Tag Archives: Black Panther

Pixel Scroll 12/31/25 Pixels, Unlike Cats, Really Do Remember Everything

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(1) SUCH STINKERS! Cora Buhlert has announced who’s getting “The 2025 Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents”.

It’s almost the end of the year, so we are proud to present to you, live from the Multiversal Nexus Ballroom, the 44th Annual Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents….

Here’s one of the contenders (but not the winner):

… The latest incarnation of Superman was not something I expected to end up on the shortlist for the Darth Vader Parenthood Award, considering our sister award for good fictional parents is named after Superman’s adoptive parents. And indeed, Jonathan and Martha Kent are as lovely and supportive as ever in James Gunn’s take on Superman. However, Clark’s biological parents Jor-El and Lara Lor-Von are quite spectacularly revealed to be evil in this version of the story, when Lex Luthor and Angela Spica a.k.a. The Engineer (who really deserves better) break into the Fortress of Solitude and steal an incomplete message recorded by Jor-El and Lara, restore it and broadcast it to the world. In the message, Jor-El and Lara urge their son to use his superhuman powers to conquer Earth, take many wives to single-handedly (or single-penisly) restore the Kryptonian people and make Krypton great again. This revelation does wonders for Superman’s public image – not.

In the audience, Superman – dressed in his familiar suit and cape – looks rather embarassed and crest-fallen, though I’m sure some of Martha Kent’s famous apple pie will soon soothe those wounds….

By the way, Cora got to take a second bite of the poisoned apple by also reaching into the past for a character to give the 2025 Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents.

And don’t touch that dial! Cora’s companion prize, the Jonathan and Martha Kent Award for the Fictional Parent of the Year will be handed out tomorrow.

(2) OVERWHELMING DEMAND. So maybe you aren’t watching Stranger Things just now? Variety reports “Netflix Down: Crashes as Stranger Things 5 Finale Releases”.

Vecna has struck again!

Netflix crashed for some users Wednesday night as the series finale of “Stranger Things” premiered. The streamer also experienced technical problems a few weeks ago during the Season 5 premiere on Nov. 26.

The streamer crashed right at 5 p.m. PT, coinciding with the drop time for the “Stranger Things 5” finale. The crash lasted roughly a minute and was fixed after a few refreshes. As was the case last time, users encountering the error were met with an image from “Nailed It!” with the caption: “Something went wrong. Sorry, we’re having trouble with your request. You’ll find lots to explore on the home page.”…

(3) GET READY FOR SELF-PUBLISHED FANTASY BLOG-OFF 11. Sponsor Mark Lawrence has announced that Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off 11 opens to entries at 11:00 a.m. GMT January 3, 2026. The link to the sign-up page will be published on the  Official Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off homepage and on Lawrence’s multiple social media.

You don’t need to rush – the gates will stay open for 24 hours.

If we get more than 300 entries – 300 will be randomly selected.

If you tried last year and weren’t in the 300 – you can try again.

(4) HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY USING AI IN IRELAND? [Item by James Bacon.] Following the discussion regarding the use of AI in nonfiction or artistic endeavors in the realms of the SF community, here on File 770, I was quite surprised to see that is reported that there are over one million weekly users of Open AI’s ChatGPT in Ireland.  

A report on The Irish Times following a freedom of information request, had the headline: “Fewer Irish people using ChatGPT than in other countries, OpenAI told Taoiseach”, while noting that Ms Friar, The Open AI CFO, originally from Northern, met Micheál Martin, the Taoiseach [the head of government in the Republic of Ireland]. 

Ms Friar is reported as saying, “28 per cent of the population in Ireland is using ChatGPT weekly, compared to 50 per cent in the best countries”.

The Irish Times noted that when asked, “OpenAI did not set out countries where 50 per cent of the population use ChatGPT weekly.” 

OpenAI gave The Irish Times a  statement which said: “With over one million ChatGPT users now in Ireland…” 

Which caught my attention especially in a country of 5.38 million people. Open AI have their European HQ in Dublin.  

This is juxtaposed with an article from national broadcaster RTE from earlier in the month headlined “Worker usage of AI tools remains low – survey”.

Price Waterhouse Cooper’s Survey noted “that just 10% of workers here are using generative AI every day. This is below the global figure of 14%.”

The article shared views of workers, and continues to say  note that ” The survey does show that 43% of Irish workers had used AI for their role in the past month, suggesting that many had tried the technology but not seen enough of a benefit to make it a regular habit.”

It is interesting how reportage can vary on the same subject, but I was really surprised with the Open AI info, but smiled at the number of people who had a go, and obviously determined it was a bit shite and left it. 

Which countries with 50% of the population using Chat GPT is a fascinating question.  

Links (Behind Paywall)

(5) MAGAZINE RETRENCHMENT. This news came out a month ago, but we haven’t covered it yet. “What’s next for Psychopomp” and Fantasy Magazine.

Sean Markey, here, publisher of Psychopomp (and The Deadlands and Fantasy Magazine) with a post about the end of things.

But not EVERY thing.

I’ll rip the Bandaid off quickly, and then expand a bit below:

1 – We will no longer be publishing novellas at Psychopomp.

2 – We will no longer publish novelettes on Psychopomp.

3 – Publishing nonfiction on Psychopomp is on hiatus.

4 – Fantasy Magazine is going on hiatus after our December issue.

(6) ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTING. A Deep Look by Dave Hook sifts “’The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World’, Harlan Ellison collection, 1969 Avon”.

The Short: I read the Harlan Ellison collection The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, 1969 Avon, recently when I wanted to read his story “White on White“. Although horrifying, the best story here is unsurprisingly the superlative “A Boy and His Dog“, a Vic and Blood novella, New Worlds April 1969. Harlan’s Introduction “The Waves in Rio” is interesting and worth reading. Although this collection is very uneven, I like the psychedelic cover by Diane and Leo Dillon. My average rating for the stories is 3.52/5, or “Good”. Recommended only to Ellison completists.

(7) IN TIMES THAT WERE TO COME. “What did 2026 look like in 1926? Here are some predictions that appeared in the New York Times”: “Looking at 2026 Through the Eyes of 1926” (behind a paywall).

“Canada will ultimately join the United States,” The New York Times quoted a London editor as saying in 1926. Though whether such a unification would be beneficial or disastrous, the editor said, “it is impossible to say.”

Similar articles from 100 years ago echo some of the same debates — and hopes — people have going into 2026. The next generation will heed the lessons of war and believe in peace. Some deadly diseases will come to an end. Economies can be prosperous indefinitely.

The year 1926 was full of predictions amid giant technological advancements and transformative cultural moments, so we took a deep dive into The Times’s archives to see what the future looked like a century ago, and what actually came to pass.

In addition to the debate about America expanding north (which hasn’t happened — yet), articles in The Times asked if perhaps jazz music was dying (it certainly was not — John Coltrane and Miles Davis, future icons of the art form, would both be born in 1926).

A scientist from M.I.T. predicted that a dire global food shortage would occur over the next century, positing that reindeer and caribou might become important sources of sustenance unless more efficient methods for food production and preservation were developed (luckily, they were)….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

December 31, 1949 — Ellen Datlow, 76

By Paul Weimer: Ellen Datlow is an Empress of short fiction editing.

Although I didn’t pay attention to it at the time, I’ve been reading fiction edited by Datlow for most of my science fiction reading life. That is to say, Omni Magazine. Datlow was the Omni Magazine (and later Omni Online) fiction editor. So the stories I enjoyed in those early halcyon days of short fiction reading were under her editorial hand — Omni was the first SF magazine I read and for a while was the only one before I transitioned into magazines like Asimov’s and Analog. So some of my early favorite SF stories, like “The Infinite Plane” by Paul Nahin, were thanks to her editorial direction. But young me didn’t even think of looking up editors in those halcyon days.

After her stint in Omni, and more famously, Datlow’s short fiction editing transitioned to a goodly number of anthologies.  And this, friends, is where Datlow as a name came to my reading attention. Her editorial work on many volumes of books like The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Best Horror of the Year and others have been staples of my reading for years. Datlow has also won a number of Hugo and World Fantasy awards for her short fiction and for some of her one-off anthologies, such as the fantastic The Green Man.

Datlow also co-hosts the speculative fiction reading series held on the second Wednesday of every month at the KGB Bar in Manhattan. 

Ellen Datlow

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) IF CHADWICK BOSEMAN HAD LIVED. Variety took notes on a podcast where “Ryan Coogler Details ‘Black Panther 2’ Script Before Boseman’s Death”.

…Marvel fans wondering what Coogler originally planned for Boseman’s return finally have an answer as Coogler told “Happy Sad Confused” podcast host Josh Horowitz that his original “Black Panther 2” script focused on an adventure between Boseman’s T’Challa and the character’s 8-year-old son. Namor, played by Tenoch Huerta in “Wakanda Forever,” was still the main villain.

“The big thing with the script was a thing called the Ritual of 8 where a prince is 8 years old, he must spend 8 days in the bush with his father,” Coogler said. “The rule is for those 8 days the prince can ask the father any question and the father must answer. In the course of those 8 days, Namor launches an attack… he had to deal with someone who’s insanely dangerous but because of this ritual, his son had to be joined at his hip the whole time or else they’d violate this ritual that had never been broken. It was insane. Chadwick was going to kill it, but life goes as it goes.”….

(11) SOUND FAMILIAR? [Item by Steven French.] As we all knew already, the three-body problem is indeed a thing: “Before we build on the moon, we have to master the commute” at Phys.org.

Even most rocket scientists would rather avoid hard math when they don’t have to do it. So when it comes to figuring out orbits in complex three-body systems, like those in cis-lunar space, which is between Earth and the moon, they’d rather someone else do the work for them.

Luckily, some scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory seem to have a masochistic streak—or enough of an altruistic one that it overwhelmed the unpleasantness of doing the hard math—to come up with an open-source dataset and software package that maps out 1,000,000 cis-lunar orbits. The work is published on the arXiv preprint server.
Note that the last paragraph didn’t say stable cis-lunar orbits. In fact, only 9.7% of them were “stable” over the three years the simulation was run. Others resulted in a satellite either crashing into the moon, burning up in Earth’s atmosphere, or being ejected from the system entirely. So why is it so difficult to stay in orbit between Earth and the moon?

