26 My Dear Guests, I Am Mr. Scroll, Your Host. Welcome To Fantasy Pixel

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) NOMMOS SHORTLIST AND MORE. This year’s Worldcon announced activities to look forward to by “The African Speculative Fiction Society (ASFS) at LAcon V”.

We are thrilled to be partnering with the African Speculative Fiction Society at LAcon V!

ASFS presents the annual Nommo Awards, which honor outstanding works of speculative fiction by African writers across the continent and diaspora. This year, ASFS will be announcing the shortlisted works live at LAcon via our Virtual Program! There will be introductions and contributions from the nominees, as well as a discussion about the evolution and global impact of African speculative fiction.

In addition to this Celebrating African Speculative Fiction panel, ASFS will be presenting multiple panels as part of the LAcon V Virtual Program.

The full schedule will be released August 2026.

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to chew on peri-peri chicken with Octothorpe’s John Coxon and Alison Scott in Episode 284 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Two Hugo Award-nominated podcasts collide in the fifth and final episode of Eating the Fantastic recorded during this year’s Eastercon. John Coxon and Alison Scott, two-thirds of the award-winning team behind Octothorpe (absent their equally entertaining cohost Liz Batty) took me on walkabout to a nearby Nando’s so I could experience its peri-peri chicken for the first time — and we recorded not just our meal, but the hikes there and back again.

We discussed the many first-time Eastercon attendees I encountered who were there due to their podcast, Nando’s place in British culture and why it was chosen to be our venue for this episode, what they’re willing to reveal about cohost Liz Batty in her absence, how the coming of COVID-19 kickstarted the creation of Octothorpe, why they didn’t launch an old-school fanzine instead, how the first episode wasn’t even originally intended to be the first episode, why we’re still here considering 90% of podcasts don’t make it past three episodes, how to comment responsibly on fandom while being a part of fandom, the reason their letters of comment section is so important, what changed about the show once they realized people were actually listening, advice for those who’d like to start podcasts of their own, plus much more.

(3) SFF REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup” in the Guardian covers Not With a Bang by Temi Oh; Tillinghast by Clare Cavenagh; Atomic Coffin by Benedict Anning; The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden; and Bad Things Happen Here by Mark Morris.

(4) NOT TO BE READ OUT LOUD. “Silent Movies Jump from Screen to Page in Movie Tie-In Novels” at SFWA’s Planetside.

The first movie tie-in novels date to the rise of silent movies as mass entertainment at the beginning of the 20th century. As with movie tie-in books today, these included both novelizations of screenplays and reissues of published novels illustrated with movie stills.

The novelization of The Adventures of Kathlyn is one of the earliest movie tie-in novels. This serial began on December 29, 1913, and was shown in movie theaters through 1914. One of the action heroines of silent movies, the film’s star, Kathlyn Williams, was famous for performing with big cats. The movie took advantage of her talents and first name. Over the course of 13 episodes, the fictional Kathlyn rescues her explorer father and frees the enslaved population of a mythical kingdom. She traverses jungles, battles wild beasts, outwits the insidious Council of Three, and dodges a forced marriage to a foul prince. Each episode ended with a cliffhanger guaranteed to bring the audience back to enjoy the next installment until the story’s happy resolution.

Harold McGrath, who supplied the original story for the screenplay, wrote the novel published by The Bobbs-Merrill Company. The text was illustrated with black-and-white photos from the film. The frontispiece opposite the title page shows Kathlyn clutching the hunter Bruce, who aids her quest to rescue her father and provides a romantic interest.

Newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times also featured stories illustrated with stills from The Adventures of Kathlyn. This was designed to boost sales of the newspapers, the serial, and the book, cashing in on every possible way to keep the public intrigued by Kathlyn’s trials and tribulations. It was all coordinated, with the Chicago Tribune helping to finance the movie production in hopes of boosting their circulation. The Motion Picture News noted film screenings ended with a reminder to read about Kathlyn in the Sunday newspaper, while the newspaper stories urged fans to go to the “picture theater” to watch the next episode….

(5) WALTER SCOTT PRIZE. The BBC reports “‘Most unusual book’ wins Walter Scott historical fiction prize”.

A book which judges said “may be the most unusual book you read this year” has won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Alice Jolly’s work The Matchbox Girl tells the story of Adelheid Brunner – a mute autistic patient of Dr Hans Asperger in the now-infamous Vienna Children’s Hospital during the 1930s, while the city is under Nazi occupation….

…Judges praised the “originality, innovation, ambition” of Jolly’s work which “confronts a topic of immense complexity in a gripping tour de force”.

“The Matchbox Girl may be the most unusual book you read this year,” they said. “For its honesty, power and storytelling dexterity, our 2026 winner will also be one of the most important.”

Jolly was part of the first ever all-British shortlist for the award.

Speaking of writing the book, she said: “I remain constantly troubled by that age of old question as to how people who were certainly not wholly ‘evil’ nevertheless found themselves drawn into appalling crimes.

“In 2018, two non-fiction books about the history of autism were published which told wildly differing stories about Dr Asperger. My book started with the simple question – who was Dr Asperger?”.

Dr Asperger is known for his work in child psychiatry and identifying Asperger syndrome, a form of autism, in 1944 – however the term “autistic psychopathy” was used until 1981.

In 1981, the British psychiatrist Lorna Wing introduced the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome.

But documents uncovered in 2018 suggested Dr Asperger sent child patients to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, where they were put to death by the Nazi regime.

Jolly said that as she worked on the book she realised that his forgotten colleagues were “perhaps more interesting than he was”.

She said she became obsessed with “bringing them into the light” and celebrating the ways in which they “struggled to hold onto their research, and their principles, despite finding themselves in the eye of the most evil storm of the 20th Century”.

(6) A JANE YOLEN TRIBUTE. Here is the start of Michael Swanwick’s remembrance, “Jane Yolen, 1939-2026” at Flogging Babel.

I was talking with Jane Yolen once, in her house in St. Andrews, Scotland. I told her how much I admired her prolific output of books–something like 400 then, though it’s grown since. She tried to duck the compliment by saying, “Well, yours are so much longer than mine.”

“I’ve read Owl Moon,” I said. (For those who don’t know, it’s an illustrated story sold as a ‘children’s book’ but actually a gem of a prose poem of a reminiscence, possibly true and possibly not.) “How many drafts did that take?”

“A few hundred,” she admitted.

“I rest my case,” I said….

(7) RONNIE SCHELL (1931-2026). “Ronnie Schell Dead: ‘Gomer Pyle: USMC’ Actor Was 94” reports Deadline.

Ronnie Schell, a prolific TV character actor perhaps best known for his portrayal of the amiable Pvt. Duke Slater, pal of Jim Nabors’ hayseed Gomer Pyle on the ’60s sitcom of that name, died of natural causes today at UCLA Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 94….

He worked a lot – the sff TV shows in his resume included The Girl With Something Extra, Mork & Mindy and Phil of the Future.

His genre films included Disney’s Gus, The Shaggy D.A., and The Devil and Max Devlin.

He provided voices on such animated projects as Jetsons: The Movie as well as TV series including Battle of the Planets and Smurfs.

(8) MARGARET KERRY (1929-2026). “Margaret Kerry Dead: Tinker Bell Model for ‘Peter Pan’ Was 97” – The Hollywood Reporter finds that wasn’t her only genre role.

…As a voice actress, Kerry starred on Clutch Cargo in 1959, Space Angel in 1962-64 and Captain Fathom in 1965 — those cartoons used the Syncro-Vox system, with real human lips superimposed over the animated characters’ mouths — and on The New Three Stooges in 1965. She did live segments with Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Joe DeRita as well. All were for Cambria Productions, a company led by her first husband, Dick Brown.

The 5-foot-2 Kerry had starred alongside Eddie Cantor in If You Knew Susie (1948) and was an assistant dance director on the Gloria DeHaven musical I’ll Get By (1950) when her agent sent her to Disney Studios in Burbank to audition for Peter Pan, she recalled in a 2003 interview with Jim Korkis….

… Kerry got the job, reported for work the next Tuesday and on and off for the next six to nine months, she moved around “a great big soundstage that seemed to go on forever” wearing her own one-piece bathing suit and her hair in a bun and being observed by Marc Davis (one of Walt Disney’s “Nine Old Men”) and other animators.

“There was no one for me to react to. I had to imagine almost everything,” she said. “There was an occasional prop like huge scissors or a wire-frame keyhole or something. Most of the time it was just me pretending to be looking up from under something or walking around.”…

…She appeared as a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) — she said after a studio light caught fire, Mickey Rooney “dragged me into this little two-inch deep stream on the set so I’d be safe from any flames” — and in Our Gang comedy shorts and took dancing lessons from Nico Charisse, husband of Cyd Charisse.

She showed up in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) and The Star Maker (1939) and was a stand-in for Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet (1944), then tap-danced and sang as the daughter of Cantor and Joan Davis’ characters in If You Knew Susie. It was Cantor who gave her the stage name Margaret Kerry….

… “You remember the scene where [Tinker Bell] falls over backward in Wendy’s dresser drawer?” she asked Korkis. “Well, they had me falling over backward onto a mattress. The mattress was about a half-inch thick, or at least it seemed that thick, and I went over backward and went thud. The look of my face of surprise and pain was identical to the one Tink has in the finished film.”…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born June 12, 1916 – Irwin Allen. (Died 1992.)

So let’s talk about Irwin Allen. While he may be best known for that most spectacular of ocean disaster movies, The Poseidon Adventure, he’s done more than done a reasonable share of genre work.

The first series that he created in the Sixties was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, was based off his film of the same name, which aired on ABC from the fall of 1964 to the spring of 1968 making it the decade’s longest-running American science fiction television series with continuing characters. The one hundred and ten episodes produced included the first thirty-two shot in black-and-white, and last seventy-eight filmed in color.

Next up for him was Lost in Space. Saying it’s based off Johann David Wyss’ The Swiss Family Robinson is really, really stretching things, isn’t it? Be that as it may, the show ran for eighty-three episodes over three seasons on CBS.

Remember The Time Tunnel? Yeah he was responsible for it too. The show ran for one season of thirty episodes from 1966 to 1967 on ABC.

His run of SF series would be concluded with Land of the Giants, a one-hour series that aired on ABC from the fall of 1968 to the spring of 1970. It was filmed in color. It’s worth noting that five novels based on the television series, including three written by Murray Leinster, would be published while the series aired.

A decade later, we have a miniseries on that took Robert Bloch and six other scriptwriters to please Irwin Allen, The Return of Captain Nemo (its theatrical title when a shorter, possibly more coherent version had a screen run was The Amazing Captain Nemo). It has been considered an attempt by him to duplicate the success of his Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. It didn’t.

Finally, I’ll note that he was responsible for it happening in all aspects possible, a music version of Alice in Wonderland. It aired on CBS over two nights in 1985, and it had an amazing cast of Natalie Gregory (Alice here), Red Buttons, Anthony Newley, Jayne Meadows, Carol Channing, Sammy Davis Jr., Roddy McDowall, Ann Jillian, Pat Morita and Robert Morley. It has an extraordinary rating of eighty-five percent over at Rotten Tomatoes.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit has a plan for rejections.
Wondermark overpaid to be fleeced.
Yaffle mixes genres.
xkcd applies the trend of flipping to geology.

(11) ANALYZING THE WHO HIATUS. The New York Times tries to answer the question: “‘Doctor Who’ Is in Limbo. What Does That Mean for Fans?”

What do the changes mean for the future of the series?

Although the show has not been canceled, it appears to have entered an indefinite hiatus.

The Cardiff, Wales-based production company Bad Wolf, whose founders worked with Davies on “Doctor Who” throughout the reboot era, said on Instagram on Wednesday that they were leaving. And Davies, the “It’s A Sin” and “Years and Years” writer who returned to the franchise in 2023, is out, too.

There are no upcoming episodes on the show’s slate (bar a previously announced animated series for preschoolers), and nothing more can be produced until a new team is chosen.

On social media, fans have dubbed this new period “the Wilderness Years 2.0,” in reference to the 16-year gap between Sylvester McCoy’s final episode as the Doctor in 1989 and Christopher Eccleston’s first in 2005….

View this post on Instagram

(12) BRING IT BACK ALIVE. Meanwhile, here are some of Charlie Jane Anders’ ideas about “How to Bring Back Doctor Who” at Happy Dancing.

…One of the great innovations of the 2005 relaunch was having companions who were from present-day England and frequently returned home to visit their family and/or loved ones. This made Doctor Who more explicitly a portal fantasy, which is excellent, and allowed the companions to feel more grounded in reality.

I think, however, it might be time to return to having companions who are a bit more unusual in their own right. And here’s where I think of something like One Piece, where every member of Monkey D. Luffy’s crew is a colorful character with a fancy backstory. Maybe it’s time for another companion from the future, or the distant past. Maybe we could get someone a bit more akin to Captain Jack Harkness, who did travel in the TARDIS occasionally but never quite settled in as a companion.

It would also be interesting to have companions with more personal issues of their own, not focused quite so much on their relationship with the Doctor — and maybe no more companions who are at the center of a great mystery in which they’re the MacGuffin rather than the detective. My ideal companion would be Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride: constantly chasing revenge against the person who did them wrong, while the doctor tries to temper their fury and every adventure brings them closer to their goal. (Doctor Who did this a bit with Graham in Jodie Whitaker’s first season, but only a bit.)…

(13) HELP THE SOAPBOX COMMUNITY PRINT SHOP AND ZINE LIBRARY. The Soapbox is a community print shop and zine library in the West Philadelphia neighborhood of Philadelphia, PA. The studio has to move to a new location (there is no option to stay in the current studio location) and the owners say “the costs of this move are dire.” Gillian Lee, Project Special Collections Cataloging Librarian, University of Pennsylvania, and Board member, The Soapbox Community Print Shop and Zine Library, asks people to contribute here: “The Soapbox Studio Move Fundraiser”.

The Soapbox is the only community printshop in West Philly and one of the only zine libraries in Philadelphia, and they are in a truly urgent financial situation. There is one part-time studio coordinator and all other work, including working with architects and budgeting for this move, is done by dedicated, hardworking volunteers.

If community printing, low-cost book arts educational programming, and free public zine libraries are important to you, please consider donating or sending to a friend or colleague. If you are a Philadelphian like me and can take a class or donate, please do so; see the list of class offerings here. Financial support is truly make or break for the organization at this time. Fundraiser link

(14) NOT UNIQUE. [Item by Steven French.] A pair of philosophers explore the notion of ‘substrate flexibility’ with regard to alien consciousness with the accompanying article giving a nod of the head to the alien in Project Hail Mary: “Consciousness likely not unique to earthlings, paper says” at Phys.org.

Does consciousness depend on flesh and blood? The answer is almost certainly no, according to Eric Schwitzgebel, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. In a new working paper, Schwitzgebel and Jeremy Pober, a former UCR graduate student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lisbon, assert that consciousness is likely possible in life forms made of very different stuff. Think of the five-limbed alien with a rocklike exterior in the recent blockbuster movie “Project Hail Mary.”

Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness; they proceed from the heuristic premise that it’s a real and recognizable phenomenon. Instead, they ask a narrower question: Must it be tied to the biology found on Earth?

(15) YOU CAN CALL ME AL. According to NPR, “’Algorithm’ comes from the name of a Uzbek mathematician”.

It’s a simple word that has developed a sinister connotation: algorithm. For many of us, algorithms help determine what we watch, read and listen to — in the process, confirming our tastes and biases, and creating ideological echo chambers.

The word might not seem like one that would get much consideration from the Holy See. But last month in his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV addressed the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. The word “algorithm” came up 19 times….

… The etymology of the word is a strange one, according to Rob Watts, a journalist and host of RobWords, a popular YouTube channel about word origins and usage. “It just sounds like a mathematical term,” he notes. Instead, it invokes a specific mathematician, he says: the 9th century Persian Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.

“It’s actually the Latin take on that name al-Khwarizmi that we’re invoking when we use the word algorithm,” Watts says.

But it’s taken a rather convoluted journey to reach us a dozen centuries later. The modern word algorithm traces back to the Latin algorismus through French (algorisme) and English (algorism). It also got “somewhat conflated with the term “arithmetic” before arriving in its current form, Watts says….

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

Pixel Scroll 6/10/26 Thongor And The Pixel Of Scrollia

Posted on June 10, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) THERE’LL BE A WHO-SIZED HOLE IN YOUR CHRISTMAS STOCKING. “Doctor Who’ Christmas Special Canceled As Russell T Davies Exits” reports Deadline.

The BBC has canceled the special Christmas episode of Doctor Who, while showrunner Russell T Davies and producer Bad Wolf are exiting the iconic sci-fi series.

In an announcement on Wednesday, the BBC acknowledged that the news would be “disappointing for fans” after the broadcaster promised last year that it would air a “spectacular” special episode in 2026.

The Doctor Who festive special is something of an institution in the UK, with previous favorites including David Tennant making his full debut as the Doctor in 2005’s “The Christmas Invasion.”

The exit of Davies and Bad Wolf, who signed up for Doctor Who as part of a major reboot in 2021, will result in the BBC putting the series out to competitive tender.

It means that BBC Studios, which owns the rights to Doctor Who, or an independent producer will have the opportunity to reinvent the beloved Time Lord….

Here is the BBC’s official announcement: “An update on the future of Doctor Who”.

Today we’re announcing an update on plans for the future of Doctor Who.

As part of securing the next phase of the show for future generations, and in line with the BBC’s Charter and Agreement requirements, the BBC will put Doctor Who out to competitive tender this year. Doctor Who remains an important part of the BBC and this tender underpins the BBC’s continued commitment to Doctor Who ensuring audiences will enjoy the show for years to come.

After careful consideration, the BBC, Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf have collectively decided not to go ahead with the previously announced Doctor Who Christmas episode. This decision was not taken lightly, and we know it will be disappointing for fans, but in order to set the show up for future series, it was decided that rather than bridge the gap with a one off special, we are choosing to push forward to invest in the long-term future of the show which ensures that when the TARDIS lands once more, it does so in all its glory.

The previously announced new Doctor Who animation series for CBeebies is currently in production.

Details of the tender will be announced in due course.

The BBC retains all IP in Doctor Who. BBC Studios will continue to lead the global distribution of Doctor Who as well as licensing, consumer products, digital and immersive experiences on behalf of the BBC.

(2) DAVIES BOWS OUT. Russell T Davies made his own farewell statement on Instagram.

View this post on Instagram

(3) THE GUARDIAN’S TAKE. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian reflects on Russell T Davies’ departure from the Whoniverse: “’A poisoned chalice’: will Doctor Who survive Russell T Davies’s exit?”

…At its best, Doctor Who is an irresistible storytelling format: a clever and kind alien can go anywhere in time and space, and put the baddies on the back foot with words and intelligence rather than guns and violence, while holding a mirror up to our own times. The adventures of the Doctor will, of course, continue in many forms even if the show is absent from our screens for quite some time. There are audio dramas featuring former Doctors, graphic novels and the occasional original novel, plus an ongoing comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine which continues – for now – to be published monthly. When it will next be able to preview an upcoming television series, however, remains entirely up in the air….

(4) JRRT ON FAIRY TALES. “J.R.R. Tolkien on Fairy Tales, Language, the Psychology of Fantasy, and Why There’s No Such Thing as Writing ‘For Children’” by Maria Popova in The Marginalian.

On March 8, 1939, J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973), celebrated as one of the greatest fantasy writers in history, gave a lecture titled “Fairy Stories,” eventually adapted into an essay retitled “On Fairy-Stories” and included in the appendix to Tales from the Perilous Realm (public library). At the crux of his argument, which explores the nature of fantasy and the cultural role of fairy tales, is the same profound conviction that there is no such thing as writing “for children.”…

…. Like Sendak and Gaiman, Tolkien insists that fairy tales aren’t inherently “for” children but that we, as adults, simply decide that they are, based on a series of misconceptions about both the nature of this literature and the nature of children:

“… Among those who still have enough wisdom not to think fairy-stories pernicious, the common opinion seems to be that there is a natural connexion between the minds of children and fairy-stories, of the same order as the connexion between children’s bodies and milk. I think this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childlessness), tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large…”

(5) HONORARY OSCAR RECIPIENTS ANNOUNCED. “Glenn Close, Ridley Scott to Receive Honorary Oscars” reports Variety.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present Honorary Oscars to veteran actress Glenn Close, legendary director Ridley Scott and Disney’s first Black animator Floyd Norman, while producers Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler, longtime champions of independent film, will receive the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, following a vote by its Board of Governors.

The statuettes will be presented at the Academy’s 17th Governors Awards on Nov. 15, at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Ovation Hollywood.

(6) DISCLOSURE DAY VERDICTS. There are thumbs pointing in all directions.

The Guardian likes it: “Disclosure Day review – close encounters of a deferred kind in Spielberg’s conspiracy spectacular”.

The old school is the new school in this very enjoyable and entirely ridiculous space-alien conspiracy adventure from screenwriter David Koepp and director Steven Spielberg; it is cheerfully mischievous and deadly serious in equal measure. It has something of Hitchcock from North By Northwest, Christopher Nolan from Inception and Spielberg from pretty much every other movie he’s ever made. Spielberg incidentally appears in the trailer for this film, disclosing that, hand-on-heart, he really believes in its contents, in the way I imagine CS Lewis believed in Aslan and the secret Narnian sovereignty of Peter and Susan.

Only Spielberg could get away with taking two of the world’s best-known hoaxes – Roswell and crop circles – and treating them with judicious deadpan respect. With heartfelt idealism, Spielberg also asks us to believe that should the ultimate truth come out, people everywhere would be terribly upset at the way captured aliens have been vivisected. (I suspect that would be very far down the list of our concerns.)…

The BBC sayeth it doth suck: “Disclosure Day review: Steven Spielberg’s ‘flimsy’ alien drama is like ‘a drab X-Files episode'”. (Subscription required by readers outside the UK.)

…Disclosure Day isn’t the worst film of the year, but it may well be the most disappointing. For a start, it’s directed by Steven Spielberg, one of the US’s greatest living film-makers. And for another thing, it’s about a topic that has obsessed him throughout his career: aliens coming to Earth.

He first touched on the topic in Firelight, a film he made as a teenager in 1964. He returned to it in 1977 for his definitive UFO drama, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And he’s kept coming back to it ever since. When the spine-tingling trailer for Disclosure Day was released, with a “Story by Steven Spielberg” credit hinting at how close the scenario was to his heart, many of us hoped that the 79-year-old would deliver a career-crowning masterpiece: his profound last word on a question he has been thinking about and researching for most of his life.

And what did he deliver instead? A flimsy, outdated car-chase thriller with no ideas about aliens that we haven’t heard before.

The film’s thesis on alien life is so amazingly uninspired that you’d assume that Spielberg had pondered it for several minutes, not several decades…

(7) ANIME FANS PROTEST PETITION. The BBC reports a “Growing backlash in Japan over Trump’s use of anime characters”. (Subscription required by readers outside the UK.)

A backlash is growing in Japan over US President Donald Trump’s use of popular anime and manga characters in his posts on social media.

Upset has been brewing since March, when fans started noticing the president using images of – and in some cases depicting himself as – iconic Japanese animation characters like Pikachu, Naruto and Yu-Gi-Oh!.

Almost 20,000 people have now signed an online petition, arguing he does not share the values of the characters, and that using them for political reasons could infringe the creators’ rights.

Pokémon Company International has condemned Trump’s use of its imagery. The BBC has contacted other rights holders and the White House for comment.

The petition calling for Trump and the White House to respect Japanese manga was first launched in March, when a couple of posts caught the attention of some fans.

The official White House X account had released videos combining footage of US military strikes on Iran with clips from Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball. A day earlier, the account had published an image with the phrase “Make America Great Again”, on top of what appears to be a screengrab from the Pokémon Pokopia video game.

The petition was revived after Trump shared a video on Truth Social on Saturday depicting himself as Naruto Uzumaki, the protagonist and namesake of a popular anime and manga series about a young ninja’s journey to become the village leader….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

June 10, 1952 — Kage Baker. (Died 2010.)

Kage Baker was one of those writers that I had a close relationship by email and phone for many years until she passed on. I’m still sad that she died early but relieved that she is no longer in constant pain.

Though most knew her as a genre writer, she was very proud of her other life. As Kathleen noted on the site she keeps about her life with Kage, Kathleen, Kage and the Company: “Kage Baker taught Elizabethan English (also known as Language I when we had time for lots of classes) for the performers at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. She taught it for most of 30 years; we team-taught at workshops, she and I, in a spiel I can still recite. Well, I can recite my half – I get stuck pausing for her lines here and there. We had worked out a class recitation that was half improv and half thesaurus.”

Kage told me how they both dressed up on in their best Elizabethan cosplay finery for the Renaissance Pleasure Faires, surely the social highlight of their year from the way she described it way such obvious delight. I know they even took Harry the Space Pirate with them on occasion.

Yes Harry, a most unusual bird who’s in the photo below. Let’s have her explain: “Well, a Household Bench Mark is approaching — my parrot, Harry Redux, is about to reach his first birthday. Or his twenty-first, as he is the reincarnation of my first parrot, Harry Prime. He is the Dalai Parrot. I rescued Harry Prime from an abusive situation 20 years ago, and he was the love of my life; when he died last year, I decided my middle-aged life had enough tragedy and it was time to invoke Mystic Forces. I made sure of a clutch laid shortly after he entered the Higher Plane, and waited anxiously for his return — the system works for Tibetan religious leaders, and I saw no reason why it would not do so for my evolved dinosaur. Sure enough, this brand new little bird exhibits unnerving knowledge of his past life, including where we hide the McVittie’s Digestive Biscuits in the kitchen. When he gazes dulcetly from his pirate-gold-coin eyes, one must believe that here is an ancient and inhuman soul.”

She baked food a lot. Really she did. Quite a bit, much of it Elizabethan. And then there was Barm Brack: “Barm Brack is a soul cake — traditional Scots recipe calls for a bean or silver coin or some other token to be baked into it and the person getting the winning slice gets fame or good luck or sacrificed or whatever, deciding on how much of The Wicker Man you take seriously. I leave the tokens out of mine, personally. Life is enough of a lottery as it is.” Her recipe is here: “Barm Brack”.

No, I’m not talking about novels here though I liked them so much that we were supposed to do a Concordance for them for Golden Gryphon. I was supposed to draft a series of questions for each of the cyborgs for which she was would play out being that cyborg and answer the questions in detail. Each of these would be in turn become a chapter in the Corcordance. Sadly she got too ill before we could do it.

I’ll miss her a lot. She was a great conversationalist, a fantastic SF writer and she wrote a number of really great reviews for Green Man including this one authored with her sister about a series dear to both of them: “The Two Fat Ladies: The Complete 4 Series”.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal knows young beginning writers.
Free Range explains the missing Musketeer.
Waynovision appreciates art.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gets creepy.

(10) ARTEMIS III CREW. “NASA names astronaut crew for Artemis III mission” – NPR calls the roll.

NASA introduced the four astronauts scheduled to fly on next year’s Artemis III mission. (From left to right) NASA commander Randy Bresnik, European Space Agency pilot Luca Parmitano, NASA mission specialists Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas at a press conference announcing the crew at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

NASA named the international crew of four that will fly on its next Artemis mission as early as next year. It’s a key test flight ahead of a human landing mission to the lunar surface that the agency calls “one of the most highly complex missions NASA has undertaken.”

The Artemis III mission, while vital to future moon missions, will remain closer to home in low-Earth orbit. There, it will demonstrate the Orion spacecraft’s rendezvous and docking capabilities with two commercially designed and built lunar landers.

NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik will command the mission. A member of the U.S. Marine Corps, Bresnik has flown to space twice and logged 149 days off the planet. European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano, from Italy, will serve as the mission’s pilot. Parmitano has also been to space twice, including one dangerous spacewalk that was cut short when he nearly drowned as his helmet filled up with water.

NASA’s Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas will serve as mission specialists. Rubio served in the U.S. Army and is a board-certified family physician and flight surgeon. He has flown to space once, to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz capsule. After engineers discovered the spacecraft was damaged, Rubio’s stay was extended while awaiting a new ride, and he set the record for longest spaceflight by an American at 371 days.

This will be the first spaceflight for Douglas. The Coast Guard reserve officer was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021. He is a systems engineer with a doctorate from George Washington University. Douglas served as backup crew to Artemis II….

(11) CALL FOR PAPERS. Here is the Call For Papers from The Virtual Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (VICFA) 2026 organized by the IAFA and CoFutures

Speculative Visions of Care and Hope

Guests of Honor: Zoha Kazemi (Iran) and Ahmed Naji (Egypt)

Date: 17-19 September 2026

Visions of care and hope are central to contemporary speculative fiction across media, even in, and perhaps especially in, postapocalyptic and dystopian narratives. Against the fundamental brokenness of the technofascist structures of the contemporary world system, speculative fiction is perhaps the most realistic of our genres that demand the impossible: alternative futures of what can be, and alternative pasts of what might have been: worlds with their own economic, social, and technological structures.

From the standpoint of speculative fiction, three primary strands of these new speculative visions may be immediately observed: a) Contemporary CoFuturisms, including Indigenous Futurisms, Afrofuturisms, Arab- and Gulf-Futurisms, Latinx Futurisms, Crip Futurisms, and Xenofuturisms offer their own challenges to prior speculative thinking; b) emergent genres of hope, care, and restoration and renewal, for instance solarpunk, hopepunk, healthpunk, and; c) shifts in the generic form itself as it renews itself through new social and political sensibilities. These three strands unite established voices who have always been at the forefront of thinking with the radical potentials for speculative thinking, as well as a new generation of creatives invested in pushing the boundaries of (and even embodying) speculation itself as an act of care of hope. What is fundamental to these new visions is that these speculative worlds not only exist in fiction, they also seek to transform the world itself by building and organizing new communities of practice.

