Let’s celebrate The Universe Box‘s February 3rd release by Tachyon Press! I have opened the universe box that is my life, and will be sharing a piece of it every Monday.
By Michael Swanwick: Dear lord! How long ago those Thursday night Hearts games were! Back in the 1970s, everyone I knew was invited to play Hearts once a week in my shabby efficiency apartment on 23rd Street in Center City Philadelphia. After long and terrifying joblessness, I had a position as a clerk-typist 1 for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, so I could spring for wine and snacks. Life was good.
My best friend at the time was Susan Casper, and when it came to games she was a shark. As was I. So too were, to lesser degrees, those who came simply because they were friends and young and needed to fill every night with entertainment. There were two exceptions. While we shrieked and triumphantly slammed down cards or groaned and turned our despairing faces to the wall, Gardner Dozois and Marianne Porter sat aside from it all and quietly talked.
They were not gamers.
They were talkers and thinkers. And though one was later to become my mentor and the other my wife, they were no closer to me then than anyone else there.
We few, we happy few, we band of bohemians, lived and loved and whooped and hollered and, whenever I broke out a new deck of cards, I got Gardner to autograph the joker. He was the celebrity of the group, of course, the famous science fiction writer, the only one of us who had yet achieved anything of note. But he was also an astonishment to us because his stories were so dark and he himself so ebullient. The contrast we thought hilarious. Hence the joker.
We were young and callow. He saw our folly as harmless, and he always signed with good humor.
How many jokers did Gardner Dozois autograph? Twenty? Thirty? More? Yet only one remains. All the rest are sunk deep beneath the seas of yesteryear, drowned alongside my youth and the glory that was Atlantis.
Let’s celebrate The Universe Box‘s February 3rd release by Tachyon Press! I have opened the universe box that is my life, and will be sharing a piece of it every Monday.
By Michael Swanwick: Vanishingly few people in the science fiction community ever met Alice Sheldon, the woman who wrote science fiction under the nom de plume James Tiptree, Jr. Two who did were Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper. They were at a convention in Washington D.C. when they got a call from “Sylvester Mule”—Sheldon in CIA mode—and subsequently rendezvoused with her and her husband Huntington at their home in McLean, Virginia.
The house was mostly glass and sat over a stream that ran through the living room. Raccoons would come into it at night. Gardner later wrote, “…we went out there and spent the afternoon. We had burgers, I think, which they grilled, and we sat around for a while. I found out during the afternoon that she kept her Nebula Award in a closet with galoshes piled on top of it.”
Sheldon, he said, was flamboyant, even theatrical. “She really dominated your attention. She was magnetic. […] While we were eating our hamburgers… She had put out paper napkins and I was nervous, so I sat nervously shredding a napkin. She told me later that after we left she had picked up the shreds of the napkin and put them in a baggie and written “Napkin Shredded by Gardner Dozois” and the date on a label. Whether that still exists or not, I have no idea.”
Such souvenirs were obviously important to Sheldon. When Gardner and Susan started to leave, she looked around hurriedly for something to give them as a memento and ended up handing Gardner an oversized blue plastic paper clip—the one you see enshrined above.
Gardner didn’t value souvenirs so he gave it to me.
I have recounted this story elsewhere and repeat it now, chiefly in the hope that, long years from now when I am dead and gone, somebody will acquire the paperclip, value it, and pass it along as a literary relic.
Seriously, it’s just too cool to be thrown in a drawer and forgotten.
Let’s celebrate The Universe Box‘s February 3rd release by Tachyon Press! I have opened the universe box that is my life, and will be sharing a piece of it every Monday.
By Michael Swanwick: Gardner Dozois received two Nebula Awards for his fiction and fifteen Hugo Awards for his work as editor of Asimov’s. He kept them all on a little table in his living room, where the throng of rockets looked like a display in a sex shop while the Nebulas nestled among them gleamed with virginal purity. He valued the fiction awards highly. The rest? Not so much.
I was once among the volunteers helping Gardner move to a new apartment. It did not bring out the best in him. I remember Gardner shouting from the kitchen, “Who wants this half-full jar of bouillon cubes? I’m just going to throw it out!” while the rest of us tried to get things squared away. When Fran Wilde came upon a cardboard box of Hugos and asked where it should go, he said, “You want it? Take it! Take as many as you like. Take them all.”
Afterward, I said, “Fran, he meant it. I know you want a Hugo. You should have taken one.”
“I want a Hugo for my own work,” she replied.
Sad times came, and Gardner Dozois died. His son, Christopher Casper, invited me to take whatever I wished from his office. I chose one of those unwanted Hugos and gave it a loving home, among my own.
Later, I visited Christopher at his house. The Nebulas were in a prominent place of honor. The Hugos, I learned, were stored in his garage.
…Since then, we have worked with our legal counsel to detail specific areas of concerns to Must Read, with a particular focus on 1) moral rights, 2) merchandising rights, and 3) author’s termination and rights reversion. While SFWA cannot negotiate with publishers, we can offer resources and model best practices for publishers as they work with authors.
WIth that in mind, today we offered Must Read notes and sample contract language to consider in those three main areas….
SFWA’s press release says this is what’s next:
….Our Contracts Committee continues to receive contracts from Must Read and other publishers. We know contract negotiations are underway for many authors. We hope the new boilerplate language in Must Read and in other contracts will incorporate our primary suggestions: removing moral rights waivers and merchandising clauses, and solidifying termination terms.
Solutions to a problem of broken trust in our industry can take time to emerge in full. SFWA’s aim in ongoing discussions with our community, from writers affected by contract issues to publishers navigating their own financial and distribution pressures in a difficult production environment, is to develop a more robust and unified community for the creation of speculative work.
Editor Sheila Williams of Asimov’s writes: “At Asimov’s, we cherish our working relationship with authors and with SFWA. We look forward to continuing these transparent and respectful relationships going forward.”
In addition, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction communicated that they deeply value their authors, and believe Must Read Magazines is committed to building a “transparent and equitable environment for creators.”
“Contract negotiations are a difficult but natural part of the business,” says Editor Trevor Quachri of Analog, “So I’m glad that our authors both advocated for their creative rights and gave Must Read the opportunity to recalibrate how they’ve asked for what we need. I’m looking forward to a swift resolution now that the moral rights waiver has been removed so we can get back to focusing on the business of publishing great fiction at Analog.”…
(2) HABITATS 2 KICKSTARTER. Habitats Press announces the release of Habitats Volume 2, in print and digital via Kickstarter until August 13, 2025. The latest issue of their acclaimed magazine features “optimistic science fiction and fantasy stories that imagine better tomorrows.”
Dust jacket art by Mateusz Urbanowicz (@mateusz_urbanowicz).
Independent publisher Habitats Press releases Habitats Volume 2 (December 2025), delivering carefully curated optimistic science fiction and fantasy stories that answer growing reader demand for hopeful narratives.
Habitats Volume 2 features six stories:
“Reclamation” by Eliane Boey: A monsoon-driven clash between a defiant fisherman’s resilient kelong and a bureaucrat’s ecological reckoning, exposing the cost of Singapore’s land reclamation on nature’s fragile balance.
“The Refabricator” by Ian Li: Elena’s revolutionary clothing renewal device sparks a battle against corporate interests, when her invention threatens to transform a wasteful world addicted to disposable fashion.
“The Storm” by Julia LaFond: A family weathers an extended hurricane in their historic home, discovering that survival in an energy-scarce future depends on adaptation, resourcefulness, and unbreakable bonds.
“Festival of Lights” by Stewart C Baker: Amid the glittering spectacle of Mars’ winter celebration, a young pickpocket encounters someone who offers a chance at redemption and escape from a life of shadows.
“Anieb and the Dragon” by Lauren Cook: When mysterious sounds terrorize a village, only a deaf shepherd can venture forth to discover the source — and forge an unlikely connection with a creature in pain.
“Storm Talker” by Toshiya Kamei: A young scientist with the rare ability to communicate with weather systems must prove that storms respond to empathy rather than force, challenging a world that chooses destruction over understanding.
Original illustrations by Mateusz Urbanowicz, RossDraws, Tiffany Pham, Saefern and more.
(3) TOUGH TRIVIA. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Round Britain Quiz is a regular feature with a season each year on BBC Radio 4 (the BBC’s national, topical, documentary, entertainment and news channel). It is a highbrow quiz not for the faint hearted.
This week’s programme had the following SFnal question….
Where would you find these together: A British surgeon and pioneer of aseptic practice. An ‘admirable’ film of 1957. Perhaps the greatest goal keep in Aston Villa’s history. And a rock and roll pioneer from Texas?
For the answer, scroll down to item (11) at the bottom of this post.
(4) CARYATID WHO HAS FALLEN UNDER HER STONE. Cherie Priest tells the truth about book promotion — while promoting a new book: “Getting Naked on Main: It Was Her House First — The Haunt*”. At the link (not quoted here) is Priest’s short list of the four things that actually work.
…The fact is, I’ve said it all. I’ve sung my own praises, tooted my own horn, and rounded up links of of reviews from other people doing likewise ad infinitum and I guess the truth is, I’m really, really, really tired of it – which makes me feel like a jerk.
After all, self-promotion is part of the job, right? I knew that when I jumped carelessly face-first into writing books, eyes open, heart full of optimism and (intermittent) confidence. It’s the job, and I do the job. I always do the job, and I do it on time, and I do it right. It’s how I’ve stayed in the game as long as I have so far.
And it’s been one hell of a ride, really. They say that if you’re in the business long enough, everything both good and bad that can possibly happen…will happen at some point – and that’s certainly been true for me. In the wake of a disastrous small press implosion, I stumbled backward into a 3-book deal with Tor back in 2002 – and it’s been a roller coaster ever since….
…But it’s now been about a quarter century since I took my first baby steps into the field, and a lot has changed.
When I was young and flexible, especially after I quit my day jobs (after ten years and 7 books) – I said “yes” to absolutely every promotional opportunity that was offered. I did dozens and dozens of blog interviews for sites large and small; I talked to NPR on three different occasions, as well as many local radio shows; I bent over backwards to find new angles to answer the same ten questions asked by dozens of different magazines or websites; I did local daytime TV shows by the score; I went to conferences that were hours away at my own expense (as often as not); and as the tech changed, I changed with it. I did YouTube videos and podcasts; I boosted Goodreads giveaways, I ran promotions and and and.
Yes, yes, yes. I’d do it all, and I’d do it with a smile.
But. Fast-forward to 2025….
…Success which had previously relied on a combination of luck + publisher investment became, “If you want to succeed you’ll self-promote until your eyeballs bleed – and if you fail, it’s because you didn’t.” I’m not saying anyone ever told me that directly (though I already had an audience on LiveJournal when I got started), but that sentiment deeply infected the author zeitgeist. Publishers spent less and less on promotion (and there were fewer and fewer venues to spend it), and authors were expected to do more, and more, and more….
