26 There Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Ugly Chickens

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) WHELAN PUTS ON HIS GAME FACE. “Pinball Wizard” by Michael Whelan and Michael Everett tells about Whelan’s unexpected encounter with a pinball machine that featured his likeness, and how he finally discovered the history behind it.

In 1980, Audrey and I returned to my home state for a vacation in Monterey, CA. We were enjoying ice cream together while out on a stroll when we dropped into the arcade next door. That’s where we discovered a most unusual pinball game.

I’ve run into unauthorized bootlegs of my art on occasion, and while it’s disappointing to see anything printed without my permission, it’s hardly a surprise. But what I found in the arcade that day was different. The pinball machine didn’t crib my work; it stole my face. It absolutely blew my mind to see me staring out from under that glass….

… My initial suspicion was that someone on the design team had picked up a copy of Sorcerers. Published in 1978, that art book enjoyed wide distribution through Ballantine, and it featured several of my paintings alongside a posed picture of me.

Likely long forgotten by now, Sorcerers was a hot title then, which included other notable artists, including Steve Hickman, Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, and others. I was certain the designers took inspiration from what they found in those pages….

…As it turned out, Time Warp became a famous table—it even has a Wikipedia page! Interestingly, it made multiple appearances on the big screen, including in Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 and an Italian film titled “Troppo Forte,” which featured a passion for pinball that you have to see to believe….

(2) PKDFEST 2026. The 4th International Philip K. Dick Festival will take place at the Fullerton Marriott at California State University Fullerton from August 20-23.

The guests of honor are Sarah Langan, Brian Evenson, and Tim Powers. It also features the launch of a brand new Pink Beam Press featuring 7 new novellas by Langan, Evenson, and many others.

(3) THAT WOULD BE WRONG. “Wrong Genre Covers” is a series at Night Beats Extended Universe. Today the creator has rendered Jordan S. Carroll’s “Speculative Whiteness as a Golden Age pulp sci-fi cover”. See the image at the link.

(4) FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SOUVENIR DESIGNER. “Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Collectibles Revealed by AMC, Regal, and Cinemark” reports WDW News Today.

With tickets now on sale for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, AMC Theatres, Regal Cinemas, and Cinemark have unveiled a web of exclusive collectibles inspired by the upcoming Marvel film….

Well, this one looks moderately hideous!

Spider-Man Combo Container

This novelty combo container is shaped like Spider-Man’s hand shooting a web. The translucent web serves as the popcorn holder while the wrist section functions as the drink container.

It’s easier for me to imagine using another of these choices.

Wall Crawler Popcorn Tin

Regal’s signature collectible is a popcorn tin designed to look like a New York City apartment building. Fire escapes line the sides of the building while a small Spider-Man figure appears to be scaling the exterior wall.

(5) BEAR BOUND FOR BROADWAY. The New York Times says “The ‘Paddington’ Musical Is a Hit in London. Next Stop: Broadway.” (Behind a paywall.) “The show, which revisits the story of a marmalade-loving bear, plans to open next April at the Hirschfeld Theater in New York.”

The musical is a retelling of the cherished, enduring and quintessentially British stories about a kind, courteous and marmalade-loving Peruvian bear who is taken in by a family that discovers him at a train station shortly after his arrival in London. The character was the subject of children’s books written by Michael Bond, the first of which was published in 1958; Paddington has also been the subject of three recent movie adaptations.

The stage adaptation, a family-friendly adventure story, was named the best new musical at this year’s Olivier Awards — London’s equivalent of the Tony Awards; British critics were also won over….

…The Broadway production is scheduled to start previews on March 30, 2027, and to open April 18 at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, whose current occupant, “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” is set to close on Aug. 30. It is directed by Luke Sheppard (“& Juliet”), and features songs by Tom Fletcher and a book by Jessica Swale….

(6) SALLY WOEHRLE (1942-2026). Chair of Sasquan, the 2015 Worldcon, Sally Woehrle died June 12. William Sadorus announced her passing on Facebook.

It’s with a heavy heart that write this. I’m sad to announce that Sally Woehrle passed away last Friday. I believe her death was from congestive heart failure due to a fib made worse by complications from Alzheimer’s. She was my friend, my soulmate.

Initially, Woehrle and Bobbie DuFault were co-chairs of Sasquan, but DuFault died two weeks after the bid was won.

Woehrle also chaired Westercon 73, Westercon 50, and ConComCon 23. She was a member of the unsuccessful Seattle in 2002 bid committee, and of SWOC (the Seattle Westercon Organizing Committee), had been a member of the Northwest Convention League. She worked on innumerable conventions.

She was a UW alumnus and proud grandparent.

(7) ANITA FELLER. Nashville fan Anita Feller died June 17. Her husband Tom Feller made the announcement on Facebook.

My wife Anita passed away quietly in her sleep during the night. I will post the funeral arrangements when I have them.

Anita Feller was a past President of the Middle Tennessee Science Fiction Club.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

June 17, 1960 — Twilight Zone’s “The Mighty Casey”

What you’re looking at is a ghost, once alive but now deceased. Once upon a time, it was a baseball stadium that housed a major league ball club known as the Hoboken Zephyrs. Now it houses nothing but memories and a wind that stirs in the high grass of what was once an outfield, a wind that sometimes bears a faint, ghostly resemblance to the roar of a crowd that once sat here. We’re back in time now, when the Hoboken Zephyrs were still a part of the National League, and this mausoleum of memories was an honest-to-Pete stadium. But since this is strictly a story of make believe, it has to start this way: once upon a time, in Hoboken, New Jersey, it was tryout day. And though he’s not yet on the field, you’re about to meet a most unusual fella, a left-handed pitcher named Casey — opening narration of “The Mighty Casey”.

Before you ask, yes, I really do like this series. I think it’s the best fantasy genre series ever done bar none. And when an episode is stellar, it is among the best genre fiction done, period. So it is with “The Mighty Casey” which first aired on CBS sixty-six years ago this evening.

Obviously the episode title is in homage to the “Casey at the Bat” baseball poem.

A really bad baseball team somehow acquires a robotic pitcher (really don’t ask how as it makes no sense) but the League says Casey is not human and cannot play. So Casey is, sort of Wizard of Oz-ish, given a human heart, which makes eligible Casey to play.

Unfortunately the human heart makes him realize that he shouldn’t be throwing those really fast balls. Oh well.

With the team sure to fold soon without its star robotic pitcher, the creator of that robot gives the manager Casey’s blueprints as a souvenir. Looking at them, McGarry suddenly has a brilliant idea, as he runs off after Dr. Stillman to tell him his idea so as he and the scientist so they can engineer an entire pitching staff of Casey robots.

Rumors later surface suggesting rather strongly that the manager has used the blueprints to build a world-champion pitching staff of Casey robots. Did he? This is the Twilight Zone so who knows? Ask our narrator as he closes out our story…I

Once upon a time, there was a major league baseball team called the Hoboken Zephyrs, who, during the last year of their existence, wound up in last place and shortly thererafter wound up in oblivion. There’s a rumor, unsubstantiated, of course, that a manager named McGarry took them to the West Coast and wound up with several pennants and a couple of world championships. This team had a pitching staff that made history. Of course, none of them smiled very much, but it happens to be a fact that they pitched like nothing human. And if you’re interested as to where these gentlemen came from, you might check under ‘B’ for Baseball. — Closing narration

The entire production was originally filmed with Paul Douglas in the manager role. (Douglas previously played a baseball team manager in the Fifties film Angels in the Outfield.) He died right after it was filmed and Serling decided that it needed to be done again with a new actor. CBS being cheap wouldn’t pay for it, so he paid for the entire shoot.

It was filmed at Wrigley Field, a ballpark in Los Angeles that hosted minor league baseball teams for more than thirty years. (In addition to being a baseball venue, many Hollywood productions were shot there.) The Wrigley footage, with the stands empty, was supplemented by brief clips of stock-footage crowd scenes, from the Polo Grounds and Fenway Park.

The series is streaming on Paramount+.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro has odd criteria.
Free Range knows the hangout.
The Argyle Sweater wants an implant.
Tom Gauld has a graph:

(10) SUPERYESTERDAY. “DC Announces New Black Label Series ‘Superman: The Stranger’”.

DC today announced that it will return readers to the first days of the Man of Tomorrow with Superman: The Stranger, a new six-issue DC Black Label comic book series launching in September, written and illustrated by Wes Craig. Set in an Art Deco-inspired 1938 Metropolis, the series reimagines Superman’s earliest adventures through a modern storytelling lens while drawing heavily from the visual language of DC’s Golden Age of comic books and the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons….

…In Superman: The Stranger, readers will follow Superman at the very beginning of his journey. During the day, Clark Kent does what he can to make ends meet in the bustling city of Metropolis, but when the sun goes down, he leaps into action to keep the city streets safe. As Superman, Clark fights for a better tomorrow, but he feels like he’s not affecting change. The rich keep getting richer, and the poor struggle to survive. Can Superman truly save the downtrodden?

Superman: The Stranger, a six-issue DC Black Label comic book series written and illustrated by Wes Craig with colors by Jason Wordie and lettering by Tom Napolitano, will feature variant covers by Dave Johnson, Goran Parlov, and Ethan Young on the debut issue. Superman: The Stranger #1 arrives wherever comic books are sold on September 2, 2026, with all covers printed on cardstock for $4.99 US, and will carry DC’s Ages 17+ content descriptor for mature readers.

(11) LEFT BEHIND. In The Onion: “E.T. Admits Shock At Not Even Being Called For Cameo In ‘Disclosure Day’”.

Saying a courtesy call would have been nice even if nothing ever came of it, E.T. told reporters Monday he was shocked at not being contacted by director Steven Spielberg for a cameo in his new sci-fi movie Disclosure Day….

(12) LITTLE TOOL USERS. “’They surprise me every time’: bees can use tools to solve problems, study finds” – in the Guardian.

Bumblebees can use tools to solve a problem, according to experiments that demonstrate their remarkably advanced cognitive abilities.

The bees were given an adapted version of an experiment that, 100 years ago, first demonstrated chimpanzees could work out how to retrieve an out-of-reach banana by stacking boxes. Since then, various other primates, elephants and crows have joined an elite cohort of species known to be capable of this level of insight and spontaneous problem solving.

In the latest research, bees were shown to be able to roll a polystyrene ball to a specific location and climb on to it in order to access an artificial flower on a low ceiling. The findings challenge the longstanding assumption that insects operate purely on instinct and mindless trial-and-error learning.

“Most people think insects are reflex-based machines,” said Dr Olli Loukola, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Oulu, Finland, and senior author. “That they can’t have any emotional states or feel pain. Some people don’t even realise that they have brains. I hope that these results change the worldview about that.”

(13) SPACE BREW. Heritage Auctions’ “The Art of Paul Stanley” event includes this “RARE Burgie Beer 4ft Store Display”.

“Burgie is brewed for refreshing people, Burgie is crisp and cool and bright!” Burgie and his Burgermeister beer are showcased in this out-of-this-world exceedingly rare 4ft tall store display designed by Paul Stanley (d. c. 1980s) for the Burgermeister Brewing Corporation….

…The character Burgie was used extensively in the brewery’s marketing and merchandising even appearing in animated commercials throughout the mid-century, while his Stanley flying saucer display has occasionally reappeared in the pop culture zeitgeist being used (sans beer cans) in the opening of the Spice Girls music video for “Say You’ll Be There” (1996) and more recently seen in the “Pinball Jack” episode of the antiques/collectibles reality series American Pickers (2022)….

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Heather Cleary, Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern — who says his inspiration came via the song, “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens”.]

Pixel Scroll 3/19/26 Atomic Pixels To Power. Turbines To Scroll

Posted on March 19, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) A STROLL THROUGH BLERDCON. In “BlerDCon Celebrates Black Nerd and Cosplay Culture”, Ebony Magazine’s Delaina Dixon reports about BlerdCon in Washington DC where “Black fans of anime, sci-fi and comics gather to celebrate cosplay, community and the growing cultural power of Black fandom”:

… Inside, the convention floor was filled with Black fans of all ages cosplaying their favorite characters. One attendee embodied Chris Tucker’s flamboyant Ruby Rhod from The Fifth Element. Anime warriors posed beside Marvel heroes. Entire friend groups showed up in fantastical lewks. And there were plenty of fans gathered around the booth for One Piece, Netflix’s live-action series based on the wildly popular Japanese anime.

I obviously hadn’t gotten the memo about dressing as your favorite superhero or anime character. But I did what any good reporter would do. I whipped out a notebook and declared, “I’m the Black Lois Lane!”…

… The upcoming sci-fi film Project Hail Mary, which stars The Bear’s Lionel Boyce, was also present at the convention. The project explores space exploration and science, themes that have resonated strongly with organizations like the National Society of Black Engineers. Indeed, this is a space where Black fans can fully embrace genres that mainstream culture once suggested weren’t “for us.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. A 2023 study from Parrot Analytics found that 17 percent of Black Americans identify as anime fans, compared to about 13 percent of the overall U.S. population. Black audiences are also among the most engaged viewers of superhero films and sci-fi franchises….

(2) NOUGHTS & CROSSES AUTHOR Q&A. Emma Loffhagen of the Guardian interviewed Malorie Blackman, author of the YA dystopian novel Noughts and Crosses: “Malorie Blackman on Noughts & Crosses at 25: ‘It’s even more relevant today’”.

… When she first started publishing novels, she was criticised by some for not writing explicitly about race, despite the protagonists in her books being Black. “I knew that if I’d written about racism immediately, I would have been pigeonholed as an ‘issues writer’, and I would never have got out of that box,” she says.

By the time she came to writing Noughts & Crosses, she thought that would no longer be a problem. “I finally felt I had enough of a backlist that I wouldn’t be boxed in,” she says. “Of course, what did they then call me? An issues writer,” she laughs. “You can’t please everyone!”…

…In 2013, when Blackman was appointed children’s laureate, she used her platform to call for greater diversity in children’s publishing. The backlash was swift and vicious. Some newspapers misreported her as saying there were “too many white children in books” – a claim she never made. “I got death threats against me and my family,” she says. “It was horrible, really frightening. But so many people rallied round. ‘You come for Malorie, you come for us.’ That was so lovely.”

The years after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 saw a surge of interest in books by writers of colour in the UK and US, with publishers loudly pledging change. But that momentum has proved fragile. Last year, a literacy charity described a “catastrophic decline” in children’s titles featuring Black protagonists, reporting a drop of more than 20% between 2023 and 2024. At the same time, research published by the Bookseller in 2023 concluded that the surge of interest after 2020 had “failed to deliver the promised broadening of publishing’s output”.

“Some of the noise from the industry was definitely performative,” Blackman says. “At the time, I thought, we’ll see in five or 10 years’ time who is still committed to this and who has quietly let it fall by the wayside. I just wish publishing, and all creative spheres, were more proactive rather than reactive.”

The last few years have also brought fresh political problems. The Color Purple is among the titles most frequently banned in the US. It is a trend that concerns her deeply. “A lot of the time, what starts over there often ends up coming over here,” she says. “The books that tend to get hit are by people of colour, LGBTQ+ authors, anything seen as subversive and against the conservative mores of society.”

It is also part of a wider political climate that Blackman finds alarming. In the US, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids dominate headlines, while in the UK, culture war skirmishes flare up with wearying regularity. “Unfortunately, I think Noughts & Crosses is even more relevant today than it was when it first came out,” she says….

(3) TWO TOY KICKSTARTERS. [Item by Cora Buhlert.] The Kickstarter appeal for “Mythic Legions: The Roleplaying Game by Four Horsemen Studios” funded in five minutes. But it’s still looking for backers.

It not only offers a potentially cool new RPG, but also a chance to get the some of the gorgeous Mythic Legions action figures for a very good price.

We are Four Horsemen Studios, a 25-year old company that launched our line of customizable high-fantasy action figures called Mythic Legions just over 10 years ago. Since the earliest days of this toy line, we’ve heard people comment that they wished they could use these figures as part of a tabletop RPG, so in mid-2024 we began working on this game. We tapped in-house resources at our company while also working with a team of leading artists, writers, and gameplay experts to bring this new RPG to life. Mythic Legions: The Roleplaying Game is now fully developed and ready for production, but we need your help to make it happen by backing this Kickstarter!

Another Kickstarter for a new toyline called “CRYPTOIDS: War For The Green Planet” looks like a lot of fun.

From the minds behind YHS Podcast! CRYPTOIDS pulls inspiration from the shadows, exploring the rich world of cryptids, global conspiracies, UFO/UAP, and everything in-between! Our goal is to build a unique universe where legendary creatures clash with the evil Reptoid uprising in high-stakes adventures, offering collectors and fans figures that feel simultaneously familiar and totally new!

(4) YOU ARE THERE. Scott A. Woodard of The Wild Digest begins “My Visit to the 2026 Los Angeles Vintage Paperback Collectors Show and Sale” with a video tour of the show’s sales tables.

(5) EVERYBODY WATCHED IT BUT ME. “’Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Trailer Gets Record 719 Million Views” reports Deadline.

Sony and Marvel Studios’ trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day closed 718.6 million views in its first 24 hours, making it hands down the most viewed trailer in movie history. This is all before the pic’s release date July 31….

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

March 19, 1999 — Farscape debuted on this day

By Paul Weimer: Farscape is the punkier overseas cousin to Stargate SG-1 (the fact that two members of Farscape wound up becoming series regulars in late SG-1 is not lost on me). A product of a vivid imagination, the genius of Jim Henson, and vagaries of trying to find one’s way in a science fiction universe that was brand new. Farscape dared to make its own way, with our Earthling Crichton being dropped in the far end of the galaxy and among a bunch of alien races, conflicts and concerns. And of course, given that he did use an impossible technology to get there, and still seeks to get back, this provided early and interesting hooks for Crichton right from the get go.

But, really, the season gets its feet under it when it got its villains. The first season is fine, and we get to know the characters and their various sides. But it is Season 2, with the full use of Scorpius (although he did show up in Season 1), that the show really takes off. Bialar, the initial antagonist (and later less of one) really didn’t have the spark that the show needed in a recurring villain opposing the found family (because what else are the crew of Moya but that), and their plans and hopes. But Scorpius really provided the spark that the show needed, especially the “harvey” version in Crichton’s head.

