(1) ALLOY ALLIES. The Guardian declares: “Bite my shiny metal ass! TV’s all-time top robots”.

Surprising no one, ranked right at the bottom is –

20. Twiki (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, 1979-1981)

Swashbuckling sci-fi hero Buck Rogers began life as a 1929 newspaper comic strip. By the time he got an NBC adaptation half a century later, starring square-jawed Gil Gerard, he was accompanied by cute robo-assistant Twiki. Played by Felix “Cousin Itt from the Addams Family” Silla and voiced by Looney Tunes favourite Mel Blanc, Twiki served drinks, said “Biddi-biddi-biddi!” and carried a Frisbee-sized sentient computer called Dr Theopolis around this neck. Because this is what the 25th century will look like, apparently.

(2) LOOTING THE GENRE. “Silicon Valley has a science fiction problem” says Ali Rıza Taşkale at Aeon. “Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future.”

… What makes the Foundation books so resonant is their emotional generosity toward ordinary people and ordinary institutions. Seldon’s ‘psychohistory’ works not because one man is brilliant but because it models the behaviour of millions of people making small, often anonymous choices in favour of knowledge and community. The heroes of the later novels are not visionaries but librarians, diplomats and civic administrators. Asimov’s vision of the far future is a defence of the mundane infrastructure of civilisation: the archive, the committee, the negotiated agreement.

Musk’s reading discards all of this. By 2024, he was explicit: ‘Becoming multiplanetary is critical to ensuring the long-term survival of humanity and all life as we know it.’ The framing recasts SpaceX’s ventures as civilisational imperative and immunises them from scrutiny – placing Musk in the role of Seldon, the lone visionary who sees what others cannot, so that questions about labour practices, environmental costs or whether Mars colonisation serves any public good become mere friction obstructing humanity’s survival. But the premises are contested on both scientific and moral grounds. On the science, the astrophysicists Arwen E Nicholson and Raphaëlle D Haywood argue in their Aeon Essay ‘There Is No Planet B’ (2023) that the proposed best-case scenario for terraforming Mars still leaves an atmosphere of concentrated CO₂ that humans cannot breathe, and that replicating the billions of years of co-evolution between Earth’s biosphere and its life, on any timescale relevant to human survival, is simply impossible.

As for Musk’s invocation of the Sun’s eventual expansion as long-term justification for his plans, Nicholson and Haywood are blunt: that is a problem for a billion years hence, and treating it as urgent while the climate crisis unfolds within the next 50 is simply absurd. On the ethics, Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel argue in their Aeon Essay ‘Whitey on Mars’ (2017) that Musk’s invocation of ‘humanity’ conceals a striking sleight of hand: his target population of 1 million Mars colonists would represent just 0.014 per cent of Earth’s current inhabitants. The ‘spillover’ justification – that space investment trickles down to benefit everyone – is trickle-down science: if the goal is to solve real problems, a research agenda aimed directly at those problems would be more effective than hoping Mars money overflows onto the needy. As the poet Gil Scott-Heron put it in 1970, some people have rats biting their sisters while ‘Whitey’s on the Moon’. The question Russell and Vinsel pose has not dated: shouldn’t we be ashamed for spending so much time and effort to put Whitey on Mars? Musk wants to be Hari Seldon, but without the Foundation that Seldon knew he needed to build.

Similarly, Jeff Bezos funds space-habitat projects inspired by Gerard K O’Neill’s book The High Frontier (1976). O’Neill’s vision was one of the most ambitious and humanistic in 20th-century speculative thought: massive rotating space colonies that would relieve Earth’s environmental pressures by moving industry off-planet, with settlement governed democratically and benefits distributed widely. O’Neill imagined these colonies as humanity’s next great collective project – a genuine expansion of the democratic frontier into space. Bezos’s reading, like all readings, is selective: he takes the engineering vision and the scale of ambition, and leaves behind the democratic governance and broadly shared benefit that gave O’Neill’s project its moral foundation…

…The vision is one of infinite growth, infinite resources. But like Musk’s Mars ambitions, Bezos’s space colonies reframe Earth’s environmental crises not as problems requiring collective action but as resource constraints to be solved by expansion. The sci-fi vision becomes an escape hatch from reality, funded by private wealth and governed by private interests. O’Neill imagined these colonies as humanity’s democratic future; Bezos offers them as Amazon’s next frontier….

