25 Pixeler on the Roof

Posted on April 23, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) 2025 HUGO VOTING BEGINS. Seattle 2025 opened Hugo Awards voting today. All ballots must be received by July 23 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.

Voting by surface mail is also an option. Download a printable ballot. Print the ballot and follow the included instructions.

(2) HUGO VOTER PACKET. You can find out “What’s In The 2025 Hugo Voter Packet?” in File 770’s compilation of the HVP category indexes.

(3) NOTES FROM BELFAST. “Eastercon Reconnect” by SJ Groenewegen is a fine conreport.

… Next up was The Doctor Will See You Now, with Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Brian M. Milton, Fiona Moore, Nicholas Whyte and Catherine Sharp (moderator). The description read, ‘We’ve seen dramatic events in the Whoniverse in the last year, both in-canon and in production, from bi-generation and new companions to the return of Russel T. Davies and the first Doctor Who Christmas Specials since 2017. Our Whovian panel will discuss the highs and lows of the new era of New Who, the relationship it has to previous canons, Ncuti Gatwa’s playing of the Doctor so far, and more.’ Catherine began the panel by asking each panellist whether they were doctors… and all answered in the affirmative. An entertaining and knowledgeable discussion followed….

(4) SEMIPROZINES. The Semiprozine Directory is still being maintained by Neil Clarke at Semiprozine.org.

(5) EARLY C.L. MOORE. “Deeper Cut: C. L. Moore Before The Pulps” is discussed by Bobby Derie at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein. Here’s an excerpt from Moore’s 1934 letter to R.H. Barlow.

Ever since we were about nine a friend and I have been evolving a romantic island kingdom and populating it with a race which, inevitably, is a remnant of Atlanteans. We’ve a very detailed theology and mythology, maps all water-colored and scroll-bordered and everything, a ruling house whose geneology and family tree and so forth has been worked out in tbales and charts from the year minus—oh, just about everything that two imaginative girls could think of over the space of fifteen years. (Heavens, has it been that long?) We have songs and long sagas of heroes, and a literature full of tradition and legends, and we even made and colored a series of paper dolls to illustrate the different types and their costumes, and then there were wars and plans of battle, and we have the maps of all our favorite cities, and we’ve written a good deal of history. And that history is what I take seriously….

(6) RELIGION IN WORLDBUILDING. Last night the Chicago Public Library hosted a panel of sff writers to discuss “American Prophets: Making New Gods”. A recording can be viewed on YouTube.

Four contemporary fiction writers – N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Nghi Vo and Matthew Kirby – talk about religion in their writing, the importance of considering socio-spiritual systems when world-building and how these influence the ways their characters move through the worlds they create.

(7) MORE ABOUT DAMIEN BRODERICK. Rich Horton has written a tribute – “Damien Broderick, April 22, 1944 – April 19, 2025” – for Black Gate.

…Damien Broderick was an outstanding science fiction writer – and, to my mind, a somewhat underappreciated one. He was a tireless advocate of Australian SF, in both his anthologies and his critical work. He was an intriguing and rather iconoclastic science writer, very interested in the far future and in very speculative scientific ideas, including paranormal powers….

(8) SIMPSONS IN THE WILD. Animation Magazine is there when “’The Simpsons’ Exclusive Episode ‘Yellow Planet’ Launches on Disney+”

Today, Disney+ announced that an all-new episode of The Simpsons is now streaming exclusively on the streaming service. The full-length episode, titled “Yellow Planet,” is the show’s latest exclusive episode to hit the streamer this season, joining previous installments “The Past and the Furious” and “O C’mon All Ye Faithful.”

In “Yellow Planet,” The Simpsons are reimagined as animals in a National Geographic-style nature mockumentary. Homer and Marge navigate the ocean as whales from different series, Bart hatches as an iguana struggling to survive, and Lisa leads her flock as a finch. Along the way, familiar Springfield faces appear in unexpected roles, shaping their journeys in the wild….

(9) EARLY CLI-FI. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Changing Climates Radio 4 Extra. This short series looks at climate change through the prism of science fiction. (Meanwhile, always seek out good sources of climate change science. 😉 )

The meteorologist, John Hammond explores the way that science fiction has served as a barometer for our wonder, curiosity and sometimes anxiety about the environment. With expert insight from Sarah Dillon – Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities and Professor of Human Geography, Mike Hulme, we find out how writers imagined – sometimes very accurately – the changing world around them.

Today, we focus on the early decades of the 20th century, a period rich in technological optimism and environmental unease.

First, we hear E.M. Forster’s chillingly prescient ‘The Machine Stops’;

A world in which people can only communicate through a machine sounds like the internet today. But this story, written in 1909, takes us to a future where the machine has become an all-powerful God.

EM Forster’s story dramatised by Gregory Norminton and first broadcast in 2001.

You can access the episode here.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

April 23, 1973 — Naomi Kritzer, 52.

By Lis Carey: Naomi Kritzer first came to my attention with the delightful short story, “Cat Pictures, Please,” about a bored, rogue, AI who identifies as a cat, enjoys cat pictures, and decides to help out those silly humans, whose lives it knows so much more about than they do. What does it want in return? More cat pictures, please!

What I didn’t know then was that this new-to-me writer had been publishing since 1999, with two trilogies, some standalone novels, and quite varied short fiction. Along the way, having grown up in Wisconsin and attended college in Minnesota, she found time to live in London and Nepal.

There were more stories of the rogue Cat AI, committed in its own way to making the world a better place for good people who like cats. These include two novels. Catfishing on CatNet is about a teenage girl, Steph, who, with her mother, is constantly moving to escape her dangerous stalker father. She has a flipphone, no smartphone, is not allowed to make friends, and has no outlet except her online friends, in the friendly atmosphere of CatNet, run by the wise, kind, and completely anonymous CheshireCat. On CatNet, Steph is “Brown Bat,” and her friends, the members of her “clowder,” have similarly anonymous names. They all have fun and companionship, and with CheshireCat’s very intelligent but inexperienced in the real world (CheshireCat has only been active for five years, and is still learning about humans), pull off a prank that winds up attracting unwanted attention to Steph, her mom, and the other kids.

Chaos on CatNet has Steph and her mother settled in Minneapolis, Steph enrolled in a high school she can expect to graduate from. She’s also making real-world friends in addition to her online clowder. One of those friends, Nell, has her own complicated family history, and a very different kind of online community, which Steph starts to explore with her. CheshireCat is also getting messages from what he believes is another AI like himself, but he doesn’t trust the AI’s approach. Of course things get complicated. Another enjoyable, satisfying book.

But Naomi has other fiction that’s very different. A short story about a “Little Free Library” where one user, instead of leaving books in exchange for books, leaves little bits of artwork, and notes, and gradually, we find out who this strange visitor is, and what’s going on in their world.

“The Year Without Sunshine,” a novelette, is another very different kind of story. The world has undergone a series of smaller disasters, followed by a catastrophe that leaves clouds thick enough to block all sunshine. We follow one community struggling to make things work with a few days of electricity a week, intermittent delivery of life-critical medications by (apparently) federal authorities, and other such intermittent and not necessarily reliable outside support. When the internet goes down, Alexis and a neighbor, Tanesha, set up a booth, “WhatsUp,” to help keep communication going among neighbors who previously relied on WhatsApp. Then someone suggests it might be good to go door to door, and find out both what people need, and what they might have that they don’t need anymore—and a bigger project, and network, starts to form.

On her list to be is Liberty’s Daughter. Beck Garrison lives on a seastead, built out of constructed platforms and old cruise ships, to be a libertarian paradise. She’s grown up comfortable and privileged, but has started doing odd jobs for pocket money. Beck is hired by a woman from the other side of the waterline, to find her missing sister. She starts to learn things she never suspected, about the seastead, her father, herself, and the world. Some people don’t want her to say anything, or ask any more questions. This is a young adult novel, with a bright, good teenager learning to grow up in a hurry and make some big decisions.

Naomi Kritzer is a really interesting writer, who doesn’t do the same thing all the time, and somehow manages to be both realistic and positive about people. Truly a delight to read.

(11) NAOMI KRITZER Q&A. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Naomi Kritzer’s CatNet at this point consists of “Cat Pictures Please” which won a Hugo at MidAmeriCon II, Chaos on CatNet and Catfishing on CatNet. As one who likes this series enough that I had her personally autograph the Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories collection, I wanted to know the origin of CatNet, so I asked. Well, I also gifted her with a birthday chocolate treat, sea salt dark chocolate truffles.

Here’s her answers:

Naomi: The original short story was basically the collision of two things:

1. The line, “the Internet loves cat pictures,” which made me imagine a central internet-based intelligence that wanted pictures of cats.

2. Getting myself a smartphone for the first time (I was a late adopter), and discovering some of its quirks, and coming up with anthropomorphic explanations for things like bad directions.

I mean, the Internet clearly does love cat pictures — although “the Internet” is “the billions of people who use the Internet,” not a secret sentient AI, though!

Cat: I went on to ask her how CatNet came to be…

Naomi: Do you mean in the story, how it got created? I was very vague about it in the short story but sort of heavily implied it was the result of something someone did at Google. In the novel CatNet was an experimental project from a company that was again, heavily implied to be Google.

Way, way cool in my opinion.

While putting this Birthday together, I noticed that she had two other series from when she was starting out as a writer, so I asked her to talk about them. Both are available on Kindle.

Cat: Let’s talk about your first series, Eliana’s Song.

Naomi: Eliana’s Song is my first novel, split into two pieces. I rewrote it really heavily multiple times, and each time I tried to make it shorter and it got longer. When Bantam bought it, they suggested that I split it into two books and expand each, which is what I did.

The book actually started out as a short story I wrote while in college. It garnered a number of rejections that said something like, “this isn’t bad, but it kind of reads like chapters 1 and 36 of a novel.” I eventually decided to write the novel, and struggled for a while before realizing I could not literally use the short story as Chapter 1, I had to start over writing from scratch.

Cat: And your second series, Dead Rivers.

Naomi: Sometime around 2010 I picked up the Scott Westerfield Uglies series and really loved it. Uglies in particular followed a plotline that I really loved, in which someone is sent to infiltrate the enemy side, only to realize once she’s there that these are her people, far more than her bosses are. But she came among them under false pretenses, and she’d have to come clean! And she almost comes clean,

doesn’t, of course is discovered and cast out, and and then has to spend the next book (maybe the next two) demonstrating her worthiness to be allowed to come back. I read this series and thought, “dang, I love this plot — I loved this plot as a kid, and reading it now is like re-visiting an amusement park ride you loved when you were 10 and finding out that even when you know where all the turns and drops are, it’s still super fun.” Like two days after that I suddenly remembered that I had literally written that plotline. It’s the plotline of the Dead Rivers trilogy. I really really love this plot, it turns out! So much that I’ve written it!

I’m not sure how well it’s aged. We were not doing trigger warnings on books yet when it came out, and the fact that the book has an explicit and fairly vivid rape scene took a lot of readers by surprise. It’s also a story that’s very much about whether someone can start out a bad guy and work their way to redemption.

Cat: Now unto your short stories. I obviously believe everyone should read “Cat Pictures Please” and Little Free Library”, both of which I enjoyed immensely. So what of your short story writing do you think is essential for readers to start with?

Naomi: That is a good question but one I find very hard to answer about my own work! It’s a “can’t see the forest because of all the trees” problem, I think.

“So Much Cooking” would probably be at the top, though (with the explanatory note that I always attach these days — I wrote this in 2015.) And then probably “Scrap Dragon” and “The Thing About Ghost Stories.”

To date, she has two short story collections, Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories which is only available as an epub, and of course Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories which is also available in trade paper edition.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Dinosaur Comics plans an alternate version of space travel.
Eek! compares villains’ brands.
The Argyle Sweater envisions a medical Dr. Seuss. (Don’t miss the poster on the wall!)
WaynoVision recalls an artist’s school days.

(13) QUEEN’S OWN. A royal gift from the Boer War: “’It’s got a bit of a whiff’: Chocolate bar made in 1900 is on sale” reports BBC.

…The Queen commissioned manufacturers J S Fry & Sons, Cadbury Brothers Limited, and Rowntree and Company Limited to produce the special tins in 1899, Auctioneum said.

The tins bear the words “I wish you a happy new year”.

By the end of 1900, more than 120,000 tins had been distributed to soldiers….

Mr Stowe said while most of the chocolate bars were eaten straight away, some were sent home to loved ones or to hospitals for wounded soldiers.

“It is incredibly rare,” Mr Stowe said. “If you think over 125 years what that tin has been through – there’s been several world wars, it’s probably travelled back and forth over the Atlantic a couple of times.”

He said the chocolate bar, which is valued between £250 and £400, appealed to bidders who “might want an important piece of social history” or just a “talking point at a dinner party”.

(14) HIRING OBSTACLES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] My brother Jim, who brought this to my attention and is a late boomer himself, commented that the “Original poster is too young to have any idea what it was like before fandom became mainstream.” “Entitled coworker rejects job candidate because she’s a fan of Stark Trek: ‘She made the mistake of mentioning her hobbies during [the] interview’” at Cheezburger.com.

Keep scrolling below for this tale of an unfortunately biased manager who thought a candidate was weird and unfit simply because she was a Star Trek fan.

(15) CAT FURNITURE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] The credential credenza at Viral News Flare.

(16) WHY DIDN’T ANTIMATTER DESTROY THE UNIVERSE? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] When the Universe began you might have thought that matter and anti-matter would be produced in equal quantities resulting in a bigger BANG but with no physical matter left for galaxies, stars, you, me and pints of real ale at the con bar. However Matt O’Dowd over at PBS Space Time suggests we now have an answer…

At one-one-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang, the great annihilation event should have wiped out all matter, leaving a universe of only radiation. Why still don’t know why any matter survived. Well, a new finding from the LHC brings us one step closer to understanding why there’s something rather than nothing.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Danny Sichel.] Steve Shives’s Starfleet Guidance Counselor is amazing. Actually, so is everything in his “Starfleet Jobs” series: “Starfleet Historian”, “Starfleet Chaplain”, “Starfleet Lawyer”…

Trying to educate children under the constant threat of violent death presents certain challenges.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/20/25 One Ordinary Scroll With Pixels

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) WAS YOUR WORK PIRATED TO TRAIN AI? The Atlantic today invited readers to “Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI”. Many sff writers have found some or all of their work listed.

LibGen contains millions of pirated books and research papers, built over nearly two decades. Court documents show Meta torrented a version of it to build its AI.

Here’s an example of what is being discovered.

But writers refuse to despair.

(2) BORDER AROUND THE WORLDCON. Seattle Worldcon 2025 chair Kathy Bond today responded to concerns about Trump administration policies and the hazards they create for international visitors to the U.S. Here are some excerpts:

I am writing this statement in order to share the status of Seattle Worldcon’s current journey through living up to our theme of Building Yesterday’s Future—For Everyone. We have received a number of concerns asking how the convention will respond to orders and actions of the U.S. government, which we condemn, that create hostile conditions and travel barriers for LGBTQ+ members and international members….

… We do not have a list of all the steps we are going to take in light of the political landscape right now, as it continues to shift rapidly. We know this is not a particularly satisfying answer in light of the many concerns that we have heard from you about our members who need to enter the United States and what they might encounter trying to cross the border. We are not minimizing those concerns. The situation is frightening, and we encourage our members to make the best decisions for themselves even if that means that we will miss you at our convention. At the same time we are committed to not cancelling the in-person Worldcon as some have suggested because it is even more important than ever to gather with those who are able to do so to discuss our theme and celebrate the power of SFF to imagine different societies.

We are investigating what concrete actions we can take and offer to our members. Our Code of Conduct, Diversity Commitment, and Anti-Racism Statement provide the guidelines we are using in making these determinations. We would also like to remind people about what we are already doing.

First, we have in place a Virtual Membership for people who determine that they are no longer safe traveling to the U.S or cannot attend for other reasons…

Second, building on the work of other Worldcons and conventions, we will be having Safer Spaces Lounges available for members of marginalized communities who attend the convention in person. These spaces will be marked on convention maps.

Third, we will be drafting a resource guide to collate many of the wonderful resources that local organizations have already put together. In the interim, the ACLU of Washington has several Know Your Rights publications available, as does Northwest Immigrants Rights Project for individuals concerned about their rights while traveling.

Fourth, we will be fundraising for the following nonprofit organizations at the convention: Books to Prisoners, The Bureau of Fearless Ideas, and Hugo House. All of these organizations do important work to promote literacy education in the Seattle area and help build community resilience.

Finally, the political landscape is changing daily and impacting all of us in differing, but profound ways. Our staff is not immune. Many of our staff are deeply, personally impacted by the actions of the U.S. president, as his bigoted and hateful orders target our shared humanity. Many of us are federal employees who are now navigating what is happening to the civil service, terminations from our careers, and extreme uncertainty about our livelihoods. Many of us are also still dealing with the impact of the Los Angeles fires, Hurricane Helene, tornadoes, and other recent severe weather events on our families, loved ones, and friends. As citizens in the U.S. and around the world, we have many concerns, which are probably similar to yours. We all care deeply about our community and about Worldcon and are working diligently to navigate all of the waters that surround us, but we are also human with all the fallibility, blind spots, and competing demands on our time that entails.

This is a time to support each other. If you have questions about how we can support you in deciding about your Worldcon attendance, please reach out to [email protected].

(3) ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY. Frank Catalano, journalist, past SFWA Secretary, and File 770 contributor, amplified the expressed concerns in a Facebook post.

…The climate, and practices, at the border have changed a lot since Seattle committee won its bid.

…I think it now requires even more caution if you’re a writer or artist from outside the U.S. who considers conventions like this to be part of your work.

Asked at border crossings your purpose for entering the U.S.? In the past, saying you were attending a science-fiction convention might have gotten a weird look and a wave. Now, if you also say you work in the field, it may get you denied entry without an appropriate visa. Or even detained.

This isn’t alarmism. It’s happened to Canadian and U.K. citizens trying to enter the U.S. recently whose visa paperwork, in the eyes of those at the border, was not in order.

I’m attending Worldcon. I’d love to see all of you there, especially my international colleagues.

But take care. Prepare. Based on recent events, casual answers that led to a wave of flexibility in the past may keep you from entering, or returning home, in a timely manner.

(4) END OF AN ERA. Uncanny Magazine has announced “Lynne M. Thomas Is Stepping Down as Co-Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher; Michael Damian Thomas Will Continue Solo in Both Roles!”

After 11 years as Co-Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher of Uncanny Magazine, Lynne M. Thomas is stepping down from her editorial duties starting with Issue 64, and will also be stepping down as Co-Publisher starting with Issue 67. Going forward, Co-Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher Michael Damian Thomas will continue solo in both of these roles.

As many of you know, Lynne worked at Uncanny Magazine while also working as a rare books librarian, most recently as the Head of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. For over 15 years, Lynne has balanced rare book librarianship with an editorial and publishing career in science fiction and fantasy, but she is now shifting her focus to her day job as she works towards her rare book librarianship goals. The entire Uncanny Magazine staff warmly wishes Lynne the best of luck going forward!

Over the years, Michael gradually took over most of the editorial and publishing responsibilities at the magazine, and he is prepared for the work ahead and excited to continue sharing his vision as the sole Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Uncanny Magazine.

(5) IT’S STORYTIME WITH WIL WHEATON. However, the Thomases have still been able to lend a hand with Wil Wheaton’s latest project, as he told a Vital Thrills interviewer in “We Chat with Wil Wheaton About His New Podcast, It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton”.

Today, Wheaton announced a brand new weekly audiobook podcast called It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton, in which he narrates speculative fiction stories he loves from places like Lightspeed Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Clark’s World Magazine, and On Spec. The podcast launches on March 26, 2025, anywhere you get your podcasts.

We got a chance to chat with Wheaton about the inspiration behind it, what we’re going to experience, and getting the blessing of fellow Star Trek actor LeVar Burton.

Vital Thrills: Tell us all about “It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton”!

Wil Wheaton: …Our first season is mostly established authors. We have a couple of multiple Hugo and Nebula finalists who have written incredible works because I just wanted to have something to show people in a few months, or however long it takes, so I could say to them, look, this is what I’m doing. This is what I want to do. Do you want to pitch us?

