(1) NOMMOS SHORTLIST AND MORE. This year’s Worldcon announced activities to look forward to by “The African Speculative Fiction Society (ASFS) at LAcon V”.
We are thrilled to be partnering with the African Speculative Fiction Society at LAcon V!
ASFS presents the annual Nommo Awards, which honor outstanding works of speculative fiction by African writers across the continent and diaspora. This year, ASFS will be announcing the shortlisted works live at LAcon via our Virtual Program! There will be introductions and contributions from the nominees, as well as a discussion about the evolution and global impact of African speculative fiction.
In addition to this Celebrating African Speculative Fiction panel, ASFS will be presenting multiple panels as part of the LAcon V Virtual Program.
The full schedule will be released August 2026.
(2) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to chew on peri-peri chicken with Octothorpe’s John Coxon and Alison Scott in Episode 284 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Two Hugo Award-nominated podcasts collide in the fifth and final episode of Eating the Fantastic recorded during this year’s Eastercon. John Coxon and Alison Scott, two-thirds of the award-winning team behind Octothorpe (absent their equally entertaining cohost Liz Batty) took me on walkabout to a nearby Nando’s so I could experience its peri-peri chicken for the first time — and we recorded not just our meal, but the hikes there and back again.
We discussed the many first-time Eastercon attendees I encountered who were there due to their podcast, Nando’s place in British culture and why it was chosen to be our venue for this episode, what they’re willing to reveal about cohost Liz Batty in her absence, how the coming of COVID-19 kickstarted the creation of Octothorpe, why they didn’t launch an old-school fanzine instead, how the first episode wasn’t even originally intended to be the first episode, why we’re still here considering 90% of podcasts don’t make it past three episodes, how to comment responsibly on fandom while being a part of fandom, the reason their letters of comment section is so important, what changed about the show once they realized people were actually listening, advice for those who’d like to start podcasts of their own, plus much more.
(3) SFF REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup” in the Guardian covers Not With a Bang by Temi Oh; Tillinghast by Clare Cavenagh; Atomic Coffin by Benedict Anning; The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden; and Bad Things Happen Here by Mark Morris.
(4) NOT TO BE READ OUT LOUD. “Silent Movies Jump from Screen to Page in Movie Tie-In Novels” at SFWA’s Planetside.
The first movie tie-in novels date to the rise of silent movies as mass entertainment at the beginning of the 20th century. As with movie tie-in books today, these included both novelizations of screenplays and reissues of published novels illustrated with movie stills.
The novelization of The Adventures of Kathlyn is one of the earliest movie tie-in novels. This serial began on December 29, 1913, and was shown in movie theaters through 1914. One of the action heroines of silent movies, the film’s star, Kathlyn Williams, was famous for performing with big cats. The movie took advantage of her talents and first name. Over the course of 13 episodes, the fictional Kathlyn rescues her explorer father and frees the enslaved population of a mythical kingdom. She traverses jungles, battles wild beasts, outwits the insidious Council of Three, and dodges a forced marriage to a foul prince. Each episode ended with a cliffhanger guaranteed to bring the audience back to enjoy the next installment until the story’s happy resolution.
Harold McGrath, who supplied the original story for the screenplay, wrote the novel published by The Bobbs-Merrill Company. The text was illustrated with black-and-white photos from the film. The frontispiece opposite the title page shows Kathlyn clutching the hunter Bruce, who aids her quest to rescue her father and provides a romantic interest.
Newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times also featured stories illustrated with stills from The Adventures of Kathlyn. This was designed to boost sales of the newspapers, the serial, and the book, cashing in on every possible way to keep the public intrigued by Kathlyn’s trials and tribulations. It was all coordinated, with the Chicago Tribune helping to finance the movie production in hopes of boosting their circulation. The Motion Picture News noted film screenings ended with a reminder to read about Kathlyn in the Sunday newspaper, while the newspaper stories urged fans to go to the “picture theater” to watch the next episode….
(5) WALTER SCOTT PRIZE. The BBC reports “‘Most unusual book’ wins Walter Scott historical fiction prize”.
