(1) 2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD SHORTLIST. Publishers Weekly has shared the 2025 National Book Award Finalists.

Of genre interest are at least one of the Fiction works, The Antidote by Karen Russell, and two of the Translated Literature works, On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, and We Computers: A Ghazal Novel by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega.

Fiction

• The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine (Grove)
• A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Knopf)
• The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf)
• North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford (A Strange Object)
• Palaver by Bryan Washington (FSG)

Nonfiction

• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Knopf)
• Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe (Ecco)
• Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li (FSG)
• Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care by Claudia Rowe (Abrams)
• When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World by Jordan Thomas (Riverhead)

Poetry

• The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (Copper Canyon)
• Becoming Ghost by Cathy Linh Che (Washington Square)
• Scorched Earth by Tiana Clark (Washington Square)
• I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken (Copper Canyon)
• The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith (Scribner)

Translated Literature

• On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (New Directions)
• We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (New Directions)
• The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, translated from the Dutch by David McKay (New Vessel)
• We Computers: A Ghazal Novel by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega (Yale)
• Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer (Seven Stories)

The winners will be announced on November 19. Winners receive $10,000, a bronze medal, and statue; Finalists receive $1,000 and a bronze medal; Winners and Finalists in the Translated Literature category will split the prize evenly between author and translator.

Two lifetime achievement awards will also be presented as part of the evening’s ceremony: George Saunders, writer and professor, will be recognized with the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; and Roxane Gay, author and cultural critic, will receive the Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

(2) ASU CSI BOOK LAUNCH. The Center for Science and the Imagination today announced the publication of Sound Systems, a book of speculative fiction, nonfiction, and art exploring possible futures for the symphony orchestra. The book features, among other things, original short stories by Karen Lord, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Amy K. Nichols, and Ernest Hogan. The book is free to read and download across a variety of digital formats. (You’ll find a more thorough description and full list of contributors at the link above.)

To celebrate the publication, they are hosting a virtual launch event on Monday, October 27 from 2:00-3:00 pm Eastern time. The event will feature conversations with several contributors from the book: composer, multimedia artist, and writer Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky); speculative fiction author Deji Bryce Olukotun; violist, songwriter, and music educator Ashley Lauren Frith; clarinetist and arts leader Alex Laing; and Ed Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination. The event is free and open to everyone.

Register for the virtual launch event at this link.

(3) AI EVOLUTION. Christopher Beam tells WIRED readers that “The Future of AI Isn’t Just Slop”. (Article is behind a paywall, though visible to users of the Apple News app.)

THE FILMMAKER COULD not get Tiggy the alien to cooperate. He just needed the glistening brown creature to turn its head. But Tiggy, who was sitting in the passenger’s seat of a cop car, kept disobeying. At first Tiggy rotated his gaze only slightly. Then he looked to the wrong side of the camera. Then his skin turned splotchy, like an overripe fruit.

The filmmaker was not on a movie set, or Mars. He was sitting at his home computer in Los Angeles using a piece of AI software called FLUX Kontext to generate and regenerate images of the alien, waiting for a workable one to appear. He’d used a different AI tool, Midjourney, to generate the very first image of Tiggy (prompt: “fat blob alien with a tiny mouth and tiny lips”); one called ElevenLabs to create the timbre of Tiggy’s voice (the filmmaker’s voice overlaid with a synthetic one, then pitch-shifted way up); and yet another called Runway to describe the precise shot he wanted in this scene (“close up on the little alien as they ride in the passenger seat, shallow depth of field”).

The AI kept getting things wrong. In one shot, Tiggy looked inexplicably jacked. In another, his back was too dry. When the filmmaker told one piece of software to give the back of Tiggy’s head “frog-like skin,” it superimposed an entire frog’s face. The AI seemed to resist depicting Tiggy naked, but Tiggy does not wear clothes. When the director asked for a “short shirtless alien,” he got an error message, presumably because of the tool’s safeguards. “Because I said the word shirtless,” he guessed.

Narratives around AI tend to be all-or-nothing: Either we’re cooked or it’s all hype. Watching the filmmaker work with AI software—morning iced coffee in hand, brown hair and beard lightly unkempt—is quirkier and less dramatic than all that. It’s like dropping in on puppy school. The tools keep ignoring instructions, making odd choices, or veering entirely off-course. But with care and patience, he reins them in, eventually coaxing out eight minutes of densely scripted original TV.

