For many years, it was not clear how the brain responds to invented languages. To address this, a 2025 study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took functional magnetic resonance images of brain activity in people who spoke them.
The results were clear. When fluent speakers used invented languages (such as Esperanto, Klingon, the Na’vi language from Avatar, and High Valyrian or Dothraki from Game of Thrones), the brain activated the same neural networks as for a natural language. In other words, there was no difference in how the brain processed natural and invented languages.
But for the brain to perceive these languages as a real language, they have to express meaning about the world, other people and our own mental states. For this reason, programming languages do not—despite their clear rules and structure—activate the same brain areas.’…
In Sleeping Murder, Miss Marple visits the fictional British seaside town of Dillmouth. She warns the novels young protagonists, Gwenda and Giles, not to investigate past events at their new home, telling them to let well alone. Miss Marple then proceeds to uncover and solve a decades old murder, where only the killer knew a murder had taken place.
Sleeping Murder is one of my favorite Christie novels for the way she seeds the constantly unfurling plot, leaving clues for the reader at each stage of the story. By the end of the book, Miss Marple has uncovered the victim, where and how she was killed, where she is buried and, of course, who the killer is. Throughout Sleeping Murder, Christie takes us on a brilliant journey of discovery where one revelation leads to another, before the killer is finally exposed.
In reading the novel, a casual reader can enjoy the story for what it is: an adventure in a seaside town with classic characters and a great twist at the end. However, Christie knew other readers liked to read in forensic detail. Searching for clues, acting as detective, they follow the seeds she carefully plants along the way.
Reading a Christie thriller for a second time gives you a true appreciation of her genius. All thriller writers wanting to learn from her skill should take the time to revisit her classics. A second reading, when you have full knowledge of the final denouement, lets you share in all of the authors brilliantly seeded delicious twists and turns.
In every one of her novels, she seeds the truth, but very often secrets are planted so deep they are impossible to appreciate upon first reading. Early in Sleeping Murder, the author gives us such a definitive steer on the location of the body, long before the confirmation of an actual murder, reading the book again you wonder how you missed it….
Secondhand booksellers in the UK and Ireland are reporting a flurry of bulk orders from mystery buyers, amid speculation AI companies are acquiring the tomes for their data.
Bookshops contacted by the Guardian say they have been receiving orders from buyers in the US, Canada, continental Europe and the UK. The increase has been replicated around the world, with booksellers in the US, Australia and Europe also reporting unusual orders.
Stuart Manley, the co-owner of Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, said the orders, which began arriving three months ago, were unusual because they did not follow the typical pattern of being grouped into themes such as sport or motoring.
“It’s definitely a strange combination of books,” said Manley. “Normally a book order is on a theme but this is all over the place.”
Twitch has been criticised by users after it emerged the popular streaming platform allowed their content to be used to train Amazon’s AI models.
Amazon owns Twitch and a setting allowing the US tech giant to take data generated by creators and audiences to train AI is turned on by default.
Users can opt out of that, Twitch said on Wednesday, but the announcement sparked a backlash with some users questioning why it was allowed in the first place.
Twitch’s chief product officer Mike Minton, said it was “respecting” users by letting them opt out but on why data was collected by default, he admitted: “If it’s opt-in, nobody would opt-in. That’s the honest answer.”
(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
August 15, 1933 – Bĵo Trimble, 93.
Bĵo was born in Holdenville, Oklahoma, in 1933, discovered sf fandom in 1952. She was serving in the US Navy, at the Great Lakes Naval Station, and saw an announcement in Astounding Science Fiction about the science fiction convention that weekend in Chicago—the 10th Worldcon, the one we now call Chicon II, though at the time it had no official name. The largest Worldcon ever at the time, with 870 members, it was a great place for a smart and friendly young woman to meet people and make connections in fandom. Her new acquaintances included Robert Bloch, Willy Ley, August Derleth, and Harlan Ellison.
Bĵo Trimble attends the 2024 Peabody Awards at Beverly Wilshire on June 9. Photo by Jon Kopaloff.
When it was discovered that she was an artist and cartoonist, she was recruited to provide illustrations for fanzines, sealing her fate. She claims to have met her husband, John Griffin Trimble, under Forrest J Ackerman’s piano, during a particularly crowded party. He was serving in the US Air Force, and they traded Stupid Officer Stories.
But as we all know, this was mere prelude. Bĵo was active in LASFS (Los Angeles Science Fiction Society), and organized a fashion show for Solacon (the 16th Worldcon). In 1960, she started Project Art Show, which brought the first modern, organized art show at a science fiction convention to Pittcon, the 1960 Worldcon. Bĵo continued the project, bringing art shows to Worldcons and other conventions. By 1969, Project Art Show had become The International Science-Fantasy Art Exhibition” (ISFAE), and was judging and awarding prizes, as well as organizing the art shows.
But in 1968, Bĵo started turning her attention to a new fannish interest–Star Trek. Bĵo and John Trimble were active in the letter-writing campaign credited with getting the show a third season, after it was initially canceled after its second season. They also helped convince NASA to name the first of the Space Shuttles Enterprise, although that was a test vehicle never intended for space flight.
Bĵo was a major contributor to the Star Trek Concordance, containing cross-referenced details on every character, setting, event and device in every episode of the original Star Trek, and, in later editions of the book, its animated incarnation, and the Star Trek films. Originally self-published, it got a mass market publication by Ballantine Books in 1976, and an updated edition by Citadel Press in 1995. On the Good Ship Enterprise: My 15 Years with Star Trek, her memoir of her experiences in Star Trek fandom, was published in 1982.
Bĵo was a Guest of Honor at Dragon Con, which was also the 6th North American Science Fiction Convention, in 1995. Bĵo and John Trimble were Fan Guests of Honor at ConJosé, the 60th Worldcon. Bĵo, or Bĵo and John, were also honored at many Star Trek and other science fiction conventions.
In addition, Bĵo and John Trimble were Baron and Baroness of the Society for Creative Anachronism’s Barony of the Angels, from September 2008 to January 2012. That’s at least fandom adjacent, right?
Sadly, John left us in April 2024, but Bĵo is still with us. Her contributions to fandom will remain.
Luise Petti and Bĵo at Disneyland in 1966. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
(7) OCTOTHORPE. Episode 166 of the Octothorpe podcast, “Writings of Greeks and Romans”, is introduced by John Coxon who says, “It’s a day late, and John’s going to bed now. Goodnight everyone. Zzzzzzzzzzz.”
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, one of Disney’s earliest characters who predated Mickey Mouse, is back for the 21st century.
At the D23 fan event in Anaheim on Friday, Disney revealed the first look at its live action combined with hand-drawn 2D animation series “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” that’s being written, directed and executive produced by Jon Favreau. The series is coming to Disney+ as a three-part miniseries in February 2027….
… Oswald was created by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks in 1927 for Universal Pictures. The character proved to be a major milestone for Disney, as he and Iwerks created Mickey Mouse after Universal took control of Oswald in 1928. The Walt Disney Company reacquired the rights to the character in 2006, though it entered the public domain in 2023….
[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, and Mark Roth-Whitworth for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
(1) LACON V RELEASES PROGRAM SCHEDULE. The LACon V Program Guide dropped today. It has information about what panel topics have been scheduled and who will be discussing them. You don’t need to be a member to access it.
(2) OSCAR-WINNING ANIMATOR RESCUED. [Item by Bruce D. Arthurs.] Animator Glen Keane, who worked on Beauty & The Beast and other Disney films before starting his own career in 2014 (directed 2020’s Over The Moon, among other credits), had to be rescued off Mummy Mountain by the Phoenix fire department yesterday, July 29, while hiking.
…Keane told 12News that he made an emergency call when he realized the narrow mountain trail had become too difficult to navigate. “I knew that I really needed help,” he told the station. A rescue helicopter was dispatched by the Phoenix Fire Department, which was able to recover Keane from the mountaintop and deposit him at a nearby landing zone. The PFD reported that all of its rescue crew also made it safely off the mountain.
The son of Family Circus cartoonist Bil Keane and father to illustrator/animation visdev artist Claire Keane (Tangled) and animator Max Keane (Trash Truck), Glen Keane studied animation at CalArts and joined Disney straight from school in 1974, where he spent his early years working under Ollie Johnston — one of Walt Disney’s legendary “Nine Old Men.” Keane animated some of the most beloved characters of the Disney Renaissance, including The Little Mermaid‘s Ariel and the title characters of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Pocahontas. He was the original director of Disney’s Tangled, but stepped back to continue as exec producer and animating director….
… I think there is one more similarity… the collaboration of characters, wittingly or unwittingly, in some aspect of a crime.
Sound familiar? I think that Bleak House influenced Christie in writing her 1934 classic, Murder on the Orient Express.
See, in Bleak House, nearly every character is a detective. Within the enormous mass of events that together make up the novel’s (multi-layered) plot, there are many strange matters and even a few mysteries… and many characters, varying in the degrees to which they are affiliated with the law, chose to conduct their own investigation in these peculiar events, accounts, and problems, which include ghost stories, rumors of illegitimacy, missing documents, general affairs of lies and deceit, impenetrable court cases, and incredibly suspicious deaths. The clerk Mr. Guppy, the lawyer Mr. Tulkinghorn, the physician Allan Woodcourt, are just some of the figures in the novel who take up the work of investigation… work which is eventually subsumed and continued by the police detective Inspector Bucket….
… We know Christie was thinking about Dickens in general as she wrote Murder on the Orient Express—Poirot takes up residence in a cabin reserved under the name Harris. He explains that the cabin will be available, that Harris will be a no-show. What’s his reasoning? “I read my Dickens,” he says, “M. Harris will not arrive.” Is this a deduction? No, it’s an allusion. Poirot is referring to the novel Martin Chuzzlewit, in which a character named Mrs. Harris (who is never seen) is thought not to exist at all. The name Harris, to Poirot’s mind, signals a lack of appearance, and so he takes the cabin as his own.
But the general structure, and ultimate reveal, that all the suspects in Murder on the Orient Express, have committed the murder together, seems to suggest an inverse in the narrative of Bleak House. What if, instead of everyone working to create a kind of collective of “the detective,” the characters worked in a collective to form “the murderer?”…
A much-anticipated annual series from Harper Perennial, Olive Editions are exclusive small-format publications of some of our bestselling and celebrated titles, featuring unique, hand-drawn cover illustrations by one of our talented designers, Milan Bozic.
There’s a surge of new independent bookstores in the U.S. More than 600 opened last year – nearly double from the year before. That’s according to the American Booksellers Association, which predicts hundreds more this year. Reagan Jones with member station WUOT in Knoxville reports….
… JONES: So whether you’re looking to embark on an epic quest, find your next book boyfriend or just meet some new people, your local bookstore could be the perfect place to start.
(6) OCTOTHORPE. In episode 165 of the Octothorpe podcast, “E Ese Efe Ese”, John Coxon, Alison Scott, and Liz Batty “deal with a veritably bulging mailbag before diving back into the WSFS Business Meeting and bringing you all the HOTTEST GOSSIP. Who was the best-dressed? What was controversial about a jar of jam? And why are bees?” There’s an uncorrected transcript here.
(7) WADE GILBREATH OBITUARY. Fan artist Wade Gilbreath has died reports Cliff Biggers:
Wade Gilbreath, a longtime friend and an active member of Birmingham fandom in the 1970s and 1980s, has passed away after a period of declining health. I heard the news a little while ago from Wade’s son James, and I am overwhelmed with so many positive memories of our years of friendship, and at the same time I’m sad that the issues that Wade was struggling with made our last few conversations more strained and cautious than I would have hoped. Wade was an amazing artist (his painting of the Shadow that I purchased from him in the mid-1970s is still hanging in our house and I see it every day), a talented writer, and an enthusiastic guitarist (I have so many memories of Wade and I lugging acoustic guitars between my house and his apartment as we alternated spending weekends visiting one another). Wade’s joys in life were counterbalanced with heartbreak and loss that he all seemed to take a toll on him, and I always wished there had been more I could do to help him rediscover the joys of those times past. I am sad, not only for me but for James and for Andie and for other friends who will realize that this world is a bit less now that Wade’s not a part of it.
Gilbreath did quite a bit of art for early issues of File 770, including the covers of File 770 16 in 1979, File 770 21 in 1980, and this fine parody of an ad:
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
July 30, 1995 — Outer Limits’ “If These Walls Could Talk”
Ghosts. Haunted houses. Many maintain that such concepts have no place in our computerized twentieth century reality. But until man conquers death, one inevitable question will always linger within the recesses of the human mind: What lies beyond? — Opening narration Outer Limits’s “If These Walls Could Talk”.
Forty years ago this evening on the rebooted Outer Limits, we had an apparently classic haunted house story where a woman whose son disappeared asks a supernatural debunker to investigate a seemingly haunted house where her son was last seen.
Now being Outer Limits, it turns out that the house isn’t haunted at all. Did any of you read the first novel in Simon R. Green’s Nightside series, Something from the Nightside? John Taylor enters a house to rescue a woman only to discover the house itself is alive. Same here. It’s essentially an alien kudzu lifeform that crashed to earth and is mimicking being a house. And eating people. Lots of them.
