26 Voyage To The Pixel Of The Scroll

Posted on June 14, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) CULTURE FAN. Before Joel Miller explains “What The Player of Games and the Duolingo Owl Have in Common”, he takes a deep dive into Iain M. Banks’ Culture at Transmissions from Tomorrow.

…Every society runs on a game. Status, power, and wealth are decided by invisible rules you were never handed, in a game you were born into halfway through. That reality is the basis of Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games. He built an entire alien empire around it and called it Azad: a name alien enough to trick you into thinking he wasn’t talking about home….

… At the edge of Culture space sits the Empire of Azad. Where the Culture is open and collective, Azad is savage, sexual, and obsessed with rank. And every inch of it is organized around a single, brutally complex game.

In Azad, your place in society—from the lowliest servant to the emperor himself—comes down to how well you play. Win, and you rule. Lose, and you’re ruled. The empire even takes its name from the game, because the game and the civilization are one and the same. A game reveals what a society believes, how it behaves, and what it worships.

Think about the games we play. Chess and Risk mirror our obsession with strategy and conquest. Monopoly and Catan? Our fascination with money and trade. Even Scrabble and trivia nights show off our love of knowledge. Each one takes something our society prizes and crystallizes it into a set of rules. As Banks put it in a 1990 interview with Michael Cobley:

“The morality of games is the rules. Games have a very definite and set morality, you play according to the rules or you don’t play at all. The difference with the games that we play as human beings is that the rules are always changing.”

That’s why Banks makes Azad the main focus of The Player of Games. He takes our instinct to gamify everything, builds an empire on it, and yanks back the curtain on the cruelty underneath….

(2) POP FANS. “What Happens When ‘Star Wars’ Replaces Mozart?” asks the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.)

This summer, plenty of familiar scores will be heard at the biggest orchestras in the country. Of course, there will be symphonies by Mozart and Mahler. But even more famous, perhaps, will be the soundtracks for “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars.”

What used to be a novelty has now become a core staple of symphonic programming in the United States: live soundtracks, performances in which an orchestra plays while a movie screens overhead. As the classical music industry grapples with declining cultural relevance and mounting financial challenges, an evening of “How to Train Your Dragon” is no longer inconceivable.

Orchestra administrators say the programming shift attracts audiences that might not otherwise come to a typical concert. And because of technological advances, there are more films available for programming than ever. Melia Tourangeau, the president and chief executive of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, said in an interview that live soundtrack shows are the ensemble’s “fastest-growing product line.”

Still, there have been grumbles about the artistic merit of these concerts.

“Trying to get people to go to the symphony by presenting something that’s more familiar is not necessarily a bad thing,” Evan Shinners, a musician and the host of the podcast “W.T.F. Bach,” said in an interview. “It’s just not an effective thing.”

“Despite how lovely film music can be, it’s not classical music,” he added. “It just happens to be playable by the orchestra. What you do when you do present film music in an orchestra is, you reinforce people’s love for films. You don’t cause them to come back to want hear Beethoven.”…

… “The bottom line is that it’s an income generator, and it also brings in new audiences into the concert hall, which orchestras are always trying to accomplish,” said Sarah Hicks, the principal conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Live at Orchestra Hall, a series focused on popular music that includes film concerts. The ensemble has found that 38 percent of those who attend the live soundtrack performances purchase ticket packages that include at least two other programs….

… Although live soundtrack performances bring in much-needed revenue for orchestras across the country, some, particularly the musicians, question whether the concerts devalue their art form.

“I’ll be perfectly honest,” said Ryan Fleur, the president and chief executive of the Philadelphia Orchestra. “We have some musicians that feel very strongly that this wasn’t the reason that they went to conservatory.”

Jim Nova, a trombonist with the Pittsburgh Symphony, said of film scores, “I don’t think anyone is as enthusiastic as I am. I mean, I love this music.”

“I have friends who live in Los Angeles who have played on a lot of film scores, and they say that film scoring is like 95 percent boredom and 5 percent terror,” Nova said. “You’ll be plugging along playing something, and it’s not really that hard, and then you turn the page and there’s something that’s basically almost unplayable.”

Hicks said that there used to be a “certain resistance” to performing live soundtracks because the musicians weren’t trained for them.

“There was some sort of attitude,” she said, “that soundtracks and score music was somehow lesser and orchestras still do have this curatorial responsibility to perform the great works of art.”…

(3) MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE BUT NOT THE BOX OFFICE? [Item by Steven French.] Despite the broadly positive reviews, the Guardian’s Ben Child raises doubts about the possibility of a sequel to Masters of the Universe: “Masters of the Universe is a box office flop. Can they really be serious about a sequel?”

Reports suggest Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe made just $54m (£40m) globally on debut at the weekend, a figure that, while not exactly fatal, would usually be considered a disappointment for a mainstream movie with a budget of more than $200m. Worse still, this heavily caffeinated, meta take on the 1980s TV show arrived carrying the weight of a major studio relaunch and decades of pent-up nostalgia. On paper at least, its bow looks less like the birth of a cinematic universe than the sort of expensive stumble from which some franchises never recover.

So why then does everyone involved in this thing seem so cheerful? “Travis Knight and the entire cast and film-making team have delivered something truly special,” Amazon MGM’s Kevin Wilson gushed to Variety. “This opening is exactly the kind of critical first moment that validates our holistic distribution strategy – building awareness and engagement that will carry well beyond the theatrical window.”

Meanwhile, Knight has been talking up the possibility of sequels, after the movie appeared to introduce He-Man’s twin She-Ra in a mid-credits scene. “With every movie that I’ve ever made, I’ve always imagined where the characters go outside … the bounds of the movie,” Knight told TechRadar. “You want to tell a self-contained story, and I think we’ve done that with this movie, but there are things within the wider mythology that didn’t fit within that, and the She-Ra character was one of them.”

“Adora is also a character that carries a lot of weight with her,” he added. “A lot of people, myself included, love that character, so we wanted to give a little nod to where that could go if we were given the opportunity to tell more stories.”

So far, so positive. Yet the real question is: why? Data from the opening weekend suggests that nearly 40% of Masters of the Universe’s audience were over 45, hinting that nostalgia for the original show probably fuelled much of the film’s relatively meagre box office take. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the movie’s run, as it may well be that the core audience have already seen it….

(4) SHELFIES. Shelfies, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin, “Takes a unique peek each week into one of our contributors’ weird and wonderful bookshelves.” A recent entry was Shelfies #92: Mary G. Thompson.

Mary G. Thompson is the author of the forthcoming sci-fi/horror novel Precious Children (2026), One Level Down (2025), Flicker and Mist, The Word, Wuftoom, and other novels. Her contemporary thriller Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee was a winner of the 2017 Westchester Fiction Award and a finalist for the 2018-2019 Missouri Gateway award. Her short fiction has appeared in Dark Matter, Apex, and others. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children from The New School and completed the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television’s Professional Program in Screenwriting. She lives in Washington, DC.

(5) ZOMBIE DEMONSTRATION. “The Casting Call Was for Zombies. The Job Was Actually a Landlord Rally” reports the New York Times. (Article is behind a paywall.)

The casting call seemed simple enough: An unnamed nonprofit was offering $75 in cash to people who could spend a couple of hours acting as zombies in a “mock demonstration.” The scenes would be part of an instructional video, and actors were asked to wear tattered clothing and to be ready to have their faces painted.

But when the group of 40 or so participants arrived at the filming site in Downtown Brooklyn on Thursday evening, things started to take a turn.

First, they discovered that the organization behind the event was a pro-landlord advocacy group known as the Gotham Housing Alliance. The actors were to become zombies to symbolize the “death” of the housing industry at the hands of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist.

Then it became clear that the “mock” demonstration was, in fact, real. The actors were directed to march down Jay Street in the sweltering heat, moaning and shuffling alongside landlords, some carrying Gotham Housing Alliance flags.

Eventually, the group mustered outside a building where a city panel was set to hold a hearing on whether to freeze rents in nearly one million rent-stabilized buildings.

A crowd of at least 50 pro-tenant protesters had also gathered there, and the confluence of the two groups grew tense, with expletives hurled in both directions. (At least one zombie, staying in character, snarled and barked at the pro-tenant group.) As the evening progressed, many of the actors, several of whom identified themselves as renters, grew visibly uncomfortable, hiding their faces behind signs or flags. Several murmured that they felt they had been duped to show up on the “wrong side.”

“To discover, in the moment, that I’m doing something I love, and it’s being utilized against me — that’s especially disturbing,” said Ian Cobb, one of the zombie actors, who said he lives in a rent-stabilized apartment.

Like others, Mr. Cobb, 25, said he had been given no further details about the project beforehand. And while he had played unsavory roles before onstage, this felt different.

Many of the performers said they had felt pressured to take part in the protest even after realizing it was not what they had expected. The casting call, shared with The New York Times by Erik Rivera, an actor and skateboarder who was part of the group, said that people who were hired and did not show up would be put on a “Do Not Cast” list and would be reported to an online casting platform. The casting call made clear that the actors would be paid only at the end of the event….

(6) A CINEMATIC CAREER FROM SOUP TO NUTS. “All 35 Steven Spielberg Movies, Ranked From Worst to Best” — The Hollywood Reporter wades right in.

As ‘Disclosure Day’ hits theaters, The Hollywood Reporter takes a look at the film director’s entire oeuvre, featuring aliens (lots of them!), Indiana Jones (lots of him!) and wars (lots of — well, you know).

And look what’s Number One! Holy cow. I remember how mad I was when this lost to Gandhi for Best Picture. (Yes, I’m probably lucky only Spielberg films are in the running here….)

1. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Darker than you remember. E.T. starts and ends in the forest, the lit city down the hill resembling a night sky full of stars. The most famous image is a black silhouette against the moon: boy, alien, bicycle. Shadows fill the house Henry Thomas’ Elliott shares with his brother, his sister, and his mom. (Dad’s in Mexico with Sally, his absence as palpable as a shark you never see.) The camera hovers down with the young cast, so the toy-stuffed closet feels cavernous as a doom temple. Junk kid’s movies tend to be overlit and colorful, but Spielberg remembers how visceral darkness feels to a child: the witching hour, staying up late at a sleepover, the scary wonder of being awake when your parents are asleep. This is his smallest story on a map — house, neighborhood, woods, a school day cut short by frog liberation — but the emotions reach for cosmic empathy. “Think how other people feel for a change!” Robert MacNaughton’s big brother demands. Empathy is the plot and the primary special effect. Marvelous technique crafted E.T.’s body, but the soul-baring performances (Drew Barrymore!) bring him to life. And no matter how soaring Williams’ score is, there’s no doubt E.T. is the toughest of Spielberg’s alien quintet. Close Encounters and Disclosure Day promise revelation. War of the Worlds and even Crystal Skull fix their broken families. Elliott is the one who says goodbye to someone he loves. But E.T. knows we all have to go sometime. Our eyes will close. The credits will roll. Someday, Steven Spielberg will stop making movies. Put your hand on your glowing heart and repeat this prayer: He’ll be right here.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

June 14, 1949 — Harry Turtledove, 77.

By Paul Weimer: Harry Turtledove, The Avtokrator.

That one is not my invention, that would be Steven H Silver, who is the most knowledgeable person I know about the work of Harry Turtledove. I was delighted, back in the day, to encounter Steven’s website about Harry’s work, and he made it very easy to catch up and figure out my gaps in my reading.

I discovered Turtledove in my first big alternate history phase in the late Eighties. I had started reading a (now unreadable, thanks a lot Theodore Beale) anthology series edited by Jerry Pournelle called There Will Be War. I was also into military science fiction of the time at the time. In any event in one of those volumes was a story called “The Long Drum Roll” which was an early version/excerpt from the novel that would become The Guns of the South, his classic “Time traveling South Africans help the Confederacy win the civil war with AK-47s”. I devoured that novel, too, and then started reading his work.

Although Turtledove wrote a lot of fantasy I liked (such as King of the North, The Case of the Toxic-Spell Dump, Between the Rivers) and more, imagine my squee of delight when I discovered Videssos. Videssos was the story of a Roman Legion transported in space to a fantasy world that was extremely similar to Byzantium (so in a sense, they “time travelled” as well). Lots of the setup, incidents and characters in the Videssos novels are based on real Byzantine history.

The Avtokrator has written a lot since. There’s straight up alternate history (How Few Remain) as well as science fiction alternate history (e.g. Worldwar), and of course fantasy novels here and there as well. Turtledove doesn’t always write a form of alternate history, he has written straight up fantasy and SF novels, but alternate history, or secondary worlds that resonate strongly with history, really are the center of his oeuvre.

And he is prolific. He had several books out last year this year alone, and much of his older stuff is being reissued, particularly in ebook, and including stuff he originally wrote under pen names.

The Avtokrator’s realm is large, and there is always more to read.

Happy birthday, good sir!

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Free Range has a bedtime horror story for cats.
Phoebe and Her Unicorn thinks a balance must be struck.
Reality Check finds King Arthur researching the wrong family tree.
Thatababy quizzes your knowledge of blue folk. Can you name them?
The Argyle Sweater looks at the constellations.
Wallace the Brave is an imaginative excavator.
Tom Gauld has his eyes on the prize.

Pat Bagley sees the risks.

(9) REASONS. A Hugo voter explains the rankings they assigned in “My Hugo Ballot 1: Short Fiction – by Evan Þ” at Papyrus Rampant.

…. One of my Best Novel nominations even got on the ballot this time! Admittedly, it wasn’t my first choice, but that’s how I expect it to be in a lot of ways. I wasn’t a typical Trufan last year when I first went to Worldcon; I still am not now. Their tastes and mine overlap, but only overlap; they aren’t the same….

Here’s the top pick in one of the categories:

Best Novelette ( defined as 7,500-17,500 words):

1) “Never Eaten Vegetables“ , by H. H. Pak – A poignant story of a sapient spaceship carrying embryos to populate a new colony world, where some start waking up early – and what comes after. The love is visible on the page.

(10) ‘THEY PUT THINGS IN OUR EARS TO CONTROL OUR MINDS’. “Are smartphones behind the birth rate dropping?” – NPR can see it.

… In a provocative new working paper titled “Is the iPhone Birth Control?” Myers argues that the spread of smartphones could explain between a third and a half of the decline in birth rates during that period.

To test that theory, she makes clever use of an accident of history that creates a kind of natural experiment. When iPhones first came out, they worked only with AT&T.

“In some areas of the country, AT&T had broadband coverage and you could get an iPhone, and in other areas, including where I live in Vermont, that coverage was much more limited,” Myers recalls. “And what you can see in this simplest of comparisons, births start to fall in the places where you can get one, and they’re not falling nearly as much in the places where you can’t.”…

…The drop in birth rates has affected women of all ages, but it’s most pronounced among teenagers. That sounds plausible to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University.

In books like Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents, Twenge has documented the profound behavioral changes that accompanied smartphones, especially among young people.

“The smartphone fundamentally changed the way adolescents spent their time outside of school,” Twenge told NPR. “They started spending a lot more time online and on their phones and a lot less time hanging out with their friends in person and driving around in a car or going to the mall or just hanging out.”

Myers says it’s not a stretch to think that this would result in fewer babies.

“If there’s one thing I learned in abstinence-only sex ed in the ’90s in Georgia growing up, it’s that you’re probably not going to get pregnant if you’re not interacting with people in person — if you’re not having sex,” Myers says.

In the paper, co-authored with her 24-year-old stepson, Ezekiel Hooper, Myers suggests smartphones also placed access to information about contraceptives and abortion in the palm of users’ hands.

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. CBS Sunday Morning explains why “’It’s a Good Life’ for actor Bill Mumy”.

