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Pixel Scroll 5/14/26 Scrolling, Scrolling, Scrolling — Pixelhide!

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(1) OR THE HORSE MAY TALK. Judith Tarr analyzes “The Universal Appeal of the Talking Animal” at Reactor.

…Humans all over the world tell stories and sing songs of animals who talk to each other like humans, act like humans, think like humans. The world is a mirror. Everywhere we look, we see ourselves.

The technical term is anthropomorphism. Imputing human traits to nonhuman things. When that thing is an animal, the animal talks, because humans do. Human language, human ideas, human ways of doing things.

In folklore and oral storytelling, animals talk to each other. They talk to humans. Humans talk to them. Everyone communicates on the same level, in the same words.

Literary animals may be their natural selves—rabbits, lions, horses, cats—or they may be fully anthropomorphized. Peter Rabbit and his family wear human clothes and do human things. So do Toad and his friends in The Wind in the Willows. And then there’s Winnie the Pooh, who begins his life as a child’s toy, inhabiting a world of toys based on living animals: a bear, a donkey, a tiger, a kangaroo. (And let’s not forget Paddington Bear and Calvin’s inimitable Hobbes.)

Animals rule the world of animated comedy. Mickey Mouse, Mighty Mouse, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Felix the cat, Sylvester the cat and his arch-foe Tweety Bird, Foghorn Leghorn (whose accent inspires a human avatar, Benoit Blanc), Yogi Bear, Rocky the flying squirrel and Bullwinkle the moose, the list goes on and on.

These animals and their stories are often consigned to the children’s section. Adults are expected to grow out of them. Grownup stories are “real” stories, stories about humans doing “real” things, in a world in which animals stay strictly in their lane. They may make sounds, but they’re not talking. Talking is a human thing.

And yet, humans of all ages keep right on loving their talking animals. Cartoons are grand entertainment for kids, but there are whole levels and layers of wit and satire that the grown-up kid will catch. Bugs Bunny’s riff on Wagnerian opera is central to my childhood; the older I get, the more I appreciate the gloriously cracked genius of a wiseass rabbit in a brass bra and a winged helmet (and that horse) …

(2) WOLF WOMEN. “Sam Beckbessinger: A Brief History of the Female Werewolf” at CrimeReads.

…So the glorious exceptions that do center female werewolves usually tread quite different thematic territory. Unlike male werewolves, who are usually infected through a random physical attack, female werewolves are more likely to see their transformation linked to a moment of innate reproductive change: menarche, childbirth or menopause….

…All cultures have animal shapeshifter myths, but the European werewolf tradition, specifically, starts from two places: ancient Greek texts (Lycaon from Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the origin of the term “lycanthropy”) and the Old Norse tradition of warriors wearing enchanted wolfskins to “become” wolves in battle.

By the Middle Ages, werewolves are well-established in folklore all across Europe, to varying degrees, but there are only a couple of notable women in these stories. There’s an Irish story about the Daughters of Airitech (which appears in the Acallam na Senórach from around 1200), who are three wolf-women who live in the wild and are a nuisance to local villagers because they eat their sheep. They have a weakness for certain elements of human culture, though (in some stories harp music; in others cooked meat), and turn back into human women to enjoy them, in which state they are vulnerable enough to be either murdered or (worse) married off. There’s also a story of the Werewolves of Ossory from 1188’s Topographia Hibernica, which features a man and woman who must live seven years at a time as wolves, transforming (like the Norse) when they don wolfskins. In these stories, the werewolf isn’t violent so much as uncultured….

(3) SOMETIMES THEY KEEP THE TITLE AND THROW THE BOOK AWAY. But not always. Movieweb’s discussion of“8 Book-to-Movie Adaptations That Ended Up Nothing Like the Source Material” includes three sff works: Starship Troopers, Lawnmower Man, and A Clockwork Orange (excerpted below).

‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1971)

A Clockwork Orange is a peculiar case. While Stanley Kubrick stuck close to the general source material, the release of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel differed between US publishers and the original release. The version that Kubrick read and adapted the script from was the American release of the book, which cut the final 21st chapter in its entirety. The final chapter offers a redemption arc for Alex, showing that he is redeemed. While this is just a minor change, it drastically shifts the entire messaging of the film versus the novel.

Kubrick, when he found out, said he preferred his ending to the one Burgess wrote, while Burgess hated the film Kubrick made. There were also some smaller changes worth mentioning. Alex in the book is 15 years old, and it is almost entirely written in Nadsat slang (a made-up mash of English and Russian) that readers have to decode; Kubrick used some of it, but not all. Finally, the novel has more explicit Christian and free-will themes, with the prison chaplain having a more prominent role.

Many of Kubrick’s changes to the screen made sense, and the movie still managed to draw acclaim and controversy, but a single chapter left out makes the novel and the film drastically different experiences.

(4) PITCH MEETING. Deadline quotes “Peter Jackson On How Stephen Colbert Got ‘LOTR: Shadow of the Past’”.

Freshly lauded Cannes Palme d’Or honoree Peter Jackson tells us that Stephen Colbert‘s attachment as writer on a new Lord of the Rings movie, which is being released after 2027’s Hunt for Gollum, occurred when The Late Show host pitched himself for the gig.

“He was re-reading Lord of the Rings over Christmas and thought this section would make a great film,” Jackson tells us at Cannes.

“He pitched this whole idea… I said it sounds interesting, let’s have a go at this, doing a treatment. Philippa Boyens flew over and Colbert has come down to New Zealand a couple of times.”

“This is before he knew his show was going to get canned.”

“It’s a part of Lord of the Rings that we never filmed. There were these big chunks of Lord of the Rings that we skipped over,” says Jackson, the three-time Oscar winner.

The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past is based on the section “Fog on the Barrow-downs,” the eighth chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, in which the Hobbits are trapped by a Barrow-wight in an unnatural fog. The story also includes a fan-favorite character omitted from the previous films, Tom Bombadil. The feature is being adapted from chapters three through eight of JRR Tolkien’s book.

“Next week, he’s doing his final show and the next day he’ll be a Tolkien screenwriter,” said Jackson of Colbert.

(5) ‘THE NEXT GENERATION’ CLASSIC REVISITED. Collider tells why “Patrick Stewart Still Calls This 34-Year-Old ‘Star Trek’ Episode a True Masterpiece”.

…While never a fully serialized series, The Next Generation‘s later seasons inject lasting character growth into its episodic formula. As a standalone that grafts permanent ripple effects onto Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), Season 5’s “The Inner Light” deserves the glowing superlatives fans, critics, the Hugo Awards, and Stewart himself have sent its way since 1992. Often regarded as the already sophisticated series’ pinnacle achievement, “The Inner Light” is an arresting and resonant example of everything sci-fi’s genre trappings can offer, swapping out epic scale for a character study that’s as psychologically contemplative as it is philosophically driven.

What Is “The Inner Light” About?

When the Enterprise investigates an unidentified space probe, the device targets Picard with a mysterious energy bolt. Struck comatose, he wakes upon the planet of Kataan, where every stranger recognizes him as Kamin, a local iron weaver. Kamin’s wife, Eline (Margot Rose), assures Picard that his memories of French vineyards and starship corridors are delirious inventions caused by a week-long fever. As years pass without answers, Picard makes the most of his unwelcome circumstances. He falls in love with Eline, grows old with her while raising their children, and practices the flute in his leisure time.

However, Kataan’s scientists determine that a nearby exploding star will annihilate the planet within their lifetimes. Since Kataan dwells outside the Federation’s borders, they lack access to the cutting-edge resources that might reverse its inevitable demise. During this civilization’s final moments, Picard learns the last four decades were an interactive mental simulation induced by the probe’s beam. Kataan’s long-dead citizens didn’t want to be forgotten, and their floating time capsule chose Picard as the best person to safeguard their legacy. Its purpose fulfilled, the program returns Picard to the Enterprise bridge, his body never left. The 40 years Picard experienced have been just 25 minutes for his concerned crew…

…”The Inner Light” rises above its classic “what if?” structure thanks to its laser-focused purpose and restrained execution. Written by Morgan Gendel and directed by Peter Lauritson, the two share a kind of harmonious understanding over which emotional beats to imply and which need lingering with. The episode’s broad concepts about our fleeting mortality and the value of cherishing humble joys are straightforward enough not to court sentimentality and are conveyed through an earnest accessibility that stands the test of time. What could be an overt laundry list of ideas instead gracefully flows through legacy, identity, second chances, environmental decay, what determines a well-lived life, and the resolved wisdom required to carve out that existence while facing imminent destruction….

(6) THE RUMBLE AND THE ROAR. [Item by Steven French.] Keza MacDonald reminiscences in this week’s “Pushing Buttons” newsletter in the Guardian: “Star Fox 64, a game I loved in my childhood, is returning – but I have mixed feelings”.

The Nintendo 64 was not my first video game console, but it was my formative one. Getting to grips with 3D movement in Super Mario 64 with that weird three-pronged controller is one of my most visceral childhood memories; the long, long wait for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the background noise to a huge chunk of my youth. But back in the 1990s (in the UK at least), it felt as if nobody had an N64. When everybody had a PlayStation instead, I felt I was the only kid in my whole city who cared more about Banjo-Kazooie than Crash Bandicoot.

If even Zelda seemed comparatively niche in Europe in the 90s, Lylat Wars (known elsewhere as Star Fox 64) was a real deep cut. It’s a 1997 space-flight shooter starring Fox McCloud and his squad of animal pilots laser-blasting across different planets in nimble crafts called Arwings. I played this game to absolute death in 1998, when I got it for my birthday alongside the fabled Rumble Pak, which made your controller vibrate and shudder whenever something cool was happening on screen (fun fact: Lylat Wars was the first console game to feature controller rumble). But I really hadn’t thought about it much since. Then, last week, Nintendo announced a Switch 2 remake….

(7) “THESE DETECTIVES LOOK UP!” EXCLAIMED TOM SHEEPISHLY. [Item by Daniel Dern.] A short video, “The Sheep Detectives – Behind the Scenes“, for the new movie starring, among others, Hugh Jackman,

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 14, 1944 – George Lucas, 82.

By Paul Weimer: To talk about George Lucas for me is to first talk about Star Wars. 

Star Wars lurked in my imagination long before seeing any of it. I didn’t see Star Wars in the theater but my younger brother and I got a joint Christmas gift of a Death Star playset, and a few action figures. We only had the commercials for the set to go on, not Lucas’ own vision, and so our playing of the set led to very strange scenarios having nothing to do with the movie. 

It would not be until 1983, and Return of the Jedi, that I saw a George Lucas movie at all, and in the theater. I saw the magic of his world, having only the fuzziest idea of the first two movies, but I was swept along. This shows the power of Lucas harnessing the power of serial fiction to allow watchers to get in on the action quickly. This is something the Marvel cinematic universe could still learn from Lucas today. It’s not just the crawls at the beginning, it’s the economy of storytelling, the establishment of characters that let you hit the ground running. 

Like Star Wars, I missed the first Indiana Jones movie in theaters, but did see Temple of Doom (Lucas did not direct but his story was the basis of the film). And of course, too, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  Same principle applies. Early Lucas knew the power of crafting episodic sequels and making them work. 

In keeping with those films, Lucas was also responsible for getting me hooked into the idea of the Hero’s Journey, since I read the Joseph Campbell book The Power of Myth thanks to Lucas’ forward in the book. Sure, the Hero’s Journey is a very outdated, patriarchal and restrictive story framework but it was my first real engagement with the nature and form of stories. Lucas helped introduce me to that whole new world. 

However, I would not see another Lucas directed film until the late 1990’s…but that is another story, one that deserves its own entry.

George Lucas with his wife, Mellody Hobson.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) DOCTOR WHO, WHERE? The Hollywood Reporter tells where to find the Doctor: “’Doctor Who’ Gets New U.S. Streaming Home on AMC+”.

The TARDIS is set to land in a new location in a few weeks.

AMC+ has acquired streaming rights to most of the 21st century run of Doctor Who. Thirteen seasons of the series, spanning the runs of the ninth through thirteenth Doctors (2005-22), will be available on the streamer starting June 11.

The AMC+ acquisition is something of a homecoming for Doctor Who. BBC America, which like AMC+ is part of AMC Networks, was the U.S. home for the series from 2009-22 (Sci Fi Channel, the forerunner to Syfy, had the first few seasons)….

…The acquisition does not include the two most recent seasons of Doctor Who, which the BBC produced in conjunction with Disney. Those seasons, starring Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor, remain on Disney+ in the United States….

(11) “DO HAVE A CACO, MAN!” “Chocolate now has standards for excellence, like wine and coffee” – NPR tells how that works.

In central Rome, Julien Simonis holds a tiny bar of chocolate made from cacao beans that originated in Hawaii. He cracks it into pieces before unwrapping the gold foil that surrounds it. Simonis places a morsel on his tongue and then breathes in through his mouth and out through his nose to heighten his perception of the chocolate’s aroma and taste.

A look of reverence comes over him.

“My god,” he whispers. “Each time I taste this, I’m always amazed. You have a boost of acidity. This burst of fresh flavors.” Simonis detects a fruitiness and a hint of cardamom and nutmeg….

… The standardized processing of the cacao takes place at a lab tucked inside the Chocolate Experience Museum in hilly Perugia, about a hundred miles north of Rome.

To begin, lab assistant Julia Butac empties a burlap bag of beans into a bin and starts to sift them a couple handfuls at a time, removing anything that isn’t a full bean. “It’s really physical work,” she says, acknowledging the rigorousness of the method.

Butac is from the Philippines and was never a huge chocolate fan, but this process has given her a deeper appreciation for it….

…Those two chocolates that Simonis tasted — the one from Hawaii and the other from Peru — had been processed and prepared identically in Perugia. But they have two very different personalities.

“Just realize that the difference in these chocolates [is] only coming from the cacao bean,” he says. “Despite the recipe being exactly the same, flavors are completely different.”

Simonis relies on a panel of 15 trained professional tasters to evaluate a chocolate’s unique blend of acidity, bitterness, astringency and more. The result is a standardized way of comparing chocolate, allowing cacao to be priced and valued according to its quality.

More and more people are joining the program. There’s a charge for trainings and certification but access to resources including a step-by-step guide to cacao processing and the flavor wheel that the official tasters use to do their evaluations are free. “We are trying to work with every single producing country in the world,” he adds….

(12) TRAINING DAY. “Blue Origin’s lunar lander mockup is ready for NASA Artemis astronaut training” reports Space.com.

NASA’s Orion space capsule training simulator is located inside Building 9 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It’s a full-scale, high-fidelity model of the real thing, and where the Artemis 2 astronauts spent more than a year preparing for their recent mission around the moon.

For a long time, the Orion simulator sat alone in its own corner, away from the group of International Space Station training modules lined up inside the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility (SVMF). But now, Orion has a neighbor.

