26 One Ordinary Scroll, With Peanut Butter And Jellicle Credentials

Posted on June 16, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) HAO JINGFANG AI AUTHORSHIP CONTROVERSY. [Item by Ersatz Culture.]

Source: (Japanese)

阿井幸作 on X: “「折りたたみ北京」でヒューゴー賞を受賞した中国の有名なSF小説家・郝景芳が、自身の児童向けSF小説『銀河学院』(中国版ハリーポッターと呼ばれているらしい)シリーズの新作にAI執筆が50％含まれていると告白。

X.com machine translation’s rendition of that text:

Chinese renowned science fiction writer Hao Jingfang, who won the Hugo Award for “Folding Beijing,” has confessed that 50% of the writing in the new installment of her children’s science fiction novel series “Galactic Academy” (apparently being called the Chinese version of Harry Potter) was done by AI.

The Chinese blog/news post image from that tweet is shown below, along with a Google Translate rendition, the text of which is as follows (minor pronoun fixes by me):

Hugo Award-winning author’s new book sparks controversy! She admits that half of the writing is AI-generated – Artificial Intelligence

Daily news excerpts

June 16, 11:13

Recently, renowned science fiction writer and Hugo Award winner Hao Jingfang revealed in a media interview that in her latest children’s science fiction series, “Galaxy Academy,” published this year, the proportion of content written using artificial intelligence has reached as high as 50%. This public statement immediately caused a huge stir online and quickly spread across major social media platforms.

Ironically, Hao Jingfang also revealed that the publisher’s editors had previously praised the book’s quality, even repeatedly commending her for writing well this year. She also admitted that once the book is published and enters the market, ordinary readers simply cannot distinguish which parts were written by AI.

(2) ROLLACRIT WILL LAUNCH A KICKSTARTER FOR A NEW CON BAG OF HOLDING! [Item by Daniel Dern.] Rollacrit, which in 2024 brought out an updated, improved version of the original Thinkgeek Messenger Bag of Holding (see my File770 Scroll on this) (Rollacrit’s staff includes some ThinkGeek alums), has just announced their new Con Bag of Holding (improving on the ThinkGeek Con Survival Bag of Holding), more specifically that they will be launching a Kickstarter for it in Fall 2026. (I’m ready to order two!) Scroll with more deets (I’ve got a few questions to ask ‘em) to follow, ideally within a day or two.

(3) MEMORIES OF THE MAKERS OF LABYRINTH. “’David Bowie was a crazy workaholic’: Labyrinth at 40 – an oral history” – the Guardian put it together.

…Soon after the release of 1982’s The Dark Crystal, director, animator and puppeteer Henson was keen to follow up with a film that combined human actors with quirky puppets. Terry Jones of Monty Python fame was hired to write the script, while George Lucas served as executive producer.

Brian Froud, conceptual designer and costume design: We’d just had a showing of The Dark Crystal in San Francisco. In the back of the limousine, Jim said: “Should we do another one?” I said: “What about goblins?” Jim’s eyes lit up. Then into my head came a labyrinth and I had a vision of a baby surrounded by goblins. He said: “That’s great” – and that was it….

… [Brian Froud]: A few days before we started the film, I met David in his dressing room and gave him a little flute as a present. He took it, leapt up on to the counter in front of the mirror and played it. It was astonishing. I thought: “Oh, this is gonna really work.”

[Brian Henson]: David was a crazy workaholic, just like my dad. They were both people who were used to being creative every waking moment of their life. So for David, doing Labyrinth was like being on vacation. He was a really wonderful spark of a person.

[Karen Prell]: He was really fascinated by the process with the puppets. He would also hang around the puppet workshop and just see how things were built and performed. He was very down to earth and game for anything. He would go and have a pint in the studio pub with the crew….

(4) THE PERFECT IS THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD PLACE. The Guardian’s Stephen Poole analyzes an intellectual history of imagined paradises that takes readers from Thomas More to Ursula K Le Guin. “The Uses of Utopia by Joad Raymond Wren review – can the ideal society ever exist?”

By definition, utopia cannot exist. In 1516, educated readers of Thomas More’s Utopia would have appreciated a tension between two possible derivations of this novel word: the Greek “eu-topos”, meaning good place, and “ou-topos”, meaning not a place at all. It might have been a compact warning that one should never attempt to turn utopias into reality. Those who have tried usually witnessed the model societies they founded devolving into grungily dysfunctional communes, weird sex cults, or both.

In this richly diverting intellectual history of the idea, we begin, as we must, with Plato, and the zany prescriptions of his Republic (“we should neutralise the poets’ influence on mothers”). Passing in silence over the potentially utopian aspects of Jesus’s thinking, we arrive at More’s utopia, where “nothing is private”, and so “the common affairs be earnestly looked upon”. The great Renaissance scientist Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis portrays a utopia of rational scientific experimentation – which, Wren suggests ingeniously, might have inspired Wakanda in the Marvel Black Panther films. The 17th-century duchess Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World imagines the author as a goddess elected by a world of human-animal hybrids who like science. In the 18th century, Sarah Scott’s Millenium [sic] Hall imagined an ideal society of women without men, as did Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland during the first world war.

Some patterns emerge: many utopias employ a framing device in which the narrator is accidentally or fantastically transported to a new land, and then subjected to reams of expository monologue about how it all works. Families are often abolished, with children raised in common. And in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 fantasy Looking Backward, Wren explains straightfacedly, “there are no law schools or lawyers, abolished here as in most utopias”….

(5) SHELDON COOPER WAS WRONG: WHETHER TO TRY NEW DISHES HAS A BENEFIT AND A MATHEMATICAL SOLUTION! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Sheldon Copper of The Big Bang Theory has a strict rota for his weekly meals: he never tries new ones. However, in the real world we regularly do decide when going to a restaurant whether or not to strict to a tried-and-tested dish or to try something new off of the menu. Scott Edelman and his guests must come across this a lot in his Eating the Fantastic podcast. (Though visitors to Brit Cit arguably might want to make a point of firmly avoiding Nandos. Seriously.)

This ‘problem’ was made famous by Richard Feynman. In the late 1970s, the physicist Richard Feynman sat down for lunch with his friend Ralph Leighton at a Thai restaurant called Indra in Glendale, California. Leighton was trying to decide whether to order his running favourite (the ginger chicken), or try something new that had a chance of being even better. Feynman turned the dilemma into a math problem – and solved it. Unfortunately, Feynman never published the detail of how he came to his analysis but we do have his equation and how he derived that.

The optimal policy specifies decreasing thresholds for switching from exploring new dishes to exploiting the best, with thresholds varying based on the distribution of the quality of dishes.

Which brings us to today and British and US researchers have decipher the problem and solution from Feynman’s notes, and prove that Feynman’s solution is optimal. They generalised his result and find closed-form solutions for other distributions, and then turn to ask the question of how humans actually solve such decision-making problems. In a preregistered experiment with 2,520 participants, we find definitive evidence that humans use a decision threshold that decreases linearly with the proportion of trials remaining, achieving performance remarkably close to the optimal solution found by Feynman.

When in Brit Cit, stick with Sheldon and arguably avoid Nandos.

See the primary research Christian, B. et al (2026) Resolving Feynman’s restaurant problem reveals optimal solutions and human strategies. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., vol. 123 (23), e2509612123 and the comment item Castelvecchi, D. (2026) Feynman’s Solution To ‘Restaurant Dilemma’ Holds Firm. Nature, vol. 654, p309-310.

(6) THIS PHOENIX NOT EXPECTED TO RISE. “Phoenix magazine to cease publication after 43 years” reports BBC. (Subscription required by readers outside the UK.)

The Phoenix magazine, seen by some as Ireland’s version of Private Eye, is to cease operations after 43 years.

Irish broadcaster RTÉ reports the magazine’s publisher, Penfield, is believed to be entering voluntary liquidation.

The last edition of the magazine was published on 5 June.

The magazine is no longer taking new subscriptions, with a message on the phoenix.ie website saying it is “unable to offer” online or print subscriptions “at this time”.

Edited by Paddy Prendiville, the magazine had been published every two weeks.

It was founded in 1983 by the late journalist and publisher John Mulcahy and peaked in term of sales in the early 1990s.

The magazine combined humour, satire and political and business coverage.

(7) STOP THE STEAL. “Publishers Sue Pirate Site WeLib for Copyright Infringement” – Publishers Weekly has details.

Fresh off of last month’s victory against pirate web site Anna’s Archive, 13 publishers across all segments of the industry have allied to sue yet another pirate site, WeLib, for copyright infringement.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, charges that the operators of WeLib “ copied the source code and most of the contents of” Anna’s Archive.”

The plaintiffs include the Big Five, Cengage, Elsevier, McGraw Hill, Pearson, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley.

“Defendants boast that they have reproduced ‘an endless collection of literature, research papers, and education materials,’ none of which they own or have licensed,” the complaint alleges.

According to its website and repeated in the lawsuit, WeLib hosts over 43 million books and 98 million papers, and its stolen collection of literary works has purportedly attracted over 80,000 active monthly users. According to the website, WeLib’s users have illegally accessed over 51 million books in the last month alone, or an average of over 1.7 million books per day.

Although the owners of WeLib claim to be a library of sorts, publishers say that they have created a mechanism to cash in on the pirated content.

According to the complaint, download speeds for free users are typically very slow, but in exchange for a “donation,” users receive “fast downloads” and avoid waitlists. …

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

June 16, 1896 — Murray Leinster. (Died 1975.)

By Paul Weimer: Murray Leinster. Not many people get an award named after one of their stories, but Murray Leinster managed that feat.

I read his “Sidewise in Time” (for which the Sidewise Award for Alternate History is named) decades ago. I read it as part of my first full on dunking into Alternate Histories back in the 1980s, when I was trying to read every bit of AH I could get my paws on. Unlike a lot of those stories and worlds, Murray Leinster instead gives us a sort of a multiverse of worlds, The sheer variety of worlds crammed into the story, a story where temporary conjunctions of parallel worlds throws a bevy of people into alternate worlds, and things from those worlds into our own, showed the pulp sensibilities of Leinster in full. When I would later read Frederik Pohl’s “The Coming of the Quantum Cats”, I saw the homage to Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time” straightaway.

Alternate history is hardly Leinster’s only badge of honor of prediction, or as a forerunner in the science fiction field. “A Logic Named Joe”, in a time when computers were in their infancy, depicted a world with an internet. In these days with AI and the perils of information on the internet, the story and its plot seems more relevant than ever. But as off kilter as the logics go in that story, even Leinster didn’t predict an internet that, tainted by AI, would offer recipes for pizza that involve glue.

“The Runaway Skyscraper”, one of his earliest stories (and written before “Sidewise in Time” by over a decade) didn’t invent the time travel story. However, it helped give it a form in a 20th Century vein. For reasons beyond understanding, a skyscraper slips several thousand years in the past, and the building occupants must come together to figure out how to survive…and how to return to their modern day, if they can.

Leinster is a writer who started in the pulps and kept writing into the 1950’s and 1960’s, managing a transition that very few writers of his era were able to accomplish. His staying power isn’t super dense characterization, it’s his vivid imagination and ideas that he scatters like candy throughout his work. Take his story “Exploration Team” which has an amazing wild alien planet for the protagonist to cross…accompanied by his animal companions, including uplifted bears!

Oh, and the spaceship in the opening scenes of Starcrash is named the Murray Leinster.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Dog Eat Doug makes you hear the line.
Free Range does a favor for a passenger.
Loose Parts’ theme park ride delivers a true love experience.
Wondermark speed reads.

(10) DARK HORSE EMPLOYEE CUTS. “Layoffs begin at Dark Horse, but union means it’s complicated” reports ComicsBeat.

The proposed layoffs include three people in IT and six in the warehouse, with some employees notified of upcoming layoffs on June 10th, just days after Dark Horse management voluntarily recognized the Dark Horse Workers Union on June 3rd.

There is a lot of back and forth in Rabiroff’s reporting, but the shorter version is that although Dark Horse management was planning layoffs prior to the unionization, layoffs must now be part of the arbitration process between the union and the company.

Based on many conversations with past and present Dark Horse employees over the years, they all expressed the opinion that Dark Horse has a huge staff, much larger than publishers who put out a similar number of books. Some of those workers were involved with the retail end of the company, including both the shuttered TFAW.com and the soon-to-close brick and mortar Things from Another World stores.

I’ve been told many times that as Dark Horse parent Embracer Group underwent layoffs in most of their units, it was only a matter of time until the budget cuts hit Dark Horse. There were a handful of layoffs last year, but nothing sweeping.

However, with Mike Richardson no longer in the picture, everyone expected more layoffs to hit; the unionization effort, which took five years to organize, has may goals, but making sweeping staff cuts a lot harder to implement must have been one of them.

(11) SEEKING SETI. [Item by Steven French.] This offers an interesting take on an old chestnut by framing alien colonisation in terms of ‘artificial infection’. The conclusion is both surprising and dismaying (to some, anyway): “David Kipping has new take on the existence of advanced life in the universe and the numbers are not encouraging” says Phys.org.

“The firmest conclusion we can say is that if infections spawn more frequently than 1 in 100,000 galaxies, then 99.9% of the universe would be infected for a 0.1c infection wave speed. If we take it as a given that this is inconsistent with observation/experience, then this requires that less than 1 in 10 quadrillion star systems have ever spawned an infection. That’s a staggeringly tight observational constraint on alien behavior; it’s by far the strongest statistical statement we can make in all of SETI.”

There are possible explanations for this that don’t involve the nonexistence of intelligent life beyond Earth, as Kipping notes. For what Sagan described as “contact optimists,” a natural explanation would be that despite there being a large population of ETCs in our universe, the odds of them ever spawning an infection, i.e., sending out probes or ships, are astronomically small. However, this is difficult to consider if one rejects the idea of uniformity in behavior and motivation. As David Brin argued in his 1983 paper, “The “Great Silence’: the Controversy Concerning Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life,” it only takes one species to break the pattern for a proposed resolution to become untenable.

In contrast, the contact pessimist has a much easier job explaining the apparent lack of evidence for ETCs, either by stating that they don’t exist or employing the Great Filter argument. But as Kipping stated, this explanation is also difficult to maintain: “If the filter is behind us, then where? Life started so early that it strongly indicates abiogenesis is a rapid and easy process. Perhaps some evolutionary steps are hard and very rarely transpire, but evolutionary biologists have argued against this recently. Or perhaps it’s ahead of us, and we won’t last another century needed to develop infection technologies.

“But then it’s hard to imagine how such a future Great Filter is so potent that it can suppress the odds at the level needed here. We can imagine many ways in which humanity continues, so surely someone, somewhere, especially those civilizations with greater wisdom than our own, would sail past the challenges we face today without annihilation.”

Consider “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” the famous science fiction tale that chronicles the collapse of human civilization, its rebirth and, spoilers, its imminent collapse again toward the end. Or Foundation, where the collapse of the Galactic Empire (à la The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) is inevitable, but is not a permanent condition. In short, the data support no conclusions, something that Kipping acknowledges.

“Frankly, I don’t have a good answer for this,” he tells us. “I suspect I will be wrestling with this question for the rest of my life in frustration and wonder.” The same may apply to the rest of us, and humanity as a whole….

(12) TREK AHOY. “’Strange New Worlds’ Season 4 Trailer Teases the Journey to the Beginning of ‘Star Trek’” – Gizmodo has details.

The future of Star Trek on TV isn’t terribly optimistic, but the new season of Strange New Worlds—its fourth, ahead of a shortened fifth and final outing—looks stuffed full of excitement and wonder. Paramount just shared the latest trailer ahead of the show’s return in July, featuring a meaningful chat between future dynamic duo Spock (Ethan Peck) and Captain Kirk (Paul Wesley).

…Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season four begins July 23 on Paramount+. It runs weekly, with new episodes arriving Thursdays through September 24.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/8/26 Lord Scrollentine’s Pixel

Posted on March 8, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) AT THE BOX OFFICE. Deadline tells where the cash registers are ringing: “Box Office Global: ‘Hoppers’ $88M WW Pixar Rebound, ‘Bride’ Bombs $13M”.

When it comes to an original animated film, the Pete Docter-led administration at Pixar Studios can celebrate a big breakthrough with Hoppers which jumped to an $88M global opening, broken out by $42M (81% offshore footprint) international and $46M stateside. As we’ve been writing all weekend, it’s the best opening for an original animated film, and a Pixar original animated movie since 2017’s Coco ($104.7M WW in like-for-likes). Hoppers also outstrips the like-for-like global starts of Pixar originals 2020’s Onward ($65.6M) and 2023’s Elemental ($65.1M).

Similar to the U.S., Saturday popped over Friday around the global. Stateside Saturday of $19.1M was up +45% over Friday/previews of $13.2M. If domestic is any indication, Hoppers is pulling in a broad audience with 52% general and 48% families. Quite often on a Pixar movie like this, it can be family leaning in the 60 percentile….

… Here comes The Bride! and there goes The Bride! with an international take of $6.3M in 70 markets, lower than domestic’s $7.3M. Brazenly, Warners forecasted a $38M-$40M global start. The Bride! was rejected by global suiters with a $13.6M worldwide opening off an $80M production cost and a global P&A around $65M, I now hear. Typically, an auteur driven movie can find an audience in Europe, however, Maggie Gyllenhaal wasn’t a selling point at this time for sophisticated moviegoers in the way that Paul Thomas Anderson or Quentin Tarantino would be. In many markets, the Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley starring movie wasn’t even in the top 10….

(2) LACON V NEWS. LAcon V has posted the Masquerade guidelines.

(3) MORE LACON V NEWS. And you now can buy the Fuzzy the Channel Island Fox Plushie for $29.99. For some reason there’s a deadline – it’s only available until March 28.

Fuzzy the Channel Island Fox is the mascot of the 84th World Science Fiction Convention, LAcon V. Named after Marilyn “Fuzzy Pink” Niven (1940-2023), a long-time fixture of science fiction conventions who was known for her efforts to welcome new fans to the community.

This plush Fuzzy The Fox will be a memento of LAcon V that will be a treasured keepsake and a tribute to a well loved science fiction fan.

(4) WHEN WEST DOESN’T MEET EAST. The Writers Guild of America West’s awards show originally scheduled for March 8 was cancelled while the WGAW staff union strike continues. However, the Writers Guild of America East, a separate union, is still holding its own awards function today.

… Non-supervisory staff of the WGAW, organized under the Pacific Northwest Staff Union (PNWSU), have been on strike since February 17, 2026. Since the start of PNWSU strike, bargaining unit staff have picketed outside the WGAW headquarters at 3rd & Fairfax and the Writers Guild Theater. All member events have been cancelled and the building has been closed to members and the public, including the Foundation library, and member lounge.

