(1) SCIENCE FICTION OUTREACH AT WONDERCON. The Science Fiction Outreach Project – USA is at Wondercon in Anaheim this weekend doling out free sff books and planting seeds of interest in LAcon V they hope to harvest in August – and in years to come. They’re in booth 711.
(2) HUGO NOMINATING DEADLINE IS TOMORROW. And speaking of LAcon V, they reminded eligible Hugo Award nominators that the window to make nominations for the 2026 awards will close TOMORROW, Saturday March 28, 2026, at Noon Pacific Time/ 3:00 pm Eastern Time/ 7:00pm GMT.
…So when Tony & Ziva came out, I felt as if I couldn’t cover a show helmed by someone who is unwilling to take responsibility for behavior he admits took place. I understand the career implications for him if had done so. But at least then I wouldn’t be thinking about the “rape van” every time I watched the show.
And I feel the same way when it comes to the upcoming HBO Max series Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone. The streamer has gone to great lengths to distance itself from J.K. Rowling, but the series is based on her books and she will making a substantial amount of money from the project.
I am not going to go over all of Rowling’s distasteful comments here, they are easy enough to find if you’re unaware of the issue. But she doesn’t just hold beliefs I deeply find offensive, it’s also that she has used her fame and substantial wealth to bully and harass critics. And given that, it seems hypocritical of me to cover a show that is only going to provide her with yet another platform and even more resources to be a loud-mouthed asshat.
Maybe you’re a Harry Potter fan and it doesn’t matter. Or maybe you agree with her comments. If so, and if you want to learn more about the show, there are plenty of outlets that will be covering it.
And to be clear, I don’t blame any of the journalists who will have to write about the show. If you are a freelancer or working for an editor who wants it covered, you can’t afford to burn bridges and decline to do the work. But that’s also why I think it’s important for people like myself who have the ability to say no to do so when we can….
A light-up C-3PO head used in Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back has fetched more than US$1m at an auction.
The prop was part of a collection of film and TV memorabilia that went under the hammer on Wednesday as part of the Spring Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction at Propstore auction house in Los Angeles.
It is the only known example of the fictional droid’s head to appear on the collector market and sold for US$1,058,400 (£790,440 or A$1,519,259), having received a pre-sale estimate of $350,000 to $700,000.
The C-3PO head was the top lot at the auction, which also saw the harpoon gun used by the actor Robert Shaw in Jaws, accompanied by its original case, fetch $327,600….
…Elsewhere, a Wilson volleyball used by Tom Hanks in 2000’s Cast Away sold for $189,000 after receiving a pre-sale estimate of $150,000 to $300,000.
The auction also featured broken pieces of a sword used in The Lord Of The Rings, which sold for $252,000….
(5) DYNAMIC DUO. William Shatner and Neil deGrasse Tyson bring their show “The Universe is Absurd!” to the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills, CA on May 19 and 20. Tickets at the link.
Each evening features a completely different conversation and program. Because the event is unscripted, no two performances are ever the same.
(6) FUTURE TENSE. The new Future Tense Fiction story for March 2026 is “The Pocket Box,” by Gunnar Anderson. The story is about dimensional paradoxes, consumerism, the technology hype cycle, and crime.
The response essay is “The Real Drivers of Tech Adoption” by journalist Torie Bosch, who has more than a decade of experience covering emerging technologies and is currently the First Opinion editor at the health and medicine news outlet STAT.
(7) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Quantum Leap series (1989)
By Paul Weimer:
[Editor’s note: Spoiler warning for end of original series.]
Dr. Sam Beckett, theorizing one could time travel within their own lifetime, stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator, and vanished.
So began Quantum Leap, one of the iconic SF shows of the late 80’s and early 90’s. With excellent chemistry between Scott Bakula as Beckett and Dean Stockwell as Al, the show got to explore recent American History by mostly telling the small stories, stories of individual people, not usually famous ones, and changing the world for the better. (It seems interesting to me that Beckett has problems when he tries to change big events in history (the Lee Harvey Oswald episodes really show this in spades) but his goal is to make small changes in the timeline to make the world better. It became clear to me somewhere along the line that the timeline of the Quantum Leap show wasn’t our own, but that the changes were aligning it with our own reality. The idea of our world being the best of all possible worlds is one that had a lot more plausibility then, than it does now, I am afraid.
With a few exceptions to show his own range, this really is a masterpiece of a Bakula vehicle, playing basically the same character every week–and yet not, having to inhabit a new character every week in his ceaseless efforts. While I at first always wanted more allohistorical content (like, say, Voyagers), the show wasn’t for that. The show was about the small changes, the small moves, to make things better.
I still don’t quite understand the last episode. Was the bartender God? Could Beckett ever return home whenever he wanted? Was he always really on a mission from God? I don’t know. I suppose with a series like this, one shouldn’t even try to find definitive answers, and when you get them they are unsatisfactory at best.
I was amused, years later, during Enterprise, when Bakula, as Captain Archer, encounters an alien played by Dean Stockwell. They do NOT get along together at all. That was a neat tip of the hat to Quantum Leap.
xkcd figured out how to make satellite pollution even worse.
(9) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to lunch on lamb with Steven H Silver in Episode 278 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.
Steven H Silver
Silver, a 21-time Hugo Award nominee, was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB Books. His novel, After Hastings, was first published in 2020. In 1995, he created the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference 5 times, as well as serving as the Event Coordinator for SFWA. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7. Steven has maintained In Memoriam lists for Worldcon, the Nebula Conference, and the World Fantasy Con for several years.
We discussed our shared status as record-breaking losers, my morbid suggestion about what he’ll need to do upon my death, the reason he found The Silmarillion more interesting than The Lord of the Rings, how meeting Mel Brooks and other luminaries made him more at ease once he began attending science fiction conventions, the way a cancelled contest resulted in his first short fiction sale, what it was like to be in a writing workshop taught by Gene Wolfe, the allure of the alternate history subgenre (and how it differs from secret histories), what he learned publishing a novel in the middle of a global pandemic, the Easter eggs he scattered through After Hastings, and much more.
Variety reports an adult-aimed animated series based on Monstress is being developed at Amazon MGM Studios, presumably for the Prime Video streaming service. The steampunk fantasy series, created by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, debuted at Image in 2015, and tells the story of a 17-year old slave girl with a literal monster living inside of her, who embarks on a quest to avenge her mother….
…Since its debut in 2015, Monstress has racked up multiple awards, including the Hugo for Best Graphic Story from 2017 to 2019. In 2018, it won five Eisners, including Best Writer, making Liu the first woman to win the award….
Another promising test is the Yuxing 3-06, also known as the Hukeda-2, a low earth orbit (LEO) satellite sporting a robotic “octopus tentacle” forpumping fellow spacecraft full of rocket fuel.
According to CCTV, the craft — which launched on March 16 — has now successfully completed a demonstration of its robotic appendage, which involved both a compliance control and refueling test. To complete the test, the robotic tentacle inserted a nozzled tip into its own dummy fuel port while flying around the planet at around 16,800 miles per hour, the South China Morning Post reported.
The arm is basically an assemblage of spring-laden tubesarticulated via individually motorized cables, SCMP notes, designed to maneuver in the microgravity of LEO….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Joey Eschrich, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
Olav Rokne, who has served on the panel since 2019 will step down from active judging duties, although he will continue to support the Sidewise Awards behind the scenes.
Three new judges have been added to the panel: Andrea Horbinski, Alana Phelan, and Arturo Serrano. They will join returning judges Matt Mitrovich, Kurt Sidaway, and Steven H Silver.
Arturo Serrano will join the judges for the 2025 reading year, with Andrea Horbinski and Alana Phelan joining for the 2026 reading year.
Andrea Horbinski holds a PhD in history and new media from the University of California, Berkeley. An sff fan since approximately age four, she wrote her middle school graduation speech on Star Wars. She has written about alternate history as well as fandom, anime, and manga in journals including The WisCon Chronicles, Transformative Works and Cultures, Internet Histories, Mechademia, and Strange Horizons. She is also the author of Manga’s First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989 (University of California Press, 2025).
Alana Phelan (she/her) is a queer, disabled writer and editor in southern New Jersey. She is the co-owner of For Hire Enterprises, which was awarded an Effing Foundation for Sex Positivity grant in 2020 for its work. She has previously done committee work for the American Librarian Association’s Rainbow Book List. You can find her online as The Polyamorous Librarian, or as the webmistress for the Mary vs the Movies podcast, where she is also a recurring guest.
