Tag Archives: Glen Cook

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.]

Pixel Scroll 7/9/25 In A Scroll In The File, There Ticked A Pixel

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(1) YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Monday saw me travel 35 miles into and out of London to Radlett in the leafy country of Hertfordshire for a small reunion of my former college SF group PSIFA (Polytechnic Science Fiction and Fantasy Association). Three PSIFAns lived there back in the day — late 1970s to early ’80s.

Radlett is down the road from Elstree and they were shooting a little known ‘b’ movie called Star Wars. Drive through Elstree at 14.00 and you’d hear a siren sound to call actors and crew back to the stage. Drivers in the high street would be slightly alarmed as droves of white and black storm troopers exited the cafes and bars to cross the road, halting the traffic, as they returned to set…

Pulling into Radlett station I was surprised not to be able to see my friends’ former flat: it was all trees! Upon reflection, hardly surprising as it was nearly half a century ago and you get a heck of a lot of tree growth over that time… 

Some of the discussion was fannish and there was quiet musings as whether or not to have another reunion at either Manchester’s Festival of Fantastic Films or the next Sci-Fi London.  We will see…. Both are worth checking out for Filers who are film buffs: the former more for those into vintage horror and the latter for those into recent independent SF. Meanwhile, the deference to which the staff treated us ‘oldsters’ was a little bemusing as we are still late teenagers/early-20-somethings at heart. Tempus fugit.

PSIFA logo

(2) SF IN TRANSLATION HUGO PROPOSED. The people behind adding a Best Translated Work category to the Hugos — Jake Casella Brookins, Rachel Cordasco, Eden Kupermintz, Alexander Dickow, and Kat Kourbeti — have created The Translated Hugo Initiative website to encourage support.

Speculative fiction—including science fiction, fantasy, and related genres—is a global phenomenon. There is a wealth of communities and organizations creating and celebrating SF around the world, and yet, within English-speaking circles, there are no major awards highlighting translated speculative fiction.

The Translated Hugo Initiative wants to change that, by introducing a Hugo Award for Best Translated Work….

… We believe that it’s a great time to propose this award, due to the strength and variety of speculative fiction being translated today. A shortlist highlighting diverse and interesting science fiction and fantasy from around the world would deepen conversations within fan communities, boost authors and publishers who are expanding what SF is and does, and benefit the librarians, booksellers, educators, and readers who look to the awards for a record of noteworthy books. And, at a time of rising xenophobia & insularity in the the predominant Worldcon host countries, a Translated Hugo would be a small but potent gesture of inclusion toward the world SF community…. 

The people who have already lent their names in support are listed on the Signatories page.

(3) FOR YOUR IMMEDIATE READING PLEASURE. The New York Times says these are “The Best Science Fiction Novels to Read Right Now” – gift link bypasses the paywall. List includes “Jeff VanderMeer’s Favorite Climate Fiction”.

The editors of The New York Times Book Review bring you immersive climate fiction, our latest reviews, gripping dystopian reads, novels with great world-building, books with “The Last of Us” vibes, the essential Octavia E. Butler and more!

(4) GUNN ON SUPERMAN. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]  BBC Radio 4s weekday arts programme Front Row’s first item was with James Gunn on his new Superman film. This informative over-10-minute interview saw the director of Guardians of the Galaxy tell us that he did not want to do Superman but his partner went on at him for years. He finally contemplated what sort of Superman film he might make if he were ever offered it. He decided he would not tell of Kal El’s coming to Earth as that had been done twice before, but to present Superman as Gunn had read the comics when growing up. Luther would be a technophile scientist and he’d bring back Krypto.  There would even be hints of what might be the Justice League of America (no doubt making it Great Again…

Front Row can be downloaded here for a month and after that it will be available through BBC Sounds.

Superman is back on the big screen for the first time in nearly a decade, we speak with director James Gunn.

(5) FUTURE TENSE. The new Future Tense Fiction story for June 2025 is “Tunnel Fever,” by Margrét Helgadóttir. The story has a bit of the Western in it, and it engages with issues of climate chaos and rampant pollution, imagining a far future in which many (maybe all?) humans are living underground.

Did you know that the seabed in the Arctic Ocean is covered with myriad tunnels? Three hectic highways meet at the foot of the Lomonosov Ridge, uniting the northern parts of the American, Eurasian, and European continents thousands of meters below the surface. But there are numerous other tunnels. They crisscross between the underwater mountains, valleys, and lakes. Here traffic moves leisurely. At the crossroads where the Yukon and East Siberia tunnels intersect at the edge of the steep Chukchi Plateau, you’ll even find a small roadside bar where the weary journeyer may rest for a few hours in artificial daylight. Here, no one cares why you are wayfaring so far off the grid….

There’s a response essay by human geographer Anna Pigott: “Resisting Tunnel Vision”. “To work toward better climate policy and governance, we need to expand our vision of what’s possible.”

(6) BEWARE MURDERBOT SPOILER. Entertainment Weekly lets the SJW credential out of the bag in “Alexander Skarsgård might be beyond saving in ‘Murderbot’ finale clip”. Kathy Sullivan says, “Spoiler for those who haven’t read the novella, extra stuff for those who have.”

(7) WASTE NOT, WANT NOT. Michael Whelan invites fans to visit his “Leftovers & Palette Gremlins 2025” gallery at The Art of Michael Whelan website.

About Leftovers & Palette Gremlins

Leftovers are spur-of-the-moment doodles or sketches created with paint left over from a work in progress. (Ever since my poor art student days, I’ve been loathe to discard any usable paint or other art materials!) Many of these quickies end up in the trash, but some give rise to an idea that merits development into a full sized painting.

Palette Gremlins are small creations inspired by random or accidental shapes in my immediate environment. Usually these gremlins are found on a used palette, but nearly as often they spring from an unintentional mark of paint on a piece of paper or a suggestive shadow in my studio.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 8, 1944 — Glen Cook, 81.

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 a 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

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) A RED ‘S’ AND A BLACK EYE. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth, who says he needs to rewatch Christopher Reeve.] Two stars. “Superman review – is it a bust? Is it a pain? James Gunn’s dim reboot is both” – can you guess which direction the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw is pointing his thumb?

Here is a film occupying the heartsinking Venn diagram overlap between franchise exhaustion and AI soullessness: a film fatally unconvinced of the reason for its own existence. We’d all hoped that writer-director James Gunn, who was in charge of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movie series, might put some wind back beneath Superman’s wings – or in his cape, or under his boots, or at any rate somewhere near his costumed person. The Man of Steel needed a fresh start after his self-cancelling contest in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016, and getting muddled together with a lot of other utility superheroes in Justice League a year later – though I will admit to enjoying the pure hubristic craziness of the lengthy Zack Snyder cut of that movie when it saw the light of day.

