26 How Many Pixels Does Mike Need? How Many Files, How Many Scrolls?

Posted on February 15, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) FRANKENSTEIN AND SINNERS DOMINATE ANOTHER HOLLYWOOD AWARD. The Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild Awards 2026 were presented February 14. Here are the winners of genre interest. (The complete list is at the Deadline link.)

Best Special Make-Up Prosthetics

Frankenstein (Netflix)
Mike Hill, Megan Many

Best Period and/or Character Make-Up

Sinners (Warner Bros. Pictures/HBO Max)
Ken Diaz, Siân Richards, Ned Neidhardt, Allison laCour, Lana Mora

Best Period and/or Character Hair Styling

Sinners (Warner Bros. Pictures/HBO Max)
Shunika Terry-Jennings, Elizabeth Robinson, Tene Wilder, Jove Edmond, Sherri B. Hamilton

TELEVISION SERIES – LIMITED OR MOVIE FOR TELEVISION

Best Special Make-Up Prosthetics

Stranger Things – Season 5 (Netflix)
Barrie Gower, Mike Mekash, Duncan Jarman

CHILDREN AND TEEN TELEVISION PROGRAMMING

Best Hair Styling

Skeleton Crew (Disney+)
Lane Friedman, Nanxy Tong-Heater, Richard DeAlba, Roxane Griffin

Best Make-Up

Skeleton Crew (Disney+)
Samantha Ward, Sonia Cabrera, Cristina Waltz, Alexei Dmitriew, Adina Sullivan

LIVE THEATRICAL PRODUCTIONS (LIVE STAGE)

Broadway and International: Best Make-Up and Hair Styling

Frankenstein (Segerstrom Center for the Arts)
Lisa Ruth Zomer, Thomas Richards-Keyes, Timothy Santry

California Regional: Best Make-Up and Hair Styling

The Monkey King (San Francisco Opera)
Jeanna Parham, Christina Martin, Erin Hennessy, Maur Sela

(2) ALIEN AND OTHERS. [Item by Steven French.] Although this interview with actor David Jonsson is mostly about his upcoming prison drama, Wasteman, it has a nice anecdote about delivering a classic line as the android Andy in Alien: Romulus, as well as covering his work in The Long Walk: “’Every role I do, I’m going to be a Black man first’: David Jonsson on winning Baftas, rebooting Alien and leaving TV’s hottest show” in the Guardian.

David Jonsson is the kind of actor who disappears so completely into his roles that it’s easy to forget you’re watching the same person each time. In Rye Lane, he’s a lovestruck south Londoner; in Industry, an Etonian banker with ice in his veins; in Alien: Romulus, a paranoid android. He’s now starring as heroin addict Taylor in the ultraviolent British prison drama Wasteman and, for the first time, the 32-year-old actor claims he is playing something close to himself. “This is the most personal role I’ve done,” he says. “It’s so messed up because it’s a dark story about rehabilitation and addiction, but I know these men really well. Especially when you’re growing up somewhere like where I did.”

(3) NEVER? WELL, HARDLY EVER. “’The Simpsons’ will ‘never’ have a series finale, showrunner says” – Entertainment Weekly heard it from his own lips.

Don’t expect The Simpsons to go out with a bang.

Matt Selman, a showrunner for the long-running animated sitcom, has no plans to end it as it airs its 37th season.

“We did an episode about a year and a half ago that was like a parody of the series finale,” Selman said in a new interview with The Wrap. “We jammed every possible series finale concept into one show, so that was sort of my way of saying we’re never going to do a series finale.”

He continued, “We did a series finale in the middle of the show that made fun of all the ideas of wrapping everything up or ending.”

That episode was the season 36 premiere, titled “Bart’s Birthday.” Hosted by Conan O’Brien, who served as a writer on the series before becoming a talk show host, it featured an AI service called HackGPT that generated a ridiculous finale for The Simpsons.

Selman and his team crammed a number of preposterous ideas — each of which could have hypothetically served as a series finale — into the episode, including Mr. Burns dying, Moe’s Tavern closing, Krusty ending his show, Milhouse moving to Atlanta, Principal Skinner retiring, and Maggie finally speaking….

(4) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books has released Simultaneous Times Episode 96 with work by Thomas Ha and Jenna Hanchey.

Stories featured in this episode:

“The Folded Balloon” by Thomas Ha. With music by TSG. Read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier
“Accidental Curses” by Jenna Hanchey. With music by Phog Masheeen. Read by the author

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(5) THE VIRTUES OF SAM GAMGEE. Yesterday someone celebrated Valentine’s Day by reprinting on Facebook a 2016 piece by Senator Paula Simons. Here’s an excerpt.

The other day, a bunch of us in the office, Lord of the Rings fans all, were talking about our favourite characters from the book and movie. I said when I was a girl, I loved to imagine myself as Arwen, the dark-haired Elven princess.

Arwen, for those (few) who’ve neither read the books nor seen the movie, is the heroic beauty who sacrifices her chance at immortality in order to marry her great love, Aragorn, the handsome, brooding warrior who becomes the High King of Middle-Earth.

But, as I joked with the guys here, I didn’t end up as Arwen, married to Aragorn. I grew up to be Rose Cotton, married to Sam Gamgee.

That line got a good laugh in the newsroom. Rose Cotton, you see, is no elf princess. She’s a short, plump hobbit, with a tendency to be bit bossy with her men-folk. Sam is her hobbit husband, a down-to-earth cook and gardener with hairy feet.

Most of the people I was talking to thought I was taking a shot at my husband. But in actual fact, I think I was really paying him the highest of compliments. As far as I’m concerned, Samwise Gamgee is the real hero of The Lord of the Rings, not Aragorn or Gandalf or Frodo.

Sam isn’t a warrior by training or inclination. He isn’t looking for glory or adventure.

He gets dragged into danger because of his love and loyalty for his gentle master, Frodo, the soulful hobbit who’s been given the great task of destroying the Dark Lord’s ring of evil.

As Frodo’s squire, Sam travels all the way to heart of the Dark Lord’s kingdom, battling orc-goblins, giant spiders and his own fears and frailties. He fights as bravely as any of the story’s flashier knights — more bravely, because he’s no superhero with a magic sword, just an ordinary guy overtaken by extraordinary circumstances.

But his real heroism lies in his unshakeable loyalty to his best friend, and in his unshakeable loyalty to his hobbit values, his moral code.

When all the battles and quests are over, Sam returns to his prosaic hobbit life, marrying Rose, raising kids, planting trees and nurturing the community he loves.

The problem is, our culture doesn’t validate the heroism of the Samwise Gamgees of this world. The romantic heroes every teenage girl is taught to pine for are the Byronic brooders like Aragorn.

But outside of books and movies, Aragorn-types are hard to come by. So, for that matter, are fantastically beautiful Arwen elf princesses.

No wonder so many people end up disappointed and disillusioned, hoodwinked by our cult of romantic love, which tells us that if we don’t end up with an Arwen or an Aragorn, we have failed in the game of life….

(6) PETAL TO THE METAL. Naomi Kaye extols “The Beguiling Magic of Floral Mysteries” at CrimeReads.

The exquisite, fragile beauty of flowers has certainly inspired budding (yes, pun intended) authors to pen lush prose, sentimental epithets and stunning poetry. Yet despite their evocative imagery and the scent memories they conjure up, flowers have managed to be the basis for any number of mystery, crime and thriller stories and novels over the years. Whether a series of mysteries that take place surrounding a florist shop or inspired by historic events, it’s well worth delving into the beautiful, yet dark, atmosphere of floral literary mysteries….

… In Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked brings readers back to 17th century Holland during peak tulip mania. Tulip mania was an intriguing phenomenon, generally regarded as the first historical economic bubble, in which the value of rare tulip bulbs went up to staggering highs. At one point, a single bulb of a particularly rare variety, cost more than the price of a house in a desirable Amsterdam neighborhood. Amidst this backdrop, Maguire gives readers a retelling of the Cinderella story, this time focused on one of the “ugly stepsisters,” and the father of the Cinderella character experiences financial difficulties due to tulip mania. This is a brilliant choice for those who like a side of fantastical historical fiction with their mystery reads….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 15, 1945 — Jack Dann, 81.

It’s been awhile since we’ve done an Australian resident writer, so let’s do Jack Dann tonight. Yes, I know he’s American-born but he’s lived there for the past forty years and yes he’s citizen there.

In 1994 he had moved to Melbourne to join Janeen Webb, a Melbourne based academic, SF critic, and writer, whom he had met at a conference in San Francisco and who he married a year later. Thirty years later they’re still married.

They would edit together In the Field of Fire, a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories relating to the horrors of the Vietnam War. I’m not aware who anyone else has done one on this subject, so go ahead and tell who else has.

He published his first book as an editor, Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction forty years ago, (later followed up by More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction) and his first novel, Starhiker, several years later.

His Dreaming Again and Dreaming down-under are excellent anthologies of Australian genre short fiction. The latter, edited with his wife, would win a Ditmar and a World Fantasy Award. Dreaming Again, again edited with his wife, also won a Ditmar.

With Nick Gever, he won a Shirley Jackson Award for one of my favorite reads, Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense.

He’s written roughly a hundred pieces of shorter fiction. I’ve read enough of it to say that he’s quite excellent in that length of fiction. Centipede Press released in their Masters of Science Fiction, a volume devoted to him. Thirty stories, all quite excellent.

So what is worth reading for novels beyond Starhiker which I like a lot? Well if you’ve not read it, do read The Memory Cathedral: A Secret History of Leonardo da Vinci in which de Vinci actually constructs his creations as it is indeed an amazing story.

The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean is extraordinary. All I’ll say here is Dean lived, had an amazing life and yes, it’s genre. I see PS Publishing filled out the story when they gave us Promised Land.

Those are the works of his that I really, really like.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Alley Oop finds a use for a time machine.
Brewster Rockit dislikes sponsors.
Crabgrass debates where to jump into a series.
Cul de Sac plays a song with its own story.
Frank and Ernest comment on the Olympic Games.
Heart of the City knows true romance.
Lio knows cats (do you?)

(9) THE RETURN OF DARK HELMET. “Spaceballs 2: How Mel Brooks Got Rick Moranis For The Sequel” — SYFY Wire has the story.

When one of the greatest comedy minds personally asks you to come out of retirement, it’s pretty hard to say no.

That’s what happened when Mel Brooks came to call on Rick Moranis for the long-awaited sequel to 1987’s sci-fi satire, Spaceballs (still no word on whether it’ll be subtitled “The Search For More Money,” per Yogurt’s promise in the first movie).

Moranis, who stepped away from Hollywood in the late ’90s to raise his children following the death of his wife, agreed to reprise the hilariously inept Darth Vader parody character, Dark Helmet. It was quite the casting coup, considering Moranis has not appeared in a live-action film since 1997’s Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves.

“I said, ‘Look, do you want to go to your grave without ever coming back to show business again in any way?'” Brooks, who will celebrate his 100th birthday in June, recalled during a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “Then I said, ‘This is the way. This is the only way. Spaceballs, Dark Helmet—that’s your re-entrance.’ I got him to do it. He’s never been better. He’s even better than in the first edition. He’s so good. He’s a strange, wonderful, lovely guy and a very talented comic.”

(10) SUN RA AND THE BLACK SPACE AGE. PBS’ American Masters series will feature “Sun Ra: Do The Impossible” nationwide on February 20 at 9:00 Eastern.

From swing to bebop to free jazz, Sun Ra bridged myriad musical styles to form his own avant-garde sound. With his ever-evolving collective, the Arkestra, he stretched the boundaries of jazz and self-produced more than 200 records, in addition to being one of the first Black artists to have his own record label. Remembered today as the “Godfather of Afrofuturism,” Sun Ra weaved ancient Egyptian and interstellar metaphors into a definitive musical and spiritual vision that resonates across generations. Discover the extraordinary life of this poet, philosopher, and musical visionary in American Masters – Sun Ra: Do The Impossible….

…Born Herman Poole Blount in 1914, Sun Ra was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. An adept pianist and musical prodigy, Sun Ra had a revelatory experience as a young man: he was transported to Saturn and was called to pursue music. His voyage into a dynamic vision of a Black Space Age took off as a result of this event, leading him to develop a unique, genre-melding sound that defied musical boundaries.

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

Pixel Scroll 11/5/25 Oh, Sweet Mercury, We Have A Notification On Vellum

Posted on November 5, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) BIG DOLLARS BID ON TV COLLECTIBLES. Heritage Auction has announced the top sales from “The Stewart Berkowitz Television Treasures Auction” held in October.

Headlining the auction were the original 1960s Batman series costumes worn by Adam West and Burt Ward, which together realized $575,000. The Caped Crusader’s legacy dominated the event, with seven of the top twelve lots tied to the show. Highlights included Cesar Romero’s Joker costume ($212,500), Yvonne Craig’s Batgirl outfit ($87,500), Julie Newmar’s Catwoman suit ($68,750), and the Batscanner console from the Batcave, which brought $150,000.

Beyond Gotham, other TV legends found eager buyers. Lynda Carter’s complete Wonder Woman costume, including her signature golden Lasso of Truth, fetched $225,000. From Happy Days, two of Henry Winkler’s Fonzie leather jackets sold for $87,500 and $75,000. And Star Trek fans boldly bid on William Shatner’s Captain Kirk ensembles, realizing $62,500 and $52,500.

(2) HERE THERE BE COPYRIGHTED DRAGONS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] There is something inherently comical about a paywalled article that describes efforts by copyright holders to block illegal access to pay-to-read material. Mashable reports (behind a paywall): “Google reportedly blocks 749 million Anna’s Archive URLs”.

Have you ever heard of Anna’s Archive? No? Well, then, that’s good news for copyright holders. They don’t want you to know about Anna’s Archive, and they’re making sure Google helps keep it that way.

Google has taken down a whopping 749 million links to Anna’s Archive from its search engine, according to the company’s own transparency report, and as first reported by copyright and digital rights outlet TorrentFreak….

… What is Anna’s Archive?

Anna’s Archive is an open-source search engine for “shadow libraries,” or online libraries made up of usually paid or paywalled content that’s been pirated and uploaded for free. It’s basically a Pirate Bay, but for books and other literary material.

The takedown requests are mostly from copyright holders, like book publisher Penguin Random House. However, more than 1,000 different publishers and even authors themselves have submitted takedown requests to Google for Anna’s Archive links.

The Anna’s Archive platform itself is just a search engine. It does not host any of the pirated material. It simply helps users find material elsewhere on the internet….

(3) I STILL HAVEN’T FOUND WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR. Radio Times ranks “Doctor Who’s 5 most sought-after missing episodes – and how they could be found”.

It’s almost hard to imagine how something as culturally significant as an episode of Doctor Who could go missing.

How could anybody hold a piece of television history in their hands and throw it in a skip? Well, it isn’t quite as straightforward as that – even though this dramatic “junking” may have been the fate of many episodes; in fact, there are 97 episodes still missing from both William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton’s years as the Doctor.

How did this happen? To find out we have to understand a little about how the show was made and distributed. In the early years Doctor Who was recorded on 2-inch quadruplex videotape in-studio (on location it was recorded in 16mm film and model shots were sometimes recorded in 35mm film – these would then be recorded, or telecined, onto the 2-inch videotape).

The BBC often looked to sell Doctor Who overseas, and as such it had to make a few copies to ship out to countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Sierra Leone. But the countries and the number of copies made varied from story to story.

The copies were created via a process called telerecording. Essentially, the videotape would be played back through a (CRT) monitor and a film camera would record the playback onto 16mm film. These copies would then be shipped around the world with a label attached showing the copyright expiry date, instructing them when the film should be destroyed, or returned to the BBC.

Meanwhile, the 2-inch videotape itself would be stored for a short period of time before finally being wiped to be used again. The BBC changed its archiving policy in 1978, but before this, there was a lack of clarity between departments when it came to cataloguing programmes….

…Although the footage of most of the 97 episodes remains lost, there are other ways that they have been preserved. Some very dedicated fans made reel-to-reel tape recordings at the time of broadcast, meaning that every single episode of Doctor Who survives via audio. Unfortunately, it wasn’t common practice for home viewers to make their own video recordings in the 1960s….

Radio Times says these are the five Doctor Who stories featuring some of the most wanted missing episodes. The article has a synopsis of each story plus a rundown on efforts to recover the episodes.

5. The Celestial Toymaker by Brian Hayles (1966)

4. The Evil of the Daleks by David Whitaker (1967)

3. The Web of Fear by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln (1968)

2. The Tenth Planet by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis (1966)

1. The Power of the Daleks by David Whitaker and Dennis Spooner (1966)

(4) DID CHANGING OF THE GUARD KILL PW’S INTEREST IN SFF? Has Publishers Weekly stopped running sff news? Andrew Porter thinks so.