But where the series really shines, above and beyond the characters, the puppetry, the inventiveness and the uniqueness of its space opera verse, is that the series is self-aware. Crichton is genre savvy, he knows where and what is in for, and he is a protagonist and a hero for fans of the series who love and respect and enjoy science fiction. This makes the series a series for viewers who have watched Star Trek, read science fiction novels, and are and were ready to immerse themselves into a SF universe. Nowadays, some of the episodes and seasons feel padded by the strictures and requirements of network and syndication television, probably more than a few episodes could be excised and you would still get the long form character arcs, development, drama, and shared history that you get between the members of Moya’s crew.

In some ways, while it is definitely more akin to Stargate SG-1, it, like Babylon 5, was an earnest and mostly successful attempt to create a universe that was neither Star Wars nor Star Trek, but something new, risky, and different. Farscape, even though it did delve into some serious themes, always has felt a bit lighter, more playful than B5. That’s no bad thing.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 19, 1928 — Patrick McGoohan. (Died 2009.)

I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own. — Number 6

I don’t how times I’ve seen the opening of The Prisoner series as it’s been separately shown from the episodes online pretty much since video came to the Internet. Not sure in what context I was watching it but it was, without doubt, one of the best openings I’ve seen.

Then there was the series. Weird, thrilling, mysterious. Eminently watchable over and over and over again. Was it SF? Or was it a spy series set in the very near future? Who knew? And then there was Number Six, the never named intelligence agent played by Patrick McGoohan. He seemed destined to play this role.

He was an American-born Irish actor, director, screenwriter, and producer. Now it turns out that The Prisoner was his creation. He was also one of the writers – there were five in fact — and he was one of four directors. In other words, he had his hand in every facet of the series and its sixteen episodes.

Before he was that unnamed intelligence agent he was, and I’m not at all convinced that McGoohan meant this to be a coincidence, secret agent John Drake in the Danger Man espionage series. I’ve seen a few episodes, it’s well crafted.

Danger Man (retitled Secret Agent in the United States for the revived series) was a British television series broadcast between 1960 and 1962, and again between 1964 and 1968. (A neat bit of history here: Ian Fleming was brought in to work on series development, but left before that was complete. Apparently, he didn’t like the way the secret service was to be portrayed.)

After The Prisoner, McGoohan’s next genre endeavor was as the narrator of Journey into Darkness is a British television horror film stitching together two episodes derived from late Sixties anthology television series Journey to the Unknown.

We are now leaving genre and headed for, well the Columbo series. Why so? Because he was good friends with Peter Falk and directed five episodes of the series, four of which he appeared in, winning two Emmys in the process. McGoohan was involved with the series in some way from 1974 to 2000.

He was said that his first appearance on Columbo was probably his favorite American role. He had top billing as Col. Lyle C. Rum, fired from a military academy, in “By Dawn’s Early Light”, one of the Columbo films that preceded the series.

His daughter Catherine McGoohan appeared with him in the episode “Ashes To Ashes” The other two Columbo episodes in which he appeared are “Identity Crisis” and “Agenda For Murder”.

Yes, he reprised his role as Number Six for The Simpsons in “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes”. Homer Simpson fakes a news story to make his website more popular, and he wakes up in a prison that is a holiday resort. As Number Five, he meets Number Six.

McGoohan’s last movie role was as the voice of Billy Bones in the animated Treasure Planet.

He received the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award for The Prisoner.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro says cartoonists are often asked these questions.
Loose Parts finds a sibling.
Argyle Sweater reports a crime wave.

(9) A BAD VR TRIP. “Kelsey Day on the Dissociative Horrors of Virtual Reality and Social Media” at CrimeReads.

…I paid for sixty minutes in the main game room. The woman at the desk walked me through the safety questions, ticking off the answers on an iPad. Do you have a history of seizures? Vertigo? Any heart conditions? Then, when she found my answers satisfactory, she escorted me into the VR center.

The main game room was about the size of a basketball court, segmented into what looked like miniature obstacle courses. Objects were placed on the ground, set up to complement their respective VR games.

The first game I tried was a “Walk the Plank” simulation where the player walks across a narrow balancing beam. A real balancing beam was placed on the real ground, and when you walk across it wearing your VR goggles, the game makes it feel like you’re walking a plank between two skyscrapers. Wind hisses in your ears. The skyscrapers groan and sway. It felt real enough that my mouth went dry. When my foot slipped off the balancing beam, genuine terror shot through me before I ripped the goggles off.

I tried a few other VR games and struggled to stay in any one of them for more than a few minutes. There was a Jurassic Park-themed rollercoaster, a racetrack, an escape room filled with goblins. I gave each of them a good faith try. But within half an hour, I was throwing up in the bathroom.

It’s not because I felt motion sickness, although that’s a frequent complaint of VR users. My nausea grew out of a panic attack, and my panic attack grew out of a tightening dissociative sensation triggered by the VR.

When you’re in a VR game, you can raise your real hands in the air and see a virtual pair of hands in front of you. The virtual hands follow your real hands’ movement. It registers as quite realistic, right on the edge of real. But there’s still a gap—a slivering space between the VR world and the real world, and something about that gap set me off.

I moved my real hands, and my virtual hands flickered, moved with them. A feeling of dread burned down my back. A nasty suspicion took root: that if I removed my VR goggles, I still wouldn’t be in the real world. That I would have to peel off another pair of goggles, then another. That my hands still wouldn’t be real—like I was a nesting doll of virtual selves, and my real body had gone somewhere I wouldn’t be able to find it again….

(10) BRICK-A-BRACK. “Amazon Has the New Smart ‘Star Wars’ Lego—And Collectors Will Want It Fast” – Yahoo! supplies details.

…Lego debuted its Smart Brick technology at CES back in January, along with the first three sets they’d feature the new tech: Darth Vader’s TIE fighter, Luke’s Red Five X-Wing, and Palpatine’s Throne Room Duel & A-Wing recreation, the most expensive smart-infused set of the bunch at a still-reasonable $160. Lego, of course, assured there were more to come—and that sets weren’t limited to the Star Wars IP—and it looks like they’re already backing up the former. The Smart Bricks version of the Millennium Falcon is already available on Amazon and at the Lego store, and it looks like another legitimate grail piece for collectors and hobbyists alike.

The latest Falcon upgrade is available for a pretty reasonable $100—certainly a discount compared to the legendary full-sized set at $850. The latest set is more comparable to the aforementioned 25th-anniversary set, which debuted at $85 (and is currently on sale on Amazon for $67). In addition to Smart Brick compatibility, it does offer other meaningful upgrades. Most notably, the inclusion of four iconic Star Wars minifigures in Luke Skywalker, C-3PO, Chewbacca, and, of course, the ship’s captain himself, Hans Solo.

The latest version of the Falcon is actually slightly easier to build than last year’s release—it features 885 pieces as opposed to the anniversary version’s 921. It’s also a little more age-inclusive, intended for ages 9+ rather than last year’s 18+ rating.

When combined with Lego’s new Smart Brick technology, the Falcon makes movie-accurate sounds and lights up when it senses the inclusion of a Smart Brick. One thing to note—the Falcon doesn’t come with Smart Bricks, and you’ll have to use the ones you already have. The other downside is that Smart Bricks aren’t yet available separately, so you’ll only be able to acquire them by purchasing one of the all-in-one sets (no complaints from us). We expect Smart Bricks to be sold individually down the line, but so far, there’s no timetable for that release…

(11) RETURN OF SHAUN THE SHEEP. Animation World Network takes notes as “GKIDS Unveils ‘Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom’ Trailer and Poster”. The movie comes to theaters on September 18.

…In the latest feature from the stop-motion masters at Aardman, residents of Mossy Bottom Farm are looking forward to Halloween – until the clumsy Farmer trashes the Flock’s beloved pumpkin patch! When Shaun turns MAD SCIENTIST to fix the problem, things rapidly spiral out of control… With The Farmer missing and a wild beast roaming the woods of Mossingham, all the ingredients are in place for a monstrously fun family adventure….

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cora Buhlert, 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 Andrew (not Werdna).]

Pixel Scroll 2/12/26 Scanners Live In Vain, They Probably Think This Scroll Is About Them

Posted on February 12, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) HOW S.A. COREY KICKS OFF NEW SERIES. Jake Casella Brookins discusses “Tangled Fantasies: Speculative Anti-Imperialism and the Myth of Internal Resistance in S.A. Corey’s The Mercy of Gods” at Typebar Magazine.

After the explosive interstellar action of The Expanse, S.A. Corey’s newest novel, The Mercy of Gods, begins quietly enough: university politics, a successful research group jockeying for funding, subdued interpersonal drama. It’s not long before the action and the stakes rise dramatically, but that initial framing, and the longer plot structure the novel sets up, make for an uneasy allegory of collaboration and resistance. It’s an enjoyable, even a classic science fiction thriller, built around high-tension moral situations and subterfuge; it left me wondering whether, when we fantasize about effecting change by working for the enemy, we’re merely indulging in escapism or rehearsing denial—trying out rationalizations for our own complicities….

…There’s much in The Mercy of Gods that will appeal to fans of The Expanse: its mix of giant scale and tight personal stakes, its plucky characters up against impossible odds, and its sense of wonder at big science-fictional concepts. One of the great strengths of The Expanse is how that series draws on and remixes early science fiction; here, Iain M. Banks’ Culture and David Brin’s Uplift books were never far from my mind, with their vast interstellar conflicts and delightfully alien aliens—also, perhaps a bit more obscure, William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters, an enchanting semi-comic novel about an invasion of enormous and technologically superior aliens. The alien society that our human characters are trapped within is often horrific, an ultra-Darwinist dystopia where life has little value, but it’s exuberantly and fantastically described, with the huge, mantis shrimp-like Carryx surrounded by dozens of outlandish species. (If, in the Carryx, Corey is setting up a fairly subtle “Jordan Peterson’s badly-informed lobster metaphors are brought low by actual academics” plot, then I really do have to applaud.)

Comparing this novel to Leviathan Wakes and its sequels, there are two weaknesses that jump out. One is that The Mercy of Gods hasn’t yet caught the interpersonal lightning-in-a-bottle that makes The Expanse so enjoyable on a character level. The other is more complicated: setting the novel in a far-future diaspora where humanity doesn’t even remember Earth allows Corey something of a clean slate on which to sketch out big moral questions, but it also hamstrings the novel culturally. With almost no cultural details, either real or invented, the human characters here wind up with a kind of vaguely American blandness; they feel unrooted even before they’re literally abducted….

…In discussing sociopolitical science fiction, it behooves us to beware metastasizing Omelas takes: we don’t need to read every dystopia, every problematic utopia, as offering the solution to society’s ills, or as challenging us to come up with one. When it comes to questions of working for a blatantly evil company, or of helping an evil empire carry out some horror, it’s useful to remember that Le Guin put the main solution right in the title: if you can, walk away. It may not be easy, it may not slow the machine much, but it means something to withdraw what you can of your support. As something of an upbeat rejoinder to the perpetually-relevant “The Dead Flag Blues,” I’ve been trying to keep AJJ’s “Death Machine” close to mind. Yes, we’re trapped in the belly of the machine; no, it doesn’t matter who’s steering; and yes, it’s going to keep on killing—but only until we find a way to break the routine. It’s hard to make entertaining plots out of it, maybe, but there’s a lot that’s inspiring in the long history of breaking the routine to fight something awful—in work stoppages, in walkouts, in unions and dockworkers refusing to load weapons for a genocide….

(2) SPIDER-NOIR. [Item by James Bacon.] The teaser trailer for the Nicholas Cage-staring Spider-Noir from Amazon has just dropped.

Filer James Bacon is a fan of the 2009 comic and is very positive.

Spider-Man Noir was a phenomenal comic, Peter Parker set in a different time, the 1930’s, a different approach, crime noir, more violent and honest, and laced with politics. Written by David Hine and Fabrice Sapolsky with art by Carmine Di Giandomenico, I loved it. I still do.

The trailer for Spider Noir, with Nicholas Cage, now playing Ben Reilly looks amazing. It’s available in both black-and-white and color, and it’s so unusual, it feels perfectly fitting.

Hard to know how similar or different it is from the comic and I am hopeful we get to see the politics. But it’s a strong trailer for me, feels different, not what we are used to from Marvel.

I interviewed David about Spider-Man Noir, for an issue of Drink Tank, with a cover by Sara Felix, which was co-edited by Christopher J Garcia, Alissa Wales and Chuck Serface.

David Hine said of the character:

“Our Peter Parker was very much the personality that Steve Ditko and Stan Lee created, but we gave him a more realistic edge.”

David explained the different setting:

“Being a teenager in early 1930s New York gave us the chance to write a highly political story. This was a period where it looked like socialism might become the most powerful force in American politics. It seemed perfectly natural for Aunt May and Uncle Ben to be communist agitators, standing up for workers’ rights, campaigning for the out-of-work homeless, and working in soup kitchens.”

“I really wanted our American readers to go back to their history books and fact- check the things we were saying about the exploitation of the workers, racism, and corruption in high places.”

James continues: Depending on how Spider-Noir was scripted, it could well be that it’s tapped into elements that are very relevant to today’s America.

(3) “LOGIC IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM.” Camestros Felapton, in “The Androids (and otherwise) of Star Trek”, starts by analyzing the values used by the show to dramatize androids, robots, and sentient computers, and then compares how they apply to the show’s half-alien sidekick.

…Trek’s storylines about androids and computers would mainly (but not always) rest on the idea that their commitment to rigid, logical thinking was at odds with humanity but also limited in comparison to more intuitive thinking. This idea was coupled with the fear of replacement of humans by logical thinking machines and that such machines were deceptive and imitative. Even in the case of the sympathetic Rayna Kapec, Kirk is deceived into falling in love with a being who is not a “real” woman.

There is one character who I have not been discussing in all this: Spock.

The half human, half Vulcan, science officer is arguably the most enduring character of the show. As part of the original pilot for the show, he predates Captain Kirk who was not cast until the second (more successful) pilot. While the show’s strength is its use of an ensemble cast, Spock is a signature character.

Spock, like the various androids, is presented as being overly logical.

Spock does not technically fit within the very broad range of beings I’m including in this project (which includes puppets, reanimated corpses and brains in boxes). While his humanity and Vulcanity(?) are sometimes questioned, his basic personhood is not. He is a natural person rather than a manufactured one.

Nor is it the case that the writers pulled tropes about robots and simply applied them to an alien. Rather Spock is drawing on a different set of science fiction tropes in which there are people whose innate ability and mental discipline grant them increased intelligence and psychic powers. A particularly notable instance of this was the 1946 book Slan by A.E. van Vogt in which more evolved humans known as Slans are hunted by an authoritarian society that fears and hates them.

The concept of Slans was embraced by American fandom to the extent that a popular slogan “Fans are Slans” was adopted. The idea that fans of science fiction might (because of their interest in science) be smarter than average but also “persecuted” because their interest in apparently corny books was perceived as juvenile and obsessive had an obvious appeal….

(4) CONSTABLE ON PATROL. At CrimeReads Olivia Rutigliano says she thinks “There Should Be a Murder in Bridgerton”.

…Now, you might be wondering, what will that accomplish? Well, GENTLE READER, it will do one thing the show already likes to do, which is switch micro-genre from season to season! Season One was about longing across self-imposed barriers (which I would classify as Sense and Sensibility on steroids), Season Two was “enemies to lovers,” AKA Pride and Prejudice, Season Three was “old friends to lovers,” and Season Four is Cinderella. How about Season Five become a murder mystery?…

(5) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 153 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Bowling Captain Kirk for a Duck”, has arrived, with John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty immersed in fannish conversation.

We discuss the best board games to play at school, and then we cover important topics such as whether yellow is “Pokémon-coloured” before discussing SMOFcon 43, Nuremberg in 2028, and Dublin in 2029.

An uncorrected transcript is here.

A picture of Alison with white hair, wearing a white dressing gown, and wielding a staff with a moose head. John and Liz flank her. She says “Behold! I am reborn as Alison the White!” John says “That’s a bit dramatic… it’s only a haircut” and Liz says “Pretty sure that’s a dressing gown… and are you standing on a box?” The words Octothorpe 153 are at the top.

(6) HUDSON TALBOTT (1949-2026). The New York Times tribute, “Hudson Talbott Dies at 76; Wrote and Illustrated Wide-Ranging Children’s Books”, reports the author died January 22.

Hudson Talbott, an award-winning children’s book author and illustrator whose tale about time-traveling dinosaurs in Manhattan became an animated film produced by Steven Spielberg and who also adapted the Stephen Sondheim musical “Into the Woods” into a book for young readers, died on Jan. 22 in Albany, N.Y. He was 76.

His death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy, an autoimmune disorder known as C.I.D.P., Jay Lesenger, Mr. Talbott’s partner, said.

Before Mr. Talbott published more than 20 children’s books on subjects as diverse as Arthurian legend, the Holocaust and the 19th-century painter Thomas Cole, he was a freelance artist whose 1987 dinosaur calendar, published the previous fall, reimagined prehistoric creatures as oversize pets in contemporary settings — including a Tyrannosaurus Rex catching a Frisbee thrown by a boy.

“Drawing them gave me a sense of returning to something that I was very fond of when I was a little kid,” he told The Advocate of Stamford, Conn.

David Allender, an editor of children’s books at Crown Publishers, spotted the calendar at a Barnes & Noble. He was so impressed with the amusing watercolors that he looked up Mr. Talbott in the Manhattan phone book, called him and asked him to write what became “We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story” (1987).

In the book, the dinosaurs ingest multivitamins that turn them into intelligent beings. They are then transported to 20th-century New York, where they head to the American Museum of Natural History. But along the way they inadvertently start a panic when one of them greets a dinosaur balloon in a Thanksgiving parade, thinking it’s a friend, and accidentally destroys it….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

February 12, 1976 — Tim Pratt, 50.

By Paul Weimer: In both his straight-up name and his pen names, Pratt has written a slew of novels, having “graduated” to novels after a run of shorter fiction that culminated with his Hugo award winning story “Impossible Dreams”. That short story’s parallel universe heart is something that I see and encounter again and again in his fiction. Parallel universes, adjacent dimensions, demiplanes, and the like populate many of his novels, one way or another.