Arturo Serrano is a Colombian reviewer for the Ignyte-winning, Hugo-winning blog Nerds of a Feather. He’s also a member of the editorial teams of the magazines Strange Horizons and Galactic Journey, and recently became one of the volunteer translators at Global Voices. He previously wrote reviews for Hypable and was one of the translators at the bilingual magazine Constelación. In 2021, he self-published the alternate history novel To Climates Unknown. Since 2023, he’s been a judge for the British Fantasy Awards. Currently, he’s finishing a degree in Creative Writing. His obsessions include nonviolent gaming, Linux distro-hopping, and music in Esperanto.
Submitting works: Submission information for the Sidewise Awards, along with mailing addresses for all of the judges, can be found at at their website. Books and stories for consideration can be submitted throughout the year and the judges prefer to receive them as close to the publication date as possible.
About the Sidewise Awards: The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were conceived in late 1995 to honor the best allohistorical genre publications of the year. The first awards were announced in summer 1996 and honored works from 1995. The award takes its name from Murray Leinster’s 1934 short story “Sidewise in Time,” in which a strange storm causes portions of Earth to swap places with their analogs from other timelines. The Awards were founded by Evelyn C. Leeper, Robert Schmunk, and Steven H Silver. Silver is the award’s administrator and an active judge. Schmunk maintains the award’s website.
Future Award Ceremonies: The Sidewise Awards for works published in 2025 are expected to be presented at LACon V in Anaheim, California the weekend of August 27–31, 2026. The awards for works published in 2026 are expected to be presented at Montréal Worldcon 2027 the weekend of September 2–6, 2027.
(1) BRITISH BOOK AWARDS. The Bookseller reports The British Book Awards “Book of the Year Winners 2025”. One is of genre interest, while James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the viewpoint of Jim, has been discussed here for its parallels to Julia, a 1984 retelling. The complete list of winners is at the link.
AUTHOR OF THE YEAR
Percival Everett, author of James
BOOK OF THE YEAR – FICTION
James by Percival Everett
BOOK OF THE YEAR – PAGETURNER
Faebound by Saara El-Arifi
(2) HUGO-WORTHY POETRY CONSIDERED. Dina at SFF Book Reviews compares all the poetry finalists in “Reading the Hugos 2025: Best Poem”. Here’s one of the comments:
…Ever Noir by Mari Ness was much more to my liking, combining fairy tale tropes with a noir style. It’s like the noir detective in the grimy office is visited by a fairy tale princess. While it doesn’t really tell a story, I really enjoyed the juxtaposition of the two clashing sub-genres. (7/10)…
(3) JOURNEY PLANET 90. Steven H Silver announces that Chris Garcia and James Bacon have published an issue of Journey Planet he edited on the theme “My Favorite Museum”, which is 155 pages and looks at more than 60 museums on all seven continents. The issue can be downloaded at the link.
The 2027 Westercon Site Selection Administrator announced that she has accepted a bid from the Society for the Promotion of Speculative Fiction (SPSF) to host Westercon 79 in conjunction with BayCon 2027 at the Marriott Hotel in Santa Clara, California, and that this bid will be on the ballot for the election to be held this year at Westercon 77/BayCon 2025.
Site Selection Administrator Kayla Allen explained that there was a misunderstanding between herself and SPSF around the original filing deadline of April 15, 2025. After several discussions, Allen decided in the interest of fairness to accept SPSF’s bid and place the Santa Clara in 2027 bid on the ballot. No other groups filed bids to host Westercon 79.
For those wishing to vote electronically, you will be able to pay the advance “voting fee ($20) tokens” by purchasing a token through the BayCon 2025 website. There is also a small service charge for such online purchases. Members will also be able to pay by check or money order. Cash will only be accepted in person at Westercon 77/BayCon 2025.
The 2027 Westercon Site Selection ballot will be posted at the Westercon.org website and will be sent to all members of Westercon 77/BayCon 2025. Members will be able to vote by email, paper mail, or in person at Westercon 77/BayCon 2025.
Sesame Streethas a new streaming home. Netflix has picked up the children’s series, which will make its debut on the streamer later this year with an all-new, reimagined 56th season — plus 90 hours of previous episodes — available to audiences worldwide.
Netflix is coming on board after HBO Max opted not to renew its Sesame Street streaming deal at the end of last year. Finding a new streaming partner has been considered critical to the series’ financial survival.
The new episodes, which will now each center on one 11-minute story, will be available same day-and-date in the U.S. on PBS stations and PBS KIDS digital platforms, maintaining U.S. kids’ free access to early learning, which Sesame Street is all about. That is a departure from Netflix’s typical push for exclusivity unless a second window on a library title is involved….
(6) 451. In “Ray Bradbury Told Us So”, Carl Abrahamsson analyzes the lasting relevance of Fahrenheit 451. (Behind a paywall.).
…Bradbury’s novel emerged from the McCarthy era, when fear of communist influence led to intense scrutiny of intellectuals and artists. The story follows Guy Montag, a “fireman” whose job is burning books in a future America where literature is forbidden. Through his relationship with Clarisse McClellan, a young woman who questions society’s values, and his own growing disillusionment, Montag begins to read the books he’s meant to destroy. The novel depicts a population numbed by wall-sized televisions, immersive entertainment, and high-speed living. Bradbury’s warning focuses on how mass media and anti-intellectualism could lead to cultural amnesia and the death of critical thinking….
I’m a primary school teacher with two children under three at home. As a reception teacher I spend a lot of time reading children’s books out loud. With my own children I like a book that is calm and gives me something as well as them. Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob by Huw Aaron is my new favourite: Lovely, relaxed rhymes with a touch of sci-fi and horror thrown in. Children who can read or appreciate the pictures love the idea of a “scary” bedtime story, and those who can’t, get the rhythm and time with a happy, giggling parent. Patrick Clark, Leeds’
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Item by Cat Eldridge.]
May 19, 1983 — Shatner’s Star
Forty-two years ago on this day, William Shatner got his very own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was the one thousand and sixty-second such star. It’s located at 6901 Hollywood Blvd. He’d also get a star on the Canada’s Walk of Fame in Toronto.
It is said that hundreds of people attended Shatner’s dedication ceremony, including Leonard Nimoy who gave a speech on the day in which he said that Shatner was “a wonderful man and a great actor” before telling the crowd about the terrible jokes Shatner liked to play on him.
Shatner also spoke, “This is my small ticket to the stars. All of the other accolades are so ephemeral one never has anything that’s truly concrete and this is the one exception.”
Mike Deodato co-created Riri Williams, Ironheart, with Brian Michael Bendis for Marvel Comics, who first appeared in Invincible Iron Man Vol. 3 #7 in 2016, and on the screen in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, played by Dominique Thorne. With the TV series adaptation starring Thorne about to drop on Disney+, he has written an open letter on social media earlier this week, reproduced in English below;…
… “But as much as I celebrate this moment, there’s a bitter edge to it. You see, while Marvel has built an empire worth billions on the backs of its creators, the compensation model hasn’t kept pace with the success. I’m in a good place, one of the best-paid creators in the industry, and I truly appreciate that. But it’s not about me. It’s about the principle. When a character you poured your heart into helps fuel the engine of a multi-billion-dollar machine, a small share of that success feels only fair.
“Creators don’t ask for billions or even millions. Just a nod, a bit of recognition, and a share that reflects the contribution they’ve made. It’s not just good ethics—it’s good business. Happy creators stay invested, inspired, and loyal. But when the business side doesn’t match the creative investment, creators naturally drift toward projects where they retain control, where their work can lead to lasting financial security. That’s why more and more of us are focusing on creator-owned projects, where we can truly share in the success of our creations….”
Mars, the red planet, could be in for a global display of aurora this week after a huge cloud of charged particles left the sun in the direction of the red planet.
The prediction from solar scientists comes in the same week NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover made history by detecting visibly green auroras on Mars for the first time.
An X2.7 solar flare on Wednesday, May 14 — the strongest of the year so far — saw an intense burst of energy and electromagnetic radiation from the sun’s surface spread out across the system at light speed. An X-class solar flare is the most intense class, according to NASA. In its wake, there was a coronal mass ejection — a cloud of super-charged particles — that left the sun’s surface….