In this case, those eight minutes constituted the latest episode in the sci-fi cinematic universe that the filmmaker has created under the name Neural Viz. The project started in 2024 with a mockumentary web series called Unanswered Oddities, a talking-head TV show from a future where the Earth is inhabited by creatures called glurons, who engage in Ancient Aliens–style speculation about their human predecessors. Each episode explores a different (and badly mispronounced) aspect of “hooman” civilization, like America, exercise, or the NFL. At first it seemed like a funny, self-contained bit.

But then the universe, known as the Monoverse, started to expand. Neural Viz churned out episodes of different series from the same gluron TV network, Monovision: a documentary cop show, a UFC-style show about fighting bugs. Then came podcasts, street interviews. Subplots and arcs started to emerge between videos, with romances forming, religious cults lurking in the background, and grainy archival footage surfacing about the true circumstances that wiped out humanity. Before long, the filmmaker had built an entire world with its own language, characters, and lore, all of it made with AI.

Neural Viz became a cult hit—a favorite of Redditors and AI nerds on Twitter—then a hit-hit, with individual videos racking up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and millions on TikTok and Instagram.

But beyond any measures of popularity, Neural Viz counts as a historic accomplishment: It is among the first pieces of AI filmmaking that truly does not suck…

(4) WAILING IN WALES. “Doctor Who boss Russell T Davies warns of ‘censorship’ after BAFTA win” – Radio Times has quotes.

Russell T Davies, the current showrunner of Doctor Who and writer behind dramas like Queer as Folk, It’s a Sin and Years and Years, has warned about the perils of censorship in the current climate.

Davies was presented with the award for Outstanding Contribution to Television at last night’s BAFTA Cymru Awards ceremony. In his acceptance speech, he spoke about how greater compliance requirements mean writers start censoring themselves.

“When times get tough, TV gets timid,” Davies warned in his fiery speech. “And you all know how hard it is to deal with compliance. And I’m not blaming the people in compliance, they work very hard and have a tough job to do.

“I do blame their bosses for getting scared. And I can feel it, I’ve literally had experience of this.”

He added: “The compliance is getting tough, ‘You can’t say this, you can’t say that, you have to balance it’. No, you don’t have to f*****g balance it, you can just be strong and say what you want. And I think then, that is where censorship creeps in. The censorship isn’t the government, isn’t the authorities, it’s in us.

“We sit there and say, ‘Oh they won’t like that. Oh, you can’t do that, you can’t say that.’ And then the worst form of censorship of all comes in at home.

“Where the writers – and I don’t just mean drama, I mean writers whether in children’s or factual or documentaries, entertainment, where those creators sit there saying, ‘I can’t write that. They won’t like that, they won’t accept that, they won’t make that.’

“And that is the worst form of censorship that exists because it censors an idea before it’s ever been shown to someone.”

Davies’s speech, which was posted on Instagram, continued: “So now, with the danger that’s coming towards us, indisputably coming towards us, we now need a world in which the BBC stands for ‘Big Balls Corporation’.

(5) 2025 NOBEL PRIZE FOR PHYSICS. [Item by Steven French.] After last year’s controversy, the Nobel Prize committee have acknowledged the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology with an award for demonstrating quantum tunnelling (responsible for radioactive decay) at the macroscopic level:“Groundbreaking quantum-tunnelling experiments win physics Nobel” reports Nature.

Three physicists have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating quantum physics on the macroscopic scale.

The research, including into the bizarre phenomena of quantum tunnelling and quantum superposition, has helped to underpin some of today’s most advanced quantum computers. 

John Clarke at the University of California, Berkeley, Michel Devoret at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and John Martinis, also of USCB will share the prize of 11-million Swedish kronor (US$1.2 million), announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 7 October. 

“I am completely stunned; it had never occurred to me in any way that this might be the basis for a Nobel prize,” said Clarke…

…The foundations of quantum mechanics were laid down 100 years ago. But many of its strange implications have taken decades to unravel.