Alberta Watson, Tom McBeath, Molly Parker. Physicist and professional debunker Leviticus Mitchell agrees to help professional psychic Lynda Tillman investigate the abandoned mansion where her son and his girlfriend have mysteriously disappeared. He expects supernatural reason, but instead gets one a lot worse, a lot more dangerous.
They a rather good job of making the Big Bad believable which I’ve said like is that like the house in that Green novel. And howl do you escape a living house? Or even better, destroy it?
Both the original and this series are currently running on Prime.
In 1964, a group of teenage boys organised a convention in New York – it became known as the first official Comic Con.
The idea began after 16-year-old Bernie Bubnis wrote an article in his comic book fanzine. But when no-one else took on the project, he rounded up friends to help.
Together, they booked a venue, arranged a date, sent out letters and posted ads. And for the star attraction, they invited legendary American comic book artist, Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange.
In late July, the doors opened on the first convention, kickstarting what’s become a worldwide cultural phenomenon.
Bernie tells Jane Wilkinson how it happened.
(11) JUST FOLLOW THE BOUNCING BALL. Camestros Felapton wrote an autobiographical entry to answer his own question: “At what age did you first see a pixel?” First step is to define the experience –
…I would contend that to see a pixel requires both a digital screen and a digital input. I’m looking at pixels now on my laptop. Additionally, it needs to be a component of an image that is both smaller than the image and of general purpose, i.e. the numbers on an old LED or LCD pocket calculator aren’t really made of pixels. Those big chunky lozenge things shouldn’t be called “pixels” even though they have a lot in common with the concept….
There are many memorable props in Jurassic Park, including that very special shaving cream can, those fantastical goggles, and a very perilous toilet. But the item that kick-starts the entire story is the ancient mosquito trapped in amber that zillionaire dreamer John Hammond uses to bring dinosaurs back to life—because he could. Not because he should.
We all know what happened as a result of that misapplication of science; Jurassic Park became Jurassic World, and they’re still making movies about it three decades later. But the chance to actually own the screen-used mosquito-in-amber prop glimpsed in the opening scenes of Jurassic Park is now available to you if you happen to have $100,000 to $200,000, the estimated sale price at Propstore’s upcoming auction of Hollywood memorabilia….
After years as China’s top-selling automaker, Volkswagen in 2019 was looking beyond the roads it dominated and set out to own a piece of the sky.
VW had a vision for a battery-powered airborne vehicle. To turn it into reality, the then-82-year-old manufacturer sought Chinese design and technology that was beginning to outpace its own.
The German automaker’s goal was to move fast with an in-house startup team in Beijing to produce a flying car — a moonshot challenge that had stumped its Porsche and Audi divisions. In China, for China, VW would deliver what it described internally as a “luxury futuristic” drone that would convey four wealthy passengers in style.The aim was to sell them a vehicle to fly between cities like Beijing and Tianjin in a quiet craft with noise levels half those of a helicopter….
…But now, while local upstarts prepare for flying-car liftoff in China, Volkswagen remains grounded.
Volkswagen’s flying-car effort couldn’t match the speed of China’s low-altitude economy. That’s the aviation industry’s term for an emerging market encompassing drones, air taxis and other aviation services aimed at the airspace below 1,000 meters. In China, local rivals, governments and supply chains have moved fasterthan VW, a legacy giant with a culture of deliberation and compliance safeguards. VW’s stumble serves as another example of older automakers rapidly losing business to Chinese competitors….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Rich Lynch, Bruce D. Arthurs, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, and Steven French for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]
Game of Thrones mastermind and A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin is working on a fourth Dunk and Egg book, according to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker.
The HBO showrunner opened up about the future of the fantasy spinoff during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. While his adaptation of Martin’s Dunk and Egg stories has only received a green light for up to Season 2, he’s stated in the past that he’d love to expand this live-action version of the tales of Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) and Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell).
If all goes well, he’s hoping to expand into three seasons “or maybe four or five.” Part of what might help A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms move forward is if Martin can finish the next Dunk and Egg chapter on time.
“Book four, which George is working on, takes place in a very cool location,” Parker teased. “And five is the last story point of Egg as a boy. So it’s a very natural ending place for us to take a break and come back when Dexter is older. So then we can do Egg the Prince, do some politics, do some fun stuff in Summer Hall and King’s Landing, and get a different vibe where they’re not on the road all the time.”…
In less than half an hour, Philip K. Dick watched an attack-therapy group tear a man apart—screaming at him, breaking him down—until he confessed to being something he wasn’t. And when the man finally broke and sobbed out his false confession, the group didn’t stop. They only got louder.
This, Dick realized, is how tyranny works.
What unsettled him was how easy it was. The man wasn’t weak. He was ordinary. Yet a dozen loud, confident voices had rewritten who he was. And if it could happen to one man, it could happen to anyone. Perhaps even a whole country.
Dick is best known for two questions: What is reality? and What is the authentic human being?I’ve discussed them both before. But beneath those questions lies a fear and paranoia that is more than metaphysical. . .
If someone has enough power over you, can they overwrite your perception of reality? Worse yet, would you subconsciously help them rewrite it without ever knowing?
When we picture tyranny, most of us imagine Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: propaganda, surveillance, thought control. Dick’s greatest fear was that tyranny was already inside your mind, disguised as your own thoughts.
In a 1979 interview with fellow SF writer Charles Platt, in one of the last interviews before his death, Dick spoke about what frightened him most. Then, because he’s Philip K. Dick, he took the idea somewhere strange:
“The greatest menace in the twentieth century is the totalitarian state. It can take many forms: left-wing fascism, psychological movements, religious movements, drug rehabilitation places, powerful people, manipulative people; or it can be in a relationship with someone who is more powerful than you psychologically.”
When Dick begins listing totalitarian states, he starts with the usual suspects of control, and then moves toward things closer to ordinary life. His examples become smaller and more intimate until the last one is simply an unequal power balance in a relationship. It’s odd to see a bad partner placed on the same list as a dictator.
And that might sound like a stretch until you understand what Dick thought tyranny really was. We tend to picture it as something big: a government taking away your rights and a whole population losing its freedom. Dick thought the more dangerous tyranny happens much closer to home….
Agatha was a surprise addition to the Miller family, an “afterthought,” as she would describe herself. Born on September 15, 1890, she was a child of the Victorian fin de siecle (or “end of the century.”) Her siblings, Margaret (“Madge”), born in 1879, and Louis (“Monty”), born in 1880, were eleven and ten, respectively.
Photographed with large hazel eyes and massive golden hair, Agatha was a happy child. Her autobiography, written between 1950 and 1965, recounts how much she relished the pleasures of home: piano lessons; swims in the cove; and afternoon teas of cakes and cream.
Yet beneath the sunshine, a dark imagination lurked. At age five, she began having nightmares of someone she called the “Gunman,” a uniformed Frenchman who carried a musket. Later in her youth, the Gunman would appear in her dreams to be a friend or family member, then suddenly turn into a stranger…
… At age ten, Agatha wrote her first poem, “The Cowslip.” Around the same time, she invented a story about the noble Lady Madge and bloody Lady Agatha, a Gothic melodrama that involved the inheritance of a castle. It was very short, Agatha would explain, because “both writing and spelling were a pain to me.”
When Clara primly suggested she shouldn’t use the word “bloody,” Agatha protested, “[b]ut she was bloody. She killed a lot of people.” And so emerged Agatha’s first portrait of a serial killer….
(4) DIONYSIUS AWARDS. [Item by John A Arkansawyer.] This week’s Philosophy Talk episode is the Dionysius Awards, “movies of the past year [which] challenged our assumptions and made us think about things in new ways”. Lots of genre interest in here: Companion, Mickey-17, Frankenstein, Severance, Pluribus, Hamnet, among others. Plus it’s just a good show. “The 2026 Dionysus Awards”.
The awards categories include:
Best Future-Facing Fantasy That Asks What Makes Us Human (and Whether That’s Even a Good Thing)
Best Tweak on a Classic That Raises Questions about Parents and Children
Best TV Show That Blows Up All Your Theories of Personal Identity
Freedom and restraint seem like opposing forces, but to Yu Deng, they go hand in hand.
Take the poem he’s just pulled up on his computer screen: a dense forest of Chinese characters corralled into eight lines of equal length — a perfect, symmetric block of text. Written in the ninth century by the Tang Dynasty poet Li Shangyin, as China teetered on the brink of civil war, “The Brocade Zither” is famous for its ambiguity. “Many people have tried to explain it,” Deng said. “But I think this is something that’s not explainable.” A single word might allude to an ancient battle or a classic fairy tale; a simple phrase might have scores of diverging interpretations.
“My personal favorite of all time,” Deng said — an example of a highly structured form of Chinese poetry that literally translates to “regulated verse.” It must satisfy all sorts of rules: parallel constructions and contrasting images, lilting tonal patterns and strict rhyme schemes. “These patterns are part of the beauty,” Deng said. “But they’re also something that restricts your expression. The fact that you can still say so many things under this restriction is another level of beauty.”…
… For comfort, Deng turned to manga. “I remember him at Courant. He was always holding a manga,” said Jalal Shatah(opens a new tab), a professor there who formerly chaired the math department. Deng particularly liked stories about deep friendship and romance and found himself drawn to a genre known as yuri, which focuses on those kinds of relationships between women — stories that “feel nice and warm and beautiful,” as he put it. They helped him be kinder to himself, “more comfortable with life.”…
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
July 26, 1945 — M. John Harrison, 81.
By Paul Weimer: M. John Harrison taught me about the joy of inconsistent and contradictory worldbuilding.
M John Harrison
For most writers of fantasy, for most works of fantasy, I am always looking for the consistency and the power of the worldbuilding. Inconsistent and worse, lazy and weak worldbuilding can catapult me right out of a story or a novel, permanently. This has happened for me as a reader just this month with a brand-new novel.
M John Harrison is the exception to that for me. My reading of his work is almost exclusively Viriconium. But it is precisely in Viriconium, Harrison’s carved out territory in the Dying Earth subgenre, that I learned that worldbuilding is not the be all and end all of fantasy writing.
The contradictions, the inconsistencies, the lack of cohesion is part of the point of the dying world of Viriconium. Not being able to rely on previous stories and novels in the sequence to understand what is happening in a particular work is something that Harrison relies on, and it is something that I learned to accept, and even expect in the Viriconium stories.
Really, Viriconium’s world building is beside the point, and that is why Harrison writes it in a way that you can’t rely on it. Instead, to use modern parlance, Viriconium is much more all about the “vibes”, and what vibes! Vance and Wolfe may have perfected Dying Earth as a subgenre, but Harrison gives it a feel that few authors have managed to hit ever since. There are few authors I’ve read that have managed to embody the vibe of the subgenre they are writing in as well as M John Harrison has. And with such language and writing. On a sentence by sentence level, Harrison is one of the most talented writers I’ve ever read, of any genre.
In Victorian America, ice cream became an increasingly popular dessert. As historian Edward Geist writes, it was also sometimes a dangerous one, with semi-regular reports of whole groups of picnickers or fair-goers becoming terribly sick with bowel pain, vomiting, and diarrhea. Some, typically children, died.
Geist explains that ice cream’s widespread availability in the mid-nineteenth century came thanks to the rise of the commercial ice trade, abundant sugar production, and the invention of the hand-cranked ice cream freezer. Custard-based ice creams favored by the rich remained too expensive for most people, but eggless “Philadelphia style” ice cream or even cheaper flavored ices were widely available.
The hygienic practices of the vendors who sold these treats were, to an observer in the twenty-first century, horrifying. They often used reusable glass dishes, which were merely wiped off between customers. And some refroze melted ice cream, something we now know offers a perfect opportunity for bacterial growth.
In one early incident in 1854 Geist describes, attendees of a festival in Beverly, Massachusetts, fell ill after eating pineapple-flavored ice cream. Doctors blamed this and other similar incidents on butyric ether flavorings, which were made using a component of rancid butter. Some placed blame for other poisoning incidents on dyes used in ices, which were frequently contaminated with arsenic.
These additives quickly fell out of favor, but the ice cream poisonings continued. In the 1870s, doctors blamed many such events on “vanillin poisoning,” though they struggled to explain why this only occurred with ice cream and not other products using artificial vanilla flavor…..
Astronomers have found evidence that the Milky Way was flipped on its side following a direct hit from a wayward galaxy long before the solar system was born.
The cataclysmic collision took place about 10bn years ago when the Milky Way was struck head-on by an incoming dwarf galaxy known – for purely astronomical reasons – as the Gaia Sausage.
The Milky Way tore the interloper to shreds and absorbed its stars, but the chaos unleashed in the event probably flipped the entire disc of the Milky Way by more than 90 degrees into the position seen today, researchers said.
Astronomers at Durham University used supercomputer simulations to show that Milky Way-like galaxies involved in head-on collisions with the Gaia Sausage were likely to experience a “disc flip” that dramatically, if slowly, reoriented the galaxy. “It probably takes at least a few hundred million years,” said Kirill Batrakov, the lead researcher on the project….
