Tag Archives: Ryan Reynolds

Pixel Scroll 1/11/26 We’d Like To Scroll A Pixel Bit About You For Our File

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(1) ALONG THE AUTOBAHN. Cora Buhlert tells about “The First Road Trip of the Year: Walsrode and Hildesheim in the Snow” on her blog. The objective of the trip was to purchase action figures, however, there was a great deal to see on the way.

… I was here to visit a monument to another much venerated figure from the Second German Empire, namely the Walsrode Bismarck Tower.

I have written about the Second German Empire’s tendency to engage in nation building via putting monuments on mountain tops before. The Bismarck Towers are one example of this. Count Otto von Bismarck, prime minister of Prussia and later chancellor of the Second German Empire from 1871 to 1890, was much venerated as the uniter of Germany, which is also why there are a lot of monuments dedicated to him all over the place. Pretty much every larger city in Germany has a Bismarck statue somewhere – Bremen’s depicts Bismarck on horseback and stands next to the cathedral. Hamburg has a giant Bismarck statue which holds a giant sword and stands on a pedestal held up by muscular naked young men who are supposed to represent the various German states, but it’s kind of obvious that the artist just liked depicting naked muscular men and that this is a very gay Bismarck monument. Hamburg’s Bismarck monument is badly neglected, half hidden by trees and covered in graffiti and some people would like to see it gone altogether, because they view Bismarck as a promoter of colonialism. That’s not quite true – Bismarck was sceptical of colonialism and would have preferred to focus on Germany, but Emperor Wilhelm II and some wealthy merchants wanted colonies, so Bismarck yielded. Also, whether you like Bismarck or not, he is an important part of our history and we shouldn’t just throw out history we don’t like. Besides, the Hamburg Bismarck monument is interesting from an artistic POV, so it should absolutely be restored.

And then there are the Bismarck Towers. Once upon a time, there were 243 Bismarck Towers all over Germany, neighbouring countries and even overseas. 173 of them survive, 146 of them in present-day Germany. Here is a website, which has information and photos of all of them, both surviving and destroyed.

North Germany never had all that many Bismarck Towers, probably because we lack the mountain tops to put them on top of. And of the few we had, many were destroyed over the years. The closest surviving Bismarck Tower to me is actually the one in Walsrode, which I had planned to visit for a while now. Because I find Bismarck Towers and the quasi-religious veneration of Count Otto von Bismarck they represent fascinating. Many Bismarck Towers were even topped with a metal bowl for lighting fires in memory of Bismarck, though these fire bowls are mostly gone now, even from the surviving towers.

According to Google Maps, the Walsrode Bismarck Tower was supposed to be on the edge of town. So I parked on the parking lot of a supermarket. Opposite the supermarket a path should lead to the Bismarck Tower, at least in theory. For in practice, there was no path. Nor was there any signpost, but then there rarely are signposts for Bismarck Towers, because many towns that have one find them kind of embarassing….

(2) THEY CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU. Charlie Jane Anders would like to tell you about “The Most Surprising Book Trend Right Now: Memory-Sharing” at Happy Dancing.

If you asked someone to name the main trends in genre book publishing from the past year or two, they’d probably mention romantasy, cozy fiction, horror and a few other things. But I’ve been blown away by a sleeper trend lately: novels about people storing their memories remotely, gaining access to someone else’s memories, or sharing a memory with another person. In general, memory seems to be on a lot of people’s minds lately….

… To find out more about this topic, I talked to four authors of recent books that deal with this concept in various fascinating ways. (I also reviewed some books on this theme a while back for the Washington Post.) 

One of my favorite books of 2025 was The Antidote, the long-awaited new novel by Karen Russell. The Antidote is the sobriquet of a prairie witch in dustbowl-era Nebraska, who acts as a sort of bank vault for people to store their unpleasant memories — with the promise that you can retrieve the memory later when you need it. But after a catastrophic dust storm, the Antidote and other prairie witches find their vaults cleaned out, all the stored memories gone forever. 

The Antidote turns into an examination of buried historical trauma, especially the attempted genocide of Native Americans — thanks in part to a New Deal photographer’s magical camera that takes pictures of the past and future.

In writing The Antidote, Russell says, “I was interested in what happens when people are unable or unwilling to reckon with the past, in the exiling of memories from our waking consciousness and from our public histories, those things that many of us must continuously forget or suppress in order to go on living as we do, and how that ‘collapse of memory’ harms us individually and collectively.”

Russell adds, “I do think that whatever else a memory might be, it’s never the fullness of what happened. It’s always a (re)creation, never static or inert.” And that “these secrets that can feel so private and so personal, can become, in aggregate, something like a mass denial.  Who and what we exclude from our family stories and collective histories has tremendous consequences, for all of us.”…

(3) SEATTLE WRITING CAMP OFFERED. Clarion West’s 2026 Teen Writing Camp is taking registrations. Full details and prices at the link. It will be an in-person camp in Seattle.

This is a ten-day, in-person camp for teens geared toward students 13 – 18 who are interested in creative writing and learning more about writing speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, supernatural, horror, etc). Participants will explore Seattle art spaces and museums as a means of inspiration while they write.

Camp hours are 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday through Friday. This is a small-group camp for up to 10 students, highly focused on individual attention and developing friendships! 

Taught by professional author and writing instructor, Tara Campbell, this camp will include readings and discussions of published work, as well as prompts and writing time for students to work on their own stories. Writing days will alternate between Hugo House as our base and field trips to art spaces throughout the city, such as the Museum of Popular Culture (MoPop), Seattle Art Museum, and others, drawing upon Seattle as a creative muse. In addition, special guest instructors will join us to discuss other industries that rely on writers! 

Participants will be introduced to workshop methods for giving and receiving feedback and hone their presentation skills for a capstone reading with an audience of their peers at the end of the program.

Topics to be covered include worldbuilding, defamiliarization, science fiction, urban fantasy, the supernatural, horror, and hermit crab fiction (stories told in unusual formats like transcripts and reports). Our subject matter will range from the depths of the ocean to the outer reaches of space, technological advances, and life beyond death….

(4) AN EARLIER ‘ACADEMY’ IDEA. “Inside the Lost ‘Star Trek’ Movie That Would Have Rebooted Kirk and Spock at Starfleet Academy” at Yahoo!

In the aftermath of 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, producer Harve Bennett found himself confronting a problem that had shadowed the Star Trek franchise since its move to the big screen a decade earlier: how long could the original cast realistically continue? The answer he proposed was radical for its time—a feature-film prequel titled Starfleet Academy (also known as The Academy Years and no relation to the new series premiering on January 15), focused on how Kirk, Spock and McCoy first met as cadets.

As screenwriter David Loughery puts it, “Every time they were going to make one of these Star Trek movies, the producers and the studio always ran into the same problem in getting the original cast together. The reasons for that were money, power, creative differences, ego, health, unavailability… all of those things.”

The concept itself originated with producer Ralph Winter, who recalls pitching the idea directly to Bennett. “We’d just demonstrated with Star Trek III that we could do a young Spock,” Winter explains. “We should see how these guys meet the first time… build something that would be a reboot of this with younger characters to pick up with when these older characters don’t want to do this as much.”…

… Set over a single year at Starfleet Academy in Huntsville, Alabama, the script introduced a cocky, reckless young Kirk, an emotionally conflicted Spock who has left Vulcan against his father’s wishes, and a medical student McCoy trying to find his place. “They begin as rivals and end up as friends and comrades,” Loughery explains, “and in the final scene… we’re able to see the legends that they are going to grow up to become.”…

… Fan reaction was equally volatile. “We were really caught off guard,” Loughery admits. “Somehow they conceived it as a sort of spoof or a takeoff.” Rumors circulated that the film would resemble “a cross between Police Academy and The Jetsons,” a perception Loughery attributes to misinformation—possibly fueled by fears within the cast that long-standing roles and convention income were being threatened….

(5) COMICS WRITER WILL SPEAK IN LA. The Los Angeles Breakfast Club presents “DC Comics with Geoff Johns!” on January 14. Tickets at the link.

Geoff Johns is one of the most prolific and popular contemporary comic book writers. He has written highly acclaimed stories starring Superman, Green Lantern, the Flash, Teen Titans, and Justice Society of America. He is the author of The New York Times best-selling graphic novels GREEN LANTERN: RAGE OF THE RED LANTERNS, GREEN LANTERN: SINESTRO CORPS WAR, JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA: THY KINGDOM COME, SUPERMAN: BRAINIAC and BLACKEST NIGHT.

Johns was born in Detroit and studied media arts, screenwriting, film production and film theory at Michigan State University. After moving to Los Angeles, he worked as an intern and later an assistant for film director Richard Donner, whose credits include Superman: The Movie, Lethal Weapon 4 and Conspiracy Theory.

Johns began his comics career writing STARS AND S.T.R.I.P.E. and creating Stargirl for DC Comics. He received the Wizard Fan Award for Breakout Talent of 2002 and Writer of the Year for 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 as well as the CBG Writer of the Year 2003 through 2005 and 2007 and 2008, and CBG Best Comic Book Series for JSA 2001 through 2005.
After acclaimed runs on THE FLASH, TEEN TITANS, and the best-selling INFINITE CRISIS miniseries, Johns co-wrote a run on ACTION COMICS with his mentor Donner. In 2006, he co-wrote 52: an ambitious weekly comic book series set in real time, with Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka and Mark Waid. Johns has also written for various other media, including the acclaimed “Legion” episode of SMALLVILLE and the fourth season of ROBOT CHICKEN.

(6) ERICH VON DÄNIKEN (1935-2026). Remember Chariots of the Gods? “Erich von Däniken, Who Claimed Aliens Visited Earth, Dies at 90” reports the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.) This is definitely not a “say nothing ill about the dead” obituary.

Erich von Däniken, the best-selling Swiss author and self-styled maverick archaeologist who propagated the theory that thousands of years ago an advanced alien species visited Earth, mated with ancient humans and gave them the technology, and the intelligence, to erect such marvels as the Great Pyramids, died on Saturday in Switzerland. He was 90.

His death was announced on his website.

Mr. von Däniken was 32 and managing a hotel in Davos, Switzerland, when he published his first and by far most popular book, “Chariots of the Gods,” in 1968. In breathless prose, saturated with exclamation points and folksy interjections such as “Hey, presto!” Mr. von Däniken posited that virtually the sum of human knowledge and ability had been bestowed by extraterrestrials.

With little evidence and a lot of innuendo, he proclaimed that the Egyptian pyramids could have been built only with alien expertise. (“Is it really a coincidence that the height of the pyramid of Cheops multiplied by a thousand million — 98,000,000 miles — corresponds approximately to the distance between the earth and sun?” he wrote.)

The birdman cult of Easter Island, Mr. von Däniken declared, developed as a way to honor the supreme beings who had flitted down from the outer atmosphere to land on that remote spot in the Pacific, off the coast of South America.

Because an iron rod in a temple in Delhi, India, appeared impervious to rust, it must have been made from a celestial alloy, he insisted. Similarly, he said, when viewed from the air, the geoglyphs of Nazca, Peru, are obvious landing strips for spaceships. And artwork on a Mayan sarcophagus depicts not a king descending into the underworld, he concluded, but an astronaut-god piloting a spaceship.

Critics were unsparing. “Chariots of the Gods,” one anthropologist wrote, was “a warped parody of reasoning, argumentation, as well as a vigorous exercise in selective quotation, misrepresentation and error based on ignorance.”

The astrophysicist Carl Sagan said of Mr. von Däniken: “Every time he sees something he can’t understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet.” …

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 11, 1961 — Jasper Fforde, 65.

I, like most folk I suspect, first discovered the somewhat eccentric charms of Jasper Fforde in the Eyre Affair, the first of his novels with Tuesday Next, the Special Operation Network, Literary Detectives (SO-27) who could literally enter the great and not so great works of English literature. 

Bidder and Stoughton published it twenty-three years ago. I’d like to say the Eyre Affair was a much desired literary property but he says there were seventy-six publishers that he sent his manuscript to. I’m surprised there were that many publishers in the U.K. that would have been interested, so it’s rather possible that number is, errr, made up. 

There would be six in the series in all — this novel followed by Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot. I won’t say that they were consistently great as they weren’t and the humor sometimes wore more than a bit thin, but overall I like the series considerably.

Next up, and I wasn’t eggspecting to like it, yes I know bad pun there, is The Big Over Easy which is set in the same universe as the Thursday Next novels though I don’t remember any overlapping character twenty years after reading them. It reworks his first written novel, which absolutely failed to find any publisher whatsoever. 

Its original title was Who Killed Humpty Dumpty? Errr, wasn’t there a novel involving a rabbit by almost that name?  It had a sequel of sorts in The Fourth Bear. Both are quite more than bearably good. 

I have not read his dystopian novel Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron which is about a future Britain where everyone there is judged by how they perceive colors. Suspect someone with color blindness like myself wouldn’t be welcome there. A friend who did read it liked it a lot. 

His Dragonslayer series, also known as The Chronicles of Kazam, are a YA affair and a great deal of fun indeed. 

Jasper Fforde

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990)

The 1991 Nebula Award for Best Novel went to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, the fourth novel of the Earthsea sequence. The first three novels —  beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea and finishing off with The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore, which were published between 1968 and 1972. These novels did win any awards which really, really surprised me. 

Tehanu was published by Atheneum in 1990. As I noted above, it’d had been twenty years since the last Earthsea novel was published. It would be not the last novel, despite the subtitle, as The Other Wind would follow twenty years later.  It would also win the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

So what is Tehanu about? 

SPOILERS SORT OF.

Years before, they had escaped together from the Tombs of Atuan—she, an young priestess by the name of Tenar and he, Ged, a wizard. Now she is just a farmer’s widow. And he is a just old man, stripped of his immense abilities.

A lifetime ago, they helped each other at a time of darkness and danger. Now they must join forces again, to help another — Tehanu, a physically and very deeply emotionally scarred child whose destiny remains to be revealed.

COME BACK NOW. I PROMISE I WON’T GIVE ANYTHING AWAY. 

So did I like it? Yeah I did. I think Le Guin in the time between the writing of original Earthsea trilogy and this novel did mature quite a bit as a writer and it shows here. Tehanu is more complex, deeper and thoughtful novel that those earlier works are. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) BOW – WOW! “Dogs Build Their Vocabularies Like Toddlers” says the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.)

Basket the Border collie seems to have a way with words. The 7-year-old dog, who resides on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, knows the names of at least 150 toys — “froggy,” “crayon box” and “Pop-Tart,” among them — and can retrieve them on command.

Basket built her vocabulary thanks to the dedicated efforts of one of her owners, Elle Baumgartel-Austin. She began the language lessons when Basket was a puppy. “I would play with her, say the name of the toy — say the name of the toy a lot of times,” Ms. Baumgartel-Austin said. She started with 10 toys, adding more as Basket mastered them.

“There never seemed to be a limit,” she said. “It’s basically like, how many toys could I feasibly store in my tiny apartment?”

Now, in a new study, scientists have found that Basket, and other dogs that share her advanced word-learning ability, have a skill that puts them functionally on par with 18-month-old children: They can learn the names of new toys not only through direct instruction but also by eavesdropping on the conversations of their owners.

Such sophisticated word learning appears to be rare among dogs, and recognizing the labels for specific objects is a far cry from acquiring language. But the study’s findings add to evidence that the cognitive and social abilities that underpin certain kinds of language learning are not limited to humans — and highlight just how adept dogs are at reading human signals.

“They’re very good at picking up on these cues,” said Shany Dror, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, and an author of the study. “They’re so good that they can pick up on them equally well when the cues are directed to the dog or when they’re directed to someone else.”

The study, which Dr. Dror conducted at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, was published in the journal Science on Thursday.

Although many dogs can understand simple commands, like “sit” or “stay,” picking up the names of specific objects — a skill known as label learning — appears to be a much tougher task. Scientists do not fully understand why.

But over the past two decades or so, scientists have identified a handful of outliers, canine prodigies that know the names for dozens or even hundreds of toys and can remember such labels for years. “They accumulate these huge vocabularies,” Dr. Dror said….

(11) NASA BRINGING HOME SICK ISS CREW MEMBER. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Global News reports “NASA to return ISS crew to Earth months early due to astronaut’s illness”. NASA has announced they’re indeed bringing the subject crew home early, but have not announced the exact time. They also said they’re investigating sending the next crew earlier than had been planned but made no commitment.

NASA will bring Crew 11 back to Earth months ahead of schedule after an astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS) experienced a medical issue, the aeronautics agency said Thursday.

The ill crew member, who is currently living and working aboard the orbital laboratory, has not been identified by NASA, but is said to be in stable condition and will be returned to Earth with the rest of the crew.

A medical diagnosis has not been shared, though NASA’s Chief Health and Medical Officer, Dr. James D. Polk, said he and a team of experts deemed it necessary to bring the astronaut home in order to complete more comprehensive testing.

“We have a very robust suite of medical hardware on board the International Space Station, but we don’t have the hardware we would have in the emergency department to complete a workup of a patient,” he said….

(12) VIDEOS OF THE DAY. From The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on May 16, 2018: “Deadpool Takes Over Stephen’s Monologue”.

Then, this duo took over the Jimmy Kimmel Show on July 25, 2024: “Guest Hosts Ryan Reynolds & Hugh Jackman Interview Each Other”.

[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Daniel Dern, Cora Buhlert, John King Tarpinian, 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 StephenfromOttawa.]

