26 Why? It Has To Be Pixels Because They’re All Out Of Snakes

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) TOMORROW HUMANS FLY TO THE MOON FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 53 YEARS. Artemis II, the first crewed mission of the Artemis program, is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:24 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, April 1.

NASA will provide live coverage of prelaunch, launch, and mission events – this page will be continuously updated: “NASA Sets Coverage for Artemis II Moon Mission”.

Upcoming NASA Mission Coverage

Wednesday, April 1

7:45 a.m. EDT | Live coverage of tanking operations for NASA’s (SLS) Space Launch System rocket for Artemis II begins. Coverage includes live rocket views with audio commentary.

▶ Watch on YouTube

12:50 p.m. EDT | Live launch coverage of Artemis II begins.

▶ Watch on Amazon Prime, YouTube, and NASA+

(2) WARMING UP THE AUDIENCE. Elizabeth Bear introduced the film “Fahrenheit 451” at the Worcester Public Library last weekend. She has posted her script at Throw Another Bear in the Canoe.

What follows is a slightly tidied-up version of my remarks to introduce Fahrenheit 451 at the Worcester Public Library last Saturday, March 28th.

Welcome.

The film we are about to watch is a 1966 Francois Truffaut adaptation of a 1953 Ray Bradbury novel about book burning, censorship, state capture of media, propaganda, the proliferation of parasocial relationships replacing real ones, forced conformity, and fake news.

If that seems relevant to our world today, I have to admit, I agree.

Bradbury was influenced in his writing by his experiences with McCarthyism, Naziism, and the changing media landscape of his lifetime, which spanned the golden age of radio and the height of broadcast television. Broadcast media concerned him greatly: he thought that it would inevitably lead to a dumbing down of the populace and was an ideal vector for propaganda and social control. He warned of a flourishing of censorship and authoritarianism as a result.

Truffaut brought that thematic charge into the 1960s and the modernist era, using the visual language of futurism to create a sense of everyday claustrophobia, conformity, and peril, and to symbolize the death of the life of the mind….

… However, one psychological truth that manifests through that metaphor is among the ways in which authoritarianism gets a roothold to begin with: with that intolerance for uncomfortable ideas. When people are not willing to have their preconceptions challenged, they try to create an environment where they will never be pushed back against. Nobody really wants to deal with moral complexities and nuance: we want a world where we can be right. And that’s the world that Truffaut’s authoritarians provide for their populace. One where the answers are simple and the good guys always win and you never have to feel that faint unease that maybe there are a lot of ethical compromises in every action and throughout history….

(3) THE MELODY LINGERS ON. In a post about books that continue well-known series, J. W. McCormack, editor of The Baffler, disapproves of Sanderson’s Wheel of Time novels: “Neverending Stories”. (First article free; subscription required thereafter.)

…The most tragic case of a continuation novel in recent memory is likely that of Robert Jordan’s tetradecalogy The Wheel of Time, the last three novels of which were finished after Jordan’s death from a rare blood disease by graphomaniacal Mormon Magic: The Gathering enthusiast Brandon Sanderson, who makes between $10 and $55 million a year for his own best-selling, ponderous fantasy novels. Hand-selected by Jordan’s widow to complete The Wheel for Tor Publishing Group after, no kidding, auditioning via obituary, Sanderson’s three volumes exchange Jordan’s hard lore regarding the Aes Sedai, Darkfriends, and the prophesied Car’a’carn for stupefied descriptions of buildings (“stonework and wood”); sentences beginning with “women are like . . .”; and so much reliance on plot over prose that people are often “perked up,” described as “tanned,” and, according to one intrepid blog, sniff in disdain 75 times in 978,460 words (which may not sound like a lot, but The Lord of the Rings apparently tallies 28 sniffs total)….

(4) MORROW Q&A. At CrimeReads, “Bethany C. Morrow Talks Religious Horror, Slow-Burn Storytelling, and Crafting Atmospheres of Anxiety” with Molly Odintz.

MO: The Body made me think of that scale in Donny Darko where everything is placed on a continuum of love and fear; in The Body, love is the source of fear: a visceral fear of loss, rejection, and abandonment. What did you want to explore about community, connection, and the fragility of the ties that bind?

BCM: The Body is probably most about consequences. Not for Mavis; for groups who successfully employ coercive control—which, yes, must depend on fear. The entire ecosystem of repression is dependent on fear. Which means, also, that there is no opportunity for love to exist at all. There’s therefore no community, no connection—as soon as you threaten someone, love is impossible. Consent is impossible. Intimacy is impossible.

(5) TV RECOMMENDATION. [Item by Olav Rokne.] This article is almost a month old, but having watched the series, it’s definitely SFF and it’s delightful. “Small Prophets review – Mackenzie Crook’s magical new comedy is pure, pure pleasure” – in the Guardian.

…If there is a message or a moral, it is that there are still wonderful things at hand in a world that might seem like it is running out of them. The existence of Small Prophets proves the point: that British telly can still create impossible marvels like this is a reason to keep believing in magic.

(6) PUBLIC MEDIA FUNDING BAR REMOVED. “Judge Blocks Trump’s Restrictions On PBS And NPR Funding” – Deadline analyzes the decision.

A federal judge blocked Donald Trump‘s executive order that prohibited federal agencies from providing funding to NPR and PBS.

In a ruling issued on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss wrote that the president’s executive order “singles out two speakers and, on the basis of their speech, bars them from all federally funded programs.”

“Although there are many lawful reasons that the government might decline to make ‘a valuable governmental benefit’ available to someone, punishing disfavored private speech is not one of them,” the judge wrote.

In an executive order last May, Trump prohibited the U.S. government from distributing any funds to the public media outlets, deeming them biased.

Read the judge’s ruling in the PBS and NPR case.

While the ruling is a victory for NPR and PBS, part of their lawsuit is now moot. Last summer, the Republican-controlled Congress rescinded all federal funding to the entity that distributed public media money, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB later dissolved.

The judge’s opinion does not change the revocation of CPB money, but he noted that PBS and NPR still received grants from other federal agencies and entities. He wrote, “The message is clear: NPR and PBS need not apply for any federal benefit because the President disapproves of their ‘left-wing’ coverage of the news. Because the First Amendment does not tolerate viewpoint discrimination and retaliation of this type, the Court will issue judgment against the federal- agency defendants declaring Section 3(a) of the Executive Order is unconstitutional and will issue an injunction barring those defendants from implementing it.”…

(7) A FYRE FESTIVAL FOR BARBIE FANS. The New York Times tells “How Barbie Dream Fest Turned Into a Nightmare”. (Behind a paywall.)

It was advertised as “the ultimate Barbie fan event.”

The billing of an attraction as a life-size Barbie Dreamhouse led fans to believe they would be physically stepping into the doll’s iconic home to play around and pose for pictures. They also expected a neon-filled 1980s roller disco and a space-themed exhibition titled “Beyond the Stars.” Doll lovers from around the world bought tickets expecting a weekend of quality entertainment, photo ops and pink galore.

The reality at the event, which was held over the weekend at the Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was a lot less rosy, several attendees said.

The Dreamhouse was a 2-D cardboard cutout with a pink Volkswagen bus parked out front. Guests were not allowed inside the vehicle. The space exhibition consisted of an oversize Barbie box decorated with a ringed planet. The roller disco was a penned-off area on the center’s concrete floors with metal beams forming a tent but with no canvas overhead.

Eventually, the event organizers did put up a small disco ball, attendees said.

The three-day event was orchestrated by Mischief Management, an event organizer that oversees fan events like BroadwayCon. According to Mattel, the toymaker that manufactures Barbie, Mischief Management licensed the Barbie brand for the event. Mischief Management has since informed attendees that it will issue full refunds for any tickets sold.

Still, it’s cold comfort for Barbie fans who had high hopes for the event, given its formal association with Mattel.

Some of the promises panned out. The tennis star Serena Williams spoke on a panel as advertised. (Ms. Williams did not respond to a request for comment.)

Tickets started at $149 for adult admission and went up to $449. Tara Brooks, a data analyst who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., spent about $249 on a “pink pass,” a higher-tier ticket that included a “special swag bag.” She received a bottle of Barbie-branded hand sanitizer.

“You can get them at the Dollar Store,” she added….

…Failed conventions and festivals have become something of their own genre in recent years, including the now infamous Fyre Festival, which conjures images of festivalgoers stranded on a tropical island with only cheese sandwiches in foam containers, and DashCon, a Tumblr convention in 2014 that turned out to be not much more than a ball pit in an empty hall….

The BBC reports “Barbie Dream Fest in Florida to issue refunds after fan complaints”. (Subscription required for readers outside UK.)

The organisers of the Barbie Dream Fest weekend in Florida are issuing refunds to attendees after customers complained of a lacklustre event.

The creators of the event promised “unforgettable experiences”, and advertised a roller rink and disco with a caption that read: “Join us for three days of glam, nostalgia, and dream-big energy made for Barbie fans of every generation.”

But ticketholders, who paid up to $450 (£340), say it was far from that. Photos of the event show a grey convention centre space with pink cardboard cut-out Barbie signs.

Mattel, which owns the Barbie brand, said that full refunds would be given to everyone who purchased tickets….

(8) LAST DAUGHTER OF KRYPTON. [Item by N.] The full trailer for Supergirl, who flies into theaters on June 26.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novel

It’s the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first publication of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation as a novel. So let’s tell the history of the novel.

In the summer of 1941, Isaac Asimov proposed to John W. Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction that he write a short story set in a slowly declining Galactic Empire, based on the fall of the Roman Empire. Campbell thought the idea was great.

Then Asimov proposed writing a series of stories depicting the fall of the first Galactic Empire and the rise of the second. Asimov would write eight stories for Campbell’s magazine over eight years (1942-1949), and they were later collected into three volumes known as The Foundation Trilogy which were published from 1951 to 1953.

Foundation was first published as a single book by Gnome Press. It has “The Psychohistorians”, “The Encyclopedists”, “The Mayors”, “The Traders” and “The Merchant Princes”. “The Encyclopedists” and “The Mayors” were novelettes, the others are short stories. As noted before, each was in Astounding Science Fiction.

The cover art is by David Kyle. Please note that on the cover it is titled Foundation: An Interplanetary Novel. When Ace published it they renamed it The 1,000 Year Plan in their two editions of 1955 and 1962.

At Tricon (1966), it would win the Hugo for Best All-Time Series. Other nominees were Burroughs’ Barsoom series, Heinlein’s Future History series , E. E. Smith’s Lensmen series and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

As you know, it is now streaming as a series as Apple+.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bound and Gagged delivers a world of entertainment.
Dinosaur Comics traces the ruination of hobbies.
Free Range overflows the seating capacity.
Wondermark saves a lot of browser tabs.
Tom Gauld prefers brevity.

(11) NEVERMORE. “The New York Times drops freelance journalist who used AI to write book review” reports the Guardian.

The New York Times has cut ties with a freelance journalist after discovering he used artificial intelligence to help write a book review that echoed elements of a review of the same book in the Guardian.

It came after a New York Times reader flagged similarities between the paper’s January review of Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, written by author and journalist Alex Preston, and an August review of the same book written by Christobel Kent in the Guardian.

The New York Times launched an investigation, during which Preston admitted that he had used AI to assist writing the review and did not spot the sections that were pulled from the Guardian before submitting it. In a statement to the Guardian on Tuesday, Preston said that he was “hugely embarrassed” and had “made a serious mistake”.

The New York Times alerted the Guardian to the overlap in an email sent on Monday, and added an editor’s note to the review acknowledging the use of AI and linking to the Guardian piece. “A reader recently alerted the Times that this review included language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in the Guardian,” reads the editor’s note. “We spoke to the author of this piece, a freelancer reviewer, who told us he used an AI tool that incorporated material from the Guardian review into his draft, which he failed to identify and remove. His reliance on AI and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of the Times’s standards.”…

(12) CLASSICAL FELINE. See the architectural drawing of “The Timothy T. Cat Presidential Library” at Camestros Felapton.

Library, ballroom and scratching post – this multifunctional building is a monument to the towering intellect of its namesake and a celebration of Western Culture™ with its subtle blend of classical styles….

I’d like to know what books will be on its shelves.

(13) JUST DROPPED: WORLD OF WARCRAFT SKILLET. Lodge Cast Iron is offering a “10.25 Inch Seasoned Cast Iron World of Warcraft Skillet”.

Working up an appetite defending Azeroth? This frying pan is ready to help you bring people together over an Azerothian feast. It’s seasoned and ready to use, naturally nontoxic, made in the USA, and ready for any cooking adventure. Whether you like to cook over an open fire or in your cozy kitchen, make everything from Savory Deviate Delight to a Bloodberry Tart. Plus, when you take home this skillet, you’ll also receive a code to unlock a special in-game companion!

(14) A BLOT ON THE UNIVERSE. [Item by Steven French.] The first time I saw a chain of Starlink satellites passing overhead I actually thought for a moment the alien invasion had begun! Here’s a warning on what a million will do to our view of the night sky: “A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky—for everyone on Earth” concludes Phys.org.

More than 10,000 Starlink satellitescurrently orbit Earth. We see them crawling across dark skies, no matter how remote our location, and streaking throughimages from research telescopes.

SpaceX recently announced that it wants to launch one million more of these satellites as orbital data centers for AI computing power.

A few years ago, we wrote a paper predicting what the night sky would look like with 65,000 satellites from four planned megaconstellations: SpaceX’s Starlink, Amazon’s Kuiper (now Leo), the U.K.’s OneWeb and China’s Guowang. We calibrated our models to observations of real Starlink satellites and came up with a startling prediction: One in 15 visible points in the night sky would be a satellite, not a star.

A million satellites would be so much worse.

The human eye can see fewer than 4,500 stars in an unpolluted night sky. If we permit SpaceX to launch these satellites, we will see more satellites than stars—for large portions of the night and the year, throughout the world. This will severely damage the night sky for everyone on Earth.

SpaceX’s proposal also completely fails to account for atmospheric pollution, collision risk or how to develop the technology needed to disperse waste heat from orbital data centers.’

(15) MEME-TO-SCREEN (OR SCREAM). [Item by N.] A24’s Backrooms, based on the Internet creepypasta and phenomena of the same name, (directed by the 20(!)-year old Kane Parsons, based on his web series of the same name), comes to theaters May 29.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended says this is “How Zootopia 2 Should Have Ended”.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Olav Rokne, N., Cora Buhlert, 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 P J Evans.]

Pixel Scroll 9/16/25 The Universal Pixelgraph

Posted on September 16, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) NEXT MURDERBOT COVER. “A new ‘Murderbot’ book is coming, author shares release date and cover” at USA Today. They say it will be released in May 26.

…”Platform Decay” follows Murderbot on a new volunteer rescue mission, realizing it will have to spend significant time with humans (especially human children) that it doesn’t know.

“Ugh,” the book description says. “This may well call for… eye contact!”

“I had a lot of fun writing Platform Decay; I thought of it as ‘Murderbot goes on the family road trip from hell’ and I hope readers enjoy it,” Wells wrote to USA TODAY. “I’m also excited for readers to see the great cover by Jaime Jones.”…

(2) CRIME, ANCIENT AND MODERN. Julie Berry profiles “True Crime as Myth’s Copycat” at CrimeReads.

Compared to the heroes and heroines of most of Greek mythology, our most shocking modern criminals, though they leave swaths of destruction, are still milquetoast wannabe, practically plagiarists of the gruesomeness of our culture’s foundational stories. For serious cases of messed-up murderous mayhem, especially within families—hot crimes of passion and cold, calculated acts of revenge—look to the classics. For rage raised to an art form, look to myth.

Like true crime, myths make for addictive storytelling. They’ve held us captive for millennia. But they’re more than entertainment. We need myths to give us a vocabulary for our raw emotions, to arm us with metaphors that can encompass the worst things that humans do to one another.

Mythical adaptations and literary myth retellings are especially hot right now. Here’s a little flight of pairings for you, a wine-and-cheese party of recent literary myth retellings matched with just one of many possible true crime parallels that wish they were as rage-filled or maniacal as the ancient Greeks of lore.

First on Berry’s list of comparisons:

Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati

A classic tale of revenge: Clytemnestra has achieved her happily ever after in Sparta with her husband Tantalus and their infant child, until Agamemnon arrives on the scene. Refusing to take “no” for an answer, he murders her husband and dashes their infant on the ground, then forces her into an unwanted marriage. Just imagine the pillow talk between that cozy couple. Somehow she bears him children (more on them below) including a daughter, Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon later sacrifices when an oracle tells him doing so will grant him success in the Trojan war. Clytemnestra has more reasons to hate her husband than Medusa has serpents. She bides her time before repaying her husband, with help from her lover, Aegisthus, for her slaughtered first love and her two murdered children.