“As a labor union, we would not ask our guests to cross a picket line to attend the awards show,” said WGAW President Michele Mulroney. “The WGAW staff union has the right to strike, and our exceptional nominees and honorees deserve an uncomplicated celebration of their achievements.”…

… The 2026 Writers Guild Awards New York ceremony, presented by the Writers Guild of America East—a separate union from Writers Guild of America West—will move forward with all film, television and news awards being presented live on Sunday, March 8, at the Edison Ballroom in Manhattan….

The WGAW will plan a later celebration for its 2026 honorees and nominees.

(5) FUNDING APPEAL. Long-time SF fan Dragon Dronet has come upon some hard times and has launched a GoFundMe: “Help Dragon Dronet keep teaching, save his shop and house.” So far almost $7,000 of the initial $9,000 goal has been raised.

Hi, my name is Dragon Dronet. I am a special practical effects artist, stunt man, martial artist, sword and weapons master, model builder, and teacher for over 35 years in the industry of Hollywood. I’m also a husband and grandfather. I have contributed to the arts community teaching and sharing what I know my entire life for free, never charged to visit schools or centers of learning. My main focus was helping young filmmakers and artist, and even kids that just needed encouragement. I still have a lot to teach…

Because the industry has been in a downturn, there has been very little work; not enough to get by. So I’m changing my approach to make teaching and the things I live to do still possible for me. I can still teach out of my shop online, with years of behind the scenes in-depth videos and content, many behind the scenes videos that have never been seen before from entertainment that people love, including interviews with many industry friends…

I need to save my shop and my house as we’ve fallen behind, and need funds to help get my online site up and running. I already have the content and the interview space/workspace to teach and help. If I can get a bump start, I just need the breath to start with… Then I’ll fly! I’ve never felt comfortable asking for help, as a giver myself, but this time it’s imperative at this point in my life. The goal would be to raise around 50k, but if it’s possible to raise more, it would give me, my wife, and my granddaughter the time needed to put my website and all of the content to put on it/make for it together…

(6) WITH LESS-THAN-SPECIAL EFFECTS! YesterTube remembers these “1970s Superhero Shows That Were So Bad… They Were Great!”

Travel back to the golden age of campy, charming, and unforgettable 1970s superhero TV shows that were so bad… they were great! From the emotional power of The Incredible Hulk to the magical adventures of Shazam! and The Secrets of Isis, this video celebrates the classic superhero series that defined a generation. Whether it’s Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman, Nicholas Hammond’s Spider-Man, or the wild antics of Electra Woman & Dyna Girl, these shows were packed with cheesy effects, heartfelt moments, and the kind of gritty charm that only the ’70s could deliver. If you love nostalgia, retro TV, and remembering the shows that made you believe in heroes, this trip down memory lane is for you. Which of these shows do you remember watching as a kid?

(7) BLUME BIO RELEASES MARCH 10. “He Wrote Judy Blume’s Life Story. She Won’t Talk About It” – in the New York Times (behind a paywall).

On July 16, 2022, Mark Oppenheimer was in his basement office at home in New Haven, Conn., when he opened an email he’d hoped to receive for more than a decade. It was from Judy Blume, author of “Blubber,” “Forever …” and the Fudge books, among many other classics for children and adults.

Blume said she was ready to start talking about a biography and wanted to meet.

Oppenheimer was thrilled. He ran upstairs and shared the news with his wife, then waited a few hours before responding to Blume so as not too look too “thirsty,” as he jokingly put it….

…In 1997, soon after he graduated from Yale, Oppenheimer wrote a tribute to Blume in the Book Review, praising her realism, range and enduring appeal. She responded by inviting him to visit her summer home on Martha’s Vineyard if he happened to be in the vicinity.

The following summer he spent a memorable two days with Blume and a handful of houseguests at her mini-compound on Lake Tashmoo. It was one of those pinch-me experiences, with a chef-prepared dinner, lively conversation and a view of houses owned by household names.

After that, Oppenheimer and Blume remained loosely in touch, and, at some point in the 2010s, he let her know he was interested in writing her biography.

Blume said she wasn’t ready. “Maybe someday,” Oppenheimer said, “but the time hadn’t come yet.”

When Blume called in 2022, Oppenheimer was teaching journalism at Yale and co-hosting “Unorthodox,” a weekly podcast about Jewish news. He’d wrapped up publicity for his latest book, “Squirrel Hill,” about the aftermath of the shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and was embarking on a biography of Ann Landers. He happily put that project aside.

Their arrangement was straightforward. Oppenheimer met with Blume and her third husband, George Cooper, who agreed to be interviewed and to help facilitate other interviews. The book wouldn’t be a collaboration — “This was never an authorized biography,” Oppenheimer said — but Blume promised to share notes she had made for a memoir and to answer questions via email, on the phone and in person.

“I wouldn’t have written the book otherwise,” Oppenheimer said. He described his conversations with Blume and Cooper as “meaningful, candid, thoughtful,” full of “on the record memories.”

“It would have been an impoverished biography without that relationship,” he added.

He doesn’t know why Blume gave up on the idea of writing a memoir. “I promised myself that I would never, ever put words in her mouth. You’d have to ask her.”

Blume declined to comment on “Judy Blume: A Life.”…

… Perhaps the most salient information in “Judy Blume: A Life” is buried on Page 415, in a three-paragraph section called “Sources.”

“After I wrote a draft of this biography, I sent it to Judy,” Oppenheimer writes. “After several months, she returned it with hundreds of comments in the margins; she also attached a separate memo, 40 pages long, offering suggestions, disagreements and assorted thoughts, covering every era discussed in the draft.”

Recalling the exchange, Oppenheimer said: “It was hard for me to click ‘open’ on that PDF. Once I did, I realized there was a lot of wisdom in it.”…

(8) TATJANA WOOD (1926-2026). Comics colorist Tatjana Wood died February 27 at the age of 99. The New York Times tribute is behind a paywall. (The Lee Dillon mentioned in the article is the son of famed artists Leo and Diane Dillon.)

Tatjana Wood, an award-winning colorist who worked on covers and interior pages for DC Comics and was part of the critically acclaimed creative teams behind the comic book series Swamp Thing, Camelot 3000 and Animal Man, died on Feb. 27 in Brooklyn. She was 99.

Her death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by Lee Dillon, a friend who was helping to care for Ms. Wood.

Anyone who laid eyes on a DC Comics cover from 1973 to 1983 was likely seeing an example of Ms. Wood’s work. She colored nearly every cover for the company, whether the image was for a horror title, a war comic or a superhero adventure.

She also provided color guides for the engravers to follow on interior pages. In the days before computer-assisted production, that involved a painstaking process of creating hand-applied dyes and indicating color combinations — denoting the percentage of cyan, magenta or yellow to be used.

Comic books are often produced in a team effort involving a script writer, a penciler, an inker, a colorist and a letterer who adds the dialogue in the word balloons. In the 1986 story “My Blue Heaven,” written by Alan Moore, the bog creature Swamp Thing is in outer space and lands on a planet where everything is blue. That presented a coloring challenge.

“The old comic book coloring system was really limited,” Rick Veitch, the story’s penciler, said in an interview.

Mr. Veitch drew the initial images, which were then inked and colored. “You only had three or four variations on different colors,” he said. “Tatjana just turned it into a masterpiece.”

He continued: “She was able to take all the diverse visual elements on a comic book page, of which sometimes there are hundreds, and make them all clear against each other by the choice of which color and which tint she used, often using a very light blue against a very dark blue behind it, so that it would pop.”

Karen Berger, who edited Swamp Thing, wrote in an email about Ms. Wood: “Her magnificent and evocative palette was a perfect fit — she was an integral part of the magic of that groundbreaking series. She loved coloring ‘Shvampy,’ as she called him in her thick, gravelly German accent.”

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 8, 1921 – Alan Hale, Jr. (Died 1990.)

Let’s talk about Alan Hale Jr.

His father, Alan Hale Sr., played Little John in Robin Hood a century ago with Douglas Fairbanks and Wallace Beery, reprised the role in The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone, then played him once more in The Rogues of Sherwood Forest. We agreed that Robin Hood is genre, didn’t we?

Alan Hale Jr.’s best-known role is Captain Jonas Grumby — referred to by name only in the Gilligan’s Island pilot, thereafter as The Skipper. We’ve also agreed that series is genre. He’s owner and captain of the S.S. Minnow which ends up in the genre-based lost island setting with its passengers and sole crew member.

Counting the pilot, it ran for ninety-nine episodes over three seasons starting sixty-two years ago. There would later be three television films in the late Seventies and early Eighties in color. I don’t remember any of them, do any of you remember them?

There are two Filmation-produced animated sequel series which I’ve mercifully never seen as I’m really not keen on animated series made off live series and yes that includes the Star Trek one. They were The New Adventures of Gilligan and Gilligan’s Planet, both short-lived. Hale Jr. voiced his character.

Genre appearances included The Wild Wild West where he shows up in “The Night of The Sabatini West” as department chemist/agent Brown. We also have here Jim Backus as funeral director Swanson. A Gilligan’s Island in-joke is of Brown remarking he is going on vacation on a desert island!

There’s also My Favorite Martin, Fantasy Island, ALF for television series, whereas films were The Giant Spider Invasion, The Fifth Musketeer, and well, and I didn’t see anything else but if I missed anything I’m sure I’ll hear about it.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Brevity is missing one of the gang.
Brewster Rockit discusses orientation.
Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee has a second thought.
Foxtrot invents the next step in social media.
Speed Bump has the end in sight.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal shares the real reason for The Flood.

(11) ZERO GRAVITY NEWS #37. River Flow told Facebook readers this week that the “Chinese Sci-fi fanzine Zero Gravity News has completed 37th issue.”

…This issue mainly focuses on science fiction introductions and stories translations in East Asia (Korea, North Korea, Mongolia), Southeast Asia (Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia), West Asia (Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Oman, Jordan, Bahrain), and the Arab world of West Asia.

You can learn about the creative self-explanations and perspectives of many science fiction writers from Arab countries in this issue. You can also read many science fiction stories from non-English-speaking countries that have not been introduced before.

I even specially wrote a 20,000-word review article that comprehensively introduces science fiction works from the Middle East and Arab[ia]. The entire production took over a month and was the first time in the Chinese world to introduce such a large quantity of science fiction from the Arab world. I hope it can serve as a window for Chinese science fiction enthusiasts to understand science fiction from the Arab world….

(12) STORMY WEATHER. Cue Ethel Waters! According to the Guardian, “Stormy space weather may be garbling messages from aliens, new research suggests”.

Earth’s leading alien hunters believe extraterrestrials could be out there, they’re just having a hard time getting through to us because it’s stormy in space.

Reminiscent of ET’s struggles to “phone home” in Steven Spielberg’s 1982 blockbuster movie, new research by the Silicon Valley-based SETI Institute (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) suggests tempestuous space weather makes radio signals from the distant cosmos harder to detect.

The organization, which is partly funded by Nasa, said stellar activity such as solar storms and plasma turbulence from a star near “a transmitting planet” can broaden otherwise ultra-narrow signals. That spreads the power of any such transmission across more frequencies, the institute’s scientists say, which makes it more difficult to detect using traditional narrowband searches.

“If a signal gets broadened by its own star’s environment, it can slip below our detection thresholds, even if it’s there, potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we’ve seen in technosignature searches,” SETI astronomer Vishal Gajjarsaid.

His report, co-authored with SETI research assistant Grayce C Brown, was published this week in the Astrophysical Journal….

(13) A WHALE OF A TALE. “An American study shows that humans could live up to 200 years if its method were applied” at Ecoticias.

…Bowhead whales are the longest-lived mammals we know. Some individuals are estimated to be more than two hundred years old, yet they almost never develop age-related diseases such as cancer that become common in people after only a few decades.

That is a puzzle because larger animals have far more cells, which should mean more chances for dangerous mutations over time. This contradiction is known as Peto’s paradox, and it has pushed scientists to look for hidden defenses in species like whales and elephants that seem to dodge cancer despite their size.

In the new study, researchers focused on a molecule called CIRBP, short for cold inducible RNA binding protein. In bowhead whale tissue, they found CIRBP levels roughly one hundred times higher than in other mammals, suggesting that this protein is a major part of the whale’s repair toolkit.

When the team added the bowhead version of CIRBP to human cells in the lab, the cells fixed serious DNA breaks more accurately and produced fewer mutations. Fruit flies engineered to make extra CIRBP not only survived radiation better, they also lived longer than normal flies, hinting that this repair strategy works across very different species.

The study suggests that bowhead whales do not rely mainly on extra copies of cancer fighting genes, as elephants do, but instead on unusually precise DNA repair. Their cells seem to follow a quiet rule of repair rather than destroy, fixing damage instead of simply killing off stressed cells, which may help tissues stay healthy for many decades….

(14) PRIVACY? WHAT’S THAT? The Guardian reports: “AI allows hackers to identify anonymous social media accounts, study finds”.

AI has made it vastly easier for malicious hackers to identify anonymous social media accounts, a new study has warned.

In most test scenarios, large language models (LLMs) – the technology behind platforms such as ChatGPT – successfully matched anonymous online users with their actual identities on other platforms, based on the information they posted.

The AI researchers Simon Lermen and Daniel Paleka said LLMs make it cost effective to perform sophisticated privacy attacks, forcing a “fundamental reassessment of what can be considered private online”.

In their experiment, the researchers fed anonymous accounts into an AI, and got it to scrape all the information it could. They gave a hypothetical example of a user talking about struggling at school, and walking their dog Biscuit through a “Dolores park”.

In that hypothetical case, the AI then searched elsewhere for those details and matched @anon_user42 to the known identity with a high degree of confidence.

While this example was fictional, the paper’s authors highlighted scenarios in which governments use AI to surveil dissidents and activists posting anonymously, or hackers are able to launch “highly personalised” scams….

…Information about members of the public that is readily available online can already be “misused straightforwardly” for scams, said Lermen, including spear-phishing, where a hacker poses as a trusted friend to get victims to follow a malicious link in their inbox.

With the expertise requirement to perform more developed attacks now much lower, hackers only need access to publicly available language models and an internet connection….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George introduces us to “The Guys Who Invented English Spelling”.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/16/26 See A Pixel Pulled Out Of A Hat. It Doesn’t End Well. And No, I Don’t Know How The Pixel Got Into The Hat

Posted on January 16, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) CHILLING EFFECT. Don Blyly of Uncle Hugo’s in Minneapolis is one of the bookstore owners quoted in Publishers Weekly’s report “Twin Cities Bookstores Contend With ICE”.

…Sales are also down at Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s, known as the Uncles, according to owner Don Blyly. “A lot of people are demonstrating instead of reading books,” Blyly said, adding that sales last Saturday, usually the store’s biggest day of the week, were down two-thirds.

“A lot of my customers are afraid to leave their houses,” Byly said, “and there’s a lot going over on Lake Street”—a major artery through Minneapolis a block away from the Uncles that’s lined with Latinx restaurants, markets, and other businesses….

(2) GOLDEN REEL AWARD NOMINEES. The Motion Picture Sound Editors released the nominations for the 2026 MPSE Golden Reel Awards on January 12. Probably two-thirds of the works up for the award are of genre interest. The complete list is at the link. Murderbot is one of the nominees.

Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing – Broadcast Short Form

Murderbot: “All Systems Red”
Apple TV+
Supervising Sound Editor: Tyler Whitham MPSE
Supervising ADR Editor: Danielle McBride MPSE
Sound Effects Editor: Craig MacLellan
Dialogue Editor: Ève Corrêa-Guedes
Foley Artist: John Elliot

The winners will be revealed on March 8. As previously announced, two honorary awards will also be presented at the gala: Kathleen Kennedy will receive the 2026 Filmmaker Award, and supervising sound editor Mark Mangini will receive the Career Achievement Award.

(3) TIME FOR AN OSCAR PARADIGM SHIFT. “The Oscars Can’t Pretend Anime Doesn’t Exist Anymore” says The Hollywood Reporter.

Traditionally, the Animation Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has not been known for risk-taking. Since the best animated feature Oscar was introduced in 2002, the category has overwhelmingly rewarded studio-backed, 3D CGI family fare of the Disney-Pixar-DreamWorks school. In more than two decades, exceptions have been rare: one claymation winner (Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit), one stop-motion drama (Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio) and one independent (last year’s Latvian breakout Flow).

As East Asian animation — from Japanese anime to South Korean hanguk aeni and Chinese donghua — exploded into a global pop-culture force, the Academy has remained largely unimpressed. As far as Oscar voters are concerned, Asian animation can be defined as beginning and ending with the films of Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, The Boy and the Heron) and his devotees at Studio Ghibli. Miyazaki’s singular style — his hand-drawn, painterly aesthetic and his thematic focus on a child’s-eye view of morally complex, humanistic tales — has been treated as the sole Asian animation worthy of entry into the Oscar canon. To date, Mamoru Hosoda’s 2019 time-travel drama Mirai remains the only non-Ghibli anime feature ever nominated.

Things will be different this year.

Two of the season’s animation frontrunners — Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters and anime blockbuster Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, both Golden Globe nominees — have little in common with a Miyazaki movie. KPop is a neon-soaked action musical about a chart-topping girl group, Huntrix, juggling stadium tours with their secret lives as superpowered demon hunters. Demon Slayer, the first of a series-ending film trilogy, is a master class in hyper-kinetic, violent battles and high-stakes melodrama, in which a sequence of epic duels is intercut with emotional character backstories. Dark horse contenders include Scarlet from Hosoda, an action-fantasy reimagining of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” as a surreal revenge tale; and Ryu Nakayama’s Chainsaw Man, another anime series to film adaptation, featuring a hero whose arms and head turn into chainsaws, who falls for a girl who can transform into a nuclear bomb….

(4) VERY LATE BREAKING NEWS. Last November is when Scott Edelman’s collection 101 Things to Do Before You’re Downloaded was released. How did I miss that? I don’t know, but let me clue you in about it today.

2025 marked the 50th anniversary of the launch of Scott Edelman’s professional writing career, and he says:

…Though much of my fiction over the decades has been horrific — so much so I’ve received eight Bram Stoker Award nominations, plus Publishers Weekly has said of my 2020 collection of eerie tales, Things That Never Happened, that “his talent is undeniable” — I’ve found that as the world itself has become more horrifying, my fiction became less so. That wasn’t anything done by choice, but rather as a natural response to the terrifying tenor of the world.

And so I found myself instead writing mostly of robots rather than zombies, and deep space missions have been swapped in for serial killers. Time travel has taken the place of terror.

Oh, don’t worry. I haven’t abandoned horror. I never could. But as a percentage of tales lately told, science fiction has in recent years been winning out.

