Tag Archives: Moid Moidelhoff

Pixel Scroll 6/15/26 Scroll Tuner Wanted, Must Not Be Allergic To Pixels

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(1) FAIRY TALES AT THE BRITISH LIBRARY. [Item by Steven French.] If any Filers happen to be in London this summer, this exhibition is on at the British Library until August 23: “Fairy Tales”.

Take your family on a magical adventure in a new interactive exhibition! Explore enchanted lands, magical creatures, iconic characters and timeless tales, brought to life through books, theatre costumes, puppets, pop-ups, artwork and illustrations. 

From the deep dark forest to the royal palace, set off on a journey through a fairy tale world. Sit down at the Three Bears’ breakfast table, tell the genie your wish, smell the wicked witch’s potions and discover lots more.

With interactive displays, theatrical design, story sharing spaces, costumes, activities, and plenty of surprises, families can dive into the stories they love and find some new favourites. And if you think you know fairy tales, think again! From the three little wolves and the witch with a heart of gold to the princess who wouldn’t go to the ball, discover how these tales have been transformed.

Throughout the exhibition, beautiful books and artwork from some of the UK’s most beloved writers and illustrators offer a glimpse of the tales that have captured imaginations for generations.

Pack your magic beans and make sure to not leave your glass slippers behind: an adventure awaits.  

Warning: please don’t wake the troll. 

(2) SPACE COWBOY BOOKS PRESENTS SIMULTANEOUS TIMES EPISODE 100. Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA bids farewell to its podcast series with Simultaneous Times Episode #100.

Stories featured in this episode:

  • “The Waitlist, or Today is a Good Day to Die” by Ai Jiang. With music by Oneirothopter. Read by Jean-Paul Garnier
  • “The Twain Shall Meet” by Brent A. Harris. With music by Phog Masheeen. Read by Jenna Hanchey.
  • Theme music by Dain Luscombe

Simultaneous Times science fiction podcast began in March of 2018 and has since produced 100 episodes featuring 206 stories and 10 poems by 108 authors from over 20 countries. In this time, we have produced collaboration episodes with Apex Magazine, Radon Journal, Hexagon, Sci-Fi Lampoon, Shacklebound Books, Worlds of IF, and Utopia SF Magazine. We also produced three paperback anthologies, and one ebook anthology, of stories and authors from the podcast.

During the nine-year run of Simultaneous Times we have won the Laureate Award, been a finalist for the Fiyah, BSFA, and British Fantasy Awards, and been long-listed for the Hugo Award three times.

As of episode 100 we will no longer be producing episodes on a monthly basis but will rather move to a “when we feel like it” schedule, most likely creating two to four episodes a year. We will be redirecting our efforts (and finances) to publishing more books and our new magazine Electronic Brain.

A huge thank you to all of our authors, composers, narrators, and to our listeners!

Find all of our evergreen episodes at Space Cowboy Books / Bandcamp.com.

(3) EARLIEST AFROFUTURISM. Lisa Yaszek told Facebook readers that Mothership Rising will be released on February 16, 2027. Pre-order here: Mothership Rising.

What if Afrofuturism didn’t begin in the 1960s… but decades earlier?

I’m thrilled to share that Mothership Rising: Afrofuturism in the Radium Age is now available for preorder!

This anthology recovers groundbreaking Black speculative fiction from the early 20th century—stories of space travel, alien encounters, high-tech revolution, AI: ancestral intelligence, and radical possibility that helped lay the foundations for Afrofuturism long before the term existed.

Turns out Black writers were making space from the very beginning.

I’m especially honored that the brilliant Nisi Shawl wrote the introduction, bringing their own visionary perspective to this project.

(4) HARLAN ELLISON’S FANZINE. Eddy Nix told The Harlan Ellison Facebook Fan Club about his discovery.

Pulled this one out of a box last week. 

Science Fantasy Bulletin, number 13, March 1953. Twenty cents. It’s a fanzine, mimeographed and hand-stapled, and the kid who edited and published it was Harlan Ellison. He was eighteen, running it out of Cleveland under his own Fanvariety Enterprises banner after a falling-out with the local club, whose bulletin he’d taken over and renamed as his own.

The contributor list is almost funny when you look at it. L. Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, Bob Silverberg, and an early Marion Z. Bradley a full decade before Darkover. The cover, “That Big Blue Entity,” is by Richard Bergeron, who’d later edit Warhoon. An eighteen-year-old talked all of them onto the pages of a hand-cranked zine.

Here’s the part that gets me. This issue came out two months before Ellison gathered a handful of young fans in his apartment and tried to will “Seventh Fandom” into existence, kicking off one of the loudest fan feuds of the decade. So this isn’t just early Ellison. It’s Ellison right at the moment he became the guy who starts the fight, and it’s three years before his first story ever sold. The temperament is already all over it.

It turned up in a box from a Chicago shop that closed, no telling how long it had been buried back there.

You can read the issue at Fanac.org: Science Fantasy Bulletin 13 v1n13.

(5) I’VE GOT A SECRET. Francis Hamit tells how English spy and playwright “Marlowe’s undercover work inspired me.”

I worked for the Encylopaedia Britannica from 1980 to 1982. I was originally hired to write about spies. He was not one of them. My initial assignment as a writer/researcher was 13 short articles. Belle Boyd was one of them and I ended up writing a novel about her, The Shenandoah Spy. Bruce Felknor, the Managing Editor for revisions, then gave me the many intelligence agencies. Not just ours, but every Big Power nation’s. That led me to MI5 and MI6 whose combined roots reach back to the early English Secret Service of Sir Francis Walsingham and the discovery of a letter from the Privy Counsel to Cambridge University ordering them to give Christopher Marlowe his Master of Theology degree.

Marlowe had gone to France and was suspected of converting to Catholicism. This was the Great Power struggle of the day. Marlowe passed himself off as a Catholic for months at the renegade English Abbey at Rheims. He’d infiltrated the Jesuits, the other international spy service of that era. I could imagine the strain. I did some undercover work myself in Iowa City against drug dealers in 1966 and 67. (See my memoir “A Perfect Spy”). I thought Marlowe’s story would make a great play….

(6) AT THE BOX OFFICE. “’Disclosure Day’ Nears $100 Million, ‘Michael’ Eyes $950 Million” reports Variety.

Steven Spielberg’s alien conspiracy thriller “Disclosure Day” collected a leading $48.9 million from 73 territories in its international box office debut.

Overseas audiences will be key in the theatrical longevity of “Disclosure Day,” which Universal spent $115 million to produce and $80 million to market. Since about half of revenues go to theater owners, the movie needs to generate roughly $300 million globally to justify its price tag. Along with $44 million in North America, “Disclosure Day” has generated $92.9 million after three days of release. Reviews are positive, but audience reactions have been mixed, so a bigger question is how the film will endure on the big screen….

(7) BBC ON FAN FICTION. BBC’s The Conversation has an episode about “Fan fiction: a writer’s playground”. (Subscription required for listeners outside the UK.)

(8) TODAY’S DAY. Days of the Year has appointed this “National Kiss a Wookiee Day”.

National Kiss a Wookiee Day is a playful celebration of Star Wars’ most huggable hero. Chewbacca and his fellow Wookiees take the spotlight, giving fans a chance to show some love.

Whether through stuffed animals, costumes, or clever posts, the focus stays fun and lighthearted. People lean into the humor, pretending to smooch their favorite shaggy sidekick.

The mood? Pure joy. Think big bear hugs, fuzzy feelings, and a good laugh shared among fans of all ages.

Wookiees represent loyalty, courage, and kindness—so the day isn’t just about silliness. It’s also a sweet way to highlight those same traits in real life…

…National Kiss a Wookiee Day began in 2005 as a fun, fan-created celebration. It honors Chewbacca and other Wookiees from the Star Wars universe. Early internet users and pop culture calendars helped it grow.

The idea didn’t come from movie studios or official merchandise. Instead, fans with creative usernames and blogs pushed it forward. One group called “A Girl and Her Wookiee Adventures” played a big part in spreading the joy….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

This Island Earth (1955)

Seventy-one years ago This Island Earth went into general circulation in the United States, five days after it premiered in New York. 

It was produced by William Alland, and directed by Joseph M. Newman and Jack Arnold. It was written by Franklin Coen and Edward G. O’Callaghan as based on the novel by Raymond F. Jones, first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories as three separate novelettes, “The Alien Machine” in the June 1949 issue, “The Shroud of Secrecy” in the December 1949 issue, and “The Greater Conflict” in the February 1950 issue.  

The primary cast was Jeff Morrow as Exeter Faith,  Domergue as Ruth Adams,  Rex Reason as Cal Meacham, Lance Fuller as Brack and Russell Johnson as Steve Carlson. The last of course will be will known later as the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. 

It was made at a cost of around eight hundred thousand and made at least one point eight million in its first run. 

Critics in general loved it, it did very well at the box office but currently the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes give it a not so great forty-four percent rating. 

It’s a great film? By no means is it a great film, but it’s a fun film to watch and in the end that’s all that matters, isn’t it? I’ve seen it three or four times down the years and it holds up well for what is one of the invasion films of that period. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) TCA AWARDS NEW ANIMATION CATEGORY. Animation Magazine reports “Nine Titles Nominated in TCA Awards’ New Animation Category”.

Nominees for the 42nd TCA Awards were announced Friday. The awards are presented by the Television Critics Association, which includes more than 220 professional TV journalists from the U.S. and Canada. Winners will be announced this summer via TCA’s social media feeds.

The 2026 awards introduce two new categories: Best International Series and Best Achievement in Animation, which offers a dedicated alternative to the inclusive Family Programming and Children’s Programming races which are often dominated by toons, and highlights the growing appeal of adult-targeted animated series….

Best Achievement in Animation

  • Bob’s Burgers (Fox)
  • Haunted Hotel (Netflix)
  • Invincible (Prime Video)
  • King of the Hill (Hulu)
  • Long Story Short (Netflix)
  • The Simpsons (Fox)
  • South Park (Comedy Central)
  • Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord (Disney+)
  • Women Wearing Shoulder Pads (Adult Swim)

(12) CAT WALKS ON ROMEO AND JULIET. “O Romeow … cat steals the show during final scene at Romeo and Juliet ballet” – the Guardian has video at the link.

A cat decided it was the main character during the final scene of a Romeo and Juliet performance by the Imperial Russian Ballet Company in Izmir, Turkey. The cat had a lie down, licked itself and played with Romeo’s hair as the performers kept going with their performance undeterred while onlookers chuckled in the background….

(13) AMONG THE RUINS. “NASA’s Chandra Discovers Possible Supernova Remnant in Galactic Center” at NASA Science.

Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers may have found a supernova remnant in an intriguing neighborhood in the middle of our galaxy. A paper describing these new findings published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Supernova remnants are the expanding remains of exploded stars and provide elements – like iron, oxygen, and silicon – that are critical for the formation of planets and for life as we know it to form and flourish.

This new supernova remnant, if confirmed, would be one of the closest ever discovered to the supermassive black hole at the central region of the Milky Way galaxy, an exotic region crammed with massive stars, long threads of magnetic fields and dense clouds of gas orbiting rapidly around the Galactic Center….

…A new composite image of this region contains X-rays from Chandra and ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) XMM-Newton mission (shown in blue) as well as radio data from the MeerKAT telescope (shown in red) in South Africa. These have been combined with an optical image from the Pan-STARRS telescopes in Hawaii (red, green, and blue). The plane of the galaxy runs horizontally from left to right in the image, and the central black hole is off to the left of the image.

The evidence for the new supernova remnant, located about 26,000 light-years from Earth, comes from X-ray data from Chandra and XMM-Newton. The X-ray data reveals a “blob” of X-ray emission that may come from the remains of a massive star that self-destructed as a supernova, buried within the larger cloud of expanding gas.

The location of this suspected supernova remnant in the image is labeled with a circle….

(14) WHY MOID STOPPED COLLECTING SF BOOKS! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at the Media Death Cult YouTube channel has just posted a click-bait titled, 15-minute video on why he has stopped collecting SF books.

Now, I have to say I have been following Moid for about half a decade, and as a commentator on SF books I do find him ‘interesting’. So, when he announces that he is stopping collecting books I had to find out why.

I have to say that myself I have over 150 feet of SF bookshelf space and that’s not counting the 2000AD-related collection or the science library (though for the past decade that has been almost entirely digital – I have several thousand academic papers from the 1970s to 2000s, but as I am currently accruing papers at the rate of well over a thousand a year, digital is the way to go and keeping them in digital topic folders and titling the files in a search-friendly way makes it easier to find them when needed.), let alone my mundane library. Of course, I suspect that this will be positively low for some Filers, but I do find my collection of value. Every week I find myself hunting for a book in the collection to check something out, so my library is very much a working reference one: these are not books boxed up getting dusty in the attic. The other thing (as I wrote in the journal Biologist before it became decades later a magazine) having bookshelves of books lining your walls has a certain environmental sustainability value: books store carbon (in my case for decades) so there is a greenhouse gas sequestration value to having a shelved library; they also store heat and so provide a thermal buffer, and then there is their heat insulation value.

Anyway, Moid has a different take and different concerns. I should say though that the title of his video is precise: Moid is stopping collecting SF books as he has been; he is not giving up reading them.

Anyway, enjoy the 15-minute vid.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, John A Arkansawyer, Francis Hamit, 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 Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 5/27/26 Pixelbot Murderscrolls

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(1) CHINA EXECUTES FORMER CEO OF COMPANY THAT HELD FILM RIGHTS TO THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM. The BBC story reporting his fate, “China executes man for poisoning billionaire gaming tycoon”, begins —

Chinese authorities have executed a man for murdering his associate, billionaire gaming tycoon Lin Qi.

In 2020, a disgruntled Xu Yao poisoned Lin for sidelining him shortly after he helped him land a Netflix deal, local media reported.

Lin’s Yoozoo Games holds the film adaptation rights for the Chinese science fiction trilogy which Netflix made into the series 3 Body Problem.

Xu was convicted in 2024 and his execution, which reportedly happened on 21 May, was confirmed on Tuesday by his company in a statement, adding “justice has ultimately been served”.

“We deeply mourn Mr. Lin and extend our heartfelt condolences to his family,” the statement said.

“As colleagues who fought alongside him, all members of the company are grateful for the impartiality of the judicial process.”…

The AP News story about the execution tells how the poisoning was accomplished:

…According to local media reports, Xu spent hundreds of thousands of yuan (tens of thousands of dollars) to buy highly toxic substances online, including alpha-amanitin, a lethal compound found in some poisonous mushrooms.

He disguised the poisons as probiotic pills, as well as put them inside coffee capsules, water containers and whiskey bottles, which he then shared with Lin and other company employees.

Lin was taken to the hospital in December 2020 and died a few days later. He was 39.

Several others became sick but recovered….

Comments on Weibo indicate that Xu Yao was involved in the early deal-making stages of the Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem.

(2) CELEBRATING DYLAN’S BIRTHDAY. Brian Cronin displays “85 Bob Dylan Comic Book References” at CBR.com.

…I’ve been doing this since Dylan’s 70th birthday, and I used to just add a reference each year, but for his 80th, I thought I’d be stupid and actually come up with 80 new references that I had not previously used (you’re welcome, websites that will use these references in the future without mentioning that you got them from here). Starting with his 81st birthday, I picked my favorite references from the 179 options, and now I’m back to just adding one new reference every year. So if you’re familiar with all of these references, feel free to scan to the end of the piece for the brand-new 85th reference in honor of Bob turning 85 today….

Here’s an example –

From G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #2 (by Larry Hama, Don Perlin and Jack Abel), the introduction of Kwinn the Eskimo, a reference to Dylan’s song “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn”)…

(3) HE-MAN AND THE GANG. Cora Buhlert catches up with Masters of the Universe developments in “Cora’s Thoughts on the Latest Masters of the Universe Trailers and Other Footage and the Marketing Campaign in General”. Her post begins:

The marketing machine for the upcoming Masters of the Universe live action movie is really running on full power. There has been yet another trailer and new featurettes, TV spots, behind the scenes footage and interviews with cast and crew have been released almost every single day. There’s even been a massive, world record breaking drone show in the skies above Los Angeles. This isn’t even the first drone show they’ve done, they’ve also done another over a congested highway in California some time ago. I kind of suspect that such drone shows wouldn’t have been allowed here in Germany – definitely not the one above the congested highway because it might distract drivers and cause accidents – but they’re very cool….

(4) PEAK BLINDERS. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia’s John Clute decries “Burning Mappemonde To The Ground”.

I won’t go on at length here about the arguments that drive The Book Blinders: Annals of Vandalism at the British Library: A Necrology (2024). These arguments, which are presented at length (with illustrations), all stem from a conviction that the British Library’s destruction of millions of dustjackets they were meant to preserve has constituted a Puritan war of choice against the huge terpsichorean flow of culture and context and wisdom and flummery and mummery conveyed through those covers since the first one was created in 1819: those millionfold theatres of arrival, each cover an instantiation of the mapping of the story of the world: for every duskjacket that comes into the world proclaims the world within: Speak Friend and Enter: each dustjacket burned is a theatre closed.