And that’s the ultimate goal. The thing that pushed that all from an idea into a thing that I worked on and the thing that is coming out was my love of LeVar Burton’s podcast, “LeVar Burton Reads.” When he was finishing his podcast, I was at a point where I had to decide: am I going to do this, or am I just going to record a thing for my friend?

I asked LeVar what he thought, and I said, “This is what I’m thinking about doing, and this is how I’m thinking about doing it, and I just really want to make sure that I don’t step on your toes. You absolutely inspire it.”

And it was so awesome. We were at the Burbank airport waiting to get on an airplane to go to a convention together, and LeVar just lit up and he hugged me, and he was like, “I’m so excited for you. I love it. It’s such a great idea. I give you my blessing. If there’s anything I can do to help you, please ask.”…

VT: I love that! The book market is so different now with everything online and self-publishing and all that, so a lot of stuff gets buried. This is such a cool way to get stuff out there. Did you have specific criteria in terms of what you were picking? Were there things that you’ve seen before?

Wil Wheaton: There were a couple of things that I’d seen before. I knew, for instance, that I loved Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Clarkesworld. I’ve been reading them for years, and when I was in the beginning, I went and looked for things… I was like, I’m going to do this entirely on my own.

And I went looking for new things. I went to all the writers’ markets. I went to all the very, very, very small publications. Most of ’em are online only in the double digits only. And I’m like, I’m going to find gems here. I know there are. And it turns out that I’m not good at that. It turns out that I don’t have that editorial skill.

So I went back to, okay, I love these magazines, and I love these editors. And as it turns out, a good friend of mine has a great relationship with Lynne and Michael Thomas, who are the editors of Uncanny, and she offered to make an introduction for me. I talked to them, and I told them what I wanted to do, and they were so excited.

They were on board before I even finished, before I got to the part of the pitch where I was like, “So, do you want to work together?” They were like, “So what do you need from us?” I was like, “Holy crap. This is amazing.” Every step of the way….

VT: The podcast launches on March 26 — where can everybody find it?

Wil Wheaton: You can get it wherever you get podcasts. I’ve asked the team to make sure that it’s in all the usual places. So Apple Podcasts is probably the biggest, most centralized place for people to find it, but it’s also on Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Pandora, iHeart, and Spotify. I have a homepage for the podcast at WilWheaton.net/Podcast. And there’s a list there with links to all the different places that it’s online at the moment….

(6) C.L. MOORE’S SHAMBLEAU. [Item by Rich Horton.] I thought this essay very interesting. There’s a paywall but you get two free per month. “The Soul Should Not Be Handled” by B.D. McClay in The Point Magazine.

… I like genre fiction for the same reason I like black-and-white film, stylized dialogue, animation, the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake. If somebody asked me whether I preferred literary fiction to genre fiction (or vice versa) I would say, I hope, that I prefer good fiction to bad fiction. I think that this is a good response to a silly question, but there’s another one we could ask that’s a little more interesting: Is what makes a genre story good the same thing that makes realistic fiction good? Part of what makes genre genre is its place in a certain tradition with certain conventions and stock elements. If we are reading a detective story, we have certain figures and moments we come to expect: the amateur detective, the hapless sidekick, the suspicious woman, a second crime, a red herring, a solution. Part of what makes a detective story good or bad is its use of these expectations—a use that can (and often does) include subverting them. When it comes to speculative fiction, another dimension is that the boundaries between a fan, a professional and an amateur are never very clear. The landscape is more horizontal. You could, if you wanted, start a fanzine and get important writers to contribute; you could publish your first story ever in a magazine and get a letter from one of your most famous peers. Within genre, work can be wildly experimental, but this experiment takes place in a context of shared touchstones and trust in the audience. Writers of speculative fiction want to be read, and they have a good idea of who is out there reading their work….

…So let’s go back to that old issue of Weird Tales—it’s from November 1933—and to the first entry in the table of contents: “Shambleau,” “an utterly strange story” (the table of contents says) “about an alluring female creature that was neither beast nor human, neither ghost nor vampire.”…

(7) KEEPS BANGING ON. “’The Big Bang Theory’ Spinoff Title Is Stuart-Centric” says Deadline.

The Big Bang Theory spinoff on Max is untitled no more — and it’s good news and bad news for Kevin Sussman’s Stuart Bloom character.

The series, which remains in development, will be titled Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, Deadline has learned. That puts Stuart at the center of the offshoot but also hints that the beloved sidekick, who could never quite catch a break on Big Bang, might not have better luck on his own….

…On Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, Sussman is joined by fellow Big Bang alums Lauren Lapkus, who plays Stuart’s girlfriend Denise, Brian Posehn (Bert Kibbler) and John Ross Bowie (Barry Kripke). Because the series is still awaiting a green light, the quartet are not formally cast in it but have talent holding deals with WBTV with the purpose of starring in the spinoff once it’s picked up.

(8) SEE SYD MEAD ARTWORKS IN NEW YORK EXHIBITION. “Legendary Futurist Syd Mead Gets First Major Art Exhibition” – Deadline has details.

For the first time, legendary visual futurist Syd Mead will have a major exhibition of his paintings. “Future Pastime” will run March 28-May 21 at the former Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery space in Chelsea.

Long before the metaverse, Mead was crafting immersive future worlds that have shaped our collective imagination and became a defining force in science fiction cinema, designing iconic worlds. From the neon-drenched streets of Blade Runner (1982) to the sleek, geometric landscapes of TRON (1982), his influence on sci-fi films is undeniable. His designs also impacted Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) 2010 (1984), Aliens (1986), and many more. They even inspired Elon Musk’s Cybertruck.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1933, Mead was a visionary artist who redefined how we imagine the future. After serving in the U.S. Army, he studied at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, blending inspiration from classical masters like Caravaggio with the Space Age musings of Chesley Bonestell to create a singular and unprecedented art style: visions of the future rendered wholly with classical technique. His philosophy of science fiction as “reality ahead of schedule” defined a career that bridged imagination and reality. He died in 2019….

(9) TRIBUTE TO GINJER BUCHANAN. [Written by Cat Eldridge.] I have come to honor one of our most excellent Editors ever, Ginjer Buchanan. She was the Editor-in-Chief at Ace Books and Roc Books, two sff imprints of Penguin Books, where she stayed for an extraordinary thirty years before retiring. Prior to that, she was consulting editor for the Star Trek tie-ins at Pocket Books and an outside reader for the Science Fiction Book Club which just ended its long run.

And yes, she was active in fandom from an early age which included being a founding member of the Western Pennsylvania Science Fiction Association (WPSFA, or “Woops-fa” as it was affectionately known as she noted in a Locus interview.)

Berkley president and publisher Leslie Gelbman upon her retirement said of her: “During her thirty years with Ace and Roc, Ginjer was essential in growing our science fiction and fantasy list and launching the careers of several bestselling authors. Her love for the genre and books in general and dedication to her authors is unparalleled, and she’s a key reason Ace/Roc is one of the preeminent science fiction-fantasy publishers.”

She won a Hugo at Loncon 3 for Best Editor, Long Form and was nominated for the same at Nippon 2007, Denvention 3, Anticipation, Aussiecon 4 and Renovation.

She won the Nebula Solstice Award in 2013, and the same year saw her garner the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction (aka the Skylark). She was nominated in 2006 for a World Fantasy Award in the Special Award, Professional category for her work Ace Books but alas did not win.

She was the Toastmaster at the World Fantasy Convention in 1989, and a Guest of Honor at ArmadilloCon in 1988, Foolscap in 2000 and at OryCon in 2008. Ginjer was also a Guest of Honor at the Dublin 2019 Worldcon, and a GOH at World Fantasy Con in New Orleans in 2022.

And yes, she’s written fiction. Her sole novel is a Highlander series tie-in, White Silence. It’s a most excellent novel, well worth reading, especially if you are a fan of that series. Yes I am. She’s got a deft feel for the characters and the milieu they’re a part of. Yes, it’s available from the usual suspects.

She’s also penned three short pieces of fiction, “The End of Summer by The Great Sea” in the Alternate Kennedys anthology, “Cathachresis” in the More Whatdunits anthology, and “If Horses Were Wishes …” in the By Any Other Fame anthology. The first two are edited by Mike Resnick alone, the last by Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. All three are available are to be had from the usual suspects.

So being a serious Firefly fan, she has an essay, “Who Killed Firefly?” in the Jane Espenson edited Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly collection. It’s available from the usual suspects. And yes, it’s a lot of fun to read if you’re a Firefly fan. Really it is.

And being a fan of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, she penned “The Journey of Jonathan Levenson: From Scenery to Sacrifice” which was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide, Volume 3 edited by Paul Ruditis. This is not to be had from the usual suspects.

Oh, and she has one published poem, “Four Views of Necon” published in Cemetery Dance’s The Big Book of Necon anthology edited by Bob Booth. No luck on this one either.

All in all, a truly amazing individual who has contributed in oh so many ways to our community, so let’s toast her now as she so richly deserves to be.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Carpe Diem finds small businesses have it hard in Middle-Earth, too.
Crankshaft recalls more comics history.
Reality Check needs to focus.
Speckticles isn’t so charming anymore.
The Argyle Sweater has Harry Potter rejects.

(11) DC SHUFFLING AND REDEALING. “After 90 years of reboots, relaunches, and more, Batman & Superman and all of DC Comics continuity is getting a ‘realignment’ to be ‘one master timeline’” reports Popverse. I guess they’re going to get everything straightened out so they can get back to selling “Death of [fill in the suphero name]” megaissues.

If there’s one man who could reliably be considered to have the history of the DC Universe at his fingertips, it’d be Barry Allen — the former Flash who was the first hero to travel the multiverse and uncover the secrets behind DC’s reality. If there were two, then the other would be real-life comic book writer Mark Waid, long-time DC expert and writer of everything from The Flash and Kingdom Come to Action Comics and Justice League Unlimited. Starting this June, the two will be collaborating (well, kind of) to make fans’ dreams come true with the four-issue comic book series New History of the DC Universe.

Written by Waid and starring the erstwhile Mr. Allen, the series is intended to reveal the truth behind the DCU — including some secrets even longtime fans might be surprised by.

“This is my dream project,” Waid said in a statement about the series. “It’s a chance to realign all of DC’s sprawling continuity into one master timeline, and to be joined by some of comics’ greatest artists to make it shine. With new information for even longtime fans, plus Easter eggs galore, this series will be an essential read for DC fans.”

The first issue will feature art from Jerry Ordway and Todd Nauck, and will cover everything from the beginnings of the DCU through the origins of the Justice Society of America. Future issues will see an “all-star line-up of interior artists” contribute, according to DC, with an equally impressive group of cover artists working on the title throughout….

… This isn’t the first time DC has released an official version of its comic book canon: in 1986, the company published History of the DC Universe by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, the two creators who had just rebooted everything in the previous year’s Crisis on Infinite Earths series. It’s also not the first time that Mark Waid has worked on a project of this scope; in 2019, he wrote the six-issue History of the Marvel Universe, illustrated by Javier Rodriguez….

(12) DISNEY SHAREHOLDERS VOTE DOWN ANTI-WOKE PROPOSAL. “Disney Shareholders Reject Anti-LGBTQ Proposal at Annual Meeting” – Variety explains the issue.

Disney investors on Thursday voted down a proposal that the entertainment giant cease its participation in a prominent LGBTQ rights organization’s equality ratings program.

The proposal — requesting that Disney “cease” its participation in the Human Rights Campaign‘s annual Corporate Equality Index — was submitted by right-wing think tank National Center for Public Policy Research, through its Free Enterprise Project initiative. (The FEP calls itself “the original and premier opponent of the woke takeover of American corporate life.”)

“When corporations take extreme positions, they destroy shareholder value by alienating large portions of their customers and investors. This proposal provides Disney with an opportunity to move back to neutral,” the FEP’s proposal stated. It noted that since 2007, Disney has received a “perfect score” on the CEI, “which can only be attained by abiding by its partisan, divisive and increasingly radical criteria.”…

… Disney’s board recommended voting against the proposal to end its participation in the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index. Shareholders concurred, with only 1% of shares voted in favor the proposal, according to the preliminary tally….

(13) AI DUBBING. “‘Watch the Skies,’ First Feature Film Dubbed Entirely With AI, Sets Distribution Deal With AMC Theatres” – and this Variety writer is enthusiastic.

A foreign language sci-fi movie is headed to U.S. movie theaters this spring, but audiences won’t have to groan about subtitles. For the first time, an international feature film will look and sound as if it was made in English thanks to artificial intelligence.

Though the supernatural Swedish adventure “Watch the Skies” was made in its native tongue, AI company Flawless has digitally altered the film’s images and sound so character mouth movements and speech will be perfectly synced for English speaking viewers. The tech uses voices of the original cast to create dubs, and is compliant with SAG-AFTRA.

AMC Theatres, the nation’s top movie chain, has committed 100 screens to the project in the top 20 markets across America. Flawless has partnered with distributor XYZ films to roll the film out to cineplexes on May 9.

(14) THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN. “Dolphins welcome SpaceX’s Crew-9 astronauts home after splashdown (video)” at Space.com.

SpaceX’s Crew-9 astronauts had some company in the water after they splashed down on Tuesday afternoon (March 18).

The Crew-9 mission returned to Earth at 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 GMT) on Tuesday, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida. A fleet of recovery vessels soon converged on Crew-9‘s Dragon capsule, named Freedom — and so did some curious marine mammals, who wanted to check out this strange object that fell from the sky into their domain.

Freedom carried four people — NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore and Aleksandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos — home from the International Space Station (ISS)…

…Crew-9’s splashdown was memorable and dramatic even before the dolphins showed up. It brought an end to the long space saga of Wilmore and Williams, which was a big story from the outset but became turbo-charged recently….

CNBC looks back at “NASA astronaut Suni Williams morning routine over 9 months in space”.

On April 16, 2007, Sunita “Suni” Williams ran the Boston Marathon. But she wasn’t in Boston. She wasn’t even in the United States.

Inside the International Space Station, more than 250 miles above sea level, the NASA astronaut became the first person to run a marathon in space.

Williams, now 59, found her endurance tested again in June 2024 after the Boeing capsule that brought her to the International Space Station malfunctioned. Her expected eight-day trip with fellow astronaut Butch Wilmore lasted nine months. The pair splashed down safely in Florida on Tuesday evening, and traveled to Houston that night.

While in space, astronauts must exercise two hours per day, every day, according to a NASA pamphlet, as zero-gravity conditions can cause “bone and muscle deterioration” over time. Williams worked out first thing as part of her morning routine — waking up at 5:30 a.m. GMT and “running, cycling, and weightlifting” until 7:30 a.m., according to ESPN. (NASA did not immediately respond to CNBC Make It’s request for comment on the amount of control Williams had over her schedule.)

Wilmore and Williams will now have to spend 45 days re-acclimatizing to Earth’s gravity, NPR reports. Their new routines will include a “personalized recovery program” of two hours per day that they spend exercising with personal trainers….

(15) NOW IT’S STRONGER, NOW IT’S WEAKENING. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Last I heard, the expansion of the universe is speeding up. But… dark energy is now weakening. “Dark energy: mysterious cosmic force appears to be weakening, say scientists” – the Guardian explains.

Dark energy, the mysterious force powering the expansion of the universe, appears to be weakening, according to a survey that could “overthrow” scientists’ current understanding of the fate of the cosmos.

If confirmed, the results from the dark energy spectroscopic instrument (Desi) team at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona would have profound implications for theories about the evolution of the universe, opening up the possibility that its current expansion could eventually go into reverse in a “big crunch”.

A suggestion that dark energy reached a peak billions of years ago would also herald the first substantial change in decades to the widely accepted theoretical model of the universe….

… Dark energy has been assumed to be a constant, which would imply the universe will meet its end in a desolate scenario called the “big freeze”, when everything is eventually so far apart that even light cannot bridge the gap between galaxies. The latest findings, announced on Thursday at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California, challenge that prevailing view.

Desi uses its 5,000 fibreoptic “eyes” to map the cosmos with unprecedented precision. Its latest data release captures 15m galaxies, spanning 11bn years of history, which astronomers have used to create the most detailed three-dimensional map of the universe to date.

The results suggest that dark energy reached a peak in strength when the universe was about 70% of its current age and it is now about 10% weaker. This would mean the rate of expansion is still accelerating, but that dark energy is gently lifting its foot off the pedal.…

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

Pixel Scroll 1/24/25 This Starship Is Bound For Glory, Every Pixel On Her Must Be Scrolly

Posted on January 24, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) THE SHELVES LOOK DIFFERENT THIS WEEK. The Guardian interviews Octavia’s Bookshelf owner Nikki High about how she’s aided her community during the Eaton Fire: “It was a town’s only Black-owned bookstore. It is now a refuge for those displaced by the California fires”.

… That night, the flames ravaged her neighborhood. “There’s about maybe seven or eight homes left on our street, including ours,” she says. The following day, she drove to Octavia’s Bookshelf to see if it was damaged. Although winds blew dirt into the store, her business was otherwise in the clear. In fact, her store still had power and wifi. An idea struck her: perhaps others in the community needed to get online.

“I wrote up something real quick on Instagram,” High says. “I just said, ‘Hey, I have wifi and power. If you need to come here to get online, I’ll be here all day.’” That small act of outreach became the catalyst for something much larger.

As people trickled into the store, they began asking for basic necessities. “Do you have any water?” one person asked. High turned back to Instagram, posting a call for water donations, which she received, plus more. By the end of the day, the bookstore had transformed into a full-fledged relief center.

“We packed up all of our books off the shelves and put them in the attic,” High explains. The books were replaced by the items people gave to victims of the fire. The donations poured in from as far away as Portland, filling the store with supplies like toothpaste, diapers, cat food and water. Volunteers from the community, including loyal customers, stepped in to help organize and distribute the items.

For those who came seeking aid, the store became a place of connection and solace. High remembers one customer who came in for diapers and wipes. “She told me she had donated to our original GoFundMe when we opened. She said, ‘I never thought in a million years I’d be coming here to get supplies after losing my home.’”…

(2) WHEN BUY BY ALMOST WENT BYE-BYE. “Bloomsbury UK Reaches Last-Minute Contract Agreement With Amazon” reports Publishers Weekly.

Charging that Bloomsbury UK failed to engage in good faith to reach a new contract agreement, Amazon posted a notice on its UK website late Thursday afternoon that as of midnight January 24, Bloomsbury UK print titles would no longer be available directly from its online stores in the U.K., Europe, and Australia. That takedown was averted, however, when the two parties reached an agreement in principle on a new contract 90 minutes before the last one expired.

In the initial announcement, Amazon stressed that Bloomsbury print book availability in Amazon’s U.S. store would have been unaffected by the action, but that its Bloomsbury’s Kindle editions would not be available for sale worldwide. According to the post, Bloomsbury UK’s agreement with Amazon expired last year, and the e-tailer had extended the deal for about seven months in hopes of reaching a new agreement.

The last extension ended at midnight on Jan. 24, and if no new contract had been signed by then, Amazon would have begun to pull its “buy buttons” from impacted countries. Customers would still be able to buy Bloomsbury titles from third-party sellers who use Amazon’s services. In practical terms, the dispute meant that, for example, Sarah J. Maas titles that are published by Bloomsbury UK would not have been available in affected stores, while Maas titles released by Bloomsbury’s U.S. subsidiary will still be available in the American Amazon store….

(3) WE HAVE HEARD THE CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT. “Thousands of romantasy fans make midnight dates with new Rebecca Yarros novel” and the Guardian cheers them on.

Rebecca Yarros couldn’t sell her first novel. No publisher would take it. But this week, 14 years later, legions of her devoted readers turned up to more than a thousand midnight-release parties held to celebrate the publication of her latest book.

