26 The Scroll Is A Harsh Pixel

Posted on March 25, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) META & GOOGLE LOSE SOCIAL MEDIA ADDICTION LAWSUIT. This morning Deadline reported “Meta & Google Found Negligent In Social Media Addiction Trial In L.A.”. The headline was written before the punitive damages were determined by the jury, which were announced later today.

After more than a week of deliberations, a Los Angeles jury Wednesday delivered a potential game-changing verdict of negligence against social media giants Meta and Google for creating addictive products and platforms that harm minors….

… At the core of both the California and New Mexico trials is the premise that social media and its algorithms and sticky attraction have harsh consequences that include inducing thoughts of suicide, depression, sleep disruption, eating disorders, body dysmorphia and anxiety.

Today’s non-unanimous verdict in L.A. and the one out of Santa Fe on March 24 are a long way from settled.

While the data harvesting that propels tech companies was left relatively unexplored in the trials, it is undeniable that both verdicts put the business models of social media platforms on shaky ground. At this point, whether this ends up like the tobacco cases of the 1990s, increased guardrails of use and alterations in algorithms and other designs are near certain to be imposed in one way or another. Once the appeals are launched, regulatory spotlights are likely to be ramped up with big-bucks settlements paid out to keep the courts and lawmakers out of the matters….

But after the punitive damages were announced here is how Deadline saw it — “Meta & Google Get Less Than A Financial Slap On The Wrist As L.A. Social Media Trial Jury Orders Tech Giants To Pay Out Just $6M In Total Damages”.

…Pinpointing the social media companies as predators and providers of addictive algorithm assault against minors, the breakdown on the punitive damages essentially equaled the compensatory damages, with $2.1 million for Meta and $900,000 for YouTube.

The implications of this verdict and the $375 million one out of New Mexico on Tuesday will be debated in and out of the courts for ages, as will the moral, business and technological blast radiuses. Meta has already made it clear it plans to appeal both cases.

To that, as lawyers, plaintiff K.G.M., parents and more awaited the punitive damages number from the L.A. jury this afternoon, Meta offered an updated statement on the outcome of the trial.

“We respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal,” spokesperson Andy Stone said. “Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.”

For a larger financial perspective, think on this when you ponder both that $6 million in L.A. and $375 million in Santa Fe: Meta raked in $201 billion in profits last year….

(2) COLBERT LOTR MOVIE UNVEILED. “New ‘Lord of the Rings’ Movie From Stephen Colbert in Development” reports Variety.

Warner Bros. has revealed that Stephen Colbert and his son are developing a brand new “Lord of the Rings” movie. The announcement came Tuesday night via the studio’s various social media accounts.

The video announcement opened with “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson giving a quick update about the next film in the fantasy franchise: Andy Serkis’ “The Hunt for Gollum.” Jackson said of the project, which is set for release in 2027: “Andy is doing a terrific job. It’s looking amazing. The script is coming together really well and I think it’s going to be a really good film.”

Jackson then teased his “very special partner” who will help develop the next film after “The Hunt for Gollum,” titled “The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past.” That partner is none other than “The Late Show” host Colbert, who Jackson patched in through a video call. Colbert, a vocal Tolkien fanatic, then explained that the plot of his movie will come from chapters of “The Fellowship of the Ring” that didn’t make it into Jackson’s 2001 adaptation.

“You know what the books mean to me, and what your films mean to me,” Colbert told Jackson. “But the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in [‘The Fellowship of the Ring’] that y’all never developed into the first movie back in the day. It’s basically the chapter ‘Three Is Company’ [Chapter III] through ‘Fog on the Barrow-Downs’ [Chapter VIII]. And I thought, ‘Oh, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?’”

The late-night host said that after coming up with this idea, he discussed it with his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, and worked out a “framing device” for the film. After the groundwork was laid, Colbert called Jackson, and over the last two years, they’ve worked with screenwriter Philippa Boyens to develop a script.

The film’s official logline reads, “Fourteen years after the passing of Frodo — Sam, Merry and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began.”

In honor of Tolkien Reading Day and the destruction of the One Ring, we bring you a special announcement. pic.twitter.com/ufh9RLBIxO
— Warner Bros. (@warnerbros) March 25, 2026

(3) BRITISH SCHOOL BANS BOOKS. [Item by James Bacon.] A very unexpected situation has occurred, in England, at an unidentified school in the Greater Manchester area. Index on Censorship have conducted extensive work on appalling treatment of a Librarian, and the banning of many books and graphic novels from the school library.

Katie Dancey-Downs broke the story on the 20th of March, for the Index on Censorship and the article is extensive and an important read. “School book banning escalates in the UK as Greater Manchester secondary school censors scores of books.

While fans are used to hearing about schools in the US banning books, this is surprising news in England, and concerning. What is more extraordinary is that some of the works are ones that will be recognised as stories read when filers themselves were teenagers.

The idea that the 1984 Graphic Novel, a beautiful work by Matyáš Namai & George Orwell, is now a work that teenagers need safeguarding from, is a concept that fans will find ironic.

Works that the school removed included: Dark Winter by Andy McNab, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, Heartstopper vol 4 & 5 by Alice Oseman, a selection of books by George RR Martin, Freddie Mercury: The Definitive Biography by Lesley-Ann Jones, Madly, Deeply by Alan Rickman, Interview With a Vampire by Anne Rice, some eleven volumes of Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba & Takeshi Obata

The book Men Who Hate Women: the extremism no-one is talking about by Laura Bates appears to have been the catalyst for the purge, and the Librarian concerned facing harsh disciplinary action, resigned. A tragic outcome for a person dedicated to helping young people find understanding through books.

James Bacon has written a longer analysis for Downthetubes: “1984, Batman, Twilight Banned: Comics Censorship Concerns after huge British school library book ban”.

(4) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present: Michael Swanwick and Mike Allen on Wednesday, April 8, 2026 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Location: KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 (Just off 2nd Ave, upstairs).

Michael Swanwick

Michael Swanwick has been writing fantasy and science fiction at every length from flash fiction to novel trilogy for over forty years, during which time he has received the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards, as well as five Hugo Awards. As a hobby, he writes critical non-fiction and the occasional interview.

Mike Allen

Mike Allen’s most recent novel is Trail of Shadows, published in 2025. Two of his collections of horror tales, Unseaming and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident, were finalists for the Shirley Jackson Award, and as an editor, he’s a two-time World Fantasy Award nominee. His short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Interzone, Weird Tales, and Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology. With his wife and creative partner, Anita, he runs Mythic Delirium Books in Roanoke, Virginia.

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cora Buhlert.]

March 25, 1939 — D.C. Fontana. (Died 2019.)

By Cora Buhlert: Dorothy Catherine Fontana, better known as D.C. Fontana, was born on March 25, 1939 in New Jersey. At age eleven she decided that she wanted to become a novelist. But while she would become a writer, her main body of work would be in television rather than novels.

Employment opportunities for women were limited in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so Dorothy Fontana went to work as a secretary after college. This was her entrance into the TV industry, because she found employment first at Screen Gems and then at Revue Studios, where she worked as a secretary for Samuel A. Peeples on the largely forgotten western series Overland Trail and The Tall Man. But Dorothy Fontana wanted more than just to type other people’s scripts. She wanted to write her own and in 1960, aged twenty-one, she managed to sell her first script for the episode “A Bounty for Billy” of The Tall Man. More sales followed.

In 1963, Dorothy Fontana went to work on a military themed TV show called The Lieutenant. The show only lasted for one season, but nonetheless it would change D.C. Fontana’s, as she was calling herself by now, life, because she wound up working as the secretary of Gene Roddenberry, creator of The Lieutenant. Roddenberry encouraged Fontana’s writing, leading to the publication of her first novel, a western called Brazos River.

When The Lieutenant was cancelled, Gene Roddenberry started working on a new show called Star Trek. D.C. Fontana accompanied him. Before working on Star Trek, D.C. Fontana had had no interest in science fiction, but this quickly changed as work on the new show progressed. D.C. Fontana wrote the teleplay for “Charlie X”, the second episode of Star Trek. By the end of season 1, she was the story editor of Star Trek and also wrote the scripts of such memorable episodes as “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, “Journey to Babel”, “This Side of Paradise” and “Friday’s Child”.

D.C. Fontana left as story editor before the third season of Star Trek, but continued to contribute to the series as a freelance writer. Her collaboration with Gene Roddenberry continued on The Questor Tapes and Star Trek: The Animated Series. By the 1970s, D.C. Fontana, who had never read a science fiction story before Star Trek, had become one of the go-to writers for science fiction television and worked on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Logan’s Run, The Six Million Dollar Man, Fantastic Journey and Battlestar Galactica, an experience she disliked so much that she disavowed her screenplay. She also continued to work on non-genre shows such as The Waltons, The Streets of San Francisco, Bonanza, Kung Fu and Dallas.

D.C. Fontana returned to Star Trek as story editor and associate producer on Star Trek: The Next Generation, for which she co-wrote the pilot “Encounter at Farpoint”. However, she left during the first season, following a fallout with Gene Roddenberry. Though D.C. Fontana was not completely done with Star Trek yet. She wrote Star Trek novels and contributed a script to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. She also wrote several screenplays for Deep Space Nine’s great rival Babylon Five.

I don’t know what my first contact with D.C. Fontana’s work was. I know it wasn’t Star Trek, because she wrote none of the Star Trek episodes I saw as a young kid during a rerun on German TV in the late 1970s. And while I watched all of the science fiction series on which she worked, I didn’t see most of them until much later, when the floodgates of private television opened and many of these shows aired in Germany for the first time.

Indeed, it’s quite likely that my first contact with D.C. Fontana’s writing was a non-genre show, quite possibly The Waltons, which aired on Sunday afternoons and which my parents watched religiously. The Streets of San Francisco or Dallas are also possibilities, though I only got to see those shows sporadically during the holidays, since they aired in evening slots after my bedtime.

However, one story penned by D.C. Fontana that I definitely encountered early on is her sole contribution to the Filmation He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon, the second season episode “Battlecat”, which tells the origin of Prince Adam’s “fearless friend” Cringer and his alter-ego Battlecat. The episode is basically one long flashback, recounting how a young Prince Adam rescues a tiger cub from a sabrecat stalking the little one. Adam takes the injured cub to the royal palace and nurses him back to health and the two are soon inseparable. However, Adam is mortified that is pet is terrified of everything, up to and including his own shadow, which also gains him the name Cringer, courtesy of Teela teasing Adam about his pet.

As for why Cringer is always so afraid, this episode never shows us what happened before Adam found Cringer, though we can guess from fact that Cringer is all alone in the jungle and being stalked by a predator that it was nothing good. In 2012 finally, a comic did tell what happened just before, namely that Cringer’s entire family and tribe were wiped out by a sabrecat attack. Baby Cringer was the only survivor and was hunted for days, until Adam drove off the predators and rescued him. So the reason Cringer is always terrified is because he is deeply traumatized.

When Adam gains the Power of Grayskull and becomes into He-Man, he makes sure never to transform in front of Cringer, until one day when Cringer follows Adam and chances to witness the transformation. Cringer is understandably terrified and when He-Man tries to reassure him that there’s no reason to be afraid and that he’s still Adam inside, he accidentally points the Sword of Power at Cringer and Battlecat is born. And not a moment too soon, because an eldritch horror has escaped from its tomb and needs to be stopped…

“Battlecat” is a highly memorable episode, especially since the Filmation He-Man cartoon rarely ever gave us origin stories for the various characters. We never even got to see how Adam first became He-Man, so it’s a treat to see how Cringer first became Battlecat and how Adam and Cringer met in the first place. The fact that Baby Cringer is one of the cutest creatures ever seen on screen doesn’t hurt either.

