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 4/12/26 “Open The Cat Flap, HAL”

Posted on April 12, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) YOU CAN CHECK IN ANY TIME YOU LIKE. Brian Keene sends greetings from “Hotel Hell” in Letters From the Labyrinth 466.

…Greetings from The Verve, a hotel on the outskirts of Boston that is part of The Tapestry Collection by Hilton. The hotel’s full, official name is The Verve Hotel Boston Natick Tapestry Collection by Hilton which is an unwieldy mouthful of mish-mash, but oddly suitable for lodging that feels like it was designed by a bunch of TikTok influencers using AI while micro-dosing on some new hallucinogenic drug nobody over the age of 25 has ever heard of.

It is 4am on Saturday morning as I write this, and I am unhappy because there is no coffee to be found in the hotel, except for the coffeemaker in my room, which I dare not use because the latest TikTok lifehack trend involves young people putting their dirty underwear inside their hotel room coffeemakers and then running hot water through them to clean the soiled item of clothing. And this has the vibe of the type of hotel such a person would be attracted to, so I’d be a brain-damaged fool to use the hotel room coffee pot.

The hallways and corridors are filled with random kitsch and pop art, but again, it all distinctly feels one step removed from any sort of human design. There are random candle shrines devoted to Ozzy Osborne and Hulk Hogan, complimented by framed print-outs of their Wikipedia pages on lime green and neon pink copier paper. There is a random Honda motorcycle in the lobby, along with framed pictures of James Dean, Evel Knievel, and Batgirl hanging behind it (all posed on motorcycles which are not, in fact, the Honda), and a sign advertising the bike as a ‘Selfie Zone’….

(2) BUJOLD AND KRITZER EVENTS. Don Blyly announced two upcoming signings at his Uncle Hugo’s/Uncle Edgar’s Minneapolis bookstore.

Lois McMaster Bujold will be signing at the Uncles on Saturday May 16 from 1-2 pm for Penric’s Intrigues, an omnibus reprint of Assassins of Thasalon + Knot of Shadows. A lot of people have already ordered The Adventure of the Demonic Ox, the next Penric book, which is a signed numbered hardcover at $48.00 that was supposed to be a February release. In late March I e-mailed to the publisher to ask when he thought I would receive this “February” title. He said that his printer has been having production problems and has been late on lots of books. He is hoping to see the book sometime in April, but might not have it until May. Another new Bujold book is Two Tales, a collection of two Vorkosigan stories that had previously been published. “Winterfair Gifts” is a short story that appeared in Irresistable Forces edited by Catherine Asaro in 2004. Flowers of Vashnoi is a novelette that Subterranean Press published in hardcover in 2019 and has been out-of-print for years, and goes for high prices on the internet. I haven’t yet received Two Tales but have received the e-mailed invoice and will probably see the book in the next two or three days, and expect the price to be $13.50.

Naomi Kritzer will be signing at the Uncles on Saturday June 27 from 2-3 pm for Obstetrix, a thriller about a OB/GYN who is kidnapped by a fundamentalist cult in the west to provide medical services to their pregnant population. Doctor Liz tries to find a way to escape while also dealing with her patients’ medical needs.

(3) SPACE JUNK MAGAZINE. The New York Times recommends “A Magazine for Earthlings Who Dream of Outer Space”. (Link bypasses the NYT paywall.)

As Artemis II lifted off last week, sending NASA astronauts on a 10-day swing around the moon, another cosmic venture was preparing to launch: Space Junk.

It bills itself as the first magazine to look at the culture of space travel — not just astronauts and prospective space tourists, but meteor hunters, stargazing communities and sci-fi fans.

The timing seems right. The first issue will come out in May, shortly after the Artemis crew’s scheduled return from its exploratory mission. China is also aiming for a moon landing, as is the next Artemis mission, and the billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are also reaching for the stars with their rocket companies….

… Space Junk is not a science magazine like Air & Space from the Smithsonian but rather a kind of art book, planned to be published annually. It’s more interested in aesthetics and emotional experiences than, say, recent findings in quantum mechanics….

(4) RALLY ROUND KURTZMAN. “Starfleet Academy Actor Defends Star Trek Producer Alex Kurtzman” reports Sci-Fi and Fantasy Gazette.

With speculation mounting that Alex Kurtzman may soon be out of a job as main creative leader of Star Trek, Starfleet Academy actor Karime Diane has come to the showrunner’s defense. In a post on Instagram, Diane, who plays queer Klingon cadet Jay-Den Kraag in Starfleet Academy, posted about his experience working with Kurtzman the past two years, and how the showrunner helped bring his character to the forefront of the series.

“In the context of this character, Jay-Den, the fact that Jay-Den is a gay Klingon is not an accident. It was the result of very thoughtful processes,” Diane said in his video, defending the idea that Star Trek has always pushed boundaries with its characters. “It is because there are people behind the scenes, including Alex Kurtzman, who really believe that Star Trek should continue to expand. Star Trek has existed for 60 years. It’s always believed in pushing things forward. In the 60s, that looked one way. In the 90s, pushing things forward looked different. And today, pushing things forward, again, always looks different in every single decade.”

The actor acknowledged that not everyone may agree with Kurtzman’s creative decisions, but expressed admiration for his passion for the franchise and recognized that being a showrunner for a franchise as big as Star Trek is no easy job.

“I understand not every single person is going to agree with every single creative decision,” he continued. “That’s fair. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. But what I can say for a fact is this: Alex Kurtzman is a hardcore Trekkie. Like, he’s a huge fan. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. And he has one of the hardest jobs of being the captain of this ship, whose goal is to keep this universe alive for a completely brand new generation.”…

(5) SAMURAI ON DISPLAY. [Item by Steven French.] Filers who happen to be in London might want to check out this exhibition at the British Museum which I am told (I haven’t visited it myself) also includes Darth Vader’s costume: “Samurai”.

The modern mythology of the ‘samurai’ emerged gradually across the 20th century through interactions between Japan and the wider world, with idealised images of the historical warriors increasingly consumed by foreign visitors.

The story of the evolution of the samurai is told through battle gear such as the suit of armour sent by Tokugawa Hidetada to James VI and I, as well as luxury objects such as an intriguing incense connoisseurship game. From a Louis Vuitton outfit inspired by Japanese armour, to the popular, loosely historical videogame Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, the exhibition explores the samurai’s enduring legacy in games, fashion and film.

This major exhibition is a candid look at the real men and women whom we know as samurai, from the battlefields of medieval Japan to the global pop culture of today.

(6) DESSERT FIRST. Michael Chabon holds forth on the topic of “Having One’s Cake” at Tragic Magic.

…Anyway, when I came downstairs to see about dinner, I found myself unable to rid myself of the idea that a nice piece of cake might be just the thing. And I knew, to my core, that if I were jonesing this hard for cake, my wife must be in a very bad way, indeed. But the neighborhood bakeries had all closed by now, and outside it was pouring down rain, and though the exact nature of the cake whose surprise appearance had just been applauded by the characters in our book had been left to the imagination— “chocolate” was the lone detail provided—the imagination was pretty sure that it had not been Doordashed from Safeway, in a polyethylene clamshell.

The imagination and I reviewed the available alternatives. I could bake a nice layer cake—a “sandwich,” as they were known on the British baking show—but I knew from experience that even the most powerful yearning for a piece of cake rarely survives the time needed to bake one from start to finish, cooling times and all. Also: no matter what kind of cake I decided on, I knew, I was likely to be missing or running low on some needed ingredient or other: pecans, say, or dutch-process cocoa.

Cake mix? suggested the imagination, a little plaintively.

Now, I am not a mix-cake snob—far from it. Mr. Duncan Hines and I are old friends, and I will never say no to a slice of the man’s basic Yellow (though I will have no truck with his frosting, the kind that comes in a tub and can be used, in a pinch, to lubricate the rails of a rocket launcher). I have known the arcane thrill of practicing that essential trick of twentieth-century industrial food alchemy, immortalized in the lyrics to Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne,” of adding pudding mix to the cake mix….

(7) TODAY’S NIGHT.

“Yuri’s Night” – April 12 — is explained at Days Of The Year.

During the 20th century, space travel was considered to be the final frontier for the billions of humans living on Earth. Space exploration included sending humans into space, putting men on the moon, and eventually creating space shuttles and space stations.

This day, also known as the International Day of Human Space Flight, reflects on the progress made in space exploration and its benefits for humanity’s well-being and sustainable development.

Beyond the headline moments, it also nods to the quieter wins that come from learning how to live, work, and solve problems in an environment that does not forgive mistakes: better materials, safer engineering practices, improved medical monitoring, and a deeper understanding of Earth itself through satellites and observation.

One of the most significant accomplishments of the “space race” was when an astronaut became the first human to enter space. But that’s not all!

From Gagarin’s pioneering orbit around Earth to the numerous missions that followed, including the first woman in space, the first moon landing, and the first international space mission, this day celebrates them all! Yuri’s Night tends to hold two ideas in the same gloved hand: genuine awe at what humans can build and a playful sense that space is for everyone, not just people with flight suits, acronyms, and carefully practiced radio voices.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 12, 1973 — J. Scott Campbell, 53.

J. Scott Campbell is a comic books artist best known for his work on Wildstorm Comics. Scott actually got hired by Wildstorm by submitting a package that included a four-page WildC.A.T.S story. Before that however his first work was on Homage Studios Swimsuit Special at age twenty. It’d get a PG-13 rating today.

So did you know that Marvel did a Swimsuit issue as well? It was an annual magazine-style publication from 1991 to 1995. One issue said “Take Wakanda Wild Side” on the cover. Really it did.

His subsequent work for Wildstorm included some illustrations in WildC.A.T.S Sourcebook and Stormwatch #0. I love the idea of #0 issues. Why so?

Now do you remember Gen13? He created the series along with Jim Lee and Brandon Choi as the series came out of Team 7, a series that Lee and Choi created. The series involved a group of spandexed clothed metahuman teens. I like that series but it wasn’t nearly as fun as Danger Girl, his next series.

That series followed the adventures of a group of female secret agents, made the most of Campbell’s talents which involved very well-endowed women, in the firm of three sexy female well weaponized secret agents — Abbey Chase, Sydney Savage and Sonya Savage and over the top action sequences.

Twenty years ago I read Danger Girl: The Ultimate Collection, which is a bit of an overstatement as it’s only two hundred and fifty-six pages long, but it’s still a lot of a fun. Yes, it’s still available.

Danger Girl has been continuously published since it was first came out twenty-six years ago, so there’s a lot of it now. I’ve read quite a bit of it over the years and it’s been pretty consistent in its quality. However only the first seven-issue series is illustrated by Campbell.

Campbell illustrated the covers to the Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash six-issue limited series.

Eighteen years ago, Marvel Comics announced that he had signed an exclusive contract to work on a Spider-Man series with writer Jeph Loeb. Yes, he did just covers, not interior work.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro offers a two-for-one deal.
Brewster Rockit’s phone receives targeted ads.
Free Range has a spot that’s already taken.
Herman needs a lift.
Mother Goose and Grimm says a crime has been committed.
Pearls Before Swine reveals its author’s superstitions and rituals.
The Argyle Sweater features Star Wars accessories.

(10) OH HOW I HATE TO GET UP IN THE MORNING. NPR chronicles “The history of the out-of-this-world playlist NASA uses to wake up mission crews”.

It’s become a tradition: NASA’s ground control plays music to wake up the astronauts on a mission. NASA’s chief historian Brian Odom shares the history of the practice….…LEILA FADEL, HOST:

This is “Sleepyhead” by an artist who goes by the name Young & Sick. It was the crew’s first wakeup call of the mission. A few Earth days later, it was this hit by Chappell Roan.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “PINK PONY CLUB”)

CHAPPELL ROAN: (Singing) I can hear your Southern drawl a thousand miles away, saying, God, what have you done?