In the UK alone, more than 180,000 copies of Onyx Storm, the third instalment of Yarros’s blockbuster Empyrean series, sold on day one of publication on Tuesday. Nearly 60 Waterstones branches held late-night parties or opened early on Tuesday morning to mark the occasion. And after some TikTok users posted videos showing that they had managed to buy the book in Asda ahead of its official release, other fans filmed themselves scouring their local branches trying to get their hands on early copies too.Along with Sarah J Maas, Yarros is at the forefront of the romantasy genre, writing stories that combine elements of fantasy and romance. The first two books of the Empyrean series, Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, follow 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail as she makes her way through dragon-rider training at Basgiath War College. Her enemies-to-lovers romance with Xaden Riorson is central to the story, and in the third instalment, her mission is to save him….

(4) KERFUFFLE IN BLAKE’S 7 FANDOM. Lena Barkin dives deep into “The War That Almost Broke a Classic Fandom” at Fansplaining — Blake’s 7 fandom to be precise.

…Media cons were new and fundamentally different because of screen divide. Literary fans were used to writers being fandom participants at cons—and assumed that’s why actors went, too. One Blake’s 7 fan postulated, “Isaac Asimov and Andre Norton go to cons because they love Science Fiction… These people, and many like them, do not charge fees for attending cons… Mostly they go for many of the same reasons we all have … to get feedback on their work; to have a chance to get on a podium and panel and sound off on favorite issues; to browse in the dealers’ room and art show; to discuss elements of SF into the wee hours; to party!”

While fans could only speculate on the true motivations of the actors, the behaviors described were observed and accepted as standard. It’s also true that many successful sci-fi writers had risen up through the community, supporting this fan’s assertion that these writers “are a part of science fiction.” Science fiction literary fandom was like a really devoted writer’s group where successful writers could give back to the community that helped form them.

But the entertainment industry had long had different ideas about the roles of its stars. From the beginning of Hollywood, female fans were instructed on how to idolize actors. In her book Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity, Samantha Barras posits that, “just as fans sometimes controlled Hollywood, Hollywood also controlled fans.” By redirecting ‘movie-struck’ girls from aspiration to emulation, Hollywood told fans how they could dress like the stars and collect autographs, but weren’t allowed to be stars. The divide between actor and fan had to be strict in order to maintain control of persona and image….

I was struck by the effort here to contrast media cons with the fandom of written science fiction in the Eighties. Barkin uncritically embraces the latter’s (written sf fandom’s) view of itself despite that being a wild oversimplification. Which I know because in the late Eighties that was the myth I believed until I had the experience of setting up the program for NolaCon II (1988) and talked to a bunch of writers who did not feel connected to fandom in that way, who were only entertaining the idea of attending the con because their agent urged them to for business reasons. Asimov’s and Norton’s and some others’ connection with fans was merely part of a wide spectrum of writers’ attitudes towards fandom.

(5) CARD SHARKS. But you don’t need to reach any farther back in time than a week ago if you’re looking for a fan kerfuffle. And there’s video of this one. “Fight breaks out over Pokémon cards at a Los Angeles Costco” reports the LA Times (behind a paywall).

A fight broke out at a Costco store in Los Angeles over Pokémon cards, according to a video circulating on social media.

The fight was captured at the Atwater Village Costco on Jan. 16, according to a video posted on X by DisguisedToast.

Wild footage captured shoppers at the Atwater Village Costco in Los Angeles fighting over large quantities of the coveted Pokémon cards on Jan. 16.

Two men fought over a Pokémon box set, with one of them elbowing the other in the face.

“Get the f— off of me bro,” one of the men said.

Police weren’t called to the scene and aren’t investigating the brawl, Los Angeles Police Department officials said….

the asian man with the green jacket was just trying to buy them for his sons birthday too and the other guy snatched them ???????????? pic.twitter.com/UXqJ5AhZNu
— alison (@aloeson) January 16, 2025

(6) 31 FLAVOR. LA Times critic Robert Lloyd says it’s a matter of taste in “’Star Trek: Section 31 review: A diverting but frustrating first TV film” (behind a paywall).

… Originally conceived as a spinoff series from “Star Trek: Discovery” to star Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou, an agent of Starfleet’s secret black ops arm, the project was downgraded or promoted to a “feature,” officially the 14th in the “Star Trek” canon, and the franchise’s first “TV movie.” Even though this decision apparently preceded production, most everything about “Section 31” says “pilot episode,” as if whatever ideas informed the aborted series were still driving the starship, as characters are positioned for episodes yet to come — as if the film did not want to let go of the possibility of being a TV show…

… The backstory, which will drive the later plot, is meant to make her character tragic, but we came to know her well enough during her time on the starship Discovery, living among nice people, which had softened her considerably. She was practically lovable by the time she walked into that portal.

Perhaps you will be surprised, then, to find Georgiou sliding back into what looks like narcissism, running her version of Rick’s Cafe Américain in the borderlands outside Federation Space back in the 23rd century, using the alias Madame du Franc (and speaking a little French). Introductory narration, as at the start of a “Mission: Impossible” episode — an acknowledged inspiration — tells us that after her return from the 32nd century to 2257 she joined Section 31 for a time and then went missing. How this lines up with Georgiou having already been introduced as an agent of Section 31 in the second season of “Discovery,” which is to say, the agency she’s going back into the past to join, I’m not at all sure. Time travel will break your brain if you let it….

(7) CHILDREN OF THE SURVIVORS. Rich Horton introduces us to a new novel by a well-known fan: “Review: In Memoriam: A Novel of the Terran Diaspora, by Fred Lerner”

…It’s narrated by David Bernstein. As the novel opens, he’s finishing his final year of school before going to college. And he’s attending a performance staged by the alien race that is native to the planet on which he lives. We learn quickly that these aliens, the Wyneri, rescued the survivors of the Cataclysm, which wiped out humanity on Earth, a couple of centuries prior to this story. The couple of thousand who were rescued have been fruitful enough that the human population is about 30,000 — living in small chapters embedded among the Wyneri. The humans have been gifted one island, on which they have built a University, and to which they go once each year for the Ingathering. And this Remnant, as they style themselves, devote themselves to preserving as much knowledge of Terran history and culture as they can….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 24, 1911 — C. L. Moore. (Died 1987.)

By Paul Weimer: A giant of the 1930’s and 1940’s science fiction and fantasy, I came across C L Moore’s work thanks to Heinlein. It was the early 1980’s and I read Number of the Beast (which weirdly was one of the first Heinlein books I read, which might explain some things about me…). Anyway, early on in the book, Deity offers her collection of pulp magazines to Zeb…and mentions Moore and her characters Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith by name. Young brain went “Who are THEY?” (I did that a lot with Heinlein, it’s how I discovered artists like Maxwell Parrish and Rodin.) I found Jirel of Joiry in a collection of the protagonist’s stories. Northwest Smith came, later, in a variety of anthologies of early science fiction.

And I was off and running. Passionate, cerebral and very strongly defined characters in often amazing environments were what I associated with Moore’s work. Sure, a pulp writer, but Moore’s work was uplifted by the interior lives of her characters (consider the agony and the conflict inside of Jirel’s heart, just as one example of her writing at work).

When Moore met and started collaborating with Henry Kuttner, figuring out what pieces were hers, what was his and what were collaborations becomes a morass to untangle. I highly enjoy those stories, but they are really “all” collaborations in my mind.

My favorite Moore works are two of her collaborations with her husband, and they are much more contemporary in her science fiction. “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” I had had the good luck to have read after reading Carroll, so I got the references and allusions immediately, and understood the weird time traveling nature of the futuristic kit and what it did to the child protagonists–and what it almost did decades earlier. It was a “whoa” moment of the power of not time travel of people, but of objects that affect history and people, and literature.

The other story is “Vintage Season”, and it is one of the dagger-to-the-heart endings and the sheer indifference that time travelers can have to the problems of people they visit in the past. When ST: TNG had a protagonist who purported to be from the future act like he was one of the “Vintage Season” time travelers, something clicked and I understood both the original story and the episode much better. I also recently recounted the bit that the time travelers were off next to see Charlemagne in the year 800 to a medievalist friend of mine who is SF adjacent. He was much amused by the idea.

What a talent, in singular and in combination with Kuttner!

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Non Sequitur sees a sign.
Thatababy recommends a cookie brand we need.
Dinosaur Comics predicts the future of sf.

(10) PAYING THEIR RESPECTS. Los Angeles Magazine takes us “Inside the David Lynch Shrine at Bob’s Big Boy”.

Shortly after the family of filmmaker David Lynch announced his death last Thursday morning, fans began gathering at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank. Hundreds of them left something behind as a huge shrine to the visionary behind Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive took shape at the feet of the Big Boy statue on Riverside Drive.

As the tributes continued to pour in, the installation was being disassembled Wednesday afternoon by archivist and historian Kat Fox, who wrote her UCLA thesis on roadside shrines and spontaneous memorializations. Fox has previously studied temporary monuments to people lost from COVID, AIDS and 9/11. “Lynch doesn’t have a star on the Walk of Fame which is where these often crop up,” Fox said. “I’m very interested in the way L.A. chooses to memorialize and the way the community comes together in a place like Bob’s that has larger connections to the movie and TV industry,” she said. “It’s a cultural cornerstone and part of David Lynch lore.”

The landmark restaurant was a longtime favorite of the acclaimed director, who had a fondness for the lost world of 1950s Americana, and where he wrote and found inspiration. “I went there every day for seven years,” the director remarked after a film screening. “I would write on the napkins. It was like having a desk. You need paper and there’s a piece of paper and you write on it when you get ideas.”…

… Original drawings and paintings, poetry, and personal letters were mixed in with stuffed logs, real logs, donuts, Cheetos and keys to the hotel where special agent Dale Cooper stayed in Twin Peaks. “There’s half-drunk coffee and half-smoked cigarettes,” Fox said. “It’s like they’re sharing it with him.” An estimated 400 cigarettes, 45 cups of coffee, and dozens of donuts and pie slices were accessioned, documented and photographed before finding their way to the Dumpster….

Reflecting on what we’ve lost today.
— Schooley (@schooley.bsky.social) 2025-01-20T18:12:20.666Z

(11) DID DEFERENTIAL EPISTEMOLOGY LEAVE WITH THE ENTWIVES? [Item by Steven French.] In this Physics World essay, historian of physics and philosopher Robert P Crease argues that the best way to counter misinformation is to be even more melodramatic: “Why telling bigger stories is the only way to counter misinformation”.

If aliens came to Earth and tried to work out how we earthlings make sense of our world, they’d surely conclude that we take information and slot it into pre-existing stories – some true, some false, some bizarre. Ominously, these aliens would be correct. You don’t need to ask earthling philosophers, just look around….

…Humans gain a sense of what’s happening in several ways. Three of them, to use philosophical language, are deferential, civic and melodramatic epistemology.

In “deferential epistemology”, citizens habitually take the word of experts and institutions about things like the dangers of x picocuries and exposures of y millirems. In his 1624 book New Atlantis, the philosopher Francis Bacon famously crafted a fictional portrait of an island society where deferential epistemology rules and people instinctively trust the scientific infrastructure.

We may think this is how people ought to behave. But Bacon, who was also a politician, understood that deference to experts is not automatic and requires constantly curating the public face of the scientific infrastructure. Earthlings haven’t seen deferential epistemology in a while.

“Civic epistemology”, meanwhile, is how people acquire knowledge in the absence of that curation. Such people don’t necessarily reject experts but hear their voices alongside many others claiming to know best how to pursue our interests and values. Civic epistemology is when we negotiate daily life not by first consulting scientists but by pursuing our concerns with a mix of habit, trust, experience and friendly advice.

We sometimes don’t, in fact, take scientific advice when it collides with how we already behave; we may smoke or drink, for instance, despite warnings not to. Or we might seek guidance from non-scientists about things like the harms of radiation.

Finally, what I call “melodramatic epistemology” draws on the word “melodrama”, a genre of theatre involving extreme plots, obvious villains, emotional appeal, sensational language, and moral outrage (the 1939 film Gone with the Wind comes to mind)….

(12) VIDEO GAME BUSINESS. The Guardian asks “Can Assassin’s Creed Shadows save Ubisoft?”

It’s no secret that the video game industry is struggling. The last two years have seen more than 25,000 redundancies and more than 40 studio closures. Thanks to game development’s spiralling costs (blockbuster titles now cost hundreds of millions to make), overinvestment during the Covid-19 pandemic, and a series of failed bets to create the next money-printing “forever game”, the pressure for blockbuster games to succeed is now higher than ever.

It’s a predicament that feels especially pertinent for Ubisoft. Employing in the region of 20,000 people across 45 studios in 30 countries, its most recent big licensed games Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws underperformed commercially. It has had two expensive, failed live-service experiments in the past year, Skull and Bones and X-Defiant. With Ubisoft share prices plummeting and investment partners circling like sharks, rarely have the fortunes of a massive games company relied so heavily on a single release. It has already been delayed multiple times, to ensure its quality.

Against this gloomy backdrop, I find myself roaming the glistening halls of Ubisoft Quebec for the world’s first hands-on of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. The company’s series of historical action games is back after a two-year break, and this time it takes us to feudal Japan. This has been the most requested setting by fans, according to creative director Jonathan Dumont, but ironically some of those purported fans have turned on Ubisoft over the course of this game’s development….

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

Pixel Scroll 3/16/24 And The Riverbank Scrolls Of The Pixels Of March

Posted on March 16, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) SEE SAMATAR’S EPIC LECTURE. Sofia Samatar will deliver the 2024 Richard W. Gunn Memorial Lecture on Monday, March 18, at 4:00 p.m Central. The lecture is virtual and you can register here. She will be speaking on the relationship between epic poetry and fantasy:

What is the relationship between ancient epic poetry and the contemporary genre known as epic fantasy? This talk offers five answers to that question, from the perspective of a speculative fiction writer. Sofia Samatar is the author of six books, including the memoir The White Mosque, a PEN/Jean Stein Award finalist. Her works range from the award-winning epic fantasy A Stranger in Olondria to Tone, a collaborative study of literary tone with Kate Zambreno.

(2) THE FIRST GREEN HILLS. Bobby Derie filled in a previously unsuspected gaping hole in my knowledge of sff history with “Quest for the Green Hills of Earth (1995) by Ned Brooks” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein. Originally I was just checking to see if he was talking about the Ned Brooks I knew – he was. Then – bang! – I discovered that C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner are at the root of a famous verse tradition.

…Who wrote this bit [in “Quest of the Starstone”]? Moore was the poet of the pair, but Kuttner was no slouch, and the title itself is a callback to two previous tales. In “Shambleau” Moore wrote: “[…] he hummed The Green Hills of Earth to himself in a surprisingly good baritone”; and in “The Cold Gray God” (1935):

“No one sang Starless Night any more, and it was the Earth-born Rose Robertson’s voice which rang through the solar system in lilting praise of The Green Hills of Earth.”

That could be the kind of detail that a good pasticheur like Kuttner would pick up and expand upon. Yet it wouldn’t be surprising if they both had a hand in the final version of this scene….

…However, Sam Moskowitz claims:

“When Robert Heinlein read the story, he never forgot the phrase which became the title of one of his most famous short stories and of a collection, The Green Hills of Earth.” — Sam Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow (1967), 312

“The Green Hills of Earth” ran in The Saturday Evening Post for 8 Feb 1947, and provided the title for Heinlein’s 1951 collection of science fiction. Heinlein did not reiterate Moore & Kuttner’s verses, but came up with his own—and attributed it to an author, the blind poet Rhysling….

Ned Brooks later produced a chapbook based on these works:

…This is where Quest of the Green Hills of Earth (1995) comes in. Edited by Ned Brooks and illustrated by Alan Hunter, this is the kind of standalone chapbook that is a hallmark of science fiction and fantasy fandom. It reprints “Quest of the Starstone” in its entirety, Heinlein’s verses from “The Green Hills of Earth,” and three fan-made versions—one by Chuck Rein, George Heap, “and other fans of the 1960s”; one by Don Markstein (“late 60s”), and one by Steve Sneyd (Oct 1992)….

(3) SPIRITED GIVING 2024. Spirited Giving, a horror-themed fundraiser serving as the official kickoff to StokerCon 2024, takes place May 29, 2024 beginning at 3:00 p.m. in the San Diego Central Library. Full details at the link.

It’s a night of author readings, live performances, meet and greets, and book signings, all while raising funds for the San Diego Library Foundation, particularly the Books Unbanned Initiative.

The event will feature readings from: Clay McLeod Chapman, Jamie Flanagan, Ai Jiang, Vincent V. Cava, Danger Slater, and Bridget D. Brave. And a special one-hour live performance by YouTube Horror Narrator Mr. Creepypasta.

To attend the event, get Spirited Giving Tickets at Eventbrite.

(4) IF NOT NEWS TO YOU, IT WILL BE NEWS TO SOMEONE. At Literary Hub Debbie Berne makes her case — “Not Just Covers, But Every Page: Why Writers Should Talk About Book Design Early On”.

… Interior design is both micro and macro. It involves technical prowess and creativity. There is line-by-line typesetting and there is translation of vibe.

Take, for instance, chapter openers. Most books are divided into chapters and an author has decided if they each have chapter titles or just numbers, or both, or neither, or additional info like a subtitle or time stamp or narrator name or geographic locator or setting-up-an-idea pull quote.

The designer, then, must figure out how to make those pieces of text—many or few—look nice and clear on the page and put forward an aesthetic, bringing visual voice to the writing voice. Which font? How big? How bold? Italic? Centered or no? In a single line, neatly stacked, cascading? Each decision is literal and expressive….

(5) HOW MUCH WAS C-3PO’S HEAD WORTH? Read the answer reported in Friday’s Birmingham (UK) Mail.

(6) SPRINGTIME FOR WONKA. Everyone is going to make money off this disaster except the people who perpetrated it. (Would you have it any other way?) “Viral Willy Wonka Glasgow event to be turned into musical” at BBC.

A new musical satire based on a Glasgow Willy Wonka experience that went viral is in the works.

The show’s lead producer, Richard Kraft, has assembled a team of writers and producers for the project titled Willy Fest: A Musical Parody.

The event in February gained notoriety after angry families, who paid up to £35 to attend, demanded their money back.

Kraft says he hopes people watching the show “won’t be left in tears.”

The creative team working on the musical includes Emmy-nominated actor and comedian Riki Lindhome who tweeted, “I’m so excited,” along with screenshots of an article.

Others attached to the project include Broadway songwriters Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner.

Kraft is known for producing and directing a Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory concert at the famed Hollywood Bowl.

He told the BBC it was his idea to turn the Glasgow event into a musical and that the writing team was “assembled in less time than it takes for someone to sing the first verse of ‘Oompa Loompa Doompa-Dee-Do’.”

He hopes to launch the musical later this year….

…Asked why the Glasgow event might be ripe for the musical theatre treatment, Kraft said: “It is about desperate dreamers who actually have fragments of a great idea, just executed beyond their budget and abilities.”

He said he loved shows “about big-hearted flim-flam artists in musicals like The Music Man, The Greatest Showman, and The Producers. At the core they are romantics who get in over their heads.”…

(7) THREE-BODY, BUT NOT JUST ONE PROBLEM. “’3 Body Problem:’ How Netflix’s new sci-fi saga employs the legendary Wow! signal” – Space.com is sure you’ll want to know.

The Wow! signal is one of the great astronomy puzzles of the past 50 years, but it’s not so mysterious in the sci-fi universe of “3 Body Problem.”

Netflix’s new eight-episode alien invasion saga “3 Body Problem” uses the famous SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) signal as a prominent plot device in its wild centuries-spanning narrative.

The Wow! signal was an intense narrowband radio signal detected on the night of Aug. 15, 1977 by Ohio State University’s Big Ear Radio Observatory and the North American Astrophysical Observatory (NAAPO) during a standard SETI search. No personnel were on duty at the time, yet the strong 72-second-long signal was recorded by a computer printer….

Beware spoiler:

… “3 Body Problem,” which drops on March 21, puts its own spin on the signal. In the series, Wow! is a real message from intelligent aliens beyond Earth. A Chinese astrophysicist responds to the translated signal by inviting the aliens to visit Earth — to humanity’s detriment, as we later learn….