…So did I ever “make it”? From one angle, sure. I had one book that sold pretty well fifteen years ago, and it still earns a (vanishingly) small royalty check even though it never made any bestseller lists – and yeah, I’m still here, still writing books, still getting them published. Hell, I’ll never stop writing them – this is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, and I sincerely believe that storytellers can move the universe. So if traditional publishing ever decides it’s done with me, I’ll keep doing it on my own….
Sure, America occasionally has a “The White House is photoshopping the president’s head onto Superman posters” problem, but it turns out plenty of other countries also have a bit of an issue with politicians leveraging pop culture cosplaying for political gain. It’s just that those other countries will have studios telling them to quit it.
Earlier this week, Japanese politician Taro Yamamoto, the founder of the left-populist political party Reiwa Shinsengumi, went viral on social media for recording a political campaign video outside of the life-sized Unicorn Gundam statue in Odaiba, Tokyo. Dressed as Quattro Bajeena from Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, Yamamoto campaigned for the then-upcoming elections for the House of Councillors, the upper chamber of the National Diet, before introducing fellow Reiwa Shinsengumi candidate Maya Okamoto—an actress best known to Gundam fans as the voice of Zeta supporting character Emma Sheen.
The seemingly innocent skit drew a variety of criticisms from rival political figures and Japanese netizens alike for leveraging Gundam and Okamoto’s connection to the series for political gain, and even a little mockery considering Char Aznable’s own political trajectory across early Gundam, culminating in his attempts to forcefully migrate the remnants of humanity into space by dropping an asteroid on Earth….
Bookish creator and actor Mark Gatiss and Polly Walker chat favourite detectives; the dynamics of the show including the definition of a lavender marriage; and how Mark juggled both writing and starring in the crime drama.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
July 23, 1947 — Gardner Dozois. (Died 2018.)
By Paul Weimer: I mentioned Dozois recently in my birthday appreciation of James E Gunn. And like Gunn, Gardner Dozois has both fictional and non-fictional elements to his oeuvre, but for Dozois that balance is even more on the nonfictional side.
Gardner Dozois
But the piece of Dozois’ fiction I want to mention before his editorial work is near and dear to me — his “Counterfactual”. It is an alternate history story of the metafictional kind, as someone who is in an alternate history (where the Civil War went very differently) and is trying to write a story about a world where the South lost, and not hitting the mark of our own world, but coming up with a complete and different variant. Since I had read The Man In the High Castle by the time I came across “Counterfactual”, I saw immediately what Dozois was doing, and was delighted he was going for that approach, too.
But really, Dozois as an anthologist is really what his bread and butter is. The Year’s Best SF collections were bread and butter to me, and once I got into Hugo nominations and voting regularly, they served as a guidepost as to help inform my choices.
Those volumes not only had a great set of stories every year, but the gigantic editorial/field review essay Dozois provided gave a perspective as to what he thought the field was doing, where it had been and where it was going. I didn’t always agree with his assertions and ideas (once I had enough feet under me to do so) but I found his arguments and perspective fascinating. And that essay always included a whole additional set of recommendations of stories (and novels!) that he could not anthologize in that volume. I could set up a good half year’s reading just from one of those Year’s Best volumes and working my way through his recommendations.
Aside from The Year’s Best, I always found a new original or reprint anthology of Dozois’ to command my attention, and my wallet. And the sheer variety of the subgenres and topics he anthologized showed his Renaissance Man-like knowledge of the field. From The Good Old Stuff, to One Million A.D., to The Book of Swords, Dozois provided endless reading of short fiction carefully curated and collected for particular tastes. One of my favorite of this was among his last. Ever since I read A Princess of Mars, Mars in its dying civilization mode has always fascinated me as a setting.
So his collection Old Mars, with many stories in that vein, was a particular favorite. And with a kickass set of authors including Michael Moorcock, Ian McDonald and Melinda Snodgrass, the reputation of Dozois meant that when he cast for an yanthology of new stories, authors jumped at the chance.
While there are plenty of year’s best and other anthologies since, no one, IMHO, has quite shown the power and magic of a collector of stories, be it reprints or original fiction, quite like Gardner Dozois did.
Susan Casper and Gardner Dozois. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter. Casper and Dozois were married 47 years; she passed away in February 2017.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
Birdbrains shows who answers the phone when you call for support.
(9) THE SUPER MUSEUM. [Item by Steven French.] Timely! “The Super Museum” at Atlas Obscura.
It’s Superman! It’s a museum! It’s a museum about Superman! And it’s in Illinois.
Metropolis, Illinois, to be exact, which really rounds out the experience for Superman fanatics. And fanatics are exactly what this museum tries to attract, with the comprehensive (if there is such a thing) and Superman-centric lore, memorabilia, and history that fills the building from wall to wall.
The Super Museum opened in 1993, and features the collection of Jim Hambrick. There are over 20,000 items of superman memorabilia, including the only remaining George Reeves costume. An iconic, and much photographed giant Superman statue is just outside the store.
Metropolis, Illinois also hosts an annual Superman festival each June. There are events and activities for all ages. Of course, Superman is there, and various stars associated with the movies and television series have been known to visit.
…In addition to a brand-new spokeshand, Cheetos is also debuting a brand-new flavor: Cheetos Flamin’ Hot Fiery Skulls. The new flavor combines hit character Thing’s penchant for the occult with the beloved spice of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos for a mischievous twist—and the perfect snack for rewatching the first season of “Wednesday” before the second season drops in August….
(11) TOUGH TRIVIA ANSWER. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]
Answer to scroll item (3) above
Where did they meet? A British surgeon and pioneer of aseptic practice is Lister. An ‘admirable’ film of 1957 is The Admirable Crichton. Yusuf Islam is the former name of Cat Stevens. Perhaps the greatest goal keep in Aston Villa’s history is John Rimmer And the rock and roll pioneer from Texas is Buddy Holly.
So, if someone smoked you a kipper for breakfast then you probably got this. Lister, Crichton (Kryten), Cat, Rimmer and Holly all met on Red Dwarf.
…Bee makes a $49.99 Fitbit-like device that listens in on your conversations while using AI to transcribe everything that you and the people around you say, allowing it to generate personalized summaries of your days, reminders, and suggestions from within the Bee app. You can also give the device permission to access your emails, contacts, location, reminders, photos, and calendar events to help inform its AI-generated insights, as well as create a searchable history of your activities.
My colleague Victoria Song got to try out the device for herself and found that it didn’t always get things quite right. It tended to confuse real-life conversations with the TV shows, TikTok videos, music, and movies that it heard….
(13) WHAT DID DART DO? [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Sound like it spun the asteroid – that’s the only way I can figure that what flew off was more energy than the DART provided. Sabine Hossenfelder discusses “Unexpected Result of NASA’s Asteroid Deflection Test”.
In 2021, NASA launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which aimed to change the course of an asteroid by slamming a spacecraft into it at high speed. The impact occurred in 2022, and we’ve just now got a data analysis of how exactly the crash affected the asteroid. The results are unexpected.
(14) SF TOP TEN BOOKS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]Moid Moidelhoff over at the Media Death Cult YouTube channel makes some interesting SF videos focusing mainly on books with some independent studio cinematic SF, and in the process has accrued over 52 thousand subscribers. (This is less than SF² Concatenation’s peak monthly unique visitors this year, but more than the average monthly figure.) Moid himself has read over a thousand books and has now decided to come up with his own, personal top ten. It is an interesting list irrespective of whether or not you agree with some, or all, of his choices. You can see it below… “Top Ten Science Fiction Books”.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Kat Kourbeti, Samuel Weeks, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Dan’l.]
In writer Geoffrey Landis’s short story “Cloudskimmer,” a pair of astronauts in the near future gaze down at planet Venus from their idling spacecraft. Hired by some unnamed government backer, the two, Zara and Sanjay, begin a loose debate after one decides to—for the sake of better research!—travel to Venus’s surface himself. Why? Zara asks.
“Same reason Mallory climbed Everest,” Sanjay says. “Because I can.”
“What are we going to tell our backers?” she tells Sanjay later in the story. “They’re paying us for science, not for stunts.”
Sanjay makes the trip personal. “Humans see different things than drones do,” he says.
The vision and risk in Landis’s science fiction, like in that 2022 short story, are barely contained to the realm of make believe. Landis, besides being an award-winning novelist and fiction writer, is an aerospace engineer at NASA Glenn, which has gifted the now 69-year-old a reciprocal gift in by-day and by-night lives: interplanetary research that feeds into his writing; writing that foreshadows his research….
A ceramic skull, grinning at visitors from a side table in the entry hall, offers a clue to the identity of the former owner of this grand home perched above the banks of the River Dart in Devon.
You don’t need Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells or the observational skills of Jane Marple to solve this mystery. Who else but the Queen of Crime would display such a macabre ornament?
Welcome to Greenway, the country retreat of Agatha Christie. This compact Georgian mansion, faced in white stucco that gleams in England’s rare bursts of spring sunshine, was her refuge from the demands of being the world’s most famous and beloved crime writer. It’s secluded – accessible only by boat or via a long, narrow driveway – and set on more than thirty acres of gardens and woodland. Her dream home, she called it, “the loveliest place in the world.”
Each year thousands of Christie fans make the pilgrimage to Greenway, which opened to the public fifteen years ago….
…Staff members circulate through the house, answering questions and offering insights and anecdotes. The doll a bored-looking, four-year-old Christie clutches in a portrait housed in the morning room? Her name is Rosie and, 130 years later, she’s propped up in a nearby chair. Ask about the cuneiform tablet embedded in an outside wall – Mallowan brought it back from Iraq in the 1930s – and a staff member hands over a printout explaining it dates from 600 BCE and is a plea to the Assyrian god Nabu. The black gown with gold trim hanging in a bedroom closet? Christie wore it to the 1952 premiere of The Mousetrap, her record-setting play that has been performed in London’s West End more than 29,000 times and is still going strong…
(4) DAVID BRIN ON FIRST CONTACT. The Science in Fiction podcast hosted David Brin after they talked to Avi Loeb. So “first contact scenarios, Fermi Paradoxf and plausible types of alien probes in the Solar System all came up.” “David Brin on First Contact in ‘Existence’” at Spotify.
Marty and Holly speak with David Brin, science fiction icon, scientist, futurist and civilizational optimist. We discuss his particular view of first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, as portrayed in his 2012 novel ‘Existence’, along with his predictions about how artificial intelligence and virtual reality will change our world in the near future. We discuss the UFO phenomenon (a sophisticated form of cat lasers for us to chase) and the unspeakably rude behaviour of these hypothetical silvery teaser punks. David speaks directly to the artificial intelligences and possibly alien intelligences who may be inveigled in our internet. We talk about Cixin Liu’s ‘The Three Body Problem’ (there is no three body problem), the likely prevalence of life in the universe (90% of star systems), the Fermi Paradox, SETI, METI, and various forms that first contact with alien civilizations may take, among them Von Neumann machines and artificial alien intelligences stored in ‘envoy eggs’ orbiting our planet for millions of years. David tells us how to make the most powerful telescope in the universe, by turning the Kuiper Belt into a solar system sized lens. Finally, he implores us to fight back against the ingrate habit of cynicism and pessimism rotting our global civilization today, and declares “I’m proud as hell and nothing can stop us! … Be citizens of wonder, help save a good civilization.”