True crime parallel? Pamela Smart follows Clytemnestra’s footsteps, conspiring with her lover, a teenaged high school student, to murder her husband. But whereas Smart disposes of her husband to avoid the financial ruin of divorce, Casati’s literary Clytemnestra, with her lover, Aegisthus, makes Agamemnon pay for all he stole from her in his fanatical pursuits—first of her, then of glory in battle. Smart’s murder of her husband was unconscionable. Clytemnestra’s has all the weight of poetic justice on her side.

Verdict: Guilty, but find a jury of mothers willing to convict Clytemnestra.

(3) ELBOW ROOM. James Davis Nicoll tells Reactor readers how to make space for everything in “Five Artificially Layered Planets and World Cities”,

… Wreckers, cynics, and other riffraff may ask “As there is only a finite surface area on Earth, where would we park a hundred trillion cars?” Happily, there is an obvious answer.

Build more Earth.

Humans do this every time we construct a multistory building. A ten-story parking garage with a one-hectare footprint has effectively created nine new hectares. Why not do this for the whole of the planet?

Perhaps some examples are in order. Let’s tackle them in ascending order of scale….

He begins with –

Trantor — Foundation by Isaac Asimov

All 75,000,000 square miles of Trantor’s landmasses are covered in a continuous cityscape. The city reaches a mile under the surface and well above it as well. At ten feet per level, it follows that Trantor probably provides its inhabitants with the equivalent of five or six hundred planets worth of surface area.

Oddly, Trantor does not have five or six hundred planets worth of people. It has something over forty billion people. The effective population density is something like one person per square mile, which is something more than Greenland’s population density, but significantly less than Mongolia’s. What does Trantor do with all those miles and miles of empty corridor²? Fill them with row after row of filing cabinets, each one filled with Hollerith cards?

(4) MAKING A COVER FOR AN EPIC. Michael Whelan’s work on Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings is profiled in “Shaping Roshar” by Michael Whelan and Michael Everett. Lots of concept art, alternatives, and final cover images at the link.

When I received the manuscript for The Way of Kings from TOR, I was somewhat dismayed that it was 1400 pages. Given the mood I was in, I felt that it would be tough sledding to work my way through such a massive fantasy epic.

As it turned out, I was soon lost in the world Brandon Sanderson so skillfully realized.

It helped that the writing had a rich cinematic quality that brought images of scenes, characters and creatures to my mind as if I were watching a movie or immersed in a Myst-style virtual reality adventure.

The manuscript was fun to read, but it made my work for the cover art difficult. How can one successfully distill enough of this novel to one picture and possibly do justice to the book? It was a steep challenge.

One thing I found very helpful was to have the manuscript delivered to me in a digital format. It was only the second time that I’ve done that, but it was a godsend. To be able to flag and highlight character and scene references, then to search them out and collate information and details, was an invaluable time saver for me….

(5) TAKING LEAVE FROM TECHNOLOGY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I keep on telling people that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever listens…. Well, not quite. The BBC has reported on an experiment where youngsters abstain from technology for five days…. “What happened when teens tried out tech-free bedrooms?”.

A group of teenagers from Bradford, the 2025 UK City of Culture, agreed to take all technology out of their bedrooms for five days to see how they would cope….

The findings of the survey, external, carried out by polling company Survation, suggest:

More than a third (38%) of teenagers said they spent five or more hours on their phones on an average day.
39% would consider taking tech and screens out of their bedrooms to reduce time spent on their devices
Other ways to minimise time on their devices include using in-built settings such as screen time caps (59%) or scheduling regular screen time breaks (66%)
25% say their parents set clear limits on how much time they spend on tech, gaming or social media, while 47% say their parents sometimes set limits
However, more than a quarter (27%) say their parents don’t set any limits.

The BBC also has an online quiz to see how addicted you are to tech…. It’s a brave new world.

(6) PHILIPPE GODDIN (1944-2025). “Death of Hergéologist Philippe Goddin” – the scholar died September 8, and Tintin.com paid tribute.

It is with deep sadness that Fanny and Nick Rodwell, along with the entire teams at Tintinimaginatio and the Hergé Museum, have learned of the death of their colleague Philippe Goddin. They extend their sincere condolences to his family and wish to pay tribute to a man who was, for all of them, a respected and friendly figurehead in the study and analysis of Hergé’s work.

Philippe Goddin, born in Brussels in 1944, was one of the world’s leading experts on Hergé’s work, to the extent that his publisher once described him as a “Hergéologist”. After studying fine arts, he pursued a career in teaching before devoting himself entirely to the study and dissemination of Hergé’s work.

He developed a passion for comic strip books at an early age and came into contact with Hergé. From 1989 to 1999, he served as secretary general of the Hergé Foundation, which holds the archives of the great master, thus playing a central role in the conservation, cataloguing and promotion of the treasures left by the creator of Tintin.

Philippe Goddin is the author of numerous reference works, including Hergé et Tintin, Reporters (1986, Le Lombard), the biography Hergé, lignes de vie (2007, Éditions Moulinsart), and the monumental seven-volume series Hergé – Chronologie d’une œuvre (2000-2011, Éditions Moulinsart), considered the most comprehensive study ever undertaken on Hergé’s creative process. Also noteworthy is Les Tribulations de Tintin au Congo (2018, Éditions Moulinsart), in which he demonstrates that Tintin au Congo (1930) is not a racist book, even though it is steeped in the colonialist environment of its time…

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

September 16, 1918 — Karen Anderson (Died 2016.)

By Paul Weimer: Karen Anderson, the formidable wife of Poul Anderson. But it would be unfair and unjust for me to merely label her as the wife of an SF author, no matter how big of an SF writer they are. Karen Anderson was heavily into filking, and at the very least popularized the term, if not outright invented it. Filking is not one of my strengths or area of knowledge, so I don’t know Karen’s work in that field too directly. The first time I saw her name in print is when I was exposed to her collaborations with Poul Anderson, particularly Ys, a personal favorite of mine.

Ys is a set of historical fantasy novels set at the end of the Western Roman Empire, is what is now Brittany. Our hero is a Roman Prefect, Gratillonius. He has been sent to Gaul by Rome, and by turns, winds up at the city of Ys, and his story eventually turns from historical fiction to straight up historical fantasy. Ys is a city that never existed, a legend, a myth that in our world was developed in a series of romances and stories in the late middle ages.

The Andersons take that myth and story, mix it in with ideas ranging from Phoenician history to the Golden Bough, and tell the story of how a Roman prefect fights against the final fall of the west to a dark Age (David Perry and Matt Gabriele don’t hate me) in order to preserve the city of Ys, at least for a while. A classic “Fighting against the raging of the light” from Poul Anderson, leavened and softened by his wife’s collaboration.

Showing her interest in historical fiction straight up, she also co-wrote The Last Viking with her husband, telling the story of Harald Hardrada, from his time as a mercenary in Constantinople until his ultimate destiny and conflict in the wars of the year 1066. Between this series and the historical elements of Ys, Karen Anderson’s knowledge and writing enthusiasm clearly meshed well with her husband’s. In addition, Karen Anderson wrote numerous essays and articles, which pepper the fanzines of the era.

And, apparently, she is the “Karen” that is listed among the people dedicated in Robert Heinlein’s Friday (and also appears in a cameo at the end of Number of the Beast as well.)

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit didn’t check the time.
Close to Home adds an unnecessary feature.
Frank and Ernest left something out of the directions.
Rhymes with Orange needs better glasses.
Wumo confronts an ungrateful planet.

(9) OUCH OUCH OUCH. “New Zealand Woman Sets Guinness World Record for Fastest Barefoot 100 Meter Sprint Over LEGO Bricks” reports GeekTyrant.

Gabrielle Wall of Christchurch, New Zealand, has pulled off a feat that sounds like pure childhood torture and turned it into a world record.

She set the Guinness World Record for the fastest 100-meter sprint barefoot over random LEGO bricks, finishing in just 24.75 seconds. Guinness shared when announcing her accomplishment.

“Running 100 m is quite the challenge for anyone, but imagine trying to do that while barefoot and over lego pieces on the ground!”

The record-breaking sprint wasn’t just about endurance and pain tolerance, it was also built on community support. The LEGO track was created with a massive donation of bricks from the New Zealand non-profit Imagination Station.

“The track was made using 300 kg (661 lb) of LEGO that was donated by the charity Imagination Station, a New Zealand organization that uses LEGO in its educational robotics and mechanics classes for kids.”…

(10) FUSION RECORD. “France beats the world record for fusion plasma duration” – Earth.com has details.

France’s WEST tokamak held a hot plasma for 1,337 seconds, a little over 22 minutes. That performance matters because long, steady plasma operation is a core requirement for future nuclear fusion power plants.

The run also edged past the mark set weeks earlier by China’s EAST, improving the duration by about 25 percent.

It showed that researchers can hold tough operating conditions without the machine’s internal surfaces breaking down.

Anne-Isabelle Etienvre, Director of Fundamental Research at the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, the CEA, reported the result….

(11) AUTUMN EDITION OF SF² CONCATENATION. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The autumnal edition of SF² Concatenation has just gone up with the usual large, seasonal news page, a few con reports and around 40 standalone book reviews.

v35(5) 2025.9.15 — New Columns & Articles for the Autumn 2025

Newscast for the Autumn 2025. This includes within it many key sections. See also the master newscast link index that connects to all its SF/F genre and science news sub-sections. In the mix are its Film News; Television News; Publishing News; General Science News and Forthcoming SF Books from major British Isles SF imprints for the season subsections, among much else.
Designing Terry Pratchett’s Discworld – Peter Tyers
Peter’s illustrated review of the new Paul Kidby book
Windycon 50 – Sue Burke
A report from last year’s Chicago-based convention
Contabile – The 2025 UK Filkcon – Peter Tyers
The 35th Annual UK Filk Music Convention
Reconnect – The 2025 British Eastercon – Arthur Chappell
For the first time, the British Eastercon was held in Northern Ireland
The Sci-Fi London 2025 Film Fest – Jonathan Cowie
This year it is a return to the usual three-and-a-bit day format
Ten Years Ago Exactly. Some from the archives.
Science Fiction Club Deutschland – 60th anniversary retrospective – Thomas Recktenwald
How Might the World End? 200 years on from penning Frankenstein – Ted Nield
Eurocon 1 – The First Eurocon in 1972 – Dave Rowe
Archipelacon: A Scandinavian convention through Swedish eyes – Karl-Johan Norén
Archipelacon: A Scandinavian convention through British eyes – Peter Tyers
Twenty Years Ago Exactly. One from the archives.
The 2006 European SF Convention – Ukraine – Jonathan Cowie

v35(5) 2025.9.15 — Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Reviews

v35(5) 2025.9.15 — Non-Fiction SF & Science Fact Book Reviews

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by N.] In the music video for his song “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship Of The It’s My Book They’ll Walk If I Tell Them Too” (sic), Tom Cardy and ScumHouse give us an (expletive-laden) look at J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing process.

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

Pixel Scroll 8/25/25 Synthetic Scrolls Of Pixel

Posted on August 25, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) PUT ANOTHER CANDLE ON RAY’S BIRTHDAY CAKE. Bradbury was born 101 years ago this week. To celebrate, Phil Nichols’ “Bonus Episode: Bradbury 100 LIVE! – 2021 edition” includes video from Ray’s 90th birthday party at Mystery and Imagination Bookstore in Glendale.

(You can also read John King Tarpinian’s 2010 coverage for File 770 here: “Ray Bradbury’s 90th Birthday Party”. And John can be seen assisting Ray at the autograph table in the video below.)

On Saturday 21st August – the eve of Ray Bradury’s 101st birthday – I took to the “airwaves” of Facebook with another live edition of Bradbury 100.

I was joined over Zoom by writer and former Hollywood animation producer Steven Paul Leiva. Steve knew Ray Bradbury well, having worked with him on the abortive Little Nemo In Slumberland film project, and having organised “Ray Bradbury Week” in Los Angeles in 2010. Steve was also the very first interview guest on the Bradbury 100 audio podcast about a year ago, and it was great to talk to him again.

The live show was recorded, and below you will find a slightly remastered version of the show. Highlights of the show:

never-before-seen photos from Ray’s 90th birthday party
never-before-seen video from the same party
Steve’s inside scoop on what went wrong (and occasionally right) with Little Nemo in Slumberland
discussion of Ray and his good friend, the animation legend Chuck Jones

(2) RENDEZVOUS AT FROMIN’S DELI. Steve Vertlieb is in LA visiting his brother Erwin and his many local friends. The three of us met for lunch today in Santa Monica. And here are the pictures to prove it!

(3) THE ART OF EMPIRE. “The Birth of Foundation” is the topic of Michael Whelan’s latest newsletter. The post is plentifully illustrated with cover art.

The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov is the classic science-fiction epic. Told against the background of the decay and collapse of an interstellar empire, as well as the subsequent “Dark Years,” the protagonists struggle to bring about a new order of peace and prosperity.

When I was asked to do the covers for the reissues of the first three books, Thomas Cole’s allegorical “Course of Empire” paintings immediately came to mind.

I could think of nothing more appropriate for the books than to feature the main players of the saga against a futuristic backdrop of the course of the “Galactic Empire.”

I had already done the cover for the fourth book in the series a few years before, and it fit well into my plan. Using the planet Trantor as the obvious locale, I painted the first three in “Colesian” stages: the Empire in its heyday (Foundation), in its destruction (Foundation and Empire), and in the pastoral state (Second Foundation). These dovetailed nicely with Foundation’s Edge, which featured the Empire in desolation.

The circle became my symbol for the galaxy and the cyclical nature of history. In the first painting, Foundation, there is an edge-on circle behind Hari Seldon. In the cover for Foundation and Empire, the very base of the metal junk that supports the Mule is circular but now shattered….

These artworks are available in Whelan’s shop as signed giclées—save when you buy as a set.

(4) ADMINISTRATION PULLS WRITING FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM. Publishers Weekly reports “NEA’s Creative Writing Fellowship Program Canceled”.

On Friday afternoon, writers who applied for the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2026 Creative Writing Fellowships received an email from the NEA saying that the program had been canceled. The annual program had, to date, offered grants of up to $50,000 in fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry to published writers; previous fellows include Melissa Febos, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Donika Kelly, Ling Ma, Jason Mott, Maggie Shipstead, and Morgan Talty.

The email, shared to social media by such authors as Kelly Luce and Carmen Maria Machado, said the NEA has “withdrawn” the “Creative Writing category” due to the agency “updating its grant making policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the Administration.” As a result, per the email, the NEA is “cancelling existing funding opportunities that fall outside these priorities.”

The NEA also stated in the email that it “continues to support the Literary Arts through the Grants for Arts Projects (GAP) opportunity,” which offers grants for “organizations that cultivate writers at all stages of their careers, including emerging writers.” The GAP website currently says that the program “strongly encourage[s] applications for arts projects that incorporate one of more agency funding priorities,” namely “celebrat[ing] the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America.”

The move marks the Trump administration’s latest round of cuts to the NEA. In May $1.2 million in grants awarded to 51 independent publishers and literary organizations were canceled, also under the guise of new grant making policies prioritizing projects that “celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence,” “foster AI competency,” and “make America healthy again,” among other stated priorities….

(5) HOT TAKES. “On the ‘Alien: Earth’ Set, Everyone Can See You Sweat” – the New York Times has the story. (Behind a paywall.)

April is the hottest month in Thailand. In the sprawling film production area known as the Studio Park, just outside Bangkok, walking between the air-conditioned sound stages is like staggering from boiling sauna to frigid pond. The hundreds of Thai workers gabbing in the outdoor canteen appeared to be taking the heat in stride; among them, small groups of Westerners sat quietly, some just picking at their food.

“It’s hot,” said Sydney Chandler, star of the FX series “Alien: Earth,” which was filming its first season here in April 2024. “I’m used to Texas, but this heat comes from below and above. It’s amazing.”

For “Alien: Earth,” the extreme conditions were both a challenge and a feature. The show was drawn to Thailand by the up-to-date facilities and skilled work force, and by proximity to dramatic coastal and mountain locations. But its vision of Earth in 2120, when corporations have replaced governments and climate change has made the planet hospitable for all sorts of alien parasites, was also a good fit for the local natural environment.

