Tag Archives: Dune

Pixel Scroll 4/6/26 I Gave My Love A Pixel, Without A Scroll

Posted on by
13

(1) NEBULA CONFERENCE PROGRAM POSTED. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has launched its preliminary program for its 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference, running from June 3-7 in Chicago, Illinois: “Nebula Awards Conference Weekend Program – SFWA”. [Click for larger image.]

…The Nebulas are an opportunity to celebrate SFWA’s latest finalists and their works in Chicago this June 3-7, along with SFWA’s 42nd Grand Master N. K. Jemisin, latest Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award recipient David Langford, and current Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award recipient Gay Haldeman.

The Nebula Awards Conference is also an excellent opportunity to network with fellow writers, expand industry horizons, and pursue professional development goals in science fiction, fantasy, and related genres.

This year’s conference is packed with in-person and virtual offerings and strongly celebrates our theme of Worldbuilding & Worldbreaking. You can check out our preliminary schedule at our new programming station on SFWA.org. Full panelist complements and final modifications will be added soon….

(2) HE’LL TELL YOU HIMSELF. SyFy Wire interviews director Jonah Tulis about a Rod Serling documentary heavily featuring Serling’s own voice drawn from contemporaneous Dictaphone recordings. “Leonardo DiCaprio Producing Rod Serling Twilight Zone Doc, Serling”.

Half a century after his death, trailblazing Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling tells the story of his life and career in a new documentary from director Jonah Tulis (Console Wars, Gamestop: Rise of the Players). 

Appropriately titled Serling, the film does not follow the standard documentary format, insofar as there are no talking heads…

…For the most part, the narrative comprises archival audio of its titular subject, who recorded almost everything—scripts, letters, speeches—on his trusty dictaphone. “His voice is so iconic,” Tulis said. “It should be the linchpin of any documentary.”

Tulis took a serious leap of faith by foregoing tradition and in doing so, forged a new breed of documentary, “whose boundaries,” if you’ll allow us to quote the great Mr. Serling, “are that of imagination.” Thankfully, he had trusting partners in Rod’s two daughters, Anne and Jodi Serling, the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way.

“They brought in the financing and were very actively involved in this because they’re big fans and think it’s a great story,” Tulis said of DiCaprio and his team. “They don’t need to do this kind of film. There’s a reason they chose to do a film like this—it’s an important film that people care about in that world.”

Getting the green light, however, turned out to be the easy part. The real work began as Tulis dove headfirst into three different archives of Serling material at the Ithaca College Library, UCLA Film and Television Archive, and University of Wisconsin.

The dictaphone recordings proved particularly tricky because “they were really out of order,” shared the director. “There was no rhyme or reason to it. You could kind figure out what era it came from based on what he was talking about, but it wasn’t as easy as you think. You’re hearing some things about passion and politics and then some things about a car mechanic.”…

(3) NOISES ON. “Trailblazers, trumpets and the theremin: 10 soundtracks that changed the way we listen to movies” in the Guardian. Almost half of these are sff!

The music of cinema’s earliest years played a crucial role in how audiences – with a live pianist or organist soundtracking the silent movie – experienced the stories on screen. But it wasn’t until the advent of synchronised sound that they were guaranteed the same musical experience.

Even that moment, widely regarded to be 1926’s Don Juan – an otherwise silent film – wasn’t a true soundtrack. Warner Bros used the Vitaphone system, essentially a recording on disc that was played with the picture. The same system was used for 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the first film for which voices were synchronised to the picture as well. Playing a disc to picture was unreliable, and it wasn’t long before music could be printed directly on to the celluloid of the film itself and the soundtrack proper was born.

Film music as we know it quickly found its feet in the early 1930s. This was largely thanks to European émigré composers who brought with them a stylistic flair and narrative framework born of opera, the symphony and the music hall. Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songwriters followed, adding to the rich seam of musicality that would be the bedrock of Hollywood music for years to come. Today, almost a century later, the basics of what a film’s musical soundtrack is and how it functions remain relatively unchanged. But which have moved the artform along and changed the way we listen to movies?

Here are two of their ten:

King Kong (1933)

Though he had cut his teeth on a string of films before this, most of them without credit, Austrian-born Max Steiner refined just exactly how a film score could function with this classic for RKO. His meticulous application of the orchestra to attend to matters of musical narrative, structure, scene setting and emotional nuance was a huge part of the film’s impact and success. Indeed, King Kong was the foundation and framework on which all symphonic Hollywood film music that followed was built, and in some respects still is.

Forbidden Planet (1956)

Years before the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was founded, pioneering couple Louis and Bebe Barron were creating otherworldly sounds for magnetic tape. Hollywood had flirted with electronic sounds, most notably the theremin – as used by the likes of Dimitri Tiomkin in The Thing from Another World and Herrmann in The Day the Earth Stood Still (both 1951). For Forbidden Planet, however, the Barrons crafted the first ever completely electronic film score. Its blurring of effects and music surprised and delighted audiences and inspired a new generation of composers.

(4) WHAT’S THAT SMELL? [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s Keith Stuart tries out the latest Mario Galaxy toiletry tie-ins: “’I am trapped in a sweet-smelling cycle of video game-branded toiletries’: Lush’s Mario Galaxy range, reviewed”.

When The Super Mario Bros Movie came out in 2023, it came with a rather unlikely tie-in: a range of skincare and bathing products from cosmetics chain Lush. The store, known for its devotion to natural ingredients and support for social justice causes, didn’t seem like the obvious partner for a major video game franchise. Because of this, I thought I should try them out, assuming that my dalliance with beauty journalism would be short-lived.

I was wrong. The collection was so successful, Lush later released a Minecraft range, which I also reviewed, and now there’s a Super Mario Galaxy range to tie in with the new movie. Somehow, I have become the Guardian’s Lush correspondent and it seems I am now trapped in a sweet-smelling cycle of video game-branded toiletries. There are definitely worse fates, so I’m just going with it.

As a dedicated professional, I tried most of the tie-in products, including body sprays, shower gels and lip balms. The new movie has Mario, Luigi, Yoshi and Peach blasting off into the cosmos to help cosmic guardian Rosalina escape infamous dinosaur criminal Bowser. So, naturally, there are a lot of space references. The Princess Rosalina lip scrub contains little edible stars, the Protect the Galaxy shower gel has a lovely sparkly lustre, and the shower jelly has little Lumas suspended in it as though they’re floating in zero gravity….

(5) MAJOR SFF COLLECTION GOES TO AUCTION. “The David Aronovitz Collection of Important Science Fiction and Fantasy” will be sold by Heritage Auctions in two stages. Part I is scheduled for May 13, and Part II for December 9.

Heritage Auctions is proud to present The David Aronovitz Collection of Important Science Fiction and Fantasy, one of — if not the — greatest collection of science fiction books ever to appear at auction, offered across a series of sales. The quality, depth, and breadth of the collection cannot be overstated, and these sales represent a true landmark in the field. The collection includes cornerstones of the genre from authors such as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, H. P. Lovecraft, E. E. Smith, J. R. R. Tolkien, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and many others. First editions are generously represented, with a particular focus on dedication, association, and presentation copies, as well as proof copies, typescripts, and limited editions.

One of the lots is “A complete run of the books published by the Arkham House” – imagine what that will sell for! (Although not quite as much as it might, because Heritage notes: “The Outsider and Others‘ dust jacket is a facsimile.”)

The present collection consists of 165 titles published by Arkham House from 1939 to 1984. Sixty-four titles are either signed or inscribed by their respective authors including: August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and A. E. van Vogt.

Founded in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei for the sole purpose of preserving and publishing the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Arkham House stands as one of the most important small presses in the history of macabre and speculative literature. Determined that Lovecraft’s work should not disappear into the obscurity of pulp magazines, Derleth and Wandrei scraped together the funds necessary to establish their own publishing house….

(6) WHEN WELLES PERFOMED BRADBURY. “’Something Wicked’ – Orson Welles 1983 radio show” at Wellesnet.

Orson Welles’ radio legacy is most closely associated with his 1930s work, from The March of Time to The Shadow and the celebrated productions of The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Those programs secured his place in broadcasting history and continue to define his reputation in the medium.

Yet Welles’ radio career did not end there. He remained active into the 1940s and beyond, returning intermittently in later decades—including, as the narrator of a syndicated 1983 adaptation of Something Wicked This Way Comes, a production that likely marked the final chapter in his radio career.

The radio show utilized audio from the Walt Disney-produced movie of the same name, which starred Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce.

Author Mark Edlitz, currently at work on a two-volume examination of Welles’ radio career, has studied Something Wicked This Way Comes closely.

“I’ve been tracking down some of his more obscure appearances. It appears that this is indeed his final radio project. That distinction alone makes it worthy of attention, but the program is notable for other reasons as well,” Edlitz said. “Most striking is that Welles was still finding work in radio in the 1980s. Five decades after his early professional work in the 1930s on shows like The March of Time and Cavalcade of Stars, his name and voice remained marketable and remarkable attributes.”

It would be wrong to dismiss the radio adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dark fantasy as little more than a marketing tie-in for the Disney film, he noted.

“The program is more than that. It is a sincere effort to create an unsettling, disorienting, and dreamlike, almost trance-like experience for the listener, while showcasing Ray Bradbury’s evocative language,” Edlitz said. “Welles isn’t merely reading ad copy. He is the centerpiece of the program, delivering a commanding performance on radio one last time.”

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Poul Anderson & Karen Anderson’s “Cosmic Concepts”

This is less about “Cosmic Concepts” of which I offer up the first two stanzas , but rather all of the splendid poetry of The Unicorn Trade. Let’s not forget that.

Now most of you know that this collection which is by Poul & Karen Anderson was published first by Tor forty-two years ago. It’s an amazing collection of stories, poems, and, errr, science fiction haikus, something I never knew even existed. Oh, and that most excellent cover art is by Tom Kidd. 

I am not by any means a big poetry fan but I was quite delighted by everything that was here for poetry, most of which is by her. The poetry is a sheer joy to read. Of the collection starts off with “The Unicorn Trade”, a stellar affair, by her but I will also single out “Haiku for Mars” and “Professor James” by both of them. A deep drink of their favorite ale is in order! 

And now those stanzas

This is the science fiction story.
This is the young man full of pride,
whose gadgets work the first time tried
in a science fiction story.

This is the elder scientist,
every year on the honors list,
who trained the young man full of pride,
whose gadgets work the first time tried
in a science fiction story.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 6, 1937 — Billy Dee Williams, 89.

Rather obviously, Billy Dee Williams’ best-known role is as — and no I did know this was his full name — Landonis Balthazar “Lando” Calrissian III. He was introduced in The Empire Strikes Back as a longtime friend of Han Solo and the administrator of the floating Cloud City on the gas planet Bespin. 

(So have I mentioned, I’ve only watched the original trilogy, and this is my favorite film of that trilogy? If anyone cares to convince me I’ve missed something by not watching the later films, go ahead.) 

He is Lando in the original trilogy, as well in as the sequel, The Rise of Skywalker, thirty-six years later. The Star Wars fandom site thinks this might be the longest interval between first playing a character and later playing the same character, being a thirty-six year gap.

He returned to the role within the continuity in the animated Star Wars Rebels series, voicing the role in “Idiot’s Array” and “The Siege of Lothal” episodes. Truly great series if you haven’t seen, and available of course on Disney+. 

He voiced him in two audio dramas with one being the full cast adaption of Timothy Zahn’s Dark Empire. 

Now this is where it gets silly, really silly. The most times he’s been involved with the character is in the Lego ‘verse. Between 2024 with The Lego Movie to Billy Dee Williams returned to the role in the Star Wars: Summer Vacation in 2022, he has voiced Lando in eight Lego films, mostly made as television specials.

Going from hero to villain, he was Harvey Dent in Batman, and yes in The Lego Batman Movie. Really they made it. I’d like to say I remember him here but than they would admitting this film made an impression on me which it decidedly didn’t. None of the Batman films did in the Eighties.

He’s in Mission Impossible as Hank Benton, an enforcer for a monster, in “The Miracle” episode; he’s Ferguson in  Epoch: Evolution, the sequel to Epoch, which looks like quite silly, and I’m using this term deliberately, sci-film, and finally he voiced himself on Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?,  the thirteenth television series in the Scooby-Doo franchise. 

Billy Dee Williams

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) THE ROADS MUST ROLL. “In 1871, cities almost got moving sidewalks. Why are we still waiting?” asks Yahoo!

In 1872, New York City’s Broadway was a slow-moving snarl of horses, wagons, and pedestrians, all competing along the same well-worn corridor. Alfred Speer, a merchant known around town as “The Wine Man,” believed the congestion outside his Broadway wine shop, across the street from City Hall, was costing him customers. Speer’s solution was not modest: He proposed an elevated sidewalk, running the length of Broadway, moving constantly at 10 miles per hour, with settees for riders who wanted to sit or chat along the way. He called it the “Endless Traveling Sidewalk.” New York’s state legislature passed the proposal—twice. And the governor, John Dix, vetoed it—twice. More than 150 years later, Broadway is still a gridlocked nightmare, and our sidewalks still don’t move….

…In the 1870s, industrialization fueled the rapid growth of American cities following the Civil War. Traditional modes of transportation, mainly horse-drawn carriages and carts, gave way to steam-driven light rail, like Manhattan’s Elevated Railway, the Third Avenue Elevated Railroad, and Brooklyn’s Sea Beach and Coney Island Railroad.

In response to the competition from streetcars and elevated rails, Speer began to embellish his moving sidewalk design. His new idea offered separate tracks running at different speeds, one for walking, one for outdoor seating, and a third for enclosed travel with accommodations. All would be moving at 12 to 16 mph in a continuous loop from The Bowery, a bustling neighborhood bordering Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to Central Park. According to a description in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, “Mr. Speer proposes to have drawing-rooms every hundred feet: some of them to be fitted with toilet-rooms exclusively for ladies.” Speer also envisioned providing “gentlemen…with smoking-apartments at convenient distances.”…

(11) IN DEMAND. “’Dune: Part Three’ Imax 70MM Shows Are Already Selling Out” reports Deadline.

Dune: Part Three doesn’t open until December 18, but Warner Bros is reporting that 70MM Imax shows are already selling out for the Denis Villeneuve-directed threequel in both North America and London.

Essentially, we understand that the sold-out shows are for the opening weekend (Thursday-Sunday) — one show a day at 19 Imax locations. More tickets will be going on sale soon for the Legendary-Warner Bros co-production.

(12) HUNGRY DÉCOR. Titlemedle would love to sell you this “Whimsical Metal Carnivorous Plant Garden Stake”.

Give your garden something a little more unexpected.

This whimsical carnivorous plant metal garden stake is made for people who want their outdoor space to feel fun, creative, and full of personality. With three dramatic open-mouth blooms rising from curved stems, it brings a playful fantasy feel with just the right hint of gothic charm.

