Tag Archives: Dragon Awards

Pixel Scroll 7/9/26 These Are The Pixels That Try Fen’s Scrolls

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(1) DEADLINE APPROACHING TO NOMINATE FOR DRAGON AWARDS. Nominations are being taken for the 2026 Dragon Awards until July 12.

(2) REVISITING THE CODOMINIUM. Mark Atwood says about Baen author Jerry Pournelle’s CoDominium stories – “The CoDominium Was a Warning, Not a Forecast”. Atwood writes “The CoDominium is a setting that got more legible after its geopolitics expired. That’s what happens when you’re diagnosing the disease and everyone else is arguing about the symptoms.”

Jerry Pournelle’s CoDominium stories land in Analog between 1971 and 1973, right as Nixon and Brezhnev are signing SALT I and the ABM treaty. The setting depicts a near-future where the United States and Soviet Union merge their militaries, carve up the world, and collude to suppress any technology that might destabilize the arrangement. Read at a glance, it looks like Pournelle bought the mid-century assumption that both superpowers were converging on the same managerial form. Galbraith’s technostructure with different flags.

He didn’t buy it. He weaponized it.

“Superpower condominium” was a live term of art in 1970s foreign policy. It’s what Peking and Gaullist Paris accused Washington and Moscow of building: a duopoly that carves up the world and colludes to keep everyone else down. Pournelle took the accusation literally and named his setting after it. That’s not agreement with convergence optimism. It’s taking the Chinese critique of détente and saying: yes, exactly, and here’s what it looks like fully ripened.

The intellectual lineage runs through James Burnham, not John Kenneth Galbraith. Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution argued the converging managerial form was coming regardless of ideology, and Burnham was a founding-generation anti-communist Cold Warrior. You could take managerial convergence seriously as a threat model while hating it. Pournelle, PhD in political science, protégé of Stefan Possony at the Hoover Institution, was squarely in that tradition. Notice what the CoDominium actually converges on: not shared values, but the shared class interest of two ruling elites who discover they fear their own populations, nationalist movements, and destabilizing technology more than they fear each other. The ideologies were always liturgical. The apparat is what’s real, and two apparats can do business.

The tell that it’s a nightmare and not a forecast is the technology suppression.

In the CoDominium future, Fleet intelligence assassinates physicists and buries research. This is the precise inversion of The Strategy of Technology, which Pournelle co-wrote with Possony and Francis X. Kane. That book argued technological momentum is the decisive weapon; freezing the competition is suicide-by-stability….

(3) HISTORY SHOWS AGAIN AND AGAIN. [Item by N.] The sequel to Minus One, Godzilla Minus Zero stomps into theaters on November 6.

(4) SIGN UP FOR PKDFEST2026. Registration for PKDFEST2026, The 4th International Philip K. Dick Festival, is open and free. August 20–23, 2026. Fullerton Marriott at California State University. Four days of panels, readings, world premieres, and the first-ever Pink Beam Awards.

(5) CREATIVE ARTS EMMY AWARDS. Animation Magazine lists “2026 Emmy Awards: All the Animation & VFX Nominees”.

…The 78th Emmy Awards, hosted by Emmy Award winner Mariska Hargitay, will air Monday, September 14 at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT from the Peacock Theater at L.A. LIVE., airing live coast-to-coast on NBC and streaming on Peacock. The Creative Arts Emmy Awards, which include Outstanding Animated Program and Outstanding Special Visual Effects categories, will take place on Saturday, September 5, and Sunday, September 6….

Outstanding Animated Program

  • Bob’s Burgers – “Grand Pre Pre Pre Opening” (FOX / 20th Television Animation)
  • Rick and Morty – “There’s Something About Morty” (Adult Swim / Rick and Morty LLC, Williams Street)
  • The Simpsons – “Homer? A Cracker Bro?” (FOX / Gracie Films, 20th Television Animation)
  • Smiling Friends – “Le Voyage Incroyable de Monsieur Grenouille” (Adult Swim / Williams Street)
  • South Park – “Sermon on the Mount” (Comedy Central)
  • Star Wars: Visions – “Black” (Disney+ / Lucasfilm, David Production)

Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance

  • Pamela Adlon – Bobby Hill, King of the Hill
  • Julie Andrews – Lady Whistledown, Bridgerton
  • Hank Azaria – Gary Chalmers, The Simpsons
  • Trey Parker – Satan, South Park
  • Matt Vogel – Kermit the Frog, The Muppet Show
  • Steven Yeun – Mark Grayson/Invincible, Invincible

Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Season or a Movie

  • Alien: Earth (FX/Hulu)
  • Foundation (Apple TV+)
  • IT: Welcome to Derry (HBO Max)
  • Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (Apple TV+)
  • Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age (Apple TV+)
  • Stranger Things (Netflix)

Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Single Episode

  • Gen V – “New Year, New U” (Prime Video)
  • A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – “In the Name of the Mother” (HBO Max)
  • Paradise – “Exodus” (Hulu)
  • Spider-Noir – “Nightmare on a Gurney” (MGM+/Prime Video)
  • The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – “Costa da Morte” (AMC)

(6) KGB. Ellen Datlow has shared her photos from “Fantastic Fiction at KGB July 8, 2026” on Flickr.

Sam Rebelein read an excerpt from his chapbook and Victor Manibo read from his work in progress, a novel coming out in 2028. A large and enthusiastic audience!

(7) JY MEMORIES. Here’s a Jane Yolen tribute by her daughter Heidi Stemple: “Lessons from My Mother, Jane Yolen” at the School Library Journal.

…My brothers and I have always known we shared our mom with the world, and these last two weeks really brought that home. Years ago, she told me, instead of a headstone, when she died, she wanted a bench where people could sit and read. She wanted it to say, “She wrote many good books and one great one,” because, she said, she wanted everyone to pick their own favorite.

I may have laughed at the time, but in the online memorials since her death, I can see that this is, indeed, appropriate. Everyone has pointed to their own special Jane Yolen book—not just the classics. Yes, the “How Do Dino” books and Owl Moon, but also dragon books and Merlin books, long out-of-print picture books, nonfictions, and ones even I had forgotten about. It’s like she knew (of course she knew) that each reader connects with a book in their own way. An individual book may not be right for every reader, but with so many, six decades of readers have found their way to at least one of her stories. And made it their own.

She, by the way, will be getting a headstone and the bench.

What can I say that hasn’t already been written? My mom was so smart. She had a once-in-a-lifetime imagination. Everything became a story once she got ahold of it. She was a lifelong learner. Often, at conferences, she would attend sessions other authors were teaching. I never could get her to understand how nerve wracking it must be to have Jane Yolen in the front row of your workshop taking notes….

(8) IAN MAULE (1952-2026). British fan Ian Maule died July 8. Originally a member of the Gannets from Newcastle upon Tyne, he moved to London in the mid-1970s, and later to Surrey where he became a leading member of the Surrey Limpwrists group.

Maule edited the newzine Checkpoint from issue #63 to #73. He also published By British: A Fanthology of the Seventies (with Joseph Nicholas).

(9) GERRY CONWAY (1952-2026). The Comics Journal profiles “Gerry Conway, 1952-2026” who died April 26.

He grew up: that’s the important thing to remember. He had swaggered into the lecture hall in Bloomington that morning with the same confidence he swaggered into Marvel Comics two years earlier: with the assurance of a pro. Gerry Conway had come to Indiana in September 1972 to deliver a guest lecture at Indiana University’s first-of-its-kind “The Comic In Society” course (instigated at the school by future Swamp Thing and Batman film producer Michael Uslan). Conway was, to be sure, a high-profile get for the course’s lecture series: four months earlier, he had taken over from Stan Lee as scripter on Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man, the first writer to be permanently assigned to Marvel’s flagship title apart from Stan himself.

Still, it must be admitted, the article in the Herald-Times might have oversold him. “Gerry Conway, a New York City writer who created Spiderman [sic], Daredevil, Thor and the Hulk for Marvel Comics assured some 50 members of an Indiana University class Wednesday night they are not looney if they like comic books,” ran the lede, underneath the headline, “Spiderman Creator Says Comic Lovers Not Looney.”

But if Conway himself made no claims to displace Steve Ditko or Stan Lee, what he had to say that morning was just as ambitious as the headline implied. “We are not hacks,” he told the Indiana students. “We are professional writers and artists who have chosen, for a variety of reasons, to work in the comics.” …

… Oddly enough, the Hollywood caste system being what it is, Conway was seldom involved with movie and TV projects based on his own comic book creations — one of whom in particular had been growing up without him. In 1974, Conway, along with artist John Romita, had created the Punisher as a vigilante antihero in the model of Don Pendleton’s Executioner novels. The Punisher appeared initially as a recurring foil for Spider-Man, and in later years Conway would maintain that the character was imagined as a one-off villain, and certainly not a hero in his own right.

To be sure, this wasn’t entirely ingenuous. The Punisher as originally conceived wasn’t a moral paragon, but he wasn’t a villain either, and when the character showed enough success to warrant a spinoff stories in Marvel’s black-and-white magazines, Conway obliged by writing him with the kind of hard-bitten grittiness that had made Dirty Harry a hit at the box office.

But during the early 2000s, the Punisher took on a second life of his own, becoming a kind of mascot for the American far right: “American Sniper” Chris Kyle boasted of putting the Punisher’s skull logo on his unit’s gear during the Iraq War, and by the time Donald Trump was in office, the image and character had become a meme on military and police-centric kitsch. By 2025, Kash Patel was putting the logo on challenge coins handed out to agents at the FBI.

Conway, whose own politics by then skewed toward the left, wanted none of it. “It’s as offensive as putting a Confederate flag on a government building,” he said. In 2020, amid the wave of protests following the murder of George Floyd, he decided, vigilante-style, to take matters into his own hands, selling a line of shirts bearing the logo with all proceeds donated to Black Lives Matter. A few decades earlier, it might have been different. Roy Thomas recalled that in the early ‘80s, Conway was something of a “definite Reaganite, not unlike myself.” In a field not always known for the capacity of its creators to grow and change with the times, Conway was a model of graceful evolution….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 9, 1944 — Glen Cook, 82 

By Paul Weimer: Grimdark before Grimdark was a thing? Maybe. My first encounter with Glen Cook was not the series he is most famous for, which I will talk about shortly. And not his other major fantasy series, which I will also talk about.  Instead, I encountered Glen Cook somewhere in the early 1990’s with a book called Tower of Fear. A city under the uneasy rule of an oppressive occupation, a wizard sealed and lost in the titular tower, and a general simmering of a city ready to go over the edge, with the right spark. Think of it as a darker, more sword and sorcery version of Ilmar (City of Last Chances) and you will be in the right ballpark. I was on an S&S kick at the time, so I thought it was just excellent.