(8) SIGNING TIME. John King Tarpinian has the Glendale Civic Auditorium all prepared to welcome tomorrow’s influx of dealers to the 2024 LA Vintage Paperback Collectors Show & Sale.

(9) JON STOPA (1935-2024). Longtime Chicagoland fan Jon Stopa died March 4 at the age of 88. See the family obituary in the Kenosha News at the link. (The family obituary spells his first name “John”. In the sff field he was known as “Jon” except for the few instances when he used “John” in the credits for his book cover art for Advent:Publishers).

Fancyclopedia 3’s article about Jon records that he made his first sf short story sale to Astounding at age 22, “The First Inch” published in 1957, followed by two more appearances in Campbell’s magazine in 1958. Jon’s fourth and last fiction credit was in 1973 with “Kiddy-Lib” in Eros in Orbit.

He co-founded Advent:Publishers in 1955 with Earl Kemp, Robert Briney, Sidney Coleman, James O’Meara, George Price, and Ed Wood. The company produced nonfiction books about the sf field, the first of which was Damon Knight’s essay collection In Search of Wonder (1956).

Stopa met Joni Cornell at the 1960 Worldcon (Pittcon). They married in 1962 and lived at Wilmot Mountain, Stopa’s family ski resort in Wilmot, WI, where they began hosting Wilcon, a three-day long invitation-only relaxacon.

Jon appears as a bartender in the video Faans (1983) (around the 18:50 mark) in a scene shot at the lodge at Wilmot Mountain.

Throughout the 1960s, the Stopas entered and won many convention masquerades. In the early 1970s, the couple helped found the conrunning group ISFiC.

The Stopas were Fan GoHs at Chicon V, the 1991 Worldcon.

Jon’s survivors include his grandson, Keanen (Kim) Burns; sister, Diane Reese; great-granddaughter, Kinsley Burns; and nieces: Tiffany and Amanda Stopa. Along with his parents and wife; John was preceded in death by his daughter, Deb Burns; and brothers: Walter Jr. and Conrad (Karen) Stopa.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 16, 1920 — Leo McKern. (Died 2002.) Pop culture is wonderful, isn’t it? And Leo McKern was definitely part of it.

The Prisoner where he was Number Two in three of the seventeen episodes is definitely his best remembered SF role. He played that role more than any of the other seventeen credited actors. That is if you consider The Prisoner to even be SF and not merely a spy series gone very weird. Just tossing that idea out here.

Leo McKern as Number Two in The Prisoner.

Next up is The Adventures of Robin Hood where he was Sir Roger DeLisle, usurper of the Locksley manor and lands, and Herbert of Doncaster, a corrupt moneylender. It was an early Fifties series and his of earliest acting roles.

Sliding on later in his career is one of my favorite roles by him, Horace Rumpole, a London barrister on Rumpole of the Bailey. He was a great character to watch, the cases were interesting and the supporting cast was well thought out.

Slipping on over to his radio work, he was the voice of Captain Haddock in the 1992 and 1993 BBC Radio Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin.

He was “Mac” MacGill in X the Unknown, a Fifties horror SF film from Hanmer Productions; and he’s got a lead role as Bill McGuire in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, an end of the world Sixties film.

The final role I want to mention is in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother where he gets to be Professor Moriarty. I’m almost certain that I’ve seen it.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Wizard of Id has a genre golf joke.

And we’re overdue to catch up with Tom Gauld!

My latest cartoon for @newscientist pic.twitter.com/qnWr3ZPRWb
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) March 8, 2024

My latest cartoon for @GuardianBooks pic.twitter.com/mCaSmTQTvn
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) March 10, 2024

To celebrate #Wordle1000, here is my cartoon about Wordle addiction for the Guardian. pic.twitter.com/e8C48saJHH
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) March 15, 2024

(12) STAND AND DELIVER. [Item by Steven French.] Sally Wainwright is a national treasure over here in the U.K. so her writing a new fantasy show set in the 18th century (featuring Louisa Harland formerly of Derry Girls as a gender fluid highwaywoman with superpowers!) is a Big Deal: “’I never dreamed I’d get this role!’: Derry Girl Louisa Harland on Sally Wainwright’s thrilling new heroine” in the Guardian.

When Louisa Harland was cast as the lead in the new Sally Wainwright drama, Renegade Nell, the director told her: “Nell needs to be one of those characters, even when she’s on the screen so much, you still want the audience to miss her when she’s not.” It’s quite an ask: Nell is a massive Doctor Who of a role, swashbuckling, always with a new accent or cool pyrotechnics or punch in the face, and Harland fills the screen every second she’s on it. Somehow, though, you do miss her when she isn’t. Meeting the 31-year-old in central London, I can see exactly why she was chosen for Nell, even though almost the first thing she says is “I never in my wildest dreams thought I would get this role. My parents still think it is so random.”

Renegade Nell is a rebel and a chancer, an 18th-century tomboy in a constant life-or-death scenario of some other bugger’s making. The year is 1705, and she’s just lost her husband in a battle that has left her both widowed and superhuman, but only sometimes. The show has a lush period feel and is a closely observed love affair with the British countryside (Harland describes the incredibly precise location scouts combing through forests searching for trees that would have been mature by 1705), but it is powered by mischief – fight scenes, disguises, magic monsters and highway robbery after highway robbery….

(13) JAPANIMATION’S SUICIDE SQUAD. Animation Magazine introduces Warner Bros. Japan LLC’s updated trailer featuring the anime-styled anti-heroes of Suicide Squad ISEKAI.

Synopsis: In the crime-ridden Gotham city, Amanda Waller, the head of A.R.G.U.S., has assembled a group of notorious criminals for a mission: Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Peacemaker, Clayface and King Shark. These DC Super-Villains are sent into an otherworldly realm that’s connected to this world through a gate. It’s a world of swords and magic where orcs rampage and dragons rule the skies — an “ISEKAI!”

Harley and others go on a rampage after arriving in ISEKAI but are captured by the Kingdom’s soldiers and sent to prison. They only have 72 hours before the bomb on their neck explodes.

The deadline is fast approaching. After negotiations with Queen Aldora, the condition for liberation was the conquest of the hostile Imperial army. They have no choice but to throw themselves head-first into the front line of battle.

They run; they die. They lose; they die. With their lives on the line, can Harley Quinn and The Suicide Squad survive in ISEKAI? Brace yourselves for the pulse-pounding saga of the elite task force known as the “Suicide Squad” as they embark on a jaw-dropping adventure! Let the party begin!

(14) THE HOBBIT DIET EXPLAINED SCIENTIFICALLY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Filers may have noted “(10) NO MICHELIN STARS FOR MORDOR. CBR.com chronicles ‘Every Meal Hobbits Eat In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings’” in “Pixel Would Like A Word With Engineering”. It strikes me that there is a very logical, biological reason for Hobbits requiring more meals than us, larger, humans!

It centres on the fact that scale is size specific: a cube does not have the same spatial properties at any scale – its surface area to volume ration is scale specific. For example, to depart slightly from a simple cube, a single cube might have a volume of one unit and a surface area of six square units: a cube has six sides. However, a cube of volume of two cubic unites only has a surface area of ten square units. (You can easily create a volume of two cubic units by joining two one-cubic-volume cubes together and in the process cover two, one cubic square sides leaving just ten cubic squares as the surface area.)

What this all means is that smaller creatures have proportionally more surface area from which to lose heat.

Hobbits are smaller than humans and so must lose more heat assuming they have the same blood temperature. Proportionally losing more heat means that they must consume proportionally more food, hence require more meals.

Jus’ sayin’.

Second breakfast anyone?

(15) POOR LITTLE MERCURY! Space.com says “Mercury slammed by gargantuan eruption from the sun’s hidden far side, possibly triggering ‘X-ray auroras’”.

A gigantic, fiery eruption around 40 times wider than Earth recently exploded from the sun’s hidden far side. The eruption hurled a massive cloud of plasma into space that later smashed into Mercury, scouring the planet’s rocky surface and potentially triggering “X-ray auroras” on the unprotected world.

The eruption was likely triggered by a powerful solar flare, which occurred around 7 p.m. ET on March 9, Spaceweather.com reported. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spotted a large, partially obscured plasma filament exploding outward from behind the sun’s northeast limb. Based on the amount of visible plasma, the eruption likely spanned around 310,000 miles (500,000 kilometers) across.

SDO data showed that the explosion, which likely left behind a massive “canyon of fire” on the sun’s surface, also released a large coronal mass ejection (CME) — a fast-moving cloud of magnetized plasma and radiation — that collided with Mercury on March 10.

Mercury is often blasted with CMEs due to its proximity to our home star. The small planet has no atmosphere left as a result of this bombardment and is fully exposed to the full force of these solar storms. …

(16) HOT TIMES CLOSER TO HOME. “The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud” at The MIT Press Reader. “Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage.” (A full version of this article, as well as a bibliography, can be accessed here.)

…The molecular frictions of digital industry, as this example shows, proliferate as unruly heat. The flotsam and jetsam of our digital queries and transactions, the flurry of electrons flitting about, warm the medium of air. Heat is the waste product of computation, and if left unchecked, it becomes a foil to the workings of digital civilization. Heat must therefore be relentlessly abated to keep the engine of the digital thrumming in a constant state, 24 hours a day, every day.

To quell this thermodynamic threat, data centers overwhelmingly rely on air conditioning, a mechanical process that refrigerates the gaseous medium of air, so that it can displace or lift perilous heat away from computers. Today, power-hungry computer room air conditioners (CRACs) or computer room air handlers (CRAHs) are staples of even the most advanced data centers. In North America, most data centers draw power from “dirty” electricity grids, especially in Virginia’s “data center alley,” the site of 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic in 2019. To cool, the Cloud burns carbon, what Jeffrey Moro calls an “elemental irony.” In most data centers today, cooling accounts for greater than 40 percent of electricity usage….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Physicist Matt O’Dowd at PBS Space Time this week takes a dive into a decidedly SFnal trope, that of the possible need to hide humanity from aliens as they themselves may be doing so?

Dark Forest: Should We NOT Contact Aliens?

In 1974 we sent the Arecibo radio message towards Messier 13, a globular cluster near the edge of the Milky Way, made up of a few hundred thousand stars. The message was mostly symbolic; we weren’t really expecting a reply. Yet surely other civilisations out there are doing the same thing. So, why haven’t we heard anything? What if the silence from the stars is a hint that we shouldn’t be so outgoing? What if aliens are deliberately keeping quiet for fear that they might be destroyed?

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Rich Lynch, Steve Green, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]

Pixel Scroll 7/8/23 If It Wasn’t For Pixel Scroll, I Wouldn’t Have No Scroll At All!

Posted on July 8, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) JUST SAYING. “Parlez-vous Valyrian? Meet the people creating languages for Game of Thrones, Avatar and more” in the Guardian.

Half a million Duolingo users are currently learning High Valyrian. But how do you make a language out of nothing? The linguists behind top fantasy TV shows and films explain:

If a language offers clues to the culture of its speakers, then the experience of learning Game of Thrones’s High Valyrian on Duolingo conjures visions of a bustling historic civilisation in which owls stalk the skies, magic abounds, and the spectre of death forever haunts the imaginations of the living. You learn to say “The woman is sweating” before that most basic greeting, “Hello”. An incongruously cheerful cartoon asks you to translate “All men must die, goodbye.” And, of course: “Ñuhyz zaldrīzesse gevī issi.” (“My dragons are beautiful!”).

Described in George RR Martin’s books as the language of the dragon-taming rulers of a once-great empire, Old Valyria has been compared to the Roman Republic, and High Valyrian to classical Latin. The language only assumed full life when linguist David J Peterson took it on for season three of the television series in 2012. Working from the few High Valyrian phrases mentioned in the book – names, places, and the infamous strapline, “Valar Morghūlis” (“All men must die”) – Peterson created an entire language. The Duolingo course was launched in 2017….

(2) HUGO ANALYSIS. Cora Buhlert has posted “Some Thoughts on the 2023 Hugo Finalists”. Cora also says she is “Still trying to hunt down information on some of the Chinese finalists, but it’s difficult due to multiple spellings and multiple people with the same names. But I’ve made friends with the two Chinese fan writer finalists.”

Speaking about the Best Series category:

… Personally, I’m sad that Elric by Melniboné by Michael Moorcock did not make the ballot, because not only is it a seminal sword and sorcery series, it’s also the longest running series written by a single author ever, as far as I know. The first Elric story “The Dreaming City” appeared in 1961, The Citadel of Forgotten Myths in 2022, i.e. the series has been going for a whopping 61 years. Plus, Michael Moorcock has never won a Hugo due to the longstanding anti-fantasy bias of the Hugos and the undeserved dominance of John W. Campbell’s Analog in the 1960s, when he was editing New Worlds. That said, a new Elric story will appear later this year in New Edge Sword and Sorcery No. 1, so maybe we can rectify this oversight next year….

(3) SWORD SLINGER. Marion Deeds has a nice overview of the Jirel of Joiry stories by C.L. Moore in her latest “WWWednesday” column at Fantasy Literature.

Jirel of Joiry is arguably the first pulp-fiction sword-and-sorcery female protagonist. The creation of C.L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore, Jirel first appeared in Weird Tales in 1934. Did she pre-date Red Sonya? Well, yes and no. Also in 1934, Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan) wrote a historical fantasy “The Shadow of the Vulture” featuring a woman called Red Sonja of Rogatino, of Ukranian-Polish ancestry, who wielded pistols, not swords. In the 1960s, the chainmail-bikini- clad woman-warrior named Red Sonja emerged, but it’s hard to look at her and not see Moore’s tempestuous, red-tressed warrior—actually, probably staring in smirking disbelief at Sonja’s bikini….

(4) MAGIC KINGDOM. Former Disney Imagineer Jim Shull regularly tweets photos and history about the several international Disney theme parks he worked on. Here are some recent examples. (DCA = “Disney California Adventure”.)

In 20/20 the train near the entrance of DCA wasn't all that bad as it has been made out to be. There was an idea behind it, and it featured a real engine. There has been worst. #dca2023 #Disneyland pic.twitter.com/EexT9jSSw3
— Jim Shull (@JimShull) July 6, 2023

The engine was on rails set down in a 'hole'. The local park cats called this area their home. #cats pic.twitter.com/yuebHTt1ss
— Jim Shull (@JimShull) July 6, 2023

One lesson learned while providing creative direction on global projects is that construction in different countries use different method to achieve the same objectives. In France a electric vault was made from pre cast concrete, where in China it was built brick by brick. pic.twitter.com/LDnKrYht26
— Jim Shull (@JimShull) July 5, 2023

Once the model for Toy Story Playland was complete, the question arose where the review for the model would occur? The image documents the scale of the model and so moving it would be no easy task. #ToyStory #Disneylandparis pic.twitter.com/3BKFiyZtAI
— Jim Shull (@JimShull) July 2, 2023

The answer of how to move the Toy Story Playland model was to load it into this truck and drive the 6 1/2 hours up I 5 from Glendale to Emeryville. Harris Ranch was around the half way point and served a good lunch. #ToyStory #WDI pic.twitter.com/16pvt1fkGw
— Jim Shull (@JimShull) July 2, 2023

Our job complete and the model approved we drove back to Glendale picking up even more bugs on the 6 1/2 drive from Emeryville. The life of a Imagineer is filled with glamorous stories such as this one. #bugs #insects #WDW #Imagineer pic.twitter.com/6DfooTH74n
— Jim Shull (@JimShull) July 2, 2023

(5) DECISION MADE. Samantha Mills, author of Hugo nominee “Rabbit Test”, explains why she would not participate in 2023 Worldcon programming if asked. (Briefly, GoH Sergey Lukianenko.)

…Okay, time for the caveat. I’m not going to be participating in programming at Worldcon this year. (To be clear, I have not been invited to do so yet, not having an attending membership. And I have never attended before, though that hasn’t been by choice, simply logistics. Every year I say, “maybe next year I’ll be able to travel again… ah well.” So this isn’t as much of a sacrifice as I know it will be for others making similar decisions….

(6) NOW ON THE SHELVES. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” in the Guardian covers The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi; Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs; Silent City by Sarah Davis-Goff; Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; and Red Smoking Mirror by Nick Hunt.

(7) EARTH’S SECRET WEAPON REMEMBERED. NPR’s Stephen Thompson commemorates the tenth anniversary of the death of singer Slim Whitman.

It’s become tradition for my family to spend the Fourth of July watching a vaguely patriotic movie in which things are blown up in pursuit of a common good. Independence Day, both National Treasure movies, Team America: World Police … you get the idea. This year, we chose the Tim Burton film Mars Attacks!, in which an overstuffed cast must fend off an army of killer Martians. Released in late 1996, the film drew on the legacy of cheesy alien-invasion and disaster movies, and culminated in a couple of major musical reveals.

[This missive contains several Mars Attacks! spoilers. Stop reading now if you wish to remain in the dark about this 27-year-old film and the fate of its bloodthirsty villains.]

Given that parts of Mars Attacks! take place in Las Vegas, it wasn’t a huge surprise that Tom Jones, already an established presence in three decades of movies and TV, would pop up in several scenes — first performing “It’s Not Unusual” and later as part of a small band of heroes who make their escape from a city under siege. The bigger surprise was the identity of the musician whose voice, when blared through a loudspeaker, vibrated at a frequency that caused Martian heads to explode. His name was Slim Whitman, and he was one of the best-selling musicians of the 20th century. As we watched the film, we quickly realized that I was the only person in the room who’d heard of him….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1996 – [Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

One of the joys of doing these Beginnings as a collaboration with Mike is that I get to discover writers such as Gill Alderman.

She had a short genre career with just four novels, two in her Guna sequence – The Archivist: A Black Romance and The Land Beyond: A Fable, plus two others, Lilith’s Castle and The Memory Palace, plus two stories in a career that lasted about a decade starting in the Eighties.

And she’s done some screenplay writing including for HBO’s The Undoing mystery series. Outside of the genre, she has written are Gone Girl, Sharp Objects, Dark Places and the “The Grownup” novella.

The Memory Palace (Voyager, 1996) which is what Mike selected for our Beginning was nominated for British Science Fiction Award the year Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars won.

And now for this Beginning…

His hands ached badly, as they often did at the end of a long keyboard session. He flexed his fingers while he looked out, beyond the screen, into the twilit garden of the old rectory. It was a little cooler; he thought the rosebushes trembled slightly. There might be a breeze, one zephyr only: just a breath of air to end the stifling day. The lawns merged with churchyard and field and, in Humfrey’s Close, the Norman castle mound looked bigger than it was, worn down by nine hundred years of weather, rabbits and grazing sheep. A mile or so away, Karemarn’s dark slopes were beginning to merge with the night sky.

The sun had set. The only light in the room came from the screen of the computer before the window, a luminescent shield which occulted the world outside as effectively as the steep hill hid the rising moon. It was covered with words, the conclusion of his newest novel and–as necessary an adjunct to his storytelling as the hallowed and familiar phrase ‘Once upon a time’–with his authorial adieu to the reader, that essential phrase with which he always signed off at the finish of the task: ‘THE END’. Then, his last words, his hand upon the creation: ‘Guy Kester Parados, The Old Rectory, Maidford Halse, June 24th 1990’.

He stretched, reaching high, yawned wide. A grisaille light as glamorous as that cast by his mind-mirroring screen filled the garden and the small field beyond it. It was time to be gone. He clicked the mouse under his right hand and saw his work vanish into the machine. He would leave it now, to settle and sift out of his mind; when he returned after the break, he would come to it refreshed. Then, one or two readings, a little tweaking (especially of the unsatisfactory last chapter) and a punctuation check should suffice and he could be rid of it for ever, in the future seeing it only as an entity given public birth by others, separate from him, one more title on the shelf–He made a copy and, reaching up, hid the floppy disk in the customary place in the cracked mullion.

‘You may now switch off safely.’ He read the prompt and, reaching for the switch, said ‘I shall, I shall.’ It had been a long haul, this one, through the fifteenth. The landscape of the novels was so familiar that he no longer had to consciously invent it, only travel the road with his chosen company, as used to his fictional country of Malthassa as to the hedged and crop-marked fields of the rural Midlands outside his study window. It was an old picture, this place outside the house; he no longer needed to look at it to remember it, but only inwards, into his mind, where those more perilous places, the dangerous rocks, the wild steppes and untameable floods he had created called him persistently.