The Book Blinders stops around 1990, when the British Library began to retain dustjackets of some categories of friction, thought it stored them in boxes in a warehouse hundreds of miles away, where they were declared to be available to Readers; but as they seem to have been sorted according to date of transfer, it may have proved a tad time-consuming to sort through large boxes filled with how many hundred covers stacked in the chronological order of their arrival at the warehouse…

(5) RODDENBERRY ARCHIVE VIDEOS. TrekCore.com draws attention as “New INSIDE THE RODDENBERRY ARCHIVE Video Series Debuts with Look at Long-Lost USS Enterprise Model”.

The team at the Roddenberry Archive — led by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s son, Rod Roddenberry — is opening its vault to the public in a new series of videos for this 60th anniversary year.
 
Inside the Roddenberry Archive debuted this afternoon with a pair of videos: one introducing this new series, where Rod Roddenberry shares a brief look at the team’s archive of Trek-related material and hints at things to come.
 
Every episode of Inside the Roddenberry Archive will feature an expert guest and deep dives into rare Star Trek artifacts and never before seen memorabilia from Gene and Majel Roddenberry. Experience Star Trek’s creation and legacy in a whole new way.

The project’s second video today focuses on the current state of the 34″ USS Enterprise model built  in 1964 for “The Cage,” which went missing for decades until its miraculous recovery in 2024.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 27, 1911 — Vincent Price. (Died 1993.)

By Paul Weimer: Vincent Price. My first voice and face of horror. But especially, his voice. 

I’ve mentioned WPIX many times in these birthday reminiscences and in comments at File 770. And so it was on NY’s movie station that I first encountered the work of Vincent Price. It was one of the Dr. Phibes movies, gory, weird and a lot of fun. That voice was unmistakable. Imagine my surprise when the very different looking Dr. Egghead (played by Price) showed up in an episode of the 60’s Batman cartoon. Although Egghead and Phibes couldn’t be more different, the voice was what keyed me, even with my amusia, that the same actor was at work here.  That oily, horror fueled voice. He was the voice of terror, of nightmares, of the dark descent. 

And that’s kind of how I kept running into him, by accident, again and again. For a while it seemed I could not escape the Master of Horror. Oh, here he is in a movie based on the “Pit and the Pendulum”. How very droll.  Oh, and here he has shown up randomly on an episode of Columbo. Oops, here he is again in a Roger Corman horror film. All with That Voice. Although I still think the Jeff Goldblum version is better, the haunting image of his version of The Fly, where a part of him is trapped in a fly’s body, caught in a web, with a spider coming to eat him, is enough to give me the chills. 

Even with all of his other work, again and again, what Price comes down to is the voice of horror. And so I ask you, who else could have been the narrator voice for the music video Thriller?

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) HOMEWARD BOUND. Space Daily remembers: “In April 1970, the crew of Apollo 13 navigated home by holding the spacecraft against the terminator of the Earth, the line where day met night on the planet they were trying to reach, timing a fourteen-second engine burn with a wristwatch because their guidance computer had been shut down to save battery power for reentry”.

On the afternoon of April 15, 1970, somewhere between the Moon and the Earth, three men were sitting inside a spacecraft they were not supposed to be living in, watching their breath fog in front of them, and looking through a small triangular window at a tiny crescent of blue and white. The cabin temperature had dropped to near freezing. The guidance computer was off. The navigation platform that normally told the spacecraft which way it was pointing in three-dimensional space was cold and dark. And in a matter of hours they would have to fire an engine for fourteen seconds to refine a trajectory that, if wrong by even a fraction of a degree, would either skip them off the Earth’s atmosphere like a stone off a pond or burn them up on reentry.

So they used a wristwatch. They used the reticle etched in the lunar module window. And they aimed at the line on the Earth where shadow met sunlight….

… The computer in the lunar module, the Apollo Guidance Computer built at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, drew power continuously when running. Running it for the entire trip home would have consumed amp-hours they could not afford to spare while protecting the command module’s reentry sequence.

So they shut it down. And without the computer, the inertial measurement unit that kept track of the spacecraft’s orientation drifted. By the time of the second course correction burn, the platform had no useful alignment at all. The cloud of debris from the explosion, lit up by the Sun, made it impossible to sight on stars in the usual way….

… For that fourteen-second burn, Lovell and Haise needed to know the spacecraft was pointed in the right direction. Without the platform, they had to use the universe itself as a reference. The procedure, developed on the ground and read up to the crew, came from a technique Lovell had quietly experimented with on Apollo 8. Keep the Earth centered in the lunar module’s overhead docking window. Hold the cusps of the Earth’s terminator, the sharp line of day and night across the home planet, on the crosshairs of the Crewman Optical Alignment Sight on the forward window. Lovell would handle yaw with the hand controller. Haise would handle pitch. Swigert, back in the dark and freezing cabin, would call out time on his Omega Speedmaster wristwatch.

Fourteen seconds. Then shut down. Then drift again….

(9) CHINA’S MOON AMBITION. “China shakes up its space programs to land astronauts on the moon by 2030: ‘We will spare no effort’” reports Space.com.

China is establishing an integrated program called the Lunar Exploration Program, melding both its robotic Chang’e lunar probe activities with the country’s human spaceflight program. Zhang Jingbo, spokesman for the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) agency, made the announcement at a May 23 pre-launch event for the Shenzhou-23 crew launch to the nation’s Tiangong Space Station.

Speaking at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, Zhang said that “to fully leverage the technological expertise and practical experience accumulated over decades” via its human spaceflight and Chang’e lunar rover programs, “the existing manned lunar landing and unmanned lunar exploration efforts will be integrated across three areas of missions, resources, and teams.”

“We will spare no effort to strive for the goal of achieving the first Chinese landing on the moon by 2030,” Zhang added.

(10) THE TREMENDOUS TASTE OF DICK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff (all hail the Media Death Cult leader) is a massive Philip K. Dick fan. Over the years, he and his Cult followers have had a number of Dick SF novel read-alongs and Moid himself last year completed his personal mission of reading all of Dick’s SF novels (about which he made an earlier video). Anyway, last month Moid was struck down by the worst disease known to man… The deadly man-flu!!!! There was nothing for it. Surrounded by soiled tissues (that would make a germ-warfare biologist blush) he set about to watch all the cinematic adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s SF novels and short stories (but skipped TV series, so no The Man in the High Castle or animated Blade Runner stuff). And he has a confession – he hasn’t watched a couple of non-Anglophone film adaptations and non-SF works… and Radio Free Albemuth is not available over here in Brit Cit except as a very expensive import (plus shipping plus Trump reciprocal tariff etc. etc..) and if he was going to fork out over US$100 on a two-hour video of not-guaranteed-enjoyment he wouldn’t unless, that is, your mother was present…

Not wishing his deed of derring-do to go to waste, and because he has an excellent taste in Dick, he has ranked all the adaptations. Do you agree with him? Disagree with him? Or are you somewhere in the middle? You can see his 21-minute video below.

To continue my journey to complete and utter P. K. Dickness, I watched every Philip K. Dick story that has ever been made into a film.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Ersatz Culture, 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 Camestros Felapton.]

Pixel Scroll 5/14/26 Scrolling, Scrolling, Scrolling — Pixelhide!

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(1) OR THE HORSE MAY TALK. Judith Tarr analyzes “The Universal Appeal of the Talking Animal” at Reactor.

…Humans all over the world tell stories and sing songs of animals who talk to each other like humans, act like humans, think like humans. The world is a mirror. Everywhere we look, we see ourselves.

The technical term is anthropomorphism. Imputing human traits to nonhuman things. When that thing is an animal, the animal talks, because humans do. Human language, human ideas, human ways of doing things.

In folklore and oral storytelling, animals talk to each other. They talk to humans. Humans talk to them. Everyone communicates on the same level, in the same words.

Literary animals may be their natural selves—rabbits, lions, horses, cats—or they may be fully anthropomorphized. Peter Rabbit and his family wear human clothes and do human things. So do Toad and his friends in The Wind in the Willows. And then there’s Winnie the Pooh, who begins his life as a child’s toy, inhabiting a world of toys based on living animals: a bear, a donkey, a tiger, a kangaroo. (And let’s not forget Paddington Bear and Calvin’s inimitable Hobbes.)

Animals rule the world of animated comedy. Mickey Mouse, Mighty Mouse, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Felix the cat, Sylvester the cat and his arch-foe Tweety Bird, Foghorn Leghorn (whose accent inspires a human avatar, Benoit Blanc), Yogi Bear, Rocky the flying squirrel and Bullwinkle the moose, the list goes on and on.

These animals and their stories are often consigned to the children’s section. Adults are expected to grow out of them. Grownup stories are “real” stories, stories about humans doing “real” things, in a world in which animals stay strictly in their lane. They may make sounds, but they’re not talking. Talking is a human thing.

And yet, humans of all ages keep right on loving their talking animals. Cartoons are grand entertainment for kids, but there are whole levels and layers of wit and satire that the grown-up kid will catch. Bugs Bunny’s riff on Wagnerian opera is central to my childhood; the older I get, the more I appreciate the gloriously cracked genius of a wiseass rabbit in a brass bra and a winged helmet (and that horse) …

(2) WOLF WOMEN. “Sam Beckbessinger: A Brief History of the Female Werewolf” at CrimeReads.

…So the glorious exceptions that do center female werewolves usually tread quite different thematic territory. Unlike male werewolves, who are usually infected through a random physical attack, female werewolves are more likely to see their transformation linked to a moment of innate reproductive change: menarche, childbirth or menopause….

…All cultures have animal shapeshifter myths, but the European werewolf tradition, specifically, starts from two places: ancient Greek texts (Lycaon from Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the origin of the term “lycanthropy”) and the Old Norse tradition of warriors wearing enchanted wolfskins to “become” wolves in battle.

By the Middle Ages, werewolves are well-established in folklore all across Europe, to varying degrees, but there are only a couple of notable women in these stories. There’s an Irish story about the Daughters of Airitech (which appears in the Acallam na Senórach from around 1200), who are three wolf-women who live in the wild and are a nuisance to local villagers because they eat their sheep. They have a weakness for certain elements of human culture, though (in some stories harp music; in others cooked meat), and turn back into human women to enjoy them, in which state they are vulnerable enough to be either murdered or (worse) married off. There’s also a story of the Werewolves of Ossory from 1188’s Topographia Hibernica, which features a man and woman who must live seven years at a time as wolves, transforming (like the Norse) when they don wolfskins. In these stories, the werewolf isn’t violent so much as uncultured….

(3) SOMETIMES THEY KEEP THE TITLE AND THROW THE BOOK AWAY. But not always. Movieweb’s discussion of“8 Book-to-Movie Adaptations That Ended Up Nothing Like the Source Material” includes three sff works: Starship Troopers, Lawnmower Man, and A Clockwork Orange (excerpted below).

‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1971)

A Clockwork Orange is a peculiar case. While Stanley Kubrick stuck close to the general source material, the release of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel differed between US publishers and the original release. The version that Kubrick read and adapted the script from was the American release of the book, which cut the final 21st chapter in its entirety. The final chapter offers a redemption arc for Alex, showing that he is redeemed. While this is just a minor change, it drastically shifts the entire messaging of the film versus the novel.

Kubrick, when he found out, said he preferred his ending to the one Burgess wrote, while Burgess hated the film Kubrick made. There were also some smaller changes worth mentioning. Alex in the book is 15 years old, and it is almost entirely written in Nadsat slang (a made-up mash of English and Russian) that readers have to decode; Kubrick used some of it, but not all. Finally, the novel has more explicit Christian and free-will themes, with the prison chaplain having a more prominent role.

Many of Kubrick’s changes to the screen made sense, and the movie still managed to draw acclaim and controversy, but a single chapter left out makes the novel and the film drastically different experiences.

(4) PITCH MEETING. Deadline quotes “Peter Jackson On How Stephen Colbert Got ‘LOTR: Shadow of the Past’”.

Freshly lauded Cannes Palme d’Or honoree Peter Jackson tells us that Stephen Colbert‘s attachment as writer on a new Lord of the Rings movie, which is being released after 2027’s Hunt for Gollum, occurred when The Late Show host pitched himself for the gig.

“He was re-reading Lord of the Rings over Christmas and thought this section would make a great film,” Jackson tells us at Cannes.

“He pitched this whole idea… I said it sounds interesting, let’s have a go at this, doing a treatment. Philippa Boyens flew over and Colbert has come down to New Zealand a couple of times.”

“This is before he knew his show was going to get canned.”

“It’s a part of Lord of the Rings that we never filmed. There were these big chunks of Lord of the Rings that we skipped over,” says Jackson, the three-time Oscar winner.

The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past is based on the section “Fog on the Barrow-downs,” the eighth chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, in which the Hobbits are trapped by a Barrow-wight in an unnatural fog. The story also includes a fan-favorite character omitted from the previous films, Tom Bombadil. The feature is being adapted from chapters three through eight of JRR Tolkien’s book.

“Next week, he’s doing his final show and the next day he’ll be a Tolkien screenwriter,” said Jackson of Colbert.

(5) ‘THE NEXT GENERATION’ CLASSIC REVISITED. Collider tells why “Patrick Stewart Still Calls This 34-Year-Old ‘Star Trek’ Episode a True Masterpiece”.

…While never a fully serialized series, The Next Generation‘s later seasons inject lasting character growth into its episodic formula. As a standalone that grafts permanent ripple effects onto Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), Season 5’s “The Inner Light” deserves the glowing superlatives fans, critics, the Hugo Awards, and Stewart himself have sent its way since 1992. Often regarded as the already sophisticated series’ pinnacle achievement, “The Inner Light” is an arresting and resonant example of everything sci-fi’s genre trappings can offer, swapping out epic scale for a character study that’s as psychologically contemplative as it is philosophically driven.

What Is “The Inner Light” About?

When the Enterprise investigates an unidentified space probe, the device targets Picard with a mysterious energy bolt. Struck comatose, he wakes upon the planet of Kataan, where every stranger recognizes him as Kamin, a local iron weaver. Kamin’s wife, Eline (Margot Rose), assures Picard that his memories of French vineyards and starship corridors are delirious inventions caused by a week-long fever. As years pass without answers, Picard makes the most of his unwelcome circumstances. He falls in love with Eline, grows old with her while raising their children, and practices the flute in his leisure time.

However, Kataan’s scientists determine that a nearby exploding star will annihilate the planet within their lifetimes. Since Kataan dwells outside the Federation’s borders, they lack access to the cutting-edge resources that might reverse its inevitable demise. During this civilization’s final moments, Picard learns the last four decades were an interactive mental simulation induced by the probe’s beam. Kataan’s long-dead citizens didn’t want to be forgotten, and their floating time capsule chose Picard as the best person to safeguard their legacy. Its purpose fulfilled, the program returns Picard to the Enterprise bridge, his body never left. The 40 years Picard experienced have been just 25 minutes for his concerned crew…

…”The Inner Light” rises above its classic “what if?” structure thanks to its laser-focused purpose and restrained execution. Written by Morgan Gendel and directed by Peter Lauritson, the two share a kind of harmonious understanding over which emotional beats to imply and which need lingering with. The episode’s broad concepts about our fleeting mortality and the value of cherishing humble joys are straightforward enough not to court sentimentality and are conveyed through an earnest accessibility that stands the test of time. What could be an overt laundry list of ideas instead gracefully flows through legacy, identity, second chances, environmental decay, what determines a well-lived life, and the resolved wisdom required to carve out that existence while facing imminent destruction….

(6) THE RUMBLE AND THE ROAR. [Item by Steven French.] Keza MacDonald reminiscences in this week’s “Pushing Buttons” newsletter in the Guardian: “Star Fox 64, a game I loved in my childhood, is returning – but I have mixed feelings”.

The Nintendo 64 was not my first video game console, but it was my formative one. Getting to grips with 3D movement in Super Mario 64 with that weird three-pronged controller is one of my most visceral childhood memories; the long, long wait for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the background noise to a huge chunk of my youth. But back in the 1990s (in the UK at least), it felt as if nobody had an N64. When everybody had a PlayStation instead, I felt I was the only kid in my whole city who cared more about Banjo-Kazooie than Crash Bandicoot.

If even Zelda seemed comparatively niche in Europe in the 90s, Lylat Wars (known elsewhere as Star Fox 64) was a real deep cut. It’s a 1997 space-flight shooter starring Fox McCloud and his squad of animal pilots laser-blasting across different planets in nimble crafts called Arwings. I played this game to absolute death in 1998, when I got it for my birthday alongside the fabled Rumble Pak, which made your controller vibrate and shudder whenever something cool was happening on screen (fun fact: Lylat Wars was the first console game to feature controller rumble). But I really hadn’t thought about it much since. Then, last week, Nintendo announced a Switch 2 remake….

(7) “THESE DETECTIVES LOOK UP!” EXCLAIMED TOM SHEEPISHLY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] A short video, “The Sheep Detectives – Behind the Scenes“, for the new movie starring, among others, Hugh Jackman,

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 14, 1944 – George Lucas, 82.

By Paul Weimer: To talk about George Lucas for me is to first talk about Star Wars. 

Star Wars lurked in my imagination long before seeing any of it. I didn’t see Star Wars in the theater but my younger brother and I got a joint Christmas gift of a Death Star playset, and a few action figures. We only had the commercials for the set to go on, not Lucas’ own vision, and so our playing of the set led to very strange scenarios having nothing to do with the movie. 