A mockup of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 2 (MK2) lunar lander has been assembled at the SVMF, and is ready for astronauts to come aboard to begin training, according to a NASA release. Standing adjacent to the Orion capsule, the Blue Moon crew cabin and exterior resemble the design of the lander’s Mark 2 variant, which will eventually land Artemis astronauts on the moon, if all goes according to plan.

With Blue Origin’s mockup now assembled at JSC, astronauts can now seamlessly transition from training inside Orion to training in Blue Moon as they prepare for the Artemis missions ahead. The next mission, Artemis 3, is dependent on at least one lunar lander being ready to fly before the mission can launch.

Blue Moon is one of two lunar landers NASA has chosen through the agency’s Human Landing System (HLS) contracts, the other being SpaceX’s Starship, and is a critical component of NASA’s Artemis program that aims to establish a permanent presence on the moon’s surface….

(13) NEW ORGANIC MOLECULES DETECTED ON MARS. COULD IT BE LIFE JIM? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Hot on the news of water-altered molecules detected by the Perseverance rover in Mars’ Jezero crater is fresh research from another Martian crater, the Gale crater. There the Curiosity rover has taken samples and subjected them to the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite onboard the rover. And the results are now in. There are benzothiophene, methyl benzoate, and single and dicyclic aromatic molecules present. The researchers, mainly US-based, do not know whether the source of these molecules comes from meteors or were they formed in situ either by life or some geological process. What they can say is that these molecules are most likely around 3.5-billion years old as that is the age of the strata from which they were taken.

The importance of this work is that it is an indication that with further development of robotic lab analysis on future Martian rovers, it is likely that some future missions will have the capability to detect biosignatures should they exist.

Primary research: Williams, A. J. et al. (2026) Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment. Nature Communications, vol. 17, 2748.

(14) RE-VISITING PIRANESI BY SUSANNA CLARKE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff’s Media Death Cult has a YouTube Channel but is bigger on Patreon where Cult followers discuss all things SFnal. Recently, the Cult has had a read-along of Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi and this has fired up Moid to make, possibly his longest video yet. It has only just been posted and in it he shares his thoughts on the novel and some of the comments made on the Media Death Cult Patreon thingy.

This is a video about the evolving theories surrounding Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

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

Pixel Scroll 12/15/25 You Gotta Find Some Pixels To Scroll

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(1) STAR WARS PAINTING SETS RECORD. Heritage Auctions made history its Dec. 9–10 Hollywood & Entertainment Signature® Auction, where the original 1977 half-sheet artwork created by illustrator Tom Jung for Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope sold for $3.875 million, making it the most valuable piece of Star Wars memorabilia and piece of movie poster art ever sold at auction. “Heritage Auctions Establishes New World Record With $3.875 Million ‘Star Wars’ Painting”.

…Jung’s painting — the first widely published image used to promote Star Wars — shattered every existing franchise record, surpassing the screen-matched “Red Leader” X-Wing filming miniature ($3.125 million through Heritage in 2023) and Darth Vader’s lightsaber ($3.654 million). Its sale also sets a new world auction record for any piece of movie poster art, dramatically eclipsing the previous benchmark achieved by Heritage of $687,500 for Bob Peak’s Apocalypse Now artwork….

…The painting was consigned directly by the family of producer Gary Kurtz, offering fans and collectors a rare opportunity to acquire a foundational piece with impeccable provenance and further underscoring Heritage Auctions’ commitment to presenting the most significant and historically meaningful works of popular culture….

(2) GERROLD GOFUNDME. “David Gerrold’s Health and Leukemia Fundraiser” has launched on GoFundMe with a $40,000 goal. At this writing a bit over $26,000 has been donated. Gerrold explains why he is making the appeal:

I’d been putting this off, hoping it wouldn’t be necessary, but finally Sean came to me and said, “Dad, stop playing the hero. You have to do a GoFundMe. We can’t dig this hole any deeper. I saw your hospital bill.”

I said, “Sean, there are people with much worse situations, much greater needs, and people should donate to them first — “

He stopped me again. “Dad, you had a pulmonary embolism in August. The doctor said you could have died. And you still have bills to cover from that. I saw the hospital bill, $19,000!”

“Well, Medicare and Vermont Wellcare are supposed to — “

“But they haven’t yet. And we don’t know what they’ll cover. And there;s another $3,000 in other health related bills. And you’re still not done. They did your blood tests and found Hairy Cell Leukemia. You have six doctor’s appointments coming up between now and February….”

(3) DIAMOND COMICS MOVES TO LIQUIDATION. “Diamond Comics Moves To Chapter 7 Bankruptcy, As Banks Pull Funding” reports Bleeding Cool.

Diamond Comic Distributors Inc., the debtor in the long-running Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is now heading toward Chapter 7, with the debtor requesting that the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Maryland convert its cases to Chapter 7 after its lender, JPMorgan Chase Bank, refused to continue funding operations. In a newly filed motion, the debtor tell the court bluntly that it can no longer remain in Chapter 11 because “the Debtors cannot continue to administer their cases without funding,” and that JPMorgan has made clear it is “unwilling to finance further administration of these cases in Chapter 11.”

U.S. Courts describe Chapter 7 bankruptcy as providing for “liquidation – the sale of a debtor’s nonexempt property and the distribution of the proceeds to creditors,” whereas “A Chapter 11 debtor usually proposes a plan of reorganization to keep its business alive and pay creditors over time.”  However, a debtor may sometimes choose to liquidate under Chapter 11 rather than Chapter 7.  According to the Chapter 11 portion of the Bankruptcy Code, “A debtor in a case under chapter 11 has a one-time absolute right to convert the chapter 11 case to a case under chapter 7 unless: (1) the debtor is not a debtor in possession; (2) the case originally was commenced as an involuntary case under chapter 11; or (3) the case was converted to a case under chapter 11 other than at the debtor’s request. 11 U.S.C. § 1112(a).”

Diamond, the debtor, is separate from Diamond Comic Distribution II, the distribution operation acquired by Ad Populum/Sparkle Pop in the bankruptcy auction earlier this year, which is still operating, although one departing staffer told us in September that they believed the comics distribution business “will not last much longer, maybe not even until the end of the year.” …

(4) SLF DIVERSITY GRANT SHORTLIST. The Speculative Literature Foundation has announced the finalists for their 2025 Diversity Grants.

(5) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. Space Cowboy Books of Joshua Tree, CA has dropped episode 94 of “Simultaneous Times” with stories from the pages of Radon Journal. 

Stories featured in this episode:

  • “Instructions for Self-reflection” by Parker M. O’Neill; music by Phog Masheeen; read by the Jean-Paul Garnier
  • “Instructions for Rewilding the Wasteland” by Emma Burnett; music by TSG; read by Jenna Hanchey
  • “Dad Jokes” by David Lee Zweifler; music by Doctor Auxiliary; read by the author

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

 (6) OF BOOKS TO COME. There are over sixty books of all genres on Goodreads’  listicle “Get Ready! Readers’ Most Anticipated Books of 2026”.

For devoted bookworms, the new year is an exciting time. Specifics on the year’s upcoming books start making the rounds, along with release dates. The Goodreads editorial team has been carefully tracking and sorting this information, and we’re pleased to report that 2026 is going to be really quite busy. And, frankly, pretty awesome….

It’s worth pointing out that there’s another Goodreads list – “Can’t Wait Sci-Fi/Fantasy of 2026” — based on user votes, that gives a slightly different impression, while having a fair few commonalities. This list contains nearly 300 titles, and Martha Wells’ next Murderbot book, Platform Decay, is at the top of it, followed by Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Trade of Blood (Shadow of the Leviathan, #3).

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

December 15, 1951 — David Bischoff. (Died 2018.)

Our community is blessed with many amazing writers whom David Bischoff was one. So let’s talk about him.  

His first writings were in the Thrust fanzine where he did a mix of commentary and criticism. Editor Doug Fratz would later convert it into a semiprozine where Bischoff along with John Shirley and Michael Bishop were regular contributors. Thrust got one Hugo nomination as a fanzine and four as semiprozine.

David Bischoff. Photo taken and copyright by Andrew Porter.

Bischoff’s  first novel, The Seeker, co-written with Christopher Lampton, was published by Laser Books forty-nine years ago. 

He was extremely prolific. No, I don’t mean sort of prolific, I mean extremely prolific. He wrote some seventy-five original novels which is to say not within of any of the many media franchises that he wrote within plus another thirty-five or so novels falling within those media franchises.

What franchises? Oh, how about these for a start and this is not a full listing by any means — Aliens, Alien Versus Predator, Farscape, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Jonny Quest, SeaQuest DSV, Space Precinct and War Games. And no, I never knew there were Jonny Quest novels. 

Oh, and I must single out that he wrote two Bill, the Galactic Hero novels, Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure and Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Ten Thousand Bars which is either a great idea or maybe not. Not having read them I have no idea. A Planet of Ten Thousand Bars? Do they clone livers there? 

And he wrote for the Trek universe, two most excellent episodes at that. He co-wrote the ”Tin Man” episode from Next Generation, a Nebula nominee, with Dennis Putman Bailey, and the “First Contact” episode from the same series written with Dennis Russell Bailey, Joe Menosky, Ronald D. Moore and Michael Piller. 

Almost none of his extensive fiction has been collected save that which is in Tripping the Dark Fantastic from a quarter of a century ago which collects a few novelettes and some short stories. 

Very little of his fiction is available from the usual suspects, and even Tripping the Dark Fantastic is not available. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) WHERE WOLF? On BlueSky, Cora Buhlert shared a local werewolf legend from the town of Vechta and a statue inspired by it. Here is the first of four posts in the series – click through to see the rest.

Lambert Sprengepiel was a nobleman from the town of Vechta and a colonel of the Imperial army during the Thirty Years War. He waged guerrilla warfare against the occupying Swedes, striking seemingly out of nowhere. 1/4 #Vechta #Werewolves

— Cora Buhlert (@corabuhlert.bsky.social) 2025-12-12T13:58:30.471Z

(10) YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE IMAGES. [Item by Steven French.] Some wonderful photos here, including one of a tattooed tardigrade! “The best science images of 2025 — Nature’s picks”.

Icy ink. This tardigrade is sporting what is perhaps the world’s tiniest ‘tattoo’. Researchers used an electron beam to etch the dots into a layer of ice coating the animal. The beam transforms the substance into a compound that sticks to the tardigrade’s skin, leaving the design visible when the rest of the ice evaporates. The method’s extremely high precision means it could have applications in biomedical engineering, the scientists who developed the technique say. They are now working on tattooing even smaller organisms, including bacteria, in the same way.

The Sun’s fiery surface, a tattooed tardigrade, rare red lightning and more – these are the best science images from 2025, chosen by Nature's Photo TeamCheck them out: go.nature.com/3MANqs5

— Nature (@nature.com) 2025-12-15T16:59:03.441Z

(11) TRAILER PARK. “’Stranger Things 5′ Volume 2 Trailer: Vecna Begins His New World Order”. Variety tells where you can see it.

“Stranger Things” is marching toward its endgame with the latest trailer for the show’s second batch of episodes, releasing on Christmas.

Netflix revealed a first look at Volume 2 after dropping the first four episodes of “Stranger Things 5” on Thanksgiving. Volume 2 will consist of the middle three episodes dropping Dec. 25 at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET, and the finale will be released on New Year’s Eve, in addition to playing in theaters….

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

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 5/13/25 The Psy Who Clicked In From The Scroll

Posted on by
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(1) ATWOOD’S FREEDOM TO PUBLISH AWARD. The Guardian reports an award acceptance speech in which “Margaret Atwood says she cannot remember another time ‘when words themselves have felt under such threat’”.

Margaret Atwood has said she cannot remember another point in her lifetime “when words themselves have felt under such threat”.

“Words are our earliest human technology, like water they appear insubstantial, but like water they can generate tremendous power” the 85-year-old novelist said in her acceptance speech for the freedom to publish prize at the British Book awards.

“Political and religious polarisation, which appeared to be on the wane for parts of the 20th century, has increased alarmingly in the past decade,” she added. “The world feels to me more like the 1930s and 40s at present than it has in the intervening 80 years.”

The British Book awards, colloquially known as the Nibbies, are a set of prizes for authors, illustrators and book industry professionals run by the publishing trade magazine, The Bookseller. …

…Though Atwood did not attend the ceremony in London, she recorded a video acceptance speech to be shown when she was announced winner of the freedom to publish award, which is supported by freedom of expression campaign organisation Index on Censorship and was established in 2022 to “highlight the growing threats to writers, publishers and booksellers, and to amplify those who fight back”.

(2) FIGHTING BACK. “Jamie Lee Curtis just wanted an AI ad removed, not to become the ‘poster child of internet fakery’” – at the LA Times (behind a paywall).

Jamie Lee Curtis didn’t expect to be at the forefront of the artificial intelligence debate in Hollywood. But she didn’t have a choice.

The Oscar-winning actor recently called out Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on social media, saying the company ignored her requests to take down a fake AI-generated advertisement on Instagram that had been on the platform for months.

The ad, which used footage from an interview Curtis gave to MSNBC about January’s Los Angeles area wildfires, manipulated her voice to make it appear that she was endorsing a dental product, Curtis said.

“I was not looking to become the poster child of internet fakery, and I’m certainly not the first,” Curtis told The Times by phone Tuesday morning.

The ad has since been removed.

What happened to Curtis is part of a larger issue actors are dealing with amid the rise of generative AI technology, which has allowed their images and voices to be altered in ways they haven’t authorized. Those changes can be wildly misleading….

(3) DOOR DRAGONS AT WORK. [Item by Mark Roth-Whitworth.] They told him, both of them, to Go Away. From NPR: “The President has named a new Acting Librarian of Congress. It’s his former defense lawyer.”

Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, has been appointed as the acting Librarian of Congress by President Trump, according to a spokesperson at the Department of Justice….

Blanche has no experience working in libraries or archives,…

An employee at the Librarian of Congress, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, said two men showed up this morning with a letter saying that Blanche was appointed the acting Librarian of Congress, Brian Nieves was appointed acting assistant librarian, and Paul Perkins was appointed the acting Register of Copyrights and Director of the Copyright Office. The men were not allowed into offices and left soon after, the employee said, adding that the Library of Congress is a legislative branch agency, and has not yet received direction from Congress on how to move forward….

Publishers Weekly offers more detail about the turnover: “U.S. Executive and Legislative Branches Battle at the LoC”.

Does the future of the free world come down to who oversees the Library of Congress? Events of the past five days suggest as much, with a pitched battle over who may serve as interim Librarian and strong words from the House of Representatives.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden was summarily fired, via email, late in the day on May 8. At the time of her removal, Hayden was serving a 10-year appointment that would have concluded in 2026, and her sudden ouster—without clear grounds for dismissal—was met with nationwide rage and disappointment from librarians, members of Congress, and the general public. Robert R. Newlen was named acting Librarian to replace Hayden, according to LoC seniority regulations and rules for succession.