In many ways, this episode also illustrates D.C. Fontana’s strengths as a writer. Her episodes were inevitably memorable and often expanded the world of the story and gave backstory to characters who did not have a lot before, whether it’s introducing Spock’s parents in “Journey to Babel”, delving into the previous hosts of the Dax symbiont in “Dax” or recounting the origins of Cringer in “Battlecat”.

(6) COMICS SECTION.

Animal Crackers knows who protects the skies.
Dinosaur Comics reassures about extinctions.
Dog Eat Doug seeks wisdom but gets an odd answer.
Reality Check emphasizes a different syllable.
Thatababy seeks a recursive memory aid.

(7) DISSENTING OPINION. Wesley Chu told Facebook readers that he ran one of his books through AI detecting software and got this unlikely result.

(8) ANOTHER AUTHOR’S AI DETECTOR TRIAL. Andrea Bartz told New York Times readers she experimented with an AI detector and got a ridiculous result, too: “A Horror Novel Got Canceled. What’s Coming Next Is a Bigger Nightmare.” (Behind a paywall.)

…Shortly after ChatGPT was publicly released, I entered the prompt “write a short story in the style of author Andrea Bartz.” The output was an uncanny facsimile of my prose — the actual scenes it generated made little sense, but the rhythm and sentences themselves mimicked some of the deliberate stylistic choices I make in my books.

A.I. detectors exist, but they’re far from perfect. OpenAI has called them unreliable. I don’t pretend to know how these checkers work under the hood. But if large language models were trained on my work (which was the case in at least one instance), then it’s easy to see how my own writing may come across to some as A.I.-generated.

In other words, I don’t write like A.I.; A.I. writes like me.

I pasted a few paragraphs of my own prose (a quick satire piece I’d shared on my Substack newsletter) into a free online detection tool. It deemed the passage “very likely A.I.-generated,” with 82 percent of the text exhibiting the hallmarks of A.I. This app appeared to be cruder and less reliable than other detectors I tried, perhaps because it was pushing a feature to “humanize” my passage with the click of a button. Lord help us all….

(9) “THAT’S ALL, FOLKS!” [Item by Steve Green.] The online retail outlet WB Shop UK, which ceased selling physical media last year, is currently running a merchandise sale ahead of its closure on 31 March. The customer services department will operate until 15 May.

(10) I’M NOT SURE WE SPECIFIED OUR DESTINATION CORRECTLY. [Item by Bill Higgins.] So we’re downstate visiting family, and we go out to see a science fiction movie. I am driving. My wife asks her phone to guide us to the theater. She searches for “Hail Mary Peoria.”

Here’s the result.

(11) DILEMMA SOLVED. Well now…

Finally ???????????? pic.twitter.com/NihKHu5Wgk
— ???????????? ???????????????????? ???????????????????????? (@White_Rabbit_OG) March 24, 2026

(12) IT’S ALL SO SIMPLE WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT. “Chandra resolves why black holes hit the brakes on growth” at Phys.org.

Astronomers have an answer for a long-running mystery in astrophysics: why is the growth of supermassive black holes so much lower today than in the past? A study using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray telescopes found that supermassive black holes are unable to consume material as rapidly as they did in the distant past. The results appeared in the December 2025 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Ten billion years ago, there was a period that astronomers call “cosmic noon,” when the growth of supermassive black holes (those with millions to billions of times the mass of the sun) was at its peak across the entire history of the universe. Between cosmic noon and now, however, astronomers have seen a major slowdown in how rapidly black holes are growing….

… By analyzing observations of about 1.3 million galaxies and 8,000 growing supermassive black holes from Chandra, ESA’s XMM-Newton and eROSITA (the extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array, a German and Russian mission), the team was able to isolate the “why” behind this black hole slowdown.

“It appears that black holes’ consumption of material has greatly slowed down as the universe has aged,” said co-author Niel Brandt, also of Penn State University. “This is probably because the amount of cold gas available for them to ingest has decreased since cosmic noon.”…

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Steve Green, Juli Marr, Bill Higgins, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mark Roth-Whitworth for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]

2026 Lord Ruthven Award Winners

Posted on March 25, 2026 by Mike Glyer

The winners of the 2026 Lord Ruthven Awards, presented for the best fiction on vampires and the best academic work on the study of the vampire figure in culture and literature, were announced following this year’s International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts on March 23.

The Lord Ruthven Awards for the eligibility year 2025 are:

FICTION

Hungerstone, by Kat Dunn (Zando)

MEDIA

Sinners. Written and Directed by Ryan Coogler (Warner Brothers, Proximity Media)

NON-FICTION

Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, by John Blair (Princeton University Press)

PERIODICALS

Dracula Beyond Stoker Issue 7: Mina Harker. Tucker Christine(editor), Tyler Kitchenman, Mark Oxbrow, Vince Stadon, Henry Herz, Bill Cozza, R.S. Tiemstra, Dennis K. Crosby, Macoy Greco, Doris V. Sutherland, Lindy Ryan, Gwendolyn Kiste, Cynthia Ward, James S. Dorr (DBS Press)

The awards take their name from the vampire antagonist in John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819) and are given by the Lord Ruthven Assembly, an organization affiliated with the IAFA whose objectives include the serious pursuit of scholarship and research focusing on the vampire/revenant figure in a variety of disciplines. The Lord Ruthven Assembly is a public group on Facebook.

BAFTA TV Awards 2026 Nominations

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Mike Glyer

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) released the BAFTA Awards 2026 nominations on March 24.

Non-genre series Adolescence dominates with 11 nominations across the Television and Craft awards divisions.

One series of genre interest, Star Wars: Andor, collected 6 nominations, all in the Craft division.

The complete list of nominees follows the jump.

Continue reading →

Pixel Scroll 3/24/26 Gotta Be Lots More Pixels, If You Wanna Scroll With Me

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) R.I.P. FACEBOOK’S METAVERSE. In “My Prodigal Brainchild” Neal Stephenson reflects “on the latest and greatest Death of the Metaverse.”

It feels incumbent upon me to write something about last week’s big news in which the company formerly known as Facebook decided to shut down its Metaverse project on which it has, according to various reports, spent eighty billion dollars.

I spelled that figure out because it’s more zeroes and commas than I can type in before blowing through my attention span and losing track.

This event has unleashed yet another spate of Internet cartoons depicting tombstones with the word METAVERSE chiseled into them, a genre that comes and goes every few years….

…I am, thank God, curiously detached from all this. Four and a half years ago I was minding my own business, cutting metal in my machine shop, when I received a text message from John Gaeta, a former colleague at Magic Leap, reading simply “Sorry for your loss.” At first I thought that he’d sent it to me mistakenly, but after a bit of Googling I became aware that Facebook had changed its name and announced that it was now going to build the Metaverse.

In retrospect, John’s message was prescient, since it marked the moment when the Metaverse really did break free and become my alienated, prodigal brainchild.

In the following weeks I had to make a few Tweets trying to convince incredulous strangers that I had no connection with what Meta was up to; that they hadn’t communicated with me in any way; that they hadn’t paid me off; and that, no, I wasn’t going to sue them. All of these things remain true.

So there wouldn’t have been any upside for me if Meta’s Metaverse had succeeded. What remains to be seen is whether there’s a downside for me now that it has failed. I think I’m standing clear of the blast radius, but seeing the front page of the New York Times’s business page dominated by the inevitable Metaverse tombstone image does give one pause.

Since this is now water under the bridge, here is some free advice to future companies who might become interested in this topic when the tombstone cartoons fade once again from memory and the concept becomes hot again.

The basic idea is obvious. Consider picking a different name

Once you have computers that can show graphics, and an Internet, the notion of creating a virtual online space where users go around in audiovisual bodies (avatars) is sort of obvious. Such a thing existed at least once before I wrote Snow Crash, in the form of Habitat, and would have been independently invented over and over again had the book never existed. All I did was make up a name for it, and put it in a novel that got read by a lot of techies. And the novel had a plot – a topic I will return to at the end of this post.

People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do

When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.

Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces. Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible.

A possible workaround is to keep refining and miniaturizing the devices to the point where they just look like eyeglasses. This, however, turns out to have the unintended side effect of making these things seem sinister. It happened with Google Glass, which instantaneously spawned the term “glasshole,” and it has happened again with Meta’s product that looks like normal, albeit heavy-framed glasses.

When someone around you is staring at a rectangle in their hand, it might be incredibly annoying, but at least you can tell they’re doing it. When someone’s wearing a head-mounted display, on the other hand, you don’t know whether they are looking at you or not.

Likewise, when someone holds up their phone and aims it at you, it’s obvious that you are on camera. That’s not true in the case of glasses or goggles. So it’s creepy….

(2) 2026 HUGO NOMINATONS DEADLINE. The LAcon V committee shared a graph with Facebook readers today showing that Hugo voting is spiking as the March 28 deadline approaches.

With just days to go the pace of Hugo nominations is picking up! If you’re one of the more than 7700 people eligible to nominate this year, you can help make the process run smoothly by nominating sooner rather than later.

(3) ON DAVE HOOK’S NOMINATING BALLOT. A Deep Look by Dave Hook tells us about the virtues of “The Martian Trilogy (John P. Moore, Amazing Stories, Black Science Fiction, and The Illustrated Features Section), 2025 Amazing Stories”. Here’s his short summary – the full-length take is at the link.

The short: I recently read The Martian Trilogy (John P. Moore, Amazing Stories, Black Science Fiction, and The Illustrated Features Section), including three related 1930 short stories by John P. Moore, with very substantial non-fiction essay content by Lisa Yaszek, Chris M. Barkley, Maurice Broaddus, Bill Campbell, Minister Faust, Brooks E. Hefner, Sheree Renée Thomas, Steve Davidson, John Jennings, and many others, 2025 Amazing Stories. These three stories are probably the first planetary romances by an African American author. While I rated one of these stories as “Very good” and two as “Good”, the essay content is phenomenal. Recommended, and I nominated The Martian Trilogy for the Hugo Award Best Related Work category….

(4) IN THE BEFORE TIMES. [Item by Andrew Porter.] Article by David Streitfeld starts off mentioning Larry Niven, then goes into Michael Dirda’s time at the Washington Post.“’Lonesome Dove,’ ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and the Power of the Book Review in the Age Before Algorithms” – in the New York Times (link bypasses the paywall.)

Jeff Bezos did not create the world’s biggest bookstore out of a deep love of literature. I interviewed him in his Seattle office back when he was the crown prince of the dot-com crowd and recall seeing only one book in it: “Destiny’s Road,” by the science fiction writer Larry Niven, about a planet colonization attempt gone awry.

If books were not a passion for Bezos, it seems that owning a newspaper does not rank high either. Last month he fired more than a third of the journalists at The Washington Post, the paper he bought in 2013. That included the entire staff of the book review. Bezos said the purge was merely a question of numbers. “The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus,” he explained.

This is the high art of Silicon Valley: If a subject clicks with readers, they will quickly be served more of the same. But readers don’t want the same thing all over again. The pleasures of a good book review are less in being a leader than a follower — to have smarter minds tell you things you didn’t know about things you weren’t necessarily thinking about.

