(0) Again I will be spending much of the day visiting my mother in the hospital, so I have done the most I can here in the time available. Thanks for all your good wishes for her health.
(1) EISNER DROPS FINALIST AFTER AI CONTENT DISCOVERED. Publisher Weekly has the story — “Eisner Awards to Implement AI Policy Following Controversy”.
A comics anthology featuring AI-generated writing has been withdrawn from this year’s Eisner Award ballot following controversy over the work’s nomination for the one of the comic world’s highest honors.
Stardust the Super Wizard Anthology, based on cartoonist Fletcher Hanks’s eponymous superhero from the early 1940s, and now in the public domain, had been nominated in the Eisners’ Best Anthology category. Nominations were announced on May 14 by Comic-Con, which hosts the Eisners.
Stardust was edited by Van Jensen and funded through the crowdfunding platform Zoop in 2023, raising more than $39,000 from 614 backers. The use of generative AI in the anthology was confined to one of its contributions: a one-page story by writer Michael Todasco, in the guise of what he subsequently dubbed his “AI persona” Alex Irons.
The inclusion of an AI story had been noticed by several backers of the project when it was first released in 2025, and the anthology’s inclusion on the Eisner ballot sparked immediate controversy within the comics press as well as the Eisner Awards judging panel. On May 18, Comic-Con announced that Jensen had withdrawn the anthology from inclusion, and it would not be appearing on the Eisner ballot.
“In light of the recent disclosure that Artificial Intelligence was included in a work submitted for Eisner Award consideration, the judges have indicated that had they been aware of this information, they would not have voted for its inclusion,” a spokesperson for Comic-Con told PW in a statement. “The editor of the anthology in question has also rescinded this submission for inclusion. Therefore, the submission has been removed from the list of nominees and will not appear on the ballot.”
The statement continued: “It is clear that the ever evolving landscape of technology, as it relates to art, will benefit from further review and discussion. For this reason, San Diego Comic Convention will undertake that effort and will produce a policy that better reflects its long-standing efforts in the protection of artists and creators alike.”…
…Though the Eisner judges broadly agreed that the book would not have been nominated had the use of AI been clear, there was some disagreement over whether the nomination should be rescinded after the fact—both for the effect it would have on other contributors to the book, and because there is no official Eisner policy on AI….
(2) SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD. The 2025 Shirley Jackson Award nominees are out. Complete list at the link.
(3) CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE. The Climate Fiction Prize 2026 winner is Hum by Helen Phillips.
(4) MAD, I TELL YOU. CrimeReads sings “An Aria to the Mad Scientist”.
There’s a term you’ll hear in fiction writing, the “inciting event.” Loosely stated, it’s an event that kicks the protagonist out of their quotidian state, unsettles their personal world—or, perhaps, the greater sum of humanity of which they are a part—and forces them to act.
For me—for the stories I write—my most common inciting character, who keeps turning up in my work like a doomy bad penny, is the Mad Scientist.
Why do I so often gravitate to that type? Well, as I said above, if inciting events are a needful hallmark of narrative progression, a mad scientist is a veritable cornucopia of incendiary incidents. They’re forever pushing the plot forward. How? In as many ways as a novelist can dream up. They create conundrums of every type—physical, moral, psychological, philosophical—and force other characters to react to, cope with, and survive the threats they’ve set in motion.
A list of mad scientists in literature would exhaust the limits of this short essay and be rather pointless anyway, as anyone reading this can summon a handful without prompting. Perhaps, the most famous—the ne plus ultra, the template—is Victor Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s second most famous creation embodies everything that so fascinates both writers and readers about the character type. Victor is brilliant and ambitious (to the point of being out of touch with humanity and its moral concerns), he’s blindered, headstrong and isolationist and romantically doomed… and maybe, most crucially (or to me this is so), he really wants to help.
This is the most fascinating element of the character type, what makes it so rich on an emotional level. The ideas of many a mad scientist at their most core definition are often good. Or they aspire to be so, at least. They could conceivably benefit mankind. Broken by the death of his mother, Victor Frankenstein’s goal was to banish disease, deny death, and create a new order of life. Was that all bad? On the range of human endeavor from penicillin to the atom bomb, I’d tender that it sat somewhere between those two poles. But like all mad scientists (this being the crucial facet of the type), Victor was so blinkered by his superiority complex, his singlemindedness, that he never gave any thought to the ripple effects of his ambitions: how it could all go so spectacularly and horridly awry.
Well, that was fine. Mary Shelley had it covered….
(5) I’M BAAACK! “Long lost BBC episode No Such Thing as a Vampire discovered after almost 60 years” reports MSN.com.
Almost 60 years after it was destroyed, an episode of the terrifying BBC series Late Night Horror has been unearthed and will be shown again.
Late Night Horror was a deeply unsettling six-episode anthology which first came out in 1968. Just two years later, it disappeared from screens and the BBC archives.
The show was notoriously gory with storylines chock-a-block with severed limbs, creatures of the night and ghastly tales, with the scant reaction we have from the time showing ‘complaints it was too scary’ and had BBC technicians ‘buckling at their knees’.
BFI film curator Atlas Obscura added: ‘It was quite shocking, I think it was controversial.’