If I had gone in for the Church, he thought, would it have made me any happier? Would that honest life have felt more just, more true, than this of spinning the thread, weaving the cloth, cutting and stitching the garment of the storyteller? Would Helen have avoided me, or seen me as a greater challenge? I was a pushover for her after all, most eager to co-operate.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born July 8, 1914 — Hans Stefan Santesson. Trifecta of editor, writer, and reviewer. He edited Fantastic Universe from 1956 to 1960, and the US edition of the British New Worlds Science Fiction. In the Sixties, he edited a lot of anthologies including The Fantastic Universe Omnibus, The Mighty Barbarians: Great Sword and Sorcery Heroes and Crime Prevention in the 30th Century. As a writer, he had a handful of short fiction, none of which is available digitally. His reviews appear to be all in Fantastic Universe in the Fifties. (Died 1975.)
Born July 8, 1933 — Michael Barrier, 90. One of the few actors not a regular crew member on the original Trek who shows in multiple episodes under the same name. He was DeSalle in “The Squire of Gothos”, “This Side of Paradise” and “Catspaw”. While he has the same name each time, he does not have the same shipboard job as he serves as a navigator in the first episode, a biologist in “This Side of Paradise” and assistant chief engineer in “Catspaw”.
Born July 8, 1942 — Otto Penzler, 81. He’s proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City who edits anthologies. Oh does he edit them, over fifty that I know of, some of genre interest including The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories, Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! and The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories which an original Lester Dent story in it. Back in the Seventies, with Chris Steinbrunner, he co-wrote the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection for which they won an Edgar Award.
Born July 8, 1944 — Jeffrey Tambor, 79. I first encountered him on Max Headroom as Murray, Edison’s editor. Later on, he’s Mayor Augustus Maywho in How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Finally I’ll note he was in both of the only true Hellboy films that there was playing Tom Manning, director of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense.
Born July 8, 1951 — Anjelica Huston, 72. I’m going to single her out for her performance as The Grand High Witch of All The World, or Eva Ernst in The Witches, a most delicious film. She was also wonderful as Morticia Addams in both of the Addams Family films, and made an interesting Viviane, Lady of the Lake in The Mists of Avalon miniseries.
Born July 8, 1953 — Mark Blackman, 70. Mark has often written about the Fantastic Fiction at KGB and New York Review of Science Fiction readings series for File 770. He was a member of Lunarians and chaired Lunacon 38 in 1995. He was a member of the New York in 1989 Worldcon bid. (OGH)
Born July 8, 1955 — Susan Price, 68. English author of children’s and YA novels. She has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize for British children’s books. The Pagan Mars trilogy is her best known work, and The Sterkarm Handshake and its sequel A Sterkarm Kiss, will please Outlander fans.
Born July 8, 1988 — Shazad Latif, 35. If you watched Spooks, you’ll remember him as Tariq Masood. (Spooks did become genre.) He was Chief of Security Ash Tyler in Discovery,andDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Penny Dreadful. He voiced Kyla in The Dark Crystal: Voice of Resistance. And he was in the Black Mirror episode “The National Anthem” as Mehdi Raboud.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Tom Gauld’s comment on tell-all books.

My cartoon for today’s @GdnSaturday / @GuardianBooks pic.twitter.com/wH3hUhlF33
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) July 8, 2023

(11) OPPENHEIMER ACTOR. [Item by Steven French.] There’s some marginal genre interest here insofar as Cillian Murphy was the central character in the zombie apocalypse flick 28 Days Later but I was also struck by this comment regarding his role as Oppenheimer: “I had dinner with all these geniuses. I’ll never understand quantum mechanics, but I was interested in what science does to their perspective.” “Cillian Murphy on Oppenheimer, sex scenes and self-doubt: ‘I’m stubborn and lacking in confidence – a terrible combination’”: a profile in the Guardian.

…I raise method acting and Murphy tilts his head and frowns. “Method acting is a sort of … No,” he says, firm but with a half smile. Oppenheimer had many defining characteristics, not least walking on the balls of his feet and a vocal tic that sounded like nim-nim-nim, but Murphy didn’t want to do an impression. Nolan was obsessed with the Brillo-texture hair, so they spent “a long time working on hair”. And the voice. The real question for Murphy was what combination – ambition, madness, delusion, deep hatred of the Nazi regime? – allowed this theoretical physicist to agree to an experiment he knew could obliterate humankind. “He was dancing between the raindrops morally. He was complex, contradictory, polymathic; incredibly attractive intellectually and charismatic, but,” he decides, “ultimately unknowable.”…

(12) IT IS YOUR DESTINY. [Item by Dann.] Ryan George dropped a new Pitch Meeting for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Selling that concept had to be super easy! Barely an inconvenience!

(13) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] The Thursday episode had three clues in the single Jeopardy round, and (at least arguably) the Final Jeopardy.

A TV Series, $200: Captains of the Enterprise: William Shatner; This man from 1987 to 1994; then Scott Bakula

Challenger Carol Oppenheim identified this as Patrick Stewart.

So I’m Reading This Book, $400: A novel, writing the clue for us: “The is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure”

Challenger Alex Gordon knew this one.

A TV Series: $1000: This big fella on “Game of Thrones”: Conan Stevens, Ian Whyte, Hafthor Julius Bjornsson

Returning champion Anji Nyquist responded: “Who is the Mountain?”

Ken Jennings said, “Gregor Clegane, well done.”

Final Jeopardy: Squashing the allegory theory, the daughters of the author of this novel say it’s “just a story about rabbits”

Carol and Alex knew this was Watership Down.

(14) IT’S A MIRACLE. Cracked’s list of “14 Supernatural Things Our Bodies Can Do” leaves out a Kurt Vonnegut favorite, “turning perfectly good food into shit”.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Klingon Pop Warrior jenbom brings us “’Cha Cha Cha’, a Eurovision 2023 Cover”.

I watched Eurovision and this awesome Finnish dude with a bowl cut, a lime green bolero, and a name that’s a multi-level pun (Käärijä = wrapper) reminded me why I love performing and gave me some desperately needed inspiration with a song called “Cha Cha Cha.” If by some small chance, Käärijä himself hears this/sees the lyrics, I hope that he laughs and enjoys what we managed to accomplish. Despite how nerdy and funny the language is that I’m singing in, we always push for good musical arrangements. We had a fun day in the recording studio and I hope that fans of Käärijä, of which I am one, will catch the small details musically, in the translation effort, and in the accompanying lyric video. It’s my sincere hope that Käärijä fans who know nothing about Star Trek or Klingon enjoy this acoustic cover as much as my nerdy Trekkie fans.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, David Goldfarb, Cora Buhlert, Dann, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]

Classics of SF at Loscon 48

Posted on October 20, 2022 by Mike Glyer

By John Hertz: We’ll discuss three Classics of Science Fiction at Loscon XLVIII, to be held November 25-27, one discussion each. Come to as many as you like. You’ll be welcome to join in.

Our operating definition is “A classic is a work that survives its own time. After the currents which might have sustained it have changed, it remains, and is seen to be worthwhile for itself.” If you have a better definition, bring it.

Each of the three is famous in a different way. Each may be more interesting now than when first published. Have you read them? Have you re-read them?

Charles Harness, The Paradox Men (1953)

Five crises have fused the Americas together; the Imperator is dead, leaving his widow Imperatrix Juana-Maria Chatham-Perez; there’s aristocracy, and a Society of Thieves rigorously trained who steal from the rich to buy freedom for slaves. Dueling. Research stations on the Sun. A star-drive is being tested, based on the square root of -1 and an acceleration of several million gravities. The hero doesn’t know who he is.

Robert A. Heinlein, Time for the Stars (1956)

The Long Range Foundation starts looking for identical twins – because a very few have proved to be telepathic – and rigorous tests can’t find that telepathy takes any time – so it looks promising for messages from starships traveling light-years away. The ships go. There are adventures. Eventually there are consequences – indirect ones – fruitful ones.

C.L. Moore, Doomsday Morning (1957)

Where others rant, this author lights a lantern: looking, as a Star Trek fan sang, at both sides now. Or more. Moore shows her fictional society, its fictional technology, through the human element; always the human element. And we learn why the actor-director protagonist is told he has to put on his play without changing the script even a little.

Pixel Scroll 11/2/21 Escape From the Other Pixel Scroll (A Sequel)

Posted on November 2, 2021 by Mike Glyer

(1) ANTITRUST ACTION. “Justice Department sues to stop Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster” reports CNN.

The Justice Department is suing to block Penguin Random House’s proposed acquisition of Simon & Schuster, arguing that the combination of the two book business giants “would likely harm competition in the publishing industry.”
Tuesday’s complaint in United States District Court is one of the first major antitrust actions by the Biden administration.
The publishers said they are prepared to defend the deal in court, calling it “a pro-consumer, pro-author, and pro-book seller transaction.”
Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster are two members of the “Big Five,” the industry’s term for the five biggest publishers in the United States.
In a court filing on Tuesday, DOJ lawyers said the companies should not be allowed to combine because it “would give Penguin Random House outsized influence over who and what is published, and how much authors are paid for their work.”

The New York Times has a bit more about the government’s legal arguments: “Justice Dept. Sues Penguin Random House Over Simon & Schuster Deal”.

In a publishing landscape dominated by a handful of mega corporations, Penguin Random House towers over the others. It operates more than 300 imprints worldwide and has 15,000 new releases a year, far more than the other four major U.S. publishers. With its $2.2 billion proposed acquisition of Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House stood to become substantially larger.
The deal was challenged amid a shifting atmosphere in Washington toward consolidation, where there has been increased scrutiny on competition and the power wielded by big companies like Amazon and Facebook. The move provides a window into how the Biden administration will handle these concerns going forward.
Rather than concerns solely over harm to consumers, the Department of Justice said the acquisition could be detrimental to producers — in this case, authors — in what is called a monopsony, as opposed to a monopoly. The Biden administration filed its case against Penguin Random House in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday.

A combined statement issued by Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster contends:

“DOJ’s lawsuit is wrong on the facts, the law, and public policy,” Daniel Petrocelli, Vice Chair of O’Melveny & Meyers and PRH’s lead trial attorney, said. “Importantly, DOJ has not found, nor does it allege, that the combination will reduce competition in the sale of books. The publishing industry is strong and vibrant and has seen strong growth at all levels. We are confident that the robust and competitive landscape that exists will ensure a decision that the acquisition will promote, not harm, competition.”

PRH and S&S’ attorneys make additional arguments in the linked statement.

(2) CLIMATE FUTURES. The “Crafting Climate Futures: From Story to Policy” webinar on Monday, November 8 is cohosted by ASU’s Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative and the Olaf Stapledon Centre for Speculative Futures at the University of Liverpool. It features three of ASU’s Climate Imagination Fellows—Xia Jia, Hannah Ongowue, and Vandana Singh—along with Kim Stanley Robinson, and the moderator is Adeline Johns-Putra, a professor of literature at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and author of the book Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel. Begins 5:30 a.m. Pacific.

The UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow presents an opportunity for decisive global action amidst escalating climate chaos. Now, more than ever, we need narratives of positive climate futures alongside coordinated interventions in order to ameliorate the crisis. Join the University of Liverpool’s Olaf Stapledon Centre for Speculative Futures and the Climate Imagination Fellows at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination for a session dedicated to exploring the stories that might catalyze new understandings and connect narrative interventions to transformations in policy, governance, and culture.

(3) FOR YOUR REFERENCE. Susan Guthmann Henry saw yesterday’s Scroll item about the Texas legislator who has put together a list of 850 books and is demanding that schools in the state tell him if they have these books in their libraries and how much they have spent on them, and the discussion in comments about the seeming random order of the list. “It occurred to me that there might be a way to make the 16 page Matt Krause list ‘easier’ to look through. So, I downloaded it, converted it to a spreadsheet, and made two lists, one that is alphabetical by title and one that is alphabetical by author.” Many thanks! Here are the Excel spreadsheets:

krausebooklist–alpha by author Download

krausebooklist–alpha by title Download

(4) AS TIME GOES BY. Cora Buhlert discusses the Jirel of Joiry stories by C.L. Moore on the Appendix N Book Club podcast: “C.L. Moore’s ‘Jirel of Joiry’ with special guest Cora Buhlert”.

Cora Buhlert joins us to discuss C.L. Moore’s “Jirel of Joiry”, used book store finds, kisses as stand-ins for sex, the appropriateness of using genre to explore our fear of sexual violence, cozy stories, writers being inspired by their peers, comparing and contrasting Conan and Jirel as characters, employing undead suckers, the influence of comics on the early pulps, her work with Henry Kuttner, fictitious France, C.L. Moore’s reemerging popularity, and much more!

(5) COLD-HEARTED ORB. Jess Nevins reviews John Steinbeck’s lost werewolf murder mystery Murder at the Full Moon: “Nine-10ths of a Triumph: On John Steinbeck’s ‘Murder at Full Moon’” at LA Review of Books.

… At first glance, Murder at Full Moon seems to consist primarily of the clichéd routines and tropes of detective fiction circa 1930: the whodunnit structure; the eccentric but all-knowing detective; the hapless sidekick; the events that abide by “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” laid out by S. S. Van Dine in 1928 and by the “Ten Commandments” for mystery stories conceived of by Ronald Knox in 1929; the gathering of the characters at the end to watch the detective reveal and apprehend the murderer; and so on. A superficial reading of Murder at Full Moon could indeed lead one to claim that it is “a shameless commercial satire of pulp-detective novels” or “a cynical attempt at a standard commercial mystery-thriller.” But what Steinbeck clearly attempted to do, and mostly succeeded at doing, was tell a mystery story about mysteries as they were written in 1930, and to challenge his fellow mystery authors to write more ambitious material in a more intelligent way — to step up their game….

(6) UNDER CONSTRUCTION. Cora Buhlert’s newest Fancast Spotlight interview features Hugo finalist Worldbuilding for Masochists from Marshall Ryan Maresca, Cass Morris and Rowenna Miller: “Fancast Spotlight: Worldbuilding for Masochists”.

Tell us about your podcast or channel.
Tide charts — a stack of books on constellation mythology — an elaborately sketched map — a bulletin board covered in illustrations of obsolete technology — research on textiles, naming conventions, architecture and a dozen ways to cook lentils — what could it all mean?
It means worldbuilding. Big worldbuilding. Elaborate worldbuilding. Obsessive worldbuilding. Dare we say… masochistic worldbuilding?…

(7) LAWRENCE PERSON ON HOWARD WALDROP’S YEAR. Howard Waldrop related the details of his very tough medical year to an audience at Armadillocon, and Lawrence Person has signal-boosted what he said.

These topics were covered at his interview at Armadillocon in October 2021, and as they’re now public knowledge, here is the concise summary of Howard Waldrop’s trials and tribulations from late 2020 through 2021:

He had to deal with an infestation of bedbugs in his apartment.
He was involved in a minor car wreck in a driving rainstorm that totaled his car (but inflicted no serious injury).
Had to deal with the legal fallout from that (since cleared up).
Suffered a series of minor falls.
Found out he had kidney stones that were too large to pass.
Had his kidney stones zapped with lasers via a tube up his urethra (a very science fictional future, but not the one he was hoping for). As a result of which…
“I pissed blood and gravel for a week.”
His power went out for several days as part of the Texas ice storm (second coldest recorded temperature in Austin history).
Suffered a major fall that broke his shoulder ball and socket, and left him unable to reach his cell phone to call for help.
Spent a day crawling around on the floor of his apartment.
Ended up barfing on himself just before Brad Denton and Martha Grenon came to his apartment to check on him.
Went to the hospital, by which time he was already suffering from diabetic ketoacidosis.
Got his bone set and his blood sugar stabilized.
He spent weeks recovering at two different recovery centers.
By which time he was suffering gastrointestinal distress, which was traced to a perforated colon.
Which required the removal of several feet of lower intestine and installing a colostomy bag.
“They’ve removed my ass. I have no ass.”
Moved into an assisted living facility, where he’s recovered nicely. “The food is really good.”

This summary is quite condensed but chronologically accurate and Howard-approved. And I’ve actually spared you a few bodily function details.
Howard’s close circle of caregivers has been keeping a lid on all this until Howard was recovered enough to reveal it to the public at large.
On the bright side, he lost enough weight that he’s no longer diabetic, and several of his short stories have been optioned for film, including “Heirs of the Perisphere,” “Night of the Cooters” and “The Ugly Chickens,” all in various states of production. And won the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

(8) SOMEWHERE IN OUR LITERARY FAMILY TREE. You might need Mental Floss after reading this sentence repeatedly: “’A Dark and Stormy Night’: The History of Literature’s Worst Sentence”. But can it be true that Edward Bulwer-Lytton inspired a forerunner of sf fandom?

…If you want to start a novel, your options for an opening line are just this side of infinite. But if you want to start a novel badly, any cartoon beagle can tell you that there’s only one choice: “It was a dark and stormy night.”
The phrase has become so ingrained in our literary culture that we rarely give much thought to its origin—and when he put pen to paper, it’s likely that author and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton had no idea just how infamous his dark and stormy night would become. Bulwer-Lytton was once as widely read as his friend Charles Dickens, but today he’s remembered almost exclusively for one bad sentence. It’s an ironic legacy for a prolific author who influenced some of the most popular novels in English literature, helped invent sci-fi fandom, laid the groundwork for modern crime fiction, and accidentally sparked a movement for an important social reform.
…Bulwer-Lytton’s 1862 novel A Strange Story is thought to have influenced Dracula, and his 1871 science fiction novel The Coming Race inspired the world’s first sci-fi convention (and gave rise to an exceptionally bizarre Nazi conspiracy theory)….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

2001 – Twenty years ago, Monsters, Inc. was released by Pixar. It was directed by Pete Docter in his directorial debut, and executive produced by John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton. The screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Daniel Gerson from a story by Pete Docter, Jill Culton, Jeff Pidgeon and Ralph Eggleston. An amazing voice cast consisted of John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi, James Coburn, Mary Gibbs and Jennifer Tilly.

It generated a lawsuit by a poet who said it was based on her “There’s a Boy in My Closet” poem but the Judge refused to issued an injunction stopping the film from opening and eventually said her suit had absolutely no merit. Another suit claimed the lead characters of Mike and Sulley were based on his art. That suit was settled out of Court and the details of the settlement were sealed.

Critics all loved the film with the Salon critic saying it was “agreeable and often funny, and adults who take their kids to see it might be surprised to find themselves having a pretty good time.” Box office wise, it made nearly six hundred million on a budget of under three hundred million, not counting streaming revenue and DVD sales. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a monstrous ninety percent rating.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born November 2, 1913 — Burt Lancaster. Certainly being Dr. Paul Moreau on The Island of Doctor Moreau was his most genre-ish role but I like him as General James Mattoon Scott in Seven Days in May. And of course, he’s really great as Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams. (Died 1994.)
Born November 2, 1924 — Michi Kobi. She was Dr. Hideko Murata in Twelve to the Moon, half of a double feature with either Battle in Outer Space or 13 Ghosts. Unless you consider her doing voices on Courage the Cowardly Dog, an early Oughts animated series, to be genre, this is her only SF work. (Died 2016.)
Born November 2, 1927 — Steve Ditko. Illustrator who began his career working in the studio of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby during which he began his long association with Charlton Comics and which led to his creating the Captain Atom character. Did I mention DC absorbed that company as it did so many others? Now he’s best known as the artist and co-creator, with Stan Lee, of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. For Charlton and also DC itself: a complete redesign of Blue Beetle, and creating or co-creating The Question, The Creeper, Shade the Changing Man, and Hawk and Dove. He been inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame and into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame. (Died 2018.)
Born November 2, 1941 — Ed Gorman. He’d be here if only for writing the script for the Batman: I, Werewolf series in which Batman meets a werewolf. Very cool. More straight SFF is his Star Precinct trilogy with Kevin Randle which is quite excellent, and I’m fond of his short fiction which fortunately is showing up in digital form at the usual suspects. (Died 2016.)
Born November 2, 1942 — Carol Resnick, 79. Wife of that Resnick who credited her according to several sources with being a co-writer on many of his novels. He also credited her as being a co-author on two movie scripts that they’ve sold, based on his novels Santiago and The Widowmaker. And she’s responsible for the costumes that she and Mike wore in five Worldcon masquerades in the Seventies, winning many awards.
Born November 2, 1942 — Stefanie Powers, 79. April Dancer, the lead in The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. which lasted just one season. (I just downloaded the pilot to watch as I’ve never seen the series.) Did you know Ian Fleming contributed concepts to this series and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as well? She would play Shalon in the crossover that started on The Six-Million Man and concluded on The Six-Million Woman called “The Return of Bigfoot”.
Born November 2, 1949 — Lois McMaster Bujold, 72. First let’s note she’s won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, matching Robert A. Heinlein’s record, not counting his Retro Hugo. Quite impressive that. Bujold’s works largely comprises three separate book series: the Vorkosigan Saga, the Chalion series, and the Sharing Knife series. She joined the Central Ohio Science Fiction Society, and co-published with Lillian Stewart Carl StarDate, a Trek fanzine in which a story of hers appeared under the byline Lois McMaster.
Born November 2, 1980 — Brittany Ishibashi, 41. Ishibashi played Karai in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, the sequel to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. She’s currently portrays Tina Minoru on Runaways, streaming on Hulu. And she was Maggie Zeddmore in the Ghostfacers webseries.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Take me to your leader is a cliché, so Garfield starts the conversation in another way.