People read The Washington Post’s Book World for entertainment, education and serendipity. As Henry James, a pretty fair critic himself, famously said, “We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have.”

Here is a tale, in the dark for 30 years, about how book reviews are an engine that helps keep the culture running. It is about what can happen when you’re not ruled by data.

Our prologue takes place in the mid-1970s. Larry McMurtry is the respected author of a half-dozen novels, including one that became the hit movie “Hud,” and a recent Oscar nominee as the co-writer of the script for “The Last Picture Show,” based on his novel. McMurtry is also a weekly book reviewer for The Post. His reviews are good: terse, wide-ranging, effective. He likes his job.

One day in 1978 a new editor at Book World named Michael Dirda calls McMurtry and, acting on orders from management, fires him. Reviewing has always been a tough trade. An annoyed McMurtry, who never liked Washington much, begins spending more time in his native Texas.

It is so boring in his small town that it proves a good place to write. One day he sees a church bus with a distinctive name, which he appropriates for a stalled manuscript about a 19th-century cattle drive. Almost no one thinks this novel sounds promising. Texas fiction is traditionally concerned with sex-crazed oil tycoons or the assassination of President Kennedy, and this tale has neither. Before McMurtry’s story is finally published in 1985, every major studio in Hollywood passes on it….

… For at least a few decades, McMurtry remained bitter about being fired by The Post. He never acknowledged that his dismissal got him out of Washington and thrust him toward that neglected cattle-drive novel, which won a Pulitzer and then became a much-loved mini-series. According to Amazon’s sales data, “Lonesome Dove” — 41 years after publication and five years after McMurtry’s death — is routinely one of the best-selling books on the platform. Not best-selling novels. Books….

(5) WAS ‘WOKENESS’ THE ISSUE? “William Shatner weighs in as ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ canceled” at USA Today.

William Shatner wishes the latest “Star Trek” show had been given the chance to live long and prosper.

The “Star Trek” actor, 95, took to X on March 23 to bemoan news that the sci-fi franchise’s newest series, “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” will end after its upcoming second season.

“It’s with sorrow that I hear about the cancellation of the new ‘Star Trek’ series,” he wrote.

In a follow-up post, Shatner mocked critics who celebrated the show’s cancellation because they claimed it was “woke.” He argued that the original “Star Trek,” which famously featured an interracial kiss between Shatner’s character, Captain Kirk, and Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura in a 1968 episode, would be considered “woke” today….

(6) BRIN GETTING CLARKE MEMORIAL AWARD. The National Space Society announced today: “Noted Sci-Fi Author Dr. David Brin to Receive the NSS Arthur C. Clarke Memorial Award at ISDC”.

Famed science fiction author Dr. David Brin will be a keynote speaker at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference® (ISDC®), which runs from June 4-7 in McLean, Virginia. The general public is invited to attend and more information can be found at the event website, isdc.nss.org.

Brin will also receive the coveted NSS Arthur C. Clarke Memorial Award for his pivotal writing in sci-fi and futurism. Initiated in 2025, the Clarke award seeks to recognize individuals who, like Arthur C. Clarke, have used creative, scientifically grounded storytelling or media to foster curiosity and enthusiasm about space exploration and contributing to public understanding and support for space development, and Brin is an exemplar of this….

(7) THE DEADLY GENDER GAP IN CAR SAFETY. [Item by Andrew Porter.] Audio. Strongly recommended for any woman who has ever ridden in a car! “The Deadly Gender Gap in Car Safety” in the New York Times – link bypasses the paywall.

In November 2024, the filmmaker Eve Van Dyke was headed to Thanksgiving dinner with her family. Then her car crashed.

She noticed the women in the car ended up with more injuries than the men. Turns out, that wasn’t just a coincidence. In the United States, women are 73 percent more likely to be severely injured in vehicle crashes than men, and 17 percent more likely to die.

To understand why, Ms. Van Dyke dug through the half-century history of auto safety in the United States. In the Opinion Video above, she reveals her disturbing discovery.

(8) IS LE GUIN’S THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969) OVER-RATED? [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Over at the Grammaticus Books YouTube Channel there is no fear of controversy, however this is not click-bait: Grammaticus recognises that this book deserves both its Hugo and Nebula wins. There is a lot to appreciate here: the ideas, world-building and writing. And the thing that puts it on the map is the exploration of gender fluidity, especially remembering that this was back in 1969. However, there are – Grammaticus says – three fundamental flaws… It is opined that these flaws came about because of LeGuin’s laser focus on themes, concept and world-building. This means that for some readers the novel is a difficult one to digest. (Actually, I have some sympathy with this but had never said for obvious reasons.) This video is only 11-minutes long. There are comments over at the channel and I dare say that some may make some here at File 770 jump in.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 24, 1946 – Andrew Porter, 80.

File 770’s indispensable Scroll contributor Andrew Porter got into sf fandom in the Sixties. He published a major genzine, Algol/Starship (1963–84), which received five Hugo nominations and won in 1974. And he has been a leading sf news writer for even longer — his first news-related column on upcoming paperbacks appeared in James V. Taurasi’s Science Fiction Times in 1960. Later in the decade he started his own newzine, S.F. Weekly (1966–68), and returned in the Eighties with Science Fiction Chronicle (1979–2002), a 21-time Hugo nominee that won in 1993 and 1994.

Andrew Porter in his Oxford robes after winning the 1993 Best Semiprozine Hugo.

Porter was assistant editor on The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1966–74, and associate editor at Lancer Books in the late 1960s. Outside the sf field he also worked as a trade magazine editor and advertising production manager on such titles as Rudder, Quick Frozen Foods (under editor Sam Moskowitz), QFF International, Construction Equipment, and Electro-Procurement.

He has independently published nonfiction collections such as The Book of Ellison, Dreams Must Explain Themselves by Ursula K. Le Guin, Exploring Cordwainer Smith, and Experiment Perilous: The Art and Science of Anguish in Science Fiction and The Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr. by Gardner Dozois. He was honored with a Special British Fantasy Award in 1992.

He was Fan Guest of Honour at ConFiction, the 1990 World Science Fiction Convention held in The Hague, Netherlands. The audio of his speech is available at Fanac.org.

He also was recognized by Chicon V (1991) with a Special Committee Award for Distinguished Semiprozine Work. And he was honored with the Big Heart Award in 2009.

His photos have appeared in The Guardian, the NY Times, Publishers Weekly and numerous convention program books. In recent years he’s been a frequent commenter in the NY Times and locally in such outlets as The Brooklyn Heights Blog, where he’s contributed numerous local photos and scans of architectural features. “And,” he proudly adds, “I always comment under my own name, not a screen name.”

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Pavane by Keith Roberts (1968)

Sixty years ago the ending of Pavane was first published.

The ending of this novel, yes the ending, a novellette, “Pavane: The Signaller”, came out in Impulse: The New Science Fantasy in their March 1966 issue. The complete stories that are Pavane would first be printed by Hart-Davis in 1968. Why the ending first? I’ve no idea, but perhaps one of you knows why.

So I’ll just say that Pavane is a brilliant telling of an alternative England that mercifully never happened. So without further commentary, here’s the perfect Beginning that the author gave it…

PROLOGUE

On a warm July evening of the year 1588, in the royal palace of Greenwich, London, a woman lay dying, an assassin’s bullets lodged in abdomen and chest. Her face was lined, her teeth blackened, and death lent her no dignity; but her last breath started echoes that ran out to shake a hemisphere. For the Faery Queen, Elizabeth the First, paramount ruler of England, was no more …

The rage of the English knew no bounds. A word, a whisper was enough; a half-wit youth, torn by the mob, calling on the blessing of the Pope. … The English Catholics, bled white by fines, still mourning the Queen of Scots, still remembering the gory Rising of the North, were faced with fresh pogroms. Unwillingly, in self-defence, they took up arms against their countrymen as the flame lit by the Walsingham massacres ran across the land, mingling with the light of warning beacons the sullen glare of the auto-da-fé.

The news spread; To Paris, to Rome, to the strange fastness of the Escorial, where Philip II still brooded on his Enterprise of England. The word of a land torn and divided against itself reached the great ships of the Armada, threshing up past the Lizard to link with Parma’s army of invasion on the Flemish coast. For a day while Medina-Sidonia paced the decks of the San Martin, the fate of half the world hung in balance. Then his decision was made; and one by one the galleons and carracks, the galleys and the lumbering urcas turned north toward the land. Toward Hastings and the ancient battleground of Santlache, where history had been made once centuries before. The turmoil that ensued saw Philip ensconced as ruler of England; in France the followers of Guise, heartened by the victories across the Channel, finally deposed the weakened House of Valois. The War of the Three Henrys ended with the Holy League triumphant, and the Church restored once more to her ancient power.

To the victor, the spoils. With the authority of the Catholic Church assured, the rising nation of Great Britain deployed her forces in the service of the Popes, smashing the Protestants of the Netherlands, destroying the power of the German city-states in the long-drawn-out Lutheran Wars. The Newworlders of the North American continent remained under the rule of Spain; Cook planted in Australasia the cobalt flag of the Throne of Peter.

In England herself, across a land half ancient and half modern, split as in primitive times by barriers of language, class, and race, the castles of mediaevalism still glowered; mile on mile of unfelled woodland harboured creatures of another age. To some the years that passed were years of fulfillment, of the final flowering of God’s Design; to others they were a new Dark Age, haunted by things dead and others best forgotten; bears and catamounts, dire wolves and Fairies.

Over all, the long arm of the Popes reached out to punish and reward; the Church Militant remained supreme. But by the middle of the twentieth century widespread mutterings were making themselves heard. Rebellion was once more in the air…

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Bound and Gagged has part of a favorite book.
Brewster Rockit complains about kids’ books.
Ink Pen says it’s relative.
Speed Bump brings the mat to the lab.
Wondermark traces the changes in knowledge saving til it’s too much!

(12) GAME’S DECLINE COSTS JOBS. “Epic Games Lays Off Over 1,000 Employees, Citing Fortnite Slump” – the New York Times has the story. (Behind a paywall.)

The video game company Epic Games is laying off more than 1,000 employees, it said on Tuesday, citing a drop in the amount of time people are spending playing Fortnite.

“The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we’re spending significantly more than we’re making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded,” Tim Sweeney, the company’s chief executive, wrote in a blog post. “This layoff, together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing and closing some open roles puts us in a more stable place.”

The cut represents about 20 percent of the work force at Epic Games, a company spokeswoman said.

It was the second time in recent years that the company, which is based in North Carolina, had announced major job cuts. In 2023, Epic Games laid off 830 employees, or about 16 percent of its work force, citing lower profit margins for Fortnite. “I’m sorry we’re here again,” Mr. Sweeney wrote in his blog post….

(13) GO THE DISTANCE. “’For All Mankind’ to End at Apple TV With Season 6 Renewal” reports Variety.

Hi, Bob! In advance of its long-awaited Season 5 return, Apple TV‘s “For All Mankind” has been renewed for a sixth and final season. The news also comes in advance of the premiere of spinoff series “Star City,” which takes a look at the alternate space race story line from the Soviet perspective and premieres on May 29.

News means “For All Mankind” will be able to complete its expansive storyline as originally envisioned by creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi — a rarity in the often quick-cancel culture of TV. “For All Mankind” launched on Nov. 1, 2019, the same day as Apple TV’s “The Morning Show,” making both series the streamer’s longest-running series….

