By John Hertz: (reprinted from No Direction Home 32) In the present season – in 2019 the New Year
on the Jewish religious calendar began at sundown on 29 Sep, followed by Ten
Days of Repentance, and Atonement Day beginning at sundown on 8 Oct (it’s a
lunar-solar calendar adjusted by a leap month, so the dates shift back and
forth on the secular i.e. Gregorian calendar) – I sometimes see this poem,
attributed to Judy Chicago (1939- ) and
said to be from 1979.
A Poem Praying for Us Then and Them Right Now
And then all of what has divided us will merge.
And then compassion will be wedded to power.
And then softness will come to a world that is often harsh and unkind.
And then both women and men will be gentle.
And then both men and women will be strong.
And then no other person will be subject to another’s will.
And then all will be rich and varied.
And then all will share equally in the earth’s abundance.
And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old.
And then all will nourish the young.
And then all will cherish life’s creatures.
And then all will live in harmony with each other and the earth.
And then everywhere will be called Eden once again.
It
appears elsewhen too. Maybe I should add
elsefaith; I’ve seen it among Christians.
At the moment I have three
scholarly questions to pursue. The title
does not always appear. The word “often”
does not always appear. When it is
omitted – so maybe these are just two questions – a further line appears after
“And then all will be rich and free and varied”:
“And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many.” I’m not sure about the title; I think often, greed and need, matter.
(1) THE GAME OF THE NAME. John D. Berry renders his verdict
about their usefulness and design in “A tale of three nametags”.
In the course of less than a month this summer, I attended three major events, each of which had a nametag that attendees were supposed to wear. The first, in Dublin, was this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, which was being held in Ireland for the first time. The second, a week later in Belfast, was the Eurocon, or European Science Fiction Convention, which moves around among European countries and was hosted by the organizers of Titancon, an annual Belfast science fiction convention; holding it in Northern Ireland the week after the worldcon made it easy for people visiting from other countries to attend both conventions on their trip. The third event was ATypI 2019, the annual conference of the Association Typographique Internationale, in Tokyo – ATypI’s second time in Asia, as it happens….
“It ain’t over,” radio host Jim Freund told the Brooklyn Eagle on Tuesday.
Freund, 65, hosts a science fiction and fantasy talk show called “Hour of the Wolf” on 99.5 WBAI FM — the decades-old, listener-sponsored radio station currently taking its parent nonprofit, the Pacifica Foundation, to court.
On Monday, Pacifica — which owns a slate of other independently operated radio stations — abruptly shut down local programming at WBAI and shuttered its Atlantic Avenue workspace, citing millions of dollars of debt and the desire to rebuild the station around national, syndicated content.
By Tuesday morning, the staff — which consists largely of unpaid volunteers — was granted a temporary restraining order by the Manhattan Supreme Court, barring Pacifica from terminating any WBAI employees or impeding on its local programming in any way until Oct. 18, when both parties must appear in court.
But as of Wednesday, producers said local programming was still being kept off the air.
“This isn’t the first time something like this has happened,” said Freund, who has hosted “Hour of the Wolf” on WBAI for nearly half a century. “In 1977, there was an incident so huge that Pacifica took us off the air for three months. There was static.”…
Q. You’re organizing a dinner party. Which three scholars or academics, dead or alive, do you invite?
A. The first guest would have to be Tolkien, Oxford’s Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. Then Gregory Benford, the noted science fiction writer and the University of California at Irvine’s Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy. There have always been rumors that Elena Ferrante is actually an Italian professor; if whoever it was accepted the invitation, we’d find out for sure!
Anyone over the age of 35 will remember growing up in a world in which only one planetary system was known — our own. We remember proudly reciting the names of the nine planets (eight before Pluto’s discovery in 1930, and again today with its reclassification as a dwarf planet in 2006) and wondering what other planets might exist around the stars in the night sky. Contemplating life beyond the Solar System was relegated to science fiction. This all changed in 1995 when Mayor and Queloz1 reported the detection of the first exoplanet around a Sun-like star…
…Call it Tom’s Choice. Like all the major studios, Sony Pictures is questing for new franchises — and after years of development, it might have one with the He-Man movie Masters of the Universe.
But while the picture is on the calendar for release in March 2021, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that studio chairman Tom Rothman is exploring the prospect of getting risk-free cash for the pricey project by making it for Netflix instead. A studio source says talks are preliminary, but such a deal would make Sony the next studio after Paramount to start making movies belonging exclusively or almost exclusively to the streamer.
So there’s the dilemma: seek a studio or financier to partner on the project, holding on to various rights and territories, or make the safe deal with Netflix (which would not seem quite so safe if the film were a huge hit and it already was sold).
Her lifelong interest in science and societal upheaval is embodied in fascinating ways in Canopus in Argos, a series of five books published from 1979 to 1983. (She came up with the title a few weeks after seeing, and loving, George Lucas’s film Star Wars, in 1978. The inspiration might have been the ‘crawl text’ at the film’s start.)…
Novelist Anthony Burgess, author of the dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), complained of her “fanciful cosmic viewpoint”. Although science-fiction doyenne Ursula K. Le Guin praised some character sketches in Shikasta as “immortal diamond”, she found the whole at times “little more than a pulp-Galactic Empire with the Goodies fighting the Baddies”. Undeterred, Lessing worked her way through the series, declaring bloodymindedly that “space fiction, with science fiction, makes up the most original branch of literature now”. She had friends among scifi authors, including Brian Aldiss, and happily attended meetings of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. She championed the genre as influential in mainstream literature, whose pundits nevertheless “are much to blame for patronising or ignoring it”.
Science fiction, fantasy, and horror are genres with a long history behind them, and historians and writers have spilled plenty of ink covering the authors, events, franchises, and works that form their bedrock. Recently, two books have hit stores that are well worth picking up if you’re a fan of genre history: Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror & Speculative Fiction, by Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson, and Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Desirina Boskovich. Both offer excellent examinations of the genres while shedding a bit of light on parts of their history that aren’t often illuminated.
From its inception, cyberpunk has shared quite a bit of DNA with crime fiction. Your archetypical (some might say stereotypical) cyberpunk anti-hero, hacking into the mainframe of a highly militarized mega-corporation, could easily trade some tips about life on the street with a grizzled safecracker from a Richard Stark novel or Michael Mann film. Both cyberpunk and crime fiction often focus on those who live on the edge of society, trying to scratch out a living while wrestling with some degree of existential ennui.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.
October 10, 2008 — City of Ember enjoyed its theatrical release. The film starred Saoirse Ronan and Toby Jones, currently The Librarian in The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. It’s based on the series by Jeanne DuPrau. Rotten Tomatoes gave it rating of 53%.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 10, 1924 — Edward Wood Jr. Though known for Plan 9 from Outer Space, he did a lot of bad genre films including Night of the Monster and Bride of The Ghouls. (Died 1978.)
Born October 10, 1927 — Dana Elcar. Most of you will remember him as Peter Thornton on MacGyver, but he has a long genre history including Russ in Condorman which was inspired by Robert Sheckley’s The Game of X. He also played Sheriff George Paterson in Dark Shadows, and showed up in 2010 as Dimitri Moisevitch. (Died 2005.)
Born October 10, 1929 — Robin Hardy. Wicker Man is the film he’s known for though he followed that up with The Wicker Tree, an adaptation of his Cowboys for Christ novel. Anyone seen it? (Died 2016.)
Born October 10, 1931 — Victor Pemberton. Writer of the script for the the “Fury from the Deep”, a Second Doctor story in which he created the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver. He had appeared as an actor in the series, in a non-speaking role as a scientist in “The Moonbase” story. In 1976, he wrote the BBC audio drama Doctor Who and the Pescatons which I remember hearing. Quite good it was. (Died 2007.)
