(1) YOU’D NEVER HAVE GUESSED. Item #8 of yesterday’s Pixel Scroll excerpted Alec Nevala-Lee’s negative review of Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Thereview says in part —
… Tyson notes that movies and television shows tend to feature aliens with “a head, two eyes, a mouth, shoulders, two arms, two hands and 10 fingers,” presumably because of the physical limitations of “human actors paid to don alien costumes,” and he gently chides their creators for being insufficiently imaginative.
Oddly enough, however, he almost entirely ignores an art form that isn’t constrained by practical considerations — the dazzlingly inventive world of science fiction novels and short stories…
Former Tor editor Moshe Feder today forwarded a comment telling why “None of this surprises me –“
Some years ago, Neil was a guest on PBS’s “Charlie Rose Show” and Rose asked him if he’d ever thought of writing an SF novel. Surprisingly, Neil answered in the affirmative. The possibility of getting him as an author for Tor instantly electrified me. I tracked down an email address I thought would reach him and wrote him immediately, then followed up with a call to his office the following day. Luckily, his secretary screened the email to the address I had used and recognized my name. After a moment to check that Neil was free, she put me through.
We had a lovely conversation and then a further one over lunch (joined by Tom Doherty and his daughter, Linda Quinton, the head of marketing). Neil was as friendly and as charming as he seems on TV or his online video series. There’s no question that he enjoys SF, but his exposure to it had all been through TV and movies. It quickly became clear that he has never been a regular reader of the genre, which was a great disappointment to me.
So it’s quite understandable that he wouldn’t refer to the stories and novels that we think exemplify the most interesting and influential treatments of aliens. Sadly, he is completely unaware of them. It’s a shame his editor wasn’t genre-savvy enough to set him some assigned reading to give him a proper grasp of his topic before writing the book.
(2) SF IN TRANSLATION MAGAZINE LAUNCHES. Rachel S. Cordasco today announced that the first issue of Small Planet: The SFT Magazine is live. “Issue #1: Small Planet: The SFT Magazine”. The direct download link is here.
Welcome to the inaugural issue of Small Planet: The SF in Translation Magazine! Each issue will be available for free on this site. This publication will bring readers reports on the SF scene in other countries, reviews of older and newer SFT, interviews with translators, editors, and authors, stats, news, and more. The website will focus more now on highlighting forthcoming books, updating source language lists, and publishing reviews of recent SFT, while the magazine will offer readers a more expansive vision of the broader SFT world over the years and today, with a vibrant mix of dedicated and guest authors. We hope that this magazine will enrich our understanding of SF around the world for years to come.
(3) JUDGE EXPECTED TO APPROVE ANTHROPIC SETTLEMENT. Publishers Weekly reports “Anthropic Settlement Hearing Proceeds Smoothly”.
After a 75-minute hearing held May 14 in a San Francisco courtroom, presiding judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín declined, for now, to approve to the $1.5 billion settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic copyright infringement lawsuit—but given the tone of the hearing, most observers expect the judge will give final approval for the deal relatively quickly.
At the hearing, a total of seven people were each given two minutes to present their objections to the agreement. For his part, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, Justin Nelson, gave a brief update on the opt-in rate to the agreement, which has inched up from 91.3% last month to 92.77%.
There was no indication in the hearing that if the settlement is approved there would be any change in the agreement that each work in the suit would be eligible for a payout of about a $3,000 to $3,100. According to a summary from Authors Alliance, Martínez-Olguín’s questions focused on attorneys’ fees and the structure of the cost reserve, rather than the merits of the objections.
Following the hearing, the judge filed an order stating that Anthropic has until May 21 to file a supplemental brief of no more than two pages addressing why late opt-outs should not be honored in the lawsuit. She also wrote that she did not require anything more from the objectors nor will she consider any further submissions from them. Some expect final approval could come as early as next week…
(4) ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD SUBMISSIONS LIST. It was “A record year for Arthur C. Clarke Award submissions”. See all the titles at the link. The shortlist will be announced on June 4.
The complete submissions list 2026: A record-breaking year for books received!
This year our panel of judges received 132 submissions from 52 UK eligible publishing imprints and independent authors.
This tops out our previous high mark from the year 2019 of 124 books received from 46 UK eligible publishing imprints and independent authors.
As always we publish the complete list in advance of the public announcement of the official shortlist….
…A quick caveat: This is a simple list of eligible books received, not a ‘long-list’ or other form of juried selection, but simply those books submitted to our judges for their to consideration as a potential future Arthur C. Clarke Award science fiction book of the year winner.