… “For All Mankind” has earned rave reviews and awards recognition for its unique storytelling, unfurling an alt-history of the U.S., the space race and even the globe as it ponders how life might be different had the Soviet Union made it to the moon first. Perhaps the Cold War would have forced the U.S. to double down, spending more money and resources to then build a moon base first. Along the way, the Soviets and the Americans would try to outdo each other, leading to earlier advances in technology and perhaps quicker social change, like the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment….

(14) ANTI-ROAD-TRIP. [Item by Steven French.] Well, they did it – moved all 92 (count ‘em!) antiprotons without incident: “BASE experiment at CERN succeeds in transporting antimatter”.

Today, in a world first, a team of scientists from the BASE experiment at CERN successfully transported a trap filled with antiprotons in a truck across the Laboratory’s main site. The team managed to accumulate a cloud of 92 antiprotons in an innovative portable cryogenic Penning trap, then disconnect it from the experimental facility, load it onto a truck and continue experiment operation after transport. This is a remarkable achievement, given that antimatter is very difficult to preserve, as it annihilates upon contact with matter. This world premiere is a test, the ultimate aim being to transport antiprotons to other European laboratories, such as Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), where very-high-precision measurements of the antiproton properties could be performed…

(15) 2026’S 8 BIGGEST SCI-FI MOVIES THAT WILL CRUSH THE BOX OFFICE OR FLOP HARD. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Over at the KageMovies YouTube channel there are listed its SF films for 2026 that they think will either fly at the box office or sink. This vid has already attracted getting on for half-a-million views. For those not liking click bait, the films are: Greenland 2; Migration; World Breaker; Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die; Project Hail Mary; The Dog Stars; Disclosure Day; The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping; Dune: Part Three.

I have to say as a personal aside I have been a tad disappointed that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die has not done better at the box office. It does not look like it will begin to break even despite its comparatively modest budget. Indeed, I am very surprised that it did not do better worldwide given that the European market seems to be more tolerant, if not welcoming, to films with a more independent studio vibe, but then what do I know… Comments, rather your suggestions, as to films not on this list would be most welcome…. (I’m always on the lookout for solid, SFnal offerings.) You can see the video here or below.

[Thanks to Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Andrew (not Werdna), 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 Daniel Dern.]

Twelve Months, A Harry Dresden book, recommended — A Dern Very Micro Book Review

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Mike Glyer

By Daniel Dern: Having spent much of the weekend reading Twelve Months (Ace books, 480 Pages), Jim Butcher’s twentieth “Dresden Files” book (Novel #18 in the series, plus two story collections), which was released in January (and Item #9 in the February 2, 2026 Scroll), I recommend it without reservations (unless, like me, you would get it as a library borrow (or e-borrow), in which case I recommend a reservation, like I’d done, so you don’t have to hope it shows up in the “Speed Read” section or wait until a copy show up on the regular-circulation shelves).

If you’re unfamiliar with Harry Dresden (and his FILES)…

Here’s a non-spoiler general summary, Per the Dresden Files’ Wikipedia page:

The first novel, Storm Front—which was also Butcher’s writing debut—was published in 2000. The books are written as a first-person narrative from the perspective of private investigator and wizard Harry Dresden as he recounts investigations into supernatural disturbances in modern-day Chicago.” [As in, our world, smartphones, Internet, Star Wars (movies) etc… except there’s also magic entities and activity – DPD]

Butcher’s original proposed title for the first novel was Semiautomagic, which sums up the series’ balance of fantasy and hard-boiled detective fiction… In the world of The Dresden Files, magic is real—alongside vampires, demons, spirits, faeries, werewolves, outsiders and other monsters—while both it and the supernatural are widely discredited.” [I.e., the general public doesn’t know about it. -DPD]

…. Harry Dresden is the only advertising wizard in the United States, living in Chicago and investigating supernatural cases on behalf of both human and nonhuman clients. He also serves as a civilian consultant for the Special Investigations division of the Chicago Police Department, and is called upon at times to offer his opinion on cases that appear to have a magical element.

Dern advises: if this makes you Dresden-curious, start with Book #1; while (in most cases) the individual books start-and-wrap plots, there’s longer arcs and developments (and backstory) with each new(er) book. (Like, for example, Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers Of London stories; unlike, say, Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series, or, for the most part, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories.)

And if you’re already a Dresden fan, but haven’t yet requested/got/read TWELVE MONTHS…

Twelve Months picks up just after the events in the two previous Dresden Files – Peace Talks (July 2020) and Battle Ground (released September 2020) (arguably, these are really Parts 1 and 2 of a single story). As you’d expect, there’s magic prep, research, angst, snark, snappy dialog, fights and battles, f/sf cultural references, and two Spider Robinson/David-Gerrold-worth puns. The immediate plot threads are resolved within this volume…(but) there are larger and looming Next And Bigger Problems left over for the next Dresden File book — and, according to Butcher’s web site, “Mirror Mirror will now be book #19.” (Expected publication January 1, 2027, according to GoodReads.)

(BTW, according to Butcher’s web site (looks like this was written before mid-2020, so it’s possibly the plans have changed), The series is slated to run 23-24 books: 20-21 “case books” like we’ve seen so far, capped by a Big Apocalyptic Trilogy, because who doesn’t love apocalyptic trilogies?“

Speaking for myself, if you’re a Dresden Files fan, I think you’ll enjoy Twelve Months. Or, in the word of Nero Wolfe, “Satisfactory.”

(BTW, one non-spoiler question for Mr. Butcher (if you’re reading this) – one group in Twelve Months says they “like stories”…in the text, we see a kid or two doing the story-telling. Would “like stories” extend also to “see/hear/watch TV/video/movies?” Just wondering.)

Pixel Scroll 3/23/26 You Keep On Saying Those Words

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) WHO SHOULD WIN THE BRITISH FANTASY AWARDS? The suggestions list for this year’s British Fantasy Awards is now open. Anyone can add their favorite SFF titles first published in 2025. “British Fantasy Awards 2026 Suggestions”.

(2) EARLY GRADUATION. “’Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ to End With Season 2” reports Variety.

“Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” will end with its upcoming second season, Variety has learned exclusively.

The show was originally picked up at Paramount+ in 2023, with the streamer renewing the show for a second season before the first had aired. The first season debuted in January and aired its season finale on March 12, while the second season recently wrapped production….

… The first season of “Starfleet Academy” reached an 87% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Variety‘s Aramide Tinubu describing it as a “delightful entry point” into the franchise. But the show failed to find a significant audience. Across its 10-episode first season, it has failed to rank on the Nielsen Top 10 streaming viewership charts….

(3) SNAPE ACTOR GETS THREATS. “’Harry Potter’ star details racist ‘abuse’ after joining upcoming TV show” – Entertainment Weekly has the story.

Paapa Essiedu is speaking out on “abuse” he’s endured since being cast as Severus Snape in HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter series.

“I’ve been told, ‘Quit, or I’ll murder you,'” the actor told The Times in career-spanning interview published Saturday.

Essiedu is English of Ghanian descent. Though he’s played famous figures like George Boleyn (Channel 5’s Anne Boleyn) and beloved characters from the literary canon (he played Romeo in a 2015 production of Romeo and Juliet) alike, he shared that the Harry Potter casting has brought out the most vicious racist backlash.

“The reality is that if I look at Instagram I will see somebody saying, ‘I’m going to come to your house and kill you,'” he said. “While I hope I’ll be okay, nobody should have to encounter this for doing their job.”

(4) OKORAFOR AWARD ARRIVES. Nnedi Okorafor has posted a video on Facebook of her NAACP Image Award trophy. She won it for her novel Death of the Author.

(5) SF 101. Episode 63 of Phil Nichols and Colin Kuskie’s Science Fiction 101 podcast takes listeners “Back to the Futures”.

This time on Science Fiction 101, we take some trips down memory lane to revisit classic time travel movies. We mostly focus on the Back to the Future series, but also a couple of wildcards: Primer (2004, Colin’s pick) and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986, Phil’s pick).

(6) SFF INTERVIEWS COLLECTED. The latest book from Space Cowboy is James Machell’s Human Voices, Alien Conversations.

Human Voices, Alien Conversations is a tour through the modern world of speculative fiction, featuring a variety of perspectives. Authors, critics, editors, and artists, legends and new talents, reflect on their passage through words. Interviewees include a TV star turned novelist, the first transgender woman to win a Hugo Award, and the editor of The Best Science Fiction of the Year (2016 – ).

The book takes the form of a literal journey, opening with James Machell stepping off a plane to explore SF. Along the way, he learns the secrets of non-fiction writing from the co-editor and biggest contributor to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The intricacies of world building are explained by a bestselling author of epic fantasy. He discovers the background to some of the most iconic images in SF from their artists as well as the literature that inspired them. “Would artificially created animals be kosher to eat?” is just one of the conundrums traversed.

Featuring candid discussions about creative doubt, the pressures of making art under late capitalism, and how AI threatens a new generation of creatives, Human Voices, Alien Conversations snapshots SF before its predictions come true.

Interviews with: Ken Liu, Bogi Takács, Paolo Bacigalupi, John Picacio, John Clute, Samuel R. Delany, Samantha Mills, Jeff Noon, Steven Youll, P. Djèlí Clark, Chris Moore, Ai Jiang, Cheryl Morgan, Neil Clarke, Pat Cadigan, & Matthew Holness.

Currently available for pre-order and releases on June 1.

(7) SAM KIETH (1963-2026). “Sam Kieth, Comic Artist, Creator of The Maxx and Co-Creator of Sandman, Passes Away at 63”. The CBR.com profile contains many examples of Kieth’s fascinating art.

Sam Kieth, the beloved comic book artist who co-created The Sandman with Neil Gaiman and Mike Dringenberg in 1988, became one of the most popular Wolverine artists in the business in the early 1990s, and created the hit comic book series (which later became an iconic cartoon on MTV), The Maxx, has passed away at the age of 63.

Rich Johnston has confirmed that the acclaimed artist has passed away from Lewy Body Dementia. He is survived by his wife of 43 years, Kathy Kieth.

Kieth made his comic book debut in 1983 while he was just 20 years old in Comico Primer #5 (the same anthology series where Matt Wagner debuted Grendel in 1982), with a short story about a killer hare named Max…

(8) VALERIE PERRINE (1943-2026). “Valerie Perrine Dead: ‘Superman’, ‘Lenny’, ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ Actor Was 82” – Deadline profiles her career.

Valerie Perrine, whose memorable film roles included a porn actress abducted by aliens in Slaughterhouse-Five, Lex Luthor’s secretary in two Superman films and an Oscar-nominated performance as the wife of Lenny Bruce in Lenny, died Monday at her home in Beverly Hills following a 15-year battle with Parkinson’s disease. She was 82.

… In 1973, Perrine was cast in the PBS presentation of Bruce Jay Friedman’s acclaimed hit Off Broadway play Steambath, a performance that’s often credited for including the first appearance of naked female breasts in network TV history….

If Perrine’s performances to that point had been as infamous as famous, she proved any naysayers wrong in 1974 when she gave an Oscar-nominated (and Cannes-winning) performance in Bob Fosse’s Lenny, playing Lenny Bruce’s stripper wife Honey Bruce opposite Dustin Hoffman’s title character. She followed up that role by appearing two years later in Arthur Hiller’s well-received W.C. Fields biopic W.C. and Me; she played the classic comic’s mistress Carlotta Monti opposite Rod Steiger.