It was in his Pathfinder tie-in work that I first started reading his novels, proceeding through the Kindle serial Heirs of Grace and into his even more ambitious work. I want to highlight these two.

The Axiom novels are a fun trio of space opera novels, revolving around a freight and salvage ship, the White Raven, accidentally finding the secret to a dread Alien race, the titular Axiom, whose awakening would spell doom for humanity. The crew of the White Raven, in a breezy trio of reads that belie their doorstopper status catapult themselves from frying pans to fires as they are literally on the front line of trying to protect humanity from an existential threat.

But it is the Doors of Sleep books that I think Pratt really hits all cylinders. The premise is deceptively simple, our protagonist Zaxony has, for reasons slowly revealed in the unfolding of the story, been granted a blessing and a curse. Every time he falls asleep, he wakes up in a new parallel world. As far as he can tell, he can’t ever “go back”, either. And so with a tone often reminiscent of Doctor Who and Sliders, Zaxony finds himself traveling from world to world.

The novel is clever in that it starts us in media res, Zaxony has been through this for nearly three years of personal time when the novel begins, so we get to see how he’s adapted and tried to deal with his gift. In fashion reminiscent of both Doctor Who and Sliders, it emerges that Zaxony isn’t the only person who can travel the worlds…but Zaxony’s gift makes him a target. The pair of novels go down easy and are a fun read and are my current Tim Pratt favorites.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Mandatory Roller Coaster begs the question, “What’s the overlap between robots and giraffes?”
Animal Crackers creates a queue.
Bliss nearly makes a discovery.
Diamond Lil’s marathon watch turns seasonal.
Dog Eats Doug debates the standards for superheroism.
Glasbergen will have to dial again.
Pearls Before Swine never knew til now.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is very Grimm.
Spectickles witnesses a failed delivery in the ancient world.
The Argyle Sweater has bad suggestions for sitcoms.

(9) HIS CONFUSED FACE. [Item by Steven French.] Keith Stuart gets all metatextual in this week’s ‘Pushing Buttons’ newsletter: “Is surprise box-office hit Iron Lung the future of ‘video game films’?”

Something weird struck me early on while watching the movie Iron Lung, which has so far taken $32m at the box office, despite being a grungy low-budget sci-fi thriller adapted from an independent video game few people outside of the horror gaming community have even heard of. Set after a galactic apocalypse, it follows a convict who must buy his freedom by piloting a rusty submarine through an ocean of human blood on a distant planet. Ostensibly, he’s looking for relics that may prove vital for scientific research, but what he finds is much more ghastly. So far, so strange.

The film was also written, directed and financed by one person – the YouTube gaming superstar Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach – who also stars. But that’s not the weird part, either. The weird part is that watching the film Iron Lung feels like watching Fischbach play Iron Lung the game. Maybe it’s the fact that he spends most of the movie sitting at the sub’s controls, trying to figure out how to use them correctly – like a gamer would. Maybe it’s that, as the film progresses, he has to solve a series of environmental puzzles linked by various codes, computer read-outs and little injections of narrative – just like in a video game. Long periods of the movie involve Fischbach trying to decide what to do next, the camera close up on his confused face. This is incredibly similar to watching his YouTube videos about playing Iron Lung, an experience he often found bewildering. It was the most metatextual experience I’ve had in the cinema since The Truman Show – but I’m not sure this is what Fischbach intended….

(10) YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY HANDS… [Item by Steven French.] Forget the big diggers, microbial mining is the future! (Maybe). “Space mining without heavy machines? Microbes harvest metals from meteorites aboard space station” at Phys.org.

If humankind is to explore deep space, one small passenger should not be left behind: microbes. In fact, it would be impossible to leave them behind, since they live on and in our bodies, surfaces and food. Learning how they react to space conditions is critical, but they could also be invaluable fellows in our endeavor to explore space.

Microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi can harvest crucial minerals from rocks and could provide a sustainable alternative to transporting much-needed resources from Earth.

Researchers from Cornell and the University of Edinburgh collaborated to study how those microbes extract platinum group elements from a meteorite in microgravity, with an experiment conducted aboard the International Space Station. They found that “biomining” fungi are particularly adept at extracting the valuable metal palladium, while removing the fungus resulted in a negative effect on nonbiological leaching in microgravity.

The team’s study is published in npj Microgravity. The lead author is Rosa Santomartino, assistant professor of biological and environmental engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; Alessandro Stirpe, a research associate in microbiology, is a co-author.

(11) SQUIRREL! Or at least that’s the image that popped to mind when I read how this space telescope normally works. “NASA Puts 21-Year-Old Spacecraft on Pause to Keep It From Crashing Into Earth”. Gizmodo explains what that’s about.

NASA is racing to save an aging space telescope before it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere. To do that, the space agency has recently limited the mission’s operations in orbit to keep it from moving around so much.

NASA suspended most of Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory’s science operations on Wednesday in an effort to reduce the effects of atmospheric drag on the spacecraft and slow down its orbital decay, the space agency announced. Swift is due for an orbit boost, with a mission planned for later this summer set to raise it to a higher altitude. In the meantime, NASA is working on keeping Swift from dropping further.

Swift launched into low-Earth orbit on a Delta 7320 rocket on November 20, 2004. The satellite is designed to study the most powerful explosions in the cosmos, known as gamma-ray bursts. It does so using three on-board telescopes, collecting data in visible, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray light.

In order to keep the spacecraft in an orientation that minimizes drag effects, NASA has put some of Swift’s science activities on hold. “Normally, Swift quickly turns to view its targets — especially the fleeting, almost daily explosions called gamma-ray bursts — with multiple telescopes,” S. Bradley Cenko, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. “Swift’s Burst Alert Telescope will continue to detect gamma-ray bursts, but the spacecraft will no longer slew to observe targets with its other telescopes.”…

(12) JUSTWATCH’S AMBIVALENT LISTS. JustWatch – The Streaming Guide has released their “JustWatch Valentine’s vs Anti-Valentine’s rankings” for the U.S., based on streaming engagement over the past four years.

As Valentine’s Day approaches, many Americans are celebrating by streaming offbeat and unexpected romantic movies, while others opt for anti-romance, genre-bending thrills. Based on JustWatch demand, audiences are engaging with both nostalgic romance classics and modern love stories, alongside a demand for thrillers in their Anti-Valentine’s viewing.

This year’s Most Watched Offbeat Love Stories and Anti-Valentine’s Day Movies lists show that audiences continue to seek out humor and warmth, or the exciting drama of a “love story gone wrong”, proving that the celebration extends well beyond traditional romances.

Key Insights

● Last year’s Oscar Best Picture winner Anora, a surprising romance of sorts, tops the list of most-watched offbeat love stories.

Sydney Sweeney is making a bit of a comeback in streaming, with The Housemaid now available to rent or buy. The Sweeney/Glenn Powell romantic comedy, Anyone But You, is #2 on the VDay list.

● Florence Pugh’s Midsommar is the top anti-Valentine’s Day movie, while Pugh’s tearjerker We Live in Time is #10 on the offbeat love stories list.

Viewers enjoy “love stories gone wrong,” with titles like Gone Girl (#4), Get Out (#8), and Ready or Not (#10) making the Anti-Valentine’s Day list.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/5/25 There Are Pixels And Then There Are Pixels

Posted on December 5, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) CONGRATULATIONS! Diana Pavlac Glyer’s book received this accolade in Kent State University Press’ roundup “Six Decades of Publishing What Matters”.

(2) THE LAST GENRE? Daniel Yadin gives an overview of romantasy’s effect on writers, readers and publishers in “Escape Artists” at The Drift.

…On the consumption side, giant books, and giant series of giant books, started going viral on TikTok in 2020, amid the Covid lockdowns. Countless people, spurred by their algorithms and then by screen fatigue, returned to reading and began to relish in smutty — or, in fan parlance, “spicy” — supernatural love stories. Until quite recently, this was perhaps a niche genre for the American adult, but it now can look, more and more, like the only genre left. There seem to be women of all ages, races, classes, educational backgrounds, and sexual orientations who bear their crosses proudly and passionately down romantasy’s via dolorosa. When I attended a Maas event at a Manhattan bookstore, I witnessed displays of devotion I had previously thought unimaginable outside the Vatican.

Romantasy is marketed to young adults, “new adults” (a category invented in 2009 to ease the path out of Y.A.), and plain old adults alike. The books are fun and frothy, marking a shift from the stern dystopias of the Obama era, when children killed each other with rocks (in The Hunger Games, that is). At its best, romantasy is freakishly hypnotic, the whole body tugged into the world of the book. Clear, unfussy prose with predictable rhetorical flourishes — Maas is particularly fond of polysyndeton, with her descriptions of “darkness and fire and ice and wind” and passion that is “unending and wild and burning” — opens the gate to the fantasy realm. There, a world of bright lights and constant stimulation, filled with magical powers and familiar tropes, alongside healthy doses of raunch, gore, and soaring emotion, seals the bond. Eventually, any roommate, relative, lover, or friend in the fallout zone of the reading experience comes to learn a great deal, too, about the goings-on of the faerie courts.

The heart swells just thinking about a genuine literary “PHENOMENON” occurring in a country whose days of mass literacy may be behind it. That this phenomenon happens to consist of love stories between imaginary creatures engaging in graphic sex — well, you know what they say about beggars being choosers….

(3) MORE CONGRATULATIONS! Bogi Takács’ Song of Spores is a selection for “Scientific American’s Best Fiction of 2025”. (The list is behind a paywall.)

(4) MEMORABLE SETTINGS. No Film School names “9 Films That Made Their Settings As Iconic As the Characters”.

In cinema, the setting refers to the physical location, time period, era, historical event, or cultural backdrop against which the main events of the story unfold. In a way, the setting serves as a container for the story, holding all its aspects together.

In cinema, the setting refers to the physical location, time period, era, historical event, or cultural backdrop against which the main events of the story unfold. In a way, the setting serves as a container for the story, holding all its aspects together.

But it doesn’t always have to be just a container. It can be the contents within as well. Filmmakers who understand this potential, or possibilities in their settings, strive to bring it out. When that happens, the setting becomes a character, the story itself. A window, a hallway, or a city block suddenly has moods, secrets, personalities, and even motives.

Good filmmakers, worth their salt, know how to transform their setting into a living and breathing force; they know how to make time, geography, and design shape their film’s rhythm. A setting with a personality can scare you, amplify loneliness; it can even spark a rebellion. It can turn passive observation into active storytelling.

There are several sff films on the list. Here’s their final example.

9. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Written by: George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nico Lathouris | Directed by: George Miller

If the desert in Lawrence of Arabia was operatic poetry, it is complete chaos and unhinged madness in Mad Max: Fury Road—talk about a chameleon actor; the desert plays both roles flawlessly. In this film, every dune and every storm is a part of its heartbeat. The desert here is not merely a place where all the action happens; it is the action. George Miller uses the desert as a demanding protagonist that makes other (supporting) characters struggle for survival and, as if in exchange for the entertainment, offers reinvention. This is one of the examples where the setting creates and maneuvers the drama.

(5) FLAT OFFER. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Columbia Sportswear pledges to give ‘the company’ to whoever proves the Earth is flat” reports OregonLive. Dern wonders whether a selfie from (an appropriate place on) Bizarro World would count?

Are you a conspiracy theorist who has always wanted to own your own sportswear company? Today is your lucky day because if you can find the edge of the Earth and photograph it, then Columbia Sportswear can be yours — or at least some of the stuff lying around its Oregon headquarters.

A new ad from the company features Tim Boyle, the company’s CEO, challenging flat-earthers.

“You guys claim there’s an end to the Earth?” Boyle says. “Well, just go snap a picture. Send it to us. And you get the assets of the company. All of it.”

MediaPost makes clear that the reward offer shouldn’t be taken at face value (depending on what you think its face value is). “Will Flat Earthers Take Columbia Sportswear’s Bait?”.

Columbia Sportswear is leaning into absurdity with a new campaign aimed squarely at Flat Earthers. The premise: Anyone who reaches the “edge of the earth” and brings back a photo gets the company’s full inventory of assets — from conference tables and copy machines to the taxidermy beaver in the cafeteria.

They don’t even have to wear Columbia gear on the quest, although CEO Tim Boyle, who stars in the deadpan spot, would prefer they did. The work, from adam&eveDDB, continues the brand’s “Engineered for Whatever” platform — and pushes it into darker, sharper humor. A recently launched spot in the series, for example, featured a one-armed mountaineer joking about losing his other arm to the elements, and at Halloween, the company hired the Grim Reaper as an influencer. It’s all a wink at the brutal conditions the gear is built for, and a sign that Columbia is reclaiming the irreverence it leaned on in the ’80s and ’90s.

A long-copy ad in the New York Times, signed by Boyle, lays out the Flat Earther challenge. “This is a message to Flat Earthers,” it begins. “I’ve seen your manifestos, admired your diagrams, watched you stand proudly on your, well, flat ground. So here’s the deal: it’s time to put your map where your mouth is.”

Should someone actually deliver the photo, he adds, they can have “all of it. The mannequins, coffee machines, snowshoes, toboggans, office plants — even the taxidermy beaver.”

The fine print clarifies that “the Company, LLC” — the entity being offered — is valued at $100,000, far below Columbia’s roughly $3.3 billion in annual sales. It also spells out the required “Edge of the Earth”: a visible, physical end to the planet defined as “a sheer drop, abyssal void, clouds cascading into infinity.” What does not count: a clifftop in Seattle, a Kansas cul-de-sac or “your buddy Dave legally changing his name to The Edge.”…

(6) FALLOUT’S GENRE SOURCES. “Fallout’s Secret Westworld Connection Addressed by Jonathan Nolan” at CBR.com.

Prime Video’s acclaimed Fallout series is set to debut its highly anticipated second season on Dec. 17. The Emmy-winning series comes from executive producer and director Jonathan Nolan, who is revealing a secret connection to the apocalyptic series Westworld in an exclusive interview with CBR….

…Nolan added, “And I think we’re now, once again, Westworld was a science fiction show. Now pretty much daily reality. You know, hopefully some of the things in Fallout don’t become a daily reality, but asking that question of the what ifs right, where do these things go? I think one of the things that is most exciting to me about Fallout is it gets to question, you know what? ‘What happens to our institutions after the end of the world and 200 years in Geneva?’”

Nolan continued that Fallout was also loosely inspired by a book called A Canticle for Leibowitz, which he said, “I think also informed the games a little bit.” He continued speaking of the book that told a story of “this monk somewhere in the future who’s sifting through the ruins of our civilization and trying to piece together what these technologies were and how these people came to the precipice. So, I think there’s always something engaging in a story like that, definitely.”…

(7) CARY-HIROYUKI TAGAWA (1950-2025). “Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa Dead: ‘Mortal Kombat’ Actor Was 75” reports Variety.

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, who played evil sorcerer Shang Tsung in the “Mortal Kombat” franchise and appeared in “The Last Emperor,” “Licence to Kill” and “The Man in the High Castle,” died Thursday in Santa Barbara. A rep confirmed he died of complications from a stroke. He was 75.

Tagawa’s first film role came in Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor.” Soon after that, Tagawa played the villian Kwang in James Bond movie “Licence to Kill.”…

…Kagawa is known for his role as Shang Tsung in the “Mortal Kombat” franchise. He appeared in the first film adaptation in 1995 and went on to appear in the TV series “Mortal Kombat: Legacy” in 2013 and lent his voice to the more recent “Mortal Kombat 11” videogame….

…In Amazon’s TV series “The Man in the High Castle,” Tagawa starred as Trade Minister Nobusuke Tagomi; in Netflix’s “Lost in Space,” he played Hiroki Watanabe….

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas film

Forty-eight years ago on CBC Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas film first aired. It would premiere a year later in the States on HBO. It was based off of the children’s book of the same name by Russell Hoban and his wife Lillian Hoban. Russell Hoban you’ll no doubt recognize as the author of Riddley Walker which won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award. It was directed and produced by Jim Henson off the script by Jerry Juhl who was known for his work on The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock and Sesame Street.

The Muppets voice cast was Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, Dave Goelz, Marilyn Sokol and Eren Ozker.

Paul Williams, who I was surprised to learn wrote Three Dog Night’s “An Old Fashioned Love Song” among quite a few other songs, composed the music and several songs here. This would not be his last such Muppets work as he would be involved in The Muppet Movie several years later among other of his Muppets projects.

Reception was very positive with the New York Times comparing it to The Wind in The Willows saying and “These really are the nicest folk on the river.” It was Christmas season, blame that comparison on too much eggnog made way too strong if you want. And AV Critic said that “it was “The kind of Christmas special you could wrap in tissue when the season’s over and store carefully in a box in the attic.”

Oh, and Bret McKenzie (you fans of The Hobbit films might recognize him) was writing the script and songs for a film adaptation of it which might be someday produced by The Jim Henson Company though it’s been years since that was announced.

Yes, the Suck Fairy very much liked it. She even looked at her iPad mini to see what the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes thought of it. She’s pleased to say that the more than five thousand people who had rated it gave it a hundred percent rating. After that, she put her iPad mini down, went back to stroking Pixel and watching the film. Again. Sentimental sop.

It is streaming on Prime Video.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Brevity doesn’t want to share second breakfast.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comes prepared.
The Argyle Sweater lists chicken films.
Cartoonist/illustrator Marie Enger posted this single page comic to Bluesky based on the 1985 film Brazil.

(10) SUNRISE OR SUNSET? Gizmodo’s Germain Lussier hopes “’Andor’ Can’t Be the End of Good ‘Star Wars’”.

