Tag Archives: For All Mankind

Pixel Scroll 4/25/26 Pixels Bursting In The Air, Gave Proof, Our Scroll Was Still There

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(1) SAD CHERRYH ANNOUNCEMENT. CJ Cherryh told Facebook readers today why she will not be producing new fiction going forward.   

Dear readers and friends. The unhappy fact is—the numerous bouts of anaesthetic I’ve had have made it pretty well impossible for me to write. I drop stitches. Not many. No problems with daily life or doing creative stuff or enjoying life in general. But the ability to control narrative is just not what it was, and it’s just not going to be there. I’ve accepted that, painful as it is. I thank all of you who’ve stood by me patiently. The body of work is what it is, and I am lastingly grateful to my publisher, Betsy Wollheim, who has given me every extension of time and resource. And of course to Jane, who is all things.

(2) WHERE TO FIND HUGO FINALISTS. At From the Heart of Europe Nicholas Whyte has a compilation of links showing “Where to get the 2026 Hugo finalists” to get started on your Hugo reading.

The Hugo final ballot is out, and I understand that as is usual, the Hugo team is working hard to assemble a Voter Packet which will be made available for free to all Hugo voters (WSFS members of this year’s Worldcon). This is obviously a Good Thing, but as a matter of fact you can start your Hugo reading right now; there is no need to wait until the Packet is available.

Below, I give links to works which are available for free online, and Amazon links to other works, skipping individual people and Dramatic Presentations. The Packet, when it is available, is likely to also include samples of work by individuals who are finalists, and if we’re lucky also a Dramatic Presentation or two. But you can get started right now.

(3) THE PLATENS MUST ROLL. Jason Sanford reports “Must Read Magazines switching to new printer for Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF” at Genre Grapevine. The text of the publisher’s announcement is at the link.

Must Read Magazines – the publisher of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Fantasy and Science Fiction – announced on April 22 that they are switching to a new printing company….

(4) BUM DEAL. “‘Very funny’ naked statue of Monty Python’s Terry Jones unveiled” reports BBC. (Subscription required by readers outside UK.)

A statue commemorating actor and writer Terry Jones has been unveiled in his birthplace. 

Jones, best known for his part in the British comedy troupe Monty Python, died in 2020 aged 77 from a rare form of dementia.

His family backed a fundraising campaign to have him immortalised in bronze in Colwyn Bay, Conwy, as the nude organist, a recurring character played by Jones in Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Jones’ fellow Python, Sir Michael Palin, attended the unveiling and said the late star would find the tribute “very funny indeed”, adding Jones was a “brilliant man in so many ways”.

Fellow Python Terry Gilliam also attended the unveiling of the statue on Saturday, which overlooked Colwyn Bay beach in north Wales….

Terry Jones statue

(5) HUGO’S MAGAZINE REMEMBERED. “Amazing Stories at 100: A pioneering publication celebrates a century of ‘scientifiction’” and NPR’s “All Things Considered” attends the party.

Amazing Stories was like nothing else when its April 1926 issue appeared on newsstands. Between its lurid painted covers was the first magazine devoted exclusively to the publication of what came to be called science fiction — though its 41-year-old publisher, Hugo Gernsback, called its mindbending contents by a different name: scientifiction.

“By ‘scientifiction,’ I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story,” Gernsback wrote in a mission statement in the first issue, under the all-caps headline A NEW SORT OF MAGAZINE. “A charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.”…

… His portmanteau never quite made it into port. But Gernsback’s innovation of collecting previously-diffuse bits of literature ruminating on scientific discovery or technological advancement in one place proved to be an idea with staying power. The evidence is all around us, on all your streaming services and movie marquees, if not your bookshelves….

(6) BALDREE COLLECTION REVIEWED. A Deep Look by Dave Hook covers “’Tales from the Territory’, a Travis Baldree collection, Fall 2026 Subterranean Press”. Here’s the short take – the longer, deeper analysis is at the link.

The Short: I just read Tales from the Territory, a Travis Baldree collection, Fall 2026 Subterranean Press. It includes five works of cozy fantasy short fiction. Information online suggests there will be an e-book, audiobook, and hardcover edition, with 224 pages for the hardcover. Three of the stories are original to this collection. My favorites are two great stories, “Goblins and Greatcoats“, a short story, 2025 Subterranean chapbook, and “Just A Thimbleful”, short fiction, original to this collection. My overall, average rating is 3.74/5, or “Very good”. Recommended.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 25, 1999 — X-Files’ “The Unnatural”

Twenty-seven years ago on this evening on FOX, the David Duchovny-written-and-directed X-Files’ “The Unnatural” episode first aired. It is not connected to the underlying mythology of series, and thus is one of their Monster of the Week stories.

We’ve aliens (as in Roswell), baseball and the KKK. Well, only the latter are the monsters here if you ask me as the aliens definitely aren’t. Aliens playing baseball definitely are not monsters. 

We would have had Darren McGavin here too but he suffered a stroke after he was cast as one of the principal characters, so after the stroke, he was replaced by M. Emmet Walsh whom you’ll recognize as Bryant in Blade Runner. McGavin never filmed anything again. 

It had a notable cast, so I’ll list it: Frederic Lane, M. Emmet Walsh, Jesse L. Martin, Walter T. Phelan, Jr., Brian Thompson and Paul Willson.

Reception for this episode is exceptionally good. Them Movie Reviews said of it that, “It is truly a credit to Duchovny that The Unnatural works at all, let alone that it turns out as a season highlight. There are any number of memorable and striking visuals in The Unnatural. The sequence where Dales discovers Exley’s true nature is one of the most distinctive shots in the history of The X-Files.”

While Doux Reviews stated “Think about it for a minute. This is an episode about baseball players in the 1940s. They are not only black in a time when being so could be life threatening, they are aliens. Our two heroes are, for the most part, nowhere to be seen throughout this hour. This story should never have worked. It did and it does on every subsequent re-watch. Written and directed by David Duchovny, this is an earnest hour of television. Duchovny took a premise that could have been silly and inane beyond the telling of it and chose to take the whole thing seriously. Because he does, we do as well.”

The X-Files are on Hulu. 

The Unnatural

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 25, 1969 — Gina Torres, 57.

Where shall I start with Gina Torres?  What was her best role? I submit it was a non-genre role as Jessica Pearson in the legal drama Suits and Pearson, the sort of sequel series where she was a disbarred attorney. It was a truly meaningful role that she got to grow into over the time the two series ran.

Genre-wise her most interesting character was Zoë Alleyne Washburne in the Firefly series which I really would have loved to see developed into more a rounded character had the series lasted. I liked her background of having served in the Unification War under Reynolds for two-and-a-half years and being one of the few to survive the Battle of Serenity Valley. 

Before that she was down in New Zealand, where she appeared in Xena: Warrior Princess as Cleopatra in “The King of Assassins”, and in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, she had a recurring role as Nebula. 

She was in the M.A.N.T.I.S. series as Dr. Amy.  I liked that series. 

She was the Big Bad in a season of Angel as Jasmine. It’s hard to explain what she did here without Major Spoilers being given away and there might be at least one least one reader here who hasn’t seen Angel yet. I actually think it’s a better series than Buffy was. 

Right after the Firefly series, she had a role in the Matrix films, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions as Cas. 

After that came the Cleopatra series where she was Helen “Hel” Carter (and which lasted longer than I thought at twenty-six episodes) , a great piece of pulpy SF. She was obviously having a lot of fun there.

One of my favorite roles for her strictly using her voice came in the animated Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths where she was the Crime Syndicate Siberia Woman. Stellar role done with just her voice.  She also voiced Vixen / McCabe on Justice League Unlimited. She was the girlfriend of John Stewart, the Green Lantern there. 

She voiced Ketsu Onyo on two of the animated Star Wars series, Star Wars Rebels and Star Wars Forces of Destiny. She’s a Mandalorian bounty hunter who helps the Rebel Alliance. 

She’s on Westworld in a storyline that that is so convoluted that I’m not sure that I could explain it. Suffice it to say that she was there. Or not. 

Lest I forget I should note that she had a recurring role on Alias as Anna Espinosa, an assassin who was the utterly ruthless and ceaselessly persistent nemesis of Sydney Bristow, the character that Jennifer Garner played. 

Gina Torres

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) THE BEATLE WHO LIVED. TVLine says “For All Mankind Changed One Alternate Timeline Easter Egg Over Lawsuit Fears”.

John Lennon survives his 1980 assassination attempt in the universe of “For All Mankind.” Every season of the series begins with a different montage of major events from the decade, including presidential elections and celebrity deaths. Season 2 nearly featured a different Easter egg involving The Beatles, but the co-creator of Apple TV’s alternate history show decided to change his plans.

During a 2021 interview with Inverse, Ronald D. Moore revealed that Season 2’s timeline originally included The Beatles getting back together following their breakup in 1970. “Well, John Lennon is alive in our 1983,” Moore said. “And at one point it wasn’t just going to be John Lennon out there doing stuff. There was going to be a whole Beatles reunion tour happening. And then I just realized once that happened, I’m going to start raising flags all over the place and I’m going to be getting calls from lawyers. So, I was like, let’s just do John Lennon.”

While “For All Mankind” Season 2 leaves the aftermath of Lennon’s failed assassination attempt up to interpretation, Season 3 confirms that The Beatles’ reconvened and took the world by storm, opening their reunion tour in Chicago in 1987. Then, Season 4’s introductory montage reveals that Lennon headlined the Super Bowl XXXVI halftime show in 2002 as a solo artist. 

Most recently, Season 5 briefly depicts Lennon performing alongside Jay-Z at the 2005 Grammys, where their collaboration on “The Grey Album” won album of the year. This Beatles Easter egg in “For All Mankind” is especially fascinating because “The Grey Album” — a blend of Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” and The Beatles’ “The White Album” released by producer Danger Mouse in 2004 — actually exists….

(11) TIMING ISN’T ONLY THE SECRET OF COMEDY. “Former Nintendo employees confirm that Nintendo holds onto finished games until they find the right release date” reports GoNintendo.

Earlier this week we posted about the German USK rating for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, as we learned it popped up all the way back in May 2025. This seemed to point to Nintendo sitting on a content-complete version of the game for roughly a year before it released. Fans have long thought that Nintendo would sometimes finish games and then hold onto them until they have a spot on their release calendar that they feel best suits the title, and now we know that’s indeed the case. (h/t Genki)

Former Nintendo employees Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang have opened up on Nintendo’s practice of holding off on the release of finished games, saying exactly what fans thought. At least during the Switch era, Nintendo would wrap up some games quite quickly, and then they’d bank them until the perfect release timing would pop up.

“That totally happened though in the past where a lot of these things they just sock away in the Nintendo vault. Like a lot of these remakes, those ports, those are just like done real fast and they’ll just sock them away and then whenever there’s a gap in the calendar, they’ll just release one of those ports.

And that’s how they kept the Switch life cycle so long, is because they just didn’t really have any lulls because they were able to be so quick and kind of have a batch of stuff ready to go and they would just find the right time strategically to release it.”

[Kit and Krysta Podcast]

While that might have been the case for Nintendo during the bulk of the Switch era, it’s been years since Kit and Krysta were employed at Nintendo, so they can’t speak to whether or not Nintendo is still continuing this practice. Again, the discovery with Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream’s rating would seem to indicate that Nintendo still does bank titles, but whether it’s part of their Switch 2 plan going forward remains to be seen.

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George presents: “If Your Parents’ Videos Had An Awards Show”.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/10/26 Not Plane Nor Bird Nor Even Troll, It’s Just Little Old Me, Pixel Scroll!

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(1) AUTHOR SAFETY PROGRAM. “PEN America launches a US safety program for authors facing harassment” reports AP News.

A coalition of publishers and literary agencies are teaming with PEN America on an initiative meant to counter a growing trend of harassment against members of the literary community.

PEN America, the century-old free expression organization, announced Friday that it was launching the U.S. Safety Program, which would provide safety training and other resources for authors amid a wave of censorship efforts around the country.

“We have heard from countless authors, illustrators, and translators who are under siege, fending off a steady stream of abuse and threats, online and at book events,” said Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, co-chief executive officer of PEN America. “Through this new program, the literary and publishing community is stepping up together because writers should not be forced to choose between their safety and their voice.”

Viktorya Vilk, who directs PEN’s digital safety efforts, told The Associated Press that she first noticed a rise in harassment against journalists a decade ago, around the time Donald Trump was first elected president, and has seen it spread to writers and educators over the past couple of years. Maia Kababe, Jon Evison and George Johnson are among the authors of censored works who have spoken out about being harassed and threatened and even physically assaulted.

Ashley Hope Pérez, whose young adult novel “Out of Darkness” became a target for censors over its depictions of sex and sexual abuse, says she had to take down her office email and telephone. “I got hate mail and all kinds of ugly phone calls,” says Pérez, who teaches at Ohio State University.

According to PEN, it has raised nearly $1 million through contributions from Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers and Penguin Random House among others. This spring, Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Egan and Lee Child will be among the writers auctioning off character names for future novels, with the proceeds benefiting the safety program. PEN will be building on other programs from recent years, including digital safety workshops held for Hachette authors in 2023.

“There have probably never been as many threats to authors’ safety as there are currently in the U.S,” Hachette CEO David Shelley said in a statement. “We’re proud to support this much-needed program from PEN America that will give writers a wide range of professional resources to help them deal with threats to their safety, online and offline.”

(2) CHARLES DICKENS SAYS. It’s always an extraordinary pleasure to see the variety of stamps on the envelope containing the latest issue of Ansible. But this time there was an extra message!

(3) KGB PHOTOS. Ellen Datlow has shared her photos of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series event on April 8, 2026 with Michael Swanwick and Mike Allen.

(4) PKDFEST2026 FUNDRAISER. The “Global Time-Slip Telethon” on April 29 is a 17-hour online fundraiser for the Philip K. Dick Festival featuring lectures, panels, and interviews with PKD scholars, authors, and creators from around the world. Grab a ticket, drop in anytime, and help make the festival happen.

The PKDFEST2026 — the 4th International Philip K. Dick Festival itself takes place August 20-23 at Cal State Fullerton in California — four days of panels, readings, world premieres, plus the first-ever Pink Beam Awards.

(5) WHERE’S THE BEEF? “’They’re not shipping cows up to Mars’: ‘For All Mankind’ creators talk scientific accuracy and colonial inspirations behind season 5 (interview)” at Space.com.

…”In some ways, that gap and the control Earth still wants to have over Mars forms a lot of tension that you feel this season. That approach was something we take seriously. As much as we try to get the science right, we also try to reflect history. History repeats itself, and it feels like even on Mars, with all the advancements and technology, humans are still there, so we bring our problems and baggage.”

How these pioneering Mars colonists would begin to cultivate a distinct cultural identity after two decades — with their own unique customs, foods, and traditions aside from those back on Earth — is a subject matter that Nedivi and Wolbert were eager to explore. A tasty Mars Taco, anyone?

“One of the things people will see early on in the show is that they’re starting to grow their own crops,” Wolbert adds. “It’s things designed in an effort to become self-sustainable. We’ve referenced here and there throughout the season about distilleries that make the alcohol up there, or the lab-grown meat, because they’re not shipping cows up to Mars. While I do think they’d have elements of culture that grow organically, I think humans are also creatures of habit and would want that chicken sandwich or thing they love.

“But what is the Mars version of that? Our props department thinks through these things in fascinating ways that fans who pay attention to the details will see, like items on a menu in the restaurant. Like coffee is a crop that doesn’t grow well on Mars, so it’s probably going to be like dehydrated crystals.”…

…”A lot of the photographs being taken on Mars directly inform our process of designing the surface of Mars,” explains Nedivi. “We pride ourselves on being as true to life as possible, so the fact that we have this incredible photography coming back all the time has been a real boon for visual effects and everyone. Because you’re seeing how it really looks, and it looks different than I think how movies portrayed it even five, ten, fifteen years ago….”

(6) BIG SCREEN ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS 2026. “CinemaCon 2026: Full List of Honorees Big Screen Achievement Awards” – The Hollywood Reporter names them all.

James Cameron, one of the industry’s leading champions of the theatrical experience, leads CinemaCon’s roster of honorees for the Big Screen Achievement Awards.

The ceremony — a starry gathering that closes the four day gathering of exhibition insiders presented by Cinema United — is set to take place inside the Dolby Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on April 16. It will see trophies going to James Cameron (Cinema United Spirit of the Industry), Queen Latifah (Cultural Impact in Film), LaKeith Stanfield (Star of the Year), Zoey Deutch (Vanguard Award) Adam Scott (Award of Excellence in Acting), Noah Centineo (Star of Tomorrow) and Catherine Lagaʻaia (Rising Star of 2026).

(7) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to tear into tacos with Alan Smale in Episode 279 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Alan Smale

Seven years, one month, and 15 days before the meal on which you’re about to eavesdrop, Alan Smale and I got together to chat about his Clash of Eagles trilogy. Now that he’s completed yet another trilogy, we decided to grab lunch during Awesome Con to discuss how his Apollo Rising books came to be.

Smale writes alternate history and hard SF. His novella of a Roman invasion of ancient America, “A Clash of Eagles”, won the 2010 Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and his series of novels set in the same universe, Clash of Eagles (2015), Eagle in Exile (2016), and Eagle and Empire (2017), are available from Del Rey (US) and Titan Books (UK and Europe). His Roman baseball collaboration with Rick Wilber, The Wandering Warriors, came out from WordFire Press (2020), and Hot Moon, his alternate-Apollo “technothriller with heart,” set entirely on and around the Moon, was launched by CAEZIK SF & Fantasy in July 2022, followed by sequel Radiant Sky in November 2024 and the concluding volume in the Apollo Rising series, Burning Night, in November 2025.

Smale has also sold over fifty pieces of shorter fiction to Asimov’s and other magazines and original anthologies. His short story, “Gunpowder Treason,” set in London in 1605, the lead story in Tales from Alternate Earths Vol. III from Inklings Press, won the 2021 Sidewise Award. His non-fiction essays have appeared in Lightspeed and Journey Planet, and he wrote a regular column about scientific and historical turning points for Galaxy’s Edge….

…We discussed the three projects he’d told me in 2019 he was going to write next (and what became of them), how what was originally intended to be a standalone novel turned into his latest trilogy, the synergy of writing an alternate history about the Apollo space program while working at NASA, how the constraints imposed by science helped improve his plot arc, the way astronaut personalities have changed across the decades, how to write alternate history to be entertaining both for those who know actual history and those who don’t, the advice he wishes he could give his younger self, how we don’t really dislike info dumps (only the ones which aren’t done well), and much more.