The idea came to Danielle Boyer in a toy store. The inspiration? It was Tickle Me Elmo.
“Whenever you’d press his belly, he would talk, and he would teach you things,” she said. “There are toys that teach us in English, but there aren’t toys that teach us Anishinaabemowin. And I wanted that to be different.”
Anishinaabemowin includes the Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe languages. Exact estimates vary, but there are fewer than 10,000 people in the U.S. who speak Anishinaabemowin. That number is around 25,000 in Canada. Some Native languages have just a few dozen fluent speakers, while others have none.
Boyer has seen how quickly language loss can happen. Her grandmother speaks Anishinaabemowin, but she is one of the last fluent speakers of their dialect.
“It is devastating to feel like your language could be lost,” said Boyer, a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. “You lose your culture, you lose a way to describe who you are.”
U.S. Indian boarding schools played a major role in the loss of Indigenous languages. Children separated from their families were taught, sometimes violently, not to speak their native tongues, and many did not pass them on to their children.
Today, some Native youth are learning their languages in schools. But Boyer said many of them still aren’t invested. “They see it as another homework assignment.”
That’s why she invented the SkoBot. It’s a customizable toy robot designed to get Indigenous children excited to learn their languages.
“I can say ‘Hey SkoBot, what is bear?’ And it will say, ‘Bear is makwa, makwa,’ and it’ll repeat it, right? So I can say, ‘What is crane?’ It’ll say, ‘Crane is ajijaak, ajijaak.'”
SkoBots use a form of artificial intelligence to speak Indigenous languages, and they’re small enough to mount on the user’s shoulder. They sort of resemble mini R2-D2 droids, from Star Wars, except these robots are designed to look like woodland creatures and decorated in Native American florals….
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, John A Arkansawyer, Paul Weimer, 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 Soon Lee.]
(1) TIM KIRK ART NEWS. The original artwork from Tim Kirk’s fully-funded “Nightmares to Come by Flights of Imagination” Kickstarter, containing illustration created for Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions, will be up for sale at LAcon V in August.
Tim Kirk has matted the originals for sale at the Worldcon. He’s spread them out in his back yard, near his pool, to give you an overview of most of the art.
(2) REVISIT STAR WARS HISTORY. LACon V guest of honor Geri Sullivan appears in a Facebook video announcing that a Worldcon program will display Charles Lippincott’s reconstructed publicity slideshow from 1976 that he presented at various places ahead of the release of Star Wars. (I remember lining him up to give the talk at the LASFS meeting held at the 1976 Westercon – the first of my brief and otherwise not-terribly-shining Presidency of the club.)
(3) 2030 EASTERCON/EUROCON PROPOSAL. The British Science Fiction Association has a Facebook page about their proposed bid for a combined Eastercon/Eurocon in 2030 in Birmingham.
Ansible reports it includes fallback positions of holding a non-Eurocon Eastercon or vice versa.
The District of Columbia has agreed to pay $50,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a resident who accused police officers of illegally detaining him for following an Ohio National Guard patrol while playing Darth Vader’s theme song from “Star Wars” on his cellphone, according to a document released Monday.
The plaintiff, Sam O’Hara, sued the district, four Metropolitan Police Department officers and a guard member from Ohio over what he says was his act of protest against President Donald Trump’s federal law enforcement surge in Washington, D.C.
A court filing on Thursday disclosed the settlement but didn’t specify any monetary terms. The amount is included in a copy of the settlement agreement that D.C. Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb’s office provided to The Associated Press.
The $50,000 settlement includes attorney’s fees and costs. O’Hara is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia. In an email on Friday, an ACLU spokesperson referred to the settlement’s financial terms as “a significant amount” that O’Hara “is pleased with” but said they weren’t disclosing the dollar figure to protect his privacy.
O’Hara, an artist who works in the hospitality industry, agreed to drop his claims against the district and the MPD officers within three business days of receiving the settlement payment. The settlement isn’t an admission of wrongdoing by the district, the agreement says.
O’Hara’s settlement with the district doesn’t resolve his related claims against an Ohio National Guard member, Sgt. Devon Beck, who has asked a judge to dismiss O’Hara’s claims against him.
O’Hara said in a statement that he is satisfied with the settlement but conflicted that taxpayers are footing the bill….
Hollywood writer-director Carl Rinsch was sentenced Monday to 2 1/2 years in prison after being convicted of defrauding Netflix out of $11 million for a never-finished sci-fi series. Supporters including Keanu Reeves had asked the court to show him leniency.
Rinsch, best known for the 2013 samurai fantasy film “47 Ronin,” was convicted in December of federal wire fraud and other charges. According to prosecutors and trial testimony, he told Netflix he needed $11 million to finish a show called “White Horse” but diverted the money into a personal account and ultimately spent whopping sums on luxury cars, watches, clothes and household goods, including $638,000 on two mattresses….
(6) OCTOTHORPE. Octothorpe 163 — “Board Games” — has arrived, and John Coxon, Alison Scott and Liz Batty discuss Eurocons in some detail, covering all the news from 2026 to 2030. Alison is currently at Metropol Con and she’s promised to report back. They also discuss queer awards and swim headphones. An uncorrected transcript is available here.
Denouements are as fundamental to classic mysteries as detectives and the clues they detect. A synonym for “resolution,” or “outcome,” the term can be applied to stories outside the mystery genre, or even to the wrapping up of real-life scenarios. But given that its literal meaning is “unknotting,” it makes sense that the denouement has become associated with whodunits in particular, a subset of mysteries that require a thorough unravelling at story’s end. The detective separates the wheat of the clues from the chaff of the nonsense and red herrings: an intellectual winnowing that provides clarity, hence satisfaction, when the culprit is identified.
There are no rules governing the denouement. In the late 1920s, when mystery authors Ronald Knox and S.S. Van Dine concocted their famously facetious “commandments” for the Golden Age of detective fiction (Knox had ten, perhaps because he was also a priest, while Van Dine had twenty, perhaps because he was American and couldn’t help himself), they left the denouement untouched. But over time certain clichés creeped in, to the point where the “drawing room denouement” has become a recognizable trope of the genre. We all know how this goes. The detective announces he knows everything, gathering the major characters into one space—often a literal drawing room or its equivalent, though in my anecdotal experience a popular alternative is a theater: a neat externalization of the dramatics underlying this sequence. The case is summarized, side plots having nothing to do with the murder are elucidated (with extra points for fleeting moments in which it seems as though innocent parties are guilty), and then, at long last, the murderer is revealed. At this point there are a few options: the murderer could spontaneously confess, be led away by an officer of the law, or even take her own life. But one hopes at the very least that she will adopt the “evil voice” of the unmasked villain. (If you’re not sure what I mean here, behold this very entertaining parody of the final moments of the classic drawing room denouement.)
Agatha Christie is widely credited(/faulted?) with popularizing this stereotype, and for good reason…
(8) DAFYDD AB HUGH (1960-2026).Dafydd ab Hugh (1960-2026), died in June aged 65 reports Ansible. The author of 15 books including Heroing: or, How He Wound Down the World (1987) plus various Star Trek and (with Brad Linaweaver) Doom tie-ins, his novelette “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk” was a 1991 Hugo and Nebula finalist.
The author furnished this unforgettable bio for my 2002 Westercon program:
ab Hugh, along with many other bioms, is to all intents and purposes an organic guterary sac, with input and output nodes open at top and bottom, respectively, and an internal rigid structural support evolved to make it easier to balance on his hind legs. He has a carbon-nitrogen based chemical system that requires frequent refueling and periodic maintenance.
His genetic structure is based around a supermolecule that is little more than a highly redundant, 3-GigaBit, base-2 code string comprising sequences of four nitrogenous bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. Base-pair cohabitation rules are strictly enforced.
He has a neural bulge at the top which has its own complicated structure. Most of its activity takes place in the medulla, or reptile brain, which seems appropriate somehow. But occasionally, some electrocolloidal activity flickers across the cerebral cortex, and a novel forthcomes (cf. Arthur War Lord, Far Beyond the Wave, Heroing, Warriorwards, the Swept Away YA trilogy, seven or eight Star Treks, and the four Doom novels — the last in conspiracy with a similar biomass dubbed Brad Linaweaver).
ab Hugh has some sort of vague self-awareness, but I wouldn’t push it too far.
(8B) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
July 2, 1948 — Saul Rubinek, 78.
So tonight we have Saul Rubinek. My brain when I started stitching this together kept tugging at a thread that wasn’t quite there of a production that I’d seen him where he was quite good in a role so I had to look up his credits on IMDB where it turned out it was first in a nearly fifteen-year-old airing of The Golden Spiders: A Nero Wolfe Mystery where he was cast as Saul Panzer, freelance detective working for Nero Wolfe.
Saul Rubinek
This was the first of two hour-long movies that originally were all that was planned to be but ratings were excellent and critics loved it, so two seasons followed with stars Maury Chaykin as Nero Wolfe, and Timothy Hutton as Wolfe’s assistant, Archie Goodwin.
He was on the series not as this character, but as Lon Cohen, a reporter at the New York Gazette. He’s Archie’s source of crime news, and Archie often asks Lon for background information on current or prospective clients.
Before you ask, yes, I loved the series. Unfortunately it is not streaming anywhere right now and the DVDs are ridiculously expensive as a fellow member of Susan’s Salon noted earlier this week and I found them for sale at $150 for the complete series on Amazon.
Now onto his genre work.
His longest role was as Special Agent in Charge of Warehouse 13 Artie Nielsen, in charge of the often troublesome Pete Lattimer, Myka Bering and Claudia Donovan, not to mention several others that had very interesting stories here. Now Artie prefers old fashioned items and ways of doing things because they are familiar and comfortable. He likes tinkering with what is in Charge of Warehouse, something which can be hazardous to him, other and Warehouse 13 itself.
Obviously I’m not going to say anything about what happens to him here as if you haven’t seen the series, it’d spoil for you. Suffice it to say that the writers use the character well.
Spoilers now as they can’t be avoided. On the “The Most Toys” episode of The Next Generation, he plays a nearly obsessed collector who adds Data to his collection.
(Tom Toles in a Washington Post article noted what the title meant, “Maybe you remember and maybe you don’t the phrase “He who dies with the most toys wins.” It has been attributed to Malcolm Forbes, but whoever said it deserves to be noted for being able to get it out while throwing up a little in the back of his mouth.”)
Data has been deactivated somehow and reactivated and met by Fajo, his character, who explains he collects rare and valuable objects — like Data himself. Ok let me note that is nothing to like in my opinion about Fajo. Which of course was the lint of the story here.
The homage to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics is rather obvious. Perhaps a little too obvious.
Saul wasn’t the first choice for this character. It’s very important to note the last-minute nature of his casting went well for three reasons: he was available as he wasn’t engaged in anything, he was a Star Trek fan keen to appear in the series, and he was a personal friend of the episode’s director Timothy Bond.
They had created an elaborate prosthetic outfit for the first choice but there wasn’t time to design even facial prosthetics for him given when they needed to get the episode done, well, now, when he stepped into the role.
Memory Alpha has a listing of what Kivas Fajo has collected and which is shown here or used here to create a feeling of his alienness. Not surprisingly, nothing in his collection or that he uses here was created for this episode but had already been designed and constructed for another episode such as the communication device used by Sarjenka for “Pen Pals”, a Next Generation episode that aired the previous season.
Ok, there’s lots of one-offs he did I could mention but those are the three roles that I want to note.
Cloudflare announced new controls that give publishers more say over how AI companies access and use their content. Beginning September 15, new Cloudflare sites will allow traditional search indexing while blocking AI training and AI agent access on ad supported pages by default. The company is also expanding its monetization efforts with a Pay-Per-Use model that aims to compensate publishers when their content contributes to AI generated answers rather than simply being crawled. Cloudflare argues that publishers should not have to choose between being discoverable online and giving away their work for free to AI systems.
(11) TRAILER PARK. The Dog Stars, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, and Margaret Qualley comes to theaters August 28. (It’s based on a novel of the same name which Jonathan Cowie reviewed in 2012.)
I enjoyed this scene more than the entire movie that followed it The movie wasn’t terrible or anything, this scene is just that good imo…
If only the rest of the movie had lived up to this. The opening scene is incredible….
[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Lise Andreasen, Daniel Dern, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]
The workers are here now, with rocks the size of small toddlers to build a wall to replace the old “wall” which was porridge by this stage. I will have them take pictures later when they’re more advanced and show y’all. but this needed doing, and it needed doing NOW, and I cannot thank you guys enough for stepping up to help – i’m halfway to the fundraising goal as stated on the GFM page but even if this is as far as it gets… it makes a huge *HUGE* difference. thank you thank you thank you.
In recent days, my 14-year-old daughter has been exhibiting signs of becoming a conspiracy theorist. But this isn’t your common or garden Twin-Towers-grassy-knoll-moon-landings business. She has fallen, entirely and joyfully, for a conjecture known as Conformity Gate – and she is not the only one.