But this? If it was to be a reboot then really we needed to get back to basics, and be reminded why we liked superheroes in the first place – and I do – and remember why they were exciting and escapist and fun. We needed the clarity and simplicity of something like the origin myth of the infant Superman arriving here from his doomed planet, like Moses, destined to put heart back into an America hit by the Great Depression, hokey though all that may be.

Yet from the very beginning, this new Superman is encumbered by a pointless and cluttered new backstory which has to be explained in many wearisome intertitles flashed up on screen before anything happens at all. Only the repeated and laborious quotation of the great John Williams theme from the 1978 original reminds you of happier times. Superman, played with square-faced vanilla dullness by David Corenswet, has recently taken it upon himself to intervene in a war between two fancifully named fictional nation states. Why this war in particular, and none of the many others happening all over the globe, you ask? Perhaps because these countries are so palpably made up and without inconvenient political associations and implications….

(11) THUMB THE OTHER (AMERICAN?) WAY. However, New York Times critic Alissa Wilkinson says it works: “‘Superman’ Review: It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a Reboot!” (Behind a paywall).

…So while staying true to Superman requires trotting out certain familiar plot elements — his birth parents, his adoptive parents, his susceptibility to Kryptonite, his big old crush on the scrappy lady reporter Lois Lane — it also means tapping into those ideological roots. He’s a metahuman, but he’s also a man who’s almost guilelessly attached to truth, justice and something called “the American way”: protecting the little guy, pummeling the baddies. Set that guy down in the 21st century, and things get complicated.

By all of these measures, Gunn’s charming take on the Superman myth succeeds — it even won over a particular superhero-weary critic. It’s a sincere but also goofy movie, with a few well-timed twists on the mythology and a couple of added characters (I won’t spoil it, I promise) who keep things light at just the right moments….

(12) STUART KEEPS BANGING ON. Deadline has the story —  “‘The Big Bang Theory’ Enters The Multiverse As Sci-Fi Spinoff ‘Stuart Fails To Save The Universe’ Gets HBO Max Pickup & Sets Up More OG Returns”.

SFTSTU is set in the future, after the events in Big Bang. In it, comic book store owner Stuart Bloom (Sussman) is tasked with restoring reality after he breaks a device built by Sheldon and Leonard, accidentally bringing about a multiverse Armageddon. (The contraption is something Sheldon and Leonard worked on after the end of the original series.)

Stuart is aided in this quest by his girlfriend Denise (Lapkus), geologist friend Bert (Posehn), and quantum physicist/all-around pain in the ass Barry Kripke (Bowie). Along the way, they meet alternate-universe versions of characters we’ve come to know and love from The Big Bang Theory. As the title implies, things don’t go well.

Like has been the case in superhero franchises, Big Bang actors are expected to play alternate-universe versions of characters. No details on who may be returning are being revealed, but given that their characters made the device whose destruction unleashed chaos, it is safe to assume that Jim Parsons and Johnny Galecki may pop in as Sheldon and Leonard, respectively….

… The pickup caps a long journey for the project, which was first announced in April 2023 with no premise and a single auspice, Lorre, via Big Bang studio Warner Bros. Television where his Chuck Lorre Prods. is based….

(13) BIG BIRD. “Peter Jackson joins Colossal Biosciences to resurrect New Zealand’s moa bird from extinction” reports AP News.

 Filmmaker Peter Jackson owns one of the largest private collections of bones of an extinct New Zealand bird called the moa. His fascination with the flightless ostrich-like bird has led to an unusual partnership with a biotech company known for its grand and controversial plans to bring back lost species.

On Tuesday, Colossal Biosciences announced an effort to genetically engineer living birds to resemble the extinct South Island giant moa – which once stood 12 feet (3.6 meters) tall – with $15 million in funding from Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh. The collaboration also includes the New Zealand-based Ngāi Tahu Research Centre….

… The moa had roamed New Zealand for 4,000 years until they became extinct around 600 years ago, mainly because of overhunting. A large skeleton brought to England in the 19th century, now on display at the Yorkshire Museum, prompted international interest in the long-necked bird….

(14) SCHOOL’S BACK IN SESSION. “’Wednesday’ Season 2 Trailer Reveals Plot”, which is where Deadline gets these details:

…Wednesday is focused on getting where she needs to be when she is approached by a bubbly man dressed in head-to-toe purple. This is her new principal, Barry Dort (Steve Buscemi), who refers to Wednesday as the savior of Nevermore, a comment connected to her heroic deeds in Season 1. Much to the famous pupil’s chagrin, she also has a bevy of fangirls hoping to get their queen’s autograph.

Once the fandom dies down, Wednesday reunites with Enid (Emma Myers), who is looking excitedly to a new year full of fun with her roomie. However, Wednesday becomes entranced, leading to a horrible vision: Enid is dead, and Wednesday is somehow at fault. Wednesday confesses what she saw to her mother, who vows not to let history repeat itself. This season, the show’s protagonist will also count on the support of Grandmama (Joanna Lumley), whose powers have yet to be revealed….

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

Pixel Scroll 7/9/24 We Also Walk Cats (But Not Through Walls)

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(1) FIRST LAWS OF ROBOTICS. South China Morning Post has a few details —  “China’s Laws of Robotics: Shanghai publishes first humanoid robot guidelines”.

Shanghai has published China’s first governance guidelines for humanoid robots, calling for risk controls and international collaboration, as tech giants like Tesla showed off their own automatons at the country’s largest artificial intelligence (AI) conference.

Makers of humanoid robots should guarantee that their products “do not threaten human security” and “effectively safeguard human dignity”, according to a new set of guidelines published in Shanghai during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) on Saturday.

They should also take measures that include setting up risk warning procedures and emergency response systems, as well as give users training on the ethical and lawful use of these machines, according to the guidelines.

The document was penned by five Shanghai-based industry organisations including the Shanghai Law Society, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry Association and the National and Local Humanoid Robot Innovation Centre.

…China has made it a goal to have mass production of humanoid robots by 2025 and wants global leadership in the sector by 2027, according to a plan published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) in November last year.

By 2027, humanoid robots should become “an important new engine of economic growth” in China, the MIIT urged. Robots are expected to be popularised in industries including healthcare, home services, agriculture and logistics, according to the document….

(2) 3RD ANNUAL STURGEON SYMPOSIUM REGISTRATION. Registration is now open for the 3rd Annual Sturgeon Symposium, Oct 24-25, celebrating the groundbreaking work of author and critic Samuel R. Delany. The symposium will include a reading by the winner of the Sturgeon Award for best speculative fiction story published in 2023, scholarly panels, and appearances by Delany himself. Fee waiver available for students and others with financial need. Join us!

Register here: Sturgeon Symposium | Stars in Our Pockets: Celebrating Samuel R. Delany Tickets, Thu, Oct 24, 2024 at 9:00 AM | Eventbrite T-shirt, lunch, and Thursday reception are included with registration.

More information here, including updates to schedule: 

(3) VIRTUAL STOKERCON PANEL REPORTS. Lee Murray has put together highly informative summaries of two panels convened during the Horror Writers Association’s 2024 Virtual StokerCon event.