Actor Bill Mumy first became known for his childhood appearances on classic series such as “The Twilight Zone,” and later as Will Robinson on “Lost in Space.” Correspondent Jim Axelrod discovers how Mumy, now 72, avoided the dangers that other child actors faced while pursuing a Hollywood career, as an Emmy-nominated songwriter, touring musician and recording artist, and finds out what has kept Mumy grounded.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/30/26 We Had To File The Pixel In Order To Scroll It

Posted on May 30, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) HUGO HISTORY. Nicholas Whyte has a rundown of what was disqualified from the category over the years in “Best Related Work eligibility for the Hugo Awards” at From the Heart of Europe. Here’s a brief excerpt from his commentary:

… I don’t know of any other case in the regular Hugos, but in 2020 we disqualified The Book of Thoth, by Aleister Crowley, from the 1945 Retro Hugos, on the grounds that it was not sufficiently related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom to be eligible in this category. It had only six nominating votes and was bottom of the EPH count (just as Writers of the Future XVII was at the bottom in 2002); removing it allowed Leigh Brackett’s The Science Fiction Field onto the ballot, and indeed that actually won the award….

(2) LUCAS MUSEUM PREVIEW. Vogue takes us “Inside the Otherworldly Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles”. This is a fascinating article. Photos by Annie Leibovitz.

…The structure where we find ourselves is towering with rich wood paneling and almost entirely devoid of right angles. Its ceiling sweeps down; its grand staircases twist. A set of central elevators are threaded through glass tubes. The museum’s façade—its carapace, really—was designed using a process called parametric modeling, which enables its shape to be molded like Play-Doh. It was assembled around an internal skeleton from 1,500 school-bus-size fiberglass panels, each fitted into place, like three-dimensional puzzle pieces, by human crews. “It’s a piece of modern architecture so of its time that you couldn’t have built it 15 years ago,” Michael Siegel, a principal at Stantec architecture and a leader of the project on site, tells me. Yet the effect is classically Californian in its balance of tech futurism and organicity, bringing to mind the designs of Apple’s heyday: openness and compactness, something cool and something warm. The building looks as if it might stretch and lumber off at any moment, like one of Lucas’s fantastical creatures.

In the press, the museum has been described as a gift to the city of Los Angeles, a euphemistic way of saying that Lucas and Hobson are not just designing but paying for it, at a bill of around a billion dollars. Their friends describe the financial outlay as the least of their commitments. “ I know a lot of people who create—I guess the main part of my life has been with people who are creating—but I’ve not really worked with people who have created something to this scale,” says the designer Stella McCartney, who has known both Hobson and Lucas for years. “ I wouldn’t even call it a project, because that’s just not big enough a word. It’s like another limb for them.”

Lucas likens the museum to film production. “It’s like making a movie—exactly the same thing,” he says. Sir Lewis Hamilton, the Formula 1 driver, who knows the couple very well—Lucas is his pancake-eating and movie-watching companion on some mornings when he isn’t racing—describes the museum’s elegant, irregular interior as “like walking through George’s brain.”

On the way to the first gallery, we dip into the gift shop, an irresistible-looking space with glowing shelves and tubular glass cases, which will sell T-shirts, books, and toys that tie into the collection. (Lucas, who may be in better touch with the discerning eight-year-old within than many of us, tells me, “We’re only going to do stuff that’s good—I want to look at it and say, ‘That’s a great toy!’ ”) Most museum gift shops, they were surprised to find, lose money. Lucas thought he could do better. “I know about licensing and merchandising,” he tells me in confidential tones, as if it were a secret. Alongside items tied to the museum collection, the shop will sell Star Wars merchandise. The museum’s attitude toward the famous franchise might be called pragmatic: It is emphatically not a Star Wars museum, but neither does it avoid what might get people in the door to discover, say, the 20th-century illustrator Maxfield Parrish. An exhibition in one gallery will include vehicles and models used in the movies. (“I’m like, That’s the section I’m going to be spending all my time in,” says Hamilton, who, at 41, is building a Lego Millennium Falcon and hopes to build a Lego Death Star soon.) The shop is meant to have something for kids of all backgrounds—a priority for Hobson, who, before making it to Princeton and eventually the helm of Ariel Investments, America’s best-known minority-owned value-investing firm, was reared as one of six children by a struggling single mother in Chicago….

… Unusually for a museum collection, Lucas and Hobson’s centers on illustration: 1,200 pieces of storytelling art that Lucas himself picked from a pool of 40,000 items. There are well-known oil works, such as those by Parrish and Norman Rockwell, made for magazines and advertisers. But there are also comic strips, manga, movie art, and fantasy scenes of dragons and kings. The exceptional range reflects the owners’ particular taste. Lucas began collecting in college, when he discovered he could afford original drawings for comic strips he loved. “It was an underground thing—none of the auction houses handled that kind of stuff,” he says. “It was fanboys, and I could get a little Alley Oop for $35.”…

(3) BACK ABOVE GROUND. The BBC quotes a collector: “Our hobby was outlawed, now it’s making a comeback”. (Subscription required for readers outside the UK.)

Collectors of cinema reels and other film spools are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their annual convention.

The first British Film Collectors Convention (BFCC) was held in 1976, with the next event taking place in Oxted, Surrey on Saturday.

Mark Stuckey from charitable trust Film is Fabulous said the hobby was once outlawed, but is now growing in popularity.

“If we go back just a couple of decades or so, a private collector owning particularly a 35mm print would have been in prison, because technically that print was not owned by him,” he told the BBC.

“If he had acquired it, he had technically stolen it and therefore a lot of collectors for many years went underground,” said the 70-year-old from Cromer, Norfolk.

“The result was that early silent film, which was part of our social history, has gone forever.”

The BFCC allows collectors to sell or trade films, ranging from 35mm to Super 8 gauges, and to view projected cinema.

Convention-goers can trade in and watch various types of film

Convention organiser John Clancy said it “looked like the convention was killed” by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We brought it back for one event in 2023… I started to think that film was fashionable once more,” he told the BBC.

Film is Fabulous was set up after that 2023 event and has since helped recover film believed to be lost.

Clancy, from Wiltshire, said collectors had heard about families of elderly collectors who had died “quite often just putting the collections into skips”, and this set “alarm bells ringing”….

(4) 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.

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

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.

(5) COMICS SECTION.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is deceptive for a reason.
Wumo has unusual neighbors.

(6) RUN FOR YOUR LIFE. [Item by Steven French.] How the game Zombies, Run! helped Dominik Diamond get into shape for a marathon: “If you want to run your first marathon in your 50s, it helps to be chased by zombies” says the Guardian.

At 56, I am running my first marathon, an old, fat, bald dad surrounded by millennials in body-hugging Lycra and smiles that look AI-generated. But I am ahead of them. For they are only competing for positions and personal bests, and I am being chased by zombies.

The black dog of depression hit me around the time of my last birthday. I didn’t feel I had achieved anything of note for an eternity. I used to work out but, for years, work kept getting in the way. I decided to kill two circling, carcass-sniffing vultures with one stone and run my first marathon.

I started off accompanied by audiobooks, but when Ben Elton’s autobiography got a bit whiny, I remembered Zombies, Run! – an interactive running game for smartphones that came out years ago. That became my running companion.

You start in the ruins of a shot-down chopper, with the voice in your ears trying to guide you to safety through the ranks of the undead. The interaction comes via short sections where you are told to run fast rather than lope. This is a challenge because sprinting is on that list of things you just can’t or won’t do in your mid-50s, along with sleeping all night without getting up for a pee, waiting in line at funfairs and anything to do with kale…

(7) SETBACK. “Blue Origin rocket explodes on the launchpad during an engine-firing test” – NBC News tells what we know.

Blue Origin said its New Glenn rocket exploded during an engine-firing test being conducted ahead of a satellite launch planned for next week. No one was hurt, according to officials at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

“It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it,” Bezos said via X. “Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.”

The massive New Glenn was grounded in April after it left a satellite in the wrong orbit because of engine failure. It was only the third flight of the rocket that Blue Origin intends to use to launch landers to the moon for NASA, including the landers that will take astronauts to the lunar surface.

The company had been on track to launch a prototype lunar lander to the moon on a flight test this fall. Earlier this week, the space agency awarded Blue Origin a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars to launch a pair of moon buggies in the next few years as part of the Artemis program….

(8) EXOPLANET CENSUS. Space Daily remembers: “In 1992, the number of confirmed planets outside our solar system was zero — and as of this year, NASA’s exoplanet archive lists more than 6,000 of them, with the lead scientist on the archive predicting the number could hit 100,000 within the next seven years”.

The official tally of confirmed planets outside our solar system, maintained by NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, has passed 6,000. The agency announced the milestone through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on 17 September 2025, noting that confirmed planets are added on a rolling basis by researchers around the world, so no single discovery is the 6,000th entry. More than 8,000 additional candidate planets are sitting in the queue awaiting confirmation.

The number that gets more attention from the people running the archive is not 6,000. It is 100,000. Jessie Christiansen, the archive’s chief scientist, has told Scientific American that the catalogue could reach roughly that figure within six to seven years, depending on when the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches and how the data from ESA’s Gaia mission flows through. Her team has spent the past year rewriting the archive’s software to handle that scale. As she put it to the magazine, they have been “madly redesigning” the system because it was built to hold a few thousand entries, not a hundred thousand….

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

Pixel Scroll 9/19/25 So We Can Both Laugh And Cry, Like Demented Harlequins

Posted on September 19, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) BEAR Q&A. The latest Subterranean Press newsletter includes a short interview with Elizabeth Bear about her return to Karen Memory, Angel Maker; (scroll down the page): “Announcing THE CITY WE BECAME by N. K. Jemisin, in Stock…”

Angel Maker has not only Western elements, but Steampunk ones as well. What other works in those genres would you recommend to readers?

For fans of Karen Memory, I would recommend Charles Portis’ novel True Grit and Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker and sequels. I’m also a fan of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, but that one comes with every content warning in the world—it’s a tragedy and a critique of toxic masculinity and wow, can that be rough going occasionally.

I also very much like the Jonah Hex graphic novels written by Joe R. Lansdale and drawn by Tim Truman, and Ian Tregillis’s trilogy starting with The Mechanical. Those are a bit more on the grimmer side than Karen, though.

(2) ESCHEW SURPLUSAGE. A timely reminder of Mark Twain’s rule would fit here: “Judge strikes down Trump’s $15bn lawsuit against the New York Times” reports the Guardian.

A federal judge tossed Donald Trump’s $15bn defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, book publisher Penguin and two Times reporters, and said the suit was filled with “vituperation and invective” and violated civil procedure in federal cases for failing to get to the point.

US district court judge Steven Merryday in Florida will allow the president to refile and amend the action within 28 days, however.

Merryday cited Rule 8(a) of the federal rules of civil procedure requiring a complaint include a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief to disqualify the filing.

“Alleging only two simple counts of defamation, the complaint consumes eighty-five pages,” Merryday wrote. “Count I appears on page eighty, and Count II appears on page eighty-three … Even under the most generous and lenient application of Rule 8, the complaint is decidedly improper and impermissible.”

Merryday noted the “many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations,” and “much more, persistently alleged in abundant, florid, and enervating detail”.

The judge’s order does not address the truth of the allegations nor the validity of the claims, but said “a complaint remains an improper and impermissible place for the tedious and burdensome aggregation of prospective evidence, for the rehearsal of tendentious arguments, or for the protracted recitation and explanation of legal authority putatively supporting the pleader’s claim for relief.”

(3) STAR ENCOURAGES DISNEY+ SUBSCRIBERS TO CANCEL. “Marvel She-Hulk Star & Others Call For Disney Boycott” — Deadline has the story.

In the aftermath of the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! by Disney-owned ABC, She-Hulk herself is speaking out.

Tatiana Maslany, star of Marvel’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, which aired on Disney+, is urging people to cancel their subscriptions to Disney services.

Maslany posted an image to her Instagram Story of herself in motion capture costume for She-Hulk – acknowledging her connection to Disney – with text above that read “cancel your @disneyplus @hulu @espn subscriptions!”

Maslany posted an image to her Instagram Story of herself in motion capture costume for She-Hulk – acknowledging her connection to Disney – with text above that read “cancel your @disneyplus @hulu @espn subscriptions!”

See screenshot below.

(4) PATTON OSWALT APPEAL. “’Star Trek’ Actor Patton Oswalt Makes Bold ‘Science Fiction’ Comparison After ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ Cancellation” – quotes at Parade.

…In his video, captioned “When freedom is under fire you can count on me to ramble and mutter incoherently,” Oswalt connected the show’s cancellation to a recent trend. “Hi, Jimmy. Hi, Stephen [Colbert]. Hi, every news anchor that’s been fired, every reporter that’s probably going to get fired,” he began. “Sometimes adding to the wall of voices that’s saying ‘We see what’s happening,’ … can help at times like this.”

Oswalt, an avid fan of science fiction, framed the event through the lens of a classic genre trope. Referencing legendary sci-fi author Isaac Asimov, Oswalt said there are only three science fiction plots: “’What if,’ ‘If only,’ and ‘If this goes on.’” He warned that the United States is now at the “dark end” of the third plot.

“That line that, that when we crossed it, we’re all supposed to rise up? That’s way, way behind us,” Oswalt stated. He then urged Americans to “roar up screaming and link arms. This thing is coming for all of us. This is an ancient evil that is shooting its shot right now. It sees its window, and it’s trying again. It’s always going to try. We’re always going to have to fight it. This is our time to fight it. “

As if anticipating online criticism, Oswalt took a moment to address his perceived “West Coast elite” status. He countered by listing his recent and upcoming travel destinations—from Austin and Raleigh to Ohio and Milwaukee—to emphasize his connection to people across the country….

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

September 19, 1922 — Damon Knight. (Died 2002.)

By Paul Weimer: What can I say about the man the SFWA Grand Master Award is named for? Member of the Futurians of New York city, for openers, there where the Deep Magic was written, one might say.

One can talk about his extensive genre criticism, a model and a role model for genre critics in the field ever since. In Search of Wonder, his first collection of essays, collects the essays that earned Knight a Hugo in 1956 for “Best Book Reviewer”. (Fan Writer as a category would not exist until over a decade later). Creating Short Fiction, although perhaps dated today, was a book about the craft of writing short fiction. He was an editor of the twelve series of Orbit anthologies, which published original stories from people ranging from Le Guin and Russ to Poul Anderson, Gene Wolfe, and Norman Spinrad (whose story, “The Big Flash” which won him a Hugo award for Best Novelette)

Or one can talk about this extensive body of fiction. While he wrote a fair sheaf of novels, his short fiction is where he excelled. And honestly, in this day and age, it’s the easiest and best way to get into his work (as noted above, Short Stories was his thing) He wrote in an era of twist and zinger endings that really pack a punch, sometimes with a sledgehammer and sometimes with a scalpel. The Devil getting outfoxed in “The Last Word”. “Not with a Bang” features a really nasty protagonist, possibly the last man on a devastated Earth, who is undone by his would-be wife’s prudishness.

And oh yes, people outside the genre might not know of his work in criticism or the fact that his name is on the Grand Master Award, or just about any of his extensive short fiction…except for one more story to mention. It’s a story everyone knows. Enough rebroadcasts of The Twilight Zone have ensured that, and so will six more words, as Knight came up with the definitive twist ending for the series (no surprise given the above) but this story is the gold standard:

“To serve man…it’s a cookbook!”

(6) COMICS SECTION.

Broom Hilda is a mistaken flying object.
Loose Parts powers up.
Non Sequitur is non-motivational.
Speed Bump pictures frozen moments.
xkcd is phasing in…

(7) MONETIZING THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE… [Item by Mike Kennedy.] …and America’s love affair with gun culture. “Zombie Paintball @ Grace Hill Farms – Athens, AL”.

Welcome to Grace Hill Farms Zombie Hunt — North Alabama’s most thrilling fall attraction, where our ordinary farm transforms into an extraordinary, adrenaline-fueled adventure. Every fall, our woods come alive with glowing paintballs, roaring Zombie Assault Vehicles (ZAVs), and relentless hordes of the undead.

Step into the action with our interactive zombie paintball ride, where you’ll board a Zombie Assault Vehicle armed with a mounted paintball gun filled with glow-in-the-dark zombie serum. Your mission: roll deep into the woods, aim true, and eliminate the undead before it’s too late. Humanity is counting on you!