Born October 10, 1931 — Jack Jardine. A long-time L.A. fan who was present at many West Coast cons and who shared the dais on panels with some of the major names in SF. He attended his last convention, in a wheelchair, assisted by his daughter Sabra, after a debilitating stroke at the age of 70. His health continued to get worse until he died from heart failure. File 770 has more here. (Died 2009.)
Born October 10, 1941 — Peter Coyote, 78. He actually did two genre films in 1982 with the first being Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann in which he appeared as Porter Reese and the second being E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial which he’s Keys, the Agent hunting E.T. down. Sphere in which he’s Captain Harold C. Barnes is his next SF outing followed by The 4400 and FlashForward series being his next major genre involvements.
Born October 10, 1947 — Laura Brodian Freas Beraha, 72. While married to Kelly Freas, she wrote Frank Kelly Freas: As He Sees It with him along with quite a few essays such as “ On the Painting of Beautiful Women or Ayesha, She Who Must Be Obeyed” and “ Some of My Best Critics are Friends – or Vice Versa“. She’s credited solely for the cover art for the 1993 Easton Press interior art for The Left Hand of Darkness according to ISFDB.
Born October 10, 1966 — Bai Ling, 53. She’s Miss West in Wild West West and the Mysterious Woman in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, she has a major role as Guanyin in The Monkey King which aired on Syfy.
Given the mildculturalpanic surrounding the Oct. 4 release of Todd Phillips’ Joker, it’s fair to speculate that theater security and guest services departments have had a rough couple weeks and were on edge going into last weekend. A student at Cal State Long Beach decided to test their patience anyhow, and got hit with a lifetime ban for his efforts.
On the night of Oct. 3, Twitter user @jinpayn — who declined to share his first name with The Hollywood Reporter but whose last name is Payne — posted a photo of a flyer taped to a ticket kiosk outside the AMC Orange 30 cinema in Orange, California, that read, “Please note: We are enforcing a strict NO SINGLES POLICY for tonight’s showings of JOKER due to safety precautions. We will not be admitting anyone without an additional partner.” “Great, I can’t see @jokermovie because I’m here alone. Wtf @amctheaters?” he tweeted.
French cosplay champion Alice Livanart has been removed from the EuroCosplay finals by organisers after she was accused of “blackface.”
The EuroCosplay Championships, to be held at MCM Comic Con in London later this month, pit together the winners of individual competitions in 25 European countries.
Alice Livanart won the France Cosplay Cup in September 2019 with her cosplay of League of Legends character Pyke.
However, she has now been banned from the European finals after allegations on social media that her costume was insensitive.
A rare copy of the first Harry Potter book has sold for £46,000 at auction after it was kept in a briefcase for safekeeping for more than 20 years.
The Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone hardback edition was given to a Lancashire family who planned to keep it as an heirloom.
They decided to sell it after hearing about another book fetching £28,500.
The 1997 edition is the “Holy Grail” for collectors, a spokesman for the auction house said.
…Only 500 copies were published in the book’s first print run, with 300 of those sent to libraries.
(15) GRAPHIC EXAMPLES. You’ve heard of the comics
censorship that happened in the Fifties, and after you read the examples CrimeReads
offers in “A
History of EC Comics in 7 Tales of Murder & Horror” you’ll know
what it was about.
“Split Personality”—The Vault of Horror 29
Ed King is one of EC’s long line a smooth-talking, pencil-mustached con men. He sees dollar signs after learning of rich twin-sister agoraphobes. Both sisters fall for the oily eel, but if he marries only one of them, he’ll only get half their fortune. So the snake decides to play his own twin. It only makes sense, right? Eventually the dames catch on, and with EC’s classic I’ve-gone-mad signifiers (Little Orphan Annie eyes, frozen grins, sweat beads), the sisters split Ed down the middle so they can each enjoy half. As our host, the Vault-Keeper says, Ed made “a BIGAMISTake!” (Note: Another tale, “How Green Was My Alley” is the same story, but with the addition of bowling/golf, and the two-timer getting his head/eye used as balls.)
A Japanese student of ninja history who handed in a blank paper was given top marks – after her professor realised the essay was written in invisible ink.
Eimi Haga followed the ninja technique of “aburidashi”, spending hours soaking and crushing soybeans to make the ink.
The words appeared when her professor heated the paper over his gas stove.
“It is something I learned through a book when I was little,” Ms Haga told the BBC. “I just hoped that no-one would come up with the same idea.”
…”When the professor said in class that he would give a high mark for creativity, I decided that I would make my essay stand out from others,” she said.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, JJ, John King Tarpinian, SF
Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, Michael
Toman, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File
770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
GUFF administrators ae calling for nominations to send a European fan to CoNZealand,
the 2020 Worldcon in Wellington, New Zealand (July 29-August 2).
GUFF
is the Going Under and Over (or Get Under) Fan Fund which transports SF fans
from Europe to Australasia (and vice versa).
Marcin “Alqua” Klak, the current European Administrator of GUFF, and Simon Litten (Australasian Administrator) have posted full details here.
Depending
on the length of trip they’re able to make, the winner could also consider
visiting other parts of New Zealand and Australia to visit fans. The winner
will also be required to take over the administration of the fund for the next
northbound and southbound races.
Nominations
are being taken until January 10, 2020. Then the candidates will be announced
and voting will run until April 13.
Olga
Tokarczuk, a Polish author, and Peter Handke, an Austrian writer, were awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature on October 10. At a ceremony in Stockholm, the
Swedish Academy announced the 2019 prize went to Handke, Tokarczuk won the 2018
prize, which was not presented last year because of a scandal at the academy.
The academy cites Tokarczuk “for a narrative imagination that with
encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”
Olga Tokarczuk
Tokarczuk is particularly noted for
the mythical tone of her writing. The summaries of her work in the Wikipedia
show her closest approaches to the fantastic are in these three novels:
E. E. (1995) took its title from the initials of its protagonist, a young woman named Erna Eltzner, who grows up in a bourgeois German-Polish family in Breslau (the at that time German city that was to become the Polish Wroc?aw after World War II) in the 1920s, who develops psychic abilities…
Prawiek i inne czasy (“Primeval and Other Times”) was published in 1996 and became highly successful. It is set in the fictitious village of Prawiek (Primeval) at the very heart of Poland, which is populated by some eccentric, archetypical characters. The village is guarded by four archangels, from whose perspective the novel chronicles the lives of Prawiek’s inhabitants over a period of eight decades, beginning in 1914….
In 2009 the novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was published. It is written in the convention of a detective story with the main character telling the story from her point of view. Janina Duszejko, an old woman, eccentric in her perception of other humans through astrology, relates a series of deaths in a rural area near K?odzko, Poland. She explains the deaths as caused by wild animals in vengeance on hunters.
Tokarczuk continues to write
significant work, and in 2018 won the Man Booker International Prize for
translated fiction for “Flights,” an experimental novel based on stories of
travel.
Handke was cited by the Swedish
Academy “for an influential work that with
linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human
experience.”
Peter Handke
He is a prolific writer, however, the Wikipedia lacks helpful synopses of Handke’s works, having a great deal more to say about the controversies created by his political associations. For example:
His writings about the Yugoslav Wars and subsequent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia with criticism of the Western position and his speech at the funeral of Slobodan Miloševi? have caused controversy, and he has been widely described as an apologist for far-right Serbian nationalism
Two winners were
named today because the prize was not awarded in 2018.
