26 They’re Maids Of Mead!

Posted on March 29, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) BUJOLD SAYS NEW PENRIC MIGHT ARRIVE IN APRIL. Lois McMaster Bujold yesterday told followers of her Goodreads blog: “Penric 16 impending!”.

I am pleased to report that I have just today finished the first draft of a new Penric & Desdemona novella, to be titled “Darksight Dare”. I plan to read a little section from it at next weekend’s upcoming Minicon here in Minneapolis. (See prior post for Minicon link.)

Artist Ron Miller has nearly completed the cover for it — we’re down to fine tuning last-done things like the color and placement of the font. I’ll post a sneak peek when we’re finished.

Still to be done on my end are collecting and collating my test readers’ comments, and final revisions. I expect this to take a couple of weeks, after which I’ll turn the pieces over to Spectrum for e-publication distribution on our five vendor platforms. I’m thinking this novella may be out as early as mid-April, but parts of the process are not up to me, so we’ll see.

Also still to do is writing the vendor-page copy, which is going to be the usual challenge of trying to give folks a clear idea of what they’ll be buying without undue spoilers. I can say the story takes place in the late fall after “The Adventure of the Demonic Ox”, and will feature some new characters bringing new problems to Pen & Des….

(2) PETITION TO SAVE STARTFLEET ACADEMY. CBR.com reports “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Fan Petition Hits Milestone After Paramount+ Cancellation”. (The direct link to the petition is here.) At this writing, the petition has over 22,000 signatures.

The divisive series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was officially canceled by Paramount+ ahead of its upcoming second season. Some fans of the show are unwilling to accept this outcome, as the rallying has begun to save the series with a new petition.

The petition, which can be found at Change.org, calls for Paramount+ to renew Star Trek: Academy for Season 3. In a matter of days, it had reached its first major milestone by passing over 5,000 signatures, and just over 24 hours later, that number was doubled to over 10,000. New names are still being added continuously as more fans become aware of the petition, seemingly suggesting that it’s starting to pick up some serious momentum. Whether this will ultimately convince Paramount+ execs to reconsider their decision, however, remains to be seen.

“Given its significant impact, it is crucial not to halt this journey prematurely,” the petition’s description reads in part. “A third season would allow for the growth and development of these beloved characters and the continuation of storylines that fans are eager to see unfold. Moreover, it will provide the team behind the show the opportunity to delve deeper into narratives that challenge and inspire.”….

(3) DECANONIZATON FIRE. However, a writer currently at the top of the media pyramid sounds happy to see it go — “‘Project Hail Mary’ Author Andy Weir Says Paramount Rejected His ‘Star Trek’ Pitch: Their ‘Shows Are Sh**’” at The Hollywood Reporter.

The author of Project Hail Mary is firing a photon torpedo at Paramount+’s Star Trek efforts.

Bestselling writer Andy Weir criticized modern Trek shows while on the Critical Drinker podcast last week, and even revealed he pitched a Trek show that was shot down by Paramount.

The topic began with the podcast’s host, Will Jordan, saying how refreshing the box office hit Project Hail Mary has been, especially for audiences who grew up on Star Trek and now suffer from “a lack of” such sci-fi efforts nowadays.

“Yeah, I saw a … I forgot who it was — I wish I could remember who it was who said it, some analyst — he said something like: ‘All modern science fiction TV shows and movies have been heavily influenced by the original Star Trek — except for the current batch of Star Trek shows,’” Weir said.

Jordan replied, “Yes!” and they both laughed.

At first, Weir left that comment open to interpretation, but then added, “I’m Gen X, so my sci-fi was like original series Star Trek reruns and Lost in Space reruns. And there wasn’t really much in the way of [new] sci-fi that was airing — where people are off in space doing cool things — until we got to [Star Trek: The Next Generation].”

Later, Jordan brought up the divisive Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which Paramount+ recently confirmed will end after its already-shot second season.

“I think we can probably safely never talk about it again,” Jordan quipped.

“It’s gone baby!” Weir cheerfully agreed. “It’s all gone.”

Jordan said his advice to Paramount is to de-canonize everything Star Trek from Enterprise onward.

“Okay, you’re a little more severe than I am,” Weir said. “I’ll give you my opinion and I’m just a consumer. I like Strange New Worlds. I think it’s pretty good. I didn’t hate Enterprise. I thought it was kind of weird. Lower Decks I thought was entertaining and fun. All the others, they can go. And here’s another thing: I pitched a Star Trek show to Paramount and I was in Zoom with the showrunners with all the shows and spent a lot of time talking to [executive producer Alex Kurtzman]. I don’t like a lot of the new Trek. He, as a person, is a really nice guy. But at the same time, those shows are shit. He is a nice guy. But they didn’t accept my pitch so, you know, fvck ’em.”…

(4) ALL THE MONEY HAIL MARY IS MAKING. Deadline has the figures: “Global Box Office: ‘Project Hail Mary’ Is Top Grossing Hollywood Movie YTD”.

In what is hopefully a sign of the times for the box office to quote the Harry Styles song in Project Hail Mary, non-franchise IP is excelling around the world with Amazon MGM Studios’ posting an amazing $108.6M second frame for a running total of $300.8M. Not only is that the top grossing Amazon MGM Studios post merger, besting the $276M haul of 2023’s Creed III, but it’s also currently the top grossing MPA title of 2026 year-to-date. Remember, China’s racing car movie, Pegasus 3 is the highest grossing movie year to date with $630.4M….

(5) CHATBOTS AND LAWYERS, OH, MY. We reported on U.S. v. Heppner soon after it was published (Pixel Scroll 3/9/26 item #5) – where the court decided that exchanges with the AI Claude were not communications between Heppner and his attorneys because Claude isn’t an attorney. And the court also ruled the exchanges weren’t confidential because under Anthropic’s terms of use for Claude the information could be disclosed to the authorities or used by the company for AI training.

However you may find this Facebook reel by Emily K. Catania, Esq. that explains the case to be both entertaining and informative.

(6) JONESING. On the March 7 episode of the Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones podcast Emily Tesh, Rebecca Fraimow and Ariella Bouskilla discuss “Deep Secret”. (Kudos to Nicholas Whyte for pointing it out to Facebook readers.) Links to the other casts at the bottom of the page.

I thought of Uncle Ted’s wobbly windows, and I began to think he must really, truly never look through them or anything else. Can’t anyone look out there and see that you need not to think of everything in terms of what works or what they ought to do?

Game dev and narrative expert Ariella Bouskila joins us for a discussion of bad colleagues, sick empires, beautiful boys, katabasis ducks, and the magic that can be found all around us if you have the eyes to see but can perhaps especially be found at a 1990s science fiction convention.

NB: As much as we would like not to, this one inevitably contains some conversation about Neil Gaiman.

(7) TATJANA WOOD (1926-2026.) The Comics Journal pays tribute: “Tatjana Wood, March 2, 1926-Feb. 27, 2026”.

Tatjana Wood, whose artistry and color palette defined DC Comics for generations of fans, passed away in an assisted living facility in Brooklyn, New York, on Feb. 27, just a few days shy of her hundredth birthday. Wood’s death came “after a long struggle with fading memory,” according to longtime friend and colleague Paul Levitz, who broke the news of her passing on social media, prompting an outpouring of stories and celebrations from friends, fans, and many of the women who had followed in her footsteps in the six decades since she had established herself as one of the premier colorists in the modern comic book industry….

She got her start helping her then-husband Wallace Wood on his assignments for EC Comics in the 1950s. Later —

… However she’d gotten her foot in the door, Wood quickly developed a reputation as one of DC’s most talented colorists, elevating what had been seen, even by those in the comic book industry, as cheap, disposable entertainment for children. “For those who don’t understand the process, comic book pages in those years were produced by a team, assembly line fashion,” wrote graphic novelist Derf Backderf in a Facebook tribute to Wood. “A writer passed his story on to a penciler. A letterer then put in the dialogue, word balloons and sound effects. An inker rendered those pencils. Finally, a colorist added the wonderful finishes that make comics into comics.

“In Tatjana’s time, floppy comics were printed on shitty newsprint. The printing was garbage. The color resolution was low. Think about those Ban Day dots that so enthralled parasite Roy Lichtenstein,” Derf continued. “If you look closely at any comics page you can see those dots with the naked eye. It was the most primitive–and inexpensive–reproduction available, and yet a master like Tatjana could achieve incredible effects. She was an important talent.”

Wood’s coloring on DC’s anthology titles, including the horror comic House of Secrets, military action series Our Army at War, and superhero team-up The Brave and Bold, showcased her versatility in the early 1970s. In 1972 she landed what would become her most enduring DC Comics freelance assignment when friend and editor Joe Orlando, knowing her ability to enhance mood and atmosphere in the four-color world, tapped her to color the first issue of Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing. She continued after the original creative team’s departure and anchored the title through several subsequent creative and editorial changes, ultimately coloring Swamp Thing for over 20 years. “Her crown jewel was Swamp Thing, ‘Shvampy’ as she called him in her gravelly German accent,” said friend and editor Karen Berger….

(8) BARRY CALDWELL (1957-2026). “Barry Caldwell Dies: ‘Animaniacs’ Animator Was 68” reports Deadline.

He worked for Warner Bros. Animation, Walt Disney Television Studios and DreamWorks during his storied career, which began with an episode of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids in 1980.

Throughout the ’80s, Caldwell was a regular storyboard artist on The New Adventures of Zorro, The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show, He Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Smurfs and Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers.

Caldwell was also known for his work on Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, The Tigger Movie (2000), Osmosis Jones (2001), Kim Possible and DreamWorks Dragons.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

“Assignment Earth” Star Trek episode (1968)

Captain’s log. Using the light-speed breakaway factor, the Enterprise has moved back through time to the 20th century. We are now in extended orbit around Earth, using our ship’s deflector shields to remain unobserved. Our mission – historical research. We are monitoring Earth communications to find out how our planet survived desperate problems in the year 1968.

Fifty-eight years ago on this evening, Star Trek’s “Assignment: Earth” first aired on NBC as part of the second season. Guest starring Robert Lansing as Gary Seven and Terri Garr as Roberta Lincoln, our crew which has time-travelled to 1968 Earth for historical research encounters an interstellar agent and Isis, his cat, who are planning to intervene in Earth history.

It was directed by Marc Daniels whose first break in the business was directing the first thirty-eight episodes of I Love Lucy which was produced at the Desilu studio which became Paramount. This was one of fifteen Trek episodes he’d direct. He won a Hugo at NYCon 3 with Gene Roddenberry for Best Dramatic Presentation for “The Menagerie”.

The story is by Art Wallace and Gene Roddenberry. Wallace, who also did the teleplay, is best remembered for his work on the soap opera Dark Shadows. Oh, and he did some scripts for Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.

It was intended as a pilot for an Assignment: Earth series that Gene Roddenberry planned but that never happened. Roddenberry’s intent was that Lansing and Garr would continue in the series if it was commissioned, but since NBC was not involved in casting the backdoor pilot, it could and well might have been that NBC would have insisted on changes or even completely recast the series had it picked up.

Terri Garr and Robert Lansing in “Assignment Earth”.

Interesting note: The uncredited human form of Isis was portrayed by actress, dancer, and contortionist April Tatro, not Victoria Vetri, actress (in Rosemary’s Baby under the name of Angela Dorian) and Playboy Playmate of the previous year, as would become part of Trek lore. Her identity was unknown until 2019 when The Trek Files podcast cited a production call sheet for extras dated the fifth of January for the year of broadcast. For decades fans had believed that the very briefly seen human form of the cat Isis was portrayed by actress Victoria Vetri. Many articles and websites treat that belief as revealed truth. Recently Vetri herself confirmed that she was not in the episode. No idea why the rumor started.

Barbara Babcock, best remembered as Grace Gardner on Hill Street Blues, a most excellent series, was the Beta 5 computer voice (uncredited at the time) and she did the Isis’ cat vocalizations as well. Speaking of that cat, it was played by Sambo as you can see by this NBC memo. Interestingly Lansing though would later contradict that claiming that there were actually three black cats involved. I can’t confirm his claim elsewhere.

Though this backdoor pilot did not enter production as a television series, both Seven and Roberta were featured in multiple stories and they were spun-off into a comic book series from IDW Publishing, Star Trek: Assignment: Earth by John Byrne. And there was the excellent novelization of the episode that Scott Dutton did for Catspaw Dynamics. I’ve read it and it’s quite superb.

In addition, according to Memory Alpha, the source for all things Trek, “Seven and Lincoln have appeared in several Star Trek novels (Assignment: Eternity and the two-volume series, The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh by Greg Cox) and short stories (“The Aliens Are Coming!” by Dayton Ward in Strange New Worlds III, “Seven and Seven” by Kevin Hosey in Strange New Worlds VI and “Assignment: One” by Kevin Lauderdale in Strange New Worlds VIII).”

The plot concept of benevolent aliens secretively helping Earthlings was later resurrected by Roddenberry for The Questor Tapes film. That film was one of a series of television movies in which Roddenberry was involved — Genesis II, Planet Earth, Strange New World and Spectre. Need I say none made it past the stage of the initial television movie which served as a pilot?

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro does space opera.
Bound and Gagged shows a word search app from the 19th century.
Brewster Rockit gets a message at a bad time.
Carpe Diem opposes littering.
Cul de Sac might have an alien toy.
Free Range has a sense of anticipation.
Non Sequitur canvasses the residents.
Rubes has an early bag of holding.
Thatababy has a disadvantages ball team (can you name the players?)
Tom Gauld knows there’s an opposite of book love.

(11) WHAT IF YOU’RE A HUGO FINALIST? Now that the 2026 Hugo nominations have closed, Cora Buhlert has posted an updated version of her advice and admonitions – “An Open Letter to the 2026 Hugo Finalists, Whoever They May Be”.

Here’s an example:

…You can tell a few people you trust about your nomination as long as you know they won’t blab it all over the internet. Before the official announcement, a handful of people knew I was a Hugo finalist. These include my parents (whose reaction was, “That’s nice,” before turning back to watch a rerun of Midsomer Murders), some folks from Galactic Journey and others in the SFF community, who knew not to say anything before the official announcement, as well as my accountant (because I asked her if buying an evening gown for the Hugo ceremony was tax-deductible – it’s not BTW) and the guy who repaired my patio, because he just happened to be there, when I got the e-mail. Neither the accountant nor the patio guy are SFF fans, so chances of a leak were zero. They both also probably thought I was quite mad.

(12) SALUTE TO A SEVENTIES EASTERN EUROPEAN TV FANTASY SERIES. Cora Buhlert’s new contribution to Galactic Journey is a review of the delightful Czech children’s fantasy TV series Pan Tau. Cora also argues that Pan Tau is a Time Lord. Plus, the series also featured the screen debut of 21-year-old Czech skier and model Ivana Zelníčková, better known as Ivana Trump. “[March 26, 1971] A Czech Delight: Pan Tau”.

…The first episode “Pan Tau tritt auf” (Pan Tau steps out) begins with a stock footage of real world rocket launches both Soviet and American. The scene then shifts into outer space, where traffic is remarkably busy with various spaceships racing past, courtesy of the excellent model work of Czech animators. The most fascinating of these spaceships is a Victorian style vehicle that looks as if the time machine from the 1960 movie and the rocket from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Moon had a baby. The driver of this strange contraption is a man dressed in – no, not a spacesuit, but a Stresemann suit with a white carnation in the buttonhole. On his head, he doesn’t wear a space helmet, but a bowler hat. This is our protagonist Pan Tau – here still in the form of a puppet. In human form, Pan Tau is played by Czech stage actor Otto Šimánek….

(13) DERN’S EXPLICATION OF TODAY’S SCROLL TITLE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Title origin story: The title reference should, I hope, be obvious to a majority of Filers (Mild hint: Rhyme-riffing on a Terry Bisson story title)…but the “how I came to think of it, not, I think, anywhere near obvious, so: I was checking part of my back for what might be ticks (rare, but has happened), which made me think of a New-England-local news story from the (dead tree) newspaper a day or two ago about increasing (though still, IIRC, small numbers of) tick bites that result in becoming allergic to red meat. (Lookup phrase: alpha-gal). From there, easy free-association to the title suggestion.

(14) NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED. [Item by N.] Now that the broom dust has cleared, James Woodall puts a magnifying glass on last year’s Wicked: For Good in “Wicked 2: The Bad VS The Good”.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/15/26 I Won’t Scroll, Don’t Click Me

Posted on March 15, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) NEBULA AWARDS FINALISTS REVEALED. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) announced the finalists for the 61st Annual Nebula Awards® in a livestreamed presentation today. See list here at File 770.

(2) READING THE ROOM. Hannah Beachler won an Oscar in 2019 for her work in Black Panther. This year, she’s a part of a film with a record-breaking number of nominations, Sinners, and a nominee for Best Production Design. This Ohio native won an Oscar for her production design. This weekend, she hopes to do it again” at WVXU.

On what makes “Sinners” so immersive

“It really is, like they say, the devil’s in the details. It’s the small things that you don’t necessarily think changes the way an audience sees something. Even if you don’t see it on film, the actor sees it. If I can harness and control and detail the world, they’re really going to respond and react to the space that they’re in. So, it was a slow education of how these small details, whether you see them or not, sort of shapes what people feel and think when they walk into the space.”

On her favorite design details in “Sinners”

“There was a ton of detail because it’s heavily researched as well, right? We needed to make it right for the time period. We needed to understand what the economy of the country was and the Jim Crow segregation at the time. [In the film], when you see the downtown, one side is Black and one side is white. When you go into those grocery stores, what’s the difference? The difference is on the Black side, it’s all utilitarian work-related staples. You see all the things that a sharecropper would need to do their job. Then when you go to the other side, it’s flowers, cakes and sewing and fabrics, little things like that. Those are the little details, like all the wood that’s in the churches were cut dimensionally, which is how they cut wood in 1932. All of the columns and posts that hold up the juke joint are the trees that you see at Annie’s.”

(3) DRAWN THAT WAY. “Firefly returns as an animated series with controversial creator Joss Whedon’s blessing” reports Polygon.

After teasing a major announcement for the past few weeks, actor Nathan Fillion took the stage at Awesome Con on Sunday, March 15 to announce a new season of Firefly. The catch? The beloved live-action space-western will return as an animated series set between the end of the original show and the follow-up film Serenity.

