay exposition — where people dress up as a characters from movies, books, TV shows and video games — for wearing a costume that could be considered Japanese style. A security guard at a shopping mall last month turned away a man who was dressed like a samurai. Last year, the police in the eastern city of Suzhou temporarily detained a woman for wearing a kimono.

These episodes were related to anti-Japanese sentiment instigated by the Chinese government. But the confrontations go beyond that.

Last month in Beijing, security guards cracking down on expressions of gay pride stopped people dressed in rainbow-themed clothes from entering a concert featuring the Taiwanese singer Zhang Huimei, better known as A-Mei. Also in August, people filed complaints about a concert by the Taiwanese singer Jolin Tsai because her fans displayed rainbow lights and some of the male fans dressed in what was described as “flamboyant” female clothing. Just last week the police in Shenzhen scolded a man who was livestreaming in a miniskirt. “A man wearing a skirt in public, do you think you’re positive energy?!” the police yelled at the man.

If the proposed amendments, which are open to public comment until Sept. 30, are approved by the national legislature, such incidents could result in fines of up to $680 and up to 15 days in police custody.

“The morality police is on the verge of coming out,” a lawyer named Guo Hui wrote on Weibo. “Do you think you can still make fun of Iran and Afghanistan?” People posted photos last week of Iranian and Afghan women wearing miniskirts and other Western-style clothes in the 1970s, before their countries were taken over by autocratic religious rulers.

Many people are concerned that the proposal doesn’t specify what would constitute an offense. The language it uses — clothing or symbols that are “detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese nation and hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” — tracks expressions the foreign ministry and official media use to voice their displeasure at Western countries and people. No one knows exactly what they mean.

Without a clear definition, enforcement of the law would be subject to the interpretation of individual officers….

(7) LOSCON 49 SPECIAL GUEST. Loscon 49 welcomes Robert J Sawyer as a Special Guest. The convention will be held at the LAX Marriott from November 24-26.

Rob is one of only eight writers in history — and the only Canadian — to win all three of the world’s top Science Fiction awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. A prolific author, his most recent release is The Oppenheimer Alternative.

(8) DISNEY’S LATEST WAY TO EMPTY YOUR WALLET (OR MAYBE YOUR BANK ACCOUNT). [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Disney has announced they are releasing a Blu-ray + digital box set of 100 films. What’s the price, you ask? Well, if you ask, maybe you can’t afford it. Pre-orders start at Walmart.com later this month at a cool $1,500. “Disney will release a 100-film Blu-ray collection that includes Pixar movies” at The Verge.

Disney is releasing a 100-film Blu-ray collection on November 14th called the Disney Legacy Animated Film Collection (via The Wrap). Preorders will start on September 18th at Walmart.com, and we regret to inform you it will cost $1,500, according to The Wrap.

The collection includes movies from both Disney and Pixar, all crammed into three volumes of discs that span Disney’s entire feature film history from 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to this year’s Elemental.

What’s really impressive is how little filler this package seems to have. Scrolling through the list that The Wrap published, it has every single movie I’d have wanted to see, like all of the Toy Story movies, both of The Incredibles, The Black Cauldron, Frankenweenie, and Robin Hood, but very few of the mediocre direct-to-video snoozers the company produced so many of over the years…