As proof of that alteration to my psyche, I offer up the contents of my newest collection, 101 Things to Do Before You’re Downloaded. Included among the thirteen stories you’ll find “The Stranded Time Traveler Embraces the Inevitable,” the writing of which released me from my despair over the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election as well as breaking the only writer’s block I’ve ever experienced; “Learning to Accept What’s to Come,” in which two robots wrestle with surviving as humanity seems headed to become merely a memory; the title story, in which our species — or some of us anyway — seeks a new home as our solar system reaches the end of its life cycle; plus ten more glimpses of the future….

(5) WHAT HE LIKES ABOUT AKOT7K. NPR’s Glen Weldon says this series travels light: “’A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ review: ‘Game of Thrones’ for the haters”.

…A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms requires no homework; it’s a small, grounded story you can watch without a wiki open on your phone.

In fact, it’s easier to start by listing the stuff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms doesn’t have, before getting to the stuff it does.

No magic. No dragons. No epic sweep. No maps. No internecine family trees. No sexual assault. No incestuous aristocrats. No female nudity. (Male nudity, however? Including some full frontal that’s … markedly um … full? Yep.) No “Bend the knee!” No vast armies somehow traversing entire continents on foot over a long weekend.

But don’t get it twisted: This is still a show based on Martin’s fiction, and while it may not suffer from his above writerly tics, it doubles down on others: The only women with speaking parts are either sex workers or love interests. And those love interests swiftly get relegated to plot devices, as violence against them spurs our hero — who is, after all, a literal white knight — into action.

The fact that it feels so wholly and gratifyingly different than both GoT and HotD is the product of a combination of factors — length (just six episodes, each around 30 minutes or so), point of view (instead of rich ruling families, AKotSK is told from the perspective of Westeros’ commoners), scope (the entire series takes place over the course of a few days, entirely in one location — a jousting tournament) and, especially, tone….

(6) THIS WOULD TURN IT INTO A LAUGHING ACADEMY. “Stephen Miller Begs William Shatner To Save ‘Star Trek’ From Wokeness” reports HuffPost.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller took a brief moment away from his goal of deporting immigrants in order to offer a suggestion on how to improve “Star Trek.”

And, yes, he was mocked.

The franchise’s latest show, “Starfleet Academy,” debuted this week on Paramount Plus and, true to the original vision, shows characters from different backgrounds working together for a greater cause.

So, of course, Miller hated it.

On Thursday, he responded to a post from the @EndWokeness X account that showed a brief clip of three female characters competently dealing with a serious issue by calling the clip “tragic.”

Miller then made a suggestion that Paramount Plus “save the franchise” by bringing back 94-year-old William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in the original 1960s-era show, and “give him total creative control.”…

…But on X, the mockery commenced, including this joke from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office: “Stephen Miller saw an alien on the bridge and started drafting an executive order.”…

… Some people pointed out the franchise’s history of promoting civil rights and Shatner’s own commitment to progressive politics….

…One person did point out a possible reason why an “America First” guy like Miller might want to rethink his “Star Trek” suggestion: Shatner isn’t an American citizen…

(7) UNIVERSAL STUDIOS’ CLASSIC SCARES. CrimeReads presents “A Brief, Disturbing History of Universal Monsters”. Keith Roysdon’s full thoughts about each are at the link.

Although it’s long been said that Sherlock Holmes, Mickey Mouse and Superman are the most familiar characters in fiction – especially if we take into account all the variants of those characters – you could make the argument that the Universal monsters, the creatures first adapted from vintage tales and legends by Universal Studios from the 1920s onward, are equally recognizable. Their faces appear on Halloween candy, they stomp and snarl through cartoons and pop music and commercials and their on-screen iterations are endless, timeless and modern, as the recent “Frankenstein” adaptation demonstrates.

These creatures inspire nightmares and box-office and, after more than a century of film, continue to be a cultural force.

Inspired in part by the relatively recent films that bring these legends to life, I wanted to touch on the waves of film adaptations of what might be Hollywood’s first and most durable intellectual property. (Sorry for bringing it down to the IP level, but the box-office immortality of the creature creations is a big factor in their cultural immortality.)

A quick note: I’m limiting myself to only a handful of what I’m defining as the Universal monster “stars,” namely Dracula, Frankenstein (and his monster), the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Invisible Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. You could argue that other Universal staples like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Phantom of the Opera would be appropriate additions to the list and I wouldn’t even disagree. But I had to narrow the field a little. (And those monsters still get a shout-out.)…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

January 16, 1970 — Garth Ennis, 56.

Garth Ennis is without a doubt one of my favorite comic writers. Born in Northern Ireland, though a rare individual who grew up with no religious background (and you are fully aware why I’m mentioning that), he’s now resident in the States.

Next up on the list of series he wrote that he created and I seriously adore is Hellblazer with the supernatural detective John Constantine. I can’t say that I’ve read every issue of that series as I lost interest in it a decade or so ago but his work on it, mostly from issues forty to eighty-three, was among the best undertaken in the series.

I’ve read all of the Preacher series, a disturbing story, twice. I have not seen the series that was spawned out of it. It lasted for four seasons, so the viewing audience liked it. What say y’all? Worth seeing?

He had a run on The Authority for the Wildstorm imprint, that run being possibly the most annoying run in the history of the series as it focused on a character called Kev; and the first arc of the Authority spin-off series Midnighter, a character he admits was conceived as an anti-Superman by him and artist Brian Hitch.

Before you ask, where’s the Marvel Comics, I looked at his work there and since I hadn’t read any of it, save random issues of his Punisher writing, I can’t say what is good and what isn’t. So do feel free to tell me what is good over there.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

xkcd places importance on punctuation.
Arctic Circle is cheered by comebacks.
Brevity decries a new fad.
Carpe Diem has a claim to fame.
Glasbergen knows writers.
Off the Mark has Vader going formal.
Reality Check has a difficult captcha.
Tom the Dancing Bug stays frosty.
Zack Hill complains about the movie.

(10) URSA MAJOR AWARDS NOMINATIONS OPEN. The public is invited to submit Ursa Major Awards nominations through February 5. “More formally known as the Annual Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Award, the Ursa Major Award is presented annually for excellence in the furry arts.”

The administrators have added two categories, one permanent, plus a one-shot.

We are pleased to announce a new category, Furry Streamers! When nominating names, please try and include links to their socials, such as their Youtube, Twitch, Etc.

For the 25th anniversary of the UMAs, we have a special category! Classic Anthro Videogames! This is a fun, one-time category to celebrate Anthropomorphic video games that never got a proper shot in the UMAs!

(11) LEGO’S ZELDA DIORAMA. Gizmodo tells readers how “Lego’s Next ‘Legend of Zelda’ Set Takes Us Back to ‘Ocarina of Time’”.

…This morning Lego and Nintendo unveiled Ocarina of Time: The Final Battle, a 1,003-piece diorama faithfully recreating the climactic fight from the beloved game. Taking place on a Triforce-badged display base recreating the fiery arena and ruins of Hyrule right out of the N64, the set includes three minifigures—Link, Princess Zelda, and Ganondorf—as well as a massive brick-built version of the latter’s transformation into Ganon.

The set itself also features a bevy of little features and nods to Ocarina, including a pile of rubble for the Ganondorf minifigure to burst out of, as well as a couple of items hidden away among the ruins in the form of a trio of recovery hearts (you’ll need them!) and the Megaton Hammer. And, of course, there’s a small display stand to pose Navi the fairy floating from nearby. But really, the focus is on that amazing, brick-built Ganon, which is fully poseable and comes with two massive greatswords for him to wield….

(12) DID E.T. CALL? “This SETI program is chasing down its final 100 signals: Could one of them be from aliens?” asks Space.com.

Astronomers are using China’s powerful FAST radio telescope to chase after 100 intriguing signals detected by the SETI@home project, which is run by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scientists.

SETI@home, which ran from 1999 to 2020, had millions of users all around the world donating their CPU time to downloadable software that churned through data collected by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. In the end, 12 billion candidate narrowband signals were spotted. These signals appeared as “momentary blips of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky,” David Anderson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and co-founder of the SETI@home project, said in a statement.

FAST, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, has been patiently following up on this century of candidate extraterrestrial signals since July 2025. Although observations and analysis are still ongoing, bitter experience has taught the SETI@home team to expect them all to turn out to be local radio frequency interference (RFI) rather than real extraterrestrial beacons.

But whatever their origin, they represent the culmination of one of the largest citizen science projects ever undertaken. It’s taken years to figure out how to properly scrutinize this vast amount of data.

“Until about 2016, we didn’t really know what we were going to do with these detections that we’d accumulated,” said Anderson. “We hadn’t figured out how to do the whole second part of the analysis.”…

… Eventually, at the supercomputer facilities of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, algorithms designed to spot RFI sorted the wheat from the chaff, reducing those 12 billion to 1 million, then 1,000. These 1,000 signals then had to be inspected manually, by eye, before being whittled down to 100 that deserved a second look….

… The scale of the project has gone far beyond the dreams of Anderson or anyone on his team when SETI@home began in 1999. They thought they might get 50,000 users if they were lucky. By the end of the first week they had 200,000 users, and within a year they had 2 million….

(13) TOPPING OFF. Smarter Every Day shared “Refueling a NUCLEAR REACTOR”.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George has also made a new Pitch Meeting video: “The Fantastic Four: First Steps Pitch Meeting”.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/9/25 I Shot The Sheriff But I Did Not Shoot The Scroll

Posted on November 9, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) TESTIMONY OF MUSHROOMS. What does it look like to give nature full rights and legal representation? Grist’s new “Imagine 2200” short story, “The Case of the Missing Lake” by Colby Devitt, imagines that world in a high stakes legal drama.

When Lake Ballona disappears, legal and political processes kick into action. But when a mushroom communicator brings the perspective of the mycorrhizal network to the table, the question of who stole it and who gets to keep it gets complicated.

(2) THE ROAD FROM SOUTH PARK TO THE WHITE HOUSE. The New York Times tells how “‘South Park’ Takes On Trump and Wins Bigly”. (Behind a paywall.)

When they started sketching new episodes of the brash animated comedy “South Park” this summer, the show’s two creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, found themselves thinking a lot about politics and MAGA. The Trump administration, and everything that comes with it, was inescapable.

“It’s not that we got all political,” Mr. Parker said in an interview. “It’s that politics became pop culture.”

On top of that, they sensed a fear of speaking out against the administration and that “new taboos” had emerged, Mr. Stone said.

“Trey and I are attracted to that like flies to honey,” Mr. Stone said. “Oh, that’s where the taboo is? Over there? OK, then we’re over there.”

The result has been a season full of withering attacks against President Trump and his team of advisers. It has turned “South Park,” which built its reputation on the scatological adventures of four young pals, into a surprising voice of the resistance and catapulted the show back into relevance — no small feat for a program that is nearly three decades old.

Ratings for the Comedy Central show have surged. Viewership over the past four months is more than double 2023, the last year the show had a new season, according to Nielsen. “South Park” has gotten so popular so quickly that entertainment websites have alerted even minor scheduling changes.

Making the criticism of Mr. Trump even more notable: It has come immediately after Paramount, Comedy Central’s parent, changed owners in a series of events that appeared to cater to Mr. Trump. It has also aired during a few chaotic months in the comedy world. Paramount abruptly announced in July that it would cancel Stephen Colbert’s late-night show after this season, and Disney temporarily pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s competing show off the air in September after pressure from a top Trump administration official.

(3) BRAVE NEW BOT. Camestros Felapton’s Robot Fabulas series takes up “Ch40: Robby the Robot”.

…[Forbidden Planet] famously incorporates elements of Shakespeare’s The Tempest with the role of Prospero shifted to Dr. Edward Morbius played with some gravitas by Walter Pidgeon – a philologist who is one of only two survivors of a doomed expedition to a remote planet. There he found the remains of an alien civilisation, learned to read their records and eventually gained (some) control of their technology. In the play Prospero has two supernatural servants, Ariel (a spirit like being) and Caliban (a monstrous enslaved being). The Forbidden Planet turns Caliban into an invisible (largely) monster who it is eventually revealed is an involuntary manifestation of Morbius’s subconscious. “Monsters from the id!” is the answer to the series mysteries that film poses to the viewers, from what happened to the original expedition to why the alien civilisation destroyed itself.

Ariel, on the other hand, takes on a very different form.

In different strands of this project we have looked at mythic/literary manufactured beings, fictional robots, automatons and puppets. Robby the Robot is, in part, all of these things.

Thousands of dollars went into building a complex movie prop for the role of Morbius’s high-tech servant Robby the Robot. The design of the robot eschewed the more blocky image of a mechanical man and instead used more spherical elements that gave the robot the look of a deep-sea diving suit. The distinctive head of the robot used vacuum formed plexiglass to create a kind of parabolic dome, through which mechanical switches and revolving gyroscopes can be seen….

(4) WE ARE (A.I.) DOOMED. DOOMED. DOOMED! YOU HEAR? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I keep on telling folk that the machines are taking over but no-one ever listens… Actually, that’s not true: it is a load of balderdash and, dare I say it – yes, I do (Mike, cover your ears) – bumpkin. The ‘Godfather’ of artificial intelligence (AI) is Geoffrey Hinton. Lest you had forgotten, he won the Turing Award in 2019 and he has now just won the Queen Elizabeth Award. (Oh, and he bagged a Nobel in 2024, but you knew that.) He has been warning for some time of the dangers of AI and that it could doom humanity. (So I am certainly not alone in warning folk. That’s a little myth I’ve been perpetuating…) And this brings us up to date.

This week’s BBC Radio 4 programme Inside Science looked at AI as a threat. The first half of the programme was devoted to a fascinating interview with the Godfather of AI himself and why it certainly threatens humanity. This threat is so serious that it should necessitate us, whether we like it or not, to research into how we might (just ‘might’) come up with a way of successfully living with AI… If we don’t, we are doomed. Doomed. Doomed! You hear?

With the Turing Prize, the Nobel Prize and now this week the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering under his belt, Geoffrey Hinton is known for his pioneering work on AI. And, since leaving a job at Google in 2023, for his warnings that AI could bring about the end of humanity. Tom Whipple speaks to Geoffrey about the science of super intelligence.

You can access the programme here.

(5) ROBERT R. CHASE. [Item by Brick Barrientos.] Author Robert R. Chase died October 21 from cancer. Bob was a frequent guest at Baltimore and Washington conventions. He played my trivia contests a few times. I believe we were on a Doctor Who panel at Balticon, after the first year of Jodie Whitaker. We both liked Graham, played by Bradley Walsh, because we were both old guys. In addition for me, because Bradley Walsh was a game show host. My daughter Miranda met Bob before she was five, and I tried to make the point to her that this was one of the writers whose name was one of those on the front of an issue of Analog I was showing to her. That writers were real people. The family obituary is here.

Robert Reynolds Chase died on Monday, October 20, 2025. Born in Attleboro, MA in 1948, Robert attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Dartmouth College, and earned his J.D. at Duke Law School. It was at Duke where he met his beloved wife, Margaret.

For over 40 years he was a civilian attorney for the United States Army specializing in contract and procurement law. He retired as Chief Counsel of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in 2016.

A passionate reader, writer, and lover of stories, Robert published three science fiction novels: The Game of Fox and Lion (1986), Shapers (1989) and Crucible (1991), as well as over 35 shorter speculative fiction pieces in publications including Analog Science Fiction and Fantasy & Science Fiction. In addition, a non- fiction article “Science Friction” was published in the journal First Things. His final published story was “Lost Recall,” published in the September 2024 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

November 9, 1934 — Carl Sagan. (Died 1996.)

By Paul Weimer: Billions and Billions of milliseconds of my life have been influenced by Carl Sagan.

Carl Sagan with a model of the Viking lander in Death Valley (NASA).

It all started with Cosmos, the original TV series. I heard about it (in TV Guide!) and wanted desperately to watch it in the hallowed year of 1980. I was entranced from the first episode, which had such diverse ideas as the cosmic calendar, the Library of Alexandria and much more. Cosmos became important must see viewing for me, and in an age before I had a VCR, I tried to use a tape recorder to capture an episode (“Heaven and Hell”, on Venus and global warming). I was entranced and Carl Sagan is directly responsible for me being fascinated with science in general and biology and astronomy in particular.

He kindled the love of science in me. While I did not ultimately end up as a scientist, my love of science grew hand in hand with my love of science fiction, and Sagan is the person to thank and point to for that.

Besides Cosmos, his last major work, Pale Blue Dot, stands as a book that very darkly and presciently has foreseen our current political environment, where ignorance and misinformation, particularly around science, has become public policy for the Republicans. Sagan’s warnings, as well as his love of science and his defense of science as an idea, a process, that is ultimately not just worthwhile…but vital to our future.

Sagan has written other books as well, and has been an influential figure, good and bad for a long time (I remember an Omni magazine comic that posted and posited him as a villain covering up evidence of aliens having visited Mars. That…was a bit of a shock).

In order to celebrate Carl Sagan’s birthday, you must first invent the universe.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit has the last words of defeated aliens.
Crabgrass has the very image of inspiration.
Cul de Sac says kid’s cereal boxes have the best stories.
Luann has noticed something about comics.

(8) POP CULTURE TRADING CARDS ON THE BLOCK. Here are some highlights from Heritage Auction’s 2025 November 13 Non-Sports Trading Cards Showcase Extended Bidding Auction #43218.

1962 Topps Mars Attacks – #1 The Invasion Begins – MBA 6.5 .

The 1962 Topps Mars Attacks set is one of the most famous and controversial non-sports trading card series ever released, consisting of 55 vividly illustrated cards that depict a violent Martian invasion of Earth. Painted by Norm Saunders from sketches by Wally Wood and Bob Powell, the set blends pulp sci-fi with graphic horror, showing scenes of alien destruction, human resistance, and shocking imagery that stirred parental outrage at the time. Pulled from shelves in some areas due to its violent content, the series nevertheless became a cult classic, and today high-grade originals are considered blue-chip collectibles in the non-sports hobby, inspiring comics, reprints, and even Tim Burton’s 1996 film Mars Attacks!

1994 Comic Images Jack Kirby: The Unpublished Archives – Original – Card #89 Power Plane.

The 1994 Comic Images Jack Kirby: The Unpublished Archives trading card set is a 90-card tribute to the legendary “King of Comics,” showcasing rare and previously unseen artwork from Jack Kirby’s vast creative vault. Each card features high-quality reproductions of sketches, concept art, and unfinished pages that reveal Kirby’s raw creative process and unmatched imagination. Spanning themes from superheroes to science fiction and fantasy, the set offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the mind of the artist who helped define the visual language of modern comics. Printed on glossy stock with detailed commentary on the reverse, The Unpublished Archives stands as both a collector’s item and a historical document-celebrating Kirby’s genius and preserving unseen pieces of his artistic legacy for fans and historians alike.

