A seven-word letter of support for Palestine Action, declared by the British Government to be a terrorist organization, has been published by Defend Our Juries and sent to the Court of Appeal.
The letter says:
“We oppose genocide, we support Palestine Action”
China Miéville just after winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2010. Photo by Paul Jacques.
It has been signed by over 100 academics, a number of authors, musicians and activists, including China Miéville, Sally Rooney, Lina Meruane and Brian Eno.
The British Government is fighting in the Appeal court next week to overturn a High Court ruling from February that determined the proscription of Palestine Action by the government was “disproportionate and unlawful”, given that most of the action it has undertaken was not on the level or scale of terrorism. However, the high court allowed the law to temporarily remain in effect to allow appeal.
Some 3,000 people have been arrested just for supporting Palestine Action – which they did predominantly by holding placards peacefully stating support.
Members of the direct action organization had damaged planes at RAF Brize Norton and occupied,vandalized and damaged factories of Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit System. One action on August 6, 2024 resulted in a charge of grievous bodily harm, as a Police Sgt. was struck by a sledgehammer.
The peaceful, quiet protests in support of Palestine Action have continued. Over 500 people were arrested at the beginning of the month at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square.
The Open Letter is on the Defend Our Juries website and the organization is allowing the public to add their names. There is a very serious risk to the signatories of being arrested which the Defend Our Juries website cautions anyone before they sign.
A direct link to the letter and signatories is here.
A cardboard box found in a collector’s “ramshackle” collection of vintage films contained two episodes of Doctor Who that have not been viewed since airing in the 1960s.
The episodes feature the first incarnation of the Doctor, played by William Hartnell, tackling a Dalek plan to take over Earth, the solar system and the galaxy in a storyline only ever shown in the UK.
Peter Purves, who played the Doctor’s assistant Steven Taylor, was invited to the Phoenix Cinema in Leicester on Wednesday under false pretences to view the two episodes, and he said: “My flabber has never been so gasted.”
Restored versions of the episodes will be released on BBC iPlayer this Easter.
The first episode, titled The Nightmare Begins, was part of the third season of Doctor Who and was aired in November 1965.
The second recovered episode, Devil’s Planet, was broadcast two weeks later….
… The intervening episode, Day of Armageddon, was found in 2004 by a former BBC engineer, meaning fans now have the first three instalments of The Daleks’ Master Plan arc. Written by the creator of the Daleks, Terry Nation, and Dennis Spooner, the serial starred Hartnell and Purves alongside an early appearance by Nicholas Courtney as Bret Vyon, Adrienne Hill as Katarina, and Kevin Stoney as Mavic Chen….
Salinee Goldenberg is the author of the novels The Last Phi Hunter and Way of the Walker, the second of which was released only a few weeks before we recorded. Both were published by Angry Robot. Previously, she worked at Bethesda Softworks creating narrative trailers for games such as Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Dishonored, and now produces videos for Minecraft. But those aren’t her only artistic outlets, for she also paints and plays in the punk band SexFaces.
We discussed what it was like having to deliver her second published novel on a deadline after having had her entire life to write the first, the Final Fantasy fanfic she wrote as a kid, why she’s attracted more to novels than short stories, how getting critiqued in the gaming industry prepared her to deal with writing workshops, why she considers herself a recovering pantser, how writing the ending of her new novel was almost like being in a fever dream, why she likes reading bad reviews, how to know when it’s necessary to kill your darlings, the way to write battle scenes so readers can follow the fight choreography, how being a guitarist in a punk rock band impacts her writing, and much more.
Unlike other professional industry awards, the Ringo Awards include fan participation in the nomination process along with an esteemed jury of comics professionals.
Fan and pro-jury voting are tallied independently, and the combined nomination ballot is compiled by the Ringo Awards Committee. The top two fan choices become nominees, and the jury’s selections fill the remaining three slots for five total nominees per category. Ties may result in more than five nominees in a single category. Nominees will be listed on the ballot alphabetically. Nomination ballot voting is open to the public (fans and pros) between March 13, 2026 and May 28, 2026.
Updated Categories: New in 2026 are a number of updates to the Ringo Awards based on juror, publisher, and voter submissions:
Best Single Issue or Story is renamed Best Short Story
Best Kids Comic or Graphic Novel is now divided into subcategories for Ages 11 and Under and Ages 12 and Up
Added the Best Comics-Related Publication category, recognizing outstanding non-comic works that explore, analyze, or document the art, history, and/or culture of comics
(4) TUTTLE REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup” in the Guardian covers The Library of Traumatic Memory by Neil Jordan; The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan; Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison; Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman; and Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran
Miéville’s much-lauded police procedural is something special. What seems at first like a straightforward murder investigation of a foreign student quickly becomes more than meets the eye– though actually, in the fictional Eastern European city of Beszél, choosing what does and does not meet your eye is a matter of grave consequence. Beszél has a twin city, Ul Qoma– the two cities are so close that they are intertwined, sharing much of the same geographical space, but the citizens of each metropolis must “unsee” the other. To acknowledge the other city is known as breaching, a violation which brings on the full force of Breach, an inescapable, all-seeing secret police. Breach, and you disappear forever. Inspector Tyador Borlu’s investigation leads him through iron doors and puzzle boxes of bureaucracy in what becomes a search for a rumored third city hiding between Beszél and Ul Qoma. Miéville deftly conjures a sense of surveillance and control so oppressive it feels physically palpable.
(6) FREE READ. Grist has published the next climate fiction story in their Imagine 2200 series, “Sandbag Squidward”, “a snarky, sarcastic story about the desire to run away from reality, and how hope and connection can find their way in despite your best efforts.”
Henry’s visions of serving his Conservation Corps time on a beautiful beach, like the one in the digital world he’s building, crash into reality when he’s assigned instead to a cold, dirty beach in Louisiana. Despite his best efforts to do as little work as possible, and to demean everyone around him, the real world seeps into his digital paradise.
What will happen when Henry gets the chance to leave the real world behind and devote himself full time to his digital existence? Well, the answer might not surprise you, but the path to get there will surely entertain you.
Right-wingers crumble as their arguments over the new Masters of the Universe movie, Mr. Rogers and the new Star Trek series immediately backfire in their faces. John Iadarola and Brett Erlich break it down on The Damage Report. Leave a comment with your thoughts below!
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
March 13, 1956 — Dana Delany, 70.
I remember Dana Delany best for her role as nurse Colleen McMurphy on China Beach, set at a Vietnam War evacuation hospital. It aired for four seasons starting in the late Eighties. Great role, fantastic series. I rewatched it a decade or so ago on DVD — it held up very well.
Dana Delany
So let me deal with her main genre role which was voicing Lois Lane. She first did this twenty years ago in Superman: The Animated Series for forty-four episodes, an amazing feat by any standard. That role would come again in Superman: Brainiac Attacks, Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox (avoid if you’ve got even a shred of brain cells), in a recurring role on the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited series, The Batman and even in the Superman: Shadow of Apokolips game.
Her other voice role of note was for Wing Commander Academy as Gwen Archer Bowman. And she wasn’t Lois Lane but Vilsi Vaylar in Batman: The Brave and the Bold’s “The Super-Batman of Planet X!”.
She’ll have a one-off on Battle Galactica as Sesha Abinell; more significantly she has a starring role as Grace Wyckoff in the Wild Palms series.
Oh, she showed up on Castle as FBI Special Agent Jordan Shaw in a two-part story, the episodes being “Tick, Tick, Tick…” and “Boom!”.
So I’m going to finish with her role in Tombstone, Emma Bull and Will Shetterley’s favorite Western film along with the Deadwood series. It’s an inspiration she says for her Territory novel. And I love it as well. Delany played magnificently Josephine Sarah “Sadie” Earp, the common-law wife of Wyatt Earp. The final scene of them dancing in the snow in San Francisco is truly sniffles inducing.
Video games have long been heavily inspired by physical games, from chess and Scrabble to Dungeons & Dragons. The deck-building collectible card game, for example, has become immensely popular in digital form, thanks to hits such as Slay the Spire, Marvel Snap and Balatro. Now, an increasing number of games are going in the opposite direction, trading pixels for pieces and screens for spinners. Here are six of our favourites….
Two planets crashed into one another in a violent, chaotic collision that astronomers recently witnessed 11,000 light-years away from Earth.
The rare cosmic event is not one scientists get to see every day.
But thanks to a bit of serendipity, a researcher at the University of Washington looking through old telescope data happened upon the bread crumbs that would lead him to the stunning discovery. A distant star located at a distance equal to nearly halfway from Earth to the galactic center of the Milky Way was displaying short dips in brightness before apparent chaos erupted.
“Right around 2021, it went completely bonkers,” study lead author Anastasios Tzanidakis, a researcher at the University of Washington, said in a statement. “I can’t emphasize enough that stars like our sun don’t do that. So when we saw this one, we were like ‘Hello, what’s going on here?’”
The phenomenon, which researchers claimed had never before been observed, led them to conclude that what they were seeing was evidence of a planetary collision, according to a study published March 11 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters….
…Engineers studying interstellar missions increasingly approach the challenge from a different perspective. Instead of designing a craft for a small crew, they imagine a self-contained environment capable of supporting an entire population for generations. A vessel attempting such a journey would need to produce food, recycle its atmosphere, and maintain a functioning society without any external support.
One concept exploring that possibility is called Chrysalis. Developed as part of the Project Hyperion Design Competition, the proposal outlines a massive generational spacecraft capable of carrying 1,000 people on a voyage lasting roughly 250 years toward a neighboring star system.
The Chrysalis concept was proposed by a multidisciplinary team that includes Andreas M. Hein of the University of Luxembourg and designer Frederic Spiedel. Their approach treats the vessel less like a transport craft and more like a long-term settlement that happens to travel through space.
At the center of the design is a rotating habitat ring. Instead of drifting weightless, the inhabitants would experience artificial gravity generated by centrifugal force as the structure spins. This approach has long been considered one of the most practical ways to replicate Earth-like gravity conditions in space….
… The technical challenges of building a generational spacecraft are immense, but they are only part of the problem. Maintaining a stable community for centuries inside a closed environment introduces equally complex social questions.
The competition required participating teams to address governance, education, and knowledge preservation across generations. Children born aboard the ship would eventually inherit responsibility for maintaining the systems that sustain the spacecraft.
To support that continuity, the Chrysalis design includes educational facilities, research areas, and community governance spaces. These institutions would help preserve technical knowledge and maintain the mission’s long-term objectives.
Robotic maintenance systems also form a critical component of the spacecraft’s infrastructure. Autonomous robots could inspect the outer hull, repair mechanical systems, and monitor environmental stability without exposing humans to the risks of deep-space operations….
(13) SINNERS VS. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. Ahead of the 98th Academy Awards, JustWatch analyzed streaming behavior from 20 million monthly U.S. users to compare demand for two of this year’s most talked-about nominees: Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.
Our latest data shows that awards buzz is translating into a recent surge in streaming demand for one of the films.
Key takeaways:
Sinners leads One Battle After Another in overall streaming interest on JustWatch by 30%
Following the Oscar nominations announcement, Sinners saw a 617%surge in streaming interest when compared to One BattleAfter Another
Momentum continued after the SAG-AFTRA’s Actor Awards, with Sinners seeing a 187% increase in audience interest compared to One Battle After Another
[Click for larger image.] The chart above illustrates how streaming demand for both films evolved across major awards season milestones like the announcement of the Academy Award nomination, the BAFTAs, and the Actors Awards. Across these moments, recent streaming audience interest appears to swing increasingly in favor of Sinners.
The analysis is based on streaming intent data from JustWatch users in the U.S. between January 8 and March 9, 2026, capturing audience actions such as clicking through to streaming providers.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Andrew (not Werdna), Nicholas Whyte, Olav Rokne, James Bacon, Scott Edelman, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Thomas the Red.]
(1) DO YOU KNOW HISTORICAL SF WHEN YOU SEE IT? [Item by Steven French.] Brenda Clough presents a taxonomy of science fiction stories set in the past at Speculative Insight: “Towards a Taxonomy of Historical Science Fiction”.
A historical fantasy is a novel that is grounded in magic, or centering around dragons or such, that is set in a historical period. A Sorceress Comes to Call (2024) by T. Kingfisher is Victorian, while Jo Walton’s Lent (2019) is set in 15th century Florence. Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series has dragons fighting in the Napoleonic wars. The Brother Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters, or the Marcus Didius Falco series by Lindsey Davis, are unquestionably historical mystery novels, driven by crime-solving detectives but set in a historical period. And historical horror novels are quite common – the fictional explorations of Jack the Ripper come to mind, and many vampire novels. Other examples might be The Terror by Dan Simmons (2014), in which a monster attacks 19th century explorers trapped in the ice in Canada, or Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin (1982), about a New Orleans riverboat in 1857 assailed by a vampire.
So then we can consider: is there such a thing as historical science fiction? There must be science fiction set in the past. We don’t hear a lot about it – it’s not a major marketing category dominating the best-seller lists, like historical romance or historical fantasy. But a little digging turns up enough titles to show it really is a separate genre. So, let’s think about historical science fiction some more….
… So what is historical science fiction? The simplest historical SF involves time travel. This goes back at least to H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). If the characters have a time machine, then they can travel either to the past or to the future, and Wells has his hero do both. It’s the dream of the historian, to go back and see stuff happening, and many SF authors have had huge fun with it.
A favorite manifestation of this is what I’m going to call the ‘wow the rubes’ plot. When the Connecticut Yankee visits the court of King Arthur, in Mark Twain’s 1889 novel, he astonishes the knights of the Table Round with his ability to predict an eclipse or use lightning rods. Another example of this kind of setup is Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp (1939). The modern hero is mysteriously transported to 6th century Rome, where he wows the rubes by using double-entry bookkeeping to prevent fraud. There’s even a movie with this plot, The Final Countdown (1980), in which the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz inexplicably travels back in time to defend Pearl Harbor from the Japanese on December 7, 1941.
If you reverse this plot – if someone arrives from another planet or time to wow us – then it’s a superhero story. Superman arrives from Krypton with fantastic powers, My Favorite Martian arrives to live in an American suburb with Bill Bixby, or Mork visits from Ork to entertain Mindy.
These are fairly simple stories, but time travel can make for great subtlety. If you turn this plot inside out – if the hero arrives in the past and it’s a disaster – then you get classics like Michael Moorcock’s “Behold the Man,” a 1966 award-winning novella that Moorcock later worked up into a novel of the same title (1969). A time traveler visits the first century CE hoping to meet Jesus of Nazareth, and after many unpleasant discoveries and existential crises finds himself crucified on Golgotha….