“Look, it’s a story that’s set on Earth in the future,” Noah Hawley, the show’s creator and principal writer, said. “Part of the reason we’re in Bangkok filming is, it’s going to be a hotter, wetter planet.” (“Alien: Earth” premieres on Tuesday, on FX and Hulu.)…

(6) PLAYING FOR AN AUDIENCE. BBC profiles a gamer with 600K viewers– “Women in gaming: Twitch streamer Alyska and the female gamers defying stereotypes”.

Alyce Rocha makes her living working from home – but she doesn’t have a normal nine to five.

Forget endless Teams meetings, she’s spent recent weeks living the (virtual) life of an ambitious Mafia upstart in 1900s Sicily.

Such is life as a video game streamer.

Known online as Alyska, she has made gaming her full-time career, by broadcasting herself playing games live, to her combined 585,000 followers.

The appeal, she says, is “sharing an experience together”.

“If you’ve played the game yourself then you want to see someone else’s reaction,” she tells the BBC’s Woman’s Hour.

Once thought of as a male-dominated pastime, today women make up around half of the game-playing public, according to the UK Games Industry Census.

Alyce says part of her role is challenging perceptions over the types of games women enjoy.

Statistics suggest women mostly play puzzle and strategy-style games. These non-violent titles, including life simulators The Sims and Animal Crossing, are often grouped under the label of “cosy gaming”.

But Alyce says she, like many women, also enjoys role-playing action and fantasy-adventure games.

“I used to hate horror games,” Alyce explains. “However, my audience loved to see me suffer, so I would play more and more, to the point I actually love them now”….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 25, 1955 — Simon R. Green, 70.

I’ve had email conversations with our Birthday honoree, Simon R. Green. He’s a fascinating, friendly person.

Simon R Green

I first read the Deathstalker series which, like everything he writes, is part of the same multiverse. Owen Deathstalker, reluctant heir to the ancient Deathstalker name and a very minor historian, will come to lead a rebellion against the powerful and corrupt empire ruled by The Iron Bitch. Every SF trope is here — crashed alien starships, rogue computer hackers, clones and espers to name but a few. Yes, it’s space opera but not to be taken too seriously.

Moving sideways for a movement, he did a stellar job with his Forest Kingdom fantasy series which plays it more straight I think —

SLIGHT SPOILER

— save such touches as a butterfly-collecting dragon who has absolutely no interest in gold, jewels or other sorts of treasure. Our protagonist rescued him when he was injured and now is friends with him.

END SLIGHT SPOILER.

The connected Hawk and Fisher series of two Guardsman in Haven, a corrupt seaport, solving magical mysteries is wonderful.

Remember how I said everything was in the same multiverse? Hawk and Fisher show up in Strangefellows, just having a drink on a table in the back, just sitting there. That being the bar in Nightside, the pocket universe beneath London where John Taylor is the only detective, as told in the Nightside series. Great setting, fascinating characters, weird stories.

The Secret History series involved the Droods, an ancient family that watches over the world and protects it from mostly supernatural and magical threats. They have a magical armor they, well, protects them from everything. Great series. This and the Nightside series were wrapped in one novel, Night Fall.

I should note that all of the must be read from the beginning. There is significant plot development as each series moved along. Characters change, situations develop.

The Ghostfinders of the Carnacki Institute, an ancient and very secretive government department , exist to deal with ghosts, and live by the motto “We don’t take any shit from the Hereafter”. The plots here are thinner than in his other series but I find the character interesting enough to like the whole series

Ishmael Jones is someone who cannot afford to be noticed, someone who lives under the radar. Why so? Because it’s been sixty years since the alien starship made him human and he hasn’t aged at all. These are really fun because Ishmael Jones simultaneously believes he’s human and alien, and views everything that way. Stories are quite good.

A freestanding novel of note is Drinking Midnight Wine about a small English town (actually where he was born) where good in all sorts of magical forms pushed back against evil in yet more magical forms. There’s an Angel, but trust me when I say that you wouldn’t want to meet her.

He’s too prolific to cover everything here and I noticed I skipped the excellent Gideon Sable series. Oh well.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Bound and Gagged is looking for a book.
Reality Check plays a game.
Rubes depicts an early observatory.
Tom Gauld visits the stacks.

(9) CON IN KENYA. [Item by Steven French.] Some nice photos here from the Otamatsuri Anime and Manga convention in Kenya: “Elves, Avatars and Chainsaw Man: anime hits Kenya – in pictures”.

The only one of its kind in Africa, the Otamatsuri Anime x Manga convention by Movie Jabber is an annual anime, manga and multi-entertainment event that attracts a vibrant and youthful fanbase celebrating all aspects of pop culture. Photographer Sarah Waiswa spent her Sunday there…

(10) FAKE NEWS. “’The Great Moon Hoax’ is published in the ‘New York Sun’| August 25, 1835” at History.

On August 25, 1835, the first in a series of six articles announcing the supposed discovery of life on the moon appears in the New York Sun newspaper.

Known collectively as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles were supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The byline was Dr. Andrew Grant, described as a colleague of Sir John Herschel, a famous astronomer of the day. Herschel had in fact traveled to Capetown, South Africa, in January 1834 to set up an observatory with a powerful new telescope. As Grant described it, Herschel had found evidence of life forms on the moon, including such fantastic animals as unicorns, two-legged beavers and furry, winged humanoids resembling bats. The articles also offered vivid description of the moon’s geography, complete with massive craters, enormous amethyst crystals, rushing rivers and lush vegetation….

[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Steve Vertlieb, Teddy Harvia, 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 Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 6/23/25 It’s The End Of The Scroll As We Know It (And I Feel Filed)

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) AFTER VERNE, THESE FRENCH WRITERS CHOSE TO ‘PATROL THE MARGINS OF CERTAINTY’. “How French ‘merveilleux-scientifique’ fiction reframed reality” by Fleur Hopkins-Loféron at Aeon Essays.

When Nicolas Vermont entered the greenhouse, he would make a gruesome discovery. It was the early 20th century in rural France, and Nicolas was visiting his uncle – a scientist and surgeon called Dr Frédéric Lerne – after 15 years apart. However, he had soon grown suspicious about his uncle’s odd behaviour, so for answers had decided to explore the grounds of his relative’s estate late at night.

Inside a greenhouse in the garden, Nicolas discovered that Dr Lerne had been conducting disturbing scientific experiments. At first, he saw plants grafted onto one another: a cactus growing a geranium flower, and an oak tree sprouting cherries and walnuts. His uneasy curiosity, though, soon turned to dread. ‘It was then that I touched the hairy plant. Having felt the two treated leaves, so like ears, I felt them warm and quivering,’ he recalled. Grafted onto the stem were the parts of an animal: the ears of a dead rabbit. ‘My hand, clenched with repugnance, shook off the memory of the contact as it would have shaken off some hideous spider.’ [Quotations from published English-language editions translated by Brian Stableford; the rest are the author’s own.]

Dr Lerne was in fact an impostor. His assistant Otto Klotz had stolen the true uncle’s body through a brain swap, and would not hesitate to punish Nicolas for his ill-placed curiosity… by transplanting his consciousness into the body of a bull.

Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908), or ‘Dr Lerne, Demi-God’, was a celebrated novel by Maurice Renard, hailed by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire as a ‘subdivine novel of metamorphoses’. Published in English as New Bodies for Old, it heralded the dawn of a new French literary genre – one that ventured boldly into the uncertain and the unknown. Renard called it ‘merveilleux-scientifique’ (‘scientific-marvellous’) and its ambition was to help the reader speculate on what could be, and on what exists beyond the reach of our senses, rather than what will be. In other words, allowing a better understanding of what Renard poetically called ‘the imminent threats of the possible’. As he wrote in 1914, the goal was to ‘patrol the margins of certainty, not to acquire knowledge of the future, but to gain a greater understanding of the present’.

Rejecting the ‘scientific adventure’ storytelling of the celebrated French sci-fi writer Jules Verne – who had died only three years before the publication of Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu – the merveilleux-scientifique genre was grounded in plausibility and the scientific method. According to Renard, only one physical, chemical or biological law may be altered when telling a story. This strict discipline, he argued, is what lent the genre its power to sharpen the reader’s mind, by offering a wholly original kind of thought experiment….

(2) CYBILS HIATUS. The CYBILS (Children’s and Young Adults Book Lovers’ Literary) Awards have announced “We’re Taking a Break, Sort-of”. They’ll be doing something besides giving their customary set of annual awards.

…As the Board of a literary award aimed at celebrating children and young adult book lovers, we can’t see just continuing on with the award while books, reading, and learning is under attack. We refuse to simply pretend that everything is normal.

We believe that

Books are treasures to be discovered.

Books are explorations to be celebrated.

Books are gifts to be shared.

That’s why, in 2025 the usual nomination and award cycle of the CYBILS Award is going on hiatus in favor of sharing books that we love, that we’d like you to love.

We’ll be book-talking fiction and nonfiction, picture books, graphic novels, science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries. We’ll share books with diverse characters of varied genders, races, cultures, socioeconomic statuses, abilities, and orientations. We’ll talk about books that reflect our world, and we hope you’ll stick around on our social media platforms to celebrate these books with us.

(3) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Scott Edelman devotes episode 24 of his Why Not Say What Happened? podcast to “My Ethical Conundrum About Owning Original Comics Art”. Among many other things.

After three conventions in four weekends, I finally catch my breath to celebrate several important personal comic book anniversaries, sort through Marie Severin’s classic covers, realize my discovery of horror comics was topsy-turvy, fail to answer a question about how to break into comics, remember Stan Lee’s fear of the word “horror,” appreciate the increased respect professional writing organizations are now paying comics, look back at the day Jim Shooter stopped sharing original art with writers, wrestle with the morality of my original art collection, and more.

In addition to the direct link, here’s a link to a dozen possible places to listen — https://pod.link/1775481331.

Scott Edelman and Joyce Carol Oates at StokerCon 2025.

(4) A HUNGRY FUTURE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Two papers in this week’s Nature do not bode well for a business-as-usual climate future. The first looks at drought, and the second at food supply.

With regard to the first we (those scientists who look at climate change) for decades, have had a very unscientific rule of thumb that wetter areas would become wetter and drier areas drier. The former because in a warmer world there is more ocean evaporation hence more rain, and the latter because in a warmer world dry becomes dryer. Of course, we all knew that this was a very rough rule of thumb as site-specific locality can knock this rule of thumb for six and other factors (such as seasonality – the nature of different seasons) are key.

Anyway, the first paper looks at how in a warmer world the air has the potential to hold more water vapour. The shortfall between atmospheric water content and the potential to hold water provides a metric called atmospheric evaporative demand (AED). The researchers looked at half-decade world data (2018-2022) and here areas of drought have expanded by 74% compared to the 1981-2017 average and over half of this, the research concludes, was due to increased AED. (By the way, if you are a Filer living in the USA then it is not good news for those in the inland south-western US… Northern US and Canada fare better.)

Of course, agricultural crops need water, and the second paper looks at what agricultural data from 12,658 regions will be impacted. These regions account for two-thirds of current global (calorific) agricultural output. Looking at six staple crops (maize, soybean, rice, wheat, cassava and sorghum) the researchers found that on average for every 1.0’C warming 120 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day from agriculture is lost. (For reference, on average a person needs around 2,000 kcal perday.) The real picture is more complicated as some of this loss can be offset by adaptation and some by expanding agriculture in areas likely to be more favourable to agriculture in a warmer world. There will be losers (mainly farmers in today’s breadbasket areas) and potential winners (areas likely to become more favourable to agriculture in a warmer world). Here farmers in northern Europe and Canada are likely to be among the winners.

Of course, politicians are free to deny that human-induced climate change is taking place if they think that will benefit their electoral chances and/or serve their constituents well. (There are some in most countries, naming no names.) However, nature takes no notice of political views. If any deny the science then they are welcome to try ignorance and see where that gets them.

(Interest declared: Jonathan has, among other things, worked on climate change science.)

End-of-century business-as-usual (no greenhouse emission reductions) maize yield projections. Dark red = -100%. Dark blue = +100%. Very light yellow/green close to zero percentage change.

(5) FOUNDATION SEASON 3. Apple TV+ has released a trailer for the third season of Foundation, based on Isaac Asimov’s stories. The 10-episode season will debut globally with one episode on July 11, followed by new episodes every Friday through September 12.

(6) LINDA EVANS (1958-2023). Baen author Linda Evans died June 13, 2023 at the age of 64. Her passing was just brought to my attention. Evans produced ten novels and four anthologies, as well as of several other novels co-authored with David Weber, John Ringo, and Robert Asprin.

She also worked for 28 years at the University of Florida as a writer, editor, webmaster and web graphic designer, photographer and print-document graphic designer, marketing and public relations specialist, event coordinator, and international-visitor tour organizer.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

June 23, 1976 — Logan’s Run

By Paul Weimer. My first encounter with Logan’s Run was not the movie, but the book. But it was a version of the book that prepped me for the movie. It was the early 1980s and I was dipping through my brother’s collection of SF paperbacks in my quest to read science fiction and fantasy and came across this slightly squashed copy of the book. Now, in those early days when Mammoths roamed the world, some books that had been turned into movies would have material tied to the movie. In this case, in the center of that old paperback, there were a few pages of still images from the movie.

So I sat down to read the book and was confused by the images. If you have read the book and seen the movie, you will know that the two part ways pretty definitively and drastically. So when the stills included stuff nowhere near the book, young me was pretty confused as to this, since I had still not seen the movie. The book made an impression, since three decades later, while in western South Dakota, I went to Crazy Horse, and was rather disappointed at how unimpressive it was compared to the completed version in the book. Logan’s Run was also the first SF book I read with a fair amount of sex in it (face it, Logan gets it on quite a bit).

It was years later that I saw the movie and finally it all came full circle. The movie is pure cheese in parts, and unintentionally funny, and less dark than the book (consider the character of Box, who is dangerous and funny in the movie, and dangerous and sadistic in the book). The movie also is unintentionally dark in that probably the population of the destroyed city is going to all starve and die, whereas Logan’s escape in the book is much more personal. I do like the visuals of the movie and in some ways those visuals have infected my reading of the book (which I re-read a couple of years ago).

1970’s science fiction, for better or worse, Logan’s Run is perhaps the definitive example in a way that Silent Running and its other kin can’t quite match.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Batch Rejection recalls an old one.
Brevity has a science pun.
Brewster Rockit is back from a date.
Dog Eat Doug studied ballistics.
Eyebeam is in bad taste.
The Argyle Sweater makes a grammar joke.

(9) MY MURDERBOT QUESTION FOR THE DAY. Daniel Dern asks, “What would Murderbot do/click on a ‘No I’m not a robot’ CAPTCHA?”

I don’t think that’s a tough question. What about the rest of you?

(10) ARTIFICIAL ECLIPSING. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Two spacecraft created their first images of an artificial solar eclipse” at Science News.

It takes two to tango. Or at least to imitate a total solar eclipse from space.

Two spacecraft orbiting Earth have begun to mimic the phenomenon, with images from one of the duo’s successful early attempts unveiled on June 16. These artificial eclipses — produced when one satellite blocks the other’s view of the sun — will help researchers better understand the solar system’s star, specifically its outermost atmosphere: the corona.

“It was so incredible,” says solar physicist Andrei Zhukov of the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, who works on the mission. “We could see the corona without any special image processing. It was just visible there, like during a natural total solar eclipse.”…

Note, DDG-searching “science news artificial eclipse satellites” turns up several other interesting-looking hits, with (based on the summary link page) a bunch of good summary sentences. Here are a couple more:

“ESA Just Faked a Solar Eclipse – And Caught the Sun’s Hidden Halo” at SciTech Daily.

ESA’s Proba-3 mission has achieved a spacefaring marvel: two satellites flying in perfect formation to mimic total solar eclipses on demand. Their first artificial eclipse delivered breathtaking images of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, offering scientists an unprecedented glimpse into the solar corona…

“Solar eclipse on-demand: How two satellites are mimicking totality in space” at AP News.

A pair of European satellites have created the first artificial solar eclipses by flying in precise and fancy formation, providing hours of on-demand totality for scientists.. The European Space Agency released the eclipse pictures at the Paris Air Show on Monday. Launched late last year, the orbiting duo have churned out simulated solar eclipses since March…

“Trailblazing Satellite Mission Delivers Its First Artificial Solar Eclipse” at Science Alert.