It would not be until 1983, and Return of the Jedi, that I saw a George Lucas movie at all, and in the theater. I saw the magic of his world, having only the fuzziest idea of the first two movies, but I was swept along. This shows the power of Lucas harnessing the power of serial fiction to allow watchers to get in on the action quickly. This is something the Marvel cinematic universe could still learn from Lucas today. It’s not just the crawls at the beginning, it’s the economy of storytelling, the establishment of characters that let you hit the ground running. 

Like Star Wars, I missed the first Indiana Jones movie in theaters, but did see Temple of Doom (Lucas did not direct but his story was the basis of the film). And of course, too, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  Same principle applies. Early Lucas knew the power of crafting episodic sequels and making them work. 

In keeping with those films, Lucas was also responsible for getting me hooked into the idea of the Hero’s Journey, since I read the Joseph Campbell book The Power of Myth thanks to Lucas’ forward in the book. Sure, the Hero’s Journey is a very outdated, patriarchal and restrictive story framework but it was my first real engagement with the nature and form of stories. Lucas helped introduce me to that whole new world. 

However, I would not see another Lucas directed film until the late 1990’s…but that is another story, one that deserves its own entry.

George Lucas with his wife, Mellody Hobson.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) DOCTOR WHO, WHERE? The Hollywood Reporter tells where to find the Doctor: “’Doctor Who’ Gets New U.S. Streaming Home on AMC+”.

The TARDIS is set to land in a new location in a few weeks.

AMC+ has acquired streaming rights to most of the 21st century run of Doctor Who. Thirteen seasons of the series, spanning the runs of the ninth through thirteenth Doctors (2005-22), will be available on the streamer starting June 11.

The AMC+ acquisition is something of a homecoming for Doctor Who. BBC America, which like AMC+ is part of AMC Networks, was the U.S. home for the series from 2009-22 (Sci Fi Channel, the forerunner to Syfy, had the first few seasons)….

…The acquisition does not include the two most recent seasons of Doctor Who, which the BBC produced in conjunction with Disney. Those seasons, starring Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor, remain on Disney+ in the United States….

(11) “DO HAVE A CACO, MAN!” “Chocolate now has standards for excellence, like wine and coffee” – NPR tells how that works.

In central Rome, Julien Simonis holds a tiny bar of chocolate made from cacao beans that originated in Hawaii. He cracks it into pieces before unwrapping the gold foil that surrounds it. Simonis places a morsel on his tongue and then breathes in through his mouth and out through his nose to heighten his perception of the chocolate’s aroma and taste.

A look of reverence comes over him.

“My god,” he whispers. “Each time I taste this, I’m always amazed. You have a boost of acidity. This burst of fresh flavors.” Simonis detects a fruitiness and a hint of cardamom and nutmeg….

… The standardized processing of the cacao takes place at a lab tucked inside the Chocolate Experience Museum in hilly Perugia, about a hundred miles north of Rome.

To begin, lab assistant Julia Butac empties a burlap bag of beans into a bin and starts to sift them a couple handfuls at a time, removing anything that isn’t a full bean. “It’s really physical work,” she says, acknowledging the rigorousness of the method.

Butac is from the Philippines and was never a huge chocolate fan, but this process has given her a deeper appreciation for it….

…Those two chocolates that Simonis tasted — the one from Hawaii and the other from Peru — had been processed and prepared identically in Perugia. But they have two very different personalities.

“Just realize that the difference in these chocolates [is] only coming from the cacao bean,” he says. “Despite the recipe being exactly the same, flavors are completely different.”

Simonis relies on a panel of 15 trained professional tasters to evaluate a chocolate’s unique blend of acidity, bitterness, astringency and more. The result is a standardized way of comparing chocolate, allowing cacao to be priced and valued according to its quality.

More and more people are joining the program. There’s a charge for trainings and certification but access to resources including a step-by-step guide to cacao processing and the flavor wheel that the official tasters use to do their evaluations are free. “We are trying to work with every single producing country in the world,” he adds….

(12) TRAINING DAY. “Blue Origin’s lunar lander mockup is ready for NASA Artemis astronaut training” reports Space.com.

NASA’s Orion space capsule training simulator is located inside Building 9 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It’s a full-scale, high-fidelity model of the real thing, and where the Artemis 2 astronauts spent more than a year preparing for their recent mission around the moon.

For a long time, the Orion simulator sat alone in its own corner, away from the group of International Space Station training modules lined up inside the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility (SVMF). But now, Orion has a neighbor.

A mockup of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 (MK2) lunar lander has been assembled at the SVMF, and is ready for astronauts to come aboard to begin training, according to a NASA release. Standing adjacent to the Orion capsule, the Blue Moon crew cabin and exterior resemble the design of the lander’s Mark 2 variant, which will eventually land Artemis astronauts on the moon, if all goes according to plan.

With Blue Origin’s mockup now assembled at JSC, astronauts can now seamlessly transition from training inside Orion to training in Blue Moon as they prepare for the Artemis missions ahead. The next mission, Artemis 3, is dependent on at least one lunar lander being ready to fly before the mission can launch.

Blue Moon is one of two lunar landers NASA has chosen through the agency’s Human Landing System (HLS) contracts, the other being SpaceX’s Starship, and is a critical component of NASA’s Artemis program that aims to establish a permanent presence on the moon’s surface….

(13) NEW ORGANIC MOLECULES DETECTED ON MARS. COULD IT BE LIFE JIM? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Hot on the news of water-altered molecules detected by the Perseverance rover in Mars’ Jezero crater is fresh research from another Martian crater, the Gale crater. There the Curiosity rover has taken samples and subjected them to the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite onboard the rover. And the results are now in. There are benzothiophene, methyl benzoate, and single and dicyclic aromatic molecules present. The researchers, mainly US-based, do not know whether the source of these molecules comes from meteors or were they formed in situ either by life or some geological process. What they can say is that these molecules are most likely around 3.5-billion years old as that is the age of the strata from which they were taken.

The importance of this work is that it is an indication that with further development of robotic lab analysis on future Martian rovers, it is likely that some future missions will have the capability to detect biosignatures should they exist.

Primary research: Williams, A. J. et al. (2026) Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment. Nature Communications, vol. 17, 2748.

(14) RE-VISITING PIRANESI BY SUSANNA CLARKE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff’s Media Death Cult has a YouTube Channel but is bigger on Patreon where Cult followers discuss all things SFnal. Recently, the Cult has had a read-along of Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi and this has fired up Moid to make, possibly his longest video yet. It has only just been posted and in it he shares his thoughts on the novel and some of the comments made on the Media Death Cult Patreon thingy.

This is a video about the evolving theories surrounding Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Paul Weimer, Daniel Dern, 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 Chris S.]

Pixel Scroll 3/22/26 I Don’t Think That Scroll Title Means What You Think It Does

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(1) SPACE:1999.  In The Telegraph. Samira Ahmed, a BBC  newsreader and journalist (Front Row, News Watch, etc), remembers when “Space: 1999 was Britain’s answer to Star Trek – until it wasn’t”.

The show was a second attempt by Gerry Anderson and Sylvia Anderson, Thunderbirds husband-and-wife creators, to break away from Supermarionation puppetry into adult human drama, following the cancellation of their first live-action series, UFO, after just one season. With the high-gloss production values of its main backer, ITC Entertainment’s Lew Grade, who gave us The Prisoner and The Avengers, when it began shooting in 1973, Space: 1999 was the most expensive British TV show ever made.

Well, yes, actually.

It can be hard to explain to people who didn’t grow up watching Space: 1999 just what a seminal experience it was. Originally broadcast in the UK between 1975 and 1977, it had a captivating mixture of futuristic design, beautiful planetary skyscapes by future Oscar-winning special effects designer Brian Johnson, and existential, often philosophical, horror….

…Only two series were shot, and they differed wildly. Arguing about which is better is like debating whether the Sean Connery or Roger Moore Bond films are superior. We all know, really – but you’ve got to admit there was some great fun in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. So it is with Space: 1999 series two, which comes to Rewind TV this week. Although I showed up to Celebrity Mastermind in a borrowed season one costume (as awkwardly form-hugging as I’d feared) to prove my gravitas, as a child it was series two that fuelled my games, where we turned our fold-out sofa beds into little Eagle command module cockpits and climbed inside for adventure, and I took on the role of Maya – alien princess with exotic eyebrows and metamorphic powers.

Space: 1999 was a kind of follow-up to UFO (set in 1980), which featured humans on the moon manning an early-warning station for alien attack. For the new show, this was reimagined as a quasi-military and scientific research station, now called Moonbase Alpha. The opening episode saw the moon hurled out of Earth’s orbit by a nuclear explosion (memo to Elon Musk: storing nuclear waste up there is not a great idea), with the 300 or so Alphans sent hurtling uncontrollably across space, looking for a new planet to call home, but mostly encountering hostile aliens.

Made with the American market in mind, real-life Hollywood couple Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, fresh from Mission: Impossible, led the cast as Commander Koenig and Chief Medical Officer Dr Helena Russell. But despite strong storylines, exquisite production values, and an impressively diverse crew, series one wasn’t picked up by a major US network, causing panic at ITC Entertainment. It was widely felt to be too dark, although if we’re really honest, its leading couple lacked charisma….

(2) LAST WORD ON TYPOS. [Item by Lew Wolkoff.] Here’s the story of a typo gone wrong that I learned in an English Lit class in college that I thought you might appreciate..

 “Why is a raven like a writing desk,” one of the characters in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland asks. Lewis Carroll wrote the scene with no intention of answering the question. In point of fact, he had no answer. Finally, after years of badgering by his fans, he produced this answer:

 “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!”.

 The word “nevar” is “put with the wrong end in front.” Written backward, it in r-a-v-e-n. It’s a deliberate typo by Carroll. And it didn’t appear in print as planned because the proofreader caught and corrected it!.

(3) CHRIS BARKLEY MEDICAL UPDATE. Chris says, “Two days removed from cataract and glaucoma surgery… Here’s Today’s ‘PROOF OF LIFE’ Photo.”

Chris Barkley after surgery.

(4) ONE FELLOW’S BALLOT. If you’re interested in what’s on Rich Horton’s Hugo ballot, he’s happy to tell you: “The Good Stuff: 2025” at Strange at Ecbatan.

… I read a dozen or more SF/F novels this year, and I feel very good about my nomination list — noting that I read several more that I’d have been happy to nominate! In other categories I’m to a great extent nominating favorites. Even so, for short fiction Editor — how in the world have neither Jonathan Strahan nor Scott Andrews won a Hugo!! Seriously!…

(5) BOW WOW LAW. The New York Times reports “Vogue Is Suing a Dog Fashion Magazine. Guess What It’s Called.” (Behind a paywall.) And it sells only a hundred copies an issue. Guess what that sales figure reminds me of.

A recent cover of Dogue, a canine fashion magazine, featured an Italian greyhound wearing an evening gown, an opera glove on each paw. Several pages in, a nattily dressed labradoodle showed off a collection of trench coats.

Readers find this sort of thing charming. The media company Condé Nast does not.

In December, Condé Nast filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing that Dogue had infringed on its trademark for Vogue, the human-centric fashion magazine published since 1892.

Lawyers for the company wrote in their complaint that Dogue’s logo was “obviously intended” to confuse customers by suggesting a relationship between the magazines. The continued publication of Dogue was a blow to Vogue’s reputation, they added, and was “likely to damage Condé Nast irreparably.”

Now, the typically harmonious world of dog fashion is gearing up for a legal showdown that Olga Portnaya, the creator and editor in chief of Dogue, believes is about far more than who gets to photograph a vizsla in a turtleneck.

“Art and culture have always evolved through reinterpretation and dialogue,” Ms. Portnaya, a graphic designer and photographer who started Dogue in 2019, said in an interview. “For me, this is a larger fight: I’m not just fighting for my own work and our community, but for other independent creators.”

She said she was astonished that Condé Nast was so interested in confronting her magazine, a one-woman editorial operation that sells fewer than 100 copies per issue. The complaint demands that Ms. Portnaya pay Condé Nast unspecified damages and deliver all copies of Dogue to the company “for destruction.”…

… In a complaint filed in federal court, lawyers for Condé Nast claimed that Dogue’s logo was “obviously intended” to confuse customers by suggesting a relationship between the magazine and Vogue.

The magazine is offered free online and sold at a single newsstand in Beverly Hills, Calif. Each issue features a four-legged cover star beneath serif text that reads “Dogue,” placed roughly where the Vogue mark appears on Condé Nast’s magazine. Between spreads of canine couture, readers might encounter an interview with the actor Kevin Costner about his English Labrador, Bobby, who enjoys eating carrots. (Ms. Portnaya writes most of the magazine’s articles under the byline Oli Port.)…

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

March 22, 1931 — William Shatner, 95.

By Paul Weimer: William Shatner. The face that launched a hundred soap operas. 

I find it interesting that like B5 would find out thirty years later, Star Trek’s first shot at a crew and a leading man, Jeffrey Hunter, wasn’t quite what a viewing public particularly wanted in a leading man of a space opera SF series. Poor Michael O’Hare and Jeffrey Hunter both weren’t quite right to be the full-on leading actors for such a series. 

But like Bruce Boxleitner three decades later, William Shatner proved to be.  I mean, sure, lots of Spock fans out there, McCoy fans, and other characters. And the whole “trio” of Kirk-Spock-McCoy has been documented to enormous detail. But it is William Shatner’s complex Captain Kirk, who was more cerebral and outwitting of his opponents than you remember, more nuanced, more interesting than the flanderized stereotype that has been parodied to the moon and back ever made him out to be. Sure, his diction and acting were, charitably melodramatic, but that is a feature, not a bug that got him through the series, and seven movies. 

Outside of genre space, he did shows like T J Hooker, and Rescue 911, and Boston Legal (although the fourth wall breaking Boston Legal might actually BE a genre show. I leave the comments to decide that). He’s done music (oddly, that doesn’t make him unique among the TOS crew). He was the voice of Priceline.com in its early days on the Internet. He co-wrote the TekWar novels. He breeds horses. (Wonder why he is horse riding in Star Trek Generations? Now you know.) 

You might think that “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” would be my favorite non-Star-Trek genre performance Shatner has done. And you would be almost right. It is a classic in paranoia, perception, fear, and it does show that his acting style does have range, and ability and even with his unusual cadence, it can work in a situation like this. The episode itself is a masterpiece and Shatner’s performance is a big part of that.

But I like “Nick of Time” a bit more. It’s a more hopeful and positive story, as we see Shatner as part of a married couple who wind up briefly in thrall to a fortune telling machine that seems to tell the future — but really just makes people dependent on its easy, cryptic answers. The utter triumph of the episode as Shatner and his wife break free of their dependency is enough to make you cheer…until you see the coda, and see a couple who have not been so fortunate, or possessing as much fortitude as Shatner’s Don S. Carter and Patricia Breslin’s Pat Carter finally manage to show.

And Shatner has been to space.

Get a life? William Shatner, in and out of Star Trek, certainly has.

Shatner on horseback

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 22, 1995 – Sliders

Thirty-one years ago on FOX, the Sliders series first aired this evening. Created by Tracy Tormé and Robert K. Weiss, it would air on that network for three years before moving to Sci Fi for another two years. As a consequence of that it was first produced in Vancouver before being finally being so done in Los Angeles. 

Befitting a cross-time series,  it had an expansive cast led by the brothers of Jerry and Charlie  O’Connell along with Cleavant Derricks, Sabrina Lloyd, John Rhys-Davies, Kari Wuhrer, Robert Floyd and Tembi Locke with Derricks being the only cast member to stay with the series throughout its entire run.

There has also been gossip among Martin fans that this series was inspired by George R.R. Martin’s 1992 ABC pilot Doorways but everyone involved said that it was not.

So how was the reception at the time? Not good. The Los Angeles Time was typical when it said “Now comes ‘Sliders,’ a banal bore of a mishmash adventure series starring Jerry O’Connell as a genius grad student named Quinn Mallory, who discovers a way to visit parallel Earths by whooshing himself through a space portal known as a ‘wormhole.’ It beats studying.”  

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) DOCTOR WHO. [Item by Steven French.] A heart-warming piece on how David Tennant’s Dr Who helped the writer connect with her autistic son: “I was struggling to understand my autistic son – until we watched an episode of Doctor Who” in the Guardian.

The film Elf is a no-go in our house. My son interprets it as the psychological horror story of a man who is telling the truth but is constantly disbelieved. He loves The Traitors and rewatches entire series of it – knowing who the traitors are gives him an autonomy and comfort watching the game. Any other kind of conflict on screen and he’ll leave the room or wind it forward. I tried to explain that there are no stories without conflict. It made no difference.

My son is autistic and has ADHD – what’s sometimes referred to as AuDHD. We’ve always called him “fizzy”. He’s often the noisiest person in a room but hates too much noise. He’s incredibly sociable and wants so desperately to be part of the fun but finds the fun stressful. I had never seen anyone like him represented on screen.