Public service announcement: don’t point your phone camera directly at a lidar sensor.
A video recently shared on Reddit demonstrates why. As the camera zooms in on the sensor affixed to the top of a Volvo EX90, a whole galaxy of colorful dots is burned into the image, forming over the exact spot that the flashing light inside the lidar device can be seen.
What you’re witnessing isn’t lens flare or a digital glitch — it’s real, physical damage to the camera. And it’s permanent.
“Lidar lasers burn your camera,” the Reddit user warned….
(13) PITCH MEETING. Ryan George remembers “The Avengers Pitch Meeting” like it was yesterday. Maybe that’s because this is a revival of a video first aired in 2018.
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Matt O’Dowd over at PBS Space Time tends to the sceptical side of technological extraterrestrials existing, at least within detection range of Earth. It is never aliens, except when it is.
I should declare that as a bio-geo (environmental) scientist, I don’t buy into this at all. Having devoted much of my extracurricular science time to climate change for over a third of a century, I was really getting depressed, and so for the last decade I have been focusing on deep-time evolution of life, the Earth and the Earth system, developing a ‘co-evolution of life and planet narrative. (I have a book in press coming out on this from an academic publisher – it has been in peer review for two years!. I’ll give Mike the nod when it is due out in case he thinks it might be worth sharing with Filers as there is a fair bit on exobiology in the mix as well as the coming singularity (both being SFnal tropes)).
For what it is worth, I do not consider the endosymbiont process to create a eukaryote (good cell) from a prokaryote (like a simple bacterial cell) a difficult one or a hard evolutionary step. If it was a hard evolutionary step then it is unlikely to have taken place a number of times (which it has). However, physicists will be physicists and this is Matt’s summary…
Around 2 billion years ago, life had plateaued in complexity, ruined the atmosphere, and was on the verge of self-annihilation. But then something strange and potentially extremely lucky happened that enabled endless new evolutionary paths. The first eukaryote cell was born. This may also explain why there are no aliens.
[Thanks to Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Kayla Allen, 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 ULTRAGOTHA who gets the 1776 reference from the other day.]
Whip-smart, unputdownable, lyrical, dazzling, pitch-perfect. Taut, tender, a tour de force. A triumph. Unflinching, stunning, mesmerizing, evocative. You will have seen a book—probably many, many books—with some of these words, what one might call blurbiage, if one were being annoying, on its cover. Often, these quotes will be just that one word. But the process by which those single words are acquired is a fraught one. So much so that last week, one top editor at a major publisher, Sean Manning at Simon & Schuster, made an unusual and attention-grabbing announcement about them. In his eight years at the company, he wrote in an essay for Publishers Weekly, “it has been tacitly expected that authors—with the help of their agents and editors—do everything in their power to obtain blurbs to use on their book cover and in promotional material.” No longer. Under his leadership, authors won’t be “required” to spend “an excessive amount of time” getting blurbs for their books….
…Debut authors also told me that it had “taken over their lives” sending out “begging letters” for blurbs, and more established ones said their lives had been taken over by the barrage of unsolicited proofs to blurb that they were receiving. “A lot of publicists are probably paid too poorly to really sit and consider which authors might genuinely like which book,” one novelist said, “but I wish this meant they just sent out less requests in general instead of taking this scatter-gun spam-bot approach.”
So many book proofs are getting sent out, and authors are being pursued so relentlessly for comment, that it has become common enough practice to blurb a book without having actually read it. “I was really horrified the first time someone said I should just make something up for them to approve,” said one debut nonfiction writer, who had a book out last year. This happens all the time, people told me.
Much of the blurb game is built on existing acquaintances. There is enormous social pressure to blurb books for people you sort of know. So people either lie about liking a book, because they don’t want things to be awkward, or end up ghosting the requests, or blurb it positively because they are “blinded by affection,” one nonfiction author told me. “The only time I’ve heard of someone having the balls to say ‘I haven’t blurbed your book because I didn’t actually like it’ is Sarah Schulman,” she added. According to another novelist, “It turns the entire industry into this fucking Regency-era tea party, where we all just owe each other favors and there’s actually no meritocracy or peer review or even admiration going on.”…
“I don’t know if blurbs have ever worked,” Manning said. “There’s no metric to tell.”
Victoria Ford, the owner of Comma, a bookstore in Minneapolis, said, “My initial reaction was that blurbs don’t matter at all.” She’d rather read a thorough summary on the back of a book, or a lively description on the flyleaf, than rely on a few beats from an established author who might have a personal relationship with the author in question.
As for her customers, Ford went on: “I have not noticed readers paying a lot of attention to blurbs, with a few exceptions. I’ve definitely sold books because a customer was browsing and saw a book Ann Patchett had blurbed. Readers trust her.”…
(3) COSTUME DESIGNERS GUILD AWARDS. The 2025 Costume Designers Guild Awards winners include two in categories devoted to sff, and a third in the Period Film category.
Excellence in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Film
Wicked; Paul Tazewell, CDG
Excellence in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Television
Dune: Prophecy; “The Hidden Hand”; Bojana Nikitovic
Excellence in Period Film
Nosferatu; Linda Muir, Costume Designer, Alima Meyboom, ACD; Anna Munro, ACD
…Ellison starts by trying, perhaps to link this collection and its contents to literature and SF, with the quotation of a letter (I assume) from George Bernard Shaw to Count Leo Tolstoy, followed by quotes from Voltaire, Ovid, and Robert A. Heinlein. These are all about gods in some way.
“It is suggested that the reader not attempt to read this book at one sitting. The emotional content of these stories, taken without break, may be extremely upsetting. This note is intended most sincerely, and not as hyperbole. H.E.”
I take this both ways, as an honest warning and part of his hyperbole….
BAFTA Award-winner Anna Maxwell Martin (Motherland) is set as a lead opposite Rhys Ifans in Apple TV+‘s upcoming series Star City, a spinoff from the streamer’s space race dramaFor All Mankind.
Created by Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert and Ronald D. Moore, Star City is another alt-history retelling of the space race – when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers, and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humanity forward…
(6) IN MEMORIAM. Steven H Silver’s list of members of the sff community who died in 2024 is available at Amazing Stories: “In Memoriam 2024”.
(7) BUT THE MEMORY LINGERS ON. Amazing Stories’ Steve Davidson at “Where Is It Safe To Host A Worldcon?” provides a new map of where he approves for the Worldcon to be held. Can you guess which country between Canada and Mexico has recently fallen off the map? Hint: It’s hosting the next two Worldcons.
…It it supremely ironic that one of the counter-arguments to the protest against the Chengdu bid was a stated belief that exposing the citizens of a repressive regime to the openness and diversity of Fandom would offer an alternative example and somehow inspire governmental change. Instead, the repressive regime has now come to the home of Fandom, the United States, which will have hosted 59 of the 83 Worldcons held by the end of this year. (Leeds excepted.)
It is, therefore, not just appropriate, but necessary, to amend the map that illustrates the relative appropriateness of Worldcon hosting.
This year, Worldcon will be hosted in a country whose government has enacted or intends to enact policies that are both repressive and dangerous to members of Fandom. It will be doing so in the name of all of its citizens as it is a duly and legally elected government (for now), because that is how representative democracies work.
Owing to prior bidding, next year’s Worldcon will also be held in a country that is dangerous to Fans and their beliefs. Three times in four years is a trend that I don’t want to see continue. I hope that the majority of Bid voters agree with me….
(8) MORT KÜNSTLER (1931-2025). [Item by Artie Fenner.] Artist Morton (Mort) Künstlerdied. Mostly known for his Civil War gallery paintings today, he did plenty of painted covers for comics and men’s adventure magazines back in the day. Early in his career he and James Bama shared a studio and modeled for each other’s illustrations. The Daily Cartoonist paid tribute: “Mort Künstler – RIP”.
…Künstler would go on to paint about 4,000 magazine covers, movie ads and canvases for NASA, the U.S. Postal Service (a depiction of Black soldiers in the Indian Wars in 1994), institutions and private collectors. His paintings are in the permanent collection of more than 50 museums and his work has been featured in more than 20 books. He was the subject of an A&E documentary in 1993.