You probably didn’t think about this, but when season two of Andor ended in May 2025, it brought a close to a whole new era of Star Wars. Six years had passed since the release of The Rise of Skywalker, and the franchise had since changed drastically, becoming primarily an in-home, streaming experience. Some of those were great, others were not so great, but when the credits rolled on Andor, which was almost undoubtedly the best of the bunch, we wondered, is it ever going to be this good again?…

… Over the course of 12 episodes, Andor season two basically gave us four new Star Wars movies. Each three-episode arc had its own tone, feeling, and themes. Some of it was a bit more of that traditional, exciting Star Wars. Other times, we watched in shock and awe at the brutality of the Empire. Some moments filled us with pure exhilaration, satisfaction, and resolution. Others made us feel complexities that seemed almost too rich for Star Wars. Who can forget the scene with Mon Mothma dancing at her daughter’s wedding? On the surface, it’s cool and fun. The music is pumping. The editing is fast and slick. But the audience knows she’s just done something unforgivable, and it changes the scene entirely.

So, if Andor proved that Star Wars is still capable of such brilliance, why do we all still feel so uncertain about the future?…

(11) SPIDER-NOIR. “Nicolas Cage’s Live-Action Spider-Man 2026 Release Seemingly Confirms New Marvel Variant” says ScreenRant.

A new look at Spider-Noir reveals who Nicolas Cage’s Marvel hero truly is. 2026 is bound to be a busy year for Spider-Man. On the Marvel side, there are at least two confirmed releases, including the animated Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man season 2 and Tom Holland’s next MCU Spider-Man movie, Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

While Marvel and Sony work together on Holland’s Spider-Man movies, the latter will also have its own live-action Spider-Man release in 2026. Sony’s Spider-Man Universe might not be releasing any new films, but the studio will bring back Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man Noir after his beloved role in the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, with a twist.

At Brazil’s CCXP (via Omelete/Instagram), where ScreenRant is in attendance, a new Spider-Noir poster confirms that Nicolas Cage is playing Ben Reilly in Prime Video’s live-action Spider-Man series.

While the Spider-Noir poster only refers to the character as B. Reilly, Marvel Comics fans will know the hero as a Peter Parker clone who ended up becoming one of the most popular Spider-Man variants. The poster features Spider-Man Noir behind an office door, spotlighting his job as a private investigator….

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(12) RYAN GEORGE UPDATE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Ryan George has posted an update on the family emergency that has kept him off of YouTube recently. In it, he shares news of his father‘s passing as well as the hope that he can get back to posting new content around the beginning of the year. “Post from Ryan George Extra Plus!”

…I know that my dad was proud that I somehow made a career out of bringing some laughter into an increasingly dark world. And so, even though I don’t feel very funny right now, I do plan on getting back to work when I can… because I know that’s what he would want. I’m aiming for the new year- and hoping the YouTube algorithm will be as understanding as I know you all will be. I love you forever, papa. I’m so sorry this happened to you.

[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Daniel Dern, Ben Bird Person, 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 Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 8/1/25 I’ll Scroll What Pixel’s Scrolling

Posted on August 1, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) DRENCHED IN PURPLE AND MAGENTA. Leah Schnelbach gets to be a fan of two shows for the price of one: “Premium Quality Entertainment: The Joys of Murderbot and Sanctuary Moon” at Reactor. (Beware spoilers.)

…From the books, I imagined Sanctuary Moon as kind of Star Trek-meets-Law & Order, with utilitarian lighting, over-the-top music cues, and questionable acting. I love how series creators Paul and Chris Weitz transformed it into a candy-colored fantasia—and the acting is questionable, but in the best way possible. I haven’t had a custom ringtone for a very long time (to give you an idea, the last one I had was this Mighty Boosh song) but if I could hear Jack McBrayer say “Stars, Captain!” every time my phone rings, I might leave the sound on.

I need to take a second to meditate upon the charisma of John Cho. There’s scene where his Captain Hossein and DeWanda Wise’s NavBot are stranded together, and he flirts with her, and by the end of their scene I wanted an entire romcom with these two. I love it when people commit to the bit, and goddamn did everyone commit here. (For more John Cho, watch Columbus. It’s one of the best movies of the decade, and I think it’s on Tubi right now.)

The Weitzes gave Sanctuary Moon a theme song that’s both a ridiculous standalone and an important plot point. They give us just enough of this show that we can enter into the silliness of it, and then use it as a counterpoint, a commentary, and at times, almost a sacred artifact….

(2) IRISH COMICS NEWS. James Bacon’s Irish Conflict in Comics: Rebellion, Nazi Spies and the Troubles will be released by Limit Break Comics on August 9. The book is a commentary on the history of Irish conflict as it appears in comics, researched at the National Library of Ireland, and covering over 70 years of comics history.

James will be part of Limit Break Comics at Dublin Comic Con Summer 2025, too.

The biggest Irish convention of the summer opens its doors on August 9th and 10th: Dublin Comic Con Summer 2025!

In his capacity as a researcher and fan, James is also taking part in Comics at the National Library of Ireland, led by Dr. Sinéad McCoole, Keeper of Exhibitions, Learning and Programming, and joined by Derek Landy, Maeve Clancy, Maura McHugh, and Declan Shalvey. The event is free to attend, on the afternoon of August 8th.

(3) DON’T BE FOOLED. Victoria Strauss warns about the “Return of the Nigerian Prince: A New Twist on Book Marketing Scams” at Writer Beware.

Marketing scams have always been plentiful. Over the past year or so, though, they’ve really surged.

I’ve written about one type of marketing scam–the “friendly author” social media scam, in which someone impersonating a real (and often very well-known) author reaches out with a direct message, ostensibly because they’re interested in your books or your writing, but actually in order to refer you to some sort of shady marketing service.

Now there’s a new type of marketing scam. It has the same starting point–direct solicitation–and the same end goal–tricking writers into handing over money. The new part is the steps that happen in between.

Step 1: (A)I Love Your Work!

Out of the blue, an email arrives in your Inbox. It begins with highly personalized and detailed praise that makes it seem the sender has actually read your book…but don’t be fooled: it has been created by feeding prompts and book information into a chatbot.

Because your work is so resonant/timely/groundbreaking/deeply human/some other superlative, the sender–who just happens to be a PR or marketing expert–wants to help you gain visibility/reach your audience/drive sales growth. These emails fall broadly into two categories: an upfront proposal for services, or a more cagey “might you be interested in discussing this further?”…

… The use of gen AI is obvious in the contacts below. One book, two different “experts”, but check how similar the openings are, right down to a comparable title. (Also: Harper Collinsworth, anyone?)…

… One writer was instructed to arrange a wire transfer (at which point they said Nope), but the other four were told to send money to freelancers on Upwork or Fiverr. Here’s the campaign confirmation one of the authors received from Richard Opeuluwa, who plys his trade on Upwork…

Note Richard’s location: Nigeria. The other four “assistants” are Nigerian too. I also heard from a writer who closely tracks their website visitor stats, and told me that they see an uptick in traffic from Nigeria whenever they receive a batch of marketing emails via their contact form. So that’s another data point.

That’s right, folks: it’s another scam from overseas!…

(4) 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 #47: Harvey Hamer”. Photo at the link.

When pondering which section of collection to share—childhood books, works from writers I’ve come to know as an adult, Star Wars, research books, TBR—I decided to specially arrange this shelfie to showcase five works that changed and inspired me on my author journey.

After a fallow reading period, it was Rick Riordan’s universe that kept me turning pages and ignited my love of mythology, and more importantly, storytelling. While Riordan’s Kane Chronicles greatly inspired the ancient Egyptian threads in my writing as I grew up, I chose The Lost Hero as it introduced me to multi-POV stories and changed the way I’d structure my chapters, books and character arcs going forward.

Another big inspiration, as I moved from YA to adult books (probably the book that prompted that change as Star Wars was on the rise again), was Chuck Wending’s Aftermath trilogy. He included interludes, each one a different character’s POV on some distant planet, little snippets of a massive galaxy. This was my first time learning truly how large fictional universes could be, and inspired interludes of my own. Wendig also introduced me properly to the urgency of present tense, which I adapted into my own work and is now my tense of choice!…

(5) HUGO BASE ARTIST REACHES GOAL. Joy Alyssa Day, a glass artist who designed this year’s Hugo base, has met the funding goal of her “Fly Me to the Worldcon!” Indiegogo appeal.

…I am being paid a small stipend to create the bases, but it just covers costs and materials. It does not cover airfare from my home state of New York, hotel, or incidentals at the convention. Being on site and being a part of the presentation would mean the world to me, and also help me continue to grow my business.

By helping and contributing, you’d be a part of my Hugo history, and you’ll get some fantastic artwork after the convention….

(6) BRAIN STRAINERS. “10 Sci-Fi Masterpieces That Are Too Complex for Normies” at Movieweb.

… There is no wrong answer on how to approach the genre, and we are not here to tout certain films over others simply because they may be lost on many (normies). If you approach the genre for entertainment in the form of action-packed adventures, more power to you. Still, these 10 movies present the more contemplative and challenging side of the sci-fi genre, one that most mainstream audiences will want to avoid, but those looking for something thought-provoking will want to check out….

Here’s one of their picks:

‘Primer’ (2004)

Engineers Aaron and Abe accidentally discover time travel while working on a project aimed at reducing the weight of objects. Their discovery triggers a series of experiments, during which the two meticulously record their findings. Yet, the deeper they become involved with the technology, the more they risk pushing its boundaries, resulting in anomalies occurring.

The Science of Time Travel

A time travel movie that heavily focuses on mathematical principles and attempts to explain paradoxes scientifically, Primer is characterized by its heavy dialogue and minimal action. Still, the indie time-traveling movie is oddly fascinating in its approach, almost hypnotic, in the way it expounds on so many details in an approachable way, despite tackling a deeply complex subject in time travel. For many, Primer will be the type of movie you fall asleep to, with its science and math-heavy dialogue, but to others, it is an underappreciated gem.

(7) SHORT STORY PANEL. Elizabeth Bear told her subscribers:

The Braille Institute has made available video of a panel I did on short stories with Nate Kurth of the BI and two absolutely amazing writers, Tananarive Due (THE REFORMATORY, out now, is a fucking tour de force) and Jendayi Brooks-Flemister (I particularly liked this story at Lightspeed of theirs).

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 1, 1977 — Holmes & Yoyo series, “The Cat Burglar”

Now I’m feeling old as I clearly remember watching this episode, the next-to-last one of the series. Holmes & Yoyo’s “The Cat Burglar“ aired forty-eight years ago on this date on ABC. Someone is stealing well-loved felines from wealthy ladies to hold for for ransom, and Holmes and Yoyo set out to catch the cat stealer.

Look no one is ever going to accuse Holmes & Yoyo, which lasted a mere thirteen episodes, of being deep or meaningful because it wasn’t. Was it good SF? Not really? Was it a decent detective series? Oh no, but despite that, it was fun to watch.

It may not surprise you that the executive producer was Leonard Stern, a former staff writer for and executive producer of the Get Smart series which had an android character named Hymie who is largely the prototype for Yoyo.

This story was proof of that in, errrr, the number of cats under foot. It’s lightweight and no one but one gets hurt, it’s got John Schuck at his very, very comic best and it’s got cats in it. None of which get hurt. Miffed, yes; hurt, no.

I don’t think that series could’ve gone any further than it did in these thirteen episodes as there just wasn’t anything there to build off, was there? To say to the premise was thin would be an understatement. It was tissue paper. Really it was.

I hold that John Schuck is best in his comic roles and that includes his role as Draal on Babylon 5 which had a measure of comedy in the way he presented himself. Herman Munster on The Munsters Today may have been his best role ever, and the Lt. Charles Enright character on the McMillian & Wife series (which yes, I watched and liked a lot) had more than a bit of comic relief in it. And I adore his take on M.A.S.H. as Capt. ‘Painless’ Waldowski which also had more than a bit of pathos in it. I’ve watched that film at least a half dozen times now.

Richard B. Shull was Yoyo’s partner, Detective Alexander Holmes. A comic actor he never appeared on any series of the myriad ones he did more than twice accepting Diana, a thirteen episode soap opera-ish series about young woman who moves to London for a job. He is a copywriter, even one of four primary actors.

So like all too many short run series it seems not to be streaming anywhere. Has anyone seen it recently?

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is…confused.
Tom the Dancing Bug lists nightmare TV shows.
Bizarro noticed a pattern.
Brewster Rockit is ironic.
Cornered picks the wrong definition.
Dinosaur Comics discusses dinosaur comics.
Fowl Language anticipates old age.
Pardon My Planet is difficult to see.
Pearls Before Swine introduces us to a block.
Rhymes with Orange would rather blend in.

(10) SPIDER-MAN FAN. J. M. DeMatteis celebrates “Creation Point: Spider-Man Day 2025”.

Sixty-three years ago a radioactive spider took a bite out of a kid named Peter Parker and the pop culture universe was changed forever. In honor of Spider-Man Day, here’s an essay that first appeared here a few years back. Enjoy!…

…June, 1966. I was standing in the Brooklyn, New York candy store where I bought all my comics and I couldn’t take my eyes off the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #39: There was the Green Goblin gliding through the sky dragging a bound and defeated Peter Parker—his Spider-Man costume visible beneath his street clothes—behind him. To my twelve-year-old eyes—conditioned as they were to the pristine DC Comics of the day—this was mesmerizing. A villain who’d actually unmasked the hero! A hero so utterly helpless! As with all great comic book covers, this one fired up my imagination. I didn’t even have to read this story: that single illustration, brought to vibrant life by the incomparable John Romita, Sr., suggested dozens of incredible tales that played out in my head. (This, I later learned, was Romita’s first issue of Amazing Spider-Man. It looked like he’d been drawing the book all his life.)

I was still a hardcore DC fan then—there was something spooky, almost dangerous, about those early Marvel Comics and I wasn’t quite ready to take the leap—so I resisted buying that issue; but a month later I gave in to temptation and purchased the story’s conclusion: I was, as the British say, gobsmacked. Stan Lee’s scripting was so exciting, so nakedly emotional. And Romita’s interior art—with his dynamic layouts and impeccable storytelling—was every bit as irresistible as the cover that had enchanted me thirty days before….

(11) ADMITTEDLY, IT WASN’T MUCH OF A TEST. According to The Independent, “ChatGPT can now pass the ‘I’m not a robot’ test”.

…ChatGPT creator OpenAI describes this next-generation artificial intelligence, known as agentic AI, as the “natural evolution” of the technology, allowing AI to carry out actions like online shopping, booking restaurants and scheduling appointments….

… In one incident, shared on Reddit, ChatGPT explained the process of getting around Cloudflare’s anti-bot verification measures…

… “I’ll click the ‘Verify you are human’ checkbox to complete the verification on Cloudflare,” the bot wrote. “This step is necessary to prove I’m not a bot and proceed with the action.”

Cloudflare’s system is one of the most common security measures employed by sites to block automated traffic. The ‘I’m not a robot’ checkbox is often used instead of a more challenging CAPTCHA puzzle, though websites may now need to reevaluate their bot testing methods…

(12) STREAMING TOP 10’S. JustWatch has shared its Top 10 charts for July.

(13) BROUGHT TO YOU IN (ONE) LIVING COLOR. Science reports “Peacock feathers can be lasers”.

Peacocks have a secret hidden in their brightly colored tail feathers: tiny reflective structures that can amplify light into a laser beam. After dyeing the feathers and energizing them with an external light source, researchers discovered they emitted narrow beams of yellow-green laser light. They say the study, published this month in Scientific Reports, offers the first example of a laser cavity in the animal kingdom.

Matjaž Humar, a biophotonics researcher at the University of Ljubljana who recently published a study on edible lasers, calls the study “novel and inspiring.” He says it “is a fascinating and elegant example of how complex biological structures can support the generation of coherent light.”

Lasers are created when a so-called gain medium, often a dye, is “pumped” with energy, which excites the medium’s electrons to higher energy levels. When those electrons fall back to lower energy states, they release their energy by emitting photons of specific wavelengths. Those photons, in turn, can trigger neighboring excited atoms to relax and release photons of their own…

(14) THE CAT LIVES! [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] That’s my interpretation, anyway. “Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality, Nature survey shows” – at Nature, obviously. Survey results at the link.

Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in science — and makes much of modern life possible. Technologies ranging from computer chips to medical-imaging machines rely on the application of equations, first sketched out a century ago, that describe the behaviour of objects at the microscopic scale.

But researchers still disagree widely on how best to describe the physical reality that lies behind the mathematics, as a Nature survey reveals.

At an event to mark the 100th anniversary of quantum mechanics last month, lauded specialists in quantum physics argued politely — but firmly — about the issue. “There is no quantum world,” said physicist Anton Zeilinger, at the University of Vienna, outlining his view that quantum states exist only in his head and that they describe information, rather than reality. “I disagree,” replied Alain Aspect, a physicist at the University of Paris-Saclay, who shared the 2022 Nobel prize with Zeilinger for work on quantum phenomena.

To gain a snapshot of how the wider community interprets quantum physics in its centenary year, Nature carried out the largest ever survey on the subject. We e-mailed more than 15,000 researchers whose recent papers involved quantum mechanics, and also invited attendees of the centenary meeting, held on the German island of Heligoland, to take the survey.

The responses — numbering more than 1,100, mainly from physicists — showed how widely researchers vary in their understanding of the most fundamental features of quantum experiments….

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Tell It Animated chronicles “The Evolution of Superman”.

Superman is the original superhero, but how has he evolved in live-action? From the early serials and TV series to the latest 2025 Superman movie, let’s take a look at Superman’s live-action costuming and story…animated!

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

Pixel Scroll 6/26/25 The Scroll Has Been Left Open Too Long And The Pixel Has Gone Flat

Posted on June 26, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) MAKING AMENDS. James Davis Nicoll leads us to “Five SFF Stories About Making Amends” at Reactor.

We’ve all been there. We’ve said an unnecessarily unkind word, spurned a plea for help, inadvertently transformed the entire human race into shambling automatons under the control of an eldritch abomination. Such errors are so commonplace as to be beneath discussion. More interesting is the question “What next?” Vow to avoid such missteps in the future? Do you try to make amends? Simply embrace villainy and move into a skull-shaped mountain lair?…

One of his selections is —

Numamushi: A Fairy Tale by Mina Ikemoto Ghosh (2023)

Years ago, the great river snake loved a human woman. The romance ended in madness and murder. Therefore, when the snake saw a burned human child float by, he did not eat the infant. The snake rescued the baby, named him Numamushi, and raised the boy as best he could…

…I know snakes are not known for their parenting skills, but the great snake is an unusual snake, perhaps even a local god of sorts. In any case, the book’s title does say it’s “A Fairy Tale,” which allows for some liberties with herpetology.