The Three-Body Problem is a popular Netflix series, based on a popular sci-fi book series, that references an actual problem in physics. Systems where there are three bodies, each of which is both exerting gravity on, and being influenced by the gravity of, the other two bodies, are known as being “chaotic.” Even one tiny change in the starting conditions of such a system or a slight deviation, such as getting hit by a solar storm, can cause massive and almost unpredictable changes in the orbital path of a satellite.

Because of that chaos, it’s been difficult to develop orbital paths for moon missions. That is precisely what the new dataset/software is intended to solve. It provides a “Gold Standard” that can be used to prove/disprove navigational software or orbital planning systems on satellites. Those will become increasingly important as more and more organizations strive to use the space near the moon to establish permanent bases and “Gateways” as the human presence in the system expands….

(12) TRIVIAL TRIVIA. Happy 70th anniversary to Michigan J. Frog who debuted on this date in 1955.

(13) SCIENCE 2050. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Nature  online takes a look at the possible science in the year 2050. “Science in 2050: the future breakthroughs that will shape our world — and beyond”.

The Roman sage Marcus Aurelius said we should never let the future disturb us. But then he never had a conversation with the futurologist Nick Bostrom about the state of the world in 2050.

There’s a good likelihood that by 2050, all scientific research will be done by superintelligent AI rather than human researchers,” Bostrom said in an e-mail. “Some humans might do science as a hobby, but they wouldn’t be making any useful contributions.”

Well, I have always warned that the machines are taking over….

Hot times

You should probably brace yourself before opening the door. “It will be worse than we had anticipated in terms of climate change,” says Guy Brasseur, a modeller at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.

Future shock

Shades of John Brunner’s  The Shockwave Rider …

The vast gulf between these two possible scenarios illustrates the dilemma for futurologists and others who try to map progress and pitfalls beyond the next election cycle. How much can the future be projected from current trends? To what extent will it be driven by disruptive events and inventions that seem unlikely or haven’t been conceived yet? And at which point do predictions become, well, just a bit silly?

Futurology — the systematic, interdisciplinary study of future trends — is best placed to imagine a time 10—15 years away, suggests Richard Watson, co-author of The Children’s Book of the Future (2024) and a former futurist in residence at Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge, UK.

“Under five years, you just get the gravitational pull of the present and you end up talking about next Tuesday,” he says. “Over about 20 years, it gets very sci-fi very quickly. I’ve run workshops for banks, and the minute you go to the 2050s you invariably get aliens living on the Moon.”

Rise of the machines

Have I said that I have always thought that the machines are taking over?

Any vision of the future has to try to account for the continuing ascent of artificial intelligence. But at what pace?

Nick Bostrom, who is based in Oxford, UK, and authored ‘Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies’ (2014), expects artificial general intelligence to arrive by 2050, and with it the capacity to answer “most of the questions that we are currently interested in, and that can in principle be answered by science”.

Even without a superintelligence takeover, AI could make the process of science look very different by 2050. Combined with robotic experimenters, autonomous systems driven by algorithms will increasingly pursue biotechnology problems 24–7 in dedicated “lights out labs”, Alex Ayad (co-founder of the London research and foresight company Outsmart Insight ) says — so named because no people would be involved.

OK Mike – that’s me for 2025.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/14/25 First Shalt Thou Take Out The Holy Pixel

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(1) INAUGURAL CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE. “And So I Roar wins Climate Fiction Prize 2025”. The Climate Fiction Prize is a new literary prize that celebrates the most inspiring novels tackling the climate crisis. The Prize, worth £10,000, was awarded at a ceremony in London, on May 14.

Abi Daré has won the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize for And so I Roar (Sceptre, Hodder). The novel follows fourteen-year-old Adunni from her life in Lagos, where she is excited to finally enroll in school, to her home village where she is summoned to face charges for events that are in fact caused by climate change.

“A book of real energy and passion which both horrifies and entertains with a cast of compelling characters, a story of how the climate crisis can provoke social crisis where often women and children are the victims. Despite the tragedy, Abi Daré holds faith in the strength of individuals and relationships and her hopefulness leaves us inspired.”

– Madeleine Bunting, Chair of Judges

(2) MARTHA WELLS Q&A. Martha Wells did a Reddit r/television Ask Me Anything today. You can read the answers here: “This is Martha Wells, a four-time Hugo, two-time Nebula, and five-time Locus Award winner for The Murderbot Diaries, a book series published by Tordotcom. Ask Me Anything”.

Here’s one exchange.

BiasCutTweed

I have two pedantic world building questions I would love to ask though, if you’re game to answer:

  • Is there any sort of nominal governance structure in the Corporation Rim? Like just enough to support a judicial and monetary system, and the regulatory stuff that occasionally gets mentioned. I know Murderbot could absolutely give zero damns and it’s our narrator but I’m weirdly curious.
  • There are alien remnants everywhere but we never see any living advanced aliens. Do they exist? Might we ever?
  • And a show-specific question – did you/they ever consider Fleabag-style 4th wall breaks for Murderbot’s inner thoughts? Or would that be way too much eye contact for it?

marthawellswriter

  1. There is basically a committee structure that handles that stuff, with different people from various dominant corporations being appointed to it, and it works about as well as you might expect.
  2. They might still exist, but I don’t think I’d take the story in that direction.
  3. I think they did early on, because I saw some auditions that used it, but I actually think the voiceover works much better and I’m glad they went with it.

(3) WIL WHEATON’S FAVES. JustWatch has teamed up with sci-fi icon Wil Wheaton to spotlight his all-time favorite science fiction movies and TV shows in a newly released editorial feature on JustWatch.com.

In this exclusive Why to Watch editorial, Wheaton shares a curated list of titles that have shaped his lifelong love of science fiction. From intergalactic epics to overlooked cult gems, the collection offers fans a rare peek into the streaming watchlist of one of pop culture’s most enduring sci-fi personalities. “Wil Wheaton’s Top 6 Sci-Fi Movies & Shows That Are Not Star Trek”.

Here is perhaps his most obscure pick.

Sugar (2024)

Wheaton also loves the cult Apple TV+ series Sugar. “It’s one of the great sci-fi series of the last five years that I never really heard people talk about,” the actor says. The show is a noir thriller that blends in fantastic sci-fi elements and follows a private investigator (Colin Farrell) who has a secret of his own. “I loved it,” Wheaton continued, “I thought it was brilliant and extremely well-done.”

(4) APPOINTMENT VIEWING. Will British cultural icon ITV be sold? “ITV Sale Speculation: Inside Deal Everyone And No One Is Talking About” at Deadline.

If you’ve watched ITV’s The Assembly, you will know that it involves stars like Danny Dyer and David Tennant subjecting themselves to no-holds-barred questions from a captivating cast of neurodivergent interrogators. It makes for illuminating viewing, producing genuine revelations from its disarmed but obliging subjects, who enter the show in a spirit of openness. 

Far from the cameras, in a colorless room in the basement of London’s 11 Cavendish Square townhouse on Tuesday, ITV chairman Andrew Cosslett was similarly squirming in the face of questioning, with less comical results. Chairing ITV’s Annual General Meeting (AGM), Cosslett was grilled, almost heckled, by an angry shareholder demanding to know when the British broadcaster’s 78p share price will rise after flatlining for more than three years.

“This is not good enough, you must have some idea, you guys are very highly paid,” said the shareholder. Cosslett struggled to answer, reaching for what by now feels like an old fail-safe. “If you can explain to me what Donald Trump will do next, then maybe I could,” he said.

Questions around ITV’s sticky share price — Cosslett and ITV boss Carolyn McCall faced three during the 45-minute AGM alone — are inextricably linked to the constant mutterings around its potential sale. On this matter, ITV has been a little less forthcoming with answers than the celeb bookings on The Assembly. The company that gave the world Downton Abbey has been finding new ways to say “no comment” to inquiries about whether it will submit to suitors, including RedBird IMI and Banijay….

(5) MISSING BUT NOT NECESSARILY LOST. “Doctor Who archive legend says missing episodes ‘certainly’ exist in private collections” – quotes in Radio Times.

With 97 of the missing Doctor Who episodes still unaccounted for, Sue Malden, the BBC’s first archive selector who has worked to find episodes across the years, has assured fans that she believes some “certainly” still exist in private collections.

Twenty-six stories from the show’s first six years are currently incomplete, because the BBC erased or reused tapes in the 1960s and 1970s to save storage space and costs. In recent years some of these episodes have now been recreated via animation, as tapes of audio recordings have survived for every episode.

Still, there remains hope amongst fans that other full episodes could still exist to this day, something Malden has suggested is a very real possibility.

Speaking at the RECOVERED festival at the Phoenix Cinema and Art Centre in Leicester, hosted by Film is Fabulous!, Malden was asked about the current situation regarding missing Doctor Who episodes.

Malden said: “As far as Doctor Who goes, we do not have a statement or anything to make at the moment. We do know fairly certainly that there are episodes missing in private collections. Some members of the Film is Fabulous! team are in a considerably significant position to help on that.”…

(6) FINAL MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] My summary: Mostly glowing reviews, especially about the action sequences. Some grumbles about the runtime and convoluted plot. “Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning First Reactions” in the Hollywood Reporter.

“Tom Cruise has done it again!” That’s the very early verdict from press screenings for the Hollywood icon’s latest film, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, with the film variously described as “astonishing,” “jaw-dropping,” “insane” and the “action movie of the summer.”

Following a series of press screenings, first reactions to Final Reckoning are hitting social media after the embargo lifted on Monday night. The social media reactions come ahead of official critics’ reviews, which drop on Wednesday.

The eighth film in the long-running Paramount Pictures spy action franchise, Final Reckoning has a lot riding on it for the studio as well as the domestic box office. In November 2024, The Hollywood Reporter reported that the project has had a long and difficult journey, with a budget approaching a hefty $400 million amid production delays — partly due to the 2023 Hollywood strikes — making it one of the most expensive films ever made….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 14, 1944 — George Lucas, 81.

By Paul Weimer: To talk about George Lucas for me is to first talk about Star Wars. 