Newlen has substantial experience in the agency, having worked at the Library of Congress from 1975–2017, and having been appointed (by Hayden) interim director of the Congressional Research Service in 2023. Newlen is a past member of the American Library Association executive board, a senior trustee of the ALA endowment, and 2016 recipient of the ALA Medal of Excellence.

One of Newlen’s first official acts as Librarian was to inform staff that the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter, had been fired Saturday, May 10. Perlmutter, also appointed by Hayden, had served in the role since 2020. The Copyright Office is housed in the Library of Congress and likewise belongs to the U.S. legislative branch, and the director is appointed to the post by the Librarian. As of May 12, no new acting director had been identified.

Newlen served for all of one weekend before the Trump administration attempted to remove him too. The New York Times reported that deputy attorney general Todd Blanche—already in a prominent Department of Justice role—had been named acting Librarian on May 12, and immediately thereafter was embroiled in a standoff with Newlen. Politico broke the news that Newlen “disputed a change that had been made in an email to library staff Monday morning” and did not cede the role to Blanche, calling for Congress and not the executive branch to direct the process….

(4) EARLY RETURNS ON MURDERBOT. “’Murderbot’ Review: Apple’s New Comedy Sci-Fi Is A Great Vehicle For Alexander Skarsgard, But Not Without Its Problems” at Forbes. Beware mild spoilers.

…The most endearing thing about Murderbot is it’s / his (nobody quite knows how to refer to SecUnit when it comes to pronouns, a running gag) obsession with The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, which is basically the show you’d get if Star Trek and Days Of Our Lives had a lovechild. The show has 2,797 episodes and we get little glimpses of them in action because Murderbot spends every waking moment glued to his entertainment feed, and is annoyed when pesky humans and their problems get in the way…

(5) PAGERTURNERS. “People who prefer physical books over ebooks usually display these 7 behaviors, says psychology” – Global English Editing has the story. First on the list:

1) They value the sensory experience

You see, for physical book lovers, reading is more than just deciphering words. It’s a sensory affair.

The smell of the paper, especially in a new book fresh off the shelf or an old one rich with history, is intoxicating to them.

The tactile stimulation of flipping through pages, feeling the texture under their fingertips, provides a satisfaction that swiping on a screen simply can’t match.

And there’s something about hearing the gentle rustle of pages turning or seeing your progress as you slowly traverse from the right side of the book to the left that makes reading a physical book uniquely rewarding.

It’s this immersive, multi-sensory experience that often keeps them loyal to traditional books, despite the convenience of digital alternatives. So if you’re someone who relishes these sensory delights, it’s safe to say you might be a physical book lover at heart….

(6) LACON V RATES TO INCREASE. Memberships in the 2026 Worldcon will cost more on June 15.

LAcon V membership rates go up on June 15th!

Right now, full attending adult memberships are $200 and will increase to $230. (All other memberships will remain the same price for now.) Our installment plan is also currently available for full adult attending memberships!

Visit the registration page on the website to get your membership before prices go up: https://www.lacon.org/register

Take advantage of the installment plan right now: https://www.lacon.org/2025/05/10/installmentplan

(7) CANARY IN THE COALMINE: USING “VIRTUAL VOICE”. [Item by Francis Hamit.] This link is for my new audiobook It is a test. https://a.co/d/07HmIQf

I am coming up on the 60th anniversary of matriculating at University of Iowa in Iowa City. I was originally a Drama major but between then and when I left to join the US Army Security Agency in 1967 several events occurred that changed my life. I discovered writing and my true vocation. Despite a history of D+’s in English it turned out I could write. I’m dyslexic but I could hear the music. Perhaps it was all of those plays I was in. I went from a Basic Playwrighting class to the Undergraduate Writers Workshop. During those two years, as the Vietnam War heated up, I saw the first draft card burning, indulged in nude photography (them not me) and took up undercover anti-narcotics work.

About ten years ago I wrote a short memoir about all of it, The Perfect Spy, which did not get much traction there because no one would review it. It was too shocking. No one wanted to know that their parents or grandparents actually did “sex, drugs, and rock and roll”.

Kirkus gave me a very nice review.

And now, out of nowhere, Amazon has offered me a “virtual voice” audiobook.  It’s not the robotic voice they used to have but AI enhanced.  Actually sounds human and had features  that allow for variations in pace.  Google gave me something similar for Starmen but it was a long slog and the voice selection was not great. Amazon’s voice are IMO better and easier to work with.  And this is probably the future in small press conversions.  When we did The Shenandoah Spy in 2008 I did a 50-50 deal with Gail Shalan on ACX. That was 40 hours of trial and error for both of us and practically no sales.  It was great for Gail. She went on to become an audiobook superstar.  I can’t afford her now but I’m very proud of having given her that first chance.

I think Virtual Voice may be my solution. No one reads anymore. Audiobooks are a big chunk of the market and Amazon controls the price to a narrow range.  I am hoping that some people will find my adventures as a young man in Iowa worth listening to.  Sixty years is not that long ago.

If you want a science fiction connection, Nicholas Meyer was a classmate.  I had a couple of things to say about him too.

(8) LET’S DO THE TIME LORD AGAIN. “Your Name Engraved in Circular Gallifreyan – Metal, Glow Reactive Paint. Doctor Who Cosplay. Prop Replica. Game Piece. Geek Gift. Pin Badge.”

Solid metal disc with your name translated into Circular Gallifreyan, then laser engraved and filled with Ultra Violet reactive paint. We can engrave this in Copper, Brass, Stainless Steel or Aluminium. If you want a different size metal than the options listed, please message us and we can help 🙂 We’ve also got a Titanium listing of this in our store, see the “Sci-Fi” section.

You can use this link to translate into Gallifreyan: https://adrian17.github.io/Gallifreyan/. I thought “That could be fun” and checked it out. They tell me this is how File 770 reads in that language.

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

May 13, 1994 — The Crow

Thirty-one years ago on the evening, The Crow premiered. I saw it at the theatre and yes, I liked it quite a bit. I’m not a horror fan but I found this quite impressive.  I hadn’t realized until now that it was co-written by John Shirley along with David J. Schow but I’ll get back to that in awhile. 

It was directed by Alex Proyas who would later be nominated for a Hugo at Aussiecon Three (1999) for Dark City. (The Truman Show won that year.) And he’d also later direct I, Robot.

The Crow was produced by Jeff Most, Edward R. Pressman and Grant Hill. Most would produce the sequels, The Crow: City of Angels, The Crow: Salvation and The Crow: Wicked Prayer. Pressman was the uncredited executive producer for Conan the Destroyer and Grant Hill was involved in the Matrix films plus V for Vendetta.

Of course, the movie starred Brandon Lee, an actor who gave the film a certain tragic edge by dying. 

The other major roles were held by Ernie Hudson and Michael Wincott. Ernie you know, but Michael Wincott has largely played villains in such films as Alien Resurrection and The Three Musketeers (remember I hold them to be genre). 

It was written by John Shirley along with David J. Schow (lots of forgettable horror in my opinion other than this). Checking IMDB, I see Shirley has written far too many screenplays too list all of them here, so I’ll just note his work on Deep Space Nine, Batman Beyond and Poltergeist: The Legacy. Though definitely not genre, he also wrote one episode of the IMDb Red Shoe Diaries. Really he did. 

His Red Shoes Diaries episode? IMDb says it was, “A beautiful astronaut, trapped in a dying spacecraft a million miles from home, makes tender love for the last time with her co-pilot as she ruminates about the sensual path of her life that led her to the adventure of outer space.”

(The only continuing role in the Wikipedia Red Shoe Diaries was Jake Winters played by David Duchovny in his first true ongoing role as it ran sixty episodes. The framing device is him as a narrator with a back story to explain why he’s introducing and offering closing commentary on these stories. Serling he ain’t though. Yes I did see a few when they originally aired back in the Nineties on Showtime. Softcore would be putting it mildly to describe them.)

The Crow did well at the box office making nearly a hundred million against twenty-four million in costs. it spawned a franchise of sorts as it has three sequels, (The Crow: City of Angels,  The Crow: Salvation and The Crow: Wicked Prayer) plus a reboot last year, The Crow, which also based  off the 1989 comic book series by James O’Barr. 

So what did the critics think? 

Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune had this to say: “What’s scary about The Crow is the story and the style itself: American Gothic, Poe-haunted nightmare, translated to the age of cyberpunk science fiction, revenge movies and outlaw rock ‘n’ roll, all set in a hideously decaying, crime-ridden urban hell.” 

Caryn James of the New York Times was impressed though not as ecstatic: “It is a dark, lurid revenge fantasy and not the breakthrough, star-making movie some people have claimed. But it is a genre film of a high order, stylish and smooth.”

It holds a most exemplary ninety percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes. 

The only place it’s streaming is on Pluto with ads. No, just no.

Yes, there are copies of it on YouTube. As always, any links to those will be deleted with extreme prejudice as it is very much under copyright. Really they will. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO STERANKO HISTORY OF COMICS. The Official Steranko Fan Page on Facebook has put out a “Call for Contributions to the Steranko History of Comics, Volume 3 and Updated Editions!”

Comic art fans, collectors, and historians: We are thrilled to announce that Jim Steranko is working on Volume 3 of the acclaimed Steranko History of Comics. As Special Advisor to this project, I’m excited to share that Volumes 1 and 2 will also be updated with new supplemental material, and all three volumes are planned to be published in full color.

We are seeking contributions of rare and original materials related to the Golden Age of Comics, including documents, original covers, photos, color comps, special pages, presentations, character/costume designs, and unpublished images. As with the original Volumes 1 and 2, the focus is on bold, iconic graphics and behind-the-scenes editorial or biographical content of historical significance. Interior panel pages are a lower priority unless they hold unique importance.

If you have art, photos, correspondence, or documents that could enhance this project, your contribution could earn you a contributor credit, a complimentary copy of the book, the benefits of having your material featured in this landmark publication, and Jim’s personal gratitude.

To ensure we reach collectors and fans with access to such materials, please share this call widely within your networks. If YOU have relevant items, contact me directly via Direct Message with a description or a low-resolution scan/photo. If it’s a potential fit, I’ll provide instructions for submitting a high-resolution (minimum 300dpi, full-color) scan to Jim Steranko.

Join us in shaping comics history with the Steranko History of Comics!

(12) FOR SOME VALUES OF FIRST. Inverse remembers:“90 Years Ago, A Forgotten Horror Movie Beat A Monster-Movie Classic To The Punch”.

Although it was technically not the first werewolf movie (that honor goes to the long-lost and now forgotten 1913 short, The Werewolf), Werewolf of London was the first feature-length motion picture in cinema history to deal with the subject of lycanthropy (or “lycanthrophobia,” as it’s called in the film itself). Produced by Universal Pictures, the film starred Henry Hull as Dr. Wilfred Glendon, a world-famous British botanist (apparently botanists could be celebrities back in the day) who ventures into Tibet to find a rare flower, Mariphasa lumina lupina, that allegedly can blossom in moonlight. He does find the flower, but brings home something much worse.

While procuring three sample buds, Glendon is attacked and bitten by an animalistic humanoid creature. He makes it home and creates an artificial source of moonlight in his lab in order to make Mariphasa bloom, after which he’s approached by Dr. Yogami (Warren Oland, creepy), a fellow botanist who claims they met in Tibet. Indeed they did: Yogami was the creature that attacked Glendon, and claims that Glendon will turn into a werewolf himself thanks to Yogami’s bite — unless the plant, which can keep lycanthrophobia in check, blooms successfully….

… Werewolf of London was originally conceived as a vehicle for horror icons Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, with the former tagged to play Glendon and the latter cast as Yogami. That would have been a blockbuster combination, but Karloff was already committed to filming Bride of Frankenstein and the studio was hesitant to muck around with that movie’s schedule (Valerie Hobson appeared in both films, incidentally, playing Dr. Frankenstein’s wife in Bride)….

(13) NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN. “Trump’s 2026 budget plan would cancel NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission. Experts say that’s a ‘major step back’” reports Space.com.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has been on the prowl within Jezero Crater following its touchdown in February 2021. That car-sized robot has been devotedly picking up select specimens from across the area, gingerly deploying those sealed pick-me-ups on the Red Planet’s surface, as well as stuffing them inside itself. Those collectibles may well hold signs of past life on that enigmatic, dusty and foreboding world.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have for years been intently plotting out plans to send future spacecraft to Mars and haul those Perseverance-plucked bits, pieces, and sniffs of atmosphere to Earth for rigorous inspection by state-of-the-art equipment.

But President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2026 proposed budget blueprint issued on May 2 by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) calls for a 24.3 percent reduction to NASA’s top-line funding and could slashing the space agency’s science budget by 47 percent. A casualty stemming from this projected budget bombshell is the Mars Sample Return (MSR) venture.

In fact, MSR is tagged in the White House’s proposed 2026 budget as “grossly over budget and whose goals would be achieved by human missions to Mars,” explaining that MSR is not scheduled to return samples until the 2030s…

(14) PATTON VS. THE VOLCANO. The National Air and Space Museum says it was exciting “That Time We Bombed a Volcano”.

Pilots are advised to avoid volcanic eruptions, but in 1935, a squad of U.S. bombers took a more aggressive approach. 

A crisis erupted (literally) on November 21, when lava spewed from a fissure on the summit of the nearly 14,000-foot-high Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. Six days later, a new vent opened on the volcano’s northern flank. The lava flowed downward, pooling at the base of the massive mountain, where it then began edging its way toward the town of Hilo—at the alarming rate of one mile per day.

Thomas Jaggar, the founder of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, grew increasingly worried after he realized the lava could reach the headwaters of the Wailuku River, which supplied water for Hilo’s 15,000 residents.

Jaggar reasoned that explosives detonated near the eruptive vent would divert the flow of lava advancing toward Hilo by collapsing the lava channels—narrow paths of fluid lava with raised rims formed by cooling magma. 

Thus, on December 26, six Keystone B-3A bombers from the 23rd Bombardment Squadron and four LB-6 light bombers from the 72nd Bombardment Squadron were deployed to Hilo from Ford Island’s Luke Field at Pearl Harbor. The next day, Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton (yes, that Patton) directed the bombers to begin their assault on Mauna Loa. Each carried two 600-pound Mark I demolition bombs, each one loaded with 300 pounds of trinitrotoluene (better known as TNT). Due to the heavy payload, the bombers flew a clearance of just 4,000 feet above the volcano.

A total of 20 of the 600-pound bombs were dropped on the lava channels. Fifteen struck the margins, while five others made direct hits, spraying molten rock in all directions.

Six days later, the eruption ended. Jaggar maintained that the bombers had helped hasten the end of the lava flow. Others are less certain. “Whether the bombing stopped the 1935 lava flow remains unknown, though many geologists today cast doubt,” notes a report later published by the U.S. Geological Survey….