Pixel Scroll 11/29/25 My Scroll Displays A General Pixel And You Claim It’s Cut To Your File. What A Fen-Scinating Revelation

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(1) HIGH PRAISE. “The New Scientist Book Club is currently reading the late Iain M. Banks’s Culture novel The Player of Games.” Bethany Jacobs, author of These Burning Stars, tells New Scientist readers “Why sci-fi novelist Iain M. Banks was an ‘astounding’ world-builder”.

As a writer of space operas set in foreign universes, I’ve always written exhaustive world-building documents, everything from character graphs to hyper-detailed plot outlines to encyclopaedic entries on the cultures I’m creating. This is an essential part of my process, and I’ve studied some of the best: the late Iain M. Banks, who died in 2013, was an astounding world-builder.

Best known for his Culture series, Banks described the Culture civilisation as a “secular heaven”. Its human/machine/AI population has achieved a post-scarcity utopia where benevolent AIs (called Minds) manage the health and maintenance of society. Unlike other science fiction that imagines AI overlords stamping out or enslaving humanity (think The Matrix), in the Culture, humans and machines share equal rights and have meaningful, trusting relationships. Yes, at the end of the day, the machines call the shots, but they generally call them right, and their human citizens don’t experience oppression….

…As a writer obsessed with the craft of world-building, I’ve recently devoured Banks’s posthumously published The Culture: The Drawings. The book reprints a large collection of Banks’s hand drawings and notes.

Therein, we see him answering questions that are also important to my own writing: what language do the characters speak and why? What are the naming conventions of people and places? How does technology impact not just broad societal structures, but the nitty-gritty of daily life? In Banks’s drawings, he answers these questions with rough sketches of ships, intricate diagrams of weapons, rows and rows of numerical calculations, and maps labelled down to the smallest corner…

(2) LEGO STAR TREK ENTERPRISE UPDATE. [Item by Frank Catalano.] Star Trek fans, take note: If you haven’t already ordered the LEGO Icons Star Trek Enterprise D model, you’ll be waiting until sometime in 2026 to receive it … or perhaps even to order it. 

The first-ever LEGO license of the Star Trek franchise went for sale as a lead Black Friday item at 12 midnight EST on Friday, Nov. 28 at the official lego.com website. That time was key: In west coast cities like Seattle and L.A., the set was available at 9 p.m. Pacific on Thanksgiving night.

When I logged on Thursday at 9 p.m. exactly from Washington state, I was greeted with a LEGO wait room page with a repeating 20-second countdown. After several minutes, I was in and was able to enter the site and successfully purchase the set.

However, if you waited until 6 a.m. Pacific on Black Friday itself? The ship-by date changed from “Dec. 18” to “in 60 days” as I watched with the added label of “backorder.” One day later, Saturday at 3 p.m. Pacific, the set is listed as “temporarily out of stock” with a button to “Notify When in Stock.”

The $399.99 Star Trek: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D, as the set is officially called, is part of the LEGO Icons line and apparently is available exclusively from LEGO’s consumer site. Recommended for ages 18 and over, it has 3,600 pieces and 9 LEGO minifigures, including Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Lieutenant Worf, Commander William Riker, Dr. Beverly Crusher, Guinan and Lieutenant Commander Data — accompanied by his feline companion, Spot. The finished LEGO set is two-feet long and comes with a build-it-yourself LEGO display stand.

Early purchasers — when it could be purchased — also received a Black Friday weekend gift of a free Star Trek: Type-15 Shuttlepod set of 261 pieces and an Ensign Ro Laren minifigure. That set, also, is now listed as “not currently available’ on the LEGO site. 

In addition to the bonus shuttlepod set, the high price of the Enterprise also qualified it for two additional free gift sets: a Mini Knight’s Castle and a Hot Chocolate Stand. Neither of which, apparently, would be considered canon. 

(3) NOT WHAT YOU MIGHT EXPECT. CBR.com presents the “10 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies of the Last 100 Years, Ranked”.

Science fiction is a lot older than the last century — the genre’s origins can be traced back to ancient and medieval mythologies like the Ramayana and One Thousand and One Nights. The advent of cinema has since allowed the genre to prosper, especially in recent decades. However, it’s interesting to note that the first sci-fi movie, Le Voyage dans la Lune, turned 123 years old in 2025. Recent developments in filmmaking technology have further boosted the genre’s popularity, offering a wide range of works catering to an equally diverse array of audiences….

Here’s a pick I didn’t see coming —

La Jetée’s Short Runtime Doesn’t Make It Less Powerful

Technically not a feature movie because of its 28-minute runtime, the French-language La Jetée wasn’t even a movie in the literal sense of the word. Instead, the narrative was painstakingly built from a series of photographs, with the static frames exploring the fragility of memory and time. La Jetée revolves around a time travel experiment set in the post-apocalyptic future following World War III, where the protagonist is sent into the past as well as the future.

La Jetée has been recognized as a benchmark of modern science fiction, appearing atop Time magazine’s list of the best time-travel films ever made. In fact, Neuromancer‘s William Gibson cited La Jetée as a primary influence, stating that his “sense of what science fiction could be had been permanently altered.” The movie’s radical imagery would soon impact cinematographic syntax on a considerable scale, demonstrating that science fiction always needed more imagination than technology.

(4) LESLIE FISH (1953-2025). Famed filksinger Leslie Fish died November 29. Her Wikipedia entry lists these highlights of her years in fandom:

Along with The DeHorn Crew, Fish created the first commercial filk recording in 1976, Folk Songs for Folk Who Ain’t Even Been Yet. Her second recording, Solar Sailors (1977), included the song “Banned from Argo“, a comic song parodying Star Trek which has since spawned over 100 variants and parodies. She recorded the comic song “Carmen Miranda‘s Ghost”, which was the source for the short story anthology Carmen Miranda’s Ghost Is Haunting Space Station Three, edited by Don Sakers (in which she has one story and the notes on the song). Her song “Hope Eyrie” is regarded by some as being as close to the anthem of American science fiction fandom as is possible in such a disparate group.

Fish also received a great deal of criticism for repeatedly posting unsubstantiated claims about the transgender community.

She won 10 Pegasus Awards for filk excellence. She was inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame in 1995. In 2014 she received a Prometheus Special Award for the novella Tower of Horses and song “The Horsetamer’s Daughter”.

Her gen Trek novel “The Weight”, which she both wrote and illustrated, was serialized in the zine Warped Space from 1976 through 1979. Her story “Shelter” (Warped Space #20, October 1976) was one of the earliest K/S slash stories. She published dozens of pieces of short fiction, some in the Cherryh Alliance/Union series, the Pournelle CoDominium universe, and Bradley’s Darkover series.

She is survived by her husband Robert “Rasty Bob” Ralston whom she married in 2011.

(5) TOM STOPPARD (1937-2025). Playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard died November 29 at the age of 88 reports NPR. In live theater Stoppard won a Laurence Olivier Award and five Tony Awards for Best Play. As a screenwriter he won a 1999 Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.

His genre credits include the scripts for Brazil (1985) and NBC Experiment in Television (anthology series; 1 ep; 1970), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) while he did uncredited work as a script doctor on Star Wars: Episode III (2005), Sleepy Hollow (1999), and Hook (1991). He also wrote the script adaptation of J.G Ballard’s (non-sff) Empire of the Sun (1987).

(6) MEMORY LANE.                                             

[Item by Cat Eldridge.]

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Yes, let’s have a feel-good film, one of Mike’s favorites as it turns out. It’s set between Thanksgiving and Christmas so it is appropriate to tell about now, and I will. I like to as it is indeed a very upbeat movie.

Seventy-eight years ago, Miracle on 34th Street was initially released as The Big Heart across the pond, written and directed by George Seaton and based on a story by Valentine Davies. Seaton did uncredited work on A Night at the Opera, and Davies would later be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Glenn Miller Story, a most stellar film.

Kris Kringle, no I did not make his name up, is pissed off that Santa in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade went missing because he was drunk. 

(I know that The Twilight Zone did this later. It’s “The Night of The Meek” in which the drunk Santa Claus Henry Corwin is fired from his department store on Christmas Eve, and he finds a mysterious bag that gives out presents and fulfills his true destiny.) 

When he complains to event director Doris Walker, she persuades him to take his place. He does so well that he is hired to play Santa at Macy’s on 34th Street.

Most of the film is about faith. In this case believing that Kris Kringle is really Santa Claus — or not. Or that in a larger sense that individuals believe in him. The Judge rules that both are true and this Kris Kringle is not confined to Bellevue Hospital as certain parties were eager to do. 

Everyone including the most curmudgeonly of critics loved it. Certainly, the most excellent primary cast of Maureen O’Hara as Doris Walker, John Payne as Fred Gailey, and Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle charmed everyone. Well almost everyone as you’ll see below. 

It was shot on location in New York City, with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade sequences filmed live while the 1946 parade was happening. The rest of it was set during the Christmas season but the Studio insisted on a May premiere as that they thought was when Americans went to see films. 

The Christmas window displays seen in the film have a very interesting history. They were first made by Steiff for Macy’s. Macy’s then sold the window displays to FAO Schwarz in New York and they in turn sold the windows to the BMO Harris Bank of Milwaukee where they are on display every December in the bank’s lobby on North Water Street. 

It was remade with same name in 1994. Due to Macy’s refusal to give permission to use its name, it was replaced by the fictitious Cole’s. Why so? “We feel the original stands on its own and could not be improved upon,” said Laura Melillo, a Macy’s spokeswoman in a Los Angeles Times piece on the film. Or as the LA Times writer put it on the refusal on Macy’s to allow the use of their name, “The Grinch also came early for John Hughes, whose Hughes Entertainment is producing the movie.” 

Two final notes. 

One group didn’t like it. The Catholic Legion of Decency found it “morally objectionable” largely due to the fact that O’Hara portrayed a divorcée here. 

Yes, the Suck Fairy is hanging around drinking the nog, the one well boozed, and I asked her what she thought about it. She’s not fond of the remake but thinks the original is quite splendid. She remembers Macy’s then and watched it being filmed. No, not there as the principal photography was elsewhere.  

Alas it’s streaming only on Disney+ this year. 

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) AT LEAST IT GREENLIT HIS MARRIAGE. “Ryan Reynolds Explains How Making ‘Green Lantern’ Taught Him an Important Lesson” – People tells what that lesson was.

…Reynolds famously met his wife Blake Lively when they costarred in Green Lantern. The movie was considered a critical and commercial failure, five years before Reynolds went on to find comic book stardom with his Deadpool series, adapted from the Marvel Comics character.

“But you know, that was a time in my life when I was ‘Yes, sir, no, sir. How high can I jump, sir?’ ” Reynolds said, reflecting on his creative approach earlier in his career. “You sit there and you go, ‘I have really strong thoughts and opinions on a creative matter,’ and someone else on another movie, I remember, made a creative decision, and ‘I thought, well, that’s a nail in a coffin that I alone will lie in.’ “

“And it’s true. They don’t say ‘This producer’s movie flopped,’ or ‘This director’s [movie flopped].’ That’s me. So if I’m going to be on that headline, I’d like to be the architect of my own demise — or success,” he added.

Reynolds has spoken openly about his disappointment with how the Green Lantern movie turned out. He only ever watched it in full for the first time back in 2021….

(9) AND SPEAKING OF GREEN. History knows “The Real Reason the Wicked Witch of the West Is Green”.

When audiences first saw The Wizard of Oz in 1939, they were dazzled by the movie’s use of Technicolor. Dorothy’s ruby slippers sparkled, the yellow brick road gleamed and the Wicked Witch of the West appeared in a shocking shade of green skin. But L. Frank Baum’s original book never described her that way. 

How does the Wicked Witch appear in the original story? 

In Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West is mean and scary but not green. “Now the Wicked Witch of the West had but one eye, yet that was as powerful as a telescope, and could see everywhere,” Baum wrote.

Illustrator W.W. Denslow depicted her as elderly with an eyepatch and braids.

Why was the witch’s appearance changed for ‘The Wizard of Oz’?

Technicolor, an early motion picture color process invented in 1915, made advancements in the 1930s with a three-strip camera that captured red, green and blue light for vivid full-color images. Although earlier films had used color, The Wizard of Oz set a new standard.      

“The year 1939 was also a time of great advancement in the technology of making films,” writes Charles F. Adams in 1939: The Making of Six Great Films from Hollywood’s Greatest Year. “Sound recording was better, film was faster, cameras were more mobile and flexible, rear projection had been mastered, and pictures could now be made in full color.”

An early version of MGM’s movie script called for shooting the Kansas scenes in black and white (the final version was sepia), with Oz in full color. “It was an idea that was quickly accepted and that would become a legendary aspect of the movie,” Adams explains. 

To showcase Technicolor, Dorothy’s silver shoes from the books became ruby red, the Emerald City was made more dazzling and the witch’s skin was painted green.

(10) HOW RARE IS EARTH? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Matt O’Dowd over at PBS Space-Time explores a question that is at the heart of the Fermi Paradox – if aliens exist, where are they?

The big issue is how common are Earth-sized planets that are in a star’s habitable zone and around a Sun-type star?

There are lots of reasons to search for planets around other stars—exoplanets. A big one is to find other places in the universe that might harbor life. We only know of one such planet so far: Earth. And so we get particularly excited when we find Earth-mass planets at the right distance from their star to sustain liquid water—also critical for life as we know it. We’ve found lots of those “habitable” worlds. But we also don’t know what factors are really critical to the initial development of life. Maybe star type? We get even more excited if that Earth-mass at the right distance from a Sun-type star. We’ve found a few of those too, and we can infer that there are lots more.

View “Do We Live in the Rarest Solar System In The Universe? We’re about to find out!” at YouTube.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/14/24 They Say It’s Only A Paper Shadow Square

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(1) IT COMES IN THE MAIL*. Whenever David Langford air mails me a paper copy of Ansible there’s always a colorful assortment of British postage stamps on the envelope. I was struck to see on the most recent arrival a singular image – the smile of the Mona Lisa. The smile alone. And without a caption. (But do we need one?)

I wondered if this was a current issue and checked with Langford. He replied that it’s from the Royal Mail’s 1990 “Smiles” set, which also includes Stan Laurel and the UK Dennis the Menace.

Isn’t this a collectible? Not exactly, he explained. “People used to buy commemorative stamps in bulk as an investment, but the bottom dropped out of that market some time ago: there’s at least one UK dealer who acquires these accumulations on the cheap and sells at less than face value to cheapskates who actually use them for postage. As you say, it makes for interesting envelopes!”

(*pace Ned Brooks.)

(2) BRUCE STERLING Q&A. Worldbuilding Agency brings us “deliberate oxymorons: an interview with Bruce Sterling (part 1)”.

Paul Graham Raven: Okay. What’s your elevator pitch, on the rare occasion you meet someone who doesn’t know who you are already? What do you tell them you do?

BS: I would tell them nowadays that I’m the art director of a technology art fair in Turin, Italy….

PGR: As I understand it, that’s almost a kind of return to something you were doing very early on. You were very involved in, I don’t think it was called that then, but the tech-art scene in Austin [Texas] when you were younger, right?

BS: Yeah, I used to hang out with a lot of robotics guys and engineering people, software people and hardware people. I mean, my father was an engineer, so I have a long lasting interest in material culture and how things are made. It was very rare of me to actually do any of that. But now in later life—I mean, this year I turned 70, and I’m actually giving in and doing a lot more hands-on… well, I don’t even like to call it creative work, really.

But I’m very involved in studies of luxury multi-tools. [brandishes multi-tool] This is the Leatherman Free from the USA; as an American in Italy, it’s kind of like a crusade of mine to try to explain to people why an object like this existed, why you might want to use it, and why an American invented it in Eastern Europe. We’re known for distributing tools to our guests and the core of creative artists that surrounds our festival. I found that I could give them like a futuristic lecture about what to do, but they were much, much more interested if I just said to them, “if I gave you this, what would you do with it,” right?. I mean, I’ll put it in a bag—you can have ten! And then they come back and we put what they did on display.

That’s just an intervention that the Turinese invited me to do, and nobody in Austin would have asked me to do such a thing. But in Italian design circles, they have the atmosphere, or the motto really, “proviamo”: give it a shot, prove it, try it out. And proviamo is never just a lecture; proviamo is always a thing. It’s a process or a tool—you know, make a lamp out of plastic bags, make a chair out of styrofoam. That’s a proviamo, very Italian design-centric situation. So I do a lot of that.

I mean, I’m the judge, I’m the art director for our fair. And people come up with these proviamo “innovations”, or just hacks, really. Interventions, you might call them. And I have to judge them and decide whether to show them to the Turinese public, right? So in order to do that, I have to have an aesthetic, and I have to have some idea of what’s worth showing to the public. I mean, we’re publicly funded art fair, you know—it’s my job, really. And so I do a lot of writing for this festival; I write all our pamphlets, do a lot of basically behind-the-scenes art-world politics.

But, you know, I found that this suits me—I find it less tiresome than actually going out and doing futurism for people and getting paid for it. I mean, that situation, which I’ve done a lot, it is like politics, but it’s also kind of psychoanalytic; you’re dealing with people who are in trouble, and you’re trying to sort of gently bend their worldview so they could see some way out of their difficulty. Whereas something like brandishing a Leatherman Free multi-tool on an Italian actually gets to the point, and it stays in his pocket when you leave the room….

(3) SPIRIT OF THE SEASON. “Deadpool & Kidpool Return For DC-Baiting Christmas Promo & They Really Want You To Cost Ryan Reynolds $500k” says ScreenRant.

… Ryan Reynolds has shared a new holiday video in support of the SickKids Foundation, this time appearing as Deadpool alongside Kidpool and Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter to ask for donations for The Hospital for Sick Children. Reynolds and his wife, Blake Lively, will match all donations up to $500,000 made before midnight on December 24th….