For the non Gen-Zers out there, Conformity Gate is the theory that the much-vaunted finale of Netflix behemoth Stranger Things, released on 1 January in the UK, wasn’t the real finale at all.
Fuelled by energy drinks and pasty from lack of sunlight, fans of the show have been beavering away in basements around the world to produce a fantastical hypothesis that the finale’s rather soupy 40-minute epilogue was all an illusion created by the show’s mind-controlling villain Vecna. A secret final episode, showing what had really happened, would be released on 7 January, at 8pm US Eastern Time (1am in the UK).
… Dismantling the phantasms of unconscious biases is the aim of Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford’s Writing the Other classes. Both Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford were chosen as hosts and guests of honor for the Seattle 2025 WordCon. Their classes and lectures seek to give authors tools to write about people outside their own lived experience so that people of all backgrounds are more accurately represented in both speculative histories and futures. More stories written by people from marginalized backgrounds and more representation in speculative fiction in general is critical to countering the white-supremecist project of constructing a future or past without Black, brown, queer, disabled, trans or other marginalized peoples.
At a joint talk between the two hosts, K. Tempest Bradford gave a stark warning about the evils of making or propagating stories written under racist or colonialist frameworks. “It does not matter if you personally have a white robe in your closet, you are standing on the foundations of white robed men.” As Bradford told the crowd, “one of the things I have come to see as deeply important is taking control of culture change,” urging the crowd to support and create cultural products that depict a better world while also being “aggressively awesome.”
Even with the utopian depictions of Star Trek, there have been broader discussions about its representation of an idealized vision of humanity that, despite its inclusivity, is underpinned by a military style command structure, and notably absent from the franchise is any depictions of elections or debate about broader policy change. What happens when one group’s version of utopia conflicts with another? These are the kind of thorny questions that speculative fiction revels in untangling.
Bradford loves Star Trek and cites the franchise as an example of a future where people from all walks of life are depicted being aggressively awesome and advocates for more books, TV shows, games, that are even more “aggressively inclusive.”
But no matter how badly Nazi’s want to appropriate popular narratives, WorldCon authors aren’t ready to cede their works to the worst of humanity….
In the near future, you will be at the center of everything. The movies and shows you watch will be tailored to your tastes, created by artificial intelligence based on personalized prompts and previous viewing habits.
The books you read will be similarly bespoke. Enjoy Stephen King but wish there was more romance and less blood? The AI will create a custom version of Carrie with a happy prom ending.
Music will be mashups of your favorite genres and artists. Want to hear Eminem croon instead of rap? The software will serve it up.
At least, that’s the vision touted by technology CEOs banking on AI becoming super intelligent and personal in the next few years….
… Some AI researchers have also raised concerns. They fear such hyper personalization could result in individuals becoming siloed in echo chambers, making civil discourse and interpersonal relations difficult, and enabling people to be more easily manipulated by bad information.
“[AI] learned all these manipulative skills just from trying to predict the next word in all the documents on the web,” said Nobel prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, a British Canadian computer scientist known as the Godfather of AI, in a video talk posted to Reddit in September 2025. “If you take an AI and you take a person and you get them to try and manipulate somebody else then the AI’s comparable with the person. And if the AI can see that person’s Facebook page, if they can both see the Facebook page, the AI is actually better than the person at manipulating them.”…
(5) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989)
Thirty-seven years ago, Agatha Christie’s Poirot series starring David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, the Belgian Detective, the most famous creation of that author, premiered on ITV.
Over the thirteen series and seventy episodes which ranged in length between fifty and a hundred minutes, some ten production companies would be involved in creating what we saw. Each episode was indeed adapted from original material by Christie.
David Suchet is the only actor to appear in the entire series though Hugh Fraser as Captain Arthur Hastings and Philip Jackson as Chief Inspector James Japp appeared in the first eight series. Pauline Moran as Miss Felicity Lemon appeared in most of the first eight series. Their absence reflects the stories of the latter series.
The “Murder on the Orient Express” is not filmed on location or anywhere but Britain with two exceptions. First let me say that’s Rustem Pasha Mosque, İstanbul, Turkey as seen from Sea of Marmara that you see in opening credit scene; that’s St.Ursula Street, Il-Belt Valletta in Malta which Poirot walks down the steps at the start of the episode, and St. Elmo Heritage Building, Valletta in Malta is used for the background for another scene.
These are the only two credited by The BBC site but I’ve a hard time believing a few minutes of film footage warranted an entire crew so I suspect more footage was shot there.
Reception for the series was excellent starting with the family who recommended Suchet for the part. Christie’s grandson Mathew Prichard commented: “Personally, I regret very much that she never saw David Suchet.” It even won an Edgar Award for Best Episode in a TV Series for “The Lost Mine”. It holds a near perfect ninety-nine percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.
Join legendary actor, comedian, songwriter, musician, screenwriter, playwright, and book collector Eric Idle for a discussion of his latest book The Spamalot Diaries.
Hailed as one of NPR’s Best books of the year and a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor in Writing, The Spamalot Diaries chronicles the making of Eric Idle’s Broadway smash hit Spamalot. Chronicling every minor mishap and triumph along the way, as well as the creative tension that drove the show to new heights, The Spamalot Diaries is an unforgettable look behind the curtain of a beloved musical and inside the wickedly entertaining mind of one of our most treasured comic performers.
This special evening is a fundraiser for The Book Club of California, a non-profit, membership organization of bibliophiles that was founded in California in 1912. Its mission is to support the history and art of the book, including fine printing related to the history and literature of California and the western states of America through research, publishing, public programs, and exhibitions.
Friday, February 20 5:30 pm reception 6:30 pm program
Attendees will receive a signed copy of The Spamalot Diaries and free tickets to Rare Books Pasadena, an antiquarian book fair which is being held February 21-22 at the Raymond Theatre and neighboring Courtyard Marriott.
You can’t see, feel, hear, taste or smell them, but tiny particles from space are constantly raining down on us.
They come from cosmic rays—high-energy particles that can originate from exploding stars and other extreme astrophysical events far beyond our solar system. When the rays collide with atoms high in Earth’s protective atmosphere, they trigger a cascade of secondary particles. Among the most important of these new particles are muons, which can pass through the atmosphere and even penetrate into the ground.
An invention by University of Delaware physics professor Spencer Axani called CosmicWatch is putting the science of muons in the palms of experienced scientists and high school students alike.
About the size of a box of animal crackers, CosmicWatch is a particle detector. Made from electronic components that cost around $100, it lights up and counts each time a muon passes through it, storing the data so it can be downloaded and analyzed.
A team of astronomers have uncovered an unusually hot 12 billion year-old gas cluster that challenges everything we thought we knew about the early growth of the universe.
Peering back to about 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, an international group of researchers has identified a baby galaxy cluster, cataloged as SPT2349-56, that’s far hotter and more energetic than current cosmological models allow. Published this week in the Nature journal, the discovery centers on the intracluster medium, or rather, the diffuse gas that fills the space between galaxies. According to standard theory, this gas should be relatively cool and sparse during a cluster’s infancy, only reaching extreme temperatures after billions of years of gravitational collapse and maturation….
(10) A WARM WELCOME TO THE NEW YEAR FOR ALL FILERS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] It’s a New Year and it is new science. The 1st January saw the first issue of Nature and a seemingly boring paper, caught my eye. I say ‘seemingly boring’ because the subject matter was the carbon cycle but a graph therein was telling.
Some people have told me not to bore folk with graphs and numbers as – they say – ‘the general public don’t go for that sort of thing’. To this I say balderdash and – sorry Mike to drop another ‘b’ bomb – bumpkin! Folk regularly see weather maps and inflation graphs in their newspapers and easily take these in their stride. So here goes…
Now, the carbon cycle is intrinsically important for various reasons, not least because carbon dioxide is the major anthropogenic greenhouse gas so the amount entering and leaving the atmosphere is key to understanding how fast the planet is likely to warm. Yet surprisingly, there is no international body formally tasked with assessing the carbon cycle, which is changing as the atmospheric carbon and ocean reservoirs increase and the planet warms. (For example, warmer water absorbs less carbon dioxide and water that already has a significant amount of carbon dioxide in it also absorbs less.) There are researchers who get research grants to look at various aspects of the carbon cycle and there are volunteer researchers who look at it in their spare time, but there is no formal body tasked with coordinating and funding such research, though there has been a proposal that this be overseen by the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation. However, what appeared in the 1st January 2026 edition of Nature was a new estimate of the fluxes of carbon entering and leaving the atmosphere.
Science fiction often deals with global change issues let alone potential future hazards and in recent years we have had the rise of cli-fi (a term I am not particularly fond of, but we have it) and this is coincident with the rise of global warming/climate change concerns up the political agenda (even if some politicians – invariably those with zero science training or understanding – do not take it seriously). And here the carbon cycle is key.
Equally surprising, possibly for many (as is there being no formal body overseeing/coordinating international research on the carbon cycle) is that there is a lot we do not know about the global carbon cycle. We have estimates as to the various carbon sources and sinks and the fluxes of carbon between them but these are not accurate as is evident by the mismatch between these and real-life measurements. The 1st January Nature paper is the latest attempt to refine our understanding and it does seem to take care of a number of the mismatches.
The graph that caught my eye was the researchers’ estimate in the net effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1960 due to the decline in both terrestrial and ocean carbon sinks. (1960 till now possibly covers much or all of the life time of many Filers.)
What it shows is that carbon sinks for a couple of decades since 1960 held but after that there was a shift – a transition – to a new state with global sinks declining resulting in a steady, extra contribution of carbon to the atmosphere. This is a signal that the Earth system is transitioning and this transitioning in turn may mean that the Earth system might be entering a new state. The past changes of the Earth’s global climate state have been (strictly geologically speaking) rapid transitions. The transition over 10,000 years ago from the last glacial to the current interglacial lasted several centuries and was mirrored by a natural Earth-system feedback rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, the carbon dioxide we have been adding to the atmosphere the past couple of centuries has seen its build up roughly ten times faster! To take us who knows where, but somewhere not so nice for sure.
All this is, of course, perfect fodder for SF writers and, in turn, us readers.
Contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide (in parts per million) due to declining carbon sinks.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Daniel Dern, 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 Cliff.]
(1) ANNIE AWARDS 2026 NOMINEES. File 770 reported the 53rd Annie Award Nominees today. The most-nominated films are Elio and KPop Demon Hunters, both with 10 nominations.
(2) ACTOR AWARDS NOMINATIONS. We also posted the SAG Actor Awards 2026 Nominations. Among films of genre interest, Sinners received the most, with five.
(3) DGA AWARDS NOMINEES. There also are a number of television productions nominated for the Directors Guild of America awards 2026, among them Andor, Severance, and Black Mirror. The complete list is at the link. (DGA’s film finalists will be announced tomorrow.) The winners will be presented on February 7.
(4) ART DIRECTORS GUILD NOMINEES. The Art Directors Guild Awards 2026 Nominations List also came out today. Full list at the link. There are a number of sff films in other categories, too, but here are the finalists for Fantasy Feature Film.
FANTASY FEATURE FILM
Avatar: Fire and Ash Production Designers: Dylan Cole, Ben Procter
The Fantastic Four: First Steps Production Designer: Kasra Farahani
Mickey 17 Production Designer: Fiona Crombie
Superman Production Designer: Beth Mickle
Wicked: For Good Production Designer: Nathan Crowley
(5) NOW HEAR THIS. AudioFile Magazine announced it has ended publication, and has transitioned its review activity to become part of Kirkus Reviews.
For 34 years, AudioFile has brought a spotlight to audiobooks with more than 65,000 audiobook reviews. In December we said goodbye to AudioFile Magazine with gratitude and excitement for what’s ahead! As of January 1, 2026 Kirkus Reviews is our new home. Kirkus is the gold standard of book reviews, with a 100-year history, and joining them gives a wonderful future for AudioFile and affirms the continued importance of audiobook reviews. Many of the AudioFile team will continue with Kirkus Audiobook Reviews, including Jennifer Dowell, the new Audiobook Editor at Kirkus.
Recommendations include Elizabeth Sandifer’s book-length online essay on Neil Gaiman and the wider context around his life and career as it relates to his work (and Sandman in particular); a SF concept album from a Dutch progressive rock musician; the last season of one of Kourbeti’s favourite anime series of all time; and a variety of YouTube content, from commentary and analysis on books and media to feature-length fanworks and documentaries.
Lest you read “Neil Gaiman” and your eyes glazed over, Kourbeti’s introduction warns you not to miss this one.
“The Cuddled Little Vice” by Elizabeth Sandifer
….By this point we all know what happened, but we have still barely reckoned with Gaiman’s legacy, or the way we collectively worshiped both his work and him as a creator for decades. This piece does so brilliantly, and I would even argue it should be the definitive Gaiman primer from this day forth: it breaks down his work and blends in relevant biographical details with cutting precision and heartbreaking empathy, mapping the inexorable path to self-destruction that Gaiman was on for his entire life, as well as the pain, betrayal, and disappointment felt by everyone around him—including members of the SFF community that once called him a friend (like Roz Kaveney, whose untitled 2024 poem lends its title to this essay2)….