The Wrap’s coverage includes the complete list of films.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born September 11, 1856 — Richard Ganthony. Playwright of A Message from Mars: A Story Founded on the Popular Play by Richard Ganthony which is a genre version of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Really, it is. Published in 1912, it was filmed twice, both times as A Message from Mars (1913 and 1921) and I’m assuming as silent movies given their dates. It would be novelized by Lester Lurgan. (Died 1924.)
Born September 11, 1929 — Björn Nyberg. A Swedish writer known largely for his Conan stories which given that he wrote just one non-Conan story makes sense. His first book in the series was The Return of Conan which was revised for publication by L. Sprague de Camp. Likewise, they later did Conan the Avenger, Conan the Victorious, Conan the Swordsman and Sagas of Conan. The latter two are available at the usual suspects. (Died 2009.)
Born September 11, 1930 — Jean-Claude Forest. He became famous when he created Barbarella, which was originally published in France in V Magazine in 1962. In 1967 it was adapted by Terry Southern and Roger Vadim and made into 1968 film of that name featuring Jane Fonda, with him acting as design consultant. It was considered an adult comic by the standards of the time. (Died 1998.)
Born September 11, 1941 — Kirby McCauley. Literary agent and editor, who as the former who represented authors such as Stephen King, George R.R. Martin and Roger Zelazny. And McCauley chaired the first World Fantasy Convention, an event he conceived with T. E. D. Klein and several others. As Editor, his works include Night Chills: Stories of Suspense, Frights, Frights 2, and Night Chills. (Died 2014.)
Born September 11, 1951 — Michael Goodwin, 72. Ahhh — Alan Dean Foster’s Commonwealth series. I know that I’ve read at least a half dozen of the novels there and really enjoyed them, so it doesn’t surprise that someone wrote a guide to it which is how we have Goodwin’s (with Robert Teague) A Guide to the Commonwealth: The Official Guide to Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth Universe. Unfortunately, like so many of these guides, it was done once and never updated.
Born September 11, 1952 — Sharon Lee, 71. She is the co-author with Steve Miller of the Liaden universe novels and stories which are quite excellent reading with the latest being Neogenesis. The authors have won Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for lifetime contributions to science fiction, and The Golden Duck (the Hal Clement Young Adult Award) for their Balance of Trade novel. They are deeply stocked at the usual digital suspects.
Born September 11, 1965 — Catriona (Cat) Sparks, 58. She’s manager and editor of Agog! Press with her partner, Australian horror writer Rob Hood. Winner of an astounding sixteen Ditmar Awards for writing, editing and artwork, her most recent in 2021 for Best Collected Work for Dark Harvest. She also collected one for The 21st Century Catastrophe: Hyper-capitalism and Severe Climate Change in Science Fiction. She has just one novel to date, Lotus Blue, but has an amazing amount of short stories which are quite stellar. Lotus Blue and The Bride Price are both available at the usual suspects.
Born September 11, 1970 — Colson Whitehead, 53. Winner of the Arthur Clarke C. Award for The Underground Railroad. Genre wise, he’s not a prolific writer, he’s written but two other such works, The Intuitionists and Zone One. He’s written but one piece of short genre fiction, “The Wooden Mallet”. However he’s written seven other works including John Henry Days which is a really interesting look at that legend, mostly set at a contemporary festival.

(10) IT PAYS TO PAY ATTENTION. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Even when it’s not something plot-essential, a lot can go by if you aren’t listening carefully (and know the territory).

Here’s an addition to the two callouts I caught in the final two episodes of The Flash (see Item 10 in the June 17, 2023 scroll)…

In the trailer for Gen V, the upcoming spinoff of The Boys, as potential supers (in a looks-like-Professor X’s School for Mutants) suggest power-related names, one student suggests “Coagula”. Which is the cape-name (or whatever we call these) of one of the late Rachel Pollack’s characters for her run on DC’s The Doom Patrol comics (after Grant Morrison’s run). (Here’s Coagula’s Wikipedia entry.)

(11) LOOK FOR IT ON STAR TREK DAY. “Paramount Teams with Kid Cudi on ‘Star Trek: Boldly Be’ Campaign” — Animation World Network has the story.

In celebration of “Star Trek Day,” Scott Mescudi, AKA Kid Cudi, is joining forces with Star Trek in a one-of-a-kind collaboration reflecting the “optimistic and inclusive spirit of adventure, discovery, imagination, and most importantly, hope, at the heart of the cultural phenomenon.” The collaboration will launch Star Trek’s new “Boldly Be” campaign.