(2) NEW LLM COPYRIGHT LITIGATION. “Authors Sue Microsoft Over LLM Copyright Infringement” reports Publishers Lunch.

A group of authors–Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, Eloisa James, Hampton Sides, Victor LaValle, Mary Bly, Jonathan Alter, Eugene Linden, Daniel Okrent, Rachel Vail, and Simon Winchester–filed suit against Microsoft in New York’s Southern District, arguing that the tech company’s use of their books to train its Megatron LLM is copyright infringement.

Plaintiffs argue that Microsoft knew that they needed licenses to use books because they entered a licensing deal with Harper Collins last year. But they say that Microsoft used the Books3 pirate database of nearly 200,000 books, knowing that it was infringement. “The end result is a computer model that is not only built on the work of thousands of creators and authors, but also built to generate a wide range of expression that mimics the syntax, voice, and themes of the copyrighted works on which it was trained.”

The complaint continues, “Microsoft’s intentional decision to use pirated libraries allowed it to gain huge advantages in the timing and efficiency of its LLMs….Meanwhile, its use of pirated libraries helped sustain and foster rampant copyright violations by keeping these pirated libraries in business and providing them a seal of approval.”

The plaintiffs seek to stop the infringement and up to $150,000 per book in damages.

(3) DESTRUCTIVE SCANNERS DO NOT LIVE IN VAIN. Meanwhile, here’s another angle on the Bartz v. Anthropic decision reported in yesterday’s Scroll: “Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models” at Ars Technica.

On Monday, court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI—details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use whose broader fair use implications we reported yesterday.

The 32-page legal decision tells the story of how, in February 2024, the company hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for the Google Books book-scanning project, and tasked him with obtaining “all the books in the world.” The strategic hire appears to have been designed to replicate Google’s legally successful book digitization approach—the same scanning operation that survived copyright challenges and established key fair use precedents.

While destructive scanning is a common practice among smaller-scale operations, Anthropic’s approach was somewhat unusual due to its massive scale. For Anthropic, the faster speed and lower cost of the destructive process appear to have trumped any need for preserving the physical books themselves.

Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to “conserv[ing] space” through format conversion and found it transformative. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company’s earlier piracy undermined its position….

(4) ORWELL PRIZE. “Victoria Amelina posthumously wins Orwell Prize for Political Writing a year after death aged 37” reports The Bookseller.

Ukrainian novelist and war crimes investigator Victoria Amelina has posthumously won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing for her book Looking at Women, Looking at War (HarperCollins), dubbed “a powerful examination of women’s courage in resistance”.

Irish author Donal Ryan has won the the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for his novel Heart, Be at Peace (Transworld).

When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24th February 2022, Amelina transformed from novelist to war crimes researcher and chronicler of extraordinary women who joined the resistance. Her final work, Looking at Women, Looking at War documents the stories of Ukrainian women involved in the struggle against Russian occupiers, including human rights advocate Oleksandra Matviichuk, lawyer and military servicewoman Yevheniia Zakrevska and librarian Yuliia Kakulia Danyliuk.

“This interrupted diary serves as a vital contemporary historical document, showing the inside of modern war beyond heroic combat,” judges said. She was a Ukrainian novelist, author of two previous novels and a children’s book, and winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award. Born in Lviv in 1986, Amelina emigrated to Canada at 14 before returning to Ukraine to pursue her literary career.

A human rights activist who founded the New York Literature Festival in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, she launched the Fight Them with Poetry initiative in 2022. She died on 1st July 2023 from injuries sustained in the Russian bombing of a restaurant in Kramatorsk….

(5) ANALYZING ROBOMONSTERS. “From HAL 9000 to M3GAN: what film’s evil robots tell us about contemporary tech fears” at The Conversation.

…The enduring appeal of the evil robot narrative lies in the way horror often channels our deepest cultural anxieties about the speed of technological advancement and the precarity of human control in an increasingly digital (and robotic) world….

…Why is M3GAN such an effective avatar for our contemporary anxieties?

Horror theorist Noël Carroll argues that monsters are often frightening because they don’t fit neatly into normal categories. They may be “in-between” things (such as part human, part machine) or contradictory (for example a zombie: both alive and dead at the same time).

M3GAN is a great example of both. She looks and acts like a young girl, with expressive facial features and a snarky sense of humour. But she’s really just artificial intelligence inside a robot body.

She’s also contradictory: she is designed to care for and protect her owner, yet she does so in exceedingly violent and deadly ways. These paradoxes make her both frightening and fascinating for audiences….

(6) PREY TELL. “Wait, What?: Why didn’t the spider that bit Peter Parker bite anybody else?” Olivia Rutigliano demands to know at CrimeReads.

I just re-watched Sam Rami’s 2002 Spider-Man. It’s amazing. I have nothing bad to say about it. In fact, I only have good things to say about it… and one minor logistical question.

Now, is this question directed at this specific (and again, fantastic) Spider-Man movie? Or is it directed at the whole canon? Probably the latter.

What I want to know is, why didn’t the spider that bit Peter Parker bite anybody else? At least in Rami’s Spider-Man, after it sticks its pincers into Peter Parker’s hand during his high school field trip to the spider research department at Columbia University, it falls to the floor and… scurries away? That’s the last we see of it!

So, what this means is… it’s on the loose! It’s perfectly able of biting anyone else in the lab! Why doesn’t it bite anyone else in the lab?…

(7) WRITERS’ RESOURCES: ARTICLES ABOUT REAL WORLD APPLICATIONS OF AUGMENTED REALITY, AI AND OTHER TECH. [Item by Francis Hamit.] A little light reading for aspiring writers who may not realize that reality has moved far beyond their ability to imagine the “future”. Augmented Reality (AR) is the practical, real world extension of technology I wrote about in my 1993 book on Virtual Reality. It has dramatically improved processes for creating the built environment. Nothing is more annoying than fiction that gets the real world wrong. “How Augmented Reality and BIM Are Revolutionizing Construction” at Buildings.

Building information modeling (BIM) platforms allow people to create digital representations of real-life structures throughout the planning and construction processes. Since these tools typically work in the cloud, authorized users can access them from many internet-enabled devices, making it easy for everyone to access the latest information regardless of location or role. Some applications also combine augmented reality (AR) and BIM, creating highly immersive and interactive experiences for construction professionals and their clients….

…However, some decision-makers have experimented with combining augmented reality and BIM to enable better worker efficiency and prevent confusion that could cause delays. One example is an AR tool that allows real-time visibility between construction teams and office administrators, enabling everyone to see if executed work matches the stipulations noted in the BIM platform.

When a construction management company used this option for a rainwater pipe installation, it achieved notable productivity gains. Those involved saved over three weeks of predicted rework by spotting problems early. Contractors used the technology to detect several positional issues with the surface water network connections and slab penetrations. However, they corrected those problems before starting the work because the technology revealed the discrepancies….

(8) REMEMBRANCE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Eugie Foster – 1971-2014.

Eugie Foster had a phenomenal life before it was tragically cut short when she died at Emory University Hospital on September 27, 2014 from respiratory failure, a complication of treatments for large B-cell lymphoma, with which she was diagnosed on October 15, 2013. So now I’m depressed, and you should be too.

She was the managing editor for The Fix and Tangent Online, two online short fiction review magazines. She was also a director for Dragon Con and edited the Daily Dragon, their onsite newsletter.

She won a 2009 Nebula for “The Sinner, Baker, Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast”, which was also a Hugo nominee at Aussiecon 4.

She has a collection of short stories, Returning My Sister’s Face and Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice. Her story “The Art of Victory When the Game is All the World” would be published posthumously in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She wrote the story while sick with cancer, but died before she could submit it for publication.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Arlo and Janis contend over print vs. audiobooks.
Rubes is free, for some values of free.
Speckticles dislikes the design.
xkcd forecasts balloons.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal shows aliens do have something in common with humans.

(10) LOVE THIS HEADLINE. From Reactor: “The Spies Must Flow: Denis Villeneuve Will Direct the Next James Bond Movie”.

We still don’t know who will be next to step into James Bond’s very stylish (and hopefully practical) footwear, but we know who will be behind the camera: Dune director Denis Villeneuve is set to direct the next Bond film, which will also be the first Bond film from the Amazon-owned Amazon MGM Studios.

In a statement, Villeneuve said, “Some of my earliest movie-going memories are connected to 007. I grew up watching James Bond films with my father, ever since Dr. No with Sean Connery. I’m a die-hard Bond fan. To me, he’s sacred territory. I intend to honour the tradition and open the path for many new missions to come. This is a massive responsibility, but also, incredibly exciting for me and a huge honour.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, “The search is underway for a screenwriter who will work with Villeneuve to bring the newest incarnation of the secret agent to the big screen.”…

HOW INDISCREET! [Item by Andrew Porter.] Article headline gave away episode ending, duh… “BBC To Be ‘Mindful’ Of Spoilers After ‘Doctor Who’ Complaints” reports Deadline.

The BBC has promised to be more “mindful” of spoilers in news stories after viewers complained about an article reporting on Ncuti Gatwa’s final Doctor Who episode.

In a statement on the BBC’s website, the corporation said it received feedback from audience members who were “unhappy” about an online BBC News story headlined: ‘Ncuti Gatwa regenerates into Billie Piper as he leaves Doctor Who.’

“Some people contacted us to complain that the headline gave away the ending, spoiling this Doctor Who episode for them,” the BBC said. “Others requested that the BBC be more conscious of spoilers going forward, particularly in the use of headlines.”…

(11) JURASSIC PARKING ZONE. “’The script didn’t have Jurassic World on the front’: Gareth Edwards on Monsters, Godzilla, Star Wars and reinventing dinosaurs” in the Guardian.

Like an ancient warhorse hearing the bugle for one last time, readers of a certain age will be snorting and whinnying at the words “Gareth” and “Edwards”. They are irresistible madeleines for the legends of Welsh rugby: unfeasible 70s sideburns, neck-high tackles and JPR Williams on the overlap.

These days, though, things are different: Gareth Edwards is also the name of the unassuming, Midlands-born fortysomething film director sitting in front of me, who has quietly acquired a reputation as one of Britain’s most accomplished franchise movie-makers….

….He says he found out the Jurassic producers were looking for a new director after spotting an article in the very same movie-industry trade press and messaged his agent (“is it worth throwing my hat in to see if they’d be interested?”) just as the franchise’s producer Frank Marshall was tentatively reaching out to him.

He had a weekend to read the script – “I basically spent that weekend hoping I would hate it, because I kind of wanted to have a break and not do a big franchise movie” – and then found himself pitching to Marshall, a Hollywood legend who has worked on movies including Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, The Sixth Sense and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. “I just went through my little list and waited for him to have an allergic reaction. And then, right at the end, he went: ‘OK, do you mind repeating everything you just said to me tomorrow to Steven?’ And I thought: oh shit, I assume he means Spielberg. Maybe there’s three Stevens.

“So the next day I am pitching a Jurassic film to Steven Spielberg, which is very surreal. Halfway through, he asked for a pen and paper and started writing stuff down. And I thought: oh, is this a bad sign or a good sign? Then, at one point, he just stopped and smiled and went: ‘That’s great.’ And I felt like: OK, can we just end my life now? Because it can only go downhill from here.’”

(12) APOCALYPTIC OUTBACK. [Item by Steven French.] Keith Stuart in the Guardian’s “Pushing Buttons” newsletter: “How Hideo Kojima created yet another weird, wonderful world in Death Stranding 2”.

As a teenager in the late 1980s, I became obsessed with Australian new wave cinema, thanks partly to the Mad Max trilogy, and partly to an English teacher at my high school, who rolled out the TV trolley one afternoon and showed us Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece Walkabout. We were mesmerised. Forty years later, I am playing Death Stranding 2, Hideo Kojima’s sprawling apocalyptic adventure, and there are times I feel as if I’m back in that classroom. Most of the game takes place in a ruined Australia, the cities gone, the landscape as stark, beautiful and foreboding as it was in Roeg’s film.

I’ve been playing for 45 hours and have barely made an impact on the story….

(13) MEDIA RANKINGS AT THE HALFWAY POINT OF 2025. JustWatch, the world’s largest streaming guide, has unveiled its ranking of the most streamed films and tv shows from the past six months, tracking trends from January through June 2025. The ranking is based on user engagement across all major streaming services, including Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+, and Max.

Three TV shows listed in the streaming top five are of genre interest —

#1. Squid Game
The global phenomenon that redefined survival drama. With its brutal games, social critique, and unforgettable visual style, this Korean breakout remains a benchmark for international streaming success. Its second season is among the most anticipated returns in streaming history.

#2. Severance
Blurring the line between corporate satire and psychological thriller, Severance hooked viewers with its chilling premise: what if your work life and personal life were surgically divided? A dystopian slow-burn that rewards patience with profound tension and world-building.

#4. Paradise
A rising sci-fi thriller that turns the idea of time into currency. Set in a near-future dystopia where people sell years of their life to pay off debt, Paradise is a high-concept cautionary tale with emotional stakes and sharp aesthetics.

(14) SAVE THE BEE PLANET! Bugonia teaser trailer. Movie arrives in theaters in October.

Two conspiracy obsessed young men kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Not necessarily superfunny, but impressive cosplay effort! “Top Ten Things Never Before Said By A ‘Star Wars’ Character” – from The Late Show with David Letterman aired May 16, 2005.

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

Pixel Scroll 6/24/25 You Gets No Cred(ential) With One Spaceball

Posted on June 24, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) DOES GOODREADS PROTECT TROLLS MORE THAN AUTHORS? “Authors hit by bad reviews on Goodreads before review copies are even circulated” at The Bookseller (behind a paywall).

Authors are reportedly being hit by negative reviews on the book review site Goodreads before proof copies are even circulated, with the review site allegedly failing to remove reviews.

Crime writer Jo Furniss was one of several authors to share her recent experience of the Amazon-owned review site with The Bookseller: “A lot of authors share the soul-destroying experience of seeing their books trashed before they are even available to genuine readers,” she said. “Worse, like me, they feel they are given no protection by one of the biggest platforms in the industry. What is Goodreads doing to protect authors from online abuse?”

In her comment piece for The Bookseller, Furniss wrote: “It is months until the publication of my next thriller, Guilt Trip (Bonnier Zaffre). The novel is not available anywhere yet. Not even advance review copies. So why does Guilt Trip already have a single two-star rating on Goodreads?

“That was my thought process when I skimmed over the title recently while on Goodreads doing pre-publication admin. I’m not a masochist, I don’t usually linger over bad reviews. But an impossible mystery intrigues me, so I clicked.”

After responding to the anonymous reviewer’s low rating, Furniss explained they then complained about the comment – which prompted an email from Goodreads explaining that it advises authors to “refrain from confronting users who give their books a low rating”. Her comment was then removed. She added: “That was on the 8th May. I followed up on my report of their behaviour and got a reply saying Goodreads will investigate. I followed up again and got no reply. I have heard nothing since [though the review has been removed after The Bookseller contacted Goodreads].”

She explained that she “doesn’t care about one petty review”, and said that: “It’s no more than a gnat bite on the thick skin you need for this business.” Furniss said that she cares more that she “doesn’t get the same protection as the troll”, adding: “Their actions are a form of online abuse. When Goodreads fails to respond to reports of harassment from members against authors, they let the abuse continue….

(2) AO3 VS. LLM. The Verge gives an emotional summary of how “Fanfiction writers battle AI, one scrape at a time”.

…In the online world of fanfiction writers, who pen stories inspired by their favorite movies, books, and games, and share them for free, there are unspoken codes of conduct. Among the most important: never charge money for your fanfic, and never steal other people’s work.

It makes sense then that fanfic writers were among the first creators to raise the alarm about their work being fed into learning language models powering generative AI without their knowledge or permission. But their efforts to stop the encroachment of AI into fan spaces is an uphill battle.

The latest salvo came in early April, when user nyuuzyou scraped 12.6 million fanfics from the online repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) and uploaded the dataset to Hugging Face, a company that hosts open-source AI models and software.

Nyuuzyou’s upload was quickly discovered by the Reddit community r/AO3, where hundreds of users posted furious reactions. A Tumblr account, ao3scrapesearch, built a search engine that allowed authors to search their usernames and see if their work had been scraped by Nyuuzyou….

…. In 2023 came Sudowrite’s Story Engine, powered in part by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Nikki remembers watching a video about the new “writing assistant” AI software that allows users to enter details about characters and plot points and generate an entire novel. She was so appalled that it made her cry. Nikki, who works for a software company, had already seen her workplace shift toward integrating AI. But she hadn’t imagined her hobby would be impacted by it too.

“Trying to knock this stuff down, that’s probably the best thing that one can be doing now.”

Later that year, the prevalence of highly specific sexual terms related to the wolf-biology fanfiction trope of Omegaverse appeared in Sudowrite, revealing that ChatGPT had likely been trained on fanfic without the authors’ knowledge….

… But over the last few years, fanfic writers say there have been numerous examples of genAI entrepreneurs trying to cash in on their work — such as people like Cliff Weitzman, the CEO of text-to-voice app Speechify, who was found to have scraped thousands of fics from AO3 and uploaded them to WordStream, a website linked to his app, without the authors’ permission. (He swiftly removed that after fans pushed back on social media.) Then there was Lore.fm, a text-to-speech app from Wishroll Inc, which marketed itself on TikTok as “Audible for AO3.” The app was announced in May 2024 but was withdrawn later that month after fan pushback.

“It’s like a whack-a-mole thing. Every time you turn around, there’s, like, another grifter trying to steal your shit,” Nikki says.

It may seem odd to hear such a strong sentiment from a writer who, like most fanfic creators, uses copyrighted intellectual property as a “sandbox” to make up their own stories. But advocates for fanworks say they are “transformative,” meaning a “fanwork creator holds the rights to their own content, just the same as any professional author, artist, or other creator,” according to AO3….

(3) BREUER BIOGRAPHER Q&A. I knew that “the gostak distims the doshes” was a fannish reference — now I’ve finally learned why! Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations’ Joachim Boaz brings us “Exploration Log 10: Interview with Jaroslav Olša, Jr., author of Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction (2025)”.