(5) RARE CODEX. The Folio Society’s illustrated edition of A Canticle for Leibowitz can be yours for $600.
Explore a world of feudal futurism in the beloved classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-nuclear masterwork featuring 12 full-page pieces of original artwork by premier fantasy artist Elliot Lang. Folio presents Walter M. Miller Jr’s Hugo-award winning novel as never before seen. This vital chapter in the canon of 20th century science fiction takes place in a scorched earth in which an order of monks is dedicated to recovering the remnants of scientific knowledge lost to nuclear war. Evocative, complex and gently funny, A Canticle for Leibowitz most recently provided direct inspiration for the Fallout games and TV show, and has been one of Folio’s most consistently requested titles. Having recommended the book himself, Pulitzer Prize-winning literary essayist Michael Dirda provides an illuminating introduction, while Elliot Lang’s brilliant designs and illustrations create a truly immersive reading experience. Along with medieval-style historiated chapter initials, scrollworked part-titles, ingenious endpaper design, an illustrated cover and slipcase, Lang also contributes an exclusive afterword that tells the uncanny story of his own personal connection to this timeless work of spiritual wonder and post-apocalyptic terror.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
July 23, 1947 – Gardner Dozois. (Died 2018).
By Paul Weimer: I mentioned Dozois recently in my birthday appreciation of James E Gunn. And like Gunn, Dozois has both fictional and non-fictional elements to his oeuvre, but for Dozois that balance is even more on the nonfictional side.
Gardner Dozois
But the piece of Dozois fiction I want to mention before his editorial work is near and dear to me — his “Counterfactual”. It is an alternate history story of the metafictional kind, as someone who is in an alternate history (where the Civil War went very differently) and is trying to write a story about a world where the South lost, and not hitting the mark of our own world, but coming up with a complete and different variant. Since I had read The Man In the High Castle by the time I came across “Counterfactual”, I saw immediately what Dozois was doing, and was delighted he was going for that approach, too.
But really, Dozois as an anthologist is really what his bread and butter is. The Year’s Best SF collections were bread and butter to me, and once I got into Hugo nominations and voting regularly, they served as a guidepost as to help inform my choices. Those volumes not only had a great set of stories every year, but the gigantic editorial/field review essay Dozois provided gave a perspective as to what he thought the field was doing, where it had been and where it was going. I didn’t always agree with his assertions and ideas (once I had enough feet under me to do so) but I found his arguments and perspective fascinating. And that essay always included a whole additional set of recommendations of stories (and novels!) that he could not anthologize in that volume. I could set up a good half year’s reading just from one of those Year’s Best volumes and working my way through his recommendations.
Aside from the Year’s Best, I always found a new original or reprint anthology of Dozois’ to command my attention, and my wallet. And the sheer variety of the subgenres and topics he anthologized showed his Renaissance Man-like knowledge of the field. From The Good Old Stuff, to One Million AD, to The Book of Swords, Dozois provided endless reading of short fiction carefully curated and collected for particular tastes. One of my favorite of this was among his last. Ever since I read A Princess of Mars, Mars in its dying civilization mode has always fascinated me as a setting. So his collection Old Mars, with many stories in that vein, was a particular favorite. And with a kickass set of authors including Michael Moorcock, Ian McDonald and Melinda Snodgrass, the reputation of Dozois meant that when he cast for an anthology of new stories, authors jumped at the chance.
While there are plenty of year’s best and other anthologies since, no one, IMHO, has quite shown the power and magic of a collector of stories, be it reprints or original fiction, quite like Gardner Dozois did.
It wouldn’t be San Diego Comic-Con without a little drama, some big questions, and a lot of hype. Just 24 hours before this year’s show floor opens at the San Diego Convention Center, it appears that the con will deliver all that and more—including some terrific programming set to begin on Thursday and Friday’s Eisner Awards ceremony. And with downtown San Diego abuzz with comics fever, some companies are ramping up their presence at the show while others are leaving the playing field.
Star Trek: Prodigy gave Wesley Crusher the story he’s deserved for decades while also providing Wil Wheaton with the experience of watching his voiceover performance, one that made us both emotional talking about it. I think it’s a given at this point that fans would love to see more of him, potentially via his own upcoming Trek spinoff, but is that a realistic hope hold onto? Wil Wheaton had some thoughts.
As the host of The Ready Room (available to stream with a Paramount+ subscription) and someone who is around the Star Trek fandom and its creatives quite a bit, Wil Wheaton has a definite read on the franchise. If anyone would know rumblings about what is and isn’t possible, it’s probably him. So I decided to get his thoughts on the probability of a Wesley Crusher spinoff happening down the road, noting that Star Trek rarely produces projects centered around non-Starfleet characters (Prodigy being the first). When I asked whether a spinoff was a realistic hope or just a pipe dream, he told me:
“Well, if there’s one thing that we have learned through like 60 years of Star Trek, It’s that anything is possible. Like no one’s ever really gone. Things are constantly in flux, and when you have a character who can manipulate spacetime and thought to kind of do anything and go anywhere, sure, you could put him any place. As an audience member, as a fan of the characters and Prodigy, and as a fan of the actors who play them, I would love to see more. I am fascinated by stories in the Star Trek universe that do not take place inside of Starfleet. I’ve always been fascinated by that. I’ve always wanted to know what it is like. What is this universe that Starfleet is kind of like looking after? What goes on on these planets before and after the Federation shows up?”…
NASA is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its Chandra X-ray Observatory launch by sharing never-before-seen photos of the largest known spiral galaxy in the universe.
The Chandra X-ray observatory was launched on July 23, 1999. Since then, it has scoured the universe to look for X-ray emissions from exploded stars, clusters of galaxies and more, according to NASA. The observatory returns data to the Chandra X-ray Center at Harvard University’s Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
Since its launch, the observatory has captured images of the aftermath of exploded stars, photographed the supermassive black hole that exists at the center of the Milky Way, and helped scientists learn more about dark matter, dark energy and black holes….
… The observatory captured thousands of images of the spiral galaxy, known as NGC 6872, since its launch. The galaxy, located in the Peacock constellation of the universe, is over 522,000 light-years across, or more than five times the size of the Milky Way, according to NASA…
Of all the potential super-Earths—terrestrial exoplanets more massive than Earth—out there, an exoplanet orbiting a star only 40 light-years away from us in the constellation Cetus might be the most similar to have been found so far.
Exoplanet LHS 1140 b was assumed to be a mini-Neptune when it was first discovered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope toward the end of 2023. After analyzing data from those observations, a team of researchers, led by astronomer Charles Cadieux, of Université de Montréal, suggest that LHS 1140 b is more likely to be a super-Earth.\
If this planet is an alternate version of our own, its relative proximity to its cool red dwarf star means it would most likely be a gargantuan snowball or a mostly frozen body with a substellar (region closest to its star) ocean that makes it look like a cosmic eyeball. It is now thought to be the exoplanet with the best chance for liquid water on its surface, and so might even be habitable.
Cadieux and his team say they have found “tantalizing evidence for a [nitrogen]-dominated atmosphere on a habitable zone super-Earth” in a study recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters….
(12) JOKER TRAILER. When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you. Joker: Folie À Deux in theaters and IMAX, October 4.
…The next in the line-up is Italian-language Citadel: Diana, which will tell a completely fresh story when it arrives on 10 October, and will have little overlap with the main series, other than the fact that it’ll involve the mysterious Citadel agency.
Diana herself is played by Matilda De Angelis, who’s been making quite a name for herself in Italian productions, and looks suitably big-budget and high-concept, fusing the same sci-fi aesthetic as the first season of Citadel did….
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Paul Weimer, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
(1) WHAT, ME WORRY? Should we share Jeffrey Davies’ concern about “Is Reimagining History Through Biofiction Ethical?”. His Book Riot post focuses on work that is not marketed as genre, although it arguably is alternate history.
…On the other side of the argument, the popularity of biofiction in the digital age, where information about the past lives of our favorite celebrities and public figures is available instantly at our fingertips, speaks to an appetite for the comfort and familiarity a fictionalized account of our favorite famous people offers. Take Daisy Jones & The Six, for example. While not considered biofiction because Daisy Jones and her friends are entirely fictional, no one can deny that they bear a remarkable resemblance to Fleetwood Mac.
Sure, Daisy Jones is a rip-off, but don’t we like it that way? Doesn’t some part of us crave a new adventure surrounding characters we pretty much already know? It’s like rewatching a movie you haven’t seen in a really long time, but you remember enough of it that it’s not asking your brain to continue engaging with new material at the end of a long day. The same can be said for Lucy Holliday’s A Night in With Audrey Hepburn, also not quite biographical fiction, but the same effect.
Then there’s Elizabeth Letts’ Finding Dorothy, a biofiction novel following L. Frank Baum’s wife in the present (1938), witnessing the production of the MGM film adaptation of her husband’s most famous novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It then flashes back to the late 1800s, imagining the historical events that led to the inspiration for Oz. Because the author treats its history with respect, it’s a joy to read and fun for any fan of Dorothy Gale, big or small, even if some aspects of the narrative can be fictionalized….
(2) SPACE UNICORNS SOUND OFF. You have until February 12 to make your voice heard:
The poll will be open from January 15 to February 12, after which we’ll announce the results. We’re excited for you to share which Uncanny stories made you feel!
A snazzy certificate will be given to the creator whose work comes out on top of the poll!
(3) WORLD FANTASY AWARDS 2024 SUBMISSIONS UPDATE. Peter Dennis Pautz today sent this change in the instructions for sending items to judge Thomas Olde Heuvelt:
Due to new customs practices in Europe and the UK, some packages that are still marked “GIFT” or “NO VALUE” or “NO COMMERCIAL VALUE” or “PROMOTIONAL” or “WORLD FANTASY AWARDS JURY MATERIAL” are requiring a duty or “landing fee” at the recipient’s end.
While some packages are getting through with those fees, there are no funds available from the WFC, WFA, or the jury member(s) to pay for or reimburse those costs.
Thus, please be aware that those submissions requiring a fee will be refused by WFA Judge Thomas Olde Heuvelt, with our agreement.
M. Olde Heuvelt still prefers hard copies of any submissions. However, I suggest backing up those submissions with PDF or EPUB to ensure your submissions receive their due attention.
In early November, I was standing in a long line at the Van Gogh gift shop in Amsterdam waiting to purchase a Pokémon ballpoint pen. It was one of the few remaining items left in the store – this was the second month of the establishment’s Pokémon collaboration, but the clamour for the limited edition merchandise was ceaseless. Everything from T-shirts to notebooks to shoulder bags with an image of Pikachu on the front had been picked bare, leaving only prints and postcards behind the till. It was barely past midday but the number of people crammed into the shop meant the area was soon cordoned off with others now rejected entry until it calmed down.