Fillion was joined onstage by his Firefly castmates: Alan Tudyk, Gina Torres, Jewel Staite, Morena Baccarin, Sean Maher, and Summer Glau. Not present was Adam Baldwin, who will also voice his character. Fillion also shared concept art for the new series from animation studio ShadowMachine (BoJack Horseman, Robot Chicken), which was published online as a Deadline exclusive….

… Most notably, Fillion says he has the approval of Firefly’s creator, Joss Whedon, the TV showrunner behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer who vanished from Hollywood following a series of allegations of inappropriate conduct by his former coworkers. (There’s too much to cover here, but you can read up on Whedon’s controversies in this excellent New York Magazine investigation/profile.) Whedon is reportedly not involved with the revival series….

(4) KGB PHOTOS. Ellen Datlow has shared her photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading for March 11 at Flickr.

C.S. E. Cooney and Kristina Ten read from their recent work and wowed the house

(5) CORRUPTION AND INCOMPETENCE GO HAND IN HAND. Jason Sanford wraps up the latest installment of his Genre Grapevine, “AI Providing Ever-Faster Ways for the Rich and Powerful to Do What They Want”:

…When I hear that something big is happening in AI, or see all the new AI systems and am told how powerful they are, I know that this is merely more hype. The tech elite pushing these systems want people to believe we have no choice but to accept these systems. If AI can do your job, why should you protest when you’re fired? If AI can create Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting on a rooftop, why should Hollywood pay actual actors and stagehands to create movies?

And if AI provides the bombing coordinates for an entire war, why should we worry about why we’ve gone to war in the first place? Or how innocent people are being killed?

When people talk about how something big is happening with AI, or how AI is inevitable and there’s nothing ordinary people can do about it, remember this:

That’s what the rich and powerful want. They don’t care about your life. They don’t care about the lives of others. All they want is the means to do what they want, when they want it.

And generative AI is supercharging their ability to do exactly that.

(6) HERE’S THE INCOMPETENCE PART AT WORK. Meantime, in “Claude, you are a cutie-pie!”, Margaret Atwood tells about Claude the AI advisor’s inability to help her answer a pop culture question.

Me: Do you actually watch TV shows?

Claude: No, I don’t watch TV shows! I’m an AI, so I don’t have eyes or the ability to experience media. My knowledge comes from text data I was trained on — things like reviews, episode summaries, fan wikis, and discussions about shows that existed up to my knowledge cutoff.

In this case, I clearly didn’t have reliable details about that specific Father Brown episode in my training data, which is why I got it wrong and then couldn’t find the answer through web searches either. I should have been upfront about that uncertainty rather than confidently giving you an incorrect answer — sorry about that!

Me: Naughty Claude!

(7) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books presents Simultaneous Times Episode 97 with stories by Tim Fahlstedt and Anne Wilkins from the pages of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine.

Stories featured in this episode:

“Water Memory” by Tim Fahlstedt; With music by Doctor Auxiliary; Read by Jenna Hanchey
“Gravitational Tug” by Anne Wilkins; With music by Phog Masheen; Read by Jean-Paul Garnier.

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

Simultaneous Times is a monthly science fiction podcast produced by Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

The Girl with Something Extra series (1976)

Networks in the Sixties liked young actresses. They were either sexy, or they were cute. So let’s talk about the lead of The Girl with Something Extra series that debuted fifty years ago.

That lead actress was Sally Field which tells you how deep the story was intended to be. She was a wife who had ESP, and her husband played by John Davidson never quite understood her. It was intended to be cute, really, really cute with her giving it that cuteness.

There was other cast, but really who cared? Not the studio. It was intended to be just a vehicle for these two to be a couple as this critic noted “The plot for The Girl With Something Extra TV show immediately brings to mind another show that ended in March of 1972 after a whopping eight seasons on the air! That series of course was ‘Bewitched’ which also featured a young newlywed couple with the wife having super-human powers that caused many problems for her and her husband.”

The audience apparently didn’t grasp its charms, and it was canceled after one season of twenty-two half hour episodes.

So the Apple search engine says it’s not streaming anywhere. The Flying Nun is streaming on, errr, Tubi. Any of y’all ever subscribe to that service?

Lancer Books published a tie-in novel by Paul Farman, The Girl With Something Extra.

I see multiple signed scripts are for sale on eBay. Press photos too. Like the one below. Aren’t they cute? Well, aren’t they?

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro visits the dark side of toys.
Brewster Rockit has a credential problem.
Close to Home introduces us to earliest Dr. Seuss.
Cul de Sac depicts another method of writing.
Eek! has a height limit.
The Other Coast ponders travel with alien dogs.

(10) OCTOTHORPE. Well done! You’ve found the contents of Octothorpe 155, perfectly preserved in a jar. The jar was in your basement. The jar was always there. You always had a basement. Don’t run—come back! We talk about Eastercon! Listen here: “Ed! Ed! ED!”. An uncorrected transcript is available here.

(11) FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. Cora Buhlert reviews the 1971 science fiction thriller Tomorrow is Too Far by James White as part of Galactic Journey’s “[February 19, 1971] Tomorrow is too far (February Galactoscope #2)”.

Northern Irish science fiction writer James White was a staple of the John Carnell era New Worlds and I have been enjoying his Sector General stories and his other works like The Escape Orbit for years now. With New Worlds changing direction under Michael Moorcock, James White’s stories became few and far between. So I was overjoyed when I spotted a new James White novel called Tomorrow is Too Far in the paperback spinner rack of my trusty import bookstore.

Tomorrow is Too Far is not set in the universe of White’s Sector General stories nor in the world of The Escape Orbit. In fact, the novel is not set in outer space at all, but right here on Earth in the nearish future….

(12) KORNBLUTH RETROSPECTIVE. Cora also was on the Postcards from a Dying World podcast, discussing the 1950 science fiction story “The Little Black Bag” by Cyril Kornbluth with David Agranoff and John Battisberger.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, John Coxon, Jean-Paul Garnier, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 3/14/26 The Real Houseplants Of Gor

Posted on March 14, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) NO, THANKS. Literary Hub remembers “How J.R.R. Tolkien Blocked W.H. Auden From Writing a Book About Him”.

Like many of us, W. H. Auden was a huge Tolkien fan in his day. In 1954, the celebrated poet raved about The Fellowship of the Ring in The New York Times, writing “No fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy.” Afterwards, the two corresponded frequently; Tolkien sent Auden advance copies of the next two installments and the two discussed Tolkien’s work at some length. (Auden thought, for one thing, that Tolkien should get rid of the romance between Aragorn and Arwen, though in the end, it didn’t seem to vex him much.)

But ten years later, when Auden proposed to write a book about Tolkien for the Christian publisher Eerdmans, as part of their “Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective” series (subjects would include J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and C.S. Lewis), Tolkien flatly refused. And while Auden is often characterized as one of the people who legitimized Tolkien’s work in the literary world, and the two are often described as “close friends,” at least in 1966, Tolkien didn’t seem to agree (at least with the latter bit).

On March 9th, 1966, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote to Roger Verhlust at Eerdmans:

“Mr. Auden did, in fact, inform me that he had agreed to contribute to your series a book called J. R. R. Tolkien in Christian Perspective. For various reasons I did not reply immediately to him; but though I regret that my view may not please you, and I am of course grateful for the honor of your attention, it is necessary I think to quote to you now what I said to him.

“’I regret very much to hear that you have contracted to write a book about me. It does meet with my strong disapproval. I regard such things as premature impertinences; and unless undertaken by an intimate friend, or with consultation of the subject (for which I have at present no time), I cannot believe that they have a usefulness to justify the distaste and irritation given to the victim. I wish at any rate that any book could wait until I produce the Silmarillion. I am constantly interrupted in this; but nothing interferes more than the present pother about ‘me’ and my history.’

“I owe Mr. Auden a debt of gratitude for the generosity with which he has supported and encouraged me since the first appearance of The Lord of the Rings. At the same time I feel obliged to comment that he does not know me.* It is possibly unfair to judge him by the press reports (possibly garbled) about me and my views at a meeting of the so-called Tolkien Society. They at any rate, as reported, showed him to be entirely mistaken about my views on the topics he touched on….”

(2) EKPEKI MEDICAL UPDATE AND GOFUNDME INFO. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki told the Sahara Reporters that in February he was seriously injured by a cyclist, and a friend was hurt too: “Lagos Company Rider Knocks Down Two Pedestrians, Victim Accuses Firm Of Negligence, Threats After Suffering Spinal Fracture”.

Lagos resident, Oghenechovwo Donald Ekpeki, has accused food delivery company Chowdeck of negligence, threat and intimidation after one of its dispatch riders knocked him and his friend down in Ikeja, leaving him with a spinal fracture that nearly resulted in paralysis.

Ekpeki, speaking with SaharaReporters, recounted how the accident occurred late at night on February 14, 2026, while he and his friend, Purity Adheke, were walking in the Ikeja Government Reserved Area (GRA) of Lagos.

According to him, the incident happened shortly after they left The Place restaurant on Isaac John Street and were walking near Reddington Hospital, Ikeja, when a Chowdeck delivery motorcycle lost control and rammed into them at full speed….

That’s why his publisher Shahid Mahmud has launched a GoFundMe appeal on Ekpeki’s behalf: “Help Award-Winning Author Ekpeki After Near-Fatal Accident”.

On the night of February 14, 2026, one of the most celebrated voices in African speculative fiction nearly lost his life — and came within inches of permanent paralysis.

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki — the first African-born Black author ever to win a Nebula Award, and a winner of the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, and two Nommo Awards — was struck by an out-of-control delivery vehicle while walking near Reddington Hospital in Ikeja, Lagos. The rider slammed into him at full speed, launching him into the air and onto the pavement, then continued forward and struck the woman walking beside him before finally stopping.

When doctors finally examined him — after a nine-hour ordeal without medical attention — they delivered alarming news: Ekpeki had sustained a spinal fracture. The orthopaedic surgeon told him plainly that had the injury been even slightly worse, he would have faced permanent paralysis, lifelong deformity, or chronic debilitating pain.

What followed the accident made everything worse.

After lying injured on the roadside for hours, the company’s supervisor eventually arrived — and his first concern was retrieving the motorcycle. When Ekpeki, in pain, demanded medical assistance, the supervisor asked what his “means of mobility” was. When Ekpeki understandably lost his composure, the supervisor threatened him. Ekpeki sat in the delivery company’s office for another five hours — fractured spine, blood pressure spiking dangerously, having not eaten or taken medication for his bipolar disorder and hypertension all day — before anyone helped him.

A full nine hours after the accident, he finally received medical care.

The road to recovery is long — and costly….

Pixel Scroll 1/21/26 Sorry I’m Late, I Was Off Chasing Dodos Out Of The Library

Posted on January 21, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) SOUND ADVICE? “Is listening to an audiobook as good as reading?” asks the Guardian.

Queen Camilla has met many disreputable characters in her time as a royal, but her encounter this week with two celebrity reprobates was at least for a good cause. The queen has appeared in the Beano alongside its celebrated bad boy Dennis the Menace and his dog, Gnasher, as part of a campaign to promote reading.

It wasn’t the cartoon Camilla’s waspish waist that captured the headlines (“I wish,” she said of her comic strip avatar), but what she had to say while encouraging the tween menace to “go all in” for reading: “Comics and audiobooks count too!”

Audiobooks have boomed in popularity in recent years – the revenue they generated for UK publishers rose by almost a third in 2023-24 – becoming an increasingly central part of the industry. But do they truly count as “proper” reading? Is listening to a book while doing the dishes, walking the dog or drifting off to sleep really as valuable as sitting down to read it?

For authors, the publishing trade and those encouraging reading and literacy, the answer is increasingly yes. “Reading is about the content and not the medium,” says Debbie Hicks, the creative director of the Reading Agency, a charity that promotes the personal and social benefits of reading and leads nationwide reading programmes in schools, prisons and communities.

Audio may have been traditionally viewed as a lesser medium, acknowledges Hicks, “but we need to reframe what it means to be a reader and throw off these traditional value hierarchies linked to print and books. Reading is about the content and not the medium.”…

(2) 2025 EASTERCON FINANCIAL REPORT. Tommy Ferguson, Treasurer and Co-Chair, has published the financial report and chair observations for Reconnect, the 2025 Eastercon, held for the first time in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

It shows a healthy surplus of approximately, of which £20k has been disbursed as passalong to current and future Eastercons, as well as a portion retained to support a new Northern Ireland convention NornCon happening in May 2026 (NornCon) which hopes to build on the legacy of Reconnect.

The report details ways in which the committee reached out to other fandoms and new to Eastercon fans (135 people attended an Eastercon for the first time) as well as supported fans with low rates, no questions asked concession rates and, with the help of the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon, bursaries for those who would otherwise be unable attend. Ferguson says, “We hope these actions will be repeated for future Eastercons.”

The report can be accessed on their website – download link here: Reconnect Financial Analysis Report.

(3) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to chat over calamari with Megaton Man creator Don Simpson in Episode 273 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

It’s time for a trip to Baltimore Comic-Con, where I had the chance to chat with comics creator Don Simpson, whose work I’ve been reading for more than 40 years, ever since the first issue of Megaton Man in 1984.

Back at the beginning of that series, it seemed (incorrectly) as if Don’s interest was solely in satirizing the Marvel tropes of my childhood, with characters such as Stella Starlight (the See-Thru Girl) and Bing Gloom (Yarn Man) spoofing Sue Storm (the Invisible Girl) and Ben Grimm (the Thing). But he soon started focusing on the natural outgrowth of the characters rather than limiting himself to metafictionally commenting only on the comics themselves. There was some pushback on that from those who wanted him to stick to the nostalgia game, as you’ll hear us chat about a bit.

He also created the science fiction backup Border Worlds, which eventually expanded into its own comic, as well as Bizarre Heroes, plus underground comics such as Forbidden Frankenstein, that last project under the pseudonym Anton Drek. Don celebrated Megaton Man’s 40th Anniversary last year with two major projects — the 608-page The Complete Megaton Man Volume I: The 1980s and Megaton Man: Multimensions — with more planned collections forthcoming.

Even those who haven’t been privileged to experience Don through those many comics projects might have encountered him via the illustrations he created for Al Franken’s 2003 bestseller Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

We discussed why he splurged on a special issue of Captain Marvel at the Baltimore Comic-Con, how the business practices of comics affect the artistic side, the way two early visits with artist Keith Pollard taught him he didn’t want to be a Marvel Comics penciller after all, where he feels the Silver Age ended and the Bronze Age truly began, how classic cinema and the auteur theory influenced his creative choices, the lessons he learned from the first few issues of Love & Rockets vs. the unfortunate expectations set up by the first few issues of Megaton Man, how working on DC’s anthology title Wasteland caused him to reinvent himself, what path his publishing life would have taken had Megaton Man been only a one-shot as originally planned, the career differences between Basil Wolverton and Will Eisner, why he’s able to let others play with his characters without feeling proprietary, the alternate universe in which he would have been a Crusty Bunker or one of Romita’s Raiders, how 9/11 caused him to head back to school for a PhD, why he wrote a Ms. Megaton Man prose novel, whether he already knows the final chapter to his comics universe, and much more.

(4) COUNTDOWN TO 1971. Galactic Journey, the daily blog that follows the sff field 55 years in the past, has announced they will do “live” coverage of the Apollo 14 mission through Portal 55, their Discord channel.

Apollo 14 coverage starts next week, with the big event beginning January 31st.

This is to-the-second “live” coverage of the entire Apollo 14 mission with all extant footage.

PLEASE tell all your friends. This is a once in a lifetime experience; this is the last time the Journey will make an extravaganza out of space for a long time.

Here’s the full schedule: Apollo 14 schedule at Google Sheets.

Edgar Mitchell, Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa

(5) MAD ABOUT DC. “MAD Magazine DC Comics Parody: April Fool’s One-Shot Details” from SYFY Wire.

…DC Comics announced Jan. 21 that it will release a MAD Magazine-inspired parody of its own superhero IP by way of a special one-shot guest edited by Eisner Award winning creator Chip Zdarsky (Image’s Sex Criminals). The 64-page MAD About DC appropriately drops on Wednesday, April 1—you know, April Fool’s Day.

“They say at DC there’s nowhere to go but down after writing Batman, and, yeah, it’s true,” Zdarsky said in a statement. “It’s very true.”…

…Zdarsky, of course, is no stranger to the sprawling world of DC, having penned stories for several Gotham City mainstays—Batman, Joker, Harley Quinn, Red Hood, Catwoman, Penguin—as well as the Justice League….

What to expect from the MAD Magazine parody of DC Comics:

Sergio Aragonés with “A MAD Look at Comic Book Stores”
Jim Zub & Ramon Perez teaming for “Guy vs. Spy”
A brand-new DC Fold-In by Charles Soule & Ryan Browne
A parade of MAD-style parodies skewering the DC comic books you love, and a few you’ve always hated anyway, from Kyle Starks, Dave Johnson, Tini Howard, Mattie Lubchansky, Mark Waid, Ty Templeton, Rainbow Rowell, Vita Ayala, M.L. Sanapo, Mark Russell, Steve Lieber, Jeff Parker, Lukas Ketner, Gerry Duggan, Scott Aukerman, Mitch Gerads, Joanne Starer, Joe Quinones, Scott Snyder, Josh Williamson, Deniz Camp, Gail Simone, Colleen Doran, Joe Kelly, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Valentine De Landro, Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo, Mariko Tamaki, Riley Rossmo, Al Ewing, PJ Holden, Shannon Wheeler, Leah Williams, Isaac Goodhart, Cody Ziglar, Daniele Di Nicuolo, Daniel Kibblesmith, Brandt&Stein, Casey Gilly, J. Bone, Skottie Young, Andrew Wheeler, Stephen Byrne, Colleen Coover, Benjamin Errett, Matt Fraction, Kagan McLeod, Lee Gatlin, Joseph Starkey, Graham Roumieu…and more?!

(6) NEW TOR IMPRINT. “Tor Publishing Group Announces Commercial Fiction Imprint” – Publishers Weekly has details.

Tor Publishing Group has announced the launch of Wildthorn Books, a new imprint for “commercial stories” spanning multiple genres. Its inaugural list is set for winter 2027.