(15) VIDEOS OF THE DAY. Remember the North Bergen High School stage production of Alien four years ago? The person who played the lead is now starting a Hollywood acting career. Marc Scott Zicree gives a two-minute introduction in “Alien! Sigourney Weaver! Ridley Scott! Space Command Studios! North Bergen High School?!”

You can still see the video of the “Alien High School Play — You’ve GOT to See What These Kids Pulled Off!” – with Sigourney Weaver on hand to introduce the performance.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Francis Hamit, Steve Green, 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 Daniel Dern.]

Pixel Scroll 2/20/25 The Tweel Of Rhyme Blares, “Thou Art Groot!”

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(1) THE MURDEROUS MONTH OF MAY. Apple TV+ announced today “Apple’s new sci-fi series “Murderbot” to make global debut May 16, 2025”. They also released two photos of Murderbot, one with the helmet, the other without.

Today, Apple TV+ unveiled a first look at “Murderbot,” its highly anticipated comedic thriller created by Academy Award nominees Chris and Paul Weitz (“About a Boy,” “Mozart in the Jungle”) and starring Emmy Award winner Alexander Skarsgård (“Succession,” “Big Little Lies”), who also serves as executive producer. The 10-episode sci-fi series will make its global debut on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes on Friday, May 16, 2025 followed by new episodes every Friday through July 11.

Based on Martha Wells’ bestselling Hugo and Nebula Award-winning book series of the same name, “Murderbot” is a sci-fi thriller/comedy about a self-hacking security construct who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable clients. Played by Skarsgård, Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe.

The ensemble cast also includes Noma Dumezweni (“Presumed Innocent”), David Dastmalchian (“Oppenheimer”), Sabrina Wu (“Joy Ride”), Akshay Khanna (“Critical Incident”), Tattiawna Jones (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) and Tamara Podemski (“Outer Range”).

(2) FROM CLIMATE EXTREMES TO HISTORIC BALKAN ORIGINS OF VAMPIRISM. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Modern fantasy lore has it that Transylvania is the home to vampires, creatures from the past that feed of the presently living for their immortality… Way back in the 1990s, following the fall of the Iron Curtain that divided Europe we (members of the SF² Concatenation  team and the former NW Kent SF Society had a series of E. Europe science and SF cultural exchanges with Romanian and Hungarian fan (and scientist fan) partners.  As part of this I was lucky enough to have a guided tour of Transylvania.  I also got to visit Jimbolia, an ethnically Hungarian town in Romania surrounded on three sides by a border with Serbia. Actually, I got to visit it with SF fans three times over the years…

This brings us up to today, and academics from Jimbolia Technology Highschool, as well as the University of Oradea (Romania), have found Transylvanian chronicles, diaries, and official records from the 16th century that illuminate extreme climate events of that time — the 16th century was part of what is known as the “Little Ice Age”. They found that prolonged heat waves, often associated with droughts and unusually cold winters, could affect agricultural production, leading to food shortages, forced migration, and social instability… 

Primary research Gaceu, O. R. et al (2025)  “Reconstruction of climatic events from the 16th century in Transylvania: interdisciplinary analysis based on historical sources”, Frontiers in Climate, vol. 6, pre-print.

All of which brings to mind whether such events could have been attributed by peasant locals to the mystical? (Other research has previously shown that witch burnings in Germany increased in rural areas around the time of crop failures associated with climate events.)

While vampires were popularised in the west with Stoker’s 19th century novel, we must remember that it was in the 17th century the Greek librarian of the Vatican, Leo Allatius, produced the first methodological description of the Balkan beliefs in vampires (Greek: vrykolakas) in his work De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus (“On certain modern opinions among the Greeks”) a few decades after the 16th century climate extreme events in the area described by this latest research. 

(3) BROCCOLI IS OFF THE MENU. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] In a shake-up worthy of a James Bond martini, the Broccoli family has relinquished control of that storied movie franchise. It will be Amazon MGM Studios forging the way forward. “James Bond Shake-Up: Amazon Takes Creative Control of Franchise” at The Hollywood Reporter.

The James Bond movie franchise has gotten a shake-up, with Amazon MGM Studios and Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli forming a new joint venture to house the movie property’s intellectual property rights.

Under the terms of the agreement, Amazon MGM Studios will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise, while Wilson and Broccoli will remain co-owners of the 60-year-old property. In 2022, Amazon acquired MGM, including a vast catalog with more than 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows.

Since the MGM acquisition, Amazon has held rights to distribute all of the James Bond films, and following completion of the joint venture transaction will control the creative on future productions.

“We are grateful to the late Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman for bringing James Bond to movie theatres around the world, and to Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli for their unyielding dedication and their role in continuing the legacy of the franchise that is cherished by legions of fans worldwide. We are honored to continue this treasured heritage, and look forward to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world,” Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said in a statement on Thursday….

Variety thinks they can explain “Why Amazon Took Control of James Bond; Next 007 Movie Remains in Limbo”.

…And even as every actor with a British accent has seen themselves tipped to slip into Bond’s designer tux, development on a follow-up has stalled. There’s still no director, no story, and no script for a new installment, sources say, and without those elements little progress has been made on finding a new leading man. Though there has been a character bible circulating around the studio and a few informal meetings with potential creative talent, shooting on a new movie is at least a year away. That’s been a source of frustration at Amazon, which spent $8.5 billion to buy MGM four years ago, in no small part because of the ties to Bond. Even with the initial acquisition, Amazon MGM only owned 50% of the franchise and was relegated to being a passive partner when it came to artistic choices.

Rumors have swirled for years that the Broccolis have clashed with Amazon over the direction of Bond. The family felt the e-commerce giant was a poor home for the elegant secret agent and bristled at its efforts to expand the scope of the franchise, while Amazon executives were frustrated by the glacial pace of getting a new film off the ground, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The company managed to get the Broccolis to sign off on a reality competition spinoff show, “007: Road to a Million,” but other attempts to revitalize the property have yet to bear fruit.

Amazon MGM’s joint venture with the Broccolis is unique in that it is not an outright sale. The family will retain an ownership stake. However, the Broccolis, who controlled everything from casting to marketing decisions, will release their grip on the series. That will allow Amazon MGM to move more quickly to figure out how to keep Bond relevant….

(4) SCIENCE BOOKS RECOMMENDED. Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks in Nature: “Poetry on Mars and robots on Earth: Books in brief” (behind a paywall). One of his selections is —

Waiting for Robots

Antonio A. Casilli Univ. Chicago Press (2025)

US founding father Thomas Jefferson used dumbwaiters — small lifts that carry meals — during his extravagant dinners. There seemed to be no human intervention, but the lifts were operated by enslaved basement staff. As sociologist Antonio Casilli acutely observes, today too, artificial-intelligence systems are made to seem automated, often by overlooked and underpaid workers.

And here’s the cover of another choice:

(5) LGBTQ IDENTIFICATION GROWS. “Nearly One in 10 U.S. Adults Identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., Survey Finds” – in the New York Times (behind a paywall).

Nearly one in 10 adults in the United States identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., according to a large analysis from Gallup released Thursday — almost triple the share since Gallup began counting in 2012, and up by two-thirds since 2020…..

…The increases have been driven by young people, and by bisexual women.

Nearly one-quarter of adults in Generation Z, defined by Gallup as those 18 to 27, identify as L.G.B.T.Q., according to the analysis, which included 14,000 adults across all of Gallup’s telephone surveys last year. More than half of these L.G.B.T.Q. young adults identify as bisexual.

Among all respondents, 1.3 percent identified as transgender, up from 0.6 percent in 2020. That is higher than other large surveys have found in recent years…

(6) LGBTQ VIDEOS BACK ONLINE. The City reports “NYC Schools Restore LGBTQ Videos Yanked by PBS Following Trump Executive Order”.

In response to a blizzard of executive orders from President Donald Trump, the Public Broadcasting Service recently erased a series of videos made in partnership with New York City Public Schools focused on LGBTQ history.

This week, the city’s Education Department found a new home for them: its own website.

The short films draw on material from the city’s LGBTQ-focused curriculum, part of a series called “Hidden Voices” that seeks to elevate a broad range of underrepresented groups students learn about in their social studies classrooms.

The videos profile prominent LGBTQ people such as the feminist thinker Audre Lorde and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. They also survey key historical moments, including the mass dismissal of queer government employees during the Lavender Scare of the 1940s-’60s and the 1969 Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village, widely considered a catalyst of the modern LGBTQ rights movement….

(7) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES. There’s a new episode of the monthly science fiction podcast produced by Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, CA. Simultaneous Times Episode 84 has stories by Marisca Pichette & Eric Fomley.

Stories featured in this episode:

“Press Release from a Utopia on the Way Down” by Marisca Pichette; with music by TSG; read by Jenna Hanchey

“The Thing You Never Were” by Eric Fomley; with music by Phog Masheeen; read by the Jean-Paul Garnier

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

February 20, 1988 — Ray Bradbury Theatre’s “Gotcha”

Thirty-seven years ago on this evening, Ray Bradbury Theatre’s “Gotcha” first aired on HBO. It like a lot of genre series can now found streaming on Peacock. 

In the episode, a lonely man dressed as Oliver Hardy at a masquerade party meets a lonely woman dressed as Stan Laurel, it seems nothing short of a match made in heaven. But a game of Gotcha! may just test their newfound romance a little too much. Or will it? Being Bradbury what’s your guess? 

It was based off his short which was published in Terry Carr’s The Year’s Finest Fantasy, Volume 2 but the romance shown here wasn’t in that story as Bradbury added it in here. 

The cast was Saul Rubinek and Kate Lynch, and it was directed by Brad Turner who has done a lot of genre series work including seventeen episodes of The Outer Limits. The casting of Saul Rubinek and Kate Lynch was absolutely perfect. 

Reception for it is generally excellent. As Scared Stiff puts it: “GOTCHA is incredible. It’s another great tale in this series and it reminded me a great deal of the beginning of Twilight Zone: The Movie with Dan Aykroyd turning into a monster. This tale starts off so slow and cheerful that the turn to terror was very impactful. I really enjoyed this. As a horror fan you can’t ask for much more. I highly recommend it.” 

Yes, I liked it very much. I think the story here is sharper, more sure of who the characters are than a lot of his stories in this series was which were more interested in the gimmick that drove the story.  

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) AT LAST THE LAST. “The Last Of Us: HBO Sets Season 2 Premiere Date” reports Deadline. (Behind a paywall.)

HBO has finally revealed when audiences can expect the new season of The Last of Us.

Season 2 will debut on April 13 at 9 p.m. ET/PT, which means it’ll be picking up the Sunday marquee time slot from The White Lotus after the third season of Mike White’s series concludes. As always, the episodes will be available to stream on Max at the same time that they air on HBO.

Along with the date announcement, HBO also released a few new character posters featuring Ellie (Bella Ramsey), Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Abby (Kaitlyn Dever)….

(11) DON’T FORGET TO BITE ON THIS CLICKBAIT. “Could Michael Sheen be the first Welsh Doctor Who?” asks Nation Cymru. And for what it’s worth, Sheen once said on an episode of Staged (his show with David Tennant) he had been considered, then “they wanted to go in another direction” as the show biz cant goes.

Michael Sheen is among the favourites to become the next Doctor Who.

The actor has been named among the frontrunners for the prized role by the bookies, who have installed him at 6/1 to become the next occupant of the Tardis after news broke that the current Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, looks set to stand down after two series.

There’s never been a Welsh Doctor Who – and with the modern incarnation of the series being filmed in Cardiff, it would be the perfect moment for a native of Wales to enter the Tardis.

Sheen, of course, lives in Wales and has shown his unswerving commitment and dedication to Welsh culture with the launch of the Welsh National Theatre.

There are others who think so too.

Writing for the Standard while pondering potential candidates for the role, media commentator Vicky Jessop wrote: “We’ve never had a Welsh Doctor before – might it be time to change that, once and for all? A longtime friend of David Tennant, Sheen also recently announced that he was becoming a “not for profit” actor, meaning he’s pledged to give away large chunks of his salary to charity and focus on doing jobs he loves. Long story short: his paycheque might actually be affordable for the beleaguered BBC.”

Other names in the running include Crown lead Josh O’Connor, Slow Horses actor Jack Lowden and Hobbit star Richard Armitage.

After 10th Doctor, David Tennant, surprised everyone by returning as the 14th Doctor, 11th Doctor Matt Smith has also been mentioned as a possibility for another stint in the Tardis.

(12) WOLF TICKETS. Metro News says “Amazon Prime Video viewers are stumbling upon ‘best’ comedy series in years”.

TV fans have been binge-watching both seasons of ‘engaging’ show Wolf Like Me which was recently added to the streamer free for subscribers.

The series follows single father Gary (Josh Gad) who lives in Adelaide with his daughter Emma (Ariel Donoghue) as he strikes up a relationship with Mary (Isla Fisher).

Both Gary and Emma are still emotionally traumatised after the death of her mother Lisa seven years ago, so when Mary enters the pictures and is able to connect with Emma she is a welcome addition to the family.

However, Mary is hiding baggage of her own that she fears may hurt Gary and Emma: she is a werewolf.

On Google, Wolf Like Me fans have been urging everyone to watch the hidden gem series which has flown under the radar since it first aired on Stan and Peacock in 2022….

(13) LIKE YOU NEED TEENY TINY BRANDING IRONS FOR ANTS. BBC finds “Dorset micro artist sets world record for smallest Lego sculpture”.

A micro artist has set a new Guinness World Record for creating the smallest handmade sculpture.

David A Lindon, from Bournemouth, said the creation took months of planning and months of creating to bring to life.

He set the world record for his sculpture of a red Lego piece which measures 0.02517mm by 0.02184mm.

Mr Lindon, an engineer by trade who started work as a micro artist in 2019, says the sculpture is about the same size as a human white blood cell.

He’s become known for his work creating miniature pieces of art, including three microscopic re-creations of Van Gogh masterpieces on a watch mechanism which sold for £90,000.

Mr Lindon’s latest creation, which was crafted from a piece of red Lego brick, was measured by the team at Evident Scientific using a light microscope….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes us inside the “Love Hurts Pitch Meeting” – beware spoilers.

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

No Howling in the Woods: Wolf Man Review

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By Jonathan Cowie: Wolf Man is currently in cinemas and, given its mediocre IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes ratings (5.9 and 57% respectively), you may be wondering if it is any good?