One is the phenomenon of quantum tunnelling — the ability of particles to pass straight through a barrier that shouldn’t be possible according to classical physics, given its energy. Tunnelling explains radioactive decay, in which, despite being confined inside an atom, an alpha particle still has a small probability of escaping the nucleus. Another is quantum superposition, in which an object can exist simultaneously in two states.

Both tunnelling and superposition were known at the atomic scale but hadn’t been observed in macroscopic systems. In the late 1970s, Anthony Leggett, who won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theoretical work on superconductors, asked whether the phenomena would be observable at the macroscopic scale using superconducting circuits — loops of wire which, when chilled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, can conduct electricity without resistance¹.

“We took the question very seriously — would quantum mechanics be obeyed by these large systems? And we thought very carefully how we would prove that,” Martinis recalls. In the 1980s, Clarke, Devoret and Martinis, working at Berkeley, were among those exploring quantum effects in superconducting loops². The trio set up an experiment in which two superconductors were separated by a thin barrier, known as a Josephson junction³. In this state, a supercurrent can flow with zero resistance, like a river that runs without friction — but also with zero voltage, so without a downhill gradient that gives the current a push. In classical physics, the system would stay stuck like this, unless given enough energy to escape.

By carefully monitoring the system, and slowly increasing the current, Clarke, Devoret and Martinis showed that the entire tiny circuit could break out into a higher energy state — by quantum tunnelling, which they observed by measuring a voltage spike. Yasunobu Nakamura, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, says that it still came as a surprise to many that quantum mechanics could manifest itself at such large scales.

“They are really pioneers of this field,” says Nakamura, who in the late 1990s became the first physicist to demonstrate a superconducting qubit bit or ‘qubit’ using a similar principle…

(6) ABOUT BOILERPLATE. Richard Curtis tells followers how “boilerplate” contract language can have consequences in “Pay Or Play” – by Richard Curtis – Inside Agenting (substack.com) at Inside Agenting.

As I recently wrote, ninety-nine percent of all book contract boilerplate language is immutable, and agents take most of it for granted. We usually just eyeball it, then focus on negotiable terms like advance and royalties, language and territory, movie and audio rights. So, it’s hard to imagine that a simple and unpretentious boilerplate phrase – indeed, a single word – could be the battleground for a gripping courtroom clash of titans played out before a rapt television audience. But that is just what happened in February 1996, when you would have found my wife and me and countless other denizens of the publishing industry glued to the Court TV channel, transfixed by the public spectacle of a publisher suing an author.

The plaintiff was colossus Random House, the defendant the glamorous and iconic television actress and author Joan Collins. The field on which Random House, Inc. v. Collins was fought was New York State’s Supreme Court. The issue was this: Random House had negotiated a two-novel contract with Collins’s agent for advances totaling $4 million. The author had turned the books in to her editors. However, in the words of Mary B. W. Tabor in the New York Times, the publisher found them “redundant, incoherent and incomplete.” Tabor was being kind.

Random not only refused to pay Collins the $2.8 million balance of her advance but demanded refund of the $1.2 million down-payment issued on signing of the agreement. Collins countersued to keep the initial payment and make Random pay the remainder of her $4 million book deal.

Random’s case was founded upon the “satisfactory performance” provision of their contract with Collins. Although the language of such clauses differs from one publisher to another, in essence they all state that in order to receive full and final compensation, the author must turn in a complete manuscript that is satisfactory in the sole discretion of the publisher.

It may justly be said that the satisfactory performance provision is the bedrock of every pact between publishers and authors. However, if anyone wished to challenge it they could seize on ambiguous terms like “satisfactory” and “discretion” and dispute a publisher’s rejection of their book. And though the word “complete” seems straightforward enough, in this case it was a critical factor in the resolution of this bitterly fought case and the fulcrum on which a verdict teetered….

(7) TERRY A. GAREY (1948-2025). Author and poet Terry A. Garey died October 6 at the age of 77.

Garey twice won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award in the Long Poem category – for “Spotting UFOs While Canning Tomatoes ” (Serve It Forth: Cooking With Anne McCaffrey) (1997), and for “The Cat Star” (Lady Poetesses from Hell) (2013).