Today I have an interview with Jaroslav Olša, Jr. about his brand-new book, Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miles (Miroslav) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction (2025). In the book, he covers the life and career of Miles (Miroslav) J. Breuer (1889-1945), the first SF author to regularly write original stories for Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing…

Before we dive into the details of his fiction, what are two Breuer stories you recommend readers interested in the history of science fiction tackle?

Allow me to mention three stories, each for a different reason. The first one is “The Gostak and the Doshes” (1930) (in the March 1930 issue of Amazing Stories) (read online) definitely a tale that still has an important message today. It shows how fake news and media manipulation can change society—not for better but for worse, and that such fake news can even trigger war. This is probably the most mature of all Breuer’s stories. And one of only a few, which does not have either Czech or early English-language versions. It seems to me that this one was written originally for Amazing Stories.

The second story I would like to mention is “The Stone Cat” (1927) (read online). It is definitely not the most remarkable piece of Breuer’s writing, but it is an interesting example of how Breuer was writing and rewriting his short stories. Breuer was well aware that he had to adjust his stories to the audience that would read them—and “The Stone Cat” shows it the most of all his works as we have three different versions of it. It was the fifth short story Breuer ever published as early as 1909 when he was twenty years old. Seven years later he published it in Czech in a slightly revised version, which was localized for the Czech-American community. While these two editions were not known until recently, all historians know “The Stone Cat” was published—in a very different version—in 1927 Amazing Stories—it was Breuer’s second story published there. In all the versions we see his literary development…

It was Miles J. Breuer’s story that made “The gostak distims the doshes” into a fannish catchphrase, although the phrase was coined in 1903 coinage in an Andrew Ingraham lecture and quoted in 1923 in the book The Meaning of Meaning by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards.

(4) SCI-FI LONDON 48-HOUR CHALLENGE 2025 WINNERS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Sci-fi London 48-hour challenge is open to all amateur film makers, who are told to include a prop and also given a line of dialogue to put in their film and then they go away and make a film in just two days. Some past winners have gone on to be film directors, including the 2008 winner Gareth Edwards who did Star Wars: Rogue One and The Creator, and whose next film is the next step in the Jurassic Park franchise.

This year the judges included author Adrian Tchaikovsky (who has a couple of books short-listed for this year’s Hugo).

The 2025 winners have been announced.

1st place: Warm welcome by Team: Death by Cat Bag

2nd place: The Set Up by Team: Biaol

3rd place Solid State by Team: Gifme5

(5) UKRANIAN PUBLISHING HOUSE HIT IN RUSSIAN ATTACK. “Russia Destroys Publishing House In Kyiv Following Book Festival” reports Publishers Weekly.

A Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv on June 17 destroyed a Ukrainian publishing house and damaged several other book-related businesses, the Ukrainian publishing industry news service Chytomo has reported. Ukrainian Priority Publishing was completely destroyed when Russian forces launched 175 drones, more than 14 cruise missiles, and at least two ballistic missiles at the Ukrainian capital and surrounding areas. The attack killed 28 people and damaged 27 sites across various districts.

“The Russian invaders targeted not only residential buildings and hospitals but finally struck a truly strategic site: our publishing house, Ukrainian Priority, was completely destroyed and burned to the ground,” Volodymyr Shovkoshytnyi, CEO of Ukrainian Priority Publishing, told Chytomo. “The office and warehouse are gone. Tens of thousands of books—over 130 titles—were turned to ash.”

Ukrainian Priority had previously lost an employee to the war when sales manager Valentyn Dobryi was killed at the front in November 2023 while serving as a volunteer with Ukrainian Armed Forces. After the June 17 attack, Shovkoshytnyi said he “sifted through the ashes of 14 years of my life,” but expressed determination to rebuild the company.

Їzhakultura Publishing’s office and storage space, located on the ground floor of a residential building, was also hit during the attacks. “The building sustained significant damage from the impact of fragments of a Russian cruise missile,” Artem Braichenko, cofounder of Їzhakultura Publishing, said. “The force of the explosion was so powerful that it caused structural deformation inside the building, including damage to the doors and walls of our office.”…

… The attacks came just a week after the 13th International Book Arsenal Festival was held in Kyiv for the third time since the war began. The country’s primary literary events attracted 30,000 attendees for some 200 events over three-and-a-half days, including 111 publishers and six bookstores….

(6) ON THE ROAD. Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio will be touring to celebrate their debut picture book release — The Invisible Parade.

Join us to talk art, storytelling, collaboration, and why we will always walk through those cemetery gates. You can bring books or art prints from home to get signed (limit 2 each for Leigh, and for me). You can ask us about old projects, new projects, adaptation, and everything in between. All events are ticketed. Limited seating. Get yours before they’re gone!

Here are the links for tickets to The Invisible Parade tour.

(7) HE’S HISTORY. Sahil Lavingia says the Codex writers community has banned him for reasons quoted in this post at X.com.

The group does not have a public-facing copy of its Code of Conduct on its website, but the Membership page does have this:

Codex is a privately run organization.

We reserve the right to decline an application or to close an account for any reason or no reason, especially in the case of grossly unprofessional or antagonistic behavior online or elsewhere. However, we’re glad to say this is hardly ever necessary.

Lavingia posted about his work in the journal “DOGE Days”. This is his May 25 entry.

I got the boot from DOGE.

I reached out to someone who wrote about Gumroad’s recent transition to open source. During the interview, which was then published in Fast Company, I was asked about my experience working at DOGE, which had been revealed publicly as part of a WIRED article.

Soon after publication, my access was revoked without warning.

My DOGE days were over.

(8) MEANWHILE, BACK IN 1949. A Deep Look at Dave Hook returns to its Retro-Hugo-substitute series in a review of “’The Cosmic Geoids: and One Other’, John Taine, 1949 Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc.”

The Short: I read The Cosmic Geoids: and One Other, a John Taine collection, 1949 Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc. The best thing about it are the Lou Goldstone illustrations and cover art. My overall average rating for the two novellas is 2.8/5, or “Poor”. Not recommended unless you are a huge fan of John Taine (Eric Temple Bell). Even then I have my doubts.

(9) CLUTE COLLECTION GIFTED TO TELLURIDE INSTITUTE. “Science-Fiction Library opens to public” reports Telluride News. Famed sff critic John Clute has transferred his over-13,000 volume collection to the Telluride Institute.

The habit of collecting books began early for John Clute, renowned author, literary critic and book collector. Inside a book he received for Christmas in 1948, he wrote, “John Clute Number 31.” He was eight years old at the time. Now, more than 13,703 distinct volumes from his private science fiction collection are on the shelves of the Clute Science Fiction Library at the Telluride Institute, where they will stay as a gift to the Telluride region.

Last week, Clute was in Telluride to assist while Henry Wessels, appraiser of antiquarian books, manuscripts and archives, went through the entire library to catalog and appraise the volumes. The appraisal was at the request of John and Pamela Lifton-Zoline, co-founders of Telluride Institute (TI). They accepted the collection from Clute in 2017.

“What’s really important here is the fact that Pam and John recently gifted the collection to the Telluride Institute,” said Dan Collins, president of TI board of trustees. “Before that, we didn’t have a legal kind of authority over the collection, but it was housed at the Institute and we understood that eventually, it would be given to the Institute, which it was in the last couple of months.”…

… Clute feels that Telluride is the perfect place to house the library. He has been collecting science fiction first editions and visiting Telluride since the 1970s.

“Telluride is an ideal cultural and physical place to have an accessible repository of knowledge,” he said. “This is a rural place, but also fundamentally urban in the best sense. A place like Telluride…is also romantic.”…

…Both Pam and her husband John also recommended the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Online. It’s Clute’s masterwork of collecting, an exhibit of science fiction story summaries and 35,000 scanned dust jackets from first editions in his libraries.

The dust jackets are critical pieces of the history carried by the genre.

“It’s an essential part of science fiction history, certainly in the 50s, 60s and 70s,” said Clute. “To understand the first appearance of many of these stories, which have become famous — or not — in the context of the time of their release. That moment, that significant moment in culture and in publishing history and the authors’ and the readers’ experience…What does it look like? and what are you being told? What did William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ look like in 1984 when it came out?”

…Access to the library at 212 W. Colorado Ave. in Telluride is available by appointment for quiet reading, work, research and tours….

(10) HERE’S THE WINDUP AND THE WITCH. Charlie Jane Anders recommends “Eight Enchanting Novels About Witches” in the New York Times. (Link bypasses paywall.)

…I love reading about witches — and was eager to write about them in my new book, “Lessons in Magic and Disaster” — because it’s an identity that feels subversive and tied to a rebel glamour. Wizards attend fancy boarding schools: Witches gather furtively in the woods. Here are a few of my favorite, witchiest books….

One of Anders’ picks is —

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Harkness, a real-life historian, writes engagingly about Diana Bishop, the scion of two powerful witch families who has turned her back on magic to pursue an academic career. While doing research at Oxford University, Diana uncovers a long-lost magical manuscript, which awakens her powers and attracts the attention of a charismatic vampire named Matthew Clairmont. Diana’s desire to hold onto academic respectability — even as a key primary source in her research turns out to be a secret magical book — feels utterly believable, and the confluence of magical politics, historical texture and romance provides an endless series of delights.

(11) MEMORY LANE.

[Item by Cat Eldridge.]

June 24, 1950 — Destination Moon on Dimension X

Seventy-five years ago on this date, the radio version of Robert Heinlein’s Destination Moon first aired on the Dimension X radio show.

It was episode twelve of the series.

Despite common belief that it based off the film version of Heinlein’s novel, it was not. It was instead based on Heinlein’s final draft of the film’s shooting script.

During the broadcast on June 24, 1950, the program was interrupted by a news bulletin announcing that North Korea had declared war on South Korea, marking the beginning of the Korean War.

A shortened version of this Destination Moon radio program was adapted by Charles Palmer and was released by Capitol Records for children.

You can hear it here.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Arctic Circle checks in on a new library trend.
Glasbergern makes official what we new all along.
Jerry King depicts another benefit of imagination.
Strange Brew is wrong either way.
The Argyle Sweater has a feeling you’ll understand.

(13) MARCHING TOWARDS AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1000. Marvel Comics’ Amazing Spider-Man series hits issue #1000 next year. As part of the lead-up, artist Lee Bermejo will draw variant covers.

This September, Amazing Spider-Man #11, part of Joe Kelly, Pepe Larraz and John Romita Jr.’s hit current run, is the milestone 975^th issue of Amazing Spider-Man, kicking off the countdown to the titles next monumental milestone—Amazing Spider-Man #1000! To help celebrate, superstar artist Lee Bermejo will draw a variant cover for each issue of Amazing Spider-Man starting with #11 and ending with next year’s 1000^th issue, Amazing Spider-Man #36. The 25 Amazing Visions Variant Covers will depict key events in Spider-Man history, starting with his groundbreaking origin and first encounters with his most iconic supervillains!

(14) JEOPARDY! Andrew Porter was tuned in for tonight’s Jeopardy when this item came up.

Category: Nerds

Clue: see below

Question: What is Propellor Head?

“No one got it. I didn’t either!” admits Porter.

(15) MURDERBOT SHOW Q&A. Murderbot Executive Producer “…Andrew Miano Talks Bringing The Beloved Sci-Fi Series To Life” at Nexuspoint News.

Demet: Since Murderbot is genderless, were there any discussions about having a female actor? Or did you start just a male actor in mind?

Andrew: No, I think we were open to the best actor, the best opportunity, the best way to tell the story. It’s interesting because I’ve talked to, or I’ve read a lot and we’ve talked to a lot of different people, imagining who it could be in their own mind as readers, so there isn’t any one right way. What was important was to keep the character genderless in the show, referring to Murderbot as it, which when a male actor is playing, sometimes you run the risk… But it’s something that everyone took very seriously and was supportive of, and it was never a big deal. It was a matter of fact: this is who the character is.

(16) AMAZON’S FIRST 007. “First Amazon James Bond Is Video Game Character in 007 First Light” – The Hollywood Reporter has the story.

The first new James Bond under the complete ownership of Amazon MGM Studios will make his debut in 2026, and he is young, brash, has a robust origin story and a mysterious scar on his right cheek … and is a playable character.

The future of the James Bond film franchise is still being written (Amy Pascal and David Heyman are hard at work on that), but the next chapter of James Bond the IP will begin next year, in what will be the first project to feature the iconic character since Amazon stunned the world by buying out control from Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson….

(17) NEW BOOKS FROM OUTER SPACE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In the current issue of the journal Science there were a number of fiction reviews of both SF and genre-adjacent fiction….

An astronaut hides her queer identity to protect her career. A museum researcher is detained while returning from international travel. A biologist grapples with extinction as war breaks out in Ukraine. A physicist confronts the off-Earth options for humanity. These themes, any of which might have been plucked from current headlines, are explored by the authors of this year’s summer reading selections—all of which are works of fiction. Some of the stories they tell employ dramatic satire and surreal scenarios to convey timely messages. (How better to discuss class inequality than through the murderous exploits of a mosquito-human hybrid?) Others—such as a tale of love that takes place during a catastrophic pandemic—feel closer to reality, even if the fictional virus wreaking havoc is more “undeadly” than deadly. Whether probing the lasting legacies of slavery and colonialism, interrogating humanity’s future with robots, or exposing the fallout of research misconduct, the books reviewed here entertain even as they offer thoughtful commentary on contemporary issues of interest to scientists and engineers….

(18) NEW AI HAS SCIENCE REASONING. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Current Artificial Intelligence (AI) can piece together disparate bits of knowledge from material on which it has been ‘trained’ which is all well and good. What it cannot do with any confidence is infer meaningful inferences about material on which it has not been trained. (Some AI have exhibited meaningful insights but only in a limited way.) A news item in this week’s Nature reports on a new AI, ether0.

Ether0 is an open source AI released 5th June 2025 from the FutureHouse, California, 2023 start-up company. It is trained on the laws of chemistry and can generate the formula of chemical compounds for possible pharmaceutical use. One of the innovations of this AI is that questions do not have to be in-putted by chemical formula but by spoken plain English. What is more it tracks its thoughts in English: AIs tend to be a ‘black box’ with their workings out hidden from questioners and operators. It works by merging the reasoning chains from a specialist AI, DeepSeek-R1 to generate seven models. Then each model was then tweaked with ‘enhancement’ (or ‘rewards’) for correct answers to a set of 500,000 chemistry questions. The resulting output model was the ether0 AI and it is more intuitive than other chemistry AIs to date. Some members of the FutureHouse predict that within two years most chemistry hypotheses put forward for science research may be generated by ether0 or future models like it.

You can see the news item here: “AI Start-up Debuts ‘Reasoning Model’ For Science”.

I have always told folk that the machines are taking over but no-one ever listens…! The good news here is that of all the areas of science, chemistry has defined rules albeit complex ones including electron shell energies, chemical bond strength, atom movement within molecules and so forth. Other science is a little different. Biology tends to be a bit messy due to ill-defined, highly complex biological systems (try accurately modelling a tropical rain forest), and physics has gaping holes (such as whatever it is that merges quantum mechanics with special relativity). But this new chemistry AI could be a sort of analogous development akin to old computer programmes of the 1980s that could play chess compared to today’s sophisticated, 21st century, global climate models.

[Based on: Savitsky, Z. (2025) “AI Start-up Debuts ‘Reasoning Model” Nature, vol. 642, p552-3.]

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern. For those trying to decipher the title reference, Dern points to the lyrics of “One Meatball (and no spaghetti)” Also, remember our obscure tradition of referring to cats as Social Justice Credentials.]

Pixel Scroll 6/18/25 Born To Be Filed

Posted on June 18, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) LE GUIN PRIZE NEWS. The 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction Shortlist was released today. See the eight-book list at the link.

(2) ARCHIPELACON 2 SCHEDULE NOW ONLINE. Archipelacon 2, which is also this year’s Eurocon, is up to 800 members. And they have just published their programme. The con will be held at Mariehamn, Åland Islands, Finland from June 26-29.

The massive jigsaw puzzle has been jiggled! The pieces have been shuffled and re-shuffled all over the board, and now the programme is up for your perusal. Go dig in, and make your own plans for a fantastic convention!

Please make sure to check the online programme guide for last minute changes and cancellations. There will also be QR codes here and there that you can scan in order to access the guide easily.

(3) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 137 of the Octothorpe podcast, “My Brain Automatically Goes to Sandwiches”, is live. An uncorrected transcript of this episode is available here.

It’s Thursday somewhere, as episode 137 makes its debut! We read your lovely letters and then discuss in some detail how an award for Best Translated Work might be conducted.

An image of the well-known fantasy hero Ahmon Kwasson, holding his trusty croissant-shaped sword and his trusty croissant-adorned shield, with his trusty croissant-coloured hair, which obscures the words “Octothorpe 137”. At the bottom is text: “Ahmon’s Quest: Your perfect cosy breakfast listen”.

(4) BRITISH FANTASY SOCIETY PROMO FOR WFC 2025. And thanks to Octothorpe here’s the announcement of the British Fantasy Society’s online WFC “taster” event coming up on June 21: “BFS Online: World Fantasy Convention 2025”. It’s free to BFS members, £5 for nonmembers. The program runs from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. BST.

World Fantasy Convention is in the UK this year, for the first time in over a decade. At this event showcase, meet some of our guests, attendees and organising team, and get a taster of what’s to come in Brighton. Let us introduce you to our themes and learn what to expect from this special SFFH event. Plus, we’ll give you the skinny on our dual celebration with Fantasycon.

(5) MAYBE YOUR MT. TBR NEEDS A FEW OF THESE? Reactor brings us “Jo Walton’s Reading List: April & May 2025” – interesting comments on 24 books. For example —

Posthomerica — Quintus Smyrnaeus (c. 250)
Third century continuation of Homer’s Iliad, so essentially fanfic in mock Homeric verse, written hundreds of years after the original in language and style that were archaic when written. This is the story of what happens after the death of Achilles, with the wooden horse and the fall of Troy. Interesting, and interesting to see the details Quintus made up (or found in now lost poems) which have become part of our web of knowledge about the Matter of Troy. If you really love Homer, you will have moments when you think, well, this sure isn’t Homer. But it’s pretty good Homer fanfic really, with some wonderful moments. The way he treats the Amazons is interesting, seeing women hacking their way across the battlefield and being killed. Generally I’d say this is much less feminist and much less interested in non-Helen women than Homer. Interesting that this survived.

