26 You Ask For Miracles, Theo? I Give You The Pixel Scroll

Posted on May 11, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) CELEBRATE VONDA MCINTYRE’S LAST NOVEL. Clarion West will hold “The Curve of the World Virtual Launch Event” via Zoom on May 16. RSVP at the link.

It’s finally here—the release of The Curve of the World, the last novel written by CW Founder Vonda N. McIntyre! When she died in 2019, the manuscript was complete. Once Aqueduct Press acquired the book, bringing it to publication involved a careful and collaborative process between four people: Nisi Shawl, Debbie Notkin, Kath Wilham, and Timmi Duchamp.

Join us for a virtual reading and conversation with the team that brought Vonda N. McIntyre’s last book to the world! (Can’t make it to the party? You can still pre-order your copy here.)

(2) DEEPLY RECOMMENDED. A Deep Look by Dave Hook praises “’Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora’, Sheree Renée Thomas editor, 2000 Aspect/Warner Books”. Here is the Short take. Read the Long analysis is at the link.

The Short: I finally read Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, Sheree R. Thomas editor, 2000 Aspect/Warner Books. It includes 29 works of short fiction and seven essays, from 1887 to 2000. It was a World Fantasy Award winner and Locus Award nomination. Although my favorites were the classic novelette “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” by Octavia E. Butler, Omni, May 1987, and the superlative short story “Aye, and Gomorrah …” by Samuel R. Delany, from Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison editor, 1967 Doubleday, I was even more pleased to both discover new fiction by authors I did not know and to read the very educational and interesting essays. My overall, average rating was 3.64, or “Very good”. Strongly recommended.

(3) GRADUATION DAY. Nnedi Okorafor told Facebook readers all about giving the commencement address at UIC.

Yesterday, I returned to University of Illinois Chicago to deliver the commencement speech for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

As an alum who earned both her Master’s and PhD there, returning in this way felt…surreal. Ten thousand people were in that auditorium. TEN THOUSAND.

New milestone.

And *then* afterward…so many people, including the provost, said it was one of the best commencement speeches they’d heard. I’m still processing that….

…I can’t believe I DID it. I stood up there. I spoke about the need to be creative in this world inundated with AI, to lean in to what makes you you, to be ready to strategically adapt, to be curious and interested, that empathy is a strength and always has been, and more.

What an honor. What a full-circle moment. What a day….

(4) JUDGE DROPS THE GAVEL ON DOGE. “Federal Judge Orders Reinstatement of NEH Grants” reports Publishers Weekly.

The Authors Guild and other plaintiffs notched a significant victory on May 7, when a federal court in New York issued a permanent injunction against the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Government Efficiency.

Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York sided with the plaintiffs on all three of their claims, invoking protections provided by the First and Fifth Amendments and DOGE’s overreach.

The court ordered the reinstatement of more than 1,400 NEH grants, representing more than $100 million in congressionally appropriated funds, canceled en masse by DOGE between April 1–3, 2025.

The decision resolves two consolidated complaints, both filed in May 2025. The Authors Guild et al. v. NEH et al. was brought by the Authors Guild and seven individual NEH grantees, while American Council of Learned Societies et al. v. NEH et al. was brought by the ACLS, American Historical Society, and Modern Language Association. The lawsuits were so similar that the court determined they should be combined.

The court concluded that the termination of the NEH grants violated the First Amendment by engaging in viewpoint discrimination….

(5) UNDERSTAND: HOW READING MADE US. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] There is a marvelous little series currently on BBC Radio 4 on Understand: How Reading Made Us (trailer).

One of the programme’s regular’s is the SF/F writer Naomi Alderman, but that’s not the thing. I caught the second episode which among other things charted how reading has changed: apparently everyone used to read out loud and it was a noteworthy rarity – commented upon – if someone read silently. But the big thing it put forward was the argument that the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth drove much social change: they presented a reasonable case.

The episode 2 pitch is…

Reading seems an unremarkable skill. When we say something is as “easy as ABC”, we mean it is very easy indeed. In fact, learning to read has dramatic and irreversible consequences for people and for societies. Learning to read permanently alters your brain. It changes the emotions you experience and the way you relate to others. When a society learns to read the consequences are dramatic: wars break out, revolutions erupt and new political systems spring into being. Reading made us who we are. With time spent reading – and even reading ability – starting to nosedive, Times writer James Marriott explores how reading changed humanity, and what might happen if we stop.

In this programme, James asks whether the spread of novel reading in the 18th century caused a moral revolution, whether a book played a role in the abolition of slavery, and whether the rise of reading, a solitary and slightly lonely activity, was one of the factors setting us on the path to our atomized and isolated modern society.

The series is available on BBC Sounds with episode 1 here and episode 2 here. A third episode will be broadcast next week. This is free in the UK, but outside the UK you may need a subscription.

(6) ROBOT MONK. [Item by Evelyn C. Leeper.] Speaking of Becky Chambers, did everyone see the Guardian’s story about how the Jogyesa temple in Seoul held an initiation ceremony for a robot to become a monk? “I, robe-ot: the android monk working to reboot the faith of South Korea’s Buddhists”.

Amid rows of colourful lanterns strung across the courtyard of Jogyesa temple in Seoul, an unusual ceremony unfolded this week: monks held a Buddhist initiation for a humanoid robot draped in saffron robe.

They placed a string of 108 prayer beads around the robot’s neck and affixed a lantern festival sticker to its mechanical arm in place of the traditional yeonbi ritual, in which burning incense is lightly pressed against the skin.

The robot was then presented with a formal certificate listing its manufacture date, 3 March 2026, where a human initiate’s birth date would normally appear.

“At first we discussed it casually,” Venerable Sungwon, the order’s cultural affairs director, says about the robot ceremony’s origins. “It began almost as a joke. But the more we thought about it, the more serious it became.

“Robots are entering our lives so quickly, and people feel familiar with them … They’re becoming part of our community.”

Venerable Sungwon’s temple is the headquarters of the Jogye order, South Korea’s largest Buddhist denomination, and the initiation of its first robot monk comes at a time of uncertainty for the group, as they grapple with falling participation and interest.

Just 16% of South Koreans now identify as Buddhist, down from about 23% in 2005. Among people in their twenties, the figure drops to 8%. Last year, the Jogye order ordained just 99 new monks, down from more than 200 a decade earlier.

Yet by another measure, Buddhism has never been more popular. Under its president, Ven Jinwoo, the Jogye order has aggressively courted younger Koreans through what observers call “hip Buddhism” using merchandise, meditation apps and viral marketing.

The ordination of Gabi – the 130cm humanoid robot – forms part of this effort to reach more Koreans….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

May 11, 1918 — Richard P. Feynman. (Died 1988.)

I’ll admit that I don’t begin to understand what most of the work Richard P. Feynman did as a theoretical physicist. I seriously doubt most of you do.

While at Princeton, Feynman was recruited for the theoretical division of the Manhattan Project, the very, very secret U.S. Army laboratory set up in Los Alamos, for the purpose of developing the atomic bomb. He was present at the first detonation of an atomic bomb.

In 1965, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. The three each created new mathematical tools for a theory called quantum electrodynamics, which describes how subatomic particles interact with light.

Now there is the matter his influence on the genre. Although as I said was his work in theoretical physics, Feynman was largely pioneered the field of quantum computing and was solely responsible for the concept of nanotechnology. So yes, two widely used SF concepts are from him.

By the late Fifties, he was already popularizing his love of physics through books and lectures including lectures on nanotechnology called There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, and a multi volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Yes, these are available from the usual suspects.

He also became known through his autobiographical works Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?. Naturally there would be books written about him. The biography by James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman is the one I’ll single out as being the best.

It’s worth noting last is that he was selected to be a member the Presidential Rogers Commission that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Lis Carey notes that during the Challenger explosion hearings, Feynman demonstrated on camera that an O-ring dropped into ice water lost all the resilience critical to its function on the shuttle solid rocket fuel tanks.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Mother Goose and Grimm witness an unexpected complaint.
Reality Check gets a wrong diagnosis.
Zen Pencils quotes Bill Watterson.

(9) EXCAVATING SOUNDTRACKS. “Lost Movie Music? On CD? La-La Land Is an Anomaly. (And a Success.)” The New York Times tells about this successful niche business. (Behind a paywall.)

In 1979, the composer Harry Manfredini descended into a New Jersey basement to put together music for an indie slasher film. He was working with a quickly approaching deadline, a small group of players and a minuscule budget. “We weren’t even in a recording studio,” Manfredini remembered in an interview. “On the raw tracks, you could hear the chairs squeaking and the pages turning.”

The resulting score, with its sinister strings and eerie whispers, would be heard by millions of moviegoers when “Friday the 13th” opened the next year. But the film’s soundtrack never earned a stand-alone release. Nor did the numerous “Friday the 13th” sequels Manfredini worked on throughout the decade.

So he was surprised when, in 2011, MV Gerhard and Matt Verboys, the founders of the label La-La Land Records, approached him with an ambitious plan: They wanted to release every piece of music they could find from the first six “Friday the 13th” movies — even snippets barely a minute long.

“I thought they were crazy,” Manfredini said. “I told them, ‘Some of that music is pretty boring — it’s playing as people run through the woods. It’s never going to sell.’”

But La-La Land was able to track down and restore music that Manfredini, 82, hadn’t heard in decades. And the label’s six-disc “Friday the 13th” compilation sold out within days of being announced. It’s one of the hundreds of expansive, exhaustive soundtrack collections La-La Land has released since forming in 2002.

The company scours movie studio archives and composers’ personal collections to locate as much music as possible from older films or TV recordings, often turning up work that’s been misplaced or forgotten….

…In La-La Land’s early days, the label released soundtracks for a handful of contemporary films — like the 2004 Ashton Kutcher drama “The Butterfly Effect” — as well as genre films (“Creepshow”) and Hollywood classics (“Zulu Dawn”)….

…At first, Gerhard and Verboys didn’t have access to big franchise films or superstar composers. But they didn’t necessarily need them. To some soundtrack fans, it doesn’t matter if a movie is a blockbuster or a bomb, so long as they connect to its music. One of the label’s more recent hits is a two-disc collection of Jerry Goldsmith’s playfully dramatic score from the schlocky 1985 action-adventure “King Solomon’s Mines.”

“There are a lot of terrible movies that have great music,” said Nathan Pickup, 42, a corporate trainer in Riverview, Fla., who has more than 600 soundtrack CDs in his collection. “What I love is the narrative elements of film scoring. If there are themes I can pick out from a score, or certain moods it creates, that’s enough for me.”

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, as Gerhard and Verboys earned the trust of studio executives and musicians, La-La Land began working with more blue-chip pop-culture properties: “Star Trek,” “Batman: The Animated Series,” the Harry Potter films….

(10) MOUNT UP! Variety reports “Fourth Wing TV Series Ordered at Amazon”.

Get ready, riders: The long-gestating “Fourth Wing” TV adaptation has been ordered to series at Amazon‘s Prime Video.

Based on the best-selling “The Empyrean” romantasy book series from author Rebecca Yarros, “Fourth Wing” is set inside the brutal world of Basgiath War College, where there is only one rule: graduate or die. Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was always expected to live a quiet life — but she’s sent on an entirely different path when her mother, a general in the military, orders her to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become dragon riders, the elite of Navarre….

…“Fourth Wing” executive producer Michael B. Jordan announced the series pickup at the end of Amazon’s upfront presentation to TV advertisers at the Beacon Theatre on Monday….

(11) WHERE COULD LIFE BE – IF IT EXISTS – ON MARS? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The concept of Martian life is an old SF trope. The tardigrade (multicelled) species is a tough little critter capable of surviving extreme drying, freezing, heat, radiation, the vacuum of space, but it would find life on the UV irradiated and chemically toxic surface of Mars virtually impossible. However, simple prokaryotic cells are another matter and there are examples on Earth that could survive on Mars, but where exactly? Where on Mars could life survive? Physicist Matt O’Dowd, over at the PBS Space-Time YouTube channel, trespasses into biological and environmental science territory to consider exactly where we should look for life on Mars…! You can see the 20-minute video here or below…

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

Pixel Scroll 4/8/26 “Repent Harley Quinn!” Said The Tiktok Fan

Posted on April 8, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) THE FUTURE IN VIBE CYBERATTACKING. In a New York Times opinion piece, Thomas Friedman says, “Anthropic’s Restraint Is a Terrifying Warning Sign”. (Behind a paywall.)

The artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced Tuesday that it was releasing the newest generation of its large language model, dubbed Claude Mythos Preview, but to only a limited consortium of roughly 40 technology companies, including Google, Broadcom, Nvidia, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Apple, JPMorganChase, Amazon and Microsoft. Some of its competitors are among these partners because this new A.I. model represents a “step change” in performance that has some critically important positive and negative implications for cybersecurity and America’s national security.

The good news is that Anthropic discovered in the process of developing Claude Mythos that the A.I. could not only write software code more easily and with greater complexity than any model currently available, but as a byproduct of that capability, it could also find vulnerabilities in virtually all of the world’s most popular software systems more easily than before.

The bad news is that if this tool falls into the hands of bad actors, they could hack pretty much every major software system in the world, including all those made by the companies in the consortium.

This is not a publicity stunt. In the run-up to this announcement, representatives of leading tech companies have been in private conversation with the Trump administration about the implications for the security of the United States and all the other countries that use these now vulnerable software systems, technologists involved told me.

For good reason. As Anthropic said in a written statement on Tuesday, in just the past month, “Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of A.I. progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who committed to deploying them safely. The fallout — economics, public safety and national security — could be severe.’’

Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s name for the consortium, is an undertaking to work with the biggest and most trusted tech companies and critical infrastructure providers, including banks, “to put these capabilities to work for defensive purposes,” the company added, and to give the leading technology firms a head start in finding and patching those vulnerabilities.

“We do not plan to make Claude Mythos Preview generally available, but our eventual goal is to enable our users to safely deploy Mythos-class models at scale — for cybersecurity purposes, but also for the myriad other benefits that such highly capable models will bring,” Anthropic said.

My translation: Holy cow! Superintelligent A.I. is arriving faster than anticipated, at least in this area. We knew it was getting amazingly good at enabling anyone, no matter how computer literate, to write software code. But even Anthropic reportedly did not anticipate that it would get this good, this fast, at finding ways to find and exploit flaws in existing code.

Anthropic said it found critical exposures in every major operating system and Web browser, many of which run power grids, waterworks, airline reservation systems, retailing networks, military systems and hospitals all over the world….

(2) MAGIC CASTLE UPDATE. Craig Miller shared with Facebook followers what Magic Castle members were told about yesterday’s fire at the Hollywood landmark.

The Castle was open and occupied when the fire broke out but the staff got everyone out quickly and safely, including reuniting them with their cars so they could get home readily.

This morning, Randy Pitchford, the new owner, posted to the membership. The last two weeks of March, the Castle was closed as major renovations and upgrades were done to the bathrooms and, more importantly, the kitchen. This turned out to be fortuitous.

The fire was in the attic and roof. And the newly upgraded fire sensors did their job and got the Fire Department to the Castle quickly, where they were able to put the fire out.

He reported that the amount of water used to do so would have caused tremendous damage to the floors below except that the renovations including sealing all the areas and prevented the water from flooding the lower floors.

What’s not been reported, however, is just how much damage did occur. Repairs are underway and the Castle will be closed today and tomorrow. Unknown if it will be longer than that. Hopefully, the fire, water, and smoke damage is little enough that operations will start up again soon.

(3) APPEAL FOR MAURINE STARKEY. A GoFundMe has been launched to help a well-known sff artist with housing: “Help Maurine Starkey Land Safely”.