Well, before we get to that, it is perhaps worthwhile taking a bite into this offering’s history. Jump back the best part of a decade and Hollywood’s Universal studios were casting an envious eye over the success of one of their rivals and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films. Universal then realized that they owned the rights to Frankenstein, Dracula and Wolfman and so established their own “Universal Monster” films. However, since then it has been a rocky ride. For example, Tom Cruise’s The Mummy (2017 trailer here) reboot was only a so-so success but had a big star and loads of effects hence was expensive and not a commercial success despite a not-too-bad box office showing. So profit-wise, it was a flop. Universal must have had déjà vu as this is exactly what previously happened with The Wolfman (2010, trailer here). Perhaps it was with this last in mind that Universal were a tad wary of venturing back into werewolf land. However, in 2020 The Invisible Man did surprisingly well (budget £5.7 million / US$7m and revenue £118million/US$145m) despite it only having a few weeks in the cinema before CoVID-19 lockdowns, but commercially it was successful as it was streamed online for a fee. It is best said that it perhaps “inspired” by the H. G. Wells story rather than “based” on it (trailer here). This success buoyed the studio but, alas, fortune was not with them, the Dracula spoof horror Renfield (2023, trailer here) flopped (it made a substantive loss having accrued less than half its budget) though for my money it deserved to do a little better at the box office, but its sizeable and big-name cast (hence expense £53 million /US$64m) did not make it profitable.

Taking all this together, you can see that Universal was by now very wary of another werewolf re-boot. Indeed, saying that they were nervous is arguably something of a British understatement. And so it was only at the start of last year that Wolf Man, which was well into pre-production but not actual production, saw Universal falter. Originally, the best part of a decade ago(!) Universal hired Aaron Guzikowski to write the screenstory. Apparently, that did not go down well with Universal’s powers-that-be as in 2021 Derek Cianfrance was set to direct and Ryan Gosling to star, but that would not last. Around Christmas, as 2023 came to a close, Derek Cianfrance was replaced by director Leigh Whannell and Christopher Abbott replaced Ryan Gosling to star (though Gosling would stay on as an executive producer).

Which brings us up to the present offering. The cast was kept minimal: just six actors playing five characters having more than three lines and I am told filming was done in New Zealand (scenic glacial valley), which has plenty of tax breaks for film makers. And the film was made quickly: under a year (not much time to fritter away cash!) Its budget was £20 million (US$25) and apparently it broke even within a fortnight of its release. So, is it any good?

Well, to my mind, it is not bad, but frustratingly not good either: I can see why it gets middling IMDB and Tomatoes scores.

It opens with a few lines of screen text info-dumping in very annoyingly small font size which means that, if you are not watching it at the cinema, you are going to need a large, flat screen TV to have half a chance of reading it unless they release a special for TV version. Anyway, we are told that apparently, US Indians were long aware of a disease they called wolf face, and then in the modern era a hiker went missing. Finally, the locals say that there’s a terrible creature lurking in the woods… So, within the first two minutes you have the set-up explained prior to a 15 minute opening act… Then we get a jump forward in time and the former child, to which we were initially introduced, is now grown up and living in a city with his wife and daughter. He gets a letter informing him of his father… And from that moment on, barely 15 minutes into the film, this offering’s plot arc is plain for the cinematically literate to see… In short, there are no plot surprises and – for the benefit of the cinematically illiterate – at the beginning of the final scenes, in a few sentences from the mother, there is an explanation given to the daughter (and the film’s viewers)…

Plus points, the acting is not bad, some of the effects, while not spectacular, are fine and there are also a couple of interesting point-of-view scenes. In short, Wolf Man is perfectly watchable, but I can’t see this one getting any fantastic film awards or even be short-listed for a Hugo. But I can see it turning a profit, though not big bucks, for Universal.

This last, if it comes to pass, may be enough to keep ‘Universal Monster’ films on track.

OK, so this is a perfectly serviceable horror, but is it a good werewolf film? Here we might reflect that the success of The Invisible Man (2020) was that though very different to H. G. Wells’ original, it stuck to the core of what made the story great: power corrupts and great power greatly corrupts with invisibility being a great power. That that film turned on itself, with the point of view being the victim who then used that power against the villain, subverted the form making it a post-modern take on the original. With werewolf films we do not necessarily know from the off who is the werewolf as for non-full Moon nights they appear as normal humans. Secondly, the person who is the werewolf is struggling with the animal within: the metaphor being that we civilised humans are at heart biological animals. However, with Wolf Man we know within the first few minutes that were are not dealing with a traditional werewolf as we see it in daylight. Second there is not transformation back to human form: in this film the wolf is a sickness; it could easily have been a variation of a zombie. This is not a werewolf film! If Universal Studios really wants to make a go of Universal Monsters, it needs to understand why its original intellectual property was so successful: it did not do this with this film!

So, what’s next for “Universal Monsters”. Well, looking a fair way down the line Universal recently let it be known that it was considering re-booting The Creature from the Black Lagoon (the original’s trailer here). But, for my money, if you want a really good, fairly recent (actually a quarter of a century old which shows my age), were-wolf film, then you could do no worse than Neil (The Descent, Doomsday) Marshall’s Dog Soldiers (2002).

Meanwhile, the trailer for Wolf Man is below.

Pixel Scroll 10/20/24 Pixel Rain

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(1) SEATTLE WORLDCON 2025 ROOM BLOCK WILL OPEN 10/24. The 2025 Worldcon has announced their room block will open for reservations at 12:00 p.m. Pacific on Thursday, October 24.

(2) WORLD FANTASY AWARDS. The 2024 World Fantasy Awards were presented today in Niagara Falls, NY.

(3) ENDEAVOUR AWARD. The winner was announced this weekend at OryCon: “Margaret Owen Wins 2023 Endeavour Award” — for Painted Devils (Henry Holt).

(4) BACK IN PRINT. “Books So Bad They’re Good: The Return of John M. Ford (fall rewind)” at Daily Kos.

…John M. Ford was part of a gifted group of SF/fantasy writers that came along in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s and included luminaries like Diane Duane, Charles de Lint, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Guy Gavriel Kay.  An immensely talented poet and even better novelist/short story writer, Ford began writing for Asimov’s before he was out of college, and by 1980 he’d published several beautifully crafted short stories, a slew of game reviews, and proto-cyberpunk novel Web of Angels.  Soon came his best-known work, The Dragon Waiting, and the next two decades saw a steady stream of finely written poems, novels, gaming supplements, and contributions to the Liavek shared-world series.  

Not all was writing — like so many authors, Ford had to take day jobs as an editor, computer consultant, and even hospital orderly to pay the bills — but by the time Ford died unexpectedly in the mid-000’s he’d won several major awards, become a fannish celebrity thanks to his long-running “Ask Dr. Mike” routine, and acquired a reputation as “writer’s writer” who had never achieved great success despite immense talent.  His place in science fiction and fantasy seemed assured, and most fans thought it was only a matter of time until a small press began reissuing his works.

Except that this didn’t happen.

Just why is still in dispute.  The late Tor editor David Hartwell claimed that Ford, who died intestate, had been estranged from his SF-hating family who thought science fiction and fantasy were immoral and refused to let the books be reprinted on religious grounds.  Ford’s life partner claimed that he’d planned to revise his will to cut his family out and appoint her as his executrix, but since the version he left was never witnessed it wasn’t legally binding, plus they had never actually married beyond a self-penned Klingon ceremony.  No one knew how to contact his heirs, and if Hartwell was to be believed, Ford’s family hadn’t approved of his work, his personal relationships, or pretty much anything  he’d done as an adult, so why even bother?

It wasn’t until 2018, when Slate’s Isaac Butler began digging into the story, that the truth came out.  Ford’s family, far from disapproving of his work, had repeatedly written to his agent inquiring about republication.  They had not known that his life partner was more than a friend, nor that the agent, overwhelmed by personal problems and grief-stricken by Ford’s death, had basically withdrawn from the industry completely.  They were not happy with the rumors that had circulated about them deliberately withholding Ford’s works from publication, and it took nearly a year of negotiations by Tor Books’ editor Beth Meacham for them to change their mind….

(5) BREVITY. Bill Ryan considers Ramsey Campbell and the power of the short story in horror writing in “Horror in Brief” at The Bulwark.

ONCE, YEARS AGO, I POSTED something on the internet about my disappointment in a novel by the revered, almost superhumanly prolific, Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell. The details of what I said then are not relevant here; what is relevant is that someone responded to what I wrote by recommending that I read a particular short story by Campbell called “The Companion.” As it happened, I owned a collection of Campbell’s short fiction that contained the story, so, with some skepticism, I read it. “The Companion” instantly became one of the best horror stories I had ever read, and it remains so to this day.

I shouldn’t have been all that surprised at the sharp contrast between what I felt about the novel by Campbell and my intense admiration for that short story. I’ve long maintained that horror fiction thrives in the short form, and that horror novels can often stretch an idea beyond its breaking point. 

(6) JEFF VANDERMEER Q&A. “Jeff VanderMeer Talks About His New ‘Southern Reach’ Novel” — link bypasses New York Times paywall:

A lot of readers wanted to learn what happens after the end of the trilogy, when the situation is pretty dire: Area X is spreading uncontrollably and looks like it will colonize the planet. Why did you decide to go back into the past instead?

To describe what happens after “Acceptance,” when Area X takes over, would be almost impossible. It would be so alien or removed that it felt like a perspective I couldn’t really write. But this book is kind of like a prequel, contiguous with the prior few books, and it’s also sneakily a sequel. So it kind of allowed me to do what I didn’t feel like I could do directly, and that was exciting.

Why do you think you and so many of your readers are still thinking about Area X?

I think because it did come so deeply out of my subconscious. The fact that I was sick when I wrote it, recovering from dental surgery, and the fact that I was still unpacking its meaning in my mind after it was written, and then it took on so many different meanings from other people. There have been so many different interpretations, because of the ambiguity in the books. So people can see a lot of different things in the books, and then when they reflect it back at me, it makes me think about the books differently as well…

(7) IN THE DAYS OF THE DEROS. No science fiction fan’s education is complete without having learned about The Shaver Mystery. Bobby Derie brings readers up to speed with “H. P. Lovecraft & The Shaver Mystery” at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein.

What follows is an extended deep-dive into the history of one of the most contentious affairs in pulp science fiction in the 1940s, the Shaver Mystery, and its interactions with H. P. Lovecraft’s Mythos, which was also beginning to coalesce in the same period. The ramifications of their interactions would spill over into science fiction fandom, conspiracy circles, and occult literature, with long-lasting effects on popular culture….

(8) BLOCH ON THE AIR. The Robert Bloch Official Website has added new radio episodes scripted by the author. Listen in at “Radio”.

Bloch spent little time working within the medium of radio. Aside from penning radio scripts resulting from participation in Milwaukee political candidate Carl Zeidler’s 1940 bid for mayor and for a few local shows in the Milwaukee area, Bloch’s only commercial foray into radio broadcasting came in 1945, with the debut of Stay Tuned for Terror. A program devoted to horror and the supernatural in the same vein as Lights Out, Terror’s initial, and only season, featured 39, 15-minute radio plays. The scripts, all written by Bloch, consisted of eight originals, with the remainder adapted from his own stories, primarily from Weird Tales, who promoted the radio show within their pages. Sadly, this radio program is for the most part “lost,” apart from, to date, four episodes that have only recently been discovered…

(9) I’M JUST A POE BOY. “The Ghost Of Edgar Allen Poe And Other Strange True Facts About The Master Of The Macabre” – the Idolator begins its collection of oddities with this —

His Obituary Was Full Of Lies

Just two days after Edgar Allan Poe’s death, the New York Daily Tribune posted an obituary about him written by a man who called himself “Ludwig.” This wasn’t the kind of loving obituary most people might see in the newspaper. Ludwig made comments such as, “He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses,” among other claims.

As it turns out, Ludwig was a fake name used by Poe’s rival Rufus Wilmot Griswold, an enemy Poe had made during his time as a critic. Griswold would later write a biographical article on Poe titled “Memoir of the Author” which made further false statements or spread half-truths to taint Poe’s image.

(10) NYCC COSPLAY. “SEE IT! New York Comic Con brings out amazing cosplayers and pop culture icons” in amNewYork. Twenty-three photos at the link.

The 2024 Comic Con wrapped up Sunday after four days that saw thousands of pop culture lovers travel to the Big Apple from all across the country.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born October 20, 1882 — Bela Lugosi. (Died 1956.)

By Paul Weimer: I’ve mentioned in this space before watching movies on WPIX in New York as a formative experience. I got to see lots of old movies that way and be exposed to a wide range of films. It is no wonder that the work of Bela Lugosi came to mind. I (except for his first appearance ifor me) seemed to always be seeing him in movies with Boris Karloff, just like I saw endless movies with Christopher Lee paired with Peter Cushing. Lugosi was Dracula, of course, his most iconic role, but I didn’t see him there first. 

The first time I saw him (and heck, the first time I saw Dracula period) was, don’t laugh, Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein.

Yes, by the vicissitudes of chance, I got to see Lugosi play Dracula in a comedic variation and derivation of his original role, as well as seeing a number of the Universal monsters at the same time.  WPIX would later give me the aforementioned Lugosi/Karloff movies and I began to understand what the comedy was making fun of. Lugosi’s Dracula is chilling, sui generis and the template that every other Dracula performer has to measure up against, since.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

  • B.C. has an unexpected crash.
  • Frazz discusses the length of a day.
  • Jumpstart introduces a new superhero.
  • The Argyle Sweater lists things that are seldom seen.
  • Carpe Diem cleans up.
  • Tom Gauld shows why there’s little time left for doing science:

(13) WHO TELLS YOUR STORY. “Mass shooting survivors turn to an unlikely place for justice – copyright law” — the Guardian’s tagline: “The approach aims to ‘avoid rewarding’ assailants and prevent trauma reliving. Could it be a viable solution?”

In a Nashville courtroom in early July, survivors of the 2023 Covenant school shooting celebrated an unusual legal victory. Citing copyright law, Judge l’Ashea Myles ruled that the assailant’s writings and other creative property could not be released to the public.

After months of hearings, the decision came down against conservative lawmakers, journalists and advocates who had sued for access to the writings, claiming officials had no right to keep them from the public. But since parents of the assailant – who killed six people at the private Christian elementary school, including three nine-year-old children – signed legal ownership of the shooter’s journals over to the families of surviving students last year, Myles said releasing the materials would violate the federal Copyright Act….

… But the approach is also a response to the frustration that survivors and victims’ families feel. The ways shooters have historically been portrayed in the media, they say, has been damaging; oversight over the distribution of harmful materials online – including video footage of deadly shootings – has been virtually nonexistent; and free rein over shooters’ names and intellectual property has enabled outside actors to profit from their reproduction.

Together, these elements speak to the need for greater care over how the stories of mass shootings are retold, survivors and advocates say, so that victims – rather than their killers – are remembered….

(14) PROBLEM OR SOLUTION? “’It’s quite galling’: children’s authors frustrated by rise in celebrity-penned titles” reports the Guardian.

A modern classic by Keira Knightley” reads the provisional cover of the actor’s debut children’s book, I Love You Just the Same. Set to be published next October, the 80-page volume, written and illustrated by Knightley, is about a girl navigating the changing dynamics that come with the arrival of a sibling.