Didn’t even run the World Fantasy Awards.

They have not used any of the numerous articles I have sent them the links to since the departure of John Maher, who went to the New York Times.

Here’s the list of all the recent awards and prizes reported by Publishers Weekly.

(5) A CENTURY AS SEEN HALF A CENTURY AGO. A Deep Look by Dave Hook praises “Damon Knight’s Survey of SF #1, ‘A Century of Science Fiction’, 1962 Simon & Schuster”.

The Short: I recently read Damon Knight’s first anthology, A Century of Science Fiction, 1962 Simon & Schuster. It includes 26 short stories, novelettes, and several novel excerpts, and a great introduction and story introductions. Functionally, it’s Knight’s first anthology of three from the 1960s surveying the history and development of science fiction. My favorites are the Odd John excerpt by Olaf Stapledon, 1935 Methuen, the excerpt from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, 1895 William Heinemann/Henry Holt, “What’s It Like Out There?“, a novelette by Edmond Hamilton, Thrilling Wonder Stories December 1952 (his best short fiction work IMHO), and “Call Me Joe“, a novelette by Poul Anderson, Astounding April 1957. My overall average rating is 3.87/5, or “Great”. Strongly recommended….

That’s followed by “Damon Knight’s Survey of SF #2, ‘A Century of Great Short Science Fiction Novels’, 1964 Delacorte”.

It includes six novels, novellas, and novelettes, along with insightful story introductions. Functionally, it’s Knight’s second anthology of the 1960s surveying the history and development of science fiction, and a supplement to his first anthology, A Century of Science Fiction, 1962 Simon & Schuster. My favorite was the classic novelette, “E for Effort“, Astounding May 1947, by T. L. Sherred. While I do question Damon Knight’s inclusion of two works of fiction, it’s still a great anthology. My overall average rating was an impressive 3.98/5, or “Great”, and just below “Superlative”. Strongly recommended….

(6) AURORA AWARDS OPENS ELIGIBILITY LISTS FOR 2025 WORKS. The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association is accepting submissions to the eligibility lists for next year’s Aurora Awards.

As of November 2025, our annual eligibility list submission period is underway. You can see our current list of confirmed eligible works on our public list page here. This page can be shared widely, everyone has access to it. This public page contains links to external URLs for each work, which you will find to the right of the entry marked as [info]. For works that are available to read in full online (eg. short stories in online magazines), the [info] link should direct you to that work so you can read it. For other works, the info link provides publication details, synopses, and purchase options.

CSFFA members are encouraged to add works they are familiar with or published in 2025. In order to add works before the end of December, you must have a 2025 membership (ie. paid the membership fee in the first half of this year). Starting in January, you will need to purchase your 2026 membership in order to access the member-only eligible work submission forms.

If you are a publisher or a creator without a membership and would like assistance adding works to the lists, please contact us. If you only published a few works, we are more than happy to put them in for you. You must send us full details of the work and a URL where members can get more information about the work or access it in full (if such is available online).

The eligibility lists are for works done in 2025 by Canadian citizens and permanent residents. For full details on eligibility rules, see here. and on the Aurora Award categories, here. Reminder that no work can be nominated unless it has been added to the eligibility lists before the nominating period begins. Nominations are made directly from the confirmed eligibility lists on our website, so this is a necessary first step in each year’s awards process.

(7) RALPH SENENSKY (1923-2025). TV director Ralph Senensky died November 1. The Hollywood Reporter profiled his career: “Ralph Senensky Dead: ‘Star Trek,’ ‘Waltons’ Director Was 102”.

…Among Star Trek fans, Senensky is synonymous with some of the best episodes of the Paramount/NBC series. Season one’s “This Side of Paradise” is regarded as one of the early standout Spock installments, and season’s two “Metamorphosis,” another installment that premiered in 1967, was his personal favorite.

For the third season, he embarked on 1968’s “The Tholian Web,” which saw Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy), McCoy (DeForest Kelley) and Chekov (Walter Koenig) don shiny silver spacesuits as they investigate a crippled sister ship.

There was trouble ahead, however. Those zipper-less suits meant the actors had to be sewn into their costumes, then unsewn when they needed a bathroom break. By the third day of shooting, Senensky was four scenes behind schedule when he was called into producer Fred Freiberger’s office and fired.

On the pages of The Hollywood Reporter, Paramount executive Douglas S. Cramer announced that Herb Wallerstein would finish things up. Senensky got zero credit for his work.

“The article pointed out the studio’s intent to curtail the problem of films not being completed as scheduled,” Senensky reflected on his website. He said he received a phone call from Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who was “outraged, apologetic and sympathetic.”…

…Despite directing nearly 200 TV episodes over 25 years, Senensky realized he primarily will be remembered for those 6 1/2 Star Trek shows. (He also helmed “Obsession,” “Return to Tomorrow,” “Bread and Circuses” and “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”) Shortly after wrapping “This Side of Paradise” — he earned $3,000 for his first Star Trek gig, he said — he received a letter from Nimoy. “It was not only a special Spock experience, but it was special for me as well in that I felt safely in the hands of a capable and sensitive director,” Nimoy wrote. “Unfortunately, a rare experience in TV…

(8) BRUCE FRENCH (1945-2025). Actor Bruce French died February 7 at the age of 79.

He was noted for having portrayed a number of different characters across the Star Trek universe, including the empath adjutant to Jean Simmons in “The Drumhead“, cited as one of the best episodes in the franchise. He is also one of the few actors to appear in both Star Trek and Star Wars, having contributed his voice to Star Wars: The Original Radio Drama in 1981.

File 770 just became aware of his passing, and since he wasn’t on the Seattle Worldcon’s in memoriam list the news may not be generally known.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Star Trek’s “The Corbomite Maneuver” (1966)

Fifty-nine years ago, “The Corbomite Maneuver” aired for the first time. If you rewatch it again, do be aware that it is the first episode to feature Kirk’s “Space: The Final Frontier” monologue in the opening credits.

It was the tenth episode of the first season, and it was written by Jerry Sohl who had previously written for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, The Invaders, and The Twilight Zone. (His other Trek scripts were “Whom Gods Destroy” and “This Side of Paradise”.)

It was the first episode filmed in which Kelley played Dr. Leonard McCoy, Nichols played Lt. Uhura and Whitney played Yeoman Rand, though we first saw them on the air in “The Man Trap”.

Clint Howard, brother of Ron Howard, played the alien Balok but he didn’t voice him — Walker Edmiston provided that. Ted Cassidy, who was the Gorn in “Arena” and the android Ruk in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” voiced the Balok puppet.

The Balok puppet itself was designed by Wah Chang, who, among other things, shared an academy award for The Time Machine prop in Pal’s movie of the same name. Cool fact: Chang is responsible for the Pillsbury dough boy. Any resemblance to Balok is probably accidental.

So did critics like it at the time? No idea as I can’t find any contemporary reviews of it anywhere even on Rotten Tomatoes though media critics now love it as most put it in their top twenty of all of the Trek series episodes.

It was nominated for a Hugo at NyCon 3, the year that “The Menagerie” won. “The Naked Time” was also nominated that year.

It is, of course, streaming on Paramount+.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal quantifies attention span.
Crankshaft portrays author confusion at a con.
Dog Eat Doug hides fugitives.
Jerry King modernizes a familiar threat.
Non Sequitur is desparate enough to check the manual.
WaynoVision starts a trend (how many do you recognize?)

(11) FORTNITE ENGAGES SIMPSONS. “The Simpsons is Fortnite now, sorry” apologizes AV Club. “The Simpsons/Fortnite crossover includes new animated shorts, a Springfield-based map, and the ability to shoot John Cena while dressed as ‘Stupid, Sexy Flanders.’”

…As part of the collaboration, Gracie Films has produced a series of Simpsons shorts that will air both in Fortnite and on Disney+, which, if the first one is anything to go off of, feature a cheaper version of the show’s animation, paired with some of the least enthusiastic line readings we’ve ever heard from its talented cast. (If that’s Dan Castellaneta voicing Kodos and Homer, he sounds like he’s on the wrong end of a grueling graveyard shift in the voice actor mines.) Oh, and there are all the little irritations inherent to having Springfield shoved into a universe designed and aimed directly at 12-year-olds, including the fact that the version of Moe’s Tavern on “Springfield Island” serves sugar-y energy drinks and not beautiful, life-restoring Duff Beer. (Also, it looks like the Stupid Sexy Flanders skin skimps on the juicy backmeat, and, like, what are we even doing here?!)…

(12) ENCOUNTER THE WORK OF JOHN P. MOORE. Amazing Selects has released A The Martian Trilogy, reprinting three stories by John P. Moore that originally were published within the “Amazing Stories” section of the Illustrated Feature Section, (published by William Ziff of Ziff-Davis, eventual owners of Amazing Stories), a syndicated publication distributed to Black newspapers in the 1930s, long forgotten and erased. These historically significant stories are the first space opera tales written by a Black author. Available once again after nearly ninety years.

Moore’s tales follow the exploits of a well-to-do Black journalist who is swept up in the first expedition to Mars, where he encounters warring nations, advanced civilizations and unrequited love.

Accompanying these stories and the original illustrations published with them (restored and enhanced by Jennings) are essays, commentary and critique by leading contemporary Black authors and others. Contributors to this volume are: Dr. Lisa Yaszen, Brooks E. Hefner, Sheree Renée Thomas, Chris M. Barkley, Maurice Broaddus, L. Marie Wood, Bill Campbell, K. Ceres Wright, Minister Faust, Dedren Snead, Edward Austin Hall, Steve Davidson, Val Barnhart, Tanvi Bhatia, Mitali Ghande, MaxAnthony Mateer, Devi “Diya” Patel, Killian Vetter, Kermit Woodall and Lloyd Penny.

The cover image is by John Jennings, Hugo Award winner and NY Times Bestseller — a homage to Harlem Renaissance art.

The Martian Trilogy: John P. Moore, Amazing Stories, Black Science Fiction and the Illustrated Feature Section is now available in print, eBook and audio formats from Amazing Selects.

(13) GODZILLA MINUTE ZERO. MovieWeb says it’s on the way: “’Godzilla Minus One’ Sequel Teaser Unleashes Chilling New Details About the Monster Movie”.

Following the monstrous success of 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, the first teaser for the upcoming sequel has now emerged from the depths. Directed by Takashi Yamazaki, Godzilla Minus One proved to be not just one of the greatest Godzilla movies ever made, but one of the greatest monster movies, period, with the sequel expected to build on the almost unbelievably solid foundations laid down by its predecessor.

The new teaser, which you can check out below, reveals that the Godzilla Minus One sequel will be titled Godzilla -0.0, aka Godzilla Minus Zero, with the footage being unveiled by the official Toho X/Twitter account. The teaser also confirms that Godzilla Minus Zero will once again be written, directed, and supervised for VFX by Takashi Yamazaki with VFX work by Shirogumi, thus reuniting the creative team that won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects at the 96th Academy Awards….

????? ?????? pic.twitter.com/qlva59H2M6
— ????-0.0????? (@g_minus_zero) November 3, 2025

(14) COLBERT STRUTTING HIS TOLKIEN GEEK CREDS. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Well, not strutting, simply demonstrating his serious knowledge.

In talking with Robert Plant in this YouTube excerpt from his Tuesday, November 4 show, “Robert Plant’s Led Zeppelin Bandmates Had No Idea He Was Referencing Tolkien In The Band’s Lyrics”, Colbert, among other things:

Notes the publication years for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
As Plant and he meander to Tolkien, including JRRT’s recording his (JRRT’s) Tom Bombadil songs/poems, Colbert clearly without having to think recites four lines of “Fair Lady Goldberry”

The latter happens around the 2:40 mark. (Warning: you’ll see that the instant auto-transcription/captioning isn’t keeping up with the recitation, nor getting it even close to correct.)

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

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

Posted on October 21, 2025 by Mike Glyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Item by Paul Weimer.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(8) COMICS SECTION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixel Scroll 9/30/25 You Never File Your Pixels When You’re At The Stone Table – They’ll Be Time Enough To File When The Clicking’s Done

Posted on September 30, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) WARPING INTO PASADENA. “First look at ‘Star Trek’s’ 2026 Rose Parade float” in the LA Times (behind a paywall.)

The voyages of the starship Enterprise will include a 5½-mile stretch in Pasadena on New Year’s Day.

The iconic “Star Trek” flagship will be prominently featured on the franchise’s 2026 Rose Parade float, which celebrates the 60th anniversary of the storied sci-fi franchise. The design for the Star Trek 60 “Space for Everybody” entry was revealed on Monday.

In addition to the USS Enterprise and its bridge — where yet-to-be-announced actors will be stationed — the float will feature an homage to Vasquez Rocks, the local landmark where “Star Trek” has filmed, as well as the franchise’s future version of San Francisco, where Starfleet is headquartered. The design also incorporates planets and transporters….

… The float will also promote the upcoming Paramount+ series “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” which stars Holly Hunter as a starship captain and chancellor leading the academy’s first new crop of cadets in more than 100 years. The show will premiere next year….

(2) BACK TO THE KENNEL. A subscription is required to read WIRED’s newly expanded version of its 2015 article about the Sad Puppies Hugo controversy. “Sci-Fi’s Hugo Awards and the Battle for Pop Culture’s Soul”.

On the other hand, you can read David Gerrold’s counterpoint on Facebook at no charge.

…Here’s my take on it.

The Pathetic Pooches never had any intention of winning any Hugos.

From the very beginning, their intention was to destroy the credibility of the awards.

There were three primary actors: Vox Bray who cannot reenter the United States, lest he be arrested for tax fraud, Larry Correa, who was still pissed at not winning an award in a previous year, and Brad Torgersen, who should have known better than to be the hood ornament on the battering ram.

They ran a slate in five Hugo categories and bought enough votes to push other (and probably more deserving) candidates off the ballot.

I’ll leave it to others — or the Wired article — to rehash the details, but one thing proves my point that the intention was disruption. Neither Correa nor Torgersen bothered to attend the convention. If either of them truly believed in their cause, they would have shown up to defend their position.

For those who weren’t there, or came in late, the membership of Sasquan was the largest membership of any Worldcon in history — mostly non-attending members who joined for the specific purpose of voting “no award” in all the pooch-slated categories. The smackdown of the pooches was evident by the applause of the audience….

PJ Mediais also running some kind of series, and made a (dog)whistle stop on September 28 to once again spin the Sad Puppies as culture war heroes. “DEI vs. Story: How Publishing Lost the Plot. Part 2 of 7: The Awards Racket”.

…But by the early 2010s, fans began noticing a shift. The Hugo shortlists looked less like celebrations of imagination and more like showcases of political themes. Message fiction was in. Adventures, space operas, and swashbuckling tales that had defined the genre were out. Even more suspicious, despite the dozens of science fiction and fantasy imprints on the market, the awards became dominated by one house: Tor Books. Time and again, Tor authors were shortlisted and Tor authors walked away with the rockets. To many, it looked less like a free contest of ideas and more like a closed shop.

A group of writers and fans, frustrated by this creeping politicization and consolidation, decided to push back. They called themselves the Sad Puppies — a tongue-in-cheek name coined by Larry Correia, later joined by Sarah Hoyt and Brad Torgersen. Their goal was simple: highlight good, entertaining stories that regular readers actually enjoyed, but that the self-appointed gatekeepers were ignoring. They organized campaigns to put overlooked works on the ballot, rallying fans to participate in the open nomination process…

(3) WHERE TO GET YOUR CLICKS. Christopher Lockett’s marathon reread of Pratchett has reached – “Discworld Reread # 9: Moving Pictures”.

…From books and libraries, to the silver screen: where Sir Terry goes in this iteration is not merely a comic speculative romp in which he plays out how a premodern society would react and adapt to cinema; or, well, he does do that, but more significantly he engages in a consideration of what is tritely called, usually during awards season, “the magic of cinema.” Moving Pictures is the Discworldification of movies and cinema and the Hollywood dream factory—it is about kinema in the alchemist’s phrasing, but also cthinema insofar as Holy Wood is a product of the Lovecraftian forces seeking a way from the Dungeon Dimensions into the Discworld reality. Because “[r]eality wasn’t the same everywhere … Reality wasn’t very thick anywhere on the Discworld,” and “[i]n some places it was very thin indeed” (281). As Victor realizes in the final battle against the invading chthonic entities, “Reality didn’t have to be real. Maybe if conditions were right, it just had to be what people believed …” (346).