Trigger Warning: This article addresses issues of grief, loss, and mental health.

Moderated with compassion by Mo Moshaty, an author-producer with experience working closely with death doulas, the panel commenced with a round-robin of introductions, including the panellists’ relevant work, and also their particular interest in the topic of grief horror. 

Panelists included Mark Mathews, Clay McLeod Chapman, Nat Cassidy, Katherine (Kat) Silva, Ally Malinenko, and Laura Keating.

From the opening comments, it was clear that this was going to be a confronting and also humbling session, with panelists sharing their own experiences of trauma and grief, with their specific experiences discussed in more detail over the course of the panel. 

Moshaty kicked off the discussion by stating that grief, as a universal emotion, touches everyone in society, so it follows that we would want to represent grief in our horror literature. Mark Matthews and Nat Cassidy agreed that horror is a genre that is grounded in grief. Clay McLeod Chapman admitted to feeling inspired and intimidated to talk frankly about the topic, but also that he expected the discussion to be eye-opening and cathartic. He was especially interested in how we move through grief while also tackling it in our work….

Striking a sustainable work-life balance for the long-game in horror takes time and experience. Eric LaRocca, Christa Carmen, Ace Antonio-Hall (Nzondi), Pamela Jeffs, and EV Knight offer their insights in a panel moderated by L. E. Daniels on how to protect our bodies and minds as we navigate dark fiction.

Recently, I had the pleasure to attend the Self-Care for Horror Writers panel offered in the virtual space at StokerCon 2024. Given the close alignment of the topic to the work of the HWA Wellness Committee and our Mental Health Initiative, this panel was a must-view for me, and I wasn’t disappointed. Expertly moderated by Bram Stoker-nominee and Wellness Committee member L. E. Daniels, the discussion was wide-ranging and engaging, with speakers offering insightful gems and tried-and-true strategies for maintaining well-being. Key points are summarised in this report.   

Daniels began by asking her panelists how they have developed a sustainable work-life balance for the long game that is writing, publishing, and writers’ events….

(4) SCOTS GOTHS. [Item by Steven French.] For those who might be in the Edinburgh area in September, here’s an interesting event at the National Library of Scotland – and it’s free! “Treasures: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Scottish Gothic Tradition”, Thursday, September 5 at 17:30 at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Hear from Dr. Emily Alder and Professor Daniel Cook, both leading experts in the field of Gothic literature, as they consider the ways in which Frankenstein and the Gothic permeate Scottish fiction to this day. Chaired by one of our foremost cultural commentators and interviewers, Dr. Alistair Braidwood.

With the recent success of the film adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s ‘Poor Things’, and the debt Gray’s novel owes to ‘Frankenstein’ and Gothic fiction, how might we consider the influence of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece on subsequent writers and their work? Where does James Hogg’s ‘Justified Sinner’, Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Jekyll and Hyde’, or more recent works by Muriel Spark, James Robertson, Alice Thompson, A. L. Kennedy, and Alasdair Gray fit into a Scottish Gothic tradition?

This event celebrates our new Treasures display, featuring items relating to Byron and Mary Shelley.

(5) RETRO PIXEL. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Regarding the July 5 Pixel Scroll’s “(9) SCIENCE EXHIBITION IN LONDON” by Steven French, who wrote, “If anyone happens to be in London over the weekend, there’s some neat stuff going on at the Royal Society…”

Actually, it lasted the previous four weekdays too. I usually go and was, indeed, there this year wearing my climate science hat.

Jonathan Cowie at the Royal Society exhibition

At the exhibition, I am pointing to a graph of past temperatures as revealed by a 900,000 year Antarctic ice core at a particular point called the Mid-Brunhes Event before which glacials were less cold with interglacials being more cold, and after this point where – like today – glacials are colder and interglacials warmer. ‘Why is this so?’ you may well ask. Alas, we don’t know, though theories abound.

Antarctic ice core drilling continues. We are currently looking at another location where the ice hopefully has a record going back over a million years: ideally to 1.5 million years so as to cover the Mid-Pleistocene Transition which saw a major change to glacial-interglacial cycles that was possibly due to the arrival of large, long-term ice over Antarctica and substantive northern hemisphere glacial ice sheets. (At least, that’s the working hypothesis I go with.)

This year, six of us went to the Royal Society’s Summer Exhibition, including another member of the SF² Concatenation team.

If you like science – and many science fiction fans do – then this annual event is worth checking out.

If you need post-exhibition sustenance, the near-by Golden Lion pub is sufficiently off the tourist track that while it is usually busy Mondays to Fridays up until 7.45 it then quietens down. It has hand-pump beers and reasonable hot pub food but note it closes early Mon-Thurs at 10pm. On the way there, you can see typical 19th century West-End London architecture.  Some old buildings have been demolished, but the past decade or so has seen developers knock down buildings but keep the frontage walls: so the building looks the same from the outside but is completely modern inside.

The Royal Society (Britain’s Science Academy) is housed in Germany’s former London embassy up to World War II.  Its (the Society’s) President’s office today has a marble swastika in the floor (under a carpet but conserved as the swastika apparently has a heritage preservation order on it).

Keep an eye out next year in early July for another Royal Society summer exhibition. Avoid the weekend day as that is very crowded (Dublin Worldcon levels of crowding) with parents bringing children.

(6) THE INSTALLMENT PLAN. Eugen Bacon offers an intriguing alternative at Reach Your Apex: “What if you wrote your novel story-by-story, using your strength as an author of short stories?” — “For Writers: Writing the Novel – For Short Story Authors”.

…Maybe you’ve even won or been a finalist in awards with your short story, you’ve been killing it in anthologies—as in editors have you on speed dial, critics raving about your short story (you kinda hog the lot, you’re getting a bit self-conscious about it—maybe not, it’s fucking awesome). And you have a short story collection or three… But your mate, your family, maybe a literary agent… has been on your case, as in: “So where’s that novel?”

And imposter syndrome is creeping in, and you feel you gotta write that effin novel.

Or maybe you’ve written a short story you like so much, you want it as a starting point for a novel. Perhaps more characters are popping up, too many to contain in a short story. Or maybe you want to stretch the story—by timeline or theme or view point. The start is the same, the closing is the same, but the inside of the story is becoming longer. It demands more history, more world-building, a deeper look. Now you really need that novel.

But short stories are your strength. You don’t want to get entangled in a tortured story or a runaway plot. What if the short story is just what it is—the point of it could be lost in expanding it. Who wants a bloody novel? You do. What if the short story has told itself out: do you really need that novel? Yes, bloody yes, every inch of you shouts.

But you do love the energy in a short story—yes, Carver: Get in, get out. Don’t linger.   

So what if you could retain all that you love about the short story, and still write that novel? What if you could write about a moment in time, something experimental and decentralized, something flexible, economic, dynamic, mimetic, metaphoric, immediate, intense—and it’s still a novel?