A few years later, I came across The Black Company.  This is the series that marks Glen Cook as possibly Grimdark before Grimdark was a thing. And also Sword and Sorcery. The premise of the sprawling series, for those who haven’t tried it, is that a mercenary company winds up getting caught in power struggles within and without an evil empire. They literally do work for the Dark Queen but that winds up getting more complicated than even they expect, when they meet the prophecy fueled White Rose, who is supposedly fated to take the Empire down. And oh yeah, the Queen’s ex, locked in a tomb, is looking to break out.  It’s a relatively low level look at what happens when a company has to deal with some very high level movers and shakers. The aforementioned Dark Queen has a number of lieutenants, the Taken, who squabble and scheme among themselves (and the poor Black Company caught in the crossfire) as much as actually fight their enemies. 

It’s a dark military fantasy, well written for those who like that sort of thing (it got reissued not too long ago as one of the Tor Essentials) The world of the Black Company is not a pleasant world, the Company gets chewed up a lot, and their advancement toward their goals can be slow at best. But they keep on keeping on, even as they often do dark things in the pursuit of their goals, their employers’ goals, or both. 

The other major series of Cook that I’ve read is the Garrett, PI books, inspired and suggested to me by a friend who loved them to pieces. Garrett (named for Randall Garrett the fantasy author) is a hard-boiled noir private detective, but in a fantasy city. The novels follow the titular character as he takes cases from the mostly demihuman population of Tunfaire, and follow a lot of the conventions of Noir fiction. Women in trouble, getting into tangles with the law and organized crime, betrayals, reversals, Garrett getting chewed up quite a bit, way in over his head but determined to see the job done. It’s a living. If you like fantasy and you like Noir/detective fiction, this is the series for you, no question. 

 And all of the Garrett books have a metal of some sort in the name (the first book is Sweet Silver Blues, the apparently last one (after a dozen!) was Wicked Bronze Ambition. Come to think, The Black Company was a pretty long lasting series, too. The man can certainly come up with idea after idea in his world, and make page turners in the progress.

Cook, prolific as he has been over a long career, has other fantasy novel series, as well but I’ve not picked any of them up. I’ve not really cottoned to his science fiction, it’s proven to be not for me, alas. 

Glen Cook

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) STATELY WAYNE MANOR FOR SALE. [Item by Daniel Dern.]   “Holy Mortgage Busters, Batman!” — “Wayne Manor From ‘Batman’ Could Be Yours For Just $32M” reports Deadline.

The estate that provided the exteriors for the 1960s Batman TV series is on the block — albeit with a Bruce Wayne-sized price tag.

The 18,000-foot Pasadena mansion is listed for a cool $32M. The home has 7 bedrooms, 3 full baths, 4 half baths and 4 three-quarter baths. Bruce Wayne, it seems, likes to bathe….

(13) ZEROES AND ONES ONLY. [Item by Steven French.] Keith Stuart reports on the latest Sony games debacle in this week’s “Pushing Buttons” newsletter: “PlayStation says it will stop making physical games – and that should worry us all” in the Guardian.

Sony’s decision last week to quietly announce the end of physical games production for the PlayStation in 2028 is one of the most perfect PR disasters in recent gaming history – and considering what has been happening with Xbox, that’s saying something.

First, there was the timing. Sony posted the news of its decision on the PlayStation blog, less than a week after admitting that it would be deleting 550 movies from the digital libraries of PlayStation owners due to the end of a licensing deal – thereby perfectly illustrating the dangers of purchasing digital products. (Surprise! You never actually owned them!) The move is in stark contrast with the company’s stance on this very issue back in 2013. When Microsoft was attempting to push Xbox One as a digital-first console with strict controls on the sharing and reselling of its games, Sony brilliantly mocked its rival with a short video on how easy it was to lend physical games to pals on the PS4. Oh dear.

If Sony thought the response to its decision would be meek compliance, it was wrong. TikTok and YouTube are buzzing with vociferous reaction videos by disgruntled gamers, while brands such as KFC, Domino’s and, for heaven’s sake, Dolorean have posted mock announcements to social media declaring their own intentions to go download-only. Satirical news site the Onion soon got in on the joke, with a story claiming popular US snack Twinkies would become exclusively digital. The response from Sony? Four days of total radio silence, because, well, what can they possibly say?…

(14) VERNE IN TRANSLATION AND ANNOTATED. Last week, Imagination Annotated published a new book, From the Earth to the Moon: Annotated for Our Spacefaring Age. Here are the details:

The Imagination, Annotated series presents compelling works of speculative fiction for new readers and contemporary concerns. Inspired by the MIT Press edition of Frankenstein, each volume is annotated by a diverse group of scientists, scholars, and other experts to illuminate the historical context and enduring questions that animate these visions of the future. By exploring speculations from the 19th and 20th centuries, the series invites readers into a continuing conversation about the kind of world we want to live in together.

The first new volume in the series is From the Earth to the Moon: Annotated for Our Spacefaring Age. Edited by literary scholar and historian Anastasia Klimchynskaya, the book presents Jules Verne’s influential 1865 novel in an acclaimed translation by Walter James Miller, with dozens of annotations and essays by contributors including astrophysicist Erika Nesvold, literature scholar Adam Roberts, space historians Asif A. Siddiqi and Jordan Bimm, and fiction authors Samit Basu, Malka Older, and Adam Oyebanji.

Verne is lauded for anticipating many modern-day technologies, including a moonshot launching from Florida with a trio of astronauts almost exactly a century before it happened. But Verne didn’t just dream up exciting gadgetry: he combined the scientific and literary, pondering the relationship between humans, science, and technology and considering the political, social, and ethical stakes of discovery and innovation.

Bridging the sciences and humanities, this edition of From the Earth to the Moon is designed for use in classrooms and reading groups, but also for science fiction fans and students and scholars of the genre. 

20% Discount
If you order the book directly from Penguin Random House, you can receive a 20% discount using the code READMIT20. The discount works only if you are shipping to an address in the United States. More details about the discount code are here.

(15) RIGHT HERE ON EARTH. Matthew Byrd found “10 Hard Sci-Fi Movies Not Set in Space” and listed them for Reactor readers.

Hard sci-fi movies are surprisingly rare beasts. As is the case with hard sci-fi video games, it’s a subgenre that has really exploded in popularity in recent years thanks largely to the release of a few tentpole projects. In the case of movies, The Martian and Interstellar most certainly helped kick off a new era of studios slowly realizing there is a sizeable (if sometimes simply vocal) audience for genre movies that feel a bit more scientific and a little less fantastical.

Interestingly, what few hard sci-fi movies we have largely take place in outer space. That’s understandable given that we are still talking about sci-fi movies, but the fact of the matter is that some of the most important and fascinating hard sci-fi films never leave our planet. These are movies that, at the very least, remind us that we have so much to learn about ourselves and our world before we ever start looking toward the stars. And though the classification of some of these movies as hard sci-fi may ruffle a few feathers (don’t such discussions always do so?), these films all show the fantastical possibilities of theories, processes, practices, experiments, and the logical pursuit of the meaning behind advancements and wonders. Above all, these movies are, rather appropriately, quite grounded….

Here’s one of them:

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

Considered to be one of the premier examples of relative scientific accuracy in a movie, Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain has lost little of its potency in the 55 years since its release. It’s an appropriate legacy for a movie that boasts this banger of a tagline:The picture runs 130 minutes…
The story covers 96 of the most critical hours in man’s history…
The suspense will last through your lifetime!

The Andromeda Strain begins in the aftermath of a catastrophic event that resulted in the death of all but two residents of a small New Mexico town. A group of scientists soon discover that the event was caused by the return of a satellite that has apparently brought back an unknown deadly substance. For a movie that mostly consists of older gentlemen examining ‘70s technology and discussing hypothetical possibilities, The Andromeda Strain is a true thriller. There is so much joy to be found in watching these incredibly capable scientists realistically breaking down a situation that is both fantastical (quite literally alien) and perhaps a little too close for comfort in modern times.

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

2026 Dragon Awards Nominations Open

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The Dragon Awards are accepting nominations for the 2026 award in the same 11 categories that made up last year’s ballot. The deadline to make nominations is July 12, 2026. 

I tested the site today and was informed my nomination had been accepted.

The Dragon Con Facebook page publicized earlier this week that they are taking nominations for the 2026 award.

Eligible works are those first released between 7/1/2025 and 6/30/2026.

The initial batch of final ballots will be released in early August 2026.

[Thanks to Ja for the story.]

Pixel Scroll 9/1/25 The Scroll That Launched A Thousand Pixels

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(1) DRAGON CON BOOTS AI ART DEALER. Complaints that a vendor was impermissibly dealing AI art at Dragon Con led to them be ejected from the convention under the eye of local police.

Pat Loika circulated these photos on Bluesky.  

Thecalebking has a walk-by video of the confrontation with security here on Threads.

Bleeding Cool’s story “Police Called On Artist Accused Of Selling A.I. Art At Dragon Con” identifies the subject as “A vendor exhibiting under the name Oriana Gerez at Dragon Con in Atlanta this weekend, at booth A10…”

Unexpectedly, a search of Dragon Con’s various pages addressed to artists and vendors does not reveal any policy addressing AI art. However, last year the Dragon Awards acknowledged they pulled Cedar Sanderson from the finalists over AI cover art, and convention co-chair Dave Cody gave this explanation to the affected publisher:

…We recognize the AI is a new tool with enormous potential and society will eventually come to a consensus about how it should be used and how much content can be can be created using AI while still crediting a human for the work, at which time, we will consider changing our policy. Until then, however, we want the Dragon Awards to offer a fans an opportunity to recognize the humans who create the works that fans love best…

Update 09/02/2025: The ban on AI artwork is in the artist/vendor contract, as is the consequence for violating it.

Artist Kelly McKernan took personally the idea that an AI artist had taken a Dragon Con space they felt entitled to.

Lauren Walsh feels the same way.

Artist Karen Hallion celebrated the ejection news story by creating this item.

(2) DRAGON AWARDS PRESS RELEASE. Dragon Con has put out this year’s press release about the Dragon Awards with the latest claim about voter participation. Compare this paragraph in the 2025 release with the comparable paragraph from 2024:

2025

Nearly 6,000 fans cast ballots for this year’s Dragon Award winners, selected from among 67 entries in 11 categories covering the full range of fiction, comics, television, movies, video gaming, and tabletop gaming.

2024

Approximately 7,000 fans cast ballots for this year’s Dragon Award winners, selected from among 67 properties in 11 categories covering the full range of fiction, comics, television, movies, video gaming, and tabletop gaming. 

A comparison of these two releases shows the number of voters declined, if the numbers can be depended upon.