Star Wars lurked in my imagination long before seeing any of it. I didn’t see Star Wars in the theater but my younger brother and I got a joint Christmas gift of a Death Star playset, and a few action figures. We only had the commercials for the set to go on, not Lucas’ own vision, and so our playing of the set led to very strange scenarios having nothing to do with the movie. 

It would not be until 1983, and Return of the Jedi, that I saw a George Lucas movie at all, and in the theater. I saw the magic of his world, having only the fuzziest idea of the first two movies, but I was swept along. This shows the power of Lucas harnessing the power of serial fiction to allow watchers to get in on the action quickly. This is something the Marvel cinematic universe could still learn from Lucas today. It’s not just the crawls at the beginning, its the economy of storytelling, the establishment of characters that let you hit the ground running. 

Like Star Wars, I missed the first Indiana Jones movie in theaters, but did see Temple of Doom (Lucas did not direct but his story was the basis of the film). And of course, too, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  Same principle applies. Early Lucas knew the power of crafting episodic sequels and making them work. 

In keeping with those films, Lucas was also responsible for getting me hooked into the idea of the Hero’s Journey, since I read the Joseph Campbell book The Power of Myth thanks to Lucas’ forward in the book. Sure, the Hero’s Journey is a very outdated, patriarchal and restrictive story framework but it was my first real engagement with the nature and form of stories. Lucas helped introduce me to that whole new world. 

However, I would not see another Lucas directed film until the late 1990’s…but that is another story, one that deserves its own entry.

George Lucas with his wife, Mellody Hobson

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bliss has a child “helpfully” point something out.
  • Mike de Jour finds that word doesn’t mean what you think it means. 
  • Mutts – did he answer the question? 
  • Rubes can’t come up with an original excuse. 
  • Wumo might be an annoying fan. 

(9) DE-RE-BRANDING. The Hollywood Reporter says “Warners Is Changing Max’s Name Again — Back to HBO Max”. Sigh. Please just make up your mind.

… Thirty minutes into Wednesday’s Warner Bros. Discovery upfront, Bloys revealed the name change to media buyers. The news was met with laughter, light applause and exactly one whistle. Bloys did follow with a solid joke: “I know you’re all shocked, but the good news is I have a drawer full of stationery from the last time around.”…

(10) COMMUNITY RESPONDS TO BOOK BURNING. “Man burns 100 library books on social media; residents donate 1,000 more” on News 5 Cleveland.

Members of an Interfaith Group Against Hate (IGAH) gathered outside a Northeast Ohio church to stand united against hate. This comes after reports that a man checked out 100 books related to race, religion, and LGBTQ+ topics from the Cuyahoga County Public Library in Beachwood — then burned them in a video posted to social media.

View the news video here.

(11) IRONHEART. Gizmodo lets everyone know “Finally, the First Ironheart Trailer Is Here”.

… Black Panther: Wakanda Forever introduced audiences to Riri Williams (Dominque Thorne), an MIT genius who built her own Iron Man-esque armored suit and helped the Wakandans fight the Talokanil.

She may have left her suit behind in Wakanda, but she hasn’t given up trying to make new ones that truly establish her as the next big talent. While back home in Chicago, she crosses paths with Parker Robbins (Anthony Ramos), a misfit with a hood that lets him use dark magic and wants her to be a part of what he’s building up. Things seem good at first, but once she starts getting wise to the shadier parts of his dealings, Riri’s gotta armor up and protect Chicago and her loved ones….

(12) SUPER TRAILER PARK. “Superman’s Full Trailer Gives Us Our Best Look Yet at DC’s New Era” reports Gizmodo.

…[James] Gunn teased the trailer on social media as the “full trailer” he’d been “waiting too long to share.” And indeed, we see Superman facing off with an array of baddies, including a giant scaly monster and several supervillains—including, most intriguingly, a smirking Lex Luthor. He also stops a war and gets in trouble for it with the U.S. government, and gets grilled about it by the toughest journalist he knows: Lois Lane, who definitely knows Clark is Superman this time around…

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

Pixel Scroll 1/13/25 Why Yes, We Are (At Least In Part) Stardust

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(1) COMPREHENSIVE COVERAGE OF GAIMAN SEX ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS. New York Magazine‘s often explicit article “There Is No Safe Word” [Archive.is link] by Lila Shapiro, as described by Publishers Lunch, “reports on the details of the Neil Gaiman sexual assault case, expanding on allegations first reported by New Zealand podcast Tortoise Media. Last July, five women accused Gaiman of assault, and one woman said she filed a complaint with New Zealand police. Four out of five of Gaiman’s accusers spoke to New York Magazine for the piece, and the publication reviewed journal entries, texts, emails, and police correspondence. Gaiman did not comment for the article, but he has denied all allegations.” Shapiro spoke with eight women in total, three who had never gone public. The story contains content that readers may find disturbing, including graphic allegations of sexual assault.

(2) ROWLING ON GAIMAN. And in Deadline, “J.K. Rowling Compares Neil Gaiman To Harvey Weinstein Amid Claims”.

…Not long after New York magazine published its detailed cover story on multiple new and old claims against Gaiman by multiple women, the Harry Potter creator took to social media to give some opinionated context of her own.

No stranger to controversy, criticism and accusations of being transphobic for her strident views on gender identity and the transitioning of minors, Rowling pinned initial reactions to allegations against the once acclaimed Gaiman to incarcerated rapist Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo outburst against the much-accused Pulp Fiction producer.  

“The literary crowd that had a hell of a lot to say about Harvey Weinstein before he was convicted has been strangely muted in its response to multiple accusations against Neil Gaiman from young women who’d never met, yet — as with Weinstein — tell remarkably similar stories,” Rowling wrote this morning on X in the second of two missives on Gaiman….

(3) WRITER’S LEGACY BURNED. The London Review of Books reports that by a tragic coincidence of timing the late Gary Indiana’s personal library and collection was destroyed by the Eaton Fire in L.A.

(4) NEW OKORAFOR BOOK DRAWS FROM LIFE. The New York Times profiles Nnedi Okorafor in “Writing Fantasy Came Naturally. Reality Was Far More Daunting”. (Link bypasses the paywall). “After winning just about every major science fiction and fantasy award, Nnedi Okorafor explores a traumatic event in her own history in her most autobiographical novel yet.”

… Thirty years and more than 20 books later, Okorafor, now an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer, is exploring that traumatic experience, and the transformation that followed, in her heavily autobiographical new novel, “Death of the Author.”

A genre-defying metafictional experiment, the story centers on a Nigerian American writer from Chicago named Zelu, who is paralyzed and uses a wheelchair after a childhood accident. She dreams of becoming a writer, but her lovingly overprotective parents and siblings are skeptical that she’ll ever support herself. After struggling for years to get published, Zelu writes a best-selling postapocalyptic novel set among sentient robots in a future Nigeria, and lands a seven-figure advance and a movie deal. Her sudden rise to fame is both thrilling and jarring, as Zelu sees her success disrupt her family, and her novel get whitewashed by Hollywood executives who strip it of the African elements.

With its autobiographical framework, “Death of the Author” is a departure from Okorafor’s previous work, otherworldly stories that often draw on her experiences in Nigeria, where she found that belief in the supernatural — giant spider deities, water spirits, shape-shifting leopard people — is part of daily life….

(5) BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING…WHAT YOU BUY WITH THIS. “1984 author and former M.E.N. journalist George Orwell honoured on new £2 coin” reports the Manchester Evening News, where he used to work. (King Charles is on the obverse. Make of that what you will.)

Famed author and former Manchester Evening News journalist George Orwell is celebrated on a new £2 coin.

The writer of 1984 and Animal Farm will be honoured by the Royal Mint, 75 years after his death. Coin artist Henry Gray created a design which appears to be an eye, but is a camera lens at the centre of the design….

The Royal Mint will soon be ready to sell you one.

(6) MARKET REPORT. Incensepunk Magazine is now accepting submissions of speculative fiction stories about 4,000 to 6,000 words in length.

And what is “incensepunk” you ask?

Incensepunk is, at its core, a genre of longing. It desires a world in which traditional faiths and churches play a major role in society. Incensepunk extrapolates Byzantine and Gothic architecture styles into a modern world of skyscrapers and globalization. However, it is not regressive. It doesn’t view the past as good and the present as wicked and depraved. Instead, it tries to envision what the world could look like if faith and society were more integrated.

Incensepunk is speculative fiction, but it need not be alternate history (though it is certainly acceptable to be)….

(7) COMPLIMENTARY ENCOUNTERS OF THE HOLLYWOOD KIND. Far Out Magazine says “The writer Steven Spielberg called his muse” was Ray Bradbury.

…In terms of source material, Spielberg has adapted some of the greats. Michael Crichton provided the original novel on which Jurassic Park is based and Minority Report comes from a story by Philip K. Dick. However, for the director’s biggest sci-fi inspiration, we turn to a writer he never got the chance to bring to the big screen…

…Commenting on Bradbury’s [2012] passing, Spielberg was extremely complimentary of his work. “He was my muse for the better part of my sci-fi career,” he said in a statement (via The Hollywood Reporter). “He lives on through his legion of fans. In the world of science fiction and fantasy and imagination he is immortal.”

This admiration went both ways. In an interview with the Star Ledger (via Entertainment Weekly), Bradbury gave his thoughts on a Spielberg classic. “Close Encounters is the best film of its kind ever made,” he espoused. “It takes too long, but the transfiguration at the end, with the splendid arrival of the mother ship – that makes up for everything. I was so amazed and changed when I saw it that I went over to the studio to tell Spielberg what a genius he was.” In a full circle moment, Spielberg replied to this praise by claiming that Close Encounters wouldn’t have been possible without It Came From Outer Space, a 1953 film that Bradbury contributed the story to…. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 13, 1893 — Clark Ashton Smith. (Died 1961.)

Clark Ashton Smith

By Paul Weimer: Clark Ashton Smith was part of the Weird Tales crowd with people like Lovecraft, and it is through reading Lovecraft and authors like him that I came across Smith’s work. I started with his weird horror/fantasy, stories like City of Singing Flame (although that particular story I would only read years later) and eventually trying stuff from Poseidonis (his Atlantis world) and Zothique (once I found out that it had inspired Jack Vance).  Empire of the Necromancers feels like it could be set in a distant corner of the Dying Earth and I like that headcanon, for example. 