The SFF publishing group’s first commercial fiction imprint will be overseen by Devi Pillai, president and publisher, and Monique Patterson, VP and editorial director. Senior editor Susan Barnes will also be acquiring for Wildthorn. Pillai and Patterson previously teamed to launch Tor Publishing Group’s romance imprint, Bramble, in 2023.

Per the announcement, Wildthorn plans to publish in such genres as “commercial and upmarket women’s fiction, suspense, paranormal mystery, magical realism, speculative nonfiction, and historical fantasy.” The imprint will simultaneously launch with Tor UK, with the two companies sharing lead authors while also commissioning in distinct areas.

“Readers have changed—and so has the market,” said Pillai in a statement, noting that as commercial fiction continues to blend with genre, it became apparent that Tor “was the perfect house to create Wildthorn.” The new imprint will be supported by the team that launched Tor’s successful Nightfire, Bramble, and Tordotcom Publishing imprints.

Wildthorn will launch next January with The Stars Look Like Home, a new novel by TJ Klune. In a statement, Klune called the book “an adventure inspired by my love of animals and favorite childhood films like Homeward Bound, The Adventures of Milo and Otis, and The Incredible Journey,” adding that publishing with Wildthorn “gives me the opportunity to tell a different kind of ‘fantasy’ story.”…

(7) BIG BUCKS. Ted Gioia looks back on the death of the midlist, and “The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul”.

…You can’t understand the stagnancy of publishing today without understanding this history. When Random House was a tiny independent company, it could make a tidy profit by publishing books that sold just ten thousand copies. But when you’re part of a billion dollar corporation, those books don’t move the needle—you need something bigger and splashier.

So you put large fonts on the cover, along with fancy shapes and garish colors. And the story inside those covers has to be tried and true.

You are now imprisoned by the formula.

The problem starts at the top. I can’t find out how much the CEO of Bertelsmann makes, but I do know that his compensation at his previous job was $1.7 million. So I assume he’s making at least as much at his new job.

This is great for him—but terrible for the book business. You can’t pay enormous salaries like this by publishing smart and bold midlist books. You’re not allowed to take risks. So editors have to reach for surefire books—celebrity memoirs filled with juicy gossip, formula novels with the potential for a Netflix adaptation, self-help books from Instagram influencers, and other dumbed down mass market fare.

If it works, the CEO gets that huge payday. But the literary culture goes down the tank—which is where we’re sitting right now….

(8) MONSTERVERSE. Apple TV has dropped the “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” Season 2 Official Teaser.

Titan X has awakened. The new season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters arrives February 27 on Apple TV Based on the Monsterverse from Legendary, this dramatic saga — spanning three generations — reveals buried secrets and the ways that epic, earth-shattering events can reverberate through our lives.

(9) SANDY COHEN (1948-2026). Longtime LASFS member Sandy Cohen died January 20 from medical complications after a fall.

Sandy joined LASFS in March 1967. He was at the first meeting ever held in the LASFS Clubhouse in 1973, and at the successor clubhouses, including in 2011. In the Seventies he wrote numerous reviews for Delap’s F&SF Review.

Helpful at many conventions; he was a leading Art Show auctioneer. His management of the Dealers’ Room at the 2019 World Fantasy Con was applauded in Locus. He was a member of the Board of Directors of SCIFI, Inc., the nonprofit organization that is running LAcon V this year.

(10) JEAN RABE (1957-2026). Author Jean Rabe, named an International Association of Media Tie-In Writers Grandmaster in 2020, died on January 19 at the age of 68.

Rabe wrote game accessories and novels for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy worlds of Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, and contributed to West End Games’ Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game and FASA’s BattleTech product lines.

She served the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America as business manager and editor of the association’s SFWA Bulletin until 2013, when she resigned following controversies over cover art on one issue, and a misogynistic column by Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg.

Rabe also became known for collaborations with Andre Norton and a series of short story anthologies frequently co-edited with Martin H. Greenberg.

She is survived by her husband, Bruce Rabe.

(11) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 21, 1972 – First Trek Con, NYC

By Paul Weimer: No, I wasn’t there, I was three months old and my mother and father were not into Star Trek. Oh, Dad would patiently watch as I watched reruns of TOS, but this piece is not about that. It is about the first Star Trek Con. Star Trek Lives! (The exclamation point is part of the title).

Or was it the first? It was held in January 1972 at the Statler Hilton, but a research of the subject suggests that there was a previous con in 1969 in Newark, New Jersey. That con was just a group of fans, no guests and lasted an afternoon. It is not the first time Star Trek was in a con of any sort– Roddenberry was at Worldcon in 1966 (Tricon). Fans have always been meeting and talking Star Trek when getting together. But the first full convention devoted to the show was Star Trek Lives!

With all of that in mind, let’s get back to the con itself. It featured guests including Roddenberry and Majel Barrett and D.C Fontana. It also had Hal Clement and Isaac Asimov. Asimov was well known as a big fan of Star Trek, so while I might be mildly surprised by Clement being at this con, I am not that surprised Asimov was invited. In any event, that’s a solid list of guests for a first ever Star Trek convention.

This con, the first Star Trek Lives! Convention, is considered the first con as we understand them, and is worth celebrating on that basis. The not so subtle goal of the con, like other efforts at the time, was to provide momentum for a revival of the show. Even given the problems of the third and final TOS season, the enthusiasm of fans for the show to come back manifested the moment the show was cancelled. This con, in 1972 was an expression by the fans not only of the love of the show, but laying the groundwork for its return.

The con also featured an art show, a dealer room, a costume call, NASA space displays (moon rocks and an astronaut suit), and a hospitality room. Episodes were also screened from 16mm prints, including the original pilot The Cage and a blooper reel. There was also a fan-made reconstruction of the Enterprise Bridge as well.

And it was written up in fanzines of the time like Ragnarok and Poison Pen Press.

This original con was the first of a series of four conventions and was in the end successful in their mission. After all, Star Trek did return in the form of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In a time between TOS and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the fate of Star Trek was fraught. Cons like Star Trek Lives! were essential in keeping the flame of Star Trek alive. It was not the only strand in keeping interest in the show alive, but it was unmistakably important, and deserves to be remembered.

My own first science fiction convention was, in fact, a Star Trek convention in the mid 1990’s in a different hotel in New York City. That Star Trek convention had Marina Sirtis and George Takei as guests, the latter I accidentally bumped into on a back staircase. At the time I had the feeling there had been plenty of these sorts of conventions before, but I did not know at the time just how far back Star Trek conventions went.

Now if I only had a time machine to go visit this first Star Trek convention. In this era where retro style cameras are all the rage, I could take all the pictures I wanted and not even raise an eyebrow.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal compares sciences.
Bizarro has a suggestion to improve the strategy.
Bob the Squirrel is not impressed.
Dark Side of the Horse sees time really does fly.
Eek! has a therapeutic insight.
Nancy wants to be first.
The Argyle Sweater attends a superhero’s funeral.
Wumo is overstaffed.

(13) POOF! [Item by Steven French.] It’s out there! “Complex building blocks of life form spontaneously in space, research reveals” – at Phys.org.

Challenging long-held assumptions, Aarhus University researchers have demonstrated that the protein building blocks essential for life as we know it can form readily in space. This discovery, appearing in Nature Astronomy, significantly raises the statistical probability of finding extraterrestrial life.

In a modern laboratory at Aarhus University and at an international European facility in Hungary (HUN-REN Atomki), researchers Sergio Ioppolo and Alfred Thomas Hopkinson conduct pioneering experiments. Within a small chamber, the two scientists have mimicked the environment found in giant dust clouds thousands of light-years away. This is no easy feat….

(14) LOOK WHAT I FOUND. “American high school student stuns scientists by mapping 1.5 million previously unknown space objects” reports Futura-Sciences.

A California teenager has stumbled upon a cosmic jackpot while digging through forgotten NASA archives. What began as a summer side project turned into a groundbreaking AI discovery — one that’s now published in a leading scientific journal.

In one of modern astronomy’s most surprising breakthroughs, a high school student from California used artificial intelligence to uncover more than 1.5 million previously unidentified space objects — all from a retired NASA mission’s data. His work has been peer-reviewed and published in The Astronomical Journal, earning him recognition within the scientific community….

(15) LONG DIVISION. Maps will be updated. But no need to hurry. “Africa is splitting in two in slow motion, and geologists have found the crack where a new ocean is being born” says Ecoticias.

Most people grew up with a simple world map in school where Africa is one solid block of land. Now scientists say that picture is slowly going out of date. According to work highlighted by National Geographic and several research teams, the African continent is tearing along a giant scar that will one day create a new ocean between two separate landmasses.

This breakup is happening along the East African Rift, where the Somali plate is pulling away from the larger Nubian plate. The movement is incredibly slow, only a few millimeters each year, yet over tens of millions of years it will reshape coastlines, trade routes, and even the way future students learn their geography….

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

Pixel Scroll 12/25/25 Scroll Hard

Posted on December 25, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(0) I’ll start today by thanking the devoted friends who do so much to make the daily Scroll possible. Cat Eldridge, who consults his calendar to provide the spine that centers every edition, often assisted by the fantastically generous Paul Weimer. John King Tarpinian, keeper of the flame of Ray Bradbury, secret sharer of our admiration of the charity of Guillermo del Toro, and minder of genre history. Kathy Sullivan, indefatigable watcher of the daily comics. Chris Barkley, who makes sure I miss no genre news from the trade papers, NPR, or the innumerable other sources he follows. Steven French, who covers the full spectrum of literature and astrophysics. Mark Roth-Whitworth, all-round contributor, and ever alert for science features. Andrew Porter, always finding provocative literature essays and publishing industry news. Plus SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, our reporter on the best of things in Brit Cit, and a scientist in his own right who knows what’s news.

(1) JUST WHAT HE NEEDED. And next I’d like to play you “Tom Baker’s Christmas message 2025”.

Tom Baker in a 1970s living room, with a Christmas message for his fans.

(2) THE YEAR’S BEST – THAT IS, 55 YEARS AGO. Galactic Journey’s post “[December 24, 1970] ‘oh my God! – it’s full of stars!’” announces their choices for the Galactic Stars of 1970.

The first year of the 1970’s is over, and boy, has compiling statistics been a delight! (and a chore…) I can safely say that it’s been a year of superlatives, and if you spend the next few months plowing through this list, I guarantee you’ll be in for a good experience….

Here are the Novelettes that earned stars that year:

Best Novelettes (20-40 pages)

Slow Sculpture, by Theodore Sturgeon

“It’s about a man and a woman, the former an engineer, the latter a cipher, both troubled. It involves electricity and bonsai and an understated romance.”

This is a story pretty much everyone knew was going to get the Star even when it came out at the beginning of the year. It got an overwhelming number of nominations.

The Second Inquisition, by Joanna Russ

A visitor from the future(?) arrives in 1925 to upend the social order of things.

The Pressure of Time, by Thomas M. Disch

In the future, social outcasts plan to leave an embattled Ireland for the freedom of England.

Through a Glass—Darkly?, by Zenna Henderson

A woman from the present is witness to the tragic life of a fierce woman of the 19th Century.

(3) NO FUTURE TENSE FOR THESE SHOWS. There are several genre favorites on The Hollywood Reporter’s list. “Canceled After One Season: 26 of The Best TV Shows That Didn’t Last”.

It is not a stretch to say that the contemporary TV audience often feels entitled: to more seasons, to their idea of a perfect ending and even to a reboot — which they sometimes get if the IP is deemed valuable enough. TV has become a wish fulfillment factory. Where viewers don’t get their way, and never really did, is when platforms and networks pull the plug on promising shows after just one season. Plenty of history’s one-season shows, well, they might have been better off as no-season shows. But the list of one-offs that were gone too soon is far too long. And since it’s also too long (and subjective) to get into all of them, let’s stick to the standouts. Here is a look at 26 such series over the past three decades that are still spoken of for having left fans wanting more…

Here’s one you may have forgotten:

‘Lovecraft Country’ (2020)

This one is complicated now, knowing what we do about what later happened in real life with male lead Jonathan Majors, so let’s just focus on how this bonkers, expensive and often deeply scary fantasy drama was an incredible showcase for three actresses. Starring Jurnee Smollett, Lovecraft Country also included future King Richard Oscar nominee Aujenue Ellis-Taylor and Sinners scene-stealer Wunmi Mosaku, the three of them forging one of the stronger female ensembles in recent TV history. It ended with enough closure for the one season to stand on its own, but you can’t help but wonder what else they could have done …

(4) BAD FOLK OF FANTASY. Yesterday, File 770 published Cora Buhlert’s “Review: Figura Obscura Mouse King Action Figure from Four Horsemen Studios”. She also shared this photo of the figure on Bluesky.

And Cora also put up another photo of the Evil Horde who are helping decorate her home for the season.

(5) BECAUSE OF COURSE IT DOES. Why would I click if it didn’t? “A faster-than-light spaceship would actually look a lot like Star Trek’s Enterprise” asserts Fast Company.

The USS Enterprise was an impossible dream rendered in fiber glass. Designed for Star Trek, it looked like a creation straight out of creator Gene Roddenberry’s imagination: Twin nacelles—those long, gleaming engine pods held by elegant pylons—extended from a central saucer holding the engines that allowed Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. Bones, and the rest of the crew to travel across the cosmos.

Inside those nacelles, the show’s creators imagined, lay the secret that made those trips possible: a warp drive that could crease spacetime itself, folding the universe in front of the ship while unfurling it behind, allowing faster-than-light travel not through speed but through geometry. For decades, physicists dismissed it as beautiful nonsense—a prop master’s fever dream.

But now the math has caught up to the dream.

Harold “Sonny” White—a mechanical engineer and applied physicist who worked on warp drive concepts at NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory—has published a peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious Classical and Quantum Gravity that proposes a new design for a warp drive that happens to look a lot like the Enterprise.

(6) GEORGE BARR’S REASONS FOR THE SEASON. A year ago Black Gate helped promote a Kickstarter to collect “George Barr’s Christmas Card Fantasies” with a post that included a large gallery of examples. Here’s one of the art panels they published:

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

December 25, 1899 — Humphrey Bogart. (Died 1957.)

By Paul Weimer: Sure, Humphrey Bogart was never in a SF/F film but his work in allied genres classifies him as being worthy of the scroll.

I’ll begin with Casablanca, since that is where I first recall seeing him. WPIX again, of course, this black and white film came on, apparently set during the war. Watching it without context gave me some weird ideas what was going on until I finally saw it start to finish. I’ve watched it many many times, since.

My next encounter with Bogart was on the African Queen, one of the best adventure movies ever made. I had already seen Katherine Hepburn (in The Lion in Winter), so this looked like a fun pairing. And it is! Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart take on Nazis in Africa is a swell way to spend a Saturday Afternoon.

With The Maltese Falcon, I got the Bogart-Lorre reunion I didn’t know but I wanted. The two actors work wonderfully together, and it was that which inspired me for years to “play” Peter Lorre in Skiffy and Fanty Torture Cinema skits. But indeed, if anyone could ever find the real Maltese Falcon, it would be Bogart.

I encountered other Bogart noir films, especially The Big Sleep, which has one of my all time favorite scenes as Bogart and an uncredited Dorothy Malone as a bookstore owner flirt outrageously. Sexy? Darn right it is.

Since I was and am still late to westerns, it took me awhile to get to movies like Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I still don’t think of Bogart as one for the country or the wilderness in his roles. Even with movies like the aforementioned African Queen and The Caine Mutiny notwithstanding, a dark nightclub, the mean streets of a city, that’s where Bogart is always in my mind. And yes, frequently with Lauren Bacall somewhere around. Why mess with one of the best actor-actress pairings in movie history in my brain?

And I return to Casablanca, one of the best movies ever made and Bogart is a big part of that. Sure, he has a dream cast to work with, and a killer script, but the world weary Rick could not be portrayed by a better actor, before, then or since.

Cheers, Mr. Bogart. Cheers.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

How The Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)

Once upon a Christmas season, there was a television show called How The Grinch Stole Christmas. A television show that explicitly had a message that Christmas was neither a celebration of the birth of Christ, nor was it something that comes in a box, but rather is a matter of remembering that we hold each other in our hearts. Warm, fuzzy, and aggressively secular. In 1966 no less!

Aired on December 18 on CBS, the short film, just 26 minutes long, aired on that network for 21 years; ABC has aired it starting 2006, and then Turner Broadcasting has been airing, well until now as you’ll see below. I just watched it after getting it off iTunes where it comes bundled with Horton Hears A Who. (Both of these would be made into films that were awful.) This animated version was written by Christine Kenne from the brief children’s book by Theodore Geisel writing as Dr. Suess; it was produced by him and Chuck Jones who also directed it rather brilliantly.

The animation style looks more than a little flat but that just adds to the feel of it being a folk tale about a villain in his lair high on the mountain, The Grinch, who decides he can’t stand all the noise and commotion of the Whos down in Whoville enjoying Christmas. Not to mention his disgust at them eating the rare roast beast. So he concocts a brilliant scheme to dress as Santie (sic) Claus and take a sleigh down into Whoville (his dog Max with an antler tied to his head being a poor substitute for a reindeer) and steal everything down and including a crumb of food so small that even a mouse wouldn’t eat it.

So up to the top of Mount Crumpet he rides waiting for them to all go ‘boo who’ when they discover everything is gone, but instead he hears them all signing out in joyful voices thereby providing the upbeat moral of this which I noted previously. Hearing this, his heart grows multiple sizes and he rescues the now falling load with ‘the strength of ten Grinches plus two’. Riding into Whoville, he grins ear to ear, and he, the now reformed Grinch, has the honor of carving the roast beast.

I watch it every year this as I really like it. I love the bit, used twice, of increasingly small Whos, once serving tea and the second time a strawberry to a small Who girl, by coming out of a series of covered dishes.

A final note must be devoted to this being I believe the last performances of Boris Karloff who both narrated it, voiced and made the sounds of The Grinch and of this tale which I noted above sung all of its songs save ‘You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch’ which was, though uncredited, sung by Thurl Ravenscroft, one of the booming voices for Kellog’s Frosted Flakes. Karloff won the only performance award he got as he was awarded a Grammy in the Spoken Word category!