Tuck it into a flower bed, planter, lawn, or patio corner and it instantly becomes the piece people notice first. It’s quirky, eye-catching, and a lot more fun than ordinary garden decor.

(13) NUCLEAR MARS MISSION. [Item by Steven French.] Scientists express skepticism over NASA’s Mars mission, according to this article in Science:  “History and mystery surround NASA’s 2028 nuclear Mars mission”.

Last week, at an event dubbed “Ignition,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman shocked the planetary science community when he announced a December 2028 mission to Mars. It wasn’t simply because of its ambitious timeline, but because the spacecraft would carry a fission reactor—the first test of space nuclear propulsion in more than 60 years.

“I confess I was more than a little surprised,” says Vicky Hamilton, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. “A lot of folks at NASA don’t even understand all the details of what’s going on.”

The mission, with an unspecified price tag, would deploy three helicopters to the martian surface to scout for ice and future human landing sites. But the hubbub surrounds their ferry: a spacecraft called Space Reactor-1 (SR-1) Freedom, which will use nuclear electric propulsion to power its interplanetary journey. Offering higher speeds from far less fuel than standard rockets, the technology could be key to unlocking exploration of the outer Solar System and enabling human space settlements closer by. But although it’s backed by decades of research and an eager industrial base, engineers and scientists say launching such a system in 2028—the next launch window for Mars—will be fraught with technical and regulatory problems….

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

Pixel Scroll 3/17/26 Last Night I Watched The Planets In My Pajamas

Posted on by
19

(1) THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS. “Noelle W. Ihli on Reading Survival Thrillers in a World of Real Danger” at CrimeReads.

Readers often ask me some version of the same question: How can I stand writing survival thrillers when there’s already so much terror and stress to survive in the real world?…

…Most days, I read at least a handful of truly disturbing headlines before my morning coffee. So why, on top of all that, would anyone choose to pick up (or write, cough) a book about being hunted, trapped, abducted, or chased down a rural highway?

I’ve learned a lot about the answer to that question over the past five years, since I started writing thrillers full-time.

I’m already an anxious person in my day-to-day life. And honestly, I expected my anxiety to skyrocket with my new career path. (To be fair, it still does when I’m writing a particularly suspenseful or scary scene.) But here’s the thing I always intuitively knew as a reader, that I’ve learned even more as a writer: Survival thrillers do something real life doesn’t.

They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is no limbo.

It’s all over in a night, if you binge that book.

In everyday life, anxiety can feel shapeless and never-ending. It follows us to work, to sleep, to the grocery store, to the car, even on vacation. Thrillers take that fear and anxiety and give it a shape. They lay out the danger, the person facing it, the ordeal to survive, and the resolution. And for those of us who live with that constant hum of anxiety, experiencing that narrative arc is priceless….

(2) DUNE 3. Variety introduces the “Dune 3 Trailer: Timotheé Chalamet, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson at War”.

“It’s a trailer launch? It looks like a premiere,” Denis Villeneuve joked after introducing the stars of “Dune Part Three” to an AMC theater full of journalists, film critics, bloggers and creators in Los Angeles on the Monday after the Oscars….

… “Dune: Part Three,” inspired by Frank Herbert’s “Dune: Messiah,” tells the story of what happens after Paul — the warrior prince and chosen one — defeats the Harkonnens and becomes Emperor, embracing his role as the Fremen’s messiah and initiating a holy war. He also marries Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) for political power, causing Chani to abandon him. The teaser features explosive glimpses of the galactic conflict that follows, as well as the internal battles that plague Paul….

…. The clip opens with Paul and Chani in happier times, discussing baby names. “If we have a girl what should we name her?” Chani asks. “Her name should be Ghanima. She would need to be strong like her mother,” Paul replies, then asks, “What if it’s a boy?” Chani replies: “I would name him Leto, so he would have the wisdom of his grandfather.”

“Dune” fans will immediately recognize this bit of foreshadowing, but we won’t spoil it here. Instead, let’s relish the gorgeous, lens-flared footage of Zendaya walking along the dunes, while Chani is still the “heartbeat” of Villeneuve’s story, this is “Dune,” not “Under the Tuscan Sun.”…

(3) HIGHEST POST-OSCAR VIEWING BUMPS. JustWatch shared some streaming insights from the Oscars on Sunday, highlighting the films that saw the biggest uplift in streaming popularity in the 24 hours following the 98th Academy Awards.

The following insights are based on the 20 million monthly JustWatch users in the US:
Documentaries and short films saw the biggest post-Oscars surge in popularity.

  • Mr. Nobody Against Putin (+524%) and All the Empty Rooms (+661%) recorded the strongest growth following their wins.
  • Short film Two People Exchanging Saliva also saw a significant increase (+334%).
  • Among major winners, One Battle After Another (Best Picture) led with a +231% rise in streaming interest.
  • Sinners followed as the second most popular Big-Five winner, up +136%.

(4) BRING ME MY SPEAR: O CLOUDS UNFOLD: BRING ME MY CHARIOT OF FIRE. “Trapped! Inside a Self-Driving Car During an Anti-Robot Attack.” The New York Times reports, “In San Francisco, some passengers of autonomous taxis have experienced an unexpected hazard: being stuck in the vehicles when the cars are assaulted.” (Behind a paywall.)

In January, Doug Fulop was riding home from a night out in San Francisco when a man crossed the street in front of his car, doubled back and began screaming at him. The man punched the car’s windows and tried lifting up the vehicle. He then yelled that he wanted to kill Mr. Fulop and the other two passengers for giving money to a robot.

A taxi driver would have simply driven away. But Mr. Fulop’s vehicle had no driver — it was a self-driving Waymo.

“We felt helpless,” said Mr. Fulop, 37, who works in the tech industry.

Since autonomous cars started roaming San Francisco streets almost four years ago, they have elicited an array of unexpected behaviors from humans, including angry protests against the vehicles. That has created an unexpected hazard for passengers of self-driving cars all around the city: being stuck inside the vehicle during an anti-robot rant.

Self-driving cars are designed to stop moving if a person is nearby. People can take advantage of that function to harass and threaten their passengers. In 2024, a San Francisco man tried covering the sensors of a self-driving car that had stopped, effectively disabling it, while passengers were inside. Another video from that year showed three women screaming as a group of vandals tagged their autonomous taxi with spray paint.

It was unsettling to be trapped inside a Waymo during an attack, Mr. Fulop said. “If he had kept hammering on one window instead of alternating, I’m sure he would have eventually broken through,” he said.

The attacker did not appear to be on drugs or otherwise impaired, but seemed to be overtaken by extreme anger at the self-driving car, Mr. Fulop said. It did not seem safe to get out and run, he added, since the man was trying to open the locked doors and said he wanted to kill the passengers.

They called 911 and Waymo’s support line, Mr. Fulop said. Waymo told them that it would not manually direct the car away if someone was standing nearby, and that the passengers would be OK with the doors locked. The car’s software does not allow riders to jump into the driver’s seat and take over during an incident.

The attack lasted around six minutes. By then, bystanders had begun cheering on the man, Mr. Fulop said. That distracted the man, who moved far enough away from the car that it could finally drive away.

San Francisco police officers showed up shortly after. A police report reviewed by The New York Times supported Mr. Fulop’s account….

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

March 17, 1948 — William Gibson, 78.

By Paul Weimer: The High Duke of Cyberpunk.

I first came to William Gibson like many other people, with Neuromancer. It took me a few years to get to it, I was still working through 50s to 80s SF through much of the 1980s, so it wasn’t until I was an adult that I finally got a deep dive into Cyberpunk.

I started with Neuromancer, of course, and found out why everyone was so interested and so enthused about it. I still think it holds up, even now, I re-read it a few years ago.  But I do admit that other Gibson novels stand on their own, and not on the shoulders of Neuromancer alone. But Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive are, basically, what a lot of people think of when they think of “cyberpunk”. One can thank, or blame, The Matrix for taking so many notes from the Sprawl books in order to transmit that aesthetic and idea into the mainstream.

The Difference Engine, for example, which he co-wrote with Sterling, feels very dated now (and some of his attitudes are pretty awful, I think, even now), but it stands as an icon of Steampunk even today. Once again, aesthetics are important, even more so than Cyberpunk, in conveying a mood and an idea (or even, gasp, a VIBE) to science fiction. 

But would I have new readers start with either? No. I think the novel that really captures his voice, his importance and his strengths as a writer is The Peripheral. I highly enjoyed the Amazon series, even given the liberties that it took with the source material, but I think that it is a good way for people to be introduced to the virtual reality and other technological ideas that Gibson brings to the table. In a real way, The Peripheral shows how important Gibson and his point of view on technology and science fiction are in a way few have matched in any era. That makes him, in my mind, one of the advocates of a phrase I coined during the Chengdu Ineligibility, of the Science Fiction Project. 

So in the end one might say that Gibson is a godfather, or one of the prime movers at the very least, of two subgenres of science fiction, in addition to being an advocate for the Science Fiction Project. That’s a solid legacy. And as mentioned above with The Peripheral, people are still discovering and enjoying Gibson for the first time.

William Gibson

(6) COMICS SECTION.

(7) MEET APOLLO AND ARTEMIS. The US Space & Rocket Center here in Huntsville has a new pair of mascots. A public vote has helped select their names—Apollo and Artemis.

When I first saw their photo, my exact original thought was, “Oh my, that’s a bit terrifying.“ Then, wondering if I was overreacting, I reached out to my brother. He assured me I was not the only one who thought that. He told me that one wag on Reddit suggested they were to warn kids about the dangers of explosive decompression. Another mentioned the “Honeynut Cheerios Bee on meth.”

Anyway, here they are:

And here is Arnold Schwarzenegger undergoing explosive decompression in Total Recall:

(8) FABULOUS PUPPETS. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian shares some lovely backstage photos of My Neighbour Totoro: “’Happy as can be!’ My Neighbour Totoro toasts first birthday in London’s West End”.

The spectacular stage version of Studio Ghibli’s much-loved film has spent a year at the Gillian Lynne theatre in London. To celebrate, photographer Tristram Kenton was granted backstage access…

(9) ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS. [Item by Jeffrey Smith.] “Asteroid Ryugu Contains All 5 DNA and RNA Building Blocks, Study Shows” – Gizmodo has details.

Early Earth was a brutally hot, volcanically active, radiation-bathed wasteland. Somehow amid this hostility, the necessary ingredients for life must have appeared, but where did they come from?

Astronomers have been working to answer that question for decades. They have developed several hypotheses, one of which suggests that asteroids and comets delivered the ingredients to Earth over the course of many collisions. A study published today in Nature Astronomy adds to a growing body of evidence to support this idea, finding all five nucleobases in samples of the asteroid Ryugu.

The five nucleobases are the building blocks of DNA and RNA—the genetic material inherent to all life on Earth. “This result further supports the idea that nucleobases could have been present in primitive asteroids and delivered to the early Earth, potentially contributing to the chemical evolution that preceded the origin of life,” co-author Toshiki Koga, a postdoctoral researcher at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, told Gizmodo in an email….

(10) TODAY’S TITLE EXPLANATION. [By Daniel P. Dern, with apologies to Groucho.] “Last Night I Watched The Planets In My Pajamas” via Grouch Marx, in Animal Crackers (the musical and the movie).

The item: This was in email from Qwoted (where journalists look for quoteable/info sources): ASTRONOMY/SCIENCE/SPACE EXPERT – MISLABELED PLANETS ON KIDS PAJAMAS IN VIRAL REDDIT POST (URGENT) [url1940.qwoted.com]

I’m a reporter at Newsweek and I’m working on a piece about a viral image circulating online that shows children’s pajamas with several planets mislabeled (for example, Jupiter and Mercury appear to be swapped based on size and appearance). I was hoping you might be able to offer a brief expert comment explaining why the labels are scientifically incorrect, particularly from a basic astronomy or early science education…

DPD: This appears to be the original Reddit, or at least, one that matches the criteria: “Planet names switched on kids’ pajamas” r/onejob.

And here’s the Newsweek story that ran: “Space-Themed Kids’ Pajamas Baffle Adults Who Notice Major Design Flaw”.

Dern concludes: It’s all bananas.

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Famous TV Show Cars That Were Lost And Found” from America on Wheels.

The studios sold most of these cars for less than five hundred dollars. The General Lee. KITT. The A-Team Van. Some went straight to the crusher. Others sat forgotten in barns and storage units for thirty years while their owners had absolutely no idea what they were sitting on. Today those same cars are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars — and the stories of how they were found are even better than the shows they came from. Let’s find them.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Daniel Dern, Jeffrey Smith, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 1/4/26 The Effect Of Gamma Rays On Fan-In-The-Moon Pixel Scrolls

Posted on by
12

(1) THE END GAME. Gizmodo learned “The Duffer Brothers Took Inspiration From ‘Lord of the Rings’ for the ‘Stranger Things’ End Credits”.

…“We thought about Return of the King a lot, just in terms of the length of the epilogue,” Matt Duffer told Deadline. “I’m one of those hardcore Lord of the Rings fans, to the point where I’ve watched all extended editions in a row on a single day. If you do that, the epilogue feels absolutely perfect and not long at all.”

“The Rightside Up” has a nearly 45-minute epilogue, so that influence is surely felt.

He continued. “Then we love the credits at the end of Return of the King. So that was the initial idea, and they were these very simple illustrations … We started to talk with Imaginary Forces, which is the title company that did the main title sequence for the show, who we absolutely love and adore. We pitched that maybe it was Will’s notebook of drawings, and then they came back like a week later and suggested, ‘What if it was done actually in the style of a real D&D manual?’”…

(2) INCOMPLETE SET. ComicBook.com explains “Why Doctor Who Lost the Rights to its Own First Episode”.

Whovians in the UK were thrilled when back in 2023, it was announced that to celebrate the 60th anniversary of a certain time-travelling blue police box, all of ‘Classic Who’ – Doctor Who episodes from the show’s first era, spanning from the 1960’s through to the 1980’s, would be made available on BBC iPlayer. The massive collection of over 800 episodes from the show’s history would be accompanied by documentaries and specials, as well as popular spin-offs like Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures to bring together the ‘Whoniverse’.

Of course, fans lamented that the 97 Doctor Who episodes still missing from the BBC archives (lost during the BBC’s clear out of the 1970’s when tapes were routinely wiped for reuse), would not be among the collection – but to have the remaining episodes together in one place finally was more than we could have hoped for. However, more than six decades after the series first aired on the BBC, the very first chapter of its history remains frustratingly out of reach for fans.