…The difference is that we can create our eclipse once every 19.6-hour orbit, while total solar eclipses only occur naturally around once, very rarely twice a year. On top of that, natural total eclipses only last a few minutes, while Proba-3 can hold its artificial eclipse for up to six hours….

(11) READY FOR THEIR CLOSE-UP. “First images of distant galaxies captured by ‘ultimate’ telescope” – photos at the Guardian.

Spectacular views of distant galaxies, giant dust clouds and hurtling asteroids have been revealed in the first images captured by a groundbreaking telescope that is embarking on a 10-year survey of the cosmos.

The stunning pictures from the $810m (£595m) Vera C Rubin observatory in Chile mark the start of what astronomers believe will be a gamechanging period of discovery as the telescope sets about compiling the best view yet of the universe in action.

In about 10 hours of observations, the observatory spotted 2,104 previously unspotted asteroids in our solar system, including seven near-Earth asteroids, which were said to pose no danger to the planet.

“I’m absolutely blown away. Just look, it’s teeming with gorgeous glittering galaxies!” said Prof Catherine Heymans, an astrophysicist at the University of Edinburgh and Scotland’s astronomer royal.

“I’m so delighted that they chose Virgo for the ‘first look’ as it celebrates a key moment in humanity’s dark matter story. It was 1930s observations of the Virgo and Coma clusters that prompted Fritz Zwicky to conclude there must be extra invisible dark matter out there.”

Built on Cerro Pachón, a mountain in the foothills of the Chilean Andes, the 18-storey observatory is equipped with the largest camera ever built. It will observe the entire southern sky every three to four days and then repeat the process, over and over, for a decade.

(12) HATE AT HOGWARTS? [Item by N.] In “You Can’t Separate Harry Potter from J.K. Rowling,” video essayist Princess Weekes argues that the art (and its franchise) can’t be separated from the artist when the artist profits off of it—and the artist uses said profit to fund anti-trans legislation.

(13) SOMEBODY’S SANDMAN. Meanwhile, Netflix seems to be depending on their viewers believing in the separability of Neil Gaiman from the series adapted from his work. “The Sandman: Season 2” releases in two parts next month, Volume 1 on July 3, followed by Volume 2 on July 24.

Animation World Network has completely bought in, going so far as to say, “The series is based on the beloved DC comic series by Neil Gaiman, Sam Keith, and Mike Dringenberg.” Beloved, no less.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/8/25 It’s Just A Scroll To The Left

Posted on May 8, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) FUTURE TENSE. April 2025’s Future Tense Fiction story is “The 28th,” by Mark Stasenko—a story about AI, bias, and the criminal justice system.

The response essay by legal scholar Elizabeth Joh, of the University of California Davis, is “Automated Justice?”

… Yet nowhere is the use of AI as fraught as it is in the criminal justice system, where adverse decisions lead to starkly life-altering outcomes. This isn’t a hypothetical future concern: criminal justice automation of varying degrees has already arrived. Local police agencies can turn to predictive technologies to help direct patrol resources and even generate police reports. A number of jurisdictions use risk assessment tools to decide who should be detained pretrial. Others permit judges to use algorithmic tools to determine criminal sentences. Parole boards can rely on automated assessments to identify who should be eligible for parole.

So AI is already present in the criminal justice system. But how far should it go?…

(2) INFLUENCE OF ‘CLOUD ATLAS’. Charlie Jane Anders explores the question “Has ‘Cloud Atlas’ Become a Genre?” at Happy Dancing. Here’s an excerpt:

…I also feel like Cloud Atlas has become a shorthand for “genre-hopping novel with literary aspirations.”

As I’ve said before, this is how genres happen: a book comes along that everybody loves so much, they want more of the same. And “more of the same” leads to the use of tropes or devices that are reminiscent of that influential work.

To find out more, I talked to four authors of recent books that seemed to bear a clear influence from Cloud Atlas. Here’s what they told me.

Conscious influence

“I conceived of Down in the Sea of Angels as Cloud Atlas meets X-Men,” says Khan Wong of his brand new novel. Down in the Sea of Angels is about Maida Sun, who can touch any object and see the stories of anyone who’s interacted with it in the past. Maida’s story in 2106 becomes intertwined with stories of a girl in a 1906 brothel and a tech worker in 2006. Wong describes it as “a time-hopping dystopian fantasy about psychic powers, liberation, and our interconnectedness through time.”

Wong says that he started out doing something more similar to Cloud Atlas’ format of six storylines spanning vast periods of time. But as he developed the novel, he “scaled it back, “both in terms of the span of time and the number of storylines and genres.”…

(3) ADULTING NEEDED. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Cli-Fi is becoming an established sub-genre of SF no least with books like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future. However most politicians simply don’t get it: some even deny it! Meanwhile scientists working in the area are suffering mentally. This is something of which I am acutely aware having worked in climate science for a number of years. So this week’s Nature has a very important editorial message on behalf of today’s youth….

“Adults should finally act like adults on climate change”:

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” This rebuke to the delegates at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York City in 2019 came from a tearful Greta Thunberg, founder of the children’s climate movement Fridays For Future. Then aged 16, she urged attendees to inject more urgency into keeping global warming to within 1.5 °C of pre-industrial levels. Since then, hundreds of thousands of children around the world have made similarly impassioned appeals to adults to heed the overwhelming evidence of the dangers of climate change. But so far, a grown-up sense of responsibility is lacking….

…Quantifying what climate change will mean for those being born now is an active topic of research. This week in Nature, one group of climate researchers reports findings (L. Grant et al. Nature 641, 374–379; 2025) that must surely make adults take more notice of what younger people are saying. Building on an earlier study (W. Thiery et al. Science 374,158–160; 2021), Luke Grant, a climate researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and his colleagues report that children and young people born in the present decade face exposure to heatwaves, crop failures, floods, droughts, wildfires and tropical cyclones, in a way that their parents and grandparents never did — and that this applies pretty much anywhere in the world.

Non-PDF version of the editorial with links to this week’s relevant research here.

(4) THE BIG THREE AND FRIENDS. Big Issue offers several examples in “These are all the times sci-fi writers predicted the future”.

…In a 1964 interview for the BBC’s Horizon program, another of the ‘Big Three’, Arthur C Clarke, said: “I’m perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand.” He expanded on this in his 1975 novel Imperial Earth, in which the protagonist explains the risks of telesurgery over a network experiencing high latency: “A half-second lag would not matter in conversation; but between a surgeon’s hand and eye, it might be fatal.”

Clarke’s vision became reality in (fittingly) 2001, when a New York-based surgeon removed the gall bladder of a patient in Strasbourg, 6,200km away. A medical robot called ZEUS cut the patient’s flesh; the surgeon’s movements reached ZEUS across a network designed to minimise lag times….

…Sometimes one sees a prediction coming true in real time, and asks: will we heed the warnings SF gave us? Jack Williamson’s 1947 novelette With Folded Hands tells of a new type of robot following a Prime Directive: “to serve and obey and guard men from harm”. Since the robots work for free, soon no one has a job. It gets worse. The robots take the “guard men from harm” directive too literally.

They ensure a person can’t do anything remotely dangerous. Before long, humans can do nothing except sit… with folded hands. We should not fear this scenario. But one can easily imagine a world in which creatives – writers, painters, musicians, photographers – twiddle their thumbs while AI spews out soulless content on demand.

Writers such as Williamson saw the threat eight decades ago. Don’t complain we’ve had no time to prepare.

(5) THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING GAMING NEWS SCENE. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s “Pushing Buttons” newsletter laments further loss of authenticity in video games journalism: “When video games journalism eats itself, we all lose out”.

Last week was a bad one for video games journalism. Two key contributors to the veteran site Giant Bomb, Jeff Grubb and Mike Minotti, have announced their departure after a recent podcast was taken down. The 888th episode of the Giant Bombcast reportedly featured a section lampooning new brand guidelinesissued to staff and is no longer available online. Later this week, it was announced that major US site Polygon was being sold to Valnet, owner of the ScreenRant and GameRant brands, resulting in a swathe of job losses. This follows ReedPop’s sale, in 2024, of four high-profile UK-based sites – Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, Rock Paper Shotgun and VG247 – to IGN Entertainment, owned by Ziff Davis, which also resulted in redundancies.

It’s sad how these long-standing sites, each with vast audiences and sturdy reputations, have been traded and chopped up like commodities. On selling Polygon, Vox CEO Jim Bankoff said in a statement: “This transaction will enable us to focus our energies and investment resources in other priority areas of growth across our portfolio.” It felt gross, to be honest, to see this decade-old bastion of progressive video games writing being reduced to an asset ripe for off-loading. Of its purchase Valnet said: “Polygon is poised to reach new editorial heights through focused investment and innovation.” Quite how it will do that with a significantly reduced staff is anyone’s guess….

(6) THIRD (SEASON) FOUNDATION. Gizmodo analyzes the Season 3 teaser: “Foundation Season 3 Shares a First Look for Lee Pace Fans (and Everyone Else)”. Returns on Apple TV+ on July 11.

…Here’s the official description for the season: “Set 152 years after the events of season two, the Foundation has become increasingly established far beyond its humble beginnings while the Cleonic Dynasty’s Empire has dwindled. As both of these galactic powers forge an uneasy alliance, a threat to the entire galaxy appears in the fearsome form of a warlord known as ‘The Mule’ whose sights are set on ruling the universe by use of physical and military force, as well as mind control. It’s anyone’s guess who will win, who will lose, who will live and who will die as Hari Seldon, Gaal Dornick, the Cleons, and Demerzel play a potentially deadly game of intergalactic chess.”…

(7) NOTES FROM BEAR MCCREARY. “‘The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power’ Composer Bear McCreary On ‘Limitless Palette’ Of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work & ‘Pushing Boundaries’ For Season 3” at Deadline.

…With Season 2 and the rise of Sauron, McCreary was excited to musically explore parts of Tolkien’s world that haven’t been adapted to screen. “We go to this part of the map that no adaptation has ever done before, the lands of Rhûn, and I’ve always wanted to write for the Bulgarian women’s choir,” says McCreary. “They are singing in a language Tolkien himself devised, so they had to learn it phonetically. But they brought all the beautiful, unique things that come with that kind of music.”…

(8) TOMORROW PRIZE CEREMONY. The Omega Sci-Fi Project’s “Tomorrow Prize & The Green Feather Award: Celebrity Readings & Honors” will be held on Saturday, May 17, from 4:00-6:00 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. Free registration at the link.

Our line-up of incredible guest stars include:

Nana Visitor from Star Trek: Deep Space, Tim Russ from Star Trek: Voyager, Isabella Gomez from One Day at a Time, Marcelo Tubert from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Amy Tolsky from Jury Duty, and Rico E. Anderson from Star Trek: Renegades.

Students winners and honorees of the Omega Sci-Fi Project’s awards are publicly recognized at the incredible May culminating event, where celebrity actors perform dramatic readings of finalists’ stories that you won’t want to miss!

“The young writers are offered a wonderful chance at recognition for their creative work through the awards process. Often, students don’t even realize that creative writing is a meaningful way for them to explore a world they struggle to understand. That is, until they get to try it!” says Bodin Adler, a participating teacher from Hollywood High School.

This event culminates a season of classroom workshops led by trained writers and literary enthusiasts and are free to any educator who wishes to participate. Within these workshops, students get to explore the development, writing, and editing processes for crafting a short science fiction story, preparing them to submit their original work to The Tomorrow Prize or The Green Feather Award, the two competitions offered under the Omega Sci-Fi Project umbrella.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Sir Harry Paget Flashman VC, KCB, KCIE, 1822 – 1915

I grant he’s not even genre adjacent, but I’ll give you a tale in a minute that makes it relevant to us. Harry Flashman appears in a series of twelve George MacDonald Fraser’s books collectively known as The Flashman Papers. If Flashman had a birthday, the author says it would have been earlier this week, May 5.

The first novel, Flashman, was published in 1969 and many readers here in the States thought it was a work of non-fiction. He’s certainly not the only fictional that readers have assumed was real. Or wished was so. Who would you would want to be?

The books center on the exploits of Harry Flashman. He is a cowardly British soldier, rake and just generally disreputable character who is placed in a series of real historical incidents between 1839 and 1894. It must be noted that despite his cowardice and his attempts to flee danger whenever possible, he becomes a decorated war hero and rises to the rank of brigadier-general.

There is a Chumbawamba song, “Hanging on the Old Barb Wire”, which has the lyric

If you want to find the general
I know where he is
He’s pinning another medal on his chest
I saw him, I saw him
Pinning another medal on his chest
Pinning another medal on his chest

(It’s a variant of a Great War song of the same name. As the band notes on their English Rebel Songs 1381–1914 LP, “Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire was written by soldiers in the trenches in the first world war. Designed to be sung whilst marching the song is one of many showing the dissent and disgust at the way war perpetuates the inequalities of rich and poor—those with the money give the orders, those without money face the guns.”)

Royal Flash, the 1975 British film, is based upon the second Flashman novel of the same name. It stars a thirty-two year old Malcolm McDowell as Flashman. It was not well received as The Observer noted it left them “breathless not so much with enchantment as with boredom”. However audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a rating of sixty-four percent which isn’t bad at all.

Here’s the trailer with a really funny narrator. As always, the standard warming about linking to copies of the film which is up on YouTube apply. You really don’t want to be defenestrated, do you? It can be rather painful or worse.

Now for that genre connection that mentioned much earlier. No, I didn’t forget…

Kage Baker didn’t actually write a Flashman novel, though we talked several times about her doing so, but the bones of one appeared in one of her novels as her sister Kathleen told me here: “Most of her notes she used in her last novel, Not Less Than Gods, which she wrote while she was sick, and that was published as she was dying. As far as I can tell, Kage and I were the only people in the world who liked it. A lot of it was panned because the reviewers didn’t get most of the satire, or hated Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, or both. Anyway, even if you personally disliked the book, I think you can see the bones of a Flashman novel there.”

Now the Green Man reviewer also liked it though he had a lump in his throat as Kage had just died as he wrote his review.

I’m pleased to say the entire series is available in hardcover, trade paperback, epub and audiobook. As audiobooks, the narration as done by David Chase captures the character extraordinarily well.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Non Sequitur offers Stone Age art criticism.
Rhymes with Orange gives an endorsement.
The Other Coast brings in a new detector.
Tom Gauld gives fans a choice of bookshops.

(11) SFF TO STREAM NOW. “’Godzilla Minus One’ and Other Science Fiction Movies to Stream” – recommendations from the New York Times. (Link bypasses paywall.) Here’s one of their picks.

‘Alienoid: Return to the Future’

Can’t decide if you want to watch a movie involving tentacled aliens or one with a sorcerer? Wire fu or time travel? How about ominous spaceships? The Korean director Choi Dong-hoon has you covered with his two-part “Alienoid” epic, which includes all of these elements. The second installment kicks off with a serviceable recap so newcomers can jump in, but having seen its predecessor, “Alienoid” (2022), makes the overall experience more enjoyable.

The madcap action goes back and forth between the 14th century and 2022 Seoul, when an alien menace going by the Controller is threatening to kill the entire population by unleashing a lethal gas. The key to defeat the Controller is in the past and involves a weapon called the Divine Blade. Even more important are the actions of a ragtag team that includes the spunky Ean (Kim Tae-ri, from “Space Sweepers”) and her possible love interest, Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol). Choi keeps up a steady pace, peppered with goofy humor and surreal touches, as when Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” plays during a big moment. Narrative coherence is an afterthought in the “Alienoid” universe so it’s best to go with whatever wackadoo scenes the movies throw at you: What matters here is pure fun, and this installment delivers.

(12) SHAUN THE SHEEP 3. [Item by Steven French.] Who could resist a trip to Mossy Bottom?! “Aardman announces third Shaun the Sheep movie: The Beast of Mossy Bottom” – details in the Guardian.

A Halloween-themed third Shaun the Sheep film is in the works from Aardman Animations, following hot on the heels of the success of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

“Expect smashed pumpkins, wayward science, and a wild hairy beast,” said Sarah Cox, chief creative director of Aardman, about the film, which launches international sales via studio StudioCanal at Cannes next week, but has already been acquired by Sky for UK distribution.

“Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom sees the residents of Mossy Bottom Farm looking forward to Halloween – until the clumsy farmer trashes the flock’s beloved pumpkin patch!” runs a synopsis for the film.

“When Shaun turns mad scientist to fix the problem, things rapidly spiral out of control … With the farmer missing and a wild beast roaming the woods of Mossingham, all the ingredients are in place for a monstrously fun family adventure.”