His specialty was images of the Civil War, and historians and art critics considered him the premier historical artist in the country — one known for his detailed research and accurate depictions of scenes from Colonial times through the Space Age. In 2006, M. Stephen Doherty, editor of American Artist magazine, wrote “Künstler is now known as America’s foremost historical artist” and since the late 1970s “has been recognized as a distinguished fine artist.”…
In one of Hollywood’s zaniest movie premiere stunts, Mel Brooks’ 1974 western spoof Blazing Saddles screens at the Pickwick Drive-In Theater in Burbank, California. Guests attend not in cars—but on horseback.
Attendees, many sporting cowboy hats, watched the movie from atop their steeds. Movie sound came through speakers attached to saddle pommels, and the studio set up a “Horsepitality Bar” where guests got “horse d’oeuvres.” Brooks, one of Hollywood’s most legendary comedic directors, was reportedly thrilled with the memorable publicity stunt, and wrote to Warner Bros.’ publicist, Marty Weiser, who came up with the clever idea. Its message: “You’re crazier than I am!”…
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
February 7, 1960 — James Spader, 65.
How can I not do the Birthday of James Spader, the performer who played Dr. Daniel Jackson, Egyptologist in Stargate? Yes, I’m really fond of him in that film. And yes, I am equally fond of Michael Shanks playing that version of the character in the Stargate SG-1 franchise.
His first SF film actually came as a starring role as Joey Callaghan in Starcrossed where an alien woman is running from a deadly enemy and tries to hide here. She meets a young mechanic (Joey), who helps her to go home and to be a freedom fighter there.
A decade later, his next role is in Stargate. I thought it was a great performance by him. And yes, the character as performed by Michael Shanks in Stargate SG-1 continuity is just as interesting, just completely different. His role I thought was more true to that of being an Egyptologist but the Stargate SG-1 continuity isn’t really concerned with the original premise, is it?
If you saw Avengers: Age of Ultron, and I will readily admit that I have not, he not only voiced Ultron but did the motion capture for it.
But his greatest role, and I readily admit that is not genre was in The Blacklist series as Raymond “Red” Reddington, a former US Naval Intelligence officer turned fugitive who’s maybe forced to become an FBI crime consultant. And I was surprised to learn that he was an executive producer for that series.
Wizard of Id delivers collateral damage at a distance.
(12) CIVILIZATION SHUFFLES THE DECK. Polygon tells us what they think about the latest iteration of a longtime classic video game: “Review: Civilization 7 embraces a new era”.
… Civilization 7 breaks with franchise tradition in a couple ways. The first is that your leader and your civilization are unrelated to one another. At the beginning of a game, you select a leader (say, Harriet Tubman) who brings certain capabilities with them (like a bonus to espionage actions). You also select a civilization, a group of people who your leader, well, leads. If you’re starting in the age of Antiquity, the oldest time period, these are civilizations like the Greeks, the Mississippians, or the Han. They are distinguished by specific traits and units that are unique to them. This whole process is inevitably a little weird to people who have played these games before, given that historically there was not a split between leaders and civs, but ultimately the vibes are the same when playing the game — you simply get to mix and match your people, even if it produces extremely weird combos like Machiavelli, leader of ancient Persia….
Is it possible to understand the universe without understanding the largest structures that reside in it? In principle, not likely. In practical terms? Definitely not. Extremely large objects can distort our understanding of the cosmos.
Astronomers have found the largest structure in the universe so far, named Quipu after an Incan measuring system. It contains a shocking 200 quadrillion solar masses.
Astronomy is an endeavor where extremely large numbers are a part of daily discourse. But even in astronomy, 200 quadrillion is a number so large it’s rarely encountered. And if Quipu’s extremely large mass doesn’t garner attention, its size surely does. The object, called a superstructure, is more than 400 megaparsecs long. That’s more than 1.3 billion light-years.
A structure that large simply has to affect its surroundings, and understanding those effects is critical to understanding the cosmos. According to new research, studying Quipu and its brethren can help us understand how galaxies evolve, help us improve our cosmological models, and improve the accuracy of our cosmological measurements…
…Astronomers have found the largest structure in the universe so far, named Quipu after an Incan measuring system. It contains a shocking 200 quadrillion solar masses….
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Artie Fenner, Jim Janney, 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 Jim Janney.]
Was the year too heavy, deep, and real? Yes, but it was also rich in creativity, humor, and shared adventures. It’s a gift and privilege for me to be continually allowed to publish so many entertaining posts. Thanks to all of you who contributed!
COLUMNS
CHRIS BARKLEY
[Note: Some of Chris’ columns don’t appear below because they are listed in the annual news roundup.]
In addition to reviewing comics and graphic novels, James used his camera and descriptive abilities to take us along on visits to all kinds of fascinating exhibits and pop culture events.
The saga of Sheriff Trigger Snowflake, the lovely Coraline, and the shenanigans of the Solarian Poets Society added several chapters this year that were not so much ripped-from-the-headlines as amused by the news.
Stormm continued her humorous series about the misdirected emails she gets from Writer X throughout 2024, braiding together comedy, horror, and the pitfalls of being a writer.
By Steven H Silver: Last night, Elaine and I saw The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Although billed as running 2 hours and 45 minutes, including a 15 minute intermission, the show started at 7:00 and ended at 10:10. Originally billed as simply The Lord of the Rings when it debuted in 2006, it has been somewhat reworked from its original form and opened in Bagnor, UK last year. After its Chicago run ends on September 1, it will travel to Auckland, New Zealand.
While in the lobby, I got to hear a woman call out to a man “I like your ears” and he responded “I like yours, too.” Both were wearing elf ears and the woman was in full costume. Prior to the show, tickets holders were sent notes that cosplay was welcome, but no weapons or full masks were allowed and, although Hobbits went barefoot, audience members must wear shoes. In fact, the Hobbits on the stage wore sandals.
Perhaps fifteen minutes before the play was scheduled to begin, the cast began appearing on stage and moving through the audience, inviting members to play a ring toss game, juggle, or just chatting with the audience members. At one point, when Bilbo (Rick Hall) appeared in the audience, the cast led the entire audience in singing “Happy Birthday” to him. Bilbo even made his way up to the first balcony, where we were sitting. We also discovered that the couple next to us were attending because a friend of theirs, Ben Mathew, was playing Pippin. The cast would continue to move through the audience (including in the balconies) throughout the show.
The play opens with Bilbo’s birthday party and the first act, which ran 90 minutes took us to the breaking of the Fellowship. The second act condensed the final two volumes into 75 minutes. Much was excised, including the entire Theoden/Helm’s Deep story line. The play includes Treebeard (voiced by John Lithgow), but probably could have been omitted.
Discussing the play after it was over, Elaine and I agreed that it probably only makes sense to people who are familiar with the storyline from the books or the films, otherwise, the actions of Aragorn (Will James, Jr.), Legolas (understudied by Luke Nowakowski), Gimli (Ian Maryfield), Merry (Eileen Doan), and Pippin in the second act seem disjointed. Gimli and Legolas, especially do not seem to have a lot to do in this version.
The focus of the second act is really on Frodo (Spencer Davis Milford), Samwise (Michael Kurowski), and Gollum (Tony Bozzuto). Of the three, Samwise is the most engaging and Bozzuto owns his role as Gollum both physically and verbally, doing a wonderful imitation of Andy Serkis from the films, although I can’t imagine how he sings using that voice (especially since he was able to get across that he is a talented singer).
The subtitle is “A Musical Tale,” although the songs generally do not move the plot along and are incidental. A few are hummable, but many are forgettable. It may be the topic of the songs, but most of them would not feel out of place in a filk circle. There is no orchestra, instead the music is provided by the actors playing instruments on stage and nearly all of the major characters play instruments at some point.
Throughout the show, we visit the Shire, the Prancing Pony, Rivendell, Moria, Isengard, Lothlorien, Fangorn, Minas Tirith, Shelob’s lair, and Mount Doom. Unlike the films, we also get a taste of the Scouring of the Shire. Although there are minor changes to the set, the different settings were mostly handled with lighting and projection changes. Most of them worked, but there is one scene in which Galadriel sings while standing in a cut out circle of light that reminded me of the opening of many James Bond films.