This isn’t a case of missing tapes. Instead, it comes down to rights — and an increasingly bitter dispute about intellectual property. Despite the episodes being perfectly available and intact, to this day, fans are unable to legally stream the very story that started it all and introduced the Doctor, the TARDIS, and the core premise of the franchise. An Unearthly Child — the four-part serial that launched Doctor Who in 1963 — is conspicuously absent from the BBC’s otherwise expansive archive on iPlayer, due to a disagreement between the BBC and the son of An Unearthly Child’s writer, Anthony Coburn. It’s a fascinating example of just how complicated intellectual property disputes can become when history, legacy, and the modern streaming age collide and how even a famous global franchise isn’t immune….

… Fans were surprised to learn that those rights apparently now belong to Anthony Coburn’s son, Stef Coburn. This wouldn’t have been a major issue if it hadn’t been for the fact that Coburn has (unfortunately for Whovians) repeatedly refused various licensing agreements offered by the BBC. According to Coburn, his father was treated poorly by the corporation during the 1960s and in later years. He has accused the BBC of plagiarism of his father’s unused scripts and ideas that were allegedly repurposed without giving proper credit or compensation at the time….

(3) WHEN CARING COUNTS. Darcie Little Badger attributes an “outpouring of support and kindness” to her decision to walk back the career announcement she made yesterday. Here’s the original statement with the reasons, and the follow-up.

(4) GOOGLE USED MANY WORKS OF SF TO TRAIN AN AI ABOUT ETHICS. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

I wonder how many of the SF authors in this list were asked for their permission to allow Google to have "the opportunity to draw inspiration from their work" in the dataset used to (irony) train an #AI about ethics?[contd]

— ErsatzCulture (@ersatzculture.bsky.social) 2026-01-04T21:12:04.932Z

Links: arxiv.org/abs/2503.10706 (seems to originally date from March 2025, so maybe this is old news?)Paper (PDF): arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10706GitHub: scifi-benchmark.github.io[contd]

— ErsatzCulture (@ersatzculture.bsky.social) 2026-01-04T21:12:04.933Z

(There are are several pages of film, TV and non-fiction works in the list – including many adaptations of written works, although not credited to the writer of the original – besides the SF fiction shown in the attached images.)

— ErsatzCulture (@ersatzculture.bsky.social) 2026-01-04T21:12:04.934Z

This came to my attention from a Weibo post by San Feng/Feng Zhang that I saw late yesterday.  He makes the comment (via Google Translate): “This may be the most important article missed by the science fiction industry last year.”  The post has a couple of brief comments from Tony Xia (8 Light Minutes, Chengdu Worldcon concom) and Jiang Bo (Hugo finalist).

Follow-up response from Charlie Stross on Mastodon:

(5) CALL TO INVESTIGATE TRADING CARD GRADING. “New York congressman asks for investigation into potential monopoly on trading card grading” reports station KY3.

A New York congressman has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Collectors Universe for potential antitrust violations after the company gained control of more than 80% of the sports card grading market.

Rep. Pat Ryan requested the investigation following Collectors Universe’s acquisition of Beckett, which joined the company’s existing ownership of Professional Sports Authenticator and Sportscard Guaranty Corporation.

According to Gemrate and data from November 2025, Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) graded 1.66 million cards. Certified Guaranty Company (CGC) graded the second most sports and trading cards at 425,000.

The three other leaders in sports and trading card grading, Beckett, Technical Authentication & Grading (TAG), and Sportscard Guaranty Corporation (SGC) combined for 448,000 total grades of cards combined.

According to New York Congressman Pat Ryan’s website, the recent addition of Beckett to the Collectors Holdings portfolio means that one company controls over 80% of the grading volume and is asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the company (Collector Holdings) for antitrust.

According to Congressman Ryan, the commission should investigate:

  • Monopolization: Whether Collectors acquired SGC and Beckett specifically to eliminate competition, and whether internal documents reveal a deliberate strategy of monopolization.
  • Serial Acquisition Pattern: Whether Collectors’ systematic roll-up strategy violates Section 5 of the FTC Act as conduct that inherently produces the cumulative harms the antitrust laws were designed to prevent.
  • Regulatory Evasion: Whether Collēctīvus Holdings functioned as a pass-through entity to evade merger scrutiny, and the extent of Collectors’ involvement in the 2024 acquisition of Beckett.
  • Good-Faith Representations: Whether the post-acquisition marginalization of SGC was contrary to representations made at the time of the merger, and if those actions warrant a court-ordered divestiture or unwinding of the deal.
  • Erosion of Competition: How the elimination of independent rivals has directly impacted consumer pricing, service quality, and turnaround times across the industry.
  • Price and Policy Coordination: What safeguards, if any, prevent Collectors from coordinating pricing, grading standards, and competitive behavior across its three nominally “independent” brands.
  • Barriers to Entry: What structural barriers now prevent new competitors from entering the market, specifically regarding the control of the limited labor pool of professional graders.
  • Market Manipulation: How vertical integration — controlling the grading process, the pricing data through CardLadder, and the marketplace itself — creates unique opportunities for market manipulation and unfair self-dealing.

In the letter to the Federal Trade Commission, Congressman Ryan wrote, “With control over three supposedly independent brands as well as critical trading card inputs, Collectors can now coordinate pricing to suppress competition, influence grade populations to protect market values of internal inventory, and leverage internal data to maximize corporate profit at the expense of consumers. This consolidation threatens the livelihoods of thousands of small businesses, including local card shops, dealers, and auction houses, who no longer have competitive alternatives for essential services.”…

(6) ‘BELIEVE IN YOUR ART’. “Guillermo del Toro: Saying Art Is Not Important Is Prelude to Fascism” reports Variety.

While accepting the directing honor at Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch and Creative Impact Awards brunch during the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Guillermo del Toro told the up-and-coming filmmakers to never listen when “people tell you art is not important,” because that is “always a prelude to fascism.”

“Be kind, be involved, believe in your art,” he said. “At a time when people tell you art is not important, that is always the prelude to fascism. When they tell you it doesn’t matter, when they tell you a fucking app can do art you say, if it’s that important, why the fuck do they want it so bad? The answer is because they think they can debase everything that makes us a little better, a little more human. And that, in my book, and in my life, includes monsters.”…

(7) ERIC LARSON DIES. Eric Larson, who volunteered at many early BayCons, passed on January 3. His wife, Pat Larson, died recently after having a cardiac event.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[By Cat Eldridge.]

January 4, 1958 — Matt Frewer, 68.

I encountered Matt Frewer the same way that I suspect most of you did when he was unrecognizable as Max Headroom almost forty years ago. That character debuted in April 1985 in the Channel 4 film Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future. It’s virtually identical to the premiere of the American television series, though there might be a bit of foul language if I remember correctly. Or not.

Two days after it was broadcast, Max hosted on the same channel The Max Headroom Show, a program where he introduced music videos, made pointed comments on various topics, and conducted rather off the wall interviews with guests before a live studio audience. These would eventually be aired in the States on Cinemax.

Max would become a global spokesperson for New Coke, appearing on way too many TV commercials with the catchphrase “Catch the wave!”.  You can see one of those commercials here

Now we come to the Max Headroom series which on ABC from just March 31, 1987, to May 5, 1988 with just a total of fifteen episodes. Damn it seemed like it lasted longer than that. He, like everyone on the series, was spot on in creating a believable future. I consider it one of the best SF series ever done.

He’s got way too many genre roles to list them all here so let me focus on a few of my favorite ones.

He was Dr. Jim Taggart on Eureka. On screen for a total of eighteen episodes, his Aussie character was the Eureka’s veterinarian and “biological containment specialist”, which means he catches whatever needs to be caught. If it moved and it did something weird, he was after it.

And then he was Dr. Aldous Leekie, the primary Big Bad on the first season of Orphan Black. He was in charge of the handling the clones as if anyone should trust him.

Though I find it hard to believe, the Hallmark Channel produced the Hallmark Sherlock Holmes films. And he was Sherlock Holmes in four of these films — The Sign of Four, The Hound of Baskervilles, The Royal Scandal and The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire.

My final role for him a silly one indeed, it’s in In Search of Dr. Seuss where he is the Cat in The Hat. This thirty-nine-year-old film is a delightful romp  — Christopher Lloyd as Mr. Hunch, Patrick Stewart is Sgt. Mulvaney, and the list goes on far too long to give in full here. 

And yes, he’s been in a lot of genre films, go ahead and tell me your favorite.

Matt Frewer

(9) COMICS SECTION.

A new year cartoon for @theguardian.com books

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2026-01-04T11:27:19.788Z

(10) GUESSING WHY. “J. R. R. Tolkien Admitted to Disliking Dune ‘With Some Intensity’ (1966)” recalls Open Culture.

The reader equally dedicated to the work of J. R. R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert turns out to be a more elusive creature than we may expect, but perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us, given Tolkien’s own attitude toward Dune.

“It is impossible for an author still writing to be fair to another author working along the same lines,” Tolkien wrote in 1966 to a fan who’d sent him a copy of Herbert’s book, which had come out the year before. “In fact I dislike DUNE with some intensity, and in that unfortunate case it is much the best and fairest to another author to keep silent and refuse to comment.”…

… Maybe it was the aristocratic isolation — a kind of anti-fellowship — of its protagonist Paul Atreides, who comes to possess the equivalent of Tolkien’s Ring of Power. “In Dune, Paul willingly takes the (metaphorical) ring and wields it,” writes Evan Amato at The Culturist. “He leads, transforms, and conquers. The universe bends to his vision. He suffers for it, yes, and questions it, but he never truly rejects the call to rule. Contrast this with the world of Middle-earth, where all Tolkien’s heroes do the opposite. When Frodo offers the Ring to Aragorn, he refuses. Even Samwise, humble as he is, feels the surge of the Ring’s power, and lets it go.”…

(11) IS MAVEN HISTORY? NBC News learned “A NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars may be dead”.

For nearly a month, NASA has been scrambling to make contact with a spacecraft in orbit around Mars that abruptly fell silent.

The space agency lost communication with the MAVEN probe (short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) on Dec. 6, and efforts to re-establish a connection have been futile. Based on bits of data received that day, mission controllers think the probe was spinning unexpectedly.

NASA now has to wait until Jan. 16 before it can again try to revive MAVEN, because Mars and Earth have been on opposite sides of the sun since Monday, resulting in a prolonged communications blackout.

Overall, it’s not looking promising for one of NASA’s workhorse missions.

Since the MAVEN spacecraft entered orbit around Mars in 2014, it has been studying the red planet’s upper atmosphere, including a plasma layer known as the ionosphere, and investigating how and why Mars has been losing its atmosphere over billions of years. The spacecraft has also been instrumental in relaying communications between two rovers on the surface of Mars, Curiosity and Perseverance, and Earth….

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

Pixel Scroll 11/28/25 But I Was Just A Kid, Pixel Scrolled Out Long Before My Comments Ever Did

Posted on by
19

(1) ONE PIECE MUSIC CAUGHT UP IN CONTROVERSY. A live public performance of the ending theme of the One Piece anime by the singer Maki Otsuki was brought to an abrupt halt in Shanghai today, as seen in a video posted by the Mexican Twitter account 24 Morelos.

This performance was part of an event organized by the Japanese toy/game/media company Bandai Namco, but it is not the only Japan-related event to have sudden issues in China. The Sailor Moon Super Live stage show tour issued a statement today, an extract of which Google Translate renders as follows:

Due to unavoidable circumstances and in accordance with local regulations, we have decided to cancel all three Hangzhou performances of the “Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon” The Super Live China Tour, which were scheduled for today, November 28th (Friday) through November 29th (Saturday).

We sincerely apologize to everyone who was looking forward to the performances for the inconvenience and concern caused, and for the short notice.

We are currently in discussions regarding the Shanghai performance, and will announce the details on our official website as soon as they are decided.

Other events by Japanese performers cancelled today include concerts in Shanghai and Beijing by the singer Natori, and three early December performances by the group chilldspot.

No official statement seems to have yet been issued to explain this spate of sudden cancellations, but perhaps readers can draw their own conclusions what the underlying cause might be.

(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to sample samsa with Naomi Kritzer on Episode 269 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Naomi Kritzer

How multi-award-winning? Naomi’s a seven-time Hugo Award nominee (winning twice for short story and twice for novelette) — a three-time Nebula Award nominee (winning once for novelette) — a three-time Lodestar Award nominee — (winning once) — a four-time nominee for the WSFA Small Press Award (winning once) — and has also won the Asimov’s readers poll. Plus she’s been a two-time Andre Norton Award nominee, as well as a finalist for the Eugie, Dragon, and William L. Crawford Awards.

The stories which won her those honors were published in such magazines as Clarkesworld, Analog, Asimov’s, Uncanny, Apex, F&SF, and others, and in such anthologies as Infinity’s End and The Reinvented Heart: Tales of Futuristic Relationships. Many of those stories have been gathered in her collections Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories (2011) and Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories (2017). Her novels include Catfishing on CatNet, Chaos on Catnet, and Liberty’s Daughter. Her novella Obstetrix, published by Tordotcom, is coming in June 2026.

We discussed why a friend stepped up to start submitting stories for her, the question she asked Madeleine l’Engle when she was nine, why she spent years not reading reviews (even the good ones), her surprise at the way “Cat Pictures Please” went viral, what it’s like when you’re on “that” panel at a convention, why she wishes she’d told the early editors to whom she’d submitted how young she was, the many writers time has passed by (and how we hope neither of us will join them), what she was told by her mentor after confessing she wanted to be Ursula K. Le Guin, the story she sold to a market by deliberately writing the sort of story that magazine said it didn’t want, the inability of writers to know which of their stories will resonate most with readers, whether the stories she’s written in response to prompts might have existed in some other form without those prompts, how our writing has been affected by the times in which we live, and much more.

(3) PEAK DEMAND. “Netflix Crashes as ‘Stranger Things 5’ Premieres” reports Variety.

“Stranger Things” briefly pulled Netflix into the Upside Down.

The streamer crashed at 5 p.m. PT on Wednesday, just as the highly anticipated fifth season of the sci-fi series premiered.

The service was down for about three minutes and continues to have bugs for some users. Tens of thousands of people who logged on to watch the sci-fi series were met with an image from “Nailed It!” with the caption: “Something went wrong. Sorry, we’re having trouble with your request. You’ll find lots to explore on the home page.”

By 5:05 p.m., the site seemed to be up and running for most users. Variety reached out to the streamer for comment; according to a Netflix spokesperson, “Some members briefly experienced an issue streaming on TV devices, but service recovered for all accounts within five minutes.”…

(4) STRANGER THINGS 5 FIRST IMPRESSIONS. “’Stranger Things’ Season 5 review: New dangers and familiar plotlines”. NPR has opinions about the first four episodes to drop. Beware spoilers.

There is a lot about this new batch of episodes that reminded me of previous storylines, as this kooky new-school Scooby Gang repeatedly pulls off elaborate plans to get past the military, sneak inside the Upside Down and search for Vecna.

