(0) THE REST OF THE TITLE. Here is Steve Davidson’s complete title for today’s Scroll.
Once a Fannish filer sat by his PC screen Reading words of Fen’s camaraderie And he sang as he typed and waited for his file to post you’ll come a scrolling the pixel with me scrolling the pixel scrolling the pixel you’ll come a scrolling the pixel with me and he sang as he typed and waited for his file to post you’ll come a scrolling the pixel with me
(1) COLBERT’S LATE NIGHT FAREWELL. “Stephen Colbert Went Out His Way: Through a Wormhole” – the New York Times notes the episode’s very entertaining sf special effects. (Link bypasses NYT paywall. Numerous embedded videos in article.)
…As the episode neared its end, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jon Stewart and Andy Cohen showed up to help Colbert through a wormhole portal that opened up to swallow his show, followed by his “Strike Force Five” co-hosts — “Jimmy, Seth, John, Handsome Jimmy!” Colbert called them — who came by to see him off.
“Without you, where will Americans turn to see a middle-aged white man make jokes about the news?” — SETH MEYERS
“But why aren’t you guys being pulled in, too?” Colbert asked.
“Actually, one of these holes opened at my show last year, but it went away after about three days.” — JIMMY KIMMEL, referring to ABC’s pulling “Jimmy Kimmel Live” off air the briefly after Kimmel made comments about Charlie Kirk
“At some point, this may come for all of our shows. But, Stephen, what’s important to remember is tonight it is going to eat you.” — JOHN OLIVER…
(2) SHELFIES. Shelfies, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin, “Takes a unique peek each week into one of our contributors’ weird and wonderful bookshelves.” A recent entry was Shelfies #89: Rachel Cordasco.
(3) VOTING FOR ROCKETS. Camestros Felapton is ready to rank the finalists in one Hugo category: “Hugo 26: Dramatic Presentation Longggggg”. He says three of the six immediately sank to the bottom of his ballot. Does that mean the cream rose to the top? Your bovine mileage may vary.
(4) SHARON LEE Q&A. The Baen Free Radio Hour has released a two-part interview with Sharon Lee: “A Liaden Universe Constellation”.
(5) TREAT YOUR CAT. Cyril Simsa of the Anglo American University in Prague says: “I thought you might enjoy this this mini-poster which we dreamed up recently with a group of cat-loving colleagues. Now proudly adorning the door of our Study Abroad office.”
(6) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
May 22, 1981 — Outland film
Outland premiered forty-five years ago this date in the States in select cities, but everywhere that following weekend. It got a Hugo nomination at Chicon IV, the year that Raiders of the Lost Ark won.
This original title of the film was Io as it’s set on Jupiter’s moon Io, but audience testing showed that wasn’t understandable at all as the test audiences thought it was the number ten, or, at least to me less puzzlingly, low. So in homage to the Western genre, it became Outland.
Which was appropriate as the writer Peter Hyams wanted to do one: “I wanted to do a Western. Everybody said, ‘You can’t do a Western; Westerns are dead; nobody will do a Western’. I remember thinking it was weird that this genre that had endured for so long was just gone. But then I woke up and came to the conclusion – obviously after other people – that it was actually alive and well, but in outer space.”
So they had a script that they really liked, now they need their actor. They wanted and got Sean Connery to be in their version in High Noon. Connery’s career had been in a nose dive as of late then, so this was a golden chance for him, so he took the role.
Law enforcement officers are faced with the nature of right and wrong, and duty versus keeping themselves safe, but while Will Kane in High Noon is played as an archetypal hero who discovers the world isn’t black and white as he was led to believe, Will O’Niel already exists firmly in the gray where things are always messy when we meet him.
Connery was magnificent in this role. In addition to Sean Connery, the movie includes performances by Peter Boyle, Frances Sternhagen, and James Sikking, who all I firmly believe deliver memorable portrayals of complex characters.
So they got the lead and the rest of an excellent core cast, now they had to film a movie. They had a very tight budget, just seventeen million dollars. The quite amazing sets were enhanced by the use of a new filming process called Introvision which allowed the director to mix a combination of sets, mattes and a generous use of miniatures in-camera, avoiding the then-lengthy process of extensive use of green screens.
Critics were mixed on it. Gary Arnold at the Washington Post thought it was “trite and dinky” whereas Desmond Ryan at the Philadelphia Inquirer called it: “a brilliant sci-fi Western.”
I said it cost seventeen million to make, and it made, errr, just about seventeen million dollars. That means that it lost money for the studio. Lots by the time you figure printing up reels for the theatres, promotional costs and that the studio only gets fifty percent most often of ticket sales. Not that the studio would admit that.
Now I liked the film. I saw it some years after it came out and thought it worked rather well, but then I think it is police drama rather than a SF film.
It may have been a place for ceremony or a barn for pack animals. It could have been a place for weary labourers to rest their heads. Or perhaps there was no building at all.
English Heritage has unveiled a 7-metre-high reconstruction of what a 4,500-year-old Neolithic hall may have looked like at Stonehenge, offering visitors a glimpse into the lives of the prehistoric builders who raised the world’s most famous stone circle.
The £1m project is in its final stages of construction near the Stonehenge visitor centre on Salisbury Plain. Built entirely by hand over nine months by a team of more than 100 volunteers, the Kusuma Neolithic Hall will open to the public this summer before transforming into an immersive, historical learning space for schools.
The structure is based on the archaeological footprint of an anomaly known as Durrington 68, a unique “square in the circle” building discovered two miles away near Woodhenge, another Neolithic site. First excavated in 1928 by Maud Cunnington, and re-examined in 2007 by the Stonehenge Riverside Project, the original site features a horseshoe-shaped ring of post holes surrounding four massive internal roof support pillars.
Because centuries of ploughing destroyed the original floor and hearths, its true purpose remains a mystery. However, discoveries of animal bones and grooved ware pottery nearby point towards winter feasting, ritual gatherings or even communal storage….
Sergei Krikalev launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in May 1991 as a Soviet citizen. He returned to Earth on 25 March 1992, after 311 days in orbit, as a Russian one. The country that had sent him no longer existed.
The mission was originally meant to last about five months. Krikalev was the flight engineer on Soyuz TM-12, alongside commander Anatoly Artsebarsky and British cosmonaut Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space, who returned with the previous crew after about a week on the station. In July 1991, with funding cuts compressing the Soviet space program, Krikalev was asked to stay on Mir for the next long-duration expedition because two planned flights had been reduced to one. According to ESA’s biographical note on Krikalev, he agreed.
What followed, on the ground beneath him, was the dissolution of his country.
The political timeline during the mission
The failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev took place in August 1991, while Krikalev and Artsebarsky were conducting EVAs and station maintenance on Mir. The Soviet Union began to unravel through the months that followed. On 6 September 1991, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR signed the decree returning Leningrad’s historical name. Krikalev’s home city was Saint Petersburg again. He learned of it on the station.
Kazakhstan declared independence on 16 December 1991, the last of the Soviet republics to do so. Ten days later, on 26 December, the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist. The cosmonaut still in orbit was now flying for a state that did not….
SpaceX launched its biggest, most powerful Starship yet on a test flight Friday, an upgraded version that NASA is counting on to land astronauts on the moon.
The redesigned mega rocket made its debut two days after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced he’s taking the company public. It blasted off from the southern tip of Texas, carrying 20 mock Starlink satellites for release halfway around the world.
It’s the 12th test flight of the rocket that Musk is building to get people to Mars one day. But first comes the moon and NASA’s Artemis program.
The last of the old space-skimming Starships lifted off in October. SpaceX’s third-generation Starship — a souped-up version dubbed V3 — soared from a brand-new launch pad at Starbase, near the Mexican border. Last-minute pad issues thwarted Thursday evening’s launch attempt.
SpaceX was hoping to avoid the fireworks it experienced during back-to-back launches last year when midair explosions rained wreckage down on the Atlantic. Earlier flights also ended in flames.
At 407 feet, the latest model eclipses the older Starship lines by several feet and packs more engine thrust….
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
(1) WSFS BUSINESS DEADLINES. People submitting business to the LAcon V Virtual Business meeting have a June 17 deadline.
Linda Deneroff, LAcon V WSFS Division Head, today reminded fans that the first WSFS Virtual Business Meeting will be held Friday, July 17.
Therefore, all new business must be submitted on or before June 17, 2026 (30 days before the start of the business meeting, per the WSFS Constitution). All financial reports from Worldcons and NASFiCs that have not closed their books are due on that date as well.
…Platform Decay introduces the emotion-check subroutine, a therapy module Murderbot has self-installed following the hallucinations and near-system-collapse depicted in System Collapse (2023). The module does not suppress or eliminate Murderbot’s anxiety. It surfaces the anxiety, forces a label on it, and allows continued operation. The recurring internal log — “Emotion check: Oh, for f—” — is both the book’s running joke and its most technically specific design choice.
What Wells has built here is a fictional implementation of metacognitive monitoring: an architecture in which a system’s internal states are treated as data to be processed rather than noise to be filtered. This maps directly onto an open research problem in AI safety. A 2025 study from researchers at UC San Diego and New York University found that large language models show a limited but measurable capacity to monitor and report on their own internal activations, with significant implications for how AI oversight systems are designed. The emotion-check subroutine models one design direction: not fix the distress, give the system structured tools to work with it while continuing to function. The design choice Wells makes — that the module doesn’t cure Murderbot but gives it a framework for handling the experience of being broken — is closer to current metacognitive safety research than to classical AI design, in which emotional analogs would simply be suppressed….
Matthew: I’m sure inquiring minds want to know your secret to writing a character that improves their emotional state despite living in a corporate hellscape. It hasn’t become a less relevant topic as the series goes on.
Martha: [laughs] I wish I really knew! Basically, my coping mechanism is the same one I gave Murderbot, which is basically TV, movies, stories, books… anything that just kind of takes you away from reality for a while.
Matthew: Speaking of which, since the Apple TV adaptation came out, I’ve been fascinated by how much people have latched on to The Rise and Fall ofSanctuary Moon, and how it’s developing its own fandom. Has that reaction changed the way you’ve engaged with that series?
Martha: Not really. It’s pretty much the same for me. I just think the way they did [Sanctuary Moon] in the TV series was so much fun. Just having so many surprise actors, and just the whole… taking the soap opera, telenovela concept and really pushing it as far as it could go into the outrageous. The costumes, the great music, and the situations. I just think that’s what people are responding to. It’s so silly, and it’s so fun, yet it’s kind of serious stuff. It was just incredibly likable.
While piracy has long been an issue for the book business, the rapid rise of unauthorized audiobooks on YouTube, which publishers and authors believe are eroding sales for their books, poses a new challenge for the industry.
Audiobooks have soared in popularity in recent years, driven by widespread smartphone use and the consequent spike in audio streaming services, and they have become a critical revenue stream for publishers. Publishers and audiobook producers are investing heavily in them, recording splashy, full-cast productions, replete with sound effects and musical scores, in a push to redefine audiobooks as their own narrative art form rather than just another publishing format.
At the same time, artificial intelligence programs have given pirates new tools to rapidly reproduce audiobooks, and to illegally profit from them by running advertisements.
A.I. has made it easier to quickly create audiobooks using synthetic narration. Because most antipiracy technology is designed to catch identical files, not altered ones, many of them avoid detection by programs used to identify copyright infringement. A.I. versions of highly anticipated titles often appear on YouTube hours after they are released….
(5) WHAT STAR WARS FANS WANT. With The Mandalorian & Grogu hitting cinemas soon, JustWatch – The Streaming Guide has just surveyed American Star Wars fans on their trilogy preferences, favorite TV shows, and which characters they want to see get their own spin-off. (Click for larger images.)
A few things that stood out:
The Original Trilogy still dominates at 83% — but nearly 30% of under-35s back the Prequels, compared to just 9% of over-35s.
Andor and The Mandalorian are splitting the audience down the middle: Andor leads among men and under-35s (51%), while women overwhelmingly favour The Mandalorian (61%).
Chewbacca tops the spin-off wish list — beating out Yoda, Lando Calrissian, and even Mace Windu.
A statue commemorating actor and writer Terry Jones has been vandalised just weeks after being unveiled.
Sculptor Nick Elphick said he was left “in shock” while Jones’ daughter, Sally, “seemed very upset” by the damage to the bronze statue at his birthplace in Colwyn Bay, Conwy county.
Jones’ family backed a £120,000 fundraising campaign to have him immortalised as the nude organist, a recurring character he played in Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Elphick said the vandals had removed two door knockers from the statue which were a nod to the 1986 fantasy film Labyrinth which Jones had co-written.
“I felt really low. It is a shock that has happened so quickly,” said Elphick….
…Elphick thanked the people who had found the vandalised pieces and said they would require repair and rewelding, costing about £1,000 to fix on-site.
“The expense is in the making of the bronzes, that’s why it costs a lot to have them done. Money value in the metal it is nothing,” he said. “My concern is that this was [an] incredibly tight budget to get this done. We’ve all really put our hearts and souls into this and I haven’t made a profit off of this.”…
(7) SUPER I SCREAM. It’s in demand in Michigan they say.
(8) MICHAEL KEATING (1947-2026). Actor Michael Keating, known to sf fans as Vila Restal in Blake’s 7, died this month at the age of 79. The Big Finish website paid tribute.
…As Vila Restal in the BBC’s Blake’s 7, Michael appeared across all four series of the show, from 1978 to 1981 – the only cast member to appear in all 52 episodes. Vila was nominally the gang’s thief and self-declared coward, though Michael always preferred a more precise description: cautious, not cowardly. In his hands, Vila was something richer than comic relief. He was warm, wily, honest about his own limitations, and almost impossible not to love.