MARTÍNEZ: “Pink Pony Club” was a wakeup song this weekend, but apparently the recording cut off after a minute or so. Ground control could hear that commander Reid Wiseman was audibly disappointed….

(11) ASTROFELINE REMEMBERED. “Félicette has landed! Memorial for first cat in space unveiled in France” – Space.com has details.

A new memorial for the first and only cat to go to space has arrived at its permanent home.

A bronze statue of the space cat now stands at the International Space University (ISU) in Strasbourg, France, two years after Matthew Serge Guy, a creative director and space cat fan in London, launched a Kickstarter campaign and raised about $57,000 to fund the project.

The memorial honors a French feline named Félicette who launched on a brief suborbital spaceflight in 1963. Although the space cat survived the 15-minute mission, she died about two months later when scientists removed electrodes from her brain to investigate how spaceflight affects the brain.

A commemorative “autographed” postcard produced by CNES, the French space agency, pictures and celebrates Félicette. (Image credit: CNES)

(12) THE SHAPELESS THINGS TO COME. [Item by Steven French.] For some reason this reminded me of a certain Terminator movie! Here’s the summary: “Liquid metals for the booming of space exploration” at Cell Press Blue.

Liquid metals (LMs) are becoming central to tackling many extreme technical bottlenecks facing space exploration. The unique microgravity and vacuum environment of space also poses big challenges and is an unprecedented laboratory to explore unknown sciences. This perspective presents an overview of the fundamentals and practical issues and envisions future opportunities for LMs in space exploration, focusing on their roles in energy systems, deep space propulsion, thermal management, flexible electronics, reconfigurable machines, additive manufacturing, life support systems, and space optics, among others. Beyond practical engineering, we further outline the potential to exploit the space environment as a unique and indispensable platform to probe LM interfacial physics and chemistry free from gravitational constraints. Prospects for disclosing microgravity-related self-organization phenomena and thus enriching fundamental breakthroughs are interpreted. Collectively, these insights establish LMs as not only generalist materials but also transformative enablers for the booming of future space science and technology…

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Live, from the wrong side of the moon, it’s Saturday Night!!!! – “Artemis II”.

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

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 3/29/26 They’re Maids Of Mead!

Posted on March 29, 2026 by Mike Glyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

“Assignment Earth” Star Trek episode (1968)

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

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

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

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

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

Terri Garr and Robert Lansing in “Assignment Earth”.

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

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

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

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

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

(10) COMICS SECTION.

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

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

Here’s an example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixel Scroll 11/16/25 By The Pixeling Of My Scrolls, Something Wicked This Way Trolls

Posted on November 16, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) SFWA’S LATEST GRAND MASTER. “N. K. Jemisin Named 42nd Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master” today by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

(2) IT’S NOT LOIS ON THE LINE. Victoria Strauss advises Writer Beware readers: “If a Famous Author Calls, Hang Up: Anatomy of an Impersonation Scam”.

Version one: Famous Author ==> literary agent ==> editor/manuscript evaluator

It arrives via email, DM, Messenger, or website contact form: a friendly missive from a well-known or even extremely famous author, professing interest in you and your writing and expressing a desire to connect. This improbable outreach ranges from somewhat credible, as in the example above, to oops, forgot to input the prompts…

…If you respond, there’s an exchange of messages–just some friendly chat about writing or publishing, with Famous Author asking leading questions, such as “are you querying right now?” or “do you have a website yet?”

Eventually…surprise! Famous Author wants to refer you to their literary agent! In this example, Lois McMaster Bujold is being impersonated by a fake X account (Ms. Bujold is aware)….

… Like the Famous Authors, the recommended agents are real–though the Gmail addresses the impersonators provide for them are not. If you bite (and at this point, many writers smell a rat and back out), it initiates the second stage of the scam, in which the “agent” responds warmly with an invitation to submit (for verisimilitude, this often involves multiple steps, with an initial request for chapters followed by a request for a full). In short order, an offer of representation arrives…but there’s a catch. The manuscript needs “refining and polishing” or a “light rework”. Happily, the “agent” has someone in mind who can help….

(3) BOGUS DOWN UNDER. Meanwhile, the Guardian is on the track of another attempt to defraud authors: “Lost in the plot: how would-be authors were fooled by AI staff and virtual offices in suspected global publishing scam”.

An aspiring Australian writer met an apparent scammer face-to-face before realising she may have become a victim of a suspicious international publishing venture.

Australia’s National Anti-Scam Centre is now investigating the case of a website luring people seeking a foothold in the increasingly crowded space of vanity and self-publishing. The Guardian has uncovered similar suspicious websites operating in the UK and New Zealand, as well as two others operating within Australia.

This apparent network of publishers – using cloned websites, AI-generated staff and virtual offices across Australia, the UK and New Zealand – includes websites trading by the names of Melbourne Book Publisher, First Page Press (UK), Aussie Book Publisher, Oz Book Publishers and BookPublishers.co.nz.

The entity operating as Melbourne Book Publisher is confusing aspiring authors who think they are dealing with the well-established publisher Melbourne Books – which is not a vanity publisher – going so far as to use a near-identical name and its Australian Business Number (ABN)….

(4) WHAT WILL A BILLIONAIRE’S TREK LOOK LIKE? The Unofficial Hugo Book Club blog is grappling with the effects of corporatized fan subcultures, specifically with what the Skydance/Paramount merger might mean for Star Trek.

…Blogger Darren Mooney has ably pointed out that the series is not always as progressive as its reputational legacy, but recent incarnations such as Discovery and Strange New Worlds have certainly leaned into diversity, equity, and inclusion as essential elements of the franchise. This is in sharp contrast to the values of the franchise’s new owners, who have vowed to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at the studio.

We suspect that Star Trek is boldly going nowhere good…..

…Declaring allegiance to a specific corporate-owned franchise effectively puts one’s loyalty up for sale; whichever media conglomerate owns the property has its hooks in the fandom. The transformation of Paramount under David Ellison illustrates how corporate ownership might reshape both the content of a franchise and potentially its fandom….

(5) HE WROTE A LOT. “Thomas Pynchon’s Books: A Guide” at the New York Times. Link bypasses the paywall.

Since the 1960s and ’70s, when he made his name with “V.,” “The Crying of Lot 49” and the 900-page, National Book Award-winning “Gravity’s Rainbow,” Thomas Pynchon has been tagged with various highfalutin epithets: experimental writer, postmodernist, systems novelist. Gore Vidal, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1976, assigned Pynchon to the “R and D (Research and Development)” wing of contemporary literature. For Vidal, the opposite of R&D was R&R — the kind of fiction people might read for pleasure.

Nearly 50 years and five novels later, we can say that Vidal was half right. While Pynchon is properly celebrated as a formidable literary innovator, he is less often recognized as a great entertainer, a master of R&R. His books are challenging, mind-blowing, precedent-shattering — all of that, yes. They’re also a lot of fun….

… Pynchon’s second book, THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (1966), is also his shortest and by many accounts his most accessible. Its heroine, the exquisitely named Oedipa Maas (her husband is known as Mucho, so you see what I mean about the dad jokes), is embroiled in a conspiracy involving, among other things, an alternative postal service with a long and shadowy history. “The Crying of Lot 49” is one of Pynchon’s more satisfying whodunits and also a good introduction to his trademark counter-realism. There are enough actual facts and checkable references in the book to tether it to the world we know and to make its wild confabulations seem almost plausible. Or maybe, by the end, you’ll just wish they were…

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

November 16, 1952 — Robin McKinley, 73.

By Paul Weimer: I almost missed out on reading Robin McKinley, in my focus to read “Adult novels”. I don’t remember how, in the mid 80’s I came across The Hero and the Crown, but I did, and I was enchanted with Aerin’s story, rising from distrusted daughter of the king, to dragon-slaying hero facing enormous odds with courage, and intelligence. I did read the books in the wrong order, since I read The Blue Sword, next, which The Hero and the Crown is a prequel to, and Aerin appears as a force ghost in, briefly. That confused me, it may have been one of the first times I accidentally read a series out of publication order, but within chronological order. I didn’t know you could do such a thing.

I kind of lost track of McKinley’s work for a good long time. Too many authors to read, too much thinking that I didn’t really feel the need for more YA (even if her later work was not all YA at all), until I came across one of the best vampire novels out there, from McKinley, Sunshine, which is set in an alternate world where the creatures of the night fought humanity and now have a prickly conflicting relationship, with vampire gangs, pools of black magic and a lot more.

The worldbuilding of “Sunshine” Rae’s world is fascinating, taking the old tropes of vampires and undead and putting them into a secondary world to be able to play with those tropes and settings and ideas as she likes. Sunshine, like other McKinley novels, really run strongly on characters and character relationships, especially ones under very heavy fire, both from plot and from others around them. I can see a line from Aerin all the way to Rae, and beyond, in McKinley’s work.

Photo of Robin McKinley standing in front of rose-patterned wallpaper — Robin McKinley in 2023.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Bound and Gagged finds inspiration.
Carpe Diem has the best view.
Foxtrot gets complicated.
The Argyle Sweater sure looks suspicious.

(8) KGB. Ellen Datlow shared her photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series for November 12, 2025.

Lara Elena Donnelly and Sam J. Miller read from their work to a great audience. Sam pinch hit for Mary Robinette Kowall, who had to cancel at the lats minute because her travel plans were screwed up.

(9) FIRST FANDOM ANNUAL 2025. The First Fandom Annual 2025, published by the First Fandom Foundation, is now available to order:

A Selection of Golden-Age Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists, Edited by John L. Coker III and Jon D. Swartz, Ph.D.

Hubert Rogers’ illustration of E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Grey Lensman (Astounding Science-Fiction, October 1939)

Featuring twenty-one artists whose work appeared in magazines, comics, fanzines, newspapers, advertising, convention publications, and on dust jackets, posters, book plates, and calendars: Murphy Anderson, Earle K. Bergey, Hannes Bok, Chesley Bonestell, Margaret Brundage, Edd Cartier, Vincent Di Fate, Morris Scott Dollens, Ed Emshwiller, Clay Ferguson, Jr., Virgil Finlay, Frank Kelly Freas, Roy V. Hunt, Mel Hunter, Frank R. Paul, Hubert Rogers, J. Allen St. John, Norman Saunders, Lawrence Stevens, Ed Valigursky, and Hans Wessolowski.

48 pages, limited edition (25 numbered copies) Photographs and many color illustrations Gloss covers, 8½ x 11, booklet-stapled. Laser printed on 28# quality paper.

To order, send a check or money order for $35. payable to John L. Coker III (includes packing, USPS Priority Mail, insurance, and tracking) to John at 4813 Lighthouse Road, Orlando, FL 32808.

(10) SAG AWARDS HAVE NEW NAME. “SAG Awards announce name change: Here come the Actor Awards” – the LA Times has the story. (Behind a paywall.)

… Now, in an effort to lean into the name of the statuette and streamline the show’s title, the Screen Actors Guild Awards announced Friday that it is renaming the ceremony to the Actor Awards. Or, if you want to get precise (and a bit verbose): the Actor Awards presented by SAG-AFTRA.

“Now that our global audience is really growing, people don’t always understand what the union name is,” says awards committee chair JoBeth Williams. “But ‘the Actor Awards’ they recognize and they know they’re going to see their favorite actors when they tune in.”…

(11) THEY WERE CLOUDS IN MY COFFEE, CLOUDS IN MY COFFEE. [Item by Steven French.] Might extraterrestrial life have its head in the clouds?! Astrobiologists may have a way of answering that question: “How to spot life in the clouds on other worlds” at Phys.org.

Cloud cover is bad for picnics and for viewing stars through a telescope. But an exoplanet with dense or even total cloud cover could help astronomers search for signs of life beyond our planet.