This had become an all too familiar sight for attendees and staff. From the very start of the collaboration, which began in September for the museum’s 50th anniversary and was intended to introduce new audiences to the work of the Dutch artist, the Pokémon merch caused mayhem as eager fans – and scalpers – clamoured for the best stuff. But the main cause was a single item: a limited edition “Pikachu With Grey Felt Hat” trading card. As soon as the card was made available, it sold out online, while desperate gallery visitors had to enter scrums to try and pick one up. Footage of the Poké riots soon hit Twitter (now known as X), and later, eBay listings had the card on sale for up to $900. In mid-October, the card was discontinued….
Pikachu inspired by Self-Portrait With Grey Felt Hat, Naoyo Kimura (1960) at Pokémon x Van Gogh Museum exhibition, Amsterdam. Right: Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat, Vincent van Gogh, 1887. Photograph: The Pokémon Company International/Vincent van Gogh Foundation
(5) NEW HORROR UNIVERSITY WORKSHOPS. The Horror Writers Association has announced that from January 22 to April 8, 2024, Horror University will offer these live workshops to horror writers everywhere interested in refining their writing, learning new skills and techniques, exploring new writing formats, or better understanding the genre. Full descriptions and registration information is available at Teachable.com:“Horror University Online”. Registration now open.
The Winter 2024 Session includes:
January 22: An Evening with Ellen Datlow: A wide-ranging discussing with multiple-award-winner, Ellen Datlow, editor of the annual The Best Horror of the Year.
January 29: Writing for Haunts with Kevin Wetmore: Learn tips and techniques for writing scripts for engaging and frightening live haunted house attractions.
February 5: Shifting Shapes: Writing the Transformation Scene with Michael Arnzen: Learn the scenecraft for depicting how a “normal” body mutates, a mind spirals into madness, or a human morphs into a monster.
February 11: Horror Archives at University of Pittsburgh with Benjamin T. Rubi, Linda Addison, Clay McLeod Chapman, Lisa Morton, Tim Waggoner, and L. Marie Wood: Join curator Ben Rubin and several horror authors for a discussion of the Horror Studies Collection at the University of Pittsburgh! THIS SESSION IS FREE!
February 12: Anti-Ableism in Horror with Callie Stoker: How to write accurately and avoid pitfalls when representing all abilities in the human spectrum.
February 26: Building Your Author Roadmap with JB Kish: An interactive workshop to help identify your goals and the steps to achieve them using techniques of project management.
March 4: Expanding Your Writing Horizons with Lisa Morton: Learn how to move beyond fiction into non-fiction, poetry, screenwriting, paid blogging, and more!
March 11: Writing the Witch with Stephanie Wytovich: Immerse yourself in the rich literary history of witchcraft and create fictional work inspired by our interpretation of witches over time.
March 18: Bringing Cosmic Horror Down to Earth with James Chambers: Explore techniques for developing grounded settings, well-developed characters, and troubling themes for effective cosmic horror stories.
March 25: The Horror Hero’s Journey with Tim Waggoner: Learn how to adapt the “hero’s journey” template to write epic horror fiction!
April 8: Marketing 101: Selling and Extending The Life of Your Work with Robert P. Ottone: Learn ways to market your work–and yourself–to better extend the life of your publications and more.
… But as scientific as all this sounds, it remains hopelessly messy: it’s a model not of a natural system but of a sentimental one. In his “Foundation” novels, the writer Isaac Asimov imagined “psychohistory,” a discipline that would bring the rigor of cause and effect to social dynamics through equations akin to Newton’s laws of motion…
(7) VINTAGE VIDEO. Michael J. Walsh mourns the passing of Howard Waldrop, adding: “I look back to the 2013 Capclave and am so glad we were able to pull this off.” Click through to watch “The Howard, George and Gardner Show”.
(8) WALDROP REMEMBRANCE. James Hollaman tells about the time he made Howard Waldrop the guest of honor at Room Con – his con inside a con at ConQuesT.
I was staying with a person and had woke up early like I normally do. I went to the library of books they had and picked up a book and read a story called “Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!” by Howard Waldrop. I really liked the style, there was something about it. This was my introduction to Howard’s work. I then found a few other things that Howard had wrote. I really enjoyed them all. They all had a flavor, a style that I loved. (I think the one word that comes close is vaudeville, but that doesnt do it justice. I would pick up anything that he worked on.
Cut a few years when Howard was a guest at a con in Oklahoma. Before the con Howard, Bradley Denton, the Murray/Bahm’s and I went to eat at a BBQ place. When it came to pay the check I paid for Howards meal (which was a barbecue bologna sandwich). I told him that I owed him for the joy his work brought me. I found out later this was the way to handle it. He normally didn’t like when people did this. getting to hear him read at the con was a joy. So great. He had wrote the story on his way up to the con, it was all hand written.
I started a party called Room Con. We was up to Room Con 6(66) and I wanted to really do something evil, but cool at the same time. It dawned on me that I liked the guest list that ConQuesT had, but i could do better. So I got a hold of Brad and got the info for Howard as I was going to ask him to be my guest of honor. I got his info and called him. A few rings of the phone and he picked up. There I was, talking to a legend. You don’t know how much that meant to me. He agreed to do so. I got his info, bought him a ticket, got him a room, paid him a per diem. He was all set up, all he had to do was show up.
Paula took and drove me to the airport to pick Howard up. We got there just as he was getting off the plane. There he was, just a small carry on in his hand. He was ready for the weekend. Got him to the hotel and in his room. He had a few panels (his pay for the membership to the con), one being the George and Howard show, 2 hours getting to hear Howard and George R.R. Martin talk. That was amazing. Over the weekend I got to eat with Howard several times, him and i would talk. I enjoyed every bit of the time I got to spend with him.
It was time to get Room Con started. Howard got to the party before we started and staid for the whole thing. He liked hearing Bland Lemon Denton and David Lee Anderson play music. Oh and he talked to everyone, just as nice as a human could be. During the party a person took and pulled me off to the side and told me that he had heard I had brought Howard in on my own, to which i said “yes, i did”. He was shocked. He had thought that ConQuesT had brought him in. This made my day. I found out that some others had thought the same, all was shocked I had brought him in.
I didn’t help get him to the airport, mainly because I was a little sad to see the weekend was done. I saw him at a few other cons after that, enjoyed any time I got to spend with him. We wrote each other mainly. I did call him a few times, but they was short calls. We talked about how he was doing and what was going on. While i did not have as close of a relationship with him as others did, I still had a closer relationship than others, and i am all the better for it.
Howard, you will be missed. Thank you for the friendship, thank you for all you have done. Thank you for your kindness.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 16, 1970 — Garth Ennis, 54. Garth Ennis is without no doubt one of my favorite comic writers. Born in Northern Ireland, though a rare individual who grew up with no religious background (and you are fully aware why I’m mentioning that), he’s now resident in the States.
So as a six-year-old, his teacher told the class that God was a being who could see inside their hearts, was always around them, and would ultimately reward or punish them. It scared, as he says in an interview, the shite out of him, and that was the genesis of Preacher. I love that series, have read it multiple times and no, I have not seen the series.
Next up on the list of series he wrote that he created and I seriously adore is Hellblazer with the supernatural detective John Constantine. I can’t say that I’ve read every issue of that series as I lost interest in it a decade or so ago but his work on it, mostly from issues forty to eighty three, was among the best undertaken in the series.
He had a run on The Authority for the Wildstorm imprint, that run being possibly the most annoying run in the history of the series as it focused on a character called Kev; and the first arc of the Authority spin-off series Midnighter, a character he admits was conceived as an ainti-Superman by him and artist Brian Hitch.
Before you ask, where’s the Marvel Comics, I looked at his work there and since I hadn’t read any of it, save random issues of his Punisher writing, I can’t say what is good and what isn’t. So do feel free to tell me what is good over there.
No surprise here. James Gunn is bringing comedy back to the Man of Steel, at least according to the director’s Lois Lane actor Rachel Brosnahan. The star recently told Entertainment Tonight that the new Superman (played by David Corenswet) will “have a sense of humor” and that her iteration of Lois Lane will be “feisty, marvelous and fiercely intelligent.”…
…Given that Gunn almost always infuses his work with comedy (see his “Guardians of the Galaxy” trilogy for Marvel), it’s not too surprising to hear his upcoming “Superman: Legacy” will be bringing out a more humorous side to the Man of Steel. It’s still a notable change given Superman’s last run on the big screen was defined largely by Zack Snyder’s ultra-serious and gritty tone. Henry Cavill played that iteration of the more super-serious Superman….
(12) EYE V. DRAGON. CBR.com wants to know “What If Smaug Had Survived The Hobbit?” Their thought experiment covers both the possibility that Sauron and Smaug would have allied, and that they would have become rivals.
Could Smaug Have Defeated Sauron?
…If Smaug and Sauron had gone to war with one another, the dragon would not have fared well. In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf noted that dragon fire was capable of melting most Rings of Power, but not the One Ring. Smaug might have been able to destroy the Nazgûl’s rings, thus robbing Sauron of his most loyal servants, but without destroying the One Ring, Sauron would have persisted. Even if Smaug had annihilated Sauron’s army, the Dark Lord was an immortal Maia, so he could have retreated and rebuilt from the shadows as he did after his defeat in the Second Age. Additionally, Smaug’s weakness was far more exploitable than Sauron’s. Tolkien gave little information about the creation of the black arrow, but Sauron and Saruman were both master craftsmen with plentiful resources, so they surely could have reproduced it. From there, it would only have been a matter of time before an Orc archer got a lucky shot against Smaug….
(13) BACK IN THE ZONE. Interzone has published the January issue in EPUB form — Interzone #297. Costs 5 euros. Here’s the cover.
…Regally displayed in the cinema lobby, Alamo Drafthouse’s Hall of Presidents includes a dozen fictional U.S. Presidents from popular films. This is a bipartisan gallery that includes beloved leaders like Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact and Harrison Ford in Air Force One, to more polarizing Commanders-in-Chief like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove and President Camacho himself: Terry Crews in Idiocracy. The hall’s centerpiece is a life-sized statue of President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) from Independence Day, framed by an engraving of his patriotic speech from that film….
(15) SMALL, CUTE ROBOTS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Gizmodo declares “These Were the Best, Cutest, Most Obscene Bots of CES 2024”. The cubist-face bot, the are-you-sure-this-isn’t-potentially-lethal industrial arm massage bot and the mini-Killdozer are particularly notable.
…Despite all the modern innovations, some of our favorite bots weren’t even meant to showcase the advancements of modern autonomous tech, one of our favorite displays was a simple, miniaturized Robot Wars demo layed out for tech press struggling after long days hoofing it through the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Sometimes, the best way to unwind after listening to an obscene amount of robot promotion is to literally dismantle an opponent’s bot with large, serrated teeth.
Greetings, Earthlings, and welcome back to Patience, Colorado, for Resident AlienSeason 3. When we last left our out-of-this-world hero Harry Vanderspeigle (Alan Tudyk), he was carving out his place in our world, struggling with his newfound humanity, and … learning that his alien race isn’t the only one determined to kill us all.