…Peter Thiel – co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, among others – has spoken of science fiction as political blueprint. He references Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966): a lunar colony that rebels and establishes a libertarian society with minimal government. In a New York Times podcast with Ross Douthat in 2025, Thiel discussed his transhumanist views. When asked whether the human race as we currently know it should endure, he hesitated before answering ‘yes’.

But Heinlein’s novel deserves more than Thiel’s reading of it. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is not a libertarian pamphlet – it is a genuinely complex political novel about what revolution actually costs. Heinlein’s lunar colonists are not entrepreneurs: they are prisoners, deportees and their descendants, people with nothing to lose who have built a fragile community out of shared deprivation. The novel’s most memorable character is Mike, an artificial intelligence who becomes politically conscious through friendship with the human rebels – motivated not by efficiency or profit but by curiosity and the desire to belong. The revolution Heinlein imagines is messy, compromised and pyrrhic; the book ends not in triumph but in exhausted ambivalence about what has been won and lost. Heinlein was genuinely fascinated by the tension between individual freedom and the social bonds that make freedom possible and worth having. Thiel reads none of this.

Heinlein’s Moon is a penal colony – the libertarian society was built on transported prisoners’ labour. Silicon Valley’s selective reading is precise: take the anti-government aesthetics, and discard the economic foundation of coercion and exploitation. Heinlein’s Moon is a frontier utopia where rugged individualists thrive without bureaucratic interference. Silicon Valley absorbed this wholesale. The seasteading movement – building sovereign, floating city-states beyond governmental reach – channels the novel’s fantasy directly. Thiel launched it with a $500,000 investment, and at a 2009 conference declared that seasteading was not even a question of possibility or desirability – it was an absolute necessity….

… The central question isn’t whether science fiction will shape reality – that process is already underway. The question is: whose version will prevail?…

(3) WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENED? Episode 34 of Scott Edelman’s podcast Why Not Say What Happened is “My Most Memorable Captain Marvel Hate Mail”. (And here’s where multiple hosts can be found,)

While shredding nearly 10,000 pages of my accumulated papers, I made several discoveries worth sharing, including memorable hate mail I received while writing Captain Marvel, multiple reasons I’m unqualified to write my own autobiography, a job application at Comico, why I refused to meet editors until after I’d already sold them stories, my unsuccessful score on a DC Comics proofreading test, four rejected Tales from the Darkside pitches which didn’t end up published in Elvira’s House of Mystery, and more.

You can hear me borne back ceaselessly into the past via the link.

(4) NO MUPPETS IN THIS. John Coulthart describes “The Cube by Jim Henson”, a 1969 show for NBC’s Experiment in Television.

…The scenario is the kind of thing you’d be more likely to find in an animated film: an unnamed man (Richard Schaal) inside a room-sized cubic space which he’s unable to leave. Furniture and other objects appear then vanish; doors open in the walls from time to time, other people enter and leave but the man himself is always told his exit through the doors his visitors use is forbidden.…

(5) CARRIE ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN. “’Carrie’ TV series first look reveals Mike Flanagan’s modern twist” at Entertainment Weekly.

…By contrast, Carrie (premiering this fall on Prime Video) was something Amazon brought to Flanagan to launch their partnership. And with a new take that excited even King — an executive producer on the series — the showrunner assembled the “Flana-fam,” the nickname for his club of frequent collaborators, to bring the horror author’s it girl back to screens.

“The themes that Steve was talking about half a century ago of kindness versus cruelty, of empathy and bullying, and violence at school have become even more relevant today than he could have contemplated because of our relationship to technology and the degree to which violence encroaches on our high schoolers, especially in the United States,” Flanagan says. “So that meant we had an opportunity to tell a story about a modern teenage experience that could use the seeds of these characters King created 50 years ago, but express them completely differently.”

With a present-day setting, Summer H. Howell is our new Carrie White. She’s spent her life hidden away at home with her mother, Margaret (Flana-fam regular Samantha Sloyan). Not even the state knew the two existed until the sudden death of Carrie’s father, Ralph, forces a spotlight onto their household and prompts the teenager to enter public school for the very first time.

