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Tag Archives: Ada Palmer
Pixel Scroll 2/11/22 They're Creepy And They're Scrolly, The Pixel Family
(1) EMPOWERING LIBRARIES. "Texas Book Ban Prompts School Librarians to Launch #FReadom Fighters" reports Publishers Weekly. (The #FReadom website is here.)
In response to Texas Rep. Matt Krause's published list of 850 books on race and sexuality that he targeted for their subject matter —many of which were pulled from school library shelves—a group of Texas school librarians has decided to push back. Last November, they orchestrated #FReadom Fighters, a social media campaign with the goal of supporting authors, teachers, librarians, and students in their pursuit of intellectual freedom. In a matter of months, the organization's work has amassed thousands of supporters, both at the state level and across the country, and incited other likeminded groups to take action.
… On launch day, November 4, 2021, #FReadom Fighters garnered 13,000 tweets, much to the organizers' surprise. "We had planned all this in secret, so we were amazed that this was happening even before starting a Twitter account," Foote said. "We saw ourselves as a guerilla effort, serving as a rapid response team." The @FReadomFighters Twitter account and website soon followed, updated with weekly and monthly action plans to support fellow librarians in their day-to-day operations. Ideas for #FReadom Fridays varied, from inviting authors to show letters they had received from readers about why their books were so powerful, to asking people to share books that had had an impact on them. A more recent prompt focuses on celebrating wins: sharing success stories of books that have been put back on shelves….
(2) THE BUZZ. Lightyear opens June 17.
"Lightyear" is the definitive origin story of Buzz Lightyear—the hero who inspired the toy—follows the legendary Space Ranger on an intergalactic adventure. "Buzz's world was always something I was excited about," said director Angus MacLane. "In 'Toy Story,' there seemed to be this incredible backstory to him being a Space Ranger that's only touched upon, and I always wanted to explore that world further. So my 'Lighytear' pitch was, 'What was the movie that Andy saw that made him want a Buzz Lightyear toy?' I wanted to see that movie. And now I'm lucky enough to get to make it."
(3) BRADBURY'S SUPER BOWL CONNECTION. A newspaper pitched Ray to contribute to its Super Bowl XXXV (2001) special section. Did he do it?
A post shared by The Ray Bradbury Center (@bradburycenter)
(4) HORROR THEATER 3000. Ursula Vernon livetweeted her experience watching the horror movie Midsommar. Thread starts here.
I hate all the dudes in this movie immediately. Also, this has big "I brought the human sacrifice!" vibes, which is at odds with my actual experience in Nordic countries, where everyone was lovely and kind and wanted to make sure I had time in the sauna.
— Kingfisher & Wombat (@UrsulaV) February 11, 2022
Nobody is coming out of this alive, are they?
(5) THE OFFICE. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, Adela Suliman says Britain's Science Museum has opened an exhibit called "Stephen Hawking At Work," which features a preserved doodle-covered blackboard and the case that held his voice synthesizer. "'Stephen Hawking at Work' exhibition in London displays his blackboard, glasses and other belongings".
Hawking's daughter, Lucy, said it was "wonderful to see my father's working environment recreated."
"It was such a unique and fascinating environment, and I am delighted his office has been recreated in order to inspire scientists of the future," she said in a statement.
The blackboard in the exhibit illustrates Hawking's playful sense of humor and was used during a "Superspace and Supergravity" conference in 1980. Delegates covered it in equations, cartoons and jokes about one another. Hawking had the souvenir framed and hung in his office.
Because even small vibrations could cause the blackboard to lose chalk, Juan-Andres Leon, curator of Stephen Hawking's Office, said in an email, "the museum applied a starch-based material to stabilise the chalk dust and enclosed it in a frame."
(6) RIGHTS AND WRONGS. Want to own the rights to The Lord of the Rings? Can you outspend Jeff Bezos? Meanwhile, other legal shenanigans are in progress reports Yahoo! — "Lord Of The Rings Mod Hit With Takedown Just As Series' Rights Are Up For Sale".
The bigger news first: the Saul Zantz company has owned most of the rights to Tolkien's works since the 1970s. Almost everything that has been made based on the books in the fields of "film, video games, merchandising, live events and theme parks" has had to be negotiated and paid for accordingly. Variety reported this week though that the company is moving to sell those rights, for a sum that's expected to be around the $2 billion mark, with Amazon expected to be front of the line to make the purchase, which seems like an absolute worst-case scenario.
So it's weird, then, that given the timing of that sale, Warner Bros.—who currently licenses the rights to Lord of the Rings video games—have chosen February 2022 to go after a prominent and highly-anticipated mod for the Total War series called Rise of Mordor.
This mod has been around for years—we wrote about it in 2018!—and has quietly gone about its business with the assumption that, like its popular predecessor Third Age, nobody really cared. Only now somebody clearly does, because Rise of Mordor's Mod DB page has been hit with a takedown notice (Third Age's, however, remains)….
(7) MAIL FROM HELL. Yesterday, Brenton Dickieson celebrated "The 80th Anniversary of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters" at A Pilgrim in Narnia.
… As I discuss it in detail here, it is a shocking beginning for the unprepared. Who is Screwtape? Who is Wormwood? Why is Wormwood being commended for encouraging connections with materialists (atheists? naturalist? worldly people?)? Why is he rebuked for using argument as a foundation for action?
The original Screwtape Letters were an extreme use of in medias res with the potential to leave the reader completely befuddled. We all "get" Screwtape now because the genre of demonic epistolary fiction is something we might expect. It is part of pop culture. Back then, though, it was entirely new. While the editor's little note may prepare regular readers to expect a Christian academic, readers not expecting a new, satirical genre may well be surprised….
… I don't know anyone who has catalogued the breadth of influence that Screwtape has had within popular culture as a whole. That Monty Python's John Cleese narrated a Grammy-nominated audiobook of The Screwtape Letters is some indication of its impact….
(8) TWO DOZEN STORIES. [Item by Daniel Dern.] A free download of 24 stories is available: "Some of the Best From Tor.com 2021 Is Out Now!" Yes, you could find these one-by-one at Tor.com. This is easier.
This anthology features twenty-four of our favorite original stories published on the site in the past year.
Of course, you can always read these—and all other—Tor.com stories for free whenever you'd like, but starting today they will be available world-wide as a single, easy-to-read, FREE ebook, available from all your favorite vendors.
1970 — [Item by Cat Eldridge] Fifty-two years ago, Hammer Films' Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed premiered. It was the fifth Hammer film that featured Baron Frankenstein. It was directed by Terrence Fisher from the screenplay by Bert Batt as taken from the story written by Anthony Nelson and Batt. It starred Peter Cushing, Freddie Jones, Veronica Carlson and Simon Ward.
Critics say that it is one of the better Hammer films in quite some time with Variety saying that it had "a minimum of artless dialogue, good lensing by Arthur Grant and a solid all round cast", and Slant Magazine holding it to be "One of the finest of the seven entries in Hammer's Frankenstein cycle."
It holds a sixty-eight percent rating among the nearly three thousand who rated it over at Rotten Tomatoes. You can watch it here.
Born February 11, 1908 — Tevis Clyde Smith, Jr. He did several short stories with Robert E. Howard — "Diogenes of today", " Eighttoes makes a play" and "Red Blades of Black Cathay". Donald M. Grant would publish them together in the Red Blades of Black Cathay collection. The title story originally appeared in Oriental Stories, an offshoot of Weird Tales. (Died 1984.)
Born February 11, 1910 — L. T. C. Rolt. English writer whose enthusiasm for heritage railways is writ large in his 1948 Sleep No More collection of supernatural horror stories which tend to be set in rural railways. (Simon R. Green may be influenced by him in his Ghost Finders series which often uses these railways as a setting.) Some of these stories were adapted as radio dramas. Sleep No More is available from the usual digital suspects. (Died 1974.)
Born February 11, 1926 — Leslie Nielsen. I know, the comic, bumbling fool who delighted generations of film goers. But his first starring role was as Commander John J. Adams in one of the finest SF films of all time Forbidden Planet. I am most decidedly not a fan of his later films, but I think he's brilliant here. (Died 2010.)
Born February 11, 1939 — Jane Yolen, 83. Jane Yolen loves not-so-dark chocolate, so I send her some from time to time. She wrote me into a novel as a character, an ethnomusicologist in One-Armed Queen to be precise, in exchange for finding her a fairytale collection she wanted. Don't remember now what it was other than it was very old and very rare. My favorite book by her is The Wild Hunt which she's signed a copy for me, and I love that she financed the production of Boiled of Lead's Antler Dance which Adam Stemple was lead vocalist on.
Born February 11, 1948 — Robert Reginald. He's here because of two Phantom Detective novels he wrote late in his career which are mostly popcorn literature. (The Phantom Detective series started in 1936 so he used the Robert Wallace house name.) He has two series of some length, the Nova Europa Fantasy Saga and War of Two Worlds. Much of what he wrote is available from the usual digital sources. (Died 2013.)
Born February 11, 1950 — Alain Bergeron, 70. He received an Aurora Award for Best Short Story for "Les Crabes de Vénus regardent le ciel" published In Solaris number 73, and a Sideways Award for Alternate History for "Le huitième registre" (translated in English as "The Eighth Register" by Howard Scott).
Born February 11, 1953 — Wayne Hammond, 69. He's married to fellow Tolkien scholar Christina Scull. Together they've done some of the finest work on Tolkien that's been done, including J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book and The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide.
Born February 11, 1982 — Natalie Dormer, 40. Best known as being in Game of Thrones as Margaery Tyrell, though I'm more interested in the fact that she was in Elementary over three seasons as both Jamie Moriarty and Irene Adler. Anyone here watch this series? I've not but this sounds fascinating!
(11) TRIVIAL TRIVIA. Thomas Edison was born this day in 1847. Edison's film company produced the very first known feature adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
(12) A WEBB FIRST. "James Webb Space Telescope captures its first images of a star" and Yahoo! has a copy — see the image at the link.
The James Webb Space Telescope has finally captured its first image of a star — or rather, images. NASA has shared a mosaic of pictures (shown above) of a star taken using the primary mirror's 18 segments. It looks like a seemingly random collection of blurry dots, but that's precisely what the mission team was expecting. The imagery will help scientists finish the lengthy mirror alignment process using the telescope's Near Infrared Camera, or NIRCam. The first phase is nearly complete as of this writing.
(13) HEVELIN FANZINES. A couple of years ago, Atlas Obscura signal-boosted a call for help with a fanzine transcription project: "Even More Ways to Help Librarians and Archivists From Home". What's their status today? They say they are 100% done!
First the 2020 excerpt:
What better time to zip into a happily unfamiliar realm? The DIY History project at the University of Iowa Library, which invites people to help transcribe digitized objects from the library's special collections and other holdings, could use your help with its massive trove of science-fiction zines. Some date back to the 1930s; all were collected by the late James L. "Rusty" Hevelin. More than 10,780 pages of the Hevelin Fanzines collection have been transcribed so far, but there are still around 500 left to go. If you need a mental break from this planet and its familiar troubles, pop into this project and spend a little time somewhere else.
David Doering was one of the volunteers, so I checked with him and this is what I learned:
We completed the transcription of Rusty's collection about two years ago. I don't see any new additions to that collection. (And the numbers match what this article says: There's 11285 pages transcribed. Which is 500 more than the articles 10,780.)
Now there are other (non-SF) works to possibly transcribe. You can find the landing page here: https://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/
To be fair, there were pages that were not transcribed because the pages were (almost) unreadable due to mimeo ink fading. I tried to noodle out the contents and made some progress, but some I just couldn't get enough of an image to read the text. So if there's someone out there who has great image restoration skills, there are probably a couple of hundred pages that were skipped due to readability.
Unfortunately, the software the U of Iowa used for this project would count a page as transcribed even if you wrote the obligatory note "Not transcribed due to legibility issues." So all the zines show 100% transcribed when some were not.
(14) FYI. Behind a paywall, WIRED presents "Ada Palmer and the Weird Hand of Progress": "The sci-fi author writes about the 25th century and teaches college students about the 15th. The past we think we know is wrong, she says—and so is the future."
(15) ATTENTION SJW CREDENTAL OWNERS. Andrew Porter witnessed Jeopardy! contestants stumped by a science fictional item on tonight's episode.
Category: I'm too sexy: a lyrical potpourri
Answer: …for this animal "who walks through walls" in a Robert A. Heinlein title.
No one could answer: What is a cat?
(16) FOURWARD MARCH. DC tells us about the four movies they're bringing out this coming year: "DC – The World Needs Heroes".
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In "Honest Game Trallers: Tom Clancy's Ranbow Six Extraction," Fandom Games notes that this series is sf, because special forces are blasting "alien goo-boys." And if the going gets tough, the narrator reminds us that "There may be no 'I' in 'team', but there is an i in 'I'm departing from this field immediately.'"
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cliff, Hampus Eckerman, David Doering,Bonnie Warford, Daniel Dern, Michael J. Walsh, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll | Tagged Ada Palmer, Brenton Dickieson, C.S. Lewis, censorship, David Doering, Fanzines, Frankenstein, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeopardy!, Lord of the Rings, Pixar, Ray Bradbury, Rusty Hevelin, Stephen Hawking, The Screwtape Letters, Tor.com, Ursula Vernon | 38 Replies
Pixel Scroll 11/4/21 Last Scroll Of The Planet Fileton, Pix-El (The Cousin Clark Doesn't Talk About)
Posted on November 4, 2021 by Mike Glyer
(1) DOCTOR WHO SEASON BEGINS. Plenty of Radio Timesy-Wimey stuff to start today's Scroll. First — "Doctor Who series 13 episode 1 review 'The Halloween Apocalypse'" – Radio Times does an episode recap, and beyond this excerpt it's rather spoilery:
…Flux – Chapter One: The Halloween Apocalypse gets off to a rollicking start. Mid escapade. High peril. No hanging about. Well, unless you're Yaz and the Doctor, who, as we join them, are dangling from a "gravity bar" over an ocean of roiling acid. The pace is set for a fast, fun-packed opener, impressively achieved by Chibnall and his team in the face of COVID.
Shorn of former sidekicks Ryan and Graham, the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and Yaz (Mandip Gill) make good sparring partners, fielding a balance of amity and antagonism, and falling into the trad pattern in which the Time Lord withholds vital information, imperilling the companion's life, who in turn proves to be plucky and resourceful….
(2) BOX SCORE. And how many watched the kickoff of Season 13? Let Radio Times tell you: "Doctor Who overnight ratings revealed for The Halloween Apocalypse".
The overnight viewing figures for yesterday's episode of Doctor Who are in, with the series 13 premiere drawing in almost 4.5 million viewers.
BBC News entertainment correspondent Lizo Mzimba shared the audience statistics on Twitter, writing that an audience of 4.43 million watched series 13's first episode – Chapter One: The Halloween Apocalypse.
While the figures are higher than most of series 12's overnight statistics, they are lower than those for last season's premiere, which was watched by 4.88 million.
(3) RAMPANT SPECULATION. Don't read this if you're avoiding spoilers: Radio Times returns with the gossip being shared around the TARDIS' water-cooler: "Swarm Doctor Who regeneration theories – is Swarm a Time Lord?"
… Obviously, there's a lot to dissect from the episode – but one of the most striking moments had to be the introduction of new (or possibly old) baddie Swarm, who claims to be an ancient foe of the Doctor now wiped from her memory (thanks to events glimpsed in series 12 finale The Timeless Children)….
(4) WORK OF A LIFETIME. Artist James A. Owen has launched a Kickstarter appeal to fund an art book retrospective/meditation/collection of illustration, comics, pop culture, and stories celebrating his career: "Illustrations & Illuminations by James A. Owen". As of this writing, it's raised $13,421 of the $30,000 goal.
…I envisioned this book as the place where I could collect and display the very best of that work: the color covers and best pages from STARCHILD; the line art, color covers, and process drawings for illustrations from the IMAGINARIUM GEOGRAPHICA books; the drawings I made of J.R.R. TOLKIEN, C.S. LEWIS, and the other Inklings of Oxford from Diana Glyer's book BANDERSNATCH; the lost graphic novel proposal for Peter Beagle's THE LAST UNICORN; covers for books by Jeff VanderMeer & Cat Rambo, and Alma Alexander, and Catherynne Valente; illustrations and covers for the emagazine THE INTERGALACTIC MEDICINE SHOW; comics adaptations of a song by TORI AMOS and a story by F. PAUL WILSON; unseen art for LOST TREASURES OF THE PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN; the covers from my periodical WORDS & PICTURES; designs for the magazines ARGOSY and INTERNATIONAL STUDIO; spot illustrations and pinups from every era of my career; and much, much more….
(5) A FINE ROMANCE, WITH NO KISSES. Deadline reports "'Eternals' Banned In Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain & Oman".
… Eternals was originally scheduled to open in the region on Nov. 11.
While official reasons weren't provided by either the studio or the local territories, here's our understanding of what went down:
In Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman, the censors were seeking further cuts beyond any scenes of intimacy and that Disney opted not to make the edits, hence distribution certificates weren't issued.
Meanwhile in Kuwait and Qatar, the Chloe Zhao-directed super-gods movie was blocked. The issue, we hear, may not solely be the same-sex kiss, but rather that overall these markets have historically had a problem with the depiction of gods and prophets, something they consider blasphemous.
In the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt we understand that a version of the film will be released that removes all scenes of intimacy — be they heterosexual or homosexual. This is generally normal practice for these markets…
(6) ALL THE ANGLES. At A Pilgrim in Narnia, Brenton Dickieson provides a fascinating in-depth review of a recent book about Tolkien's Chaucer scholarship: "The Doom and Destiny of Tolkien's Chaucer Research: A Note on John M. Bowers, Tolkien's Lost Chaucer (2019)".
Tolkien's Lost Chaucer is a book about a book that was doomed from the start….
… However, the entire book is really about how the fertile imagination and poetry of Chaucer provides an unceasingly rich bed for Tolkien's scholarship and mythopoeic work. Tolkien's Lost Chaucer really does reveal Tolkien's thinking about words, accents, language development, regional dialects, poetic beauty, storytelling, character development, and moral and creative rooting. It is also an excellent book for showing Tolkien's process as a thinker and editor. Readers of the Middle-earth histories and other Tolkien archival collections (like Christopher Tolkien's publication of Beowulf) will recognize the patterns of intensive work, attention to detail, harried productivity, and chronic procrastination endemic to Tolkien's lifetime at the desk.
When I mention "parallels" between Chaucer and Tolkien, I really mean that this is what the book is about. These parallels are often striking, sometimes surprising, and almost always thoughtful (even when they are peculiar). I wish, as I always do of writers about intertextual influence, that Bowers would have better distinguished the different kinds of probability of influence on a case-by-case basis. Usually, though, the reader can make that decision, deciding if this is a Chaucerian moment in Tolkien or merely a striking coincidence….
(7) MODEL LYRICS. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Financial Times behind a paywall, Helen Brown says that Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Major General's Song" from The Pirates of Penzance (you know, "I am the very model of a modern major general") has surprising sf resonances because of Tom Lehrer.