The Pirates of the Caribbean star is the latest in a long list of celebrities to have turned to writing children’s books. McFly’s Tom Fletcher and Dougie Poynter have been hovering at the top of the bestseller chart since the publication last month of their latest book The Dinosaur that Pooped Halloween!. Earlier in the year, David Walliams dominated with his newest book Astrochimp. The entertainer has sold 25m copies of his children’s titles in the UK alone, according to Nielsen BookData.

… “These celebrities do not need any more money or exposure, but plenty of genuine writers do,” says the author, poet and performer Joshua Seigal.

When news broke of Knightley’s book deal, authors expressed frustrations online; in one viral tweet, the writer Charlotte Levin joked about deciding to become a film star….

… Some argue that celebrity-backed titles help keep the industry healthy. “Attention paid to any children’s book creates a rising tide that lifts the entire publishing industry,” says the author Howard Pearlstein.

Books written by celebrities can also help increase representation in children’s fiction. “Celebrity fiction has been one of the key ways to get Black and brown characters on shelves in recent years,” says Jasmine Richards, a former ghostwriter of celebrity fiction and founder of StoryMix, which develops fiction with inclusive casts of characters to sell to publishers….

(15) A SERIOUS CASE OF LUPINE. “Wolf Man Official Trailer: Watch Now” advises SYFY Wire.

Watch out, Brundlefly! You might just meet your match in writer-director Leigh Whannell’s take on lupine monsters in the upcoming Wolf Man.

The film’s official trailer, which dropped during the Blumhouse panel at New York Comic Con Friday, gives off some serious Cronenberg vibes, teasing a werewolf infection akin to a deteriorative disease that eats away at the body and turns the mind into primal mush….

(16) ATTRACTIVE NUISANCE? [Item by Steven French.] Don’t go near this if you’ve got any metal in your body! “China builds record-breaking magnet — but it comes with a cost” according to Nature.

China is now home to the world’s most powerful resistive magnet, which produced a magnetic field that was more than 800,000 times stronger than Earth’s.

On 22 September, the magnet, at the Steady High Magnetic Field Facility (SHMFF) at the Chinese Academy of Science’s Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, sustained a steady magnetic field of 42.02 tesla. This milestone narrowly surpasses the 41.4-tesla record set in 2017 by a resistive magnet at the US National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) in Tallahassee, Florida. Resistive magnets are made of coiled metal wires and are widely used in magnet facilities across the world.

China’s record-breaker lays the groundwork for building reliable magnets that can sustain ever-stronger magnetic fields, which would help researchers to discover surprising new physics, says Joachim Wosnitza, a physicist at the Dresden High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Germany.

The resistive magnet — which is open to international users — is the country’s second major contribution to the global quest to produce ever-higher magnetic fields. In 2022, the SHMFF’s hybrid magnet, which combines a resistive magnet with a superconducting one, produced a field of 45.22 tesla, making it the most powerful working steady-state magnet in the world….

(17) THE ORIGINAL SPACE JUNK. [Item by Steven French.] “Most meteorites traced to three space crackups” says Science.

The bombardment never stops. Each day, up to 50 meteors survive the fiery descent through Earth’s atmosphere and reach the surface as meteorites. Researchers and collectors have recovered more than 50,000 of these rocks, which are prized in part for the mystery of where they came from.

Now, researchers have eliminated some of the mystery. They have traced most meteorites to just three Solar System bodies that shattered to form families of asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, plus countless smaller fragments that sometimes reach Earth.

Until now, a source was known for only 6% of meteorites; now, more than 70% have a known origin, says Miroslav Brož, an astrophysicist at Charles University who led one of three related studies published recently in Nature and Astronomy & Astrophysics. “It feels like a lifetime discovery.”…

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Ryan George chops it up with a “Guy Who Is Definitely Not Cursed”. ((HINT: Yes he is.))

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

Pixel Scroll 9/8/24 I’ve Grown Accustomed To The Doors of Your Face, the Lamps of Your Mouth

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(1) OFF THE CLOCK. “Critical Choices: Time Travel and Identity” by Rjurik Davidson at Speculative Insight.

…Psychologists suggest that your sense of self is constructed interpersonally, in relationship with others, and hence also in relationship to the social world. Individualism is nothing but a liberal myth. For example, people who venture into nature to “find themselves” typically discover the opposite: they lose any sense of their self. Isolated from society, they dissolve into their surroundings, become one with daily tasks: “catch fish,” “start fire,” “sleep.” They no longer exist. “All You Zombies” brilliantly illuminates this dissolution, counterintuitive to those schooled in Thoreau’s Walden or other such romantic myths. In the story, the main character (Jane) takes painkillers for her perpetual headache but discovers that without the pain everyone else disappears. It is as if the veil is torn from a false reality, revealing the true world beneath, seen before as through a glass darkly but now face to face – a premonition of one of Philip K. Dick’s enduring fascinations. Without mother, father, a social world, Jane’s existence manifests as a headache of existential dread. Either way, with headache or not, she experiences her plight as a pain of isolation. She is “alone in the dark.” Her declaration, “I know where I came from,” is replete with irony. Her somewhat desperate affirmation is made precisely because there is nothing but doubt. Neither she, nor the reader, actually knows where she came from – methinks that Jane dost protest too much….

(2) REWARDING TRANSLATION. Anton Hur analyzes “Literature that expands the borders of what ‘international’ can mean” in the Washington Post. (Usually there’s a paywall, but I was able to read this article. Hopefully, so will you.)

…But why have a translated literature category [for the National Book Awards] at all? Neil Clarke, the editor of the science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, had the same thought; he has argued against creating a translation category at the Hugo Awards, claiming that it would serve to further marginalize translated literature. A quick glance at the history of nominees for best novel at the Hugos reveals that a translation has been a finalist only twice, and for the same team: the redoubtable Cixin Liu, author of “The Three-Body Problem,” and his translator Ken Liu. As someone who reads translations primarily and prodigiously, you can’t make me take Clarke’s fears of “further” marginalization seriously. And it has to be said that this also applies to the National Book Awards, which simply stopped taking translated literature into consideration for more than three decades. (In writing this article, I was asked to consider what works may have been overlooked by the awards during the 2010s and, well, imagine me madly gesticulating at all the works in translation published in the eligibility periods between 2009 and 2017.)…

(3) THE DOCTOR IS IN. Jon Del Arroz proclaimed yesterday over a photo of Kirk and Spock that “Star Trek is an inherently right-wing concept. It upholds man’s greatness as being designed in the image of God and promotes manifest destiny and dominion of God’s creation.” Robert Picardo (who memorably played Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram) took him to task. Admittedly, the kind of attention Jon always hopes somebody will give him.

(4) FULL MOON VOTERS. “In Michigan, an ‘Unhinged Werewolf’ Will Make It Clear Who Voted” says the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.)

Plenty of the submissions in a statewide contest to design Michigan’s next “I Voted” sticker featured cherry blossoms or American flags fluttering in the wind.

Only one entry, however, depicted a werewolf clawing its shirt to tatters and howling at an unseen moon. A smattering of stars and stripes poke out from behind its brawny torso.

“I Voted,” reads a string of red, white and blue block letters floating above the creature’s open maw.

The illustration, which was created by Jane Hynous, a 12-year-old from Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., was revealed on Wednesday as one of nine winning designs that the Michigan Department of State will offer local clerks to distribute to voters in the November election.

The werewolf sticker received more than 20,000 votes in the public contest, beating every other entry by a margin of nearly 2,000 votes, said Cheri Hardmon, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of State. The design gained traction on social media among those who found it fitting for an intense, and at times bewildering, moment in national politics….

(5)  FANAC FAN HISTORY ZOOM: PLOKTA. [Item by Joe Siclari.] It’s a fannish mystery how this jumped from nothing to an everyday phrase all over fandom.

The FANAC Fan History Zoom Series starts off its new season with what promises to be a fun, interesting, historical and important session as it brings back together the Plokta Cabal. The group was known for its weird news, quirky humour and radical graphics. 

September 22, 2024 – The Secret Origins of Plokta, with Steve Davies, Sue Mason, Alison Scott, and Mike Scott

Time: 2PM EDT, 1PM CDT, 11AM PDT, 7PM London (BST) & too early in Melbourne

This fannish group burst on the scene in May 1996 with the fanzine Plokta, which went on to receive two Best Fanzine Hugos, 2 Nova Awards for Best Fanzine, and Hugo nominations each year from 1999 to 2008. They are energetic, quirky and very, very funny. They are writers, artists, con runners, Worldcon bidders and fan fund winners. Join us and learn more about their secret origins, fannish impact and what they are doing now.

To attend, send an email to [email protected]

Two other Fanac Zoom session already on the calendar are:

  • October 26, 2024, Time 7PM EDT, 4PM PDT, Midnight London (sorry), and 10AM AEDT Sunday, Oct 27 Melbourne, Senior Australian fan Robin Johnson interview, with Robin Johnson, Perry Middlemiss and Leigh Edmonds
  • January 11, 2025, Time 2PM EST, 11AM PST, 7PM GMT London, and 6AM AEDT (sorry) Sunday, Jan 12 Melbourne, Out of the Ghetto and into the University: Science Fiction Fandom University Collections, with Phoenix Alexander (University of California, Riverside), Peter Balestrieri (University of Iowa), Susan Graham (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), and Richard Lynch (moderator)

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary – Star Trek, The Original Series (1966).

On September 8 fifty-eight years ago the first episode of Star Trek aired. I want to talk about my favorite episode in the series, which is “Trouble with Tribbles”. Now there are other episodes that I will go to Paramount+ to watch such as “Shore Leave”, “Mirror, Mirrior” or “Balance of Terror” but is the one that I have watched by far the most and which I enjoy as just the funnest one they ever did.

It was first broadcast in the show’s second season, just after Christmas on December 29, 1967. The previous episode had been another one I also like a lot, “Wolf in the Fold”, written by Robert Bloch. 

This script, which was Gerrold’s first professional sale, bore the working title for the episode of “A Fuzzy Thing Happened to Me…” Writer and producer for the series Gene did heavy rewrites on the final version of the script.  The final draft script can be read in Gerrold’s The Trouble with Tribbles: The Story Behind Star Trek’s Most Popular Episode with much, much more on this episode. 

Memory Alpha notes that “While the episode was in production, Gene Roddenberry noticed that the story was similar to Robert Heinlein’s novel, The Rolling Stones, which featured the ‘Martian Flat Cats’. Too late, he called Heinlein to apologize and avoid a possible lawsuit. Heinlein was very understanding, and was satisfied with a simple ‘mea culpa’ by Roddenberry.”  

It of course is centered on tribbles. Wah Chang designed the original tribbles. Five hundred were sewn together during production, using pieces of extra-long rolls of carpet. Some of them had mechanical toys placed in them so they could move. 

According to Gerrold, the tribble-maker Jacqueline Cumere was paid $350. Want a tribble now? Gerrold has them for you in various sizes and colors. So if you’re in seeing these, go here. tribbletoys.com

Let’s talk about why it’s about my favorite episode. I’m watching it now on Paramount+. I’ve to come to the bar scene where Cyrano Jones is trying to sell the Bar Manager a tribble when Chekov and Uhura come in. When Uhura asks if it’s alive, it starts adorably purring (who created that purr?), and the story goes from there.

The next morning Kirk walks. Uhura and a group are admiring that her tribble has reproduced. Where there was one, there are now, I stopped the video to count fourteen in various hues. (Not sure what all of them are as I’ve got color blindness.) Really cute but remarkably not one seems concerned.

Right there it exhibits that It has some of the best script writing in the series including this choice line as Spock holds and strokes a tribble: “Its trilling seems to have a tranquilizing effect on the human nervous system. Fortunately, of course … I am immune … to its effect.” There is an amused look from Uhura and the others. 

Oh, and it has Klingons. Not the Worf-style ones. The ones that look like someone cos-played an Asian military character of a thousand years ago. So naturally that hard to lead to a bar fight, doesn’t it? It does when a Klingon calls Scotty’s Enterprise, his beloved ship, a garbage scow. Well, he actually calls it a lot of things before ending with that. Perfect, just perfect. 

Now let’s segue from that bar brawl to reworking of this episode to the Deep Space Nine episode which I need not talk about as I know you know about it: “Trials and Tribble-ations”. It would be nominated for Hugo at a LoneStarCon 2. It would digitally insert the performers from the original series into that episode. 

I’m assuming y’all know this delightful episode which I think can best have its attitude summed up in this conversation…

Sisko to Bashir: “Don’t you know anything about this period in time?” 

Bashir: I’m a doctor, not an historian.”

Dax in her red short skirt: “In the old days, operations officers wore red, command officers wore gold… (Looks at her outfit.) “And women wore less. I think I’m going to like history.” 

I’ve watched both shows back-to-back several times, which is well worth doing as they did an stellar job of making the DS9 characters work seamlessly in the old episode. (I know they weren’t actually there but still.) No wonder it got nominated for a Hugo. 

I could single out even more scenes like Kirk buried in tribbles, for how he reacts or the very subtle line about Spock’s ears, but I’ll stop here. I just adore it and “Trials and Tribble-ations” as both are entertaining, feel-good episodes. 

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) MAR$. The Week contrasts The Martian Chronicles with billionaires’ plans for Mars in its editorial letter, “Martian dreams”.

…Along with other sci-fi staples such as living forever and computerizing consciousness, colonizing Mars is now an obsession of our tech elite. Rocket tycoon Elon Musk has said he wants to establish a “self-sustaining civilization” of 1 million people on our neighboring planet as an insurance policy against humanity’s extinction. Yet I can’t help but think that, like Bradbury and Lowell before them, Musk and his fellow billionaires are really projecting their own beliefs onto Mars’ red vistas….

(9) HIDDEN PROPERTY INSPIRED LOVECRAFT. Charming old NYC architectural history, with a genre link! “Inside a West Village passageway leading to a hidden courtyard and 1820s backhouse” at Ephemeral New York.

…One person who made note of this Evening Post writeup when it appeared was author H.P. Lovecraft. A resident of New York City in the 1920s, this horror and science fiction writer published a short story titled “He,” which involved a narrator taking a late-night, time-traveling sojourn through Greenwich Village.

“At the conclusion of ‘He,’ a passerby finds the narrator—bloodied and broken—lying at the entrance to a Perry Street courtyard,” wrote David J. Goodwin, author of the 2023 book Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham.

In “He,” from 1925, the narrator calls it “a grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section,” as well as “a little black court off Perry Street.”…

(10) TARA CAMPBELL READING.  Space Cowboys Books of Joshua Tree, CA will host an “Online Reading & Interview with Tara Campbell” on Tuesday September 17 at 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Register to attend for free at Eventbrite.