I have known Maurine Starkey—Mo to her friends—since 1992. Over the years, we worked together at Strategic Simulations, later again at Electronic Arts, and again at Olde Skuul. I have watched Mo’s talent, dedication, and grit up close for decades. Mo is a gifted computer game artist and illustrator, one of those rare creatives who never really stops making things. Pen, paintbrush, mouse—whatever the tool, she keeps creating. That is just who she is. Mo also won the Best Fan Artist Hugo Award in 2011, a well-earned recognition of the imagination, skill, and heart she has brought to her work for years. And now she needs help.

For the past year, Mo stepped away from her own life to move in with Rebecca Heineman to work on Olde Skuul and instead ended up as a full-time caregiver for Becky as she battled cancer. She gave her time, energy, and heart to caring for someone she loved. Recently, that battle came to an end. While grieving the loss of her dear friend, Mo has also been hit with a second devastating blow: because her housing was tied to the person she was caring for, she has now lost her home. That is the hard truth of it. Mo is facing displacement at a moment when she should be allowed to mourn, breathe, and figure out her next steps with some dignity.

Mo is 70-something, close to the age where most people would be retiring—or at least slowing down—but she does not really know how to stop creating. She is still working, still making art, still showing up. But right now, talent and determination are not enough to solve an immediate housing crisis. We are asking for help to give Mo a real safety net and a stable place to land. Funds raised will go toward safe, immediate housing, moving and storage costs for her artwork and personal belongings, and basic living expenses while she gets back on stable ground….

(4) ATWOOD MINIATURES. Margaret Atwood told an interest anecdote about a bit of set decoration done for The Testaments adaptation in “DOLLHOUSE”, posted to her Substack newsletter In the Writing Burrow.

Last fall, when my memoir, Book of Lives, came out, my friend and fellow adventurer Faye Souter from Canmore, Alberta (Canada) made me a bowlful of tiny little copies of it. People thought they were candies, though nobody actually ate them.

Then, a bit later, I was on the set of The Testaments — we were shooting my weird cameo scene — and I brought some tiny memoirs to hand out to team members. After my bizarre performance — not in the first episode though, wait for it — I was given a tour of some of the built sets, including the Aunt Lydia School (every high-schooler’s nightmare, as long as it’s a girl’s school with lots of sewing; yes, revenge on my Home Ec teacher, in a twisted sort of way).

I was also shown the set of Agnes’s house. The first episode of the series is called “Dollhouse.” Inside Agnes’s house there is indeed a dollhouse; it’s a replica of the actual house. Inside the dollhouse — which is in my novel, and, as described, children do indeed act out some of their less socially-approved emotions through their dollhouses. We won’t go into the more harrowing acts visited upon Barbies (haircuts, permanent marker tattoos).

In the dollhouse within the house, there is an armchair. “Put my little Book of Lives in the armchair,” said Steve Stark of Toluca Films, one of the executive producers of The Testaments. So I did, and he took this picture….

(5) LIBRARY AGENCY LITIGATION ENDS. There’s good news and bad news. The good news is: “Trump Administration Withdraws Appeal to 2025 IMLS Decision” reports Publisher Weekly. The bad news is that the administration plans to not fund the agency in the future.

Days after the Trump administration unveiled its plan to not fund the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in its budget for fiscal 2027, a federal court granted the administration’s request to withdraw its appeal of a federal judge’s earlier ruling that struck down Trump’s attempt last year to dismantle the agency.

Last spring, Trump issued an executive order demanding that IMLS and other federal agencies be reduced to their minimum statutory functions. To enforce the EO, the executive branch appointed an IMLS acting director, put 85% of IMLS staff members on paid administrative leave, dissolved the agency’s board of directors, and curtailed the administration of grants.

That order led to a lawsuit filed by the Attorneys General of 21 states in April. In May, Rhode Island district court judge John J. McConnell Jr. formally ordered a halt to the executive order that would dismantling the IMLS. That ruling was followed by a decision in November that permanently barred the administration from taking further steps to eliminate the agency….

(6) SO THIS IS WHAT IT HAS COME TO? “Amazon and U.S. Postal Service Reach New Deal on Deliveries After Year of Talks” reports the New York Times.

Amazon reached a tentative agreement with the U.S. Postal Service that will reduce the number of packages the e-commerce giant ships through the beleaguered agency, concluding a tumultuous negotiations process.

Under the new deal, if approved, Amazon would ship 20 percent fewer packages through the Postal Service… Still, the deal would preserve guaranteed revenue for the Postal Service, which relies on Amazon, its biggest customer, for billions of dollars in income and has long struggled to stabilize its finances.

Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, said that the agreement would still have the Postal Service deliver more than 1 billion packages for Amazon a year. The Postal Service currently delivers 1.7 billion packages a year…

The Postal Service is in a precarious financial situation, having reported a $9 billion yearly loss in November. … the agency could run out of cash within a year with no major changes and asked lawmakers to increase its borrowing limits.

The postal service has come up with a 10-year plan to shore up its finances, but the service continues to lose money: During the three-month period ending in December, it lost nearly $1.3 billion.

(7) PURITY OF ESSENCE. Gareth Roberts calls out “The surprising conservativism of the old Doctor Who” in The Spectator. (Behind a paywall.)

Nicholas Whyte’s reaction on Facebook was:

I see that a writer who used to be good has published an article saying that Terry Nation and Douglas Camfield were hard-line right-wingers. He produces pretty much no evidence for this.

(8) eluki bes shahar (1956-2026). Sharon Lee announced on Facebook today that eluki bes shahar, who also wrote as Rosemary Edghill, died on April 7.

Ending the day on a sad note. My friend eluki, who wrote many things under many different names, among them eluki bes shahar, Rosemary Edghill, and James Mallory, died yesterday of sepsis. This news coming to me from eluki’s wife.

Aside Steve, eluki is the writer I’ve known the longest. She was a remarkable person — brilliant and difficult, which can be said of many of us. She taught me more about writing than anyone else, again, save Steve.

We’d grown apart after her move to the opposite coast, but I’m going to miss her, so much.

Please share this, so we can hopefully catch everyone who ought to know.

She wrote many sff novels, some in collaboration with Andre Norton, Mercedes Lackey, and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 8, 1974 — Nnedi Okorafor, 52.

This Scroll we have Nnedi Okorafor, a truly phenomenal writer.

She’s Nigerian, and has coined two words to describe her literary focus, Africanfuturism, and Africanjujuism (see “Africanfuturism Defined” at Nnedi’s Wahala Zone Blog.) The latter word identifies the Afrocentric subgenre of fantasy fiction that draws on African spiritualities and cosmologies. Cool. Really cool.

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

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

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

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

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro cleans up after a superhero battle.
Cornered finds a messy line of research.
Rhymes with Orange didn’t mean to threaten.

(11) NEW DAN DARE ADVENTURE. “Modern heroes and a ravaged Earth: reboot of 1950s space comic Dan Dare has liftoff” – the Guardian celebrates the revival.

Sufferin’ satellites! The quintessential British space hero Dan Dare is back, 76 years after he first appeared in iconic comic magazine the Eagle.

With all eyes on Nasa’s Artemis II moon mission, and with the big-screen adaptation of Andy Weir’s science fiction novel Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling, going stratospheric at the box office, our love affair with space has been reignited.

So the return of Colonel Dan Dare, chief pilot of the Interplanet Space Fleet, who debuted in the first issue of the Eagle on 14 April 1950, couldn’t be more timely.

With the blessing of the Dan Dare Corporation, which owns the rights to the comic strip – originally written and drawn by the Manchester-born illustrator Frank Hampson – the comic writer Alex de Campi and artist Marc Laming have reinvented the beloved characters for the 21st century in a graphic novel to be published by B7 Comics….

However, Mark Roth-Whitworth notes, “New version includes ‘The USA is now the United Corporations of America, and space flight has been privatised,’ Argh… Esp. when the astronauts on their way home keep talking about ALL humankind.”

(12) DIRECTOR NAMED FOR BUTLER FILM ADAPTATION. “Melina Matsoukas to Direct ‘Parable of the Sower’ Movie at Warner Bros.” reports Variety.

Melina Matsoukas has found her next directorial project in Octavia E. Butler’s landmark sci-fi odyssey “Parable of the Sower.”

Matsoukas, whose resume includes “Queen & Slim,” “Insecure” and several key collaborations with Beyoncé, will direct and produce the film adaptation of Butler’s 1993 dystopian novel. Hailed as “notable book of the year” by the New York Times upon its original publication, “Parable of the Sower” became a New York Times bestseller in 2020, 27 years later, due to its prescience and enduring notoriety.

(13) WHO CREATED BITCOIN? John Carreyrou may know the answer to the question: “Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto? My Quest to Unmask Bitcoin’s Creator”. (Link bypasses the New York Times paywall.)

One evening in the fall of 2024, my wife and I were sitting in traffic on the Long Island Expressway when, tired of listening to the jazz-funk station I often played on our drives, she switched to a podcast.

It was “Hard Fork,” the New York Times tech show, and the hosts were discussing a new HBO documentary claiming to have unmasked Bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto.

I was instantly riveted. I had long considered the question of Satoshi’s true identity one of our age’s great enigmas and had poked at it before without success. Two years earlier, I had even spent several months researching a book on the subject. But I soon realized I was out of my depth and reluctantly gave up.

Hearing that someone else might have finally identified the shadowy figure who had revolutionized finance, spawned a $2.4 trillion industry and amassed one of the world’s biggest fortunes in one stroke of staggering genius aroused in me a mixture of admiration and envy. I couldn’t wait to watch the film. As soon as we got home that night, I logged in to the HBO Max app and pressed play.

In the end, I found the conclusion of “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” unconvincing: HBO singled out a Canadian software developer based on what seemed like very thin evidence. But as I watched what was an otherwise entertaining romp through the world of crypto, one scene caught my attention.

Adam Back, a British cryptographer and leading figure in the Bitcoin movement, sat on a park bench in Riga, Latvia, his shirt untucked under a brown coat. The filmmaker casually rattled off the names of several Satoshi suspects. At the mention of his own name, Mr. Back tensed up, strenuously denied he was Satoshi and asked that the conversation be kept off the record.

Having encountered my share of liars and developed something of an expertise in their tells, Mr. Back’s demeanor — his shifty eyes, his awkward chuckle, the jerky movement of his left hand — struck me as fishy. When the credits rolled up, I replayed the sequence several times on my TV…

… With his wire-rimmed glasses, thinning gray hair and goatee, Mr. Back, 55, looks like a disheveled mathematician. Over the past dozen years, he has built a mini empire of Bitcoin-related companies and become one of the community’s most influential members.

Mr. Back has long been among the top Satoshi candidates. But, unlike some other leading suspects, he hasn’t been the subject of close journalistic scrutiny, other than in a 2020 video by an anonymous YouTuber who goes by the handle “Barely Sociable.”…

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Sharon Lee, 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 3/23/26 You Keep On Saying Those Words

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) WHO SHOULD WIN THE BRITISH FANTASY AWARDS? The suggestions list for this year’s British Fantasy Awards is now open. Anyone can add their favorite SFF titles first published in 2025. “British Fantasy Awards 2026 Suggestions”.

(2) EARLY GRADUATION. “’Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ to End With Season 2” reports Variety.

“Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” will end with its upcoming second season, Variety has learned exclusively.

The show was originally picked up at Paramount+ in 2023, with the streamer renewing the show for a second season before the first had aired. The first season debuted in January and aired its season finale on March 12, while the second season recently wrapped production….

… The first season of “Starfleet Academy” reached an 87% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Variety‘s Aramide Tinubu describing it as a “delightful entry point” into the franchise. But the show failed to find a significant audience. Across its 10-episode first season, it has failed to rank on the Nielsen Top 10 streaming viewership charts….

(3) SNAPE ACTOR GETS THREATS. “’Harry Potter’ star details racist ‘abuse’ after joining upcoming TV show” – Entertainment Weekly has the story.

Paapa Essiedu is speaking out on “abuse” he’s endured since being cast as Severus Snape in HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter series.

“I’ve been told, ‘Quit, or I’ll murder you,'” the actor told The Times in career-spanning interview published Saturday.

Essiedu is English of Ghanian descent. Though he’s played famous figures like George Boleyn (Channel 5’s Anne Boleyn) and beloved characters from the literary canon (he played Romeo in a 2015 production of Romeo and Juliet) alike, he shared that the Harry Potter casting has brought out the most vicious racist backlash.

“The reality is that if I look at Instagram I will see somebody saying, ‘I’m going to come to your house and kill you,'” he said. “While I hope I’ll be okay, nobody should have to encounter this for doing their job.”

(4) OKORAFOR AWARD ARRIVES. Nnedi Okorafor has posted a video on Facebook of her NAACP Image Award trophy. She won it for her novel Death of the Author.

(5) SF 101. Episode 63 of Phil Nichols and Colin Kuskie’s Science Fiction 101 podcast takes listeners “Back to the Futures”.

This time on Science Fiction 101, we take some trips down memory lane to revisit classic time travel movies. We mostly focus on the Back to the Future series, but also a couple of wildcards: Primer (2004, Colin’s pick) and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986, Phil’s pick).

(6) SFF INTERVIEWS COLLECTED. The latest book from Space Cowboy is James Machell’s Human Voices, Alien Conversations.

Human Voices, Alien Conversations is a tour through the modern world of speculative fiction, featuring a variety of perspectives. Authors, critics, editors, and artists, legends and new talents, reflect on their passage through words. Interviewees include a TV star turned novelist, the first transgender woman to win a Hugo Award, and the editor of The Best Science Fiction of the Year (2016 – ).

The book takes the form of a literal journey, opening with James Machell stepping off a plane to explore SF. Along the way, he learns the secrets of non-fiction writing from the co-editor and biggest contributor to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The intricacies of world building are explained by a bestselling author of epic fantasy. He discovers the background to some of the most iconic images in SF from their artists as well as the literature that inspired them. “Would artificially created animals be kosher to eat?” is just one of the conundrums traversed.

Featuring candid discussions about creative doubt, the pressures of making art under late capitalism, and how AI threatens a new generation of creatives, Human Voices, Alien Conversations snapshots SF before its predictions come true.

Interviews with: Ken Liu, Bogi Takács, Paolo Bacigalupi, John Picacio, John Clute, Samuel R. Delany, Samantha Mills, Jeff Noon, Steven Youll, P. Djèlí Clark, Chris Moore, Ai Jiang, Cheryl Morgan, Neil Clarke, Pat Cadigan, & Matthew Holness.

Currently available for pre-order and releases on June 1.

(7) SAM KIETH (1963-2026). “Sam Kieth, Comic Artist, Creator of The Maxx and Co-Creator of Sandman, Passes Away at 63”. The CBR.com profile contains many examples of Kieth’s fascinating art.

Sam Kieth, the beloved comic book artist who co-created The Sandman with Neil Gaiman and Mike Dringenberg in 1988, became one of the most popular Wolverine artists in the business in the early 1990s, and created the hit comic book series (which later became an iconic cartoon on MTV), The Maxx, has passed away at the age of 63.

Rich Johnston has confirmed that the acclaimed artist has passed away from Lewy Body Dementia. He is survived by his wife of 43 years, Kathy Kieth.

Kieth made his comic book debut in 1983 while he was just 20 years old in Comico Primer #5 (the same anthology series where Matt Wagner debuted Grendel in 1982), with a short story about a killer hare named Max…

(8) VALERIE PERRINE (1943-2026). “Valerie Perrine Dead: ‘Superman’, ‘Lenny’, ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ Actor Was 82” – Deadline profiles her career.