This is how it happens: What if you wrote your novel story-by-story, using your strength as an author of short stories?…

(7) PIDGIN DROPPINGS.  “Preliminary Notes on the Delvish Dialect” by Bruce Sterling at Medium.

…Also, the human owners/managers of Large Language Models have extensively toned-up and tuned-down these neural network/deep learners/foundation-platforms, so that these “writers” won’t stochastically-parrot the far-too-human, offensive, belligerent, and litigous material that abounds in their Common-Crawl databases.

The upshot of this effort is a new dialect. It’s a distinct subcultural jargon or cant, the world’s first patois of nonhuman origin. This distinctive human-LLM pidgin is a high-tech, high-volume, extensively distributed, conversational, widely spoken-and-read textual output that closely resembles natural human language. Although it appears as words, it never arises from “words” — instead, it arises from the statistical relationships between “tokens” as processed by pre-trained transformers employing a neural probabilistic language model.

And we’ll be reading a whole lot of it. The effort to spread this new, nonhuman dialect is a colossal technical endeavor that ranks with the likes of nuclear power and genetically modified food. So it’s not a matter of your individual choice, that you might choose to read it or not to read it; instead, much like background radioactivity and processed flour from GMO maize, it’s already everywhere.

Technically, this brave-new-world dialect is actually a wide number of different Language-Model idiolects, which arise from different databases and different LLM training methods. Machine-translation AIs speak a thousand human languages at once. Consumer-facing chatbots speak with courtly circumlocutions. LLMs exist that are specially trained for marketing, warfare, cooking, legal boilerplate, code generation, website design. And so on….

(8) HALF PAST HUMAN… [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In recent years I have moved more from the current climate change issue into looking at the deep time evolution of the Earth system as well as that of life. (This is the ‘co-evolution of life and planet’ narrative in case any of you were wondering.) It is a big topic, but one of the things I have been looking at is not just where we have come from (and how) but where we are going. One instance (of a number) is that across deep-time both geology and biology have seen increasing ‘information’: each key step in deep-time evolution has seen increased information (in the geological record) and increased information processing (in the case of biology). However, we (modern humans) are now using technology, starting with using new alloys not found in nature to make ploughs which in turn helped us sustain a larger population and a non-agrarian population which could do things like science (as well as paint pretty pictures etc). And now our technology itself is processing more information.  If DNA were represented as information (and we have already coded all the sonnets of Shakespeare as DNA) then the amount of computer information we hold globally now rivals (if not exceeds – my last data point for this was over half a decade ago) the DNA in life planet-wide….

The other thing that has happened across deep time is that we have seen earlier stages of life incorporated into more advanced stages: for example prokaryotes became incorporated into eukaryotes through endosymbiosis. Which begs the question of whether we will merge with information processing technology…

Here I venture possibly ‘yes’ but not necessarily (biomedical treatments aside) with a huge load of invasive technologies embedded in our bodies like the Star Trek’s Borg.

Instead, we will increasingly interact with technology, and we can all see how our society is (in one sense sadly) increasingly digital.  We increasingly carry technology around with us (smartphones) and even wear it, for example, joggers these days can wear a watch that keeps track of their pulse.

Are we becoming more like cyborgs????

Well, you have had a taste of my musings (if you want more, you’ll have to ask for a talk at a con). But I’m a bio-/geoscientist.  The SF view of cyborgs tends to be more engineering orientated. Witness the $6 million man… we can build him faster, better… Though none of the ladies thought to tell Steve Austin that faster is not always better. But if you do want a more engineering/physics approach to the cyborg trope then it’s Isaac Arthur to the rescue…

It was, this last weekend, sci-fi Sunday over at “Science Futures with Isaac Arthur” where he looked at “Cyborg Civilizations”. Is this where we are heading? Isaac thinks that cyborgs may be a way to colonise the galaxy…

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 9, 1944 – Glen Cook, 80.

By Paul Weimer: Glen Cook is a trailblazer whose fingerprints are all over modern fantasy in two separate subgenres.

Let’s put aside some of his interesting single novels  such as Tower of Fear, which is an interesting standalone fantasy novel, and A Matter of Time, where he shows that he can do twisty time travel in a Cold War setting. 

Glen Cook in 2011. Photo by Harmonia Amanda.

First up, Glen Cook doesn’t get enough love, I think, for his Garrett PI series. I’ve seen more prominent authors take up his mantle, but Garrett is the true heir to Lord Darcy (but in a secondary fantasy world) of a private investigator doing his job on the mean streets of TunFaire. The Titular Garrett is a character out of mystery fiction (and really the novels lean more heavily into mystery than the fantasy, for all being in a city of multiple species and magic). Garrett follows a lot of tropes that readers of, say, Raymond Chandler will see right away. Garrett isn’t overly ambitious, he just wants enough to get by day by day, but trouble keeps finding him (and yes, this is hardboiled detective fiction, so the trouble includes the cops (the watch), the mob (the outfit), femme fatales) and much more. I get the sense that Cook had a hell of a lot of run writing them (a dozen or so at this point).  Great literature? No.  Entertaining? If you are a fan of the Chandler school of writing and also like SFF, get thee to a bookseller. I’ve seen the fingerprints of Garett in other characters and authors, but few really capture the idea as well as Cook does.

But it is epic fantasy where Cook really sings and really has had his influence. Even beyond some of his other fantasy series, I am referring here to The Black Company.  Grimdark before Grimdark was ever a thing, the story of a band of mercenaries who get caught up in wars to decide the fate of the world, grey protagonists in a world of black to white and all the shades, The Black Company is one of the ur-texts for writers like Abercrombie, Erikson, and their ilk. (I could see the fingerprints of The Black Company as inspiration for Adrian Tchaikovsky’s House of Open Wounds, for instance). The Black Company members are caught in intrigues between themselves and their superiors, desperately try to survive hopeless battles they are thrown in, and slowly start to learn about their own origins and history. The cast shifts and changes across the series (and sub series), but the core of the idea of an elite mercenary unit working mostly for rather disreputable and treacherous powers is one that holds up to this day. The Bridgeburners, Caul Reachey’s Men, and many others owe their existence to Croaker and his crew.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) CAGE MATCH. Variety reports “Spider-Man Noir Series at Amazon, MGM+ Casts Brendan Gleeson”.

Brendan Gleeson has joined the cast of the upcoming Spider-Man Noir series at Amazon, Variety has learned from sources.

This marks one of Gleeson’s first announced project since his Academy Award and Golden Globe nominated turn in “The Banshees of Inisherin.” Gleeson will star in the series opposite previously announced series lead Nicolas Cage as well as the recently cast Lamorne Morris. The show, now titled “Spider-Noir,” was formally ordered to series in May with Cage in the lead role. As previously reported, the show will debut domestically on MGM+’s linear channel and then globally on Amazon Prime Video….