(12) THE UNMITIGATED EIGHTIES. Ed Brubaker talks to Alex Segura of CrimeReads about his new graphic novel, Destroy All Monsters. “Ed Brubaker on 1980s Los Angeles, Private Eye Fiction, and the Changing Face of Graphic Novels”.

…But Reckless is not a nostalgia tour, or an attempt to recapture the magic of previous private detectives or locales. The series motif and past setting allowed Brubaker and Phillips to tell stories set in another time that still reflected a lot of what was going on now.
“I wanted to write about the past from today’s point of view, to show how we got from there to here, how much the decisions of the past made this place, like the ripple effects of corruption and politics through time,” Brubaker said. “This is why the newest book DESTROY ALL MONSTERS has at the heart of it, the fallout of the construction of the 105, and the corridors of vacant houses that stood for something like 12 or 15 years during the court battle over that freeway, and which became a major source of crime and devastation in South LA, predating the crack epidemic, even.”

(13) TAKING THE CARS. Gothamist shows us “The Best Halloween 2021 Costumes On The NYC Subway”. At West 4th Street station, end-point for the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade… 96 photos in the gallery!

After things were understandably subdued last year due to the pandemic, Halloween celebrations were back across the city over the weekend. New Yorkers of all ages tend to take this holiday quite seriously, and after a year of mostly avoiding human contact, everyone seemed more excited than ever to show off their brilliant, clever and often weird costumes while traversing our mass transit system.
Indefatigable photographer Sai Mokhtari, who first started this Subway Halloween project nine years ago (it has become our favorite annual tradition since), went out between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Sunday to capture all the hottest Halloween looks… in transit. Overall, Mokhtari said, “the subways were more crowded than last year but definitely a far cry from pre-pandemic days (I’d say maybe half as many people overall).”

(14) TIS THE SEASON. Delish held its breath til Halloween was past, and now has gone into full Christmas merchandising mode. To begin with: “Le Creuset Has New ‘Harry Potter’ Kitchen Items”. A $300 Dutch oven is one of them.

Le Creuset is best known for their beloved dutch ovens and baking accessories. This line has a little bit of everything and will be available exclusively on Le Creuset’s website and through Williams-Sonoma. Every piece features a subtle nod to the Harry Potter series, like a blue dutch oven with a golden snitch knob, a red dutch oven with an embossment of Harry’s glasses and a lightening bolt knob, and even a tea kettle with 9 3/4 on the handle as a shoutout to the Hogwarts express.

(15) MOVING PICTURES. Bradbury scholar Phil Nichols is giving an online talk about “Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man at Seventy” on November 16 at 7:00 p.m. UK time as part of the University of Wolverhampton’s Artsfest Online, Free registration here.

Ray Bradbury’s book The Illustrated Man – a short story collection very loosely woven together with a fantastical framing narrative – is now seventy years old, and yet it remains a greatly influential work. Dealing with ideas around virtual reality, civil rights, the end of the world, and body art, it has managed to sustain a resonance through to the twenty-first century, despite its 1950s trappings. Individual stories from the collection have been adapted for film, television, radio and stage on multiple occasions, confirming Bradbury’s position as one of the most significant writers of science fiction even as the author tried to escape from the “ghetto” of genre fiction.
In this illustrated talk, Dr Phil Nichols will show how Bradbury’s short-story collection both defines and confines the author.

(16) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter watched three of last night’s Jeopardy! contestants unable to come up with this one:

Category: Fantastical Creatures
Answer: George Langelaan wrote the Playboy short story that inspired this film in which Seth Brundle transforms.
No one could ask, “What is The Fly?”

(17) WHO WATCHED WHAT LAST MONTH. JustWatch compiled this list of the Top 10 Sci-FI Movies and TV Shows in the US in October:

Rank*	Movies	TV shows
1	Dune	Foundation
2	Free Guy	Cowboy Bebop
3	Venom	La Brea
4	Ghostbusters	Rick and Morty
5	Titane	Doctor Who
6	The Thing	Battlestar Galactica
7	Halloween III: Season of the Witch	Y: The Last Man
8	Black Widow	The Twilight Zone
9	A Quiet Place Part II	American Horror Story
10	The Rocky Horror Picture Show	Invasion

*Based on JustWatch popularity score. Genre data is sourced from themoviedb.org

(18) NO IDLE PAWS HERE. [Item by JJ.] OMG, it’s a subreddit for working credentials – “Purposeful Pusses” at Reddit. Check out the video with Harpo, who works for serious book lovers.

(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Trailers: Marvel’s What If…?” the Screen Junkies say this is based on a Marvel series that included “What if Iron Man Fought King Arthur?” and “What if Wolverine Was A Vampire?” (These are actual comics.) They say that all the characters sound like AIs barfing out Chandler Bing dialogue. You can also take in Chadwick Boseman’s last performance as the Black Panther.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Joey Eschrich, Jumana Aumir, Cora Buhlert, Lise Andreasen, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]

Pixel Scroll 10/1/21 Ask Not For Whom The Pixel Scrolls

Posted on October 1, 2021 by Mike Glyer

(1) WFC 2021 NEWS. World Fantasy Con’s new Progress Report is a free download available here.

WFC 2021 in Montreal – taking place November 4-7 — will be a hybrid convention, with both in-person and virtual elements. Virtual memberships are $75(US)/$100(CAD) and can be obtained through the con’s registration and memberships page.

Guests of honor Nisi Shawl and John Picacio will not be attending in person but will participate virtually.

WFC 2021 has added Julie Czerneda as a Special Guest.

A communication sent to members also reminds them to adhere to the Canadian (and airline) requirements in respect to COVID vaccination and testing.

Lastly, we want to point out that if you are coming to Montreal from outside Canada, please ensure that you meet all requirements for entry into Canada. This includes being fully vaccinated and having a negative PCR test within 72 hours of the scheduled departure time of your flight to Canada. You can find more information on the Government of Canada website. (Don’t forget the other requirements too!) Your airline may have its own requirements.
We are planning on having on-site testing for travellers leaving Canada. The final price (between C$70 and C$90) will depend on the number of tests to be performed. If you are interested in on-site testing during the convention, please send a short email to [email protected]. Indicate how many people would be taking the test and which day you plan to leave the country. If the antigen test is insufficient, let us know the type required, and we will see if the testing company can handle the request. We will contact interested parties when we have finalized the arrangements.

(2) BEAR MEDICAL UPDATE. Elizabeth Bear made a public post about her cancer surgery at her Throwanotherbearinthecanoe newsletter.

… So that I don’t bury the lede too much, I got my pathology report back this afternoon, and I’ve got clear margins and no signs of metastasis into the lymph nodes. Which is an enormous crying-in-my-tea relief and as soon as I am not on opiates anymore I’m going to have myself a very very fancy glass of Scotch to celebrate….

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to snack on shredded jellyfish with Renée Witterstaetter in episode 155 p his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Come along with me to D.C.’s AwesomeCon for dinner with writer, editor, and colorist Renée Witterstaetter at Chinatown’s New Big Wong restaurant.
Witterstaetter started her comics career as an assistant editor at DC Comics working on the Superman books. She later worked at Marvel Comics on Silver Surfer, Conan, Guardians of the Galaxy, and other titles. In addition, she spearheaded the reintroduction of She-Hulk at Marvel, where she actually appeared in the comic!

But she’s much more than only comics, as you’ll soon learn.
We discussed how Jerry Lewis launched her interest in comics, the way science fiction fandom led to her first job at DC Comics, the differences between the Marvel and DC offices of the ’70s and ’80s, what made Mark Gruenwald such an amazing editor, her emotional encounter with Steve Ditko, the inflationary info we learned about the writing of letter columns during the ’70s and ’80s, her work with John Byrne on She-Hulk, how Jurassic Park caused her to leave Marvel, the prank Jackie Chan asked her to help pull on Chris Tucker, and much more.

(4) PASSING OUT. Yahoo! consults an expert – former HWA President Lisa Morton — to find out “Why Do We Pass Out Candy on Halloween?”

…”Up until the 1930s, Halloween was largely the dominion of young male pranksters; candy—in the form of mainly candy corn, tiny sugar pellets, or taffy—might be offered at parties, but it wasn’t a particularly important part of the holiday,” says Lisa Morton, an author, screenwriter, and Halloween historian. “Then, in the ’30s, prank-playing moved out of rural areas and into cities, where it became very destructive and cost millions in damages. Rather than simply ban the holiday altogether (which some cities considered), civic groups came up with the idea of buying kids off with treats, costumes, and parties. It worked, and by 1936 we have the first mention of ‘trick-or-treat’ in a national magazine.”…

(5) CHESLEY NEWS. ASFA members (the only people who can vote) have been notified the 2021 Chesley Award Suggestions List (for 2020 Works) is live. The introduction explains:

This listing constitutes the suggestions of the Chesley Nominating Committee plus suggestions received from the community. This is NOT the final ballot; it is only an example of what the community considers worthy of nominating for the Chesley Awards. These suggestions are provided to show you the kind of information we want from you on your ballot, and to maybe help jog your memory of other worthy works of art you saw in 2020. You are encouraged to look beyond this listing when making your nominations; any works published for the first time in 2020 or if unpublished, displayed for the first time in 2020, are eligible. Check out your local bookstore, gaming shop, or knock yourself out visiting various artist’s websites … lots of wonderful art out there. You may make up to five nominations in each category.

(6) I’M YOUR MAN WINS. The winners of the 2021 German film award Lola have been announced. Normally, this is of zero genre interest, but this year’s big winner, taking Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Film is the science fiction romantic comedy I’m Your Man: “Lolas 2021 German Film Awards Winners List” from The Hollywood Reporter.

I’m Your Man, a sci-fi rom-com from director Maria Schrader, featuring Downton Abbey star Dan Stevens as a German-speaking romance robot, has won the Lola in Gold for best film at the 2021 German Film Prize, Germany’s top film awards.
Schrader, fresh off her Emmy win (for best directing for a limited series in Netflix’s Unorthodox), picked up the best director Lola for I’m Your Man. Schrader and co-screenwriter Jan Schomburg took the best screenplay honor for their I’m Your Man script, an adaptation of a short story by German writer Emma Braslavsky. Maren Eggert, who plays the robot’s no-nonsense human love interest, won the best actress Lola for her performance, a role that has already earned her the best actress Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, where I’m Your Man premiered earlier this year….

(7) MAIL CALL. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Bobby Derie, who’s one of those unsung fan writers I wish more people would know, takes a look at the correspondence between C.L. Moore and Robert E. Howard: “Her Letters to Robert E. Howard: Catherine Lucille Moore” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

… Catherine Lucille Moore burst into the pages of Weird Tales with “Shambleau” (Nov 1933). She was a secretary at the Fletcher Trust Company in her native Indianapolis, Indiana, and engaged to a bank teller named Herbert Ernest Lewis. During the Great Depression, jobs were scarce and her $25 a week was needed to support her family; married women were often expected to be homemakers, and this may be why Moore and her fiance had a long engagement—and it is why, when she began to sell her stories to the pulps for extra cash, she used her initials “C. L.” so that her employers would not discover she had an extra source of income….

Derie also examined the correspondence and relationship in general between H.P. Lovecraft and his wife Sonia H. Greene: “Her Letters To Lovecraft: Sonia H. Greene”.

(8) A SINGULAR SENSATION. The Guardian published an article by Stephen Fry about a non-genre writer popular with some fans: “Stephen Fry on the enduring appeal of Georgette Heyer”.

From the absolutely appalling cover art that has defaced her books since she was first published, you would think Georgette Heyer the most gooey, ghastly, cutesy, sentimental and trashy author who ever dared put pen to paper. The surprise in store for you, if you have not encountered her before, is that once you tear off, burn or ignore those disgusting covers you will discover her to be one of the wittiest, most insightful and rewarding prose writers imaginable. Her stories satisfy all the requirements of romantic fiction, but the language she uses, the dialogue, the ironic awareness, the satire and insight – these rise far above the genre….

(9) A CLEVER CANARD. Evelyn C. Leeper drew attention to this W. Somerset Maugham quote in the weekly issue of MT Void:

“After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts the declining years of the author who exceeds the common span of man is that intelligent people after the age of thirty read nothing at all. As they grow older the books they read in their youth are lit with its glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to the author that wrote them.”

(10) RICHARD CURTIS Q&A. A famous literary figure shares a wealth of knowledge.

Watch & listen to author, playwright, literary agent and former publisher Richard Curtis talk about writing, publishing and many things that will interest writers and the general public. Richard gives tips, advice and a bit of a history of publishing and how it has changed over the years in his conversation with author Rick Bleiweiss.

(11) MEMORY LANE.

1950 – Seventy-one years ago, the first issue of Galaxy Science Fiction dated October 1950 was published. It was founded by a French-Italian company, World Editions, who hired as editor H. L. Gold who was both an established SF author and editor since the Thirties having made his first sale to Astounding in 1934. There was fiction by Clifford Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, Katherine MacLean, Issac Asimov, Fredric Brown and Fritz Leiber, as well as lots of reviews, mainly by Groff Conklin, but one each by Fredric Brown and Isaac Asimov as well. Gold contributed several essays too. The 1952 run of the magazine would be get a Hugo for Best Professional Magazine at Philcon II. Gold would later be inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born October 1, 1930 — Richard Harris. One of the Dumbledores in the Potter film franchise. He also played King Arthur in Camelot, Richard the Lion Hearted in Robin and Marian, Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels, James Parker in Tarzan, the Ape Man and he voiced Opal in Kaena: The Prophecy. His acting in Tarzan, the Ape Man got him a nomination for the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor. Anyone see that film? It earns a ten percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. (Died 2002.)
Born October 1, 1935 — Dame Julie Andrews, DBE, 86. The original Mary Poppins! I could have stopped there but I won’t. (Hee.) She had a scene cut in which was a maid in The Return of the Pink Panther, and she’s uncredited as the singing voice of Ainsley Jarvis in The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Yet again she’s uncreated as in a Panther film, this time as chairwoman in Trail of the Pink Panther. She voices Queen Lillian in Sherk 2, Shrek the Third and Shrek Forever After. And she’s the voice of Karathen in Aquaman.
Born October 1, 1940 — Richard Corben. Comic book artist best remembered for his work in Heavy Metal magazine. His work also appeared in Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella. All the stories and covers he did for Creepy and Eerie have been reprinted by Dark Horse Books in a single volume: Creepy Presents Richard Corben. Corben collaborated with Brian Azzarello on five issues of Azzarello’s run on Hellblazer, Hellblazer: Hard Time. (Died 2020.)
Born October 1, 1948 — Mike Ashley, 73. Anthologist, and that is somewhat of an understatement, as the Mammoth Book series by itself ran to thirty volumes including such titles as The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy and The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures. He also did The History of the Science Fiction Magazine which features commentary by him. He’s did a number of genre related studies including The History of the Science Fiction Magazine with Robert A. W. Lowndes and Out of This World: Science Fiction But Not As You Know It.
Born October 1, 1950 — Natalia Nogulich, 71. She’s best remembered as being on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine as Vice Admiral/Fleet Admiral Alynna Nechayev. Interestingly, though Serbian, they gave her a Russian surname. She was the voice for Mon Mothma for the radio adaptation of Return of the Jedi. She had one-offs on Dark Skies, Prey, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Charmed.
Born October 1, 1953 — John Ridley, 68. Author of Those Who Walk in Darkness and What Fire Cannot Burn novels. Both excellent though high on the violence cringe scale. Extremely high. Writer on the Static Shock and Justice League series. Writer, The Authority: human on the inside graphic novel. And apparently he was the writer for Team Knight Rider, a female version of Knight Rider that lasted but one season in the Nineties. I’ve never even heard of it until now. In 2021, Ridley began writing a number of series for DC Comics Including a future Batman story.
Born October 1, 1973 — Rachel Manija Brown, 48. Co-writer of the Change series with Sherwood Smith; Laura’s Wolf, first volume of the Werewolf Marines series. She wrote an essay entitled “The Golden Age of Fantasy Is Twelve: SF and the Young Adult Novel” which was published in Strange Horizons. She’s well stocked at the usual digital suspects.
Born October 1, 1989 — Brie Larson, 32. Captain Marvel in the Marvel film universe including of course the most excellent Captain Marvel which was nominated for a Hugo at CoNZealand. She’s also been in Kong: Skull Island as Mason Weaver, and plays Kit in the Unicorn Store which she also directed and produced. Her first genre role was Rachael in the “Into the Fire” episode of the Touched by an Angel series; she also appeared as Krista Eisenburg in the “Slam” episode of Ghost Whisperer. I wrote up a review of her Funko Rock Candy figure at Green Man.

(13) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater shows what Dracula found at the joke shop.

(14) SUIT SETTLED. Everybody’s now “proud” and “pleased”, but as one might expect terms of the settlement were not released. “Scarlett Johansson, Disney Lawsuit Settled Over ‘Black Widow’” says The Hollywood Reporter.

“I am happy to have resolved our differences with Disney,” stated Johansson. “I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve done together over the years and have greatly enjoyed my creative relationship with the team. I look forward to continuing our collaboration in years to come.”
Disney Studios chairman Alan Bergman added: “I’m very pleased that we have been able to come to a mutual agreement with Scarlett Johansson regarding Black Widow. We appreciate her contributions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and look forward to working together on a number of upcoming projects, including Disney’s Tower of Terror.”…

The New York Times adds:

… Ms. Johansson would have made tens of millions of dollars in box office bonuses if “Black Widow” had approached $1 billion in global ticket sales; “Captain Marvel” and “Black Panther” both exceeded that threshold in prepandemic release, so similar turnout for “Black Widow” was not out of the question.
The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Creative Artists had privately asked Disney to pay Ms. Johansson $80 million — on top of her base salary of $20 million — to compensate for lost bonuses. Disney did not respond with a counteroffer, prompting her to sue….

(15) JEOPARDY! While watching last night’s Jeopardy!, Andrew Porter’s jaw dropped when a contestant came up with this response.

Final Jeopardy: Children’s Literature
Answer: A 2000 Library of Congress exhibit called this 1900 work “America’s greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale.”
Wrong question: What is “Shrek”?
Right question: What is “The Wizard of Oz”?

(16) JUSTWATCH – SEPTEMBER TOP 10S. Here are the top sff movies and streaming shows of September 2021 according to JustWatch. (Click for larger images.)

(17) WEEKS LATER, THESE ESCAPEES ARE STILL WEARING STRIPES. I’m having trouble thinking of a way to connect this to science fiction, thereby justifying the presence in the Scroll of an item that amuses me. Any suggestions? “A Month Later, Five Zebras Are Still on the Run in Maryland” from the New York Times.