Valerie Perrine, whose memorable film roles included a porn actress abducted by aliens in Slaughterhouse-Five, Lex Luthor’s secretary in two Superman films and an Oscar-nominated performance as the wife of Lenny Bruce in Lenny, died Monday at her home in Beverly Hills following a 15-year battle with Parkinson’s disease. She was 82.

… In 1973, Perrine was cast in the PBS presentation of Bruce Jay Friedman’s acclaimed hit Off Broadway play Steambath, a performance that’s often credited for including the first appearance of naked female breasts in network TV history….

If Perrine’s performances to that point had been as infamous as famous, she proved any naysayers wrong in 1974 when she gave an Oscar-nominated (and Cannes-winning) performance in Bob Fosse’s Lenny, playing Lenny Bruce’s stripper wife Honey Bruce opposite Dustin Hoffman’s title character. She followed up that role by appearing two years later in Arthur Hiller’s well-received W.C. Fields biopic W.C. and Me; she played the classic comic’s mistress Carlotta Monti opposite Rod Steiger.

In what would become a signature role, Perrine took on the role of Miss Eve Teschmacher, girlfriend of villain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), in the wildly popular Superman (1978) and its sequel Superman II, both starring Christopher Reeve in the title role.

Perrine’s winning streak hit a wall in 1980 when she appeared in the notorious Village People flop Can’t Stop the Music, a performance that earned her a Razzie Award nomination. “It ruined my career,” she later said. “I moved to Europe after, I was so embarrassed.”

If Can’t Stop the Music stalled Perrine’s appearances in top-line projects — as it did with most others associated with it — she nonetheless continued working….

(9) CARRIE ANNE FLEMING (1974-2026). “Canadian actress Carrie Anne Fleming dead at 51” reports The Province.

She died on Feb. 26 in Sidney, B.C., according to Variety.

Her Supernatural co-star Jim Beaver confirmed to the outlet that Fleming died of breast cancer complications.

“My friend, my lover, my bright light, my beautiful costar Carrie Anne Fleming, who played Bobby Singer’s wife Karen on Supernatural died on Thursday, February 26, after confronting cancer for a long time. My heart is broken,” Beaver wrote in a post on the social-media platform Bluesky….

… In 2005, she was cast by director Dario Argento in his show Masters of Horror, playing a disfigured woman with cannibalistic leanings in her Jennifer episode.

She also appeared in various horror shows, including The Tooth Fairy and Bloodsuckers.

Fleming had a recurring role on the popular CW drama show Supernatural, playing Karen Singer, the wife of main character Bobby Singer….

…Fleming’s recurring role on CW’s iZombie had her playing Candy Baker for five seasons….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cora Buhlert.]

March 23, 1904 — H. Beam Piper. (Died 1964.)

By Cora Buhlert:

Content warning: Discussion of suicide.

Considering how well regarded he was and still is as an author, we know surprisingly little about him. For example, we don’t know whether the H stands for Henry, Horace or Herbert. And while we know how he died, we don’t know exactly when or why.

There’s a lot of evidence that the H stood for “Henry” (it’s on census records, his WW2 draft card, and his gravestone), but there is evidence for Horace and Herbert as well.

H. Beam Piper never received a formal higher education, because he considered the college experience unpleasant, but instead educated himself in science, engineering and history. He worked as a laborer and later as a night watchman at the railroad yard in his hometown.

At some point, Piper began to write and in 1947 at age 43 he sold his first story “Time and Time Again” to John W. Campbell at Astounding Science Fiction. More stories followed, both for Astounding and other magazines. In 1961, finally, Piper published his first novel, the juvenile Four-Day-Planet. On the planet Fenris, a year is only four days long, but each of those days lasts four thousand hours with extreme temperatures. Giant whale-like creatures roam the seas of Fenris and are hunted for their valuable tallow wax, which makes for excellent radiation shielding. Protagonist Walt Boyd is a seventeen-year-old boy reporter, who gets entangled in a conflict between the whalers guild and the corrupt mayor of Fenris and some equally corrupt business people. Basically, this is Tintin and the Space Whalers with a bonus message about the importance of formal education, which is ironic considering Piper’s own life. I have read Four-Day-Planet and enjoyed it quite a bit as a fun science fiction adventure.

However, my introduction to Piper’s work was not Four-Day-Planet, but what is probably his best-known work, the 1962 novel Little Fuzzy. I discovered the book as a teenager at Storm, the one bookshop in town with an extensive foreign language section. Most of that foreign language section actually consisted of dictionaries. There was also a table where one could peruse the huge Books-in-Print catalogues as well as a special order desk, where you could order any book listed in those giant catalogues. That special order desk was always busy with university students ordering otherwise unavailable textbooks and literature. Annoyingly, those students also kept staring at me, especially the male ones, and I was sure that they were judging my reading choices. Yes, I was quite dense.

The foreign language section at Storm also has two spinner racks with mass market paperbacks. The paperbacks in those spinner racks were almost entirely genre fiction. Romance, crime and mystery and of course science fiction, fantasy and horror. Whenever I was in the city center, I would stop at Storm (which still exists, though much diminished), head up to the foreign language section on the first floor and check out the spinner racks for anything that caught my eye, all the while dodging annoying male students staring at me. I discovered a lot of great authors and books in those spinner racks. And one day, I discovered Little Fuzzy, the 1980s Ace Books edition with the Michael Whelan cover of protagonist Jack Holloway surrounded by Fuzzies. The books caught my eye at once, because the Fuzzies were not only cute, but they looked just like the Ewoks from Return of the Jedi. Indeed, Little Fuzzy is widely considered to be the inspiration for the Ewoks and the parallels are quite obvious. The cover intrigued me enough that I plopped down my hard earned pocket money to buy the book. And English language mass market paperbacks were expensive in the 1980s due to the bad exchange rate and high import duties.

On the planet Zarathustra, prospector Jack Holloway discovers a furry alien creature he names Little Fuzzy. Little Fuzzy takes Jack to meet the rest of his tribe and Jack realizes that the Fuzzies are intelligent. This causes a problem for the mining company that has set up shop on Zarathustra to exploit the planet’s natural resources, because if the Fuzzies are declared an intelligent species, they and their habitat will be protected by law and the company will lose their mining rights. Being an unscrupulous company in a science fiction novel, they will of course do everything to prevent this, up to and including murder.

My teen self enjoyed Little Fuzzy a whole lot and it’s easy to see why. The plight of the furry aliens and their human protector against the big bad mining company is highly compelling. Though I never read any of the sequels, neither Piper’s own nor those by other authors, mostly because I didn’t know they existed.

One H. Beam Piper novel I did read, though several years later, was Space Viking, which was serialized in Analog from November 1962 to February 1963 and then appeared as a paperback in 1963. Once again, it was the cover – a glorious Michael Whelan cover with the titular space Vikings in front of a bright purple background – which attracted me along with, “Oh, it’s by H. Beam Piper. Cool. I liked Little Fuzzy.”

The protagonist of Space Viking is Lucas Trask, an aristocrat from the planet Gram. Trask is about to marry Lady Elaine, when a spurned former suitor of Elaine’s crashes the wedding and proceeds to gun down the wedding party (shades of the Red Wedding from A Song of Ice and Fire and the Moldavian wedding massacre from Dynasty, though Space Viking predates them both). Elaine is killed but Trask survives and vows revenge. He joins the Space Vikings, a group of space-faring raiders, to go after the killer, who has escaped aboard a stolen spaceship. In the process, Trask winds up establishing a little galactic empire of his own and also finds a new love. And yes, he gets his man, too, in the end.

I enjoyed Space Viking, though not nearly as much as Little Fuzzy. Part of the reason may simply be that I was older when I read Space Viking and more critical. The novel offered plenty of adventure and thrills, but also some irritating politics, including a very American view of emigration and colonization that is common, but also plain wrong. In fact, I remember wondering at the time, “Was Piper always like this and I just didn’t notice?”

Little Fuzzy, Four-Day-Planet and Space Viking are all part of a future history series called the Terro-Human Future History along with the 1963 novel The Cosmic Computer and several pieces of short fiction. The Terro-Human Future History chronicles the rise and fall and rebirth of a galactic civilization and was clearly influenced by the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.

Piper also wrote the Paratime series, which chronicles the adventures of the Paratime Police who can move between timelines and alternate histories. The Paratime series consists of several pieces of short fiction and one novel, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, which was published in 1965 and would be Piper’s final novel.

This brings us to the sad part of this birthday note, namely Piper’s untimely death. It is widely known that Piper committed suicide, but both the reason and the exact date of his death are not known.

What is known is that Piper dated the last entry in his diary November 5, 1964. On November 8, his body was found. Piper had apparently shut off the power and water to his apartment, covered the walls and floors with tarp and shot himself with a handgun from his extensive collection. He left behind a note saying “I don’t like to leave messes when I go away, but if I could have cleaned up any of this mess, I wouldn’t be going away.”

What mess precisely Piper was referring to is not known. The most common explanation is that Piper had financial problems. He had just gone through a painful and costly divorce and his agent was not replying to his letters and calls – due to having died – so Piper assumed his writing career was over. Another explanation is that Piper wanted to prevent his ex-wife from collecting his life insurance payment, so he took his own life to make sure that the insurance company would not pay. Most likely, the reason for his death was a combination of these factors.

More than sixty years after Piper’s death, the legacy that remains is a remarkable body of work, much of which is not only still in print, but is still receiving sequels and prequels written by other authors to this day.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit finds the depressing stories in the library.
Carpe Diem lists super limitations.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gives an interesting twist to the food chain.

(12) TYPO FUN CONTINUES. [Item by John Hertz.] (From Vanamonde 1656.) On my office wall at one of those law reviews [out-of-United-States readers, in our law schools the periodicals we call law reviews are edited by students, an academic honor] I had this “Ode to the Typographical Error”, anonymous so far as I know even yet.

The typographical error
Is a slippery thing and sly.
You can hunt until you’re dizzy,
But somehow it will get by.
Till the forms are off the presses
It is strange how still it keeps,
It shrinks down into a corner
And never stirs or peeps,
That typographical error
Too small for human eyes
Till the ink is on the paper
When it grows to mountain-size.
The editor stares in horror,
Then he grabs his hair and groans;
The copy reader drops his head
Upon his hands and moans.
The remainder of the issues
May be clean as clean can be,
But that typographical error
Is the only thing you see.

(13) WONDER AGAIN. “’Wonder Man’ Renewed for Season 2 at Disney+” reports Variety.

…The news comes around two months after the series launched, with eight episodes of the first season debuting on the streamer on Jan. 27. Yahya Abdul Mateen II and Ben Kingsley starred in the series as Simon Williams and Trevor Slattery, respectively. Both will return for Season 2….

… The news comes around two months after the series launched, with eight episodes of the first season debuting on the streamer on Jan. 27. Yahya Abdul Mateen II and Ben Kingsley starred in the series as Simon Williams and Trevor Slattery, respectively. Both will return for Season 2.…

(14) BREAKER, BREAKER. “NASA’s Hubble unexpectedly catches comet breaking up” – Phys.org has the story.

In a happy twist of fate, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings are published in the journal Icarus.

The comet K1, whose full name is C/2025 K1 (ATLAS)—not to be confused with interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS—was not the original target of the Hubble study.

“Sometimes the best science happens by accident,” said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. “This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. We had to find a new target—and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances.”

Noonan didn’t know K1 was fragmenting until he viewed the images the day after Hubble took them. “While I was taking an initial look at the data, I saw that there were four comets in those images when we only proposed to look at one,” said Noonan. “So we knew this was something really, really special.”…

(15) SCIENTISTS REVIVE ACTIVITY IN FROZEN MOUSE BRAINS FOR THE FIRST TIME. [Item by SF Concatenations Jonathan Cowie.]

‘Cryosleep’ remains the preserve of science fiction, but researchers are getting closer to restoring brain function after deep freezing.

I remember the reproductive biologist and SF fan Jack Cohen telling us that cryogenic suspended animation was impossible. This was back in the day, in the 1980s/1990s when UK Eastercon programming was diverse (talks, games, interviews, films etc) and not largely wall-to-wall filler panels. Jack was one of a number of semi-regular Eastercon speakers. His talks were a bit of a romp and always great fun. He told us on time that the SF trope of cryogenic suspended animation was impossible because you could not get a large brain to flash-freeze fast enough to prevent ice crystals growing and rupturing cells from within. Of course, Jack said, he could do it with small sperm because they were stored in long and very thin cylinders that could be flash-frozen at the necessary speed and so sperm storage this way was possible….

But, back in the day, suspended animation was an SFnal trope – still is – as a way to get to the stars as was used, for example, in the British/US film Alien (1979). All well and good, and now we come up to date.

A news item in Nature reports on new research recently published in which a whole mouse brain was flash frozen for days and then thawed out. Cutting the brain into slices they could test individual neuron response to electrical stimuli and the neurons’ responses to electrical stimuli were near normal.

The method necessitates the brain being saturated with cryopreservation chemicals before being rapidly cooled using liquid nitrogen at −196 ºC. They were then kept in a freezer at −150 ºC. However because the researchers sliced and diced to test neurons, rather than assemblages of them, they were unable to determine whether the animals’ memories had survived cryopreservation. But that could come.

While there is a very, very long way to go before cryogenic suspended animation is achieved, (if it ever is?) the techniques could lead the way to better tissue and organ preservation for biomedical use.

See Thompson, T. (2026) “Scientists revive activity in frozen mouse brains for the first time”. Nature. vol. 651, p563-4.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, John Hertz, Danny Sichel, 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 Steve Davidson.]

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

Posted on February 28, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(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.

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.

Animal Crackers knows humans.
Bizarro may have a short story.
Brewster Rockit regresses.
Dog Eat Doug has a perfectly innocent criminal request.
Lio is working.
Off the Mark witnesses the day of their return.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal adds a surprise.

(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 2/24/26 Elderly Pixels From Other Scrolls Dress In Regency Costume And Drink Tea Wherever They Wish

Posted on February 24, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) OKORAFOR WINS NCAAP IMAGE. Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Death of the Author won the 2026 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Fiction. See the announcement on the “57th NAACP Image Awards Virtual Pre-Show Night One” at the 18:25 mark.

Nnedi Okorafor receives NCAAP Image Award. Photo by Nollywood director Tchidi Chikere.

(2) NOTES ON LTUE. [Item by David Doering.] John Hertz kindly upbraided me for not keeping File 770 updated on our annual Life, the Universe, & Everything event here in Provo. I definitely need to repent, as we had a fabulous time–all 1300+ of us–with Ron Clements of Disney, Matt Dinniman, and Charlie Holmberg. Already planning for next year under our new non-profit “Light the Fire Foundation” auspices.

Here’s the over 600 teens, YA, and us seasoned folk showing Matt Dinniman how everyone has a hard-copy of his latest book. Who says reading dead tree editions is over???

(3) RECOVERING FROM BURNOUT. Priya Sridhar counsels readers “How to Recover from Volunteer Burnout” at SFWA’s Planetside.

I’ve volunteered with several organizations; at least one has proved disillusioning. Yet many large creative projects and events require unpaid labor of love. Otherwise, nonprofits would go bankrupt in a matter of months.

A few scandals have plagued popular writing organizations. Who bears the emotional brunt, in addition to any victims? The volunteers. That experience inevitably leads to burnout, that loss of energy and willpower to engage in such creative activities. …

…The scandal that changed my relationship with NaNoWriMo emerged in 2023, and the emotional fallout still wreaks havoc years later….