This edition of the VICFA is open to speculative visions of care and hope from around the world. Our Guests of Honor are Zoha Kazemi and Ahmed Naji, leading contemporary voices who have redefined these visions through experimental speculative fiction with bold social and political critique.

Proposals on speculative visions across media and communities of practice on – but not limited to – the following topics are welcome:

– Speculative ethics and philosophies of care, hope, community building

– Speculative storytelling, worldbuilding, and futuring as methods of care

– Archival practices of care, remembrance/commemoration practices, caring for ruins, historical repair

– More-than-human communities and forms of care

– Rethinking kinship, connection to past and future ancestors, reproductive care, family, love

– Caring in the end times, post-apocalyptic care: visions of survival, rebuilding community

We are open to presentations in different languages, as well as more creative approaches to these themes.

Proposals on topics transcending this year’s theme are welcome.

Please submit abstracts of 300-500 words along with a brief bio statement by July 15, 2026 through this portal: https://form.jotform.com/261554977711163.

Questions about the conference theme can be directed to the CoFutures organizing team at [email protected]. Questions regarding registration can be directed to the IAFA Membership and Registration Coordinator: [email protected]

(12) PHOTOBOMB IN SPACE. [Item by Steven French.] Well this sucks! (I knew it was an issue for ground-based telescopes but hadn’t realised it affected the likes of SPHEREx as well). “Space telescopes are now overwhelmed by satellite trails” says Phys.org.

Unfortunately, there’s more bad news to report on the clear skies front. A new paper, available on the arXiv preprint server from researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, reports that 73.3% of images the agency’s new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were contaminated by at least one artificial satellite trail. And it’s only going to get worse from here.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t come as a surprise. The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) was designed to map the entire sky in near-infrared light. Meaning it would have long exposure times and cover a very large chunk of the visible sky at any one time. Both of which are a recipe for interruption from orbiting satellites.

Typically this type of light pollution is primarily associated with ground telescopes. But, SPHEREx is an orbital satellite, traveling along an orbit that is 700 km above Earth’s surface. Apparently even that wasn’t enough to escape from the light trails. On average, there were 2.18 trails per exposure, most of which are concentrated in an “X” pattern that mimics the orbital paths of the satellite megaconstellations.

There appears to be no easy way to handle this interruption, either. SPHEREx uses an automated “sample up-the-ramp” algorithm to protect itself from stray cosmic rays. When a sudden energy blast from one of those rays hits a pixel, the system halts data collection on that pixel to prevent saturation. But commercial satellites are now so bright that they are triggering this system without the help of any stray cosmic rays….

(13) THE HIGH LIFE. “Earth’s stratosphere is a mysterious superhighway for microbes” says Science News.

The stratosphere is both beautiful and hostile — a purgatory between Earth and space, between life and death.

Hover 30 kilometers above the ground, and you are nearly twice as high as any raincloud on Earth. The surface of the planet curves beneath you. A diaphanous film of blue stretches over that horizon, representing the disconcertingly thin layer of atmosphere that envelops all life as we know it. Above that, the sky resembles black interplanetary space.

You would quickly die here. The air pressure is one percent what it is at sea level. As you gasped for oxygen, your blood would boil inside you, causing your skin to welt like bubble wrap.

But the stratosphere holds plenty of life — tiny single-celled microbes that somehow navigate extreme dehydration, temperatures as low as −60° Celsius and intense DNA-damaging ultraviolet radiation that would kill most life on Earth’s surface.

“If you took a microbe from those altitudes and you put them on the surface of Mars, they wouldn’t even know the difference,” says microbiologist Brent Christner of the University of Florida in Gainesville.

When Christner and his team started looking for life high in the atmosphere over a decade ago, they intended to find the upper limits of Earth’s habitable zone. They hoped that this, in turn, might show whether life could persist on the cold, radiation-pummeled surface of Mars, where the atmosphere is just as thin. But when Christner’s graduate student Noelle Bryan sent sampling balloons to 38 kilometers above Earth’s surface, she was utterly surprised by what they found: “We did not hit an altitude where we couldn’t find something [alive],” says Bryan, who is now a senior research manager at Mass General Brigham in Boston….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. It wasn’t an easy sale! Ryan George takes us inside the “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope Pitch Meeting”.

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

Titan Comics Brings Back The Daleks

Posted on June 10, 2026 by Mike Glyer

THE DALEKS ARE BACK! Titan Comics announces their involvement in the Doctor Who: Circuit Breaker mixed-media event, with TWO comics and an all-new graphic novel which will feature the Fugitive Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks.

With Issue #1 launching the first full adventure of the epic Circuit Breaker mixed-media event, Titan will publish two adventures that send the Doctor across time and space into her deadliest conflict yet. In Adversary of the Daleks, the Doctor arrives in Thessaloniki in ancient Greece where she discovers that even the gods fear strange visitors from across the universe.

While in Dawn of the Daleks, the Doctor travels to the war-ravaged world of Skaro as the Doctor battles the Daleks with the fate of their Kaled forebears at stake!

Written by acclaimed comics writers Dulce M. Montoya and Dan Watters (Batman: Dark Patterns, Nightwing) – and brought to life by stunning artwork from Sami Kivelä (Undone by Blood), these comics will be a must-read for fans of Doctor Who, science fiction, and epic intergalactic adventures.

Doctor Who: Circuit Breaker: Adversary of the Daleks #1 will be released on the July 8, 2026, with Issue #2 to follow on the August 5, and the Graphic Novel to follow on December 2.

Check out the variant covers following the jump.

Continue reading →

Pixel Scroll 6/1/26 The Ringworld Always Posts Twice

Posted on June 1, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) 2028 WORLDCON SITE SELECTION VOTING OPENS. The LAcon V Worldcon committee opened Site Selection voting for the 2028 Worldcon today. Brisbane (Australia) in 2028 is the only remaining active bid on the ballot.

(2) FLORIDA SUES AI COMPANY AND CEO. “OpenAI Is A Menace & Sam Altman Knows It, Florida AG Says In Lawsuit” – Deadline has the story.

With a blistering lawsuit filed Monday, the state of Florida may succeed where Elon Musk failed in bringing OpenAI and Sam Altman to heel.

“Today, we announced the first-in-the-nation state-led lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said this morning after filing an 83-page complaint in the Sunshine State’s 10th Judicial Circuit.

“Defendants each owed the State a duty to exercise reasonable care when designing, marketing, selling, promoting, and/or distributing ChatGPT, including to take all reasonable precautions in ensuring it was safe for use,” the filing against OpenAI’s corporate entities and Altman proclaims. “Defendants owed a heightened duty of care to the State because of the great danger of addiction, cognitive decline, suicide, violence, and related harms in Florida from their designing, marketing, selling, promoting, and/or distributing ChatGPT.”

To that, the filing seeks injunctions, a halt to data collection from minors and new guardrails galore, plus potentially millions in penalties for violations of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. Heading towards the fall midterms where Big Tech has become a top topic, the action comes in the aftermath of confirmed ChatGPT-consulted shootings that killed two at Florida State University in 2025, and the death of two University of South Florida graduate students this year.

“OpenAI and Altman ignored internal and external safety warnings, put children at great risk, and allowed a dangerous product to reach millions of Floridians,” Uthmeier added at the press conference. The Republican, running for a full term as Florida AG in November, opened a separate and ongoing criminal probe into OpenAI in April…

(3) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Nicholas Kaufmann and A.C. Wise on Wednesday, June 10th, 2026 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).

Nicholas Kaufmann

Nicholas Kaufmann has been a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Thriller Award, and the Dragon Award. Two of his novels, 100 Fathoms Below (co-written with Steven L. Kent) and The Hungry Earth, were Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com bestsellers. His latest book is the collection Monuments in Darkness. He also co-hosts the strange-but-true science podcast Spooky Science Lab with author David Wellington.

A.C. Wise

A.C. Wise is the author of the novels Wendy, Darling, Hooked, and her most recent, Ballad of the Bone Road, published in January 2026. She’s also the author of various novellas, collection, and short stories, and her work has won the Sunburst and been a finalist for the Nebula, Stoker, World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and Locus Awards, among others. Along with her fiction, she contributes regular review columns to Locus and Apex Magazine.

(4) GOTHAM TV AWARDS. The Hollywood Reporter notes three sff winners on the “2026 Gotham TV Awards Winners List”.

In the drama series categories, triple nominee Pluribus won breakthrough drama series, while best lead performance went to The Testaments‘ Chase Infiniti and supporting performance went to Babou Ceesay from Alien: Earth, another triple nominee. While Ceesay wasn’t in attendance, Infiniti and the Pluribus team were particularly excited to win, with Rhea Seehorn saying that the team behind the show were “so excited they spilled their wine on me.” She revealed creator Vince Gilligan was not there because he’s busy writing season two of the show.

(5) THE BEST. A Deep Look by Dave Hook reviews “’The Best of Ian McDonald’, 2016 PS Publishing, and a Bit More”. Dave’s short take follows; his longer analysis is at the link.

The Short: The Best of Ian McDonald, 2016 PS Publishing, came out in two different editions of SF/fantasy/horror, a deluxe edition with twenty-one stories and one with ten stories. My e-book version of the deluxe edition also has a “Story Notes” essay by McDonald. My favorite story is “Unfinished Portrait of the King of Pain by Van Gogh“, a novelette, original to McDonald’s first collection Empire Dreams, 1988 Bantam Spectra. My overall, average rating for the stories included is 3.84/5, or “Great”. Strongly recommended, although it’s no longer in print. Especially as it’s out of print, I have also speculated on other stories that could have been included.

(6) PIPER J. DRAKE (1976-2026). Writer Piper J. Drake died May 18 at the age of 49. K. Tempest Bradford’s tribute, “In Memory of Piper J. Drake”, begins:

On May 18th, 2026, our dear friend and Writing the Other teacher Lalana Dararutana, who worked with us as Piper J. Drake, passed into the next world after a multi-year fight with cervical cancer. To say that all of us are deeply saddened cannot capture the grief we’re feeling right now. Piper was an extraordinary person full of wisdom and joy and talent and skill. This is a loss we’re all going to feel for the rest of our lives….

There’s also a family obituary on Facebook by her husband Matthew.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

June 1, 1947 — Jonathan Pryce, 79.

I’m reasonably sure that the first role I saw Jonathan Pryce in was the lead antagonist of Some Wicked This Way Comes. (Bradbury did a stellar job writing the screenplay, didn’t he?) He pulls off the carnival leader of Mr. Dark in suitably sinister manner.

Then there’s the matter of Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen where we meet him executing a heroic officer played by Sting for his act of bravery because it’s demoralizing to soldiers and citizens just trying to lead as he says unexceptional lives.

Jonathan Pryce in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

(That is the Gilliam film I’ve watched the most followed by Time Bandits. Surely you’re not surprised?)

As media baron Eliot Carter is in the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, he’s trying to cause war between the United Kingdom and China. Arrogant little prick he is here.

He’s in Pirates of the Caribbean series as Governor Weatherby Swann. I’ve only seen the first film, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and I thought it was an interesting but not terribly great film.

He’s The Master in the Doctor Who special, Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death, made specifically for the Red Nose Day charity telethon. It was the only BBC commissioned live-action Doctor Who production between the Who television movie and the launch of the present Who era starting with the “Rose” episode.

In Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars, he got to play that character with Bill Paterson as Watson. The Baker Street Irregulars, a group of street urchins as the BBC press kits described them, is trying to find their missing members, while also trying to prevent Sherlock Holmes being convicted of murder. I’ll end this review with a photo of him in that role.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

xkcd knows a minor superpower.
Dinosaur Comics co-writes.
Free Range finds the zone.
Loose Parts introduces unlikely siblings.

(9) MASS EXTINCTION EVENT. Aaron Renn argues “Stephen Colbert Didn’t Get Cancelled – Mass Culture Did”.

…One of the reasons our country features a lack of civic cohesion and a high level of political polarization is the fragmentation of our previous mass-media, mass-consumer common culture. This fragmentation resulted from new technologies, such as cable television and the internet, as well as structural economic changes that helped set the upper middle class apart from the rest of society.

That old common culture started emerging in the early 20th century with the dawn of Hollywood and radio, but it crystallized after World War II, particularly with the coming of television.

In this world, with three or four TV networks, at best a handful of newspapers in any given city, a limited menu of local radio stations, a small number of book stores – and no internet – Americans basically watched the same limited number of TV shows, listened to the same handful of musical genres, etc.

There was a genuine national common culture in this world, in which Americans coast to coast shared at least some key cultural touchstones and references, even if there was along with this local and regional specific cultures as well. These might include TV shows like M*A*S*H, or news programs and personalities like Walter Cronkite of CBS Evening News, or a late night talk show host like Johnny Carson of the Tonight Show on NBC.

Younger people can’t relate to the degree of cultural mindshare someone like Johnny Carson once had. We can see in this the size of the audience for his final show, compared to those of David Letterman and Stephen Colbert. Johnny Carson drew as many as 50-55 million for his final show. David Letterman drew 13.8 million. Stephen Colbert had only 6.7 million viewers – in a country with 80 million more people than when Carson signed off the air. Colbert’s audience would no doubt be bigger than this if we included social media clips, but it’s clearly the case that he’s no Johnny Carson in terms of cultural reach….

…Americans simply share much less media in common than they used to. Perhaps only the Superbowl remains as a unifying media phenomenon. Though even here the halftime musical act this year was someone that many Americans had never heard of before even though he’s a global megastar….

(10) EX-CAFFEINATE! Walmart would be happy to sell you this “Doctor Who TARDIS 34oz French Press Coffee Maker” for $59.99.

This Doctor Who TARDIS French Press features the familiar styling of the Doctor’s iconic time machine, including the police box text around the top, making it officially licensed merchandise.

(11) TODAY’S TITLE EXPLAINED. Daniel Dern says his suggestion comes via James M. Cain’s classic novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice.)

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

Pixel Scroll 5/26/26 The Three Filers And The Secret Of The Purple Pixel Scroll

Posted on May 26, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(0) It looks like we’ll have to serve Scroll Lite tonight – my mother went back in the hospital today and I will be logging a lot of hours there for the immediate future. Thankfully Cat and Paul have stocked the shelves with Birthday and Memory pieces, so there will be something substantial to build on.

(1) A WRITER HONORS MULTIPLE GENRES. “Andrea Hairston on Crossing Genres, Science Fiction, and Taking Romance Seriously” at CrimeReads.

When I describe my recent novel, The Redemption Center is Closed on Sundays, as a SFF mystery romance, people frequently ask, “Wasn’t it difficult writing a murder mystery?”

Yes, it was.

As science-fiction author Howard Waldrop regularly told the Clarion West speculative fiction workshop I attended in 1999: Writing is hard. Given Howard’s inflection of English, the a in “hard” went on for several beats. Writing any fiction is “hard.” There are no “easy” genres. Yet nobody has asked me, was it difficult to write a romance?