…A month after they escaped from a farm in Maryland, five zebras have evaded capture and are continuing to ramble across the wilds of suburban Prince George’s County, eking out a living on territory far from the grasslands of East Africa.
… Daniel I. Rubenstein, a professor of zoology at Princeton University, said he was not surprised that the zebras had proved so elusive.
Unlike domesticated horses that will return to a barn after they’ve gotten loose, zebras are wild animals and “don’t like people generally,” he said. And they may not have any need to feed on the grain set out for them as bait, if they can find enough food to munch elsewhere.
If the zebras continue to elude capture, “they should be able to do just fine” in Prince George’s County, Dr. Rubinstein said.
The county has plenty of lawns, fields and pastures where the zebras can graze, as well as streams and other places for them to drink water, which they need to do once a day, he said.
And with the dearth of lions in the Greater Washington area, they have no natural predators, he said, adding, “coyotes they can deal with.”
While zebras “won’t like snow,” they may be able to survive colder weather in the fall and winter. Zebras, he said, live on the slopes of Mount Kenya, at 13,000 feet, where temperatures at night dip into the 30s.
“They should be able to thrive quite nicely,” Dr. Rubinstein said. “They will be able to sustain themselves naturally on that landscape.”…

(18) NOW AT BAT. Possibly too sciency but then many are interested in SARS-CoV-2 source…. “Laos Bats Host Closest Known Relatives Of Virus Behind Covid” in Nature.

Studies show southeast Asia is a hotspot for potentially dangerous viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2. Scientists have found three viruses in bats in Laos that are more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than any known viruses. Researchers say that parts of their genetic code bolster claims that the virus behind COVID-19 has a natural origin — but their discovery also raises fears that there are numerous coronaviruses with the potential to infect people.

(19) CHERNOBYL BACK IN NEWS. This is worrying: Radiation levels are rising around reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which suffered the catastrophic meltdown in 1986: “Chernobyl’s Blown Up Reactor 4 Just Woke Up” in History of Yesterday. The article explores several hypothetical explanations why this could happen.

… Scientists from Ukraine have placed many sensors around reactor 4 that constantly monitor the level of radioactivity. Recently those sensors have detected a constant increase in the level of radioactivity. It seems that this radioactivity is coming from an unreachable chamber from underneath reactor 4 that has been blocked since the night of the explosion on the 26th of April, 1986….

(20) TINGLE TALK. Dominic Noble decided to answer the question “Is Chuck Tingle A Good Writer?” and reviewed 25 of Tingle’s books.

…A question kept occurring to me over and over again that no one seemed to be addressing. Chuck Tingle is a pretty cool guy. Chuck Tingle is great at titles and covers. But are his books actually any good? Is chuck tingle a good writer? Now I feel the need to immediately qualify this. I am aware that it doesn’t matter. His books make people happy even if they’ve not read them which is quite an achievement. His inclusivity means a lot to people and his general behavior be it amusingly bizarre or the unashamedly progressive matters more in this crazy world we’re living in than if he can rock a good three-act structure…

(21) YA COMMENTARY. YouTuber Sarah Z analyzes “The Rise and Fall of Teen Dystopias”.

[Thanks to, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, Mike Kennedy, Jennifer Hawthorne, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Cora Buhlert, Paul Di Filippo, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cliff, with an assist from OGH.]

Pixel Scroll 9/13/20 Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mrs. Pixel?

Posted on September 13, 2020 by Mike Glyer

(1) MINORITY REPORT? The Tampa Bay Times says “Pasco’s sheriff created a futuristic program to stop crime before it happens. It monitors and harasses families across the county.”.

Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco took office in 2011 with a bold plan: to create a cutting-edge intelligence program that could stop crime before it happened.
What he actually built was a system to continuously monitor and harass Pasco County residents, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.
First the Sheriff’s Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts.
Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.
They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.

(2) STAR TREKKING WITH WILL SMTH? We Got This Covered’s source told them “Paramount Reportedly Eyeing Will Smith For Big Star Trek Role”.

…According to our intel – which comes from the same sources that told us Captain Pike would be getting his own spinoff long before Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was announced – the studio are keen to recruit Will Smith to play a Starfleet captain. Although, at this time, it isn’t yet clear exactly what movie they’re eying him for.
After all, the canonical Star Trek 4 and Noah Hawley’s unrelated take on the material are both still rooted firmly in development hell, and Paramount could realistically end up making none or both of those sci-fi blockbusters. Still, with Robert Downey Jr. and Brie Larson both having found themselves linked to Star Trek recently as well, it would certainly appear that the studio are actively seeking an injection of star power to ensure that the next installment in the franchise can make it into production sooner rather than later.

(3) MEET THE MAYOR. Dan Snierson, in the Entertainment Weekly story “Family Guy taps Sam Elliott to succeed Adam West as Mayor: See the first photos” says that three years after Adam West’s death, Family Guy has named Sam Elliott to replace him as mayor of Quahog. Elliott will voice Adam West’s cousin, Wild Wild West. (Adam West’s character on Family Guy was named Adam West.)

…He’ll be playing a key role: the new Mayor of Quahog, a post that became vacant after Adam West — who played Mayor Adam West in more than 100 episodes — died in 2017. West remained a presence on the show into the following year, as several episodes recorded before his death made their debut. Family Guy paid tribute to West several times, but almost two years after the actor’s death, the show finally acknowledged his passing in an episode that saw the high school renamed after him.”We wanted to take the time to respect Adam,” executive producer Richard Appel tells EW. “In having a conversation about ‘How do you replace him?,’ the universal belief was: he’s irreplaceable. And then the next question is, ‘Do you find a new mayor?’ In the world of Family Guy, he had an important role, and a role that was necessary for a lot of stories.”

(4) READING THE TRACKS. Amal El-Mohtar’s latest New York Times Sunday Book Review column “Power and Passage: New Science Fiction and Fantasy” covers Elwin Cotman’s Dance On Saturday (Small Beer Press) and Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds (Del Rey).

The discourse about reading fiction during the pandemic has followed two broad tracks: There are those who take comfort in the activity, and those who have found reading impossibly difficult. I belong to the latter camp, but I’m all the more excited to share the following books, which, while very different in genre and mode, shook me out of listless distraction with their originality.

(5) FACES IN SFF. Camestros Felapton made a discovery.

I'm looking at this picture of SF author James H Schmitz on wikipedia and I love how it looks like he and his dog have switched expressions. The dog is doing the whole visionary author who has seen the face of the future thing.https://t.co/Q7sHbLNdjJ pic.twitter.com/gMDAH8eoI3
— Camestros Felapton (@CamestrosF) September 13, 2020

So that’s James Schmitz! I never saw a photo of him before. Nor saw him in person, even though he lived in LA – he didn’t come to conventions, and I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t answer my invitation to be on a Westercon program, although I suppose I made the attempt because he did interact with a few fannish book reviewers, like Paul Walker. (FYI, there’s a whole website devoted to Schmitz and his works saved at the Internet Archive.)

(6) SHREK GENESIS. [Item by rcade.] Some audio was shared on social media of Chris Farley performing as Shrek with Eddie Murphy as Donkey.

Just learned in a passing comment by @NathanFowkesArt in a @LightBoxExpo VisDev Jam session that Shrek doesn't look like Mike Meyers because he was originally voiced by Chris Farley. RIP. Cool fact I didn't know before. https://t.co/6BJib7ProX
— Steve Muench (@stevemuench) September 12, 2020

Farley, who helped the movie become greenlit by signing on to star in the title role in 1996, had completed 80 to 95 percent of the voice work for the film when he died of a cocaine and morphine overdose. Mike Myers was brought in and the script was rewritten, turning Shrek from sweet and American under Farley to acerbic and Scottish under Myers.

More details at this archived Jim Hill Media link: “How ‘Shrek’ went from being a train wreck to one for the record books”.

…Of course, back then, “Shrek” was supposed to have had a very different storyline. It wasn’t a movie about an ogre who just wanted to be left alone in his swamp. But — rather — it was about a teenage ogre who wasn’t all that eager to go into the family business. You see, young Shrek didn’t really want to frighten people. He longed to make friends, help people. This ogre actually dreamed of becoming a knight.
This was the version of “Shrek” that Chris Farley was working on just prior to his untimely death in December 1997. According to folks that I’ve spoken with who worked on this version of the film, Farley’s voice work on the project was nothing short of heroic.

(7) YOU’RE THE TOP. The Guardian’s E Foley and B Coates rank “Top 10 goddesses in fiction”. Tagline: “In ancient myth – and novels by authors from Neil Gaiman to Toni Morrison – these ambiguous figures are sometimes repressive, sometimes inspiring.” Free registration required to read.

(8) SHORT CHANGED. Camestros Felapton finds out “Which Hugo story finalists don’t have a Wikipedia page”. But should they?

My capacity to generate (rather than just make-up) trivia increases every week. Today I get to tell you which Hugo Finalists in Novel, Novella, Novelette and Short Story do not currently have a Wikipedia page.

(9) CAMPAIGN BEGINS. “300 years on, will thousands of women burned as witches finally get justice?” – The Guardian reports they might.

It spanned more than a century and a half, and resulted in about 2,500 people – the vast majority of them women – being burned at the stake, usually after prolonged torture. Remarkably, one of the driving forces behind Scotland’s “satanic panic” was no less than the king, James VI, whose treatise, Daemonologie, may have inspired the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Now, almost 300 years after the Witchcraft Act was repealed, a campaign has been launched for a pardon for those convicted, an apology to all those accused and a national memorial to be created.
“There should be an acknowledgement that what happened to these women was a terrible miscarriage of justice,” Claire Mitchell QC, the campaign’s founder, told the Observer. She pointed out that in Salem, the Massachusetts town where a series of infamous witchcraft trials took place in the 1690s, a formal apology for the 200 accused and 20 executed was issued in 1957. In Scotland – where 3,837 people were accused, two-thirds of whom are believed to have been put to death – there has been no such recognition….

(10) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.

September 2005 — Fifteen years ago at Interaction, Susanna Clarke‘s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell won the Best Novel Hugo. The other finalists were River of Gods by Ian McDonald, The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks, Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross and Iron Council by China Miéville. It would be her last novel for fifteen years with only her only other work then being a collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories with illustrations by Charles Vess. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is also available in audiobook form as narrated most excellently by Simon Prebble. A BBC television adaptation was done ten years after publication. In 2006, it was reported that she suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome which she very recently reported that she had recovered from. Her second and soon-to-be-released novel is Piranesi which is not follow-up to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

Born September 13, 1898 – Arthur J. Burks. Served in the U.S. Marines during both World Wars, eventually retiring as lieutenant colonel. Resigned after WW I, became a million-word-a-year man for the pulps, re-enlisted, wrote again afterward, perhaps 800 stories for us and others. Interviewed in the May 33 SF Digest by Julie Schwartz and Mort Weisinger, later more famous than he. (Died 1974) [JH]
Born September 13, 1926 — Roald Dahl. Did you know he wrote the screenplay for You Only Live Twice? Or that he hosted and wrote for a sf and horror television anthology series called Way Out which aired before The Twilight Zone for a season? He also hosted the UK Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. My favorite Dahl work is The BFG. What’s yours? (Died 1990.) (CE)
Born September 13, 1931 — Barbara Bain, 89. She’s most remembered for co-starring in the original Mission: Impossible television series in the 1960s as Cinnamon Carter, and Space: 1999 as Doctor Helena Russell. I will confess that I never watched the latter. Her first genre role was as Alma in the “KAOS in CONTROL” episode of Get Smart! (CE)
Born September 13, 1937 – Dick Eney. Active fan from 1949, including fanzines, filking, cons; also our neighbor the Society for Creative Anachronism. Program Books for Discon I and II the 21st and 32nd Worldcons. Toastmaster at the first Conterpoint. Published Fancyclopedia II. Fan Guest of Honor at L.A.con II the 42nd Worldcon. Witty but pushed his prejudices; could be pithy and poisonous: earned applause, but we all knew It’s Eney’s fault! (Died 2006) [JH]
Born September 13, 1943 – Mary Kay Bray. Scholar whose work in the Black American Literature Forum, Extrapolation, Fantasy Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and the SF Research Ass’n Review led the SFRA in 2002 to establish the annual Mary Kay Bray Award for the best essay, interview, or extended review to appear in SFRA Review. Filer Rich Horton is currently on the Award Committee. (Died 1999) [JH]
Born September 13, 1946 — Frank Marshall, 74. Producer of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Indian in the Cupboard to name but a few he’s produced; there’s an even a longer list of films that he’s been involved in as an executive producer. His upcoming projects are the animated Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous series and the Jurassic World: Dominion film. (CE)
Born September 13, 1947 — Mike Grell, 73. He’s best known for his work on books such as Green Lantern/Green Arrow, The Warlord, and Jon Sable Freelance. The Warlord featuring Travis Morgan is a hollow Earth adventure series set in Skartaris which is a homage to Jules Verne. As Grell points out “the name comes from the mountain peak Scartaris that points the way to the passage to the earth’s core in Journey to the Center of the Earth.” The Justice League Unlimited “Chaos at the Earth’s Core“ episode made use of this story. (CE)
Born September 13, 1960 – Bob Eggleton, F.N., 60. Almost five hundred covers and eight hundred interiors. Magic, the Gathering cards. Fellow of NESFA (New England SF Ass’n; service award). Many times a Guest of Honor, e.g. Loscon 27, Norwescon XXIV, Balticon 39, MidSouthCon 26, Lunacon 60 (with wife Marianne Plumridge); Chicon 6 the 58th Worldcon. Artbooks Alien Horizons, Greetings from Earth, seven more. Gaughan; Skylark; twelve Chesleys including Artistic Achievement; eight Hugos. International expert on Godzilla. Here is Thrust 26. Here is Why Do Birds. Here is the Chicon 6 Souvenir Book (logograph “Chicon 2000” with Space ships at upper right). Here is the Jul-Aug 08 Analog. Here is A Bicycle Built for Brew. Here is the Nov-Dec 19 F&SF. [JH]
Born September 13, 1961 — Tom Holt, 59. Assuming you like comical fantasy, I’d recommend both Faust Among Equals and Who Afraid of Beowulf? as being well worth time. If you madly, deeply into Wagner, you’ll love Expecting Someone Taller; if not, skip it. (CE)
Born September 13, 1974 — Fiona Avery, 46. Comic book and genre series scriptwriter. While being a reference editor on the final season of Babylon 5, she wrote “The Well of Forever” and “Patterns of the Soul” as well as two that were not produced, “Value Judgements” and “Tried and True”. After work on the Crusade series ended, she turned to comic book writing, working for Marvel and Top Cow with three spin-offs of J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars being another place where her scripts were used. She created the Marvel character Anya Sofia Corazon later named Spider-girl. (CE)
Born September 13, 1977 – Pola Oloixarac, 43. One of Granta’s Best Young Spanish Novelists (2010). Founding editor of bilingual Buenos Aires Review. Savage Theories and Dark Constellations translated into English. Has presented at Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford, Univ. Toronto. Of Theories she says “The book has sparked verbal violence and a sexist uproar precisely because it doesn’t deal with … issues … traditionally associated with ‘women’s literature’, but instead contains … traits solely reserved for men.” [JH]
Born September 13, 1978 – Scarlett Algee, 42. A dozen short stories for us; since Apr 2019 managing editor at JournalStone Publishing. Has read nine of the sixteen Sheckley collections I know of, and ranks them, low to high: Divine Intervention (about even with How the Irish Saved Civilization), The People Trap, Shards of Space and Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?, Pilgrimage to Earth and Notions Unlimited, Citizen in Space, Untouched by Human Hands, Store of Infinity (above Les Misérables). [JH]

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro shows the kind of episode you can end up with if you misspell Star Trek.
And is Ziggy witnessing the Prime Directive being applied to himself?

(13) STAY HOME. Some of the principals of an independently-produced genre movie are asking that you not go out to see it. Gizmodo/io9 has the story: “Directors of Synchronic Ask You to Please Not Go See Their Movie”.

In a statement posted on Instagram, the three creators say that, “at the time of writing this, we personally wouldn’t go to an indoor movie theater, so we can’t encourage you to.” They explain that the film’s distribution situation is out of their control, and assure audiences that the film will be available via on-demand “in a few months” for those who want to watch it without risking their lives.

(14) ANOTHER THREE-LETTER WRITERS GROUP REPLACES MOST OF ITS BOARD. The International Thriller Writers are regrouping and electing a new board after an internal meltdown almost as bad as though less public than RWA’s – Publishers Weekly has the story: “International Thriller Writers Regroup After Resignations”.

Less than three months after the resignations of all but two members of the International Thriller Writers association’s board of directors, the organization is rebuilding to better serve its members with an eye towards avoiding the recent controversies that have plagued it and several other organizations serving writers. Like other organizations, including most recently, the National Book Critics Circle, ITW has been forced to confront charges of racial insensitivity. ITW is also dealing with the aftermath of charges lodged with the organization as well as with Dallas, Tex. police that a male author affiliated with ITW allegedly assaulted a female author during a conference in late fall, 2019.
ITW members recently voted on a slate of 11 mystery and thriller authors who will join its board beginning in mid-October, including such notables as Anthony Horowitz and C.J. Box. Half of the new members are female, including Karin Slaughter, Kathy Reichs, and Lisa Gardner. ITW has created a new committee, diversity and outreach, headed by incoming board member Alexia Gordon. Veteran board officer Heather Graham and incoming board member Gregg Hurwitz will serve as co-presidents of the 12-member board.
In addition, in July the 16-year-old organization established a security and safety committee to draft a comprehensive process for dealing with violations of its code of conduct policies. The six-member committee includes at least one survivor of assault, a law enforcement officer, a district attorney, a psychologist, and a victim’s rights lawyer.

(15) RETRO VISIONS CONTINUE. Cora Buhlert recently revisited the first two Jirel of Joiry stories by C.L. Moore, “Black God’s Kiss” and “Black God’s Shadow,” gaining insights into the sword and sorcery genre in the process:

“Retro Review: “Black God’s Kiss” by C.L. Moore or How to Suppress Women’s Sword and Sorcery Writing”

As I said a few posts ago, I will be reviewing vintage SFF stories beyond the confines of the Retro Hugos as well, beginning with “Black God’s Kiss”, a sword and sorcery novelette by C.L. Moore that was the cover story of the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales and also introduced the swordswoman Jirel of Joiry to the world. The story may be read online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.
Warning: Spoilers beyond this point! Also trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence.

“Retro Review: “Black God’s Shadow” by C.L. Moore or Overcoming Trauma as a Core Theme of Sword and Sorcery”

…Warning: Spoilers beyond this point! Also trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence.
“Black God’s Shadow” takes place a few weeks or even months after “Black God’s Kiss”. Our heroine Jirel of Joiry is still haunted by the events in the previous story and it shows…

(16) RAMMING SPEED. [Item by Contrarius.] The beginning of the rebellion of nature? A plot for a new movie — “The Orcas” instead of “The Birds”? “Scientists baffled by orcas ramming sailing boats near Spain and Portugal” in The Guardian.

In the last two months, from southern to northern Spain, sailors have sent distress calls after worrying encounters. Two boats lost part of their rudders, at least one crew member suffered bruising from the impact of the ramming, and several boats sustained serious damage.
The latest incident occurred on Friday afternoon just off A Coruña, on the northern coast of Spain. Halcyon Yachts was taking a 36ft boat to the UK when an orca rammed its stern at least 15 times, according to Pete Green, the company’s managing director. The boat lost steering and was towed into port to assess damage.

A second article in The Guardian — Whalemageddon! “‘I’ve never seen or heard of attacks’: scientists baffled by orcas harassing boats”.