This last conceit is one with which we’ve become familiar over the Discworld’s nine previous iterations, and which will become more thoroughly developed as the series progresses—namely, that reality is contingent and inflected with collective fictions. There is a sense in which cinema—especially classic cinema still enraptured with its own power to enthrall—is an ideal vehicle in this context. For all the Lovecraftian supernatural providing the basis for the rise of Holy Wood, its most elemental magic is in the alchemy of moving images, a fact that surprises C.M.O.T. Dibbler when he has the mechanics of film explained to him. Looking critically at a sequence of pictures on a spool of octo-cellulose, he asks “Why are all the little pictures alike?”

“They’re not really alike,” said Gaffer. “Each one’s a bit different, see? And so people’s eyes see a lot of slightly different pictures very fast and their eyes think they’re watching something move.”

Dibbler took the cigar out of his mouth. “You mean it’s all a trick?” he said, astonished.

“Yeah, that’s right.” The handleman chuckled and reached for the paste pot….

(4) ELINOR BUSBY’S 101ST BIRTHDAY IS TODAY! [Item by Linda Deneroff.] Elinor Busby completed 101 revolutions around Sol today. I believe she is the oldest living sf fan. What I don’t know is if any other fan has reached or exceeded that age.

Elinor Busby. Photo by Earl Kemp, Corflu, Las Vegas, April 2008.

(5) EVENT HORIZON. Theo Downes-Le Guin, in today’s Ursula K. Le Guin newsletter, told readers they will end the UKL social media presence at some point.

…All of this contains the genesis of what you are reading: a fresh newsletter! Molly [Templeton] and I have had a number of conversations going back a couple of years about how long we’ll keep up Ursula’s presence on the socials. I don’t know when we’ll leave, but I know that we will leave. I suspect this will be at the threshold when more content is manipulated or generated by machines than by humans. (By some accounts we are already long past that threshold, but it doesn’t yet feel that way in our tiny slice of the Metaverse). For our Plan B, we sought something more basic and unmediated. And in my case—dear Reader, please do not be offended—something one-way.

Follower interaction with our social posts can be a beautiful thing, but I’m enough of my mother’s child to distrust it, even in good times. Of course, Ursula did not entirely eschew textual responses to her writing, and I don’t either. She read her reviews, and if she thought they were well-reasoned, she heeded them. Her entire, multi-decade revisionism of The Left Hand of Darkness was prompted by other people’s writing about her writing. But the goal of her writing was not to prompt an immediate response, other than in the mind of the reader.

So here we are, trying out a new way to be a part of and support the community of Le Guin readers.

(6) MOOVE OVER. “Have a Cow, Man: They’re Making a Second ‘Simpsons’ Movie”. Gizmodo has the story.

Twenty years after the release of the original, a new Simpsons movie is coming to theaters on July 23, 2027. That’s kind of all we know at the moment, but 20th Century Fox announced the news with a poster on social media….

The Simpsons Movie was released on July 27, 2007, and told the story of the family’s hometown of Springfield being covered in a dome. It was a major hit, grossing over $500 million worldwide, which immediately had people talking about a sequel. But, as you can tell, producers and creators took their time, instead concentrating on continuing the long-running TV series.

(7) LAWYER LETTER. “Disney Legal Letter Warns Character.ai To Stop Unauthorized Use Of Its IP” reports Deadline.

Walt Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Character.AI, a “personalized superintelligence platform” that the media giant says is ripping off copyrighted characters without authorization.

The AI startup offers users the ability to create customizable, personalized AI companions that can be totally original but in some cases are inspired by existing characters, including, it seems, Disney icons from Spider-Man and Darth Vader to Moana and Elsa.

The letter is the latest legal salvo by Hollywood as studios begin to step up against AI. Disney has also sued AI company Midjourney for allegedly improper use and distribution of AI-generated characters from Disney films. Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures this month sued Chinese AI firm MiniMax for copyright infringement.

“It has come to Disney’s attention that Character Technologies, Inc. (“Character.ai”) has been using Disney’s copyrighted characters as interactive chatbots in its commercial Character.ai service without authorization. Apparently trained without authorization on Disney’s copyrighted works, the Character.ai service features countless chatbots that exploit Disney’s copyrighted works and trademarks, presenting immersive versions of Disney’s famous and beloved characters.

“These actions mislead and confuse consumers, including vulnerable young people, to believe that they are interacting with Disney’s characters, and to falsely believe that Disney has licensed these characters to, and endorsed their use by, Character.ai,” said the letter from Disney attorneys obtained by Deadline.

It said the infringing chatbots impersonate iconic characters from classic Disney animated films, Pixar movies, the Star Wars franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other properties.

A spokesperson for Character.AI told Deadline the characters have been removed and noted that “we respond swiftly to requests to remove content that rightsholders report to us.”…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

September 30, 1953 — S.M. Stirling, 72.

By Paul Weimer: I first came across S.M. Stirling’s work with the Draka. I had missed his post Apocalyptic “Fifth Millennium” series when they came out, and so it was the Draka, which hit me at a high point in my alternate history reading. I admit that I was one of those who was fooled by the title Marching Through Georgia, thinking it took place in North America. I was hooked, anyway, by a world that is measurably worse than our own, and where the bad guys really do win. I am not sure, in this current political climate, I ever want to revisit the Draka but I strongly appreciate the underpinnings and worldbulding that the novels provide.

Of course, being strongly interested in all things Rome, I loved his Forge series, co-written with David Drake, which basically does really retell the story of Belisarius, except on a fallen colonized planet in the far future, just with a higher level of technology than what Belisarius had. They definitely show Stirling’s interest in late 19th century technology, which he has kept up to this day in various works. (The Peshawar Lancers, for example)

Conquistador might be his single best alternate history standalone novel, which I value mainly for its appendices, which goes into incredible lengths in how history went very differently in the parallel world that the characters of the novel visit. I pair it in my mind with Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes novels.

The Island in the Sea of Time series is delightful in having the Nantucketeers transported to the 13th century B.C. and resulting in all sorts of delightful chaos. Harry Turtledove and his wife are [nan]tuckerized into the novel, there’s a wealth of historical detail, and even a “world war” of sorts.

The Change novels, twenty of them in total, I only read a few books in and decided I was done, but the story of a world which loses the capacity for high technology thanks to alien space bats has its rabid fans. I think the novels got too science fantasy as opposed to science fiction post-apocalyptic for their own good, but one can’t really argue with their success.

My favorite Stirling has to be the duology of The Sky People and In the Courts of the Martian Kings, The Lords of Creation duology. Set in a world where aliens terraformed and populated both Venus and Mars, the novels are a way to try and rationalize and make possible the Pulp worlds of Venus and Mars from novels and stories of that age. I particularly like his vision of Mars in the latter book. I recently reread it and I think it holds up, still.

There is a new and recent book in the duology, making it a trilogy, called The Lords of Creation. Naturally I obtained it and read it eagerly hoping for more of the same magic of the first two novels. However, sadly and tragically, I had major issues with this book. It had such potential…and it failed for me so spectacularly…and it was on the worldbuilding, no less.

To Turn the Tide is the start of a new series where the world goes to hell but time travelers go back to circa 190 AD and try and keep the Roman Empire from going into the crisis of the 3rd Century, and thus make a better world for everyone. A lot of the characters are paper-thin, but the worldbuilding is interesting and there is even a tuckerization of a character from a Harry Turtledove/Judith Tarr novel that is absolutely delightful. There is a recent sequel I have not picked up yet (The Winds of Fate), mainly because of my sourness with Lords of Creation. Has the magic of Stirling’s writing been lost on me? I don’t know. I hope not. I read Stirling not for his characters, but for his worldbuilding and alternate histories, and it is when those fail, a novel of his falls apart for me.

But in the end, Stirling remains one of the best alternate history writers writing today. He might be a distant second place to Dr. Turtledove, but in terms of sheer output alone, he is in an unassailable second place in that regard.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Baby Blues plays favorites.
Bound and Gagged escalates.
Reality Check has standards.
War and Peas – is it funny? Your mileage may vary.

(10) DIAMOND COMICS CH. 11 NEWS. “Image Comics Plan To Settle With Diamond Comics, Approved By Courts” reports Bleeding Cool. More details of the settlement terms at the link.

Last month, Bleeding Cool broke the news that Image Comics had settled with Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc, the debtor in the Diamond chapter 11 bankruptcy case, over plans for Diamond to liquidate consigned inventory of comics. owned by many publishers, to benefit the banks that had funded the bankruptcy. With none of the money going to the publishers. The court had granted the Ad Hoc Committee of comic book publishers’ Motion to stay the liquidation, which means that Diamond will now have to initiate a lawsuit called an adversary proceeding against all 135 consignment vendors in order to proceed with obtaining the right to liquidate the consigned inventory. It has already initiated such proceedings against several comic book publishers.

But Image has already settled this matter with the debtor, and now the court has approved of this settlement, stating, “The Motion is granted as set forth herein. The Settlement attached hereto as Exhibit 1 is approved. The Debtors, Image, and any agents of the Debtors are authorized to take such action as is necessary to effectuate the terms of the Settlement. This Court shall retain jurisdiction to hear and determine all matters arising from or related to the implementation, interpretation or enforcement of this Order.”…

(11) REVERSE QUANTUM PERISTALSIS. [Item by Steven French.] The clue to getting a grip on this counter-intuitive result is, as physicist Jonte Hance of the University of Newcastle (my old Alma Mater!) explains, ‘contextuality’ – the way the outcomes of quantum measurements are dependent on the context in which those measurements take place: “Negative time observed in photon-atom interaction” at Physics World.

“Negative time” might sound like science fiction, but an international team of theorists and experimentalists has determined that a photon can, in fact, spend a negative amount of time in an excited atomic state while passing through a cloud of atoms. The finding could have applications in studies of light-matter interactions and quantum sensing – though not, alas, in time travel or other sensational effects.

(12) NEW ZOO TUNE. “Hare-Raising New ‘Zootopia 2’ Trailer Intros New Song by Shakira”. Animation Magazine sets the frame.

A new trailer and poster for Walt Disney Animation Studios’ upcoming animated adventure Zootopia 2 has arrived, introducing new critter characters and featuring an all-new original song, “Zoo,” performed by Shakira, who returns as the voice of Zootopia’s biggest pop star, Gazelle.

In the trailer, audiences get a first look at brand-new characters and a hidden reptile population when rookie cops Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) come face-to-face with a mysterious pit viper, Gary De’Snake (Academy Award winner Ke Huy Quan)….

…“Zoo” music and lyrics are written by Ed Sheeran, Blake Slatkin and Shakira. The song is produced by Blake Slatkin, Alex (A.C.) Castillo, Shakira and Ed Sheeran. The single releases on Friday, October 10….

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The latest from Moid over at Media Death Cult. It’s a look at the Flatland dystopia. “A Dystopia in 2 Dimensions – Flatland”.

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

Pixel Scroll 9/2/25 Or To Be A Scroll And Ride In Triumph In Pixelpolis

Posted on September 2, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) ATWOOD REACTS TO HANDMAID’S TALE BAN. Margaret Atwood told her Substack readers that “Handmaid’s Tale Banned in Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) Schools”. But don’t ask her why. She does, however, want to be helpful about the whole situation.

But I can’t comment when I don’t know why it’s been banned. For describing what an American theological dictatorship could look like? Because it portrays evil? Is it evil to portray evil? If so, bye-bye Bible and Shakespeare. Because, as part of a power play, it perverts Christianity and rewrites the Bible , unlike anyone else, ever? Because lots of other places have banned this book and Alberta didn’t want to be left out? Because it has sex in it, even though it’s not sexy sex and anyone in Gilead of sane mind would run a mile before having any actual enjoyable sex? Because it has head coverings? Why?

Things are increasingly scrambled, because the Alberta government is now saying it didn’t do the dirty deed, the Edmonton school board did, in an act of “malicious compliance.” Compliance with an order the government itself issued and that school boards were compelled to implement? Whatever do they mean?

Because I am a helpful person, I did write a nice, clean little story on X-formerly-Twitter that can hardly be accused of being pornographic, since it doesn’t have any sex in it at all, either “explicit” or “implied.” Here it is:

Atwood’s post also includes a speech she made just this morning, over Zoom, to the PEN International Congress in Krakow, Poland. It says in part:

… It’s fitting that this International PEN Congress should be held in Poland: risk management has been part of Polish DNA for a long time, and being a writer is in itself a risky business.

Why? Artists of all kinds – but especially writers – are always among the first to face the firing squads when dictatorships are on the rise. They have no armies. They have no actual legislative or physical power. They have no voter base. They are isolated individuals, and thus easy to eliminate. Above all, they say things that autocrats don’t want to hear, and don’t want others to hear. This is true whether the autocrat is of the right or of the left, and whether religious or secular. Artists are a threat to such people because their art presents full humanity, in all its complexity – the good, the bad, and the ugly. This full humanity is what autocrats wish to destroy, in order to replace it with propaganda featuring perfect versions of themselves….

(2) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Fran Wilde and Shiva Kumar on Wednesday, September 10 at 7:00 pm Eastern at the KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).

FRAN WILDE

Fran Wilde is a two-time Nebula Award-winner, a Best of NPR author, and finalist for multiple Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and Locus awards. Her most recent books include A Catalog of Storms, collected short fiction (Fairwood Press, August 2025) and the speculative heist novel A Philosophy of Thieves (Erewhon Books, October 2025). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny Magazine, and multiple years’ best anthologies.

Fran is also Co-Editor in Chief for The Sunday Morning Transport with Julian Yap and writes nonfiction for publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, and Tor.com.

SHIVA KUMAR

Shiva Kumar is the author of the South Asian mythology inspired science fiction fantasy trilogy, The Lanka Chronicles, comprised of An Awakening, A New Reality, and Path of Destiny. As a screenwriter, Kumar has won numerous awards and best screenplay at the Long Island Film Festival for Journey to Babylon.

Kumar is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker with several films on PBS, BBC, and Amazon Prime. As an actor he has appeared in several network shows such as Madam Secretary, Law & Order SVU, FBI-Most Wanted, and Quantico.

(3) PORTER MEDICAL UPDATE. Andrew Porter told friends he’s out of the hospital:

Back home today, feeling like warmed-over spit. Deleting massive amount of too old/irrelevant e-mails, coping with abdominal surgery for perforated ulcer.

Weird foods I never eat at home on Amtrak trains and in hotel, etc. and relentless walking at convention did a number on me. Diarrhea for several days put more strain on my bowels until…

Can’t lift anything heavy for some weeks. That will complicate shopping…

(4) SEATTLE WORLDCON APOLOGIES SPAWN NEW ATTACK. Seattle Worldcon 2025 Chair Kathy Bond today apologized for several widely-criticized problems and gaffes during this year’s Hugo Awards ceremony. See “Seattle Worldcon 2025 Apologizes for Hugo Ceremony Problems”.

Hosts Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford also published a statement explaining and apologizing for what went wrong.

Kat Kourbeti, who remembered Tempest Bradford’s criticism of Hugo presenters on Twitter five years ago, decided to remind everyone why it’s futile to apologize in social media by attaching a screencap of the old tweet to Nisi Shawl’s Bluesky announcement of their apologies. Was this really necessary?

(5) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Episode 28 of Scott Edelman’s Why Not Say What Happened podcast is “The Fantastic Four Panel That Solved a Childhood Mystery”:

In which I track down the Fantastic Four panel which caused me to first enter comics fandom, look back at a 1975 Planet of the Apes contents page where I was credited for no reason I can remember, remain confused about Daredevil‘s Matt/Mike Murdock subterfuge, laugh at the way “Fabulous” Flo Steinberg gave The Thing a super headache, and more.

Here’s a link where all the episodes can be found.

(6) CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO (1942-2025). Author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, well-known for her Saint-Germain sequence of vampire fantasies, died August 31 at the age of 82.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro at 2018 Worldcon. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

A GoFundMe started to “Support Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Final Care Costs” explains:

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s health began to decline several years ago and took a serious turn for the worse soon after she appeared as Writer Guest of Honor at the 2023 DragonCon in Atlanta, GA. Quinn (as she was known to her friends) ultimately became bedridden, and after her kidneys failed, she had to move from her house to a full-time senior care facility. There she was surrounded by books and media and was regularly visited by friends while she endured the strain of being taken to dialysis and back three times a week by ambulance….

But then, as Wiley Saichek told Facebook readers:

…On Sunday, August 24th, Quinn’s heart stopped. The hospital staff was able to resuscitate her, but afterward she was totally unresponsive and needed a ventilator to support her breathing. MRI scans later confirmed that loss of oxygen after the heart stoppage had resulted in major injuries to her brain, leaving Quinn in a persistent vegetative state from which she would never wake up.