The Swedish Academy,
which oversees the prestigious award, suspended it to make changes to its
processes after it was engulfed in a sexual assault scandal.
Anticipating today’s awards, Alexandra Pascalidou, a
Swedish journalist who set up the New Academy Prize, told the New York Times:
The Swedish Academy needs to change more. It needs more inclusion, more diversity, more openness.
She
says the academy should not have awarded the 2018 prize because it will forever
be tainted by the scandal. “It’s very sad for whoever wins.”
Prior to 2019, the most recent
winner was Kazuo
Ishiguro in 2017. The
fantastic elements in his latest novel, The Buried Giant (2015) argue for his inclusion among
the small number of sff authors to win the prize, such as Kipling and Doris
Lessing.
Even 10 years ago, the fields of science fiction and fantasy were still overwhelmingly American and white. And, if you grew up speaking Spanish in Mexico City, (as I, Silvia, did), or Hebrew on a small kibbutz in Israel (as I, Lavie, did), it meant that the world of science fiction, filtered through translation, was as remote and alien as the other side of the moon. The very idea we could be writing novels like these seemed, well, fantastical.
Yet, somehow, here we are. The past decade has seen the science-fiction world change as more international voices enthusiastically jumped into the fray. Now, wonderful writers including Malaysian Zen Cho can write smart, funny fantasies such as “Sorcerer to the Crown”; after years of struggle, Nigerian Tade Thompson’s ambitious Africa-set novel, “Rosewater,” was published to wide acclaim and recently won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Chinese author Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem,” translated by Ken Liu, has become a bestseller and even has a recommendation from former president Barack Obama.
(3) FIRESIDE CANCELLATIONS. The October 8 issue of Jason
Sanford’s Genre
Grapevine reported —
…Fireside Press contacted a number of its authors and cancelled their pending book titles. The messages received by those authors said that due to unexpected changes at Fireside, the publisher had to re-evaluate their plans for the upcoming year. As a result Fireside was cancelling the contracts for multiple titles which had been accepted and contracted but not yet scheduled for publication. Fireside reverted the rights for these books to their authors, although no kill fee was paid because that wasn’t in the contract.
Pablo Defendini, the Publisher of Fireside,
responded to the report with a statement: “About our
Acquisitions”.
On Monday morning, I sent out messages reverting the rights on five unpublished and unannounced manuscripts that we acquired last year during our novel and novella acquisitions period. In the last day or so there’s been lots of rumor and speculation, so I wanted to explain what’s going on directly.
We’ve had some unexpected changes on the editorial front at Fireside this year. Any time there’s a change like that, it affects workflow, capacity, and resourcing throughout, especially at very small operations like ours. Over the past few months, as I’ve reworked our editorial operations to account for working with more people than ever before, it’s become clear to me that the amount of work that I’d previously thought Fireside could take on was unsustainable. Trying to take on too much work would have made living up to our obligations to our authors extremely challenging. It would have been bad both for Fireside and for these authors and their work. So rather than publishIng these books badly, I made the decision to cut down on our upcoming list.
This sucks no matter how you slice it, but it would have sucked more down the line. As I told each author, this is not a reflection on their work. There’s a reason we were attracted to these manuscripts in the first place — they’re great stories, and I have no doubt that they will find good homes. But I’d much rather revert the rights to these books back to their authors, than do a bad job publishing their work, or worse: sit on the rights until the contracts expired….
Meg Elison today said she is one of the authors whose contract was
cancelled, and commented at length about how that was handled. Thread starts here.
Fireside dropped us out of signed contracts despite this without
1. Saying sorry 2. Explaining what really happened beyond vague indications of failure 3. Indicating to any ONE of us whether this decision affected anyone else. We had to find each other.
(4) LEWIS QUEST. Matt Mikalatos, while “Introducing
the Great C.S. Lewis Reread” at Tor.com, raises the suspicion that the
series will be of great interest to all except to those who actually like
Lewis’s writing.
…Time passed, and over the years I’ve grown and changed, of course; recently my 16-year-old picked up my favorite Lewis book, Till We Have Faces. It’s a beautiful novel about loss and faith and confronting the gods. My daughter told me it was good, but added, “He didn’t like women much, did he?”
Okay, yes, that’s a fair response. And there are certainly moments of deeply troubling racism in Lewis’s books, too. And for those who aren’t from a Christian background (and maybe some who are), the central Christian conceits can be off-putting (even Tolkien, who was a key player in Lewis’s conversion, often disliked Lewis’s sermonizing).
So why are we embarking on a massive re-read of Lewis’s books?
Well, love them or hate them, the Narnia books played a key role in bringing children’s literature back into the worlds of the fantastic. There was a strong emphasis on realism in Lewis’s days, and too much imagination was seen as unhealthy for kids (though Baum, Barrie, and Nesbit might still be on the nursery shelf). The popularity of Narnia opened the door to more fantasy literature for children, and The Chronicles of Narnia still get placed on “Best Of” lists for children today….
(5) EMULATING WHO. Watch the full recreation of the missing
Doctor Who 1965 episode Mission to the Unknown by the University
of Central Lancashire. Find out more and watch the making-of here.
…When I first applied for this position, did I know that my expected job duties would include dueling genocidal dark lords or battling Death Eaters in the Astronomy Tower? No. Did I do them anyway, even after being denied a cost of living adjustment to my salary for ten years in a row while also dealing with insidiously small-but-steady cuts to my annual conference travel budget? Yes. Do these accomplishments count as service to the student body, to the institution, or to humanity itself? Hard to say.
Not even saving the institution from an apocalyptic calamity orchestrated by a noseless neo-Nazi, however, can compare to the daily, ongoing, and, frankly, deeply disheartening struggle to protect our students from themselves….
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY.
October 9, 2010 — Monsterwolf debuted on Syfy. It stars Leonor Varela, Robert Picardo, and Marc Macaulay. It’s a werewolf movie and Robert Picardo appeared in The Howling as a werewolf.
October 9, 2012 — Werewolf: The Beast Among Us was released on DVD. Starring Ed Quinn and Guy Wilson, it rated 37% at Rotten Tomatoes. Yes, a lot of werewolf films get released round Halloween.
October 9, 2015 — Pan was released by Warner Bros. Starring Hugh Jackman as Blackbeard and Levi Miller as Pan, it bombed at the box office. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 27% approval rating.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 9, 1900 — Harry Bates. His 1940 short story “Farewell to the Master” was the basis of The Day the Earth Stood Still just over a decade later. And he edited Astounding Science Fiction from its inception in January 1930 until March 1933 when Clayton went bankrupt and the magazine was sold to Street and Smith. Other than The Day the Earth Stood Still, neither iBooks or Kindle has much by him. (Died 1981.)
Born October 9, 1936 — Brian Blessed, 83. Lots of genre appearances including Space 1999, Blake’s 7, Doctor Who, Hamlet (as the a Ghost of Hamlet’s father), MacGyver: Lost Treasure of Atlantis, Johnny and the Dead and Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
Born October 9, 1953 — Tony Shalhoub, 66. Two great genre roles, the first being Jack Jeebs in Men In Black, the second being more I think more nuanced one, Fred Kwan in Galaxy Quest. Actually, he’s done three great genre roles as he voiced Master Splinter in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows.
Born October 9, 1954 — Scott Bakula, 65. Lead in two great SF series, Sam Beckett on Quantum Leap and Captain Jonathan Archer on Enterprise. He also starred as Nolan Wood who discovers the alien conspiracy in the remake of The Invaders.
Born October 9, 1956 — Robert Reed, 63. Extremely prolific short story writer with at least two hundred tales so far. And a number of novels as well, such as the superb Marrow series.