The smart-alecky language and precision-engineered rhyme scheme of (W.S.) Gilbert's original lyrics made their way, via (Tom) Lehrer, into 20th-century science-fiction nerd culture, which made the song a perfect fit for tv shows. On a 1978 episode of the BBC's Dr. Who written by Douglas Adams (The Pirate Planet) Tom Baker's incarnation of the Time Lord sang, 'I am the very model of a Gallifreyan Buccaneer.' The song was also sung in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1992), Babylon 5 (1997), and Star Trek: Discovery (2019)… In 2017, the adorably chaotic minions from Universal's animated film Despicable Me 3 turned the song into giddy gibberish as "Papa Mamma Loca Pipa." As their helium-high voices tear into lines like 'toka bocca pissa lalasagnaa,' you can imagine Gilbert laughing from beyond the grave.
(8) KRUGMAN, PALMER, WALTON & MORE. City University of New York will present "Imagining the Future: Science Fiction and Social Science", a free virtual event, on November 10 at 7:30 p.m. Eastern. Reservations required — register on Zoom. (The event will be available a few days later on their YouTube channel.)
What do science fiction and social science have in common? Much in the way economists and political scientists forecast the results of social and economic structures, science-fiction writers envision future civilizations, both utopian and dystopian, through systematic world-building. Paul Krugman, distinguished professor of economics at the CUNY Graduate Center, joins in a conversation about the connection between the social sciences and fantasy fiction, and how they often inspire each other. The panel, including sci-fi novelists and social scientists who often refer to fiction in their writing and interviews, includes: Henry Farrell, a professor working on democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins University and editor-in-chief of the Monkey Cage blog at The Washington Post; Ada Palmer, author of the Terra Ignota series and associate professor of history at the University of Chicago; Noah Smith, who writes about economics at Noahpinion and is a former Bloomberg columnist and assistant professor at Stony Brook University; and Jo Walton, whose many books include Tooth and Claw, Ha'Penney, and the recent Or What You Will.
(9) SLIME TIME. "Ghostbusters Confidential: Inside The Original Ghost Shop" is an in-person Artist Talk being presented at the Museum of Neon Art in Glendale, CA on Saturday, November 20 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific. If you're going to be in the neighborhood, tickets are available for $10 at the link.
To celebrate the release of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, neon and kinetic sculptor Stuart Ziff returns to MONA to share an entertaining, behind-the-scenes glimpse of the creatures in the original 1984 Ghostbusters movie. As "Head of Ghost Shop," Stuart managed over 50 artists and technicians to create the film's iconic monsters and creatures. Stuart will explain the creature-creation process–from concept drawings to filming on set– for fan-favorite creatures including "Slimer", "Terror Dogs", and The "Stay Puft Marshmallow Man."
(10) ONCE A FANNISH MECCA. Daytonian in Manhattan profiles "The Doomed 1919 Hotel Pennsylvania", a famous NYC hotel remembered by fans like Andrew Porter under its operating name the Statler-Hilton as the site of the 1967 Worldcon, NyCon 3, and other sff events. Porter commented there:
In 1966, a bunch of science fiction fans, myself included, checked out holding our annual World Science Ficrtion Convention at the then-Statler-Hilton. I remember being shown around. Sights included the enormous drained swimming pools, over which were built office space, as well as all the function rooms, some of which no longer exist. We did indeed hold the convention there, with numerous problems, including that the elevator operators were on strike because they were being automated out of existence. I remember the hotel rooms had window air conditioners, but also had hot, cold, and ice water faucets in the bathrooms, from the days before air conditioning was installed. Over the 1960s to 1990s, numerous science fiction, comics and Star Trek conventions were held in the hotel, and I have numerous photos with those facilities behind the people. Or just Google "1967 World Science Fiction Convention" to see reports, photos, etc.
All the hotel fittings were auctioned in September, and the building is expected to be demolished .
(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
1996 – Twenty-five years ago, DS9's "Trials and Tribble-ations" first aired in syndication. A most delightful episode, it blended footage from the original "The Trouble with Tribbles" into the new episode in a manner that allowed the characters from DS9 to appear to interact with the original Trek crew. The story was by Ira Steven Behr, Hans Beimler and Robert Hewitt Wolfe with Ronald D. Moore and René Echevarria writing the actual script.
Paramount promoted the episode by arranging the placement of around a quarter million tribbles in subways and buses across the United States. Huh. Critics loved it. Really. Truly. They all turned into fanboys. And everyone loved that they brought Charlie Brill back to film new scenes. It was nominated for a Hugo at LoneStarCon 2 but lost out to Babylon 5's "Severed Dreams". I personally think it should've won.
Born November 4, 1912 — Wendayne Ackerman. Was the translator-in-chief of 137 novels of the German space opera series Perry Rhodan, the majority published by Ace Books. She left Germany before WWII to escape anti-Semitism, working as a nurse in France and London. After the war she emigrated to Israel where she married her first husband and had a son. Following their divorce she moved to LA in 1948, and soon met and married Forrest J Ackerman. (Died 1990.)
Born November 4, 1917 — Babette Rosmond. She worked at magazine publisher Street & Smith, editing Doc Savage and The Shadow in the late Forties. Rosmond's first story, co-written by Leonard M. Lake, "Are You Run-Down, Tired-" was published in the October 1942 issue of Unknown Worlds. Error Hurled was her only genre novel and she only wrote three short genre pieces. She's not available at the usual suspects. (Died 1997.)
Born November 4, 1920 — Sydney Bounds. Writer, Editor, and Fan from Britain who was a prolific author of short fiction, and novels — not just science fiction, but also horror, Westerns, mysteries, and juvenile fiction — from 1946 until his death in 2006. He was an early fan who joined Britain's Science Fiction Association in 1937. He worked as an electrician on the Enigma machine during World War II, and while in the service, he started publishing the fanzine Cosmic Cuts. The film The Last Days on Mars (an adaptation of "The Animators") and the Tales of the Darkside episode "The Circus" are based on stories by him. In 2005, two collections of his fiction were released under the title The Best of Sydney J. Bounds: Strange Portrait and Other Stories, and The Wayward Ship and other Stories. In 2007, the British Fantasy Society honored him by renaming their award for best new writer after him. (Died 2006.)
Born November 4, 1934 — Gregg Calkins. Gregg Calkins, Writer, Editor, and Fan. Mike Glyer's tribute to him reads: "Longtime fan Gregg Calkins died July 31, 2017 after suffering a fall. He was 82. Gregg got active in fandom in the Fifties and his fanzine Oopsla (1952-1961) is fondly remembered. He was living in the Bay Area and serving as the Official Editor of FAPA when I applied to join its waitlist in the Seventies. He was Fan GoH at the 1976 Westercon. Calkins later moved to Costa Rica. In contrast to most of his generation, he was highly active in social media, frequently posting on Facebook where it was his pleasure to carry the conservative side of debates. He is survived by his wife, Carol."
Born November 4, 1953 — Kara Dalkey, 68. Writer of YA fiction and historical fantasy. She is a member of the Pre-Joycean Fellowship (which if memory serves me right includes both Emma Bull and Stephen Brust) and the Scribblies. Her works include The Sword of Sagamore, Steel Rose, Little Sister and The Nightingale. And her Water trilogy blends together Atlantean and Arthurian mythologies. She's been nominated for the Mythopoeic and Otherwise Awards.
Born November 4, 1953 — Stephen Jones, 68. Editor, and that is putting quite mildly, as he went well over the century mark in edited anthologies edited quite some time ago. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror accounts for eighteen volumes by itself and The Mammoth Book of (Pick A Title) runs for at least another for another dozen. He also, no surprise, to me, has authored a number of horror reference works such as The Art of Horror Movies: An Illustrated History, Basil Copper: A Life in Books and H. P. Lovecraft in Britain. He's also done hundreds of essays, con reports, obituaries and such showing up, well, just about everywhere. He's won a number of World Fantasy Awards and far too many BFAs to count.
Born November 4, 1955 — Lani Tupu, 66. He'd be here just for being Crais and the voice of the Pilot on the Farscape series but he's actually been in several other genre undertakings including the 1989 Punisher as Laccone, and Gordon Standish in Robotropolis. He also had roles in Tales of the South Seas, Time Trax and The Lost World. All of which we can guess were filmed in Australia. Lastly he appears in the Australian remake of the Mission: Impossible series which if you haven't seen it is quite excellent. I just found it in DVD format several years back.
Born November 4, 1960 — James Vickery, 61. In Babylon 5, he played Neroon which is where I remember him from as he was a Right Bastard there. His major Trek universe role was as Rusot, a member of Damar's Cardassian resistance group, appearing in the DS9 episodes "The Changing Face of Evil", "When It Rains…" and "Tacking Into the Wind". He also played a Betazoid in Next Gen's "Night Terrors" and a Klingon in Enterprise's "Judgment" episode. And he voiced the character Legolas in a radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.
The Far Side confirms a UFO sighting.
(14) REUBEN AWARD. Ray Billingsley, creator of the comic strip Curtis, won the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist from the National Cartoonists Society on October 17. Billingsley is the first Black person to win in the 75-year history of the award. A video of his acceptance speech is here. SVA profiled him in February: "'Curtis' Creator and SVA Alumnus Ray Billingsley on His Career, His Influences and Representation in Comics".
(15) STUFFING YOUR CHRISTMAS SCOFFING. The Guardian's Stuart Heritage enjoys a snarkfest at the expense of an annual UK TV tradition: "John Lewis Christmas advert 2021: this alien girl is here to ravage our planet".
There are plenty of theories why the John Lewis Christmas ad no longer hits as hard as it once did. You could look at the fortunes of John Lewis itself, which has spent the last couple of years locked in a nightmare of plunging revenues and store closures. You could look at how aggressively every other retailer has attempted to rip off the tear-jerky John Lewis Christmas ad formula, to the extent that sitting through an ITV commercial break in November or December is now exactly the same as suffering through the first 10 minutes of Up on a neverending loop in an abandoned corn silo full of crying children.
But judging by this year's offering, you might also suggest that John Lewis has run out of ideas. Because this year's ad is such a straight-down-the-line John Lewis Christmas advert that you can only imagine it was assembled by tombola.
Sweet children? Check. Bittersweet ending? Check. Maudlin cover version of a song you once liked? Check, in this case a version of Together in Electric Dreams that sounds like it was performed by someone who has tumbled down a well and just realised nobody is coming to rescue her….
(16) REN FAIRES. Maryland's NPR outlet produced a segment about "The Timeless Endurance Of Renaissance Faires". Listen to it at the link. The guests are Eleanor Janega, a guest teacher in women's history at the London School of Economics and Political Science; host, "Going Medieval;" author, "The Middle Ages: A Graphic History"; Kevin Patterson, executive director, Red Barn Productions; son of the founders of the original Renaissance Faire; and Rachel Lee Rubin, professor and chair of American Studies, University of Massachusetts-Boston; author, "Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture." There's also a sizable photo gallery.
The modern Renaissance Faire blossomed from a children's arts education program in Agoura, California, in 1963.
Now, almost 60 years later, it's a nationwide industry.
More than 200 festivals operate around the country — complete with jousters, performers, carnival games, vendors selling bespoke costume pieces, and various meats on a stick.
So why has the Renaissance Faire endured, nay, proliferated, all these years later?
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. An Audi is such a powerful car that it lets customers buy scary houses!
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, John A Arkansawyer, Bill, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna) riffing off an idea by Jon Meltzer.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll | Tagged Ada Palmer, Brenton Dickieson, Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Gilbert & Sullivan, J.R.R. Tolkien, James A. Owen, Jo Walton, Kickstarter, Paul Krugman, Renaissance Faires, Reuben Award
Pixel Scroll 9/11/21 TribblePlusUnGood
(1) THE BRONZE TROUSERS. "'Cheese!': Bronze statue of iconic duo Wallace and Gromit unveiled in Preston by creator Nick Park" reports ITV News Granada.
Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park unveils the new statue in Preston. Photo credit: PA
A large bronze statue of the iconic, cheese-loving duo Wallace and Gromit has been unveiled in Lancashire.
The bench sculpture is based on the inventor and his loyal pooch as they appeared in short-film 'The Wrong Trousers', and now sits pride of place outside Preston Markets.
(2) WORDSMITH. John Scalzi celebrates "30 Years of Being a Professional Writer" with a not-very- shocking admission:
…Thirty years on I do not have the writing career I thought I would have when I started out. I've said this before and I think people disbelieve me, but: I had no intention of being a novelist, or, at the very least, I assumed that if I were to write novels, that they would be a nice occasional side hustle. What I hoped for at the time — and what I assumed would be the case — is that I would write for newspapers all my life. The gig at the Fresno Bee would lead to gigs at other newspapers, and eventually I would land up at the New York Times/Washington Post/Los Angeles Times/Chicago Tribune as a daily columnist, riffing off local and world events like idols such as Mike Royko or Molly Ivins. Twenty-two-year-old me fully expected an entire career of daily deadlines and 800-word bursts of opinion.
And, I'm not going to lie, part of me is sad I didn't get that life. Not too sad, because, well. Hello, welcome to Whatever, which I have been writing at for twenty-three years come Monday….
(3) NOUGHTS & CROSSES AUTHOR. Guardian reporter Sian Cain interviews YA SFF writer Malorie Blackman: "'Hope is the spark'".
…The last 18 months, however, have been a significant challenge. Having been classed as extremely vulnerable due to a health condition, Blackman has been isolating for most of the pandemic – and it is clear that, as she puts it, she "loves a chat". "It has been a very strange time," she says. "I was getting government letters saying: 'Don't go out.' I was trying to live as normal a life as possible, knowing full well it was extraordinary circumstances. But you do what you can, so I focused on my writing. Endgame was a good thing because it felt like I was doing something. I wasn't saving lives, but I was doing something."
What she was doing is probably the hardest thing an author can do: writing the ending. After 20 years, six books and three novellas, Noughts & Crosses, Blackman's most famous series, is finished. It is set in Albion, an alternative Britain that was colonised by Africa, where the black population call themselves Crosses (as they are closer to God), while the white are Noughts (poorer, institutionally discriminated against)….
(4) IT'S TIME TO BE SIMULTANEOUS. The good folks at Space Cowboy Books have released Simultaneous Times, Vol. 2.5, a free ebook anthology of stories featured at the Simultaneous Times podcast. One of them is by Cora Buhlert. Here is a book trailer for the anthology:
(5) KRUGMAN, PALMER & WALTON. CUNY will host "Imagining the Future: Economics and Science Fiction" on November 10 at 7:30 p.m. Eastern. Register for Zoom webinar access at the link.
What do economics and science fiction have in common? Much in the way economists forecast the results of social and economic structures, science-fiction writers envision future civilizations, both utopian and dystopian, through systematic world-building. Paul Krugman, distinguished professor of economics at the CUNY Graduate Center, joins in a conversation about the connection between the social sciences and fantasy fiction, and how they often inspire each other. Featuring: Ada Palmer, author of the Terra Ignota series and associate professor of history at the University of Chicago; Jo Walton, whose many books include Tooth and Claw, Ha'Penney, and the recent Or What You Will; and others.
(6) FRAMING TOOL. Maybe an algorithm will help make that blank screen less empty: "New tool could help authors bust writer's block in novel-length works" reports Penn State News.
… Researchers at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology recently introduced a new technology that forecasts the future development of an ongoing written story. In their approach, researchers first characterize the narrative world using over 1,000 different "semantic frames," where each frame represents a cluster of concepts and related knowledge. A predictive algorithm then looks at the preceding story and predicts the semantic frames that might occur in the next 10, 100, or even 1,000 sentences in an ongoing story….
The researchers' framework, called semantic frame forecast, breaks a long narrative down into a sequence of text blocks with each containing a fixed number of sentences. The frequency of the occurrence of each semantic frame is then calculated. Then, the text is converted to a vector — numerical data understood by a machine — where each dimension denotes the frequency of one frame. It is then computed to quantify the number of times a semantic frame appears and signifies its importance. Finally, the model inputs a fixed number of text blocks and predicts the semantic frame for the forthcoming block.
…Authors could use the tool by feeding a part of their already-written text into the system to generate a set of word clouds with suggested nouns, verbs and adjectives to inspire them when crafting the next part of their story.
1979 – Forty-two years ago on this date, Wonder Woman put away her lasso for the last time as her series came to end after three seasons. The show's first season aired under the name of Wonder Woman on ABC and is set in the 1940s, during World War II. The last two seasons aired on CBS and was set in the then-current day late Seventies, with the title changed to The New Adventures of Wonder Woman. It starred Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman / Diana Prince and Lyle Waggoner as Steve Trevor Sr. There would be fifty-nine episodes and a movie before it ended. Currently you can find it on HBO Max along with everything Wonder Woman that Warner Media has done. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it an excellent eighty percent rating.
Born September 11, 1934 — Ian Abercrombie. He played a most excellent and proper Alfred Pennyworth on the terribly well done Birds of Prey, a certain Professor Crumbs in Wizards of Waverly Place, he was Wiseman in Army of Darkness andvoiced Palpatine in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. (Died 2012.)
Born September 11, 1940 — Brian De Palma, 81. Though not a lot of genre work, he has done some significant work including Carrie. Other films he's done of interest to us are The Fury which most likely you've never heard of, and the first Mission: Impossible film along with Mission to Mars. Not genre, but I find it fascinating that he directed Bruce Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark video which has a genre connection as actress Courtney Cox would be in the Misfits of Science series and the Scream horror franchise as well.
Born September 11, 1941 — Kirby McCauley. Literary agent and editor who represented authors such as Stephen King, George R.R. Martin and Roger Zelazny. And McCauley chaired the first World Fantasy Convention, an event he conceived with T. E. D. Klein and several others. As Editor, his works include Night Chills: Stories of Suspense, Frights, Frights 2, and Night Chills. (Died 2014.)
Born September 11, 1948 — Michael Sacks, 73. He's best remembered as Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five. Given how short his film career was, as it lasted but little over a decade, that's no surprise. His only other genre role was as Jeff in The Amityville Horror. He's now in the financial services sector.
Born September 11, 1951 — Michael Goodwin, 69. Ahhh, Alan Dean Foster's Commonwealth series. I know that I've read at least a half dozen of the novels in that series and really enjoyed them, so it doesn't surprise that someone wrote a guide to it which is how we have Goodwin's (with the assistance of co-writer Robert Teague) A Guide to the Commonwealth: The Official Guide to Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth Universe. Unfortunately like so many of these guides, it was done once part way through the series and never updated.
Born September 11, 1952 — Sharon Lee, 69. She is the co-author with Steve Miller of the Liaden universe novels and stories which are quite excellent reading with the latest being Neogenesis. They won Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for significant contribution to SF in the spirit of the writer E.E. "Doc" Smith, and they won The Golden Duck, the Hal Clement Young Adult Award, for their Balance of Trade novel. They are deeply stocked at the usual digital suspects.
Born September 11, 1958 — Roxann Dawson, 63. Best remembered for being B'Elanna Torres on Voyager. She's also a published genre author having written the Tenebrea trilogy with Daniel Graham. This space opera series is available from the usual digital suspects. She's got two genre film creds, Angela Rooker in Darkman III: Die Darkman Die, and Elizabeth Summerlee in the 1998 version of The Lost World. She's the voice of The Repair Station computer on the "Dead Stop" episode of Enterprise. Oh and she popped up once on the Seven Days series. She's long since retired from acting.
Born September 11, 1965 — Cat Sparks, 56. Winner of an astounding fourteen Ditmar Awards for writing, editing and artwork, her most recent was in 2019 when she garnered one for "The 21st Century Catastrophe: Hyper-capitalism and Severe Climate Change in Science Fiction." She has just one published novel to date, Lotus Blue, though there's an unpublished one, Effigy, listed at ISFDB. She has an amazing amount of short stories all of which are quite stellar. Lotus Blue and The Bride Price collection are both available at the usual digital suspects. (CE)
(9) NEAR TO THE MADDING CROWD. The DickHeads Podcast – so-called for their interest in Philip K. Dick – makes a side excursion to discuss someone who once gave an opinion about a PKD story: "Judith Merril Roundtable".