(12) OVERTIME. Futurism takes notes while “Former Astronaut Explains How the Astronauts Stranded in Space Might Be Feeling”.

NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are still stranded on the International Space Station after Boeing’s plagued Starliner spacecraft finally managed to drop them off last month.

Since then, technical issues affecting the spacecraft have delayed their return journey indefinitely, with multiple helium leaks kicking off an investigation.

Williams and Wilmore were originally meant to return on June 14 — over three weeks ago — and NASA has yet to announce when its latest attempt will be to bring them back down to Earth.

It raises an interesting question: how are Williams and Wilmore feeling about the delay? One former colleague says that the extended stay on board the orbital outpost could actually be a blessing rather than a curse.

“Well, my first reaction was it’s probably good news for the two Boeing astronauts,” retired Air Force colonel and NASA astronaut Terry Virts told NPR. “They’re, you know, they get a few bonus weeks in space. And you never know when your next space flight is going to happen, and so I’m sure the astronauts are happy to get some bonus time and space.”

Virts also argued that the rest of the station’s crew would be “happy” to get some “free labor.”…

… Virts also took the opportunity to send a message to Williams and Wilmore.

“I would just say enjoy it,” he told NPR. “And stay busy. You don’t want to, you know, just sit around. But I know these two, they’re not going to sit around. And I’m sure NASA will have plenty of work for them to do.”

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Astrophysicist Dr Smethurst at Dr. Becky YouTube Channel takes a look at some of the science portrayed in the SF series Battlestar Galactica. 12-minute video below.

In this episode of Astrophysicist reacts we’re watching Battlestar Galactica season 1 episode 1 “33” to pick out the science from the fiction in this sci-fi show. We’re chatting about faster than light speed travel, special relativity including time dilation and length contraction, and Newton’s third law of motion.

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

Pixel Scroll 2/19/23 Odin’s Ravens With The Assistance Of Fenrir Have Compiled A Scroll

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(1) ADVERSARIAL POLICIES BEAT SUPERHUMAN GO AIS. [Item by Tom Becker.] Machines have been considered to be almost unbeatable at Go, since 2016 when AlphaGo defeated the world Go champion Lee Sedol by four games to one. Now, Kellin Pelrine, an amateur player, playing unassisted, defeated a top-ranked AI system, fourteen games to one.

There is a good general article explaining it at Ars Technica: “Man beats machine at Go in human victory over AI”.

This sure sounds a lot like many SF/F stories where underdogs exploit flaws in a system to win against overwhelming might.

Even though Kellin Pelrine was able to beat the AI without computer assistance during the game, his strategy was planned with a massive amount of computer power. He happens to be a research scientist intern at an AI company. His team used adversarial AI techniques to find flaws in a state of the art Go playing system. By exploiting the flaws, an amateur Go player can beat a system that routinely beats professional Go masters. The strategy used to beat the AI would not work to beat a human player — a human would see it right away. But an AI does not perceive the game the same way as a human, and the strategy took advantage of that. If you want the details, there is a very long and thorough research paper, “Adversarial Policies Beat Superhuman Go AIs” at Arxiv.org.

There also is a website at Adversarial Policies in Go – Game Viewer with analysis of games against various Go systems.

We’re going to see a lot of powerful, superhuman AI systems. It will be surprising if any of them doesn’t have a devastating flaw that eventually is exploited. Also we’re going to see a lot more human-machine cooperative efforts like this one.

(2) LINKS REPAIRED. The links in the “2022 Analog AnLab Readers’ Award Finalists” and “Asimov’s 37th Annual Readers’ Awards Finalists” posts have been fixed. It’s safe to jump back into the pool.

(3) 2023 WORLDCON MEMBERSHIP ISSUES? The Chengdu Worldcon committee, in the wake of questions from people who did not receive the Hugoteam email, asked Facebook readers to pursue a solution this way:

To Chengdu Worldcon Members：

If you still have not received any email from us or have questions about your membership status, and/or if you failed to get any response from [email protected] please DM your name and email address to this account so we can help you to help us to break the invisible wall. Thank you to all members for your support, trust and patience.

(4) NESFA SHORT STORY CONTEST WINNER.

(5) A LITTLE LIST. [Item by Alan Baumler.] “Tech Companies with Lord of the Rings Names” from Arbesman.net. I knew 9 of the LOTR names, but only one of the tech companies. (Palantir). I can’t speak for how well any of these names fit the companies, since while I know what the LOTR things are, I can’t figure out what most of these companies actually do, even after following the links.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

1987 – [Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

Glen Cook’s Sweet Silver Blues is the first novel in the more than a bit humorous adventures of one Garrett, P.I.  Published thirty-six years ago by Roc, with the cover art being by Tim Hildebrandt, the main character is Garrett, a private investigator living in the city of TunFaire, a not unusual fantasy city. 

Garret is the draw here though everything here is nicely detailed by Cook and I loved most of the fourteen novels though I thought, and obviously won’t say why as I’m guessing, that many here haven’t read these yet, that the last two were major immediate Suck Fairy material. 

So here is our lovely Beginning…

Bam! Bam! Bam!

It sounded like someone was knocking with a sledgehammer. I rolled over and cracked a blood-shot eye. I couldn’t see a figure through the window, but that wasn’t surprising. I could barely make out the lettering on the grimy glass: 

GARRETT 

INVESTIGATOR 

CONFIDENTIAL AGENT 

I had blown my wad buying the glass and wound up being my own painter.

The window was as dirty as last week’s dishwater, but not filthy enough to block out the piercing morning light. The damned sun wasn’t up yet! And I’d been out till the second watch barhopping while I followed a guy who might lead me to a guy who might know where I could find a guy. All this led to was a pounding headache.

“Go away!” 

I growled. “Not available.” 

Bam! Bam! Bam!

“Go to hell away!” I yelled. It left my head feeling like an egg that had just bounced off the edge of a frying pan. I wondered if I ought to feel the back to see if the yolk was leaking, but it seemed like too much work. I’d just go ahead and die. 

Bam! Bam! Bam! 

