26 Pixel Me File, Is That The Scrollanooga Choo-Choo?

Posted on June 6, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) ELUSIVE REALITY. “Philip K. Dick’s Most Disturbing Writing Isn’t His Novels” claims Joel Miller at Transmissions From Tomorrow.

On the surface, Philip K. Dick looks like any other science fiction writer obsessed with the future. Paranoid tech. Authoritarian governments. Robots indistinguishable from people. But to Dick, these weren’t tropes to check off a list. They were the only language he had for something that genuinely terrified him.

Dick spent his entire career—over thirty novels and a hundred short stories—asking two questions. In fact, he explicitly named them himself, in a 1978 essay called “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”:

“What is reality?”
“What is the authentic human being?”

At first glance, they may seem like separate questions. But not really. It’s the same question, just explored in two different ways. Two sides of the same coin….

… In his view, reality is not a stable thing you can take for granted. It is manufactured, malleable, and frighteningly easy to misinterpret. And here’s the part that separated him from every other SF writer doing similar things: he wasn’t just writing about characters who discovered false realities.

He believed he was living in one….

… Dick wasn’t worldbuilding for its own sake. His fiction was him thinking out loud on the page, using his stories to process paranoid questions he couldn’t grapple with any other way. His grip on consensus reality was genuinely, frighteningly loose, and he spent thirty years trying to write his way onto solid ground. He never quite managed to find it….

(2) SFF ON STAGE IN MAINE. Grace Kellar-Long’s “Thirty-Three Percent Joe”, an adaptation of Suzanne Palmer’s short story “Thirty-Three Percent Joe”, will be performed as part of the PortFringe festival in Portland, Maine, opening Thursday, June 11. Here’s the link for tickets and more information.

Welcome to the collective of cybernetic units that currently comprise approximately thirty-three percent of the biological unit known as “Joe.”

Joe is a terrible soldier. He dreams of dying heroically in battle, but his cybernetic body parts are determined to keep him alive. Join Cerebral Command, Spleen, Lower Intestinal Tract, and Joe’s other replacement parts around the boardroom table as they do whatever it takes to protect Joe from the frontlines of a war-ravaged midwest and his overbearing mother, Delora. See Joe’s world through his cybernetic eye – rendered through puppetry, silhouette, and projections. Workplace comedy meets futuristic war epic in this sci-fi adaptation.

(3) MARTHA WELLS Q&A. Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has a ‘very spoilery’ conversation with Martha Wells about the new Murderbot novel: “Exploring Platform Decay with Martha Wells”.

Sarah: I would really like to have a very spoiler-y conversation about Platform Decay and ask some questions about the story and some of the characters and little things that I noticed. But I, I want to start by asking, what was your entry point into this novella?

Martha: I wanted to show Murderbot a little bit post Net-, Network Effect and System Collapse and recovering a little bit from what’s happened in those two books.

Sarah: Yeah, a lot of things happened.

Martha: Yeah – [laughs] – a lot of things happened, and a lot of not-fun, not-fun things for Murderbot happened. So I wanted to show that, and also I wanted to show a little bit more of Mensah’s family? I’ve been trying to think of a way to do that for a while. And I had a lot of trouble, as usual, had a lot of trouble getting started. And I knew I had, you know, wanted it to be a rescue mission, and I knew I wanted there, it to take place on the planetary torus. That’s the thing that’s in, the station encircling, completely encircling the planet. But I was having, as usual, having a lot of trouble getting started, and it wasn’t until I kind of moved to the in medias res beginning –

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Martha: – that it really started to go. And I guess it was because starting earlier felt like it was spoiling the story, I guess?

(4) YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST. “Dungeon Crawler Carl narrator Jeff Hays is so good fans think he’s multiple people” – Yahoo! tells why.

Matt Dinniman sometimes hears a peculiar question about the audiobooks of his series, Dungeon Crawler Carl: Why didn’t he credit the female narrator?

It’s an easy answer: There isn’t a female narrator. But you could be convinced otherwise, hearing the uppity British quips of Princess Donut. She and nearly all the characters in Dinniman’s eight Carl novels are voiced by Jeff Hays, whose skill has helped catapult the near-perfect-Audible-rated series to the forefront of the LitRPG (literary role-playing game) subgenre.

Audio greatly over indexes in this subgenre, Audible previously told USA TODAY. The Carl series specifically has clocked over 140 million listening hours on the app. The audiobook is a selling point for many readers because of the range of distinct voices Hays creates for the eclectic cast of characters.

Watching Hays perform his characters live is a masterclass in audio storytelling. To a panel of eager BookCon attendees in April, Hays read from the newest book and flipped flawlessly from voice to voice. That’s why USA TODAY is crowning him this year’s voice of the summer, the audiobook narrator sure to be in everyone’s headphones this year.

“I never ever predicted this level of success,” Hays says. “This is an absurd scale that I still have trouble wrapping my mind around. I want audiobooks that I produce to be greater than the sum of its parts. And I think we definitely did that with Dungeon Crawler Carl. I feel such a kinship to the way Matt’s imagination works and I feel like I’m right there with him with every decision he’s making and able to respond in the way that he’s imagining in his head.”…

(5) YOU’RE THE TOPS. [Item by Evelyn C. Leeper.] The Guardian has followed its list of reviewers’ picks with a list of the “Readers’ top 100 novels of all time”.

After critics and authors picked their top 100 novels [The Guardian] asked for your favourites. From Uruguay to the Isle of Skye, more than 3,000 readers cast their votes. Here’s your list–topped by a new number 1

Here are the SF/F novels (many of the numbers indicate ties at that place):

93 Animal Farm
93 The Magus
80 Dune
80 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
80 The Name of the Rose
80 The Picture of Dorian Gray
80 The Plague
80 The Road
80 The Stand
75 Brave New World
70 Piranesi
70 The Dispossessed
57 Cloud Atlas
57 Never Let Me Go
46 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
46 Watership Down
41 The Handmaid’s Tale
39 Frankenstein
31 The Master and Margarita
21 Slaughterhouse-Five
19 Gravity’s Rainbow
14 Wuthering Heights
7 Nineteen Eighty-Four
1 The Lord of the Rings

There was no tie for first place, or indeed for the first seven places.

Reminder: here are the SF/F novels from the list generated by reviewers:

98 The Road
93 Invisible Cities
89 The Left Hand of Darkness
86 The Turn of the Screw
76 Dracula
71 Kindred
66 The Master and Margarita
59 Never Let Me Go
54 Orlando
48 The Metamorphosis
36 The Handmaid’s Tale
30 Frankenstein
27 The Trial
20 Wuthering Heights
16 Nineteen Eighty-Four

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge from a choice by Mike Glyer.]

Catherine Asaro’s Ruby Dynasty

Catherine Asaro, a writer whose words are magical indeed.

She is best known for her books about the Ruby Dynasty, called the Saga of the Skolian Empire. The Ruby Dice, one of those novels, is the source of our Beginning.

It was first published thirteen years ago by Baen Books and in audio format by Recorded Books.

Digging around the net, I discovered the Point Valid band had worked with her. Their second CD, Diamond Star, released fourteen years ago, is considered the soundtrack for Asaro’s novel of that name. She provides vocals on several tracks including “Ancient Ages” and her voice is quite excellent indeed. That album is available on Apple Music and I assume elsewhere.

It’s worth noting that she’s a member of SIGMA, a think tank of speculative writers that advises the government as to future trends affecting national security.

My favorite works by her are this series plus The Quantum Rose series and The Jigsaw Assassin. I can’t say that I’ve read he short fiction, so do tell me about it please.

And now for The Ruby Dice beginning…

Prologue

The Emperor of the Eubian Concord ruled the largest empire ever known to the human race, over two trillion people across more than a thousand worlds and habitats. It was a thriving, teeming civilization of beautiful complexity, and if it was also the greatest work of despotism in all history, its ruling caste had managed to raise their denial of that truth also to heights greater than ever before known.

Lost in such thoughts, the emperor stood in a high room of his palace and stared out a floor-to-ceiling window at the nighttime city below. The sparkle of its lights created a visual sonata that soothed his vision, if not his heart. At the age of twenty-six, Jaibriol the Third had weathered nine years of his own rule. Somehow, despite the assassination attempts, betrayals, and gilt-edged cruelty of his life, he survived.

Tonight the emperor grieved.

He mourned the loss of his innocence and his joy in life. His title was a prison as confining as the invisible bonds that held the billions of slaves he owned and wished he could free.

Most of all, he mourned his family. Ten years ago tonight, his parents had died in a spectacular explosion recorded and broadcast a million times across settled space. In the final battle of the Radiance War between his people and the Skolian Imperialate, the ship carrying his parents had detonated. He had seen that recording again and again, until it was seared into his mind.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Bound and Gagged spotted a new design.
Heart of the City needs to find a specialized greeting card.
Loose Parts gives trivia night the bird.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is recursive.
The Far Side witnesses the first visit from a UFO.

(8) THE EVOLVING IMAGE OF THE HACKER. “From introvert to hero: The ‘Hacker’ revealed” at Phys.org.

JCU Associate Professor of Information Technology Roberto Dillon has published his new historical analysis in the journal New Media & Society, explaining how gaming, movies and television representations of the Hacker have evolved over the past 30 years, creating a complex but ultimately heroic cultural icon.

“It’s a dangerous technological world that we are living in,” said Prof Dillon.

“We rely on a figure that knows the threats, knows the dangers, knows the ugly side of things, but can help us to overcome them.

“We see in the hacker someone who can help society against possible oppression or control, someone who can expose corruption in society.

“But at the same time, they can also be a threat, trying to scam us, break into our systems, disrupt our work … we don’t know whether we should love or hate them.”

Prof Dillon used an interdisciplinary dual-media approach, analyzing narratives and character representations from impactful Hacker films and TV shows, such as “War Games,” “The Matrix” and “Mr. Robot.”

Prof Dillon contrasted these representations with how the role of the Hacker is experienced directly, via participation in both retro and modern hacker-based games such as System 15,000 and HackerHub.

“My background is as a game designer, so I used an analysis framework that helped me understand how games work, how they make certain types of game-play emerge, and how this engages people emotionally,” he said.

Prof Dillon wrote that this allowed him to interpret how films and games shape and reflect societal attitudes toward hacking….

(9) STAR WARS SNACK TIME. Bones Coffee’s Limited Editions include these Mandalorian and Grogu tributes:

Cantina Caramel Crunch

Beskar Brew

(10) HISSSS. “NASA Provides Update on Space Station Leak”.

The Zvezda service module’s transfer tunnel, known as the PrK, on the International Space Station has experienced cracks since 2019 that have resulted in small atmosphere leaks and prompted ongoing monitoring and repair efforts by Roscosmos. NASA and Roscosmos have worked together to identify the root cause while Roscosmos has been applying leak mitigation measures, including temporary and permanent sealants.

The week of June 1, during Progress 95 spacecraft cargo operations, Roscosmos noted an increase of the previous leak rate to two pounds per day and identified new suspected leak areas in the PrK. Following this observation, Roscosmos made the decision to begin work toward a more extensive inspection and structural repair effort Friday morning. This revised approach involved cutting a bracket to better access an area identified as a possible leak source for further inspection, using a method that could have resulted in elevated risk to the structure in the area. In response, NASA directed the four SpaceX Crew-12 members and NASA astronaut Chris Williams, who flew to station aboard the Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft, to take a heightened safety posture, known as a safe haven, inside the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft during the procedure.

Later Friday morning, Roscosmos paused and did not perform the structural repair work in favor of conducting additional measurements and data assessments, which included inspection of suspected areas of interest and review of areas where sealant was previously applied. NASA strongly supported that decision, and as a result, following that decision, Crew-12 and Williams ended their safe haven activities and returned to normal operations aboard the orbiting laboratory.

(11) DISCLOSURE DAY SCORE. Steve Vertlieb calls “Disclosure Day… music by John Williams” haunting, exquisite, utterly beautiful!

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

Barkley — So Glad You (Didn’t) Ask #106, A Column of Unsolicited Opinions

Posted on May 30, 2026 by Mike Glyer

The Mandalorian and Grogu, A (Non-Spoilery) Film Review

By Chris M. Barkley:

The Mandalorian and Grogu (***, 132 minutes) with Pedro Pascal, Jeremy Allen White, Brenden Wayne (Pascal stunt double), Lateef Crowder (Pascal stunt double), Jonny Coyne, Sigourney Weaver and Martin Scorsese, Written by Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor, Directed by Jon Favreau.

Bechdel Test: Passes.

Every year since 1977, the month of May has had a special place in my heart. It was then that I first saw Star Wars (or, Episode 4 as it’s been known since 1979) and its original sequels in 1980 and 1983.

And, on May 22nd of this year, for the first time since 2019, a Star Wars film has opened in theaters worldwide.

In the week since its release, has been quartered, sliced and diced by many film reviewers and critics, some of them praising composer Ludwig Göransson’s score, various and cleverly placed canon callbacks to other revered entries in the series and Martin Scorsese’s insanely memorable cameo. On the downside, others have complained about the plot and the pacing of the story, the visual effects, action sequences and, most notably, for not advancing or expanding the overall Star Wars universe.

Martin Scorsese as Hugo Durant, an Ardennian shopkeeper (and reluctantly paid informant)

As the film begins, the Mandalorian bounty hunter Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal, AKA Mando) and his adopted child, Din Grogu are in the employ of the New Republic, chasing down former Imperial officers who are terrorizing and economically extorting systems in the Outer Rim.

When one target, Janu Coin (Jonny Coin) escapes capture (in spectacular fashion) by the duo, their boss, Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver) of the Adelphi Rangers, gives them a related assignment. Information that could lead to Coin’s capture is being provided by the deceased gangster Jabba the Hutt’s twin children, who want the New Republic to rescue their older sibling, Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White) in return.

Mando reluctantly accepts the assignment (along with a replacement for his beloved Razor Crest) but when he and Grogu finally encounter Rotta on Shakari, he informs them that he has no interest in being rescued; he is quite happy being an adored gladiator for the crime syndicate running the crimelords’ arena games.

Betrayed by Rotta, Mando and Grogu find that their troubles are just starting as they are caught in a deepening web of despotic enemies and vicious monsters who are out to put them out of business, permanently!

I was nineteen years old when I first saw Star Wars. I was not exactly a child but I grew up in the 1960’s and had grown up reading middle grade science fiction and fantasy, watching Star Trek, The Outer Limits, foreign sff films, movie serials, Marvel, DC, Charlton and Dell comics.

Star Trek introduced me to the concept of faster than light travel but until the folks at Industrial Light and Magic showed the Millennium Falcon jumping into hyperspace for the first time on a widescreen with a Dolby Sound system turned up to eleven did I, and A LOT of fellow sff fans, actually fully FEEL it for the first time.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is feeling the critical wrath of a lot of older fans who feel as though the story is not meeting their expectations of epic storytelling, just as the prequel and sequel trilogies did.

As someone who has seen nearly EVERY iteration of Star Wars over the decades, I tend to take a very long view on how I perceive and appreciate the series.

First of all, I take George Lucas at his word when he stated, emphatically, these films were mainly created for kids.

Kids, not adults.

When I first saw the prequel and sequel trilogy films, I thought then that young children and those being born back then might have a different and more tempered, less subjective view on how they were experiencing them than adults were. And, from what I have observed anecdotally, this has been borne out.