Cornell researchers have created the first reflectance spectra—a color-coded key—of diverse, colorful microorganisms that live in the clouds floating above Earth’s surface. Astronomers don’t know if these bacteria exist elsewhere in the universe and in enough abundance to be detected by telescopes; on Earth they are not. But now, astronomers can use the color key in the search for life outside our world—making an exoplanet’s clouds, in addition to its surface and air, a promising realm for finding signs of life.

“There is a vibrant community of microorganisms in our atmosphere that produce colorful biopigments which have fascinated biologists for years,” said astrobiologist Ligia Coelho, 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellow in astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and fellow at the Carl Sagan Institute (CSI). “I thought astronomers should know about them.”…

(12) LEST DARKNESS FALL. Neil deGrasse Tyson answers the question “Is Our Universe Inside a Black Hole?” at Star Talk.

Is our universe inside a black hole? Neil deGrasse Tyson breaks down intriguing new evidence along with other curious parallels that could point to the universe being inside a black hole. Is the edge of our universe an event horizon on a black hole in some other universe?

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Olav Rokne, 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 Xtifr.]

Pixel Scroll 4/8/24 Everyone I Know Is A Hoopy Scroll, Who Know Where Their Pixel Is

Posted on April 8, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) ANGRY ROBOT BRINGS ON ECLIPSE OF STORYWISE. [Item by Anne Marble.] Angry Robot Books announced a one-week open submissions period that begins April 22, and several posts down in their thread they also said they would be using a submissions portal named Storywise to help them sort through their submissions. In their image, they explain a little more and point out that it’s not generative AI.

Angry Robot provided more information about Storywise here: “Storywise and Open Submissions FAQ’s “ [Internet Archive copy]. It included information on how authors can opt out of Storywise being used in their submission.

For obvious reasons, people are worried. People are pointing out that the Storywise platform can have biases. (And because it’s software, you can’t see those biases.) While it’s great that it’s not generative AI, does that mean writers can still trust it? For example, how do authors known what Storywise will do with their submissions? Others think its fine because it’s not generative AI — it’s just AI being used as a tool. Some have pointed out that slush readers are often unpaid, so that this is not taking away jobs. (But does that apply to slush readers working for book publishers?!)

Here is a quote-tweet by Vajra Chandrasekera with lots of information about Storywise. (Thread starts on X.com here.)

Angry Robot subsequently removed the posts to social media about their open submissions, and walked back the announcement with respect to Storywise, saying they will resume using their inbox system.

Editor’s note: Adrian Moher has a good roundup about the controversy at Astrolabe Digest: 040824. (Moher provided the link in his social media.)

(2) ON THE WAY TO THE CENTERLINE. Rich Lynch snapped this photo of the view from Interstate 87, in the middle of Adirondack Park while on his way to witness today’s eclipse. (Click for larger image to read sign).

No pictures of the event itself, though. “I don’t have any eclipse photos on my iPhone.” But Rich says, “It very much did exceed my expectations, even with the sun having to burn its way through a thin cloud layer.”

(3) STOKERCON 2024 ADDS GOH. Rob Savage was announced today as StokerCon 2024’s fifth Guest of Honor.

Rob Savage initially gained attention at the age of 19 when he wrote, directed, produced, and edited the low-budget romantic drama film Strings (2012), he later became more widely known for his work in horror films and has since co-written and directed lockdown horror hit Host (2020), co-written and directed Dashcam (2021), and directed Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman (2023).

The con also signal-boosted HWA’s Librarian’s Day.

This year’s Librarian’s Day on Friday, May 31, 2024, once again offers fantastic programming featuring the conference’s guest authors on timely topics and more. Librarian’s Day ticket holders ($60) will have access to the Dealers Room and other areas of the full conference throughout the day.

(4) DETROIT FURRY CON VICTIMIZED AGAIN. “Motor City Furry Con evacuated for second straight year” reports Audacy.

For a second straight year Motor City Furry Con attendees were forced to be evacuated from their hotel due to a threat.

The nature of the threat was not clear, but officials with the convention confirmed Sunday the Ann Arbor Marriott Ypsilanti at Eagle Crest in Ypsilanti was evacuated around 9 a.m.

The “all clear” was given around 12:30 p.m. and the final day of convention activities resumed.

Sunday’s evacuation comes a year after attendees were evacuated from the same hotel due to an emailed bomb threat. Ultimately, there were no injuries or any explosives found last March.

The Motor City Furry Con is a convention for people who “appreciate the anthropomorphic lifestyle,” according to a report from The Detroit Free Press.

The Detroit Free Press article also noted, “Event attendee Scoops took to social media to celebrate the second year of being an evacuee.”

Bomb threat at #MCFC2024 2 years in a row, lets gooooo!!! pic.twitter.com/qzk0SNyICt
— Scoops! plushieyeen.bsky.social (@SpoonsScoops) April 7, 2024

(5) SLOWLY WE TURNED, STEP BY STEP. “Caeciliusinhorto” has written an impressive perspective piece synthesizing all the news items that comprise “The 2023 Hugo Awards fuckup” for Reddit’s r/HobbyDrama.

… After much discussion, the general consensus seemed to coalesce around a combination of two or three explanations: firstly, active censorship by the Hugo administrators, possibly due to pressure from the Chinese government (national or local); secondly, incompetence; and perhaps thirdly, weird nominator behaviour (possibly including organised voting blocs). For a while things stalled there: the data was obviously wrong, the most plausible explanation seemed to be some combination of cock-up and conspiracy, and there was no prospect of anyone finding out anything more.

And then we found out more….

(6) SURE. MAYBE. DUNNO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Nautilus asked six sff writers “Does Science Fiction Shape the Future?”.

Behind most every tech billionaire is a sci-fi novel they read as a teenager. For Bill Gates it was Stranger in a Strange Land, the 1960s epic detailing the culture clashes that arise when a Martian visits Earth. Google’s Sergey Brin has said it was Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the cyberpunk classic about hackers and computer viruses set in an Orwellian Los Angeles. Jeff Bezos cites Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, which unreel in an utopian society of humanoids and artificial intelligences, often orchestrated by “Minds,” a powerful AI. Elon Musk named three of SpaceX’s landing drones after starships from Banks’ books, a tribute to the role they played in turning his eyes to the stars.

Part of this makes sense. Science fiction widens the frontiers of our aspirations. It introduces us to new technologies that could shape the world, and new ideas and political systems that could organize it. It’s difficult to be an architect of the future without a pioneer’s vision of what that future might look like. For many, science fiction blasts that vision open.

Yet these tech titans seem to skip over the allegories at the heart of their favorite sci-fi books. Musk has tweeted, “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.” Yet in Banks’ post-scarcity utopia, billionaires and their colossal influence are banished to the most backward corners of the galaxy.

Recently, I interviewed six of today’s foremost science-fiction authors. I asked them to weigh in on how much impact they think science fiction has had, or can have, on society and the future….

The interview subjects are N.K. Jemisin, Andy Weir, Lois McMaster Bujold, David Brin, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. Here’s a quote from Stross:

Charles Stross: Yes, the entire current AI bubble is exactly that. The whole idea of AI has been turned into the centerpiece of a secular apocalyptic religion in which we can create superhumanly intelligent slaves that will solve all our knottily human intellectual problems, then work out how to liberate our pure soul-stuff from these clumsy rotting meatbags and upload us into a virtual heaven. And right now, some of the biggest tech companies out there are run by zealots who believe this stuff, even though we have no clear understanding of the mechanisms underlying consciousness. It’s an unsupported mass of speculation, but it’s threatening to derail efforts to reduce our carbon footprint and mitigate the climate crisis by encouraging vast energy expenditure.

(7) MONSTER BOX OFFICE. Godzilla x Kong rang the registers loudly last weekend reports Variety.

“Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” dominated the domestic box office again, looming large over newcomers “Monkey Man” and “The First Omen.”

Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment’s monster tentpole added $31.7 million from 3,948 theaters in its second weekend of release. Ticket sales dropped a standard (for a tentpole of its size and scale) 60% from its mighty $80 million debut and stand at $132 million domestically and $361 million globally.

First-time director Dev Patel’s action thriller “Monkey Man” nabbed second place with $10.1 million from 3,029 venues, while Disney and 20th Century’s supernatural prequel “The First Omen” trailed at the No. 4 spot with a muted $8.4 million from 3,375 locations….

(8) PEAK TELEVISION. “Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper: How TV’s strangest detective was born” – BBC went right to the source.

… Writer Mark Frost told the BBC’s Late Show that part of the inspiration behind the character was the show’s co-creator and director David Lynch.

“I tried to base that character on David to some extent,” said Frost. “A lot of his quirkiness and attention to detail, which are things that David has in great abundance, sort of came to the surface with that character. I guess his interest in people’s obsessions, and characters who are obsessed with something, are pretty common with other things he’s done.” …

(9) SMALL BUSINESS. And what is David Lynch working on today? “David Lynch Still Wants To Make Animated Movie ‘Snootworld’: Interview” at Deadline. Netflix said no – maybe someone else will say yes.

…“I don’t know when I started thinking about Snoots but I’d do these drawings of Snoots and then a story started to emerge,” Lynch told us in a rare interview. “I got together with Caroline and we worked on a script. Just recently I thought someone might be interested in getting behind this so I presented it to Netflix in the last few months but they rejected it.”

Lynch was philosophical about the reasons for that decision: “Snootworld is kind of an old fashioned story and animation today is more about surface jokes. Old fashioned fairytales are considered groaners: apparently people don’t want to see them. It’s a different world now and it’s easier to say no than to say yes.”

Thompson described the storyline to us as “wackadoo”: “It takes my breath away how wacky it is. The Snoots are these tiny creatures who have a ritual transition at aged eight at which time they get tinier and they’re sent away for a year so they are protected. The world goes into chaos when the Snoot hero of the story disappears into the carpet and his family can’t find him and he enters a crazy, magnificent world”….

(10) WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN? “Star Trek Discovery’s Doug Jones Reveals How He Said Goodbye to Saru (And It Involves Whitney Houston)” – Comicbook.com listens in.

Star Trek: Discovery‘s long-awaited fifth season finally debuted this week on Paramount+, and it marks the beginning of the end for the series. ComicBook.com recently had the chance to chat with some of the show’s cast, and they opened up about saying goodbye to their characters in the final season. Doug Jones (Saru) revealed how he said farewell to the character he began playing in 2017, and it involves an iconic song…

“Oh yeah,” Jones said when asked if he was able to keep any part of Saru after the show finished filming. “I wasn’t gonna let that go. Yeah. My final time taking Saru off, I did not cut him up and throw him across the room at all,” he added, referencing the famous story of René Auberjonois throwing his Odo mask at the showrunner at the end of Deep Space Nine. “I held him on my hand and we were playing a Whitney Houston song and I sang ‘I Will Always Love You’ to him and somebody was recording it. So I hope that’s out there somewhere.”…

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 8, 1974 — Nnedi Okorafor, 50. Tonight we have Nnedi Okorafor, a truly phenomenal writer.

She’s Nigerian, and has coined two words to describe her literary focus, Africanfuturism, and Africanjujuism. The latter word identifies the Afrocentric subgenre of fantasy fiction that draws on African spiritualities and cosmologies. Cool.

Let’s start with some of her work as comic book writer. The LaGuardia series that she wrote for was published by Berger Books. The collection won a Graphic Story Hugo Award at ConZealand, and her Black Panther: Long Live the King was nominated at Dublin 2019. She did other work in the Panther universe as well — Shuri in which Black Panther is missing and she has to find him (great story), Wakanda Forever and Shuri: Wakanda Forever

I started there as I love her writing in this medium. Now let me pick my favorite novellas and novels by her.