The questions people do pose make me wonder: Do we suspect that writing mysteries is harder than writing romance? Or that writing science fiction is harder than writing fantasy? Do we think that crafting realistic fiction is more demanding than creating speculative works? Is writing a mathematical proof harder than writing a short story?

For me, murder mysteries are like algebra, teasing out the unknown from the known. So much of storytelling, no matter the genre-mapping, relies on the drama of mystery. You set the stage for conflict and lay out the clues, frequently in plain sight. The setting, props, and costumes are dynamic elements of the story, of the action, not just decoration or atmosphere. As characters interact with their world, they reveal themselves, often reversing audience expectations, surprising us and themselves….

… My first full-length play, Einstein, which I directed for the Black Theatre Workshop at Smith College in 1973, was a mystery. Like The Redemption Center is Closed on Sundays, the play features a black cleaning lady as the detective. It was what I termed a sci-fi carnival jam and what twenty years later would be called Afrofuturism….

(2) FIELD LOSES A PRESTIGIOUS MAGAZINE. FIYAH Literary Magazine Of Black Speculative Fiction will go on an indefinite hiatus following the publication of issue 40. Publisher and Executive Editor DaVaun Sanders made the announcement on Bluesky. Thread starts here.

(3) COVER REVEAL. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association has unveiled the 2026 Rhysling Anthology cover.

The featured image “Death on a Pale Horse” was created by artist Julie Dillon. Find more of her incredible work here: The Art of Julie Dillon.

(4) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

May 26, 1995 — Johnny Mnemonic, the film, not the excellent story

Ok, I’m assuming that most of you have read the Nebula-nominated story that the film Johnny Mnemonic was based off? It was originally published in the May 1981 issue of Omni magazine but it has been reprinted quite a few times in the forty years since then. I could’ve sworn it got nominated for a Hugo but the Hugo Awards site tells me it wasn’t.

Well the film had its premiere thirty-one years ago on this date. I for one did not see in theatre, indeed did not know it existed until maybe a decade later. My opinion of it will be noted below.

The screenplay was supposedly by William Gibson as it says as IMDb so we can’t fault the script here being crafted by others, can one? Well it was as you’ll see below.

Was it at all good? Well, the critics were divided on that. Roger Ebert in his Chicago Sun-Times review said “Johnny Mnemonic is one of the great goofy gestures of recent cinema, a movie that doesn’t deserve one nanosecond of serious analysis but has a kind of idiotic grandeur that makes you almost forgive it.”

Caryn James of the New York Times has the last word: “Though the film was written by the cyberpunk master William Gibson from his own story and was directed by the artist Robert Longo, ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ looks and feels like a shabby imitation of ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Total Recall.’ It is a disaster in every way. There is little tension in the story despite the ever-present threat of an exploding brain. The special effects that take us on a tour of the information superhighway — traveling inside the circuits of Johnny’s brain, or viewing his search for information while wearing virtual reality headgear — look no better than a CD-ROM. Visually, the rest of the film looks murky, as if the future were one big brown-toned mud puddle.”

Now let’s talk about numbers. It’s generally accepted that a film needs to make at least three times what it cost to produce to just break even in the Hollyworld accounting system. Johnny Mnemonic didn’t even come close to that. It cost at least thirty million to produce (the numbers are still are in dispute even to this day as the Studio stored them in a file cabinet in a basement guarded by very hungry accountants) and made just double that and that’s not even taking into account that the Studio got at best fifty percent of the ticket price.

There were two versions of this film. The film had actually premiered in Japan earlier on April 15th, in a longer version, well six minutes longer, that was closer to the director’s cut that came out later (yes there was a director’s cut — there’s always a director’s cut, isn’t there?), featuring a score by Mychael Danna and different editing. I doubt any version makes it a better film.

I haven’t discussed the film or the cast, so NO SPOILERS here. It’s possible, just possible, that someone here hasn’t seen it yet.

I have. Shudder. Just shudder. Bad acting, worse story and that SFX? The lead actor who I shall not name here was so wrong as being cast that role as to defy comprehension as to why he got cast for it. Well this unfortunately was due to a common occurrence in Hollywood that the studio decided to make the casting calls so the person that I won’t mention was picked up by the studio, so we can blame them for him. Frell.

Then there were the numerous script rewrites were forced upon them by the studio, so Gibson, the producer and the writing staff who had a great script, at the beginning according to Longo, ended up with a piece of shit again according to him. Now that piece of shit was one that the studio loved. Idiots. Obviously not science fiction fans there, were they? Turning into what it became proved that.

A black-and-white edition of the film, titled Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White was released three years ago. Robert Longo, the producer, says it is closer to what he and Gibson envisioned. It is available on Blu-Ray.

Now y’all are free to give away as much as you want for spoilers. That’s on your heads. Or memory chips.

Someday I’m hope for a better interpretation of a Gibson film. I’ve hopes for the soon to be Neuromancer series on Amazon. Really I do. I’m even to once again going to break my long standing stance of not seeing anything made off a work I liked a lot. I did with Johnny Mnuemonic and I’m still regretting it.

I didn’t see The Peripheral series on Sci-Fi as I don’t subscribe to that streaming service. Who watched it? Opinions please.

It wasn’t at all liked by the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes Neuromancer who gave it a rating of just thirty-one percent when I originally wrote the first version of this but there’s no pages for it there now. Interesting…

The most excellent Burning Chrome collection which has this story is available in dead tree format from your favorite bookseller but not for purchase on Amazon though it available if you have Kindle Unlimited; iBooks also known as Apple Books has it available but not Kobo.

(5) COMICS SECTION.

Bound and Gagged has a new excuse.
Brewster Rockit refuses contact.
Carpe Diem is concerned about the design.
Macanudo quotes Tolkien.
xkcd designs something.

(6) TIMEY-WIMEY SCHEDULING. “New Doctor Who special tipped to be delayed from Christmas 2026” reports Radio Times.

Doctor Who’s planned return this Christmas reportedly may be delayed until Easter.

The BBC’s flagship sci-fi show was last on our screens in May 2025, when Ncuti Gatwa bowed out as the 15th incarnation of the titular space traveller after two seasons.

In the final moments, he was seen regenerating into Billie Piper, who previously played beloved companion Rose Tyler, leaving a major cliffhanger over what’s to come.

There have been long-held plans for the show to return at Christmas 2026, with showrunner Russell T Davies previously stating that BBC bosses were left “with jaws agape, loving it”, when he shared plot details for the special.

However, The Sun now claims that the festive special may be pushed back while producers continue to search for the next person to take over the role of the Doctor, and the special may instead air over Easter 2027.

The BBC declined to comment when approached by Radio Times.

(7) DRACULA A.D. 1958. “Hammer to rerelease 1958 Dracula in UK with long-lost footage added” reports the Guardian.

Hammer Films’ horror masterpiece Dracula is to be rereleased in UK cinemas in October, including footage believed to have been lost for more than six decades after it was deemed too gruesome for audiences.

The 1958 movie starring Christopher Lee as Count Dracula and Peter Cushing as Doctor Van Helsing has been fully restored in 4K.

The restoration reinstates footage previously seen only by audiences at the film’s original Japanese theatrical release in 1958.

The recovered material, which was discovered in a Warner Bros warehouse, has never been released before in the UK or US and has never appeared on home entertainment in any territory.

The chief executive of Hammer Films, John Gore, called it “the recovery of a piece of British film history that audiences believed had been lost for ever”….

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

Pixel Scroll 5/14/26 Scrolling, Scrolling, Scrolling — Pixelhide!

Posted on May 14, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) OR THE HORSE MAY TALK. Judith Tarr analyzes “The Universal Appeal of the Talking Animal” at Reactor.

…Humans all over the world tell stories and sing songs of animals who talk to each other like humans, act like humans, think like humans. The world is a mirror. Everywhere we look, we see ourselves.

The technical term is anthropomorphism. Imputing human traits to nonhuman things. When that thing is an animal, the animal talks, because humans do. Human language, human ideas, human ways of doing things.

In folklore and oral storytelling, animals talk to each other. They talk to humans. Humans talk to them. Everyone communicates on the same level, in the same words.

Literary animals may be their natural selves—rabbits, lions, horses, cats—or they may be fully anthropomorphized. Peter Rabbit and his family wear human clothes and do human things. So do Toad and his friends in The Wind in the Willows. And then there’s Winnie the Pooh, who begins his life as a child’s toy, inhabiting a world of toys based on living animals: a bear, a donkey, a tiger, a kangaroo. (And let’s not forget Paddington Bear and Calvin’s inimitable Hobbes.)

Animals rule the world of animated comedy. Mickey Mouse, Mighty Mouse, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Felix the cat, Sylvester the cat and his arch-foe Tweety Bird, Foghorn Leghorn (whose accent inspires a human avatar, Benoit Blanc), Yogi Bear, Rocky the flying squirrel and Bullwinkle the moose, the list goes on and on.

These animals and their stories are often consigned to the children’s section. Adults are expected to grow out of them. Grownup stories are “real” stories, stories about humans doing “real” things, in a world in which animals stay strictly in their lane. They may make sounds, but they’re not talking. Talking is a human thing.

And yet, humans of all ages keep right on loving their talking animals. Cartoons are grand entertainment for kids, but there are whole levels and layers of wit and satire that the grown-up kid will catch. Bugs Bunny’s riff on Wagnerian opera is central to my childhood; the older I get, the more I appreciate the gloriously cracked genius of a wiseass rabbit in a brass bra and a winged helmet (and that horse) …

(2) WOLF WOMEN. “Sam Beckbessinger: A Brief History of the Female Werewolf” at CrimeReads.

…So the glorious exceptions that do center female werewolves usually tread quite different thematic territory. Unlike male werewolves, who are usually infected through a random physical attack, female werewolves are more likely to see their transformation linked to a moment of innate reproductive change: menarche, childbirth or menopause….

…All cultures have animal shapeshifter myths, but the European werewolf tradition, specifically, starts from two places: ancient Greek texts (Lycaon from Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the origin of the term “lycanthropy”) and the Old Norse tradition of warriors wearing enchanted wolfskins to “become” wolves in battle.

By the Middle Ages, werewolves are well-established in folklore all across Europe, to varying degrees, but there are only a couple of notable women in these stories. There’s an Irish story about the Daughters of Airitech (which appears in the Acallam na Senórach from around 1200), who are three wolf-women who live in the wild and are a nuisance to local villagers because they eat their sheep. They have a weakness for certain elements of human culture, though (in some stories harp music; in others cooked meat), and turn back into human women to enjoy them, in which state they are vulnerable enough to be either murdered or (worse) married off. There’s also a story of the Werewolves of Ossory from 1188’s Topographia Hibernica, which features a man and woman who must live seven years at a time as wolves, transforming (like the Norse) when they don wolfskins. In these stories, the werewolf isn’t violent so much as uncultured….

(3) SOMETIMES THEY KEEP THE TITLE AND THROW THE BOOK AWAY. But not always. Movieweb’s discussion of“8 Book-to-Movie Adaptations That Ended Up Nothing Like the Source Material” includes three sff works: Starship Troopers, Lawnmower Man, and A Clockwork Orange (excerpted below).

‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1971)

A Clockwork Orange is a peculiar case. While Stanley Kubrick stuck close to the general source material, the release of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel differed between US publishers and the original release. The version that Kubrick read and adapted the script from was the American release of the book, which cut the final 21st chapter in its entirety. The final chapter offers a redemption arc for Alex, showing that he is redeemed. While this is just a minor change, it drastically shifts the entire messaging of the film versus the novel.

Kubrick, when he found out, said he preferred his ending to the one Burgess wrote, while Burgess hated the film Kubrick made. There were also some smaller changes worth mentioning. Alex in the book is 15 years old, and it is almost entirely written in Nadsat slang (a made-up mash of English and Russian) that readers have to decode; Kubrick used some of it, but not all. Finally, the novel has more explicit Christian and free-will themes, with the prison chaplain having a more prominent role.

Many of Kubrick’s changes to the screen made sense, and the movie still managed to draw acclaim and controversy, but a single chapter left out makes the novel and the film drastically different experiences.

(4) PITCH MEETING. Deadline quotes “Peter Jackson On How Stephen Colbert Got ‘LOTR: Shadow of the Past’”.

Freshly lauded Cannes Palme d’Or honoree Peter Jackson tells us that Stephen Colbert‘s attachment as writer on a new Lord of the Rings movie, which is being released after 2027’s Hunt for Gollum, occurred when The Late Show host pitched himself for the gig.

“He was re-reading Lord of the Rings over Christmas and thought this section would make a great film,” Jackson tells us at Cannes.

“He pitched this whole idea… I said it sounds interesting, let’s have a go at this, doing a treatment. Philippa Boyens flew over and Colbert has come down to New Zealand a couple of times.”

“This is before he knew his show was going to get canned.”

“It’s a part of Lord of the Rings that we never filmed. There were these big chunks of Lord of the Rings that we skipped over,” says Jackson, the three-time Oscar winner.

The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past is based on the section “Fog on the Barrow-downs,” the eighth chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, in which the Hobbits are trapped by a Barrow-wight in an unnatural fog. The story also includes a fan-favorite character omitted from the previous films, Tom Bombadil. The feature is being adapted from chapters three through eight of JRR Tolkien’s book.

“Next week, he’s doing his final show and the next day he’ll be a Tolkien screenwriter,” said Jackson of Colbert.

(5) ‘THE NEXT GENERATION’ CLASSIC REVISITED. Collider tells why “Patrick Stewart Still Calls This 34-Year-Old ‘Star Trek’ Episode a True Masterpiece”.

…While never a fully serialized series, The Next Generation‘s later seasons inject lasting character growth into its episodic formula. As a standalone that grafts permanent ripple effects onto Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), Season 5’s “The Inner Light” deserves the glowing superlatives fans, critics, the Hugo Awards, and Stewart himself have sent its way since 1992. Often regarded as the already sophisticated series’ pinnacle achievement, “The Inner Light” is an arresting and resonant example of everything sci-fi’s genre trappings can offer, swapping out epic scale for a character study that’s as psychologically contemplative as it is philosophically driven.

What Is “The Inner Light” About?

When the Enterprise investigates an unidentified space probe, the device targets Picard with a mysterious energy bolt. Struck comatose, he wakes upon the planet of Kataan, where every stranger recognizes him as Kamin, a local iron weaver. Kamin’s wife, Eline (Margot Rose), assures Picard that his memories of French vineyards and starship corridors are delirious inventions caused by a week-long fever. As years pass without answers, Picard makes the most of his unwelcome circumstances. He falls in love with Eline, grows old with her while raising their children, and practices the flute in his leisure time.