Offered here is an outstanding opportunity to own an original Jack Kirby illustration for card #89 “Power Plane” from the card set. The art measures 28″ x 18″ and was created on illustration board measuring 30″ x 20″. The illustration board is framed with a black border with a total measurement of 32″ x 21″. A piece of paper stating “Ruby Spears Enterprises, Inc. 1984 has been pasted to the bottom right of the illustration board.

1966 Topps Batman Black Bat Logo – Complete Graded Set of 55.

The 1966 Topps Batman Black Bat Logo card set is one of the most iconic non-sports issues of the 1960s, released during the height of the Batman TV show craze. This 55-card series is identified by the black bat symbol on the card fronts and features dramatic, pulp-style painted artwork-much of it by artist Norm Saunders-depicting Batman and Robin in action against Gotham’s rogues. The Black Bat series leaned heavily into comic-inspired illustration, giving it a unique aesthetic that appealed to young fans and collectors. Today, it stands as a highly sought-after vintage set, prized both for its artistry and for its role in the broader wave of “Batmania” collectibles of the era.

1964 Leaf Munsters – Complete Set of 72.

From 1964 to 1966 the Munsters provided a quirky and humorous escape for viewers by providing a satirical view of suburban life with traditional monsters from the movie genre. Through the magic of syndication, Lilly, Herman, Grandpa and Eddie along with a pet dragon named Spot have entertained a generation of fans. Offered here is a complete set of 72 Leaf “Munsters” cards.

(9) PROJECT GUTENBERG ORIGINS. BBC Audio’s Witness History features “The ‘father of e-books’”.

In 1971, an American historical document typed out on a university computer played a vital role in the digital revolution of electronic books. It became the foundation of Project Gutenberg.

Michael Hart, the visionary behind the project, later became known as the ‘father of e-books’.

His close friend, Greg Newby, who was Project Gutenberg’s CEO and director, tells Gill Kearsley how a bike ride to a shop became the unlikely catalyst for a global transformation in how we read and share literature. Greg died shortly after giving this interview.

(10) BE ON THE LOOKOUT. [Item by Steven French.] They’re heeeeeeere! (Maybe.) “Self-replicating probes could be operating right now in the solar system; here’s how we could look for them” suggests Phys.org.

In 1949, famed mathematician and physicist John von Neumann delivered a series of addresses at the University of Illinois, where he introduced the concept of the “universal constructor.” The theory was further detailed in the 1966 book, “Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata,” a collection of von Neumann’s writings compiled and completed by a colleague after his death.

In the years that followed, scientists engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) considered how advanced civilizations could rely on self-replicating probes to explore the galaxy.

As many theoretical studies have shown, self-replicating probes (released from a single planet) could proliferate and explore the entire galaxy within a few eons. According to new research by Professor Alex Ellery of Carleton University, these probes may have already visited the solar system, and some could be operating here right now. As he recommends in a recent paper, future SETI surveys should be on the lookout for the telltale technosignatures these probes would produce…

(11) WILL HUMANITY EVER BECOME A TYPE I KARDASHEV CIVILISATION? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I have to say I am not a big fan of the Kardashev scale which, no doubt, Sheldon’s mother believes to be a communist plot. Yet is has its adherents and is decidedly genre-adjacent as it aims to categorise planetary and interplanetary civilisations… Hank Green’s latest vid (14 minutes) at the Sci Show YouTube channel takes a dive into the Kardashev Scale noting that we are currently somewhere around 0.7 on it depending on how you do the maths.

If you’ve heard of the Kardashev Scale, you might be a fan of Sci-Fi. Or maybe you’re just interested in when Earth will achieve that elusive Type 1 status. But since its inception, people who aren’t Kardashev have had the opportunity to iterate on his original idea…from thinking about where blue whales fall on the Scale, to thinking up entirely new scales to describe humanity’s relationship with the world around them.

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

Pixel Scroll 10/21/25 Waiter, There’s A Flying Saucer In My Soup

Posted on October 21, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) KIM STANLEY ROBINSON ARCHIVE GOES TO HUNTINGTON. Announced today:“The Huntington Acquires the Archive and Library of Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer Kim Stanley Robinson”. The collection will be processed with the goal of making it available to researchers by 2027.

Kim Stanley Robinson beside a chapter outline for The Ministry for the Future, 2018.

The Huntington has acquired the papers and personal library of Kim Stanley Robinson, a New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards.

Robinson is the author of more than 20 books, including his bestselling Mars trilogy—Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), Blue Mars (1996)—and the widely praised 2312 (2012), Shaman (2013), New York 2140 (2017), and The Ministry for the Future (2020).

“It’s a deep pleasure to have my archive go to The Huntington,” said Robinson. “I remember visiting from Orange County when I was in school; as a lifelong library lover, I was amazed there could be such a big and beautiful one. Since then, I’ve known The Huntington as the home of the Octavia E. Butler papers, and I’m proud to have mine join hers there. Science fiction is the genre best suited to expressing Southern California—as our work will show. I’m also honored to have my papers join the library that holds those of other authors I admire, such as Hilary Mantel and Thomas Pynchon.”

Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem hailed Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, which envisions the consequences of a future climate crisis, as the “best science fiction–nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” The novel inspired the 2024 launch of the real-life Oxford Ministry for the Future, which describes itself as “an interdisciplinary network of academics, writers, policymakers, and corporate leaders working to convene high-profile public events and educational activities that amplify voices from the humanities and social sciences.” The protagonists of Robinson’s novels are often scientists, with storylines that engage in both technological discovery and the social issues surrounding scientific progress.

“The Huntington’s acquisition of Robinson’s archive and library expands our capacity to connect literature with pressing questions facing society today,” said Karen R. Lawrence, president of The Huntington. “Robinson’s unflinching fiction urges us to judge our present actions ‘from the angle of the future,’ as one of his characters puts it. The Huntington’s wide-ranging collections and support for advanced research will enable scholars to see Robinson’s work within both its literary traditions and cultural impact.”…

…“Robinson’s archive strengthens the Huntington Library’s holdings in contemporary literature, enriching a collection that also includes such speculative fiction writers as Octavia E. Butler and Robert Silverberg,” said Sandra Brooke Gordon, Avery Director of the Library. “Robinson’s archive also complements Huntington collections documenting the history of the American West, Southern California’s astronomical research, and the aerospace industry.”

The Robinson archive comprises 50 linear feet of papers, photographs, and manuscripts as well as thousands of digital files. It contains:

Draft manuscripts, typescripts, and digital files for nearly all of Robinson’s novels, with extensive revisions that reveal his writing process and evolving ideas.
Research materials and notes on subjects ranging from Martian geology and Antarctic glaciology to climate science and economics, which informed his fiction.
Correspondence with scientists, policy experts, and fellow authors, offering insight into his collaborations and his role in climate policy discussions.
Personal notebooks and journals documenting Robinson’s creative process, daily life, and reflections on environmental and political issues.
Thousands of digital photographs related to his travels and backpacking expeditions as well as ephemera related to his public appearances.
Annotated editions of works by authors who influenced him, including Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

(2) READING NAYLER. Rich Horton is jazzed about Ray Nayler’s new book, as he explains in his review for Strange at Ecbatan, “The End of the World (and a Beginning?)”.

Ray Nayler’s remarkable new novel is, from one perspective, a tale of the end of the world. It is from another perspective an oddly hopeful novel — though the hope is for something diminished, in a sense. It is a novel that is completely uncompromising both in its treament of its characters and in its view of its world and its power structures. It is also true SF and stuffed with fascinating ideas….

… The plot is intricate, with lots of spywork — daring escapes and desperate searches. As I said, Nayler is unsparing of his characters — no one is guaranteed to survive…

(3) SEE LE GUIN’S MAPS IN LONDON. The Architectural Association School of Architecture is hosting “The Word for World”, an exhibition and book presenting the maps of Ursula K Le Guin, at its London gallery through December 6.

When Ursula K Le Guin was writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World presents a selection of these images by the celebrated author, many of which have never been exhibited before, to consider how her imaginary worlds enable us to re-envision our own.

Le Guin’s maps offer journeys of consciousness beyond conventional cartography, from the archipelagos of Earthsea to the talismanic maps of Always Coming Home. Rather than remaining within known terrain, they open up paradigms of knowledge, exemplified by the map’s edges and how a map is read, made and remade together.

The exhibition coincides with the release of The Word for World, a book co-published by Spiral House (a new imprint of Silver Press) and AA Publications. The book brings Le Guin’s maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays by contributors from a variety of perspectives to enquire into the relationship between worlds and how they are represented and imagined.

(4) SEE LE GUIN’S ART IN PORTLAND. Theo Downes-Le Guin alerted readers today that an exhibition about Ursula Le Guin’s life and art – “A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin” – will open at the Oregon Contemporary in Portland, OR on November 1 (and remain up through February 8, 2026).

A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin offers a biographical and poetical portrait of one of Oregon’s best known artists. Examining important moments and themes in Le Guin’s life and oeuvre, the exhibition encompasses a rich variety of media, immersing guests in the ideas, playfulness and hope that course through Ursula K. Le Guin’s art. The exhibition is curated by Theo Downes-Le Guin, the author’s son, with contributions from many others who knew the author or her work.

A Larger Reality honors many facets of this complex artist, intermingling contemplative and open-ended experiences with texts, images, audio, video, interactive experiences, and ephemera, places to lean back and unwind, and places to lean in and engage. The exhibition offers different levels of engagement for fans and Le Guin novices alike.

During the three month exhibition run, A Larger Reality will be punctuated by programming that brings in other elements of Le Guin’s art including music, activism, and community engagement. An accompanying book, published by Winter Texts (Port Townsend) offers a series of texts by Le Guin and others.

(5) TREEHOUSE OF HORROR TIME. “’The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror XXXVI’ Score Was Inspired by ‘Jaws,’” explains Variety.

Yes, that was a “Jaws” reference in the latest “The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror” episode, and it very much riffs off John Williams’ iconic score.

Composer Kara Talve confirms “Jaws” was the main reference. Talve is no stranger to scoring “Treehouse of Horror,” the annual horror-themed episode of “The Simpsons,” which is now in its 37th season. She is part of Bleeding Fingers Music, a collective founded over a decade ago by Hans Zimmer. Talve is on her sixth go-round with score producer Russell Emanuel.

In the episode, Springfield is “menaced by a mysterious murdering monster from out of the sewers, Krusty has a demonic special guest on his live Halloween special, and we are transported a thousand years into the town’s poseable plastic post-apocalyptic future.”

The episode is split into three segments, the first titled “The Last Days of Crisco.” Fatberg is the monster who draws fat from his victims and parodies “Jaws.” Emanuel explains, “The music to Fatberg had to be delightfully distasteful and disgusting. So we had to score disgusting.”

Talve adds, “‘Jaws’ was the biggest reference for Fatberg. So we got to go really John Williams, with heavy orchestral music, and we used big, over-the-top brass.” The duo moved around notes to create a sound that was dissonant, amplifying the disgusting effect….

… “Clown Night with the Devil” sees Krusty the Clown’s show go haywire when the Devil (voiced by Idris Elba) shows up and causes chaos. Unlike the previous segment, the music veered away from orchestral sounds and leaned into synth-heavy tones. Talve points out, “It references ‘Late Night With the Devil.’”…

… “Plastic World” leans away from horror and more into a dystopian depiction of Springfield, imagining a world covered in Buzz Cola bottles. For that segment, renowned woodwind player Pedro Eustache was brought in with his extensive arsenal of woodwinds. Talve says, “He used the Wilding Horn,” and, in addition to that, Eustache — who is known for making many of his own instruments — brought in a pipe.

Emanuel says, “He had made this giant thing out of PVC pipe, and he was a key part of the sound of ‘Plastic World.’”….

YouTube has a promo trailer — The Simpsons treehouse of horror XXXVI trailer (2025); a snip from the intro — The Simpsons treehouse of horror XXXVI intro (2025); and a two-minute clip from the episode — Bart Gets Dragged from Hell.

(6) SEVEN-FIGURE SHRINKAGE. “Disney+ Cancellations Jump After Kimmel Suspension” – the New York Times has the numbers. (Article behind a paywall.)

Disney+ and Hulu customers canceled their subscriptions in droves last month, according to independent data released on Monday, an apparent reaction to Disney’s temporarily pulling “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air.

About three million Americans canceled Disney+ in September, up from a three-month average of 1.2 million, according to Antenna, a subscription research firm. Disney-owned Hulu had roughly 4.1 million cancellations in the United States, up from 1.9 million.

The numbers offered the first glimpse at the economic fallout for Disney from the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” dispute. The company pulled Mr. Kimmel’s show on Sept. 17 after growing criticism, including by a top federal regulator, over comments Mr. Kimmel made during his show about the man accused of fatally shooting the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The show’s suspension set off a national debate about free speech and the Trump administration’s attacks on the media.

People who were angry about Disney’s action began calling for a boycott of the company’s products, in particular its streaming services. “Cancel your @disneyplus @hulu @espn subscriptions!” Tatiana Maslany, who starred in the Disney+ show “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” posted on her Instagram account.

Mr. Kimmel’s show returned on Sept. 23….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Item by Paul Weimer.]

October 21, 1956 — Carrie Fisher. (Died 2016.)

By Paul Weimer: She’ll always be Royalty to me, to quote the movie.

Since, as I have mentioned before, Return of the Jedi was the first Star Wars movie I saw, I got to see her in her most deprotagonized state, in the bikini, before seeing the more proactive and kick-ass heroine of the first two novels. Still, I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, given my age, and given her magnetism and charm, who could blame me?

So, when Fisher returned in the latest Star Wars Trilogy, after decades, I was cheered in The Force Awakens. And then felt the tragedy and weight of her passing, both cinematic and real, in The Last Jedi. I didn’t quite realize just how much she was a formative figure in my genre life, until she had passed and I could reflect on it.

In a non-genre mode, I highly enjoyed her as well in one of my favorite romantic comedies (if not the favorite), When Harry Met Sally. And again, who could blame Bruno Kirby’s character, upon seeing her on the double date, wanting to switch from Meg Ryan (sorry Meg) to Carrie Fisher first chance that he got.

And off screen, she showed she was as smart as she was intelligent and charismatic with her skills in script writing and rewriting. Truly a talent far beyond a woman in a gold bikini…and one that is missed.

Editorial note: This is her in Wonderwell, her last performance. She played Hazel who or may not be The Witch of The Woods. Though it was released in 2023, it was filmed in 2016.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Carpe Diem can’t go back for it.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal discusses signaling.
Speed Bump knows true pain.
The Argyle Sweater never expected this security question.
xkcd graphs a thing about Star Wars casting.

(9) DOUBLE DAY. Apprehension/Red Star Hustle, the former by Mary Robinette Kowal, the latter by Sam J. Miller, are part of a new Saga Double book released October 21.

Two expertly crafted crime stories, by two Nebula award winning authors, set in a far-future science fiction universe, from two award-winning authors known for their gripping plots and unforgettable characters—a short novel and a long novella that will thrill fans of space adventures, mystery, and intergalactic intrigue in this Saga Double.

(10) KICKSTARTER-FUNDED ON SPEC 2026 ANTHOLOGY COMING. Shadowpaw Press has announced it will carry on the legacy of On Spec, Canada’s premier magazine of science fiction and fantasy, which recently announced it will be ceasing publication after thirty-five years. (You can read more about the history of On Spec here.)

The current plan is to Kickstart an On Spec 2026 anthology early in 2026, with the goal of opening to submissions after that and publishing the book in the fall. If the Kickstarter succeeds, the aim would be an annual anthology thereafter.

The anthology will be open to all Canadian writers of science fiction and fantasy and edited by Shadowpaw’s publisher and editor Edward Willett, an Aurora Award-winning author of science fiction, fantasy, and non-fiction for all ages. Like so many other Canadian authors, Willett has himself been published in On Spec. Willett looks forward to drawing on the expertise and assistance of the current On Spec editorial staff as he works toward publication of the new anthology.

Willett has previously run six successful Kickstarters, most notably the campaigns that produced the five Shapers of Worlds anthologies, featuring authors featured on his Aurora Award-winning podcast, The Worldshapers, international award-winners and bestsellers among them, and numerous Canadians.

(11) WHAT IF WE FIND SOMETHING? [Item by Steven French.] It’s good to be prepared … “What do we do if SETI is successful?” asks Phys.org.

The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is evolving. We’ve moved on from the limited thinking of monitoring radio waves to checking for interstellar pushing lasers or even budding Dyson swarms around stars. To match our increased understanding of the ways we might find intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) is working through an update to its protocols for what researchers should do after a confirmed detection of intelligence outside Earth.

(12) JELLICLE PARODY. From Forbidden Broadway — “I Enjoy Being A Cat”. Hear the tune at the link.

Remember when actors played humans
Now to bring home a paycheck I dress up in fur
So I glue on my whiskers, tail and animal hair
And I grin it and I bare it with a purr.

When I wear my brand new collar
And my fur is all smooth and pat
I love to hear the public hollar
I enjoy being a cat.

I rather do serious dramas
But as long as my paychecks fat
The show is the cat’s pajamas
I enjoy being a cat.

[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Mickey Mikkelsen, 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 10/9/25 Last Supermassive Black Hole For 27 Parsecs

Posted on October 9, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) CANADA’S ON SPEC MAGAZINE TO FOLD. On Spec told readers today that the magazine will end publication after “Thirty-Five Years”. Managing editor Diane Walton had previously announced that she will be retiring and leaving On Spec at the end of December, and that her final issue would be VOL 35 No 4. Now, “After much soul-searching, and discussion with the rest of our editorial staff, the Board of the Copper Pig Writers’ Society has made the difficult decision to end publication of On Spec with that issue.”

… Putting an issue together takes a huge amount of work, with many hands participating. None of us are doing this as an eight-hour day job, so we contribute what we can, when we can. An optimistic person might suggest that the team could carry on, independently doing their various jobs without a wrangler, and make it magically come together like when the Fairy Godmother waves her wand and turns a pumpkin and some rats and mice into a fancy carriage with horses and servants. However, it simply isn’t fair to anyone to assume that everyone involved can get their particular piece of the puzzle together at the same time, without some form of coordination. Experience has shown that somebody still needs to decide what tasks need to be done, by whom, and by what deadline. And that someone herding cats for twenty years or so, has been me.

As I write this, I have just uploaded the edited and proofed stories to a Dropbox file for the current issue. I will soon share this file with our designer, along with a Resource Guide for the two of us to follow so that nothing gets missed. It’s his roadmap for placement of the works, getting author names spelled correctly, and putting the correct advertisements in. And not leaving anything out. At the same time, I’ve made sure the writers have signed contracts, received payment, and that we have a current author bio to publish with each work. I selected the featured author for our interview. I’ve also ensured that we have a really cool cover image lined up. And before that ever happened, I was assigning slush stories to be read by a team of first readers (after getting assurance that they had the time in their own schedules to do the reading). I’ve been doing this as a retiree for a few years now, and it’s hard to fathom that for some years before that, I was doing this along with having a day job. But I was younger then.