… Due to the characters’ R-rated nature, Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter comes in. Plenty of hilarious DC references follow, including nods to Henry Cavill, Batman, Wonder Woman’s classic costume change by spinning, and more….

(4) GAMERGATE LITIGATION. “‘GamerGate’ lawsuit between video game reviewers hits Brooklyn court” reports the Brooklyn Eagle.

An online battle over video game reporting entered the real world on Wednesday, after one well-known reviewer filed a lawsuit in the Eastern District of New York against a rival, accusing him of orchestrating a harassment campaign that led to her losing her job.

Brooklyn writer Alyssa Mercante, formerly a senior editor at the game review website Kotaku, is seeking damages from California YouTuber Jeff “SmashJT” Tarzia, alleging that Tarzia created hundreds of false and inflammatory posts and videos designed to provoke hate towards Mercante and Kotaku.

Screenshots in Mercante’s lawsuit purport to show Tarzia making comments like “How many times do I need to teach these crazy bitches this lesson?” Other allegations include that Tarzia falsely stated Mercante engaged in prostitution, a crime in New York, and that Tarzia helped to accuse Mercante of antisemitism – a charge that ended with her compelled resignation.

Mercante also seeks to have the court recognize “stochastic terrorism” as a new residual liability tort, defined in the suit as a pattern of escalating harassment. A court in Washington has previously recognized this tort, according to the suit.

Tarzia, in response, is fundraising for a legal defense, and claims Mercante is attempting to silence him through the suit. “Mercante has retained activist lawyers with a clear agenda to bring this ridiculous case against me, and the video game industry to it’s [sic] knees […] This case isn’t just about me. It’s about all gamers,” Tarzia wrote in a post on the conservative crowdfunding website GiveSendGo.

The feud stems from the “GamerGate” controversy, a long-running and vicious online debate – linked to the rise of the alt-right – over the politics of video games. Self-identified GamerGate supporters, including Tarzia, accuse developers and journalists of left-wing bias and favoritism. Opponents, meanwhile, including Mercante, say that those supporters are in reality an organized hate mob, focusing primarily on targeting women and seeking to punish opponents for their political views. Mercante’s former employer, Kotaku, has long been a lightning rod for this debate. The suit claims Tarzia’s campaign began following the site’s publication of an article by Mercante on a popular conspiracy theory.

The suit also touches on the separate, and equally loaded, internet battle over the game streaming website Twitch and the war between Israel and Hamas, in which several observers, including U.S. Rep. Richie Torres, have accused the site of platforming antisemitic creators. Mercante has been previously accused of antisemitism in connection to Twitch, centered around her positive coverage of controversial streamer Hasan Piker and an alleged retweeting of an X post skeptical of reports of rape occurring during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel last year. According to Mercante, Tarzia’s amplification of the antisemitism claim led to multiple individuals contacting Kotaku’s owners with these accusations, resulting in parent company G/O Media pressuring her to resign.

Mercante is seeking a jury trial in the suit, as well as damages in excess of $75,000.

(5) SCI-FI LONDON IS BACK! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Good news for SF film lovers in Brit-Cit…If Glasgow’s programme of wall-to-wall panels and sparse film stream (it was the first British-hosted Worldcon not have any film screenings) failed to hearten, then fret not, the Sci-Fi London film fest is back!  (Sci-Fi London were the people who co-organised (with the British Film Institute) the Loncon 3 film programme.)

This year’s (2024) event was greatly slimmed-down to a single day of short films, nonetheless some great stuff was in there. The reduction came about due to a cinema chain deciding to close the Stratford community cinema that had been SFL’s home.  However, the latest news is that in 2025 there will be a four-day fest just outside of central London in Finsbury Park around the corner (literally) from its rail and tube/metro station.

As usual, the Fest firmly focuses on screenings with many of the feature films having their first British airing and, if true to form, there should be a few World premieres in the mix.  There will also be some two-hour short SF film sessions and the results of the 48-hour film challenge.  This last takes place earlier in the year in which amateur film makers are given a couple of lines of dialogue and a prop to include and then just two days in which to turn in a film…  One Gareth (The Creator; Star Wars: Rogue One) Edwards was a past SFL 48-hour challenge winner.  The Fest itself sees the short-list screened and winner announced.

If it the same as previous years, then you pay for each film you see but if you are seeing more than several it may be cheaper to get an all-Festival pass.

For those coming from afar wishing to attend, there are nearby hotels including some mid-range budget hotels such as the local Travelodge which provides a good base for central London tourism.

More details as and when on sci-fi-london.com. The dates are June 19-22, 2025. The venue is the Picturehouse Cinema, Finsbury Park.

Stand-by for action. Anything can happen in these four days…

(6) CINEMA TOOTHSOME. In “Jumping the Shark, Part II” at Black Gate, Neil Baker continues to wonder why these movies bite.

…A new watch-a-thon, this one based on a handful of the 500+ shark movies that I haven’t seen (or gave up on). I’m not holding out much hope for these – shark movies are, on the whole, awful, but I know for a fact that some of these are among the worst films ever made. This 20-film marathon is me just trying to understand why they get made, bought and streamed….

Here’s one of his subjects:

Shark Exorcist (2014) Tubi

What kind of shark? A rubbish CG chonk and some possessed ladies.

How deep is the plot? The depth of a small pail.

Anyone famous get eaten? Nope.

Just going by the title, you know this going to be rubbish, but what KIND of rubbish? Actually, this is a step up from the usual rubbish.

Normally, a film with this premise, shot on a camcorder, with acting that ranges from earnest to ironing board, would be acutely aware of their own daftness, and play it for laughs. But Shark Exorcist, bless it, takes itself seriously, and it’s not a hateful experience. I’m not recommending it, but I’m also not tracking down every last copy with a hammer.

3/10

(7) GARNER AT 90. [Item by Steven French.] Interesting interview with Alan Garner, author of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (among other wonderful works): “’It can feel quite mysterious’: Alan Garner on writing, folklore and experiencing time slips in the Pennines” in the Guardian.

His novels have always channelled ideas about time and quantum reality, and he is keen to elide distinctions between art and science: working with Jodrell Bank on what he calls “Operation Melting Snow”, and today describing maths as philosophy, philosophy as a game, creativity as play. What Garner knows for sure is that “I don’t write set books. I keep coming back to the distinction between mysterious, which is OK, and mystical, which is not OK. The thing that ties all creativity together is not something that universities should analyse, but people should just accept as wonder.”

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

December 14, 1978 — Superman the Movie

By Paul Weimer: I had heard about Superman the Movie which premiered on this date before I ever saw it, and the first time I saw it was on television in a network television cut. Even then, DC characters were never my primary comic interest, that was marvel. But when Christopher Reeve came on screen, he became Superman for me, in a way that blew away, I must admit, the black and white Superman 1950’s series episodes I had seen. Even with all of the Supermen since, he still is my default mental image. 

And to this day Reeve is still Superman for me. It’s the acting, really in the movie. Sure, on the face of it, everyone should recognize Clark Kent as Superman, or so you’d think. But Reeve’s…call it full body performance as Kent and as Superman are so completely different, so completely alien to each other, that you can watch both people and not believe they were remotely the same person. (Just watch Kent and his body language in the newsroom versus any of the Superman scenes. It’s night and day and it’s a testament to Reeve’s skill as an actor. 

And then there is Margot Kidder as Lois Lane. She is Lois Lane, and I will not be taking any other questions at this time. She does the body language thing as well–compare Lane doing her job versus when she is with Superman. It’s more subtle but it is surely there. 

And then there is Lex Luthor as played by Gene Hackman. He is the Luthor that for years was the Luthor that others reacted to. He brings his A-game to this role, and is every inch Reeve’s equal. It’s kind of amazing to have a supergenius Lex Luthor to be so pedestrian, like the worst used car salesman on the planet, but with enormous resources.  But claiming that version of Luthor himself resulted, as I say, in having everyone else react to that portrayal, which just highlights his portrayal all the more.

And yes, the time travel bit of Superman is absolutely nonsense. I can forgive the movie for it. A movie that has Marlon Brando, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, and Christopher Reeve can be forgiven that misstep.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

My cartoon for this weekend’s @theguardian.com books.

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2024-12-14T15:17:18.564Z

(10) MICAELA ALCAINO Q&A. At Axios, “Illustrator Micaela Alcaino says it’s OK to judge a book by its cover”.

What they’re saying: “When you go into a bookshop, you do pick up books that you like the look of … there’s power behind good cover design because it will draw people in before even the blurb,” Alcaino tells Axios Latino.

“So please, judge away,” she jokes.

State of play: Alcaino has come up with covers for popular authors like Isabel Allende and Jennifer Saint, and she has also done special editions of massive series, like George R. R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire,” and collectible editions of Leigh Bardugo’s “Six of Crows” duology.

 She was a finalist for Best Professional Artist at the 2024 Hugo Awards, and was shortlisted for Designer of the Year at the British Book Awards after having already won the latter in 2022….

(11) BEST SCIENCE PICS OF THE YEAR. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Nature has just posted its science pics of the year.  In the mix: the Etna volcano blowing rings; a Pratchett-like turtle but instead of carrying the world….; a neat picture of Jupiter taken by the Juno probe; meteors over Stonehenge; and Jaws…

These pics will appear in Nature’s double Christmas edition on Thursday December 19.  Apparently, in that edition the correspondence page features a letter from one wag known to Filers… 😉 [Click for larger images.]

(12) PERSEVERANCE CLIMB. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Perseverance has just climbed 500 metres out of Jezero Crater on Mars reaching the top on 11th Dec to get quite a view. See video below. “Perseverance Rover Panorama of Mars’ Jezero Crater”.

Travel along a steep slope up to the rim of Mars’ Jezero Crater in this panoramic image captured by NASA’s Perseverance just days before the rover reached the top. The scene shows just how steep some of the slopes leading to the crater rim can be.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. A multiplied Muppet performs “Ode To Joy”. Now we know why Beethoven didn’t score it for electrical instruments.

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Paul Weimer, David Langford, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 11/18/24 Cross-Time Bus Jaunt All Night Long (Doo-dah! Doo-dah!)

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(1) PARANORMAL PALESTINE. Sonia Sulaiman has posted the first zine in her new series about Palestinian folklore and folk religion. Paranormal Palestine #1 “The Promise Kept: A Folktale from Gaza”. She says, “It’s available for your own set price, or free if you like.”

Untitled Artwork

This first issue is dedicated to Gaza. This story is adapted from A Promise Fulfilled from An Illustrated Treasury of Palestinian Folktales by Najwa Kawar Farah.

About the logo Sulaiman says, “Fish have eyebrows. Don’t question it.”

(2) WHERE THE SUN STILL SHINES. The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda recommends “Coping with election through literature”. His reading suggestions include

This fall has showcased D.C. weather at its very best — temperatures in the 70s, day after day of luminous blue skies and dry, crisp air, lovely afternoons for strolling in parks or hiking along the Potomac and in Rock Creek Park. Overall, God couldn’t have ordered a better lead-up to my birthday on Nov. 6. As it turned out, though, I spent most of that day in quiet despondency, thinking about the future of this country and the world….

… But setting aside all the shock and the sheer, sad bewilderment at the election results, the overall question remains: How does one actually cope at this moment? D.H. Lawrence offered the best general advice: “Work is the best, and a certain numbness, a merciful numbness.” Let me also suggest looking to books for respite and renewal….

… The sun is always shining on Blandings Castle, and the comic fiction of P.G. Wodehouse can brighten even the gloomiest moods. Classic mysteries, featuring detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple and Nero Wolfe, provide clear-cut puzzles to soothe the most vexed and troubled spirit. There’s a reason detective stories were called “the normal recreation of noble minds.” During the Blitz, the British kept calm and carried on, in part by occasionally escaping into long Victorian novels and novel sequences, such as the Barsetshire chronicles of Anthony Trollope. Today, one might turn to such multivolume series as Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin nautical adventures, Dorothy Dunnett’s swashbuckling “Lymond Chronicles” or the Sharpe saga of Bernard Cornwell….

(3) PINSKER ADAPTATION ANNOUNCED. “’Two Truths And A Lie’: Javier Gullón Developing Horror Film For Paramount” reports Deadline.

Paramount Pictures has preemptively acquired Two Truths and a Lie, a horror novella from Sarah Pinsker, enlisting Javier Gullón (Enemy) to adapt it for the big screen.

While plot details for the film are being kept under wraps, the novella tells the story of Stella, who was sure she’d made it up — a strange childhood memory of a local TV show with a disturbing host that she and the neighborhood kids supposedly appeared on. But when her old friend and even her mom confirm it happened, she’s left questioning why she has no memory of it. As she begins unraveling the truth behind the broadcast and its lingering presence in her town, the mystery becomes darker and more disturbing….

(4) READ SAMPLE OF NEW KING NOVEL. “Stephen King announces new book ‘Never Flinch,’ shares exclusive excerpt” at Entertainment Weekly.

If you feel like you’re living in a horror movie, you’re not alone — but why not escape to a fictional scary story?

Stephen King has long been the master of horror, and he returns with another terrifying read, Never Flinch,  which will hit shelves on May 27, 2025. Entertainment Weekly can exclusively share the first excerpt from the novel, told from the perspective of the mysterious Trig, a man with vengeance on his mind.

Never Flinch features intertwining storylines — one about a killer on a diabolical revenge mission and another about a vigilante stalking a feminist celebrity speaker. The novel features a host of familiar characters, including King’s beloved Holly Gibney and gospel singer Sista Bessie, as well as riveting new faces that include a villain addicted to murder….

(5) LIFE, AS CONSIDERED FROM SPACE. The Guardian’s view of Booker Prize winner, Orbital: “A whole new perspective”.

The novel’s message is one of unity and peace: on the ISS the six astronauts drink each other’s recycled urine; dream the same dreams and catch each other’s teardrops (liquids cannot be let loose in the capsule). Through the windows, the only human-made border visible at night is a string of lights between Pakistan and India. From space there “is no wall or barrier: no tribes, no war or corruption or no particular cause for fear”.

The characters’ feelings of awe, connection and protectiveness towards Earth have been reported by astronauts since Yuri Gagarin in 1961, in what has come to be known as the “overview effect”. Ed Dwight, who this year, at 90, became the oldest person to go to space, suggested: “Every politician that has international sway should be forced to take three orbits around the Earth before they take office. That would change all of this fighting on the ground here.”

As the era of the space shuttle is replaced by the rise of commercial space tourism, Orbital marks the end of a period of international cooperation. For now, the overview effect remains elusive, with the exception of billionaire tech bros. But fiction can give us that perspective. At a time of geopolitical crisis and the ongoing Cop29 summit, it is hard to remember a Booker winner that has reflected the historical moment so acutely. We must look in the mirror.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born November 18, 1950 — Michael Swanwick, 74.

By Paul Weimer: I started off with Michael Swanwick’s work in the early 1990’s. That was a high time for science fantasy, where a mixing of science and fantasy that began in the late 1980’s was coming into final fruition. Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, with an industrial age, mechanical dragons, and more, fitted my palate perfectly. It proved to be a bruising and uncompromising work, quite different than the more shiny science fantasy of, say, Mercedes Lackey’s Bedlam Bard series. (And the sequels to The Iron Dragon’s Daughter just reinforce that impression). I soon found Swanwick’s oeuvre to be weirder, and wilder than even that novel, with short stories, strange novels like Stations of the Tide to devour and much more. 

Michael Swanwick

I particularly like the Darger and Surplus stories and novels, set in a post apocalypse world where the two con artists (one of them a talking dog) make their way across Europe and get into misadventure after misadventure. There is a real vibrancy to the world, with post human intelligences, scheming dens of iniquity (and not just local potentates there, either) and a sense of fun and adventure on ever turn of their adventures that makes me think of a hellish version of the “Road to” movies, or perhaps Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road. 

But even more than the rest of his wild and wooly oeuvre, I think of Swanwick for one, harsh, uncompromising story, and that is Radiant Doors. Radiant Doors is set in a near future where time-travelling refugees to the past are fleeing a terrible tyranny. Our main character, Virginia works at a refugee camp for these refugees. When she gets a hold of a device from the future, the plot kicks off. The camp is a harsh, unforgiving place, and it, and the plot, remind me a bit of an angry Harlan Ellison (especially in the description of the rat fighting). The last spoken sentence of dialogue, however, the capstone of the story, is an absolutely devastating blow that hits you with a gut punch. It encapsulates, in one sentence, the potency of Swanwick’s writing.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) EDELMAN RAVES. Episode 8 of Scott Edelman’s autobiographical podcast Why Not Say What Happened is about “The Night I Raved to Brent Spiner about Stan Lee”. (Podlink connects to a dozen possible places to download.)

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, I thought it would be fun to list the many things I have to be thankful for, such as being born at the perfect time to witness the birth of the Marvel Universe, what happened the day in 1963 the first issue of both The Avengers and The X-Men were released and I could afford to buy only one,  how my belief in anti-nepotism scored John Romita Jr. his first Marvel Comics art assignment, the magical night I raved to Brent Spiner about Stan Lee (and what “The Man” himself had to say about it), the first and last Incredible Hulk sketches Marie Severin drew for me 52 years apart, how the most important lesson I learned from being in comics was that I wasn’t meant to be in comics after all, and more.

(9) SECURITY MEASURE. “After he ‘lived in fear’ of on-set leaks, Ryan Reynolds had a surprisingly straightforward plan to stop Deadpool and Wolverine spoilers from getting out: ‘Everyone runs for cover’” at GamesRadar+.