In what would become a signature role, Perrine took on the role of Miss Eve Teschmacher, girlfriend of villain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), in the wildly popular Superman (1978) and its sequel Superman II, both starring Christopher Reeve in the title role.

Perrine’s winning streak hit a wall in 1980 when she appeared in the notorious Village People flop Can’t Stop the Music, a performance that earned her a Razzie Award nomination. “It ruined my career,” she later said. “I moved to Europe after, I was so embarrassed.”

If Can’t Stop the Music stalled Perrine’s appearances in top-line projects — as it did with most others associated with it — she nonetheless continued working….

(9) CARRIE ANNE FLEMING (1974-2026). “Canadian actress Carrie Anne Fleming dead at 51” reports The Province.

She died on Feb. 26 in Sidney, B.C., according to Variety.

Her Supernatural co-star Jim Beaver confirmed to the outlet that Fleming died of breast cancer complications.

“My friend, my lover, my bright light, my beautiful costar Carrie Anne Fleming, who played Bobby Singer’s wife Karen on Supernatural died on Thursday, February 26, after confronting cancer for a long time. My heart is broken,” Beaver wrote in a post on the social-media platform Bluesky….

… In 2005, she was cast by director Dario Argento in his show Masters of Horror, playing a disfigured woman with cannibalistic leanings in her Jennifer episode.

She also appeared in various horror shows, including The Tooth Fairy and Bloodsuckers.

Fleming had a recurring role on the popular CW drama show Supernatural, playing Karen Singer, the wife of main character Bobby Singer….

…Fleming’s recurring role on CW’s iZombie had her playing Candy Baker for five seasons….

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cora Buhlert.]

March 23, 1904 — H. Beam Piper. (Died 1964.)

By Cora Buhlert:

Content warning: Discussion of suicide.

Considering how well regarded he was and still is as an author, we know surprisingly little about him. For example, we don’t know whether the H stands for Henry, Horace or Herbert. And while we know how he died, we don’t know exactly when or why.

There’s a lot of evidence that the H stood for “Henry” (it’s on census records, his WW2 draft card, and his gravestone), but there is evidence for Horace and Herbert as well.

H. Beam Piper never received a formal higher education, because he considered the college experience unpleasant, but instead educated himself in science, engineering and history. He worked as a laborer and later as a night watchman at the railroad yard in his hometown.

At some point, Piper began to write and in 1947 at age 43 he sold his first story “Time and Time Again” to John W. Campbell at Astounding Science Fiction. More stories followed, both for Astounding and other magazines. In 1961, finally, Piper published his first novel, the juvenile Four-Day-Planet. On the planet Fenris, a year is only four days long, but each of those days lasts four thousand hours with extreme temperatures. Giant whale-like creatures roam the seas of Fenris and are hunted for their valuable tallow wax, which makes for excellent radiation shielding. Protagonist Walt Boyd is a seventeen-year-old boy reporter, who gets entangled in a conflict between the whalers guild and the corrupt mayor of Fenris and some equally corrupt business people. Basically, this is Tintin and the Space Whalers with a bonus message about the importance of formal education, which is ironic considering Piper’s own life. I have read Four-Day-Planet and enjoyed it quite a bit as a fun science fiction adventure.

However, my introduction to Piper’s work was not Four-Day-Planet, but what is probably his best-known work, the 1962 novel Little Fuzzy. I discovered the book as a teenager at Storm, the one bookshop in town with an extensive foreign language section. Most of that foreign language section actually consisted of dictionaries. There was also a table where one could peruse the huge Books-in-Print catalogues as well as a special order desk, where you could order any book listed in those giant catalogues. That special order desk was always busy with university students ordering otherwise unavailable textbooks and literature. Annoyingly, those students also kept staring at me, especially the male ones, and I was sure that they were judging my reading choices. Yes, I was quite dense.

The foreign language section at Storm also has two spinner racks with mass market paperbacks. The paperbacks in those spinner racks were almost entirely genre fiction. Romance, crime and mystery and of course science fiction, fantasy and horror. Whenever I was in the city center, I would stop at Storm (which still exists, though much diminished), head up to the foreign language section on the first floor and check out the spinner racks for anything that caught my eye, all the while dodging annoying male students staring at me. I discovered a lot of great authors and books in those spinner racks. And one day, I discovered Little Fuzzy, the 1980s Ace Books edition with the Michael Whelan cover of protagonist Jack Holloway surrounded by Fuzzies. The books caught my eye at once, because the Fuzzies were not only cute, but they looked just like the Ewoks from Return of the Jedi. Indeed, Little Fuzzy is widely considered to be the inspiration for the Ewoks and the parallels are quite obvious. The cover intrigued me enough that I plopped down my hard earned pocket money to buy the book. And English language mass market paperbacks were expensive in the 1980s due to the bad exchange rate and high import duties.

On the planet Zarathustra, prospector Jack Holloway discovers a furry alien creature he names Little Fuzzy. Little Fuzzy takes Jack to meet the rest of his tribe and Jack realizes that the Fuzzies are intelligent. This causes a problem for the mining company that has set up shop on Zarathustra to exploit the planet’s natural resources, because if the Fuzzies are declared an intelligent species, they and their habitat will be protected by law and the company will lose their mining rights. Being an unscrupulous company in a science fiction novel, they will of course do everything to prevent this, up to and including murder.

My teen self enjoyed Little Fuzzy a whole lot and it’s easy to see why. The plight of the furry aliens and their human protector against the big bad mining company is highly compelling. Though I never read any of the sequels, neither Piper’s own nor those by other authors, mostly because I didn’t know they existed.

One H. Beam Piper novel I did read, though several years later, was Space Viking, which was serialized in Analog from November 1962 to February 1963 and then appeared as a paperback in 1963. Once again, it was the cover – a glorious Michael Whelan cover with the titular space Vikings in front of a bright purple background – which attracted me along with, “Oh, it’s by H. Beam Piper. Cool. I liked Little Fuzzy.”

The protagonist of Space Viking is Lucas Trask, an aristocrat from the planet Gram. Trask is about to marry Lady Elaine, when a spurned former suitor of Elaine’s crashes the wedding and proceeds to gun down the wedding party (shades of the Red Wedding from A Song of Ice and Fire and the Moldavian wedding massacre from Dynasty, though Space Viking predates them both). Elaine is killed but Trask survives and vows revenge. He joins the Space Vikings, a group of space-faring raiders, to go after the killer, who has escaped aboard a stolen spaceship. In the process, Trask winds up establishing a little galactic empire of his own and also finds a new love. And yes, he gets his man, too, in the end.

I enjoyed Space Viking, though not nearly as much as Little Fuzzy. Part of the reason may simply be that I was older when I read Space Viking and more critical. The novel offered plenty of adventure and thrills, but also some irritating politics, including a very American view of emigration and colonization that is common, but also plain wrong. In fact, I remember wondering at the time, “Was Piper always like this and I just didn’t notice?”

Little Fuzzy, Four-Day-Planet and Space Viking are all part of a future history series called the Terro-Human Future History along with the 1963 novel The Cosmic Computer and several pieces of short fiction. The Terro-Human Future History chronicles the rise and fall and rebirth of a galactic civilization and was clearly influenced by the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.

Piper also wrote the Paratime series, which chronicles the adventures of the Paratime Police who can move between timelines and alternate histories. The Paratime series consists of several pieces of short fiction and one novel, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, which was published in 1965 and would be Piper’s final novel.

This brings us to the sad part of this birthday note, namely Piper’s untimely death. It is widely known that Piper committed suicide, but both the reason and the exact date of his death are not known.

What is known is that Piper dated the last entry in his diary November 5, 1964. On November 8, his body was found. Piper had apparently shut off the power and water to his apartment, covered the walls and floors with tarp and shot himself with a handgun from his extensive collection. He left behind a note saying “I don’t like to leave messes when I go away, but if I could have cleaned up any of this mess, I wouldn’t be going away.”

What mess precisely Piper was referring to is not known. The most common explanation is that Piper had financial problems. He had just gone through a painful and costly divorce and his agent was not replying to his letters and calls – due to having died – so Piper assumed his writing career was over. Another explanation is that Piper wanted to prevent his ex-wife from collecting his life insurance payment, so he took his own life to make sure that the insurance company would not pay. Most likely, the reason for his death was a combination of these factors.

More than sixty years after Piper’s death, the legacy that remains is a remarkable body of work, much of which is not only still in print, but is still receiving sequels and prequels written by other authors to this day.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit finds the depressing stories in the library.
Carpe Diem lists super limitations.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gives an interesting twist to the food chain.

(12) TYPO FUN CONTINUES. [Item by John Hertz.] (From Vanamonde 1656.) On my office wall at one of those law reviews [out-of-United-States readers, in our law schools the periodicals we call law reviews are edited by students, an academic honor] I had this “Ode to the Typographical Error”, anonymous so far as I know even yet.

The typographical error
Is a slippery thing and sly.
You can hunt until you’re dizzy,
But somehow it will get by.
Till the forms are off the presses
It is strange how still it keeps,
It shrinks down into a corner
And never stirs or peeps,
That typographical error
Too small for human eyes
Till the ink is on the paper
When it grows to mountain-size.
The editor stares in horror,
Then he grabs his hair and groans;
The copy reader drops his head
Upon his hands and moans.
The remainder of the issues
May be clean as clean can be,
But that typographical error
Is the only thing you see.

(13) WONDER AGAIN. “’Wonder Man’ Renewed for Season 2 at Disney+” reports Variety.

…The news comes around two months after the series launched, with eight episodes of the first season debuting on the streamer on Jan. 27. Yahya Abdul Mateen II and Ben Kingsley starred in the series as Simon Williams and Trevor Slattery, respectively. Both will return for Season 2….

… The news comes around two months after the series launched, with eight episodes of the first season debuting on the streamer on Jan. 27. Yahya Abdul Mateen II and Ben Kingsley starred in the series as Simon Williams and Trevor Slattery, respectively. Both will return for Season 2.…

(14) BREAKER, BREAKER. “NASA’s Hubble unexpectedly catches comet breaking up” – Phys.org has the story.

In a happy twist of fate, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings are published in the journal Icarus.

The comet K1, whose full name is C/2025 K1 (ATLAS)—not to be confused with interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS—was not the original target of the Hubble study.

“Sometimes the best science happens by accident,” said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. “This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. We had to find a new target—and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances.”

Noonan didn’t know K1 was fragmenting until he viewed the images the day after Hubble took them. “While I was taking an initial look at the data, I saw that there were four comets in those images when we only proposed to look at one,” said Noonan. “So we knew this was something really, really special.”…

(15) SCIENTISTS REVIVE ACTIVITY IN FROZEN MOUSE BRAINS FOR THE FIRST TIME. [Item by SF Concatenations Jonathan Cowie.]

‘Cryosleep’ remains the preserve of science fiction, but researchers are getting closer to restoring brain function after deep freezing.

I remember the reproductive biologist and SF fan Jack Cohen telling us that cryogenic suspended animation was impossible. This was back in the day, in the 1980s/1990s when UK Eastercon programming was diverse (talks, games, interviews, films etc) and not largely wall-to-wall filler panels. Jack was one of a number of semi-regular Eastercon speakers. His talks were a bit of a romp and always great fun. He told us on time that the SF trope of cryogenic suspended animation was impossible because you could not get a large brain to flash-freeze fast enough to prevent ice crystals growing and rupturing cells from within. Of course, Jack said, he could do it with small sperm because they were stored in long and very thin cylinders that could be flash-frozen at the necessary speed and so sperm storage this way was possible….

