(1) LACON V LOOKING FOR HUGO BASE DESIGN. See File 770’s post “LAcon V Seeks 2026 Hugo Base Design”. Full specifications and guidelines are on the LAcon V website.

(2) BOSKONE 2026 BOOK KICKSTARTER. The New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA) has launched a Kickstarter appeal to fund publication of Dubious Pleasures, a group of previously published short stories by Greg Cox, Writer Guest of Honor at Boskone 63, to be held in February, 2026.  The cover art is by Charles Urbach, Official Artist of Boskone 63.

(3) WAUKEGAN’S OWN. [Item by Steven H Silver.] WGN TV ran this piece on local boy Ray Bradbury: “The True Genius of Ray Bradbury”.

Ray Bradbury is perhaps the bridge between the early visionaries of science fiction and our currently catalogue of Marvel and Star Wars. And it all started just north of Chicago, in Waukegan, Illinois. Larry Potash unearths the true genius of Ray Bradbury in this piece for Backstory. Backstory with Larry Potash airs Sunday nights at 11 on WGN-TV and on smart TVs on the free WGN+ app. 

(4) HOME IS WHERE THE HAUNT IS. Henry Corrigan has done a fascinating analysis of the psychology behind Haunted Houses: “Halloween Haunts: This Haunted House Will Save You” at the Horror Writers Association blog.

Everything we do, tends to have a purpose behind it. We humans might be weird, but we don’t really do random. That’s because randomness is risky. It invites chaos and if there’s one thing that both scares and offends us, it’s that something could be done to us, and we’re left with no recourse. We’re just done.

So, to deal with this inescapable fact, we do what we do best. We play pretend. We create stories, structures and scenarios where we can come to grips with it safely. We give ourselves a place where we can put the worst parts of ourselves, all the fear, selfishness, violence and greed, in the hopes that by offering up a safer alternative, we’ll prevent the reality from encroaching on us, if for just a little while.

Everything we do, we do for a reason. They might be twisted to hell and back, but the things we create are meant to keep something worse from happening. And that is as true of seatbelts and airbags as it is of…well, haunted houses.

I’ve loved haunted houses ever since I was a child. The eerie lights, the sounds, the crackling tension that builds before someone or something jumps out at me…it brings a smile to my face even to this day.

I can vividly remember building a mini haunted house with my brother on the second floor of our home. I can’t for the life of me remember why. It wasn’t for Halloween, that much I know. But every once in a while, we’d sneak upstairs and grab anything that came to hand.

We’d stick string to the walls and pretend they were guts or vines. We’d take our old clothes, stuff them with pillows and suspend a ‘body’ from the ceiling. Then, once everything was set, we’d turn off all the lights and tell our parents to come upstairs. We’d make them close their eyes and walk blind into whatever horrors we’d created, laughing our heads off the entire time.

No one really knows where the haunted house came from. Its actual origins are one more thing lost to history. But the story I like most comes from Lisa Morton, author of Trick or Treat, A History of Halloween. She believes that the haunted house was born from much the same activities as my brother and I engaged in. Homemade frights built out of whatever could be brought to hand….

(5) SPIRITED DISCUSSION. Lisa Morton is also cited in NPR’s article about “The not-so-spooky origins of ‘ghost’”.

It wouldn’t be spooky season without ghosts. The otherworldly white apparitions are a standby of Halloween celebrations.

But they weren’t always the stereotypical evil spirits we see in books and movies today. The messengers from the afterlife have gone through a variety of makeovers over the centuries, and the word continues to influence the English language in many ways.

Part of the reason for that, said Lisa Morton, author of Ghosts: A Haunted History, is just like ghosts themselves, our fascination with the afterlife just won’t die.

“I think one of the reasons we fear them is that sense that this is the worst part of us and this is what’s going to survive after death,” she said….

A detailed etymology of “ghost” follows.

(6) KEITH RAYMOND DIES. [Item by Steven French.] Dr. Keith ‘Doc’ Raymond, co-founder of the science-fiction magazine Savage Planets, died October 21 after a long illness. (On a personal note, Savage Planets has published a number of my short stories over the past couple of years and Keith was always helpful with his comments and generous with his praise.) Click for larger image.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

October 22, 1938 — Derek Jacobi, 87.

Remember I’m not covering everything here, just what I find interesting.

First, I fondly remember Derek Jacobi from the Cadfael series where he played Brother Cadfael, the monk mystery solver. He had an edge to him that belied his supposed monkness.  

It lasted for a much shorter period than I thought as the series only went thirteen episodes. There were twenty-one novels, not all of which were filmed, and there are many differences between the plots and characters in the novels. 

(Neat note here: Sean Pertwee was Sheriff Hugh Beringar in four episodes (not all).)

Much earlier and certainly less gentle was I, Claudius in which he played Claudius who was considered rather sane after Caligula, who didn’t survive assassination, and before Nero who succeeded him. He plays the role brilliantly over the twelve episodes and I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t yet seen it. 

By no means a major character in it, but he is Probert, Sir William’s valet in Gosford Park. He, in his scenes, is spot on. And this film is of my favorite of the Manor House mysteries. 