Dick Adjacent is back. And it's a good one too. The story goes that after David finished reading some of Judith Merril's stories, he found a scathing review she wrote of PKD's story Roog, and with that connection made, it seemed only appropriate to gather a panel of experts together and discuss her place in the science fiction universe. Considered a feminist force, she had to bully her way through a male-dominated business to make her voice heard. Incredible person. Incredible story. And a truly accredited panel. So listen in on David, Lisa Yazek, Gideon Marcus, Ritchie Calvin, and Kathryn Heffner as they discuss the legacy of Judith Merril.
(10) FLICKS BY THE BRIDGE. The Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival is back for 2021 with 160 sff films from 18 countries. All film selections will be available to stream online September 20-26 with live, in-person screenings to be held in Brooklyn at the Wythe Hotel Screening Room on September 25. Tickets available here. Special recognition in eight categories will be awarded by a panel of jurors and industry professionals on September 25.
This year, the BSFFF will feature all-new exclusive online events, screening parties, and filmmaker commentary. Another addition is the "The Future Sounds of Brooklyn," which is a compilation of SciFi-inspired music from musicians across the globe. The popular The Sixth Borough, a curated, BSFFF-developed series, which presents three fantastic science fiction short films united by a common theme each day of the festival, will return for the second year.
(11) A DIFFERENT WAY. Sebastien de Castell's new YA fantasy Way Of The Argosi is pitched as "The Alchemist meets The Three Musketeers — with card tricks."
A merciless band of mages murdered her parents, massacred her tribe and branded her with mystical sigils that left her a reviled outcast. They should have killed her instead.
Stealing, swindling, and gambling with her own life just to survive, Ferius will risk anything to avenge herself on the zealous young mage who haunts her every waking hour. But then she meets the incomparable Durral Brown, a wandering philosopher gifted in the arts of violence who instead overcomes his opponents with shrewdness and compassion. Does this charismatic and infuriating man hold the key to defeating her enemies, or will he lead her down a path that will destroy her very soul?
Through this outstanding tale of swashbuckling action, magical intrigue and dazzling wit, follow Ferius along the Way of the Argosi and enter a world of magic and mystery unlike any other.
(12) SAY AGAIN? [Item by David Doering.] Just the thing for the WSFS Business Meeting:
— Which the US Navy is also working on: "A New Navy Weapon Actually Stops You From Talking". Like having that annoying kid who keeps repeating everything you say…on-demand!
The U.S. Navy has successfully invented a special electronic device that is designed to stop people from talking. A form of non-lethal weapon, the new electronic device effectively repeats a speaker's own voice back at them, and only them, while they attempt to talk.
It was developed, and patented back in 2019 but has only recently been discovered, according to a report by the New Scientist.
The main idea of the weapon is to disorientate a target so much that they will be unable to communicate effectively with other people.
Called acoustic hailing and disruption (AHAD), the weapon is able to record speech and instantly broadcast it at a target in milliseconds. Much like an annoying sibling, this action will disrupt the target's concentration, and, in theory, discourage them from continuing to speak. …
(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. First Fandom Experience tells "The Tale of Aubrey MacDermott", who claimed to be the first active sff fan.
Aubrey McDermott was born in 1909 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and claims to be the first active science-fiction fan. We'll let Aubrey tell his own story through a letter that he sent to Andrew Porter around 1990…
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cora Buhlert, Denny Lien, Todd Mason, Michael Toman, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll | Tagged Ada Palmer, Aubrey MacDermott, David Doering, Jo Walton, John Scalzi, Malorie Blackman, Nick Park, Paul Krugman, Sebastien de Castell, Space Cowboy Books, Wallace & Gromit
Pixel Scroll 10/12/20 Petronius Tiberius Tirebiter
(1) ASU CSI PODCAST. The initial episode of the second season of The Imagination Desk podcast from the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University is live now, featuring an interview with Ytasha Womack, author of the book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. The next episode will be with sff author and editor Troy L. Wiggins
The Imagination Desk is a series of interviews with authors, scholars, and technologists about how we can harness creativity and imaginative thinking to inspire new work and build better futures. As this long, strange year wanes, we're launching new set of podcast episodes featuring deep conversations with fascinating collaborators to think about ways we can move forward together.
For the first installment of Season 2, we sat down with Ytasha L. Womack. Ytasha is a Chicago-based filmmaker, dancer, fiction writer, scholar, and the author of the 2013 book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. In this chat, CSI's Joey Eschrich and Ytasha discuss how culture, art, and storytelling help us to understand the complexity of Black life in the present, as well as transformative prospects for the future.
This conversation with Ytasha is part of our observance of Black Speculative Fiction Month, which takes place every October. Started by authors Balogun Ojetade and Milton Davis, Black Speculative Fiction Month honors the role that Black people have played in shaping the culture of speculative fiction and charting the course toward vibrant and equitable futures. We'll continue to explore these themes in future events and upcoming episodes of The Imagination Desk. Follow along on our website and subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or RadioPublic.
(2) SHOSHANA EDWARDS Q&A. Conducted by Cat Rambo:
I interviewed Shoshana Edwards, author of Death Lives in the Water: A Harper's Landing Story from Ring of Fire Press and A Roman Wilderness of Pain. We talk about her writing, neurolinguistics, and current political rhetoric. Shoshana Edwards was born in rural Oregon, attended Portland State University and California State University, Los Angeles. She later earned advanced degrees in English and Rhetoric. Now retired, she lives near Portland, Oregon where she continues to write.
(3) ADA PALMER'S EXOTERRA GAME CRITICIZED. Ashlyn Sparrow's op-ed "A Game that Threatens Student Intellectual Property", in the Chicago Maroon, the independent newspaper of the University of Chicago, contends "Ada Palmer's ExoTerra game has colonial themes and undermines students' creative freedom."
During the 2020 fall quarter, Ada Palmer (Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago) launched ExoTerra. The WordPress website for this project describes ExoTerra as "an online collaborative research role-playing game (RPG) community, in which students from all disciplines, from physics to literature, pool their expertise to design a new world." The game incorporates students via several university courses, including "Self, Culture, and Society 1," "America in World Civilization I," and "Europe's Intellectual Transformations." What appears like a well-intentioned pedagogical experiment, however, turns out to make lazy narrative choices and, more importantly, undermines the creative labor and intellectual property of University of Chicago undergraduate students.
ExoTerra is a game where "participating students play the crew of a space colony ship traveling from Earth to a newly-terraformed exoplanet." Sparrow thinks narratives should focus on improving the Earth.
… But as I looked closer at ExoTerra and began to discuss it with colleagues, I grew increasingly concerned. Some of my initial concerns had to do with a narrative frame that focuses on a colonization narrative at a historical moment when Black and Brown people continue to be exploited in the aftermath of global empire in so many ways. In focusing on the creation of a "new civilization," this game rests on a colonization and Earth escape fantasy that is being celebrated by tech billionaires such as Elon Musk. Rather than improving the Earth, such a narrative takes us further from facing the ills of climate change, unprecedented income inequality, systemic racism, and global pandemic. This is problematic even at an allegorical level or via the cognitive estrangement characteristic of the science fiction genre. There are so many better narrative arcs and fresher sub-genres from which to choose, especially in our current world.
Sparrow points out that participants sign away to Palmer the rights to what they create in the game.
…Palmer (who is also a published science fiction novelist) reserves the right to take any intellectual property that students might contribute to this allegedly collective storytelling game and use it for her own purposes, including fiction she publishes in the future. To be clear, this is not a video game that students play. It is instead a roleplaying and world building game that they are creating together. Yet the material benefits of this shared effort return to a single person: Ada Palmer.
(4) WHAT SPACE LETS CREATORS DO. Dwayne Day reviews the second season of For All Mankind at The Space Review. "In the paler moonlight: the future's past in 'For All Mankind'".
…Setting a program in the near future restricts the writers and what they can do. In contrast, as Hale noted, setting a science fiction show in the far future (or, alternatively, "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away") can free up the writers from having to reference—and be limited by—historical or current events that the audience is familiar with. Setting a story in a far distant future can be liberating in terms of storytelling. But it also restricts the writers' ability to use the show to make social commentary, and their ability to use familiar historical and cultural reference points in their storytelling.
"For All Mankind" has a different set of challenges in terms of storytelling—it is both about our past, and our future, while also inevitably being a commentary about the present. The show's setting in the 1960s and, for season two, the 1980s, represents a time decades in our past, but still within the living memory of many people. Yet the stories depict a space program that never happened, but still might happen in some way. The Jamestown lunar base in the show is not that different from concepts NASA and its contractors are currently studying. Perhaps in the coming decades, NASA could build something that looks a lot like Jamestown….
(5) WALT WILLIS' TASFIC SPEECH. Fanac.org announced on FB that thanks to the fan history researches of Rob Hansen in Vince Clarke's papers, they can present the final draft typescript of Walt Willis's speech at the 1952 Worldcon, which Willis was able to attend because of the "WAW with the Crew in '52" fan fund started by Shelby Vick. Here is Joe Siclari's introduction to the speech:
Although Walt Willis was prolific, the quality of his writing remained very high because he was diligent. In several articles, Walt Willis described some of his writing procedures. Despite what so many people thought was his facile and relaxed style, he worried over pieces and rewrote them. See Warhoon 12, p 22.
Walt's quality writing was why Shelby Vick created the first really successful campaign to bring a foreign fan to a US Worldcon, "WAW with the Crew in '52". You can imagine the excitement when this was successful. You might also imagine the stress when Walt realized that he would have to speak at the TASFiC/Chicon II.
So it seems he wrote a speech beforehand. Not only did he work on it in advance and rewrite and edit it, but it seems he sent it to at least one friend. During his research into Vince Clarke's papers, Rob Hansen discovered this presentation that you are about to read. It's probably the closest we will get to what Walt Willis said at the TASFiC. As Rob indicated in a note: "What *isn't* included, obviously, is whatever off-the-cuff thanks he added after he'd finished reading."
Not seen in close to 70 years, here is what Rob has called: "The Harp Speaks"
(6) MEDIA ANNIVERSARY.
1987 — Thirty-three years ago, the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Novel went to Peter Beagle's The Folk of the Air which had been published that year by Ballantine Del Rey. The main character is Joe Farrell, who first appeared as the hero of a short story called "Lila the Werewolf", making a sequel of sorts to that story. The League for Archaic Pleasures, here described as a group dedicated to the pleasures of the medieval period, is very obviously modelled after the SCA. Thirteen years later, Tamsin would garner him a second Mythopoeic Award, and The New Voices of Fantasy anthology three years ago would get him his third. He also received their Lifetime Achievement Award as well.
Born October 12, 1904 — Lester Dent. Pulp-fiction author who was best known as the creator and main author of the series of novels chronicling Doc Savage. Of the one hundred and eighty-one Doc Savage novels published by Street and Smith, one hundred and seventy-nine were credited to Kenneth Robeson; and all but twenty were written by Dent. (Died 1959.) (CE)
Born October 12, 1905 – William Kolliker. Moved from Switzerland to New York at 16. Illustrated for newspapers e.g. NY American, Baltimore News & American. Art director & editor of The American Weekly 25 years. Moved to Texas, resigned from business, taught at El Paso Museum of Art; Conquistador Award from El Paso 1963. A hundred twenty interiors for us. Here is an interior for "The Weapon Shop" (Astounding, Dec 42). Here is one for "Mimsy Were the Borogoves". Here is one for "The Sorcerer of Rhiannon". Here is a 1979 etching "The Graduate". Here is a mid-1970s abstract landscape. (Died 1995) [JH]
Born October 12, 1943 – Daphne Patai, Ph.D., 77. Feminist dissenter, see e.g. What Price Utopia? (2008); Oral History, Feminism, and Politics (2010, in Portuguese). Outstanding to us for discovering that the author of Swastika Night, published under a pseudonym 1930, was Englishwoman Katherine Burdekin. [JH]
Born October 12, 1949 – Barclay Shaw, 71. A hundred twenty covers, thirty interiors. Here is The Glass Teat; here is I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Here is The Shockwave Rider. Here is The Ringworld Throne. Here is the Mar 01 F&SF. Chesley for three-dimensional Wonderland. Artbooks The Art of Barclay Shaw; Electric Dreams. Website here (includes 3D animation). [JH]
Born October 12, 1951 – Taral Wayne, 69. Fanartist, pro artist, fanwriter. Many covers and interiors for fanzines; here is Torus 2; here is File 770 116 (PDF); see more in the cover gallery at his efanzines.com page. Here is his logograph for IguanaCon II the 36th Worldcon; Fan Guest of Honor at Anticipation the 67th. Co-founded Ditto (fanziners' convention, named for a brand of spirit-duplicator copying machine); Special Guest at Ditto 8. Toastmaster at Corflu 4 (fanziners' con, named for mimeograph correction fluid). CUFF (Canadian Unity Fan Fund) delegate; his CUFF history here. Numismatist. Collections Old Toys; The Great White Zine. Eleven-time Hugo finalist. FAAn (Fan Activity Achievement) award. Rotsler Award. [JH]
Born October 12, 1956 — Storm Constantine, 63. Writer with her longest-running series being the Wraeththu Universe which has at least four separate series within all of which are known for their themes of alternative sexuality and gender. She has also written a number of non-fiction (I think they are) works such as Sekhem Heka: A Natural Healing and Self Development System and The Grimoire of Deharan Magick: Kaimana. (CE)
Born October 12, 1961 – Susan Power, 59. Enrolled member of the Standing Rock Tribe (Dakota). Law degree from Harvard. Hemingway/PEN Award for first novel The Grass Dancer (ours); several more novels; shorter fiction in The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Story, a dozen for us in collection Roofwalker. Voices from the Gaps interview with her here (PDF). [JH]
Born October 12, 1965 — Dan Abnett, 55. His earlier work was actually on Doctor Who Magazine, but I'll single out his co-writing Guardians of the Galaxy #1–6 with Andy Lanning, The Authority: Rule Britannia and his Border Princes novel he did in the Tirchworch universe as great looks at him as a writer. (CE)
Born October 12, 1966 — Sandra McDonald, 54. Author of some sixty genre short stories, some of which are collected in Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories (which won a Lambda Award for LGBT SF, Fantasy and Horror Works) and Lovely Little Planet: Stories of the Apocalypse. Outback Stars is her space opera-ish trilogy. (CE)
Born October 12, 1968 — Hugh Jackman, 52. Obviously Wolverine in the Marvel film franchise. He's also been the lead character in Van Helsing as well as voicing him in the animated prequel Van Helsing: The London Assignment. One of his most charming roles was voicing The Easter Bunny in The Rise of The Guardians. And he played Robert Angier in The Prestige based off the World Fantasy Award winning novel written by the real Christopher Priest. (CE)
Born October 12, 1974 — Kate Beahan, 46. Her best remembered role is as Sister Willow Woodward in the remake of The Wicker Man. In the same year, she was Michell in The Return, a horror film. She showed up on Farscape as Hubero in "Fractures", and on Lucifer as Justine Doble in "All About Her". (CE)
Born October 12, 1992 – Melanie Vogltanz, 28. Austrian author and translator. European SF Society Encouragement Award, 2016; shortlisted for several prizes e.g. Kurd Laßwitz. Five novels, plus six in a Black Blood series; shorter stories collected in On Dark Wings (in German). I have not yet found translations into English. [JH]
(8) COMICS SECTION.
Off The Mark wakes up to a monster.
(9) WHAT CHILD IS THIS. Disney released posters for season 2 of The Mandalorian, including a sad Baby Yoda!
(10) DISNEY DISAPPOINTS EURO MOVIE HOUSES. Naman Ramachandran, in the Variety story "Disney's 'Soul' Decision Upsets European Cinemas" says the European trade association the International Union of Cinemas is mad at Disney because they say they operate safe cinemas and would love to have exhibited Soul.
…"There is compelling evidence that where audiences have returned, they have found the experience both safe and enjoyable," the UNIC statement said. "But it is also clear that it is the release of new films that will make all the difference in encouraging people back to the big screen."
"Indeed, across Europe, many cinemas have — since re-opening successfully — screened countless local releases, underlining that first-run titles are now more important than ever."
(11) SAINTHOOD FOR J.R.R.? Daniel Cote Davis, a promoter of J.R.R. Tolkien Cause for Canonization, will speak in New Zealand on October 31 reports the Tolkien sainthood Facebook group. (See more information about the movement in "Tolkien: An Unexpected Sainthood".)
Should J.R.R. Tolkien be made a Saint? In this film we explore the Catholic virtue of one of England's most renowned authors and look beyond the trolls and goblins at what the Lord of the Rings is really trying to say.
(12) IT ALL GOES AROUND. CrowdScience answers the question "Why do planets spin?" in an episode available at the BBC Sounds archive.
Crowdscience solves a range of listeners' cosmic mysteries, from the reason we only ever see one side of the moon, to why planets spin, and discover the answer can be found in the formation of the solar system. We talk to astronomer Dr Carolin Crawford to understand how stars are made, and investigate the art of astronomy with journalist Jo Marchant, hearing how the ancient Greeks came up with a zodiac long before the invention of a telescope, revealing an intimate relationship between humans and the night sky.
(13) WOMEN OF SFF IN THE SIXTIES. Fanac.org has posted to its YouTube channel a recording from Boskone 6 in 1969, "The Feminine Viewpoint," moderated by Hal Clement, with Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Larry Niven. NESFA and Rick Kovalcik provided the recording.
Moderated by Hal Clement, this audio recording (illustrated with dozens of images) is a 1960s view of feminism and the female viewpoint in SF by two of SF's most successful women writers of the day. It is uncomfortable in parts by today's standards, with comments like "you can't be a feminist if you like being a woman", and remarks about fanzines that discount female writers solely because of their sex. Hal Clement is the neutral moderator, and Larry Niven provides a male perspective. This panel is dominated by MZB and Anne McCaffrey, who express their views on women in the field, on the differences in fiction written by woman and men, and on the disadvantages attendant on being a female science fiction writer. Remember, Anne McCaffrey was born in 1926 and MZB in 1930. Their opinions were shaped by the times. It's a fascinating snapshot of the times.
The audio recording is accompanied by contemporary photos, including one of Walter Breen and MZB, just so you know.
[Thanks to JJ, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Michael Toman, Martin Morse Wooster, John Hertz, Mike Kennedy, Joey Eschrich, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll | Tagged Ada Palmer, Anne McCaffrey, Boskone, Cat Rambo, Center for Science and Imagination, Fanac.org, For All Mankind, Hal Clement, J.R.R. Tolkien, Joe Siclari, Larry Niven, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Shoshana Edwards, Walt Willis
Pixel Scroll 7/7/20 I Know This Defies The Law Of Pixel Scrolling, But I Never Studied Law
(1) CLARKE AWARD GOES GREEN. Well, the reverse idea worked when Lucky Strike went to war… The Clarke Award has unveiled a logo redesign on Twitter via @clarkeaward.
(2) PRATCHETT'S GENESIS. "Final Terry Pratchett stories to be published in September" reports The Guardian. The stories in The Time-travelling Caveman were written for newspapers in the Sixties and Seventies. One of them, "The Tropnecian Invasion of Great Britain," appears at the end of the article.