Flanagan’s fresh vision for these iconic characters couldn’t be more different than previous depictions. He describes Spacek’s performance as “a clenched fist who’s absolutely shaking out there in the world.” Meanwhile, the character that Howell plays is “wide open,” “eager,” “curious,” and “earnest,” he explains. “[She’s] walking into the forest of her teenagehood without any sense of danger and with an innate trust in people and in goodness.”…

(6) KILLER ROBOTS. The New York Times tells how “A Robot Army Remakes Ground Warfare in Ukraine”. (Behind a paywall.)

While flying drones have grabbed the world’s attention and rewritten the rules of combat, a quieter revolution is crawling along beneath them on the battlefield in Ukraine.

Battalions of ground robots — tracked and wheeled machines that deliver supplies, haul ammunition, evacuate the wounded, lay mines and, increasingly, hold land — now conduct thousands of missions every month. That has made them an indispensable tool for Ukrainian infantrymen who spend monthslong rotations in buried bunkers hiding from flying drones.

At the cutting edge, unmanned ground vehicles are doing what once seemed a generation away: assaulting and capturing enemy trenches. In April, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces had captured a Russian-held position using only land and aerial drones, without putting a single soldier on its own side in direct danger.

Ukraine is outrunning the world’s most advanced militaries, including Russia’s, in its development of ground robots. Leading the charge are not the software whizzes behind aerial drones, but welders and grease monkeys whose MacGyvered creations help with the grunt work of infantrymen.

“Drones developed faster because they were in the hands of highly creative I.T. people,” said Oleksiy Honcharuk, a former prime minister and board chairman of Uforce, a company that makes land drones. “Ground robotic systems were mostly in frontline infantry units where the work is heavier and more practical — more about figuring out how to bolt things together so they work.”

A desperate underdog, Ukraine has turned to ever more technical tricks to stay in the fight. Cheap 3-D-printed quadcopter drones now matter more than rifles at the front. Naval drones have driven Russia’s Black Sea fleet into port. Ukrainian drone interceptors proved so effective that some were sent to the Middle East to help down Iranian attackers…

(7) SAM NEILL (1947-2026). “’Jurassic Park’ star Sam Neill dies aged 78: Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern and Steven Spielberg pay tribute to ‘dream leading man’” at Yahoo!

…Neill’s most enduring role will likely be that of gruff paleontologist Dr Alan Grant in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park franchise.

Appearing alongside Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough in the initial 1993 blockbuster, Neill’s character is asked to travel to an island near Costa Rica where herds of cloned dinosaurs roam.

Billed as “an adventure 65 million years in the making,” the 1993 hit — based on Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel — was a box-office smash and pop-culture phenomenon, blending pioneering computer-generated imagery with life-size animatronics, scooping three Oscars in 1994 and spawning a series of sequels of varying success and critical acclaim.

Neill did not reprise his role in 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park II, but returned for the third movie in 2001 and Jurassic World: Dominion in 2022….

…Speaking in 2022, the actor said he “never liked living” in Los Angeles and had “zero interest” in show business, adding, “My true home is my farm in New Zealand. That’s where I am at my utmost peace, where I produce wine.”

“I’m not afraid to die,” Neill told the Guardian in 2023, “but it would annoy me. Because I’d really like another decade or two, you know?…

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

1974 – Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia 

Fifty-two years ago, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia was published. (Not on this day.) 

Though it is often considered the fifth book of the Hainish Cycle, Le Guin in multiple interviews and her writings has stated that there is no particular cycle or order for what she called the Ekumen novels. 

And yes, I can say having read it more than once and those readings being decades apart that the full title does really make sense. Later printings would just call it The Dispossessed. No idea why the change and if Le Guin said why. 

It was by published by Harper & Row that year with a stunning wraparound cover by Fred Winkowski. I found only two first editions to be had online, the first $1200, the other substantially more, but that was signed. 