It’s one of the best Christmas shows ever!

It is streaming on Peacock now. So go watch it. The red-haired, green-eyed Suck Fairy says you really should.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Aurora Winter.]

The Lion in Winter (1968 and 2004)

In 1968 MGM Studios teamed up with James Goldman to adapt his play The Lion in Winter for the screen. At the time the play had been a flop, running for a mere eighty-three performances on Broadway two years previous. The movie was made and was not only a success, but also breathed new interest into the stage version. I first encountered the 1968 film in university and read the script.

The title, for those of you rusty with your English history, refers to King Henry II (the lion was his crest) being in the “winter” of his life. At this point in history King Henry II had a kingdom that stretched into France and was in need of choosing his heir. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry’s wife, was imprisoned in a castle (thanks to Henry who was the key keeper). Goldman’s story is a fictional account of the Christmas court held to determine the future king. A complicated story this is, the wit in the script combined with the actors’ stellar timing make it worth watching again and again.

Seven characters, each tremendously important, make up the cast . . . and what a cast it is. The role of the fifty-year-old (quite old for 1183) King Henry is played by a mature Peter O’Toole. Katherine Hepburn was granted the role of the spunky and vivacious Eleanor of Aquitaine. The three sons up for the throne are: Richard (Anthony Hopkins), John (Nigel Terry), and Geoffrey (John Castle). Let us not forget Alais (Jane Merrow) either, the young girl given to Henry by the French king sixteen years before to one day be the bride for the chosen king. Beyond this it is useless to explain more of the plot as it is far too complicated.

I said that the timing was crucial to the success and enjoyment one can experience with this film. While some may not appreciate a film that finds its humor through fast paced, verbal, intelligent wit with little ‘sight gags’ and no slapstick, I adore it. Each scene seems half the length it actually is because these actors are so tight in their character that they can fire one-liners back and forth without ever seeming fake or forced. One gets the sense that these conversations might have occurred between Eleanor and Henry, Henry and Alais, Richard and Philip, John and Geoff.

The technical aspects of this film are quite impressive too, period costume more accurate than those generally seen in such films. The whole movie takes place within Henry’s castle in Chinon, a vast castle in the cold of December, and the production crew made sure we felt the draft from the open spaces and cold stone. The cinematography often mirrors the long walking shots that we now see all the time on West Wing, creating the feeling that we have been transported back centuries to drop in on this family crisis.

While this film does have some minor downfalls — Morrow’s Alais is a bit too whiny for my taste and a few gems were cut from the original text and replaced with extraneous muck (I’m still holding out for the version that leaves those gems in) — they are easily ignored and outdone by the beauty of the final work. It is no surprise that this launched Anthony Hopkins into stardom, or how so many see Hepburn (she did win the Best Actress Oscar for this role) and O’Toole as the definitive Eleanor and Henry. If, somehow, you have missed this piece of film history, go rent the DVD, sit back, and allow yourself to be transported back to 1183.

I am not a big fan of remakes when it comes to the film industry, especially when the original was so fantastic. But every now and then someone comes along and surprises me with a new-old movie that is as good, or better than the original. This was what I discovered after I watched the 2004 version of The Lion in Winter.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Rhymes with Orange isn’t finished decorating.
The Argyle Sweater didn’t hit its first market, though it would have been a big one.
xkcd explains something wrong.

(11) TRUE MOB. “Nuts & Bolts: George Anastasia of Netflix’s ‘Mob War’” tells readers of the Horror Writers Association blog how write more realistic criminals.

Mobsters have a long history with horror. No, this is not an exposé. Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Laird Barron have written about them. They’ve prowled the shadowy underworlds of John Constantine and Felix Castor, and taken center stage in everything from survival horror to Twilight Zone episodes.

If your horror fiction includes mobbed-up characters and you’d like them to ring true, legendary crime writer George Anastasia offers some advice in this month’s edition of Nuts & Bolts.

Nearly 50 years ago, George started covering the local Mafia for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and did such a good job that mob boss John Stanfa put out a hit on him. He’s since released six books, profiling real-life criminals including mafiosi and outlaw bikers….

Q: WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE A FICTION AUTHOR WHO WANTS TO WRITE A REALISTIC PORTRAYAL OF MOBSTERS?

A: Read newspaper and magazine accounts about organized crime figures and look for documented (federal court records, defense attorney filings, etc.) examples of mobsters talking in unguarded moments. There’s a lot out there.

The biggest problem with writing non-fiction is the lack of dialogue but given the extensive use of electronic surveillance, there plenty of examples of mobsters talking about anything and everything – from petty gossip to murders.

(12) TOY HISTORY ENDS. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Playmates Toys have lost the license for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles after 38 years: “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Are Moving Away from Playmates in 2027” at Bleeding Cool. This is huge news, because not only were Playmates Toys the first to make TNMT toys, but apparently TNMT also makes up half of their entire revenue, so this is a huge blow to them. Playmates were also pretty open to sublicense TNMT to other companies for higher end collector figures, crossovers, etc…

…After 2026, Playmates can no longer manufacture or sell TMNT toys unless a new agreement is reached. TMNT has been a significant part of Playmates’ business, accounting for nearly half (or more) of their yearly revenue in recent years, so this is a major change for the company. Losing the license marks the end of an era, and figures released before 2027 may become more desirable to collectors over time. Playmates will instead continue to focus on their other brands, such as Power Rangers, MonsterVerse, and Winx, going forward. It’s unclear where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will go next, but they still have figures arriving from NECA and Super7 in the meantime. Check out … the Playmates Press Release … online.

(13) FOR EVERYONE ELSE. Merry Christmas to those who are merry. Season’s greetings to those who are well seasoned!

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Cora Buhlert, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mark Roth-Whitworth for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day OGH. It is a Christmas ~~movie~~ Scroll, so I keep reading.]

Pixel Scroll 12/3/25 The Scrolling Of Pixel 49

Posted on December 3, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) THE REASONS WHY. France 24’s English service delivers more information and insight about Angoulême festival: “Bam! Pow! Bubbles burst as Angoulême comics festival is cancelled”.

With the 2026 edition of the Angoulême International Comics Festival now officially cancelled, we take a look at what went wrong and who’s to blame. We dig into what pushed authors to massively boycott the 53rd edition of the festival, despite the economic losses for them and the southwestern French city.

(2) SILENT SERVICE. “Amazon Quietly Pulls Disastrous AI Dubs For Popular Anime After Outcry” reports Futurism.

If you watched the English-dubbed version of one of several popular anime on Amazon Prime Video lately, like “Banana Fish,” and “No Game, No Life,” you may have noticed something strange. The voices were generic, unexpressive, and at times robotic, completely disconnected from the action unfolding on screen. Some lines even sounded a little glitchy. In a word: it was a disaster.

The embarrassing English voices it turned out, were AI-generated. An entourage of actors didn’t sit down in a room somewhere recording take after take to bring these characters to life; instead the voice lines were automatically stitched together using what’s essentially glorified text-to-speech software, with predictably horrendous results.

Fans were furious. And the fallout on social media quickly became so vociferous that Amazon has now quietly pulled the AI dubs from several of the shows, including “Banana Fish.” The AI-generated Spanish dub for “Banana Fish” and “Vinland Saga,” however, are still available, Anime Corner noted….

(3) SOME HOPEFUL FUTURES. The Center for Science and the Imagination’s book Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures was released December 2 by the MIT Press. It includes fiction (by authors Gu Shi, Vandana Singh, Hannah Onoguwe, Libia Brenda, and Laura Watts) along with essays and visual art.

Where can we look for hopeful climate futures, when the global picture seems dominated by inaction or backsliding? While influential nations and international bodies seem adrift, absent, or flatfooted in the face of an accelerating climate emergency, vigorous action is happening at local and regional levels, propelled by coalitions of advocates, researchers, community leaders, and everyday people.

In this conversation on the new book Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, we will talk with writers and thinkers from different regions to learn not only about hopeful climate stories and imaginaries but also local resources and efforts on the ground.

Edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, the book presents speculative fiction, essays, and artworks that explore possible futures shaped by climate action, grounded in real science and the complexities of actual physical and human geographies around the world. Contributors represent 17 different countries from Mexico, Germany, and Sri Lanka to Nigeria, China, Norway, Brazil, and more: Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, Jason Anderson, Claire Armitstead, Libia Brenda, Azucena Castro, Andrea Chapela, Nalini Chhetri, Alejandra Espino del Castillo, Fabio Fernandes, Ed Finn, Pippa Goldschmidt, Adeline Johns-Putra, Joseph Kunkel, Ken Liu, Manjana Milkoreit, Gabriela Damián Miravete, Benjamin Ong, Hannah Onoguwe, Chinelo Onwualu, Martha Riva Palacio, Anna Pigott, Kim Stanley Robinson, Gu Shi, Vandana Singh, Nigel Topping, Emma Törzs, Iliana Vargas, Laura Watts, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, and Farhana Yamin.

There’s a virtual launch event for the book on Thursday, December 11 from 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern, featuring three contributors to the book: the SF writer, journalist, and data scientist Yudhanjaya Wijeratne; climate researcher Manjana Milkoreit; and SF writer and physicist Vandana Singh.

(4) HWA CROWN AWARDS. Historia Magazine revealed the winners of the HWA Crown Awards 2025, presented by the Historical Writers’ Association (HWA) to celebrate the best in recent historical writing, fiction and non-fiction.

The winners of the Gold Crown for fiction, the Non-fiction Crown and the Debut Crown were revealed on Wednesday, November 19, at an awards party at Crypt on the Green, a historic building in Clerkenwell.

HWA Gold Crown Award 2025

The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry (Canongate Books)

HWA Non-fiction Crown Award 2025

Moederland by Cato Pedder (John Murray)

(5) DEEP DEPOSITS. Not to be missed is the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’s celebration of “The Library as a Turkey That Does Not Give Thanks” by John Clute titled “Transgressive Embedment”.

… So we’re not here at the moment to thank the kind of institutional “library” after the years of plague when books, once their information “content” was abstracted into digital form, were routinely destroyed; the kind of library whose innards, like frozen elevator music, evoke the terrifying cenotaphic interior spaces Stanley Kubrick created for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in order to demonstrate the denuded torpor Homo sapiens had sunk into by 2001: how desperately we needed help to mature as a species: we know the answer we gave. We can of course thank digital libraries for the abyssally fertile maps of nearly infinitve amounts of data they contain, data doors within data doors like Arabian Nightmares; but we cannot thank their makers for attempting to disable our deep intuition that in the end, after much journeying, maps are less not more. That even the profoundest of Borgesian maps can only describe more fully that which can be described. That when you misdescribe a thing in the world, the skinned torso of the Thing in the World does not become whatever. You do….

(6) S&S S.O.S. Cora Buhlert reviewed Swords of the Barbarians by Kenneth Bulmer, which she found to be “a not very good sword and sorcery novel”, for Galactic Journey: “[November 20, 1970] Year of the Cloud… and lesser lights (November Galactoscope #2)”.

… Now I happen to like sword and sorcery, and while very few authors manage to reach the heights of a Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, or C.L. Moore, even the lesser entries in the genre are at the very least entertaining. And so, when I spotted a cover (courtesy of Richard Clifton-Day) featuring a dark-haired, muscular and nearly naked barbarian with a sword squaring off against a somewhat more dressed barbarian with a red beard and horned helmet wielding a battle axe in the spinner rack of my trusty import bookstore, with a blurb promising “a sword and sorcery saga in the great tradition of Conan”, I of course took it home…

(7) U.F.FAUX. Later in November Cora returned to Galactic Journey with a review of what may well be the first found footage film ever, the 1970 UFO mockumentary The Delegation: “’[November 28, 1970] A True Fake Story: Die Delegation – eine utopische Reportage (The Delegation – a Utopian Documentary)”.

… The unaired footage looks rough and uncut. Clapperboards are visible, there are random cuts and lens flares, radio music plays in the background, the sound crackles and sometimes drops out altogether, people walk into the shot, wave at the camera and kids push in front of the camera and grin. In Washington DC, Roczinski stands outside the Pentagon and declares that the Pentagon has no official comment on UFOs. Then, he enters a car to interview a colonel of the US Air Force who notes that though the Pentagon’s official line is that there are no UFOs and no extraterrestrials, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. The colonel also points Roczinski to a 1955 report on the UFO phenomenon by Major Donald Keyhoe who came to the conclusion that the Soviets are not responsible for the UFO sightings and an extraterrestrial origin is the only explanation. Donald Keyhoe is a real person, a former pulp writer and military officer who wrote the bestselling books The Flying Saucers Are Real and The Flying Saucer Conspiracy and co-founded the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena NICAP. Afterwards, Roczinski tries to interview the Mailers, a black couple from Washington DC who claim to have been abducted by UFOs en route to Cleveland, only to reappear a few days later in El Paso, Texas. However, the neighbours of the Mailers bodily kick Roczinski and his cameraman Gerd Hannieck out of the apartment building, complete with shaky footage….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

November 3, 1968 — Brendan Fraser, 57.

By Paul Weimer:

“Patience is a virtue…”

“Not right now it isn’t!”

Brendan Fraser, as Rick O’Connell in the three Mummy movies, proved that the old formula of pulp action that started in the 30’s, The Mummy, and was revived somewhat by the Indiana Jones films in the 80’s, could have a bit of new life in the late 90’s.

Why did The Mummy succeed when The Phantom, The Shadow and other attempts at pulp action in the Nineties failed? A lot of that I give the credit to Brendan Fraser. Straight jawed handsome hero, but with humor and a modern sensibility, The Mummy’s success is in no small part thanks to him embodying the role of the central hero.

The movies have lots of other charms, from the supporting cast (which sadly gets somewhat less sparkling as one goes from the first to the third film), and good writing (again, which slips as we go down the movies). But Fraser is the tentpole around which the film runs. (Just consider how miscast Tom Cruise was in the recent Mummy remake and you will see what I mean–Fraser could have made hay out of that role). The alternate worlds where someone else took the O’Connell role are probably poorer for that choice.

Fraser is the kind of actor whose roles often were characters you want to be, be friends with, or get romantically entangled with. He has other genre work to his credit, too. Although the movie is uneven, he’s fun in Bedazzled, selling his soul to Elizabeth Hurley’s devil. Looney Tunes: Back in Action requires an actor who can act with Toons…Fraser fits that bill, too. Journey to the Center of the Earth…I admit I got vertigo trying to watch that one.

The strains of being an actor and stardom meant that Fraser took a decade off from movies, but I am delighted that he is back. He’s in a more mature, older form. I really like his work in Doom Patrol, for instance. Robotman should be a ridiculous character, and he is, but Fraser helps sell it. He played a villain in the never-released Batgirl movie (curse you, Warner Brothers). I’d like to someday see what he did with the role of Firefly.

And yes, I heard the news that there is going to be a new Mummy movie. For that, indeed, Patience is a Virtue.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY, TOO.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

December 3, 1958 — Terri Windling, 67.

By Cat Eldridge: I first encountered Terri Windling’s writing through reading The Wood Wife, a truly extraordinary fantasy that deserved the Mythopoeic Award it won. (The Hole in the Wall bar in it would be borrowed by Charles de Lint with her permission for a scene in his Medicine Road novel, an excellent novel.) I like the American edition with Susan Sedona Boulet’s art much better than I do the British edition with the Brian Froud art as I feel it catches the tone of the novel.

I would be very remiss not mention about her stellar work as the founding editor along with Ellen Datlow of what would be called The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror after the first volume which was simply The Year’s Best Fantasy, that being noted for those of you who would doubt correct me for not noting that. The series won three World Fantasy Awards and a Stoker as well.

They also edited the most splendid Snow White, Blood Red anthologies which were stories based on traditional folk tales. Lots of very good stuff there. Like the Mythic Fiction series is well worth reading and available at usual suspects and in digital form as well.

Oh, and I want to single out The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood which took on the difficult subject of child abuse. It garnered a much warranted Otherwise nomination.

Now let’s have a beer at the Dancing Ferret as I note her creation and editing (for the most part) of the Bordertown series. I haven’t read all of it, though I did read her first three anthologies several times and love the punks as you can see here on Life on the Border, but I’ve quite a bit of it and all of the three novels written in it, Emma Bull’s Finder: A Novel: of The Borderlands, is one of my comfort works, so she gets credit for that.

So now let’s move to an art credit for her. So have you seen the cover art for Another Way to Travel by Cats Laughing? I’ve the original pen and ink art that she did here.

Which brings me to the Old Oak Wood series which is penned by her and illustrated by Wendy Froud. Now Wikipedia and most of the reading world thinks that it consists of three lovely works — A Midsummer Night’s Faery Tale, The Winter Child and The Faeries of Spring Cottage.

But there’s a story that Terri wrote that never got published anywhere but on Green Man. It’s an Excerpt from The Old Oak Chronicles: Interviews with Famous Personages by Professor Arnel Rootmuster. It’s a charming story, so go ahead and read it.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

BirdBrains found a bad sign.
Heart of the City falls into movies.
Off the Mark knows one substance is impervious!
Reality Check finds one detail of a TV series unbelievable, if you can believe that.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal predicts
Yaffle pays full attention to the man behind the curtain.

(11) JEOPARDY! [Item by Andrew Porter.] On last night’s Jeopardy!, the category was “Pulp Fiction.” Here are 4 screenshots from the show. And no, I didn’t get all of the clues.

(12) TIME TRAVEL ANTHEM. [Item by Steven French.] A little tangential perhaps but here’s Chris Hayes on writing the song “The Power of Love” for Back to the Future: “We didn’t think Back to the Future sounded plausible – or good’: Huey Lewis and the News on The Power of Love” in the Guardian.

When I wrote it, I had no idea what was going to happen or how popular it was going to be. It ended up being an integral part of the whole Back to the Future franchise, the biggest song in our career, and gave us our first No 1, which was exciting. What’s weird about it, though, is that the song really has nothing to do with the film whatsoever. We were given a synopsis of the screenplay of the movie, and I read through the whole thing and I remember thinking to myself: “This doesn’t sound plausible or like it’s going to be good.” And boy was I wrong!

(13) THEREMIN NEWS. [Item by Dann.] The New York Times recently had a piece on the theremin. Thought it might be of interest for obvious reasons. Although the authors didn’t cover the most obvious reason for some odd reason. Most unreasonable of them. “The Beguiling, Misunderstood Theremin” at Archive.ph.