(2) ZOOM SFF/H READING SERIES. “Strong Women-Strange Worlds” presents the “First Friday – Third Thursday QuickReads” live reading series via Zoom. Each virtual event features six authors for eight minutes each.
Our mission is to elevate the voices of women and other underrepresented gender identity authors of science fiction, fantasy, and horror; to highlight stories featuring strong female and non-binary characters; and to share these stories with readers of all ages.
Their next event is Thursday, September 18 at 7:00 pm Eastern, featuring Karen Bao, Lara Elena Donnelly, Ryan Marie Ketterer, LindaAnn LoSchiavo, Annie Mare, and Jolie Toomajan.
(3) DEEP DIVES AUTHOR CONVERSATION. Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron will appear at the Seattle Central Library on October 22. You can catch them there or watch the livestream. Register through Clarion West.
The Deep Dives conversation series brings speculative fiction authors to Seattle for conversations with local and international experts on the real-world intersections of sci-fi and science and how each can inspire and inform the other….
A Deep Dives Conversation with Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron
October 22 | 7:00 – 8:00 PM Seattle Central Library
In Person | Streaming
VIP Reception Tickets Available
Join Cory Doctorow (Enshittification), Ed Zitron (Better Offline), and moderator Whitney Beltrán for a discussion of how reckless tech policy created an enshittogenic environment that allowed the worst people in our most structurally important corporations to turn them into vast, remorseless extraction machines, without facing any government, market, technological or labor consequences – and to learn how we can build a new, good internet that will serve as the nervous system for a 21st century where we are confronting genocide, environmental collapse and fascism.
(4) YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU. [Item by Steven French.] The Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting piece on Cormac McCarthy’s personal library. Apparently the author of the post-apocalyptic novel The Road (and also No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses etc. etc.) was a big fan of the philosopher Wittgenstein:“Two Years After Cormac McCarthy’s Death, Rare Access to His Personal Library Reveals the Man Behind the Myth” – Smithsonian Magazine reports on its tour of his home and effects.
…I was invited to the house by two McCarthy scholars who were embroiled in a herculean endeavor. Working unpaid, with help from other volunteer scholars and occasional graduate students, they had taken it upon themselves to physically examine and digitally catalog every single book in McCarthy’s enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library. They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000….
…The second major discovery, discernible in his work but confirmed beyond doubt in his library, was that McCarthy was a genius-level intellectual polymath with an insatiable curiosity. His interests ranged from quantum physics, which he taught himself by reading 190 books on the notoriously challenging subject, to whale biology, violins, obscure corners of French history in the early Middle Ages, the highest levels of advanced mathematics and almost any other subject you can name.
In the living room was a pool table piled with books and a leather couch facing two tall windows and three sets of nine-foot-tall wooden bookshelves designed by McCarthy that held approximately 1,000 books. Moving closer, I saw they were nearly all nonfiction hardbacks with no obvious system of organization.
One shelf held volumes about Mesoamerican history and archaeology, along with Charles Darwin’s collected notebooks, Victor Klemperer’s three-volume diary of the Nazi years, books about organic chemistry and sports cars, and an obscure volume titled The Biology of the Naked Mole-Rat (Monographs in Behavior and Ecology). Another shelf held books about Grand Prix and Formula 1 racing, a great passion of McCarthy’s, and the collected writings of Charles S. Peirce, the American scientist, philosopher and logician, in six fat volumes of dense, difficult prose….
…McCarthy often had a pencil when he was reading and would make tiny vertical marks next to sentences that interested him and add comments in the margins in small print handwriting. Sometimes he jotted down thoughts on slips of paper that he left between the pages. Inside The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself, first published in 1565, we found him musing philosophically: “There is an intelligence to the universe (of which we are fractal) and that intelligence has a character and that character is benign. Intends well toward all things. How could it not?”
McCarthy is known for the bleak, violent nihilism in many of his novels, so it was a surprise to see him describing the universe as intelligent and well-intentioned. He was a lapsed Catholic who went back and forth on the question of God’s existence, sometimes changing his mind from one day to the next…
ATTENTION, FELLOW WRITERS, ARTISTS, EDITORS AND PUBLISHERS. You may be entitled to boatloads of money. THIS IS NOT A JOKE OR SCAM. The lawsuit involving the theft of (possibly) your work for use by their AI has settled for $1.5 BILLION, of which you may be eligible for $3000. PER THEFT.
To apply for your slice of the settlement, (1) fill out the form at the lawsuit’s website: anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/contact Because I am guessing the 1000’s of submittals will be reviewed by AI or poorly-paid legal assistants, I recommend listing 1 theft/form rather than submitting a list in one submission.
I know that’s a lot of work, but it is also possibly 3k per violation. There’s also a phone number for the law firm handling this: 1- 877-206-2314. To see if your stuff has been stolen look in the (a) LibGen library for books and (b) the LibGen library for movies/videos: hLibGen library for movies/videos (unfortunately behind paywall); and (c) Anna’s archive. I don’t know if being in both Anna’s archive and LibGen counts as 2 thefts or 1 so I filled out a form for each. Also be sure to include if there is a copyright registration number, (starts with TX) which you can search for here: https://publicrecords.copyright.gov. Also include publication date (including the original publication), publisher and ISBN. There’s no slot for that in the form, so I put that in the TITLE entry, along with a note of whether the stolen item was in LibGen or Anna’s. If you’re a science fiction writer/artist/editor/publisher, the internet SF database is a godsend. https://www.isfdb.org (SF FANS RULE!!!) Good luck, everyone! Let’s make these thieving bastards pay – and pay YOU!
… As for the world of Jurassic Park, its creator Michael Crichton was a passionate fan who in his youth read TheLand That Time Forgot and other Burroughs tales pitting modern humans against fierce dinosaurs. Crichton even embedded an homage within his long-running TV series ER. One of its principal characters was Dr. John Carter.
After the phenomenal success with his 1997 film Titanic, James Cameron decided to go in an entirely different direction. He’d “forget all these chick flicks and do a classic guys’ adventure movie,” Cameron later explained to the New Yorker, “something in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold, like John Carter of Mars — a soldier goes to Mars.” The result, Avatar, remains one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.
Other authors who freely admitted the influence of Burroughs on their work included Frank Herbert (Dune) and Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles).
Edgar Rice Burroughs didn’t just inspire. He innovated. One of the first authors to incorporate and take an active role in his own publishing and licensing ventures, Burroughs also pioneered the plot device of heroic crossovers within a shared universe. One of his inner-world novels, Tanar of Pellucidar, begins with an inventor named Jason Gridley showing his latest radio set to Burroughs himself. Gridley tries to contact John Carter on Mars but picks up a distress call from Pellucidar, an underground realm whose hero, David Innes, has been captured. The next novel in the series has Gridley leading an African safari to recruit Tarzan for a rescue party into the inner world….
The Twilight books and movies transformed Forks, Wash., the remote logging town where they were set. Forks struggled after losing its main industry. Then the vampires brought an economic boost….
BAKER: My childhood, I was coming up on “Twilight,” so it would be a sin if I didn’t come here and check it out.
MARTIN: Baker is one of many people who come to Forks each year because of the “Twilight” books and movies. It’s not the only reason. The town is on the Olympic Peninsula, which is full of beautiful beaches, parks and forests. Still, there’s been a huge uptick in visitors since “Twilight.” The year after the first movie was released, the number of people who stopped by the visitor center in town jumped by about 50,000. And Forks has embraced the attention….
… MARTIN: In 2023, food, retail and accommodations made up 32% of the economy in Forks. Two decades before, it was 16%…
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
September 6, 1972 — China Miéville, 53.
By Paul Weimer: China Miéville first came to my attention in the early days of my reviewing in the 2000s. This also correlated with my growing knowledge and experience with contemporary British SF. While I had been reading various British SF authors for quite some time, it was mostly a historical exercise and I was only in the early days of my reviewing seeking out actual British fiction (One of these was getting a hold of a copy of Children of Time by Tchaikovsky years before it was published in the states). So in the heady days of the 2000s, Miéville came onto my radar with Perdido Street Station.
China Miéville
While I was getting into the New Weird at the time (c.f. The work of Jeff Vandermeer), Perdido Street Station was a real jolt to the veins in my reading. There was a dreamlike feel to Ambergris, but Perdido Street Station, a New Weird (and retroactively in my mind) City State fantasy was something completely novel, strange and weird and wonderful. The characters, writing and evoked, from the scientist Isaac to the exotic and weird Weaver, Yagharek and the Council, among others, were wild and weird to me. The whole idea of the city of New Crobuzon, steampunk and odd magic side by side, instantly became memorable in my mind, if not unforgettable. It is the template in my mind for the very weird city. (c.f. RPGs like The Strange, I think of New Crobuzon as an inspiration for its own weirdness).
I of course eagerly read The Scar and Iron Council and found that the author’s talents extended to other places in the world of Bas-Lag as well. After a small gap, I encountered Miéville in the amazing world of The City and The City. The conceit of the book, having two cities separated by perception and stubborn training in the same space, showed me that Mievlle was far more than just a “New Weird” writer (and at that point the New Weird’s star was in decline). I’ve long thought that one could look at Gotham City and Metropolis in the same way one looks at the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma. And when I thought I had fully grokked that book (I still need to watch the miniseries) a few years later, we run into Embassytown and his ideas on embassies, and aliens and alien language. Once again, the author has shown his adaptability, skill and vividly realized imagination.
And to this day, Miéville continues his evolution, exploration and expansion of the boundaries of science fiction and fantasy.
I have not read it, but I am curious about his collaboration with Keanu Reeves (of all people!), The Book of Elsewhere. If his past record is anything to go on, it will surprise and delight me.
We are Walt Boyes and Joy Ward, and we really need your help.
Joy is on kidney dialysis, waiting for a transplant list spot, and she’s been in and out of the hospital a lot the past two years. Joy’s medical bills are mounting up. Medicare doesn’t cover everything.
Now I’ve been injured myself, and so we have even more medical bills and costs.
Joy is legally blind, so she can’t write or edit. My work has been sporadic since COVID, and the rise of AI.
During COVID and for a while after, we lived on our credit cards, and while we’ve paid off a lot of it, there is still a bunch of debt we haven’t been able to clear.
We need help to clear our debts and our medical bills.
Here’s the update:
Yesterday by Walt Boyes, Organizer
ANOTHER JOY UPDATE— We got not-so-good news this morning from the cardiologist. Joy has beginning heart failure. She was diagnosed two years ago but it wasn’t major. Now it is. She’s going to undergo exploratory surgery to see if they can put another stent in, or rebuild her valves. Please keep her, and me, in your prayers. This will probably happen Monday.
Friends, we can certainly use any donations you have.
A Kent hospital has revived a book library trolley service visiting its wards after 25 years.
The scheme at Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham aims to “help support the wellbeing and recovery of patients”.
The volunteer-run trolley is to operate in the hospital’s brown zone wards every Thursday and Friday.
Richard Pemberton, the hospital’s knowledge and library service strategic manager, said: “Reading offers a lot of therapeutic benefits that complement medical treatment, helps to reduces anxiety, and stimulates cognitive function.”
He said: “Books can also help patients maintain a sense of normalcy by sparking conversations with others, combat isolation, and support emotional healing.
“There really are lots of wellbeing benefits to reading which is why we decided to bring the service back after discovering the photo in our archives.”
Patients can borrow books for as long as they wish, with returns collected during the next trolley visit.
If a patient is discharged mid-read, the hospital said they were welcome to take the book home.
The trolley has been funded by the Medway Hospital Charity with books donated by the public, volunteers and hospital staff….
Bookstores are the perfect place to find a good read, but at Mysterious Galaxy, the owners want to help people start their own romantic chapter with the first words being “I do.”
Matthew Berger loves the books he stocks on his shelves, but what he loves most are the stories that come to life in his cozy bookshop.
“It was just a fun thing for me to do with my sister, and we held the wedding here in the bookstore,” said Matthew Berger, co-owner of Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore.
Berger got ordained in 2023. He first saw it as an opportunity to officiate his sister’s wedding at his store and roast her in the process. But now, he says it’s time to turn the page.
“Now that I’m ordained, it feels like I might as well extend the offer to more people in the community,” Berger said.
He’s offering to officiate marriages for LGBTQ+ couples and allow them to use the shop as their venue for a low cost….
… Berger says he wants to show his support for the community in the best way he knows how.
“If there’s an opportunity to show the world that you love someone and that you are who you are, that you should absolutely take that opportunity,” Berger said.
If you’re interested in using the store for your wedding, you can visit their website or email them at [email protected].
LEGO just revealed the Star Wars Ultimate Death Star set, which is a massive beast that includes over 9,000 pieces. The company says it’s the largest LEGO Star Wars set ever made. It’s also the most expensive LEGO set ever, Star Wars or not. It costs a whopping $1,000.
It may set you back around a month’s rent, but just look at this thing. It’s a legit monster. The set ships with 38 minifigures, including characters like Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine. It also comes with a stormtrooper figure in a hot tub, which is a nod to the LEGO Star Wars video games.
It’s not a full globe, like the actual Death Star. It’s more of a cross-section of the interior. This lets collectors recreate various locations from the movies, like the trash compactor, Palpatine’s throne room and Princess Leia’s jail cell. There’s also a tractor beam control unit, a shuttle hanger and more….
A group of Chinese researchers has just gone even further, creating what they say are the first multicolored and brightest-ever luminescent plants.
“Picture the world of Avatar, where glowing plants light up an entire ecosystem,” biologist Shuting Liu, a researcher at South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou and co-author of the study published August 27 in the journal Matter, said in a statement….
… To make the plants glow, Liu and her fellow researchers injected the leaves of the succulent Echeveria “Mebina” with strontium aluminate, a material often used in glow-in-the-dark toys that absorbs light and gradually releases it over time.
Time crystals may sound like something out of science fiction, but they take their inspiration from naturally occurring crystals, such as diamonds or table salt.
Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek first proposed the idea of time crystals in 2012. You can think of traditional crystals as “space crystals.” The carbon atoms that make up a diamond, for example, form a lattice pattern in space that is very hard to break apart.
Wilczek wondered if it would be possible to build a crystal that was similarly well organized, except in time rather than space. Even in their resting state, the atoms in such a state wouldn’t form a lattice pattern, but would move or transform in a never-ending cycle—like a GIF that loops forever.