…The pod rammed the boat for more than an hour, during which time the crew were too busy getting the sails in, readying the life raft and radioing a mayday – “Orca attack!” – to feel fear. The moment fear kicked in, Morris says, was when she went below deck to prepare a grab bag – the stuff you take when abandoning ship. “The noise was really scary. They were ramming the keel, there was this horrible echo, I thought they could capsize the boat. And this deafening noise as they communicated, whistling to each other. It was so loud that we had to shout.” It felt, she says, “totally orchestrated”.
The crew waited a tense hour and a half for rescue – perhaps understandably, the coastguard took time to comprehend (“You are saying you are under attack from orca?”). To say this is unusual is to massively understate it. By the time help arrived, the orcas were gone. The boat was towed to Barbate, where it was lifted to reveal the rudder missing its bottom third and outer layer, and teeth marks along the underside….

(17) D@MN ROBOTS. Abandon hope, all ye who own phones. Inverse reports a study: “Does ignoring robocalls make them stop? Researchers uncover 2 key findings”.

More than 80 percent of robocalls come from fake numbers – and answering these calls or not has no effect on how many more you’ll get. Those are two key findings of an 11-month study into unsolicited phone calls that we conducted from February 2019 to January 2020.
To better understand how these unwanted callers operate, we monitored every phone call received to over 66,000 phone lines in our telephone security lab, the Robocall Observatory at North Carolina State University. We received 1.48 million unsolicited phone calls over the course of the study. Some of these calls we answered, while others we let ring. Contrary to popular wisdom, we found that answering calls makes no difference in the number of robocalls received by a phone number. The weekly volume of robocalls remained constant throughout the study.

(18) DAY GO SNOW, DAY GO SLEET, DAGOBAH. Starbuck’s “Been There” series of cups includes this souvenir of Dagobah. This one is “pre-owned.” I wonder when this series came out.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/22/20 Then Curl Up On The Pile And Sleep For A While, It’s The Scrolliest Thing, It’s The Pixel Dream

Posted on April 22, 2020 by Mike Glyer

(1) DRAGON CON STILL ON SCHEDULE. Dragon Con told Facebook readers today they are proceeding with plans for their Labor Day event.

Many things in the world are uncertain right now. One thing isn’t: We are planning to throw one sorely-needed, amazing celebration come Labor Day. We’re moving forward to keep #DragonCon2020 on schedule.
Currently, there are no plans to reschedule or cancel the event, however we’re keeping in touch with the experts either way, and working with our venue partners to make sure everything and everyone stays safe, happy, and healthy.
Rest assured if at any time we feel that cannot be accomplished, we will do what is needed to protect our community.

(2) POPPING OFF. Gideon Marcus used a clever theme to pull together Galactic Journey’s review of the latest issue – in 1965 – of F&SF: “[APRIL 22, 1965] CRACKER JACK ISSUE (MAY 1965 FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION)”.

I’m sure everyone’s familiar with America’s snack, as ubiquitous at ball games as beer and hotdogs. As caramel corn goes, it’s pretty mediocre stuff, though once you start eating, you find you can’t stop. And the real incentive is the prize waiting for you at the bottom of the box. Will it be a ring? A toy or a little game? Maybe a baseball card.
This month, like most months recently, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is kind of like a box of Cracker Jacks. But the prize at the end of the May 1965 issue is worth the chore of getting there.

(3) PATREON’S UNLUCKY NUMBER. “Patreon lays off 13% of workforce” reports TechCrunch.

Creative platform Patreon has laid off 30 employees, which is 13% of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned.
“It is unclear how long this economic uncertainty will last and therefore, to prepare accordingly, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with 13% of Patreon’s workforce,” a Patreon spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “This decision was not made lightly and consisted of several other factors beyond the financial ones.”
…The startup ecosystem has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, with layoffs no longer the exception, but the rule. Still, it’s peculiar timing for Patreon, given the company touted an increase in new memberships during the first three weeks of March….

(4) VISITOR FROM BEYOND. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Jeff Hecht (who’s sold sf stories everywhere from Analog, Asimov’s and Interzone to Nature and various anthologies — ) has an article in the April 21, 2020 Sky & Telescope on recent interstellar visitors: “The Origins of Interstellar Objects”.

…Comet Borisov was easy to recognize as a comet, but our first interstellar visitor, 1I/’Oumuamua, was like nothing astronomers had seen before. It was elongated, tumbling erratically, porous, moving oddly, releasing only wisps of gas — even evoking thoughts of derelict alien spaceship….

In terms of SF relevance (beyond “we also are interested in science fact stuff”), Jeff notes, regarding this article, “The only SF twist was saying they finally found a way to explain the origin of ‘Oumuamua other than as an alien spacecraft.”

(5) MOORCOCK REVEALED WHEN PAYWALL FALLS. Stacy Hollister’s “A Q&A With Michael Moorcock” is an interview with Michael Moorcock about his novel King Of The City that first appeared in the November 2002 Texas Monthly, which has lowered its paywall for the rest of the year.

texasmonthly.com: What’s your mission as a writer?
MM: I’m very moralistic. I think I bear a certain responsibility for the effect of the fiction I write. Anger at injustice, cruelty, or ignorance is what tends to fire me up. I try to show readers where we might all be wearing cultural blinders. I hate imperialism, so therefore much of my early work was an attempt to show admirers of the British Empire, say, what kind of injustice, prejudice and hypocrisy such an empire is based on. I am very uneasy with current Anglophone rhetoric about responsibilities to other parts of the world, for instance. King of the City deals with some of this, especially the destruction of African society by imperial rapacity.

(6) SMALL SHOW RECAP – BEWARE SPOILERS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Last night on DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, the time ship ended up in British Columbia in 2020 and ended up in a woods which ultimately led them to the set of Supernatural. They didn’t see any members of the cast, but they did see Sam and Dean’s car and opened the trunk, which was full of monster-fighting equipment. They then used the equipment to fight a bunch of zombie-like creatures, and learn the creatures have killed the crew shooting Supernatural.

“How will they finish season 15?” one of the legends asks.

Well, now we know why Supernatural still has seven episodes left to shoot…

(7) ENTERTAINMENT FOR SJW CREDENTIAL OWNERS. Martin Morse Wooster, our designated Financial Times reader, peeked behind the paywall and found that in the April 17 issue Sarah Hemming reviews fiction podcasts.

Nadia, star of Russian For Cats (created by Pam Cameron), has escaped from prison and is desperately seeking refuge. She discovers it with Brian, a loser who lives in a caravan in a state of great disorder and despondency. When Nadia arrives, he finds a confidante and she finds sanctuary.
The only thing is, Nadia is a cat: a talking cat fluent in Russian. Here’s a story ideally suited to lockdown :a gently absurd thriller, featuring a chatty feline, the chance to learn Russian (a short lesson follows each episode), and a sinister explanation for popularity of cat memes. Is your cat spying on you? Do you need to ask?

(8) MT. TSUNDOKU CALLS YOU. Steven Cooper today made the Asimov biblioraphy that was referenced in the Scroll a few days ago available to purchase as a print-on-demand book from Lulu — An Annotated Bibliography for Isaac Asimov. Thanks to Bill for the discovery.

(9) CASEY OBIT. Past President of the Philadelphia SF Society Hugh Casey died April 21 after a long illness, including a stroke. He is survived by his partner Stephanie Lucas.

In happier times Hugh made File 770 with this humorous incident from 2002:

Philadelphia SF Club President Hugh Casey almost made his show business debut in September. “I was supposed to be checking out an alternate location for meetings, but was unable to make it due to being held up in traffic. In fact I ended up driving into the middle of filming for Kevin Smith’s upcoming movie Jersey Girl – apparently disrupting a shot and getting some crew members very angry at me. I did not see either the director or the stars.”

In 2017, when Casey battled cancer, his friends rallied to raise money for his medical expenses by creating “HughCon” –

…The Rotunda has donated their space, Star Trek-themed band The Roddenberries have donated their time and talent, a number of makers and vendors have donated items for our silent auction, and a lots of people have donated their time and effort

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY.

April 22, 1953 — Invaders from Mars premiered. It directed by William Cameron Menzies and produced by Edward L. Alperson Jr. from the script written by Richard Blake with the story by John Tucker Battle. It starred Jimmy Hunt, Helena Carter, Arthur Franz, Morris Ankrum, Leif Erickson, and Hillary Brooke. Invaders from Mars was nominated for a Retro-Hugo at Noreascon 4 but lost out to The War of The Worlds. Critics at the time liked it quite a bit, and At Rotten Tomatoes, it holds an approval rating of 82% among audience reviewers. You can watch it here.

April 22, 1959 — The Monster Of Piedras Blancas enjoyed its premiere. It was produced by Jack Kevan who started out as a makeup artist on The Wizard of Oz as written and directed by Irvin Berwick who was associate produced later on for The Loch Ness Horror. The screenplay was by H. Haile Chace It starred Jeanne Carmen, Les Tremayne, John Harmon, Don Sullivan, Forrest Lewis, and Pete Dunn. It received universally negative criticism with most calling it amateurish with the script, dialogue, and monster design being noted s being bad. It holds a not terribly bad 33% rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. You’re in for for a special treat as you can see it here.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 22, 1902 — Philip Latham. Name used by Robert Shirley Richardson on his genre work. His novels were largely first published in Astounding starting in the Forties, With the exception of his children’s SF novels that were published in Space Science Fiction Magazine. He also wrote a few scripts for Captain Video, the predecessor of Captain Video and his Video Rangers. His Comeback novel starts this way: ‘ When Parkhurst heard the announcement that climaxed the science fiction convention, he found that he’d been right, years ago when he had faith in science-fictionists’ dreams. But, in another way, he’d been wrong . . .’ It’s available at the usual digital suspects for a buck. (Died 1981.)
Born April 22, 1934 — Sheldon Jaffery. An editor and bibliographer of pulps whose non-fiction Work and genre anthologies are both fascinating. Among the latter are such publications as Sensuous Science Fiction From the Weird and Spicy Pulps and The Weirds: A Facsimile Selection of Fiction From the Era of the Shudder Pulps, and from the former are Future and Fantastic Worlds: Bibliography of DAW Books, The Arkham House Companion: Fifty Years of Arkham House and Collector’s Index to Weird Tales. (Died 2003.)
Born April 22, 1937 — Jack Nicholson, 82. I think my favorite role for him in a genre film was as Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick. Other genre roles include Jack Torrance in The Shining, Wilbur Force in The Little Shop of Horrors, Rexford Bedlo in The Raven, Andre Duvalier in The Terror, (previous three films are all Roger Corman productions), Will Randall in Wolf, President James Dale / Art Land in Mars Attacks! and Jack Napier aka The Joker in Tim Burton’s The Batman. I watched the last one, was not impressed.
Born April 22, 1944 — Damien Broderick, 76. Australian writer of over seventy genre novels. It is said that The Judas Mandala novel contains the first appearance of the term “virtual reality” in SF. He’s won five Ditmar Awards, a remarkable achievement. I know I’ve read several novels by him including Godplayers and K-Machines which are quite good.
Born April 22, 1967 — Sheryl Lee, 53. Best remembered as being cast by David Lynch as Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson in Twin Peaks and in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and reprised in the later Twin Peaks. Her other interesting genre role was playing the title role in Guinevere based on Persia Woolley’s Guinevere trilogy. Finally, she was Katrina in John Carpenter’s Vampires for which she won the very cool sounding Fangoria Chainsaw Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Born April 22, 1977 – Kate Baker, 43. Editor along with with Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace of the last two print issues Clarkesworld. She’s won the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine twice, and the World Fantasy Award (Special Award: Non Professional) in 2014, all alongside the editorial staff of Clarkesworld. She’s a writer of three short genre stories, the latest of which, “No Matter Where; Of Comfort No One Speak”, you can hear here. (Warning for subject matters abuse and suicide.)
Born April 22, 1978 — Manu Intiraymi, 42. He played the former Borg Icheb on the television series Star Trek: Voyager. A role that he played a remarkable eleven times. And this Birthday research led me to discovering yet another video Trek fanfic, this time in guise of Star Trek: Renegades in which he reprised his role. Any Trekkies here watch this?
Born April 22, 1984 — Michelle Ryan, 36. She had the odd honor of being a Companion to the Tenth Doctor as Lady Christina de Souza for just one story, “Planet of the Dead”. She had a somewhat longer genre run as the rebooted Bionic Woman that lasted eight episodes, and early in her career, she appeared as the sorceress Nimueh in BBC’s Merlin. Finally I’ll note she played Helena from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in BBC’s Learning project, Off By Heart Shakespeare.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater shows why October cannot come too soon.
Bliss finds the visual that perfectly matches a misreading of a common yard sign.
The Far Side witnesses a dragon tragedy.
Bob the Angry Flower finds that with baby aliens the squee fades quickly.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal unpacks the “AI and trolleys” ethical dilemma.

(13) BREAKTHROUGH. In the Washington Post, Michael Cavna profiles Steenz (pseudonym of Christina Stewart) and Bianca Xunise as two African-American comic strip creators who have broken into the world of newspaper comic strips, as Steenz has taken over Heart of the City and Xunise has joined the artists producing Six Chix. “Newspaper comics hardly ever feature black women as artists. But two new voices have arrived.”

“The ‘powers that be’ — white male editors at white publications — have kept folks of color to a minimum on their pages so as not to cause a stir. That’s the case still,” says Barbara Brandon-Croft, whose trailblazing strip “Where I’m Coming From” was distributed by Universal Press Syndicate from 1991 to 2005 — making her the first black woman to achieve national mainstream syndication as a cartoonist.
“You had to go to the black newspapers — as early as the ’30s — to find black characters drawn by black hands,” she says. ”And a black woman lead — what? Jackie Ormes’s ‘Torchy Brown’ was truly groundbreaking.” (Ormes, the first African American woman to have a syndicated comic strip, was elected to the Will Eisner Comics Hall of Fame in 2018.)

(14) KEEP THEM DOGIES MOVIN’. There’s money to be made! “‘The Mandalorian’ Season 3 Already in the Works at Disney Plus”.

The October premiere date for Season 2 of “The Mandalorian” may still feel like it’s far, far away, but pre-production has already begun on a third installment of the wildly popular Disney Plus series, Variety has learned exclusively.
Sources close to the production have confirmed that creator Jon Favreau has been “writing season 3 for a while,” and that the art department, led by Lucasfilm vice president and executive creative director Doug Chiang, has been creating concepts for Season 3 “for the past few weeks.”
…The Mouse House also has two others series from a Galaxy far, far away in the works, namely an Obi-Wan Kenobi series with Ewan McGregor reprising the iconic role, and a Cassian Andor series starring Diego Luna, which recently added Stellan Skarsgard and Kyle Soller, as Variety reported exclusively.

(15) RELIEF FOR COMICS STORES. “Comic Book Publishers Unite for Fund to Help Stores” — The Hollywood Reporter runs the numbers.

As the comic book industry seeks to rebuild in the wake of store closures and publication pauses caused by the coronavirus outbreak, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (BINC) is announcing the formation of a new fund specifically aimed at assisting comics, the Comicbook United Fund.
Combining the $100,000 pledged last year to BINC from the Oni-Lion Forge Publishing Group to support comic book retailers with the $250,000 pledged earlier this month by DC, the Comicbook United Fund is intended to be the central location for any and all figures and organizations hoping to raise money for comic book retailers.

(16) EMERGENCY. The roleplaying game designer Guy McLimore (FASA’s Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game, Mekton Empire, The Fantasy Trip) says he had to break social distancing for an exceptionally good reason:

Broke distancing today; no choice. Young woman across the street fled her abusive husband & I found her hiding in my back yard. Brought her in, but couldn’t convince her to go to a women’s shelter. A friend came to get her. Barbara gave her supplies from our stash.(1 of ?)
— Guy “Couchguy” McLimore (@couchguy) April 22, 2020

(17) STEWARDS OF THE FUTURE. Wil Wheaton penned a visionary essay to accompany his voicing of a C.L. Moore audio story — “Radio Free Burrito Presents: The Tree of Life by CL Moore”.

…I’m sure, in her incredible, gifted, magnificent imagination, she never even considered for a second that, almost 100 years into her future, someone whose parents weren’t yet born would take her work, bring it to life in a unique way, and then distribute that new work to anyone who wants it, in the world, without even getting out of my desk chair.
What amazing thing is sitting just over our horizon? What amazing thing is waiting for our grandchildren that we can’t even imagine right now? Why aren’t we doing more to protect our planet and each other, so our grandchildren don’t have to live in some apocalyptic nightmare?

(18) RELIC. “Hawking’s family donate ventilator to hospital”.

Stephen Hawking’s personal ventilator has been donated to the hospital where he was often treated to help patients diagnosed with coronavirus.

The physicist, who had motor neurone disease, died in 2018, aged 76.

His family donated the medical equipment he bought himself to the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge.
Prof Hawking’s daughter Lucy said the hospital was “incredibly important” to her father and Dr Mike Davies said staff were “so grateful” to the family.

(19) SPEAKING IN PARSELTONGUES. “Scientists discover a new snake and name it after Salazar Slytherin” – CNN has the story.

A team of researchers from India, upon discovering a new species of green pit vipers, have decided to name the snake after the one, the only Salazar Slytherin. Their findings were published this month in the journal Zoosystematics and Evolution.
For those not familiar with Harry Potter, a quick history lesson. In a nutshell, Salazar Slytherin was one of the founders of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, along with his pals Godric Gryffindor, Rowena Ravenclaw and Helga Hufflepuff.
Along with being some of the most powerful witches and wizards of their time in the Harry Potter world, they’re also the namesakes of the four Hogwarts houses.
Slytherin, partly known for his ability to talk to snakes, is linked to the animals — the snake is, after all, the symbol of the Slytherin Hogwarts house. That’s why the researchers chose the name Trimeresurus salazar.

(20) NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH. NBC’s Dallas/Ft. Worth affiliate sent a crew to capture this scene: “Stormtrooper Patrols Richardson Neighborhood With Coronavirus-Related Messages”.

A Richardson man who has had a lifelong love of “Star Wars” and particularly stormtroopers, took to the streets to bring a smile and an important message to his neighbors.
Rob Johnson dressed up as a stormtrooper and patrolled the sidewalks near his home carrying signs reminding people “Good guys wear masks” and “move alone, move alone.”
The stormtrooper shows a sense of humor too, with one sign reading, “Have you seen my droid, TP4U?”

Stormtrooper Patrols Richardson Neighborhood With Coronavirus-Related Messages –> https://t.co/jjWDGmqkZ9
— NBC DFW (@NBCDFW) April 22, 2020

(21) TV TIME. Edgar Wright’s doing a thing on Twitter:

Name just one comedy show and, in your opinion, its greatest episode. NO lists, just put one show, one episode.

For example:

The Young Ones: 'Bambi' – Series 2, Episode 1.
— edgarwright (@edgarwright) April 21, 2020

Not specifically genre related but it looks fun. Here’s some relevant replies:

Quarantine.
It’s very relevant right now pic.twitter.com/ssG49saFiE
— Mike (@DMKylar) April 21, 2020

pic.twitter.com/2aSucTc9TN
— valerie gritsch ? (@valderie) April 21, 2020

https://twitter.com/sdrsn16/status/1252531048044355584

???????????????????????? pic.twitter.com/YMfBriNv6o
— Dominic Burgess (@dominicburgess) April 21, 2020

[Thanks to Cath Jackel, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, rcade, Bill, Daniel Dern, N., and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]

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Tag Archives: C. L. Moore

Pixel Scroll 4/23/25 Pixeler on the Roof

Pixel Scroll 3/20/25 One Ordinary Scroll With Pixels

Pixel Scroll 1/24/25 This Starship Is Bound For Glory, Every Pixel On Her Must Be Scrolly

Pixel Scroll 3/16/24 And The Riverbank Scrolls Of The Pixels Of March

Pixel Scroll 7/8/23 If It Wasn’t For Pixel Scroll, I Wouldn’t Have No Scroll At All!

Classics of SF at Loscon 48

Pixel Scroll 11/2/21 Escape From the Other Pixel Scroll (A Sequel)

Pixel Scroll 10/1/21 Ask Not For Whom The Pixel Scrolls

Pixel Scroll 9/13/20 Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mrs. Pixel?

Pixel Scroll 4/22/20 Then Curl Up On The Pile And Sleep For A While, It’s The Scrolliest Thing, It’s The Pixel Dream