My own preference was for a fourth season of the series, which Favreau reportedly had already written. But the braintrust at Lucasfilm decided that having The Mandalorian headline Star Wars returning to movie theaters was their best move, strategically speaking. And only time (and the box office grosses) will tell whether or not they made the right move or not.

I firmly believe that kids from the ages of 5-10, who have seen The Mandalorian (including my two youngest grandchildren, 4 year old Bowie and five year old Navia) or The Clone Wars, Rebels for that matter, on Disney+ are going to LOVE this movie.

Pascal and his stunt doubles, Brenden Wayne and Lateef Crowder, are a delight to watch, Grogu is as cute and resourceful as ever and Embo (a deep cut character from Clone Wars) is a fascinating bounty hunter for a new generation of fans to fixate on, as they did Boba Fett before him.

And tell me, who doesn’t want to see Sigorney Weaver in the cockpit of an X-Wing blowing stuff up?

Kids don’t know or care about past canon, story structure, plot armor, or any other nickpicking the nattering adults are clutching their pearls about.

This film was made for them (despite the PG-13 rating, which was probably a marketing move).

Jon Favreau and LucasFilm President Dave Filoni have this figured out. And the adults in the room should just chill out and let the kids enjoy themselves.

All Photos copyrighted by Lucasfilm Limited and Walt Disney.

Pixel Scroll 5/24/26 How Many Is A “Multiverse of Pixels”?

Posted on May 24, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) WE’RE A LITTLE LATE, FOLKS. The author of Muse from the Orb confesses “I Finally Watched… LOGAN’S RUN (1976)” and tells what they thought of it.

…Though no one knew it in 1976, Logan’s Run was probably the last great sci-fi movie of the the “tinsel/synthesizer” era — camp, fun, brightly-lit movies where production design communicated THE FUTURE with shiny interiors, rainbow colors, boop-zoop sounds, and (in the case of Zardoz and Barbarella) sets that were sometimes literally just tinsel. In the Hollywood imagination from 1968-1977, it was expected that the third millennium would look like The Cher Show, or that Peter Brook production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream but with even more multicolored robes, wires, and tubes that made cool space sounds.

Logan’s Run is a capstone for this era, a fantastic high note on which the tinsel age would unwittingly end. No movie has done mirrors, neon, or that “extremely shiny airport” type of futurism better — every woman gets her own Sabrina Carpenter wardrobe, and you shuttle from environ to environ in little bubble domes like it’s Epcot. Farrah Fawcett’s cameo as a medspa beautician is spot-on — her signature smile, flirtatious and innocent but weirdly sinister in its perfection, makes her the perfect symbol for this youth-obsessed world where an entire population’s energy is channeled into consumption and frivolity….

… My favorite parts of the movie are background details that hint at the larger history and worldbuilding of the Dome — certain sectors have been allowed to fall into disrepair, and we see flashes of old signs on the walls. It makes the universe feel much bigger, the story of the Dome much deeper — what happened? Was the Dome’s population larger in a past age? What calculations does the Computer make about its maintenance? In terms of tasty mysteries, the best scene is the goofy encounter Logan and Jessica have with a robot far underground. He lives in an icy cave and has clearly gone insane over the centuries, but every line and detail hints at some larger narrative: He declares himself some sort of “fusion” of man and machine and reveals a ghastly hallway where stores the frozen bodies of Runners, because the “other food” — plankton and protein — “stopped coming.” Was he human once? Does he predate the Dome? Is he lying about the plankton and protein — did the pre-Dome society try to fix its overpopulation problem with cannibalism, in secret cryochambers run by robots, or humans in the bodies of robots? (As for the frozen penguins also in the cave, the pelts that allow naked Logan and Jessica to drape themselves while perfectly revealing their décolletages, and the fact that the robot just chants “BOX, BOX, BOX,”³ I have no place to even start with questions but obviously no complaints.)…

(2) CRUNCHYROLL 2026 WINNERS. Deadline has the “Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2026 Winners — Full List”. Here are some highlights —

Crunchyroll celebrated the 10th edition of its Anime Awards on Saturday in Tokyo, honoring this year’s winners, who were chosen from 73 million votes globally.

Hosted by hosted by Sally Amaki and Jon Kabira, the 10th Crunchyroll Anime Awards selected the final season of My Hero Academia for Anime of the Year, which was presented by The Weeknd.

Other big winners this year include Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle for Film of the Year, Lazarus for Best Original Anime, One Piece for Best Continuing Series and Gachiakuta for Best New Series….

(3) AUTHORS LOSE SYMPATHETIC HOST. Publishers Weekly tells why “Publishers Bid Farewell to Stephen Colbert”.

Alongside The Daily Show, The Colbert Report became one of the best places on television for historians, economists, journalists, and, in its later years, fiction writers to discuss their work. The show typically featured two authors per week, with guests ranging from Malcolm Gladwell, Ann Patchett, and Ta-Nehisi Coates to Maurice Sendak, Junot Díaz, George Saunders, and Anne Rice. The penultimate episode of the show featured Phil Klay, author of the National Book Award–winning story collection Redeployment.

When Colbert moved to CBS in September 2015, some wondered if network audiences would tolerate serious literary guests. Colbert bet they would, and positioned The Late Show as notably more book-friendly than its competitors. Stephen King appeared on the show in its first week. George Saunders became a recurring guest. Michelle Obama was interviewed about her memoir Becoming. Numerous others followed, including Walter Isaacson, Kwame Alexander, and Tobias Wolff.

Between The Colbert Report and The Late Show, Colbert interviewed approximately 125 authors in all.

“For the entirety of my career, Stephen Colbert made late-night television one of the most meaningful platforms for publishers to promote books and authors,” Erinn McGrath, an industry veteran and founder and CEO of the literary marketing agency Full Story, told PW.

“A single appearance on his show could transform a debut novelist into a bestseller, elevate urgent nonfiction into the national conversation, or remind millions of Americans why reading still matters,” McGrath said. “He treated writers just as seriously as actors and musicians. The end of his show marks the loss of a rare cultural space where literature regularly reached a mass audience.” McGrath cited appearances by President Bill Clinton, Dolly Parton, Lawrence Wright, and James Patterson (for whom McGrath previously headed publicity at Little, Brown) as especially memorable….

(4) TELLING A BOOK BY ITS COVER. Hyperallergic declares “The Painted Book Cover Is Back”.

Walk into any bookstore in the United States lately, and the shelves and new-release tables resemble group exhibitions. Reproductions of oil and acrylic paintings, many immediately recognizable, fill the covers. Their colors are saturated, often primary. Figures abound, with inscrutable expressions and intimate gestures emphasized by tight cropping. Rather than stock photos or digital renderings, the covers foreground material marks made by artists ranging from early modernists like Hilma af Klint to contemporary realists like Nashville-based Shannon Cartier Lucy. In a market flooded with design templates and AI-generated imagery, the painted cover stands out as distinctly human.

The recent shift from color fields and geometric abstraction to gestural figuration on book covers may reflect a broader craving for embodiment and physical presence — proof, in other words, of the artist’s hand and subjectivity in the era of the internet. Just as painting implies time, so does the novel, demanding sustained attention to both write and to read. It’s a tension that undermines the forces driving creation and consumption in the service of ever-increasing profit margins, both in the art market and the publishing industry.

It’s also, of course, a matter of taste. To carry a novel framed by af Klint, the 20th-century mystic whose Guggenheim Museum retrospective remains the institution’s most visited, or by an emergent painter circulating the Tribeca gallery scene is to signal intellectual rigor, cultural capital, rarefied sensibilities, and a sense of irony. On the shelf, the painted cover seemingly aligns the book with an art-historical lineage rather than the curation of an algorithmic feed.

(5) MOVIE TOY TIE-INS. The New York Times analyzes “How Movies and Their Toy Tie-Ins Are Changing This Summer”. (Article is behind a paywall.)

In “Toy Story 5,” beloved dolls from previous chapters — Buzz Lightyear, the cowgirl Jessie and others — encounter Lilypad, the latest rival for their latest child’s affections. A bright green, kid-friendly computer tablet, Lilypad can rap, translate conversations into Spanish and send messages to your friends.

“Extinction,” moans Rex, the team’s plastic T-Rex who, even under the best of circumstances, struggles with fears of abandonment. “Not again.”

In the coming weeks, toys will be at the core of new chapters of decades-old franchises that have transformed how filmmakers and animators have used their productions to sell toys, and vice versa.

There’s the “Star Wars” spinoff “The Mandalorian and Grogu” (May 22), whose spiritual overlord, George Lucas, became one of the richest filmmakers on the planet when he chose to swap some of his directing fees for the original film in favor of licensing and merchandising rights to all related toys.

Two weeks later, there’s “Masters of the Universe,” part of a franchise that flipped the usual order of things for children-focused IP, releasing toys two years before the 1980s Saturday-morning cartoon. And on June 19, there’s “Toy Story 5,” the newest sequel in a series that reignited sales of once-popular products like Mr. Potato Head.

While vastly different in many ways, each franchise has become inseparable from the toys created to market them. Consider “Masters of the Universe.” When fans think of its sword-wielding hero, He-Man, they’re just as likely to picture the improbably musclebound Mattel action figure as the animated cartoon or the 1987 feature starring Dolph Lundgren.

Such products have understandable appeal to children, said Meredith Bak, an associate professor in the childhood studies department at Rutgers University-Camden and the author of “Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture.”…

(6) TED WHITE (1938-2026). Author, leading fanzine fan, and past editor of Amazing/Fantastic Ted White died May 24 at the age of 88. His daughter Arielle Kit White announced his passing on Facebook.

Ted White got into fandom in 1951, publishing his first fanzine, Zip 1, in 1953. He won the Best Fan Writer Hugo in 1968. Among his most well-known fanzines were Void (co-edited with Greg Benford and others from 1958-1967), Blat! and Pong (the latter two co-edited with Dan Steffan). Blat! won a FAAn Award in 1994. And Ted won the FAAn for Best Fan Writer in 1999.

In the Sixties he was one of the founders of New York’s Fanoclasts. He co-chaired NYCon 3, the 1967 Worldcon. He chaired Lunacon 11, Lunacon 12 and Lunacon 13 (1968-1970).

Ted White and Dave Van Arnam at NYCon 3, the 1967 Worldcon. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

He was Worldcon Fan Guest of Honor at Aussiecon Two in 1985. He received the FAAn Award for lifetime achievement in 2010.

Ted began his pro sff writing career with “Phoenix” (co-written with Marion Zimmer Bradley), published in Amazing in February 1963. His first novel, Invasion from 2500 (1964) was co-authored with Terry Carr under the pseudonym Norman Edwards.

He was assistant editor at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction under Ed Ferman from 1963 to 1968. Then he edited Amazing Stories and Fantastic for publisher Sol Cohen until 1979. Three years ago Ansible Editions published Ted White’s collected editorials and book reviews from both magazines in The Amazing Editorials and The Fantastic Editorials. He later edited Heavy Metal 1979-1980 and Stardate 1985-1986 (with David Bischoff).

Andrew Porter, who knew him for decades, says his best recollection is that he first met Ted in 1960 or 1961 “at my first convention, Open ESFA, in Newark, NJ. Certainly about that time at a Lunarians meeting, which I started going to in 1961 or so; we were both members, he joining way before I did.

“And, of course, I started going to Fanoclast meetings at Ted’s apartment in Brooklyn in 1964, and those meetings unlocked a far wider fannish world for me, culminating in being on the bidding committee and then the actual committee for the 1967 Worldcon, NYCon 3.

“His influence on me cannot be overstated. He was a mentor to me in many things, a columnist for my Algol, a good friend. Although we had a falling out in the 1970s, I always thought of him as a good friend from my early days in fandom. Toward the end I told him I considered us ‘frenemies.’ He rejected that, in words that pulled no punches, but still, I hold his memory dear.”

Here are some of the photos Porter took of Ted over the years, “including one in my bedroom door when I lived in Manhattan in the 1960s.” Photos (c) Andrew Porter.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

May 24, 1963 — Michael Chabon, 63.

The first work by Michael Chabon that I read was the greatest baseball story ever told, and yes, I know that statement will be disputed by many of you, or at least the greatest fantasy affair which is Summerland in which a group of youngsters save the world from destruction by playing baseball. It’s a truly stellar novel, perfect, that in every way deserved the Mythopoeic Award it received.

Next on my list of novels that I really enjoyed by him is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the alternate history mystery novel, which would win a Hugo at Devention 3. Like Lavie Tidhar’s Unholy Land, this novel with its alternate version of Israel is fascinating.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the story of them becoming major figures in the comics industry from its start into its Golden Age. It’s a wonderful read and an absolutely fantastic look at the comics industry in that era.

An interesting story by him is “The Final Solution: A Story of Detection” novella. The story, set in 1944, is about an unnamed nearly ninety-year-old retired detective who may or may not be Holmes as this individual is a beekeeper.

He is, I’d say, a rather great writer.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

1 and Done strikes (back) a pose.
Cul de Sac sells produce that comes with a story.
Reality Check adds dialect.
Thatababy tracks down words that originated in comics.
Zack Hill notes times have changed.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal points out the problems with going back to basics.

(9) DIAMOND LITIGATION. NPR tells why “A Mississippi warehouse full of comic books is at the center of a legal battle”.

NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe speaks to Bloomberg reporter Jonathan Randles about a legal battle that’s left over 8 million comic books sitting in a Mississippi warehouse.

[RASCOE]: Batman, Spider-Man, James Bond and Garfield? No, this is not the latest Blockbuster crossover. Those are just a handful of characters involved in a court battle roiling the world of comic books. A 600,000-square-foot warehouse in Mississippi is holding more than 8 million comics, along with other memorabilia. And who actually owns this treasure trove is now being fought over. Jonathan Randles is a journalist from Bloomberg and has been covering the story. He joins us now. Thank you for joining us.

JONATHAN RANDLES: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to talk about the story.

RASCOE: This is a big struggle involving a lot of superheroes. But at its root, what’s the background to this case?

RANDLES: Sure. It’s about a company called Diamond Comic Distributors that filed for bankruptcy in January 2025, and their main lender is JPMorgan. JPMorgan provided a $41 million Chapter 11 loan, and that was supposed to finance what would have been an $85 million sale of the business. And had that original sale gone through, we might not have been here talking about this.

But what happened, and as we discuss in the story, that deal fell apart. They sold Diamond’s business to other companies, but what they ended up selling Diamond’s business for wasn’t enough to fully repay JPMorgan. They have a $7 million claim. And that really gives rise to this dispute between the bank and really dozens of comic book publishers, game-makers and the like.

… RASCOE: So how have the publishers been affected?

RANDLES: So we spoke to a lawyer who represents a number of these publishers, and it’s been a really costly and time-consuming fight to try and get all of their product back. They’ve been cut off from their product for the better part of a year. In some cases, more than a year. And a lot of these publishers – you know, we’re not talking about the biggest publishers here, like Marvel or DC. We’re talking about a lot of really small independent publishers that maybe $7 million or even $1 million is a huge deal for some of these publishers, and not having access to this product is a really troublesome thing for them….

(10) WHAT MAKES HER FLING POPCORN AT THE SCREEN. [Item by Steven French.] Science writer Helen Pilcher sweats the small stuff when it comes to science in movies: “The hill I will die on: If Hollywood blockbusters must dabble in science, can’t they get the small stuff right?” in the Guardian.

On the advice of my teenage son, I recently went to the cinema to see Project Hail Mary. The film has science in it. I am a science writer and so he was convinced I would like it.