Beyond the confines of the spaceship Liberator, Michael enjoyed a long and varied career in theatre and television, including stints with both the National Theatre and the Old Vic. In 1985, he created the role of Marty at the Phoenix Theatre in the West End in Are You Lonesome Tonight, Alan Bleasdale’s play about Elvis Presley, in which Martin Shaw played the King….
There’s also an overview of his many roles for Big Finish, for Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 stories.
(9) DR. MARTIN C. WEISSKOPF (1942-2026). NASA scientist Dr. Martin C. Weisskopf, father of editor Toni Weisskopf, died May 2. Read the complete family obituary at the link.
Dr. Martin C. Weisskopf, a pioneering physicist whose work helped shape modern X-ray astronomy, died on May 2, 2026, with his daughter at his side. He was 84.
Over a career spanning more than five decades, Dr. Weisskopf became widely respected within the scientific community for both his technical contributions and his leadership in advancing space-based X-ray astronomy. He served as Project Scientist for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and as Chief Scientist for X-ray Astronomy at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He was also the Principal Investigator for the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, a mission that opened a new window on the high-energy universe…
…He began his academic career at Columbia University, where he rose from Research Associate to Assistant Professor. During those years, he conducted pioneering experiments, including the first detection of X-ray polarization from the Crab Nebula using a sounding rocket. He also contributed to the development of high-resolution X-ray optics and played key roles in experiments aboard the OSO-8 satellite and in what would become the Einstein Observatory.
In 1977, Dr. Weisskopf joined NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he would leave a lasting institutional and scientific legacy. He founded the X-ray Astronomy Branch and later served as its Chief, guiding major programs and mentoring generations of scientists. His work advanced technologies that enabled the first focused images of astronomical objects in hard X-rays and supported research that significantly expanded the study of galaxy clusters and cosmic structure. Over the course of his career, Dr. Weisskopf authored or co-authored more than 360 scientific publications. He remained deeply engaged in scientific work throughout his career and beyond, continuing as a NASA Emeritus following his retirement in May 2022….
,,, In lieu of flowers, the family requests that letters of support be directed to efforts sustaining NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which has provided decades of critical data on high-energy cosmic phenomena including black holes, supernovae, and the large-scale structure of the universe…
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
May 21, 1917 — Raymond Burr. (Died 1993.)
Surely you know Raymond Burr, the man whose Birthday it is today. So let’s get started.
I must of course start with his long running role as Perry Mason which is decidedly not genre. CBS paid Gardener for the rights to two hundred and seventy-two of his stories, a good idea given that Perry Mason would run nine seasons. Many early episodes were based off his stories and novels.
The role of Perry Mason proved the hardest to cast. Richard Carlson, Mike Connors, Richard Egan, and William Holden were considered. None at all suited the casting team. Burr initially read for the role of district attorney Hamilton Burger, but he told them that he was more interested in the Perry Mason role. They had seen him being a lawyer, and said he could play the role provided he lose at least sixty pounds. He did and got the role.
What a magnificent Perry Mason he made. Burr’s coolness, control and reserved sense of humor were such that he became so identified with the character that, for the television audience, that meant there was no other Mason but Burr. He was not the Mason that had existed, there were four before him, all on film, and the producers tried reviving the series after CBS cancelled it, but it utterly failed. And HBO had a new series that looks at early years of his life.
In the late Eighties he reprised his Mason role in twenty-six TV movies. The first has the title of Perry Mason Returns.
Now for his genre work. Mike joked with me when I said when I was doing him that he was the lawyer for Godzilla. Well, he was Steven Martin in Godzilla, King of the Monsters! It is a re-edited for American audiences of the 1954 Japanese film Godzilla which in its original wasn’t available outside Japan for fifty years. He would reprise this role in Godzilla 1985.
Raymond Burr, right, Frank Iwanaga, left, in Godzilla
He was the Grand Vizier Boreg al Buzzar in The Magic Carpet. Evil viziers! Dungeons! Magic carpets! Princesses!
He’s Cy Mill, hulking villainin Gorilla at Large. Remember what was said about his weight in his Burr casting. Well, this film was done just previous to this series and he was quoted as saying there, “I was just a fat heavy.” Burr told journalist James Bawden, “I split the heavy parts with Bill Conrad. We were both in our twenties playing much older men. I never got the girl but I once got the gorilla in a 3-D picture called Gorilla at Large.”
He was Vargo in Tarzan and the She-Devil , the seventeenth film of the Tarzan film series that began with 1932’s Tarzan the Ape Man, twenty years earlier.
Television wise, he appeared on Tales on Tomorrow in “The Masks of Medusa” and in the horror film Curse of King Tut’s Tomb, he’s Jonash Sebastian. I thought there’d be more but there aren’t.
(12) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 160 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Global Nando’s Correspondents”, comes with an exclusive free gift*! (*free gift is theoretical/made up) John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty talk a little bit more about the Hugo Awards including the packet, but mostly they dive into their bulging mailbag and read out your letters and comments. (An uncorrected transcript is available here.)
…The 408-foot-tall (124 meters) V3 (“Version 3”) is bigger and more powerful than previous Starship iterations, which were already the biggest and most powerful rockets ever built, and it sports a number of other important upgrades as well.
For starters, it’s outfitted with the new V3 Raptor engine — 33 of them on Super Heavy and six on Ship — which provides more heft, and a far more streamlined design, than its predecessors.
The V3 Super Heavy also now has just three grid fins (which help it steer its way back to Earth for recovery and reuse) instead of four. And the “hot stage ring” — the structure that marks the meeting point of Super Heavy and Ship — is now attached to the booster, meaning it can be reused, whereas previously it had fallen away during flight. (Starship engages in “hot stage” separation, meaning Ship fires its engines before it has detached from Super Heavy.)…
Tomorrow Studios, the indie studio behind Netflix’s One Piece, has set out to adapt for television Skyward, the first book in bestselling author Brandon Sanderson‘s Cytoverse franchise. Sanderson will write the pilot script with TV writer-producers Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)…
…In the Skyward (aka Cytoverse) sci-fi book series, humanity is trapped on a harsh planet and constantly under attack by mysterious alien forces. The story follows Spensa Nightshade, a determined pilot who dreams of joining the fighter corps to defend humanity and redeem her disgraced father’s legacy. Blending high-stakes aerial combat, advanced technology, and themes of courage, identity, and discovery, the series explores both the secrets of the galaxy and Spensa’s growth from an outsider into a key figure in humanity’s fight for survival….
…“I’ve been working on the Skyward series for nearly a decade, and to have a partner like Tomorrow Studios to help bring this story to television is a dream come true,” Sanderson said….
In the remote South Korea village of Hope Harbor, police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung- min) and officer Sung-ae (Hoyeon) are called to find a mysterious creature that has wreaked havoc on the village. In the nearby forest, a coterie of hunters, including Sung- ki (Zo In-Sung) set out to track the beast and find themselves hunted instead. But all is not as it seems, and perceptions can be misleading. What begins as ignorance plants the seed of disaster, escalating through human conflict into a tragedy of cosmic proportions.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Joe H.]
… The result is exactly what might be expected of a show with such a gestation: it’s a puzzling mess, its narrative abbreviated to the point of incoherence….
… And so we are ushered towards a final four-way verbal showdown between Crowley, Aziraphale and two supernatural beings, played by two delightful heavyweight guest stars. As they debate what it was all for, Good Omens rehearses its rather basic musings on religion, doling out standard humanist stuff about messy mortals being pretty bloody marvellous things who don’t deserve to be restricted by a fear of judgment in the great beyond. All four players in the scene are wasted: this show has possibly the biggest imbalance in TV history between dazzling cast and stale script….
When 20th Century Studios released a trailer for “The Devil Wears Prada 2” it quickly racked up millions of views. It is impossible to say, however, how many of those views came from the same people rewatching the coming attraction, not because they could not wait to see the sequel, but because they could barely see the trailer.
“The heartbreaking story of a woman who can no longer afford lamps in her office,” read one viral post, showing Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly of yore alongside a screenshot from the new dimly-lit trailer. “So did we just forget how to light movies?” asked another, above bright images from the 2006 film beside shadowy, shrouded shots from the sequel. Noting that the sequel employs the same director and cinematographer as the original, one poster lamented “that isn’t a skill issue it’s a choice. So why DO new movies insist on looking like that. Absolutely lifeless.”
Ask anyone on Letterboxd and they’ll surely report that the average movie today lacks the “look” of the average movie from even just 25 years ago: Images are dark and blurry, special effects a C.G.I. sludge, the overall feeling artificial and flat. Even fans who can’t put their finger on what is happening or why seem to be in consensus that it’s happening.
“I think over the last 10 years, it’s not even just cinephiles. It’s just everyday moviegoers. We all feel like movies have changed. They don’t look the same anymore,” said James Deveney. “You go back to the 2000s and anytime before that, even B-movies, C-movies, look good!”
These commentators suspect a few culprits: Bottom-line-focused executives for whom cinema is nothing more than “content”; standardization wrought by streamers; the inherent supremacy of shooting on film over now-dominant digital. “People are becoming hip to it, and it’s a big factor in why people aren’t going to the movies anymore,” said Deveney.
To van der Linden, there’s “a moral question” at play. “The reality of a movie is not something that exists on its own,” he said. “It’s solely determined by the viewer’s immersion in the movie. When that breaks, there is a disconnect that is kind of tragic.”
What’s With Those Blurry Backgrounds?
Ironically, several of the features in modern movies these film buffs decry are, according to the industry professionals, likely deployed to make movies shot on digital look more “cinematic.” Take a chief complaint: an overreliance on shallow depth-of-field shots, in which the foreground is in focus and the background is blurry, like Portrait Mode on an iPhone.
“I think there’s a sense [out there] of everything being in focus is video-y, and narrow depth of field is cinematic,” said the cinematographer Steve Yedlin (“Knives Out,” “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”) He says there is a misconception that “softness” is what makes a movie look like a film….
(3) IKER Q&A. If This Goes On (Don’t Panic) is a podcast about hope and resistance in Science Fiction and Fantasy. In the latest episode, “I’ll Make a Spectacle of You with Beatrice Winifred Iker”, cohosts Alan Bailey and Cat Rambo talk to poet, podcaster, author, and tarot reader, Beatrice Winifred Iker. They discuss religion, horror and religion, queerness, writing neurodiverse characters, Appalachia, organizing complicated plots, Mothman, perfume recommendations, and much more. You can find Beatrice and their books here.
…Among others, I chatted with Adrian Tchaikovsky, Anna Smith Spark, Charles Stross, his wife Feorag and their plush Cthulhu, Matt/Womble, Andrew Knighton, Ana Sun, Scott Edelman (who had just enjoyed his first Birmingham balti the day before), Alison Scott, John Coxon, España Sheriff, Sara Felix, James Bacon, S.J. Groenewegen and many, many others whose names I don’t recall. If I talked to you at Eastercon or gave you a koala and failed to mention you, I’m very sorry.
I also took this photo (with permission) of Cthulhu making friends with a tiny koala and posted it on social media, where it went kind of viral and even ended up in the convention newsletter The Fiery Chicken….
To celebrate a quarter century of “The Lord of the Rings,” the Lego Group, in partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products, is launching an 8,278-piece set recreating the majestic city of Gondor – the legendary White City of Minas Tirith.
From towering architecture to the iconic citadel, the striking display model captures “one of Middle-earth’s most memorable locations.”
The set, which features a hybrid-scale design, combines an “expansive microscale cityscape with richly detailed minifigure-scale interior scenes,” according to a May 12 news release.
“From afar, builders can admire the sweeping skyline and defensive walls of Minas Tirith,” the release reads. “Up close, they can explore key interior spaces, including the throne room of the citadel, where pivotal moments from the story unfold.”
The set also features 10 minifigures, themed accessories and the legendary Shadowfax horse figure to help bring “the world of Middle-earth to life.”…
… The 25th Anniversary Legacy Collection will be available to Lego Insiders through Early Access on June 1 and to the general population three days later, on June 4….
We’re getting the first look at footage from The Big Bang Theory spinoff Stuart Fails To Save the Universe. The teaser was revealed along with the release date Wednesday during the Warner Bros. Discovery Upfront presentation in New York. The ten-episode season will make its streaming debut Thursday, July 23 at 9 pm ET on HBO Max, followed by a new episode every Thursday.
The spinoff revolves around comic book store owner Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman) who is tasked with restoring reality after he breaks a device built by Sheldon (Jim Parsons) and Leonard (Johnny Galecki), accidentally bringing about a multiverse Armageddon. Stuart is aided in this quest by his girlfriend Denise, geologist friend Bert, and quantum physicist/all-around pain in the ass Barry Kripke. Along the way, they meet alternate-universe versions of characters we’ve come to know and love from The Big Bang Theory. As the title implies, things don’t go well….
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
May 13, 1937 — Roger Zelazny. (Died 1995.)
By Paul Weimer: The author that got me into Science Fiction and Fantasy? Maybe. My first science fiction and fantasy was Asimov (I,Robot), Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles) and Tolkien (The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings). But it was Roger Zelazny who really made it stick. Sure, I read more of Asimov, and I tried to read The Silmarillion and failed, but it was reading Nine Princes in Amber and its sequels that really convinced me to get on the endless road through shadow to seek out other science fiction and fantasy.
It is ironic that for a writer best known for his short stories that I started with, and for a while stuck with, Zelazny’s novels. After Amber came Jack of Shadows, Deus Irae, Dilvish the Damned, Lord of Light and others.
If I had to point a single novel at a reader for Zelazny, I would go with Jack of Shadows. Jack of Shadows does a lot of things that the second Amber series tries to do (and not always successfully) . And I have mentioned before and elsewhere science fantasy IS my jam. How can I resist a novel where the dayside of the Earth is run on science, and the darkside is run on magic?