Born October 9, 1958 — Michael Paré, 61. I’ll start off with his being in Streets of Fire but he’s also been in The Philadelphia Expirement, Lunarcop, both BloodRayne films and Moon 44.
Born October 9, 1961 — Matt Wagner, 58. The Grendel Tales and Batman / Grendel Are very good as is Grendel vs. The Shadow stories he did a few years back. His run on Madame Xanadu was amazing too.
Born October 9, 1964 — Jacqueline Carey, 55. Author of the long-running mildly BDSM centered Kushiel’s Legacy Universe which also includes the Moirin Trilogy. (Multiple Green Man reviewers used this phraseology in their approving reviews.) LOCUS in their December 2002 issue did an interview with her called “Jacqueline Carey: Existential BDSM”. She did several stand-alone novels including the intriguingly entitled Miranda and Caliban.
Born October 9, 1964 — Guillermo del Toro, 55. Best films? Hellboy, Hellboy II and Pan’s Labyrinth. Worst films? The Hobbit films. Hellboy II would make it solely for the Goblin’s Market sequence.
Born October 9, 1979 — Brandon Routh, 40. The lead in Superman Returns, a film that got a very positive 75% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Surprisingly it didn’t make the final ballot for the Hugo Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form when It was eligible. He’s currently Ray Palmer, The Atom, in the Arrowverse.
…But that universe could have been lost forever when Marvel hit financial problems in the 1990s.
“The comics industry had been massively overvalued for years,” says [Professor Chris Murray].
“Comic collectors had been buying multiple copies of issues, believing that they were going to be valuable in 10-20 years time so they were investing.”
…The tiny figure, like those singers in the terrific documentary 20 Feet From Stardom, was a major talent in its own right. Like so much else in Disney comic history, the name was applied retroactively, because fans and followers needed a tag to put on the character. They had little to go on. At first, Barks seldom had Gyro even directly notice his shadow, much less address it. But even Barks occasionally nodded. There is an instance of Gyro calling it “Helper.” And Helper morphed into Little Helper, which is the best term to search on. (It’s Little Bulb in the Duck Tales cartoons.) Helper is canonical, because helper is how Barks thought of his creation, as quoted in Tom Andrae, Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity.
Zombie Skittles are the definition of trick or treat. This new bag of candy looks like regular ol’ Skittles — but beware! Some of the candy pieces are sweet and fruity, while others taste like rotten eggs. So, brace yourself before you grab a handful. There’s a good chance you’ll get a mouthful of YUCK.
Three scientists have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of lithium-ion batteries.
John B Goodenough, M Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino share the prize for their work on these rechargeable devices, which are used for portable electronics.
At the age of 97, Prof Goodenough is the oldest ever Nobel laureate.
Professor of chemistry Olof Ramström said lithium-ion batteries had “enabled the mobile world”.
The trio will share the prize money of nine million kronor (£738,000).
The lithium-ion battery is a lightweight, rechargeable and powerful battery that is used in everything from mobile phones to laptops to electric cars.
…A recent episode of the adult-oriented animated series entitled “Band in China” was, well, banned in China after the country’s government deemed it inappropriate (via The Hollywood Reporter). Every last clip of the episode, which critiques the ways in which Hollywood tends to adjust its content to avoid censorship from the Chinese government and features character Randy Marsh (Trey Parker) getting thrown in jail after he’s caught selling drugs in China, has been scrubbed from China’s intensely monitored internet — including from streaming services, fan pages dedicated to South Park, and social media platforms. All instances of discussion about the “Band in China” episode, official or otherwise, have also been removed from the Chinese internet.
The versatility of the Apple II made it one of the most widespread personal computers of the 1970s and 80s. In schools, labs, and even command centers, these classic American computers kept a foothold even after the advent of more advanced machines. But of all the places you’d expect to find the computer that popularized The Oregon Trail, the mournful museum of a Communist leader is one of the most unlikely.
Lenin Museum in Gorki Leninskiye, located 20 miles south of Moscow, doesn’t look hi-tech even by 1980s standards. But among black marble interiors, gilded display cases, and Soviet historical documents, there is an elaborate audiovisual show about the last years of Vladimir Lenin’s life. Opened in 1987, it’s still powered by vintage Apple technology….
(16) BRADBURY PROFILE. Thanks to YouTube, it’s not too late
to tune into Ray Bradbury – Story of a Writer, a 25-minute documentary
from 1963 by David L. Wolper.
(17) FRIGHT NIGHT. Remember the week horror stars Bela
Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr. and Vampira were on the Red Skelton Show? Me
neither, but YouTube does. (And it somehow seems appropriate that Geritol was
the sponsor.) Dial B for Brush starts at about the 7:30 mark.
(18) DRAWN THAT WAY. In “The Real Fake Cameras of Toy Story 4” on YouTube,
the Nerdwriter looks at how Toy Story 4 cinematographer Patrick
Lim used analog cinematography techniques, including split diopter shots and
anamorphic lenses, to improve the film.
[Thanks to Andy Leighton, Mlex, Lise Andreasen, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike
Kennedy, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Olav Rokne, SF
Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories.
Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]
The sixth
annual Philip K. Dick European Science Fiction Film Festival celebrates the talent of independent
filmmakers and honors Philip K. Dick’s worldwide legacy. With an emphasis on technological advancements and
existence of alternative worlds and cultures, the festival convenes at venues in Cologne, Germany from
October 25-26 and Lille, France from October 31-November 1.
Attendees to this year’s event will view themes reminiscent of today’s society, and according to Daniel Abella, the founder and director of the festival, each official selection represents the fragmentation of consensus reality. “Many will argue that we already live in a sci-fi universe with serious talks given to UFO’s, artificial intelligence, the universe as a computer simulation, and time travel,” he said. “PKD’s work followed the growing blurriness between man and machine and humanity’s surrender to the seduction of technology. We cover these topics and more because more than any other writer, PKD had his finger on the pulse of what is happening today.”
The film titles and showing schedules follow the jump.
(1) ROBOTECH. Titan Comics launches its new Robotech comics
on October 16.
A new Robotech saga starts now with Robotech: Remix, a gripping series that will take beloved characters and iconic mecha to places fans have never seen before! Featuring new writer Brenden Fletcher (Motorcrush, Isola) and anime ace Elmer Damaso (Robotech/Voltron).
Jim Freund’s radio talk show Hour of the Wolf has been a fixture within the New York science fiction community on WBAI 99.5 FM for nearly half a century. On Monday, the station’s parent company, Pacifica Across America, abruptly shut down the station and replaced its local programming with shows from its other holdings, citing “financial losses,” according to Gothamist and The New York Times. The move leaves the future of the long-running program in question.
…The turmoil is a blow to the show, which began in 1971, and has been continually hosted by Freund since 1974. “Hour of the Wolf” was an early-morning talk show that aired between 5AM and 7AM, Freund explained, telling Tor.com that the live, call-in show was a way for the general public to learn about the science fiction and fantasy community….
This is terrible news. Jim Freund's Hour of the Wolf has been an iconic fixture of NY sf and fantasy for decades. https://t.co/VxYYnrhy37
…In an interview, Mr. Vernile said WBAI — which, like the network’s other stations, is listener supported — had fallen short of its fund-raising goals in recent years. He added that the station was unable to make payroll and other expenses, forcing the larger Pacifica Foundation network to bail it out.
“Listeners in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston and Washington, D.C., have been supporting the efforts in New York,” Mr. Vernile said. “It has gotten to a point where we can no longer do that.”
