26 Don’t Stand Underneath When The Pixels Scroll By

Posted on February 2, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) GROUNDHOG DAY. Reactor is a fan of these “13 Excellent Groundhog Day-Style Time Loops”.

The now-classic Groundhog Day flirts with (and breaks) the rules of multiple movie genres: romantic comedy, time travel narrative, small town dramedy, spiritual redemption tale—and it’s also given birth to an entire subgenre of its own. The “Groundhog Day episode” is a mainstay of many television series, and the plot even pops up in films, novels, and short fiction. It’s a fun way to play with established characters, putting your faves through the emotional wringer while trying to solve a murder or stop a crime. And it can be an equally effective tool for riffing on entire genre tropes; mixing in high school drama, slasher horror, or other well-worn genres can lead to some fascinating mashups. And in (almost) all cases, the protagonist stuck in the time loop comes out on the other side all the better.

We’ve compiled a list of our favorite Groundhog Day riffs and the most memorable time loops in SFF. Take a break from listening to “I Got You Babe” for the millionth time and check out these thirteen recursive tales.

Here’s one of their picks:

Stargate SG-1: “Window of Opportunity”

On a mission to a planet experiencing strange solar activity, the SG-1 team has a run-in with an archaeologist who seems a tad unbalanced. Following a geomagnetic disturbance, Jack O’Neill and Teal’c both find themselves trapped in a time loop of this day over and over. They attempt to explain this to Daniel Jackson, Sam Carter, and General Hammond with varying levels of success as the loop plays out, but fail to prevent numerous iterations over the course of many months. Because Daniel (their resident linguist, archaeologist, and anthropologist) is not a part of the time loop, Jack and Teal’c are forced to learn and memorize the alien language on the solar-wobbly planet in an effort to break the loop. Daniel also points out that a time loop allows them to do what they want without consequences, however, which leads to a series of antics on their part—they play golf through the Stargate, Jack rides a bike through the SGC, they both learn to juggle. Eventually they find out that the archaeologist they encountered on their mission is attempting to use incomplete time travel technology of the Ancients, trying to get more time with his dead wife. Jack, who lost his son some years back, appeals to the man to get him to shut down the loop. —Emmet

(2) KETTER NEWS. DreamHaven Books’ Greg Ketter gave Facebook followers an update today.

I love you all! Thank you for the thousands of emails, phone calls and book orders in the past week. It is immensely gratifying, humbling and…exhausting. My poor staff, joined by several former employees, has been moving at lightspeed processing your orders. We’re still behind but we’re working on it. We appreciate your patience and if you are waiting to place an order with us, please be a little more patient. We’ll have a slightly better idea of where we’re at in the next day or two.

About those thousands of messages: I wish I could respond to you all. I’m trying to read every one but fear I may fail at even that. We’re so flooded with sincere well-wishes that I’m on the verge of hysteria constantly, crying along with the people who burst into tears on the phone or here in person at the store. We had more than 500 people visit the store on Saturday and it was a madhouse – in the best possible way. Our biggest sales day ever and the biggest outpouring of love and respect we could ever know.

I want to say one last thing – Renee Good and Alex Pretti should still be here, living the good life in Minnesota. But they are not. ICE HAS GOT TO GO – NOW !

(3) DRAGON TAXONOMY. [Item by Jim Janney.] This guy takes a more expansive view than Tolkien’s. “There is No Proto-Dragon: The Illusion of Fictional Taxonomy” by Alex Conroy at Typebar Magazine.

When I was twelve years old, I went to my public library in search of the answer to a question: What was the first dragon? Now, I was a pretty naive kid, but I wasn’t that naive. I didn’t actually believe in dragons, at least, not at that point. But I wanted to know where the idea of them originated. There is a pretty common theory that you’ve probably heard of, that early people found dinosaur bones and called them dragons. But, while that might not be a wholly incorrect interpretation, that’s not actually the answer I was looking for.

I wanted to know, in fiction or in myth, what was the first thing that was represented as a dragon? I wanted to know because, if I could find out what the original was, I could identify the “core traits” of a dragon, as opposed to adaptations to the central premise, and thus I would know what a “true” dragon really should be, a topic that was somehow extremely important to 12 year old me….

… What I found in my fledgling research was even more confusing. There were far more categories of dragon than simply Eastern and Western. Dragons appear, in one form or another, in cultures all across the world. There is, of course, the classic western dragon, the great scaled beast with massive bat wings, the type that may have been put down by Sir Gawain. About as recognizable is the majestic eastern dragon, the huge elemental serpents that are tantamount to gods and often appear in traditional parades and festivals. There are countless other dragons besides: Meso-American dragons, from the feathered snake Kukulkan to an aspect of the deity Quetzalcoatl, African dragons in the form of lwas and other primordial beings, and a veritable wellspring of dragon myths arise when you look towards the Pacific. A cursory look at the wikipedia entry for “list of dragons in folklore” makes it seem like draconic myths hail from literally every corner of the earth.

And yet, none of them seemed to be the “first” one….

(4) NONSENSE AND SENSIBILITY. In “Starfleet Academy, Episode 4: What Nobody’s Talking About!”, Erin Underwood says a big mistake was made in how the first season’s story was ordered. Beware spoilers.

… So, with Star Trek’s Starfleet Academy you’re either going to like it or not. This isn’t a traditional review of episode 4, but rather a breakdown that separates the writing from the storytelling because I think that “bad writing” is a generic term that gets used when viewers can’t quite explain why a TV series feels off to them. What’s great about episode 4 is that when we break it down into its core pieces, we get a clear picture of what’s working and broken in the series itself.

This all boils down to one thing: the first four episodes should have been five episodes. That change ruined so much, and here’s why…

…This moment, finding the anomaly is when Lt. Rork suggested it could be a good training opportunity. Now, that decision makes so much more sense, because she’s not making it on Orientation Day (even though that’s when it was aired). As originally written and filmed, she’s making that call during a training mission to the nebula that Chancellor Ake is talking about in Episode 4.

The editing and restructuring choices of the first five episodes, smashing them ineffectively into four episodes, not only broke the narrative structure but also created a cascade of scenes that didn’t have a natural continuity. Worse, they also made both Lt. Rork and Chancellor Ake look ineffective and irresponsible in a series of bad decisions that all revolved around an ill-informed choice to stop and investigate a spatial anomaly before the students were even finished being processed.

That is how you undermine a series and kill it before it even has a chance to get going….

(5) NITPICKING AND FLYSPECKING. Camestros Felapton agrees that the series has a flaw, but it’s not the same one Erin is complaining about: “Trek Tuesday: Starfleet Academy s1e4: Vox in Excelso”.

This is the strongest episode yet of the new Trek show. It retains the core flaw in the show i.e. the whole genre of kids at wizarding school but as that is the core premise of the show it is like complaining about there being aliens in it.

By way of example of the inherent-flaws, we have that annoying thing where a supposedly large school revolves around a small social circle of students….

(6) CASTING DIVERSITY ANALYZED. A study commissioned by the broadcaster says “BBC Must Avoid ‘Clunky’ Color-Blind Casting In Shows like ‘Doctor Who’” reports Deadline.

The BBC has been urged to rethink color-blind casting “tokenism” and “preachy” storylines about the UK’s colonial history in scripted series, according to a major study commissioned by the broadcaster.

Conducted by former BAFTA chair Anne Morrison and ex-Ofcom executive Chris Banatvala, the thematic review of “portrayal and representation” across BBC output found that “clunky” depictions of race can cause more harm than good.

The 80-page report revealed audience complaints about Doctor Who casting Nathaniel Curtis as Sir Isaac Newton in the 60th anniversary special “Wild Blue Yonder,” as well as the 2023 Agatha Christie series Murder Is Easy, which featured an allegory on colonialism.

The review noted that color-blind casting was a matter of controversy for commentators and some viewers. Urging commissioners to “consider their choices carefully,” the report said that good intentions to increase diverisity can lead to inauthentic outcomes — outcomes that can sometimes be damaging to the communities they are attempting to serve.

“In depicting an anachronistic historical world in which people of colour are able to rise to the top of society as scientists, artists, courtiers and Lords of the Realm, there may be the unintended consequence of erasing the past exclusion and oppression of ethnic minorities and breeding complacency about their former opportunities,” the review said.

“What needs to be avoided is ethnic diversity which looks forced and tick box, and we found our interviewees of colour as emphatic on this point as those who were white.”…

… Though Doctor Who was referenced, the report raised an eyebrow about the specific concerns regarding Curtis, saying that a mixed-race Newton “seems much less of a stretch” in a universe in which the central character is a time-travelling extra-terrestrial, who regenerates into different actors….

(7) GO ASK ALICE. Something I heard about for the first time today. The Klingon language transation of Alice In Wonderland.

Alice in Wonderland has been translated into Klingon in 2021.

…On July 1st, 2021, Lieven L. Litaer announced his Klingon translation of the book. Its Klingon title is QelIS boqHarmey, literally “Alice’s wonders”. The book was published on November 3rd 2021, the Kindle ebook edition followed on November 8th….

…This translation by Klingon teacher Lieven L. Litaer is not just a pure translation, it conveys the wordplays into Klingon, creating all new jokes based on that language. The book is bilingual and comes with an entirely new English backtranslation, providing a better understanding of the Klingon text. A detailed appendix focuses on several translation steps and explains new words created for this project by Klingon inventor Marc Okrand….

(8) NEW TYSON BOOK. “Jonathan Karp Announces Inaugural Simon Six Title” reports Publishers Weekly. It will be by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Outgoing Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp announced this Saturday on Instagram that Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter by Neil deGrasse Tyson will be the first title published by Simon Six, the new imprint he is launching at S&S. The book is scheduled for publication in May.

“By reading about aliens, you’re actually learning a lot about humanity and human nature,” Karp said. “In a world where a lot of things are going wrong right here on Earth, I wanted to think about something bigger and something more magnificent.”

Karp praised Tyson as “one of the most entertaining writers on science alive” and said the book examines “the practical, scientific aspects of what alien visitation would look like.” He described the title as “a book that enlarged me, and it gave me hope.”…

(9) JIM BUTCHER IS NUMBER ONE. Publishers Weekly says Jim Butcher leads the list of “This Week’s Bestsellers: February 2, 2026”.

Twelve Months, Jim Butcher’s 18th urban fantasy featuring professional wizard Harry Dresden, is #1 on our hardcover fiction list. Our review notes that the author shifts gears in this installment, “focusing on the character’s struggles, over the course of one year, to come to terms with recent devastating events.” The result is a “more intimate, and ultimately more optimistic, outing.” Stops on Butcher’s book tour included a sold-out event at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego and an appearance at Powell’s in Portland, Ore., where Bridget Schuch and Travis Brueckner, the creators behind the Bricksonian social media accounts, presented Butcher with a custom-made Harry Dresden Lego mosaic.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Buck Rogers serial (1939)

Eighty-seven years ago, the Buck Rogers serial, produced by Universal Pictures, debuted. It starred Buster Crabbe (who had previously played the title character in two Flash Gordon serials and would return for a third.) Buster was sometimes billed as Larry Crabbe as well as you will note in the poster below.

I don’t think I need to say that it’s is based on the Buck Rogers character as y’all know that as created by Philip Francis Nowlan but for the sake of the few Filers who will nitpick if I don’t I will.

It was directed by Ford Beebe was Saul A. Goodkind as written by Norman S. Hall, Ray Trampe and Dick Calkins. It would run for twelve chapters of roughly twenty minutes each. Typical for the time

As I said Buck Roger was Larry “Buster” Crabbe with Constance Moore as Wilma Deering, and Jackie Moran as “Buddy” Wade, an original character who was based on the Sunday strip character Buddy Deering.

It had a really small budget and re-used film footage from the futuristic Thirties musical Just Imagine.

In 1953, it was edited into the film Planet Outlaws and twelve years it was edited again into Destination Saturn, not to stop there, the late Seventies saw the latter release of the latter as Buck Rogers. All three were feature films.

Not surprisingly, you can watch it online — here is the first chapter.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater illustrates an origin story.
xkcd registered the shift in meaning.

(12) MAKING MONEY WITH MAGIC. “Lawsuit Claims Hasbro Misled Investors Regarding Sales of Controversial Magic: the Gathering Anniversary Set” – IGN has the story.

A new lawsuit filed by shareholders of Hasbro against the company and its directors alleges that company leadership has mismanaged Magic: The Gathering by overprinting sets of cards, thereby devaluing existing ones. It also, quite notably, claims that Hasbro leadership “concealed the true reason” that its widely-criticized, incredibly expensive Magic: The Gathering 30th Anniversary Set was pulled from sale within an hour of its initial release.

The lawsuit, filed in Rhode Island earlier this week, is filed by shareholders Joseph Crocono and Ultan McGlone against Hasbro CEO Christian Cocks, a number of fellow company directors, and Hasbro itself. The lawsuit alleges breaches of fiduciary duty, unjust enrichment, waste of corporate assets, gross mismanagement, abuse of control, and violations of the Exchange Act.

Specifically, the shareholder plaintiffs claim that, under Cocks’ leadership, Hasbro has been printing far too many Magic: The Gathering sets, thereby reducing the value of existing sets. This complaint probably sounds familiar to avid Magic players, as Wizards of the Coast has been printing significantly more sets per year than it used to….

… Regardless of how you count them, it is true that the card release volume has gone up lately, as anyone who’s grouchy about the number of Universes Beyond collaborations in 2026 will tell you. But the issue the shareholders have is that the volume, they claim, is exceeding consumer demand, and that Hasbro leadership is only releasing this many to get quick cash to cover up shortfalls elsewhere in the Hasbro business.

The lawsuit itself is 76 pages long, but there are two major accusations that stand out. One is an allegation that Hasbro management used something called the “Parachute Strategy.” Allegedly, leadership plotted to “parachute in” new Magic sets whenever there was a shortfall somewhere else in Hasbro. These parachute sets initially consisted of “Masters” sets – largely reprints with low production costs. However, as it grew, more sets got involved, including the aforementioned Secret Lair collaborations and the Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate set. Per the lawsuit, “As such, the explosive growth in the Magic business noted just prior to and during the Relevant Period [September 2021 – October 2023] was in fact the result of the Parachute Strategy. Notably, in 2022 such ‘parachute’ Magic sets accounted for 46% of all Magic releases.”

The second, and perhaps even spicier, accusation is the allegation that Hasbro management essentially faked being out of stock of the controversial, extremely expensive Magic 30th Anniversary Set in order to encourage demand….

(13) DIE ANOTHER DAY. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage gives Darren Aronofsky’s On This Day … 1776 the thrashing it so clearly deserves: “Requiem for a film-maker: Darren Aronofsky’s AI revolutionary war series is a horror”.

If you happen to find yourself stumbling through Time magazine’s YouTube account, perhaps because you are a time traveller from the 1970s who doesn’t fully understand how the present works yet – then you will be presented with something that many believe represents the vanguard of entertainment as we know it.

On This Day… 1776 is a series of short videos depicting America’s revolutionary war. What makes On This Day notable is that it was made by Darren Aronofsky’s studio Primordial Soup. What also makes it interesting is that it was created with AI. The third thing that makes it interesting is that it is terrible….

…It is, as you might expect, as ugly as sin. It’s the sort of thing that looks like it was shooting for photorealism, but then either chickened out or blew up along the way. In the very first shot, King George’s hair looks like someone melted down and hardened a plastic badger. And this is a shame because, like so much generative AI at the moment, an awful lot of the episode consists of shots where we see the characters from behind. This is, after all, because the back of an AI-generated head is far less likely to send people into screaming fits of trauma than an AI-generated face, and Aronofsky is a humanist…

(14) ISSUES FACING DIRECTORS GUILD. Variety profiles “Christopher Nolan on Netflix-Warner Bros., AI and Being DGA President”.

Christopher Nolan is a busy man.

When he’s not working on “The Odyssey,” his sprawling adaptation of Homer’s epic, he is tackling all the other challenges facing Hollywood as the new president of the Directors Guild of America.

The union’s 20,000 members are dealing with a sharp decline in jobs, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the absorption of Warner Bros. into either Netflix or Paramount — which portends consolidation in streaming and a threat to the future of moviegoing….

… Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros., which still must clear regulatory hurdles, raises concerns across the board. Filmmakers fear the loss of a major distributor, while those in TV face the potential consolidation of HBO Max into the largest streaming platform.

(15) HISTORY OF AN EVOLVING FIELD. [Item by Steven French.] From the History newsletter of the American Institute of Physics: “Special issue spotlight: Shaping a multi-messenger universe” at AIP.org.

When astronomers detected gravitational waves for the first time in 2016, and then in 2017 they observed both gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation from a neutron star merger, they hailed it as the start of a new era for their field. “Multi-messenger” astronomy—the coordinated observation of electromagnetic, particle, and gravitational signals—had come into its own.

These discoveries have also captivated historians and philosophers of science, who are asking: What does it mean to observe the universe through multiple “messengers”? How did this approach emerge from earlier traditions of multi-wavelength astronomy, neutrino detection, and gravitational-wave research? And perhaps most intriguingly, is multi-messenger astronomy truly a revolutionary break from the past, or is it simply the latest iteration of practices that astronomers have employed for over a century?

In this historiographical boom, scholars are racing to document and interpret this rapidly evolving field before its early history fades from view. A new, open-access special issueof Centaurus, “Shaping a multi-messenger universe,” explores multi-messenger astronomy’s emergence, bringing together historians, philosophers, and scientists to examine both continuities and transformations in astronomical practices.

Edited by Luisa Bonolis, Roberto Lalli, and Adele La Rana, this collection tackles fundamental questions about what multi-messenger astronomy actually is—a surprisingly contested issue, even among practitioners—and how it relates to the constellation of disciplines it encompasses. The collection’s seven articles span from the dawn of telescopic astronomy to 21st-century black hole imaging, revealing how new observational windows have repeatedly reshaped astronomical work….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended brings us – “How Stranger Things Should Have Ended”.

[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Jim Janney, James Bacon, Daniel Dern, 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 R.]

Pixel Scroll 1/31/26 And What Pixels Shall The Poor File Wear To All Tomorrow’s Scrollings?

Posted on January 31, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) HARLAN ELLISON’S PACKARD GETS NEW HOME. James Artimus Owen told Facebook readers today:

…My pal John Van Hassel and I have just picked up Harlan Ellison’s 1947 Packard from Hollywood, where her foster parents, my good friends Jim & Gabrielle Pascoe, have been looking after her, and we’re taking her to her new forever home at the Biblioteca Fantastica, in the historic Coppervale Studio, in Silvertown (Taylor), Arizona.