(8) KEITH HODIAK (1950-2026). [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Although best known as a ballet dancer, he also did interesting genre work. The Guardian’s Keith Hodiak obituary notes::

…In 1978 Hodiak took on the role of one of the four members of the band Sam Spade and the Private Eyes in the Blake Edwards film The Revenge of the Pink Panther. He played supporting roles as police officers in John Landis’s horror comedy An American Werewolf in London (1981) and the marine Daddy DA in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987).

On television he was the Raston Warrior Robot in the 20th anniversary Doctor Who special The Five Doctors (1985), a role that benefited from his dance training and brought him a cult following. …

Here’s a YouTube video of the latter (slightly rough audio): “The Raston Warrior Robot”.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

April 10, 1957 — John M Ford. (Died 2006.)

By Paul Weimer: John M Ford has, sadly after his passing, become one of my heart writers. Years ago I came across one of my favorite novels, period, The Dragon Waiting. Possibly one of the best alternate history novels ever written, and simultaneously introduced me to a new point of view on Richard III.

It was not until I started going to 4th Street Fantasy con, of which he is practically a patron saint, that I really have grasped just how wide and broad his work really is. Space Opera? Early Cyberpunk? Urban Fantasy? The writer who Ford reminds me of, today, is Walter Jon Williams: a ferocious and restless talent. Ford’s last and incomplete novel, Aspects, a steampunk-esque fantasy novel, only cements that sentiment.

Ford’s work is not for everyone. It is work that not only rewards close attention, it demands it in order to enjoy it. In that way think if we wanted to reconstruct Ford, in addition to Walter Jon Williams, we’d add a lot of Gene Wolfe as well.

Finally, Ford’s writing and style has more than a touch of the mythic and definitely the poetic. There is joy in reading his work line by line, be its setting or sharp dialogue. So to complete this reconstructIon, add a helping of Roger Zelazny as well.

Given my love of these three, now you see why Ford is one of my favorites. And taken from us all too soon.

John M. Ford portrait, January 2000. By David Dyer-Bennet. CC BY-SA 2.5

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 10, 1981 — Excalibur

Forty-five years ago, one of those truly great genre films premiered — Excalibur.  I saw it in a movie theatre virtually empty at the time but it still was a wonderful experience. It’s directed and produced by John Boorman off a script by him and Rospo Pallenberg who later got on to The Emerald Forest with Boorman.

Lest you think those are the only Boorman connections, they’re not as it was shot was filmed in Irish locations in County Wicklow, County Tipperary, and County Kerry. The Count Wicklow locations were just a few miles from where Boorman was living at the time. No idea if the cast popped by his manor house for drinks after filming ended for the day. 

I say that as it has a stellar cast: Gabriel Byrne as Uther Pendragon,  Nicholas Clay was Lancelot,  Ciarán Hinds as Lot,  Cherie Lunghi was Guenevere, Helen Mirren was Morgana, Liam Neeson was Gawain, Corin Redgrave was Gorlois, Patrick Stewart was Leondegrance, Nigel Terry was Arthur, and Nicol Williamson was Merlin. What a group that they would’ve been to party with! 

So what did the critics at the time think of it?

Well Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times summed it rather appropriately in his lead to his review: “What a wondrous vision ‘Excalibur’ is! And what a mess. This wildly ambitious retelling of the legend of King Arthur is a haunting and violent version of the Dark Ages and the heroic figures who (we dream) populated them. But it’s rough going for anyone determined to be sure what is happening from scene to scene.”

And Gary Arnold of the Washington Post said that “In ‘Excalibur,’ opening today at area theaters, Boorman can’t seem to master the ironic approach to high adventure that allows a movie to satisfy heroic longings without getting ridiculous. This stilted reenactment of the Arthurian saga finds Boorman evolving into a modernist parody of Cecil B. De Mille, whipping up a kitschy costume spectacle.” 

It was nominated for a Hugo at Chicon IV finishing second to Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

It has a sterling eighty percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes, and it earned thirty-five million at the box office against a rather small budget of just eleven million dollars.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) ALTERNATE 1939. “’Ray Gunn’ First Look: New Brad Bird Film” at IndieWire.

Thirty years ago, Brad Bird wrote the script for a mystery sci-fi film called “Ray Gunn,” which was set to be produced by Turner Feature Animation. The 1996 Turner/Time Warner merger caused the project to be shelved, and Bird instead made his first feature at Warner Bros. Feature Animation, 1999’s acclaimed “The Iron Giant.”

Now, “Ray Gunn” is finally seeing the light of day. Netflix has released first look images for the upcoming retro-futuristic animated film, and announced the starry voice cast for the future, with Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, and Tom Waits joining the film.

Directed by Bird from a new script he co-wrote with Matthew Robbins, “Ray Gunn” is set in “Metropia,” a giant city described in the logline as “an alternate future as seen from 1939.” Rockwell plays the titular Raymond Gunn, a private eye drawn into a case involving murder, aliens, and Johansson’s multimedia star Venus Nova. Waits rounds out the cast as an alien named Eyera….

(13) BEN THERE, DONE THAT. Variety asks, “Can Adam Driver’s Axed ‘Star Wars’ Movie ‘The Hunt For Ben Solo’ Be Revived Under New Disney CEO? Soderbergh Says ‘Nope’: ‘If It Was Gonna Happen, It Would’ve’”.

Stephen Soderbergh has no intention of reviving “The Hunt for Ben Solo” under Disney’s new leadership. During an interview with “The Playlist” on the press tour for his latest directorial effort, “The Christophers,” the filmmaker said “nope” when asked if he was trying to revive the movie and added: “Look, if it was gonna happen, it would have happened. It’s that simple.”

Adam Driver revealed the existence of “The Hunt for Ben Solo” in an October 2025 interview with the Associated Press, explaining he had been developing a movie to revive Ben Solo/Kylo Ren movie for two years with Soderbergh. Then Disney executives pulled the plug on them.

“It was strictly Adam saying, ‘I think there’s still somewhere to go with this character.’ That’s how it started,” Soderbergh told The Playlist. “Otherwise, I never in a million years would have found myself in that universe again… I don’t regret one minute of the time we spent working on that. I felt the work was good. It’s just good for you to be in that room and working on it. It’s like CrossFit — it’s good for you. It’ll have a residual effect that will be unexpected at some point.”…

(14) SALEM CAT MUSEUM. [Item by Daniel Dern.]  From today’s (deadtree) Boston Globe: “Weird museums for a weird world”. (Behind a paywall.)  

“Welcome to the world of weird museums. Salem’s cat museum joins a global collection of places that celebrate everything from failed products to lost love.”

Wait — Salem has a Cat Museum? Nobody tells me anything.

Indeed it does, and the 18-month-old storefront museum/feline curiosity store — owner-curator Wendy Casazza is especially proud of an eight-foot-long “Kung Fu Kitty” mural that she commissioned from artist Kameko Branchaud — is a most welcoming space.

Unless you are a dog. The generally affable Casazza seizes up at the very mention of the alien species. “I like dogs that look like cats,” she allows, and that’s about it….

Yes, that’s all you can get without a paid account…but the rest of the article is about other museums. Here’s the museum’s link: Salem Cat Museum.

(15) JUSTICE LEAGUE BOXCAR. Mr. Muffin’s Trains has a super deal – today only.

Lionel 6-82950 – Justice League Boxcar “Aquaman / Martian Manhunter” (2-Car) – 1 Left – Regularly $169.99 – Sale Priced at $99.99 – Below Dealer Cost!

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. From an internet long ago, and far, far away: “Star Wars ‘Cantina Band’ Ragtime Piano Duet” performed by Martin Spitznagel & Bryan Wright.

Here are Martin Spitznagel (me, on left) and Bryan Wright (username “bixvenuti”) having some fun performing “Cantina Band” by John Williams. We were giving a concert in Pittsburgh on March 28, 2009, and needed a tune to end with. We didn’t have anything prepared, so we got together the afternoon of the concert and figured out this arrangement. Bryan and I both specialize in ragtime and early American piano music, so it’s kind of awesome that John Williams chose to score the seedy, dangerous cantina in “A New Hope” with ragtime.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, David Agranoff, Daniel Dern, Ersatz Culture, Scott Edelman, 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 Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 3/24/26 Gotta Be Lots More Pixels, If You Wanna Scroll With Me

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(1) R.I.P. FACEBOOK’S METAVERSE. In “My Prodigal Brainchild” Neal Stephenson reflects “on the latest and greatest Death of the Metaverse.”

It feels incumbent upon me to write something about last week’s big news in which the company formerly known as Facebook decided to shut down its Metaverse project on which it has, according to various reports, spent eighty billion dollars.

I spelled that figure out because it’s more zeroes and commas than I can type in before blowing through my attention span and losing track.

This event has unleashed yet another spate of Internet cartoons depicting tombstones with the word METAVERSE chiseled into them, a genre that comes and goes every few years….

…I am, thank God, curiously detached from all this. Four and a half years ago I was minding my own business, cutting metal in my machine shop, when I received a text message from John Gaeta, a former colleague at Magic Leap, reading simply “Sorry for your loss.” At first I thought that he’d sent it to me mistakenly, but after a bit of Googling I became aware that Facebook had changed its name and announced that it was now going to build the Metaverse.

In retrospect, John’s message was prescient, since it marked the moment when the Metaverse really did break free and become my alienated, prodigal brainchild.

In the following weeks I had to make a few Tweets trying to convince incredulous strangers that I had no connection with what Meta was up to; that they hadn’t communicated with me in any way; that they hadn’t paid me off; and that, no, I wasn’t going to sue them. All of these things remain true.

So there wouldn’t have been any upside for me if Meta’s Metaverse had succeeded. What remains to be seen is whether there’s a downside for me now that it has failed. I think I’m standing clear of the blast radius, but seeing the front page of the New York Times’s business page dominated by the inevitable Metaverse tombstone image does give one pause.

Since this is now water under the bridge, here is some free advice to future companies who might become interested in this topic when the tombstone cartoons fade once again from memory and the concept becomes hot again.

The basic idea is obvious. Consider picking a different name

Once you have computers that can show graphics, and an Internet, the notion of creating a virtual online space where users go around in audiovisual bodies (avatars) is sort of obvious. Such a thing existed at least once before I wrote Snow Crash, in the form of Habitat, and would have been independently invented over and over again had the book never existed. All I did was make up a name for it, and put it in a novel that got read by a lot of techies. And the novel had a plot – a topic I will return to at the end of this post.

People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do

When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.

Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces. Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible.

A possible workaround is to keep refining and miniaturizing the devices to the point where they just look like eyeglasses. This, however, turns out to have the unintended side effect of making these things seem sinister. It happened with Google Glass, which instantaneously spawned the term “glasshole,” and it has happened again with Meta’s product that looks like normal, albeit heavy-framed glasses.

When someone around you is staring at a rectangle in their hand, it might be incredibly annoying, but at least you can tell they’re doing it. When someone’s wearing a head-mounted display, on the other hand, you don’t know whether they are looking at you or not.

Likewise, when someone holds up their phone and aims it at you, it’s obvious that you are on camera. That’s not true in the case of glasses or goggles. So it’s creepy….

(2) 2026 HUGO NOMINATONS DEADLINE. The LAcon V committee shared a graph with Facebook readers today showing that Hugo voting is spiking as the March 28 deadline approaches.

With just days to go the pace of Hugo nominations is picking up! If you’re one of the more than 7700 people eligible to nominate this year, you can help make the process run smoothly by nominating sooner rather than later.

(3) ON DAVE HOOK’S NOMINATING BALLOT. A Deep Look by Dave Hook tells us about the virtues of “The Martian Trilogy (John P. Moore, Amazing Stories, Black Science Fiction, and The Illustrated Features Section), 2025 Amazing Stories”. Here’s his short summary – the full-length take is at the link.

The short: I recently read The Martian Trilogy (John P. Moore, Amazing Stories, Black Science Fiction, and The Illustrated Features Section), including three related 1930 short stories by John P. Moore, with very substantial non-fiction essay content by Lisa Yaszek, Chris M. Barkley, Maurice Broaddus, Bill Campbell, Minister Faust, Brooks E. Hefner, Sheree Renée Thomas, Steve Davidson, John Jennings, and many others, 2025 Amazing Stories. These three stories are probably the first planetary romances by an African American author. While I rated one of these stories as “Very good” and two as “Good”, the essay content is phenomenal. Recommended, and I nominated The Martian Trilogy for the Hugo Award Best Related Work category….

(4) IN THE BEFORE TIMES. [Item by Andrew Porter.] Article by David Streitfeld starts off mentioning Larry Niven, then goes into Michael Dirda’s time at the Washington Post.“’Lonesome Dove,’ ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and the Power of the Book Review in the Age Before Algorithms” – in the New York Times (link bypasses the paywall.)

Jeff Bezos did not create the world’s biggest bookstore out of a deep love of literature. I interviewed him in his Seattle office back when he was the crown prince of the dot-com crowd and recall seeing only one book in it: “Destiny’s Road,” by the science fiction writer Larry Niven, about a planet colonization attempt gone awry.

If books were not a passion for Bezos, it seems that owning a newspaper does not rank high either. Last month he fired more than a third of the journalists at The Washington Post, the paper he bought in 2013. That included the entire staff of the book review. Bezos said the purge was merely a question of numbers. “The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus,” he explained.

This is the high art of Silicon Valley: If a subject clicks with readers, they will quickly be served more of the same. But readers don’t want the same thing all over again. The pleasures of a good book review are less in being a leader than a follower — to have smarter minds tell you things you didn’t know about things you weren’t necessarily thinking about.

People read The Washington Post’s Book World for entertainment, education and serendipity. As Henry James, a pretty fair critic himself, famously said, “We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have.”

Here is a tale, in the dark for 30 years, about how book reviews are an engine that helps keep the culture running. It is about what can happen when you’re not ruled by data.

Our prologue takes place in the mid-1970s. Larry McMurtry is the respected author of a half-dozen novels, including one that became the hit movie “Hud,” and a recent Oscar nominee as the co-writer of the script for “The Last Picture Show,” based on his novel. McMurtry is also a weekly book reviewer for The Post. His reviews are good: terse, wide-ranging, effective. He likes his job.

One day in 1978 a new editor at Book World named Michael Dirda calls McMurtry and, acting on orders from management, fires him. Reviewing has always been a tough trade. An annoyed McMurtry, who never liked Washington much, begins spending more time in his native Texas.

It is so boring in his small town that it proves a good place to write. One day he sees a church bus with a distinctive name, which he appropriates for a stalled manuscript about a 19th-century cattle drive. Almost no one thinks this novel sounds promising. Texas fiction is traditionally concerned with sex-crazed oil tycoons or the assassination of President Kennedy, and this tale has neither. Before McMurtry’s story is finally published in 1985, every major studio in Hollywood passes on it….

… For at least a few decades, McMurtry remained bitter about being fired by The Post. He never acknowledged that his dismissal got him out of Washington and thrust him toward that neglected cattle-drive novel, which won a Pulitzer and then became a much-loved mini-series. According to Amazon’s sales data, “Lonesome Dove” — 41 years after publication and five years after McMurtry’s death — is routinely one of the best-selling books on the platform. Not best-selling novels. Books….

(5) WAS ‘WOKENESS’ THE ISSUE? “William Shatner weighs in as ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ canceled” at USA Today.

William Shatner wishes the latest “Star Trek” show had been given the chance to live long and prosper.

The “Star Trek” actor, 95, took to X on March 23 to bemoan news that the sci-fi franchise’s newest series, “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” will end after its upcoming second season.

“It’s with sorrow that I hear about the cancellation of the new ‘Star Trek’ series,” he wrote.

In a follow-up post, Shatner mocked critics who celebrated the show’s cancellation because they claimed it was “woke.” He argued that the original “Star Trek,” which famously featured an interracial kiss between Shatner’s character, Captain Kirk, and Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura in a 1968 episode, would be considered “woke” today….

(6) BRIN GETTING CLARKE MEMORIAL AWARD. The National Space Society announced today: “Noted Sci-Fi Author Dr. David Brin to Receive the NSS Arthur C. Clarke Memorial Award at ISDC”.

Famed science fiction author Dr. David Brin will be a keynote speaker at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference® (ISDC®), which runs from June 4-7 in McLean, Virginia. The general public is invited to attend and more information can be found at the event website, isdc.nss.org.

Brin will also receive the coveted NSS Arthur C. Clarke Memorial Award for his pivotal writing in sci-fi and futurism. Initiated in 2025, the Clarke award seeks to recognize individuals who, like Arthur C. Clarke, have used creative, scientifically grounded storytelling or media to foster curiosity and enthusiasm about space exploration and contributing to public understanding and support for space development, and Brin is an exemplar of this….

(7) THE DEADLY GENDER GAP IN CAR SAFETY. [Item by Andrew Porter.] Audio. Strongly recommended for any woman who has ever ridden in a car! “The Deadly Gender Gap in Car Safety” in the New York Times – link bypasses the paywall.

In November 2024, the filmmaker Eve Van Dyke was headed to Thanksgiving dinner with her family. Then her car crashed.

She noticed the women in the car ended up with more injuries than the men. Turns out, that wasn’t just a coincidence. In the United States, women are 73 percent more likely to be severely injured in vehicle crashes than men, and 17 percent more likely to die.

To understand why, Ms. Van Dyke dug through the half-century history of auto safety in the United States. In the Opinion Video above, she reveals her disturbing discovery.

(8) IS LE GUIN’S THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969) OVER-RATED? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Over at the Grammaticus Books YouTube Channel there is no fear of controversy, however this is not click-bait: Grammaticus recognises that this book deserves both its Hugo and Nebula wins. There is a lot to appreciate here: the ideas, world-building and writing. And the thing that puts it on the map is the exploration of gender fluidity, especially remembering that this was back in 1969.  However, there are – Grammaticus says – three fundamental flaws… It is opined that these flaws came about because of LeGuin’s laser focus on themes, concept and world-building.  This means that for some readers the novel is a difficult one to digest. (Actually, I have some sympathy with this but had never said for obvious reasons.) This video is only 11-minutes long. There are comments over at the channel and I dare say that some may make some here at File 770 jump in.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 24, 1946 – Andrew Porter, 80. 