N.Y. State Supreme Court Justice Frank Nervo has granted an injunction against the Pacifica Foundation’s attempt to close WBAI. Regular programming should resume today. Both parties are currently due to appear before Justice Nervo on Friday, Oct. 18. Just after 10:30 p.m. on Monday, the following statement was issued by Berthold Reimers, WBAI General Manager, to all producers and staff at the station:
WBAI managed to get an injunction to stay the takeover of the station. This means the station is legally back in the hands of WBAI’s personnel. All programs are back on and there is much to be done and we have no time to waste. The producers of WBAI have organized a meeting tomorrow night [Tuesday, Oct. 8] at 6:30 PM at 325 Hudson Street near Van Dam.
A Canadian American cosmologist and two Swiss scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their work in understanding how the universe has evolved from the Big Bang and the blockbuster discovery of the first known planet outside our solar system.
Canadian-born James Peebles, 84, of Princeton University, was credited for “theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology” and Switzerland’s Michel Mayor, 77, and Didier Queloz, 53, both from the University of Geneva, were honored for discovering “an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star,” said Prof. Goran Hansson, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Peebles, hailed as one of the most influential cosmologists of his time, will collect half of the $918,000 cash award, and the Swiss men will share the other half.
The Nobel committee said Peebles’ theoretical framework about the cosmos — and its billions of galaxies and galaxy clusters — amounted to “the foundation of our modern understanding of the universe’s history, from the Big Bang to the present day.”
Reacting to the news, Prof Queloz told BBC News: “It’s unbelievable,” adding: “Since the discovery [of the first extrasolar planet] 25 years ago, everyone kept telling me: ‘It’s a Nobel Prize discovery’. And I say: ‘Oh yeah, yeah, maybe, whatever.'”
But in the intervening years, he more-or-less “forgot” about the discovery: “I don’t even think about it,” he said. “So frankly, yes, it came as a surprise to me. I understand the impact of the discovery, but there’s such great physics being done in the world, I thought, it’s not for us, we will never have it.
(4) DEFYING DOOMSDAY. The winners of the 2018 D Franklin Defying Doomsday Award were announced
October 6. This award is for media
that deserves recognition for work in disability advocacy in SFF literature.
R.B. Lemberg for “Sergeant Bothari and Disability Representation in the Early Vorkosiverse,” in Strange Horizons
Ace Ratcliff for “Staircases In Space: Why Are Places In Science Fiction Not Wheelchair-Accessible?” in io9.
The judges felt that R.B. Lemberg’s article was important because it noted how easy it is to veer away from criticising the representations that we do see throughout the Vorkosigan series because honestly, we’re just glad there’s something focusing on disability at all. But ignoring these issues means we risk having these continue, now and in the future. R.B acknowledges the importance and value of these books, but also encourages us to question them. In fact, the article encourages everyone to question books and the representations in them; this shouldn’t be something readers wish to avoid, simply because we have been desperate for visibility for so long.
(5) TOP HORROR. Rocket
Stack Rank has posted itsannual “Outstanding SF/F Horror of 2018”, with 30
stories that were that were finalists
for major SF/F awards, included in “year’s best” SF/F anthologies, or
recommended by prolific reviewers in short fiction.
Included are some observations obtained from highlighting specific recommenders and pivoting the table by publication, author, awards, year’s best anthologies, and reviewers.
Among publications, the Magazine of Fantasy &
Science Fiction had the most here with 7 stories (23%).
Among ?authors, 3 stories are by Dale Bailey, the only author
with more than one story in the list.
SF/F horror stories are 14% of SF/F awards finalistswith 14 stories (of which four
are Shirley Jackson or Bram Stoker award finalists) out of 101 total award-nominated stories from
the 2018 Best SF/F. The story “The Only Harmless Great
Thing” won two awards.
As for RSR, we recommended 16 stories, was
neutral on 8 stories, recommended against 3 stories, and did not review 3
stories (view by RSR rating).
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY.
October 8, 1993 — Demolition Man starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes premiered. Two years ago, Stallone’s filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. over the disbursement of profits from the film. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 66% score.
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 8, 1920 — Frank Herbert. I’ll confess that I enjoyed Dune and Dune Messiah that’s as far as I got in the series. The other Herbert novel I really liked was Under Pressure. (Died 1986.)
Born October 8, 1927 — Dallas Mitchell. He played Lieutenant Tom Nellis on Star Trek in the “Charlie X” episode. He one-offs on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Six Million Dollar Man, The Invaders, Voyage to The Bottom of the Sea and Mission: Impossible. (Died 2009.)
Born October 8, 1943 — R.L.Stine, 75. He’s been called the “Stephen King of children’s literature” and is the author of hundreds of horror novels including works in the Goosebumps, Fear Street, Mostly Ghostly, and The Nightmare Room series. Library of Congress lists four hundred and twenty-three separate entries for him.
Born October 8, 1949 — Sigourney Weaver, 70. I’m picking her greatest genre role as being the dual roles of Gwen DeMarco and lieutenant Tawny Madison in Galaxy Quest. Chicon 2000 did give the film the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo after all and it is a loving homage to all that is good in the genre.
Born October 8, 1949 — Richard Hescox, 70. An illustrator who between the Seventies and early Nineties painted over one hundred and thirty covers for genre books,and is now working exclusively in the games industry and private commissions. His website is here. Here’s one of his covers.
Born October 8, 1963 — David Yates, 56. Director of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows (both films), The Legend Of Tarzan, and Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, and its sequel, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. So who’s seen the latter films?
Born October 8, 1979 — Kristanna Loken, 40. She’s best known for her roles in the films Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, BloodRayne and the Painkiller Jane series.
Born October 8, 1993 — Molly Quinn, 25. I first heard her voicing the dual role of Kara and Supergirl most excellently on Superman Unbound (John Noble voices Brainiac) and I see ventured in the MCU as well as Howard’s Date in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. She was also Jenny on the Avalon High film, and she’s contributing to the Welcome to Nightvale story podcast.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
Free Range shows how you can improve any tabletop game by adding Godzilla.
(9) WHAT GREAT EARS YOU HAVE. Kate
Pacculia’s “A
Gothic Education: Or, How I Learned To
Love The Dark” on CrimeReads is worth reading if only because
of its description of “Bunnicula” which sounds like a classic kids’
book. Most of the books she picks are supernatural.
The gateway text. The classic tale of a vegetable-draining vampire bunny adopted by the unwitting Monroe family and actively dealt with by their housepets, genial dog Harold and megalomaniacal cat Chester—the best feline in literature (fight me)—isn’t very scary, and isn’t trying to be. Harold’s first person narration is an outrageously clever and charming feat of point-of-view that generates real sympathy for the titular monster bun. This was something I absorbed rather than realized at the time: that the beats of a genre are made to be remixed.
3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?
Re-reading is interesting. Sometimes it’s just a quiet impulse, or you pick up something because you’d like to enjoy that again or remind yourself of it in some way, but sometimes it’s an intense craving. When it’s the latter, it can be a need to escape into something familiar from some stress or worry or heavy weight on you, but often I find that the thing I felt such an urgent desire to re-read turns out to have something in it that resolves some quandary that I’ve been wrestling with in my current work — it’ll be something to do with the narrative approach, or how difficulties in a character are set up, or a way of touching the story, that reminds me of what I need to be doing or sparks off something that solves my problem, shines a bit of moonlight on the path I’ve been stumbling in the dark to find. It’s like some underlayer of my brain knows what’s missing or where I’ve gone wrong in the WiP but doesn’t have any words of its own, so it points me at something that will show it to me. I’ve had that experience with LeCarré and Bujold, though most often it will be Diana Wynne Jones or Cherryh. The thing I most recently had an intense desire to reread was McKillip’s Kingfisher, which I’ve read a couple of times, but this time I bought the audiobook because I felt like I needed to have it read to me. Aside from the sheer enjoyment of the work, which is one of her best, what I’m taking from it on this re-read is a reminder of her lightness of touch, something I’m trying to achieve in my current project.