(2) MORALITY ON A LARGE SCALE. Timothy Snyder reminds us about “Tolkien’s Dragons and Ours” at Thinking About…

In the first month of a threatening year, in January of 1938, a great writer gathered himself to speak to children about dragons.

We know JRR Tolkien as the creator of Middle Earth and the author of the Lord of the Rings. But at the time he was just an Oxford university professor who had agreed to bring some light to a dark winter’s evening.

His first book, The Hobbit, had just been published. Most likely the children who gathered in the University Museum had not read it. Professor Tolkien over-prepared, bringing twenty-four pages of hand-written prose….

… The lecture gives us a bit of the moral theory behind The Hobbit, and of the books to follow. Dragons, explained Tolkien, assemble huge wealth, appreciating only its quantity, but taking no joy in any particular object. They are, however, enraged if any one piece were to go missing, and would burn the world with fury. They are obsessed to the point of paranoia with thieves. Their great intelligence is thus reduced to the cunning of protecting their hoard.A dragon is not a fearful beast of a real or imaginary past, but a way of being in the world. They are not the serpent that represents evil; they are not a symbol of something abstract. “The alarming thing about dragons as I have said is not only their shape — which may have dwindled or vanished — but their spirit.” Dragons convey to us a way that people can be evil, here in our world: turning the quality of small joys into the quantity of a senseless hoard, mocking and destroying others who still see the good things of life.

It is the spirit of dragons, concluded Tolkien, that has survived, and it survives in us, or in some of us. A man can become a dragon through sheer greed. If we want to find a dragon, the place to look is the “vaults of the Bank of England.” And if “you want to see a dragon-heath just go out and look” at a landscape tortured by machines, a sky blackened with smoke….

(3) STEVE VERTLIEB MEDICAL UPDATE. Steve Vertlieb is out of the hospital after a week of treatment for internal bleeding. He told Facebook friends today the full details (which I won’t quote here). Thankfully he’s still with us.

…Over the course of my nearly weeklong confinement to the emergency room and special care unit of the hospital, I was consigned an impossibly bland diet of liquids and clear broth. They remain the only boring part of my week. Finally on Friday, January 28th, as my vital signs had stabilized for an acceptable duration of time and testing, I was released from the hospital, along with the admonition that if symptoms recurred, to return immediately to the emergency room.

I’m weak and somewhat unsteady on my feet, but happy to be alive. Death had returned from his holiday, leaving me to return to my flawed, yet nearly concluded existence. I was released from the hospital on Friday afternoon, January 30th, 2026. My ordeal and “Long Day’s Journey into Night” had emerged once more into the life affirming brightness and future of day.

(4) 2026 DIAMOND DAGGER. The Crime Writers’ Association has announced the 2026 CWA Diamond Dagger recipient. Shots reports:

Mark Billingham is the 2026 recipient of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Diamond Dagger, sponsored by Karen Baugh Menuhin.

The award recognises authors whose crime writing careers have been marked by sustained excellence, and who have made a significant contribution to the genre.

One of the UK’s most prominent societies, the CWA was founded in 1953 by John Creasey. The awards started in 1955 with its first award going to Winston Graham, best known for Poldark.

25 years ago, Mark Billingham’s debut novel Sleepyhead became an instant bestseller, launching a prolific career as a novelist….

… Nadine Matheson, Chair of the CWA, said: “Across a remarkable body of work, Mark has consistently set the bar for contemporary crime fiction, while also being generous with his time and support to emerging writers. His influence on the genre extends far beyond his own novels, shaping the crime writing community as a whole. For his outstanding contribution to crime fiction, his lasting impact on readers and writers alike, and his commitment to the genre, Mark Billingham is a thoroughly deserving recipient of the Diamond Dagger.”…

(5) NEW TOYS KEEP ON COMING. Cora Buhlert has written a follow-up post, “More Masters of the Universe Movie Toys Revealed” because Mattel has unveiled more figures and also the packaging at the Nuremberg Toy Fair.

…So what do I think about this first wave of Masters of the Universe movie figures? Well, I’m glad you asked (or not), cause here are my thoughts.

The first wave of Masters of the Universe Chronicles figures consists of a solid seven figures plus one mount – note that a normal Masterverse or Origins or Cartoon Collection wave consists of three figures, four at most. Of course, it’s also possible that we’re looking at more than one wave here.

The Heroic Warriors are represented by He-Man, Teela, Man-at-Arms and Battle Cat. The Evil Warriors are represented by Skeletor, Evil-Lyn, Trap-Jaw and Tri-Klops. We already saw Man-at-Arms and Evil-Lyn in person plus He-Man and Tri-Klops on the cross sell yesterday. Trap-Jaw, Skeletor, Teela and Battle Cat are new.

It’s a solid assortment of characters and you can play out some mighty battles with those. Though it is notable that all seven characters (excluding Battle Cat for obvious reasons) are human or at least humanoid, which means that at least some parts (hands, feet, arms, etc…) can be reused, though these toys seem to have a lot of new tooling, which means a big investment. Non-human characters like Roboto, Beast-Man or Spikor, all of whom require a lot of new parts, are not included in this first wave. Whether we will also get deluxe figures (often two-packs or oversized characters such as Beast-Man or Roboto), vehicles and a Castle Grayskull playset remains to be seen…

(6) CROSS THEIR PALMS WITH SILVER. Joe Stech in the latest Compelling Science Fiction Newsletter says he is creating “The ‘bullion prerogative’ for science fiction authors”.

A while back I bought some silver coins on a whim. I discovered this week that they’ve appreciated considerably (despite the price drop yesterday). Selling them would trigger capital gains taxes, which does not excite me^*. And so, in the way that many terrible ideas are born, I found myself in Discord asking science fiction authors if they’d be willing to get paid in physical silver coins for their writing.

The response was immediate and enthusiastic, but not for any financially sound reasons. Here are a few choice selections of how authors were feeling about being paid in silver…

Here’s a couple of the responses:

“yes because that would be hilarious” — Isabel J. Kim

“I got paid in beer one time and I’ll always treasure that, would love to add silver to the weird payments list” — Parker M. O’Neill

Which Stech founding inspiring:

…By this point I was having visions of a full John Wick-style economy where science fiction authors just walk around with stacks of coins, paying for everything from conventions to Clarkesworld memberships with bullion….

(7) KEEPING UP WITH ANTHROPIC. Victoria Strauss has shared news about the Anthropic Settlement.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 31, 1934 — Gene DeWeese. (Died 2012.)

This Scroll I’m looking at a writer this I’ve never heard of before, Gene DeWeese. He was a member of fandom, and his stories were published in fanzines such as The Chigger Patch of Fandom, Fan-Fare and Yandro. He was a member of the Eastern Indiana Science Fiction Association and the Midwest Nomads. Fancyclopedia notes, “He tried to attend Midwestcon 4 in 1953 with his friends Bev Clark and Buck Coulson, but left when she wasn’t permitted in due to Beatley’s Hotel’s racist Jim Crow policy.”

His first professional novels appeared in the Sixties, a Man from U.N.C.L.E. book co-written with Robert “Buck” Coulson under the name Thomas Stratton, The Invisibility Affair. They would do one more book in this continuity, The Mind-Twisters Affair.

(I do wish that these, like so many works of that era, had become digital publications. They didn’t obviously.)

In the Seventies he and Coulson wrote under their own names two novels set in fandom, Now You See It/Him/Them… and Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats.

Most of us remember DeWeese for his Trek novels which is interesting as they were written later in his career. The four that are set in the original continuity were written the Eighties onward, all by him except one he wrote with Margaret Wander Bonanno and Diane Duane. He also wrote three set in the Next Generation continuity as well.

What else did he do? There’s Dinotopia novels, something I swear exists by the dozens even if they don’t. I think. And one in the Lost in Space continuity as well.

What’s more interesting is the series that I’ve never heard of. The Black Suits from Outer Space YA trilogy involves, well, Men (possibly) in Black, plucky teenagers, spaceships, aliens (some cute, some not) and nothing terrible challenging. Fun is the best word to describe them.

He wrote three novels in the Ravenloft continuity, a campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. I just got the giggles, errr, laughs reading the summary of that module, but then I never played fantasy RPGs, just SF ones like the Traveller RPG. What a fantastic RPG that was!

There’s still a lot of other novels that I’ve not mentioned and quite a bit of short stories (none collected).

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit learns the history of a saying.
Luann found a calling.
Speed Bump runs a specialized eye test.
Strange Brew does new patient intake.
The Argyle Sweater started small.
Tom Gauld on the rewards of enhanced reading.

(10) MUPPET SHOW REDUX. The Guardian’s review says, “The Muppet Show: this thrilling return is so great I can’t even count how many times I laughed”. Coming February 4.

… That’s why we love them. Do we not, too, know ourselves to be odd, hapless psychological caricatures? Do our plans not also lead to flaming wreckage? Do we not long to put on a vaudeville-style variety show in a classic theatre?

Which brings us to the 2026 Muppet Show (Disney+, from Wednesday 4 February), with executive producer Seth Rogen on board. It’s a one-off, but could lead to a whole new series, the trailer reveals, “depending on how tonight goes”. Happily, it hasn’t been updated so Fozzie is doing bits on TikTok, or Rowlf protesting about streaming royalties. The guys are still trying to put on that variety show, and it’s still all going wrong…

… A highlight is when Carpenter meets Miss Piggy, gushing how she has always loved her, and even copied her look. “My attorneys have taken note,” Piggy replies primly. The porcine diva is energetic throughout, trotting backstage to announce to anyone present that she is “on vocal rest”. Protecting her place in the running order, she undertakes a water-based romantic rescue mission, which culminates in a bisexual rug-pull moment. She’s doing a lot.

Even the show within the show is good. Expect toe-tapping needle drops old and new. Skits include period-drama parody Pigs in Wigs, and a science segment about screen time, which ends with Beaker losing his eyes. Unlike Sesame Street, where the Muppets also appear, there is no educational agenda. The agenda is electric mayhem…

(11) FAMILY WII COMPETITION. [Item by Steven French.] Dominik Diamond at the Guardian plots some gaming revenge … against his mum: “There’s a reason that Wii Bowling remains my mum’s favourite game of all time”.

My mother bore me. My mother nurtured me. My mother educated me. She has a resilience unmatched, a love all-forgiving. She is the glue that holds our family together. But right now, I am kicking her ass at video game bowling, and it feels good!

In the 00s, my mum was the best Wii Bowling player in the world. She was unbeatable. Strike after strike after strike. The Dudette in our family’s Big Lebowski. So when she said she was coming to visit us in Canada, I thought the time was right to buy the updated Nintendo Switch Sports version of her favourite game. She’s 76 now, and I might finally have a chance of beating her, I thought, especially if I allowed myself a cheeky tune-up on the game before she arrived.

I fire up Nintendo Switch Sports to get the lay of the land. Tennis and golf have survived the almost 20 years since Wii Sports, along with bowling. The tennis has nothing to keep me entertained for longer than 10 minutes, and I have been terrified of any golf game where you swing a controller since Christmas morning 2009, when my wife surprised me with Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf for the Wii and I surprised her by throwing my back out after a six-hour session on it….

(12) A COOL ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] An Earth-sized planet has been discovered 146 light years away from the nearest bar. It is called HD 137010 b and orbits a little closer to its star than the Earth to the Sun: its year is roughly 10 days shorter than the Earth’s year.

The discovery was made by analysing data obtained in 2017 from the Kepler space telescope mission. Those of you who vaguely follow astronomical news may wonder how this could be possible as Kepler had an instrument failure back in 2013 and lost good quality manoeuvrability. This meant that it could not look for repeat transits (covering many years) by exoplanets of their stars. However, the probe has been repurposed to look for single transits and one such is what has been found in the 2017 data.

Now, single transit data is not as good as multiple transits, but if the plane of the star’s planetary system lines up with the Earth then knowing the size of the star and the size of the planet, it is possible to estimate its orbital duration hence distance from its star. This is what the astronomers did when analysing the old Kepler data.

They calculate that while HD 137010 b orbits a little closer to its star than the Earth to the Sun, because its star is cooler (in the temperature, not the Fonz, sense) it would get a similar amount of heat as does Mars. The good news is that the planet is a little larger than Earth and so may have an atmosphere. It may even have an atmosphere a little greater than Earth’s. That means that there could – at a pinch – be liquid water somewhere on its surface.

The star HD 137010 is a K-type star. It is a quarter lighter in mass than the Sun and this means that it will last longer on its main sequence of its lifetime, some 90 billion years, which is roughly ten times that of the Sun. This spectral classification of stars is also a little more common than Sun-type stars, though not as common as the plentiful red dwarfs (Lister says ‘hi’). However, complex life about red dwarfs is tricky as they are so cool (again, not in the Fonz sense) that planets have to orbit closely for them to be warm enough for liquid water. But at such closeness planets are likely to become tidally locked (or close to tidally locked) and also subject to occasional raging stellar winds from their star: red dwarfs tend to have bad space weather. In short, K-type stars are a good place to look for complex life.

Given the right conditions: a planet roughly Earth’s temperature, with plenty of water and some land (which can be eroded by carbonic acid in rain to release nutrients from rock), a stable axial tilt (hence most likely requiring a sizable moon), and then complex life is likely. Though eukaryotes are said to have arisen once, (seemingly paradoxically for non-biologists) the process by which eukaryotes arose (called symbiogenesis) occurred multiple times (and at least twice for chloroplasts) this suggests that the rise of eukaryotes is an easy evolutionary step. Similarly multicellularity arose many times suggesting that that too is an easy evolutionary step. And as for life arising in the first place: life’s early appearance on Earth speaks to that too being fairly easy. So, life is not the problem (you can trust a biologist (we are cool in the Fonz sense)): it’s the type of planet, its star, and the distance between them that matters – astronomy is the issue.

A single planet as discussed above is the best interpretation of the Kepler data, but it is not the only interpretation and so follow-up observation is required.

The primary research is Venner, A. et al (2026) A Cool Earth-sized Planet Candidate Transiting a Tenth Magnitude K-dwarf From K2. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol. 997, L38.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/6/25 Bewitched, Bothered, And Bepixeled

Posted on August 6, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) CGE’S HARRY POTTER-THEMED GAME STARTS KERFUFFLE. BoardGameWire reports a Harry Potter-themed game has been boycotted by some reviewers over J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans campaigning. In turn publisher Czech Games Edition (CGE) has issued a statement trying to separate the artist from the creation, and blocked a large number of users from posting complaints on its Bluesky page. “Reviewers including No Pun Included, Shut Up & Sit Down boycott Codenames publisher CGE for releasing new Harry Potter game while ignoring JK Rowling’s anti-trans rhetoric”.

Some of board gaming’s biggest and most influential reviewers are boycotting Codenames publisher Czech Games Edition, after the company decided to release a new Harry Potter-themed version of the game despite years of anti-trans campaigning from the character’s creator, JK Rowling.

CGE faced an immediate online backlash after unveiling Codenames: Back to Hogwarts on social media site BlueSky on July 23, with the announcement receiving hundreds of responses attacking the decision before the Codenames account locked comments, and switched off the function allowing users to share the post alongside their own remarks.

The continued online criticism intensified two days later when CGE released a short statement attempting to justify its decision to release the game – which was panned for going out of its way to avoid mentioning Harry Potter or JK Rowling by name.

It said, “When we embarked on creating the newly announced version of Codenames many years ago, it was a dream coming true for many of us at CGE.

“The vast world of magic featured in the upcoming Codenames has been a source of inspiration. It ignited a passion for learning English and exploring new worlds through reading. It shaped our childhoods, sparked imagination, or gave comfort in difficult times.

“We know many people around the world share the same sentiment about this universe, even among those who have been hurt by the public views and actions of its creator.

“Deciding whether those feelings should also transfer to the once-beloved world is up to everyone, and we fully respect and understand those who do not wish to engage with this game. We still believe in the magic of stories and the connection they create between people.

“As this is an ongoing conversation, we encourage everyone to approach discussion with care, empathy, and respect—both online and in person.”

That statement also immediately came under fire online for its attempt to separate the art from the artist, while failing to address that Rowling – a dollar billionaire thanks to Harry Potter – has used financial proceeds from her creation to directly fund organisations attempting to strip trans people of their rights.

Despite describing the situation as an “ongoing conversation”, CGE has blocked commenting on the statement on Facebook, Twitter and BlueSky.

The Codenames BlueSky account has also blocked more than 200 users since making the Back to Hogwarts announcement, including board game video review site No Pun Included, veteran tabletop gaming reviewer Matt Thrower and a mass of trans and trans rights-supporting profiles….

(2) SFF OLD AND NEW. The latest posts at Rich Horton’s Strange at Ecbatan look at some recentish short fiction, and appraise The Female Man in a 50th anniversary review.

“Some good new stuff (SF/F)”

Not One of Us is one of the small print* magazines I’ve been reading for a long time. It’s been published by John Benson since 1986(!) — and its 83rd issue came out in July 2025. Its format is the classic saddle-stapled ‘zine — 8.5″ by 11″ sheets folded once. It features both fiction and poetry. The poetry is to my taste some of the best I see in the SF/Fantasy field — one of my favorite fantasy poets, Sonya Taaffe, is a regular. The fiction tends to what might be called “dark fantasy” — it’s not really a horror magazine (though some stories certainly qualify) and I should note that there is some range here — occasionally Benson published SF, occasionally contemporary fiction, and while the mood is typically darkish (one might almost say “morose”) there are sweeter stories here as well. And there is plenty of strong work to be found….

“Review: The Female Man, by Joanna Russ”

…1975 was 50 years ago, and for that reason there have been some discussions of the major SF novels of that year, and in the process I have reread the top three such books: in terms of sales (I assume), notoriety (I am sure), and latter day reputation (I sense). These are The Forever War, which won both the Nebula and the Hugo; Dhalgren; and The Female Man. (The latter two did not appear on the Hugo shortlist, but were both on the (rather long) Nebula shortlist.) Back in 1976 I am pretty sure my Hugo vote went to The Forever War, though I did read both Dhalgren (the whole thing, honest!) and The Female Man. But here in 2025 I am pretty strongly of the opinion that the best SF novel of 1975 was The Female Man. All three novels are to a great extent, er, “products of their time” — particularly in their treatment of sex and sexuality. But The Female Man remains much fresher today, certainly including that aspect….