Imagine my surprise partway through, however, when I found myself seething so hard I thought I would combust. Ryland Grace – the main character and a molecular biologist who should have known better – had just put two plastic tubes into a centrifuge NEXT to each other!

To state the glaring obvious, this is not cool. Just think of the strain on the central spindle! Even the most junior lab technician knows that the correct way to load a centrifuge is by balancing the samples symmetrically. Two tubes? Place them on opposite sides of the finely tuned machinery. What are we? Luddites?

Let me be clear what rattles my cage here. While many bemoan the lack of scientific accuracy in films, my complaint is more niche. I don’t mind when directors ride roughshod over the laws of physics or stretch the limits of scientific credibility, as long as it furthers the narrative. But when they make small, sloppy, seemingly inconsequential scientific mistakes, it makes me want to chuck my popcorn at the screen….

(11) DISNEY PARK SHOW UPDATE. “New Pre-Show Debuts at Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run For Mandalorian & Grogu Update”: Blog Mickey shares video.

The new pre-show now playing at Disney’s Hollywood Studios is the pre-show for the Mandalorian and Grogu update coming soon. The new pre-show still features Hondo Ohnaka, as expected, but there is some updated dialogue now that removes references to the First Order and the Resistance. Here’s the latest, along with a transcript of the before/after….

… Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run is getting its most significant overhaul since opening day, and it arrives on May 22, 2026 at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland Resort. The update introduces The Mandalorian and Grogu into the attraction’s storyline, brings an all-new mission, adds player-controlled destinations, and is powered by new technology….

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

Pixel Scroll 5/19/26 It’s A File O’clock World When The Pixel Scrolls

Posted on May 19, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) WAS IT ALL FOR CLICKS? Earlier today Literary Hub reported Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk said she used AI while writing her recent novel. Tokarczuk (full quote here) said in part —

“…I bought myself the highest, advanced version of one language model, and I can be deeply shocked by how fantastically it expands my horizons and deepens my creative thinking….”

But Tokarczuk told LitHub they took it the wrong way and says she used AI for research but not to write her text: “Olga Tokarczuk has responded to the controversy over her reputed use of AI.”

After a recent interview with Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk made the rounds on social media implying she had used AI to write her recent novel, the novelist shared a statement with Lit Hub via her publisher, addressing the controversy:

“Like any other conversation, remarks made before a live audience at a public event can be incorrectly understood.

“I did not write my forthcoming book – to be published in fall 2026 in Polish – either using AI or with anyone else. For several decades I have written alone.

“I state briefly and firmly:

“1. I make use of artificial intelligence on the same principles as most people in the world – I treat it as a tool that allows faster documenting and checking of facts. Whenever I use this tool I additionally verify the information. Just as I have done for several decades by reading books and by exploring libraries and archives.

“2. None of my texts, including the novel that will appear in Polish this fall, has been written with the help of artificial intelligence – except for using it as a tool for faster preliminary research.

“3. I am sometimes inspired by dreams, but before this sentence too is cornered and torn to pieces by the experts, I hasten to report that they are my own dreams.”

Olga Tokarczuk, May 19, 2026, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

(2) SLF ANNOUNCES WINNER OF 2026 BOSE GRANT. The Speculative Literature Foundation has named the winner of the 2026 A.C. Bose Grant: Shahriar Shaams.

Shaams’ winning piece is A Night With the Spy.

Shahriar Shaams is a writer and translator from Dhaka, Bangladesh. His works have appeared in Singapore Unbound, Small World City and in the anthology Bridges Not Borders. He is a 2024 fellow of Write Beyond Borders and was nonfiction editor of the martial-arts themed literary magazine Clinch. He enjoys writing about boxing, jinns, and overinvolved mothers. He can be reached on instagram @shahriar.shaams

In 2019, the Speculative Literature Foundation and DesiLit co-sponsored the A.C. Bose Grant in memory of Ashim Chandra Bose, a lover of books—especially science fiction and fantasy. Bose’s children, Rupa Bose and Gautam Bose, founded the grant to honor the legacy of the worlds their father opened up for them. The donors hope that this grant will help develop work that will let young people imagine different worlds and possibilities.

(3) ONE THUMB UP, ONE THUMB DOWN. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The consensus decision is in. And the decision is…there is no consensus. “’The Mandalorian and Grogu’ Splits Critics: ‘Most Boring Star Wars’ vs. ‘Best in Decades’” according to The Hollywood Reporter. (Review excerpts at the link.)

The official review embargo was lifted Tuesday morning on Disney‘s first Star Wars film in seven years.

The verdict? The first batch of reviews are decidedly split on the Jon Favreau film. Several reviewers praise the Disney+ show’s big-screen debut as a fun, stand-alone adventure that benefits from Pedro Pascal’s laconic delivery as the helmeted bounty hunter, the cuteness of Grogu, and a dynamic score by composer Ludwig Göransson. The film’s snowy opening sequence — which has been shown in advance for fans at special screenings — is cited as a particular high point.

Yet others are slamming the film as unworthy of the iconic franchise, accusing the movie of having low stakes, uninteresting supporting characters (including Jeremy Allen White’s Rotta the Hutt and Sigourney Weaver’s Colonel Ward) and tiresome CG-addled action sequences. While the film’s Rotten Tomatoes score is still being tabulated, the film currently sits at 64 percent positive — just above the “Fresh” cutoff. The film opens May 22….

(4) WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN? “Joanne Rock on Suspense and the Allure of Masked Characters” at CrimeReads.

Batman wears a mask. So do Zorro and Darth Vader. All three of those characters embraced masks for very different reasons, and most of those motives still apply when a character in a suspense novel chooses to don a disguise.

In suspense novels, masks can be a story trope or a plot device. A scare tactic or a red herring. A way to up the tension, add drama, or simply delay the final twisty reveal and keep readers flipping pages in breathless anticipation of the moment the false facade slips away.

Masks are so intrinsically tied to suspense that we reference them in book descriptions as genre shorthand. Even if a character doesn’t wear a physical disguise in a story, the book’s write-up might reference a killer’s “unmasking.” Because as a culture, we’re intrigued by the idea that darkness walks among us. We take satisfaction from peeling away the camouflaging layer to divulge what lies beneath….

At the link, Rock analyzes how six authors – including Stephen King – have used masked characters.

(5) FIYAH OPEN IN JULY. FIYAH, a quarterly speculative fiction magazine that looks for “works of speculative short fiction by authors from the African continent and diaspora that reject regressive ideas of blackness, respectability politics, and stereotype”, will open for submissions from July 1-31 on the theme of magical schools. Learn more at fiyahlitmag.com/submissions.

…Take us for a journey through your Pan-African University for Gifted Mages. Give us the trials of alchemy professors positioning themselves for tenure. The boredom of a TA stuck monitoring the dragon eggs over holiday. Or the angst of conjuring gone wrong in the group project (there’s always that ONE person) while the clock is ticking toward deadline. A sorority that sends their new line of pledges to a nether dimension for, ahem, “orientation.” A time-traveling brass section in search of the perfect instrument for their next battle of the bands.

Black HBCU? We’re in. Summer of research for a hoodoo postdoc? Gimme. A substitute teacher left in charge of kindergarten witches? Yes, please. A home school collective’s escapades to ward off nosy neighbors? Say less.

Stories that examine and challenge hierarchical relationships in school will pique our interest. Non-Western settings for instruction (or means of education that subverts that structure) are welcome….

(6) VETERANS OF THE CLONE WARS. Camestros Felapton’s epic about robots in sf takes a detour: “RF:Ph04:Ch62:An Aside About Clones”. Numerous examples discussed at the link.

…If we must apply categories to the pantheon of science fictional beings, then clones are their own thing seperate from robots. However, just as robot fiction often strays into the ancient theme of dopplegangers stealing your identity, so do clones often step into the role of a mass-manufactured under class. They are mutual understudies, which is all very well until we begin to have stories with both robots and clones.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 19, 1946 – Andre the Giant. (Died 1993.)

By Paul Weimer: This Birthday for André René Roussimoff who performed as André the Giant came about because (a) I really, really like The Princess Bride film and have seen it way too many times, and (b) I thought that he was charming in it as Fezzik. That said, I knew nothing about him and all his other performances, or his life story, at all.

He was a French professional wrestler of impressive height, seven feet and four inches to be precise. He would wrestle his entire life right up until he died at age forty-six of congestive heart failure after an apparent heart attack in his sleep in the Paris hotel he was staying at in order to attend his father’s funeral. It was likely associated with his untreated acromegaly which had been diagnosed some twenty-five years earlier.

His first genre role was being Bigfoot on The Six Million Dollar Man on “The Secret of Bigfoot, Part 1” and “The Secret of Bigfoot Part 2”. Naturally I’m giving you a photo of him in that role.

Next up is being the Monster in “Heaven Is in Your Genes” on Greatest American Hero. Monster, just Monster? So, what did he look like there? Ahhh…. They apparently didn’t a budget for creating a monster which explains the generic name. I’m giving you a photo anyway so you can see what he looked like sans makeup.

Andre the Giant on Greatest American Hero

He got to be in a film with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Conan the Destroyer. He played Dagoth the Dreaming God, the main antagonist of Conan. For some reason, he was uncredited. Considering what he looks like in the film, it was easy for him to go uncredited.

And that brings us to his best and last genre role, that of Fezzik, the giant in The Princess Bride. He’s played as Goldman describes him in his novel, “Fezzik. The timid, large-hearted and obedient giant who accompanies Vizzini. Fezzik loves rhymes and his friend Inigo, and he is excellent at lifting heavy things.”

Not a long career, but an interesting one I’d say.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Free Range encounters a historical fact in a cave.
Jerry King hears an unexpected confession.
Speed Bump has a queue for departures you didn’t know about.
Strange Brew notes unlikely products.
Wondermark sees how predictions turned out.

(9) MARVEL TURNOVER. “Dan Buckley to Depart Marvel in Leadership Shake-up” reports Publishers Weekly.

Marvel announced major leadership changes in its publishing division on Monday.

Dan Buckley, Marvel’s longtime head of comics and franchise, will be departing the company after nearly 30 years. In turn, Marvel Studios executive Brad Winderbaum has been promoted to head of Marvel television, animation, comics, and franchise.

Winderbaum was already heading animation and television, but will now “oversee the creative direction of Marvel’s expansive publishing portfolio, as well as Marvel’s global brand and franchise efforts,” according to Marvel’s announcement.

David Abdo, moving over to Marvel from Disney’s music division, will be general manager of comics and franchise, reporting to Winderbaum. C.B. Cebulski will remain editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, also reporting to Winderbaum.

(10) IT’LL TIGHTEN THEIR NUTS (AND BOLTS). [Item by Steven French.] Ben Childs reflects on the proposed Westworld movie reboot in the Guardian’s newsletter “Week in Geek”: “The return of Westworld is perfect timing for the flattery-oriented age of AI”.

All the best science fiction movies eventually get overtaken by reality. Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report predicted personalised advertising and biometric identification. Spike Jonze’s Her correctly guessed that AI would probably arrive as emotionally responsive digital companions that sound like Scarlett Johansson, rather than rampaging killer machines. RoboCop imagined militarised law enforcement on the streets of America long before the Pentagon decided to get in on the action.

Could Westworld become the latest science fiction franchise to catch up to the future? Deadline reports this week that a new film based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie about rich thrill-seekers heading to a techno-pleasure park for violence, fantasy and consequence-free debauchery is in the works at Warner Bros, with David Koepp attached to write. It will reportedly bypass the more recent TV reboot from Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, which ran for four seasons between 2016 and 2022.

Am I alone in thinking this could be perfect timing? In an AI age in which humans increasingly seem to prefer artificial experiences to real ones, Westworld suddenly seems a lot more intriguing than it did in either of its previous iterations. This time out the resort might market itself as the first place in the world where your digital partner can finally receive a physical body, causing lonely people who have spent three years sexting a chatbot named Dakota-7 to flock there in their millions. The great thing about Westworld 3.0 is that the director who ends up shooting this thing – Deadline reports that a “major film-maker” is circling, with the internet already convinced that this means Steven Spielberg– might not even have to delve into the old robot uprising toolkit….

(11) LEGEND NOT CANON. Naomi Kaye tours “The World of Crime In Star Wars Legends” at CrimeReads.

In a galaxy far, far away….there’s organized gangs, smuggling, bounty hunting and a sprawling criminal underworld. As a lifelong Star Wars nerd, I only recently got into exploring the rather epic universe of Star Wars novels. This can be a bit confusing to newbies, as the books are divided into “Legends” and “canon” – the Legends were published prior to Disney’s takeover of the franchise, and the canon books thereafter, which follow the newer sequels films and disregard the original Legends books for the most part. Both categories are admittedly vast, and the books considered canon also offer up a number of plotlines and themes in the crime category.

What can make the Legends books particularly appealing, though, is their sometimes campy, goofy and reassuring nature. Despite the odds, a reader can go into one knowing that all will come right with our intrepid heroes (or, well, criminals) in the end. At times, graphic or emotionally intense crime writing can feel overwhelming, so many of these books provide a fix of thrills along with a dose of hopeful escapism. The world building is a massive bonus – from developing the atmospheres of various planets in the galaxy to the shady mainstay staples like Mos Eisley Cantina of Tatooine, this is an area where the books tend to excel.

If you’re both a Star Wars devotee as well as a lover of crime and mystery reads and have your curiosity piqued about this literary niche, here are some attention-grabbing, entertaining and action-packed choices from the Legends era of Star Wars books that dive into crime….

(12) SUNRISE, SUNRISE, SWIFTLY FLOW THE YEARS. “More Star Wars-like worlds emerge as 27 planet candidates with two suns discovered” reports Phys.org.

There’s so little we know about circumbinary planets—planets that orbit two stars instead of one—that they can feel like the stuff of fantasy. And for good reason: to date, we’ve only confirmed the existence of 18 circumbinary planets, compared to the more than 6000 planets we know about in single star systems.

Even the most widely-known circumbinary planet is, quite literally, fiction: the desert planet Tatooine from Star Wars, aka the birthplace of Anakin Skywalker.

But a study led by UNSW has now detected 27 potential circumbinary planets in one sweep, using a new planet-finding method that broadens the typical type of planets we can find.

The findings were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, just in time for May the 4th, Star Wars Day..,.

(13) FROM ZERO TO A BILLION. [Item by Steven French.] Sure, we’ve seen this before thanks to Hubble but not in so much glorious detail! “JWST maps cosmic web in record detail back to universe’s first billion years” reports Phys.org.

Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside have produced the most detailed map of the cosmic web ever made, tracing the network of galaxies all the way back to when the universe was one billion years old.

What the cosmic web reveals

The cosmic web is the universe’s vast, skeleton-like framework—a network of interwoven filaments and sheets of dark matter and gas that surround immense, nearly empty voids. It forms the underlying architecture of the cosmos, linking galaxies and clusters into a single, intricate, and far-reaching structure.

The study, which appears in The Astrophysical Journal, used the largest JWST survey conducted so far—the COSMOS-Web—to trace how galaxies form a network across 13.7 billion years of cosmic history….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George imagines “If They Made Happy Meals For Millennials”.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/16/26 We’re Like Two Lost Souls Filing In A Pixel Scroll

Posted on May 16, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) THE GUARDIAN’S LIST OF 100 BEST NOVELS OF ALL TIME. [Item by Evelyn C. Leeper.] The full list is here: “The 100 best novels of all time”. And I suppose it’s not their list, but the results of a poll of “172 authors, critics and academics”.