The final collection of early stories from the late Terry Pratchett, written while the Discworld creator was a young reporter, will be published in September. The tales in The Time-travelling Caveman, many of them never released in book form before, range from a steam-powered rocket's flight to Mars to a Welsh shepherd's discovery of the resting place of King Arthur. "Bedwyr was the handsomest of all the shepherds, and his dog, Bedwetter, the finest sheepdog in all Wales," writes the young Pratchett, with typical flourish….
(3) SFF NOT QUITE IN TRANSLATION. Ann Leckie wryly announced she is —
Pleased to note that Google Translate still thinks the Spanish title of Ancillary Justice is "Assistant Attorney General."
— Ann Leckie ? (@ann_leckie) July 7, 2020
(4) THE LID IS UP. Today Camestros Felapton advocates for another finalist in "Hugo Fan Writer: Why you should vote for…Alasdair Stuart".
… Stuart manages very well to shift the distance in his writing from the observational to the personal. Character is, I'd contend, a underestimated aspect of fan-writing. Yes, fan-writing does cover the kind of community journalism style writing, as well as descriptive reviews (both valuable – I'm not knocking them) but fan-writers are by title fans and it is the personal engagement with fandom and stories that drives the world of fan-writing. You can't genuinely know people from what they write but good fan-writing should, over the course of many examples, give a sense of a person and a perspective. I think it is something that Alasdair Stuart does very well. I've never met him (and it's unlikely I will anytime soon) but his writing conveys character in a way that is very personally engaging. Yes, yes, that's an illusion of sorts but that illusion is something I enjoy in good writing.
(5) TWO TOPICS WITH ADA PALMER. In "Uncanny Censorship Essay & Writing POV" on Ex Urbe, Ada Palmer discusses her article in Uncanny Magazine about censorship and summarizes a panel she was on at Balticon about writing point-of-view in fiction.
…Black Lives Matter has momentum now around the world, a call for change that can't be silenced; the hate it battles also has momentum, and amid their clash another wave is gaining momentum, as it does in every information revolution: the wave of those in power (politicians, corporations, alarmed elites) wanting to silence the uncomfortable voices empowered by the new medium. We need to fight this battle too, a battle to find a balance between protecting the new ability of radical voices to speak while also protecting against hate speech, misinformation, and other forms of communication toxic to peace and democracy. As I explain in my essay, genre fiction, we who read it, we who write it, have a lot of power to affect the battle over censorship. These days are hard; as someone both disabled and immunocompromised I can't go join the protests in the streets, not without both endangering fellow protesters by getting in their way, and the risk of this one moment of resistance destroying my ability to be here helping with the next one, and the next. But I can help on the home front as it were, working to protect the tools of free expression which those out on the streets depend on every minute, every protest, every video exposing cruel realities. Everything we do to strengthen speech and battle censorship protects our best tool, not just for this resistance, but for the next one, and the next….
The second section of the post, about writing POV begins:
Question: What I don't get is why they tell new writers to not have multiple POVs in a novel. I mean, if the story calls for it, and you're clear on the change, why not?
Jo Walton: Minimizing POVs is good discipline because it's very easy to get sloppy. So it's one of those things that's good advice when you're starting out, but not a law.
Ada Palmer: I agree that minimizing POVs is often wise. Whenever I find myself wanting a scene to be in a different POV I think really hard about it. Sometimes it's the right answer, but the fail condition is that you have too many POVs and the reader expects each of them to have follow-through and they don't….
(6) HAVE YOU READ THESE? Goodreads has posted "The 100 Most Popular Sci-Fi Books on Goodreads". I've read 54 of them – much better than I usually do with book lists, but barely over 50% even so.
Dystopias, alien invasions, regenerated dinosaurs, space operas, multiverses, and more, the realm of science fiction takes readers out of this world to tackle all-too-real issues, including oppression, bigotry, censorship, and the horrors of war. To celebrate the most inventive of genres, we're exploring readers' 100 most popular science fiction novels of all time on Goodreads.
As all good sci-fi readers know, the science behind the story is half the fun. To create our list, we ran the data to reveal the most reviewed books on our site. Additionally, each title needed at least a 3.5-star rating from your fellow readers to join this list. And, since science fiction is known for its continuing voyages, in the case of multiple titles from the same series, we chose the one with the most reviews.
Here are the top science fiction novels on Goodreads, listed from 1 to 100. We hope you discover a book or two you'll want to read in this lineup, whether it's a classic of the genre or one of the newer entries to sci-fi.
The top four books on the list are:
(7) PANTHER'S PRIEST. [Item by Olav Rokne.] One of the most important comic creators you may never have heard interviewed dropped in to Marvel creative director Joe Quesada's YouTube channel. The somewhat reclusive and iconoclastic Christopher Priest opened up about his creative process with regards to Black Panther, as well as some of the challenges he faced as the first African American to be a full-time writer in mainstream comic books. For the record, there would never have been a Black Panther movie without Christopher Priest's stellar run on the book.
July 1988 — Bruce Sterling's Islands in The Net was published by Arbor House, an imprint of William Morrow. This hardcover edition went for $18.95 and was 394 pages in length. It would win the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. It was nominated for Hugo, Ditmar and Locus Awards that same year. It would lose out to C. J. Cherryh's Cyteen at Noreascon 3.
Born July 7, 1851 – Kate Prichard. With her son Hesketh, whom she outlived, a dozen pioneering stories of Flaxman Low, possibly the first psychic detective in literature. Six are at Project Gutenberg Australia (as by E. & H. Heron, pseudonyms used by the authors) here. (Died 1935) [JH]
Born July 7, 1907 — Robert A. Heinlein. I find RAH to be a complicated writer when it comes to assessing him. Is Starship Troopers a fascist novel? Is The Number of The Beast as bad as it seems? (Yes.) What do I really like by him? The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (though I despise its sequel To Sail Beyond the Sunset), The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and The Rolling Stones. Lots of his short fiction such as as "…All You Zombies" is just amazing. And only he knows why he wrote Time Enough for Love. John has an interesting take on him here. (Died 1988.) (CE)
Born July 7, 1919 — Jon Pertwee. The Third Doctor and one that I'll admit I like a lot. He returned to the role of the Doctor in The Five Doctors and the charity special Dimensions in Time for Children in Need. He also portrayed the Doctor in the stage play Doctor Who – The Ultimate Adventure. After a four-year run there, he was the lead on Worzel Gummidge where he was, errr, a scarecrow. And I must note that one of his first roles was as The Judge in the film of Toad of Toad Hall by A. A. Milne. (Died 1996.) (CE)
Born July 7, 1926 – Tom Beecham. Five dozen interiors for Amazing, Fantastic, Future, Galaxy, If, SF Quarterly. Here is his illustration for "A Saucer of Loneliness". Here, "Weak on Square Roots". Here is a spaceship cover for Fury magazine. Later well-known for Westerns, wildlife in landscape; President, Soc. American Historical Artists; 360 paintings. (Died 2000) [JH]
Born July 7, 1948 – Paul Doherty, Ph.D. Fifty science columns in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with noted student of 'Pataphysics and co-founder of the Tiptree Award (as it then was) Pat Murphy. Popped corn in David Letterman's hand with a Van deGraaff generator. Rock climber who climbed the face of El Capitan. Taught with the Exploratorium, also the Science Circle which established a Paul Doherty educators' award. Named Best Science Demonstrator, World Congress of Museums, 1996. His Exploratorium Teacher Institute Website is here. (Died 2017) [JH]
Born July 7, 1959 — Billy Campbell, 61. There are some films so good in my memory that even the Suck Fairy can't spoil them and The Rocketeer in which he played stunt pilot Cliff Secord is one of them. By the way, IDW published a hardcover edition called Dave Stevens' The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures and Amazon has it for a mere twenty bucks! (CE)
Born July 7, 1962 — Akiva J. Goldsman, 58. Screenwriter whose most notable accomplishment was that he wrote a dozen episodes of Fringe; he also wrote the screenplays for Batman Forever and its sequel Batman & Robin; I, Robot; I Am Legend, Practical Magic, Winter's Tale (his first directing gig) and Lost in Space. (CE)
Born July 7, 1964 – Kôsuke Fujishima, 56. Famous for Oh, My Goddess! manga, with video animation, games, and like that; Kodansha Manga Award. Of course college sophomore Keiichi Morisato calls a wrong number and reaches the Goddess Help Line. Of course when a Norn answers and says KM gets one wish, KM thinks it's a practical joke and tells Verthandi (which Fujishima renders "Belldandy", not too bad) KM wants her to stay with him forever. They have to leave KM's dormitory. Today is the author's fourth wedding anniversary; he married the famous 20-year-old cosplayer Nekomu Otogi on July 7, 2016 (or at least that's when he confirmed it on Twitter). [JH]
Born July 7, 1968 – Tricia Sullivan, 52. A dozen novels, as many shorter stories. Translated into French, German, Portuguese. Clarke Award for Dreaming Into Smoke. She says "Occupy Me [2016] … is the work that means the most to me…. I have a B.A. in Music … M.Sc. in Astrophysics…. working on a Ph.D…. machine learning in astronomy, which means coding most days. I balance out this madness by talking to my vegetable garden, sometimes even as I eat bits of it." [JH]
Born July 7, 1980 – Elena Vizerskaya, 40. Illustrator; she says "surrealist photographer", which is true. Here is her cover for Permeable Borders. Here is Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (nominated for a Chesley); Brenda Cooper said "Get it in physical form, the cover is worth having." Here is Amaryllis. Here is "Find new ways to change". Try this Website. [JH]
Born July 7, 1987 — V. E. Schwab, 33. I'm very pleased with her A Darker Shade of Magic which explores magicians in a parallel universe London. It's part of her Shades of Magic series. Highly recommended. Her Cassidy Blake series is also good provided you're a Potter fan because she makes a lot of references to that series. (CE)
Death takes a holiday in Bizarro.
Despite the pandemic, Moderately Confused is off to see the Wizard.
Lio shows how to become a proper superhero.
And here's some welcome news –
Gary Larson releases his first set new of comics since his retirement in 1995 https://t.co/8REZTPdEPE
— CNET (@CNET) July 7, 2020
(11) PROTECTING COPYRIGHT. The SFWA Blog reports "Copyright Registration Rule Change Allows Flat Fee Registration of Short Textual Works Published Online". (A complete explanation of the rule can be read here in the Federal Register.)
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) is extremely pleased that the U.S. Copyright Office has issued a new copyright registration rule that will allow authors to register up to fifty short textual works published online for a single flat fee.
SFWA, along with the National Writers Union, Horror Writers Association, and American Society of Journalists and Authors, first requested the creation of such a group registration option in January 2017. In 2018, a productive round table between authors' groups and the Copyright Office was held, and subsequent comments from SFWA and other groups were fully integrated into the final rule.
The rule, which takes effect on August 17, 2020, specifies that each work must be between fifty and 17,500 words in length, must have been published in the same 90-day period, and be written by the same single author or collaboration. For works that qualify, a single fee of $65 will cover the registration of up to fifty individual works….
(12) LEGO PORTRAITS. "Lego debuts new sets for the young at heart featuring Marilyn Monroe, The Beatles, Star Wars and Iron Man" – CNN has photos.
Lego announced a new line of "Lego Art" — a higher-end building set geared towards adult fans.
The line, available for purchase September 1st, will launch with four themes: Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe, Marvel Studios Iron Man, Star Wars "The Sith" and The Beatles.
The pieces, once they are completed, form beautiful mosaics worthy of permanent display.
(13) K/S. "How Slash Fiction Saved Star Trek" has a title with a clickbait claim that tends to overshadow the video's nuanced account of early Trek fanhistory and about a strong facet of fannish interest in the show's characters.
Slash fiction and fan fiction in general has always been a derided part of the fandom community. But without the pioneering efforts of many fan fiction and slash fiction writers, we wouldn't have Star Trek or science fiction as we know it today! So let's dive into the complex relationship between slash fiction and Star Trek.
(14) SILLY SEASON. "Doncaster baby owl webcam 'banned by Facebook over sex and nudity rule'".
Video of nesting baby owls was temporarily removed by Facebook for apparently breaking rules on nudity and sexual activity, the page's owner said.
The live stream was set up by Graham Moss, who started sharing cute pictures of the owls in his Doncaster garden during the coronavirus lockdown.
He claimed his Brockholes Wildlife Diary's (sic) page was blocked despite having no inappropriate content.
While the page has been reinstated Mr Moss has yet to receive an explanation.
Facebook has been contacted by the BBC for a comment.
(15) ROYALTY QUESTION. Marissa Doyle inquires "Have You Upped a Swan Lately?" at Book View Café. I must admit I have not. But I learned that because of the pandemic, neither has anybody else.
Swan Upping is the traditional census-taking of Mute Swans on the River Thames, wherein swans are rounded up, checked for bands or banded, and released. The king or queen of England, by ancient law and custom dating back to the middle ages, owns all unmarked swans in England. And since the twelfth century or so, the swans who live on the Thames have been counted and marked by the Royal Swan Upper to enforce that ownership (though two ancient groups, the Worshipful Company of Vintners and the equally Worshipful Company of Dyers also have some swan-related rights and participate as well.) Swans were once reckoned something of a delicacy, after all, and having one on your banquet table was something of a status symbol that the Crown thought ought to mostly belong to it.
(16) GET IN LINE. BBC tells how "Esa and Nasa line up satellites to measure Antarctic sea-ice".
US and European scientists are about to get a unique view of polar ice as their respective space agencies line up two satellites in the sky.
Authorisation was given on Tuesday for Europe's Cryosat-2 spacecraft to raise its orbit by just under one kilometre.
This will hugely increase the number of coincident observations it can make with the Americans' Icesat-2 mission.
One outcome from this new strategy will be the first ever reliable maps of Antarctic sea-ice thickness.
Currently, the floes in the far south befuddle efforts to measure their vertical dimension.
Heavy snow can pile on top of the floating ice, hiding its true thickness. Indeed, significant loading can even push Antarctic sea-ice under the water.
But researchers believe the different instruments on the two satellites working in tandem can help them tease apart this complexity.
Nasa's Icesat-2, which orbits the globe at about 500km in altitude, uses a laser to measure the distance to the Earth's surface – and hence the height of objects. This light beam reflects directly off the top of the snow.
Esa's Cryosat-2, on the other hand, at around 720km in altitude, uses radar as its height tool, and this penetrates much more deeply into the snow cover before bouncing back.
(17) ALONG CAME JONES. In "Honest Trailers–Indiana Jones Trilogy" the Screen Junkies look at the first three Indiana Jones movies and conclude that Jones "isn't just a terrible professor–he's a terrible archeologist!"
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, John Hertz, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Michael Toman, Darrah Chavey, Olav Rokne, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll | Tagged Ada Palmer, Alasdair Stuart, Ann Leckie, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Black Panther, Bruce Sterling, Camestros Felapton, Christopher Priest, copyright, Goodreads, Honest Trailers, Jo Walton, Lego, Marissa Doyle, SFWA Blog, slash fiction, Star Trek, Terry Pratchett
Pixel Scroll 8/19/19 Click, Click, Click Went The Pixel, Post, Post, Post Went The Scroll
Posted on August 19, 2019 by Mike Glyer
The Dublin 2019 juggernaut coasted slowly to a stop today. Here is a sampling of people's farewell tweets.
(1) PROGRAMMING.
Dr Karen Simpson Nikakis, Marie Brennan, Aliette de Bodard, Naomi Novik and Joey Yu engaged in a spirited discussion of dragons in literature and culture. #Dublin2019 #worldcon2019 pic.twitter.com/HeKMjFMsJ1
— Lawrence Charters (@lcharters) August 19, 2019
(2) RIBBONS.
And done and over with. Flying home tomorrow after an amazing five day #Dublin2019 and meeting all the best people. In the closing ceremony queue staff were giving out "I made this happen" ribbons to everyone! pic.twitter.com/Ym4gTmSVpR
— Beth Winter (@bwinter) August 19, 2019
Was a bit weird knowing I don't need/get to wear this again …but I got to wear it in the first place!!! 🙂#worldcon2019 / #Dublin2019 pic.twitter.com/7ja3irCs7a
— Jay Faulkner ???? @Dublin2019 Worldcon (@thejayfaulkner) August 19, 2019
#Dublin2019 badge ribbons! (Unfortunately my Site Selection "I Voted" badge blew away.) pic.twitter.com/C5BsMTQqho
— Martin P. @ An Irish Worldcon (@Goobergunch) August 19, 2019
It's possible I got carried away collecting ribbons at WorldCon!!! #Dublin2019 #Dublin #WorldCon #WorldCon2019 #AnIrishWorldCon https://t.co/s26zhGqwch pic.twitter.com/bs70itWCfz
— The Geordie Geek (@BigGeordieGeek) August 19, 2019
My final @Dublin2019 badge-state.
So many wonderful experiences and interactions. I have thoughts, but have not the spoons left to express them.
Thanks to everyone I met, the org team for all their work, and all the authors and creators who made this so great. pic.twitter.com/pxp0hcxy4m
— dgold (@_dgoldsmith) August 19, 2019
(3) MEDALS.
We are just two among many @Dublin2019 Heroes but we are proud of it and of everything we did for the programme.
(Maybe we don't need to get tattoos now we have the official badges!) @Liz_loves_lit pic.twitter.com/yGMS2J1uD0
— Catherine Sharp @ Worldcon (@CSharpWords) August 19, 2019
(4) T-SHIRT.
My wife bought me a T shirt at @Dublin2019. She says it's for somebody not totally into science fiction. Hmmm…… pic.twitter.com/FEBKc0egyD
— MagicBus1 (@VWMagicBus1) August 19, 2019
(5) FEEDBACK SESSION.
Dead dog in Martin's now. Earlier feedback session: Queues,, Wifi slow, speak closer to microphone for sound, problems with badges, etc. But overall MOST WENT WELL with @Dublin2019. Warm body count 5800 (so why cap at 6500?). Slan!=Goodbye! And fans are slans… pic.twitter.com/SGuOvslHTi
— ????SF?Journalen???? (@SFJournalen) August 19, 2019
(6) OOK OOK. Something from the HOAX daily newzine:
Nice bit of bias against young and new fans there.
?#dublin2019 pic.twitter.com/lMMSYGs5AV
— Emma survived Worldcon; send coffee (@triagegirl) August 19, 2019
(7) CLOSING CEREMONIES.
Closing ceremony @Dublin2019 – congratulations on a fantastic #worldcon in #dublin #ireland and a huge shout out to all the volunteers who made this happen. pic.twitter.com/9Cwc2EWG8a
— Dr. Norah Patten (@SpaceNorah) August 19, 2019
George RR Martin and Paris Martin receive a special committee award at Worldcon Dublin closing. #Dublin2019 #worldcon2019 pic.twitter.com/b9Ja5me3My
Worldcon Dublin committee leads and MCs receive a pint at closing ceremony. #Dublin2019 #worldcon2019 pic.twitter.com/Pl9Chx856s
Aerial duet at closing ceremony. #Dublin2019 #worldcon2019 pic.twitter.com/eqe6Yj5iSa
Worldcon Dublin chair James Bacon and his amazing suit. #worldcon2019 #Dublin2019 pic.twitter.com/aHDjGqTd5y
Day 5 of @Dublin2019 was a day of bittersweet farewells for friends new and old. But it's okay: in the words of Parris Mcbride Martin, "folks, if you're lucky, fandom is a way of life". I'll miss you all until the next time – please stay in touch! ?? #Worldcon pic.twitter.com/6cOk8Or7nM
— kat [email protected]? (@darthjuno) August 19, 2019
The committee award presented at closing ceremonies @Dublin2019 Resin that has been poured in six layers with acrylic paint to mimic veins in the layers. Resin border inlaid in the wooden base. Quite proud. #sfawards #resinart pic.twitter.com/a6DkIQleHh
— Sara Felix (@sillysarasue) August 19, 2019
James Bacon formally closes @Dublin2019 before handing the Gavel of WSFS to @CoNZealand co-chairs Norman Cates and Kelly Beauler. pic.twitter.com/r7IFoo5cwU
— Kevin Standlee ?????????? (@KevinStandlee) August 19, 2019
(8) SLOW GETAWAY.