Once again, there’s a ruthless doctor empowered by the military to probe the Upside Down — this time, played by Terminator alum Linda Hamilton. Our young heroes keep devising elaborate-yet-successful plans to outwit the military and access the alternate universe where Vecna is hiding. We have generous sprinkles of ’80s pop culture, from a surprising reference to pop star Tiffany to the sly use of Diana Ross’ 1980 dance hit Upside Down.

There are also winking nods to movies, with scenes that recall moments from Aliens, Good Morning, Vietnam and even Home Alone. Deft as these touches are, however, they are also moves we have seen before in this show.

And there’s a series of attacks by Demogorgons — super strong, super-teethy humanoid creatures from the Upside Down controlled by Vecna — who motivate our heroes by targeting children in Hawkins for kidnapping. This seems a deliberate callback to the way Will’s abduction jumpstarted everything in the show’s first season.

Stranger Things often juxtaposes action sequences and physical danger with protagonists separating and reuniting emotionally. So the new episodes feature Eleven pushing back against Hopper’s efforts to keep her out of the fray and safe from capture by the military, while Steve struggles with feelings for ex-girlfriend Nancy, Robin bumbles a relationship with her girlfriend and Will is continually on the verge of declaring something about his romantic feelings. Again, little of this will seem new to longtime fans.

(5) INSCRIBED ON THE HEART. Michael Chabon tells how his relatives memorably celebrated the holiday one year in “Thanksgiven – Tragic Magic”.

You people may assemble with ritual correctness at the annual table under the ancestral roof, but in my family, Thanksgiving is as homeless as the Pilgrims. Our family tree has no trunk; it’s all roots and branches. There is no grand high grandmother to ingather the tribes by fiat or the irresistible excellence of her fare. Instead, unwritten charts ensure that a byzantine system of mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law rotates the meal through the houses of our family, with guilt playing the role of gravitation. I am not at all sure that in the two decades my wife and I have been together we have ever passed consecutive Thanksgivings at the same table. We have gone to Ridgewood, New Jersey, and Calabasas, California, to my mother and my mother-in-law, to my mother’s sister-in-law and my sister-in-law’s mother. We have even, on occasion, hosted the meal ourselves.

Sometimes all these intricacies wear us down and we flee, like tax fugitives seeking shelter from a burdensome bureaucracy, to the tranquil haven of somebody else’s mishegas. One year we went to the Sacramento mansion of a Greek-American whose family gave thanks with first-generation fervor and a buffet that honored the traditions on either side of their hyphen. Another year we went to the home of some writer friends in Pacifica for a Creole soul-food extravaganza, lavishly furnished with young novelists, chess pie, and Dungeness crabs plucked that morning out of the bay. In 2002, we fled to Manka’s Inverness Lodge….

….And that, to me, is the meaning of Thanksgiving. Of all the Thanksgivings before and since, the one spent at Manka’s stands out for me as the truest, even though we were far from our places of origin. Nothing lasts; everything changes. People die, and marriages dissolve, and friendships fade, and families fall apart, whether or not we appreciate them; whether or not we give thanks every waking moment or one night a year. For the act of returning to the same table, to the same people and the same dishes — to the same traditions — can blind you to life’s transience…. 

(6) RIVAL DUNES. “The first Dune bombed, but it’s still better than Timothée Chalamet’s version” says a Polygon writer is this contrarian piece.

David Lynch’s Dune, from 1984, is a notorious turkey. It was panned by critics, bombed at the box office, and for decades, the director — who went on to become cinema’s greatest surrealist — refused to speak of it in interviews. He even went so far as to have his name removed from the credits of certain extended versions.

Over time, Dune’s reputation evolved from dud to cultish camp classic and even, among some fans, to flawed masterpiece. But a successful adaptation of the monolithic Frank Herbert sci-fi novel it was based on — a book that had already spent over a decade in development by directors as varied as David Lean, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Ridley Scott, by the time Lynch got his hands on it — remained a white whale for the filmmaking community. When Denis Villeneuve released the first part of his acclaimed adaptation in 2021, everyone breathed a sigh of relief; now we could all pretend that Lynch’s one artistic failure never happened.

But the 1984 Dune, like all Lynch’s movies, has an uncanny, linerging potency. It’s as instinctive and dreamlike as Villeneuve’s movies are rational and grandiose, and it accesses uglier and weirder facets of the material than the ever-tasteful Villeneuve, director of the recent Dune and Dune Part 2, can stomach. Here are just a few things that it does better.

Here’s an example of their claims:

6. The Spacing Guild of Navigators

Villeneuve noped out of depicting the Spacing Guild of spice-using navigators that has a monopoly on interstellar travel in Herbert’s world, even though it is their need for spice, harvested on the desert planet Arrakis, that drives the plot. Lynch is no such coward. In his movie, the Guild is an ominous force behind the throne, embodied in the nightmarishly mutated Navigator — a kind of wrinkled whale-baby-monster — that strongarms the Emperor from inside the glass coffin of its spice tank.

Lynch even includes an utterly bizarre attempt to visualize the Navigators’ mystical spacefaring process, which in his vision involves floating around inside a lightshow and then — there’s no other way to put this — defecating beams of light from a pulsating rear orifice which then seem to manifest the planets being traveled to. It’s distractingly weird and horrible, but in Lynch’s Dune, there’s no mistaking the fear and awe the Spacing Guild inspires, nor its stranglehold on galactic power.

(7) LOOKING FORWARD. “Apple TV’s Neuromancer Will Be the Sci-Fi Event of the Decade” contends CBR.com.

…Apple TV+ is about to dip its toe into the science fiction genre once again with one of its riskiest projects yet. The streaming service is home to the greatest sci-fi shows on television right now, including critically acclaimed series like Foundation, Severance, Silo, and For All Mankind. Now, Neuromancer becomes the latest addition to Apple’s already impressive catalogue….

… Neuromancer is a particularly difficult book to adapt, specifically when it comes to its depiction of “cyberspace,” a digital plane wherein humans can interact with computers. This, combined with the cyberpunk elements, gripping social critiques, and many other intricate elements of William Gibson’s sci-fi world, makes Neuromancer one of the most difficult book-to-screen adaptations ever….

(8) ANNE RICE WEBSITE NEWS. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian previews a documentary anthology about Anne Rice: “’Stay tuned’: new Anne Rice film could foretell release of unpublished work by late author”.

The worst heartbreak and most riveting triumph of Anne Rice’s life happened in relatively quick succession, each beginning when the US novelist’s daughter – Michele, then about three – told her she was too tired to play.

Rice had never heard such a comment from a child that age, and subsequent blood tests ordered by a doctor revealed that her beloved “Mouse” had acute granulocytic leukemia, considered untreatable for her.

Mouse died in 1972 shortly before turning six. And as the devastating end neared, then the initial grief of losing her daughter, Rice mostly coped by huddling over her typewriter, crafting what became her first novel: the enduring classic Interview With the Vampire.

“I knew that writing was the only thing I could do, and when I wrote it was like fighting the darkness, pushing all the absurdity and horror away,” Rice later said of her novel about vampires fighting the complications of immortality, including a five-year-old girl inspired by Mouse.

When Rice was done, the first read went to her husband, Mouse’s father, the poet Stan Rice. Stan Rice once recounted how he read it in “approximately one sitting” and upon finishing it told himself: “Our life will never be the same.”

“And,” he said, “it never was.”…

…Now, at AnneRice.com, that story and myriad other related ones are being retold in an anthology of documentaries being made available for streaming for free starting Thursday.

Anne Rice: An All Saints’ Day Celebration was helmed by her son, the author Christopher Rice, and his business partner and her close friend Eric Shaw Quinn. It contains archival footage, privately held photographs and new interviews, paying tribute to the literary titan who died at 80 toward the end of 2021 following a stroke. And it chronicles a live event in New Orleans at the beginning of November that celebrated Rice’s legacy….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

November 28, 1946 — Joe Dante, 79.

Joe Dante started off as one as us as he wrote columns and articles for fanzines and APAs. 

Now let’s look at what he’s done that I find interesting.

The first would be his collaboration with John Sayles when they completely rewrote the first draft of Gary Brandner’s The Howling novel for that film. Brandner was said to be extremely angry with the film that was produced.

Because of The Howling, Spielberg offered up Gremlins, one of my all time favorite films, to him. I’ve watched it more times than I can count and I’ve enjoyed it each time. Gremlins II, not so much. 

Spielberg also brought him on as one of the directors on John Landis’ Twilight Zone: The Movie. Dante’s segment is a remake of the original Twilight Zone “It’s a Good Life” episode as written by Serling. That story was based off a Jerome Bixby story published in 1953 in the Star Science Fiction Stories anthology series, edited by Frederik Pohl.

Ahhh, Innerspace with Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, and Meg Ryan. The Studio hated it, Dante made the film he wanted to despite the Studio and audiences stayed home.  Really stayed.  I thought it was sweet. 

I hadn’t realized til now that Dante was responsible for Small Soldiers, an interesting film. Not a great film but it had a possibility of being something. Not sure what that something would have been. Dante says that there were twelve writers involved in writing the script. Ouch. 

Finally, Dante directed Looney Tunes: Back in Action. Moving on. 

Well I will leave you with this ever so cute photo…

Joe Dante

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) OOPSIE! “Before a Soyuz launch Thursday someone forgot to secure a 20-ton service platform” – Ars Technica tells what that means.

A Soyuz rocket launched on Thursday carrying Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, as well as NASA astronaut Christopher Williams, for an eight-month mission to the International Space Station. The trio of astronauts arrived at the orbiting laboratory without incident.

However, on the ground, there was a serious problem during the launch with the ground systems that support processing of the vehicle before liftoff at Site 31, located at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

In a terse statement issued Thursday night on the social media site Telegram, the Russian space corporation that operates Soyuz appeared to downplay the incident: “The launch pad was inspected, as is done every time a rocket is launched. Damage to several launch pad components was identified. Damage can occur after launch, so such inspections are mandatory worldwide. The launch pad’s condition is currently being assessed.”

However video imagery of the launch site after liftoff showed substantial damage, with a large service platform appearing to have fallen into the flame trench below the launch table. According to one source, this is a platform located beneath the rocket, where workers can access the vehicle before liftoff. It has a mass of about 20 metric tons and was apparently not secured prior to launch, and the thrust of the vehicle ejected it into the flame trench. “There is significant damage to the pad,” said this source….

(12) THE MARTIAN ZAP. “A rover on Mars has detected a form of lightning” reports NPR.

Mini-lightning strikes created by whirling dust devils on Mars have been detected accidentally by the microphone on board the Perseverance rover.

The chance discovery is direct evidence of a form of lightning on Mars, researchers say in a report published in Nature. They describe how the rover’s microphone picked up signs of electrical arcs just a few centimeters long, which were accompanied by audible shockwaves.

“There’s been a very big mystery about lightning on Mars for a long time. It’s probably one of the biggest mysteries about Mars,” says Daniel Mitchard, a lightning researcher at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, who wasn’t part of the research team but wrote an accompanying commentary for the journal.

“The key thing here,” he explains, “is that we actually have a rover on the surface of Mars that appears to have detected something that fits our idea of what we think lightning on Mars would look like.”

Besides Earth, flashes of lightning have been seen in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, and lightning has also been detected on Neptune and Uranus. But finding lightning has proven more elusive on our closest planetary neighbors — even though experimenters in the 1970s did lab work that suggested lightning should exist on Mars.

For example, when researchers put volcanic sand into a flask and pumped it down to Martian atmospheric pressures, swirling the sand in the flask created a glow that could be seen in the dark, says Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory….

(13) UNIT CITATION. “Doctor Who Magazine special covers UNIT” reports Cultbox.

The soldiers of UNIT have been defending the Earth from alien aggressors since the black-and-white era of Doctor Who. The makers of Doctor Who Magazine promise a lavish bookazine that traces the history of the secret organisation, from the Cyberman invasion of London to the epic spin-off series The War Between the Land and the Sea.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/19/25 ELIZA, Where The Devil Are My Pixels?

Posted on by
16

(1) STARGATE REOPENING. Variety reports “New ‘Stargate’ TV Series Ordered at Amazon”.

Amazon is officially moving forward with a new “Stargate” TV series, Variety has learned.

The new project hails from Martin Gero, who began his career in the original “Stargate” TV franchise. Exact plot details for the series are being kept under wraps. The series will be produced by Amazon MGM Studios and air on Prime Video.

“Twenty years ago, my first real job in television was as a Story Editor on ‘Stargate: Atlantis,’” Gero said. “I spent five years at the franchise working across all three series, ‘Stargate’ taught me everything about making television — it’s written into my DNA. I’m beyond thrilled that Amazon MGM Studios has entrusted me with guiding this incredible franchise into its next phase. For those who’ve kept the gate active through conventions, rewatches, and unwavering faith — this one’s for you. And for those that are new to our world — I promise you’re in for something extraordinary.”

This news has given people an excuse to reminisce with John Scalzi, who consulted on the franchise’s previous iteration, Stargate Universe.

IN FACT one of my consistent notes early on in SGU was "every bullet you fire is one you don't have for later," because the conceit of the show was they were entirely cut off from supply restock. Likewise, fewer people died over the series run because of me, but a lot more got survivably injured.

— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2025-11-19T18:07:44.433Z

(2) CONGRATULATIONS. Rob Thornton, a frequent File 770 contributor (including yesterday’s “Freakflag Guitar Technology: Way Huge’s Atreides Analog Weirding Module”) received some great news:

I am happy and proud to announce that my story “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground” has been accepted by Ion Newcombe for Issue 328 of AntipodeanSF, which will celebrate its 28th anniversary of publication.

(3) FBI LOOKED AT VINGE. Reason Magazine has the story — “Declassified FBI file reveals surveillance of author Vernor Vinge”.

… Despite his clear libertarian leanings, the FBI worried about Vinge’s association
with socialists. His recently declassified file shows he was investigated for alleged “contact with Karl Amatneek,” a computer engineer involved in TecNICA, an organization that sent technologically skilled volunteers to aid Nicaragua during the socialist Sandinista revolution….

…A teletype message from January 1983 says the relationship between Vinge and Amatneek “has not yet been established,” requesting more time to investigate. Ironically, Vinge had already mocked the incompetence of the surveillance state in True Names, describing a federal agent confidently insisting the government could catch any lone troublemaker if it devoted enough resources. Pollack, the character being questioned, knew better. “He had snooped on enough secret memos to realize that the Feds really believed it, but it was very far from true.”

Vinge foresaw a world where individuals could outmatch governments. That made him a target of the very state machinery he critiqued.

(4) THE ROOM WHERE IT (SOMETIMES) HAPPENS. Curbed New York tells us “The Novelists Are Fighting at the Center for Fiction”.