A book which judges said “may be the most unusual book you read this year” has won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
Alice Jolly’s work The Matchbox Girl tells the story of Adelheid Brunner – a mute autistic patient of Dr Hans Asperger in the now-infamous Vienna Children’s Hospital during the 1930s, while the city is under Nazi occupation….
…Judges praised the “originality, innovation, ambition” of Jolly’s work which “confronts a topic of immense complexity in a gripping tour de force”.
“The Matchbox Girl may be the most unusual book you read this year,” they said. “For its honesty, power and storytelling dexterity, our 2026 winner will also be one of the most important.”
Jolly was part of the first ever all-British shortlist for the award.
Speaking of writing the book, she said: “I remain constantly troubled by that age of old question as to how people who were certainly not wholly ‘evil’ nevertheless found themselves drawn into appalling crimes.
“In 2018, two non-fiction books about the history of autism were published which told wildly differing stories about Dr Asperger. My book started with the simple question – who was Dr Asperger?”.
Dr Asperger is known for his work in child psychiatry and identifying Asperger syndrome, a form of autism, in 1944 – however the term “autistic psychopathy” was used until 1981.
In 1981, the British psychiatrist Lorna Wing introduced the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome.
But documents uncovered in 2018 suggested Dr Asperger sent child patients to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, where they were put to death by the Nazi regime.
Jolly said that as she worked on the book she realised that his forgotten colleagues were “perhaps more interesting than he was”.
She said she became obsessed with “bringing them into the light” and celebrating the ways in which they “struggled to hold onto their research, and their principles, despite finding themselves in the eye of the most evil storm of the 20th Century”.
(6) A JANE YOLEN TRIBUTE. Here is the start of Michael Swanwick’s remembrance, “Jane Yolen, 1939-2026” at Flogging Babel.
I was talking with Jane Yolen once, in her house in St. Andrews, Scotland. I told her how much I admired her prolific output of books–something like 400 then, though it’s grown since. She tried to duck the compliment by saying, “Well, yours are so much longer than mine.”
“I’ve read Owl Moon,” I said. (For those who don’t know, it’s an illustrated story sold as a ‘children’s book’ but actually a gem of a prose poem of a reminiscence, possibly true and possibly not.) “How many drafts did that take?”
“A few hundred,” she admitted.
“I rest my case,” I said….
(7) RONNIE SCHELL (1931-2026). “Ronnie Schell Dead: ‘Gomer Pyle: USMC’ Actor Was 94” reports Deadline.
Ronnie Schell, a prolific TV character actor perhaps best known for his portrayal of the amiable Pvt. Duke Slater, pal of Jim Nabors’ hayseed Gomer Pyle on the ’60s sitcom of that name, died of natural causes today at UCLA Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 94….
He worked a lot – the sff TV shows in his resume included The Girl With Something Extra, Mork & Mindy and Phil of the Future.
His genre films included Disney’s Gus, The Shaggy D.A., and The Devil and Max Devlin.
He provided voices on such animated projects as Jetsons: The Movie as well as TV series including Battle of the Planets and Smurfs.
(8) MARGARET KERRY (1929-2026). “Margaret Kerry Dead: Tinker Bell Model for ‘Peter Pan’ Was 97” – The Hollywood Reporter finds that wasn’t her only genre role.
…As a voice actress, Kerry starred on Clutch Cargo in 1959, Space Angel in 1962-64 and Captain Fathom in 1965 — those cartoons used the Syncro-Vox system, with real human lips superimposed over the animated characters’ mouths — and on The New Three Stooges in 1965. She did live segments with Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Joe DeRita as well. All were for Cambria Productions, a company led by her first husband, Dick Brown.
The 5-foot-2 Kerry had starred alongside Eddie Cantor in If You Knew Susie (1948) and was an assistant dance director on the Gloria DeHaven musical I’ll Get By (1950) when her agent sent her to Disney Studios in Burbank to audition for Peter Pan, she recalled in a 2003 interview with Jim Korkis….
… Kerry got the job, reported for work the next Tuesday and on and off for the next six to nine months, she moved around “a great big soundstage that seemed to go on forever” wearing her own one-piece bathing suit and her hair in a bun and being observed by Marc Davis (one of Walt Disney’s “Nine Old Men”) and other animators.