He was in The Golden Compass film as Magisterial Emissary which according to the film wiki “was a man from Lyra’s world who worked for the Magisterium. He talked to Pavel Rasek about Bolvangar and how it should be protected. He said that Marisa Coulter was going to demonstrate the intercision process on Lyra Belacqua. His dæmon was a black panther.” Now if you read the series and don’t recognize him that’s because they invented his character for the film. 

I just discovered he was in Tolkien, a biography of, well, you can guess who. He played as Joseph Wright, Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford. Tolkien himself was played by Nicholas Hoult, with a younger one performed by Harry Gilby as he would been at eighteen, so presumably during the War. 

I’m going to finish off with his performance as Professor Yanna the Tenth Doctor’s “Utopia” episode. 

Derek Jacobi here plays the fifth version of the Master whom the Doctor will encounter on screen, and John Simm will the sixth of eight to be so far. This will be the first of three episodes that form a single story along with “The Sound of Drums” and “Last of the Time Lords”.

The episode serves to re-introduce the Master (John Simm), a Time Lord villain of the show’s original run who last appeared in the 1996 television movie Doctor Who.”

Those are my choices. I’m sure yours might be different. 

P.S. Cadfael is available on BritBox;  I, Claudius is on Acorn; Gosford Park is available to rent on Amazon Prime, as is The Golden Compass; Tolkien’s on Hulu; the new Doctor Who is on Disney+. Did I say yet there’s too many streaming services?

(8) COMICS SECTION.

• Bound and Gagged knows the telltale signs. 
• Dinosaur Comics leaves everyone fully aware how hyperbole works.  
• Macanudo gets to the heart of literature. 
• Reality Check finds one’s a crowd. 
• WaynoVision has been stopped for a snack. 

(9) THE HEALING ARTS. [Item by Paul Riddell.] In time for Halloween, may I recommend taking a look at “The Annals of St. Remedius Medical College”, probably the wildest take on alternate Dallas history you’re likely to see for a while? Where else are you going to get the lowdown on Galveston kaiju, the transformation of the State Fair of Texas to an alternative to Burning Man, screenings of “Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald,” and the city’s plague of earwax vampires?

(10) IT’S MY PARTY AND I’LL CRY IF I WANT TO. The premise of AppleTV’s ‎Plur1bus is: “The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness.” Premieres November 7.

(11) TWENTIETH CENTURY READING. Smithsonian remembers “How the Hardy Boys Book Series Cracked the Case of Getting Kids Hooked on Reading”.

Edward Stratemeyer had a plan to get American children reading. An ambitious paper merchant in Newark, New Jersey, he’d founded a publishing company, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, in 1906, with the goal of dominating the emerging juvenile fiction market. The company’s success came largely from series books, written by an army of ghostwriters spinning wholesome adventure stories under company-owned pseudonyms. Over the next quarter-century, the Stratemeyer Syndicate would create some of the most enduring characters in children’s literature—Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins—whose plucky exploits instilled in young people a love of reading that arguably wouldn’t be duplicated until the Harry Potter books came out at the end of the century. 

It was in 1927 that Stratemeyer introduced the characters who would become the company’s tentpole: the Hardy Boys, two small-town brothers of impeccable virtue and daring who would define what it meant to be a 20th-century American boy. They would also inspire the creation of their female counterpart, Nancy Drew, introduced just three years later. 

The brothers, Frank, 18, and Joe, 17, live in the Atlantic coastal town of Bayport, where they embody the values of self-reliance, hard work and rigorous honesty. As amateur sleuths, the Hardys traverse gloomy cemeteries and dank caves, forbidding mansions and shadowy hideouts, darting through danger with breezy guile and Boy Scout winsomeness. Their father, Fenton, is a private investigator who encourages his sons’ sleuthing, while their doting mother, Laura, worries…

Laura Hardy, eh?

(12) THANKS FOR DROPPING BY. “Scientists find quasi-moon orbiting the Earth for the last 60 years—and it’s not the first one” reports Phys.org.

Everyone who has ever lived on Earth has been well-aware of the moon, but it turns out Earth also has some frequent temporary companions. These “quasi-moons” are small asteroids that enter into a kind of resonance with Earth’s orbit, although they aren’t technically orbiting Earth. In August, this small group of asteroids, called Arjunas, offered another companion to add to the list.

Astronomers at the Pan-STARRS observatory in Hawaii discovered the new quasi-moon, referred to as “2025 PN7,” on August 2, 2025. Their research was recently published in Research Notes of the AAS. Using JPL’s Horizons system and Python tools, they analyzed the orbital data and compared it to other Arjunas and quasi-satellites.

The team found that 2025 PN7 had been in a quasi-orbit for about 60 years already and would likely be nearby for another 60 or so years before departing. Compared to other quasi-moons, this period is relatively short. The quasi-moon Kamo’oalewa has an expected near-Earth orbit of around 381 years, while the total time for 2025 PN7 is 128 years.

Scientists have been aware of these quasi-satellites since 1991, when they first discovered 1991 VG—which some believed was an interstellar probe at the time….

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