A collection of her work, The Cat Star and Other Poems, came out in 2022. She edited the anthologies Time Gum and Other Poems from the Minicon Poetry Readings (1988, with Eleanor Arnason), and Time Frames: A Speculative Poetry Anthology (1991).  She wrote a nonfiction book on The Joy of Home Winemaking (1996).

Living in Minneapolis, she was a member of Minn-Stf, and of The Workshop, The Lady Poetesses from Hell, and War. She was Official Editor of the feminist apa Spinoff.

Garey was married to fellow fan Denny Lien from 1984 until his death in 2023.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Demolition Man (1993)

So what’s Sylvester Stallone’s perfect film? Without any doubt at all, that’d be Demolition Man which came out thirty-two years ago this month. It is a film that I saw first at the cinema on a proper full screen and I think have watched at least a half dozen times since. 

It’s that ever so rare screenplay written by committee that I like, as it had three hands in the writing of it — Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau and Peter M. Lenkov. Waters had just written Batman Returns and had earlier received an Edgar for Heathers, Reneau had for genre just an episode of Tales from the Crypt, and Lenkov hadn’t done anything notable yet though much later he make his mark as a rebooter of, well everything — McGyver, Hawaii 5-0 and even Magnum PI got so done by him. 

The latter is truly awful as is the first one though the second is kind of, well, actually it’s crap as well. Never mess with classics. 

It was, weirdly, directed by Marco Brambilla, an Italian-born Canadian contemporary artist and film director, known for re-contextualizations of popular and found imagery. The design here certainly isn’t the draw, it’s the performers. 

Huh? 

Now for the film itself.

SHALL I MAKE THIS SPOILERS? I THINK NOT. 

Stallone played a cop thawed out (shades of Niven) to capture an escaped criminal who originally had been frozen when he was. They both wind up in what is considered a utopia, the city of San Angeles. Like all utopian undertakings, it really isn’t. 

I loved the absolute deadpan way Stallone deals with everything odd there from the lack of toilet paper to discovering sex has been replaced by virtual experiences. He would have made an absolute spot-on Dredd. (Oh, wait!)

Let’s not forget the other casting here. Wesley Snipes gives one of the best performances of his career as Simon Phoenix, and I completely adore Sandra Bullock as Lieutenant Lenina Huxley. 

Her character was named after Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, and Lenina Crowne, a character in the novel.

The studio refused to say how much it cost but estimates say somewhere between fifty and seventy-five million. It did exceedingly well at the box office making at least one hundred and seventy million.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal explains beyond.
• Bizarro goes incognito. 
• Free Range found the entrance.
• Mother Goose and Grimm asks the question. 
• Non Sequitur is there for the beginning. 
• The Argyle Sweater discovers the abbreviation is news to some. 

(10) REVIVAL OF DOCTOR WHO TRADING CARD GAME. “Heathside Trading and BBC announce return of Doctor Who TCG” – Toy World Magazine has the story.

Heathside Trading and BBC Studios have announced a new agreement to bring back the wildly popular Doctor Who trading card game, Battles in Time.

Originally launched in 2006, the game became a fan favourite before ceasing production in 2009. Now, in time for its 20th anniversary, Heathside will relaunch the original game alongside new lines designed to fit seamlessly into any Whovian’s collection….

… The new range will debut in 2026 on MasterReplicas.com, with products launching for preorder throughout the year….

(11) PADDINGTON SAID #%@!! …And a few other naughty things. “Paddington Lawsuit: StudioCanal Sues Avalon Over ‘Spitting Image’” – Deadline speculates about the cause of the suit.

“Things are always happening to me. I’m that sort of bear.”

Those are the famous words of Michael Bond’s beloved children’s creation, Paddington Bear. But it turns out that Bond’s estate is not so keen on the latest thing to befall the marmalade-loving mammal.

StudioCanal, which produces the Paddington movies, and Paddington Bear’s rights holders are suing Avalon after the British producer’s Spitting Image series on YouTube depicted Paddington as a foul-mouthed podcast host.

Deadline can reveal that the claimants, represented by law firm Edwin Coe, have filed a High Court complaint citing copyright and design right concerns.

The filing does not reveal the particulars of the claim, but it comes months after The Rest is Bulls*!t, a sketch from Spitting Image, the BAFTA and Emmy-winning British puppet show….

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