Back in the 1980s, I was a regular attendee of the interactive play Dungeon Master and watching the actors move on the stage, I felt, at times, that I was watching a big-budget version of that show, perhaps because many of the fight scenes were staged in slow-motion. Speaking of the battle scenes, when Aragorn was attempting to rally his troops, you never got the feeling he was talking to more than a half dozen people. On the other hand, the five actors portraying the orcs (who seemed to me to be depicted as an inner city street gang) managed to appear to be a never-ending horde.
The fight choreography was stronger than the dance choreography. The fights seemed naturalistic, but dancing, aside from in the opening scene at the party, felt like it was choreographed specifically to put on a show for the watching audience and therefore felt staged and a little awkward.
The special effects were mostly well done, although the first, Bilbo’s disappearance, probably played better from the orchestra than it does from the balconies from where you can see the trap open. The Nazgul’s horses are depicted as enormous horse skull puppets with glowing red eyes and move throughout the audience. The Shelob spider puppet is incredibly well done as well.
I would recommend the show with some reservations. If you are not a Lord of the Rings fan, this is not the proper introduction for you. You’ll spend much of the show asking your companions what is happening and who people are, many of whom don’t really seem to have a purpose. Fans of The Lord of the Rings will enjoy it, filling in the parts that aren’t fully explained (and probably griping that their favorite parts or characters are given short shrift or omitted entirely).
The show also featured Tom Amandes as Gandalf, Suzanne Hannau as Rosie Cotton, Jeff Parker and Elrond and Saruman, Alina Taber as Arwen, Matthew C. Yee as Boromir, and Lauren Zakrin as Galadriel. Rick Hall not only played Bilbo, but also the Steward of Gondor.
The 2024 Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award honoree is Claire Winger Harris. The selection was announced this weekend at Readercon, held July 11-14, 2022, in Quincy, Massachusetts.
The 2024 jury consisted of Ann VanderMeer, Steven H Silver, and Rich Horton, who gave these reasons for their choice:
Clare Winger Harris, as pictured in the 1929 debut issue of Science Wonder Quarterly
Clare Winger Harris (1891-1968) was a true pioneer of the field of genre science fiction, and was the first woman to write regularly for the early Science Fiction pulps such as Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories under her own name. She published a dozen stories between 1926 and 1933, and her work was characterized by a truly expansive and exotic imagination, and by an uncompromising devotion to the consequences of the unusual events she conceived. Her best work, such as “The Fate of the Poseidonia”, “The Miracle of the Lily”, “The Diabolical Drug”, and “The Artificial Man”, is rewarding reading to this day. Her sole novel, Persephone of Eleusis (1923), is historical fiction. It is unfortunate that she abandoned her writing career so soon, but we hope this award will focus attention on her early contributions.
The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award has been given annually since 2001 by the Cordwainer Smith Foundation, preserving the memory of science-fiction writer Paul Linebarger, who wrote under that pen name. The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award honors under-read science fiction and fantasy authors with the intention of drawing renewed attention to the winners.
Built around the testimony of Steven’s grandmother, who lived in the Płońsk ghetto before her internment in Auschwitz and several other concentration camps, the issue looks at how her experiences have impacted four generations of that family, with articles Steven’s mother, who was a hidden child of the Holocaust, Steven, his sister, and wife, as well as his daughter’s discovery that not every family has the Holocaust in a central place in their story.
Other articles look at Russell Handelman’s own family’s experiences during the Holocaust, Mark Herrup’s father’s role in helping to liberate the concentration camps, and others, who may not have as direct a link to the Holocaust, write about living in its shadow.
James Bacon, Daniel Kimmel, and Barbara Barnett explore the cultural impact of the Holocaust as seen in comics, film, and television, while Dina S. Krause describes the work she has done as a docent at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.
Atypical of Journey Planet, this issue also contains reprints of two short stories. Avram Davidson’s “What Time Is It?” tackled the subject of the Holocaust in the late 1940s as the devastating effects on family’s became known, and Michael A. Burstein’s “Kaddish for the Last Survivor,” originally published in Analog in 2000 and a Hugo and Nebula nominee.
(1) GLASGOW 2024 REOPENS HUGO NOMINATIONS. Members of Glasgow 2024 were notified today that online nominations for the Hugo Awards are working again.
One day after they initially went live on January 27, the committee announced in social media, “We are aware of an issue with nominations. We have taken that system offline as a precaution.” There is no extension to the originally announced deadline; all nominations must be received by Saturday, March 9, 2024, 16:00 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) (UTC+0). Detailed instructions for how to nominate, plus more specific information about the nomination categories and eligibility, are available here.
Thomas Pynchon is one of America’s most reclusive novelists and the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Slow Learner, Vineland, Mason and Dixon, Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge.
This is a collection of 246 items comes from a fine private library.
Highlights include: an advance reading copy of V. (1963), Pynchon’s first novel, in its original wrapper, as well as a first edition copy of V. in a dust jacket, advance unbound signatures and an uncorrected proof of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the binder’s dummy of Mason & Dixon (1997) in a proof dust jacket, and more.
“Assembled over a lifetime by a dedicated private collector, this remarkable collection of Thomas Pynchon’s work contained over 240 items. One would be hard-pressed to find a more bibliographically complete collection containing so many Pynchon rarities in such perfect condition.”
2. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling – $85,620
This true first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published by Bloomsbury in June of 1997. Only 500 copies were printed, 200 of which were used to promote the book, and 300 were provided to libraries. This copy was originally owned by Edinburgh Public Library in Rowling’s hometown. She wrote the novel while sitting in various cafes around the Scottish city.
The book’s library card shows that it was borrowed 27 times between December 15, 1997 and October 12, 1999 before it was withdrawn from service. Those 27 readers were among the first people to experience the magic of Hogwarts.
This copy is a hardcover and was issued without a dust jacket. It has been restored and housed in a full red leather box lined with black suede. The sale marks our second most expensive sale of all time, and shows that the Harry Potter phenomenon, which began in 1997, has not diminished.
This is likely the most expensive online sale of a first edition of the Philosopher’s Stone. Another first edition sold at a live auction for $471,000 in 2021….
7. The Chronicles of Narnia Set by C.S. Lewis – $45,699
This remarkable set is made up of the first editions of each book in the author’s classic Chronicles of Narnia series, which has sold over 100 million copies and been translated into 47 languages….
10. Calvin and Hobbes: The Last Sunday, “Let’s Go Exploring” by Bill Watterson – $35,000
A rarity, this large color proof of the final Calvin and Hobbes strip is signed by Bill Watterson.
Calvin and Hobbes was a daily comic strip that ran between 1985 and 1995. It became hugely successful and was featured in thousands of newspapers around the globe.
This signed color proof was one of a small number produced and sent as a thank-you gift from Watterson to select newspapers who carried the strip.
(3) FREE READS. Analog and Asimov’s are offering their short fiction that made the Locus Recommended Reading List for readers to enjoy.
(4) 100. Sunday Morning Transport, in search of subscribers, also has a free read: “A Hundred Secret Names” by Margaret Ronald.
My forty-eighth secret name is Accurate-in-Speech, so you will know that every word I say to you tonight is true.
I was born under the ice mountains, the second-youngest of a clutch of five. Like me, my siblings were loud and demanding in our fiery infancy, and unlike me, they are uninteresting. My mother was much the same; the only importance she has is that before she left us for good (for we had grown near her size and would soon be extinguished enough to venture out), she took each of us aside and whispered to us our first secret names. My siblings, being what they were, immediately told each other and reveled in this new ability to be individually loud. I, being as I am, wisely kept my name to myself….
We blindfolded 5 Mashable employees and asked for their honest reactions to Dune: Part 2sandworm popcorn bucket. They did not disappoint. Dune: Part 2 premieres in theaters March 1st, 2024.
An even better video, however, is last weekend’s Saturday Night Live parody the “Dune Popcorn Bucket”.
A group of teenagers sings a song about a special night.
Actor Gina Carano sued Disney and Lucasfilm on Tuesday for firing her from “The Mandalorian” in 2021, over a social media post in which she compared being a Republican to being Jewish during the Holocaust.
The suit, filed in California federal court, alleges wrongful termination and discrimination, as well as a demand that the court should force Lucasfilm to recast her and pay at least $75,000 in punitive damages.
Elon Musk is funding the suit, following his promise to pay for legal actions taken by people claiming discrimination from posts to Twitter/X. However, the posts in question originated on Carano’s Instagram Stories….