(3) NOAH WARD. D.J. Butler, Senior Editor, ARK Press, has interviewed Ben Yalow for ARK Press’ Gopher Wood Lounge YouTube series. (Gopher wood is what was used to build Noah’s Ark, in case you forgot.) The installment, titled “The Rise and Fall of Worldcon”, is a good conversation about the basic history of Worldcon’s first few decades, even with Yalow shouldering the extra burden of correcting the factual mistakes in Butler’s questions. However, there is a bizarre moment late in the interview when Butler brings up Chengdu, the Worldcon Yalow co-chaired, in this remark:

…But you can imagine someone saying, “I’m going to have a Worldcon, but really I don’t care about Worldcon long term. I just want to show that I can do it or I want to sort of have control over the Hugos for a year.” Whether or not that’s what happened with Chengdu, I’m not saying that, but you can imagine someone doing it, right? Hey, I don’t have to, you know, if I if I have the money…

But by then Butler, staring off into space, seems to feel he’s answered his own question and never tries to get Yalow himself to talk about it. Great journalistic technique…

Just to let you know how ARK Press’ swings, Camestros Felapton wrote an introduction in “Reading the Politically Incorrect Guide to Science Fiction & Fantasy so you don’t have to”.

D.J.Butler is a Baen author and former Baen employee who recently became an editor at Ark Press, a new science fiction imprint of the far-right Peter Thiel-funded Passage Press….

And to leave no doubt, the previous installment of Gopher Wood Lounge was “How Politics Killed Science Fiction’s Top Prize”, an incoherent recitation of what Larry Correia fans are expected to believe about his attempt to win himself a Hugo Award – a version which carefully never mentions Vox Day and the Rabid Puppies, who were the entire reason Correia’s picked slate made the 2015 Hugo ballot.

A Short History of the Sad Puppies. Ark Press editors recount to L0m3z of Passage Publishing how leftwing cancel culture conspired to forever destroy sci-fi’s Hugo Awards and 70 years of tradition. With Jonathan Keeperman, Tony Daniel, David Afsharirad & David Butler.

(4) BEWARE KRAPTONITE OVEREXPOSURE. “Superman actor Dean Cain says he joined ICE for Americans’ safety” – USA Today has the story.

Dean Cain was once the Man of Steel, but the TV superhero icon has a new title.

Cain, who played Superman in the 1990s series “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” revealed to fans that he enlisted as an officer in the federal agency U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to an Aug. 5 video shared to Cain’s social media channels.

“For those who don’t know, I am a sworn law enforcement officer, as well as being a filmmaker, and I felt it was important to join with our first responders to help secure the safety of all Americans, not just talk about it,” Cain, 59, said. “So, I joined up.”

Cain also used the minute-and-a-half clip as an informal recruitment ad to tout the “great benefits” of working for ICE…

(5) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Scott Edelman is back with episode 26 of his Why Not Say What Happened? podcast: “The Reason I Should Never Have Been Allowed to Write Comics”. And here’s a link to where a variety of platforms can be found.

Rereading my mid-’70s run of Captain Marvel teaches me why I should never have been writing comics in the first place — but it also causes me to reminisce about how I rescued Rick Jones from the Negative Zone, the way the success of Crazy Rich Asians caused Captain Marvel reshoots, the travesty of the Teen Brigade’s return, George Tuska’s unseen Wonder Man, why I believe in back-shadowing, not foreshadowing, and more.

(6) BEWARE THE VIBESHIFT. [Item by Steven French.] Jennifer Walshe writes in the Guardian about what went into the making of her new opera about a mission to Mars: “The all-female rescue mission to Mars: my opera about a toxic tech bro takeover of the red planet”.

Our research was far-ranging, taking what might be termed a hard science-fiction approach. We started with mundane details. How do astronauts exercise? Eat? Shower? Poop? Is it possible for a pregnancy to be carried to term in zero gravity, or Martian gravity, which is 38% of Earth’s? The answers range from the benign (using Ared, the advanced resistive exercise device) to the not so benign (one option is to strap the woman into a subterranean centrifuge throughout the pregnancy).…

Our opera centres on an all-female mission. Four astronauts – Svetlana, Sally, Judith and Valentina, named after the first four women to go into space – are on their way to Mars aboard the spaceship Buckminster, with only Arabella, the onboard AI, for company. Their mission is to search for water to enable the development of the commune that has already been established there.

The journey is long, and made more difficult by the fact that they only have Shrek the Third and a few seasons of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. As they prepare to land, they discover their mission has been the subject of a hostile takeover and that they now work for Shadowfax Ventures, a company helmed by libertarian billionaire Axel Parchment. They must now confront isolation, sinister ideologies, the prospect of alien life and a vibeshift toward corporate authoritarianism….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

August 6, 1926 — Janet Asimov. (Died 2019.)

By Lis Carey: Janet Opal Jeppson earned a medical degree from New York University Medical School, completed a residency in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, and in 1960 graduated from the William Alanson White Institute of Psychoanalysis, where she continued to work, practicing psychiatry and psychoanalysis until 1986. She continued to practice and publish medical papers under the name of J.O. Jeppson, even after her marriage to Isaac Asimov.

Janet Jeppson Asimov and Isaac Asimov. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

She started writing children’s science fiction in 1970, also published as J.O. Jeppson. The other change in Jeppson’s life that year was that she started dating Isaac Asimov, after he separated from his first wife. They married in 1973, after the divorce became final.

Some of Jeppson’s solo science fiction included The Second Experiment and The Package in Hyperspace. Together with Isaac, she wrote the Norby Chronicles series, which ran to eleven volumes. However, Isaac is reported to have said that the work was 90% Janet’s, with him just doing a final read-thru and polish, but his name “was wanted on the book for the betterment of sales”.

She was married to Isaac until his death in 1992, from complications of HIV, due to a transfusion during bypass surgery in 1983. Based on symptoms, Janet suspected HIV, and pushed for an HIV test, but doctors resisted until he was extremely ill.

They also pressured her to keep the results secret due to fear of public reaction, and so it was not revealed until ten years after his death.

Married to a strong personality, she kept her own space and her own career, while being a loyal partner, and a determined advocate for him in his final illness.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Dinosaur Comics attempts fan fiction.
Eek! hears from an agent.
Loose Parts looks at the indicators.
The Flying McCoys tries ordering online.
xkcd uses animal testing.

(9) WHAT YEAR? Lise Andreasen sends a screencap from a German quiz show which challenged a contestant to answer this question:

One of the oldest future novels in the world, appearing just before the French Revolution, is the book “The Year …”.

Options: 1789, 1984, 2440.

Player chose: 1984.

Correct answer: 2440.

(10) NO LONGER JUST AN IMAGINARY BESTSELLER. The New York Times tells “How a Dungeons & Dragons Joke Led to a Best-Selling Romance Novel”. (Behind a paywall.)

…Critical Role is a live-streamed web series created in 2015 by a group of actors who gather to play D&D. Every week, they embody fantasy characters, conjure plot points and invent back stories.

In 2018, during the group’s second season, several characters wandered into a smutty book shop called Chastity’s Nook.

There, the cast improvised. Playing the shopkeeper, the actor Matt Mercer, the Dungeon Master who was in charge of steering the game, dashed off the titles of a few imaginary books: “The Enchanting Tryst.” “Scent of the Sea.” “Zemnian Nights” (a reference to a city in Critical Role’s fictional world, Exandria).

One book, however, stood out. “There’s ‘Tusk Love,’” Mercer riffed. “That one’s a little more saucy.”

It was an off-the-cuff joke, “a wild moment of letting the brain just roll with the unexpected question,” Mercer recalled in an email.

But it struck like lightning. Another character, a cleric named Jester, voiced by the actor Laura Bailey, purchased the book. From then on, the cast would drop improvised details about the novel while playing.

Slowly, through these bits, a story began to form: The half-orc’s name is Oskar; his beloved is Guinevere; “Tusk Love” is one of the most popular books in Critical Role’s world; there is a scene where Oskar paddles Guinevere to shore from a sinking ship; and another where Oskar carries Guinevere across a field of flowers.

It was just a running gag, championed by Bailey in part for “the joy of seeing my friends have to make up spicy dialogue on the spot,” she said in an email.

But Critical Role’s fans, who call themselves Critters, loved the joke, too, and began demanding to see “Tusk Love” as a real book.

By this point, the cultural perception of Dungeons & Dragons had changed considerably. What was once seen as a niche, dorky pastime since its creation in the 1970s had become a more accepted pop-culture phenomenon, fueled in part by the game’s increased visibility online and social media’s capacity to let fans find one another.

“In the last decade, the tides of cool began to shift,” The New York Times wrote in 2022. “Now, playing Dungeons & Dragons has become something of a social flex.”

Critical Role was both a herald and a beneficiary of that surge. Though it began as just a group of friends playing a game, by the time the team was considering a real “Tusk Love” book, it had grown into a veritable media empire. In addition to the game livestreams, which raked in millions of views, there was a Critical Role television show in development (“The Legend of Vox Machina,” which debuted in 2022), Critical Role prequel novels, Critical Role comic books and more.

(11) WEDNESDAY Q&A. “Back in Black: Jenna Ortega and Tim Burton Break Their Silence on ‘Wednesday’ Season 2” at The Hollywood Reporter.

Let’s go back to the start: What initially excited you both about Wednesday?

TIM BURTON I’ve never done television, so it was the idea of exploring something on a longer time frame, and she’s an interesting character. As much as a middle-aged man could feel like a teenage Wednesday Addams, I feel those things. And she’s a character that’s all about being subtle because she doesn’t really have a huge range of emotions.

JENNA ORTEGA She’s also one of the few protagonists who is able to get away with that, aside from villains — who tend not to have emotional growth or depth. … I actually did an audition for [a Wednesday animated movie] when I was 14, and I didn’t get it. I remember telling my mom, “That would be cool to be her, though.”…

“Jenna Ortega & Tim Burton Go One-on-One: Talking ‘Wednesday,’ Favorite Burton Film & More”.

Tim Burton hosts ‘The Tim Burton Nightmare Show’ with special guest Jenna Ortega in this Hollywood Reporter cover video. Jenna reveals what changed her mind after initially being reluctant to play the role of Wednesday in the Netflix series while Tim Burton shares his favorite scene to film from season one. Plus, they reveal if they watch any of their work, what job they would pursue if it weren’t showbiz and much more!

(12) DRAGONS ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND, [Item by Daniel Dern.] Whitney Avalon’s done lots of great movie/tv/Disney/etc song parodies, e.g. “DOROTHY vs ALICE: Princess Rap Battle (Emily Kinney, Ryan McCartan, Whitney Avalon) *explicit*” [warning is in the listing text ).

“Dragons are a Girl’s Best Friend — Ginny Di, Anjali Bhimani, Whitney Avalon”

What a joy to work with gals who are not only triple threats and total sweethearts – but also world-renowned for knowing a thing or two about dragons (and dungeons!) Enjoy as Anjali Bhimani, Ginny Di, and I parody Marilyn Monroe and epic fantasy like “Game of Thrones” or “Lord of the Rings” in another of my extremely silly mashups.

The source song, Per Wikipedia: “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” is a jazz song written for the stage musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Leo Robin. Carol Channing introduced the song in the original Broadway production, and Marilyn Monroe followed in the film version, performing it in a strapless, “now-iconic satin pink gown”.

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

Pixel Scroll 6/14/25 Kids, Grow Your Own Bestiary Of Sub-Atomic Particles In Your Basement!

Posted on June 14, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) STAR WARS FIRST CONTACT. Congratulations to Filer Cliff whose reminiscence made this Guardian collection of memories: “’It was simply mind-blowing’: readers remember seeing Star Wars for the first time”.

Like many readers, Cliff Ramshaw’s anticipation for the film had been fuelled by its merchandising. By the time it came out in the UK, Ramshaw, now 58, had already read the novelisation and part of the Marvel comic book adaptation, and had decorated his school haversack with drawings of X-wings and Tie fighters. Unfortunately, his father did not share his enthusiasm for the film when he took him and his younger brother to see it in Sunderland in 1978.

“We arrived early and Dad, not wanting to hang around, took us in straight away [to an earlier screening],” he recalled. “We sat down just in time to see the attack on the Death Star. After the movie ended we remained seated while the audience left and a new crowd arrived. We saw the beginning and middle of the movie and then, when the attack on the Death Star was about to start, Dad took us out of the cinema and drove us home!”

Ramshaw, who now lives in the Cotswolds, didn’t get to see the film the whole way through until it was aired on British TV four years later. But his unusual viewing experience did not dampen his love for Star Wars, and he later became a software engineer at George Lucas’s visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic….

Click on the link and you can see a photo of Cliff with his daughter, too!

(2) GAMING CON HELD IN KIEV. This YouTube video about recent Kiev Fancon, via Borys Sydiuk, shows SF activities re-starting in Ukraine. The narrative is in Ukranian. The title is “Fancon 2025 — 40 000 геймерів під одним дахом!!!” — “40,000 gamers under one roof”. The introduction says —

Fancon 2025 impressed with both its scale and quality.

For a festival held in a warring country, the event exceeded all expectations. The number of visitors, partners, and celebrities was off the charts.

Cosplayers gave it their all. We still can’t shake off the emotions. This is the best festival of popular culture not only in Ukraine, but we are sure it would become one for many European countries!

(3) NEW BRITISH FANTASY EVENT. “Hodderscape and Lucy’s Book Club launch fantasy event series” reports The Bookseller (behind a paywall).

Hodderscape, the science fiction and fantasy imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, has announced a new collaboration with Lucy’s Book Club to launch a series of intimate, community-led events celebrating the best in fantasy fiction.

Designed as a cosy, connected space for readers to meet new friends, swap books and get lost in their favourite magical worlds, the events will be held in collaboration with independent bookshops.

Each event will centre around a different fantasy title, promising signature cocktails inspired by the books, games designed to help readers meet their next bookish best friend, and an unfiltered, joyful discussion about their favourite fantasy reads.

The first event will take place on Wednesday 2nd July at Bourne & Hollingsworth Buildings, and will spotlight the romantasy book of the moment: Quicksilver by Callie Hart. Tickets for the first event will go on sale on Tuesday 17th June….

(4) ACCEPTABLE DUD? From the Guardian’s “Week in Geek” column: “Heroic indifference: was Thunderbolts* always doomed at the box office?”

There’s no such thing as a sure thing in Hollywood. Just ask Marvel Studios – once the box office equivalent of a cashpoint duct-taped to a golden goose, now resembling a busted slot machine in Skegness. Reports this week suggest that Thunderbolts*, the studio’s latest attempt to turn supervillain also-rans into marquee gold, has officially faceplanted at the box office despite strong reviews, a cast stacked with rising stars and indie darlings, and enough emotional baggage to ground a Sundance drama….

…In many ways, Thunderbolts* was something of a free hit for the studio. Had comic book movie fans warmed to it, Marvel might have had a completely new team of colourful miscreants to spin off into the glorious synergised future, just as they did with James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. But if fans aren’t feeling the new team, it’s really not a big issue, because Red Guardian, Ghost and US Agent are surely destined to be torpedoed by the real Avengers when they eventually trampoline in from whatever pocket dimension Robert Downey Jr is cryogenically stored in….

…Maybe Thunderbolts* was never meant to save the MCU – just stall for time while the A-listers finished renegotiating their contracts….

(5) DOOGIEPOOL. “Ryan Reynolds reacts to Neil Patrick Harris stealing his Deadpool role” – Harris will play Deadpool in a VR game. So Reynolds parodies Harris’ old Doogie Houser show.

“Today, I learned a lesson about buttholes they don’t teach you in medical school,” Reynolds narrates. “People who steal your signature role are the biggest buttholes of all.”

Spoofing the journal entries that Doogie often made on the show, Reynolds continued, “No, I don’t blame Meta Quest. Neil Patrick Harris is an amazing actor with the nurturing voice of an angel, but even though I haven’t hit puberty yet, I still know when you’re getting totally screwed.”

Reynolds is then interrupted by the appearance of Robyn Lively, who played a love interest to Harris in Doogie Howser M.D. “House call,” she announces…

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

June 14, 1949 — Harry Turtledove, 76.

By Paul Weimer: Harry Turtledove, The Avtokrator.

That one is not my invention, that would be Steven Silver, who is the most knowledgeable person I know about the work of Harry Turtledove. I was delighted, back in the day, to encounter Steven’s website about Harry’s work, and he made it very easy to catch up and figure out my gaps in my reading.

I discovered Turtledove in my first big alternate history phase in the late Eighties. I had started reading a (now unreadable, thanks a lot Theodore Beale) anthology series edited by Jerry Pournelle called There Will Be War. I was also into military science fiction of the time at the time. In any event in one of those volumes was a story called “The Long Drum Roll” which was an early version/excerpt from the novel that would become The Guns of the South, his classic “Time traveling South Africans help the Confederacy win the civil war with AK-47s”. I devoured that novel, too, and then started reading his work.

Although Turtledove wrote a lot of fantasy I liked (such as King of the North, The Case of the Toxic-Spell Dump, Between the Rivers) and more, Imagine my squee of delight when I discovered Videssos. Videssos was the story of a Roman Legion transported in space to a fantasy world that was extremely similar to Byzantium (so in a sense, they “time travelled” as well ). Lots of the setup, incidents and characters in the Videssos novels are based on real Byzantine history.

The Avtokrator has written a lot since. There’s straight up alternate history (How Few Remain) as well as science fiction alternate history (e,g, Worldwar), and of course fantasy novels here and there as well. Turtledove doesn’t always write a form of alternate history, he has written straight up fantasy and SF novels, but alternate history, or secondary worlds that resonate strongly with history, really are the center of his oeuvre.

And he is prolific. He has several books this year this year alone, and much of his older stuff is being reissued, particularly in ebook, and including stuff he originally wrote under pen names.

The Avtokrator’s realm is large, and there is always more to read.

Happy birthday, good sir!

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal dances through math.
Jerry King mistakes the visitor.
Pardon My Planet brings comfort to vampires.

(8) YOU CAN CHECK OUT ANY TIME YOU WANT. [Item by Steven French.] The British Library is to symbolically reinstate Oscar Wilde’s reader pass, 130 years after its trustees cancelled it following his conviction for gross indecency reports the Guardian.

A contemporary pass bearing the name of the Irish author and playwright will be officially presented to his grandson, Merlin Holland, at an event in October, it will be announced on Sunday.