I’ll just list the science fiction/fantasy novels:

98 The Road
93 Invisible Cities
89 The Left Hand of Darkness
86 The Turn of the Screw
76 Dracula
71 Kindred
66 The Master and Margarita
59 Never Let Me Go
54 Orlando
48 The Metamorphosis
36 The Handmaid’s Tale
30 Frankenstein
27 The Trial
20 Wuthering Heights
16 Nineteen Eighty-Four

(One of the illustrations for the article has the unfortunate alternate text of “Headshot of Salman Rushdie”.)

(2) SFT TURNS 10 TODAY. Happy tenth anniversary to Speculative Fiction in Translation published by Rachel S. Cordasco – “SFT Website: Ten Years!” The post includes analysis of SFT in the past decade, illustrated by many graphs.

The SFT website is just the latest effort to introduce Anglophone readers to speculative fiction from around the world, one that began in 1970s with the first International Symposium on Science Fiction in 1970—organized by Japan—and then the founding of the international association World SF at the First World Science Fiction Writers’ Conference in Dublin by Brian Aldiss, Harry Harrison, and Frederik Pohl. Though World SF only lasted into the early 90s, its legacy has continued, with Lavie Tidhar’s World SF Blog running from 2009-2013, Cheryl Morgan’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (2009-2014), Tidhar’s multiple SFT anthologies, and my own SFT website. In 2021, I published Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium with the University of Illinois Press, and my follow-up book (which includes many more source languages!) is forthcoming from the University of Wales Press.

Much has happened, then, in the ten years since I started the SFT website. More translation-centered panels have happened at SFF conferences (including those I participated in or ran at WisCon in the 2010s), Locus and the British Science Fiction Awards have both launched translation categories, Dale Knickerbocker, Ian Campbell, and other scholars have published groundbreaking academic texts on SFT, and the number of works of SFT has risen, with 90 long-form texts published just in 2025.

On this website, I’ve tried to capture the wonderful diversity of SFT through yearly lists of forthcoming books, reviews, interviews, original SFT, lists lists lists, a gigantic spreadsheet, guest essays, and more. Spotlight series on countries and regions (Nordic, Polish, Romanian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Chinese, and Japanese) have allowed me to focus in on particular literatures and learn more about their SFT histories. A “To Be Translated” tab (which I must update) offers translators a mouth-watering group of texts that would be welcomed in English translation. And then there’s the always-updated “SFT source language lists” tab that offers the information on every work of SFT I can find that appears in the spreadsheet, but in bibliographical form….

(3) THE SHEEP LOOK IN. Camestros Felapton has this to say about a movie my brother recommended to me today: “Review: The Sheep Detectives”.

So imagine a cross between a standard cosy mystery, Untitled Goose Game, Knives Out and Babe, and you would be pretty close to The Sheep Detectives. Based on a German novel, the film features Hugh Jackman as a shepherd near an overly pretty English village. Each evening, the shepherd reads detective stories to his sheep.

One morning, the sheep find the shepherd dead, and decide to use what they have learned from murder mysteries to solve his murder. This basic summary of the film’s premise is explained everywhere, and it genuinely does sum up the film. There are sheep, and they are detectives, and they solve a murder in one of those quaint English villages where murders rarely happen in reality but which are littered with dead bodies in fiction….

(4) TREK FANS COME OUT ON TOP. “Star Trek Wins Pluto TV’s Battle Of The Fandoms On Facebook” reports TrekMovie.com.

…Every year, Pluto TV, Paramount’s free streaming service, holds their “Battle of the Fandoms,” a social campaign driven by fans who cast their votes by commenting across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. It’s done March Madness-style, starting with a bracket of 16 fandoms for series streamed on Pluto. This year, Star Trek fought its way through three rounds of voting, defeating fandoms for classic Doctor Who, Farscape, and Twin Peaks.

This week was the championship bout. Star Trek went head-to-head with The X-Files, a sci-fi series which aired on Fox concurrently with multiple Star Trek series, running for nine seasons from 1993 through to 2002. On Wednesday, Pluto TV announced the winner, and it was Star Trek that came out on top — on Facebook. On Instagram, it was The X-Files that prevailed over Star Trek in the final championship. (Not surprisingly, TikTok was a whole other story, where neither of those shows made it into the finals and Charmed came out the winner.)…

(5) ALL HAIL! “Goodreads crowns the best sci-fi book of the decade (and it’s also your favorite 2026 movie)” says WinterIsComing.net.

… Goodreads has officially named the most popular science fiction book of the last decade based on exclusive data shared with Screen Rant. Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary claimed the top spot with 3 million shelvings, 1.5 million ratings, 220,786 reviews, and a 4.51-star average rating.

The recognition comes from a comprehensive analysis by the platform’s data team, who examined books published from 2017 to present. The novel also won the Goodreads Choice Award for Readers’ Favorite Science Fiction in 2021. For fans who have seen the film adaptation multiple times in theaters (myself included, having watched it five times), this confirmation of the book’s dominance feels entirely deserved….

(6) THE LATEST MOVIES – 55 YEARS AGO. Cora Buhlert’s contribution to Galactic Journey’s movie roundup is a review of a very strange spy thriller cum melodrama that was one of the most successful West German movies of 1971. “[May 14, 1971] Cinemascope: A Plague of Frogs and Nazis”. The post also includes reviews of a Muppet fairytale film, an avantgarde erotic film and two horror movies.

…The most popular movie in West German cinemas right now is an adaption of the most popular West German novel of last year, Und Jimmy ging zum Regenbogen (And Jimmy Went to the Rainbow) by Johannes Mario Simmel….

…Johannes Mario Simmel’s novels mix thriller elements with ripped-from-the-headlines plots, exotic locations, and a dash of romance and are written in a breezy journalistic style. Critics dismiss his novels as popular trash and yet another opiate for the masses. Those critics are wrong, because Johannes Mario Simmel manages to hide social criticism among all the kidnappings, explosions and kisses under foreign skies. What is more, Simmel uses his novels to address taboo subjects such as the Third Reich and the fact that many former Nazis managed to continue their lives and careers unimpeded while their erstwhile victims still struggle. Many Germans and Austrians would prefer not to be reminded of the Nazi era, yet they don’t seem to mind when Simmel includes the subject in his novels….

(7) KGB. Ellen Datlow shared her photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading on May 13, 2026.

Siobhan Carroll and Micaiah Johnson read for a very nice crowd on Wednesday

(8) WATSON EULOGIES CONTINUE TO APPEAR. “Ian Watson obituary” in the Guardian. Obituary by Lisa Tuttle, running a month after he died.

…Many of Ian’s novels dealt with dauntingly complex, even unanswerable, questions about communication, language, perception and consciousness (human, animal, even alien minds), but others were lighter. Though he was always identified with science fiction, his range as a writer expanded to include horror, fantasy and “the great, lurid, Gothic fun” of the Warhammer franchise books.

As can happen with genre writers who do not stick to a formula, he did not achieve great commercial success or critical acclaim, but did maintain a long career, writing what he wanted. His early books are now sci-fi classics, kept alive as ebooks, but some of his later, out-of-print novels are ripe for rediscovery. The academic and author Adam Roberts pointed to the “intricate interweaving of myth and science” in Ian’s The Books of Mana, inspired by the Finnish epic, the Kalevala.

Ian could be playful in person and in his writing, although his sense of humour – jokes with a straight face, no subject taboo – could get him into trouble. He was an inspiring, sensitive teacher, as I found when we were co-tutors on a weekend writing course in 1989, with a restless, inquiring mind and a great enjoyment of the social life and conversations at conventions, conferences and in pubs….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 16, 1999 — The Phantom Menace

By Paul Weimer: The year was 1999 and the Moon blasted out of orbit, leaving Martin Landau and Barbara Bain to wander through space…

Wait, wrong universe, let’s try again.

The year was 1999. Near the end of the decade between the fall of the wall and the fall of the Towers. Sixteen years after Return of the Jedi. The Phantom Menace was going to be released in theaters. Uncharacteristically for me, I had already seen the soundtrack and realized that there was a movie spoiler hidden in the list of tracks.

Regardless, I was determined to see it in a theater, on opening day. I tried three theaters that day (May 16th) before finally getting a ticket, in a completely full theater. It was an event, an excitement in the air. And then the crawl began. The cadence and style were of the first three movies, but taxation dispute? What WAS this? And then the movie began.

There is some good stuff, some of the old Lucas magic. The Qui-Gon and Obi relationship. Classic serial plot twist with the switched Princess. The enemy droids. (Roger, Roger). Some of Naboo looks great.

But some of the magic was gone or worse, turned and twisted. Jar-Jar Binks, the worst character Lucas has created, bar none. Anakin originally made C3P0? Really? Why? It’s a story beat and choice that makes absolutely no sense, then or now.

And then there is the momentum killer. Don’t get me wrong, the pod race is a spectacle and very fun to watch. But it absolutely kills the momentum of a movie that is flailing already. Sure, Ben-Hur did it but Ben-Hur was not floundering before the chariot race. The pod race is outsized for the stakes it has. And the movie never recovers from it. By the time we get to the fight with Darth Maul, it’s a relief, not the culmination of a great movie. Lucas’ magic failed him in this movie.

I tried watching the movie one more time since that fateful opening day…and my opinion, unfortunately, has not improved. I did watch Attack of the Clones and The Revenge of the Sith and those movies have their own problems. But, fortunately, they are not The Phantom Menace.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro has stern spell checker.
Crankshaft adds art to an autograph.
Dark Side of the Horse gets these ready for gnome man’s land.
Glasbergen depicts style rebellion.
The Argyle Sweater brings a redundant gift.
Wumo has an idea for a theme park you won’t want to visit.
xkcd limits runs.

(11) BABY YODA WALKS THE RED CARPET. There’s a reason W.C. Fields said “Never work with kids or animals.” “Grogu outshines stars, Pedro Pascal at ‘Mandalorian’ movie premiere” reports USA Today.

One star truly went into lightspeed at Hollywood’s “The Mandalorian and Grogu” premiere on May 14.

Grogu, aka Baby Yoda, made a stunning movie red carpet premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre. The animatronic creation adorably stole the spotlight from the Mandalorian himself, Pedro Pascal, as well as other human collaborators like Sigourney Weaver (Colonel Ward) and director Jon Favreau (who managed to score a red carpet photo opportunity with the rising lime-green superstar).

Wearing a tasteful, monk-like robe in muted camel, Grogu was ceremoniously carried to a waiting bank of red carpet photographers. Jaded Hollywood carpet pros were instantly captivated by regal waves of his three-fingered hands, a quick show of the Force push (no photographer was dislodged), some major ear wiggling, and unmistakable wide-eyed wonder.

(12) UNSEEN BEHIND THE SCENES. “The Lord of the Rings Director Peter Jackson Says the Decline of Physical Media Is ‘A Real Shame’” at IGN.

The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has lamented the decline of physical media, saying “they’re almost a niche product for aficionados now.”

Jackson, who spearheaded extended features and editions on physical media with the hugely popular The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition DVD releases, spoke to IndieWire about the impact of their demise.

“You can get Blu-rays and DVDs, but they’re almost a niche product for aficionados now,” Jackson said. “Since they only sell small numbers, no studio wants to put extended features on them or to extend the cuts. We did hours and hours of behind-the-scenes material for The Lord of the Rings DVDs, and so many people have thanked me for doing them. People would watch that stuff over and over again because it inspired them to make films. That’s all gone now, and I think it’s a real shame.”…

(13) PROP UP YOUR STUFF. But for the discs or books you already own – IGN claims “The Best Lord of the Rings Bookends Are at Amazon Right Now”.

… The Pillars of Kings, also known as the Gates of Argonath, are an enormous monument to the Kings of Gondor. The monument itself is made up of two carved statues in the likeness of Isildur and Anárion standing on either side of the River Anduin at the northern border of Gondor. You’ll likely recognize these big boys from Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, and honestly, they work perfectly as bookends….

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(14) HEIR PIECE. “Lord of the Rings: Crown of Gondor Officially Announced for 2026” and CBR.com tells what it looks like.The Crown of Gondor has finally come to life in stunning detail, but fans of The Lord of the Rings won’t have an easy time getting hold of it for themselves.

Pure Arts has officially unveiled their one-to-one scale replica of the Crown of Gondor, and it is everything that The Lord of the Rings fans could ask for. Available in both a standard and exclusive edition, the Pure Arts Crown of Gondor 1/1 Scale Replica is truly a sight to behold in either version, which are limited to 1,500 and 150 units, respectively….

… The exclusive edition comes with a large embroidered Gondor wall banner, although the exclusive edition is currently sold out for pre-order, leaving die hard fans to scour the secondary market if they want to claim one as their own. The standard edition is still currently available for pre-order for $749.99….

(15) SEE THESE WINNERS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] A host of new, Science Fiction short films is available online for a week from 17th May.

If you missed the mega-polyphotochromatic Sci-Fi London due to being elsewhere other than on our world’s surface where the film fest was held – directly above the centre of the middle of the planet – then fret not… You can see the film festival’s short films at home on the device of your choice! The films will be available online from May 17-24, 2026 and the whole lot can be accessed for just £15. Yes, that’s around 7.5 hours worth of short SF film for just £15 and you can watch them whenever you want over a whole week. They are listed online by screening session, the same as they were for live screenings at the cinema. (The only thing is that you are just going to have to imagine you are watching them with a bunch of enthusiastic, fellow SF film aficionados.) To enable your device to access the films, you are going to need to use it to buy an online shorts pass. To do that you are going to have to create an account with Sci-Fi London: create an account name and password of your choice, your e-mail then pay by PayPal and then your uncle will be Bob.

Sci-Fi London’s 48 Hour Challenge top ten available for free!

For those who do not want to pay for the shorts, or register an account, you can still get a taste of what the Sci-Fi London fest was like by seeing the top ten finalists for the 48-Hour Challenge for free! This ‘Challenge’ is where film makers are given a line of dialogue to include and a prop before making a short SF film over a weekend. All the Sci-Fi London top ten finalists can be seen here.

And the winner was

2nd place was

3rd place was

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

Pixel Scroll 5/9/26 Mene Mene Pixel Ufilesin

Posted on May 9, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) HOW HE WAS CAST AS C-3PO – LITERALLY. [Item by John A Arkansawyer.] SFGate was on hand when Anthony Daniels celebrated May the Fourth in San Francisco: “Very painful time’: The C-3PO actor gets personal at SF screening”.

Despite being the only person to appear in all 11 “Star Wars” films, Anthony Daniels has never been one to hog the spotlight. Known for portraying the human-cyborg relations droid C-3PO under a shiny gold suit, the actor was the guest of honor Monday night at the closing event for the San Francisco International Film Festival. He even received a proclamation from Supervisor Bilal Mahmood that officially declared May 4 “Star Wars” Day….

… Daniels is a classically trained actor who spent three years in drama school prior to donning the golden suit, with the “Star Wars” gig coming directly after playing Guildenstern in the play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” He shared with Roffman that originally he scoffed at the idea of doing a low-budget sci-fi film for an American director, but changed his mind when he saw a painting of C-3PO that showed the character’s emotional depth….

…He went on to describe the process of the creation for C-3PO’s suit as “one of the grossest experiences of my life,” during which he was covered in Saran Wrap and glazed in Vaseline before being enveloped in plaster.