It took me a while to actually find and delve into the short fiction that everyone had raved about. The Last Defender of Camelot was the first collection of his I read, and then I started hunting his stories in “Best of” collections and other anthologies, and started filling in hjs oeuvre and trying to read all of his work.
This is a process that continues to this day.
Reading the NESFA collections of Roger Zelazny, which I have been reviewing here at File 770, I have realized how much of the Zelazny stories I have missed, and how much, for even the author that got me into SF and Fantasy, I still have a lot to learn about. My love for Roger Zelazny and his work is a lifelong journey. I suppose in theory there will come a day where I can say I have read all of Zelazny’s work. Someday.
There are always surprises. I remember reading and liking a story in an old anthology of “best stories” that, much to my surprise, I only recently learned was a Zelazny story. (“The Game of Blood and Dust”). Zelazny continues to delight me.
But why do I like Zelazny’s work in the first place? Even long before I picked up a camera, I’ve always been interested in imagery, in capturing moments. Zelazny captures these moments, that imagery, those scenes that resonate in my mind. Those moments captured, that lovely writing demands my attention. From Corwin walking down the stairs to Rebma, to Jack coming back from the death at the eastern pole of the world, to the Tristan and Isolde imagery of The Dream Master, to Hellwell in Lord of Light. And on, and on, and on.
And such well drawn characters in often very limited space. They are often driven, and yes, the women very often have green eyes and red hair. (Zelazny had a type, you see) but I see that as feature, not bug. And yes, too many of them smoked, and that helped take him from us way way too soon. I never got to meet him, much to my sorrow. (He, Pratchett and Banks are three of my regrets in that regard). Dilvish the Damned, particularly comes across as a character we learn in bursts, in small bits of backstory and worldbuilding. (Also a lot of Zelazny’s characters are driven, almost to obsession. They are passionate and seize things by the horns, and sometimes get the horns as a result.
But, finally, what other SFF author has written properties that I’ve mined and run roleplaying games out of for three decades, after all? Long live the work of Roger Zelazny.
A fork of uBlock Origin Lite doesn’t just remove the ads from web pages; it replaces them with tiles containing slogans from John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live.
Published by Australian Dave Lawrence, the Chromium add-in (so it’ll work in browsers such as Chrome and Edge) takes the uBlock Origin Lite content blocker (also known as uBO Lite) and tweaks it so that rather than simply hiding the ads, the ads are replaced with white boxes containing slogans from the movies.
Lawrence listed them: “OBEY, CONSUME, WATCH TV, SLEEP, SUBMIT, CONFORM, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WORK, NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.”
But sadly, nothing along the lines of “THIS AD IS HERE SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO PAY TO KEEP THIS SITE RUNNING.”
“Each blocked ad gets a single phrase, picked at random from the list,” Lawrence explained in the project’s repository.
The uBlock Origin project is not involved, and Lawrence noted that only ads blocked by cosmetic filters get the They Live treatment. Custom user-defined cosmetic filters still hide ads normally….
Medieval-style fantasy continues be a hot genre for streamers looking to cast spells on viewers.
At its Upfronts, Netflix announced it has greenlit Barbaric, a fantasy drama based on the hit Vault Comics title of the same name.
Created by Mike Moreci and Nathan Gooden and edited by Adrian Wassel, Barbaric centers on a ruthless and crass barbarian who is cursed to only use his violence for good, which sends him, his talking axe and a young witch, on a road of self-discovery, redemption and revenge….
… Not mentioned in Wednesday’s announcement are the incoming talent deals featuring Michael Bay as director, and Claflin and Patrick Stewart as the stars. The trio have been involved with Barbaric since it was first revealed that Netflix was developing the project in 2024.
Launched in 2021, Vault’s Barbaric proved to be a surprise, massive hit for the indie publisher, founded by Wassel, with the comics collected into volumes and selling well over 600,000 units, per the publisher. It has been translated into six languages and launched a spin-off series, Queen of Swords, as well as various one-shots….
SpaceX’s advanced new Starship megarocket will fly for the first time a week from today, if all goes to plan.
SpaceX is targeting May 19 for the debut launch of its Starship V3 (Version 3), a bigger and more capable vehicle that could help humanity take its first steps on the moon and Mars, the company announced Tuesday (May 12).
The rocket will lift off from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas on May 19 during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT; 5:30 p.m. local Texas time). You’ll be able to watch it live here at Space.com when the time comes.
This will be the 12th flight overall for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. But it will be the first for Starship V3, which SpaceX says boasts many improvements over its predecessors.
For example, the V3 Super Heavy first stage now has three grid fins — lattice-like structures that help the booster steer its way back to Earth for recovery and reuse — instead of the original four. And each fin is now 50% larger and significantly stronger, according to SpaceX….
Photographers search for dark skies in the most remote landscapes to find places where the galaxy shines with extraordinary clarity. They share not only their breathtaking results but also their methods, trials and adventures.
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Here’s a new SFnal song parody video from Ginny Di, Anjali Bhimani, and Whitney Avalon: “There’s No Realm Like The Fey Realm”.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, 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 Eldridge.]
(1) TOMORROW HUMANS FLY TO THE MOON FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 53 YEARS. Artemis II, the first crewed mission of the Artemis program, is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:24 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, April 1.
7:45 a.m. EDT | Live coverage of tanking operations for NASA’s (SLS) Space Launch System rocket for Artemis II begins. Coverage includes live rocket views with audio commentary.
(2) WARMING UP THE AUDIENCE. Elizabeth Bear introduced the film “Fahrenheit 451” at the Worcester Public Library last weekend. She has posted her script at Throw Another Bear in the Canoe.
What follows is a slightly tidied-up version of my remarks to introduce Fahrenheit 451 at the Worcester Public Library last Saturday, March 28th.
Welcome.
The film we are about to watch is a 1966 Francois Truffaut adaptation of a 1953 Ray Bradbury novel about book burning, censorship, state capture of media, propaganda, the proliferation of parasocial relationships replacing real ones, forced conformity, and fake news.
If that seems relevant to our world today, I have to admit, I agree.
Bradbury was influenced in his writing by his experiences with McCarthyism, Naziism, and the changing media landscape of his lifetime, which spanned the golden age of radio and the height of broadcast television. Broadcast media concerned him greatly: he thought that it would inevitably lead to a dumbing down of the populace and was an ideal vector for propaganda and social control. He warned of a flourishing of censorship and authoritarianism as a result.
Truffaut brought that thematic charge into the 1960s and the modernist era, using the visual language of futurism to create a sense of everyday claustrophobia, conformity, and peril, and to symbolize the death of the life of the mind….
… However, one psychological truth that manifests through that metaphor is among the ways in which authoritarianism gets a roothold to begin with: with that intolerance for uncomfortable ideas. When people are not willing to have their preconceptions challenged, they try to create an environment where they will never be pushed back against. Nobody really wants to deal with moral complexities and nuance: we want a world where we can be right. And that’s the world that Truffaut’s authoritarians provide for their populace. One where the answers are simple and the good guys always win and you never have to feel that faint unease that maybe there are a lot of ethical compromises in every action and throughout history….
(3) THE MELODY LINGERS ON. In a post about books that continue well-known series, J. W. McCormack, editor of The Baffler, disapproves of Sanderson’s Wheel of Time novels: “Neverending Stories”. (First article free; subscription required thereafter.)
…The most tragic case of a continuation novel in recent memory is likely that of Robert Jordan’s tetradecalogy The Wheel of Time, the last three novels of which were finished after Jordan’s death from a rare blood disease by graphomaniacal Mormon Magic: The Gathering enthusiast Brandon Sanderson, who makes between $10 and $55 million a year for his own best-selling, ponderous fantasy novels. Hand-selected by Jordan’s widow to complete The Wheel for Tor Publishing Group after, no kidding, auditioning via obituary, Sanderson’s three volumes exchange Jordan’s hard lore regarding the Aes Sedai, Darkfriends, and the prophesied Car’a’carn for stupefied descriptions of buildings (“stonework and wood”); sentences beginning with “women are like . . .”; and so much reliance on plot over prose that people are often “perked up,” described as “tanned,” and, according to one intrepid blog, sniff in disdain 75 times in 978,460 words (which may not sound like a lot, but The Lord of the Rings apparently tallies 28 sniffs total)….
MO: The Body made me think of that scale in Donny Darko where everything is placed on a continuum of love and fear; in The Body, love is the source of fear: a visceral fear of loss, rejection, and abandonment. What did you want to explore about community, connection, and the fragility of the ties that bind?
BCM: The Body is probably most about consequences. Not for Mavis; for groups who successfully employ coercive control—which, yes, must depend on fear. The entire ecosystem of repression is dependent on fear. Which means, also, that there is no opportunity for love to exist at all. There’s therefore no community, no connection—as soon as you threaten someone, love is impossible. Consent is impossible. Intimacy is impossible.
…If there is a message or a moral, it is that there are still wonderful things at hand in a world that might seem like it is running out of them. The existence of Small Prophets proves the point: that British telly can still create impossible marvels like this is a reason to keep believing in magic.
A federal judge blocked Donald Trump‘s executive order that prohibited federal agencies from providing funding to NPR and PBS.
In a ruling issued on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss wrote that the president’s executive order “singles out two speakers and, on the basis of their speech, bars them from all federally funded programs.”
“Although there are many lawful reasons that the government might decline to make ‘a valuable governmental benefit’ available to someone, punishing disfavored private speech is not one of them,” the judge wrote.
In an executive order last May, Trump prohibited the U.S. government from distributing any funds to the public media outlets, deeming them biased.
While the ruling is a victory for NPR and PBS, part of their lawsuit is now moot. Last summer, the Republican-controlled Congress rescinded all federal funding to the entity that distributed public media money, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB later dissolved.
The judge’s opinion does not change the revocation of CPB money, but he noted that PBS and NPR still received grants from other federal agencies and entities. He wrote, “The message is clear: NPR and PBS need not apply for any federal benefit because the President disapproves of their ‘left-wing’ coverage of the news. Because the First Amendment does not tolerate viewpoint discrimination and retaliation of this type, the Court will issue judgment against the federal- agency defendants declaring Section 3(a) of the Executive Order is unconstitutional and will issue an injunction barring those defendants from implementing it.”…
It was advertised as “the ultimate Barbie fan event.”
The billing of an attraction as a life-size Barbie Dreamhouse led fans to believe they would be physically stepping into the doll’s iconic home to play around and pose for pictures. They also expected a neon-filled 1980s roller disco and a space-themed exhibition titled “Beyond the Stars.” Doll lovers from around the world bought tickets expecting a weekend of quality entertainment, photo ops and pink galore.
The reality at the event, which was held over the weekend at the Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was a lot less rosy, several attendees said.
The Dreamhouse was a 2-D cardboard cutout with a pink Volkswagen bus parked out front. Guests were not allowed inside the vehicle. The space exhibition consisted of an oversize Barbie box decorated with a ringed planet. The roller disco was a penned-off area on the center’s concrete floors with metal beams forming a tent but with no canvas overhead.
Eventually, the event organizers did put up a small disco ball, attendees said.
The three-day event was orchestrated by Mischief Management, an event organizer that oversees fan events like BroadwayCon. According to Mattel, the toymaker that manufactures Barbie, Mischief Management licensed the Barbie brand for the event. Mischief Management has since informed attendees that it will issue full refunds for any tickets sold.
Still, it’s cold comfort for Barbie fans who had high hopes for the event, given its formal association with Mattel.
Some of the promises panned out. The tennis star Serena Williams spoke on a panel as advertised. (Ms. Williams did not respond to a request for comment.)
Tickets started at $149 for adult admission and went up to $449. Tara Brooks, a data analyst who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., spent about $249 on a “pink pass,” a higher-tier ticket that included a “special swag bag.” She received a bottle of Barbie-branded hand sanitizer.
“You can get them at the Dollar Store,” she added….
…Failed conventions and festivals have become something of their own genre in recent years, including the now infamous Fyre Festival, which conjures images of festivalgoers stranded on a tropical island with only cheese sandwiches in foam containers, and DashCon, a Tumblr convention in 2014 that turned out to be not much more than a ball pit in an empty hall….
The organisers of the Barbie Dream Fest weekend in Florida are issuing refunds to attendees after customers complained of a lacklustre event.
The creators of the event promised “unforgettable experiences”, and advertised a roller rink and disco with a caption that read: “Join us for three days of glam, nostalgia, and dream-big energy made for Barbie fans of every generation.”
But ticketholders, who paid up to $450 (£340), say it was far from that. Photos of the event show a grey convention centre space with pink cardboard cut-out Barbie signs.
Mattel, which owns the Barbie brand, said that full refunds would be given to everyone who purchased tickets….
(8) LAST DAUGHTER OF KRYPTON. [Item by N.] The full trailer for Supergirl, who flies into theaters on June 26.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novel
It’s the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first publication of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation as a novel. So let’s tell the history of the novel.
In the summer of 1941, Isaac Asimov proposed to John W. Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction that he write a short story set in a slowly declining Galactic Empire, based on the fall of the Roman Empire. Campbell thought the idea was great.
Then Asimov proposed writing a series of stories depicting the fall of the first Galactic Empire and the rise of the second. Asimov would write eight stories for Campbell’s magazine over eight years (1942-1949), and they were later collected into three volumes known as The Foundation Trilogy which were published from 1951 to 1953.
Foundation was first published as a single book by Gnome Press. It has “The Psychohistorians”, “The Encyclopedists”, “The Mayors”, “The Traders” and “The Merchant Princes”. “The Encyclopedists” and “The Mayors” were novelettes, the others are short stories. As noted before, each was in Astounding Science Fiction.