File 770’s indispensable Scroll contributor Andrew Porter got into sf fandom in the Sixties. He published a major genzine, Algol/Starship (1963–84), which received five Hugo nominations and won in 1974. And he has been a leading sf news writer for even longer — his first news-related column on upcoming paperbacks appeared in James V. Taurasi’s Science Fiction Times in 1960. Later in the decade he started his own newzine, S.F. Weekly (1966–68), and returned in the Eighties with Science Fiction Chronicle (1979–2002), a 21-time Hugo nominee that won in 1993 and 1994.

Andrew Porter in his Oxford robes after winning the 1993 Best Semiprozine Hugo.

Porter was assistant editor on The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1966–74, and associate editor at Lancer Books in the late 1960s. Outside the sf field he also worked as a trade magazine editor and advertising production manager on such titles as Rudder, Quick Frozen Foods (under editor Sam Moskowitz), QFF International, Construction Equipment, and Electro-Procurement.

He has independently published nonfiction collections such as The Book of Ellison, Dreams Must Explain Themselves by Ursula K. Le Guin, Exploring Cordwainer Smith, and Experiment Perilous: The Art and Science of Anguish in Science Fiction and The Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr. by Gardner Dozois. He was honored with a Special British Fantasy Award in 1992.

He was Fan Guest of Honour at ConFiction, the 1990 World Science Fiction Convention held in The Hague, Netherlands. The audio of his speech is available at Fanac.org.

He also was recognized by Chicon V (1991) with a Special Committee Award for Distinguished Semiprozine Work. And he was honored with the Big Heart Award in 2009.

His photos have appeared in The Guardian, the NY Times, Publishers Weekly and numerous convention program books. In recent years he’s been a frequent commenter in the NY Times and locally in such outlets as The Brooklyn Heights Blog, where he’s contributed numerous local photos and scans of architectural features. “And,” he proudly adds, “I always comment under my own name, not a screen name.”

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Pavane by Keith Roberts (1968)

Sixty years ago the ending of Pavane was first published.

The ending of this novel, yes the ending, a novellette, “Pavane: The Signaller”, came out in Impulse: The New Science Fantasy in their March 1966 issue.  The complete stories that are Pavane would first be printed by Hart-Davis in 1968. Why the ending first? I’ve no idea, but perhaps one of you knows why. 

So I’ll just say that Pavane is a brilliant telling of an alternative England that mercifully never happened. So without further commentary, here’s the perfect Beginning that the author gave it…

PROLOGUE

On a warm July evening of the year 1588, in the royal palace of Greenwich, London, a woman lay dying, an assassin’s bullets lodged in abdomen and chest. Her face was lined, her teeth blackened, and death lent her no dignity; but her last breath started echoes that ran out to shake a hemisphere. For the Faery Queen, Elizabeth the First, paramount ruler of England, was no more … 

The rage of the English knew no bounds. A word, a whisper was enough; a half-wit youth, torn by the mob, calling on the blessing of the Pope. … The English Catholics, bled white by fines, still mourning the Queen of Scots, still remembering the gory Rising of the North, were faced with fresh pogroms. Unwillingly, in self-defence, they took up arms against their countrymen as the flame lit by the Walsingham massacres ran across the land, mingling with the light of warning beacons the sullen glare of the auto-da-fé. 

The news spread; To Paris, to Rome, to the strange fastness of the Escorial, where Philip II still brooded on his Enterprise of England. The word of a land torn and divided against itself reached the great ships of the Armada, threshing up past the Lizard to link with Parma’s army of invasion on the Flemish coast. For a day while Medina-Sidonia paced the decks of the San Martin, the fate of half the world hung in balance. Then his decision was made; and one by one the galleons and carracks, the galleys and the lumbering urcas turned north toward the land. Toward Hastings and the ancient battleground of Santlache, where history had been made once centuries before. The turmoil that ensued saw Philip ensconced as ruler of England; in France the followers of Guise, heartened by the victories across the Channel, finally deposed the weakened House of Valois. The War of the Three Henrys ended with the Holy League triumphant, and the Church restored once more to her ancient power. 

To the victor, the spoils. With the authority of the Catholic Church assured, the rising nation of Great Britain deployed her forces in the service of the Popes, smashing the Protestants of the Netherlands, destroying the power of the German city-states in the long-drawn-out Lutheran Wars. The Newworlders of the North American continent remained under the rule of Spain; Cook planted in Australasia the cobalt flag of the Throne of Peter. 

In England herself, across a land half ancient and half modern, split as in primitive times by barriers of language, class, and race, the castles of mediaevalism still glowered; mile on mile of unfelled woodland harboured creatures of another age. To some the years that passed were years of fulfillment, of the final flowering of God’s Design; to others they were a new Dark Age, haunted by things dead and others best forgotten; bears and catamounts, dire wolves and Fairies. 

Over all, the long arm of the Popes reached out to punish and reward; the Church Militant remained supreme. But by the middle of the twentieth century widespread mutterings were making themselves heard. Rebellion was once more in the air…

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) GAME’S DECLINE COSTS JOBS. “Epic Games Lays Off Over 1,000 Employees, Citing Fortnite Slump” – the New York Times has the story. (Behind a paywall.)

The video game company Epic Games is laying off more than 1,000 employees, it said on Tuesday, citing a drop in the amount of time people are spending playing Fortnite.

“The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we’re spending significantly more than we’re making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded,” Tim Sweeney, the company’s chief executive, wrote in a blog post. “This layoff, together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing and closing some open roles puts us in a more stable place.”

The cut represents about 20 percent of the work force at Epic Games, a company spokeswoman said.

It was the second time in recent years that the company, which is based in North Carolina, had announced major job cuts. In 2023, Epic Games laid off 830 employees, or about 16 percent of its work force, citing lower profit margins for Fortnite. “I’m sorry we’re here again,” Mr. Sweeney wrote in his blog post….

(13) GO THE DISTANCE. “’For All Mankind’ to End at Apple TV With Season 6 Renewal” reports Variety.

Hi, Bob! In advance of its long-awaited Season 5 return, Apple TV‘s “For All Mankind” has been renewed for a sixth and final season. The news also comes in advance of the premiere of spinoff series “Star City,” which takes a look at the alternate space race story line from the Soviet perspective and premieres on May 29.

News means “For All Mankind” will be able to complete its expansive storyline as originally envisioned by creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi — a rarity in the often quick-cancel culture of TV. “For All Mankind” launched on Nov. 1, 2019, the same day as Apple TV’s “The Morning Show,” making both series the streamer’s longest-running series….

… “For All Mankind” has earned rave reviews and awards recognition for its unique storytelling, unfurling an alt-history of the U.S., the space race and even the globe as it ponders how life might be different had the Soviet Union made it to the moon first. Perhaps the Cold War would have forced the U.S. to double down, spending more money and resources to then build a moon base first. Along the way, the Soviets and the Americans would try to outdo each other, leading to earlier advances in technology and perhaps quicker social change, like the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment….

(14) ANTI-ROAD-TRIP. [Item by Steven French.] Well, they did it – moved all 92 (count ‘em!) antiprotons without incident: “BASE experiment at CERN succeeds in transporting antimatter”.

Today, in a world first, a team of scientists from the BASE experiment at CERN successfully transported a trap filled with antiprotons in a truck across the Laboratory’s main site. The team managed to accumulate a cloud of 92 antiprotons in an innovative portable cryogenic Penning trap, then disconnect it from the experimental facility, load it onto a truck and continue experiment operation after transport. This is a remarkable achievement, given that antimatter is very difficult to preserve, as it annihilates upon contact with matter. This world premiere is a test, the ultimate aim being to transport antiprotons to other European laboratories, such as Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), where very-high-precision measurements of the antiproton properties could be performed…

(15) 2026’S 8 BIGGEST SCI-FI MOVIES THAT WILL CRUSH THE BOX OFFICE OR FLOP HARD. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Over at the KageMovies YouTube channel there are listed its SF films for 2026 that they think will either fly at the box office or sink. This vid has already attracted getting on for half-a-million views. For those not liking click bait, the films are: Greenland 2; Migration; World Breaker; Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die; Project Hail Mary; The Dog Stars; Disclosure Day; The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping; Dune: Part Three.

I have to say as a personal aside I have been a tad disappointed that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die has not done better at the box office. It does not look like it will begin to break even despite its comparatively modest budget. Indeed, I am very surprised that it did not do better worldwide given that the European market seems to be more tolerant, if not welcoming, to films with a more independent studio vibe, but then what do I know… Comments, rather your suggestions, as to films not on this list would be most welcome…. (I’m always on the lookout for solid, SFnal offerings.) You can see the video here or below.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/25/26 I Am A Houyhnhnm Of Constant Sorrow

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(1) KETTER INTERVIEWED ABOUT STATE OF THE UNION. Following Trump’s State of the Union address last night, MSNOW set up reporter Jacob Sorboroff and a camera in DreamHaven Bookstore to ask Greg Ketter what he thought: “Greg Ketter responds to SOTU: ‘I am still angry’”. And you can view a complete clip here on Facebook.

(2) SONG OF DOPE AND FIRE. Christopher Lockett’s high-concept discussion of “George R.R. Martin vs. Destiny” takes a side trip into an impressive mashup titled “A Song of Ice and The Wire”.

That GoT was not a departure for HBO but a doubling-down on the conventions that defined its most critically acclaimed shows was hilariously articulated by a still-extant Tumblr page called “A Song of Ice and The Wire”—which, as the title suggests, mashes up elements of GoT and The Wire. Specifically, it took stills from each series and captioned them with appropriate lines from the other….

…The subtle genius of these mashups is that they highlight at once the profound, almost antithetical differences between the series—one a scrupulously realistic sociological portrait of American urban decay, systemic racism, and broken institutions, and the other a work of high fantasy set in a premodern world of knights and dragons—while identifying the structural consonance, one they share with the other series cited above. This consonance is perhaps best articulated in a line spoken by the detective Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) in season one: “You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don’t know where the fuck it’s gonna take you.” Money is power in The Wire—not so much in the sense of more money=more power, but that money is the concrete representation of power’s circulatory qualities, especially considering it respects no boundaries. This principle is even more succinctly articulated in season three by stick-up artist Omar Little (Michael K. Williams6), perhaps the best character on the show, who makes his living robbing drug dealers. He helpfully supplements Freamon’s wisdom with an axiom of his own. When he robs a high-stakes poker game featuring some of the Baltimore underworld’s high rollers, the future drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield says, “That’s my money.” To which Omar responds, in what could function as Cliff’s Notes Foucault, “Money ain’t got no owners, only spenders.”…

(3) ‘WOMAN IN THE MOON’. BGR celebrates that “The Oldest Movie To Realistically Depict Space Travel Is Almost 100 Years Old”.

Science fiction has an uncanny history of foretelling scientific advancement, predicting technological breakthroughs, ranging from tablets to holograms, and even defining the public’s understanding of complex scientific phenomenon. Since its earliest iterations, a fierce debate has raged amongst cinephiles and scientists alike over the extent of the genre’s scientific influence. Most notably is sci-fi’s influence over the public’s understanding of complex scientific concepts. Perhaps nowhere is this more relevant than the realm of space travel, in which films like “Woman in the Moon” (1929) by legendary Austrian director Fritz Lang have proven incredibly prescient, serving as the first popular representation of everything from rocket countdowns and lunar orbits to the politics surrounding modern space races….

…What really makes the film standout to modern viewers, however, is its scientific prescience. To ensure accuracy, Lang became one of the first directors to employ a team of scientists, soliciting the help of rocket scientist Hermann Oberth, who’d later be instrumental in developing Nazi Germany’s V-2 rocket program, and influential science writer Willy Ley. Together, they created a story that foretold modern space flight, becoming the first film to depict zero-gravity, multi-stage rockets, figure-8 lunar landing trajectories, and g-force-laden liftoffs. It even popularized our conception of rocket launches, complete with detailed checklists and momentous countdowns. As Lang told Peter Bogdanovic in a 1965 interview published in his book “Who The Devil Made It,” the countdown was born out of “dire necessity” to build narrative suspense (via TCM). Unfortunately, the film’s realism runs out once the rocket lands upon the moon, depicting a breathable atmosphere, Earth-like gravity, and a surface rife with riches. However, the fantastical ending doesn’t diminish the fact that many of the defining images of space flight were born on a German screen….

(4) NOW ONLINE: ‘MIDWEST SIDE STORY’. Geri Sullivan announced today on Facebook that thanks to Guy Spiller, David Dyer-Bennet, and FANAC.org the video of the performance of Midwest Side Story at Minicon 12 in 1977 is up on the FANAC YouTube channel: “Minicon 12 (1977) – Midwest Side Story”. (There’s a cast list and some other details on Geri’s Facebook page.)

Description:

Midwest Side Story is a rare recording of that entertaining subgenre of fannish endeavors – the fannish musical. First performed on April 9, 1977 at Minicon in Minneapolis, the recording was preserved in the Scott Imes Video archive, and kept safe for many years by Scott Imes, Jeff Schalles and Corwin Brust.

Midwest Side Story is set in an alternate universe where the 1973 Worldcon is held in Minneapolis. It takes place in an alternate Minneapolis where fanzine fans and convention fans behave like rival gangs The musical is a love story between a fanzine femmefan and a male convention fan. If you want more, you’ll have to watch the show. It’s funny, it’s thoughtful and it has a great ending. Just remember this was written about 50 years ago, and has the expected cultural attitudes of the time. The recording is captioned for your convenience….

(5) WAPO’S BOOK WORLD MOURNED. The New York Times attends “A Wake for The Washington Post’s Book World”. Link bypasses the NYT paywall. Photo of Michael Dirda speaking leads off the article.

Hundreds gathered on Saturday evening in Washington, D.C., to mourn Book World, The Washington Post’s books section, which was shuttered this month amid widespread layoffs at the organization.

Journalists, policy wonks, speechwriters and erstwhile political aides packed the main branch of Politics and Prose, the storied bookstore, to hear former staff members and others commemorate what Marie Arana, a longtime editor of the section, called “a vanished gem.” She spoke alongside such former marquee critics and writers as Ron Charles, Michael Dirda and Carlos Lozada (now a New York Times Opinion columnist) — a “formidable cavalcade of smarts,” as she put it.

“We find ourselves battling book bans, the trivialization of truth, the bashing of serious journalism,” Arana said. “And now The Washington Post, once one of the most respected journalistic institutions in America, is enduring a mass demolition like no other.”…

… The journalist and scholar Warren Bass, a former Book World editor and one of the organizers of the tribute, read statements on behalf of what he described as “three titans of The Washington Post.” One was Martin Baron, a former chief editor of the news organization.

“It is difficult to contemplate, and hard to forgive, a decision to sever The Post’s relationship with books,” Baron wrote.

Merilyn Francis, an expert in health policy who has lived in Washington for the past 20 years, attended the event even though she said she only occasionally read Book World. “It was a really good section to see not only all these different writings, but people’s perspective on them,” she said. The writing, she added, had “a lot of relevance into what was going on in the community.”

Saturday’s event was the rare funeral with a question-and-answer session at the end…..

…The event felt as much like a referendum on the state of American journalism as a memorial. More than 300 journalists were laid off from The Post this month, and many of them were in the audience on Saturday night, greeting each other in a stupor after the event….

(6) BOOK CRITIC WITHOUT AN OUTLET. Charlie Jane Anders confesses, “I’m Still Not Over Losing My Book Review Gig” at Happy Dancing.

A few weeks ago, I found out on social media that I had lost my job as science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. I’ve been meaning to write about it for my newsletter ever since, but I needed time to collect my thoughts — and I didn’t just want to rehash what everyone else was already saying.

I really loved that gig, and I’m still feeling kinda bereft. I’ve written before about how invigorating it was to be paid to keep tabs on everything being published in science fiction and fantasy, and to read a decent selection of the new books coming out every month. I felt like a part of the SFF community in a whole different way. Plus that gig forced me to spend a lot of time reading cool stories instead of looking at upsetting news online. Being able to shout out amazing new books by lesser known authors felt like a way to give back and to help keep genre fiction healthy and exciting. …

…Part of the job of a book critic is making critical judgments — because I only had 200 words per book, or sometimes fewer if I was reviewing more books, I mostly reviewed books for the Post which I’d either loved or enjoyed with some reservations. If I’d had more space, or had been reviewing a single book at a greater length, I might have written more harsh reviews. But even in that short space with limited ability to get into the weeds, I still tried my best to offer thoughts about how the book was using narrative devices, and how well they worked. …

(7) WHAT’S THAT SMELL? “Daniel Radcliffe Was Pitched A ‘Wizard Of Oz’ Remake With ‘HP’ Trio” says Deadline.

Post-Harry Potter, star Daniel Radcliffe has taken on no shortage of singular projects, playing anyone from a flatulent corpse (Swiss Army Man) to a gun-toting computer programmer (Guns Akimbo), but there’s one pitch that stands out as “one of the worst” he’s ever heard.

While guesting on Hot Ones ahead of his Broadway return in Every Brilliant Thing and the premiere of comedy The Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins, the Kill Your Darlings actor was asked about bizarre or unique pitches he’s agreed to take on. The question made him call back the memory of a particularly horrendous pitch for the Harry Potter trio.

“One of the worst ideas that I’ve ever heard: During Potter, somebody came to us and, I think, asked — like they wanted to cast all three of us — me, Emma [Watson] and Rupert [Grint] — in a remake of Wizard of Oz, where Emma was Dorothy, I can’t remember what Rupert was and I just remember I was going to be the lion, but also, he knew karate. I was like a karate-kicking Cowardly Lion,” Radcliffe said.

He added, “I was like 14 or 15, and I was like, ‘I don’t know a lot about the world, but this is a bad idea. This should not be made.’”…

(8) CARVER FUNERAL INFO. [Item by Mickey Mikkelsen.] Author and Nebula Award nominee, Jeffrey A. Carver passed away on February 6 as a result of his quest for a lung transplant.  The family reached out to me this morning as his funeral is set for March 14th and there will be a zoom option.  Jeffrey was an incredible staple in the science fiction community 

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 25, 1971 — Sean Astin, 55.

Let’s talk about Sean Astin who played Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of The Rings films. I’ll admit that he was one of my favorite hobbits in the trilogy and Sean did a sterling job of bringing his character to life here, didn’t he? I’ll also admit that I’d completely forgotten that he wasn’t in The Hobbit as in I tend to think that the hobbits in The Hobbit were the same as those who were in the trilogy.