Wilczek’s original concept proved impossible to make, but, in the years since, scientists have created phases of matter that get reasonably close….
(16) A TRIO OF STAR TREK-THEMED MUSIC VIDEOS. [Item by Daniel Dern.]
Star Trek – The Bluegrass Edition
Star Trek but it’s Cheers – TNG x Cheers Intro
Star Trek (TOS) theme song with lyrics (a cappella arrangement)
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Frank Wu, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mark Roth-Whitworth for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
(1) THE VERSIFICATORE. Bruce Sterling offers the creation of a working Star Trek-style communicator as one example of “How to Rebuild an Imaginary Future (2025)” in the Medium transcript of an extemporaneous speech he gave at SXSW 2025 on March 12. Then he goes into full detail about a comparable project he’s involved with in Italy. (Let me emphasize this is not an April Fools post.)
Fifteen years ago, here at South By Southwest, I was on a panel where the term “design fiction” was made public. Before Julian Bleecker invented and deployed that term, there were many things going on that resembled “design fiction.” But nobody knew “how to do design fiction.” The ideas and approaches were diffuse, they weren’t crystallised.
This current speech is taking place in another decade, in a era where “design fiction” has been normalized, and it’s practiced widely. “Design Fiction” is established, and is part of the worlds of design and futurism. This speech, “How to Rebuild an Imaginary Future,” is also about futurism, design, and design-fiction “diegetic prototypes.”…
…I am the art director of a technology art festival in Turin, Italy, which is called “Share Festival.” In our researches, we found a historical design-fiction that we want and need to rebuild for artistic and cultural reasons. And we are rebuilding it. It’s an artifact, an imaginary machine, from a science fiction story written 65 years ago by a science fiction writer in Turin: Primo Levi.
Primo Levi’s imaginary “Versificatore” is as old as a Star Trek Communicator. It is a cybernetic, desktop, mass-manufactured business machine that can write Italian poetry. The Versificatore works with prompts, very much like ChatGPT. So, Primo Levi’s historic “Versificatore” is a prophetic vision of Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence.
The Versificatore first appeared, in May 1960, as a character in a short drama piece that Levi published in a newspaper. Years later, that story was gathered into a collection of other futuristic gadget stories that Primo Levi also wrote, as part of a series of Levi’s science fiction satires and comedies.
In 1971, the Versificatore became one episode of Italian TV series derived from the Levi stories.
In these screenshots from the TV show, we can see an Italian poet, and a technology salesman, and a secretary interacting with their brand-new desktop poetry machine. The machine is a creative writer and is the center of the action in the drama. The humans react to this intelligent machine with varying attitudes of enthusiasm, amazement, commercial interest, dread, alarm and so on.
It’s quite amazing how well Levi understood the future human reactions to a novelty like an AI that can write human language. You can watch that show on YouTube right now, it’s quite engaging and funny. Of course it’s all in Italian, but who cares? As you watch the show, you can get Google’s Artificial Intelligence to translate the TV show from speech to subtitled text in real-time. It turns out, sixty year later, that Primo Levi was quite right about the prospect of machines with an astonishing command of human language. They’re very much here, and wreaking predictable havoc.
So, at Share Festival, thanks to a good friend, Riccardo Luna from “Wired Italia,” we became aware of Levi’s diegetic prophesy of modern AI. Since Primo Levi was from Turin, and we’re a festival from Turin, we immediately decided that we had to rebuild a Levi Versificatore and show that device to our public. We understand that the Versificatore has historic, artistic, cinematic, computational and literary significance. It should be a public source of civic pride.
In other words, we are motivated to rebuild an imaginary future. This is not a merely hypothetical project. It’s an actual artistic production project, and even a patriotic crusade. It’s a practical matter for us, where we have to raise funds, and find designers and crafts people, and find a venue for the display of our new artifact, and so on….
…Let’s admit it: it’s a rather unusual thing to re-make an imaginary Italian Artificial Intelligence from the 1960s that works in public and speaks Italian poetry. But in this speech, I want to put that work into a larger context. It’s just one practical sample of a broader creative practice, which might be described as: deliberately turning culturally significant imaginary things into functional real-life things.
We are using modern capabilities to make things work, when it was once merely imagined that these things might somehow someday work.
This Versificatore project is a physical demonstration of the impressive prescience of a world-famous Turinese writer. Primo Levi made up some other different gadgets in his stories, but with this one, he hit the predictive jackpot.
We have means, motive and opportunity to rebuild this important object, for our public, which is the Turinese public, and for our client, who is MUFANT, the science fiction and fantasy museum in Turin. Turin has a museum of “fantascienza,” so naturally they’re interested in Turinese science fiction museum exhibits. Like this one.
So, with that given, what is the proper way to do this? We are confident that we can build a replica, but what are the best practices here? Who else is doing anything like this? Where can we get some help and good advice? How do we know if we’ve done a good job? What are we trying to prove with this project?…
(2) CHINA MIÉVILLE Q&A.[Item by Tom Becker.] Capitalist billionaires are changing the world’s political and economic systems to serve their visions of the future that are straight out of science fiction. China Miéville, who knows politics and science fiction very well, punctures that balloon in an interview with TechCrunch: “China Miéville says we shouldn’t blame science fiction for its bad readers”.
Even though some science-fiction writers do think in terms of their writing being either a utopian blueprint or a dystopian warning, I don’t think that’s what science fiction ever is. It’s always about now. It’s always a reflection. It’s a kind of fever dream, and it’s always about its own sociological context. It’s always an expression of the anxieties of the now. So there’s a category error in treating it as if it is “about the future.”
The full interview is well worth reading, because Miéville is always interesting, and he has much to say about the fantasy traditions that inspired him, and the science fiction that he loves, and the value of literature that is diverse and contradictory and not a simplistic blueprint.
(3) IS PRATCHETT MORE BASED THAN TOLKIEN? “Discworld Rules” claims Venkatesh Rao at Contraptions.
The Lord of the Rings is a great story, but I have to say, I’ve never understood the strange hold it seems to have on the imagination of a particular breed of technologists.
As a story it’s great. It is pure fantasy of course (in the Chiang’s Law sense of being about special people rather than strange rules), full of Chosen Ones doing Great Man (or Great Hobbit) things. As an extended allegory for society and technology it absolutely sucks and is also ludicrously wrong-headed. Humorless Chosen people presiding grimly over a world in terminal decline, fighting Dark Lords, playing out decline-and-fall scripts to which there is no alternative, no Plan B.
This is no way for a high-agency technological species to live, and thankfully it doesn’t have to be.
I mean, I get why politicians and economists might identify with the story. They enjoy little to no direct technological agency, harbor ridiculous Chosen One conceits, and operate in domains — political narratives and the dismal pseudoscience of economics — that are natural intellectual monopolies or oligopolies. Domains that allow fantasies to be memed into existence (the technical term is hyperstitional theory-fictions) for a while before they come crashing down to earth in flames, demonstrating yet again that no, you do not in fact get to create your own reality; that “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”
There is a contrarian reading of The Lord of the Rings that argues that Sauron and Mordor are in fact the good guys, and represent technological progress, etc. But this is throwing good money narrativium after bad. Flipping the valence of a Chosen One story doesn’t make it any better. It’s still a Chosen One story with reversed roles.
No, you have to tell different sorts of stories altogether.
Such stories have, in fact, been told. They are Terry Pratchett’s Discworld stories. This post is an extended argument that as a lens for thinking about the world, TheLord of the Rings, is a work that you should “not set aside lightly, but throw across the room with great force,” and that in place of Middle Earth, you should install Terry Pratchett’s Discworld….
… If you’re an actual, serious technologist, Discworld is where you should look for clues about how the world works, how it evolves in response to technological forces, and how humans should engage with those forces. It is catnip for actual technological curiosity, as opposed to validation of incuriously instrumental approaches to technology….
(4) FEARLESS MONSTER FANS. Peter Bebergal will deliver a Zoom lecture, “Monster World”, about “How pop culture monsters mythologised our worries about sexuality, nuclear war, race and the other” on April 14. This Last Tuesday Society digital event begins at 8:00 p.m. – British time, apparently. Tickets are £6 – £10 & By Donation. Ticket buys also will be sent a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
Monster Worlds In the 1970s, the sometimes-garish world of monster-movie pop culture was a comfort, an external expression of grotesquery and strangeness that the culture was feeling inside but had no name for. Rather than making us more afraid, monsters mythologized our own abstract worries about sexuality, nuclear war, race and the other, as well as personifying our collective sense of being untethered from mystery and enchantment. The talk will track the changing face of monsters as mythic and literary creatures as our culture’s own lingering unease began to morph, moving from the shadowed myths of the past into the daytime horrors of serial killers and gore and argue that we need monsters again to learn how to reimagine what frightens us in a way that remythologizes our anxieties and will offer a path for a re-enchanting our imaginations using monsters as a guide, looking at current examples in film, television, and comics.
(5) CRAWFORD AWARD JUDGES SOLICIT SUBMISSIONS FOR 2025. The William L. Crawford Award, given by the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA), recognizes an outstanding writer whose first fantasy book was published during the previous calendar year. The judges are currently soliciting books published in 2025 for the award to be given at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts in 2026.
Publishers are asked to submit qualifying ebooks in PDF and ePub formats here.
What works qualify
This is an award for an author’s first work of fantasy in book form. It is not a first novel award; an author may have a long bibliography and still qualify for their first work of fantasy. “Book” is defined broadly, and includes novels, novellas, poetry collections, short fiction, graphic novels, works in translation, or other work at the discretion of the judges.
The Award Administrator is Kelly Robson. This year’s judges are Brian Attebery, Joyce Chng, Eddie Clark, Joy Sanchez-Taylor, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay.
Brian Attebery is an American writer and emeritus professor of English and philosophy at Idaho State University. He is known for his studies of fantasy literature, including The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin and Strategies of Fantasy which won the Mythopoeic Award
Joyce Chng lives in Singapore. Their speculative fiction has appeared in The Apex Book of World SF II, We See A Different Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing The Future. Joyce also co-edited THE SEA IS OURS: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia with Jaymee Goh. Their novels span across wolf clans (Starfang: Rise of the Clan), vineyards (Water into Wine) and swordmaking forges (Fire Heart) respectively. Joyce wrangles article editing at Strange Horizons and is diversity coordinator for IGDN (Independent Game Designer Network).
Eddie Clark is an academic and SFF fan from Wellington, New Zealand. He has been peering into the obscure corners of SFF for thirty years, recently with a particular focus on queer fantasy.
Dr. Joy Sanchez-Taylor is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College whose research interest is science fiction and fantasy literature by authors of color. Her first book Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Writers of Color (2021) examines the contributions of late twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. and Canadian science fiction authors of color to the genre. Her newest book is titled Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Color Reimagine a Genre (forthcoming July 2025).
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor in Global Culture Studies at the University of Oslo. He is the leader of CoFUTURES, an international research group on contemporary futurisms headquartered in Oslo. He is a World Fantasy Award-winning editor, translator, writer, and critic of speculative fiction, and the producer of Kalpavigyan: A Speculative Journey, the first documentary film on Indian science fiction.
(6) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Ruthven Todd’s Space Cat series
The Muppet Show has a segment called “Pigs in Space.” Well, this is the Social Justice Credential counterpart, “Cats in Space”, with a dollop of ever-so-cute kittens added in, which appeared long before Heinlein’s Pixel came into being as they were published between 1952 and 1958.
This was definitely a departure for the author Ruthven Todd who is known primarily for his poetry, scholarly work on William Blake studies, and as R. T. Campbell for writing mysteries.
It’s a children’s books series involving Flyball, a cat who, yes, lives in space. And like all cats wears a space suit. These are not your ordinary felines by any means.
The books, which are all illustrated by Paul Galdone, are Space Cat, Space Cat Visits Venus, Space Cat Meets Mars and Space Cat and the Kittens. Without giving anything away, let me just say that there will be a lot of cats, not a few kittens and considerable comical situations as the series goes on.
As it flew up toward the International Space Station last summer, the Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters. A NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, had to take manual control of the vehicle. But as Starliner’s thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go.
He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone’s throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission’s flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as for the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.
But what if it was not safe to come home, either?
“I don’t know that we can come back to Earth at that point,” Wilmore said in an interview. “I don’t know if we can. And matter of fact, I’m thinking we probably can’t.”
Starliner astronauts meet with the media
On Monday, for the first time since they returned to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle two weeks ago, Wilmore and Williams participated in a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Afterward, they spent hours conducting short, 10-minute interviews with reporters from around the world, describing their mission. I spoke with both of them….
We cut to where two thrusters have just failed as the Starliner arrives at the ISS.
…Wilmore: “Thankfully, these folks are heroes. And please print this. What do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into a fiery building and pull people out of it. That’s a hero. Heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems, and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask, ‘What do you think?’ they know their system so well they come up with a plan on the fly. That is a hero. And there are several of them in Mission Control.”
From the outside, as Starliner approached the space station last June, we knew little of this. By following NASA’s webcast of the docking, it was clear there were some thruster issues and that Wilmore had to take manual control. But we did not know that in the final minutes before docking, NASA waived the flight rules about loss of thrusters. According to Wilmore and Williams, the drama was only beginning at this point….
“Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse,” the third entry in Sony’s animated web-slinging trilogy, will swing into theaters… in a few years. It’ll be released on June 4, 2027.
“We know how important this franchise is to so many people around us. We just could not run it back,” the filmmaking team of producer Phil Lord and co-directors Bob Persichetti and Justin K. Thompson said at CinemaCon, the movie theater trade show that’s currently unfolding in Las Vegas. “So, we decided we needed to take the time to make sure we got it just right.”…
… On stage at CinemaCon, Lord teases that Miles begins the threequel as a fugitive on the run from every other spider in the multiverse… and hinted that “Gwen and his other friends may or may not be enough to help him save the family that’s been the leading part of the entire system.”…
(10) JUSTWATCH TOP 10S. The most-viewed streaming sff movies and TV of March 2025 have been ranked by JustWatch.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Tom Becker, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
(1) S.B. DIVYA FREE ONLINE READING. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA will host an “Online Reading & Interview with S.B. Divya” on March 18 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Free registration at the link.