And then I put on Doctor Who. It was a punt – my son was eight and he liked science. We went in at the David Tennant era – beginning with the episode The Christmas Invasion, where the Doctor doesn’t wake up till a third of the way through the episode. Suddenly there, standing in his pyjamas with a big boyish grin, was Tennant, describing a frightening alien with a weapon as a “big fella”. My son grinned back at the screen. When Tennant’s Doctor arrives properly, he barely stops talking or moving. He’s sword-fighting, then joking, then forgiving – and then he kills the baddy with a satsuma. All while repeating certain phrases to himself. My son laughed in recognition (he often repeats phrases to himself). He turned to me, eyes wide.

“He’s like me!” he said.

“You mean funny? Yes, you are very funny, luv.”

“No,” he insisted. “He’s fizzy. Like me.”…

(10) PROJECT HAIL MARY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Now, there are two reasons I read book reviews (well three, as I also HTML code some for SF² Concatenation).  First, I check book reviews out for titles I am considering reading. Secondly, once I have read a book, I like to see how others found it and whether or not I missed something.  With old, or even recent, best-selling SF novels, I suspect that most Filers will not check out book reviews for the first reason, but might well do for the second. And so we come to Andy Weir’s 2021 novel Project Hail Mary (my own old review at the link).  Arguably, this novel is now worth re-visiting given that the cinematic adaptation directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, staring Ryan Gosling, is now just out on general release across the Cursed Earth, the former US Mega-Cities and over here in Brit Cit and Cal Hab, as well as EuroCit and elsewhere on planet Earth (but not the rest of the Galaxy)…

And so we come to England’s, Midlands-based Moid Moidelhoff who took down the archive of his Media Death Cult YouTube Channel a few years ago, but occasionally he re-visits some of these early episodes. Because the film is just out, he just re-posted from his archive from half a decade ago (how time flies) his own, reasonably spoiler-free, review of the novel.

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The Internet is a, um, magical, um, well, not exactly a place per se. But it turns out, you can try to become magical for real using that, um, let’s just call it a place. Ryan George tells how “I Enrolled in Wizard School (Online)”.

I did not receive an owl. Not a snowy owl, not a budget owl, not even a morally questionable burrowing owl. So instead of attending wizard school the traditional way, I enrolled in an online course that promised to help me reclaim my magic. In this video, I take a real wizarding course on the internet, learn about alchemy, magical staffs, chakras, telepathy, and the importance of keeping your wand clean, and attempt to determine whether I am now legally considered a wizard. If you enjoy watching a grown man take online wizard classes very seriously, welcome.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/28/26 The Nature Of My Pixel Emergency? It’s Been Pixelated!

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(1) HARLAND PRIJS 2025. [Item by Hinse Mutter.] Today the Harland Prijs 2025 writing contest (“Prijs” = Dutch for award) winner was announced at the Afternoon of the Fantastic Book in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Pam Hage won for the story Foutmelding 404 (“Error Message 404”) and she receives €1000.

It is one award, for best short story (up to 7500 words) in the genre of scifi/fantasy/horror of the year 2025 in the Netherlands.  This edition had 267 entries, a record number.

The five best stories will be published for free in ebook in March on Hebban.nl (basically Dutch Goodreads). More info here.

It was a cute afternoon with some workshops and interviews as well, along with a book and art market and a few Star Wars cosplayers. I myself participated and came in 52nd (woohoo). Some pictures are on my Bluesky profile.

The stage at the Neude Utrecht Library, featuring Martijn Lindeboom, Heidi (in a mushroom hat), and Pam Hage, who is telling about her winning story. Photo by John Klein Haneveld

(2) HISTORICAL PLAQUE. “U.S. Has Annexed Canada in Toronto Artist’s Speculative Series” – chronicled in the New York Times’ “Canada Letter”. (Behind a paywall.)

Last winter, as Canada was becoming the persistent target of economic, verbal and social media attacks from President Trump, the Toronto multimedia artist Dara Vandor got to work imagining a nightmarish scenario — the annexation of Canada by the United States.

She hung the result — an aluminum plaque, 18 by 24 inches, memorializing a fictitious surrender on Aug. 11, 2031 — in an alley near her home. She did not expect to be continuing the narrative in the continuing series “Pax Americana” a year later.

For nine months Ms. Vandor produced and posted 18 historical plaques in stairwells and a forest, and on buildings, telephone poles and chain-link fences in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Tofino, British Columbia. The signs recounted disturbing scenarios: an invasion by U.S. troops, a Canadian resistance and then a quick surrender in straightforward, chronological detail. Each plaque can stand alone, but taken together they tell a whole story.

People who stumbled on the signs had big feelings — confusion, anxiety and even fury, Ms. Vandor says. People also stole them, which was fine with her. On Tuesday, “Pax Americana” opens at the D.B. Weldon Library at Western University in London, Ontario. (Unlike those in the wild, these are meant to stay put.)

Alongside 20 new plaques will be a collection of books, also hypothetical. Many nod to Canada’s literary past, inside jokes only we would understand — “The Log Driver’s Waltz: Clearcutting a Northern Passage” and “Selected Canadian Apologies”. One volume, “The Lives of The Presidents 1789-2045,” highlights a five-term Trump dynasty….

(3) A ‘REAL’ WRITER. Nnedi Okorafor shared this terrible experience with Bluesky readers last week.

(4) SOLARPUNK ADVOCATE. Clive Thompson has a suggestion for Mother Jones readers: “Tired of Dystopian Sci-Fi? You Might Like Solarpunk”.

…But what enchanted me about [Cory Doctorow’s The Lost Cause] was its vibe of possibility. Here was a world where climate change had gotten worse, but people were adapting—cleverly using tech to rebuild communities that would generate far fewer emissions and far less waste than before. It was a glimpse of a new destination….

…Many solarpunk thinkers told me their first encounter with the idea, though he didn’t coin the term, was a 2014 essay by Adam Flynn, an American writer and public health strategist, titled “Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto”—his contribution to the Arizona State University sci-fi collaboration Project Hieroglyph.

“We’re solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair,” Flynn wrote. Artists and activists needed to envision “ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and more importantly for the generations that follow us…Imagine permaculturists thinking in cathedral time. Consider terraced irrigation systems that also act as fluidic computers. Contemplate the life of a Department of Reclamation officer managing a sparsely populated American southwest given over to solar collection and pump storage.”

Other writers were, it turns out, having similar thoughts. They were deeply worried about climate and weary of sci-fi’s doomerist turn. They wanted art that elucidated a way forward, so they set about creating fictional glimpses of a sustainable future. In a duet of novels, Becky Chambers sketched out a world where humanity had survived climactic collapse—the robots became self-aware and politely fled into the wilderness—and then figured out how to exist in a better balance with nature: Her characters live in skyscrapers engulfed with vines, ride e-bike camper vans powered by solar panel coatings, and have abandoned swaths of their world to the wild.

In Sarena Ulibarri’s 2023 novel Another Life, a communal society runs solar desalination plants that irrigate Death Valley. The 2018 Brazilian short-story anthology Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World includes a classic hard-bitten-detective whodunit set in a world where homes have biodigesters that turn kitchen scraps into fuel.

Solarpunk often depicts technology deployed not to conquer nature, but to complement it—sometimes in deeply weird ways. In the story “Thank Geo,” by the author BrightFlame, humanity has wired trees with probes that let people talk to them….

(5) WHAT CAME FIRST? Douglas A. Anderson delves into the history of “Mothra” at Wormwoodiana.

As a youth I enjoyed the various Japanese monster films that showed up on late night television. We didn’t then know to call the monsters kaiju. Godzilla was most frequently encountered, but the monster and film that intrigued me the most was Mothra, because of its very surreal nature. I mean: an island in a radiation zone near Japan is found to be inhabited by savages, overseen by a pair of diminutive women who speak and sing in unison. After the women are taken away from the island by an unscrupulous businessman, in order to exploit them in a carnival-type show, they sing for rescue by Mothra, who, back on the island, hatches from a large egg, and as a larva swims gallantly over the sea, cocoons itself in Tokyo, and emerges as a very large moth with very slow-moving wings, which nonetheless compel hugely destructive winds. That is the kernel of the plot of the film Mosura, released in July 1961, with an English version released the following year as Mothra. 

I learned recently that the original novella (three connected stories by three different writers), made as a preliminary film treatment, was published in January 1961 in a periodical whose title translates to Asian Weekly Supplement. The story was titled “Hakko yosei to Mosura,” the three parts written successively by Shin’ichiro Nakamura, Takehiko Fukanaga, and Yoshie Hotta. It has now been translated into English for the first time, as The Luminous Fairies and Mothra. The slim book, published by the University of Minnesota Press, contains the translation (42 pages) and a Translator’s Afterword, by Jeffrey Angles, which is almost twice as long as the original story….

(6) A FOOTNOTE IN TELEVISION HISTORY. The Daytonian in Manhattan profiles “The 1931 Dumont Building – 515 Madison Avenue”.

As early as 1936, the burgeoning television industry was represented in 515 Madison Avenue by The Television Corporation of America.  It was joined by the Allen B. Dumont Laboratories, Inc., “manufacturers of television equipment.”  In 1938, Dumont installed a broadcasting antenna on the building and in May 1939 The New York Times reported it would erect an “outdoor studio” for “the transmission of tele-pictures.”  The article said it “will be equipped on a setback of the building to receive the benefit of daylight.  It will be roofed with glass so that inclement weather will not interfere with the schedule.”

Licensing of the Dumont Laboratories television station was granted in April 1940.  Later that year, the station made history.  On November 10, The New York Times reported:

Television has just played with honor and acclaim its most striking role in America’s greatest political show.  Last Tuesday it took its place alongside that more mature trouper of twenty-odd years of Presidential elections, the microphone.

According to the article, “nearly 4,000 television sets were in use,” as the results of the Presidential election came in.

The firm’s visible presence here gave the building its nickname, the Dumont Building.  The following January, the Allen B. Dumont Laboratories, Inc. demonstrated a “625 line definition” receiver here that produced enhanced clarity to the image.  The firm made history again that year by initiating “commercial” television.  The New York Times reported on May 11, “The DuMont station will specialize in outside pick-ups, such as baseball and football games and events.”…

… In 1958, the former Dumont rooftop station became home to the Columbia University WKCR-FM radio station.  It would remain until 1977.

(7) NEVERMORE TO SAY GOODBYE: MICHAEL HARPER (1954-2026). [Tribute by Dave Rowe reprinted with permission.] Michael Harper died on February 24th.  “He had his family around him to the end.”

A year and a day ago he announced he had pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver.  “Prognosis: 12 months or less.”

He kept up correspondence detailing the ups and downs. What was working and what was not.  All with a stiff upper lip and at times a wry smile.

He came to Canada from India via Manchester, Britain, and Canadians (because they are quiet and sensible) have Medically Assisted Induced Death (aka MAID) for the terminally ill.  Michael said he’d prefer to die with his family around him, rather than receive the wretched news while  they were working abroad.

Michael and I have been friends for seven months shy of half a century.  Sharing a very similar sense of humor.  

Michael kept a youthful enthusiasm about anything and everything he was involved with.

He once said that if he ever produced a fanzine (which unfortunately he never did) he would entitle it BUMPH. Of all the thousands of fanzine names, was there ever a more valid one?

Life was the better for knowing him. 

(8) JOSEPH L. GREEN (1931-2026). [Item by Andrew Porter.] Joseph L. Green, author and science fiction fan, died suddenly on February 20. He was 95.

His daughter Rose-Marie Lillian wrote, “…My father unfortunately passed away on February 20 after a relatively short spate of bad health. The good news is that he was able to go peacefully on his terms, which is not an opportunity afforded everyone.”

His chief employment was in the American space program for which he worked for 37 years, retiring from NASA as Deputy Chief of the Education Office at Kennedy Space Center. His specialty was the preparation of NASA fact sheets, brochures and other such publications for the general public, in which complex scientific and engineering concepts were explained in layman’s language. One of his most important accomplishments was serving as editor and principal writer of the NASA report on the Challenger disaster. 

He also hosted celebrated launch parties for NASA liftoffs which were visible from his house.

Prior to retirement from NASA and becoming a full-time writer, Joseph Green produced five novels and about 70 fiction stories, the latter published primarily in the Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in original anthologies.

Fanac.org’s one-hour interview with him was posted to YouTube in 2024 – “Joseph L. Green – An Interview conducted by Edie Stern”.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley is a novel that I’ll admit that I do like.  As a novel it works rather well with protagonist, if that’s the right description for Tanner, a landscape that is truly horrendous and a story that is interesting. The film, well, I’ll deal with that eventually. There will be spoilers for that. 

It was published first in 1969 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The cover art (which I think is utterly wrong for the novel) is by Jack Gaughan. It was by no means as bad as what Paul Lehr did for the Berkley Medallion cover that was the next edition.  A recent edition is from a Greek publisher, Mnemos, and there it’s renamed Route 666, but I like its cover over any of the others done so far. 

I did not know until now that a novella length version of this was first published in the October 1967 issue of Galaxy. Who here can tell me how significantly different the two versions are? That novella is in The Last Defender of Camelot collection which is available from the usual suspects.

The novella was nominated for a Hugo at Baycon, the year “Riders of the Purple Wage” by Philip José Farmer won. Lord of Light did win a Hugo that year. That was also the year all Best Dramatic Presentation nominees were Star Trek episodes.

Now the film. May I quote Doctor Seuss’ The Grinch? I thought it stink, stank stunk. 

Two actors, George Peppard and Jan Michael Vincent are really extraneous. Neither is known for his acting skills. They are somewhere in a missile silo in the southwestern desert with a small army of extras fighting over Playboy magazines (no, I’m not kidding) in the aftermath of civilization destroying in World War III. Albany is the only city in the United States still functioning why Albany who knows. Maybe the dry deep snows every year protected it.

Those Playboy magazines? A fight will break out somehow leading to a fire that ignites missiles (don’t ask please), destroys the bunker, and kills everyone but the two leads. Naturally.

We will get bad special effects monsters including giant scorpions beyond belief. It was supposed to cost around the 6-1/2 million dollars that it was budgeted for but it went way over budget. How the film cost that much is something only those who, well, I’ve no idea. 

So that explains why I found it so distracted, so badly done because it really wasn’t a film. It was a collection of stock footage put together like a seamstress who didn’t know what she was doing working with bits and pieces of cloth creating the Frankenstein a patchwork  of costumes for a kid going on Halloween where it didn’t matter that didn’t look good. 

It didn’t help that the script was really a piece of shit. It certainly had very little to do with the original novel. I’m not sure they actually read the novel. I think somebody told them hey this is what it was and they went from there.

Surprisingly Rotten Tomatoes give it a 34% rating. Of course it’s become a cult classic and Vishnu forbid us some films are bad enough that happens and this one certainly is bad enough.

(10) BONUS LEAP BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 29, 1952 – Tim Powers, 74.

Now Tim Powers is a writer that I really admire. He’s decently prolific as he has twenty novels published. Now remember this essay is about what I like, so I may or may not mention what something that you, so please do t be too miffed by that. 

Tim Powers

Where to start?  That’s easy as it has to be The Anubis Gates. Victorian London and Egypt. Ancient Egypt. Time travel. Anubis. Oh ymmm. It’s on my list of To Be Listened To list as I’ve already read it several times and the sample at Audible indicates Bronson Pinchot does a great job of narrating this. 

Just as good in a very different manner is On Stranger Tides takes place during the so-called Golden Age of Piracy which was nothing of the kind, when an individual on his way from Britain to Haiti has a series of increasingly wild adventures. I know the novel was purchased to be part on the Pirates of Caribbean franchise. I’ve not seen the film, so I don’t know how much, if anything of his novel made it into the film, but I’m betting nothing except the name did.

Declare, a secret history of the Cold War, is extraordinary. I mean it really. When I was still actually reading novels as opposed to listening to them, as I’m doing now, I didn’t spend six to eight hours a day on one but I remember I did on Declare just to see where the story went. Stellar.

The Vickery and Castine series is just fun, and I mean that as a compliment. Set in contemporary LA, rogue federal agents Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine can see ghosts and other things that are the secret reality of that city. It’s an ongoing series with four novels so far. Highly recommended. 

Then there’s Three Days to Never which I’m not convinced actually makes sense but is really fun to read with its wild mix of supernatural history of what actually happened, time travel and foreign agents. 

Ok, those are my picks as the Powers novels that I really like. So what’s your choices? 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) SUPERMAN AGAINST ABUSE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It is rare that a radio programme grabs you especially at 3.00am in the small hours.  At that time, over here in Brit Cit, BBC Radio 4 (formerly the Home Service) hands over to the BBC World Service so we get a taste of what you folks are given.  Anyway, last night there was a 40 minute documentary on aspects of metal but the first 20 minutes were devoted to the Man of Steel, a.k.a. Superman.  Actually, the subject was Joe Straczynski is an award-winning comic book writer and filmmaker.  It turns out that as an impoverished child, and son of a mother who did not want him and alcoholic and violent father, he sought recluse in science fiction and would steal SF books from his local shop, carefully read them and then return them, finding the most scary part putting them back because if he was caught he knew he would not be believed.  Back then his idol was Superman.

He went on to write (among much else) Superman Earth One and had himself as a ten-year old included (see cover below).