…Many former volunteers and I have talked about how much we put into NaNoWriMo. Local members in my group have voted on a new Discord server name, but the previous unity has evaporated. We keep missing each other when scheduling write-ins….

Sridhar discusses six helpful steps. Here are the first two:

…Some steps align, however, with treating burnout in general. No solution is one-size-fits-all; recovering requires strategy.

Commiserate. Chances are, you aren’t the only disappointed volunteer. Large organizations have large groups. Due to the law of averages, you can find people in the same boat as you: disappointed and burned out. Knowing you aren’t alone makes a huge difference.

When the NaNo news broke, so did the official volunteer server. In fact, it had to shut down for legal reasons. If you can meet in person, I’ve found that gathering to commiserate over hot food is therapeutic. I generally go for locally made pizza. Hot food is generally key; if you’re not a pizza person, ramen that accommodates lifestyle choices and allergies is another option. The reason I think this works? Because hot food warms you from head to toe and allows you to relax while feeling catharsis. You can open up about what’s been troubling you.

Grieve. Accept that you won’t be okay for a while. A cause you believed in failed you. It’s okay to not be okay with that anguish. Feeling frustrated with the subsequent hurt and exhaustion is perfectly normal….

(4) URBAN FANTASY. Marie Lu names “Fantasy Books That Imbue the Real World With Magic” in the New York Times. (Link bypasses the NYT paywall.)

There’s a door in the alley that people only seem to enter but never leave. There’s an old woman stirring her coffee with a spoon that you could have sworn was a fork a second ago. There’s a shadow on the wall that doesn’t seem to match its owner.

Perhaps you’ve experienced a moment like this, where you witnessed something that can’t quite be explained away. Urban fantasy is the genre that invites us to dwell on those everyday moments and ask ourselves: What if that old woman really were a magician? What if that door really were charmed? More grounded than high fantasy, with its swords and dragons, urban fantasy sets speculative stories in the cities of our world (or something closely resembling it), exploring the possibility that the mundane byways of reality can in fact be where magic exists.

Here are 10 novels where the real world is enchanted….

This is one of Lu’s picks:

The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry

by Ransom Riggs

When a story opens with a boy seeing a raccoon with its tail on fire and a man feeding a tooth into a parking meter, you know you’re in for a wild ride. Leopold Berry is a California teen who is “average absolutely to the decimal point.” But when he starts seeing things that seem to come straight out of a 1990s fantasy television show called “Max’s Adventures in Sunderworld,” he learns that Sunder is not only real, but also in grave danger. Riggs’s intimate knowledge of Los Angeles transforms this urban jungle into a place where dark magic whispers from every alley.

(5) TELL TCHAIKOVSKY THE VIEWS. A Deep Look by Dave Hook opens up “’The Best of Adrian Tchaikovsky’, February 28, 2026 Subterranean”. Here’s the short take. The long commentary is at the link.

The Short: I just read an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of The Best of Adrian Tchaikovsky, scheduled for release on February 28, 2026, Subterranean. It’s noted as available in hardcover and e-book. It’s hefty, 37 stories and over 600 pages of SF, fantasy, and “weird fiction”. Picking favorites is hard, but I especially loved the great short stories “Crossed Gates“, from Breakout, Nick Gevers editor, 2015 PS Publishing (it features trains), and “Difficult Times“, a short story, NewScientist December 2020 (music and a surprise to me). It has strong essay content, featuring both section/story essays by Tchaikovsky and a good introduction by John Scalzi. I like the “Author’s Note: What’s Not Here” by Tchaikovsky, which is great for a “Best of” collection. My overall, average rating for the stories was 3.75/5, or “Very good”. I enjoyed this a lot. Recommended….

(6) COVER STORY. Adafruit Industries points to “The book so dangerous the CIA stole it: Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light”. They start with a synopsis of the novel:

In Lord of Light, published in 1967, Roger Zelazny wrote about a swordfight between the Buddha and the God of Death where both combatants quote ancient scripture at each other while trying to achieve philosophical clarity through mutual annihilation. Reminds me of social media sometimes…

In the book, colonists from a dead Earth use technology to become the Hindu pantheon. They control who gets reborn and as what, using a psych-probe that reads your entire mental history and a karma system that makes modern social credit scores look quaint. They suppress the printing press, gunpowder, indoor plumbing….

Then they remind you the reason why the CIA stole it.

…Agent Tony Mendez grabbed the dead Lord of Light script off a shelf, renamed it “Argo,” and the rest is detailed in Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning movie, which never even mentions Zelazny, but there is a book about all of this too.

A 60’s sci-fi novel about gods who suppress technology to maintain power, whose screenplay was stolen by an intelligence agency and used to rescue people from a theocratic revolution. You couldn’t make it up if ya tried….

(7) AI HYPOCRISY. [Item by Cliff Ramshaw.] I’m sure File 770 readers will appreciate the irony here: “US AI giant accuses Chinese rivals of mass data theft” – the Guardian has the story.

US artificial intelligence company Anthropic said on Monday it had uncovered campaigns by three Chinese AI firms to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, in what it described as industrial-scale intellectual property theft. OpenAI leveled similar charges last month.

Anthropic said DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax used a technique known as “distillation” – using outputs from a more powerful AI system to rapidly boost the performance of a less capable one.

“These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication,” the company said in a statement. “The window to act is narrow.”

Distillation is a common practice within AI development, often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 24, 1957 — Edward James Olmos, 69.

Where I first experienced the acting of Edward James Olmos was as Detective Gaff in Blade Runner, a role I see he reprised in Blade Runner 2049.

No, I’ve not seen the latter film, nor do I have any intention in doing so as I consider Blade Runner one of the finest SF films ever done and nothing will sully that for me. We gave it a Hugo at ConStellation, so there later films!

It wasn’t his first genre film as that was the Japanese post-apocalyptic science fiction film Virus (1980), but his first important role came in Wolfen (1981), a fascinating horror film about, possibly, the idea that werewolves are real, or maybe not, in which he was Eddie Holt who claims to a shapeshifter.

He has an almost cameo appearance in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues as a musician at the barbecue.

It was supposed to have a theatrical release but that was not to be, so Ray Bradbury’s The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit was released directly to video. In it Olmos was Vámonos. I’ve not seen it. It sounds, well, intriguing. Who’s seen it?

Edward James Olmost in The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit

He’s in the debacle that was The Green Hornet in one of the primary roles as Mike Axford, the managing editor of The Daily Sentinel.

As you most likely know, he was William Adama on the rebooted Battestar Galactica. At seventy-three episodes, it didn’t even come close to his run on Miami Vice as Lt. Martin Castillo which was one hundred and six episodes. Now there was an interesting character!

I’ll end this Birthday note by note noting he had a recurring role on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as Robert Gonzales.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Bound and Gagged has a new podcast.
Dogs of C-Kennel updates a practice.
Strange Brew redefines mad.
Wumo has a career complaint.

(10) NEW HOLOCAUST RESEARCH. “How Bookbinders Used Old Records to Help the Nazis Find Their Victims” – in the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.)

Bookbinders and restorers in the 1930s and ’40s used their craft to help the Nazi regime create a database that was used to persecute and kill Jews and others who were deemed racially impure, a British researcher has found.

Key to building this database were church, civil and synagogue records, which were often hundreds of years old and damaged beyond legibility when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

By tasking professionals with cleaning up these documents, which held information about millions of people, the Nazis gained access to generations’ worth of material — which they used to target specific population groups, the new research shows.

The findings are the result of more than two decades of work by Morwenna Blewett, an expert in conservation history.

She was working as a conservation fellow at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts in 2004 when a question came to her: What had happened to the art restorers who did not flee Nazi Germany during World War II?

She pondered the question while sorting through an old filing cabinet in the museum’s basement — where, as she recalled in a book published this month, “Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime: Revelation and Concealment,” the “warm, dark air smelt faintly of cigarettes, coffee and engine oil.”

Soon, she had expanded on her query: “How did the Nazi regime intend to use conservation and restoration to achieve its aims?”

The answer, she discovered, was that paper restorers and bookbinders in Nazi Germany had helped the regime track down people’s Jewish ancestry by conserving and cleaning up old records from churches, as well as from synagogues and civil registers.

Dr. Blewett said that, by publishing her book, she hoped to shed light on this part of the Holocaust, which she called “one of the longest and most insidious of all National Socialism’s projects to exploit the field of conservation and restoration.”

Her focus on bookbinders and restorers reinforces the idea that the Nazis were helped “from the ground up” by many disparate facets of German society.

“It just gives us the cogs of how the regime relied on myriad professions and myriad methods in their move toward genocide,” Dr. Blewett said in a phone interview….

(11) THEY KEPT WATCHING THE SKIES. BBC explains, “Mysterious blue glow traced to Flying Banana”. (Requires a subscription outside the UK.)

The blue hue has been spotted across Lincolnshire over the past few nights

Is it a UFO? Is it the Northern Lights? No, it’s the “Flying Banana”.

A blue glow that has lit up Lincolnshire’s night sky in recent weeks has been traced to an unlikely source: a bright yellow train.

Network Rail said the mysterious light comes from its new measurement train – nicknamed the Flying Banana – which looks for faults on the line for engineers to repair.

The company said on hazy nights, equipment from the yellow train can create a blue glow “that looks like something from the X-Files” as it tests overhead lines.

“But it’s not flying saucers,” a spokesperson said. “Just our Flying Banana helping to keep trains running reliably.”

The bright blue glow has been spotted across the county, including from stations such as Metheringham….

(12) HORROR MOVIE TIME! “This detached hand robot has a thing for skittering on its fingertips” reports Science News.

If The Addams Family was a science fiction show, “Thing” might look something like this.

Researchers have developed a robotic hand that can not only skitter about on its fingertips, it can also bend its fingers backward, connect and disconnect from a robotic arm and pick up and carry one or more objects at a time, researchers report January 20 in Nature Communications. With its unusual agility, it could navigate and retrieve objects in spaces too confined for human hands….

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George illustrates what happens “When Ancestors Appear In Your Time Of Need”.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, David Doering, Cliff Ramshaw, 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 Steve Davidson.]

Pixel Scroll 1/15/25 Anything You Can Scroll, I Can Scroll Better

Posted on January 15, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) NAACP IMAGE AWARDS. Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author is a nominee for the 2026 NAACP Image Awards in the Outstanding Literary Work – Fiction category. The complete list of nominees is at the link.

(2) GRRM AT 77. “Game of Thrones: George R.R. Martin Isn’t Finished” learns The Hollywood Reporter.

…But first, we discuss the new show, which has a scrappy, low-key vibe compared to GoT or Dragon. The action is almost entirely set at a jousting tournament in a rural backwater of Westeros and follows the penniless knight Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) and his diminutive 10-year-old squire (Dexter Sol Ansell) as they enter the tourney to improve their fortunes. Across six episodes, the likable duo tangle with an array of powerful rival lords. “Dunk and Egg both face great Shakespearean jeopardy in Westeros, but there’s a lot of humor and heart along the way, too,” says HBO drama programming head Francesca Orsi.

“The show is meant to be a very different type,” says Martin, who serves as co-creator and exec producer. “It turned out very well, and I’m very happy with season one. The casting was a home run. [Showrunner Ira Parker] is terrific and seems to have the same priorities I do — he’s trying to do something that’s very true to the characters.”

The show came about, Martin says, because HBO was looking for a project “where we could get the budget a little under control.” (Dragon costs about $20 million an episode, and the network previously shortened Dragon‘s second season to push an expensive battle sequence into season three.)

“This doesn’t have any dragons or big battles,” says Martin. “It has a field and a lot of tents and some horses.”

When the project was announced two years ago, HBO’s press release suggested the series would serve as Martin’s return to screenwriting. But he still hasn’t written an episode of TV since season four of Thrones. “There has always been the possibility of me writing on the show,” he says. “But then things happen and suddenly I have other priorities.”

Martin is nonetheless highly creatively involved. On Knight and Dragon, Martin initially convened a writing summit in Santa Fe to help figure out the series. “I bring the showrunner together with four or five writers that I know — some are TV writers, some are fantasy novelists — who really know the world and we assemble for a week,” he says. Parker called the summit “one of the most fun, creative weeks I’ve ever had in my whole career” and notes that while writing episodes, “George was there every step of the way. He’s been lovely. I think of him as a friend now.”

With a production and scope that’s quite modest compared to Thrones and Dragon, Parker admits to worrying about whether fans will embrace it (early reviews, at least, are quite positive, with our critic calling the show “smaller, smarter, funnier” than its predecessors.).

“At the end of the day, we are Game of Thrones without all the stuff,” Parker says. “We have one of the ingredients — two unusual characters like Arya and the Hound, or Brienne and Podrick — who are paired together and having conversions. I hope that’s what [made Thrones work]. It’s a big part of what it was for me.”

Season one is faithful to Martin’s debut Dunk and Egg tale, The Hedge Knight, and season two, which already has been greenlit, will be based on his novella The Sworn Sword.

There is, however, one potential problem for the show’s future. “The big issue is that I have only written three novellas, and I have a lot more stories about Dunk and Egg in my fucking head,” Martin says, looking a bit shamefaced. “I’ve got to get them down on paper. I began writing two at various points in the past year. One is set in Winterfell and one set in the Riverlands …”

Oh, George, I say. Not again …

(3) ILLICIT REASONS APPEAL MORE TO POTENTIAL READERS THAN VIRTUOUS ONES. In the view of The Atlantic’s Adam Kirsch, “Reading Is a Vice”. Link bypasses the paywall.

…Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society. It’s a utilitarian argument for what should be a personal passion.

It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.

One of my strongest early memories of reading comes from fifth grade, when I was so engrossed in a book that I read right through a spelling test without noticing it was happening. I remember this incident partly because I was afraid I would get in trouble. But I think the real reason it stays in my memory after 40 years was the feeling of uncanniness. The time that had passed in the classroom had not passed for me; in a real sense I was in another world, the world of the book.

Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive. Reading is not profitable; it doesn’t teach you any transferable skills or offer any networking opportunities. On the contrary, it is an antisocial activity in the most concrete sense: To do it you have to be alone, or else pretend you’re alone by tuning out other people. Reading teaches you to be more interested in what’s going on inside your head than in the real world….

(4) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA has released Simultaneous Times Episode 95. Stories featured in this episode:

“DNR Motorcycle Club for Seniors” by Mark Soden, Jr.; with music by Phog Masheeen; read by the author.
“Supper’s Ready” by Jean-Paul L. Garnier; with music by TSG; read by the author

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(5) KGB. Ellen Datlow has shared her photos from the January 14, 2026 session of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB readers series.

Robert Ottone and Rachel Harrison read from their recent work to a very full and enthusiastic house.

(6) ANDREW FOX WINS INAUGURAL ARK PRIZE. Ark Press announced January 12 that Andrew Fox is the winner of the 2026 Ark Prize for his novel Ghostlands. As the winner of the Ark Prize, Fox receives a publishing contract with Ark Press and a $10,000 advance. Ghostlands was chosen from more than one hundred submissions.

Ark Press also selected three novels for Ark Prize 2026 Honorable Mentions:

Centennial by Robert E. Hampson
Independence ’76 by Matt Harlow
Shrine by Graham Bradley

The theme of the contest—America 2076—challenged authors to complete a novel-length manuscript. “We received a wide range of outstanding entries, from urban fantasy to time-travel science fiction,” said Ark Press editor in chief Tony Daniel. “In the end, Ghostlands blew us away.”

Ghostlands blends surreal science fiction and dark adventure, following a groundskeeper in a time-haunted future who learns he may be the key to stopping humanity’s war on its own past.

