(1) BUTLER BOOK IS BACK. The Huntington in Pasadena, CA will host “Reading Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Lost’ Novel” on September 2 from 6-8 p.m. Attendees will be able to get Butler’s Survivor, which has been long out of print. Ticket information at the link.

Be among the first to get your hands on legendary speculative fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s novel, ‘Survivor’, out in a new edition Sept. 1.

Returning to print after nearly 50 years, Survivor extends Butler’sPatternist series, telling the story of a woman struggling to stay alive on a warring planet far from Earth. The new edition includes essays from Alyssa Collins, The Huntington’s inaugural Octavia E. Butler Research Fellow.

Gather with fellow book lovers to hear Collins in conversation with Butler scholars Alaina Morgan (USC) and Phoenix Alexander (UCR). Learn more about this exciting novel, the decision to reprint it, and what Butler’s archives at The Huntington can tell us about her thoughts regarding its composition and publication. 

Survivor will be available for purchase. This event is sponsored by Hachette Book Group.

(2) CAN DO. The New York Times tells “How Nigel Farage Ended Up Running Against Count Binface in Clacton”. “Nigel Farage forced a new election in his parliamentary seat after coming under pressure over his finances. His main challenger is Count Binface, a novelty candidate.” In theory this link bypasses the NYT paywall, but it mostly doesn’t.

Count Binface, a man in a trash can costume, was trying to explain why he would be a winner no matter what happened on Thursday in the most high-profile election he’s ever fought.

“Shall we do a little flowchart?” he asked me, gesturing with his gloved fingers.

If you haven’t been following British politics, you may be wondering why I was interviewing someone who claims to be an intergalactic space warrior from the planet Sigma IX. Count Binface is a character played by the writer and comedian Jon Harvey, 46, and he has run in several elections as part of Britain’s long tradition of novelty political candidates.

Now he is heading for his biggest gig yet. He is the main opposition to Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing populist party Reform U.K., in a special parliamentary election in Clacton, an area on England’s eastern coast….

(3) LUNCH IS SERVED. “Skywalker Grill opens bookings ahead of hotly anticipated $1B Lucas Museum debut” reports Yahoo!

May the forks be with you!

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art announced the debut of Skywalker Grill Wednesday, an out-of-this-world restaurant inspired by the essence of George Lucas’ creative workplace Skywalker Ranch.

The long-awaited museum, alongside the Grill, will open its doors next month to the public — art enthusiasts, cinephiles and Star Wars fanatics alike have been anticipating the grand opening of the museum since an official unveiling date was announced in November 2025.

The menu will incorporate locally-grown ingredients to make up its classic American fare. Some options include a Skywalker Ranch Wagyu burger, Dungeness crab cakes, lobster corn dogs, house-made pastas, seasonal salads and communal appetizers…

(4) COULD IT BE…MALARKEY? [Item by Steven French.] Theatre critic Michael Billington adopts a somewhat jaundiced view towards claims that The Game of Thrones prequel The Mad King is ‘Shakespearean’, despite it being performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company: “Game of Thrones, Shakespearean? What fools these mortals be!” in the Guardian.

 As a latecomer to Game of Thrones, I am struck by how many people tell me it is “very Shakespearean”. It is as if they need to justify its heady escapism and heavy reliance on bonking and brutality. But its debt to the Bard – apart from the rivalry between the houses of Lannister and Stark – rests mainly on the casting. Watching the first 11 episodes, I noticed four Lears past and to come (Julian Glover, David Bradley, Oliver Ford-Davies and Roger Allam), a Macbeth (Sean Bean), a Hamlet and Henry V (Iain Glen) and a Cassius (Michelle Fairley) among many others.

Because it is presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company and staged by Dominic Cooke, who memorably directed The Hollow Crown on television, we shall doubtless hear the same arguments about Game of Thrones: The Mad King at Stratford. But, although there are frequent nods to Shakespeare, they totally lack the resonance of the original….

(5) FRANKENSTEINLY SPEAKING. “Chris Carter on How the Real World Has Caught Up With ‘The X-Files’” at Gizmodo.

Cheryl Eddy, io9: The director’s cut is billed as being more horror-oriented than the original. But other things have also changed—the movie’s a few minutes shorter, some scenes are re-edited, and there are some musical swaps too. What was the process like as you decided what to change?

Chris Carter: There were things I wanted to put back in to make it the scary movie I always imagined it [would be], but there are also things I wanted to take out…. 

… And when I talk about horror elements, I’m realizing I keep talking about this as a horror movie. It’s really an X-Files horror movie. The original idea came to me when I read a story about a doctor in Cleveland, Ohio, who had transplanted the head of a monkey onto another monkey, and he did it successfully. I thought that’s X-Files territory right there. So I went and sought this guy out, and he explained to me how he had done it and the process … so [I Want to Believe co-writer] Frank Spotnitz and I set about trying to tell an X-Files story about this very thing…

… I’ll tell you the reason to do this director’s cut. It came out of an experience that I had when I showed I Want to Believe to the executives. They watched it. The lights went up and they were angry. They said, “This is not the PG-13 movie you promised you’d make for us. This is torture porn,” they called it, which is a term often used to reference movies like the Saw movies. But, you know, this wasn’t a Saw movie. This was an X-Files movie. But we had to cut it back to satisfy them…

(6) MONSTER TIMES CO-FOUNDER EULOGIZED. “The Passing of a Visionary: Remembering Larry Brill, Co-Founder of ‘The Monster Times’” — Dream Saga pays tribute. (See Steve Vertlieb’s own account from File 770 yesterday, “Remembering Larry Brill And ‘The Monster Times’”.)