I have a little trouble with my temper, especially when I have a hangover. I was halfway to the door with two feet of lead-weighted truncheon before sense penetrated the scrambled yolk.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 19, 1912 — Walter Gillings. UK fan and zine writer. He edited Scientifiction, a short lived but historic fanzine. Shortly thereafter he edited Tales of Wonder, regarded as the first UK SF zine. Clarke made his pro debut here. He’d edit a number of other genre zines later on, and ISFDB lists him as having two genre stories to his credit whereas Wiki claims he has three. (Died 1979.)
  • Born February 19, 1937 — Terry Carr. Well known and loved fan, author, editor, and writing instructor. I usually don’t list Awards both won and nominated for but his are damned impressive so I will. He was nominated five times for Hugos for Best Fanzine (1959–1961, 1967–1968), winning in 1959, was nominated three times for Best Fan Writer (1971–1973), winning in 1973, and he was Fan Guest of Honor at ConFederation in 1986. Wow. He worked at Ace Books before going freelance where he edited an original story anthology series called Universe, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies that ran from 1972 until his early death in 1987. Back to Awards again. He was nominated for the Hugo for Best Editor thirteen times (1973–1975, 1977–1979, 1981–1987), winning twice (1985 and 1987). His win in 1985 was the first time a freelance editor had won. Wow indeed. Novelist as well. Just three novels but all are still in print today though I don’t think his collections are and none of his anthologies seem to be currently either. A final note. An original anthology of science fiction, Terry’s Universe, was published the year after his death with all proceeds went to his widow. (Died 1987.)
  • Born February 19, 1937 — Lee Harding, 86. He was among the founding members of the Melbourne Science Fiction Club along with Bertram Chandler. He won Ditmar Awards for Dancing Gerontius and Fallen Spaceman. In the Oughts, the Australian Science Fiction Foundation would give him the Chandler Award in gratitude for his life’s work. It does not appear that any of his work is available from the usual digital sources. 
  • Born February 19, 1963 — Laurell K. Hamilton, 60. She is best known as the author of two series of stories. One is the  Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter of which I’ll confess I’ve read but one or two novels, the other is the Merry Gentry series which held my interest longer but which I lost in somewhere around the sixth or seventh novel when the sex became really repetitive. 
  • Born February 19, 1964 — Jonathan Lethem, 59. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a weird mix of SF and detective fiction, is fantastic in more ways that I can detail briefly here. I confess that I lost track of him after that novel so I’d be interested in hearing what y’all think of his later genre work. 
  • Born February 19, 1966 — Claude Lalumière, 57. I met him once here in Portland. Really nice person. Author, book reviewer and has edited numerous anthologies. Amazing writer of short dark fantasy stories collected in three volumes, Objects of Worship, The Door to Lost Pages and Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes. Tachyon published his latest anthology, Super Stories of Heroes & Villains. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Eek! shows Gotham City’s surprising money-saving move.

(9) EN ESPAÑOL. “El día que Ray Bradbury, el autor de Crónicas Marcianas, fue una estrella de rock en Buenos Aires” in the Argentine publication La Nacion, a headline which Google translates as “The day the author of Martian Chronicles was a rock star in Buenos Aires”. And here’s a computer-translated excerpt.

“After leaving Argentina, the pilots invited me to the cockpit to talk. When I arrived, they asked me to sit in the commander’s chair and take charge of the ship,” wrote Ray Bradbury, on April 4, 2007, on the one-decade anniversary of his visit to Buenos Aires, in an e-mail addressed to his friend Marcial Souto, the editor and translator who convinced him to land in these lands so far from his own. With a prologue, edition and selection by Souto, Libros del Zorro Rojo launched Otros crónicas marcianas, a volume illustrated by David de las Heras that brings together 10 stories [some unpublished in Spanish and others published in a dispersed way] that at the time had been left out of the original publication of Crónicas marcianas….

(10) WHY CAN’T YOU CHEAT AN HONEST MAN? [Item by Mike Kennedy.] This is so, so meta-… So iterative… That it almost hurts. Hurts so good, as the song says. “A Student Used ChatGPT to Cheat in an AI Ethics Class” in Gizmodo.

A student used ChatGPT to cheat on an essay in an AI ethics class, according to a report from NBC Bay Area. To quote the scorpion in a famous fable, “lol. lmao.”

“The irony is very clearly there,” Santa Clara University professor Brian Green told NBC. The essay in question “wasn’t exactly on topic and, also, it had a very kind of, honestly, a robotic feel to it in some ways.”

The student used ChatGPT to spit out an essay for Green’s “Ethics in Artificial Intelligence” class and turned it in as their own work, the professor said. Green said he’s no longer going to require essays as a final project for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence, replacing them with oral presentations given in person. Several Bay Area universities have convened their professors to discuss the implications of generative chatbots that can generate essays in seconds, according to NBC.

This is only the latest of several media reports about the cheat-tool of the century. The New York Post published a story Friday about a ChatGPT cheating scandal “erupting” in a Florida gifted students program. In both of these cases, the cheating was easy to detect because—news flash—ChatGPT writes like a robot, and if you just submit an essay that looks different from your other writing, your teacher will see the difference….

(11) BE GLAD IT MISSED. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The strange thing looks like a giant worm. That alone made the story worth sending for the Scroll. Since it was described in the article as being the size and shape of the Empire State Building, we can be happy that it didn’t hit the Earth. Then it would obviously be the Empire striking back. “NASA Images a Weirdly Long Asteroid” at Gizmodo.

Six radar observations made of an asteroid swinging by our planet have revealed an unusually oblong space rock. The object is three times as long as it is wide—an irregular shape, as far as asteroids are concerned.

The asteroid, called 2011 AG5, is about the shape and size of the Empire State Building, minus the 222-foot antenna of course. The asteroid’s nearest approach to Earth happened on February 3, when it came within 1.1 million miles of our planet. (When scientists talk about close approaches, they’re usually speaking relatively.) The Webb Space Telescope, for comparison, is about 1 million miles from Earth…

(12) CRIME IN SPACE. This calls for a trained homicide investigator!

[Thanks to Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Tom Becker, Alan Baumler, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]

Pixel Scroll 1/13/21 The Scroll Is A Harsh Mistress

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(1) OVERVIEW OF THE NEW LOTR SERIES. Amazon just unloaded Parler but now they’re bringing back Sauron? What are they thinking? io9 has the story: “Amazon Reveals Lord of the Rings TV Show Details—Sauron Returns”.

…Confirmed via a synopsis provided to TheOneRing.net, Amazon Studios revealed that the series—currently filming in New Zealand with a cast that seems about as large as the population of a small country on top of that—is indeed set in the Second Age, “thousands” of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The show will concern itself with characters “both familiar and new” as they reckon with the fact that the Dark Lord Sauron has returned to cast shadow and flame across Middle-earth.

(2) WORLDCON HOTEL NEWS. “Owner of DC’s Wardman Park Hotel files for bankruptcy” reports WTOP. The hotel is where DisCon III, the 2021 Worldcon, would be held if an in-person 2021 Worldcon is possible:

Wardman Hotel Owner LLC, an affiliate of Pacific Life Insurance Co., has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and has ended its management contract with Marriott International.

The 1,152-room Wardman Park, one of the largest hotels in D.C., opened in 1918, during the Spanish Flu pandemic.

Pacific Life permanently closed the hotel just before filing for bankruptcy protection, and is seeking to sell the property, which could clear the way for the property’s redevelopment.

The Chapter 11 petition was filed Jan. 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.

Marriott and Pacific Life have been locked in legal disputes since shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic led to the hotel’s temporary closure in March 2020.

…The owner’s bankruptcy filing Monday came the same day that neighboring historic hotel the Omni Shoreham reopened.