Finding a place to belong becomes a girl’s ambitious quest in a thrilling epic about space, humanity, and self-discovery by S.B. Divya, Hugo and Nebula Award finalist and author of Meru. Akshaya is the hybrid daughter of a human mother and an alloy, a genetically engineered posthuman–and she’s the future of life on the planet Meru. But not if the determined Akshaya can help it. Before choosing where her future lies, she wants to circumnavigate the most historic orb in the universe–the birthplace of humanity: Earth. Akshaya’s parents reluctantly agree to her anthropological challenge–one with no assistance from alloy devices, transport, or wary alloys themselves who manage humanity and the regions of Earth called Loka. It’s just Akshaya; her equally bold best friend, Somya; and a carefully planned itinerary threading continent by continent across a wondrous terrain of things she’s never seen: blue skies, sunrises, snowcapped mountains, and roiling oceans. As the adventure unfolds, the travelers discover love and new friendships, but they also learn the risks of a planet that’s not entirely welcoming. On this trek–rapturous, dangerous, and life-changing–Akshaya will discover what human existence really means.
A new executive order issued Friday called for the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the nation’s only federal agency for supporting libraries. The office of 75 workers administers grants to libraries throughout the US. The executive order reads: “the non-statutory components and functions of the following governmental entities shall be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, and such entities shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”
The IMLS had requested grant money of approximately $255 million for fiscal 2025, and an administrative budget of $24.5 million.
The American Library Association writes in a release, “ALA implores President Trump to reconsider this short-sighted decision. We encourage U.S. Congress members, Senators and decision makers at every level of government to visit the libraries that serve their constituents and urge the White House to spare the modest federal funding for America’s libraries. And we call on all Americans who value reading, learning, and enrichment to reach out to their elected leaders and Show Up For Our Libraries at library and school meetings, town halls, and everywhere decisions are made about libraries.”
The release also lists some of the critical functions of public libraries including: Early literacy development and grade-level reading programs; summer reading programs for kids; high-speed internet access; employment assistance for job seekers ; and much more….
…Scientific advancements, environmental stressors, and geopolitical tensions can be inextricably linked. This road has been well-tread by masters of crime and science-fiction. In Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton used cutting-edge genetic science to resurrect dinosaurs, transforming bioengineering research into a harrowing lesson about nature’s unpredictability. Robin Cook’s medical thrillers, such as Coma and Outbreak, delve into the darker sides of biomedical innovation; these are stories about how technology intended for healing can result in unforeseen horrors. As a scientist and futurist in my day-to-day life, the fusing of credible scientific research into suspense and ethical complexity is something I relish.
The narrative approach of grounding extraordinary events in everyday science, and creating a recognizable sliver of reality, has made it easier for me as a reader to slip into the protagonist’s shoes. I can more immediately imagine myself in their situation, instead of suspending disbelief and going along for the ride. Andy Weir’s The Martian is a great example. The protagonist uses actual scientific principles and problem-solving strategies to overcome life-threatening challenges. Weir’s meticulous attention to detail on the minutiae of survival on Mars captured our imagination….
(4) MIÉVILLE COLLECTIBLE EDITION. Tomorrow The Folio Society will release a limited edition of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station.
The Folio Society, independent publisher of beautifully illustrated hardback books, is partnering with award-winning fantasy and sci-fi author China Miéville for the ultimate edition of his iconic steampunk novel PERDIDO STREET STATION. First published 25 years ago in 2000, PERDIDO STREET STATION blends elements of fantasy, horror and science fiction and was nominated for several awards, winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award, establishing Miéville as a central figure in the “Weird Fiction” genre. The Folio Society limited edition, with a scant 500 copies available, will include the full text of the first edition, a new afterword by the author, and a map and striking art by award-winning illustrator Doug Bell, who is making his debut with the Folio Society.
Crafted with China Miéville’s close involvement, the 707-page PERDIDO STREET STATION Limited Edition from the Folio Society will feature a limitation page signed by the author and artist, printed map endpapers, iridescent foiling, a presentation box in the rough shape of a moth, and a black ribbon marker. Illustrator Doug Bell has contributed a binding and map revealing the layout of the city of New Crobuzon, as well as 8 black and white integrated chapter opening illustrations and 12 full-colour illustrations. The book will be bound in screen-printed and blocked canvas cloth, printed in black and metallic copper ink, and presented in a clamshell covered in paper which has been silver cold-foiled, printed, laminated and over-blocked in translucent foil with a design by the artist.
A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Miéville is the only author to have won the Arthur C. Clarke three times.
(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
March 17, 1948 — William Gibson, 77.
By Paul Weimer: The High Duke of Cyberpunk.
I first came to William Gibson like many other people, with Neuromancer. It took me a few years to get to it, I was still working through 50s to 80s SF through much of the 1980, so it wasn’t until I was an adult that I finally got a deep dive into Cyberpunk.
I started with Neuromancer, of course, and found out why everyone was so interested and so enthused about it. I still think it holds up, even now, I re-read it a few years ago. But I do admit that other Gibson novels stand on their own, and not on the shoulders of Neuromancer alone. But Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive are, basically, what a lot of people think of when they think of “cyberpunk”. One can thank, or blame, The Matrix for taking so many notes from the Sprawl books in order to transmit that aesthetic and idea into the mainstream.
The Difference Engine, for example, which he co-wrote with Sterling, feels very dated now (and some of his attitudes are pretty awful, I think, even now), but it stands as an icon of Steampunk even today. Once again, aesthetics are important, even more so than Cyberpunk, in conveying a mood and an idea (or even, gasp, a VIBE) to science fiction.
But would I have new readers start with either? No. I think the novel that really captures his voice, his importance and his strengths as a writer is The Peripheral. I highly enjoyed the Amazon series, even given the liberties that it took with the source material, but I think that it is a good way for people to be introduced to the virtual reality and other technological ideas that Gibson brings to the table. In a real way, The Peripheral shows how important Gibson and his point of view on technology and science fiction are in a way few have matched in any era. That makes him, in my mind, one of the advocates of a phrase I coined during the Chengdu Ineligibity, of the Science Fiction Project.
So in the end one might say that Gibson is a godfather, or one of the prime movers at the very least, of two subgenres of science fiction, in addition to being an advocate for the Science Fiction Project. That’s a solid legacy. And as mentioned above with The Peripheral, people are still discovering and enjoying Gibson for the first time.
What would having sex in a car crash sound like, as music? What about a gynaecological exam performed by identical twins, or a man’s transmogrification into a grotesque human-insectoid hybrid? These are just some of the challenges faced, over more than 40 years and upwards of a dozen films, by the composer Howard Shore as part of his long collaboration with the director David Cronenberg. Shore, 78, may have won three Oscars for the magisterial sweep of his Lord of the Rings score, but it is his work on the 81-year-old Cronenberg’s notorious body-horror movies, from The Fly to Dead Ringers and Crash, that is most indelible. Those last two films will be screening this month as part of a wider tribute to Shore’s work at the London Soundtrack festival, where the composer will appear with his director-collaborator for an onstage conversation. Ahead of that encounter and the release of their next collaboration, The Shrouds, the pair sat down to talk about their long, bloody body of work….
… The stresses of the space environment are likely to become more concerning as explorers and settlers go beyond Earth orbit and our planet’s protective magnetic shield. Which gets us back to the things that can kill Mickey 17 and other earthly life forms.
Radiation is the top concern. The studies done to date suggest that astronauts could be exposed to cancer-causing levels of radiation during a three-year mission to Mars and back. Thick shielding could reduce the risk, but Mason suggests using genetics as well.
“For example, tardigrades are these water bears that can survive even the vacuum of space and heavy doses of radiation,” he says. “We’ve made cells in my laboratory that can actually take a tardigrade gene and use it in a human cell, and have this increase of radiation resistance—an 80% decrease in the [DNA] damage that we observe.”…
(9) YOU CAN’T WIN, YOU CAN’T BREAK EVEN, AND YOU CAN’T GET OUT OF THE GAME. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Space.com asks “is our universe trapped within a black hole?” It seems that two-thirds of distant galaxies observed by the Webb Telescope are rotating one way, the same as nearer ones, and one third in the opposite direction.
Which leads me to two questions: what’s the difference between the rotations, if there is no preferred direction “up”?
… Black hole cosmology, also known as “Schwarzschild cosmology,” suggests that our observable universe might be the interior of a black hole itself within a larger parent universe.
The idea was first introduced by theoretical physicist Raj Kumar Pathria and by mathematician I. J. Good. It presents the idea that the “Schwarzchild radius,” better known as the “event horizon,” (the boundary from within which nothing can escape a black hole, not even light) is also the horizon of the visible universe.
This has another implication; each and every black hole in our universe could be the doorway to another “baby universe.” These universes would be unobservable to us because they are also behind an event horizon, a one-way light-trapping point of no return from which light cannot escape, meaning information can never travel from the interior of a black hole to an external observer.
This is a theory that has been championed by Polish theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski of the University of New Haven.
Black holes are born when the core of a massive star collapses. At its heart is matter with a density that far exceeds anything in the known universe.
In Poplawski’s theory, eventually, the coupling between torsion, the twisting and turning of matter, and spin becomes very strong and prevents the matter from compressing indefinitely to a singularity.
“The matter instead reaches a state of finite, extremely large density, stops collapsing, undergoes a bounce like a compressed spring, and starts rapidly expanding,” Poplawski explained to Space.com. “Extremely strong gravitational forces near this state cause an intense particle production, increasing the mass inside a black hole by many orders of magnitude and strengthening gravitational repulsion that powers the bounce.”
The scientist continued by adding that rapid recoil after such a big bounce could be what has led to our expanding universe, an event we now refer to as the Big Bang.
“It produces a finite period of cosmic inflation, which explains why the universe that we observe today appears at largest scales flat, homogeneous, and isotropic,” Poplawski said….
White House is considering a staggering 50% cut to NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in the 2026 budget request. Such a dramatic cut, if implemented, would have widespread negative consequences, including the cancellation of nearly every planned spacecraft project, the premature termination of active missions throughout the Solar System, and the rapid constriction of the related scientific and technical workforce in the United States.
It would be nothing short of an extinction-level event for NASA’s science activities.
While no formal budget submission has been made, this report is credible. It is consistent with the administration’s stated spending goal and, notably, with a proposal released by the conservative think tank, Center for Renewing America, in 2023. This alternative budget declared that “every executive branch agency must focus on its core mission. For NASA, that is Deep Space Exploration, putting Americans back on the Moon, and looking to Mars…The Budget also proposes a 50% reduction in NASA Science programs and spending.” I reference this document because the organization’s founder and President, Russell Vought, is now the Director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for the upcoming budget request …
(11) SECRETS OF OUR MILKY WAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Back in the late 1990s, SF² Concatenation co-founding editor Graham Connor kindly invited me for a week at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. (Incidentally, ESTEC was where SF author Alastair Reynolds also worked, and he must have been there unbeknownst to us at that time.) Graham would work during the day designing and testing satellite microwave communication systems while I raided the ESTEC library (that’s when on the way home I found out that a ream of photocopy paper imaged similarly to plastic explosives on the then airport security scanners… but that’s another story). At the time I was at ESTEC I visited their press office, and they were all agog with the forthcoming ESA Gaia Probe: I still have Gaia magnetic badges on my fridge. Gaia has now come to the end of its life and the Astrum YouTube Channel has now posted an 18-minute vid on what we have learned from this remarkable space telescope…
ESA’s Gaia telescope has reached the end of its life, but what has it discovered about our Milky Way galaxy’s hidden secret?
[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]
(1) DEPICTING CULTURE. Kanishk Tantia discusses the difference between using set dressing and true engagement in the representations of a culture at the SFWA Blog: “Culture: Moving Beyond Set Dressing”.
… But perhaps we can do better. I hope I have been doing better. When I wrote “I Hear the Starwhale Sing”, which was published in Canadian SFF magazine Heartlines Spec, I was consciously possessed of the urge to write something truer to my experience, something more genuine than a list of Indian foodstuffs to convince the reader they were in a diverse setting.
What does “better” look like? Let’s draw out the issues with the Rajpur sample above, and contrast what better replacements could be used.
First, there’s the shallowness of the writing. The passage above does not need to be set in Rajpur, India. It could take place on Mars, or in London, or Atlantis. The setting exists only for flavor and can be quickly hot-swapped out without changing what we have seen of the story so far.
Next, the simple goodness, or stereotyping. It’s a dirty word, isn’t it? Even positive stereotypes can be harmful. In the paragraph above, I elicit color, food, and smell, all in a positive way. But these are flashy tricks, forcing my reader to imagine richness and depth by drawing on their own biases about India rather than trying to show them something new or deeper. That’s what stereotyping does; it simply pulls from a reader’s existing bank of experiences, without challenge or comment.
Most egregious are the loanwords. And there are indeed so many. Sari, kachoris, modaks, gulab jamuns, beedi, Diwali. These are all Hindi words, but they are given no real meaning and treated as arbitrary objects. The cultural impact of these words is lost entirely, because they exist only to fill space and create an illusion.
Can we do better? Perhaps. Here’s another sample….
… My next question to Mr. Reeves was an innocent “What do you make of China’s politics?” Did the Internet’s Boyfriend fully understand, in other words, that he was partnering with China Miéville here? “I don’t really know his politics per se,” Keanu replied. He knew exactly what China’s politics were. As any interviewer would, I waited. Keanu then told me he had recently read, “and enjoyed,” the Communist Manifesto.
Whether he meant the short text by Marx and Engels, itself a commissioned project, a tie-in of sorts for the revolutions of 1848, or China Miéville’s most recent book, A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, about the same, I could not tell. The ambiguity made me giggle. Sensing it well up in me like a sneeze, I muted the phone just in time. I was forming my own speculative fiction: Keanu Reeves as communist, the Engels to China’s Marx. I suppose this makes perfect sense. Because science fiction—the kind China Miéville writes, but also, maybe, all of it, the entire genre—is, or so the great critic Fredric Jameson tells us, bent toward utopia. Possibly even a communist one….
A Paramount special committee and the buying consortium — David Ellison’s Skydance, backed by private equity firms RedBird Capital and KKR — agreed to the terms. The deal is awaiting signoff from Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, who owns National Amusements, which owns 77% of class A Paramount shares… [National Amusements has movie theaters in the U.S., U.K. and Latin America.]
The agreement terms come after weeks of discussion and a recent competing offer from Apollo Global Management and Sony Pictures.
“We received the financial terms of the proposed Paramount/Skydance transaction over the weekend and we are reviewing them,” said a National Amusements spokesperson.
The deal currently calls for Redstone to receive $2 billion for National Amusements, Faber reported Monday. Skydance would buy out nearly 50% of class B Paramount shares at $15 apiece, or $4.5 billion, leaving the holders with equity in the new company.