So here we sit. I wanted On Spec to end on a high note, with a reputation for excellence in the works we’ve published. Perhaps my induction into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association Hall of Fame this year was a sign that our time has come….

(2) GILLER PRIZE 2025 SHORTLIST. The 2025 Giller Prize shortlist was released October 6. The Prize is a celebration of Canadian literary talent. From the descriptions posted to the award website it does not appear than any of these works are of genre interest. The shortlisted authors are:

Mona Awad for her novel We Love You, Bunny, published by Scribner Canada
Eddy Boudel Tan for his novel The Tiger and the Cosmonaut, published by Viking Canada
Emma Donoghue for her novel The Paris Express, published by Harper Avenue
Emma Knight for her novel The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, published by Viking Canada
Souvankham Thammavongsa for her novel Pick a Colour, published by Knopf Canada

(3) IF LIFE WAS REALLY INTELLIGENT… “Daniel H. Wilson On The Colonialist Fallacies Undergirding Our Failed Search for Alien Life” at CrimeReads.

…NASA officially launched SETI on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ first “voyage of discovery.” So it was literally founded on a settler mentality. And the goal of SETI is to find something called “civilization.” Specifically, an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization.

It’s a loaded term. Civilization means different things to different people. But to SETI it means they’re looking for things like industrial changes to atmospheric signatures on faraway planets; they’re looking for non-naturally occurring detritus or artifacts floating around where they shouldn’t be; and of course, most of all, they’re listening for random radio waves flying off into outer space.

Putting those objectives into English—what SETI is actually looking for is pollution, space junk, and old television shows beamed out into the cosmos. They’re looking for what our civilization is producing right now, and has been for seventy years or so. We are the one and only example of what SETI thinks it is looking for—an intelligent civilization.

We are looking into the stars and scanning them for our own reflection, and that mindset has permeated a lot of our scientific endeavors.

Consider the Fermi Paradox—the fundamental question that has long defined the scientific debate about finding extraterrestrial civilizations: Where is everybody?

A physicist named Frank Drake created an equation to predict the likelihood of intelligent civilizations emerging in our galaxy over time—and it predicted thousands and thousands. The assumption is that these aliens should have spread far and wide by now—yet we haven’t found evidence of them.

To help out, Nikola Kardashev created a taxonomy: Type 1 civilizations use a lot of the power of their star; type 2 civilizations can absorb every last drop of energy from their home star by wrapping it in something called a Dyson sphere; and type 3 civilizations have drained all the energy not only from their home star, but from their entire host galaxy.

Based on the Drake equation predicting so many aliens, and the Kardashev scale predicting their technological development, the sky should be teeming with advanced intelligent civilizations sucking up all the power of their suns and possibly whole chunks of the galaxy.

So, again, where is everybody?

…. Maybe total galactic colonization, destruction of planetary environments, and complete extraction of resources is not the logical endpoint of an intelligent civilization? Maybe strip mining our home star and every resource in our solar system before moving on to pillage the rest of the galaxy should be labeled Type 0 civilization, instead of Type 3?…

… I would argue that SETI is not looking for an intelligent civilization. A truly advanced intelligent civilization would have a balanced ecosystem. They would have no reason to encase their suns in Dyson spheres to absorb every photon or to expand like locusts between worlds. I’d argue that sustainability and locality are the hallmarks of intelligence.

So why are we looking for worlds on fire? I think it’s because science has trouble looking past that Western perspective—we can’t see past our own reflection….

(4) JOIN US. [Item by N.] Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul‘s Vince Gilligan reunites with BCS‘s Rhea Seehorn for Pluribus, a new series premiering November 7 on Apple TV+ that seems to follow a woman trying to outrun a hivemind:

This series marks Gilligan’s return to sci-fi, a genre he got his start in writing on The X-Files, debuting with the season two episode “Soft Light” and going on to pen beloved installments like “Pusher,” “Paper Hearts” and “Tithonus.” A particularly famous episode of his, “Drive,” featured a guest star who Gilligan kept in mind for the lead actor of the new show he was developing. The rest is history.

(5) TRAILER PARK. Dropped today – “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: first trailer for new Game of Thrones prequel” – and the Guardian shares lots of background info.

HBO is headed back to Westeros once again. The network revealed the first trailer for its second Game of Thrones prequel, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, at New York’s Comic Con on Thursday, revealing the Targaryen colors, jousting and plenty of chainmail.

According to the logline, the series, based on a series of novellas by the Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, will follow “two unlikely heroes” who wandered Westeros: a “young, naive but courageous knight” named Ser Duncan “Dunk” the Tall, played by Peter Claffey, and his “diminutive squire” Egg, played by Dexter Sol Ansell.

The events – seemingly a lot of knight training, jousting and at least one battle – take place during “an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne and the memory of the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes, and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends”….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Mike Glyer.]

October 9, 1964 – Guillermo del Toro, 61.

Here at File 770 we’re big fans of filmmaker, director, and author Guillermo del Toro. And not just because of the great work he’s done – including Pan’s Labyrinth (he wrote its Nebula-winning script), The Shape of Water(which won him an Oscar as Best Director while the film took Best Picture), Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (an Oscar for Best Animated Feature), plus two Hellboy movies, and Pacific Rim. He’s also an impressive and generous person.

As John King Tarpinian, reporting on the del Toro signing at Mystery & Imagination in 2013, told us: “Guillermo is a kind, unassuming, down to earth man. When he heard a local bookshop, Mystery and Imagination, was just getting by in this age of internet sales and big box book stores he volunteered to do what turns out to be his only official signing of his new book, Pacific Rim, as a fund raiser… Once the event got started Guillermo was more than affable with all in attendance. He spoke with everybody, shook everybody’s hand. Guillermo was great with kids, a few of which had drawn their versions of the Kaiju. He’d stop and look at the drawing showing real appreciation at their attempts….”

He’s been inducted to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame (2017), and naturally has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (2019).

However, he tells interviewers that there’s a price to pay for his work:

“I think the main sign of a good story for you is that it has to hurt. It has to dig deep into who you are … I jokingly say that Hellboy is autobiographical, but it is. The way I think about myself, and the way I think about my story with my wife, everything is in there, and Pan’s Labyrinth was incredibly personal, to the point where I showed it to my wife and she turned to me after seeing the movie complete and she said, ‘You felt that bad?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I felt that bad.’

His latest project, a Frankenstein movie for Netflix, begins streaming in November.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

xkcd tries a new skateboard trick.
Bliss shares an American fear.
Close to Home remembers a contestant.
The Argyle Sweater did give a warning….

(8) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 145 of the Octothorpe podcast confusingly titled “James Bacon and His Enthusiasms” the hosts talk to Tommy Ferguson, chair of Reconnect, about conrunning with a Northern Irish slant. There’s an uncorrected transcript here.

John, Alison and Tommy are weaving ropes of fate as norns. The ropes lead to little spools, above their heads, reminiscent of a sculpture called Umbilical by Conrad Shawcross which Alison will explain in more detail in Octothorpe 146. The words “Octothorpe 145” appear at the top, and “Looking forward to Norncon” at the bottom.

(9) IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREEN. “A Stolen Dinosaur Named Claire Is Returned to a California Gas Station” reports the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.) (NBC News video here: “Stolen dinosaur named Claire returned with apology note”.)

Residents of a Los Angeles neighborhood devastated by wildfires earlier this year did not take it lightly when their community sustained a loss earlier this week: Their beloved 50-pound green, fiberglass dinosaur had been stolen.

Many stirred up a storm over the long-necked, make-believe herbivore named Claire after she was taken in the middle of the night from her perch outside a gas station in Brentwood, an upscale enclave east of the Palisades, on Sept. 27. They called the local news, held a memorial in her name and posted footage of the brazen theft on social media, where the outrage went viral.

The outpouring was probably what helped reverse the dino-knapping. Claire was returned 10 days later, bundled in cloth and carrying an apology.

“I’m sorry for stealing Claire!” whoever returned it wrote in a message taped to the back of her neck. “Please do not press charges! Thanks.”

The tale proved to John Fawcett, 65, the owner of the gas station, that in his star-studded neighborhood, Claire’s fame rose above the rest.

Mr. Fawcett has owned the gas station for decades. But when the station became a Sinclair Oil franchise seven years ago, a regular customer asked if Mr. Fawcett if he planned to get one of the company’s fiberglass dinosaur statues, which were once common at Sinclair gas stations.

Sinclair has used DINO in marketing since 1930. It first flew as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1963 and was exhibited in the New York World’s Fair the following year. But over the decades, the statues became rare.

He told the customer, Keith Salmon, that he “would love to get one, but they’re so hard to find,” Mr. Fawcett recalled. “You can’t get them. The company doesn’t have them.”

Mr. Salmon responded by inviting Mr. Fawcett to his production company office in Santa Monica.

“‘I would love to show you something,’” Mr. Fawcett recalled him saying. “So I went over to his office, and there was Claire.”

Mr. Fawcett did not find out how the customer had ended up with the five-by-eight apatosaurus (or maybe brontosaurus — Sinclair says it is aware of conflicting opinions among paleontologists), but he gladly accepted the present from Mr. Salmon.

Mr. Fawcett took the prehistoric creature to the gas station, painted her green and installed her next to the sign advertising the price of fuel. He gave her the name Claire, a spin on Sinclair. Since then, his wife and customers have taken turns dressing her up for holidays and other occasions.

Claire became beloved to the community, Mr. Fawcett said. Over the years, he said he thought that she might be stolen in a prank, perhaps a bet among college students, and then get returned.

But he couldn’t have anticipated what happened at 2:30 a.m. on a Saturday in late September, he said. Security footage showed a person with their jacket hood up, cutting the metal that kept her secured to the ground, then loading her in the back of a white pickup truck.

The cashier who arrived for her shift that morning to discover Claire missing called Mr. Fawcett to deliver the bad news. He was devastated.

“Obviously she’s not real,” Mr. Fawcett said. “But it was just sad to think that she’s not here. She’s not out on the corner where she belongs.”

Mr. Fawcett said the robbery looked planned, based on the footage. He suspected the person who took it had wanted to sell Claire. Sinclair’s website calls the dinosaur “one of the most popular icons in American petroliana,” or gas station collectibles. Online, the fiberglass statues are listed for sale for more than $1,500.

But the community stepped in and footage of the theft ended up on social media, where it was reposted by the actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who lives in nearby Pacific Palisades.

“Hey, you with your fancy truck, really?” she captioned the video on Instagram. “You need to steal the dinosaur from in front of the Sinclair gas station? Really? Not cool dude. Not cool!”

The tale spread so wide that Mr. Fawcett got a call from the Los Angeles Police Department, where an officer asked him if he wanted to file a report. He had thought Claire was gone for good and hadn’t gone to the police.

When Claire turned up on Tuesday — deposited in the early hours, wrapped in cloth, much in the same way that she had been taken — area residents rejoiced….

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by KCAL News (@kcalnews)

(10) THE EGG AND EYE. Futurism tells how “Japanese Farmers Send Out Automated Laser Drones to Defend Chickens”. (See demonstration video here.)

Chicken farming is a fowl business. To make it, you’ll need extensive knowledge in animal husbandry, business finance, biosecurity, and mechanical repair. If one company in Japan has its way, that list could soon include “drone skills” as well.

A Japanese firm called NTT e-Drone Technology Company Ltd has developed a drone-laser system designed to scare wild birds and other unwanted visitors away from chicken coops, as reported by tech blog Tom’s Hardware.

The quadcopter system sports a payload consisting of a laser-grid projector not unlike those chintzy Christmas light shows from 2019. When deployed, the drone automatically navigates toward unwanted nuisance animals before blasting them with a dazzling array of red and green lasers.

A YouTube teaser reel shows the NTT drone gently shooing wild boar, stags, crows, pigeons, and waterfowl away from a desired area….

(11) THIRD QUARTER STREAMING STATS. JustWatch has put out its Q3 2025 U.S. Streaming Market Share Report, analyzing activity from over 20 million monthly U.S. users. The latest data shows the competition intensifying among the top SVOD platforms, with challengers like Disney+, HBO Max, and Hulu closing the gap on long-time leaders Prime Video and Netflix.

Headline Insight

Prime Video and Netflix are losing steam as challengers like Disney+, HBO Max, and Hulu capture more market share. After years of dominance, the U.S. streaming landscape is more competitive than ever.

Key Takeaways

Market leaders losing dominance: Prime Video (20%) and Netflix (19%) remain on top but each lost 1 percentage point this quarter and 2 points year over year, continuing a steady decline from their peaks earlier in 2025.
Challengers closing in: Disney+ (14%) holds its ground as the strongest contender, while HBO Max rebounded (+1 pp) and kept its market share consistent year over year.
Mid-tier shake-up: Paramount+ (6%) continues to slip, down 3 points year over year, as platforms like Apple TV+ (8%) and Peacock (2%) hold steady or edge upward.

(12) WYOMING PUBLIC LIBRARY FIRING ISSUE SETTLED. “Librarian Fired in Books Dispute to Receive $700,000 Settlement” from a Wyoming county reports the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.)

A library director in Wyoming, who was fired two years ago because she refused to remove books with sexual content and L.G.B.T.Q. themes from a library’s children and young adult sections, was awarded $700,000 in a settlement on Wednesday.

Terri Lesley, the former director of the Campbell County Public Library in Gillette, Wyo., filed a federal lawsuit in April for defamation and the violation of her civil rights against the county, its board of commissioners, the library board and individual members of both government boards.

The lawsuit accused them of violating her First Amendment right to free speech, and of firing Ms. Lesley in a retaliatory and discriminatory way. She had worked for the local library system since 1996 and directed the system for about 11 years….

…Campbell County is among the most conservative areas in a very conservative state, but hundreds of people showed up at a special library board meeting when Ms. Lesley was fired, most of them in support of her, the Gillette News Record reported at the time. There were also a few dozen residents who showed support for the board.

After the news of the settlement, Ms. Lesley’s lawyer, Iris Halpern, said, “We care fundamentally about our constitutional rights and we fundamentally care about our neighbors, even if they’re different than us, and want them to have equal access to our public institutions.”…

(13) LIFE ON MARS DOOMS HUMANITY! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Does the recent discovery of signs of past life on Mars doom humanity?

Physicist Matt O’Dowd at PBS Space-Time has taken a look at the recent discovery of signs of possible ancient life on Mars and its implications. The discovery itself was announced in a paper in Nature mid-September (surely I covered it for File). Brief recap. The Perseverance rover discovered these strange mineral splodges (forgive the technical term) on the bed of a billions years-old former river that entered Jezero Crater which itself, billions of years ago, was a lake. Here’s the thing, these carbon deposit mudstones areas were surrounded by bands enriched in ferrous iron phosphate and sulphide minerals. Now, the carbon alone is quite interesting (we have found many carbon samples elsewhere on Mars) but is not firmly indicative of life until we can get a sample back to Earth and do an isotope analysis (life-born carbon is likely to be enriched in carbon-12 and depleted in carbon-13). However, the ferrous iron phosphate and sulphide minerals are interesting as it suggests that there was iron and sulphur reduction, simultaneous with organic matter oxidation and that is exactly what you would expect with some microbial action. Indeed, it is difficult to say how these minerals, in that environment, could have formed without life! Yet, ‘difficult’ is not ‘impossible’, so we really do need to give these samples a far more detailed analysis, but a certain Mr Trump has slashed US science (which had formerly been ‘great’ and world-leading but now leaves the world’s top science-active nations as being European and China). One casualty of this assault on science is the (formerly) planned NASA Mars sample-return mission.

The mysterious Mars minerals found by the Perseverance rover.

OK, so that’s the recent discovery and where we are. What of the implications?

Matt O’Dowd reviews the discovery in the first four minutes of PBS Space-Time’s latest 20-minute video. He then goes on to speculate, that if this is a detection of former life, what are the implications for life in the Galaxy at large? Here Matt enters some decidedly SFnal territory.

We do know that there is life on Earth – you are reading this – even if it is not particularly intelligent (just look who all too often we let lead us). Now, it could be that life on Earth is unique in the Solar system, if that were so then the implications for life – including intelligent life – elsewhere in the Galaxy would be potentially profound.

First, we have to discount a confounding hypothesis: that life on Earth and Mars has the same origins taking a ride on asteroid ejecta from one planet to the other. We need to park that notion to one side before we continue our contemplation.

Could life have transferred between Mars and Earth?

If Perseverance’s discovery really is of ancient life on Mars and this arose independently of life on Earth, then the implications would be that that life – at least microbial life – is really common in the Galaxy. And if microbial life is common then that ups the chance of the rise of technology wielding life elsewhere in the Galaxy!

But – and isn’t there always a ‘but’ – we have yet to detect biosignatures let alone technological signatures of life elsewhere in the Galaxy!

What this suggests, is that there is some sort of a ‘filter, a ‘Fermi filter‘ to be precise, that impedes the rise of technology wielding, interstellar-going, species from common, simple life. If there was such barrier then it would be a Great Filter that sieves out the rise of technology-wielding, interstellar-going species across the Galaxy.

The next question arises is what is this Great Filter? Well, we don’t know, but we do know that we humans exist and wield technology. So it could be that we have yet to encounter this filter and that it is a ‘late filter’ such as something that prevents interstellar colonisation. Here the reason that we have not yet encountered this filter is because it is in our future!

An alternative hypothesis is that this filter is an ‘early filter’ and that it is in our past. It could be that the ‘rise of life’ is one such early filter and that we just happened to be very lucky that life rose early on Earth (3.7 – 4.0 billion years ago) so giving the time for oxygen-generating photosynthesis (possibly around three billion years ago) and multicellularity (about one-and-a-half billion years) to evolve and then for us to arise after the Cambrian boom (or Cambrian explosion), a couple of partial planetary re-sets (such as the dinosaur extinction – I have never really forgiven the dinosaurs for what they did to Raquel Welch).

This is where Perseverance’s discovery of the signs of possible past Martian microbial life comes in. If life did arise independently on both Mars and Earth then one major, early Fermi filter can be ruled out. It would appear that the rise of life itself is apparently an easy evolutionary step.

If this is the case, Matt O’Dowd muses, and if things like the rise of eukaryotes (‘good’ cells) from prokaryote (simple, ‘before nucleus’ cells), multicellularity, are easy evolutionary steps, then this means that the great filter is not an early filter but a late one. The more we rule out great filters in the past; the more likely that a great filter is in the future! It means that we have yet to encounter it. Such a late filter could be global Armageddon through nuclear war, or it could be that interstellar colonisation is so difficult as being next to impossible. Or it could be that super-artificial intelligence destroys us: Skynet is an obvious SFnal example. (I have often warned that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever seems to listen.)