(13) LEGO AND LUNAR OUTPOST PARTNERSHIP. “Lego and Lunar Outpost to roll out ‘Moon Rover Space Vehicle’ in August” promises CollectSPACE.

The United States’ first teleoperated rover to reach the moon’s surface is rolling out as a Lego model this summer, together with two futuristic vehicles inspired by real-life robotic lunar explorers.

The new Lunar Outpost Moon Rover Space Vehicle is scheduled for release on Aug. 1, as part of Lego’s Technic line of advanced building kits. The $99.99 set is the result of a collaboration between the Danish toymaker and Lunar Outpost, a Colorado-based company specializing in lunar surface mobility, commercial space robotics and space resources.

“Inspired by real-life Lunar Outpost vehicles enabling humanity’s return to the moon, this Lego Technic Lunar Outpost Moon Rover Space Vehicle comes with a moon rover, mining rover and MAPP rover to inspire endless journeys of exploration,” reads the set’s description on Lego’s website.

The MAPP, or Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, was the key part of Lunar Outpost’s Lunar Voyage 1 mission, which on March 6 arrived on the moon, making history. It would have made even more, had the commercial lander that delivered MAPP there not have immediately tipped over, trapping the rover inside its garage. It never had the chance to actually rove anywhere….

(14) ONE LAST LANDING ON THE GLOBE THAT GAVE IT BIRTH. “53-Year-Old Soviet Spacecraft Will Plummet Back to Earth This Week” reports Gizmodo.

Kosmos 482 has been trapped in Earth’s orbit for 53 years but its wandering journey is coming to an end. The failed Venus mission is expected to reenter through the atmosphere in a dramatic fall toward its home planet, where it may remain intact or scatter its bits across a still unknown location on either side of the equator.

The Soviet-era spacecraft will plunge through Earth’s atmosphere sometime between May 8 to 12. As of now, the exact location of where Kosmos 482 will crash-land on Earth is still unknown, with a preliminary estimate that stretches across large parts of the world on either side of the equator. It’s also unclear whether the spacecraft will remain in one piece or if it will break apart during reentry, raining down bits of debris.

Kosmos 482 launched on March 31, 1972 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in what is know Kazakhstan. The mission was an attempt by the Soviet space program to reach Venus, but it failed to gain enough velocity to enter a transfer trajectory toward the scorching hot planet….

(15) DONE BY DAYLIGHT. “Lunar laser: China makes 1st daytime laser-ranging measurement from Earth to the moon” – Space has the story.

China has achieved a milestone feat, making the first-ever laser ranging measurement from Earth to the moon during the daytime.

Researchers at Yunnan Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) used an infrared lunar laser ranging system of a recently upgraded 1.2-meter (3.9 feet) telescope to ping a small laser retroreflector on the Tiandu 1 satellite orbiting the moon.

Laser ranging over lunar distances is challenging, requiring sending a high-power, precise beam over 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) to hit a small corner retroreflector, which bounces the laser pulse straight back where it came from. The return signal then needs to be picked up by a telescope using ultra-sensitive detectors. Doing this in the daytime brings the added challenge of massive background “noise” from the sun….

(16) SQUAREPANTS TREK BLOOPERS. Animation Magazine is there when “Paramount+ Voyages Behind the Scenes of Crossover Spot ‘Patrick Starship Enterprise’”.

Following the debut of its new Star Trek: Strange New Worlds X SpongeBob SquarePants promo video (which you can watch here), Paramount+ has dropped a behind-the-scenes blooper reel full of illogical, astro-nautical amusement.

Starring Strange New Worlds cast members Ethan Peck (Spock), Anson Mount (Christopher Pike) and Celia Rose-Gooding (Nyota Uhura), the new video pokes fun at the making of the short and features some funny moments where we see the creative stand-in solutions for the animated characters, which include SpongeBob, Sandy and Mr. Krabs…

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

Pixel Scroll 3/31/25 Are Pixels Beyond Count Or Not?

Posted on March 31, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) WILE E.’S DAY. We’ll get to see it after all: “Warner Bros Completes Sale Of ‘Coyote Vs. Acme’ To Ketchup” reports Deadline.

Ketchup Entertainment today confirmed their completed deal for worldwide rights to the live-action/animated hybrid film that brings Looney Tunes character Wile E. Coyote to the big screen. We had the deal pegged in the $50M range and the film is expected to get a theatrical release in 2026….

….The film is based on the Looney Tunes characters and the New Yorker humor article “Coyote v. Acme” by Ian Frazier.

Will Forte, John Cena, Lana Condor and Tone Bell star in the movie, which follows Wile E. Coyote, who, after Acme products fail him one too many times in his dogged pursuit of the Roadrunner, decides to hire a billboard lawyer to sue the Acme Corporation. The case pits Wile E. and his lawyer (Forte) against the latter’s intimidating former boss (Cena), but a growing friendship between man and cartoon stokes their determination to win….

(2) #30#. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) has announced that the organization is shutting down. They offer a lengthy explanation in “The State of NaNoWriMo – A Community Update – March 2025” on YouTube.

We come to you today with a major operational update and important news about the future of the organization and we encourage you to listen to it in its entirety. This video shares real data and information that the organization has not discussed previously. It also contains some important acknowledgments and information about the logistics of our next steps.

This is the aftermath of a controversy that erupted last September when they issued an equivocal statement about using AI – when it did not go unnoticed that NaNoWriMo is sponsored by ProWritingAid, a writing app that advertises AI-powered technology, including text rewrites – and Writers Board members Daniel Jose Older, Cass Morris, and Rebecca Kim Wells immediately resigned.

(3) KICKSTARTER FOR LONG LIST ANTHOLOGY 9. [Item by Ziv Wities.] The Long List Anthology series collects stories that show up on the Hugo Award finalist tally, based on the official report of the top fifteen finishers in each Hugo category.

Long List Anthology Volume 9 is drawn from the Long List of the 2024 Hugo Awards. This volume is co-edited by David Steffen, Chelle Parker, and Hal Y. Zhang, with original cover art by Evelyne Park. The new volume includes stories by genre favorites, new voices, and three translations of stories originally published in Chinese — including one translation which is original to the LLA.

Join the Kickstarter here: “The Long List Anthology Volume 9 by David Steffen”.

(4) SOCIETY OF ILLUSTRATORS 2025 HOF INDUCTEES. The Society of Illustrators have announced the 2025 Hall of Fame recipients, contemporary artists Rudy Gutierrez, Kadir Nelson, and Tim O’Brien, and posthumous honorees Peter Arno, Frank R. Paul, and Marie Severin. The Society’s Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony will be held on Thursday, October 9.

Here is what the press release says about artists of genre interest Paul and Severin.

Art credit: Frank R. Paul, Stories of the Stars: Andromeda, circa 1950s. Gouache and ink on board.

Frank R. Paul (1884 – 1963) was a pioneering American illustrator best known for shaping the visual language of science fiction during the early 20th century. His bold, visionary artwork graced the covers of seminal pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Science Wonder Stories, and Fantastic Adventures, introducing readers to a vibrant, imaginative future filled with spaceships, robots, and alien worlds. Trained in mechanical drafting and architecture, Paul brought an unmatched level of technical precision and grandeur to his work, helping to define the aesthetic of speculative fiction long before the rise of popular sci-fi cinema. In an era before comic books or concept art departments, Paul created entire worlds from scratch, often illustrating full-color covers, interior black-and-white pieces, and even full spreads for each issue. Over the course of his career, he illustrated thousands of works and played a foundational role in inspiring generations of artists, writers, and filmmakers. He is widely regarded as the first major science fiction artist, and his influence is still seen in visual media today. Frank R. Paul was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009 for his trailblazing contributions to the genre.

Art credit: Marie Severin (interior pencils), Marvel Spotlight No. 32, Marvel Comics, February 1977. Ink and color on paper.

Marie Severin (1929 – 2018) was a legendary comic book artist and colorist whose work helped define the visual identity of both EC Comics and Marvel Comics throughout the mid-20th century. Beginning her career as a colorist at EC in the 1950s, she quickly earned recognition for her keen sense of composition, storytelling, and humor, eventually moving into penciling and inking as one of the few prominent female artists in the male-dominated industry of the Silver Age. At Marvel, she co-created iconic characters such as the Living Tribunal and worked on titles including Doctor Strange, The Hulk, Sub-Mariner, Iron Man, and Not Brand Echh, a satirical series that showcased her sharp comedic sensibility. Known affectionately as “Mirthful Marie” among peers, Severin brought a distinctive style that blended expressive characters with dynamic layouts, all while mastering the art of visual pacing. She had a unique ability to inject personality and emotion into every panel, making even the most fantastical scenarios feel grounded and human. Her behind-the-scenes influence also extended to production and design, contributing to Marvel’s overall visual tone during a crucial period of expansion and experimentation.

Her versatility as both a humorist and dramatic artist made her an invaluable creative force in every genre she touched—whether superheroes, horror, fantasy, or comedy. Severin was admired not only for her technical skill but also for her warmth, wit, and generosity within the comics community. In 2001, she was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, and her legacy continues to inspire comic artists around the world. Marie Severin remains one of the most important and beloved figures in the history of American comics.

(5) BLACK MIRROR S7 EPISODE BRIEFING. “’Black Mirror’ Season 7 Trailer and Episode Details Revealed” by The Hollywood Reporter.

Such details include cast, synopsis, run time and credits for each standalone saga, which includes the first-ever Black Mirror sequel, for USS Callister, and a callback episode to Netflix’s first-ever interactive feature with Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

(6) JAMESON QUINN DIES. Jameson Quinn was killed when he fell off a cliff in Guatemala on March 23. His death was announced by his mother on Bluesky. According to his son it happened when Quinn was trying to rescue a dog.

Quinn is best known to science fiction fans for helping to reform the Hugo Award nominating system in the wake of the Sad/Rabid Puppies block voting episodes of 2013-2017. He designed the EPH (E Pluribus Hugo) voting method, and helped get it adopted by the World Science Fiction Society for use in nominations for the Hugo awards. He was an active participant on Making Light, and contributed articles to File 770 and also led comment discussions about the initiative here.

Quinn’s other noteworthy accomplishments in voting theory and/or voting reform included co-organizing and attending the British Colombia Symposium on Proportional Representation in 2018 (sponsored by the Center for Election Science), and popularizing the term “Voter Satisfaction Efficiency” (VSE).

A Harvard grad school blog profile about Jameson featured his contribution to EPH as an example of his work: “A Better Way to Vote”.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novel

It’s the seventy-fourth anniversary of the first publication of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation as a novel. So let’s tell the history of the novel.

Foundation was first published as a single book by Gnome Press. It has “The Psychohistorians”, “The Encyclopedists” “The Mayors”, “The Traders” and “The Merchant Princes”. “The Encyclopedists” and “The Mayors” were novelettes, the others are short stories. As noted before, each was in Astounding Science Fiction.

As you know, it is now streaming as a series as Apple+.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal expects too much from the past.
Bizarro features love language.
Brewster Rockit delivers a short history of computers.
Dinosaur Comics is in rapture about the value of what’s new.
Reality Check plays mind games.

(9) THE INSIDE STORY. “Rare Merlin and King Arthur text found hidden in binding of medieval book” – Popular Science tells how it was done.

Variations on the classic Merlin and King Arthur legends span hundreds, if not thousands, of retellings. Many are documented within handwritten medieval manuscripts dating back over a millenia—but some editions are far rarer than others. For example, less than 40 copies are known to exist of a once-popular sequel series, the Suite Vulgate du Merlin. In 2019, researchers at the University of Cambridge discovered fragments of one more copy in their collections, tucked inside the recycled binding of a wealthy family’s property record from the 16th century. But at the time of discovery, the text was impossible to read.

Now after years of painstaking collaborative work with the university’s Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory (CHIL), archivists have finally been able to peer inside the obscured texts—without ever needing to physically handle the long-lost pages.

Experts combined multiple conservation tools and techniques to construct a 3D model of the fragments. These included multispectral imaging (MSI), which creates high-resolution images by scanning an artifact with wavelengths ranging from ultraviolet to infrared light. After borrowing X-ray and CT machines from Cambridge’s zoology department, the team then examined the parchment layers to map unseen binding structures without the need to deconstruct the delicate material. CT scanning allowed researchers to examine how the pages were stitched together using thin strips of similar parchment.

Some of the Merlin texts were unreadable due to being hidden under folds or stitching, so the team also needed to amass hundreds of images from every angle using an array of magnets, prisms, mirrors, and other tools. The combined result is a high-definition, digitized 3D model of the entire relic that unfolds, allowing experts to analyze it as though reviewing the physical manuscript itself.

The results revealed not just a part of Suite Vulgate du Merlin, but insights into the time period in which it existed. Experts now believe the sections originally belonged to a shortened edition of the tale. Given small typographical errors as well as the red and blue ink used in its handwritten decorated initials, historians traced its origins to sometime between 1275–1315 CE…

(10) TIME FOR A SNACK. Invasion ’53, written by Danielle Weinberg,is making the rounds of film festivals. View the trailer at the link.

Invasion ’53, a 10-minute short film about a man-eating alien who crashes a suburban cocktail party. The movie stars Jeffrey Combs (Re-Animator, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) and was produced with Kurt Uebersax (Elf-Man, America’s Most Wanted).

(11) FROM AN OLD FAMILIAR SCORE. “What gave life on Earth its spark? Scientists recreating a decades-old experiment offer a new clue” says CNN.

In the 1931 movie “Frankenstein,” Dr. Henry Frankenstein howling his triumph was an electrifying moment in more ways than one. As massive bolts of lightning and energy crackled, Frankenstein’s monster stirred on a laboratory table, its corpse brought to life by the power of electricity.

Electrical energy may also have sparked the beginnings of life on Earth billions of years ago, though with a bit less scenery-chewing than that classic film scene.

Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and the oldest direct fossil evidence of ancient life — stromatolites, or microscopic organisms preserved in layers known as microbial mats — is about 3.5 billion years old. However, some scientists suspect life originated even earlier, emerging from accumulated organic molecules in primitive bodies of water, a mixture sometimes referred to as primordial soup.

But where did that organic material come from in the first place? Researchers decades ago proposed that lightning caused chemical reactions in ancient Earth’s oceans and spontaneously produced the organic molecules.

Now, new research published March 14 in the journal Science Advances suggests that fizzes of barely visible “microlightning,” generated between charged droplets of water mist, could have been potent enough to cook up amino acids from inorganic material. Amino acids — organic molecules that combine to form proteins — are life’s most basic building blocks and would have been the first step toward the evolution of life….

(12) VIDEO FROM ANCIENT DAYS. A zillion years ago, Vincent Price was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to promote Theatre of Blood, in which he murders all the critics who fail to praise his Shakespearean ham acting. (How long ago was this? Sitting next to him was the singer Mama Cass Elliot, who obviously wasn’t dead yet…!)

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

Pixel Scroll 2/25/25 General Systems Vehicle Strange Women Lying About In Ponds Distributing Swords Is No Basis For A System Of Government

Posted on February 25, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) IAIN M. BANKS TV ADAPTATION. “’Consider Phlebas’ Series Set At Amazon From Charles Yu & Chloé Zhao” reports Deadline.

Amazon MGM Studios is developing science fiction TV series Consider Phlebas. It is an adaptation of the novel by Iain M Banks, the first in the late Scottish author’s classic 10-book Culture book series about an interstellar post-scarcity society.

Interior Chinatown creator Charles Yu is writing and executive producing. The potential series also is executive produced by Nomadland Oscar winner Chloé Zhao through her production company Books of Shadows, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner for Plan B Entertainment as well as Adele Banks.

In Consider Phlebas, while war rages between the utopian Culture and the Idiran Empire, a Culture Ship AI “Mind” takes refuge on a forbidden planet. Both Horza, a shape-shifting mercenary working for the Idirans, and Balveda, a “Special Circumstances” Culture agent, have been tasked with retrieving it to tip the balance in a galaxy-spanning conflict. Consider Phlebas pits sentience against AI in an epic and bloody quest across the cosmos….

(2) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Episode 20 of Scott Edelman’s Why Not Say What Happened? podcast, “The Barry Smith Comic Book Which Caused Me to Disobey My Parents”, has all the burning bridges that have fallen after him….