Nothing worse than the batteries on your time machine running flat so you need a push #Dublin2019 pic.twitter.com/igDMY9neIQ
— Martin [email protected] (@wissewords) August 19, 2019
(9) COMPLETE AND UNINTERRUPTED. Ada Palmer, whose Campbell presenter speech was interrupted by absurdities appearing in the closed captioning behind her, has posted the text online: "2019 Campbell Speech + Refugee Charity Fundraiser". This excerpt comes from the post's introduction –
…I hope I find a video somewhere so I too can enjoy such disasters as "dog mechanism" for "dogmatic" and "Bored of the Rings and Cream of Thrown" for Lord of the Rings & Game of Thrones. More seriously, it was a great honor to speak again at this year's Worldcon, and I couldn't be more proud of Jeannette Ng's courageous acceptance speech, bringing attention to the crisis and violence happening right now in her home city of Hong Kong, and to the great responsibility we in the science fiction and fantasy community have to make sure that the theme of empire–which has numerous positive depictions in genre literature from space empires to the returns of kings–does not end up celebrating the dangerous, colonial, and autocratic faces of empire, and that as we explore empire in our work (including in my own work) we do so in ways which examine empire's problems and advance versions of empire which reverse or rehabilitate it, and which affirm the greater values of free-determination, autonomy, and human dignity.
(10) GROWING UP. In an article for the September WIRED, "We Can Be Heroes: How the Nerds Are Reinventing Pop Culture", Laurie Penny discusses how fandom–and, specifically, writing Harry Potter fan fiction–led her to a writing career, including stints as a writer for Joss Whedon's HBO show "the Nevers" and "The Haunting of Bly Manor."
But fandom also helped me meet people unlike myself, and that was just as important. There comes a time in the life of very lonely, misunderstood, intelligent child of privilege when they must confront the fact that being intelligent, lonely, and misunderstood is not the worst thing that can befall a person, that some people have a great deal more to contend with on top of being an unsalvageable dweeb. I was and remain a clueless Caucasian shut-in with a lot to learn, but that part of my education started when I began following fans and creators of color. My first real friends who weren't white lived thousands of miles away, and I knew them through jerky avatars and punnish screen names and an exhaustive knowledge of Tolkien lore. I educated myself with the articles and books they linked to. There were long, torturous flame wars. I listened. I took notes."
(11) MORE ABOUT HUGO LOSERS PARTY. Marguerite Kenner pursued more information about why there were problems (Hugo finalists who couldn't get in when they arrived). Thread starts here.
(2/) @CoNZealand provided staff for the event and other support. Both @CoNZealand and @Dublin2019 confirmed the party was "private" and not a convention programming item or sanctioned event (my words).
— Marguerite Kenner (@ #Dublin2019) (@LegalValkyrie) August 19, 2019
Ada Palmer also pointed out the effect on people with accessibility needs:
An important thing for future #Worldcon committees to remember: accessibility at the Hugo Losers Party can easily fall through the cracks since it's run by the next year's con com not the current one so isn't as covered by the current year's access team. https://t.co/dKyUW7uPdJ
— Ada Palmer (@Ada_Palmer) August 19, 2019
(12) ADMIRING UNCANNY. Their local newspaper covered the Hugo won by Lynne and Michael Thomas' Uncanny Magazine in the Semiprozine category: "Urbana-based Uncanny Magazine lands another rocket at Hugo Awards". Jim Meadows sent the link with a note: "Of course, you already know who the Hugo winners are, but I thought I'd pass along the local coverage from the Champaign-Urbana area, where the Thomases now live. Uncanny has received local coverage before, and I'm impressed by the degree of media support it gets in the area. I don't think this would have happened to this degree a few decades ago, but even a print version of Uncanny would have been more difficult to do a few decades ago." The article appeared on the website of the (Champaign, IL) News-Gazette on Sunday evening, and appeared on the front page (below the fold) of the paper's print edition on Monday morning.
Uncanny Magazine, which is produced in Urbana, was named the winner of the Hugo for best the best semi-professional magazine @uncannymagazine #NGMEDIA https://t.co/a3jjAQRvp6
— The News-Gazette (@news_gazette) August 18, 2019
Born August 19, 1807 — Jane C. Loudon. A very early SF writer as her novel, The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, was published in 1827. If you'd like to read it, the Internet Archive has it available. (Died 1858.)
Born August 19, 1893 — Hans Waldemar Wessolowski. An artist best remembered for his cover art for pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, Clues and Strange Tales. Wesso was the name most commonly cited wherever his art is given credit. Wesso painted all 34 covers of the Clayton Magazines Astounding Stories from January 1930 to March 1933. (Died 1947.)
Born August 19, 1921 — Gene Roddenberry. Oh, you know who he is. But did you know he wrote a lot of scripts for Have Gun – Will Travel? Indeed, his script for the show, "Helen of Abajinian" would win the Writer's Guild of America award for Best Teleplay in 1958. (Died 1991.)
Born August 19, 1950 — Mary Doria Russell, 69. The Sparrow series, The Sparrow and its sequel Children of God, are awesome. The Sparrow won the Arthur C. Clarke, BSFA, and Tiptree Awards, and it was the reason she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Born August 19, 1950 — Jill St. John, 69. She's best remembered as Tiffany Case, the Bond girl in Diamonds Are Forever. She was the first American to play a Bond girl. She shows in The Batman in "Smack in the Middle" and "Hi Diddle Riddle" as Molly. And she played Jennifer Holmes in the 1960 film version of The Lost World. Fascinatingly, she's an uncredited dancer on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In!
Born August 19, 1952 — Jonathan Frakes, 67. Best known for his portrayal of Commander William T. Riker in Next Gen though I'm fond of his voicing David Xanatos on the Gargoyles series. Interesting bit of trivia: For a time in the Seventies, he worked for Marvel Comics at cons as Captain America.
Born August 19, 1988 — Veronica Roth, 31. She's best known for her Divergent trilogy, consisting of Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant; and also Four: A Divergent Collection. The first two were made into films, a proposed series was cancelled.
(14) HIVES. LAist's selections as "LA's Coolest, Weirdest, Most Immersive Themed Bars" tilts heavily towards genre. For example —
Theme: A Star Wars-inspired bar for geeks
Obi-Wan Kenobi promised a young Luke Skywalker that he would "never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy" than the Mos Eisley Spaceport. This Hollywood Boulevard bar does its best to top the cantina where Han shot first, complete with war room-style maps and customers milling about in their best First Order cosplay. It wouldn't be accurate to say Scum & Villainy is only a Star Wars bar. All fandoms are welcome at weekly game nights, karaoke, trivia contests and occasional cosplay evenings. Leading up to the final season of Game of Thrones, it transformed into Fire & Ice Tavern, with a sad-faced Weirwood tree, an Iron Throne and Stark and Targaryen sigils. As for the menu, expect beer, themed cocktails and bar bites such as quesadillas, tots and chicken fingers, which were one of Greedo's favorite snacks, as any real Star Wars fan knows.
6377 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. 424-501-4229.
Not at SDCC? Neither are we! We're opening early today (12noon) and showing fan films (noon to 5ish), hosting geek trivia featuring LOTR, MCU, DC, Star Trek, Stas Wars, etc (6p), having a costume contest (8:30p) AND delighting in galactic tunes as crafted by everyone's favorite geeky DJ, @thedjelliot (9p). As usual, free to visit and all ages until 8p! #yourfriendlyneighborhoodgeekbar #scumandvillainycantina #scifisafehouse #sdcc ?: @jcreifenberg
A post shared by Scum & Villainy Cantina (@scumandvillainycantina) on Jul 20, 2019 at 8:19am PDT
(15) LUNCHTIME, AND YOU'RE IT. A Yahoo! reporter shares "What it's like to see a blinking, breathing 'Jurassic World' dinosaur up close" on the Jurassic World Live Tour.
It's actually not the teeth that get your attention first.
It's the eyes.
The velociraptor's yellow eyeballs don't exactly look at you but through you, a soul-piercing kind of stare that suggests she's wondering just how salty your skin tastes.
At least that's how I feel when I'm stalked by one of the dinosaur puppets from the Jurassic World Live Tour, a traveling stage show that arrives in dozens of U.S. arenas starting Sept. 26 in Columbus, Ohio, and runs through 2020.
My raptor encounter takes place in a nondescript building that looks like a dentist's office and smells like freshly baked bread. The first clue that I'm in the right location (which is located next to a bakery): A sign on a door that reads "DINOSAUR CROSSING." I walk inside, and it turns out to be a portal to the Jurassic era where dinosaurs roam.
(16) VERSUS TROLLS. NPR tells how "Trolled Online, Women In Politics Fight To Hold Big Tech Accountable In The U.K."
Lisa Cameron is a member of the British Parliament. She's also a victim, and survivor, of online trolls.
Cameron was new to politics in 2015, when she was elected in East Kilbride, Scotland. She'd been a clinical psychologist, a wife, a mom, and a trade union representative — the kind of political newcomer democracies want to run for office.
But the sludge of the Internet began to attack her — and not just for her policy stances. Her inbox, Facebook and Twitter accounts filled with insults about her appearance, rape fantasies, pictures of decapitated bodies, threats to her family, and anti-Semitic slurs (Cameron is Jewish).
Cameron's #MeToo story — and those of her female colleagues in Parliament — has helped usher in a new era in the United Kingdom: digital assault is understood as a real threat, one that is pushing the government to hold tech giants accountable for their role as hosts to these attacks.
Cameron says the ugliness got to her. "It makes you question whether you are doing something wrong in your job, whether politics is right for you." She also wondered if running was unfair to her two children.
Then, a horrific attack — not against her, but against a female colleague who was sworn into Parliament in the same class — changed the conversation for Cameron, and for the entire country.
In 2016, Member of Parliament Jo Cox was gunned down and stabbed on the streets by a white supremacist. According to prosecutors, he was radicalized on the Internet, where he viewed Nazi materials and, on the eve of the attack, researched right-wing politicians and the Ku Klux Klan. The motive appeared to be policy-oriented. The killer was pro-Brexit. And Cox, a member of the Labour Party, wanted Britain to stay in the European Union. But some believed she was targeted because she was a woman.
The Prime Minister's office reached out to men and women in Parliament to ask if they had been intimidated online. The final report, published in December 2017, coincided with the rise of the #MeToo movement in the United States. U.K. regulators didn't set out to spotlight female leaders. But they did, because women had horrific anecdotes to share.
(17) SUPER-RESISTANCE. Art Spiegelman, in "Art Spiegelman: golden age superheroes were shaped by the rise of fascism" in The Guardian, is a discussion about the rise of superheroes in the late 1930s.
…In late 1940, over a year before Pearl Harbor, while the Nazis were Blitzkrieging London, Simon, an entrepreneurial freelancer for Funnies, Inc, was hired by Goodman to write, draw and edit for him directly. Simon showed him the cover concept for a new superhero that he and Kirby had dreamed up – a hero dressed like an American flag with giant biceps and abs of steel has just burst into Nazi headquarters and knocked Hitler over with a haymaker to the jaw. Goodman began to tremble, knowing what an impact this book would make and remained anxious until the first issue of Captain America, dated March 1941, landed on the stands. Goodman had been terrified that someone might assassinate Hitler before the comic book came out!
Captain America was a recruiting poster, battling against the real Nazi super-villains while Superman was still fighting cheap gunsels, strike breakers, greedy landlords and Lex Luthor – and America was still equivocating about entering the conflict at all. No wonder Simon and Kirby's comic book became an enormous hit, selling close to a million copies a month throughout the war….
A related article explains that this piece was originally written as an introduction to a Folio Society collection of classic Marvel comics but Spiegelman withdrew it because he had a reference to "an Orange Skull haunts America" in a discussion of the Red Skull and Marvel found this unacceptable.("Spiegelman's Marvel essay 'refused publication for Orange Skull Trump dig'").
(18) KILLING JOKE. The BBC covers "Edinburgh Fringe funniest joke: Vegetable gag wins top prize" and the also-rans. No, I don't know what "florets" is a sound-alike to; anyone alse to enlighten me?
A joke about vegetables has made it to the top of the menu as this year's funniest at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Swedish comedian Olaf Falafel has won Dave's "Funniest Joke of The Fringe" award with the niche culinary pun.
He took the title with the gag: "I keep randomly shouting out 'Broccoli' and 'Cauliflower' – I think I might have florets".
It is from Falafel's show It's One Giant Leek For Mankind at the Pear Tree.
In its 12th year, the prize rewards the funniest one-liner to grace the venues of the festival and celebrates the pool of talent the Fringe has to offer.
(19) TALK TO ABOUT THE HAND. Something CoNZealand-goers won't have to travel to see: "'Nightmare' hand statue looms over New Zealand city".
A giant hand which has been described as a "Lovecraftian nightmare come to life" has been lifted into place atop Wellington's City Gallery in New Zealand.
Ronnie van Hout's "Quasi" installation was carried by helicopter to its new home on Monday overlooking the city's civic centre.
The artwork, which was created in 2016, originally stood on top of the Christchurch Art Gallery. It is on loan to Wellington, where it will stand for the next three to four years.
The operation has cost NZ$74,000 (US$47,000; £39,000), which includes transportation, designing the hoist, and "Wellington-proofing" the hand against the local elements, Stuff news website reports.
The relocation of the five-metre tall (16 feet) sculpture, which weighs 400kg (880 pounds), has stirred up a mixture of revulsion and civic pride in New Zealand's capital.
A giant hand which has been described as a "Lovecraftian nightmare come to life" has been lifted into place atop Wellington's City Gallery in New Zealand
Ronnie van Hout's Quasi installation was carried by helicopter to its new home on Monday overlooking the city's civic centre. pic.twitter.com/0s5wBwTjIz
— IanBroughall (@IanBroughall) August 19, 2019
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, JJ, Hampus Eckerman, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Jim Meadows, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll | Tagged Ada Palmer, Art Spiegelman, Dublin 2019, Jim Meadows, Jurassic Park, Laurie Penny, Lynne M. Thomas, Marguerite Kenner, Michael Damian Thomas, superheroes, Uncanny
Pixel Scroll 7/9/19 With Mullets Towards None
(1) THOUGHTS ON A PROPOSED HUGO CATEGORY. Neil Clarke explains why he opposes "Hugo Proposal for Best Translated Novel":
…The biggest problem I have with this proposal is the message it sends not only to domestic readers, but foreign authors, editors, and publishers: translated works are not as good as ours, so we're making a special category for you so you can get awards too. I don't believe that's the intention of those who drafted this proposal. I think they approached it with the best of intentions, but simply got it wrong. For years now, I have been making the case that we should be treating translated and international works as equals: stories worthy of standing alongside those we have routinely seen published. This proposal sends the opposite message, and on those grounds intend to vote no.
Translated works are capable of winning the Hugo without any special treatment. As they point out in their own commentary, three translated works have won since 2015, despite the relatively low number of translations published among a wide sea of domestic releases….
(2) 'TOPIARY. Juliette Wade's Dive Into Worldbuilding encounters winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and Nebula nominee "Sam J. Miller and Blackfish City". Read the synopsis at the link, and/or watch the video:
…There are some utopian elements in the story as well as dystopian ones. A lot of energy problems can be solved. The city uses methane generators to produce light. They also don't need militarized police. Sam remarked how any place can have both utopian and dystopian elements depending on who you are. To the people who live in the Capital, the Hunger Games world is a utopia.
I asked if this book was strictly speaking science fiction or whether it had fantastical elements. He explained that it is a science fiction story, but that he uses nanites to do things that might seem magical. The nanites allow some humans to bond with animals. That bond could seem fantastical but it has technological underpinnings.
There are people called orcamancers. Sam explained that the origins of the orcamancers are with illegal pharmaceutical testing that happened in the period between the present and the time period of the novel. Rival drugs were tested on people at different times. This accidentally led to a form of bonding with animals that Sam compared to the daemons in The Golden Compass. He explained that cultural practices regulate why you would bond with particular animals….
(3) CICERO – NOT ILLINOIS. Ada Palmer dives into "Stoicism's Appeal to the Rich and Powerful" at Ex Urbe
I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver of my thoughts made it into the article, but the question from Nellie Bowles was very stimulating so I wanted to share more of my thoughts.
To begin with, like any ancient philosophy, stoicism has a physics and metaphysics–how it thinks the universe works–and separately an ethics–how it advises one to live, and judge good and bad action. The ethics is based on the physics and metaphysics, but can be divorced from it, and the ethics has long been far more popular than the metaphysics. This is a big part of why stoic texts surviving from antiquity focus on the ethics; people transcribing manuscripts cared more about these than about the others. And this is why thinkers from Cicero to Petrarch to today have celebrated stoicism's moral and ethical advice while following utterly different cosmologies and metaphysicses. (For serious engagement with stoic ontology & metaphysics you want Spinoza.) The current fad for stoicism, like all past fads for stoicism (except Spinoza) focuses on the ethics.
(4) DRAGON TRAINER NOW LAUREATE. "How to Train Your Dragon author Cressida Cowell named new children's laureate" – The Guardian has the story.
Cressida Cowell has become the new UK Children's Laureate.
The author of How To Train Your Dragon, and the Wizards of Once will take over from previous laureate, Lauren Childs..
She said: "Books and reading are magic, and this magic must be available to absolutely everyone. I'm honoured to be chosen to be the eleventh Waterstones Children's Laureate. I will be a laureate who fights for books and children's interests with passion, conviction and action. Practical magic, empathy and creative intelligence, is the plan."
Cressida has also revealed a 'giant to-do list' to help make sure that books and reading are available to everyone. It says that every child has the right to:
Read for the joy of it.
Access NEW books in schools, libraries and bookshops.
Have advice from a trained librarian or bookseller.
Own their OWN book.
See themselves reflected in a book.
Be read aloud to.
Have some choice in what they read.
Be creative for at least 15 minutes a week.
See an author event at least ONCE.
Have a planet to read on.
(5) GEEKY GETAWAYS. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] For your vacationing pleasure, SYFY Wire has lists and descriptions of 10 hotels "Geek Road Trip: 10 nerdy hotels that'll turn vacation into a fandom pilgrimage" and 6 Airbnbs "Geek Road Trip: 6 extra-nerdy Airbnb to book for your next vacation" with fan welcoming accommodations. The latter include a Harry Potter themed apartment in Atlanta GA, an '80s throwback gaming room in Lisbon, Portugal (& other themed rooms in the same building), a Marvel-ous studio apartment in Manila Philippines, a Star Wars suite in Melbourne Australia, a riverside Hobbit hole in Orondo, WA and Pixar paradise (with differently-themed rooms) in Anaheim CA.