…Larry Brill was not merely a businessman; he was a cultural provocateur. In the early 1970s, the landscape of horror fandom was dominated by glossy magazines like James Warren’s Famous Monsters of Filmland. Brill and Waldstein envisioned something different: a bi-weekly tabloid that treated the “fantastic” with the urgency and layout of a major metropolitan newspaper.

The Monster Times premiered in January 1972. While industry insiders predicted a swift and expensive failure, the publication defied the odds, running for 48 issues until 1976. It became a cornerstone of the “Second Wave” of horror fandom, providing a platform for serious film scholarship, investigative reporting on special effects, and a training ground for the next generation of film critics.

Brill’s personality was as much a part of the publication’s DNA as the monsters on the cover. A fierce advocate for human rights and an outspoken participant in cultural debates, he ensured that The Monster Times was more than just a fan magazine—it was a reflection of a creative, adventurous, and often provocative spirit….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

August 12, 1931 — William Goldman. (Died 2018.)

By Paul Weimer: William Goldman was a screenwriter par excellence, so you probably think I am going to mostly talk about The Princess Bride in this piece. And you would be right, we’ll start there. He adapted his own novel (which had not really found an audience) into one of the greatest screenplays in movie history. It’s the kind of movie roleplayers quote and reference endlessly, it’s a movie with verve, and love, and drama, and everything that viewers of any age could possibly want. I didn’t get to see it until 1990 or so on a videotape of it. I wondered why the Wonder Years kid was the grandson of an old looking Columbo, but I highly enjoyed it. 

As my mother was a big fan of WWF (at the time) wrestling, I particularly liked seeing Andre the Giant, especially because in a few short years, he would get less and less mobile and capable, but in the movie he is delightfully fully able. The swordfighting scene is a masterpiece, the duelists actually performing the real swordsmanship schools as they are fighting. (Was 7th Sea the RPG born thanks to this sword fighting sequence?).  And so much more.

And Goldman is much more than The Princess Bride. He wrote the screenplay for All the President’s Men although he wasn’t happy with the changes to it. He wrote the screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He also did the screenplay for a number of other movies I’ve loved…Heat, Misery, Maverick, Dreamcatcher, and The Ghost and the Darkness. His oeuvre was varied, his scripts excellent, and his talent undeniable.  My favorite remains The Princess Bride, but I think you expected that. I’ll blame Vizzini.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

• Herman knows the family.
• Mother Goose and Grimm applaud self-determination.
• Off the Mark demonstrates a new app.
• Reality Check has a super-horrible pun.
• The Argyle Sweater lists hilariously-named failed cartoons.

(9) TREK COMIC. Charlie Jane Anders announces “I’ve Written a Star Trek Comic!” at Happy Dancing.

… I have loved Star Trek for as long as I can remember. Literally, somewhere there exists a photo of me aged seven or eight wearing my homemade Starfleet uniform — which I probably wore to school, let’s be real. I’ve also been a massive fan of Star Trek tie-in media forever. Star Trek is how I first became a fan of the legendary Vonda McIntyre and the iconic John M. Ford. I will always consider Diane Duane’s Rihannsu novels to be the definitive version of the Romulans. I still have a collected edition of the Gold Key comics that I defaced as a small child with lots of terrible doodles and scribbles. I have a complete set of Peter David’s New Frontier novels, along with a smattering of his other Trek books and comics. And last but definitely not least, I’ve been absolutely blown away by everything IDW has been doing with the Star Trek comics for the past few years.

More than any other big science fiction or fantasy universe, I’ve always seen Star Trek as being at least as much about the novels and comics as the TV shows and movies.

So yeah — when I was approached to write a Star Trek comic, I was over the moon. Especially the opportunity to start a title from scratch, with a brand new ship and a mostly new crew, including a few characters from existing TV shows, felt like a massive gift. The comic I’m writing is called Star Trek: Zero Point and the first issue is out October 14. However, if you want to make sure your local comic book store sets aside a copy for you and you don’t lose out, you only have until September 7 to request it. This is a weird quirk of how comics work — they’re non-returnable, so if you really want to read something, you absolutely need to ask for it over a month before-hand.

Star Trek: Zero Point takes place five years after the end of the Picard TV show….

… One thing I can tease about the opening storyline is that we’re visiting an eyeball planet! Long-time readers of my work will know that I am obsessed with tidally-locked planets, meaning planets where one side faces towards the sun and the other side is always locked in darkness. Many tidally-locked planets are believed to be so cold that they are covered entirely with ice except for a small dot of liquid water where the planet is closest to the sun — hence eyeball. To make this work, I ended up talking to four physicists and exoplanet scientists, including a former NASA scientist. I’m super passionate about including real science in this comic wherever I can…

(10) DOGS RECOGNISE HUMAN EXPRESSIONS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.]  “We should smile at our dogs – a new scientific study reveals why” at BBC. (Subscription required for readers outside the UK.)

 Now scientists have worked out exactly what is going on inside a dog’s brain when it sees a human – even a complete stranger – smiling or scowling.

Their research involved 14 dogs in total who all sat very still in a brain scanner while they were shown pictures of people’s faces.

Photographs of happy, smiling human faces made an area of the brain that is associated with reward “light up” with activity.

This reward circuitry is the part of the brain that is activated when we enjoy and remember good things, like tasty food or praise.

In terms of our own brains, we often refer to it as the “hit” or “high” that is triggered by winning a game or even receiving a positive comment on a social media post….

Primary research for above is here. 

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