However, Kataan’s scientists determine that a nearby exploding star will annihilate the planet within their lifetimes. Since Kataan dwells outside the Federation’s borders, they lack access to the cutting-edge resources that might reverse its inevitable demise. During this civilization’s final moments, Picard learns the last four decades were an interactive mental simulation induced by the probe’s beam. Kataan’s long-dead citizens didn’t want to be forgotten, and their floating time capsule chose Picard as the best person to safeguard their legacy. Its purpose fulfilled, the program returns Picard to the Enterprise bridge, his body never left. The 40 years Picard experienced have been just 25 minutes for his concerned crew…

…”The Inner Light” rises above its classic “what if?” structure thanks to its laser-focused purpose and restrained execution. Written by Morgan Gendel and directed by Peter Lauritson, the two share a kind of harmonious understanding over which emotional beats to imply and which need lingering with. The episode’s broad concepts about our fleeting mortality and the value of cherishing humble joys are straightforward enough not to court sentimentality and are conveyed through an earnest accessibility that stands the test of time. What could be an overt laundry list of ideas instead gracefully flows through legacy, identity, second chances, environmental decay, what determines a well-lived life, and the resolved wisdom required to carve out that existence while facing imminent destruction….

(6) THE RUMBLE AND THE ROAR. [Item by Steven French.] Keza MacDonald reminiscences in this week’s “Pushing Buttons” newsletter in the Guardian: “Star Fox 64, a game I loved in my childhood, is returning – but I have mixed feelings”.

The Nintendo 64 was not my first video game console, but it was my formative one. Getting to grips with 3D movement in Super Mario 64 with that weird three-pronged controller is one of my most visceral childhood memories; the long, long wait for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the background noise to a huge chunk of my youth. But back in the 1990s (in the UK at least), it felt as if nobody had an N64. When everybody had a PlayStation instead, I felt I was the only kid in my whole city who cared more about Banjo-Kazooie than Crash Bandicoot.

If even Zelda seemed comparatively niche in Europe in the 90s, Lylat Wars (known elsewhere as Star Fox 64) was a real deep cut. It’s a 1997 space-flight shooter starring Fox McCloud and his squad of animal pilots laser-blasting across different planets in nimble crafts called Arwings. I played this game to absolute death in 1998, when I got it for my birthday alongside the fabled Rumble Pak, which made your controller vibrate and shudder whenever something cool was happening on screen (fun fact: Lylat Wars was the first console game to feature controller rumble). But I really hadn’t thought about it much since. Then, last week, Nintendo announced a Switch 2 remake….

(7) “THESE DETECTIVES LOOK UP!” EXCLAIMED TOM SHEEPISHLY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] A short video, “The Sheep Detectives – Behind the Scenes“, for the new movie starring, among others, Hugh Jackman,

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 14, 1944 – George Lucas, 82.

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Lucas with his wife, Mellody Hobson.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Barney and Clyde reflects on memorable TV theme music.
Dinosaur Comics pins the blame for bad fan fiction.
Mother Goose and Grimm did not expect to need a permit.

(10) DOCTOR WHO, WHERE? The Hollywood Reporter tells where to find the Doctor: “’Doctor Who’ Gets New U.S. Streaming Home on AMC+”.

The TARDIS is set to land in a new location in a few weeks.

AMC+ has acquired streaming rights to most of the 21st century run of Doctor Who. Thirteen seasons of the series, spanning the runs of the ninth through thirteenth Doctors (2005-22), will be available on the streamer starting June 11.

The AMC+ acquisition is something of a homecoming for Doctor Who. BBC America, which like AMC+ is part of AMC Networks, was the U.S. home for the series from 2009-22 (Sci Fi Channel, the forerunner to Syfy, had the first few seasons)….

…The acquisition does not include the two most recent seasons of Doctor Who, which the BBC produced in conjunction with Disney. Those seasons, starring Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor, remain on Disney+ in the United States….

(11) “DO HAVE A CACO, MAN!” “Chocolate now has standards for excellence, like wine and coffee” – NPR tells how that works.

In central Rome, Julien Simonis holds a tiny bar of chocolate made from cacao beans that originated in Hawaii. He cracks it into pieces before unwrapping the gold foil that surrounds it. Simonis places a morsel on his tongue and then breathes in through his mouth and out through his nose to heighten his perception of the chocolate’s aroma and taste.

A look of reverence comes over him.

“My god,” he whispers. “Each time I taste this, I’m always amazed. You have a boost of acidity. This burst of fresh flavors.” Simonis detects a fruitiness and a hint of cardamom and nutmeg….

… The standardized processing of the cacao takes place at a lab tucked inside the Chocolate Experience Museum in hilly Perugia, about a hundred miles north of Rome.

To begin, lab assistant Julia Butac empties a burlap bag of beans into a bin and starts to sift them a couple handfuls at a time, removing anything that isn’t a full bean. “It’s really physical work,” she says, acknowledging the rigorousness of the method.

Butac is from the Philippines and was never a huge chocolate fan, but this process has given her a deeper appreciation for it….

…Those two chocolates that Simonis tasted — the one from Hawaii and the other from Peru — had been processed and prepared identically in Perugia. But they have two very different personalities.

“Just realize that the difference in these chocolates [is] only coming from the cacao bean,” he says. “Despite the recipe being exactly the same, flavors are completely different.”

Simonis relies on a panel of 15 trained professional tasters to evaluate a chocolate’s unique blend of acidity, bitterness, astringency and more. The result is a standardized way of comparing chocolate, allowing cacao to be priced and valued according to its quality.

More and more people are joining the program. There’s a charge for trainings and certification but access to resources including a step-by-step guide to cacao processing and the flavor wheel that the official tasters use to do their evaluations are free. “We are trying to work with every single producing country in the world,” he adds….

(12) TRAINING DAY. “Blue Origin’s lunar lander mockup is ready for NASA Artemis astronaut training” reports Space.com.

NASA’s Orion space capsule training simulator is located inside Building 9 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It’s a full-scale, high-fidelity model of the real thing, and where the Artemis 2 astronauts spent more than a year preparing for their recent mission around the moon.

For a long time, the Orion simulator sat alone in its own corner, away from the group of International Space Station training modules lined up inside the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility (SVMF). But now, Orion has a neighbor.

A mockup of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 (MK2) lunar lander has been assembled at the SVMF, and is ready for astronauts to come aboard to begin training, according to a NASA release. Standing adjacent to the Orion capsule, the Blue Moon crew cabin and exterior resemble the design of the lander’s Mark 2 variant, which will eventually land Artemis astronauts on the moon, if all goes according to plan.

With Blue Origin’s mockup now assembled at JSC, astronauts can now seamlessly transition from training inside Orion to training in Blue Moon as they prepare for the Artemis missions ahead. The next mission, Artemis 3, is dependent on at least one lunar lander being ready to fly before the mission can launch.

Blue Moon is one of two lunar landers NASA has chosen through the agency’s Human Landing System (HLS) contracts, the other being SpaceX’s Starship, and is a critical component of NASA’s Artemis program that aims to establish a permanent presence on the moon’s surface….

(13) NEW ORGANIC MOLECULES DETECTED ON MARS. COULD IT BE LIFE JIM? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Hot on the news of water-altered molecules detected by the Perseverance rover in Mars’ Jezero crater is fresh research from another Martian crater, the Gale crater. There the Curiosity rover has taken samples and subjected them to the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite onboard the rover. And the results are now in. There are benzothiophene, methyl benzoate, and single and dicyclic aromatic molecules present. The researchers, mainly US-based, do not know whether the source of these molecules comes from meteors or were they formed in situ either by life or some geological process. What they can say is that these molecules are most likely around 3.5-billion years old as that is the age of the strata from which they were taken.

The importance of this work is that it is an indication that with further development of robotic lab analysis on future Martian rovers, it is likely that some future missions will have the capability to detect biosignatures should they exist.

Primary research: Williams, A. J. et al. (2026) Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment. Nature Communications, vol. 17, 2748.

(14) RE-VISITING PIRANESI BY SUSANNA CLARKE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff’s Media Death Cult has a YouTube Channel but is bigger on Patreon where Cult followers discuss all things SFnal. Recently, the Cult has had a read-along of Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi and this has fired up Moid to make, possibly his longest video yet. It has only just been posted and in it he shares his thoughts on the novel and some of the comments made on the Media Death Cult Patreon thingy.

This is a video about the evolving theories surrounding Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/1/26 Atomic Pixels To Power, Turbines To Scroll

Posted on May 1, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(0) I’m the guest of honor at a medical procedure today, so this Scroll will largely be Do It Yourself. Please fill the comments with the things we should have covered!

(1) CRAFT TIP. Charlie Jane Anders advises writers, “Let Your Characters Teach Us About their World” at Happy Dancing.

…Getting to know your characters and learning about the world they inhabit can go hand in hand. It’s the same process, in fact. The more we can inhabit your POV characters’ perspectives, the better we’ll be able to understand the place they live and the society they belong to. We get to know the characters and their milieu at the same time, and the characters help explain their surroundings to us.

So here are some thoughts about how a strong narrative POV can serve to introduce us to the setting of your story…

Anders’ first segment is based on the answer to this question:

I. How well does your protagonist know the world?

a) Total novice (portal fantasy hero, or raised by wolves)

Think of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: John the Savage is raised in the wilderness, and stumbles into this “advanced” society, which he has to learn from the ground up. We discover it along with him. Or a portal fantasy!

b) Native but partial knowledge (knows one neighborhood/stratus but not all)

A lot of popular fiction lately features a protagonist who comes from an impoverished background turns out to have a unique ability which leads to them going to a magical academy or a palace — think dark academia.

c) Expert level (knows all corners of the world very well)

This is someone who has traveled and studied, and might know multiple languages. This character knows how to navigate lots of different social strata and is familiar with many different sorts of neighborhoods.

d) Super boss (knows more than literally anyone else)

The most common example of this is if you have a a spymaster character, or someone who has eyes and ears everywhere. Or a literal tour guide.

Side rant: “portal fantasy” and “native fantasy” represent two different sorts of relationships with a world: discovering it for the first time (alongside with the reader) versus being deeply familiar already. Portal fantasy has somewhat fallen from popularity, because people crave that feeling of being immersed in a world from the jump — which is also why most narrators these days are tight third person or first-person, present tense.

(2) ROYAL GIFT. “Queen Camilla Unites Winnie-the-Pooh With a Long-Lost Friend”. The New York Times has the story. Link bypasses the NYT paywall.

On Wednesday, the queen of Britain presented the New York Public Library with a bespoke replica of Roo, the smallest companion of the Bear of Very Little Brain.

The queen of Britain, Camilla, stopped by the New York Public Library on Wednesday to pay a special visit to a small, carefully preserved stuffed animal that the library’s president and chief executive, Anthony Marx, called “the world’s most famous teddy bear.”

That would be Winnie-the-Pooh, a toy bought from Harrods department store in the 1920s and given by A.A. Milne, the author of the “Winnie-the-Pooh” books, to his son, Christopher Robin Milne. Along with the other stuffed animals that inspired the books — Kanga, Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger — Pooh resides in pride of place in a climate-controlled case in the Polonsky Exhibition of the New York Public Library’s Treasures.

Alas, Kanga’s baby, Roo, got lost somewhere in an English apple orchard in the 1930s. But Camilla, who arrived in the United States on Monday for a state visit with her husband, King Charles III, came to the library bearing the next best thing: a bespoke replica of Roo produced by Merrythought, Britain’s oldest surviving teddy bear manufacturer….

(3) LUCAS MUSEUM UPDATE. “Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Unveils Inaugural Exibitions” and Variety previewed them. (The Museum doesn’t open til September.)

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, co-founded by George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson and set to open Sept. 22 in Los Angeles, has announced its inaugural exhibitions.

With more than 1,200 objects total, the installations will span more than 30 galleries and occupy approximately 100,000 square feet of the museum which aims to “honor the universal tradition of telling stories through images.”

Drawn from the museum’s founding collection, the exhibitions aim trace the evolution of human culture through storytelling, from ancient sculptures of gods and goddesses to Renaissance paintings to photographs, comics, and modern cinema, including props and costumes from the Lucas Archives….

…See the full list of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art’s exhibitions below.

Architecture: Innovative designs that inspired the architectural vision of the museum
Benton: Selected works of Thomas Hart Benton’s depiction of American life
Children’s Stories: Illustrations of children’s literature by Beatrix Potter, Leo Politi, E.H. Shepard, Jacob Lawerence and more
Cinema: A selection of production designs, props and costumes from the Lucas Archives
Everyday Life: A series of galleries dedicated to visual stories about chil.dhood, community, family, love, motherhood, play, school, sports and work
Civic Life: Portrayals of the courthouse, the polling place, political headquarters and more
Comics • Graphic Stories: American and European comics, including works by Mœbius, Marie Severin, Jack Kirby, Alison Bechdel, Jim Lee, Frank Miller and Rafael Navarro
Manga • Anime: Influential work in Japanese illustration and animation
Frazetta: Frank Frazetta illustrations and book covers
History: Paintings, prints and illustrations of major historical events
Jessie Willcox Smith: Scenes by the illustrator of fairy tales and childhood scenes
Murals: Large-scale, public works of narrative art by Judith F. Baca, Diego Rivera and JR
Narrative Forms: Narrative art across genres of adventure, fantasy, romance and science fiction by artists Julie Bell, Boris Vallejo, Ken Kelly, Georges Méliès, John C. Berkey and Jeffrey Catherine Jones
Parrish: Works by illustrator Maxfield Parrish
Photography: Documentary images by Robert Capa, Gordon Parks, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Dorothea Lange and more
Rockwell: Works by Norman Rockwell
Wyeth: Book illustrations from the 1910s through the 1940s by N.C. Wyeth
Western Stories: Myths of the American West, including wagon trains, shoot-outs, frontier towns and more

Artist’s rendering of Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

(4) THE PLUTONIC IDEAL. “Head of NASA Calls for Pluto to Be Made a Planet Again” reports Futurism.

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman is necroposting about an age-old debate in astronomy that was considered officially settled two decades ago: whether Pluto should be counted as a planet.

“I am very much in the camp of, ‘Make Pluto A Planet Again,’” Isaacman said during a Tuesday Senate hearing, as quoted by Space.com.

While “MPAPA” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as his president’s political slogan, it’s a position that Isaacman is apparently serious enough about to mobilize the minds at NASA over.

During the hearing, he teased that the space agency is “doing some papers right now” on a “position that we would love to escalate through the scientific community to revisit this discussion and ensure that Clyde Tombaugh gets the credit he received once and rightfully deserves to receive again.”

Isaacman is referring to the American astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930, classifying it as a planet. But that was nearly ninety years ago, and the definition of planet subsequently shifted.

(5) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 1, 1966 — Star Trek pilot, “The Cage”

By Paul Weimer: I saw pieces of it before I got to see the entire thing, of course, in the two-part Star Trek episode “The Menagerie” which has Spock recall the events of the episode. My opinion of “The Cage” was thus an incomplete opinion until I finally got to see the complete “The Cage” on TV on a TV special just before The Next Generation debuted.

It was a fascinating experience to see the entire pilot at last, without any Kirk or the rest of his era, and all of the missing material. I came to see how even more progressively radical for its time that the original pilot for Star Trek was. Mind you, I saw how Jeffrey Hunter ‘s Christopher Pike was really Jeffrey Sinclair before his time…a lead that was good, but not quite what audiences would want in the main. I could see the swing from Hunter to Shatner, Pike to Kirk. I could sadly see why having a female Number One in the early 1960’s was a non-starter, too.