Skydance and RedBird would also contribute $1.5 billion in cash to Paramount’s balance sheet to help reduce debt.
Following the deal’s close, Skydance and RedBird would own two-thirds of Paramount, and the class B shareholders would own the remaining third of the company, Faber reported. The negotiated terms were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal….
(4) SF IN SF. Science Fiction in San Francisco will host readings by Robin Sloan, Rudy Rucker & Clara Ward on June 23 at The American Bookbinders Museum, 355 Clementina Street, San Francisco CA. Doors open at 6PM – event gets underway 6:30PM. $10 at the door – $8 seniors and students. No one turned away for lack of funds. CASH PREFERRED. All proceeds benefit the American Bookbinders Museum.
(5) JOURNEY PLANET CALL FOR ARTICLES. For the August issue of Journey Planet, Chris Garcia and James Bacon are joined by Jean Martin for an issue featuring food and drink in sci-fi and fantasy stories.
Chris says, “A key part of worldbuilding is creating comestibles and libations that offer the audience an elevated sensory experience along with the characters. Share articles and artwork with us about your favorite made-up gustatory delights in novels, movies, etc. And if you know where to get them and/or have actually made them, let us know how they tasted!”
(6) ONLINE FLASH SF NIGHT. Space Cowboy Books presents Online Flash Science Fiction Night with Eliane Boey, Jendia Gammon, and Jonathan Nevairon June 11 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register for free tickets at the link.
Join us online for an evening of short science fiction readings (1000 words or less) with authors Eliane Boey, Jendia Gammon, and Jonathan Nevair. Flash Science Fiction Nights run 30 minutes or less, and are a fun and great way to learn about new authors from around the world.
(7) TAKING GAS. Cora Buhlert was on the autobahn and filled up at Dammer Berge, the “service station of the future” (in 1969). Her encounter is part of Galactic Journey’s roundup “[May 16, 1969] Strange Dreams (May Galactoscope)”. Cora makes clear that the cuisine is not a reason to visit:
The structure is spectacular, a beacon of modernism, though sadly the food itself was rather lacklustre: a cup of coffee that tasted of the soap used to clean the machine and a slice of stale apple cake.
Cora then goes on to review Zero Cool, a pseudonymous Michael Crichton thriller from 1969.
A rare letter written by Franz Kafka to his publisher shows just how anguished a struggle it was for the Bohemian writer to put pen to paper, especially as his health deteriorated.
The letter, which will soon be auctioned, coincided with Kafka’s diagnosis with tuberculosis, which would end up killing him and which, scholars say, very probably added to his sense of mental paralysis and helplessness.
“When worries have penetrated to a certain layer of existence, the writing and the complaining obviously stop,” he wrote to his friend and publisher, the Austrian poet Albert Ehrenstein. “My resistance was not all that strong either.”
Undated, the letter is believed by scholars to have been written between April and June 1920, when Kafka was being treated for his illness at a clinic in Merano, northern Italy. Writer’s block famously haunted Kafka throughout his life but was exacerbated by his poor physical condition.
Neatly handwritten in polite, legible German, the letter is thought to be Kafka’s response to Ehrenstein’s request for the established author to contribute to Die Gefährten (The Fellows), the expressionist literary journal he was editing at the time. He had recently seen new work by Kafka in print, possibly his short story collection Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor), written in 1917 and published two years later. But Kafka quickly disabused him of the notion that he was actively writing….
…Russell played schoolteacher Ian Chesterton in the first two series of the BBC’s sci-fi show and was the Doctor’s first companion.
He left the show in 1965, but in 2022 he reprised his role and made a cameo in Jodie Whittaker’s final episode, The Power of The Doctor.
The actor broke a Guinness World Record for the longest gap between TV appearances.
In the first ever episode, An Unearthly Child, which aired in 1963, Russell’s character meets the Doctor, played by William Hartnell.
Russell’s character mistakenly calls him Doctor Foreman, before Hartnell then replies “Doctor Who?”…
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
June 5, 1928 — Robert Lansing. (Died 1994.) Let’s talk about Gary Seven, errrr, Robert Lansing.
For us, his most important performance was as the secret agent Gary Seven on Star Trek’s “Assignment: Earth” in which the Enterprise ended up in the Sixties. His companion was Teri Garr. He was sent there by an alien race on a mission that he’s now afraid the Enterprise will compromise. And then there’s Isis, a shapeshifter who’s a black cat in one form. Nice kitty.
Sources agree that this episode was designed at least in part as a pilot for a new series featuring Gary Seven and his mission. Trek was seriously on the edge of cancellation late in its second year, and Roddenberry hoped to get a new show going for the fall season, hence this episode. The first draft pilot script of November 14 of 1968 had no mention of Star Trek or its characters which suggests that this was not intended as an episode for this series at all.
Robert Lansing as Gary Seven in Star Trek.
Indeed, somewhere there’s a draft of “Seven” as it was titled before that was revised two years after the first outline of what would become “Assignment: Earth” written by Gene Roddenberry and Art Wallace in October of 1967. I want that script!
Garr was quoted in a Sci-fi article about this episode: “Garr feared (correctly) that Starlog wanted to talk Trek and had to be persuaded to chat so as to promote her new flick. Warren sat down with her on the balcony of her publicist’s office for an in-person session and from there, things went sour. ‘I have nothing to say about it,’ Garr declared of ‘Assignment: Earth’ in Starlog #173. ‘I did that years ago and I mostly deny I ever did it.’ Turns out she was glad the Gary Seven show didn’t go to series.”
Lansing did do some other genre work…
His major role was as Dan Stokely in The Empire of The Ants, he’s a charter boat captain in Fort Pierce, Florida. He’s a primary character here and is in almost every scene.
Following up on that fillm, he has the lead role of Elias Johnson in The Nest where a small New England town is overrun by genetically engineered killer cockroaches. Ants. Cockroaches.
So what next? Crabs, yes crabs. In Island Crabs, he’s Captain Moody nearly ten foot long land crabs created by a biological experiment gone horribly wrong are killing everything in sight.
Oh he has other genre and genre adjacent roles, but how can I not stop there?
Well just one more as it’s a significant one — he was Commander Douglas Stansfield in Twilight Zone’s “The Long Morrow” where before leaving on a decades-long solitary mission to another system he meets a woman and they both fall deeply in love. But what kind of a future can there be for them in the Twilight Zone when he returns?
A Vancouver comics festival apologized to a Jewish artist it had banned over her past Israeli military service and a Seattle museum announced it was recommitting to an exhibit on antisemitism that prompted a staff walkout, in two reversals of arts-world sanctions connected to the Israel-Hamas war.
Both the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival and the Wing Luke Museum had faced significant backlash over the actions they took because of pro-Palestinian activism.
The festival didn’t name Libicki in either its initial statement banning her — which it quickly removed from social media following backlash — or its lengthy new apology. But the ban referenced Libicki’s previous IDF service, which she has turned into a comic, while the apology referenced another specific work of hers: “But I Live,” a collaboration with Holocaust survivors.
… As Straczynski moves through the rooms of the house called “Ellison Wonderland,” his deep affection and respect for his friend remains evident. He points out the care with which more than 250,000 books are shelved, each hardback jacket fitted with transparent archival covers, the dust-free groupings of comic-book figurines, the room full of shelves specifically made to hold jelly glasses from the 1960s. He touches only the things he must, in order to make something visible, such as when in Ellison’s office proper he opens a tiny door in one of the Bram Stoker Awards given by the Horror Writers Assn. and takes out the mini plaque inside that holds the winner’s name and book title…
Harlan Ellison’s collection of books and awards
(14) VERBAL CATS. This article is paywalled, but you can enjoy the excerpt. “Written by Paw” by Kathryn Hughes in The New York Review of Books.
Cats were not, historically, great talkers (unless you counted Siamese). For much of their existence they had not needed to be. Consigned to barns, kitchens and alleyways for centuries, their main communication remained mostly among themselves. Apart from the unearthly wailing of queens during heat, or the involuntary screech of a tom scratched during a fight, cats conveyed their feelings by a twitch of the tail, a flattened ear, a crouch to the ground.
Only in the nineteenth century, once cats moved to the city and started to bump into humans more regularly, did direct communication become necessary with greater frequency….
… For the more suggestible owner, though, it was possible to imagine a darker side to this newfound articulation. For if the modern cat knew its name and could ask for food when hungry, who was to say that, when your back was turned, it wasn’t gossiping about you? If you added the cat’s well-known fondness for sitting on tops of piles of paper and books, it was quite possible to believe that it was reading your diary or browsing your letters. Worse still, perhaps it was at this very moment jotting in its own journal or cogitating a literary masterpiece—and, again, it might be all about you….
In a blow to publishers and authors, Costco plans to stop selling books regularly at stores around the United States, four publishing executives who had been informed of the warehouse retailer’s plans said on Wednesday.
Beginning in January 2025, the company will stop stocking books regularly, and will instead sell them only during the holiday shopping period, from September through December. During the rest of the year, some books may be sold at Costco stores from time to time, but not in a consistent manner, according to the executives, who spoke anonymously in order to discuss a confidential business matter that has not yet been publicly announced.
Costco’s shift away from books came largely because of the labor required to stock books, the executives said. Copies have to be laid out by hand, rather than just rolled out on a pallet as other products often are at Costco. The constant turnaround of books — new ones come out every Tuesday and the ones that have not sold need to be returned — also created more work….
…Godzilla Minus One is by no means an artsy slow burn; like the other titles on the list of the highest-grossing foreign-language films in US history, it’s accessible and entertaining. It’s about reckoning with postwar survivor’s guilt, and it movingly challenges cultural notions of what constitutes honor, yes, but it’s also about the half-terrifying, half-exhilarating vision of a particularly mean-looking iteration of Godzilla laying waste to anything in his path…
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Cora Buhlert, Chris Garcia, Joel Zakem, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Tom Becker.]
(1) SOCIETY OF ILLUSTRATORS HOF CLASS OF 2024. Muddy Colors announces the Greg Manchess and Yuko Shimizu are among the “2024 Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame” inductees. See examples of all the artists’ work at the link.
The Society of Illustrators has announced the 2024 inductees into their prestigious Hall of Fame. In recognition for their “distinguished achievement in the art of illustration” the artists are chosen based on their body of work and the significant impact it has made on the field of illustration as a whole. This year’s honorees are:
Virginia Frances Sterrett [1900 – 1931]
Robert Grossman [1940 – 2018]
Gustave Doré [1832 – 1883]
Yuko Shimizu [b. 1946]
Gregory Manchess [b. 1955]
Steve Brodner [b. 1954].
(2) LE GUIN PRIZE NOMINATION DEADLINE 4/30. There’s just one week left in the nomination period for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. This $25,000 cash prize is awarded to a writer whose book reflects concepts and ideas central to Ursula’s work.
The recipient of this year’s prize will be chosen by authors Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado.
Through April 30th, everyone is welcome to nominate books. Learn more about the prize, eligibility requirements, and the 2024 selection panel here.
China Miéville refuses to take up DAAD residency in Germany in protest of the institution’s willingness to be part of a “shameful program of repression and anti-Palestinian racism” pic.twitter.com/1Y8xOBvdgr
(4) A LITTLE TOO ON THE NOSE? [Item by Scott Edelman.] This year’s Met Gala theme will be “The Garden of Time,” a 1962 short story by J.G. Ballard. “Met Gala 2024: A Guide to the Theme, Hosts and How to Watch”. (Read the New York Times gift article courtesy of Scott Edelman.)
OK, what is the dress code?
It’s as potentially confusing as the exhibit. Guests have been instructed to dress for “The Garden of Time,” so named after a 1962 short story by J.G. Ballard about an aristocratic couple living in a walled estate with a magical garden while an encroaching mob threatens to end their peaceful existence. To keep the crowd at bay, the husband tries to turn back time by breaking off flower after flower, until there are no more blooms left. The mob arrives and ransacks the estate, and the two aristocrats turn to stone.
Just what comes to mind when you think “fashion,” right?
(5) BUTLER IS THEME OF LITFEST OPENING. LitFest in the Dena will hold its main program on May 4-5 at the Mt. View Mausoleum, 2300 N. Marengo Ave, in Altadena, CA. The opening event will be on May 3 – “Introduction and Keynote Presentation: In Conversation with Nikki High”, founder of Octavia’s Bookshelf.
Founder of Octavia’s Bookshelf, Nikki High will tell us about her discovery of books as an early reader and how authors of color helped her discover herself and what could become of her life. Featured in conversation with her friend Natalie Daily, librarian and literacy advocate at the Octavia E. Butler Magnet in Pasadena, Nikki talks about her bookstore as a community gathering place for book lovers who will find a treasure trove of BIPOC literature.
Around the country, growing numbers of independent booksellers are finding themselves the targets of anti-LGBT harassment, with bomb threats proving to be an increasingly common tactic.
In recent weeks, Loyalty Bookstores in Washington, D.C., and Silver Spring, Md., Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, N.Y., and Mosaics in Provo, Utah, have all been targets of bomb threats related to drag storytime programming. Sadly, they are not alone, and the numbers only continue to rise.
Per the nonprofit Drag Story Hour, there were nine documented incidents of bomb threats targeting official DSH events in 2023. In 2024, there have already been at least 12 such incidents, with the number growing almost every weekend.
DSH executive director Jonathan Hamilt noted that bomb threats represent only a small fraction of the harassment directed at LGBT communities and LGBT-inclusive gatherings. In 2023, there were more than 60 documented cases of harassment targeting DSH or adjacent programming; the figure more than doubles when including anti-drag incidents in general.
Hamilt called it “deeply disturbing” that adults are choosing to incite violence and intimidate children, parents, and storytellers at family-oriented events while claiming to want to protect children.
Despite what the public perception may be, Hamilt continued, Drag Story Hour is “not scrambling.” The organization is nearly 10 years old and its efforts are “very organized.” Anti-LGBT harassment is nothing new, though sometimes it takes different forms, and the organization is “working on getting through this.”
(8) ELLISON BACK IN PRINT. Inverse interviews J. Michael Straczynski for a piece titled “The Unexpected Resurrection of Harlan Ellison “. The interviewer’s portion is largely a rehearsal of decades-old Ellison controversies. (But by no means all of them.)
…As the title suggests, Greatest Hits is a kind of historical document. These are stories that don’t necessarily reflect where science fiction and fantasy are going but where the genre has been, as seen through the dark lenses of Harlan Ellison. Some of the stories (like “Shatterday”) hold up beautifully. Some, as Cassandra Khaw points out in her introduction, have problematic elements.