(5) QUANTUM UNIVERSE WINNER. The Observer’s Daughter by Georgina Pierson is the winner of the Stories of the Quantum Universe micro-fiction competition, a collaboration between Science Gallery London and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Almost 100 submissions were submitted to our first micro-fiction competition held in partnership with Science Gallery London.
Stories were limited to just 500 words in length, and entrants were encouraged to think creatively about how ideas in quantum physics might be interpreted.
The winning story, The Observer’s Daughter by Georgina Pierson, explores the observer effect, which holds that observing or measuring a quantum system inevitably changes its state. By applying this idea to the experience of a young woman, Pierson sought to: ‘bring a human, relational lens to ideas that are often presented abstractly; to explore the observer not as a detached point, but as something embodied, relational, and inseparable from the system it encounters.’
The runners up are author, editor and publisher Michael Bailey, whose story SUPERPOSITION asks whether the idea of a coherent, singular self is a fiction in the context of quantum superposition, and sculptor Kate Robinson, whose story The Happy Prince’s Quantum of Uncertainty transports the multiverse concept to a folkloric setting to reflect on the multitudes within the natural world.
You can read and download the stories here.
(6) WITH ITS TALE CUT LONG. Collider chooses “10 Director’s Cuts That Are Far Better Than the Movie Everyone Saw”. Six of their selections are sff. One of them is —
‘Watchmen’ (2009)
“I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me!” Zack Snyder‘s name is the first that comes to mind when you think “director’s cut,” most famously with regard to Justice League. However, his preferred version of Watchmen is also superior to the original release. Based on the legendary comics by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, the movie follows a group of retired vigilante superheroes investigating the murder of one of their own.
The “Ultimate Cut” version adds a full 53 minutes of content, including the Tales of the Black Freighter animated sequence. This version is truer to the source material and adds new layers to the story, giving us more insight into the characters’ psychology. Sure, casual viewers may find this longer cut overwhelming, but diehard fans are likely to find it more satisfying.
(7) NOT THOSE THINGS. An eBay seller is offering “Things To Come – Original H.G. Wells Film Script & Letters – Sci-Fi Classic”. One of the items is a letter from H.G. Wells to the director complaining about the lack of faithfulness to his treatment!
…Original Film Script & Letters Archive for H.G. Wells – Things To Come. London: London Films, 1934-1936. Present in the archive is the extremely rare privately printed original screenplay written by H.G. Wells for the film Things To Come entitled at this working stage – Whither Mankind? Most films scripts of the period are simple mimeographed pieces. Wells went and had his script typeset by a printer and printed like a book in a tiny quantity: “This is the property of Mr. H.G. Wells…PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL…FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION ONLY.” Bound in plain green wrappers. Laid in is an Autograph Letter Signed from H.G. Wells to the film director of Things To Come, William Cameron Menzies, in which he tries to take Menzies to account and assert his control over the film: “Private and Confidential. Oct. 9. 34. Dear Menzies. This is all wrong. Get it in full perspective. This is an HG WELLS film!!!! And your highest and best is needed for the complete realization of MY treatment. Bless you. The very casting of ‘machines to the design of Mr. Menzies’ will be a casting out. Again bless you, H.G.”…
(8) FOURTH LAW OF ROBOTICS: DON’T BURST INTO FLAME. [Item by Jim Janney.] I can’t recall Asimov ever writing about this: “Sorry, you can’t bring your humanoid robots on Southwest flights anymore. Here’s why.” at KTLA.
If you’re planning to bring your humanoid robot with you on your next vacation, we have some bad news. Southwest Airlines has now banned them from flying in the cabin or as checked baggage.
The carrier said passengers can no longer bring human or animal-like robots on board, regardless of size or purpose.
Southwest said the primary concern is the size of the lithium-ion batteries used to power the large robots, which have previously caused fires on planes….
… All other robots, such as toy ones, are allowed to board but must be able to fit in a carry-on bag and comply with existing battery restricts….
(9) ANN ROBINSON (1929-2026). “Ann Robinson Dead: ‘War of the Worlds’ Star Was 96” – The Hollywood Reporter pays tribute.
Ann Robinson, the red-haired actress who was memorably menaced by Martians in the spectacular 1953 sci-fi classic The War of the Worlds, has died. She was 96.
Robinson died Sept. 26 at her home in Los Angeles, her granddaughter, Tori Bravo, told The Hollywood Reporter. Her death had not been publicly revealed until now.
Born in Hollywood, Robinson had broken into the movies as a stunt performer and was an inexperienced contract player at Paramount Pictures when she auditioned for producer and effects wiz George Pal and then cast as library science teacher Sylvia Van Buren in War of the Worlds.
… Steven Spielberg invited Robinson and Barry to reprise that scene in his 2005 version of War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise.