…At the time of its publication, the classic detective story was governed by an implicit contract. The author promised to present clues honestly; the reader promised to pay attention. Christie honoured that agreement—and then exposed its fragility. Roger Ackroyd demonstrated that honesty in fiction is not the same as transparency. By exploiting the conventions of first-person narration, Christie revealed how easily readers project trust onto a familiar voice, especially when that voice appears sensible, modest and helpful. The twist in Roger Ackroyd was not merely intellectual but moral: readers felt complicit in having been misled by their own assumptions. Direct descendants of this approach abound – Gone Girl and The Silent Patient to name but two recent best sellers.
The controversy that followed the publication of Roger Ackroyd was immediate and intense. Some critics accused Christie of cheating; others recognized that she had done something more daring: she had expanded the boundaries of what detective fiction could do….
(8) QUINTON RETIRES. Another familiar name also retired from Tor this week. We reported Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s retirement the other day. Linda Quinton, publisher and VP of Tor’s Forge Books imprint, also departed on January 5. “Two Longtime Tor Execs Retire” at Publishers Weekly.
…Quinton’s nearly forty-year career at Tor culminated in nine years at the helm of Forge, which focuses on thriller, mystery, and general fiction and nonfiction titles. No one will replace her as VP and publisher, per a TPG spokesperson, and her duties will be split among existing editorial staff.
Linda Quinton, right, with Tom Doherty at BEA. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter.
Maguire’s novel, published in 1995 by ReganBooks, is a reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The book was adapted into a Broadway musical that debuted in 2003; that production was in turn adapted into two movies, premiering in 2024 and 2025, respectively.
The other two books now banned in Utah schools are Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes and Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Chbosky’s novel is one of the most frequently banned books in American libraries and schools, appearing on the American Library Association’s list of the top 10 most challenged books a total of 10 times since its publication in 1999.
There are now 22 books banned statewide in Utah’s schools. Six of the books on the list are young adult romantasy novels by Sarah J. Maas, including all five installments of her Court of Thorns and Roses series; while three books on the list are by Ellen Hopkins, another author whose novels have also been the frequent target of bans nationwide. Among the other books banned in Utah are Judy Blume’s Forever…, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why….
On behalf of the Kurt Vonnegut Estate, authors Elana K. Arnold, Ellen Hopkins, and Amy Reed, and two anonymous high school student plaintiffs with the ACLU of Utah filed a complaint on January 6 to challenge provisions of Utah House Bill 29, known as the “sensitive material review” law.
HB 29, which went into effect on July 1, 2024, prohibits “pornographic or indecent” material from public school classrooms and school libraries, and a “plausible claim” that material is “harmful to minors” which results in the removal of the offending item. The plaintiffs contend that the law violates First and 14th Amendment rights, noting in their filing that “no one disputes that pornography and obscene material can and should be excluded from school libraries.”
Defendants in the suit include Utah attorney general Derek Brown, the Utah State Board of Education and its members, and the school districts of Davis, Salt Lake City, and Washington, Ut., along with their superintendents. The case will be heard in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah.
Ahead of the upcoming 30-day legislative session, a state lawmaker has introduced the first in an expected series of proposed bills that would prohibit banning books in public libraries.
State Rep. Kathleen Cates (D-Rio Rancho) pre-filed House Bill 26 last week, which, along with prohibiting book banning, would also require publicly run libraries to establish a procedure for people to challenge library materials “believed to be obscene, unlawful or incompatible with the library’s purpose;” prohibit retaliation against library employees; and would make public libraries ineligible for state funding if they do not follow state law.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham will have to explicitly include the issue in her “call” for the session starting Jan. 20, which is otherwise limited to budgetary matters. Michael Coleman, the governor’s communications director, told Source NM via email that the proposal “is one of many that the governor and her staff are reviewing prior to the 30-day session. While a decision about this bill hasn’t been made yet, the governor is staunchly opposed to banning books — a view that she believes most New Mexicans share.”…
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
January 7, 1912 – Charles Addams. (Died 1988.)
Charles Addams. No doubt you’re now thinking of The Addams Family and you’ve certainly reason to do so, but let’s first note some other artistic endeavors of his.
His first published book work in the early Forties was the cover for But Who Wakes The Bugler by Peter DeVries, a silly slice of life novel. He previously sold some sketches to the New Yorker.
Random House soon thereafter contracted him for anthologies of drawings, Drawn and Quartered and Addams and Evil. (Lest you ask, the term “anthology” is from his website.) Four more anthologies, now on Simon & Schuster will follow.
And there was The Chas Addams Mother Goose, really there was. Here’s his cover for it.
Based on his the characters that had appeared in his New Yorker cartoons, 1964 saw The Addams Family television series premiere on ABC. It would star, and I’m just singling them out as the rest was wonderful too, John Astin as Gomez and Carolyn Jones as Morticia. Sweet mercy, they were amazing.
It lasted just two seasons of thirty-minute episodes. Mind you there were sixty-four episodes. Yes, I loved every minute of it. I have watched it at least three times, as recently as several years ago and it as great now as was when I first watched it decades ago.
Halloween with the New Addams Family is a follow-up film with the primary cast back. No idea why the New is in there. We also had The Addams Family, an animated with a voice cast with some of the original performers, yet another Addams Family series (each with these largely had just Sean Astin from the original series).
Think we’re done? Of course there is The Addams Family with Raúl Julia as a most macabre Gomez and Anjelica Huston as Morticia Addams with Carol Struycken playing Lurch for the first of several times. I really, really adore this film as I’ve watched it over and over.
It was followed by the Addams FamilyValues which for some reason that I can’t quite figure out I just don’t adore. Opinions please.
Are we finished? No. The New Addams Family which aired for one nearly a quarter of a century after the original series went off the air after but a single season but lasted an extraordinary sixty-five episodes. I need to see at least the pilot for this.
And then there’s the Addams Family Reunion which had the distinction of Tim Curry as Gomez. I’ve not seen it, so who has? It sounds like an intriguing role for him…
There will be two animated films as well, The Addams Family and The Addams Family 2, neither of which I’ve seen.
Finally let’s talk about licensing. After his death, his wife, Tee Addams, was responsible for getting his works licensed. To quote the website, “The Addams Family, both its individual characters and the Family in its entirety, have a long history of selling products, in print ad campaigns and television commercials alike – from typewriters to Japanese scotch, from designer showcases to perfume, from paper towels to chocolate candies, and all that lies in between.”
So I went looking for use of the characters. I think the best one I found is the claymation one for M&Ms Dark Chocolate which you can see here. (And please don’t ask me about the Wizard of Oz M&Ms commercial. That one is still giving me nightmares.though the FedEx Wizard of Oz commercial is just silly. I mean dropping a FedEx truck on that witch…)
Sarah Michelle Gellar is clearing things up about the Buffy the Vampire Slayer continuation series she’s working on with Chloé Zhao.
Hulu ordered a pilot for the series that Gellar starred in for seven seasons, and in a new interview, revealed that the title of the new show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale.
“It’s not a sequel, it’s not a reboot — it’s a continuation,” Gellar said on the Shut Up, Evan podcast.
Gellar said the series will answer the questions of where Buffy “is now in this world and what is this world that Buffy lives in with her and without her,” adding, “So it’s not a reboot, it’s not picking up with all of the same characters right away. It is not like a sequel… That’s why the name was even important to me — Buffy: New Sunnydale. It’s Buffy, but it’s also something else.”
Although Gellar didn’t reveal anything new, she did say she “learned a hard lesson in life” about the saying, “never say never,” as she was initially opposed to re-taking the character.
“I will eat my words, and I’m OK with that — I learned my lesson,” she said. “I never saw how and why it could be as good [as the original series]. I’m not trying to be better. I just want to hold and honor the memory and what we created. I know sometimes that memory is conflicted for people about how they’re supposed to feel about it, but a lot of people put their blood, sweat, and tears into making what I think is an incredibly great show, and I’m incredibly proud of it.”…
What is a misconception about you that you secretly enjoy?
I think I would offer up the rumor that was going around in about 1960, 1970, that I dressed up in pre-revolutionary French court dress, including the wig, and prowled the streets of Toronto at night in this getup.
Why would you be doing that?
I don’t know, nor do I know where this rumor came from, but it was a rumor.
That’s a really good one.
The only thing I can suspect is that the rumor was supposing I’d been alive since 1780, and was still wearing the same outfit while looking for my prey.
(16) RICH MIXTURE. The Skewer on BBC4 has mixed Donald Trump talking about Venezuela and Caracas, and Stellan Skarsgård playing Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in Dune talking about Arakis and saying “the Emperor is a dangerous man” “a jealous man”, and Spice. “There are Stranger Things…” (Limited to UK viewers or those with a BBC subscription.)
(17) JUSTWATCH TOP 10. JustWatch has released its charts of the Top 10 most-viewed sff films and tv series for December 2025.
(18) TODAY’S TITLE INSPIRATION. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Today’s Scroll title comes via “If I Can’t Sell It, I’ll Keep Sittin’ on It” words’n’music by Andy Razaf and Alex Hill. And probably best known from Ruth Brown’s performing it in the musical review Black and Blue (which we saw, decades ago).
[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Jim Janney, Kat Kourbeti, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
(1) HWA ELECTIONS. The Horror Writers Association held its annual election in September. The candidates for the Offices of Vice President and Treasurer ran unopposed. There were four contested Trustee positions.
Vice President: Lisa Wood (unopposed)
Treasurer: Marc Abbot (unopposed)
Trustees: Incumbents Lisa Kröger, Brian Matthews, and Patrick Barb were re-elected; and a new Trustee, Sèphera Girón, was elected.
(2) BROWSING THE ANTHROPIC SETTLEMENT SITE. Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey reminds authors to look for their names and titles using the “Works Lookup” tool on the Anthropic copyright settlement page. He wondered how many sff writers are on the list – the answer was: plenty!
I don’t have any books to my credit, but those of you who do might want to explore this site. Obviously, the search engine may return some false positives. But among people I know, the thieves have 134 items by Mercedes Lackey on the list, 28 items by Samuel Delany, one by Mary Anne Mohanraj, 27 by Joe Haldeman, 50 by Eric Flint, 68 by G.R.R. Martin, 16 by Robert Asprin (“Yang”), six by Juanita R Coulson, six by Gene DeWeese under his own name, 17 by andrew j offutt under his own name or as John Cleve, one by Erwin Strauss (“Filthy Pierre”), at least five by David Friedman (“Cariadoc of the Bow”), 12 by C. S. Friedman, two for Dave Langford, five by Bob Tucker, etc., etc.
(3) REALLY A PRATCHETT FAN? Rhianna Pratchett is impressed by Rachel Cunliffe’s New Statesman article “Has Kemi Badenoch actually read Terry Pratchett?” (Kemi Badenoch is a British politician who has served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Conservative Party since November 2024.)
It’s important for politicians to have some kind of cultural hinterland. So perhaps we should be reassured by Kemi Badenoch’s revelation on the morning broadcast round that her favourite author is the literary legend Terry Pratchett. The Tory leader apparently has all but one of Pratchett’s 60-odd books, which blend sci-fi and fantasy with searing social commentary. She finds them “very funny”.
Nonetheless, one question remains: has she actually read them?
Post-structural theory dictates that readers may take whatever meaning they like from the content they consume. If Trump and his fans want to play “Born In The USA” at a Maga rally, the fact the song is a scathing critique of the Vietnam War and the arrogance of American leadership shouldn’t stop them. The artist’s own politics or intentions are irrelevant. So Badenoch is perfectly entitled to enjoy the Discworld novels, set in a magical disc-shaped land that flies through space carried by four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle. It makes a change from her previous top reads (the works of Thomas Sowell and Friedrich Hayek’s Road To Serfdom), but if she can find joy in tales of witches and werewolves and a wizarding university with an orangutan for a librarian, all the more power to her.
Yet something about the image of Badenoch settling down with a dog-eared copy of one of Pratchett’s masterpieces doesn’t quite compute. …
…How, for example, would Badenoch interpret the Sam Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness as detailed in Men At Arms, that notes how rich people can afford to make a single purchase of high-quality products (like boots) that last forever, whereas the poor are forced into a cycle of buying cheap goods that wear out quickly and must be frequently replaced, costing them far more over time? Does she see the innate injustice of trapping people in grinding poverty, or does she just think it is good for economic growth to sell as many cheap boots as possible?
Similar points may be made about other Pratchett musings on poverty, power and class dynamics. For instance, the observation in Feet of Clay that “while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions”, seems distinctly un-Tory in its nature. …
…NBC-4 in Ohio writes that Rep. Thaddeus Claggett, who chairs the state’s House Technology and Innovation Committee, has introduced legislation that would stop such unions from occurring. Indeed, not only would House Bill 469 stop the wedding bells for AI-human relationships, it would also stop AI programs from gaining the status of legal personhood. The bill states:
“No AI system shall be recognized as a spouse, domestic partner, or hold any personal legal status analogous to marriage or union with a human or another AI system. Any purported attempt to marry or create a personal union with an AI system is void and has no legal effect.”