“The Grey Aliens, they are here to destroy the planet,” Harry explains in the first trailer for Resident Alien Season 3 (above). Now that he’s firmly set down roots on Earth, he seems ready and willing to fight for humanity — but not everyone trusts his motives….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Andrew (not Werdna) Michael J. Walsh, Daniel Dern, Kathy Sullivan, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Patrick Morris Miller.]
(1) COVID OUTBREAK AMONG EASTERCON ATTENDEES. Fans who attended last week’s Eastercon in the UK (“Conversation”) have been self-reporting positive Covid tests and symptoms to the con’s Facebook community group, or to the con’s Discord server, now closed, which reportedly had more than 70 positive tests. Masking is no longer mandatory in the UK, however, the con’s own Covid policy asked people to test before coming, stay home if they tested positive (or had symptoms of an infectious disease), and to wear a mask in program items and crowded areas. There is much discussion of how many people complied with their masking policy, as well as the load on the venue’s ventilation system in places like the bar.
Today one author put it rather dramatically:
Very sad to say that this has also had to be postponed due to the great Eastercon plague outbreak. Half the UK's SFF community now bedridden and diseased. https://t.co/MxSqyyDiBL
— Anna Smith Spark A SWORD OF BRONZE AND ASHES (@queenofgrimdark) April 12, 2023
(2) FANZINE PILGRIMAGE. Marcin “Alqua” Kłak today published a conreport about “Corflu Craic – my first fanzine convention” at Fandom Rover. The event was held in Belfast the weekend before Eastercon.
…Did I enjoy Corflu? Oh yes! I certainly want to repeat the experience (although next year the con will be held in Nevada so outside of my reach). The atmosphere, the friendliness, the conversations – It was pretty awesome. Eating meals together and discussing fannish topics was memorable.
I got a lot of reading materials. Firstly items I bought at the auction at previous Corflu were given to me. They came with some additional stuff (including the Programme Book from 2022). Then each person coming to Corflu Craic got a random set of fanzines from the chair’s own supplies. Then I got many zines people produced for this year or took them to the con to give away. And at last I bought two publications. The first was 1957 The First UK Worldcon edited by Rob Hansen (which at the end of the con got an award). The second one was a TAFF trip report from Sue Mason. I cannot complain for the lack of fanzines to read this year (and probably next too!). The challenge wiI be to write a few LoCs though (and I don’t have too much experience!).
(3) KSR AT UCSD. On April 19 The School for Global Policy and Strategy and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego will host an in-person discussion with Kim Stanley Robinson, engaging with several UC San Diego researchers, about the bidirectional patterns of influence between climate research and science fiction narrative, and what both suggest about the Earth’s future, and our own. Free admission, register here.
Earth’s Future: A Discussion with Kim Stanley Robinson. April 19, 2023, 12:30p – 1:50p. Institute of the Americas, Hojel Auditorium, UC San Diego
Internationally renowned writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction has long been engaged with the tradition of utopian thought: how do we imagine a better society? His most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, has been hailed as a masterpiece and held up as a roadmap to climate policy and action, and how his characters navigate the next hundred years of climate catastrophe and cascading political and social effects toward a better future have inspired numerous projects that engage with related ideas in political economy, technology and engineering, climatology and ecology, and urban design.
Featuring:
Kim Stanley Robinson: American novelist, widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of science fiction.
Introduction by Patrick Coleman, Asst. Director, Clarke Center for Human Imagination
Moderated by Jennifer Burney (Professor; Marshall Saunders Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Global Climate Policy and Research, UC San Diego)
Panelists:
Kate Ricke(Assistant Professor, School of Global Policy and Strategy and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego)
Teevrat Garg (Assistant Professor of Economics, School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego)
John Ahlquist (Professor and Associate Dean, School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego)
…It’s not uncommon for sci-fi movies to have several endings before the director and the studio decide on the one that will hit the theatres. The fans can only hope to catch a glimpse of the alternative cuts on DVDs or Blu-rays. As it happens, these highly successful sci-fi films almost ended differently, and if they had been cut today, their stories might have concluded differently….
Here’s an example – beware spoilers. (If you wonder, “how could they spoil an ending that wasn’t made?” – well, they have to compare it to the actual ending, and there you are, spoiled!)
6. LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1986)
Here’s an example of a dark but comical ending that might have been retained had Little Shop of Horrors beenmade in another era. Instead of successfully defeating Audrey II, the killer plant that fed on human blood, it eats both Seymour, the main character, and his love interest, the original Audrey. It’s then strong enough to replicate, and the final scenes include several giant killer plants tearing apart the city.
Test audiences weren’t too keen on the ending, however, which sees our downtrodden but plucky protagonist turned into plant food. An alternative ending was used instead, in which Seymour manages to electrocute Audry II before it can do any more damage and stop the global carnage before it even starts.
(5) MEMORY LANE.
1975 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Our Beginning this Scroll is that of Gardner Dozois’ “The Visible Man” novelette. He was a prolific author of short fiction, for which he won two Nebulas, and also wrote four novels. Though his fiction won no Hugos despite five nominations, he won myriads as Professional Editor, Short Fiction.
Now for “The Visible Man” novelette. It was first published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, the December 1975 issue. It got printed as part of The Visible Man collection several years later. Baen has the rights to it now and they last published as an ebook a decade in Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois. It’s a nicely done look at him as a writer. So let’s get to that Beginning…
GEORGE ROWAN’S ONLY chance of escape came to him like a benediction, sudden and unlooked for, on the road between Newburyport and Boston.
They were on old Route 1, the Newburyport Turnpike, and there was not another car in sight. The fully automated Route 95 guideway was just a few miles west of here, running almost parallel to Route 1, but for reasons of his own the sheriff had preferred to take the old secondary road, even though he had to drive the car himself and couldn’t possibly get up to guideway speeds. Perhaps he simply enjoyed manual driving. Perhaps it was some old State regulation, now solidified into tradition, that prohibited the transportation of prisoners on automated roads. Perhaps it was just some more of the expected psychological torture, taking the slowest possible route so that Rowan would have time to build up a greater charge of fear and dreadful anticipation for what awaited him in Boston.
For Rowan, the trip had already become interminable. His memory of the jail in Newburyport, of his crime, of his hasty trial, of his past life—all had become hazy and indistinct. It seemed as if he had been riding forever, on the road, going to Boston for the execution of his sentence. Only that was real and vivid: the slight swaying motion of the car, the seat upholstery sticking uncomfortably to his sweat-soaked back, the ridged rubber mat under his feet. The countryside they drove through was flat and empty, trees, meadows, cultivated fields, little streams, sometimes a boarded-up gas station or a long-abandoned roadside stand. The sky was a flat, washed-out blue, and the sunlight was thick and dusty. Occasionally they would bump over a pothole or a stretch of frost-buckled pavement—the State didn’t spend much anymore to keep up the secondary roads. The car’s electric engine made no sound at all, and the interior of the car was close and hot with the windows rolled up.
Rowan found himself reluctantly watching the little motions of the steering wheel, apparently turning all by itself, driverless. That made him shiver. He knew intellectually, of course, that he was sitting on the front seat between the sheriff and the deputy, but he couldn’t see them. He could hear them breathing, and occasionally the deputy’s arm would brush against his own, but, for Rowan, they were invisible.
He knew why they were invisible, but that didn’t make it any less spooky. When the State’s analysis computers had gone down into his mind and found the memories that proved him guilty, they had also, as a matter of course, implanted a very deep and very specific hypnotic injunction: from now on, George Rowan would not be able to see any other living creature. Apparently the injunction had not included trees and other kinds of vegetation, but it had covered animals and birds and people. He assumed that when he “saw” through invisible people—as he now “saw” the portions of the car that should have been blocked from sight by the sheriffs body—it was because his subconscious mind was extrapolating, creating a logical extension of the view from other visual data in order to comply with the spirit of the injunction. Nothing must be allowed to spoil the illusion. Nor could Rowan break it, although he knew what it was and how it had been created. It was too strong, and planted too deep. He was “blind” in a special and insidious way….
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born April 12, 1884 — Bob Olsen. He wrote stories for Amazing Stories, from 1927 to 1936, many of them said to be of humorous inclination. He was one of the first writers to use the phrase ‘space marine’ in a two-story Captain Brink sequence consisting of “Captain Brink of the Space Marines” (November 1932 Amazing) and “The Space Marines and the Slavers” (December 1936 Amazing). I’m fairly sure that he wrote no novels and less than twenty-four short stories. I do know that severe arthritis curtailed his writing career in 1940. (Died 1956.)
Born April 12, 1915 — Emil Petaja. An author whose career spanned seven decades who really should be remembered as much for his social circles that included early on as H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and August Derleth which later expanded to include Anthony Boucher, Frank M. Robinson, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick and Robert A. Heinlein. It should not be overlooked that he did write seven novels and around forty short stories during his career with the stories appearing in Weird Tales, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fantastic Adventures, Worlds of Tomorrow, Future Science Fiction Stories and other venues as well. (Died 2000.)
Born April 12, 1921 — Carol Emshwiller. I think her short stories are amazing and The Start of the End of It All and Other Stories collection won a World Fantasy Award. She’d later receive a Life Achievement from the group of judges chosen by the World Fantasy Awards Administration. I’ve not read her novels, so which would you recommend I read? (Died 2019.)
Born April 12, 1916 — Beverly Cleary. One of America’s most successful authors, almost a hundred million copies of her children’s books have been sold worldwide since her first book was published in seventy years ago. Some of her best known characters are Ramona Quimby and Beezus Quimby, Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, and Ralph S. Mouse. (Died 2021.)
Born April 12, 1958 — Elizabeth Klein-Lebbink, 65. An LA-resident con-running fan. She has worked on a variety of conventions, both regionals and Worldcons, frequently in the art shows. She is has been a member of the Dorsai Irregulars. She is married to fellow fan Jerome Scott. Works for NASA where she writes such papers as ‘Measurements of Integration Gain for the Cospas-Sarsat System from Geosynchronous Satellites’.
Born April 12, 1936 — Charles Napier. Well let’s meet Adam on the Trek episode of “The Way to Eden”. Oh, that’s a horrible outfit he’s wearing. Let’s see if he had better genre roles… well he was on Mission: Impossible twice in truly anonymous roles, likewise he played two minor characters on The Incredible Hulk and he did get a character with a meaningful name (General Denning) on Deep Space 9. I surprised to learn that he was General Hardcastle in Superman and Justice League Unlimited series, and also voiced Agent Zed for the entire run of the Men in Black animated series. (Died 2011.)
Born April 12, 1979 — Jennifer Morrison, 44. Emma Swan in the Once Upon a Time series, and Winona Kirk, mother of James T. Kirk in Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness. She also paid her horror dues in Urban Legends: Final Cut as Amy Mayfield, the student videographer whose film goes terribly wrong. I’m intrigued to see that she’s the voice actor for the role of Selina Kyle / Catwoman in the Batman: Hush, a film that needs a R rating to be told properly and indeed did so.