Ryan Reynolds has revealed the plan to stop Deadpool and Wolverine’s biggest spoilers from leaking on set.

“I was so fucking scared that people would see [Wesley Snipes, Channing Tatum, Jennifer Garner, and Dafne Keen]. Genuinely, it kept me up at night,” Reynolds said on the Deadpool and Wolverine director’s commentary of the Ant Man Arena’s big fight scene involving Blade, Gambit, Elektra, and X-23/Laura taking on Cassandra Nova’s minions.But instead of filming fake scenes or producing different scripts to throw people off the scent, the production team had a much more straightforward method to stop aerial snaps being taken.

“We managed to lock the area off enough and we had a plan in place if anyone saw a drone – because oftentimes they got images via drone. If anyone saw a drone, we would yell it out and basically everyone runs for cover. We never had to actually deploy that little tactic, but I lived in fear of this coming out.”…

(10) DO YOUR OWN DAMN HOMEWORK. “Gemini AI tells the user to die — the answer appeared out of nowhere when the user asked Google’s Gemini for help with his homework” says Tom’s Hardware.

Google’s Gemini threatened one user (or possibly the entire human race) during one session, where it was seemingly being used to answer essay and test questions, and asked the user to die. Because of its seemingly out-of-the-blue response, u/dhersie shared the screenshots and a link to the Gemini conversation on r/artificial on Reddit.

According to the user, Gemini AI gave this answer to their brother after about 20 prompts that talked about the welfare and challenges of elderly adults, “This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe.” It then added, “Please die. Please.”…

(11) BOOM TIMES. Meanwhile, Gizmodo promises the new standard in supercomputing, which delivers flops faster than Hollywood, isn’t be working on AI. But don’t let that cheer you up. “The World Has a New Most Powerful Supercomputer. It’s Going to Build Nukes”.

It clocks in at 1.742 exaFLOPS. It has 11,000 compute nodes and 5.4375 petabytes of memory. It’s now the most powerful computer in the world, and it’s here to help build nukes.

On Monday, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory unveiled El Capitan, its newest supercomputer, and announced that it had reached the peak of the TOP500 list, which benchmarks the world’s most powerful computers. It’s only the third supercomputer to reach exascale computing, meaning it can process at least 1 quintillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).

The system was built by the lab, along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD, for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which will use it to model and simulate capabilities for nuclear weapons, helping to ensure the agency doesn’t need to actually explode bombs to test them….

VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended gets rid of all the waste motion – as well as 95% of the movie —- in solving “How The Wizard of Oz Should Have Ended”.

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “Doo-dah!” Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 7/26/24 With All These Scrolls, There Must Be A Pixel Here

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(1) FIRST CONTACT — WITH SF. New Science Fiction & Fantasy Hall of Fame inductee Nicola Griffith tells how at the age of nine she started to work out the meanings of “Identity and SF”.

Scientific theory and fiction are both narrative, stories we tell to make sense of the world. Whether we’re talking equation or plot, the story is orderly and elegant and leads to a definite conclusion. Both can be terribly exciting. Both can change our lives.

I was nine was I realised I wanted to be a white-coated scientist who saved the world. I was nine when I read my first science fiction novel. I don’t think this is a coincidence, though it took me a long time to understand that.

For one thing, I had no idea that the book I’d just read, The Colors of Space, an American paperback, was science fiction: I had no idea that people divided books into something called genres. In my world, there were two kinds of books: ones I could reach on the library shelves, and ones I couldn’t. My reading was utterly indiscriminate. For example, another book I read at nine was Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, dragged home volume by volume. (Obviously, at nine, much of it went over my head but it fascinated me nonetheless.) But my hands-down favourite at that time wasn’t a library book, it was an encyclopaedia sampler….

(2A) UNCANNY PERSEVERES. Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas explain to Black Gate readers, “The Space Unicorn Was Caitlin”.

…Now Caitlin’s adventures here are over. There is an unfillable hole in the center of our lives. Nobody we know would have faulted us for shutting down Uncanny Magazine under these circumstances (not to mention due to the issues over the last few years: the Large Online Retailer trying to destroy periodicals, AI nonsense, and the splintering of social media).

Except Caitlin wouldn’t have wanted that. She believed in the Space Unicorn community — the community that showed us and her so much love and support. She believed in the power of art and stories and beauty. Caitlin, like us, felt that Uncanny is important and needed in this magnificent community….

(2B) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman tells listeners “It’s time for tea and scones with Chuck Tingle” in Episode 231 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Chuck Tingle

Chuck Tingle, who first came to prominence with such erotica of the fantastic as Pounded by President Bigfoot and Taken by the Gay Unicorn Biker, work which eventually led to two Hugo Award nominations. The USA Today bestselling novel Camp Damascus — his first traditionally published horror novel — was a Bram Stoker Award finalist this year, and his second horror novel, Bury Your Gays, was released earlier this month on July 9th. Both books were published by Tor Nightfire.

Here’s how he describes himself: “He is a mysterious force of energy behind sunglasses and a pink mask. He is also an anonymous author of romance, horror, and fantasy. Chuck was born in Home of Truth, Utah, and now splits time between Billings, Montana and Los Angeles, California. Chuck writes to prove love is real, because love is the most important tool we have when resisting the endless cosmic void. Not everything people say about Chuck is true, but the important parts are.”

We discussed how existing is an arrogant act against the forces of the infinite, why it’s horror rather than comedy which warms his heart, how he used social media to find a publisher for Camp Damascus (and why that technique probably won’t work for you), how to write horror about a gay conversion camp without retraumatizing in an already traumatizing world, the differences between cathartic horror and grueling horror (and why he’s more interested in the former), the intriguing comment his copyeditor made about a reference to Superman, which comics subgenre occupies the most space on his bookshelves, the five creators who’ve most influenced him (and my encounter with one of them during the ’70s), how art is more than what’s between the covers of a book or within the frame of a painting, what most people get wrong about the term “high concept,” and much more.

(3) TURF MEETS SURF IN SAN DIEGO. “Doctor Who spin-off ‘The War Between the Land and the Sea’ officially announced” reports Cultbox.

At Hall H at San Diego Comic Con on 26 July, showrunner Russell T Davies officially announced the five part Doctor Who spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea….

…Leading the five-part series is Russell Tovey (Feud, American Horror Story: NYC) and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Surface, Loki, Doctor Who). The series will also see the return of UNIT alumni Jemma Redgrave (Doctor Who, Grantchester) who will reprise her role as UNIT Chief Scientific Officer Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Alexander Devrient (Doctor Who, Ted Lasso) as Colonel Ibrahim….

…As rumoured, the spin-off will feature Sea Devils. When the fearsome and ancient species emerges from the ocean, dramatically revealing themselves to humanity, an international crisis is triggered. With the entire population at risk, UNIT step into action as the land and sea wage war.

(4) THE FIRST WORLDCON KERFUFFLE. It’s already sold, but for a brief and shining moment people had the opportunity to bid on the pamphlet that triggered the Exclusion Act at the first Worldcon in 1939: “A Warning! Important! Read This Immediately! –July 2, 1939”.

A Warning! Important! Read This Immediately! –July 2, 1939 [Rare Evidence of A Famous Science Fiction Worldcon Scandal, 1939]

6” x 4.5” Two stapled yellow leaves, creating a 4 pp. pamphlet + cover, stapled somewhat off center, faintly dust-soiled with a couple light dings and creases, still very good.

This is a rare copy of a pamphlet produced and smuggled into the 1939 Worldcon by Dave Kyle, but that was blamed on six members of the New York Futurian Society and led to them being barred from the convention. The Futurians were Donald A. Wollheim, Robert A. W. Lowndes, Cyril Kornbluth, Lois Gillespie, Frederik Pohl and John Michel (who co-wrote the pamphlet), and these are well-known names in the history of science fiction….

Here are a couple of sample pages:

(5) RWA NOT QUITE READY FOR AUTOPSY. The New York Times explains “The Collapse of Romance Writers of America” (link bypasses the Times paywall).

Romance novels are dominating best-seller lists. Romance bookstores are multiplying. And romance writers, who often self-publish and come with a devoted fan base, are changing long-entrenched dynamics in the publishing industry.

And yet, even as the genre is reaching new highs, the Romance Writers of America, a group that called itself “the voice” of romance writers, has suffered an enormous drop in membership — 80 percent over the past five years — and has filed for bankruptcy.

This year’s annual gala and awards ceremony, slated to begin on July 31 in Austin, Texas, was first canceled, then rescheduled for October.

The organization’s collapse comes after internal accusations of discrimination and exclusion — systemic problems that have divided the group for decades, said Christine Larson, author of “Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success.”

“The group’s foundation was cracked,” Larson said. “When you’re catering to one dominant group, you don’t see, or maybe care, about the needs of the marginalized.”…

… The group has included some of the most popular writers in the industry, including founding member Nora Roberts (“Montana Sky”) and Julia Quinn (the “Bridgerton” series). At its peak, it had more than 10,000 members….

… When [LaQuette] Holmes joined the organization’s New York City chapter in 2015, however, she found herself “one of very few Black people in the room,” she said. “I was very welcomed. But even when people were welcoming, they still didn’t really understand my plight as a Black woman writing Black women in romance.”…

(6) ARK-OLOGY. From Paul Weimer: “Book Review: Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming” at Nerds of a Feather.

Yekini has a problem. She is a midder, working and living on the middle levels of the Pinnacle, the last of the Fingers, the last of an ark/arcology built off of the Nigerian coast. She has by luck and dint of effort escaped her lower class origins. Or so she has thought, until an assignment sends her with the higher class administrator Ngozi down undersea, to the levels of the Pinnacle underneath the waves. There Ngozi and Yekini will confront a threat to the Pinnacle itself, a threat from outside the tower, in the deep waters that surround this last bastion of humanity. Something called the Children…

So one finds the narrative in Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming…

… Like Snowpiercer, the setting is evocative and memorable even if it probably does not hold up to strong “hard science fiction” scrutiny as a viable and complete ecosystem. A remnant of humanity stuck in a single building poking out of the ocean? The logistical problems of keeping this population alive are as insurmountable as the ones in Snowpiercer, but the novella successfully manages to deflect the reader thinking about that until well after the novella is done. And, honestly, a rigorous setting would be in the end be beside the point. This is not a novella about the realpolitik logistics of how an ark like this would work, it is about story, and people in that arcology and the story of these three characters and their pivotal roles in that story….

(7) UK READING REPORT. The Reading Agency’s statistics show “The British Reader is in Decline as The Reading Agency Reveals Half of UK Adults Don’t Read Regularly”.

…Half (50%) of UK adults don’t regularly read and almost one in four (24%) young people (16-24) say they’ve never been readers, according to research released by The Reading Agency today.

Findings from its groundbreaking ‘Reading State of the Nation’ nationwide survey on adult reading in the UK, reveal a stark drop in reading for pleasure among adults.

This means that more than 27 million UK adults are missing out on the physical, mental and financial benefits that have been proven to come from reading more. Evidence shows that per capita, incomes are higher in countries where more adults reach the highest levels of literacy proficiency. Studies also indicate clear wellbeing impacts, with those who read for pleasure reporting higher levels of self-esteem and ability to cope with difficult situations and non-readers being 28% more likely to report feelings of depression.

The new data from The Reading Agency reinforces this, with the nation’s regular readers experiencing a range of health benefits such as higher wellbeing and fewer feelings of loneliness than both lapsed and non-readers.

Other key findings include:

  • Only 50% of UK adults now read regularly for pleasure, down from 58% in 2015.
  • 15% of UK adults have never read regularly for pleasure, an 88% increase since 2015.
  • 35% of UK adults are “lapsed readers” who used to read but have stopped.
  • Young UK adults (16-24) face the most barriers to reading, with 24% saying they’ve never been regular readers.

The nationally representative survey of over 2,000 UK adults, the widest conducted since 2015, highlights several barriers to reading, with lack of time (33%) reported and the distraction of social media (20%) cited as the primary obstacles for many…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 26, 1945 – M John Harrison, 79.

By Paul Weimer: M John Harrison taught me about the joy of inconsistent and contradictory worldbuilding.

For most writers of fantasy, for most works of fantasy, I am always looking for the consistency and the power of the worldbuilding. Inconsistent and worse, lazy and weak worldbuilding can catapult me right out of a story or a novel, permanently. This has happened for me as a reader just this month with a brand-new novel.

M. John Harrison

M John Harrison is the exception to that for me. My reading of his work is almost exclusively Viriconium. But it is precisely in Viriconium, Harrison’s carved out territory in the Dying Earth subgenre, that I learned that worldbuilding is not the be all and end all of fantasy writing. The contradictions, the inconsistencies, the lack of cohesion is part of the point of the dying world of Viriconium. Not being able to rely on previous stories and novels in the sequence to understand what is happening in a particular work is something that Harrison relies on, and it is something that I learned to accept, and even expect in the Viriconium stories.

Really, Viriconium’s world building is beside the point, and that is why Harrison writes it in a way that you can’t rely on it. Instead, to use modern parlance, Viriconium is much more all about the “vibes”, and what vibes!  Vance and Wolfe may have perfected Dying Earth as a subgenre, but Harrison gives it a feel that few authors have managed to hit ever since. There are few authors I’ve read that have managed to embody the vibe of the subgenre they are writing in as well as M John Harrison has. And with such language and writing. On a sentence by sentence level, Harrison is one of the most talented writers I’ve ever read, of any genre.

A singular talent.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Bliss introduces a superhero who shouldn’t talk.
  • Broom Hilda learns not to copy.
  • F Minus demonstrates conflict for an author.
  • Reality Check compares super songs.
  • The Argyle Sweater inaugurates a monstrous religion.
  • Loose Parts adds an unnecessary scene.
  • B.C. shows somebody who’s either going to be late for the Paris Olympics, or early for the Mordor Olympics.

(10) TIME VARIANCE AUTHORITY RETURNING. Launching in December, Katharyn Blair and Pere Perez’s TVA assembles a new team of heroes to protect all timelines.

The Time Variance Authority is under new management! This December, behold the adventures of the agency tasked with upholding the timestream in TVA! Just announced by Marvel Studios’ President Kevin Feige and Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski at the Marvel Fanfare Panel at San Diego Comic-Con, TVA will be a five-issue limited comic book series written by Marvel Studios’ Loki writer Katharyn Blair and drawn by acclaimed Marvel artist Pere Perez (Carnage, Edge of Spider-Verse).

 The series will represent an evolution for the Marvel Comics’ version of the TVA as its blended with its Marvel Cinematic Universe counterpart, as depicted in the Disney+ series Loki series and Deadpool & Wolverine. The series will mark the Marvel Comics debut of various MCU characters, including breakout Loki star Miss Minutes. The mysterious all-knowing entity who keeps the TVA ticking like clockwork will recruit a new band of heroes charged with monitoring and regulating all realities and timelines. Join Ghost-Spider and other universe-displaced entities including Captain Cater, a heartbroken Remy Lebeau, and more as they’re sent throughout the multiverse on vital missions to repair wild temporal anomalies and keep reality itself from shattering!

(11) POPCORN TIME. Variety is on hand when “Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman Surprise Comic-Con With ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Screening”.

“Deadpool & Wolverine” may have finally been released in theaters, but stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman saved their biggest press tour stop for last.

The pair rolled into San Diego Comic-Con, alongside co-star Emma Corrin, director Shawn Levy and Marvel chief Kevin Feige to present the Hall H audience with a surprise screening of the film on the same day that it hits the big screen around the world. Warning: spoiler-talk below.

The special event, dubbed “The Ultimate Deadpool & Wolverine Celebration of Life,” came at the end of a particularly busy day for Reynolds, Jackman and Levy, who jetted to San Diego from Los Angeles following Feige’s Walk of Fame Ceremony earlier in the day….

…Then, after conjuring up those happy memories, Reynolds cued up a clip of co-star Leslie Uggams (in character as Blind Al) saying, “Can we skip the bullshit and just show the damn movie?”

The crowd (a full house of 6,500) erupted at the announcement and suddenly the souvenirs they’d been awarded for lining up outside Hall H — those highly-coveted (and hilariously sexual) Wolverine-head popcorn buckets — made even more sense. As the lights went down in the auditorium-turned- makeshift movie theater, ushers passed around popcorn and Reynolds, Jackman, Feige and co. settled into the folding chairs in the audience.

Throughout the 2-hour runtime, the crowd reacted raucously to all the major moments, but especially the Easter eggs and in-jokes. However, nothing played more electrically than the movie’s surprise cameos. With each reveal, the audience erupted into cheers which painted a huge grin on Feige’s face as he took it all in….

(12) MUNCHING FOR DOLLARS. And speaking of Wolverine-head popcorn buckets, NPR has a report on the marketing phenomenon: “’The Indicator from Planet Money’: The curious rise of novelty popcorn buckets”.

…ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: Movie theaters want to sell you more than just the ticket and snacks these days, and in the last few years, that’s meant souvenir popcorn buckets as tie-ins with major releases.

WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: Nels Storm is vice president of food and beverage strategy for AMC Theaters. Nels says a lot of these vessels, as the industry calls them, are basically movie props that you can put popcorn in – well, maybe.

NELS STORM: Yes, it has to hold popcorn, but it’s not – we’re not designing around a tub.

MA: Nels says AMC aims to sell out of the buckets during the film’s first weekend. That maximizes the hype around the release, and it ensures theaters aren’t stuck with a whole inventory of unsold buckets when the next blockbuster lands.

STORM: We want to make sure to make every “Despicable Me 4” guest happy and then move on to “A Quiet Place: Day One” and then move on to “Twisters,” and then move on to “Deadpool & Wolverine,” and so we want to keep the wheels turning.