The real poleaxe was Spock. The Spock of “The Cage” is a very different Spock than the Spock we see in every subsequent iteration. A smiling Spock, an emotional Spock, a Spock that is fundamentally less alien in many ways than the Spock we come to know and love. And of course one that is just a moderate officer on the Enterprise, not the first officer, not part of the Heroic Trio of Bones, Kirk and Spock. And no Heroic Trio as well. (Good old Jon Lormer as Dr. Theodore Haskins is no McCoy, but it’s clear that he’s the model for McCoy). And of course, once we have gotten to Strange New Worlds, the conception of what an Enterprise Bridge could be has changed.

So in the end, we will never know what might have resulted…but I strongly suspect Star Trek would not have survived as long as it did, if “The Cage” had gone forward and become the actual TV series. But again (c.f. Babylon 5 again), it was a prototype that made the real version possible, and magical.

(6) WHO UNIFIED FIELD THEORY. Inverse recalls that “20 Years Ago, The Oldest Sci-Fi Show Cemented Its Complex Canon”.

…On April 29, 2006, Doctor Who, Season 2, Episode 3, “School Reunion” found the Doctor (David Tennant) and Rose (Billie Piper) embarking on a good-old-fashioned-aliens-hiding-in-a-school plot. Featuring Anthony Head of Buffy fame as the evil Mr. Finch, “School Reunion,” at least at a glance, has the plot of one of the more forgettable early Tennant adventures; its monster and concept are no more memorable than “The Idiot’s Lantern” and its production values, today, somehow look more dated than the 1970s and 1980s versions of the show. But nobody loves “School Reunion” for the monster-y sci-fi plot. The reason why “School Reunion” is immortal and a great Who episode is that it featured the return of Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, the previous companion of both the 3rd (Jon Pertwee) and 4th (Tom Baker) Doctors. Like the Doctor and Rose, Sarah Jane is investigating the fishy school for signs of otherworldly activity, which echoes her original role as an investigative journalist in the serial “The Time Warrior.”

The brilliance of bringing back Sarah Jane to the Who mythos is that this episode is twofold: First, it firmly establishes that contemporary Doctor Who is meant to be seen as the same continuity as the classic series, and that the Doctor carries all the memories from all their previous incarnations, including the groovy 1970s. But, more tenderly and intelligently, the episode also paints the Doctor in a new light, at least for viewers who were getting used to a young, flirty version of the character. The 10th Doctor may look and act youthful and cartoonish, but he’s very, very old, and the proof is right here: a middle-aged woman who was once a young woman who, like Rose, travelled with the Doctor and endured a regeneration, too.

At the time, Sladen was 60 when “School Reunion” aired, which is interesting, considering that David Tennant is 55 now, in 2026. To put it another way, she wasn’t that old in “School Reunion,” but considering the characters of Rose Tyler and Mickey Smith (Noel Clarke) were meant to be 19 and roughly 24, Sarah Jane was witnessing the notion that she had been replaced by people who were about her age when she first started traveling with the Doctor….

(7) IF IT WAS EASY, EVERYBODY WOULD BE DOING IT. James Davis Nicoll holds forth on “The Science Behind Torchships” for the readers of Reactor.

…We have some idea how to tackle fission power, although not in any way that delivers 10 m/s/s for an extended length of time. We have no working fusion generators and no prospect of having them any time soon.

Which is fine, because if we did have fusion generators, and they could be adapted to power torchships, and we used them to power torchships, we’d very soon discover that every process produces a certain minimum amount of waste heat. In space, the only way to get rid of heat is through radiation. This process is sufficiently inefficient as to require radiators that (if we are assuming a 100 tonne torchship) are either hotter than the sun or the size of Prince Edward Island or somewhere in between.

Even fairly modest nuclear craft such as that shown in the film 2001 should have huge radiators. No such radiators were shown in the film, because they were visually unappealing. I should add that in the case of high-acceleration torchships, making large radiators light enough that they don’t comprise a significant fraction of the dry mass and yet are sturdy enough not to from tear off during boost… well, that could be challenging….

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

Pixel Scroll 4/30/26 I Have No Pixel But I Must Scroll

Posted on April 30, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(0) I am scheduled to have an angiogram on May 1. Hopefully it will do me some good. If all goes well I’ll be back home by mid-afternoon. However, in anticipation that I won’t feel like rushing to the computer to write the Scroll, I am drafting something for tomorrow that will leave plenty of room for you all to pitch in.

(1) BEYOND BLEEP-BLOOP. “Why Does Music in Science Fiction Sound Like That?” asks JSTOR Daily.

As a genre, science fiction stands out for its cinematic grandeur (across media), for its use of futuristic civilizations as allegories for the present, for its rich world-building and multi-layered lore, and for its in-universe music.

Think of movies such as The Fifth Element, where Diva Plavalaguna entertains the passengers aboard a flying cruise ship. Or think of Star Wars, where the seedy cantina is enlivened by an almost-folksy live music selection. This kind of diegetic music (music that exists within the world of the story) is emblematic of what James Wierzbicki identifies as standard science fiction music in an article for Lied und populäre Kultur / Song and Popular Culture.

To Wierzbicki, science fiction music falls into two camps: “other-worldly, and thus never-heard-before music” and music that is “quite old-fashioned and earthbound.” This distinction, however, is not simply a matter of describing or performing a particular sound….

…How did cinema respond? In part by inserting in-universe chants and music. As Wierzbicki notes, 1950s sound effect departments were busy “concocting blip-bleep-bloop noises to illustrate futuristic/alien technologies, but there was little effort to depict whatever ‘music’ denizens of the future, or aliens, might have heard.” One notable exception is Forbidden Planet, in which officers aboard an Earth-based spacecraft listen to music recorded half a million years earlier by the planet’s denizens….

… The tides began to shift in the 1960s and 1970s. Consider, for example, Spock playing the lyre in the first season (1966) of Star Trek; the electronic “lounge” music in Barbarella (1968); the synthetic “Ode to Joy” in A Clockwork Orange (1971); the grunting chants of the mutants known as “The Family” in The Omega Man (1971) alongside the comparable hymns in Zardoz (1974); the glittery sonic backdrops for the mall and disco in Logan’s Run (1976); the cantina band in Star Wars (1977); and the after-dinner songs in the “Androids of Tara” episodes (1979) of Doctor Who.

As entertaining as they might be, most of these pieces of music “conjure up an image of what audiences of the day thought the future should sound like, and thus with each passing year their ‘contemporaneous strangeness’ seems more and more dated,” writes Wierzbicki. …

(2) STEVE VERTLIEB MEDICAL UPDATE. [Item by Steve Vertlieb.] Took Shelly home last Saturday night at one thirty in the morning. There was pouring rain. It was quite dark on her street. I didn’t see a slight ledge raised up on the sidewalk approaching her property. I tripped over it and fell down hard, crashing head and face into the cement. I was rushed by ambulance to the Trauma Center at Einstein Hospital where I remained for four days. I’m back home now and my brother in currently enroute from Los Angeles to take care of me for the next couple of weeks. I’m badly bruised, while my face looks like the white dog with black rings around his eyes from the old ‘Our Gang’ comedies. My left arm feels dead and is enveloped in a hard, bulky cast. There isn’t much that I can do for myself and moving about is challenging. I’m terrified of falling yet again. Recovery will likely take at least three months. My typing skills are limited by the use of just one hand. Having said that, I’m alive and still breathing. So ends another exciting chapter in the ever-continuing adventures of ‘The Perils of Pauline’ …or of Steve Vertlieb. Your healing thoughts and prayers are deeply appreciated.

Steve Vertlieb in hospital — April 2026.

(3) 2025 REUBEN AWARDS NOMINEES. “National Cartoonists Society announces 2025 Reuben Divisional Award nominees”. ComicsBeat has the whole list at the link. LAcon V guest of honor Stan Sakai is nominated in the Comic Book category for Usagi Yojimbo.

The National Cartoonists Society has announced the complete slate of creators, illustrators and sequential artisans up for the 2025 NCS Divisional Awards for Excellence in Cartooning. A vote of NCS members will take place in May, with the winners announced at the 80^th Annual Reuben Awards, in Columbus, Ohio on August 7.

The NCS Divisional Awards comprises 13 categories, running the gamut from advertising, animation, comic strips, editorial cartooning, online and offline comics, and more. Each category has three nominees up for the title. All awards cover work published last year (hence the ‘2025’ Reuben Awards)….

(4) TODAY’S DAY.

According to Days Of The Year it’s “National Mr. Potato Head Day”.

…Mr. Potato Head is an iconic toy, but he certainly hasn’t stayed the same over his more than 70 years of history.

This guy is pretty classic, but he has also evolved to keep up with the times and stay relevant. Today’s versions of Mr. Potato Head toys offer some different options for facial features, unique shoes, and there are even family sets that come in a group.

Mini versions of the toy can even be found, wearing little costumes related to the Toy Story movie.

In honor of National Mr. Potato Head Day, head on over to a toy store and start wandering through the aisles….

(5) KATHLEEN MCBRIDE OBITUARY. Georgia fan Kathleen McBride died April 29. Her former spouse David Ettlin made an announcement on Facebook.

Kathleen McBride, longtime science fiction and fantasy fan, died this evening at a hospital in Valdosta, Georgia, after several years of declining health. Born Kathleen Margaret Aranyosi and raised in Bethlehem, Pa., she was also known as Kathleen Ettlin during our four years of marriage in the mid-late 1970s in Baltimore, and Kathleen Reeves during a second marriage when living near Washington, D.C. After her second husband’s death, she moved to southwestern Georgia. She adopted the name McBride in kinship with her best friend Parris McBride, the longtime partner and wife of George R.R. Martin, with whom she had kept in touch for half a century. This photo of Kathleen dates to about 1977, and was taken in my then-house, an end-of-row mini-mansion known as Toad Hall in Baltimore’s Charles Village neighborhood. It is how I will always remember her.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

April 30, 1938 — Larry Niven, 88.

By Paul Weimer. One could write a whole book about his early work, but I am here today on his birthday to discuss his later work, what I read of it anyway. Niven, like a number of writers, became less and less aligned with the kinds of SFF I was interested in as time goes by, but he lasted longer than many.

Take The Burning City. Years after The Magic Goes Away stories (still some of the best sword and sorcery out there), Niven teamed up with Jerry Pournelle to write a novel set in The Magic Goes Awayverse. It’s set in a version of Los Angeles in the distant prehistoric past, a Los Angeles that occasionally burns down again and again (Fire Gods are so temperamental). Some of the magic of Niven, and some of the magic of the Niven and Pournelle combination, are here. Other things feel a lot like men shouting at clouds. (A group of antagonists clearly meant to be the IRS, for example, feels like leaden and unwanted political point making). But the brilliance of Niven sometimes shines through.

Rainbow Mars is a book whose contents are published in the wrong order. The titular work is a novella, one of the Svetz series and a capstone to the stories of his time traveler going back in time and winding up tangling with all sorts of supernatural creatures. In Rainbow Mars, he winds up dealing with a number of different SFF Martian landscapes and creatures, and a world-killing Yddgrasil. But this novella is first in the book, and then the rest of the Svetz stories come after it. It is my opinion that is the absolute wrong way to appreciate what Niven is doing in the Svetz stories and his cleverness is wasted thereby.

Finally, a few words about Achilles’ Choice. Co-written with Steven Barnes, Achilles’ Choice is the story of Jillian. In a world where winning Olympic medals means personal power, and where winning Olympic medals means taking a drug that, if not managed afterwards (expensively), means death, the devil’s choice of the title becomes clear right away and is a Niven novel which runs on theme more than anything. Is it better to have an obscure, low life, safe and cossetted, or to risk greatly, in the hopes of getting great glory. Jillian of course goes for the latter, just as Achilles did, and the unfolding of that choice runs through the novel. It may be a standalone “lesser” Niven, but I think he and Barnes team up here as well as they did in the first couple of Dream Park novels.

Happy Birthday, Larry Niven!

Larry Niven, Steve Barnes and Jerry Pournelle at the LA Annual Paperback Show in 2015. Photo by Alex Pournelle. Used by permission.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal predicts the future of work.
Crankshaft gets a difficult request.
Dinosaur Comics finds a graveyard.
Off the Mark has a shakeup.
Reality Check gives the answer.
Tom the Dancing Bug illustrates a proper signature.

(8) MARTIAN ROOTS. “’The Martian’ becomes real life: Meet ‘Spudnik,’ the space potato” at Space.com.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit is showing off his pride and joy: a potato named “Spudnik.”

In their very minimal “free time,” astronauts aboard the International Space Station generally play instruments, make art, take photos, and more. But Pettit spent his time making like Mark Watney in “The Martian,” and growing potatoes in microgravity.

“Recognized by Andy Weir in his book/movie ‘The Martian,’ potatoes will have a place in future exploration of space. So I thought it good to get started now!” Pettit wrote on X on March 20.

Pettit’s latest mission to the International Space Station, Expedition 72, which landed back on Earth in April 2025, saw him make history as the oldest active astronaut, at age 70. As part of this mission, the crew conducted incredible research, including a study of the changes that can happen to your eyes due to living in space. But a year after the mission ended, Pettit’s side project growing Spudnik is now finding its time in the spotlight….

… Sputnik can be seen in the photo growing out of a plastic containment bag, emerging like some furry, purple alien. But despite its unique appearance, this agricultural experiment seems to have thrived onboard the space station….

(9) THE WHONIVERSE SHOW. “The countdown to ‘Doctor Who: Circuit Breaker’ starts now” says BBC’s Doctor Who website.

The global multi-platform story begins 25 June, and the Fugitive Doctor is at the centre of it all!

A major new Doctor Who story event is here, and this time, the threat is closer than ever. Following its initial reveal last year, BBC Studios unveiled new rollout details, story elements and artwork for Circuit Breaker in the latest episode of The Whoniverse Show on the official Doctor Who YouTube channel.

Doctor Who: Circuit Breaker launches on 25 June 2026, kicking off an epic, multi-platform adventure unfolding this summer across audio, publishing, gaming and digital, bringing fans together for one connected, must-follow Whoniverse event.

The story event will see a single, escalating crisis play out across multiple formats, with each chapter unlocking new clues, new dangers… and a new side to the Time Lord.

Circuit Breaker brings together a range of longstanding Doctor Who partners including Titan Comics, Doctor Who Magazine, BBC Audiobooks, East Side Games, Puffin, BBC Books and Big Finish, each delivering a unique chapter of the story across the summer.

Fans can follow every twist via the Doctor Who website and official channels and The Whoniverse Show, with the first chapter of the epic story launching on the in-universe UNIT website on 25 June.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/11/26 Will The Moebius Strip Be Unbroken?

Posted on April 11, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) PAT CADIGAN IS CANCER FREE. Cadigan made the announcement Friday on her blog: “The Damned Horse Actually Learned To Sing”.

Yesterday, my oncologist called to give me the results of my latest CT scan and it seems the thing that I didn’t think could happen, happened: there is no more cancer.