Around four on a recent Thursday afternoon, the second floor of the Center for Fiction buzzed with a near-silent hum of productivity. Light streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows as writers hunched over their laptops. A giant mural of Toni Morrison smiled in the stairwell. A lost-and-found table bore more forgotten water bottles than an Ultimate Frisbee tournament. But all was not well at the literary nonprofit: Sometimes, especially on weekday mornings, there aren’t enough desks. “Everybody is complaining,” says a current member, a novelist. And there was more trouble on the horizon: “It’s going to get worse when it’s too cold to use the outdoor terrace.”

Originally known as the Mercantile Library, the Center was founded in 1820, decades before the city’s public-library system, backed by the businessmen of Manhattan’s growing merchant class who wanted to keep their employees “away from the rumshop and the billiard room.” Membership has two tiers: General members pay $180 a year for access to several bright, airy, bookshelf-lined rooms on the second floor of the BKSK-designed space. But for $250 a month, 100 or so Writers Studio members can secure access to a separate, even brighter and airier space with individual desks. (This is significantly more expensive than, say, bringing a laptop to a coffee shop but significantly cheaper than the WeWork on Dean Street, which is comparatively charmless and where one might have to share a kitchen with unsavory AI-start-up types.) All desks and table space exist on a first-come, first-served basis, which, when they’re all full, has led to about as much aggression as the average writer can muster — piercing glares, raised eyebrows, and uncharitable speculation: “A lot of whispering about who’s really a writer and who’s just a ‘creative’ doing Zoom calls,” says a former member who left the Center over the apparent overcrowding….

(5) RATIONAL ACTORS AND EVERYONE ELSE. J. D. Harlock advises writers about “Verisimilitude in Speculative International Relations with Game Theory” at SFWA’s Planetside.

Game theory is the study of strategic decision-making when outcomes depend on a player’s actions and the actions of others involved. Analyzing interactions between political actors using game theory allows us to theorize why specific actions are taken. As an academic with a master’s degree in International Relations (IR), it’s helped me conceptualize fictional scenarios through theoretical modeling. In this article, I’ll share one approach for creators to use game theory to build believable political tensions, strategic standoffs, and high-stakes diplomacy in their speculative IR stories….

(6) GOODNIGHT MOONS. [Item by Jim Janney.] This has been around, apparently, since 2011 but it was new to me: “Goodnight Dune”.

“In a great green room, tucked away in bed, a young bunny gazes upon the two remaining moons of Arrakis…”

This book is inspired by Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune. Many of the visual motifs come from the 1984 David Lynch movie adaptation of Dune, and drawn in the style of Margaret Wise Brown / Clement Hurd’s classic children’s book Goodnight Moon. Originally created in 2011, (finally) updated in 2021.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

November 19, 1911 — Mary Elizabeth Counselman. (Died 1995.) 

Writer of genre short stories and poetry. “The Three Marked Pennies” which she wrote while she was in her teens published in Weird Tales in 1934 is considered one of the three most popular stories in all of that zine’s history.

There’s but a smattering of her at the usual suspects but she did get published— Masters of Horrors, Vol. Three, Mary Elizabeth Counselman: Hostess of Horror and Fantasy collects seventeen of her short stories and it’s readily available, and The Face of Fear and Other Poems collected much of her poetry.  It was published by Eidolon Press in an edition of 325 copies, so good luck on finding a copy. (Died 1995.)

Mary Elizabeth Counselman

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) BLACK PANTHER AT 60. This February, Marvel Comics proudly pays tribute to one of its most groundbreaking super heroes in Black Panther Anniversary Special #1. The one-shot celebrates 60 years of T’Challa and Wakanda with brand-new, stories from a lineup of fan-favorite writers, artists, and those who have helped define Black Panther’s legacy, including writer Christopher Priest.

 Here are some of the stories fans can look forward to: 

  • Writer Evan Narcisse (Wakanda, Sam Wilson: Captain America) and artist George Jeanty (Star Wars: Mace Windu) bring back former Black Panther, Kasper Cole! In this framing story, join Cole as he searches for Wakanda’s exiled king, learning about some of T’Challa’s never-before-told adventures in the process.
  • Cole also pays a visit to the former Queen of Wakanda in a tale by acclaimed Storm writer Murewa Ayodele and rising star artist Eder Messias (Sam Wilson: Captain America). Listen in as Storm shares an intimate memory from her time by T’Challa’s side, when their love was powerful enough to overcome any threat against them!
  • Cody Ziglar (Miles Morales: Spider-Man) joins forces with veteran Black Panther artist Alitha E. Martinez for a Black Panther/Blue Marvel team-up! Dr. Adam Brashear recounts their time together in the Ultimates, and reveals what T’Challa taught him about strength and leadership!
  • Superstar writer Christopher Priest returns to his groundbreaking Black Panther with a surprising encounter T’Challa had with Magneto, set during the time the Master of Magnetism ruled his own African nation, Genosha.

 Black Panther’s 60th anniversary coincides with an exciting new status quo for the character. The king of Wakanda is currently trying to unite his kingdom—both on Earth and in the stars—in Black Panther: Intergalactic, a four-issue limited series by Victor La Valle and Stefano Nesi debuting next month. [Based on a press release.]

(10) AI, AI, OH! [Item by Steven French.] It’s everywhere! Keza Macdonald looks at the intrusion of AI into gaming in the latest “Pushing Buttons” newsletter in the Guardian: “How generative AI in Arc Raiders started a scrap over the gaming industry’s future”.

Arc Raiders is, by all accounts, a late game-of-the-year contender. Dropped into a multiplayer world overrun with hostile drones and military robots, every human player is at the mercy of the machines – and each other. Can you trust the other raider you’ve spotted on your way back to humanity’s safe haven underground, or will they shoot you and take everything you’ve just scavenged? Perhaps surprisingly, humanity is (mostly) choosing to band together, according to most people I’ve talked to about this game.

In a review for Gamespot, Mark Delaney paints a beguiling picture of Arc Raiders’s potential for generating war stories, and highlights its surprisingly hopeful tone as the thing that elevates it above similar multiplayer extraction shooters: “We can all kill each other in Arc Raiders. The fact that most of us are choosing instead to lend a helping hand, if not a sign that humanity will be all right in the real world, at the very least makes for one of the best multiplayer games I’ve ever played.”

But, but, but, but … There is a small irony to Arc’s depiction of humanity united against the machines. The game uses AI-generated text-to-speech voices, trained on real actors. (The game also uses machine learning to improve the behaviour and animation of its robot enemies, a different type of “AI”, which video games have been using for ever.) Games writer Rick Lane found this to be so ethically compromising that he couldn’t look past it. “For Arc Raiders to ride the wave of human sociability all the way to the bank, while also being so contemptuous of the thing that makes us social animals – carving up human voices and reassembling them like a digital Victor Frankenstein – demonstrates a lack of artistic integrity that I find impossible to ignore,” he wrote for Eurogamer….

(11) DON’T. LOOK. NOW. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] So, effectively we could be inside a tin-can universe. Alternativesly, as I’ve endorsed since my teens, it could be a *four* dimensional torus… “Cosmic Paradox Reveals the Awful Consequence of an Observer-Free Universe” at Quanta Magazine.

Tinkering at their desks with the mathematics of quantum space and time, physicists have discovered a puzzling conundrum. The arcane rules of quantum theory and gravity let them imagine many different kinds of universes in precise detail, enabling powerful thought experiments that in recent years have addressed long-standing mysteries swirling around black holes.

But when a group of researchers examined a universe intriguingly like our own in 2019, they found a paradox: The theoretical universe seemed to admit only a single possible state. It appeared so simple that its contents could be described without conveying even a single bit of data, not even a choice of a zero or a one. This result clashed with the fact that this type of universe should be capable of hosting black holes, stars, planets — and people. Yet all those rich details were nowhere to be seen…

(12) THAT UFO? “Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) breaks apart in incredible telescope photos” – see them at Space.com.

A comet discovered earlier this year continues to break apart after its close brush with the sun this month.

Astronomer Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project captured breathtaking imagery of solar system comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) as its central icy core, or nucleus, appears to have broken into multiple pieces after being warmed by the sun. The comet made its closest approach to the sun on Oct. 8, and astronomers captured images following the solar flyby that appear to show it dramatically breaking apart.

These most recent images seem to confirm that, as multiple distinct fragments can be seen. The images appear to show “three fragments of the original nucleus and possibly a fourth one,” Masi wrote in a statement accompanying the images.

(13) TRAILER PARK. ‘”Project Hail Mary’ Second Trailer: Ryan Gosling in Space” at IndieWire.

…An official synopsis for the film reads: “Science teacher Ryland Grace (Gosling) wakes up on a spaceship light years from home with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. As his memory returns, he begins to uncover his mission: solve the riddle of the mysterious substance causing the sun to die out. He must call on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas to save everything on Earth from extinction… but an unexpected friendship means he may not have to do it alone.”…

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

Freakflag Guitar Technology: Way Huge’s Atreides Analog Weirding Module

Posted on by
4

Written by RL Thornton of Freakflag

Believe it or not, the Way Huge Atreides Analog Weirding Module is an actual electric guitar pedal, thanks to innovative electronics wizard Jeorge Tripps and the Jim Dunlop Company. Guitar pedals sit on the floor between the guitar and the amplifier. They’re stomp-boxes: you hit the switch with your foot, and they shape the signal — boosting it, clipping it, delaying it, filtering it, or throwing it through controlled chaos. One pedal is “spice”; a chain of them is a recipe. Some pedals create fuzz, distortion, overdrive (distortion’s mild cousin), chorus, reverb, delay, phaser, and flanger. But the Weirding Module is much more. It’s part synthesizer, part artifact, part fever dream.  As Jim Dunlop Company put it:

Jim Dunlop: A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care—that the balances are correct.

Fear is the TONE killer! You are about to enter a world where the unexpected, the unknown, and the unbelievable meet. Take a spectacular journey through the wonders of space and the mysteries of time. From the boundaries of the incredible to the borders of the implausible.

The Sleeper has awakened! The Way Huge Atreides Analog Weirding Module offers a kaleidoscope of organic synth-like tones—this consciousness-awakening device produces a monophonic effect with many layers that can be manipulated as needed through dynamic playing technique and adjustment of each of its several sliders.

This unique guitar pedal began with Frank Herbert’s legendary 1965 novel Dune and the late director David Lynch, who decided to produce the first Dune movie in 1981 even though Wikipedia stated that he had “had not read the book, was not familiar with the story, or even been interested in science fiction.”

When Lynch was working on the movie, he knew that the Atreides used the mental technology of the female-oriented Bene Gesserit to give their warlike desert allies an edge against the evil Harkonnen and the Emperor’s Sardaukar killers. But how could Lynch bring the Gesserit technology to the screen? Lynch knew that the Bene Gesserit “witches” were expert manipulators of sound, so he came up with “weirding modules” that used sound as a weapon, and Lynch ended up with this approach:

As you can see, inspirations can be found anywhere, and electric guitar pedal designer Jeorge Tripps obviously saw more in Lynch’s “weirding module” than anyone thought.

Jeorge Tripps (from his conversation with JHS Pedals’ Josh Scott):  It really was inspired by the 1980 Electro Harmonix Mini Synthesizer Keyboard, which was used by Van Halen on the last tune on Fair Warning, “One Foot Out the Door.” It’s something that I’ve always been a fan of. I’ve always loved those things. They literally are made of plastic and cardboard — I’m not joking. They made them for one year, from 1980-1981. That’s what inspired it. I was just like, “Oh my God, this is so cool. I want my guitar to sound like that”.

You can make it sound different and do different things according to how you play. You can’t just hand the Atreides to somebody that just plays their stuff [without experimenting]. If you jump on it and automatically start playing Stevie Ray Vaughan, it’s going to sound like crap. Just utter garbage. But if you plug into it, and [play around] to find out what [the settings] do, you’re going to experiment and go, ‘Oh, wow.’

However, the best way to understand the Atreides guitar pedal is to hear it in action. Go and click on the pedal demos and have a blast. It’s one of those rare cases where a prop from SF cinema inspires a real piece of musical technology — a “weirding module” you can actually stomp on.

Atreides Guitar Pedal Demos

 

AI Tag Team: Dune vs. Popular Music

Posted on by

ChatGPT does a deep dive on musical tributes to Frank Herbert’s classic (with some help). [Reprinted from Freakflag with permission.]

By Rob Thornton.

INTRODUCTION: We have seen a lot of controversy around Large Language Models (aka “AI”), If you are not familiar with them, these software tools are trained by us to act on their own, learn and grow, and handle many tasks. Despite their power, the current consequences of AI—AI companies are devouring information without permission, the tools return false information and creating deepfakes of people, becoming intelligent death machines for the military).

But as a fan of speculative fiction, I had to see what was what. So in my time with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, I asked them to search for music that was related to Dune with a little human assistance.

Freakflag: Tell us about the intersection between Dune and popular music.

Absolutely! ♥ Frank Herbert’s Dune has had a surprising influence on pop music, inspiring everything from psychedelic rock to electronic music to hip-hop. Here’s a deep dive into how Dune has shaped music across genres:

1. 1970s: Psych, Prog, and Early Space Rock

♦ David Matthews – Dune (1977) → A jazz-funk fusion album directly inspired by the novel. Think spacey, cinematic grooves with a touch of Blaxploitation cool.

♦ Tangerine Dream → While not explicitly referencing Dune, their synth-heavy, atmospheric music—like Phaedra (1974) and Zeit (1972)—feels like the perfect soundtrack for Arrakis.

♦ Zed – Vision of Dune (1979) → An obscure French electronic/synth album that’s essentially a Dune-themed Berlin School synth journey.

♦ Klaus Schulze – Dune (1979) → A massive 30-minute ambient track from the Tangerine Dream alum, evoking Arrakis’ vast, endless deserts.

2. 1980s: Synths, New Wave, and the Lynch Film

♦ Iron Maiden – To Tame a Land (1983) → An epic heavy metal song originally titled Dune, but Herbert refused to grant permission for the name! So, they changed it to To Tame a Land. The lyrics retell Paul Atreides’ journey with soaring guitars and galloping rhythms.

♦ Brian Eno – Prophecy Theme (1984) → The best-known piece of music from David Lynch’s Dune soundtrack. Eno’s ethereal synth washes capture the mystical tone of the Bene Gesserit prophecies.

♦ Toto – Dune Soundtrack (1984) → Yes, the same Toto that did Africa! They scored the entire Dune film with epic orchestration and dramatic synths. Their sweeping, sci-fi symphonic pieces still hold up today.

3. 1990s: Dune & Hip-Hop?

♦ Wu-Tang Clan & Afrofuturist Influence → While Dune isn’t a primary reference, Wu-Tang’s love of mystical, philosophical storytelling echoes Dune’s epic worldbuilding.

→ Killah Priest’s “B.I.B.L.E.” (1995)* references Dune with lines like “Reading books on Isaac Asimov and Dune”—a nod to sci-fi’s impact on hip-hop lyricism.