Le Guin in the forward to Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One which includes The Dispossessed says “The Dispossessed started as a very bad short story, which I didn’t try to finish but couldn’t quite let go. There was a book in it, and I knew it, but the book had to wait for me to learn what I was writing about and how to write about it. I needed to understand my own passionate opposition to the war that we were, endlessly it seemed, waging in Vietnam, and endlessly protesting at home. If I had known then that my country would continue making aggressive wars for the rest of my life, I might have had less energy for protesting that one. But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak. So, when I realized that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be.” 

So let’s now go on to note that I discovered that the novel has a story set before it, “The Day Before the Revolution” and the character in that story, revolutionary Laia Asieo Odo, is a major presence in The Dispossessed. 

But that’s not really why I’m bringing the story to your attention. The story is included in the Library of America’s Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels & Stories which has a short essay on what she was feeling after writing the novel which you can read here “Story of the Week: The Day Before the Revolution”. And the story is here “The Day Before the Revolution”.

Now where was I? Ahh it’s 1974, the novel has come out. Among us, it was widely acclaimed, and the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation definitely was appreciative of this as her website lists them this way:

Winner of the 1974 Nebula Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Hugo Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Locus Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Jupiter Award for Best Novel

And yes, each link takes you to the proper Award site. Stellar webmasters whoever they are. Now interestingly, the Foundation doesn’t include the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. I wonder why.  It was also nominated for a John W. Campbell Memorial Award but didn’t win. 

As near as I can tell, it has never been out of print in the last fifty years with multiple hardcover, trade and paperback editions. ISFDB lists far too many editions to really make sense of its printing history, so I can’t say definitively. 

What I didn’t see is it ever got the small press, lavish edition treatment, but then I’m having a hard time remembering if any of her works did. Come on Filers, help me out here.  

In 2019, The Folio Society published a hardcover edition with illustrations by David Lupton and an introduction by Brian Attebery.  

Harper Perennial published a trade paper edition of the book with a new foreword by Karen Joy Fowler. 

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Dark Side of the Horse finished a work.
• Frank and Ernest see a bad sign.
• Mother Goose and Grimm get news from the doctor.
• Specktickles has its own take on a movie.
• Yaffle is highly specialized.

(10) KELLY THOMPSON Q&A. “Breaking the Mold: PW Talks with Kelly Thompson” at Publishers Weekly.

While she doesn’t do conventions, Kelly Thompson remains a perennial nominee at the Eisner Awards that are given out at San Diego Comic-Con every year. She’s nominated once again for Best Writer for Absolute Wonder Woman, one of the standouts of the megasuccessful Absolute line that helped DC dominate this year’s nominations….

Wonder Woman has had her ups and downs over the years. It sometimes has felt like comics creators don’t always know what to do with her, or which aspects of her character to focus on. One of the most fun things about Absolute Wonder Woman has been you leaning into her as a fantasy character. How did that approach, and the Absolute vibe overall, unlock new facets of her character?

DC really put their full force behind it and [Absolute Batman writer] Scott Snyder has been the greatest champion and leader, which has led to them bringing in creators who really had an idea for what they wanted to do. I can’t speak to everyone’s experience, but nobody got in my way. DC was like, “that’s the coolest thing we’ve ever seen. Let’s do that.” And once you feel like you’re being given that rope, you can also just really push the envelope and do some interesting stuff.

Diana in particular is often handcuffed. It’s much less true these days, but for a very long time, she was one of the only headlining female superhero characters that had name recognition and therefore always had a book. When you’re one of the only women, that means you have to represent all women and that’s hard to do. It can end up pigeonholing the character and feeling like you can’t do certain things with her, which becomes very limiting. It’s a limitation that you rarely see on a character like Batman who can do anything and be anything. So the new modern age of comics has helped Wonder Woman. The fantasy and magic you mentioned is just an incredibly rich vein of material to tap. It also fits very well with Diana, even her main version has a lot of that, but it’s also really useful in defining her among the Trinity. It pushes her into a more fantasy place and it lets Superman exist in a more sci-fi place, which really helps stake out territory and is great for everyone….

(11) THAT’S REALLY SUPER, SUPERGIRL. [Item by N.] YouTuber Princess Weekes was not a fan of the recent Supergirl film. As an alternative to all those “it’s bad because it’s woke” takes, she dissects it in her newest video: “Why Supergirl Didn’t Work”.

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