But, back in the day, suspended animation was an SFnal trope – still is – as a way to get to the stars as was used, for example, in the British/US film Alien (1979). All well and good, and now we come up to date.

A news item in Nature reports on new research recently published in which a whole mouse brain was flash frozen for days and then thawed out. Cutting the brain into slices they could test individual neuron response to electrical stimuli and the neurons’ responses to electrical stimuli were near normal.

The method necessitates the brain being saturated with cryopreservation chemicals before being rapidly cooled using liquid nitrogen at −196 ºC. They were then kept in a freezer at −150 ºC. However because the researchers sliced and diced to test neurons, rather than assemblages of them, they were unable to determine whether the animals’ memories had survived cryopreservation. But that could come.

While there is a very, very long way to go before cryogenic suspended animation is achieved, (if it ever is?) the techniques could lead the way to better tissue and organ preservation for biomedical use.

See Thompson, T. (2026) “Scientists revive activity in frozen mouse brains for the first time”. Nature. vol. 651, p563-4.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, John Hertz, Danny Sichel, 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 Steve Davidson.]

The Theory of Related-ivity: Segment IV

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Mike Glyer

The Theory of Related-ivity:

A History and Analysis of the Best Related Work Hugo Category

By Heather Rose Jones

(This is a serialized article exploring the history of the Best Related Work Hugo category in its various names and versions. If you’ve come in at the middle, start here [Segment I].)

Contents

Part 2: Methodology
2.3 Data and Eligibility
2.3.1 Data Sources and Available Data
2.3.2 Eligibility Notes

Part 2: Methodology

2.3 Data and Eligibility

2.3.1 Data Sources and Available Data

Data Sources

This section documents the sources of the data used, the types of data available, and any administrative requirements that affected that availability, concluding with a discussion of how the available data determines the types of comparisons that will be made across the several identifiable “eras” of the award category.

Lists of Best Related Work nominees were taken from the official Hugo Award website (www.thehugoawards.org) and documents linked there. The documents at the Hugo Awards website are generally copies (either electronic or scanned) of reports released after the awards ceremony. Other than reports of Finalists and Winners, reports of this type may not have been created prior to the administrative requirement for reporting the Long List, and the type of data included on these reports is variable. The most complete possible data would be:

Total number of Hugo nominating ballots
For each Hugo category, the number of ballots including at least one nomination in that category
For each Hugo category, the number of different works nominated
The number of nominating ballots each work was included on
Any disqualifications, exclusions, or transfer of nominations to another category
The name/title of the work, the name(s) of the author(s) or creator(s), and in the case of published Books, the Publisher

After the application of the E Pluribus Hugo nomination processing system, the report also shows the calculation data that produces the “score” for determining Finalists.

From this, each work was then researched online to confirm the correct and complete title, author(s), and publication date, as well as to assign tags for the Media type and subject matter Categories of the work.^[1] It is also noted if a nominee is part of an ongoing Series of some type, or is a repeat nominee with different content. Whenever possible, a URL link has been identified for reference purposes.^[2]

The basic accuracy of the official Hugo Award website is assumed with regard to the nominee lists. Additional details including full titles and full credits have been researched in Wikipedia and archive.org, as well as sites relevant to the individual works.

A reasonable effort has been made to identify the gender of all authors and subjects, as reflected in public information. (See the section on Categorization Process in the chapter on Gender for details of this process.)

Ideally, individuals would also be tagged for nationality, ethnicity, or other identity factors, however as these cannot be consistently determined from publicly available data, the results would not be statistically meaningful.

History of the Administrative Reporting Requirements

While Finalist data is available for all years, the availability of additional nominee data is affected by changes in the reporting requirements for this data. In 1980 (Worldcon 38, Noreascon Two), when the Best Related category first appeared, it is coincidental that a new amendment appears in the business meeting minutes^[3] requiring reporting of the final voting data (presumably rather than a simple report of the results). There is no reference to nomination data in this proposal and the existing constitution did not require reporting of extended nomination data. The requirement to report final voting data was ratified in 1981 (Worldcon 39, Denvention Two) and made part of the WSFS constitution.^[4] The present study focuses on nomination data rather than the final voting process, therefore the voting data is not relevant here.

The 1994 (Worldcon 52, ConAdian) business meeting minutes^[5] include the following proposed amendment affecting the available nomination data.

Release of Hugo Nomination Totals

MOVED, to add the following to the end of Section 2.9.4 of the WSFS Constitution: During the same period the nomination voting totals shall also be published, including in each category the vote counts for at least the 15 highest vote-getters and any other candidates receiving a number of votes equal to at least 5% of the nomination ballots cast in that category.

(submitted by Mark L. Olson, Rick Katze, Anthony Lewis, and Sharon Sbarsky)

(The rules now require the publication of the final-ballot Hugo voting counts. (It is not presently required that nomination totals be released, though it has become customary for Worldcons to release them.)^[6] This motion would require that the nomination counts also be published, including runners-up down to 15th place or 5%, whichever represents fewer votes.)

After some debate regarding whether this requirement should be a resolution or an amendment, the original amendment passed its initial vote. The amendment was ratified at the 1995 (Worldcon 53, Intersection) business meeting.^[7]

This requirement was therefore in place officially starting in 1996. Data consistent with this requirement is available at HugoAwards.org for 1996, not for 1997, then consistently thereafter starting in 1998.^[8] Note that in years when data is available for both the total number of nominating ballots for Best Related and the number of nominations received by the 15th place nominee, the 15^th place work always received fewer nominations than 5% of the total nominating ballots in the category, therefore it should never have been the case that additional nominees were listed below 15^th place because they were on at least 5% of the nominating ballots. Additional nominees are sometimes listed, but not for this reason.

The approved version of the nominee reporting requirement is documented in the archived 1999 version of the WSFS constitution^[9] which has the following text. (No archived business meeting documents are available for 1998.)

3.11.4: The complete numerical vote totals, including all preliminary tallies for first, second, … places, shall be made public by the Worldcon Committee within ninety (90) days after the Worldcon. During the same period the nomination voting totals shall also be published, including in each category the vote counts for at least the fifteen highest vote-getters and any other candidate receiving a number of votes equal to at least five percent (5%) of the nomination ballots cast in that category.

The next change to relevant reporting requirements was proposed in the 2007 business meeting.^[10] This involved some sort of change to the Long List of nominees, but the specific text is not included in the minutes that year. The amendment passed and was ratified in 2008 Worldcon 66, Denvention 3)^[11] as follows (new text is underlined), becoming effective in 2009:

Moved, To amend section 3.11.4 of the Constitution by adding the following words to the end of Section 3.11.4: During the same period the nomination voting totals shall also be published, including in each category the vote counts for at least the fifteen highest vote-getters and any other candidate receiving a number of votes equal to at least five percent (5%) of the nomination ballots cast in that category, but not including any candidate receiving fewer than five (5) votes.^[12]

For years when the full Long List nomination statistics are available, there appear to be only 2 years when the “not less than 5” rule would need to have been invoked. In 1998 (before the requirement of “at least 5 votes”), there was a tie for 11-14th place with 4 votes each and, as noted previously, the 15th ranked nominee (which presumably was a tie for items with 3 votes) was not listed. In 2007, the year the 5-vote restriction was first proposed, there was a tie for 15-19th place with 4 votes each.

Note that in 2007 a far more extensive Long List than usual was published. For Best Related, the list included every item receiving at least 2 votes. (Other categories reporting extended nominee lists that year had different minimums.) The data reporting for this year was unusual in other ways, in that it did not include nomination data for total ballots, ballots for each category, or distinct works in each category, which data had been fairly standard in the previous decade. This means it’s not possible to calculate how the more extensive Long List relates to the 5%-of-category cut-off.^[13] The business meeting would have occurred prior to the nominee data being published, though the data reports were almost certainly prepared earlier. It seems likely that the extended nominee lists were related in some way to the debate over reporting requirements, but in that case, the omission of the category totals is baffling.

In 2009, the first year the revised reporting requirements were effective, there was also an unusually extensive Long List reported. All categories reported every nominee that received 5 or more nominations. For Best Related, this included works down to 25^th place, which had 6 nominations.^[14] The 5% cut-off that year would be 13 nominations. It isn’t clear whether this was a deliberate choice to publish non-required data using only the “at least 5 nominations” rule or whether it was a misreading of the requirements of the new rule.^[15]

Changes to the nomination process under E Pluribus Hugo^[16] affected data reporting primarily in that it functionally eliminated ties during the evaluation of nominees.^[17] As noted previously, the two changes to the nomination process (6 rather than 5 Finalists and use of EPH) combined with the reporting requirements for nominees appears to have been generally interpreted as “Finalists plus 10 runners up,” i.e., a total of 16 works, however the occasional year reporting 15 items on the Long List may be following the letter of the requirement to report the top 15 items.

Timeline of the Available Data and the Effects of Reporting Requirements

Overall, here is the timeline of reporting requirements and actual available data, as it relates to the changes in the category name/scope. (The requirement for at least 5 votes isn’t included as it had no statutory effect on the data.)

1980-1995: Best Non-Fiction Book, only Finalists required to be reported
- Additional nominees reported in 1980 (10 total), 1989 (12 total), and 1993 (8 total) but otherwise only Finalists, which may be 5 or 6, presumably due to ties. (Actual nomination numbers are not consistently reported.)
1996-1997: Best Non-Fiction Book, Long List required to be reported
- Long List omitted in 1997, otherwise requirements are followed.
1998-2009: Best Related Book, Long List required to be reported
- Reporting as required with the following items noted:
  - 1998 only lists 14 items (see discussion above).
  - In 4 years, there was a tie involving 15th place and therefore more nominees were listed (2000, 2001, 2003, 2004).
  - 1999 16 nominees reported with no tie for 15th place, therefore this was not required.
  - 2002 17 nominees reported with a tie between 16 & 17, which should not have required this addition.
  - 2006 17 nominees reported with a tie between 16 & 17, which should not have required this addition.
  - 2007 All nominees with at least 2 votes reported for a total of 40 items.
  - 2009 All nominees with at least 5 votes reported for a total of 25 items.^[1]
- 2010-2016: Best Related Work, Long List required to be reported
  - 2 years involved a tie for 15th place (2011, 2013) and therefore listed more than 15 nominees.
  - 2010 23 nominees listed with the lowest number of votes being 8. As the number of ballots for each category was not reported, the 5% threshold cannot be calculated. Votes for 15th place were 13. Therefore, it does not appear that this more extensive list was based on reporting requirements.
- 2017-Present: Best Related Work, EPH in effect
  - Long List consists of either 15 or 16 items (see discussion above).

Reporting is more erratic for the total number of Hugo nominating ballots, the number of ballots including each specific category, and the number of distinct works nominated in each category. It isn’t clear that any of this data is required to be reported. The incompleteness of this data will be relevant when tracking certain trends in nomination data.^[19]

Total nominating ballots is available for 4 of the Non-Fiction years (22%), 9 of the Related Book years (75%), and 8 of the Related Work years (50%).
Nominating ballots including Best Related works is available for 2 of the Non-Fiction years (11%), 11 of the Related Book years (92%), and 15 of the Related Work years (94%).
Number of distinct works for Best Related is available for 1 of the Non-Fiction years (6%), 9 of the Related Book years (75%), and 7 of the Related Work years (44%).
Overall, only 13 years (28%) report all 3 types of data.