But counting is not the forte of the person who writes these releases. Although 2025 did have 67 finalists, 2024 actually had 70 finalists (or 69, after the AI cover of Cedar Sanderson’s book was disqualified).

(3) DRAGON AWARDS ENDNOTE. Thanks to Camestros Felapton I now have the answer to “Who the heck is that?” which passed my lips when I saw who won the Dragon Award for SF Novel: “Dragon and on”.

Best Science Fiction Novel

  • This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman

Like most LitRPGs, this is a genre crossing story with a human protagonist fighting their way through fantasy-like dungeons created by aliens. This book seven in the sort of series that is very popular with the people who read it but not the sort of book people are casually picking up.

So not a surprise win as it’s a book series with a big fan base. The other finalists were solid picks but if they all had similar sized votes then I can see how this one won. This is also the kind of book that the Dragon Awards should be giving glass paperweights to. Popular books that otherwise don’t get awards.

Having said all that…this is book seven and it is the first time the series has been listed in any category at all in the Dragon Awards.

(4) TOP BOTS. Picked by Alison Flood: “From The Terminator to R2D2, the 25 best fictional robots – according to New Scientist”.

We write a lot about robots here at New Scientist – the latest cutting-edge developments, the newest technology. Fancy reading about a golf robot? A laundry robot? A kickboxing robot? A space robot? We’ve got you covered.

But we also have a great deal of fondness for them in fiction, whether that’s the super cute likes of WALL-E and BB-8, or the darker side of the robotic family, from the Terminator to Ava from Ex Machina.

Last month, Sierra Greer’s novel about the rebellion of a robot designed for intimacy, Annie Bot, won this year’s Arthur C Clarke award, the UK’s top prize for science fiction. It was described by judges as “a tightly-focused first person account of a robot designed to be the perfect companion who struggles to become free”. Greer’s win felt like the right moment to ask New Scientist staff to nominate their own favourite fictional robotic beings, from page or screen…

Most of them will be familiar to you. Maybe not this one:

Ron, Ron’s Gone Wrong (2021)

In a world where every teenager has a robot best friend called a B-bot, outcast Barney has to make do with a defective one – Ron – that fell off the back of a lorry.  The story of Ron’s wild and inappropriate behaviour in the 2021 animation Ron’s Gone Wrong is not only moving and funny, but surprisingly profound and I can’t understand why Ron isn’t better known.

Alison George

(5) SF BLINDNESS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This weekend BBC Radio 4 ran a half-hour documentary by its disability correspondent who happens himself to be blind.  He looks at blindness in science fiction and how it inspired blind folk

From Victorian novels to Hollywood blockbusters, sci-fi regularly returns to the theme of blindness.

Peter White, who was heavily influenced as a child by one of the classics, sets out to explore the impact of these explorations of sight on blind and visually impaired people.

He believes a scene in The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham imbued him with a strange confidence – and he considers the power of science fiction to present an alternative reality for blind readers precisely at a time when lockdown and social distancing has seen visually impaired people marginalised.

He talks to technology producer Dave Williams about Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge, Dr Sheri Wells-Jensen talks about Birdbox and world-building from a blind point of view in James L Cambias’s A Darkling Sea. Professor Hannah Thompson of Royal Holloway University of London takes us back to 1910 to consider The Blue Peril – a novel which in some ways is more forward thinking in its depiction of blindness than Hollywood now.

And Doctor Who actor Ellie Wallwork gives us her take on why blindness is so fascinating to the creators of science fiction.

You can download if for a month here or later access it from BBC Sounds.

(6) DISNEY SERVED COLD. “Disney Sued By Former Top Lawyer For Discrimination & Retaliation” reports Deadline.

Less than a year since Disney finally settled a pay inequity class action from female employees with a $43 million payout, the company now is facing similar claims in a new suit from one of its former top lawyers.

Let’s just put it plainly, when someone like Alisa Clairet, a 20-year veteran of the House of Mouse and an ex-temporary co-head of the Legal Affairs group at Disney Channel, accuses Disney of violating the Equity Pay Act, and lashing out with retaliation and discrimination, you know this is personal — very personal.

“From the beginning of her career with the Disney Channel at The Walt Disney Company in May 2005 through the end of her career at Disney in October 2024, Alisa Clairet was paid substantially less than her male counterpart – another lawyer with the same experience, qualifications and job duties as Ms. Clairet in the same legal affairs department,” the seven-claim August 15 filing in LA Superior Court states. “Not only was she paid less, she consistently did more work and had more responsibilities than her male counterpart,” the 12-page document goes on to say.

“When Ms. Clairet brought this inequality to Disney’s attention she was ignored.”

“Even after Disney was sued by a class of women alleging company-wide pay discrimination, Disney continued to ignore her,” asserts Clairet and her Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan lawyer Nathan M Smith. “Then, after announcing a settlement of the class action, Disney laid off Ms. Clairet as punishment for her efforts to secure equal pay and non-discrimination from Disney. This lawsuit follows to seek justice for decades of pay inequality and discrimination.”

Specifically, Clairet is going after Disney for violation of California’s Pay Equity Act, disparate treatment based on sex, retaliation in violation of the Golden State’s Pay Equity Act, retaliation in violation of California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act,  failure to pay wages due to discharged employees, violations of California’s Unfair Competition Act, and wage penalties.

It’s a lot.

Adding insult to injury, Clairet and her lawyer Smith notes of her September 24, 2024 so-called cost cutting pink slipping from Disney effective October 19 that her “male counterpart kept his job.”

The filing goes on to note: “Upon the termination date, Ms. Clairet received a severance payment pursuant to a written plan but was not asked to sign any release.” If truly the case, the latter may be what keeps this suit out of arbitration. The former, with that male colleague, could prove the spear of Disney’s destiny here. “if the reasons for the layoffs were due cost-cutting, and efficiencies as Ms. Clairet was explicitly told, then the higher paid and less effective male Principal Counsel should have been selected.”…

(7) ERBDOM. “Edgar Rice Burroughs: High Adventure Master Has a Lasting Literary Legacy” says National Review.

…Others may whine about Hollywood’s lack of originality, but I prefer to congratulate all involved for doing their job, which is to sell enough tickets to ensure a healthy return on shareholder investment. Filmmakers are free to play with ideas or pursue their passions, of course. But when you’re spending other people’s money, you’re obligated to try to earn it back — and then some.

That tales of daring heroes, fantastic creatures, and high adventure continue to draw big audiences would come as no surprise to the master of adventure himself, Edgar Rice Burroughs, born 150 years ago today in Chicago. “Entertainment is fiction’s purpose,” he once wrote, explaining that audiences might wish to be “frightened or thrilled or soothed” but never “to be instructed.”

Although his Tarzan remains one of the best-known characters in the world, Burroughs wrote many other popular stories of adventure set in every corner of the globe, far beneath its surface, and on the moon, Mars, Venus, and other planets. Many of his books remain in print today — and their influence extends even further….

… Edgar Rice Burroughs didn’t just inspire. He innovated. One of the first authors to incorporate and take an active role in his own publishing and licensing ventures, Burroughs also pioneered the plot device of heroic crossovers within a shared universe. One of his inner-world novels, Tanar of Pellucidar, begins with an inventor named Jason Gridley showing his latest radio set to Burroughs himself. Gridley tries to contact John Carter on Mars but picks up a distress call from Pellucidar, an underground realm whose hero, David Innes, has been captured. The next novel in the series has Gridley leading an African safari to recruit Tarzan for a rescue party into the inner world….

(8) NE ZHA II REVIEW: From The Atlantic: “Why a Chinese Animated Film Has Made More Money Than Any Star Wars Sequel”. (Behind a paywall.)

Like its mischievous demigod protagonist, the Chinese animated fantasy film Ne Zha II has been a practically unstoppable force. Since its initial release in China, over Lunar New Year, the blockbuster has earned more than $2 billion worldwide. It’s now the highest-grossing film of 2025, the highest-grossing animated film of all time, and the highest-grossing non-English-language film in history.

The film has also been a magnet for conspiratorial chatter, with viewers and critics alike theorizing about the reasons for its box-office success. The film’s feverish run has been referred to by some English-language outlets as evidence of “national pride” in China; when it trounced Captain America: Brave New World in February, Reuters cited Ne Zha II’s victory as proof of China’s “hostility toward rival Hollywood offerings.” Yet as Slate’s Jenny Zhang noted, Chinese audiences—who are responsible for most of the film’s ticket sales so far—haven’t been uniformly supportive of the movie, leaving “verdicts ranging from negative to lukewarm to positive.” Some viewers, she observed, believe that the film’s imagery indeed contains hints of anti-American sentiment; others interpret its hero’s quest for individuality as subtle but sharp criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. When an English-language version of Ne Zha II was announced for an August debut in the United States, via a rare partnership between the Chinese company CMC Pictures and the indie distributor A24, The Hollywood Reporter predicted that the film’s theatrical release would be a “litmus test of the U.S. market’s appetite for Chinese storytelling.”…

A robot charm, given to all Hugo nominees present.

(9) A CHARMING GIFT. In “Fuzzy’s Travelogue: Volume Four”, the LAcon V committee tells what they did at Seattle Worldcon 2025, like hosting the Post Hugo Reception, traditionally organized by the next year’s Worldcon. They also posted a picture and description of their traditional gift to the Hugo finalists.

As is also customary, we presented our guests with a gift to commemorate their Hugo nomination. We kept to our theme and gave them this. The robot can be used as a necklace by placing it on the chain as shown here or placed on the clear base also included in the package to be put on a desk. Our invitees were enchanted by the robot clock and amused by how it reflected the party’s theme.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

September 1, 1942 — C.J. Cherryh, 83

By Paul Weimer: The most amusing thing I can start off with my discussion of Cherryh is the fact that for the first few decades of my life, I thought her last name was pronounced Chair-uh, not Cherry like the fruit.

My love of her work began, given my age, predictably, with Morgaine. I actually encountered Morgaine, before the actual books, in Dragon Magazine, the official magazine of Dungeons and Dragons. In the early issues of Dragon Magazine, there was a column called “Giants in the Earth”. Issue 57 featured writeups and stats for Morgaine and her companion Vanye. Those writeups explained not only the stats but gave background to the characters and what they were all about:

C. J. Cherryh

“Morgaine is from a universe where an early civilization discovered or invented the ability to teleport via gates. These gates are controlled by a mechanical contrivance housed in a large cubical building. The lesser gates on a planet can transfer someone through space and/or time between each other. The master gate of a planet is physically located near the control center and has the additional capability to teleport to gates on other planets.”

Given my love of portal fantasies, teleportation and the like, this first paragraph was catnip. I had to read the Morgaine books.  And I was delighted that the novels were every inch the column promised, and much more. Cherryh was a hell of a writer, and I was hooked. I went from Morgaine to the Faded Sun novels, to Cyteen, and on and on.