***

Things To Know Before You Ride

Live zombies on the prowl — the undead will approach your vehicle, but don’t worry, they won’t shoot back. Your mission is simple: annihilate them!
38 people per ZAV — we can accommodate large groups!
Coming with friends or a group? If tickets were purchased separately, please wait until your entire party has arrived before checking in. Send just the ticket holder to the booth and let us know your total group size. This helps shorten lines and ensures your whole group rides together.
100 rounds per person — every rider gets 100 glow-in-the-dark paintballs. Reloads are available online, at the ticket booth, and even at the halfway point of the ride. (Cash preferred at halfway point; Venmo & Cash App also accepted.)
More fun on the farm — enjoy extra attractions before or after your ride.

(8) NO USE RAILING AGAINST THIS CHOICE. “Train named Ctrl Alt Deleaf to help blast billions of leaves from Great Britain’s tracks” says the Guardian.

If Boaty McBoatface taught us one thing, it’s that the public do not take a naming ceremony particularly seriously.

Cue the newly named leaf-removal train: Ctrl Alt Deleaf.

Named after a public vote, Network Rail said the train was part of its fleet of “leaf-busters”, which blast mulch off rails.

Great Britain’s railway network stretches for 20,000 miles and has to cope with about 500bn leaves each year.

Ctrl Alt Deleaf – a pun on the computer keyboard command Control-Alt-Delete – will be deployed next week from a depot at Effingham Junction, Surrey.

Other shortlisted entries for the train’s name were Leaf-Fall Weapon, Pulp Friction and The Autumn Avenger….

(9) HI, ALIEN. [Item by Steven French.] Hamish Johnston at Physics World reviews a book that explores a question that the likes of Carl Sagan and Ted Chiang have also had fun with: “If you met an alien, what would you say to it?”

“Imagine the day the aliens arrive.” So begins Do Aliens Speak Physics? by the US particle physicist Daniel Whiteson and the cartoonist and author Andy Warner. From that starting point, if you believe the plots of many works of science fiction, it wouldn’t be long before we’re communicating with emissaries of an extraterrestrial civilization. Quickly, we’d be marvelling at their advanced science and technology.

But is this a reasonable assumption? Would we really be able to communicate with aliens? Even if we could, would their way of doing science have any meaning to us? What if an advanced alien civilization had no science at all? These are some of the questions tackled by Whiteson and Warner in their entertaining and thought-provoking book….

(10) KNIGHTS OF GUINEVERE. Glitch has dropped “Knights Of Guinevere: Pilot”. And appeals to people to buy merchandise to help fund the series.

Knights of Guinevere is a psychological thriller that welcomes you to a planet-wide theme park in the clouds!… And the shadows below, where a broken Princess Android is two dreamers’ tickets to better lives, or the end of them.

(11) GREEN HORNET’S RIDE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Dern notes: This is about the actual, physical vehicles (and related scale models) created for/used in the TV show (and brief movie cameo(s))…and where some are now. “10 Cool Facts About Green Hornet’s ’66 ‘Black Beauty’”.

(12) POWER SHORTAGE. TVDays has posted a rare Star Trek television commercial with William Shatner and James Doohan.

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

Pixel Scroll 5/10/25 All Around The Scrollberry Bush, The Monkey Chased The Pixel

Posted on May 10, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) GUARDIAN BOOK REVIEWS. Past Best Fan Writer Hugo winner Abigail Nussbaum, and author of 2025 BSFA Award winner Track Changes penned the Guardian’s latest “The best science fiction, fantasy and horror – reviews roundup”. Nussbaum cover The Devils by Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz, £25), The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (Orbit, £20), Land of Hope by Cate Baum (Indigo Press, £12.99), and A Line You Have Traced by Roisin Dunnett (Magpie, £16.99).

(2) MEETING DEATH SCIENTIFICALLY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The BBC’s World Service has a nifty weekly science programme Unexplained Elements. This week’s programme was topical with this week’s news of the Pope popping off and the pomp and circumstance ceremony that garnered international attention. It was a topic in which the late Terry Pratchett would have been interested.

It addressed questions such as when did humans first start burying their dead? The answer seems to be over 100,000 years ago, but this is for anatomically modern humans. Apparently some proto-human species (whose brain capacity was a third of modern humans) may have buried their dead, though the research (currently in peer review) is debatable. Apparently, the pre-print has been amended to take criticisms into account and while one critic has been convinced, others remain sceptical.

Another topic was that of the biology of graveyards. Because its ground remains largely untilled, and because of gravestones and the like, there are many micro-environments, and both these factors lead church graveyards have a higher local area biodiversity.

Then there is the issue of a dead person’s digital rights to their social media and online accounts. The European Union’s GDPR is the world’s most robust data protection regulation, though that does not seem to stop firms like Facebook or EventBrite failing to strictly follow it (just look as the small print when you sign up) or even Worldcons who arguably (it would be interesting to test this in court and I could write an essay on this) fail to strictly adhere to its provisions. Nonetheless, despite GDPR being the world’s gold standard in data protection, the dead have no rights whatsoever under GDPR!

Talking of a dead person’s digital rights (or lack thereof), what of mobile (cell) phones and smartphones, what happens to them when they ‘die’? Well, fans of Red Dwarf might say that they go to silicon heaven. The reality, however, is for most of them landfill! Here there are multiple environmental sustainability issues. All those heavy metals and rare earth elements leech out in landfill causing threats to water tables and other ecotoxicology issues. And then there is the loss of these elements (which include silver and gold – many kilograms per tonne of mobile phones disposed) to the economy necessitating the mining of replacement elements and the environmental damage that this does. So the next time a Worldcon tells you that they are ditching recyclable paper from sustainably managed forests (look for the kite mark when buying the paper for publications) don’t accept the Worldcon’s word for it: more greenwash!

It was a fascinating programme. You can access it here.

First up, we delve into the thorny issue of when early humans started to carry out funerary rituals, before turning our attention to graveyards and the life that thrives within these sacred environments.

Next, we are joined Carl Öhman from Uppsala University in Sweden, who reveals what happens to our data when we die and why we should care about it.

Plus, we discuss the precious materials hiding in our old devices, and find out whether animals mourn.

(3) DODGE THE SCAMS. Victoria Strauss points out “Two to Avoid: Book Order Scams and Fake Reviews”. Full details at Writer Beware.

Here are two newish frauds that appear to be on the rise. As with most writing scams these days, they target self-published authors.

The Book Order Scam

I’ve written before about book order scams, in the context of scammers impersonating bookstores such as Barnes & Noble with out-of-the-blue emails promising bulk purchases and big royalties. All the author has to do is pony up thousands of dollars or pounds to cover printing and/or shipping costs (the relevant note here: bookstores do not print the books they sell, and they typically order from the publisher or publishing platform, rather than from the author).

This newer version of the book order scam is somewhat different, arriving not from a bookstore impersonator, but from the self-publishing service provider the writer has hired to publish and/or market their book. That provider isn’t a true self-publishing company, though, but rather one of the many ghostwriting scams that waylay would-be indie authors in order to defraud them….

Fake Reviews

Fake reviews–sometimes just a few lines, sometimes elaborate essays with stars and number rankings–arrive unasked-for, attached to a complimentary email claiming that a book has been “discovered” by book scouts or book evaluators. Or they’re included as part of a pitch for a package of publishing and marketing services, to show how much the service provider believes in the author’s book.

Undoubtedly produced by feeding book blurbs and other info into chatbots, they are essentially bait: affirmation and flattery designed to induce the author to reply, so they can be subjected to aggressive sales pitches for whatever the “reviewer” is selling.

Here are a couple of examples, both sent out by scammers on this list. They’re not just book reviews–they’re PROFESSIONAL book reviews! So much better than just the regular kind….

(4) CHERRYH ANNOUNCEMENT. CJ Cherryh told Facebook followers yesterday she and Jane Fancher won’t be at the Seattle Worldcon – but it’s not the result of any controversy.

Jane and I will not be attending WorldCon despite it being in our state (which some people might want to know)—no controversy, just the expense and the physical buffeting of crowds. While Jane’s got more go-juice than I do, the crowd pressure and distances involved would be pretty exhausting, leaving us sadly low-energy. We’ll still go to friendly ‘little’ cons in driving range, note well, if we know about them!!! and be our brilliant selves, but we’re not up to a full-on WorldCon.

(5) ABOUT THE FEMALE MAN. Farah Mendlesohn’s book Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore is available for preorder from Luna Press Publishing. It will be released in Summer 2026.

Joanna Russ’s writing career was relatively short, running from 1968 to 1987, with a number of essay collections published in the years after that. Her fiction career consists of just six novels and four collections, but each of the novels she published challenged engrained conventions of the genre.

The Female Man was received with shock, horror and vituperation when it was published in 1975. Its fractured narrative, and its direct attack on patriarchy and the straight-jacket of performative femininity, were described as shrill and man-hating. Over the years it emerged as a classic of feminist science fiction, a novel that continues to excite and resonate, and a touchstone for proudly militant feminists.

This exploration of The Female Man offers a close reading of the text, focussing on how the book works, its structures, arguments, humour, and brilliant anger

(6) COMPENSATING FACTORS. “My School Visit was Cancelled. I Fought Back and Won” writers Erica S. Perl in School Library Journal.

As a children’s book author, I love a good mystery. Which is why, last month, after a Virginia elementary school principal abruptly cancelled my visit by email, with no explanation or interest in rescheduling or paying me, I decided to investigate.

It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what had happened: a parent had complained because of a social media video I had made celebrating Pride month. In it, I mention that Snail, a character in my Whale, Quail, Snail early reader series (illustrated by Sam Ailey), is nonbinary. Most snails are. “It’s a fiction series,” I add, “but that’s a fact.”…

… I wish I could tell you that my story ended amicably with the return of my visit to the school’s calendar. That’s not what happened.

Instead, after I asked for my fee, the principal turned the matter over to the district’s lawyers. The principal then informed the school librarian, who booked my visit, that she might have to pay me out of her own pocket. I told her I would not take her money, no matter what happened. I was extra-outraged that the principal was threatening to make her pay for the “crime” of setting up an author visit.

But my story doesn’t end there. I’m not just a children’s book author. I’m also a former trial lawyer. So instead of walking away muttering about injustice, I spent some quality time with my contract.

That’s right, my author contract. Whenever I am invited to visit a school, my booking agent draws up a contract—and this visit was no exception. According to one clause, if an appearance is cancelled with less than 30 days notice, the school is required to pay my entire fee plus any non-refundable travel expenses. The principal had cancelled on me 28 days before my visit.

And finally, my contract specifies that the contract is governed by the law of the state where I live, not the law of the state where the school is located. So if I wanted to sue for breach of contract, I could simply file papers in my local courthouse (no legal expertise or degree required!).

So, I did. Which is how I got to a different kind of happy ending: the school paid me my fee.

It’s not the win I wanted, because that would have had me standing in front of a gymnasium full of elementary school students. But it is a victory, as I see it, for all authors, especially in this current climate….

(7) KILLER ROBOTS NO LONGER SCIENCE FICTION. [Item by Francis Hamit.] “Unmanned Systems Are Not Revolutionary (But Could Be)” says a post on War Room, hosted by the U.S. Army War College.

Rather than revolutionizing warfare, unmanned systems have emerged as evolutions within the larger information revolution; advancements to be sure, but failing to render conventional militaries obsolete or dramatically reshaping force structures….

(8) PLONK YOUR MAGIC TWANGER. The one answer Smithsonian Magazine knows for sure is the price: “Who Created This Peculiar Painting of a Drooling Dragon? Nobody Knows—but a Museum Just Bought It for $20 Million”. Steven French adds, “Actually the ‘drooling dragon’ looks more like our Patterdale Terrier after he’s spotted the postman!”

Emma Capron, a curator at the museum who was responsible for the acquisition, describes the altarpiece as “wildly inventive” and “full of iconographical oddities,” per the Art Newspaper.

Start with the dragon and its bizarre dog-like face, exaggerated fangs and dripping drool. According to tradition, Satan, disguised as a dragon, swallowed St. Margaret whole. His stomach rejected her and there she appears in the painting, kneeling in prayer, totally unfazed by the event.Next to Margaret, one of the two angels holds a book of song, once thought to be a hymn by the English composer Walter Frye but now identified as musical gibberish. The other angel plucks her mouth harp, “a sound hardly associated with celestial harmony,” as the National Gallery says in the statement….

(9) PEACEMAKER IS BACK. “Peacemaker Season 2 Trailer: John Cena’s DC Superhero Returns” – Variety sets the frame.

… John Cena‘s very R-rated DC superhero has returned in the first trailer for “Peacemaker” Season 2, created by DC Studios co-chief James Gunn. The sophomore season takes place in the rebooted DC Universe, which officially kicked off with Gunn’s animated series “Creature Commando” and continues with his summer tentpole “Superman.” Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner and Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl cameo in the trailer and will appear in “Superman.”…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 10, 1969 — John Scalzi, 56.

By Paul Weimer: I’d read John Scalzi’s blog for years before his fiction.

I got onto the Scalzi train with his entry in Metatropolis. His story involving a high tech pig farmer had all of the bones of a Scalzi story, from its “I think I know everything” protagonist, to its often snarky sense of humor. While I didn’t fall deeply in love with his work, then or since, I kept reading his work. Redshirts, of course, which still may be my favorite of his novels and stories, helped expand in my mind the metafictional opportunities in science fiction. Lock In is a solid piece of science fictional speculation on how a society might come together and respond to the consequences of a pandemic. Given that it was written long before Covid…I wonder if Scalzi or, aged fifty six yearswould have reconsidered the novel after the worldwide reaction to the aftermath of the Covid Pandemic.

Of course the Old Man’s War series is the one that he gets grief for, because it should appeal to the Sad and Rabid Puppies…but it is, in the parlance of today, “too woke”. It’s possible that the existence of such books helped motivate Torgersen and Beale, an irritant to their ideology and worldview (and a counterexample to the idea that Mil-SF must be conservative). Again, I do wonder how Scalzi would write it today, given all that has happened.

So this is a long way of saying that although it is on my Kindle, I have not yet read When The Moon Hits Your Eye, which seems to have as triggering an idea (the moon turns into cheese. Seriously?) as one can possibly make in the field. But it shows that in the end, Scalzi likes to have fun when writing. He never takes it too seriously, even if he keeps it as rigorous and locked down as the story needs. He’s just telling stories and doing his thing and having the time of his life, and haters can go hang.

The first time I actually met him in person, he didn’t remember it. He was extremely jet lagged, sitting in a hotel lobby and apparently remembered little from the entire weekend. Due to circumstance (although Scalzi is an excellent DJ, I am told, I am not a dance party goer), I only finally, finally actually got to talk to him at the Glasgow Worldcon. Being part of the photography team did let me meet and photograph everyone who would hold still. But did he know who I was? I’m still convinced that he didn’t, and that’s all right.

John Scalzi’s fiction, too…that’s all right.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

xkcd offers another science fact.
Baldo has help coming up with an excuse.
Brewster Rockit creates fan fiction.
Lio finds something waiting.
Reality Check tries a pun.

(12) AMAZING STORIES COLLECTION. Amazing Stories: Best of 2024,a collection of science fiction short stories published by the magazine over the past year, is now available.

Edited by Lloyd Penney, this collection continues Amazing’s nearly century-long tradition of exploring the strange, the speculative, and the sublime.

From lunar labor revolutions to delicate alien diplomacy, these stories represent the vanguard of speculative fiction. Readers will encounter futures both dystopian and dazzling, technologies that reshape identity and time, and characters grappling with the emotional and ethical consequences of scientific progress. Highlights include:

“A Short-Lived History of the Stockpiling of Time, in Post-Mono-Heliocentric Space-Times” by K.V.K. Kvas, a mind-bending tale of interstellar economics, identity, and revolt.
“Return from Venus” by C.B. Droege, a quiet and touching story about cross-species friendship and the longing for home.
“Best Case Scenario” by Susan Oke, a suspenseful diplomatic mission where what you offer—and what you misunderstand—could mean the difference between peace and peril.

With cover art by Hugo Award-winning artist Bob Eggleton and a lineup of diverse voices offering everything from hard science speculation to lyrical philosophical fiction, Amazing Stories: Best of 2024 is a must-have for any SF fan’s collection.