Rupert Everett, who wrote, directed and starred as Wilde in The Happy Prince – the acclaimed 2018 film about the writer’s tragic final years in exile – will play a part in the ceremony.

Holland is an expert on Wilde whose publications include The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Asked how his grandfather might have reacted to the pass being reinstated, he said: “He’d probably say ‘about time too’.”

(9) SQUID FINALE. JoBlo introduces us to the“Squid Game season 3 final trailer released by Netflix”.

The official logline reads: “The third and final season of Squid Game follows Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) after losing his best friend in the game and being driven to utter despair by The Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), who was hiding his true identity to infiltrate the game. Gi-hun persists with his goal to put an end to the game, while the Front Man continues onto his next move and the surviving players’ choices will lead to graver consequences with each round. The world eagerly awaits to see the grand finale written and directed by Director Hwang Dong-hyuk, who has vowed to bring the epic story to its deserved closure. Can we hope for humanity in the cruelest of realities? Fans all over the world are counting the days until the final answer is revealed.”

(10) NEVER? WELL, HARDLY EVER. The New York Times takes readers “Inside Universal’s Big Bet on ‘How to Train Your Dragon’”. (Behind a paywall.)

In 2020, Dean DeBlois publicly blasted live-action remakes of animated films as “lazy” studio endeavors.

The director who, along with Chris Sanders, had made the 2002 Disney animated “Lilo & Stitch” and the 2010 DreamWorks Animation release “How to Train Your Dragon,” said that he viewed such remakes as “a missed opportunity to put something original into the world.”

Then, two years later, DeBlois received a call from the Universal Pictures president, Peter Cramer, asking if he’d be interested in directing a live-action version of “How to Train Your Dragon.”

“At the expense of seeming like a hypocrite, I thought, well, I’m either going to sit here and pout and watch somebody else do it,” DeBlois said in a video interview with The Times, “or I could jump in and shoulder the blame or help to change the narrative.”

Now, as the live-action “Dragon” arrives in theaters on Friday, DeBlois is enthusiastically attached to the type of movie he formerly criticized.

(11) ARE WE MISSING LAYERS OF REALITY…? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I sometimes wonder if I am in the same world as everyone else? Not only do I keep warning that the machines are taking over, but successive Worldcons in recent years have trampled on the WSFS constitution with impunity, but no-one ever listens… And then at cons, I wake up and wonder, did that really happen last night, as I see a black leather, toad body harness languidly lying on the floor…? (Don’t ask — I never do…) And so we come to the question the ever-interesting Matt O’Dowd at PBS Space Time who is asking this week… Are there missing layers (note the plural) to reality…? “The Crisis In Physics: Are We Missing 17 Layers of Reality?”

Big things are made of smaller things, and those smaller things are made of smaller things still. That’s reductionism in a nutshell, and digging our way to the smallest layer has been one of the primary goals of physics for ever. But what if, just before we reach the bottom, we find out that reductionism fails?

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

Pixel Scroll 5/10/25 All Around The Scrollberry Bush, The Monkey Chased The Pixel

Posted on May 10, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) GUARDIAN BOOK REVIEWS. Past Best Fan Writer Hugo winner Abigail Nussbaum, and author of 2025 BSFA Award winner Track Changes penned the Guardian’s latest “The best science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup”. Nussbaum cover The Devils by Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz, £25), The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (Orbit, £20), Land of Hope by Cate Baum (Indigo Press, £12.99), and A Line You Have Traced by Roisin Dunnett (Magpie, £16.99).

(2) MEETING DEATH SCIENTIFICALLY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The BBC’s World Service has a nifty weekly science programme Unexplained Elements. This week’s programme was topical with this week’s news of the Pope popping off and the pomp and circumstance ceremony that garnered international attention. It was a topic in which the late Terry Pratchett would have been interested.

It addressed questions such as when did humans first start burying their dead? The answer seems to be over 100,000 years ago, but this is for anatomically modern humans. Apparently some proto-human species (whose brain capacity was a third of modern humans) may have buried their dead, though the research (currently in peer review) is debatable. Apparently, the pre-print has been amended to take criticisms into account and while one critic has been convinced, others remain sceptical.

Another topic was that of the biology of graveyards. Because its ground remains largely untilled, and because of gravestones and the like, there are many micro-environments, and both these factors lead church graveyards have a higher local area biodiversity.

Then there is the issue of a dead person’s digital rights to their social media and online accounts. The European Union’s GDPR is the world’s most robust data protection regulation, though that does not seem to stop firms like Facebook or EventBrite failing to strictly follow it (just look as the small print when you sign up) or even Worldcons who arguably (it would be interesting to test this in court and I could write an essay on this) fail to strictly adhere to its provisions. Nonetheless, despite GDPR being the world’s gold standard in data protection, the dead have no rights whatsoever under GDPR!

Talking of a dead person’s digital rights (or lack thereof), what of mobile (cell) phones and smartphones, what happens to them when they ‘die’? Well, fans of Red Dwarf might say that they go to silicon heaven. The reality, however, is for most of them landfill! Here there are multiple environmental sustainability issues. All those heavy metals and rare earth elements leech out in landfill causing threats to water tables and other ecotoxicology issues. And then there is the loss of these elements (which include silver and gold – many kilograms per tonne of mobile phones disposed) to the economy necessitating the mining of replacement elements and the environmental damage that this does. So the next time a Worldcon tells you that they are ditching recyclable paper from sustainably managed forests (look for the kite mark when buying the paper for publications) don’t accept the Worldcon’s word for it: more greenwash!

It was a fascinating programme. You can access it here.

First up, we delve into the thorny issue of when early humans started to carry out funerary rituals, before turning our attention to graveyards and the life that thrives within these sacred environments.

Next, we are joined Carl Öhman from Uppsala University in Sweden, who reveals what happens to our data when we die and why we should care about it.

Plus, we discuss the precious materials hiding in our old devices, and find out whether animals mourn.

(3) DODGE THE SCAMS. Victoria Strauss points out “Two to Avoid: Book Order Scams and Fake Reviews”. Full details at Writer Beware.

Here are two newish frauds that appear to be on the rise. As with most writing scams these days, they target self-published authors.

The Book Order Scam

I’ve written before about book order scams, in the context of scammers impersonating bookstores such as Barnes & Noble with out-of-the-blue emails promising bulk purchases and big royalties. All the author has to do is pony up thousands of dollars or pounds to cover printing and/or shipping costs (the relevant note here: bookstores do not print the books they sell, and they typically order from the publisher or publishing platform, rather than from the author).

This newer version of the book order scam is somewhat different, arriving not from a bookstore impersonator, but from the self-publishing service provider the writer has hired to publish and/or market their book. That provider isn’t a true self-publishing company, though, but rather one of the many ghostwriting scams that waylay would-be indie authors in order to defraud them….

Fake Reviews

Fake reviews–sometimes just a few lines, sometimes elaborate essays with stars and number rankings–arrive unasked-for, attached to a complimentary email claiming that a book has been “discovered” by book scouts or book evaluators. Or they’re included as part of a pitch for a package of publishing and marketing services, to show how much the service provider believes in the author’s book.

Undoubtedly produced by feeding book blurbs and other info into chatbots, they are essentially bait: affirmation and flattery designed to induce the author to reply, so they can be subjected to aggressive sales pitches for whatever the “reviewer” is selling.

Here are a couple of examples, both sent out by scammers on this list. They’re not just book reviews–they’re PROFESSIONAL book reviews! So much better than just the regular kind….

(4) CHERRYH ANNOUNCEMENT. CJ Cherryh told Facebook followers yesterday she and Jane Fancher won’t be at the Seattle Worldcon – but it’s not the result of any controversy.

Jane and I will not be attending WorldCon despite it being in our state (which some people might want to know)—no controversy, just the expense and the physical buffeting of crowds. While Jane’s got more go-juice than I do, the crowd pressure and distances involved would be pretty exhausting, leaving us sadly low-energy. We’ll still go to friendly ‘little’ cons in driving range, note well, if we know about them!!! and be our brilliant selves, but we’re not up to a full-on WorldCon.

(5) ABOUT THE FEMALE MAN. Farah Mendlesohn’s book Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore is available for preorder from Luna Press Publishing. It will be released in Summer 2026.

Joanna Russ’s writing career was relatively short, running from 1968 to 1987, with a number of essay collections published in the years after that. Her fiction career consists of just six novels and four collections, but each of the novels she published challenged engrained conventions of the genre.

The Female Man was received with shock, horror and vituperation when it was published in 1975. Its fractured narrative, and its direct attack on patriarchy and the straight-jacket of performative femininity, were described as shrill and man-hating. Over the years it emerged as a classic of feminist science fiction, a novel that continues to excite and resonate, and a touchstone for proudly militant feminists.

This exploration of The Female Man offers a close reading of the text, focussing on how the book works, its structures, arguments, humour, and brilliant anger

(6) COMPENSATING FACTORS. “My School Visit was Cancelled. I Fought Back and Won” writers Erica S. Perl in School Library Journal.

As a children’s book author, I love a good mystery. Which is why, last month, after a Virginia elementary school principal abruptly cancelled my visit by email, with no explanation or interest in rescheduling or paying me, I decided to investigate.

It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what had happened: a parent had complained because of a social media video I had made celebrating Pride month. In it, I mention that Snail, a character in my Whale, Quail, Snail early reader series (illustrated by Sam Ailey), is nonbinary. Most snails are. “It’s a fiction series,” I add, “but that’s a fact.”…

… I wish I could tell you that my story ended amicably with the return of my visit to the school’s calendar. That’s not what happened.

Instead, after I asked for my fee, the principal turned the matter over to the district’s lawyers. The principal then informed the school librarian, who booked my visit, that she might have to pay me out of her own pocket. I told her I would not take her money, no matter what happened. I was extra-outraged that the principal was threatening to make her pay for the “crime” of setting up an author visit.

But my story doesn’t end there. I’m not just a children’s book author. I’m also a former trial lawyer. So instead of walking away muttering about injustice, I spent some quality time with my contract.

That’s right, my author contract. Whenever I am invited to visit a school, my booking agent draws up a contract—and this visit was no exception. According to one clause, if an appearance is cancelled with less than 30 days notice, the school is required to pay my entire fee plus any non-refundable travel expenses. The principal had cancelled on me 28 days before my visit.

And finally, my contract specifies that the contract is governed by the law of the state where I live, not the law of the state where the school is located. So if I wanted to sue for breach of contract, I could simply file papers in my local courthouse (no legal expertise or degree required!).

So, I did. Which is how I got to a different kind of happy ending: the school paid me my fee.

It’s not the win I wanted, because that would have had me standing in front of a gymnasium full of elementary school students. But it is a victory, as I see it, for all authors, especially in this current climate….

(7) KILLER ROBOTS NO LONGER SCIENCE FICTION. [Item by Francis Hamit.] “Unmanned Systems Are Not Revolutionary (But Could Be)” says a post on War Room, hosted by the U.S. Army War College.

Rather than revolutionizing warfare, unmanned systems have emerged as evolutions within the larger information revolution; advancements to be sure, but failing to render conventional militaries obsolete or dramatically reshaping force structures….

(8) PLONK YOUR MAGIC TWANGER. The one answer Smithsonian Magazine knows for sure is the price: “Who Created This Peculiar Painting of a Drooling Dragon? Nobody Knows—but a Museum Just Bought It for $20 Million”. Steven French adds, “Actually the ‘drooling dragon’ looks more like our Patterdale Terrier after he’s spotted the postman!”

Emma Capron, a curator at the museum who was responsible for the acquisition, describes the altarpiece as “wildly inventive” and “full of iconographical oddities,” per the Art Newspaper.

Start with the dragon and its bizarre dog-like face, exaggerated fangs and dripping drool. According to tradition, Satan, disguised as a dragon, swallowed St. Margaret whole. His stomach rejected her and there she appears in the painting, kneeling in prayer, totally unfazed by the event.Next to Margaret, one of the two angels holds a book of song, once thought to be a hymn by the English composer Walter Frye but now identified as musical gibberish. The other angel plucks her mouth harp, “a sound hardly associated with celestial harmony,” as the National Gallery says in the statement….

(9) PEACEMAKER IS BACK. “Peacemaker Season 2 Trailer: John Cena’s DC Superhero Returns” – Variety sets the frame.

… John Cena‘s very R-rated DC superhero has returned in the first trailer for “Peacemaker” Season 2, created by DC Studios co-chief James Gunn. The sophomore season takes place in the rebooted DC Universe, which officially kicked off with Gunn’s animated series “Creature Commando” and continues with his summer tentpole “Superman.” Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner and Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl cameo in the trailer and will appear in “Superman.”…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 10, 1969 — John Scalzi, 56.

By Paul Weimer: I’d read John Scalzi’s blog for years before his fiction.

I got onto the Scalzi train with his entry in Metatropolis. His story involving a high tech pig farmer had all of the bones of a Scalzi story, from its “I think I know everything” protagonist, to its often snarky sense of humor. While I didn’t fall deeply in love with his work, then or since, I kept reading his work. Redshirts, of course, which still may be my favorite of his novels and stories, helped expand in my mind the metafictional opportunities in science fiction. Lock In is a solid piece of science fictional speculation on how a society might come together and respond to the consequences of a pandemic. Given that it was written long before Covid…I wonder if Scalzi or, aged fifty six yearswould have reconsidered the novel after the worldwide reaction to the aftermath of the Covid Pandemic.

Of course the Old Man’s War series is the one that he gets grief for, because it should appeal to the Sad and Rabid Puppies…but it is, in the parlance of today, “too woke”. It’s possible that the existence of such books helped motivate Torgersen and Beale, an irritant to their ideology and worldview (and a counterexample to the idea that Mil-SF must be conservative). Again, I do wonder how Scalzi would write it today, given all that has happened.

So this is a long way of saying that although it is on my Kindle, I have not yet read When The Moon Hits Your Eye, which seems to have as triggering an idea (the moon turns into cheese. Seriously?) as one can possibly make in the field. But it shows that in the end, Scalzi likes to have fun when writing. He never takes it too seriously, even if he keeps it as rigorous and locked down as the story needs. He’s just telling stories and doing his thing and having the time of his life, and haters can go hang.

The first time I actually met him in person, he didn’t remember it. He was extremely jet lagged, sitting in a hotel lobby and apparently remembered little from the entire weekend. Due to circumstance (although Scalzi is an excellent DJ, I am told, I am not a dance party goer), I only finally, finally actually got to talk to him at the Glasgow Worldcon. Being part of the photography team did let me meet and photograph everyone who would hold still. But did he know who I was? I’m still convinced that he didn’t, and that’s all right.

John Scalzi’s fiction, too…that’s all right.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

xkcd offers another science fact.
Baldo has help coming up with an excuse.
Brewster Rockit creates fan fiction.
Lio finds something waiting.
Reality Check tries a pun.

(12) AMAZING STORIES COLLECTION. Amazing Stories: Best of 2024,a collection of science fiction short stories published by the magazine over the past year, is now available.

Edited by Lloyd Penney, this collection continues Amazing’s nearly century-long tradition of exploring the strange, the speculative, and the sublime.

From lunar labor revolutions to delicate alien diplomacy, these stories represent the vanguard of speculative fiction. Readers will encounter futures both dystopian and dazzling, technologies that reshape identity and time, and characters grappling with the emotional and ethical consequences of scientific progress. Highlights include:

“A Short-Lived History of the Stockpiling of Time, in Post-Mono-Heliocentric Space-Times” by K.V.K. Kvas, a mind-bending tale of interstellar economics, identity, and revolt.
“Return from Venus” by C.B. Droege, a quiet and touching story about cross-species friendship and the longing for home.
“Best Case Scenario” by Susan Oke, a suspenseful diplomatic mission where what you offer—and what you misunderstand—could mean the difference between peace and peril.

With cover art by Hugo Award-winning artist Bob Eggleton and a lineup of diverse voices offering everything from hard science speculation to lyrical philosophical fiction, Amazing Stories: Best of 2024 is a must-have for any SF fan’s collection.

“Amazing Stories has always been a home for bold, boundary-pushing science fiction,” says Editor-in-Chief Lloyd Penney. “This year’s stories continue that proud legacy—with some of the most challenging, beautiful, and entertaining tales we’ve ever published.”

It is available online at amazingstories.com and in paperback and eBook editions at indie and major retailers worldwide or at this link.

(13) MONSTROUSLY COOL. That’s what your drinks become with an assist from the “Godzilla Ice Mold”.

(14) DAISY RIDLEY’S ZOMBIE ENCOUNTER. JustWatch quotes Daisy Ridley in its Why to Watch feature about her role in the zombie thriller “We Bury the Dead streaming: where to watch online?”

We Bury the Dead is a gripping, emotional thriller set in a world transformed by the undead. In a unique take on the zombie genre, the film follows Ava—a woman tormented by loss—who volunteers with a corpse retrieval unit to search for her missing husband. Set against a surreal yet intimate apocalypse, the story explores love, grief, and the fragile boundaries of what makes us human.

Daisy Ridley says:

The script is beautiful. It’s about grief and watching someone desperately trying to find an answer, even though she doesn’t know what that answer is going to be. The backdrop of the zombies represents this moment for [my character] Ava because she’s neither here nor there emotionally. Ava’s sole purpose is to find her husband. As a means to get to him, she joins the body retrieval unit which volunteers to find people and notify families. The zombies look like our friends and family, so it’s close enough to reality but in a way that doesn’t feel too close. It feels horribly human.

(15) HONEY, I’M HOME! “Soviet-era spacecraft Kosmos 482 plunges to Earth after 53 years stuck in orbit” reports AP News.

A Soviet-era spacecraft plunged to Earth on Saturday, more than a half-century after its failed launch to Venus.

Its uncontrolled entry was confirmed by both the Russian Space Agency and European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking. The Russians indicated it came down over the Indian Ocean, but some experts were not so sure of the precise location. The European Space Agency’s space debris office also tracked the spacecraft’s doom after it failed to appear over a German radar station.

It was not immediately known how much, if any, of the half-ton spacecraft survived the fiery descent from orbit. Experts said ahead of time that some if not all of it might come crashing down, given it was built to withstand a landing on Venus, the solar system’s hottest planet.

The chances of anyone getting clobbered by spacecraft debris were exceedingly low, scientists said….

…Any surviving wreckage will belong to Russia under a United Nations treaty….

…After so much anticipation, some observers were disappointed by the lingering uncertainty over the exact whereabouts of the spacecraft’s grave….

A Russian press release says it fell in the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta.

(16) YOUR ALIEN NATION. The BBC explains, “More than half your body is not human”.