“There was no one for me to react to. I had to imagine almost everything,” she said. “There was an occasional prop like huge scissors or a wire-frame keyhole or something. Most of the time it was just me pretending to be looking up from under something or walking around.”…
…She appeared as a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) — she said after a studio light caught fire, Mickey Rooney “dragged me into this little two-inch deep stream on the set so I’d be safe from any flames” — and in Our Gang comedy shorts and took dancing lessons from Nico Charisse, husband of Cyd Charisse.
She showed up in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) and The Star Maker (1939) and was a stand-in for Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet (1944), then tap-danced and sang as the daughter of Cantor and Joan Davis’ characters in If You Knew Susie. It was Cantor who gave her the stage name Margaret Kerry….
… “You remember the scene where [Tinker Bell] falls over backward in Wendy’s dresser drawer?” she asked Korkis. “Well, they had me falling over backward onto a mattress. The mattress was about a half-inch thick, or at least it seemed that thick, and I went over backward and went thud. The look of my face of surprise and pain was identical to the one Tink has in the finished film.”…
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born June 12, 1916 – Irwin Allen. (Died 1992.)
So let’s talk about Irwin Allen. While he may be best known for that most spectacular of ocean disaster movies, The Poseidon Adventure, he’s done more than done a reasonable share of genre work.
The first series that he created in the Sixties was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, was based off his film of the same name, which aired on ABC from the fall of 1964 to the spring of 1968 making it the decade’s longest-running American science fiction television series with continuing characters. The one hundred and ten episodes produced included the first thirty-two shot in black-and-white, and last seventy-eight filmed in color.
Next up for him was Lost in Space. Saying it’s based off Johann David Wyss’ The Swiss Family Robinson is really, really stretching things, isn’t it? Be that as it may, the show ran for eighty-three episodes over three seasons on CBS.
Remember The Time Tunnel? Yeah he was responsible for it too. The show ran for one season of thirty episodes from 1966 to 1967 on ABC.
His run of SF series would be concluded with Land of the Giants, a one-hour series that aired on ABC from the fall of 1968 to the spring of 1970. It was filmed in color. It’s worth noting that five novels based on the television series, including three written by Murray Leinster, would be published while the series aired.
A decade later, we have a miniseries on that took Robert Bloch and six other scriptwriters to please Irwin Allen, The Return of Captain Nemo (its theatrical title when a shorter, possibly more coherent version had a screen run was The Amazing Captain Nemo). It has been considered an attempt by him to duplicate the success of his Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. It didn’t.
Finally, I’ll note that he was responsible for it happening in all aspects possible, a music version of Alice in Wonderland. It aired on CBS over two nights in 1985, and it had an amazing cast of Natalie Gregory (Alice here), Red Buttons, Anthony Newley, Jayne Meadows, Carol Channing, Sammy Davis Jr., Roddy McDowall, Ann Jillian, Pat Morita and Robert Morley. It has an extraordinary rating of eighty-five percent over at Rotten Tomatoes.
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- Brewster Rockit has a plan for rejections.
- Wondermark overpaid to be fleeced.
- Yaffle mixes genres.
- xkcd applies the trend of flipping to geology.
(11) ANALYZING THE WHO HIATUS. The New York Times tries to answer the question: “‘Doctor Who’ Is in Limbo. What Does That Mean for Fans?”
What do the changes mean for the future of the series?
Although the show has not been canceled, it appears to have entered an indefinite hiatus.
The Cardiff, Wales-based production company Bad Wolf, whose founders worked with Davies on “Doctor Who” throughout the reboot era, said on Instagram on Wednesday that they were leaving. And Davies, the “It’s A Sin” and “Years and Years” writer who returned to the franchise in 2023, is out, too.
There are no upcoming episodes on the show’s slate (bar a previously announced animated series for preschoolers), and nothing more can be produced until a new team is chosen.
On social media, fans have dubbed this new period “the Wilderness Years 2.0,” in reference to the 16-year gap between Sylvester McCoy’s final episode as the Doctor in 1989 and Christopher Eccleston’s first in 2005….
(12) BRING IT BACK ALIVE. Meanwhile, here are some of Charlie Jane Anders’ ideas about “How to Bring Back Doctor Who” at Happy Dancing.