Quinn’s advance medical directive regarding this possibility was absolutely clear…so on Friday, August 29th, while some of her favorite classical music played, she was given comfort care and taken off mechanical life support. On site to celebrate her life and send her on were close friends Charles and Peggy Lucke, Connor Cochran, Tracy Blackstone, Megan Kincaid, Lucia Knight, Gaye Raymond, and former husband Don Simpson. Steve Rawlins attended via video connection from Texas. Other close friends held their own vigils from wherever they resided.

The doctors were clear that there was no way to tell how long Quinn’s unconscious body might continue on its own, due to the nature of the brain damage she had suffered. It might be minutes, hours, or even days. But they promised to monitor her condition closely and make sure she was never in any discomfort.

The process of letting go took 42 hours. Don and Connor kept vigil to the very end. At 7 AM on Sunday Connor was sitting at Quinn’s bedside when her slow, steady breathing changed pace, and finally came to a stop at 7:10. Then Don sang her a special song he had written for her, in Esperanto, during the night….

Saichek’s post includes several more paragraphs of medical details.

She was a World Horror Convention Grand Master, a recipient of the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend, HWA Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement and World Fantasy Life Achievement awards.

Her Science Fiction Encyclopedia entry says the Saint-Germain series was “about a sympathetic immortal Vampire of aristocratic birth. Set in Europe and elsewhere over a span of centuries, the main sequence begins with Hôtel Transylvania: A Novel of Forbidden Love (1978) and more than two dozen volumes followed…”

Stephen Jones (Editor) notes

Her other books include Time of the Fourth Horseman, False Dawn, Ariosto, A Mortal Glamour, To the High Redoubt and Monet’s Ghosts. Gary Sherman’s 1981 movie Dead & Buried was based on her novel, and her 1984 novelisation of the film Nomads came out two years before the film. Yarbro’s short fiction is collected in Cautionary Tales, Signs & Portents and Apprehensions and Other Delusions, and she co-edited the anthology Two Views of Wonder with Thomas N. Scortia…

Tom Whitmore is writing a tribute to her which will appear later this week.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

September 2, 1964 — Keanu Reeves, 61.

Keanu Reeves certainly has fascinating genre credits. So let’s get started and look at them.

First about that film. It was by no mean his first film, he’d done quite a few including some very serious films before that including Dangerous Liaisons, but his first film that we know him from is of course what is his most best loved film of a genre nature which is Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. He played Ted “Theodore” Logan.

I’ll confess that since I deeply, madly adore this film, I’ve not seen either of the sequels, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey or Bill & Ted Face the Music. Why spoil perfection?

A choice bit of stakes through the heart was up for him in Bram Stoker’s Dracula where he had the role of Jonathan Harker. I really need to see this.

Following that was Johnny Mnemonic which in its original version is considered one of the worst genre films ever made, but 13 years back, a black-and-white edition of the film which was titled Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White was released and William Gibson says is much closer, closer to his original vision. I see it’s available on Amazon, either in BluRay or DVD.

So what next? The Matrix where he played Neo, the protagonist throughout The Matrix franchise. I saw the first, found it interesting, but not enough to watch the next two. I see it was nominated for a Hugo at Chicon 2000 but didn’t win as that was the year that Galaxy Quest deservedly won.

He was Bob / Fed / Bruce in A Scanner Darkly as based off Philip K. Dick’s novel. And it too was nominated for Hugo, this being at Nippon 2007, the year Pan’s Labyrinth won.

Finally as John Wick can’t possibly be considered genre or can it?, he had potentially plum of a role as there was a remake of The Earth Stood Still and he was Klaatu! Yes, I did go to Rotten Tomatoes to see what to reaction was.

Well, the audience yours gave it a 21% rating, Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal said this, which is the overwhelming consensus: “Where the original film was unpretentious, this version, with Keanu Reeves as Klaatu, is insufferably full of itself, an X-Files episode pumped up to pseudo-cosmic proportions.” Is anyone really surprised?

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Carpe Diem has an entrance exam.
Dark Side of the Horse has an interview tip.
Fowl Language chooses a super power, and delivers a judgment.
Strange Brew thinks few time travelers use these settings.
The Argyle Sweater promises never to do this again in Neverland.
xkcd ponders attraction.
Non Sequitur enters a federally approved museum.

(9) SOFT CENSORSHIP. Anime News Network gives an overview of “The Legal and ‘Soft’ Censorship Affecting Manga in America”.

Panels about manga being targeted by book-banning campaigns have had a regular presence at anime conventions for as long as I can remember. In light of the current political climate (be sure to read Coop Bicknell’s deep dive into the state of manga censorship in 2025 if you haven’t yet), such panels are more crucial than ever before. One of the last major panels at Anime NYC 2025, “Manga Under Fire: The State of Censorship in Manga, Both Domestically and Abroad,” approached the issue from several different perspectives.

Daniel Cruz, from the free expression advocacy group PEN America (the organization presenting the panel), focused on the legal side of censorship and steps being taken to combat it. Varun Gupta, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Manga Mavericks, and Kristiina Korpus, an editor for Abrams Books‘ Kana line, came at the subject from a different angle: the “soft censorship” decisions publishers have to make to protect themselves and their IP from getting into the legal trouble of “hard censorship.” Hannah Lee from the Japan Society moderated the discussion, balancing multiple topics over the course of an hour.

For a clear example of “soft censorship,” Korpus pointed to the cover-ups of body parts you might see in hentai — “blurring, lightsabers, little black boxes.” This censorship often comes directly from the original author; when a title in Seven Seas‘ Mature-rated Steamship line displays a black box instead of full nudity, it’s because the artist didn’t include anything to fill that space. Gupta had a different example of soft censorship on a title he worked on: replacing lyrics from Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” to avoid potential copyright issues (this would have been the time to make a JoJo reference, but no one did).

Neither Korpus nor Gupta wants to have to make content changes to manga, and when they have to, Gupta said changes must be made “in respect to the original publisher and mangaka’s intention.” The larger chilling effect of book-banning is that it makes publishers more likely to have second thoughts about publishing certain books at all. As a smaller publisher, Manga Mavericks chooses to avoid licensing certain types of more explicit content….

(10) CUTE DETECTIVE. [Item by Steven French.] Cosy crime drama makes it into video games: “Little Problems – a cute detective game with no violence or victims” in the Guardian.

As the latest generation of 18-year-olds is about to find out, starting university is an experience fraught with minor as well as major problems. Oversleeping and missing lectures, forgetting where your study group is meeting, mislaying your books – a lot of your time is spent looking for things.

It is these small mysteries that concern Little Problems, a cute detective game, in which the protagonist, Mary, must use her sleuthing abilities to make it through each day as a new student. Created by Indonesian designer Melisa, who has chosen to go by her first name only, the idea comes from her love of detective stories, but also her wish to take violence out of the genre….

(11) RARE BOOKS UNION STATION CELEBRATES FRANKENSTEIN. Antiquarians will rendezvous next month: “Rare Books LA, Union Station returns October 4-5 2025!”

“It’s alive, IT’S ALIVE…!” Rare Books LA returns to Los Angeles Union Station on October 4-5, 2025 with a monstrous selection of antiquarian books, maps, fine prints, book arts, and more. This year’s fair is celebrating the release of Rare Books LA friend and patron Guillermo Del Toro’s new film Frankenstein on Netflix this November.

With support from AbeBooks, more than 50 exhibitors from London, New York, and everywhere in between will fill the Ticket Concourse at LA Union Station with an electrifying array of first editions and other historical material. Attendees are encouraged to join our partner Metro and hop onboard Metrolink, Metro Rail, or Amtrak for this transit-friendly book fair.

Rare Books LA Union Station will also feature a series of free talks on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and other bookish subjects. Plans are also in the works for a special fundraising event prior to the book fair. This event will benefit the Library Foundation of Los Angeles (LFLA) in its mission to provide critical support for the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL), including the long-term recovery of the LAPL Palisades Branch, which was destroyed in the January fire.

(12) NETFLIX STAYS ON BRAND. Ryan George shows what it will be like “When Netflix Adds AI Movies”.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “BornToRun turned 50 this week…” and The Simpsons Hank Azaria delivers Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics in an array of the character voices he performs on the series.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/30/25 If They Could Scroll Me Now, That Old Karass Of Mine

Posted on May 30, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) NANOWRIMO SITE VANISHES. [Item by Dan Bloch.] Earlier this week NaNoWriMo shut down their website without any notice. People are commiserating on Reddit.

What a freaking waste. A huge, passionate and vibrant community founded on conquering the impossible, brought down by gross mismanagement and a refusal to listen to the community that gave it life.

I’ve been sad about this for a long time, but it’s definitely hitting home today, especially seeing the posts from people freaking out about losing their site data, since NaNoWriMo NEVER officially announced the shutdown on official channels to warn them.

We meant nothing to them, even in the end. Good riddance.

The Wayback Machine’s latest Nanowrimo.org screencap was May 27.

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) announced in March that the organization was shutting down. They offered a lengthy explanation in “The State of NaNoWriMo – A Community Update – March 2025” on YouTube.

This followed in the aftermath of a controversy that erupted the previous September when they issued an equivocal statement about using AI – and it did not go unnoticed that NaNoWriMo is sponsored by ProWritingAid, a writing app that advertises AI-powered technology, including text rewrites – leading Zriters Board members Daniel Jose Older, Cass Morris, and Rebecca Kim Wells to immediately resign.

(2) EXTRA CREDIT READING. Two sff news periodicals posted today:

Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine for May 2025 at Patreon; and
David Langford’s Ansible® 455, for June 2025.

(3) IGNYTE AWARDS VOTING OPENS JUNE 9. Public voting on The Ignyte Awards will begin June 9.

The Ignyte Awards began in 2020 alongside the inaugural FIYAHCON, a virtual convention centering the contributions and experiences of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) in Speculative Fiction. Founded by L. D. Lewis and Suzan Palumbo, the awards were an attempt to correct representative gaps in traditional spec lit awards and have grown into a coveted and cherished addition to the awards landscape. The Ignytes seek to celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscapes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts toward inclusivity of the genre.

(4) SAVE WHEEL OF TIME. Did a show ever have so many spokes persons? “Wheel of Time fans band together to save show after cancellation – petition gets over 50,000 signatures” says Radio Times.

Following the cancellation of The Wheel of Time after its third season, a petition has quickly racked up signatures from fans hoping to save the Prime Video fantasy show.

The petition, titled Save The Wheel of Time, has already got over 53,700 signatures and counting, with fans calling for the story to be finished and arguing that it “deserves to be told in full”.

The petition points not only to the third season’s strong critical and fan reception, but also to reported viewing figures, arguing for the show’s continuation by putting it in comparison with other fantasy shows The Rings of Power, House of the Dragon and The Witcher….

(5) FUTURE TENSE FICTION. The Future Tense Fiction story for May 2025 is “The Shade Technician,” by Harrison Cook, about urban heat and its health effects, as well as the privatization of critical infrastructure.

The response essay “The Limits of Heat Resilience” is by physician and heat researcher Pope L. Moseley.

Extreme heat is pushing up against our physiological limits. We can’t adapt our way out of the problem—we need to confront it directly.

(6) JOHN SCALZI Q&A. CollectSPACE starts their interview with an anecdote about the author’s research: “John Scalzi reconned Apollo 11 moon rock before turning it to cheese in new novel”.

…”I went to the Armstrong Air and Space Museum very specifically so I knew what the layout of the place was, so I could see the moon rock there for myself and so when I wrote about it, it would be reasonable to what is actually there,” said Scalzi in an interview with collectSPACE. “They had no idea.”

Had the docents approached him and asked why he was interested in the moon rock, they might not have believed him anyway. In “When the Moon Hits Your Eye,” released today (March 25), it is Virgil Augustine, the museum’s (fictional) executive director, who comes to realize what has happened, however impossible it might seem…

Then they follow with more conventional questions about the new book.

collectSPACE (cS): Was there a particular moment in your life that it just struck you, or how do you come up with the idea of writing a book about the moon turning into cheese?

John Scalzi: It was something that had been just rolling around my brain for a while, simply because it was just such an absurd idea that it almost felt like a challenge. You know, was this something that I could make something out of?

cS: Did you search to see if anyone else had written a book about the moon turning to cheese?

Scalzi: I didn’t, but if someone did, it wouldn’t have necessarily stopped me because there are so few super original ideas. you just accept that most of what you’re doing is not about what’s original, but what you can bring to that particular topic that nobody else has.

There are lots of children’s books about the moon being made of cheese, but they’re all picture books, so I felt that this was a pretty safe subject. Also, as soon someone mentions the topic, people are like, ‘Oh, it’s like Wallace and Gromit,’ because they go to the moon and it is cheese [in “A Grand Day Out With Wallace and Gromit” released in 1989].

This was something I was reasonably confident had been unexplored territory in the adult literature format, and certainly in the manner in which I did it, which was to structure it around a lunar cycle, rather than just one or two main characters….

(7) THE ONLY ONE WHO COULD INTERRUPT HARLAN WAS – HARLAN. Edwin L. Battistella reminisces about his introduction to parenthetical phrases in “What I learned from reading Harlan Ellison” at the OUPblog.

When I was in high school, I went through a Harlan Ellison phase….

…Stylistically, what stood out most was his use of parentheses. In the essays, Ellison used them all the time. In a random four-page section I count six parentheticals, some as long as a paragraph. Elsewhere, I found a couple that went on for more than half a page….

…Ellison used the parenthesis to amplify his outrage, to underscore his smart-alecky awareness, and even occasionally to poke fun at himself.

For a time, Elision’s style left a mark on me as a writer. I began including (what I thought were) pointed, witty asides in my essays and correspondence. I got away with it in high school, less so in college, and finally my wife convinced me to give it up. It was, she said, “too cutesy” and “distracting.”

Every now and then, I miss parentheses and trot a pair of parens out, but for the most part I’ve given them up. The style worked for Ellison, who managed to never be too cutesy and whose distractions were interesting, but I could not pull it off….

(8) BREATH MINT OR CANDY MINT? Chris Winkle argues “Why Literary Fiction Is a Genre” at Mythcreants. Here are a couple of excerpts. You’d need to read the article to see him make his case.

…In any widespread discussion of literary fiction, two contradictory ideas are bound to make an appearance. Some people advocate for one or the other, while others embrace both simultaneously. Let’s look at these two competing ideas.

Literary fiction as the best fiction. Under this definition, any book of any genre can be considered literary fiction if it is good enough. This means that literary fiction is simply a prestige label given to a wide variety of books we admire. Let’s call this the prestige definition.
Literary fiction as a distinct style of fiction. Under this definition, literary fiction has specific characteristics that distinguish it from non-literary books. These characteristics include realism, slow and detailed prose, and experimental style or form. Let’s call this the style definition.

You might think these two definitions would be at war with each other. Conceptually, they are. But while individual literary fans may take one side or the other, the community as a whole isn’t interested in resolving this contradiction. In fact, these definitions coexist by design.

That’s because both definitions are needed to send a bigger message: that literary fiction entails specific characteristics, and those characteristics are superior. Meaning, a book of any genre supposedly becomes better by adopting literary fiction conventions. That’s how it “transcends” its genre and becomes literary instead….

… This is why publishers already treat contemporary literary fiction like a genre. It’s a specific type of fiction that appeals to a specific audience of fans. Business-wise, that’s what a genre is. It’s used to match books with the readers who are inclined to purchase and enjoy them.

However, literary books don’t fit everyone’s idea of what genres are. The prestige definition is only partly responsible for this. I think a greater factor is that we love our favorite genres, so we want them to be more coherent and meaningful than they are. And when we assign meaning to them, it’s easy to make that meaning too restrictive. For instance, if we associate genres with a specific type of setting or plot, then literary books, which are distinguished by characteristics such as prose style, may seem like the odd group out….

(9) JOHN BOARDMAN (1932-2025). By Gary Farber. I was sorry to read Ansible’s report today: “John Boardman (1932-2025), US fan active since 1950 in cons, clubs and APAs, and treasurer of the 1967 Worldcon, died on 29 May aged 92.”

John was among the first fans I met in NYC fandom in the early 1970s; he and his wife Perdita lived within a long walk’s distance from my childhood home in Midwood, Brooklyn, and at the time I was first invited to the Lunarians, the NYC science fiction club that put on the annual Lunacon science fiction convention, the club met at their home, until months later when Perdita, fed up with the way fans left half-filled cups and dirty plates all over their large house, announced that she wouldn’t put up with it any more, and that the club would have to find a new meeting place.

For a time, that was Frank and Ann Dietz (Frank’s second wife) house in Oradell, New Jersey, and then we met at the Lunacon hotel in Manhattan; my memory is a bit shaky at the moment if we were using the Statler-Hilton that year or the Commodore.