If all this is the case, the Perseverance’s discovery – should it really be a sign of former early Martian life – could be evidence that we have yet to encounter the great filter: it could be evidence of our doom to come! The filter has to be somewhere: we don’t see aliens.

Matt O’Dowd ponders if the great filter is in the future

This idea of a future great filter is not new: it has been put forward by others. Matt O’Dowd is just reminding us of this in the light of Perseverance’s recent discovery that, at the very least, we should not taker for granted our continued survival into the future as putative Martian life is now stronger evidence of existential risk. (Remember from earlier, it could still be that our life on Earth is Martian and that the rise of life itself is a difficult step.)

OK, so where does that leave us? Well, while I will leave the detail of my own feelings on this topic to my next book (currently about to enter copy edit with my publisher), I will make a couple of comments. First, it could very well be that life could arise more easily on an early Mars than an early Earth. The ratio of land to sea on early Mars was much higher than on Earth (this has nutrient release implications) and there were numerous crater lakes on Mars each of which could provide nurseries for life once it got going. Alas, Mars’ magnetic field ceased early on and its atmosphere began to be eroded by Solar wind. Meanwhile, the Earth had conditions capable of supporting a long-lived biosphere, so once life got going here it could, given time, flourish.

The second thing is that the rise of eukaryotes and the rise of multicellularity both occurred independently a number of times on Earth as did anoxygenic photosynthesis (non-oxygen-generating photosynthesis) and this suggests that these too were comparatively ‘easy’ evolutionary steps. Only oxygenic photosynthesis (oxygen generating photosynthesis as used by plants) initially arose once (in cyanobacteria) and this was then subsequently modified numerous times, including being purloined by the aforesaid plants. So it looks like many of the main candidates for early filters are actually unlikely filters.

A final thought relates to this oxygen-generating photosynthesis and the possibility of it arising on Mars. Back in 2019 it was reported that over a five Earth-year (three Mars years) period the Curiosity rover had detected seasonal oxygen in Mars’ Gale Crater. We do not know of any non-biological reasons for this seasonal oxygen (though there may be an unknown geological reason, but if so no-one has thought of it). Could it be that oxygenic photosynthesis arose early on Mars? If this were so then it could have risen early on Earth too, but the reason it took so long to transform the Earth’s atmosphere is that the biosphere (geology, oceans as well as atmosphere) was so vast and so different (chemically reducing as opposed to chemically oxidising) that it took literally billions of years to transform. If this is so then complex life may not be as rare in the Galaxy as some pessimists think, even if technology-wielding life is rare, or interstellar colonisation too difficult or impossible. Either way, it would be prudent to be aware of possible future Fermi filters.

You can see Matt’s 20-minute video below.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/17/25 A Handbook For Pixels

Posted on May 17, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) AI HALLUCINATES ABOUT JG BALLARD. The Bookseller exposes that “Coca-Cola advert featuring JG Ballard novel ‘errors’ was ‘AI-leveraged’” (article is paywalled).

A Coca-Cola advert released as part of its “Classic” campaign, which features well-known authors referencing its products in their novels, appears to include an inaccurate representation of work by the English novelist JG Ballard.

The Empire of the Sun and Crash author is one of three writers included in an advertisement released by Coca-Cola in mid-April 2025. The advert shows an old-fashioned typewriter writing out excerpts from novels, such as Stephen King’s The Shining, as if the onlooker is watching the author type directly onto the page. References to Coca-Cola are accompanied by the appearance of the brand’s red logo and a burst of sound evoking that which might accompany the opening of a fizzy-drink bottle. As well extracts of work by King and VS Naipaul the advert presents us with Extreme Metaphors by JG Ballard, dated 1967. It features a misspelling of the Chinese city of Shanghai.

JG Ballard, who was published by HarperCollins in the UK, did not write a novel published in 1967 called Extreme Metaphors. There is, however, a book titled Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with JG Ballard, edited by Dan O’Hara and Simon Sellars (4th Estate) and published in 2012, three years after Ballard’s death. O’Hara told 404Media: “The sequence of words being typed out by the imagined JG Ballard in the ad was never written by him, only spoken, and the only person ever to type that exact sequence out in English is me.”…

(2) HORROR UNIVERSITY OPEN FOR ENROLLMENT. StokerCon has announced the 2025 Horror University workshop schedule. From June 12-15 they will present nine live, in-person workshops at StokerCon 2025 in Stamford, CT. See course descriptions at the link.

HORROR UNIVERSITY is designed for horror writers interested in refining their writing, learning new skills and techniques, exploring new writing formats, or better understanding the genre. These workshops are taught by some of the most experienced voices in horror.

Registration per workshop is $55 per workshop for all attendees. General registration for StokerCon does not include Horror University programming; additional registration is required so that the Con is able to compensate each instructor for their workshop and support the cost of the program.

More details are available on Eventbrite and will be posted to StokerCon.com soon! Horror Universty workshops are separately ticketed sessions. Registrations may be purchased through the Registration portal.

(3) TUNED IN. A new episode – “Doctor Who: The Interstellar Song Contest” reviewed by Camestros Felapton. This is an ambiguous excerpt, but I want to avoid spoiling the review, the same way Camestros avoids spoiling the episode.

…Undoubtedly this is going to be a divisive episode. Some Doctor Who places I visit are showing a lot of love for it but I think a more general consensus is one of disappointment.

My main takeaway is that this episode is the best example of the recurring problem with this season….

(4) NIVEN Q&A. “Larry Niven interview: Ringworld legend discusses his classic novel and all things sci-fi” – a fun dialog that Niven fans will enjoy.

EHW: Is there anything you would do differently if you wrote Ringworld today?

LN: I’ve been telling people that I would start over with a universe in which you can’t go faster than light [and] nobody’s got psychic powers. The point is, if you build a Ringworld, it has to be because you can’t reach other stars…

EHW: What is the one piece of advice you would offer someone trying to write science fiction today?

LN: Shorten your name, like I did….

(5) BRADBURY’S BEST. James Wallace Harris only wants to read the best Bradbury – so how can he make sure he doesn’t miss any? Harris tries to solve that problem in “How Many Ray Bradbury Short Stories Do You Want to Read?” at Classics of Science Fiction.

…However, over the last five years, I’ve been gorging on science fiction short stories, and I’ve been surprised by how often his stories show up in anthologies. Then, a few weeks ago, I read The Bradbury Chronicles, a biography of Ray Bradbury by Sam Weller. Bradbury’s life was riveting, inspiring me to read more of his work. According to the Library of Congress, Bradbury published over 600 short stories. According to the Weller biography, by the late 1940s, Bradbury was writing and publishing a short story a week.

Piet Nel sent me a spreadsheet with 375 stories from all of Bradbury’s major collection. Piet also said, “Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, by Eller & Touponce (2004), has a comprehensive story list, compiled with academic rigor, up to 2002. It runs to about 400 stories.” So, it’s hard to reconcile the 600 number from the Library of Congress. Piet also sent me the link to Phil Nichols’ site and his Short Story Finder….

…I just don’t want to read that many Ray Bradbury stories. I just want to read his best stories, but I’m unsure which ones are the best. I’m partial to his science fiction stories, but I’m willing to read any type as long as they are among his best….

(6) GOLD STANDARD. “US Mint releases Space Shuttle $1 gold coin” and Popular Science tells how to get one.

You can now own a $1 gold coin celebrating one of America’s most revolutionary achievements: the NASA Space Shuttle program. The latest variant in the ongoing American Innovation $1 Coin series is available to order through the United States Mint. Selected to represent the state of Florida, the noncirculating legal tender is the third coin released this year and the 28th coin in the 15-year project first announced in 2018.

While the coin’s front displays the series’ Statue of Liberty image, the back shows the shuttle launching above plumes of exhaust. United States Mint Medallic Artist Eric David Custer sculpted the image while Artistic Infusion Program (AIP) Designer Ron Sanders designed it….

(7) MURDERBOT PRAISE. A highly favorable review – with a headline that makes an interesting claim: “’Murderbot’ review: This sci-fi show is the best new comedy of 2025” at NPR.

…I laughed a lot, watching Murderbot, and admired how much the show gets right from the jump. SecUnit offers a running commentary on the action, so the show is awash in voiceover. But that voiceover is used, never relied upon. It’s always employed in ways that individualize and particularize SecUnit’s character, which often manifests in jokes that undercut the events we’re watching through its eyes.

About those space-hippies. There are a lot of jokes at their expense, but they’re not the kind of lazy, lay-up, make-fun-of-the-wokes jokes. They’re specific, and so firmly rooted in character that they allow each member of the team to distinguish themselves from each other, to be weird in their own particular way….

…So, yeah. Murderbot is the best comedy series I’ve seen this year and I’m gonna be shouting that from the rooftops. Check out the episodes that drop Friday on Apple TV+. If you like them, do me a favor, because we need to get the word out about this show:

Meet me on the roof.

(8) LAW OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND. Seems the demand wasn’t that great in 1946. “Harvard Law Paid $27 for a Copy of Magna Carta. Surprise! It’s an Original.” The New York Times tells about the discovery. (Article is behind a paywall.)

Bought for $27.50 after World War II, the faint, water stained manuscript in the library of Harvard Law School had attracted relatively little attention since it arrived there in 1946.

That is about to change.

Two British academics, one of whom happened on the manuscript by chance, have discovered that it is an original 1300 version — not a copy, as long thought — of Magna Carta, the medieval document that helped establish some of the world’s most cherished liberties.

It is one of just seven such documents from that date still in existence.

“I never in all my life expected to discover a Magna Carta,” said David Carpenter, a professor of medieval history at King’s College London, describing the moment in December 2023 when he made the startling find.

The manuscript’s value is hard to estimate, although it is fair to say that its price tag of under $30 (about $500 today) must make it one of the bargains of the last century. A 710-year-old version of Magna Carta was sold in 2007 for $21.3 million.

Nicholas Vincent, a professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia, in eastern England, helped authenticate the text. He noted that the document, which bound the nation’s rulers to acting within the law, had resurfaced at a time when Harvard has come under extraordinary pressure from the Trump administration….

(9) JIM WALKER OBITUARY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Sadly, the British SF fan Jim Walker has passed. Jim was a friend of, and a contributor to, the SF² Concatenation. His first offerings were a couple of book reviews back in the mid-1990s. From the early 2000s to 2017, he was one of our regular convention reporters, especially of Eurocons. He also took part in the Anglo-Romanian Fan Fund activities of the 1990s to early 2000s attending events, both here in Britain when there were visiting Eastern European fans, and also in Timisoara, Romania, with our two International Weeks of Science and SF in 1999 and 2003.

In addition to Eurocons, he was a regular at Britain’s (there are others) Festival of Fantastic Films and the British Eastercon. A civil engineer by training and profession, in retirement he made short films with local friends including a couple of SF offerings which, naturally, were screened at the Festival of Fantastic Films. Sadly, Jim was not at the 2023 Festival of Fantastic Films which I attended for the first time in a few years. We last physically met up in the summer of 2019 when he came down to London. We met to take in the view by Greenwich Observatory of the Thames and the new financial district to the north. We then walked across Blackheath’s Black Death plague pit (hence Blackheath’s name), to have lunch at a real ale hostelry… The thing about ‘last times’ is that when they occur you never know then that they are a ‘last time’. Farewell old pal.

The Dead Dog party participants following a gala dinner for the 1st International Week of Science & SF in 1999. Jim is far left (Jonathan next to him, yellow tie).

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

By Paul Weimer: The Empire Strikes Back. The Greatest of the Star Wars films?

Possibly.

Like Star Wars, I didn’t get to see this one in the theater. I didn’t get any playsets for this one, no Cloud City playset, unfortunately. I had a sketchy idea of the events of the movie from seeing Return of the Jedi, and the Atari 2600 videogame. Oh, and the vector laser arcade game. So I knew only a sketch of the movie and its events.

It would be when it aired on TV in the mid-80’s (along with Star Wars itself, and after I had seen ROTJ) that I would finally see the movie.

Best script of the entire nine movies? Possibly. For freshness and reinvention, the original Star Wars has Empire beat, but Star Wars can be slow going in places, where Empire is much leaner, meaner and more controlled in its blaster fire. We see how Lucas clearly had changed his mind about Luke and Leia and started the run toward Leia and Han. We meet Yoda, in his best incarnation. Force Ghost Obi-Wan. And just the casual way Vader deflects the laser fire from Han Solo was just so good. It answered the question of “Why don’t you just shoot him?” that I had wondered since his lightsaber fight in Star Wars.

And of course “Luke, I am your Father”. One of the greatest twists in modern cinema, without none. Was Vader lying? Why did Obi-Wan lie if he wasn’t? It brings Luke and the Rebellion to a low point not long after, Han captured, the rebellion scattered to the wind. In the Hero’s Journey, this is about as low as things can get in the trilogy. The middle of trilogies is hard, often flabby or repetitive. Empire is none of these. It’s the exception that proves the rule.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit is fooled by a face.
Carpe Diem has trouble adjusting to working in person again.
Ink Pen would recommend his doctor.
Nancy thinks this self-help book is for someone else.
Off the Mark thinks the Lorax shares too much information.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal awaits the robot rebellion.
Wumo finds four’s a crowd.
xkcd complicates sailing.

(12) BUSTED. “How Broken is Google?” Camestros Felapton would like to tell you.

I’ve been writing short spoiler-free reviews of the current seasons of Doctor Who each (for me) Sunday morning, having watched the show Saturday (evening). Last week, I had a bit of blank on the title of the episode: was it the Story Engine…no…not quite. Rather than tie myself in knots I just googled it. “doctor who recent episode”.

Google came back with an answer: Castrovalva: Part One, Doctor Who Season 117, episode 1. It had a little picture of Peter Davison next to it. Observant readers will spot that Peter Davison is not Ncuti Gatwa, Castrovalva was broadcast 43 years ago and that, while long running, Doctor Who has not had 117 seasons….

And that’s not all!

(13) WHERE IT BEGAN. BBC reports about “The ‘space archaeologists’ hoping to save our cosmic history”. (And yet not a mention of River Song!)

Space is being commercialised on a scale unseen before. Faced by powerful commercial and political forces and with scant legal protections, artefacts that tell the story of our species’ journey into space are in danger of being lost – both in orbit and down here on Earth.

Like Stonehenge, these are irreplaceable artefacts and sites that have a timeless significance to humanity because they represent an essential stage in the evolution of our species. They are often also expressions of national pride because of the industrial and scientific effort needed to achieve them. Sometimes they are also memorials to those who died in the course of ambitious space programmes.

They also have another use. Studying these artefacts and sites helps researchers better understand how astronauts interact with new technology, adapt to new environments and develop new cultural practices. The conclusions of researchers can influence the design of future spacecraft and help future space missions succeed.

Can a new generation of pioneering space archaeologists like Alice Gorman and Justin Walsh help save our space heritage for coming generations, and how might their work change space exploration in the future? …

(14) IT HAS A PULSE. [Item by Steven French.] Not saying it’s aliens but not *not* saying it’s aliens either! “Not saying it’s aliens: SETI survey reveals unexplained pulses from distant stars” at Phys.org.

More than 60 years ago, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) officially began with Project Ozma at the Greenbank Observatory in West Bank, Virginia. Led by famed astronomer Frank Drake (who coined the Drake Equation), this survey used the observatory’s 25-meter (82-foot) dish to monitor Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti—two nearby sun-like stars—between April and July of 1960. Since then, multiple surveys have been conducted at different wavelengths to search for indications of technological activity (aka “technosignatures”) around other stars.

While no conclusive evidence has been found that indicates the presence of an advanced civilization, there have been many cases where scientists could not rule out the possibility. In a recent paper, veteran NASA scientist Richard H. Stanton describes the results of his multi-year survey of more than 1,300 sun-like stars for optical SETI signals. As he indicates, this survey revealed two fast identical pulses from a sun-like star about 100 light-years from Earth that match similar pulses from a different star observed four years ago…

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. DUST has posted “Sci-Fi Short Film ‘Imminent Arrival’”.

Richard James, AKA “Reaper Rick,” is a simple Red-blooded, paranoid, country man. His long history of Military Service has taught him to never trust the government, pushing him to live out his days in the country, off of the grid. Other than his religious viewership of his favorite cable news network, his only other connection to the outside world is through his good buddy, “Squinty Joe,” who he only keeps in contact through HAM Radio. The two of them engage daily about the latest wild conspiracy theories, further exacerbating and shaping their views on the world. The two are constantly trying to one-up each other, bragging about who has the latest gear or best doomsday prep. In their minds, the apocalypse is right around the corner so it only makes sense to have a solid plan. In this Sci-fi Dramedy short film, we follow a day in the life of Rick as his intense paranoia becomes a reality during one of the strangest days of his life!

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

Pixel Scroll 5/6/25 All I Need To Know, I Learned From Pixel Scrolls

Posted on May 6, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) MORE SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 COVERAGE. Two of the more widely-read pop culture sites have picked up the story – and heavily cite File 770, for which I thank them.

Gizmodo: “Hugo Administrators Resign in Wake of ChatGPT Controversy”
Slashdot: “Hugo Administrators Resign in Wake of ChatGPT Controversy”

Jason Sanford’s new Genre Grapevine is also devoted to the “2025 Seattle Worldcon AI Fallout”.

Yesterday Elizabeth Bear and Fran Wilde withdrew from the Worldcon program:

(2) BALTIMORE BOOK EVENT FAILS. “Broken promises, Fyre Festival vibes: A Million Lives Book Festival was a disaster” reports The Baltimore Banner.

In February, Philadelphia-area author Hannah Levin found out she’d been accepted to participate in A Million Lives Book Festival, a convention of fantasy authors, narrators and influencers to be held the first weekend of May at the Baltimore Convention Center. As a new author whose debut novel, “The Treasured One,” was published by Aethon Books in 2024, she was excited about the event. “We thought it would be a big thing for us,” she said.

It was a big thing, but not in the way anyone expected. The festival, organized by Baltimore-based author Grace Willows’ Archer Fantasy Events, was supposed to provide an opportunity for writers to network and an audience of at least 500 to 600 paid ticket holders. What participants got, they said, was a disappointing weekend of dashed expectations, unfulfilled promises, lost money and more questions than answers.

“I think ‘debacle’ is the word for it,” Levin said of the event that was quickly dubbed online as the Fyre Festival of literary festivals.

The 11 authors, vendors and influencers I interviewed by email and phone spent between $300 and $2,000 to attend A Million Lives depending on their travel arrangements and other factors. They said they were promised special badges that designated them as official participants, a creator’s lounge, cosplay events and a VIP swag bag for the top two ticketing levels.

That didn’t happen.