I found him to be a taproot writer, ones whose ideas and style were perhaps somewhat better than his execution at times (this is also true of Lovecraft, let’s be honest). But his ideas and style were inspirational, transformational and helped inspire a sheaf of fans, authors, games and much more as a result. In a way, without reading Smith, you’ve read Smith–through how he has influenced writers since (to say nothing of his correspondence with Howard and Lovecraft at the time). 

And it must be said that there is a poetic feel to all of his work. The poetry Smith wrote early in his career suffused and influenced his subsequent stories and fragments. He never lost the dream of poetry. Or, the poetic muse never left him.  Smith wrote intensely and evocatively and his poetic training and use of word choice and imagery come through in all of his stories. Reading a Smith story is to be transported into another world, into another reality, be it in the far past or the far future.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 13, 2008 — Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Seventeen years ago this evening on Fox, the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles premiered. It was directed by Josh Friedman whose sole genre work previously was H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.  The top cast was Lena Headey as Sarah Connor along with Thomas Dekker and Summer Glau in supporting roles

If Lena Headey sounds familiar that’s because she was on the Game of Thrones as Cersei Lannister.

In addition, the narrator was also Headey. Though it would last but two seasons comprising thirty-one episodes, as the first season was abbreviated, it was the highest-rated new scripted series of the ’07 to ‘08 television season. And yes, it started in the ‘07 television season even though its first episode was in January of ‘08. Such are the mysteries of television seasons.

Reception among critics was generally quite fine. Gina Bellafante of the New York Times said that it was “one of the more humanizing adventures in science fiction to arrive in quite a while.” And Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune exclaimed of the second season that the “season’s opener is much clearer and more sheer fun than anything that aired last spring.”

It has a stellar eighty-four percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes on the Popcornmeter as they call it.

Despite numerous ongoing fan efforts to revive the series, Josh Friedman has dismissed the possibility of crowdfunding a third season unlike say the recent Veronica Mars series due to issues involving holder rights. I suspect the Terminator issues here are hellishly complex. 

(10) NEW ACTOR FOR T’CHALLA? [Item by Steven French.] I suspect fandom may be divided on this one: “Marvel is ready to recast Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa in Black Panther. Should they?” asks the Guardian.

Marvel’s multiverse has become a narrative Swiss army knife capable of slicing through the thorniest of creative dilemmas and papering over the widest of cracks. That said, few dilemmas are as sensitive as how to move forward with a superhero as iconic as Black Panther. Chadwick Boseman’s portrayal of T’Challa wasn’t just a performance – it was a cultural touchstone, woven so tightly into the fabric of modern blockbuster cinema that imagining anyone else in the role feels like attempting to rewrite history. Four years after Boseman’s untimely death from colon cancer, Marvel faces the delicate task of continuing a legacy that seems impossible to replicate.

If rumblings out of Hollywood this week have foundation, however, the studio is beginning to countenance just that, a new T’Challa from an alternate reality who presumably finds his way into the mainstream Marvel universe via one of the umpteen ways we’ve seen superheroes such as Doctor Strange, various Spider-Men and Scarlet Witch crossing the boundaries between one reality and another. Jeff Sneider of the InSneider newsletter reports that the studio is finally “firmly open” to bringing back the king of Wakanda, despite previous attempts to recast the role having getting rebuffed by actors who didn’t want to jeopardise their careers by “stepping into Boseman’s gigantic shoes”.

(11) CORREIA “DEDICATION” TO GRRM. A GRRM fansite ran a photo of the dedication page.

 “Fantasy author taunts Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin in his new book” reports MSN.com.

…Is this a playful jab or a petty insult? It’s probably closer to the latter, seeing as how Martin and Correia have locked horns before. Their last public clash involves the Hugo Awards, which are handed out every year to honor the best in science fiction and fantasy fiction. Martin has been attending the Hugos since the 1970s, while Correia got involved in the 2010s….

Correia is all over his social media crowing about the attention his jab is getting.

(12) STANDING ROOM ONLY. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket did not leave the ground today after all: “Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin calls off launch of New Glenn rocket” – AP News tells the reason.

Blue Origin will try again to launch its massive new rocket as early as Tuesday after calling off the debut launch because of ice buildup in critical plumbing.

The 320-foot (98-meter) New Glenn rocket was supposed to blast off before dawn Monday with a prototype satellite. But ice formed in a purge line for a unit powering some of the rocket’s hydraulic systems and launch controllers ran out of time to clear it, according to the company.

Founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin said Tuesday’s poor weather forecast could cause more delay. Thick clouds and stiff wind were expected at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The test flight already had been delayed by rough seas that posed a risk to the company’s plan to land the first-stage booster on a floating platform in the Atlantic….

(13) MOANA LITIGATION. “Disney faces copyright lawsuit over ‘Moana’ franchise” reports Entertainment Weekly.

Disney has been hit with a copyright lawsuit alleging that the wildly popular Moana franchise was nearly entirely lifted from a decades-old screenplay without the writer’s consent.

In a lawsuit reviewed by Entertainment Weekly that was filed Friday, animator Buck Woodall claims that former Mandeville Films development director Jenny Marchick violated his copyright by secretly passing to Disney materials he produced confidentially for her two decades ago. That material, Woodall alleges, became Moana and Moana 2….

…The animator claims that he delivered to Marchick “extremely large quantities of intellectual property and trade secrets” related to a project variously called “Bucky” and “Bucky the Wave Warrior” between 2003 and 2008. Those materials included a completed screenplay, character illustrations, budgets, a fully animated concept trailer, storyboards, background image references, and more.

Woodall also notes that he received copyright protection on these materials in 2004 that was updated in 2014.

“Bucky” was never developed, but Woodall claims that Marchick was able to pass his materials to Disney by exploiting legal loopholes inherent to the “tapestry of confusion” that is Disney’s elaborate corporate structure. According to Woodall, “Bucky” not only became Moana without his consent, but continued to serve as the basis for Moana 2 as well.

The suit enumerates a number of similarities between Woodall’s undeveloped script and Moana and Moana 2. Like “Bucky,” the first film follows a teenager on a voyage in an outrigger canoe across Polynesian waters to save Polynesian land. It features the Polynesian belief in spiritual ancestors who manifest as animal guides, and a number of specifics including a symbolic necklace, navigation by stars, a lava goddess, and a giant creature disguised as a mountainous island.

As for Moana 2, the suit notes that details such as the rooster and pig companions, a mission to break a curse, a whirlpool that leads to an oceanic portal, and an encounter with the Kakamora warrior tribe were all lifted without consent from “Bucky.”…

(14) PITCH MEETING. Hmm. Did any of the foregoing get mentioned during the “Moana 2 Pitch Meeting”?

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

Marvel Black History Month Variant Covers

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Next month, Marvel Comics celebrates Black History Month! In addition to Storm: Lifedream, a special one-shot honoring the legacy of Earth’s Mightiest Mutant, Marvel proudly presents two collections of variant covers: Star Wars Black History Month Variant Covers featuring Black Heroes of the galaxy far, far away and Black History Month Variant Covers spotlighting Marvel super heroes Black Panther and Captain America.

 Here are the 8 heroes spotlighted this year and where to find them.

  •  Black Panther, legendary super hero and King of Wakanda. T’Challa can currently be seen taking charge in Jed MacKay and Farid Karami’s hit run of Avengers.
  • Captain America (Sam Wilson), whose latest high-flying adventure kicked off last week in Evan Narcisse, Greg Pak, and Eder Messias’ Sam Wilson: Captain America.
  • Frenzy, the former villain who now lends her super strength to the government’s officially sanctioned mutant team in Mark Russell and Robert Quinn’s X-Factor.
  • Gold Tiger, a mysterious new Wakandan hero who debuted this week in Steve Foxe and Ivan Fiorelli’s New Champions!
  • Power Man, or rather a version of him from the far future! Be there when this future Luke Cage and his awe-inspiring array of powers arrives in the modern Marvel Universe next month in Collin Kelly, Jackson Lanzing, and Bernard Chang’s Power Man: Timeless!
  • Spider-Man (Miles Morales), Brooklyn’s own web-slinger who’s currently enjoying a celebrated run by Cody Ziglar, Luigi Zagaria and more where he’ll soon face off against Deadpool for the first time in the upcoming “Pools of Blood” crossover!
  • Storm, Earth’s Mightiest Mutant and one of Marvel’s most groundbreaking super heroes. Celebrating 50 years of storytelling this year, the iconic X-Men leader currently stars in both Avengers and her own solo ongoing series by Murewa Ayodele and Lucas Werneck.
  • Temper, one of the X-Men’s most promising students. The young temperature-controlling mutant was recently promoted to the flagship X-Men team, following Cyclops’ leadership in Jed MacKay and Ryan Stegman’s X-Men.

Following the jump, check out 7 of the covers now. For more information, visit Marvel.com.

Continue reading →

Black Panther and Dragon Ball Join SF&F Hall of Fame

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Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture has followed its announcement of the first two MoPOP Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame Inductees of 2024: The Creators by naming the two Creations that are going in this year.

BLACK PANTHER

Black Panther, the first Black superhero to appear in mainstream American comics and the iconic hero of six decades of Marvel comics, books, and film. First introduced in 1966, the Black Panther reached new heights with 2018’s eponymous Black Panther movie starring Chadwick Boseman—the highest-grossing solo superhero film of all time—and is now honored as one of the most impactful characters across global media. 

DRAGON BALL

Dragon Ball. The Dragon Ball phenomenon began in 1984 when Japan’s well-known manga from Akira Toriyama premiered in Shueisha’s “Weekly Shonen Jump” – becoming a top ranked title throughout its 10 and a half years of publication. Since then, the manga’s popularity has continued to grow with an astonishing record of 260 million copies sold worldwide and counting as of 2024. And with Dragon Ball’s ever-increasing popularity, it has expanded beyond manga to include TV animation, movies, games, and merchandising.