When I was barely in fifth grade, I felt too nerdy, too disabled, too brown, and secretly too queer to be accepted by my white, homophobic town. I escaped this alienation by turning to books. But as much as I loved Harry Potter, The Lightning Thief, and the other novels I flicked through at my town library, I never saw myself in the protagonists, who were mostly white, heterosexual men.
I didn’t realize how deeply this affected me until I got an iPod Touch and stumbled upon fanfiction. Across the internet, fans of particular works were rewriting popular stories however they liked: coffeeshop romances between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, time travel re-do’s of Disney movies, what-if’s about the protagonist from Wicked having twins. I couldn’t be openly queer, but I could read about Luna Lovegood and Ginny Weasley falling in love.
I soon created accounts on fanfiction sites and talked to authors—many of whom were themselves queer—about the same-sex relationships they wrote about. I slowly accepted the parts of myself that made me feel alienated from my peers, and I carried that newfound self-acceptance throughout my high school years….
“We went to Gale Crater because it preserves this unique record of a changing Mars,” William Rapin, of Caltech, the lead author of a study of their findings, published Monday in Nature Geoscience paper said in a statement.
A “virtual sculpture trail” at a university’s £330m campus is thought to be the first of its kind in the UK.
Visitors to the University of Northampton can use a mobile phone to view 3D sculptures created by students.
The six augmented reality pieces of art around the Waterside campus are visible through an app made by a media agency.
Iain Douglas, from the university, said: “This was a valuable opportunity to bring a real-life collaborative project to the students.”
(15) VIDEO OF
THE DAY. “James Bond Theme For
Boomwhackers (Fall 2014)” was done at Harvard five years ago but it’s
still fannish!
[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Eric Wong,
Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, Harold Osler, and Andrew
Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing
editor of the day JeffWarner.]
By Colleen McMahon: This was a slow week. No new Librivox audiobooks that fit into the
genre categories, however broadly drawn. So this might be a good time to
mention that Librivox does have a lot of older short science fiction available.
They have been doing a series of short science fiction collections for
years.
The
way it works is that a volume is started, and anyone can contribute a short
science fiction story that is known to be in the public domain. Once there are
15-20 stories, the volume is closed and released and a new one opened. They are
up to 64 volumes at this point. If you are curious and would like to sample
some of them, the whole Short Science Fiction series is here.
I
have a bit of a backlog of random authors who were mentioned in the birthday
lists over the last few months, and this is a good time to do a little catching
up with some of these.
Stanton
Coblentz
(1896-1982) had a birthday back in August. He is represented in Project Gutenberg
by two short stories:
“The
Cosmic Deflector” has not been recorded yet for Librivox, but “Flight Through
Tomorrow” has been recorded three different times for Short Science
Fiction Collections
Paul
W. Fairman (1909-1977)
was active as an author from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, publishing
several novels and many short stories under his own name as well as the
pseudonym Ivar Jorgensen. He is also the founding editor of If science
fiction magazine, and later became editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic
from 1955-1958.
Bryce
Walton (1918-1988)
is best remembered now as a television script writer (Captain Video and His
Video Rangers, Alfred Hitchcock Presents) and a pulp mystery author,
but he was quite prolific in science fiction too.
Project
Gutenberg has 16 of his stories. He published most often in If: Worlds of
Science Fiction and, interestingly, in two cases he had two stories in one
issue, one published under his own name and one under the pseudonym “Kenneth
O’Hara”.
As I
mentioned at the top of this installment, I could not find anything
genre-related in the list of recent releases, which is very unusual. However,
there is one book that might be of mild interest here: an all-but-forgotten
1923 mystery novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs!
The countryside outside of Los Angeles is a paradise on Earth: nature
gives bounty on the land, the animals are majestic, the oaks breathe and
the natural pools and ponds are all you would want on a summer’s day. And
if you are a Pennington or an Evans, life is simple and complete. However,
every paradise has a serpent. For Rancho Ganado, that comes in the shape
of Bootlegging, Drugs and Murder. All the vice of nearby Hollywood
manifest themselves in the picturesque landscape, throwing the lives of
these families into turmoil.
(1) FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION. Here is the cover of the
Nov/Dec 2019 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy
& Science Fiction. The cover art
is by Bob Eggleton.
This survey is designed to provide context to reports like Fireside Fiction’s #BlackSpecFic Reports. We invite Black SFF writers to submit information about their practices and insights on submission to SFF short fiction markets with a focus on a 13 month period. The responses we receive will allow us to:
Quantify the existence of Black speculative fiction writers seeking publication.
Provide submission context to existing publication data.
Expose the impact of doleful publication statistics on Black writers.
Enable markets to pinpoint their failings in attracting or publishing Black writers.
… For the purposes of this survey, participating writers:
must have submitted at least one piece of short speculative fiction to a paying market in the last 12 months. You do not have to be published in order to participate in the survey. Speculative fiction includes fantasy, science fiction, horror, paranormal and all of their included subgenres. “Short” fiction includes flash, shorts, novelettes, and novellas (under 40,000 words).
must identify as Black or of the African Diaspora (to include mixed/biracial)
(3) INSPIRED CREATURES. The “Natural History of
Horror” exhibit will open October 10 at Los Angeles County’s Museum of
Natural History, and run through April 19.
We have a strange curiosity for mysterious, eerie, and grotesque monsters. We love the thrill of intense, heart-pounding bursts of adrenaline that only horror movies can provide. In our new exhibition Natural History of Horror, explore the scientific inspiration for classic monsters from Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Get a glimpse of rare movie props, film footage, hands-on activities, and museum specimens.
…Your senses will tingle as you hear about the scientific experiments and discoveries that inspired filmmakers to create four of the world‘s most iconic movie monsters: the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein, the Mummy, and Dracula. Whether these classics spotlighted sinister figures lurking in the shadows or creatures waiting unseen beneath the water, one thing is true: Each larger-than-life character had a surprisingly rich real-world backstory.
The report last week that books were included in the new tariffs on E.U. products imported to the U.S. was inaccurate. In fact, books will not be included in the $7.5 billion of tariffs, which are being imposed after the World Trade Organization ruled last Wednesday that the U.S. could tax $7.5 billion of E.U. goods to recoup damages after the WTO had determined in May that the E.U. illegally subsidized Airbus.
(5) ATWOOD’S LATEST. Kyra reviews The Testaments in a
comment on File 770’s 2019
Recommended SFF List.
I wasn’t at all sure what to expect from this book. What I absolutely did not expect was … a pretty good young adult dystopian adventure story. It was a bit jarring when I realized that was what I was reading, as if I’d discovered that The Hunger Games had somehow been intended as a direct sequel to 1984….
In a move that reminds us that the streaming wars are already well underway, Disney has banned all Netflix advertising from its entertainment properties, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Netflix spent $99.2 million on U.S. TV ads during 2018, with about 13% going to Disney-owned networks, according to estimates made by the ad-measurement firm iSpot.TV. But with Disney’s new streaming service Disney+ launching next month, the Mouse has ramped up its competitive edge to gain any traction it can against its newest, biggest rival. Notably, the ban only applies to Disney’s entertainment networks, not Disney-owned ESPN.