The cover art is by David Kyle. Please note that on the cover it is titled Foundation: An Interplanetary Novel. When Ace published it they renamed it The 1,000 Year Plan in their two editions of 1955 and 1962.
At Tricon (1966), it would win the Hugo for Best All-Time Series. Other nominees were Burroughs’ Barsoom series, Heinlein’s Future History series , E. E. Smith’s Lensmen series and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
As you know, it is now streaming as a series as Apple+.
The New York Times has cut ties with a freelance journalist after discovering he used artificial intelligence to help write a book review that echoed elements of a review of the same book in the Guardian.
The New York Times launched an investigation, during which Preston admitted that he had used AI to assist writing the review and did not spot the sections that were pulled from the Guardian before submitting it. In a statement to the Guardian on Tuesday, Preston said that he was “hugely embarrassed” and had “made a serious mistake”.
The New York Times alerted the Guardian to the overlap in an email sent on Monday, and added an editor’s note to the review acknowledging the use of AI and linking to the Guardian piece. “A reader recently alerted the Times that this review included language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in the Guardian,” reads the editor’s note. “We spoke to the author of this piece, a freelancer reviewer, who told us he used an AI tool that incorporated material from the Guardian review into his draft, which he failed to identify and remove. His reliance on AI and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of the Times’s standards.”…
Library, ballroom and scratching post – this multifunctional building is a monument to the towering intellect of its namesake and a celebration of Western Culture™ with its subtle blend of classical styles….
I’d like to know what books will be on its shelves.
Working up an appetite defending Azeroth? This frying pan is ready to help you bring people together over an Azerothian feast. It’s seasoned and ready to use, naturally nontoxic, made in the USA, and ready for any cooking adventure. Whether you like to cook over an open fire or in your cozy kitchen, make everything from Savory Deviate Delight to a Bloodberry Tart. Plus, when you take home this skillet, you’ll also receive a code to unlock a special in-game companion!
(14) A BLOT ON THE UNIVERSE. [Item by Steven French.] The first time I saw a chain of Starlink satellites passing overhead I actually thought for a moment the alien invasion had begun! Here’s a warning on what a million will do to our view of the night sky: “A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky—for everyone on Earth” concludes Phys.org.
The human eye can see fewer than 4,500 stars in an unpolluted night sky. If we permit SpaceX to launch these satellites, we will see more satellites than stars—for large portions of the night and the year, throughout the world. This will severely damage the night sky for everyone on Earth.
SpaceX’s proposal also completely fails to account for atmospheric pollution, collision risk or how to develop the technology needed to disperse waste heat from orbital data centers.’
(15) MEME-TO-SCREEN (OR SCREAM). [Item by N.] A24’s Backrooms, based on the Internet creepypasta and phenomena of the same name, (directed by the 20(!)-year old Kane Parsons, based on his web series of the same name), comes to theaters May 29.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Olav Rokne, N., Cora Buhlert, 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 P J Evans.]
Having had their fill of songs, folksy rhymes, and the charms of Goldberry, the hobbits continue on their journey in this chapter. And basically instantly run into more mortal peril. This time, what should (again) have been a straight shot to the East Road instead finds them trapped by a barrow-wight, a creature who has infested one of the many burial mounds scattered across this part of the countryside, and who ropes them into its plans for ritualized murder.
There’s a strong connection here to the history of Middle Earth as Tolkien has laid it out in various ancillary materials, and as he will go on to spell out later in the book. The barrow mounds are all that remains of the kingdom of Arnor, the northern kingdom established by the survivors of Númenor after they played their part in the defeat of Sauron at the end of the Second Age. After the fall of Arnor (at the hands of the king of Angmar, whom Frodo will have a fateful encounter with very soon) survivors of its royal line became the Rangers, whom we will soon meet in the form of Strider/Aragorn (this is alluded to by Tom Bombadil when he shows up to rescue the hobbits, because once again, Tolkien cannot keep from hinting at what’s coming next in the story, even if the hints are opaque to everyone but himself).
Within the chapter itself, however, this is the bit of Middle Earth worldbuilding that feels closest to, and most nakedly taken from, English history. The standing stones the hobbits pass on their journey, the burial mounds themselves, even the grave goods the hobbits are arrayed with by the barrow-wight, all seem taken from a specific, real-world cultural context. To take but the most famous example, the Sutton Hoo excavation took place in 1938, and Tolkien would absolutely have been aware of it and of similar discoveries. It’s such a distinctive cultural reference that I remember being a bit baffled by it as a young reader. Having grown up outside of the UK, much of the chapter’s detailing felt opaque to me, and yet I was able to sense that here was something that stood a bit aside from the rest of the novel’s worldbuilding, more its own thing than a part of the greater tapestry….
(3) SF CINEMA CARD BOOK. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Richard Rempel from Winnipeg, Canada, north of the Cursed Earth and the Mega Cities, runs the YouTube Channel, Vintage SF. It is a bit of a departure for him this month as he delves into just one book and it is non-fiction SF on classic SF cinema. It is by Dennis Gifford who was an SF aficionado (sadly died in 2000) who reputedly owned the largest collection of British comics. But he was also a broadcaster for radio and television, a journalist, film historian and the author of over fifty books on these subjects. He is noted for rediscovering lost films and finding out who nameless (uncredited) creators were. In this Vintage SF episode, Richard Rempel delves into Gifford’s Things, Its and Aliens!: Lobby Card Posters from the ’50s and ’60s.
First up, is the poster card for Project Moonbase. A film whose screenstory was by one Robert Heinlein. It was kind of interesting to see which films I knew and which were unknown to me…
DC Comics has become the king of the retcon. Over the decades, even before the dreaded term “retroactive continuity” reared its ugly head, the publisher had to retcon numerous things. This makes sense, of course. No one working on comics back in the day figured they were anything other than disposable stories for kids, so they didn’t put as much thought into the future and how their stories would affect those who came after them. Eventually, retcons would become a normal part of the comic industry, with DC leading the way in using them to fix all kinds of problems created by their older comics….
For example –
10) The New 52 Superman Costume
Superman has some well-known weaknesses, but he’s also known for being nigh-indestructible. That’s what made the change to his costume in the New 52 so nonsensical. Instead of having a costume made by the Kents, his costume was Kryptonian battle armor. There was no reason for him to wear this, since one of his powers is invulnerability. It was such a strange thing to change, and it still doesn’t make any sense to this day.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
March 11, 1952 — Douglas Adams. (Died 2001.)
Was there ever a better work of epic humorous SF, and yes I deliberately used the British spelling there, than The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that Douglas Adams delightfully created?
I first encountered it as the BBC television adaptation on public television in the Eighties. It was quite good. Really it was very, very silly.
I next listened to the most excellent radio series which originally broadcast in by BBC Radio 4, and then on the National Public Radio where I heard it. I think it one of the best full cast SF dramas I’ve heard and I’ve listened to it at least three or four times that I can remember.
Now the books. Oh, they’re most excellent as well. All five of them that he wrote before his very untimely death as there were more later, one of which I’ve read. The US edition of the fifth book was originally released with the note of “The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy” on the cover.
I’m trying to remember at what point the novels finally weren’t based on off the radio series but I know that it finally happened.
I have not read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency novels which were described by him as “a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics”. I did see some of the BBC series, oddly enough filmed in Vancouver, and it’s silly and fun.
Adams was the script editor for the seventeenth season of Doctor Who, and he wrote three scripts starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor — “The Pirate Planet”, “City of Death” and “Shada”.
The latter was only partially filmed but never not televised due to industry disputes which even unclear to this day. It was later completed using animation for the unfinished scenes and broadcast as Doctor Who: The Lost Episode on BBC America.
The last thing I want to mention to you is Last Chance to See, BBC radio documentary series and a book, written and presented by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. Adams and Carwardine travel to various locations in the hope of encountering species on the brink of extinction. It’s quite extraordinary.
(8) EXPANDED UNIVERSE. Two films and a pair of virtual reality demonstrations have been added to the programming slate of the 13th edition of The Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival, returning this week from March 13-14, 2026.
Friday, March 13, 2026
The Producers Club (358 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036)
Pitchfork Retreat
Directors Gregory Van Voorhis, Nicole Van Voorhis — United States, 94 minutes
Three people arrive on a private island for a horror writer’s retreat where they are each hell-bent on winning a life-changing competition. That is until they tap into their inner demons which causes everything to spiral down on them. The star-studded cast includes Tony Todd (Candyman, Platoon), Danielle Harris (Urban Legend, Halloween), Terry Kiser (Weekend at Bernie’s, Friday the 13th Part VII), Dee Wallace (E.T., Cujo), and Adrienne Barbeau (Creepshow, Escape from New York).
Saturday, March 14, 2026
Village East Cinema by Angelika (181-189 2nd Ave, New York, NY 10003)
Projection
Directors Evan Samaras, George Scoufaras — United States, 80 min
A man is struggling with grief due to the recent death of his father. He copes by beginning to write and envision a reality where he and his father are bonding over their shared passion, filmmaking. The lines between the realities begin to blur until only one remains. Q&A with filmmakers and cast will follow.
VR demonstrations will be held throughout the festival:
Meridian Transmissions
Director Eric Patrick — United States, 13 min
A quotidian meditation on surveillance and the decay of modernity.
Chronological Experiments by The Naturalists Group
Director Jon Bernson — United States, 14 min
A renegade collective of scientists films a pitch video for a group of anonymous investors in this VR mockumentary which explores the tension between the pursuit of truth and the financial power structures that sustain it.
Sofia Papa started studying physics in high school because she thought the subject “was married with art in a nice way.” Both scientists and artists are driven by curiosity about the world around them, she says, and she dreamt of a future in which these different means of exploring unanswered questions could enrich each other.
In the years that followed, Papa tried to combine these two passions wherever possible—and now Papa has found the ultimate way to unite them. The graduate student at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies is the winner of this year’s top prize in Science’s annual “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest, a competition in which scientists express their research through dance.
In Papa’s winning entry, she and five other dancers—in red and blue outfits representing positive and negative charges, respectively—re-create the piezoelectric effect, the ability of some crystalline materials to generate electricity when subjected to stress. The property is a critical component of technologies such as cigarette lighters and quartz watches. Papa’s dance, full of twists and turns, uses movement as a metaphor for the differences between crystalline and semicrystalline materials, as well as how the charges can become displaced under certain conditions….
NASA’s inspector general released a new report on Tuesday that examines the space agency’s management of the Human Landing System development contracts signed with SpaceX and Blue Origin.
These landers are essential for NASA’s program to land humans on the Moon this decade and then establish a long-term settlement on the lunar surface. However, both NASA and the companies developing the landers have largely been silent about their efforts. For this reason the new report on Human Landing Systems (HLS) provides some interesting insights previously unknown to the public.
Overall, the report, signed by Office of Inspector General senior official Robert Steinau, finds that the fixed-price contracting approach has been beneficial for NASA as it seeks to broaden its utilization of the US commercial space industry….
…That’s not to say there have not been difficulties.
…One of these involves the extent to which astronauts flying on board SpaceX’s Starship should be able to take manual control of the vehicle during flights down to the lunar surface.
The report notes that during every one of the Apollo program’s crewed lunar landings, astronauts engaged the backup manual control method. (Of course, this occurred six decades ago, when flight software was considerably less sophisticated than today.)
As NASA and SpaceX near a key decision point, known as Critical Design Review, the issue remains unresolved. The new report suggests that this may result in automation being the only landing method….
DPD notes the whole segment is worth watching — but if nothing else, go to the link and start watching around the 15:30 mark.
(12) CONFIDENTIAL TO “LAGNIAPPE”. Not running the rest of your material is what we call an “editorial decision”, not a “mistake”.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Daniel Dern, Steve Green, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel (No Trigger Warning) Dern.]
On January 28, 2026, Disney released the short film The Mandalorian: Knot a Toy, and though it doesn’t tell a new, never-before-seen story between Din Djarin and Grogu, it’s worth watching. Running at almost two minutes, Knot a Toy is a unique recreation of a scene from The Mandalorian, in which Grogu explores the Razor Crest and finds his new favorite toy.
What makes Knot a Toy special is that it’s animated, with Din Djarin, Grogu, the ship, and everything made as crochet toys. It’s a creative short film in terms of its animation style, and Disney chose one of the most endearing and memorable scenes from The Mandalorian to be recreated as crochet toys….
(2) LOCUS RECOMMENDED READING LIST. The 2025 Locus Recommended Reading List was posted today at Locus Online. It includes a newly added category for Translated Novels.
And Locus’2025 Poll & Survey is now accepting votes from all to decide the winners of the Locus Awards. The poll closes April 15. The Locus Awards will be presented on May 30 during the Bay Area Book Festival.
(4) BOMBS AWAY. The Heinlein Society put up a post on Facebook detailing Robert Heinlein’s construction of a fallout shelter behind his Colorado Springs home in the early Sixties. The story has an ironic ending:
… Now for the rest of the story. In 1963, NORAD command center operations moved from Ent Air Force Base to the partially underground “Combined Operations Center” for Aerospace Defense Command and NORAD, making the Cheyenne Mountain Complex a primary target of a Russian nuclear strike. The complex was only a few miles from Heinlein’s house at 1776 Mesa Ave in Colorado Springs, basically making all the work done on the shelter pointless. This must have been on Heinlein’s mind when he wrote Farnham’s Freehold in 1964….
(5) THE THINGS YOU LEARN FROM FANZINES. Lofgeornost is the title of Fred Learner’s quarterly fanzine. In the latest issue he reminded people where he got it from.
“Lofgeornost” is the final word of Beowulf, a poem that I studies in college. It means ‘most desirous of renown’, which I reckon is a common aim in fanzine production.