Due to certain coincidences of timing regarding changes to the category and changes to reporting practices, we can conveniently group the data into the following comparison sets.

Best Non-Fiction Book

Finalist data is complete
Only minimal Long List data is available, therefore Long List data during this period will be considered anecdotally but not used for between-group comparisons.

Best Related Book

Finalist data is complete
Required Long List data (through #15) is functionally complete.
Additional, non-required data is available for several years but in most cases is equivalent to the number of required nominees in other years due to ties for #15.
One year is anomalous listing all 40 nominees with at least 2 votes while 20 nominees have 3 or more votes. One year lists all nominees with at least 5 votes. As the number of nominees receiving 3+ and 5+ votes respectively are roughly equivalent to the Long List size for years with large ties for #15, they will be included in Long List comparisons, with the remainder being analyzed anecdotally.

Best Related Work

Finalist data is complete
Required Long List data is complete
One year has additional non-required nominees, however the numbers are similar to those included in Long List sets under Best Related Book and will be included in group comparisons.

Comparison Sets

Therefore, the analysis will include the following:

Finalist data will be compared across all three eras.
Finalist + Long List data will be compared between Best Related Book and Best Related Work. This provides a useful comparison for the effects of the increased scope of formats.
Within the Related Book and Related Work eras, year-by-year differences in Finalist + Long List will be analyzed and compared to the overall group to identify and directional shifts.
Any year with an anomalously large data set will be compared to its truncated data set(s) to find anecdotal differences in content of the long tail.

2.3.2 Eligibility Notes

Eligibility Questions

Works that make the nomination cut-off for Finalist are evaluated to confirm that they meet eligibility requirements for release date, format, categorization, etc. Some aspects of this evaluation are clear-cut while others can be subjective. Works on the Long List that don’t make the Finalist cut-off are not necessarily evaluated for eligibility, although in some cases there are notes indicating a Long List work would not be eligible. Therefore, the two data sets (Finalists and cumulative Long List) answer slightly different questions. Finalist data tells us what eligible works have been nominated, but Long List data can tell us what the nominators think should be eligible, or perhaps what their impression of the category’s scope is without reference to the eligibility rules.

When a clearly ineligible work appears on the Long List, it could be a sign that nominators aren’t studying the eligibility requirements carefully, or that they are unaware of key information (such as publication date), but it could also indicate that nominators think the work should be recognized in some way regardless of whether it fits the eligibility requirements at the time.[20] This last motivation would be difficult to identify in the absence of documented discussions on the topic. Given that ambiguous works (especially during the Related Work era), when such discussions are well-documented, can show a conscious interest in exploring and stretching the boundaries of the category’s scope, it’s probably best to assume similar motivations in cases where the motivations aren’t well documented. For example, when works of Fiction or Fiction collections are nominated, it should be presumed that nominators considered the work to be significant for some other aspect. It can’t entirely be ruled out that there may have been organized bad-faith campaigns to nominate works that the nominators knew to be out of scope, yet nominated anyway. But this study gives the benefit of the doubt, given the regular appearance of clearly ambiguous works.

Eligibility in Multiple Years

That said, there are contexts in which apparent eligibility concerns can be explained. Works are sometimes nominated in more than one year, or in a different year than the year of creation, due to the allowance for extended eligibility or circumstances which allowed renewed eligibility.

If a new edition of a Book was published, the new edition might be nominated as a substantially new work. This is the case for the following works:

Anatomy of Wonder, Second Edition (Finalist in 1982), Anatomy of Wonder, Third Edition (Finalist in 1988).
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, unnumbered 1st Edition (Finalist and Winner in 1994), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 3rd Edition (Finalist and Winner in 2012)

Some works seem to appear twice based on a short version of the title, but on further examination this is due to different volumes of a multi-volume work being nominated.

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 1: (1907–1948): Learning Curve (Finalist in 2011) and Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better: 1948-1988 (Long List in 2015).
In 2024, nominations were received for both Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History vol. 3 (中国科幻口述史第三卷) (Long List), and Chinese SF: An Oral History vols. 2 & 3 (中国科幻口述史, 第二卷, 第三卷) (Finalist). The usual approach when both a work and its subset are nominated (which happens more often in the Graphic Work or Dramatic Presentation categories) is a process to transfer nominations to best reflect the overall intent of the nominators. In this case, the Hugo voting report notes that as the combined volumes 2 & 3 nomination made the Finalist list on its own, no nomination transfers were considered. (The prohibition on a work appearing more than once on the ballot was moot, as there were insufficient nominations for volume 3 alone to be considered as a Finalist.)

During the Related Work era, certain ongoing projects have been nominated in multiple years based on continually changing content, essentially functioning as a new edition. This is the case for the following works:

Writing Excuses, Podcast (Long List in 2010, Finalist in 2011, 2012, 2014, Finalist and Winner in 2013)
Archive of Our Own, Website (Long List in 2014, 2017, and 2018, Finalist and Winner in 2019)
FIYAHCON, Event (Finalist in 2021, Long List in 2022)

The question of whether the Archive of Our Own site was sufficiently different from year to year for re-nomination was discussed within the fannish community and raised some interesting philosophical issues. The fact that the site only made Finalist once, and then was not re-nominated after it won that year, has contributed to leaving these issues unresolved. The Event and Podcast nominees can more clearly be considered discrete works in different years. There have been other ongoing projects that could raise the same questions, such as The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction website, where the lack of multiple appearances has made the question moot.

Extended Eligibility

When a specific work is nominated in a year other than its official year of eligibility, it is typically the following year, either based on extended eligibility or possibly a mistaken assumption that eligibility would be extended. Eligibility may be extended if a work had limited availability in its release year, or specifically had limited availability to English-speaking readers in the USA.

While it’s common for Dramatic Presentations to have petitions for extended eligibility^[21] it’s far less common for other types of works. Fictional works originally published in non-English languages have a different allowance for the year of first publication in English, due to the Anglocentric nature of the Worldcon nominators. Similarly, due to the USA-centric nature of the Worldcon nominators, there is an allowance to renew eligibility in the first year of USA publication for works originally published outside the USA.

The following shows the timeline that can explain dual appearances in adjacent years due to extension:

In Year X: work is released.
Early in Year X+1: nominations are made for year X.
Summer of Year X+1: petition is submitted to the business meeting and approved for extended eligibility by 2/3 of the business meeting.
Early Year X+2: nominations are made for year X+1 and works with extended eligibility are included in consideration.^[22]

One exception to these allowances is that if a work was a Finalist in a previous year, it cannot receive extended eligibility regardless of other considerations.^[23]

Extension of eligibility may be documented in the Business Meeting minutes (if voted on) or may be determined by the Hugo administrators and documented in the Hugo voting report (if procedural), but this latter isn’t always explicitly stated. In some cases, no written documentation for an apparent extension could be identified.

One work was nominated early (i.e., nominated in the same year as creation rather than nominated in the following year) as well as being nominated in its eligible year.

The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion, (published in 2024 in which year it was declared ineligible for the Long List, Finalist in 2025).

A somewhat unusual case is a work nominated in translation after its original publication date, but as the original publication was English/USA, the translation did not get extended eligibility.

The Art of Ghost of Tsushima, original English publication in 2020, Chinese translation published in 2022 (nominated in 2023, but deemed ineligible due to the prior publication, per the Hugo voting report).^[24]

The following works appear as nominees in the year after the eligible year (i.e., 2 years after publication) and there is specific documentation that eligibility was extended.

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, published in the UK in 2003 (Long List in 2004, Finalist and Winner in 2005 based on extended eligibility, per the author).
The True Knowledge of Ken MacLeod, published in the UK in 2003, extended eligibility in 2004 based on the USA publication date, per the Business Meeting minutes. (Long List in 2003 and 2004.)
Up Through an Empty House of Stars, published in the UK in 2003 (Long List in 2004, extended eligibility in 2005 based on initial non-USA publication, per the Business Meeting minutes, when it also made the Long List).
Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, film, released in 2018 (Long List in 2019, given extended eligibility due to limited release in 2020, per the Business Meeting minutes, when it was a Finalist).

The following works appear as nominees for the year after the eligible year (i.e., 2 years after publication) and may have been given extended eligibility but there is no documentation to that effect.[25]

Algernon, Charlie and I: A Writer’s Journey, has a copyright date of 1999, appears on the Long List in 2001 with no commentary. It appears that the original publication in 1999 was by Challcrest Press Books, which may have been determined to have low enough distribution to allow for extended eligibility.^[26] It was republished in 2000 by an imprint of Harcourt Books.
J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, published in 2000 (Long List in 2001 the year of official eligibility, Finalist in 2002). Presumably there was extended eligibility but no documentation of this was identified as the Business Meeting minutes for 2001 are not available. The work was published by HarperCollins and won 2001 World Fantasy and Mythopoeic awards, which would seem to suggest that limited distribution was not an issue. The reason for it not being disqualified is a mystery.
The Arrival, published (in Australia) in 2006 (Long List in 2007, Finalist in 2008). This would automatically be eligible for extension due to the initial publication being outside the USA, but there is no specific documentation of this.
The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, published in 2008 (Long List in 2009 and 2010). It was published by Wesleyan University Press, a US company, but may have been considered to have had limited distribution. There is no specific documentation of extended eligibility.

Extended eligibility is not always documented even when it appears to have been granted. However, in some cases a lack of extended eligibility is specifically documented, as for the following.

The Way the Future Was: A Memoir, published in 1978, (would have been on the Long List in 1980 but noted as ineligible, per the Hugo voting report, due to the publication date).
Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard, published in 1987 (would have been on the Long List in 1989 but noted as ineligible due to the publication date, per the Hugo voting report).
Myths for the Modern Age: Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe, published in 2005 (listed among the extended list of nominees in 2007 with the publication date called out, but it would not have been on an official Long List). It’s unclear whether the note highlighting the publication date was intended to be understood as an ineligibility comment.
The Anticipation Novelists of 1950s French Science Fiction: Stepchildren of Voltaire, published in 2010 (would have been a Finalist in 2012 but noted as ineligible in the Hugo voting report due to publication date).

Extended eligibility is excluded if a work has been a Finalist in its official year of eligibility. That’s the situation for the following, though the notes on ineligibility do not mention the prior Finalist status.

Imagination: The Art & Technique of David A. Cherry, published in 1987 (Finalist in 1988, Long List in 1989 but noted as ineligible in the Hugo voting report).

It is much rarer for a work to be nominated later than the year after official eligibility, however the following item appears in the data set.

Greetings From Lake Wu, published with very limited distribution in 2003 (appears in the extended list of nominees in 2007 with the publication date noted but it would not have been on an official Long List, therefore there is no reason why it would have been vetted for publication date).[27]

Other Disqualifiations

There are several other reasons why nominated works might be disqualified. The following additional works have disqualification reasons listed.