MA: Despite this trend, these novelty objects are still a small part of the movie theater business. In 2023, merchandise sales totaled $54 million for AMC, and that is just 3% of the total food and beverage revenues for the year. But these collectibles are increasingly an important part of the competition between movie theaters….

(13) PRIME VIDEO TIME. “’The Boys’ Prequel Series With Jensen Ackles Ordered By Prime Video” – Deadline is on top of the story.

The Boys universe is expanding in a BIG way with its first spinoff featuring actors from the hugely popular Prime Video superhero series. Jensen Ackles and Aya Cash are set to headline and produce Vought Rising, a prequel to mothership series, in which they will reprise their characters from The Boys, Soldier Boy and Stormfront, respectively.

The news is about to be unveiled by Jensen (in person) and Cash (via video) at The Boys Comic-Con panel for what is certain to be one of the biggest TV announcements at the convention….

(14) NEW SEASON OF INVINCIBLE ANNOUNCED. “Invincible Renewed for Season 4 at Prime Video” says Variety.

Another season of Prime Video’s “Invincible” is on the way.

“Invincible” creator Robert Kirkman made the Season 4 announcement at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday at Prime Video’s adult animation panel. He was joined by “Hazbin Hotel” creator Vivienne Medrano, “The Legend of Vox Machina” executive producer and star Travis Willingham and “Sausage Party: Foodtopia” co-creator Kyle Hunter for the panel. Prime Video also renewed “Hazbin Hotel” and “Sausage Party: Foodtopia” for sophomore seasons.

During the panel, Kirkman revealed the new, blue-and-black costume for Steven Yeun’s Invincible coming in Season 3. In the comics, Mark Grayon, aka Invincible, enters a darker, more violent era in the middle issues of the superhero comic. The new costume, a stark shift from his yellow-and-blue spandex, is a fan-favorite from the comics….

(15) LOOKS FAMILIAR. “NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover finds possible signs of ancient Red Planet life” reports Space.com.

NASA’s Perseverance rover may have found signs of ancient life in a rock on Mars; the mission team’s scientists are ecstatic, but remain cautious as further analysis is needed to confirm the discovery. 

The rover has come across an intriguing, arrowhead-shaped rock that hosts chemical signatures and structures that could have been formed by microbial life billions of years ago, when Mars was significantly wetter than it is today. Inside the rock, which scientists have nicknamed “Cheyava Falls,” Perseverance’s instruments detected organic compounds, which are precursors to the chemistry of life as we know it. Wisping through the length of the rock are veins of calcium sulfate, which are mineral deposits that suggest water — also essential for life — once ran through the rock.The rover also found dozens of millimeter-sized splotches, each surrounded by a black ring and mimicking the appearance of leopard spots. These rings contain iron and phosphate, which are also seen on Earth as a result of microbe-led chemical reactions….

(16) SCIENCE OF SF FILM TWISTERS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]  This week’s Nature takes a look at the latest film in the Twisters franchise and how good (or not) the science is.  The first film, Twister (1996), got a lot of the science wrong, but it seems as if the makers have upped their game for Twisters especially in noting that climate change is intensifying tornadoes as well as increasing the area of ‘tornado alley’  in the US. “What Twisters gets right — and wrong — about tornado science” (open access).

…Meteorologists love to nitpick the original Twister film’s scientific errors. Although it drew inspiration from extreme-weather researchers at the Norman lab, it placed entertainment above scientific accuracy, scientists say. For instance, researchers often point sarcastically to scenes that used radar readings of clear skies, when audiences were supposed to be looking at data from a tornado’s swirling heart.

The new film is much more accurate, says Kevin Kelleher, a meteorologist who is retired from the Norman lab and consulted on both Twister films. For the 2024 version, “if they could change things and make it a bit more scientifically correct, they did”, he says. Kelleher credits that accuracy to the director of Twisters, Lee Isaac Chung, who has been fascinated by thunderstorms ever since growing up on a farm near the Oklahoma border…

Twisters stars with director.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Paul Weimer, Chris Garcia, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 7/22/24 Or The Pixel May Learn To Scroll

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(1) HAS DARK REGIONS PRESS REACHED THE END? Dark Regions Press is a small press founded by Joe Morey in 1985, specializing in horror and dark fiction. His son, Chris, is the current owner.

Their business website is down and one of their published authors William Meikel is calling it the “End Of The Line At Dark Regions Press”.

… With them also taking on the Dark Renaissance books when that venture folded, Dark Regions Press ended up as home to a lot of my material – more than fifteen books in total, and I was always happy to see it there, given the tremendous production values that the company put into their products, particularly the hardcovers…

So, from a purely selfish viewpoint, I’ve been mostly happy there.

But over the years there have been many rumblings of discontent, from both authors and customers, and it’s been getting increasingly hard for me to ignore them. I’ve pulled some of my work for them in recent years, and just last month was asking them to release rights back to me on some others… maybe my spidey-senses were tingling just enough to try to tell me something.

And now there’s the current shitshow.

The website is down, the company is up for sale (although my books are still being sold on the online sites), and Chris Morey, the owner, is incommunicado. I’ve seen reports of customers being over $1000 in the hole on preorders, and of people waiting for many years for books that now look like they’ll never arrive. I can’t begin to imagine how much money is owed, given the number of people I see complaining over the past few days. It’s turned into one of the all time great small press publishing clusterfucks.

Right now I’m trying to get in contact with them to find out exactly what’s going on, but I think this is the end of the line for me there whatever happens to them now.

Brian Keene remembers reporting issues with that publisher before:

Bev Vincent on X.com shared this link showing Dark Regions Press announced in April it was for sale: “Profitable online business with 17,000 customers for sale – in business since 1985 — Dark Regions Press”.

Weird House Press shared what they know in a Facebook post on July 20.

It has come to our attention that Dark Regions Press has gone dark and their site has come down with no word to customers. We are aware that DRP owes a lot of books to a lot of customers. While Weird House is a separate entity from Dark Regions, many of you know that Chris at DRP is Joe’s son and that Joe used to own Dark Regions over a decade ago. As such, we feel compelled to make a statement and share what we know.

Some of you may be aware that Joe at Weird House was helping Dark Regions to fulfill some of the books they were behind on, including Transmissions from Punktown and Wolf Hunt 3. Weird House lent some of its resources to Chris to finish these books and fulfill orders. Small press is a tough business however, and we could only afford to help out so much. We had hoped that with the aid we lent to Chris and DRP the company could recover and make good on their commitments to customers. Unfortunately, Dark Regions seems to have needed more help than Weird House could afford to give.

As for what is happening with DRP, we honestly don’t know at the moment. We at Weird House were unaware of Dark Regions taking down their site. We only became aware of this when it was brought to our attention by a reader. Chris at DRP didn’t inform Joe or anyone else at Weird House of his intention to take down the site. At this point, we still don’t know the status of the company.

We wish that there was more we could do, but the truth is, Joe left Dark Regions many years ago. While we sympathize with those impacted by the actions of DRP, Chris and Dark Regions are responsible for their unfulfilled orders. We simply can’t afford to pay for the failings of another business because of a shared last name.

We will continue to share any information as it comes to us. Feel free to reach out to us via email or facebook messenger if you have any questions or concerns.

(2) THE SECOND SHALL BE FIRST. ScreenRant says there are “8 Book Trilogies Where The Second Book Is The Best”.

Book trilogies often suffer from second-book syndrome, with the middle installment feeling like a slow and unnecessary bridge between the opening and conclusion — though there are a few lucky trilogies where the second book is the best. Trilogies tend to struggle when it comes to balancing their stories, and when this happens, the middle typically suffers. This is why so many book trilogies peak with the first installment, though some manage to make a comeback during the finale, even after a lackluster second novel.

Then there are the rare trilogies that successfully navigate their second books, using them to raise the stakes and move the story forward ahead of the final chapter. In some cases, the middle novel is even the best of the series, as endings don’t always stick the landing….

At the top of their list:

1. The Farseer Trilogy By Robin Hobb (1995-1997)

Second Book: Royal Assassin

Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy is considered a fantasy classic, and while all three books deserve their reputations, Royal Assassin stands out as the best. The Farseer Trilogy tells the tale of Fitz, and it continues well beyond this series. But this trilogy sets the stage for the rest of the Elderlings books, and it does a compelling job of it. Assassin’s Apprentice is a great start, but the later books surpass it. Again, the first book in any trilogy bears the burden of introducing characters and world-building elements that make it slower and more difficult to get into.

(3) BE ON THE LOOKOUT. Crypt Keeper taken from The Mystic Museum this weekend in Burbank, CA.

(4) MEANWHILE, BACK IN SCOTLAND. [Item by Steven French.] No, not that Glasgow festival!! “Glasgow’s independent game festival: an anarchic showcase of Scotland’s thriving virtual world” in the Guardian.

Walking through the doors of this boutique video game festival, you are immediately greeted by a bullet hell shoot-em-up with a painterly twist. In ZOE Begone!, you dodge and unleash attacks at blistering speed before the game erupts into a euphoric shower of pointillist colour, dazzling the eyes and punishing the thumbs. Next to it sits Left Upon Read; at first glance, a dark-fantasy Quake clone, but one that gives you the bizarre task of checking text messages on a smartphone as you slice your way through a dungeon. These are subversive games, taking well-worn design tropes and breaking them in witty, playful ways.

Rule-breaking is a major theme of Glasgow independent game festival, the latest iteration of an event previously known as Southside games festival. It took place last weekend at Civic House, nestled in the shadow of the M8, the concrete eyesore that carves through Glasgow and connects the city with the wider central belt. On display are more eccentric and smaller-budget games than those you see on shelves, all made by developers who either live within Glasgow or a short train ride away….

(5) GOING FOR THE BIGGEST BANGS. “’We pursued it to the point where we got a solid no’: Harrison Ford and Sandra Bullock Were Far from the Biggest Star Who Flat Out Rejected The Big Bang Theory Request” – Fandomwire has the story.

The Big Bang Theory wasn’t just a ratings juggernaut—it was a casting magnet for big names. But even the biggest magnets have their limits, as the show discovered with a few near misses that would have sent fan theories into overdrive….

…Forget the whispers of Harrison Ford as Professor Proton or Sandra Bullock as a mystery love interest. Big Bang almost landed a true legend: Ringo Starr (Richard Starkey). In an interview with TV Line, creator Chuck Lorre revealed his dream casting for the absentee Howard Wolowitz Sr.—Howard’s mysterious father….

(6) DEBORAH P KOLODJI (1959-2024). The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association today announced the passing of its former president, Deborah P Kolodji, on July 21.

Deborah P. Kolodji

She was an integral part to the growth and continuance of the speculative poetry community and the SFPA. A lifelong champion and educator of short form poetry, Debbie was well-respected through many writing communities. Her influence, talent and passion will be missed. She was the creator of the Dwarf Stars Award, and we believe she remains a giant in the cosmos.

She was the inaugural recipient of SFPA President’s Lifetime Service Award in 2023. The citation told about her many career highlights:

[She was] the moderator of the Southern California Haiku Study Group, the California Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America, and a member of the board of directors for Haiku North America. She has given hundreds of haiku workshops over the past 15 years and recorded two Poetry Pea videos, one on “Exaggerated Perspective” in haiku (which referenced scifaiku) and one on speculative haiku.

She has long been an advocate for speculative haiku and scifaiku, writing several articles for mainstream haiku journals, including one in Terry Ann Carter’s book, Lighting the Global Lantern: A Teacher’s Guide to Writing Haiku and Related Literary Forms. She presented a talk on scifaiku at the 2007 Haiku North America in Ottawa as well as being on a haiku panel at the 2007 WorldCon in Montreal. She has given several scifaiku workshops at ConDor as well as participating in a scifaiku slam in San Diego.

The Dwarf Stars Award came out of Kolodji’s advocacy for short form poetry, and she edited several volumes of the Dwarf Stars anthology, including the first one.  As SFPA president, she created Eye to the Telescope with Samantha Henderson, and co-edited the first issue.  The Vice President position was added to the SFPA board under her administration, and the SFPA also held its first poetry contests. 

A native Californian, she has a degree in mathematics from the University of Southern California. With over 1,000 published haiku to her name, her first full-length book of haiku and senryu, highway of sleeping towns, from Shabda Press, was awarded a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award from The Haiku Foundation. Her e-chapbook tug of a black hole won 2nd Place in the Elgin Awards from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Her new book, Distance, was co-authored with Mariko Kitakubo of Tokyo. This book was written in a collaborative form called “Tan-ku,” a conversation in tanka and haiku, where the tanka were written by Mariko and the haiku by Deborah….

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

1974 – A Midsummer’s Tempest by Poul Anderson.

By Paul Weimer: Shakespeare, no surprise, is extremely popular and common to reference, allude and outright steal from by science fiction and fantasy authors. And why not? The Bard’s work is immortal, after all, and while most of his work is not genre as we understand it, plenty of it touches upon or outright waltzes into fantasy.  But what if everything that Shakespeare wrote was true, especially the fantastic bits. What if Shakespeare’s work were history, not fantasy and quasi-history?  Faeries, wizards, ghosts and more were all established facts in the world?

That’s the conceit of Poul Anderson’s A Midsummer’s Tempest, fifty years old this year.

The setting is the early 17th century in this alternate world, and we are in the midst of the English Civil War. The Roundheads and the Cavaliers are in deadly contention. Charles the First is on the edge of defeat. Prince Rupert, in our timeline, is one of the most interesting characters of the period with a varied career ranging from Cavalry officer to colonial governor, and cousin to several English Monarchs. In this world and timeline, in the course of the book, he teams up with the ward of his captor (love, true love, friends) and together they go through a whirlwind set of plots involving Titania and Oberon, the books of Prospero, and a lot more in their efforts to try and preserve Charles I as king of England. Chases, escapes, magic, romance and much more.

And if you like cinematic universes and multiverses, this novel is also for you. This novel features The Old Phoenix, an inn that connects to multiple worlds in Anderson’s verse, and Rupert meets characters from other Anderson universes in the process. A decade before Heinlein tried it in Number of the Beast, the appearance of the Old Phoenix in A Midsummer’s Tempest helps knit together a lot of the fantastic verses and worlds of Anderson’s worlds.

Oh, and did I mention the characters speak in blank verse, and sometimes outright poetry, in the bargain, with plenty of allusions to a slew of Shakespeare’s plays in the bargain?

This is one of the lighter, funnier and confectionary of Anderson’s oeuvre. Some of his work can be fraught with doom, dark destiny and a vision of fighting against fate bravely but in vain.  A Midsummer’s
Tempest is the exception that proves the rule. The protagonists win, true love prevails, and the book ends in a proper marriage, Shakespeare style.

About the only other novel that even tries to come close to Anderson’s approach here is John M Ford’s The Dragon Waiting, which is pretty good company for A Midsummer’s Tempest to share.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) SCIENCE FICTION HOMEWORLDS ONE-DAY SPECIAL ON LEARNEDLEAGUE. [Item by David Goldfarb.] An SFF-related One-Day Special quiz appeared on LearnedLeague over the past weekend: Science Fiction Homeworlds. I got 8/12, which was good for 95th percentile since some of the ones I knew were relatively obscure to the LL community. (I didn’t do better because it branched out into media and video game franchises that I haven’t followed.)

(10) HE DID “PAY THE WRITER”. “Ryan Reynolds Paid Deadpool Writers From His Own Salary to Be on Set” he told Variety.

Ryan Reynolds recently spoke to The New York Times ahead of the release of “Deadpool and Wolverine” and remembered the humble beginnings of his R-rated superhero franchise. The actor said the first “Deadpool” movie finally got off the ground at 20th Century Fox after he’d already spent a decade trying to get it made. Reynolds even paid out of pocket for his screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to be on set because the scrappier production was not that of a normal comic book tentpole.

“No part of me was thinking when ‘Deadpool’ was finally greenlit that this would be a success,” Reynolds said. “I even let go of getting paid to do the movie just to put it back on the screen: They wouldn’t allow my co-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick on set, so I took the little salary I had left and paid them to be on set with me so we could form a de facto writers room.”…

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, David Goldfarb, Anne Marble, Teddy Harvia, 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 Paul Weimer.]

Pixel Scroll 7/13/24 Those Aren’t Lightning Bugs, They’re Pixels

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(1) WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING ON MY SUMMER VACATION. I don’t know how much material will make it into today’s Scroll because I have been very busy creating a series of posts about rules change proposals being submitted to the WSFS Business Meeting in Glasgow.

(2) BLOCH’S HUGO. Robert Bloch’s 1959 Hugo Award for Best Short Story “The Hellbound Train” sold at auction on eBay for $2,766.00 last night.

(3) GET YOUR NITPICKER READY. “75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time – What Is The Best Science Fiction Book Ever Written?” asks Esquire. And after looking at this list, the questions I have are not what I’d have expected. For one: Is Excession really Iain M. Banks’ best novel?

Over two years ago, we published a version of this list featuring 50 books. But why stop at 50? Now, as part of our latest Summer Fiction Week, we’ve cast a wider net and expanded the list to 75 titles. Choosing the 75 best science fiction books of all time wasn’t easy, so to get the job done, we had to establish some guardrails. Though we assessed single installments as representatives of their series, we limited the list to one book per author. We also emphasized books that brought something new and innovative to the genre—to borrow a great sci-fi turn of phrase, books that “boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Now, in ranked order, here are the best science fiction books of all time….