“Amazing Stories has always been a home for bold, boundary-pushing science fiction,” says Editor-in-Chief Lloyd Penney. “This year’s stories continue that proud legacy—with some of the most challenging, beautiful, and entertaining tales we’ve ever published.”

It is available online at amazingstories.com and in paperback and eBook editions at indie and major retailers worldwide or at this link.

(13) MONSTROUSLY COOL. That’s what your drinks become with an assist from the “Godzilla Ice Mold”.

(14) DAISY RIDLEY’S ZOMBIE ENCOUNTER. JustWatch quotes Daisy Ridley in its Why to Watch feature about her role in the zombie thriller “We Bury the Dead streaming: where to watch online?”

We Bury the Dead is a gripping, emotional thriller set in a world transformed by the undead. In a unique take on the zombie genre, the film follows Ava—a woman tormented by loss—who volunteers with a corpse retrieval unit to search for her missing husband. Set against a surreal yet intimate apocalypse, the story explores love, grief, and the fragile boundaries of what makes us human.

Daisy Ridley says:

The script is beautiful. It’s about grief and watching someone desperately trying to find an answer, even though she doesn’t know what that answer is going to be. The backdrop of the zombies represents this moment for [my character] Ava because she’s neither here nor there emotionally. Ava’s sole purpose is to find her husband. As a means to get to him, she joins the body retrieval unit which volunteers to find people and notify families. The zombies look like our friends and family, so it’s close enough to reality but in a way that doesn’t feel too close. It feels horribly human.

(15) HONEY, I’M HOME! “Soviet-era spacecraft Kosmos 482 plunges to Earth after 53 years stuck in orbit” reports AP News.

A Soviet-era spacecraft plunged to Earth on Saturday, more than a half-century after its failed launch to Venus.

Its uncontrolled entry was confirmed by both the Russian Space Agency and European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking. The Russians indicated it came down over the Indian Ocean, but some experts were not so sure of the precise location. The European Space Agency’s space debris office also tracked the spacecraft’s doom after it failed to appear over a German radar station.

It was not immediately known how much, if any, of the half-ton spacecraft survived the fiery descent from orbit. Experts said ahead of time that some if not all of it might come crashing down, given it was built to withstand a landing on Venus, the solar system’s hottest planet.

The chances of anyone getting clobbered by spacecraft debris were exceedingly low, scientists said….

…Any surviving wreckage will belong to Russia under a United Nations treaty….

…After so much anticipation, some observers were disappointed by the lingering uncertainty over the exact whereabouts of the spacecraft’s grave….

A Russian press release says it fell in the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta.

(16) YOUR ALIEN NATION. The BBC explains, “More than half your body is not human”.

More than half of your body is not human, say scientists.

Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.

Understanding this hidden half of ourselves – our microbiome – is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson’s.

The field is even asking questions of what it means to be “human” and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result.

“They are essential to your health,” says Prof Ruth Ley, the director of the department of microbiome science at the Max Planck Institute, “your body isn’t just you”….

… But genetically we’re even more outgunned.

The human genome – the full set of genetic instructions for a human being – is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes.

But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes.

Prof Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist from Caltech, argues: “We don’t have just one genome, the genes of our microbiome present essentially a second genome which augment the activity of our own…

(17) SCIENCE PAPERS WITH UNDISCLOSED AI USE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is controversial to some, in no small part due to large language models (LLMs) and other A.I. (such as image-generating A.I.) using people’s intellectual property (their written or art works) for A.I. and LLM training without permission or recompense. This is exemplified by the recent debate over the Seattle’s Worldcon use of A.I. (for example, see (1) in the Scroll here).

Similarly, the use of A.I. has controversies in science. Indeed, a number of leading science journals, such as Nature, frown on the use of A.I. and/or at least ask science authors to declare any use of A.I. in their submissions. The latest news here comes from a news item in this week’s Nature that hundreds of papers have used A.I without disclosure!

Generative A.I. tools such as ChatGPT have quickly transformed academic publishing. Scientists are increasingly using them to prepare and review manuscripts, and publishers have scrambled to create guidelines for their ethical us. Although policies vary, many publishers require authors to disclose their use of A.I….

But science sleuths have identified hundreds of cases in which A.I. tools seem to have been used without disclosure…

…Publishers need to act quickly to resolve issues of dishonest A.I. use.

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

Pixel Scroll 1/28/25 One Moon Was A Ghostly Galleon, The Other A Spirited Schooner

Posted on January 28, 2025 by Mike Glyer

(1) CHINESE FANZINE ZERO GRAVITY NEWS PUBLISHES THREE ISSUES. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Three issues of the Hugo Award-winning fanzine Zero Gravity News have just been published, featuring articles about their personal experiences from a number of Chinese fans. Here is the text of RiverFlow’s two tweets about the issues (slightly edited):

Chinese fanzine Zero Gravity has published a themed special “l With Sci-Fi” across three issues. Issues 25 and 26 contain the views of middle school and college students on science fiction. The 27th issue mainly contains the articles of the memories of working-age Chinese sci-fi fans.

This comes to a total of 480,000 words across the three issues, which can be said to be another collective voice of Chinese science fiction fans.

The PDFs of the three issues can be downloaded from this Google Drive link – each is around 10MB in size.

(2) EBOOK ALTERNATIVE HELPS INDIE BOOKSTORES. Bookshop.org US now is also selling ebooks.

Every purchase on the site financially supports independent bookstores. Our platform gives independent bookstores tools to compete online and financial support to help them maintain their presence in local communities.

NPR has the story — “Bookshop.org launches new e-book platform that exclusively supports local bookstores”.

…MARTÍNEZ: OK, there are already a lot of online retailers for e-books. I mean, millions of them are sold every year. So why are we focusing on this one?

FADEL: Well, this one exclusively supports local bookstores, and that’s because e-books are a difficult format for smaller booksellers to keep up with, according to Bookshop’s CEO, Andy Hunter.

ANDY HUNTER: Because the publisher requirements are so strict, it requires a huge amount of technical effort to deliver an e-book securely so it can’t be hacked and it can’t be pirated around the web. And that is too much for any individual local bookstore to deal with.

MARTÍNEZ: All right, so that makes sense. So what do indie bookstores think?

FADEL: We checked in with a few owners like Pete Mulvihill of Green Apple Books in San Francisco, and he told us his stores will take all the help they can get.

PETE MULVIHILL: We survive by kind of (laughter) scraping and clawing where we can to find efficiencies or make a little extra income. And this is another significant, if small, stream of income for us. So it’s truly helpful….

(3) ROMANTASY RINGING THE REGISTER. “Bestsellers – Critical Maas: Is this real life? Is this just fantasy?” asks The Bookseller about the UK market. Since the start of the year sff sales are up nearly a third, with fantasy titles driving the train. “Bookshops across the country may soon need to rebalance their space as readers continue to seek to escape from reality.”

You would be forgiven for thinking that bookshops were caught in a landslide of fantasy fiction in 2024 with authors such as Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros dominating the top end of the fiction charts – as seen in our Author Review of the Year in last week’s issue (The Bookseller, 17th January 2025). It was not just the spicy side of the genre represented either, with JRR Tolkien’s sales rising 21.3% year-on-year through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market and Brandon Sanderson appearing inside the top 50 authors of the year for the first time. Is this a trend that’s going to continue into 2025 – and, if it is, which series should we be keeping our eye on?

It is timely to start with Rebecca Yarros, as the third book in her Empyrean series – Onyx Storm – is published this week, while Fourth Wing and Iron Flame are sitting atop the Fantasy charts so far for 2025.

First published in hardback in 2023, the first two books in the series were released in paperback in 2024, with Fourth Wing placing 11th in the full-year chart, selling just shy of 250,000 copies. The paperback of Iron Flame was only released in November and has shifted 78,586 copies in its first nine weeks – 7.4% down on the equivalent period for its predecessor….

…While Yarros tops the fantasy chart so far for 2025, it is Sarah J Maas who dominates it, taking five of the top 10 spots. With TCM volume sales of 1.3 million units in 2024, the author of the A Court of Thorns and Roses series rooted herself into second place in our authors of the year chart with sales of £13.2m.

So far this year, Yarros’ value has already reached £483,676 – up 88.9% against the first two weeks of 2024 – and with fans eagerly awaiting the paperback release of last January’s House of Flame and Shadow, as well as the fifth ACOTAR novel, a surprise 2025 release or two could see Maas’ sales increase further still.

The bestselling fantasy hardback title at the moment could be the start of the next big thing. First published at the beginning of December, Quicksilver – the first instalment of Callie Hart’s Fae & Alchemy series – has sold 34,417 copies, with 17.9% of that coming in the past two weeks. A sequel is due later in 2025 but, so far, no date for the paperback edition has emerged. Another author to keep an eye on is Sarah A Parker, whose When the Moon Hatched is one of just three hardbacks inside the fantasy top 20, despite being first published back in June. It has just topped £1m worth of sales and consistently appears in the e-book charts provided by BookStat. The paperback is due in May, while the second book in the Moonfall series will be published in October of this year.

While 19 of the 20 listed here are romantasy – only Gregory Maguire’s Wicked bucks the trend – they are not the only sub-genre of the market on which to keep an eye. The third bestselling fantasy author of the moment is Brandon Sanderson, whose Cosmere universe has delivered £135,763, while Tolkien’s romance-free books have notched up £109,753 – though it is worth noting even when Tolkien and Sanderson’s sales are combined with second-placed Yarros, they still cannot top Maas’ total…..

(4) CHINESE NEW YEAR GALA BROADCAST. [Item by Ersatz Culture and Prograft.] The annual Chinese New Year/Spring Festival Gala was broadcast by state broadcaster CCTV/CMG on Tuesday 28th. The full (nearly 5 hour) show can be seen on YouTube, but the links below jump directly a couple of performances that may be the ones of most relevance to File 770:

A folk dance performed by robots and human dancers. Per this news article, this is “a traditional Yangko dance, a vibrant folk art form from northeast China” where “the robots showcased their ability to manipulate handkerchiefs, a signature element of Yangko dance“.

A friend sent me a link to the Taobao sales page for what seems to be the robots used in this performance. The link wouldn’t show me the full product list as I don’t have a user account there, but he also sent me a screenshot, which is below, along with a Google Translation. The prices per unit convert to approximately $69k and $90k USD.

A girls choir performed a folk song with elements relating to the Chinese space program, such as the moon, an astronaut and a space station, which were overlaid onto the broadcast. This news article has more information about the performers, although it does not really mention the space aspects.

(5) YOUNG ADULTS WRITE NOW. The Horror Writers Association blog today announced the 2024 recipients of the YAWN Endowment — Young Adults Write Now (YAWN).

This endowment is provided by the Horror Writers Association and is aimed at supporting teen writing programs in libraries as part of its ongoing dedication to furthering young adult literacy. We received a large number of excellent applications last year and are heartened by the number of libraries currently prioritizing teen writing programs.

The YAWN application period runs from August 1st to October 1st, with five recipients selected in October. Each recipient is awarded $250, to be put toward developing or supporting a teen writing program in their library. More about the endowment can be found on the Horror Writers Association’s website, via the Horror Scholarships page.

Libraries receiving funding will be able to use the monies for anything relating to their proposed or currently active writing program, including but not limited to: books (specifically young adult horror and books on writing), supplies, special events, publishing costs, guest speakers and instructors, additions to the collection, and operating expenses.

The recipients of the 2024 Young Adults Write Now Endowment are:

South Fayette Township Library (Pennsylvania)
San Benito County Free Library (California)
Wharton County Library (Texas)
Cuyahoga County Public Library, Garfield Heights Branch (Ohio)
Public Library of New London (Connecticut)

(6) KASEY AND JOE LANSDALE Q&A. The Horror Writers Association blog’s “Nuts & Bolts” series has added an “Interview With Kasey and Joe R. Lansdale”.

KASEY LANSDALE

Q: What marketing advice do you have for authors, especially in light of the changing social media landscape?

A: I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Mailing list. Social platforms are too erratic. It doesn’t matter if you have a million followers if, let’s say for example, they ban your audience …

Q: Can you share any insights about publishing that many authors don’t know, but would benefit from knowing?

A: The cream does not rise to the top. The publishers in most cases pick their lead title and put most of their juice behind it, and if something else gets out, it’s by pure magic. There’s no formula or we would all be doing it. There are two kinds of publicists. The ones who shoot out to their mailing list and hope someone answers, and the ones who beat down doors and hope for answers. Unfortunately, the results are usually pretty on par with one another. But that’s not a defeat, that’s a call to action. That means that the author must tell the world about their books, and take the opportunities given to share it and themselves with the world.

(7) LAUREL AMBERDINE (1970-2025). Writer and editor Laurel Amberdine died January 21 at the age of 54. The SFWA Blog has published a tribute: “In Memoriam: Laurel Amberdine”.

Laurel Amberdine (1970–21 January 2025) was a writer, interviewer, and genre editor. She worked for Locus Magazine for ten years, and was an assistant editor for Lightspeed magazine.

Amberdine was known for her kind and thoughtful interviews, yet she also loved to write, both prose and poetry. Her short fiction story, “Airship Hope” was published by Daily Science Fiction in 2013, and in her 2018 essay “Science Fiction Saved My Life” (Uncanny Magazine), she discussed how her chronic illness and disability had affected her, how finding writing gave her purpose, and how privilege inherent in the industry limits voices that readers may need to hear. Amberdine wrote a young adult novel, Luminator, which made it far along in the publication process, as well as an adult science-fiction novel.

Amberdine was known for her kindness and warmth, rooted in her Catholic faith, and extended to all who she encountered….

(8) AL SARRANTONIO (1952-2025). Sff/h writer, editor and publisher Al Sarrantonio has died reported Chet Williamson on Facebook. Wikipedia has a detailed article about his career.

Al Sarrantonio in the Seventies. Photo by and copyright © Andrew Porter.

He began an editing career at a major New York publishing house in 1976. His first short fiction, “Ahead of the Joneses,” appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1979, and the following year he published 14 short stories. In 1982 he left publishing to become a full-time writer.

He established himself in the horror field with such much-anthologized stories as “Pumpkin Head”, “The Man With Legs”, “Father Dear,” “Wish”, and “Richard’s Head,” (all of which appear in his first short story collection, Toybox). “Richard’s Head” brought him his first Bram Stoker Award nomination.

Sarrantonio won a Bram Stoker Award in 2000 for his anthology 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, and a Shirley Jackson Award in 2011 for the anthology Stories: All-New Tales (co-edited with Neil Gaiman; it also won an Audie). Both books also were finalists for the World Fantasy Award.

(9) JEANNOT SZWARC (1940-2025). The Guardian’s writeup about movie/TV director Jeannot Szwarc is almost harshly frank: “Jeannot Szwarc obituary”. “Director whose big screen credits include Jaws 2, Supergirl and Santa Claus: The Movie alongside a 50-year career in television.” He also directed Somewhere in Time.

…His blockbusters, though, were among the most maligned films of their age. When asked about Jaws 2, Szwarc said: “I do believe I deserve some credit for just pulling it off.”

The odds were not in his favour. He had less than a month to prepare when the picture’s original director, John Hancock, quit three weeks into production. Only 90 seconds of what Hancock had shot proved usable. At that point, Szwarc said, “It was the biggest disaster in the history of Universal. They had spent $10m, and they had nothing.”

An unfinished script, bad weather and a malfunctioning mechanical shark only added to Szwarc’s woes as an immovable release date loomed. He was under no illusions about the task at hand. “I knew it wasn’t going to be a cinematic masterpiece. All I went in with was knowing I had to make it scary, and that I had to finish it.”

The film, which features a scene in which a shark chomps on a sea rescue helicopter as it attempts to take off from water, was met with dismay by critics. Riding the wave of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 predecessor, however, it was still a hit, grossing $187m….

…His TV credits in the early 70s included Columbo, The Six Million Dollar Man and more than a fifth of the episodes of the long-running macabre suspense series Night Gallery.