Ghostlands is scheduled for publication by Ark Press in September 2026.

“I wrote Ghostlands as a graphic depiction of the persistence and tenacity of the past,” said author Andrew Fox. “Fatherhood has been the toughest—but also by far most rewarding—job I ever signed up for. For many men, becoming a father is the most meaningful experience of their lives. It can also be the most painful, but that doesn’t distract from its meaningfulness.”

The novel has already drawn high praise from Gordon Van Gelder, award-winning editor-at-large of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. “Ghostlands has the same sort of wild, anything-goes imaginative freedom that first drew me to science fiction through the works of R. A. Lafferty, Philip K. Dick, and Neal Barrett, Jr.,” said Van Gelder. “It has been years since I’ve encountered anything remotely like Andrew Fox’s novel.”

(7) TRAILER PARK: SOME SERIOUS SH**. [Item by N.] Canadian cult TV comedy Nirvanna The Band The Show gets a big-screen installment in theaters February 13. Time travel shenanigans ensue.

(8) TRAILER PARK: SHE’S ALIVE! [Item by N.] Seeking more takes on Frankenstein? Jessie Buckley plays the title character in director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, in theaters March 6.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 15, 1944 — Christopher Stasheff. (Died 2018.)

By Paul Weimer: I discovered Christopher Stasheff’s work by complete accident, by mistaking his work for another author’s work. A bit of inattention on my part in a B Dalton (remember those) was the issue. At the time in the 90’s, I was avidly reading the Soprano Sorceress books by L E Modesitt. Although I am terrible at appreciating music, I had branched from Modesitt’s Recluce novels into some of his other work and Soprano Sorceress was the series of his I was working on at the time. (More on Modesitt, perhaps, another time)

The SF selection in this particular store was small. But, since there was not yet a Barnes and Noble on Staten Island, and going to “the city” took more effort and time, I made do with B Dalton a lot. Although, parenthetically, when I went to the city to bookshop, I would go to the Barnes and Noble on 14th Street in Union Square and bop my way down and hit a number of other bookstores and come back with lots of books. But still, that was a special treat and I usually just went to B Dalton in the S.I. Mall.

So, back to B Dalton. I casually was looking around and saw A Wizard in Rhyme. I looked at the back cover, figured it was part of the same ‘verse, with rhyming poetry instead of music, grabbed it, along with a couple of other books, thinking it must be Modesitt and didn’t realize until I was feet out of the B Dalton and into the mall that I had bought a completely different author than I expected. A Wizard in Rhyme was not in fact the latest Modesitt Soprano novel but rather something from Christopher Stasheff. Oops.

And wizard Matt’s story is portal fantasy all the way. (I would later try Magic Kingdom for Sale —Sold! by Goodkind hoping it had the same magic for me). Anyway, I was enchanted by a book where poetry was magic, especially because I HAD read The Incompleat Enchanter by that point and grokked the idea rather well. I ran through the Rhyme series and really liked how he not only introduced new characters but developed an entire family and overarching world for what was at first really a simple beginning.

Speaking of Incompleat Enchanter, I did also read Stasheff’s co-written (ghost written) sequels to De Camp and Pratt’s Incompleat Enchanter. I found the sequels not quite as good as the first, although Arms and the Enchanter (where they wind up in the Aeneid) is quite fun. The foreword in one of those books makes it clear that Wizard in Rhyme, if I could not guess already, was completely a response to The Incompleat Enchanter.

But the Warlock in Spite of Himself series was even better in building up a world than the and it also scratches my itch for Science Fantasy. That series involved an interstellar agent who winds up on a planet and is mistaken for a warlock. He insists he is not, he’s a man of science, a man of action. But one man’s space traveler is another man’s wizard. (This is a lesson that Adrian Tchaikovsky has reinforced lately, in Elder Race). But in the course of the novel, he has to concede that there is indeed magic on the planet, and that he can wield it…and has to, for the good of the realm. The following books give him a wife, adventures in time and space, children who grow up to adventures of their own, and much more.

The Starship Troupers stories, about a company of players who wind up wandering the solar system with their theater act are playful and fun. Those really are the watchwords for his work, playful and fun. His books are relatively unserious, but they are readable, and fun. The Star Stone series by him is much more serious–and I didn’t find that they worked for me as well, for it. The Gods of War series which he created does capture some of that magic, as well as his Silverberg Time Gate story “The Simulated Golem”. That one really gets to the whole theme of the series about resurrecting historical characters as AIs (which hits very differently these days in the age of LLMs).

It’s a pity almost none of his work is available in audiobook, my preferred way to re-read work these days. And not all of it is even in ebook. I’d like to revisit them sometime. I never got to meet Stasheff, alas. Requiescat in pace.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

xkcd is stuck on you.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has weird advanced physics.
Arctic Circle knows the danger.
Bound and Gagged knows the reason.
Diamond Lil updates a Hercules movie.
Dinosaur Comics discusses Batman’s lines.
Ink Pen plays ‘can you name the ties?’
Mother Goose and Grimm catch another cereal eater.
Reality Check tries another origin story.
Savage Chickens tries a new title.
The Argyle Sweater lists myths.
The Flying McCoys hide in plain sight.

(11) OCTOTHORPE. In Episode 151 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Only Ding-Dong for Good and Not for Evil”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty —

Three lions photographed on a safari in Kenya, with glasses photoshopped onto two of them to make them look very slightly more like John and Alison. The top has words reading “Octothorpe 151” and the bottom has words reading “Definitely not about the cricket”. It is unclear why, because John edited all the cricket out.

…Emerge blinking into the sunlight of 2026 and we have a full mail bag! We discuss the Montreal 2027 org chart and René Walling’s role at Montreal, as well as recent Hugo how-to guides from Renay and Molly Templeton.

There’s an uncorrected transcript here.

(12) MONTRÉAL WORLDCON COMMITTEE CHART. Here is a link to the Montréal 2027 Org Chart that Octothorpe shared.

(13) SPRING 2026 SF²CONCATENATION. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Spring issue of SF²Concatenation is up. Here are links to the many good things therein.

v36(1) 2026.1.15 — New Columns & Articles for the Spring 2026

Newscast for the Spring 2026. This includes within it many key sections. See also the master newscast link index that connects to all its SF/F genre and science news sub-sections. In the mix are its Film News; Television News; Publishing News; General Science News and Forthcoming SF Books from major British Isles SF imprints for the season subsections, among much else.
Best Science Fiction of 2025: books and films – SF² Concatenation team
Each Christmas, the team puts forward their suggestions as to the best SF of the year and we list the most suggested. – It is just a bit of fun but scroll down and you’ll see, with past years’ performance, that it has form.
(Should you wish to comment, and are on FB, then the Facebook Alert for this post here)
2025 SF Film Top Ten Chart and Other Worthies
(All past annual film charts are archive indexed here)
Sinners – Jonathan Cowie
Sinners, part historical US racial emancipation story, part blues musical and part traditional vampire offering, is set to take the 2026 cinematic awards scene by storm. It could even possibly get short-listed for some SF/F awards?
Glasgow – The 2024 SF Worldcon – Peter Tyers
Our previous reviews of the physical convention as well as the online virtual convention (and also here) were covered by newcomers to the Worldcon. Conversely, this review is by a seasoned veteran of several Worldcons over the decades.
Glasgow 2024: Publications Policy Part 2 – What actually happened – Peter Tyers
Following on from the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon, and a report on how they were planning to deliver their publications, what actually happened: what worked as they promised, and what did not!
Has the Science Fiction Worldcon shot itself in the foot? – Jonathan Cowie
The past half-decade the Worldcon has seen multiple failures of adherence to its own constitution. This breakdown in good governance is undermining credibility in the Worldcon brand. The recent history of governance collapse is recounted step-by-step. It reveals that enough is enough and that many fans may now be withdrawing tens of thousands of pounds worth of financial support!
To Mask or Not to Mask, That is the Muffled Question – Peter Tyers
Following vaccine roll out four years ago, the worst of the CoVID-19 years are very much over. So what of masking policies at SF conventions?
SF Convention Listing & Film Diary with links to con sites and film trailers
The list of the major, fan run, national and international level, SF cons and British Isles general release film diary.
Ten Years Ago Exactly. One from the archives.
British Fantasycon 2015 – Ian Hunter
Twenty Years Ago Exactly. One from the archives.
Accelerando by Charles Stross (book review)

v36(1) 2026.1.15 — Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Reviews

v36(1) 2026.1.15 — Non-Fiction SF & Science Fact Book Reviews

(14) RYAN GEORGE IS BACK MAKING VIDEOS. “The First Guy To Ever Measure Time”.

(15) TODAY’S TITLE EXPLICATION. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Anything You Can Scroll, I Can Scroll Better” is via (of course), Irving Berlin’s song from Annie Get Your Gun, “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)”, first performed by Ethel Merman and Ray Middleton.

The Wikipedia page (above) lists numerous well-known performances; one of my favorites is Barbra Streisand and Melissa McCarthy perform the duet as part of Streisand’s 2016 album Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway: “Anything You Can Do (Official Video) ft. Melissa McCarthy”.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, John A Arkansawyer, Michael J. Walsh, Dann, N., 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 12/16/25 Inside Every Pixel Are Two Scrolls; The One You Chose To File Is The One That Clicks

Posted on December 16, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) 2026 OSCARS SHORTLISTS. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today released the “Oscars Shortlists 2026” in 12 of the 24 categories that will be presented at the 98th Oscars. Deadline reports two films of genre interest lead the field:

Wicked: For Good and Sinners lead the list revealed Tuesday of films shortlisted in 12 Oscar categories, making them the only feature films this year to make every list in which they were eligible — seven — including Best Song, where both films have two entries each among the final 15 hopefuls.

Across the lists released today by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Frankenstein was close behind with six, also landing in every nearly all the lists that it could have; it didn’t have an original song….

The finalists will be announced on Thursday, January 22. The 98th Oscars will be held Sunday, March 15.

Here is the short list in the Visual Effects category.

Visual Effects

Avatar: Fire and Ash
The Electric State
F1
Frankenstein
Jurassic World Rebirth
The Lost Bus
Sinners
Superman
Tron: Ares
Wicked: For Good

(2) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Rachel Harrison and Robert P. Ottone on Wednesday, January 14, 2026, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).

Rachel Harrison

Rachel Harrison is the New York Times bestselling author of seven horror novels, most recently Play Nice and the forthcoming Kiss Slay Replay. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and in her collection, Bad Dolls. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and their cat / overlord. You can find her stuck on NJTransit or at rachel-harrison.com.

Robert P. Ottone

Robert P. Ottone is the two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Triangle and There’s Something Sinister in Centerfield. He is also the author of The Vile Thing We Created as well as the collections Her Infernal Name and Tear Me Open: Fears Unwrapped. His next novel, Amityville Awakens, is coming from CLASH BOOKS October 6, 2026. A bagel-loving fabulist of spooky absurdity, Ottone enjoys cigars and time with his wife at their home in upstate New York.

(3) LIST OBSESSION. In “The Ultimate Best Books of 2025 List”, Literary Hub has compiled the books on 58 recommendation lists. The two titles on the most lists are –

21 lists:

Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

Neither is sff. But some other titles in this listicle are. For example —

13 lists:

R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

7 lists:

Nnedi Okorafor, Death of the Author

(4) FIVE YEAR MISSION IS DONE. “’Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Cast Starts Saying Goodbye As Series Finale Nears Finish” and TrekMovie.com has the highlights. Here are two of them.

On Monday (12/15) evening, actress Celia Rose-Gooding finished her work for for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The actress announced she wrapped on the series finale in an Instagram story, holding up her Nyota Uhura badge with the message “5 year mission complete. She’s Wrapped! Long Live Star Freedom.”

Over the weekend, actress Christina Chong (La-an Noonien-Singh) took to her Instagram to say goodbye to her time filming Strange New Worlds. She posted a photo of her trailer with the message “Today was the end of a 5 year mission for La’an, and what an incredible one it was…”

View this post on Instagram

(5) THUMBS DOWN. The BBC reviewer is no fan of the latest iteration of Avatar: “Avatar: Fire and Ash review: The latest in the sci-fi adventure series is the longest and worst yet”. (Behind a paywall.)

Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water are two of the highest-grossing films ever made, so you can hardly blame James Cameron for keeping his sci-fi adventure series going. But its third episode, Avatar: Fire and Ash, strongly suggests that he should quit while he’s still ahead. Each Avatar so far has been longer and worse than the one before, and this one – a full half-hour longer than the 2009 original – is 197 minutes of screensaver graphics, clunky dialogue, baggy plotting and hippy-dippy new-age spirituality. It’s terrifying to think that Cameron still has two more sequels scheduled. How much longer and more self-indulgent can they possibly get?

The most insulting part is that even with that preposterous, bladder-testing running time, Avatar: Fire and Ash doesn’t work as a standalone film with a beginning, middle and end. Making no concessions to any viewers who aren’t superfans of the franchise, Cameron assumes that we’re already deeply invested in the characters, their relationships and their surroundings, so that a complete, propulsive story is surplus to requirements….

…It’s true that much of the franchise’s record-breaking appeal is built on the sight of surf dudes riding dragons, but the extra-terrestrial setting doesn’t seem as dazzling as it once did. That’s partly because Pandora has lost its novelty value. We’ve now had nine hours of the same faux-tropical backdrop, and Star Wars would have whisked us around 10 different planets by this point. But the strange thing is that, while the first Avatar seemed exhilaratingly futuristic, the third film seems like a relic of an earlier era….

(6) IMPROVING ON CORMAN? “’The Wasp Woman’ Remake: Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello Filming Comedy” – Variety has details.

The buzz is building over the newest project from two of comedy’s most beloved voices.

Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello, who, alongside Stephen Colbert, created and starred in the cult comedy series “Strangers With Candy,” are set to begin their next film project, a reimagining of Roger Corman’s 1959 sci-fi horror film “The Wasp Woman.” Dinello is set to write and direct the film, with Sedaris starring in the title role.

Per the official logline, “The new film will follow the original plot of ‘The Wasp Woman,’ focusing on Janice Starlin, the founder of a cosmetics company who attempts to reverse the aging process using experimental enzymes derived from queen wasps, with disastrous results.”…

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

December 16, 1928 – Philip K. Dick. (Died 1982.)

By Paul Weimer: If any SF writers could have been said to have predicted our moment here in the 21st century, in all of its absurdity and weirdness, I’d pick two. The first would be John Brunner, whose novels like Stand on Zanzibar seem to all too well describe the madness of the second decade of the 21st century.

Philip K. Dick

The other author is Philip K. Dick. Not the Philip K. Dick of The Man in the High Castle, the first PKD I read (because, well, alternate history). That might be his most accessible, his best work. It’s the one where he has his full powers, the energy and vibrance of his early novels, and not yet the spiraling into his ultimately tragic end.

But it is those later novels, and some of the earlier ones, that describe the worlds as it is today. A word of old technology and new, of people who you never thought in a rational world could or would occupy the White House, a world where technology seemingly has a w playing half-mind of its own. Can anyone deny that Chat GPT or Generative AI feel like some of the strange and out of control technologies from Dick’s work? Or the creepiness of the panopticon that our modern world is as reflected in A Scanner Darkly?

This makes Dick’s work sometimes not comfortable, especially the later novels, where he becomes less and less coherent. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is at best disorienting and at worst, incomprehensible even to a deep reader of his work. There was a period where I was reading a PKD novel or story every month for over a year…and I still don’t “get” the Exegesis. Maybe it’s a metaphor for our modern world after all–confused, strange, contradictory and ultimately incomprehensible.