“No, I’m not really a horror film fella,” the Oscar winner tells EW. “I like to sleep deeply at nighttime.”
Crowe is hoping to give cinemagoers interrupted slumbers with his new film The Pope’s Exorcist (in theaters April 14). In this purportedly inspired-by-real-events horror movie, the actor plays Father Gabriele Amorth, the Diocese of Rome’s chief exorcist who investigated thousands of possession cases starting in the late ’80s. Directed by Julius Avery (Overlord), the film finds Franco Nero’s Pontiff sending Amorth to investigate the strange happenings at a Spanish castle which are tormenting an American family, played by Laurel Marsden, Peter DeSouza-Feighoney, and, as the clan’s matriarch, Doctor Sleep actress Alex Essoe….
The announcement was made during Warner Bros. Discovery’s presentation to press and investors on April 12, during which it was announced that HBO Max and Discovery+ are officially being combined into a new service dubbed simply Max.
News of a show based on the megahit J.K. Rowling book series first leaked on April 3, but details have now been confirmed.
Each season of the show will be based on one of the books in the franchise, with Warner Bros. Discovery describing the show as a “decade-long series.” It will feature an entirely new cast from the films.
The New York Police Department is reenlisting Digidog, the four-legged robot that the city faced backlash for deploying a few years back, as reported earlier by The New York Times. NYC Mayor Eric Adams announced the news during a press event on Tuesday, stating that the use of Digidog in the city can “save lives.”
Digidog — also known as Spot — is a remote-controlled robot made by the Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics. It’s designed to work in situations that may pose a threat to humans, helping to do things like perform inspections in dangerous areas and monitor construction sites. However, Boston Dynamics also touts its use as a public safety tool, which the NYPD has tried in the past.
… City officials say that the NYPD will acquire two robot dogs for a total of $750,000, according to the NYT, and that they will only be used during life-threatening situations, such as bomb threats.
“I believe that technology is here; we cannot be afraid of it,” Mayor Adams said during Tuesday’s press conference. “A few loud people were opposed to it, and we took a step back — that is not how I operate. I operate on looking at what’s best for the city.”…
Stephen takes a moment to honor one of the true giants of his childhood, MAD Magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee, who died Monday at the age of 102.
(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Appropriate for the Easter season: bunnies… “Is Watership Down Science Fiction?” is a question posed by Moid Moidelhoff over at Media Death Cult. Only touching briefly on actual definitions of SF (it arguably defies precise definition) it is the first Media Death Cult video to take place on location at the real Watership down. Join Moid – who’s occasionally known to be a bit of a wag and a tease – for this nine-minute video….
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day John A Arkansawyer.]
…The sci-fi tale is the only one among Martin’s body of work that features a Latino lead, making it a natural fit for Exile Content which has produced a slew of content in Spanish and English.
Based on the sci-fi novel co-penned by Martin, Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham (“The Expanse”), “Hunter’s Run” follows Ramón Espejo who ekes out a living as a day laborer on a distant planet where he finds his living conditions no better off than what he left on planet Earth. He escapes but finds himself on the run for the murder of an interplanetary diplomat….
The novel itself took thirty years to finish, for reasons explained in the Wikipedia:“Hunter’s Run”.
…In 1976, science fiction author and editor Dozois conceived of a story beginning with a man floating in darkness. Dozois conceived of Ramón’s name, ethnicity (feeling that Hispanic protagonists were underrepresented in science fiction) and his basic situation, but the story did not proceed far. The following year, while working as a guest instructor at a Catholic women’s college at the invitation of Martin, his friend and colleague, Dozois read the story out loud. Martin thought the story was interesting and waited for Dozois to finish it, but Dozois found himself unable to do so. In 1981, Dozois suggested that Martin continue the story instead, which he did, bringing the story to the beginning of the chase sequence. Martin hit on the idea of expanding the story to a 500-page novel exploring the ecosystem of São Paulo..
After his writing on the story stalled in 1982, Martin handed it back to Dozois, suggesting they alternate working on it until it was done. However, Dozois was unable to come up with any ideas on how to proceed and the book remained in his desk drawer until 2002, when he and Martin decided to bring the story to the attention of a third author, Daniel Abraham. Abraham completed the story, and titled Shadow Twin, it was published by Subterranean as a novella in 2004. Dozois then went back and reworked the manuscript into a 380-page novel, renamed Hunter’s Run, for publication in 2007….
… Netflix has set a date for Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon. The space epic will bow Dec. 22 on the streaming service, Netflix revealed Wednesday as part of a broader look at its 2023 slate.
Snyder originally developed Rebel Moon as a potential Star Wars feature more than a decade ago, before Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. “This is me growing up as an Akira Kurosawa fan, a Star Wars fan,” Snyder told The Hollywood Reporter in July 2021. “It’s my love of sci-fi and a giant adventure. My hope is that this also becomes a massive IP and a universe that can be built out.”…
(3) NOT AGAINST THE LAW? [Item by Daniel Dern.] Behind a paywall, more from the New York Times on the not-dead indie romance author: “A Fake Death in Romancelandia”
… She had not heard again from the police and sounded confident that she would not face charges, saying the family had not received substantial donations after her online death announcement; she had offered the detectives access to her bank accounts to prove it. She did admit feeling remorse for the fans who had grieved her loss.
“I’m sorry for their mourning, but from a legal standpoint, I did nothing wrong,” she said. “Morally, I might have done something wrong. But legally, there’s nothing wrong.”
Today, my first novel is being published. It’s the culmination of seven years of work and, uh, a large number of years of dreaming of writing a novel. Publication day for a debut novel can be a little overwhelming, I’m told—you’ve got all those TV news producers begging you for interviews. (They haven’t called me yet, but I assume they will soon.) Overall, though, pub day ought to be a time of joy, if slightly nervous joy: A thing you made, and care deeply about, is finally making its way into the world!
But for me, and for a lot of other authors this winter, publication day is feeling a little bittersweet. That’s because we’re being published by HarperCollins.
About 200 HarperCollins publishing employees, primarily younger assistants and associates, have been on strike since November. Their demands are not outlandish and reflect the issues facing junior employees across publishing: They want the company’s minimum starting salary increased from $45,000 to $50,000. They want the publisher to address diversity issues at the company. They also want to ensure all eligible employees are in the union.
… So what do I owe the young striking employees of HarperCollins? Should I be delivering public statements about my support for the union? Sure, that’s easy. But is that enough? Isn’t the success of my book also success for a company that’s currently behaving in a way I can’t agree with? Should I be withholding my labor and refusing to promote my book entirely?
No, said Rachel Kambury, a striking associate editor at HarperCollins. “That’s not your responsibility,” she said. “We don’t want to harm HarperCollins authors.” Indeed, the striking workers aren’t asking customers to boycott Harper titles, and have even created a Bookshop.org affiliate page where you can buy Harper books (here’s a great example!) while also contributing to the union’s strike fund, which supports workers who haven’t gotten paid for two months now….
As the HarperCollins labor dispute rolls into a new year, the company’s unionized employee strike is now the longest in the union’s more than 80-year history at the top publisher. Since the initial employee walkout on November 10, the dispute has caught the attention of all publishing sectors, with many anticipating the outcome as a test case for how labor unions could change business operations. But for many publishing industry veterans, whether that change is positive or negative remains to be seen.
Indeed, some smaller independent publishers—mostly outside of New York City—are concerned that the public nature of the strike, with wage demands made public, is raising unrealistic financial expectations. Smaller publishing operations can’t afford to match wages at the Big Five publishing companies. Moreover, despite the double-digit profit margins that the publicly-traded publishers have posted in recent years, publishing is generally a low margin business. Sales gains during the initial years of the COVID-19 outbreak notwithstanding, the industry typically has marginal growth in annual sales, and “flat is the new up” has long been an unofficial business slogan. A lengthy, very public strike only adds to the industry’s challenges, with many agents and authors wanting the dispute to be resolved quickly and immediately so the industry can get back to business.
As of January 18, unionized employees have missed 50 work days, amid numerous stories about HarperCollins’ low pay, particularly for entry-level employees….
China has ended its de facto ban on Marvel films, with superhero flicks Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania both locking in surprise release dates, after a three-and-a-half-year gap that has cost Disney hundreds of millions in ticket sales.
The films will be released in February, after the lunar new year, marking the first Marvel releases in the world’s second-largest theatrical market since Avengers: Endgame in 2019.
Foreign film releases are approved or denied by regulators at the China Film Administration, which is part of the Chinese Communist party’s propaganda department. The CFA routinely blocks the release of foreign films to maintain censorship and protect the domestic film industry.
The CFA has never explained why Marvel films have been blocked since mid-2019….
…The readmittance of Marvel films comes as the US and China work to repair relations, and amid other signs of China’s government easing its hardline approaches on the private sector.
Edmond Moore Hamilton was a popular author of science fiction stories and novels through the mid-20th century. During his career, he wrote more than 30 science fiction novels and 400 stories.
… On Dec. 31, 1946, Hamilton married fellow science fiction author and screenwriter Leigh Brackett in San Gabriel, California, and in 1951 moved with her to a farmhouse in Kinsman, where they worked side by side for a quarter-century, but rarely shared the task of authorship….
(7) MEMORY LANE.
1993 — [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
I am not making the assumption that all of us here love Terry Pratchett’s Discworld fiction but I deeply, madly do. At forty one novels and a number of related works including the Hugo nominated The Science of Discworld, there’s a lot of great reading to be had.
And let’s not forget a music adaptation by Steeleye Span of one of his novels. As the Green Man reviewer says, “It may be an example of retrospective inevitability now that it has actually happened in the form of the Wintersmith CD, however. In any case, the end result is one that is overwhelmingly a credit to all concerned; worthy of the names involved and their reputations.”
And of course, Discworld has food. Tonight, I’ll offer up one of my favorite quotes by him on that subject. Don’t worry — there’s more food to follow by him.
Our quote this Scroll is from “Theatre of Cruelty”, a Discworld short story that Terry Pratchett wrote in 1993. It has an interesting history as it was first written for W. H. Smith Bookcase magazine and then was slightly changed before being published in the program of OryCon 15, and finally in The Wizards of Odd, a compilation of fantasy short stories.
Pratchett allowed it to be published sort as a feral thing online, so you can find the full text, well, pretty much everywhere. Here’s a nicely formatted copy.
And here’s the excerpt from it that I promised.
There is such a thing as an edible, nay delicious, meat pie floater, its mushy peas of just the right consistency, its tomato sauce piquant in its cheekiness, its pie filling tending even towards named parts of the animal. There are platonic burgers made of beef instead of cow lips and hooves. There are fish ‘n’ chips where the fish is more than just a white goo lurking at the bottom of a batter casing and you can’t use the chips to shave with. There are hot dog fillings which have more in common with meat than mere pinkness, whose lucky consumers don’t apply mustard because that would spoil the taste. It’s just that people can be trained to prefer the other sort, and seek it out. It’s as if Machiavelli had written a cookery book.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 18, 1882 — A.A. Milne. Oh, Pooh has to count as genre, doesn’t he? A talking, honey loving bear? Certainly that an exhibition entitled “Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic” appeared at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London shows his place in our culture. There’s also Once on a Time, a rather charming fairy tale by him. And though it isn’t remotely genre, I wholeheartedly recommend The Red House Mystery, a Country House Mystery that’s most excellent! (Died 1956.)