I’ve learned to judge Beowulf translations by the way the translator renders this final word. Anyone who translates it as “most deserving of praise” misses the point that the author of the poem took 3182 lines to make. Like pietas in Latin or sisu in Finnish, it’s a term that can’t be rendered in English as a single word; but it embodies the essence of its culture.
The public is invited to pick the winners. Go here to complete the Clarkesworld 2025 Poll. Voting will close on February 15 at 11:00 p.m. Eastern and the winners will be announced in the March issue.
(8) X. J. KENNEDY (1929-2026). Rich Horton’s tribute to the late “X. J. Kennedy (1929-2026)” notes that although “best known for his (very good) poetry, he was also a fan and writer of SF and Fantasy.” Kennedy died February 1. Full details at the link.
Bill Mumy is best remembered, I think, of course for being on Lost in Space for three seasons (“Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!”) though he has a much more extensive performance resume.
At the rather tender age of seven, he made his genre acting debut on TheTwilight Zone as Billy Bayles in “Long Distance Call”. He’d appear in two more Twilight Zone episodes, “It’s A Good Life” as Anthony Fremont, a child with godlike powers, and finally as the young Pip Phillips in “In Praise of Pip”.
He’d show up much later on in Twilight Zone: The Movie in one of the segments, not unsurprisingly a remake of “It’s A Good Life” which here is listed as being from a screenplay by Richard Matheson. He’s Tim. Whoever that is.
He’d be on the reboot of the Twilight Zone in “It’s Still A Good Life” as the adult Anthony Fremont.
He next had three appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, none genre. His next genre outing would be playing two different characters on Bewitched. I Dream of Jeannie and the Munsters followed.
Then came the eighty-three episode, three season run on Lost in Space. He’d be eleven years old when it started. I know I’ve seen all of it at least once. No idea how the Suck Fairy would treat it nearly this long on, but I really liked it when I saw it at the time.
Remember the 1990 Captain America? If you don’t, you’re not alone. In this WW II version, he plays a young boy, Tom Kimball, who photographs Captain America over the Capitol building kicking a missile off after batting Red Skull so it crashes in Alaska, burying itself and Steve Rogers under the ice. 12%, repeat 12%, is the rating audience reviewers gave it on Rotten Tomatoes.
He showed up once in the first iteration of a Flash series, and then has three appearances as Tommy Puck in the Nineties Superboy series. The first I saw and quite like, the latter not a single episode have I encountered.
The next thing that is quite worthy of note is his stellar role on Babylon 5 as Mimbari warrior monk, I think that’s the proper term, Lennier. Of one hundred and ten episodes, he was in all but two. That’s right, he missed just two. Or at he’s least credited as being so. What an amazing role that was. I’ve watched this series including the six films at least twice straight through.
The last thing of note, and I’ve not seen the series, was him playing Dr. Zachary Smith on the reboot of the Lost in Space series that came out just a few years ago for two episodes.
Photo from Twilight Zone’s “Long Distance Call” an episode considered one of their darkest, if not their darkest, about the ghost of a grandmother who spends the entire story trying to get her grandson as played by Mumy to commit suicide so he can join her in the afterlife.
Sugar is coming back to puzzle through a new mystery this summer—and with it the reminder of why Sugar, an Apple TV series starring Colin Farrell as a neo-noir gumshoe type, is being covered on a website that focuses on sci-fi and fantasy. Season one’s sixth episode, “Go Home,” let viewers in on a big secret: Farrell’s character, the very human-looking John Sugar, is actually… an alien in disguise.
With that reveal out of the way, Sugar also let viewers know that certain other characters were also extraterrestrials—including one who got mixed up in some very bad business, most certainly knows valuable details about Sugar’s missing sister, and was in the wind at the end of the season. So instead of taking “the last ride home,” as he’d originally intended, Sugar decided there’s enough on Earth to make him stick around….
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has applied to launch one million satellites into Earth’s orbit to power artificial intelligence (AI).
The application claims “orbital data centres” are the most cost and energy-efficient way to meet the growing demand for AI computing power.
Traditionally, such centres are large warehouses full of powerful computers which process and store data. Musk’s aerospace firm claims processing needs due to the expanding use of AI are already outpacing “terrestrial capabilities”.
It would increase the number of SpaceX satellites in orbit drastically. Its existing Starlink network of nearly 10,000 satellites has already been accused of creating congestion in space, which Musk denies.
The new network could comprise up to one million solar-powered satellites, according to the application filed on Friday with the Federal Communications Commission – which does not specify a timeline for the plan. SpaceX claims the system would deliver the computer capacity required to serve “billions of users globally”.
It also says it would be the first step towards “becoming a Kardashev II-level civilisation – one that can harness the Sun’s full power”, referencing a scale of hypothetical alien societies proposed by an astronomer in the 1960s.
Musk wrote on his social media site X: “The satellites will actually be so far apart that it will be hard to see from one to another. Space is so vast as to be beyond comprehension.” Like the Starlink satellites, which provide high-speed internet, they would operate in low-Earth orbit at altitudes from 500-2,000km (310-1,242 miles).
SpaceX claims “orbital data centres” – a concept also being explored by other firms – would be a greener alternative to traditional centres, which require enormous amounts of power and water for cooling.
Lego once released a typewriter set but it only mimicked the functions of a typewriter, since then I have always wondered if you could build a working typewriter only using LEGO bricks so today I’m trying to do just that.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, 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 Ken Richards.]
(0) The Friday and Saturday Scrolls are going to be lean. Partly holiday travel, and partly because there are only so many hours in the day – I ended up writing the following SFWA news post instead of advance items to fill tomorrow’s Scroll.
…But with this rules change SFWA has still set the Nebula Awards up for failure. The organization is basically legitimizing LLM use in story creation in the minds of readers and writers. SFWA could have taken a principled stand on this issue. Instead, they did this.
I guarantee this isn’t what most SFWA members wanted. My prediction is SFWA members will be so angry about this change that the organization quickly backtracks. At least, I hope this is what happens. Because as things stand, I’m reconsidering my SFWA membership over this. I’m sure many others are doing the same….
(2) FANS’ FAVORITES. At Reactor, “Readers Pick Their Favorite SFF of 2025”. Poll categories include books, movies, TV series, short stories, video games, podcasts, and video channels. Over 600 voters participated.
What an excellent year for science fiction, fantasy, and horror! For the first time, we asked for your favorite genre books, TV shows, movies, video games, and more from 2025. A book cover that caught your eye. A short story you couldn’t get out of your head. That movie you saw two, three, maybe even four times in theaters!
The owner of Waterstones and Barnes & Noble is reportedly preparing to list the booksellers on the stock market.
Elliott Investment Management, the hedge fund that owns the most popular bookstores in the US and the UK, has spoken to potential advisers about an initial public offering (IPO), the Financial Times reported.
The multibillion-pound group is thought to prefer London over New York for the listing, which could be a welcome boost to the UK stock market.
While initial talks are under way, no final decisions have been made and the plans could change.
The company’s financial year ends in April, which makes an IPO unlikely until after the summer at the earliest, the FT reported, citing unnamed sources close to the matter. However, it is believed that Elliott could appoint investment bankers early next year….
(5) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
A Clockwork Orange
By Paul Weimer: …or, Paul gets snakebit by looking at acclaimed films.
I’ve mentioned in earlier columns how I started to in the early to mid 90’s to read SFF books that had been nominated and won awards. I did the same thing for a while with films as well. Although I was not and would not be interested in photography as something for me to do for another decade, in retrospect, my interest in image started earlier, even more subconsciously, than I realized.
Anyway, I had heard of the brilliance of A Clockwork Orange, and I had been watching a number of 70’s films, and so a trip to the video store (remember those?) meant that it was time for me to engage with Kubrick’s film. I had already seen Dr. Strangelove (I had won a copy in an early online contest) and of course, 2001. So I thought I knew what I was in for when I watched A Clockwork Orange.
Reader, I was not and did not.
Much of the film I was enthralled by. I had not yet read the Burgess book, but the worldbuilding, the dark future of Britain was enthralling. The movie is well acted, even if it is hard to take (poor, poor Alex’s reconditioning). The score, even if I was and am not a music fan, was memorable (and I bought the soundtrack on CD). It’s a dark future but an enthralling one.
But that scene. You know the scene. The imagery. Alex’s break-in, his deadly sexual assault with that gigantic sculpture of a helpless woman. That I had not signed up for. That was hard to take. That I had not been warned about. I’ve only watched the movie a few times since, as brilliant as it is…and I skip that scene. Every single time after the second time, where I stopped and froze the cascade of images that we see in the height of the assault. But I don’t need to see this scene anymore. So it goes.
But I still do use the phrase a “bit of the old ultraviolence” now and again. The movie is unforgettable, and revolutionary.
SpaceX has lost contact with one of its broadband satellites, which is now falling toward Earth due to an unspecified and seemingly mysterious anomaly.
The company revealed that a Starlink satellite experienced an anomaly on Wednesday that led to a complete loss of communication. The satellite suddenly dropped around 2.5 miles in altitude (4 kilometers) and created a small field of debris, according to SpaceX.
“The satellite is largely intact, tumbling, and will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and fully demise within weeks,” SpaceX wrote on X. It’s not clear what caused the satellite to tumble, but the loss of altitude and small bits of debris suggest it, or at least a part of it, may have exploded in orbit. …
David Rankin is the closest thing Earth has to a space superhero.
As an observer and operations engineer at the Catalina Sky Survey, a NASA-funded planetary defense program that utilizes the telescopes atop the Santa Catalina Mountains in Arizona, he spends hours looking for dangerous rocks that could cause catastrophic damage to Earth. Telescope operator, asteroid hunter, photographer, storm chaser and programmer are just some of his credentials—Rankin even has an ancient marine reptile named after him, a plesiosaur that he discovered at age 14.
At the mountain range’s highest point, Mt. Lemmon, we found the mild-mannered skywatcher nonchalantly protecting humans from extinction by space rock. Since 2019, Rankin has been trekking to the peak to look for solar system objects that might collide with our planet. The Catalina Sky Survey, based at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab in Tucson, aims to catalog more than 90 percent of near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters across. According to Rankin, they’re about halfway there….
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Ersatz Culture, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, 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 Patrick Morris Miller.]
(1) YALOW IN CHENGDU FOR TIANWEN AWARDS AGAIN. On the afternoon of October 24th, the 2025 Chengdu Chinese Science Fiction Literature Contest Achievement Release Conference was held at the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum, where the full list of Tianwen Award winners [in Chinese] was announced. Chengdu 2023 Worldcon co-chair Ben Yalow was present and participated in the event. Here are publicity photos from the ceremony. Note: although it may appear that Tianwen is using the same panda logo as the Chengdu Worldcon, the two logos are similar but not identical. [Click for larger images.]
(2) CROWN AWARDS SHORTLISTS. For the fans of historical fiction among us, the Historical Writers’ Association (HWA) has revealed the 2025 Crown Awards shortlists, celebrating the best in historical writing, fiction and non-fiction, published during 2024–2025. The winners of the juried award will be announced November 19.
HWA Gold Crown Award
The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry (Canongate Books)
Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans (Doubleday)
The Maiden of Florence by Katherine Mezzacappa (Fairlight Books)
Hold Back the Night by Jessica Moor (Manilla Press)
Time of the Child by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury)
HWA Non-fiction Crown Award
Lionessheart by Catherine Hanley (The History Press)
The Endless Country by Sami Kent (Picador)
Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson (William Collins)
Naples 1944 by Keith Lowe (William Collins)
Storm’s Edge by Peter Marshall (William Collins)
Moederland by Cato Pedder (John Murray)
HWA Debut Crown Award
The Wicked of the Earth by AD Bergin (Northodox Press)
The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable (Bloomsbury)
Nephthys by Rachel Louise Driscoll (Harvill Secker)
Winter of Shadows by Clare Grant (Black Spring Crime)
The Booker prize foundation has launched a major new literary award, the Children’s Booker prize, offering £50,000 for the best fiction written for readers aged eight to 12.
The new award will launch in 2026, with the first winner announced in early 2027. It will be decided by a mixed panel of adult and child judges, a first for a Booker award. The inaugural chair of judges will be Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the children’s author and current children’s laureate. He will be joined by two other adult judges, who will help select a shortlist of eight books before three child judges are recruited to help decide the winner.
The Booker prize foundation will also gift 30,000 copies of shortlisted and winning books to children each year, working with partners including the National Literacy Trust, The Reading Agency, Bookbanks and the Children’s Book Project. The initiative comes amid reports that children’s reading for pleasure is at its lowest level in 20 years….
… Regular readers may be aware that I’m a big fan of the pulp fiction of yesteryear. And thankfully, a lot of it is coming back into print right now, so it’s possible to enjoy the adventures of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Conan the Cimmerian, Kull of Atlantis, Solomon Kane, Jirel of Joiry, The Shadow, Doc Savage, Fu Manchu and others in brand new paperback editions without having to hunt down yellowing pulp magazines.
What is more, I sometimes also wonder what if all of those pulp heroes actually lived in the same world? What if Conan were to team up with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Jirel of Joiry were to join forces with Ivanhoe? What if John Carter bumped into Eric John Stark on Mars and then they both teamed up to fight Ming the Merciless? What if Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson hunted French master thief Arsene Lupin or the criminal mastermind Fantomas or took on Fu Manchu? What if the Spider or the Shadow fought Dr. Mabuse? Or maybe James Bond could join forces with Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin to fight Blofeld? Or how about Doc Savage and his friends battling Cthulhu?
Do these possibilities intrigue you? Then I have just the book or rather three for you….