In the parched, post-apocalyptic Western U.S. of the 22nd Century, wolves float, bonfires sing, and devils gather to pray. Water and safety are elusive in this chaotic world of alchemical transformations, where history books bleed, dragons kiss, and gun-toting trees keep their own kind of peace. Among this menagerie of strange beasts, two sentient stone gargoyles, known only as “E” and “M,” flee the rubble of their Southwestern church in search of water. Along the way, they meet climate refugees Dolores Baker and her mother Rose, who’ve escaped the ravaged West Coast in search of a safer home. This quartet forms an uneasy alliance when they hear of a new hope: a mysterious city of dancing gargoyles. Or is it something more sinister? In this strange, terrible new world, their arrival at this elusive city could spark the destruction of everything they know. Tara Campbell summons fantastical magic in this kaleidoscopic new speculative climate fiction.

Get your copy of the book here.

(11) RADIO ASTRONOMY. [Item by Steven French.] This is pretty much standard stuff but the radio telescope itself is amazing: “Inside the ‘golden age’ of alien hunting at the Green Bank Telescope” at Physics.org.

Nestled between mountains in a secluded corner of West Virginia, a giant awakens: the Green Bank Telescope begins its nightly vigil, scanning the cosmos for secrets.

If intelligent life exists beyond Earth, there’s a good chance the teams analyzing the data from the world’s largest, fully steerable radio astronomy facility will be the first to know.

“People have been asking themselves the question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ ever since they first gazed up at the night sky and wondered if there were other worlds out there,” says Steve Croft, project scientist for the Breakthrough Listen initiative.

For the past decade, this groundbreaking scientific endeavor has partnered with a pioneering, US government-funded site built in the 1950s to search for “technosignatures”—traces of technology that originate far beyond our own solar system.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or “SETI,” was long dismissed as the realm of eccentrics and was even cut off from federal funding by Congress thirty years ago.

But today, the field is experiencing a renaissance and seeing an influx of graduates, bolstered by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as recent discoveries showing that nearly every star in the night sky hosts planets, many of which are Earth-like.

“It feels to me like this is something of a golden age,” says Croft, an Oxford-trained radio astronomer who began his career studying astrophysical phenomena, from supermassive black holes to the emissions of exploding stars…

(12) MERCHANT OF MENACE. Actor Vincent Price gave an entertaining interview on Aspel & Co in 1984.

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George invites us step inside the Pitch Meeting that led to The Crow (2024).

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

Pixel Scroll 9/6/24 24 Views of Mount Pixel, By Scroll-You-Say

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(1) PROS FOR SALE. Galactic Journey’s Gideon Marcus is at the Worldcon – the 1969 Worldcon: “[September 6, 1969] A hot time in the old town (Worldcon in St. Louis!)”.

… Jack Gaughan was the first artist since Frank Paul in ’56 to be the convention Guest of Honor.  Harlan Ellison was the toastmaster, a job he’s quite good at.  A little longwinded, but always funny.  On Friday, he auctioned off Bob Silverberg for $66 before Silverbob, in turn, auctioned Harlan off for $115 to a bunch of young ladies wearing Roddenberry sweatshirts….

(2) SFWA’S NEW QUARK. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association has inaugurated a monthly public-facing roundup of the organization’s news: “Quark – A SFWA Public Digest”.

In an effort to maintain transparency and foster communications with all members of the SFF community and the public, SFWA would like to introduce Quark, a monthly digest which will give quick updates on what’s been happening within the organization…. 

(3) I WISH I WAS A SPACEMAN, THE FASTEST GUY ALIVE [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Word of Mouth over at BBC Radio 4 took a look at what it is like to be an astronaut. It began with a quick dive into the film Gravity musing on what was real – an encounter with an imaginary George Clooney who somehow imparted unknown but critical information – and what was not. But soon the programme got into the real meat of what it is like to be a spaceman with an interview with Chris Hadfield. I have to say it was one of the best interviews I have heard with an astronaut. Topics covered included: the why’s of space techno-speak, overcoming fear, sense of place and Chris’ getting into being a fiction author. All good stuff. 

Colonel Chris Hadfield is a veteran of three spaceflights. He crewed the US space shuttle twice, piloted the Russian Soyuz, helped build space station Mir and served as Commander of the International Space Station. 

Getting words and language right in as clear and a concise way is a matter of life and death for astronauts. Crews are traditionally made up of different nationalities and Russian is second to English on board. Chris Hadfield who flew several missions and captained the International Space Station talks about how astronauts communicate and the special language they use that he dubs NASA speak. He speaks several languages and lived in Russia for twenty years. As an author he has written several novels based on his experience in Space and as a fighter pilot the latest of which is The Defector. His books The Apollo Murders are being made into a series for TV. He tells Michael about the obligation he feels to share in words as best he can an experience that so few people have – of being in space and seeing Earth from afar. 

You can hear the 25-minute programme here.

(4) HOMEWARD BOUND. Starliner Updates reports:

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft undocked from the International Space Station on Friday, Sept. 6, with separation confirmed at 6:04 p.m. Eastern time.

The reusable crew module is expected to land at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time (10:01 p.m. Mountain time) Saturday at White Sands Space Harbor at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

AP News posted this overview: “Boeing Starliner returns to Earth without NASA astronauts”.

After months of turmoil over its safety, Boeing’s new astronaut capsule departed the International Space Station on Friday without its crew and headed back to Earth.

NASA’s two test pilots stayed behind at the space station — their home until next year — as the Starliner capsule undocked 260 miles (420 kilometers) over China, springs gently pushing it away from the orbiting laboratory. The return flight was expected to take six hours, with a nighttime touchdown in the New Mexico desert….

… A minute after separating from the space station, Starliner’s thrusters could be seen firing as the white, blue-trimmed capsule slowly backed away. NASA Mission Control called it a “perfect” departure.

Flight controllers planned more test firings of the capsule’s thrusters following undocking. Engineers suspect the more the thrusters are fired, the hotter they become, causing protective seals to swell and obstruct the flow of propellant. They won’t be able to examine any of the parts; the section holding the thrusters will be ditched just before reentry….

(5) NESFA SHORT STORY CONTEST. The New England Science Fiction Association is having a Short Story Contest (again) for non-professional writers.  Deadline is September 30.  Submissions must be less than 7500 words, and sent to [email protected]. Full details here: “Short Story Contest”.

…The winner, runners-up, and honorable mentions will be announced during the awards ceremony at Boskone, in NESFA’s newsletter following Boskone, and in various electronic media, including e-zines, newszines, and the Boskone and NESFA websites, blogs, and Facebook pages.

The winner will receive a certificate of achievement, three NESFA Press books, and a free membership to their choice of the next Boskone or the Boskone after that.

Runners-up will receive a certificate and two NESFA Press books. Honorable mentions will receive a certificate and one NESFA Press book….

(6) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to munch on Mattar Paneer with horror writer William J. Donahue in Episode 235 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

William J. Donahue

Horror writer William J. Donahue is the author of such novels as Burn Beautiful Soul (2020), Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life (2022), and most recently, Only Monsters Remain (2023). His short story collections include Brain Cradle (2003), Filthy Beast (2004) and Too Much Poison (2014). When not writing fiction, Donahue works as a full-time magazine editor and features writer. Over the past 15 years, his writing and reporting have earned nearly a dozen awards for excellence in journalism from the American Society of Business Publication Editors.

We discussed the artistic endeavor which had him performing under the name Dirty Rotten Bill, why the first three novels he wrote will never see the light of day, what he was doing with one of those heads from the film 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, why he finds playing with the apocalypse so appealing, the reason he’s neither a plotter or a pantser, but a plantser, how a vegetarian is able to do damage to human flesh in his fiction, the way our journeys were different and yet we managed to wind up at the same destination, how wrestling changed his life, why we keep writing and submitting in the face of rejection, and much more.

(7) GAME ON! N. helps readers evaluate potential game Hugo nominees in “Hugo Award Gamer Grab Bag 2025: Indelible Indies” at the Hugo Book Club Blog.

Last year saw the formal introduction of the Best Game or Interactive Work category to the Hugo Awards, set for re-ratification in 2028. This year saw beloved RPG title Baldur’s Gate 3 win the prize (accepted by an attending dev team!), showing that this category does indeed have juice.

Still, questions remain on logistics, and how Worldcon attendees can best evaluate games in the face of the sprawling gaming industry. That’s what we hope to tackle in this (sporadic) series of guest posts, in which we plan to highlight various genre titles worthy of Hugo consideration (and plain worthy of playing). Easing into this inaugural post, here are three acclaimed indie SFF video games of note released so far in 2024 that we think voters would enjoy…

(8) CLOSING THE STARGATE. Slashfilm thinks they know “Why The Sci-Fi Channel Canceled Stargate SG-1 After Season 10”.

…So, what was “Stargate SG-1” about? The series picks up roughly a year after the events in [Roland] Emmerich’s movie, by which point the titular artifact has become common knowledge among the masses and the U.S. government has leveraged it to traverse distant worlds. An elite U.S. Air Force squad named SG-1 is deployed with the intention of warding off alien attacks, as the dark forest hypothesis comes into play with access to galactic civilizations both benign and malignant. The Goa’uld, the Replicators, and the Ori emerge as key threats to Earth, and the series draws heavily from history and mythology to weave intriguing cultural tapestries that intertwine, and often clash, with our own.

However, this well-oiled machine, which often ran on fumes due to budgetary constraints or a dearth of fresh creative directions, came to a halt in August 2006, when the Sci-Fi Channel (where the show had migrated to in 2002), announced that there would be no 11th season. Speculations about dwindling ratings, ever-expanding production costs, and poor marketing were cited to justify this cancellation. However, the real reason “Stargate SG-1” was axed can be traced to a network decision that had little to do with such logistical aspects. But what happened, exactly?

… In a now-archived interview with Variety, Mark Stern, former exec VP of original programming for the Sci-Fi Channel (now known as Syfy), clarified that “SG-1” cancellation was not ratings-based. “[The cancellation] was not a ratings-driven decision. We’re actually going out on a high note,” Stern said, while affirming that the cast and crew were given enough time to wrap up the narrative in a satisfactory manner, with all loose ends tied up in the series finale….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Dr. Valentin D. Ivanov.]

September 6, 1951 — Aleksandar Karapanchev.  (Died 2021.) Aleksandar Karapanchev was a Bulgarian speculative fiction writer, journalist and poet. He was also an active fan, publisher and editor. He graduated from the University of Sofia with degrees in Turkish and Russian languages. However, the most impactful part of his career was the work at the specialized speculative fiction publishers Rollis, Orphia and Argus in the 1990s. 

He joined fandom well before that and came to love and enjoy genre literature. He edited many dozens of books, served in the juries of a host of writing competitions and on the boards of non-profit organizations aimed to support and advance the speculative fiction. The last ten years of his life he was the secretary of Terra Fantastica – the society of Bulgarian speculative fiction writers.

Karapanchev authored tens of stories, published in the periodicals and in various anthologies. He was the recipient of tens of accolades and awards, including two Eurocons – for the Fantastica, Euristics and Prognotics (FEP) magazine he edited in 1989 and for his debut book in 2002. In 1996 as an editor he won, together with the team of the Argus publishing house, the most prestigious speculative genre accolade in Bulgaria – the Graviton award.

His most notable pieces of fiction are the short stories Stapen Croyd, describing the consequences of a noise catastrophe that has left the humanity in constant unrest and In the UNIMO Epoch, about the destructive effect of the consumerism. His stories have been translated in English, German and Russian. He also authored some poetry and a lot of genre-related non-fiction – reviews, articles on the history and modern tendencies of the genre.

Many young Bulgarian writers owe major improvements in their style to the diligent and careful editorial work of Aleksandar Karapanchev. His passing in 2021 was a major blow to the community.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) LATEST ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE NEWS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] “LLMs produce racist output when prompted in African American English” – a news report in Nature. “Large language models (LLMs) are becoming less overtly racist, but respond negatively to text in African American English. Such ‘covert’ racism could harm speakers of this dialect when LLMs are used for decision-making.”

From the research paper’s abstract:

 Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from help with writing1,2 to informing hiring decisions3. However, these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgements biased in problematic ways about groups such as African Americans4,5,6,7. Although previous research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time, particularly in the United States after the civil rights movement8,9. It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models. Here, we demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice, exhibiting raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English (AAE) that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded.

Primary research paper here, and it’s open access.

(12) NIGHT PATROL. Atlas Obscura explains how “In This Beautiful Library, Bats Guard the Books”.

THE 60,000 BOOKS IN THE Joanine Library are all hundreds of years old. Keeping texts readable for that long, safe from mold and moisture and nibbling bugs, requires dedication. The library’s original architects designed 6-foot (1.8 meters) stone walls to keep out the elements. Employees dust all day, every day.

And then there are the bats. For centuries, small colonies of these helpful creatures have lent their considerable pest control expertise to the library. In the daytime—as scholars lean over historic works and visitors admire the architecture—the bats roost quietly behind the two-story bookshelves. At night, they swoop around the darkened building, eating the beetles and moths that would otherwise do a number on all that old paper and binding glue….

(13) VOLCANISM ON THE MOON 120 MILLION YEARS AGO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Back when the dinosaurs were scaring Raquel Welch (I have never really forgiven them for that) 120 million years ago, there was volcanic activity on the Moon. Research reported in this week’s Science looks at samples from China’s the Chang’e-5 spacecraft.

Igneous rocks on the Moon demonstrate that it experienced extensive volcanism, with the most recent precisely dated volcanic lunar rocks being 2 billion years old. Some types of volcanic eruption produce microscopic glass beads, but so do impacts. Wang et al. examined thousands of glass beads taken from a lunar sample collected by the Chang’e-5 spacecraft (see the Perspective by Amelin and Yin). They used compositional and isotopic measurements to distinguish volcanic- and impact-related beads, identifying three beads of volcanic origin. Radiometric dating of those volcanic beads showed that they formed 120 million years ago and were subsequently transported to the Chang’e-5 landing site. The results indicate recent lunar volcanism that is not predicted by thermal models.

See the primary research here. 

(14) REV. B. HIBBARD’S VEGETABLE ANTIBILIOUS FAMILY PILLS. [Item by Andrew Porter.] From the site Daytonian in Manhattan. An advertisement in The Evening Post on August 25, 1837 promised in part:

They are highly appreciated for the relief they afford in affections of the Liver and Digestive Organs.  The worst cases of Chronic Dyspepsia, Inveterate Costiveness, Indigestion, Dyspeptic Consumption, Rheumatism, Nervous or Sick Headache and Scurvy, have been entirely cured by a proper use of them.  Also, Liver Complaints, Fever and Ague, Bilious Fever, Jaundice, Dysentery or Bloody Flex, the premonitory symptoms of Cholera, Dropsical Swelling, Piles, Worms in Children, Fits, Looseness and Irregularity of the Bowels, occasioned by Irritation, Teething, &c.

(15) WHERE WOLF? “’Wolf Man’ Trailer Sees Christopher Abbott’s Monster Unleashed”, and Deadline sets the scene.

