(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.]