Before The Lord of The Rings, he showed in his first film playing Mikey Walsh in The Goonies. No, not genre (remember My Birthday Write-up, my rules what gets included here) but a really fine YA treasure hunt adventure in which everyone has fun. Well not everyone.

He has a lead role in Toy Soldiers, a film I still have an odd fond spot for, as William “Billy” Tepper. Damn I liked those toy soldiers. I even had some of the action figures a long time ago.

He was Stuart Conway in a film named after a time travel device called Slipstream that was stolen by a group of bank robbers. Might be interesting to see. Any of you seen it? 

He voiced Shazam in a pair of animated DC films, Justice League: War and Justice League: Atlantis, almost proving there are might be too many DC animated films, though I have seen the second one and it’s rather well done.  Look he even did a Lego one!

In the Department of Films That I Never Knew Existed Off Novels I Never Knew Were Written is Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, which proves how prolific he was or how bad my memory is, at any rate Sean is Twoflower here. 

Dorothy and the Witches of Oz is a 2012 series of a decade ago which apparently covered The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Ozma of Oz, The Road to Oz and The Magic of Oz. Somewhere in there, he was Frack Muckadoo, a servant of Princess Langwidere.

He even got to voice Raphael in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Wrath of the Mutants series. 

I think the last thing I’ll mention is that he showed up in a brief recurring role on The Big Bang Theory series as Dr. Greg Pemberton, one of a team of Fermi-Lab physicists who accidentally confirmed the Super-Asymmetry paper published by Sheldon and Amy. Wasn’t that an amazingly fantastic series? 

Yes, there’s other kibbles and bits which I’m sure you’ll point out, but I need tea now.

Sean Astin

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) MARVEL’S ‘WHAT IF?’ IS 50. For 50 years, Marvel Comics has dared to ask WHAT IF?, putting bold twists on major Marvel moments and opening the floodgates to the multiverse! To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the original What If? series, Marvel will publish eight all-new WHAT IF…? one-shots this summer. Crafted by some of today’s biggest talents, the new one-shots shake the foundations of every corner of the Marvel mythos beginning with startling stories starring the X-Men and Thor and continuing with epic reimaginings of pivotal storylines like Secret Wars and Kraven’s Last Hunt.

 The new one-shots kick off in June with WHAT IF…? UNCANNY X-MEN #1, where Gerry Duggan and Jan Bazaldua put a spin on one of comics’ most tragic love stories, and WHAT IF…? THOR #1,which sees Torunn Grønbekk and Sergio Dávila shift symbiote history towards a mighty new destiny!

 WHAT IF…? UNCANNY X-MEN #1. Written by GERRY DUGGAN. Art by JAN BAZALDUA

WHAT IF…CYCLOPS HAD STAYED WITH MADELYNE PRYOR?

Imagine a world where Madelyne Pryor, the Goblin Queen, had survived the Inferno. What would have happened if Cyclops had saved her soul. What would have happened if he and Maddie had raised their son, Nathan Summers? What would that world look like? And why would that be the most terrible thing to happen to mutantdom and Earth itself?

 WHAT IF…? THOR #1. Written by TORUNN GRØNBEKK. Art by SERGIO DÁVILA

WHAT IF…THOR GOT SPIDER-MAN’S SYMBIOTE SUIT?

Amid the chaos, there comes a costume – but not to the hero you know! Legend has it that bonding with the symbiote suit made Thor mightier still. But what shadows lurking in the Ten Realms would take interest in such a powerful pairing?

Check out the full lineup along with Lucas Werneck’s first two covers and stay tuned for more details in the months ahead.

(12) SUPPORT SOUGHT FOR HE-MAN CREATOR. [Item by Steven French.] “’He-Man’ Creator Roger Sweet Suffering From Dementia, Wife Starts GoFundMe” reports TMZ.com. The direct link to the GoFundMe is here.

Roger Sweet — the toy designer who created the He-Man character in the “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” 1980s animated kids’ show — is suffering from dementia … and according to his wife, he’s unable to afford the necessary care.

Marlene Sweet — who has been married to Roger for nearly 40 years — launched a GoFundMe to help with the $10,200-a-month bill for Roger’s memory care facility….

(13) THE EYE HAS IT. [Item by Daniel Dern.]  “The Evolution of Eyes Began With One” in the New York Times. Link bypasses NYT paywall. “Even Charles Darwin was puzzled by the evolution of the vertebrate eye. New research suggests that it traces back to a cyclopean invertebrate with a single eye atop the head.”

…In 1994, scientists didn’t know enough about those microscopic details to develop a hypothesis for how they evolved as well. Three decades later, that’s no longer the case. “There’s lots of molecular data now that we can use that is extremely powerful,” Dr. Nilsson said.

He and other vision experts have now joined forces to develop a hypothesis for how vertebrate eyes evolved….

…“What we’ve done is, we’ve provided a plausible set of steps that got us there,” Dr. Baden said.

The scenario starts about 560 million years ago, when our invertebrate ancestors lived mostly buried in the ocean floor. They stuck out their brainless heads to filter bits of food floating by….

(14) TRAILER PARK. “’For All Mankind’ Season 5 Trailer: Mars Reaches A Boiling Point” – Deadline supplies an introduction.

It’s getting really intense between Mars and Earth, as we can see in the full Season 5 trailer for For All Mankind dropped Tuesday by Apple.

Season 5 picks up in the alt-2010s with President Bragg (Randy Oglesby) declaring “My administration will put Earth back in charge.” But Mars is having none of that.

The sci-fi series returns for its fifth season on March 27. 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mickey Mikkelsen, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 2/7/25 It’s Only A Pixel Scroll, Filing Over A Mimeo Sea

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(1) THE BLURB REVOLUTION. “Book blurbs: Authors hate them. Publishers love them. They’re often made-up” says Slate’s Imogen West-Knights.

Whip-smart, unputdownable, lyrical, dazzling, pitch-perfect. Taut, tender, a tour de force. A triumph. Unflinching, stunning, mesmerizing, evocative. You will have seen a book—probably many, many books—with some of these words, what one might call blurbiage, if one were being annoying, on its cover. Often, these quotes will be just that one word. But the process by which those single words are acquired is a fraught one. So much so that last week, one top editor at a major publisher, Sean Manning at Simon & Schuster, made an unusual and attention-grabbing announcement about them. In his eight years at the company, he wrote in an essay for Publishers Weekly, “it has been tacitly expected that authors—with the help of their agents and editors—do everything in their power to obtain blurbs to use on their book cover and in promotional material.” No longer. Under his leadership, authors won’t be “required” to spend “an excessive amount of time” getting blurbs for their books….

…Debut authors also told me that it had “taken over their lives” sending out “begging letters” for blurbs, and more established ones said their lives had been taken over by the barrage of unsolicited proofs to blurb that they were receiving. “A lot of publicists are probably paid too poorly to really sit and consider which authors might genuinely like which book,” one novelist said, “but I wish this meant they just sent out less requests in general instead of taking this scatter-gun spam-bot approach.”

So many book proofs are getting sent out, and authors are being pursued so relentlessly for comment, that it has become common enough practice to blurb a book without having actually read it. “I was really horrified the first time someone said I should just make something up for them to approve,” said one debut nonfiction writer, who had a book out last year. This happens all the time, people told me.

Much of the blurb game is built on existing acquaintances. There is enormous social pressure to blurb books for people you sort of know. So people either lie about liking a book, because they don’t want things to be awkward, or end up ghosting the requests, or blurb it positively because they are “blinded by affection,” one nonfiction author told me. “The only time I’ve heard of someone having the balls to say ‘I haven’t blurbed your book because I didn’t actually like it’ is Sarah Schulman,” she added. According to another novelist, “It turns the entire industry into this fucking Regency-era tea party, where we all just owe each other favors and there’s actually no meritocracy or peer review or even admiration going on.”…

(2) ALL THAT TROUBLE, SO ARE THEY WORTH ANYTHING? The New York Times has also reacted to the Simon & Schuster announcement in “What Are Book Blurbs, and How Much Do They Matter in Publishing?” (link bypasses the paywall.)

…Do blurbs really help sell books?

The truth is, no one can say for sure.

“I don’t know if blurbs have ever worked,” Manning said. “There’s no metric to tell.”

Victoria Ford, the owner of Comma, a bookstore in Minneapolis, said, “My initial reaction was that blurbs don’t matter at all.” She’d rather read a thorough summary on the back of a book, or a lively description on the flyleaf, than rely on a few beats from an established author who might have a personal relationship with the author in question.

As for her customers, Ford went on: “I have not noticed readers paying a lot of attention to blurbs, with a few exceptions. I’ve definitely sold books because a customer was browsing and saw a book Ann Patchett had blurbed. Readers trust her.”…

(3) COSTUME DESIGNERS GUILD AWARDS. The 2025 Costume Designers Guild Awards winners include two in categories devoted to sff, and a third in the Period Film category.

Excellence in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Film

  • Wicked; Paul Tazewell, CDG

Excellence in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Television

  • Dune: Prophecy; “The Hidden Hand”; Bojana Nikitovic

Excellence in Period Film

  • Nosferatu; Linda Muir, Costume Designer, Alima Meyboom, ACD; Anna Munro, ACD

(4) CLASSIC ELLISON SHORT FICTION CONSIDERED. A Deep Look by Dave Hook devotes its closest attention to “’Deathbird Stories’, by Harlan Ellison, 1975 Harper & Row”.

…Ellison starts by trying, perhaps to link this collection and its contents to literature and SF, with the quotation of a letter (I assume) from George Bernard Shaw to Count Leo Tolstoy, followed by quotes from Voltaire, Ovid, and Robert A. Heinlein. These are all about gods in some way.

He adds this Caveat Lector, a Latin Phrase for “let the reader beware“:

“It is suggested that the reader not attempt to read this book at one sitting. The emotional content of these stories, taken without break, may be extremely upsetting. This note is intended most sincerely, and not as hyperbole. H.E.”

I take this both ways, as an honest warning and part of his hyperbole….

(5) ALTERNATE HISTORY TV SPINOFF. “’Star City’: Anna Maxwell Martin Joins ‘For All Mankind’ Spinoff” reports Deadline.

BAFTA Award-winner Anna Maxwell Martin (Motherland) is set as a lead opposite Rhys Ifans in Apple TV+‘s upcoming series Star City, a spinoff from the streamer’s space race drama For All Mankind.

Created by Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert and Ronald D. Moore, Star City is another alt-history retelling of the space race – when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward…

(6) IN MEMORIAM. Steven H Silver’s list of members of the sff community who died in 2024 is available at Amazing Stories: “In Memoriam 2024”.

(7) BUT THE MEMORY LINGERS ON. Amazing Stories’ Steve Davidson at “Where Is It Safe To Host A Worldcon?” provides a new map of where he approves for the Worldcon to be held. Can you guess which country between Canada and Mexico has recently fallen off the map? Hint: It’s hosting the next two Worldcons.

…It it supremely ironic that one of the counter-arguments to the protest against the Chengdu bid was a stated belief that exposing the citizens of a repressive regime to the openness and diversity of Fandom would offer an alternative example and somehow inspire governmental change.  Instead, the repressive regime has now come to the home of Fandom, the United States, which will have hosted 59 of the 83 Worldcons held by the end of this year.  (Leeds excepted.)

It is, therefore, not just appropriate, but necessary, to amend the map that illustrates the relative appropriateness of Worldcon hosting.

This year, Worldcon will be hosted in a country whose government has enacted or intends to enact policies that are both repressive and dangerous to members of Fandom.  It will be doing so in the name of all of its citizens as it is a duly and legally elected government (for now), because that is how representative democracies work.

Owing to prior bidding, next year’s Worldcon will also be held in a country that is dangerous to Fans and their beliefs.  Three times in four years is a trend that I  don’t want to see continue.  I hope that the majority of Bid voters agree with me….

(8) MORT KÜNSTLER (1931-2025). [Item by Artie Fenner.]  Artist Morton (Mort) Künstler died. Mostly known for his Civil War gallery paintings today, he did plenty of painted covers for comics and men’s adventure magazines back in the day. Early in his career he and James Bama shared a studio and modeled for each other’s illustrations. The Daily Cartoonist paid tribute: “Mort Künstler – RIP”.

…Künstler would go on to paint about 4,000 magazine covers, movie ads and canvases for NASA, the U.S. Postal Service (a depiction of Black soldiers in the Indian Wars in 1994), institutions and private collectors. His paintings are in the permanent collection of more than 50 museums and his work has been featured in more than 20 books. He was the subject of an A&E documentary in 1993.

His specialty was images of the Civil War, and historians and art critics considered him the premier historical artist in the country — one known for his detailed research and accurate depictions of scenes from Colonial times through the Space Age. In 2006, M. Stephen Doherty, editor of American Artist magazine, wrote “Künstler is now known as America’s foremost historical artist” and since the late 1970s “has been recognized as a distinguished fine artist.”…

(9) MEMORY LANE. History.com remembers what happened on February 7, 1974: “Guests watch Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” movie premiere from horseback”. Guess which daily Scroll contributor whose initials are JKT was there! See photo at this link.

In one of Hollywood’s zaniest movie premiere stunts, Mel Brooks’ 1974 western spoof Blazing Saddles screens at the Pickwick Drive-In Theater in Burbank, California. Guests attend not in cars—but on horseback.

Attendees, many sporting cowboy hats, watched the movie from atop their steeds. Movie sound came through speakers attached to saddle pommels, and the studio set up a “Horsepitality Bar” where guests got “horse d’oeuvres.” Brooks, one of Hollywood’s most legendary comedic directors, was reportedly thrilled with the memorable publicity stunt, and wrote to Warner Bros.’ publicist, Marty Weiser, who came up with the clever idea. Its message: “You’re crazier than I am!”…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 7, 1960 — James Spader, 65.

How can I not do the Birthday of James Spader, the performer who played Dr. Daniel Jackson, Egyptologist in Stargate? Yes, I’m really fond of him in that film. And yes, I am equally fond of Michael Shanks playing that version of the character in the Stargate SG-1 franchise.

His first SF film actually came as a starring role as Joey Callaghan in Starcrossed where an alien woman is running from a deadly enemy and tries to hide here. She meets a young mechanic (Joey), who helps her to go home and to be a freedom fighter there.

A decade later, his next role is in Stargate. I thought it was a great performance by him. And yes, the character as performed by Michael Shanks in Stargate SG-1 continuity is just as interesting, just completely different. His role I thought was more true to that of being an Egyptologist but the Stargate SG-1 continuity isn’t really concerned with the original premise, is it? 

If you saw Avengers: Age of Ultron, and I will readily admit that I have not, he not only voiced Ultron but did the motion capture for it. 

But his greatest role, and I readily admit that is not genre was in The Blacklist series as Raymond “Red” Reddington, a former US Naval Intelligence officer turned fugitive who’s maybe forced to become an FBI crime consultant. And I was surprised to learn that he was an executive producer for that series.  

It’s streaming on Netflix. 

James Spader

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) CIVILIZATION SHUFFLES THE DECK. Polygon tells us what they think about the latest iteration of a longtime classic video game: “Review: Civilization 7 embraces a new era”.

… Civilization 7 breaks with franchise tradition in a couple ways. The first is that your leader and your civilization are unrelated to one another. At the beginning of a game, you select a leader (say, Harriet Tubman) who brings certain capabilities with them (like a bonus to espionage actions). You also select a civilization, a group of people who your leader, well, leads. If you’re starting in the age of Antiquity, the oldest time period, these are civilizations like the Greeks, the Mississippians, or the Han. They are distinguished by specific traits and units that are unique to them. This whole process is inevitably a little weird to people who have played these games before, given that historically there was not a split between leaders and civs, but ultimately the vibes are the same when playing the game — you simply get to mix and match your people, even if it produces extremely weird combos like Machiavelli, leader of ancient Persia….

(13) SUPERSIZED. “Astronomers find the largest structure in the universe and name it Quipu” reports Phys.Org.

Is it possible to understand the universe without understanding the largest structures that reside in it? In principle, not likely. In practical terms? Definitely not. Extremely large objects can distort our understanding of the cosmos.

Astronomers have found the largest structure in the universe so far, named Quipu after an Incan measuring system. It contains a shocking 200 quadrillion solar masses.

Astronomy is an endeavor where extremely large numbers are a part of daily discourse. But even in astronomy, 200 quadrillion is a number so large it’s rarely encountered. And if Quipu’s extremely large mass doesn’t garner attention, its size surely does. The object, called a superstructure, is more than 400 megaparsecs long. That’s more than 1.3 billion light-years.

A structure that large simply has to affect its surroundings, and understanding those effects is critical to understanding the cosmos. According to new research, studying Quipu and its brethren can help us understand how galaxies evolve, help us improve our cosmological models, and improve the accuracy of our cosmological measurements…

…Astronomers have found the largest structure in the universe so far, named Quipu after an Incan measuring system. It contains a shocking 200 quadrillion solar masses….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Jack Benny and Mel Blanc – The Man of a Thousand Voices” with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/17/24 Root/File; Droppixels

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(1) SECOND TIME AROUND. Rebecca F. Kuang brings us “The Poppy War (Becky’s Version)”. See the new cover at the link.

…I did the best I could for that book. I didn’t know how to ask for things. I made compromises. I knew I didn’t want the cover art to play into Orientalist tropes, and I knew I didn’t want a generic, European, epic fantasy cover, but I didn’t know how to communicate or negotiate something in between. I latched onto the first concept that wasn’t dreadful. I thought that if I said anything more, then I would hamstring my career before it had gotten off the ground. At twenty, I was scared of my own shadow.

We’ve grown a lot since then.

Last year, my editor asked me: if we could reissue The Poppy War again today, what would I change? How would the cover look? How would the interior art look?…

(2)  THE SUMMER OF ’24. The Clarion West Writers Workship has announced their Six-Week Workshop Class of 2024.

(3) DOCTOR WHO REJECTS AND SALVAGE JOBS. Den of Geek discusses “Doctor Who’s Unmade TV Episodes”. Here are two examples.

…. In 1964 Victor Pemberton submitted ‘The Slide’ (in which the Doctor discovered sentient, mind-controlling mud) to the Doctor Who production offices. The story was rejected and so Pemberton adapted it for BBC radio. ‘The Slide’ was then adapted back into a Doctor Who story that swapped the mud for seaweed in 1968’s ‘Fury from the Deep’.