The Binti trilogy is an extraordinary feat of writing and my favorite reading experience by her. The “Binti” novella which leads it off won a Hugo at MidAmeriCon II. Then came the “Binti: Home” novella which was nominatedfor a Hugo at Worldcon 76 and the final “Binti: The Night Masquerade” novella to date which was nominatedfor a Hugo at Dublin 2019.

Lagoon is a deep dive in Nigerian mythology including Legba in the forefront here, in what is a SF novel as aliens and humans come together to form a new postcapitalist Nigeria. Neat concept well executed, characters are fascinating and the story is done well.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Distracted Dino brings us “ADHDinos… in space!”.

ADHDinos… in space! pic.twitter.com/qtyTPRxMfy
— (The Book is Out!!!) Distracted Dino (@ADHDinos) April 7, 2024

(13) IT COULDN’T HURT. “Fallout Moves To California For Season 2 With Big Tax Credit Award” – Deadline pencils in the numbers.

Just days before its debut, Fallout looks to be assured a second season thanks to a $25 million tax credit from California.

Officially, Amazon has not said yet that the Prime Video series is coming back, but, with some hints from executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan recently, it is pretty clear the money is doing the talking here. Receiving one of the largest allocations ever from the program for a relocating series, the LA-set post-apocalyptic drama is among a dozen shows awarded $152 million in incentives.

Primetime prequel NCIS: Origins, the Noah Wyle starring The Pitt, plus the Ryan Murphy executive produced Dr. Odyssey starring Joshua Jackson, and Grotesquerie starring Emmy winner Niecy Nash also were awarded credits through the California Film Commission run $330 million annual program – as you can see below….

… Of course, being awarded the tax credits, even big bucks like what Fallout has reaped, is no guarantee a project will go forward. The allocations are conditional on certain timelines being met, and a number of films and shows, like Season 2 of Amazon’s spy saga Citadel, have dropped out of the program after getting a green light….

(14) FILM CENSORSHIP. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Though not SF in itself, this half-hour radio programme, Screenshot, will be of interest to anyone over here in Brit Cit who are fans of fantastic films. It explains how Britain ranks its films for age suitability. Those in the rebel colonies are not ignored as there is a section comparing Britain’s system with that in the US. It seems we get a better deal over here. Meanwhile, along the way Kim Newman (co-master of ceremonies at the 2005 Hugo ceremony) gets a name check.

As the British Board of Film Classification publishes its new guidelines, Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode delve into the long, chequered history of film censorship and classification in the UK.

Mark speaks to BBFC President (and original Strictly Come Dancing winner) Natasha Kaplinsky about her role, and about her reaction to the new guidelines. And he discusses the Board’s controversial history, and some of its most notorious decisions, with ex-BBFC Head of Compliance Craig Lapper.

Ellen talks to director Prano Bailey-Bond about her debut film Censor, which was inspired by the ‘video nasty’ moral panic of the 1980s. And pop culture critic Kayleigh Donaldson talks her through some of the differences between the BBFC and its US equivalent, the MPA Ratings Board.

Half hour prog here: BBC Radio 4 – Screenshot, “Censorship”.

(15) THE ELEPHANT NOT IN THE ROOM. “US company hoping to bring back the dodo and the mammoth – but here’s why it won’t be like Jurassic Park” explains Sky News.

… “We’ve got all the technology we need,” says Ben Lamm, chief executive of the firm, based in Dallas, Texas.

“It is just a focus of time and funding. But we are 100% confident [we can bring back] the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and the mammoth.”

The science behind the project is simple: Work out the genes that make an extinct animal what it is, and then replicate those genes using the DNA of a close existing relative….

… So after around 4,000 years of extinction, when could we see the return of the mighty mammoth – a creature that fell victim to human hunting and the changing conditions brought about by the end of the last Ice Age.

“We are well into the editing phase,” says Mr Lamm.

“We don’t have mammoths yet, but we still feel very good about 2028.”…

(16) STAND BY FOR MANIACAL LAUGHTER. “Animaniacs in Concert” will be presented at Pepperdine in Malibu on April 19. Buy tickets at the link. Learn more about the show itself at their website: “Animaniacs – IN CONCERT”.

Join the leading voice cast of Animaniacs—the iconic animated Warner Bros. series created and produced by Steven Spielberg—for a “zany, animany and totally insaney” evening as they perform the world-famous songs backed by projections from the beloved cartoon TV series. The live show celebrates the creative inspiration behind the songs with lots of audience interaction and never-before-told behind-the-scenes insider stories shared by the show’s original Emmy-Winning composer Randy Rogel and iconic voice actors like Rob Paulsen (Yakko) and Maurice LaMarche (The Brain) to some of the most unforgettable characters in the history of animation. Special guest Nancy Cartwright joins for this performance. Nancy, of course, is Bart Simpson, a lead character in a “globally known property,” as well as Mindy in Animaniacs, from “Mindy and Buttons.”

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Warp Zone’s video “If the Star Wars ‘Cantina Song’ Had Lyrics” was first posted six years ago – but it is news to me! (Maybe you, too?)

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

Pixel Scroll 12/16/23 To Say Nothing Of The Pixels

Posted on December 16, 2023 by Mike Glyer

(1) THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF MURDER. James Davis Nicoll assigned the “Young People Read Old SFF” panel a series of Hugo finalists to read. We’ve reached the end:

The final installment¹ in Young People Read Old Hugo Finalists is Lois McMaster Bujold’s 1989The Mountains of Mourning. One of Bujold’s popular Miles Vorkosigan stories, Mountains is a murder mystery. Through Miles’ eyes, Bujold explores certain aspects of Barrayaran life generally kept off-stage thanks to the series’ focus on the aristocracy.

Mountains won the Best Novella Hugo, beating The Father of Stones by Lucius Shepard, A Touch of Lavender by Megan Lindholm, Time Out by Connie Willis, and Tiny Tango by Judith Moffett. I’ve not read the other finalists so I cannot compare them to the winner. I can say that Mountains was the first Bujold I read. It is the reason I have a shelf full of Bujold novels.

Fans liked it. I liked it. But did the Young People like it?…

Nicoll says the next project, debuting in 2024, is Young People Read Old Nebula Finalists.

(2) THEY LIVE! Galaxy is also being resurrected by the same company that has announced the relaunch of Worlds of IF. “Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1951 (FIRST-EVER WEBZINE REISSUE + new bonus content!)” at Starship Sloane Publishing.

I am happy to announce that this magazine, like its sister publication, Worlds of IF, is also being revived and relaunched by Starship Sloane Publishing Company, Inc.

This might be a slow process, as we are wonderfully busy with the booming relaunch of Worlds of IF already, and I have no desire to make things overly frenetic. The idea is to methodically breathe new life into Galaxy. It seems only fitting that these two magazines should walk hand in hand once again. I will be keeping this celebrated magazine skinny, minimalist in style, and highly selective. The quality of work will speak for itself….

… I do this for the love of creativity and science fiction. But I also strive for simplicity. If something becomes a self-imposed, burdensome form of work, I reevaluate. I will not place stressful expectations on myself here. A strict publishing schedule? Very unlikely. But semiannually sounds about right, I suppose….

(3) GONE IN POINT SIX SECONDS. The MinnPost believes people should be concerned with “Protecting physical media in an age of streaming”.

It’s been repeated, echoed and understood ad nauseam that we live in the streaming era.

We get it. Something that streamers may not understand, however, is that nobody owns their digital media.

The $12.99 spent through Amazon Prime Video to purchase “Barbie” is not “your” copy of the film. A person only has access to it until Amazon decides it doesn’t want to support the licensing anymore. This concept is not new or nuanced, but it is lost. The constant shuffling of online media between major streaming conglomerates has resulted in physical media’s futility in the eyes of the general public. We indeed live in the streaming age, but it’s also an age where the cultural impact of art preservation is needed more than ever.

This sentiment is not a condemnation against people using services like Netflix and Spotify. The convenience factor of these platforms is undeniable. However, combing through records, DVDs and books at local businesses should become something other than ancient practice.

Art preservation is at the forefront of this streaming puzzle because of the cultural significance of owning physical media. Much like artifacts, art has been replaced, lost and not protected. Now, instead of encouraging ownership of your favorite titles, businesses that still champion the physical media medium are fighting an uphill battle.

With all the revenue that floods in through streaming platforms, physical media becomes a nuisance to the profit margins of online Fortune 500s.

So, when a seemingly neglected and inevitable problem like this presents itself, the starting point of where to spark the renaissance can get blurred. Viewers, listeners, patrons and readers should look to local shops that allow physical media literacy to return to the mainstream….

(4) REVIEWERS’ PROTEST. Courtney Tonokawa told review blog readers ”I’m Participating in the St. Martin’s Press Reviewer Boycott!” in November at Courtney Reads Romance.

This is a brief post throwing my support behind the ongoing St. Martin’s Press reviewer boycott, which started in late October (as far as I’m aware; if anyone has more conclusive timeline information, please let me know). It is in response to a few major issues, like the general favoritism of white reviewers for ARCs over reviewers of color and, more recently, the behavior of a marketing employee in response to recent escalation in violence between Israel and Palestine, with said employee spewing Islamophobic and queerphobic rhetoric on their socials. All receipts and a more thorough recap of events can be found at the “Readers for Accountability” website here, along with a list of the boycott demands, screenshots, graphics, and all other relevant information.

But until those demands are met, in short addressing the actions of their employee and their action plan for the future, I am joining my fellow reviewers in withholding reviews and any other promo for St. Martin’s Press, and invite anyone else interested to join.

As Courtney’s post says, the allegations are documented at the “Readers for Accountability” website. Their overview of the complaints follows:

The boycott of St. Martin’s Press, Wednesday Books, and other related imprints is a direct response to the publishers lack of accountability regarding one of their employees. This employee, who we will not name here, posted Islamophobic, Queerphobic, and anti-Palestinian content on their personal social media. This content was shared in Instagram stories and was brought to our attention by Palestinian activist and BookToker @vivafalastinleen. Leen noted that while she is on the St. Martin’s Press influencer list, she never seemed to receive any of the ARCs she requested. Additionally, Leen noticed that her white counterparts would receive ARCs regularly. She began to question if this was a symptom of the employee’s bigotry when she was sent screenshots of a marketing Islamophobic employee sharing racist, Islamophobic pink washing content to their stories.
Leen attempted to reach out to St. Martin’s Press when the employee’s posts came to light, but struggled to receive a response and was largely ignored. Other influencers and content creators reached out as well with similar results. However, Leen did eventually receive email from Brant Janeway. However, the response was dismissive and defensive with no action being taken to investigate.

The boycott was officially enacted after ten days of radio silence from St. Martin’s Press and Wednesday books. During those ten days, content creators were emailing, DMing, commenting, and making videos to demand that St. Martin’s Press make a statement to no avail. As such, Leen created a video that provided other creators with context for the boycott. This video also included a large amount of screenshots and context into why those screenshots are so dangerous. Twitter likes were also included so as to provide evidence of how deep the employee’s bigotry runs. Demands were issued for St. Martin’s Press and Wednesday Books in hopes and readers will continue to boycott the publishers and related imprints until those demands are met.

(5) WHO IS NUMBER ONE? Kim Ju-sŏng tells Guardian readers “’I repeatedly failed to win any awards’: my doomed career as a North Korean novelist”.

…I believe the reason my writing received poor evaluations lay primarily in my choice of genre. All of my stories took place in Japan, or had zainichi as the main characters. In North Korea these were dismissed as “foreign works”, the catch-all term for anything about the wider world. Like anywhere, in North Korean literary circles there is a fair amount of specialisation, and each writer has his or her own style and character.

The most highly regarded genre, it goes without saying, is No 1 literature – that is, works about members of the ruling Kim family. This is not a genre that just anybody can write. In order of esteem, the genres of North Korean literature are:

1) No 1 works: stories about the achievements and personalities of the Kim family.

2) Anti-Japan partisan works AKA revolutionary works: stories set within the colonial-era independence movement.