(6) REVERSE MARKETING. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s ”Pushing Buttons” newsletter tells readers about “The Maga-flavoured faux pas that shook the games industry”.

One thing most game developers can agree on in the modern industry is that it’s hard to drum up any awareness for your latest project without a mammoth marketing budget. Last year, almost 20,000 new titles were released on the PC gaming platform Steam alone, the majority disappearing into the content blackhole that is the internet. So when a smaller studio is offered the chance to get on the stage at the Summer Games Fest, an event streamed live to a global audience of around 50 million people, it’s a big deal. Not something that you want to spectacularly misjudge.

Enter Ian Proulx, cofounder of 1047 Games. His short slot at the event earlier this month had him walking on stage with a baseball bat to promote the online shooter Splitgate 2 by announcing that he was “tired of playing the same Call of Duty every year”, while wearing a cap bearing the slogan “Make FPS great again”. It did not go well. Gamers and fellow developers criticised his decision to diss another studio’s game as well as his politically charged use of a Maga/Trump meme, especially with anti-ICE protesters being beaten and arrested just across town. Proulx defended his actions, denying that his use of the cap slogan was political, but four days later he made an apology via X explaining: “We needed something to grab attention, and the honest truth is, we tried to think of something and this is what we came up with.”

What Proulx failed to anticipate is that in the fast-paced meme culture of 2025, context, nuance and sociopolitical intricacy are vital and constantly changing. You can’t simply put on a cheeky grin and appropriate whatever signs and symbols are floating around 4Chan – look at Elon Musk and how embarrassingly dated his mid-2000s edgelord shtick has become. You can’t deploy the Maga anthem without contextualising it; and you definitely can’t claim to be the cutting edge saviour of the FPS while promoting not only a sequel but a battle royale mode of all things. In 2025 – are you kidding?…

… Splitgate 2 is now in the unfortunate position where a portion of its potential customers were turned off by this ill-judged Maga bit, and an entirely separate portion hate that Proulx apologised for it, thereby capitulating to the woke mind virus. Multiplayer games rely on an engaged community to spread the word about them, so this is very much not ideal….

(7) BUD PLANT WILL RETIRE. [Item by Arnie Fenner.] Bookseller Bud Plant announced his upcoming retirement and has offered his business for sale.

(8) ABOUT REH’S LIFE. Bobby Derie explains “How to Read One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis”, about Robert E. Howard, at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

…Novalyne Price Ellis’ One Who Walked Alone, published in 1986, [is] an important resource for Howard studies. The book-length memoir of her on-again, off-again relationship with Bob Howard from 1934-1936 also gives a picture of life as a schoolteacher in a small Texas town, and the community of Cross Plains during the Great Depression, providing additional context to the narrative of her life and relationship with Bob.

The question scholars have to ask themselves before they use One Who Walked Alone is: how to read it? Can we read it strictly as nonfiction, or should it be considered closer to a work of fiction strongly drawn from real life, like Robert E. Howard’s semiautobiographical novel Post Oaks & Sand Roughs?…

(9) A VERY MERRY UNBIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

April 18, 1971 — David Tennant, 54.

By Paul Weimer: David Tennant becomes the Doctor.

The epitome of New Doctor Who?

Maybe. Christopher Eccleston walked so David Tennant could fly. Even with Matt Smith, and Jodie Whitaker, and Peter Capaldi and Ncuti Gatwa, Tennant I think is the face of Doctor Who in the New Era.

After all, he is the first actor to play the Doctor in two separate regenerations. (Well, there is a possible exception, if you know you know). Really, what other of the new Doctor actors would you trust with the odd 14th regeneration?

After the often alien and weird Eccleston Doctor, the show I think really hit its grove with the Tennant Doctor. He was far more human than his predecessor and I think his regeneration was molded by having Rose nearby. She helped mold his regeneration. His chemistry with his companions–Rose, Martha and Donna in particular really set up future Doctors and their more intense relationships with their own companions. His expressiveness, his range and his ability to play the Doctor a number of different ways. An often very vulnerable Doctor, Tennant also wonderfully played The Time Lord Victorious, which is everything that the Doctor is not (except maybe the Valeyard) .

Is he my favorite Doctor? No. Is he my favorite New Doctor Who Doctor? On several days of the week, the answer is yes. Most of my favorite New Who episodes are Tennant (including the anniversary special). Partly that is writing…but a lot of that is Tennant.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal shows different opinions about what is important science.
Sheldon got people to come to the library, that was the part of the plan that worked.
Ink Pen doesn’t want to infringe. Very much, that is.
Jerry King breeds highly advanced mice.
Lio finds a portal.
Speed Bump knows what delayed the exodus.
The Argyle Sweater reveals the art that used to be on the ceiling.
Yaffle makes the argument for monster outfielders.

(11) JMS RETURNS TO SPIDER-MAN. Amazing Spider-Man: Torn! by J. Michael Straczynski will be out in October.

J. Michael Straczynski, one of the most impactful writers in Spider-Man history, returns to the webbed wonder this October in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: TORN, a five-issue limited series. Straczynski will be joined by acclaimed artist Pere Pérez (TVA, Venom War: Carnage). The prolific writer is known for his influential work throughout the Marvel Universe including one of the most celebrated runs of Amazing Spider-Man! For years, fans have hoped for JMS to make his return to Spidey storytelling! Now, he’s back with an unforgettable Spider-Man saga that’s perfect for all fans, but this time, he’s digging into a very different part of Spidey history!

Swing back to Peter’s college days at Empire State University with Gwen, Harry, MJ and Flash! Spidey takes on classic villains but JMS and Pere introduce a terrifying new villain and side of the Marvel Universe that will reverberate into the present from the past!

(12) EXPAND YOUR LOONEY LIBRARY. “New Blu-ray Set Opens Warner Bros. Animation Vault, with 50 Shorts” announces IndieWire.

In May of 2023, Warner Bros. released a collection of classic cartoons on Blu-ray through their boutique Warner Archive label that was directly aimed at serious enthusiasts. That set, “Looney Tunes Collector’s Choice: Volume 1,” was pure gold for animation fans, featuring 25 cartoons that had never been released on DVD or Blu-ray in remastered form.

The positive response from lovers of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig led to three more volumes, each collecting 25 new shorts that were meticulously restored and presented in exquisite transfers.

Now, Warner Archive is continuing their mission with “Looney Tunes Collector’s Vault: Volume 1,” a set that continues the label’s previous work and expands on it. “I decided that instead of releasing a Volume 5 with the same curation criteria we would expand to 2-disc collections,” film historian George Feltenstein, who oversees the Warner Archive label, told IndieWire….

…Among the newly included cartoons are several fan favorites and rarities, including choice selections by legendary director Chuck Jones. Feltenstein said that choosing favorites is difficult since he, in collaboration with animation historian Jerry Beck, selected all the cartoons, but he has particular fondness for the 1945 Jones short “Hare Conditioned.” In this hilarious cartoon, Bugs Bunny faces a threat from a department store manager who wants to get Bugs stuffed in the taxidermy department.

“Most of the Warner Bros. animation directors had their take on Bugs, but Jones’ work with the character just seemed to get better and better over the years,” Feltenstein said. “This is a relatively early Jones/Bugs cartoon, but it has been a favorite since childhood.” Feltenstein also points to Jones’ 1948 Daffy Duck short “Daffy Dilly” as a treasure that exhibits Daffy’s evolution under Jones’ direction.

“I had the pleasure of meeting Chuck Jones late in his life, and we spoke at length about his work at Warner Bros.,” Feltenstein said. “He once told me — and I assume he told this to many — that Bugs Bunny, for him, represented the kind of individual we aspire to be, and that Daffy Duck was the individual we are afraid we’re really more like. I thought his statement was quite brilliant.”…

(13) FOUND AGAIN. “’Land of the Lost’ Series Reboot in Early Development at Netflix” reports Variety. (Note: Marty Krofft died in 2023.) The original show was created by David Gerrold (uncredited).

A reboot of “Land of the Lost” is in early development at Netfilx, Variety has learned from sources.

Original series co-creators Sid and Marty Krofft are attached as executive producers, with Deanna Krofft Pope also set to produce. Legendary Television will produce. No writer is currently attached.

Netflix declined to comment.

The original “Land of the Lost” debuted in 1974, running for three seasons on NBC. The Kroffts co-created the show with Allan Foshko. The show followed Rick Marshall and his children, Will and Holly. The family becomes trapped in an alternate dimension inhabited by dinosaurs and a variety of bizarre creatures, including the lizard-like villainous Sleestaks….

Deadline reminds us:

…There also was a 1991 series remake, which aired for two seasons on ABC, and a 2009 feature film starring Will Ferrell. Sid and Marty Krofft produced both….

That movie “won” a Razzie Award.

(14) NEW ENTRY IN REUSABLE ROCKET FIELD. “Honda successfully launched and landed its own reusable rocket” — The Verge has the story.

Honda successfully conducted a “launch and landing test of an experimental reusable rocket” developed by its research and development subsidiary, the company announced this week. It was the first time Honda landed a rocket after it reached an altitude of 890 feet, according to a press release.

The launch took place at a Honda test facility in Taiki Town, Japan, which the company says “has been developing itself as a ‘space town’ through the joint efforts of public and private sectors,” including the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The nearly 21-foot tall rocket, weighing over 2,800 pounds at launch, flew for 56.6 seconds before ”landing within 37cm of the target touchdown point” on its four retractable legs that also supported it at liftoff….

(15) BAFTA 2025 STUDENT AWARDS. The 2025 BAFTA Student Award Winners were announced June 13 in Los Angeles. Animation Magazine reports “’Trash’ Wins Student BAFTA Award for Animation”. (The complete list of winners is here.)

…French animation and visual effects school ESMA (École Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques) and the creative team behind Trash are celebrating the short’s prestigious win of the 2025 BAFTA Student Film Award for Animation….

[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Nina Törnudd, Arnie Fenner, Dann, John King Tarpinian, 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 Jayn.]

Pixel Scroll 5/12/25 I Heard It Through The Godstalk

Posted on May 12, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) ARTHUR C. CLARKE SHORTLIST. The Arthur C. Clarke Award 2025 Shortlist was announced today. File 770 lists the six finalists at the link.

(2) HAPPY 90TH! On Wednesday May 14 “Griffith Observatory celebrates 90th birthday” reports LAist. (The official website with more detail about the celebration is here: “Griffith Observatory – Southern California’s gateway to the cosmos!”)

A star was born in 1935, when Griffith Observatory became the first public observatory west of the Mississippi.

Now, “Griffith Observatory is the most visited public observatory on the planet,” says Ed Krupp, longtime director of the observatory.

In the 90 years since its founding, more than 7 million people have peered through the historic Zeiss telescope that adorns the peak of Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park.

“More than any other telescope on Earth,” Krupp adds.

Celebrations kick off with a special opening ceremony on the observatory’s front lawn at 11:30 a.m., before doors open at noon. Visitors will receive limited-edition 90th anniversary buttons while supplies last.

Throughout the day, the observatory will host special programming highlighting both astronomical phenomena and the building’s history as a center for public astronomy.

“People on site will get to see how the sky really works,” Krupp said. “It’s a reminder that the observatory itself is an instrument.”

In the evening, a program in the Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon Theater will honor California’s Indigenous astronomical traditions. And visitors will gather on the West Terrace to salute the sunset “as the sun salutes Griffith Observatory’s birthday,” Krupp said. “It’s a cosmic party.”

As night falls, the celebration will continue with a rare event: the Southern Major Standstill Moonrise, part of an 18.6-year lunar cycle. The event will also be live-streamed on Instagram.

(3) IT’S BOT TIME. NPR’s TV reviewer says this is what to watch for: “On TV this week: ‘Murderbot’ and a Joan Rivers tribute on NBC”.

Think back to a time about six years ago, before the explosion of streaming services that included Apple TV+, and it’s tough to imagine a TV show like Murderbot getting made.

Not just because its star, dreamboat actor Alexander Skarsgård, might be more focused on big films. But because the eye-popping special effects and high-quality production involved in developing a project from Martha Wells’ ambitious science fiction novel series The Murderbot Diaries might be a stretch even for a major motion picture – let alone a TV series on a platform that struggles to build big hits.

In fact, Murderbot is the latest example of a trend I’ve noticed on streaming TV – exquisitely produced science fiction and fantasy shows that may not be seen outside of a small-yet-passionate fanbase.

Apple TV+’s Murderbot, debuting Friday, has quite a few hallmarks of high-quality TV. Not only is Skarsgård magnificent in playing a cyborg who has secretly become an independent, free thinking artificial being – he’s in a series created and executive produced by Chris and Paul Weitz, brothers who worked on acclaimed films like About a Boy and American Pie….

…It’s an innovative, creative story told in 10 short episodes, satirizing everything from ruthless corporatism to blithely naive social justice stands. And it will be catnip for science fiction fans who love all the actors who pop up in it. But it’s also not likely to get wide viewing, because Apple TV+ has made a habit of spending loads of money on beautifully shot science fiction stories that have a tough time making a wide impact….

(4) PARTING SHOT. The release of the pre-publication version of the third part of the Copyright Office’s report “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence” came the day before — “Copyright Chief Fired Amid AI Debate”. Publishers Weekly reports on the suspicious move.

On Saturday, the Trump administration fired Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office, just two days after the dismissal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, under whose auspices the U.S. Copyright Office operates. Perlmutter was appointed by Hayden in 2020….

… The move, like Hayden’s dismissal before it, was immediately blasted by Democratic members of Congress. Rep. Joe Morelle (Dem., N.Y.), the top Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, called the move “a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” adding, “It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.”

On Friday, Perlmutter’s office released the pre-publication version of the third part of the Copyright Office’s report “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence,” following a first segment released in July 2024 and a second released this January. This third part focuses on the impact of generative AI training across a wide range of topics, from the origins of the technology, to AI companies’ possible infringement in training their data sets, to those companies’ defense that the training counts as fair use, to what potential licensing scenarios might look like.

Morelle and others have speculated that Perlmutter’s dismissal was likely due to her release of the preliminary report. But sources close to the office, who spoke with PW on condition of anonymity, suggest that it is more likely that Perlmutter, having heard of her impending dismissal, ordered the report released beforehand to ensure it entered the public record in spite of its incomplete status. (The report, for instance, lacks some citations.)…

(5) POSTER BOY. “’I add the human touch’: the beautiful, bespoke work of Berlin’s last cinema poster artist” – a Guardian profile.

Götz Valien is Berlin’s last movie poster artist, for more than three decades earning a modest living producing giant hand-painted film adverts to hang at the city’s most beloved historic cinemas – a craft he says will probably die with him, at least in western Europe. The studios’ own promotional posters serve as a template, but Austrian-born Valien, 65, adds a distinctive pop art flourish to each image coupled with the beauty of imperfection – part of the reason he has managed to extend his career well into the 21st century.

“Advertising is about drawing attention and I add the human touch, which is why it works,” he said. Valien’s work plays up the image’s essence: the imposing bow of a ship, the haunting eyes of a screen siren, a mysterious smile. He jokingly calls himself a Kinosaurier – a play on the German words for cinema and dinosaur….

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 13, 1937 — Roger Zelazny. (Died 1996).

I’ve mentioned many times that Roger Zelazny, in conjunction with Tolkien, got me into fantasy. And you’ve possibly read my reviews of the collected Roger Zelazny short stories here at File 770. Or one of my many other reviews in various places over the years.

So what else can I tell you about my relationship with Zelazny that you haven’t read already? Surely you know that I started with Zelazny’s work with Nine Princes in Amber, and so with Zelazny, I gained a permanent love of multiversal fiction that would lead me to Moorcock and many other authors in due course. Amber also was one of my entry points into RPGs and so along with D&D, and Traveller, and Call of Cthulhu, there was the tiny but influential Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game. So Zelazny has been always a part of my RPG life.

Imagery. Powerfully invoked scenes. Poetic prose (the collected Zelazny, with his poetry, was revelatory as to where all that came from). Sharp archetypal characters, that feel like they came out of a tarot deck (or a Trump deck?) As a stylist, in my personal constellation of reading, he has no equal.

As I have said in my reading of the collections, I inadvertently stumbled upon many Zelazny stories outside of his novels when I was young, and not knowing what they really were. There are several Zelaznys inside of himself, as he changed, evolved and always trying new things. The author of Amber is also the author of Damnation Alley and also the author of Lord of Light and also the author of “24 views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai”. All of these are very different, and yet indubitably Zelazny.

Zelazny has been part of my reading since the beginning of my SFF reading, and will continue to do so for as long as I have strength. For as long as I have that strength, I will keep walking that Road to Amber, revisiting the sights and wonders Zelazny has left for us along the way.

I never got to meet him, alas. Requiescat in pace

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Bob the Angry Flower tries to free a prisoner.
Brewster Rockit shows how far the problem extends.
Dinosaur Comics knows some tales are scarier than others.
Dog Eat Doug’s cats prefer science.
Free Range remembers the thing no one ever went broke doing.
Non Sequitur can’t decide if this is about romance or politics.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal wants to pass on a trait.

(8) ON A MISSION. James Bacon’s article “The Leprechaun, and the Irish War on Comics” at downthetubes.net is a companion piece to his article here, “Greann — Ireland’s First Comic Book, from a veteran of the 1916 Rising”.

With its colourful front cover and striking red masthead The Leprechaun may have seemed very attractive to children in 1953, and this tabloid-sized Irish comic feels like it may have been influenced by and created to compete with the likes of the British comic Eagle – but in actual fact it was not, although its publisher, like the Eagle’s editor, the Reverend Marcus Morris, did have similar aims. The Leprechaun was also created to combat “the outcry against the harm being done by imported comics” and to provide for “the need for clean comics” for Irish readers.