(6) NAMELESS DREAD. The series doesn't have a title yet, but it does have characters: "George RR Martin Says 'Game of Thrones' Prequel Includes the Starks, Direwolves and White Walkers".
HBO's untitled Naomi Watts-led "Game of Thrones" prequel pilot may not have Targaryens and dragons — but it does have Starks, direwolves and, of course, White Walkers.
"The Starks will definitely be there," George R.R. Martin, co-creator and executive producer on the project alongside showrunner Jane Goldman, told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published Tuesday.
"Obviously the White Walkers are here — or as they're called in my books, The Others — and that will be an aspect of it," the "A Song of Ice and Fire" author said, adding: "There are things like direwolves and mammoths."
The appearance of the Starks, descendants of the First Men, shouldn't be a shock to fans who remember the prequel — which is reportedly currently filming in North Ireland — takes place roughly 5,000 years before the events of HBO's "Game of Thrones."
(7) THE REEL DEAL. Yahoo! Finance expects big bucks to change hands: "'Lost' tapes of first moonwalk to be sold; former NASA intern may make millions".
A former intern at NASA may become a millionaire when he sells three metal reels that contain original videotape recordings of man's first steps on the moon.
The videotapes will be offered in a live auction on July 20th at Sotheby's New York, but interested parties are able to place bids now at Sothebys.com. The sale coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. The price could reach $2 million.
According to the auction site, Gary George was awarded a cooperative work internship at the NASA Johnson Space Center in June 1973. Three years later, he bought more than 1,100 reels at a government surplus auction for $218, Reuters reported.
(8) GAIMAN'S STUDY. Variety's photo essay takes you "Inside Neil Gaiman's Rural Writing Retreat". (Hey, we have the same interior decorator!)
Although Gaiman has won multiple Hugo Awards, he only keeps one in his office; the others are in his house in Wisconsin. The one he earned in 2016 for "The Sandman: Overture" receives extra special placement not only because of his long history with the franchise ("It had a 'you can go home again' quality to it," he says) but also because "there is something magical in knowing I was awarded it for a graphic novel. I remember I was there, not too long ago, fighting for whether comics could get awards and things like that. But people loved it; it got its audience; it got awards; people cared."
(9) NATIVE TONGUE TRILOGY EVENT. On Thursday, July 18, there will be a panel discussion on feminist sci-fi with Rebecca Romney, Jennifer Marie Brissett, Bethany C. Morrow, and moderated by Eliza Cushman Rose focusing on "The Legacy of Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue Trilogy". This event is hosted by The Feminist Press and will be held at Books are Magic, 225 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY
Born July 9, 1911 — Mervyn Peake. Ok I'll admit I've not read the Gormenghast novels, nor have I seen the various video adaptations. Please tell me what I've been missing. (Died 1968.)
Born July 9, 1944 — Glen Cook, 75. With the exception of the new novel which I need to read, I've read his entire excellent Black Company series. I've also his far lighter Garrett P.I. Which unfortunately he's abandoned. And I should read the Instrumentalities of the Night as I've heard good things about it.
Born July 9, 1945 — Dean Koontz, 74. The genres of of mystery. horror, fantasy and science fiction are all home to him. Author of over a hundred novels, his first novel was SF — it being Star Quest (not in print) published as an Ace Double with Doom of the Green Planet by Emil Petaja. ISFDB claims over half of his output is genre, I'd say that a low estimate.
Born July 9, 1954 — Ellen Klages, 65. Her novelette "Basement Magic" won a Nebula Award for Best Novelette. I strongly recommend Portable Childhoods, a collection of her short fiction, which published by Tachyon Publications, my boutique favorite publisher of fantasy. Passing Strange, her 1940 set San Francisco novel is really great.
Born July 9, 1970 — Ekaterina Sedia, 49. Her Heart of Iron novel is simply awesome. I'd also recommend The Secret History of Moscow as well. It's worth noting that both iBooks and Kindle list several collections by her, Willful Impropriety: 13 Tales of Society, Scandal, and Romance and Wilful Impropriety that ISFDB doesn't list. I'm off to buy them now.
Born July 9, 1978 — Linda Park, 41. Best known for her portrayal of communications officer character Hoshi Sato on the Enterprise. Her first genre role was Hannah in Jurassic Park III, she was Renee Hansen in Spectres which Marina Sirtis is also in. She was in some called Star Trek: Captain Pike three years back as Captain Grace Shintal.
(11) DISTURBING TREND? Yesterday, "Jar Jar Binks spent the day trending on Twitter, baffling Star Wars fans" says SYFY Wire.
Earlier this morning, Jar Jar Binks was inexplicably one of the trending topics on Twitter. No one seemed to understand why, although there have been some theories. The Tampa Bay Times looked into the matter, which traced it back to a meme that predicts your Star Wars fate. While the image had been making the rounds online, it was shared by Mark Hamill earlier this morning, giving it some serious traction.
I refuse to be distracted by such meaningless, moronic time-wasters (especially since my home planet was blown up by an unnamed stormtrooper).#FickleFingerOfFate ? pic.twitter.com/JnlevrCNpo
— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) July 8, 2019
(12) VINTAGE 2018 FINNCON. Karl-Johan Norén's report on his 2018 Nordic Fan Fund trip to Finncon 2018 is up on eFanzines in both epub (preferred) and PDF formats.
…Meanwhile, Hulda and Therese participated in the Klingon language workshop, where they learnt some helpful Klingon phrases and Hulda impressed by showing a basic knowledge of the IPA symbols. Later on, when Hulda accidentally tickled Therese, Therese gave off a very Klingon-like sound, leading Hulda to ask if Klingons are ticklish. That gave rise to a very spirited discussion, including if Klingons would admit that they could possibly be ticklish, and if empirical research was advised…
(13) BUSTED. The Daily Beast reports on Streamliner Lines' inaugural run through western Nevada: "Redditors Say This Is a Nazi Bus. The Owner Says It's a Misunderstanding."
It bans "social justice warriors" and drives across Nevada with a logo that looks suspiciously like a Nazi flag. It's Reno's new bus line and the owner says the racist reputation is all just a misunderstanding.
On Friday, Streamliner Lines launched its maiden bus run from Reno to Las Vegas. Streamliner president John Wang told The Daily Beast it ran a little behind schedule (traffic), and sold few tickets (the Nazi reputation). Still, the trip was the first victory for Streamliner, which previously failed inspection on its only bus and has spent the past month embroiled in spats with Redditors over the company's logo and its ban on some left-wing passengers.
(14) BLADE RUNNER. Titan Comics advertises Blade Runner 2019 as "the first comic to tell new stories set in the Blade Runner universe!"
(15) KORNBLUTH TRIBUTE. Andrew Porter passed along a scanned clipping of Cyril Kornbluth's obituary in a 1958 New York Times.
(16) UMM, YUM? Gastro Obscura calls her 'Annabel Lecter' because "These Made-to-Order Cakes Look Like Beautiful Nightmares".
English pastry chef Annabel de Vetten crafts what may be the world's most fantastically morbid confections. Her Birmingham studio and cooking space, the Conjurer's Kitchen, is filled with feasts of macabre eye candy rendered with ghoulish precision.
Here is a plate heaped with thumb-sized maggots and grubs. There a bloodied human heart lies in a pool of green, molar-strewn slime. A stainless-steel coroner's table hosts the disemboweled upper-torso of a corpse. It's flanked by a four-foot statue of a saint, his face melting away to bone. On the counter, the neck of a deer's partially fleshless head sinks its roots into a bisected flowerpot; a sapling bursts from its skull like a unicorn horn.
(17) THE ART OF FILLING OUT THE HUGO BALLOT. Steve J. Wright moves on to review "Hugo Category: Best Art Book".
…Taking a look at this year's offerings – well, the Hugo voters' packet contains partial content (the images, really) from three of the six, and the full text and images from a fourth, which last was something I really didn't expect. I bought one of the remaining two myself… but the last one, Julie Dillon's Daydreamer's Journey, is a self-published job funded by a Kickstarter project and put together using indie tools, and the ultimate result was, I figured I could just about afford the book, but then I looked at the cost of overseas shipping, and my wallet instinctively snapped shut. Pity, really. Julie Dillon is a familiar name from recent Pro Artist final lists, and a book of her artwork (with accompanying descriptions of her creative process for each piece) would be a very nice thing to have. The Kickstarter makes it look very enticing indeed….
(18) THEY CAME FROM SPACE. NPR finds that "Moon Rocks Still Awe, And Scientists Hope To Get Their Hands On More"
Darby Dyar says that as a kid, whenever Apollo astronauts returned from the moon, she and her classmates would get ushered into the school library to watch it on TV.
She remembers seeing the space capsules bobbing in the ocean as the astronauts emerged. "They climbed out and then they very carefully took the lunar samples and put them in the little rubber boat," Dyar says, recalling that the storage box looked like an ice chest.
Nearly a half-ton of moon rocks were collected by the six Apollo missions to the lunar surface. And as the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 first landing mission approaches, NASA has decided to open up a still-sealed, never-studied moon rock sample that has been carefully saved for decades, waiting for technology to advance.
(19) I PRAY FOR ONE FIRST LANDING. Even if it's not one of Glyer's Chinese 'bots I'm sure you'll cheer when "AI pilot 'sees' runway and lands automatically".
An automatic pilot has landed a plane using image-recognition artificial intelligence to locate the runway.
At large airports, systems on the ground beam up the position of the runway to guide automatic systems.
But in late May a new AI tool landed a small plane carrying passengers, by "sight" alone at Austria's Diamond Aircraft airfield.
One expert said it could potentially improve flight safety.
The new system, developed by researchers at the technical universities of Braunschweig and Munich, processes visual data of the runway and then adjusts the plane's flight controls, without human assistance.
Because it can detect both infrared light as well as the normal visible spectrum, it can handle weather conditions such as fog that might make it difficult for the human pilot to make out the landing strip.
Another advantage of the technology is it does not rely on the radio signals provided by the existing Instrument Landing System (ILS). Smaller airports often cannot justify the cost of this equipment and it can suffer from interference.
(20) LE GUIN ON PBS. THIRTEEN's American Masters presents the U.S. broadcast premiere of the "Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin" documentary on August 2.
Produced with Le Guin's participation over the course of a decade, American Masters – Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin tells the intimate coming-of-age story of the Portland, Oregon, housewife and mother of three who forever transformed American literature by bringing science fiction into the literary mainstream. Through her influential work, Le Guin opened doors for generations of younger writers like Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon and David Mitchell — all of whom appear in the film — to explore fantastic elements in their writing.
The film explores the personal and professional life of the notoriously private author through revealing conversations with Le Guin as well as her family, friends and the generations of renowned writers she influenced. Visually rich, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin illustrates the dramatic real-world settings that shaped Le Guin's invented places using lush original animations over her own readings of her work to provide a firsthand experience of her fantastic worlds.
(21) TOUGH TIME AT NASFiC. Artist Newton Ewell had a terrible experience at SpikeCon and wrote about it on Facebook. Friends of his told me he's okay with sharing it on File 770. (I'm adding this at the last minute, in preference to waiting for tomorrow's Scroll.)
Have you ever been invited to a convention, only to be treated like you don't belong there? I have.
Thursday was really hard on me. I felt very unwelcome at Spikecon, and have realized that driving an hour one-way, being shoved off into an unlit corner and having to confront people who hate me just really isn't my thing.
Frankly, I'm afraid to come back to the convention. Libertarian Loudmouth Guy came by the table yesterday evening to drone on at me like a broken record about the same crap (his skewed politics) as usual. Being buttonholed by wackos who see my skin color and use it as a pretext to spew hateful talk at me does not make a good convention experience. Racist DrawGirl's grudge against me was on full display. I'm not there to compete with anyone, nor am I there to be hated on by weirdos with strange fetishy grudges. Right-Wing Space Guy still can't grasp that I don't want to talk to him either, because of the Trump fanaticism displayed toward me.
I have friends there, but I was isolated from them, making the whole experience into an ordeal for me. I wanted to bring my large pieces, but something said, "don't". I'm glad I listened to that inner voice, because if I'd brought them, they'd have been ruined by the rain. I was supposed to have an electrical outlet for my drawing light, but all the outlets were taken up by the USS Dildo-prise people.
I don't have money to afford driving back out there, let alone commuting back-and-forth, food etc. Being placed into a hostile working environment is too much pain for too little reward.
I realized that being presented with a symbol of racial oppression and corporate greed (a plastic golden spike) really hurt. All I feel from that is the pain and death dealt out to the people who worked so hard to join the two railroads, and it makes me sad. I'm hurt that my art is on all the con badges, but once I get there I'm made into a problem, a bothersome individual who's not worth having the space I contracted for….
[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, Andrew Porter, Cat Eldridge, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Contrarius, Robin A. Reid, Trisha Lynn, Mike Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll | Tagged Ada Palmer, auction, Bethany C. Morrow, Blade Runner, Cyril Kornbluth, Dive Into Worldbuilding, dragons, Eliza Cushman Rose, Finncon, George R. R. Martin, Jar Jar Binks, Jennifer Marie Brissett, Juliette Wade, Karl-Johan Noren, Mike Kennedy, Neil Clarke, Neil Gaiman, Nelson Ewell, Rebecca Romney, Sam J. Miller, Star Wars, Steve J. Wright, Suzette Haden Elgin, Ursula K. Le Guin
Pixel Scroll 2/21/18 I Picked The Wrong Week To Quit Scrollin' Pixels
(1) THE SOURCE. Paste Magazine tells readers "If You Love Black Panther, You Have to Read Nnedi Okorafor's Books".
…Okorafor, who's about to wrap up a run on Marvel's Black Panther: Long Live the King comic series, boasts an enthralling catalogue of novels steeped in afrofuturism. So if you're looking for more stories featuring kickass women and inventive tech on the African continent, Okorafor has you covered.
Here are Paste's top five picks to get you started:
Black Panther: Long Live the King
The obvious first title on this list is Marvel's six-issue Long Live the King series, in which Okorafor wrote issues one, two and five. With art by André Lima Araújo and colors by Chris O'Halloran, Okorafor's vision for Wakanda delivers a captivating narrative that breathes new life into the Black Panther canon.
Okorafor also wrote issue six, a one-shot story about Ngozi illustrated by Tana Ford, due out on February 28th. You might recognize Ngozi—an original Okorafor creation—from her first appearance in Venomverse: War Stories. And if the character is new to you, you'll love the Nigerian woman who bonded with the Venom symbiote and became a hero….
(2) OKORAFOR FREE READ. Slate agrees that the work of Nnedi Okorafor is the place to start, and has timely released "Mother of Invention", "a new short story by the author of Marvel's Black Panther: Long Live The King."
(3) DOUBLE UP. Yes, one reason Black Panther had a record weekend is because patrons failed to get away with stunts like this! "Two kids dressed as a tall man to get into "Black Panther" were caught on video". Rare has the story:
Two kids decided they wanted to go to the new Marvel superhero film "Black Panther," but they didn't want to pay for two movie tickets, so they tried to dupe the movie theater's manager.
The duo went to the theater disguised as one "tall man" under a trench coat, but unsurprisingly, their plan didn't work. However, despite their unsuccessful attempt to save on movie tickets, they have gone viral on Twitter thanks to their hilarious antics.
We tried getting the two for one special at black panther. The manager was not having it. pic.twitter.com/Ktqsuh7s3m
— Pillsbury (@stevelikescups) February 16, 2018
(4) ANTIHARASSMENT DONOR. The Independent reports "Emma Watson donates £1m to help fund for sexual harassment victims".
The donation from the Harry Potter star to the UK Justice and Equality Fund comes as nearly 200 female British and Irish stars signed an open letter calling for an end to sexual harassment in the workplace.
Watson is one of the first donors to the fund, which was set up by the 190 women who signed the open letter, along with a group of 160 academics, activists and charity workers.
Emma Thompson, Carey Mulligan, Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Chan, Keira Knightley and Watson are among the actors to sign the letter, which was published in The Observer.
(5) THE CULTURE MEETS THE VAST WASTELAND. Engadget reports "Amazon's answer to 'Altered Carbon' is Iain M. Banks' space opera".
…Amazon Studios will adapt the first novel, Consider Phlebas, for television.
Dennis Kelly will adapt the sci-fi drama for Plan B Entertainment (World War Z). The Iain Banks's estate will serve as an executive producer for the series. "Iain Banks has long been a hero of mine, and his innate warmth, humor and humanism shines through these novels," said Kelly, who previously adapted Matilda for the stage. "Far from being the dystopian nightmares that we are used to, Banks creates a kind of flawed paradise, a society truly worth fighting for — rather than a warning from the future, his books are a beckoning."
(6) DIAL M. Upon hearing the news about Banks' novel, Damien G. Walter immediately warned all in hearing that the sky is falling — "5 things that can go HORRIBLY wrong adapting The Culture".
I don't consider myself a true fan of many things, but I am an unapologetic Iain (M) Banks fanboy.
Which is an easy thing to be. Banks is a brilliant, brilliant writer. A storyteller in the class of Neil Gaiman, with the muscular prose abilities of J G Ballard, and the conceptual imagination of an Asimov or Le Guin. I read his Culture books in my teens, his literary novels in my twenties, and re-read nearly all of them in my thirties. Just this year I've been working my way through Peter Kenny's spot on audio adaptations.
So, like all true fans, I'm a little worried by news of a tv adaptation. Banks was fairly outspoken about his decision not to allow movie or tv adaptations of the Culture novels. I totally respect any decision his estate makes on this, and nobody doubts Amazon have the cash to make it happen? But do they have the skill, creativity and imagination?
How many ways could a Culture tv adaptation go wrong? Let us count the ways….
(7) WHAT ADA PALMER AND JOHN HERTZ HAVE IN COMMON. Patrick McGuire writes: "I just received my Winter issue of the alumni University of Chicago Magazine. Bundled with it was The Core, a semiannual supplement magazine devoted to the College. (U.C. is primarily a graduate institution, so the undergraduate school is decidedly the tail, not the dog.) The Winter 2018 Core has a profile of sf writer and history professor Ada Palmer. It is fairly insightful and informative, even if it does refer to Sassafras as a 'folk band.' The current issue of The Core is, at least as I write, not at the URL where it is supposed to be per the print issue, but after considerable poking around I found the Palmer article here — 'Renaissance-woman'. The profile does discuss her sf novels and it has photographs of Ada and others in costume. She also gets the magazine cover."
"Curiously, the mother-ship University of Chicago Magazine for Winter itself has a letter from prominent fan John Hertz. John primarily discusses non-sfnal topics, but does include a plug for Benford's The Berlin Project."
(8) BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS. New York bookstore The Strand would be delighted to sell you a copy of every single one: "Best Selling Author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer, Shares His Top 50 Books".
(9) BEST EDITOR HUGO RECOMMENDATIONS. Lee Harris doesn't want British sff editors overlooked, and assembled a get-acquainted thread. Jump aboard here —
Thread.
4 years ago I was nominated for a Hugo. It is the only time a British editor has ever been nominated in the Hugo editing categories. Which is crazy. When you're filling out your nomination forms this year, please give some thought to some amazing British editors. (1/12)
— Lee H. (@LeeAHarris) February 15, 2018
February 21, 1966 — Raquel Welch in a Stone Age bikini starred in One Million Years B.C. which premiered theatrically on this date.
(11) TODAY'S BIRTHDAY DROID
Born February 21, 1946 — Anthony Daniels, who plays C3PO.
John King Tarpinian found a Yoda joke that really works in Half Full.
On the other hand, John is right to call this stfnal pun a real groaner – The Argyle Sweater.