(5) OUR TWO MOONS. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Colbert updates a classic song to reflect our Earth now (albeit briefly) having a second moon… Link takes you to the timestamp within the longer video clip: “The Late Show monologue”.
(6) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 146 of the Octothorpe podcast, “It Winds Me Up Something Chronic”, John is on holiday, Alison said she’d have T-shirts ready, and Liz is back. (There’s an uncorrected transcript here.)
…Oates is unusual among capital-L Literary writers of her age in that she’s never tried to mask her interest in mystery, suspense, and horror fiction, nor has she ever claimed to be more high-minded about it than the genre writers she admires. There’s nothing about her writing that suggests she believes she’s “transcending” genre (a pernicious type of snobbery that I have, if possible, less than no time for). She vocally supported Stephen King at a time when other writers of her stature would only sneer at him. An anthology she edited called American Gothic Fiction contains stories by everyone from Herman Melville and Paul Bowles to Harlan Ellison, King, and Thomas Ligotti.
It’s in her short fiction that Oates really lets this side of her talents fly, and there is a lot of that. The number of original story collections she’s written far exceeds the entire bibliographies of most writers. Many of these collections are devoted to, or contain examples of, a wide variety of horror fiction. And despite how dark Oates can get, no matter what she’s writing, she’s not always overly solemn about it. She can be playful. Take “Mystery, Inc.,” from her collection The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror. In it, an independent owner of a number of bookstores that specialize in mystery and suspense fiction travels to a small town in New England, where a legendary store of the same type that the narrator owns can be found. It soon becomes clear that his plan is to meet the owner, the similarly legendary, and beloved, Aaron Neuhaus, make himself interesting enough to be invited to speak with Neuhaus after hours, poison him with a chocolate truffle, and ultimately, in the not-too-distant future, buy the store from Neuhaus’s sure-to-be-overwhelmed widow, as well as the store’s remarkable stock of antiques and rarities….
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
October 24, 1952 — David Weber, 73
By Paul Weimer: Sometimes the subtext is the text. A lot of space opera has the subtext of being naval adventures in space, ranging from the original Star Trek on to the present day. It is no surprise, then, that David Weber decided to cut straight to the source and have actual naval style military adventures in the stars, with Honor Harrington. His books follow the rise of Harrington in a manner that Hornblower and O’Brian could recognize, and appreciate.
David Weber
With all of the side books and ancillary books in the series, the amount of Harrington stories Weber has produced is staggering, but it is undeniably a gem of an idea he can and has taken advantage of for all it’s worth. I’ve not read all of them, but enough to get a good sampling.
What I like even more is Weber’s Armageddon Reef series. The Safehold books take place on a colony planet where humans have fled after a genocidal attack, and have been forcibly reduced in technology in order to evade detection. So we have an alien planet, humans on it, and a lack of space flight. And so Weber adds 18-19th century style naval combat and technology to the mix.
These books, I feel, have to be an even more explicit love letter to Hornblower and company. The conflict between technology and religion and the problems of separation of church and state do elevate these books, I feel, to a question that we face today. While Weber’s novels might be dismissed as just being fun naval and space adventures, there is that undercurrent and layer of engaging with societal questions that make them very worthy of attention.
xkcd finds it surprising what humanity didn’t know before it started space travel.
(10) DAH-DAH-DAH DAT-DADA DAT-DADA AKA WE ARE NOT AMUSED. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Police, and particularly a member of the Ohio National Guard deployed in DC, were not amused when a protester walked behind the Guardsman playing the Star Wars Imperial March. The protester was not amused when he was handcuffed and detained on the street (but released without charges). And I’m guessing the judge will not be amused by having to hear the resulting lawsuit. “Man who played ‘Star Wars’ song at National Guard sues over arrest” at USA Today.
A Washington, D.C., man filed a lawsuit on Oct. 23 against a member of the Ohio National Guard and several police officers after being detained at a September protest in the nation’s capital while playing a well-known villain theme song from the “Star Wars” movies.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of Sam O’Hara, 35, naming Sgt. Devon Beck of the Ohio National Guard and four DC police officers as the defendants. The lawsuit stems from his Sept. 11 arrest, which he says violated his First Amendment rights.
The lawsuit claims O’Hara frequently protested the presence of National Guard members sent to Washington, D.C., in August. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Aug. 16 ordered 250 guard members to Washington at the request of the Secretary of the Army.
“Mr. O’Hara was deeply concerned about the normalization of troops patrolling D.C. neighborhoods. And so, he began protesting the Guard members’ presence by walking several feet behind them when he saw them in the community,” the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia states.
O’Hara used his phone and sometimes a small speaker to play “The Imperial March,” an imposing John Williams composition synonymous with “Star Wars” character Darth Vader, while recording the encounters and posting them on TikTok.
“Ohio National Guard member Sgt. Devon Beck was not amused by this satire,” the suit says.
The lawsuit accuses the Guard member and the local law enforcement officers of suppression of speech, retaliation, unreasonable seizure, excessive force, and false imprisonment. O’Hara is seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, in addition to his legal fees.
As a youngster, Hallam recalls furtively peering into the curtained R-rated section of her local video store in Australia at Re-Animator’s VHS cover, which pictured Combs, his face lit by a luminous green syringe, with a severed head gazing up at him from his laboratory table. “Most provocatively of all,” she says, “the VHS cover had ‘BANNED IN QUEENSLAND’ emblazoned across it, making it seem even more tantalisingly forbidden.”
LINA SELYUKH, BYLINE: A couple of years ago, Stephanie Espinosa moved to a new town, Babcock Ranch in Florida – a town with a spooky surprise.
STEPHANIE ESPINOSA: Our town is very into Halloween. We did not realize how big Halloween is here. October 1, everyone’s – already their houses are decorated.
SELYUKH: Espinosa and her husband got into it. Their oak tree in the yard is now haunted by a floating ghost. Palm trees have sprouted glowing eyeballs. But the real fright for them was the cost of Halloween candy, which they buy in bulk at Walmart.
ESPINOSA: We bought some bags that – you know, it said around a hundred to a hundred and twenty pieces last year for, like, 9.95. And those bags are now, like, $15. You know, do the math. We have, like, 5,000 kids in our town, and that’s just a bag of between 100 and 120 pieces.
SELYUKH: Federal data shows the price of chewing gum and candy going up more than 8% from a year ago, and it’s mainly because of one specific type of candy, which is chocolate as harvests of cocoa keep coming up short for three years. David Branch tracks agricultural markets at Wells Fargo.
DAVID BRANCH: What’s really driving increase is the weather.
SELYUKH: Most of the world’s cocoa beans grow in West Africa, where farmers have dealt with extreme weather, changing climate patterns and disease in their aging trees. The price of cocoa has more than doubled since the beginning of last year, Branch says. And so all the major chocolate makers have raised their prices – Nestle, Lindt, Hershey and Mars, which makes M&M’s, Snickers and Twix. And they are resorting to tricks to make their treats.
BRANCH: We’re seeing a lot more fillers going in, a lot more with wafers, nuts. They’re putting more nuts, less chocolate. Keeping the price the same, just reducing the amount of cocoa costs that’s going in it…
In appearances on CNBC and Fox News, Sean Duffy, the temporary leader of the space agency, said he would open bidding on a contract to build a new lunar lander to other companies. Mr. Duffy, who is also the secretary of transportation, cited urgency for NASA to beat China, which is aiming to send its astronauts to the moon by 2030.
“We’re not going to wait for one company,” Mr. Duffy said during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “We’re going to push this forward and win the second space race against the Chinese.”
Mr. Duffy identified another priority: that President Trump wanted the moon landing to occur before Jan. 20, 2029, the end of his second term as president. That would mean developing and building a new lunar lander in less than three and a half years, at a cost that would very likely add billions of dollars to what NASA has already budgeted.
Mr. Duffy named Blue Origin, the space company owned by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, as one possibility. Blue Origin is already developing a lunar lander for NASA. But that $3.4 billion contract is for the Artemis V mission, which is not set to take place until the 2030s.
Lockheed Martin and other companies could also make a play for the moon mission.
On X, Mr. Musk responded dismissively. “SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry,” he wrote in one post. “Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.”
In another post, Mr. Musk noted that Mr. Bezos’s company had accomplished far less than his own. “Blue Origin has never delivered a payload to orbit, let alone the Moon,” he wrote. He subsequently clarified a “useful payload,” as the company launched a test spacecraft to orbit in January.
In 2021, SpaceX won a $2.9 billion contract to provide the lander for Artemis III, a NASA mission that aims to take two NASA astronauts to the lunar surface in the south polar region.
Artemis III is scheduled for mid-2027, but no one expects that NASA can meet that date. The question is how far into the future it may slip….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Ersatz Culture, Cora Buhlert, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Janney.]
(1) TRAPPED IN ICE. “Anbara Salam on the HMS Terror, arctic voyages, and writing a novel about exploring the depths” at CrimeReads: “The Enduring Appeal of a Shipwreck Mystery”. This expedition also provides major background for Kaliane Bradley’s Hugo finalist novel The Ministry of Time.
…Seeking some vicarious watery adventure, I found myself watching the footage of Parks Canada’s Underwater Archaeology Team diving into the shipwreck of the Victorian ship, HMS Terror. The location of the HMS Terror and her expedition partner, HMS Erebus, were the subject of ferocious speculation since the 1840s, and their whereabouts were discovered in 2016 and 2014 respectively. The video of the divers going down into the ship is eerie, otherworldly, and strangely moving due to how well-preserved the wreck is. The footage that lingered with me long after watching was the Delftware dishes, still sitting on the shelves….
…Franklin’s expedition set sail in May 1845, and when no word of the ships was received after two years, the families of the crew began to be concerned. Could the vessels be stuck in the ice, in need of supplies? Or perhaps they had abandoned their ships and were awaiting rescue in an Inuit settlement. Franklin’s wife, Lady Franklin, was the most active public advocate that the men could still be found alive, and that the British public had a duty to attempt their rescue.
Over the next nine years, at least fifteen search parties were dispatched to look for traces of the lost ships. Some of these, like an 1853 expedition led by Elisha Kent Kane, found themselves also frozen in Arctic ice and forced to abandon their own vessels. These astronomically expensive and logistically complicated search parties were funded by the British government, private donors and campaigns led by Lady Franklin. The mystery of the fate of the men became something of a public fascination. Magic lantern shows were produced to depict the search efforts, psychic mediums in the US and the UK claimed to have made contact with the crew, folk ballads honoured the pain of Lady Franklin’s grief, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens collaborated on a play, The Frozen Deep about the expedition….
(2) PRESTON Q&A. ThePulp.Net reprints author William Preston’s self-interview from 2013: “Old Man, look at my life”. Reprinted with permission.
Q:When you planned “Helping Them Take the Old Man Down,” did you have any idea you were starting a series of stories?
None. It was like the opening of a suspense novel: “Little did he know how events would unfold.” I operated in ignorance, which turned out in my favor. I had no idea until after my story appeared how often Doc Savage had been used as a template or repurposed in published fiction and fan fiction. I also had no idea so many people still connected with pulp heroes, or that there still was a market for the original stuff as well as for newer works. And I certainly had no plan to write a five-story arc. One and done: that was it. So I had no sense of a particular audience or a larger story.
Q:Was your aim to tell a new Doc Savage story without using the name?
My initial impulse was to dramatize some questions about heroic figures in general, questions to which I didn’t have immediate answers: What’s it like to work for a character like this? How does he run such an organization? What kinds of cases earn his attention? How secret are his activities? What do the authorities think? What should the rest of us think?
The lenses through which I examined those questions were post–9/11 lenses: The country is on high alert; we’re looking for people to blame; the government starts making lists, or examining old lists; ideals have given way to fears.
In the end, the model for thinking about the character’s purpose was probably less Doc Savage than Superman, particularly the Man of Steel I remembered from Superman #247, Elliot Maggin’s famous story in which the Guardians from Oa put into Superman’s head the question of how much he should be doing for humanity. That story suggests it’s okay for Superman to address huge natural disasters and criminal behavior, but not necessarily social injustice. Although the Guardians want the Man of Steel to calibrate his impact on human society, to me the story raised the question, “What can Superman actually fix?”…
(3) INVITATION FROM JOYCE CAROL OATES. To a celebration of Daphne du Maurier.
Joyce Carol Oates, Sadie Stein, and Rachel Syme: A Celebration of Daphne du Maurier at the 92nd St. Y, NYC, October 15 at 7:30 PM.looking forward to an exciting discussion of Daphne du Maurier with a focus on the Collected Short Stories.hoping that some of you will join us.
A French woman is involved in the mother of all battles with DC Comics for naming her family advice app Wondermum.
Lise Sobéron received a letter from the superhero comic book company’s French lawyers on 1 April this year demanding she stop using the name because of its alleged similarity to Wonder Woman.
“When I got the letter, I rang my close friends and said: ‘Very funny, guys,’ thinking it was an April fool,” she said. “Then I contacted the lawyers’ office and realised it was no joke. They told me DC Comics objected to the name Wondermum.”
Sobéron, 43, who visits schools to talk about bullying, is a hero to parents and children in Caen in Normandy, where her company is based. The app provides local listings for family activities and atéliers (workshops) as well as advice and a chatroom. She insists her creation bears no resemblance to the fictional Wonder Woman.
Sobéron’s Wondermum has no red, gold or blue star-spangled outfit but wears a white T-shirt, blue trousers and red stiletto heels, with not a headdress in sight. She does sport a hexagonal pink and purple logo containing the letters WM, but Wondermum is a single word – unlike Wonder Woman – and uses the British spelling of “mum”, not the American “mom”.