Back in August, Disney announced that it had banned ads from any of its streaming rivals but then walked that back, citing complex, mutually beneficial business relationships with partners who are also competitors such as Apple and Amazon.
Electrek also found references in the Tesla Android app’s code to a currently unavailable “Patsy Mode” (named after Arthur’s sidekick in Holy Grail) that could play the coconuts when you summon your car from Auto Park. Things are about to get very silly in your EV, then, whether or not you’re actually moving.
(8) TAYLOR OBIT. Comedian Rip Taylor, a staple of daytime
TV back in the day, died
October 6 at the age of 84. SYFY Wire reminded readers about his
genre resume.
…Aside from his career as a shtick-happy comic, he had a number of noteworthy genre roles, particularly in animation, where his unique vocal delivery got to breathe real life into his cartoon counterparts. His first major role animated role was in 1979’s Scooby Goes to Hollywood in 1979. Years later, he’d appear in two more Scooby-Doo projects, What’s New, Scooby-Doo in 2002 and Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico in 2003. He also voiced the genie in 1990’s DuckTales the Movie.
Additionally, he had roles in Popeye and Son, The Snorks, and The Jetsons. Later, he had a recurring role as Uncle Fester in the early 1990s animated series The Addams Family. More recently, he was the voice of the Royal Recordkeeper in the Disney short film series The Emperor’s New School, and he played another genie in the superhero family series The Aquabats! Super Show! His last role was in the 2012 horror flick Silent But Deadly.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY.
October 7, 1959 — First photos taken of the far side of the Moon, by Luna 3.
October 7, 1988 — The War of the Worlds series premiered. Starring Jared Martin and Lynda Mason Green, it would last for two seasons. Andria Paul of Highlander fame would join the cast in season two.
October 7, 1988 — Alien Nation debuted as a film. Written by Rockne S. O’Bannon, it starred James Caan and Mandy Patinkin. It received a nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation in the Hugo Awards losing out at Noreascon 3 to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Both the movie and the series rate a 43% at Rotten Tomatoes.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
Born October 7, 1926 — Ken Krueger. Krueger co-founded and organized the first San Diego Comic-Con International convention, then called “San Diego’s Golden State Comic-Con,” in 1970. He attended the first Worldcon in 1939. I’ll leave it up to y’all to discuss his activities as a fan and as a pro as they won’t fit here! (Died 2009.)
Born October 7, 1942 — Lee Gold, 77. She’s a member of LAFA and a writer and editor in the role-playing game and filk music communities. She published Xenofilkia, a bi-monthly compilation of filk songs which has been published since 1988, four issues of the Filker Up anthology; and has published for forty-four years, Alarums and Excursions, a monthly gaming zine. She’s edited more fanzines than I care to list here, and is a member of the Filk Hall of Fame along with Barry Gold, her husband.
Born October 7, 1946 — Chris Foss, 73. UK Illustrator known for the Seventies UK paperback covers for Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman and Skylark series among many that he did. He also did design work for the Jodorowsky version of Dune.Alien has his Spaceship design, and he did redesign of Gordon’s rocket cycle for the 1980 Flash Gordon film.
Born October 7, 1950 — Howard Chaykin, 69. Comic book artist and writer. His first major work was for DC Comics, drawing The Price of Pain” which was an adaptation of author Fritz Leiber’s characters Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in Sword of Sorcery #1. He would illustrate damn near everything else from Batman and The Legion of Super-Heroes for DC to Hulk and Iron-Man for Marvel (to name but two series) but I think his best genre work was his own American Flagg! series.
Born October 7, 1958 — Rosalyn Landor, 61. She played Guinevere in Arthur the King, and Helen Stoner in “The Speckled Band” of Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes. She was the red headed colleen Brenna Odell in the “Up the Long Ladder” episode of Next Generation.
Born October 7, 1959 — Steven Erikson, 60. He’s definitely most known for his Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which began with the publication of Gardens of the Moon and was completed with the publication of The Crippled God, ten novels later. Though I’ve not read it, and didn’t know it existed, he’s written the Willful Child trilogy, a spoof on Star Trek and other tropes common in the genre.
Born October 7, 1963 — Tammy Klein, 56. She’s getting Birthday Honors because of the most-likely-unauthorised Trek audioseries she’s involved in called Star Trek: Henglaar, M.D. in which she’s Subcommander Nonia but she also been in some definitely really pulpy works such as Lizard Man, Jurassic City, Awaken the Dead and Zoombies.
Born October 7, 1970 — Nicole Ari Parker, 49. She’s getting a Birthday Honor because she was Vanessa Anders in Time After Time, a short lived series (twelve episodes aired in 2017) based off the H.G. Wells novel of that name. Freddie Stroma played Wells. Anyone see it? Oh, and she had a recurring role in the Revolution series as Justine Allenford.
Born October 7, 1979 — Aaron Ashmore, 40. He‘s known for being Jimmy Olsen on Smallville and Steve Jinks on Warehouse 13. He also is Johnny Jaqobis on Killjoys. He also had a recurring role as Dylan Masters in XIII: The Series which I think is SFF.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
Lio intercepts a message from outer space. It sounds pretty familiar…
Moderately Confused amuses by combining Halloween with a sff trope joke. I laughed.
On the other hand, today’s Off the Mark is truly bizarre.
(12) THE INTERNET SAYS “OOPS!” At Examined Worlds, Ethan
Mills asks “Was
Social Media a Huge Mistake?” Of course it was, that’s why I hurried to
read his post…
My concern isn’t so much that social media makes new bad things. Humans have always been intellectually and morally fallible. My concern is that it exacerbates our weaknesses in a deeply unhealthy way.
Cognitive Biases and Logical Fallacies
Social media exacerbates our cognitive biases and tendencies toward fallacious reasoning. “Fake news” and conspiracy theories are shared more quickly and are believed more widely. Social media successfully exploits cognitive biases like availability heuristic and confirmation bias. Social media echo chambers make us think our views are more popular or more correct than they actually are.
Logical fallacies like Ad Hominem, Tu Quoque, Strawman, Red Herring, Appeal to Popularity, Appeal to Authority, and No True Scotsman frequently pass for good arguments. And social media algorithms and click bait headlines deliberately exploit all of this to keep us clicking, liking, and sharing too quickly, long before we have time to digest or examine anything philosophically. (Indeed, I suspect philosophical thinking is too slow for social media, although a lucky few on philosophy Twitter may be exceptions.)…
(13) SHORTSFF AT ANGRY ROBOT. Tomorrow Angry Robot releases its “first foray
into short-form fiction” Duchamp Versus Einstein, by Christopher Hinz and Etan Ilfeld,
something we reported
this last week. But we’ve subsequently learned the interesting fact that
co-author Etan Ilfeld is also the owner
of Watkins Media, of which Angry Robot has been part since 2014. Does that
change how likely it is there will be more short sff forthcoming?
Three scientists who discovered how cells sense and adapt to oxygen levels have won the 2019 Nobel Prize.
Sir Peter Ratcliffe, of the University of Oxford and Francis Crick Institute, William Kaelin, of Harvard, and Gregg Semenza, of Johns Hopkins University share the physiology or medicine prize.
Their work is leading to new treatments for anaemia and even cancer.
The role of oxygen-sensing is also being investigated in diseases from heart failure to chronic lung disease.
…Why does this matter?
The oxygen-sensing ability of the body has a role in the immune system and the earliest stages of development inside the womb.
It can trigger the production of red blood cells or the construction of blood vessels.
So, drugs that mimic it may be an effective treatment for anaemia.
Tumours, meanwhile, can hijack this process to selfishly create new blood vessels and grow.