3) War works: stories set during the Korean war.

4) Historical works: stories set during the Yi, Koguryo or Koryo dynasties.

5) Real-life works: stories about ordinary society from the postwar to the present.

6) South Korean works: stories set in South Korea.

7) Foreign works: stories set anywhere outside Korea.

I was involved with foreign works. Aside from No 1 works, writers had free choice of any genre, and we were also free to move around and experiment between genres. But only the most elite, accomplished writers were permitted to produce No 1 works….

(6) STRANGER THAN FICTION (BUT NOT FOR LONG). [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] People have seen me complain that I didn’t sign up to live in the cyberpunk dystopia we live in now, and thought I was exaggerating.

Nope.

Brian Krebs is probably the premier computer security journalist in the US. As I understand it, he had a column in the Washington Post, until the Post’s editors got freaked out by the number of what the police, and perhaps the FBI, considered “credible death threats”. My favorite story is from one of his investigations, the FBI followed the target, then suckered him to travel from eastern Europe to Guam, where he was arrested, extradited, and spent several years in US jails.

If you want to see the kind of thing he does… “Ten Years Later, New Clues in the Target Breach” at Krebs on Security.

Then tell me I’m exaggerating.

I’ve actually got a short story based on him that I’ve been trying to sell, but I guess it’s not “character-driven” enough (that I sincerely hope never happens, although he and his family have been swatted several times).

(7) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books presents episode 70 of the Simultaneous Times podcast. Stories featured in this episode:

“I Hope I Call You Back” by Tara Campbell – Music by Phog Masheeen – Read by Heather Morgan

“The Escape” by Jean-Paul L. Garnier – Music by Fall Precauxions – Read by the author

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born December 16, 1917 — Arthur C. Clarke. Sir Arthur C. Clarke is one of one of my of all time favorite writers, however, this will be not be an all-inclusive look at him, but what I like for his films and writings. So let’s me get started now…

As regards short works, Tales from the White Hart is without doubt the stories I like above all others. Like Niven’s Draco Tavern stories or those of Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers, I adore stories told in a bar setting, and these are quite splendid.

Those are hardly his only great short stories. NyCon II would give him Hugo Award for “The Star” story which is wonderful, “The Nine Billion Names of God” got a well-deserved Retro Hugo at Noreascon 4, and Loncon 3 likewise honored “How We Went to Mars”. And I loved “A Meeting with Medusa” as well.

Arthur C. Clarke receives Hugo Award from chairman Dave Kyle at the 1956 Worldcon, NyCon II.

Which collection you pick up is your choice — The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke currently being published legitimately in ebook format by Open Road Media has somewhere around ninety stories in it and is an excellent choice. It has “The Nine Billion Names of God” in it, another story of his I should note I love.

Novels? Well let’s start with The Fountains of Paradise if only because I got to actually got to see the setting in Sri Lanka that it’s based off of. Every bookshop there had copies of it. And it certainly deserved the Hugo it got at Noreascon Two.

I also have on my reading list the Hugo-nominated A Fall of Moondust, one of the better lunar colonization novels ever written; and likewise The Sands of Mars is a worthy look at using and that planet.

Now we come to Rendezvous with Rama which won a Hugo at DisCon II. Damn that’s a fascinating novel. I re-read maybe a decade back and I’m please to say that the Suck Fairy broke her toe trying to tarnish its reputation.

So films. Well it in my mind’s eye, there is but one film only and that is 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ve seen it in cinema once, many times on a small screen. It’s wonderful. Yes, it got a Hugo at St. LouisCon.

That’s it for him. Have a good evening.

Alice Turner and Arthur C. Clarke. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Tom Gauld remembers a school tradition.

My latest cartoon for @newscientist pic.twitter.com/KfRD5H8Avk
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 12, 2023

And Gauld finds an ability to predict the future can have bittersweet results.

Books of the Year! My cartoon for this week’s @GuardianBooks pic.twitter.com/Dn6Rly0nj2
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 10, 2023

(10) TUTTLE ROUNDUP. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup” for the Guardian includes The Reformatory by Tananarive Due; The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow; Him by Geoff Ryman; and Audition by Pip Adam

(11) CURATED HORROR. Gabino Iglesias picked “The Best Horror Books of 2023” for the New York Times. The column begins:

There were a ton of amazing horror books published in 2023, and as a genre, horror delivered so much — from fresh takes on vampire stories to historical works that looked at racism and misogyny. That made selecting just 10 titles for this list a formidable task. So consider this a personal pantheon of favorites from 2023.

Some of the books on this list are easy reads and some will challenge you. Some are long and multilayered while others have a great sense of humor or unfurl at breakneck speed. Some adhere to a classic understanding of horror and others aim to redefine it. The important thing is that they are all outstanding.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is known for her ability to stylishly jump from genre to genre, and in SILVER NITRATE (Del Rey, 318 pp., $28), she goes full-blown horror. The book follows Montse, a sound editor navigating the macho culture of the film industry in Mexico City in the ’90s, and her best friend, Tristán, a soap opera star whose career is withering, as they help a horror director shoot a scene that’s really a ritual to break an awful curse. It’s a creepy, fast-paced tale filled with Nazis on the run and more. The novel is also Mexican to the core — it celebrates the country’s history, culture and films. This book pulls you in with its lovable, deeply flawed characters and gripping plot, and wows you with its eerie atmosphere and deft blend of historical fiction, horror and black magic….

(12) THE HOLE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In this week’s Science journal there is an interesting piece that may explain the dark matter conundrum. Could tiny, primordial black holes made during the Big Bang, hiding in stars account for the missing mass??? “Do tiny black holes from cosmic dawn hide within giant stars?”

“…Might itty-bitty black holes from the dawn of time be lurking in the hearts of giant stars? The idea is not so far-fetched “

This month, an enormous dark and cool spot, known as a coronal hole, opened up on the Sun’s surface—almost as if it were being swallowed by a black hole.

(13) CHRISTMAS SF BOOKS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It’s that time of year again to remind folk seeking SF/F books for themselves or as Christmas presents for others that the SF² Concatenation seasonal news page has forthcoming Science Fiction and forthcoming fantasy book listings from the major SF/F book imprints over here in Brit Cit. Back when last season’s news page was posted, these titles were all forthcoming but now, with the festive season fast approaching, most of these are now out. With just six shopping days to Christmas, there’s just time to order from your favourite genre bookshop. Happy Crimble…

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

Mike Resnick Memorial Award for Short Fiction 2023 Finalists

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Mike Glyer

Mike Resnick at Imaginales 2016 in France.

The finalists for the 2023 Mike Resnick Memorial Award for the best unpublished science fiction short story by a new author were announced on July 20.

The award is sponsored by Galaxy’s Edge (published by Arc Manor) and Dragon Con. The winner will be announced at Dragon Con during the annual Dragon Awards ceremony.

FINALISTS FOR THE 2023 AWARD

“For the Great and Immortal” by Daniel Burnbridge (South Africa)
“Spare Parts” by M. Thomas Diskint (Unknown)
“Just Another Day” by Cecilia Kang (Singapore)
“Lag” by Pierre-Alexandre Sicart (Taiwan)
“Deep Sadness” by Sophia Tao (United States)

The first-place winner will get a trophy, a cash award of $250 and have their story bought (at the magazine’s prevailing rate) by Galaxy’s Edge for publication in the magazine. The second-place winner will be given a prize of $100 and the third-place winner a prize of $50.

The members of the finalist judging panel were Nancy Kress, Sheree Renée Thomas, Jody Lynn Nye, Lois McMaster Bujold, and William B. Fawcett.

Pixel Scroll 11/14/22 One Scroll Makes You Pixel, The Other Makes You Smaug

Posted on November 14, 2022 by Mike Glyer

(1) DESTINATION FOR THE STARS? The New York Times’ Blake Gopnik reports that last week Christie’s auction house broke records by selling more than $1.5 billion in art from the estate of Paul G. Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft who died in 2018. Although a lot of high art went under the hammer, his pop culture holdings, including sf art, did not and may have a different fate.

… It all made me think of Allen as the kind of person who might have enjoyed buying, and owning, a $15 million Stradivarius violin and a $12 million Mickey Mantle baseball card and a $10 million stamp from British Guiana.

But there was one work in the sale — a real outlier — that meshed with stronger, more focused feelings that I seemed to glimpse when I met with Allen. Hanging among pieces by the certified geniuses of Western “high” art at Christie’s sat a dreamy, sunset scene of teen-girls-in-nature, painted in 1926 by the American Maxfield Parrish, best known for his truly great work in commercial illustration. It called to mind the tremendous excitement that Allen showed, a decade ago, when he had me look at a series of paintings that had been used, sometime in the 1950s or ’60s, I’d guess, for reproduction on the cover of science-fiction novels or magazines: I remember seeing weird Martian landscapes, galactic skies and maybe a rocket ship or two.

I can’t confirm those memories, right off the bat, because none of those pictures ended up at Christie’s. (Even though you could say that Allen’s Botticelli has some extraterrestrial strangeness to it, if only because of its distance from today’s culture, and that his paintings by Salvador Dalí and Jacob Hendrik Pierneef might work with stories by Philip K. Dick.) But I do remember that in our interview Allen’s enthusiasm for those objects from so-called “popular” culture seemed much more intense, and heartfelt, than the feelings he expressed for masterpieces that had cost him thousands of times more.

And that may be born out in the future that seems in store for those sci-fi objects, different from the fate of the ones sold into private hands at Christie’s. Last month, a spokesperson for Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, founded by Allen in 2000 — his sister Jody Allen is its current chair — told The Times that more than 4,000 objects of un-fine art and culture from the Allen estate, valued at some $20 million, were due to end up among its holdings, and I can only hope that the sci-fi paintings will be among them. (A representative from Vulcan, the Allen company in charge of his estate, later weighed in to say that the bequest to MoPOP was not final and that Vulcan could not confirm the exact number or type of objects in it. As when their boss was alive, his Vulcans play their cards close to their chests.)…

(2) AO3’S FANZINE SCAN HOSTING PROJECT. “AO3’s fanfiction preservation project: Archivists are digitizing zines to save fan history” reports Slate.

Archive of Our Own is probably best known as the place to read fans’ carefully crafted Harry Potter prequels or Lord of the Rings stories millions of words long. But the fanfiction website also has a lesser known, though no less important mission: to save older fanfic that’s at risk of disappearing. A new initiative, the Fanzine Scan Hosting Project, aims to make fan stories and art from physical fanzines accessible through the Archive, preserving pieces of history previously confined to university libraries, scattered eBay sales, and forgotten corners of attics….

Over the last year or so, however, Open Doors’ Fan Culture Preservation Project has expanded, finally giving them room to launch the Fanzine Scan Hosting Project. So far, they’re making their way through the backlog of scans that Zinedom has already accumulated, which Dawn estimates is “a couple thousand.”

These came from various sources, with Dawn doing a lot of outreach herself simply by searching Facebook for names she came across in zines and making phone calls. Janet Quarton, a Scottish Star Trek zine publisher and preservationist, scanned about 500 zines herself in 2013. But even Zinedom’s digital collection is only a fragment of what’s out there. One Zinedom participant has a collection of around 8,000 physical zines from the Star Trek fandom alone, and digs out the appropriate copies if Dawn is contacted by someone looking to save something in particular.

Open Doors is now preparing to post on the Archive those zines from Zinedom’s backlog which they already have permission to share. Some of these overlap with online zine archives that they’ve been previously importing, like the Kirk/Spock archive. But new requests and permissions have also been coming in since the announcement, and it will be an ongoing process, with volunteers working hard to convert and edit each individual zine.

(3) THE RIGHT WORD? Nisi Shawl was still in search of an answer that hits the spot when I looked at Facebook this afternoon:

What’s the word for the kind of apology you get that blames you for what went wrong?