In my latest look back at the comics field of the ’70s, I share about the home away from home Phil Seuling built for fandom which earned his recent much-deserved accolade, whether the Ethics columns I wrote for The Comics Journal during the ’80s burned any bridges (and if I even cared those bridges were on fire), the kung fu comic book series I’d completely forgotten I’d pitched to Marvel, why my job in the Bullpen stunned writer/editor/artist Bob Budiansky, the Barry Smith Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. comic which caused me to disobey my parents, my initial fears I might not last long enough at Marvel to be eligible to receive unemployment benefits if I were fired, and much more.

The whole series can be downloaded from a variety of platforms at this link.

The issue of Nick Fury I wasn’t supposed to buy.

(3) GALLIFREY ONE WINDING DOWN. LA’s legendary Doctor Who convention Gallifrey One will end its run in 2028. But another LA event in the same spirit will keep the torch burning into the future. “Gallifrey One To Conclude in 2028… But The Moment Has Been Prepared For” writes Shaun Lyon.

It was with a heavy heart that we announced on February 16, 2025, at the end of this year’s convention Closing Ceremonies, that Gallifrey One will be coming to an end in 2028, after three more events over the next three years. Our February 2028 convention will conclude an unprecedented, sometimes inexplicable and definitely historic 38-year run as the world’s largest and longest-running annual Doctor Who fan event….

…Those of us who have been on this journey for decades have earned the right to go out on our own terms. We aren’t interested in passing along our name or reputation to someone else, someone untested, who might squander the good will we engendered in the fan community. We don’t ever want Gallifrey One to be remembered as the convention that didn’t know when to quit, or is looked back upon with regret: it was great, until it wasn’t.

Most importantly, we want it to be a testament to all the people who brought it forward, from the launch in January 1989 to our first convention in May 1990, through decades of memories and connections (and even a year without one, thank you COVID) until today, when it’s the destination so many people look forward to. So many friendships have come about through the convention. People have met and married through Gallifrey One; babies have grown up with their families attending. And along the way, we’ve also lost so many friends through the passage of time; friends gone, but never forgotten.

We also gave our fandom three years’ notice. We didn’t want to spring this on all of you at the last minute. Many of our former attendees we know would love to come back again before we’re done. Many others out there who dream of attending one day, now have three years to plan if they want to make it in time. We didn’t have to do it, and we certainly didn’t do it to make any of you panic; this was a gift to our dedicated fan base, so that you know you’re being looked after and don’t need to think about the future… quite yet.

We don’t want the fandom that we’ve engendered here for so long, the friendships and families and memories we’ve shared, to disappear. That is why we are confidently moving forward with our plans.

We still have three more events to bring you before we close the book. In 2026, we will proudly present our thirty-sixth convention, The 36 Legends of Gallifrey One: Stories Untold on February 6-8 due to the NBA All Star Game on our regular weekend. (More details about that convention on the wrap-up article & 2026 preview also posted today.) In 2027, our thirty-seventh convention (already named, and we will share it next year) will also be a week or two after our regular weekend (the Super Bowl returns to LA that month). And finally, in 2028, we’ll present the last Gallifrey One convention: a last hurrah and final reunion as ourselves, with a convention name our former chairperson came up with more than thirty years ago….

…In discussing the end of Gallifrey One in 2028 with Jason [Joiner] and Paul [Jones], it became apparent to us that the best opportunity to continue the spirit of our convention was with them: Showmasters Events has the financial strength to run a Doctor Who show here, run in a manner resembling much of Gallifrey One — but not entirely. Put simply, they don’t want Gallifrey One’s fan community to disappear after 2028 any more than we do. And they’ve committed to running a show, while not a non-profit event like Gallifrey One, that operates much like it does today. They have the contacts we have, and most importantly, the capital to put up (this type of event is expensive, and everyone gets paid up front these days, including the hotel and the guests.) Some of Gallifrey One’s team, as well as some guests and attendees, have already committed to helping them through the transition, so that programming operates in much the same way (discussion panels, for instance), the photos and autographs continue, your favorite dealers can continue to vend, and so forth.

We also asked them not to use the Gallifrey One name, as that brand — that legacy — retires with us; they were completely in agreement that this would be something new, but still for the fans….

(4) HOW TO DONATE TO THE LEEPER SCHOLARSHIP FUND. [Item by Evelyn C. Leeper.] People have asked more specifically how to donate to the Leeper Mathematics Scholarship.

The main page is <https://www.umassfoundation.org>, but the specific page is:

<https://minutefund.uma-foundation.org/project/29554/donate?fund_id=GEN%20SCH>

Under the Fund Designation field, select “Other” from the very bottom of the list. This will open a text box where you can write in any fund/designation you would like to support, in this case “Leeper Mathematics Scholarship”.

At the bottom of the page, you can indicate who it is “In Memory Of”.

(5) WENDY AND RICHARD PINI MAKE MASSIVE DONATION. “ElfQuest Creators Donate $500,000 To Columbia University Comics Archive” reports Forbes.

Wendy and Richard Pini, the couple behind the long-running ElfQuest independent comics series, are donating $500,000 to Columbia University to endow and conserve the school library’s growing collection of comics, graphic novels and related prose works.

“The money will go for acquisitions and stewardship for circulating and archival collections,” said Karen Green, the curator for comics and cartoons within Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. “Stewardship is a really all-embracing and umbrella term, covering digitization, preservation, anything to make sure things are accessible safely. There was a big ‘et cetera’ to the grant.”…

…Thus, in 2012, at San Diego Comic-Con, where Wendy was making one of her regular appearances, Green approached the Pinis with a compelling question: “Would you consider allowing us to preserve your legacy?”

A year later, the couple had turned over some 37 linear feet of boxes of ElfQuest-related material, including more than 2,000 of Wendy Pini’s hand-drawn, hand-painted storyboards from 1978 through about 1990….

(6) OH CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN. With David S. Goyer’s departure from Foundation, Inverse suspects “The Most Ambitious Sci-Fi Epic on TV Could Be In Big Trouble”.

In the sprawling future depicted by Foundation, everyone has pretty much forgotten about the planet Earth. But over several generations can remember the predictions of one man: Hari Seldon. Played by Jared Harris in the first two seasons of Foundation, the character of Seldon is able to see the twists and turns of the future history of the human Empire through a process called psychohistory. But even the study of psychohistory couldn’t have predicted what’s happening to Foundation after its upcoming third season. Because now, the show’s real-life Hari Seldon — creator David S. Goyer — is leaving the show, along with the existing writing staff.

In short, after the next season of Foundation, the literal foundation for the show’s future is very unclear.

As revealed in a newsletter from Goyer’s official site, and reproduced in its entirety on the Foundation subreddit, the writer and producer is leaving taking a massive step back from the show. Here’s what he said:

“I know a lot of you have been waiting for an update. Season 3 will likely be dropping this summer, premiere date TBD. We finally get to the Mule’s story. Expect a few surprises along the way – even for those of you who’ve read the original trilogy.

“To set the record straight, I did decide to step back from the show. S3 will be the last season with my day-to-day involvement, along with most of my fellow directors and writers. I adore the cast and it was a difficult decision. The reasons for my leaving are complicated and were certainly exacerbated by strike-related issues. The biggest reason is that I was forced to spend a ton of time in Europe, away from my family – and after 5 ½ years, it was becoming a drag on my soul. That said, I do believe Apple will green-light S4. Best of luck to the next creative team.”…

(7) ALSO HEADING FOR THE EXIT. There’s a crucial turnover coming at Lucasfilm, too: “Star Wars Succession: Who Will Replace Kathleen Kennedy?” asks The Hollywood Reporter.

…But who should Disney choose to inspire greatness in the next generation of Star Wars creatives now that longtime Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy is retiring later this year?

The job hunt will be like nothing before in Lucasfilm history. Star Wars creator George Lucas hand picked Kennedy in 2012 to run the company before selling his ownership stake to Disney, which elected to keep her in place. Now, for the first time, Disney will pick somebody new to lead its galaxy far, far away.

During her tenure, Kennedy guided the Star Wars brand across many celebrated achievements (such as the franchise’s return to theaters with The Force Awakens and its successful shift to TV with The Mandalorian). She has also been often criticized for the franchise’s many missteps (including some lackluster movies and shows, and overseeing numerous announced-and-discarded projects). The executive — along with Disney in general — has also often been targeted by franchise’s fandom for diverse casting moves and a perceived “woke” agenda (a perception that Disney boss Bob Iger has been eager to move past)….

(8) ROBERTO ORCI (1973-2025). Robert Orci, a writer-producer with credits on the Star Trek, Xena, Hercules, and Transformers franchises, died February 25. Deadline paid tribute: “Roberto Orci Dead: ‘Star Trek’, ‘Transformers’ Writer-Producer Was 51”.

Roberto “Bob” Gaston Orci, a writer-producer who worked on some of the biggest action-adventure and sci-fi movies and television shows from the first two decades of the century, died at his home in Los Angeles today, Feb. 25, after a battle with kidney disease. He was 51.

Born and raised in Mexico City, Orci moved to the United States with his family when he was 10. He started off as a writer-producer on Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and for most of his career was partnered with Alex Kurtzman.

Orci was co-writer/producer on the 2009 Star Trek movie reboot and its two sequels as well as on the 2007 Transformers movie and the 2009 followup Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Orci’s feature credits also include writing work on Mission Impossible III and The Legend Of Zorro and producing on the Now You See Me franchise, The Proposal, Eagle Eye, The Mummy as well as The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which he also co-wrote….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 25, 1971 — Sean Astin, 54.

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?

Did you know that a spin-off of the original series was in development first several years now? More promisingly, on October 10, 2024, it was announced that a third spin-off will feature Stuart Bloom, Denise, and Bert Kibbler, with Kevin Sussman, Lauren Lapkus, and Brian Posehn reprising their roles.

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

Ray Bradbury and Sean Astin in 2009. Photo by John King Tarpinian.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Dinosaur Comics discusses phones in sf.
Glasbergen Comics sends back a different Terminator.
Rubes shows a bedtime reader who made the right choice.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal sends a rescue message.
Shoe plays the latest version of a country song.
The Contrarian takes us to the Eye of Sauron.

(11) MARVEL CINEMATIC FEUD. Deadline quoted Rob Liefeld’s latest salvo: “’Deadpool’ Creator Calls For Marvel’s Kevin Feige To ‘Get Off Mound’ After ‘Captain America’s Box Office Crash”. (In case you’ve forgotten, Liefeld made news at the time of the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere in 2024 saying he was ignored by Feige on the red carpet and found out his family was not invited to the afterparty.)

The post-Avengers: Endgame era at the box office has been challenging for Marvel, with only a few exceptions such as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Deadpool & Wolverine.

Box office results for the second weekend of Captain America: Brave New World showed a 68% drop week-to-week, positioning it as the third-most significant drop in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The two films that fared worse were The Marvels, with a 78% dropoff, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania at 68%.

Following the report of Brave New World’s results, Liefeld took to X (formerly Twitter) and posted: “Get Feige off the mound. He’s spent.”

Liefeld quoted all the Marvel films that have dropped more than 60% at the box office in its second weekend, saying in another X post that the “MCU is on an extended downside.”

“This is beyond a trend, it’s become the norm,” Liefeld said. “If this was sports, Feige would be removed. Marvel brand is like Dodgers, Lakers, Yankees, Celtics, coaches that win championships are removed a year later when the results are disappointing.”

In another X post he added, “8 movies crash over the last 3 years. Don’t we want better movies? You get the curiosity crowd then plunge.”…

(12) WARNER BROS. SQUEEZES ITS GAME BUSINESS. “Wonder Woman Video Game Canceled at Warner Bros., Studio Shut Down” – The Hollywood Reporter lists the casualties.

Warner Bros. Discovery is restructuring its video game division and shutting down three of its studios as it refocuses its efforts on some core intellectual property.

In connection with the restructuring, the company also said that it is ending development of its Wonder Woman game, which it first announced back in 2021. Instead, the company will focus on “building the best games possible with our key franchises -– Harry Potter, Mortal Kombat, DC and Game of Thrones,” per a Warner Bros. Games spokesperson.

The spokesperson added that three of the company’s game studios: Monolith Productions, Player First Games and Warner Bros. Games San Diego, will shut down amid the changes. Monolith had been developing the Wonder Woman game….

(13) HERE’S MY NUMBER AND A DIME. [Item by Steven French.] “Riki don’t lose that number …!” “If you’re going to call aliens, use this number” recommends Phys.org.

Let’s dive into one of those cosmic curiosities that’s bound to blow your mind: how we might chat with aliens. And no, I’m not talking about elaborate coded messages or flashy signals. We’re talking about something incredibly fundamental—21 cm radiation.

If you’re planning on having a conversation across the vastness of space, using light waves (electromagnetic radiation) is pretty much your go-to option. It’s fast, reliable, and, well, it’s the most practical way to shout out to other civilizations in the universe. But why specifically 21 centimeters? That’s where things get juicy.

This 21 cm radiation isn’t just some random frequency we picked out of a hat. It’s tied to something very essential, known as the hydrogen spin flip. Hydrogen atoms consist of one proton and one electron, and these tiny particles have a property called “spin.”

Think of spin like a little arrow pointing up or down. Every so often, in the vast reaches of space, a hydrogen atom’s electron can flip its spin, going from a state where its spin is aligned with the proton to one pointing in the opposite direction. This flip releases energy in the form of radiation at—you guessed it—a wavelength of 21 centimeters.

So why does this matter? Well, any smart civilization, whether they have blue skin, tentacles, or something more bizarre, will eventually discover hydrogen, understand spin, dabble in quantum mechanics, and figure out this whole 21 cm radiation thing. They’ll call it something different (they won’t have “21” or “cm”) but the concept remains universal. It’s like the cosmic Rosetta Stone….

(14) AH, THE BEACHES OF MARS. “Mars once had an ocean with sandy beaches, researchers say” – the Guardian has the resort brochure.

Mars may not seem like a prime holiday spot with its arid landscape and punishing radiation levels, but it once boasted beaches, researchers have found.

While previous discoveries of features including valley networks and sedimentary rocks has suggested the red planet once had flowing rivers, there has been debate among scientists over whether it also had oceans.

Now researchers say they have fresh evidence to support the idea after discovering buried beaches on Mars.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists report how they made the discovery after they analysed below-ground imaging data from China’s Zhurong rover.

“Zhurong was sent to southern Utopia Planitia near locations where paleoshorelines have been mapped from satellite data,” said Dr Benjamin Cardenas, a co-author of the research from Penn State University.

The authors say the results from the northern lowlands of Mars are similar to those obtained at shorelines on Earth using ground-penetrating radar: both indicate features in the subsurface material that are tilted – and with a similar angle – towards the lowland, or ocean, direction.

“Typically the radar picks up on even subtle changes in sediment size, which is probably what’s happening here,” said Cardenas.

The researchers say this Martian beach appears to have shifted position over time. The data reveals a series of features dipping towards the north – something Cardenas said indicated the beach grew out into the ocean. “In fact, it grew at least 1.3km north into the ocean.”

Cardenas said the implications were exciting. “It’s a simple structure, but it tells you there had to be tides, there had to be waves, there had to be a nearby river supplying sediment, and all these things had to be active for some extended period of time,” he said….

(15) SMILE FOR THE CAMERA. “This City’s Sewer System Is Full of Alligators, but It’s Not New York” brags the New York Times (behind a paywall).

An enduring urban legend has it that blind, albino alligators patrol New York City’s sewers. These mythical crocodilians have become ingrained in the city’s lore, and some New Yorkers even celebrate Alligator in the Sewer Day each February.

But in Florida, alligators in the sewers are no myth. The reptiles routinely find their way into municipal drainpipes. In late January, a 10½-foot gator was rescued in Cape Coral after it got stuck in a storm drain.

And not all alligators end up in sewers by accident. Recently published research in the journal Urban Naturalist reveals that alligators and nearly three dozen other species use storm water sewer systems in one urban area of Florida to safely traverse urban environments.

“It’s like something out of ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,’” said Alan Ivory, a Ph.D. student at the University of Florida who led the research. “The abundance of animals down there was surprising.”

While there has been thorough research on rats in sewer systems, what other animals are up to under the streets is less documented. Mr. Ivory and his colleagues suspected that these subterranean labyrinths, which are built to divert storm water and are separated from sewage systems, serve as important pathways for urban animals.

Mr. Ivory and his colleagues focused on storm water sewers under the city of Gainesville. The scientists outfitted motion-activated trail cameras with magnetic mounts and fastened them underneath manhole covers. Overall, 39 cameras were deployed in 33 storm water drains.

The cameras were left for 60 days, but not all of them survived that long. Some were swept away by storm water, while others were pilfered by bandits with sticky paws.