Pixel Scroll 7/15/24 Frankly My Dear, I Don’t Scroll A Pixel

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(1) GLASGOW 2024 UPDATE. Glasgow 2024 has sent draft program schedules to almost a thousand participants.

(2) AUDIBLE REVEALS NEW CALCULATION  FOR ROYALTIES. “Audible’s New Royalty Model: More Opportunities for Authors and Publishers”.  

…We are now rolling out a new royalty model that prioritizes equity, flexibility, and insight for creators—one that evolved out of ongoing conversations with authors and publishers, and that advances our creator-centric ethos. Under this model, creators are able to monetize more types of content, and listeners will get to discover more innovative storytelling.

Titles in all Audible’s membership offerings can now earn royalties: Audible’s new royalty model means new opportunities for small publishers and independent authors to earn across all membership listening activity. Now more titles—including those currently in Audible Plus, Audible’s all-you-can-listen offering—can generate royalty payments. Depending on the audiences that publishers and creators want to reach, there are new ways to monetize and promote content, which means more flexibility to reach listeners where they are….

How is the new royalty model calculated? Audible takes a member’s plan value (Plus or Premium Plus) and adds the value of any additional credits used, then divides that value among the titles the member listened to over the course of the month. That figure, multiplied by the contractual royalty rate, comprises a creator’s royalty payment….

Publishers Weekly’s coverage, “Audible Rolls Out New Royalty Plan”, observes that “the announcement comes after one of Audible’s most vocal critics, bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, reported in March that Audible officials had approached him to discuss ‘a new royalty structure they intend to offer to independent writers and smaller publishers,’ a plan that Sanderson said was ‘encouraging.’”

(3) BACIGALUPI Q&A. At Colorado Public Radio:“Exhausted by climate fiction, Colorado novelist Paolo Bacigalupi turns to fantasy”.

Sure he has won the biggest prizes in science fiction– the Nebula and the Hugo awards. But Paolo Bacigalupi found himself bereft of inspiration. Penning apocalyptic climate fiction, like 2016’s The Water Knife, had taken its toll….

…The Paonia-based author knew it was time for a change. Then the invitation came.

A wine-importer friend who knew Bacigalupi’s penchant for languages (he’d studied Chinese in college) invited him to Bologna for a crash course in Italian.

The answer was yes…..

…The real-life Bolognese setting inspired Bacigalupi’s new fantasy novel, “Navola.” It takes place in a city-state reminiscent of Florence or Venice during The Renaissance.

His protagonist, Davico di Regulai, is the son of an uber-wealthy merchant and banker. The boy has big shoes to fill, but very different feet, as it were. Armed with a preserved dragon eye that possesses magical powers, Davico struggles to be the man his father and community expect him to be….

Ryan Warner: How did you know it was time for something different?

Paolo Bacigalupi: Well, when you keep trying to write things and you keep failing to actually finish them, or even when you’re starting to try to write, it’s like sticking your finger in a light socket. It is sort of painful and damaging, you think ‘maybe I should do something different.’

Warner: And that’s how it started to feel in the climate change space?

Bacigalupi: Yeah. A lot of what I was doing, the news was bad, and then the stories that you’re trying to tell are extrapolations on the present day, and those are all terrifying. Then you find you’re in this space where your creative world and your regular life are all smashed together, and they’re all really negative and they’re all full of terrors, and it’s not a sustainable space to be. If you spend all of your imaginative time in anxiety, then yeah, it takes a toll and eventually you just break down entirely.

Warner: And if the writer isn’t enjoying it, how possibly could the reader?

Bacigalupi: Yeah. I think that a healthy writer finds pleasure in their work. I think there are unhealthy ways to go about doing good work, as well. The outcome can be good, but the damage internally is bad for the writer.

(4) KGB. Ellen Datlow has posted photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading on July 10.

A.T. Sayre read and Nat Cassidy read and played his guitar for a very enjoyable evening.

(5) ERIN UNDERWOOD PRESENTS. The latest Erin Underwood videos take up Star Wars fanhistory, and test the relevance of Battlestar Galactica’s 2004 remake.

Star Wars: The Impacts of How Lucasfilm Built its Fan Base

Star Wars fandom holds a unique place as possibly the first ever nurtured fanbase built by a film studio. To understand the evolution of Star Wars fandom, I decided to explore its roots by inviting Craig Miller, former publicity executive at Lucas Film, and Garen Daly, Director of the Boston SciFi Film Festival, to discuss the early days of Star Wars fandom and its lasting impact on the film industry. Watch the video podcast discussion on YouTube and share your thoughts in the comments.

Battlestar Galactica (2004) Series Review – Does this Iconic Sci-Fi Remake Hold Up Today?

It’s been 20 years since they remade the 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica, and remakes often struggle to be relevant over time. From the story to the characters and the technology, how does BSG hold up 2 decades later? Watch my review of the full series and let me know if you think Battlestar Galactica holds up as well today … or even better!

(6) NEW FILM PLAYS ON CONSPIRACY THEORIES. “Note To Hollywood: Nobody Faked The Moon Landing” complains Inverse.

It’s getting exhausting calling out Moon landing truthers. Especially when a high-profile rom-com starring Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson makes a mockery of one of the greatest human achievements in all of history. This weekend, the new film Fly Me to the Moon hits theaters, telling the story of a 1969 advertising executive (Johansson) who is determined to film a “backup” version of the Moon landing in a studio, in case the real one fails. Tatum plays an astronaut, and the two fall for each other, in a silly movie about how the nature of love is a lot like flying to the Moon, or pretending to, or something. All harmless fun, right?

Well, no. While Fly Me to the Moon isn’t presented as a dramatic film purporting to unveil long-lost truths about the space race, it is built upon a frustratingly pervasive conspiracy theory that the Apollo 11 moon landing never took place, or in this case, that NASA would try to use taxpayer dollars to create a hoax. But, the historical and scientific evidence that we did, in fact, land on the Moon is overwhelming. And, because this movie is dredging up all those conspiracy theories again, it’s worth restating why we know the 1969 Moon landing was very real….

… But outside of heroes like Buzz Aldrin, there is plenty of objective evidence that the Moon landing occurred. In light of the bogus concept behind Fly Me to the Moon, and to get a contemporary reminder of Moon landing evidence Inverse reached out to Dr. Brett Denevi, a planetary geologist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, was a vice-chair of Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, is working on the Artemis program.

“There is a whole host of evidence to demonstrate the Moon landings occurred, including images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera,” Denevi told Inverse. As she points out this is a relatively contemporary camera, launched back in 2009. “The camera is used to scout new landing sites like we are doing for Artemis, so it was built to take incredibly detailed pictures.”….

(7) SONGS OF SFF. [Item by Rob Thornton.] This is six minutes of reverb-soaked electric guitar recorded in a bathroom and reminiscent of the banjo in the theme song from the BBC’s Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. All the song titles are from my fave SF/F novels (see “Terminus Est,” “Burning Bright” and “Green Rapture.”). Bonus points if you know my musical nym! “Now And Always” by R Carnassus at Bandcamp.

(8) SDCC PROGRAM DROPS. “San Diego Comic Con Schedule: Best Panels in Hall H and More”. Variety has highlights at the link. Or you can browse the complete Programming Schedule on the Comic-Con website.

San Diego Comic-Con has rolled out its schedule for the 2024 convention this week, which runs from July 25–28. For the first time since 2019, SDCC will unfold without a virtual event, pandemic protocols or labor strike cancelations, marking a return to normal of sorts for the largest annual fan gathering in North America.

Several major franchises will make an appearance at the event, including panels for Marvel Studios, “Star Trek,” “The Penguin,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” the “Walking Dead” franchise, “Transformers One,” “Alien: Romulus,” “The Boys” and “Doctor Who.” Here are the highlights, with descriptions from SDCC and/or the panel sponsors…. 

(9) MEDICAL AWARENESS IN CANADA. CBC News led its post about tick-spread illnesses with the story of MaryAnn Harris, wife of sff author Charles de Lint: “Tick-spread illnesses are on the rise in Canada. Are surveillance, awareness efforts keeping up?”

One morning in Sept. 2021, MaryAnn Harris felt strangely tired. She told her husband, Charles de Lint, that she needed to lie down. Then more worrisome symptoms began cropping up, from nausea to double vision.

The Ottawa couple rushed to a local emergency department. 

At first, the cause of Harris’s ailment was a mystery. The ER team ran various tests, and after a few hours with no answers, they sent her husband home due to visitor restrictions put in place during the pandemic.

By the time de Lint came back the next day, his beloved partner of four decades was unresponsive and on life support in the intensive care unit.

“You don’t know what to think, what to feel,” de Lint recalled. “It was just utter panic.”

What followed was a three-year ordeal, as medical teams offered a battery of tests and treatments in hopes of bringing Harris back from the brink of death. She eventually regained consciousness, but by that point, inflammation in her brain stem had left her paralyzed. Harris never left the hospital and died in early June at the age of 71.

The cause of her devastating illness? A little-known virus that spreads through tick bites.

For years, medical experts have warned a rising number of Canadians are being exposed to ticks carrying an array of dangerous pathogens. Lyme disease is the most familiar — and by far the most common — but there’s growing concern about lesser-known threats as well, from various bacterial infections, to the rare Powassan virus that claimed Harris’s life earlier this year.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

1974 – Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia 

Fifty years ago, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia was published. (No, not on this day. Just this year.) 

Though it is often considered the fifth book of the Hainish Cycle, Le Guin in multiple interviews and her writings has stated that there is no particular cycle or order for what she called the Ekumen novels. 

And yes, I can say having read it more than once and those readings being decades apart that the full title does really make sense. Later printings would just call it The Dispossessed. No idea why the change and if Le Guin said why. 

It was by published by Harper & Row that year with a stunning wraparound cover by Fred Winkowski. I found only two first editions to be had online, the first $1200, the other substantially more, but that was signed. 

Le Guin in the forward to Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One which includes The Dispossessed says “The Dispossessed started as a very bad short story, which I didn’t try to finish but couldn’t quite let go. There was a book in it, and I knew it, but the book had to wait for me to learn what I was writing about and how to write about it. I needed to understand my own passionate opposition to the war that we were, endlessly it seemed, waging in Vietnam, and endlessly protesting at home. If I had known then that my country would continue making aggressive wars for the rest of my life, I might have had less energy for protesting that one. But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak. So, when I realized that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be.” 