Cherryh’s facility with hard science fiction, with clever fantasy, and mixing the two in things like Morgaine just show her facility as a writer. I know the latter part of her career has seemingly been an endless series of Foreigner novels (and rightly so, the novels are a fascinating study of human-alien cultures) but her oeuvre is so wide and diverse, that I would almost recommend people start with something OTHER than Foreigner and its seemingly limitless series. Try the Pride of Chanur, with its fascinating aliens and a space station that certainly inspired Babylon 5. Or Fortress in the Eye of Time, and see the power of deep time and an old conflict and a wizard’s older ambition. Or the fantastic Downbelow Station, a slow burn novel in the Alliance-Union Wars that, when it goes off, it hits like a brick, and shows the power of the author’s work.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) THE GAG RECAP IS FOLDING. [Item by Steve Green.] US cartoonist Ron Coleman, who took over as editor / publisher of industry newsletter The Gag Recap in October 2024, e-mailed readers on Monday: “I have decided to discontinue publishing The Gag Recap after the September and October issues. The truth is it just isn’t profitable. I earn a profit of around $135 a month, but I spend around 80 hours per month putting it together. I can do better if I spend my time cartooning, even if I only sell one or two cartoons per month. As a thank you for your past support I have also decided the September and October issues will be free. This also simplifies my bookkeeping and distribution of these last two issues.”

The Gag Recap was founded by Earl Temple in 1954, with the editor’s seat subsequently occupied by Al Gottlieb, Bill Keough and Van Scott (Source: The Daily Cartoonist).

The Gag Recap is a marketing newsletter for cartoonists and gagwriters. Here you will find sources where cartoons can be sold, and examples of what publishers are buying. We provide articles which help cartoonists find more success in their business and in each issue we try to provide new markets for artists to try.

(13) A BRICK TARIFF WALL. [Item by Jim Janney.] Bestseller elements are shipped from American warehouses and so are not affected. Is Lego smuggling going to be a thing now? “Pick a Brick: Standard bricks service halted in North America| LEGO® parts, sets and techniques” posted by New Elementary on August 25.

The LEGO® Pick a Brick (PaB) individual element online ordering service has had a successful year in respects of new features and improvements, but a challenging time with the fulfilment of orders. Just as things seemed back on track, there’s fresh woe for customers in the USA and Canada: today, thousands of Standard elements have been removed from sale, and it seems the root cause may be changes to tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.

On the North American PaB stores, Standard elements are those stored in and shipped from the European warehouse, while Bestseller elements are in the USA. (For the rest of the world, there is no such distinction – everything comes from Europe.)

The Trump government have suspended something called the De Minimis exemption, where packages with a value less than US$800 can enter without paying customs, duties or taxes. Now, tariffs have to be paid prior to arrival, and it’s up to the postage carriers to ensure this happens. As a result, postage carriers in Denmark and other countries are suspending all deliveries there, because of the short window given to them by the US to alter their business practices before this comes into effect on 29 August 2025.

We have not had any official statement from The LEGO Group as yet about how this affects customers, however thousands of Standard elements have been removed from the service today. At time of writing, there are less than 2,000 Standard elements still available, but we would not recommend purchasing them before they disappear, given the unpredictability of the situation….

And the next day Jay’s Brick Blog posted a similar report: “LEGO Pick a Brick Standard elements removed for North America”.

…LEGO’s Standard elements usually ship from the Billund warehouse, and thus would attract a 15% tariff that importers (read: American citizens and residents) would have to pay.

Due to the rushed nature of the implementation of this, and the uncertainty around how consumers will be able to quickly pay for these tariffs and release these packages, this has led to many international postal services (EU and Australia) temporarily suspending deliveries into the US while they figure out how to navigate this mess.

Bestseller elements which are shipped from American warehouses are of course still going ahead, so it’s not a complete removal of PAB elements, but the more interesting elements tend to be Standard Elements, so this is a huge blow to LEGO fans and builders in North America.

Canada of course, is caught in the crossfire as they aren’t imposing any duties or tariffs, but presumably, LEGO’s backend system treats North America as a single bucket, which is why Canada is also impacted….

(14) WOULD YOU LIKE FRIED AI WITH THAT? “Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters” – BBC has the details.

Taco Bell is rethinking its use of artificial intelligence (AI) to power drive-through restaurants in the US after comical videos of the tech making mistakes were viewed millions of times.

In one clip, a customer seemingly crashed the system by ordering 18,000 water cups, while in another a person got increasingly angry as the AI repeatedly asked him to add more drinks to his order.

Since 2023, the fast-food chain has introduced the technology at over 500 locations in the US, with the aim of reducing mistakes and speeding up orders.

But the AI seems to have served up the complete opposite….

… One clip on Instagram, which has been viewed over 21.5 million times, shows a man ordering “a large Mountain Dew” and the AI voice continually replying “and what will you drink with that?”….

(15) SOBER WEREWOLF. “It’s alive! Norman the werewolf resurrected in Altadena” – Laist has the story.

In Los Angeles, you’re bound to run into some kind of local creature. Opossums, coyotes, mountain lions, and in the case of Altadena, a giant toy werewolf statue.

Tucked on the corner of Fair Oaks Avenue and Mariposa Street, the 8-foot creature goes by the name Norman Jr. He’s not too dissimilar from ones you’d find at Costco or Spirit Halloween, except Junior sports a shredded red flannel and a white T-shirt that reads, “We ❤️ Altadena.”

As you can guess, Norman Jr. wasn’t the first werewolf to sit on that corner. The original Norman was lost along with the home that tended to him in the Eaton Fire. Since January, the werewolf has become a symbol of resilience, hope — and normalcy — for a ravished community.

The Fair Oaks House has been a sober home in Altadena since 2002, as part of the Jubilee Homes program for men in recovery from addiction.

The Rev. Tim Hartley is the executive director for Jubilee Homes and runs some of these houses, which are owned by the Church of Our Savior in San Gabriel. These homes don’t typically call attention to themselves — until the first Norman showed up.

“Probably five years ago, Sergio Flores, I love him, he was a resident up until the fire, but he decided to go out and buy this ridiculous, 10-foot Costco werewolf and put it up for Halloween,” Hartley said.

Norman stuck around after Halloween. When the rainy season came, someone threw a raincoat on him — so on and so forth until he became a bit of an Altadena staple….

(16) ROLLING FOR XX. Archeology & Art shared this find from the Louvre.

(17) YOU’RE LOCKED IN HERE WITH ME. From The Owl House creator and writers Dana Terrace, John Bailey Owen and Zach Marcus comes Knights of Guinevere, an adult indie animation sci-fi series from the studio behind The Amazing Digital Circus.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Ersatz Culture, Jim Janney, Dann, Paul Weimer, N., Andrew (not Werdna), Steve Green, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]

Pixel Scroll 8/31/25 Here’s The Finest Pixels, Roll Your Own Scroll

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(1) 2025 DRAGON AWARDS. The 2025 Dragon Awards winners were announced today at Dragon Con.

(2) 2025 EUGIE AWARD. The 2025 Eugie Award winner is “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Uncanny Magazine).

(3) 2025 MIKE RESNICK AWARD. The 2025 Mike Resnick Memorial Award winner is “Elsewhere” by Anaïs Godard.

(4) A LITERAL SPACE OPERA. [Item by Jan Vaněk jr.] Cyril Simsa digs out a remarkable manuscript: “’The Utmost Sail’ by Karel Janovický: A Neglected Czech SF Opera” at Vector.

My late father, the Czech composer and broadcaster, Karel Janovický – born Bohuš František Šimsa in Pilsen in 1930, but better known under the pseudonym he adopted in the 1950s to protect his parents, whom he had left behind in Communist Czechoslovakia, when he skipped the border during the Cold War – died in January 2024. He left behind a four-storey Victorian terrace in North London, crammed with music, books, and papers, including 250 or so classical compositions and a not inconsiderable personal archive. 

It was in his papers that I found a booklet with the libretto of his one-act opera, The Utmost Sail, which he wrote in 1958 to an English-language text by another Czech émigré, Karel Brušák (1913-2004). The booklet is mimeographed, fanzine-style, so it is not a professional publication; but to anyone familiar with the history of fanzines or sf fandom, the format will be immediately recognisable, and I assume this is something that he or Brušák must have had printed for the benefit of future producers and performers at around the same time they were finishing the work itself.

I had been long aware that my father had written an opera, and back in my teenage years, when I was at the height of my initial involvement with science fiction, he had even told me it was set on a spaceship. However, in the way children have of ignoring their parents, I had never actually seen a copy or read the text. And while I have still not seen a performance, the libretto can stand on its own as an interesting example of mid-20th Century European sf theatre. 

(5) DEL TORO’S FRANKENSTEIN. Variety reports “Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi Shed Tears as Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ Brings Venice to Life With Monstrous 13-Minute Ovation”.

Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” injected some life into Venice on Saturday night, earning a rapturous 13-minute standing ovation, the longest of the festival so far. Oscar Isaac, who plays the titular mad scientist, and Jacob Elordi, who embodies his monstrous creation, couldn’t hold back their tears as the crowd continued to applaud.

During the lengthy ovation, del Toro waved to the crowd and shared multiple hugs with Elordi and Isaac. A visibly emotional Elordi also got a kiss on the cheek from Isaac as the two embraced, with Elordi resting his chin on Isaac’s head.

The gothic sci-fi film — which is competing for the prestigious Golden Lion at the festival — is a retelling of Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic horror novel following a brilliant scientist who brings a monstrous creature to life, ultimately resulting in both of their undoings. The 149-minute, $120 million epic could become a major awards contender for Netflix….

(6) BANDWITH OF THE IMAGINATION. Does sff now require the same, or less?The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog shares “Hot Take: The Abstraction of Science Fiction”.

…Photorealistic special effects in live action film transformed speculative fiction by visually realizing imaginative worlds once limited to prose. In the 1980s, if you wanted to experience a story about small, hairy-footed country folk befriending talking trees and fighting dragons the primary way to do so was to read a book and imagine much of the associated world-building.

If you’re looking for a cinematic turning point, you could name Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs in 1993 or the seamless use of digital compositing in 1997’s Titanic. But Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings should be seen as the watershed moment; the moment at which filmic reality became virtually indistinguishable from documentary footage for the viewer. Film and television are the primary access points for viewing and engaging with The Lord Of The Rings. Although approximately 40 million copies of the first volume of the trilogy have been sold across the globe with a readership of likely triple that number, somewhat in excess of 200 million documented viewers have seen Peter Jackson’s movie. The work has been flattened out in its filmic form, the poetry stripped from the page, and Tom Bombadil relegated to a footnote. While this might offend militaristic bibliophiles, there’s no question that the story found a wider audience through film.