(7) IS IT WORTH WHAT YOU PAY FOR IT? An employee of Heritage Auctions answers the question “Is Toy Grading A Good Idea?” for readers of Intelligent Collector.
If you are a toy or action figure collector, you likely have a strong opinion on the subject when it comes to your personal collection. But whether it is a go0od idea for positive future monetary returns is an entirely different question.
While many collectors have long seen the encasement of their treasures as a separation from their tactile enjoyment, others have maintained that it preserves them in their highest quality state as time moves forward. Neither is wrong, strictly from a personal collecting perspective, but grading action figures and toys can have a significant effect on the value when sold. That is not to say that every toy should be graded as there is a real cost associated with it, but the right pieces with good grades can multiply the value from hundreds to thousands of dollars per item.
My general rule of thumb is that a toy is worth grading if the value of it is increased by at least 150% of the grading fee when added to the ungraded value. This is the case for items that already have value and a demonstrated history of selling in graded and ungraded condition. Of course, the final value will depend on the grade that the item receives as buyers pay more for higher-graded toys. For example, if a carded action figure is worth $300 and costs $100 to grade, I would grade it if it were certain to bring at least $450 at the lowest conceivable grade it could get.
On the opposing side, I would not recommend grading most brand-new items as they have not yet proven their value in the longer term. Many of the newer toys graded today may never increase in value over the grading cost and I have seen many toys over the years that are still unable to recoup the money paid for the service. Because many collectors now save packaged toys, there are many more in circulation than have ever been in the past due to the speculation of future value. If there is the potential of significant future value, I would recommend bagging and boxing the toys separately or using temporary clamshell cases made to preserve their condition.
As for vintage toys from the 1980’s and before, if the value is significant and the grade is expected to be 80 or above, I highly recommend grading to increase the value. It makes buyers more comfortable with their purchase of a graded item and its confirmed condition. Of course, these are general guidelines and there are many situations where exceptions would be made….
…Yet the envelope’s contents turned out to be rather curious. There are several labeled items, apparently intended for a museum of the War Department that Townsend was trying to develop after the Civil War. Along with a piece of a British flag captured in 1781 at Yorktown and a length of red tape used by Confederate President Jefferson Davis during his detention at Fortress Monroe, there was a spool of thread wrapped in a piece of paper.
Spools like this were found in the numerous sewing kits (known as “housewives”) carried by U.S. soldiers. But it was the wrapper that caught my eye. It contained a typescript message dated 1861—several years before the typewriter was invented. A note written in Townsend’s hand along the bottom of the page read: “Sent this way to pass thru rebel lines. Message in spool of thread from one Union officer to another.”
I peered into the hole of the spool. Sure enough, inside was what appeared to be a tightly rolled piece of paper. I immediately contacted The Huntington’s superb conservation lab, where project conservator Cynthia Kapteyn managed to extract the paper and smooth it out. (You can watch a video of the extraction here.) The unrolled page revealed a handwritten message, hastily scribbled in pencil. The text matched the typed transcription.
The humble spool and the grubby note shed new light on the dramatic events that unfolded shortly after the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860….
(9) WORLDCON IN MEMORIAM CHANGES PLATFORMS. Steven H Silver announced that he’s moved the Worldcon In Memoriam account from Twitter (theoretically known as X) to Bluesky. Please can follow it at “Worldcon In Memoriam” (@wcinmemoriam.bsky.social).
(10) TONY BENOUN OBITUARY. Twenty-five year LASFS member Tony Benoun died January 18 after a long illness. He was active in Doctor Who fandom and helped found the Gallifrey One convention as Shaun Lyon recalls in his tribute “Tony Benoun remembered by Gallifrey One”.
Throughout the year 1988, following the Doctor Who Traveling Exhibition’s visit to Los Angeles the prior October, scarcely a month went by at the meetings of our local Doctor Who club, the Time Meddlers of Los Angeles, without someone giving voice to the idea that we should run a convention of our own. Tony Benoun was one of those loud and frequent voices in 1988, clamoring for us to step up to the plate and run our own event. He’d been part of Los Angeles Doctor Who fandom since the early 1980s, as part of the Chancellory Guard fan group; had participated in phone banking at KCET during Doctor Who pledge breaks; and had worked many other events, including as security for Creation Conventions. Tony was right with us in early 1989 when our club at large decided to move forward with the dream that would become Gallifrey One; he was with us in 1990, when that dream became reality; and he was with us ever since, as Gallifrey One persists through to this day.
As one of the longest-serving members of the Gallifrey One staff –and one of the few of us still left from those early days — Tony had been co-lead of what we’ve always called our Special Projects division: working on (and selling) our convention merchandise, T-shirts, tote bags, playing cards, stickers and more; supervising the moving and maintenance of our homegrown TARDIS for many years (he was part of a small group that created it, a group we’ve always referred to with a wink as the TARDIS Movers Union Local 42)….
He is survived by his wife Sherri, another member of the Gallifrey One team, and innumerable friends.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born February 6, 1922 — Patrick Macnee. (Died 2015.) So let’s talk about Patrick Macnee. Even the character of Patrick Macnee as John Steed in The Avengers is more complicated than we generally think of him. Steed started as a rougher agent than the gentleman he would become during the Gale and Peel eras.
His dress as Dr. David Keel’s sidekick was a trenchcoat and suit, though the famous bowler hat and umbrella showed up very occasionally part way through the first series.
The gentleman agent in look and manner came to be in the second series when the actor who played Keel quit to pursue a film career. Once Macnee was promoted to star he adapted permanently that Saville Row suit and bowler hat with the sword cane look that he’d keep for the entire series and the New Avengers as well.
So what else do I find interesting about his career? (My way of saying don’t expect me to cover everything he did here.)
Now you might well guess the first role I’ll single out.
He may, and I say may deliberately, played Holmes twice in two television films, The Hound of London and Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Temporal Nexus. The latter may or may not exist as commenters online say they cannot actually find this case of paranormal murders and extraterrestrials. Holmes meets War of the Worlds? Surely in those nearly one and fifty films involving him, that been done, hasn’t it? Or not.
Of his Watson performances, more is certain. He played him three times: once alongside Roger Moore’s Sherlock Holmes in these television films: Sherlock Holmes in New York, and then twice with Christopher Lee, first in Sherlock Holmesand the Leading Lady, and then in Incident at Victoria Falls.
He sort of plays him a fourth time. He appeared in Magnum, P.I. as, what else?, a retired British agent who suffered from the delusion that he was Sherlock Holmes, in the episode titled “Holmes”.
What next? In a one-off, he took over Leo G. Carroll’s role as the head of U.N.C.L.E. as Sir John Raleigh in Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair. Anyone see this?
He’s in A View to Kill as Sir Godfrey Tibbett, a Roger Moore Bond film, as a horse trainer who helps him infiltrate Zorin’s chateau and stables.
Since everyone it seems showed up on this series, it probably won’t surprise you I that he was on Columbo in the “Troubled Waters” where he’s Capt. Gibbon. They filmed it on a real cruise ship, called the Sun Princess at the time. It was later sold many times and renamed Ocean Dream finally. It was abandoned off the coast of Thailand and sank there. Don’t you love my trivia?
Finally, I think, he appeared on Broadway as the star of Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth in the early seventies. He then headlined the national tour of that play.
No, I forgot an appearance I wanted to note. My bad. He appeared on The Twilight Zone in “Judgement Night”. There he played the First Officer on the S.S. Queen of Glasgow, a cargo carrier, headed out on London to New York with a passenger with no memory but a feeling that something very bad will happen.
I’m going now. Really I am.
(12) COMICS SECTION.
Annie incorporates a reference to an old Galaxy Magazine pardner.
(13) EGYPTIAN GRAPHIC STORIES. Hear about “Cairo in comics” in The Documentary at BBC Sounds.
Modern Cairo is a crowded metropolis. The city’s ‘thousand minarets’ are now dwarfed by a new skyline of slick tower blocks. Modern highways fly over bustling kiosks where residents gather to smoke and buy soda drinks.
Inspired by the lives of their neighbours, playing out among mosques, high rise buildings and on busy streets, Egyptian writers and graphic artists, including Deena Mohamed, Shennawy and Mohamed Wahba bring their thousand-year-old capital to life. They tell the stories behind their own books and comics – Tok Tok, Shubeik Lubeik, and A Bird’s Eye View over Cairo. And how today, the city’s dedicated festival Cairo Comix has become an annual destination for artists and fans from around the world.