♦ Sleep – Dopesmoker (2003) → This legendary stoner doom metal album is essentially a Dune story in slow-motion. Spacey, repetitive, heavy-as-sandstorm riffs tell the journey of a weed priest across the desert—basically Paul Atreides meets doom metal.

4. 2000s–Present: Electronic, Metal, and Experimental

♦ Hans Zimmer – Dune Soundtrack (2021) → Zimmer reinvented the sound of sci-fi epics, using unearthly vocal tones, throat singing, and massive drum patterns to capture the raw, spiritual feel of Dune’s world.

♦ Kendrick Lamar – DNA. (2017) → No direct Dune reference, but Kendrick samples dialogue from Dune (1984) in live performances—tying Dune’s themes of destiny, prophecy, and power into his own storytelling.

Final Thoughts: Why Dune Inspires Music

⊗ Dune’s themes of fate, power, rebellion, and mysticism resonate across genres, from metal to electronic to hip-hop.

∇ Arrakis itself is an environment that lends itself to soundscapes—whether desert psychedelia, ambient textures, or thunderous metal.

Freakflag: Two of your items did not contain any Dune items so I deleted them. You missed a few things:

There was a minimal wave band called Bene Gesserit.

The 2010 Grimes album Giedi Primes was a Dune concept album.

Richard Pinhas has an album called Chronolyse with many Dune-related tracks.

in the 90s, a techno project called Eon did a track called Mindkiller, which used the “Fear is the mindkiller” chant.”

Great additions! ♥ You’re absolutely right—those are key Dune-inspired musical moments:

♦ Richard Pinhas – Chronolyse (1978) French electronic composer Richard Pinhas—known for his work in Heldon—crafted Chronolyse as a tribute to Frank Herbert’s Dune, filtering the saga through fractal synth loops and hypnotic minimalism.

♦ Bene Gesserit (1981–1990s) → A Belgian minimal wave/synth duo taking their name from Dune’s secretive sisterhood. Their music was quirky, experimental, and otherworldly, much like the Bene Gesserit themselves.

♦ Grimes – Geidi Primes (2010) Before she became a pop experimentalist, Grimes crafted this lo-fi, dreamlike debut—a hazy, otherworldly take on the universe of Dune. Named after the Harkonnen homeworld, Geidi Primes blends ethereal synths, ghostly vocals, and off-kilter beats into a soundscape that feels like a distant radio transmission from Arrakis.

♦ Eon – Mindkiller (1990) → A classic UK techno track built around the Dune quote “Fear is the mindkiller.” A perfect example of how Dune’s philosophy found its way into rave culture and electronic music.

If you would like to dive even deeper into Dune-related music, check out the Dune wiki at:

https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Music_inspired_by_Dune

Pixel Scroll 3/6/25 Hail Pixels, We Who Are About To File Salute You

Posted on by

(1) BRADBURY IN THE WAUKEGAN MUSEUM. The Chicago Tribune is there as “Visitors get sneak peek at newly restored Waukegan History Museum”.

Walking into the almost fully restored, more than century-old, one-time Waukegan Public Library — that is now the Waukegan History Museum at the Carnegie — visitors can take a step back in time….

…Lori Nerheim, the historical society’s president, said part of the intent of the $15 million restoration was to give visitors a feel for the experience a young Ray Bradbury had when he spent hours there as a boy reading and nurturing the imagination which led the famed author to the writing of his books.

“We wanted to bring it back to its original look and feel,” she said of the museum operated jointly by the historical society and the Waukegan Park District. “I feel tremendous pride. I am excited to see people’s reaction.”

… To enter the building, visitors ascend a few steps before entering the door where they see a staircase on either side leading to two floors of permanent exhibits, and before them some steps going to the top, main floor containing a permanent exhibit honoring Bradbury as well as a room for research.

Before the building closed as the library in 1965, the room containing the Bradbury exhibit was the children’s reading room. He spent hours there in the 1920s and 1930s reading and developing his thirst for books. Nerheim said she hopes the environment will inspire future authors.

“I can see children today sitting in that room where Ray Bradbury sat as a child and reading books he read,” she said. “Perhaps they will be inspired to write or tell their own stories.”

Filling the bookcases in the Bradbury room are the author’s private collection of thousands of volumes he willed to the Waukegan Public Library when he died in 2012…..

(2) FAMOUS BOOKSTORE MAY REOPEN ‘NEXT WEEK’. Mysterious Galaxy bookstore in San Diego is in the process of repairing flood damage sustained in late February. On Monday their latest newsletter gave a progress report: “Flooded! Curbside Pickup Is Available!”

First, thank you to all of the customers, authors, publishers, and other community members that have reached out to offer their support in the last week. The outpouring of support has been incredibly heartwarming and has helped us get through the uncertainty of the last week. We also want to extend a special thank you to our fellow independent bookstores who have offered support including opening their spaces for last minute event venues. This is truly a special book community and one we are so happy to be a part of.

We wanted to reach out with an update on the store and forecast of what’s to come. As this situation is continually evolving, there may be additional changes, but we promise to communicate as much as possible.

The good news:
No inventory was damaged in the flooding. THE BOOKS ARE OK! The vinyl flooring is also intact and does not need to be removed. 

The bad news:
The carpet in the children’s section was flooded and is being replaced. Additionally, they found some significant water damage in the walls on the west side of the unit as well as in the wall behind the YA section separating the front area of the store from the back room. The drywall needs to be replaced. There was also damage to the fixtures.

What does this mean?:
Mysterious Galaxy is currently closed to in-store shopping and events. If you purchased a ticket to an upcoming event, please keep a lookout for an email with more information. However, the demo has already begun and we are hoping to reopen to browsing by early next week! (*knocks on wood*)
The construction is such that it is not safe to have customers browsing at this time. However, fortunately (or unfortunately) for us, we are not strangers to running a closed bookstore, and we are ready to work through the challenges that are sure to arise in the coming weeks. 

(3) SUIT AGAINST N.E.A. OVER EXECUTIVE ORDER. “Theaters Sue the N.E.A. Over Trump’s ‘Gender Ideology’ Order” – the New York Times explains the litigation. (Story is behind a paywall.)

Several arts organizations sued the National Endowment for the Arts on Thursday, challenging its new requirement that grant applicants agree to comply with President Trump’s executive orders by promising not to promote “gender ideology.”

The groups that filed the suit have made or supported art about transgender and nonbinary people, and have received N.E.A. funding in the past. They say the new requirement unconstitutionally threatens their eligibility for future grants.

“Because they seek to affirm transgender and nonbinary identities and experiences in the projects for which they seek funding, plaintiffs are effectively barred by the ‘gender ideology’ certification and prohibition from receiving N.E.A. grants on artistic merit and excellence grounds,” the lawsuit says.

The groups are being represented in the litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union, which said in the lawsuit that the N.E.A. rule “has sowed chaos in the funding of arts projects across the United States.” After Mr. Trump began his second term, the N.E.A. said it would require grant applicants to agree “that federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology,” which Mr. Trump said in an executive order includes “the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.”

The N.E.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The suit was filed in a federal court in Rhode Island on behalf of Rhode Island Latino Arts, which promotes art made by Latinos; the Theater Offensive, an organization in Boston that presents work “by, for and about queer and trans people of color”; and National Queer Theater, a New York company best known for its Criminal Queerness Festival, which presents the work of international artists with roots in countries where their sexuality is criminalized or censored.

(4) NERO GOLD PRIZE. The ultimate Nero accolade and £30,000 prize went to a non-genre (and nonfiction) book, Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Shipwreck, Survival and Love. “Maurice And Maralyn By Sophie Elmhirst Announced As Winner Of 2024 Nero Gold Prize Book Of The Year”.

(5) TOLKIEN WAS PEEVED. [Item by Steven French.] I am not sure that Tolkien’s loathing of sloppiness and love of language is quite the exclusive that the Guardian thinks it is! “’Reduced to nonsense’: JRR Tolkien’s irritation with typist revealed in archive”.

JRR Tolkien was so irritated by a careless typist’s slapdash work on one of his manuscripts that he vented his frustration in a letter that has come to light.

The Lord of the Rings author said in despair: “She reduced [my manuscript] to nonsense. I have some sympathy with the typist faced with such unfamiliar matter; though evidently she wasn’t paying much attention.”

He mocked her confusion of “poche for poetic, highballs(!) for high halls, and arias for cries”.

The letter is within a collection of largely unpublished correspondence that reflects Tolkien’s loathing of sloppiness and love of language.

It is part of an archive that includes the last major Tolkien manuscript in private hands, The Road Goes Ever On, his collaboration with the composer Donald Swann of the musical comedy duo Flanders and Swann….

(6) WELCOME TO EARTH. Gizmodo invites us to “Watch 5 Mysterious Clips From Alien: Earth’s Crashed Ship” – a series of teasers from the upcoming FX series.

…What’s about to happen is the debut of Alien: Earth, FX’s upcoming show set years before any of the Alien films. It follows a team of soldiers who investigate a ship that has crashed on Earth and are forced to deal with what it contains. We assume, of course, that it contains something that will eventually create an alien, but what exactly? …

…So here you get to see the cat get the camera put on him and walk around a bit. The key takeaway is the end where we see a computer—much like Mother in the first Alien—with a very similar “Priority One” message: “Acquisition and safe return of all organisms for analysis. All other considerations secondary.” So, this ship was sent out to find something. And find something, it did….

…We see one of the crew members in hypersleep when something goes wrong. A fire. Is this the incident that started the crash back to Earth? What caused the fire? We don’t know.

All of this is a very cool way to tease the show and it’s culminating later this week in Austin, Texas. That’s where FX has recreated the crash site of the Maginot for fans to check out at SXSW. Learn more about that here.…

(7) THE RIGHT WAY, THE WRONG WAY, AND THE JANEWAY. According to Inverse, “A Much-Demanded Star Trek Spinoff Just Got A Hopeful Update”.

…We’re talking about the possibility of Star Trek: Janeway, a series focused on the return of Kate Mulgrew as Admiral Kathryn Janeway, set sometime after the events of Prodigy and perhaps, after the events of Picard Season 3. Speaking to a crowd of fans during the official Star Trek Cruise, Mulgrew answered a question about the possibility of a Janeway-focused spinoff TV series, or, failing that, her returning to the franchise in any capacity.

“There is a conversation happening,” Mulgrew said, according to WhatCulture. “It is being pursued.”

Mulgrew has long been vocal about galvanizing fans, which partially resulted in Star Trek: Prodigy Season 2 ending up on Netflix. But in terms of any new Star Trek series focusing on the post-Voyager era, nothing on the current Paramount+ slate fits that description. Strange New Worlds will run for at least two more seasons, and Starfleet Academy is expected to debut either later this year or sometime in 2026. At the same event on the Star Trek: The Cruise, Mulgrew expressed concerns that a Janeway live-action series might not live up to what fans wanted. And she also didn’t want to do a show as a “vanity project.”

(8) DUNE WHAT COMES NATURALLY. “1 of Dune’s Most Crucial Events Is Secretly Way Smarter Than Fans Realize (& It Proves Frank Herbert Was Brilliant)” asserts CBR.com.

…Frank Herbert’s masterpiece Dune emerged from various fascinating influences, beginning with an unlikely source: the Oregon coast. In 1957, after publishing his novel The Dragon in the Sea, Herbert traveled to Florence, Oregon, where he observed the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s efforts to stabilize massive dunes using poverty grasses. The sight of these imposing dunes, which Herbert believed could “swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways,” sparked a deep interest in ecology and desert environments that would become central to his epic novel. The ecological themes in Dune were further shaped by Herbert’s interactions with Native American mentors, particularly Howard Hansen and “Indian Henry” Martin from the Quileute reservation. Hansen’s warning that white men were “eating the earth” and could turn the planet into a wasteland “just like North Africa” resonated deeply with Herbert, who incorporated these environmental concerns into his story….

Many science fiction novels include predictions regarding technology, but Frank Herbert deliberately stayed away from that. Instead, Herbert’s novels focus on the power of the human mind and its ability to focus on discipline to overcome fears and regain control over thoughts, feelings, and even bodily functions. Herbert summed this up in one of his most iconic quoted Dune lines:

“Fear is the mind-killer.”…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

March 6, 1928 — William F. Nolan. (Died 2021.)

By Paul Weimer: Is the crystal in your palm blinking?

While he did write two sequels to it, plenty of short stories, a number of screenplays and a fair number of critical works, the name William F. Nolan means one and one thing only for me: Logan’s Run.

Well, two, if you count the movie.

The book, co-authored with George Clayton Johnson, came first. Ironically, while I read the book first, and only saw the movie some years later, the edition I read of the book first and had for years until it fell apart was one of those “movie/tv tie in” editions, that even had some stills/photos from the movie in it. So I “saw” a couple of scenes from the movie thanks to reading and re-reading this edition long before actually watching the movie.

Such a strange, wild book. 21 is the age of mandatory death., the triumph of youth. Feels very weird, today, in our sometimes gerontocratic governments. You’ll never get away from a homer, homer, homer. Casual use of drugs. Casual sex.  It’s a good thing that my parents never knew what was in the book, they’d have been shocked. A breakneck plot and scenes all across the country, from domed cities to the frozen prison of hell to Crazy Horse and the Thinker, to a Civil War re-enactment with robots! 

I did visit Crazy Horse in 2008, inspired by the novel, and was disappointed in how slow the construction has gone (far different than in the Logan’s Run timeline). It’s…worse than a tourist trap, somehow. Alas. 

But the movie is something else. The future as a giant enclosed shopping mall. Lots of things missing from the books and a very different set of confrontations–the original book has a fight with a tiger, but the movie has…house cats? And the utter disappointment that while in the book some people are escaping and becoming free, in the movie, apparently, they all were frozen into frozen food by Box, who was turned from a chilling sadist into a figure of comedy in the movie. And yet like the book, the movie subtly is suggesting that the current world order cannot stand, and in fact must change, or else. 

Yes, this birthday turned into a Logan’s Run’s remembrance rather than a Nolan remembrance. Nolan died in 2021. Requiescat in pace.

William F Nolan at Multnomah Falls

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) SIMPSONS ART AUCTION. On March 15 Heritage Auctions will hold “Cowabunga II – Celebrating the Art of The Simpsons Animation Art Showcase Auction”. Among the 300+ lots going under the hammer is this animation cel:

The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror VIII “The HΩmega Man” Original Kang and Kudos Production Cel (Fox, 1997). This original production cel from The Simpsons episode “Treehouse of Horror VIII” (Season 9, Episode 4) features the iconic alien duo Kang and Kodos Johnson from Rigel 7. Taken from the first segment, “The HΩmega Man,” this rare cel captures their brief yet hilarious appearance as they witness Springfield’s demise from space. In the segment, France launches a neutron bomb at Springfield after Mayor Quimby insults the French with a “frog legs” joke. As the bomb travels through space, it flies past Kang and Kodos’ flying saucer, prompting Kang to exclaim, “What the hell was that?” This humorous moment occurs near the 2:58 timestamp, adding to the duo’s memorable cameos.