… Utopian visions of liberation have been entwined in the theremin’s history for as long as it has existed. The inventor of the instrument, the Russian-born engineer Leon Theremin, told The New York Times in 1927 that his “apparatus,” which he believed could produce an unprecedented range of tonal colors and sounds, “frees the composer from the despotism of the 12-note tempered piano scale, to which even violinists must adapt themselves.”

Theremin, a physicist and amateur cellist, would go on to serve time in a Siberian labor camp, spy for the Soviet government and invent an electronic security system used at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, N.Y. But first, he created his musical apparatus by accident. He was developing an electronic device for measuring the density of gases when he realized that the sounds it emitted changed when he moved his hands.

In the late 1920s, RCA began to manufacture and sell the theremin, making it the first mass-produced electronic instrument. Today, perhaps 140 original models remain. “At the time that it came out, it was promoted as being easily playable,” Chrysler said, standing in front of an original RCA theremin housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s music gallery, “which of course wasn’t true.”…

(14) WHAT WOULD IT BE LIKE IF THE EARTH DID NOT HAVE ANY AXIAL TILT? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Curious Cases is a BBC Radio 4 programme hosted by a scientist and comedian who has a passion for science on the side. This week they looked at the ‘what if’ scenario of the Earth not having any axial tilt.

Because the Earth has tilt, we obviously get seasons and this in itself would mess up a lot of biology. Many multicellular terrestrial species use the seasons to govern their life cycles breeding in the seasons of plenty.

Now, this you might not think would be a big deal. You might suppose that a non-tilted Earth would be more a mediocre place and so the absence of seasons would be no big deal. However, researchers have modeled a non-tilted Earth and it is not good news.

A non-tilted Earth would see more expansive frozen poles as well as more expansive sub-tropical zone deserts: The Sahara would be bigger as would the central Australian desert. The tropical forest zone would be reduced as would the comfortable temperate zones.

For those of us in Brit Cit, it would be like March all year round but with more and stronger storms due to changed weather track patterns. Conversely, somewhere like Melbourne, Australia, would have something like 20°C days all year round. However, Melbourne would be on the edge of the expanded Australian desert and so be far drier than today: so kiss goodbye to Australia’s Darling agricultural bread basket.

The show’s hosts and one of their guests also briefly considered that a non-tilted Earth would see the dinosaur destroying asteroid miss a land impact and hit the ocean. This would reduce sulphate injection into the atmosphere, which cooled the Earth, and also increase water injection into the stratosphere so causing a warming effect. The actual difference between such a non-tilted Earth strike and what actually happened depends on how the mix of these two effects played out. However, one of the guests muses that more dinosaurs may have survived in this scenario and possible co-exist with humans today. (Have I ever told you that I have never really forgiven the dinosaurs for what they did to Raquel Welch?) Here I was minded – and sadly they did not mention this – Harry Harrison’s mid-1980s Eden trilogy of books whose central conceit is that dinosaurs survived through to today.

Could you survive an eternal winter? Or is endless summer sun a more appealing prospect? Lots of us are grateful for the seasonal changes that shape the world around us, but this week Hannah and Dara are asking what life would look like without the axial tilt that brings each hemisphere closer and further away from the sun as the seasons change each year. Listener Andrew from Melbourne wants to know what would happen if the planet stood perfectly upright, no lean, no tilt, no seasons. But what else could happen? Is Earth’s 23-degree slant the cosmic fluke that made life possible?

To find out, Hannah and Dara explore how losing the tilt reshapes climate, ecosystems, evolution and maybe even the fate of the dinosaurs.

This was another of the series’ good editions and you can access it here.

The present day biome map of N. America. If the Earth did not have any axial tilt then the ice and tundra zones would expand as would the semi-desert of S.W. USA. The cool and warm temperate zones would contract.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Cora Buhlert, Dann, Michael Burianyk, Joey Eschrich, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, 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 Brian Jones.]

Pixel Scroll 10/25/25 Pixel, Queen Of The Scrolls

Posted on October 25, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) SCIENCE FICTION ENCYCLOPEDIA OPENS SUBSTACK BRANCH. As John Clute explains in “SFE on Substack” at The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the Encyclopedia will remain free, the Substack posts beyond the first five will be for subscribers.

…Most of what I write these days is in the form of new entries and entry-revisions for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, a task (for 20 years with David Langford) I’ve no inclination to ease up on. But times have changed. The SFE is free now and will always be free. We’ve been published over the decades by various publishers (Doubleday, Granada, St Martin’s, Orbit, Gollancz). Those times have passed. Since 2021 we’ve survived on momentum and donations, mainly because of David’s genius at site construction and maintenance; and if we were ourselves able to work for free the SFE could continue afloat (though not exactly flourishing) indefinitely. Which is to say we can’t work for free (and because of donations haven’t had to); but that at the same time we’re not exactly prosperous, and can’t expand as fast as we think we need to (even though, as of today, our wordcount is more than ten times the wordcount of the 1979 first edition).

So I’ve decided to contribute a weekly post on a new Substack site, only just now active. The site is called The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The link is:

https://encyclopediaofsciencefiction.substack.com/

This Substack site is free to access and will clock the sf world as it changes, and more particularly how SFE records and honours these changes. There will be retrospectives and news updates and thoughts about navigating our 7,500,000 words and counting. There’s a lot of serendipity inside the SFE, and some Easter Eggs.

But after five or so of my own posts have gone up – which should demonstrate the sort of thing I’d like to do – the more substantial ones will move over to a subscription basis. I’m thinking I’ll do around one extended piece a week, plus shorter free-access posts when they come to mind, though frequency will vary. The first five are already up or will be very soon.

All subscriptions will be thought of and treated as donations to the SFE itself. Any income will go directly to the SFE and will be spent variously. Supporting me and David. Running the site. Expanding the coverage…

(2) MONSTER MODELS. Keth Braithwaite reprises MonSFFA’s overview of Aurora’s line of movie monster-themed plastic model kits in “MonSFFA’s Halloween Special – Post 4 of 4”.

The Long Island, NY-based Aurora Plastics Corporation was founded in 1950 as a contract manufacturer of injection-molded plastics. Before too long, the company began producing and marketing its own line of “all plastic assembly kits” for young hobbyists, focusing chiefly on aircraft and automobiles.

Aurora’s first figure kits, a set of medieval knights in armour, were introduced in the mid-’50s, quickly followed by the “Guys and Gals of All Nations” series, featuring statuettes dressed in the national costumes of Holland, China, Scotland, and other countries, this in an effort to appeal to female crafters. Throughout the late-’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, other historical subjects followed the knights, from Roman gladiators to modern U.S. soldiers, sailors, and airmen, along with a variety of kits spotlighting American wildlife, sports stars, comic book superheroes, sci-fi TV characters, and the prehistoric world.

But it was a licensing agreement with Universal Studios that allowed Aurora to launch what would become its most popular and successful series of all, the Movie Monster Models collection!

Universal’s classic horror films were enjoying a revival in the late-’50s- and early-’60s, and were all the rage with youngsters, who watched them on television, where they aired frequently, or flocked to movie houses to see them. Aurora marketing director Bill Silverstein had taken note of the appeal these old pictures had with adolescents and teens, and pitched the idea of a series of kits showcasing Universal’s stable of venerable movie monsters. He was met with ridicule and disinterest but persisted and eventually convinced skeptical upper management to gauge interest by bringing to market one model.

That model was Frankenstein, released in 1961. Silverstein was soon vindicated! Frankenstein was an instant hit and calls started coming in to Aurora’s sales offices requesting other kits in the line. Dracula and The Wolf Man were rushed into production and were on store shelves in time for Christmas 1962. …

(3) ONLY (THE MOST DANGEROUS) A GAME. Cora Buhlert reviewed the West German TV adaptation of “The Prize of Peril” by Robert Sheckley for Galactic Journey: “[October 22, 1970] The Most Dangerous Game on West German TV: Das Millionenspiel (The Million Game)”. It’s a German TV event that had one thing in common with Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast – a bunch of people didn’t realize it was fiction.

On the evening of Sunday, October 18, I settled down on my sofa with a glass of wine and a selection of crackers, potato chips and mini pretzels and tuned in to watch a new TV movie on the West German broadcaster ARD called Das Millionenspiel (The Million Game). I was quite excited because this movie was science fiction, an adaptation of the short story “The Prize of Peril” by Robert Sheckley, and science fiction films are sadly few and far between on West German TV.

Like me, a lot of West Germans were tuning in to ARD. After all, we only have three TV channels – unless you’re one of those lucky few who can receive additional channels from East Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Austria or Switzerland. However, unlike me, a lot of those viewers were not aware that they were watching a science fiction film. Indeed, many were not aware that they were watching a TV movie at all. Instead, they thought they were watching a new game-show, a game-show where the grand prize was a staggering one million Deutschmarks. However, there is a catch. For in order to win this marvellous prize, the contestants have to avoid a gang of stone-cold killers for an entire week. So there are really two prizes: One million Deutschmarks or death.

Even while The Million Game was still running, the TV station ARD was inundated with phone calls. Most of the viewers called in to express their outrage that the ARD dared to use their hard-earned licence fees to produce and broadcast such a terrible and cynical game-show, where contestants could be murdered for entertainment, something that the outraged viewers were certain violates the constitution. Some folks even called the police, demanding that they intervene and stop this outrage at once….

(4) GORT KLAATU BARADA NIKTO, BABY! Camestros Felapton discusses media variations on Harry Bates’ classic “Farewell to the Master” in “Ch38: Gort”.

An alien spaceship lands in America. It is quickly surrounded by the US military. Two figures emerge from the strange craft. The first is a human sized figure but the second is larger, a metallic humanoid robot. Suddenly, a shot rings out! The alien is hit!

We have three versions of this story and what happens next. The first, in 1940 was “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates published in Astounding Magazine. Bates was a long-standing writer and editor of pulp magazines. He had been the editor of Astounding prior to John W. Campbell and like many writers of his generation (and since) wrote across a wide range of genres.

We will come back to “Farewell to the Master”, it is arguably Bates’s most notable science fiction story but mainly because of the 1951 film, The Day the Earth Stood Still. That film in turn inspired a big budget remake in 2008 but it also inspired an album cover for the former Beatle Ringo Starr and a 2021 album by Willie Nelson….

(5) WHAT WHO MEANT. Den of Geek, while reminding us they didn’t like the Doctor Who finale generally, goes into one specific shortcoming in “Here’s What Carole Ann Ford’s Doctor Who Return Originally Meant”.

At this point, talking about all the things that are controversial, or kind of bad, or just downright weird about the Doctor Who season 15 finale kind of feels like beating a dead horse. “The Reality War” is just not a great episode. It’s fully apparent that the ending we got wasn’t the ending Russell T. Davies initially set out to write, and it certainly seems as though Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor wasn’t originally meant to regenerate quite this early in his run. The stunt casting of former companion Billie Piper as… whatever role she’s meant to be currently playing is basically the definition of a last-second Hail Mary. And that’s before we even get to the fact that the show finally seemed poised to solve a 60-year-old mystery… before whiffing on it entirely.

The endless questions surrounding Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter and original companion, have been a topic of fierce debate for many years: What became of her after she departed the TARDIS? Was she also a Time Lord? If so, who are her parents? And it seemed as though Doctor Who was finally ready to offer up some answers — even bringing back original actress Carole Ann Ford for her first appearance onscreen since the 1993 charity special “Dimensions In Time”. But her return ultimately amounted to little more than a glorified cameo, as a vision of Susan urged her grandfather go back and find her. What that means is anyone’s guess, as the character is never mentioned again in the season, despite featuring a two-part finale that was hyper-focused on convincing the Doctor he had a child. But now we know there was meant to be more to the story.

The news comes courtesy of Ford herself, who was recently interviewed by former companion Katy Manning at Club Parramatta in Sydney, Australia. During their conversation, Manning asked about Susan’s origins and whether Ford knew who her character’s mother was. Her answer, which describes what appears to be “The Reality War’s” original ending, is a fascinating one.

“You didn’t see the episode, which was to sort of introduce my coming back, where I was holding hands with a little — beautiful little tiny Black child, three years old. And we were watching through the window somewhere where the audience wasn’t supposed to know where we were supposed to be,” Ford said. “And we were watching my newly embodied grandfather, who was now Ncuti [Gatwa], and watching him have a wonderful time singing and dancing in a party in a shop opposite where we were. And obviously, I, my character Susan, was longing to just go there and fling her arms around her grandfather and say, ‘Grandfather, how lovely to see you after all this time and how did you survive your floating about in space… and why have you changed?’”

Presumably, that child is Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps, the young actress who played the charming Captain Poppy, who was initially introduced in “Space Babies” before being reintroduced as a Human-Time Lord child on the alternate reality Earth of “Wish World.” In the aired version of the finale, Susan doesn’t appear at all, and it’s the act of saving Poppy — and altering reality enough to allow her to live as Belinda’s fully human daughter — that causes Fifteen’s regeneration. But clearly that wasn’t the way the story was originally supposed to go. So what changed? It’s possible we’ll never know. And Ford’s not telling.

“Anyway, that was unfortunately not to be — for reasons I know and will not disclose,” she said….

(6) JEOPARDY! [Item by Andrew Porter.] On last night’s Jeopardy! Category: Women Authors — this was a clue.

(7) ALL IN A GOOD CAUSE. WELL, A CAUSE, ANYWAY. “Louvre Thieves Given Immunity After Confirming Jewels Stolen For Purpose Of Training AI Software” reports the Waterford Whispers News.

FRENCH POLICE have immediately ended all efforts to recover priceless Napoleon-era jewellery from the Louvre taken in a daring heist after it emerged the jewels were merely stolen for the purposes of training AI software.

“When we realised these jewels were only stolen to inflate the share price of a company whose entire value relies on the wholesale theft of other people’s art, we had no choice but grant these scamps immunity,” confirmed French prosecutor Alain Barbier.

“Thievery of art is here to stay, we need to accept that and move with the times. Yes, this gang stole from the most famous museum in the world but it’s in the name of training their AI software so it can do good doodle of jewels and maximise shareholder value so we are powerless to stand in the way,” added Barbier, appealing for people to just get over it and move on….

(8) JUNE LOCKHART (1925-2025). Actress June Lockhart died October 23 reports the New York Times: “June Lockhart, Beloved Television Mother, Dies at 100”. Tribute is behind a paywall. These excerpts focus on her sff work.

June Lockhart, the soft-spoken actress who exuded earnest maternal wisdom and wistful contentment in two very different mid-20th-century television roles, on the heartwarming children’s series “Lassie” and the futuristic “Lost in Space,” died on Thursday at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 100.

Her death was announced by a spokesman, Harlan Boll.

…In 1965, Ms. Lockhart returned to series television, playing a wife, mother and interplanetary explorer turned castaway on “Lost in Space.” Her television family included a robot who seemed to announce “Danger, Will Robinson,” alerting the show’s boy hero (Bill Mumy) to extraterrestrial menace, as often as Lassie’s sensitive ears and nose alerted her to earthly emergencies. The series, which combined an over-the-top villain (Jonathan Harris as Dr. Smith) with low-budget production values, became something of a camp classic, acquiring a devoted following years after its original run.

She made her film debut at the age of 13, appearing uncredited in the 1938 version of “A Christmas Carol.” Her parents, the Canadian-born actor Gene Lockhart and the British-born actress Kathleen (Arthur) Lockhart, played the poor but happy Mr. and Mrs. Bob Cratchit; she played their daughter Belinda. She had first appeared onstage at 8 in a Metropolitan Opera production of “Peter Ibbetson.”…

… But she seemed to be making her own choices by 1946, when she starred in “She-Wolf of London,” a horror drama in which she and Don Porter were the biggest names.

After “Lost in Space” went off the air in 1968, Ms. Lockhart immediately signed on to join the cast of the rural sitcom “Petticoat Junction,” whose star, Bea Benaderet, had died. Playing a new doctor in town, she remained until the series ended its run two years later.

She continued to make guest appearances on television series and was also occasionally seen in feature films, including “Strange Invaders” (1983)…

Her last screen roles were in “Zombie Hamlet” (2012), in which she played a Southern matron who finances a strange film; “The Remake” (2018), a romantic comedy about actors; and the animated “Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm” (2019), as the voice of Mindy the Owl. She also provided the voice of Alpha Control in the 2021 Netflix reboot of “Lost in Space.”

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

October 25, 1968 — Star Trek’s “Spectre of the Gun”

Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. Where the laws do not operate, there is no reality. – Spock to McCoy, at the OK Corral.

Fifty-seven years this evening on NBC, Star Trek’s “Spectre of the Gun” first aired. It was written by former producer Gene L. Coon (under the name of Lee Cronin) and directed by Vincent McEveety.

In the episode, the Enterprise having been found trespassing into Melkotian space, Captain Kirk and members of the his bridge crew except Uhura are sent to die in a surreal re-enactment of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Not at all surprisingly aliens are behind this entire affair, testing humans before they make contact with them by testing Kirk’s refusal to kill. They finally grant the Enterprise permission to approach their planet.

The first use that I know of a setting similar to this was the First Doctor two years previously in “The Gunfighters”. A later splendid use is Emma Bull’s Territory.

I will note that the budget wasn’t available to shoot on location on a full set, so instead a Western street of false building fronts and no sides was used.

It’s considered one of the finest episodes of the original, although Keith R.A. DeCandido of Tor.com inexplicably choose to criticize the episode for its historical inaccuracies. Huh?

Christian Science Monitor and Hollywood Reporter both put it in their top 20 original Star Trek episodes, and the A.V. Club ranked this episode as one of top ten “must see” episodes of the original series.

I liked it and thought it was one of the better episodes and certainly a high point of generally not great season three. And Jubal dropping in from that Party thought the writing was excellent, high praise from him.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comments on a trend.
Shoe contains multitudes.
Speed Bump buys in volume.

(11) HAVE SPACE SHUTTLE, WILL EVENTUALLY TRAVEL. I hope they don’t cut the baby in half. “How do you solve a problem like Discovery?” in The Register.

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget is grappling with how to transport Space Shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian Museum in Virginia to Space Center Houston. How would you do it?