(14) FROM SPACE COWBOY BOOKS. Released on February 4: Another Time: An Anthology of Time Travel Stories 1942-1960 edited by Jean-Paul L. Garnier.
The nature of time has forever perplexed humankind. Add the many ripe paradoxes of time travel and the situation gets complicated. While science has shown us that time travel is technically possible, at least on paper, we still know little about what time actually is, or our place within it. Science fiction has long explored this theme and it has become one of the cornerstones of the genre. In this collection of stories, we find visions of what time travel could be, what could go wrong, and dive headlong into the paradoxical nature of what it might entail. Tales ranging from 1942 to 1960 bring us into these mysterious worlds and provide a window into what the writers of this era grappled with when exploring time and the possibilities of traveling within the fourth dimension. Readers will also delight in traversing another time in literature, with stories that first appeared in Worlds of IF, Astonishing Stories, Galaxy Magazine, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories, and Imagination Stories of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
With stories by:
C. Shook
Darius John Granger
Evelyn E. Smith,
Sylvia Jacobs
Rog Phillips
Miriam Allen deFord
Anthony Boucher
Henry Kuttner
Alfred Bester
With an introduction by Dr. Phoenix Alexander. Original cover art by Zara Kand. Get your copy at Bookshop.org.
Constellation Premiere date: Wednesday, February 21 A new, eight-part conspiracy-based psychological thriller starring Noomi Rapace and Emmy Award nominee Jonathan Banks that will premiere globally on Wednesday, February 21, 2024 with the first three episodes, followed by one episode weekly, every Wednesday through March 27 on Apple TV+.
Created and written by Peter Harness, “Constellation” stars Rapace as Jo – an astronaut who returns to Earth after a disaster in space – only to discover that key pieces of her life seem to be missing. The action-packed space adventure is an exploration of the dark edges of human psychology, and one woman’s desperate quest to expose the truth about the hidden history of space travel and recover all that she has lost. The series also stars James D’Arcy, Julian Looman, Will Catlett, Barbara Sukowa, and introduces Rosie and Davina Coleman as Alice.
“Constellation” is directed by Emmy Award winner Michelle MacLaren, Oscar nominee Oliver Hirschbiegel and Oscar nominee Joseph Cedar. Produced by Turbine Studios and Haut et Court TV, the series is executive produced by David Tanner, Tracey Scoffield, Caroline Benjo, Simon Arnal, Carole Scotta and Justin Thomson. MacLaren directs the first two episodes and executive produces the series with Rebecca Hobbs and co-executive producer Jahan Lopes for MacLaren Entertainment. Harness executive produces through Haunted Barn Ltd. The series was shot principally in Germany and was series produced by Daniel Hetzer for Turbine Studios, Germany…
Dark Matter Premiere date: Wednesday, May 8
Dark Matter is a sci-fi thriller series based on the blockbuster book by acclaimed, bestselling author Blake Crouch. The nine-episode series features an ensemble cast that includes Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Connelly, Alice Braga, Jimmi Simpson, Dayo Okeniyi and Oakes Fegley. Dark Matter makes its global debut on Apple TV+ on May 8, 2024, premiering with the first two episodes, followed by new episodes every Wednesday through June 26.
Hailed as one of the best sci-fi novels of the decade, Dark Matter is a story about the road not taken. The series will follow Jason Dessen (played by Edgerton), a physicist, professor, and family man who — one night while walking home on the streets of Chicago — is abducted into an alternate version of his life. Wonder quickly turns to nightmare when he tries to return to his reality amid the mind-bending landscapeof lives he could have lived. In this labyrinth of realities, he embarks on a harrowing journey to get back to his true family and save them from the most terrifying, unbeatable foe imaginable: himself.
Crouch serves as executive producer, showrunner, and writer alongside executive producers Matt Tolmach and David Manpearl for Matt Tolmach Productions, and Joel Edgerton. Dark Matter” is produced for Apple TV+ by Sony Pictures Television.
An excellent guide to Middle-earth and the Undying Lands, including vivid descriptions of all Tolkien’s beasts, monsters, races, nations, deities, and the flora and fauna of the territory. Full-color pages with stunning illustrations create an enchanting source for information on all the fantastical places and creatures that sprung from Tolkien’s mind….
Doctors and researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the UMD Institute for Health Computing and the VA Maryland Healthcare System are concerned that large language models summarizing clinical data could meet the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s device-exemption criteria and could cause patient harm.
WHY IT MATTERS
Artificial intelligence that summarizes clinical notes, medications and other patient data without FDA oversight will soon reach patients, doctors and researchers said in a new viewpoint published Monday on the JAMA Network.
They analyzed FDA’s final guidance on clinical decision support software. The agency has interpreted it as involving “time-critical” decision-making as a regulated device function, and that could include LLM generation of a clinical summary, the authors said.
Published about two months before ChatGPT’s release, the researchers said the guidance “provides an unintentional ‘roadmap’ for how LLMs could avoid FDA regulation.”
Generative AI will change everyday clinical tasks. It has earned a great deal of attention for its promise to reduce physician and nurse burnout, and to improve healthcare operational efficiencies, but LLMs that summarize clinical notes, medications and other forms of patient data “could exert important and unpredictable effects on clinician decision-making,” the researchers said.
They conducted tests using ChatGPT and anonymized patient record data, and examined the summarization outputs, concluding, that results raise questions that go beyond “accuracy.”
“In the clinical context, sycophantic summaries could accentuate or otherwise emphasize facts that comport with clinicians’ preexisting suspicions, risking a confirmation bias that could increase diagnostic error,” they said.
…However, it’s a dystopian danger that generally arises “when LLMs tailor responses to perceived user expectations” and become virtual AI yes-men to clinicians.
“Like the behavior of an eager personal assistant.”…
(18) A BIT SHY OF THE MARK. Damien G. Walter’s history “The war for the Hugo awards” begins by saying that the first Hugo Awards (1953) were “so small scale that no plans were made to run them again.” Although the runners of the 1954 Worldcon didn’t give them, Ben Jason, who was instrumental in resuming the Hugos in 1955 (see “The Twice-Invented Hugos”) told me that the people who created the awards intended them to be annual. So that’s Walter taking a bit of literary license. You’ll have to check to see how closely the rest of his video hews to history.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Lise Andreasen, Kathy Sullivan, John Hertz, Daniel Dern, Steven H Silver, Michael J. Walsh, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
(1) 1632 AT FANTASCI. The first 1632Con from 1632 & Beyond will be at FantaSci in Raleigh-Durham, NC from April 19-21. Kevin Ikenberry, author of the Assiti Shards book The Crossing, is one of the con’s Special Guests. Bjorn Hasseler, Bethanne Kim, and Chuck Thompson will all be there, as will other authors from the series.
Fred Chappell (born 28 May 1936/died 4 January 2024) and Robert Silverberg (born 15 January 1935) were teenaged fantastic-fiction fans in 1952, but were already showing some promise of the kind of writers (and editors) they would soon and continue to become…both had discovered the fiction magazines, among other reading, that would help shape a notable part of both their careers, and were involved in the (somewhat!) organized fantasy/sf/horror-fiction-fandom culture of the late ’40s and early ’50s…so much so that three issues of young New Yorker Silverberg’s fanzine (or amateur magazine meant for other fans and any other interested parties) Spaceship (first published by Silverberg in 1949) would each offer one of three vignettes from young Canton, North Carolina resident Fred Chappell, in Starship’s 4/52, 4/53 and 10/53 issues….
(3) IN MEMORIAM LIST. “In Memoriam: 2023”, Steven H Silver’s compilation of sff figures who died last year, has been posted at Amazing Stories.
(4) FOLLOW THE MONEY. Jason Sanford’s “Genre Grapevine for January 2024” at Patreon about the Hugo controversy and other news is a free read.
… And here’s a great reason why all this drama likely happened in the first place: MONEY!
According to China.org.cn, “Investment deals valued at approximately $1.09 billion were signed during the 81st World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) held in Chengdu, Sichuan province, last week at its inaugural industrial development summit, marking significant progress in the advancement of sci-fi development in China. The deals included 21 sci-fi industry projects involving companies that produce films, parks, and immersive sci-fi experiences. Others were related to the development of melodramas, games, and the metaverse. Additionally, various service platforms for sci-fi franchise incubation projects and sci-fi cultural and creative funds will be developed.”