John was a true character. Known to some as “the Jerry Pournelle of the left,” he was a professor of physics at Brooklyn College, a leftist, a bit deaf and thus very loud, very opinionated, and thus the parallels to Jerry. John was a founder of Diplomacy-by-mail fandom with his fanzine Graustark, a mainstay of parts of NYC fandom, a bit of a blowhard, but unforgettable.

He was always hale and hearty, speaking with a vibrant and booming voice, one you could hear as soon as you entered a party he was at, always ready for a good argument.

Among other bits of personal history, from his Wikipedia page:

“Boardman earned his BA at the University of Chicago in 1952 and his MS from Iowa State University in 1956. He then attended Florida State University to begin his doctoral studies. However, he was expelled in 1957 due to his involvement with the Inter-Civic Council and more specifically for inviting three black Florida A&M exchange students to a Christmas party.”

Also see Fancyclopedia’s entry on John Boardman.

John Boardman, right, at 1967 PhilCon. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter. “Taken with my trusty Kodak Starflash, I think”

(10) ALF CLAUSEN (1941-2025). “Alf Clausen, Emmy-winning ‘Simpsons’ Composer, Dies at 84” reports Variety. He died on May 29.

… Clausen won two Emmys and another 21 nominations for the long-running animated Fox series. He began scoring the antics of Bart, Lisa and company in 1990, during its second season, and is believed to be the most-nominated composer in Emmy history with a total of 30 nominations overall.

He also won five Annie Awards, also for “Simpsons” music. His long tenure with Matt Groening’s irreverent creation made him one of the most respected creators of animation music in TV history. His nearly 600 original scores for the series are also believed to be a record for the most written for a single TV series in America….

Clausen conducted a 35-piece orchestra every week, something producers insisted upon from the beginning. His unexpected firing in August 2017, a cost-saving move by Fox and “Simpsons” producer Gracie Films, resulted in a firestorm of protests from fans around the world….

Six of Clausen’s pre-“Simpsons” Emmy nominations were for “Moonlighting,” including two landmark episodes: the black-and-white “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice” and the “Taming of the Shrew” sendup “Atomic Shakespeare.”…

… He scored nearly 100 episodes of the late 1980s puppet sitcom “Alf” (and when asked about the title, he would often quip, “no relation”)….

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 30, 1922 — Hal Clement. (Died 2003.)

By Paul Weimer: If hard science and physics could be considered “characters” in science fiction, Hal Clement is certainly the person who was able to make them so. Mission of Gravity is the premier look at this, giving an extremely weird and strange, and yet possible high gravity world. Do the characters he populates this world with work as individual characters? Not really, but what you read Clement for is the puzzles and the logic behind the hard science that makes a high gravity-distorted world like Mesklin (the planet of Mission of Gravity) possible in the first place.

Another novel in this vein that doesn’t get much play or notice, but I ironically read before Mission of Gravity, is The Nitrogen Fix. In this book, Earth’s atmosphere has changed, radically, with the free nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere having combined into a toxic and unbreathable mix of nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide and water. Did the aliens who have come to Earth change and terraform Earth for their own purposes? In the end, the transformation of Earth’s atmosphere is a puzzle that is solved, and makes sense, with a big heaping sense of irony to it all.

Although shared worlds are not a big thing anymore, back in the 1980’s, they were all the rage. I didn’t mention it back when I wrote on Ellison (way too much to write about him) but even Harlan Ellison did a shared world, Medea. His shared planet had a bunch of writers very interested in building a realistic planet and solar system. Clement not only provided an essay on worldbuilding the astrophysics of Medea in the book, but also contributed a story.

Once again, hard science as a character in Clement’s work. That’s what it means to me.

Hal Clement at ConFiction (1990). Photo by Frank Olynyk. From Fanac.org site.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Curses! suspects what a book club is really about.
Half Full gives a compliment at a signing.
Jerry King questions book marketing.
Reality Check thinks a writer is busy.
Rhymes with Orange has a monster problem.
Tom the Dancing Bug completely redoes the comics page.

(13) MEMORIES. Steven Thompson, son of famous comics fans Don and Maggie Thompson, tells a great anecdote about the late Peter David on Facebook. It has to do with how Peter made a tribute panel to Don Thompson a terrific memory.

(14) JON DECLES PROFILE. File 770 commenter Jon DeCles – the pen name of Don Studebaker – was interviewed in 2017 by The Press Democrat about the loss of his house in a fire: “Valley fire survivor starting over with prized cuckoo clock that escaped the flames”.

It’s nearly two years since the Valley fire vaporized the Cobb Mountain home of Don Studebaker, a highly literate high-school dropout, science-fantasy writer, stage channeler of Mark Twain, devotee of ancient Greek gods, co-creator of the documentary-worthy Berkeley literary commune of Greyhaven and a decadeslong student of the nearly infinite subtleties and elements of ritual significance of the Japanese tea ceremony.

The 75-year-old Studebaker has no earthly idea when he’ll be able to call in a crane to set a new modular home roughly where the old, conventionally constructed house was. But already he contemplates special placement of the clock.

“The cuckoo is going to be the pièce de résistance,” beamed the gray-bearded, blue-eyed and kinetic Studebaker from alongside the fish-pond porch of the residence off State Route 75 that he dubbed the Rhinoceros Lodge and references fleetingly on his website home.pon.net/rhinoceroslodge. The 1950s country home was devoured along with those of 11 immediate neighbors by the historic south Lake County inferno of Sept. 12, 2015, that killed four people downhill from Cobb, charred more than 76,000 acres and destroyed nearly 2,000 buildings.

Studebaker lost almost everything he owned, but not his German cuckoo clock.

One day in June 2015, three months before the Valley fire, he’d decided for no particular reason that it was time to seek repair of the musical timepiece his wife purchased for him while on an international book tour at least two decades earlier….

… Had it not been in the shop, the clock surely would have burned in the fire that surged down Cobb Mountain toward Middletown that Saturday afternoon two years ago. …

(15) SHAKEN NOT STIRRED, DEEP UNDERGROUND. [Item by Steven French.] A complex of tunnels built after the Blitz is set to become an immersive spy museum and will also feature one of the deepest underground bars in the world: “London tunnels that inspired James Bond creator will become spy museum” reports the Guardian.

During his time in military intelligence, Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, regularly worked with Winston Churchill’s spy organisation based 30 metres below ground in a labyrinth of tunnels in central London.

The Kingsway Exchange tunnels complex, stretching out across 8,000 sq metres beneath High Holborn, near Chancery Lane underground station, hosted the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and is said to have inspired Q Branch in Fleming’s novels.

So it seems appropriate that plans to breathe new life into this long-abandoned second world war subterranean network will include a permanent exhibition about the history of military intelligence and espionage.

The Military Intelligence Museum is to collaborate with the London Tunnels company, developing the complex to showcase its original artefacts, equipment, weapons and documents in a modern hi-tech experience at the proposed new £220m London tourist attraction, which is planned to open in 2028.

(16) FEEL FREE TO STEP ON THAT BUTTERFLY. Dete Meserve’s op-ed for Space.com asks “Could time travel tourism be the next space tourism?” I admit it – I clicked.

…Up until recently, physicists believed that time travel to the past was impossible because it required unusual matter or extreme warping of spacetime. However, physicist John D. Norton has developed a new model based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity that shows time travel is mathematically possible.

His model does not rely on strange matter or intense space-time distortion, but uses a simple space-time shape that allows paths to loop back in time. This work suggests that time travel could occur under more ordinary physical conditions than previously thought.

The classic understanding of time travel centers on a fundamental problem: paradoxes. If travelers could alter even minor details of the past, the cascading consequences would either rewrite the present or eliminate the traveler’s own existence — the infamous grandfather paradox. This seemingly insurmountable obstacle led physicist Stephen Hawking to propose his Chronology Protection Conjecture, which essentially argues that the laws of physics themselves forbid backward time travel by preventing the formation of closed timelike curves.

However, groundbreaking research by Dr. Fabio Costa and Germain Tobar at the University of Queensland challenges this assumption. They’ve developed a mathematical model showing that closed timelike curves do not automatically create paradoxes. Their revolutionary model suggests that while time travelers can move and act freely in the past, the universe itself maintains consistency—events would self-adjust to prevent any logical contradictions from occurring.

This revolutionary finding has profound implications. If Norton is right — that time travel won’t require exotic materials — and Costa and Tobar are correct — that time travel doesn’t alter the future — it opens the door for time travel technology to evolve beyond fictional ideas of secret inventions or unpredictable glitches in the universe. Instead, it could follow the trajectory of other breakthrough technologies—gradually becoming accessible, eventually commercial….

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The Blasters and Blades podcast features author Sharon Lee speaking about a Liaden Universe® novel she co-wrote with Steven Miller: “Episode 578: Ribbon Dance by Sharon Lee”. The book was released in 2024.

Today we were graced with the presence of Sharon Lee, one of the nicest ladies we’ve interviewed! We had Jana S Brown (aka Jena Rey) on as a co-host, and together we produced a kick butt interview about Sharon’s love of reading and speculative fiction. And we talked about her Liaden Universe. This was a fun interview, so go check out this episode. Lend us your eyes and ears, you won’t be sorry!!

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

Pixel Scroll 4/23/25 Pixeler on the Roof

Posted on April 23, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) 2025 HUGO VOTING BEGINS. Seattle 2025 opened Hugo Awards voting today. All ballots must be received by July 23 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.

Voting by surface mail is also an option. Download a printable ballot. Print the ballot and follow the included instructions.

(2) HUGO VOTER PACKET. You can find out “What’s In The 2025 Hugo Voter Packet?” in File 770’s compilation of the HVP category indexes.

(3) NOTES FROM BELFAST. “Eastercon Reconnect” by SJ Groenewegen is a fine conreport.

… Next up was The Doctor Will See You Now, with Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Brian M. Milton, Fiona Moore, Nicholas Whyte and Catherine Sharp (moderator). The description read, ‘We’ve seen dramatic events in the Whoniverse in the last year, both in-canon and in production, from bi-generation and new companions to the return of Russel T. Davies and the first Doctor Who Christmas Specials since 2017. Our Whovian panel will discuss the highs and lows of the new era of New Who, the relationship it has to previous canons, Ncuti Gatwa’s playing of the Doctor so far, and more.’ Catherine began the panel by asking each panellist whether they were doctors… and all answered in the affirmative. An entertaining and knowledgeable discussion followed….

(4) SEMIPROZINES. The Semiprozine Directory is still being maintained by Neil Clarke at Semiprozine.org.

(5) EARLY C.L. MOORE. “Deeper Cut: C. L. Moore Before The Pulps” is discussed by Bobby Derie at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein. Here’s an excerpt from Moore’s 1934 letter to R.H. Barlow.

Ever since we were about nine a friend and I have been evolving a romantic island kingdom and populating it with a race which, inevitably, is a remnant of Atlanteans. We’ve a very detailed theology and mythology, maps all water-colored and scroll-bordered and everything, a ruling house whose geneology and family tree and so forth has been worked out in tbales and charts from the year minus—oh, just about everything that two imaginative girls could think of over the space of fifteen years. (Heavens, has it been that long?) We have songs and long sagas of heroes, and a literature full of tradition and legends, and we even made and colored a series of paper dolls to illustrate the different types and their costumes, and then there were wars and plans of battle, and we have the maps of all our favorite cities, and we’ve written a good deal of history. And that history is what I take seriously….

(6) RELIGION IN WORLDBUILDING. Last night the Chicago Public Library hosted a panel of sff writers to discuss “American Prophets: Making New Gods”. A recording can be viewed on YouTube.

Four contemporary fiction writers – N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Nghi Vo and Matthew Kirby – talk about religion in their writing, the importance of considering socio-spiritual systems when world-building and how these influence the ways their characters move through the worlds they create.

(7) MORE ABOUT DAMIEN BRODERICK. Rich Horton has written a tribute – “Damien Broderick, April 22, 1944 – April 19, 2025” – for Black Gate.

…Damien Broderick was an outstanding science fiction writer – and, to my mind, a somewhat underappreciated one. He was a tireless advocate of Australian SF, in both his anthologies and his critical work. He was an intriguing and rather iconoclastic science writer, very interested in the far future and in very speculative scientific ideas, including paranormal powers….

(8) SIMPSONS IN THE WILD. Animation Magazine is there when “’The Simpsons’ Exclusive Episode ‘Yellow Planet’ Launches on Disney+”

Today, Disney+ announced that an all-new episode of The Simpsons is now streaming exclusively on the streaming service. The full-length episode, titled “Yellow Planet,” is the show’s latest exclusive episode to hit the streamer this season, joining previous installments “The Past and the Furious” and “O C’mon All Ye Faithful.”

In “Yellow Planet,” The Simpsons are reimagined as animals in a National Geographic-style nature mockumentary. Homer and Marge navigate the ocean as whales from different series, Bart hatches as an iguana struggling to survive, and Lisa leads her flock as a finch. Along the way, familiar Springfield faces appear in unexpected roles, shaping their journeys in the wild….

(9) EARLY CLI-FI. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Changing Climates Radio 4 Extra. This short series looks at climate change through the prism of science fiction. (Meanwhile, always seek out good sources of climate change science. 😉 )

The meteorologist, John Hammond explores the way that science fiction has served as a barometer for our wonder, curiosity and sometimes anxiety about the environment. With expert insight from Sarah Dillon – Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities and Professor of Human Geography, Mike Hulme, we find out how writers imagined – sometimes very accurately – the changing world around them.

Today, we focus on the early decades of the 20th century, a period rich in technological optimism and environmental unease.

First, we hear E.M. Forster’s chillingly prescient ‘The Machine Stops’;

A world in which people can only communicate through a machine sounds like the internet today. But this story, written in 1909, takes us to a future where the machine has become an all-powerful God.

EM Forster’s story dramatised by Gregory Norminton and first broadcast in 2001.

You can access the episode here.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

April 23, 1973 — Naomi Kritzer, 52.

By Lis Carey: Naomi Kritzer first came to my attention with the delightful short story, “Cat Pictures, Please,” about a bored, rogue, AI who identifies as a cat, enjoys cat pictures, and decides to help out those silly humans, whose lives it knows so much more about than they do. What does it want in return? More cat pictures, please!

What I didn’t know then was that this new-to-me writer had been publishing since 1999, with two trilogies, some standalone novels, and quite varied short fiction. Along the way, having grown up in Wisconsin and attended college in Minnesota, she found time to live in London and Nepal.

There were more stories of the rogue Cat AI, committed in its own way to making the world a better place for good people who like cats. These include two novels. Catfishing on CatNet is about a teenage girl, Steph, who, with her mother, is constantly moving to escape her dangerous stalker father. She has a flipphone, no smartphone, is not allowed to make friends, and has no outlet except her online friends, in the friendly atmosphere of CatNet, run by the wise, kind, and completely anonymous CheshireCat. On CatNet, Steph is “Brown Bat,” and her friends, the members of her “clowder,” have similarly anonymous names. They all have fun and companionship, and with CheshireCat’s very intelligent but inexperienced in the real world (CheshireCat has only been active for five years, and is still learning about humans), pull off a prank that winds up attracting unwanted attention to Steph, her mom, and the other kids.

Chaos on CatNet has Steph and her mother settled in Minneapolis, Steph enrolled in a high school she can expect to graduate from. She’s also making real-world friends in addition to her online clowder. One of those friends, Nell, has her own complicated family history, and a very different kind of online community, which Steph starts to explore with her. CheshireCat is also getting messages from what he believes is another AI like himself, but he doesn’t trust the AI’s approach. Of course things get complicated. Another enjoyable, satisfying book.

But Naomi has other fiction that’s very different. A short story about a “Little Free Library” where one user, instead of leaving books in exchange for books, leaves little bits of artwork, and notes, and gradually, we find out who this strange visitor is, and what’s going on in their world.

“The Year Without Sunshine,” a novelette, is another very different kind of story. The world has undergone a series of smaller disasters, followed by a catastrophe that leaves clouds thick enough to block all sunshine. We follow one community struggling to make things work with a few days of electricity a week, intermittent delivery of life-critical medications by (apparently) federal authorities, and other such intermittent and not necessarily reliable outside support. When the internet goes down, Alexis and a neighbor, Tanesha, set up a booth, “WhatsUp,” to help keep communication going among neighbors who previously relied on WhatsApp. Then someone suggests it might be good to go door to door, and find out both what people need, and what they might have that they don’t need anymore—and a bigger project, and network, starts to form.

On her list to be is Liberty’s Daughter. Beck Garrison lives on a seastead, built out of constructed platforms and old cruise ships, to be a libertarian paradise. She’s grown up comfortable and privileged, but has started doing odd jobs for pocket money. Beck is hired by a woman from the other side of the waterline, to find her missing sister. She starts to learn things she never suspected, about the seastead, her father, herself, and the world. Some people don’t want her to say anything, or ask any more questions. This is a young adult novel, with a bright, good teenager learning to grow up in a hurry and make some big decisions.