It has often been observed that speculative fiction won the culture war, becoming the ascendant genre and providing most of the popular culture touchpoints in current society, but what’s left unsaid is that it is filmic speculative fiction and fantasy that was the victor, not works of prose. Speculative fiction film and television are the lingua franca of North American culture in the new millennium, but speculative fiction literature is not. As movies took over spectacle and futuristic imagery, written speculative fiction — which is still a relatively niche pursuit — was freed from the need to describe elaborate visuals.

Much of the heft of worldbuilding was suddenly provided to the consumer, in a more passive visual format. We would posit that this shift provided authors with the freedom to delve deeper into complex ideas, philosophical questions, and experimental narratives. Rather than focusing on detailed scene-setting, prose speculative fiction seems now to focus more on literary styling, metaphor, and ambiguity, perhaps redefining itself in response to cinema’s dominance over visual storytelling. It is also possible that there are writers who would have turned to prose in the past, who are now writing for the screen because the medium is in demand, supports the stories they want to tell, and arguably provides more reliable remuneration.

We wonder if speculative fiction authors have had to become more poetic to compete with the hard-edged realism of screen special effects and more demanding readers. The classic work There Will Come Soft Rains — praised in its day for Bradbury’s elegiac style — seems hard-nosed and unambiguous when compared to John Chu’s Hugo-winning magical realist fable The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere.

It should not be lost on anyone that there is an ongoing backlash against abstract (and dare we say more literary) work. Those who preferred the prose style that Heinlein and Asimov had popularized have taken aim at a style of writing that is more metaphorical….

(7) ADDRESSEES KNOWN AND UNKNOWN. David Langford reports that authors with Science Fiction Encyclopedia entries are the would-be targets of a recent wave of “AI Spam”.

 AI-generated spam sent via the SF Encyclopedia feedback form, addressed not to the editors but to authors who have SFE entries. For example, Guy N Smith (“Hi Smith”) is praised for the superb cover of one of his least-known books, before an attempt to sell him promotional videos crammed with “scroll-stopping, emotion-grabbing, goosebump-giving moments”….

(8) IMPACT OF TARIFFS. “Anime vendors, fans feel pressure from U.S. tariffs on Japan imports” reports Japan Today.

Some American vendors and fans of Japanese anime content are feeling the pinch from price increases on memorabilia after recent U.S. tariff policy changes and fresh levies imposed on imports from Japan.

President Donald Trump’s administration has suspended a tariff exemption for low-cost goods worldwide that was seen as a loophole hurting U.S. manufacturers, while its country-specific tariffs include a 15 percent rate for imports from Japan.

At a recent anime convention in New York City where over 540 vendors gathered to sell collectibles related to Asian cartoons, many attendees expressed dissatisfaction with the new policies, with some fearing a double-digit percentage hike on the prices of merchandise.

Max Suwaki, co-owner of the Texas-based online store G.M. Anime, who sold figurines from “Demon Slayer” and other popular Japanese manga titles at the Anime NYC convention, said prices for his customers have increased by around 10 percent.

Under the de minimis rule, low-value shipments worth $800 or less were exempt from import duties. But under a July 30 executive order, starting Friday, they are subject to a levy corresponding to the country-specific tariff rate or a duty of at least $80 per item, a change many predict will hit small-business owners and e-commerce retailers with increased costs.

Suwaki noted that his business in recent months saw costs rise as much as 40 percent in one extreme case, saying, “That definitely impacts negatively how we can operate.”

Since the administration announced sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, targeting dozens of countries with which the United States runs trade deficits, the tariff rates for some countries have been modified.

(9) FILLING IN THE BLANK VERSE. Harvard Magazine knows you want to read all about “Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival”. Because that’s how you swing!

HE WAS A RADICAL, the inventor of blank verse, a master of internal monologue, and a victim of murder. This was the English playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary and rival of William Shakespeare—and perhaps the Bard’s key creative influence….

… By the time Marlowe died in 1593, at just 29 years old, England was in the midst of a cultural and intellectual flourishing. Greenblatt credits Marlowe with sparking this transformation. In a new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Christopher Marlowe, Greenblatt—one of the world’s foremost Shakespeare scholars—argues that Marlowe didn’t merely precede Shakespeare, he made Shakespeare’s career possible.

“It was Marlowe who cracked something open,” Greenblatt says, “and enabled Shakespeare to walk through—how should we say?—over his dead body.”

Marlowe’s story, Greenblatt adds, is also relevant to many of academia’s current preoccupations. He was a “first-gen” student who glimpsed radical possibilities in the supposedly conservative texts of “great books courses.” He faced a “vocational crisis” familiar to many humanities students today—and pursued his passion despite the risk.

That career began with Marlowe’s debut play, Tamburlaine the Great, written in 1587 or 1588. “Virtually everything in the Elizabethan theater,” Greenblatt writes, “is pre- and post-Tamburlaine.”

Part of the play’s shock value lay in its plot. Loosely based on the rise of the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror Timur (also known as Tamerlane), Tamburlaine the Great tells the story of a Scythian shepherd who ascends from obscurity to become a dominating tyrant. The violence is unrelenting, and the ambition unchecked: Tamburlaine faces no moral comeuppance for his pride. This rags-to-riches arc may have mirrored Marlowe’s own desires, Greenblatt writes—and defined many of the other outsider characters Marlowe would go on to write.

But the play’s most revolutionary element was formal: the use of “this hallucinatory blank verse, which Marlowe basically invented,” Greenblatt says….

(10) A FOUNDATION OF IRISH FANDOM. Nicholas Whyte introduces us to “Hugh Carswell: Belfast’s first science fiction fan” at From the Heart of Europe.

I’m browsing Then, Rob Hansen’s comprehensive analysis of the early history of UK science fiction, and came across the interesting fact that in 1935, one Hugh C. Carswell was appointed as Director of the Belfast chapter of the Science Fiction League, created by Hugo Gernsback for readers of his magazine Wonder Stories. Hansen then reports that this chapter ‘collapsed’ in around May 1937, when Hugh Carswell joined the RAF. Quite possibly there were no other actual members. In any case, Hugh Carswell is the first identifiable participant in science fiction fandom from Northern Ireland (I originally thought he might be the first from the whole of Ireland, but Fitz-Gerald P. Grattan (1913-1993) was writing to Astounding in 1931) and in the UK, the Belfast chapter of the SFL was preceded only by Leeds.

I wondered what else might be traceable about Carswell….

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

August 31, 1982 — G. Willow Wilson, 43.

By Lis Carey: G(wendolyn) Willow Wilson is an American fiction writer, comics writer, and essayist, who headed up the relaunch of the Ms. Marvel title for Marvel Comics with its 16-year-old Muslim superhero, Kamala Khan. Let me just admit right here that I love it.

Wilson was born in New Jersey, to ex-Protestant atheist parents, and so not raised in a religious household. While attending Boston University, she began reading about a variety of religions, and ultimately converted to Islam. Not long after graduation, she began teaching English in Cairo, where she met her husband, Omar.

G. Willow Wilson

Her prose fiction includes Alif the Unseen, set in an unnamed Middle Eastern city undergoing a political crisis enlivened by jinn, magicians, and highly talented hackers on both the government side and the happily “neutral” independent side. Alif is a very good hacker, expert at shielding his clients from their governments and rivals. He might be a bit sunnily optimistic for the environment he’s living and working in. It’s delightfully convoluted and interesting.

Air is a graphic novel series about an acrophobic flight attendant named Blythe, working for fictional Clearfleet Airlines, who is approached by the “Etesian Front,” which claims to be an antiterrorism organization. She and a man named Zayn wind up on a plane which is being hijacked, and they eventually found it wise to jump out of it—and very strange things start to happen. Including meeting Amelia Earhart and Quetzalcoatl, and visiting Narimar, a country that disappeared in the redrawing of borders in the partition of India. The Etesian Front discovers (along with Blythe, who is even more surprised than they are) that Blythe is a hyperpract, able to travel into alternate dimensions.

There’s so much here that’s exciting, interesting, and lots of fun. Go read her stuff.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

My latest cartoon for @theguardian.com books

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) 2025-08-18T08:22:44.313Z

(13) JO-BURG’S BIG CON. “Comic-Con Africa draws thousands of fans and cosplayers to Johannesburg” reports NBC News.

Tens of thousands of South African comic book fans and cosplayers flocked to Johannesburg on Saturday to celebrate the sixth edition of Comic-Con Africa, the continent’s biggest celebration of pop culture and gaming.

The four-day festival, which began Thursday, celebrated anime, gaming, comics and cosplay with a variety of entertainment, including vintage arcade games, esports and costume competitions.

Fans dressed up as their favorite comic book heroes and villains, snapping selfies in replicas of famous local sets and donning original character outfits inspired by their own imagination.

“This year’s Comic-Con has been bigger and bolder than ever before,” said Comic-Con Africa Show Director Carla Massmann, adding they anticipate a total of 70,000 fans having walked through the gate by Sunday….

(14) EASTER EGG ALERT. [Item by Daniel Dern.] As a friend thankfully let me know, there’s an amusing extended Easter Egg after the credits on the (newest so far) episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “Four And A Half Vulcans”.

(15) IN THE SPHERE. “Interview: Backstreet Boys at the Sphere Sci-Fi Themes” – at Gizmodo in an article that traces the inspirations behind the Backstreet Boys’ popular new residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas, Nevada.

…This past July, one of the biggest boy bands of all time celebrated 20 years of their iconic album, Millennium, at the technologically advanced venue, with two months of sold-out shows that generated a ton of buzz and interest. As a result, two more months of shows were recently added, and io9 spoke to Baz Halpin, CEO and founder of Silent House, about it. Silent House was one of several companies crucial to the creation of the show, and Halpin explained how a love of science fiction was instrumental in creating what some, like director Joseph Kahn, have called the “best concert I’ve ever seen.”

“It. Is. Mind-blowing,” Kahn, who directed two of the group’s most iconic videos—the monster-filled “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” and sci-fi heavy “Larger Than Life”—said on X. “You think I’m joking. I’m not. Perfect blend of their performance, creativity, charisma, and visuals. Think of the way people felt about the opening of Star Wars in ’77 turned into a concert. You have to see it to believe it.” Well, we have seen it and he’s right. Even if you don’t like the timeless pop music of the Backstreet Boys, the show takes you on an epic journey through the galaxy, filled with some intentional and some unintentional winks to iconic sci-fi movies of the past and present….