Who has non-opposable thumbs and apparently likes stealing motion-activated trail cameras placed by scientists? These guys. Alan Ivory, via UF/IFAS

“We would have raccoons steal cameras every now and then,” Mr. Ivory said. “They would climb up the ladders and tear them off the manholes.”…

(16) ELDRITCH LAUGHTER. Scotto.org remembers “H.P. Lovecraft: Stand-Up Comedian!” from 2015. You can watch it on YouTube. Includes jokes like, “I was worrying about the Boston Massacre. Do you know how many people actually died in the Boston Massacre? Five people. That’s not a massacre. That’s an afternoon snack for Cthulhu.”

Ran for six performances, Tues & Wed nights, April 28-May 13, 2015, at Annex Theatre in Seattle. Remounted for two performances, Sept 5 & 7, 2015, at Bumbershoot. I wrote the script and played Howie; my pal K. Brian Neel directed.

“Instead of expressing his terrifying vision of malevolent, eldritch gods via horror stories in the early twentieth century, H.P. (‘Howie’ to his friends) Lovecraft expresses his terrifying vision in the present day via stand-up comedy. But an ancient evil stirs beneath the sea— can Howie pull off one last sold-out gig before the human race is destroyed?”

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, N., Evelyn C. Leeper, Scott Edelman, Lisa Hertel, James Bacon, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day PhilRM.]

Pixel Scroll 1/7/24 Pixels Scrolling Off Into The Sky, The Sound Of Filers Echoing Down From The Heaven

Posted on January 7, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) THESE GUYS ARE SHAMELESS. Disney tried to shut down a YouTuber’s remix of Steamboat Willie even though it was in public domain: “Disney pulls ‘Steamboat Willie’ YouTube copyright claim amid Mickey Mouse entry into public domain”.

Mashable reported that YouTuber and voice actor Brock Baker had uploaded a video to his channel with over 1 million subscribers which was almost immediately hit with a copyright claim from Disney.

Baker’s video featured the entirety of the 1928 Disney animated short Steamboat Willie. He had remixed the film, which stars Mickey Mouse, with his own comedic audio track playing over the nearly 8-minute cartoon, and released it under the title “Steamboat Willie (Brock’s Dub).”

After being hit with the claim, Baker’s upload became demonetized, meaning the YouTuber could not make any money off of it. The claim also blocked the ability to embed the video on third-party websites. In addition, the YouTube video was given limited visibility, including being blocked from view entirely in certain countries.

Baker disputed the copyright claim shortly after receiving it. His case appeared strong, as Steamboat Willie entered the public domain on January 1, 2024, allowing a broad range of creative usage of the film and its contents without Disney’s permission — including for profit.

He was successful.

“Disney released their claim and it’s now embeddable and shareable worldwide,” Baker told Mashable on Friday along with a screenshot of the email alert he received from YouTube letting him know the copyright claim was released.

“Good news! After reviewing your dispute, Disney has decided to release their copyright claim on your YouTube video,” reads the YouTube email message….

Watch “Steamboat Willie (Brock’s Dub)” at the link.

(2) THE SUBSTACK DILEMMA. Cass Morris and Brian Keene recently shared their takes on “Substack’s Nazi Problem”.

“So… Substack…” by Cass Morris.

A few weeks ago, I co-signed an open letter to Substack’s founders asking them to not platform Nazis. Their response was… not great. The Paradox of Tolerance in action, really. And I could go into a big thing about the dangers of free speech absolutism and how it’s really just permission for terrible people to be more terrible more openly, but, y’know, that’s all been said a billion times. “Don’t welcome Nazis” really should not be a controversial viewpoint, yet here we are.

As a result of the founders’ statement, a fair number of both creators and supporters are leaving Substack. Even more, I think, are trying to decide whether to do so. A.R. Moxon and Catherynne Valente have said, more eloquently and thoroughly, the things I’m thinking and wrangling with, but I did want my readers to hear from me directly on this….

…Moving somewhere else is also no guarantee that a new platform won’t also face the same problems someday, forcing yet another move. I’m a child of the LiveJournal age; I remember how it started, and I remember what happened when it got sold. Very few sites seem to have long-term viability without corporate backing, and the increased corporatization of the internet is most of the reason I think the internet peaked in 2007. Every site is potentially in danger. Just because Buttondown or other platforms are promising good behavior now doesn’t mean anything if leadership or ownership changes (citation: Twitter). As Moxon and Valente both pointed out in their essays, abandoning every site that fails a virtue test means giving all our playgrounds over to the Nazis, and I’m not sure I’m okay with continuing to do that….

“Letters From the Labyrinth 364” by Brian Keene.

…These days I am so far removed from the drama and the backbiting and the petty squabbles that encompass our industry that I no longer know who is mad at who, or who’s been cancelled and for what, or which publisher isn’t paying, or what this person did. For example, I only found out recently that Substack has an apparent Nazi problem — something I was blissfully unaware of until several newsletters I subscribe to migrated away from the platform. And I respect folks decisions to do that. I’m going to stick it out because I’m tired of leaving platforms when the Nazis show up. We did that with Facebook and Twitter and Reddit. If we keep doing that, soon every bar will be a Nazi bar. Sooner or later, you’ve got to plant your feet and fight. So here is where I’ll make my stand — a counter-voice to their voices. If you can dig that, cool. If not, I don’t care….

(3) THE AMERICAN MULE? Ross Douthat’s New York Times opinion piece “Is Trump an Agent or an Accident of History?” kicks off with a big reference to Asimov.

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, a “psychohistorian” in a far-flung galactic empire figures out a way to predict the future so exactly that he can anticipate both the empire’s fall and the way that civilization can be painstakingly rebuilt. This enables him to plan a project — the “foundation” of the title — that will long outlast his death, complete with periodic messages to his heirs that always show foreknowledge of their challenges and crises.

Until one day the foreknowledge fails, because an inherently unpredictable figure has come upon the scene — the Mule, a Napoleon of galactic politics, whose advent was hard for even a psychohistorian to see coming because he’s literally a mutant, graced by some genetic twist with the power of telepathy.

Donald Trump is not a mutant telepath. (Or so I assume — fact checkers are still at work.) But the debates about how to deal with his challenge to the American political system turn, in part, on how much you think that he resembles Asimov’s Mule.

Was there a more normal, conventional, stable-seeming timeline for 21st century American politics that Trump, with his unique blend of tabloid celebrity, reality-TV charisma, personal shamelessness and demagogic intuition, somehow wrenched us off?

Or is Trump just an American expression of the trends that have revived nationalism all over the world, precisely the sort of figure a “psychohistory” of our era would have anticipated? In which case, are attempts to find some elite removal mechanism likely to just heighten the contradictions that yielded Trumpism in the first place, widening the gyre and bringing the rough beast slouching in much faster?…

(4) DOUG BERRY: THE GUY IN THE GIANTS HAT. [Item by Chris Garcia.] Last October, the world lost a wonderful human being — Douglas Berry. A Bay Area fan who was one of the original denizens of the 2000s Fanzine Lounges, Doug was also a phenomenal writer, best-known for his game writing in the Traveler game system universe, he was also a regularly blogger and Facebooker, and contributed to Journey Planet and The Drink Tank, co-editing two issues of the latter.

Doug’s widow Kirsten, Chuck Serface, and Chris Garcia gathered some of Doug’s best writing from 2023, along with a few pieces from the last few years. The resulting collection, The Guy in the Giants Hat, can be downloaded from the link.

(5) PARAMOUNT+ SHEDS ORIGINAL STAR TREK MOVIES. Rachel Leishman gloats “Now That Only the Kelvin-Verse ‘Star Trek’ Movies Are Available on Paramount+, Maybe You’ll See Things My Way” at The Mary Sue.

Finally my time has come. You will all be forced to appreciate the Kelvin-verse. My plan is working, and you will all soon love my favorite Star Trek movies. That’s what you get for being mean.

To be fair, you can still stream the original Star Trek movies. They’re just no longer on Paramount+, the home of the franchise. Hilarious to think about it like that, but it is weird that the home of Trek does not have the original Star Trek movies on its platform. What it does have are the movies starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and Karl Urban. Yes, you can still watch the magic that is Star Trek Beyond to your heart’s content.

The Kelvin-verse movies (aptly named because they exist in an alternate timeline) started with the 2009 Star Trek from director J.J. Abrams and gave us a new crew of the Enterprise. They are beautiful and getting to see their adventures is extremely necessary in the world of Trek. Also, who doesn’t want to see more of Leonard Nimoy as Spock? Point is: These movies rule and we have been stuck in limbo about whether this franchise will continue for years.

(6) SCHRÖDINGER’S TV SERIES. Meanwhile, The Orville’s fate has not been sealed: “Seth MacFarlane Says The Orville Isn’t Canceled Yet” in The Wrap.

Seth MacFarlane, the creator, writer and star of “The Orville,” has offered a cryptic update on the sci-fi series’ fate.

“All I can tell you is that there is no official death certificate for ‘The Orville’,” MacFarlane told TheWrap in an interview when asked about an update on a possible Season 4. “It is still with us. I can’t go any further than that at the moment. There are too many factors.”

MacFarlane’s co-star Scott Grimes added that conversations about “The Orville” Season 4 began before the SAG-AFTRA and Writers’ Guild of America strikes.

“I do know that we are still talking about it. It’s not dead in any sort of way whatsoever. It’s just about when, where and how and building the stuff again,” Grimes told TheWrap. “I’m excited because it’s one of the greatest things to work on. So I just have my fingers crossed. And I know Seth wants to do it and that usually holds a lot of power. And I hope he gets to because it’s one of his babies that he just loves and it’s a blast to work on.”…

(7) FREE SFF READ. The Sunday Morning Transport offers “Agni” by Nibedita Sen as a free read to encourage people to subscribe.

Nibedita Sen brings us a brilliant, dangerous world, complex power dynamics, and characters we can’t stop thinking about…

(8) DR. EMANUEL LOTTEM (1944-2024.) Israeli translator and editor Dr. Emanuel Lotem has died. The Israeli Science Fiction and Fantasy Association mourned his loss on Facebook. (Note: Translations of his name are spelled several different ways; I have followed the spelling used by his Zion’s Fiction co-editor Sheldon Teitelbaum.)

Emanuel was one of the founding fathers of the Israeli community. As one of the association’s founders and chairman, he saw the approach of science fiction and fantasy as a supreme goal. The founders of the community and the association concentrated around him, and in light of his vision, conferences, and lectures began in them. Even after retiring from his official position, Emanuel was always present to give a listening ear, a push in the right direction or a prickly and precise word, always out of love for the content world and the community created around him. Emanuel made sure to lecture at conferences, meet the young and old fans that always surrounded him, and always returned the love that the community allowed him.

Emanuel was the translator of the science fiction and fantasy types into Hebrew, his translations brought to the Israeli audience the greatness of writers and books in Israel for more than 45 years. For many his translations were the first encounter with science fiction. His translations to “Dune” and “Lord of the Rings” well illustrated that Emanuel saw in the role of a translator a purpose, and a way to enrich the literary world through careful dialogue with the work. His vast breadth of knowledge and proficiency in every possible subject made his translations into art, and not just technical art. Emanuel pushed for the translation and publication of science fiction at a time when its translation was an insidious act, and was a significant factor in the field’s bloom.

Many people owe him their entry into this world, and many more will miss him.

Lottem recalled his start as an sff translator in an interview, “Dr. Emanuel Lottem, Intrigue and Conspiracies”, by the ISFFA.

…I fell in love with the English language and it helped me a lot to develop my third career as a translator from English to Hebrew. I started it basically as a gig. In my first career, as a university lecturer, salaries there weren’t anything, I needed a gig, I said, I can translate, why not, that’s how I came to Am Oved Publishing House, I had personal connections there, and I translated several books for them in my professional field, which is international economics. Then the White Series was born. And I was turned on. I said I want to translate. Tell me what a serious person is, what you have with this nonsense, science fiction. What are you, floating in the clouds? Translate serious things. I insisted, and then one day I called, it was already in my second career in the Foreign Ministry, the editorial secretary of Am Oved, called me, said I have a book called Dune, want to translate it? Luckily I was sitting on a good chair, so I didn’t fall out of it… And that’s how it started. That’s how my journey as a science fiction translator began. If the question was how my love for science fiction began, it was years before….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 7, 1912 — Charles Addams. (Died 1988.) Ahhh Charles Addams. No doubt you’re now thinking of the Addams Family and you’ve certainly reason to do so, but let’s first note some other artistic endeavors of his.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Thatababy plays “match the snowman”. How many do you recognize?
The Far Side shows the dogs’ take on nuclear war.
Peanuts from March 28, 1955 is the start of five more Martian jokes.
Sally Forth has a complaint about that other Jetpack…

(11) I’LL BE BACK. [Item by Steven French.] Physics World picks “The 10 quirkiest stories from the world of physics in 2023”. This one is kinda scary:

Shape-shifting robot

In the classic 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s robot assassin, the T-800, comes up against the T-1000 Advanced Prototype, which is made from a liquid metal called “mimetic polyalloy” that can reform into any shape it touches. Researchers in China and the US this year came close to recreating in the lab some of the T-1000’s special abilities. They did this by designing miniature robots that can rapidly and reversibly shift between liquid and solid. First, they embedded magnetic particles in gallium, a soft metal with a low melting point. Then they applied an alternating magnetic field, which not only heats the magnetic particles, making the body become a liquid, but also allows it to become mobile. In one video released by the team, a 10mm-tall LEGO-like minifigure liquifies to ooze before passing through bars in a mocked-up cell. It then cools inside a mould before the figure reforms back into its original shape.”

(12) CLIENTS PROPPING THEM UP. CBS Los Angeles reports how the “Entertainment industry bands together to save struggling Hollywood prop house”.

From the outside, Faux Library Studio Props may seem like an unassuming warehouse nestled in North Hollywood. Inside, however, are a whole host of set pieces that tell the recent history of the entertainment industry.

Unfortunately, like many businesses trying to bounce back in the past couple of years, all of the priceless mementos may be lost unless the owner can come up with $100,000 by February.

Marc Meyer started Faux Library Studio Props over two decades ago in 2000.

“When I retired from decorating I said I got to keep buying and enjoying myself. So, this was my business,” Meyer said.

His retirement project turned into the home for vintage furniture and décor worth millions of dollars, including a desk from “Top Gun Maverick” and a boardroom table in “Grey’s Anatomy.”

However, Meyer is famous for the prop books he holds, all 16,000 of them, including the ones from “Angels and Demons.”

While the covers are real, the insides are not.

“That’s the wallpaper on the inside, just to make it look like pages,” Meyer said. “The actor really has to act to show the weight.”…

(13) STAR HOOEY. “Fox News Host Unexpectedly Wins for Most Baffling ‘Star Trek’ vs. ‘Star Wars’ Take” according to The Mary Sue.

….On Thursday’s episode of the Fox News roundtable show Outnumbered, the hosts discussed a new Star Wars announcement. These high-profile, successful women on Fox News were outraged that a woman, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, will direct the next Star Wars film. Like much of the right-wing media, they found it upsetting that Obaid-Chinoy said it was about time a woman directed a Star Wars movie.

The show also highlighted a statement Obaid-Chinoy made years ago, unrelated to Star Wars, about enjoying making men uncomfortable with her movies. After showing the Obaid-Chinoy quote, Fox News host Emily Compagno said, “Pretty great attitude for a director of a franchise that is geared towards men!”

Kayleigh McEnany, another host on the show, predicted Obaid-Chinoy’s film would “flop.” McEnany tried to bolster her argument by reading a list of recent conservative “successes” in pop culture. These included the terrible song “Try That in a Small Town” and the Bud Light boycott. McEnany made an argument that “woke” things failed in 2023. (I guess she missed how Barbie dominated the box office, among other successful feminist works in the past year.) She wrapped up her rant by sarcastically wishing Obaid-Chinoy the “best of luck” with her Star Wars movie.

That’s when Compagno flashed a backward Vulcan salute and said, “And that’s why I’m a Trekkie and not Star Wars!”…

And then The Mary Sue pointed out many examples of when Star Trek was attacked as too “woke”.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes you inside the “Rebel Moon: Part One Pitch Meeting”.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/15/23 Earth Scrolls Are Easy

Posted on December 15, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(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, 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:

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;
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.

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 9/19/23 In Pixelated Ink Which Glows Under Starlight

Posted on September 19, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) OPEN LETTER AGAINST BOOK BANS. “Ariana Grande, Garbage, Natasha Lyonne Sign Open Letter Against Book Bans” – The Hollywood Reporter has the story.