(12) AHH, ROMANCE. Booklegger tells Facebook readers how a bookstore figured into a couple’s anniversary celebration.

A few days ago I noticed a customer browsing the shelves in the science fiction/fantasy section. I asked him if there was anything I could help him find. “No, I’m doing fine, thanks,” he responded,” “but actually I do have a question I wanted to ask you.” His expression was animated and I wondered where this was heading.

He went on to tell me that he and his girlfriend were approaching their first anniversary, and that they had come to Booklegger on their first date. They were planning on re-creating that first date by visiting Dick Taylor for chocolates, and then coming to our store. He had created a little 42 page book for her as an anniversary gift, and he wondered if he could come in on the morning of their anniversary and plant the book on our shelves for her to find when they came to our shop later in the day.

I was 100% on board with this idea! What a compliment that they had their first date at our place, and what a sweet, creative surprise to mark the occasion. So this morning just as we opened Kiloe came in and showed me the book that he had created. 42 pages of things that he adores about Sarah, inside jokes between them, remembrance of fun things they’ve done together etc. And yes, it’s 42 things because they are both fans of Douglas Adams. He planted the book between Jim Butcher titles, knowing that she would browse that area….

(13) WAX ON, WAX OFF. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Goldman Sachs, in a research note Thursday (the note isn’t publicly posted) reported by Slashdot: “Goldman Sachs: Why AI Spending Is Not Boosting GDP”.

Annualized revenue for public companies exposed to the build-out of AI infrastructure increased by over $340 billion from 2022 through 2024Q4 (and is projected to increase by almost $580 billion by end-2025). In contrast, annualized real investment in AI-related categories in the US GDP accounts has only risen by $42 billion over the same period. This sharp divergence has prompted questions from investors about why US GDP is not receiving a larger boost from AI….

Or, as I think it was Cory Doctorow posted months ago, they haven’t come up with a real, usefull killer usage for the thing. I am reminded of a news story on the radio in the early oughts, after the tech bubble  collapsed, som3eone saying “they were spending money like mad, making fancy websites… and hoping that they’d eventually find a way to monetize it (they didn’t).

(14) WATER IN THE EARLY UNIVERSE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] One of the determinants many think is the need for water for life.

(I myself am a primacy of water man, though my former colleague, and fellow SF fan, Jack Cohen, was more broadminded than I.) Anyway, news comes that water has been discovered very early in the Universe’s history. This means that the Universe has had water in it for nearly all its time.  This boosts the prospects for life arising elsewhere before now…  Primary research here….

Of course, if you are not a primacy of water person then this news will be of lesser import…

Scientists from the University of Portsmouth have discovered that water was already present in the Universe 100-200 million years after the Big Bang. 

The discovery means habitable planets could have started forming much earlier – before the first galaxies formed and billions of years earlier than was previously thought. 

The study was led by astrophysicist Dr Daniel Whalen from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation. It is published today (3 March 2025) in Nature Astronomy. 

It is the first time water has been modelled in the primordial universe.

According to the researchers’ simulations, water molecules began forming shortly after the first supernova explosions, known as Population III (Pop III) supernovae. These cosmic events, which occurred in the first generation of stars, were essential for creating the heavy elements – such as oxygen – required for water to exist.

The key finding is that primordial supernovae formed water in the Universe that predated the first galaxies. 

Dr Daniel Whalen, from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation

Dr Whalen said: “Before the first stars exploded, there was no water in the Universe because there was no oxygen. Only very simple nuclei survived the Big Bang – hydrogen, helium, lithium and trace amounts of barium and boron.

“Oxygen, forged in the hearts of these supernovae, combined with hydrogen to form water, paving the way for the creation of the essential elements needed for life.”…

(15) TILT. The company’s Sunday landing was a success, however, today’s encore was not: “Private lunar lander may have fallen over while touching down near the moon’s south pole” – AP News has the story.

A privately owned lunar lander touched down on the moon with a drill, drone and rovers for NASA and other customers Thursday, but quickly ran into trouble and may have fallen over.

Intuitive Machines said it was uncertain whether its Athena lander was upright near the moon’s south pole — standing 15 feet (4.7 meters) tall — or lying sideways like its first spacecraft from a year ago. Controllers rushed to turn off some of the lander’s equipment to conserve power while trying to determine what went wrong.

It was the second moon landing this week by a Texas company under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program. Sunday’s touchdown was a complete success….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Mark Barsotti has rolled a sixth installment of his Paul Di Filippo interview: “Sci-Fi Writer Paul Di Filippo #6 ~ Weird Names & Cyberpunk Jazz Scatting”.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/21/25 As I Was Listening To Charles Ives, I Met Ningauble Of the Seven Eyes

Posted on by

(1) SFWA ANNOUNCES DATE OF NEBULA FINALIST ANNOUNCEMENT. SFWA President Kate Ristau recently introduced members to Nebula Conference Project Manager, Sherine Mani saying, “Sherine is an events manager who has run conferences for Fortune 500 companies and nonprofits, as well as fan cons like CrimeCon.”

Ristau also spotlighted Nebula Award producers, Rebekah Postupak and Josh Storey. Both were assistant producers last year.

The Nebula Awards Finalist Announcement will be presented live on YouTube on March 12 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific.

(2) WORTH MORE THAN ITS WEIGHT IN GOLD. Apparently, because the BBC thinks “Luke Skywalker’s Star Wars medal could sell for up to £476k”. It will go on the block during Propstore’s “Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction” in March.

A medal given to Luke Skywalker after he destroyed the Death Star in Star Wars could sell for up to £476,000.

Propstore, based in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, is selling the Medal of Yavin, worn by future Jedi master Luke during the first film in the franchise.

The medal is also believed to have been worn by Harrison Ford – who played Han Solo – during rehearsals for the 1977 film, later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.

Brandon Alinger from Propstore said the item held a “special place in cinematic history”.

It goes on sale in Los Angeles in March with a price estimate of $300,000 to $600,000 (£238,000 to £476,000).

The medal came from the collection of props master Gerard Bourke, who worked on the original Star Wars films shot at Elstree Studios.

Propstore claimed it was the “first and only medal to be offered for public sale” after its team researched the prop….

(3) RUSHDIE ASSAILANT CONVICTED. “Man Who Stabbed Salman Rushdie Is Found Guilty of Attempted Murder” – the New York Times has the story (behind a paywall).

A jury in western New York on Friday found a New Jersey man guilty of attempted murder in the stabbing of the author Salman Rushdie, which left him partially blind.

The conviction of the man, Hadi Matar, 27, followed harrowing testimony from Mr. Rushdie, 77, who said he had been struck by his attacker’s dark, ferocious eyes. He told the jury that at first he felt he was being punched, but then he realized he had “a very large quantity of blood pouring out” onto his clothes.

Mr. Rushdie had been scheduled to deliver a talk at the Chautauqua Institution amphitheater on Aug. 12, 2022, about how the United States has been a safe haven for writers and other artists in exile.

Shortly before the talk was set to begin, a man wearing dark clothing and a face mask rushed onstage and stabbed Mr. Rushdie repeatedly.

Mr. Matar was also found guilty of assault on Friday for injuring Ralph Henry Reese, one of the founders of a project that offers refuge for writers. Mr. Reese had been onstage to moderate the talk.

Mr. Matar, who is scheduled to be sentenced on April 23, faces up to 32 years in prison. He also faces federal terrorism-related charges.

The attack occurred in front of more than 1,000 people. Afterward, Mr. Rushdie was airlifted to a hospital with a trauma clinic in Erie, Pa. He spent 17 days there before he was transferred to N.Y.U. Langone’s Rusk Rehabilitation center in New York City, where he stayed for nearly a month….

(4) SHELFIES. The latest to share about his accumulated books with Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin is “Paul Graham Raven” in Shelfies #24. (Photos at the link.)

…As is probably obvious, I keep books either because I haven’t read them yet and fully intend to, or because I have read them already, and intend eventually to read them again. This exercise has made me realise that the latter category is necessarily growing faster than the former, which means I should probably stop buying books (an extremely expensive habit in Sweden) and catch up on my re-reads.

(Like that’s gonna happen any time soon.)

(5) THE OSCAR FOR DUNE 2? [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s Adrian Horton makes the case for Dune: Part 2: “Why Dune: Part Two should win the best picture Oscar”.

A common complaint I’ve heard about Dune: Part Two is that it is too similar to the first Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s audacious gamble to adapt just half of Frank Herbert’s beloved sci-fi tome and hope for another greenlight from Warner Bros. This is correct. Part Two, like its predecessor, is arcane, surprisingly weird, oddly structured and deeply uninterested in pandering. This is actually a compliment, because though I have seen Part Two six times and still do not totally understand the Bene Gesserit, the film, like its predecessor, is a strange creature in modern cinema: a true blockbuster – a cinematic behemoth that makes millions, generates memes and cements the ever-vanishing movie star – that harnesses the full power of the art form….

(6) WHEN IAIN BANKS HELPED MAKE IT THE FULL MONTY. [Item by Steven French.] For my comfort read over Christmas and New Year I chose the fourth volume of Michael Palin’s diaries, covering the period 1999 to 2009, and there in the entry for September 14 2009 I discovered that Iain Banks, while a student at Stirling University, was an extra (a knight no less) in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail! [Click for larger image.]

(7) IT’S THE NANONEWTONS THAT KILL YOU. [Item by Steven French.] Who hasn’t wondered about this?! “What would happen if a tiny black hole passed through your body?” at Phys.org.

In 1974, science fiction author Larry Niven wrote a murder mystery with an interesting premise: Could you kill a man with a tiny black hole? I won’t spoil the story, though I’m willing to bet most people would argue the answer is clearly yes. Intense gravity, tidal forces, and the event horizon would surely lead to a messy end. But it turns out the scientific answer is a bit more interesting.

On the one hand, it’s clear that a large enough black hole could kill you. On the other hand, a black hole with the mass of a single hydrogen atom is clearly too small to be noticed. The real question is the critical mass. At what minimum size would a black hole become deadly? That’s the focus of a new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server….

…But if the black hole passed through your head, that would be a different story. Tidal forces could tear apart brain cells, which would be much more serious. Since brain cells are delicate, even a force differential of 10–100 nanonewtons might kill you. But that would take a black hole at the highest end of our mass range….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary: The Cats of Tanglewood Forest (2013)

Two of my favorite individuals, Charles de Lint, who would later win a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, and Charles Vess, who received a Hugo at Dublin 2019 for Best Professional Artist and a World Fantasy Award for Best Artist, collaborated on The Cats of Tanglewood Forest, a follow-up to their A Circle of Cats. 

Twenty years ago, it would win the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, an award that until this moment I’d not heard of. My bad for not knowing of this award. 

If you’ve not encountered this novel, it’s considered a young adult work, but I’d recommend for anyone interested in a good read grounded in Appalachia folklore with the fantastic artwork of Vess profusely illustrating it. You can read the Green Man review here. And here’s our review for A Circle of Cats as well. I’ve got one of his signed prints for A Circle of Cats in my apartment over the desk where I’m write this review.

It is available from the usual suspects, but you really should get the hardcover edition as it should be read that way as holding it and admiring the illustrations by Vess that way are extraordinary. You should be able to get a copy from the local bookstore as it is readily available. 

Of course it has cats, lots of cats. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) CAPACIOUS CAPE. “DC Comics to Relaunch Batman With New #1 Issue and New Costume” reports IGN.

2025 is definitely shaping up to be a huge year for DC’s flagship Batman comic. Current writer Chip Zdarsky just ended his run with Batman #157, paving the way for Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee’s Hush 2 storyline in March. And once Hush 2 is over, DC will be relaunching Batman with a new #1 issue, new writer, and new costume.

As revealed at the ComicsPro retailer event, the new volume of Batman will be written by Matt Fraction (Uncanny X-Men, The Invincible Iron Man). Current Batman artist Jorge Jimenez is remaining on board, though as mentioned, he and Fraction have designed a new costume and new Batmobile to ring in the new series. Batman is trading in the black and gray suit for a more vintage-inspired blue and gray costume. Check out the new Batsuit below:

(11) KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES. [Item by Steven French.] There are some absolutely stunning shots of aurorae here: “2024 Northern Lights Photographer of the Year” at Capture the Atlas.

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George hilariously sends up “How Bomb Timers Work In Movies”.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Jeffrey Smith, Chris Barkley, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 2/12/25 When The Scroll Rolls Over, We Will All Be Pixeled

Posted on by

(1) KRESS Q&A. Asimov’s “From Earth to the Stars” department brings us a  “Q&A With Nancy Kress”

AE: What is your process?
NK: For any story with real science (or rather, real-to-a-point science; if it were all real it wouldn’t be science fiction), I research first.  The characters, like Kenda and Dayson, might already be in my mind, but characters have to actually do things, and the majority of those things should be connected in some way to the science.  So I begin with reading, note-taking, and playing with the concepts and details of the science, be it genetic engineering, stellar physics, or—in this case—the Earth’s geomagnetic sphere (which is not a sphere but an elongated shape that extends from the center of the Earth to several hundred miles into space.)  Because I knew next-to-nothing about geomagnetism, this involved a lot of study, a lot of going “Huh?” and then “Huh!”  Also a lot of cursing; I am not trained as a scientist.  Research not only grounds a story in actual science, it can also suggest plot ideas, and I ended up with as many pages of story ideas as research facts.
Next all this gets reviewed and a loose outline emerges.  Actually, to call it an “outline” is to vastly overstate.  It’s one or two pages labeled MASTER SHEET which pretty much ends up mastering nothing, but at least it’s something to point out which direction I am hypothetically going and a few possible pathways to get there.  Not so much GPS as a faded, dog-eared, slightly outdated Atlas roadmap that lacks all the new roads, collapsed bridges, and accidents on Interstate 90.

(2) GREENE’S REPLY. YouTuber Daniel Greene has responded in a 1-minute video to the sexual assault allegations reported in yesterday’s Scroll: “In Response To Naomi King’s Allegations”. Here is the transcript:

Hello, my name is Daniel Greene. This is an important message in response to various false allegations made against me by Naomi King of alleged sexual assault in a campaign launched on YouTube and more.

Let me be clear: I had consensual sex with Naomi King. Yes it was an affair that my then girlfriend and now fiance took several years to move on from. I also have clear and convincing evidence to prove everything was consensual.

Myself and my team are now planning to sue Naomi King in a court of law. The communication Naomi King has inaccurately used against me online has greatly damaged me and others to date. I also have many other pieces of evidence which prove my innocence.

Look for more communication from me based on truth and fact in the near future. Naomi King took time to launch a campaign against me and I will need time to communicate my truth as well more soon.