Naomi Kritzer is a really interesting writer, who doesn’t do the same thing all the time, and somehow manages to be both realistic and positive about people. Truly a delight to read.

(11) NAOMI KRITZER Q&A. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Naomi Kritzer’s CatNet at this point consists of “Cat Pictures Please” which won a Hugo at MidAmeriCon II, Chaos on CatNet and Catfishing on CatNet. As one who likes this series enough that I had her personally autograph the Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories collection, I wanted to know the origin of CatNet, so I asked. Well, I also gifted her with a birthday chocolate treat, sea salt dark chocolate truffles.

Here’s her answers:

Naomi: The original short story was basically the collision of two things:

1. The line, “the Internet loves cat pictures,” which made me imagine a central internet-based intelligence that wanted pictures of cats.

2. Getting myself a smartphone for the first time (I was a late adopter), and discovering some of its quirks, and coming up with anthropomorphic explanations for things like bad directions.

I mean, the Internet clearly does love cat pictures — although “the Internet” is “the billions of people who use the Internet,” not a secret sentient AI, though!

Cat: I went on to ask her how CatNet came to be…

Naomi: Do you mean in the story, how it got created? I was very vague about it in the short story but sort of heavily implied it was the result of something someone did at Google. In the novel CatNet was an experimental project from a company that was again, heavily implied to be Google.

Way, way cool in my opinion.

While putting this Birthday together, I noticed that she had two other series from when she was starting out as a writer, so I asked her to talk about them. Both are available on Kindle.

Cat: Let’s talk about your first series, Eliana’s Song.

Naomi: Eliana’s Song is my first novel, split into two pieces. I rewrote it really heavily multiple times, and each time I tried to make it shorter and it got longer. When Bantam bought it, they suggested that I split it into two books and expand each, which is what I did.

The book actually started out as a short story I wrote while in college. It garnered a number of rejections that said something like, “this isn’t bad, but it kind of reads like chapters 1 and 36 of a novel.” I eventually decided to write the novel, and struggled for a while before realizing I could not literally use the short story as Chapter 1, I had to start over writing from scratch.

Cat: And your second series, Dead Rivers.

Naomi: Sometime around 2010 I picked up the Scott Westerfield Uglies series and really loved it. Uglies in particular followed a plotline that I really loved, in which someone is sent to infiltrate the enemy side, only to realize once she’s there that these are her people, far more than her bosses are. But she came among them under false pretenses, and she’d have to come clean! And she almost comes clean,

doesn’t, of course is discovered and cast out, and and then has to spend the next book (maybe the next two) demonstrating her worthiness to be allowed to come back. I read this series and thought, “dang, I love this plot — I loved this plot as a kid, and reading it now is like re-visiting an amusement park ride you loved when you were 10 and finding out that even when you know where all the turns and drops are, it’s still super fun.” Like two days after that I suddenly remembered that I had literally written that plotline. It’s the plotline of the Dead Rivers trilogy. I really really love this plot, it turns out! So much that I’ve written it!

I’m not sure how well it’s aged. We were not doing trigger warnings on books yet when it came out, and the fact that the book has an explicit and fairly vivid rape scene took a lot of readers by surprise. It’s also a story that’s very much about whether someone can start out a bad guy and work their way to redemption.

Cat: Now unto your short stories. I obviously believe everyone should read “Cat Pictures Please” and Little Free Library”, both of which I enjoyed immensely. So what of your short story writing do you think is essential for readers to start with?

Naomi: That is a good question but one I find very hard to answer about my own work! It’s a “can’t see the forest because of all the trees” problem, I think.

“So Much Cooking” would probably be at the top, though (with the explanatory note that I always attach these days — I wrote this in 2015.) And then probably “Scrap Dragon” and “The Thing About Ghost Stories.”

To date, she has two short story collections, Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories which is only available as an epub, and of course Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories which is also available in trade paper edition.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Dinosaur Comics plans an alternate version of space travel.
Eek! compares villains’ brands.
The Argyle Sweater envisions a medical Dr. Seuss. (Don’t miss the poster on the wall!)
WaynoVision recalls an artist’s school days.

(13) QUEEN’S OWN. A royal gift from the Boer War: “’It’s got a bit of a whiff’: Chocolate bar made in 1900 is on sale” reports BBC.

…The Queen commissioned manufacturers J S Fry & Sons, Cadbury Brothers Limited, and Rowntree and Company Limited to produce the special tins in 1899, Auctioneum said.

The tins bear the words “I wish you a happy new year”.

By the end of 1900, more than 120,000 tins had been distributed to soldiers….

Mr Stowe said while most of the chocolate bars were eaten straight away, some were sent home to loved ones or to hospitals for wounded soldiers.

“It is incredibly rare,” Mr Stowe said. “If you think over 125 years what that tin has been through – there’s been several world wars, it’s probably travelled back and forth over the Atlantic a couple of times.”

He said the chocolate bar, which is valued between £250 and £400, appealed to bidders who “might want an important piece of social history” or just a “talking point at a dinner party”.

(14) HIRING OBSTACLES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] My brother Jim, who brought this to my attention and is a late boomer himself, commented that the “Original poster is too young to have any idea what it was like before fandom became mainstream.” “Entitled coworker rejects job candidate because she’s a fan of Stark Trek: ‘She made the mistake of mentioning her hobbies during [the] interview’” at Cheezburger.com.

Keep scrolling below for this tale of an unfortunately biased manager who thought a candidate was weird and unfit simply because she was a Star Trek fan.

(15) CAT FURNITURE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] The credential credenza at Viral News Flare.

(16) WHY DIDN’T ANTIMATTER DESTROY THE UNIVERSE? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] When the Universe began you might have thought that matter and anti-matter would be produced in equal quantities resulting in a bigger BANG but with no physical matter left for galaxies, stars, you, me and pints of real ale at the con bar. However Matt O’Dowd over at PBS Space Time suggests we now have an answer…

At one-one-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang, the great annihilation event should have wiped out all matter, leaving a universe of only radiation. Why still don’t know why any matter survived. Well, a new finding from the LHC brings us one step closer to understanding why there’s something rather than nothing.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Danny Sichel.] Steve Shives’s Starfleet Guidance Counselor is amazing. Actually, so is everything in his “Starfleet Jobs” series: “Starfleet Historian”, “Starfleet Chaplain”, “Starfleet Lawyer”…

Trying to educate children under the constant threat of violent death presents certain challenges.

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

Pixel Scroll 3/6/25 Hail Pixels, We Who Are About To File Salute You

Posted on March 6, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) BRADBURY IN THE WAUKEGAN MUSEUM. The Chicago Tribune is there as “Visitors get sneak peek at newly restored Waukegan History Museum”.

Walking into the almost fully restored, more than century-old, one-time Waukegan Public Library — that is now the Waukegan History Museum at the Carnegie — visitors can take a step back in time….

…Lori Nerheim, the historical society’s president, said part of the intent of the $15 million restoration was to give visitors a feel for the experience a young Ray Bradbury had when he spent hours there as a boy reading and nurturing the imagination which led the famed author to the writing of his books.

“We wanted to bring it back to its original look and feel,” she said of the museum operated jointly by the historical society and the Waukegan Park District. “I feel tremendous pride. I am excited to see people’s reaction.”

… To enter the building, visitors ascend a few steps before entering the door where they see a staircase on either side leading to two floors of permanent exhibits, and before them some steps going to the top, main floor containing a permanent exhibit honoring Bradbury as well as a room for research.

Before the building closed as the library in 1965, the room containing the Bradbury exhibit was the children’s reading room. He spent hours there in the 1920s and 1930s reading and developing his thirst for books. Nerheim said she hopes the environment will inspire future authors.

“I can see children today sitting in that room where Ray Bradbury sat as a child and reading books he read,” she said. “Perhaps they will be inspired to write or tell their own stories.”

Filling the bookcases in the Bradbury room are the author’s private collection of thousands of volumes he willed to the Waukegan Public Library when he died in 2012…..

(2) FAMOUS BOOKSTORE MAY REOPEN ‘NEXT WEEK’. Mysterious Galaxy bookstore in San Diego is in the process of repairing flood damage sustained in late February. On Monday their latest newsletter gave a progress report: “Flooded! Curbside Pickup Is Available!”

First, thank you to all of the customers, authors, publishers, and other community members that have reached out to offer their support in the last week. The outpouring of support has been incredibly heartwarming and has helped us get through the uncertainty of the last week. We also want to extend a special thank you to our fellow independent bookstores who have offered support including opening their spaces for last minute event venues. This is truly a special book community and one we are so happy to be a part of.

We wanted to reach out with an update on the store and forecast of what’s to come. As this situation is continually evolving, there may be additional changes, but we promise to communicate as much as possible.

The good news:
No inventory was damaged in the flooding. THE BOOKS ARE OK! The vinyl flooring is also intact and does not need to be removed.

The bad news:
The carpet in the children’s section was flooded and is being replaced. Additionally, they found some significant water damage in the walls on the west side of the unit as well as in the wall behind the YA section separating the front area of the store from the back room. The drywall needs to be replaced. There was also damage to the fixtures.

What does this mean?:
Mysterious Galaxy is currently closed to in-store shopping and events. If you purchased a ticket to an upcoming event, please keep a lookout for an email with more information. However, the demo has already begun and we are hoping to reopen to browsing by early next week! (*knocks on wood*)
The construction is such that it is not safe to have customers browsing at this time. However, fortunately (or unfortunately) for us, we are not strangers to running a closed bookstore, and we are ready to work through the challenges that are sure to arise in the coming weeks.

(3) SUIT AGAINST N.E.A. OVER EXECUTIVE ORDER. “Theaters Sue the N.E.A. Over Trump’s ‘Gender Ideology’ Order” – the New York Times explains the litigation. (Story is behind a paywall.)

Several arts organizations sued the National Endowment for the Arts on Thursday, challenging its new requirement that grant applicants agree to comply with President Trump’s executive orders by promising not to promote “gender ideology.”

The groups that filed the suit have made or supported art about transgender and nonbinary people, and have received N.E.A. funding in the past. They say the new requirement unconstitutionally threatens their eligibility for future grants.

“Because they seek to affirm transgender and nonbinary identities and experiences in the projects for which they seek funding, plaintiffs are effectively barred by the ‘gender ideology’ certification and prohibition from receiving N.E.A. grants on artistic merit and excellence grounds,” the lawsuit says.

The groups are being represented in the litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union, which said in the lawsuit that the N.E.A. rule “has sowed chaos in the funding of arts projects across the United States.” After Mr. Trump began his second term, the N.E.A. said it would require grant applicants to agree “that federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology,” which Mr. Trump said in an executive order includes “the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.”

The N.E.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The suit was filed in a federal court in Rhode Island on behalf of Rhode Island Latino Arts, which promotes art made by Latinos; the Theater Offensive, an organization in Boston that presents work “by, for and about queer and trans people of color”; and National Queer Theater, a New York company best known for its Criminal Queerness Festival, which presents the work of international artists with roots in countries where their sexuality is criminalized or censored.

(4) NERO GOLD PRIZE. The ultimate Nero accolade and £30,000 prize went to a non-genre (and nonfiction) book, Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Shipwreck, Survival and Love. “Maurice And Maralyn By Sophie Elmhirst Announced As Winner Of 2024 Nero Gold Prize Book Of The Year”.

(5) TOLKIEN WAS PEEVED. [Item by Steven French.] I am not sure that Tolkien’s loathing of sloppiness and love of language is quite the exclusive that the Guardian thinks it is! “’Reduced to nonsense’: JRR Tolkien’s irritation with typist revealed in archive”.

JRR Tolkien was so irritated by a careless typist’s slapdash work on one of his manuscripts that he vented his frustration in a letter that has come to light.

The Lord of the Rings author said in despair: “She reduced [my manuscript] to nonsense. I have some sympathy with the typist faced with such unfamiliar matter; though evidently she wasn’t paying much attention.”

He mocked her confusion of “poche for poetic, highballs(!) for high halls, and arias for cries”.

The letter is within a collection of largely unpublished correspondence that reflects Tolkien’s loathing of sloppiness and love of language.

It is part of an archive that includes the last major Tolkien manuscript in private hands, The Road Goes Ever On, his collaboration with the composer Donald Swann of the musical comedy duo Flanders and Swann….

(6) WELCOME TO EARTH. Gizmodo invites us to “Watch 5 Mysterious Clips From Alien: Earth’s Crashed Ship” – a series of teasers from the upcoming FX series.

…What’s about to happen is the debut of Alien: Earth, FX’s upcoming show set years before any of the Alien films. It follows a team of soldiers who investigate a ship that has crashed on Earth and are forced to deal with what it contains. We assume, of course, that it contains something that will eventually create an alien, but what exactly? …

…So here you get to see the cat get the camera put on him and walk around a bit. The key takeaway is the end where we see a computer—much like Mother in the first Alien—with a very similar “Priority One” message: “Acquisition and safe return of all organisms for analysis. All other considerations secondary.” So, this ship was sent out to find something. And find something, it did….

…We see one of the crew members in hypersleep when something goes wrong. A fire. Is this the incident that started the crash back to Earth? What caused the fire? We don’t know.

All of this is a very cool way to tease the show and it’s culminating later this week in Austin, Texas. That’s where FX has recreated the crash site of the Maginot for fans to check out at SXSW. Learn more about that here.…

(7) THE RIGHT WAY, THE WRONG WAY, AND THE JANEWAY. According to Inverse, “A Much-Demanded Star Trek Spinoff Just Got A Hopeful Update”.

…We’re talking about the possibility of Star Trek: Janeway, a series focused on the return of Kate Mulgrew as Admiral Kathryn Janeway, set sometime after the events of Prodigy and perhaps, after the events of Picard Season 3. Speaking to a crowd of fans during the official Star Trek Cruise, Mulgrew answered a question about the possibility of a Janeway-focused spinoff TV series, or, failing that, her returning to the franchise in any capacity.

“There is a conversation happening,” Mulgrew said, according to WhatCulture. “It is being pursued.”

Mulgrew has long been vocal about galvanizing fans, which partially resulted in Star Trek: Prodigy Season 2 ending up on Netflix. But in terms of any new Star Trek series focusing on the post-Voyager era, nothing on the current Paramount+ slate fits that description. Strange New Worlds will run for at least two more seasons, and Starfleet Academy is expected to debut either later this year or sometime in 2026. At the same event on the Star Trek: The Cruise, Mulgrew expressed concerns that a Janeway live-action series might not live up to what fans wanted. And she also didn’t want to do a show as a “vanity project.”

(8) DUNE WHAT COMES NATURALLY. “1 of Dune’s Most Crucial Events Is Secretly Way Smarter Than Fans Realize (& It Proves Frank Herbert Was Brilliant)” asserts CBR.com.

…Frank Herbert’s masterpiece Dune emerged from various fascinating influences, beginning with an unlikely source: the Oregon coast. In 1957, after publishing his novel The Dragon in the Sea, Herbert traveled to Florence, Oregon, where he observed the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s efforts to stabilize massive dunes using poverty grasses. The sight of these imposing dunes, which Herbert believed could “swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways,” sparked a deep interest in ecology and desert environments that would become central to his epic novel. The ecological themes in Dune were further shaped by Herbert’s interactions with Native American mentors, particularly Howard Hansen and “Indian Henry” Martin from the Quileute reservation. Hansen’s warning that white men were “eating the earth” and could turn the planet into a wasteland “just like North Africa” resonated deeply with Herbert, who incorporated these environmental concerns into his story….

Many science fiction novels include predictions regarding technology, but Frank Herbert deliberately stayed away from that. Instead, Herbert’s novels focus on the power of the human mind and its ability to focus on discipline to overcome fears and regain control over thoughts, feelings, and even bodily functions. Herbert summed this up in one of his most iconic quoted Dune lines:

“Fear is the mind-killer.”…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

March 6, 1928 — William F. Nolan. (Died 2021.)

By Paul Weimer: Is the crystal in your palm blinking?

While he did write two sequels to it, plenty of short stories, a number of screenplays and a fair number of critical works, the name William F. Nolan means one and one thing only for me: Logan’s Run.

Well, two, if you count the movie.

The book, co-authored with George Clayton Johnson, came first. Ironically, while I read the book first, and only saw the movie some years later, the edition I read of the book first and had for years until it fell apart was one of those “movie/tv tie in” editions, that even had some stills/photos from the movie in it. So I “saw” a couple of scenes from the movie thanks to reading and re-reading this edition long before actually watching the movie.