Claggett’s interest in banning AI-human unions would appear to have a lot more to do with maintaining exclusive legal rights for humans than it does with stopping people from getting so emotionally attached to their software programs that they decide to tie the knot with them. NBC-4 notes that the goal is to stop AI programs from being able to take on roles that the act of marriage confers upon them—stuff like holding power of attorney or making financial decisions.
“As the computer systems improve in their capacity to act more like humans, we want to be sure we have prohibitions in our law that prohibit those systems from ever being human in their agency,” Claggett told the news outlet. “People need to understand, we’re not talking about marching down the aisle to some tune and having a ceremony with the robot that’ll be on our streets here in a year or two,” he added. “That could happen, but that’s not really what we’re saying.”…
“Breathing Night” by Laura Blackwell; narration by Jean-Paul Garnier; with music by TSG
“Care of Your Electric Sheep” by F.J. Bergmann; narration by Jean-Paul Garnier; with music by Oneirothopter
“Skeletal” by Elad Haber; narration by Jean-Paul Garnier; with music by Phog Masheeen.
Theme music by Dain Luscombe.
(6) APEX MAGAZINE KICKSTARTER UPDATE. Apex Magazine’s 2026 Kickstarter appeal has raised $9,283 of its $20,000 goal in the first two weeks, and continues through October 31. Four of its eight pledge milestones have already been unlocked – for example:
At 10% of our goal, our Kickstarter backers will gain early access to a story slated to be published next year. “Piglet Delivers,” by Maria Haskins, is a delightfully dark story set in the Hundred Acre Wood. This will be exclusive to our Kickstarter backers, so back early so you don’t miss it! UNLOCKED!
Every year, Banned Books Week celebrates the freedom to read and draws attention to the dangers of censorship. It’s a stark reminder that throughout history and even today, books are challenged, restricted, or removed from shelves for their ideas. Reading these works is an act of intellectual defiance, a way to understand different perspectives, and a celebration of the very liberty that censorship seeks to suppress.
Here are some seminal works, all banned at one time or another, that deserve a place on your reading list….
Including the following title, three of the eight books listed are sff – the other two are A Clockwork Orange and Fahrenheit 451.
5. Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Banning: Orwell’s allegorical satire of the Soviet Union was rejected by multiple publishers, including T.S. Eliot, who felt its critique of a wartime ally (Stalin’s Russia) was ill-timed. It was later banned in the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries, as well as in places like the UAE for its themes that contradicted Islamic values. It has also been challenged in US schools for being “anti-communist.”
Why You Should Read It: It is a timeless and devastating fable about how revolutions can be betrayed by tyranny and propaganda. Its warning about the corruption of power is universally applicable and remains as relevant today as it was in 1945.
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
October 15, 1928 — The Passing of Mr. Quin
We have a rarity for you this Scroll, a silent film first shown in the UK ninety-five years ago. The Passing of Mr. Quin was the first British film to be based off a short story by Agatha Christie. Though it did not feature Hercule Poirot, as that film debut wouldn’t happen for another three years.
It is a rather odd story. To wit, Professor Appleby has abused his wife, Eleanor, for years but when he is brutally murdered and her lover, Derek, goes missing under mysterious circumstances, Eleanor suspects the worst as she indeed should.
A mysterious stranger, known mostly as “Mr Quin” appears, and begins to seduce her, but his alcoholism causes him to die quite soon. On his death bed, he confesses that he was Derek all along, and offers her to a rival, who promises to make Eleanor a happy wife.
Not cheerful at all and with just more than a soupçon of misogyny there as well but I don’t think it had any of the anti-Jewish tendencies Christie was known for early on. Need I say that the scriptwriters had their way with Christie’s original story? Well they did.
This silent film was directed by Leslie Alibi. Three years later he directed the first ever depiction of Poirot with Austin Trevor in the lead role. That was not a silent film and Trevor once claimed he was cast as Poirot because he could speak with a French accent. The Poirot film unfortunately is now lost.
Miriam Allen deFord (1888-1975) was a feminist, a suffragette, birth control advocate, journalist, editor, winner of the Mystery Writer’s of America’s Edgar Award, and author of science fiction, mystery, and true crime. Now, at long last, a collection of her science fiction short stories are back in print with One Way & Other Stories.
Mystery writer, Fortean, anti-fascist, feminist of the first generation, and science fiction trailblazer for five decades, Miriam Allen deFord masterfully weaves all of her facets into her stories, bringing a macabre, fantastic tone to her tales: Bradbury meets Hitchcock. She was already the grand dame of science fiction when the genre reached its second peak with the magazine boom of the early ’50s. Her work thus paved and led the way for SF’s Silver Age. Miriam Allen deFord somehow slips under the radar when SF luminaries are listed. With luck, this volume will remedy this oversight. – Gideon Marcus, editor of Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women
Harlan Ellison knew this history and secured a story by deFord for his own milestone Dangerous Visions anthology.
…Struzan first started painting this artwork for Blade Runner‘s original theatrical release in 1982, but it was ultimately passed on, leaving the piece unfinished for nearly two decades. When Ridley Scott returned to Blade Runner to release the director’s cut of the film, he went back to Struzan to ask if the piece could finally be completed, giving it the spotlight it deserved….
(12) YODA IN INTERIOR DECORATOR COLORS. [Item by Steven French.] This will already be familiar to many but I for one did not know that Yoda was ‘partly inspired’ by Albert Einstein! So says the Guardian: “Blue, Yoda originally was, archival Star Wars sources reveal”.
“You must unlearn what you have learned,” Jedi master Yoda instructed his stubborn apprentice, Luke Skywalker. And now Star Wars fans may have to do the same after confirmation that the beloved fictional alien was very nearly blue, or even purple.
Reviews of archival sources – and new testimony from a special effects makeup artist who worked on the first Yoda puppets – suggest film-makers made a decision late in the development process to switch the character’s skin colour to green.
Had producers of The Empire Strikes Back closely followed the final screenplay, then Yoda would have been “bluish”.
In the text, Luke and his droid companion, R2-D2, are surprised after being confronted by a small creature who appears on the swamp-covered planet of Dagobah. “Mysteriously standing right in front of Luke is a strange, bluish creature, not more than two feet tall. The wizened little thing is dressed in rags,” reads the screenplay….
…In simple terms, the creators of AI incentivize them to guess rather than admit they don’t know the answer — which might be a good strategy on an exam, but is outright dangerous when giving high-stakes advice about topics like medicine or law.
While OpenAI claimed in an accompanying blog post that “there is a straightforward fix” — tweaking evaluations to “penalize confident errors more than you penalize uncertainty and give partial credit for appropriate expressions of uncertainty” — one expert is warning that the strategy could pose devastating business realities.
In an essay for The Conversation, University of Sheffield lecturer and AI optimization expert Wei Xing argued that the AI industry wouldn’t be economically incentivized to make these changes, as doing so could dramatically increase costs.
Worse yet, having an AI repeatedly admit it can’t answer a prompt with a sufficient degree of confidence could deter users, who love a confidently positioned answer, even if it’s ultimately incorrect.
Even if ChatGPT admitted that it doesn’t know the answer just 30 percent of the time, users could quickly become frustrated and move on, Xing argued….
In science fiction and fantasy circles Vigil Finlay is quite rightly held in high esteem. But because most of his output appeared in pulp magazines between the 1930s and 50s his remarkable paintings and monochrome line drawings haven’t really attracted a wider legion of admirers. I hope this video will make some new converts among viewers of the channel.
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Michael J. “Orange Mike” Lowrey, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew (not Werdna).]
If you want to make me love your work, take a scene or a character who could have been flat or cliche or basic, and write them a wildly new direction. In Murderbot, to my surprise and delight, it was what the Weitzes did with the character of Dr. Gurathin. In the books, Gurathin is the one member of the PresAux team who’s a little more suspicious of their assigned SecUnit. He clocks that Murderbot is acting weird, and he questions it in front of the rest of the group to figure out whether they’re in danger. Once they figure out that it’s autonomous, he needles Murderbot occasionally just to make sure it’s not going to go rogue and kill them all. This is brave of him, from a certain point of view, but also stupid, and Dr. Mensah mostly seems to be annoyed when he does it.
When I learned that David Dastmalchian had been cast in the Murderbot adaptation, I figured he was playing Dr. Gurathin, and that Gurathin’s role was going to be expanded a bit. My first thought was that he would be the Dr. Smith of the group, which would have been fun, but nowhere near as meaningful as the path they took….
Advocacy organization EveryLibrary has shared some of its latest research on the status of library-related policymaking and patrons’ library usage across the U.S. In a summary titled “Codifying Censorship or Reclaiming Rights? The State-by-State 2025 Legislative Landscape for Libraries,” EveryLibrary compiles an eye-opening stack of bills that have been passed, enacted, vetoed, or left to wither on the vine. The document also details how coalitions are forming in support of intellectual freedom nationwide.
The legislative update concludes that library advocates “must actively build coalitions across our own sectors,” including outreach to “legitimate conservative or libertarian organizations.” EveryLibrary observes that coalitions “tend to skew older,” necessitating outreach to Gen Z free speech activists too. The emphasis on expanding partnerships echoes a pillar of the American Library Association’s new strategic plan.
Separately, in this year’s Freckle Project report, supported by EveryLibrary and generated annually since 2019, consumer survey data indicates that library visits and print circulation have declined more than 50% since 2011, while digital circulation has risen from 8% to 45% in the past decade. Though digital is up, the report also attests that patron demand for “more nonfiction and more backlist” print titles is going unmet.
The first six months of this year has brought 133 “negative bills” in 33 states, threatening public libraries, school libraries, librarianship, and the rights of readers, according to EveryLibrary’s “Codifying Censorship” white paper. Concurrently, another 76 bills in 32 states aim to protect or extend library services and intellectual freedom. In all of 2024, only 121 such “bad bills” came under consideration, and only 36 right to read bills were proposed….
(3) MEET ISIS ASARE. SFWA’s new Executive Director Isis Asare, announced last month, is featured in today’s Shelf Awareness.
Isis Asare has been named executive director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. She is the fifth executive director and the first African-American executive director of the association, and will work with SFWA board president Kate Ristau and operations director Russell Davis (the previous interim executive director) to implement the strategic direction set by the SFWA board of directors.
SFWA described Asare as “a queer Afrofuturist, technology entrepreneur, Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia alum, and the CEO/founder of Sistah Scifi, the first Black-owned bookstore focused on science fiction and fantasy in the U.S.,” which is located in Oakland, Calif. She was honored as Norwescon 47’s special guest of honor and served as executive director of Aunt Lute Books, the nonprofit press that has a history of championing underrepresented authors.
Asare aims, SFWA wrote, to “cultivate a space at SFWA where more conversation can happen, and where consensus on next steps can be achieved through a thoughtful inclusion of different points of view. SFWA is home to both traditional and transformative forms of SFF, and that wide array of approaches to the genre is not a source of schism. Rather, it is the rich foundation of creative practice on which the next phase of our advocacy journey–and our community uplift–will unfold.”
Asare said, “Continuing the legacy of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association is a true honor. It was a privilege to present the Nebula Award for Best Novel to John Wiswell for Someone You Can Build a Nest In, and I cheered as A.W. Prihandita became the first Indonesian to win–or even be nominated for–the prestigious Nebula Award for Best Novelette, for ‘Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being.’ It is a joy to celebrate the work of speculative fiction writers that inspire all readers to imagine futures beyond our wildest dreams.”
…Dr. Mullaney’s mania for clunky text appliances began in 2007, when he was preparing a talk on the disappearance of Chinese characters and found himself contemplating the disintegration of everything.
Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language — around 100,000, by some estimates — there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce. They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost.
Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Dr. Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole.
It would have been physically impossible to build a typing machine to include all the characters that were historically written out by hand, he thought. Some characters must have made the cut, while others were left behind. He sat back in his chair and asked himself: Could he recall ever having seen a Chinese typewriter?
Two hours later, he was lying on the floor of his office, looking at patent documents for such devices. There had been, over the last century and a half, dozens of different Chinese typewriters made. Each one was an inventor’s take on how to incorporate thousands of characters into a machine without making it unusable — a physical manifestation of their ideas about language. Never plentiful, the typewriters were now increasingly rare, gone the way of most obsolete technology.
Dr. Mullaney was fascinated.
That evening turned into months of research, which turned into years of searching, as Chinese typewriters became one of his areas of historical expertise.
He cold-called strangers and left voice mail messages for private collectors, people whom he suspected, from faint traces left on the internet, of having typewriters. He pored over Ancestry.com, looking for the next of kin of the last known owner of a particular machine. He called museums and asked, “Do you, by any chance, have a Chinese typewriter?”
Sometimes, they said yes. A private museum in Delaware happened to have a surviving IBM Chinese typewriter, of which only two or three were ever made. Someone at a Chinese Christian church in San Francisco got in touch with him to say they owned a typewriter that they were trying to get rid of. Dr. Mullaney took it off their hands.