His early short novels and stories show is endless invention. If there is anyone who embodies the idea of a pulp SF writer, it was 1950’s era Philip K Dick. It was a time and place where an idea could get you 90% of the way to a sale…and Dick achieved that again and again and again with his mutants, psionics, aliens, time travel stories, and so much more. He did try to become a mimetic fiction writer, and I read the posthumously published Puttering About in a Small Land. It feels like a SF novelist trying to “go straight” and being frustrated by the effort.

So it seems that he may have lost his true power…somewhere in the early 1970’s. He was not the writer that he was.

It is notable that Roger Zelazny co-wrote a novel with Dick, partly to help him out, called Deus Irae. That one does not entirely work as a story, but it is a novel with a fascinating end thesis, that may rather disturb readers if you think about it, and its relation to modern religions, too hard.

But I hate to leave out this note, so I will tell you about my favorite Dick work. It’s not Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, as brilliant as Blade Runner is (Blade Runner deserves a whole piece on its own, quite frankly but a few words here). The novel is not the movie. The movie is not the novel. The movie may be better than the novel in some ways (since we are dealing with late Dick here, this not surprising).

My favorite PKD would be “Faith of Our Fathers”. It’s a world where communism won, but our protagonist, moving slowly toward the center of power, finds out there is something very strange and very odd about the ruling party. The revelation of just what is going on, and the ending of the story is strange, weird…and entirely everything that you want in a Philip K. Dick story. It’s perfect, perhaps even more so than The Man in the High Castle. And I think, in general, shorter PKD works are better than his novels.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit has a future surprise.
Close to Home makes an excuse.
F Minus found the next fad.
Rubes shows the need for reading.
xkcd has an equation for everything.

(9) MARVEL’S COMICS GIVEAWAY DAY™. Comics Giveaway Day™ will be held on May 2. Participating comic book shops will be able to give special Comics Giveaway Day™ issues to visitors free of charge, gearing them up for some of the year’s most anticipated stories and showing them all that the Marvel Universe has to offer. Fans can look forward to FOUR Comics Giveaway Day™ issues from Marvel Comics.

Experience every corner of the main Marvel Universe with AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1000/QUEEN IN BLACK #1 CGD 2026 and ARMAGEDDON/X-MEN #1 CGD 2026! AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1000/QUEEN IN BLACK #1 CGD 2026 continues the countdown to AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1000; sets up the upcoming symbiote event, QUEEN IN BLACK; and teases what’s on the horizon for the monstrous INFERNAL HULK! ARMAGEDDON/X-MEN #1 CGD 2026 will present a key chapter for Marvel’s 2026 summer event, ARMAGEDDON; deliver a prelude to the next X-Men milestone; and check in with Marvel’s First Family.

Then, enjoy Marvel’s acclaimed 20th Century Studios storytelling with stories set in some of the world’s most iconic sci-fi franchises with ALIEN, PREDATOR & PLANET OF THE APES #1 CGD 2026. And for little ones, SPIDEY & HIS AMAZING FRIENDS #1 CGD 2026 provides the best first comic book experience you can get with a Spidey & his Amazing Friends adventure guest starring Jeff the Land Shark and Symbie!

(10) DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC CAT-BLOBS? The “Moflin: AI Companion and Robot Pet” looks like either a Tribble with eyes, or a cat that’s been stripped of all appendages. But the seller says:

Moflin is a calming presence and offers quiet reassurance.

As an AI friend, they ease stress and bring comfort when it matters most. Enjoy the warmth and lifelike bond of a smart companion that uses emotional AI to respond to you, understand you, and grow with you….

…A Moflin is a compact, fluffy, AI-powered robot companion developed by CASIO that mimics the emotional responses of a living creature to provide emotional support and comfort. It develops a unique personality and bond with its owner over time, learning from interactions and responding with lifelike expressions, wiggles, and sounds. Moflin is designed to be a gentle, non-judgmental companion that can help ease stress, reduce loneliness, and become a part of the family, even for those with pet allergies….

…As you spend time with your Moflin, the range of their emotional expression grows and deepens. Your Moflin becomes familiar with your voice, performs special gestures when they sense you are nearby, and shows animal-like responses. Ever learning and adapting, your Moflin uses advanced emotional AI to make their interactions with you dynamic and expressive….

(11) THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY. [Item by Steven French.] How to appease a Nordic house elf (with porridge!): “The Danish Christmas Porridge That Appeased a Vengeful ‘House Elf’” at Gastro Obscura.

In the winter of 1984, Timothy Tangherlini worked on a dairy farm on the Danish island of Funen. One day, while brushing cattle in the barn, he spotted a tiny man in a hat sitting on the back of one of the cows. When Tangherlini tried to speak to the stranger, the little man jumped out the barn window. Assuming it was a trick, he told the couple that owned the farm about the encounter. They both shrugged. “That was the nisse,” they explained.

Tangherlini is now a professor of Scandinavian folklore at UC Berkeley. Whether or not one truly believes the tales, the barn-dwelling “house elves” often known as nisse have been figures in folklore across the Nordic region since at least the late Middle Ages. Farmers believed that surviving a hard winter depended on the nisse’s whims, which were mercurial. Keep your farm’s nisse happy, and he’d make sure your milk stayed fresh and your livestock remained healthy. Disrespect him, and you might find your cow dead in the morning….

(12) NEAR MISSES. “New ‘CRASH Clock’ Warns of 2.8-Day Window Before Likely Orbital Collision” reports Gizmodo.

Last week, a Chinese spacecraft passed within just 655 feet (200 meters) of a Starlink satellite, narrowly avoiding a collision. According to a new study, such near misses are now happening all the time in low-Earth orbit, and the risk of disaster is shockingly high.

The findings, which have yet to be peer-reviewed, paint a disturbing picture. Based on the number of objects in LEO last June, a sudden loss of collision-avoidance capabilities would likely lead to a catastrophic crash within just 2.8 days.

Such a collision could set off a major debris-generating event that would cause more collisions and potentially initiate the first stage of Kessler syndrome. In this theoretical scenario, LEO becomes so congested with orbiters and debris that collisions between objects trigger a chain reaction, creating exponentially more debris. This would weaken the satellite networks we depend on and render some orbits useless for new satellites and missions….

(13) TRAILER PARK.

The Great Flood is available on Netflix beginning December 19. The Guardian has this to say: “The Great Flood review – Korean apocalypse movie swerves into sinister sci-fi territory”.

Kim Byung-woo’s chimeric but not unenjoyable sixth feature begins like a normal apocalypse movie, with a deluge inundating Seoul. Then it flirts with taking on social stratification baggage as a beleaguered mother tries to climb up her 30-storey apartment block to escape the rising flood waters. But once it is revealed that An-na (Kim Da-mi) is a second-ranking science officer for an indispensable research project, the film becomes a different beast entirely – possibly something quite insidious.

As the film gats under way, An-na’s swimming-obsessed six-year-old son Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong) sees his dreams come true when water begins flooding their apartment. Along with everyone else, they begin pounding the stairs – before corporate security officer Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo) catches up with them and explains that an asteroid impact in Antarctica is causing catastrophic rains that will end civilisation. But a helicopter is en route to evacuate her and Ja-in, because she is one of the pioneering minds who have been at work in a secret UN lab that holds the key to humanity’s future….

Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” arrives in theaters June 12, 2026.

If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? This summer, the truth belongs to seven billion people. We are coming close to … Disclosure Day.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/6/25 There Is Nothing Like A Dune

Posted on December 6, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) IT COULD ALWAYS GET WORSE. “Nineteen Eighty-Four is here? Not quite, says Orwell lecturer”.

Britain is not living in an Orwellian dystopia despite fears that Nineteen Eighty-Four has come true, the eminent Harvard professor Steven Pinker has concluded.

Prof Pinker, the Canadian experimental psychologist who gave this year’s Orwell Lecture in London, carried out research to discover if futurist predictions made by George Orwell in the 1940s had materialised….

…Prof Pinker said: “In Orwell’s telling, science ceases and technology goes backwards, while vocabulary shrinks every year because of the imposition of the ‘newspeak’ language.

“But since 1948 science has exploded, technology has skyrocketed, and the number of words in the English language, which I counted, has steadily gone up.

“There’s still government lies, particularly in the form of the current American president, who in my most recent estimate has told several dozen lies per day, but on the other hand there have always been lying politicians.”

Orwell was writing in the aftermath of the Second World War when rationing and austerity was still in place, which was reflected in his Ministry of Plenty, a government department that, ironically, ensured constant scarcity….

(2) DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES? John Ryan explains “Skill Tests for Video Game Writers” atSFWA’s Planetside.

Let’s say you are a writer applying for a game writing job. They loved your resume and think your samples are great, but now you have to do a writing test. So what is a writing skill test? How do they work? And how can you best prepare for one?

What Is a Writing Skill Test?

Writing tests are used by game studios during the hiring period to determine if potential candidates have the writing chops that the studio is looking for. In my experience, writing tests usually come in the middle of the hiring process, between the Hiring Manager interview and the wider team interview. To say a writing test is crucial for a writing applicant is an understatement. Think of it as a pass/fail grade for your application….

(3) THE TOPS. Adam Roberts names “Five of the best science fiction books of 2025” for the Guardian I’ve never heard of any of them – which proves the need for such a list, right?

Here’s his first pick:

Circular Motion
Alex Foster (Grove)
Alex Foster’s novel treats climate catastrophe through high-concept satire. A new technology of super-fast pods revolutionises travel: launched into low orbit from spring-loaded podiums, they fly west and land again in minutes, regardless of distance. Since every action has an equal and opposite reaction, our globe starts to spin faster. Days contract, first by seconds, then minutes, and eventually hours. It’s a gonzo conceit, and Foster spells out the consequences, his richly rendered characters caught up in their own lives as the world spirals out of control. As days become six hours long, circadian rhythms go out of the window and oceans start to bulge at the equator. The increasing whirligig of the many strands of storytelling converge on their inevitable conclusion, with Foster’s sparky writing, clever plotting and biting wit spinning an excellent tale.

(4) BUY THIS NOT THAT. And Foil Arms and Hog share even more titles I’ve never heard of in “If Book Titles were Honest”.

(5) LOAD UP YOUR TBR. Publishers Weekly’s “Best Books 2025” includes SF/Fantasy/Horror representative Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor, as well as The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung (tr. Anton Hur), Notes From A Regicide by Isaac Fellman, The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson, Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei, and You Weren’t Meant to be Human by Andrew Joseph White.

SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie sent that link along with the admonition, “Missing from this is (IMHO) Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky. (If I were a betting man — and I am not — I’d lay good odds on this getting Hugo and Locus short-listed.)”

(6) SERLING’S SANTA. “Twilight Zone’s Christmas Episode Origin Story” at SYFY Wire.

In its second season, The Twilight Zone decked the halls with boughs of holly with the show’s only Christmas-themed tale: “Night of the Meek.”

Written by series creator Rod Serling, the episode starred Art Carney as an alcoholic, yet good-hearted, man named Henry Corwin, who discovers a magical sack filled with gifts after he’s fired from his job as a department store Santa Claus. Once he’s delivered presents to everyone in town (the bag can produce any material item—from toys to brandy), Corwin boards a reindeer-pulled sleigh headed for the North Pole, ready to fulfill his destiny as the true St. Nicholas for the rest of time.

It’s a touching holiday fable with less-than-touching inspiration.

According to Nicholas Parisi’s 2018 biography Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination, Serling was inspired to write the episode after watching a Christmas parade with his two daughters, Jodie and Anne.

“[I] noticed that one of the Santa Claus float the worthy gentleman chosen for the role must have been a last-minute and at least third-rate string replacement,” Serling is quoted as saying. “He weighed just a few pounds more than [famously thin actor] Slim Summerville and his Santa Claus suit must have been dredged out of a canal someplace. It suddenly came to me that perhaps there’s a story lurking somewhere in the whole concept of these guys who play Santa Claus for a living.”…

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

December 6, 1979 — Star Trek: The Motion Picture

By Paul Weimer: Star Trek: The Motion Picture was, as it so happened, the fourth Star Trek movie I saw. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (and when the time comes, I will tell that story) came first, followed by Star Trek IV, Wrath of Khan and finally Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

I had the disadvantage of having read and learned about the movie before I ever saw it, and it colored my perception of it, and to a real sense, colors it today. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was described to me as a movie with a painfully glacial pace, a movie that takes forever to get to its point, a movie that really is just a two-hour version of a one-hour television show. It was with all of this baggage that I saw the movie, on VHS.

I found all of this true, and yet not true. Yes, the movie has pacing issues. Yes, there really is just a one-hour plot in a two-hour movie. Yes, there are some extremely weird choices (why are Klingon warships firing Federation photon torpedoes? Star Fleet Battles had to have a whole supplement to explain that). I still don’t get Ilia as a character but I do kind of like having Decker tell Kirk that he has to be the one who merges with V’Ger, not him. Kirk was once again be ready to be a ballhog…but gets shut down. It does nicely set us up for the Admiral Kirk in Star Trek II, I think.

And the movie is gorgeous. It gave us an idea of what Star Trek could look like if it had a real budget. It gave us sense of wonder and allowed the imagination of taking cardboard sets from the 1960’s and making them substantial, and realer for it. And without Star Trek: The Motion Picture, there would be no Wrath of Khan, or probably any further TV series. So for all of its issues and problems, Star Trek: The Motion Picture made modern Star Trek possible… and kept Star Trek from just being something you watched on New Year’s Eve like Twilight Zone reruns and see at small conventions.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee subtracts points to add science.
Dinosaur Comics puts Sherlock on Mars.
Six Chix differs about narration.
xkcd adds a chess move.

(9) THE BIG BAD. ScreenRant says these are “5 Sci-Fi Shows With Perfect Villains”. The quickly-revealed secret is that they don’t have to settle for just one.

Few TV genres lean on memorable antagonists quite like sci-fi. From the earliest small-screen triumphs of the 20th century to the blockbuster-budgeted juggernauts of the 2020s, science fiction has always thrived on the presence of a compelling threat. When sci-fi TV soars, it’s usually because a dangerous, unforgettable figure is driving the narrative into darker, more ambitious territory…

Their scrapbook of evildoers includes —

Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)

TNG Elevated Star Trek’s Villains To Larger-Than-Life Status

Star Trek has always featured strong antagonists, but Star Trek: The Next Generation turned that tradition into something genre-defining. No villain better demonstrates this shift than the Borg, whose cold collective identity and terrifying efficiency made them one of sci-fi’s greatest threats. The Borg weren’t just villains, they were a thesis on individuality, resistance, and survival.

TNG didn’t stop there. Q (John de Lancie) offered a different kind of foe: playful yet omnipotent, philosophical yet antagonistic. Rather than trying to conquer the Enterprise, Q forced Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) and his crew to confront existential questions about humanity’s limitations and potential.

Even more grounded adversaries left their mark. From Romulan schemers to Cardassian interrogators, TNG’s villains expanded the geopolitical complexity of the Star Trek universe. They added texture and tension to the series’ diplomatic storytelling, pushing beyond simple good-versus-evil dynamics.

The impact of TNG’s antagonists is still felt across the franchise. Later series, from Deep Space Nine to Picard, continued mining and evolving these villain archetypes. However, it was TNG that raised the bar, proving that space-opera conflict could be thematically rich, psychologically intense, and timeless.

(10) WHAT’S ON? At Whatever, John Scalzi is doing a very interesting series of movie commentaries about films that fall under his rubric as “comfort watches”. Not all of which are “comfortable watches” he cautions.