Among his television films was The Small Miracle (1973), which starred one of his heroes, the Italian neo-realist director Vittorio De Sica. “I told him I felt like an art student who had to instruct Michelangelo,” he said.

Szwarc made his big-screen debut in the same year with the Michael Crichton-scripted thriller Extreme Close-Up. He followed this with Bug (1975), a horror film about pyromaniac cockroaches, which became the swansong of the ingenious horror producer William Castle….

…Between 2003 and 2011, he returned to the Supergirl/DC Comics milieu by directing 14 episodes of Smallville, the television series about Superman’s younger years…

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 28, 1973 — Carrie Vaughn, 52.

By Paul Weimer: Carrie Vaughn’s urban fantasy series, the Kitty Norville series, is probably very well known to you. A radio DJ turned accidental radio talk show host who is (at first secretly) a werewolf gets involved with other aspects of the slowly revealed supernatural community, bringing them out into the open and having the United States and the world come to terms with them. It’s as if the Masquerade (from White Wolf) was being slowly and steadily lifted, and for everyone all at once.

Even then and even now, that goes against the grain of a lot of Urban fantasy, which either has the supernatural always out and open, or following the Masquerade model. But a series that considers the problems werewolves, vampires and others have adapting to modern society–and modern society adapting to others? That’s a lovely sociological and anthropological twist. Those first few novels, as Kitty herself comes to terms with her secret coming out, are really strong and I think they hold up to this day.

And Norville is and was willing to expand the playground and consider–if supernatural creatures have always been around, what does that, what did that actually mean in historical terms. There’s some really lovely worldbuilding in her nuanced explorations of the idea.

But a reason why the Norville books also hold a strong place in my heart is that they are, again, some of the earliest books I was given ARCs to read for review (the first three as a matter of fact). Although urban fantasy (except for, say, Seanan McGuire) is not my power chord of reading SFF, the idea that a publisher would give me books if I would review them was a pretty heady feeling.

Still is.

I’ve read a couple of novels and work by Vaughn outside of the Kitty Norville books (After the Golden Age, written in that heady period where authors were writing original superhero novels not tied to Marvel or DC). But for me, it may be unfair, Vaughn’s work begins and ends with a DJ turned accidental social heroine.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Jerry King knows why the monsters aren’t in their old hiding place.
Reality Check has a Dickens update.
Cornered misses a friend. [Warning for amazing bad taste.]
Thatababy has DIY special effects.
The Argyle Sweater should not practice medicine. Even in Hyperborea.
Wumo witnesses – different planet, same complaint.

(12) INSIDE DOCTOR WHO. Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat tell what it’s like writing a different Doctor. Watch video at X.com.

(13) STOP THAT GARBAGE TRUCK! “Scans for the memories: why old games magazines are a vital source of cultural history – and nostalgia” explains the Guardian.

Before the internet, if you were an avid gamer then you were very likely to be an avid reader of games magazines. From the early 1980s, the likes of Crash, Mega, PC Gamer and the Official PlayStation Magazine were your connection with the industry, providing news, reviews and interviews as well as lively letters pages that fostered a sense of community. Very rarely, however, did anyone keep hold of their magazine collections. Lacking the cultural gravitas of music or movie publications, they were mostly thrown away. While working at Future Publishing as a games journalist in the 1990s, I watched many times as hundreds of old issues of SuperPlay, Edge and GamesMaster were tipped into skips for pulping. I feel queasy just thinking about it.

Because now, of course, I and thousands of other video game veterans have realised these magazines are a vital historical resource as well as a source of nostalgic joy. Surviving copies of classic mags are selling at a vast premium on eBay, and while the Internet Archive does contain patchy collections of scanned magazines, it is vulnerable to legal challenges from copyright holders.

Thankfully, there are institutions taking the preservation of games magazines seriously. Last week, the Video Game History Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation of games and their history, announced that from 30 January, it would be opening up its digital archive of out-of-print magazines to read and study online. So far 1,500 issues of mostly American games mags are available, as well as art books and other printed ephemera, but the organisation is busy scanning its entire collection. The digitised content will be fully tagged and searchable by word or phrase, so you’ll be able to easily track down the first mentions of, say, Minecraft, John Romero, or the survival horror genre….

(14) OH, THAT’S DIFFERENT. NEVER MIND. “An asteroid got deleted because it was actually Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster” says Astronomy.com.

On Jan. 2, the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced the discovery of an unusual asteroid, designated 2018 CN41. First identified and submitted by a citizen scientist, the object’s orbit was notable: It came less than 150,000 miles (240,000 km) from Earth, closer than the orbit of the Moon. That qualified it as a near-Earth object (NEO) — one worth monitoring for its potential to someday slam into Earth.

But less than 17 hours later, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) issued an editorial notice: It was deleting 2018 CN41 from its records because, it turned out, the object was not an asteroid.

It was a car.

To be precise, it was Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster mounted to a Falcon Heavy upper stage, which boosted into orbit around the Sun on Feb. 6, 2018. The car — which had been owned and driven by Musk — was a test payload for the Falcon Heavy’s first flight….

(15) PREPARE FOR THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] See the Orchard Machinery Corporation’s imposing Hedgehog tree trimming machine hacking along to Zombie as covered by Bad Wolves. Could this be a subtle hint that we should prepare for the zombie apocalypse? If so, such a machine might come in handy.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Orchard Machinery Corporation (@omcshakermaker)

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Ersatz Culture, Prograft, Daniel Dern, Jim Janney, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 12/11/24 If You Stare At A Scroll Too Long, It Dissolves Into Pixels

Posted on December 11, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) CITY TECH SF SYMPOSIUM. For Andrew Porter it was a short walk to yesterday’s City Tech SF Symposium in Brooklyn. He brought his camera with him and shot these photos during the “Asimov/Analog Writers Panel”.

L to R: Matthew Kressel, Mercurio D. Rivera, Sakinah Hoefler, Sarah Pinsker, moderator Emily Hockaday, senior managing editor of Analog and Asimov’s SF magazines. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

Emily Hockaday. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

Sakina Hoefler. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.

(2) SKYWALKER SHELTERS IN PLACE. The Franklin Fire has forced several well-known celebrities to evacuate, but some haven’t left.

The Franklin fire is raging through California’s Malibu coast, causing evacuations and ravaging homes while some celebrities like Mark Hamill shelter in place.

Hamill took to Instagram on Tuesday to share with fans that he would not evacuate his California home, with the “Star Wars” star telling his 6.2 million followers on the platform to “stay safe.”

“We’re in lockdown because of the Malibu fires. Please stay safe everyone! I’m not allowed to leave the house, which fits in perfectly with my elderly-recluse lifestyle,” Hamill wrote.

Hollywood legend Dick Van Dyke is also one of the celebrities in the affected area, saying on Facebook that he evacuated the area with his wife Arlene.

The Franklin Fire continued to explode in size overnight and covers 3,983 acres as of Wednesday morning with 7% containment, according to CalFire. Late Tuesday night, officials said 2,667 had burned. It was fueled by strong Santa Ana winds and low humidity, a dangerous combination prompting red flag warnings in the region through Wednesday evening….

Others who have evacuated include Cher, Eagles rocker Don Henley, and Cindy Crawford.

(3) PRODUCERS GUILD AWARDS. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is a nominee in documentary category for the 36th annual PGA Awards. The complete list of nominated documentaries is at the link. That is the first and only PGA category announced so far.

(4) THESE GHOSTS WANT TO BE SEEN. [Item by Steven French.] The UK’s “Society of Authors calls for celebrity memoir ghostwriters to be credited” – the Guardian tells why.

The SoA’s call comes following writers expressing frustration in recent months about celebrities writing books at a time when author incomes are in decline. Last year, Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown was criticised over her novel, Nineteen Steps, which was ghostwritten by Kathleen McGurl. While Brown publicly acknowledged McGurl’s work in an Instagram post, critics said that McGurl’s name “should be on the cover”.

(5) GHOSTLY GIFTS. [Item by Steven French.] If anyone happens to be in the Chicago area: “Ghoulish Mortals – St. Charles, Illinois” in Atlas Obscura.

JUST WEST OF CHICAGO, THERE is a little spot of spooky in the charming downtown of St. Charles, Illinois. Ghoulish Mortals is made up of equal parts immersive haunted house-style vignettes, macabre art gallery, and pop culture collector gift shop.

Haunting organ music leads you down the quaint downtown sidewalks and into the dark mysterious doors. As you make your way exploring through the shop, you will travel through a haunted mansion, a fortune teller’s tent, an 80s living room inspired by Stranger Things, a killer clown circus, abandoned hospital operating room, cannibal swamp cabin, and even come face to face with Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors.

If you love horror movies, true crime, the occult, oddities, or fantasy, leaving this shop empty-handed is nearly impossible!

(6) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES PODCAST. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA presents episode 81 of “Simultaneous Times – Eric Fomley & Adele Gardner”. Stories featured in this episode:

“Weapons Test” by Eric Fomley; music by TSG; read by Jean-Paul L. Garnier
“Tree Love” by Adele Gardner; music by Phog Masheeen – h Phog Masheeen; read by Jenna Hanchey
Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(7) RHYSLING AWARD CHAIR NAMED. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) has announced the 2025 Rhysling Award Chair will be Pixie Bruner.

Pixie Bruner (HWA/SFPA) is a writer, editor, mutant, and cancer survivor. She lives in Atlanta, GA, with her doppelgänger and their alien cats. Her collection The Body As Haunted was published in 2024 (Authortunities Press). She co-curated and edited Nature Triumphs : A Charity Anthology of Dark Speculative Literature (Dark Moon Rising Publications). Her words are in/forthcoming from Space & Time Magazine, Hotel Macabre (Crystal Lake Publishing), Star*Line, Weird Fiction Quarterly, Dreams & Nightmares, Angry Gable Press, Punk Noir, and many more. She wrote for White Wolf Gaming Studio. Werespiders ruining LARPs are all her fault.

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Thirty-two years ago, The Muppet Christmas Carol premiered, directed by Brian Henson (in his feature film directorial debut) from the screenplay by Jerry Juhl.

Based amazingly faithfully off that beloved story, it starred Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge with a multitude of Muppet performers, to wit Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Ed Sanders, Jerry Nelson, Theo Sanders, Kristopher Milnes, Russell Martin, Ray Coulthard and Frank Oz, to name just some of them.

I must single out Jessica Fox as the voice of Ghost of Christmas Past, a stellar performance indeed.

Following Jim Henson’s death in May 1990, the talent agent Bill Haber had approached Henson’s son Brian with the idea of filming an adaptation. It was pitched to ABC as a television film, but Disney ended up purchasing it instead. That’s why it’s only available on Disney+ these days.

Critics in general liked it with Roger Ebert being among them though he added that it “could have done with a few more songs than it has, and the merrymaking at the end might have been carried on a little longer, just to offset the gloom of most of Scrooge’s tour through his lifetime spent spreading misery.”

Ebert added of Caine playing Scrooge that, “He is the latest of many human actors (including the great Orson Welles) to fight for screen space with the Muppets, and he sensibly avoids any attempt to go for a laugh. He plays the role straight and treats the Muppets as if they are real. It is not an easy assignment.”

They did give him his own song which showed us the cast.

Those songs were by Paul Williams, another one of his collaborations with the Jim Henson Company after working on The Muppet Movie.

Box office wise it did just ok, as it made twenty-seven million against production costs of twelve million, not counting whatever was spent on marketing. And that Christmas goose.

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a rather ungloomy rating of eighty-eight percent.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Reality Check should not be surprised by these test results.
Working Daze illustrates a universal problem.
Dinosaur Comics is careful not to copy.
Loose Parts should be retitled “lose part” today.
Rudy Park knows why you’ve heard this before.
Speed Bump has proof of concept.

(10) ‘INNER LIGHT’ WRITER HAS SHOW IN DEVELOPMENT. Inverse reports: “32 Years Later, One of Star Trek’s Most Celebrated Writers is Launching a Gritty Sci-Fi Show”.

The writer responsible for the most celebrated episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is launching a new gritty sci-fi series. As reported by Deadline, Morgan Gendel — writer of TNG’s “The Inner Light” — has just secured a deal with Welsh broadcaster S4C, Hiraeth Productions, Canada’s Fun Republic Pictures and Karma Film, to develop a new “eco-thriller” science fiction show currently titled Isolation. The in-development series will focus on an ensemble of characters attempting to combat climate change in the near future, who also encounter an extraterrestrial force capable of direct contact with human minds.

“There’s a whole ‘Inner Light,’ kind of linkage here, to the extent that both deal with alien technology and the human brain,” Gendel tells Inverse. “And you’ve got a team thrown together isolated from humanity to one extent or another. Those are not intentional [parallels]. My writing often puts people in a pressure cooker to see what emotions or truths boil out of them.”…

(11) SURREALISM OF GENRE INTEREST. John Coulthart assembles a gallery of “The art of Jean Ransy, 1910–1991” at { feuilleton }.

… All the same, Jean Ransy may fit the Surrealist bill even if he doesn’t seem to have had any lasting connections with those groups who regarded themselves as the official guardians of the Surrealist flame. Ransy was Belgian artist which makes him Surrealist by default if you subscribe to Jonathan Meades’ proposition that Belgium is a Surrealist nation at heart. (Magritte wasn’t a Surrealist, says Meades, he was a social realist.)

Ransy’s paintings appear at first glance like a Belgian equivalent of Rex Whistler in their pictorial realism and refusal to jump on the Modernist bandwagon. Whistler and Ransy were contemporaries (Whistler was born in 1905) but Whistler’s paintings were much more restrained even when outright fantasy entered his baroque pastiches. The “metaphysical” vistas of Giorgio de Chirico are mentioned as an influence on Ransy’s work so he was at least looking at living artists, something you never sense with Whistler. There’s a de Chirico quality in the tilted perspectives and accumulations of disparate objects, also a hint of Max Ernst in one or two paintings….

Le chemin de ronde au visage soleil (1985).

(12) JUSTWATCH SHARES 2024 TOP 10 LISTS. What were the most-watched movies and TV shows on streaming services in 2024? JustWatch compiled these year-end Streaming Charts based on user activity, including: clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as ‘seen’. This data is collected from >45 million movie & TV show fans per month. It is updated daily for 140 countries and 4,500 streaming services.

2024 was packed with standout streaming hits. Movies like “Civil War”, “Oppenheimer”, and “The Fall Guy” drew huge audiences with their mix of action and drama. On the TV side, shows like “Shogun”, “Fallout”, and our streaming charts champion “The Bear” kept viewers hooked all year long. Whether it was blockbuster films or binge-worthy series, there was something for everyone. These titles set the tone for another exciting year in entertainment.

(13) WE STAND CORRECTED. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian says people have jumped to the wrong conclusion about an image in the trailer we ran yesterday: “Emaciated zombie in 28 Years Later is not Cillian Murphy, sources confirm”.

When the trailer for Danny Boyle’s belated zombie sequel 28 Years Later released on Tuesday, the less-than-rosy-cheeked appearance of the first film’s star, Cillian Murphy, did not escape comment.

A scene in which a strikingly skinny member of the undead suddenly rears up, naked, behind new star Jodie Comer was taken as confirmation of rumours that Murphy had returned for an appearance in the new film….

…Yet the Guardian can reveal that the actor playing “Emaciated Infected” in the film, due for release in June 2025, is not Murphy but rather newcomer Angus Neill.

Neill, an art dealer specialising in old masters, was talent-spotted by Boyle, who was much struck by his distinctive looks. Neill also works as a model, with his professional profile suggesting he has a 28-inch waist….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Ryan George takes us inside the “Elf Pitch Meeting” – one of the retro reviews stockpiled in anticipation of his baby arriving.

Will Ferrell is one of the most successful comedy actors of our time – but back in 2003, it was kind of a surprise to see him leading a Christmas movie as a giant non-elf. Elf ended up becoming a holiday classic, but it still raises some questions. Like what happened to that poor nun? Why didn’t the news reporter follow up on anything? Is Buddy the elf actually kind of creepy? So check out the pitch meeting that led to Elf to find out how it all came together!