But unlike recent reissues of books by Roald Dahl or Ian Fleming, these stories remain uncensored. The fight against censorship was one of Ellison’s lifelong passions, and so, other than a few content warning labels in the book, the sex, sci-fi, and rock ’n’ roll of this writer’s vision remains intact and raucous. Like the punk rock of genre fiction, Ellison’s stories are as jarring and blistering as ever.
“No, no, you don’t touch Harlan’s stuff, man,” Straczynski says. “Even if he’s dead, he’ll come after you.”
(9) SPEAKING OUT. The New Mexico Press Women presented George R.R. Martin with its “Courageous Communicator Award” last month, which Martin found thought-provoking as he explains in “Women of the Press” at Not A Blog.
“On the Occasion of its 75th Anniversary Bestows its COURAGEOUS COMMUNICATOR AWARD on March 15-16, 2024 to George R.R. Martin for building new worlds and creating strong, yet nuanced, women characters in his books and television shows.”
…Our world needs courageous communicators more than ever in these dark divided days, when so many people would rather silence those they disagree with than engage them in debate and discussion. I deplore that… but had I really done enough, myself, to be recognized for courageous speech?
I am not sure I have, truth be told. Yes, I’ve spoken up from time to time, on issues both large and small… but not always. It is always easier to remain silent, to stay on the sidelines and let the storms wash over you. The more I pondered, the more convinced I became that I need to do more. That we all need to do more.
I started by delivering a 45 minute keynote address, on the subject of free speech and censorship. Which, I am happy to say, was very well received (I was not entirely sure it would be)….
(10) 2024 ROMCON AWARDS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Best Translation goes to an old Ian Watson title from 1973…
The Best Novella winner Silviu Genescu is noted for back in the 1990s winning the Romanian equivalent of “D is for End” (that’s the English translation but the play on words works in English as it does in the original Romanian). I remember staying with Silviu’s family back in the late 1990s when doing an Anglo-Romanian SF & Science Cultural Exchange, and their son came back from school to say that they had been learning about his father’s oeuvre that day in class….
The upcoming Mad Max prequel film Furiosa includes a 15-minute action scene that took 78 days to film, it has been revealed.
Speaking to Total Film Magazine, the film’s star Anya Taylor-Joy and George Miller’s production partner Doug Mitchell spoke about the scene, which Taylor-Joy says is “very important for understanding” the character of Furiosa better.
Mitchell revealed that the film includes a “has one 15-minute sequence which took us 78 days to shoot” and required close to 200 stunt workers on set daily. While little else has been revealed about the scene, it has been described as a “turning point” for Furiosa…
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 23, 1973 — Naomi Kritzer, 51. 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 Kritzer in 2020 after winning the Lodestar Award.
Naomi Kritzer: 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 Eldridge: I went on to ask her how CatNet came to be…
Naomi Kritzer: 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 Eldridge: Let’s talk about your first series, Eliana’s Song.
Naomi Kritzer: 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 Eldridge: And your second series, Dead Rivers.
Naomi Kritzer: 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 Eldridge: 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 Kritzer: 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.
Reality Check introduces the superhero nobody wants.
(14) A MONOPOLY OF WHAT? Ellie Griffin concludes “No one buys books” at The Elysian.
In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37 percent and 11 percent of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into the Big Four. But the government intervened and brought an antitrust case against Penguin to determine whether that would create a monopoly.
The judge ultimately ruled that the merger would create a monopoly and blocked the $2.2 billion purchase. But during the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the industry from the inside. All of the transcripts from the trial were compiled into a book called The Trial. It took me a year to read, but I’ve finally summarized my findings and pulled out all the compelling highlights.
I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
But let’s dig into everything they said in detail….
…While Translyvania, Romania, brings to mind images of Dracula and his imposing castle, the Hoia Baciu Forest might be more reliably scary. Known as the “Bermuda Triangle of Romania,” the forest has been home to UFO sightings, glowing eyes, strange disappearances, in addition to trees that look like they were plucked from the Upside Down. In the busy residential section of Ichikawa, Japan, is a small, seemingly out-of-place wooded area. It’s been said that those who choose to enter the Yawata no Yabushirazu are whisked away, never to be seen again. Entrance is strictly forbidden. From a woodland in the shadows of England’s “most haunted village” to a tree in a Michigan forest said to be possessed by spirits, here are our favorite spine-tingling forests…
…Environmental enrichment (although without a single, agreed-upon, definition) generally refers to the addition of activities, objects or companionship to optimize physical and psychological states and improve an animal’s welfare.1–3 Appropriate enrichment encourages species-typical behaviors,1 and may improve welfare by providing an individual a greater perception of control and choice in their environment,4 and reducing their perception of threat.5 Because all non-domesticated animals must forage for food, whether by hunting, scavenging or searching, interventions that encourage foraging behavior are commonly implemented for zoo and laboratory animals.
Previous studies of companion animals have demonstrated positive effects of foraging toys on behavior. Shelter dogs that were provided with a Kong toy stuffed with frozen food in addition to reinforcement-based training were calmer, quieter and showed less jumping behavior when meeting potential adopters.6 Shelter parrots that engaged in feather-picking spent more time foraging and showed improved feather condition when provided with a food puzzle.7 Case studies suggest positive effects of food puzzles on the behavior of cats such as weight loss and resolution of inter-cat aggression and other behavioral concerns,8 even though a recent study found that food puzzles may not increase overall activity levels in house cats.9 Despite potential benefits, a recent survey found that less than 5% of Portuguese cat owners attending a veterinary practice provided food puzzles for their cats or hid food around the home to stimulate foraging behavior.10…
TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Hampus Eckerman, Arnie Fenner, Kathy Sullivan, Scott Edelman, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Dan’l.]
(1) TEXAS LIBRARY ASSOCIATON ASKS TINGLE FOR DO-OVER. Today the Texas Library Association’s executive director Shirley Robinson published a “TLA Statement Regarding Author Chuck Tingle” which says they want him to reconsider participating in their annual conference, although it says nothing one way or the other about him going masked.
As you may know, the Texas Library Association is currently planning and securing speakers for our annual conference in April. Last fall, we extended an initial invitation to author Chuck Tingle to participate as a panelist at our Evening with Authors event. We later offered Mr. Tingle the opportunity to participate in a different conference event.
This was a misstep that we regret, and it is counter to our mission to ‘unite and amplify voices…through intentional equity, diversity, and inclusion.’
I contacted Mr. Tingle’s publisher today to apologize and to ask whether or not he might reconsider participating in our Evening with Authors event. I hope Mr. Tingle will accept, and we can discuss what has transpired so that we may all come to a place of greater understanding.
TLA has spent the last two years fighting for the freedom to read and freedom of knowledge in school libraries, and we are always on the side of authors. We set a high standard for ourselves, and in this instance, we did not meet it. In the future, we will be more diligent in our processes and clearer and more thoughtful when discussing opportunities with potential speakers at our events. I am sorry for this mistake. We will learn from this and do better in the future.
(2) FOR FAN MAIL. The US Postal Service will have a Dungeons & Dragons-themed stamp issue this year: “USPS Reveals Additional Stamps for 2024” at American Philatelic Society.
This stamp release marks the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, described by its owners as the World’s Greatest Role-playing Game, that has become a cultural phenomenon. By inviting participants to imagine themselves as wizards, warriors and other adventurers in exciting and treacherous fantasy worlds, Dungeons & Dragons opened doors to whole new universes of creativity for generations of players. The pane of 20 stamps features 10 different designs that highlight characters, creatures and encounters familiar to players of the game. Greg Breeding, an art director for USPS, designed the stamps and pane with existing illustrations.
…Their joint novel is titled The Book of Elsewhere and is set in the world of the BRZRKR comic book series created by Reeves, first published in 2021. It follows an immortal warrior on a millennia-long journey to understand his immortality.
The novel is due to be published on 23 July by Penguin. Reeves, who is best known for his roles in The Matrix and John Wick franchises, said it was “extraordinary” to work with Miéville. “China did exactly what I was hoping for – he came in with a clear architecture for the story and how he wanted to play with the world of BRZRKR, a world that I love so much. I was thrilled with his vision and feel honoured to be a part of this collaborative process.”…
…“Sometimes the greatest games are those you play with other people’s toys,” said Miéville on the collaboration. “It was an honour, a shock and a delight when Keanu invited me to play. But I could never have predicted how generous he’d be with toys he’s spent so long creating,” he added….
…Upon its release, BRZRKR, created with writer Matt Kindt and artist Ron Garney, became the highest-selling original comic book series debut in more than 25 years. The comic will also be adapted into a live-action Netflix film starring Reeves and an anime series….
(4) ON THE ROAD AGAIN. Annalee Newitz soon will be touring to promote their far-future epic The Terraformers. Check the venue website to reserve free tickets.
NPR’s Ari Shapiro speaks with author Naomi Alderman on her new novel, The Future, which asks whether the giants of technology more likely to save humankind or accelerate its end.
…ALDERMAN: When I heard about these billionaires building their bunkers, I immediately thought of Lot. So this is a story that is about how you cannot escape from a terrible situation. If you think that, oh no, I’m powerful; I can escape; I can go to my bunker; I’m going to be all right, you just have to know that you take it with you. On a more broad level, I think Bible stories, particularly the stories of Genesis – I grew up reading them in the original Hebrew because I grew up very religious Jewish. And it seems to me that those stories are the foundations of what we might call Western civilization now, and we have sort of ceded them to religious education. So you learn those stories if you have a strong biblical schooling where you’re maybe taught that all of this is literally true, but actually, they’re incredibly important stories.
SHAPIRO: So, like, everybody can talk about the lesson of Icarus. Don’t fly too close to the sun.
ALDERMAN: Right…
(6) HE FOUGHT THE LAW AND THE LAW LOST. AND SO DID HE. Norman Spinrad’s latest “Norman Spinrad at Large” tells why he hasn’t had a new novel out for years.
…When I read that I am “One of the Four “Great Speculative Writers of the Past” I feel that I’m reading my own obituary. Sometimes when I am asked about things of my history I feel like I’m writing it.
Which, I suppose, is one good reason to let my Wikipedia answer such questions instead of myself. When I’m interviewed I’m much more interested in talking about what I’ve written about than talking about myself.
And another reason is that I don’t have time for much of such pondering of my past. I am indeed still crazy after all these years. Since my last new published novel THE PEOPLE’S POLICE in 2017 I’ve written dozens of my On Books column in Asimov’s. Songs. Journalism. This and that in the arts world. Political screeds. Published short stories and novellas, some of which are waiting to become a novel. Even a full first draft of a novel which needs a proper publisher with a good editor.
So why have I not published a new novel since THE PEOPLE’S POLICE in 2017?
That’s a story you won’t find in my wikipedia. That’s a story that is still going on.
There is a lot of talk today that because of the Woke vs. Maga literary political war, white male writers are finding it unfairly difficult getting their work published. Well, I confese that I am a white man, but I don’t think that is what had happened to me.
What Tor books did to THE PEOPLE’S POLICE is why I haven’t been able to publish a novel ever since. My editor on it there was the great David Hartwell. I was so confident of what he would do for the publication that Dona and I went to New Orleans on our own money to shoot promotional video for the book, knowing of course that Tor itself would not pay for any such thing.
But when we came back to New York, the shit hit the fan. David Harwell died in an accident, which among other things, turned THE PEOPLE’S POLICE into what is called a orphan book, meaning no one in Tor championed its publication. A horrible cover of a black cop and a white cop back to back on the hardcover against what the novel was actually hopefully about.
No one showed me the cover until it was too late to change,, telling me that David had approved it while he was still alive without showing it me, which he never would have done, and Tor refused to do anything at all with the videos that we had fronted with several thousand dollars of our money or even spend any at all on promoting the book.
What with the cover and the refusal of Tor to spend anything at all, what could have been a big seller at least in the South, the hard cover sanked. As you might imagine, I was not amused, but I thought a good cover, a just conver, could be put on the trade paperback, and Tor would have the freebee video for nothing.
Instead I was told that there would be no trade paperback. Well I was already crazy and did what most writers were not crazy enough to do. I went to war with Tor. And I won it. I got back my novel away from them so that I could at least create my own trade paperback on Amazon where it still is the only place you can find it.
But I paid a high price for my victory. I lost my agent because no agent can fight on the side of his writer against a publisher, and indeed shouldn’t for the sake of his other writers. And by then, it was becoming just about impossible get a proper publisher to even look at a novel except through an agent. And thusfar there has been no agent willing to take a chance on “One of the Four Great Speculative Writers of the Past.”…
(7) DARRAH CHAVEY OBITUARY. Wisconsin fan Darrah Chavey died January 6, 2024 from complications of heart surgery.
He was a mathematics professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin, teaching Computer Science, Ethnomathematics, and Ballroom Dancing.
He was a member of the Beloit Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. He was an active volunteer in putting on WisCon for a number of years, including running the “Internet Lounge”.
As a contributor to the Internet Science Fiction Database, one of his specialties was SF by women authors, especially works before the mid-80’s. Some of his research was captured on the SF Gender page.
He is survived by his wife Peggy Weisensel Chavey and other family members.
(8) TERRY BISSON (1942-2024). Author Terry Bisson died January 10 at the age of 81. He was especially well-known for short stories including “Bears Discover Fire”, winner of the Hugo and Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial awards, and ”They’re Made Out of Meat”. His story “macs” also won a Nebula (2001), as well as French and Spanish sff awards.
…He sold his first science-fiction novel, “Wylrdmaker,” to the publisher David Hartwell in 1981, for fifteen hundred dollars. The novel was pulp: it told the story of Kemen of Pastryn, a satirical futuristic version of Conan the Barbarian. It wasn’t the book Bisson wanted to write, he told me, but “it was the smartest thing I ever did. That’s when I discovered you didn’t have to be fucking Hemingway or Fitzgerald to write a novel.” His second novel, “The Talking Man,” was more of a passion project—it was a fantasy novel set in the rural South, with junkyards instead of castles…
He also wrote many film novelizations, including William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic; Virtuosity; The Fifth Element by Luc Besson; Alien Resurrection; Dreamworks’ Galaxy Quest; and The Sixth Day, and three Jonny Quest novels, plus other media tie-in novels.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
1987 — Sharyn McCrumb’s Highland Laddie Gone, published in hardcover by Avon Bokks thirty-seven years ago, is the third of the Elizabeth MacPherson mysteries and I think can safely discuss the setting of this novel and the prime character.