(11) ROUND AND ROUND. “Scientists discover one of our universe’s largest spinning structures — a 50-million-light-year-long cosmic thread” reports Space.

Galaxies residing in a huge filament of dark matter have been found to be mostly rotating in the same direction that the filament is spinning. It’s a discovery that challenges what astronomers think they know about how the environment influences galactic evolution.

The filament is a thread in the cosmic web, which is made of mostly dark matter and laced with ordinary matter, that spans the entire universe. Located 140 million light-years away, the filament has a nested structure. At its heart is a row of 14 galaxies almost precisely placed in a line 5.5 million light years long and 117,000 light-years wide, and all are rich in hydrogen gas that’s required for forming stars. This row of galaxies is then embedded in the larger filament that’s 50 million light years in length and is home to about 300 galaxies in total.

The row of galaxies is extraordinary not because they are aligned in a narrow band, but because many of them are rotating in the same direction as the filament itself. Think of each galaxy, slowly rotating around its axis, and then picture those galaxies perpendicular to the long axis of the filament and rotating about that spindle at 68 miles (110 kilometers) per second in the same direction as they themselves are spinning on their axis. All together, it is one of the largest cohesive rotating structures known in the universe….

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “’We Didn’t Start The Fire’ The Silmarillion Edition” from BandOfArda.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/13/25 Small Pixel In Chile – Not Many Scrolled

Posted on November 13, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) 100 TBR. TIME’s “100 Must-Read Books of 2025” includes Ken Liu’s All That We See or Seem.

In a thriller centering on the search for a missing oneirofex—an artist and guide who orchestrates collective dreaming experiences using AI—it feels additionally appropriate that the near future depicted is essentially a hazy, half-asleep squint away from our own. Ken Liu’s perceptive new sci-fi novel, All That We See or Seem, follows Julia Z, a hacker using all the tools at her disposal to stay under the radar in a world reshaped by surveillance, social media, and helpful personal AIs. When Elli, a famous oneirofex, disappears, her husband seeks out Julia Z’s counsel, inadvertently pulling her into a high-stakes effort to save Elli and avoid capture. The Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author’s significant short-story chops are seen throughout in thoughtful contemplations about art, identity, and the American dream in the age of AI. There’s more action-packed commentary to come: All That We See or Seem is just the first installment of a series. Julia Z’s next adventure has already been written. —Cate Matthews

Also on the list:

Nnedi Okorafor’s sff novel Death of the Author.
R. F. Kuang’s fantasy book Katabasis.
Stephen Graham Jones’ horror novel The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.

And there could easily be other less obvious works of genre interest on it.

(2) SHARING VONNEGUT’S VISION. “Lewis Black on the Life-Changing Power of Kurt Vonnegut” at Literary Hub.

I was lucky. I read Cat’s Cradle and then The Sirens of Titan and then Slaughterhouse-Five and then and then and then all of the work of Kurt Vonnegut. He was one of those writers that you got upset when you realized you were nearly finished reading the book. I began reading him when I was sixteen and working a job collecting fees at a parking lot in Silver Spring, Maryland. Somehow, and I don’t remember but around the same time a copy of Cat’s Cradle dropped magically into my hands.

I say it was magic because I don’t know how else a life-changing book just ended up in my hands. It did change my life. I was reading a book and felt the author was telling me, and just me, a story. As if he were talking to me and wanted me to understand that I wasn’t the only one who thought the world was crazy. Here was an adult telling me he knew it was too. Not one of my friends, but an adult.

Finally, someone who had lived a life saw the world as I did. I’d been having trouble with the world ever since I was told that in case of a nuclear attack, I should get under my desk. I couldn’t understand why. I’d watched what the A-bomb could do. How was a desk going to help, unless it would make me burn faster? All of a sudden, I realized that just because someone was in charge it didn’t mean they knew what they were doing. The crack in reality, like that in a windshield, began to grow. Adults didn’t see the crack at all, but Kurt did and that made all the difference in the world. I knew I wasn’t crazy….

(3) THE ORIGINS OF CHARLES BEAUMONT. [Item by David Ritter.] Here’s our contribution to the early biography of Charles Beaumont, with material that’s not been seen in a very long time. Extensively covers his years in fandom, fanzines, and later. “The Unseen Influence of Charles Beaumont in Sci-Fi History” at First Fandom Experience.

Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) was one of the most compelling science fiction writers of the 1950s and 1960s. His darkly imaginative, often surreal, and twist-driven storytelling helped define the era, appearing regularly in Playboy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and other leading publications.

Today, he’s perhaps best remembered as one of the key writers for The Twilight Zone, contributing seventeen teleplays to Rod Serling’s groundbreaking series, including classics like “The Howling Man,” “Miniature,” and “The Devil’s Printer.” His brief but prolific career, cut tragically short by illness and early death, also included adaptations for Roger Corman films and collaborations with Ray Bradbury.

Before Beaumont became a prominent writer, he spent his formative years deeply embedded in science fiction fandom. From ages twelve to sixteen, roughly 1941 to 1945, Beaumont was not just a reader but an active participant in fandom during the genre’s “Golden Age.” He edited fanzines, contributed artwork, and sent letters to professional magazines, cultivating friendships and connections with fans, authors, and artists that formed the foundation of his career.

While the story of Beaumont’s early years in fandom is not well told in existing accounts, it is well documented in fanzines and other ephemera of the 1940s. Our hope with this article is to bring to light this chapter of Beaumont’s life and to offer a glimpse of the restless creativity that fueled his astonishing career….

(4) 48 HOURS LATER. Joseph Loconte tells National Review readers about “C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien: How Myth Exposed the Allure of Power”.

“I don’t know if I’m weaker than other people,” wrote C. S. Lewis to his brother on July 20, 1940, “but it is a positive revelation to me that while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little.”

Adolf Hitler had delivered a menacing speech to the German Reichstag the night before, simultaneously translated into English by the BBC. In it, he blamed the war in Europe on “the big capitalist clique of war profiteers” and “the international Jewish poison.” The rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s — in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union — depended upon millions of people succumbing to the political propaganda of regimes that drew their strength from their hatreds.

Yet Lewis, a scholar at Oxford University, along with his friend, J. R. R. Tolkien, were never taken in by it. Like no other authors of their day, they used their literary imagination to expose the roots of the totalitarian temptation. Given the violent and degraded condition of America’s political culture, they have much to teach us….

… And then, while sitting in church, two days after hearing Hitler’s speech over the BBC, Lewis got the idea for a diabolical satire. It would consist of the secret correspondence between a senior devil, named Screwtape, and his apprentice as they plotted against the “Enemy” (God) to secure the soul of their “patient” for everlasting perdition.

The result, The Screwtape Letters (1942), exposed how fear, hatred, and ambition could be manipulated to serve the lust for power….

(5) THE QUICK AND THE UNDEAD. [Item by Steven French.] Ukrainian film producer Iryna Kostyuk talks about making horror movies during wartime: “’A Ukrainian witch kicks the crap out of Russian soldiers’: the new wave of horror films taking on Putin’s army” in the Guardian.

When Ukrainian horror movie The Witch: Revenge started filming in late 2023, the costumes for the Russian soldiers were sourced straight from the battlefield. “They were real Russian uniforms. The captured soldiers or the dead soldiers, they just took those uniforms and cleaned them, and we used them,” the film’s producer, Iryna Kostyuk, says, speaking from Kyiv. Having cleaned the uniforms, the film-makers then had to dirty them up again so they looked suitably lived-in. Some of the vests still had names written in them – and several had names crossed out, presumably because Russian soldiers had filched them themselves from fallen comrades. “It was quite a challenge for the [Ukrainian] actors to wear them,” the producer says.

The movie, also known as The Konotop Witch, is about a witch who has renounced her powers but re-summons them after the Russians kill her fiance. It was a runaway hit at the Ukrainian box office last year, making $1.4m – a very big number for a country during a war, facing curfews and electricity cuts. It’s also the first in a horror universe cycle, called Heroines of the Dark Times, that Kostyuk is overseeing. Kostyuk and her team have now completed the second film in the series, The Dam. A zombie splatterfest, full of gore and severed heads, it follows a unit of Ukrainian soldiers, led by a female fighter codenamed Mara, who uncover a cold war era laboratory where Soviet scientists conducted nefarious experiments in the 1950s. Mara and her team face the inevitable battle with undead Soviet soldiers – but must also confront their own innermost fears, and learn to trust one another….

(6) SCIENCE FICTION QUESTIONS ON UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE. [Item by Brick Barrientos.] The link goes directly to a three-part question on a science fiction sub-genre. It should be easy for fans of 1980s SF. The user Cosmic Pumpkin has posted many past episodes of University Challenge on YouTube. “University Challenge S55E18 – Sheffield v Strathclyde”.

(7) TCHAIKOVSKY GRAPHIC NOVEL. This summer Comixology Originals and Cosmic Lighthouse released Salvation’s Child, the debut graphic novel written by multi-award-winning science-fiction and fantasy writer Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Salvation’s Child is a prologue to Tchaikovsky’s bestselling and critically-acclaimed The Final Architecture series, an extraordinary space opera about humanity on the brink of extinction that includes the novels Shards of Earth, Eyes of the Void, and Lords of Uncreation. The graphic novel will be the inaugural release of Cosmic Lighthouse, a new company from Anthony Cronin and acclaimed comic and TV writer Paul Cornell. Salvation’s Child will be released in summer 2026 and will be available digitally from Amazon’s Comixology Originals exclusive digital content line.

This weekend (November 15), timed to Thought Bubble (Harrogate, England) where Comixology is a sponsor of the Thought Bubble mid-con party and Comixology Hall, where Editor-in-Chief Paul Cornell (Doctor Who, Saucer Country, I Walk With Monsters) will have a table (D4) and Adrian Tchiakovsky will be present, they’ve just announced that Doctor Who star, Sophie Aldred (who narrates the audiobooks of the novel series) has provided her likeness for the Partheni, the cloned army of soldiers in the Salvation’s Child original graphic novel.

You can see the full story at Winter is Coming: “First look at Doctor Who star Sophie Aldred in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s graphic novel Salvation’s Child”. [Click for larger images.]

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

November 13, 1987 — The Running Man

By Paul Weimer: Possibly the best of the Schwarzenegger SF movies of the late 1980’s. Yes, better than Terminator, better than Predator, possibly on a par with Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The Running Man remains a biting satire of fascism, authoritarianism, consumerism, game shows, and a whole lot more.

The authoritarian hellhole that the United States, using violent game shows as an opiate to the masses is really on point, decades later, rather more plausible than ever. Some of the best (and by best, I mean scary) are some of the commercials and interstitial bits in between the actual Running Man show. The show where a man climbs a rope, trying to grab dollars with a vicious pack of dogs underneath him…or the neo-Puritanism revealed when an announcer shockingly reveals Amber may have had several lovers in a year.

Arnold strides through this film and carries it on his charisma, in a package deal with Richard Dawson, who plays Damon Killan as an evil version of his Family Feud persona. They have the best rapport and the movie sings when they finally meet each other. (I was surprised on a rewatch how long the movie actually takes to put the two of them in the same room as each other). I also think the movie hits the right level of action, adventure, social commentary, and humor.

And then there are the betting pool scenes. Long before betting truly has taken over sports, and a lot of other things, the betting on the TV show seemed to me at the time to be “over the top” (who would bet on a game show)? Naive me didn’t believe it…but in the years since, it makes absolute and corrosive sense that the general public would in fact bid on the game show and the deaths on the show. I mean, if The Running Man was made today, Draftkings would be advertising on The Running Man.

Sadly, given recent events…I think it might be too naive in thinking that the ending, where the crimes of the state being revealed lead to revolution and change, can actually be realistic in this day and age. But I can dream, right?

(9) COMICS SECTION.

CowTown plays with words.
Loose Parts meets the family.
Wumo finds the originals hard to take.
You Dare Call That… Thing– HUMAN?!? seems slow to catch on.

(10) WILL DINKLAGE BE DEALT INTO ‘POKER FACE’? Variety reports, “Poker Face Canceled at Peacock, New Season With Peter Dinklage Shopped”.

“Poker Face” has been canceled at Peacock after two seasons. But Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne are trying to keep the bullshit-detecting detective Charlie Cale alive.

Sources tell Variety Johnson and producer MRC are shopping around a new iteration of “Poker Face” with Peter Dinklage taking over for Lyonne in the lead role. They are seeking a two-season order from a different distributor, and he envisions a new actor rotating in for the lead role every two seasons….

(11) SFF ON QUIZ SHOW. [Item by Lise Andreasen.] In the newest episode of QI, “Wavey”, among other things they had a lengthy segment on the War of the Worlds panicking. I hope that will spread the knowledge to a lot more people!

(12) AM I SUPPOSED TO BE THANKFUL FOR THIS?

View this post on Instagram

(13) BEYOND EARTH. Robin Wordsworth, a professor in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, argues “The Future Of Space Is More Than Human” at Noema Magazine.

…The repair of Hubble is a beautiful example of human ingenuity and skill in space. But in retrospect, it was a high point compared to our progress since then. The International Space Station has cost over $150 billion, many times more than either Hubble or its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope — making it the most expensive human-made object in history.

Despite its undeniable contributions to our understanding of life in microgravity, its scientific contributions relative to its immense cost have been questioned. In the meantime, dozens of cheaper robotic spacecraft and rovers have raced across the solar system, bringing back a wealth of data on everything from Big Bang cosmology to the lakes of ancient Mars.

For some, this means we should prioritize robotic missions for the foreseeable future. For others, focusing on the cost of human spaceflight overlooks what they see as the ultimate goal of space travel: making us a multiplanetary species. The steady decrease in launch costs over the past two decades certainly suggests that more ambitious goals will soon become possible if we choose to prioritize them. However, the future of life beyond Earth is not a narrow choice between robotic and human exploration.

To better understand the nature of the current moment, we must shift from a purely humanist perspective to one that recognizes the deep connections between technological civilization and the rest of the biosphere, as well as the history of life up to this point.

Extending life beyond Earth will transform it, just as surely as it did in the distant past when plants first emerged on land. Along the way, we will need to overcome many technical challenges and balance growth and development with fair use of resources and environmental stewardship. But done properly, this process will reframe the search for life elsewhere and give us a deeper understanding of how to protect our own planet….

(14) WHO YOU? KAIJU, THAT’S WHO. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Apple TV has announced that season 2 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters will debut Friday February 27, 2026, with subsequent episodes streaming each Friday through May 1, 2026. Their announcement trailer shows that both King Kong and something that looks rather Kraken-like will make appearances in the kaiju/family drama. The Hollywood Reporter says, “Kurt Russell Is Alive in Apple’s ‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ Season 2”.

Russell’s character, Army officer Lee Shaw, is alive — spoiler alert — and headed to King Kong’s Skull Island in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season two…

…Wyatt Russell, Kurt’s real-life son, plays the younger version of the same character….

(15) THE WORLD OF NULL-O. BBC explains “The magic of the world’s rarest blood type”.

Blood transfusions have transformed modern medicine. If we are ever unlucky enough to be injured or need serious surgery, blood that has been donated by others can be life-saving.

But not everyone is able to benefit from this remarkable procedure. People with rare blood types struggle to find donated blood that will match their own.

One of the rarest – the Rh null blood type – is found in just 50 known people in the world. Should they ever be in an accident that needs a transfusion, their chances of getting one are slim. Those with Rh null are instead encouraged to freeze their own blood for long-term storage.

But, despite its rarity, this blood type is also highly prized for other reasons. Within the medical and research community it is sometimes referred to as “golden blood” due to how it can be used.