Universal Pictures on Friday debuted the first teaser for Wolf Man, its new film in which Christopher Abbott (Poor Things) transforms into the classic movie monster.

Co-starring three-time Emmy winner Julia Garner (Ozark), Sam Jaeger (The Handmaid’s Tale) and young up-and-comer Matilda Firth (Subservience), the New Zealand-shot reboot helmed for Blumhouse and Universal by Leigh Whannell (The Invisible Man) follows a family that is being terrorized by a lethal predator. Pic is slated for release in theaters on January 17, 2025….

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

Pixel Scroll 10/29/22 If Pixels Waltz, Do Scrolls Pirouette?

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(1) THE GULF BETWEEN. [Item by Jim Janney.] Pat Bagley’s editorial cartoon in today’s Salt Lake Tribune references a famous cover from the October 1953 Astounding. (Note how it’s signed “With apologies to Frank Kelly Freas.”)

(2) KEEP CALM. No matter what you may have heard – like in an email from the World Fantasy Convention committee itself – the WFC 2022 Covid policy remains the same.

The convention’s website adds these details: “COVID-19 Policy”.

Our safety protocols for WFC 2022 are as follows:

– Attending members must be fully vaccinated. Proof of vaccination will be required upon check-in at the convention.

– Masks will be required in all public places. Masks must be worn properly, covering the nose and mouth. If a member appears at any WFC 2022 event without a mask, they will be asked to put one on. If they refuse, their membership will be revoked, their badge confiscated, and they will be required to leave the convention.

– Safe social distances will be observed at all times.

– We will have hand sanitizer easily accessible throughout the convention.

If you are not fully vaccinated for any reason, please do not purchase an attending membership. We invite you to purchase a virtual membership and participate in the convention remotely.

James Van Pelt addressed on Facebook that a similar policy at the recent MileHiCon was not always followed by panelists, with the attendant social pressure on those who would rather it be followed.

(3) YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WINDROSE. Can it be that John C. Wright thieved a diagram created by Camestros Felapton without giving credit? Survey says – “Bow wow!” However, according to Camestros, “It’s nice to be appreciated”.

In 2016 I was going to write a post about John C. Wright’s near incomprehensible scheme for categorising ideologies on two axes (original Wright post archived here). However, vanity and vainglorious aspiration required me to furnish the post with a better graphic. Having laboured on the graphic I realised I had very little to say, leaving the post as little more than my drawing of Wright’s windrose: https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2016/01/30/john-c-wrights-windrose-of-political-heresy/

Now Mr Wright recently reposted his essay on his scheme, and as with his previous essay, there was a graphic to accompany it…which looks more than a little familiar…

(4) THE HOUSE OF COMMONS NEEDS YOU. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]  AI is sort of SFnal.  Do any Filers have knowledge of AI and wish to contribute to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry into the “Governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI)”? The call for evidence is here. The deadline is November 25. HAL lives! (but does not give 42 as the answer.)

MPs to examine regulating AI in new inquiry

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee launches an inquiry into the governance of artificial intelligence (AI). In July, the UK Government set out its emerging thinking on how it would regulate the use of AI. It is expected to publish proposals in a White Paper later this year, which the Committee would examine in its inquiry.

Used to spot patterns in large datasets, make predictions, and automate processes, AI’s role in the UK economy and society is growing. However, there are concerns around its use. MPs will examine the potential impacts of biased algorithms in the public and private sectors. A lack of transparency on how AI is applied and how automated decisions can be challenged will also be investigated.

In the inquiry, MPs will explore how risks posed to the public by the improper use of AI should be addressed, and how the Government can ensure AI is used in an ethical and responsible way. The Committee seeks evidence on the current governance of AI, whether the Government’s proposed approach is the right one, and how their plans compare with other countries.

(5) NOT FOREVER STAMPS. The UK’s Royal Mail, which added barcodes to its stamps this year, soon will no longer honor previous issues. The Guardian’s Dale Berning Sawa asks “My stash of old stamps is beautiful. Why make them unnecessarily obsolete?”

After introducing barcodes to our regular sticker stamps in February, Royal Mail has now given us 100 days to use up our old stamps. Come February 2023, only those barcoded will be valid. To swap out any remaining oldies, we will have to fill out a request form and send it, for free, to a depot in Edinburgh.

The ironic loop-the-loop of freeposting postage to receive same-value postage in the post – in order to, in the beleaguered company’s own words, “connect physical stamps to the digital world” – is not lost on me. It’s more than curmudgeonly irritation, though, I feel bewildered. Why does one stamp having the ability to play you Shaun the Sheep videos mean that all those other beauties have to go? Does the Royal Mail not realise how great, how quietly subversive, how steadfast its one defining product has been all these years?…

(6) SWEDISH SHORTS SFF COMPETITION. [Item by Ahrvid Engholm.] The Result of the 23rd Fantastiknovelltävlingen (approx “Fantastic Short Story Competition”; Fantastic as in Fantastic Literatur, often here called Fantastik.) I translate the story titles, but skip the 6 “honorary mentions”:

  • 1st prize “Fyrmästarens dotter” by Camilla Linde  (999 kr) [“Daughter of the Lighthouse Keeper”]
  • 2nd prize “En glimt av oändlighet” by Sunna Andersson (600 kr) [“A Glimpse of Eternity”]
  • 3rd prize “God Granne” by Tobias Robinson (400 kr) [“Good Neighbour”]

The prize sums are in Kr=kronor; 10 kr is around 1 USD/Eur. Winners also get a diploma.

(7) A SOLID HONOR. Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, CA will host the “Vroman’s Walk Of Fame Dedication Ceremony Honoring Author Leigh Bardugo” on Saturday, November 19, 2022 at 12:00 p.m. The location is 695 E. Colorado St., Pasadena, CA 91101.

We are very excited to announce author Leigh Bardugo as our next honoree to immortalize her handprints and signature in the Vroman’s Author Walk of Fame! We are so thrilled to honor Leigh with this dedication and to celebrate all of her wonderful books.

Join us on Saturday, November 19th at noon for the dedication. After the dedication please stay for a special conversation between Leigh Bardugo and Sarah Enni, discussing Leigh’s life and career.

We realize that not everyone will get the best view of the dedication ceremony so we will be broadcasting this morning event on Instagram Live. Keep watch for more details and follow up on Instagram! @vromansbookstore

(8) WHERE WOLF? THERE HOME DEPOT. In the Washington Post, Maura Judkis talks to buyers of the 9-1/2 foot audioanimatronic werewolf available at Home Depot for $399.  She talked to one anonymous furry who thinks the werewolf is a furry icon. “The Home Depot werewolf is getting howls of approval”.

… She saw him and she had to buy him: A beefy, sinewy wolfman with massive hands (paws?), glowing eyes and, under his shredded buffalo-check shirt, six-pack abs. Best of all, and unlike his skeletal brethren, he talks and moves: With a growl, he opens his mouth to reveal a row of sharp fangs, tilts his head back and … aroooooooooo!

Rush bought the $399 werewolf on “Orange Friday,” which is what the most dedicated of Halloween decorators call the day Home Depot makes its Halloween decorations available online for purchase. This year, that day was July 15, when normal people are, well, what’s normal anymore?…

(9) MEMORY LANE.

1951 — [By Cat Eldridge.] One of the finest works that Bradbury crafted was The Illustrated Man. It was published seventy-one years ago by Doubleday & Company and consists of eighteen stories, of which ISFDB claims three are original to here.

Let’s note that the British edition, published a year later by Hart-Davis, omits “The Rocket Man”, “The Fire Balloons, “The Exiles” and “The Concrete Mixer” and adds “Usher I” from The Martian Chronicles and “The Playground”. 

The unrelated stories are weaved together by the framing story of “The Illustrated Man” involving a now wandering member of a carnival freak show with an almost completely tattooed body, save one spot, whom the unnamed narrator and a few other people meet. (My assumption there.) The man’s tattoos, supposedly created by a time-traveling woman, are individually animated, and each tells a different story.

The stories would be adapted elsewhere. Some of the stories, including “The Veldt”, “The Fox and the Forest” (changed to “To the Future”), “Marionettes, Inc.”, and “Zero Hour” were also dramatized for the Fifties X Minus One radio series. 

The Ray Bradbury Theater series used “The Concrete Mixer”, “The Long Rain”, “Marionettes Inc.” “The Veldt”, “Zero Hour” whereas “The Fox and the Forest” was adapted for Out of the Unknown series.

Seventeen years after it was published, it would debut as a film. The screenplay was by Howard B. Kreitsek who adapted three of the stories from the collection, “The Veldt”, “The Long Rain” and “The Last Night of the World”, the last one a good choice I think to end the film.

SPOILERS NOW AS WE CONSIDER A BEGINNING AND A POSSIBLE END

The prologue tells of how The Illustrated Man came to be so after he encountered a mysterious woman named Felicia. Our film narrator encounters our The Illustrated Man and watches the three stories play out as animated stories. 

The plot comes to a terrifying conclusion when one of the people accompanying The Illustrated Man on his journey looks at the only blank patch of skin on his body and sees an image of his own murder at his hand of The Illustrated Man then attempts to kill The Illustrated Man and then flees into the night, pursued by a still-living Illustrated Man, with the audience left undetermined as to his fate of either.

NOW BACK TO OUR REGULAR PROGRAMMING 

Jack Smight, the film director, decided that the carnival sideshow freak who appeared in the collection’s prologue and epilogue made the  best primary narrative device. 

As for The Illustrated Man, he cast Rod Steiger, whom he had known since the Fifties. 

It failed horribly at the Box Office and critics hated it. 

It was nominated for a Hugo at the Heicon ’70 Worldcon held in Heidelberg, Germany but did not win. 

I will let our writer have the last word here: “Rod was very good in it, but it wasn’t a good film, the script was terrible.” 

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 29, 1906 — Fredric Brown. Author of Martians, Go Home which was made into a movie of the same name. He received compensation and credit from NBC as their Trek episode “Arena” had more than a passing similarity to his novelette which was nominated for a Retro Hugo at CoNZealand. (Died 1972.)
  • Born October 29, 1928 — Benjamin F. Chapman, Jr. He played the Gill-man on the land takes in Creature from the Black Lagoon. (Ricou Browning did the water takes.) His only other genre appearance was in Jungle Moon Men, a Johnny Weissmuller film. (Died 2008.)
  • Born October 29, 1928 — Jack Donner. He’s no doubt best known for his role of Romulan Subcommander Tal in the Trek episode “The Enterprise Incident”. He would later return as a Vulcan priest in the “Kir’Shara” and “Home” episodes on Enterprise. He’d also show up in other genre shows including The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission Impossible (eleven episodes which is the most by any guest star) and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. (Died 2019.)
  • Born October 29, 1935 — Sheila Finch, 87. She is best remembered for her stories about the Guild of Xenolinguists, which aptly enough are collected in The Guild of Xenolinguists. She first used the term her 1986 Triad novel, and it would later be used to describe the character Uhura in the rebooted Trek film. Her Reading the Bones novella, part of the Guild of Xenolinguists series, would win a Nebula. These books are available at the usual suspects. 
  • Born October 29, 1941 — Hal W. Hall, 81. Bibliographer responsible for the Science Fiction Book Review Index (1970 – 1985) and the Science Fiction Research Index (1981 – 1922). He also did a number of reviews including three of H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzy books showing he had excellent taste in fiction.
  • Born October 29, 1954 — Paul Di Filippo, 68. He is, I’d say, an acquired taste. I like him. I’d suggest as a first reading if you don’t know him The Steampunk Trilogy and go from there. His “A Year in the Linear City” novella was nominated at Torcon 3 for Best Novella, and won the 2003 World Fantasy Award and the 2003 Theodore Sturgeon Award. Oh, and he’s one of our stellar reviewers having reviewed at one time or another for Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Fiction Eye, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Interzone, Nova Express and Science Fiction Weekly. 
  • Born October 29, 1954 — Kathleen O’Neal Gear, 68. Archaeologist and writer. I highly recommend the three Anasazi Mysteries that she co-wrote with W. Michael Gear. She’s a historian of note so she’s done a lot of interesting work in that area such as Viking Warrior Women: Did ‘Shieldmaidens’ like Lagertha Really Exist?  And should you decide you want to keep buffalo, she’s the expert on doing so. Really. Truly, she is. 
  • Born October 29, 1971 — Winona Ryder, 51. Beetlejuice, of course, but also Edward Scissorhands and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Not to mention Alien Resurrection and Star Trek. Which brings me to Being John Malkovich which might be the coolest genre film of all time. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • Junk Drawer has an amusing twist on a familiar bit of horror pedantry.
  • Non Sequitur shows the very first “trick or treat” trial run.

(12) READ SJUNNESON STORY. Arizon State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination has posted the final Us in Flux story for 2022. This is the latest in their series of short fiction and virtual events about reimagining and reorganizing communities in the face of transformative change.

The story is “The Island,” by Elsa Sjunneson, about the ability-disability continuum, journalism, and creating adaptable communities.

(13) CLIP SHOW. NPR’s “Fresh Air” “Halloween special, with horror masters Stephen King and Jordan Peele” is a compilation of past interviews.

King talks about what terrified him as a child — and what frightens him as an adult. Peele talks about the fears that inspire his filmmaking. Originally broadcast in 1992, 2013 and 2017.

(14) VISION OF THE FUTURE. “Marvel developing Vision spinoff series with Paul Bettany” – and SYFY Wire assumes readers have seen every MCU movie and freely reveal the previous fates of various characters, so beware spoilers.

Deadline reports the studio is developing a new potential series codenamed Vision Quest, which will star Paul Bettany returning to the role of Vision. The show will reportedly follow Vision as he attempts to “regain his memory and humanity.” This would focus on the White Vision character who ended the first season of WandaVision on the loose in the world after regaining enough of his memories following a face-off with Wanda’s version of Vision (yeah, it’s a bit confusing).

It’s still early, with a writers room reportedly opening for the project next week, but it’s reportedly possible that Elizabeth Olsen could also return as Wanda Maximoff. As fans know, Wanda was last seen buried under a temple in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness…. 

(15) PLAYING MARS LIKE A DRUM. [SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Science journal has “A seismic meteor strike on Mars”. “A meteor impact and its subsequent seismic waves has revealed the crustal structure of Mars.”

A large meteorite impact on Mars, as recorded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) InSight Mars lander and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and present analysis of the detected surface waves produced by the meteorite impact. Kim et al. also present an updated crustal model of Mars that provides a better understanding of the formation and composition of the martian crust and extends the current knowledge of the geodynamic evolution of Mars.

First primary research paper here. Second paper here here.

(16) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] This is Ryan George’s latest BUT my computer is wonky in that the sound is off so I don’t know what he says! I am sure he has a field day because I saw Black Adam and it’s a stinker. Spoiler alert!

[Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Jim Janney, Ahrvid Engholm, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]