Sharyn McCrumb I’ve covered before, looking at several of her Ballad novels here as well as the genre Jay Omega series as well.
These novels are apparently her take at Agatha Christie as she has told interviewers. Now I don’t see that when I it read them but none-the-less Elizabeth MacPherson, forensic anthropologist, who’s from Scotland is a delightful central character.
Most of these novels are set in the mid Atlantic region of the States, and this one was no exception. The mystery is set at a Highland Games of which there are some hundred in the US alone. Now consider men wearing kilts, haggis on a stick, far too many bagpipes (and I like them) and way too much Scottish themed junk for sale. And everyone is of course Scottish for the day. Now she, our writer, manages to find the humor in all of that and make it quite interesting.
(Yes, I’m part Scottish. Scotch-Irish on my maternal side. No, not Scottish-Irish as I had to explain to more one person who said Scotch was a drink. Scotch-Irish are descendants of Ulster Protestants who emigrated from Ulster to North America during the 18th and 19th centuries. And I’m Welsh on the paternal side.)
MacPherson has to solve her mystery while dealing with the eccentric culture of the Highland Games. I think that McCrumb did a spot-on job of capturing the feel of those games.
Here’s our Beginning…
CLAN CHATTAN
Dear Elizabeth, How are you? It’s been ages! Due to a security leak in your organization (your mom), I have obtained your address and am writing to ask a favor. (In business school they teach us to come to the point in the first paragraph.) Did you know that I’m getting my MBA at Princeton! The folks are so thrilled about it—Daddy’s plastered bumper stickers on every vehicle we own, even the riding lawn mower. It’s quite sweet, really, to see them so happy. Your mother didn’t say what you were doing.
Haven’t seen you at the Highland games festivals since high school. You really ought to come to one. Surely you’re not still upset about the dance competition. Goodness, there’s so much more to a festival than that! There’s the hospitality tent, and the nametag chairman. Not everybody is meant to be graceful, you know.
Anyway, I hope I can persuade you to come to the Labor Day games (see enclosed brochure), because there is something that I need a volunteer for. You remember Cluny, don’t you? He’s fine, as reserved as ever. For the past two years, I’ve been the person in charge of him for the festivals. You know how they like a pretty girl to show him off. Well, this year I simply can’t come! I’ll be in Europe during term break with my flatmate. So, I need someone to take my place. Buffy and Pax and Cammie-Lynn were all booked up, so I’m hoping that you’ll show the old Clan spirit and volunteer for the job. But if you can’t afford it, do say so, and I’ll understand.
Please let me know soon about this. I’m off to Europe next week. Oh, and what have you been doing lately? Teaching? Got to run!
Mary-Stuart Gillespie
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 10, 1957 — George Alec Effinger. (Died 2002.) I first experienced him when I read the Marîd Audran novels (Gravity Fails, A Fire in The Sunand The Exile Kiss). Though he set them in a 22nd-century Middle East, the setting isn’t really faithful to that reality but reflects more the city of New Orleans where he lived much of his life. Truly exceptional novels.
He started work on a fourth Audran novel, Word of Night, but died before that work was completed. The existing two chapters of Word of Night that he did complete are now available in Budayeen Nights, along with the other Budayeen stories and some other short stories as which was edited by Marty Halpern at Golden Gryphon.
The “Schrödinger’s Kitten” novelette won a Hugo at Noreascon 3, it also garnered a Sturgeon and Nebula too; his “Marîd Changes His Mind” novella was nominated for a Nebula but was withdrawn for a Hugo after the nomination was declined.
He wrote a lot, and I do mean a lot, of novels besides the Marîd Audran works but I’ll confess that I’m largely unfamiliar with most of them. I’ve immensely enjoyed The Red Tape War co-written with Resnick and Jack L. Chalker, but that’s it. Anyone care to give an opinion on the rest of his novels?
I see he did the scripts for about a dozen comics, one of which was “The Mouse Alone!” in which he created the character of a young Gray Mouser. Huh. That was the Sword of Sorcery #5 issue, DC Comics, Nov.-Dec. 1973.
And I was surprised to learn he did a Sandman story as well, “Seven Nights in Slumberland” which ran in The Sandman: Book of Dreams. I must’ve read it at some point as I read that anthology. It’s a very good anthology too.
Planet of the Apes novels? Really? Anyone here read these?
George Alec Effinger in 1988. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
(11) ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION.
[Item by Cat Eldridge.]
2001–So this date was when The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring film was premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in London twenty-three years ago.
I don’t as a rule watch films or series based off literary works that I deeply, madly love. That’s because I’ve got in my mind’s eye my own vision of what each character looks like already, what the landscape is and so forth. So I’m usually disappointed by what is visually created by even the best of our video creators. Not their fault of course.
I cannot begin to remember the number of times that I’ve read The Fellowship of the Ring as it is a novel that I both deeply loved and found to be one that I find always is fresh when I read it. Forty years on since by my first reading of it and now I’m listened to being the tale narrated by Andy Serkis, and I was once again deeply and fully delighted by this story as written by Tolkien.
The very first words of “When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton” were enough to draw me and they’ve drawn me ever since. The rest of the novel is just as good.
So did Peter Jackson do that to me? Very much not at all. He was faithful to the source material as he much as could be given the difference in story telling mediums, and the script as written by him, his wife Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens (they were the writing team for all of the Tolkien films) was quite delightful indeed.
The actors? Stellar they were, one and all in creating the feel that characters of this novels had come alive. I can’t possibly detail all of them here. I really can’t. My favorites? Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins, Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins, Ian McKellen as Gandalf and John Rhys-Davies as Gimli. Those are my favorite actors the first time that I watched it and they remained so with repeated reviewings.
McKellen it is said by several sources was the fourth choice as the first three approached to play that role turned it down because of ill health — Patrick McGoohan, Anthony Hopkins and Christopher Plummer.
Oh and the universe they inhabited. John Howe and Alan Lee were deeply involved as conceptual artists throughout the project, Lee mainly on the architecture such as creating Hobbiton; Howe on characters such as Gandalf, the Ents and the Balrog. Weta was responsible first such things as armour, miniatures and weapons.
Oh those Ents. They were just what I expected them to be, perfectly realised to be what was in my minds eye. I did look for a nicely crafted one after the film came out even then they were they were running well several hundred dollars unfortunately. Still want one to have who will sit among my plants here.
So let’s not forget the New Zealand landscape standing in for Middle-earth. It worked magnificently as it has on oh so many occasions for other series and films now. I felt like I was seeing Middle-earth made real.
So I fell in love with it and have stayed so. And therefore I’m not at all surprised that it won at Hugo at ConJosé. It certainly deserved that Hugo.
After years of stops and starts, Paramount is making a step toward returning Star Trekto the big screen. Toby Haynes, who directed episodes of of the Star Wars series Andor, will helm a new feature, with Seth Grahame-Smith writing.
This would mark the first feature for Haynes, who helmed the dark, celebrated Star Trek-inspired episode of Black Mirror, “USS Callister.”
Deadline’s article adds, “Insiders add that the final chapter in that main series, Star Trek 4, remains in active development.”
…Ahsoka‘s renewal is welcome, if unsurprising. The series premiere got 14 million views in the first five days following its premiere, and the series holds an 86% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Ahsoka joins Andor, which is also getting a second season.
Ahsoka stars Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano, a former Jedi Padawan apprenticing under Anakin Skywalker. Dawson first played the character in season two of The Mandalorian followed by an appearance in The Book of Boba Fett. The first season of Ahsoka premiered on Disney+ in August 2023 with 8 episodes….
(15) EXPOSURE. The LA Public Library announced a way for indie authors to submit their e-books for circulation. The info doesn’t discuss any payment for authors.
The Los Angeles Public Library is partnering with BiblioBoard to bring the Indie Author Project public library e-book discover service to L.A. residents.
Indie Author Project provides L.A.’s self published authors a wonderful opportunity to submit their e-book for circulation at LAPL, libraries throughout California, and possibly libraries nationwide. This is a great way to reach a wider reading audience and build buzz on your book.
Indie Author Project also provides adventurous readers access to exciting new literary voices in a variety of genres. Discover a great new author before they make it big!
Click here if you are interested in submitting your title and read the terms of agreement.
Submissions must be in the epub or pdf file format—here are a few sites that provide simple free tools to convert files from MS Word to epub: Online-Convert; Zamzar. Or, use our free Pressbooks tool to create a professional quality formatted ebook file.
(16) ARTIST INTELLIGENCE. [Item by Steven French.] What do you do when you don’t have a photo to go with a creepy story about a Tennessee ghost or an Aboriginal Australian cryptid? You ask an illustrator for an equally spooky image of course! Atlas Obscura shared its best illustrations of the year: “In 2023, We Illustrated the Darkest Corners of the Human Imagination”.
At Atlas Obscura, we’re always curious about the unusual, and that doesn’t always lend itself to photos. So we turn to an amazing army of illustrators to bring readers into our stories. This year, we noticed that many of our favorite illustrations were commissioned to depict the dark and the mysterious—pretty on-brand for us—whether it’s of menacing creatures of the spring, un-jolly characters of Christmas, or myths of the Egyptian underworld. Our artists around the globe took on the art direction challenges with spooky glee, and brought these unearthly stories to life with bewitching visuals….
…Illustrator Harshad Marathe generally enjoys working on otherworldly subject matter, such as mythology, or creatures, demons, and dieties. So he took naturally to the Egyptian sun god, on a boat towed on snakes, in a desert. He conceived other trippy and colorful scenes for our series on Egypt’s netherworld, a highlight of our annual month-long Halloween bacchanalia….
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The trailer has dropped for Monolith, available in theaters and on digital beginning February 16.
While trying to salvage her career, a disgraced journalist begins investigating a strange conspiracy theory. But as the trail leads uncomfortably close to home, she is left to grapple with the lies at the heart of her own story.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Ita, Kathy Sullivan, Carl, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jeff Smith.]
King Rat by China Miéville. Introduction by Tim Maughan.
First published in 1998. Reprinted in 2023 by Tor Essentials
Review by Warner Holme: China Miéville’s King Rat is a fascinating mixture of the elements in late 1990’s urban fantasy. Coming out originally as the breakout volume for someone who would become a byword of the genre, this book deals with a hidden world outside of and beneath what is known, dealing with a focal point in London.
Specifically it is about a man called Saul dealing with the sudden death of his father, as he is thrust into a strange underworld where King Rat, a human looking figure, who explains he has a hidden ancestry and great destiny, though he might be fighting against a mind controlling force. While this seems straightforward enough, the fact more is going on becomes obvious from the get-go.
A very nice new introduction attempts to give some background on the book, and in particular on the musical genre known as Jungle which features within it. This is a relatively small genre to be sure, and as a result a reminder for readers who are unfamiliar with it will be greatly appreciated.
The depiction of this strange underworld as centered around rats, spiders, and birds is a clever way to reference back to old mythologies and folk tales. It is also, however, somewhat arguably a slightly classist way to reference back towards the people of the streets in the process, almost treating them as vermin. Odd era-appropriate images of class, like some groups hating acoustic playing along with samples or people being suspicious of a cellphone user, are clearly finding the whole matter completely out of date. More than this, the clueless but legitimately honest and well meaning cops are an especially noticeable oddity in what is obviously a left leaning story, and this has only become more-so over time.
Class and race play roles in this book, although the elements of each are not what might be obvious. The use of music is clever and could easily be seen as an examination of the dangers and weaknesses regarding cultural appropriation. This is not to say that this was intentional, and indeed character dynamics mean that even the more socialist sentiments raise questions as characters often espouse them for personal reasons.
The similar subjects and release dates matching well enough means that for many Neil Gaiman’s Neverewhere supplants this book in memory. This is an unfortunate association as both are enjoyable but they do not approach the material from a similar philosophical point of view. While forgetting the homeless or strange is treated as unfortunate in Neverwhere, here even the powerful of the underworld are treated as a special example of privilege and desperate to maintain that control to which they are accustomed.
The Tor Essentials line has republished volumes both well known and obscure. This falls somewhat into a middle category, as it was successful enough on release and from an author who is considered one of the great names in the genre of fantasy. Certainly to be recommended to fans of the author, urban fantasy aficionados will undoubtedly like a look at this strange volume as well.
(1) CALLING BLACK SFF WRITERS. The 2022 BSF Writer Survey conducted by FIYAH closes March 4 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. See complete guidelines at the link.
The BSF Writer Survey is back! FIYAH will be inheriting Fireside Fiction’s #BlackSpecFic Reports, and this survey will be used to provide context to those results in a report being released in the fall of 2022.
We invite Black SFF writers to submit information about their practices and insights on submission to SFF short fiction markets with a focus on the 2021 calendar year, as well as the impact of and experience with special offerings made during the summer of 2020. The responses we receive will allow us to:
Quantify the existence of Black speculative fiction writers seeking publication.
Provide submission context to existing publication data.
Expose the impact of doleful publication statistics on Black writers.
Enable markets to pinpoint their failings in attracting or publishing Black writers.
The FIYAH Literary Magazine Grant Series is intended to assist Black writers of speculative fiction in defraying costs associated with honing their craft.
The series includes three $1,000 grants to be distributed annually based on a set of submission requirements. All grants with the exception of the Emergency Grant will be issued and awarded as part of Juneteenth every year. The emergency grant will be awarded twice a year in $500 amounts.
Applications for the Rest, Craft, and Study grants close May 15th.
1: The Rest Grant
The FIYAH Rest Grant is for activists and organizers with a record of working on behalf of the SFF community, but who are in need of respite or time to recommit to their personal projects.
3: Study Grant
This grant is to be used for defraying costs associated with attending workshops, retreats, or conducting research for a writing project.
4: Craft Grant
This grant is awarded based on a writer’s submitted WIP sample or project proposal, in the spirit of assisting with the project’s completion.
(3) AUCTION TO AID RED CROSS UKRAINE. Fan and editor Johnny Mains has set up an online auction of genre-related items in support of Red Cross Ukraine; it runs until March 12: “Authors And Artists Auction For The Ukraine” at Will You Send a Dinghy, Please? Lots include signed books from Kim Newman, Ramsey Campbell, Nicholas Royle, and participation in an online interview with Ellen Datlow.