…One of the great innovations of the 2005 relaunch was having companions who were from present-day England and frequently returned home to visit their family and/or loved ones. This made Doctor Who more explicitly a portal fantasy, which is excellent, and allowed the companions to feel more grounded in reality.
I think, however, it might be time to return to having companions who are a bit more unusual in their own right. And here’s where I think of something like One Piece, where every member of Monkey D. Luffy’s crew is a colorful character with a fancy backstory. Maybe it’s time for another companion from the future, or the distant past. Maybe we could get someone a bit more akin to Captain Jack Harkness, who did travel in the TARDIS occasionally but never quite settled in as a companion.
It would also be interesting to have companions with more personal issues of their own, not focused quite so much on their relationship with the Doctor — and maybe no more companions who are at the center of a great mystery in which they’re the MacGuffin rather than the detective. My ideal companion would be Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride: constantly chasing revenge against the person who did them wrong, while the doctor tries to temper their fury and every adventure brings them closer to their goal. (Doctor Who did this a bit with Graham in Jodie Whitaker’s first season, but only a bit.)…
(13) HELP THE SOAPBOX COMMUNITY PRINT SHOP AND ZINE LIBRARY. The Soapbox is a community print shop and zine library in the West Philadelphia neighborhood of Philadelphia, PA. The studio has to move to a new location (there is no option to stay in the current studio location) and the owners say “the costs of this move are dire.” Gillian Lee, Project Special Collections Cataloging Librarian, University of Pennsylvania, and Board member, The Soapbox Community Print Shop and Zine Library, asks people to contribute here: “The Soapbox Studio Move Fundraiser”.
The Soapbox is the only community printshop in West Philly and one of the only zine libraries in Philadelphia, and they are in a truly urgent financial situation. There is one part-time studio coordinator and all other work, including working with architects and budgeting for this move, is done by dedicated, hardworking volunteers.
If community printing, low-cost book arts educational programming, and free public zine libraries are important to you, please consider donating or sending to a friend or colleague. If you are a Philadelphian like me and can take a class or donate, please do so; see the list of class offerings here. Financial support is truly make or break for the organization at this time. Fundraiser link
(14) NOT UNIQUE. [Item by Steven French.] A pair of philosophers explore the notion of ‘substrate flexibility’ with regard to alien consciousness with the accompanying article giving a nod of the head to the alien in Project Hail Mary: “Consciousness likely not unique to earthlings, paper says” at Phys.org.
Does consciousness depend on flesh and blood? The answer is almost certainly no, according to Eric Schwitzgebel, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. In a new working paper, Schwitzgebel and Jeremy Pober, a former UCR graduate student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lisbon, assert that consciousness is likely possible in life forms made of very different stuff. Think of the five-limbed alien with a rocklike exterior in the recent blockbuster movie “Project Hail Mary.”
Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness; they proceed from the heuristic premise that it’s a real and recognizable phenomenon. Instead, they ask a narrower question: Must it be tied to the biology found on Earth?
(15) YOU CAN CALL ME AL. According to NPR, “’Algorithm’ comes from the name of a Uzbek mathematician”.
It’s a simple word that has developed a sinister connotation: algorithm. For many of us, algorithms help determine what we watch, read and listen to — in the process, confirming our tastes and biases, and creating ideological echo chambers.
The word might not seem like one that would get much consideration from the Holy See. But last month in his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV addressed the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. The word “algorithm” came up 19 times….
… The etymology of the word is a strange one, according to Rob Watts, a journalist and host of RobWords, a popular YouTube channel about word origins and usage. “It just sounds like a mathematical term,” he notes. Instead, it invokes a specific mathematician, he says: the 9th century Persian Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.
“It’s actually the Latin take on that name al-Khwarizmi that we’re invoking when we use the word algorithm,” Watts says.
But it’s taken a rather convoluted journey to reach us a dozen centuries later. The modern word algorithm traces back to the Latin algorismus through French (algorisme) and English (algorism). It also got “somewhat conflated with the term “arithmetic” before arriving in its current form, Watts says….
[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, “Orange Mike” Lowrey, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