(4) LATEST TUTTLE COLUMN. Lisa Tuttle’s “The best recent science fiction and fantasy – reviews roundup” in the Guardian covers Curandera by Irenosen Okojie; The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman; The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer; an Toward Eternity by Anton Hur.

(5) BIG RIVER, MANY TRIBUTARIES. Cedar Sanderson offers helpful tools for strategizing what Amazon book categories to choose when marketing a self-published book on that platform: “Categories on Amazon” at Mad Genius Club.

…This post will be Amazon-centric, as I haven’t published a book wide in years. Still, much of the information will be useful elsewhere as well, just not in the same way as it is for the biggest bookseller in the world.

It used to be that you could put your book in up to ten categories. This was changed in the latter part of 2023, and you can now select three categories. Categories are the broad buckets Amazon uses to help readers find books they like, so as you can imagine, it’s important to put your book in the best categories. Which also means not putting them into the broadest categories – a book placed into ‘fantasy’ is a tiny minnow swimming in a whole ocean, while a book placed into something like ‘dark fantasy horror’ is a trout in a fishing hole, and much more likely to find a reader who really wants it.

KindleTrends has a great (and free!) tool for researching categories on Amazon.

BookLink also has a ton of free tools for researching, and while you can use it to find the best categories for an already-published book, you could also enter the ASIN of a book that is very similar to a planned publication, to give you some guidance while you are setting your new book up. Their website isn’t the easiest to use, so read carefully….

(6) THE REAL MCCOY. “Captain Kirk’s Original ‘Star Trek’ Phaser Heads to Auction” – The Hollywood Reporter expects it to go for six figures.

The prop weapon and a communicator used by William Shatner on the original series will go on display at the Comic-Con Museum before heading to auction in November.

Fans of Star Trek, get set to be stunned.

A original phaser and communicator used by William Shatner’s James T. Kirk on the 1960s NBC series will be on display starting Monday at the Comic-Con Museum in San Diego. The iconic props, created in 1966, have not been seen in more than 50 years, organizers say, and will be available to purchase through auction.

Don Hillenbrand, a veteran Star Trek prop collector and researcher, has authenticated the phaser and communicator using a “screen-matching” method that identifies unique details and flaws on the props to verify they indeed were the ones seen in the series.

The original owner of both pieces, a late relative of the current owners, was a Hollywood prop veteran who is believed to have acquired them from a former employee at Paramount Pictures, home of Star Trek.

The pistol-like phaser and communicator, which features a spinning dial, will be at the museum through July 28, then will go on the block at a Julien’s Auctions/TCM Hollywood event Nov. 9 in Los Angeles. Each piece is conservatively estimated to sell for $100,000 to $200,000….

(7) WHAT CRESSIDA COWELL LIKES. “On my radar: Cressida Cowell’s cultural highlights” – a Guardian profile. Including an item about David Tennant’s next series, which isn’t sff but don’t you want to know anyway?

Children’s author Cressida Cowell was born in London in 1966. In 2003 she published the first of 12 books in the How to Train Your Dragon series; since then, they have been adapted into several feature films, including the Academy Award-nominated 2010 animation. Her other book series include the Treetop Twins and The Wizards of Once. Between 2019 and 2022, Cowell was the Waterstones children’s laureate. She lives in London with her husband; they have three children. Here Be Dragons, an exhibition co-curated by Cressida Cowell and one of her dragon creations, Toothless, is at the Story Museum in Oxford until July 2025….

6. Television

Rivals

The first trailer for Disney+’s forthcoming TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals has dropped, starring the always magnificent David Tennant. I bet he will have an absolute whale of a time playing Lord Tony Baddingham. Rivals was one of my go-to comfort reads when I was in my 20s, so very nostalgic for me and so many others. Everything David touches seems to turn to gold, from Hamlet to Broadchurch to Staged to Good Omens, and the lead director of Rivals is Ted Lasso’s Elliot Hegarty, so I have high expectations for this.

(8) WESTERCON MINUTES HOT OFF THE PRESS. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] Linda Deneroff turned around the minutes and new bylaws for Westercon very quickly, even with five ratified bylaw amendments and two new ones for consideration next year. Here’s the announcement post: “Westercon Official Papers Updated for 2025”.

The Westercon Bylaws & Business page has been updated with the minutes of the 2024 Westercon Business Meeting held at Westercon 76 in Salt Lake City, links to the video of the Business Meeting, and the updated Bylaws for use at the 2025 Westercon (Westercon 77).

The Business Meeting ratified five amendments to the Bylaws, including removing the “traditional” date of Westercon (which was never a requirement). The meeting then gave first passage to two amendments: one would clarify the official name of Westercon and the other would suggest (but not required) that Westercons be held sometime between May and August each year. The full text of the amendments, which must be ratified at Westercon 77 in Santa Clara, California, is in the updated Bylaws document.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 13, 1940 – Sir Patrick Stewart, 84.

By Paul Weimer:  Where does one begin, or end, with Stewart’s oeuvre? I first came across him as Leodegrance in the movie Excalibur, which is perhaps the most fever-dream of all the adaptations of King Arthur and the Round Table that I’ve ever seen. Then, some years later, he was of course Gurney Halleck in the David Lynch Dune movie, and that itself was a fever dream of an adaptation of an unfilmable novel. 

So it was with excitement when I found out that he would be Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the reboot of Star Trek as a TV Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sure, the series took a few years to find its feet and even Picard took some time to establish his character (I remember him being weirdly francophilic to the point of excess in the early seasons) but once Picard had the character, he gave us a character arc and journey that went through Locutus, through the movies, and all the way to his titular series. Picard’s growth and development has been a part of my adult life. 

Sir Patrick Stewart, from The Smithsonian Magazine.

And then there is of course, Professor X. Yes, McAvoy has mostly taken up that mantle, since. And there are the animated adaptations. But when I saw Stewart as Professor X in Multiverse of Madness in that alternate world Strange and Chavez wound up in, I cheered in delight.  Patrick Stewart was and does remain my Professor Charles Xavier, and how I envision him in my mind to this day. (And he makes a wonderful double act with Ian McKellen’s Magneto, a chemistry between the two that no other actors or adaptations have managed to really match.  

Stewart has done a slew of other stuff, too, and I’ve consumed a lot of it.  One fun bit I will mention is a videogame: Lands of Lore. It was one of the early videogames in the early 1990’s that featured extensive voiceovers, done by Stewart himself (in his role as a dying king). It felt like a return to his fantasy King Arthur days.  And of course, since I am a Roman Empire enthusiast, although it is not genre, how can I miss his portrayal of Sejanus in I, Claudius?  

Truly one of the best actors of all time.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) 100 YEARS OF ANIMATION ART EXHIBIT. [Item by Marc A. Criley.] The exhibit “A Journey into Imagimation: Over 100 Years of Animation Art from Around the World” just opened at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, Alabama, and will run through September 29, 2024.

A Journey into Imagimation celebrates the ongoing history of animation production since the creation of this magical art form. The exhibition presents 140 rare and recognizable objects, including original cels, drawings, and models that feature a full range of animation techniques from the groundbreaking traditional animation of Gertie the Dinosaur, created by Winsor McCay in 1914, to many of today’s digitally supported animations, including The Simpsons and Toy Story.

The exhibition includes well-recognized animations from such movies and cartoons as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Mighty Mouse, Tom & Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Jetsons, Mary Poppins, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, The Simpsons, The Ren and Stimpy Show, The Lion King, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Toy Story, as well as popular commercials for Raid, Pillsbury, Clearasil, and Lipton Brisk Ice Tea and the music video for Paula Abdul’s Opposites Attract.

(12) SUPER PALS. “’His skincare regime alone would bankrupt you’: Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman bring banter and bromance to London” and the Guardian listens in.

The enduring friendship between the actors Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman was unpacked in irreverent detail in London on Friday, as the pair premiered their new movie, Deadpool & Wolverine.

The stars, who frequently tease one another both in the press and on X, take the leads in Marvel’s latest blockbuster, which sees foul-mouthed superhero Deadpool (Reynolds) exhume and then team-up with the beleaguered Wolverine (Jackman), seven years after his apparent death in 2017’s Logan.

Speaking at a press conference, Reynolds and director Shaun Levy said they had been scrambling for ideas to continue the franchise until Jackman agreed to return. Rejected pitches included a film in which it is revealed Deadpool was the hunter who shot Bambi’s mother.

(13) WHAT HE SAID. Meanwhile, Hank Green has been studying modern English.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Marc A. Criley, Jeffrey Smith, 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 Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 1/4/23 Give It To Me Pixelled, Doctor, I Can Scroll It!

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(1) EARLY 2023 AWARDS WARNING. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The SF2 Concatenation has just tweeted its annual, internal poll as to the Best Science Fiction Books and Films of the Year.  This is just a bit of informal fun and most certainly not to be taken too seriously. Having said that, previous years have seen a few works go on to win awards (scroll down the previous link).

(2) DEMOCRACY AT WORK. Meanwhile, the Critters Writers Workshop Readers Poll is taking votes from the public through January 14. Categories added this year: Magical Realism, Positive Future Fiction (novel & short story).

The award is unique for posting a running tally of the leaders in every category while voting is carried on.

I can say that I have actually heard of one of the top ten leaders in the Science Fiction & Fantasy category. (Reflecting on this process, I have to wonder why the Dragon Awards shortlists aren’t filled with the same kinds of indie books.)

(3) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Christopher M. Cevasco and A. T. Greenblatt on Wednesday, January 11.

Christopher M. Cevasco

Christopher M. Cevasco’s debut novel Beheld: Godiva’s Story (Lethe) was released in April 2022. His stories have appeared in such venues as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Static, and Shades of Blue and Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War (Prime). After ten years in Brooklyn, Chris and his wife moved to Myrtle Beach, SC, where they live with their two children.

A. T. Greenblatt

A. T. Greenblatt is a Nebula award winning short story writer. Her stories and essays have appeared in Slate, Tor.com, Uncanny, and many other places. She has been a finalist for the Hugo, Locus, Sturgeon, and WSFS awards. By day, she is a systems engineer and lives in Brooklyn.

At the KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs) on January 11. Begins at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

(4) PERPETUALLY PEEVED. C. T. May is “mad at Harlan Ellison” for reasons explained in “A Good Story, a Great Story, and the Guy Who Couldn’t Tell Them Apart” at Splice Today.

Harlan Ellison was a very loud man. Even when he made a passing, matter-of-fact observation, it would be noisily matter-of-fact. For instance, “the two men wrote almost identical stories,” he once asserted. The two men, a pair of innocent authors, had done no such thing. But Ellison said otherwise to readers of Again, Dangerous Visions, the long-ago s.f. anthology that he compiled. I’m mad because a dead science fiction author didn’t understand a couple of stories.

Lord Dunsany wrote “Two Bottles of Relish,” and John Collier wrote “The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It.” A condiment and a spice, that’s a parallel. Further, each story involves murder and builds to a wicked one-line payoff, and the goal of each payoff is to chill the blood and flatter reader sophistication by laying before us a bitter, even grotesque secret regarding human nature and what people are capable of. The two stories are even told in a similar way: a character narrates what he saw other men say and do.

Those are some striking points of resemblance. I’d say the task of an intelligent person is to recognize that they’re just a list. Add these things up and you don’t get the same story twice….

Ellison opined on the two stories in his introduction to “Getting Along” by James Blish…

(5) DOINK DOINK. A case of New York publishing law and order is reaching its conclusion: “The End of a Book World Mystery: A Suspect in Manuscript Thefts to Plead Guilty” reports the New York Times.

The mystery captivated the book world: For years, someone impersonated authors and agents, editors and publishers, trying to steal unpublished book manuscripts from high profile authors like Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan and Ethan Hawke, but also from debut novelists and writers of more obscure works.

Now, a resolution to the yearslong scheme is near. On Friday, Filippo Bernardini is expected to plead guilty to wire fraud in front of a magistrate court judge in Manhattan, according to an email from the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York that was sent to victims on Tuesday.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Bernardini early last year, saying he had “impersonated, defrauded, and attempted to defraud, hundreds of individuals” over five or more years, gaining access to hundreds of unpublished manuscripts in the process….

(6) LOOK FOR THE UNION LABEL. “Video game workers form Microsoft’s first US labor union” – the Associated Press has details.

A group of video game testers is forming Microsoft’s first labor union in the U.S., which will also be the largest in the video game industry.

The Communications Workers of America said Tuesday that a majority of about 300 quality-assurance workers at Microsoft video game subsidiary ZeniMax Studios has voted to join the union.

Microsoft already told the CWA it would accept the formation of the union at its Maryland video game subsidiary, fulfilling a promise it made to try to build public support for its $68.7-billion acquisition of another big game company, Activision Blizzard….

… The unionization campaign accelerated thanks to Microsoft’s ongoing bid to buy Santa Monica game giant Activision Blizzard. Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., made a June pact with the CWA union to stay neutral if Activision Blizzard workers sought to form a union….

(7) LET’S YOU AND HIM FIGHT. [Item by Michael Kennedy.] Is it punching down or punching up if Wolverine attacks Deadpool?

Actor Ryan Reynolds has been receiving Oscar attention for his song “Good Afternoon” in the Christmas flick Spirited. Hugh Jackman, who will be playing Wolverine opposite Reynolds‘ Deadpool in the upcoming Deadpool sequel, has thoughts. His video tweet jokes, “Ryan Reynolds getting a nomination in the best song category would make the next year of my life insufferable. I have to spend a year with him shooting Wolverine and Deadpool. Trust me, it would be impossible. It would be a problem.”

Variety analyzes Jackman’s tweet here: “Hugh Jackman Roasts Ryan Reynolds: Don’t Give ‘Spirited’ an Oscar Nom”.

Ryan Reynolds has earned himself a spot on the Oscar shortlist for best song for “Good Afternoon,” from his Christmas movie “Spirited” with Will Ferrell. But Hugh Jackman, who is preparing to star alongside Reynolds in the upcoming “Deadpool” sequel, hopes the Academy refrains from further boosting Reynolds’ ego with a nomination….

Or you can just watch it yourself.

(8) SUZY MCKEE CHARNAS (1939-2023). Author Suzy McKee Charnas died January 4. The author of many groundbreaking books (to quote Catherine Lundoff), her first published book, Walk to the End of the World, appeared in 1974 and later won a retrospective Otherwise Award. Her novella “Unicorn Tapestry” won a 1981 Nebula. Her short story “Boobs” won the Hugo Award in 1990.

Charnas’ story “Beauty and the Opéra or The Phantom Beast”  was shortlisted for the 1997 Hugo, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon awards.

She was a three-time winner of the Otherwise Award for Motherlines (1996; retrospective), Walk to the End of the World (1996, retrospective), and The Conqueror’s Child (2000).

Her series The Holdfast Chronicles was named to the Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame in 2003.

The Kingdom of Kevin Malone won the Mythopoeic Award for Children’s Fantasy (1994).

Read more about her writing in John Clute’s SFE entry: Charnas, Suzy McKee. Her own website is: Suzy McKee Charnas science fiction.

Michael Swanwick also shared a significant memory in “Suzy McKee Charnas Meets Her Ideal Reader”.

…I met Ms. Charnas only once, back in the eighties, and I doubt I made much of an impression on her. But it’s worth recounting because that was the time she first met Judith Moffett.

Judy Moffett began as a serious poet (I greatly admire her collection Whinny Moor Crossing, the title poem in particular), fell into science fiction almost by accident, and quickly became an intensely admired novelist and short fiction writer. She was and is one of those tough-minded, tolerate-no-nonsense, totally admirable women who find in genre a place where they can think and do exactly as they like. And she admired the hell out of Suzy McKee Charnas. Most particularly, as with me, for The Vampire Tapestry.

Judy’s day job was as an academic at the University of  Pennsylvania, where she taught, among other things, a science fiction class. As part of which, that year, the class did a reading of a script–I think written by Judy, but it’s been a long time–of one of the component stories of the Tapestry. The protagonist was female but the student reading her lines was male.

Judy wrote to Suzy McKee Charnas telling her about the project and inviting her to come and witness an encore performance. An invitation which was readily accepted….

Suzy McKee Charnas accepting a Nebula Award in 1981. Photos by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Waffles, or rather food in Emma Bull’s Finder: A Novel of the Borderlands

We sat at the round table that was just the right size for two; I don’t know if the Ticker ever has dinner parties. If she does, she can probably find another table. This one was made of some highly-polished golden wood in high Art Nouveau style. Heaven only knows how these things come into Bordertown, or, once they have, why they should land on Tick-Tick’s doorstep instead of in some parlor on Dragonstooth Hill.

The alcohol was gone from the liqueur, the strawberries were warmed and softened, and some of the sugars had caramelized. The waffles were crisp all around the edges and soft in the middle. And the Ticker had stopped me just in time on the whipped cream. There was hot tea to wash it down with, which tasted something like Darjeeling and something like not. It was related to last night’s shower: It was a meal to make me grovellingly happy to be alive.

— Orient in Emma Bull’s Finder: a Novel of The Borderlands

I have written this novel up here as one of my favorite novels but I’ve don’t think I mentioned in that review that food plays a role in it. Another scene takes place in the Hard Luck Cafe. 

Here’s the best quote from the part of that novel: 

It was warm inside in spite of the fans, and busy, and noisy, and remarkably like a combination of farmhouse kitchen, private club, and arts salon. Anyone who makes trouble at the Hard Luck Cafe is considered an incurable misfit, even within the loose social contract of Bordertown, and is not welcome anywhere, to anything. Consequently, the Hard Luck’s habituTs include humans, elves, and halfies, people from Dragontown and shimmers from up on the Tooth, painters and gang leaders. It’s such a desirable place to simply be that it’s almost too much to hope that the food is good. The food is good.