Donald Cotton, who wrote two Hartnell stories, submitted a third which contained the idea that the Loch Ness Monster was of alien origin. ‘The Herdsmen of Venus’ suggested that the Loch Ness Monster was in fact a type of space bovine, bred by the titular herdsmen, and raising the very real possibility of a space helmet for a cow. Cotton’s story was rejected by the a new production team who felt Doctor Who should be a serious show, though seemingly conflicting alien origins for the Loch Ness Monster would appear in 1975’s ‘Terror of the Zygons’ and 1985’s ‘Timelash’….

(4) THE BASIC UNIT OF SOCIETY. Joe Vasicek by no means styles himself a liberal thinker, however, it’s thought-provoking to read his explanation for this change: “Why I no longer consider myself to be a libertarian” at One Thousand And One Parsecs.

… Families don’t just happen. They take a lot of work to build and to maintain, and unless they are planted in a culture that nourishes them, they will wither and die. Libertarianism does not foster that kind of a culture, yet it depends on families in order to raise the kind of people who can make a libertarian society work. People from broken families often lack the mental and emotional maturity to take upon themselves the personal responsibilities that come with personal liberty—in other words, they lack the capacity for personal independence which libertarianism depends on…. 

(5) WHEN IT’S TIME TO RAILROAD. “The U.S. is exploring a railroad for the moon. It has a good reason.” – Mashable has the story.

… The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA — an ambitious federal innovations division — has begun collaborating with over a dozen companies on potential future lunar technologies, including a moon railroad. It’s called the 10-Year Lunar Architecture Capability Study, or LunA-10, and its mission is to find technologies that will catalyze a self-perpetuating lunar economy….

… DARPA recently chose the aerospace and defense giant Northrup Grumman to create the concept for the railroad. “The envisioned lunar railroad network could transport humans, supplies, and resources for commercial ventures across the lunar surface — contributing to a space economy for the United States and international partners,” the company wrote. They’ll aim to develop a railway that limits the human footprint on the largely still pristine lunar surface, and design a system that anyone could ride or load cargo on (such as with standardized, moon-worthy equipment that can withstand huge temperature swings)…

(6) CONAN IN 1969. Cora Buhlert is among the reviewers who contribute to Galactic Journey’s post “[April 16, 1969] The Men from Ipomoea (April 1969 Galactoscope)”.

Conan with a Metafictional Gimmick: Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman, by Gardner F. Fox

There has been an invasion at my trusty local import bookstore, an invasion of scantily clad, muscular Barbarians, sporting furry loincloths and horned helmets and brandishing gigantic swords and axes, while equally scantily clad maidens cling to their mighty thews….

(7) SOVIET NOSTALGIA? Gizmodo gripes and cheers: “The Greatest Sci-Fi Show You’re Still Not Watching Is Getting a New Season—and a Spinoff”.

The world of For All Mankind was forever changed when the Soviet Union arrived on the moon before the United States. That one event changed the course of the show’s alternate history, and now we’ll get to see exactly how it happened.

Apple TV+ has just announced that not only is For All Mankind coming back for a fifth season, it’s also getting a spinoff called Star City that will tell the story from the Soviet point of view, starting with them beating America to the moon….

According to Deadline:

…Apple is billing Star City is “a propulsive paranoid thriller” which will explore a key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, it will explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 17, 1959 — Sean Bean, 65. Today’s Birthday is that of Sean Bean whose most well known role is either Lord Eddard “Ned” Stark in Game of Thrones or Boromir in Jackson’s The Lord of The Rings trilogy (though his scenes in The Two Towers are only available on the extended version.) I really liked him as Boromir in The Fellowship of The Ring which I’ve watched a number of times. 

Sean Bean in 2016.

If you count National Treasure as being genre adjacent, and I certainly do given its premise, he’s Ian Lowe there — a crime boss and treasure hunter who is a former friend of Benjamin Gate, the character Nicolas Cage plays. 

He’s James in The Dark, a horror film based off Welsh mythology with connections to the Welsh underworld Annwyn.  

He’s done a lot of horror films — Silent Hill is his next one in which he’s Christopher Da Silva, husband of Rose, and it’s a haunted mansion mystery as its sequel.  He played Ulric in Black Death. Guess when that is set?  

Genre wise, there’s Possessor where he’s a mind jumping assassin. Hey it’s also listed as being horror! Then there’s Jupiter Ascending where he’s Stinger Apindi, Over there we find The Martian where he’s Mitch Henderson, and in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief he’s Zeus.   

More interestingly he was Inspector John Marlottin The Frankenstein Chronicles, an ITV series about a London police officer who uncovers a corpse made up of body parts from eight missing children and sets about to determine who is responsible.

Lastly I’ll note that he was in the Snowpiercer series as Mr. Wilford. I’ve not seen it. So how is it? 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) BURSTING BACK INTO THEATERS. Comicbook.com tells fans “Original Alien Returning to Theaters This Month for Alien Day”. (Check Fandango for Alien 45th Anniversary Re-Release (2024) Showtimes.)

Just in time to celebrate 45 years since its release, Ridley Scott’s Alien is coming back to theaters this spring. Coming on “Alien Day” — that’s April 26 — the movie will screen at theaters across the U.S. Over at Fandango, you can see where screenings are, order tickets, and browse other merch like an homage poster, collectables, books, apparel, and more. The screenings on Alien Day will also feature an exclusive conversation between Scott and Alien: Romulus writer/director Fede Alvarez….

(11) ANOTHER HELPING OF GOOD OMENS, PLEASE. Radio Times intercepts the signal as “Neil Gaiman confirms when Good Omens season 3 begins filming”.

…Speaking in an interview with Deadline about post-strike Hollywood, Gaiman reflected on his upcoming projects – and in the process, offered up a timeline for Good Omens season 3 production.

He said: “That being said, you know, Dead Boy Detectives comes out in 10 days. I’ve seen half of Sandman season 2, and it’s astonishing. I’m writing Good Omens season 3, and we start shooting that in January.”…

(12) CLOSING THE BOOKS. San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions, Inc. announces “Costume-Con 39, Westercon 74 Committees Discharged”.

At its March 16, 2024 meeting, the SFSFC Board of Directors discharged the standing committees previously established to operate Costume-Con 39 and Westercon 74. Both conventions have completed all of their tasks. This action means that both convention committees will close their financial books and turn over any remaining surplus assets to the SFSFC corporate general fund. Any residual responsibilities of these committees have similarly been absorbed by the corporation’s general fund.

SFSFC continues to maintain both conventions’ websites. Anyone with questions about either committee can still contact the organization through those convention’s general-information inquiry addresses or they can contact SFSFC directly.

(13) PET PUSHES THE BUTTON. This news item involving a dog continues a line of interest we began by covering Mary Robinette Kowal’s cat who talks using buttons. “Dog uses sound buttons to communicate with owner that she’s unwell” at USA Today.

A golden retriever turned into a doctor when he diagnosed his owner with an illness before she got sick.

Christina Lee, a software engineer from Northern California, taught her dog Cache to talk to her by pressing buttons on a communication device.

The device is pre-programmed with words such as “food,” “friend,” and “mom.” But when Cache pressed a button saying “sick,” Lee was initially skeptical as she felt fine. However, five hours later, she began to feel unwell.

“This is the first time that he’s predicted when I would get sick ahead of time,” says Lee. “I think he could smell it on me or something.”

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

Pixel Scroll 1/11/24 Scroll, Pixel, Scroll, Upon Your Mystery Ship

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(1) BITTER KARELLA (“MIDNIGHT PALS”) Q&A. The Horror Writers Association blog continues its “Nuts & Bolts” series in an “Interview With Bitter Karella, Creator of The Midnight Pals”.

The Midnight Pals microfiction series started as a simple but inspired running gag on Twitter. Storytellers gather around a campfire a la Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark?, except they’re real-life horror authors past and present — Stephen King, Clive Barker, Mary Shelley, etc.

Its author, Bitter Karella, has managed to find surprising depths in that premise, delivered almost entirely in dialogue. Midnight Pals features complex, interweaving storylines, recurring characters, and trenchant social commentary, all while remaining consistently hilarious….

Q: Humor aside, it’s impressive how Midnight Pals manages to convey entire narrative arcs using little but snippets of dialogue. Do you have any pointers on story-telling?

A: One of the most powerful parts of storytelling is leaving things unsaid. A well-timed pause or a deflection can say so much —  about what a character is thinking, their emotional state, what they want to say but can’t for some reason, what inner demons they refuse to confront, what blind spots they’re not even aware of. These are the moments that really let the reader ponder what’s going on in a character’s brain and I think letting the reader try and figure out for themselves what is going on gives the whole affair a bigger impact than if the writer just spells everything out for them. Because we live in a social media world where we’re all understandably nervous about getting yelled at online, I think many writers today feel uncomfortable with the idea that a reader might misunderstand them and they feel compelled to answer every question before it’s asked. I struggle a lot with that as well … when I write a punchline, I want to write it so that there’s no ambiguity about what’s happening, so that everyone can get it. But sometimes the phrasing that hits best is also going to be the phrasing most ripe for misinterpretation or sometimes it’s just funnier (or more interesting) to leave something out. You just have to trust your reader to connect the dots for themselves, sometimes!

(2) AUTHOR BIO ADVICE. Nicola Griffith makes recommendations: “Author Bios: Saying the quiet part out loud”.

…Nobody really talks about about Author Bios. Consequently, when I was first asked to write one (in the late 80s, for Interzone, or maybe Iron Women) I hadn’t a clue where to begin. If I’d thought about them at all I probably assumed somebody else wrote them. After all, as my English, trained-to-not-blow-my-own-horn inner voice reminded me, If you have to tell people you’re important/interesting, you’re not. Looking back, I’m glad I was clueless about this kind of self-promotion. I might never have begun this writing thing if I’d had any idea how much being a working novelist depends on blasting out your own brassy fanfares all the time, about everything: not just social media but essays, interviews, panels, readings, think pieces, puff pieces, listicles, blog posts, podcasts… It’s a very large part of the job. And all those things rest on the bio—usually between 500 and 1,000 words for your own website (the Inside Bio), and anything from 25 to 200 words elsewhere (the Outside Bio)1…

(3) LEARNEDLEAGUE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] Two SFF-related themed quizzes were featured this week on LearnedLeague. Here’s a link to “Spaceballs: The One-Day Special!” and here’s one to “The Sandman“.

I’ve actually never seen Spaceballs, so I didn’t take that quiz. Sandman, by contrast, I’ve been reading since 1988. I got 12/12 right on that one fairly easily (I did need the embedded hints in one question) but wasn’t in the winners’ circle because the scoring involves guessing what questions will be the hardest, and I failed at that. My old friend Tom Galloway got a perfect score, though.

(4) SHADE TREK. “Star Trek Series Erased From Existence By Sci-Fi Show, Is It Revenge?” asks Giant Freakin Robot.

Star Trek definitely exists in the universe of Ronald D. Moore’s Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, but does every show from the franchise exist? A recent episode has fans speculating that Moore is purposefully suggesting that Star Trek: Voyager wasn’t made in the For All Mankind universe.

If true, it seems like Moore would be throwing some slight shade toward screenwriter Brannon Braga, whom Moore had a falling out with, causing him to leave Voyager.

For All Mankind takes place in an alternate reality where there is a global space race, and one of the interesting aspects of the show is seeing the slight differences in the timelines from our reality. The Star Trek: Voyager theory popped up when a Reddit user pointed out that the character Danielle (Krys Marshall), the first African-American woman in space, sent a message to her stepson Isaiah about the birth of his daughter.

In the scene, Danielle says, “I know you hate Star Trek, but you better get used to it, because I’m gonna make sure my grandbaby is a full-blown Trekkie,” adding, “That’s right, we’re gonna watch all the series, all three of them.”

While that statement may seem innocuous enough, the scene takes place in 2003, when there were six series in the franchise, including The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise….

(5) SCRIPT OF THE UNMADE DUNE SEQUEL. Max Evry tells Ars Technica “I found David Lynch’s lost Dune II script”. That the 1984 Dune movie was low-earning and brutally reviewed is part of the reason it was lost.

… During the two years I spent putting together my book A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune—An Oral History, I had no luck uncovering Lynch’s script for Dune II, despite Frank Herbert telling Prevue magazine in December 1984 that he possessed a copy and was advising Lynch on it. “Now that we speak the same ‘language,’ it’s much easier for both of us to make progress, especially with the screenplays,” Herbert told the publication. Then, in July 2023, within the Frank Herbert archives at California State University, Fullerton, I came across a slim folder with a sticky note declaring “Dune Messiah script revisions,” addressed to the second floor of VFX man Barry Nolan’s office in Burbank where Lynch supervised the final effects shoots and editing on Dune….

… Of the many differences between Dune Messiah in novel form and David Lynch’s script, the biggest lay in the opening pages, which detail what happens in the aftermath of the scene in the first Dune movie when the Harkonnens bombed the Atreides’ fortress in Arrakeen, the capitol of the desert planet Arrakis. In the hallway where Duncan Idaho (Richard Jordan) was shot in the head, his shielded dead body still floats on the floor, humming and sparking.

From out of the shadows emerges a familiar face: the Baron’s Doctor (Leonardo Cimino). Thought to be the only speaking part created specifically for Dune by Lynch, we learn this Doctor was actually Scytale, a shape-shifting “face dancer” crucial to the plot of Herbert’s second book. Going back to Dune ’84, you may not have noticed Cimino’s Doctor accompanied Baron Harkonnen during the Arrakeen attack. The Doc is absent after that, even as the Baron yells creepily, “Where’s my doctor?” That’s because Doc/Scytale absconded with Duncan’s body. This Easter egg is Lynchian world-building at its best.

Scytale’s 12-year odyssey reanimating “dead Duncan Idaho” into the ghola named Hayt on the nightmarish Bene Tleilax world (mentioned by Paul in Dune) constitutes the entire opening 10 minutes of the script. Lynch calls the planet Tleilax “a dark metal world with canals of steaming chemicals and acids.” Those canals, Lynch writes, are lined with “dead pink small test tube animals.” Initiating Dune II with a focus on Scytale foregrounds him to primary antagonist, unlike Herbert’s book where myriad conspirators work against Paul….

(6) TURN OUT THE LIGHTSABER, THE PARTY’S OVER. And speaking of unmade sequels – which two famous producers did in The Hollywood Reporter interview: “David Benioff, Dan Weiss Reveal Their Star Wars Movie: The First Jedi”.

…On the Star Wars front, the duo confirm media reports from 2019 that they were looking at the early days of the Jedi, but added some details.

“We wanted to do The First Jedi,” Benioff says. “Basically, how the Jedi Order came to be, why it came to be, the first lightsaber …” 

“And we were annoyed as hell when [Rian Johnson, the duo’s longtime friend and 3 Body Problem producer] called his movie The Last Jedi,” Weiss says dryly. “He completely destroyed the obvious title for what we were working on.” 

Asked what went wrong, Benioff says, “[Lucasfilm] ended up not wanting to do a First Jedi story. We had a very specific story idea in mind, and ultimately they decided they didn’t want to do that. And we totally get it. It’s their company and their IP, but we weren’t the droids they were looking for.”

The duo were far from the only ones that had their Star Wars movie taken away. Lucasfilm also decided against making Star Wars projects from top creatives like Kevin Feige, Patty Jenkins and Damon Lindelof….

(7) BRITISH LIBRARY RECOVERY. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] The British Library announced that some of their major services will begin to be available again starting next week, following last October’s crippling cyber-attack. “Restoring our services – an update”. There is still much work to be done.

As we begin a new year, I’m pleased to confirm that – as promised before Christmas – next Monday 15 January will see the return online of one of the most important datasets for researchers around the world: the main British Library catalogue of over 36 million records, including details of our printed books, journals, maps, music scores and rare books. Its absence from the internet has been perhaps the single most visible impact of the criminal cyber attack which took place at the end of October last year, and I want to acknowledge how difficult this has been for all our users.

When the catalogue returns it won’t be in quite the form that long-standing users will be familiar with. Most notably it will be ‘read-only’, so although you will be able to search for items as before, the process for checking availability and ordering them for to use in the Reading Rooms will be different. We’ll be providing more detailed information and practical guidance when the catalogue goes online on Monday….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 11, 1961 — Jasper Fforde, 63. I, like most folk I suspect, first discovered the somewhat eccentric charms of his writing in the Eyre Affair, the first of his novels with Tuesday Next, the  Special Operation Network, Literary Detectives (SO-27) who could literally enter the great and not so great works of English literature. 

Bidder and Stoughton published it twenty-three years ago. I’d like to say the Eyre Affair was a much desired literary property but he says there were seventy-six publisher that he sent his manuscript to. I’m surprised there were that many publishers in the U.K. that would have been interested…

Jasper Fforde in 2012.

There would be six in the series in all — this novel followed by Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot. I won’t say that they were consistently great as they weren’t and the humor sometimes wore more than a bit thin, but overall I like the series considerably.

Next up, and I wasn’t eggspecting to like it, yes I know bad pun there, is The Big Over Easy which is set in the same universe as the Thursday Next novels though I don’t remember any overlapping character twenty years after reading them. It reworks his first written novel, which absolutely failed to find any publisher whatsoever. 

Its original title was Who Killed Humpty Dumpty? Errr, wasn’t there a novel involving a rabbit by almost that name?  It had a sequel of sorts in The Fourth Bear. Both are quite more than bearably good. 

I have not read his dystopian novel Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffronwhich is about a future Britain where everyone there is judged by how they perceive colors. Suspect someone with color blindness like myself wouldn’t be welcome there. A friend who did read it like it a lot. 

His Dragonslayer series, also known as The Chronicles of Kazam, are a YA affair and a great deal of fun indeed. 

He’s got several one-offs but I know absolutely nothing about them.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) STRACZYNSKI Q&A. “Hope and Strange: PW Talks with J. Michael Straczynski” at Publishers Weekly.

You’ve said before that, with established mainstream comics characters, you view your job as asking unlikely questions. Could you expand on that approach?

[JMS]: Spider-Man is a good example of that. For 50-plus years, we’ve known that Peter Parker got bit by a spider and got his powers. I like to look under the hood and say, oh, wait, hang on a second. The spider was irradiated—we know that part of it. But did the spider have the powers from the radiation, and therefore gave it to Peter, or was that spider bringing the powers to him in the first place, and had to get to him before the radiation killed it? Because the second question implies intent. And the moment you put intent into that equation, it changes everything. It opens up whole new possibilities of storytelling. Out of that one question came the Spider Totem idea, but also the Spider-Verse. All the things you’ve seen since then from the Spider-Verse, the characters and movies, and the animated stuff, all that came from that one unlikely question—that implied intent….