Then there was the fellow in Northern California who had held on to two Japanese typewriters, as rare as the Chinese varieties, for some decades. “He looked at me and said, ‘Is your trunk big enough?’” Dr. Mullaney recalled. It was, just.
Dr. Mullaney took home those typewriters, and the typewriter in London and others like them, because it had begun to dawn on him that he might soon be one of the only people alive who knew what these machines were, who really understood their stories. He might be the last thing standing between these machines and oblivion….
(5) IN THE DAYS OF ‘KIM’. Francis Hamit has accumulated over a thousand books in his Intelligence and Espionage Research Library. At his new Substack he will be reviewing some of them for his “Intelligence Bookshelf” feature – which will be a free feature, not behind the paywall. Hamit’s starting with Spying For Empire: The Great Game In Central And South Asia, 1757 to 1947 by Robert Johnson (Greenhill Books, 2006) in “The Real World Spies In Kipling’s KIM”.
… Spying For Empire explores the reality behind Kipling’s novel, beginning with the British conquest of India by both military and diplomatic means. Spies were needed for tactical military intelligence, but also to explore the lands beyond the frontier. The main adversary then, as now, was Russia, with an expanding empire of its own. Between lay Persia (now Iran), Afghanistan, Tibet, and the edge of China, another empire. Lone agents, often in disguise, were posted in market towns to gather information and hired correspondents known as “pundits” to write reports that were sent back to London….
…James Gunn’s new take on “Superman,” in theaters now, has its fair share of flight scenes and they’re all convincingly done. But the movie’s mission statement has more to do with a pure spirit than a special effect: In the middle of one frenetic action sequence, after noticing a tiny squirrel is in danger of being crushed by debris, Superman leaps into action to rush the animal out of harm’s way.
Sure, you’ll believe a man could fly. But would you believe that man would go to the trouble of saving a squirrel?
“The squirrel moment is probably one of the most debated,” Gunn told me recently. In early test screenings, some audiences were confused about why Superman (David Corenswet) would prioritize a tiny critter when all of Metropolis was in jeopardy. But to Gunn, that was exactly the point: His cleareyed, upbeat incarnation of Superman prizes saving every life, human or not.
“A lot of people were anti-squirrel. They thought it was too much,” he said. “And I think it really comes down to, do you like squirrels or not?”
Gunn’s own answer to that question should come as no surprise, given the empathy he extended to a raccoon in his “Guardians of the Galaxy” trilogy.
“I love squirrels,” he said. “If a monster’s tail was coming at the squirrel, I would save the squirrel if I could. I’ve done it before: Every day, I’m honking at squirrels on the road.”
Even though he stripped the squirrel moment from one early cut of the film, Gunn ultimately decided that keeping it was fundamental to understanding his main character, who had been portrayed in a much darker fashion by Henry Cavill in recent films like “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” When Corenswet’s Superman saves the squirrel, the message couldn’t be clearer: This is not that.
(7) TALES OF GALACTIC PEST CONTROL FROM AMAZING SELECTS. The containment fields are holding, the exterminator bots are standing by, and the newest anthology from Amazing Selects has officially landed! Tales of Galactic Pest Control is now available for purchase.
It’s crawling with weirdness (in the best way). Edited by science fiction legends David Gerrold (The Trouble with Tribbles) and Tom Easton (Analog), this one-of-a-kind anthology features 34 original stories about the unglamorous, underappreciated, and utterly essential job of pest control… in space.
List of authors: Stephen Antczak, Sarah Arnette, Lauren Taylor Bak, Marleen S. Barr, Charles Barouch, Reginald Bretnor, Pete Carter, Jenny Perry Carr, Stephen Chappell, Dave Creek, Tom Easton, David Gerrold, Galen Gower, Dana Gricken, Nissa Harlow, Henry Herz, Liam Hogan, S. E. M. Ishida, Leonid Kaganov, John Leahy, Edward M. Lerner, Nicola Lombardi, Brian K. Lowe, Jeff Parsons, Matt Rouse, Steven H. Silver, Al Sirois, Sarah Smith, Ryk E. Spoor, Allen Steele, Ian Randal Strock, Alex Shvartsman, Matt Thompson, Joe Weintraub, Jay Werkheiser
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Agatha Christie’s TheSecret Adversary (1923)
One hundred and two years ago, Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary was published in the United Kingdom by The Bodley Head, a young company then just thirty-six years of age. The novel introduces Tommy and Tuppence who will be featured in three more novels and a collection of short stories. The five Tommy and Tuppence books would span Christie’s writing career.
The story here is that the Great War is over, and jobs are almost impossible to find, so childhood friends Tommy Beresford and Prudence “Tuppence” Cowley decide to start their own business as The Young Adventurers. In this novel, they are hired for a job that leads them into many dangerous situations, and meeting allies as well, including an American millionaire in search of his cousin.
The critics liked it. The Times Literary Supplement said it was “a whirl of thrilling adventures” and the Daily Chronicle was very happy with it: “It’s an excellent yarn and the reader will find it as impossible as we did to put it aside until the mystery has been fathomed.”
It would be the second Christie work to be turned into a film as it would be made in Germany by the Orplid Film company in 1929 as a silent movie which ran for 76 minutes. Thought to be lost, it wasn’t and was shown at the National Film Theatre in 2001.
The novel was adapted twice for television, in 1983 and in 2014. Significant changes were made to story. A graphic novel was done. Several theatre productions were staged. It’s been made into an audiobook, errr, at least twenty-three times according to what I see over at Audible.
‘I kept it a huge, dark secret,” says Matt Michaud. “I tried to push people away. I wouldn’t call it shame. I wasn’t sure if it was right or wrong. I wasn’t sure if it was something I could share with other people.”
It is curious to hear these words spoken at the outset of a disarmingly sweet documentary. What kind of perversion, or even crime, is twentysomething Michaud confessing to in his own living room? A glimpse behind him provides a clue to his obsession and anxiety: displayed on a table is a collection of toy locomotives and model railway books. And the centrepiece is a model of Thomas the Tank Engine.
In one of his letters to the Corinthians, St Paul wrote that when he became a man he put away childish things. Brannon Carty’s documentary, called An Unlikely Fandom: The Impact of Thomas the Tank Engine, is a rebuke to that philosophy. It celebrates the men (and the fans Carty interviews are overwhelmingly male) who have found friendship, community and creativity in what, as far as I can judge, is the most wholesome of subcultures.
Yet a sense of shame pervades Thomas the Tank Engine fandom. “Aside from a handful of people,” says Carty, “no one’s really out and proud about it – because it’s socially unacceptable, especially here in the States.” Why? “I think Thomas gets looped in with Sesame Street and other preschool TV shows over here, whereas in the UK it’s seen more as a children’s show.”
(11) APPROPRIATE. The actor who plays Freddy Krueger will be added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Halloween.
Tesla enthusiasts began lining up outside Elon Musk’s long-awaited Tesla Diner & Drive-In in Hollywood early Monday, eager to get their first glimpse of what’s inside.
But with little clarity about when the gates would open, some of Musk’s most ardent fans waited hours before they were finally allowed in at 4:20 p.m., a classic reference Musk often makesto marijuana.
Built in the bustling Hollywood location where a Shakey’s Pizza used to be, the retro-futuristic diner, which also doubles as a drive-in movie theater, is filled with Tesla technology — including its humanoid robot, Optimus — and merch, such as Cybertruck-themed food containers.
The menu, created by chef Eric Greenspan,featured diner staples, such as fried chicken & waffles, grilled cheese and tuna melts, as well as some themed items, such as the “Tesla Burger” with “Electric Sauce.” Prices range from $4 for a side of fries to $15 for biscuits & red gravy.
As they entered the facility, guests were greeted by servers on roller skates, who rolled up with ice cream samples. The drive-in projector played the 1960s animated sitcom “The Jetsons,” which depicted life in the 21st century and featured flying cars and a housekeeper robot. Guests could order items from a kiosk at the counter….
(13) THE GRAVE OF MISFIT GAMES. Wikipedia invites us to remember the “Atari video game burial”. File 770 followed that story step by step. Here’s the whole journey in one article.
… Excavation started on April 26, 2014 as an open event to the public. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial designer Howard Scott Warshaw, Ready Player One author Ernest Cline, and film director Zak Penn attended the event as part of a documentary about the burial,[43] as did local residents such as Armando Ortega, a city official who was reportedly one of the original children to raid the dump in 1983. Ortega stated that although he and his friends found dozens of quality games, they gave the E.T. cartridges away because the “game sucked … you couldn’t finish it”. James Heller, the former Atari manager in charge of the original burial, was also on hand at the excavation. Heller revealed that he had originally ordered the site to be covered in concrete. Contrary to the urban legend that claims millions of cartridges were buried there, Heller stated that only 728,000 cartridges were buried.
Remnants of E.T. and other Atari games were discovered in the early hours of the excavation, as reported by Microsoft’s Larry Hryb. A team of archaeologists was present to examine and document the Atari material unearthed by excavation machinery: Andrew Reinhard (American School of Classical Studies at Athens), Richard Rothaus (Trefoil Cultural and Environmental), Bill Caraher (University of North Dakota), with support from video game historian Raiford Guins (Stony Brook University) and historian Bret Weber (University of North Dakota)…
…The award was launched in 2008 and has been held every year since apart from during the Covid-19 pandemic. Last year, Mark Simmons won for his nautical one-liner “I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship but I bottled it”. The shortlist of jokes was chosen by a panel of UK comedy critics and comedians, then submitted anonymously to 2,000 members of the public who were asked to pick their favourites. Upon winning last year’s prize, Simmons said: “I needed some good news as I was just fired from my job marking exam papers, can’t understand it, I always gave 110%.”…
…Lorna Rose Treen, the second woman to win the award, triumphed in 2023 for the joke “I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah.”…
… Researchers in the U.S. and Germany have tested a global earthquake detection and alert system that makes use of a device many people already own, including in less developed countries—Android smartphones. According to their study, published today in the journal Science, the Android Earthquake Alerts (AEA) system’s efficacy rivaled traditional seismic networks in its ability to detect seismic activity and deliver alerts.
“The global adoption of smartphone technology places sophisticated sensing and alerting capabilities in people’s hands, in both the wealthy and less-wealthy portions of the planet,” the researchers, including Richard Allen from the University of California in Berkeley’s Seismological Laboratory, wrote in the study. “Although the accelerometers in these phones are less sensitive than the permanent instrumentation used in traditional seismic networks, they can still detect the ground motions and building response in hazardous earthquakes.”
According to the study, 70% of the world’s smartphones are Android phones, which by default come with the aforementioned sensing and alerting capabilities. From 2021 to 2024, the AEA system detected an average of 312 earthquakes per month across 98 countries. The earthquakes had a magnitude between 1.9 and 7.8, and the system alerted users of earthquakes at or over a magnitude of 4.5, averaging around 60 events and 18 million alerts per month.
The AEA system also collected user feedback, revealing that 85% of users who received alerts experienced shaking, with 36% receiving the alert before, 28% during, and 23% after the shaking began….
(16) GRUMPY AND DOC. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Former Doctor Who script writer of nine episodes, Mark Gatiss (who helped bring the show back) has tried to support the current season of the show stating that ‘grumpy old’ fans need to realize that the present-day show is not for them but a younger audience. He said that old fans have fallen in to a ‘space-time trap’.
Right. Let’s get this straight. The new season is aimed at new younger fans and so older fans should not complain. And this explains the UK viewing figures for Gatwa in 2025 halving compared to the three-episode Tennant reprise in 2022, exactly how!???
Mark Gatiss must have a new show to promote, because he’s been making a lot of headlines lately. Now he’s turned his attention to calling out “grumpy old Doctor Who fans” and warning that nostalgia is holding the show back.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Radio Times, the writer and actor looked back on his time working on the series, highlighting the importance of looking forward.
“The actual process of trying to make a modern show for a new audience is not about nostalgia,” Gatiss explained. “And I think that’s the great difference. You have to get right. Why is this going to work now? It doesn’t really matter what worked for Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. It’s about now.”
Gatiss, who wrote nine episodes for the revived series, noted the recurring temptation for both writers and fans to fall back on the familiar…
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Francis Hamit, 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 Randall M.]
Online Review by Francis Hamit: Imagine learning the subtle art of mystery writing from the best-selling author in history. This is what BBC Maestro, the online teaching unit of BBC purports to offer, and it pretty much succeeds. While aimed at beginners, there is much that even hardened, cynical writers with decades of experience in a multitude of writing forms can learn.
Agatha Christie wrote her best-selling novels for a specific audience using a formula that relied on specific tools and techniques. This is not a course for “literary” high culture aspirants, but for people who simply want to create a short, fun read. It is also not for “fanfic” writers who want to play in others literary yards. It demands, within the strictures of the detective novel form, originality and creativity – and admits that many plots and their aspects may take years to become fully formed.