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, 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 12/10/24 We Are The Telepath Guild, The Telepath Guild, The Telepath Guild

Posted on December 10, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) UNION AND STRAND BOOK STORE SETTLE. “Strike Ends at the Strand as Union, Management Reach Tentative Agreement” reports Publishers Weekly.

The Strand Book Store has reached a tentative contract agreement with its staff union, which is represented by United Auto Workers Local 2179, putting an end to a strike that stretched through the weekend and much of Monday, December 9. Should the contract be ratified, it would last through Aug 31, 2028, adding an additional year to a contract that was previously three years long, said Will Bobrowski, the former Strand employee and current second VP at UAW Local 2179.

Among the changes to the contract, Bobrowski told PW, are an increase to the store’s per hour hiring rate, which will now be $0.50 above New York State minimum wage and a $1.50/hour raise in an employee’s fourth year, amounting to a roughly 37% wage increase over four years for Strand workers who begin at the base salary. (The minimum wage in New York will increase by another $0.50 on January 1, 2026, and on Jan. 1, 2027, the state’s rate will be tied to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, taking inflation into account in the establishment of a minimum.)

Paid time off for employees will remain unchanged in the new contract, totaling nine days for all workers. Charges of unfair labor practices filed by the union to the National Board of Labor Relations over the weekend will also be dropped….

(2) DEADLINE APPROACHES TO APPLY FOR OTHERWISE FELLOWSHIPS. The Otherwise Motherboard is soliciting applications for two 2024 Otherwise Fellows.

The Otherwise Fellowship (formerly Tiptree Fellowship) was established in 2015 to support and recognize new voices who are creating work that is changing our view of gender today. The Fellowship program seeks out creators who are striving to complete new works, particularly creators from communities that have been historically underrepresented in the science fiction and fantasy genre and those who are working in media other than traditional fiction! Each Fellow receives USD $500 in support of a new or ongoing project.

Applications are due December 15, 2024, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time, via email. Selected Fellows will be announced in Spring 2025. The Fellowship committee is being chaired by Otherwise Motherboard member Jed Samer.

For more information about what the Fellowship entails and how to apply, see “How to apply for an Otherwise Fellowship”.

(3) GENRE SPECIALISTS’ PICKS. At Reactor: “Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2024”.

As readers of speculative fiction, we are spoiled for choice. The book releases in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and beyond this year took us to lands of magic and wonder, newly terraformed planets and generation ships, crumbling gothic mansions, and tech-fueled future Earths—and we are so lucky to get to read them all. Our reviewers each picked their top contenders for the best books of the year, along with some personal favorites….

(4) ASFS’ REVISED CODE OF CONDUCT. The African Science Fiction Society released its new Code of Conduct today in concert with this statement about Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki. (The Code of Conduct is at the link.)

ASFS had started gathering information in response to Erin Cairns’ report discussed in File 770’s post “Two Accusations Against Ekpeki Disproved”.

(5) SCOTT EDELMAN’S OTHER PODCAST. Episode 10 of Scott Edelman’s podcast Why Not Say What Happened? — “Why I Was Questioned by the Police for Wearing a Mister Miracle Mask” — includes his ramblings about his first cons — plus a couple of con photos of him at 16.

And here’s the link to all episodes in the series, which can be downloaded through multiple sites.

Scott Edelman, at right wearing glasses.

(6) CALL ME ISHMAEL, BUT DON’T CALL ME LATE TO DINNER. “’People are rooting for the whale’: the strange American tradition of Moby-Dick reading marathons” at Yahoo!

Every fall on Venice beach, local residents set up a director’s chair by the water. A harpoon goes on one side, a whalebone on the other. Then, in honor of grey whale migration season, they spend two days reading Moby-Dick aloud.

Nearly 200 years after Herman Melville first published the story of a sea captain’s obsessive hunt for a white whale, Moby-Dick marathons have become a surprisingly popular American tradition. There are an estimated 25 or more across the US each year, in locations ranging from museums to a 19th-century whaling ship….

…The Venice beach marathon, held for 29 years, is a particularly surreal scene. Even in late November, the beach is crowded: French tourists on bicycles, the men of Muscle beach lifting weights, friends playing volleyball in short shorts. Far out on the sand, where the air begins to smell more like salt than weed or essential oils, the Moby-Dick readers sit in a circle, switching readers every chapter, as tourists and surfers eddy around them, drifting up to take photographs and then drifting away again. Occasionally, readers spot whales in the distance….

…Other classic novelists may inspire larger fan events, but Jane Austen celebrations don’t typically include a live reading of all of Pride and Prejudice.

“No offense to Jane Austen, but more happens. It’s more exciting to hunt a whale than to hunt a husband,” said Dawn Coleman, the executive secretary of the Melville Society, and an English professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville….

(7) MANY DOLLARS WERE LOST. Giant Freakin Robot makes its case for “How Disney’s Horrible Marketing Forever Changed Sci-Fi Movies”. They begin by dissecting the corpse of Disney’s marketing campaign for John Carter (2012).

In the long, storied history of Disney, the company has had massive successes, including the history-making Marvel Cinematic Universe and their entire animated output in the ’90s. At the same time, they’ve created some of the biggest bombs of all time.

The 2012 sci-fi adventure John Carter was, at the time of its release, the least profitable film ever made, a title it might end up losing to Joker: Folie a Deux by the end of the year. A rollicking sci-fi adventure based on classic pulp novels, John Carter should have been a massive success, but it never had a chance, thanks to the worst marketing campaign of all time….

…The second trailer course-corrected and starts off with Carter fighting in an arena before launching into a montage of the alien planet with Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” playing. As with everything about this movie, it was too far ahead of the curve, as today, every trailer has a slowed-down, epic version of a classic rock song playing over the trailer, but in 2012, this confused most of the general audience.

Worse, there’s nothing about being based on the legendary pulp novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, nothing about being an adventure 100 years in the making, no mention of how it’s starring Taylor Kitsch, who at the time Hollywood was pushing as the next big thing. In interviews leading up to its release, Kitsch publicly spoke about his disappointment with the film’s marketing, which lacked any sort of “hook” or jaw-dropping special effects shot to leave an impression on viewers. Even his other sci-fi dud, Battleship, included a screen-filling shot of the alien ship in all of its glory to tease moviegoers of the battle yet to come….

(8) WICKED INSPIRATION. Saturday Night Live gives us “Gladiator II: The Musical”. “There’s No Place Like Rome.”

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

December 10, 1960 — Kenneth Branagh, 64.

I first saw Kenneth Branagh with his then-wife Emma Thompson in Much Ado About Nothing, the Shakespearean comedy which he adapted. Truly lovely film.

So let’s look at his genre work as a performer. Dead Again might or might not be his first genre film where he was Mike Church / Roman Strauss, but Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where he was Victor Frankenstein is genre and he directed it as well. I’ve heard varying opinions on it. What did y’all think of it?

Then there’s Wild Wild West where he was Arliss Loveless, some bastardized variant on Michael Dunn’s perfectly acted Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless. He didn’t work for me. Not at all. Nor did that shudderingly awful film.

Alien Love Triangle is a thirty-minute film starring Kenneth Branagh, Alice Connor, Courteney Cox and Heather Graham. Teleportation. Aliens. Genders, alien.

He got to play in Rowling’s universe in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as Gilderoy Lockhart. Great role it was.

Oh, and in an alternate reality sort of way, he plays William Shakespeare in All is True, another name for Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII. It’s a very lovely role and a sweet film as well. Recommended.

For hard SF, I’ve got him directing Thor. (Well sort of hard SF.) For fantasy, he directed Cinderella and Artemis Fowl.

Finally, he’s Hercule Poirot in the three Agatha Christie films produced so far — Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and A Haunting in Venice. He was also director and producer for these. He’s certainly a different manner of that detective. Really different.

(10) SPIDER-MAN FIGURES. “Hasbro Unveils New Spider-Man Marvel Legends Wave for 2025” – Bleeding Cool has all the photos. Here are a couple.

…The first wave of Marvel Legends figures for 2025 have been revealed, with Spider-Man bringing some heat in the new year…. However, the whole roster has been unveiled, with six iconic heroes and villains coming to life, with each getting their own card back. For the classic Spider-Man: The Animated Series retro wave, we have the debut of The Chameleon, and yes, he gets a J. Jonah Jameson mask. We are also getting a Clone Saga debut with Kaine from a time before he was a hero and the corrupt clone of Peter Parker. Lastly, we are stepping into the Spider-Verse with the 1st ever-Marvel Legends figure of Spider-Man Unlimited!…

…The latest wave of Marvel Legends Series Spider-Man inspired figures:

Spider-Man Unlimited
Agent Venom (Flash Thompson)
Spider-Boy
Marvel’s Chameleon
Marvel’s Kaine
Electro (Francine Frye)

(11) CASTING OUCH. Variety reports “Jeremy Allen White Joins ‘Star Wars’ Film ‘The Mandalorian & Grogu’ as Jabba the Hutt’s Son”. Eh, Jabba the Hutt’s son? How? Parthenogenesis? Binary fission? Actual sex? Where’s my eye bleach.

… Plot details have been hard to come by for “The Mandalorian & Grogu,” so White’s casting as Jabba’s son provides the first real glimpse for what could be in store for the titular bounty hunter and his adorably wee adopted son. Their Disney+ series “The Mandalorian” is set in the years following the events of 1983’s “Return of the Jedi,” in which Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) strangles Jabba to death. The recent spin-off series “The Book of Boba Fett” revealed that Jabba’s absence left a power vacuum among the organized crime bosses on Tatooine; two of Jabba’s cousins made a play for his territory, only to be defeated by Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison), who takes over instead. It seems likely that, with Jabba’s son somehow involved in the new film, Boba Fett and his deputy Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) could show up as well….

(12) BLASTED IN THE PAST. Larry Correia would never do this. “Why ‘Gladiator’ director Ridley Scott keeps a 40-year-old negative review framed on his wall: ‘I was actually hurt’” at CNBC.

At 87 years old, director Ridley Scott has seen a tremendous amount of success over the course of his career.

His films have grossed billions at the box office and taken home nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture for 2000′s “Gladiator.” But despite the plaudits he has received as a filmmaker, it’s the critical pans that have stayed with Scott the most.

In an interview with filmmaker Fede Alvarez on the DGA’s “Director’s Cut” podcast, Scott revealed that he has a negative review from famed film critic Pauline Kael of his 1982 science fiction epic “Blade Runner” on display in his office.

Scott explained that Kael “destroyed Blade Runner in four pages” in the New Yorker, likening the review to “industrial espionage, because you’re destroying a product before it’s out.”…

… “I framed that. It’s still in my office today,” he said. “It taught me this: there’s only one critic that means anything, and that’s you.”…

(13) THE WEST EGG AND I. Chuck Tingle seems to have embraced Scott’s number – and a good many other things.

(14) UNUSUAL VIDEO GAME. [Item by N.] “I Hope This Hurts: Mouthwashing Through A Disabled Lens” at The Jimquisition is a video essay from game critic James Stephanie Sterling, which analyzes the recent indie sci-fi horror success Mouthwashing from the vantage point of disability.

(15) CASTLEVANIA. Netflix dropped a trailer for “Castlevania: Nocturne Season 2”, which is available there starting January 16.

The legendary Alucard, Richter Belmont, and his band of vampire hunters are in a desperate race against time. Erzsebet Báthory, the Vampire Messiah, who already seems invincible, seeks the full power of the goddess Sekhmet so she can plunge the world into endless darkness and terror

(16) ZOMBIES BY INCREMENTS. Gizmodo says, “In 28 Years Later’s First Trailer, the Apocalypse Just Keeps Going”. Beware spoilers (maybe). Beware gory zombie stuff (definitely). In theaters June 20, 2025.

A lot can change in nearly three decades, even in a zombie apocalypse. New ways to survive, new mysteries evolving in the infection that laid the world low. Sometimes people grow up and become Aaron Taylor-Johnson, even. But one thing that doesn’t change? The violence….

…28 Years Later is just the first half of our long-awaited return to this version of the zombie apocalypse, however–Boyle’s sequel was shot back-to-back with its own continuation, helmed by Nia DaCosta and titled The Bone Temple (which we seem to get a brief look at in this trailer, too). That film will see Cillian Murphy reprise his role from 28 Days as Jim, but it hasn’t stopped people from speculating that one of the zombies glimpsed in the trailer could be his grim fate, as there is one that looks especially like a particularly gaunt Murphy glimpsed rising out of a bed of wild grass….

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Sumana Harihareswara, N., Daniel Dern, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel “We’d Like To Welcome You” Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 8/25/24 Pixel ScrollRight Of The Mounties

Posted on August 25, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION AWARD. The idea of the Location Managers Guild Award is truly Hollywood insider stuff. It’s “meant to spotlight outstanding filming locations that sent the tone and enhance the narrative for international features, television and commercials.” There are genre winners, of course. “Location Managers Guild Awards 2024” at Deadline.

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A PERIOD TELEVISION SERIES
Fallout
Paul Kramer, Chris Arena, Mandi Dillin / LMGI, David Park / LMGI, Paul van der Ploeg

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A CONTEMPORARY TELEVISION SERIES
Fargo Season 5
Mohammad Qazzaz / LMGI, Luke Antosz / LMGI

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A TV SERIAL PROGRAM, ANTHOLOGY, MOW OR LIMITED SERIES
Ripley
Robin Melville / LMGI, Giuseppe Nardi / LMGI, Fabio Ferrante, Shane Haden

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A PERIOD FEATURE FILM
Oppenheimer
Justin Duncan /LMGI, Dennis Muscari, Patty Carey-Perazzo, T.C. Townsen

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A CONTEMPORARY FEATURE FILM
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part 1
David Campbell-Bell, Enrico Latella / LMGI, Jonas Fylling Christiansen, Niall O’Shea, Ben Firminger

OUTSTANDING FILM COMMISSION
Film in Iceland
True Detective: Night Country

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A COMMERCIAL
Toyota: Present from the Past
Mark Freid / LMGI, Paul Riordan / LMGI

(2) LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS BOOKS. Charlie Jane Anders names “10 Literary Books That Made Me a Better Science Fiction Writer” at Happy Dancing.

… As I wrote a while back, the appearance of literary merit means people will give your work more of a chance in spite of weird experiments, but it also means the reader might pay a bit more attention to the nuts and bolts of the story (at least sometimes.) In a good literary story, this relationship with the ideal reader leads to more attention to detail: the sentence-level prose, but also the small details of people’s lives and inner states….

6) Possession by A.S. Byatt

I re-read this book just a few months ago, because my upcoming novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster has a similar literary detective story at its heart. And when I think about the current vogue for Dark Academia stories, Possession feels like a foundational text to me. The story of two young scholars who stumble upon a long lost letter that hints at a secret affair between two Victorian poets, Possession fairly burns with the joy of discovery and textual analysis. That’s the thing that I really discovered when I re-read this book: the poetry of Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte is vitally important to the story and to their love affair, and the “clues” in the story are as much about the beauty of their writing and metaphors as any love letters. I’ll probably be writing more about Possession as the release date of Lessons in Magic and Disaster grows closer, so stay tuned….

(3) CAN THE PRICE BE RIGHT? “AMC to release new Batman popcorn bucket” – Batman News has details.

…AMC Theaters will have a Bat-Signal popcorn bucket available on Aug. 28 that will sell for $34.99. A new collectible cup of the Batmobile will also be available for $11.99, but a combo can be purchased for $44.99….

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(4) ARMED LIBRARIAN. “Hell hath no fury like a librarian scorned in the book banning wars” – behind a paywall at the LA Times.

A MANDA JONES is a Louisiana middle-school librarian who sleeps with a shotgun under her bed and carries a pistol when she travels the back roads.

Threats against her began two years ago after she spoke out against censorship and was drawn into the culture wars over book banning. She was condemned as a pedophile and a groomer and accused of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” The Christian right targeted her, and she found herself in the news warning that conservatives in her state and across much of the country were endangering libraries and intellectual freedom.

“I never expected any of this,” said Jones, who lives in Livingston Parish. “It’s a huge weight to feel all that attention. I’m just a school librarian from a two red-light town.”