“As far as I’m aware, DC Comics doesn’t own the word ‘wonder’,” Sobéron said. “I could have called the application Maman Merveilleuse, but it doesn’t have the same ring.”…
… The former financial adviser added: “It’s been so stressful I’ve lost 8kg [18lbs] in six months. We’re not talking about taking on the local corner shop but an American giant.”
She said most of her income was now going on paying her lawyer to fight this mother of battles. Last month, she set up a crowdfunder….
When the autumn mists descend and the trees turn from leafy green to russet brown, some people defrost the Gilmore Girls: I defrost Gimli son of Glóin (and the lads). The world needs saving again and I know just the nine capable sets of hands – well, eight if you discount a fool of a Took – to get it done.
I have a friend who is loth to watch The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring because she feels bad about setting those noble hobbits off on their journey to Mordor again, knowing the peril and horrors that lie ahead of them. Not me. I love to send them off on their quest two, maybe three times a year, and I rarely let them finish it: not because I yearn for the suffering of tiny little guys, but because I put my own comfort above them. With all due respect to mists and mellow fruitfulness, Fellowship is autumn to me: as cosy and comforting as snuggling into a blanket with a hot chocolate.
Most people I know agree that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is as close as we will ever get to cinematic perfection. Even on the small screen, the sweeping grandeur of the scenery is breathtaking and the emotional undercurrent that drives every scene pulls you out of your living room and into Middle-Earth. But no one can quite agree on which of the three is the best. Every man I’ve ever been on a date with has put forth passionate arguments for The Two Towers supremacy based mainly on the Battle of Helm’s Deep. My most sensitive friends like Return of the King and the general concept of narrative closure. But I personally don’t think you can beat Fellowship: a bunch of new pals getting together and agreeing to Do the Good and Noble Thing is as close as you can get to a utopian society in my opinion, even if I only ever let them get a third of the way through the mission….
(6) JAMES A. HETLEY (1947-2025). Maine sff author James A. Hetley died October 8 from injuries received in a car/bicycle crash on October 6. His family has set up a tribute wall where many writers have already left memories.
Hetley was the author of nine fantasy novels set in Maine, published by Ace. The first, The Summer Country, appeared in 2002. A year before, his chapbook Dragon’s Bones was published by SRM Publisher, Ltd, aka Steve Miller and Sharon Lee. He also write a handful of short stories.
He served three years in the U. S. Army during the Vietnam war, and worked such diverse jobs as electronics instructor, trash collector, and operating engineer in a refrigeration plant, architect, and Kempo karate instructor.
(8) DREW STRUZAN (1947-2025). Movie poster artist Drew Struzan has died at age 78, The Hollywood Reporter paid tribute.
Drew Struzan, the iconic movie poster artist who created the marketing art for an enormous number of popular films, has died at 78. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease several years ago and retreated from public life….
… Struzan was once dubbed the “one-sheet wonder,” a go-to artist for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who created the posters for films such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Risky Business, the special edition of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Back to the Future, The Goonies, The Thing and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
The artist’s signature style was bold, dramatic and colorful. He never failed to capture a film’s tone perfectly, often focusing heavily on its characters — layering a sprawling ensemble cast into a single image was a Struzan specialty. Spielberg once called him “my favorite movie artist” and later added, “I had to almost live up to the art that we later were going to ask Drew to create for the poster.”…
During his career, he was awarded a Saturn Award in 2002 and an Inkpot Award in 2010. He received several lifetime achievement honors such as the 2014 Saul Bass Award, the 2016 Sergio Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Comic Art Professional Society (CAPS) and was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2020.
Drew Struzan created poster art for ‘Back to the Future,’ ‘The Last Crusade’ and the special edition of ‘The Empire Strikes Back.’
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Mike Glyer.]
October 14, 1952 – Charlie Williams. (Died 2021.)
Fan artist Charlie Williams first came to prominence as a regular contributor to Chat, the Chattanooga clubzine published by Rich and Nicki Lynch. He also later appeared in all 30 issues of their Hugo-winning genzine Mimosa.
Williams was a member of the Knoxville Science-Fantasy Federation and in the 1970s, he owned a comics store in Knoxville and taught cartoon illustration at the University of Tennessee. At one time he was a member of the Spectator Amateur Press Association. He was guest of honor at Imagincon ’81 (1981), Con*Stellation II (1983), and Roc*Kon 8 (1983).
Williams loved to draw complex, inventive scenes several of which are displayed below, including a cover for an issue of File 770 from the Eighties.
…Two proposed street co-namings honoring trailblazing New Yorkers are on the agenda for Community Board 3’s Transportation, Public Safety, Sanitation & Environment Committee meeting tonight [October 14]….
….The other proposal seeks to co-name Essex Street between Delancey and Rivington as Jack Kirby Way, recognizing the legendary comic book creator and Lower East Side native.
Kirby, a decorated World War II veteran who grew up in 147 Essex St., co-created Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, the Avengers, X-Men, and Black Panther, among many others.
Per the proposal, his bold imagination and storytelling helped define modern pop culture, while his LES roots continued to influence his work throughout his career.
Sensa pays homage to Dracula with this stunning and mysterious limited edition ballpoint pen. The Sensa Dracula limited edition ballpoint celebrates the world’s most famous vampire created by author Bram Stoker in his novel originally published in 1897. Since its original publication, adaptations of Dracula in plays, films and books have enhanced the legend of original Vampire character. Today, Dracula continues to spook fans and has achieved tremendous popularity by creating a powerful and lasting image that has become a part of popular culture the world over. The Sensa Dracula Limited Edition has a solid brass barrel which has been lacquered with an exclusive licensed art print of Dracula in vampire red and midnight black. A red twist top end cap with the Dracula logo has been added to enhance the gothic elegance of this unique writing instrument.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Sir Ben Kingsley shared a look at their new series that takes audiences behind the scenes of a super hero movie remake: Wonder Man. Kingsley and Abdul-Mateen II talked about working with director Destin Daniel Cretton, shooting in Los Angeles, and the fun of playing a character who is also an actor, before sharing the first trailer for the show, which debuts its 8-episode season January 27, 2026 on Disney+….
SpaceX’s Starship , the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, aced a suborbital test flight today (Oct. 13), following up on a similar success in late August.
Today’s mission, which lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas, was the 11th overall test flight for the Starship program. It was also the final launch of the current version of the giant vehicle, which will soon be replaced by an even larger variant. And this swan song was a memorable one….
A new analysis of our solar system’s interstellar interloper, 3I/ATLAS, reveals that it’s spewing huge amounts of water — and astronomers can’t immediately explain why.
The object, which is widely believed to be comet, showed strong ultraviolet emissions that are unmistakable telltales of hydroxyl gas (OH), a byproduct of water, when astronomers imaged it with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift space telescope before it disappeared behind the Sun. The emissions could only be spotted from space because the ultraviolet light would get absorbed in the atmosphere.
Their findings, detailed in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, argue that the presence of all this OH indicates the comet is ejecting water vapor at a torrential rate of about 88 pounds per second — around the same rate as a fire hose running at full blast, according to a press release about the findings.
The most extraordinary thing is that this was spotted happening pretty far from the Sun, at a heliocentric distance of about three astronomical units (AU) away, or three times the distance between the Earth and our star….
(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The BookPilled YouTube channel is a fascinating window into classic book SF by (it is believed) Matt, who makes a living buying and selling mainly classic SF books and along the way amassing his own collection, while travelling the world.
As indicated, he mainly does classic/old SF books but now it seems that the 21st century has caught up with him. He finally has read six 21st century SF/Slipstream novels (to possibly save you having to clickbait) by: Valeria Luiselli, Olga Ravn, Hilary Leichter, Hiroko Oyamada, Lisa Tuttle, and qntm.
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Sharon Lee, Arnie Fenner, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
(1) YOU ASKED FOR IT. Cora Buhlert’s Heicon ’70 report linked here a few days ago roused curiosity about what that year’s Hugo base looked like, allegedly made with scraps from a barn door. There didn’t seem to be a photo of it. The Hugo Awards site photo is of Kelly Freas’ award, with the replacement base he made himself. We got a partial look in a b&w photo shared by Andrew Porter. But now File 770 has been gifted with a good color photo taken by Tim Kirk at the request of Rich Lynch. Thanks to all! And here it is.
…As laid out in the new filing by the attorneys, and explained in a note to members of the Association of American Publishers by CEO Maria Pallante, the revised settlement proposes “default (non-mandatory) recovery allocations for claimants of trade and university press books, with authors and publishers splitting the per-work award equally in half (with co-authors and co-publishers splitting the author or publisher share of the award equally amongst themselves), with an option to vary from those divisions based on a particular contract.”
For education titles, the proposal “does not provide a default percentage for this sector but instead requires the claimant to make a good-faith representation regarding the percentage of recovery that the claimant is entitled to receive for a given work relative to other potential claimants of the work.”…
…The amended filing also lays out an ambitious publicity campaign to alert anyone who may be party to the lawsuit. According to the filing, the legal administrator involved in the case, JND, will spend about $15 million in an effort to reach potential claimants using tactics ranging from direct notice sent via first class mail, social media outreach, and publication in consumer and trade publications (including PW), as well as outreach by several well-established membership organizations to their members in both the U. S. and other countries.
The filing further notes that the administrator has addresses for about 279,000 works that had been filed with the U.S. Copyright Office, a figure that represents approximately 58% of total identified works, which would put the number of works eligible for a recovery at about 482,000. The number of works involved that had not been filed with the Copyright Office remains a sore spot among authors, agents, and publishers.
Not-for-profit author organizations that signed a declaration supporting the agreement include Novelists, Inc., Romance Writers of America, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Authors Guild. According to the press release issued by the plaintiffs, the groups back the plan because it provides “a simplified, one-step process allowing individual authors to file their own claims and the availability of a non-mandatory default 50/50 split, rooted in industry norms and practices reflected in most trade and university authors’ contracts.”
Representatives also provided comments from all three authors named in the lawsuit, including Andrea Bartz. “I strongly support this settlement and, in the coming months, I’m committed to helping class members, including my fellow authors, understand the settlement and why it’s such a critical step for those of us who believe that Anthropic violated our copyrights” Bartz said….
When even Sam Altman thinks there is an AI bubble, then there most likely is an AI bubble. But it’s even worse than that. There isn’t just one AI bubble: there are three.
First, AI is almost certainly in what economists call an asset bubble or a speculative bubble. As the name suggests, this is when asset prices soar well above their fundamental value. A classic example of this kind of bubble is the Dutch “tulip mania” of the 17th century, when speculators drove up the price of tulip bulbs to astronomical heights, convinced that there would always be someone willing to pay more than they had.
As I write, Nvidia is trading at 50 times earnings, Tesla at an astounding 200 times, despite falling revenues, while the rest of the Magnificent 7 (Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta) are enjoying significant boosts thanks to the bets they are taking on an AI-led future. The chances of this not being a bubble are between slim and none—and while Slim hasn’t quite left town, he’s booked his ticket and is packing his bags.
Second, AI is also arguably in what we might call an infrastructure bubble, with huge amounts being invested in infrastructure without any certainty that it will be used at full capacity in the future. This happened multiple times in the later 1800s, as railroad investors built thousands of miles of unneeded track to serve future demand that never materialized. More recently, it happened in the late ’90s with the rollout of huge amount of fiber optic cable in anticipation of internet traffic demand that didn’t turn up until decades later.
Companies are pouring billions into GPUs, power systems, and cooling infrastructure, betting that demand will eventually justify the capacity. McKinsey analysts talk of a $7 trillion “race to scale data centers” for AI, and just eight projects in 2025 already represent commitments of over $1 trillion in AI infrastructure investment. Will this be like the railroad booms and busts of the late 1800s? It is impossible to say with any kind of certainty, but it is not unreasonable to think so.
Third, AI is certainly in a hype bubble, which is where the promise claimed for a new technology exceeds reality, and the discussion around that technology becomes increasingly detached from likely future outcomes. Remember the hype around NFTs? That was a classic hype bubble. And AI has been in a similar moment for a while. All kinds of media—social, print, and web—are filled with AI-related content, while AI boosterism has been the mood music of the corporate world for the last few years. Meanwhile, a recent MIT study reported that 95% of AI pilot projects fail to generate any returns at all….
…And almost as soon as it started, it was over: in 1988, facing mounting debts of his own, Plant cashed out of the distribution business, selling everything off to Steve Geppi and Diamond Distributors, then in the process of assembling a very deliberate national empire of their own (of Geppi and Diamond’s own fate, we need only say sic transit gloria). Plant decided to return to his roots, putting out the curated and artfully designed mail order catalog that has continued to bear his name for the past four decades.
So when Plant casually announced, in the pages of that same catalog this past June that he was “retiring — sort of — in 2026,” it came … not as a surprise, exactly, since there are more surprising things on this earth than a 73-year-old man managing to successfully retire. But certainly as a melancholy, if inevitable, bit of news. So…Bud Plant is calling it a day….
…On a sultry holiday weekend in July, Plant spoke with me from his home in San Jose about the long story of his time in comics. …
You’ve had all of these other shops and company names that existed under you, but it’s always been sort of the Bud Plant brand that’s hovered above it.
That is true. Comics & Comix was the first major set of stores I was involved with. That was a partnership. In fact, Comics & Comix started out with some silly names. We were imitating what Phil Seuling had done. He called [his convention] the New York Comic Art Convention, and we said, “‘Comic art’, that’s really cool.” So we [opened] the Berkeley Comic Art Shop and the San Francisco Comic Art Shop and the Palo Alto Comic Art Shop. Really stupid — you want to brand a number of stores with the same exact name. But fortunately, we got smart fairly early. Bobby London had done a logo for us that read, “Comics & Comix” with the X and the C on our Berkeley shop, and we said, “Duh, let’s just call ourselves Comics & Comix.”