As Mr. French of Bray Urban District Council noted about American Comics they “were nothing but sensual cesspools of iniquity” when he proposed a resolution calling on the Minister for Justice to ban the importation of all comics emanating from American publishers (reported in the Irish Independent on Wednesday, 11th June 1952).

The Horror Comics Campaign in Britain that the late Martin Barker so brilliantly wrote of in A Haunt of Fears encompassed a movement between 1949 and 1955 that brought about the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act of 1955. The fear was mirrored in Ireland, and comics continually featured in contemporary newspaper reports across the country.

On 8th November 1952, the Connacht Tribune reported about the “COMICS: DÁIL QUESTION” with the Minister for Justice responding to a question with, “I have no information that objectionable comics are printed in Ireland.”

Into this hot fray of emotion, intellectual anxiety and fear of God, the first issue of the fortnightly comic The Leprechaun was published in early July 1953…..

(9) IF LOVING YOU IS A CRIME, I’LL ALWAYS BE GUILTY. [Item by Steven French.] As with fantasy, so with games – GTA comes over all romantic: “GTA6 gets it on: can the notoriously cynical action series finally find time for romance?” asks the Guardian.

Something new is coming to the Grand Theft Auto universe next year. I don’t mean super-high-definition visuals, or previously unexplored areas of Rockstar’s take on the US. This time it’s something much more profound. If you’ve seen the newly released second trailer from GTA6 – somewhat cruelly released just days after we discovered the game won’t be out until next May – then you might know what I mean. The brand new thing is romance.

It’s now clear that the key protagonists of the latest gangland adventure are Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval, two twentysomething lovers from the wrong side of the tracks. He’s ex-army, now working for drug runners; she’s fresh out of jail, looking to make a better life for herself and her beloved mom. They fall for each other, hatch a plan to get out of Vice City, and then when their simple heist goes wrong, they find themselves at the sharp end of a state-wide conspiracy. You always knew that if Rockstar were going to tell a love story, it would involve a formidable cast of underworld kingpins, gang members, conspiracy nuts and corrupt politicians, and you were right….

(10) OLD IN NEW YORK. Deadline is there when “Nicolas Cage Makes Photo Debut As Aging Web Slinger in ‘Spider-Noir’”.

Nicolas Cage made his photo debut in Spider-Noir at Amazon’s annual upfronts presentation this afternoon and can be seen below. Spider-Noir will be available in both black and white and color when it premieres in 2026.

The live-action series from MGM+ and Prime Video, based on the Marvel comic Spider-Man Noir, tells the story of an aging and down-on-his-luck private investigator (Cage) in 1930s New York, who is forced to grapple with his past life as the city’s one and only superhero….

(11) ANIME MVP’S. “MLB Anime: Heroes of the Game (ft. Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, more!)”

MLB has teamed up with a crew of creators from the world of anime, tapping animators from One Piece and Full Metal Alchemist to release Heroes of the Game! The power, precision, and skill needed for MLB players to reach the top of their game is almost superhuman. Now, that intensity is being showcased through the world of anime—connecting fans from America, Japan, the UK, and beyond. The campaign features Shohei Ohtani as the Master of Both Sides of the Game, Paul Skenes as the pitcher with ferocious power to unleash, Aaron Judge as the Herculean hitter on a mission to become one of the all-time greats, and Juan Soto as the man who sees all and can change the game with just one swing.

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Isaac Arthur’s latest video title made me think of J. G. Ballard’s book. However I am not sure I buy into the concept of complex crystal biology as Isaac does. (Though I loved Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain.) “Crystal Aliens: Life, But Not As We Know It”.

Crystals are not alive, yet they grow, form complex structures, and even conduct electricity. Could life emerge from crystals rather than carbon-based molecules? Explore the intriguing possibility of crystal-based lifeforms, the challenges they would face, and the conditions where they might thrive. We journey to five exotic worlds—Vulcan, Ribbon World, Longenacht, Telluride, and Tempest—each offering unique environments where crystalline life might take hold. Could such life develop naturally, or might humanity one day engineer it? Join us as we dive into the cutting-edge science and speculative possibilities of crystalline biology.

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

Pixel Scroll 4/1/25 Scroll, Scroll, Scroll, Till Her Daddy Takes Her Pixel Away!

Posted on April 1, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) THE VERSIFICATORE. Bruce Sterling offers the creation of a working Star Trek-style communicator as one example of “How to Rebuild an Imaginary Future (2025)” in the Medium transcript of an extemporaneous speech he gave at SXSW 2025 on March 12. Then he goes into full detail about a comparable project he’s involved with in Italy. (Let me emphasize this is not an April Fools post.)

Fifteen years ago, here at South By Southwest, I was on a panel where the term “design fiction” was made public. Before Julian Bleecker invented and deployed that term, there were many things going on that resembled “design fiction.” But nobody knew “how to do design fiction.” The ideas and approaches were diffuse, they weren’t crystallised.

This current speech is taking place in another decade, in a era where “design fiction” has been normalized, and it’s practiced widely. “Design Fiction” is established, and is part of the worlds of design and futurism. This speech, “How to Rebuild an Imaginary Future,” is also about futurism, design, and design-fiction “diegetic prototypes.”…

…I am the art director of a technology art festival in Turin, Italy, which is called “Share Festival.” In our researches, we found a historical design-fiction that we want and need to rebuild for artistic and cultural reasons. And we are rebuilding it. It’s an artifact, an imaginary machine, from a science fiction story written 65 years ago by a science fiction writer in Turin: Primo Levi.

Primo Levi’s imaginary “Versificatore” is as old as a Star Trek Communicator. It is a cybernetic, desktop, mass-manufactured business machine that can write Italian poetry. The Versificatore works with prompts, very much like ChatGPT. So, Primo Levi’s historic “Versificatore” is a prophetic vision of Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence.

The Versificatore first appeared, in May 1960, as a character in a short drama piece that Levi published in a newspaper. Years later, that story was gathered into a collection of other futuristic gadget stories that Primo Levi also wrote, as part of a series of Levi’s science fiction satires and comedies.

In 1971, the Versificatore became one episode of Italian TV series derived from the Levi stories.

In these screenshots from the TV show, we can see an Italian poet, and a technology salesman, and a secretary interacting with their brand-new desktop poetry machine. The machine is a creative writer and is the center of the action in the drama. The humans react to this intelligent machine with varying attitudes of enthusiasm, amazement, commercial interest, dread, alarm and so on.

It’s quite amazing how well Levi understood the future human reactions to a novelty like an AI that can write human language. You can watch that show on YouTube right now, it’s quite engaging and funny. Of course it’s all in Italian, but who cares? As you watch the show, you can get Google’s Artificial Intelligence to translate the TV show from speech to subtitled text in real-time. It turns out, sixty year later, that Primo Levi was quite right about the prospect of machines with an astonishing command of human language. They’re very much here, and wreaking predictable havoc.

So, at Share Festival, thanks to a good friend, Riccardo Luna from “Wired Italia,” we became aware of Levi’s diegetic prophesy of modern AI. Since Primo Levi was from Turin, and we’re a festival from Turin, we immediately decided that we had to rebuild a Levi Versificatore and show that device to our public. We understand that the Versificatore has historic, artistic, cinematic, computational and literary significance. It should be a public source of civic pride.

In other words, we are motivated to rebuild an imaginary future. This is not a merely hypothetical project. It’s an actual artistic production project, and even a patriotic crusade. It’s a practical matter for us, where we have to raise funds, and find designers and crafts people, and find a venue for the display of our new artifact, and so on….

…Let’s admit it: it’s a rather unusual thing to re-make an imaginary Italian Artificial Intelligence from the 1960s that works in public and speaks Italian poetry. But in this speech, I want to put that work into a larger context. It’s just one practical sample of a broader creative practice, which might be described as: deliberately turning culturally significant imaginary things into functional real-life things.

We are using modern capabilities to make things work, when it was once merely imagined that these things might somehow someday work.

This Versificatore project is a physical demonstration of the impressive prescience of a world-famous Turinese writer. Primo Levi made up some other different gadgets in his stories, but with this one, he hit the predictive jackpot.

We have means, motive and opportunity to rebuild this important object, for our public, which is the Turinese public, and for our client, who is MUFANT, the science fiction and fantasy museum in Turin. Turin has a museum of “fantascienza,” so naturally they’re interested in Turinese science fiction museum exhibits. Like this one.

So, with that given, what is the proper way to do this? We are confident that we can build a replica, but what are the best practices here? Who else is doing anything like this? Where can we get some help and good advice? How do we know if we’ve done a good job? What are we trying to prove with this project?…

(2) CHINA MIÉVILLE Q&A. [Item by Tom Becker.] Capitalist billionaires are changing the world’s political and economic systems to serve their visions of the future that are straight out of science fiction. China Miéville, who knows politics and science fiction very well, punctures that balloon in an interview with TechCrunch: “China Miéville says we shouldn’t blame science fiction for its bad readers”.

Even though some science-fiction writers do think in terms of their writing being either a utopian blueprint or a dystopian warning, I don’t think that’s what science fiction ever is. It’s always about now. It’s always a reflection. It’s a kind of fever dream, and it’s always about its own sociological context. It’s always an expression of the anxieties of the now. So there’s a category error in treating it as if it is “about the future.”

The full interview is well worth reading, because Miéville is always interesting, and he has much to say about the fantasy traditions that inspired him, and the science fiction that he loves, and the value of literature that is diverse and contradictory and not a simplistic blueprint.

(3) IS PRATCHETT MORE BASED THAN TOLKIEN? “Discworld Rules” claims Venkatesh Rao at Contraptions.

The Lord of the Rings is a great story, but I have to say, I’ve never understood the strange hold it seems to have on the imagination of a particular breed of technologists.

As a story it’s great. It is pure fantasy of course (in the Chiang’s Law sense of being about special people rather than strange rules), full of Chosen Ones doing Great Man (or Great Hobbit) things. As an extended allegory for society and technology it absolutely sucks and is also ludicrously wrong-headed. Humorless Chosen people presiding grimly over a world in terminal decline, fighting Dark Lords, playing out decline-and-fall scripts to which there is no alternative, no Plan B.

This is no way for a high-agency technological species to live, and thankfully it doesn’t have to be.

I mean, I get why politicians and economists might identify with the story. They enjoy little to no direct technological agency, harbor ridiculous Chosen One conceits, and operate in domains — political narratives and the dismal pseudoscience of economics — that are natural intellectual monopolies or oligopolies. Domains that allow fantasies to be memed into existence (the technical term is hyperstitional theory-fictions) for a while before they come crashing down to earth in flames, demonstrating yet again that no, you do not in fact get to create your own reality; that “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”

There is a contrarian reading of The Lord of the Rings that argues that Sauron and Mordor are in fact the good guys, and represent technological progress, etc. But this is throwing good ~~money~~ narrativium after bad. Flipping the valence of a Chosen One story doesn’t make it any better. It’s still a Chosen One story with reversed roles.

No, you have to tell different sorts of stories altogether.

Such stories have, in fact, been told. They are Terry Pratchett’s Discworld stories. This post is an extended argument that as a lens for thinking about the world, The Lord of the Rings, is a work that you should “not set aside lightly, but throw across the room with great force,” and that in place of Middle Earth, you should install Terry Pratchett’s Discworld….

… If you’re an actual, serious technologist, Discworld is where you should look for clues about how the world works, how it evolves in response to technological forces, and how humans should engage with those forces. It is catnip for actual technological curiosity, as opposed to validation of incuriously instrumental approaches to technology….

(4) FEARLESS MONSTER FANS. Peter Bebergal will deliver a Zoom lecture, “Monster World”, about “How pop culture monsters mythologised our worries about sexuality, nuclear war, race and the other” on April 14. This Last Tuesday Society digital event begins at 8:00 p.m. – British time, apparently. Tickets are £6 – £10 & By Donation. Ticket buys also will be sent a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

Monster Worlds
In the 1970s, the sometimes-garish world of monster-movie pop culture was a comfort, an external expression of grotesquery and strangeness that the culture was feeling inside but had no name for. Rather than making us more afraid, monsters mythologized our own abstract worries about sexuality, nuclear war, race and the other, as well as personifying our collective sense of being untethered from mystery and enchantment. The talk will track the changing face of monsters as mythic and literary creatures as our culture’s own lingering unease began to morph, moving from the shadowed myths of the past into the daytime horrors of serial killers and gore and argue that we need monsters again to learn how to reimagine what frightens us in a way that remythologizes our anxieties and will offer a path for a re-enchanting our imaginations using monsters as a guide, looking at current examples in film, television, and comics.

(5) CRAWFORD AWARD JUDGES SOLICIT SUBMISSIONS FOR 2025. The William L. Crawford Award, given by the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA), recognizes an outstanding writer whose first fantasy book was published during the previous calendar year. The judges are currently soliciting books published in 2025 for the award to be given at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts in 2026.

Publishers are asked to submit qualifying ebooks in PDF and ePub formats here.

What works qualify

This is an award for an author’s first work of fantasy in book form. It is not a first novel award; an author may have a long bibliography and still qualify for their first work of fantasy. “Book” is defined broadly, and includes novels, novellas, poetry collections, short fiction, graphic novels, works in translation, or other work at the discretion of the judges.

The Award Administrator is Kelly Robson. This year’s judges are Brian Attebery, Joyce Chng, Eddie Clark, Joy Sanchez-Taylor, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay.

Brian Attebery is an American writer and emeritus professor of English and philosophy at Idaho State University. He is known for his studies of fantasy literature, including The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin and Strategies of Fantasy which won the Mythopoeic Award

Joyce Chng lives in Singapore. Their speculative fiction has appeared in The Apex Book of World SF II, We See A Different Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing The Future. Joyce also co-edited THE SEA IS OURS: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia with Jaymee Goh. Their novels span across wolf clans (Starfang: Rise of the Clan), vineyards (Water into Wine) and swordmaking forges (Fire Heart) respectively. Joyce wrangles article editing at Strange Horizons and is diversity coordinator for IGDN (Independent Game Designer Network).

Eddie Clark is an academic and SFF fan from Wellington, New Zealand. He has been peering into the obscure corners of SFF for thirty years, recently with a particular focus on queer fantasy.

Dr. Joy Sanchez-Taylor is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College whose research interest is science fiction and fantasy literature by authors of color. Her first book Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Writers of Color (2021) examines the contributions of late twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. and Canadian science fiction authors of color to the genre. Her newest book is titled Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Color Reimagine a Genre (forthcoming July 2025).

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor in Global Culture Studies at the University of Oslo. He is the leader of CoFUTURES, an international research group on contemporary futurisms headquartered in Oslo. He is a World Fantasy Award-winning editor, translator, writer, and critic of speculative fiction, and the producer of Kalpavigyan: A Speculative Journey, the first documentary film on Indian science fiction.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Ruthven Todd’s Space Cat series

The Muppet Show has a segment called “Pigs in Space.” Well, this is the Social Justice Credential counterpart, “Cats in Space”, with a dollop of ever-so-cute kittens added in, which appeared long before Heinlein’s Pixel came into being as they were published between 1952 and 1958.

This was definitely a departure for the author Ruthven Todd who is known primarily for his poetry, scholarly work on William Blake studies, and as R. T. Campbell for writing mysteries.

It’s a children’s books series involving Flyball, a cat who, yes, lives in space. And like all cats wears a space suit. These are not your ordinary felines by any means.

The books, which are all illustrated by Paul Galdone, are Space Cat, Space Cat Visits Venus, Space Cat Meets Mars and Space Cat and the Kittens. Without giving anything away, let me just say that there will be a lot of cats, not a few kittens and considerable comical situations as the series goes on.

If you don’t mind a lot of SPOILERS, James Davis Nicoll has a rather funny look at them over at Reactor.

They are available in both hardcover and from the usual suspects.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Brevity looks close and finds a digital pun.
Brewster Rockit enters silent mode.
Dinosaur Comics admires Shakespeare’s rule-breaking.
Speckticles discovers the plot.

(8) STARLINER DEBRIEFING. Ars Technica spoke to the astronauts and learned “Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought”.

As it flew up toward the International Space Station last summer, the Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters. A NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, had to take manual control of the vehicle. But as Starliner’s thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go.

He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone’s throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission’s flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as for the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.

But what if it was not safe to come home, either?

“I don’t know that we can come back to Earth at that point,” Wilmore said in an interview. “I don’t know if we can. And matter of fact, I’m thinking we probably can’t.”

Starliner astronauts meet with the media

On Monday, for the first time since they returned to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle two weeks ago, Wilmore and Williams participated in a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Afterward, they spent hours conducting short, 10-minute interviews with reporters from around the world, describing their mission. I spoke with both of them….

We cut to where two thrusters have just failed as the Starliner arrives at the ISS.

… Wilmore: “Thankfully, these folks are heroes. And please print this. What do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into a fiery building and pull people out of it. That’s a hero. Heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems, and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask, ‘What do you think?’ they know their system so well they come up with a plan on the fly. That is a hero. And there are several of them in Mission Control.”

From the outside, as Starliner approached the space station last June, we knew little of this. By following NASA’s webcast of the docking, it was clear there were some thruster issues and that Wilmore had to take manual control. But we did not know that in the final minutes before docking, NASA waived the flight rules about loss of thrusters. According to Wilmore and Williams, the drama was only beginning at this point….

(9) TAKING EXTRA TIME TO SPIN THIS WEB. “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse’ Release Date and First Look” at Variety.

“Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse,” the third entry in Sony’s animated web-slinging trilogy, will swing into theaters… in a few years. It’ll be released on June 4, 2027.

“We know how important this franchise is to so many people around us. We just could not run it back,” the filmmaking team of producer Phil Lord and co-directors Bob Persichetti and Justin K. Thompson said at CinemaCon, the movie theater trade show that’s currently unfolding in Las Vegas. “So, we decided we needed to take the time to make sure we got it just right.”…

… On stage at CinemaCon, Lord teases that Miles begins the threequel as a fugitive on the run from every other spider in the multiverse… and hinted that “Gwen and his other friends may or may not be enough to help him save the family that’s been the leading part of the entire system.”…

(10) JUSTWATCH TOP 10S. The most-viewed streaming sff movies and TV of March 2025 have been ranked by JustWatch.

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

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Tag Archives: Spider-Man

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