… “Get Another Boyfriend,” for example, the show’s eighth song, sees the Boys in a very neo-noir setting with floating transports above, towering buildings in the mist, and small vehicles driving on neon lights. It looks very much like Blade Runner or Akira, with a hint of Tron, all of which were part of the conception, to a point. “So the Tron reference was actually something that we’re trying to get away from,” Halpin said. “Initially, they were actually bikes with wheels. And I said, ‘I don’t want that. If anything, they should be more like speeder bikes.’ So I went on this whole concept art dive on different types of speeder bikes. And I didn’t want any trail. I didn’t want any lightcycle trail or anything like that. But, you know, in this world, they’re gonna have a neon outline. They’re gonna have a sort of light-up thing. It’s hard because Tron… was so aesthetically singular, it’s hard to have an LED outline on anything, and someone not say, ‘It’s Tron.’”…

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Kathy Sullivan.] I was in the audience at Worldcon while they were recording this: “Martha Wells Reflects on ‘Murderbot’ S:01” at Creative Conversations.

Author Martha Wells joins LIVE at Seattle Worldcon 2025 to discuss “Murderbot” season 1, adapted by Paul and Chris Weitz for Apple TV+. In episode 356, Luke Elliott & James Bailey host their first live-recording in front of a packed room of Martha Wells fans, adding to their “Creative Conversations” series. They kick things off with a special video message from the show’s cast for Martha Wells: Noma Dumezweni, Sabrina Wu, Akshay Khanna, Tamara Podemski, Tattiawna Jones, David Dastmalchian, and Alexander Skarsgård! Topics include: the original idea that led to Murderbot’s creation, surprise insights into herself after reader reactions, her input and thoughts on the casting of the series’ biggest role, her visit to the set (and what she got to take home), and why she pushes back at fans surprised by the show’s more comedic tone.

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

2025 Dragon Awards Winners

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Dragon Awards trophy from 2024. Photo by Sean CW Korsgaard,

The 2025 Dragon Award winners were announced on August 31.

Best Science Fiction Novel

  • This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman

Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal)

  • The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel

  • Sunrise of the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

Best Alternate History Novel

  • The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal

Best Horror Novel

  • Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

Best Illustrative Book Cover

  • Wind and Truth by Michael Whelan

Best Comic Book / Graphic Novel

  • Daredevil: Cold Day In Hell by Charles Soule, Steve McNiven

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series, TV or Internet

  • Andor, Disney+

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie

  • Deadpool & Wolverine by Shawn Levy

Best Digital Game

  • Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft Quebec

Best Tabletop Game

  • Magic the Gathering: Final Fantasy, Wizards of the Coast

Also presented at Dragon Con today were the following awards.

2025 JULIE AWARD

  • Dave Goelz

Best known for performing Gonzo the Great, Dr. Benson Honeydew, and other beloved Muppet characters, Goelz joined The Jim Henson Company in 1973 and quickly became a key performer in many Muppet productions, including The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, and various movies and television specials. Goelz won an Emmy Award for The Muppet Show and two Grammy Awards, one each for The Muppet Show and The Muppet Movie.

In 1998, Dragon Con established the Julie Award presented annually in tribute to the legendary Julie Schwartz. The Julie Award is bestowed for universal achievement spanning multiple genres, selected each year by a panel of industry professionals. The first recipient in 1998 was science fiction and fantasy Grandmaster Ray Bradbury.

THE HANK REINHARDT FANDOM AWARD

  • Mike Hannigan

The Hank Reinhardt Fandom Award was formerly named the Georgia Fandom Award. Henigan, who died earlier this summer, spent more than 30 years as a volunteer at Dragon Con and several other conventions, providing invaluable service to fan communities. He also invested himself in the wider community, earning significant volunteer honors from Intown Food Pantry and the Jaycees. His husband, Kelly Hilliard, accepted the award on his behalf.

[Thanks to Sean CW Korsgaard for the story.]

2025 Dragon Awards Ballot

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4

The 2025 Dragon Awards ballot was published on August 4. Registered voters should expect to receive notice by email.

To be eligible for the 2025 Dragon Awards the book, comic, game, movie, must have been released between July 1, 2024 and the close of the eligibility period, June 30, 2025, which accounts for the mix of nominees from last year and this year. No part of the work may be created by artificial intelligence.

Most categories have six nominees, but Best Science Fiction Novel has seven.

Recipients of the award will be announced at Dragon Con.

Best Science Fiction Novel

  • Alliance Unbound by C .J. Cherryh, Jane S. Fancher
  • The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey
  • Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer
  • Extremophile by Ian Green
  • Nether Station by Kevin J. Anderson
  • The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear
  • This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman

Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal)

  • The Last Shield by Cameron Johnston
  • The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness
  • Shadow of the Smoking Mountain by Howard Andrew Jones
  • Heart of the Mountain by Larry Correia
  • The Devils by Joe Abercrombie
  • Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan

Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel

  • Sunrise of the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
  • Labyrinth Arcanist by Shami Stovall
  • Friends Indeed by David Weber, Jane Lindskold
  • Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White
  • Among Serpents by Marc J Gregson
  • Rest in Peaches by Alex Brown

Best Alternate History Novel

  • 1635: The Weaver’s Code by Eric Flint, Jody Lynn Nye
  • 1919: The Romanov Rising by Tom Kratman, Kacey Ezell, Justin Watson
  • To Turn the Tide by S.M. Stirling
  • The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
  • Gangster by Dan Willis
  • Gold, Gangs, and Glory by Laurence Dahners

Best Horror Novel

  • Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle
  • The Vengeful Dead by Darcy Coates
  • It Will Only Hurt for a Moment by Delilah S. Dawson
  • Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes
  • The Wilding by Ian McDonald
  • The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

Best Illustrative Book Cover

  • The Icarus Coda by Dave Seeley
  • Flames of Gold by Jeff Brown
  • Rise From Ruin by Pierluigi Abbondanza
  • Wind and Truth by Michael Whelan
  • Blood of Her Father by Sam Kennedy
  • Mountain of Fire by Kurt Miller

Best Comic Book / Graphic Novel

  • Absolute Batman by Scott Snyder, Nick Dragotta
  • Absolute Superman by Jason Aaron, Rafa Sandoval
  • Daredevil: Cold Day In Hell by Charles Soule, Steve McNiven
  • Transformers Volume 3 by Daniel Warren Johnson, Jorge Corona
  • Ultimate Spider-Man Volume 2 by Jonathan Hickman, Marco Checchetto
  • Ultimate Wolverine by Christopher Condon, Alessandro Cappuccio

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series, TV or Internet

  • Murderbot, Apple TV+
  • Severance, Apple TV+
  • Wheel of Time, Amazon Prime
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Amazon Prime
  • Silo, Apple TV+
  • Andor, Disney+

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie

  • Sinners by Ryan Coogler
  • Thunderbolts* by Jake Schreier
  • Wicked by Jon M. Chu
  • How to Train Your Dragon by Dean DeBlois
  • Deadpool & Wolverine by Shawn Levy
  • Alien: Romulus by Fede Álvarez

Best Digital Game

  • Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Kojima Productions
  • Split Fiction, Hazelight Studios
  • Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft Quebec
  • Elden Ring Nightreign, FromSoftware
  • Monster Hunter Wilds, Capcom
  • Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Warhorse Studios

Best Tabletop Game

  • Arcs, Leder Games
  • Magic the Gathering: Bloomburrow, Wizards of the Coast
  • Magic the Gathering: Final Fantasy, Wizards of the Coast
  • Heat: Tunnel Vision, Days of Wonder
  • Splendor: The Silk Road, Space Cowboys
  • Disney Lorcana: Archazia’s Island, Ravensburger

2025 Dragon Awards Nominations Open

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Photo by Sean C.W. Korsgaard.

The Dragon Awards are accepting nominations for the 2025 award in the same 11 categories that made up last year’s ballot. The deadline to make nominations is July 19, 2025. 

I tested the site today and was informed my nomination had been accepted.

The website began taking nominations for the 2025 award sometime this past week.

Eligible works are those first released between 7/1/2024 and 6/30/2025.

The initial batch of final ballots will be released in early August 2025.

Pixel Scroll 9/2/24 Fifth Scrollboard Outside Pixel, California

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(1) AMIWRIMO? National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)’s post “What is NaNoWriMo’s position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)?” is drawing a critical response. Outraged Writers Board members Daniel Jose Older, Cass Morris, and Rebecca Kim Wells have all resigned. (Coincidentally, this year’s new NaNoWriMo sponsor is ProWritingAid.com, which has now added unspecified “AI” functionality: “How to Unstick Your Camp NaNoWriMo Project” [Archive.is link].) Their position statement on AI is quoted below — including an update added after the first wave of negative responses hit social media:

NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI. NaNoWriMo’s mission is to “provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page.” We fulfill our mission by supporting the humans doing the writing. Please see this related post that speaks to our overall position on nondiscrimination with respect to approaches to creativity, writer’s resources, and personal choice. 

Note: we have edited this post by adding this paragraph to reflect our acknowledgment that there are bad actors in the AI space who are doing harm to writers and who are acting unethically. We want to make clear that, though we find the categorical condemnation for AI to be problematic for the reasons stated below, we are troubled by situational abuse of AI, and that certain situational abuses clearly conflict with our values. We also want to make clear that AI is a large umbrella technology and that the size and complexity of that category (which includes both non-generative and generative AI, among other uses) contributes to our belief that it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse. 

We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege. 

      • Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one. The financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes a level of privilege that not all community members possess.
      • Not all brains have same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing. Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals. The notion that all writers “should“ be able to perform certain functions independently or is a position that we disagree with wholeheartedly. There is a wealth of reasons why individuals can’t “see” the issues in their writing without help. 
      • General Access Issues.All of these considerations exist within a larger system in which writers don’t always have equal access to resources along the chain. For example, underrepresented minorities are less likely to be offered traditional publishing contracts, which places some, by default, into the indie author space, which inequitably creates upfront cost burdens that authors who do not suffer from systemic discrimination may have to incur. 

Beyond that, we see value in sharing resources and information about AI and any emerging technology, issue, or discussion that is relevant to the writing community as a whole. It’s healthy for writers to be curious about what’s new and forthcoming, and what might impact their career space or their pursuit of the craft. Our events with a connection to AI have been extremely well-attended, further-proof that this programming is serving Wrimos who want to know more…. 

Three Board members quit over this post:

Here is a selection from among the many other negative responses to the post.

(2) TRADITION DERAILED. [Item by Steven French.] One can only speculate why it was decided to end the ‘tradition’! “Harry Potter fans boo as King’s Cross ends ‘back to Hogwarts’ tradition” reports the Guardian.

Disappointed Harry Potter fans booed after an annual announcement at London King’s Cross railway station did not happen.

People gathered at the station hoping to hear a message on the public address system that the fictional Hogwarts Express would depart from platform 9 ¾ at 11am, as happens in JK Rowling’s books.

The back to Hogwarts tradition, which celebrates the start of each academic year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry every 1 September, has previously also involved the train service being displayed on departure boards, with hundreds of fans attending the 2023 event.