Today, Joe Straczynski is an award-winning comic book writer and filmmaker. He’s created TV shows like Babylon 5, Sense8 and the movie Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angeline Jolie. But he had a tough start to life. Joe was born into a loveless household full of abuse. His escape came through the pages of Superman comics. For him, the ‘Man of Steel’ saved his life and helped form his own moral character, steering him to a better life. Outlook’s Andrea Kennedy spoke to Joe back in 2019.

You can access the programme here  but if outside Brit Cit you may need to subscribe to BBC.

(13) ANOTHER GAME TV ADAPTATION. “’God Of War’: First Look At Kratos & Atreus In Prime Video Series” at Deadline.

We’re getting the first look at Ryan Hurst and Callum Vinson as Kratos and Atreus, respectively, as production begins on Prime Video‘s God of War. You can see the photo above.

The live-action adaptation of PlayStation’s ancient mythology-themed video game, from Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios, has received a two-season order.

From writer, showrunner and executive producer Ronald D. Moore (Outlander, For All Mankind), God of War follows father and son Kratos (Hurst) and Atreus (Vinson) as they embark on a journey to spread the ashes of their wife and mother, Faye. Through their adventures, Kratos tries to teach his son to be a better god, while Atreus tries to teach his father how to be a better human….

(14) RED PLANET COMES TO VISIT. “Last chance to see Mars sculpture in cathedral” reports BBC.

People on the Isle of Man have a final chance to see Mars up close this weekend.

The installation Mars: From Imagination to Science by artist Luke Jerrum draws to a close on Monday at Cathedral Isle of Man in Peel.

The artwork featuring detailed NASA imagery has been on display since 7 February.

Lay preacher and event organiser Rosemary Clarke said about 11,000 people had so far been to see it prior to its final weekend and there had been a “general happy feel about it” from those who visited.

“It’s certainly been a success and it’s just so rewarding to see people come in,” she said.

The exhibition is free to attend and the cathedral is open daily between 09:00 and 21:00 GMT.

The sculpture, has previously been exhibited in several UK locations, as well as in France, Singapore and the United States, followed on from a similar Moon display last year.

Isle of Man Today shared this photo: “Pictures show giant Mars sculpture on display at cathedral”.

(15) IS GOD HIDING IN A TV SHOW? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Now, this might seem something of a stretch, but is it?!!!!  Is it really?  Moid Moidelhoff – the British uber-SF-geek behind the quantamazing, magnetically monopolled and fantasomagorical  Media Death Cult YouTube channel – has found connections between hundreds of TV shows and films. What he did was to find over 600 connections and counting (just check that… ‘over 600 connections and counting’!) between films and TV shows. These shows, and their neighbourly connections, he painstakingly constructed from multi-coloured post-it notes on his living room wall. (Much to his wife’s annoyance.)

For example, several shows connect to  St Elsewhere, Oz, Beat, Law and Order, Special Victims Unit. And… Detective John Munch from Special Victims Unit crosses over into Arrested Development to investigate the Bluthe family, and Tobias (again from Arrested Development) is seen in the Collector’s Museum of Avengers: Infinity War.  Of course, this is an Easter Egg put there by the Russo Brothers who directed both Avengers: Infinity War> and some episodes of Arrested Development.  From here, you can see that the connections spread out through the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe….!  Alas, Moid did not have enough coloured Post-It Notes for all of that.

This is a physical representation of the greatest fan theory, the most intricate, interlinked, media hypothesis, the world has ever seen…  We are dealing with several layers of consciousness and realities within realities.  He even finds a connection between these fictional worlds with our reality (other than they are all too obviously shows/films made in our reality). This, is the Tommy Westphall Universe!

But Moid, never satisfied, wants even more! He seeks a unified theme that ties the whole Gordian’s Knot together! Something more satisfying that Tommy Westphall is a metaphor for ‘the simulation is real’.  Maybe it is in this as yet not fully-explored thread that emanates from Firefly which connects to Aliens, which connects to Bladerunner which is an adaptation of Phil K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?… Perhaps it is time to ask Hugh Everett III to step up? (Doncha just’ dig alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation?)

We may have discovered the DNA of all speculative, drama, entertainment, information and reality, hiding in the corridors of a fictional Boston Hospital and echoed in the mind of a 20th century SF author….

Spooky, huh?

You can see the 12-minute video below….  Tread boldly (but softly, oh, so softly).

[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Hinse Mutter, Andrew (not Werdna), Dave Rowe, 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 Mark Roth-Whitworth.]

Pixel Scroll 1/29/26 A Thousand Naked Pixels Screaming And Throwing Little Scrolls At You

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(1) NATIONAL FILM REGISTRY 2026. Four genre films were among the 25 added to National Film Registry this year. See the complete list at the link.

(2) SATURN AWARDS. The 2026 Saturn Awards Nominations dropped today.

(3) AUDIE AWARDS. The Audie Awards 2026 finalists have been announced. There are many genre works on the list.

(4) FANNISH FUMBLES. [Item by David Doering.] You may know Slashdot.org, the daily news site devoted to us techies and keen on SF, puts quotes at the bottom of each page.  One would think that they would check the proper quote for The Day the Earth Stood Still.  Sadly… in reality, here’s from today’s column. Sigh… [Click for larger image.]

(5) OH, WHAT A TANGLED WEB. “’Rage knitting’ against the machine: the hobbyists putting anti-ICE messages into crafts” reports the Guardian.

In the nine years that Gilah Mashaal has owned Needle & Skein, a yarn store in the suburbs of Minneapolis, she has tried to maintain a rule that “nobody talks politics” in the shop. But amid the weeks-long occupation of the Twin Cities by federal immigration paramilitaries, Mashaal and one of her employees decided to turn one of their weekly knit-alongs into a “protest stitch-along”.

They didn’t want to return to the “pussy hats” that symbolized women’s resistance to Donald Trump in 2016, so Paul, their employee, did some research and came back with a proposal: a red knit hat inspired by the topplue or nisselue (woolen caps), worn by Norwegians during the second world war to signify their resistance to the Nazi occupation.

“I said: ‘Well gee whiz, that’s extremely fitting for this moment,’” said Mashaal. “Me being a Jewish small business owner, that resonates with me on so many levels.”

Mashaal and her team quickly put together a pattern for a red knit cap with a ribbed brim, pointy top and jaunty tassel. They published the “Melt the ICE hat” pattern on Ravelry, the social network for knitters and crocheters, and made it available for download for $5, with proceeds going to the St Louis Park Emergency Program (Step), a group that is helping people affected by ICE raids to pay their rent and bills….

“We thought we’d have a group of 10 people come and knit, and it turned out to be over 100,” Mashaal said. “Then it started spreading and it’s just been crazy.” Nearly 70,000 copies of the pattern had been sold by Wednesday, less than two weeks after it was first published online. It has been adapted for crochet and other weights of yarn, and has become ubiquitous on knitting social media. Local yarn shops across the country are offering specials on red yarn and hosting knit-alongs of their own….

(6) SHE’LL BE BACK. Olivia Rutigliano points out that “The Terminator Is About the Last Moments In a Woman’s Life Before She Becomes a Mother” at CrimeReads.

A few weeks ago, I found myself with a burning desire to watch The Terminator. I love The Terminator for many reasons; it’s a perfect movie. It has easily adaptable lore but is itself very self-contained. It is smart and prescient about the pitfalls of our society’s over-reliance on technology, especially artificial intelligence. It is a beautiful story about the perseverance of humanity in a world that longs to erase it. It features a jaw-dropping series of handmade special effects, combining stop-motion animation, robotics and animatronics, and prosthetic make-up. It is a tight thriller, a moving love story, a meaningful sci-fi epic. It also features one of the greatest cinematic villains of all time. The Terminator. Tell your friends.

It’s also a story about motherhood, but from a perspective we do not often get in films: it’s the story of the last moments in a woman’s life before she becomes pregnant, becomes a mother.

We’ll see in T2 the transformation that our heroine, the normal woman Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), undergoes, after she realizes in T1 that she will give birth to the greatest hero of the 21st century. But in The Terminator we don’t get that, yet. We witness the final moments in Sarah Connor’s life that she lives alone—in her body, in the world.

A few weeks ago, I put together a small list of the coolest pregnant women in crime movies and TV. I didn’t include Sarah Connor from the Terminator movies, because, again, she’s not really pregnant during any of the major events in either T1 and T2.

Bur perhaps the fact that I’m super pregnant propelled me to watch this movie again. I last saw the movie as a teenager, so I had a very different set of takeaways this time around. In a way, The Terminator is a powerful metaphor for the reproductive lives of women, capturing the moment that a woman realizes that her body is about to become the home and host for someone else, the moment that she realizes her entire life will be about some other person she does not know yet. T2 is about how she rebuilds her own autonomy in the face of that; she’s not simply the hero John Connor’s mother, but a powerful warrior, herself. But T1 is about an ordinary woman realizing her life and body are about to grow and serve someone else…

…The film presents us with a heroine who models the bravery and the strength of pregnancy and motherhood and how they stand in opposition to the rising tide of anti-women, anti-human sentiment. I’m not a mother quite yet, but Sarah Connor is standing with me, showing me how.

(7) THIS HALO’S NOT FOR ANGELS. Animation World Network interviews the creators of “The Devilishly Clever Visual Effects of ‘Sinners’”. Beware spoilers.

…Driving the narrative are twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both portrayed by Michael B. Jordan, who decide to establish a juke joint in 1932 Mississippi.  The twinning effect could not be accomplished simply through a face swap because Sinners was being shot on IMAX.  “I remember attending a test screening with Autumn Durald Arkapaw [Cinematographer] at the IMAX headquarters,” recalls Ralla.  “When I looked especially at the 50 perf 65mm IMAX footage projected on the screen, it immediately became clear that nothing we had until that point was going to be good enough for that level of fidelity because you saw every pore.” He continues, “The split screen technique has the highest fidelity but there had to be physical interaction between the siblings. There was also the matter of not interrupting the on-set momentum of Ryan Coogler.  We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had something that Michael could strap on like a backpack and it captures him in 360 degrees from every possible angle but still allows him to move around and deliver the performance as he just did.” 

Well, it turns out they did have something. The Halo rig. The Halo rig consisted of 12 cameras positioned around Jordan’s head with the firmware modified to shoot in LOG.  “The Halo rig is a carbon fiber ring, so it was surprisingly light,” Ralla explains. “And the fact that it’s shoulder worn distributes the weight in a way that it didn’t make a big difference to Michael.  Switching between Smoke to Stack was trickier for Michael than putting on the Halo rig.” The Halo rig was strictly used for shots with lots of physical interaction between the twins, including a long, drawn-out fight between them at the end….

(8) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 152 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Slap That Fish More” is live. (Click this link for an uncorrected transcript,) 

John is summarising, Alison is eating, and it’s all Liz. We read your letters before discussing Brisbane in 2028’s neat new logo and the latest Eastercon’s financial report.

John’s head and shoulders appear behind a pinkish desk as if he is the puppeteer of Sooty and Sweep (Americans, ask your British friends). Sooty is pulling on Sweep’s ear. Text at the top reads “Octothorpe 152: John is preparing for the big dust-up”.

(9) JAMES SALLIS (1944-2026). Author James Sallis died January 27 at the age of 81. The announcement on his website said:

We are very sorry to share that James Sallis passed away on January 27, 2026, peacefully, with his wife Karyn by his side, after a long illness.

Sallis published his first sf story, “Kazoo”, in New Worlds in 1967. He sold several stories to Damon Knight for his Orbit series of anthologies. After selling a story to Michael Moorcock, Sallis was invited to go to London to help edit New Worlds just as it changed to its large format during its Michael Moorcock-directed New Wave SF phase; Sallis was co-editor from April 1968 through February 1969. 

He gained fame as a writer of mystery fiction, including the Lew Griffin, John Turner, and The Driver series. For his mystery writing, he received the Bouchercon lifetime achievement award in 2007.

He reviewed books for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1999-2022.

Sallis taught writing classes at Otis College in Los Angeles and until September 2015 at Phoenix College in Arizona; he left his job rather than sign a state-mandated loyalty oath that he regards as unconstitutional.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 29, 1964 — Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Sixty-two years ago, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb premiered on this date. It had a stellar cast of Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, James Earl Jones and Slim Pickens, and was directed by directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick. Peter Sellers in his multiple roles including Dr. Strangelove makes the film worth watching if for no other reason, but there’s oh so much else here. 

It was not the original title as Kubrick considered Dr. Strangelove’s Secret Uses of Uranus as well as Dr. Doomsday or: How to Start World War III Without Even Trying, and the much shorter Wonderful Bomb.

The film is somewhat based on Peter George’s political thriller Red Alert novel. (Originally called Two Hours To Doom.) Curiously Dr. Strangelove did not appear in the book. This novel’s available at the usual digital suspects. And George’s novelization of the film is on all digital sources. If you purchase it, it has an expanded section on Strangelove’s early career. 

It would not surprisingly win the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation at Loncon II in 1965 with The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao being the only other film on the final ballot.

The film was a box office success as it only cost one point eight million to make and it made nine point four million. Critics were universal in their belief that it was one of the best films ever done with Ebert saying it was “arguably the best political satire of the century”. At Rotten Tomatoes, it currently holds a ninety-four percent rating with over two hundred thousand audience reviewers casting a vote.  The studio on the other hand thought it was an anti-war film and distanced itself as far as it could from it. 

A sequel was planned by Kubrick with Terry Gilliam directing though Gilliam was never told this by Kubrick and only discovered this after Kubrick died. He said “I never knew about that until after he died but I would have loved to.”

Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) COMICS CASUALTY. “Amazon layoffs may have shut down what remains of Comixology” reports ComicsBeat.

Tech giant Amazon announced 16,000 layoffs yesterday, and we’re hearing that most of the remaining Comixology staff may have been among them. 

While we have no official confirmation from Amazon, we’re told that the remaining US staff was either immediately terminated or given until April as an end date. 

While it doesn’t talk about it much, Amazon still sells digital comics day and date from almost every major publisher. Converting the comics files to “Guided View” (automated transitions that make paneling clearer) and a digital format had been offshored at the company since the last round of layoffs in early 2023, which I compared to a “bloodbath.” Although the company was drastically downsized at that time, it did continue on, notably with the Comixology Originals line of creator owned comics. Comixology Originals has been putting out both graphic novels and periodical format comics regularly even since the last round of layoffs, under GM and CTO Jeff DiBartolomeo. It offers both decent page rates and total creative ownership – a rarity in the comics industry….

(13) EYE-CATCHING. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth] How can I beat that headline? “Dragons, sex and the Bible: What drove the book business in 2025” in The Virginian-Pilot.

2025 brought more blockbuster books about sex and magic along with bestsellers nobody saw coming. Yet while sales are solid and bookstores are generally flourishing, the book business still faces a dizzying set of challenges.

Rising costs ate into profits. Nonprofit presses lost federal funding. Artificial intelligence disrupted online search results and flooded Amazon with poorly written copycat books and slapdash genre fiction, making it harder for books written by humans to stand out from the slop. Major retailers ordered fewer books than they used to, and there weren’t as many companies distributing books to stores. Book bans threatened to limit collections in schools and libraries….

…Young adult fiction sales have fallen sharply, especially if you exclude sales of books by Suzanne Collins, whose bestseller “Sunrise on the Reaping,” a Hunger Games prequel, sold around 2 million print copies. Setting Collins’ sales aside, YA fiction sales were down 12% in 2025 compared with 2024, according to BookScan.

One reason, industry observers suggest, is that teens who haven’t abandoned reading are moving on from YA….

…Romance sales are still rising, though the genre isn’t growing at the meteoric rate of recent years. According to BookScan, romance sales rose around 5% this past year over 2024, largely because of blockbuster sales of Yarros’ “Onyx Storm.”

Another growth area is Bible sales, which are up over the past few years — a likely sign of some Americans’ growing interest in faith and spirituality — and jumped about 12% over the prior year.

And increased interest from a new generation of comics readers helped boost sales at comic book stores by 27% through the first eight months of the year, according to a report from the comics industry publication ICv2…

(14) PAPERBACK HUNTING. Jules Burt takes us with him: “Visiting the Zardoz Books – Vintage Paperback Warehouse – Over 100,000 Vintage Paperbacks + Pulps”. (Maurice Flanagan, owner of Zardoz Books, occasionally attends the LA Vintage Paperback Show in Glendale to shop.)

In today’s video I take a much delayed trip to the Zardoz/AllYouNeedIsBooks warehouse. My wants lists were updated and I was ready for action. Accompanied by my friend Steve we visited the £1 a book retail store then onto the warehouse for some serious shopping, I was not disappointed. The Zardoz books website is here; https://www.zardozbooks.co.uk/

(15) ORYX AND CRAKE — PROOF THAT MARGARET ATWOOD WRITES SCIENCE FICTION. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at the Media Death Cult YouTube Channel takes a bit of a dive into the Oryx and Crake and takes that as proof that Margaret Atwood writes Science Fiction…  Moid took down his archive of videos a couple of years ago but has been re-posting some of them including this one from half a decade ago.  This book was on his ‘to be read’ list courtesy of recommendations from some of his 55+ thousand followers. Atwood has ben arguably a little cagey (sniffy?) as to admitting whether or not she writes science fiction as opposed to more (ahem) literary offerings… You can see Moid’s 14-minute review below.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/24/26 What Happens Inside The Event Horizon Stays Inside The Event Horizon

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(1) INAUGURAL MEETING AT NEW LASFS CLUBHOUSE SCHEDULED. The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society will meet at their new clubhouse on February 12. Location: 8819 Reseda Blvd., Northridge, CA. Meetings nominally begin at 8:00 p.m.