As Charles Stross wrote, “That’s a metric fuckton of moolah in play, and it would totally account for the fan-run convention folks being discreetly elbowed out of the way and the entire event being stage-managed as a backdrop for a major industrial event to bootstrap creative industries (film, TV, and games) in Chengdu. And—looking for the most charitable interpretation here—the hapless western WSFS people being carried along for the ride to provide a veneer of worldcon-ness to what was basically Chinese venture capital hijacking the event and then sanitizing it politically.”…
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit from the Walt Disney Co. against Ron DeSantis that may decide the entertainment giant’s authority to control development around its sprawling theme park.
U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor, in an order issued on Wednesday, found Disney “lacks standing to sue the governor” and DeSantis’ handpicked board that now controls the district in which the company’s park operates. He concluded that the statute reshaping the leadership structure and granting the governor the authority to appoint every member of the tax district’s governing body is “facially constitutional” and cannot be challenged with a free speech claim….
U.S.-based visual effects artists who help bring James Cameron’sAvatar epics to life have voted to unionize in a National Labor Relations Board election.
Of an eligible 88 workers at Walt Disney Studios subsidiary TCF US Productions 27, Inc. who assist with productions for Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment, 57 voted to join the union and 19 voted against, while two ballots were void. These workers include creatures costume leads and environment artists as well as others in the stage, environments, render, post viz, sequence, turn over and kabuki departments…
A strike has been averted atThe Onionand several of its sister publications, at least for now.
Hours before their current labor agreement was set to expire, The Onion union — representing staffers at The Onion, Onion Labs, The A.V. Club, Deadspin and The Takeout — reached a tentative deal on a new contract with owners G/O Media. According to union, affiliated with the Writers Guild of America East, the new agreement “made important gains in wages and workplace protections.” No other details were immediately available.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 31, 1934 — Gene DeWeese. (Died 2012.) This Scroll I’m looking at a writer this I’ve never heard of before, Gene DeWeese. He was a member of fandom, and his stories were published in fanzines such as The Chigger Patch of Fandom, Fan-Fare and Yandro. He was a member of the Eastern Indiana Science Fiction Association and the Midwest Nomads. Fancyclopedia notes, “He tried to attend Midwestcon 4 in 1953 with his friends Bev Clark and Buck Coulson, but left when she wasn’t permitted in due to Beatley’s Hotel’s racist Jim Crow policy.”
Gene DeWeese
His first professional novels appeared in the Sixties, a Man from U.N.C.L.E. book co-written with Robert “Buck” Coulson under the name Thomas Stratton, The Invisibility Affair. They would do one more book in this continuity, The Mind-Twisters Affair.
(I do wish that these, like so many works of that era, had become digital publications. They didn’t obviously.)
In the Seventies he and Coulson wrote under their own names two novels set in fandom, Now You See It/Him/Them… and Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats.
Most of us remember DeWeese for his Trek novels which is interesting as they were written later in his career. The four that are set in the original continuity were written the Eighties onward, all by him except one he wrote with Margaret Wander Bonanno and Diane Duane. He also wrote three set in the Next Generation continuity as well.
What else did he do? There’s Dinotopia novels, something I swear exists by the dozens even if they don’t. I think. And one in the Lost in Space continuity as well.
What’s more interesting is the series that I’ve never heard of. The Black Suits from Outer Space YA trilogy involves, well, Men (possibly) in Black, plucky teenagers, spaceships, aliens (some cute, some not) and nothing terrible challenging. Fun is the best word to describe them.
He wrote two novels in the Birthstone Gothic series which as near as I can tell is the standard cookie cutter gothic mansion pulpish series with no redeeming alue ehat-so-ever that a writer would do because, well, there’s money there. (The reviewers on Goodreads admit that they were really, really horrible. In an entertaining way.)
He wrote three novels in the Ravenloft continuity, a campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. I just got the giggles, errr, laughs reading the summary of that module, but then I never played fantasy RPGs, just SF ones like the Traveller RPG. What a fantastic RPG that was!
There’s still a lot of other novels that I’ve not mentioned and quite a bit of short stories (none collected).
(10) ENDLESS TROUBLES. Artist Colleen Doran tells how the sky fell on her after she agreed to adapt Good Omens: “Great Big Good Omens Graphic Novel Update”. You think Job had it bad?
Anyway, as a long time Good Omens novel fan, you may imagine how thrilled I was to get picked to adapt the graphic novel.
This is quite a task, I have to say, especially since I was originally going to just draw (and color) it, but I ended up writing the adaptation as well. Tricky to fit a 400 page novel into a 160-ish page graphic novel, especially when so much of the humor is dependent on the language, and not necessarily on the visuals.
Not complainin’, just sayin’.
Anyway, I started out the gate like a herd of turtles, because right away I got COVID which knocked me on my butt.
And COVID brain fog? That’s a thing. I already struggle with brain fog due to autoimmune disease, and COVID made it worse.
Not complainin’ just sayin’.
This set a few of the assignments on my plate back, which pushed starting Good Omens back.
But hey, big fat lead time! No worries!
Then my computer crawled toward the grave….
(11) COME LIVE THAT DAY ALL OVER AGAIN. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Groundhog Day cast members will reunite in Chicago on February 2 to celebrate the life and career of director Harold Ramis.
The reunion will feature an immersive experience inspired by the 1993 film, as well as iconic costumes, props and set pieces.
According to the release (per Harry Caray’s Tavern), nine Groundhog Day actors are expected to show up at Harry Caray’s Tavern, Navy Pier, on Friday, February 2. Unfortunately, the movie’s two leads, Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, were not listed among those expected to appear. Given Murray’s love of Chicago Cubs baseball, though, he could pop in as a surprise guest, but that’s not been confirmed. However, Stephen Tobolowsky, the actor who played the unforgettable insurance salesman, Ned Ryerson, will be in attendance.
Joining Tobolowsky is another prominent cast member, Bill Murray’s brother, Brian Doyle-Murray (the mayor who almost chokes to death). Marita Geraghty (Nancy Taylor — the woman who makes noises like a chipmunk when she gets “real excited”), Robin Duke (Doris the waitress), Ken Hudson Campbell (the hotel guest who says “ciao”), David Pasquesi (the psychiatrist who asks if Murray’s character can come back tomorrow), Peggy Roeder (Phil Connors’ piano teacher), Richard Henzel (DJ) and Don Rio McNichols (drummer) are all scheduled to show up at Harry Caray’s Tavern. And fans can check out one of Phil Connors (Murray) and Ned Ryerson’s memorable scenes (below) to whet their appetities:
Chef Art Smith’s Reunion, located right next door to Harry Caray’s Tavern, will be playing Groundhog Day on their monitors and treating guests to a complimentary taste of their signature Punxsutawney Punch which will be available for purchase all day. Additional offerings include a GREAT Instagrammable moment where guests can take their pic being a groundhog. Make sure you say the line “I had groundhog for lunch, tastes like chicken” to get dessert comped on the house! Click below to make a reservation.
“Webb’s new images are extraordinary,” said Janice Lee, a project scientist for strategic initiatives at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “They’re mind-blowing even for researchers who have studied these same galaxies for decades. Bubbles and filaments are resolved down to the smallest scales ever observed, and tell a story about the star formation cycle.”
… Something else that amazed astronomers? Webb’s images show large, spherical shells in the gas and dust. “These holes may have been created by one or more stars that exploded, carving out giant holes in the interstellar material,” explained Adam Leroy, a professor of astronomy at the Ohio State University in Columbus.
Now, trace the spiral arms to find extended regions of gas that appear red and orange. “These structures tend to follow the same pattern in certain parts of the galaxies,” Rosolowsky added. “We think of these like waves, and their spacing tells us a lot about how a galaxy distributes its gas and dust.” Study of these structures will provide key insights about how galaxies build, maintain, and shut off star formation….
(13) DOUBLE DIP. Two new trailers for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, coming to movie theaters March 22. This is the US trailer:
This is the international trailer, which reportedly includes some different footage.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Steven H Silver, Kathy Sullivan, Todd Mason, Daniel Dern, Dariensync, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]