“There was a huge financial loss for authors, vendors and narrators attending,” wrote a book influencer known as Azthia, who spent about $300 on a plane ticket but crashed with other participants when her hotel stay was not paid for as promised. “They were told 600 tickets and in the end there were more authors than attendees.”…

(3) ACTOR/ACTRESS AWARDS? “’The Last Of Us’ Star Bella Ramsey Defends Gendered Emmy Categories” at Deadline.

Bella Ramsey has a decent shot at Emmy success this year — and won’t quibble if competing in the Lead Actress category.

The British star of HBO hit The Last of Us identifies as non-binary and prefers the they/them pronouns, but said it was fine for people to “call me how you see me.”

Speaking on Spotify’s The Louis Theroux Podcast about gendered award categories, Ramsey said it was important “recognition for women in the industry is preserved.”

“I don’t have the answer and I wish that there was something that was an easy way around it, but I think that it is really important that we have a female category and a male category,” Ramsey added.

The former Game of Thrones star said they had thought hard about how to represent non-binary individuals in award categories, but did not have a solution.

One idea was to name the category “best performance in a female character,” but Ramsey said this creates issues for those portraying non-binary characters on screen.

One thing Ramsey is certain of is that being called an “actress” feels uneasy. “I have a guttural, ‘That’s not quite right,’ instinct to it,” Ramsey said. “But I just don’t take it too seriously … it doesn’t feel like an attack on my identity.”…

(4) ROWLING ON HARRY POTTER ACTOR’S SUPPORT OF TRANS RIGHTS. “’I don’t have the power’: JK Rowling won’t sack Paapa Essiedu from Harry Potter TV show over trans rights views” reports the Guardian.

JK Rowling has said she will not fire actor Paapa Essiedu from the forthcoming Harry Potter TV series over his support for transgender rights.

Essiedu has been cast as key character Severus Snape in the HBO drama, which is designed to run for more than a decade and will be one of the most expensively produced television shows of all time.

In a post on X, Rowling wrote: “I don’t have the power to sack an actor from the series and I wouldn’t exercise it if I did. I don’t believe in taking away people’s jobs or livelihoods because they hold legally protected beliefs that differ from mine.”

Last week, Essiedu, along with more than 1,500 figures from film and TV, signed an open letter condemning the UK supreme court ruling, which judged that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer only to a biological woman and to biological sex….

(5) CIVILIZATION ENDS: FILM AT ELEVEN. “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” from The Atlantic (Archive.ph link).

Last year, i visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.

He welcomed me into his suburban-Texas home and showed me to a sunlit library. At the center of the room, arranged neatly on a countertop, stood 41 books. These, he said, were the books I needed to read.

The display included all seven volumes of Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ; both volumes of Oswald Spengler’s World War I–era tract, The Decline of the West ; and a 2,500-year-old account of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, who “was the first historian to look at his own culture, Greece, and say, I’m going to tell you the story of how stupid we were,” Gioia explained….

…He’s not alone in fearing that we’ve entered a cultural dark age. According to a recent YouGov poll, Americans rate the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports. A 2023 story in The New York Times Magazine declared that we’re in the “least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” An art critic for The Guardian recently proclaimed that “the avant garde is dead.”

What’s so jarring about these declarations of malaise is that we should, logically, be in a renaissance. The internet has caused a Cambrian explosion of creative expression by allowing artists to execute and distribute their visions with unprecedented ease. …

…in 312 c.e., the Roman Senate ordered the construction of a gaudy monument called the Arch of Constantine. It incorporated pieces from older monuments, built in more glorious times for the empire, which had begun its centuries-long decline.

The Arch is one of Gioia’s favorite metaphors for modern culture. The TV and film industry is enamored of reboots, spin-offs, and formulaic genre fare. Broadway theaters subsist on stunt-cast revivals of old warhorses; book publishers rely disproportionately on backlist sales. Entertainment companies have long understood the power of giving people more of what they already like, but recommendation algorithms take that logic to a new extreme, keeping us swiping endlessly for slight variations on our favorite things. In every sector of society, Gioia told me, “we’re facing powerful forces that want to impose stagnation on us.”

The problem is particularly acute in music. In 2024, new releases accounted for a little more than a quarter of the albums consumed in the U.S.; every year, a greater and greater percentage of the albums streamed online is “catalog music,” meaning it is at least 18 months old. Hoping to remonetize the classics, record labels and private-equity firms have spent billions of dollars to acquire artists’ publishing rights. The reemergence of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2022, 37 years after its release, seemed to signal that this was a good bet. A brief placement in a popular TV show (Netflix’s Stranger Things, itself a pastiche of 1980s movie tropes) could, it turned out, cause an old hit to outcompete most of the newer songs in the world….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 6, 1969 — Annalee Newitz, 56.

By Paul Weimer: I first encountered Annalee Newitz’ nonfiction, first, as a columnist, as a non fiction writer, as a podcaster with their partner Charlie Jane Anders. Four Lost Cities is an amazingly researched book looking at the rise and fall of four cities and what we can learn about the challenges they faced. I learned an amazing amount I never know about, for example, Angkor Wat. I think it is their strongest work and if you asked me “what one book of theirs should I read?”, Four Lost Cities is the one I’d put into your hands.

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was a surprisingly hopeful book, given its title and content.

Although they have been writing fiction, too for a while, I finally got into their fiction with The Future of Another Timeline, with rival powers fighting for control of a timeline just catnip for me. Given the political changes lately in the United States, it feels even more relevant than it once did. And once again, I learned a lot about some historical events I hadn’t even heard of, thanks to the jumping around the timeline by the protagonists. But even with that, the changes to the timeline are not shown in some grand manner, but how they affect people. People matter to Newitz’s work.

Newitz’ work is bright, well researched, deep, and thought provoking, with a mind like an engineer and the language and diction of an English professor. I am pretty sure that as good as Future was, I prefer Newitz’ nonfiction more, but I am primed for whatever they decide to turn their prodigious powers on, next. (In the meantime, of course, there is always Our Opinions are Correct).

[Note: ISFDB and the Science Fiction Encyclopedia say Newitz’ birthday is today, Wikipedia says tomorrow. Happy birthday whichever is the case!)

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Herman is aboard that trebuchet we so often hear about.
Off the Mark is deceived.
Reality Check misses the point.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal discusses villain motivation.
Wallace the Brave finds comics writing is easy.
xkcd needs a break from dark matter research.

(8) HUGO VIEWING. In “Hugo 2025: The Wild Robot”, Camestros Felapton rates another finalist.

…As I said in the intro, the film has more bite than you might imagine. It’s not a nature documentary and their are kid-friendly fantasy elements to how the animals of the island live but aside from that the animals are presented naturalistically. There is a repeated emphasis on death as a common occurrence and the film is clear that animals kill and eat other animals. Fink the fox (the almost ubiquitous Pedro Pascal) is a key supporting character but when he first turns up he is trying to catch and eat Bright Bill, Roz’s adopted baby goose child.

The idea of juxtaposing robots with nature is not a new one but it is an under-explored one….

(9) VINTAGE PROPS. “Where Would Hollywood Find Its Guillotines or Pay Phones Without Them?” asks the New York Times. (Article is behind a paywall.)

When the Netflix series “Wednesday” needed a guillotine recently, it did not have to venture far. A North Hollywood prop house called History for Hire had one available, standing more than eight feet high with a suitably menacing blade. (The business offers pillories too, but the show wasn’t in the market for any.)

The company’s 33,000-square-foot warehouse is like the film and television industry’s treasure-filled attic, crammed with hundreds of thousands of items that help bring the past to life. It has a guitar Timothée Chalamet used in “A Complete Unknown,” luggage from “Titanic,” a black baby carriage from “The Addams Family.”

Looking for period detail? You can find different iterations of Wheaties boxes going back to the ’40s, enormous television cameras with rotating lenses from the ’50s, a hair dyer with a long hose that connects to a plastic bonnet from the ’60s, a pay phone from the ’70s and a yellow waterproof Sony Walkman from the ’80s….

… History for Hire, which Jim and Pam Elyea have owned for almost four decades, is part of the crucial but often unseen infrastructure that keeps Hollywood churning, and helps make it one of the best places in the world to make film and television.

“People just don’t realize how valuable a business like that is to help support the look of a film,” said Nancy Haigh, a set decorator who found everything from a retro can of pork and beans to a one-ton studio crane there for “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which she won an Oscar for. “But it’s because people like them exist that your moviegoing experience has such life to it.”…

… “I don’t know what we would do without them,” said Pascale, who has won an Oscar for “Mank.”

No one likes entertaining that idea. But with fewer movies and television shows being shot in Los Angeles these days, and History for Hire getting less business, the Elyeas fear they may not be able to afford to renew their lease for five more years. If they close, Los Angeles will lose another piece of the vibrant ecosystem that has kept it attractive to filmmakers, even as states like Georgia and New Mexico lure productions with lucrative tax credits. Some Angelenos fear a vicious cycle: If the city continues to lose local talent and resources, even more productions will flee….

(10) SPEAKEASY. “AI-Dubbed Swedish Film ‘Watch the Skies’ Opening in Theaters” – Variety listens in.

When XYZ Films‘ “Watch the Skies” has its U.S. theatrical release on Friday, Hollywood will also get a glimpse at the state-of-the-art in AI-driven “visual dubbing” and its potential for Hollywood.

“Watch the Skies” is a sci-fi adventure filmed in Swedish (under the name “UFO Sweden”), but, uniquely, the actors will appear to be speaking English through the use of TrueSync, an AI visual dubbing tool from startup Flawless, which effectively syncs new (in this case, English language) dialogue with the actors’ mouth movements. The original actors recorded their lines in English as an ADR process, before the Flawless AI tech was applied to the movie….

(11) LEFT BEHIND. “Andor Leaves Out a Key Part of Star Wars Mythology, and I Think It’s Brilliant” says CBR.com.

While Andor enjoys effusive praise from critics and Star Wars fans, both usually fail to mention a key reason the series is so unique. The two-season Disney+ series is the first, and thus far only, story in the expansive saga aimed specifically at adult viewers. How Cassian Andor finds his way to the Rebellion meticulously examines the Star Wars political philosophy, which only works because it ignores an important aspect of the mythology: the Force. As a fan of both the political and spiritual allegory in this universe, I believe ignoring the latter makes the series absolutely brilliant….

(12) GETTING WITH THE TIMES. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki reminds readers:

(13) KEEPING THE AI IN SETI. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I spotted this article pre-print on the Nature website. “AI scientist ‘team’ joins the search for extraterrestrial life”.

The collaborative system generated more than 100 hypotheses relating to the origins of life in the Universe.

Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have created a system that can perform autonomous research in astrobiology, the study of the origins of life in the Universe.

AstroAgents comprises eight ‘AI agents’ that analyse data and generate scientific hypotheses. It joins a suite of other AI tools that aim to automate the process of science, from reading the literature to coming up with hypotheses and even writing papers….

…The result was 101 hypotheses from Gemini and 48 from Claude. One hypothesis posits that certain molecules found on Earth would make “reliable biomarkers” indicating the presence of life. Another suggests that a cluster of the organic molecules found in two meteorites might have formed through the same series of chemical reactions.

Buckner scored each hypothesis. She deemed 36 of the Gemini hypotheses to be plausible and 24 novel. By contrast, none of the Claude-generated hypotheses was original — but they were overall less error-prone and clearer than Gemini’s.

Primary research pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23170

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Jeffrey Smith, Daniel Dern, Kathy Sullivan, 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 Kendall.]

Pixel Scroll 9/8/24 I’ve Grown Accustomed To The Doors of Your Face, the Lamps of Your Mouth

Posted on September 8, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) OFF THE CLOCK. “Critical Choices: Time Travel and Identity” by Rjurik Davidson at Speculative Insight.

…Psychologists suggest that your sense of self is constructed interpersonally, in relationship with others, and hence also in relationship to the social world. Individualism is nothing but a liberal myth. For example, people who venture into nature to “find themselves” typically discover the opposite: they lose any sense of their self. Isolated from society, they dissolve into their surroundings, become one with daily tasks: “catch fish,” “start fire,” “sleep.” They no longer exist. “All You Zombies” brilliantly illuminates this dissolution, counterintuitive to those schooled in Thoreau’s Walden or other such romantic myths. In the story, the main character (Jane) takes painkillers for her perpetual headache but discovers that without the pain everyone else disappears. It is as if the veil is torn from a false reality, revealing the true world beneath, seen before as through a glass darkly but now face to face – a premonition of one of Philip K. Dick’s enduring fascinations. Without mother, father, a social world, Jane’s existence manifests as a headache of existential dread. Either way, with headache or not, she experiences her plight as a pain of isolation. She is “alone in the dark.” Her declaration, “I know where I came from,” is replete with irony. Her somewhat desperate affirmation is made precisely because there is nothing but doubt. Neither she, nor the reader, actually knows where she came from – methinks that Jane dost protest too much….

(2) REWARDING TRANSLATION. Anton Hur analyzes “Literature that expands the borders of what ‘international’ can mean” in the Washington Post. (Usually there’s a paywall, but I was able to read this article. Hopefully, so will you.)

…But why have a translated literature category [for the National Book Awards] at all? Neil Clarke, the editor of the science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, had the same thought; he has argued against creating a translation category at the Hugo Awards, claiming that it would serve to further marginalize translated literature. A quick glance at the history of nominees for best novel at the Hugos reveals that a translation has been a finalist only twice, and for the same team: the redoubtable Cixin Liu, author of “The Three-Body Problem,” and his translator Ken Liu. As someone who reads translations primarily and prodigiously, you can’t make me take Clarke’s fears of “further” marginalization seriously. And it has to be said that this also applies to the National Book Awards, which simply stopped taking translated literature into consideration for more than three decades. (In writing this article, I was asked to consider what works may have been overlooked by the awards during the 2010s and, well, imagine me madly gesticulating at all the works in translation published in the eligibility periods between 2009 and 2017.)…

(3) THE DOCTOR IS IN. Jon Del Arroz proclaimed yesterday over a photo of Kirk and Spock that “Star Trek is an inherently right-wing concept. It upholds man’s greatness as being designed in the image of God and promotes manifest destiny and dominion of God’s creation.” Robert Picardo (who memorably played Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram) took him to task. Admittedly, the kind of attention Jon always hopes somebody will give him.

(4) FULL MOON VOTERS. “In Michigan, an ‘Unhinged Werewolf’ Will Make It Clear Who Voted” says the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.)

Plenty of the submissions in a statewide contest to design Michigan’s next “I Voted” sticker featured cherry blossoms or American flags fluttering in the wind.

Only one entry, however, depicted a werewolf clawing its shirt to tatters and howling at an unseen moon. A smattering of stars and stripes poke out from behind its brawny torso.

“I Voted,” reads a string of red, white and blue block letters floating above the creature’s open maw.

The illustration, which was created by Jane Hynous, a 12-year-old from Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., was revealed on Wednesday as one of nine winning designs that the Michigan Department of State will offer local clerks to distribute to voters in the November election.

The werewolf sticker received more than 20,000 votes in the public contest, beating every other entry by a margin of nearly 2,000 votes, said Cheri Hardmon, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of State. The design gained traction on social media among those who found it fitting for an intense, and at times bewildering, moment in national politics….

(5) FANAC FAN HISTORY ZOOM: PLOKTA. [Item by Joe Siclari.] It’s a fannish mystery how this jumped from nothing to an everyday phrase all over fandom.

The FANAC Fan History Zoom Series starts off its new season with what promises to be a fun, interesting, historical and important session as it brings back together the Plokta Cabal. The group was known for its weird news, quirky humour and radical graphics.

September 22, 2024 – The Secret Origins of Plokta, with Steve Davies, Sue Mason, Alison Scott, and Mike Scott

Time: 2PM EDT, 1PM CDT, 11AM PDT, 7PM London (BST) & too early in Melbourne

This fannish group burst on the scene in May 1996 with the fanzine Plokta, which went on to receive two Best Fanzine Hugos, 2 Nova Awards for Best Fanzine, and Hugo nominations each year from 1999 to 2008. They are energetic, quirky and very, very funny. They are writers, artists, con runners, Worldcon bidders and fan fund winners. Join us and learn more about their secret origins, fannish impact and what they are doing now.

To attend, send an email to [email protected]

Two other Fanac Zoom session already on the calendar are:

October 26, 2024, Time 7PM EDT, 4PM PDT, Midnight London (sorry), and 10AM AEDT Sunday, Oct 27 Melbourne, Senior Australian fan Robin Johnson interview, with Robin Johnson, Perry Middlemiss and Leigh Edmonds
January 11, 2025, Time 2PM EST, 11AM PST, 7PM GMT London, and 6AM AEDT (sorry) Sunday, Jan 12 Melbourne, Out of the Ghetto and into the University: Science Fiction Fandom University Collections, with Phoenix Alexander (University of California, Riverside), Peter Balestrieri (University of Iowa), Susan Graham (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), and Richard Lynch (moderator)

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary – Star Trek, The Original Series (1966).

On September 8 fifty-eight years ago the first episode of Star Trek aired. I want to talk about my favorite episode in the series, which is “Trouble with Tribbles”. Now there are other episodes that I will go to Paramount+ to watch such as “Shore Leave”, “Mirror, Mirrior” or “Balance of Terror” but is the one that I have watched by far the most and which I enjoy as just the funnest one they ever did.

It was first broadcast in the show’s second season, just after Christmas on December 29, 1967. The previous episode had been another one I also like a lot, “Wolf in the Fold”, written by Robert Bloch.

This script, which was Gerrold’s first professional sale, bore the working title for the episode of “A Fuzzy Thing Happened to Me…” Writer and producer for the series Gene did heavy rewrites on the final version of the script. The final draft script can be read in Gerrold’s The Trouble with Tribbles: The Story Behind Star Trek’s Most Popular Episode with much, much more on this episode.

Memory Alpha notes that “While the episode was in production, Gene Roddenberry noticed that the story was similar to Robert Heinlein’s novel, The Rolling Stones, which featured the ‘Martian Flat Cats’. Too late, he called Heinlein to apologize and avoid a possible lawsuit. Heinlein was very understanding, and was satisfied with a simple ‘mea culpa’ by Roddenberry.”

It of course is centered on tribbles. Wah Chang designed the original tribbles. Five hundred were sewn together during production, using pieces of extra-long rolls of carpet. Some of them had mechanical toys placed in them so they could move.

According to Gerrold, the tribble-maker Jacqueline Cumere was paid $350. Want a tribble now? Gerrold has them for you in various sizes and colors. So if you’re in seeing these, go here. tribbletoys.com

Let’s talk about why it’s about my favorite episode. I’m watching it now on Paramount+. I’ve to come to the bar scene where Cyrano Jones is trying to sell the Bar Manager a tribble when Chekov and Uhura come in. When Uhura asks if it’s alive, it starts adorably purring (who created that purr?), and the story goes from there.