(2) FOLLOW THE MONEY. The New York Times has the lowdown on “The Secretive V.I.P. Programs That Keep Gamers Spending”. (Behind a paywall.)

CSR 2 Realistic Drag Racing is a simple game, even by smartphone standards. Players compete in short street races — tapping a button onscreen to change gears at just the right time — for virtual currency that lets them buy new parts to make their hot rod a few tenths of a second faster.

It does not take long for the races to seem like distractions from the more consequential activity: scrolling through menus looking for new spark plugs or a better set of tires.

Players who want to upgrade their vehicles more quickly can spend real money. And they have. The Custom Street Racing series has generated more than $1 billion in revenue since the first game was released in 2012.

To keep people splurging in mobile games like the Custom Street Racing, FarmVille and Words With Friends franchises, their publisher, Zynga, uses a secretive V.I.P. program that treats players like royalty. It is a tactic borrowed from casinos, which may offer a free meal or show tickets when they notice a player is losing more than usual on a slot machine promising a trip to the Land of Oz.

“We really have to cultivate these players and let them know they are connected to a person as well as a game, and that we’re here for them to fix any issues they have, and reward them for their loyalty,” said Gemma Doyle, who helped build Zynga’s V.I.P. program and now works in the finance industry.

Retaining big spenders, she said, is essential in the competitive world of mobile gaming, where roughly 90 percent of revenue can come from less than 5 percent of the player base….

(3) HE KNOWS ABOUT LEAVING SINKING SHIPS. [Item by Steven French.] James Cameron has decided to live permanently in Aotearoa, New Zealand: “’Everybody’s at each other’s throats’: James Cameron says he has left the US permanently” reports the Guardian.

“Where would you rather live? A place that actually believes in science and is sane and where people can work together cohesively to a common goal, or a place where everybody’s at each other’s throats, extremely polarised, turning its back on science and basically would be in utter disarray if another pandemic appears.”…

(4) STARFLEET ACADEMY SHOWRUNNERS Q&A. At Space.com “’Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’: Showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau talk USS Athena design and why this is the perfect series for Trek’s 60th”.

A long-gestating effort to bring a Starfleet Academy TV series from concept to reality has finally manifested itself, as the “Discovery” spinoff series’ Star Trek: Starfleet Academy debuted on Paramount+ with a two-episode launch on Jan. 15.

It chronicles the lives and loves of a fresh class of young Starfleet cadets in the 32nd century under the direction of school chancellor and USS Athena captain Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter). Executive producer and current “Star Trek” ringmaster Alex Kurtzman and series co-showrunner Noga Landau (“Tom Swift,” “Nancy Drew”) believe this was the ideal “Star Trek” show to bring fans to mark the venerable franchise’s 60th anniversary.

“For every ‘Trek’ show, they all reflect the moment in which they were made,” Kurtzman tells Space.com.

“They’re saying something about society in its different phases. And right now — and I’m speaking both as the showrunner but also as a parent — I see our kids inheriting a very divided, fractured world. And I also see that they’re able to hold onto this optimism still, that anything is possible. It’s probably the first generation that I’ve seen that’s able to do both of those things. And that felt like a beautiful reinforcement of Roddenberry’s essential vision.

“What a great reason to make a show, because right now they’re being bombarded with negativity all day long,” explains Kurtzman. “We wanted to be a compass that guided them back toward hope and possibility and a brighter future.”

“We take on very real-world topics. All science fiction, but particularly ‘Star Trek,’ is always allegorical to something, and you get to read into it whatever you want. It felt like we got to talk about something very relevant now in this show. And that it’s not possible to learn without legacy. You have to learn from the past in order to understand the future and the present. To have a brand new generation and then several members of older generations there, I think it speaks to the spectrum of what is possible with ‘Star Trek.’”…

(5) 2028 WORLDCON BIDDERS FILING DEADLINE. The LAcon V committee reminded Facebook readers today that bidders for the 2028 Worldcon must submit their paperwork by February 28, 2026, to [email protected]. Bidders should reference 4.6 of the WSFS Constitution for the requirements. More details and information about site selection voting will be available later.

(6) THE WAY TO LEARN SFF ART HISTORY. Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations has a roundup about sff art books by Adam Rowe: “Exploration Log 12: Adam Rowe on the Best Retro Science Fiction Art Collections”. Here’s his introduction. Click through for his recommendations of specific books.

I’ve read a lot of art books covering science fiction in the 20th century. This likely isn’t a big surprise, given that I sunk more than a few years into compiling my own retrospective art collection, Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s. 

These types of collections come in two basic categories. First, collections that are dedicated to exploring every facet of one single artist and, second, collections that encompass dozens of artists, intentionally (or inadvertently) capturing a slice of a specific era. 

The former collections are often beautiful – I’d recommend just about every book focused on Chris Foss, John Harris, or Jeffrey Catherine Jones for the art alone. But single-serving art collections aren’t designed to deliver something that I tend to crave: The context that exists around any given artist. Some of them do have this. One great example is Jane Frank’s incisive 2001 book The Art of Richard Powers, which explores the artist’s deep influence on 1950s and ‘60s surrealist paperback covers while delivering a flaws-and-all portrait of the artist’s colorful personality. I’d also recommend Stephen D. Korshak’s Frank R. Paul: Father of Science Fiction Art (2010), Luis Ortiz’s Outermost: The Art + Life of Jack Gaughan (2010), and Frank Kelly Freas: The Art of Science Fiction, the latter of which was written in 1977 by the endearingly self-deprecating Freas himself. 

But in my experience, the best entry points for the average sci-fi enthusiast are collections that package up a big selection of artists. You’ll get a new curious vision on every page, and by the time you close the cover, you have all you need to piece together a mosaic-like celebration of the style.

Here’s my take on the best and most influential science fiction art collections from the 70s, 80s, and beyond. I hope it can serve as a meta version of what all these books themselves do, and provide the context you need to identify this snapshot of art history…. 

(7) 100% CERTIFIED. Sarah A. Hoyt tells Mad Genius Club readers how she became a Real Writer: “The Velveteen Author”.

….How did I make it here on top of the mountain (the mountain being being published and read. The mountain of publishing? I’m stuck on a rock halfway up, wondering if my fingernails and my remaining life span allow me to climb it.) Well… blood, sweat and tears, fits, screaming, giving up, picking up again… (I never managed to give it up for more than 3 days. And that one was bad.)

I have a process. It’s just a bad process you shouldn’t imitate. It’s called: be very bad at something, try it anyway, scream, cry, throw things, say a lot of swear words, read everything on how to do it, then scream, cry, throwing things, invent new swear words. Eventually pick it up by the wrong end, and push on that until something gives, it goes sproing, and suddenly I know the thing/program/subject better than most “experts.”…

(8) YVONNE LIME (1935-2026). Actress Yvonne Lime of I Was A Teenage Werewolf fame died January 23 at the age of 90 reports Deadline.

Yvonne Lime, who starred alongside Michael Landon in I Was A Teenage Werewolf, recurred on Father Knows Best, had dozens of other screen credits and later devoted her life to philanthropy, died Friday. She was 90….

…Born on April 7, 1935, in Glendale, CA, Lime’s screen career took off in 1956, when she guested on several TV series and landed a role opposite Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn in the Depression-set 1956 drama The Rainmaker. That year she also started a multi-season recurring role as Dotty on Father Knows Best, the long-running sitcom starring Robert Young and Jane Wyatt. Lime appeared on more than a dozen episodes from Season 2-6 in 1956-59.

She appeared on more television shows the following year and also had probably her best known role, second-billed as the girlfriend of Landon’s title character in the popular sci-fi horror pic I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Around that time, Lime also had an unbilled role in Loving You, which was Elvis Presley‘s first major starring role.

Lime would get top billing in the 1958 bikers-vs.-car club pic Dragstrip Riot, which also starred Gary Clark, Fay Wray, Connie Francis and others, and also as the new girl in school in the movie High School Hellcats that same year. Her final big-screen role was a co-lead opposite her Hellcats co-star Brett Halsey in the 1958 car-racing drama Speed Crazy…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 24, 1944 — David Gerrold, 82.

By Paul Weimer: It starts with Tribbles, because of course it does. My first interaction with David Gerrold’s work was “The Trouble with Tribbles”, the classic Star Trek episode that has spawned such an afterlife in subsequent iterations of the show. It’s perhaps Trek at its comedic best, a lighthearted episode that warped my viewing of TOS for a bit, because I was expecting more comedy than I got in subsequent episodes.  It would turn out that he would get to cameo in the DS9 episode “Trials and Tribble-ations”, which is one of those afterlives of “The Trouble with Tribbles”. 

That’s the only contact I had with his work for a while, knowingly, anyway. He did write scripts for an episode of Babylon 5, Land of the Lost, Sliders and the New Twilight Zone but I wasn’t aware of his connection to any of those.  It was in the late 90’s when I started reading Hugo and Nebulas winners and finalists that I came across Nebula finalist The Man Who Folded Himself.

That novel is best described as taking some of Heinlein’s time travel ideas to the absolute limit, with practically all of the characters being versions of the same character in different parts of their time line, and even a queer relationship with himself at two different points in the timeline.  It’s a twisty and intricate novel that requires the reader to pay attention to see Gerrold’s full design. Out of the crop of novels and stories with similar ideas, Gerrold’s might be the best. 

I’ve not read or watched The Martian Child, but I am aware of its existence.

He is famous for the unfinished War against the Chtorr series, which has been in limbo (since 1993!)  far longer than certain other authors works I will not name here but you know of whom I speak. I vaguely recall the first novel in the series, A Matter for Men but have not continued the series. 

But the work of Gerrold’s I remember the most besides the Tribbles episode and The Man Who Folded Himself has to be the co-written The Flying Sorcerers with Larry Niven. It is perhaps the at- the-time definitive Technology as Magic story (one that I think has exceeded in every respect is Elder Race by Tchaikovsky) but the idea of an astronaut trying to force an industrial revolution to get what he needs to escape is one that has been borrowed, too, by other writers. Is it a good novel? I can’t say that it is, but it’s certainly formative on a number of levels.

But if all of that is too much, just watch the joy that is “The Trouble with Tribbles”. You’ll be glad you did. 

David Gerrold

(10) MEMORY LANE

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man

Seventy-four years ago this month, the first installment of Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man appeared in the January 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Although he had been writing short fiction since 1939, this was Bester’s first novel.

The novel is dedicated to Galaxy‘s editor, H. L. Gold, who made suggestions during its writing. Bester’s preferred title was Demolition! but Gold convinced him it was not a good one. Anyone know where the title came from? 

The Demolished Man would be published in hardcover by Shasta Publishers the next year. Shasta Publishers was formed in 1947 by a group of Chicago area fans.

Critics at the time really loved it. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas in their Recommended Reading column for The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy said it was “a taut, surrealistic melodrama [and] a masterful compounding of science and detective fiction.” And Groff Conklin in his Galaxy 5 Star Shelf column exclaimed that it is “a magnificent novel as fascinating a study of character as I have ever read.”

As you know The Demolished Man would win the first Hugo for Best Novel at PhilCon II. It was also nominated for the International Fantasy Award. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) REVIEW OF BI GAN’S ‘RESURRECTION’. NPR’s Teresa Xie says “This sprawling, surrealist movie is a tribute to cinema itself”.

If you’ve ever wondered what filming your dreams would look like, director Bi Gan’s Resurrection has an answer. The Chinese auteur’s newest feature is as sprawling as it is enigmatic, conjuring up dreamlike forces from transcendent worlds and blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. The film’s nearly three-hour run time feels as such, and for some, the payoff may not be worth it. But Resurrection is less interested in an audience’s pleasure than in widening a sense of cinematic possibility. Beginning and ending in a movie theatre, the film unfolds as a sweeping tribute to Chinese history and to the enduring power of global cinema.

Resurrection opens with a series of title cards, reminiscent of those in the silent film era. They explain that the film is set in a futuristic world where humans can live indefinitely — if they do not dream. “People not dreaming is like candles that don’t burn, they can exist forever,” one intertitle reads. However, a few remaining figures called Deliriants are trapped in a state of dreaming, and a woman known as The Big Other, played by the elegant Shu Qi, is tasked with stopping them from doing so….

(13) MARATHON MAN. [Item by Steven French.] I missed Ben Wheatley’s sf movie Bulk when it came to our local indie cinema but I love his idea of a movie marathon: “The Guide #227: A brain-melting sci-fi movie marathon, curated by Britain’s best cult film-maker” in the Guardian.

Few directors currently working merit the title of ‘cult hero’ more than Ben Wheatley. Over a 15-year-plus career, the British film-maker has dabbled in just about every cinematic genre and style imaginable: psychedelic horror (A Field in England, In the Earth), grimy video nasty (Kill List), stylish, gun-toting thrillers (Free Fire), murderous Mike Leigh homages (Down Terrace, Sightseers), literary adaptations (Rebecca, High-Rise), and even a whopping great studio monster movie (Meg 2: The Trench).

Wheatley’s latest film further cements that cult status. Bulk is a defiantly DIY sci-fi-noir-paranoid-thriller hybrid, starring Sam Riley as an investigative journo tasked with rescuing a scientist from his own malfunctioning multi-dimensional creation. With its handwritten title cards, overdubbed dialogue, sticky-back-plastic special effects and general vibe of formal experimentation, Bulk exists a world away from most modern film-making. Even it’s delivery method feels far from the churn of the mainstream: instead of a standard release, the film is in the middle of a tour of independent cinemas across the UK and Ireland – tonight in Liverpool, tomorrow Lewes, with Dublin and Cork on the horizon (you can seek out your nearest screening here).

So who better than Wheatley to programme that arthouse-cinema staple, a movie marathon, for the Guide? We tasked him with putting together a 12-hour, backside-numbing, brain-melting series on a single loose theme. He has responded by selecting eight films that inspired Bulk in their paranoid/sci-fi/noir stylings and general ability to work magic with limited resources. Though, says Ben, “I’d lead with the paranoid, sci-fi, noir angle rather than the limited resources. ‘Come to the limited-resources all-nighter’ doesn’t sound appealing!”

Not that it needs to be an all-nighter. “Don’t start at midnight – everyone would be knackered,” Ben cautions. Instead his preference would be to make a start bright and early at 7am – “the best part of the day”….

(14) THE JOKE THAT ENDS ‘AND THE HOG LOVES IT’. A Youtuber with over a million subscribers, The Damage Report, is getting their clicks today at the expense of Jon Del Arroz. “Right-Wingers CRUMBLE As Masters Of The Universe Movie Attack Backfires Spectacularly”. But let’s be serious. Is anybody happier than Jon about being attacked by another creator with 150 times as many subscribers as he has? I guarantee you Jon LOVES it. Attention is what he lives for.

(15) KIDS THESE DAYS HAVEN’T READ WATCHMEN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at the Media Death Cult YouTube Channel takes a bit of a dive into the Watchmen graphic novel and all the commercial follow-ups including the TV series.

He begins by noting that there is something of a Tik Tok fad for videos of youngsters for the first time listening to what used to be famous pop songs.  Could the same be true for science fiction?  Moid wonders if, in its 40th anniversary year, Watchmen is unknown to the under-30-year olds?

Moid then goes into the story before what DC Comics did to upset the graphic novel’s creators….

Watchmen was a game changer when it was released FORTY YEARS AGO!!! But kids these days, would you believe that many of them just haven’t read it? Here is rough guide to what Watchmen actually is, how that universe expanded and why you should read it, well, some of it anyway.

By the way, the ‘some of it anyway’ refers to the original graphic novel and not the DC follow-ups prequels and sequels as well as related tales involving Batman and The Flash….

Moid’s recommendation is to read the original and then watch the TV series and if you like them then check out the feature film. (And don’t bother with the DC prequel, sequels and spin-offs.)

Moid’s 24-minute video is below. “You’ve all read Watchmen right?…..RIGHT?”

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

Pixel Scroll 12/17/25 This Starship Is Bound For Glory, Every Pixel On Her Must Be Scrolly

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(1) FUTURE TENSE. The new Future Tense Fiction story for December 2025 is “Bonum Certamen,” by Andrés Martinez. It’s being published a bit earlier this month, to avoid the winter holiday break/crush. The story is about English football, AI, and the interplay of on-field performance and strategy with sporting values like fair play.

The response essay  “Can an AI Manage the ‘Beautiful Game’?” is by the fantastic speculative fiction author Deji Bryce Olukotun, who also works for the sound technology company Sonos and has a background in digital rights law.

(2) JOANNA RUSS, AGE 16. A photo of Joanna Russ when she was a finalist in the “Science Talent Search 1953” has been making the rounds. You can view it at the link.

(3) GERROLD GOFUNDME UPDATE. As of today, “David Gerrold’s Health and Leukemia Fundraiser” has raised over $45,000 of its new $50,000 target.