(4) HORROR WRITING VETERANS. The Horror Writers Association blog has been running a “Veterans in Horror Spotlight” series. Here’s an example: “Veterans in Horror: Interview with Jonathan Gensler”.

What role, if any, did reading and writing play during your military service?

I still have stacks of my journals from the whole nine-year period sitting on my bookshelf, unread to this day. I had written poetry and journaled most of my teenage years up to that point, but when I got out of the service I stopped journaling and writing almost completely for reasons I haven’t quite grasped. That was over 15 years ago. Reading, on the other hand is something I have never stopped doing. These combat deployments were well before I had anything like an e-reader, so it was physical books all the way. I must have lugged around a ridiculous amount of books with me. The big ones that hit me the hardest while deployed are still some of my favorites: Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Epictetus’ The Enchiridion, my first readings of Ender’s Game and that series. I got my first copy of House of Leaves while deployed to Iraq and that copy is scrawled with my own footnotes and reflections, and is falling apart at the seams. And then of course, King finished out The Dark Tower while I was deployed so I had those tomes sent to me and to tote around as well. So, yeah, I filled my spare hours with both reading and writing, quite a bit of both.

Here are the links to the rest of the series.

(5) BOOKSTORE REBOUNDS FROM ARSON ATTACK. “L.A. book emporium the Iliad recovering from mysterious fire” reports the Los Angeles Times. The bookstore’s GoFundMe has been an enormous success. The owner asked for $5,000 to cover his insurance deductible. “The response has topped $34,000, sparing him the need to file a claim at all.”

…The cause of the blaze remains unknown. Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Erik Scott said it has been ruled undetermined.

[Iliad owner] Weinstein said he believes an arsonist started the fire. It appeared that books the store leaves outside for the community to browse were stacked in a pyramidal shape next to the entry door and lit, he said.

An inscrutable motive was suggested by 15 to 20 copies of a flyer Weinstein said he found taped to the sides of the building. It was a collage of conspiratorial references — the Irish and South African flags, a photo of the burned-out cabin where policeman-turned-killer Christopher Dorner died, an address of a nearby home, and a handwritten letter attributed to Alex Cox, a deceased figure in a complex family homicide case depicted in a Netflix documentary….

(6) AMAZON WORKFORCE CUTS COMING. Reuters has learned “Amazon to lay off thousands of employees”. (And last week, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc said it would cut more than 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce.)

… The cuts, earlier reported by the New York Times, would represent about 3% of Amazon’s corporate staff. The exact number may vary as businesses within Amazon review their priorities, the source told Reuters.

The online retailer plans to eliminate jobs in its devices organization, which makes voice-controlled “Alexa” gadgets and home-security cameras, as well as in its human-resources and retail divisions, the person said. Amazon’s time frame for informing staff remained unclear….

(7) THE ART OF FANHISTORY. Garth Spencer’s name was chosen from the hat to be Corflu Pangloss’ Guest of Honour. He has published the speech he gave “revealing the hideous basic truths of fandom” in Obdurate Eye #21.

…There was a time when I thought every other country seems to have a published fanhistory; why shouldn’t a Canadian fanhistory be published? Maybe I could compile it, from any information I could gather. Then I got strange responses like “Who are you? Why are you asking me questions? Who sent you? I’m not responsible!” So, I learned that There Are Things Fans Must Not Put on Record. More to the point, my search to find out what people can be expected to do, when to expect it, and how to defend yourself, is not the first thing people think of when they think of fanhistory….

(8) A MEMORY PROMPT. Daytonian in Manhattan’s “The Lost ‘Furness House’ — 34 Whitehall Street” is an article about the NYC headquarters building for the steamship line A. Bertram Chandler once worked for.

In 1891, Christopher Furness, owner of the Furness Line of steamships, and Henry Withy, head of the shipbuilding firm Edward Withy & Co., merged their businesses to form Furness, Withy & Co., Ltd. Starting out with 18 vessels, by the outbreak of World War I, it sailed more than 200–and it was ready for a new New York City branch office building….

Andrew Porter reminds readers that he published Chandler’s autobiographical “Around the World in 23,741 Days” in Algol 31. You can read it here.

…One very early—but remarkably vivid—memory I have is of a Zeppelin raid on London during World War I. can still see the probing searchlights, like the questing antennae of giant insects and, sailing serenely overhead, high in the night sky, that slim, silvery cigar. I can’t remember any bombs; I suppose that none fell anywhere near where I was. It is worth remarking that in those distant days, with aerial warfare in its infancy, civilians had not yet learned to run for cover on the approach of raiders but stood in the streets, with their children, to watch the show….

(9) READ COMPLETE MOORE REMARKS ON KEVIN O’NEILL. [Item by Danny Sichel.] At the request of the New York Times, Alan Moore wrote an obit for Kevin O’Neill which was too long to publish. Jeet Heer posted it to Twitter.(O’Neill did the art for Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.)

The New York Times asked Alan Moore for an obituary statement about his longtime collaborator Kevin O'Neill. Moore being Moore, he wrote a lovely 800 words far too long to use. Here it is. pic.twitter.com/GilMT3wGxV
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 13, 2022

(10) WOOSTER EULOGY. Philanthropy Daily, where he was a contributor, paid tribute to him in “Martin Morse Wooster, RIP”.

…In addition to writing for Philanthropy Daily, Martin was a senior fellow at the Capital Research Center, and contributed significantly to research on philanthropy and especially the issue of donor intent. Martin’s contributions to questions around philanthropy, charity, and donor intent can scarcely be overstated. How Great Philanthropists Failed remains the leading book on donor intent and the history of failed philanthropic legacies.

Martin’s work has appeared everywhere from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Reason, and numerous other publications.

Martin will be sorely missed by all of us at Philanthropy Daily and countless others who have benefited from his important work.

(11) MEMORY LANE.

1985 — [By Cat Eldridge.] Shadow Chasers

Before we get started on talking about today’s essay, may I note that this was the day fifty-eight years ago that Santa Claus Conquers The Martians premiered was well? It was considered one of the worst genre films ever released, bar none.

Thirty-seven years ago this evening a series premiered on ABC, receiving almost no notice: Shadow Chasers. Let’s talk about the show before we turn to a brief autopsy on its numbers.

LOOK— I SEE BIGFOOT COMING WITH SPOILERS!

British anthropologist Jonathan MacKensie (Trevor Eve who played Peter Boyd in the excellent Waking the Dead forensic series) works for the fictional Georgetown Institute Paranormal Research Unit (PRU). MacKenzie’s department head, Dr. Julianna Moorhouse (Nina Foch), withholds a research grant to force him into investigating what she says is a haunting involving a teenage boy. He is paired with flamboyant tabloid reporter Edgar “Benny” Benedek.

Benny and Jonathan do not get along, but manage to solve the case without killing each other. The episodes continued in this vein, with Jonathan and Benny grudgingly learning to respect and admire each other, in the fashion of American cop shows.

LOOK IT WASN’T REALLY BIGFOOT, WAS IT?

Now for the rating autopsy I promised.

So understand that it was on ABC as I said for just ten episodes of its sad existence with the last four shows being broadcast solely on the Armed Forces network. Just how bad was its existence? It was the lowest-rated of a one hundred and six programs during the 1985-1986 TV season.

Why so, you ask? Well that’s easy. It was broadcast against NBC’s The Cosby Show and Family Ties and CBS’s Magnum P.I. and, later on, Simon & Simon on CBS. It didn’t stand a chance.

Indeed, local ABC affiliates within a few weeks in started preempting the series for other programming.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born November 14, 1907 — Astrid Lindgren. Creator of the Pippi Longstocking series and, at least in the States, lesser known Emil i Lönneberga, Karlsson-on-the-Roof, and the Six Bullerby Children series as well. In January 2017, she was calculated to be the world’s eighteenth most translated author, and the fourth most translated children’s writer after Enid Blyton, H. C. Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. There have been at least forty video adaptations of her works over the decades mostly in Swedish but Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter was an animated series in Japan recently. (Died 2002.)
Born November 14, 1932 — Alex Ebel. He did the poster for the first Friday the 13th film, and his cover illustration for The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin published by Ace Books in 1975 is considered one of the best such illustrations done. I’m also very impressed with The Dispossessed cover he did as well as his Planet of Exile cover too. His work for magazines includes Heavy Metal, Space Science Fiction and Fantastic Story Magazine. (Died 2013.)
Born November 14, 1950 — Elliot S. Maggin, 72. A writer for DC Comics during the Bronze and early Modern ages of comics where he helped shaped the Superman character. Most of his work was on Action Comics and Superman titles though he did extensive work elsewhere including, of course, on the Batman titles.
Born November 14, 1951 — Beth Meacham, 71. In 1984, she became an editor for Tor Books, where she rose to the position of editor-in-chief. After her 1989 move to the west coast, she continued working for Tor as an executive editor which she just retired from. She does have one novel, co-written with Tappan King, entitled Nightshade Book One: Terror, Inc. and a handful of short fiction. A Reader’s Guide to Fantasy that she co-wrote wrote Michael Franklin and Baird Searles was nominated for a Hugo at L.A. Con II. She has been nominated for six Hugos as Best Professional Editor or Best Editor Long Form.
Born November 14, 1959 — Paul McGann, 63. Yes, he only did one film as the eighth incarnation of the Doctor in the 1996 Doctor Who: The Television Movie, but he has reprised that role in numerous audio dramas, and the 2013 short film entitled The Night of the Doctor. He also appeared in “The Five(ish) Doctors” reboot. Other genre appearances include The Pit and the Pendulum: A Study in Torture, Alien 3, the excellent FairyTale: A True Story, Queen of the Damned and Lesbian Vampire Killers.
Born November 14, 1963 — Cat Rambo, 59 . All around great person. Past President of SFWA. She was editor of Fantasy Magazine for four years which earned her a 2012 nomination in the World Fantasy Special Award: Non-Professional category. Her novelette Carpe Glitter won a 2020 Nebula, and her short story “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain” was a 2013 Nebula Award finalist. Her impressive fantasy Tabat Quartet quartet begins withBeasts of Tabat, Hearts of Tabat, and Exiles of Tabat, and will soon be completed by Gods of Tabat. She also writes amazing short fiction as well. The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers is her long-standing school for writers that provides her excellent assistance in learning proper writing skills through live and on demand classes about a range of topics. You can get details here. Her latest, You Sexy Thing, was a stellar listen indeed and I’m very much looking forward to the sequel.
Born November 14, 1969 — Daniel Abraham, 53. Co-author with Ty Franck of The Expanse series which won a Hugo at CoNZealand. Under the pseudonym M. L. N. Hanover, he is the author of the Black Sun’s Daughter urban fantasy series. Abraham collaborated with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois to write the Hunter’s Run. Abraham also has adapted several of Martin’s works into comic books and graphic novels, such as A Game of Thrones: The Graphic Novel, and has contributed to Wild Cards anthologies. By himself, he picked up a Hugo nomination at Denvention 3 for his “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” novelette.

(13) COMICS SECTION.

Speed Bump knows of one effect that’s not special at all!

(14) HAPPY NEW YEAR. Lois McMaster Bujold pointed out to her Goodreads followers that the next Penric book Knot of Shadows garnered a starred review in Publishers Weekly. The Subterranean Press hardcover is due to be released on January 1. [Update: Bujold’s author page shows the Kindle edition of Knot of Shadows came out last year in October, so this will be a new hardcover edition, but not a new release per se.]