More than half of your body is not human, say scientists.

Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.

Understanding this hidden half of ourselves – our microbiome – is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson’s.

The field is even asking questions of what it means to be “human” and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result.

“They are essential to your health,” says Prof Ruth Ley, the director of the department of microbiome science at the Max Planck Institute, “your body isn’t just you”….

… But genetically we’re even more outgunned.

The human genome – the full set of genetic instructions for a human being – is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes.

But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes.

Prof Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist from Caltech, argues: “We don’t have just one genome, the genes of our microbiome present essentially a second genome which augment the activity of our own…

(17) SCIENCE PAPERS WITH UNDISCLOSED AI USE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is controversial to some, in no small part due to large language models (LLMs) and other A.I. (such as image-generating A.I.) using people’s intellectual property (their written or art works) for A.I. and LLM training without permission or recompense. This is exemplified by the recent debate over the Seattle’s Worldcon use of A.I. (for example, see (1) in the Scroll here).

Similarly, the use of A.I. has controversies in science. Indeed, a number of leading science journals, such as Nature, frown on the use of A.I. and/or at least ask science authors to declare any use of A.I. in their submissions. The latest news here comes from a news item in this week’s Nature that hundreds of papers have used A.I without disclosure!

Generative A.I. tools such as ChatGPT have quickly transformed academic publishing. Scientists are increasingly using them to prepare and review manuscripts, and publishers have scrambled to create guidelines for their ethical us. Although policies vary, many publishers require authors to disclose their use of A.I….

But science sleuths have identified hundreds of cases in which A.I. tools seem to have been used without disclosure…

…Publishers need to act quickly to resolve issues of dishonest A.I. use.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/2/25 Don Simpson And The Escaped Typos

Posted on February 2, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) FANTASY TAKES CENTER STAGE. The Guardian’s “Bookmarks” newsletter says, “Fantasy appears to be having a ‘moment’ (quite a long one as it happens)”

“Increasingly fantasy has moved more from the fringes towards the centre”, with a rise in writers operating in the genre, says Irenosen Okojie, who founded the afrofuturist festival Black to the Future and whose books include Curandera.

Why is the genre thriving? Readers “need escapism right now in ways that truly speak to our imagination”, says Okojie, and they “like these richly imaginative worlds that explore our lived experiences in dynamic, transformative ways”. Fantasy is also “invested in projecting how worlds different from our own might flourish”, says Matthew Sangster, a professor of romantic studies, fantasy and cultural history at the University of Glasgow.

However, even though the “success of the likes of George RR Martin and Nnedi Okorafor” show fantasy is a “thriving space”, says Okojie, it “always has been”: look at the likes of Ursula K Le Guin and Samuel R Delany.

George Sandison, managing editor at Titan Books – which publishes VE Schwab and Veronica Roth – agrees. Though he often hears that a particular genre is “having a moment”, when it comes to fantasy, he feels as though “that moment has lasted my entire career in fiction, my entire life before that, and for the countless generations required to produce all the work that lit up my brain as a child!”

Fantasy “is arguably at the root of all literature”, he says – even Virginia Woolf. Every work of fiction “imagines a whole new reality”, fantasy “just has a lot more fun with those mental images, turning them into dragons and talking cats, giving them magic powers, and breaking them free of our planet’s geography”. He sees the publishing industry’s categorisations of fantasy as simply telling readers what metaphors and tropes to expect, “to try to sell more books”….

(2) CTHULHU IS ON THE LINE. Christopher Lockett, in “China Miéville and the Banality of Weird”, has a Lovecraft quote from almost a century ago that is still capable of launching discussions:

…Once again, the best articulation of this premise is the opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu,” which functions as about as perfect a Lovecraftian mission statement as you’ll find:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (139)”

To be fair to Lovecraft, he was writing in the 1920s and 30s, and he died before the outbreak of WWII. He wrote during the post-WWI crisis of spirit and the more general collapse of faith in such prewar verities as the invariably positive nature of scientific and technological progress. His work shares the alienation and disillusion present in the critical mass of modernism, alongside its often desperate pursuit of meaning in arcana.³ His fascination with and nominal devotion to science, along with his militant atheism, coexisted with his figurations of occultism in a manner entirely consonant with the historical moment: science and technology shorn of utopianism by the horrors of the Western Front, seeming to hint at vaster horrors beyond human ken.

In that respect he was not wrong: the war he didn’t live to see ended in the unthinkable. The Holocaust and Hiroshima would seem to represent the “terrifying vistas of reality” warned of in the passage above and allegorized by such Old Gods as Cthulhu and his monstrous kin. But if those unthinkable events have shown us anything, it’s the basic flaw of Lovecraft’s premise: far from going “mad from the revelation” or fleeing “from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age,” humanity has demonstrated instead an apparently bottomless capacity to make the unthinkable thinkable. Indeed—with the benefit of time, self-rationalization, mythologization, and a massive dose of delusional euphemism—to render the unthinkable banal….

(3) OLD SCAM, NEWLY HATCHED. Victoria Strauss warns about “USA Pen Press: The Ghostwriting Scam of a Thousand Websites” at Writer Beware.

… Ghostwriting scams pose as publishing service providers. Like the similar similar-seeming publishing/marketing scams from the Philippines, they are based overseas, primarily in Pakistan and India, and offer menus of publishing and marketing services designed to attract writers looking to self-publish or to market their books.

Also like the Philippine scams, they frequently take writers’ money and run, or deliver substandard quality, or treat whatever package or service the writer initially buys as a gateway to the writer’s bank account, relentlessly pressuring them to hand over more cash….

… It didn’t take long on USA Pen Press’s website for me to identify it as a ghostwriting scam. Many of the typical markers are there: the prominent advertising of ghostwriting services, of course, but also an array of trad-pubbed book covers to falsely imply USA Pen Press had something to do with them, a header image (see above) with even more false references to famous writers, “testimonials” that all sound alike and in one case reference a different company, awkward English (“How Do the USA Pen Press Work on the Book Covers?” “What the process of Ghostwriting includes?”), and false claims (they say 10+ years in business but as of this writing, their web domain is just 119 days old)….

(4) IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES. [Item by Steven French.] Another day, another piece on Dick and dystopias: “The PKD Dystopia” by Henry Farrell at Programmable Mutter.

This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by environmentally friendly technologies. Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies.

Dystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees all, knows all, and controls all. And our world is indeed one of ubiquitous surveillance. Phones and household devices produce trails of data, like particles in a cloud chamber, indicating our wants and behaviors to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Yet the information thus produced is imperfect and classified by machine-learning algorithms that themselves make mistakes. The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations.

This does not look like totalitarianism unless you squint very hard indeed. As the sociologist Kieran Healy has suggested, sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.

Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping)….

(5) READING BINGO. If Reddit’s “OFFICIAL r/Fantasy 2024 Book Bingo Challenge!” ends up on the Hugo ballot, that will be because its creators are drumming up support in posts like this: “For Your Consideration: r/Fantasy’s 2024 Bingo Challenge is Eligible for a Hugo Nomination for Best Related Work”. Apparently, they’ve been doing these challenges for ten years. Everybody does eligibility posts now – and you might find the challenge an item of interest in its own right.

(6) ROBERT BLOCH RARITIES. Here’s “What’s New at the Robert Bloch Official Website.

Read the first two pages of an operatic Libretto Bloch wrote for Gaston Leroux’s novel, The Phantom of the Opera.
IN 1980, Bloch penned a script for the pilot of a proposed weekly TV spinoff series of the (Stephen King) Salem’s Lot TV movie that recounted the further adventures of Ben Mears and Mark Petrie. Sadly, what we have is not the complete script (of 54 pages), rather a random sampling, the only pages available, captured during an auction of the script. Still, an interesting find!

(7) TODAY’S DAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Today in the UK is National Yorkshire Pudding Day. Learn more from the Yorkshire Post’s 2020 article “When is it, origins of the side dish, and the best Yorkshire Pudding recipe”. Note, the article includes a recipe.

Depending on who you ask, where you search, or how you feel about it, Yorkshire Pudding and popovers either are or aren’t the same thing, although they’re clearly related. Here’s some of those opinions (and more recipes):

(8) JAY SMITH OBITUARY. Costuming fan Jay Smith died January 27, 2025. The International Costumers Galley announced on Facebook:

Jay Smith was a costumer, attending conventions primarily in California, going back to Equicon. He was an actor and worked Renaissance Fairs and The Great Dickens Christmas Fair, where he was known for his portrayal of Father Christmas. He was beloved for his portrayal of the character for decades at many events.

At the link is a photo of Smith wearing a “Redesign of Superman” from Equicon 1985 by Civi Poth.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Buck Rogers serial (1939)

Eighty-six years ago, the Buck Rogers serial, produced by Universal Pictures, first was in the theaters. It starred Buster Crabbe (who had previously played the title character in two Flash Gordon serials and would return for a third.) Buster was sometimes billed as Larry Crabbe as well as you will note in the poster below.

I don’t think I need to say that it’s based on the Buck Rogers character as y’all know that as created by Philip Francis Nowlan but for the sake of the few Filers who will nitpick if I don’t I will.

It was directed by Ford Beebe was Saul A. Goodkind as written by Norman S. Hall, Ray Trampe and Dick Calkins. It would run for twelve chapters of roughly twenty minutes each.

It had a really small budget and re-used film footage from the futuristic Thirties musical Just Imagine.

In 1953, it was edited into the film Planet Outlaws and twelve years later it was edited again into Destination Saturn, and not to stop there, the late Seventies saw the latter release of the latter as Buck Rogers. All three were feature films.

Not surprisingly, you can watch it online as it’s public domain — here is the first chapter

(10) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater makes a different sound of music.
Carpe Diem reveals there’s wi-fi in Mordor.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal wonders whether AI is the biggest threat. Maybe.

(11) HOLD YOUR BREATH FOR A COUPLE OF MONTHS, PLEASE. Popular Science learns that in Poland a “Fire-breathing dragon sculpture not allowed to breathe fire”.

A famous dragon sculpture that spits out real fire is going to be a little less dramatic this month. The Wawel Dragon–or Smok Wawelski–in Krakow, Poland will have to hold its fiery breath so that authorities can see why it has been guzzling too much fuel lately.

Krzysztof Wojdowski, spokesman for Krakow’s road infrastructure office, told the Associated Press that officials will inspect the gas lines and pipes that feed the 19-feet metal dragon to look for ways to reduce energy bills. The sculpture is expected to begin to breathe fire again by March, pending the investigation….

(12) PWNING THE LIBS? The New York Times reports “E.V. Owners Don’t Pay Gas Taxes. So, Many States Are Charging Them Fees.” (Behind a paywall.)

Owners of electric cars in Vermont recently got a letter from the Department of Motor Vehicles with some bad news. Starting Jan. 1 they would have to pay $178 a year to register their cars, twice as much as owners of vehicles with internal combustion engines.

In imposing the higher fee, Vermont became the latest state to make people pay a premium for driving electric. At least 39 states charge such annual fees, including $50 in Hawaii and $200 in Texas, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That’s up from no states a few years ago.

Now, as President Trump rolls back Biden administration measures to promote electric vehicles, Republicans in Congress are considering imposing a national fee to bolster the fund used to finance roads and bridges, a fund that is in dire shape.

The fees are an attempt to make up for declining revenue from gasoline taxes that electric cars, for obvious reasons, don’t pay. They’re an example of how governments are struggling to adjust to technological upheaval in the auto industry.

Environmentalists and consumer groups agree that electric vehicle owners should help pay for road maintenance and construction. But they worry that Republicans, who control Congress, would set the fee at extremely high levels to punish electric vehicle owners, who tend to be liberals…

And yet somehow not all owners of companies that make electric cars are liberals….

(13) THIS IS THE DROID YOU’RE LOOKING FOR. Cool. And really expensive. “RoboCop – ED-209 1/3 Scale Statue”. Price tag: $3,100.

Wikipedia explains:

The Enforcement Droid Series 209, or ED-209, is a fictional heavily armed robot that appears in the RoboCop franchise. It serves as a foil for RoboCop, as well as a source of comic relief due to its lack of intelligence and tendency towards clumsy malfunctions.

The sales pitch says:

Premium Collectibles Studio presents their ED-209 1/3 Scale Statue. Hailing from the sci-fi classic RoboCop, this piece stands nearly 35 inches tall. Featuring every rivet, plate, and movie-accurate feature of the iconic Enforcement Droid, the finish is in a slate gray and matte black. Included is a pedestal base with the OCP logo, making it a striking addition for any RoboCop fan.

(14) I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU. Ryan George does a hilarious Tolkien-themed “When Your Friend Won’t Admit He’s Wrong” bit which some might say is NSFW, though really just for the last couple seconds, and not even then if you work for Frederick’s of Hollywood….

(15) FANGS FOR THE MEMORIES. Once upon a time actor Jonathan Frid, Dark Shadows’ Barnabas Collins, appeared as a celebrity guest on What’s My Line – vampire dentures and all.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/7/25 The Fortress Of Scrollitude

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) CHANGE MY WORDS? Ira Nayman discusses the elements of “The Professional Editor/Writer Relationship” at the SFWA Blog.

…Many writers resist the editorial process for a variety of reasons. It takes a lot of time, thought and, ultimately, work to craft effective prose fiction; it can be galling to allow a stranger to come along and tell you that it has to be changed. In addition, it can be hard to accept that what you have put so much of yourself into is not perfect exactly as you wrote it. These issues can be overcome with experience. All you need is one great editor to help you see the flaws in a story and guide you through the process of correcting them to see the value in the process….

… My practice as an editor is to couch interpretive input as either a suggestion (“You might want to try…”) or a question (“This is unclear. Might it be better as…?”). If the writer makes a reasonable argument for why the change isn’t necessary, I’m usually willing to accept it (although it is also true that 90% or more of the changes I ask for are accepted by authors). I try to keep in mind that, in matters of artistic interpretation, there aren’t always clear-cut right or wrong answers. While my input makes sense to me given my understanding of how stories work, it is always possible that the writer is in a better position to judge what works for their specific story….

(2) DEPARTMENT OF REDUNDANCY DEPARTMENT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4 is ready to mourn “The Strange Death of Cultural Originality”. The above was quite interesting. Basic thesis is that before 2000 only 25% of top box office films were sequels or franchise related but after 2000 it is 50%. Worryingly, it also applies to TV and films. There is an explanation. Competition due to the growth in content delivery formats means that platform deliveries cannot afford to take chances. Conversely, it is possible to argue philosophically, that little is new and that most is a variation, re-hash, mix-n-match of old material….

These days, when you turn on the TV or visit the cinema do you ever think, hang on, I’m sure I’ve seen this before? Maybe you’ve bought the latest crime thriller after seeing it in the bestseller lists and, 50 pages in, you’re overcome with a weird feeling of deja vu? And when you put the radio on in the car, does all the music sound, well, the same?

If so, don’t worry. It’s not just you. Something strange seems to be happening.

Statistics show that the number of top 20 highest grossing Hollywood films each year which are either sequels or spin-offs has risen from 25% to 50% in the past two decades.

In the 1960s, most TV shows were original formats. Today, a third are spinoffs or multiple broadcasts.

In music, the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been falling for some time, meaning the big established acts are getting more and more exposure while new acts struggle to break through.

Existing best-selling authors are becoming increasingly dominant in publishing sales.

So is it fair to say that cultural originality is in rather poor health?

Might it even be dead?

Ben Chu spends spends a lot of time thinking about economics, numbers and why the world works in the way it does. In this programme he’s going to ask – if cultural originality is dead, who or what killed it?

(3) SOME STATES RESIST CENSORSHIP OF LIBRARIES. “Librarians gain protections in some states as book bans soar” reports the South Dakota Searchlight.

… Amid a national rise in book bans in school libraries and new laws in some red states that threaten criminal penalties against librarians, a growing number of blue states are taking the opposite approach.

New Jersey joined at least five other states — California, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington — that have passed legislation within the past two years that aims to preserve access to reading materials that deal with racial and sexual themes, including those about the LGBTQ+ community.

Conservative groups have led the effort to ban materials to shield children from what they deem as harmful content. In the 2023-24 school year, there were 10,000 instances of book bans across the U.S. — nearly three times as many as the year before, according to a recent report by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for literary freedom.

The New Jersey measure not only sets minimum standards for localities when they adopt a policy on how books are curated or can be challenged but also prevents school districts from removing material based on “the origin, background, or views of the library material or those contributing to its creation.”

The law also gives librarians immunity from civil and criminal liability for “good faith actions.”

New Jersey state Sen. Andrew Zwicker, a Democrat who introduced the legislation, said until recently he thought that book bans were a disturbing trend, but one limited to other states. But early last year, he went to a brunch event and met a school librarian who told him she faced a torrent of verbal and online abuse for refusing to remove a handful of books with LGBTQ+ themes from her library’s shelves.

https://southdakotasearchlight.com/2024/12/15/state-library-budget-cut-would-hamstring-local-libraries-opponents-say/embed/#?secret=AmvBI5LLAe#?secret=3GwRz4n2Kt “That’s when I realized that I was so horribly mistaken, that these attacks on librarians and on the freedom to read were happening everywhere,” Zwicker told Stateline. “I went up to her and asked, ‘What can I do?’”…

… Legislation differs by state, including in enforcement and how to penalize noncompliant localities.

In Illinois, for example, school districts risk losing thousands of dollars in state grant funding if they violate the state’s new law discouraging book bans. But as the Chicago Tribune reported last month, that financial penalty was not enough to persuade many school districts throughout the state to comply, with administrators saying they are concerned about giving up local control on school decisions.

Several school districts in other states have similarly rebelled.

North of Minneapolis, St. Francis Area Schools’ board last month decided it would consult with conservative group BookLooks to determine which books it will buy for its school libraries. BookLooks uses a 0-through-5 rating system that flags books for violent and sexual content.

Under its rating system, books that have long had a place in school libraries — such as the Holocaust memoir “Night” by Elie Wiesel or “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou — would require parental consent to read….

(4) CALLING LA COUNTY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS. The Light Bringer Project is putting together the first-ever student edition of their literary journal, Locavore Lit. Los Angeles County high school students looking to publish their original fiction are invited to submit original fiction in any genre, between 500 and 5,000 words, through February 21.

Show us your fantastical worlds, your daring adventures, your tragic endings, and your strangely compelling characters.

We will be publishing between five and seven stories, and each chosen author will be paired with a professional illustrator who will work to highlight the story’s themes and imagery.