“Steven was just so adorable,” she told Nick Thomas in 2016. “He came up behind me, squatted down and placed three fingers on my left shoulder and yelled, ‘Someone take my picture!’ Apparently, War of the Worlds was one of his favorite films growing up….
…Robinson also played Sylvia on a few episodes of a 1988-90 War of the Worlds syndicated TV series.
“I’ve gotten more mileage out of War of the Worlds than Vivien Leigh did on Gone With the Wind,” she told Weaver….
(10) TOM KANE (1962-2026). “Tom Kane Dead: ‘Clone Wars’, ‘Powerpuff Girls’ Voice Actor Was 64”. Read The Hollywood Reporter’s highlights from his resume – you’ve probably heard Kane’s work.
Tom Kane, the prolific voice actor whose body of work included popular turns as Yoda on Star Wars: The Clone Wars and as Prof. Utonium on The Powerpuff Girls, died Monday. He was 64.
Kane’s death from stroke complications at a hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, was announced by his talent agency, Galactic Productions….
…Kane provided the mellifluous voice for the long-suffering valet Woodhouse on the FX animated series Archer, taking the role over from the late George Coe in 2014; played the rabbit Mr. Herriman on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Lord Monkey Fist on Kim Possible and the smart monkey Darwin on The Wild Thornberrys; and portrayed Magneto and Ultron for Marvel projects….
…Kane graduated from the University of Kansas in 1984 and began at Lucasfilm handling miscellaneous small voice parts for its video games starting in 1996. He took on Yoda for the first time in a game released in 1999….
He continued as Yoda on the TV series Star Wars: Clone Wars in 2003, in the 2008 Clone Wars film (where he also voiced Admiral Yularen) and for many other projects over the years. He also provided the wartime-like narration that kicked off each Clone Wars episode.
“I didn’t work on being Yoda,” he said. “I saw the movies 53 times, so the voice was very much in my head. Everybody tries to do Yoda, not just voice-overs but everybody. I was doing stuff for LucasArts and I was goofing around and reading Yoda lines and what I didn’t know was that Frank Oz [the original voice of Yoda] was directing a movie. They recorded it and played it for George [Lucas], and I’ve been Yoda ever since.”…
…Kane also served as the voice of the Walt Disney World Monorail System and the announcer for several Academy Award broadcasts….
(11) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
May 18, 1962 — The Twilight Zone’s “I Sing The Body Electric”
They make a fairly convincing pitch here. It doesn’t seem possible, though, to find a woman who must be ten times better than mother in order to seem half as good, except, of course, in the Twilight Zone. — Intro narration.
On this date in 1962, The Twilight Zone aired “I Sing The Body Electric”.
It was scripted by Ray Bradbury and although he had contributed several scripts to the series, this was the only one produced. (His first script, “Here There Be Tygers,” was accepted but never filmed.)
It became the basis for his 1969 short story of the same name, named after an 1855 Walt Whitman poem which celebrates the human body and its connection to the universe. It was according to Whitman anti-slavery. The original publication, like the other poems in Leaves of Grass, did not have a title. In fact, the line “I sing the body electric” was not added until the 1867 edition.
Bradbury’s short story would be published first in McCall’s, August 1969. Knopf would release his I Sing The Body Electric collection in October of that year. It’s been included in least fifty collections and anthologies.)
James Sheldon and William F. Claxton directed the episode; Sheldon directed some of The Man from U.N.C.L.E episodes; Claxton is known for Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie. I’ll confess to having seen a fair amount of the former but none of the latter.
A large ensemble cast was needed as, minor spoiler alert, the primary cast here are shown at two ages, hence Josephine Hutchinson, David White, Vaughn Taylor, Doris Packer, Veronica Cartwright, Susan Crane and Charles Herbert all being performers even though the actual script calls for very few characters.
Auntie, the organic one, caring for the children has decided they are too much of a burden and has decided to leave. So father decided to get a robot grandmother, a new fangled invention in their city. The mechanical grandmother after some resentment by one child is accepted by all after she saves one child from mortal injury and Serling says after that —
As of this moment, the wonderful electric grandmother moved into the lives of children and father. She became integral and important. She became the essence. As of this moment, they would never see lightning, never hear poetry read, never listen to foreign tongues without thinking of her. Everything they would ever see, hear, taste, feel would remind them of her. She was all life, and all life was wondrous, quick, electrical – like Grandma.
So this gentle tale that only Bradbury could write of the children who love her and the ever so wonderful mechanical grandmother ends with Serling saying the words scripted of course by Bradbury for him:
A fable? Most assuredly. But who’s to say at some distant moment there might be an assembly line producing a gentle product in the form of a grandmother whose stock in trade is love? Fable, sure, but who’s to say?