Temple sorcerer Penric and demon Desdemona return in this page-turner fantasy mystery from Bujold, the 11th in the series (after The Assassins of Thasalon) and possibly the best yet. Penric and Desdemona, the chaos elemental who shares his body, are joined by Alixtra and her own demon, Arra, to help the healers of the Mother’s Order in Vilnoc with an unusual case: a corpse has revived and is now shouting gibberish. Penric discovers that the victim is not one but two dead people—a man slain by death magic and a ghost that has begun animating his body. Death magic is so rare that even Desdemona has never witnessed it performed. A supplicant offers their own life to ensure that the Bastard, Penric’s god, will kill their target. This ritual opens multiple quandaries: Who is the corpse? Were they the supplicant or the target? And where is the other party to the death prayer? Penric remarks that “this case is bound to get ugly and sad”—and indeed it does, in the most creative of ways. Bujold has her protagonists combine mundane and mystical investigative methods to unravel the questions at hand, creating a truly enticing mystery. Series fans and new readers alike will want to savor this intricate , unusual case.

(15) WORLD MUSIC. “Ludwig Göransson Discusses His Globe-Trotting ‘Wakanda Forever’ Score” in Variety.

… The challenge, Göransson says, was to find a new sound for the African kingdom of Wakanda and its grief-stricken people while also trying to imagine the sound of Prince Namor’s undersea kingdom of Talokan, whose origins lay in Mexico’s ancient Mayan civilization.

Göransson consulted musical archaeologists and spent two weeks in Mexico City collaborating with Mexican musicians. He auditioned “hundreds of ancient instruments,” from clay flutes to unusual percussion instruments, and saw paintings of Mayans playing on turtle shells, among dozens of similar musically inspirational moments. He discovered the “flute of truth,” a high-pitched whistle-like woodwind instrument, and vowed to incorporate the “death whistle,” which has a piecing sound like a human scream.

By day, Göransson recorded with Mexican musicians, and by night, he was recording with Mexican singers and rappers. “I was using the morning sessions to put together beats and songs that we would use later that day with the artists,” the composer reports….

(16) ON THE GRIPPING HAND. Leaflock™ The Ent™ from WETA Workshop is only fifteen hundred dollars… The image of this veteran of the attack on Isengard “Contains two (and a half) Orcs, squashed, pinned and/or crushed by the Ent’s wrath.”

(17) MAKE IT GO. And if you have any money left after buying the Ent, you can order the Volkswagen-built Star Trek captain’s chair that goes 12mph – assuming it truly exists, which the Verge says should not be taken for granted.

…Assuming all of this is real, of course. Volkswagen has a recent history of lying to people. This time, the company seems to be fairly transparent that it’s a one-off marketing stunt, while also suggesting that “it will be available for test drives at various locations.” Hopefully that means citizens of Norway will soon be able to prove its capabilities….

(18) COMING FROM DUST. The short film Jettison will be released online December 7 by DUST & Film Shortage.

A restless young woman ships off to fight an interstellar war, only to struggle with the effects of being cut off from her home by both time and space.

(19) BELA WINS. “The 20 best horror villains of all time”, according to Entertainment Weekly.

…But for every icon of the macabre, there are a much larger number of deranged dentists, serial-killing Santa Clauses, and sorority house murderers who don’t quite rank as highly in the frightening food chain. In fact, it’s been a while since a character came along and asserted his or herself as the next count of the Carpathians or chainsaw-wielding maniac. Whoever steps up next has some big shoes to fill, because these are the crème de la crème when it comes to history-making evildoers….

1. Dracula

Dracula is the most influential horror villain of all time. The Count stalks like a slasher, murders in droves like a serial killer, and is the inspiration for every single vampire movie made after 1931. Dracula’s vast powers, and his immortality, make him the most formidable of any killer on this list, and while Bela Lugosi is most often associated with the character, it was Sir Christopher Lee who made the Count the vile, sadistic creature of the night.

Lee gave the character a grandiose feel thanks to his imposing height, and there was a sexuality the villain exuded which made him irresistible to women. Unlike his colleague and friend, Peter Cushing, Lee loathed reprising the role because Hammer wasn’t faithful to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. “I wanted to play Stoker’s character,” Lee explained. “It wasn’t remotely like the book.”

You’ll also enjoy Horror of Dracula (1958).

(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Dream Foundry has released the video of “Fantasy? On MY Spaceship?! Blending Science and Sorcery” on their YouTube channel. Features panelists Valerie Valdes, Tobias Buckell, and Bogi Takács.

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Danny Sichel, David Doering, Andrew (not Werdna), Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 6/30/22 Pixel Scroll Them From Orbit, It’s The Only Way To Be Sure

Posted on June 30, 2022 by Mike Glyer

(1) PKD IS READY FOR HIS CLOSEUP. A movie will be made about the life of Philip K. Dick announces The Hollywood Reporter: “Blade Runner Author Philip K. Dick Gets ‘Only Apparently Real’ Biopic”. It will be based in part on the book written by Paul Williams, the one-time literary executor of Dick’s estate and friend of the author.

…His own life was just as mind-bending as his work, filled with drug use and hallucinations, a suicide attempt and letters to the FBI, paranormal experiences and believing he was living parallel lives in two different time periods, one in the present and the other in the Roman Empire.
Only Apparently Real centers on a break-in at Dick’s house that took place in the early ’70s. He was in the midst of his fourth divorce, trying to give up amphetamines, battling writer’s block and possibly being spied on by the United States government. Then his house was ransacked, his safe blown open and his manuscripts were stolen. But then again, maybe they weren’t and maybe there was never a break-in.
“His life was as surreal as his books,” says Shestack. “He was a high-level functioning person and you never know, even when reading his journals, what is real and what isn’t.”
The story also tackles what Dick himself described as a tragic theme that pervaded his life: the death in infancy of his twin sister, Jane, and the reenactment of it over and over again. Dick attributed many of his psychological issues and personal life challenges to her death, including his attachment anxieties….

(2) BRANCHING OUT. Lois McMaster Bujold received some major league help in expanding her family tree she told Facebook readers.

A while ago, I was invited to be a guest subject on a website called WikiTree, which is an online association of dedicated genealogy enthusiasts. https://www.wikitree.com/ They run a group effort called WikiTree Challenge, in which they turn their skills loose upon the guest’s family tree for one week, and compete to see who can find out the most previously unknown information about the guest’s ancestors; sort of a cross between Roots and Time Team, crowdsourcing genealogy research.

The link to the Bujold entry on WikiTree is: Lois (McMaster) McMaster Bujold (b. 1940s)

The Bujold page is linked to WikiTree’s page which collects information about a number of well-known sf writers – “Which Science Fiction author are you most closely connected to?”

The experience inspired Bujold to assemble the diaries of three Civil War era family members and make them available for sale: The Gerould Family of New Hampshire in the Civil War: Two Diaries and a Memoir.

“When family history meets history…
“This chapbook is a collection of eyewitness historical documents from the American Civil War handed down through descendants of the Gerould family. Two transcribed pocket diaries for the year 1864 describe the day-by-day tribulations of young Union navy surgeon Dr. Martin Gerould, assigned to the ill-fated ironclad Eastport in the Red River Campaign; and his aging mother Cynthia Locke Gerould, the wife of a clergyman, back home in New Hampshire. The increasingly gripping cross-illumination of the paired accounts is further rounded out by the later-written memoir of Martin’s eldest brother Reverend (soon to be Private) Samuel L. Gerould, detailing his experiences in the Fourteenth New Hampshire Volunteers: three voices from the past speaking directly, in their own words.
“Editor Lois McMaster Bujold is a well-known science fiction and fantasy writer, and the great-granddaughter of Samuel L. Gerould.”
With my added introductions and other material, it ended up running about 42k words, about the size of a long novella. Really, it was a lucky intersection of stimulus, time, technology, and ebook skillset, most of which I’d not had until recently.

(3) THOSE THRILLING DAYS OF YESTERYEAR. You can now see video of the “Fandom through the Generations Panel” from the recent Star Wars Celebration Anaheim 2022.

Which era did you enter into Star Wars fandom – classic, prequel, The Clone Wars/Rebels, sequels? Join fandom tour guides Richard and Sarah Woloski from Skywalking Through Neverland as they take you through four decades of fandom. Featured guests include Craig Miller (Former Director – Fan Relations for Lucasfilm), Dan Madsen (Founder – Star Wars Insider), and Matt Martin (current Lucasfilm Senior Creative) who share stories of the ever-evolving fan communities.

(4) CLARION WEST UPDATE. In Clarion West’s Six-Week Summer Workshop, the class is finishing up Week 2 with P. Djèlí Clark. Listen to him read from A Master of Djinn for the Summer of Science Fiction & Fantasy Reading Series on YouTube.

They’re now heading into Week 3 with instructor Fonda Lee. She will be reading on July 5th at the Seattle Public Library; register here to attend either in-person or online.

(5) INTERZONE MIGRATES. TTA Press has announced that the UK prozine “Interzone Has A New Publisher”

From issue #294 Interzone will be edited by Gareth Jelley and published by MYY Press.
Buy a 6-issue print subscription to Interzone and get a high-quality full-colour magazine packed full of mind-expanding fiction and nonfiction delivered directly to your door bimonthly, all for just €47 (price includes VAT and free delivery worldwide).
New subscriptions begin with issue #294.
If you are renewing or extending a TTA Press subscription, we will combine them to ensure you don’t miss out on an issue.
SUBSCRIBE TO INTERZONE
Many thanks to all the collaborators, contributors, readers, and everybody else who helped and supported us through the past one hundred issues. Interzone #292/293, our 100th and final issue, should be purchased as normal from the TTA Shop.

(6) INTERZONE DIGITAL. Meanwhile, Ansible Links alerted readers to the creation of Interzone Digital – mind-bending fantastika from all over the planet, and a web page that concisely explains, “Interzone Digital is like Interzone, but digital.” They’re open for story submissions.

(7) IN THE BLACK FANTASTIC. The Guardian’s Aindrea Emelife visits an Afrofuturism exhibit at a London gallery: “In the Black Fantastic review – reaching for tomorrow’s art world”

Hayward Gallery, London
Eleven contemporary artists inspired by Afrofuturism consider possible futures with a hopeful, fizzing energy
Of the many themes addressed by In the Black Fantastic, a new exhibition inspired by Afrofuturism at the the Hayward Gallery, the negotiations of the Black body is perhaps the most resonant.
Take Chain Reaction, a dramatic new commission by the American sculptor Nick Cave, which sees casts of the artist’s arm, joined together in both unity and struggle, hang from the ceiling, fingers grasping for each other. Elsewhere, Cave’s Soundsuits – colourful costumes that cover the wearer’s face and body – loom with unsettling yet celebratory fervour. When in movement, as part of Cave’s performances, they ensure that the Black male body is seen. It is no coincidence that Cave’s first Soundsuit was made in 1992 following the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles. Soundsuit 9:29, the latest iteration on display here, is a homage to George Floyd and the duration of time former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck. For Cave, taking up space and sound is a form of protest and a means of envisioning new realities.
With its hopeful, fizzing energy, this collection of work by 11 contemporary artists from the African diaspora is important because it offers a glimpse of the way ahead….

(8) A HOLE NEW WORLD. Gizmodo nominates these as “The 8 Worst Apocalypse Bunkers in Science Fiction”. BEWARE SPOILERS.

If the world were to end, you’d probably want to be as sequestered as possible—preferably underground with a freshly stocked pantry, your loved ones close by, and plenty of stuff to distract you from the fiery inferno outside your door….This list compiles some of the worst, most grotesque, and eeriest bunkers in recent years, with shelters that tried everything from draining people of their blood to experimenting with cryogenics….

(9) IF YOU KNOW WHERE THEY ARE, THAT’S ALL THAT MATTERS. The Atlantic’s Leslie Kendall Dye contends that “The Organization of Your Bookshelves Tells Its Own Story”.