(4) TOLKIEN STUDIES NEWS. David Bratman has announced his retirement as co-editor of Tolkien Studies., and the name of his successor.

Though thirteen years is too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable hobbits, I regret to announce that, as of this year, I am retiring from the co-editorship of the journal Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review.

Health concerns are the proximate cause for my retirement. But I will continue to be associated with and do work for the journal as availability permits.

My co-editors, Michael D.C. Drout and Yvette Kisor, have appointed as the new co-editor of the journal, with my enthusiastic approval, Kristine Larsen, noted and prolific Tolkien scholar, sometime contributor to TS, and professor at Central Connecticut State University.

They are hoping to send the next issue, Tolkien Studies 22, to press with our courteous publisher, West Virginia University Press, sometime in the spring of 2026.

– David Bratman, former co-editor, Tolkien Studies

(5) COLLATERAL DAMAGE. “Google AI summaries are ruining the livelihoods of recipe writers: ‘It’s an extinction event’” reports the Guardian.

This past March, when Google began rolling out its AI Mode search capability, it began offering AI-generated recipes. The recipes were not all that intelligent. The AI had taken elements of similar recipes from multiple creators and Frankensteined them into something barely recognizable. In one memorable case, the Google AI failed to distinguish comments on a Reddit thread from legitimate recipe sites and advised users to cook with non-toxic glue.

Over the past few years, bloggers who have not secured their sites behind a paywall have seen their carefully developed and tested recipes show up, often without attribution and in a bastardized form, in ChatGPT replies. They have seen dumbed-down versions of their recipes in AI-assembled cookbooks available for digital downloads on Etsy or on AI-built websites that bear a superficial resemblance to an old-school human-written blog. Their photos and videos, meanwhile, are repurposed in Facebook posts and Pinterest pins that link back to this digital slop.

Recipe writers have no legal recourse because recipes generally are not copyrightable. Although copyright protects published or recorded work, they do not cover sets of instructions (although it can apply to the particular wording of those instructions).

Without this essential IP, many food bloggers earn their living by offering their work for free while using ads to make money. But now they fear that casual users who rely on search engines or social media to find a recipe for dinner will conflate their work with AI slop and stop trusting online recipe sites altogether….

(6) MORE THUMBS FOR AVATAR. Two more reviews – one positive, one negative.

Deadline likes it: “‘Avatar: Fire And Ash’ Review: James Cameron’s Thrilling Third Trip To The Pandora Universe Is A War Epic For The Ages”.

…Cameron knows how to do spectacle better than anyone, and this Avatar builds out its worlds to such a high degree I would dare to say you could put the first two films together and it still wouldn’t add up to the fierce levels and magnitude of the fight in this one. Compared to The Way of Water, this version has far more land action although rest assured, the fan-favorite Tolkuns seafaring whales are back in action when you need them most.

This is what they used to call in Hollywood a true epic, taking place in the sky, water and land in a visual knockout like you rarely see on this level these days. Its secret sauce however is our emotional connection through the Sully family. They are again the hook, and Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver know you have to deliver a compelling family story to keep this all from drowning in too much fire and water. It is a credit to the actors, most having to do performance capture and somehow making us feel for them throughout. Led by exceptional turns again from Worthington and Saldaña, along with standouts Dalton and Champion, plus of course Weaver (convincing even as a 14 year old), there is also room for greater character development than before from Lang, who masters the villainry of Colonel Quaritch in his new guise, but also manages a three-dimensional relationship with Spider that feels authentic. Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement and Giovanni Ribisi also get their moments on the human side of things….

The Guardian doesn’t: “Avatar: Fire and Ash review – witchy new sex interest can’t save this gigantically dull hunk of nonsense”.

…On and on and on it goes. The planet-sized movie franchise of Avatar continues to spin massively in the cosmos – yet without affecting the tides in any other world. Maybe Avatar is the cosmos and its originator James Cameron is the new L Ron Hubbard; the creator, or rather prophet, of a new belief system involving big blue creatures with pointy ears that flap and twitch when they talk, to whom we will all one day be required to bow down when they float past. And while the rest of the cinema industry has quietly abandoned 3D without ever quite admitting it, theatres showing James Cameron’s giant new three-hour hunk of nonsense are still handing out the 3D specs to the customers….

…As ever, the look of this film is impressive and yet strange. Billions upon billions of pixels have been crunched to create its huge, infinitesimally detailed digital world. Like Middle-earth, it is probably the key to the franchise’s great success but, presented as it is in motion-smoothed high-definition, it looks to me like a “making of” featurette projected on to the white cliffs of Dover. And when ordinary human faces appear, they seem bizarrely out of context, as if Photoshopped in, like seeing American movie stars’ faces on a poster advertising a panto. Edie Falco again plays the general, her face set in an unvarying expression of pop-eyed annoyance at everything that presents itself to her senses. As an actor, she probably thinks it’s the only way to get through this. Jemaine Clement has a cameo that oddly humanises the film.

What we are heading for is yet another mighty struggle between the Na’vi and the evil human invaders, the “pink-skins”, and (as ever) it needs to be conveniently resolved by calling on the assistance of huge undersea creatures whose presence certainly levels the playing field….

(7) GIL GERARD (1943-2025). Actor Gil Gerard died December 16. He was best known for playing the title character in the Buck Rogers movie that was retooled into the opening episode of the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century TV series. It ran on NBC from 1979 to 1981. The New York Times obituary, “Gil Gerard, Star of ‘Buck Rogers,’ Dies at 82” (behind a paywall), shares his memory of that role:

“I thought the character had a sense of reality about him,” Mr. Gerard said of the part in 2017. “He wasn’t a stiff kind of a guy. He was a guy who could solve problems on his feet, and he wasn’t a superhero.”

Despite only running for two seasons, the show was well-received among television viewers and for years has been remembered fondly by fans.

And another sff series was noted among his other credits by the Times:

Mr. Gerard went on to produce the 1983 Broadway musical “Amen Corner” by James Baldwin, and continued acting, with roles in the 1990s on the CBS series “E.A.R.T.H. Force” and on the NBC soap opera “Days of Our Lives.”

(8) BOB BURNS III (1935-2025). Archivist and actorBob Burns III, a well-known historian of props, costumes, and other paraphernalia from sff/h movies, died December 16 at the age of 90. Here’s some key memories from his profile at Eve’s Obits: “Bob Burns III, 1935 – 2025”:

…Burns acted in 40-some movies and TV series, often as a gorilla, mummy, or other monster (Invasion of the Saucer Men, Capt. America vs. the Mutant, The Lucy Show, My Three Sons, The Ghost Busters—the 1970s TV series—The Vampire Hunters Club). His “Bob’s Basement” contained tons of props, costumes, and other memorabilia, which he frequently loaned out to production companies, and assisted with makeup and special effects. Burns was the subject of the 2012 documentary Beast Wishes….

Burns and Paul Blaisdell also co-published a monster magazine together in the early 1960s called Fantastic Monsters of the Films.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

December 17, 1944 — Jack Chalker. (Died 2005.)

By Paul Weimer: Jack Chalker may have had a “bit”, but he worked that bit rather well.

Jack Chalker

His bit was transformation. I have a friend, he’s not much into reading SFF books. He loves SFF movies, though and he loves physical transformations. Give him a werewolf transformation or something else, and he is there for it.  If he ever decided to try science fiction or fantasy, I would hand him a Jack Chalker novel and let him go to town on it.

Because Jack Chalker and his works were all about transformation. 

This is most evident in his most popular series, the Well World novels. The Well World itself, shorn of the transformational aspects, is one of the most interesting concepts for a SF novel or series.  A supercomputer that, in effect, stabilizes and controls our universe, posing as a planet that is cut up into 1500 hexagons. If you use one of the gates from our universe (available in old ruins on various worlds) to enter a hex of the Well World, you are usually automatically transformed into a form appropriate for that hex — because normal oxygen-nitrogen land hexes are not the only hexes to be had.  The partial maps of the Well World show all sorts of intriguing things such as the “Sea of Chlorine”, “Sea of Storms” and other intriguing bits. 

Even more intriguing is that given the reality warping available to the computer in the well world, the hexes can and do enforce levels of technology that work in a hex. It’s an amazing setting (but the RPG made from it was terrible).  This all puts Chalker’s Well World firmly in the realm of science fantasy. 

The real comp for that would be Farmer’s World of Tiers, which has plenty of gates and artificial worlds…but without the transformational elements therein. 

Much of the rest of Chalker’s oeuvre is more science fictional than science fantasy, but as noted before, people winding up in new bodies (long before things like Altered Carbon, sorry Richard Morgan) were de rigueur in Chalker’s books. Although he did not do as much with it as some might like, winding up in a body of a being of different gender (or genders) was par for the course for Chalker. Unfortunately, I can think of multiple times where women (and it seemed to be frequently women) who wound up in new bodies of lesser intelligence and usually higher sex appeal in combination (you don’t need a further picture than that). That wasn’t so great. 

Chalker grew more enthusiastic with his world the longer he wrote, right up to his unfortunate passing. Midnight at the World of Souls is a lean and mean book, the books grew longer and longer as that series went on, and he went to other books.  But I think that first novel still holds up, especially if you don’t know the answer to the question of who or what Nathan Brazil really is. I think the revelation of that deflates the works, just a little bit. But still, in the end, Chalker had his bit and he worked his bit to a fine edge. If transformation is your thing, Chalker is here for you.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) THE YEAR’S FEEL-GOOD SCIENCE STORIES. [Item by Steven French.] The recovery of the ampurta in Australia and the further shrinking of the Antarctic ozone hole – just a couple of the feel good science stories that we all need: “Seven feel-good science stories to restore your faith in 2025” in Nature.

…Our recent Nature’s 10 package includes many good news stories — and there were many more. From gene-editing firsts to rapid disease containment and policy victories, Nature takes a look at some positive science stories of 2025….

(12) TINY TYRANT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The latest Nature cover story relates to who ruled the dinosaur world.  Apparently a smaller than T. rex dinosaur is a contender.

Tyrannosaurus rex is one of the most iconic and well-known dinosaurs — but it has also been beset for decades by a controversy. At the heart of the debate is a fossil skull from what appeared to be a smaller cousin of T. rex, discovered in the 1940s. Initially described as a new species, Nanotyrannus lancensis, this skull has more recently been labelled as merely a juvenile Tyrannosaurus. In this week’s issue, Lindsay Zanno and James Napoli present evidence that should settle the debate. The authors describe a new skeleton of a small tyrannosaur found in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. The remains are exceptionally well preserved, and the researchers were able to determine that it was a young adult — not yet fully grown, but also, crucially, unlikely to grow to anywhere near the size of an adult.

T. rex. Their analyses reveal that Nanotyrannus, a small, swift predator, hunted in the same ecosystems as the colossal apex predator T. rex at the end of the Cretaceous.

(13) LOOKING BACK AT ‘THE LORD OF LIGHT’. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff, over at the reasonably popular Media Death Cult YouTube Channel, took down his archive a few years ago. (He is bigger on Patreon these days.) However, he is now re-posting some of the best short videos including here a review of Roger Zelazny’s The Lord of Light (the 1968 Hugo winner).  Moid read this first as a teenager and is now having a blast re-reading some SF classics including this one.

You can check out his 12-minute review, with countless cover variants, below…

[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, Olav Rokne, Joey Eschrich, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Randall M.]

Pixel Scroll 11/11/25 If We Had Pixels We Could Have Pixels And Scrolls, If We Had Scrolls

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(1) WAS AI ART USED IN NEW GRRM BOOK? ART DIRECTOR’S DENIAL. Did Penguin Random House’s 20th anniversary edition of GRRM’s A Feast for Crows use AI art? This thread on Reddit – “George R.R. Martin’s team accused of using AI” – analyzes numerous examples in support of the claim, pointing to odd anatomical distortions and mistakes.

The book’s illustrations are by imaginative realism artist Jeffery R McDonald.

The person responsible for approving the art in the book, Raya Golden, yesterday published a denial AI art was used in a post at GRRM’s Not A Blog: “FFC art accusations”.

My name is Raya Golden and I manage the art direction and licensing development here at Fevre River working closely with GRRM as his schedule will allow. But I alone am responsible for approving all the licensed art that accompanies our SOI&F book driven materials.

Recently there have been accusations floating around that the Penguin Random House’s illustrated edition of A Feast For Crows was produced using AI generative art.

To our knowledge and as presented by the artist who completed the work in question there was NO such programing used. While he is a digital multimedia artist and relies on digital programing to complete his work, he has expressed unequivocally that no AI was used, and we believe him.

SO…

The official word from our office is, of course, that we DO NOT, never have and will not willingly work with A.I generative artists in any way shape or form.

(2) ELLISON WONDERLAND PRESERVATION UPDATE. On Facebook, J.Michael Straczynski has posted an impressive gallery of photos taken inside Harlan Ellison’s house:

While I am here…as part of preserving Ellison Wonderland and getting it ready to be classified a historic/cultural landmark, we had one of the best architectural photographers, Barry Schwartz, come in to shoot high resolution photos, along with an Oscar nominated filmographer to do videos for a 3D tour on an eventual website. The core photos, which have been sized down for upload to Facebook, are such high resolution that you can go all the way down on books in the libraries to read the titles.

(There are also a couple of shots of the Lost Aztec Temple of Mars, which has had the capstones atop the house fixed and restored to their original positions, and each panel was individually taken down so that the wooden boarding on which they were mounted could be replaced. The mounting was so soft from years of decay that you could literally shove your finger through them. One more good storm and they would have collapsed.) We had to clear out some of the shrubbery to get to the bottom of the mounting, then clean the panels before returning them to their original place. We’ve also found the molds for some of the broken or missing hieroglyphs and will be replacing them.)

Just for those who wonder if the house still looks as it should. Those of you who have been there should recognize every inch of these….

(3) GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD VOTING OPENS. File 770’s post “Goodreads Choice Awards 2025 Opening Round Nominees” shows the covers of the first round contenders in the Fantasy, Romantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, and Young Adult Fantasy and Sci-Fi categories. There are 15 categories altogether, and Goodreads members have until November 23 to cast their votes. A second round of voting will follow, and then the winners will be announced December 4.

(4) 2025 BOOKER PRIZE. The winner of the 2025 Booker Prize is David Szalay for Flesh, which is a non-genre novel.

(5) MEET THE BSFA CHAIR. The latest Clarke Award Substack newsletter includes an intriguing interview with novelist and Chair of the British Science Fiction Association Stewart Hotston, which includes his reasons for preferring juried awards.

Tom Hunter: Hi Stewart, and thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. I was hoping that to start us off you could introduce yourself and your work to our readers.

Stewart Hotston: Hi, yes, I’m an author who’s largely known for SF. I’ve also been a judge for the Clarkes as well as currently being the treasurer of the BFS and as a councillor and now Chair for the BSFA.

I write non-fiction in a number of places — both essays and cultural criticism. My previous published longer work was The Entropy of Loss which was a finalist for both the BFS awards and for the Subjective Chaos awards.

My new book, the space opera Project Hanuman, is published by Angry Robot, and features microbial spaceships, information warfare, planets made of gold and grand ringworlds.

Tom: We know you best, of course, as a BSFA nominated judge for the Clarke Award. I was curious about how you found reading an entire year’s worth of UK published SF (twice!) and the impact, if any, on both your own writing and any wider understanding of the genre.

Stewart: The impact was broad. I found I recognised trends properly for the first time — when you’re reading everything publishers think is worthy of consideration you also get a sense of what the industry thinks is both commercial and substantial. Of course, you’re aware of trends and fashions, but seeing them first hand because you’re seeing literally everything, was a new experience for me.

I found the entire thing fascinating and although it was a tremendous amount of work, it was also really enjoyable.

I’m on record as saying I prefer juried awards over voted because although I think both approaches have strengths, you’re really unlikely to find diamonds in the rough rising to the top of voted awards. What really excites me is those stories that haven’t been as visible as others suddenly getting seen…

(6) HWA WEBMASTER TURNOVER. Horror Writers Association webmaster Angel Leigh McCoy announced on Facebook they will no longer hold that post after December 5. McCoy says it “was not my choice” and calls it a “surprise”.

I wanted to share an important update so that no one is caught off guard. The HWA is undergoing a leadership-directed restructuring, and as part of that process, my contract will end after the first week of December. After that time, my responsibilities will transition to someone new (I don’t yet know who that will be).

This decision was made by the Executive Director, Max, and was not my choice. It came as a surprise, and while transitions are never easy, I want to ensure that the community experiences as smooth a hand-off as possible. If you have any website requests, tech needs, or support questions, please send them to me before December 5 so I can complete them while I’m still in place.

Serving the HWA for the past twelve years has been one of the most meaningful experiences of my career. It’s been my privilege to support our members, chapters, events, awards, and scholarships, and to witness the creativity and generosity that make this community so special. I joined HWA as a new writer back in 1999, and I’ve cherished every step of this journey.

If my work has made a positive impact on your experience with the HWA, I would be deeply grateful if you shared that with the organization’s leadership ([email protected], [email protected], [email protected]).

Thank you all for your trust, your collaboration, and your kindness. It has truly been an honor.
With appreciation and affection, Angel Leigh McCoy

(7) ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD NEWS. The Arthur C. Clarke Award is now taking submissions for books published in 2025.