Governments in the UK, US and Australia have asked Facebook, in an open letter, to roll back plans to bring end-to-end encryption to all of its platforms.
Facebook, rocked by privacy scandals, responds that everyone has the right to a private conversation.
It is the latest in an age-old battle between privacy and safety, which has played out between governments and tech firms ever since digital communication became mass market.
What is end-to-end encryption?
As the name suggests, this is a secure way of sending information so that only the intended receiver can read it.
The information is encrypted while it is still on the sender’s device and is only decrypted when it reaches the person intended. Nobody, not even the platform owner, has the keys to unlock it.
Is there evidence encryption has hampered police enquiries?
When the BBC asked the Home Office to provide examples, it could not do so.
The real issue is the fact that Facebook will no longer be able to police its own content, it said.
It pointed to the fact that last year Facebook sent 12 million reports of child exploitation or abuse to the US’s National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and it would no longer be able to do this if it had encryption on all its platforms.
It is something that Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg addressed directly in a Q&A with staff about the issue.
“When we decided to go to end-to-end encryption across the different apps, this is one of the things that just weighed the most heavily on me,” he said.
…Rose did a bit of soul searching when CW called. Shooting a network TV season often means filming almost year round, leaving a limited window for Rose to make movies. She would have to move from Los Angeles to Vancouver, where most of the CW’s DC shows film.
But ultimately, Rose answered the bat-signal call — the role was too emotionally appealing to pass up. She tried to think of any upcoming role she’d been offered that could make her feel the same way. There weren’t any.
“[This role is] something that we all wish did exist when we were growing up [watching] television. It would have helped [us] as well as other people feel less alone and less misunderstood or all confused or isolated and different and not unlike many other things that come with being young and gay,” Rose said. She hopes the show will impact people who feel alone — “and empower them to feel like they’re a superhero too and that they can change the world too.”…
(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. 2001 A Space Odyssey, Epilogue.
Featuring Frank Poole on Vimeo.
Some 203 years after astronaut Frank Poole is murdered by the Discovery’s A.I. HAL 9000, his body encounters a Monolith.
Using practical models and digital versions of the tricks used in the original, with respect to Stanley and Wally.
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, John King
Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these
stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cliff.]
The
winner of the 2019 Sunburst Award for Adult Fiction is Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano Lax
[Penguin Random House Canada].
The
Sunburst Jury commented:
Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano Lax is a masterpiece, a story set in a future Japan so deftly drawn that it makes its world seem inevitable. The main characters’ lives and relationships are steeped in, and grow from, a past which is both historical and personal, built on a century of colonialism and exploitation: social, sexual, and economic. Woven into the novel is a unique exploration of an Artificial Intelligence story, incorporating both fast-forward developmental psychology and an analysis of the facets of empathy. This brilliant, character-driven novel examines individual reactions to threats to survival and autonomy. In the process, it challenges notions of insularity, suggesting that loyalty comes primarily from personal connection rather than group association. The interrogation of the notions of Outsider/Insider, connection, belonging, and compassion drive a story that is all too relevant to our present-day world.
Andromeda
Romano-Lax has been a journalist, a travel writer, and a serious amateur cellist.
She is the author of The Spanish Bow (translated into eleven languages and
chosen as a New York Times Editors’ Choice), The Detour, and Behave, among
others. Plum Rains draws inspiration from her family’s experience living in
rural Taiwan. Andromeda co-founded and continues to teach for 49 Writers, a
nonprofit organization. She currently lives with her family in Ladysmith
British Columbia.
The
other shortlisted works for the 2019 Adult Award were:
Amber Dawn, Sodom Road Exit [Arsenal Pulp Press]
Kate Heartfield, Armed in Her
Fashion
[ChizinePublications]
Rich Larson, Annex[Orbit/Hachette Book Group]
Eden Robinson, Trickster Drift [Penguin Random House Canada]
Young Adult Award
The
2019 winner of the Sunburst Award for Young Adult Fiction is Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman [Penguin
Random House Canada]
The
Sunburst Jury commented:
Rachel Hartman’s Tess of the Road is a tour de force, a novel that dives headfirst into its heroine’s complex, messy, morally multifaceted world while never losing sight of the story at its heart. Hartman’s Tess is on a journey whose point is less self-discovery than it is a simple acceptance of self-worth. Her credo, “Walk on,” comes to encompass not just her physical journey but her struggle to accept that she matters and that it is possible for others to find worth in her. Tess’s progress takes place in a richly imagined fantastic landscape where even the deeply alien quigutl are so deftly painted that the unfamiliar becomes known and comforting. The reader is able to journey with Tess into an understanding that the seemingly strictest and most unshakeable beliefs can be based on lack of knowledge or unwillingness to embrace change.
Rachel
Hartman is both an author and comics creator; she currently lives in Vancouver.
Tess of the Road is a companion novel to her first two YA books, Seraphina and
Shadow Scale, the former of which won the Sunburst Award, the William C. Morris
Award, and the Cybilis Award. Tess itself was shortlisted for the Andre Norton
Award and the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book.
The
other shortlisted works for the 2019 Young Adult Award were:
Sebastien de Castell, Spellslinger [Orbit/ Hachette Book Group]
Regan McDonell, Black Chuck [ Orca Book Publishers]
Rebecca Schaeffer , Not Even Bones [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt]
Patrick Weekes, Feeder [Simon & Schuster Canada]
Short Story Award
The
winner of the 2019 Sunburst Award for Short Story is “The Glow-in-the-Dark Girls” by Senaa
Ahmad [Strange
Horizons,
15 Jan 2018]
In a remarkable year for short speculative fiction, Senaa Ahmad’s The Glow-in-the-Dark Girls stands apart, its horrific scenario etched in cool crisp prose: A group of young girls hope to better their lives by volunteering to be deployed as living incendiary devices, razing cities and their inhabitants, and accelerating their own decay and death in the process. A cunning inversion of the real-life Radium Girls, factory workers who were gradually and grotesquely poisoned by the material they worked with, Ahmad’s story turns the titular girls into weapons of mass destruction, objectified and vilified by the larger world even as they yearn for normalcy, grapple with their mortality and the consequences of their choices–and set each other on fire.
Senaa
Ahmad is a writer living in Toronto. Her short fiction has appeared in
publications such as Lightspeed Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, and Strange
Horizons. A Clarion 2018 alumnus, she is working concurrently on her first two
short story collections.
The
other shortlisted works for the 2019 Short Story Award were:
The
Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic has
celebrated the best in Canadian fantastic literature in both Adult and Young
Adult publications since 2001. Winners receive a medallion that incorporates
the Sunburst logo. Winners of both the Adult and Young Adult Sunburst Award
also receive a cash prize of $1,000, while winners of the Short Story Sunburst
Award receive a cash prize of $500.
The
Sunburst Award takes its name from the debut novel of the late Phyllis Gotlieb,
one of the first published authors of contemporary Canadian speculative
fiction.
SUNBURST
JURORS. The
2019 Sunburst Award novel jury was comprised of Greg Bechtel, Susan Forest,
Kari Maaren, and Susan Reynolds. Jurors for the 2019 short story awards were
S.M. Beiko, David Demchuk, and Gemma Files.
The
jurors for the 2020 Sunburst
Awards have been named. Novel Jury: Kristyn Dunnion, Michelle Butler
Hallett, John Jantunen, Michael Johnstone, and Peter Darbyshire. Short Story
Jury: Omar El Akkad, Ruth Clarke, and Sarah Tolmie.
Submissions of eligible works published in 2019 for the 2020 awards will be accepted October 15, 2019. Submissions will close January 31, 2020. See the Sunburst Award News Page for details.