(13) WHAT'S THAT HE SAID? At age 54, a Doctor Who reviver finally gets to play Macbeth: "Christopher Eccleston: Northern accent 'held me back'".
The actor star says there is a perception in the industry that "people like me can't be classical".
Eccleston was born into a working class family on a council estate in Salford in Lancashire in 1964.
He will appear as Macbeth in a new production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford Upon Avon, but he had to ask for the role.
Unfortunately, Billie Piper is not playing Lady Macbeth.
(14) SECOND BREAKFAST. Did you ever do a movie marathon drinking game? Well, this is an eating game for the LotR trilogy – whatever food is eaten on screen, they cook and eat too!
So at 6am, @Glitter_brawl & I are going to start a back to back marathon of the 3 LOTR films (long versions), and I've prepared a 14 course 'meal' to reflect what gets eaten on screen. Dad died a year ago, and this seemed by far the most reasonable way to commemorate that.
— Regular Frog (@FrogCroakley) February 18, 2018
(15) TANK GIRL TO RETURN. Titan Comics will bring the Tank Girl franchise back to life in 2018.
It's been 30 years since the dynamic partnership of Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett (Gorillaz) unleashed Tank Girl upon the world! To celebrate Tank Girl's 30th Anniversary, Titan Comics is launching the 'Year of Tank Girl' in 2018 – a year-long celebration with new comics, graphic novels and special events, including a global Tank Girl Day event on Saturday, October 20.
Originally published in 1988 as a black and white comic strip in UK magazine Deadline, Tank Girl has gone on to become a cult icon in the 30 years since her first appearance, with numerous comics and graphic novels, and even her own feature film in 1995, which boasted an all-star cast including Lori Petty, Naomi Watts, Malcolm McDowell, Ice-T, and Iggy Pop, and directed by Doctor Who's Rachel Talalay.
As Tank Girl prepares to celebrate 30 riotous years in 2018, Titan Comics is proud to announce its 'Year of Tank Girl' campaign.
Celebrations kick off in April 2018 with Tank Girl: Full Color Classics 1988-1989 – the first of six prestige editions presenting those original seminal strips from Deadline in glorious color, just as Hewlett and Martin envisaged them three decades ago. Colored by Tracy Bailey (Fighting American) and Sofie Dodgson (Tank Girl: Bad Wind Rising), this is a new take on the classic strips. Plus, it includes rare and unseen artwork, as well as photos from the early days of the Martin and Hewlett partnership.
(16) #!&@! MY DAD SAYS. Bradford Betz, in a Fox News story "William Shatner Shames Texas Dem From Using His Photo in Campaign Newsletter", says that Shat told Brandy Chambers, running for the Texas House of Representatives as a Democrat, to stop using a photo she took at a Comic-Con with him because it seemed like he endorsed her, which he hasn't.
The image circulated until it reached Shatner on Saturday. The 86-year-old actor tweeted at Chambers that her use of the convention photo misleadingly suggests an "endorsement" on his part. He then told her to "remove my photo" and "destroy all copies of whatever this is immediately."
(17) BOXING DAY. According to ULTRAGOTHA, "Spurius Ennius Nasica is Rocky Balboa put through a Roman name generator." The connection between Rocky and Rome is this discovery — "Rare Roman boxing gloves uncovered near Hadrian's Wall in 'astonishing' find".
Roman boxing gloves believed to be the only surviving example from the period have gone on display after being discovered near Hadrian's Wall.
The gloves were found last summer during an excavation at Vindolanda, near Hexham in Northumberland.
Other items were unearthed in the dig, including swords, horse gear and writing tablets.
The gloves – which date from around 120 AD – are made of leather and have the appearance of a protective guard. They are designed to fit snugly over the knuckles, protecting them from impact.
(18) QUANTUM LEAP LEFTOVERS. Io9 investigates the tantalizing question "Did a Fan Just Find Proof of Quantum Leap's Secret Lost Ending?"
…The series finale of Quantum Leap was bleak (to put it mildly), with the final title card confirming that Scott Bakula's character, Sam Beckett, remained lost in time. However, one video claims a long-rumored alternate ending was actually real, one which would've made it possible for Sam to make that final leap home.
YouTuber Allison Pregler has released a video sharing what she says are negatives for an alternate ending to the fifth season of Quantum Leap. How did she get her hands on such a historical item? Pregler bought a bunch of Quantum Leap negatives on eBay.
"When I was looking at the film strips to try and guess what episodes or scenes they were, it took me a second to really grasp what I had. I thought it really looked like that alternate ending I'd read before, but no one knew it was filmed so I couldn't believe it," Pregler told io9. "I'm still having trouble believing it."…
(19) LOST AGAIN. Netflix reboot of Lost in Space premieres April 13.
The Robinson family, part of a highly trained mission to establish a new colony in space, is unexpectedly pulled off course forcing them to crash land on a lost planet.
(20) REPEL BUYERS! Tabletop Tribe is not kidding — "The Worst Board Game Box Art Ever". Man, are these awful! Just look at #19 —
Guildhall (2012?—?Alderac Entertainment Group)
"Meet the wife. I luv 'er more than any pig, and that's sayin' summat."
Indeed sir. For a pig farmer you appear to be punching way above your weight.
It's not that the characters are badly rendered (although it does appear that it's simply photo overpainting at work here), or the inconsistent lighting and flat boring background. It's just a bizarre motley collection and a piglet with a nose four sizes too big.
[Thanks to Joel Zakem, JJ, Mix Mat, Cat Eldridge, Carl Slaughter, John King Tarpinian, ULTRAGOTHA, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Mark Hepworth, Patrick McGuire, Hampus Eckerman, Michael J. Walsh, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bruce Diamond.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll | Tagged Ada Palmer, Amazon, Black Panther, Damien G. Walter, Doctor Who, Emma Watson, Iain M. Banks, Jeff VanderMeer, John Hertz, John King Tarpinian, Lee A. Harris, Lord of the Rings, Lost in Space, Netflix, Nnedi Okorafor, Quantum Leap, Tank Girl, Titan Comics, ULTRAGOTHA, William Shatner
Pixel Scroll 12/11/17 You Ain't Pixelin' Dixie!
Posted on December 11, 2017 by Mike Glyer
(1) DEFENDANTS COMMENT ON COMIC CON VERDICT. Bryan Brandenburg has this to say about the verdict in the SDCC v, SLCC lawsuit.
I woke up this morning facing a bright new future. The weight of the world has been lifted from Dan [Farr]'s and my shoulders. We have successfully cleared our names and lifted the cloud of accusation that has been surrounding us for 3 1/2 years.
– We were accused of stealing and hijacking. The jury said we were NOT GUILTY of this. There was no willful infringement.
– We were accused of trying to associate our convention with the San Diego convention. The jury said that we were NOT GUILTY of this. They found no evidence of false designation of origin.
– We were accused of causing $12,000,000 damage to the SDCC brand. They said we were the very worst offender. The jury found no evidence of damage. They awarded San Diego $20,000 in damages, less than .2% of what they asked for sending a clear message that we didn't hurt the San Diego brand and this is what will be paid out for the worst of the 140 comic cons.
– We were accused of infringing San Diego's trademarks, along with 140 other "infringers"…other conventions that call themselves "comic con". The jury said that we were guilty. San Diego said, "They're all infringers, that we and 140 other conventions that use the term comic con were guilty." So for now they have 3 valid trademarks. We think that they will still lose "comic-con". We're proud to be lumped in with some of the finest comic cons in the country.
Dan and I have no regrets about standing up for ourselves when we took action after receiving a cease and desist. In hindsight, we would not have taken the car down to San Diego. For that we apologize to San Diego Comic Con. They are a great event with great people.
This process helped me realize once again that we truly have the best fans in the world. You have been there for us and it was comforting to have so many pulling for us. We are glad that we were able to clear our names at a minimum. But there are a lot of things moving in the background which I cannot talk about. All good things.
We own the trademark for FanX. There are over 140 comic cons and one FanX. That's not a booby prize. If we needed to drop comic con from the name and just be FanX we have a trademark for that and a lot of positive brand awareness. Almost all the hundreds of thousands of people that have attended our events are familiar with that brand and name.
We're not sure exactly how things will play out. We may change our name. We may appeal. But one thing is for certain. 2018 will be our best year yet….
(2) NEW LOGO. Bubonicon 50 takes place August 24-26, 2018 in Albuquerque, NM with Guests of Honor John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal, Toastmaster Lee Moyer, and Guest Artist Eric Velhagen. Bubonicon 49 Toastmaster Ursula Vernon has created a special logo:
(3) THE CUTTING ROOM. I was very interested to learn How Star Wars was saved in the edit – speaking here about the original movie.
A video essay exploring how Star Wars' editors recut and rearranged Star Wars: A New Hope to create the cinematic classic it became.
(4) EXPAND YOUR MASHUP WARDROBE. Still gift shopping? A lot of places online will be happy to sell you the shirt off their backs!
(5) LONG LIST ANTHOLOGY IS OUT. David Steffen announced the release of the Long List Anthology Volume 3, available as an ebook from Amazon and Kobo, in print from Amazon. He said more ebook vendors are in the works, including Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and others.
This is the third annual edition of the Long List Anthology. Every year, supporting members of WorldCon nominate their favorite stories first published during the previous year to determine the top five in each category for the final Hugo Award ballot. This is an anthology collecting more of the stories from that nomination list to get them to more readers
There are 20 stories in the volume – see the complete list at the link.
(6) BEYOND PATREON. Here's the hybrid approach that The Digital Antiquarian will take in the aftermath of Patreon's problems.
I'll be rolling out a new pledging system for this site next week. Built on a platform called Memberful, it will let you pledge your support right from the site, without Patreon or anyone else inserting themselves into the conversation. The folks from Memberful have been great to communicate with, and I'm really excited about how this is shaping up. I think it's going to be a great system that will work really well for many or most of you.
That said, my feeling after much vacillation over the last several days is that I won't abandon Patreon either. Some of you doubtless would prefer to stay with them, for perfectly valid reasons: for high pledge amounts, the new fee schedule is much less onerous; some of you really like the ability to pledge per-article rather than on a monthly basis, which is something no other solution I've found — including Memberful — can quite duplicate; some of you really want to keep all of your pledges to creators integrated on the same site; etc. And of course it's possible that Patreon will still do something to mitigate the enormous damage they did to their brand last week. At the risk of introducing a bit more complication, then, I think the best approach is just to clearly explain the pros and cons of the two options and leave the choice in your hands
(7) VIRTUAL BEST OF YEAR – FANTASY EDITION. Jason, at Featured Futures, has completed the set by posting his picks for the Web's Best Fantasy #1 (2017 Stories).
As with Web's Best Science Fiction, Web's Best Fantasy is a 70,000 word "virtual anthology" selected from the fifteen webzines I've covered throughout the year, with the contents selected solely for their quality, allowing that some consideration is paid to having variety in the reading experience. The contents were sequenced as best I could with the same concern in mind.
(8) RATIFYING STURGEON'S LAW. Fanac.org has added "Lunacon 15 (1972) – Theodore Sturgeon Guest of Honor speech" to its YouTube channel, a 38-minute audiotape, enhanced with numerous images and photos (including two taken by Andrew Porter.)
Isaac Asimov introduces Theodore Sturgeon's Guest of Honor speech at the 1972 Lunacon. There are corny puns and jokes from both of them, but primarily the talk is a serious, constructive discussion of Sturgeon's "best beloved field", and a defense against those that would marginalize and dismiss it. There are a few poignant minutes at the end about the (1972) US government amassing citizens' private data, without any ability to challenge it. More than 40 years later, it's still important, and worth listening.
(9) TODAY'S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. Andrew Porter draws our attention to the fact that the German film Münchhausen came out in 1943. As he sees it, "We could have a Nazi film under consideration for a retro-Hugo!"
The complete film is available on YouTube, with English subtitles.
(10) BILLINGS OBIT. Harold Billings (1931-2017), librarian, scholar, and author, died November 29. (The complete Austin American-Statesman obituary is here.)
He spent fifty years at the University of Texas general libraries, rising from cataloger to Director of General Libraries, a position he held for the last twenty-five years of his career. … Harold also edited and wrote extensively about authors Edward Dahlberg and M. P. Shiel. Reflecting a long time interest in Arthur Conan Doyle, in 2006 he received the Morley-Montgomery award for his essay The Materia Medica of Sherlock Holmes. In recent years, Harold had turned to supernatural literary fiction, authoring such stories as "A Dead Church", "The Monk's Bible", and "The Daughters of Lilith".
(11) TODAY'S BIRTHDAY GIRL
Born December 11, 1922 — Maila Nurmi. (Vampira)
(12) HEROIC EFFORT. Reportedly, "New research finds that kids aged 4-6 perform better during boring tasks when dressed as Batman". Hampus Eckerman says, "I'm sure this works for adults too."
In other words, the more the child could distance him or herself from the temptation, the better the focus. "Children who were asked to reflect on the task as if they were another person were less likely to indulge in immediate gratification and more likely to work toward a relatively long-term goal," the authors wrote in the study called "The "Batman Effect": Improving Perseverance in Young Children," published in Child Development.
(13) WITH ADDED SEASONING. Star Trek: The Jingle Generation.
Darmok and Jalad at the North Pole.
Rudolph, his teeth bared, his nose red!
Santa, when the walls fell.
— Michael G. Munz (@TheWriteMunz) December 9, 2017
(14) THAT FIGURES. This must be like Rule 34, only it's Rule 1138: If it exists, something Star Wars has been made out of it. "Funko POP! Star Wars Trash Compactor Escape (Luke & Leia) Exclusive Vinyl Figure 2-Pack [Movie Moments]".
(15) MORE MYCROFT. SFFWorld's Mark Yon reviews "The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer".
Probably the thing I like the most about The Will to Battle is that we get to know in much more depth the inner workings of the political aspects of the world that Palmer has imagined. We learn much more about things that we have only seen mentioned before (the set-set riots or the difference between Blacklaws, Greylaws and Whitelaws, for instance) and we even witness a trial, a meeting of the Senate and the Olympic Games. I really enjoyed discovering how the author had planned with incredible care every little aspect and finding out that little details that seemed to be arbitrary are, in fact, of crucial importance.
(16) YOUNG UNIVERSE. Linked to this news before, but the Washington Post's account is more colorful: "Scientists just found the oldest known black hole, and it's a monster"
That hope is what drove Bañados, an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in California, to the Chilean mountaintop in March. It was not entirely clear whether he'd be able to find a quasar so far away. Supermassive black holes swallow up huge amounts of matter, squeezing the equivalent mass of several hundred thousand suns into a space so small that gravity wraps around it like an invisibility cloak and causes it to vanish. An object like that needs a long time to grow and more matter than might have been available in the young universe.
But the object Bañados and his colleagues discovered, called ULAS J1342+0928, was even bigger than they'd bargained for — suggesting that something might have made black holes grow more quickly. Scientists don't yet know the underlying reasons for such rapid growth, or whether still older black holes are waiting to be found.
"This is what we are trying to push forward." Bañados said. "At some point these shouldn't exist. When is that point? We still don't know."
In a companion paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the scientists report another odd finding: The galaxy where ULAS J1342+0928 dwells was generating new stars "like crazy," Bañados said. Objects the size of our sun were emerging 100 times as frequently as they do in our own galaxy today.
"To build stars you need dust," Bañados said. "But it's really hard to form all this dust in such little time on cosmic scales — that requires some generations of supernovae to explode."
During the universe's toddler years, there hadn't been time for several rounds of stars living and dying. So where were the ingredients for all these new stars coming from?
(17) THE RISKS OF TALKING TO THE COPS. I saw Ken White's "Everybody Lies: FBI Edition" for Popehat linked by a FB friend and found it riveting. While it's focused on criminal law, a lot of this advice is still good even if you're only talking to someone about your taxes.
Dumbass, you don't even know if you're lying or not. When an FBI agent is interviewing you, assume that that agent is exquisitely prepared. They probably already have proof about the answer of half the questions they're going to ask you. They have the receipts. They've listened to the tapes. They've read the emails. Recently. You, on the other hand, haven't thought about Oh Yeah That Thing for months or years, and you routinely forget birthdays and names and whether you had a doctor's appointment today and so forth. So, if you go in with "I'll just tell the truth," you're going to start answering questions based on your cold-memory unrefreshed holistic general concept of the subject, like an impressionistic painting by a dim third-grader. Will you say "I really don't remember" or "I would have to look at the emails" or "I'm not sure"? That would be smart. But we've established you're not smart, because you've set out to tell the truth to the FBI. You're dumb. So you're going to answer questions incorrectly, through bad memory. Sometimes you're going to go off on long detours and frolics based on entirely incorrect memories. You're going to be incorrect about things you wouldn't lie about if you remembered them. If you realize you got something wrong or that you may not be remembering right, you're going to get flustered, because it's the FBI, and remember even worse. But the FBI would never prosecute you for a false statement that was the result of a failed memory, right? Oh, my sweet country mouse. If you had talked to a lawyer first, that lawyer would have grilled you mercilessly for hours, helped you search for every potentially relevant document, reviewed every communication, inquired into every scenario, and dragged reliable memory kicking and screaming out the quicksand of your psyche.
(18) MRS. PEEL IS NO RELATION. Bananaman: The Musical is on stage at the Southwark Playhouse in the UK through January 20.
Bananaman is one of the flagship characters in the world's longest running comic, The Beano. He was also the subject of the hugely popular TV cartoon that ran on the BBC during the 1980s. With a useless hero and some equally clueless villains, Bananaman's riotously funny, slapstick humour has been sealed into the memories of those who saw him first, and will now spark the imagination of a new bunch of Bananafans.
In "A Call To Action" Marc Pickering is playing Bananaman's nemesis Doctor Gloom. The song comes in the first half when Doctor Gloom is planning ways in which to deal with Bananaman who is thwarting his plans for world domination!!
(19) FIXED THAT FOR YOU. Damien Broderick says "A strange and terrible thing happened" with his book, now available in a modified 2018 version — Starlight Interviews: Conversations with a Science Fiction writer by Damien Broderick.
The first printing, also from Ramble House affiliate Surinam Turtle Press (owned by Dick Lupoff) turned out to have a botched variant of Russell Blackford's chapter. My fault, I freely confess it! I only learned of this goof after I gave Russell his copy at the recent World Fantasy con in San Antonio.
Russell and I delved into the dark heart of several hard drives and managed to recompile his intended text. With the help of Chum Gavin, a repaired version of the book has now appeared on Amazon (although their website announcement has retained a mistaken pub date from earlier this year). If any Chum purchased a copy of the botched version, do let me know and I will hastily dispatch a Word doc of RB's True Chapter. For those very few Chums who somehow forgot to rush their order for the book to Amazon, now is your near-Xmas chance to make good that lapse!
(20) OUTSIDE THE STORY. K. C. Alexander describes a variation on the classic writer's advice in "Don't Show, Don't Tell" at Fantasy-Faction.
You're probably familiar with Welcome to Night Vale, so you'll recognize the Night Vale Presents line in this incredible and fascinating podcast. The key difference, however, is this one presents more of a focused story, all delivered from a single point of view—Keisha; a truck driver (narrated by the matchless Jasika Nicole) searching for her dead wife. Named, naturally, Alice. (One other POV appears later in season, which I will not spoil here, but it is eerie af.) This is a creeping, haunting, sometimes lonely story about a heartbroken woman struggling with a mental illness—namely, a panic/anxiety disorder, and the paranoia and fear that comes with. After the death of her wife, an experience she was not there to witness, our fearful protagonist hires on with a long-haul trucking service to find answers.