…Our judges are braced for incoming book mail.

The award is open to original authored works published in English by an author of any nationality, provided that the novel is published for the first time by a UK publisher between 1 January and 31 December of the current submission year.

Deadline for submissions is 31st December 2025: Contact us for our full submissions guidelines.

(8) LEE MOYER INJURED. [Item by Brick Barrientos.] Artist Lee Moyer, a two-time Hugo Award-winning illustrator and designer, sent the following email to his mailing list:

Writing great comics sound effects is harder than you’d think. But sadly, FOOSH is not just a great sound effect, it’s an acronym that stands for “Fall Onto Out-Stretched Hand.”

While I’m usually quite slow in sending out updates, this update represents an all-time (s)low because I’m typing it entirely with my offhand.

I sheered off the larger bone in my left wrist (the Radius) in a terrible fall. A longish metal plate with nine screws has been implanted in my wrist, but it may be months until I can really again draw with my left hand.

So, rather than a cheery list of all the things I’ve been working on, I have a humble request.

If your budget and interest allow, it would mean a great deal to me if you ordered a custom-made print.”

Lee Moyer’s Author Arcana would be interest just to look at.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

November 11, 1922 — Kurt Vonnegut. (Died 2007.)

By Paul Weimer: My first encounter with Kurt Vonnegut was not actually through his work, but through a movie. Not the movie of Slaughterhouse Five, his best known (an adaptation of perhaps his best novel), although that would come later. No, it came, in all places, in the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back To School. 

Kurt Vonnegut

In that movie, Dangerfield, a successful businessman who doesn’t have a college degree, goes to college in order to inspire his son, who is not doing well at the university. But Dangerfield’s character figures he can buy his way to a grade.  So, when he needs to do a paper on the work of Kurt Vonnegut…he hires Kurt Vonnegut, who shows up in a cameo in the movie.  Dangerfield’s tactic backfires, when his professor tells him “whoever wrote this doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut”

Friends, I didn’t know who Kurt Vonnegut was at the time. My high school had not taught him, and I had missed him in my still growing education into SF. But, if you know me by now, I had to know who he was. And so I read Slaughterhouse Five, and Breakfast of Champions, and a variety of other things by him. His biting and unrelenting humor has stayed with me ever since, and “So it goes” is part of my vocabulary.

Speaking of which, funny thing, when I got around to reading Pournelle and Niven’s Inferno, I was shocked and surprised to find that Vonnegut had a particularly prominent place in hell. I think that the reason they put him there as they did (Vonnegut was still alive when they wrote Inferno) is because Vonnegut (like, say, Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates) vociferously and vocally denied he wrote science fiction, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I am certain that Vonnegut wrote science fiction, but to put him in hell for not saying so…badly done, indeed.  But…so it goes. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) ATWOOD ON WOMEN’S HOUR. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Last week’s Best of Women’s Hour had an interview with Margaret Atwood (first item after the programme’s introduction) as her autobiography is now out..  In the programme, she covered why and how she became a writer. She never thought she would be successful. It was Canada and writers were considered dedicated and writing a purely vocational occupation. Other topics also covered included A Handmaid’s Tale and the history of the USA…

In Margaret Atwood’s 64-year career she has published world-renowned, prescient novels like The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace and Blind Assassin, and now a memoir. Margaret joins Nuala McGovern to discuss  Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts and reflect on her life, her work and the power of knowing her own mind.

You can access it here.

(12) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 147 of the Octothorpe podcast, “What? What?! No!”, says John Coxon, “was described by my two cohosts during the editing process as ‘discursive’ and ‘rambly’. STRAP IN, LISTENERS.” There’s an uncorrected transcript available here.

A photograph of the mountains of Nepal with text overlaid, reading “Octothorpe 147 Official Octothorpe Nepal Identification Guide* (*apparently never gets old)** (** Liz might like to go to a comics con there)”.

(13) KATHERINE RUNDELL Q&A. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Take Four Books is a weekly BBC Radio 4 series of interviews with authors where they discuss an author’s famous book and then the author discusses three other books that inspired the author in the writing of their book.  This week’s author was the children’s fantasy writer Katherine Rundell the author of the Impossible Creatures books that riffs on species loss and climate change.  Her latest one is The Poisoned King. The first here recommended books in Prince Caspian.and the second was The Wizard of Earthsea. The programme includes a clip of Ursula K. LeGuin speaking on writing fantasy.

Award-winning author Katherine Rundell discusses The Poisoned King, the second installment in her acclaimed children’s fantasy series, ‘Impossible Creatures’.

In this latest adventure, protagonist Christopher journeys back to the magical archipelago – a realm where dragons, unicorns, griffons, mermaids, and much more, all roam free. But this time, he’s faced with an urgent and mysterious threat.

Rundell shares the three literary inspirations behind her new novel: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600), C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian (1951), and Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968).

You can access it here.

(14) REREADING CHILDHOOD’S END. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at YouTube’s Media Death Cult wiped his archive some years ago, but has now been re-posting some of his more memorable videos. This one is from 2021 and is a review of Arthur C. Clarke’s classic Childhood’s End.  This novel came out back in 1953 early on in Clarke’s career but Moid has only just resurrected his review video. Now, I suspect most Filers will have already read this book, but possibly not recently.  The same is true for Moid.  It is interesting to see how younger SF readers consider the classics as well as how re-reading after many years alters perceptions. You can see the 15-minute video here.

(15) THREE’S COMPANY, SIX IS A CROWD. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Tiangong, the Chinese space station, is a little more crowded than usual. It’s currently playing host to two crews of three taikonauts each. 

Normally, the old crew (launched in April of this year on Shenzhou-20) would have returned to Earth shortly after the arrival of the Shenzhou-21 crew. However, it’s suspected that the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft was damaged by an on-orbit debris collision. The China Manned Space Agency is undertaking analysis and has not announced a timeline for the earlier crew’s return.

Though not covered in the linked article, various SpaceX/Elon Musk fans are starting to agitate for a SpaceX rescue mission for the taikonauts. The technical, as well as political, complications that would have to be overcome for that to occur are not known (but would likely be quite significant, so don’t bet the house on it just yet). “Tiangong hosts dual crews after debris impact delays Shenzhou-20 return” reports Space Daily.

…On November 5, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) postponed the scheduled return of Shenzhou-20, citing concerns over possible damage caused by a debris event. Crew commander Chen Dong, operator Chen Zhongrui, and science operator Wang Jie continue to live and work aboard the station, joined by the three-member Shenzhou-21 crew.

CMSA officials reaffirmed: “Following the postponement of the Shenzhou-20 manned spacecraft return mission, the project team, adhering to the principles of ‘life first, safety first,’ immediately activated emergency plans and measures… All tasks are progressing steadily and orderly according to schedule”.

Both Shenzhou-20 and Shenzhou-21 astronauts are conducting joint scientific experiments, made possible by robust station systems and supplies delivered by Tianzhou cargo ships.

Engineers and risk teams have performed simulation analysis and system testing on the Shenzhou-20 capsule, while ground teams continue return drills at the landing site….

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

Pixel Scroll 11/8/25 Nothing That Needs A Monkey Wrench Done To It

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(1) HELP DECIDE THE DIAGRAM PRIZE. The shortlist for The Bookseller Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year 2025 was released October 24, and is now open for a public vote on The Bookseller website here. Voting will close November 17, with the winner revealed November 21.

“Axe murder and Montreal erotica titles vie for the Oddest Book Title of the Year” reports The Bookseller.

…As always, there will be no prize for the author or publisher, but the traditional “passable bottle of claret” will be awarded to the person who nominated the winning entry.

In contention for The Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year 2025:

  • Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World

A canter through the “macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to do harm from the grave”, featuring not just European vampyres but female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the “lustful yoginīs of India”. Author John Blair provocatively and eyebrow-raisingly argues, the publisher says, that “corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear”.

  • The Pornographic Delicatessen: Mid-century Montreal’s Erotic Art, Media, and Spaces

A survey of saucy materials from mid-20th-century Montreal, which became North America’s erotic capital, thanks to its thriving red-light district, nightclub scene and pornography industry.

  • Self-Recognition in Fish: Exploring the Mind in Animals

A “groundbreaking” discovery of animal self-awareness that “vividly documents” the mirror self-recognition ability of fish, which also, Springer Nature says, takes readers on “an engaging exploration of the scientific experiments”.

  • Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder

The story of the axe – “familiar implement and most human of weapons” – looks at the ways humans have used it to kill each other, from its role in warfare, as the favourite execution method of Henry VIII and instrument of choice for parricide Lizzie Borden.

  • Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America

Body politics and US history intersect in a look at how Americans went coif crazy in the 1800s, obsessed by the “revelatory power of hair” and how ones’ ‘do became a marker of culture and identity.

  • Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences

The collection of essays from the distinguished scholar of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation includes the titular piece, a look at the “inherent contradictions between consumer safety and product marketing”. Other topics addressed in this collection include: How efficient are wild animals as investors? Why was United Shoe Machinery the Microsoft of the 1890s? And have the Amish played a key role in advanced technology?

(2) THE ROADS MUST SCROLL. [Item by Steven French.] There’s one that runs just to the north of here! “’Google Maps’ for Roman roads reveals vast extent of ancient network” in Nature.

A high-resolution digital map allows people to plan their routes along the ancient roads of the Roman Empire. Combining historical records with modern mapping techniques, researchers mapped hundreds of thousands of kilometres of roads. The findings nearly double the known length of Roman roads.

The data set was published in Scientific Data on 6 November alongside an online platform called Itiner-e, which study co-author Tom Brughmans calls a “Google Maps for Roman roads”1.

“It’s a growing resource for a community to keep on adding information to to ensure that this remains the best representation of our knowledge of where all the roads in the Roman Empire were,” says Brughmans, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Brughmans hopes the data set will “revolutionize our understanding of how people, ideas and infectious diseases” spread 2,000 years ago. “Such insights can be used to better understand the challenges we face today,” he adds…

(3) OWL SERVICE ON SIXTIES TV. “Filming The Owl Service – Far Off Memories from Otherly Television Landscapes” from A Year in the Country.

For myself a particular touchstone for the “wyrd” sense of patterns beneath the plough and otherly landscapes is Alan Garner’s The Owl Service book from 1967 and its television adaptation that was broadcast in 1969-1970 and that has become one of the core touchstones of wyrd culture….

Very loosely and briefly, it is the tale of three teenagers who discover a mysterious set of owl and flower-patterned dinner plates in an attic and the magical ancient legend of the “Mabinogion” comes to life once again in their Welsh valley, with the story taking in supernatural fantasy, class struggle and adolescent permissiveness….

1. The colours of the outfits of three of the main characters, Alison, Gwyn and Roger, were based on an older International Colour Code for electrical wiring (red, black and green); although it was initially broadcast in black and white, a decision was made that if it was going to be filmed in colour, they would use colour to hint at the power the three could unleash….

(4) NEW JERSEY DINOS ON THE MOVE. “Saved from extinction: Giant North Jersey dinosaurs migrating to new home” reports Gothamist.

Field Station: Dinosaurs, the animatronic Jurassic playground that has drawn visitors to Overpeck County Park in Leonia for more than a decade, will close after this weekend.

But the roaring, life-sized dinosaurs aren’t done with New Jersey just yet.

The herd is migrating down the Parkway to a new home along the Atlantic City Boardwalk.

Showboat Atlantic City has purchased all 31 life-sized dinosaurs currently on display and plans to build a dino-themed attraction next to the resort, slated to open in spring 2026.

The move keeps the creatures together and keeps them in the state, something the park’s founder and executive producer, Guy Gsell, said was important to him.

“We’re like the family who moves from a house to an apartment and has to give away their pets,” he said. “We wanted to make sure that the pets had a nice place to go and that they stayed together.”…

About a month ago, the park listed its dinosaurs on Facebook Marketplace. A feathered velociraptor was listed for $700, while a bucking green-and-orange hadrosaurus (the species first discovered in Haddonfield, New Jersey) was going for $2,450. The long-necked apatosaurus was the priciest (not counting a pair of hatching eggs) at $2,860.

Inquiries rolled in from as far away as Europe and South America, including zoos and “wealthy people who thought it would be nice to have a dinosaur next to their pool,” Gsell said.

He joked that the dinosaurs are simply following a familiar trajectory: “It’s like a really common progression in New Jersey to move from Hudson County to Bergen County to the beach.”…

(5) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Elizabeth Bear’s Sub-Inspector Ferron Series (2018 and 2020)

Sometimes it’s the offbeat stories that I really like from authors, the short works that aren’t expanded into full length stories. Such is the case with Elizabeth Bear’s Sub-Inspector Ferron series. Of course, everything she writes is a delight to read which is why I enjoyed the third White Space novel, The Folded Sky, which came out this summer.

Bear’s Sub-Inspector Ferron series at the present consists alas of but two novellas, In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns and A Blessing of Unicorns. Will there be more? Oh, I hope so. Will there? Read on for that answer. 

In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns is set a half a century from now. In the city of Bangalore, a scientist working on cutting-edge biotechnology has been discovered inside his own locked flat, his body converted into a neat block of organic material.

It’s up to Police Sub-Inspector Ferron to figure out the victim’s past and solve the crime, outwitting the best efforts of whoever is behind the death, her overbearing mother, and the complexities of dealing with the only witness – an ever so cute parrot-cat Chairman Miaow. (The latter, she says are, as I guessed, a cat with parrot colors and “a parrot-like level of intelligence and ability to mimic speech”. That cat will later be adopted by her. She already has a fox. I don’t think it said what the intelligence level of the fox is.

I’ll note that the stories aren’t freestanding, so the novella, A Blessing of Unicorns builds off the first novella, therefore must be experienced after the first is read or listened to.

Together they make up a fascinating look at the life and work of Ferron as a Police Sub-Inspector in a balkanized world where there are no national or regional police forces. No, it’s not some small libertarian wet dream here, but a real world with actual consequences to everything that happens. 

There is certainly more than enough story here for her to someday write a novel set in the universe. And I was much looking forward to that, but I asked her if there would be a novel in the series, she replied “there might be a novel someday but I really need to visit Bangalore myself to write that! I’ve been relying on friends who hail from there, or who have family there and have visited extensively, but it’s not the same as boots in the dirt experience!”

Fantastic stories told well by a master storyteller, what more do you want? I’ve never read anything by her that’s even the least bit disappointing.

The Audible narrations are done most excellently by narrator Zehra Jane Naqvi. She’s an Australian expatriate in the United Kingdom of Anglo-Indian descent. She very much handles the Indian accents quite wonderfully here.  She started her voice acting career in Big Finish Productions’ Doctor Who audio dramas with Sylvester McCoy and Peter Davison reprising the Seventh and Fifth Doctors.

The first one is available at the usual suspects, but the second remains at this time an Audible exclusive several years later.  I have a note from Elizabeth Bear that says that there will not be a print edition, “Not unless something unforeseen happens”. 

(6) COMICS SECTION.

(7) NOT QUITE THE RETURN OF PEANUT BUTTER MAN. [Item by Michael J. Walsh.] “Purdue police (mostly) solve the mystery of peanut butter man” at Boing Boing.

A man covered in what was widely assumed by onlookers to be peanut butter was spotted wandering around Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, on Wednesday, November 5, causing alarm on campus, especially to those with peanut allergies. WLFI News 18 explained on Wednesday afternoon that Purdue University campus police were trying to figure out who the man was and why he was covered in peanut butter. They continue:

“Concerns arose about the potential danger to those with peanut allergies. News 18 arrived shortly after, observing an increased police presence and confused students. Boilermakers reported seeing the man walking around campus.”

WLFI News 18 also reported that cleaning crews had been called to the scene to clean up and sanitize any surfaces that had been contaminated by peanut butter dripping off the unknown man. Police officers and student witnesses speculated that perhaps the peanut butter man was a student who was undergoing some kind of hazing event.

The mystery of the peanut butter man was partly solved on Thursday, much to the relief of the Purdue community. The Journal and Courier ran an absolutely hilarious article that provided some new insight into the case — notably that Purdue Police Captain Song Kang confirmed that the man was, indeed, a student. The Journal and Courier also reports that he wasn’t actually covered in peanut butter but, instead, had been slathered from head to toe in sunflower seed butter….

I assume Michael J. Walsh’s interest in this story is nostaligic – it reminds him of the 1972 Worldcon masquerade, as chronicled here in “Scott Shaw! Deuce of Deuces”.

(8) UNUSUAL WEAPON. [Item by Mlex.] There are still things worth inventing. (Posted by William Gibson at Bluesky.)

— William Gibson (@greatdismal.bsky.social) 2025-11-06T02:21:39.133Z

(9) JUSTWATCH TOP 10. JustWatch has released its ranking of the Top 10 streaming movies and TV shows for October 2025.

(10) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] If you have not yet had enough of Halloween, Moid over at the Media Death Cult YouTube Channel has re-visited Ghostwatch.  This was broadcast by the BBC on Halloween in 1992.  It caused quite a stir as it was meant to be a documentary….  Moid re-visits this fantastical totem of British broadcasting… “The Most Traumatic TV Show Ever Made – Ghostwatch”.

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