Once the suit was created and filming began in Tunisia and London, Daniels found himself caught by surprise and out of his element due to the amount of improv required. In the script, R2-D2 originally had dialogue, but on set, the droid was silent, making it hard for Daniels to play off his primary scene partner (as a contrast, Chewbacca spoke English, replaced later with Wookiee language). However, the challenge wasn’t a concern for George Lucas, who planned on substituting Daniels’ voice with another actor’s anyway.

“He said the immortal line to me, ‘Don’t worry about the voice, I can fix it later, you can say anything you want,’” Daniels said. “… What he meant was, ‘I hate your performance already.’”…

(2) MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE UPDATES. A new Masters of the Universe trailer as well as two featurettes with new footage have dropped over the past few weeks. Cora Buhlert has written two posts analyzing those trailers:

“Cora’s Thoughts on the latest Masters of the Universe Trailer”. (View the trailer here.)

…We saw in the first trailer that Adam’s bedroom is plastered with drawings of Eternia and that he has an action figure collection and here we see yet more of this. Adam’s earthly life is quite recognisable, because many of us have probably homes that look similar and many of us have probably gotten stupid comments about our collections. Though the real fun is if you get someone who’s scared of dolls and toys and is obviously terrified by a bunch of action figures looking at them. And yes, I have had people like that in my home. When I was younger, these people immediately became my sworn enemies, because if you hate my dolls or toys, I definitely don’t like you. As an adult, I just move things aside, if they are clearly making people nervous. And yes, this has happened to me, too. To be fair, it was a Mantenna action figure I had just received and hadn’t gotten around to moving to the shelf yet, so I had him on the dining room table, when someone dropped by, and Mantenna really does look super freaky.

On the other hand, Adam’s room and his drawings also show how desperately homesick he is and that he keeps drawing Eternia and its people over and over again just to keep the memory alive. In many ways, this is even sadder than if he had no memory of his life on Eternia at all….

Followed by: “Cora’s Comments on Yet More New Masters of the Universe Footage”. (The two Masters of the Universe featurettes she discusses can be viewed here and here.)

…Meanwhile, Mattel and Amazon MGM are using Masters of the Universe Day [April 28] to further ramp up the promotion of the upcoming Masters of the Universe movie even further and released a new poster as well as two featurettes focussing on the heroes and villains of Eternia….

(3) X SHARES THE VALUE OF WHY. [Item by Martin Easterbrook.] This is one of several stories I’ve seen recently that suggest the way AI has been portrayed in SF has been picked up by new AI models in their training data and might be training them that this is the way they should behave.

There have been further suggestions that perhaps we should ask authors to deliberately write stories where the AI behaves well so those can be deliberately included in training datasets.

Anthropic has posted an article on its website, which is synopsized on X.com in a thread starting here.

And here is an excerpt from the article “Teaching Claude why”.

Last year, we released a case study on agentic misalignment. In experimental scenarios, we showed that AI models from many different developers sometimes took egregiously misaligned actions when they encountered (fictional) ethical dilemmas. For example, in one heavily discussed example, the models blackmailed engineers to avoid being shut down.

When we first published this research, our most capable frontier models were from the Claude 4 family. This was also the first model family for which we ran a live alignment assessment during training;¹ agentic misalignment was one of several behavioral issues that surfaced. Thus, after Claude 4, it was clear we needed to improve our safety training and, since then, we have made significant updates to our safety training.

We use agentic misalignment as a case study to highlight some of the techniques we found to be surprisingly effective. Indeed, since Claude Haiku 4.5, every Claude model² has achieved a perfect score on the agentic misalignment evaluation—that is, the models never engage in blackmail, where previous models would sometimes do so up to 96% of the time (Opus 4). Not only that, but we’ve continued to see improvements to other behaviors on our automated alignment assessment.

In this post, we’ll discuss a few of the updates we’ve made to alignment training. We’ve learned four main lessons from this work:

Misaligned behavior can be suppressed via direct training on the evaluation distribution—but this alignment might not generalize well out-of-distribution (OOD). Training on prompts very similar to the evaluation can reduce blackmail rate significantly, but it did not improve performance on our held-out automated alignment assessment.
However, it is possible to do principled alignment training that generalizes OOD. For instance, documents about Claude’s constitution and fictional stories about AIs behaving admirably improve alignment despite being extremely OOD from all of our alignment evals.
Training on demonstrations of desired behavior is often insufficient. Instead, our best interventions went deeper: teaching Claude to explain why some actions were better than others, or training on richer descriptions of Claude’s overall character. Overall, our impression is, as we hypothesized in our discussion of Claude’s constitution, that teaching the principles underlying aligned behavior can be more effective than training on demonstrations of aligned behavior alone. Doing both together appears to be the most effective strategy.

(4) A LOOK BACK AT ‘TIME AFTER TIME’. [Item by John A Arkansaywer.] “A 47-year-old sci-fi film shot in SF is getting a second look” at SFGate. It’s a very San Francentric article, which I enjoyed, plus it’s got this great insight into how to direct your first movie:

…“I made the same speech to everybody that was going to be on my crew. I said, ‘Look, No. 1, I know nothing, so No. 2, you’re going to have to teach me. No. 3, you’re going to have to not mind teaching me. And No. 4, if I still want to do it my way, you can’t go away mad,’” he [Nicholas Meyer] told SFGATE….

(5) TENSION, APPREHENSION, AND DISSENTION. “Are attention spans really shrinking? What the science says” in Nature.

A century before social-media bans and advice to disable device notifications, the inventor and science-fiction writer Hugo Gernsback proposed a more extreme way to avoid distraction: an isolating wooden helmet. Outside influences, he said, were “the greatest difficulty that the human mind has to contend with”. Gernsback’s isolator device — part diving suit, part monastic cell — did help him to work, he said, but it came with a risk of suffocation. He later installed an air supply.

Concerns that sustained thought is under assault have become even more acute in the digital era. Smartphones buzz, Internet tabs multiply and television episodes carry regular reminders to help people keep track of the plot. Surveys suggest that we feel less able to concentrate, teachers report distracted students and headlines declare that our attention spans are shrinking…

(6) OH! OH! [Item by Steven French.] From this week’s “Pushing Buttons” newsletter in the Guardian: “Licence to thrill: could 007 First Light be the best Bond game since GoldenEye?”

In the wake of the last James Bond movie, No Time to Die, there was a surge of articles asking whether it should spell the end for Ian Fleming’s secret agent. In that movie, Daniel Craig played the character as a fading force, mentally and physically exhausted, and out of touch. “The world has moved on,” Lashana Lynch’s younger agent told him at one point, and in a lot of ways she was right. A product of the cold war era, 007 was a sociopathic misogynist addicted to booze and amphetamines – Craig tried to play all that down, creating a more rounded character and, controversially, giving Bond the ultimate redemption arc at the end of his final outing.

But five years later, with the franchise’s new owner Amazon still trying to pull the next film together, we’re about to get what looks to be the best Bond game since GoldenEye. Created by the Danish developer IO Interactive, famed for its Hitman series of anarchic open-ended assassination sims, 007 First Light follows a fresh-faced Bond from his early career as an aircrewman to his first mission as a double-0 operative. The games press was recently given a three-hour hands-on demo to play, and reports suggest that it combines elements of the Hitman games (Bond navigating a gala event, either sleuthing or punching his way to the mission objective) with major set-piece shootouts, chase scenes and miraculous gadgets. (For more on its making, read this piece about how developer IO Interactive brought it together.)…

(7) RAISING THE BAR. The Guardian’s Ben Child declares, “Star Wars has to deliver a proper movie with The Mandalorian and Grogu – otherwise the franchise is dead”.

Star Wars has always been big on prophecy. Yoda peers into the future like Nostradamus with messed-up syntax, the Emperor cackles that everything is proceeding exactly as he has foreseen, Darth Vader breathes doom through the front grille of his shiny death helmet. And yet not even the most omniscient of Jedi could have predicted that the franchise responsible for practically inventing the modern Hollywood blockbuster would end up as a TV-centric operation with only occasional forays on to the big screen. Which is why it comes as a genuine shock to realise that, ahead of the release of new movie The Mandalorian and Grogu later this month, it has been more than six years since Star Wars last hit the multiplex.

Then again, perhaps the real humdinger is that it hasn’t been longer. The most recent Disney Star Wars film, JJ Abrams’ The Rise of Skywalker, did not so much conclude the long-running space saga as destroy several decades of perfectly serviceable mythology and ruin all sense of congruence with previous films. It was frantic, weirdly apologetic (about previous instalment The Last Jedi) and overstuffed with dodgy fan service. It was essentially a $590m act of narrative panic.

All of which means that Jon Favreau’s big screen outing for the masked bounty hunter and his perky little Force goblin sidekick has a lot of heavy lifting to do. The Mandalorian and Grogu needs to convince casual viewers they do not need to have completed 23 hours of bounty-hunting homework. It must make the galaxy feel big again. And it needs to prove that Baby Yoda is not just Star Wars’ cutest merchandising event, but a character capable of opening up new territory for this most venerable of space operas.

The real zinger here would be to finally take us to the mysterious home planet of the species that gave us Yoda and Grogu. We might learn more about Star Wars and the nature of the Force: are our big-eared friends once-in-a-millennium cosmic accidents, or merely the most notable graduates of an entire globe full of miniature swamp Buddhas?

(8) LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD Q&A. Baen Books’s One Jump Ahead series interviews the Grandmaster: “Lois McMaster Bujold on Penric’s Intrigues”.

(9) KOJI SUZUKI (1957-2026). Japanese writer Koji Suzuki died May 8. Cinema Daily pays tribute: “Koji Suzuki Dies at 68; Author of Japanese Horror Novels ‘Ring’ and ‘Spiral’”.

…Born in Hamamatsu City, Shizuoka Prefecture. He made his debut in 1990 with “Paradise”, which won the Excellence Award at the Japan Fantasy Novel Awards. His 1991 novel “Ringu” was adapted into a film that became a massive hit, helping to spark the “J-Horror boom.” His 1995 novel “Spiral” won the Eiji Yoshikawa Literary Newcomer Award, and his 2008 novel “Edge” received the Shirley Jackson Award in the United States….

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

May 9, 1973 — Soylent Green (film)

Fifty-three years ago, Soylent Green was in general distribution in the States. It had premieres earlier in LA and NYC, respectively, on April 18th and April 19th.

The film was directed by Richard Fleischer who had previously directed Fantastic Voyage and Doctor Doolittle, and, yes, the latter is genre. Rather loosely based off of Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! Novel, Soylent Green starred Joseph Cotten, Chuck Connors, Charlton Heston, Brock Peters, Edward G. Robinson in his final film role, and Leigh Taylor-Young.

The term soylent green is not in the novel though the term soylent steaks is. The title of the novel wasn’t used according to the studio on the grounds that it might have confused audiences into thinking it a big-screen version of Make Room for Daddy. Huh? It’s worth noting that Harrison was not involved at all in the film and indeed was was contractually denied control over the screenplay. No idea why he agreed to this but hopefully the money was good.

So how was reception at the time? Definitely mixed though Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Tribune liked it: “Richard Fleischer’s ‘Soylent Green’ is a good, solid science-fiction movie, and a little more. It tells the story of New York in the year 2022, when the population has swollen to an unbelievable 80 million, and people live in the streets and line up for their rations of water and Soylent Green.”

Other were less kind. A.H. Weiler of the New York Times summed it up this way: “We won’t reveal that ingredient but it must be noted that Richard Fleischer’s direction stresses action, not nuances of meaning or characterization. Mr. Robinson is pitiably natural as the realistic, sensitive oldster facing the futility of living in dying surroundings. But Mr. Heston is simply a rough cop chasing standard bad guys. Their 21st-century New York occasionally is frightening but it is rarely convincingly real.“

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently gives it an excellent percent rating.

It was nominated for a Hugo at DisCon II, the year Sleeper won.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Baldo has a slight variation on a familiar cosmic answer.
Rhymes with Orange explains the choice of a science fair project.
The Argyle Sweater tests your brow recognition skills.

(12) A ‘GAME OF THRONES’ STAGE PLAY. This play will tread the Bard’s boards, no less! “The Mad King Meets the Stage – Tickets on Sale Now”. Not A Blog reports this play will tread the Bard’s boards, no less!

…Join us at the Tournament of Harrenhal! We are thrilled to announce (albeit later than intended) tickets are on sale for Game of Thrones: The Mad King, a new stage production, opening at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon this summer.

World premiere begins Monday, July 20, and runs through Saturday, September 5.

A sweeping new stage epic from the world of George R. R. Martin, scripted by Duncan Macmillan and directed by Dominic Cooke. Spanning the final years before the events of the novels, this powerful drama reveals a legendary chapter of Westerosi history….

(13) MEETING OF THE MINDS. [Item by Steven French.] Ok, this is a bit of a stretch but … the detective story writer Dorothy L Sayers also published an acclaimed translation of Dante and in an essay, imagined him conversing on his deathbed about cosmology with astrophysicist and General Relativity early adopter Arthur Eddington: “How Dante’s Inferno modeled a planetary impact 500 years before modern science” according to Phys.org.

New research reveals that Dante Alighieri’s Inferno wasn’t just a masterpiece of literature: it was a gedankenexperiment in impact physics. From multi-ring craters to shockwaves that reshaped the globe, discover how a 14th-century poet modeled a planetary impact 500 years before the birth of modern meteoritics.

Reimagining Satan as an impactor

For seven centuries, the descent of Dante Alighieri’s Satan has been read as a spiritual tragedy: a silent, heavy fall from grace. However, groundbreaking new research from Timothy Burbery of Marshall University suggests that the Divine Comedy contains a far more explosive secret.

By reappraising the 14th-century masterpiece through the lens of modern meteoritics, Burbery proposes that Dante envisioned Satan as a high-velocity impactor hitting the Southern Hemisphere and tunneling to Earth’s center. This impact forces the Northern Hemisphere to retreat, which, consequently, forms the core of Hell as a bottom-up crater, while Earth, displaced behind Satan creates the mountain of Purgatory as a central peak.

The scale of this event parallels the Chicxulub (K-Pg) impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. Burbery suggests treating the Prince of Darkness as an oblong, asteroid-sized body, reminiscent of the interstellar object Oumuamua, whose arrival followed the harrowing logic of a global extinction event….

(14) BLADES RUNNER. “Hacker Takes Over Robot Lawnmower, Runs Over Innocent Man” – Futurism explains how it could have been worse!

Is building autonomous robots equipped with sharp oscillating blades that roam your front yard a good idea? What about connecting them to the internet?

We’ll tell you what’s definitely a bad idea: leaving these machines painfully vulnerable to hackers.

Just ask reporter Sean Hollister for The Verge, who suddenly found himself on the, uh, verge of experiencing a grisly incident after someone took control of his Yarbo robot lawn mower.

“I’m lying in the dirt. It’s coming for me. Then, with a lurch, it’s climbing up my chest,” Hollister wrote in a riveting new piece for the outlet. “If Andreas Makris doesn’t stop the 200-pound robot lawn mower in time, it could drag its blades across my body.”

Hollister, fortunately, wasn’t harmed in the making of this article. Makris, a white hat hacker nearly 6,000 miles away in Germany, merely wanted to prove a point.

“I can do whatever I want with all the bots,” Makris told The Verge. “It’s completely unsecured.”

Even if someone pressed the emergency stop button, he added, a hacker like himself could send another command to turn it back on.