Born January 18, 1932 — Robert Anton Wilson. Conspiracy nut or SF writer? Or both? I think I first encountered him in something Geis wrote about him in SFR in the Eighties. Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy is just weird and might or might not be a sequel to The Illuminatus! Trilogy. But the absolutely weirdest thing he did I think is an interview titled Robert Anton Wilson On Finnegans Wake and Joseph Campbell. Yes, he frothed at the mouth on Campbell and Joyce in it! (Died 2007.)
Born January 18, 1937 — Dick Durock. He was best known for playing Swamp Thing in Swamp Thing and The Return of Swamp Thing and the following television series which ran for three seasons. His only other genre appearances were in The Nude Bomb (also known as The Return of Maxwell Smart) and “The First” of The Incredible Hulk. He shows up in Die Hard with a Vengeance in a subway scene. No, it’s not genre, I just like that film. (Died 2009.)
Born January 18, 1943 — Paul Freeman, 80. Best remembered I’d say for being the evil René Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He also played Professor Moriarty in Without a Clue which had Michael Caine as Holmes and Kingsley as Watson. He played Frederick Selous on two episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. His last genre appearance was the new The Man Who Fell to Earth series.
Born January 18, 1953 — Pamela Dean, 70. Her best novel is I think Tam Lin though one could make an argument for Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary which Windling claims is her favorite fantasy novel. Her Secret Country trilogy is a great deal of fun reading. Much of her short stories are set in the Liavek shared universe created by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly. Alll of these are now available on all major digital platforms. According to the files sitting in my Dropbox folder, there’s eight volumes to the series. They’re wonderful reading. End of plug.
Born January 18, 1955 — Kevin Costner, 68. Some of his genre films are Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Waterworld, The Postman and the recent Dragonfly.Bull Durham is one of my go-to films when I want to feel good. He also was Jonathan Kent in both Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. On the baseball side of things, I really like his Field of Dreams — his acting in it as Ray Kinsella is quite excellent. Not quite as superb as he was as “Crash” Davis in Bull Durham but damned good.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
Bizarro shares the latest in alien transportation.
…Last month, the nearest star to the Earth was in California. In a laboratory, for the first time, the world’s largest lasers forced atoms of hydrogen to fuse together in the same kind of energy producing reaction that fires the sun. It lasted less than a billionth of a second. But, after six decades of toil and failure, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory proved it could be done. If fusion becomes commercial power one day, it would be endless and carbon free. In other words, it would change human destiny. As you’ll see, there’s far to go. But after December’s breakthrough, we were invited to tour the lab and meet the team that brought star power down to Earth.
Uncontrolled fusion is easy–mastered so long ago the films are in black and white. Fusion is what a hydrogen bomb does, releasing energy by forcing atoms of hydrogen to fuse together. What’s been impossible is harnessing the fires of Armageddon into something useful.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory helps maintain nuclear weapons and experiments with high-energy physics. An hour east of San Francisco, we met Livermore’s director, Kim Budil, in the lab that made history, the National Ignition Facility.
Kim Budil: The National Ignition Facility is the world’s largest, most energetic laser. It was built starting in the 1990s, to create conditions in the laboratory that had previously only been accessible in the most extreme objects in the universe, like the center of giant planets, or the sun, or in operating nuclear weapons. And the goal was to really be able to study that kind of very high-energy, high-density condition in a lot of detail….
(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Game Trailers: High on Life”, Fandom Games is not just honest, but brutally honest.
…From Rick and Morty creator and alleged domestic abuser Justin Roiland comes a brand new video game that’s exactly the thing that you would expect from him. It’s a space adventure where every joke goes on two minutes too long – High on Life.
Witness what happens when Justin Roiland decides to bring his vision to life in game and experience a world that feels like a cheap knockoff of a thing made by the same guy…
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Daniel Dern, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ingvar.]
We’re very sorry to have to announce that Titan Con is cancelled this year.
I don’t need to tell you that the past few years have been enormously challenging for everyone and many of us are still processing our experiences. While finances are good, the humans and human resources needed to make Titan Con viable have been impacted.
In recent weeks, a number of committee members, including my co-chair, have had to step away due to personal reasons. I’m sorry to lose them, and am extremely grateful for their hard work, but understand it’s the best decision.
After taking stock of the situation with the committee and advisers, it’s clear we do not have the resources for this year’s already smaller con, and unfortunately have to cancel it. This was a very difficult decision and one the committee wished could be avoided, but there was simply no alternative.
A fresh start is called for.
We need to cancel, regroup, and consider our way forward carefully.
We’ll be recruiting some people to help us look at delivering a Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror convention with the best elements of our legacy events, while considering how to become sustainable going forward.
All current members will receive a full refund.
Thank you for your support and patience, and we hope to see you in the future to celebrate the wonderful media we are all fans of.
(2) MALIK Q&A. The Horror Writers Association Blog continues its “Asian Heritage in Horror” theme in an “Interview with Usman T. Malik”.
What is one piece of advice you would give horror authors today?
Don’t worry about pandering to western stereotypes or the market. Write your own darkness. Spill your own fears onto the page and the audience will follow.
(3) ABOUT THE BROKEN TRUST. Jake and Ron chat with author Juliette Wade about her projected five-book series, The Broken Trust on The Wrath of the iOtians podcast. (Also available on Spotify.)
Juliette Wade is a novelist … and after listening to this interview, you’ll understand why it’s a hard-earned and well-deserved title for this masterclass worldbuilder.
Her background is impressive. She is fluent in French and Japanese, has degrees in linguistics and anthropology, and also boasts a Ph.D. in education.
Juliette started writing fiction in 1999, and her short stories have been featured in Analog, Clarkesworld, and Fantasy & Science Fiction magazines. But she is perhaps best known for her projected five-volume Broken Trust series, whose latest volume, Inheritors of Power, was published earlier this year by DAW. Juliette’s specialty is sociological science-fiction, of which Broken Trust is one of our finest contemporary examples. Each stratum of Broken Trust’s complex caste system has its own vocation, ideals, manners, and culture, and naturally, they come into a devastating conflict. There’s a lot to discuss, so let’s dive in!
(4) JO FLETCHER NEWS. Publishers Lunch reports, “Publisher Jo Fletcher will leave the Quercus sci-fi, fantasy and horror imprint she founded 11 years ago on September 30. She will continue to edit some of her long-standing authors for the line.”
Netflix is adding a warning card to the “Stranger Things 4” premiere in light of the shooting on Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which left 21 people dead — including 19 children and two teachers.
The warning card, which will show up for viewers in the U.S. when the episodes launch on Friday, reads: “We filmed this season of ‘Stranger Things’ a year ago. But given the recent tragic shooting at a school in Texas, viewers may find the opening scene of episode 1 distressing. We are deeply saddened by this unspeakable violence, and our hearts go out to every family mourning a loved one.”
This warning will appear before the prior season recap that auto-plays at the beginning of “Stranger Things 4” Episode 1 for viewers in the U.S. only. Additionally, Netflix has also edited the description for the premiere to include the note, “Warning: Contains graphic violence involving children,” and added “disturbing images” to the show rating advisories….
(6) LIFT OFF. The New Yorker’s Neima Jahromi analyzes Disney World’s Starcruiser experience in “LARPing Goes to Disney World”.
In February, when it was cold and wet in New York, I rode a jitney under blue skies from the Orlando airport into Disney World. Before reaching the Magic Kingdom, the bus passed a range of gray crags perched on scaffolding—a sliver of Black Spire Outpost, which, in the “Star Wars” universe, is a settlement on a planet called Batuu. Nearby, the Millennium Falcon rested below a control tower built into the rock; Stormtrooper helmets were for sale at a sun-bleached military-surplus garage. Black Spire is also the destination of the Galactic Starcruiser, a spaceship that carries hundreds of interstellar tourists to and from the outpost, on what Disney calls an “immersive adventure.” The Starcruiser begins its journey floating in space, light-years from Batuu and Black Spire. In reality, the spacecraft is a massive brutalist building that sits beside a highway….
In one of the games —
In Calculations, written by Caro Murphy, a veteran larper with a side-swept cyberpunk haircut, Sinking Ship customers play a spaceship pilot delivering medicine to Mars, where colonists have been dying from an illness that causes “shortness of breath.” Murphy adapted the game from a nineteen-fifties sci-fi story by Tom Godwin.
(7) DIAL ‘M’ FOR MILKY WAY. No, E.T. should not be allowed to phone home. Vice looks at a scientific paper: “There Are 4 ‘Malicious Extraterrestrial Civilizations’ in Milky Way, Researcher Estimates”. The author, PhD student Alberto Caballero of Spain’s University of Vigo, readily admits he had to make a number of assumptions. Thus, it’s hard to put error boundaries on his conclusions.
Stephen Hawking famously said sending messages from Earth into deep space could get human civilization destroyed: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
Hawking’s words have often been used to discourage the practice of METI, which is Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But how many “malicious” alien civilizations are there? And what are the chances any message we sent into our own galaxy would be received by an evil alien civilization? There is precious little research on this topic, and very few scientists have even posited a guess.
A new thought experiment attempts to at least venture a guess in hopes that other scientists will begin to take METI more seriously, and will try to determine how dangerous it actually is to try to contact alien civilizations.
According to this paper, which the author admits has “some limitations,” there are roughly four “malicious extraterrestrial civilizations” in the Milky Way, and we could likely send out 18,000 interstellar messages to different exoplanets in our galaxy and the probability of ensuring our own destruction would still be about the same as Earth being hit by a “global catastrophe asteroid.”
It must have been fate. Born eleven days apart on opposite coasts, Leo and Diane met, competed artistically, and eventually fell in love while attending Parsons School of Design, each aspiring to a life of art. After their marriage in 1957, the artists initially pursued separate careers in illustration before recognizing their strengths were collaborative in nature. In an effort to work in a particular style that they both could master, they symbiotically and seamlessly melded their personalities and styles, employing pastels, colored pencil, watercolor, acrylic, stencils, typography, woodcut, pochoir, found-object assemblage, collage, and sculpture into an entity/partnership that they came to refer to as “the artist.”
Noted Leo on the gorgeously striking complexity of their distinctive decorative realism and unconventional techniques: “People often comment on the ‘Dillon style.’ I think that someplace, the two of us made a pact with each other. We both decided that we would give up the essence of ourselves, that part that made the art each of us did our own. And I think that in doing that we opened the door to everything.”…
(9) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
1998 – [By Cat Eldridge.] Warning: there are lots of SPOILERS here. Go away now if you’ve not watched Babylon 5. Really I do mean it!