Her story is narrated through snatches of narrative delivered on CB radio.
So what makes this podcast the keystone for "don't show, don't tell?"
It's the outside stuff we never see. What's going on outside her narration, what the people outside of our view are doing and why they are doing it. The ripples "shown" in Fink's writing remain so subtle that you may not hear them, understand them, until your second or third listen. They are small ripples, hardly noticeable in black water, bringing with them an expertly woven sense of dread. But why? From where?
We don't know.
(21) THE CLASSICS. The comments are fun, too. (If you need the reference explained like I did – clicketh here.)
And ye maye aske yowerself, 'How do Ich werke thys?'
And ye maye aske yowerself, 'Wher ys that large destrier?'
And ye maye tell yowerself, 'Thys nys nat my fayre castel!'
And ye maye tell yowerself, 'Thys nys nat my swift goshawk!'
— Chaucer Doth Tweet (@LeVostreGC) December 10, 2017
(22) NETFLIX TRAILERS. New seasons for two genre shows on Netflix.
Sense8 — Finale Special First Look
Marvel's Jessica Jones: She's Back
Just don't get in her way. Marvel's Jessica Jones Season 2 coming March 8, only on Netflix.
(23) BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS. Marcus Errico, in "The secret history of 'Christmas in the Stars,' the bonkers 'Star Wars' holiday album co-starring Jon Bon Jovi" on Yahoo! Entertainment, discusses the super-cheesy and super-obscure Star Wars Christmas album that came out in 1980.
Unlike his previous cover-heavy albums, Meco started from scratch with the music. He and Bongiovi needed Star Wars-themed Christmas songs and they needed them fast, but they weren't having much luck with the songwriters they approached. Enter a struggling composer named Maury Yeston, who was trying to put together the musical that would become Nine and could use some extra cash. "I met with Meco and I said, 'Look, this may sound ridiculous to you, but if you want to do a Star Wars Christmas album you have to have a story," Yeston told the CBC. "This is obviously Christmas in the world of Star Wars, which means this is in a galaxy far, far away, thousands of years ago. It's not now. So call it Christmas in the Stars." Meco was sold on the idea of the album having a through-line and recruited Yeston.
Yeston, who would go on to win a Tony Award for Nine and eventually write the smash Broadway musicals Titanic and Grand Hotel, cranked out nearly 20 Yule-appropriate tunes, nine of which made the final lineup. "The Meaning of Christmas," minus Yoda, was radically retooled from the original version because Lucas didn't want any of the traditional, religious-themed lyrics to be associated with the Force. It established the story of the album, set in a factory where droids make gifts for one "S. Claus."
[Thanks to JJ, Dave Doering, John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Ed Fortune, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll | Tagged Ada Palmer, black holes, Bryan Brandenburg, Bubonicon, Damien Broderick, Dan Farr, David Steffen, Digital Antiquarian, Doctor Who, Fanac.org, Featured Futures, Isaac Asimov, Jason, Jessica Jones, K. C. Alexander, Ken White, Lunacon, Mark Yon, Netflix, Patreon, Russell Blackford, Salt Lake Comic Con, San Diego Comic-Con, Sense8, Star Wars, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula Vernon
Pixel Scroll 8/18/17 And Though She Thought Mike Knew The Answer, Well He Knew But He Would Not Say
(1) THIS JOB IS NOT THAT EASY! Nicholas Whyte is back with "The Adminstrator's Worldcon – part 2 of my 2017 Hugo memories".
I almost didn't make it to Worldcon 75. My taxi was 15 minutes late picking me up from home, and then encountered serious traffic en route to Zaventem airport. I was far too late to check my bag and brought it through security, where I almost came unstuck because of the Official Hugo Glue, which Dave McCarty had given me at Smofcon in December and I now needed to give back to him. (In fact we did not need it, as the artist who created the bases had engraved the winners' plaques and attached them to the bases herself.) Five different security officials inspected the Official Hugo Glue Gun (which fortunately in Dutch is not a gun but a "lijmapparaat", glue machine) before I was allowed to go on my way. The captain of my plane then scolded me, entirely fairly, for bringing "hand luggage" which was, in his words, "way too big". But he did not throw me off, and I arrived in Helsinki.
Whyte includes a clear photo of the Hugo base by itself:
(2) ALL'S WELL. Yesterday's Scroll quoted Renay's tweets about the dismaying condition of Lady Business' Hugo when it arrived. She told File 770 the problems were quickly resolved:
It turns out it was melted glue from where the felt was attached to the base (it's hot here in Arkansas!). It's been cleaned off with no problems and we're looking into the proper type of glue to reattach the felt so disaster averted!! The bolt and washer were missing, too, but we're going to pick a replacement up tomorrow. Nicholas Whyte from the Hugo team was super responsive. I'm also impressed everything arrived so fast. Those Worldcon 75 volunteers are ON IT.
(3) HUGO WINNER. The speech Ada Palmer was too overwhelmed to read at the Hugos is posted at her blog: "Campbell Award & Invisible Disability".
Thank you very much. I have a speech here but I actually can't see it. I can think of no higher honor than having a welcome like this to this community. This… we all work so hard on other worlds, on creating them, on reading them, and discussing them, and while we do so we're also working equally hard on this world and making it the best world we possibly can. I have a list with me of people to thank, but I can't read it. These tears are three quarters joy, but one quarter pain. This speech wasn't supposed to be about invisible disability, but I'm afraid it really has to be now. I have been living with invisible disability for many years and… and there are very cruel people in the world for which reason I have been for more than ten years not public about this, and I'm terrified to be at this point, but at this point I have to. I also know that there are many many more kind and warm and wonderful people in this world who are part of the team and being excellent people, so, if anyone out there is living with disability or loves someone who has, please never let that make you give up doing what you want or working towards making life more good or making the world a more fabulous place.
(4) CONREPORT. Cora Buhlert shares her Worldcon experience in a short video, Cora's Adventures at WorldCon 75 in Helsinki. Includes a shot of one of the File 770 meetups.
(5) CURBED ENTHUSIASM. Mark Ciocco weighs in on "Hugo Awards 2017: The Results".
The 2017 Hugo Awards were announced on Friday, so it's time for the requisite whining/celebration that peppers the steak of our blogging diet (that's how food works, right?) Um, anyway, despite my formal participation in the awards process roughly coinciding with the Sad/Rabid Puppy era/debacle, this marks the fourth year wherein I've contributed to the results. This year's awards were less directly impacted by those meddlesome puppies, but I feel like we're still suffering through an indirect backlash and overcorrection. This isn't exactly new, so let's just get on with it. (For those who really want to geek out and see how instant-runoff voting works, the detailed final and nominating ballots are available.)
The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin takes the rocket for Best Novel, making Jemisin just the third author to have back-to-back wins in this category (joining the ranks of Orson Scott Card and Lois McMaster Bujold). She's a good author, but damn, these books are not for me. Both were at the bottom of my ballot and while I can see why her novel won last year, this one is a little more baffling. It appears to have been a close race though, with All the Birds in the Sky only narrowly missing the win. I regret not putting it higher on my ballot, as it's the only non-series finalist, and that's something that's becoming more and more of an issue… My preferred Ninefox Gambit came in third in the voting, which wound up being a theme for my first ranked works this year….
(6) PHOTO FINISH. Amal El-Mohtar coincidentally provides another clear photo of the Hugo base.
I didn't realize winning a Hugo required passing a skill-testing trial first! pic.twitter.com/mBx9UiRGfh
— Amal El-Mohtar (@tithenai) August 18, 2017
(7) WHAT THEATRICAL GENIUSES ARE READING. Broadway World delivers "Your 2017 Summer Reading List Courtesy of Lin-Manuel Miranda", which includes a few genre works:
I read so much on vacation. This is everything I liked. I MISSED YOU!
See you next week. pic.twitter.com/HjpLSmSSR9
— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) August 11, 2017
(8) WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE ARE READING. At Young People Read Old SFF, James Davis Nicoll has sicced the panel on "By the Waters of Babylon". (Wow – I first read that in a junior high school textbook, when I was a Young People myself!)
The second story in Phase II of Young People Read Old SFF is Stephen Vincent Benét's 1937's"By The Waters of Babylon". He's more obscure than he once was now—dying at age 44 didn't help him stay in the spotlight—but you may have encountered his The Devil and Daniel Webster or Benét's upbeat toe-tapper, Nightmare, with Angels, quoted in part in John Brunner's disco-era The Jagged Orbit…
(9) ROWELL REUNITES RUNAWAYS. Marvel is bringing back Nico, Karolina, Molly, Chase, Old Lace and even Gert.
This fall, best-selling YA writer Rainbow Rowell (Carry On, Eleanor and Park), superstar artist Kris Anka (All-New X-Men, Star-Lord) and Eisner-winning colorist Matt Wilson (The Mighty Thor, Black Widow) team up to bring the universe's pluckiest team of super heroes back to where they belong: in the pages of a Marvel comic book.
"As a Runaways fan, it's been such a thrill for me to see these characters together again," said writer Rainbow Rowell. "I can't wait to let everyone else into the party."
"For years I batted other editors and creators back from the Runaways," said Executive Editor Nick Lowe. "I was the last Editor to edit them and they are precious to me, so I didn't want just ANYBODY to bring them back. So when my new favorite writer (Rainbow's Eleanor & Park slayed me in the best way) said they were her favorites, I knew I had half of the lightning I needed. Kris [Anka] was the other missing link for the PERFECT RUNAWAYS creative team and I'm so excited to share them with the world!"
(10) NO CAPTAIN SULU. Mr. Sci-Fi, Marc Scott Zicree, talks about an unproduced Trek series:
Star Trek and Deep Space Nine writer Marc Scott Zicree shares the entire Captain Sulu Star Trek pilot he and Emmy winner Michael Reaves wrote, and shares the untold story of why you never got to see that series — despite its Hugo and Nebula Award nominations!
August 18, 1947 – Hewlett-Packard Co. is incorporated, nine years after William Hewlett and David Packard sold their first oscillators from a garage in Palo Alto, where they had set up shop with $538 in capital. Moving from oscillators, the first of which they sold to Disney for the movie Fantasia, the Stanford graduates built one of the world's largest electronics companies
August 18, 2001 — Stacy: Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombies premieres in Japan.
Born August 18, 1925 – Brian Aldiss
COMICS SECTION. John King Tarpinian approves of the monkey business on Brevity.
(13) INFRINGEMENT SUIT. In January the Arthur C. Clarke estate, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster joined with the estates of Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac to sue Frederik Colting, Melissa Medina, and their publishing firm, Moppet Books, charging copyright infringement. They charged that KinderGuides seek "to capitalize on the [classic] Novels' enduring fame and popularity," describing the titles as "a transparent attempt to recast their unauthorized derivatives as 'study guides' intended for the elementary school set."
Publishers Weekly has a progress report on the litigation in "Still No Opinion, but Judge's Order Bans Distribution of 'Infringing' KinderGuides".
Following a summary judgment ruling last month, a federal judge this week signed off on a permanent injunction immediately barring Moppet Books from distributing in the U.S. any versions of its KinderGuides series held to be infringing, until the works on which they are based enter the public domain. In addition, Moppet Books also agreed to destroy all current copies of the infringing works "in its possession or under its control" within 10 days.
Don't expect the shredders to fire up quite yet, however. While the ban on distribution is effective immediately, the injunction includes an automatic stay on the destruction of existing stock, pending the "final outcome" of the appeal process.
…On July 28, Judge Jed Rakoff issued a summary judgment for the plaintiffs, rejecting Moppet Books' claims that the works, created by founders Frederik Colting and Melissa Medina for the company's KinderGuides series, were protected by fair use. The ruling came just days after oral arguments were presented in the case, and without an accompanying memorandum by Rakoff explaining his decision, which the judge said would come "in due course."
…Meanwhile, despite the ongoing legal battle, Moppet Books is moving ahead with plans to launch a new line of books in October, including a collection of KinderGuides based on public domain works, and two original nonfiction works.
(14) WHAT'S THAT, ROCKY? The New York Times, in "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth", reports that new fossil discoveries show prehistoric "squirrels" glided through forests at least 160 million years ago.
In a study published on Wednesday, a team of paleontologists added some particularly fascinating new creatures to the Mesozoic Menagerie. These mammals did not lurk in the shadows of dinosaurs.
Instead, they glided far overhead, avoiding predatory dinosaurs on the ground — essentially flying squirrels of the Jurassic Period, from an extinct branch of mammals that probably still laid eggs.
(15) BRADBURY DRAMATIZED. Broadway World says a one-man Bradbury play will be part of a stage festival in New York next month.
Bill Oberst Jr. brings his award-winning solo performance, "Ray Bradbury's Pillar Of Fire," one of Bradbury's darkest tales, to Theatre Row on Sunday, Sept. 17 at 6:00pm. The NYC debut is part of the United Solo Theatre Festival.
"Ray Bradbury has something to say to us at this exact moment in time;" said Oberst, "that we are citizens of the cosmos first, that the way we imagine our future determines our future, and that the most dangerous minds are those which cannot imagine themselves to be wrong."
Oberst's one-act adaptation uses Ray Bradbury's poetic prose to tell the story of William Lantry, a 400-year-old corpse who rises from the grave in the year 2349 to find himself the last dead man on Earth. Filled with hatred for a future world where superstition, gothic literature and human burials are all banned, Lantry decides to create an army of the dead. Bradbury later called the novella "a rehearsal for Fahrenheit 451." He also famously said, "I don't predict the future, I try to prevent it."
(16) OLD HOME WEEK. Andrew Porter used to live in part of the historic Henry Siegel mansion, whose story was chronicled in the Daytonian in Manhattan blog yesterday.
…This is where I first published ALGOL, DEGLER! and then S.F. WEEKLY. It's where I lived while I worked on the 1967 Worldcon, NYCon 3. I had numerous fan gatherings there, and have photos of Ted White and Arnie Katz in my room. This block of East 82nd Street is also the direct approach to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose fabled entrance stairs are visible directly down at the end of the block.
He wrote a long, fascinating comment there, including this genre tidbit –
In later years, part of the basement housed a toy store accessed by a stairway from the bookstore above. The proprietor told me that some of the toy soldiers he sold came from the collection of Donald A. Wollheim, a well-known collector and once publisher of DAW Books. And one of the buyers was George R.R. Martin, whose "Game of Thrones" (HBO) is so popular.
…For many years there was also a bookstore. In early 2017, Crawford Doyle Booksellers, which claimed to be there for 21 years, closed. However, there'd been a bookstore there since at least the late 1950s. I know, because as a teenager, I had a job delivering Womrath Library rental books to posh apartments around the area.
(17) IN THE FLOW. The Hugo Award Book Club discusses John Scalzi's latest novel in "Review: The Collapsing Empire".
Given John Scalzi's track record, high profile, and vocal fan base, it seems likely that The Collapsing Empire will be given a fair amount of consideration on many 2018 Hugo nominators' lists.
Based on how fun this book is at times, that consideration is probably warranted. The novel is set in an interstellar empire tied together by limited faster-than-light traderoutes known as 'the Flow.' This empire — The Interdependency — has lasted for millennia because of the economic dependence of its member worlds to each other. The key protagonists are the new Empress of the Interdependency, and the son of a scientist on a distant world whose father has spent decades discovering that the flow is going to collapse. The overaching plot — which has some parallels to Asimov's Foundation— is expertly constructed and well-paced. Although the characters all seemed to speak with a similar voice, their motivations were clear, and the conflicts felt natural.
(18) THROWING SHADE. Solar-powered California prepares for the eclipse:
"We're doing a lot of coordination, a lot of preparation," says Deane Lyon, a manager at the California Independent System Operator (ISO), which manages about 80 percent of the state's electric grid. "It's probably the most work this company has done to prepare for a three-hour event in our history."
Solar power already comes with up and downs, in the form of clouds.
"So this was a particularly cloudy day," says Jan Klube of Enphase, pulling up a graph showing the solar output from one California home. The Petaluma-based company monitors rooftop solar systems around the country day in and day out.
To show how a single cloud can make a difference, he points to the afternoon hours, when the output dips by about a third. "You see the big drop, so there's a cloud coming and going," he explains. "That's why you see the zigzag."
If your solar panels are in the path of totality during the eclipse, "it will go all the way to zero," he says.
California isn't squarely in the path, but the moon's partial shadow will obscure 90 percent of the sun in the north, down to nearly 60 percent in the south. That's more than enough to cause some anxiety for the people who have to keep California's lights on.
(19) THE DARK SIDE. Scientists to study whether nature really goes crazy during an eclipse: "Will The Eclipse Make Crops And Animals Flip Out? Scientists Ask (Really)".
With the help of elementary school students, University of Missouri biology professor Candi Galen is putting out microphones near beehives, in gardens and in a pumpkin patch to record buzzing activity.
"I don't think it is really known the cues that bees use or don't use when they are foraging that tell them to jump ship and go back their hives or stay put," Galen says. "Bees depend upon the environment to regulate their temperature, and that may suggest that if indeed it does cool off a few degrees as the eclipse progresses, then they would get less active because they would be at a lower temperature physiologically."
Researchers are also working with nearby cattle ranchers and even fishermen to monitor fish activity, Reinbott says.
(20) DNA EDITING. An NPR report is allowed to go "Inside The Lab Where Scientists Are Editing DNA In Human Embryos".
Critics, however, pounced on the news. They fear editing DNA in human embryos is unsafe, unnecessary and could open the door to "designer babies" and possibly someday to genetically enhanced people who are considered superior by society.
As the debate raged last week, I asked Mitalipov if I could visit his lab to see the next round of his experiments. He wants to confirm his initial results and determine whether the method can be used to repair other mutations.
He agreed to a visit, and on Monday, I became the first journalist to see these scientists cross a line that, until recently, had been taboo.
Chip Hitchcock adds a historical note: "Readers of antique SF may remember Heinlein's elaborate description of deductive sorting of ova in Beyond This Horizon; another infodump bites the dust."
(21) PUNISHER. The Verge invites everyone to watch The Punisher teaser trailer:
The Defenders hits Netflix today, and with it comes a look at Marvel's upcoming show The Punisher. Frank Castle was introduced in season 2 of Daredevil. He's played by Jon Bernthal, who will reprise his role as the gun-toting Army vet out for revenge.
Various rips of the trailer are popping up all over YouTube…
(22) SAY HELLO. Amazon Prime video will stream The Tick on August 25.
From creator Ben Edlund comes the hero you've been waiting for. In a world where heroes and villains have existed for decades, a mild-mannered accountant named Arthur has his life turned upside down when he runs into a mysterious blue superhero, The Tick, who insists that Arthur become the brains to his brawn in a crime-fighting duo. Will Arthur resist the call of Destiny or join the fight?
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Hampus Eckerman, JJ, James Davis Nicoll, Karl-Johan Norén, Carl Slaughter, Chip Hitchcock, Andrew Porter, and Michael J. Walsh for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]
Posted in Pixel Scroll | Tagged Ada Palmer, Amal El-Mohtar, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchcock, Cora Buhlert, Hugo Award Book Club, Hugo Awards, James Davis Nicoll, John Scalzi, Lady Business, Marc Scott Zicree, Mark Ciocco, Marvel, Nicholas Whyte, Rainbow Rowell, Ray Bradbury, Renay, The Tick, Young People Read Old SF