I, like many, have been shaken by Russia’s horrific attack on Ukraine. I stand in solidarity with all Ukranians. I’m aware I have a miniscule public profile, but if I can do some good with it, then it’s a privilige and my duty. Plus, children in Ukraine being put through that? It’s sickening. So I’m doing a charity auction – with all proceeds going to directly to Red Cross Ukraine as you’ll be donating the money directly to them after the auction ends. 95% of goods will be posted by those donating them – in one or two cases I’ve been asked to post on that person’s behalf.
For the next two weeks, until the 12th of March, I’ll be running a live auction. I have asked people to donate things and I’ll be donating stuff myself….
(4) SANDERSON KEEPS ROLLING. Brandon Sanderson’s editor at Tor, Moshe Feder, sounds like he’s in a bit of shock: “To say it’s a massive surprise is a massive understatement. While the immediate overwhelming response on Kickstarter is quite a coup for Brandon and his team. I hope I get to be involved.”
(5) GUESS WHO LEARNED IT’S HARD RUNNING A BOOKSTORE. Even building your house of brick can’t keep it from being blown down. Shelf Awareness reports “Amazon Closing All Amazon Books Stores”.
Big news from Amazon: the company is closing all of its Amazon Book books and electronics stores, as well as all of its pop-up and “4-star” stores, a move that was first reported yesterday by Reuters. Altogether, 68 stores are involved–66 in the U.S. and two in the U.K. There are some 24 Amazon Books stores around the country.
The company said it was making the move to concentrate its bricks-and-mortar efforts on Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, Amazon Go and a new venture, Amazon Style fashion and accessories stores, the first of which is set to open in Los Angeles this year, and will feature a variety of high-tech touches, including “just walk out” cashierless technology….
(6) CAN’T KEEP UP. Charles Stross admits how hard it is to stay ahead of reality.
We’re finally getting to learn a bit more about upcoming Doctor Who special Legend of the Sea Devils, with the episode’s co-writer, director and other new details confirmed in the latest edition of Doctor Who Magazine.
“It’s a bit of a swashbuckler,” executive producer Matt Strevens told DWM. “It’s the last ‘regular’ adventure story before you go into the machinations of a regeneration story.”
So who is behind this penultimate peril for Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor? Well, co-writing the episode with Chibnall is Ella Road, a playwright and screenwriter who wrote Olivier-nominated play The Phlebotomist (later adapted for BBC radio) as well as episodes of upcoming Call My Agent remake Ten Percent. Legend of the Sea Devils marks the first time a guest writer has co-written a special alongside Chibnall, as well as Road’s Doctor Who debut….
… David Tennant or Matt Smith coming back for a quick victory lap, on the other hand, is something everyone can enjoy, no matter how casual their relationship with the show. The polar opposite of fan-serving indulgence, it’s actually the biggest, most populist, most crowd-pleasing, big tent move Doctor Who could possibly make. (And this was true even in the 1980s, by the way, when the return of the Cybermen after an absence of seven years was an exciting event for everyone – including the kids who’d never heard of them.)
Even the return of Paul McGann, whose Eighth Doctor has had only fleeting screen-time, would be pretty simple to explain to viewers who aren’t familiar with him. And not just simple, but fun. Exciting. A strange man in strange clothes rocking up and telling everyone he used to be the Doctor? That’s drama. That’s a story. Who on Earth is going to take flight at that?…
… A few weeks ago, a long-ago conversation with a friend came to mind as I tried to bring some order to my bookshelves. My friend was not yet of a certain age, but he had, he confessed, crossed a line: He had made a transition from the curating stage of life to the editing stage. He was no longer collecting; he was deaccessioning. I lack his wisdom and maturity, and rather than editing as I sorted, I instead paused to thumb through and scan. And then I came across a book that made me stop and reread: The City & the City(2009), by the British writer China Miéville. It is a police procedural novel with a background environment that recalls Philip K. Dick. A crime needs to be solved in a society where two different cities—two separate polities, with separate populations, customs, alphabets, religions, and outlooks—coexist within the same small patch of geography. The names of the overlapping cities are Beszel and Ul Qoma….
(9) DID YOU MISS THIS WORLDCON PROGRAM? Morgan Hazelwood posts her notes about the DisCon III panel “Breaking A Story: Hollywood Style” at Writer in Progress. (Hazelwood also has a YouTube video version.)
The panelists for the titular panel were: Michael R Underwood, Nikhil Singh, Sumiko Saulson, and Rebecca Roanhorse as moderator….
(10) NEXT FANTASTIC BEASTS. “Set in the 1930s, the film centers on the lead-up to Wizarding World’s involvement in World War II” says IndieWire about the “’Fantastic Beasts 3’ New Trailer”. See it on YouTube.
Professor Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) knows the powerful Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen) is moving to seize control of the wizarding world. Unable to stop him alone, he entrusts Magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) to lead an intrepid team of wizards, witches and one brave Muggle baker on a dangerous mission, where they encounter old and new beasts and clash with Grindelwald’s growing legion of followers. But with the stakes so high, how long can Dumbledore remain on the sidelines?
(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
1940 — [Item by Cat Eldridge] Eighty-two years ago this day, Larry “Buster” Crabbe starred in Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, a black-and-white twelve-part movie serial from Universal Pictures. It would be the last of the three such Universal serials made between 1936 and 1940.
It was directed by Ford Beebe and Ray Taylor, neither of whom had any background in genre undertakings of this sort beyond Taylor directing Chandu on the Magic Island and its sequel The Return of Chandu, serials which starred Béla Lugosi. This serial was written by George H. Plympton, Basil Dickey and Barry Shipman. George H. Plympton would go on to write the Forties versions of The Green Hornet, Batman and Robin and Superman.
The primary cast beyond Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon was Carol Hughes as Dale Arden, Frank Shannon as Dr. Alexis Zarkov and Charles B. Middleton as Ming the Merciless. It actually had a very large cast for such a serial.
I couldn’t find any contemporary reviews but our present day reviewers like it with the Movie Metropolis reviewer saying of it that “Of course, it’s corny and juvenile but that’s the point”, and one Audience reviewer at Rotten Tomatoes noted “Of curiosity value to film buffs. Those who want to see how these old matinee serials influenced George Lucas’ Star Wars films will enjoy this.” It doesn’t get a great rating over there garnering only a fifty-seven percent rating.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born March 3, 1863 — Arthur Machen. His novella “The Great God Pan” published in 1890 has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as “Maybe the best horror story in the English language.” His The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations 1895 novel is considered a precursor to Lovecraft and was reprinted in paperback by Ballantine Books in the Seventies. (Died 1947.)
Born March 3, 1876 — David Lindsay. Best remembered for A Voyage to Arcturus which C.S. Lewis acknowledged was a great influence on Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. His other genre works were fantasies including The Haunted Woman and The Witch. A Voyage to Arcturus is available from the usual suspects for free. And weirdly it’s available in seven audio narratives. Huh. (Died 1945.)
Born March 3, 1920 — James Doohan. Montgomery “Scotty” Scott on Trek of course. His first genre appearance was I think in Outer Limits as Police Lt. Branch, followed by being a SDI Agent at Gas Station in The Satan Bug film before getting the Trek gig. His first genre series would’ve been Space Command where he played Phil Mitchell. He filmed a Man from U.N.C.L.E. film, One of Our Spies Is Missing, in which he played Phillip Bainbridge, during the first season of Trek. After Trek, he was on Jason of Star Command as Commander Canarvin. ISFDB notes that he did three Scotty novels co-written with S.M. Stirling. (Died 2005.)
Born March 3, 1936 — Donald E. Morse, 86. Author of the single best book done on Holdstock, The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction which he co-wrote according to ISFDB with Kalman Matolcsy. I see he also did two books on Kurt Vonnegut and the Anatomy of Science Fiction on the intersection between SF and society at large which sounds fascinating.
Born March 3, 1945 — George Miller, 77. Best known for his Mad Max franchise, The Road Warrior (nominated for a Hugo at ConStellation), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Fury Road. He also directed TheNightmare at 20,000 Feet segment of the Twilight Zone film, The Witches of Eastwick (nominated for a Hugo at Nolacon II), Babe and 40,000 Years of Dreaming.
Born March 3, 1948 — Max Allan Collins, 74. Best remembered for writing the Dick Tracy newspaper strip for many years and has numerous novels featuring the character as well. He’s novelized Waterworld and all of The Mummy films. He won the Faust Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Born March 3, 1955 — Gregory Feeley, 67. Reviewer and essayist. Clute says of his reviews “Sometimes adversarial, unfailingly intelligent, they represent a cold-eyed view of a genre he loves by a critic immersed in its material.” Writer of two SF novels, The Oxygen Barons and Arabian Wine, plus the Kentauros essay and novella.
Born March 3, 1982 — Jessica Biel, 40. A number of interesting genre films including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Blade: Trinity, Stealth, The Illusionist, the remake of Total Recall which I confess I’ve not seen, and the animated Spark: A Space Tail.
(13) FANAC.ORG FANHISTORY ZOOM. The latest fanhistory Zoom at Fanac.org is now online: “Death Does Not Release You – LASFS Through the Years (Pt 1 of 2).”
From the YouTube description: “Legend (and John Trimble) has it that the slogan “Death Does Not Release You” came about when Ray Bradbury gave a talk at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society and was asked to pay his dues. When Bradbury said his membership had expired, Ernie Wheatley told him “death does not release you, even if you die”. Bradbury paid his 35 cents…
This notable group of panelists, including artist Tim Kirk, TV writer and producer Craig Miller, filmmaker Ken Rudolph and convention runner Bobbi Armbruster are all current or former members of LASFS. They are fan artists, convention runners, fanzine editors and club officers.
In part 1, the panelists talk about how they were welcomed into science fiction fandom and into LASFS (including how Ray Bradbury talked teenager Craig Miller into going to his first club meeting). There are stories about the drug culture of the 60s and its barbarian invasion of the club, as well as about the big movers and shakers of the 60s and 70s, many no longer with us, such as Bruce Pelz and Len Moffat. Even if you’ve never been to a LASFS meeting, this feels like a nostalgic family reunion. See Part 2 for the continuation.”
…I will be taking photos and videos for my patrons (I don’t actually mean to keep flogging that, isn’t my intention, just came up thrice in a row in answer to this.) We’re busy fixing the place up, doing repairs, making it tour-friendly. It’s been a ton of work, as well as setting up the Harlan and Susan Ellison nonprofit foundation that will ensure his work and legacy are protected long after I’ve gone to dust. This is important because some writers’ estates have been ransacked in the past, but by setting up a nonprofit that is directly answerable to state and federal regulators, with a strong board of directors, it guarantees that not a dime goes in or out that’s unaccounted for or unchecked. Will have a lot more on that count to say soon.
(15) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 52 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Who’s Robert Picardo?”, celebrates an award nomination with a victory lap.
John Coxon, Alison Scott and Liz Batty have been nominated for a BSFA Award! (Also, Liz is on holiday, naturally.) We discuss that with worse audio quality than usual, before normal service is resumed and we talk about Hugo nominations and Eastercon bids.
(16) DAVID M. KELLY. Meet David M. Kelly, the author of Kwelengsen Storm, Book One of the Logan’s World Series.
Originally from the wild and woolly region of Yorkshire, England, David emigrated to Canada in 2005 and settled in Northern Ontario with his patient and supportive wife, Hilary. Foot surgery in 2014 temporarily curtailed many of his favorite activities – hiking, camping, piloting his own personal starfighter (otherwise known as a 1991 Corvette ZR-1). But on the plus side, it meant a transition from the world of IT into life as a full-time writer—an opportunity he grasped enthusiastically.
David is passionate about science, especially astronomy and physics, and is a rabid science news follower. Never short of an opinion, David writes about science and technology on his blog davidmkelly.net. He has supported various charity projects such as the Smithsonian’s Reboot The Suit and the Lowell Observatory Pluto Telescope Restoration. He also contributes to citizen science projects such as SETI@home.
What’s his book about?
When Logan Twofeathers takes on the job of head of engineering on Kwelengsen, the first habitable planet discovered by Earth, he thinks he’s leaving conflict far behind. But when he investigates the loss of a deep-space communications relay, his ship is attacked and crash-lands back on the planet.
With his new home destroyed by the invaders, Logan is stranded deep in the frozen mountains with an injured sergeant who hates him almost as much as the enemy. Against the ever-present threat of capture, he must battle his way through icy surroundings in a treacherous attempt to find his wife.
And when he’s forced to ally himself with a disparate group of soldiers and their uncompromising captain, Logan must face the reality that he may have lost everything—and everyone—he loves. Will he choose to fight? And what will it cost him?
(17) WAVES HELLO. If Mars is the Red Planet, could we call Venus the Infra-Red Planet? Well, not exactly. But this New York Times article prompted the question: “Venus Shows Its Hot, Cloudy Side”.
Venus is so hot that its surface glows visibly at night through its thick clouds.
That is what pictures taken by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe have revealed.
The planet’s average temperature hovers around 860 degrees Fahrenheit, and thick clouds of sulfuric acid obscure the view. Until now, the only photographs of the Venusian surface were taken by four Soviet spacecraft that successfully landed there in the 1970s and 1980s, operating briefly before succumbing to the hellish environs.
During flybys of Venus, the Parker spacecraft pointed its cameras at the night side of Venus. It was able to see the visible wavelengths of light, including the reddish colors that verge on the infrared that can pass through the clouds.
“It’s a new way of looking at Venus that we’ve never even tried before — in fact, weren’t even sure it was possible,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary division.
In the Parker photographs, hotter locales like low-lying volcanic plains appeared brighter while those at higher altitudes like Aphrodite Terra, one of three continent-size regions on Venus, were about 85 degrees cooler and darker.
Astronomers have discovered an unprecedented three moons in orbit around an asteroid.
‘Binary’ asteroids, which have one moon, are fairly common. Triple asteroids, with two moons, are rare. Now, the identification of the first known quadruple asteroid — Elektra, which orbits the Sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — shows that two is not the limit.
Previous observations had shown that two moons circle Elektra, which is roughly 200 kilometres wide. A team led by Anthony Berdeu at the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand in Chiang Mai re-assessed Elektra by analysing images of the asteroid taken in 2014 by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal, Chile. The scientists used sophisticated image-processing techniques to detect the third, faint moon….
…Of course, almost all the credit should go to Hidetaka Miyazaki and his astonishing team of games designers who have been laboring on this game for half a decade or more, determined to create the best videogame ever. I am honored to have met them and worked with them, and to have have played a part, however small, in creating this fantastic world and making ELDEN RING the landmark megahit that it is…
[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Chris Barkley, Rob Thornton, Jennifer Hawthorne, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Xtifr.]