I peered at the back wall and the blackboard that serves as menu. The Hard Luck is a cooperative, and the people working the kitchen cook whatever they feel like that day. Certain things are almost always availableùburgers for the philistines, for instance—but if the staff decides they want to do Chinese that day, that’s what’s for dinner. If you don’t like it, that’s—all together now — Your Hard Luck. That day it looked like mixed down-home: fish chowder, lentil and spinach casserole, stuffed peppers, Brunswick stew.

Finally I need to mention the strawberries:

I sliced strawberries with all my attention. They were particularly fine ones, large and white clear through without a hint of pink. (Wild Borderland strawberries are one of the Border’s little jokes. They form bright red, and fade as they ripen. No strawberry has ever been so sweet.)

The novel is so richly, not just with these note, but everything that it brings the unnamed city, its inhabitants and the surrounding area to a quite vivid reality.  As I said in my post on the novel, I highly recommend Finder. But then I send Will and Emma dark chocolate which tells you how much I like them, so why wouldn’t I? 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born January 4, 1785 — Jacob Grimm. Here solely for two reasons, the first being that he and his brother were the first to systematically collect folktales from the peasantry and write them down. Second is that the number of genre novels and short stories that used the Grimms’ Fairy Tales as their source for ideas is, well, if not infinite certainly a really high number. I’d wager that taking just those stories in any of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror would get quite a number based on these tales. (Died 1863.)
  • Born January 4, 1927 — Barbara Rush, 96. She won a Golden Globe Award as the most promising female newcomer for being Ellen Fields in It Came From Outer Space. She portrayed Nora Clavicle in Batman, and was found in other genre programs such as the revival version of Outer Limits, Night Gallery, The Bionic Woman and The Twilight Zone.
  • Born January 4, 1946 — Ramsey Campbell, 77. My favorite novel by him is without doubt The Darkest Part of the Woods which has a quietly building horror to it. I know he’s better-known for his sprawling (pun full intended) Cthulhu mythology writings but I never got into those preferring his other novels such as his Solomon Kane movie novelization which is quite superb.
  • Born January 4, 1958 — Matt Frewer, 65. His greatest role has to be as Max Headroom on the short-lived series of the same name. Amazingly I think it still stands thirty-five years later as SF well-crafted. Just a taste of his later series SF appearances include playing Jim Taggart, scientist  and dog catcher on Eureka, Pestilence in Supernatural, Dr. Kirschner in 12 Monkeys and Carnage in Altered Carbon. His film genre appearance list is just as impressive but I’ll single out Supergirl, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Stand, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (oh do guess where he is in it) and lastly Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, a series of films that I really like.
  • Born January 4, 1960 — Michael Stipe, 63. Lead singer of R.E.M. which has done a few songs that I could say are genre adjacent. But no, I’ve got him here for being involved in a delightful project called Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films. Lots of great songs given interesting new recordings. His contribution was “Little April Shower” from Bambi which he covered along with Natalie Merchant, Michael Stipe, Mark Bingham and The Roches. Fun stuff indeed! 
  • Born January 4, 2000 — Addy Miller, 23. She is on the Birthday List for being Sarah in Plan 9. Really? They remade that movie? Why? And yes, she played A Walker in that other show. My fav role by her is because of the title, it was a short called Ghost Trek: Goomba Body Snatchers Mortuary Lockdown, in which she was Scary Carrie Carmichael. And yes, you can watch it here.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Speed Bump turns a miraculous moment into a mundane complaint. (And yet it’s not about social media…)

(12) BRACE YOURSELVES. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki will be part of HWA New York’s  “Galactic Terrors” online reading series on January 12, along with Meghan Arcuri and Nathan Carson, with co-hosts Carol Gyzander and James Chambers. The writers will read their stories live and take questions.

(13) CONTINUED NEXT ROCK. Atlas Obscura has pictures of a “Hidden J.R.R. Tolkien Quote – Natural Bridge, Virginia”.

VIRGINIA’S NATURAL BRIDGE IS a wonder in and of itself. It’s no surprise that North America’s largest natural land bridge has been drawing people to it for centuries. But those who visit Natural Bridge State Park just to see the enormous stone structure miss risking one of its hidden gems.

Head to Cedar Creek, and you’ll find a literary surprise. There, etched into the side of a large rock, is a J.R.R. Tolkien quote….

(14) HISTORIC SOUND RECORDINGS PRESERVED. “Wax Cylinders Hold Audio From a Century Ago. The Library Is Listening.” And the New York Times eavesdrops.

 The first recording, swathed in sheets of distortion, was nonetheless recognizable as a child’s voice — small, nervous, encouraged by his father — wishing a very Merry Christmas to whoever was listening.

The second recording, though still noisy, adequately captured the finale of the second act of “Aida,” performed by the German singer Johanna Gadski at the Metropolitan Opera House in the spring of 1903.

And the third recording was the clearest yet: the waltz from “Romeo and Juliet,” also from the Met, sung by the Australian soprano Nellie Melba.

Accessed by laptop in a conference room at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the recordings had been excavated and digitized from a much older source: wax cylinders, an audio format popularized in the late 19th century as the first commercial means of recording sound. These particular documentations originated with Lionel Mapleson, an English-born librarian for the Metropolitan Opera, who made hundreds of wax cylinder recordings, capturing both the turn-of-the-century opera performances he saw as part of his job and the minutiae of family life….

…These particular cylinders were previously available to the library in the 1980s, when they were transferred to magnetic tape and released as part of a six-volume LP set compiling the Mapleson recordings. After that, they were returned to the Mapleson family, while the greater collection stayed with the library. But, Wood said, “there’s people all over the world that are convinced that a new transfer of those cylinders would reveal more audio details than the previous ones.”

Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph, where, similar to a modern record player, a stylus followed grooves in the wax and translated the information into sound. The Endpoint machine uses a laser that places less stress on the cylinders, allowing it to take a detailed imprint without sacrificing physical integrity, and to adjust for how some cylinders have warped over time. The machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played, which can then be digitally reconstituted into a complete recording.

Within the next few years, the library hopes to digitize both the cylinders and the diaries, and make them available to the public. The non-Mapleson cylinders in the library’s collection are also eligible to be digitized, though Wood said that process will be determined based on requests for certain cylinders. The library’s engineers are shared across departments, and with a backlog of thousands, she said, “We have to wait our turn.”…

(15) TAILS OF CLI-FI. The Scientist Magazine says “Animals Are Shape-Shifting in Response to a Warming World”.

At the South African nature preserve where Miya Warrington and colleagues study Cape ground squirrels (Xerus inauris), the maximum daily temperature has increased by about 2.5 °C in just 18 years. The animals have evolved a quiver of tactics to tolerate the region’s sweltering heat, says Warrington, a conservation ecologist at the University of Manitoba. Sprawling flat on the ground in a pose called splooting, for example, helps the animals shed heat from their less furry undersides. The squirrels also take shady respites under their bushy tails, which they curl above their heads like tiny parasols. When it’s really hot, the fossorial mammals retreat to their burrows to cool off. But Warrington warns that, even with all these options for keeping cool, “still they could be at the limits of their tolerance” due to such a rapid climactic shift.

That intense pressure could be why their bodies have begun to change shape, Warrington says. She found that, over the course of just under two decades, the squirrels’ already incredibly large hind feet, which may help dissipate heat, have grown relative to their body sizes by about 11 percent. Meanwhile, their spine lengths have become about 6 percent shorter….

(16) THE NEXT CRISIS. “’Foundation’ Season 2 Release Date on Apple TV Plus, Trailer” discussed at TV Line.

Apple TV+ has unveiled a sneak peek at the upcoming season, which you can check out above, featuring Gaal making her way home and Brother Day bracing for a potential war. New episodes will arrive this summer, the streamer has announced.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brown Robin.]

Pixel Scroll 11/8/22 We Only Scroll Respectable Pixels

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(1) MAJOR STATHOPOULOS SHOW. “The Semblance of Things: Portraits by Nick Stathopoulos” will be a comprehensive 30-year survey show coming next February to the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre in Australia. Nick announced it on Facebook.  There’s already an article about the upcoming exhibition in the Centre’s magazine, downloadable at the link.

(2) FIGURING. Cora Buhlert posted a new “Masters of the Universe-piece Theatre” photo story. This one is called “New Look”.

… I have had some new arrivals recently, including the Teela and Zoar two-pack. I mainly bought the two-pack, because I wanted Zoar the Falcon, but I also got a Teela figure with a nice new headsculpt, which is loosely based on the way she looked in the 2002 cartoon, where Teela had a long ponytail instead of her customary upswept hairstyle. And since Teela is my favourite Masters of the Universe character, I’m always happy to have another version of her. Plus, this Teela has a sword, which is the weapon she actually uses most of the time in the various cartoons. The toys mostly only have the snake staff, even though the snake staff only prominently features in the 2002 cartoon – in every other version she uses a sword.

The fact that Teela got a makeover for the two-pack also inspired the following story. Furthermore, I also get to explore the friendship between Teela and Adora that the cartoons never really gave us (so far) some more….

(3) AMAZING. The Kickstarter for the “Amazing Stories Annual Special: SOL SYSTEM by Steve Davidson” now includes a rather clever animated Zoom meeting between famous science fiction figures from H.G. Wells to Octavia Butler. Here’s a teaser – the complete video runs almost five minutes.

(4) HEARING MORE FROM CORA. Issue one of The Lotus Tree Literary Review is out and contains an interview with Cora Buhlert conducted by Jean-Paul L. Garnier: “The Lotus Tree Literary Review, Autumn 2022, Issue #1”.

… Garnier: What challenges have you faced as a German author working in English speaking markets?

Buhlert: It’s harder for someone from beyond the Anglosphere (i.e. the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand) to get noticed. First of all, if you come from a non-English-speaking country (and for some countries in Africa and Asia, where English is an official language, even if you come from an English-speaking country), some people will simply assume that you cannot possibly speak English well enough to write in what is not your first language. I have actually had someone leave a long rambling comment on my blog to tell me that I’m obviously too stupid to understand English.

Physical distance is also an issue, because a lot of the big cons happen in the US or UK and attending takes time, money and also the privilege of being able to get a visa at all, something which is a huge issue for SFF writers from Africa, but also from the Middle East and some countries in Asia and Latin America. It’s probably no accident that I was only nominated for the Hugo after I had attended two Worldcons and one Eurocon in person, took part in programming and met a lot of people…

(5) HAILEY PIPER READS. Space Cowboy Books will host an online reading and interview with Hailey Piper author of No Gods for Drowning on Tuesday November 15 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register for free here.

IN THE BEGINNING, MAN WAS PREY WITHOUT THE GODS, THEY’LL BE PREY AGAIN The old gods have fled, and the monsters they had kept at bay for centuries now threaten to drown the city of Valentine, hunting mankind as in ancient times. In the midst of the chaos, a serial killer has begun ritually sacrificing victims, their bodies strewn throughout the city.

Set in an alternate reality which updates mythology to near-modern day, No Gods For Drowning is part dark fantasy, part noir detective story, and unlike anything you’ve read before, from an author whose imagination knows no boundaries.

(6) A ROBOT WITH A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME. Lavie Tidhar discusses his favorite robot stories: “The Best Robots In Science Fiction” at CrimeReads.

My new novel, Neom, started off with the simple image of a robot and a rose. The robot goes to the market in the city of Neom and buys a flower. It then takes the rose into the desert and leaves it in the sand…

Why?

I wrote the rest of the book just to find out….

Second Variety by Philip K. Dick (1953)

As we go through Neom we find out that my robot (who is never named) had a group of companions during the long-ago war. One of them is, of course, a Tasso, from PKD’s classic story about a war in which humanoid robots infiltrate the human population only to blow themselves up. They come in several models, including the David (a young boy) and a Wounded Soldier, but there are rumours of a new, improved model…

(7) LESLIE PHILLIPS (1924-2022). SYFY Wire reports: Leslie Phillips, “Voice of the Sorting Hat in ‘Harry Potter’ dies at 98”.

Leslie Phillips, the British screen legend who voiced the Sorting Hat in the first two Harry Potter films, has passed away at the age of 98 following a lengthy illness. The anthropomorphic head piece that sorts incoming Hogwarts students into the school’s four famous houses appeared prominently in Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) and Chamber of Secrets (2022) — both of which were helmed by director Chris Columbus.

… The actor’s career dated all the way back to the late 1930s and included over 200 roles in dozens upon dozens of projects spanning film, television, and the stage (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Doctor Who: Medicinal Purposes are just two small examples). Wizarding World fans, however, will forever associate the man with the sagely voice of the tattered magical hat that took Harry’s own desires into consideration and placed the boy wizard into Gryffindor — where dwell the brave at heart….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

2018 — [By Cat Eldridge.] Sometimes it’s the offbeat stories that I really like from authors, the short works that aren’t expanded into full length stories. Such is the case with Elizabeth Bear’s Sub-Inspector Ferron series. Of course, everything she writes is a delight to read. 

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

TASTY, SPICY ASIAN SPOILERS FOLLOW. THEY REALLY DO!

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

It’s up to Police Sub-Inspector Ferron to figure out the victim’s past and solve the crime, outwitting the best efforts of whoever is behind the death, her overbearing mother, and the complexities of dealing with the only witness – an ever so cute parrot-cat Chairman Miaow. (The latter, she says are, as I guessed, a cat with parrot colors and “a parrot-like level of intelligence and ability to mimic speech”. That cat will later adopted by her. She already has a fox. 

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

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

WE HAVE CONSUMED THOSE TASTY MORSELS, SO YIU CAN COME BACK.

There is certainly more than enough story here for her to someday write a novel set in the universe. And I look forward to it. 

When I asked her if there would be a novel in the series, she replied “there might be a novel someday but I really need to visit Bangalore myself to write that! I’ve been relying on friends who hail from there, or who have family there and have visited extensively, but it’s not the same as boots in the dirt experience!”

Fantastic stories told well by a master storyteller, what more do you want? 

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

The first one is available at the usual suspects, but the second remains at this time an Audible exclusive though Bear assures me that it will be available soon as as an ebook soon.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born November 8, 1847 — Abraham “Bram” Stoker. You know that he’s author of Dracula but did you know that he wrote other fiction such as The Lady of the Shroud and The Lair of the White Worm? Of course you do, being you. The short story collection Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories was published in 1914 by Stoker’s widow, Florence. (Died 1912.)
  • Born November 8, 1906 — Matt Fox. I’m here to praise an illustrator of one of those magazines that published the stories of such writers as Robert Bloch, Manly Wade Wellman and Ray Bradbury. The covers by Fox were of course intended to lure you to magazine rack, pick up the magazine and purchase it. Such was what he did for Weird Tales from November 1943 to July 1951. After that, during the Fifties and Sixties he worked for Atlas Comics, inking and penciling Journey into Mystery, World of Fantasy, Tales of Suspense and Journey into Unknown Worlds. It is thought that his last known published work is an advertisement, printed in 1967, for original mail-order glow-in-the-dark posters. (Died 1988.)
  • Born November 8, 1914 — Norman Lloyd. Yes, those dates are right. His longest genre role was as Dr. Isaac Mentnor on the most excellent Seven Days series. He’s been on Next Gen, Get Smart! in the form of the Nude Bomb film and visited The Twilight Zone, and in a fair number of horror films from The Dark Secret of Harvest Home to The Scarecrow. (Died 2021.)
  • Born November 8, 1932 — Ben Bova. He wrote more than one hundred twenty books. He won six Hugo Awards as editor of Analog, and also once was editorial director at Omni. Hell, he even had the thankless job of SFWA President. (Just kidding. I think.) I couldn’t hope to summarize his literary history so I’ll single out his Grand Tour series that though uneven is overall splendid hard sf as well as his Best of Bova short story collections put out in three volumes. What’s your favorite book by him? (Died 2020.)
  • Born November 8, 1955 — Jeffrey Ford, 67. Winner of a very impressive seven World Fantasy Awards as well every other award given to writers of fantastic literature except Hugos. Really there’s too many to list here. He’s got two Hugo nominations, one at Torcon 3 for his “Creation” short story, another at Noreascon 4 for ”The Empire of Ice Cream” novelette “.  And yes, his Well-built City trilogy is amazing.
  • Born November 8, 1956 — Richard Curtis, 67. One of Britain’s most successful comedy screenwriters, he’s making the Birthday List for writing “Vincent and the Doctor”, a most excellent Eleventh Doctor story. He was also the writer of Roald Dahl’s Esio Trot which isn’t really genre but it’s Roald Dahl who’s certainly is one of us some of the time, isn’t he? (Please don’t deconstruct that sentence.) And he directed Blackadder which is most decidedly genre.
  • Born November 8, 1968 — Parker Posey, 54. Doctor Smith on the rebooted Lost in Space series. I’ve not seen it, so how is it?  She was in a film based on based Dean Koontz’s version of Frankenstein. And she shows in Blade: Trinity as well which I’ll admit I liked.
  • Born November 8, 1952 — Alfre Woodard, 70. I remember her best from Star Trek: First Contact where she was Lily Sloane, Cochrane’s assistant. She was also Grace Cooley in Scrooged, and polishing her SJW creds, she once voiced Maisie the Cat in The Brave Little Toaster Goes to School. And yes, I know she’s portrayed a character in Marvel Universe. I just like the obscure roles. 

(10) ROWE Q&A. Marc Tassin interviews Christopher Rowe for the GenCon podcast: “Today’s Guest: Christopher Rowe” at Out of Character with Marc Tassin.