(11) UNCANNY MAGAZINE’S SUBMISSION SCORECARD. A little peek behind the scenes at a leading sff magazine.

(12) MORE AI FAKERY ON AMAZON. “Scammy AI-Generated Book Rewrites Are Flooding Amazon” reports WIRED.

When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI’s impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom—with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, in an apparent scheme to profit off her work. It looks like another example of the ecommerce giant’s ongoing problem with a glut of low-quality AI-generated ebooks.

Mitchell learned that searching Amazon for her book surfaced not only her own tome but also another ebook with the same title, published last September. It was only 45 pages long and it parroted Mitchell’s ideas in halting, awkward language. The listed author, “Shumaila Majid,” had no bio, headshot, or internet presence, but clicking on that name brought up dozens of similar books summarizing recently published titles.

Mitchell guessed the knock-off ebook was AI-generated, and her hunch appears to be correct. WIRED asked deepfake-detection startup Reality Defender to analyze the ersatz version of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, and its software declared the book 99 percent likely AI-generated. “It made me mad,” says Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. “It’s just horrifying how people are getting suckered into buying these books.”…

(13) ELFQUEST SCRIPT IS GO. “’Elfquest’ Animated Series Based On Comics In Works At Fox” reports Deadline.

Fox has given a script commitment to Elfquest, a one-hour animated drama series based on the epic fantasy adventure comic series created by Wendy and Richard Pini, from Rodney Rothman and Adam Rosenberg’s Modern Magic. Susan Hurwitz Arneson (The Last Amazon) will pen the series adaptation and serve as showrunner and executive producer.

Created in 1978, Elfquest, published by Dark Horse Comics, is a fantasy story about a community of elves and other fictional species who struggle to survive and coexist on a primitive Earth-like planet with two moons….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] The fan-relevant part starts at 3:53 into the video, “Stephen [Colbert] Plays ‘Ick Or No Ick’ With Taylor Tomlinson, Host Of “After Midnight”. Listen through Colbert’s follow-up to Tomlinson’s response, until he closes with a plug for her new show.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Daniel Dern, David Goldfarb, Kathy Sullivan, Michael J. Walsh, Bruce D. Arthurs, Jim Janney, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark J. McGarry.]

Pixel Scroll 12/15/23 Earth Scrolls Are Easy

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(1) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to feast on crab fried rice with Nina Kiriki Hoffman in Episode 214 of his Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Nina Kiriki Hoffman, who aside from having sung the earworm “Feelings” with me more times than I can count, has either won or been a finalist for the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the HOMer award from CompuServe, the Endeavour Award, the Mythopoeic Society Award, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award.

She won the 2008 Nebula Award for Best Short Story for “Trophy Wives,” and her novel The Thread That Binds the Bones won the Bram Stoker Award for first novel. Other novels include The Silent Strength of Stones (a sequel to The Thread That Binds the Bones), A Fistful of Sky, and A Stir of Bones. Her novella ‘”Unmasking,” published in 1992 by Axolotl Press, was a finalist for the 1993 World Fantasy Award. Her novella “Haunted Humans” was a finalist for the 1995 Nebula Award for Best Novella and on the same ballot as her novelette”The Skeleton Key,” shortlisted for Best Novelette.

We discussed the way a ghost story which left her wanting more led to her taking her writing more seriously, her early reactions to reading Robert A. Heinlein and Ursula K. Le Guin, how the Clarion workshop convinced her she could have a career as a writer, the way she wanted to grow up to be a combination of Ray Bradbury and Zenna Henderson, what she learned about characterization from Samuel R. Delany while at Clarion, the major difference she saw between the horror and science fiction communities during the early days of the Internet, how my perception of the arc her career was affected not by what she wrote but by what she sold, the lesson Ellen Datlow taught her which she passes on to her students, and much more.

(2) DEFENSE BUDGET DIVIDEND? SYFY Wire gets us ready for holiday conversations with these Seussian factoids: “5 Things to Know About How the Grinch Stole Christmas!”

WWII training cartoons led the way for special to get made

During WWII, a lot of talented artists were enlisted to create materials that would help the war effort, or help train troops heading overseas. Two of those talents were animator Chuck Jones and [Theodore] Geisel, who met and worked together on the U.S. Military commissioned animated short films produced by Warner Bros. Studio. The Private Snafu series helped educate G.I.s on a range of subjects in an easy and entertaining way. 

Having worked well together, Jones approached Geisel about adapting the book into an animated holiday special in the same vein as the hit 1965 animated special, A Charlie Brown Christmas. Unhappy with previous adaptations of his books, Geisel agreed to give Jones the rights because of their previous personal collaborations. 

(3) CLIMATE ACTION ALMANAC. ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination and the ClimateWorks Foundation will launch their new book, The Climate Action Almanac, with a free virtual event on January 16, 2024, at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time. The event will feature, among its speakers, the SF authors Kim Stanley Robinson, Libia Brenda, and Vandana Singh. They’ll explore how to craft narratives about hopeful climate futures that catalyze real-world action and resonate with policy realities, especially in the wake of the recent COP28 UN climate summit.

When we think of climate, the stories we tell about the future are bad: megastorms, crop failures, and heat waves loom over us. These narratives are compelling, but can leave us feeling hopeless, helpless, and disillusioned.

To motivate broad-based change in the present, we need visions of positive climate futures grounded both in science and in local geographical and cultural particularities. We need stories that bridge the imperative for global coordination with values, resources, and community action, envisioning transformation that grows bottom-up and bottom-out, rather than top-down.

In the wake of the COP28 climate summit, join us for the launch of a collection of such stories: The Climate Action Almanac, presented by CSI and the ClimateWorks Foundation. We’ll hear from contributors from across the globe who have charted pathways toward a vibrant, decarbonized future.

The event is free and open to everyone. Register today!

This event will take place in English, with simultaneous interpretation into Spanish. It is presented by CSI and Future Tense in collaboration with the ClimateWorks Foundation and ASU’s Convergence Lab.

(4) DRIVEN. “Famous Cars: The Most Memorable & Expensive Cars to Ever Grace Our Screens” – Investing Magazine has a list. Many are from sff productions. Here’s one that wasn’t cheap to begin with, and now is worth a fortune:

9. The Original Batmobile

As Seen In: Batman the Movie
Year: 1966 
Estimated Value: $4.6 million*

Built by famous designer George Barris, the original Batmobile was based off a 1955 Ford Lincoln Futura. This concept car was worth $250,000 at the time. But by the time it had become an iconic part of pop culture, the Batmobile was worth $4.6 million. 

(5) CURBING A HABIT. Charlie Jane Anders shares a technique for keeping doomscrolling from interfering with writing in “A Productivity Hack That’s Been Helping Me Lately” at Happy Dancing.

I used to be way better at staying focused on pouring words into a word processor, which would puree them gently into a delicious word slurry that I would send to my publisher. (At which point the publisher takes the word slurry, mixes it with gravel and limestone to turn it into decorative bricks for your garden, or so I’m assuming.) Anyway, in recent years it’s gotten harder to tear my gaze away from the sussurating horrors gathering in the desolate crevices of the collective unconscious.

Basically, the doomscrolling has gotten harder and harder to resist. It’s bad for my concentration — and, frankly, for my mental health.

(To be clear, I support staying informed about the state of the world! But not to the point where you’re just marinating in learned helplessness. And I really believe what I wrote in that book, that creativity is a worthwhile and valid way to deal with awful times. And as I keep saying, daydreaming is the opposite of doomscrolling — and daydreams are powerful.)

So I’ve come up with a productivity hack to keep myself from staring at news sites and social media all day. I recently told a friend about this method, and she seemed to find it useful too. So here it is.

Basically, my main problem is social media and news sites, plus emails to some extent. All of this stuff lives on my browser on my computer at home, and I experimented for a few years with installing browser extensions to block certain sites during daytime hours — but they usually wanted to invade my privacy, and they weren’t super reliable.

Then I discovered a way to just make my browser inaccessible during work hours, using my Mac’s settings. (I’m running the latest version, Sonoma 14.1.1.)…

(6) MAJOR SF+F EVENTS IN EUROPE IN 2024. [Item by Dave Lally.]  Now that Chengdu Worldcon 2023 is over… The year 2024 has a number of major SF+F events, in Europe, approaching (and all dates given herein are inclusive).  And this data is primarily for those from outside the area (to help).

Mid April 2024 sees another major SF+F event (herein numbered No 2 :  Eastercon/UK  (in late March-early April) being No 1):   

Luxcon (Luxembourg National SF+F Con): —

Fri 12 (unofficial for early arrivals), Sat 13-Sun 14 April

Venue: Forum Geesseknappchen, Hollerich, (western) Central Luxembourg City, L-1430, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. 

Everyone in Luxembourg speaks English fluently (and many therein also speak many other languages).

The Grand Duchy (in the EU) has one of the highest standards of living in Europe.   Currency: Euro.

Luxcon held a very successful Eurocon –with that year’s Luxcon– in 2022.

Their website: Official Luxcon. Also double check other media re updates.

Nearest Airport : Luxembourg [ IATA :  LUX ] – fast connecting express bus from the airport to the Luxembourg City Central Rail Station. Thence and FREE (*) local buses (no 10, and no 20) from there to the Con venue.

[* Nota Bene within Luxembourg and at all times, all local public transport (standard class) — incl the Luxembourg City tram (LuxTram), local buses and local CFL (rail) trains– are Free.  Hugo Gernsback (yes him, originally from here) has a street named after him in eastern Luxembourg City.] 

 Luxembourg City Rail Station is served by: 

  1. SNCB (Belgian Rail) trains from Brussels Midi (via Arlon and usually one per hour) tho the cost from Arlon (Luxembourg border) to the Luxembourg Rail Station portion (see * above) is free. And sometimes there is a train change at Arlon. Note this train usually has NO catering thereon (so stock up on food/drink before travelling).  Brussels Midi is of course served by EUROSTAR trains from London St Pancras International Rail Station and from many other places, elsewhere in Europe;
  2. SNCF (French Rail) – TGV (High Speed) trains (with catering) from Paris Gare de L’Est (via Metz, tho there may be a change of train on that route). Paris-Gare de L’Est is right next door to Paris-Gare Du Nord (which itself is well served by EUROSTAR trains from London St Pancras -as above).  

 [No doubt local Luxembourg fen, reading this,  will be able to update/augment this data. ]

And as usual fen from anywhere overseas are very welcome at any SF+F Cons here in Europe, including Luxcon.

(More events to follow.)

(7) MEOWMEOW. The New York Times ran an obituary for “Neil Drossman, Adman Who Sold With a Smile, Is Dead at 83”. Not a genre figure; he just made a big imprint on popular culture with his memorable ads.

Neil Drossman, who brought a cheeky wit and a tireless work ethic to the award-winning print advertisements and television commercials he wrote for clients like Meow Mix cat food, Teacher’s Scotch whisky and 1-800-Flowers, died on Nov. 25 in the Bronx. He was 83….

From the late 1960s until this year, Mr. Drossman was a copywriter and an executive at several agencies, some run by the advertising guru Jerry Della Femina and some he helped run himself….

…One of the most enduring lines Mr. Drossman wrote was for Meow Mix: “Tastes so good, cats ask for it by name.” That came at the end of commercials in which cats appeared to sing (“Meow meow meow meow/Meow meow meow meow”) for their chicken and seafood…

…In 1973 and 1974, Mr. Drossman ghostwrote full-page testimonials for Teacher’s Scotch in the voices of celebrities like Groucho Marx, George Burns and Mel Brooks. The Brooks ad was written as an interview with Mr. Brooks’s character the 2,000 Year Old Man.

“Sir, when was Scotch discovered?”

“It was during the Ice Age. We had so many tons of ice, we didn’t know what to do. So we made drinks, all kinds of drinks.”….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 15, 1951 — David Bischoff. (Died 2018.) Our community is blessed with many amazing writers of which David Bischoff was one. So let’s talk about him.  

His first writings were in the Thrust fanzine where he did a mix of commentary and criticism. (Thrust got one Hugo nomination as a fanzine and four as semi-prozine.)  Editor Doug Fratz would later convert it into a prozine for which Bischoff along with John Shirley and Michael Bishop were regular contributors. 

David Bischoff

His first novel, The Seeker, which was co-written with Christopher Lampton was published by Laser Books forty-seven years ago. He was extremely prolific. No, I don’t mean sort of prolific, I mean extremely prolific. He wrote some seventy-five original novels which is to say not within of any of the many media franchises that he wrote within plus another thirty-five or so novels falling within those media franchises.

What franchises? Oh how about these for a start and this is not a full listing by any means — Aliens, Alien Versus Predator, Farscape, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Jonny Quest, SeaQuest DSV,  Space Precinct and War Games.. And no, I never knew there were Jonny Quest novels. 

Oh, and I must single out that he wrote two Bill, the Galactic Hero novels, Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure and Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Ten Thousand Bars which is either a great idea or maybe not. Not having read them I have no idea. 

And he wrote for the Trek universe, two most excellent episodes at that. He co-wrote the ”Tin Man” episode from Next Generation, a Nebula nominee, with Dennis Putman Bailey, and the “First Contact” episode from the same series written with Dennis Russell Bailey, Joe Menosky, Ronald D. Moore and Michael Piller. 

Almost none of his extensive fiction has been collected save that which is in Tripping the Dark Fantastic from a quarter of a century ago which collects a few novelettes and some short stories. 

Very little of his fiction is available from the usual suspects, almost none of it his original works. And Tripping the Dark Fantastic is not available. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Far Side shows a new kind of “Love, American Style.”
  • Free Range found the answer to a super trivia question.

(10) NO LONGER THE ANSWER. Deadline says “Mayim Bialik Out At ‘Jeopardy!’”.

Mayim Bialik will no longer be part of the Jeopardy! hosting team.

The actor posted the news on Instagram on Friday.

The move comes as Ken Jennings has been hosting Season 40 of the syndicated show by himself.

Deadline revealed in May that The Big Bang Theory and Call Me Kat star walked away from hosting the final week of season 39 of the gameshow as a result of the strike.

Mayim Bialik’s Instagram says:

“As the holiday break begins in Hollywood, I have some Jeopardy! news. Sony has informed me that I will no longer be hosting the syndicated version of Jeopardy! I am incredibly honored to have been nominated for a primetime Emmy for hosting this year and I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have been a part of the Jeopardy! family. For all of you who have supported me through this incredible journey and to the fans, contestants, writers, staff and crew of America’s Favorite Quiz Show, thank you.”

(11) HARI HARI SELDON SELDON. “Elon Musk to open a STEM-focused K-12 school, university in Austin” according to the New York Post.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk plans to launch a STEM-focused primary and secondary school in Texas before debuting a glittering university “dedicated to education at the highest levels,” according to a tax filing.

Musk, who moved from California to the Lone Star State during the pandemic, will build the schools in Austin with a $100 million donation from the billionaire’s charity called The Foundation, according to tax filings first reported by Bloomberg.

The charity’s name appears to be a nod to the science fiction series written by famed author Isaac Asimov that details the collapse of a ruling empire to make way for the birth of an alternate society — fitting considering Musk’s public criticism of the current education system….

… The Foundation’s application to open the schools was initially filed in October 2022 and approved in March, according to Bloomberg, though it’s unclear when the K-12 school will break ground…

(12) DOESN’T LOOK LIKE A GALLIFREYAN ARMY KNIFE. “Doctor Who’s Ncuti Gatwa Shows Off the Fifteenth Doctor’s New Sonic Screwdriver” – CBR.com has the story. Somebody might think this is a spoiler, so no image here. Just a link to the video: “Ncuti Gatwa’s New Sonic Screwdriver”.

… In the official video posted to YouTube on the Doctor Who channel, Gatwa talks about the design elements of the newly remodeled sonic screwdriver, which comes with its own unique bells and whistles. As Gatwa demonstrates, the sonic is much larger than most previous iterations and contains several new gadgets, including a connector allowing it to link to other devices like a “USB port,” as the actor describes it….

(13) MARTIAN DOG YEARS. “The Biggest Sci-Fi Show of the Year Challenges Its Star In One Revolutionary Way” –that’s how Inverse describes For All Mankind and its lead, actor Joel Kinnaman.

Since 2019, Kinnaman has played the show’s lead, Ed Baldwin, who begins his journey as an Apollo astronaut in 1969 in Season 1. By Season 4, it’s 2003, and Ed is pushing 80, but still living on the Mars colony Happy Valley. At 44 in real life, Kinnaman is convincingly playing nearly double his age but, as he tells Inverse, this is the moment he has been waiting for since getting cast in the first place.

“The idea of doing this is what initially really appealed to me with this character,” Kinnaman reveals. “But of course, it’s rare that you have to wait five years to do the thing that you really were looking forward to doing with a character.”

As Ed Baldwin leads Helios workers on Mars to a labor strike in the episode “Leningrad,” Inverse caught up with Kinnaman to get a sense of how he took Ed this far, and whether or not he can play the character again in Season 5.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Lise Andreasen, Scott Edelman, Joey Eschrich, Dave Lally, Kathy Sullivan, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day RedWombat.]

Pixel Scroll 10/6/23 When You’re Dune And Tribbled, And Need A Gripping Hand…

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(1) ARE THESE YOUR FAVORITE SPOILERS? “Doctor Who’s Alex Kingston on hiding River Song’s biggest spoiler” at Radio Times. Beware spoilers. Further warning: the one excerpted below is not the “biggest spoiler” referred to in the headline.

“She’s not a companion, she’s a wife!” Alex Kingston is quick to correct about her beloved Doctor Who character River Song.

And she’s completely right. River Song is unlike any other Doctor Who character, first introduced in 2008’s Silence in the Library and spanning multiple eras in one of the most complex and glorious timelines to ever grace the show.

“She’s the most incredible character to play, and certainly when the role was offered to me, I had obviously no idea of the journey that both she and I would be undertaking – because obviously in the very first Silence in the Library story, she dies,” Kingston exclusively tells RadioTimes.com….

(2) TEXAS BOOK RATING LAW REMAINS IN EFFECT PENDING HEARING. “Appeals Court Lets Texas Book Rating Law Take Effect, Orders Expedited Hearing” reports Publishers Weekly.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will let Texas’s controversial new book rating law, HB 900, take effect while an “expedited” appeals process plays out—despite a district court finding the law to be “a web of unconstitutionally vague requirements.”