Twenty-four years ago in the last season of Babylon 5, the “Meditations on the Abyss” episode aired. It has three story lines: a mission to the edge of Centauri space, Lennier both teaches and learns; John Sheridan struggles to keep the Interstellar Alliance together; a Drazi agents plant a bug in Londo Mollari’s quarters and faces the wrath of Vir Cotto which happens after Londo Mollari tells Vir Cotto he will have to be more careful if he wishes to be worthy of his new job as Centauri Ambassador to Babylon 5.
Vir fascinates me. This episode, like so many involving him, upends the apparent light hearted nature of the character and show him to be something much more complex, more dangerous but good for the Empire in fact than Londo is as Londo has no sense of community and Vir does. Vir cares about the Centauri people in a way Londo doesn’t.
“I’d like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike, as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I want to look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this.” – Vir telling Mr Morden what he wants.
And he gets to do just that. Wasn’t that absolutely thrilling to see Vir looking up at the head of Mr Morden on a stake in the capital city of a devastated Centauri Prime and waving at it?
And he will become the Emperor of an Empire almost completely shattered after Londo is strangled by the blind G’Kar. It not known how the Empire fares under him but it has to be better than it did under under previous Emperors.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born May 27, 1894 — Dashiell Hammett. Yes, I know he’s written some genre fiction but I’m interested this time in his mysteries. He wrote The Maltese Falcon which was turned into the film you remember and another film a decade earlier. And of course there are Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man series that got turned in a six film series. Now my favorite character by him is the Continental Op in Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. And let’s not forget the Secret Agent X-9 comic strip which I think is genre, which artist Alex Raymond of Flash Gordon fame illustrated. (Died 1961.)
Born May 27, 1911 — Vincent Price. Ok, what’s popping into my head is him on The Muppets in “House of Horrors” sketch they did in which he and Kermit sport impressive fangs. If I had to single out his best work, it’d be in such films as House on Haunted Hill, House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum. Yes, I know the latter two are Roger Corman productions. He also did a lot of series work including being Egghead on Batman, appearing in the Fifties Science Fiction Theater, having a recurring role as Jason Winters on the Time Express and so forth. (Died 1993.)
Born May 27, 1922 — Christopher Lee. He first became famous for his role as Count Dracula in a series of Hammer Horror films. His other film roles include The Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, Kharis the Mummy in The Mummy, Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, Lord Summerisle In The Wicker Man, Saruman in The Lord of the Rings films and The Hobbit film trilogy, and Count Dooku in the second and third films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Now interestingly enough, ISFDB lists him as being the co-editor in the Seventies with Michael Parry with a number of horror anthologies such as Christopher Lee’s ‘X’ Certificate No. 1, From the Archives of Evil and The Great Villains. (Died 2015.)
Born May 27, 1929 — Burnett Toskey, 93. A Seattle fan who was a member of the Nameless Ones and served them in various offices from the early Fifties to the mid Sixties. He was also the official editor of Spectator Amateur Press Society. His work on Cry of the Nameless won the Best Fanzine Hugo at Pitcon, a honor he shared with F. M. Busby, Elinor Busby and Wally Weber.
Born May 27, 1934 — Harlan Ellison. Setting aside the “The City on the Edge of Forever” episode”, I think I best remember him for the two Dangerous Vision anthologies which were amazing reading. His awards are far, far too numerous to recount here so I’ll need to do an essay on them. His Hugos alone are legion and that’s hardly all of the awards that he was honored with. (Died 2018.)
Born May 27, 1935 — Lee Meriwether, 87. Catwoman on Batman. (And if you have to ask which Batman, you’re in the wrong conversation.) Also she had a turn as a rather sexy Lily Munster on The Munsters Today. And of course she had a co-starring role as Dr. Ann MacGregor on The Time Tunnel as well. And yes, I know I’m not touching upon her many other genre roles including her Trek appearance as I know you will.
Born May 27, 1951 — StepanChapman. He wrote but one novel, The Trioka, a most excellent steampunk affair that won that the Philip K. Dick Award. He’s written a lot of short fiction, some of it collected in Danger Music and Dossier. The Trioka is available for a reasonable price at the usual suspects. (Died 2014.)
Born May 27, 1967 — Eddie McClintock, 55. Best known no doubt as Secret Service agent Pete Lattimer on Warehouse 13, a series I loved. He’s also in Warehouse 13: Of Monsters and Men which is listed separately and has the plot of ‘the Warehouse 13 operatives uncover a mysterious comic book artifact and must work together to free themselves from its power.’ He’s had one-off appearances in Witches of East End, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Supergirl, but no other major genre roles to date.
(11) HORSING AROUND WITH SHATNER. Tomorrow, May 28, the Hollywood Charity Horse Show is offering “An Evening with William Shatner”. One ticket is $400. Or buy a table for 10 and only pay – eh, $4,000.
6:00pm – 7:00pm Dinner. During Dinner, Mr. Shatner will go around to each table and take a group shot (Due to Covid restrictions individual photos are not possible.)
7:00pm – 8:00pm Mr. Shatner will tell stories and answer your questions
…The last time I was in Brussel in April, I stopped at the Standaard Boekhandel book shop directly across the street from À l’Innovation to pick up the latest comics. The venerable weekly comics magazine Tintin has launched a slew of new strips to keep up with the competition of Spirou and particularly the French comics magazine Pilote….
(13) BOOK REVIEW. Cora Buhlert also appears in The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies (12.2) with a review of The Weird Tales Story: Enhanced and Expanded by Robert Weinberg et al. The publication is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to the academic study of Howard’s literary works as well as the literary historical and print culture contexts associated with it.
(14) DOZOIS AND ADLER TRANSCRIPT. The Eaton Collection shares a bit of history.
…“I think it’s safe to say that we’re still occupying our own space this year,” MacFarlane told io9 over video chat at a recent Orville press event. “Certainly, the more that’s out there, you do start to become a little concerned that, you know, is it oversaturation? Is there a pocket where our show and only our show exists? And I think that is still very much the case.”
Not wanting to spoil what’s in store, MacFarlane didn’t get too into detail about what specifically sets The Orville apart from Star Trek this season. In more general terms, “It’s this genre that emerged in the 1930s of a ship in space, captained and crewed very much the same way that a sailing ship was,” he said. “It’s something that dates back a lot of decades. Star Trek was really the first to take it and turn it into something that really mattered and was a serious form of storytelling. You know, for us… sci-fi right now is very dark. It’s very dystopian. It’s very grim in a lot of ways. It’s very cautionary. And the optimistic, uplifting part of that genre is something we haven’t really seen in a while. So there was a pretty obvious open pocket for us to kind of slip into when we started. How we fit in now is—it’s really up to the audience, I think—what we’re bringing to the table in tone, in structure, in scope is in a class of its own. But that remains [to be seen], because the verdict [on season three] has not come in yet.”…
(16) GIVE A DOG A BAD NAME. James Davis Nicoll is happy to help.
(17) WE ARE NASA. People sent me links to this 3-year-old NASA video which has been the subject of several posts this week. Take a look.
We’ve taken giant leaps and left our mark in the heavens. Now we’re building the next chapter, returning to the Moon to stay, and preparing to go beyond. We are NASA – and after 60 years, we’re just getting started. Special thanks to Mike Rowe for the voiceover work.
(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Game Trailers: Evil Dead: The Game,” Fandom Games says this move tie-in “fulfills a need you never knew you had: fighting with four Bruce Campbells.” The narrator suggests that someone convince Lucy Lawless to appear in a game with her Xena armor, “a move that would cause a majority of gamers to regress into puberty.”
[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Andrew (not Werdna), Cora Buhlert, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Thornton.]
Lou Antonelli posing with sign outside Hugo, Oklahoma.
SF author Lou Antonelli died October 6 at his Clarksville, TX residence. He was 64.
Antonelli made a late start as a science fiction writer, initially posting his first story “Insight” to get feedback on the Speculative Visions website in 2002. His first published story came at the age of 46, “Silvern” in the June 2003 issue of RevolutionSF. His first professional sale was “A Rocket for the Republic”, to Gardner Dozois at Asimov’s Science Fiction, where it appeared in September 2005 and was well-received, placing third in Asimov’s annual Readers Poll in the short story category.
Antonelli grew up in Massachusetts. He discovered sf in grade school, reading Scholastic Book Club novels. The first one he bought was The Runaway Robot by Lester Del Rey.
He eventually sold 125 short stories. Gardner Dozois gave eleven of them honorable mentions in The Year’s Best Science Fiction. And his 2012 short story “Great White Ship” was nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
Antonelli capitalized on his good relationship with editor Dozois to produce a nonfiction book about writing, Letters From Gardner, analyzing the development of 16 of his short stories, which also appeared in the book.
By profession Antonelli was a journalist, and he explained the launch of his career in sf this way: “There’s an old saying you have to write a million words before you are any good. I think that’s true. One advantage I had was that my million words were in newspapers. No one ever read my amateurish fiction, because my amateur stuff was published in newspapers. I was first published in a local newspaper when I was 12. I first started writing fiction when I was 46. That’s why, after my first acceptance, the editor said, ‘You seemed to have skipped the novice stage.’”
Late in life he and his wife, Patricia, acquired and produced the local Clarksville, TX newspaper.
Antonelli was politically active, and sometimes registered his dissent by running against incumbents. In 1982, at the age of 25, he ran as a Republican for Congress in a Manhattan-area district, losing by a margin of 85%–15%. In 2020, he ran for Congress in Texas’s 4th congressional district as a Libertarian, trailing both major parties with just 1.9% of the vote.
He did have one successful run for public office. In 1985, Antonelli moved to Texas, and in 1992, he was elected to a term as a member of the Cedar Hill ISD school board and served three years, but was not re-elected.
Antonelli likewise voiced his dissent within the science fiction field. His personal blog offered harsh criticism of an industry he considered controlled by those who were to the left of him politically. He co-founded an organization to rival SFWA, the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling (SASS) in 2012, with Michael A. Burstein as President, Brad R. Torgersen as Vice-President, and himself as Secretary. He even quit SFWA in 2017, but later rejoined and tried unsuccessfully to get elected as a Director in 2020.
He was a vocal sideline supporter of the Sad Puppies’ efforts to get their works nominated for the Hugo. In return, both Torgersen’s Sad Puppies slate and the Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies slates propelled Letters From Gardner and his short story “On A Spiritual Plain” onto the 2015 Hugo ballot.
That same year, Antonelli wrote a letter to the Police Department of Spokane, Washington, telling them to be on the lookout for someone who may incite violence — Sasquan guest of honor David Gerrold. In the uproar that followed, Antonelli published an apology which Gerrold publicly accepted and advocated that Antonelli not be banned from the convention. Antonelli was subsequently allowed to attend. However, Antonelli later resumed trying to justify what he had done. That same year he gained increased notoriety for publishing Carrie Cuinn’s contact information after she revoked plans to anthologize one of his stories, exposing her to abuse in email and social media.
The family’s obituary notice is on the Clarksville Funeral Home website. He is survived by his wife Patricia.