So let’s now go on to note that I discovered that the novel has a story set before it, “The Day Before the Revolution” and the character in that story, revolutionary Laia Asieo Odo, is a major presence in The Dispossessed. 

But that’s not really why I’m bring the story to your attention. The story is included in the Library of America’s Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories which has a short essay on what she was feeling after writing the novel which you can read here “Story of the Week: The Day Before the Revolution”. And the story is here “The Day Before the Revolution”.

Now where was I? Ahh it’s 1974, the novel has come out. Among us, it was widely acclaimed, and the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation definitely was appreciative of this as her website lists them this way:

Winner of the 1974 Nebula Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Hugo Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Locus Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Jupiter Award for Best Novel

And yes, each link takes you to the proper Award site. Stellar webmasters whoever they are. Now interestingly, the Foundation doesn’t include the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. I wonder why.  It was also nominated for a John W. Campbell Memorial Award but didn’t win. 

As near as I can tell, it has never been out of print in the last fifty years with multiple hardcover, trade and paperback editions. ISFDB lists far too many editions to really make sense of its printing history, so I can’t say definitively. 

What I didn’t see is it ever got the small press, lavish edition treatment, but then I’m having a hard time remembering if any of her works did. Come on Filers, help me out here.  

In 2019, The Folio Society published a hardcover edition with illustrations by David Lupton and an introduction by Brian Attebery.  

On November 17, Harper Perennial will publish a trade paper edition of the  book with a new foreword by Karen Joy Fowler. 

(11) SEND HIM BACK. “Mexico ‘cancels’ statue of Greek god Poseidon after dispute with local deity” says NBC News.

The gods must be angry — or just laughing at the hubris of humanity.

Authorities in Mexico have slapped a “closure” order on a 10-foot-tall (3-meter) aquatic statue of the Greek god of the sea Poseidon that was erected in May in the Gulf of Mexico just off the town of Progreso, Yucatan.

Mexico’s environmental protection agency said late Thursday that the statue, which appears to show an angry trident-wielding Poseidon “rising” from the sea a few meters from the beach, lacked permits. In the few months it has been up, tourists had gathered to take pictures of themselves with it as a striking background.

But it was symbolically “closed” Thursday — and could be removed altogether — after a group of activist lawyers filed a legal complaint saying the statue offended the beliefs of local Maya Indigenous groups who prefer their own local god of water, known as Chaac.

It’s always been dangerous for humans to get involved in battles between deities. But this one appears to be all about present-day humanity, combining “cancel culture,” social media storms, lawsuits and the one truly fearsome, overpowering force in today’s world: Instagram selfie-fueled tourism….

(12) RECAST BLACK PANTHER? Fandomwire says there’s a call to “’Remove Black Panther 2 from the timeline’: After Harrison Ford Replaces William Hurt as General Ross Fans Demand a New Black Panther in MCU”.

…And after witnessing Harrison Ford replace William Hurt as General Ross, the calls for recasting have amplified within the Marvel fandom, particularly in the instance of Black Panther. Portrayed by the iconic Chadwick Boseman, fans now want the MCU to remove the Oscar-winning Black Panther 2 from the official timeline to facilitate the character’s recasting….

…However, Ford’s casting has also triggered a wave of demand within the Marvel fandom: the demand for Black Panther recasting. Portrayed by the late Chadwick Boseman throughout the MCU until his tragic death, the actor’s portrayal has remained iconic and pretty much irreplaceable. Yet, many fans believe recasting him would not be a bad choice, but only add to the legacy of the character he so clearly loved and played.

The MCU has recast several characters throughout its run, with Bruce Banner and Rhodey being some notable examples. These recasting decisions have hardly received as much hate from fans, but instead have triggered the calls for a Black Panther replacement since Boseman’s untimely death in 2020….

(13) NOT SURE THESE ARE THE ROLLING ROADS WE’RE LOOKING FOR. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “FreightTech Friday: Japan’s proposed conveyor-belt highway” at FreightWaves.

In a recent meeting of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, the group unveiled plans to combat its transportation and logistics sector labor shortages with construction of an automated conveyor-belt highway running over 310 miles across central Japan.

Known as the Autoflow-Road proposal, the ministry showcased its blueprint for building both aboveground and underground conveyor-belt roads running between Tokyo and Osaka 24 hours a day. According to the ministry, it could move the same amount of freight in a day as 25,000 drivers.

“Automated logistics roads are designed to get the most out of road space by utilizing hard shoulders, median strips and tunnels beneath the roadway. …Our study is examining the impact on road traffic, including on surrounding roads, and costs,” senior official to the ministry, Shuya Muramatsu, told reporters.

The proposal comes as an answer to Japan’s ongoing transportation and logistics labor crisis, as the country begins to cap trucking overtime hours this year.

(14) HOW CAN A FRANCHISE CALLED THE TERMINATOR NEVER END? “’Terminator Zero’ Teases Judgement Day in First Apocalyptic Trailer” at Yahoo!

The Terminator promised he’d be back – and he is. Netflix is teasing a tense apocalyptic return to this world with the first trailer for “Terminator Zero,” its upcoming animated series set in the “Terminator” universe that will premiere on Judgement Day, aka August 29.

This teaser debuts Eiko, voiced by “House of the Dragon” star Sonoya Mizuno, a resistance fighter who is sent back in time to stop Skynet’s impending attack on humanity. “You can’t see it yet, but you’ve been on a collision course your entire life. There’s no going back, not really. It will never, ever stop,” Eiko ominously says in the teaser.

As she gives her warning, the trailer jumps between creepy shots of terminators repairing themselves, explosions and gunfire. “There’s only one thing standing between you and him — me,” Eiko says in the teaser’s final tense moment….

(15) ANDOR RETURNS. Disney+ has dropped a trailer for Andor Season 2 (2025).

The wait is over! Dive into the highly anticipated first look at Andor Season 2 with this electrifying teaser trailer. Following the critically acclaimed first season, Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) journey continues as he navigates the treacherous world of the Rebellion. Set five years before the events of Rogue One and A New Hope, this season promises to delve deeper into the rise of the Rebellion against the oppressive Galactic Empire.

(16) THE END AND BEYOND. “’Stranger Things’ Season 5 First Look Revealed by Netflix” at The Hollywood Reporter.

…Maya Hawke recently told Podcrushed that the eight episodes in the final season of the sci-fi hit will feel like “eight movies,” and noted the episodes are “very long.”

“Our showrunners, Matt and Ross [Duffer], take a lot of responsibility,” she added. “They have an amazing team of writers, but they’re very involved. They write a lot and they are very intense and serious about the quality of the continued writing, and so it takes a long time to write each season, and a long time to shoot them.”…

…While season five is the show’s final season, there are additional Stranger Things projects in the works, including: Stranger Things: The First Shadow live on stage in London’s West End and an as-yet-untitled animated spinoff series….

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Larry Powell, Rob Thornton, Daniel Dern, 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 Thomas the Red.]

Pixel Scroll 2/5/23 He Said, “First!” And Exited Stage Left To A Swirl Of Scrolling Pixels

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(1) TOLKIEN SOCIETY AWARDS NEWS. The Tolkien Society invites the public to submit nominations for The Tolkien Society Awards 2023 through February 26. Membership is not required to participate in the first round. Once the shortlist is compiled, however, only members will be eligible to vote on the winners, who will be announced April 1.

(2) WHAT HAS IT GOT IN ITS GARBAGE TRUCKS? “Refuse firm Lord of the Bins ordered to change its name by Tolkien franchise” reports the Guardian.

A refuse firm in Brighton called Lord of the Bins has been ordered by lawyers to change its name after being accused of breaching trademark laws.

The two-man waste collection business was contacted by Middle-earth Enterprises, which owns the worldwide rights to The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Nick Lockwood and Dan Walker run the company, which collects household, building and office waste across East Sussex and West Sussex.

The pair said they have been issued with a cease and desist notice after it was claimed they were in breach of the well-known franchise’s trademarks.

As well as changing the firm’s name and website, they have been forced to ditch their company slogan – “One ring to remove it all”.

(3) TWEET DECAY. Ursula Vernon speaks for many in a remark that went viral on Twitter.

(4) CHEESE PLEASE. In “An AI app walks into a writers room” Charles Stross passes along ChatGPT’s answer to an inventive question.

Question to ChatGPT: What is the plot of the unpublished script Charles Stross wrote for Wallace and Grommit?

(5) GUNN CSSF BOOK CLUB. The Gunn Center for the Study of SF’s (CSSF) monthly virtual book club has chosen for the month of February to read Akwaeke Emezi’s YA novel, Pet. 

Set in the utopian town of Lucille, Emezi’s novel portrays a society that has taught children that monsters and evil no longer exist. Jam, the protagonist, soon questions the beliefs of her society when she is faced with a real monster, who is nothing like the stories she has heard. Winner of the Stonewall Book Award for LGBTQ+ writing in 2020, Pet contemplates the classic societal conception of good versus evil. 

Readers are invited to join the virtual event on Friday, February 24 at Noon (Central). Register here.  

(6) FREE READ. Sunday Morning Transport offers Yoon Ha Lee’s “The Ethnomusicology of the Last Dreadnought” as an encouragement to subscribe.

It is not true that space is silent.

The darkness between stars is full of threnodies and threadbare laments, concertos and cantatas, the names of the dead and the wars that they’ve fed. Few people are unmoved by the strenuous harmonies and the strange hymns. Fewer people still understand their significance, the decayed etymologies and deprecated tongues….

(7) TRIBUTE TO A CRITIC. The Strange Horizons – 30 January 2023 issue is devoted to the late Maureen Kincaid Speller. (Via Ansible.)

In January 2022, the reviews department at Strange Horizons, led at the time by Maureen Kincaid Speller, published our first special issue with a focus on SF criticism. We were incredibly proud of this issue, and heartened by how many people seemed to feel, with us, that criticism of the kind we publish was important; that it was creative, transformative, worthwhile. We’d been editing the reviews section for a few years at this point, and the process of putting together this special, and the reception it got, felt like a kind of renewal—a reminder of why we cared so much. In the couple of months that followed, we made grand plans for future projects, and even started a podcast.