The DisCon III committee hasn’t posted a response to the latest development, but last October they did address their plans for an alternative to the Wardman Park if needed. The chairs wrote in the convention’s newsletter [PDF file]:

As you can imagine, we have uncertainty related to the Coronavirus but planning and activities continue. The status of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel is unclear. Litigation between the owners was filed 2 September and settled at the end of September. At the start of October, Marriott filed a lawsuit against one of the entities that owns the hotel. What a mess! The hotel itself does not have an official statement at this time, and we are in close touch. Our Facilities team does have the room blocks for both the Marriott and the Omni Shoreham set up, and our current plan is to release those in January 2021.

(3) BOOM BOOM BOOM. James Davis Nicoll names “Five Books Featuring Space Travel Powered by Atomic Bombs”. Strange that I’ve read four of these but only remembered the nukes from one of them.

Nuclear explosives can be used to address many urgent issues: a shortage of mildly radioactive harbours, for example, or the problem of having too many wealthy, industrialized nations not populated by survivors who envy the dead. The most pressing issue—the need for a fast, affordable space drive—wasn’t solved until the late 1950s. Theodore B. Taylor and others proposed that the Bomb could be used to facilitate rapid space travel across the Solar System. Thus, Project Orion was born….

(4) SOMETHING ELSE THAT’S SURGING. “Online D&D provides relief during the COVID-19 pandemic” – the Los Angeles Times profiled D&D players.

… Players and scholars attribute the game’s resurgent popularity not only to the longueurs of the pandemic, but also to its reemergence in pop culture — on the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” whose main characters play D&D in a basement; on the sitcom “The Big Bang Theory”; or via the host of celebrities who display their love for the game online.

Liz Schuh, head of publishing and licensing for Dungeons & Dragons, isn’t surprised by the game’s reanimated popularity. Revenue was up 35% in 2020 compared with 2019, the seventh consecutive year of growth, she said.

Many newcomers purchase starter kits packed with character sheets, a rule book, a set of dice and a story line. New dungeon masters may buy a foldable screen to hide their rolls and anything else they’d like to keep from the player-characters. Once the introductory journey ends, players pore through other adventure books for sale — or conjure an original odyssey.

“The first few days of news [of the virus] coming out globally, at the top of every hour all the alarms were going off at the company,” said Dean Bigbee, director of operations for Roll20, an online tabletop gaming platform. “The amount of new account requests were so high that the systems thought that we were under a denial-of-service attack. But they were legitimate. They were accounts from Italy, and then France, following the paths of lockdowns across the world.”

(5) FORTIES SF’S POWER COUPLE SPEAKS. G.W. Thomas at Dark Worlds Quarterly put together a fine link compilation: “In Their Own Words: Interviews with Leigh Brackett & Edmond Hamilton”, who married in 1946 and put Kinsman, Ohio on the map.

Here are some interviews given by Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton. They range from artsy film magazines to the cheapest of fanzines. My favorite is the audio clip from Youtube when Leigh and Ed were the guests of honor at the 1964 (PacifiCon) WorldCon. It is somehow revealing to hear what their voices sounded like and to glean a little of their personalities beyond the printed page….

Included are Q&A’s conducted by one of fandom’s best interviewers, Paul Walker, such as his Leigh Brackett interview from Luna Monthly #61 [1976] [Internet archive link].

(6) STRAIN OBIT. Actress Julie Strain, whose genre resume is mostly erotic horror movies, has died reports Joblo.com: “R.I.P.: Julie Strain, B-movie legend and Penthouse Pet, has died at age 58”. This is the third time her death has been announced, however, news sources are satisfied this time the news is accurate.

Last January, it was mistakenly announced that B-movie legend and 1993 Penthouse Pet of the Year Julie Strain had passed away. The announcement was quickly retracted – but in a sad twist of fate, friends and family are confirming that Strain has passed away almost one year to the day after that erroneous report. She was 58 years old.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

  • 1991 — Thirty years ago at Chicon V, Lois McMaster Bujold‘s The Vor Game  as published by Baen Books wins the Hugo for Best Novel. Runners-ups were David Brin‘s Earth, Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion, Michael P. Kube-McDowell’s The Quiet Pools and Greag Bear’s Queen of Angels. It would nominated for the HOMer as well.  A portion of this novel had appeared in the February 1990 issue of  Analog magazine in slightly different form as the “Weatherman” story.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born January 13, 1893 – Clark Ashton Smith.  Poetry, prose, graphic art, sculpture.  One novel, two hundred thirty shorter stories, seven hundred poems; a dozen covers, a hundred thirty interiors; five dozen posthumous collections.  Pillar of Weird Tales with Howard and Lovecraft.  “I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation.”  (Died 1961) [JH]
  • Born January 13, 1933 – Ron Goulart, age 88.  Eighty novels, a hundred fifty shorter stories.  Book reviews for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Venture.  Comic-book stories and prose about The Phantom; scripts for Marvel.  Inkpot Award.  Detective fiction, including half a dozen books featuring Groucho Marx.  Nonfiction, e.g. The Great Comic Book Artists, Comic Book Encyclopedia.  [JH]
  • Born January 13, 1937 – George Barr, age 84.  Decades-long career as a fanartist; here is a cover for Amra; here is one for Trumpet; two Hugos as Best Fanartist; Fan Guest of Honor at Westercon XXVI, at MidAmeriCon the 34th Worldcon.  Also developed a career as a pro.  Here is The Dying Earth.  Here is the Sep 86 Amazing.  Here is Adventures in Unhistory.  Artist GoH at ConAdian the 52nd Worldcon.  Fifty illustrated limericks for Weird Tales.  Fan and pro, two hundred covers, seven hundred interiors.  Artbook Upon the Winds of Yesterday.  [JH]
  • Born January 13, 1938 — Charlie Brill, 83. His best remembered role, well at least among us, is as the Klingon spy Arne Darvin in “The Trouble with Tribbles”. And yes, he’ll show in the DS9 episode that repurposed this episode to great effect. He was the voice of Grimmy in the animated Mother Goose and Grimm series, as well having one-offs in They Came from Outer Space, The Munsters Today, Sliders, The Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman and Super Train. Not even genre adjacent but he was a recurring performer on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. (CE) 
  • Born January 13, 1945 — Joy Chant, 76. Chant is an odd case as she only wrote for a short period between 1970 and 1983 but she produced the brilliant House of Kendreth trilogy, consisting of  Red Moon and Black Mountain, The Grey Mane of Morning and When Voiha Wakes.  Her other main work, and it is without doubt absolutely brilliant, is The High Kings, illustrated lavishly by George Sharp and  designed by David Larkin with editing by Ian and Betty Ballantine. It is intended as a reference work on the Arthurian legends and the Matter of Britain with her amazing retellings of the legends.  I’ve got one reference to her writing Fantasy and Allegory in Literature for Young Readers but no cites for it elsewhere. Has anyone actually read it? (CE) 
  • Born January 13, 1957 – Claudia Emerson.  Five poems for us in Son and Foe.  Eight collections.  Poetry editor for Greensboro Review.  Pulitzer Prize.  Acad. Amer. Poets Prize.  Poet Laureate of Virginia.  Elected to Fellowship of Southern Writers.  Donald Justice Award.  (Died 2014) [JH]
  • Born January 13, 1960 — Mark Chadbourn, 61. I’ve read his Age of Misrule series in which the Celtic Old Gods are returning in modern times and they’re not very nice but they make for very entertaining reading. It’s followed by the Dark Age series which is just as well crafted. His two Hellboy novels are actually worth reading as well. (CE)
  • Born January 13, 1968 — Ken Scholes, 53. His major series, and it’s quite worth reading, is The Psalms of Isaak.  His short stories, collected so far in three volumes, are also worth your precious reading time. He wrote the superb “The Wings We Dare Aspire” for METAtropolis: Green Space. (CE) 
  • Born January 13, 1972 — Una McCormack, 49. She’s the author of The Baba Yaga and The Star of the Sea, two novels  in the delightful Weird Space series. She’s also written myriad Trek novels including a Discovery novel, The Way to the Stars, and the first Picard novel, The Last Best Hope. She’s also a writer of Who novels having five so far, plus writing for Big Finish Productions. (CE) 
  • Born January 13, 1979 – Bree Despain, age 42.  Six novels, a couple of shorter stories.  Took a semester off college to write and direct plays for inner-city teens.  Felt she wasn’t special enough to be a writer, decided to study law.  Hit by a pickup truck.  Thought it out again.  First book sold on 6th anniversary of collision.  [JH]
  • Born January 13, 1980 — Beth Cato, 41. Her first series, the Clockwork Dagger sequence beginning with The Clockwork Dagger novel is most excellent popcorn literature. She’s fine a considerable amount of excellent short fiction which has been mostly collected in  Deep Roots and Red Dust and Dancing Horses and Other Stories. Her website features a number of quite tasty cake recipes including Browned Butter Coffee Bundt Cake. Really I kid you not. (CE) 
  • Born January 13, 1981 – Ieva Melgave, age 40.  Her “Siren’s Song” has been translated from Latvian into English.  Interviewed (in English) in Vector 281.  [JH]