Jones’ cautionary and disquieting testament to the nation’s divisiveness is told in her new memoir, “That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America,” a blunt, angry, searching and redeeming story about a woman engulfed by forces and designs she never imagined. It is a glimpse into a family and a small town that reads like a chapter out of “The Scarlet Letter” or “The Crucible,” narratives whose themes of fear, superstition, rage and religion are again permeating the nation’s political moment, including Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s recent comments that “Democrats want to put sexually explicit books in toddlers’ libraries.”…

(5) ANALYSIS OF A CONVOLUTED PUBLISHING HISTORY. Rich Horton decides it’s time for another look at a classic: “Review: Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith” at Strange at Ecbatan.

… I don’t really want to say more about the plot. There is at the same time a lot going on, but in an odd way not. Some of it seems a bit arbitrary, some doesn’t quite convince, and some is fascinating. But still at all pretty much works. The novel isn’t at a level with Smith’s greatest works, but parts of it are. At time it reaches the incantatory heights Smith could achieve, and it hints throughout at a really important story — the story of the Underpeople (which is also central to “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell”, and which perhaps is ultimately key to the entire Instrumentality future history.)….

(6) HOWARD WALDROP REMEMBRANCE EVENT. George R.R. Martin tells readers about the video portion of a memorial for Howard Waldrop, held June 29, at Not a Blog.

…I was not able to be there in person (we were in London at the time) but there was no way I could not be a part of a remembrance for H’ard, so I taped some remarks and sent them to Robert Taylor, who was organizing the event.   I went on rather a long time, as it happens, but Howard and I had a long history and I am a wordy bastard in any case, as many of you know. My tape ended up coming in around 45 minutes long, and could easily have gone three hours if I’d just kept talking. There are so many stories to tell.

That was too long for the Austin memorial, so Robert and his team kindly cut and trimmed it for the event.   I do have the longer version and will likely post it here… probably later rather than sooner.   For now, we have this; not only my video, but all the other speeches and stories as well, from some of Howard’s pals. (Some, not all. Howard had friends all over the world.

Parts of this may bring a tear to your eye.   Other bits will make you laugh.   Laughter was one of Howard’s gifts….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 25, 1955 – Simon R. Green, 69. I’ve had email conversations with our Birthday honoree, Simon R. Green. He’s a fascinating, friendly person.

I first read the Deathstalker series which, like everything he writes, is part of the same multiverse. Owen Deathstalker, reluctant heir to the ancient Deathstalker name and a very minor historian, will come to lead a rebellion against the powerful and corrupt empire ruled by The Iron Bitch. Every SF trope is here — crashed alien starships, rogue computer hackers, clones and espers to name but a few. Yes, it’s space opera but not to be taken too seriously.

Moving sideways for a movement, he did a stellar job with his Forest Kingdom fantasy series which plays it more straight I think save SLIGHT SPOILER such touches as a butterfly collecting dragon END SLIGHT SPOILER. The connected Hawk and Fisher series of two Guardsman in Haven, a corrupt seaport, solving magical mysteries is wonderful.

Remember how I said everything was in the same multiverse? Hawk and Fisher show up in Strangefellows, just having a drink. Strangefellows being the bar in Nightside, the pocket universe beneath London where John Taylor is the only detective, as told in the Nightside series. Great setting, fascinating characters, weird stories.

The Secret History series involved the Droods, an ancient family that watches over the world and protects it from mostly supernatural and magical threats. They have a magical armor they, well, protects them from everything. Great series. This and the Nightside series were wrapped in one novel, Night Fall.

I should note that all of the must be read from the beginning. There is significant plot development as each series moved along. Characters change, situations develop.

The Ghostfinders of the Carnacki Institute, an ancient and very secretive government department , exist to deal with ghosts, and live by the motto “We don’t take any shit from the Hereafter”. The plots here are thinner than in his other series but I find the character interesting enough to like the series.

Ishmael Jones is someone who cannot afford to be noticed, someone who lives under the radar. Why so? Because it’s been sixty years since the alien starship made him human and he hasn’t aged at all. These are really fun because Ishmael Jones simultaneously believes he’s human and alien, and views everything that way. Stories are quite good.

A freestanding novel of note is Drinking Midnight Wine about a small English town (actually where he was born) where good in all sorts of magical forms pushed back against evil in yet more magical forms. There’s an Angel, but trust me when I say that you wouldn’t want to meet her.

He’s too prolific to cover everything here and I noticed I skipped the excellent Giden Sable series. Oh well.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Arlo and Janis found something escaped from a little shop.
Eek! documents a performance complaint.
Wannabe gives writing tips, but are they any good?
Pardon My Planet finds something is super hard to hide.
The Far Side solves a super problem of its own.

(9) NOW WITH EXTRA ADDED EVIL. “’Rings of Power’ Returns, With More Creatures and More Evil”. Link bypasses New York Times paywall.

… In April last year, the production for Season 2 sprawled across several sites around Windsor, England. Shuttle cars sped hundreds of crew members and craft makers between vast studios and forests. For about eight months, nearly 90 cast members spent hours in hair and makeup to be transformed into elves, dwarves, orcs and other Middle-earth dwellers.

A building housed racks of costumes and specially molded or 3-D-printed trinkets and armor. Outdoor sets the size of playgrounds plunged the actors into a court in Númenor or the trenches of an orc camp. And nearby, machinery waited in a muddy field to film a gritty battle scene inspired by films like “Saving Private Ryan.”

“I kept saying constantly on set: more blood, more dust, more mud, more everything,” Charlotte Brandstrom, who directed four of the upcoming season’s episodes, said in an interview. (Some scenes set in Rhûn were also filmed in the Canary Islands.)

This, after all, might be the most expensive series in TV history, a blockbuster prequel that reportedly cost Amazon $715 million for its first season, and premieres the first three episodes of its second season on Thursday…

(10) BITE ON. [Item by Steven French.] Do we need another zombie series? If it has Sue Johnston biting someone’s nose off, then yes please! “‘Sue Johnston’s first day on set, she was biting someone’s nose off’: Ben Wheatley on his zombie drama Generation Z” in the Guardian.

… The old eat the young. That is the back-of-a-beermat pitch for new Channel 4 drama Generation Z. And because the Z stands for zombie, the eating is meant literally. “I loved the idea of a horror story about societal breakdown, told from the perspective of different generations,” says its writer-director Ben Wheatley. “Once I started writing it, I couldn’t stop.”

The film-maker’s first original series for TV begins with an army convoy crashing outside a care home. The subsequent chemical leak turns the residents into marauding monsters who attack local youngsters. “It’s a bit of a Brexit metaphor,” admits Wheatley. “But it’s by no means binary. We discuss it from each generation’s viewpoint, exploring the notion that boomers have ruined the lives of the young. Because it’s a genre piece, that’s basically by biting their hands and eating their brains.”…

(11) BE ON THE LOOKOUT. Dan Monroe investigates “Whatever Happened to The LAST STARFIGHTER?” at Movies, Music & Monsters.

(12) ZERO FAMILY VALUES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] From Netflix Anime. Very violent. Very bloody. Very NSFW. Gizmodo warns: “Terminator Zero’s New Trailer Shows the Bloody War to Come”.

…While writing Zero, Mattson keyed in on three core Terminator pillars: killer robots, “fear and dread around nuclear holocaust,” and family-centric stories. If the first two films are respectively about “a man and woman making a baby” and “a mother’s love for her son,” this series is about a fractured family coming together again. In his eyes, you don’t get Terminator without those three tenets, they’ve all led to an enduring franchise aiming to make a comeback and take some new swings.

Pixel Scroll 4/2/24 Knitting the Fannish News: Scroll One, Pixel Two

Posted on April 2, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) BURROUGHS ON THE BLOCK. Heritage Auctions will hold The World of Edgar Rice Burroughs Rare Books Signature^® Auction on April 25:

…featuring more than 120 lots — many of which have never been publicly offered, and some of which come from Burroughs’ collection, including his dual-edged knife used in the 1929 film Tarzan and the Tiger and the Gothic library table famously seen in numerous photos of the man at his Tarzana, California, home. But the event could just as easily have been titled The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

…Indeed, the deft brush of James Allen St. John graces the cover of the catalog for this event, which boasts two original oil paintings by St. John that were turned into iconic dust jackets for Swords of Mars, starring John Carter, and Tarzan’s Quest….

…St. John’s artwork for the dust jacket that wrapped the first edition of Sword of Marsbecame the definitive rendering of that tale. The same holds for his dust jacket artwork for Tarzan’s Quest, another Blue Book serial also published as a novel in 1936 — and the last Tarzan story to feature the Ape Man’s wife, Jane, as a significant character. Of course, she’s on the cover in her final star turn in the long-running series….

(2) KEEP THOSE DONJONS MOVIN’, RAWHIDE! [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] BBC Radio 4 has broadcast a nifty version of Diana Wynne Jones Howl’s Moving Castle.

In the land of Ingary, Sophie Hatter is resigning herself to an uninteresting life working in a hat shop, when a castle appears above the town of Market Chipping and refuses to stay still.

Visiting the shop one day, the dreaded Witch of the Waste transforms Sophie into an old crone. Setting off into the countryside to seek her fortune, Sophie soon runs into the sinister moving castle. But the castle belongs to the dreaded Wizard Howl whose appetite, they say, is satisfied only by the souls of young girls.

First published in 1986, Howl’s Moving Castle’s reputation has grown over time to become recognised as a fantasy classic and, in 2004, it was adapted as an Oscar-nominated animated film by Studio Ghibli.

You can listen to it here: “Drama on 4, Howl’s Moving Castle”.

(3) PUBLISHING TAUGHT ME. SFWA has announced that their online anthology Publishing Taught Me now has a full roster of contributors. Two currently published essays by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and James Beamon are available at Publishing Taught Me: A SFWA Anthology Project.

“Inside the Fiction Editor’s Mind: Does the Writer’s Identity Matter?” by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
“Take Editing Humor Seriously. Please.” by James Beamon

Additional essays are upcoming from Diana Pho, Erika Hardison, Kanishk Tantia, Nelly Garcia-Rosas, Yoon Ha Lee, and Emily Jiang. These essays will be posted on the first Wednesday of each month through September.

The Publishing Taught Me anthology is part of the Publishing Taught Me program supported by a grant from the NEA. Monthly posts of essays addressing the presence of BIPOC in the publication of SFFH are being edited by multiple award-winning editor Nisi Shawl and two interns, Somto Ihezue and Zhui Ning Chang. The essays will be posted through September 4. An Editors’ Afterword is scheduled for October 2, and in November anthology authors will have a chance to participate in an online symposium on the topic of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in our genres.

(4) HEAVY WAIT CROWNS. Atlas Obscura recommends “10 Secure Places to Wait Out the Zombie Apocalypse”.

THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE HAS LONG been a favorite subject of horror movies, but where would you hide if the undead really roamed the Earth?…

Fifth on their list:

5. Prison Cell of Ludger Sylbaris

SAINT-PIERRE, MARTINIQUE

On May 8th, 1902, the Mt. Pelee volcano erupted on the island of Martinique, killing an estimated 30,000-40,000 people in the town of Saint Pierre. Only a handful survived–a few lucky sailors in boats off the coast, and a local drunk who had been thrown in jail the night before: Ludger Sylbaris. His solitary confinement cell, a stone structure built partially into the ground, saved his life from scalding volcanic gasses and ash. Saint Pierre never recovered from the devastation, and today has a population of around 1000, but Sylbaris’ prison cell still stands. With a tiny window and one entrance, it could be a good place to hunker down during a zombie invasion.

Pros: This structure has a few things going for it in terms of zombie defenses: it’s located on an island, it’s made of stone with only one entrance to fortify, and, perhaps most importantly, it’s one of the few structures in the world that has already proven its effectiveness at withstanding truly apocalyptic conditions.

Cons: Mt. Pelee is still one of the world’s most active volcanos, so there is a chance that while waiting out the zombies, you would have to deal with an eruption.

(5) TOM DIGBY (1940-2024). Ansible® 441 reports “Tom Digby (1940-2024), US fan, filker and fanzine publisher who was a fan GoH at the 1993 Worldcon, died on 27 March aged 84”.

His burial took place today in Half Moon Bay, CA.

He was twice nominated for the Best Fan Writer Hugo – in 1971 and 1972 – at a time when his writing was mainly seen by those who read his zine Probably Something in LASFS’ weekly APA-L.

Around the same time he was referenced in Larry Niven’s story “What Can You Say About Chocolate-Covered Manhole Covers?” (1971), set in part at the Dian and Bruce Pelz divorce party which preceded my time in LASFS by a couple years. (There really was a cake topped by bride and groom figures facing in opposite directions.) Tom Digby was the inspiration for the alien.

Digby believed ideas are the real currency that distinguishes fandom. He coined the term “idea-tripping” for our kind of play.

And he was endlessly inventive. He made up “plergb”, a kind of Swiss-army-knife of words for use in all kinds of gags. Here is my own official certificate authorizing me to use the word. (Click for larger image.)

(6) ED PISKOR (1982-2024). “Ed Piskor, Hip Hop Family Tree and X-Men: Grand Design Artist, Reportedly Passes Away at Age 41” — CBR.com. has the story.

Ed Piskor, the artist of the Eisner Award-winning comic Hip Hop Family Tree, has reportedly passed away, per a Facebook post by his sister. Piskor, the co-host of popular podcast and YouTube channel Cartoonist Kayfabe, had recently become embroiled in controversy after two women accused Piskor of sexual misconduct, leading to the cancellation of a planned art exhibit in Pittsburgh showcasing his Hip Hop Family Tree art and Cartoonist Kayfabe co-host Jim Rugg announcing that he was ending his “working relationship” with Piskor. On Monday, Piskor posted a lengthy note where he indicated he had plans to take his own life after refuting some of the allegations against him….

I’m not going to run it all down here, but if you want more stomach-turning details including the roles of JDA and Comicsgate search his name on X.com.

(7) JOE FLAHERTY (1941-2024). [Item by Todd Mason.] Second City comedy troupe writer/performer/director Joe Flaherty has died. Along with the frequent Second City stage and SCTV material that dug deeply into fantastica in various manners (Canada’s Monty Python in many ways), he also had roles in and wrote and produced such work as Back To The Future Part Ii and Really Weird Tales, and the sitcom Maniac Mansion (and in other modes, the fine short-lived series Freaks And Geeks). One of his recurring characters was Monster Chiller Horror Theatre horror host Count Floyd, the other regular gig for his local newscaster character Floyd Robertson, on the various forms of the SCTV series. “Joe Flaherty, comedian known for work on SCTV and Freaks and Geeks, dead at 82” at CBC News.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born April 2, 1948 — Joan D. Vinge, 76. One of my favorite writers is Joan D. Vinge. What do I consider her best series? Without question that’d be the Snow Queen series of which the first novel, Snow Queen, won a Hugo at Denvention Two. I’ll admit that my favorite work in this series is Tangled Up In Blue where two police officers must fight corruption within the Tiamat force. It’s more personal I think than the rest of the series.

Next in line for her would be the Cat trilogy (well it did have a chapbook prequel, “Psiren” which I’ve not read) consisting of Psion, Catspaw and Dreamfall. Cat, the young telepath here, is fascinating as is his story which she tells over the three novels.

I’m going to give a shout-out to her first novel, The Outcasts of Heaven Belt which was serialized in February-April 1978 in Analog. An egalitarian matriarchal belt-based society is in a conflict against a patriarchal society in the same region of space. If Niven could write sympathetic female characters, this is what he might have written. Only she wrote it better. Really, it’s that good.

I general don’t read media novelizations so I can’t comment on all of her many such writings like Cowboys & Aliens, Lost in Space, Tarzan, King of the Apes and Willow.

I’ve not read her short fiction, so I’d like to know who here has. What’s the best collection?