The next morning Kirk walks. Uhura and a group are admiring that her tribble has reproduced. Where there was one, there are now, I stopped the video to count fourteen in various hues. (Not sure what all of them are as I’ve got color blindness.) Really cute but remarkably not one seems concerned.

Right there it exhibits that It has some of the best script writing in the series including this choice line as Spock holds and strokes a tribble: “Its trilling seems to have a tranquilizing effect on the human nervous system. Fortunately, of course … I am immune … to its effect.” There is an amused look from Uhura and the others.

Oh, and it has Klingons. Not the Worf-style ones. The ones that look like someone cos-played an Asian military character of a thousand years ago. So naturally that hard to lead to a bar fight, doesn’t it? It does when a Klingon calls Scotty’s Enterprise, his beloved ship, a garbage scow. Well, he actually calls it a lot of things before ending with that. Perfect, just perfect.

Now let’s segue from that bar brawl to reworking of this episode to the Deep Space Nine episode which I need not talk about as I know you know about it: “Trials and Tribble-ations”. It would be nominated for Hugo at a LoneStarCon 2. It would digitally insert the performers from the original series into that episode.

I’m assuming y’all know this delightful episode which I think can best have its attitude summed up in this conversation…

Sisko to Bashir: “Don’t you know anything about this period in time?”

Bashir: I’m a doctor, not an historian.”

Dax in her red short skirt: “In the old days, operations officers wore red, command officers wore gold… (Looks at her outfit.) “And women wore less. I think I’m going to like history.”

I’ve watched both shows back-to-back several times, which is well worth doing as they did an stellar job of making the DS9 characters work seamlessly in the old episode. (I know they weren’t actually there but still.) No wonder it got nominated for a Hugo.

I could single out even more scenes like Kirk buried in tribbles, for how he reacts or the very subtle line about Spock’s ears, but I’ll stop here. I just adore it and “Trials and Tribble-ations” as both are entertaining, feel-good episodes.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Baldo orders the special.
Brewster Rockit knows there are two types of stargazers.
The Argyle Sweater offers a herpetological survey.

(8) MAR$. The Week contrasts The Martian Chronicles with billionaires’ plans for Mars in its editorial letter, “Martian dreams”.

…Along with other sci-fi staples such as living forever and computerizing consciousness, colonizing Mars is now an obsession of our tech elite. Rocket tycoon Elon Musk has said he wants to establish a “self-sustaining civilization” of 1 million people on our neighboring planet as an insurance policy against humanity’s extinction. Yet I can’t help but think that, like Bradbury and Lowell before them, Musk and his fellow billionaires are really projecting their own beliefs onto Mars’ red vistas….

(9) HIDDEN PROPERTY INSPIRED LOVECRAFT. Charming old NYC architectural history, with a genre link! “Inside a West Village passageway leading to a hidden courtyard and 1820s backhouse” at Ephemeral New York.

…One person who made note of this Evening Post writeup when it appeared was author H.P. Lovecraft. A resident of New York City in the 1920s, this horror and science fiction writer published a short story titled “He,” which involved a narrator taking a late-night, time-traveling sojourn through Greenwich Village.

“At the conclusion of ‘He,’ a passerby finds the narrator—bloodied and broken—lying at the entrance to a Perry Street courtyard,” wrote David J. Goodwin, author of the 2023 book Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham.

In “He,” from 1925, the narrator calls it “a grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section,” as well as “a little black court off Perry Street.”…

(10) TARA CAMPBELL READING. Space Cowboys Books of Joshua Tree, CA will host an “Online Reading & Interview with Tara Campbell” on Tuesday September 17 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register to attend for free at Eventbrite.

In the parched, post-apocalyptic Western U.S. of the 22nd Century, wolves float, bonfires sing, and devils gather to pray. Water and safety are elusive in this chaotic world of alchemical transformations, where history books bleed, dragons kiss, and gun-toting trees keep their own kind of peace. Among this menagerie of strange beasts, two sentient stone gargoyles, known only as “E” and “M,” flee the rubble of their Southwestern church in search of water. Along the way, they meet climate refugees Dolores Baker and her mother Rose, who’ve escaped the ravaged West Coast in search of a safer home. This quartet forms an uneasy alliance when they hear of a new hope: a mysterious city of dancing gargoyles. Or is it something more sinister? In this strange, terrible new world, their arrival at this elusive city could spark the destruction of everything they know. Tara Campbell summons fantastical magic in this kaleidoscopic new speculative climate fiction.

Get your copy of the book here.

(11) RADIO ASTRONOMY. [Item by Steven French.] This is pretty much standard stuff but the radio telescope itself is amazing: “Inside the ‘golden age’ of alien hunting at the Green Bank Telescope” at Physics.org.

Nestled between mountains in a secluded corner of West Virginia, a giant awakens: the Green Bank Telescope begins its nightly vigil, scanning the cosmos for secrets.

If intelligent life exists beyond Earth, there’s a good chance the teams analyzing the data from the world’s largest, fully steerable radio astronomy facility will be the first to know.

“People have been asking themselves the question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ ever since they first gazed up at the night sky and wondered if there were other worlds out there,” says Steve Croft, project scientist for the Breakthrough Listen initiative.

For the past decade, this groundbreaking scientific endeavor has partnered with a pioneering, US government-funded site built in the 1950s to search for “technosignatures”—traces of technology that originate far beyond our own solar system.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or “SETI,” was long dismissed as the realm of eccentrics and was even cut off from federal funding by Congress thirty years ago.

But today, the field is experiencing a renaissance and seeing an influx of graduates, bolstered by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as recent discoveries showing that nearly every star in the night sky hosts planets, many of which are Earth-like.

“It feels to me like this is something of a golden age,” says Croft, an Oxford-trained radio astronomer who began his career studying astrophysical phenomena, from supermassive black holes to the emissions of exploding stars…

(12) MERCHANT OF MENACE. Actor Vincent Price gave an entertaining interview on Aspel & Co in 1984.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George invites us step inside the Pitch Meeting that led to The Crow (2024).

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

Pixel Scroll 2/12/24 Cats Dream Well. Why Do You Think They Sleep So Much?

Posted on February 12, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) STUMBLING OUT OF THE STARTING GATE. When the Montréal in 2027 Worldcon bid launched two days ago, one of its Presupport levels included an offer that sparked debate about whether it violated the WSFS Constitution’s site selection rules:

Today that language has been removed:

Mike Scott explained the problem on Facebook:

WSFS constitution 4.3. Non-natural persons can only cast site selection ballots for No Preference. Montreal in 2027 buying you a WSFS membership in Seattle is fine, and you can still vote in site selection yourself, because you’re a natural person. But if you delegate Montreal in 2027 to cast a ballot on your behalf, that ballot must be counted as No Preference, because Montreal in 2027 is not a natural person. The constitution doesn’t say that ballots must be cast on behalf of a natural person, it says they must be cast by a natural person.

Other people have always been allowed to deliver ballots properly executed by a voter. Here, the committee had said they would execute these ballots for others. In that case, the ballots would have to be counted as No Preference.

(2) TEL AVIV IN 2027 WEBSITE. The announcement of competition from Montréal has led to a wider awareness that the WorldCon 2027 in Tel aviv bidders launched a new website last October.

The TLV2027 bid committee boasts a team of highly experienced individuals. Guy Kovel, the Bid Chair, has a track record of convention operations. Gadi Evron, with a history of organizing events since 1996, handled logistics and events at prestigious conventions like Dublin 2019 and CoNZealand. Other members, including Einat Citron, Naama Friedman, Dror Raif Nesher, and Tal Goldman, bring expertise in programming, logistics, volunteer management, and event operations.

The front page also carries this statement about the situation in Israel:

We want to update you on the current situation with our bid committee. Firstly, we’re relieved to share that all the members of our committee are safe, even though some of us have been called to service during these challenging times.

We’re all deeply devastated by the recent attacks, but we remain steadfast in our belief that things will stabilize, and ultimately, peace will prevail. Our commitment to our shared goals remains unshaken, and we’ll continue to work diligently to bring our vision to life.

Thank you for your unwavering support, and together, we’ll navigate through these trying times and look forward to a brighter future.

(3) ROMANTASY ON THE RADIO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Open Book on BBC’s Radio 4 looked at the sub-genre of “Romantasy”. This is a hugely growing book genre in Britain the past couple of years that has had to overcome some snobbery with clear overlaps – depending on the book – with epic fantasy, military fantasy, etc…

‘Romantasy’ – combining fantasy and racy romance, it’s the hot new genre sought after by publishers and readers alike, and dominated by female authors and readers. To discuss it’s huge growth in popularity, Johny is joined by: Saara El-Arifi – bestselling author of Faebound, the first in a three part trilogy, which went straight to number one on release last month; Natasha Bardon – publisher of Science Fiction and Fantasy for Harper Voyager, of romantasy-focussed imprint Magpie Books, and of the upcoming ‘spicy’ romantasy list, the Midnight Collection; and by Katie Fraser – journalist for The Bookseller who writes about SFF.

You can download it from here: “Open Book, Madeleine Grey”.

(4) TAKE THE TOUR. Congratulations to Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni on their store opening! And thanks for the Vortex Books & Comics Opening Day video tour. (I see Brian starts right off in the true outlaw spirit by ignoring the crossing signal!)

Authors Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni have opened a bookstore in Columbia, Pennsylvania — focusing on horror, science-fiction, fantasy, thrillers, and other speculative fiction genres, as well as comic books and magazines. Brian gives you a tour on opening day.

(5) MYRIAD MEN OF TIN. G. W. Thomas rounds up an enormous number of examples of robots in Seventies comics in “Bronze Age Robots! 1970s” at Dark Worlds Quarterly.

…The 1970s divides neatly in two with Star Wars at the center. The 1980s would see Science Fiction explode in all media as Star Wars proved that fans wanted space opera again, even if they hadn’t known it. For robot fans in America there was the coming of the Japanese style giant robots. And more toy-based products like ROM the Spaceknight.

(6) OMEGA AWARDS DEADLINE. February 13 is the last day to submit entries for The Tomorrow Prize and The Green Feather Award.

(7) THE NEW NUMBER TWO. This list is presented as an infographic: “The 15 BEST Science Fiction Books of ALL TIME” at Daily Infographic. Number 1 is Dune. But number 2 is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

(8) THOSE WERE THE DAYS, MY FRIEND. The New York Times tells how “Video Games Are Mourning the Old, Weird, Clunky Internet”.

Surfing the web in the 1990s and early 2000s was a slower endeavor, and fewer people had access to the technology. But it is still easy to reminisce about the days when it felt like a public marketplace, with a good chance that someone out there had made a blog or GeoCities site about the niche topic you found interesting.

Those robust online forums have since been flattened into algorithmic social media feeds or hidden on messaging apps, a shift mourned by several video games with a shared fondness for bygone internet eras.

Games like last year’s Videoverse, 2019’s Hypnospace Outlaw and the upcoming Darkweb Streamer use chat interfaces akin to AIM or MSN, as well as fake websites that greet people with MIDI songs and text written in bold fonts. Each experience has its own nostalgic lens but is a snapshot of lost expression, creativity and independence.

Chantal Ryan, an anthropologist and the lead developer of Darkweb Streamer, a horror simulation game that merges the perils of modern streaming with the ’90s internet, bemoaned how high-quality independent services were often cannibalized by corporate interests. She pointed to sites like Goodreads and AbeBooks, both bought by Amazon.

“It reminds me of forest clearing,” said Ryan, who studied at the University of Adelaide. “You have this habitat with sustainable ecosystems, and communities of beings living harmoniously. And then the bulldozer comes in and destroys literally everything in its path with no regard to who’s being affected.”…

The visual novel Videoverse follows the final days of the online social network for a fictional gaming system in 2003. Kinmoku

(9) ELIZABETH (WARREN) ADAMS OBITUARY. Norwescon social media has announced that Elizabeth (Warren) Adams, affectionately known as The Dragon Lady, died on February 9. She was the chair of Norwescons 11, 12, and 14, and ran legendary hospitality rooms at the con. She also was a past editor of Westwind, the NWSFS clubzine, and was very active with PSST (Puget Sound Star Trekkers).

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 12, 1950 — Michael Ironside, 73. The role I remember Michael Ironside most for was as Lieutenant Jean Rasczak in Starship Troopers. There wasn’t much great about that film but I thought that he made much of that character.

Do I need to say that I’m not covering everything he’s done of a genre nature? Well most of you get that. Really you do. So let’s see what I find interesting.

Scanners is one weird film. It really is. And he was in it as Darryl Revok, the Big Baddie, a role he perfectly played.

Next he got cast as the main antagonist in another of my favorite SF films, this time as Overdog McNab in Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. Who comes with these names?

Then there was Total Recall where he was Agent Richter, the ruthless enforcer of Cohaagen, the source of everything corrupt on Mars. Great role that fit his gruff voice and frankly even gruffer looks absolutely perfectly.

One of his major ongoing roles was in the V franchise, first as Ham Tyle, a recurring role in V: The Final Battle, and then playing the same character in all episodes of V: The Series.

Now we come to my favorite of his roles, in one one of my favorite series, seaQuest 2032, where he was Captain Oliver Hudson. Great series and an absolute fantastic performance by him! Pity it got cancelled after thirteen episodes.

Finally he has one voice acting role I loved. In the DC universe, he was Darkseid, the absolute rule of Apokolis. He voiced him primarily on Superman: The Animated Series, but also on the Justice League series as well, and to my surprise on the HBO Harley Quinn series as well.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater mashes up a nursery rhyme and online shopping.
Existential Comics stages a humorous confrontation between a student and teacher of the magical arts. Sort of Clarke’s Law in reverse.

(12) A LITTLE RAY OF SUNSHINE. Nic Farey, in This Here 72, thinks that the most noteworthy feature of the 2023 Hugo stats embarrassment (“Even a WorldThing avoider such as meself cannot have failed to clock the latest brouhaha (causing much haha round here, to be sure)”) is the opportunity it affords to declare his own report of the voting figures for this year’s FAAn awards will be immediately available — while predicting coverage of the FAAns he anticipates winning will be exploited to take attention away from the Hugos’ disgrace.

The fact that the probity of the FAAns (and my own alleged “fixing” of them, a libelous statement to be sure) has been questioned starts to be more of a “but look over there…” diversion, don’t it?…

Great suggestion, Nic, except (and I know you’ll be surprised to hear this) even your figleaf won’t be big enough to cover this cockup.

(13) THE QUIET BEFORE…THE QUIET. “’A Quiet Place: Day One’ first look at Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn” at Entertainment Weekly.

The ingenuity of the next A Quiet Place movie lies in the simplicity of its idea: Take the same core premise of the previous entries, but just change the setting. That tweak alone drastically affects the stakes.

John Krasinski’s 2018 horror-thriller introduced the Abbott family, who embraced a life of silence at their rural farmhouse in upstate New York in a terrifying reality overrun by sightless alien monsters that hunt through sound. The story continued in 2021’s A Quiet Place: Part II, but now A Quiet Place: Day One, a prequel film and the franchise’s first spinoff, will see how the citizens of New York City, one of the noisiest metropolitans on the globe, fared when these vicious creatures arrived on Earth….

(14) SFF MOVIE TRAILERS DROPPED DURING SUPER BOWL. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Most (if not all) of the movie trailers debuted during the Super Bowl are for genre works. Comicbook.com did a roundup of all the YouTube videos. See them at the link: “2024 Super Bowl: Watch Every New Movie Trailer Released for the Big Game”.

The Super Bowl may technically be about the two best teams in the NFL facing off for football’s ultimate prize, but for many around the country, it represents one of the biggest movie events of the year. Several film studios use the Super Bowl as a platform to advertise some of their biggest movies in the coming year, leading to more than a few awesome trailers arriving online in the same weekend….

(15) BUGS, MISTER RICO! And some other commercials had a genre flavor, too, like this one: “Jeff Goldblum Returns as Brad Bellflower in Apartments.com’s Sci-Fi Super Bowl Ad” at LBBOnline.

Apartments.com returns to the Super Bowl as the universal leader in renting and debuted a never-before-seen 30-second spot, titled ‘Extraterrentials.’ In the new ad, which premiered during the first quarter of Super Bowl LVII, Jeff Goldblum continues his role as Brad Bellflower, visionary leader of Apartments.com, and defuses a tense standoff with some new arrivals on Earth. The campaign rollout spoofs an upcoming Jeff Goldblum sci-fi blockbuster, featuring a clever media strategy and unique creative from agency of record, RPA.

“Leading up to the Super Bowl, Apartments.com leveraged extraterrestrial buzz in culture to generate intrigue and awareness across media channels by leaning into the possibility of a new Goldblum sci-fi film,” said Fred Saint, president, marketplaces at CoStar Group….

(16) DOPPELGÄNGERS3: “Exploring New Futures in Space: A Revolutionary Integration of Neuroscience, Quantum Physics, and Space Exploration” at SETI.org.

The SETI Institute is proud to support a groundbreaking project from London-based filmmaker and SETI Institute Designer of Experiences Dr. Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian that combines insights from intergenerational trauma, neuroscience, quantum physics, and space exploration.

Premiering at SXSW 2024, Doppelgängers3 is a feature film and research project that challenges conventional narratives of space colonization by integrating diverse perspectives. Ben Hayoun-Stépanian will present this multidisciplinary endeavor at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) 2024, highlighting its unique blend of science, culture, and storytelling within the decolonial space and space culture sessions.

The project spotlights the importance of acknowledging collective trauma and its impacts — a burgeoning field in neuropsychology research. By weaving together the stories of three individuals across different geographies, Doppelgängers3imagines a utopian community on the moon that learns from the past and aspires to a future where diversity and plurality are celebrated….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Dan Monroe at Media Master Design answers the question “What Happened to THE TIME MACHINE?”

[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Dann, 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 Cat Eldridge.]

File 770

Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom

Tag Archives: SETI

Pixel Scroll 6/16/26 One Ordinary Scroll, With Peanut Butter And Jellicle Credentials

Pixel Scroll 3/8/26 Lord Scrollentine’s Pixel

Pixel Scroll 1/16/26 See A Pixel Pulled Out Of A Hat. It Doesn’t End Well. And No, I Don’t Know How The Pixel Got Into The Hat

Pixel Scroll 11/9/25 I Shot The Sheriff But I Did Not Shoot The Scroll

Pixel Scroll 10/21/25 Waiter, There’s A Flying Saucer In My Soup

Pixel Scroll 10/9/25 Last Supermassive Black Hole For 27 Parsecs

Pixel Scroll 5/17/25 A Handbook For Pixels

Pixel Scroll 5/6/25 All I Need To Know, I Learned From Pixel Scrolls

Pixel Scroll 9/8/24 I’ve Grown Accustomed To The Doors of Your Face, the Lamps of Your Mouth

Pixel Scroll 2/12/24 Cats Dream Well. Why Do You Think They Sleep So Much?