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) ALIENS OMNIBUS. Marvel invites fans to jump on the Aliens Omnibus when the volumes arrive in April and August.

Cover by Mahmud Asrar

The classic comic book tales set in the iconic—and terrifying—world of the Alien franchise are being collected in brand-new hardcover collection starting in April with Aliens Omnibus Volume 1. And in August, fans of the iconic franchise can enjoy even more of these thrilling comic book stories with Aliens: The Original Years Omnibus Vol. 2.

A rogue scientist’s genetic experiments create a horrific new alien king! A ragtag unit of Colonial Marines battles a xenomorph infestation on a space station — and the survivors face a pack of bizarre hybrids! An investigator must solve a murder on a deep-space alien-research station! But what dread music will a deranged composer make with an alien’s screams? And can a synthetic xenomorph rebel against its sadistic creator? Plus: Flash back to an alien attack in the 1950s! And witness the fate of England as aliens overrun the Earth! This rare collection includes: Aliens: Rogue #1-4, Aliens: Colonial Marines #1-10, Aliens: Labyrinth #1-4, Aliens: Salvation, Aliens: Music Of The Spears #1-4 and Aliens: Stronghold #1-4 — plus material from Dark Horse Comics #3-5, #11-13 And #15-19; Previews (1993) #1-12; Previews (1994) #1; and Aliens Magazine (1992) #9-20.

Exclusive direct market variant cover by Paul Mendoza

(11) THE REAL SPACE COMMAND. “U.S. Space Command to be headquartered in Huntsville, Ala.” reports station WAFF.

The permanent headquarters of U.S. Space Command will be located at Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal.

According to a statement from the Secretary of the Air Force, Huntsville was confirmed as the preferred location for the U.S. Space Command Headquarters.

The Department of the Air Force conducted both virtual and on-site visits to assess which of six candidate locations would be best suited to host the U.S. Space Command Headquarters. The decision was based on factors related to mission, infrastructure capacity, community support and costs to the Department of Defense.

(12) AUDIOBOOK NARRATION. In AudioFile’s latest Behind the Mic, narrator Joniece Abbott-Pratt shares her thoughts about recording Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer, on AudioFile’s list of the 2020 Best Young Adult Audiobooks.

Listeners meet Tarisai as a lonely younger girl growing up with a distant mother, and we feel her astonishment when she’s brought to the palace in Aristar and meets the prince — and discovers her new friend is the person her mother cursed her to kill. This vibrant and multilayered fantasy audiobook comes to life with Joniece’s evocative narration.

“You watch her save the world… and that was really cool, to be inside of a story of a young woman that got to stand in her truth and in her power. You watch a princess mature into a queen.”—Narrator Joniece Abbott-Pratt

Read AudioFile Magazine’s review of Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko.

(13) COOK BOOKS. Get stacks of Glen Cook novels via this new Bundle of Holding deal.

Adventurer! This Glen Cook Bundle presents novels by fantasy and science fiction author Glen Cook from Night Shade Books. Best known for his Black Company dark military fantasies, Cook has also written the eight-book Dread Empire epic fantasy series, the Starfishers and Darkwar trilogies, and many free-standing novels. This all-new fiction offer gives you nearly two dozen Glen Cook novels in both ePub and Kindle ebook formats for an unbeatable bargain price.

For just US$7.95 you get all five titles in our Glen Cook Sampler (retail value $69) as DRM-free ePub and Kindle ebooks

… And if you pay more than the threshold price of $25.97, you’ll level up and also get our entire Complete Collection with eight more titles…

(14) ON SECOND THOUGHT. He’s a busy man, you know.

(15) HELICONIA WINTER. Richard Paolinelli handed out the 2021 Helicon Awards [Internet archive link] yesterday, some to bestselling sff writers, two to L. Jagi Lamplighter and Declan Finn, but if you want to know what’s really on Richard’s mind look at this entry on the list:

  • John W. Campbell Diversity in SF/F Award – J.K. Rowling

Paolinelli also presented awards named for Melvil Dewey and Laura Ingalls Wilder, which he created after their names were removed from two American Library Association awards in recent years.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Honest Game Trailers:  Cyberpunk 2077” on YouTube, Fandom Games says that Cyberpunk 2077 is “the most anticipated release since Cup And Ball 2″ and that it lets gamers wallow in a world which is “not cool, not fun, and everything’s broken.”

[Thanks to JJ, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Michael Toman, James Davis Nicoll, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus.]

2015 World Fantasy Con Website Goes Online

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Steven Erikson
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Glen Cook
David Drake

A new web site for the 2015 World Fantasy Convention has just opened — www.wfc2015.org.

It has all the usual features, including writeups about the two guests of honor, Steven Erikson and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and two special guests, Glen Cook and David Drake.

Those interested in being on the program can fill out a questionnaire here.