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Close to Home has a character’s DNA test results.
Eek! Explains why we saw only one Batmobile driver.
Frazz reflects on sayings and the weather.
F Minus comes up with a new game.
Phoebe and Her Unicorn realize it’s all Greek to them.
Zits is sure there are better means of transportation

(10) GET YOUR MALZBERG FIX. Daniel Dern doesn’t want you to miss Collecting Myself: The Uncollected Stories of Barry N. Malzberg, released as an ebook last September and as a paperback on March 1 by Starkhouse Press. “Having just learned about it and purchase-requested my library get it,” he says.

(11) BUT WILL THEY HAVE DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “White House directs NASA to create time standard for the moon” – Reuters has details.

The White House on Tuesday directed NASA to establish a unified standard of time for the moon and other celestial bodies, as the United States aims to set international norms in space amid a growing lunar race among nations and private companies.

The head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), according to a memo seen by Reuters, instructed the space agency to work with other parts of the U.S. government to devise a plan by the end of 2026 for setting what it called a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC).

The differing gravitational force, and potentially other factors, on the moon and on other celestial bodies change how time unfolds relative to how it is perceived on Earth. Among other things, the LTC would provide a time-keeping benchmark for lunar spacecraft and satellites that require extreme precision for their missions.

“The same clock that we have on Earth would move at a different rate on the moon,” Kevin Coggins, NASA’s space communications and navigation chief, said in an interview.

OSTP chief Arati Prabhakar’s memo said that for a person on the moon, an Earth-based clock would appear to lose on average 58.7 microseconds per Earth-day and come with other periodic variations that would further drift moon time from Earth time….

(12) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Learn “How Madame Web Should Have Ended” from the crew at How It Should Have Ended. (With an assist from Pitch Meeting’s Ryan George.)

Madame Web needs more than just a new ending… It needs a complete overhaul.

[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Dave Butterfield, Daniel Dern, Kathy Sullivan, Hampus Eckerman, Todd Mason, 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 Steve Davidson.]

Pixel Scroll 3/19/24 Ocean’s Elevenses

Posted on March 19, 2024 by Mike Glyer

(1) GAIMAN COLLECTION AUCTION RESULTS. March 15 was “The Day Neil Gaiman Swapped His Original Comic Art, Comic Books and Collectibles for More Than $1 Million”.

[He offered] 125 prized pieces from his collection — everything from original comic artwork to signed books, a Coraline puppet used in the film to limited-edition sculptures, handmade Christmas stories given as gifts, to the awards he received. It was a day well spent: The completely sold-out Neil Gaiman Collection Comics & Comic Art Signature ^® Auction, which drew more than 1,200 bidders worldwide, realized $1,029,392.

A portion of the auction’s proceeds will benefit The Hero Initiative, which provides medical and monetary assistance to veteran comics creators, writers and artists needing a helping hand. Some proceeds will also go to the Authors League Fund, which assists professional authors, journalists, critics, poets and dramatists in financial need because of medical or health-related problems, temporary loss of income or other misfortunes.

Gaiman will also share some of the proceeds with the artists who made his imagination tangible enough to put on Bristol board.

“I love the idea of benefitting charities that look after authors who’ve fallen on hard times, that look after the artists and writers and creators of comics who’ve had hard times,” Gaiman told the packed auction gallery Thursday morning. “And I like the idea of normalizing the idea that we who do have art we bought for $50 a page or $100 a page that now sells for tens of thousands of dollars a page get into the idea of giving something back to the artists who originally drew it. That seems to me an important thing to do.”

This single page of art alone went for $132,000: “Dave Gibbons and John Higgins Watchmen #7 Story Page 16 Original Art”.

… Not far behind was the only piece of Sandman-related artwork Gaiman had ever purchased: Jean Giraud’s 1994 painting of Death of the Endless, sister of the titular Sandman whose epic tale spans the universe’s origin through the present day. This painting by the man called Moebius sparked a bidding war that drove its final price to $96,000. That was also the amount realized for John Totleben’s cover of Miracleman No. 16, the last issue written by Moore before Gaiman took the reins.

One of the auction’s most sought-after, fought-over pieces was among its smallest: an on-screen, camera-used puppet of Coraline in her orange polka-dot pajamas accompanied by her ever-present companion, The Cat — “fully posable actors,” as Gaiman explained. He told the audience that Coraline “has been in my bedroom in a glass case since 2009, and I had more qualms about letting her go than I did anything else in this entire auction. She’s there. She smiles at me. She’s special.”

It was so special that a bidding war broke out over Coraline, who eventually went to a new home for $72,000….

(2) KGB. Ellen Datlow has posted photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading on March 13, 2024 where Moses Ose Utomi and Richard Butner read.

(3) EVIDENCE THAT SCHOOL TOSSED BOOKS WHICH WERE OBJECTED TO BY STAFF OR PARENTS. “Publishers Issue Letter to NYC DOE Over Discarded Books” – Publishers Weekly has details.

Candlewick Press, Charlesbridge Press, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Sourcebooks, and the organization Authors Against Book Bans have issued a letter to the New York City Department of Education over reports that hundreds of books were discarded by a Staten Island elementary school on ideological grounds.

On March 11, Gothamist reported that hundreds of new books featuring characters of color and LGBTQ themes were found near the garbage at PS 55. Some of the books, pictured in the report, were marked by sticky notes that marked certain titles “not approved,” with reasons such as “Boy questions gender,” “teenage girls having a crush on another girl in class,” and “Witchcraft? Human skulls.”

The discarded books included copies of My Two Border Towns by David Bowle, illustrated by Erika Meza; Kenzy Kickstarts a Team (The Derby Daredevils #1) by Kit Rosewater, illustrated by Sophie Escabasse; Black Panther: The Young Prince by Ronald Smith; We Are Still Here: Native American Truths Everyone Should Know by Traci Sorell, illustrated by Frané Lessac; and Nina: A Story of Nina Simone by Traci N. Todd, illustrated by Christian Robinson.

Gothamist reporter Jessica Gold found that no formal challenge to the books had been raised through official channels and that “the removal of the books resulted from an objection raised by staff or parents.” The NYC DOE has reportedly announced it is conducting an investigation into the incident.

In response, a coalition of publishers whose books were discarded teamed with Authors Against Book Bans to pen a letter to New York City’s DOE over the report about the book removal, stating, “If true, such action amounts to unlawful censorship and violates authors’ and students’ First Amendment rights.”…

(4) SENDAK FELLOWS. “2024 Sendak Fellows Announced” – Publishers Weekly has the names.

The Maurice Sendak Foundation has announced this year’s Sendak Fellows: Charlotte Ager, Rocío Araya, and Cozbi A. Cabrera.

The four-week fellowship will take place May 13 through June 9 at Milkwood Farm in South Kortright, N.Y., and comes with a prize of $5,000. During the residency, artists will focus on a project of their choosing, meet with visiting artists and professionals in the field, and explore Sendak’s house and archives in Ridgefield, Conn.

Originally from the Isle of Wight, Ager is a freelance illustrator based in London. Her clients have included the New York Times, Google Design, Penguin Random House, and Flying Eye Books. Araya is an illustrator from Bilbao, Spain, currently living in France. Rocío’s first English-language translation of her book Head in the Clouds will be published by Elsewhere Editions in 2024. And Cabrera is the author-illustrator of Me & Mama, which received a Coretta Scott King Honor and Caldecott Honor, and My Hair Is a Garden.

(5) NOT QUITE INFINITE COMBINATIONS. Den of Geek says “It’s Official: TV Shows Have Run Out of Titles”. (Fanzines have run into the same problem – how else to explain “File 770”?)

Back when it was all fields around here, TV show titles were in abundance. In the days when television used to be hand-stretched and sun-dried and made at a gentlemanly pace by artisanal methods, there were titles galore. Worzel Gummidge. Starsky and Hutch. Last of the Summer Wine. Distinct and descriptive titles milled around drinking holes, and all writers had to do was toss in a lasso and drag out a Sapphire & Steel or a Knight Rider.

But thanks to streaming, nowadays TV is made in windowless factories and injected with antibiotics and e-numbers. There can never be enough. Every streamer requires a chunky flow of television shows they can release all on the same day, not tell anybody about, and quickly delete for tax purposes before anybody watches them. And the first casualty (aside from the livelihoods of the writers, directors, crew, cast and the collective human spirit)? The titles.

The problem is, the glut has dried up the supply. Abstract nouns. Character names. Place names. Common phrases. “Fun” puns. Creepy lines from nursery rhymes for psychological thrillers. Every combination of words in the English language has already been used to name a TV show. ITV got lucky with Mr Bates Vs the Post Office, but it’s hardly a long-term solution.

Neither is it a uniquely new problem, but it is getting worse. Time was that two competing TV shows with the same title would be released a good many years apart, by which point, who could really remember the first one? When HBO brought out android interplanetary sci-fi Raised by Wolves in 2020, it was several years after the Channel 4 comedy Raised by Wolves set on a Wolverhampton council estate, and fairly difficult to confuse the two….

(6) DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME? “George Lucas Backs Bob Iger in Disney Proxy Fight with Nelson Peltz: ‘Creating Magic Is Not for Amateurs’” – a quote in The Hollywood Reporter.

… The Star Wars and Indiana Jones filmmaker is weighing in on The Walt Disney Company’s ongoing proxy fight with activist investors, and he is throwing his support firmly behind CEO Bob Iger and Disney’s board.

“Creating magic is not for amateurs. When I sold Lucasfilm just over a decade ago, I was delighted to become a Disney shareholder because of my long-time admiration for its iconic brand and Bob Iger’s leadership,” Lucas said in a statement Tuesday. “When Bob recently returned to the company during a difficult time, I was relieved. No one knows Disney better. I remain a significant shareholder because I have full faith and confidence in the power of Disney and Bob’s track record of driving long-term value. I have voted all of my shares for Disney’s 12 directors and urge other shareholders to do the same.”…

… Disney is facing a proxy fight against two activists: The corporate raider Nelson Peltz, and Blackwells Capital. Notably, Peltz has billions of dollars in shares pledged by Ike Perlmutter, who, like Lucas, sold his company (Marvel) to Disney and became a major shareholder. Perlmutter remained with Disney until being laid off last year….

(7) ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE YOUR LYIN’ EYES? Meanwhile, Variety reports Disney’s Star Wars cash register has rung up another sale: “’The Acolyte’ Trailer: New Star Wars Show Gets First Look on Disney+”.

…Disney has released the trailer for its newest “Star Wars” series “The Acolyte,” which is set to stream on Disney+ June 4.

The series takes place 100 years before the franchise’s prequel trilogy during the High Republic era of the “Star Wars” universe, which is the furthest back in the timeline “Star Wars” has gone in a live-action production. An official logline for the series reveals, “An investigation into a shocking crime spree pits a respected Jedi Master (Lee Jung-jae) against a dangerous warrior from his past (Amandla Stenberg). As more clues emerge, they travel down a dark path where sinister forces reveal all is not what it seems.”…

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born March 19, 1928 — Patrick McGoohan. (Died 2009.) I don’t how times I’ve seen the opening of The Prisoner series as it’s been separately shown from the episodes online pretty much since The Prisoner series first aired. Not sure in what context I watching it but that it was. It was, without doubt, one of the the best openings I’ve seen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Carpe Diem updates a fairy tale.

(10) JEOPARDY! [Item by David Goldfarb.] On last night’s Jeopardy! episode, the Double Jeopardy round had a category, “Horrors!”

$1200: This horror master turned director to translate his own novella “The Hellhound Heart” to the screen as “Hellraiser”

Yogesh Raut knew this was Clive Barker.

$1600: H.P. Lovecraft wrote that the “U”s in the name of this “hellish entity” should sound “about like that in ‘full’ “

Ben Chan stumbled over the pronunciation a bit but gave “Cthulhu”.

$2000 – Daily Double. Yogesh: “I’ve wanted to say this ever since I was a child. Alex, I’ll make it a true Daily Double.” His bet: $15,200.

The title of this 1962 Ray Bradbury novel is a Shakespeare line that rhymes with “By the pricking of my thumbs”.

Very unsurprisingly, Yogesh got this right, parlaying this into a runaway win for the round.

$800: His Christmas ghost story “The Haunted Man” sold 18,000 copies on its first day of publication in 1848

Yogesh picked it as Dickens.

$400: Catriona Ward’s “The Last House on Needless Street” is partly narrated by Olivia, one of these animals, & that can’t be good luck

Troy Meyer tried, “What is a pig?”

Yogesh said, “What’s a cat?” and on prompting added “black” and was scored right.

Catriona Ward squeed about being a clue.

(11) GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. “Researchers Name Ancient Species of Giant Turtle After a Universe-Vomiting Stephen King Character” – IGN unravels the references.

Researchers have named a newly discovered species of giant prehistoric turtle after a universe-creating character that features in Stephen King’s novel It, alongside the Dark Tower series of books.

The monstrous armoured reptile was thought to have lived between 40,000 to 9,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene period, during which time it may have lived alongside and potentially been hunted as a source of food by early humans in the Amazon….

…The fossil’s gigantic proportions lead the scientists to name the species Peltocephalus Maturin, in reference to the fictional, god-like turtle Maturin, which vomited out the universe that serves as the setting for Stephen King’s novel It. The benevolent turtle also appears as one of the guardians of the beams featured in King’s eight-part Dark Tower book series, which, like It, has been adapted into a live-action movie, though perhaps the less said about that the better.

As noted in the paper published in the scientific journal Biology Letters – and by the author himself on X after reading the news – King’s character was itself named in reference to the fictional doctor Stephen Maturin, who, in the course of Patrick O’Brian’s seagoing novel H.M.S. Surprise, names a giant tortoise….

(12) LIFE IS SHORT, ART IS LONG. ShortCon2024, “the Premiere Conference for Short Crime Fiction Writers”, takes place Saturday, June 22, and Michael Bracken and Brendan DuBois – familiar around here – are among the presenters.

In June, I will join NYT bestseller Brendan DuBois, AHMM & EQMM Senior Managing Editor Jackie Sherbow, and Stacy Woodson as a presenter at ShortCon, the Premier Conference for Short Crime Fiction Writers. Learn more and register at https://t.co/OZ8BgEueno pic.twitter.com/KsDhwNBuUH
— Michael Bracken (@CrimeFicWriter) March 18, 2024

Join acclaimed crime fiction professionals for an immersive, one-day event and learn how to write short crime fiction, get your stories published, and develop and sustain a long-term career writing short.

(13) THUMBS UP. Camestros Felapton gives us his eyewitness account in “Review: Zombie the Musical”.

… The show starts off with the hapless cast rehearsing their production of “It’s a Musical! (The Musical!)” with requisite sailors singing about the wonders of New York. In reality, the cast is a mix of a not-so-bright leading man whose acting career is magically failing upwards, a leading woman sick of playing two-dimensional characters, an ageing actress whose career is effectively over and a perpetual understudy with genuine talent but no chance of ever becoming a professional. Outside it is Sydney 1999 and people are worried about Y2K and excited about the Olympics coming in 2000. The tone is set with broad parodies about musicals and the sexism of the theatre industry (especially circa the 1990s).

The world of musicals begins breaking down when the leading man quits and the news on the radio warns of a rapidly spreading infection. Will there even be an audience for their opening night?…

Here’s a “sneak preview” from last fall.

[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Kathy Sullivan, David Goldfarb, 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.]

File 770

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Tag Archives: zombies

Pixel Scroll 6/14/26 Voyage To The Pixel Of The Scroll

Pixel Scroll 9/19/25 So We Can Both Laugh And Cry, Like Demented Harlequins

Pixel Scroll 5/10/25 All Around The Scrollberry Bush, The Monkey Chased The Pixel

Pixel Scroll 1/28/25 One Moon Was A Ghostly Galleon, The Other A Spirited Schooner

Pixel Scroll 12/11/24 If You Stare At A Scroll Too Long, It Dissolves Into Pixels

Pixel Scroll 12/10/24 We Are The Telepath Guild, The Telepath Guild, The Telepath Guild

Pixel Scroll 8/25/24 Pixel ScrollRight Of The Mounties

Pixel Scroll 4/2/24 Knitting the Fannish News: Scroll One, Pixel Two

Pixel Scroll 3/19/24 Ocean’s Elevenses