And that was a reference to the two halves of the industry by that point: the underground ‘comix’ with an X, and the overground “comics” with a C.
Absolutely. The shop in Berkeley was four blocks down from the entrance to the University of California, Berkeley. It had at the time 30,000 kids or something going there. And so that was the place to sell Zap Comix and the whole nine yards. We were the hip shop at the right time and the right place….
Had you connected through fanzines? Is that how you all met in the first place?
Yes. I’d say overall, that’s probably true. My story, which I’ve told a bunch of times, is that a guy accosted me outside of a used bookstore that sold comics. He saw I was interested in comics and he says, “Hey, I got some buddies and we’re into comics. Are you into comics?” And boom, that was my opening to latch onto these guys. Before that, it was just me and a couple of guys in my high school that happened to be interested in comics. We were, at that time, avid Marvel fans, but we didn’t know anything about fandom at that point in time. That was actually a little bit after all the promotion of [Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas’ seminal fanzine] Alter Ego, and the fanzines in the very early days, in the back pages of DC comics, for instance. I hadn’t seen that, but once I met this guy and went over to John Barrett’s house and they said, “Here’s the Rocket’s Blast [another early fanzine, founded by Buddy Saunders]; you can buy old comics.” These guys had advertised stuff and boom, oh my God, a world suddenly blossomed….
How had you gotten into your own fanzine publishing with Promethean and Anomaly?
Well, somehow the three of us, Al Davoren, and Jim Vadeboncoeur, and myself came together and said, let’s do a fanzine. Jim and I had more interest and roots in the more conventional comic scene as far as Al Williamson, and Frank Frazetta, and all that. And then Al was more into the underground scene, which we were all very aware of. But Al was the guy who would get Crumb to do us a cover. Crumb is going to barely going to talk to me; I’m just some punk little kid.
But the three of us got together, and I don’t know why we suddenly said we wanted to do a fanzine, because everybody and their brother was doing fanzines then. That was just a way of getting a creative bent going and sharing with your friends. That was in the sixties, it was all about doing fanzines and selling them to people for 50 cents or 75 cents or a dollar.
But you actually had what I think is the first published interview with Robert Crumb, right?
That is correct. That is the story, which is hard to believe. I mean, even fucking Rolling Stone should have come along and done an interview with him by 1974, but they hadn’t. So yeah, Al did the first interview we had that was in Promethean #5….
…First played by Sean Connery, the character was formalized for moviegoers over his first five installments: a suave, calculating, cold-blooded killer with a tireless repertoire of special skills, from games of chance to international diplomacy, who always gets the girl (and, usually, a few of them). Following the maximalist (and by today’s standards especially, in many ways problematic) You Only Live Twice, Connery departed the franchise. Enter On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Arriving at a time of tremendous cultural upheaval, OHMSS set itself apart from its predecessors in the very first scene: There’s no main title song, and Bond doesn’t get the girl. Australian model-turned-actor George Lazenby, stepping in to replace Connery, cheekily observes, “This never happened to the other fellow.” Yet soon enough, Bond meets the young woman again: her name is Contessa Teresa “Tracy” di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg), and she’s the daughter of Marc-Ange Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti), the head of a European crime syndicate.
In Bond’s relentless pursuit of the international crime organization SPECTRE and its leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas), Bond quits MI6 and forms an alliance with Draco, who offers to provide tactical information in exchange for courting Tracy, who her father suggests needs a man to dominate her. Consequently, Bond brokers a partnership with the exact kind of individual he’d previously pledged to put away, and initiates a deeper relationship with a woman than he’d had in any of the earlier films. What subsequently occurs is that Bond gets out of his depths both emotionally and as an operative: the former when he falls completely in love with Tracy, and the latter when Blofeld uncovers his true identity and sends his minions to snuff the superspy out permanently.
The film further explores this in a dynamic, escalating action sequence when Bond, pursued by SPECTRE henchmen, is surrounded in a foreign environment with seemingly no place to turn and no confederates to rely upon. For the first time ever on screen (and really, one of the few ever in the franchise), we see Bond is worried. And then he’s subsequently rescued by Tracy in a combination of spectacular happenstance and some extremely skillful driving on her part…
… But Lazenby’s entry not only delivers great set pieces and a great story, but establishes the building blocks that would become a foundation for James Bond as we know and relate to him today. There’s a reason Steven Soderbergh calls it the best Bond movie, and that Christopher Nolan stole liberally (and affectionately) from it for the climax of Inception. As noted in the film on his family crest, Bond’s motto is “The World Is Not Enough,” but more than any other film about the character, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the one to show audiences exactly how big a world Bond’s truly is.
… This is a great Introduction by Conklin, starting with his first experience of reading science fiction when an uncle gave him The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, noting that it was shorter than many other novels he had read. This is true; it was published in serial form and as a book, but today we would call it a novella. He goes on to talk about why the novelette or short novel is a great length for SF. He makes the point that editors cannot fit many stories of those lengths into anthologies or collections, meaning that many great stories have not been reprinted….
… Conklin does claim it’s the first anthology of novella/short novel length science fiction. As noted above, I think this is true….
The Department of Homeland Security has sparked a Pokémon backlash after using the kids’ game to promote ICE deportation raids.
The DHS social media team posted a video to X on Monday of dramatic immigration raids—including one that was bungled yet still posted online by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—spliced with animé imagery from the popular Japanese cartoon and collectibles game, which is part owned by Nintendo.
Set to the official Pokémon theme tune, it was a clear imitation of the show’s opening sequence.
DHS also shared five mocked-up Pokémon “cards” featuring some of the men the department has arrested and deported, which it describes as the “worst of the worst,” with their alleged crimes—including child molestation and homicide—emblazoned across them.
The post was captioned “Gotta Catch ’Em All.”
All the cards listed the men’s “weaknesses” as the “ice” emoji, and said their “retreat” was an airplane, in another riff on the Pokémon card game….
(8) CITY LIFE. CrimeReads samples crime fiction set in a locale well-known to Worldcon fans: “Crime and the City: Chengdu”.
Chengdu, the capital city of western China’s Chengdu province with a whopping population of twenty-one million people (at least). Though only China’s fourth most populous city it’s the transport hub of Sichuan, surrounded by agriculture (all those Sichuan hot peppers for the local dish of super spicy hotpot), forests (with all those pandas) and a major centre of China’s universities.
Many of those universities are specialists in science and, relatedly, Chengdu has become a city known for its literature—but overwhelmingly the sci-fi genre. In fact in 2023 The 81st World Science Fiction Convention was held at the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum—the first time China had hosted the event, the largest sci-fi event globally.
But there’s also room for a little crime writing too—but with the caveats you’ll have noted from our other Crime and the City columns on China (Shanghai and Beijing) that the genre is heavily censored with no bent cops, corrupt officials or anyone ever getting away with it. The general media silence around major crime and supposed ninety-nine percent conviction rate also mean that true crime as a genre has been largely absent. Still…there are a few bangers….
And primary among them is Murong Xuecun, the pen name of the Chinese writer Hao Qun. In his twenties Murong was working as a sales manager in the car industry when he started posting his first novel Chengdu Please Forget Me Tonight on the internet.
In 2002 it became a cult hit amongst young urban Chinese looking for edgier writing after the era of the so-called “hooligan” literature writers, epitomized by Wang Shuo (see “Crime and the City: Beijing”) and writing in a language familiar to young urbanites about themes of soulless and empty city living. The Party natutrally thought this all too nihilist and supressed many of these books. But Murong attracted around five million online readers….
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Mike Glyer.]
September 23, 1971 — Rebecca Roanhorse, 54.
Rebecca Roanhorse entered the field with a roar, winning both the Hugo and Nebula with her first published sff story “ Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” (Apex Aug 2017), and taking home the 2018 Astounding Award for best new writer.
Rebecca Roanhorse
She’s best known for being what Science Fiction Encyclopedia’s John Clute describes as “an advocate of the concept of Indigenous Futurism”, exemplified by her novels Trail of Lightning and Black Sun (both Hugo and Nebula finalists; the latter an Ignyte winner), and Storm of Locusts, and her short story “A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy” (also an Ignyte-winner).
Her novels Black Sun, Fevered Star, and Mirrored Heavens are part of the Between Earth and Sky series, winner of the 2025 Best Series Hugo.
She has created two novels in the Star Wars universe, Resistance Reborn (2019) and DarkVengeance (2020).
Roanhorse also has written for comics and TV. She contributed a story about Echo to Marvel’s Voices: Indigenous Voices #1 comics anthology (2020). She was a writer on the first season of the 2023 television miniseries A Murder at the End of theWorld and the 2024 Marvel Cinematic Universe miniseries Echo.
For decades, Stan Lee was the king of comic conventions. Now, nearly seven years after his death at the age of 95, he will once again be a presence at L.A. Comic Con, this time as a hologram that will use AI to have conversations with fans.
Fans will be able to speak with the hologram at the Stan Lee Experience section of the con, a 1,500 ft. enclosed booth which costs between $15-$20 to enter, depending on whether you buy tickets ahead of time. And like meeting a celebrity or getting autographs, there will be paid opportunities to take photos with the hologram or have a three-minute, one-on-one conversation with it.
“We’ll never put words in his mouth that aren’t in line with things he spoke about in his lifetime,” said Bob Sabouni, Head of Stan Lee Legacy Programs for Kartoon Studios and a former Marvel executive. “Fortunately, with decades of footage capturing his thoughts on so many subjects, we can build a voice that stays true, not always word for word, but always faithful in spirit, context, and intent.”
The hologram hails from Proto Hologram, the company that recently helped launch an interactive mirror from The Conjuring in 47 malls, as well as Hyperreal, a company known for creating realistic avatars….
(12) EMMYS BOOST WINNERS’ VIEWERSHIP. JustWatch reports that several Primetime Emmy winners saw massiveboosts in streaming popularity within just 48 hours after the ceremony aired on September 15:
Adolescence → +1132% vs. monthly average
The Studio → +878%
Hacks → +434%
The Penguin → +549%
The Pitt → +479%
Momentum on the US Streaming Charts:
On Monday and Tuesday, The Studio ranked #1 on the US Daily Streaming Charts and has since climbed 37 spots to #9 on the Weekly Charts, ahead of Foundation, The Summer I turned Pretty and South Park.
The Pitt now sits at #8 Weekly, with Adolescence close behind at #12 (as of Wednesday, Sept. 17).
This chart isolates the startling results for The Penguin.
… On Sept. 22, NASA unveiled its 10 newest recruits who will undergo extensive training to become eligible for future spaceflight missions that could carry humans deeper into the cosmos than ever before. Chosen from more than 8,000 applicants, the incoming astronaut class includes test pilots, engineers and scientists – including one woman who, significantly, has already spent time in orbit….
Ben Bailey, 38, of Charlottesville, Virginia: an active member of the U.S. Army and graduate of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School.
Lauren Edgar, 40, of Sammamish, Washington: a geologist who worked on the Artemis II lunar geology team and who has helped support NASA’s robotic rovers on Mars.
Adam Fuhrmann, 35, of Leesburg, Virginia: a major in the U.S. Air Force with 400 combat hours.
Cameron Jones, 35, of Savanna, Illinois: a major in the U.S. Air Force and a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School with more than 1,600 flight hours in more than 30 different aircraft.
Rebecca Lawler, 38 of Little Elm, Texas: a former lieutenant commander and pilot in the U.S. Navy with more than 2,800 flight hours in more than 45 aircraft.
Anna Menon, 39, of Houston: a former SpaceX employee who also previously worked in the Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Katherine Spies, 43, of San Diego: a former Marine AH-1 attack helicopter pilot and experimental test pilot, with more than 2,000 flight hours in more than 30 different aircraft.
Elon Musk has a history of making promises to rapidly deliver technological breakthroughs, only for them to end up taking longer than predicted or to fail to materialize.
Among these are his promises for fully autonomous self-driving cars or tunnels under Los Angeles to solve traffic congestion. Now some federal government officials worry that his pledges for landing astronauts on the moon will suffer similar delays.
That is why one of the largest federal contracts Mr. Musk has ever secured is now under intense scrutiny: a multibillion agreement with NASA for this crewed mission to the moon, the first in more than five decades.
The plan to invite private companies to develop a lunar lander for NASA was kicked off with much fanfare during President Trump’s first term, with a target of completing the mission by last year.
Other parts of the NASA moon mission are nearly ready, after their own delays and cost overruns, and are set to be subject to a full-scale flight around the moon with astronauts next year. But SpaceX’s lunar lander project is now so far behind schedule that there are increasing doubts the United States will beat China, which has its own plan with a targeted landing date of 2030, back to the moon.
The concerns, which have reached the White House, follow the falling out between Mr. Musk and President Trump, which led to a call by Mr. Trump and others inside the administration to at least initially look for SpaceX contracts to pare back or cancel.
But seven current and former senior NASA officials, in recent public statements and interviews with The New York Times, said their questions about SpaceX and its new Starship rocket had nothing to do with the public spat between the president and his biggest campaign donor.
Rather, they are nervous that Mr. Musk has once again overpromised on what he could achieve by now.
The 15-story-tall Starship has not yet carried any astronauts or commercial cargo. It has exploded during three of its four recent tests, sending a spectacular but potentially dangerous plume of debris over the Caribbean on two of those aborted trips to space. And its current version can carry only a fraction of its promised payload of at least 100 tons into low-Earth orbit….
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Scott Edelman.] I did a reading at Capclave last weekend during which I shared the opening section of an as yet unpublished short story about a fish told from the point of view of that fish while I was dressed like a fish and handing out Swedish fish: “A fishy Scott Edelman reads at Capclave 2025”.
[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Rich Lynch, Tim Kirk, Scott Edelman, 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 Andrew (not Werdna).]