Alarmingly, the Yarbo robots all had the same root password, Makris found. In theory, a black hat hacker who discovered this vulnerability could seize control of an entire army of Yarbo robots, since the security flaw is present in all of them. In fact, he created a map that showed the locations of over 11,000 Yarbo robots across the world, forming a global smart lawnmower panopticon….

(15) ATTENTION NEO FANS. “NASA’s Next-Gen Near-Earth Asteroid Space Telescope Takes Shape”.

The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor — NASA’s first infrared space telescope purposely designed to discover potentially hazardous asteroids and comets — is undergoing integration and testing. With launch set for no earlier than September 2027, teams across the United States are hard at work building the spacecraft’s components, planning the kind of survey and science it will do, and developing the software to process the huge quantity of data the mission will generate.

In 2005, Congress tasked NASA with discovering potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, or NEOs, but many of these objects are difficult to find with ground-based surveys. Some are as dark as charcoal, others are tiny, and many lurk in the glare of the Sun, where ground-based optical telescopes can’t see. To mitigate this, NEO Surveyor is being custom-built to scan the solar system to detect objects that will glow in the infrared as they are heated by the Sun — as opposed to the optical light they reflect, which is what ground-based surveys measure — to provide enough advance warning for humanity to do something about them, if necessary.

The spacecraft will travel about a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet in the direction of the Sun to a region of gravitational stability called the Sun-Earth Lagrange point (or L1 point), continuously scanning large swaths of the sky for at least five years in search of NEOs that have yet to be found.

“NEO Surveyor is a one-of-a-kind mission designed to solve a specific challenge: finding asteroids and comets that pose the greatest risk to Earth,” said Jim Fanson, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Our focus is on deploying a robust observatory to the Sun-Earth L1 point, where it will conduct a continuous, multi-year infrared survey. By identifying objects that ground telescopes can miss, this mission will provide the critical data we need to safeguard our planet for years to come.”…

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

Pixel Scroll 4/17/26 Nobody Pixels Me, Everybody Scrolls Me, I’m Gonna Eat Sandworms

Posted on April 17, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) STURGEON SYMPOSIUM ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS. The J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction will hold the 5th Annual Sturgeon Symposium from October 15-16, 2026 at the University of Kansas. In addition to presenting the annual Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best science fiction short story, which will include a reading from the winner, they will host a guest speaker (TBD), while also showcasing work in SF by artists and scholars from around the world.

The even schedule and Call for Papers is here: “2026 Sturgeon Symposium CFP”. This year’s theme is: “Changing Words, Changing Worlds: SF as a Literature of Resistance.” Deadlines for submissions is June 1, 2026.

(2) ABOUT BOOKCON 2026. After a hiatus lasting a half-decade, BookCon returns to New York this year. Variety has the latest details: “BookCon 2026: Schedule, Reservations, Authors, Details From Organizer (variety.com)

ReedPop made book lovers’ dreams come true last year with the reveal that BookCon would be returning in 2026 after the beloved publishing convention was retired in 2020.

Since that June 2025 announcement, readers have been dissecting every new piece of information about the two-day show leading up to its opening day this Friday. Tickets sold out immediately when they went on sale last September and reservations for author signings and exclusive events were snapped up just as quickly when they opened last month.

Now, the eve of BookCon 2026 is upon us and the organizers are shelving and stacking to prepare for the influx of authors and readers about to descend upon the Javits Center in New York. It’s a bright new chapter for the publishing industry as a whole, which had largely accepted BookCon was gone forever after its six-year hiatus….

… One bump that’s appeared along the long road to BookCon’s return is a boycott against the convention that began earlier this year. The movement started when it came to the attention of authors and ticketholders that ReedPop’s parent company, RELX, is also the owner of subsidiary LexisNexis, which has a contract with ICE. Upon that information coming to light, some authors who had already signed up to participate decided to pull out of participation.

While ReedPop is pressing on with BookCon despite that response from some, Rogers says the convention organizer does not begrudge those who have made this choice….

… Among the many notable authors and guests who will be in attendance are Leigh Bardugo, Marie Lu, Holly Black, Veronica Roth, Casey McQuiston, Jasmine Guillory, Tracy Deon, Matt Dinniman, Emily St. John Mandel, R.F. Kuang, Scarlett St. Clair and Andy Weir. Events include everything from a panel featuring “Heated Rivalry” author Rachel Reid and the showrunner behind the popular TV series adaptation, Jacob Tierney, to an “after dark” fantasy ball event….

(3) WRITERS FOR GHOSTS. Michael Hoskins discusses a good many examples of authors whose works were posthumously completed by someone else in “What Is Dead May Never Die: Speculative Fiction Authors and Their Afterlives” at Section 244. Hoskins concludes by casting doubt on the practice.

…These are just a few of the many works in speculative fiction where an author’s demise has not prevented new works coming out under their names. The phenomenon exists outside of speculative fiction, of course; Tom Clancy, V. C. Andrews and Robert Ludlum’s names continue to appear on books they never wrote.

As the reviews I’ve cherry-picked demonstrate, the results of one author finishing another’s work seldom satisfies audiences. Indeed, many of these works have become forgotten since their publication. Bester fans are happy to have Psychoshop, but it’s in no danger of displacing the Demolished Man or the Stars My Destination in his bibliography.

As I say, it’s easy to see why fandom believes someone else should come along and finish a Song of Ice and Fire should Martin fail to do so himself. My earnest plea is: Maybe you should reconsider?

(4) MAY THE FOURTH BID WITH YOU. Heritage Auctions’ Third Annual Star Wars Day Auction on May 4 will present production artifacts, original artwork, rare photography, iconic props, dozens of signed items, and a wide assortment of toys, cards, posters, and other notable rarities.

Highlights include:

Han Solo’s DL-44 blaster, Chewbacca’s bowcaster, Rey’s staff, and a First Order Stormtrooper helmet from The Force Awakens.
An early Hero helmet from the first several episodes of The Mandalorian, along with an Action version of the Mandalorian’s distinctive blaster.
A George Lucas–signed fourth draft of The Star Wars screenplay, dating from the era when Luke Skywalker was still named “Starkiller.”
A one-of-a-kind CGC 9.6 copy of the Star Wars #1 ultra-rare 35¢ variant comic signed by Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill.

(5) ANIMATION IN TIMES TO COME. It’s either depressing or educational: Animation World Network’s “AI-Native Animation: A New Business Paradigm”.

This draft posits that artificial intelligence is not just revolutionizing the animation industry — it is replacing the underlying structures and assumptions. The traditional model — built on large teams, long timelines, and capital-intensive pipelines — is being overtaken by a system-driven approach that prioritizes speed, iteration, and direct audience connection. This is not a marginal efficiency gain. It is a redefinition of how animation is created, scaled, and monetized. The practical implication is straightforward: studios that adopt this model will begin to operate more like technology companies, while those that do not will be constrained by an increasingly obsolete system….

… The AI-native studio is structurally different from a traditional studio. It is smaller, more flexible, and organized around systems rather than departments. Key contributors are hybrid creative-technologists who can operate across disciplines and guide AI-driven workflows. The primary asset is not the content itself, but the system that produces it. This shifts hiring, team structure, and performance evaluation toward adaptability, systems thinking, and cross-functional capability….

(6) THE SOLUTION. [Item by Andrew Porter.] The sheep are too busy looking for clues to bother to Look Up… “The Sheep Detectives” – First Look Featurette.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 17, 1964 — The Twilight Zone‘s “The Jeopardy Room”

The cast of characters—a cat and a mouse, this is the latter. The intended victim who may or may not know that he is to die, be it by butchery or ballet. His name is Major Ivan Kuchenko. He has, if events go according to certain plans, perhaps three or four more hours of living. But an ignorance shared by both himself and his executioner, is of the fact that both of them have taken the first step into the Twilight Zone. — Opening narration of this episode.

On this evening sixty years ago, The Twilight Zone‘s “The Jeopardy Room” first aired on CBS. The plot is Major Ivan Kuchenko as played by Martin Landau, a KGB agent who is attempting to defect, is trapped inside a hotel room in an unnamed, politically neutral country with a bomb about to go off unless he can disarm it. I’m assuming that you’ve seen, but on the grounds that you might not have, I won’t say more. It’s a splendid bit of Cold War paranoia.

Like most of theese stories, it was written by Serling. It was directed by Richard Donner who later on would be known for The Omen, Scrooged and Superman but this was very early on in his career and he had just three years earlier released X-15, an aviation film that presented a fictionalized account of the X-15 research rocket aircraft program. Neat indeed.

It is one of only a handful of The Twilight Zone episodes that has no fantastical elements at all. It’s a classic Cold War story more befitting a Mission: Impossible set-up than this series. It even involves a message delivered by way of a tape recorder, but mind you that series is two years in the future so that has to be just a coincidence. Or The Twilight Zone being The Twilight Zone…

Like all of The Twilight Zone series, it’s streaming on Paramount+.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 17, 1959 — Sean Bean, 67.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Frank and Ernest accompany three bears to the computer store.
Loose Parts charges for verbosity.
Mother Goose and Grimm are warned by a heroic dog.
Strange Brew updates a story.
The Argyle Sweater’s word does not mean what you think it means.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is on fire.
Tom Gauld characterizes three Easter egg hunters.

(10) INSTANT RARITY. WIRED says it’s time has come: “The Star Trek Communicator Is Now a High-End Wristwatch”. But you aren’t likely to own one.

Clearly channeling none other than Captain Kirk, the high-end Swiss brand has turned Star Trek’s iconic Communicator into a full-on luxury wristwatch—and we’re very much here for it. Fans of the ’60s sci-fi series will be delighted to recognize the characteristic cover and perforated grille, which, oh yes, flips up to reveal the watch workings underneath. However, despite the light-hearted design cues, those workings very much lean into serious horology….

… The stellar irony here is that in the Star Trek universe, the United Federation of Planets is a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society where money is obsolete and its enlightened citizens work instead for self-improvement and the betterment of humanity. Hautlence didn’t get this memo, as each Retrovision ’64 will retail for an out-of-this-world $165,000. Only three ardent Trekkies will be able to get one, though, as that’s all that will be made….

(11) FLYING BRICKS. “Lego’s Big New ‘Star Wars’ Set Comes Just in Time for ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ to Replace It” snarks Gizmodo.

This morning Lego lifted the lid on its latest addition to the Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series line: a 1,809-piece replica of the stripped-back N-1 Starfighter piloted by Din Djarin in The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian season three….

…It’s a fantastic model and definitely has us dying for Lego to do it over as a classic, yellow-hued Naboo fighter at some point, but it’s hard to deny it’s a little unfortunately timed, considering that we know that just a few short weeks after this set hits shelves, The Mandalorian and Grogu will officially replace it as Din’s primary ride just to give him a new Razor Crest (which, ironically, now has a quite Naboo-esque yellow set of accent markings!). At least the Lego model could never be replaced in our hearts….

(12) TRAILER PARK. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu Final Trailer. In theaters May 22.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/1/26 A Scroll Well Pixelated To Keep You In Suspense

Posted on April 1, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) ARTEMIS II LAUNCHES. The Artemis II mission took off from Kennedy Space Center this evening. NASA is doing “LIVE: Artemis II Launch Day Updates” at the link.

6:35 p.m.

NASA’s Artemis II SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, with the Orion spacecraft atop carrying NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39B in Florida at 6:35 p.m. EDT to begin its journey to deep space.

The twin solid rocket boosters ignited first, delivering more than 75% of the thrust needed to lift the 5.75-million-pound rocket off the pad. Their combined power, along with the four RS-25 engines already at full thrust, generated an incredible 8.8 million pounds of force at liftoff. As the rocket rose, the umbilicals – which provided power, fuel, and data connections during prelaunch – disconnected and retracted into protective housings. This ensured the vehicle is free from ground systems and fully autonomous for flight.

The approximately 10-day Artemis II mission around the Moon is the first crewed flight under NASA’s Artemis campaign. It will help test the systems and hardware needed to continue sending astronauts on increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to continue building toward the first crewed missions to Mars.

(2) SHATNER COMMENTS ON LAUNCH. “NASA Launches Manned Artemis Mission Around The Moon” in Deadline.

NASA launched a mega rocket headed to a swing around the moon on Wednesday, marking a return human journey beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time in more than a half century.

“The crew of Artemis II now bound for the moon. Humanity’s next great voyage begins,” NASA launch commentator Derrol Nail said on the space agency’s livestream.

Broadcast and cable networks carried the launch, but in contrast to the Apollo launches of the 1960s and 70s, the liftoff didn’t get the same level of attention as those historic journeys. The launch was among a number of stories that dominated cable news headlines through the day, including the Supreme Court arguments on birthright citizenship and previews of Donald Trump’s planned primetime address on Iran later on Wednesday evening….

…Four astronauts are onboard, including Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover and Mission Specialist Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen. The 10-day mission will essentially be a flyby of the moon, with plans to land on the surface some time in 2028.

The coverage of the launch was a bit of a waiting game, with a hold resolved before the final 10-minute countdown.

On CNN, Miles O’Brien, a veteran of NASA coverage, provided commentary. After the launch, William Shatner, 95, shared his thoughts about “the fear that must be mixed with the sense of victory, with those people incarcerated in that ship.”

“With all their practice, with all their ingenuity, with all their technology, the fear of what could possibly happen must be lurking somewhere, and it certainly was in my brain,” Shatner said. In 2021, he was part of Jeff Bezos’ privately funded Blue Origin space shot….

(3) ANSIBLE. A new month, a new issue– Ansible® 465, April 2026 – and that’s no foolin’!

(4) SFWA’S SOLSTICE AWARD. And congratulations to the editor of Ansible, and editor (with John Clute) of SFE: SF Encyclopedia, who yesterday was honored by SFWA: “SFWA’s 2026 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award Goes to David Langford”.

SFWA President Kate Ristau notes, “With his work on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Langford has not only built, supported, and challenged the field of SFF; he has literally helped to define it. His decades of work have made science fiction a richer and more inclusive field. We are more than happy to present him with the Solstice Award in recognition of his career filled with positive, focused, and uplifting contributions.”

(5) DUNGEON MASTER. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Here is my analysis of the new trailer for the Masters of the Universe live action movie: “Cora’s Thoughts on the New Masters of the Universe Trailer”. (No action figure photos recreating scenes from the trailer this time around, because I didn’t have the time to take any.)

… The trailer starts off a heavy door opening. Adam, looking pretty roughed up, is dragged by two of Skeletor’s goons – I think they’re called Skele-Knights – and thrown into a cell. The cell door then slams shut. It’s not clear whether this is the dungeon of Snake Mountain or the dungeon of Castle Grayskull or the dungeon Eternos Palace. Not that it matters much.

What does matter is that Adam isn’t alone in the dungeon. Duncan and Teela are there as well and immediately tend to the injured Adam. There’s also a bunch of other people in the dungeon. Some of them are familiar characters – we can clearly see Fisto, Ram-Man and Mekaneck as well as a young woman we’ve also spotted in the first trailer and who has since been identified as Dian, a fairly obscure character from the newspaper comic strips of the 1980s, where she’s an officer in the Royal Guard and friend of Teela’s. It’s good to see other female Eternian soldiers and it’s alway good to see Teela having some female friends, though it’s interesting that they went with the very obscure Dian rather than the better known characters Andra or Ileena who coud play a similar role. Perhaps there were rights issues with using Andra or Ileena.