In a two-line decision issued on October 5, the Fifth Circuit said it would not hear the state’s emergency motion for a stay separately and will instead carry the motion to be heard with the state’s challenge of judge Alan D. Albright’s preliminary injunction on the merits. The court also ordered the appeal to be “expedited to the next available oral argument panel.”

But the appeals court also declined to lift an administrative stay placed on Albright’s order…

…Signed by Texas governor Greg Abbott on June 12, HB 900 requires book vendors, at their own expense, to review and rate books for sexual content under a vaguely articulated standard as a condition of doing business with Texas public schools. The law includes both the thousands of books previously sold to schools and any new books. Furthermore, the law gives the state the unchecked power to change the rating on any book, which vendors would then have to accept as their own or be barred from doing business with Texas public schools….

(3) WHERE, OH WHERE IS THE CHENGDU WORLDCON BUSINESS MEETING AGENDA? No link — with less than two weeks until the Chengdu Worldcon business meeting agenda still hasn’t been released.

People want the agenda posted so they can read what business is coming before the meeting and think about the inevitable assortment of proposed rules changes. The rule requiring the agenda to be available 30 days ahead of the meeting is so that the movers don’t have the advantage of being able to organize in favor while depriving potential opposition of the same advantage.

(4) CHENGDU WORLDCON ROUNDUP. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

Welcome to the hotel confusion-ia

This item is based on a Kevin Standlee blog post “More Worldcon Travel Plans”, and subsequent Mastodon exchange.

Some of the guests whose accommodation has been arranged by the con have been told they are staying in the “Chengdu Tianfu Hengbang Sheraton”.  However, it seems that this is a direct translation of the Chinese name of the hotel near the con venue (成都恒邦天府喜来登酒店), but it actually uses a different English name “Sheraton Chengdu Pidu”. (Compare http://www.sheraton-chengdu.com/ to http://www.sheraton-chengdu.com/en?pc )

Thus when searching Google for the first name, people are getting results for a Sheraton in the Tianfu area, which is roughly the opposite side of Chengdu from the Pidu district where the con is actually taking place, which resulted in this.

Per Kevin’s comments on Mastodon, some people have been told that they’ll be staying at the “Sheraton Lidu Pidu”, which does seem to be a different hotel from either of the two previously mentioned.

Here’s a Xiaohongsu post from a week ago showing views of the con venue from the Sheraton Chengdu Pidu: http://xhslink.com/HINobv

Video featuring the “Kormo” con mascot — https://weibo.com/5516881774/Nly3wqo4Y

This 90-second video posted by the GoChengdu Weibo account is a week old, but I only came across it today.  Content-wise, it has only minimal connection to the Worldcon – it focuses more on the mid-Autumn festival that’s just gone by – but “stars” the Kormo con mascot.

(5) A HISTORY OF PEE-WEE HERMAN PRODUCTS. The Comics Journal continues a conversation: “The Artists and Cartoonists Who Designed Pee-wee Herman’s World – Part Two”.

…But by season two in 1987, by which time production of the show itself had moved from New York City to Los Angeles, any number of Pee-wee related products—toys, dolls, bed sheets, sweaters, pajamas, t-shirts, stickers, trading cards—were available for purchase. And like the Playhouse show itself, these products were chiefly designed by a group of young NYC artists under the direction of Gary Panter and Reubens himself. Cartoonists and illustrators working on Playhouse merchandise included Ric Heitzman, Mark Newgarden, Kaz, Charles Burns, J.D. King, Richard McGuire, Stephen Kroninger, Tomas Bunk, Norman Hathaway and others. When Reubens died of acute hypoxic respiratory failure on July 30th of this year, I reached out to a number of people involved in shaping the Pee-wee empire. In Part One of this series, I spoke with a number of artists who designed the visual aesthetic of the successful television program; in this second and final part, the focus will be on the many functional and ridiculous products created in its wake, including some that never made it to stores….

… The cartoonist Kaz, another frequent RAW contributor, was brought in early on.

“I can’t remember what came first for me, but I’d been visiting Gary Panter in his various studios around Brooklyn for quite a while,” Kaz said. “Seeing his paintings, sculptures and sketchbooks was always inspiring, and he was one of the sweetest guys and very generous with his time and ideas. I love the guy! So, at some point he asked me to help out with art on some of the Pee-wee licensing that was coming in hot and hard. I just aped his Pee-wee art style (which was not as easy as it looked). I did all the flat art on the inside of the Playhouse Playset. I did some art when they expanded the Pee-wee Colorforms set by adding two wings, thereby making it ‘Deluxe.’ A keen eye will see my cartoon character, Little Bastard, sitting on Pee-wee’s bed on that art.”

“In 1987, through Gary Panter and Mark Newgarden, I worked with Mark on the Topps Chewing Gum’s ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse Fun Pak’,” Kaz continued. “I remember going into Topps’ offices every day for a few weeks. At the time, Topps was in a grimy industrial waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn that was not a good place to be after dark. Mark did the bulk of the writing and editing on the “Fun Pak” as well as drawing. I wrote and did a bunch of drawings (in the Panter style). There was a lot to do, so some of the art was freelanced out to other cartoonists. Trivia: I got my full Lithuanian first name [Kazimieras] on the back of one card!”…

(6) PAEAN TO LOST. “Six Part Fan-Made Lost Documentary 815 Explores the Complicated Production of the J.J. Abrams-Directed Pilot Episode” – Movieweb has the story.

Released in 2004 and created by J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, Lost has become not only one of the most popular series of all time, but also a role model for many other shows. Its complicated and mysterious story, along with its constant reinvention and plots full of suspense, provided its viewers with a unique experience. Its unexpected twists and strange elements that appeared without any apparent explanation, turned it a legend.

The series follows the experiences of a group of survivors of a plane crash on what appears to be a deserted island. However, as they struggle to live with each other, it becomes apparent that the island is far from a safe place, and they are not the only ones inhabiting the place.

The pilot episode, directed by Abrams and filmed in Oahu, Hawaii, was at the time the most expensive in history, a title it held for a long time. For this reason, YouTuber and Lost fan kuhpunkt (who’s real name is Stefan Lensa) took the time to collect hours of video content about the making of the show’s pilot, transforming it into a six-part documentary titled 815, the number of the flight where the protagonists were traveling…

(7) NATO IN TIMES TO COME. In 2024, NATO will celebrate its 75th anniversary. The NATO Defence College asks writers, especially science fiction writers, for 1500 words on what NATO will look like in 2099. More details at the link. €500 if you are selected. “NATO 2099: A Graphic Novel”.

…Science fiction, while often discredited by dint of its creative and at times outrageous character, holds real added value for research purposes. Not only does science fiction influence the present by projecting inventions (i.e. headsets, mobile phones and tablets), science fiction can leverage the wisdom of the crowd effect: when several authors “see” a similar future, such a future becomes more likely. As such, science fiction has the power of making ideas acceptable. It can entertain a wider public, which under normal circumstances, might not entertain certain ideas, thereby broadening mindsets and fostering critical thinking. Of course, the precondition to this is that science fiction be not fantastical, but is rooted in evidence. (Hence the term FICINT, fictional intelligence.)

Harnessing these benefits, science fiction has been instrumentalized by military organizations in the United States and France to increase preparedness, train critical thinking, and even spot trends in technology and geopolitics. (For example, the idea of Russia attacking Ukraine appeared in Russian science fiction in the 1990s).

Your mission, should you accept it…

The year is 2099, NATO will be celebrating its 150th anniversary. For this reason, sci-fi and fictional intelligence authors are being asked to contribute about 1500 words on what this future might look like. Authors are asked to describe the end state, i.e. 2099, but are free to describe how we got there.

…The compilation of 32 written pieces will be transformed and published into a graphic novel or comic book that narrates a holistic story entitled, “NATO 2099”.

(8) MICHIGAN FAKE ELECTORS CASE. “Michigan judge rules defendants accused in false elector scheme will not have charges dropped” reports the Associated Press. We’re following this story because Michele Lundgren, wife of sff artist Carl Lundgren, is one of the sixteen charged, although she was not a maker of the motion covered here.

Michigan defendants accused of participating in a fake elector scheme will not have their charges dropped after the state attorney general said the group was “brainwashed” into believing former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election, a judge ruled Friday morning.

The decision comes after motions to dismiss charges were filed last week by two defendants, Clifford Frost and Mari-Ann Henry. The two defendants are part of a group of 16 Michigan Republicans who investigators say met following the 2020 election and signed a document falsely stating they were the state’s “duly elected and qualified electors.” Each of the 16 faces eight criminal charges, including multiple counts of forgery….

(9) STARLING HOUSE. At NPR: “Book review: Alix E. Harrow’s ‘Starling House’ Gothic fantasy novel”.

In Eden, Kentucky, the air is thick with dust.

The dying coal town is the fictional setting of Alix E. Harrow’s “Starling House,” and the smog of fading power and bad luck is enough to suffocate its residents, most of whom live in abject poverty.

For Harrow, writing a book about Kentucky was a long time coming.

“This is the first book that I set fully in, like committed to writing about Kentucky,” Harrow says. “One of the reasons that I had found that difficult to do before is because I find it to be a place of very mixed experiences that I love very, very, very much, and which has just an incredible violence and terror to it.”…

(10) CHRIS HADFIELD COMMENTS ON ‘FOR ALL MANKIND’. “Apple TV+ series For All Mankind Depicts Realistic Death in Space According to Renowned Astronaut” at Movieweb.

…Navigating through this cosmic portrayal, Chris Hadfield, an astronaut with feet firmly planted in both scientific and storytelling worlds, lent his expert gaze to scrutinize a particularly grim depiction of death in the aforementioned series. Hadfield, experienced in the authentic silence of the cosmos, put under the microscope a scene from For All Mankind in a special breakdown for Vanity Fair, where an American astronaut fiercely ends a Soviet astronaut’s lunar expedition—with a gun.

But is the rendering of a bullet speeding through the weightlessness and silence of the moon’s environment precise? Hadfield nods in unsettling agreement.

What permeates this acknowledgment is the recognition of the horrifying reality of how gunfire operates in the vacuum of the moon. Unlike its earthly counterpart, a bullet on the moon, devoid of air and oxygen to disrupt its trajectory, travels with haunting precision, straighter and farther into the abyss. The portrayal of such a scenario in For All Mankind doesn’t simply draw from a well of imagined horrors, but rather bathes in a chilling accuracy that aligns with the physical realities of our universe.

Moreover, the aftermath of such a bullet puncturing a spacesuit, according to Hadfield, is equally petrifying and authentic. A spacesuit, cushioning its inhabitant with a hundred percent oxygen, can turn into an infernal chamber when breached. History has witnessed this, as Hadfield recalls an incident during a test at the Johnson Space Center, where even aluminum, veiled in flames, narrated the horrors of what could transpire inside a suit, albeit thankfully unoccupied by a human during the incident. Oxygen, the life-giving force, transforms into a silent executioner in the blink of an eye when exposed to a spark in such an environment….

(11) START THE PARTY. Today is Francis Hamit’s 79th birthday and he’s celebrating at Amazing Stories by posting a 15,000-word excerpt from his novel: “Excerpt: STARMEN by Francis Hamit: Support the Kickstarter”.

Today is  Francis Hamit’s Birthday.  (Happy Birthday, Francis!)  He also informs us that the Kickstarter for his forthcoming “genre experiment” novel – STARMEN – closes on October 10th.  As his Birthday gift to all of our readers, he wants to make sure that you know that EVERYONE contributing to the project will be able to purchase the E-book edition of this 190,000-word epic for just one dollar ($1.00)….

“My mixed genre novel STARMEN is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to excerpts.  It’s about 190,000 words long and incorporates alternative post Civil War history, quantum mechanics, Apache Indian myths and some rather nasty Aliens.  It begins in 1875 El Paso, Texas at the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.  Some of the detectives are witches.  So are some of the Apaches.  There are also some romance elements. And politics.”

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 6, 1911 — Flann O’Brien. Irish novelist, playwright and satirist. He wrote three novels, At Swim-Two-Birds, The Dalkey Archive and The Third Policeman. Though The Dalkey Archive was published before The Third Policeman, it was written after that novel, so entire sections of The Third Policeman are recycled almost word for word in it, mostly the atomic theory and the character De Selby. (Died 1966.)
  • Born October 6, 1950 — David Brin, 73. Author of several series including Existence (which I do not recognize), the Postman novel, and the Uplift series which began with Startide Rising, a most excellent book and a Hugo-winner at L.A. Con II.  I’ll admit that the book he co-wrote with Leah Wilson, King Kong Is Back! An Unauthorized Look at One Humongous Ape, tickles me to no end if only for its title. So who’s read Castaways of New Mohave, that he wrote with Jeff Carlson?
  • Born October 6, 1952 — Lorna Toolis. Librarian, editor, and fan Lorna was the long-time head of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy at the Toronto Public Library and a significant influence on the Canadian SF community. She founded the SF collection with a donation from Judith Merril. She was a founding member of SFCanada, and won an Aurora Award for co-editing Tesseracts 4 with Michael Skeet. (Died 2021.)
  • Born October 6, 1955 — Donna White, 68. Academic who has written several works worth you knowing about — Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. LeGuin and the Critics and Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom. She’s also the author of the densely-written but worth reading A Century of Welsh Myth in Children’s Literature. 
  • Born October 6, 1955 — Ellen Kushner, 68. If you’ve not read it, do so now, as her sprawling Riverside series is stellar. And there’s cups of hot chocolate. I’ve read all of it. And during the High Holy Days, do be sure to read The Golden Dreydl as it’s quite wonderful. As it’s Autumn and this being when I read it, I’d be remiss not to recommend her Thomas the Rhymer novel which won both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award. 
  • Born October 6, 1967 — Joshua Glenn, 56. Publisher who re-issued a lot of the scientific romances from the beginning of last century like J D Beresford’s Goslings, The Edward Shanks’ People of the Runs and E V Odle’s The Clockwork Man. He’s edited two anthologies, Voices from the Radium Age and More Voices from the Radium Age.

(13) CONNECTING SFF AND SCIENCE. The U.S. State Department website is hosting “From Science Fiction to Science Fact”. It begins with a video introduction by Mark Hamill.

About 400 kilometers above the Earth, the International Space Station orbits at 28,000 kilometers an hour. It’s the single largest structure humans have ever put in space and a football-field-size symbol of diplomatic cooperation.

Built over a decade with U.S. and Russian spacecraft, the station has been continuously occupied by an international crew since November 2000. The station isn’t owned by any one nation, but rather operates as a partnership among five space agencies — the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA; the Russian State Space Corporation “Roscosmos”; the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA); the European Space Agency; and the Canadian Space Agency. There are regular crew handovers whereby some astronauts leave and new ones come aboard. Two hundred seventy-three astronauts from 21 countries have worked on the station….

DETECTING MICROBES

In the popular 1960s television show Star Trek, the starship Enterprise crew members depend on handheld tricorders. The devices seem to magically detect everything from unknown life forms to the nature of a crew member’s illness.

While the TV version seems fantastical, a real — if nascent — tricorder has been developed on the International Space Station. What’s more, the research that built it is already supporting human health here on Earth.

The impetus was NASA’s efforts to sequence DNA. Scientists aimed to simplify the multistep DNA sequencing process so that one device on the space station could handle it, working to move the tricorder from the realm of science fiction to real life.

Today NASA is looking at hand-held devices made by a U.S. company and a U.K.-based company that can amplify and sequence DNA. The devices identify microbes — bacteria, viruses, fungi and other organisms too small to be seen with the naked eye — growing throughout the International Space Station. The crew can monitor what microbes are on board, how the space environment shapes microbial behavior, and how that might affect astronaut health during long missions to the Moon or Mars.

Crew members gather microbes to sequence by rubbing swabs around the space station’s interior. They then process the genetic material by inserting the swabs into a hand-held device called a miniPCR, which makes copies of a targeted microbial DNA sequence. The copies are fed into another hand-held device called the MinION, which sequences the DNA.

(14) DOUBLE YOUR TIANGONG, DOUBLE YOUR FUN. “China to double size of space station, touts alternative to NASA-led ISS” – Reuters has details.

China plans to expand its space station to six modules from three in coming years, offering astronauts from other nations an alternative platform for near-Earth missions as the NASA-led International Space Station (ISS) nears the end of its lifespan.

The operational lifetime of the Chinese space station will be more than 15 years, the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), a unit of China’s main space contractor, said at the 74th International Astronautical Congress in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Wednesday….

… China’s self-built space station, also known as Tiangong, or Celestial Palace in Chinese, has been fully operational since late 2022, hosting a maximum of three astronauts at an orbital altitude of up to 450 km (280 miles).

At 180 metric tons after its expansion to six modules, Tiangong is still just 40% of the mass of the ISS, which can hold a crew of seven astronauts. But the ISS, in orbit for more than two decades, is expected to be decommissioned after 2030, about the same time China has said it expects to become “a major space power”.

Chinese state media said last year as Tiangong became fully operational that China would be no “slouch” as the ISS headed toward retirement, adding that “several countries” had asked to send their astronauts to the Chinese station.

But in a blow to China’s aspirations for space diplomacy, the European Space Agency (ESA) said this year it did not have the budgetary or “political” green light to participate in Tiangong, shelving a years-long plan for a visit by European astronauts.

“Giving up cooperation with China in the manned space domain is clearly short-sighted, which reveals that the U.S.-led camp confrontation has led to a new space race,” the Global Times, a nationalist Chinese tabloid, wrote at the time.

Tiangong has become an emblem of China’s growing clout and confidence in its space endeavours, and a challenger to the United States in the domain after being isolated from the ISS. It is banned by U.S. law from any collaboration, direct or indirect, with NASA….

(15) WHAT IS IMAGINATION? The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination will host an in-person event “Imagine Otherwise: Featuring Stephen T. Asma” Tickets, Fri, Oct 20, 2023 at 6:00 PM | Eventbrite on October 20 at 6:00 p.m. at UC San Diego. Free registration and full information at the link.

Imagination is touted as a gift for artists or a vital skill for visionary thinkers and scientists. But what do we mean by the term “imagination,” and what has science revealed about the diversity of ways it shows itself in human minds?