But King’s Cross did not mark the occasion on Sunday.

A video posted on X shows an expectant crowd count down to 11am, and then booing when nothing happens.

Warner Bros Discovery, which owns the Harry Potter franchise, issued a statement in July urging fans to avoid travelling to King’s Cross on Sunday and instead watch a programme on YouTube hosted by the I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! winner Sam Thompson.

(3) PICKET LINES. [Item by Chris Barkley.] Something else conrunners (especially those who pine for a Labor Day Worldcon) need to worry about: “Thousands of hotel workers launch strike after talks stall with top chains” at NPR.

Thousands of hotel workers began a multiday strike in several cities across the U.S. to press for higher wages and increased staffing after contract negotiations with major hotel chains Hyatt, Hilton and Marriott stalled.

Workers walked off the job on Sunday in 25 cities including San Francisco, Seattle, Greenwich, Conn., and Honolulu, said Unite Here, a union representing hospitality workers across North America. The strikes are planned to last between two to three days, organizers said, noting the timing of the strike happening on Labor Day. Workers in Baltimore, New Haven, Conn., Oakland, Calif., and Providence, R.I., were also prepared to join the strike…

(4) THE MAKING OF GLASGOW 2024. Polish fan Marcin Klak reports on “Glasgow 2024 – A Worldcon Which I Helped to Make” at Fandom Rover.

… Earlier I mentioned about the series of unfortunate events. You already know about the fire alarm in the middle of the night and about catching Covid. The latter may have happened after the con. On top of that I also got the achievement for being splashed with water from the puddle from the top of my head downwards. Even coming back home posed a challenge and airline had to move me to another (later flight). Should it not be enough they also managed to leave my luggage in Amsterdam thanks to which I lost another 30 minutes. Yet you know what? All those unlucky incidents didn’t spoil my experience.

Glasgow 2024 was an amazing adventure. I have not seen as much of Scotland as I wanted to but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I had a great time. Once the con finished I was sad that it was over. And it lasted for eight days for me so, I dare to say, was rather long! It was definitely different than any of my previous Worldcons but I am happy with how it went. I don’t think that I should be rating it. As a member of concom I am not objective so I will leave the rating to the other members. Yet what I can say is that my experience was something I will treasure for many years to come….

(5) IF TANK MARMOT HAD A HAMMER. Doris V. Sutherland gives a rundown about the Dragon Awards winners at Women Write About Comics: “2024 Dragon Awards: John Scalzi and Rebecca Yarros Are Winners While AI Art Loses”.

… Charlaine Harris won the Best Alternate History award with All the Dead Shall Weep, the fifth book in her series about young mercenary Gunnie Rose. This was despite one of the other category finalists, Tom Kratman, lobbying his social media following to vote for his novel Dirty Water in retaliation for it receiving a negative review in Publishers’ Weekly; Kratman expressed a desire to “hammer the award up their collective ass,” a desire that must now remain unfulfilled…

(6) DRAGON AWARDS STATISTICS. Okay, you can stop laughing at the headline now. Here’s what Camestros Felapton – with a microscope – managed to extract from a press release: “Some Dragon Award Stats”.

…Anyway, here are the numbers they did provide:

“Approximately 7,000 fans cast ballots for this year’s Dragon Award winners, selected from among 67 properties in 11 categories covering the full range of fiction, comics, television, movies, video gaming, and tabletop gaming.”

Which is what they said last year, as in that is literally the same sentence….

(7) BECAUSE OF THE WONDERFUL WIZ HE IS. Deadline thinks “Ian McKellen Could Return As Gandalf In New ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Films”. An injury is keeping him on the sidelines til the end of the year. He’s likely to be available by the time they start filming – if they get him signed on.

…And it seems that Sir Ian McKellen could be coming back to his beloved role as J.R.R. Tolkien’s wizard after revealing that he had been approached about featuring in the new Lord of the Rings films.

McKellen told The Big Issue: “Enthusiasm for The Lord of the Rings shows no sign of abating … I can’t tell you any more than that. I’ve just been told there are going to be more films and Gandalf will be involved and they hope that I’ll be playing him.”

The 85-year-old actor, who is recovering from falling off stage in Player Kings in London’s West End, added: “When? I don’t know. What the script is? It’s not written yet. So, they better be quick.”

In a separate interview with BBC Breakfast, McKellen said he had no plans to retire from acting. “I shall just keep at it as long as the legs and the lungs and the mind keep working,” said the actor, who is promoting new movie The Critic….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born September 2, 1964 — Keanu Reeves, 60. Keanu Reeves certainly has fascinating genre credits. So let’s get started and look at them.

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

I’ll confess that since I deeply, madly adore this film, I’m not seen either of the sequels, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey or Bill & no Ted Face the Music. Why spoil perfection?

Keanu Reeves

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

Following that was Johnny Mnemonic which in its original version is considered one of the worst genre films ever made, but 12 years back, a black-and-white edition of the film which was titled Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White was released and William Gibson says is much closer, closer to his original vision. I see it’s available on Amazon, either in BluRay or DVD.

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

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

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

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

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Thatababy has a troublesome friend.
  • The Argyle Sweater finds a superhero frustrated by going green. (No, not literally. That’s a different superhero.)
  • Crankshaft continues the censorship storyline.
  • Brewster Rockit will appeal to metal detector enthusiasts.

(10) STAR WARS IN OJIBWE. “A new version of the 1977 Star Wars features a dub in a Native American language” – NPR spoke with one of the voice actors.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

“Star Wars” fans in Minnesota and Wisconsin yesterday got to experience a whole new version of the 1977 movie “A New Hope.” It’s a version dubbed into the language of one of the largest Indigenous groups in the U.S. and Canada. Minnesota Public Radio’s Melissa Olson has more.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS AND LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA’S “MAIN TITLE”)

MELISSA OLSON, BYLINE: Fans who came out to see the film got a chance to hear a language spoken in a galaxy far, far away for the first time. This version of the 1977 classic “Star Wars: A New Hope” has been dubbed in the Ojibwe language. It’s spoken by one of the largest Indigenous nations in the U.S. and Canada. One of the lead voice actors in the film just happened to be attending a showing in a Twin Cities suburb. He’s both a fan of the movie and a student of the language.

AJUAWAK KAPASHESIT: My name is Ajuawak Kapashesit, and I play Han Solo in this edition of “Star Wars: A New Hope.”…

(11) HASTA LA VISTA, BABY. “40 Years Later, Netflix’s New Terminator Show Just Fixed a Time-Travel Plot Hole” says Inverse.

The basic set-up of Terminator, in theory, creates two paradoxes. When the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back in time to terminate Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before she can give birth to future Resistance leader John Connor, the AI that controls him, Skynet clearly feels this is a solid plan. But, in sending the T-800 back, Skynet also causes the Resistance to send a human agent back, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who becomes John Connor’s father in the past. So Skynet messed up: Had they not sent the T-800 back in time, they wouldn’t have ever created their own, enemy, right?

In all great science fiction time travel stories, cause and effect don’t behave ordinarily, which is part of the fun. But, what the newest iteration of the Terminator franchise has just done has provided a new explanation not only for the set-up of the first film but the events of the second movie, too. Spoilers ahead….

(12) A NEW KIND OF DIG. “Aboard the ISS, Archaeologists Conduct the First ‘Space Excavation’” reports Atlas Obscura.

NEW RESULTS FROM THE FIRST archaeological fieldwork conducted in space show the International Space Station is a rich cultural landscape where crew create their own “gravity” to replace Earth’s, and adapt module spaces to suit their needs.

Archaeology is usually thought of as the study of the distant past, but it’s ideally suited for revealing how people adapt to long-duration spaceflight. In the SQuARE experiment described in our new paper in PLOS ONE, we re-imagined a standard archaeological method for use in space, and got astronauts to carry it out for us.

The International Space Station is the first permanent human settlement in space. Close to 280 people have visited it in the past 23 years. Our team has studied displays of photos, religious icons, and artworks made by crew members from different countries, observed the cargo that is returned to Earth, and used NASA’s historic photo archive to examine the relationships between crew members who serve together….

(13) ART ADMIRATION. Geoff Thew calls the fantasy manga Witch Hat Atelier “The Most Beautiful Manga I’ve Ever Read”.

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George lets us step inside the Pitch Meeting that led to Alien: Romulus. You can check in any time you want, but you can never leave…

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

Pixel Scroll 9/1/24 What Have I Got In My Pixel?

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(1) SPSFC 4. The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition begins accepting book entries tomorrow, September 2. This will be the fourth iteration of the contest. Here are the key dates:

  • New book applications (Sept. 2, 2024 to Sept. 29, 2024)
  • Resubmissions (Sept. 17, 2024 to Sept. 29, 2024)
  • Judge teams finalized (October 2024)
  • Filter/confirm submissions (October 2024)
  • Team allocations and reading starts (October 2024)
  • Round One (October 2024 to March 2025)
  • Semifinals (March 2025 to May 2025)
  • Finals (May 2025 to July 2025)
  • Winner announced (July 2025)

(2) DRAGON CON AWARDS CEREMONY. Many awards were given at today’s Dragon Con ceremony.

So were the following two traditional Dragon Con recognitions:

(3) HANK REINHARDT FANDOM AWARD. The recipient of the Hank Reinhardt Fandom Award, formerly the Georgia Fandom Award, is Clyde Gilbert.

(4) JULIE AWARD. And John Cleese popped up unexpectedly at the ceremony to be presented with Dragon Con’s “Julie Award”

In 1998, Dragon Con established the Julie Award presented annually in tribute to the legendary Julie Schwartz. The Julie Award is bestowed for universal achievement spanning multiple genres, selected each year by our esteemed panel of industry professionals. The first recipient in 1998 was science fiction and fantasy Grandmaster Ray Bradbury.

(5) FREE DELANY ZOOM LECTURE. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago invites everyone to join them on September 10 for a live virtual lecture by writer Samuel R. Delany followed by an audience Q&A. Click HERE to join via Zoom at 6:00 p.m. Central. Free and open to the public. Registration is not required.

In 2016, Samuel R. Delany was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. A filmmaker, novelist, and critic, he is the author of the award-winning books Babel-17 and Dark Reflections, as well as Nova, Dhalgren, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. He has won Nebula Awards from the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association and two Hugo Awards from the World Science Fiction Convention. In 2013, he was made a Grand Master of Science Fiction. His works are available through his website at samueldelany.com. Presented on the occasion of the exhibition In Your Face: Barbara DeGenevieve, Artist and Educator on view at the SAIC Galleries August 28–December 7. A related symposium will take place on September 14.

This event will be live captioned by Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services.