Certain individuals have held a grudge for years over the omission of Houston, Texas, when the remaining Space Shuttles were handed out at the end of the program. Los Angeles got one, Florida got one, but Houston, where the missions were managed, was left off the list.

The grumbling has continued for more than a decade, and US president Donald Trump’s recent spending bill, which is still being argued over, included $85 million to relocate a space vehicle that has flown a crew. This was widely interpreted as an order to move Space Shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia to Space Center Houston in Texas….

… A trip by road and barge appears the most likely option. However, the two sides of the argument have come up with wildly differing costs for the exercise and the impact such a move would have on the orbiter.

The only way to resolve the discussion is surely via the sensible and knowledgeable Register readership, who doubtless have many thoughts on how this task could be accomplished. Our – admittedly not very serious – ideas are below.

Engage! Help plot Discovery’s course to Houston

Balloons: Float Discovery to Houston like that house in the film Up – there’s plenty of hot air in Washington after all…
Catapult: Construct a giant catapult and fire Discovery at Houston to show-off its prowess at being a glider one last time.
Send a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Discovery to Houston with the words “You Lost, Get Over It” written on one side.
Allow Elon Musk to launch a Starship from Virginia, strap Discovery to it, and let nature take its course….

(12) RYAN GEORGE HAS STEPPED AWAY. Humor video maker Ryan George explained to YouTube followers why he’s on hiatus.

(13) AND WE PASSED THROUGH THE CATALOG OF CONTENT. [Item by N.] Games reviewer Civvie 11 looks back on the point-and-click adaptation of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, on the eve of its 30th anniversary: “Points, Clicks, And Misery”.

(14) SOME LIKE IT NOT. Sci-Fi Odyssey is pleased to remember “Top 10 sci-fi disasters that became cult masterpieces”. This could be the lowest bar ever applied to the word “masterpiece” given that the ten films on the list are Cloud Atlas; Donnie Darko; Tron; Starship Troopers; Brazil; Metropolis; Blade Runner; The Thing; Dune (1984); and Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Some of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made were box office disasters first. In this countdown, we look at 10 sci-fi flops that became cult masterpieces — the films critics hated, audiences ignored, but time redeemed.

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

Pixel Scroll 10/24/25 Pi-Pi-Pixelgena, From Die Zauberscröll

Posted on October 24, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) YALOW IN CHENGDU FOR TIANWEN AWARDS AGAIN. On the afternoon of October 24th, the 2025 Chengdu Chinese Science Fiction Literature Contest Achievement Release Conference was held at the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum, where the full list of Tianwen Award winners [in Chinese] was announced. Chengdu 2023 Worldcon co-chair Ben Yalow was present and participated in the event. Here are publicity photos from the ceremony. Note: although it may appear that Tianwen is using the same panda logo as the Chengdu Worldcon, the two logos are similar but not identical. [Click for larger images.]

(2) CROWN AWARDS SHORTLISTS. For the fans of historical fiction among us, the Historical Writers’ Association (HWA) has revealed the 2025 Crown Awards shortlists, celebrating the best in historical writing, fiction and non-fiction, published during 2024–2025. The winners of the juried award will be announced November 19.

HWA Gold Crown Award

The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry (Canongate Books)
Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans (Doubleday)
The Maiden of Florence by Katherine Mezzacappa (Fairlight Books)
Hold Back the Night by Jessica Moor (Manilla Press)
Time of the Child by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury)

HWA Non-fiction Crown Award

Lionessheart by Catherine Hanley (The History Press)
The Endless Country by Sami Kent (Picador)
Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson (William Collins)
Naples 1944 by Keith Lowe (William Collins)
Storm’s Edge by Peter Marshall (William Collins)
Moederland by Cato Pedder (John Murray)

HWA Debut Crown Award

The Wicked of the Earth by AD Bergin (Northodox Press)
The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable (Bloomsbury)
Nephthys by Rachel Louise Driscoll (Harvill Secker)
Winter of Shadows by Clare Grant (Black Spring Crime)
A Poisoner’s Tale by Cathryn Kemp (Bantam)
Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkis (Doubleday)

(3) NEW BOOKER PRIZE SPINOFF. The Booker Prize is launching a companion Children’s Booker Prize – the Guardian has the announcement: “Booker prize launches £50,000 children’s award”.

The Booker prize foundation has launched a major new literary award, the Children’s Booker prize, offering £50,000 for the best fiction written for readers aged eight to 12.

The new award will launch in 2026, with the first winner announced in early 2027. It will be decided by a mixed panel of adult and child judges, a first for a Booker award. The inaugural chair of judges will be Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the children’s author and current children’s laureate. He will be joined by two other adult judges, who will help select a shortlist of eight books before three child judges are recruited to help decide the winner.

The Booker prize foundation will also gift 30,000 copies of shortlisted and winning books to children each year, working with partners including the National Literacy Trust, The Reading Agency, Bookbanks and the Children’s Book Project. The initiative comes amid reports that children’s reading for pleasure is at its lowest level in 20 years….

(4) FARMER’S TEAM-UPS. At Galactic Journey, Cora Buhlert travels back in time to review the latest fiction by Philip José Farmer: “[October 8, 1970] It’s All Connected – A Feast Unknown, Lord of the Trees and The Mad Goblin by Philip José Farmer”.

… Regular readers may be aware that I’m a big fan of the pulp fiction of yesteryear. And thankfully, a lot of it is coming back into print right now, so it’s possible to enjoy the adventures of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Conan the Cimmerian, Kull of Atlantis, Solomon Kane, Jirel of Joiry, The Shadow, Doc Savage, Fu Manchu and others in brand new paperback editions without having to hunt down yellowing pulp magazines.

Reading all of the wonderful adventures of these iconic characters inspired me to try my hand at some pulp inspired fiction of my own, whether it’s a series of 1930s set adventures inspired by The Shadow and The Spider or sword and sorcery stories inspired by Conan, Kull and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

What is more, I sometimes also wonder what if all of those pulp heroes actually lived in the same world? What if Conan were to team up with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Jirel of Joiry were to join forces with Ivanhoe? What if John Carter bumped into Eric John Stark on Mars and then they both teamed up to fight Ming the Merciless? What if Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson hunted French master thief Arsene Lupin or the criminal mastermind Fantomas or took on Fu Manchu? What if the Spider or the Shadow fought Dr. Mabuse? Or maybe James Bond could join forces with Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin to fight Blofeld? Or how about Doc Savage and his friends battling Cthulhu?

Do these possibilities intrigue you? Then I have just the book or rather three for you….

(5) OUR TWO MOONS. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Colbert updates a classic song to reflect our Earth now (albeit briefly) having a second moon… Link takes you to the timestamp within the longer video clip: “The Late Show monologue”.

(6) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 146 of the Octothorpe podcast, “It Winds Me Up Something Chronic”, John is on holiday, Alison said she’d have T-shirts ready, and Liz is back. (There’s an uncorrected transcript here.)

The Torrijos Ceiling at the Victoria & Albert East Storehouse. An elaborate, gilded and octagonal ceiling. Why yes, Alison has a new phone, how could you tell?

(7) R-E-S-P-E-C-T H-O-R-R-O-R. The Bulwark profiles “Joyce Carol Oates, Our Most Surprising Horror Novelist”.

…Oates is unusual among capital-L Literary writers of her age in that she’s never tried to mask her interest in mystery, suspense, and horror fiction, nor has she ever claimed to be more high-minded about it than the genre writers she admires. There’s nothing about her writing that suggests she believes she’s “transcending” genre (a pernicious type of snobbery that I have, if possible, less than no time for). She vocally supported Stephen King at a time when other writers of her stature would only sneer at him. An anthology she edited called American Gothic Fiction contains stories by everyone from Herman Melville and Paul Bowles to Harlan Ellison, King, and Thomas Ligotti.

It’s in her short fiction that Oates really lets this side of her talents fly, and there is a lot of that. The number of original story collections she’s written far exceeds the entire bibliographies of most writers. Many of these collections are devoted to, or contain examples of, a wide variety of horror fiction. And despite how dark Oates can get, no matter what she’s writing, she’s not always overly solemn about it. She can be playful. Take “Mystery, Inc.,” from her collection The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror. In it, an independent owner of a number of bookstores that specialize in mystery and suspense fiction travels to a small town in New England, where a legendary store of the same type that the narrator owns can be found. It soon becomes clear that his plan is to meet the owner, the similarly legendary, and beloved, Aaron Neuhaus, make himself interesting enough to be invited to speak with Neuhaus after hours, poison him with a chocolate truffle, and ultimately, in the not-too-distant future, buy the store from Neuhaus’s sure-to-be-overwhelmed widow, as well as the store’s remarkable stock of antiques and rarities….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

October 24, 1952 — David Weber, 73

By Paul Weimer: Sometimes the subtext is the text. A lot of space opera has the subtext of being naval adventures in space, ranging from the original Star Trek on to the present day. It is no surprise, then, that David Weber decided to cut straight to the source and have actual naval style military adventures in the stars, with Honor Harrington. His books follow the rise of Harrington in a manner that Hornblower and O’Brian could recognize, and appreciate.

With all of the side books and ancillary books in the series, the amount of Harrington stories Weber has produced is staggering, but it is undeniably a gem of an idea he can and has taken advantage of for all it’s worth. I’ve not read all of them, but enough to get a good sampling.

What I like even more is Weber’s Armageddon Reef series. The Safehold books take place on a colony planet where humans have fled after a genocidal attack, and have been forcibly reduced in technology in order to evade detection. So we have an alien planet, humans on it, and a lack of space flight. And so Weber adds 18-19th century style naval combat and technology to the mix.

These books, I feel, have to be an even more explicit love letter to Hornblower and company. The conflict between technology and religion and the problems of separation of church and state do elevate these books, I feel, to a question that we face today. While Weber’s novels might be dismissed as just being fun naval and space adventures, there is that undercurrent and layer of engaging with societal questions that make them very worthy of attention.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Bliss has a very exotic dog breed.
Bound and Gagged gets in line.
Thatababy has a hypothesis.
xkcd finds it surprising what humanity didn’t know before it started space travel.

(10) DAH-DAH-DAH DAT-DADA DAT-DADA AKA WE ARE NOT AMUSED. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Police, and particularly a member of the Ohio National Guard deployed in DC, were not amused when a protester walked behind the Guardsman playing the Star Wars Imperial March. The protester was not amused when he was handcuffed and detained on the street (but released without charges). And I’m guessing the judge will not be amused by having to hear the resulting lawsuit. “Man who played ‘Star Wars’ song at National Guard sues over arrest” at USA Today.

A Washington, D.C., man filed a lawsuit on Oct. 23 against a member of the Ohio National Guard and several police officers after being detained at a September protest in the nation’s capital while playing a well-known villain theme song from the “Star Wars” movies.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of Sam O’Hara, 35, naming Sgt. Devon Beck of the Ohio National Guard and four DC police officers as the defendants. The lawsuit stems from his Sept. 11 arrest, which he says violated his First Amendment rights.

The lawsuit claims O’Hara frequently protested the presence of National Guard members sent to Washington, D.C., in August. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Aug. 16 ordered 250 guard members to Washington at the request of the Secretary of the Army.

“Mr. O’Hara was deeply concerned about the normalization of troops patrolling D.C. neighborhoods. And so, he began protesting the Guard members’ presence by walking several feet behind them when he saw them in the community,” the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia states.

O’Hara used his phone and sometimes a small speaker to play “The Imperial March,” an imposing John Williams composition synonymous with “Star Wars” character Darth Vader, while recording the encounters and posting them on TikTok.

“Ohio National Guard member Sgt. Devon Beck was not amused by this satire,” the suit says.

The lawsuit accuses the Guard member and the local law enforcement officers of suppression of speech, retaliation, unreasonable seizure, excessive force, and false imprisonment. O’Hara is seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, in addition to his legal fees.

(11) RE-ANIMATOR REVISITED. [Item by Andrew Porter.] “’Drowning in fake blood’: How cult horror Re-Animator pushed the limits of gore” at BBC. Long article. Best lines:

As a youngster, Hallam recalls furtively peering into the curtained R-rated section of her local video store in Australia at Re-Animator’s VHS cover, which pictured Combs, his face lit by a luminous green syringe, with a severed head gazing up at him from his laboratory table. “Most provocatively of all,” she says, “the VHS cover had ‘BANNED IN QUEENSLAND’ emblazoned across it, making it seem even more tantalisingly forbidden.”

(12) CHOCOLATE INFLATION. NPR knows the reason: “Cost of Living: Frightening Halloween candy costs”.

LINA SELYUKH, BYLINE: A couple of years ago, Stephanie Espinosa moved to a new town, Babcock Ranch in Florida – a town with a spooky surprise.

STEPHANIE ESPINOSA: Our town is very into Halloween. We did not realize how big Halloween is here. October 1, everyone’s – already their houses are decorated.

SELYUKH: Espinosa and her husband got into it. Their oak tree in the yard is now haunted by a floating ghost. Palm trees have sprouted glowing eyeballs. But the real fright for them was the cost of Halloween candy, which they buy in bulk at Walmart.

ESPINOSA: We bought some bags that – you know, it said around a hundred to a hundred and twenty pieces last year for, like, 9.95. And those bags are now, like, $15. You know, do the math. We have, like, 5,000 kids in our town, and that’s just a bag of between 100 and 120 pieces.

SELYUKH: Federal data shows the price of chewing gum and candy going up more than 8% from a year ago, and it’s mainly because of one specific type of candy, which is chocolate as harvests of cocoa keep coming up short for three years. David Branch tracks agricultural markets at Wells Fargo.

DAVID BRANCH: What’s really driving increase is the weather.

SELYUKH: Most of the world’s cocoa beans grow in West Africa, where farmers have dealt with extreme weather, changing climate patterns and disease in their aging trees. The price of cocoa has more than doubled since the beginning of last year, Branch says. And so all the major chocolate makers have raised their prices – Nestle, Lindt, Hershey and Mars, which makes M&M’s, Snickers and Twix. And they are resorting to tricks to make their treats.

BRANCH: We’re seeing a lot more fillers going in, a lot more with wafers, nuts. They’re putting more nuts, less chocolate. Keeping the price the same, just reducing the amount of cocoa costs that’s going in it…

(13) MAKING THE ~~TRAINS~~ LUNAR LANDER RUN ON TIME. “With SpaceX Behind Schedule, NASA Will Seek More Moon Lander Ideas” reports the New York Times.

The acting administrator of NASA said on Monday that the agency was looking for a Plan B to carry astronauts to the moon’s surface because SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, is behind schedule.

In appearances on CNBC and Fox News, Sean Duffy, the temporary leader of the space agency, said he would open bidding on a contract to build a new lunar lander to other companies. Mr. Duffy, who is also the secretary of transportation, cited urgency for NASA to beat China, which is aiming to send its astronauts to the moon by 2030.

“We’re not going to wait for one company,” Mr. Duffy said during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “We’re going to push this forward and win the second space race against the Chinese.”

Mr. Duffy identified another priority: that President Trump wanted the moon landing to occur before Jan. 20, 2029, the end of his second term as president. That would mean developing and building a new lunar lander in less than three and a half years, at a cost that would very likely add billions of dollars to what NASA has already budgeted.

Mr. Duffy named Blue Origin, the space company owned by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, as one possibility. Blue Origin is already developing a lunar lander for NASA. But that $3.4 billion contract is for the Artemis V mission, which is not set to take place until the 2030s.

Lockheed Martin and other companies could also make a play for the moon mission.

On X, Mr. Musk responded dismissively. “SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry,” he wrote in one post. “Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.”

In another post, Mr. Musk noted that Mr. Bezos’s company had accomplished far less than his own. “Blue Origin has never delivered a payload to orbit, let alone the Moon,” he wrote. He subsequently clarified a “useful payload,” as the company launched a test spacecraft to orbit in January.

In 2021, SpaceX won a $2.9 billion contract to provide the lander for Artemis III, a NASA mission that aims to take two NASA astronauts to the lunar surface in the south polar region.

Artemis III is scheduled for mid-2027, but no one expects that NASA can meet that date. The question is how far into the future it may slip….

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

Pixel Scroll 9/15/25 Pixel, Pixel, Pixel, I Made You Out Of Scroll

Posted on September 15, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) ON THIS DATE IN WORLDCON HISTORY. At Galactic Journey, Cora Buhlert attends the 1970 Worldcon: “[September 14, 1970] A Worldcon among Castles and Vineyards: Heicon ’70 in Heidelberg, West Germany, and the 1970 Hugo Awards”.

… Heicon ’70 had what must be the most beautiful venue in recent Worldcon history, if not ever, because the convention took place in Heidelberg’s Stadthalle, a striking Art Noveau building completed in 1903….

… Indeed, many West German fans wondered why Heidelberg of all possible places was chosen as the location of the first ever West German Worldcon, for Heidelberg is neither the oldest city in West Germany nor the biggest nor the most modern nor does it have an international airport to make travel easier for overseas visitors. Of course, Heidelberg is a very beautiful city and thankfully unmarred by World War II bombing damage, but it’s not the only beautiful city in West Germany. It has a castle, but then there are plenty of castles in West Germany. Heidelberg also has a famous university, Germany’s oldest, which also offers a ready supply of potential Worldcon members, but once again Heidelberg is certainly not the only West German city with a university.

However, one thing Heidelberg has is that it is extremely popular with international tourists, particularly from the US and Japan. And the reason for this is a seventy-year-old play named Alt Heidelberg (Old Heidelberg) by Wilhelm Meyer-Förster. Old Heidelberg is the story of the crown prince of some Ruritanian kingdom who is sent to Heidelberg to get a university education before resuming his royal duties. In Heidelberg, he joins a student fraternity and falls in love with a barmaid. Their love is true, but it cannot be, because of the difference in status. So the prince marries a suitable aristocratic lady, though he will always remember the barmaid Käthi. I guess you could consider it fantasy, but mostly it’s a silly melodrama, part of a trend of novels and plays warning against the impossibility of romantic relationships between aristocrats and commoners during the Second German Empire….