(5) DRONES FOR THE PROFESSIONAL ARMY. [Item by Francis Hamit.] A glimpse of the future courtesy of the US Army. I follow this stuff the way other people follow sports. “Imagining a US Army Drone Corps” at the Modern War Institute.

In February 2024, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the creation of the Unmanned Systems Forces. It is no secret that the Ukrainian military has used drones to great effect. Its units continue to innovate with drone tactics, techniques, and procedures and effects in the air, land, and maritime domains. Both belligerents in the Russia-Ukraine War have pledged to build over a million aerial drones each year to fill the skies. Even with the extremely innovative use of the drones (mine laying, incendiary delivery) already observed in Ukraine, history will show that the most important attribute of drones has been their ability to serve as economy-of-force systems. In a grinding war of attrition, drones have allowed the Ukrainian military to protect its limited combat power and threaten a much larger combat force across multiple domains.

The Unmanned Systems Forces that Zelenskyy announced amount, effectively, to a drone corps. US policymakers have taken note of the effectiveness of drones in the conflict and a drone corps may also be coming to the US Army….

… As an Army we are at a critical inflection point and have an opportunity to build a lethal enabling force. A more expansive course of action would involve creating drone units that can operate independently or augment brigade formations to fully leverage the situational awareness and strike capability of the systems. In a zero-growth environment with no major budgetary reallocations, the ready solution is the consolidation of the human-machine integration platoons across a division to build a robotics recon strike squadron (R2S2).,,,

(6) PETER YARROW (1938-2024). “Puff the Magic Dragon” composer Peter Yarrow, part of the group Peter, Paul and Mary, died January 7. The New York Times tribute says in part:

Peter Yarrow, whose caring and righteous vocals for the trio Peter, Paul and Mary helped establish them as one of the most popular folk acts of the 1960s, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 86.

His death was confirmed by Ken Sunshine, his publicist. Mr. Sunshine said the cause was bladder cancer, which Mr. Yarrow had been battling for the past four years.

On many of the trio’s recordings they split the vocal parts equally, braiding Mr. Yarrow’s precise tenor around Noel Paul Stookey’s gentle baritone and Mary Travers’s warm contralto. But Mr. Yarrow also had some prominent lead vocals as well, fronting such well-known group recordings as “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Day Is Done” and “The Great Mandala,” all of which he either wrote or co-wrote. “Puff” became a No. 2 Billboard hit, while “Day Is Done” grazed the Top 20….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 7, 1912 — Charles Addams. (Died 1988.)

Ahhh, Charles Addams. No doubt you’re now thinking of the Addams Family and you’ve certainly reason to do so, but let’s first note some other artistic endeavors of his.

His first published book work in the early Forties was the cover for But Who Wakes The Bugler by Peter DeVries, a silly slice of life novel. He previously sold some sketches to the New Yorker.

Random House soon thereafter contracted him for anthologies of drawings, Drawn and Quartered and Addams and Evil. (Lest you ask, the term “anthology” is from his website.) Four more anthologies, now on Simon & Schuster will follow.

And there was The Chas Addams Mother Goose, really there was. Here’s his cover for it.

Based on his characters that had appeared in his New Yorker cartoons, 1964 saw The Addams Family television series premiere on ABC. It would star, and I’m just singling them out, John Astin as Gomez and Carolyn Jones as Morticia.

It lasted just two seasons of thirty-minute episodes. Mind you there were sixty-four episodes. Yes, I loved every minute of it. I have watched it at least three times, as recently as several years ago and it as great now as was when I first watched it decades ago.

Halloween with the New Addams Family is a follow-up film with the primary cast back. No idea why the New is in there. We also had The Addams Family, an animated with a voice cast with some of the original performers, yet another Addams Family series (each of these largely had just John Astin from the original series).

Think we’re done? Of course, there is The Addams Family with Raúl Julia as a most macabre Gomez and Anjelica Huston as Morticia Addams with Carol Struycken playing Lurch for the first of several times. I really, really adore this film.

It was followed by the Addams Family Values which for some reason that I can’t quite figure out I just don’t adore.

Are we finished? No. The New Addams Family which aired for one nearly a quarter of a century after the original series went off the air after but a single season but lasted an extraordinary sixty-five episodes. I need to see at least the pilot for this.

And then there’s the Addams Family Reunion which had the distinction of Tim Curry as Gomez. I’ve not seen it, so who has? It sounds like an intriguing role for him…

There will be two animated films as well, The Addams Family and The Addams Family 2, neither of which I’ve seen.

Finally let’s talk about licensing. After his death, his wife, Tee Addams, was responsible for getting his works licensed. To quote the website, “The Addams Family, both its individual characters and the Family in its entirety, have a long history of selling products, in print ad campaigns and television commercials alike – from typewriters to Japanese scotch, from designer showcases to perfume, from paper towels to chocolate candies, and all that lies in between.”

So I went looking for use of the characters. I think the best one I found is the claymation one for M&Ms Dark Chocolate. (And please don’t ask me about the Wizard of Oz M&Ms commercial. That one is still giving me nightmares. Though the FedEx Wizard of Oz commercial is just silly. I mean dropping a FedEx truck on that witch…)

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 7, 1929: Three comic strips debuted

I’ve no idea why three newspaper comic strips were first published on this date. Before you think that can’t be possible, I’ve double-checked and yes, they were. I think it has to do with traditional Christmas holidays at that time in American history, so they’d be launched after those holidays.

January 7, 1929 — The Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. comic strip premiered. Philip Francis Nowlan Was the writer for the first decade with Dick Calkins and Russell Keaton being the artists for the first three years. At its peak in 1934, Buck Rogers appeared in 287 U.S. newspapers. Like many other popular comic strips of that day, Buck Rogers was reprinted in Big Little Books in a reformatted form.

January 7, 1929 — The Tarzan of the Apes strip was first published. It was drawn by Hal Foster (the first decade of strips) and Rex Mason (nearly twenty years’ worth) with Don Kraar adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs story. A full-page Sunday strip began on March 15, 1931, with artwork by Rex Maxon. A dozen artists would draw the strip including Gil Kane and Mike Grell in its waning years. Russ Manning’s portrayal of Tarzan Is considered by many to be the definitive one. We’ve included two strips here, one with him as artist, the first with Hal Foster.

January 7, 1934 — First published on this date, the Flash Gordon comic strip was inspired by the success of, and created rather obviously to compete with, the already established Buck Rogers strip. The story goes that King Features tried to purchase the rights to John Carter of Mars from Burroughs who refused, so King Features then turned to Alex Raymond, one of their staff artists, to create a similar story. The rest is history. Raymond’s strip would run until 1943 with the various artists and strips continuing for decades.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Carpe Diem has a mirror with a gripe.
Loose Parts applies cartoon logic to civil engineering.
Rhymes with Orange shows a famous inventor was more ambitious than we knew.
xkcd charts the “features of adulthood”.

(10) JESSE HOLLAND Q&A. At WBUR, “Here and Now” host Celeste Headlee speaks with journalist Jesse Holland, author of the forthcoming Marvel/Titan Books anthology Captain America: The Shield of Sam Wilson, about the state of the Black superhero universe: “Taking stock of the Black superhero universe”. There’s also an excerpt from the book at the link.

(11) WEREWOLF? THERE PUB. [Item by Steven French.] Of marginal genre interest perhaps, but the Tan Hill Inn in North Yorkshire, where that famous pub scene in An American Werewolf in London was filmed, regularly gets snowed in during the winter. Here’s the Guardian’s amusing account of the latest ‘lock in’, including this reference to the classic movie: “Popcorn, pints and a pooch’s birthday: life snowed in at the Tan Hill Inn” from the Guardian.

7pm

Headlights are approaching! There’s a knock on the door. In step Chelsey Frankland and Luke Batty, who have somehow managed to get here in a 4×4 from Doncaster. Silence falls as we stare at them, gobsmacked, reminiscent of that scene in the 1981 film An American Werewolf in London. In fact, it’s identical to that scene because we are in the exact room where it was filmed.

(12) SET IN THE PRESENT? Slashfilm invites you to discover “Eight Classic (And Not-So-Classic) Sci-Fi Movies Set In 2025”.

We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Welcome to 2025. It’s the future….

…Now we’re actually here in 2025, though, and we can see that few of those old writings came to pass. Indeed, from our standpoint, the future is looking positively bleak. There is a lot of authoritarianism to look forward to, and the curtailing of human rights seems to be on the docket worldwide. As such, we would do well to look back at the sci-fi of the past, perhaps merely as a sociological exercise. What did the writers of previous decades think 2025 would look like? Would we be fighting future Nazis, falling in love with computers, or piloting 100-foot Rock-Em-Sock-Em Robots?

One of the films they picked only looked three years into the future – and it’s a future peculiar to The Asylum.

2025 Armageddon (2022)

Schlock-lovers everywhere are likely intimately familiar with The Asylum, a low-budget film studio best known for their mockbusters (that is; clear and open imitations of contemporary blockbuster movies). Just as there was a “Pacific Rim,” The Asylum churned out the zero-budget knockoff “Atlantic Rim.” They did their own “Aladdin.” Their sales model seems to be based on tricking consumers into renting their movies, confusing them for the genuine article.

At least “2025 Armageddon” acknowledged that model, as one of the film’s opening plot points was two twin sisters (Jhey Castles and Lindsey Marie Wilson) bonding over the Asylum movie “Snakes on a Train,” which their grandmother rented for them, thinking it was “Snakes on a Plane.”

The purpose of “2025 Armageddon” was to gather the many absurd monsters from multiple other Asylum films, and assemble them in a single gigantic crossover event akin to “Destroy All Monsters.” The film features the Mega Piranha from “Mega Piranha,” the Mega Shark from “Mega Shark,” robot monsters from both “Atlantic Rim” and “Transmorphers,” and the croc monster from “Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus.” There’s even a Sharknado for good measure. These creatures are all manifesting in the real world after a species of aliens watched a bunch of Asylum movies, and mistook them for reality. They used their high-tech monster-making machines to populate the Earth with Asylum monsters, as God intended.

Michael Paré appears, of course, because it was either him or Eric Roberts.

(13) GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS. “Mathematician Reveals Strange New Enigmas for Time Travelers” – Discover Magazine says it’s time you knew.

First, the good news for time travelers. Physicists have long recognized that nothing in the laws of physics specifically forbids time travel. As far as they can tell, these laws don’t care whether time is running forwards or backwards; they work just as well either way….

…Now the bad news, which comes from Lorenzo Gavassino, a mathematician at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Gavassino has discovered some previously unknown side effects of time travel.

He says the laws of physics may not forbid it but if it is possible, these laws lead to some outlandish consequences, one of which is that any human who made the journey would not be able to remember it. The laws of physics suggest this person’s memory would be wiped clean as soon as they returned to the present….

(14) GALACTIC SQUINTING. “How astronomers used gravitational lensing to discover 44 new stars in distant galaxy” at ABC News.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, history’s largest and most complex space observatory that serves thousands of astronomers around the world, has captured a unique image that revealed 44 individual stars in a galaxy 6.5 billion light-years away from the Milky Way, according to a paper published Monday in Nature Astronomy.

Astronomers used Webb’s high-resolution optics and distortion in space to reveal the existence of dozens of previously unknown stars, the researchers said. The detection of a “treasure trove” of stars was only possible because the light from the 44 new stars was magnified by a large cluster of galaxies, called Abell 370, in front of it, according to the Center for Astrophysics.

The technique is known as gravitational lensing, which is when a massive amount of matter — like a cluster of galaxies — creates a gravitational field that distorts and magnifies the light from distant galaxies that are behind it but in the same line of sight, according to NASA. The effect is essentially like looking through a giant magnifying glass….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Exits Examined delves into “The Bizarre History of Dragonriders of Pern”.

What do you get when epic fantasy crashes violently into science fiction? The Dragonriders of Pern baby! This legendary series is packed with telepathic dragons, daring riders, and a world that’s as dangerous as it is fascinating. Set on the planet Pern, where humanity’s survival hinges on their bond with dragons to fight a deadly menace from the skies, these books are a wild mix of adventure, survival, and discovery. In this video, we’re diving into the history of Dragonriders of Pern, exploring its incredible worldbuilding, unforgettable characters, and why it’s still matters.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/26/24 I’ve Never Been To Scroll, But I Kinda Like The Pixels

Posted on August 26, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) WHO WROTE THE BOOK OF (DRAGON) LOVE? “But Do They F*** The Dragon? An Oral History of Dragon Romance” by Bree Bridges at Reactor.

… Fortunately for young Bree, McCaffrey wasn’t the only one infusing fantasy with complicated women in complicated relationships. Maybe it was my love of the way Michael Whelan painted dragons that led me across the library to one of the most romantically charged dragon covers of the ’80s: Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince.

In the (usually 800+) pages of Melanie Rawn’s fantasy novels I found everything I loved: dragons that you sometimes get to talk to, complex and flawed heroines who have to make hard choices and embrace their power, and an acknowledgement that romantic love has a power to shape kingdoms and a magic all its own.

(And dragons. Always, dragons.)

But as much as I adored what I found in the pages of these books, something was still missing. Yes, romance appeared. It was even important sometimes—the lifelong love between Sioned and Rohan impacts the nearly 5,000 pages that follow!…

As for the payoff promised in the title – Bridges has a little list.

… Riding the Dragon, as it were, is hardly a new pastime. I’m just glad it’s got a shiny new brand so we can bring new friends into the fold! You might find your gateway dragon in one of these titles:

Weapons and Wonders by Devin Harnois: Still not sure you actually want to f**k the dragon? That’s okay! Fourth Wing may have become famous for people falling in love while adjacent to dragons, but romance offers great opportunities as well, such as Weapons and Wonders by Devin Harnois where our two heroes fall in love over mechanical magical dragons….

(2) GLASGOW 2024 FAN FUND AUCTION REPORT. Sandra Bond (European TAFF admin) and Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey (North American TAFF Administrator) shared “The League of Fan Funds newsletter” which reports how much money was fan fund auctions raised at Glasgow 2024 and where it’s going.

Bids were taken of £4,420.20 at the Worldcon auction. Net of card fees the total raised by the live auction was £4,390.47.

The silent auction raised another £603.52 (£610 before fees).

All the other activities over the table, plus other donations including cash raised in the bar, came to £1,670.49 after fees, plus US$120.

The total raised was £6,664.48, plus the dollars. The LFF will distribute the money as shown below (after taking into account earmarked donations, fund requirements, and other fundraising plans):

TAFF: £2,464.48 + $120
GUFF: £1,700
DUFF: £750
The Science Fiction Encyclopaedia: £750
European Fan Fund: £500
Con or Bust: £500

The report also includes the group photo below taken (by Mike Benveniste) of all the people who could be gathered in one place at the Glasgow Worldcon who’d ever been a fan fund delegate, with an identification key (provided by Alison Scott). (Which is very handy for when you look at someone, say “I know who that is!” and it turns out you’re wrong.) Click for larger image.

You’re also invited to view the “League of Fan Funds” web page maintained by David Langford.

(3) FINIS. Abigail Nussbaum doesn’t think it’s so bad at all: “The Umbrella Academy, S4”.

As a known curmudgeon I am in the weird position of feeling like I should go to bat for this season….

…Every single season of The Umbrella Academy has revolved around the Hargreeves siblings preventing, by the skin of their teeth, an apocalypse that probably wouldn’t have happened without their presence. They are the cause of, and solution to, all the multiverse’s problems. It’s hard to imagine a resolution to that situation that wouldn’t involve taking them all off the board. Emotionally, too, there’s a logic to this entire family going down together. This was never a “change and grow” show. The Hargreeves might make concrete changes in their lives – Viktor transitions, Luther gets married, Diego has a family – but when it comes down to it, they remain a bunch of screwed up people who can only really relate to each other, and that often very dysfunctionally. Ending the show on “I love you… but you’re all such assholes” strikes, I think, the perfect note….

(4) CHARACTER ACTING. Lots of cosplay photos here: “SEE IT! Anime NYC takes over the Big Apple” at amNewYork.

Thousands of manga and anime characters took over the Jacob Javits Convention Center over the weekend for the 2024 Anime NYC convention.

The entertainment mecca, located on 34th Street and 11th Avenue, was overrun with cosplayers adorning the looks of their favorite fictional characters over three days. From cartoonish heroes to video game villains, people of all ages descended on the convention center from Aug. 23 to Aug. 25….

(5) BUT NOW, GOD KNOWS, ANYTHING GOES. [Item by Steven French.] Not entirely sure about that last line here. “Horror films were reviled as one step up from pornography – now the genre is a force to be reckoned with” says the Guardian.

Horror is the little genre that could. While 2024’s tentpole releases were struggling, before the summer’s double whammy of Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine, horror never stopped plugging away, week after week, mostly under the critical radar. Films such as Immaculate and Abigail reaped healthy returns, while Oz Perkins’ breakthrough hit, Longlegs, has made almost 10 times its budget. Horror doesn’t require lavish spending or costly stars and its loyal fans will happily turn up to watch any old devil doll, nun or exorcism, ever hopeful of stumbling across an inspired nugget of nastiness….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 26, 1980 – Chris Pine, 44. I was surprised when I decided on Chris Pine for today’s Birthday to learn how varied his genre performances had been.

Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, is in production. And a spin-off film focused on female Spider-related characters is also in development. So why am I starting off by mentioning a film that’s still in development? It’s because he’s already said he’s voicing Spider-Man aka Peter Parker there. Very cool. More Spiders!

Next up for him here is another voicing role as Jack Frost in Rise of the Guardians. It’s about how they (Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and the Sandman), who persuade a reluctant Jack Frost to stop the evil Pitch Black from tut turning the world in darkness. Voicing a character properly is essential to giving the being a sense of life that the audience member can relate to. He does a splendid job of making this character do that. I’m very much looking to hearing him do so with his Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse character.

He had yet a third voicing role and it’s got an interesting back story. He voiced Dave in Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey, an educational documentary science fiction adventure film. Interesting in itself, but what’s more interesting is that it was brought into being by none other than NASA through a grant from Jet Propulsion Lab via the international Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn which it depicts.

Oh, and he wasn’t the original individual cast as Dave, that was John Travolta.

Look now, we’ve live roles. Really we do.

He played Steve Trevor in both Wonder Woman films. The films are great and he makes a most excellent Steve Trevor I’d say.

A Wrinkle in Time film (I say film as there was also not surprisingly a BBC series as well) has him as Alexander Murry — an astrophysicist in the employ of the American government, husband of Katherine Murry.