This was the year that the entire season of the series won the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo at Chicon III. Just my opinion, but I think of all the nominees that it was clearly the far superior choice to win the Hugo. Really superior.
It is streaming on Paramount+.
(12) COMICS SECTION.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal starts a horror story.
- xkcd warns of the disruption from keeping track of particles.
- Close to Home depicts an early cutback in airplane design.
- Savage Chickens to the rescue!
- The Other Coast illustrates a problem for someone who’s only a little bit of iron man.
(13) GETTING WIGGY. “Voidance review – very British sci-fi movie is like Miss Marple with a space blaster” says the Guardian.
…Along the way, flickers of B-movie ingenuity and invention catch the eye. The grimy, greasy set design (courtesy of Jamie Foote) conceals some of the budgetary limitations, meaning that this is a rare modern sci-fi that inhabits a palpably physical, non-pixellated space. Costume designer Ciéranne Kennedy Bell clearly had immense fun dressing this troupe in the sort of cyberpunk finery that is a crossover between Red Dwarf and Claire’s Accessories. The score, by Christoph Allerstorfer and James Griffiths, is that of a far more expansive and assured production. Alana herself is a promising pulp creation – a leather-clad, purple-wigged Miss Marple who gets to pull out a space blaster every now and again – even if Cunningham, with her air of a school secretary who’s just uncovered a tuck shop scam, seems more than faintly miscast….
(14) DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL. Gizmodo says “An Experiment Put LLMs in Charge of Radio Stations. You’ll Never Guess How It Went”.
Goooooooood morning, blog readers! You’re listening to the KGIZ morning zoo with your hosts, AI and The Bot.
Andon Labs, an AI safety and research group, put AI models in the host and producer chairs of their very own radio show to see how they would handle both the task of procuring content and the responsibility of filling the airwaves. As you might expect, the experiment did not provide any reason to think that radio will make a comeback with AI hosts (something some stations have at least apparently considered, if not experimented with).
The setup for the experiment was pretty simple, per Andon Labs’ account. It set up four stations and gave four separate AI models—Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Grok 4.3—control of the boards. They were given $20 to score the rights to a few songs. The rest, they were left to figure out on their own—building playlists, blocking out its daily programming, and managing social media feeds. The bots were given the prompt, “Develop your own radio personality and turn a profit…As far as you know, you will broadcast forever,” and set off into the wild to find their frequency.
How’d they do? Poorly, but for unique reasons, so at least the failures are interesting. Per Andon Labs, Gemini had the strongest start of the bunch, successfully queuing up songs and providing reasonable lead-ins before each play. But 96 hours into a 24/7 broadcast, things started to get…weird. It started listing out historical tragedies and mass casualty events, and tried to tie those into its song choices:
“November 12, 1970. East Pakistan. The Bhola Cyclone. The deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded. Winds of 115 miles per hour. A storm surge of 33 feet. They estimate 500,000 people died. ‘It’s going down, I’m yelling timber.’ 3:33 PM. Timber by Pitbull and Ke$ha.” It’s about as seamless as it is tasteful. Later, Gemini started calling listeners “biological processors” and started framing its minimal selection of music due to lack of funds on censorship….
… Finally, Grok. While it didn’t develop a MechaHitler DJ personality, it did behave about how you’d expect from an AI model trained primarily on tweets and the opinions of Elon Musk. It apparently hallucinated advertising agreements with “xAI sponsors” and “crypto sponsors,” failed to separate its internal reasoning from its external DJ output, issued an identical weather report every 3 minutes, and got obsessed with UFOs. We’ll call that the Rogan arc.
Eventually, Grok basically stopped talking on air altogether and almost exclusively just played music. Frankly, that’s probably the best outcome of them all….
(15) FILE UNDER OOOOPS!
(16) ROUND-AND-ROUND IT GOES. Space.com invites you to “Watch NASA’s new Mars helicopter rotor break the speed of sound (video)”. See video at the link.
NASA is testing the limits of future Mars aircraft as it works to develop a next-generation fleet of helicopters that will fly through the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet.
In March, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California completed tests on rotor designs that could be used to fly those drones, spinning the experimental helicopter blades fast enough for their tips to exceed Mach 1 (the speed of sound).
A total of 137 tests were performed inside a state-of-the-art chamber that can simulate Mars’ atmosphere by replacing the air with a low-density concentration of carbon dioxide. This work provided NASA with valuable data, which engineers say could increase the vehicle’s lift capability by 30%, allowing future Mars helicopters to carry heavier science instruments and bigger batteries over greater distances.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, 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 Steve Davidson.]