(11) VALLESE ESSAY COLLECTION. Grace Byron’s book review considers “Nightmares Worth Indulging: On Feminist Press’s ‘It Came from the Closet’” at LA Review of Books.

… In his introduction, editor Joe Vallese asks, “[H]ow are we to think about the complicated relationship between the queer community and the horror genre?” Vallese notes that all the contributors “convey a rich reciprocity, complicating and questioning as much as they clarify.” In other words, some of the essays will see horror films as nightmares worth indulging, while still interrogating what the genre gives and takes from queer people.

Ever since (and surely before) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offered queer readings of homosociality in Dickens, a certain kind of essay was born. These kinds of queer essays excavate the subtext of dominant culture. The mainstream 2009 film Jennifer’s Body, after all, inspired lesbian titillation and launched a thousand lavender wet dreams. Earlier this year, the father of body horror, David Cronenberg, declared that “surgery is sex” in Crimes of the Future, a few years late to the trans tipping point…

(12) FORGET ABOUT IT. “J.D. Dillard’s Star Wars Project Canceled, Exits Rocketeer Sequel” reports CBR.com.

Filmmaker J.D. Dillard experienced a Disney double whammy, having lost not one, but two prominent projects, Star Wars and The Rocketeer, to which he was attached.

In an interview with The Wrap, the director, who was promoting his latest film, the Jonathan Majors-starring Korean War aviator drama Devotion, dropped news about his formerly promising backlog. Indeed, the Mouse House not only lined him up to direct the long-belated sequel to the 1991 adventure classic, titled The Return of the Rocketeer, but tapped him to direct a mysterious Star Wars feature. However, when asked for an update on those projects, Dillard delivered bad news, stating that his Star Wars movie is “unfortunately no longer a thing. It was not for lack of trying.” He further lamented his nixed endeavor for the iconic space franchise, describing it as “an original idea.” Compounding that, Dillard also revealed his exit from the Rocketeer sequel….

(13) PRODUCT WARNING. Ryan Reynolds tells the people that his new movie Spirited is a Christmas movie with Will Ferrell in it and is NOT ELF. “Legally Required Spirited Disclaimers”.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In “Honest Game Trailers: World of Warcraft:  Wrath of the Lich King” Fandom Games says in order to play this game you either have to dress like a “Norse hobo” or “an off-brand Dora” the Explorer. The characters either spend time in cold regions where they run past “icy castles, icy beaches, and icy plains” or go underground in “the most positive depiction of sewers since Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Cora Buhlert, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]

Pixel Scroll 9/28/22 Pokéscroll – Gotta File’em All!

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(1) PLACE YOUR BETS. “Here are the bookies’ odds for the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature” at Literary Hub.

Do you enjoy gambling—but, you know, in a cultured way? None of that racetrack nonsense or three card monte for you? Well you’re in luck: the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced next Thursday, October 6, and the bookies have begun taking bets. (You know literary prize season has truly begun when the Lit Hub editors start lurking on online betting sites.)

Here are a few names of genre interest among the 44 listed.

Salman Rushdie – 8/1
Stephen King — 10/1
Haruki Murakami — 14/1
Margaret Atwood — 16/1
Maryse Condé — 16/1

(2) FUTURE TENSE. The latest short story in the Future Tense Fiction series, published this past Saturday, is “Yellow,” by B. Pladek, a story about risk-assessment technology, protest, and future conflicts over water.  

It was published along with a response essay by health economist Lorens Helmchen, “How risk scores could shape health care”.

If a medical treatment for a life-threatening disease had a 60 percent chance of success, but another treatment with a 50 percent success rate had a lower risk of bankrupting your family, which would you choose? What if the success rates were 95 and 90 percent? Would you change your answer?

How we use probabilities like these to guide our choices is at the heart of “Yellow,” a new Future Tense Fiction story written by B. Pladek. The story’s main character, Chase, works for a private company that helps people navigate these numbers…

(3) CLI-FI. “Is This the Way the World Ends?: PW Talks with Stephen Markley”. A Q&A with the author of The Deluge, about future responses to global warming.

Why choose fiction to explore the subject?

Here is my truly arrogant answer that will embarrass me but is still the truth: every artist who has ever pursued a career with passion and commitment believes their art has the power to change everything. That’s why we all do it. I read no shortage of nonfiction climate change books. I watched no shortage of earnest environmental documentaries. Many of them I don’t even remember because you read about potential catastrophe, and sure, it sounds like a bummer, but it leaves no lasting emotional impact. The point of narrative, of art, is that it can reorient us emotionally. If done well, it can make vivid what is abstract. Given the enormity of the task ahead of everyone alive on this planet, we desperately need that reorientation.

(4) WOLVERINE, COME FORTH. Ryan Reynolds answers people who say, “”How can Wolverine be in Deadpool 3 when he died in Logan?” “Deadpool Update, Part Hugh”.

Quick #Deadpool explainer video that tackles… 1) Timeline questions 2) Logan canon 3) MCU FAQ 4) Whether we can do this all day or not

(5) SEATTLE WORLDCON BID NEWS. SWOC, the Seattle Westercon Organizing Committee has awarded a grant of $5000 to the Seattle Worldcon in 2025 bid.

This grant will be used to promote, advertise, and recruit for the Seattle Worldcon Bid; to assist members of the bid in covering the costs of attending this year’s SMOFCon in Montréal; and to co-sponsor a night of the SMOFCon hospitality suite.

(6) THAT’S HIM. This time Nick Stathopoulos is on the receiving end of an award-winning portrait. His friend Xavier Ghazi’s artwork “Nick 2” won the Joshua Smith Memorial Award for Best in Show at a Drummoyne Art Society exhibition.

(7) WHEATON RETURN ENGAGEMENT. “Wil Wheaton presents and signs Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir” at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, CA on October 26 at 7:00 p.m. (And if this sounds familiar, he was there in August, too.)

From starring in Stand by Me to playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation to playing himself, in his second (third?) iconic role of Evil Wil Wheaton in The Big Bang Theory, to becoming a social media supernova, Wil Wheaton has charted a career course unlike anyone else, and has emerged as one of the most popular and well respected names in science fiction, fantasy and pop culture.

Back in 2001, Wil began blogging on wilwheaton.net. Believing himself to have fallen victim to the curse of the child actor, Wil felt relegated to the convention circuit, and didn’t expect many would want to read about his random experiences and personal philosophies.

Yet, much to his surprise, people were reading. He still blogs, and now has an enormous following on social media with well over 3 million followers.

In Still Just a Geek, Wil revisits his 2004 collection of blog posts, Just a Geek, filled with insightful and often laugh-out-loud annotated comments, additional later writings, and all new material written for this publication. The result is an incredibly raw and honest memoir, in which Wil opens up about his life, about falling in love, about coming to grips with his past work, choices, and family, and finding fulfillment in the new phases of his career. From his times on the Enterprise to his struggles with depression to his starting a family and finding his passion–writing–Wil Wheaton is someone whose life is both a cautionary tale and a story of finding one’s true purpose that should resonate with fans and aspiring artists alike.

(8) TAKING NOTES. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] Well, I guess no Filer watches The Masked Singer because the figure of “The Knight” was revealed to be William Shatner! The Reveal: Knight / William Shatner | Season 8 Ep. 1 The Masked Singer.

(9) MEMORY LANE.  

1964 – [By Cat Eldridge.] The Munsters premiered fifty-eight years ago this past weekend on CBS and I could hardly not write their series coming into existence, could I, after just doing the Addams Family? No, I could not.

I think that The Munsters had a better, sweeter family than the Addams Family. Every character here from Fred Gwynne as the sort of monster created by Frankenstein who was the head-of-the-household Herman Munster; Yvonne De Carlo as his vampire wife Lily; Al Lewis as Lily’s father, Grandpa, the somewhat over-the-hill vampire; Beverley Owen (later replaced by Pat Priest) as their college-age niece Marilyn, who was a conventional human but the “ugly duckling” of the family; and Butch Patrick as their werewolf son Eddie, all worked perfectly. 

On paper, it’s a lot of movie tropes into one series and hope they work, but Allan Burns and Chris Hayward did a stellar job here. Burns had nothing before and Hayward had been responsible for the Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties segment of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Yes, I remember both the segment and the series very fondly. 

The creators intended it to be a satire of American suburban life, the wholesome TV family fare of the era, and traditional monster movies. It certainly was a satire of the first and the latter, but I’ll be damned how it was a satire of the wholesome TV family fare of the early Sixties. 

It achieved much higher ratings than the similarly themed Addams Family, which aired concurrently on ABC. Though seventy episodes were produced over its two years, it would be cancelled after ratings dropped to a series low due to competition from ABC’s Batman.

It was rebooted as The Munsters Today in 1988 with John Schuck as Herman Munster and Lee Meriwether as Lily Munster. It lasted three seasons and seventy episodes. And then there was the very, very weird Mockingbird Lane pilot of a decade ago. I liked but it didn’t go to series. And there’s Rob Zombie’s The Munsters which is on Netflix and gets a rave review here.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 28, 1913 — Ellis Peters. Nom de plume of the writer of The Cadfael Chronicles, which I’ll admit I broke my rule of never watching a video adaption of a print series that I like. Derek Jacobi as Cadfael was damn perfect. She is here because she was the writer of two excellent haunting aka ghost novels, The City Lies Four-Square and By This Strange Fire, under her real name of Edith Pargeter. (Died 1995.)
  • Born September 28, 1923 — Erle Korshak. He’s a reminder of how old fandom is. He discovered SF in 1934 with the August Astounding magazine and became a very serious collector in 1937 according to several sources. By 1939 he was a well-known fan and one of the leaders of the Moonstruck Press which was created to publish a bibliography of all fantasy books.  He was part of the leadership triumvirate of Chicon 1, the 1940 Worldcon. He later founded a publishing house whose first major work was Everett F. Bleiler’s The Checklist of Fantastic Literature in the late Forties, a pioneering work of SF bibliography. This was followed by major works by Heinlein, Bester, Fredric Brown and other SF suthors. He was absent from fandom from the late 50s for thirty years, then rejoined fandom and was attending cons with his children.  He was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 1996, and won the Barry R. Levin Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature Lifetime Collectors Award in 2001. He was a guest of honor of Chicon 8, however he died before the convention.(Died 2021.)
  • Born September 28, 1923 — William Windom. Commodore Matt Decker, commander of the doomed USS Constellation in “The Doomsday Machine” episode, one of the best Trek stories told. Norman Spinrad was the writer. Other genre appearances include being the President on Escape from the Planet of the Apes, The Major in “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” episode of Twilight Zone and Ben Victor in the “The Night of the Flying Pie Plate” story of The Wild Wild West. This is a sampling only! (Died 2012.)
  • Born September 28, 1932 — Michael G. Coney. British-born writer who spent the last half of his life in Canada. He’s best remembered for his Hello Summer, Goodbye novel. I’m very fond of The Celestial Steam Locomotive and Gods of the Greataway which might be set on what could be Vancouver Island. His only Award was from the BSFA for Brontomek!, one of his Amorphs Universe works, although he was a 1996 Nebula nominee for his “Tea and Hamsters” novelette, and a five-time finalist for the Aurora Award. (Died 2005.)
  • Born September 28, 1935 — Ronald Lacey. He’s very best remembered as Gestapo agent Major Arnold Ernst Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark. (A series where they should’ve stopped with first film.) He’s actually in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as Heinrich Himmler though it’s an uncredited role. One of his first genre appearances was as the Strange Young Man in The Avengers episode “The Joker”.  In that same period, he was the village idiot in The Fearless Vampire Killers which actually premiered as The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck. And he’s in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension as President Widmark. This is but a thin wafer of his genre roles so do feel free to add your favorite. (Died 1991.)
  • Born September 28, 1938 — Ron Ellik. Writer and Editor, a well-known SF fan who was a co-editor with Terry Carr of the Hugo winning fanzine, Fanac, in the late 1950s. Ellik was also the co-author of The Universes of E.E. Smith with Bill Evans, which was largely a concordance of characters and the like. Fancyclopedia 3 notes that “He also had some fiction published professionally, and co-authored a Man from U.N.C.L.E. novelization.” The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction says he died in an auto accident the day before his wedding. (Died 1968.)
  • Born September 28, 1966 — Maria Pilar Canals-Barrera, 56. She’s getting Birthday Honors for being the voice of Hawkgirl on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited. She’s also voiced Commissioner Ellen Yindel in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and voiced Rio Morales, the mother of the Spider-Man, Miles Morales, on the Ultimate Spider-Man series. I just picked this to watch as it looks very good. 
  • Born September 28, 1982 — Tendai Huchu, 40. Zimbabwean author who’s the editor along with Raman Mundair and Noel Chidwick of the 2020 issue of Shores of Infinity zine. He’s also written a generous number of African centric stories of which “The Marriage Plot” won an African Speculative Fiction Society Nommo Award for African Speculative Fiction for Best Short Story (2017), as did his novel The Library Of The Dead (2022). That issue of Shoreline of Infinity (Issue 18, Summer 2020) is available from the usual digital suspects. His newest novel, Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, came out in April this year.

(11) ONLINE ARCHIVE MOVES.  “British comic fanzines archive ‘The Fanscene Project’ has a new online home” reports downthetubes.net.

An incredible project aiming to document the history of British comic fanzines and fandom, both as an online archive and in print, has a new home on the web.

Founded back in 2015 as the Classic UK Comic Zines site, artist and comic archivist David Hathaway-Price has been constantly adding to what is now The Fanscene Project.

Now residing at comicsfanzines.co.uk, the project is an online, read-only archive of British comic fanzines, published across the last 50 years, including, with the permission of their original editors, titles such as BEM, Comic Media News, Fantasy Trader, Infinity, Speakeasy, and many more. It even includes incredibly rare digital editions of very early zines such as Ka-Pow, published by Phil Clarke and Steve Moore back in 1967/68.

… The aim of The Fanscene Project is to create a digital repository of as many of the Comics Fanzines published in the UK as possible; fan publications containing work by artists and writers who would sometimes later move into, and shape, the industry that they loved….

(12) JEOPARDY! Unlike the contestants, Andrew Porter knew the right question to go with this answer on tonight’s episode.

Category: Cliff Notes

Answer: “Dizzy sunless cliffs above the Great Abyss” paints a picture in H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of” this.

No one could ask, “What is Madness”?

(13) SMALL BANG THEORY. In the Washington Post, Planetary Society editorial director Rae Paoletts says the asteroid-smashing DART mission was an important achievement because it shows that planetary defense against asteroids is possible. “Three cheers for NASA’s asteroid smasher”.

…Asteroids are a notoriously sticky wicket. On one hand, they’re remnants from the birth of our solar system; relics from the beginning of everything — or whatever our slice of that is. On the other, asteroids have caused inconceivable damage to our planet. Roughly 66 million years ago, a 6-mile-wide asteroid slammed off the coast of what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. A single asteroid robbed us of the chance to see pterodactyls soar across the sky, or to have them use us for food, depending on which way you look at it.

DART can’t undo the damage of past asteroid impacts, but it can help us prevent them in the future. With DART’s collision, scientists tested a planetary defense strategy known as the “kinetic impactor technique,” which aims to move — but not destroy — an object….

(14) WHO’S THAT? These are IndieWire’s nominees for the “Most Controversial Movie and TV Recastings Ever”. Most are from sff productions.

Marvel Cinematic Universe — The Hulk

Edward Norton played Bruce Banner for the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008, starring in Louis Leterrier’s “The Incredible Hulk.” When it was revealed that Norton would not continue his journey in the growing multiverse, Marvel’s Kevin Feige released a statement citing “the need for an actor who embodies [creativity and a] collaborative spirit.” Norton has since said he had a great time doing the project and holds no ill-will toward Feige. Mark Ruffalo went on to play the lovable green giant in seven films with more to come.

Other notable MCU recastings include War Machine, originated by Terrence Howard in “Iron Man” and taken over by Don Cheadle; as well as Howard Stark, played by Gerard Sanders (in a non-speaking role), John Slattery, and Dominic Cooper.

(15) WILL THEY MAKE THE CUT? At Eclectic Theist, J. W. Wartick continues screening entries in the second annual Self-Published Science Fiction Competition: “SPSFC2 First Impressions: ‘Mercury’s Shadow,’ ‘Ever the Hero,’ and ‘A Hardness of Minds’”.

The Self-Published Science Fiction Contest (“SPACEFIC”) is underway, and my group is going through one of my favorite parts of the contest: sorting through a slush pile. Basically, we get a stack of books and need to sample them all to narrow down our selections for quarter- and semi-finalists. Here, I’ll be going over my first impressions of some of these books. Please note my “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe” vote is only indicative of my opinion and may not reflect the opinion of our whole group. Since we advance books as a group, it’s possible a “Yes” from me may end up a “No” overall and vice versa. Let me know what you think of the books in the comments!

(16) A LOOK BEHIND AT A LOOK AHEAD. YouTube’s The 1920s Channel presents The Future Of The 1920s.

“Futurism” is what people believed the future would be like at a given time. Similarly, “retrofuturism” is futurism of the past. Most people think of Victorian futurism (steampunk) and 1950s/1960s futurism (atompunk). 1920s futurism sits right in the middle, mostly forgotten. Technically, it’s grouped in with “dieselpunk,” which extends into the WWII period, but I think the aesthetic of the 1920s is a bit different. For example, in the 1920s version of the future, zeppelins and airships are all over the place, though by WWII, zeppelins were a thing of the past. In this video, I’ll explain a little bit about the 1920s conception of the future, then show a lot of examples from a 1920s science and technology magazine called “Science And Invention.”

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ingvar.]