Ok, last year he was one of the executive producers of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, a heist film set in the Forgotten Realms RPG setting. I am very much not detailing the bidding war between Hasbro and the film companies over the rights to the Forgotten Realms filming rights. Really I’m not. Here he played Edgin Darvis, a bard and former member of the Harpers. Stopping right there.

So what role am I forgetting? Oh that one. James T. Kirk in the Kelvin Timeline. I don’t think of it as a reboot but an alternate timeline entirely as Discovery showed us that such universes exist. So why not two such universes existing simultaneously? Remember Enterprise did that as well.

Does he make a more than merely than just acceptable Captain Kirk? Yes he does. He’s obviously very different than Shatner but just as believable as that character.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit presents a new measurement scale.
Lio re-enacts a famous scene.
Scary Gary points out the usual problem with memoirs.

(8) THIS ONE CAN’T KEEP THE DOCTOR AWAY. “Bad apple? How Disney’s Snow White remake turned sour” according to the Guardian.

In theory, it must have sounded like a good idea. At least to Hollywood movie studio executives keen to make big bucks by playing it safe with themes and stories that might be familiar to a mass audience.

A modern remake of Snow White: cashing in on the beloved Disney original with fresh stars, A-list names and a fairytale with a happy ending that everyone could enjoy.

It has not turned out that way….

(9) COME ON DOWN! BBC’s Witness History tells the story of “Canada’s first UFO landing pad”.

In 1967, the small town of St. Paul, Canada declared that they were a place that welcomed everyone, even the aliens. They did this by building a giant UFO landing pad, hoping to attract intergalactic tourists. They timed it to coincide with Canada’s centennial celebrations.

Although most of the town saw it as a light-hearted joke the driving force behind the alien parking space Margo Lagassee, was a firm believer in the outer space community.

Paul Boisvert who was the part of the original crew behind the landing pad tells Anoushka Mutanda-Dougherty how St. Paul became a destination spot for extraterrestrial visitors.

He also makes clear if aliens do descend on St. Paul he “would be pleased to feed them some Pierogi, Garlic Sausage and Pea Soup.”

(10) COMICS GRADER LOSES DEFAMATION SUIT. “Collectables Evaluator Hit With $10M Verdict for Disparaging Couple’s Comic Book Restorations” – The Legal Intelligencer analyzes the decision. Registration required.

A leading voice in the world of comic book collection was hit with a $10 million verdict Tuesday for falsely accusing a pair of sellers of using faulty techniques to restore high-value comics.

In a determination that included $5 million in punitive damages, a Philadelphia jury found that Certified Guaranty Co. LLC—a company that assesses and grades the quality of collectible comic books—knowingly published defamatory statements about the plaintiffs’ work.

The jury returned its eight-figure verdict after less than an hour of deliberation, according to the plaintiffs’ attorney, Lane Jubb Jr. of the Beasley Firm. Yet during settlement talks, Jubb said, the defendants’ insurance company never offered more than $1 million.

“The bad faith case here is going to be so much easier,” he said.

Jubb said there had been plenty of opportunity to reach a settlement during the lawsuit’s nearly eight-year pendency, but plaintiffs Matthew and Emily Meyers wanted to take their case to trial in order to clear their names in a public forum.

“In a defamation trial, when you have plaintiffs that are telling the truth, they’re willing to try the case to verdict because they know there’s nothing to hide,” Jubb said.

CGC’s attorney, Mark Zaid of Mark S. Zaid P.C. in Washington, D.C., did not respond to requests for comment.

The Meyerses—a married couple who started a business restoring and selling collectible comic books—claimed that CGC and one of its primary graders, Matthew Nelson, helped to circulate false rumors questioning the legitimacy and quality of their restorations.

According to pretrial memos, CGC is considered the leading grader of collectable comic books, and the Meyerses sent their books to the company to be rated when they began their business. The plaintiffs asserted that they honed their techniques in part by applying feedback they received from Nelson. But after receiving several grades that they perceived as unfairly low, the Meyerses stopped sending their work to CGC for evaluation.

The plaintiffs claimed that Nelson went on to post comments on a CGC-operated online forum lending credence to false rumors that the company refused to grade the Meyerses’ books because they were not genuine restorations. The plaintiffs alleged that Nelson’s comments “blackened their reputations as legitimate restoration specialists and amounted to a charge of fraud: that they were passing off photocopied fakes as genuine restorations.”

The Meyerses claimed that as a result of Nelson’s statements they had to start selling their restored comics well below their actual values and that past buyers reached out to request their money back on prior purchases.

… According to Jubb, much of the trial centered on the quality of the plaintiffs’ work, with examples of restored comics making appearances as evidence.

“We had some of the rarest comic books on the planet in the courtroom,” Jubb said….

(11) PAWSELLING. Big Hill Books, Minneapolis, Minn., shared feline bookseller Goose’s “Friday to-do list”:

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(12) “THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE FOR CHILDREN?” Talk about your dark fantasy. Ryan George is “The Guy Who Wrote ‘The Three Little Pigs’”.

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

Pixel Scroll 7/14/24 Petronius T Arbiter Says, I’m Currently Looking For A Door, Or, Even A Window, Into Winter, Which I Plan To Leave Open And Move My Bed Near

Posted on July 14, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) DRAGONS, CARE AND FEEDING. George R.R. Martin has a long exposition about dragons, and not only those of Westeros, at Not a Blog: “Here There Be Dragons”.

…Dragons need food.   They need water too, but they have no gills. They need to breathe. Some say that Smaug slept for sixty years below the Lonely Mountains before Bilbo and the dwarves woke him up.   The dragons born of Valyria cannot do that.   They are creatures of fire, and fire needs oxygen.   A dragon could dip into the ocean to scoop up a fish, perhaps, but they’d fly right up again. If held underwater too long, they would drown, just like any other land animal.

My dragons are predators, carnivores who like their meat will done.   They can and will hunt their own prey, but they are also territorial.   They have lairs.   As creatures of the sky, they like mountain tops, and volcanic mountains best of all. These are creatures of fire, and the cold dank caverns that other fantasists house their pets in are not for mine.     Man-made dwellings, like the stables of Dragonstone, the towers tops of the Valryian Freehold, and the Dragonpit of King’s Landing, are acceptable — and often come with men bringing them food. If those are not available, young dragons will find their own lairs… and defend them fiercely.

My dragons are creatures of the sky.   They fly, and can cross mountains and plains, cover hundreds of miles… but they don’t, unless their riders take them there.   They are not nomadic. During the heyday of Valyria there were forty dragon-riding families with hundreds of dragons amongst them… but (aside from our Targaryens) all of them stayed close to the Freehold and the Lands of the Long Summer…

(2) ETHICS OF SPACE TRAVEL AND ALIEN CONTACT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Human beings are mucky creatures. As a bioscientist, and especially as one who engaged in germ-free and also specific-pathogen-free work in my gap year, I am acutely aware that humans are a home to a multitude of microbes and we continually shed them. (My work involved small chambers in which we kept an open agar plate on one side to ensure everything was clean; it was very bad news if ever we came in and something was growing as that meant that that particular experiment had to come to an abrupt end.) So you can guess my ethical stance as to the proposed human landings on Mars. Yes, I know we defeated the Martians before with microbes, but that was on our own home turf in Blighty: there’s no need for us to contaminate putative Martians on Mars before we have done as much as we can using robots. (Yes, I know that I constantly tell folk that the machines are taking over the world – though nobody ever listens – but, to be fair, I don’t mind them taking over Mars: I’m not that prejudiced.)

And even our bog-standard Lunar missions have seen us pollute our Moon. Just a few weeks ago, at the end of May, there was research published that we might have already significantly contaminated Lunar polar ice with water from Apollo lander exhaust and that the proposed Starship craft will further contaminate it to a far, far greater degree. This is going to make ascertaining the origin of Lunar water ice trapped in permanently shadowed areas quite difficult. (Already on Earth we have contaminated Antarctic ice with isotopes from atomic bomb testing which is why those of us looking at palaeoclimatology through ice cores define ‘the present’ as being 1950 – can’t use any ice since then [other than for cooling one’s gin and tonic (it’s a silver lining)]. Betcha didn’t know you lived in the future!)

So, this week’s BBC Radio 4 programme Siedways – the first in a four part series – on the ethics of the search for aliens and alien contact piqued my interest. (Even though the programme trailer mentioned ‘inter-galactic’ aliens… I’d settle for detecting interstellar techno aliens.) Anyway, you can decide how good the panel was for yourself… Access the programme here: “BBC Radio 4 – Sideways, A New Frontier, A New Frontier: 1. A Message to Ourselves”.

(3) TCA 2024. There are two genre shows among the winners of the Television Critics Awards 2024. (Complete list at the link.) The winners were selected by the TCA’s membership of more than 230 TV journalists from across the United States and Canada.

Outstanding Achievement in Family Programming: Doctor Who (Disney+)
Heritage Award: Twin Peaks

(4) PEACE IN SFF. “C.S. Lewis, Sci-fi, and the Normality of Peace” by Peter Jacobsen at the Foundation for Economic Education.

…One of the easiest ways to understand what Lewis is doing in Out of the Silent Planet is to look at the context in which he is writing. The book was published in 1938, when sci-fi works like H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds dominated.

In an article “Rehabilitating H.G. Wells: C.S. Lewis’s ‘Out of the Silent Planet,’” author David Downing argues that much of what Lewis was doing in the Space Trilogy was challenging sci-fi tropes he found objectionable. He says the novel started when “Lewis and his good friend J.R.R. Tolkien agreed that there simply were not enough of their favorite sort of stories available [in the sci-fi genre], so they decided to try their own hand at it.”

Lewis goes out of his way to point out his debt to Wells in the novel, but it’s clear he disagrees with many Wellsian takes on sci-fi. One disagreement in particular stood out to me. Unlike the violent, malevolent Martians in The War of the Worlds, the extra-terrestrials in Lewis’s book are peaceful.

Brilliantly, Lewis makes it clear that the characters, like the reader, share the bias in assuming the creatures will be evil. The protagonist, Ransom, in his first encounter with one species of extra-terrestrial called the sorn, is repulsed and flees the scene. It didn’t help that Ransom was taken by other humans against his will. In that sense he had some reason to fear the sorn. But the only reason he was taken was that the other humans feared the sorn. The sorn simply wanted to talk, but the humans believed it was demanding a sacrifice.

As a reader, this point dawned on me slowly. The natives call the planet that Ransom lands on Malacandra, and there are several rational and animal species on the planet. As I read through the novel, I kept wondering, “Which of these is going to be the bad species? Which alien is the antagonist?”

Ransom shares this thinking. As he continues on the planet, he befriends a different species known as the hrossa who teach him the planetary language. In interacting with the hrossa, he tries to uncover which of the species on the planet rules the others. Which species is in control?

He slowly discovers that things are not as he expected. It isn’t the case that one species violently controls the others. Rather, each one specializes in a few things, and cooperates and exchanges with the others. This seems so foreign to Ransom that he’s skeptical that this could be true at first. However, he slowly discovers that the only hierarchy is a willing submission of all three species to the divine order.

As we continue through the book, Ransom soon discovers that the planet Malacandra is actually what we call Mars. Again, Lewis makes the contrast clear between his own works and works like The War of the Worlds. Mars, despite having been named by humans after the god of war, is a peaceful place.

The Martians are not violent invaders. Ransom asks about violent conflict: “If both wanted one thing and neither would give it… would the other at last come with force? Would they say, give it or we kill you?”

The Hrossa can’t understand why that would ever be necessary. Why would they want something like violence or war?

It’s a beautiful reframing of the issue. Peace is normal….

(5) STREET-LEGAL FLYING SAUCER. Of course, as Jacobsen says above, not everyone is prepared to encounter peace-loving aliens. “A UFO car drove cross-country. Officers thought it was out of this world” – behind a paywall in the Washington Post.

Adam Carnal, a deputy in Crawford County, Mo., wasn’t sure what he would find when he pulled over a flying saucer on Interstate 44 late last month. The vehicle had committed a lane violation, he said, and he wasn’t sure if it was allowed to be on the road in the first place.

As Carnal approached, he recalled the top of the cockpit lifting to reveal two people sporting green, alien-like glasses. The driver raised a hand and gave Carnal a Vulcan salute, the famous gesture from the TV series “Star Trek.”

“I come in peace,” Carnal said the man told him.

The traffic stop was one of four that lifelong alien-enthusiast Steve Anderson experienced during his multiday drive from Indianapolis to the Roswell UFO Festival in New Mexico. After being pulled over twice in Missouri and two more times in Oklahoma, he said, he was also welcomed to Roswell by officers who knew he’d be arriving, awaiting his lunar landing in the parking lot of his hotel.

“I thought, how cool would it be to get to ride in a flying saucer?” he said. “So since I don’t have the technology to make one that flies, I built a driving saucer.”…

…Anderson bought a tiny 1991 Geo Metro and rang up Dennis Bellows, a mechanic friend who had built a few other cars for him. Anderson asked Bellows if he could transform the Geo into a flying saucer, like the kind in old sci-fi movies….

…The car’s bubble-shaped top — adorned with an antenna — took an extra bit of ingenuity. Bellows ultimately warmed pie slices of plexiglass to form the contraption….

… Anderson is used to being stopped by law enforcement while he’s driving the space cruiser — one of roughly 45 cars he keeps at his home in Indiana. He said he often hands over a gag driver’s license identifying him as “Al Ien” and tells officers that he’s from the planet Krypton, before handing over his real identification….

(6) WILL THEY DOUBLE UP OR DOUBLE DOWN? The media asks, “Between ‘Gladiator II’ and ‘Wicked,’ is the new ‘Barbenheimer’ upon us?” Despite CNN’s fervent hope and best effort, the pairing doesn’t click the same way – and is missing a lyrical handle.

This year, two disparate, big-budget films will share a release date: One, an R-rated historical epic stacked with a starry cast of Oscar hopefuls. The other, a musical based on a beloved property with plenty of pink and a Billboard-friendly soundtrack.

Sound familiar?

With “Gladiator II” and the first part of “Wicked” sharing a release date, days before Thanksgiving, movie theaters are nearing their truest chance at another “Barbenheimer,” a viral phenomenon that in 2023 drove audiences to the movie theater by the millions, leaving a massive mark in pop culture and at the box office.

But what will we call it? “Gladiator II” star Paul Mescal thinks “Glicked” (pronounced glick-id) is the portmanteau that suits the prospective double feature best.

“’Wickiator’ doesn’t really roll off the tongue, does it?” he said in a new interview with Entertainment Tonight. “I think the films couldn’t be more polar opposite and kind of worked in that context previously, so fingers crossed people come out and see both films on opening weekend.”

But maybe we moviegoers (and Mescal) are getting ahead of ourselves. Tom Nunan, a lecturer at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and TV and the founder of the production company Bull’s Eye Entertainment, isn’t fully sold on “Barbenheimer” 2.0.

… It should be noted that after the smashing success of “Barbenheimer” summer, no release weekends have seen the same double-feature draw, though musings of “Saw Patrol” and “Garfuriosa” pairings did make the rounds online. Those were more jokes about how two seemingly incompatible films could reach the same audiences than genuine attempts at creating a viral trend — in no world does the über-graphic “Saw X” pair well with the kid-friendly “Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie.”…

(7) SHANNEN DOHERTY (1971-2024). Actress Shannen Doherty, known in genre circles for Charmed, died July 13 of cancer at the age of 53.

…Doherty starred with Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano in “Charmed” from 1998-2001, at which point her character was replaced by one played by Rose McGowan…

She was best known for her work on Beverly Hills, 90210 and its reboots.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

July 14, 1939 – Sid Haig. (Died 2019.) This Scroll, we come to honor not a performer who was known as a hero, one who was legendary mostly as a villain, Sid Haig, a role he played in fantasy, horror and SF.

His most well-known role was as Captain Spaulding in the Rob Zombie films House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects and 3 from Hell. Not for those easily offended, nor for those expected a storyline with a plot that make sense, the character is an icon of horror. SPOILER ALERT — Unlike Freddie Krugger, Rob Zombie has so far suggested this character is indeed dead. END SPOILER ALERT. Oh, and Spaulding is named for Groucho Marx’s Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding character from the Thirties Animal Crackers film.

He had one major roles in SF, that being the evil Dragos on Jason of Star Command, the series James Doohan was. He appeared in every episode of the two seasons that series ran. Dragos, Jason’s main adversary, intends to rule the galaxy and it is up to Jason and the Star Command to stop him. Haig delightfully played him way over the top in the costume below.

He showed up in Star Trek in as First Lawgiver in “The Return of The Archons”. I’m reasonably certain everyone here has seen it but if not, the plot is that Enterprise is investigating the disappearance of the USS Archon on the planet Beta III, Kirk and his crew encounter an old-style Western community brainwashed and subservient to a sinister godlike figure called Landru. He was the First Lawgiver.

The final role that I’m going to was on Batman in two episodes, “The Spell of Tut” and Tut’s Case is Shut”, he’s a minion on King Tut, the enemy of Batman who created specifically created who was portrayed by Victor Buono as was this character, Royal Apothecary. As you can see, the costume that they gave was quite silly.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Heart of the City finishes her Sunday crossovers.
Lio also has a crossover.
Thatababy sees some exotic birds.
Rubes reminds us wizards have discriminating palates.
Tom Gauld encounters declining standards.

“How are your experiments going?” (My latest cartoon for @newscientist) pic.twitter.com/dwhGNwTxie
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) July 14, 2024

(10) TINY L.A. “He built miniatures of LA buildings for fun. Now, Guillermo del Toro is among his fans” at LAist.

Many transplants come to Los Angeles to chase a dream. Kieran Wright kind of just stumbled onto his.

The New Zealander moved to the city about 8 years ago, with the humble goal of soaking in as much of L.A. as he could.

“I wanted to connect with the city as a local would, and I had so much catching up to do,” Wright said. “I started building this picture of L.A. that was different to the one that I had imagined, it turned out to be in the best way possible.”

Those quests took him on drives far and close to places famous and offbeat. Wright was fascinated with the diner, one staple in the American movies and TV shows he watched before moving to Los Angeles. It was at an icon of the genre, Rae’s Restaurant in Santa Monica, where his love for the city, architecture, and Americana all came together to nudge him to try out a hobby — to build miniature replicas of L.A. buildings that are as beautiful as they are painstakingly faithful….