…The guests of honour, American writer Robert Silverberg, Austrian writer, scientist and artist Herbert W. Franke and British writer E.C. Tubb, had been chosen to represent the internationality of this particular Worldcon. The toastmaster and thus host of the Hugo ceremony was British writer John Brunner. Other guests of note include American writers Larry Niven, James Blish, and Poul and Karen Anderson, American editor Donald Wollheim, German writer and translator Walter Ernsting a.k.a. Clark Dalton, co-creator of Perry Rhodan, Dutch Italian illustrator Karel Thole, whose works were also on display at the art show, Romanian writer Ion Hobana as well as Italian writer and science fiction pioneer Carla Parsi-Bastogi….

Elliot K. Shorter at HexaCon, in 1980, a convention in Lancaster, Penna. Photo by © Andrew I. Porter.

…The organisers of Heicon ’70 had decided beforehand that the 1970 TAFF winner would also be their fan guest of honour. The winner of the 1970 TAFF was Elliot K. Shorter, who was promptly named fan guest of honour and a most excellent choice he turned out to be, too. To begin with, Elliot K. Shorter made sure that there could be a Hugo ceremony at Heicon at all, because he organised the transport of the Hugo rockets, which were manufactured in San Diego, to Heidelberg in the luggage of various fans.

What is more, Elliot K. Shorter is a black man. Of course, people of all races and ethnicities have long been fans and also writers of science fiction, but organised fandom often seems like a very white affair. As far as I know, Elliot K. Shorter is the first black Worldcon guest of honour ever….

(2) KEIN VERGUZZ? I searched Cora’s Heicon report in vain for a mention of Verguzz, which became an instant legend among the LA fans who went to the 1970 Worldcon. Some brought bottles home to initiate others into its mystique. (I was never offered a taste – I wasn’t legally old enough to drink booze yet.) Here are a couple of examples from Seventies fanzines of why it made such an impression.

SunCon PR 2

…A group of us went to the 1970 Worldcon in Heidelberg, Germany, where Bob [Silverberg] was 1/3 of the guest of honor. There he introduced us to Verguzz, one of his favorite beverages, a drink best compared in color and taste to 150-proof Scope….

Graham Poole sampled the drink at the 1971 UK Eastercon and dramatically described effects for Zimri 4 readers.

…Mike Rosemblum told me to get some punch, which I wasn’t too keen on, and later Mike brought me and the others some green stuff called verguzz and told us to drink it down in one, which I did! I was sitting on the window-sill as I knocked back all 250% proof of it, in one.. .Pow!.’! Suddenly everything exploded all the way from my gullet to my stomach and my head started to leave by body. I didn’t dare step down for 5 minutes fearing I might collapse in a heap on the floor. Mike showed us an empty bottle with German label and a green frog with six legs, telling us that it took six frogs legs to make the stuff….

It’s also referenced in Janet Kagan’s Star Trek novel Uhura’s Song: “Verguzz | Memory Beta, non-canon Star Trek Wiki”

Montgomery Scott received a bottle of verguzz from Tail-Kinker to-Ennien to replace his bottle of Jubalan rum.

(3) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA has released “Simultaneous Times Episode 91” with stories by Todd Sullivan and Marie Vibbert.

Stories featured in this episode:

“Perceptually Misaligned” by Todd Sullivan; music by Phog Masheeen. Read by the Jean-Paul Garnier
“The Traffic Stop” by Marie Vibbert; with music by TSG. Read by Jean-Paul Garnier

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(4) THE BEAUTY OF FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER. The New York Times tells “How Guillermo del Toro Conjured a ‘Frankenstein’ Monster Unlike Any Before”. (Behind a paywall.)

Guillermo del Toro has been shaping his vision for Victor Frankenstein’s monster since he was 11 years old, when Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 Gothic novel became his Bible, as he put it in a conversation in August.

“Why is it made of many parts?” he recalled wondering as a boy. “I started thinking about the logic of that.”

Now, the filmmaker, with three Oscars to his name, has finally manifested his dream. His “Frankenstein” (out Oct. 17 in theaters and Nov. 7 on Netflix), reinterprets both the myth and the monster, which unlike many before it, feels newly born rather than repaired. Yes, that means no stitches.

“We didn’t want it to feel like an accident victim,” he said, referring to his collaboration with Mike Hill, also a “Frankenstein” acolyte and the film’s creature designer. “We wanted it to have the purity or translucency of almost like a newborn soul,” del Toro said, “to follow it from being a newborn soul into being — an ‘I think therefore I am’ sort of a human….

… Del Toro’s diary is a collection of snippets from paintings, anatomical illustrations, surgical treatises and miscellanea of observed things in the world.

Here, on the left-side page, we see the monster from behind, reaching upward, revealing lines that to some degree follow anatomical routes, where muscles connect with bones and joints to create movement. But for the monster, these lines needed to be “interesting from an aesthetic point of view rather than a medical point of view,” del Toro said. “Just as you do brush strokes on your painting.”

This Victor Frankenstein (played by Oscar Isaac) is not just an anatomist and a scientist, but also an artist. And from the beginning, he is seen working with anatomical waxes, a material with inherent patterns that has been used for centuries to sculpt models of human or animal bodies, organs and muscles.

In Shelley’s novel, Victor says that he has discovered a secret that allows him to build the monster through his own technique. But del Toro noted that Shelley had deftly bypassed exactly how the creature comes to life.

“That may sound like a cheat,” del Toro said, but it was an opportunity for imagination.

Previous movies and onscreen interpretations, he pointed out, often just show Victor robbing graves to acquire body parts, then suddenly the creature is complete.

“I wanted to detail every anatomical step I could in how he put the creature together,” del Toro said. “There is a personality to the way he put together this creature.”

It’s a sequence that veers from the expected visuals of thunderstorms, diagonal shadows and silhouettes. Instead, this Victor is akin to a performer and his monster’s construction is shot as a concert might be. “It’s like you’re watching Leonard Bernstein conduct an orchestra,” del Toro said. “This is not the most horrifying moment in the movie, it’s the most joyous.”

In Milan’s Duomo is Marco d’Agrate’s unsettling 16th-century marble statue of St. Bartholomew, one of Jesus’s 12 apostles who is said to have been flayed alive and then beheaded.

This work was a major influence for del Toro, who recalled Shelley describing the veins, tendons and muscles as visible under the creature’s stretched skin. Sending Mike Hill photos of alabaster statues became part of their process and also helped guide what would become the monster’s ethereal color palette: ivories, very pale blues and violets with some nicotine colors….

(5) AUTHOR’S PARKINSON’S EXPERIENCE. “Robert Munsch wrote The Paper Bag Princess, Love You Forever and other classics by performing them over and over for kids. But his stories are slipping away.” “Dementia Is Stealing the Imagination of Robert Munsch, Children’s Book Writer” – link bypasses the New York Times paywall.

…Over the years, Tang continued writing to Munsch every month, eventually addressing her pages-long, handwritten letters to “Uncle Bob” and “Aunt Ann,” Munsch’s wife. And Munsch continued to write back, sometimes sending books he thought she might like: a murder mystery set in northern Ontario (Munsch highlighted all the mentions of Hearst), a guide to playing badminton. In 2021, Munsch asked Ann to write to Tang on his behalf, letting her know that, at age 76, he had been diagnosed with dementia and, later, with Parkinson’s disease. His letters grew shorter — and then they mostly stopped.

When I visited Munsch this summer, at his home in Guelph, Ontario, there was a recent letter from Tang on the kitchen counter, next to some pill bottles — and, on the walls, framed letters and drawings from other children. Munsch sat at the dining table, next to the walker he uses because he has been falling around the house. “The big thing now is balance,” he said. “And it’s a bad idea if I fall.” Munsch paused for a while, which he does a lot now, making it hard for the people around him to know whether they should be waiting politely for him to finish or else rescuing him from the silence. “So most days,” he continued, “I don’t have the urge to go tell stories.”

After 50 years of publishing, Munsch told me, his ability to come up with new stories seems to have vanished. So, too, has all the time he used to spend with children, who in turn shaped the stories. Plots used to just appear to him, all the time and almost fully formed, as if they were limitless. But now they don’t. When, occasionally, Munsch thinks of an idea for a story, he waits for the narrative to reveal itself, and “nothing happens.” The story never comes….

(6) REASONS TO READ ANTHOLOGIES. A Deep Look by Dave Hook reflects on a question asked of a panel at the Seattle Worldcon in “Why Anthologies?”.

Q1: What good are anthologies? Why should I read them?

I noted that I read them substantially because I value the curated experience of an editor choosing the stories for me. I also love reading stories that I might not find easily or affordably in their original publication.

Rachael [Kuintzle] agreed. She also loves unique collections curated by an editor or team, and finding an anthology that hits a niche she loves. Also, it can be important to put out anthologies that are of interest to a community of interest that you are part of.

Sadie [Hartmann] pointed out that reading an author in an anthology can really help you figure out if that author and their fiction works for you, especially at novel length. It also helps her get the pulse of the genre she is interested in….

(7) FOR SOME VALUES OF RETURNED FROM THE DEAD. “In ‘Alien: Earth,’ Big Tech Is the Monster and Kids Are the Prey” – from the New York Times (behind a paywall.)

…In the sixth episode of “Alien: Earth,” Smee (Jonathan Ajayi) declares to his friend Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), “Being grown-ups sucks.”

The “sucks” part is hard to dispute, for them at least. They are the employees — the property, really — of a corporation that has tasked them with keeping tabs on a bunch of deadly and valuable alien life-forms that have crash-landed on 22nd-century Earth, a job that involves violence, moral compromise and exposure to inordinate amounts of extraterrestrial goo.

But are they grown-ups? Outwardly, yes. They inhabit full-sized adult bodies capable of stunning feats of strength and cognition. But those bodies are synthetic, multibillion-dollar vehicles into which Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), the wunderkind head of the Prodigy corporation, has downloaded the consciousnesses of dying children.

They are given new names drawn from “Peter Pan,” that story about children who never grow up. They have superhuman physical and mental abilities, but their emotions are still immature. They are children. They are grown-ups. They are equipment.

“Alien: Earth,” now in its first season on FX, is a continuation of the nearly half-century-old “Alien” franchise about deadly beasties from space. It has the familiar ravenous xenomorphs looking for humans to devour and spawn into, as well as its own phantasmagoric inventions. (The best of these, a tentacled eyeball that vaults from host to host, is the nightmare Baby Yoda of this TV season.)

But its truest horrors come from the original story that its showrunner, Noah Hawley, has implanted into its chest: a timely, dystopian premise about children, tech companies and exploitation.

Like “Black Mirror” before it, “Alien: Earth” captures anxiety about how technology might colonize and change us, in this case especially the youngest among us. That children are used in this experiment is part of its moral horror. (Its cast members, especially the star Sydney Chandler as Wendy, adeptly play their characters as children living as passengers inside adult bodies.)

But what rings most chilling and true-to-life is the reason that they are being used. Children’s minds, Wendy explains, are not “stiff” like adults’. They are more malleable and flexible. They can learn transhuman existence easier, much as young brains can learn a second language faster. They are the perfect raw material, beta testers for the next stage of evolution.

Along with familiar themes of scientific hubris and greed, “Alien: Earth” speaks to a very current worry. Are future generations, their minds shaped by devices, going to become something less like what we recognize as human? In the series, it’s robot bodies and chemically supercharged brains. In the real world, it’s A.I. friend-bots and scholarship generated by large language models.

In “Alien: Earth,” what sounds on its face like a miracle — bringing children back from death — turns out to be a monkey’s-paw wish: They return, but as high-tech products, proofs of concept. It is a fanciful premise and a speculative, futuristic one.

Or so I thought until last month, when I saw a very different, real-life turn on the concept.

In an August episode of his YouTube show, the former CNN journalist Jim Acosta introduced a special guest: Joaquin Oliver, who died in the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla.

What joined Acosta onscreen was the A.I.-generated avatar of Oliver, created with the cooperation of his parents using data from Oliver’s social-media posts. (This was, broadly speaking, the premise of the 2013 “Black Mirror” episode “Be Right Back.”) This digital revenant had the gauzy aspect of a computer-generated image, or a memory. The fuzzy background behind it glowed, suggesting — a beach? A horizon? Heaven?

The avatar — using Oliver’s nickname, “Guac” — greeted Acosta cheerfully: “If you want to share anything or have questions, I’m all ears.” Its voice shifted between high and low pitches while explaining that “I was taken from this world too soon due to gun violence,” advocating firearms reform and chatting with Acosta about favorite sports teams and movies….

(8) LADY KNIGHTS. [Item by Michael J. Walsh.] Alix E. Harrow was the closing keynote speaker last week at the annual meeting of the New England Independent Booksellers Association.

In the closing keynote at last week’s NEIBA Fall Conference, author Alix E. Harrow described her upcoming title The Everlasting (October 28; Tor Books) as being about “a big sad lady knight stuck in a time loop, and the cowardly historian who is sent back in time to make sure she keeps playing her part.” Harrow’s fourth novel is “a mix of my childhood obsession with lady knights (or any girl with a sword), becoming an adult, and beginning to examine things like knighthood and chivalry through a different lens.” Even though she’s a grownup now, she said, “and I know that knights were private security landowners and are kind of a bummer (ACAB includes knights), I’m still swept away by the romanticism of the knight as a hero, as a symbol. The entire medieval world still kind of has that romance for me. But it relies on there being a king worth serving.”

In a conversation with Book Riot senior contributing editor and podcaster Liberty Hardy, Harrow noted that despite growing up reading secondary world fantasy novels, this is her first time writing one. “It was one of the things that intimidated me the most,” she said. “I feel like I rely on real history to make books convincing, but it turns out that what mattered most to me in building a secondary world was the way power and hierarchy worked–all of that has to be absolutely familiar.” To illustrate this point, Harrow recounted a question from a fan. “You’re such a good writer,” the fan said. “Why do you write fantasy?” To the audience, Harrow replied, “Excuse me, ma’am, you are coming to the genre of [Ursula K.] Le Guin and you ask me that?”

But it has only been since she has had “a career writing fantasy” that Harrow has considered why she writes it: “You can use the tools of magic to magnify real things. You can talk about agency or women’s agency–or you could have an actual witch. It’s a way of literalizing the things that are important to us.” Also, it was easy to write a protagonist obsessed with lady knights “because I, too, have been obsessed with lady knights.”…

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

September 15, 1991 — Eerie, Indiana

You remember Joe Dante, who has served us such treats as the Gremlin films, a segment of the Twilight Zone: The Movie (“It’s A Good Life”) and, errr, Looney Tunes: Back in Action? (I’ll forgive him for that because he’s a consultant on HBO Max prequel series Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai. Anyone seen the latter?)

Dante also was the creative consultant and director on a weird little horror SF series called Eerie, Indiana which premiered thirty-four years ago on this evening on NBC. Yes, delightfully weird. It was created by José Rivera and Karl Schaefer. For both it would be their first genre undertaking, though they would have a starry future, their work including Eureka, that a favorite of mine until the extraordinary debacle of the last season, Goosebumps, The Jungle Book: Mowgli’s Story and Strange Luck to name but a few genre series that they’d work on in a major capacity.

SPOILER ALERT! REALLY I’M SERIOUS, GO AWAY

Hardly anyone there is normal. Or even possibly of this time and space. We have super intelligent canines bent on global domination, a man who might be the Ahab, and, in this reality, Elvis never died, and Bigfoot is fond of the forest around this small town.

There’s even an actor doomed to keep playing the same role over and over and over again, that of a mummy. They break the fourth wall and get him into a much happier film. Tony Jay played this actor.

Yes, they broke the fourth wall. That would happen again in a major way that I won’t detail here.

END SPOILER ALERT. YOU CAN COME BACK NOW.

It lasted but nineteen episodes as ratings were very poor.

Critics loved it. I’m quoting only one due to its length: “Scripted by Karl Schaefer and José Rivera with smart, sharp insights; slyly directed by feature film helmsman Joe Dante; and given edgy life by the show’s winning cast, Eerie, Indiana shapes up as one of the fall season’s standouts, a newcomer that has the fresh, bracing look of Edward Scissorhands and scores as a clever, wry presentation well worth watching.”

It won’t surprise you that at Rotten Tomatoes audience reviewers give it a rating of ninety-two percent. It is streaming on Amazon Prime, Disney+ and legally on YouTube. Yes, legally on the latter.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

1 and Done has a Grease callback.
Barney and Clyde notifies an award winner.
Free Range has the plot of a Middle Grade book.
Rhymes with Orange looks in on the comics dating scene.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal knows the books that are more honored in the breach than in the observance.
Tom Gauld can’t log in.

(11) SUPER OFF-DUTY. 13th Dimension creates the cover of “Wonder Woman And The Slow Day: An 80-Page Giant That Should Have Been”. Artwork at the link.

“This was a fun commission,” Kerry sez. “The person requesting it wanted an imaginary 80-Page Giant of Wonder Woman doing only mundane things. Haha! Honestly, it makes me laugh.”

(12) STAR TREK: KHAN PODCAST. From CBS’ Eye Podcast Productions Inc., Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment — Star Trek: Khan.

History remembers Khan Noonien Singh as a villain, the product of a failed attempt to perfect humanity through genetic engineering whose quest to avenge himself on Admiral James T. Kirk led to unimaginable tragedy and loss. But the truth has been buried for too long beneath the sands of Ceti Alpha V. How did Khan go from a beneficent tyrant and superhuman visionary with a new world at his fingertips to the monster we think we know so well? Recently unearthed, the rest of Khan’s story will finally be told in STAR TREK: KHAN. Premieres September 8.

From the introduction:

Star Trek’s most iconic villain Khan is back! The anxiously awaited scripted podcast series, STAR TREK: KHAN will premiere on Star Trek Day (September 8, 2025)! STAR TREK: KHAN explores the untold events on Ceti Alpha V, chronicling Khan’s descent from a superhuman visionary into the vengeful villain seen in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The first of nine episodes will be available to stream wherever you get your podcasts, with new episodes premiering every week. Naveen Andrews (Lost) voices the iconic role of Khan Noonien Singh, and is joined by a stellar cast, including Wrenn Schmidt (For All Mankind) as Lieutenant Marla McGivers, Sonya Cassidy (Reacher) as Dr. Rosalind Lear, with Star Trek veteran Tim Russ (Star Trek: Voyager) reprising his role as Ensign Tuvok and the legendary George Takei (Star Trek) as Captain Sulu. Supporting voice cast includes Olli Haaskivi (Oppenheimer) as Delmonda, Maury Sterling (Homeland) as Ivan, Mercy Malick (Mr. Mayor) as Ursula, and Zuri Washington (Life with Althaar) as Madot. Star Trek: Khan is based on a story by “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” writer and director, Nicholas Meyer. Kirsten Beyer and David Mack serve as writers on the podcast. Star Trek: Khan is produced by CBS’ Eye Podcast Productions Inc., Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment. Executive producers include, Alex Kurtzman, Aaron Baiers, Kirsten Beyer, Molly Barton, Carly Migliori, Fred Greenhalgh, Trevor Roth and Rod Roddenberry. Robyn Johnson serves as Co-Executive Producer, and the podcast was directed by Fred Greenhalgh. Realm serves as the production studio for the series.