….Now I use “The Library of Babel” as a metaphor for the landscape of my own library. My books are not organized alphabetically, or, for the most part, by genre. The arrangement seems to have been made entirely at random, unless you know the quirk by which it was conceived. Books are placed next to one another for companionship, based on some kinship or shared sensibility that I believe ties them together. The Little Prince is next to Act One, by Moss Hart, because I think Hart and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry convey, in their respective works, a similar purity of heart and openness of expression. The Little Prince is a French fable set primarily in the Sahara; Act One is a memoir of a poor Jewish boy’s journey to Broadway. But to me, they are about the same thing: finding what matters in life, and shutting out all that is of no consequence….

(10) NOT ELEMENTARY AT ALL. At CrimeReads, Erika Kobayashi discusses what it was like having parents who were determined to translate all of the Sherlock Holmes stories into Japanese. “My Poison Snake: Erika Kobayashi on Growing Up in a Household of Sherlock Translators”.

…Papa and Mama would sit in the kitchen munching senbei crackers.
They were peering intently at foreign-language books spread out before them: the stories of Sherlock Holmes, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Papa had once been a doctor, and Mama had once worked at a bank.
But with the arrival of their fourth daughter—that is, me—they decided to quit their jobs and devote themselves full time to translating the stories of Sherlock Holmes.
Their dream was to translate all sixty works—the entire Canon….

(11) MEMORY LANE.

2011 – [By Cat Eldridge.] On this date, Men in Black: The Series (also known as, depending on where you were watching it, as MIB: The Series, MIB: The Animated Series, and Men in Black: The Animated Series) ended its four year run. The date hereafter refers to its run on KId’s WB.

The animated series was developed by Duane Capizzi, Jeff Kline and Richard Raynis. Cappizzi was the writer/producer of the animated The Batman, a series I really liked. Kline was co-executive producer of Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, and Raynis was the same.

The show is set in an alternate timeline to the Men in Black reality with the major differ differences being that Agent K is still active, and Agent J is still regarded as a rookie. It has a more than new characters and considerably new technology, something you can do with an animated series.

Charles Napier is Zed and Keith Daimondc as Jay are the only voice performers that are in almost every episodes. Patrick Fraley and Patrick Pinney as the Wormguys voice their characters in all but a handful of episodes. George Berger and Ed O’Ross both play K.

It lasted for fifty- three episodes over four seasons.

Yes, I’ve seen more than a handful of episodes. No, it doesn’t have the energy of the films, particularly the first film, but it is reasonably done. The closest comparison I can make to another series is the animated Beatlejuice. You really aren’t going to catch the feel of the original performers, are you?

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a stellar eighty six percent rating.

(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Born June 30, 1905 — Nestor Paiva. Sometimes it only takes one film or series for a performer to get a Birthday write-up from me. Paiva makes it for Lucas the boat captain in The Creature from the Black Lagoon and its oft-forgotten sequel Revenge of the Creature. Though they were hardly his only genre roles, as his first role was in the early Forties as an uncredited prison guard in Tarzan’s Desert Mystery, and he’d be in many a genre film and series over the decades as Prof. Etienne Lafarge in The Mole People, as the saloon owner in (I kid you not!) Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, Felicity’s Father in The Spirit Is Willing, Captain Grimby in “The Great Treasure Hunt” of The Addams Family and a Doorman in the “Our Man in Leotards” episode of Get Smart. (Died 1966.)
Born June 30, 1920 — Sam Moskowitz. SF writer, critic, and historian. Chair of the very first World Science Fiction Convention held in NYC in 1939. He barred several Futurians from the con in what was later called the Great Exclusion Act. In the Fifties, he edited Science-Fiction Plus, a short-lived genre magazine owned by Hugo Gernsback, and would edit several dozen anthologies, and a few single-author collections, most published in the Sixties and early Seventies. He was the “mystery guest of honor” at Clevention in 1955. His most enduring legacy was as a historian of the genre with such works as The Immortal Storm, Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of “The Scientific Romance” in the Munsey Magazines, 1912–1920 and Hugo Gernsback: Father of Science Fiction. (Died 1997.)
Born June 30, 1938 — Jeri Taylor, 84. Scriptwriter and producer who wrote many episodes of the Next Generation and Voyager series. To say she was a scriptwriter is a bit of an understatement — she wrote one hundred and sixty-eight of the Voyager episodes, all but four that aired. She only wrote thirteen episodes of Next Gen and three of Deep Space Nine.
Born June 30, 1959 — Vincent D’Onofrio, 63. His long running role is Detective Goren on Law and Order: Criminal Intent which is in no way genre. He was Kingpin in that very good Daredevil series, Edgar the Bug in the only truly great Men in Black film to date and Vic Hoskins in Jurassic World. He also was Jason Whitney / Jerry Ashton in The Thirteenth Floor, loosely based upon Simulacron-3, a early Sixties novel by Daniel F. Galouye.
Born June 30, 1961 — Diane Purkiss, 61. I’ve not read her Corydon Trilogy she wrote with Michael Dowling, her son, but I can say that At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Nymphs, and Other Troublesome Things is as splendid as the title suggests it is. She’s also written Fairies and Fairy Stories: A History.
Born June 30, 1966 — Peter Outerbridge, 56. Dr. David Sandström in what I think is the underrated ReGenesis series as well being Henrik “Hank” Johanssen in Orphan Black anda recurring role on Millennium as Special Agent Barry Baldwin. He’s also in two series, The Umbrella in a recurring role as The Conductor, and as Calix Niklosin in V-Wars, yet another Netflix SF series.
Born June 30, 1972 — Molly Parker, 50. Maureen Robinson on the current Lost in Space series. One-offs in Nightmare Cafe, The Outer Limits, The Sentinel, Highlander: The Series, Poltergeist: The Legacy, Human Target and she appeared in The Wicker Man asSister Rose / Sister Thorn.

(13) COMICS SECTION.

Lio gets a big reaction when it’s his turn on “Story Sharing Day.”
Hagar The Horrible shows a couple with conflicting priorities.
Pearls Before Swine shows a possible reason why some writers become recluses.

(14) MS. MARVEL ASSESSMENT. An NPR roundup shows “Many Pakistanis dig the cultural nods on ‘Ms. Marvel’ but are mixed on casting”.

…”The portrayal of a Pakistani household is just right,” wrote Ozan Khan, a lifestyle editor for The Correspondent PK, a digital news organization in Pakistan, on Twitter. “Some references [are] very relatable.”
At home, Kamala’s father watches TV highlights of old cricket matches, a sport that people are fanatical about in Pakistan. Aunties (or as Kamala and Nakia call these nosy community women, “illumin-aunties” — because they see and know everything) gossip about family members and spy on their neighbors. And a cover of the 1966 Pakistani pop hit, “Ko Ko Korina” plays in the background while Kamala and her mom shop for her clothes and jewelry for her brother’s engagement in Jersey City’s South Asian markets.
Many Muslim Pakistanis love the religious touches on the show, too. “It’s the most positive representation of Pakistanis and Muslims out there right now,” wrote Zunaira Inam Khan, a Pakistani social media influencer, on Twitter.
…But our sampling of interviewees did voice criticisms. Some wish that more of the cast had Pakistani heritage. While many of the actors identify as Pakistani (Iman Vellani, the actor who plays Kamala, is Pakistani Canadian, while Nimra Bucha, Samina Ahmed, Mehwish Hayat are regulars in Pakistani TV and film) — the actors who play Kamala’s parents, Zenobia Shroff and Mohan Kapur, are Indian.
Shroff and Kapur “don’t seem like Pakistani parents, quite honestly. And the fact that they are Indian actors is indicative of that,” says Rehman.
“When Shroff spoke, I could hear inflections of a Mumbai accent. She didn’t sound like a Pakistani mother.”
Indian actors from the Bollywood industry dominate South Asian representation in TV and film, wrote @ShabanaMir1 on Twitter. So why did the parents have to be played by Indian actors? “[Disney+], we have a ton of great Pakistani actors,” she tweeted.

(15) DC, THE NEXT GENERATION. DC dropped this trailer about the son of Superman and the son of Batman teaming up. “Batman and Superman: Battle of the Super Sons”.

(16) DREDD ARTIST. The Guardian looks at the “Dredd zone: the anarchic world of comic-book artist Steve Dillon”.

…Dillon’s adopted home town of Luton is currently running an exhibition at the Hat House’s Basement Gallery, featuring work from the artist’s early days through to his illustrations for the satirical dystopian lawman Judge Dredd from British weekly comic 2000AD. There are also pages from Preacher and Warrior, the magazine that launched the careers of a number of British comics luminaries in the 1980s.
“Steve has a special place in this town,” says Samuel Javid, creative director at the Culture Trust Luton. “We have roads called Preacher Close and Cassidy Close, some of his ashes are buried here, and his local pub has a picture of him behind the bar, sticking his middle finger up … ”
Ennis, who also collaborated with Dillon on Judge Dredd and Marvel’s gun-toting antihero the Punisher, first got to know the artist in the early 90s. “I recall sitting up with him one night in the spring of 1990, long after everyone else had crashed, and killing off a bottle of Jameson while we talked about what we thought we could do in comics,” Ennis says. “There was an almost audible click as we realised we’d make a good creative partnership. Each of us simply trusted the other to do the job. I didn’t ask him for the impossible – no 10-panel action-packed pages loaded with dialogue – and he turned in perfect storytelling every time.”…

(17) LIVE LONG AND MODEL. Gigi and Bella Hadid have become Vulcans. Photos at the link: “Gigi and Bella Hadid stun runway with partially ‘shaved’ heads” at CNN Style.

Supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid debuted bold new looks Monday, storming a New York runway with bleached eyebrows, short bangs and — what appeared to be — half-shaved heads.
But the sisters’ dramatic transformation was soon revealed to be the work of prosthetics artists, who had altered their appearance with the help of bald caps, wigs and makeup.

(18) YE KEN NOW. NME is agog: “Ryan Gosling wore a Ncuti Gatwa ‘Doctor Who’ t-shirt on ‘Barbie’ set”. And Russell T Davies joked that he’s going to sue the actor over the “illegal” merchandise.

Ryan Gosling has been pictured wearing a t-shirt depicting actor Ncuti Gatwa as Doctor Who while filming on the set of Barbie.
Gatwa, who stars alongside Gosling in director Greta Gerwig’s upcoming film, shared the picture of the t-shirt (designed by fan Matthew Purchase) on Instagram….

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(19) AIN’T THIS THE PITS. La Brea creator and showrunner David Appelbaum discusses the “La Brea Season 2 teaser trailer” with SYFY Wire.

“This season will still largely take place in 10,000 BC. However, we will no longer be telling a concurrent story in modern-day Los Angeles. Instead, we will be telling a story in 1988 Los Angeles,” Appelbaum continued. “We think this will add a new layer of fun and intrigue to the episodes. It’s also a story I don’t think anyone in the audience would have expected when they first started watching the show. We love the idea of keeping our viewers on their toes and never knowing what’s around the next corner.”

The summary that accompanies the trailer says:

La Brea follows an epic family adventure after a massive sinkhole opens in Los Angeles pulling people and buildings into a mysterious and dangerous primeval land where they have no choice but to band together to survive. In season two, the Harris family remains separated as Eve is reeling from her son, Josh, having mistakenly gone through a portal to 1988. What she doesn’t know yet is that her ex-husband, Gavin, and their daughter, Izzy, have landed in prehistoric Seattle and now must brave the elements and animals to make their way to L.A.

(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Ryan George, in the spoiler-packed “Obi-Wan Kenobi Pitch Meeting,” has the producer ask the writer if he has “Star Wars milk…so we can milk the franchise we’ve spent billions of dollars on.” The writer says that Obi-Wan has lost his powers but all he has to do is “think about stuff” and he becomes a Jedi master. The writer also explains that there’s a really logical place in this series for Obi-Wan to kill Darth Vader but doesn’t “because it’s a contract thing. Vader has to be in all the other movies.”

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Daniel Dern, rcade, Rich Horton, Steven French, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Thornton.]

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