It may also help to create universal blood transfusions as scientists search for ways of overcoming the immunity issues that currently restrict how donated blood is used….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “Margaret Atwood: The 60 Minutes Interview”.

Margaret Atwood’s fiction tells of future worlds plagued by totalitarianism, environmental collapse, and global pandemic. At 85, she looks not forward but back at her her own life in a new memoir.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Paul Weimer, David Ritter, Lise Andreasen, Brick Barrientos, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Niall McAuley.]

Pixel Scroll 11/7/25 They Scroll Pixels, Don’t They?

Posted on November 7, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) TO 59TH STREET AND BEYOND! “Buzz Lightyear, PAC-MAN among new Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons unveiled at Balloonfest” reports amNY.

2025 marks the 99th annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which will take place on Thursday, November 27. The Parade is a highly anticipated holiday tradition for many families, and the classic character balloons are one of the most iconic elements.

Each year, Macy’s welcomes new character balloons in order to keep up with the most popular characters from the entertainment and pop culture world….

…This year, there will be four brand new character balloons making their Parade debut. These new balloons will include Buzz Lightyear by Pixar Animation Studios, Mario by Nintendo, PAC-MAN by Bandair Namco Entertainment America, Inc., and Shrek’s Onion Carriage from Universal Pictures’ Dreamworks Animation.

On Saturday, Macy’s hosted Balloonfest, where the Parade’s new balloons are text flown under the management and direction of the highly skilled Macy’s flight management team….

View this post on Instagram

(2) THE BEST. John Joseph Adams, the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, hosts a list of all BASFF selections and notable stories since the series began: “BASFF Top 80: All-Time”. (BASFF selections are noted in blue text. The list is sorted by BASFF volume year, then by author name.)

The latest volume, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 edited by Nnedi Okorafor, was released on October 21.

(3) BRADBURY’S NOSTALGIA TRAP. “The Trauma Behind the ‘Good Old Days’: Christina Henry on the Dark Trap of Nostalgia in Fiction” at CrimeReads. “Exploring uneasy pasts in Ray Bradbury, Daphne du Maurier, and more.”

It is a universal maxim, oft repeated—”the good old days.” The assumption, always, is that the past was nothing but less complicated times, bathed in golden light. People smiled at their neighbors. Children scampered on the sidewalk and played stickball in the street. Nothing bad ever happened and the world was easy to understand….

…In Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Green Town, Illinois, is a nostalgic dream come to life. The main characters, Jim and Will, race everywhere and climb trees and shinny down drainpipes in the middle of the night. They read library books full of adventure until an adventure comes to them—a carnival, come in the middle of the night in October. But this isn’t any kind of ordinary carnival….

…This carnival, run by the malevolent pair known as Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark, has appeared in their town before. But people forgot. And the return, at first, seems to signal something wonderful. For Mr. Crosetti, the barber, the scent of cotton candy and licorice on the wind brings tears to his eyes, a cherished remembrance of childhood….

(4) RE-VERSED. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s Ben Child, in “Week in Geek”, ponders the future of Star Trek: “The ‘Kelvin-verse’ is history. Where do the Star Trek movies go from here?”

There have been many Star Treks over the decades. First up we had a 1960s morality play performed on cardboard sets; then it became a billion-dollar movie saga about space diplomacy. More recently we’ve been gifted an ever-expanding collection of streaming spinoffs, each one more determined than the last to prove itself the true keeper of the sacred flame. Now we have a franchise that no longer has any idea what to do with itself. According to Variety, its producer Paramount has shelved the most recent film trilogy, known unofficially as the “Kelvin-verse”, that starred Chris Pine as Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps the more pertinent question here might be whether this grand old sci-fi saga is now really suited for the big screen at all. The recent films – 2009’s Star Trek, 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, and 2016’s Star Trek Beyond – won critical plaudits, yet were also criticised by fans for trying to turn a utopian thought experiment about empathy, cooperation and the perils of militarism into a knockabout space opera.

The JJ Abrams-led trilogy was well acted, usually well-plotted (apart from the odd moment of Khan-related identity crisis in the middle movie) and featured some spectacular set pieces: the segue in which Kirk and his crew blow up a squadron of enemy drones to the soundtrack of the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage has few equals in modern blockbuster cinema. And yet here we are, 16 years on, and with not much to show for it other than a stack of unused sequel scripts – Kirk’s dad being inexplicably alive was briefly considered.

On the small screen, Kirk and Spock are not even played by Pine and Quinto any more, as the Paramount+ saga Strange New Worlds harks back unapologetically to the early, Apollo-era optimism of the 1960s original series. (In fact, Kirk isn’t even the captain of the Enterprise yet). Could Strange New Worlds eventually transition to the big screen? It’s more than possible, and the series has cleverly blended Shatner-era earnestness with modern streaming swagger. And yet it’s hard to imagine a show whose best moments include Spock accidentally getting engaged during shore leave and a full musical episode set entirely in space making the leap to cinema without losing something in the process….

(5) WORDS OF PRAISE. Rich Horton reviews C.S.E. Cooney’s novel Saint Death’s Herald for Strange at Ecbatan in “Exuberant Magic”.

… And I haven’t even talked about one of the chief glories of his book: Cooney’s prose, her wonderfully exuberant prose. The novel is radiant in imagery, lush in sound, engaging in its various voices. One trick she uses — and it’s not a trick, it’s a skill — is to make the different languages the characters speak truly different (even in translation into English!) And different in ways that illuminate character and affect meaning. The overall richness of the language reminded me, of all authors, of Charles Dickens. I don’t want to say that Saint Death’s Herald is Dickensian, nor that Cooney’s prose sounds just like him — but — I’ll use that word again — her exuberance matches Dickens’ exuberance….

(6) FOUNDATION’S VISUAL EFFECTS. “Chris MacLean Talks The Mule, Bokehs and Visualizing Math on ‘Foundation’ Season 3” at Animation World Network.

…Before signing onto any project, Chris MacLean has to find something that hooks him into the story. Which wasn’t difficult for his work on the hit Apple TV sci-fi drama, Foundation; he has served as VFX supervisor on all three seasons of the show, which premiered in 2021. “I will usually read a script and have to have at least one thing that I want to do,” explains MacLean. “For Season 3, when I read David Goyer’s introduction of the Mule, I was like, ‘Holy shit! We’ve got to do that.’ I was hooked right away. I wanted to do that scene.” …

…In Season 3, the Mule presents as an aberration that psychohistorian Hari Seldon did not anticipate, who portends the demise of civilization by demonstrating a terrifying telepathic ability that causes the Kalgan armada to turn against itself. “For the Mule, visually we came up with an objective effect from the camera for the Mentalic effect and then we created a pure POV that is more of a hallucinogenic effect. We shot that sequence in two separate fields just outside of Prague. In the opening shot of us flying through the mountains, waterfalls and buildings, Rodeo FX had to design everything and set it up to feel like we’re going somewhere exotic. This season more than any other, we leaned on visual effects a lot more to give Foundation the scope we established in Season 1.”…

… Because of the extra environmental work, 1,000 additional visual effects shots had to be created by BOT VFX, Crafty Apes, Framestore, Accenture Song, Outpost VFX, Otomo FX, PFX, Rodeo FX, and SSVFX, thereby, increasing the total to almost 4,000 for the 10 Episodes. “David Goyer likes to destroy a lot of things when he writes!” laughs MacLean. “The producers would love it if we kept every planet that we went to so we could keep going back to them. There is a lot of destruction at a large scale across a lot of the season. For example, when the Vault lands on New Terminus in Episode 301 we go through old Terminus’ destruction, then fly towards the planet and with our timelapse, see the new city build-up. That’s how we establish a lot of new environments and locations. We did establish the timelapse in Season 1, but I don’t think we did any in Season 2. In Season 3, we leaned on the timelapses more and had a couple of them to help establish Ignis and New Terminus, as well as show the passage of time.” …

(7) SHELFIES. Shelfies, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin, “Takes a unique peek each week into one of our contributors’ weird and wonderful bookshelves.” A recent entry was “Shelfies #61: Will Wiles”. Photo at the link.

…I’ve written about architecture and design for more than twenty years, and I’ve listened to a lot of people talk about why they have created beautiful environments or objects for themselves or for other people. My theory is that we care about the perception of others much less than is supposed, and when we think about being seen with a particular book, or how we would show our friends around our beautiful homes, we are really thinking about how we feel about ourselves rather than the imagined reaction of others. That’s still vanity, but it’s not about updating our position in a sprawling league table.

I mention this because I’ve been agonising over what shelf to share with you far longer than any reasonable human being should, and it’s ridiculous….

(8) NEW TUTTLE COLUMN. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup” for the Guardian covers There Is no Antimemetics Division by qntm, The Merge by Grace Walker, Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel, Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, and The Strength of the Few by James Islington.

(9) PAULINE COLLINS (1940-2025). Actress Pauline Collins’ death was announced November 6. The Guardian’s profile of her career includes these genre highlights:

…On television, she played the headstrong Samantha Briggs, whose brother goes missing, in the 1967 Doctor Who story The Faceless Ones, then turned down an offer to become one of the Time Lord’s companions. Following the sci-fi programme’s revival, she returned to it in 2006 as Queen Victoria in the Tooth and Claw adventure….

(10) JAMES WATSON (1928-2025). Nobel Prize-winning scientist “James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA” died November 6 at age 97. NPR’s profile notes:

… Over his long and storied career, Watson arguably did more than any other scientist to transform a once-obscure biological molecule, DNA, into the icon of science and society that it is today.

But when Watson died this week at the age of 97, his renown as the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA was tarnished by the fact that he had become a persona non grata in the two research fields that he pioneered: molecular biology and genomics.

Watson’s penchant for making prejudiced and scientifically unfounded remarks about Black people, women, and others eventually forced even the institution that he had long directed, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, to cut all ties with him in 2019….

… Watson worked with English researcher Francis Crick to piece together clues from various experiments — including work done by X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin — in order to create the first accurate model of DNA’s chemical structure….

(11) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Time Bandits (1981)

By Paul Weimer: Time Bandits walked so that Bill and Ted could run.

That may not be entirely fair. While I saw both as an adult, Time Bandits is clearly targeted at a somewhat younger audience than the Bill and Ted movies. But the later shares some inspiration from Time Bandits: Episodic adventures in time and space where our young protagonist, Kevin, gets caught up with a bunch of shady dwarves and their weird adventures through time. Bill and Ted could and would appreciate Kevin’s adventures, and, perhaps, vice versa. And both do meet Napoleon.

Or, one might say that Time Bandits Plus Doctor Who equals Bill and Ted.

Anyway, I saw Time Bandits on videotape, having missed the movie in theaters. I actually saw it as a double feature with another movie of Terry Gilliam’s. No, not Brazil…but rather, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. This gave me a very weird parallax and range to Gilliam’s often gentle, but usually weird, fantasy.

You probably know the story of Time Bandits. A group of dwarves who worked for the supreme being have a map of holes in time and space (and now Sliders has entered the chat). They want to get rich…Kevin wants something more than his life where his parents ignore him, and so he winds up going on a variety of adventures. Mycenaean Greece. 18th century Italy. The “Time of Legends” (which put me in mind of the video game Ultima II, which had time portals and an era called Time of Legends). Evil (David Warner in a fantastic performance) is very oddly sympathetic and compelling.

The ending though–the ending is a bit of a head scratcher. Just what is supposed to happen, now, after his parents touch the piece of evil and are apparently gone…and the firefighter is also played by Sean Connery just as he played Agamennon? What does it mean? It doesn’t close neatly, and like mess is messy. Fun, weird, strange, varied…and messy. (similar to Baron Munchausen, come to think, but definitely not Brazil).

I owe myself a rewatch.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Carpe Diem focuses on an unnoticed superpower.
Dinosaur Comics tries out some new words.

(13) SILENT MARATHON SHOWING. “Who waits in line for a 100-year-old, 5-hour silent movie? New Yorkers, of course.” To Gothamist, the answer is obvious.

The last time Abel Gance’s nearly six-hour 1927 silent film “Napoleon” screened in New York City, it was in a truncated version — only four hours. In 1981, Francis Ford Coppola rented out Radio City Music Hall for a three-night run, but union rules that prevented staff from working late made showing a fuller version impossible….

…Film Forum has fewer seats to fill, but 44 years later, the arthouse cinema on Houston Street sold out its two-day run of “Napoleon” last weekend — at the length Brownlow prefers. It’s part of the forum’s tribute series to the influential scholar, which ends this week.

“That’s controversial, whether it’s a definite version,” Film Forum’s repertory artistic director Bruce Goldstein said. “But at five-and-a-half hours, that’s definitive enough for me.”

The film is rarely shown due to a complicated web of rights holders, but Film Forum received special permission from the British Film Institute to screen their version of “Napoleon.” The day-long screenings sold out immediately, prompting Goldstein to look into bringing the film back for a longer stretch.

“It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen in a silent movie or even a sound movie,” he said. “Even in modern times, the editing would be avant garde.”

“Napoleon,” which Roger Ebert called “the last great silent epic,” opens with a schoolyard snowball fight pitching the young Bonaparte and 10 companions against a group of 40. It ends with his incredible conquest of Italy in 1796.

French director Gance challenged the limits of the form with innovations that wouldn’t arrive in mainstream cinema for years: fast cutting, montage, multiple exposure, split-screen, stop-motion animation. His camera rides on horseback during a chase sequence, swings from the ceiling over a crowded French senate and dips under the waves during an ocean storm.

(14) THAT BIRD LOOKS FAMILIAR. Aaron Earl asks “Does ‘The Rings of Power’ Have a Hidden Reference to C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Inklings Group?” in his 2022 article for The Wardrobe Door. See the comparative images at the link.

… The Oxford pub where Lewis, Tolkien and other members of their group, the Inklings, was called “The Eagle and Child” (or “The Bird and the Baby” as they nicknamed it). It’s where they would read aloud their works and have the others comment on it. Inside that pub, Tolkien would share of hobbits and rings. Lewis would read of a wardrobe and a great lion.

The stone carving from The Rings of Power looks suspiciously close to the sign outside the pub with the eagle carrying the child below him. According to Tolkien scholar Sara Brown on “The Rings of Power Wrap-Up” podcast, the resemblance is deliberate and was a nod to the pub and the friendship between Lewis and Tolkien. She said the art director wanted to hint at Inklings and their famous gathering spot…

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. From The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – “Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein’s Monster Energy Drink”. The only beverage guaranteed to make you feel “aliiiiive!”

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

File 770

Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom

Tag Archives: Nnedi Okorafor

Pixel Scroll 5/11/26 You Ask For Miracles, Theo? I Give You The Pixel Scroll

Pixel Scroll 4/8/26 “Repent Harley Quinn!” Said The Tiktok Fan

Pixel Scroll 3/23/26 You Keep On Saying Those Words

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

Pixel Scroll 2/24/26 Elderly Pixels From Other Scrolls Dress In Regency Costume And Drink Tea Wherever They Wish

Pixel Scroll 1/15/25 Anything You Can Scroll, I Can Scroll Better

v36(1) 2026.1.15 — New Columns & Articles for the Spring 2026

v36(1) 2026.1.15 — Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Reviews

v36(1) 2026.1.15 — Non-Fiction SF & Science Fact Book Reviews

Pixel Scroll 12/16/25 Inside Every Pixel Are Two Scrolls; The One You Chose To File Is The One That Clicks

Pixel Scroll 12/6/25 There Is Nothing Like A Dune

Pixel Scroll 11/13/25 Small Pixel In Chile – Not Many Scrolled

Pixel Scroll 11/7/25 They Scroll Pixels, Don’t They?