Mescudi lends his lens to music with an original song inspired by Star Trek, an interactive gaming component, and a bold fashion collaboration that will launch in October. More details will be announced later….

(12) THERE’S PLENTY GOOD MONEY TO BE MADE SUPPLYING THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE. [Item by Steven French.] A company previously known for making chips for games is now making billions from AI: “How savvy trillion-dollar chipmaker Nvidia is powering the AI goldrush” in the Guardian.

It’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that blew the street’s collective mind. It had pulled in $13.5bn in revenue in the last quarter, which was at least $2bn more than the aforementioned financial geniuses had predicted. Suddenly, the surge in the company’s share price in May that had turned it into a trillion-dollar company made sense.

Well, up to a point, anyway. But how had a company that since 1998 – when it released the revolutionary Riva TNT video and graphics accelerator chip – had been the lodestone of gamers become worth a trillion dollars, almost overnight? The answer, oddly enough, can be found in the folk wisdom that emerged in the California gold rush of the mid-19th century, when it became clear that while few prospectors made fortunes panning for gold, the suppliers who sold them picks and shovels prospered nicely.

We’re now in another gold rush – this time centred on artificial intelligence (AI) – and Nvidia’s A100 and H100 graphical processing units (GPUs) are the picks and shovels. Immediately, everyone wants them – not just tech companies but also petro states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Thus demand wildly exceeds supply. And just to make the squeeze really exquisite, Nvidia had astutely prebooked scarce (4-nanometre) production capacity at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the only chip-fabrication outfit in the world that can make them, when demand was slack during the Covid-19 pandemic. So, for the time being at least, if you want to get into the AI business, you need Nvidia GPUs….

(13) TIM BURTON ON AI. “Tim Burton on Seeing His Animation Style Imitated by AI: ‘It’s Like a Robot Taking Your Humanity’” at Yahoo!

…“They had AI do my versions of Disney characters!” he exclaimed in response. “I can’t describe the feeling it gives you. It reminded me of when other cultures say, ‘Don’t take my picture because it is taking away your soul.’”

Some of the AI-generated examples included Elsa from Frozen with a pale white face and wearing a black dress while standing in what appeared to be a haunted forest, as well as Aurora from Sleeping Beauty with a similar colored face but with stitches across her cheeks and lying in a long, dark dress.

While Burton acknowledged that some of the creations were “very good,” it didn’t take away from the less-than-enjoyable feeling he got from seeing his creative style imitated.

“What it does is it sucks something from you,” he explained. “It takes something from your soul or psyche; that is very disturbing, especially if it has to do with you. It’s like a robot taking your humanity, your soul.”…

(14) THE FLIP SIDE. Guillermo del Toro is positively glib by comparison. “Guillermo del Toro Talks Artificial Intelligence: ‘I’m Worried About Natural Stupidity’” at Yahoo!

Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro isn’t much worried about artificial intelligence and its impact on making entertainment content.

It’s people that keep him up at night, evidently. “People ask if I’m worried about artificial intelligence, I say I’m worried about natural stupidity. It’s just a tool, right?” the Pinocchio and Shape of Water director said during a keynote address at the Toronto Film Festival on Friday.

“If anyone wants movies made by AI, let them get it immediately. I don’t care about people who want to be fulfilled and get something shitty, quickly,” he said, arguing that AI would succeed or die based on what people did with it creatively to bring a personal vision to a screen.

“Otherwise, why not buy a printer, print the Mona Lisa and say you made it,” del Toro said during his appearance in Toronto, which was part of the TIFF Visionaries program sponsored by The Hollywood Reporter….

(15) A GIF TO HUMANITY. Here’s a Godzilla teaser. You can watch the complete commercial on Facebook.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. J. Michael Straczynski pointed Facebook followers to this is a dramatization of the Amazing Spider-man #36 that is about the terrorist attacks in New York on 9/11/2001: The Black Issue 9/11.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, Steven French, William S. Higgins, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

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