The illusion that you are getting first-hand, one-on-one instruction from Dame Agatha herself is accomplished with a blend of traditional theatre and computer-enhanced voice and text. Christie, played by British actress Vivien Keene, sits at a desk in a library, and speaks directly to you. There are eleven lectures running between ten and fifteen minutes each, with printed course notes and exercises. It is self-paced and can be replayed as many times as needed. All of the words are Christie’s, replicated in an approximation of her voice approved by her family.
Each lesson covers a particular topic starting with “The Rules of the Game” and moving on through “Ideas”, “Plots”, Characters”, “Detectives”, “Setting”, “Structure”, “Clues”, “Resolution”, and “Conclusion”.
I played the entire thing in one sitting – and found myself taking a lot of notes and thinking about how I can apply it to my own writing. There is a lot of value for any fiction writer regardless of genre, and the on-screen illusion that you are being taught by Dame Agatha herself holds up. The voice and combination of real world and computer-controlled image and voice both work well. It did for me, and I watched and wrote about Virtual Reality for years.
At $89 this is money well spent and I went for a one-year subscription so I can access and review some of the other Maestro writing courses. Those will be delivered in due time. Maestro link: https://www.bbcmaestro.com/courses
Francis Hamit: If you enjoyed this review and want to support my writing just buy a copy of my latest novel Starmen. I am also building a Substack.
If there was one author Henry Bott disliked more than any other, it was Isaac Asimov.
Bott, a book reviewer for the science fiction publication Imagination, had spent years lobbing insults at the respected writer and his work. Of Asimov’s Second Foundation, published in 1953, Bott wrote that Asimov was “neither a writer nor a storyteller” and could churn out only “elephantine prose.” Second Foundation was, Bott observed, “not a good book.”
After another seemingly personal review followed, this one for The Caves of Steel, an irritated Asimov penned a fiery retort in which he referred to Bott as “The Nameless One” in the fan publication Peon [PDF]. More volleys followed, and Asimov continued to take a shelling.
But when Asimov picked up the February 1955 issue of Imagination, he was amused to read Bott’s enthusiastic review of Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, a spirited sci-fi adventure yarn that was part of an ongoing series by writer Paul French. The story, Bott effused, was gripping and worthy of a reader’s attention, though he felt it fell short of the young adult works by Robert Heinlein.
Asimov put the magazine down and began typing a letter to Imagination. This time, he would not attempt to argue with Bott. “I am sure that Mr. French, on reading this review, would feel quite good about the kind words and would feel no rancor at all about the eminently fair criticism,” Asimov wrote. “In fact, I am sure he would say he does his best to make his juveniles as good as Mr. Heinlein’s, and that perhaps he will improve as he continues to try.
“I am positive that Mr. French would say all this. The reason I am positive is that Paul French and Isaac Asimov are the same person.”…
It reminds me of the time Jerry Pournelle told us about a fan letter John W. Campbell received on the issue of Analog that contained one story by Pournelle and another under his pseudonym Wade Curtis. The fan’s verdict was: “Keep Wade Curtis but get rid of that Jerry Pournelle!”
(2) A POEM FOR BĴO.
By John Hertz: (reprinted from Vanamonde 1643) Learning that Bĵo Trimble was in the West Los Angeles Veterans Home, registered as Betty Trimble (Bĵois short for Betty JoAnne), I sent her this.
Before others knew, Enterprise was in your mind; Talking, drawing, you Took what could be to what was; Yet humility, yet strength.
The ĵin Bĵois an Esperanto device indicating pronunciation bee•joe; her name has sometimes alas been written Bjo {i.e. without the circumflex over the j) – which, when I first saw it, I thought must be some Nordic name pronounced b’yo; she served in the United States Navy; the poem is an acrostic (read down the first letters of each line) in unrhymed 5-7-5-7-7-syllable lines like Japanese tanka.
(3) BAFTA TV AWARDS. Genre got totally shut out of the 2025 BAFTA awards (complete list of winners at the link).
One show of genre adjacent interest won the Specialist Factual category – Atomic People (BBC), which gathers the testimony of some of the last ‘Hibakusha’, survivors of the two atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan in 1945.
(4) PARTS NOT UNKNOWN. In “A Tolkienian miscellany at Kalimac’s corner, David Bratman says another posthumous Tolkien publication is coming out this year.
If you’ve heard a rumor that yet another new book by JRRT is coming out, it’s true. The Bovadium Fragments will be appearing in the UK in October and in the US in November. “First-ever publication” as it says in the blurb is true, but “previously unknown”? Not a chance. As with some other posthumous Tolkien publication touted as “previously unknown,” its existence was first revealed in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography nearly 50 years ago. The Bovadium Fragments is mentioned there in a footnote as “a parable of the destruction of Oxford (Bovadium) by the motores manufactured by the Daemon of Vaccipratum (a reference to Lord Nuffield and his motor-works at Cowley) which block the streets, asphyxiate the inhabitants, and finally explode.” Which makes it something of a pair to an almost incoherently angry alliterative poem about motorcycles, written probably over 40 years earlier, which is no. 63 in the Collected Poems published last year, and which I think was previously unknown.
Amelia Nierenberg, who reported from London, considers “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” to be one of the greatest books ever written.
Agatha Christie is dead. But Agatha Christie also just started teaching a writing class.
“I must confess,” she says, in a cut-glass English accent, “that this is all rather new to me.”
The literary legend, who died in 1976, has been tapped to teach a course with BBC Maestro, an online lecture series similar to MasterClass. Christie, alongside dozens of other experts, is there for any aspiring writer with 79 pounds (about $105) to spare.
She has been reanimated with the help of a team of academic researchers — who wrote a script using her writings and archival interviews — and a “digital prosthetic” made with artificial intelligence and then fitted over a real actor’s performance.
“We are not trying to pretend, in any way, that this is Agatha somehow brought to life,” Michael Levine, the chief executive of BBC Maestro, said in a phone interview. “This is just a representation of Agatha to teach her own craft.”
The course’s release coincides with a heated debate about the ethics of artificial intelligence. In Britain, a potential change to copyright law has frightened artists who fear it will allow their work to be used to train A.I. models without their consent. In this case, however, there is no copyright issue: Christie’s family, who manage her estate, are fully on board.
For the past fifty years it has been normal to assume that JRR Tolkien disliked (probably because he was jealous of) Charles Williams; and that Williams did not influence Tolkien’s writing.
Despite that Tolkien personally claimed such things in writing; none of these are strictly correct.
Tolkien was good friends with Williams, during Williams’s life – it was only some years after Williams died, when Tolkien became aware of some aspects of CW’s biography, that Tolkien turned against Williams and began to make misleading statements to play-down their friendship.
The denial of Williams’s influence on Tolkien is more complex. As a generalization, it is true to say that the two men had different minds, aims, and literary styles – and there is no striking influence of Williams noticeable in the works Tolkien published during his lifetime – especially not The Lord of the Rings.
But more can be said….
… It seems to me very likely that Tolkien’s writing of The Notion Club Papers was a direct consequence of the death of Charles Williams.
The Williams derivation is seen firstly in the origins of the NCPs as a playful “alter-ego” discussion group, explicitly referencing The Inklings, read to The Inklings as work-in-progress in instalments, and with characters loosely-based on the post-Williams membership.
In this respect I regard it as significant that there is no Notion Club member who is described as based-on the just-deceased Charles. It is as if the NCPs was a tribute to Charles’s memory, and as such to include CW among the somewhat facetious caricatures the NCP membership would have been disrespectful and altogether inappropriate. …
…Before I get into the novels proper, I feel it behoves me to address the perennial Discworld question: where to begin? I am starting at the beginning here and going in sequence for two reasons: (1) I want to be systematic and not haphazard about this, and (2) I want to watch Discworld develop and grow as I go.
But then, this is not the ideal way to approach Discworld if you’re just starting.
There are forty-one novels in total, but even though we refer to the Discworld series, it’s really not. Not a series, I mean … not in the sense of being serial, at any rate, wherein each instalment picks up where the last left off, and to have a grasp on the overarching story you must begin at the beginning and read in sequence.
That is not how Discworld works. As I’ve noted in this space previously, when asked by newbies what Discworld novel to start with, the lion’s share of Sir Terry devotees emphatically recommend against starting at the beginning…
Lockett follows with a chart of all the books that looks just one step away from being a Tom Gauld cartoon.
(8) MEMORY LANE.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
So Weird series (1999)
The considerable joy of doing these anniversaries is finding these series that I’ve never heard of. So it is with a Disney series called So Weird which ran for sixty-five episodes. So Weird could best be described as a younger version of the X-Files and it far darker than anything which was on Disney when it debuted in 1999. It lasted for just three seasons.
It was centered around teen Fiona “Fi” Phillips (played by Cara DeLizia) who toured with her rocker mom Molly Phillips (played by Mackenzie Phillips). They kept running into strange and very unworldly things. For the third and final season, she was replaced by Alexz Johnson playing Annie Thelen after the other actress gets the jones to see if she could make in Hollywood. (Well she didn’t.)
The story is that one of the characters, Annie, while visiting an Egyptian museum encounters a cat who once belonged to Egyptian queen that now wants her very much missed companion back. Yes, both the cat and the princess are either immortal or of the undead.
The writer of this episode, Eleah Horwitz, had little genre background having written just three Slider episodes and a previous one in this series. He’d later be a production assistant on ALF.
Now if you went looking to watch So Weird’s “Meow” on the Disney service after it debuted, that service which is not Disney+ originally pulled the second season within days of adding the series but returned it a month later within any reason for having pulled it. The show has never been released on DVD.
However the first five episodes in the first season of the series were novelized and published by Disney Press as mass-market paperbacks, beginning with Family Reunion by Cathy East Dubowski. (I know the Wiki page says Parke Godwin wrote it but the Amazon illustration of the novel cover shows her name. So unless this is one of his pen names, it is not by him.) You can find the other four that were novelized in the Amazon app by simply doing So Weird + the episode name. No they are not available at the usual suspects.
I didn’t find hardly any critics who reviewed it, hardly surprising given it was on the Disney channel but those that did really liked it including John Dougherty at America: The Jesuit Review: “As a kid, my favorite show was about death. Well, not just death: it was also about faith, sacrifice and trying to make sense of life’s ineffable mysteries. Strangest of all, I watched it on the Disney Channel. ‘So Weird’ ran for three seasons from 1999 to 2001. It was Disney’s attempt to create a kid-friendly version of ‘The X-Files,’ tapping into an in-vogue fascination with ghosts, alien encounters and other paranormal phenomena. In practice, it became something more: a meditation on mystery and mortality.”
I think I’ll leave it there.
For those of you with Disney+, it’s streaming there.
…In many of your works, Imagination or the Elsewhere often invades Reality. We see this, obviously, in Long London, Providence, Promethea, the League, the story about Thunderman in Illuminations, and so on. Often the world of Imagination influences or interferes, when it does not directly override, the Real one. Could you elaborate on the interconnected relationship between Reality and Imagination, and how your concept of Idea-Space and Magic is linked to it?
Alan Moore: I have to start by carefully defining what is meant by the term ‘reality’. It seems to me that what you most probably mean is material reality. My own position is that while we are indeed apparently part of and surrounded by a material reality (I say apparently because we all compose material reality moment by moment on the loom of our perceptions and are unable to prove that it is actually there, this being the hard problem of consciousness), we are just as evidently part of and immersed in the immaterial reality of our own thought processes. Since material science, which rightly requires empirical testing and repeatable experiments, cannot measure or meaningfully investigate human consciousness, it has tended to argue away consciousness as a ‘ghost in the machine’, and to insist that the only true reality is the material reality for which it has metrics and theories. This has percolated down into the ordinary person on the street’s default worldview, where to say that something is only happening in someone’s mind is to say that it isn’t happening, and by extension that our thoughts and inner workings are not real. Now, thanks to the hard problem of consciousness referred to earlier, while I cannot conclusively state that everybody else’s thoughts and inner workings are real, I can assure you that mine definitely are. In fact, again thanks to the hard problem of consciousness, my thoughts and inner workings are the only things in all existence that I know to be real. The imagination is the sole phenomenon that we know not to be imaginary….
(11) YESTERDAY’S SCALZI BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION. That was clever.
Horatio and his paid intern Jojo wish author @scalzi.com a happy birthday!#Caturday #StarterVillain #HoratioTheCat #JojoThePirateCat
As FrazettaGirls designer and project manager I am proud to invite you to join me at the Coffee table for an exciting unboxing and demonstration of the upcoming Frazetta Icon Collectibles Action Figure, Conan The Barbarian!
(13) WHAT IS THE WEIRDEST FILM EVER MADE? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff over at Media Death Cultasks this question over three days of weed-enhanced film watching. He comes up with a few recommendations and also asks cult members to provide their suggestions in the ‘comments’ (worth having a skim). In the process, he scares himself sh*tless and has a nervous breakdown… But he comes up with some interesting choices including a previous film by the folk behind the Hugo-winning Everything, Everywhere, All at Once and also the best killer tyre film of all time. You can see the 21-minute video here:
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Paul Weimer.]