Ariana Grande, Guillermo del Toro, Padma Lakshmi, Roxane Gay, Gabrielle Union, Sandra Cisneros, Amanda Gorman, Margaret Cho and Ron Perlman are among the signatories of an open letter calling on creative communities in Hollywood and beyond to leverage their voices to stop book bans.

Upwards of 175 actors, musicians, authors, comedians, reality stars, models, media personalities, academics, activists and more have signed the open letter spearheaded by Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton and published Tuesday via public advocacy organization and political action committee MoveOn Political Action….

The letter’s release coincides with National Banned Books Month and comes amid a corresponding public petition from MoveOn, which will connect signatories with future advocacy opportunities around book bans. Such opportunities include methods of support or events related to MoveOn’s Banned Bookmobile, which launched a multicity tour this summer after measures touted and supported by Gov. Ron DeSantis resulted in an increase in banned and restricted books in Florida schools, according to The Associated Press.

In October, the bookmobile will once again distribute free banned books, in addition to hosting events held in conjunction with Crooked Media’s live Pod Save America and Lovett or Leave It podcasts, and author readings in Georgia, Virginia and South Carolina as part of a broader “Read Banned Books” initiative….

Here is the full text of the letter from Moveon.org.

As artists, creators, entertainers, and activists, we recognize and are horrified by the threat of censorship in the form of book bans.

This restrictive behavior is not just antithetical to free speech and expression but has a chilling effect on the broader creative field. The government cannot and should not create any interference or dictate what people can produce, write, generate, read, listen to, or consume.

We cannot stress enough how these censorious efforts will not end with book bans. It’s only a matter of time before regressive, suppressive ideologues will shift their focus toward other forms of art and entertainment, to further their attacks and efforts to scapegoat marginalized communities, particularly BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks.

We refuse to remain silent as one creative field is subjected to oppressive bans. As artists, we must band together, because a threat to one form of art is a threat to us all.

We are calling on everyone to join us in pushing back against these book bans, support free and open creative industries—regardless of personal or ideological disagreements—and use their voice at the local level to stop these bans in their school districts. There is power in artistic freedom, and we refuse to allow draconian politicians to take that from us.

(2) CHENGDU VENUE PROGRESS PHOTOS. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Here from a Weibo post are a couple more photos of the interior of the Chengdu Worldcon venue. It looks quite different to my eyes from the earlier images, not sure if it’s the lighting, angle, or if they’ve applied some coating – the Google Translated hashtags include “#金molstone# #石 CrystalWallboard#”, whatever those might be.

(3) CORA FINDS A CRACK IN THE FOUNDATION. Cora Buhlert is doing episode reviews of Apple+ series Foundation. (Access all of them here.) The latest is “Foundation travels ‘Long Ago, Not Far Away’ and blows up its own premise” – beware spoilers.

…Warning! There will be spoilers under the cut!

“Long Ago, Not Far Away” was a really good episode of Foundation. Well, at least ninety-five percent of it were really good. Unfortunately, the last five minutes or so not only ruined the episode, but the entire series….

(4) TEXAS BOOK RATING LAW BLOCKED. Publishers Weekly tells how “In a Blistering Opinion, Judge Officially Blocks Texas Book Rating Law”.

After nearly three weeks of waiting, federal judge Alan D. Albright delivered a major victory for freedom to read advocates, issuing a substantive 59-page written opinion and order officially blocking Texas’s controversial book rating law, HB 900, from taking effect. The decision comes after Albright orally enjoined the law at an August 31 hearing and signaled his intent to block the law in its entirety.

Signed by Texas governor Greg Abbott on June 12, HB 900 would have required book vendors to review and rate books for sexual content under a vaguely articulated standard as a condition of doing business with Texas public schools. Under the law, books rated “sexually explicit” (if the book includes material deemed “patently offensive” by unspecified community standards) would be banned from Texas schools. Books rated “sexually relevant” (books with any representation of sexual conduct) would have required written parental permission for students to access them. Furthermore, the law would have given the state the ultimate power to change the rating on any book, and would have forced vendors to accept the state’s designated rating as their own, or be barred from selling to Texas public schools….

…“The Court does not dispute that the state has a strong interest in what children are able to learn and access in schools. And the Court surely agrees that children should be protected from obscene content in the school setting,” Albright concluded. “That said, [the law] misses the mark on obscenity with a web of unconstitutionally vague requirements. And the state, in abdicating its responsibility to protect children, forces private individuals and corporations into compliance with an unconstitutional law that violates the First Amendment.”

In defending the law, Texas attorneys had moved to dismiss the suit, arguing that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the law, and that the state has the right to regulate vendors who wish to do business with Texas public schools—essentially asserting that rating books would simply be part of the cost of doing business in Texas. Albright demolished those arguments in his opinion, and harshly criticized the ill-conceived law in denying the motion to dismiss.

At one point, Albright observed that the burden placed on vendors by the law are “so numerous and onerous as to call into question whether the legislature believed any third party could possibly comply.” And he called out state attorneys for their inability to answer basic questions over the course of two hearings. “Generally, the government was confused and unaware of how the law would actually function in practice,” Albright observed, citing “approximately 40 instances during the August 18th hearing (‘Hearing 1’) where the government either did not know how the law would function or did not have an answer as to what the effects of certain provisions were.”…

(5) PREVIEW GREG JEIN COLLECTION. Heritage Auctions takes you “Inside the Sensational Sci-Fi Collection of Model-Making Legend Greg Jein” in this post for The Intelligent Collector.

Greg Jein was a giant among the Hollywood illusionists who created small things to fill big screens. The model- and miniature-maker never left his hometown of Los Angeles. Yet he was never earthbound: Jein spent decades introducing us to aliens who brought their motherships to Earth, and he sent us soaring time and again into space, the final frontier.

Jein, who died at 76 last year, was nominated for Academy Awards and Emmys, hailed as a magician and beloved as a mentor. Among Hollywood’s special effects wizards, Jein was heartbeat and historian, craftsman and custodian. His life’s story might have made the perfect film.

A fan first, foremost and forever, he made models when he was little. By the time Jein reached his mid-30s, he was a twice-Oscar-nominated maker of motherships, airplanes, city blocks and other models for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1941, both directed by Steven Spielberg.

“Greg loved what he did, creating things with his hands,” says Jerry Chang, Jein’s first cousin. “He could see in his mind things other people couldn’t.”

On October 14-15, Heritage Auctions is honored to offer the entirety of Greg Jein’s vast and unparalleled assemblage, which includes his prized trove of models and memorabilia and the cherished miniatures he made. The landmark Greg Jein Collection Hollywood Platinum Signature^® Auction…

There’s also a gallery of “The Most Revealing Behind-the-Scenes Photos From the Greg Jein Collection” at the link.

(6) NEW SOPHIE BURNHAM TRILOGY. DAW Books has acquired Sargassa, the first book in a trilogy from debut author Sophie Burnham. Set in an alternate North America called Roma Sargassa, where the Roman Empire never fell, readers will plunge into a landscape of political intrigue, queer romance, and impending revolution. The acquisition encompassed three books with World English rights and was agented by Maria Napolitano at the Jane Rotrosen Agency.

…Executive Editor Navah Wolfe expressed immense enthusiasm about the acquisition, stating, “Sophie’s impressive worldbuilding, compelling characters, and insightful social commentary make Sargassa an exceptional addition to DAW’s repertoire. We are immensely excited to introduce their work to the world.”

In the book, North America has always been under Roman rule, and the death of the Imperial Historian thrusts his children, Selah and Arran, into the heart of a conspiracy. An underground rebel faction seeks to obtain the Iveroa Stone and use its secrets to reveal the empire’s obscured past and dethrone its dominion. As Selah works to unlock the Stone’s enigmas, she faces a monumental decision: to uphold or challenge the historical narratives of the Roman rule in Sargassa…

Sophie Burnham is a queer nonbinary novelist and screenwriter, backed by an Acting BFA and a concentration in Playwriting from Syracuse University. Honored with a We Need Diverse Books writing grant and a placement in ScreenCraft’s 2020 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Screenplay competition, Burnham’s debut novel promises to enthrall and enlighten readers. Follow them on Twitter at @sophielburnham.

(7) CON OR BUST FUNDRAISER. The Con or Bust Prize Sweepstakes is selling entries.

Dream Foundry’s Con or Bust program issues cash grants to fans and creatives of color to help connect them with SFFH genre events and resources. Con or Bust sends folks to conventions, workshops, classes, and other networking or professional opportunities. Grants can be used toward travel, registration, food, equipment, and other expenses associated with attending the event.

Con or Bust’s fall fundraiser is in full swing! We have lots of bookish prizes, including a 1 year subscription to Apex Magazine, two $50 Weightless Books gift certificates, libro.fm credits, and more. Oh yeah, and there’s a PS5, too.

Fine print:

The Sweepstakes is open only to the following individuals (each, an “Eligible Participant”):

Individual legal residents of, and physically located within, the United States or Canada, and who are 18 (except 19 in Alabama and Nebraska and 21 in Mississippi) years of age as of the date of entry or of legal age of majority or older in their country of residence…

(8) DOING TIE-IN RESEARCH. David Mack gives a detailed example of the kind of research he needed to do for a Star Trek media tie-in novel. Thread begins here.

It was for this reason that, as part of my research for my upcoming novel STAR TREK: PICARD – FIREWALL, I found it necessary to learn all I could about the USS Dauntless, NCC-80816 from Star Trek: Prodigy.https://t.co/l3ZaC6TsYH pic.twitter.com/AZWnH2nWoq
— David Mack (@DavidAlanMack) September 18, 2023

(9) FREE READ. The 2023 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award-winning story, “The Hitchhiker on Souls’ Road” by A. A. Nour, is currently available to read at the Baen website.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born September 19, 1922 — Damon Knight. Author, editor, critic. Kate Wilhelm who was his wife is also regrettably no longer with us. His 1950 short story, “To Serve Man” was adapted for The Twilight Zone. His first story, “The Itching Hour,” appeared in the Summer 1940 number of Futuria Fantasia which was edited and published by Ray Bradbury. It’s hard to briefly sum up his amazing genre career but let me note he was a member of the Futurians and a reviewer as well as a writer. Novels of his I’ll single out are Hell’s Pavement, The Observers and Special Delivery but don’t think I’m overlooking his brilliant short stories. The Encyclopedia of SF notes that “In 1995, he was granted the SFWA Grand Master Award – which from 2002 became formally known, in his honour, as the Damon Knight Grand Master Award. He was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2003.” (Died 2002.)
Born September 19, 1928 — Adam West. Best known as Batman on that classic Sixties series, he also had a short role in 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars as Colonel Dan McReady. He last played the role of Batman by voicing him in two animated films, Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders and Batman vs. Two-Face. He also most excellently voiced The Gray Ghost in an episode of the Kevin Conroy voiced B:TAS, “Beware the Gray Ghost”. (Died 2017.)
Born September 19, 1928 — Robin Scott Wilson. Founder, with Damon Knight and others, of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop. He edited Clarion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction and Criticism from the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Clarion II and Clarion III. He wrote one genre novel, To the Sound of Freedom (with Richard W. Shryock) and a lot of short fiction. He’s not in stock at all at the usual suspects. (Died 2013.)
Born September 19, 1933 — David McCallum, 90. His longest running, though not genre, role is pathologist Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard on NCIS where he appeared in every episode of the first fifteen seasons. (With series lead Mark Harmon’s departure from the show in the fall of 2021 (Season 19), McCallum became the last remaining member of the original NCIS cast.) Genre wise, he was Illya Nickovitch Kuryakin on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and the British series Sapphire & Steel where he was Steel and Joanna Lumley was Sapphire. He played the lead in a short-lived U.S. version of The Invisible Man. He was Dr. Vance Hendricks on Babylon 5’s “Infection” episode.
Born September 19, 1947 — Tanith Lee. I hadn’t realized that she wrote more than ninety novels and three hundred short stories in her career. Ninety novels! She even wrote two of the Blake’s 7 episodes as well. I am more fond of her work for children such as The Dragon Hoard and The Unicorn Series than I am of her adult work. She has garnered well-deserved Stoker and World Fantasy Awards for Lifetime Achievement. (Died 2015.)
Born September 19, 1952 — Laurie R. King, 71. She’s on the Birthday Honors list for the Mary Russell series of historical mysteries, featuring Sherlock Holmes as her mentor and later partner. Hey it’s at least genre adjacent. She’s also written at least one genre novel, Califia’s Daughters.
Born September 19, 1972 — N. K. Jemisin, 51. Her most excellent Broken Earth series has made her the only author to have won the Hugo for Best Novel in three consecutive years. Her “Non-Zero Probabilities” was nominated for the Best Short Story losing out to Will McIntosh‘s “Bridesicle” at Aussiecon 4. “Emergency Skin” I’m pleased to note won the Best Novelette Hugo at CoNZealand. Yeah I voted for it. And at Chicon 8 she won a Best Graphic Story or Comic Hugo for Far Sector, written by her, with art by Jamal Campbell.

(11) FANHISTORY ZOOM. The next FANAC Fan History Zoom session will be about “Boston Fandom in the 60s” with Tony Lewis, Leslie Turek and Mike Ward, moderated by Mark Olson. It will happen September 23,2023 at Time: 4PM EDT, 1PM PDT, 9PM BST (UK), Sept 24 at 6AM Melbourne, AU. If you want access, please send a note to [email protected]

(12) COVER REVEAL. [Item by Ben Bird Person.] Theory podcast Acid Horizon announced on Twitter/X the new cover for the upcoming Zer0 Books release Against the Vortex: Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today by Anthony Galluzzo.

(13) LIVE ACTION, NOT ANIMATED. “Disney World forced to close rides after finding wild bear in park” reports Entertainment Weekly.

Disney World guests were just treated to a new kind of Country Bear Jamboree.

EW can confirm that a wild bear was found inside the park Monday morning, prompting the closure of at least 10 attractions inside the Frontierland, Adventureland, and Liberty Square areas. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission tells EW that biologists with FWC’s Bear Management Program, as well as FWC Law Enforcement officers, are “working on capturing and relocating the bear,” who they say was likely moving through the park in search of food….

(14) CHANGE THE TITLE, CHANGE THE GENRE. Lincoln Michel had fun with this idea – you can too.

Theory: you can make any science fiction book sound like an epic fantasy series by adding in a preposition and article.

A Crash of Snow
The Problem of Threes and Bodies
A Station for Eleven
— Lincoln Michel (@TheLincoln) September 19, 2023

(15) ON THEIR OWN TWO FEET. [Item by Nina Shepardson.] Slate has a list of “The 40 best stand-alone TV episodes that can be watched on their own.” Several are from genre TV shows, including Star Trek, The X-Files, and The Twilight Zone. I’d be interested to hear whether other Filers think Slate picked the right episodes…

Whether we’re living in the age of Peak TV or Trough TV, one thing is clear: There’s too much TV. Thankfully, not every show has to be watched in its entirety. One of the best things about television is its serialized nature, the continuous thread that strings viewers along from one episode to the next. It’s a cliché that prestige television is the new novel precisely because of the way that many dramas develop their characters and plots over many hours of storytelling. But an older virtue of TV is its brevity—the way a scenario can be introduced and resolved within the space of an hour, or half that—and some of the best episodes are less like chapters in a long-running novel than like short stories or short films. These are stand-alone episodes….

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Ersatz Culture, Ben Bird Person, Nina Shepardson, Joe Siclari, 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 Cat Eldridge.]

File 770

Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom

Tag Archives: Foundation

Pixel Scroll 3/31/26 Why? It Has To Be Pixels Because They’re All Out Of Snakes

Pixel Scroll 9/16/25 The Universal Pixelgraph

Pixel Scroll 8/25/25 Synthetic Scrolls Of Pixel

Pixel Scroll 6/23/25 It’s The End Of The Scroll As We Know It (And I Feel Filed)

Pixel Scroll 5/8/25 It’s Just A Scroll To The Left

Pixel Scroll 3/31/25 Are Pixels Beyond Count Or Not?

Pixel Scroll 2/25/25 General Systems Vehicle Strange Women Lying About In Ponds Distributing Swords Is No Basis For A System Of Government

Pixel Scroll 1/7/24 Pixels Scrolling Off Into The Sky, The Sound Of Filers Echoing Down From The Heaven

Pixel Scroll 12/15/23 Earth Scrolls Are Easy

Pixel Scroll 9/19/23 In Pixelated Ink Which Glows Under Starlight