The criticism special was also the last major project the three of us worked on together, before Maureen’s cancer diagnosis. We lost her in September.

We’d already been toying with the idea of doing another criticism special in 2023; when the subject of a tribute issue to Maureen was broached, the only way we could envision it was through the critical work that she loved.…

(8) MEMORY LANE.

2014 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

So let’s talk about Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Spade/Paladin Conundrums which got their start in the “Stomping Mad” story.

I’m very fond of our community and equally fond of mysteries as y’all well know by now. So you will not find it at all surprising that I really love these stories. They’ve got a perfect central character as you’ll see below, a great setting as they’re all set at various Cons and the stories are all fascinating. What’s not to like? 

Rusch for a long time only did short stories set here,  really great ones, a fair number of them, mostly collected in Early Conundrums, and those exist in a stellar audio version which is narrated by Rish Outfield, but two years ago Ten Little Fen: A Spade/Paladin Conundrum came out. It’s a superb mystery and a even better look at Con culture. 

Here’s the Beginning of the series in that story. 

SHE CALLED HERSELF the Martha Stewart of Science Fiction, and she looked the part: Homecoming-queen pretty with a touch of maliciousness behind the eyes, a fakely tolerant acceptance of everyone fannish, and an ability to throw the best room party at any given Worldcon in any given year.

So when a body was found in her party suite, the case came to me. Folks in fandom call me the Sam Spade of Science Fiction, but I’m actually more like the Nero Wolfe: a man who prefers good food and good conversation, a man who is huge, both in his appetite and in his education. I don’t go out much, except to science fiction conventions (a world in and of themselves) and to dinner with the rare comrade. I surround myself with books, computers, and televisions. I do not have orchids or an Archie Goodwin, but I do possess a sharp eye for detail and a critical understanding of the dark side of human nature.

I have, in the past, solved over a dozen cases, ranging from finding the source of a doomsday virus that threatened to shut down the world’s largest fan database to discovering who had stolen “the Best Artist Hugo two hours before the award ceremony. My reputation had grown during the last British Fantasy Convention when I—an American—worked with Scotland Yard to recover a diamond worth £1,000,000 that a Big Name Fan had forgotten to put in the hotel’s safe.

But I had never faced a more convoluted criminal mind until that Friday afternoon at the First Annual Jurassic Parkathon, a media convention held in Anaheim.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 5, 1906 — John Carradine. I’m going to count Murders in the Rue Morgue as his first genre appearance.  After that early Thirties film, he shows up (bad pun I know) in The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, Bride of Frankenstein, Ali Baba Goes to Town, The Three Musketeers and The Hound of the Baskervilles. Look, that’s just the Thirties. Can I just state that he did a lot of genre work and leave it at that? He even had roles on The Twilight Zone, The Munsters, Lost in Space, Night Gallery and the Night Strangler. (Died 1988.)
  • Born February 5, 1919 — Red Buttons. He shows up on The New Original Wonder Woman as Ashley Norman. Yes, this is the Lynda Carter version. Somewhat later he’s Hoagy in Pete’s Dragon followed by being the voice of Milton in Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July.  He also played four different characters on the original Fantasy Island. (Died 2006.)
  • Born February 5, 1922 — Peter Leslie. Writer in a number of media franchises including The Avengers, The New Avengers (and yes they are different franchises), The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and The Invaders. ISFDB also lists has writing in the Father Hayes series but I don’t recognize that series. (Died 2007.)
  • Born February 5, 1924 — Basil Copper. Best remembered for Solar Pons stories continuing the character created as a tribute to Sherlock Holmes by August Derleth. I’m also fond of The Great White Space, his Lovecraftian novel that has a character called Clark Ashton Scarsdale has to be homage to Clark Ashton Smith. Though I’ve not seen them them, PS Publishing released Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper, a two-volume set of his dark fantasy tales. (Died 2013.)
  • Born February 5, 1934 — Malcolm Willits, 89. Author of The Wonderful Edison Time Machine: A Celebration of Life and Shakespeare’s Cat: A Play in Three Acts which he filmed as Shakespeare’s Cat. He also co-edited Destiny, an early Fifties fanzine with Jim Bradley.
  • Born February 5, 1940 — H.R. Giger. Conceptual designer in whole or part for Aliens, Alien³, Species and Alien: Resurrection to name a few films he’s been involved in. Did you know there are two Giger Bars designed by him, both in Switzerland? And yes they’re really weird. (Died 2014.)
  • Born February 5, 1941 — Stephen J. Cannell. Creator of The Greatest American Hero. That gets him Birthday Honors. The only other genre series he was involved with was The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage thirty years ago which I never heard of. He also created the Castle series with Nathan Fillion of Firefly fame and was one of the actual players at the poker games on the series. View one of them here. (Died 2010.)
  • Born February 5, 1964 — Laura  Linney, 59. She first shows up in our corner of the Universe as Meryl Burbank/Hannah Gill on The Truman Show before playing Officer Connie Mills in The Mothman Prophecies (BARF!) and then Erin Bruner in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. She plays Mrs. Munro In Mr. Holmes, a film best described as stink, stank and stunk when it comes to all things Holmesian. Her last SF was as Rebecca Vincent in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Tom Gauld passes along advice about what women writers need.

(11) WAKANDA WORD STUDY. Dictionary.com has a rather interesting article about “The Names Of Black Panther & Wakanda: Their Meaning & Significance”. (Spoiler warning.)

Comic book creators and filmmakers pick some superhero names just because they sound cool. Other names, though, are chosen for their deep connection with a character or setting. Many of the names from Wakanda, the home of Black Panther, are especially rich in symbolism and significance.

Join us as we answer these questions and more:

  • Is there a real Wakanda that inspired the name of the technologically advanced supercountry?
  • What is Black Panther’s real name?
  • What does Namor’s name mean?

(12) BEST DRESSED. The New York Times reviews “A Murder Mystery With Clothes to Die For”.

“The Traitors,” a new reality game show, hinges on startling revelations. In episodes of the series, which is framed as a whodunit, cast members are regularly “murdered” (kicked off). Others are “banished” (also kicked off). But some of the most astonishing reveals have nothing to do with the plot — and everything to do with what outfit the show’s host, the actor Alan Cumming, will appear in next.

There are pink plaid suits. Herringbone tweed capes. Sleek little kilts. “Perhaps, rather alarmingly,” Mr. Cumming said, “the vast majority of the clothes were mine.”…

(13) CARROLL AT NYRSF. A video of Jonathan Carroll’s NYRSF Reading has been posted.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Matt Mitchell plays all the parts in “When ‘The Balloon’ Comes South”.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Steven French, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day by Cat Eldridge.]

Explore New Corners of Wakanda in Marvel’s Voices: Wakanda Forever #1

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The next edition of Marvel’s Voices acclaimed anthology series, Marvel’s Voices: Wakanda Forever, a special Black History Month one-shot, hits stands on February 15. Marvel’s Voices: Wakanda Forever #1 will feature five all-new stories spotlighting the iconic heroes of Wakanda as they are brought to life by an incredible lineup of Black creators, including fresh talent making their exciting Marvel Comics debuts. Today, fans can get a sneak peek at the stories that await and check out all four Marvel’s Voices: Wakanda Forever #1 variant covers.

Here are the tales of myth, adventure, strife, and more that readers can look forward to, each one expanding the inimitable world of Wakanda in fascinating new ways! 

  • T’Challa’s grandfather, Azzuri, learns a lesson as a teenager that will have a dramatic impact on Wakanda’s present in a moving story by writer Adam Serwer (Wakanda) and Marvel Studios storyboard artist Todd Harris!
  • It’s the debut of the LAST Black Panther in the far future of Wakanda in a revelatory tale written and drawn by Juni Ba (Black Panther, Image Comics’ Monkey Meat)
  • T’Challa must grapple with a crisis of faith and goes through surprising lengths to get through it in a thrilling tale by writer Karama Horne, author of the recent Black Panther: Protectors of Wakanda book, and artist Alitha E. Martinez, known for her work on Black Panther and Miles Morales: Spider-Man
  • Learn what length Shuri will go to in order to protect Wakanda from a devastating attack from a dangerous new foe in an action-packed story by Murewa Ayodele and Dotun Akanda, the team behind the recently announced I Am Iron Man limited series
  • A new Dora Milaje trainee must accomplish one last thing to earn her place: defeat Okoye in combat! Witness this breathtaking battle in this story by Eisner Award-winning writer Sheena Howard and artist Marcus Williams (Tuskegee Heirs)
  • Plus all-new essays, interviews, and bonus material about all things Wakanda! 

Hear from some of the creators and join Marvel Comics’ Black History Month celebration at Marvel.com.

 MARVEL’S VOICES – WAKANDA FOREVER #1

Written by JUNI BA, MUREWA AYODELE, ADAM SERWE, SHEENA HOWARD & KARAMA HORNE!; Art by JUNI BA, DOTUN AKANDE, TODD HARRIS, MARCUS WILLIAMS & ALITHA E. MARTINEZ!

COVER BY KEN LASHLEY

VARIANT COVER BY EJIWA “EDGE” EBENEBE

VARIANT COVER BY KAREN S. DARBOE  

VARIANT COVER BY AFUA RICHARDSON

INTERIOR ART

2023 Critics Choice Awards

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The Critics Choice Association (CCA) announced the winners of the 28th Annual Critics Choice Awards on January 15.

Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), Best Editing, and Best Original Screenplay.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Angela Bassett won Best Supporting Actress, while Ruth E. Carter received the award for Best Costume Design.

Avatar: The Way of Water took Best Special Effects. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio won Best Animated Feature.

The complete list of winners follows the jump.

Continue reading →

Pixel Scroll 12/26/22 Come All Ye Pixels

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(0) The Spirits have done it all in one night! (Then sent us back to work on Monday again — how is that fair?)

(1) THE DOCTOR ARRIVED RIGHT AFTER SANTA. As someone said, “We didn’t get a Christmas special, but we did get a one minute long Christmas trailer” — “The show is just beginning…” #DoctorWho returns in 2023.