My mind is blown.

My original oncologist told me I might have two years or less. If you look up the prognosis for recurrent endometrial cancer, median survival is still given as 12 to 15 months. The five-year survival rate is 20% to 55% depending on how it recurs. I managed to hang in for eleven years, and now it’s gone.

That’s the limit of my coherence right now. There’s a wild party going on in my head. Once it settles down, I’ll attempt a blog entry with more substance.

I’ll just say this one last thing for now: I didn’t do this alone. My family and all of my wonderful friends kept me going. When I told you it was your moral support, your encouraging words that buoyed me up and gave me strength, I wasn’t just being nice, because holy guacamole, here I am!

Nyah, nyah, cancer—you better run! And keep running!

(2) BOLO FOR STOLEN COMICS ART. Over the past two weeks Mark Evanier has been blogging about the “Missing Masterpieces” stolen from his comics collection.

[They were taken by] a construction-type worker who did some work at my house…. Yes, I know who he is. No, I don’t know where he is although the Los Angeles Police Department says they’re hot on his trail.

Evanier’s post “More About the Missing Masterpieces” includes a link to a partial list of what’s gone.

As I’ve mentioned, I was recently the victim of a robbery — and what really hurts is that I know who did it and it was someone I trusted a lot and not for a short time. This person, possibly in cahoots with others, stole a lot of original comic book artwork from my collection, many of them pieces that were gifts to me from the people who drew them. And most of those people are no longer with us.

I have compiled a not-quite-complete list of the items taken and some of them have already turned up on the collectors’ market. Naturally, I want them back and I want to see the responsible party/parties brought to justice. You can download this list as a PDF — it’s four pages — by clicking here.

If you are all involved in the marketplace for such items, please download the list…share it with others…post the link online. I don’t have access to all the online forums for artwork selling or trading but if you’re on one, please make sure it gets there. Thank you and I’ll keep you posted.

Heritage Auctions has also posted a list on its website: “Original Comic Book Artwork Stolen”.

(3) FATE OF HUNT VALLEY MARRIOTT. [Item by Michael J. Walsh.] A long-time Balticon hotel is being turned into rubble. The first Balticon held there was in 16–18 April 1976.

These photos of the Hunt Valley Marriott in Maryland, originally shared by Cindy Geppi Shockey, on Facebook, were posted by Phil Giunta.

(4) VENERABLE COLLECTION. A Deep Look by Dave Hook pages through “’The Moonlight Traveler: Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination’, Philip Van Doren Stern editor, 1943 Doubleday, Doran”. Here’s the short take; the long analysis is at the link.

The Short: I read The Moonlight Traveler: Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination, Philip Van Doren Stern editor, 1943 Doubleday, Doran. It includes 21 stories from 1839 to 1940, and an introduction that went on way too long for me. My favorites were “Lord Mountdrago“, a novelette by W. Somerset Maugham, Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan February 1939, and “The Curfew Tolls“, a short story by Stephen Vincent Benét, The Saturday Evening Post, October 5, 1935. On the down side, there were four stories I could not finish. My overall average rating for the stories was a rather ordinary 3.08/5, or “Good”.

(5) WHO GOES THERE. Nicholas Whyte goes into depth about “The newly recovered Doctor Who episodes, and the foolish commentary of Gareth Roberts” at From the Heart of Europe.

…One of the more bizarre reactions to the recovery of the two episodes was a piece in The Spectator by Gareth Roberts. Roberts, in case you missed the memo, wrote or co-wrote six episodes of New Who, nine stories of The Sarah Jane Adventures and ten Doctor Who novels, but was basically booted out of the Whoniverse in 2019 for his offensive tweets about trans women. (He was also pretty offensive about Muslims.)

Since then he has gone full-on culture warrior for the Right, and has been a regular writer in The Spectator since 2022. This week’s piece on “The surprising conservatism of the old Doctor Who” (I won’t link, but you can evade the paywall easily enough), asserts but fails to prove that Terry Nation, the writer of the story, and Douglas Camfield, the director, were “unusually politically conservative”.

Of course, what you get from art is often what you bring to it, but most people would agree that Doctor Who leans left – see, for instance, Alex Wilcock’s classic essay “How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal”. Malcolm Hulke, one of the classic series’ more prolific writers, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Roberts’ evidence to the contrary is slim to the point of invisibility.

Roberts starts by pointing out (entirely correctly) that Nation’s writing “is often of the two-fisted war story kind, often featuring – as here – desperate commando missions in jungle terrain.” There’s nothing particularly right-wing about war stories in the context of mid-twentieth-century Britain. Bear in mind that the 1945 election was swung to Labour by the mailed-in votes of soldiers in the field. Roberts also points out that the (fascinating) scene set in the space command centre is implicitly critical of the complacent and affluent society of Earth in the year 4000. Again, nothing very right-wing about that.

In any case, the idea that the creator of Blake’s 7, which is about rebels against a militaristic regime led by a woman, was “unusually politically conservative” is ridiculous. Terry Nation often wrote about politics; but his strength was satire, coming as he did from comedy, and he applied his satire liberally to all….

(6) WHAT’S GOOD TO READ? Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup” for the Guardian covers Loss Protocol by Paul McAuley; Night Babies by Lucie McKnight Hardy; Honeysuckle by Bar Fridman-Tell; and Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker.

(7) JOHN GUIDRY (1944-2026). John Guidry, chair of the 1988 Worldcon, NolaCon II, and active Burroughs fan, died April 10.

From his teen years on John Guidry collected science fiction. He was especially enamored of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He became friends with another Louisiana fan of the writer, Camille “Caz” Cazedessus, publisher of ERB-dom, who lived in Baton Rouge. Guidry visited Caz in 1963, who put him in touch with another Burroughs buff in the area, Patrick H. Adkins, Jr., of Algiers. Adkins became a noted artist. ERB-dom eventually won the Best Fanzine Hugo. Guidry founded ERB-apa in 1984. In 2018, Guidry was presented with the Burroughs Bibliophiles Outstanding Achievement Award.

Unfortunately, the collection Guidry spent a lifetime building was a casualty of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (see photos in Challenger 23).

Although there were science fiction fans in New Orleans before John Guidry came along (and even a Worldcon in 1951), it is popularly believed that he was responsible for the revival of organized fandom in the city in the Sixties. For example, the New Orleans Science Fiction Association (also known as the Greater New Orleans Science Fiction Association) was formed on June 25, 1967, and John Guidry was a charter member. He was also the first editor of its clubzine, NOLAzine.

In 1977 Guidry launched a New Orleans bid for the 1982 Worldcon, but it didn’t file to get on the ballot. His subsequent bid for 1988 was successful — and legendary. Guidry was by then a lawyer and, with the three other lawyers who led the bid, bankrolled the travel of the charismatic Michael Sinclair all over the country to host room parties where he could dispense Southern charm and hospitality, and French Quarter well drinks. He greeted everyone, “Here, have a Hurricane!” and handed them a potent cup of vodka, rum, and fruit juices, mixed with enough grenadine to turn it fire engine red. This was extremely popular.

The late Joey Grillot said when Guidry announced to New Orleans fans that they had won the 1988 bid he told them that the rules required the committee to do certain things, like present the Hugos. “What’s that?” Joey asked, wondering if he’d heard right. Said Guidry, “That’s the science fiction award we give every year.” Joey was amazed. “John, how’re you gonna get 26 of those Hungarian automobiles in the grand ballroom of the Sheraton?”

The 1988 Worldcon had no problem giving out the Hugos, but it did have a lot of other issues, which were somewhat ameliorated by the proximity of the French Quarter. I contributed my share to the issues while putting the con’s program together.

But as someone who later chaired a Worldcon, I must credit Guidry for his wisdom in saying, “The chair’s job is to thank people, and apologize.” I found there was a lot of truth to that.

Guidry won the 1983 Rebel Award. And after NolaCon II its antithesis, the 1989 Rubble Award. He chaired DeepSouthCon 9 and DeepSouthCon 11. He was a member of the Sons of the Sand.

Outside of fandom, he was engaged in New Orleans’ Mardi Gras traditions as a member of The Phunny Phorty Phellows whose street car ride that kicks off the annual Mardi Gras carnival season. When they were featured on TV in 2009, John was attired as a chef and wearing a yellow Lone Ranger mask.

One of Guidry’s last fannish honors was being named a guest of honor of CONtraflow 5/ DSC 53 in 2014.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 11, 1920 — Peter O’Donnell. (Died 2010.)

London-born Peter O’Donnell was the creator of the Modesty Blaise comic strip along with illustrator Jim Holdaway sixty-one years ago. She has no past as she doesn’t remember anything about her life before escaping from a displaced persons camp in Greece after WW II at the age of fifteen. She runs a criminal gang called The Network, and takes her last name from Merlin’s tutor. Her sidekick, of course she has one, is Willie Garvin, to give a bit of friendship in her life.

Peter O’Donnell from the rear dustjacket flap of the Archival Press edition of The Silver Mistress. Photo by Robert K. Wiener.

O’Donnell and Holdaway met when they worked together on a strip about Romeo Brown, a dashing private detective and reluctant ladies’ man, that ran in the tabloid Evening Standard for most of the Fifties. Blaise, too, would run here. It was quickly picked up globally running in the US, Australian, Indian, South African, Malaysian and other papers as she had a great appeal.

After Holdaway’s death in 1970, the art was by Spanish artist Enrique Romero. He would leave eight years later with three artists replacing him until he came back until the end of the strip with it still running in the Evening Standard thirty-eight years after it debuted.

Yes, it became a film which came just three years into the running of the strip. My did it piss O’Donnell off. Why so? Because he was hired to write the script which they then shitcanned and wrote a new one that had almost nothing to do with characters, the storyline or, well, anything else with the strip. Remember that friendship between her and Willie? Here it becomes full blown romance. And that’s just one of many, many changes.

A later film, Modesty Blaise, would be done as a pilot for a series that never happened and yet another film, My Name is Modesty Blaise, would be done for yet another series that never happened. The one had O’Donnell as a consultant and he liked it.

My Name is Modesty Blaise would be the only one with a British actress as the first had an Italian actress. Now Modesty wasn’t necessarily British as O’Donnell repeatedly said her nationality was deliberately not revealed.

I’ve not touched upon the plethora of books, short stories, graphic novels and original audiobooks that came of these characters in the part sixty years, and I’ll skip detailing them here.

So there you are. I did enjoy the strip when Titan, one of many who did, collected them in trade editions. I think there’s at least fifty trade paper editions available right now on Amazon.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Carpe Diem has a dilemma.
Dinosaur Comics suggests a swap.
Jerry King wins an award.
Off the Mark has a complaint.
Pearls Before Swine writes a book.
Strange Brew makes a guess.
Wumo gets excited.

(10) KEEPING TREKKERS GUESSING. 403auction.com has posted “Star Trek Auction Information” – but they don’t say when it will be, or what is being auctioned.

Celebrate 60 Years of Star Trek and Own a Piece of the Legacy!

For six decades, Star Trek has inspired generations to imagine a future defined by exploration, optimism, and unity. In honor of this milestone anniversary, we are proud to present authentic and exclusive items from across the Star Trek universe in support of DoSomething.org.

This is a rare opportunity for fans and collectors alike to own a tangible piece of the legacy. Each item tells a story, connecting you directly to the moments and characters that have shaped one of the most influential franchises in entertainment history. AND, this auction is also a chance to make a meaningful impact. A portion of the proceeds will benefit DoSomething.org, one of Star Trek’s official 60th anniversary charity partners, supporting young people driving positive change in their communities….

TrekMovie.com’s report, “Star Trek Universe Auction Announced; ‘Starfleet Academy’ AND ‘Strange New Worlds’ Sets Dismantled”, includes this speculation:

Since the new era of Star Trek TV was launched with Star Trek: Discovery in 2017, the live-action production has been in Toronto, Canada. The main exception was for Star Trek: Picard, which was shot in Southern California, primary to accommodate star Patrick Stewart. But with Paramount deciding earlier this month to not produce a third season of Starfleet Academy (and deciding to wrap up Strange New Worlds last year) the studio is now looking to let go of their Trek stuff.…

…We are still awaiting most of the details on the auction, including exactly what will be sold, and when it will be held. As the official description is “auction #1,” it appears that things will be sold off in multiple groups.

The Star Trek auction will be conducted by 403 Auctions in Toronto. And here is the main catch as this company has some strict rules on how it handles its auctions and they warn that for the Star Trek sale, they will not be doing any shipping….

(11) OLDER KINDLES FADING AWAY. “Amazon is cutting off support for older Kindles” reports Engagdet.

If you’re using an older Kindle, you may want to check what year it was released. Amazon has sent out emails to some of its users, with a warning that it’s discontinuing support for Kindle ereaders and Fire tables released in 2012 or earlier. You can still read books you’ve already downloaded on those devices, but you’ll no longer be able to purchase, borrow or download new ones, starting on May 20, 2026. In addition, if the device has an issue that can only be solved by a factory reset, doing so will brick it. Deregestering it will also render it unusable. On Kindle Fire devices, users won’t be able to purchase or download content anymore, but other services would remain functional.

The affected models include the very first Kindle, Kindle 2, Kindle DX, Kindle Keyboard, Kindle 4, Kindle Touch, Kindle 5 and the first version of Kindle Paperwhite. We’ve asked Amazon why it decided to cut off support for those models, and the company told us: “These models have been supported for at least 14 years — some as long as 18 years — but technology has come a long way in that time…”

Well, I won’t be affected. The reason why is a sad story of its own. I used to have one of these old Kindles but in 2017 I set it on top of my car while I unlocked the door. Then I got in, started the engine, and drove off. I don’t know what became of it after that…

(12) FOLLOW THOSE LEGOS! The LA Times reports “$1 million in stolen Legos intercepted en route to Riverside County; 3 arrested”. (Behind a paywall.)

Authorities on Wednesday recovered about $1 million worth of Lego products and two stolen freight trailers heading to Riverside County, according to the Kern County Sheriff’s Office.

Three people from Chino were arrested in connection with the heist on counts of possession of a stolen vehicle, cargo theft and conspiracy, authorities said…

…The deputies conducted traffic stops after seeing two box trucks fleeing the area, according to information released by the Sheriff’s Office. In their search, they discovered a large number of Lego products.

After a further search, they also found two freight trailers, authorities said. An investigation later revealed, authorities said, that the trailers had been stolen while in transit from Fort Worth, Texas, to Moreno Valley.

(13) CREDENTIALS IN SPACE. From Bluesky —

(14) TODAY’S SCROLL TITLE. Daniel Dern credits his inspiration to the song “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” recorded by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, from their album of that name. And also by Johnny Cash& Ricky Scaggs and The Carter Family.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/8/26 “Repent Harley Quinn!” Said The Tiktok Fan

Posted on April 8, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) THE FUTURE IN VIBE CYBERATTACKING. In a New York Times opinion piece, Thomas Friedman says, “Anthropic’s Restraint Is a Terrifying Warning Sign”. (Behind a paywall.)

The artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced Tuesday that it was releasing the newest generation of its large language model, dubbed Claude Mythos Preview, but to only a limited consortium of roughly 40 technology companies, including Google, Broadcom, Nvidia, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Apple, JPMorganChase, Amazon and Microsoft. Some of its competitors are among these partners because this new A.I. model represents a “step change” in performance that has some critically important positive and negative implications for cybersecurity and America’s national security.

The good news is that Anthropic discovered in the process of developing Claude Mythos that the A.I. could not only write software code more easily and with greater complexity than any model currently available, but as a byproduct of that capability, it could also find vulnerabilities in virtually all of the world’s most popular software systems more easily than before.

The bad news is that if this tool falls into the hands of bad actors, they could hack pretty much every major software system in the world, including all those made by the companies in the consortium.

This is not a publicity stunt. In the run-up to this announcement, representatives of leading tech companies have been in private conversation with the Trump administration about the implications for the security of the United States and all the other countries that use these now vulnerable software systems, technologists involved told me.

For good reason. As Anthropic said in a written statement on Tuesday, in just the past month, “Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of A.I. progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who committed to deploying them safely. The fallout — economics, public safety and national security — could be severe.’’

Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s name for the consortium, is an undertaking to work with the biggest and most trusted tech companies and critical infrastructure providers, including banks, “to put these capabilities to work for defensive purposes,” the company added, and to give the leading technology firms a head start in finding and patching those vulnerabilities.

“We do not plan to make Claude Mythos Preview generally available, but our eventual goal is to enable our users to safely deploy Mythos-class models at scale — for cybersecurity purposes, but also for the myriad other benefits that such highly capable models will bring,” Anthropic said.

My translation: Holy cow! Superintelligent A.I. is arriving faster than anticipated, at least in this area. We knew it was getting amazingly good at enabling anyone, no matter how computer literate, to write software code. But even Anthropic reportedly did not anticipate that it would get this good, this fast, at finding ways to find and exploit flaws in existing code.

Anthropic said it found critical exposures in every major operating system and Web browser, many of which run power grids, waterworks, airline reservation systems, retailing networks, military systems and hospitals all over the world….

(2) MAGIC CASTLE UPDATE. Craig Miller shared with Facebook followers what Magic Castle members were told about yesterday’s fire at the Hollywood landmark.

The Castle was open and occupied when the fire broke out but the staff got everyone out quickly and safely, including reuniting them with their cars so they could get home readily.

This morning, Randy Pitchford, the new owner, posted to the membership. The last two weeks of March, the Castle was closed as major renovations and upgrades were done to the bathrooms and, more importantly, the kitchen. This turned out to be fortuitous.

The fire was in the attic and roof. And the newly upgraded fire sensors did their job and got the Fire Department to the Castle quickly, where they were able to put the fire out.

He reported that the amount of water used to do so would have caused tremendous damage to the floors below except that the renovations including sealing all the areas and prevented the water from flooding the lower floors.

What’s not been reported, however, is just how much damage did occur. Repairs are underway and the Castle will be closed today and tomorrow. Unknown if it will be longer than that. Hopefully, the fire, water, and smoke damage is little enough that operations will start up again soon.

(3) APPEAL FOR MAURINE STARKEY. A GoFundMe has been launched to help a well-known sff artist with housing: “Help Maurine Starkey Land Safely”.

I have known Maurine Starkey—Mo to her friends—since 1992. Over the years, we worked together at Strategic Simulations, later again at Electronic Arts, and again at Olde Skuul. I have watched Mo’s talent, dedication, and grit up close for decades. Mo is a gifted computer game artist and illustrator, one of those rare creatives who never really stops making things. Pen, paintbrush, mouse—whatever the tool, she keeps creating. That is just who she is. Mo also won the Best Fan Artist Hugo Award in 2011, a well-earned recognition of the imagination, skill, and heart she has brought to her work for years. And now she needs help.

For the past year, Mo stepped away from her own life to move in with Rebecca Heineman to work on Olde Skuul and instead ended up as a full-time caregiver for Becky as she battled cancer. She gave her time, energy, and heart to caring for someone she loved. Recently, that battle came to an end. While grieving the loss of her dear friend, Mo has also been hit with a second devastating blow: because her housing was tied to the person she was caring for, she has now lost her home. That is the hard truth of it. Mo is facing displacement at a moment when she should be allowed to mourn, breathe, and figure out her next steps with some dignity.

Mo is 70-something, close to the age where most people would be retiring—or at least slowing down—but she does not really know how to stop creating. She is still working, still making art, still showing up. But right now, talent and determination are not enough to solve an immediate housing crisis. We are asking for help to give Mo a real safety net and a stable place to land. Funds raised will go toward safe, immediate housing, moving and storage costs for her artwork and personal belongings, and basic living expenses while she gets back on stable ground….

(4) ATWOOD MINIATURES. Margaret Atwood told an interest anecdote about a bit of set decoration done for The Testaments adaptation in “DOLLHOUSE”, posted to her Substack newsletter In the Writing Burrow.

Last fall, when my memoir, Book of Lives, came out, my friend and fellow adventurer Faye Souter from Canmore, Alberta (Canada) made me a bowlful of tiny little copies of it. People thought they were candies, though nobody actually ate them.

Then, a bit later, I was on the set of The Testaments — we were shooting my weird cameo scene — and I brought some tiny memoirs to hand out to team members. After my bizarre performance — not in the first episode though, wait for it — I was given a tour of some of the built sets, including the Aunt Lydia School (every high-schooler’s nightmare, as long as it’s a girl’s school with lots of sewing; yes, revenge on my Home Ec teacher, in a twisted sort of way).

I was also shown the set of Agnes’s house. The first episode of the series is called “Dollhouse.” Inside Agnes’s house there is indeed a dollhouse; it’s a replica of the actual house. Inside the dollhouse — which is in my novel, and, as described, children do indeed act out some of their less socially-approved emotions through their dollhouses. We won’t go into the more harrowing acts visited upon Barbies (haircuts, permanent marker tattoos).

In the dollhouse within the house, there is an armchair. “Put my little Book of Lives in the armchair,” said Steve Stark of Toluca Films, one of the executive producers of The Testaments. So I did, and he took this picture….

(5) LIBRARY AGENCY LITIGATION ENDS. There’s good news and bad news. The good news is: “Trump Administration Withdraws Appeal to 2025 IMLS Decision” reports Publisher Weekly. The bad news is that the administration plans to not fund the agency in the future.

Days after the Trump administration unveiled its plan to not fund the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in its budget for fiscal 2027, a federal court granted the administration’s request to withdraw its appeal of a federal judge’s earlier ruling that struck down Trump’s attempt last year to dismantle the agency.

Last spring, Trump issued an executive order demanding that IMLS and other federal agencies be reduced to their minimum statutory functions. To enforce the EO, the executive branch appointed an IMLS acting director, put 85% of IMLS staff members on paid administrative leave, dissolved the agency’s board of directors, and curtailed the administration of grants.

That order led to a lawsuit filed by the Attorneys General of 21 states in April. In May, Rhode Island district court judge John J. McConnell Jr. formally ordered a halt to the executive order that would dismantling the IMLS. That ruling was followed by a decision in November that permanently barred the administration from taking further steps to eliminate the agency….

(6) SO THIS IS WHAT IT HAS COME TO? “Amazon and U.S. Postal Service Reach New Deal on Deliveries After Year of Talks” reports the New York Times.

Amazon reached a tentative agreement with the U.S. Postal Service that will reduce the number of packages the e-commerce giant ships through the beleaguered agency, concluding a tumultuous negotiations process.

Under the new deal, if approved, Amazon would ship 20 percent fewer packages through the Postal Service… Still, the deal would preserve guaranteed revenue for the Postal Service, which relies on Amazon, its biggest customer, for billions of dollars in income and has long struggled to stabilize its finances.

Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, said that the agreement would still have the Postal Service deliver more than 1 billion packages for Amazon a year. The Postal Service currently delivers 1.7 billion packages a year…

The Postal Service is in a precarious financial situation, having reported a $9 billion yearly loss in November. … the agency could run out of cash within a year with no major changes and asked lawmakers to increase its borrowing limits.

The postal service has come up with a 10-year plan to shore up its finances, but the service continues to lose money: During the three-month period ending in December, it lost nearly $1.3 billion.

(7) PURITY OF ESSENCE. Gareth Roberts calls out “The surprising conservativism of the old Doctor Who” in The Spectator. (Behind a paywall.)

Nicholas Whyte’s reaction on Facebook was:

I see that a writer who used to be good has published an article saying that Terry Nation and Douglas Camfield were hard-line right-wingers. He produces pretty much no evidence for this.

(8) eluki bes shahar (1956-2026). Sharon Lee announced on Facebook today that eluki bes shahar, who also wrote as Rosemary Edghill, died on April 7.

Ending the day on a sad note. My friend eluki, who wrote many things under many different names, among them eluki bes shahar, Rosemary Edghill, and James Mallory, died yesterday of sepsis. This news coming to me from eluki’s wife.

Aside Steve, eluki is the writer I’ve known the longest. She was a remarkable person — brilliant and difficult, which can be said of many of us. She taught me more about writing than anyone else, again, save Steve.

We’d grown apart after her move to the opposite coast, but I’m going to miss her, so much.

Please share this, so we can hopefully catch everyone who ought to know.

She wrote many sff novels, some in collaboration with Andre Norton, Mercedes Lackey, and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 8, 1974 — Nnedi Okorafor, 52.

This Scroll we have Nnedi Okorafor, a truly phenomenal writer.

She’s Nigerian, and has coined two words to describe her literary focus, Africanfuturism, and Africanjujuism (see “Africanfuturism Defined” at Nnedi’s Wahala Zone Blog.) The latter word identifies the Afrocentric subgenre of fantasy fiction that draws on African spiritualities and cosmologies. Cool. Really cool.

Let’s start with some of her work as comic book writer. The LaGuardia series that she wrote for was published by Berger Books. The collection won a Graphic Story Hugo Award at ConZealand, and her Black Panther: Long Live the King was nominated at Dublin 2019. She did other work in the Panther universe as well — Shuri in which Black Panther is missing and she has to find him (great story), Wakanda Forever and Shuri: Wakanda Forever

I started there as I love her writing in this medium. Now let me pick my favorite novellas and novels by her.

The Binti trilogy is an extraordinary feat of writing and my favorite reading experience by her. The “Binti” novella which leads it off won a Hugo at MidAmeriCon II. Then came the “Binti: Home” novella which was nominated for a Hugo at Worldcon 76 and the final “Binti: The Night Masquerade” novella to date which was nominated for a Hugo at Dublin 2019.

Lagoon is a deep dive in Nigerian mythology including Legba in the forefront here, in what is a SF novel as aliens and humans come together to form a new postcapitalist Nigeria. Neat concept well executed, characters are fascinating and the story is done well.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro cleans up after a superhero battle.
Cornered finds a messy line of research.
Rhymes with Orange didn’t mean to threaten.

(11) NEW DAN DARE ADVENTURE. “Modern heroes and a ravaged Earth: reboot of 1950s space comic Dan Dare has liftoff” – the Guardian celebrates the revival.

Sufferin’ satellites! The quintessential British space hero Dan Dare is back, 76 years after he first appeared in iconic comic magazine the Eagle.

With all eyes on Nasa’s Artemis II moon mission, and with the big-screen adaptation of Andy Weir’s science fiction novel Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling, going stratospheric at the box office, our love affair with space has been reignited.

So the return of Colonel Dan Dare, chief pilot of the Interplanet Space Fleet, who debuted in the first issue of the Eagle on 14 April 1950, couldn’t be more timely.

With the blessing of the Dan Dare Corporation, which owns the rights to the comic strip – originally written and drawn by the Manchester-born illustrator Frank Hampson – the comic writer Alex de Campi and artist Marc Laming have reinvented the beloved characters for the 21st century in a graphic novel to be published by B7 Comics….

However, Mark Roth-Whitworth notes, “New version includes ‘The USA is now the United Corporations of America, and space flight has been privatised,’ Argh… Esp. when the astronauts on their way home keep talking about ALL humankind.”

(12) DIRECTOR NAMED FOR BUTLER FILM ADAPTATION. “Melina Matsoukas to Direct ‘Parable of the Sower’ Movie at Warner Bros.” reports Variety.

Melina Matsoukas has found her next directorial project in Octavia E. Butler’s landmark sci-fi odyssey “Parable of the Sower.”

Matsoukas, whose resume includes “Queen & Slim,” “Insecure” and several key collaborations with Beyoncé, will direct and produce the film adaptation of Butler’s 1993 dystopian novel. Hailed as “notable book of the year” by the New York Times upon its original publication, “Parable of the Sower” became a New York Times bestseller in 2020, 27 years later, due to its prescience and enduring notoriety.

(13) WHO CREATED BITCOIN? John Carreyrou may know the answer to the question: “Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto? My Quest to Unmask Bitcoin’s Creator”. (Link bypasses the New York Times paywall.)

One evening in the fall of 2024, my wife and I were sitting in traffic on the Long Island Expressway when, tired of listening to the jazz-funk station I often played on our drives, she switched to a podcast.

It was “Hard Fork,” the New York Times tech show, and the hosts were discussing a new HBO documentary claiming to have unmasked Bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto.

I was instantly riveted. I had long considered the question of Satoshi’s true identity one of our age’s great enigmas and had poked at it before without success. Two years earlier, I had even spent several months researching a book on the subject. But I soon realized I was out of my depth and reluctantly gave up.

Hearing that someone else might have finally identified the shadowy figure who had revolutionized finance, spawned a $2.4 trillion industry and amassed one of the world’s biggest fortunes in one stroke of staggering genius aroused in me a mixture of admiration and envy. I couldn’t wait to watch the film. As soon as we got home that night, I logged in to the HBO Max app and pressed play.

In the end, I found the conclusion of “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” unconvincing: HBO singled out a Canadian software developer based on what seemed like very thin evidence. But as I watched what was an otherwise entertaining romp through the world of crypto, one scene caught my attention.

Adam Back, a British cryptographer and leading figure in the Bitcoin movement, sat on a park bench in Riga, Latvia, his shirt untucked under a brown coat. The filmmaker casually rattled off the names of several Satoshi suspects. At the mention of his own name, Mr. Back tensed up, strenuously denied he was Satoshi and asked that the conversation be kept off the record.

Having encountered my share of liars and developed something of an expertise in their tells, Mr. Back’s demeanor — his shifty eyes, his awkward chuckle, the jerky movement of his left hand — struck me as fishy. When the credits rolled up, I replayed the sequence several times on my TV…

… With his wire-rimmed glasses, thinning gray hair and goatee, Mr. Back, 55, looks like a disheveled mathematician. Over the past dozen years, he has built a mini empire of Bitcoin-related companies and become one of the community’s most influential members.

Mr. Back has long been among the top Satoshi candidates. But, unlike some other leading suspects, he hasn’t been the subject of close journalistic scrutiny, other than in a 2020 video by an anonymous YouTuber who goes by the handle “Barely Sociable.”…

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

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