Such a strange, wild book. 21 is the age of mandatory death., the triumph of youth. Feels very weird, today, in our sometimes gerontocratic governments. You’ll never get away from a homer, homer, homer. Casual use of drugs. Casual sex. It’s a good thing that my parents never knew what was in the book, they’d have been shocked. A breakneck plot and scenes all across the country, from domed cities to the frozen prison of hell to Crazy Horse and the Thinker, to a Civil War re-enactment with robots!

I did visit Crazy Horse in 2008, inspired by the novel, and was disappointed in how slow the construction has gone (far different than in the Logan’s Run timeline). It’s…worse than a tourist trap, somehow. Alas.

But the movie is something else. The future as a giant enclosed shopping mall. Lots of things missing from the books and a very different set of confrontations–the original book has a fight with a tiger, but the movie has…house cats? And the utter disappointment that while in the book some people are escaping and becoming free, in the movie, apparently, they all were frozen into frozen food by Box, who was turned from a chilling sadist into a figure of comedy in the movie. And yet like the book, the movie subtly is suggesting that the current world order cannot stand, and in fact must change, or else.

Yes, this birthday turned into a Logan’s Run’s remembrance rather than a Nolan remembrance. Nolan died in 2021. Requiescat in pace.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

The Argyle Sweater explains how comics will solve newspaper shrinkage.
Free Range shows why you should say “No” to wearing full plate at the next medieval reenactment.
Nancy takes some convincing about the power of stories.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has the long and short versions.

(11) SIMPSONS ART AUCTION. On March 15 Heritage Auctions will hold “Cowabunga II – Celebrating the Art of The Simpsons Animation Art Showcase Auction”. Among the 300+ lots going under the hammer is this animation cel:

The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror VIII “The HΩmega Man” Original Kang and Kudos Production Cel (Fox, 1997). This original production cel from The Simpsons episode “Treehouse of Horror VIII” (Season 9, Episode 4) features the iconic alien duo Kang and Kodos Johnson from Rigel 7. Taken from the first segment, “The HΩmega Man,” this rare cel captures their brief yet hilarious appearance as they witness Springfield’s demise from space. In the segment, France launches a neutron bomb at Springfield after Mayor Quimby insults the French with a “frog legs” joke. As the bomb travels through space, it flies past Kang and Kodos’ flying saucer, prompting Kang to exclaim, “What the hell was that?” This humorous moment occurs near the 2:58 timestamp, adding to the duo’s memorable cameos.

(12) AHH, ROMANCE. Booklegger tells Facebook readers how a bookstore figured into a couple’s anniversary celebration.

A few days ago I noticed a customer browsing the shelves in the science fiction/fantasy section. I asked him if there was anything I could help him find. “No, I’m doing fine, thanks,” he responded,” “but actually I do have a question I wanted to ask you.” His expression was animated and I wondered where this was heading.

He went on to tell me that he and his girlfriend were approaching their first anniversary, and that they had come to Booklegger on their first date. They were planning on re-creating that first date by visiting Dick Taylor for chocolates, and then coming to our store. He had created a little 42 page book for her as an anniversary gift, and he wondered if he could come in on the morning of their anniversary and plant the book on our shelves for her to find when they came to our shop later in the day.

I was 100% on board with this idea! What a compliment that they had their first date at our place, and what a sweet, creative surprise to mark the occasion. So this morning just as we opened Kiloe came in and showed me the book that he had created. 42 pages of things that he adores about Sarah, inside jokes between them, remembrance of fun things they’ve done together etc. And yes, it’s 42 things because they are both fans of Douglas Adams. He planted the book between Jim Butcher titles, knowing that she would browse that area….

(13) WAX ON, WAX OFF. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] Goldman Sachs, in a research note Thursday (the note isn’t publicly posted) reported by Slashdot: “Goldman Sachs: Why AI Spending Is Not Boosting GDP”.

Annualized revenue for public companies exposed to the build-out of AI infrastructure increased by over $340 billion from 2022 through 2024Q4 (and is projected to increase by almost $580 billion by end-2025). In contrast, annualized real investment in AI-related categories in the US GDP accounts has only risen by $42 billion over the same period. This sharp divergence has prompted questions from investors about why US GDP is not receiving a larger boost from AI….

Or, as I think it was Cory Doctorow posted months ago, they haven’t come up with a real, usefull killer usage for the thing. I am reminded of a news story on the radio in the early oughts, after the tech bubble collapsed, som3eone saying “they were spending money like mad, making fancy websites… and hoping that they’d eventually find a way to monetize it (they didn’t).

(14) WATER IN THE EARLY UNIVERSE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] One of the determinants many think is the need for water for life.

(I myself am a primacy of water man, though my former colleague, and fellow SF fan, Jack Cohen, was more broadminded than I.) Anyway, news comes that water has been discovered very early in the Universe’s history. This means that the Universe has had water in it for nearly all its time. This boosts the prospects for life arising elsewhere before now… Primary research here….

Of course, if you are not a primacy of water person then this news will be of lesser import…

Scientists from the University of Portsmouth have discovered that water was already present in the Universe 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.

The discovery means habitable planets could have started forming much earlier – before the first galaxies formed and billions of years earlier than was previously thought.

The study was led by astrophysicist Dr Daniel Whalen from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation. It is published today (3 March 2025) in Nature Astronomy.

It is the first time water has been modelled in the primordial universe.

According to the researchers’ simulations, water molecules began forming shortly after the first supernova explosions, known as Population III (Pop III) supernovae. These cosmic events, which occurred in the first generation of stars, were essential for creating the heavy elements – such as oxygen – required for water to exist.

The key finding is that primordial supernovae formed water in the Universe that predated the first galaxies.

Dr Daniel Whalen, from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation

Dr Whalen said: “Before the first stars exploded, there was no water in the Universe because there was no oxygen. Only very simple nuclei survived the Big Bang – hydrogen, helium, lithium and trace amounts of barium and boron.

“Oxygen, forged in the hearts of these supernovae, combined with hydrogen to form water, paving the way for the creation of the essential elements needed for life.”…

(15) TILT. The company’s Sunday landing was a success, however, today’s encore was not: “Private lunar lander may have fallen over while touching down near the moon’s south pole” – AP News has the story.

A privately owned lunar lander touched down on the moon with a drill, drone and rovers for NASA and other customers Thursday, but quickly ran into trouble and may have fallen over.

Intuitive Machines said it was uncertain whether its Athena lander was upright near the moon’s south pole — standing 15 feet (4.7 meters) tall — or lying sideways like its first spacecraft from a year ago. Controllers rushed to turn off some of the lander’s equipment to conserve power while trying to determine what went wrong.

It was the second moon landing this week by a Texas company under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program. Sunday’s touchdown was a complete success….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Mark Barsotti has rolled a sixth installment of his Paul Di Filippo interview: “Sci-Fi Writer Paul Di Filippo #6 ~ Weird Names & Cyberpunk Jazz Scatting”.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/4/25 Why Are All Pixels Tailless? It Makes It Easier To Walk Through Walls

Posted on January 4, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(0) STATUS REPORT. A few people who follow File 770 through the RSS feed have asked why it’s broken. That’s a side-effect of having Cloudflare set to “Under Attack”, a step made necessary last week when the site was overwhelmed by bot calls on the server. We’ve gone through this before and at some point it always abates. It hasn’t yet.

Meantime, John King Tarpinian has suggested the following as superior to the current test for whether a File 770 user is human.

(1) SCIENCE GUY GETS PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL. Bill Nye the Science Guy was among the people honored today with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Deadline has the story: “Joe Biden To Award Medal Of Freedom: Bono, Denzel Washington, Michael J. Fox And George Stevens Jr. Among Showbiz Recipients”. KIRO’s article focuses on Nye: “Bill Nye among 19 recipients of Presidential Medal of Freedom”.

…Nye gained prominence through his TV show and appearances on the sketch comedy show Almost Live! He holds a mechanical engineering degree from Cornell University and has contributed to scientific advancements, including work on the Mars Rover.

Beyond television, Nye has dedicated himself to science advocacy. He serves as CEO of the Planetary Society and champions space exploration, environmental stewardship, and science literacy. He has also authored several books to further inspire and educate audiences….

(2) CHRISTMAS U CHALLENGE FINALS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Last night was the last in the Christmas (alumni) University Challenge. The finals saw SF author Richard Morgan’s Queens’ College Cambridge team face Durham University. It was real tight: both teams had just one scientist and three artists – one artist had graduated in political science (an oxymoronic subject if ever there was). Morgan got off to a great start getting the first starter for 10 question answering with ‘Thomas Payne’. Durham led for the first quarter, then Queens’, but Durham slowly caught up to finally win 125 against Queens’ 120.

In this year’s Christmas University Challenge there was just one SF writer among all of the teams’ members and it was his team that made it through to the finals. Now, I am not saying that this relationship was causal, for if I were then I’d be in The Twilight Zone.

If you are not familiar with Richard Morgan’s work, we have a few reviews over at SF² Concatenation, including: Altered Carbon (which was adapted into a television mini-series), Black Man, Broken Angels Market Forces The Steel Remains and Woken Furies. You can see the Christmas University Challenge finals edition on Youtube: “University Challenge Christmas 2024 – E10 Final”.

(3) A.K.A. ELVIS. If you already happen to be a Robert Crais fan and a reader of his Elvis Cole and Joe Pike novels, like I am, you will enjoy this long memoir about the writer and his series at CrimeReads: “Robert Crais: A Crime Reader’s Guide to the Classics”. (The article doesn’t mention that he is a Clarion graduate, or that in every book he writes one paragraph in the style of Harlan Ellison. Sometimes I even spot it.)

… Then, in 1985, his father died. When Crais went back to Louisiana to help sort things out, he discovered that, after forty-five years of marriage, his mother “had never written a check, paid a bill, used a credit card.” Crais had to teach her how to do all that, “and I was mad, angry, confused. I thought I would write about it, so I could understand it.”

He started a book about a woman who comes to a private detective, desperate to find her missing husband, a man who had always taken care of every detail of her life, and now she was completely unable to cope. Crais modeled the detective a bit after himself, with his own worldview and sense of humor (and taste in shirts), and over the course of the book and its many revelations, the detective helps guide the woman, named Ellen Lang, into a true sense of herself, until, by the end of the book, she can look at the detective, Elvis Cole, and say, “I can do this. I can pull us together….I won’t back up. Not ever.” She’s even the one who shoots the main villain with Cole’s .38, holding the gun just the way Cole’s friend, Joe Pike, showed her.

He named the book The Monkey’s Raincoat, after a Japanese haiku, an agent sent it out, and…it was rejected by nine publishers, before Bantam bought it as a paperback original. It went on to win Anthony and Macavity awards, get nominated for an Edgar, and eventually end up on the list of the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century by the Independent Mystery Book Sellers Association….

(4) UNBEARABLE OVERSIGHT. The BBC reports “Paddington In Peru snubbed by Bafta for new family film award”.

The latest Paddington movie will not be nominated for a new Bafta award for children’s and family films after being left off the category’s longlist.

Paddington in Peru was the top-earning British film of 2024 at the UK box office and was expected to be a frontrunner for the new award, which is intended to “celebrate the very best films appealing to inter-generational audiences”.

However, it has been overlooked by Bafta jury members for best children’s and family film.

Paddington does have a chance of a nomination in another category, though, after being included on the longlist for best British film….

(5) PUBLIC DOMAIN 2025. What has been unbound this year from the shackles of copyright? The Public Domain celebrates the most notable items in its roundup “Happy Public Domain Day 2025!”

…Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain, but there are three main types of copyright term for historical works which cover most cases. For these three systems, newly entering the public domain today are:

works by people who died in 1954, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (relevant in UK, most of the EU, and South America);
works by people who died in 1974, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (relevant to most of Africa and Asia);
films and books (incl. artworks featured) published in 1929 (relevant solely to the United States).

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 4, 1998 — Babylon 5: In the Beginning

By Paul Weimer:

Babylon 5: In the Beginning

Where it all began, chronologically, although it came out after the 4th season.

The story of Babylon 5: In the Beginning is one that had been told through the first four seasons–the Earth Minbari War and the revelation of who and what Commander Sinclair was…or will be. We’d seen scenes of this (and its framing story set in the future) here and there in the first four seasons, and would see more in the fifth season.

The plot? With a framing story set decades ahead of the actual main line of Babylon 5 during the reign of Londo, In the Beginning takes us from the tragic first contact between the Humans and Minbari (with Arthurian overtones to the whole affair), through the actual conduct of the war, all the way to the “Battle of the Line” and the siege of Earth. Here of course we have one of the pivotal moments in the entire fictional history of the Babylon 5 verse — the capture of pilot Commander Sinclair, and how it ended the war…and started a new era of peace. Or hoped for peace. (It did, of course, rock the very foundations of Minbari society). The story of In the Beginning is…how the Babylon Project came to be. Or, to be clear, In the Beginning tells the story of how we got the setup for the events of the entire series.

You can see the improvements in CGI between the first season and this movie, especially in the spacecraft. While all of that in general has not aged that well, there is a striking improvement over those several years.

In general, the movie has the strengths and weaknesses of the series, and especially the movies of the series, but shows a lot more polish than, say, In the Beginning. Great themes, some excellent dialogue, sometimes some rather stilted scenes. If you have seen Babylon 5 the series, you know what you are in for.

This movie does try and play “bingo” with plot points and revelations, which can make it feel a little soulless at times. And although the non framing bits takes place earlier than the rest of the series, it is not the place to start the series. (Heck, to be sure, I don’t even think The Gathering, the ostensible Pilot, is where you should start Babylon 5).

But back to In the Beginning, the other advantage to the movie is that if you have missed some of the clues in the course of the series, this is where we get the foundations of the Human-Minbari relationship. Which, if you think about it…is one of the major loglines of the entire series. (Or maybe even intended to have been the main logline).

(7) COMICS SECTION.

Bizarro illustrates the problem of owning a hammer.
Rhymes with Orange considers writers’ DNA.
The Non-Adventures of Wonderella has returned from cryogenic sleep.
Tom Gauld knows how to gift wrap a book.

How to gift wrap a book… my cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com books.
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2024-12-21T11:13:17.562Z

Tom Gauld compares New Year’s resolutions.

Happy New Year! (my cartoon for @newscientist.bsky.social)
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-01-01T10:04:17.610Z

And if you haven’t made any resolutions, he’s here to help.

My new year’s resolution generator for @theguardian.com. Let me know what you get!
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-01-04T10:00:24.452Z

(8) DESIGNING WOMAN. Bruce Sterling admires Laura Kampf’s repurposing of tech and other debris in “Some Public Limits of Everyday Weirdness (2025)”.

…Laura Kampf scavenges, but she’s never simple or thrifty about it. Laura Kampf is a technically advanced European-Union woman who is sometimes sponsored by tool companies. She rescues her materials from a planetary avalanche of first-world industrial debris — there’s nothing much for her to be “thrifty” or “simple” about, because that native junk of late-capitalism arrives in landslides. Sometimes the objects she repurposes are already quite weird when they arrive at her doorstep. Leftover German electronic-espionage cabinets have been a particular Laura Kampf favorite — NATO spyware, transformed into her tool-chests.

Laura Kampf will treat this objet-trouvee junk material with a tender designer’s concern. She will clean it, round and bevel its corners, remove all its splinters, and likely repaint it. This debris will be re-imagined and rebuilt with many dainty, user-friendly touchpoints. Then it’s no longer mere junk, because it becomes laurakampfian. Often her creations look quite 1960s European design-modernist. They look rather Achille Castiglioni, back when the Milanese design maestro was repurposing old tractor seats….

(9) A MAN’S HOME IS HIS CASTLE. I suppose after you’ve been a TV star for 30 years you really should be rich enough for this: “The Simpsons May Actually Be Living in A ‘Palace,’ According to Viral Diagram of Their Home” at Cracked.com.

…Last week, Redditor RocketShipUFO1106 headed to The Simpsons subreddit with a comprehensive, illustrated floor plan of the iconic light-pink abode. Upon first glance, the interior of 742 Evergreen Terrace looks like, well, just that. Boasting several in-show staples — living-room fireplace, two-car garage, iconic orange couch — it’s decked out in all its late ‘80s glory, ready for whatever wacky hijinks Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa or Maggie bring into its four walls.

But as several fans noted, seeing its size and amenities all laid out in yet another form of 2D raised several questions about the iconic cartoon property — namely, how the hell could Homer and Marge afford such a high-end home on a nuclear plant operator’s salary?…

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

Pixel Scroll 12/26/24 Clicks! Clicks! The Scroll Was Full Of Clicks!