(13) NUMBER, PLEASE. WIRED reports on “The Quest to Find the Longest-Running Simple Computer Program”. I barely understand the question, but I know some of you might understand the search for an answer.

Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107, and—wait for it—47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next?

If you’re stumped, you’re not alone. These are the first five busy beaver numbers. They form a sequence that’s intimately tied to one of the most notoriously difficult questions in theoretical computer science. Determining the values of busy beaver numbers is a daunting challenge that has attracted a cult following among both professional and amateur mathematicians for over 60 years.

Researchers identified the first four busy beaver numbers in the 1960s and 1970s. The conspicuously larger fifth number, called BB(5), was only definitively pinned down last year, by a team made up mostly of amateur mathematicians working together in an online community called the Busy Beaver Challenge.

No one knows how big BB(6) is. All we have are lower limits—truly staggering ones. In 2022 busy beaver hunters established that BB(6) must be, at a minimum, so large that it’s literally impossible to write down in ordinary decimal notation. Even if you somehow carved a digit into every atom in the cosmos, you’d run out of atoms before making any measurable progress.

“It’s way beyond anything that we could ever grasp or get our hands on,” said Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin.

Busy beaver hunters have now discovered that this stupefyingly big number must be even bigger. The finding comes from one of the most mysterious and prolific contributors to the Busy Beaver Challenge, who proved a new lower limit on BB(6) in June and broke the record again a mere nine days later. The new results make the 2022 lower bound look positively puny.

The notoriously difficult question behind the busy beaver numbers is this: Given the code of a computer program, can you tell whether it will eventually stop or run forever?

In 1936, the pioneering logician Alan Turing proved that there’s no universal procedure for answering this question, which became known as the halting problem. Any method that works for some programs will fail for others, and in some cases, no method will work.

Turing proved this seminal result by inventing a formal mathematical model of computation in which programs are represented by hypothetical devices now called Turing machines. Each Turing machine performs computations in discrete steps according to a unique list of simple rules. The more rules a Turing machine has, the more complex its behavior can get, and the harder it can be to determine whether it will halt.

But just how much harder? In 1962, the mathematician Tibor Radó invented a new way to explore this question through what he called the busy beaver game. To play, start by choosing a specific number of rules—call that number n. Your goal is to find the n-rule Turing machine that runs the longest before eventually halting. This machine is called the busy beaver, and the corresponding busy beaver number, BB(n), is the number of steps that it takes.

In principle, if you want to find the busy beaver for any given n, you just need to do a few things. First, list out all the possible n-rule Turing machines. Next, use a computer program to simulate running each machine. Look for telltale signs that machines will never halt—for example, many machines will fall into infinite repeating loops. Discard all these non-halting machines. Finally, record how many steps every other machine took before halting. The one with the longest run time is your busy beaver….

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Gideon Marcus, Michael J. Walsh, 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 Xtifr.]

Pixel Scroll 8/17/25 No Matter Where You Are, There’s A Pixel There

Posted on August 17, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) 2025 HUGO VOTING REPORT. The Seattle Worldcon 2025 Hugo Administrators today released the final ballot voting statistics, plus a report disclosing some official decisions they made along the way. Here are the direct links: 2025 Hugo Voting Statistics and 2025 Hugo Administrators’ Report. The voting stats report only the first-place runoff. They also have not yet released the nominating vote counts.

(2) MONTRÉAL’S FOURTH GOH. Montréal 2027 Worldcon co-chair Darin Briskman has named a fourth GoH: Jeph Jacques.

We are also proud to announce Jeph Jacques as a Guest of Honour of Montréal 2027 Worldcon, alongside Jo Walton, Yves Meynard, and Chris Barkley. Jeph is the creator of the hit long-running webcomic QUESTIONABLE CONTENT, as well as the completed webcomic ALICE GROVE. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia with his wife, his dog, and too many guitars.

(3) AND THE WINNERS ARE… LAcon V has posted this photo of last night’s Hugo winners and accepters.

Congratulations to all of the winners of the 2025 Hugo Awards, the Lodestar Award, and the Astounding Award as presented last night at @seattle2025!#HugoAwards #SeattleWorldcon2025 pic.twitter.com/j7pbwU2mxV
— laworldcon (@laworldcon) August 17, 2025

(4) 2025 HUGO AND LODESTAR TROPHIES. Tom Becker shared his excellent close-up photos.

Seattle Worldcon 2025 Hugo trophy. Photo by Tom Becker.

Seattle Worldcon 2025 Lodestar Award trophy. Photo by Kathryn Duval.

(5) PAST CHAIRS PHOTO. The group photo of past and future Worldcon Chairs has been posted by Kevin Standlee.

Seated: Helen Montgomery (2022), Joe Siclari (1992), Leslie Turek (1980), Kent Bloom (2008), Karen Meschke (1997), Patty Wells (2011).

First row standing: Tom Whitmore (2002), Ruth Lichtwardt (2016), Kathy Bond (2025), Tom Veal (2000), Joyce Lloyd (2026), Mary Robinette Kowal (2021).

Back row standing: Michael J. Walsh (1983), Randall Shepherd (2013), Bruce Farr (2027), Todd Dashoff (2001), Kayla Allen (2002).

(6) SEATTLE PANEL HIGHLIGHTS. [Item by Frank Catalano.] Alan Boyle at GeekWire attended several panels with well-known authors and got some great quotes: “Science fiction writers trace twists and turns at Seattle Worldcon”. The article starts off with a long anecdote told by George R.R. Martin, which is too long to excerpt, but follows with another GRRM remark:

…During a different Worldcon panel, Martin noted that J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” was an early influence on his own fantasy writing — and recalled that at one point in Tolkien’s tale, the wizard Gandalf appeared to be killed off.

“Now yes, I know. Gandalf came back,” Martin said. “Actually, I would have kept him dead. But that’s an issue for me and J.R.R. to discuss down the line. I still love Tolkien, and there’s no doubt that his influence was great. But as a reader, I like books that are not familiar to me. I like to be surprised. I like twists and turns.”…

And some of other quotes include one from John Scalzi:

John Scalzi talked about the genesis of “Redshirts,” a 2012 novel that satirized Star Trek tropes and earned him a Hugo Award. He said he was moved to write the book after getting angry over an unscientific monologue that Mr. Spock delivered in the 2009 “Star Trek” movie. “The fact that it was such lazy writing coming from Spock inspired me to write a book about lazy writing, and what it does to the people who are trapped within it,” he said. “Really shitty stuff can inspire a Hugo-winning novel.”

(7) DERYNI REMEMBERED. Cora Buhlert reviews a Katherine Kurtz novel from the perspective of a reader in 1970 for Galactic Journey. “[August 14, 1970] Intrigue, Murder and Magic: Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz”.

…I consider myself more familiar with the fantasy writers of thirty, forty, fifty or sixty years ago than the average person, yet to my infinite astonishment I had never heard of Katherine Kurtz before. However, it turned out to be not so surprising after all, because Katherine Kurtz is not a writer from decades ago. She’s a brand-new writer, only twenty-five years old, and Deryni Rising is her debut. It turns out that the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series is branching out from reprints of older works to original fiction.

Welcome as it is to see the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series adding original fiction to its line-up, there is also an inherent risk. For can a brand-new novel, one by a debut author at that, stand side by side with the best works of past decades? At least in the case of Deryni Rising, the answer is yes….

Then for her own blog, Cora throws off the restraints for a full discussion of Kurtz’ book from her current perspective. “Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz or How to Suppress Women’a Writing – The Fantasy Edition”.

…Deryni Rising is very much a book about love, but it’s not romantic or sexual love, but the mutual affection between Kelson and his general and protector Alaric Morgan, the half Deryni Duke of Corwyn, which for me at least was what made rereading the novel so enjoyable. What can I say, I am a sucker for supportive and loving families, whether biological or found. Morgan’s relationship to Kelson is also influenced Morgan’s love – and yes, that word is explicitly used in the text – for his king Brion Haldane, father of Kelson. Morgan himself notes that Brion was father and brother to him, though rereading the book as an adult, I couldn’t help but notice that there was at least a hint of romantic attraction there as well. Morgan does get married in one of the later books, to the widow of a nobleman executed for treason, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

Both A Song of Ice and Fire are also set in low magic worlds. There are no dwaves, elves, fae, etc… nor dragons and White Walkers in the Deryni books. There are only humans and humans with magical abilities, the titular Deryni. And the Deryni abilities are closer to the psionic abilities that science fiction was full of from the 1940s well into the 1970s and beyond. In many ways, the Deryni are closer to Marvel’s X-Men of the Claremont era, down to being feared and hated for abilities, than the likes of Gandalf, Elric or the sorcerers that Conan tangles with. Though I couldn’t draw the X-Men comparison in the Galactic Journey article, because Giant Size X-Men N0. 1 won’t come out until 1975. Was Chris Claremont familiar with the Deryni books? I have no idea, though it’s certainly possible. Is George R.R. Martin familiar with the Deryni books? It’s likely, sind Martin and Katherine Kurtz came up at around the same time….

(8) BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR. Edmonton in 2030 bid team member Olav Rokne has selected his formalwear for the 2026 Hugo Awards ceremony.

(9) DRAWN FROM LIFE. Fiona Moore has made available the video of her virtual Edmonton Worldcon 2030 bid party talk “Fictionalising the Franklin Expedition” at A Doctor Of Many Things.

As those who did their Hugo reading know, Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time has a major character who was in the crew of the expedition.

(10) TERENCE STAMP (1938-2025). Actor Terence Stamp, nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor for 1962’s Billy Budd, died August 17 at the age of 87. His vast resume of work included many sff roles:

…He appeared briefly at the beginning of 1977’s “Superman,” in a brief but highly memorable scene in which General Zod and his co-conspirators are banished from Krypton, and Stamp’s Zod was brought back as the principal villain in the 1980 sequel. In “Superman II” Zod, along with his two accomplices, introduced an element of real menace that was missing from the original film (in which Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor was a more genial supervillain), and the way the three were clad, all in black, introduced a whiff of sex and S&M into a very vanilla movie….

…From 2003 to 2011, the actor, in a twist from his earlier role as a villain in the “Superman” films, had recurred (via voice only) on the TV series “Smallville” as Jor-El, Superman’s real father from the planet Krypton….

…He played the villain in sci-fier “Alien Nation,” starring James Caan and Mandy Patinkin….

…Also in 1999, the actor played Chancellor Valorum, leader of the Galactic Republic, in “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace,” and in the Steve Martin-Eddie Murphy comedy “Bowfinger,” Stamp gamely played the guru of a Hollywood cult group clearly modeled on Scientology called Mind Head.

Stamp appeared in a wide variety of films in the 2000s, including sci-fier “Red Planet,” Soderbergh’s “Full Frontal,” “My Boss’s Daughter,” Disney’s “The Haunted Mansion,” Angelina Jolie starrer “Wanted,” Tom Cruise starrer “Valkyrie” and “The Adjustment Bureau.” He played…Siegfried, head of KAOS, in the feature adaptation of “Get Smart.”…

(11) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen (Allen & Unwin, 2012)

By Lis Carey: Alif the Unseen takes us on a wild ride through life in a Middle Eastern city-state, cyber-duels between State Security and gray hat hackers, jinn, a magic book, Arabic mythology, political chaos, and the difference between infatuation and love.

Alif is a young man, a “gray hat” hacker, selling his skills to provide cybersecurity to anyone who needs that protection from the government. He lives in an unnamed city-state in the Middle East, referred to throughout simply as the City. He’s non-ideological; he’ll sell his services to Islamists, communists, anyone.

Alif is not his real name, but it’s what he goes by, online, and among his friends. He hates his given name because it’s so common. He lives in a very modest neighborhood, in one half of a duplex, with his mother. In the other half is another family that has lived there as long as they have, and among the members of that family is Dina, a young woman his age, his friend, who has defied her family by going veiled. He’s in love, though, with Intisar, a young woman of much better family.

Everything seems to be going well, until Intisar tells him that her father has betrothed her to an important man in the City’s government. She doesn’t want to see or hear from him again. And everything starts to go wrong, in unexpected ways.

Alif, master hacker, decides to make sure she can never see or hear from him again, by designing a program that can identify her from any amount of online activity, and block her access to any information about him. The program becomes alarmingly capable; he’s not sure how he created something this flexible and seemingly independent. And while he’s using it, someone breaks into his system.

He cuts them off, but it’s very skilled hacker, and protecting his own system and the systems of his clients from discovery means shutting the whole thing down, including the software protecting his clients. This hacker must be the dread Hand of God, the City’s new and unidentified head of State Security.

And the world starts to go mad.

Alif did send Dina to bring Intisar the sheet they used the one time they had sex, unwashed, of course. She sent back by way of Dina a book. A very old book. The Thousand and One Days. And the man she’s now betrothed to wants the book, while Intisar wants Alif to find out more about the book. No explanation why, for either.

It’s the intersection of Alif’s new program, which he’s named TinSari, that launches Alif and Dina, and an American convert on a wild ride through high tech, Arabic mythology, jinn society, and political upheaval. Vikram the Vampire; a jinn woman called Sakina; a marid (a jinn, and (at least in this story) specifically the jinn from Aladdin); one of Alif’s online hacker friends, NewQuarter01, whose real-world identity comes as a shock to him; Azalel, Vikram’s sister; Sheikh Bilal, imam of the Al Basheera mosque; the dread “Hand of God” head of State Security, are all part of the adventure, as allies, enemies, or not clearly one or the other.

Oh, and The Thousand and One Days also plays an active role.

It’s a story of Alif exploring his programming abilities, encountering strangeness that might be quantum programming inspired by that old book, in which every word has seven thousand layers of meaning. He discovers levels of ruthlessness in real-world politics he never imagined while selling cybersecurity to anyone wanting to hide from their government.

There’s also a layer of romance here, too. And heroic sacrifice, cyberpunk, magical beings, and places that move when you’re not looking. It’s absorbing, exciting, terrifying, and has a satisfying ending.

Highly recommended.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Alley Oop has a surprise visitor.
Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee extrapolates the idea of updates.
Dinette Set has a literal listener.
Frank and Ernest make colorful if horrible puns.
Strange Brew senses something is missing.
The Argyle Sweater depicts a failed crossover.

(13) YOU COULD LOOK IT UP. IF YOU CAN FIND IT. Christopher Lockett’s “Thoughts on L-Space” take us into a Library on the Discworld.

“[W]hile the Dewey system has its fine points, when you’re setting out to look something up in the multidimensional folds of L-space what you really need is a ball of string.”

—Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Back in my reread of Sourcery, I promised/threatened to do a deep dive into L-space when we got there. L-space, as we learn in Guards! Guards! is the warping of time and space that is caused by a critical mass of books in one place. This is a particularly acute phenomenon when the books are magical, but as we learn, all libraries (and indeed, all “poky second-hand bookshops” [230]) cause this effect, and all are thus connected in the resultant L-space.

It’s impossible now, looking back over years of reading Discworld’s embarrassment of riches, to locate precisely when I went from considering the novels fun, engrossing reads to starting to think seriously about needing to do a scholarly deep dive into Sir Terry’s world-building project. When the books went from being engaging to impressing me with their philosophical depth, so cheekily disguised by their humour and frequent absurdity.

When precisely that happened, I cannot say, but I know for certain that the imagining of L-space was a profoundly significant factor….

(14) THE WAY AHEAD. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s list of five hopeful cli-fi novels included Becky Chambers’ Psalm for the Wild-Built and … “Look up: five hopeful novels about the climate crisis”.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler

Originally published in 1993, Parable of the Sower is set between 2024 and 2027 in a California bordering on anarchy, marked by economic breakdown and climate change. The narrator, Lauren Olamina, suffers from hyperempathy syndrome, meaning she feels the pain of others acutely. She creates a new religion, Earthseed, which posits that humans have the power to “shape God” and enact change. Verses from Earthseed’s book of scripture are scattered throughout the novel: “Belief initiates and guides action – or it does nothing.”’

(15) LITERARY TRAENDS. Elizabeth Bear’s latest post analyzes “The Cozy/Grimdark/Heroic Fantasy Sine Wave and a bunch of stuff about villains”.

…Because people are inspired by and influenced by what they read when they write… and often if they enjoy a thing they have read they want another thing that reminds them of the thing they liked. And if the thing they liked sold well, because a lot of people liked it, suddenly it doesn’t seem farfetched from the publisher’s perspective to spend the money to develop a book that might have seemed a little outré just a few years before.

And thus you wind up with what seems like a sudden and glorious proliferation, nay even a flowering, of books on suspiciously similar themes. Which persists until it starts to seem a little samey to the readership and the sales fall off, by which time something else is probably waiting in the wings.

A great deal of energy among writers, editors, and publishers is exhausted in trying to time the peak of that wave and predict what the next Thing is going to be….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] One of my regular go-to Channels is Matt O’Dowd’s PBS Space-Time. OK, it’s physics, but that has its moments too. This month he asks whether there is evidence for a vast multiverse? Considering multiverses are a common SF trope, this might tickle some Filers??? “Is There Evidence For a Vast Multiverse?”

In 1987, Steven Weinberg wrote a cute little paper entitled “Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant”. I say cute little paper because it feels minor in comparison to, say, electroweak unification theory that won him the Nobel Prize. Weinberg was foundational in establishing the standard model of particle physics, and represented an enormous leap in understanding how this universe works. But his little 1987 paper, though more obscure, may tell us something about how the multiverse works, and can even be thought of as evidence for the existence of an enormous number of other universes.

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

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Tag Archives: Galactic Journey

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