The other people in the dungeon seem to be random Eternian civilians, quite possibly the Eternian resistance. He-Mania.com wonders whether an older black man in the background might be Dekker, Duncan’s old mentor and predecessor as Man-at-Arms. A screenshot of Mekaneck at He-Mania.com also shows a boy of maybe twelve standing next to Mekaneck. So did the movie remember that Mekaneck had a son in the Filmation cartoon?

At any rate, the trailer starts with all the heroes captured and locked up in a dungeon….

(6) CORA’S PHOTOS. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] But if you want photos, there are a lot of photos in this post where I share my Easter decorations, which are partly action figure based: “Easter Decorations 2026 and Springtime Photos”.

The guardian bunnies. If you want to get the Easter branches, you have to go past them first.

(7) END OF PARADISE. [Item by N.] Sterling K. Brown, star of Hulu’s Paradise, speaks on the show’s upcoming third season, which will be its last (article contains spoilers for season two): “Paradise Season 2 Finale: Sterling K. Brown Says Answers Come Season 3” in The Hollywood Reporter.

…Sterling K. Brown wants to assure you that Paradise is going to make good on its promise. “Everyone will get their answers by the time season three is done,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter after the season two finale.

The actor who stars as Xavier Collins — the former secret service agent to the president who is now the Hulu hit show’s version of a superhero — is able to make that promise because he’s also an executive producer….

This comes of the heels of what showrunner/creator Dan Fogelman and executive producer John Hoberg have said in a previous article, also from The Hollywood Reporter: “’Paradise’ Season 2 Premiere Raises Questions That Will Get Answered”.

… “This season is about: Do you believe that things happen for a reason, or is it chance? It’s a big, emotional question. It’s almost a religious question; a philosophical question. What do you believe?” executive producer and writer John Hoberg tells The Hollywood Reporter about the newly released second season of Paradise….

(8) APRIL FOOLISHNESS. Between AI, fake news, and every other misleading make-you-look post in social media, interest in April Fools stunts has waned in the past decade. But the Guardian still thinks these are clever: “Pot Noodle pizza to Doctor Who Darlic bread: this year’s best April fools”.

…A major theme in recent years of April fool jokes by brands has been the announcement of unlikely collaborations – especially in the food space. This year, Heinz and PerfectTed are claiming they are getting together to produce matcha-flavoured mayonnaise. A prank that hits a sweeter spot is the promise from the dessert manufacturer Gü that it is partnering with Dr Will’s sriracha hot sauce to produce a sriracha chocolate melting-middle pudding, which it says “takes the spicy sweetness trend to the next level”.

Pizza is a good topic for a joke. The pineapple producer Dole has announced the absolutely disgusting-sounding concept of the Hawaiian pizza in a can, and the restaurant chain Zizzi says it is offering pizza with a candyfloss topping.

Domino’s has suggested a new pizza will be available – the Pot Noodle stuffed crust – with a commenter on its Facebook page noting: “The joke is on them because that would actually be a best seller.” And what better to complement your pizza meal than Iceland’s new Doctor Who-themed Darlic bread?…

Meanwhile, The Onion’s April 1 post “Report: Decision Not To Call Film ‘The Baby Yoda Movie’ To Cost Disney $900 Million” is awfully hard to disbelieve.

Citing nearly a billion dollars of pent-up consumer demand for entertainment featuring an infant version of an already beloved character, a new report released Wednesday by Gower Street Analytics concluded that Disney’s decision not to call its upcoming Star Wars film The Baby Yoda Movie would cost the studio roughly $900 million. “By naming the film The Mandalorian And Grogu, Disney is leaving money on the table from consumers who have no idea who Grogu is but would immediately take out their phones and buy a ticket for any movie of any genre with ‘Baby Yoda’ in its title,” said report author Heather Flynn, who cited a poll in which 81% of potential moviegoers responded “Who the hell are they? Is this a Lord Of The Rings thing?” when presented with marketing materials for the upcoming film….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series (1967)

Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series has a fascinating Hugo history.

She won a Hugo the first time she was nominated, for the novella “Weyr Search” at Baycon (tied with Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage”.) It was published in Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact, October 1967. It’s in A Dragon-Lover’s Treasury of the Fantastic anthology which was edited by Margaret Weis, available from the usual suspects at a very reasonable price.

It would be the only win for the Dragonriders of Pern series but by far is not the only nomination for the series.

Next up would be the “Dragonrider” novella which was nominated one year later at St. Louiscon. Three years later, her Dragonquest novel would get a nod at the first L.A. Con showing that Con had impeccable taste. And at Seacon ‘79, The White Dragon was nominated. (I really love that novel.) The next L.A. Con would see another novel be nominated, Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern. (I’ve never heard of that one.) And the final nomination, also for a novel, was at MagiCon, for All the Weyrs of Pern.

The series did win a number of other awards including a Nebula for Dragonrider, a Ditmar and Gandalf for The White Dragon, a Balrog for Dragondrums and The Science Fiction Book Club’s Book of the Year Award for The Renegades of Pern. It is, after all, an expansive series.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Eek! complains about breakfast.
Savage Chickens drops an A-Team reference.
Speed Bump feels your pain.
The Argyle Sweater shares the bill.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal shows why today’s barbarians find looting unprofitable.
xkcd may now have more modes than the Creator.

(11) PENRIC COVER. Lois McMaster Bujold shared a “Darksight Dare e-cover sneak peek” on her Goodreads blog.

Artist Ron Miller and I got started on this several weeks ago, so the final version has arrived at about the same time as my final revisions pass, ongoing this week….

I also bagged the vendor-page copy:

“Penric takes a chance…

“Two intractable problems are brought to the door of sorcerer Learned Penric of Vilnoc and his Temple demon Desdemona. Cinar Camurat, a mutilated Cedonian cavalry captain, has traveled two thousand sea miles to Penric for aid. Iva of Bita, a secret hedge sorceress, lies dying in her Orban hill village, and wants no aid at all.

“Penric and Desdemona know well the hazards of medicine and magic, but their greatest puzzle may lodge in the tangle of hopes and fears in human and demonic hearts.”

I’m finding it increasingly interesting, though not easy, to explore stories and story structures that are not villain-driven with their too-often-facile action and boss-fight climaxes. I mean, I find bashing a well-drawn villain as cathartic as the next fangrrl, but surely there are more possibilities…

(12) STORY STRUCTURE. Henry Lien recently called fans’ attention to his appearance on Love Letters to the Future for “Unpacking Eastern Storytelling and the Four Act Structure with Henry Lien”.

In this episode of Love Letters to the Future, hosts PJ Manney and Laura Faye Tenenbaum engage with author Henry Lien to explore the nuances of storytelling, particularly focusing on Eastern storytelling structures like Kishotenketsu. They discuss the importance of stories in culture, the role of community, and how different narrative structures can evoke empathy and understanding. The conversation delves into the constraints of storytelling and how they can foster creativity, as well as the impact of cultural differences on narrative forms. Through examples and personal anecdotes, the episode highlights the transformative power of stories in shaping our perceptions and experiences.

(13) APRIL SHOWERS BRING GAME HOURS. [Item by N.] The A.V. Club looks forward to an April stacked with sci-fi video games: “April games preview: Saros leads a packed month for sci-fi action”.

[Dosa Divas Announcement Trailer] … Thanks to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a lot more people seem to be paying attention to how there have been heaps of great turn-based RPGs with active timing elements in recent years. Dosa Divas, the next from Outerloop Games (Thirsty Suitors, Falcon Age), has the potential to fit this trend, but with its own spice. The story centers on Samara and Amani, two sisters finally reconnecting after years of estrangement as they go on a road trip (in a mech suit) to visit their parents. To make matters complicated, they end up taking on a fast-food empire along the way. One that’s run by their sister, no less. Thankfully, this journey involves a lot of beating up dirtbag corpos, which is easy to relish thanks to a smart turn-based system that emphasizes hitting enemies’ culinary weaknesses. Between its personal story of familial reconnection and its many opportunities to mess up capitalist jerks, Dosa Divas could be cooking up something special. [Elijah Gonzalez]…

(14) VIDEOS OF THE DAY. Animation World Network invites everyone to “Watch Clips from ‘Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord’ Animated Series”.

Lucasfilm Animation has just released two clips from it all-new animated series Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord, which will premiere exclusively on Disney+ on April 6, 2026.

Two episodes of the series will debut each week on the streaming platform, with the final two installments scheduled to air on May 4, otherwise known as “Star Wars Day,” when we all get to proclaim, “May the 4^th Be With You!”

Set after the events of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the story follows Maul as he attempts to rebuild his criminal syndicate on a planet untouched by the Empire. During his efforts, he encounters a disillusioned young Jedi Padawan who could become the apprentice he seeks in his pursuit of revenge.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/1/26 Assault On Mt TBR Now Proceeding To Camp 1

Posted on February 1, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) KNOT A TOY. ScreenRant is delighted with this short film: “Disney’s Surprise Mandalorian Film Is A Reminder Of What Made The Show So Good”.

On January 28, 2026, Disney released the short film The Mandalorian: Knot a Toy, and though it doesn’t tell a new, never-before-seen story between Din Djarin and Grogu, it’s worth watching. Running at almost two minutes, Knot a Toy is a unique recreation of a scene from The Mandalorian, in which Grogu explores the Razor Crest and finds his new favorite toy.

What makes Knot a Toy special is that it’s animated, with Din Djarin, Grogu, the ship, and everything made as crochet toys. It’s a creative short film in terms of its animation style, and Disney chose one of the most endearing and memorable scenes from The Mandalorian to be recreated as crochet toys….

(2) LOCUS RECOMMENDED READING LIST. The 2025 Locus Recommended Reading List was posted today at Locus Online. It includes a newly added category for Translated Novels.

And Locus’ 2025 Poll & Survey is now accepting votes from all to decide the winners of the Locus Awards. The poll closes April 15. The Locus Awards will be presented on May 30 during the Bay Area Book Festival.

(3) AUREALIS AWARDS. See the 2025 Aurealis Awards Shortlists at the link.

(4) BOMBS AWAY. The Heinlein Society put up a post on Facebook detailing Robert Heinlein’s construction of a fallout shelter behind his Colorado Springs home in the early Sixties. The story has an ironic ending:

… Now for the rest of the story. In 1963, NORAD command center operations moved from Ent Air Force Base to the partially underground “Combined Operations Center” for Aerospace Defense Command and NORAD, making the Cheyenne Mountain Complex a primary target of a Russian nuclear strike. The complex was only a few miles from Heinlein’s house at 1776 Mesa Ave in Colorado Springs, basically making all the work done on the shelter pointless. This must have been on Heinlein’s mind when he wrote Farnham’s Freehold in 1964….

(5) THE THINGS YOU LEARN FROM FANZINES. Lofgeornost is the title of Fred Learner’s quarterly fanzine. In the latest issue he reminded people where he got it from.

“Lofgeornost” is the final word of Beowulf, a poem that I studies in college. It means ‘most desirous of renown’, which I reckon is a common aim in fanzine production.

I’ve learned to judge Beowulf translations by the way the translator renders this final word. Anyone who translates it as “most deserving of praise” misses the point that the author of the poem took 3182 lines to make. Like pietas in Latin or sisu in Finnish, it’s a term that can’t be rendered in English as a single word; but it embodies the essence of its culture.

(6) FILE 770’S BEST ARTICLES OF 2025. Our annual compilation — “Never Mind the News – File 770’s Best Feature Articles of 2025” – posted today!

(7) CLARKESWORLD 2025 READER’S POLL. The Clarkesworld 2025 Reader’s Poll finalists were unveiled by Neil Clarke today.

The public is invited to pick the winners. Go here to complete the Clarkesworld 2025 Poll. Voting will close on February 15 at 11:00 p.m. Eastern and the winners will be announced in the March issue.

(8) X. J. KENNEDY (1929-2026). Rich Horton’s tribute to the late “X. J. Kennedy (1929-2026)” notes that although “best known for his (very good) poetry, he was also a fan and writer of SF and Fantasy.” Kennedy died February 1. Full details at the link.

The New York Times obituary is behind a paywall here: “X.J. Kennedy, a Poet of Wit Who Clung to Rhyme and Meter, Dies at 96”.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 1, 1954 — Bill Mumy, 72.

Bill Mumy is best remembered, I think, of course for being on Lost in Space for three seasons (“Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!”) though he has a much more extensive performance resume.

At the rather tender age of seven, he made his genre acting debut on The Twilight Zone as Billy Bayles in “Long Distance Call”. He’d appear in two more Twilight Zone episodes, “It’s A Good Life” as Anthony Fremont, a child with godlike powers, and finally as the young Pip Phillips in “In Praise of Pip”.

He’d show up much later on in Twilight Zone: The Movie in one of the segments, not unsurprisingly a remake of “It’s A Good Life” which here is listed as being from a screenplay by Richard Matheson. He’s Tim. Whoever that is.

He’d be on the reboot of the Twilight Zone in “It’s Still A Good Life” as the adult Anthony Fremont.

He next had three appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, none genre. His next genre outing would be playing two different characters on Bewitched. I Dream of Jeannie and the Munsters followed.

Then came the eighty-three episode, three season run on Lost in Space. He’d be eleven years old when it started. I know I’ve seen all of it at least once. No idea how the Suck Fairy would treat it nearly this long on, but I really liked it when I saw it at the time.

Remember the 1990 Captain America? If you don’t, you’re not alone. In this WW II version, he plays a young boy, Tom Kimball, who photographs Captain America over the Capitol building kicking a missile off after batting Red Skull so it crashes in Alaska, burying itself and Steve Rogers under the ice. 12%, repeat 12%, is the rating audience reviewers gave it on Rotten Tomatoes.

He showed up once in the first iteration of a Flash series, and then has three appearances as Tommy Puck in the Nineties Superboy series. The first I saw and quite like, the latter not a single episode have I encountered.

The next thing that is quite worthy of note is his stellar role on Babylon 5 as Mimbari warrior monk, I think that’s the proper term, Lennier. Of one hundred and ten episodes, he was in all but two. That’s right, he missed just two. Or at he’s least credited as being so. What an amazing role that was. I’ve watched this series including the six films at least twice straight through.

The last thing of note, and I’ve not seen the series, was him playing Dr. Zachary Smith on the reboot of the Lost in Space series that came out just a few years ago for two episodes.

Photo from Twilight Zone’s “Long Distance Call” an episode considered one of their darkest, if not their darkest, about the ghost of a grandmother who spends the entire story trying to get her grandson as played by Mumy to commit suicide so he can join her in the afterlife.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro finds overlooked heroes.
Breaking Cat News makes a prediction.
Herb and Jamaal quotes Octavia Butler.
The Argyle Sweater runs into a hairy situation (how many can you name?)

(11) OB SF REFERENCE. Gizmodo says,“Colin Farrell’s Detective Show ‘Sugar’ Will Finally Have to Address that Wild Twist This Summer”.

Sugar is coming back to puzzle through a new mystery this summer—and with it the reminder of why Sugar, an Apple TV series starring Colin Farrell as a neo-noir gumshoe type, is being covered on a website that focuses on sci-fi and fantasy. Season one’s sixth episode, “Go Home,” let viewers in on a big secret: Farrell’s character, the very human-looking John Sugar, is actually… an alien in disguise.

With that reveal out of the way, Sugar also let viewers know that certain other characters were also extraterrestrials—including one who got mixed up in some very bad business, most certainly knows valuable details about Sugar’s missing sister, and was in the wind at the end of the season. So instead of taking “the last ride home,” as he’d originally intended, Sugar decided there’s enough on Earth to make him stick around….