(6) GRABBY ALIENS AND THE FERMI PARADOX. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Over a year ago there was much discussion about a 2021 paper that some scientists nicknamed the ‘Grabby Aliens’ paper.  (If I have done right by Mike I’ll have clocked him in on this but we did cover it over at SF² Concatenation.)  The original paper’s lead author was an economist from George Mason University in the US and the other authors were maths (or maths adjacent) academics from the US and UK.

Its basic contention was that either we are alone in the Galaxy or that we should very soon see long arcs in the sky from alien civilisations and that the aliens would arrive (possibly in a wave front travelling at over half the speed of light) and likely take us over, at least culturally/technologically, and so curb our own expansion to control a sphere of stars for ourselves.

There was much debate, but if you don’t want to take a deep dive into the rather dry paper then a year ago physicist Matt O’Dowd over at PBS Space Time did a neat 20-minute video  (now over 2 million views)  explaining it all.

This brings us to the present and Brit astrophysicist David Kipping of Columbia University, New York, and host of Cool Worlds has jumped onto the debate. “Do ‘Grabby Aliens’ Solve The Fermi Paradox?”

“There are many possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox but a few have risen to particular prominence – including the “Grabby Aliens” hypothesis. Today, we’ll explore what this solution proposes, what it assumes, and ultimately three reasons why I personally don’t think it’s right.”

Those of you that know me, will not be surprised that I have my own views which I hinted at at the end of the SF² Concatenation coverage.   However, it is important you make up your own mind.

(7) POLISH LEGENDS. lance oszko says the Balticon 59 Short Film Festival was seeking Legendy Polskie, a highly rated series of short videos.

Due to a Corporate Decision, the Multiverse Series “Legendy Polskie” is not available to Festivals.  

A continuing theme is smart Polish People outwitting Evil. Meanwhile still on YouTube with Subtitles.  

A series of 27 Legendy Polskie videos (including a teaser and other odds and ends) is available on YouTube; playlist at the link.

(8) SAFETY LAST. GamesRadar+ gleefully reports “Star Wars Outlaws stormtroopers don’t have seatbelts, and that means players are already turning their speeders into death traps”. (Video on Reddit here: “My Favorite Thing to Do”.)

…It might only technically be out today, but Star Wars Outlaws early access means that players who bought into special editions have had their hands on the game for a few days already. And one of those has been playing around with the open worlds available on Star Wars Outlaws’ planets, utilizing the physics systems to really upset some unfortunate troopers.In a Reddit post, one player points out that you can shoot out the front of an incoming speeder, causing a dramatic drop in speed that sends the trooper riding the vehicle to be thrown, ragdoll-like, through the air. There are two clips in the video, including one where the unfortunate Empire grunt clatters at high speed into a small building, ping-ponging off it in a particularly slapstick moment….

(9) USE THE SWITCH, LUKE. The Verge tells “How Star Wars walked away from the world’s first self-retracting lightsaber toy”.

The Star Wars toymaker spent two years secretly working on a kids lightsaber that can automatically extend and retract its blade — the very first of its kind. Hasbro acquired all rights to the idea from a previously unknown Israeli inventor and patented it around the world.

But instead of finishing the product, Hasbro walked away without explanation. It let the inventor claw back the rights. Today, with the help of a different manufacturer, you can finally buy it at Amazon, Walmart, and Target— as the Goliath Power Saber.

The $60 toy doesn’t have official Star Wars sounds or authentic Jedi or Sith hilts. The blade isn’t as long as the movie sabers, and it doesn’t have the build quality or sophistication of pricier props.

But a simple yet ingenious mechanism means we finally have a lightsaber toy that can actually retract its own blade. Slide the golden switch, and a noisy motor sends each of its glowing blade segments smoothly in and out of the handle. Poke someone with the saber, and its blade will safely collapse without damage. You can even safely point it at your own face — see that in my video below.

Three years after Disney jazzed the world with a self-retracting lightsaber prop that you’ll never get to touch, one that was exclusively used by a paid actor in its shuttered $6,000-per-stay Star Wars hotel, you can now buy a toy that captures some of the same magic….

(10) DEBORAH CLAYPOOL. Southern fan Deborah Claypool passed away on August 30 after an extended illness her brother Tom reported on Facebook. She was the Vice-Chair of the Memphis State University SF Association when it was founded in 1980. We were both active in the apa Myriad around that time. Curt Phillips notes she also founded FOLD, an apa devoted to the art of origami.  A memorial is planned for a later date.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

September 1, 1942 — C J Cherryh, 82.

By Paul Weimer:

The most amusing thing I can start off with my discussion of Cherryh is the fact that for the first few decades of my life, I thought her last name was pronounced Chair-uh, not Cherry like the fruit. 

C. J. Cherryh

My love of her work began, given my age, predictably, with Morgaine. I actually encountered Morgaine, before the actual books, in Dragon Magazine, the official magazine of Dungeons and Dragons. In the early issues of Dragon Magazine, there was a column called “Giants in the Earth”. Issue 57 featured writeups and stats for Morgaine and her companion Vanye. Those writeups explained not only the stats but gave background to the characters and what they were all about:

“Morgaine is from a universe where an early civilization discovered or invented the ability to teleport via gates. These gates are controlled by a mechanical contrivance housed in a large cubical building. The lesser gates on a planet can transfer someone through space and/or time between each other. The master gate of a planet is physically located near the control center and has the additional capability to teleport to gates on other planets.”

Given my love of portal fantasies, teleportation and the like, this first paragraph was catnip. I had to read the Morgaine books.  And I was delighted that the novels were every inch the column promised, and much more. Cherryh was a hell of a writer, and I was hooked. I went from Morgaine to the Faded Sun novels, to Cyteen, and on and on. 

Cherryh’s facility with hard science fiction, with clever fantasy, and mixing the two in things like Morgaine just show her facility as a writer. I know the latter part of her career has seemingly been an endless series of Foreigner novels (and rightly so, the novels are a fascinating study of human-alien cultures) but her oeuvre is so wide and diverse, that I would almost recommend people start with something OTHER than Foreigner and its seemingly limitless series. Try the Pride of Chanur, with its fascinating aliens and a space station that certainly inspired Babylon 5. Or Fortress in the Eye of Time, and see the power of deep time and an old conflict and a wizard’s older ambition. Or the fantastic Downbelow Station, a slow burn novel in the Alliance-Union Wars that, when it goes off, it hits like a brick, and shows the power of the author’s work.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

(13) SAIL ON! Space.com applauds as “NASA’s solar sail successfully spreads its wings in space”.

…NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) caught a ride to space on April 24 on Rocket Lab’s Electron vehicle and, at the end of August, NASA shared in a release that its mission operators verified the technology reached full deployment in space. On Thursday, Aug. 29 at 1:33 p.m. EDT (5:33 UTC), the team obtained data indicating the test of the sail-hoisting boom system was a success. Just like the wind guides a sailboat on the water, it only takes a slight amount of sunlight to guide solar sails through space. Though photons don’t have mass, they can force momentum when they hit an object — that’s what a solar sail takes advantage of. Thankfully for us, the spacecraft that deployed the sail contains four cameras that can capture a panoramic view of both the reflective sail and the accompanying composite booms. The first of the high-resolution imagery is expected to be accessible on Wednesday, Sept. 4….

(14) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY. And that day may have started four thousand years ago. “The Discovery of a Bronze Age Game Board in Azerbaijan Challenges the Origin of One of the World’s Oldest Games” reports Arkeonews.

A new archaeological study revealed that an ancient board of a game, known as “Hounds and Jackals” or the “Game of 58 Holes”, found in 2018 on the Absheron peninsula in present-day Azerbaijan, is the oldest known.

For a long time, most have believed that the oldest board games originated in ancient Egypt. That presumption has been contested by a recent study, though. Analyzing  board games found on Azerbaijan’s Absheron Peninsula indicates that they might have originated in Asia rather than Egypt.

The study is published in the European Journal of Archaeology. Traditional interpretations hold that the  board game originated in ancient Egypt in the second millennium BCE, but evidence from recent excavations suggests that the game was also played in the South Caucasus during this time, casting doubt on this theory.

(15) CAN STARLINER GET BACK TO EARTH ON AUTOPILOT? We’ll soon know. “Boeing will try to fly its troubled Starliner capsule back to Earth next week” at Ars Technica.

…Flying on autopilot, the Starliner spacecraft is scheduled to depart the station at approximately 6:04 pm EDT (22:04 UTC) on September 6. The capsule will fire its engines to drop out of orbit and target a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico at 12:03 am EDT (04:03 UTC) on September 7, NASA said in a statement Thursday.

NASA officials completed the second part of a two-day Flight Readiness Review on Thursday to clear the Starliner spacecraft for undocking and landing. However, there are strict weather rules for landing a Starliner spacecraft, so NASA and Boeing managers will decide next week whether to proceed with the return next Friday night or wait for better conditions at the White Sands landing zone.

Over the last few days, flight controllers updated parameters in Starliner’s software to handle a fully autonomous return to Earth without inputs from astronauts flying in the cockpit, NASA said. Boeing has flown two unpiloted Starliner test flights using the same type of autonomous reentry and landing operations. This mission, called the Crew Flight Test (CFT), was the first time astronauts launched into orbit inside a Starliner spacecraft, and was expected to pave the way for future operational missions to rotate four-person crews to and from the space station….

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. From 2015, Saturday Night Lives’ “Hobbit Office” sketch.

After saving Middle-earth, Bilbo (Martin Freeman), Gandalf (Bobby Moynihan), Gollum (Taran Killam), Legolas (Kyle Mooney) and Tauriel (Kate McKinnon) take up office jobs.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Rich Lynch, Cath Jackel, Sean CW Korsgaard, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

2024 Dragon Awards Winners

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The 2024 Dragon Award winners were announced on September 1.

BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

  • Starter Villain by John Scalzi

BEST FANTASY NOVEL (INCLUDING PARANORMAL)

  • Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros

BEST YOUNG ADULT / MIDDLE GRADE NOVEL

  • Midnight at the Houdini by Delilah S. Dawson

BEST ALTERNATE HISTORY NOVEL

  • All the Dead Shall Weep by Charlaine Harris

BEST HORROR NOVEL

  • Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig

BEST ILLUSTRATIVE BOOK COVER

  • Of Jade and Dragons by Kelly Chong

BEST COMIC BOOK / GRAPHIC NOVEL

  • Monstress by Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda

BEST SCIENCE FICTION OR FANTASY TV SERIES, TV OR INTERNET

  • Fallout, Amazon Prime Video

BEST SCIENCE FICTION OR FANTASY MOVIE

  • Dune: Part Two by Denis Villeneuve

BEST DIGITAL GAME

  • Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios

BEST TABLETOP GAME

  • D&D The Deck of Many Things, Wizards of the Coast

[Via Sean CW Korsgaard.]