Although vast amounts (anywhere upto 70%) of the BBC’s output was purged across the 60s and 70s in order to free up tapes (Doctor Who famously has over 90 missing episodes from this era), a 2007 BBC news feature speculated that the sheer horror of it drove it to the chopping block.
Four of the episodes- William and Mary, The Triumph of Death, The Bells of Hell and The Kiss of Blood – remain lost to time. In 2016, archivist Chris Perry got his hands on The Corpse Can’t Play after a 30-year hunt….
… Now, a decade later, another has resurfaced – this time, the episode titled No Such Thing As a Vampire, based on I Am Legend novelist Richard Matheson’s short story…
… The film, which has not seen the light of day in six decades, was tracked down by cinema projectionist Darren Payne in a small storage area of The Regent, a 1930s art deco cinema and theatre buried in the heart of Christchurch, Dorset.
The episode is set to be aired, in conjunction with BBC Archives, in Dorset on September 20, as part of the three-day Grindfest event….
(6) MENTORS NOT OF ARISIA. James Davis Nicoll points out “Five Mostly Helpful Mentors in SF and Fantasy” at Reactor. Here’s one of his finds:
Aahz — Robert Asprin’s Another Fine Myth
Skeeve willingly became the wizard Garkin’s apprentice, since the alternative was either starvation or hypothermia. Perhaps Skeeve would have become a great mage under Garkin’s watchful eye. Sadly, an assassin’s bolt cut both Garkin’s life and Skeeve’s apprenticeship short.
Just before dying, Garkin summoned his old friend Aahz. It’s only after Garkin’s murder that Aahz discovers that Garkin cheekily stripped Aahz of magic as a playful jape. Only Garkin can reverse that spell, which Garkin is too dead to do. Having no better option available, Aahz must tutor Skeeve to use magic in Aahz’s place… because the fate of the worlds is at stake.
Good news for people who like this comedic fantasy series: There are twenty-one volumes. Good news for people who go “meh” at this novel: the Phil Foglio4 graphic novel adaptation improves on the original material.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
May 28, 1984 — Max Gladstone, 42.
By Paul Weimer: I slept on Max Gladstone’s first book, Three Parts Dead, for nearly a year. It wasn’t until it had hit paperback that I finally decided to dive into the first of the Craft Sequence, and then started and have been reading them as quickly as they come out. It’s his big conceit, his big series, and necromancy, accounting, magic, old gods, and social systems lets Max play with all of the themes and ideas that he wants, and make it into a fascinating fantasy universe. He’s also written a couple of text games set in the verse, too.
I’ve enjoyed a heck of lot of his other work, too. There’s the serial Bookburners, which he collaborated with Mur Lafferty, Andrea Phillips, Amal El-Mohtar, and others. Occult operatives dealing with magically empowered objects is not a new idea in the main, but he brings lots of invention and ideas to the table with the serial.
I am also a big fan of possibly the best road trip SF novel out there: Last Exit. It’s Gladstone’s own love letter to Zelazny and shadow walking and traveling through multiple worlds, but not realizing you are bringing yourself along into those worlds. It’s a stunning construction and deconstruction of the concept. I do really need to re-read it…but as a listen, in an audiobook, and see how it does on an actual road trip. Someday!
I should probably mention This is How You Lose the Time War, but that is such a sui generis collaboration with the aforementioned Amal El-Mohtar, that it is impossible to determine what parts are his and which ones are hers, and I bet I’d be wrong if it tried. It certainly has given life and power to science fiction poetry, and I think its existence is why poetry has risen, at least for the 2025 and 2026 Worldcons, to the level of a Hugo Award.
Happy Birthday Max!
(8) COMICS SECTION.
- Curses! noticed one of these things is not calming.
- Reality Check plays songs.
- Strange Brew has open mike.
- Thatababy combines a taste.
- xkcd missed the dates of some inventions.
- Bizarro needs a show to mimic, like the character in a recent release
- Brewster Rockit has a Star Trek reference.
- Junk Drawer needs to decide.
- Loose Parts picked up a prank.
- The Argyle Sweater lists cartoon character rejects.
(9) LOOK FOR THE UNION LABEL. ComicBook Clique reports “Workers at Dark Horse Comics are asking for union recognition”.
Workers at Dark Horse Comics are asking interim CEO Jay Komas and company leadership to voluntarily recognize their union by June 3.
Under the name Dark Horse Workers United, employees say they want a stronger voice in workplace decisions and are calling on leadership to avoid union-busting tactics and move directly into negotiations.
The group says they’re fighting to protect the creative environment that helped make Dark Horse one of the most respected publishers in comics, home to books like Hellboy, Sin City, Black Hammer, and The Umbrella Academy.
Union conversations have been growing across comics, gaming, and entertainment lately, and now Dark Horse is part of that discussion too.
(10) IMAGINARY PAPERS. Today, the ASU Center for Science and the Imaginaton published the latest issue of Imaginary Papers, their quarterly newsletter on science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and imagination.
In this issue, CY Ballard writes about the 2019 video game Mutazione and forging community after catastrophe, Jason Nabi revisits Isaac Asimov’s 1942 short story “Runaround” and the Three Laws of Robotics in the context of AI and LLMs, and Vandana Singh reports on a recent project, An Educator’s Guide to Climate Science and Colonialism.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Thomas the Red, Joey Eschrich, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]