And WhoCulture will be happy to tell you the meaning of every scene. They take 13 times longer than the trailer itself, but to be fair a picture is worth a thousand words only if you already know the words.

(2) THE BEST. The Galactic Stars of 1967 have been revealed in [ “Hit Parade ’67 (the year’s best science fiction)” at Galactic Journey.

Sure, there are other “must-read” lists. The Hugos. The Nebulas. But no other list is as comprehensive, so thoroughly vetted, so absolutely certain to be filled with excellent material than the Galactic Stars.

Thus, without further ado, here are the Galactic Stars for 1967! Results are in order of voting for the winners, alphabetical order by author for the honorable mentions.

Here’s the result in one prestigious category:

Best Author

Samuel R. Delany

Surprise, surprise…

Honorable Mention

Larry Niven

Fritz Leiber

The winner is the prince of the New Wave, while the runner ups include a scion of the new hard sf and a distinguished gentleman of the genre. A nice balance, I think!

(3) HEAR THE DARK. BBC Radio 4’s 12-part adaptation of Susan Cooper’s cult novel had its world premiere on December 19, 2022, and drops daily from December 21. When the dark comes rising, who will hold it back?

Start with the 7-minute teaser.

Fighting against evil in a time-travelling midwinter family drama. A gripping journey through a frozen landscape… and an unending epic battle against the forces of “the Dark”. On midwinter’s eve, 11-year-old Will Stanton discovers he is an ancient being and guardian of “the Light”. This eerie drama is best experienced on headphones for a unique, immersive ‘binaural’ experience.

Then listen to Episode One: “The Sign-Seeker”

A boy’s 11th birthday and an unusual gift mark the beginning of a great test of character, as young Will Stanton is drawn into an ancient struggle between Light and Dark.
He is told his task: to find the six Signs of the Light before the Dark destroys them. Realising he has supernatural powers, Will learns he is an ‘Old One’, whose duty is to fight the rising strength of the Dark across the centuries. #TheDarkIsRising

This version, edited for BBC Radio 4, of the BBC World Service serialisation of Susan Cooper’s classic, written and recorded to take place across the Christmas holidays.

(4) HELP THE BORROWERS. Kelly McClymer advises writers “How to Bring Your Indie Book to the Attention of a Librarian” in an installment of “The Indie Files” at the SFWA Blog.

… As an indie author, you may have a way to get a librarian’s attention that is not available to the traditionally published author—letting the library acquire the book in the way that suits them best. If they would like a library hardback edition, you can do that. If they buy from a certain eBook or audiobook catalog, you can make sure your book is available there.

Key phrase: get the librarian’s attention. Librarians, like most readers, want more books that they can afford to buy, so they have to prioritize according to their patrons’ desires and interests….

(5) SNAPPED BACK. Writer-director Ryan Coogler and co-screenwriter Joe Robert Cole discuss “The ‘Black Panther’ Sequel That Never Was” with the New York Times.

…In the initial draft of the script, before Chadwick’s death, how were you looking at the story? What were the challenges?

COOGLER It was, “What are we going to do about the Blip?” [In Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War,” T’Challa is one of billions of people who suddenly vanish, only to be brought back by the Avengers five years later.] That was the challenge. It was absolutely nothing like what we made. It was going to be a father-son story from the perspective of a father, because the first movie had been a father-son story from the perspective of the sons.

In the script, T’Challa was a dad who’d had this forced five-year absence from his son’s life…

(6) A STOP-MOTION NUTCRACKER. This month, for Christmas, David, Tora, and Alexander Case are taking a look at the 1979 Sanrio stop-motion animated film Nutcracker Fantasy. Anime Explorations: “Nutcracker Fantasy (1979) – Breaking it all Down”.

(7) DREDDING CHANGE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Judge Dredd Megazine has just changed its format. For some years now, this monthly comic came in a bag together with a mini-graphic novel of old strips and had a saddle stitch (staples). From this month on it will now be perfect bound with a flat spine and the min-graphic novel will be incorporated into the Megazine proper.

And while your attention is here, if you are not familiar with the Galaxy’s greatest comic then there is a new graphic anthology now out, The Best of 2000AD volume 1 (£14.99 / US$22.99 ISBN 978-1-786-18706-2).  It is the ultimate 2000AD mix tape and an excellent introductory taster for those not yet familiar with the comic which remains the only guaranteed cure for lesser spotted thrill-sucker infections. Zarjaz. Available from all good thrill merchants on both sides of the Pond (but not Russia or China).

In this volume: Judge Dredd battles Mutie Block anarchy; Halo Jones escapes in Alan Moore’s first masterpiece; humanity is on the Brink in the space murder mystery from Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard; Judge Anderson takes centre stage in the search for Sham.

Splundig.

(8) STEPHEN GREIF (1944-2022). Actor Stephen Greif, whose genre resume includes Blake’s 7 and Doctor Who, died at age 78 on December 23.

… After starring in numerous stage productions throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, he made the transition to screen – landing the role of space commander Travis in Blake’s 7.

The show ran from 1978 to 1981, with Greif starring alongside Gareth Thomas, Paul Darrow, Michael Keating and Sally Knyvette….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[By Cat Eldridge.] Dr. Seuss and Cat in the Hat sculpture at UCSD

Who doesn’t love Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat? Or Dr. Seuss himself? Well if you don’t, you can leave right now as we are going to look at a very stellar sculpture of both of them that is located the University of California at San Diego. It was in 2004, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Seuss, that the Theodor Seuss Geisel Memorial statue made its debut outside the Geisel Library at UC San Diego.

Geisel lived over forty years in La Jolla and died there, in a home not far from that university. Indeed, University of California San Diego’s main library, the Geisel Library, is now home of the Dr. Seuss Collection, as he dedicated all of his papers and other memorabilia there. 

The sculpture on the plaza outside the library is by Lark Grey Dimond-Cates. The Cat in the Hat stands at Dr. Seuss’ shoulder holding an umbrella.

This is not the original casting as that is to be found at the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden at the Springfield Museums’ Quadrangle in Springfield, Massachusetts, the birthplace of Theodor Seuss Geisel, which we’ve discussed here previously. 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born December 26, 1791 — Charles Babbage. Y’ll likely best know him as creator of the Babbage Machine which shows up in Perdido Street Station, The Peshawar Lancers, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage webcomic, and there’s “Georgia on My Mind”, a novelette by Charles Sheffield which involves a search for a lost Babbage device. The latter won both a Nebula and a Hugo Award for Best Novelette. (Died 1871.)
  • Born December 26, 1903 — Elisha Cook, Jr. On the Trek side, he shows up as playing lawyer Samuel T. Cogley in the “Court Martial” episode. Elsewhere he had long association with the genre starting with Voodoo Island and including House on a Haunted Hill, Rosemary’s Baby, Wild Wild West, The Night Stalker and Twilight Zone. (Died 1995.)
  • Born December 26, 1911 — Milton Luros. Illustrator during the Golden Age of pulp magazines from 1942 to 1954 (yes I’m expansive on what I consider to be to the Golden Age). His work graced Science Fiction Quarterly, Astounding Stories, Future Combined with Science Fiction Stories, Future Science Fiction Stories, Dynamic Science Fiction and Science Fiction Quarterly. He had an amazing ability to illustrate women in outfits in hostile environments that simply were impractical such as one for Science Fiction Quarterly (UK), October 1952 cover had a cut out in her spacesuit so her décolletage was bare.  (Died 1999.)
  • Born December 26, 1951 — Priscilla Olson, 71. She and her husband have been involved with NESFA Press’s efforts to put neglected SF writers back into print and she has edited myriad works by such as Chad Oliver and Charles Harness, plus better-known ones like Jane Yolen.  She’s chaired a number of Boskones.
  • Born December 26, 1953 — Clayton Emery, 69. Somewhere there’s a bookstore with nothing but the novels and collections that exist within a given franchise. This author has novels in the Forgotten Realms, Magic: The Gathering and Runesworld franchise, plus several genre works including surprisingly Tales of Robin Hood on Baen Books. Must not be your granddaddy’s Hood.
  • Born December 26, 1970 — Danielle Cormack, 52. If it’s fantasy and it was produced in New Zealand, she might have been in it. Performer of New Zealander status so you can guess what that means — Ephiny on  Xena: Warrior Princess, a one shot as Lady Marie DeValle on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Ephiny on the same series, Katherine on Jack of All Trades (which I’ve mentioned before was one of Kage Baker’s fav shows) as, well, Bruce was the lead. She was Raina on Cleopatra 2525 and Shota on the Legend of the Seeker. Genre television has been very, very good for the New Zealand economy! 

(11) HAIR APPARENT. And speaking again of Dr. Seuss, he’s the illustrator in Vanity Fair’s December 1931 article “Santa Claus’s beard through the ages” by Corey Ford.

The first thing that Dr. Seuss and I did, therefore, was to endeavor to trace Santa Claus’s beard back through the ages to the dawn of history. In order to accomplish this effectively, we each seized a separate strand of beard, and followed it independently to its source. The strand that Dr. Seuss chose led him a merry chase, up hill and down dale, all the way back to ancient Greek mythology, where he discovered a fabulous creature known as the Santaur (see illustration), which he claims is the origin of the whole legend of Kris Kringle. On the other hand, my own strand eventually brought me to a source known as the chin of Frank J. Swartfigure, of Council Bluffs, Iowa, who claimed he had come to New York as a boy to make his fortune, and had been standing ever since on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 47th Street, waiting for the lights to change. …

(12) A NOSE WHERE IT DOESN’T BELONG. If you think of Die Hard as Christmastime entertainment – which my nephew Bradley does – you will appreciate the nuanced humor of Eize Basa’s Twitter thread (which starts here.)

(13) GETTING WISER AS THEY GO. Tom Gauld has his own version of the wisdom of the Magi.

(14) VIDEO OF THE PREVIOUS DAY. Santa Claus appeared on Batman in 1966.

In a window cameo that makes their encounter with Col. Klink seem plausible, Batman and Robin meet Ol’ Saint Nick (played by the great character actor Andy Devine.) The Caped Crusader even directly addresses the audience

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Peer, Alexander Case, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Fiona Moore, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Iphinome.]