A commenter with the handle @ndrew7707 left these exceptionally worthwhile remarks after Greene’s video:

I doubt you’ll read through these comments, but just in case: I’ve never SA’d anyone, but I have cheated and sexually harassed people. I am a survivor of SA, though, and one that looked a lot like the situation described. Between this Naomi’s video about the cease and desist letter, it’s pretty clear to me that this is, in fact, a pattern of behavior that you’ve been denying for a long time. And I get it. Painful is an understatement for how it feels to fully admit to yourself the kind of person you’ve turned yourself into by following that impulse time and time again and learning new ways to hide it and justify it to yourself. So, please, take this from someone who does want you to get better: DO NOT sue them. Not just for their sake, but yours, and all the people you’ve hurt before this and the people you will hurt in the future if you don’t make real changes. Get out of the public eye, get into a treatment program, find a therapist that’s a social worker so that they can walk you through the change process and help you construct barriers to these thoughts and actions, including people who fully know the extent of what you’ve done and are willing to work with you to keep them in check. You cannot do this on your own. I know this comment section is full of people calling you a terrible person, and I don’t blame them. What you did is terrible, disgusting, all those things. But the most terrifying part of this is that you are not fundamentally, irredeemably bad. Very few people, if any, are. You are just a person who’s made a lot of bad decisions, and you are fully capable of making better ones. So, please, from one person who has unlearned abusive behavior: do not try to save your channel, your reputation, your career. Take the stability you’ve been able to build for yourself and actually get help. That is a privilege that should not be taken lightly. You might feel like you’re dying, but that’s normal. Feel that shit fully. Ask yourself for the rest of your life how you make certain you never treat someone else like that again. There is life to be lived on the other side of this, but you gotta figure out what that looks like without this attention, manipulation, and ill-gotten satisfaction you are clearly addicted to. And it is an addiction. Codependents Anonymous helped me tremendously for this reason, but I’d suggest some one-on-one treatment first before putting yourself in any group situation which will undoubtedly have survivors in it. I unsubscribed, but I’ll be back to remind you if you keep trying to do this. It’s bullshit, we all know it. It’s ok if the channel falls apart, it really is. There are a million other things one can do with the gift that is our one, finite, human life. Don’t waste yours on excuses.

(3) PEAK DOCTOR. Den of Geek says these are “The Doctor Who Episodes that Define Each Doctor”. The Fifth Doctor is the one I’m least familiar with, so let’s pick his segment to excerpt here.

The Fifth Doctor – Earthshock (1982)

…To younger fans (and by “younger” here I mean, “People in their 30s and 40s”) the Fifth Doctor has undergone a bit of a memetic evolution. Among the Doctors of the classic series, he was the Young One. We see him being chummy with David Tennant in the Children in Need “Time Crash” short, and hanging out with Tegan in “The Power of the Doctor”, and we watch Peter Davison in “The Five-ish Doctors” and he seems… nice. A bit grumpy. Definitely not on a par with the likes of McCoy, Ecclestone and Capaldi when you need a Doctor to go dark.

Yet what you forget about Tegan is that she’s the companion who left the TARDIS in “Resurrection of the Daleks” because it was too fricking violent. If you watch this charming collection of times the Doctor has shot someone to death with a gun, the Fifth Doctor is better represented than most – especially when you consider that in context, the Fourth Doctor is being framed in most of his scenes, and the Second Doctor is carrying a couple of big torches.

The show had been on the air for 20 years, and a battle was raging over whether it was going to be dark and grown-up and edgy now its audience was growing up, or be a kids’ show forever. And one of the definitive strikes in that battle was “Earthshock”, where the show killed off Adric. Sure, Adric will never rank well in our “Top 10 Least Annoying Doctor Who Companions” listicle, but if Star Trek: The Next Generation murdered Wesley Crusher, it’d still be considered a dark move.

It set the tone that would eventually lead to the All-Time-Favourites-List regular, “Caves of Androzani”….

(4) L.A. SWATTER SENTENCED. “L.A. teen ‘serial swatter’ sentenced to 4 years in prison” in the LA Times (behind a paywall).

A Lancaster teen was sentenced to four years in prison after making more than 375 hoax calls that included threats to detonate bombs, conduct mass shootings and “kill everyone he saw,” authorities said.

The calls targeted high schools, colleges and universities, places of worship, government officials and individuals across the United States, according to prosecutors.

The serial swatter, 18-year-old Alan W. Filion, pleaded guilty to making interstate threats to injure others, which frequently led to massive law enforcement responses and rendered officers unavailable to assist with other emergencies, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. He made hundreds of calls from August 2022 to January 2024, according to his plea agreement.

Filion was both a recreational swatter and a swatter-for-hire who advertised his services of mass disruption on social media platforms, prosecutors said.

In a January 2023 social media post, he claimed that when he swatted someone, he usually got police “to drag the victim and their families out of the house cuff them and search the house for dead bodies.” In some instances, officers entered the targeted buildings with their weapons drawn and detained individuals who were inside, prosecutors said.

He was arrested in January on Florida charges connected to a threat he made to a religious organization in Sanford, Fla., prosecutors said. Filion threatened to commit a mass shooting at the site and claimed to have an illegally modified AR-15, a Glock 17 pistol, pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails….

(5) STOP SWIPING SAYS FEDERAL JUDGE. “Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US” reports WIRED.

Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the United States.

In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor, finding that the company’s copyright was indeed infringed by Ross Intelligence’s actions.

“None of Ross’s possible defenses holds water. I reject them all,” wrote US District Court of Delaware judge Stephanos Bibas, in a summary judgment….

…Notably, Judge Bibas ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor on the question of fair use. The fair use doctrine is a key component of how AI companies are seeking to defend themselves against claims that they used copyrighted materials illegally. The idea underpinning fair use is that sometimes it’s legally permissible to use copyrighted works without permission—for example, to create parody works, or in noncommercial research or news production. When determining whether fair use applies, courts use a four-factor test, looking at the reason behind the work, the nature of the work (whether it’s poetry, nonfiction, private letters, et cetera), the amount of copyrighted work used, and how the use impacts the market value of the original. Thomson Reuters prevailed on two of the four factors, but Bibas described the fourth as the most important, and ruled that Ross “meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute.”…

(6) TONY LEWIS (1941-2025). “Dr. Tony Lewis, one of the last surviving founders of NESFA, Chairman of Noreascon, and longtime Press Czar of NESFA Press passed away yesterday at home,” announced Gay Ellen Dennett on Facebook today. “Both Suford and Alice [his wife and daughter] were by his side. Further information will be posted when known.”

Tony Lewis

Fancylopedia notes Anthony R. Lewis co-founded the New England Science Fiction Association in 1967. He chaired the Boston Worldcon of 1971, Noreascon.

He was active for many years in compiling the NESFA Index to Science Fiction Magazines. He invented the term “recursive SF” (any sf story that refers to sf) and wrote An Annotated Bibliography of Recursive Science Fiction (NESFA Press).

Space Travel by Ben Bova and Anthony R. Lewis from Writer’s Digest Books was nominated for the 1998 Best Non-Fiction Book Hugo and Concordance to Cordwainer Smith, Third Edition by Anthony R. Lewis from NESFA Press was nominated for the 2001 Best Related Book Hugo.

Among his many talents he was a well-known (and skilled) auctioneer. 

He was an active member of SFWA.

Tony is survived by his wife, Suford (they married in 1968) and daughter Alice.

File 770 will post a fuller tribute later this evening.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

“Ill Met in Lankhmar” (1970)

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser faced each other across the two thieves sprawled senseless. They were poised for attack, yet for the moment neither moved.

Each discerned something inexplicably familiar in the other.

Fafhrd said, “Our motives for being here seem identical.”

“Seem? Surely must be!” the Mouser answered curtly, fiercely eyeing this potential new foe, who was taller by a head than the tall thief.

“You said?”

“I said, ‘Seem? Surely must be!'”

“How civilized of you!” Fafhrd commented in pleased tones.

“Civilized?” the Mouser demanded suspiciously, gripping his dirk tighter.

— “Ill Met in Lankhmar” 

Fifty-four years ago at the first Noreascon, Fritz Leiber would win the Hugo for Best Novella with “Ill Met in Lankhmar”, a Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser tale. It was also be awarded a Nebula Award for Best Novella. 

The other Hugo nominees that year were “The Thing in the Stone” by Clifford D. Simak, “The Region Between” by Harlan Ellison, “The World Outside” by Robert Silverberg and “Beastchild” by Dean R. Koontz.

It was first published in the April 1970 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. A prequel to the series, Leiber had by that time been chronicling the pair’s adventures for some thirty years. 

The story is the third one in Ace’s 1970 Swords and Deviltry paperback collection. It is available from the usual sources as are the later volumes. Audible has them as well. 

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 12, 1950 — Michael Ironside, 75 .

I most remember Michael Ironside for his role as Lieutenant Jean Rasczak in Starship Troopers. There wasn’t much great about that film but I thought that he made much of that character. 

Do I need to say that I’m not covering everything he’s done of a genre nature? Well most of you get that. Really you do. So let’s see what I find interesting.

Scanners is one weird film. It really is. And he was in it as Darryl Revok, the Big Baddie, a role he perfectly played. 

Next he got cast as the main antagonist in another of my favorite SF films, this time as Overdog McNab in Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. Who comes with these names?

Then there was Total Recall where he was Agent Richter, the ruthless enforcer of Cohaagen, the source of everything corrupt on Mars. Great role that fit his gruff voice and frankly even gruffer looks absolutely perfectly.

One of his major ongoing roles was in the V franchise, first as Ham Tyle, a recurring role in V: The Final Battle, and then playing the same character in all episodes of V: The Series.

Now we come to my favorite of his roles, in one of my favorite series, seaQuest 2032, where he was Captain Oliver Hudson. Great series and an absolute fantastic performance by him! Pity it got cancelled after thirteen episodes. 

Finally, he has one voice acting role I loved. In the DC universe, he was Darkseid, the absolute rule of Apokolis. He voiced him primarily on Superman: The Animated Series, but also on the Justice League series as well, and to my surprise on the HBO Harley Quinn series as well.

Michael Ironside

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) TRUE GRIT. Warner Bros. has an awards eligibility website – “WB Awards 2024”. One section is devoted to Dune: Part II, and includes items like “The sounds of Arrakis come to life” – about riding a sandworm.

(11) LATEST ITERATION OF CIVILIZATION. The New York Times reviews Civilization VII: “The Crises Are Simulations, but the Lessons Are Real” (behind a paywall).

Unhappiness is a dreaded condition in the Civilization game series. Unhappy citizens stop working, stop researching scientific pursuits and, worst of all, start rioting.

In the new Sid Meier’s Civilization VII, which introduces three historical ages and a mounting series of crises during the transitions between them, my ancient Persian empire was running smoothly and expanding with ease. Then, suddenly, things struggled to feel cohesive. The game declared that my empire had fractured “as once-loyal settlements seek their own path forward.”

The unhappiness in my cities and towns grew so severe that several outlying settlements began trashing their districts and looking to outside civilizations for support. While I worked at putting out fires started by rioters, my neighbor Napoleon swooped in and quickly conquered one of my towns. This started a territorial war that only deepened the unhappiness of my population. Soon, half my towns were in revolt.

While following your chosen civilization’s path in Civilization VII, from the rough-hewed settlements of the past to the glistening megalopolises of the future, you move through ages that transform not just your technologies, government and civic policies, but also the broader identity of your civilization itself.

With its precipitous rises and falls, Civilization VII, which will be released on Tuesday for PCs, Macs and consoles, is a departure for the series. Although past iterations have had revolts, diplomatic incidents and civic upset, they tend to feel less closely connected to the ways that historical forces can boil over into crisis and conflict.

The violent and chaotic cuts here accurately reflect a world history where many things can happen all at once and often with surprising swiftness. History doesn’t always move forward in the routine, turn-based lock step of the 4X genre (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) that Civilization popularized. More often, root causes like financial instability, cultural changes and oppressive hierarchies stay below the surface until emerging in a cacophony of war, revolution and natural-disaster-fueled chaos….

(12) HOT GAS STATION. “Nuclear Rocket Fuel Test Success Paves the Way for Faster Space Travel” – Extremetech has the story.

A new test of nuclear propellant fuel under space-like conditions has been hailed as a success by NASA and General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS), in what is considered one more step on the road to nuclear-powered rocket engines. Such designs have long been suggested as a more efficient method of space travel and could cut interplanetary voyages down to just a few weeks.

While this latest test doesn’t make nuclear-powered rocket engines viable just yet, it’s an important step on the journey. This latest batch of tests was conducted at the compact fuel element environmental test (CFEET) facility at NASA MSFC, as per Space.com. It cycled the nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) fuel up to 2600 Kelvin (4,220 Fahrenheit) and back down again several times, using superheated hydrogen… 

(13) SAVE MY ASS. “NASA Calls in Webb Telescope to Track Recently Identified Hazardous Asteroid” reports Gizmodo.

Faced with the (very low probability) threat of an incoming asteroid impact, NASA is bringing out the big guns. The agency will employ its powerful Webb space telescope to monitor newly discovered asteroid 2024 YR4, which has a small chance of hitting Earth in 2032.

Based on current estimates, asteroid 2024 YR4 has a 2.1% chance of impact on December 22, 2032. Although the odds are still in our favor, there are currently no other known large asteroids with an impact probability above 1%, according to NASA. The space agency tends to take these matters quite seriously, which is why it plans to collect additional observations of the space rock using the Webb telescope in March to refine the current estimates, NASA revealed in a recent update.

The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Chile discovered the asteroid on December 27, 2024. Shortly after its discovery, the impact probability of the asteroid was set to 1.3%. However, additional observations increased the asteroid’s chances of crashing into Earth to 2.3% as of yesterday, before dropping slightly to 2.1% this morning. These odds are preliminary, and more observations of the asteroid are desperately needed….

(14) ASK ANY VEGETABLE. Boing Boing isn’t convinced. “Fancy science journal caught publishing nonsense term ‘vegetative electron microscopy,’ doubles down”.

A completely made-up scientific term is making the rounds in academic journals, and instead of being “oops!” one major publisher is basically saying “this is fine!”

As reported in Retraction Watch, A sharp-eyed Russian chemist (going by the extremely cool pseudonym “Paralabrax clathratus”) spotted the weird phrase “vegetative electron microscopy,” which makes about as much sense as “photosynthetic hammer” or “reproductive calculator.” The term has somehow snuck into nearly two dozen published papers, including one whose senior author is an editor at prestigious publisher Elsevier.

When called out on this obvious nonsense, Elsevier basically said “No no, it’s fine! It’s just a shorter way of saying ‘electron microscopy of vegetative structures'” which is like saying “vegetative car” is a dandy way to describe “a car that drives past vegetables.”…

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