In a conversation with Stephen T. Asma, philosopher and author of The Evolution of Imagination, Erik Viirre and Cassandra Vieten will explore the history of our understanding of imagination, how science has attempted to advance our understanding of it, and what is at stake for the future of imagination studies and the pathways it may open to advancing the imagination’s power for transformative change.

This event will take place at the Great Hall at UC San Diego and is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided. RSVP required.

(16) UP ALL NIGHT. “The ‘Ghost Hunting Gays of Ohio’ find queer community in the search for the supernatural” at WVXU.

A small group of people huddled around Mirror Lake on Ohio State University’s campus on a September evening. Their black attire matched the night sky that stretched over the splashing fountain.

Nick Post stood at the center of the group. He leaned in as he told a ghost story about the so-called ‘Lady of the Lake.’

“On cold wintry nights she can sometimes be seen skating across the ice, warming her hands and wearing outdated clothing,” Post said. “Some reports say she wears white, others say she wears pink. But none have gotten close enough to see her face.”

This is just one of many apparitions that supposedly stalk OSU’s dorms and classrooms at night. Its these legends that brought ten members of the Ghost Hunting Gays of Ohio, the state’s newest paranormal investigators, to campus on a Sunday night….

…“I’ve always been obsessed with ghost-hunting shows and all of that good stuff, so I was like, what if we just go check out some haunted places?” he said.

Post said looking to the supernatural was only natural for him, and he thinks that’s true for a lot of queer people. He said the paranormal holds a special appeal to many in the gay community.

“When you are misunderstood your entire life, it intrigues you to understand other things that are misunderstood,” Post said….

(17) PAUL BUCKLEY’S GREATEST HITS. Steven Heller talks about “Layoffs in the Publishing Industry Sting” at PRINT Magazine, and the loss of one design director in particular.

When the latest round of publishing industry buyouts and layoffs were announced in mid-July, I was surprised to see a few friends and acquaintances on the hit list. Buyouts are the humane way to let go of employees, and some can be generous. But while many buyouts come at the end of careers, layoffs can particularly sting while in mid-stride.

At Penguin Random House, the biggest book publisher in the United States, veteran editors who have worked with many of the biggest authors in fiction and nonfiction are leaving the company. It is a changing of the guard. The New York Times reported that Penguin Random House lost both its global and U.S. chief executives in the past seven months alone.

Until this latest upheaval, 58 year old Paul Buckley was the longest serving (34 years) design director of Penguin Books. His layoff was a shock to those, like me, who greatly admired his work. If he of all people is this vulnerable, what about others who are not yet ready to take retirement?

Buckley leaves behind an incredible legacy of iconic, smart, clever and damn beautiful work. So upon hearing the sad news, I asked him to select 10 projects out of the thousands he’s created for Penguin that give him the most pride. It’s better to see and read about them now than in a later postmortem/historical reprise….

(18) QUANTUM PAULI ENGINE. [Item by Steven French.] “No-heat quantum engine makes its debut” at Physics World.

“All particles known to science fall into one of two categories: bosons or fermions. While bosons cluster in the same quantum state, fermions obey the Pauli exclusion principle, meaning no two fermions can share the same state. This doesn’t matter much at room temperature when particles are flying about at high speeds. Cool those particles down to just shy of absolute zero, though, and the difference becomes vast: the bosons pile into the lowest available energy state, while fermions stack on top of each other in a “ladder” of states. At such low temperatures, a collection of fermions will thus have much more energy than a collection of bosons.”

Until recently that energy difference couldn’t be accessed but in the early 2000s  a way was found to form bosons molecules from fermionic atoms which means you could switch from one form of statistics to another. Now researchers have used this to construct a ‘proof-of-principle’ quantum Pauli engine which offers an entirely different way of charging quantum batteries and powering quantum computers. 

That may be some years off yet but this is still very cool!

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Nicholas Whyte, JeffWarner, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Ersatz Culture, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 9/14/23 There Are Some Things Money Can’t Buy; For Everything Else, There’s Pixel Scroll

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(1) TOP PEOPLE. Writer Ted Chiang, filmmaker Lilly Wachowski, manga creator Rootport, and artist Kelly McKernan are some of the recognizable names who are not CEOs or scientists on TIME’s list of “The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023”.

(2) COLLATERAL DAMAGE OF LISTS. “Here we go again. Another badly skewed list of fantasy books recommended for newcomers” – Juliet E. McKenna tees off. Which list? I don’t know, but they keep coming along.

Must be a day with a Y in it. Yes, well-informed readers are pushing back against this particular dated, limited and male-dominated list, and no, I’m not going to link to it and argue the toss over every title. There’s a wider point to be made.

Women SF&F writers don’t take these best-of lists, these recommended-for-award-nominations and shortlists, these articles and review columns that erase us ‘personally’. We object because they damage us professionally. The same is true for every under-represented group excluded from these lists. And yes, the male authors writing the progressive, informed and thought-provoking SF&F which is being ignored have a right to feel aggrieved as well.

When newcomers to fantasy fiction see the most easily-found review coverage and online discussion is all about grimdark books from big publishers, with stories about blokes in cloaks, written by authors like Macho McHackenslay, that’s what they will buy. Or they will be completely put off and go elsewhere in search of fiction where they see themselves and their concerns represented. They will never know what they’re looking for can be found in SF&F.

Either way, six months down the line, the big publisher’s accountants at head office look at the sales figures and see Macho McHackenslay is one of their bestsellers. The order goes out to ask literary agents for more of the same. Because big publishing is a numbers game, and it skews towards repeating successes rather than promoting innovation.

Meantime, an editor will be arguing the case to give another contract to P.D.Kickassgrrl. He insists the body count and hardcore ethics of P.D.Kickassgrrl’s excellent work will surely appeal to Macho McHackenslay fans, as well as whole lot of other readers. Unfortunately her sales aren’t nearly as good, because her books get far fewer reviews and other mentions. Genre magazines and blogs can have a similar skew towards established successes, arguing they have to review the books people are actually buying, because those are the writers readers are clearly interested in. The self-referential and self-reinforcing circle is complete….

(3) NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLISTS ROLLING OUT. The 2023 National Book Award Longlist for Translated Literature includes one work of genre interest – Bora Chung’s collection Cursed Bunny.

Translated Literature

  • Devil of the Provinces by Juan Cárdenas and translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis (Coffee House)
  • Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung and translated from the Korean by Anton Hur (Algonquin)
  • Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop and translated from the French by Sam Taylor (FSG)
  • Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck and translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (New Directions)
  • The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel and translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato (New Vessel)
  • No One Prayed Over Their Graves by Khaled Khalifa and translated from the Arabic by Leri Price (FSG)
  • This Is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor and translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (New Directions)
  • Abyss by Pilar Quintana and translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (World Editions)
  • On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer and tanslated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott (Two Lines)
  • The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud (Other Press)

(4) STURGEON SYMPOSIUM. The full schedule for the 2nd Annual Sturgeon Symposium has been posted at the link. Shows the in-person and several virtual program items. Optional registration available.

(5) HWA’S NEW EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. Maxwell I. Gold has been installed as Executive Director of the Horror Writers Association, replacing Brad Hodson who served the HWA for ten years as Administrator.

…The HWA Hiring Committee saw a robust pool of twenty applicants and conducted six interviews in the organization’s first executive search. As HWA President and member of the hiring committee, John Lawson  noted:

“This Executive Director search was a first for the HWA, and while I expected interest in the job opening, I had no idea we’d garner the attention of such strong applicants, including those outside the HWA community. Having worked closely with Maxwell, both as Treasurer and as Interim Executive Director, I’ve witnessed firsthand his creative problem-solving and know our membership—and volunteers—will benefit from his efforts. I couldn’t be more thrilled with the outcome of this process and am proud to serve alongside Maxwell.”

Gold has served on the Board of Trustees for two years as Treasurer and will remain a non-voting member of the Board in his new role as Executive Director. Effective immediately, Michael Knost, currently running unopposed, will assume the role and responsibility of the Office of Treasurer for the Horror Writers Association….

(6) BATTLESTAR GALACTICA PICKET LINE. You’re invited to drop by on September 21.

(7) THAT SINKING FEELING. [Item by Danny Sichel.] Mickey Ralph, the lead designer for Good Omens, posted to Twitter about some logistical problems that resulted from there being a second season. Thread starts here.

(8) FOR ALL MANKIND SEASON 4. Collider unpacks “’For All Mankind’ Season 4 Teaser”. The show returns November 10 on Apple TV+.

In previous seasons, For All Mankind explored space exploration’s impact on political and cultural landscapes in different eras, from the 1970s Moon mission to the 1980s Cold War competition for lunar resources. Season 3 saw a race to conquer Mars, leading to a climactic finale.

Launching into the new millennium, Happy Valley has made remarkable strides over the past eight years since Season 3. It has rapidly expanded its presence on Mars, transforming former adversaries into valuable partners. Fast forward to 2003, and the primary focus of this space program has shifted towards capturing and mining extraordinarily precious, mineral-rich asteroids that have the potential to reshape the destinies of both Earth and Mars. However, underlying tensions among the inhabitants of the sprawling international base now jeopardize everything they have worked so diligently to achieve.

Here’s a clip of the show’s “Helios Recruitment” commercial.

Rocketing into the new millennium in the eight years since Season 3, Happy Valley has rapidly expanded its footprint on Mars by turning former foes into partners. Now 2003, the focus of the space program has turned to the capture and mining of extremely valuable, mineral-rich asteroids that could change the future of both Earth and Mars. But simmering tensions between the residents of the now-sprawling international base threaten to undo everything they are working towards.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 14, 1919 — Claire P. Beck. He was a reclusive fan known as the Hermit of Lakeport, California was active in the 1930s. Editor of the Science Fiction Critic fanzine which published in four issues the first work of criticism devoted to American SF: “Hammer and Tongs,” written by his brother, Clyde F. Beck. Their publishing house was Futile Press. (Died 1999.)
  • Born September 14, 1927 — Martin Caidin. His best-known novel is Cyborg which was the basis for The Six Million Dollar Man franchise. He wrote two novels in the Indiana Jones franchise and one in the Buck Rogers one as well. He wrote myriad other sf novels as well. Marooned was nominated for a Hugo at Heicon ’70 but TV coverage of Apollo XI won that year. The Six Million Dollar Man film was a finalist for Best Dramatic Presentation at Discon II which Woody Allen’s Sleeper won. (Died 1997.)
  • Born September 14, 1944 — Rowena Morrill. Well-known for her genre art, she is one of the first female artists to impact paperback cover illustration. Her notable works include The Fantastic Art of Rowena, Imagine (French publication only), Imagination (German publication only), and The Art of Rowena.  Though nominated for the Hugo four times, she never won, but garnered the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. She also did the three covers you see here for the Recorded Books edition of The Lord of The Rings. OGH’s obituary for her is here. (Died 2021.)
  • Born September 14, 1950 — Michael Reaves. A scriptwriter and story editor to a number of Eighties and Nineties animated television series, including Batman: The Animated Series, Disney’s Gargoyles He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Smurfs,  Space Sentinels, Star Wars: Droids and The Transformers. Live action wise, he worked on Next Generation, Sliders, Swamp Thing, original Flash and Young Hercules.  He also worked on two of my favorite animated Batman films, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman. (Died 2023.)
  • Born September 14, 1961 — Justin Richards, 62. Clute at ESF says “Richards is fast and competent.” Well I can certain say he’s fast as he’s turned out thirty-five Doctor Who novels which Clute thinks are for the YA market between 1994 and 2016. And he has other series going as well! Another nineteen novels written, and then there’s the Doctor Who non-fiction which runs to over a half dozen works.  He writes mainly Doctor Who novels with thirteen, so from the Eighth through the Thirteenth Doctor so far, and Creative Consultant for the BBC Books range of Doctor Who novels. He’s written novels with Professor Bernice Summerfield as the protagonist as well. And written more SF that aren’t Whovian than I could possibly list here. One such series is, as EoSF notes, “the Invisible Detective sequence, beginning with The Paranormal Puppet Show (2003; vt Double Life 2004), consists in each case of two stories: one set in the 1930s, where the four young protagonists solve sf and fantasy mysteries; the other set in the contemporary world, where a parallel tale is told.”
  • Born September 14, 1972 — Jenny T. Colgan, 51. Prolific writer of short stories in the Whovian universe with a baker’s dozen to date with several centered on River Song. She novelized “The Christmas Invasion”, the first full Tenth Doctor story. She has two genre novels, Resistance Is Futile and Spandex and the City.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Wrong Hands mashes up kids’ programming with a famous horror story.
  • Wrong Hands also shows the varieties in the “film school of fish”.

(11) EMBROIDERED WORLDS KICKSTARTER PURSUES STRETCH GOALS. The Kickstarter for the “Embroidered Worlds” English translation of Ukrainian SFF is now funded as far as all stories are concerned, but now they’re working on stretch goals for illustrations and other features. Donors who support this for as little as $1 which will receive a copy of the ebook. There are just over two weeks left in the Kickstarter that will benefit not only Ukrainian writers but, it is hoped, Ukrainian illustrators.

There are several guest blogs for the Kickstarter, including this one by Michael Burianyk on “Why do we need Ukrainian stories?”.

… Because the origins of Ukraine’s cultural and political capital Kyiv are lost in the shades of unrecorded time, they are fought over by competing storytellers. To this day, historians speculate and argue and create their own legends about who and when and why. And Kyiv was for a large part of its story a post-apocalyptic city: It lay in ruins, its spectacular architecture burnt and rotting, its population ravaged and scattered — a perfect breeding ground for ghosts and angst.

Ukraine was a place of conflict, in many ways still unresolved, between the Pagan and the Christian. Priests of the new god ensured that the old, some might say more interesting, beliefs were not written down. Prince Volodymyr, the Red Sun of legend, had the wooden idol of Perun flogged and dragged into the Dnipro to drown, and one imagines that his ghost still wanders the hills of the city along with his divine siblings, Dazhbog, Stribog, and Simargl, who still haunt the wooded ravines and forests of the country — as do many other fantastic and terrible beings.

The country saw, through the centuries, hordes and armies and emperors and commissars — not so different and no more understandable than demons and invading space invaders. Ukraine saw fire and sword wielded by abominable aliens; destruction visited over terrified generations and without warning. The Ukrainian people created their own interesting champions through these times. Stories of its protectors: Volodymyr of legend again and other bogatyry, were told for consolation. Legends of the Kozaks were examples of the spirit of independence of the people and their need for liberty that permeates their souls to this day….

(12) WHERE TO SEE THE CHINESE SERIES THREE-BODY PROBLEM. Seattle PBS station KCTS 9 is going to be running the Chinese-language version of the Three-Body Problem TV series (with English subtitles). Members can stream the first episode now, and the full series starting September 23. Will it be shown on any other PBS stations? My search on the main PBS website didn’t find it, nor another search on LA PBS station KCET. Let me know if it shows up anywhere else. But you could always become a member of the Seattle station and get access to it.  

(13) MISSED THE WINDOW. “Stan Lee’s Estate Loses Yearslong Elder Abuse Lawsuit Against Former Attorney on a Technicality” — The Hollywood Reporter has the story.

A messy legal battle initiated by Stan Lee’s estate involving accusations of exploitation and elder abuse by the comic book legend’s inner circle has concluded, with an arbitrator siding with Lee’s former attorney that the lawsuit against him was brought too late.

The five-year legal saga was sparked by The Hollywood Reporter’s investigation into Lee’s estate, which chronicled allegations that people introduced into his life by his daughter, J.C., stole millions of dollars from him. This included Jerardo Olivarez, Lee’s ex-business manager who was given power of attorney. Olivarez allegedly insisted that Lee retain Uri Litvak as his attorney for business dealings, but he didn’t disclose a conflict of interest stemming from Litvak representing him in personal matters. A year after Olivarez was sued, Lee also named Litvak in the lawsuit calling the pair “unscrupulous businessmen, sycophants and opportunists” seeking to take advantage of him following the death of his wife.

A procedural defect in the lawsuit, however, led to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mark Epstein on Tuesday entering judgment in favor of Litvak after an arbitrator found in February that the statute of limitations to sue him had expired. Lee had a one-year window starting on April 12, 2018, when the complaint against Olivarez was filed, to also name Litvak in the lawsuit. Litvak was sued on April 18, 2018, five days passed the maximum allowable time to initiate legal proceedings….

(14) KGB READINGS. Ellen Datlow shared her photos from the September 13 Fantastic Fiction at KGB readings with Josh Rountree and Benjamin Percy.

(15) DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING. It was supposed to be a tautology until it wasn’t.

(16) SF2 CONCATENATION RELEASES AUTUMN ISSUE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The N. hemisphere’s academic, autumnal edition of SF2 Concatenation is now up. Its contents are:

v33(5) 2023.9.15 — New Columns & Articles for the Autumn 2023

v33(5) 2023.9.15 — Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Reviews

v33(5) 2023.9.15 — Non-Fiction SF & Science Fact Book Reviews

Forthcoming: In November SF2 Concatenation will have the third of its four ‘Best of Nature “Futures” short stories‘ of the year, and in December a pre-Christmas final one. If you are new to the site, these are short, one-page, SF stories. They’re rather fun and well worth sitting down with a mug of tea/coffee for a few minutes read. (The Best of Nature “Futures” short stories link is to the SF2 Concatenation archive of past ‘Best of’ stories, so feel free to have a browse. Enjoy.)

(17) FUTURAMA TEASER. Animation World Network shares “Exclusive Clip: ‘Futurama: The Prince and The Product’”.

… Hulu has shared with AWN an exclusive clip from Futurama: The Prince and The Product, streaming Monday, September 18 – one of three mini-episodes slated this season that reimagine the series in a different style…. 

…In the new episode “The Prince and The Product,” the crew members, reborn as toys, find themselves in life-and-death situations and, in our exclusive sneak peek clip, “Zoidberg Gets Left Behind” a plan is made to go to Saturn and the group decides to… you guessed it! Leave Zoidberg behind….

(18) REVISION QUEST. [Item by Andrew (not Werdna).] Rebecca Watson’s video “The Long History Behind the Latest TikTok ‘No Glasses’ Scam” is about a recent Tik-Tok quack who is reviving the old Bates method – a bogus method to improve eyesight that turns up in Heinlein, Van Vogt and Pohl (and perhaps others).

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew (not Werdna), Bruce D. Arthurs, Linda Deneroff, Michael Burianyk, Danny Sichel, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]