Posted on December 26, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) SMELLING BEE. “How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?” in The New Yorker begins with a rant against the prevalence of the English language, however, there are some interesting anthropological bits, too:

…Western writers have long assumed that human beings have an inherently limited capacity to describe some senses, with olfaction ranking as the most elusive. We can speak abstractly about colors (red, blue, black) and sound (high, low, loud). With smell, though, we usually give “source-based” references (“like cut grass”). But the cognitive scientist Asifa Majid, now of Oxford, and the linguist Niclas Burenhult, of Lund University, in Sweden, have shown that this needn’t be the case. They discovered that the Jahai, hunter-gatherers living at the border of Malaysia and Thailand, have a rich vocabulary of abstract smell words. One Jahai term, itpit, refers to the “intense smell of durian, perfume, soap, Aquillaria wood, and bearcat,” Majid and Burenhult report. Another, cnes, applies to “the smell of petrol, smoke, bat droppings and bat caves, some species of millipede, root of wild ginger, leaf of gingerwort, wood of mango tree.” Subsequent research has found large olfactory lexicons in at least forty other languages, among them Fang, Khmer, Swahili, and Zapotec.

It makes a difference. In a study that Majid and Burenhult conducted a decade ago, Jahai and English speakers were asked to identify and name twelve smells, including cinnamon, turpentine, gasoline, and onion. English speakers, despite their greater familiarity with the odors, faltered….

…Twenty years ago, abstract smell vocabularies seemed ridiculous. Burenhult studied the Jahai language for a decade, even writing a doctoral dissertation on its grammar, before Majid asked him to run a battery of tasks that revealed Jahai speakers’ exceptional way of talking about smell. Other linguistic features once assumed to be universal-such as tenses, personal pronouns, and even, potentially, a distinction between nouns and verbs-have turned up missing when greater numbers of languages have been scrutinized. Likewise, we’ve enlarged our sense of the metaphors used to map concepts. English describes acoustic pitch using a verticality metaphor (high-low), but a study by experts in musical cognition found that people around the world use at least thirty-five other mappings, such as small-big, alert-sleepy, pretty-ugly, tense-relaxed, summer-winter, and-in the case of some traditional Zimbabwean instrumentalists-“crocodile” (low pitch) and “those who follow crocodiles” (high pitch)….

Everett’s book revels in such discoveries, which multiply the conceivable differences separating languages. In a recent review of the research literature, the language scientist Damián E. Blasi, along with Majid and others, listed the many cognitive domains that English seems to affect, including memory, theory of mind, spatial reasoning, event processing, aesthetic preferences, and sensitivity to rhythm and melody.”

(2) DISSECTING THE TEASER. After you watch the short Doctor Who promo video below, The Hollywood Reporter stands ready with a “’Doctor Who’ Season 2 Trailer: Scene-by-Scene Breakdown of 2025 Preview”.

Is That Donna Noble?

Eagle-eyed fans may have been a little surprised to spot a magazine containing a promotional picture for the Doctor Who 2023 specials featuring Noble actress Catherine Tate.

In a whirlwind couple of seconds, we see the Doctor and the occupants of what looks like a soccer-loving barbershop (in what’s certainly not the U.K.) sucked out into some kind of cosmic storm. If you look closely at the magazines fluttering by, you can spot a magazine with the aforementioned image….

(3) DAVIES AND MOFFAT Q&A. Inverse introduces its interview with the pair, “19 Years Later, ‘Doctor Who’ Brings Back Its Best Collaboration — For Potentially The Last Time”, saying, “Nineteen years ago, TV magic happened: Steven Moffat wrote his first Doctor Who story for showrunner Russell T Davies…”.

…Davies: Because what you get, Steven, is a fool because he throws away huge movie franchises every time he does a Doctor Who story.

Moffat: So do you.

Davies: There’s River Song — could be bigger than James Bond every day, and now there’s the Time Hotel that could run for 20 years as a television show.

Moffat: You know you’ve got an idea that’s good enough for 45 minutes of Doctor Who if you’ve got a movie idea. If you just pissed away a franchise, yeah, I might give you 45 minutes….

(4) UNIVERSITIES PRESERVING SFF. Fanac.org’s next “FANAC Fanhistory Zoom” is “Out of the Ghetto and into the University: SF Fandom University Collections”. To attend, email [email protected].

Most of us are collectors (or at least accumulators) of science fiction memorabilia. And others are researchers and historians. Our first program should be interesting to all of you. We will be interviewing the Curators of three of the largest library collections specializing in science fiction, fanzines, comics and other related materials.

Come to find out what is in their collections, what they want for their collections, and how to use them. January 11, 2025 – 2PM EST, 11 AM PST, 7PM GMT London, and 6AM AEDT (sorry) Sunday, Jan 12 Melbourne

(5) VIDEOS FROM NINTH CITY TECH SCIENCE FICTION SYMPOSIUM. Videos from panels held at the Ninth Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium on SF, Artificial Intelligence, and Generative AI have been posted to YouTube. There’s also a gallery of photos taken during the event by Andrew Porter.

This is the direct link to the YouTube video playlist.

Jason W. Ellis, Associate Professor of English and Coordinator, City Tech Science Fiction Collection at New York City College of Technology says:

Our sign-in sheet recorded 58 attendees, but I’m guessing the attendance across the day was between 75-100 people as some folks, including students, didn’t sign-in. I even heard one positive take on the symposium via the telephone grapevine from a past colleague who I didn’t know attended. In any event, it took an army to chow down 10 pizzas at lunch!

(6) CLASSIC COMIC STRIP COLLECTIONS. These used to make ideal holiday gifts. CBR.com gives us the “10 Best Comic Strip Collections, Ranked”. “…The best comic strip collections feature the best comic strip titles and probably contain strips significant to its legacy and/or offer insight into its creation….”

Coming in at number six:

Pearls Before Swine: Sgt. Piggy’s Lonely Hearts Club Comic: A Comic Strip Collection About Life, Death, and Everything in Between

Starring anamorphic animals named after the animals they are, Pearls Before Swine explores themes of death, meaning, and the world’s chaos with irony and visual humor. It’s named after the Bible verse, Matthew 7:6, which contains the phrase, “Do not cast your pearls before swine,” meaning don’t impart wisdom on those who won’t appreciate it. This is a pun because Rat, a cynical and snarky loudmouth, often feels this is what he’s doing when talking to Pig, a literal swine who is kind-natured and naïve. Pearls Before Swine also stars Goat, a character often annoyed at Rat and Pig because he’s more educated and informed than them, and a family of crocodiles who always fail at killing their zebra neighbors.

Roughly half the strips in Pearls Before Swine treasuries, which collect the strips in the previous two collections, have notes under them from Pearls Before creator Stephen Pastis. Pearls Before Swine: Sgt. Piggy’s Lonely Hearts Club Comic is the first Pearls Before Swine treasury and showcases where it all began. The strips in this book were made before Pastis started drawing himself as a character to make meta-commentary, but it still had plenty of other laughs, including a strip where Pig orders bacon and says it’s a “pig-eat-pig world.”

(7) RAY, BART AND HOMER. Phil Nichols’ Bradbury 100 podcast devoted a recent episode to “Ray Bradbury and The Simpsons”, tracking down every reference the series has made to Ray.

A few weeks ago, there was a new episode of The Simpsons which was entirely based on the works of Ray Bradbury. “Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes” is not the first time Ray has been referenced by the show. In fact, the number of Bradbury allusions across all of The Simpsons (i.e. on TV, in comics, and in books) now totals: thirteen.

In this episode I detail them all!

Many of them are represented by audio clips. But there are a few gags which are purely visual, including the comic-book and book appearances, and so I’ll present a few of them below. (Click on the images to embiggen!)

(8) PARTY TIME. People’s Elizabeth Rosner tells how “I Spent the Weekend at Neil Patrick Harris’ Murder Mystery Party—and Lived to Tell the Tale”.

…Saturday evening, the drama reached its peak during a lavish five-course dinner under a heated tent. The menu featured a Crenn Caesar salad, savoy cabbage, steak wing lamb, and soy custard, paired with fine wines. But before dinner was over, the chef’s driver, Charlie Carr, was killed.

The tension escalated when a dinner guest was poisoned for suggesting Sinclair’s death wasn’t an accident, putting her in the killer’s crosshairs.

In the end, we learned the killer and his motive…

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Galaxy Quest

By Paul Weimer: Galaxy Quest — the best movie about Star Trek fandom of all time?

Very possibly yes.

In the days before The Orville (which has neatly taken up the Galaxy Quest banner in some ways), Star Trek’s self importance was sometimes overweening. Oh you could see and find some deflation of the seriousness of movies like Star Trek the Motion Picture now and again in the Star Trek canon (Star Trek IV in particular). But the strong desire and passion of fans was something that was mocked for a long time, and by William Shatner himself.

On December 20, 1986, the infamous “Get a Life” sketch was aired on Saturday Night Live. It’s worth seeing if you haven’t seen it. People forget that at the end Shatner “recants” his rant against the fans and says he was just channeling “Evil Kirk”. Everyone remembers how for the first 6 minutes of the episode he rips and destroys the enthusiasm and geeky intense interest of those same fans.

So, Galaxy Quest is a corrective, I feel, to that sketch and those perceptions. And at the time I saw Galaxy Quest in 1999, I had been to one Star Trek convention (with Marina Sirtis and George Takei). I knew and know the passions of people for a property, a franchise, an imaginary future. I share them, after all.

Galaxy Quest channels all that, and with love and respect, but knowing how silly its own source material is, uses it. From the funky controls on the bridge, to the “choppers” in a passageway that Sigourney Weaver’s character calls out as being stupid, the movie shows the absurdity of following a property so closely. And yet in showing the absurdity of it, it also shows the love, respect, care and humanity of fans of a property. (Consider how the fans come together to help land the remnants of the ship). It’s a movie that touches the heart and knows when to cut from horror, to comedy, to moments of tenderness and pathos. There are few episodes, or movies of the actual Star Trek than can say the same.

And the casting is perfect. Tim Allen as the clueless captain? Sigourney Weaver, whose sole job is to repeat the computer? The late Alan Rickman, horrified he has, by Grabthar’s Hammer, been permanently typecast? Tony Shalhoub as the slacker chief engineer? All of the cast understood the assignment and give the movie their all. The movie is peppy, doesn’t flag, and entertains thoroughly. It satirizes and respects and loves Star Trek, and its fans.

Also, in 2020, inspired by this movie, I went out of my way in my trip around the “Utah 5” to see Goblin Valley State Park, where the alien planet with the beryllium mine (and the rock monster) was filmed. Friends, it is as alien and weird as the movie makes it out to be.

Never give up, never surrender may be Captain Taggart’s catchphrase, but it’s some damn fine advice for life, too.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

Bob the Squirrel has the logical response.
Dinosaur Comics reforms a vampire’s powers.
Rubes owns a special edition.
Dinosaur Comics tests out stories about brothers.

(11) ALTERNATE GALAXY QUESTS. Cracked.com has selected “25 Trivia Tidbits About ‘Galaxy Quest’ on Its 25th Anniversary”.

For the final Christmas of the 20th century, Santa dropped off an extra special gift to movie lovers: Galaxy Quest, a Star Trek parody that’s also so much more.

In it, Tim Allen plays egotistical actor Jason Nesmith whose claim to fame was portraying the Captain Kirk-like lead, Commander Peter Quincy Taggart, in the cheesy 1980s sci-fi show Galaxy Quest. Years after Galaxy Quest has concluded, Nesmith and his co-stars are scraping by with personal appearances at sci-fi conventions. Things take a twist, though, when real-life aliens — who have mistaken Galaxy Quest as real — abduct the actors to help save them from an extraterrestrial warlord.

In the 25 years since its release, the movie has turned into a legitimate cult hit, and so, to mark its 25th anniversary, here are 25 behind-the-scenes tidbits about it…

Here are two particularly juicy tidbits – imagine Galaxy Quest helmed by the same director as Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis, and with a different cast.

21 Why Ramis Left the Project

According to Dean Parisot, who ultimately directed Galaxy Quest, “The studio wanted Tim Allen to do it, but Harold didn’t want to do it with Tim.” Additionally, producer Mark Johnson said, “Harold didn’t do the movie because we couldn’t cast it. The people we went to all turned it down, and by the time we got to Tim Allen, Harold couldn’t see it.”

20 Ramis’ Pick

Ramis had originally wanted Alec Baldwin for the lead. Other casting choices proposed were Steve Martin and Kevin Kline.

(12) ALL SINGING, ALL DANCING, ALL GRINCHING. Cat pointed out a huge oversight in yesterday’s Scroll – I should have followed his Grinch TV memory with a link to Martin Morse Wooster’s “Review of ‘Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas – The Musical’”, an account of the stage production from 2016.

I saw Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas!—The Musical last night at the National Theatre in Washington. From the musical’s website and Wikipedia, I learned that this musical has been around since 1994 and has played in 41 other cities in the U.S. before it showed up in Washington….

….You know the plot. The citizens of Whoville are looking forward to Christmas when they can get lots of stuff and eat many sugary treats. Then that mean Grinch shows up and steals all their stuff. But why? Deprived childhood? Acid reflux? The answer here is that the Grinch is tired of all the noise the Whovians make. At that point I started cheering the Grinch on….

(13) IF YOU CAN SAY SOMETHING NICE. [Item by Steven French.] As a counterweight to all the doom mongering about AI, here’s a positive news report for the Xmas season: “NHS to begin world-first trial of AI tool to identify type 2 diabetes risk” in the Guardian.

The NHS in England is launching a world-first trial of a “gamechanging” artificial intelligence tool that can identify patients at risk of type 2 diabetes more than a decade before they develop the condition.

More than 500 million people worldwide have type 2 diabetes, and finding new ways to spot people at risk before they develop the condition is a major global health priority. Estimates suggest 1 billion people will have type 2 diabetes by 2050.

The condition is a leading cause of blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks, strokes and lower limb amputation. It is often linked to being overweight or inactive, or having a family history of type 2 diabetes, although not all those diagnosed are in those categories.

Now doctors and scientists have developed a transformative AI tool that can predict those at risk of the condition as much as 13 years before it begins to develop.

The technology analyses electrocardiogram (ECG) readings during routine heart scans. It can detect subtle changes too small to be noticed by the human eye that could raise the alarm early about a patient on the road to getting type 2 diabetes.

It could enable early interventions and potentially help people avoid developing the condition altogether by, for example, making changes to their diet and lifestyle….

(14) SCIENCE IN THE ASTIN FAMILY TREE. [Item by Andrew (not Werdna).] This short documentary discusses “The AD-X2 Controversy” — in which the evaluation of the effectiveness of a car battery additive led to the firing (and later reinstatement) of the head of the National Bureau of Standards Allen Astin. The documentary features interviews with Astin’s son John Astin and grandson Sean Astin. Further details in the Wikipeida here: “AD-X2”.

(15) ‘TIS ALWAYS THE SEASON THERE. “Mars orbiters witness a ‘winter wonderland’ on the Red Planet” – Space.com shares ESA’s photos.

Hoping for a white Christmas this year? Well, even if there’s no snow where you live, at least you can enjoy these images of a “winter” wonderland on Mars.

Taken by the German-built High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter in June 2022, and by NASA’s NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on September 2022, these images showcase what appears to be a snowy landscape in the Australe Scopuli region of Mars, near the planet’s south pole.But the “snow” seen here is quite different from what we have on Earth.

In fact, it’s carbon dioxide ice, and at Mars’ south pole, there’s 26-foot-thick (8-meter-thick) layer of it year-round. (These image was actually taken near the summer solstice, not the winter one — it’s very cold here all year long.)…

(16) INTERNATIONAL CHRISTMAS STATION. We’re a little bit late picking this up, folks! “Space Station Astronauts Deliver a Christmas Message for 2024”.

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

File 770

Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom

Tag Archives: The Simpsons

Pixel Scroll 2/15/26 How Many Pixels Does Mike Need? How Many Files, How Many Scrolls?

Pixel Scroll 11/5/25 Oh, Sweet Mercury, We Have A Notification On Vellum

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

Pixel Scroll 9/30/25 You Never File Your Pixels When You’re At The Stone Table – They’ll Be Time Enough To File When The Clicking’s Done

Pixel Scroll 9/2/25 Or To Be A Scroll And Ride In Triumph In Pixelpolis

Pixel Scroll 5/30/25 If They Could Scroll Me Now, That Old Karass Of Mine

Pixel Scroll 4/23/25 Pixeler on the Roof

Pixel Scroll 3/6/25 Hail Pixels, We Who Are About To File Salute You

Pixel Scroll 1/4/25 Why Are All Pixels Tailless? It Makes It Easier To Walk Through Walls

Pixel Scroll 12/26/24 Clicks! Clicks! The Scroll Was Full Of Clicks!