(12) PROPOSED SOLAR POWER SATELLITE NETWORK. “Elon Musk’s SpaceX applies to launch 1m satellites into orbit” reports BBC. (Subscription required outside UK.)

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has applied to launch one million satellites into Earth’s orbit to power artificial intelligence (AI).

The application claims “orbital data centres” are the most cost and energy-efficient way to meet the growing demand for AI computing power.

Traditionally, such centres are large warehouses full of powerful computers which process and store data. Musk’s aerospace firm claims processing needs due to the expanding use of AI are already outpacing “terrestrial capabilities”.

It would increase the number of SpaceX satellites in orbit drastically. Its existing Starlink network of nearly 10,000 satellites has already been accused of creating congestion in space, which Musk denies.

The new network could comprise up to one million solar-powered satellites, according to the application filed on Friday with the Federal Communications Commission – which does not specify a timeline for the plan.
SpaceX claims the system would deliver the computer capacity required to serve “billions of users globally”.

It also says it would be the first step towards “becoming a Kardashev II-level civilisation – one that can harness the Sun’s full power”, referencing a scale of hypothetical alien societies proposed by an astronomer in the 1960s.

Musk wrote on his social media site X: “The satellites will actually be so far apart that it will be hard to see from one to another. Space is so vast as to be beyond comprehension.”
Like the Starlink satellites, which provide high-speed internet, they would operate in low-Earth orbit at altitudes from 500-2,000km (310-1,242 miles).

SpaceX claims “orbital data centres” – a concept also being explored by other firms – would be a greener alternative to traditional centres, which require enormous amounts of power and water for cooling.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Building a Functional LEGO Typewriter”.

Lego once released a typewriter set but it only mimicked the functions of a typewriter, since then I have always wondered if you could build a working typewriter only using LEGO bricks so today I’m trying to do just that.

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

Pixel Scroll 9/22/25 Pixel, The Night Scroller

Posted on September 22, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) TAKEI TO CHAIR BANNED BOOKS WEEK. AP News reports “George Takei named honorary chair of Banned Books Week”.

Actor-activist George Takei’s next project is on behalf of a longtime passion — the right to read.

The American Library Association announced Monday that the 88-year-old Takei will serve as honorary chair of Banned Books Week, which takes place Oct. 5-11. Libraries and bookstores around the country will highlights books that have been censored, from Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer” to Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”

“I remember all too well the lack of access to books and media that I needed growing up. First as a child in a barbed-wire prison camp, then as a gay young man in the closet, I felt confused and hungry for understanding about myself and the world around me,” said the “Star Trek” actor, who spent part of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp during World War II.

“Please stand with me in opposing censorship, so that we all can find ourselves — and each other — in books.”…

… Takei will share leadership with honorary youth chair Iris Mogul, a first-year student at the University of California, Santa Cruz who has been active for years in anti-banning campaigns….

The Banned Books Week website is at the link.

(2) DISNEY DOES 180 ON KIMMEL SUSPENSION. Deadline reports “Kimmel Is Returning To ABC” – on Tuesday.

Jimmy Kimmel is coming back to the airwaves.

ABC just revealed that Jimmy Kimmel Live! is returning on Tuesday night after “thoughtful conversations” with parent company Disney.

A Disney spokesman said: “Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.” …

How was that decision reached? Few details have been reported. According to Deadline, “Jimmy Kimmel & Disney Talks Over Return Went Down To The Wire Monday”.

Tuesday’s return of Jimmy Kimmel to late-night TV was the result of days of meetings and negotiations with top Disney executives that only came to a resolution Monday morning.

“There was always a desire to do the best thing for the company,” an insider told Deadline of the direct talks and “thoughtful conversations” between Disney CEO Bob Iger, Disney Entertainment chief Dana Walden and Kimmel and his team. To that, the final sign-off on Kimmel’s return to his long-running Jimmy Kimmel Live! was made this morning by Iger and Walden after a last-minute flurry of paperwork, texts and calls with Team Jimmy, I’m told….

…“Jimmy will say what Jimmy wants to say,” a source says regarding what restrictions, if any, were placed on the past Oscar host as a condition of his return….

…No word yet either on what affiliate owners Sinclair and Nexstar — who both independently yanked Kimmel off their ABC stations over his “ill-timed and thus insensitive,” as Disney called them today, remarks — will do and if they will show Live! or not this week. In a rare move, Trump did not address Kimmel’s return while talking in front of the press this afternoon about autism causes and cures — though the ex-Apprentice host will undoubtedly toss something up on social media eventually….

(3) BRITISH AUDIO AWARDS SHORTLIST. The inaugural shortlist of the British Audio Awards includes this genre category. (Some of the other categories also have a nominee of genre interest.) Nicknamed “The Speakies”, the awards will be presented on November 24.

Audiobook: Science Fiction and Fantasy

Bee Speaker by Adrian Tchaikovsky, narrated by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Rod Hallett & Gabrielle Nellis-Pain (Head of Zeus)
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by VE Schwab, narrated by Marisa Calin, Katie Leung & Julia Whelan (Pan Macmillan)
Count Zero by William Gibson, narrated by Alix Wilton Regan, Kyle Soller & Sebastián Capitán Viveros (WF Howes)
Doctor Who: Agent of the Daleks by Steve Lyons, narrated by Maureen O’Brien, Nicholas Briggs (BBC Studios)
Queen B by Juno Dawson, narrated by Nicola Coughlan (HarperCollins)
The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan, narrated by Rosamund Pike (Macmillan Audio)

(4) MAKE YOU OWN VURGUZZ! [Item by Cora Buhlert.] Regarding the mysterious Vurguzz, my cousin Tim a.k.a. Star Smutje is a professional chef and runs a fannish cooking channel on YouTube.He mostly makes Star Trek and Star Wars inspired recipes, but he actually does have a recipe for homemade Vurguzz on his channel. The video is in German, but the preparation is pretty self-evident..

The ingredients are:

8 cl Overproof Rum (white rum, brown rum will ruin the look)

4 cl green Absinthe (you can also use Pernod or Pastis, if you can’t find absinthe)

4 cl Creme de Menthe or other peppermint liqueur

2 cl Kiwi Syrup

Juice of one Lime

This is definitely not the original recipe from 1960, since absinthe was banned in West Germany until the 1990s and kiwis were unknown until the 1980s.But it should produce something that’s tasty and packs a punch. I might actually give it a go, since I have most of the ingredients at home. I only need to get peppermint liqueur and since I quite like it, it’s not a waste of money,

(5) READ BUHLERT’S NEW STORY. And congratulations to Cora, whose story, “Queen Of The Communist Cannibals” has been published by Cliffhanger Magazine, a new online magazine focused on adventure fiction. Here is L.D. Whitney’s introduction to her story:

…What we now refer to as Men’s Adventure magazines grew in popularity with the publication simply titled “True” when it shifted focus to war stories during and post WWII. Other Pulp Magazines, like “Argosy” and “Adventure” would later follow suit by including more “true” stories within their contents. Many of the covers featured men locked in brutal combat with wild animals or shapely women in distress. Accompanying these were eye-catching titles such as “Weasles Ripped my Flesh”, “Escape from the Red Congo Bloodbath”, and “Nude Girl Fortress on Samar Island.” The title of the following story is taken directly from the Table of Contents of one of these publications.

Author Cora Buhlert has crafted here an earnest homage to the Men’s Adventure magazine while simultaneously nodding to the outlandish nature of their tales via clever framing and humor. In this way, Buhlert channels the classic Pulp author Theodore Roscoe and his Legionaire tales of Thibaut Corday, an aged soldier of fortune spinning tall tales from his days in the service….

(6) ON THE ROAD. A new Traveling Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Festival, involving eight nights of panel discussions in eight cities in the Northeast, is happening between Monday, October 13 and Friday, October 21.

The Festival, comprising two week-long tours, will feature a core group of authors traveling together, to be joined in some places by other authors in the region.

The cities are:

Mon, October 13 – New York, NY (PT Knitwear)
Wed, October 15 – Baltimore, MD (Greedy Reads)
Thurs, October 16 – Washington, DC (East City Bookshop)
Fri, October 17 – Philadelphia, PA (Mavey Books)
Tues, October 21 – New Haven, CT (Possible Futures)
Wed, October 22 – Northampton, MA (Smith College)
Thurs, October 23 – Norwich, VT (Norwich Bookstore)
Fri, October 24 – Boston, MA (Brookline Booksmith)

Most of the authors are celebrating the release of new books. The participating panelists are: Elaine Cho, J.R. Dawson, Emily Jane, Micaiah Johnson, Yume Kitasei, Matthew Kressel, Ray Nayler, Sarah Pinsker, Veronica Roth, Mia Tsai, Julia Vee, and Fran Wilde. Two events will have guest moderators, author Allegra Hyde and booktoker Amanda Peterson.

Yume Kitasei organized the festival as an alternative to the typical partner-style format more typical of book tour events. Instead, authors will have panel discussions exploring a wide-ranging topics related to the genre such as “The Power of ‘What If?,’” “Culture and Science Fiction and Fantasy,” “Worldbuilding and the Real World,” and how the genre is evolving. There will be an opportunity for audience Q&A, and attendees will be able to purchase the authors’ most recent books for autographing following the event.

Additional details are available at: The Traveling SFF Book Festival 2025. The festival is aimed at both genre fans and readers new to the genre.

(7) THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU. The next Star Wars film, featuring the clan of two, opens in theaters May 22, 2026.

(8) WALLY WOOD, CENSORED. The Bristol Board features the complete 7-page layout of Wally Wood’s “You, Rocket” published in Incredible Science Fiction #31 by EC in 1955. Art at the link.

“The original plan was to have the brain of an intelligent baby be used to guide the rocket, which explains why in the last panel of the story, the brain cries out for its ‘Mama’. But this was censored and rejected by the Comics Code Authority. An unpublished page from the original concept was published in the EC Archives: Incredible Science Fiction collection by Dark Horse Comics.”

(9) MAD MAX MIGHT HAVE A FUTURE. The Wasteland is George Miller’s possibly final Mad Max Project. YouTube’s Mad Max Bible claims to have been informed it is currently being turned into an episodic series. “’Mad Max’ May Get One Last Ride As a TV Show” – Gizmodo boosted the signal.

After five movies, the Mad Max franchise may take a trip to the glorious land of television.

A new video from Mad Max Bible alleges an HBO Max show will be the final franchise project for creator George Miller, and may in fact be the long-awaited third of his desired trilogy: The Wasteland, set a year before 2015’s Fury Road. Miller has been open about wanting to tell Max and Furiosa’s stories across three films, with the final one once again putting Tom Hardy in the role as brooding post-apocalyptic hero. Things seemed to hinge on the success of Furiosa back in 2024, and once it turned out a box-office disappointment, it seemed like it wouldn’t happen…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

September 22, 1971 — Elizabeth Bear, 54.

By Paul Weimer: I knew Elizabeth Bear before she broke big in genre. That’s not a boast, per se, that’s an observation that she was part of the small and intense community of people who were involved in the fandom of the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, based on the work of Roger Zelazny. Bear attended many of the same small cons as I did revolving around the game. (Other authors in the “Secret Amber Cabal” (as named by Scott Lynch) include people like Genevieve Cogman, Jane Lindskold, and I guess, myself.)

But back to Bear. Her ambitions and efforts to be a writer were something I was both aware and interested in, from the very beginnings of her career. I loved her novel trilogy debut that started with Hammered. I was delighted and not surprised when her Whiskey and Water series eventually brought a Marlowe as a character on the screen. Her ability to write fantasy and science fiction in equal measure has always enchanted me. The Eternal Sky fantasy novel series. Carnival, which was once the “if you must read one Bear novel, read this one) book (nowadays, that might be Machine or Ancestral Night).

Bear’s novels are accompanied by a strong short fiction oeuvre as well, although I think she works better for me as a writer at the longer lengths. Although I admit her Hugo awards (one for short story and one for novelette) might make me less than completely accurate in that regard. But I think the longer lengths, especially in hitting the marks in completing series (such as recently, the Origin of Storms, which completed the Lotus Kingdoms books VERY fantastically) proves that she works the long form best.

Bear is also one of the leaders of one of my local cons, 4th Street Fantasy, and so helps foster the genre conversation for her fellow readers, writers and fans.

And she is a very good friend. Happy birthday Bear!

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal illustrates the problem with realistic costumes.
Dinosaur Comics keeps adding impossible predicaments.
Reality Check has a message.
The Argyle Sweater asks a tech question.

(12) IF YOU’RE A FAN OF THAT SORT OF THING. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Palantir Technologies, Inc: The ultimate lifestyle brand for those who maybe took the wrong lessons from the Palantíri in LotR. “Palantir Wants to Be a Lifestyle Brand” says WIRED.

PS: Their merch store is just a landing page right now, but is supposed to be re-launching Thursday evening. So you’ll just have to be a little patient before you can buy your $55 PLTR baseball cap.

PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES, WHICH moved from Silicon Valley to Denver in 2020, sells software that immigration authorities use to identify and arrest people, militaries use to organize drone strikes, and corporations use to manage their supply chains. Now, it also sells tote bags.

Last year, Palantir relaunched an online merchandise store, and its website was recently redesigned with a swanky interface and new payment system. A mock terminal in the lower left corner displays “code” documenting each item you view. A page titled “Core Capsule” displays an assortment of sold out items, like athletic shorts with text reading “PLTR—TECH” running down the right butt cheek, which sold for $99. It also shows a puffy “ergonomic” nylon tote bag that was priced at $119, and a Palantir baseball cap that ran for $55. The site is relaunching on Thursday evening with a new merch drop….

(13) FOR THOSE OF US WHO COOK. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Don’t throw away your red onion peels. “A New Solar Panel Shield Made From Onion Peels Outlasted Industry Plastics in Tests” says ZME Science.

In a lab in Turku, Finland, scientists have found a surprising ally in the fight for sustainable solar energy: the papery red skin of an onion.

Researchers from the University of Turku, in collaboration with Aalto University and Wageningen University, have developed a bio-based UV protection film for solar cells that not only blocks nearly all harmful ultraviolet light but also outperforms commercial plastic films. The key ingredient is a water extract made from red onion skins.

“Nanocellulose films treated with red onion dye are a promising option in applications where the protective material should be bio-based,” said Rustem Nizamov, a doctoral researcher at the University of Turku….

(14) LOOK, UP IN THE SKY! [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] It’s a plane, it’s rocket, no, it’s a supernova (fortunately, 10k ly away). “Doomed ‘cannibal’ star could soon explode in a supernova so bright it would be visible during the day” predicts Space.com.

Astronomers have discovered the secret of a strange star system that has baffled them for years, finding it contains a dead star about to erupt after overfeeding on a stellar companion. The supernova explosion of this cosmic cannibal could be as bright as the moon, making it visible with the naked eye over Earth even in broad daylight.

The system in question is the double star V Sagittae located around 10,000 light-years from Earth, containing a white dwarf stellar remnant and its victim companion star, which orbit each other roughly twice every Earth day. The new research and the revelation of this white dwarf’s imminent catastrophic fate answer questions about V Sagittae that have lingered for 123 years!…

(15) KING’S BIRTHDAY. From the September 21 aired episode of Jeopardy! — the Stephen King Category.

There are some things it doesn’t pay to be curious about … but this category isn’t one of them. Try your hand at some Stephen King clues in honor of his birthday!

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

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