…One of his career highlights, Wright said, came via a purchase notice he got on Twitter. The buyer was filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who would end up collecting several more pieces, including a mini replica of The Formosa Cafe, and The Jim Henson Company.

After Wright delivered the model to del Toro’s house, he asked the director to send him a photo of its final setting when he finds a place for it.

“Sure enough, a couple of days later, he sent me a photo of the miniature surrounded by everything in his house,” Wright said. “He’s got all sorts of interesting oddities and collectibles… and the art fits in there perfectly.”…

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(11) STARLINKS IN WRONG ORBIT. [Item by Jeanne Jackson]. Last night [July 11], I watched a Starlink launch on the usual Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Patrol Base right after logging off from my Thursday night writers’ group meeting. Although the thing was hard to see owing to an intense shroud of pea-soup fog on the launching pad, the bird got off just fine. Except for the ground visibility problem (frequent in S. California), everything looked normal. There was a good bit of uncustomary frost on the upper parts of the second-stage engine, but the Spaceflight Now commentator (independent journalist, not part of Space X) thought it was probably harmless. The first stage landed perfectly on its drone barge in the Pacific Ocean.

I went to bed last night with the erroneous idea that the launch was successful. The second stage had injected everything into orbit, and I’d never heard of Falcon 9 having any trouble with the later circularization burn, a 1 or 2 second shot upon reaching apogee. I entered the launch into the Log, sat down to watch two Perry Mason episodes, took Tillion (my dog) outdoors at midnight, and went to bed.

Today, I found out otherwise. The 20 Starlink birds had indeed made into orbit—the wrong orbit. Indeed, it was the worst orbit possible short of getting listed as FTO (Failed To Orbit). The circularization burn had not taken place as planned. Instead, there was what the astronautics trade euphemistically calls a “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly” of the upper stage motor. In plain English, the confounded thing blew itself to bits.

Oops.

I’ve made some changes in my Space Flight Log entries for these 20 Starlink satellites, of course.

Independent sources tell me that the perigees of the twenty comsats were very, very low: mostly around 130-140 kilometers, with a few outliers around 115 and one up at 190. Apogees ran from 250 to 325 kilometers. This is not conducive to long spacecraft lifetime. 130 km is ~80 miles. It’s reported that Elon Musk ordered that the satellites save themselves by using their argon-ion maneuvering thrusters, but this is unlikely to be effective. It normally takes two weeks or more for these low-power, continuous-boost thrusters to move the satellites into their operating orbits, but the projected lifetimes of this bunch are probably measurable in days, if not hours. Each of them has a pair of solar panels giving a 30-meter wingspread, meaning gross quantities of atmospheric drag.

In other words, Musk’s order is like Jim Kirk ordering Warp 9 when all Scotty has online is a single impulse engine in dire need of repair. Unlike in Star Trek, it ain’t gonna happen.

I mentioned an anomalous frosty buildup on the 2^nd stage engine, upstream of the combustion chamber. The current online buzz has it that this probably came from a small liquid oxygen leak. The frosty buildup may have accumulated enough to clog lines in the 40+ minutes between initial cutoff and reignition for the circularization burn, causing an explosion. The explosion was apparently of insufficient destructive force to prevent satellite deployment.

This has never happened before on a Falcon 9—it certainly isn’t a design flaw. Most likely, somebody goofed at some point during assembly of that upper stage, and nobody else caught the mistake. Either that, or some subcontractor supplied Space X with a faulty part (this has happened before), and no one in Space X tested the part properly prior to installation.

Most likely, the underlying cause of the failure was doing things in a hurry. The only good things about this incident are that astronauts were not involved, and no customer was discommoded by it—Starlink is an in-house operation of Space X. Just imagine what the public outcry would have been, had the payload been a billion-dollar space probe, space telescope, or reconnaissance satellite, paid for by taxpayers rather than corporate stockholders. Never mind the noise had it been a human flight mission.

In the past year or two, Space X has been emphasizing faster and faster launch tempos. Up to now, they’ve gotten away with it, but this is likely to draw them up short for at least a couple or three months while they track down the cause and come up with a remedy for it. Space is a harsh, hostile environment, and rocket science is unforgiving of mistakes.

Faster, better, cheaper—pick any two. And do it right, not do it Tuesday—if you want to deliver a product which satisfies your customers.

(12) PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS – MIND READING THE BRAIN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Nature comes news of brain scans now being sufficiently detailed that we can identify a single language word. “Ultra-Detailed Brain Map Shows Neurons for Words’ Meanings”.

Ultra-detailed brain map shows neurons that encode words’ meaning. For the first time, scientists identify individual brain cells linked to the linguistic essence of a word…

To an extent, the researchers were able to determine what people were hearing by watching their neurons fire. Although they couldn’t recreate exact sentences, they could tell, for example, that a sentence contained an animal, an action and a food, and the order in which the words appeared…

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended takes us to the Villain Pub to contend with “A Despicable QUIET PLACE”.

Fallout, The Last of Us, A Quiet Place – so many apocalypse stories! So what happens when a Ghoul, a Clicker and Death Angel walk into a bar and what do the other villains think about them?

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

Pixel Scroll 1/28/24 Intergalactic Antiques Road Show

Posted on January 28, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) GALAXY QUEST FUNKOS. Slashfilm rejoices: “Cool Stuff: By Grabthar’s Hammer, Galaxy Quest Funko POPs Have Arrived!”

… Funko has revealed three new POP vinyl figures of Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen) as Commander Peter Quincy Taggart, Sir Alexander (Alan Rickman) as Dr. Lazarus, and Fred Kwan (Tony Shalhoub) as Tech Sergeant Chen. They’re all given the classic look from the original “Galaxy Quest” TV series, though they’re not intended to be the classic versions of their characters. If they were, Tim Allen’s hair mold would probably look more retro. However, they did depict Fred Kwan with that semi-squinted expression in his eyes, which only really happened when he was fully in character on the show. Personally, I’d like to have a series of “Galaxy Quest” Funko POPs with them looking disheveled, such as Sir Alexander with hair poking out of his torn alien headpiece.

What’s a little disappointing is the lack of the rest of the original crew, with no figures for Gwen DiMarco (Sigourney Weaver) as Lt. Tawny Madison and Tommy Webber (Daryl Mitchell) as Laredo in sight. Seems like quite an oversight to exclude both the woman and the Black cast members from the movie/series, especially since the packaging for the other figures indicates that there are two other “Galaxy Quest” Funko POPs on the way…

(2) AFTER ACTION REPORT PART II. {By Steven French.] [Part I was in a previous Scroll.] It wouldn’t be a fantasy exhibition in Leeds without *some* mention of JRR! Leeds Central Library’s Fantasy: Realms of Imagination included a couple of displays with Tolkien-related material including one with a photo of his and Edith’s house in West Park, out on the edge of the city, as well as two of his poems that were published in the university student magazine The Gryphon. One, ‘Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’ not only features a dragon on its hoard but also makes mention of a ring (!). The other, ‘Light as Leaf on Lindentree’ , from 1925, eventually became the Song of Beren and Lúthien which Strider recited to the hobbits on Weathertop.

(3) AFTER ACTION REPORT PART III. [By Steven French.] And finally (honest!), no fantasy exhibition would be complete without a dragon or two and Fantasy: Realms of Imagination at Leeds Central Library had its fair share, including this fine example:

Plus an egg or two:

But my favourite was this little fellow, made by the Bermantofts Pottery of east Leeds:

(Bermantofts Pottery also made the ox-blood faïence (glazed terracotta tiles) for the facades of such London Underground stations as Covent Garden and Russell Square)

Even the reading room, with its magnificent ceiling, took part in the spot-the-dragon competition (can you see it?!):

Fun for kids of all ages!

(4) ABOUT THOSE SMOFCON VIDEOS. Ersatz Culture advanced this “Modest Proposal” about the Chengdu panels at SMOFcon:

If WSFSy types want to try to rebuild trust, maybe they could start by making the videos of the Chengdu panels at Smofcon back in Dec available to all?

AIUI currently they are available to anyone who forks out for a membership, but as a gesture of good faith, make them free? pic.twitter.com/0wAC5fCBkZ
— ErsatzCulture (@ErsatzCulture) January 28, 2024

Link for that panel description: https://t.co/9Ka7M6t6cR
— ErsatzCulture (@ErsatzCulture) January 28, 2024

He’s also posted this at Mastodon, where Cheryl Morgan gave a response that can be read at the link.

(5) TIANWEN. The “Tianwen” project was announced in Chengdu last October with the cooperation of representatives of several professional writers groups and Hugo Award Administrator Dave McCarty. This puff piece encompasses what we know so far: “Tianwen: Unveiling China’s Diverse Science Fiction to the World” at News Directory 3. While the publicity seeks to associate a new literature prize with the Hugo brand, it does not appear to claim a formal connection to the WSFS award.

The announcement and unveiling of the “Tianwen” project at the first Industrial Development Summit of the World Science Fiction Conference is set to revolutionize the Chinese science fiction scene. This global project, launched by the Chinese Authors Association and the Organizing Committee of the World Science Fiction Conference, aims to discover new talents, support science fiction works, and promote the integrated development of the industry.

The project was unveiled by Alai, Vice Chairman of the Chinese Writers Association, Hiroshi Osawa, Chairman of the Japan Science Fiction Writers Association, and Dave McCarty, head of the Hugo Award Selection Committee. Alai expressed his hope that “Qu Yuan’s romanticism and idealism will be better publicized in ‘Tianwen’”, while Osawa emphasized the impact of the project on shaping the future generation.

The “Tianwen” plan includes the establishment of the Tianwen Global Science Fiction Literature Prize, which will be awarded annually from 2024. This prize aims to encourage new and young writers, focusing on their innovative literary works and expression of new cultural fields. It will serve as an important supplement to the prestigious Hugo Awards and contribute to the diversity of the Hugo culture.

Additionally, the “Tianwen” project will host various activities to promote the integrated development of the global science fiction industry. These include sub-forums, award ceremonies, promotion conferences, creation salons, exhibitions, and industry roadshows.

Liang Xiaolan, the chairman of the World Science Fiction Conference Chengdu 2023, emphasized that “Tianwen” is not only an award and program, but also a platform for the industrial development of national science fiction culture. This initiative aims to elevate Chinese science fiction to a global level and promote exchange and collaboration between China and foreign countries.

With the inclusion of Chinese works in the selection process of the Hugo Awards for the first time, “Tianwen” will play a crucial role in showcasing Chinese science fiction to a wider audience. Dave McCarty views “Tianwen” as a valuable platform for international science fiction exchange, leading the way for the global science fiction industry….

(6) LESS PAIN, MORE GAIN. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The Directors Guild of America–the most prominent Hollywood Guild that did not strike last year—has now gotten a bump in several contract areas to more closely match their sibling guilds. You know, the siblings who did walk the picket lines. “DGA, the Guild That Didn’t Strike, Gets Improved Contract Terms” in Variety.

The Directors Guild of America, the Hollywood union that did not strike last year, told members Thursday that it has won additional gains, including a viewership bonus for streaming shows.

DGA members will get a 50% residual bump for work on the most-watched shows on streaming platforms, matching the terms won by the Writers Guild of America.

The DGA also got increases in several other areas, including a .5% increase in pension and health contributions in both the second and third year of the contract.

The DGA agreed to a three-year deal with the major studios on June 3, about a month into the WGA strike. At the time, DGA negotiators did not seek a viewership-based bonus, instead choosing to focus on a 21% increase in streaming residuals to account for the growth in foreign subscribers.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers was not obligated to reopen the terms of that deal, which was ratified by 87% of the members. But by doing so, and matching the streaming residual terms obtained by the WGA, the AMPTP helps DGA leadership make the case to its members that they were not disadvantaged by refusing to strike….

(7) BACK TO THE MOON. Maya St. Clair praises Samantha Harvey’s novel in “ORBITAL Review: the stars look very different today” at News from the Orb.

…When literary authors cross over into science fiction, they often do so as enlightened homesteaders, equipped with notions of the field’s backwardness and confidence that their own innovative ideas will reform the backwaters of tropey sci-fi for the better. (Remember when Ian McEwan — in A. D. 2019 — told sci-fi writers that they’d better start “actually looking at the human dilemmas” that would arise with high-level AI?)

Samantha Harvey falls into a different camp, in that she’s not attempting what we might consider “science fiction” — not exactly. I initially found Orbital (2022) because it was displayed the sci-fi section of my library; however, Harvey has described it as “space realism”: a rendering of life in space as humans currently experience it. Orbital takes place in the near future, on an international space station (the ISS in all but name), wherein six astronauts live and work, sheltered from the black void by its narrow walls. Their daily tasks are structured and mundane, and nothing happens in the novel (spacewalks, toilet repairs, floating dinners served in bags) that hasn’t happened in real life. No speculative elements, except a new manned mission to the moon, are introduced.

That being said, sci-fi fans would do themselves a disservice in skipping Orbital. Although it has no aliens or new technology, it’s one of the most inventive and immersive novels I’ve read in a long time.

(8) A HIGH WIRE ACT. That’s what Paul Weimer says readers are witnessing in his review of the final volume of a trilogy by Kevin Hearne, A Curse of Krakens: “Seven Kennings Trilogy and the Power of Story” at Nerds of a Feather.

…Right at the start, we find that this novel, and this trilogy is about the telling of story. A bard with the power of a Kenning, in particular the magical ability to project his voice, begins to tell the war-weary city of the war that they themselves are suffering privation under. We are in medias res of the Giant’s War, and the bard, we soon learn, has been sent to tell the story of the Giants War and prepare the populace for what is to come next.

But it’s not a simple linear narrative. This is not a simple recitation of facts. The bard has collected and (with his flawless memory) organized a raft of stories from, ultimately, twenty or so points of view. This sounds absolutely unwieldy and unsustainable and it is a high wire act that Hearne works at through the books. Hearne manages it by telling the stories of these characters through the bard in a narratively interesting and engaging order, which is not a straight up order by dates. And by having the bard tell the stories, we can use present day events in Pelemyn itself as a breather and a buffer from the stories he tells.

What’s more, this ambitious three volume out of order narrative drives plot right up to the “present”…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 28, 1981 — Elijah Wood, 43. In Elijah Wood, we’ve an actor that I always enjoy watching. Best known here and in the greater film community for being Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, he has a much more extensive film career.

Elijah Wood in 2011. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

He makes his debut in a blink and you’ll miss it performance as Video Game Boy #2 in Back to the Future Part II; he next has a significant genre role as Nat Cooper in Forever Young, the screenplay being written by J. J. Abram from his story named “The Rest of Daniel”.

He next shows up as the young Mike Marshall (primary version) in Radio Flyer with Tom Hanks playing, uncredited the older version and the film narrator. Fantastic film that.

Then he’s Huck in, well, The Adventures of Huck Finn. Haven’t seen it, but the usual suspects at Rotten Tomatoes who did see this Disney Production did like it and gave it a seventy-three rating. I know it’s not genre, but I like the story. A lot.

Elijah Wood in 2019. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

Next is SF in Deep Impact where he plays, let me see my notes, Leo Biederman, a teenage astronomer who discovers the Wolf–Biederman comet . Oh look they cast a teenager as a teenager!

Now we have an adult role for him in one of my favorite films — he’s Patrick Wertz in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Good role, wonderfully executed by him.

Can we skip Sin City pretty please? Yes, I know, and do forgive me here.

He’s got a minor role in, depending in how you frame it, the reboot or new version or remake of The Toxic Avenger. I personally see no reason for such a perfectly trashy film to be made again, do you?

To quote Porky Pig, that’s it folks.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Frazz has a question about lunch.
Candorville shares an interesting collection of filk lullabies.
Tom Gauld has more about the life of books.

“The Christmas gift books settle into the household” My cartoon for this week’s @GuardianBooks pic.twitter.com/XYnttYR0h9
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) January 27, 2024

(11) GRAND PRIX. “Graphic novelist Posy Simmonds wins prestigious French comics award” reports the Guardian.

The graphic novelist Posy Simmonds has won the Grand Prix at France’s Angoulême International Comics festival – the first time a British artist and author has been awarded the world’s most prestigious prize for lifetime achievement in comics.

Simmonds’s satirical observations on modern British society, interweaving detailed illustration with long literary texts, are held to have redefined the graphic novel genre.

She said of the award: “I was gobsmacked – époustouflée, as you would say in French … It’s extraordinary because if you’re writing or drawing, you work in a room on your own, and it’s then very extraordinary when the book, or your work, or you are given a lot of exposure.”…

(12) FREE READ. Sunday Morning Transport has another free story – “The Empty Throne” by Benjamin C. Kinney – to encourage new subscribers.

For the final free-to-read story of January, Benjamin C. Kinney takes us to 19th century Budapest, where a young woman wrestles with her father’s angels. Note: Should you be inclined towards tremendous footnotes, the author has linked one at the end of the story for you to peruse.

(13) SQUISHMALLOWS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] This Entertainment Weekly article recommends these as Valentine’s Day gifts. Hmpf. Perhaps for one’s young nephew, or niece, but it might be just a little bit ick (or EW) to give an adult love interest a squishy pillow-shaped plush styled after an underage tween/teen. “Harry Potter Squishmallows are available at Amazon just in time for Valentine’s Day”.

… Your wish has been granted with no wand-waving needed, as Harry Potter Squishmallows now exist. The lovable main character has been reimagined into a poofy, cozy plush toy that will delight any HP fan come Valentine’s Day. The Gryffindor legend has his glasses, Hogwarts house robe, and trademark lightning bolt scar all in an ultra-huggable material.

If you’re interested in snapping up the OG trio, Ron Weasley is also available, and Hermione Granger can be preordered now, too, with the official launch date set for February 13….

(14) THUNDERBOLT FANTASY. A new episode of the Anime Explorations Podcast is up today, where they discuss the second season of the Taiwanese Wuxia Puppet series Thunderbolt Fantasy, with special guest Tom Merritt of the Daily Tech News Show and Sword & Laser Podcast. “Anime Explorations Podcast: Episode 16: Thunderbolt Fantasy Season 2”.

(15) BASKETBALL MOANS. I don’t know. Maybe you can figure it out: “Tyra Banks Nets, Furries Clip Goes Viral” at Buzzfeed.

…The clip that began picking up steam was Tyra on the Jumbotron, covering her eyes with her hands as the two furries leaned over her to caress one another….

Tyra Banks is at Barclays Center tonight with a couple of furries pic.twitter.com/iAHe4ICl8H
— Nets Videos (@SNYNets) January 24, 2024

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

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