A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (would have been a Finalist in 1989 but the Hugo voting report notes it as “ineligible – withdrawn” with no reason given).
Visions in Light and Shadow (would have been on the Long List in 2001). There is no ruling in the Hugo voting results regarding eligibility, presumably because it didn’t meet the threshold for Finalist, but this is a collection of short Fiction and therefore should not be eligible.
L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XVII (would have been a Finalist in 2002 but ruled ineligible as it is classified as Fiction and does not meet the requirement for being notable for some other reason).
The Return of the Black Widowers (Long List in 2004 but ruled ineligible, per the Hugo voting report, as it is a collection of Fiction).
L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future: The First 25 Years (would have been on the Long List for 2011). There is no specific note in the Hugo voting results regarding disqualification, presumably because it didn’t meet the threshold for Finalist, but the same ruling as the previous would apply.
20 世纪中国科幻⼩说史 (Er Shi Shi Ji Zhong Guo Ke Huan Xiao Shuo Shi) / History of Chinese Science Fiction in the 20th Century (would have been a Finalist in 2023 but ruled ineligible due to conflict of interest as one of the authors was on the Hugo subcommittee that year).

Eligibility and the Data Analysis

Voluntary withdrawals have not been counted as disqualification and are not reported specifically as they do not speak to nomination patterns and the reason for withdrawal may not be known.

All works included in the nomination reports are included in the topical data analysis for Long List and full data sets, regardless of eligibility rulings or withdrawals, as they speak to patterns of nomination and the nominators’ intent.

[Segment V will cover Part 2 Methodology, Section 2.4 Categorization Process.]

[1]. Personal note: All coding regarding format, genre/nature, and subject are from my own analysis and any errors or misinterpretations are my responsibility.

[2]. Permanence of the links cannot be guaranteed. In order of priority, links refer to the work itself (in the case of online publications), a listing for the work by the author or publisher, a copy of the work at archive.org, or a listing for the work at a reference site such as Wikipedia, Goodreads, or The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (isfdb.org).

[3]. See: https://www.wsfs.org/rules-of-the-world-science-fiction-society/archive-of-wsfs-rules/wsfs-rules-as-of-worldcon-38-1980/ accessed 2025/08/25.

[4]. See: https://www.wsfs.org/rules-of-the-world-science-fiction-society/archive-of-wsfs-rules/wsfs-rules-as-of-worldcon-39-1981/, accessed 2025/08/25.

[5]. See: https://www.wsfs.org/rules-of-the-world-science-fiction-society/archive-of-wsfs-rules/wsfs-rules-as-of-worldcon-52-1994/, accessed 2025/08/25.

[6]. It isn’t clear from the materials at the HugoAward.org website that this was actually the case, unless the nomination data was being released but was not available to the compilers of the website. For Best Related, prior to 1994, non-Finalist nomination data is only available on the website for 1980 and 1989.

[7]. See: https://www.wsfs.org/rules-of-the-world-science-fiction-society/archive-of-wsfs-rules/wsfs-rules-as-of-worldcon-53-1995/, accessed 2025/08/25.

[8]. The 1998 data lists only 14 nominees, however #14 received 4 nominations. It is possible that the rule was interpreted in a way that excluded the next tier (items receiving 3 nominations) due to exceeding 15 items, but this is entirely speculation. In general, ties for 15th place result in listing all tied items.

[9]. See: https://www.wsfs.org/rules-of-the-world-science-fiction-society/archive-of-wsfs-rules/wsfs-rules-as-of-worldcon-57-1999/; accessed 2025/06/19.

[10]. See: https://www.wsfs.org/rules-of-the-world-science-fiction-society/archive-of-wsfs-rules/wsfs-rules-as-of-worldcon-65-2007/; accessed 2025/08/26.

[11]. See: https://www.wsfs.org/rules-of-the-world-science-fiction-society/archive-of-wsfs-rules/wsfs-rules-as-of-worldcon-65-2007/; accessed 2025/06/19.

[12]. Commentary in the meeting minutes indicates that reporting nominees with fewer than 5 nominations is not forbidden but is not mandatory.

[13]. The 5% cutoff in the several years before and after 2007 ran around 8-13 nominations, therefore it is highly unlikely that the extended list was based on a 5% rule.

[14]. Possibly no work had exactly 5 nominations.

[15]. For anyone wanting to study typical nomination distribution patterns, the 2007 and 2009 data sets provide a wealth of data beyond the typical.

[16]. See the Administrative History section under Changes to the Nomination Process.

[17]. It’s still theoretically possible to have a tie between works at any stage in the process, but mathematically it is far less likely to happen due to the nature of the calculations.

[18]. As a result of all these exceptions, in the 12 years of this group, only 2 years reported exactly 15 Long List nominees.

[19]. See the section on Historic Trends under Basic Nomination Data.

[20] The non-trivial number of nominations required to make the Long List means that presence on that list indicates more than an individual nominator oversight or error.

[21]. This is particularly relevant due to the rationale behind limited release of some works just before the end of the year.

[22]. Note that the timing requires that a request for extension be submitted at a time when full nomination statistics are not yet released.

[23]. The requirement for business meeting approval also functions as a gate for evaluating whether a work has had fair consideration. There was a case where an extended eligibility request for a Dramatic Presentation (Godzilla Minus One) had been approved, but then after the full nomination statistics were available and it was observed that the work had come very close to making the Finalist list, the decision was reversed on the basis that clearly it had been fairly considered in its first year.

[24]. This example points out the biases inherent in the procedural extension allowances. In 2023, a substantial proportion of the nominating body were Chinese nationals, due to the location of Worldcon that year, and might not have had access to the prior English-language publication. There is an argument to be made for updating such allowances based on an increasingly more international Worldcon membership, and this is a topic under community discussion.

[25] For works that were not Finalists, it’s possible that no evaluation was made for extended eligibility.

[26]. An online search for Challcrest Press Books does not turn up any other titles associated with this press, suggesting it may have been a self-publishing imprint for this one work.

[27] The stimulus for this delayed nomination in 2007 appears to have been re-publication of the book in a deluxe signed and numbered edition from Traife Buffet in 2006. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Lake)

Pixel Scroll 3/22/26 I Don’t Think That Scroll Title Means What You Think It Does

Posted on March 22, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) SPACE:1999. In The Telegraph. Samira Ahmed, a BBC newsreader and journalist (Front Row, News Watch, etc), remembers when “Space: 1999 was Britain’s answer to Star Trek – until it wasn’t”.

The show was a second attempt by Gerry Anderson and Sylvia Anderson, Thunderbirds husband-and-wife creators, to break away from Supermarionation puppetry into adult human drama, following the cancellation of their first live-action series, UFO, after just one season. With the high-gloss production values of its main backer, ITC Entertainment’s Lew Grade, who gave us The Prisoner and The Avengers, when it began shooting in 1973, Space: 1999 was the most expensive British TV show ever made.

Well, yes, actually.

It can be hard to explain to people who didn’t grow up watching Space: 1999 just what a seminal experience it was. Originally broadcast in the UK between 1975 and 1977, it had a captivating mixture of futuristic design, beautiful planetary skyscapes by future Oscar-winning special effects designer Brian Johnson, and existential, often philosophical, horror….

…Only two series were shot, and they differed wildly. Arguing about which is better is like debating whether the Sean Connery or Roger Moore Bond films are superior. We all know, really – but you’ve got to admit there was some great fun in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. So it is with Space: 1999 series two, which comes to Rewind TV this week. Although I showed up to Celebrity Mastermind in a borrowed season one costume (as awkwardly form-hugging as I’d feared) to prove my gravitas, as a child it was series two that fuelled my games, where we turned our fold-out sofa beds into little Eagle command module cockpits and climbed inside for adventure, and I took on the role of Maya – alien princess with exotic eyebrows and metamorphic powers.

Space: 1999 was a kind of follow-up to UFO (set in 1980), which featured humans on the moon manning an early-warning station for alien attack. For the new show, this was reimagined as a quasi-military and scientific research station, now called Moonbase Alpha. The opening episode saw the moon hurled out of Earth’s orbit by a nuclear explosion (memo to Elon Musk: storing nuclear waste up there is not a great idea), with the 300 or so Alphans sent hurtling uncontrollably across space, looking for a new planet to call home, but mostly encountering hostile aliens.

Made with the American market in mind, real-life Hollywood couple Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, fresh from Mission: Impossible, led the cast as Commander Koenig and Chief Medical Officer Dr Helena Russell. But despite strong storylines, exquisite production values, and an impressively diverse crew, series one wasn’t picked up by a major US network, causing panic at ITC Entertainment. It was widely felt to be too dark, although if we’re really honest, its leading couple lacked charisma….

(2) LAST WORD ON TYPOS. [Item by Lew Wolkoff.] Here’s the story of a typo gone wrong that I learned in an English Lit class in college that I thought you might appreciate..

“Why is a raven like a writing desk,” one of the characters in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland asks. Lewis Carroll wrote the scene with no intention of answering the question. In point of fact, he had no answer. Finally, after years of badgering by his fans, he produced this answer:

“Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!”.

The word “nevar” is “put with the wrong end in front.” Written backward, it in r-a-v-e-n. It’s a deliberate typo by Carroll. And it didn’t appear in print as planned because the proofreader caught and corrected it!.

(3) CHRIS BARKLEY MEDICAL UPDATE. Chris says, “Two days removed from cataract and glaucoma surgery… Here’s Today’s ‘PROOF OF LIFE’ Photo.”

(4) ONE FELLOW’S BALLOT. If you’re interested in what’s on Rich Horton’s Hugo ballot, he’s happy to tell you: “The Good Stuff: 2025” at Strange at Ecbatan.

… I read a dozen or more SF/F novels this year, and I feel very good about my nomination list — noting that I read several more that I’d have been happy to nominate! In other categories I’m to a great extent nominating favorites. Even so, for short fiction Editor — how in the world have neither Jonathan Strahan nor Scott Andrews won a Hugo!! Seriously!…

(5) BOW WOW LAW. The New York Times reports “Vogue Is Suing a Dog Fashion Magazine. Guess What It’s Called.” (Behind a paywall.) And it sells only a hundred copies an issue. Guess what that sales figure reminds me of.

A recent cover of Dogue, a canine fashion magazine, featured an Italian greyhound wearing an evening gown, an opera glove on each paw. Several pages in, a nattily dressed labradoodle showed off a collection of trench coats.

Readers find this sort of thing charming. The media company Condé Nast does not.

In December, Condé Nast filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing that Dogue had infringed on its trademark for Vogue, the human-centric fashion magazine published since 1892.

Lawyers for the company wrote in their complaint that Dogue’s logo was “obviously intended” to confuse customers by suggesting a relationship between the magazines. The continued publication of Dogue was a blow to Vogue’s reputation, they added, and was “likely to damage Condé Nast irreparably.”

Now, the typically harmonious world of dog fashion is gearing up for a legal showdown that Olga Portnaya, the creator and editor in chief of Dogue, believes is about far more than who gets to photograph a vizsla in a turtleneck.

“Art and culture have always evolved through reinterpretation and dialogue,” Ms. Portnaya, a graphic designer and photographer who started Dogue in 2019, said in an interview. “For me, this is a larger fight: I’m not just fighting for my own work and our community, but for other independent creators.”

She said she was astonished that Condé Nast was so interested in confronting her magazine, a one-woman editorial operation that sells fewer than 100 copies per issue. The complaint demands that Ms. Portnaya pay Condé Nast unspecified damages and deliver all copies of Dogue to the company “for destruction.”…

… In a complaint filed in federal court, lawyers for Condé Nast claimed that Dogue’s logo was “obviously intended” to confuse customers by suggesting a relationship between the magazine and Vogue.

The magazine is offered free online and sold at a single newsstand in Beverly Hills, Calif. Each issue features a four-legged cover star beneath serif text that reads “Dogue,” placed roughly where the Vogue mark appears on Condé Nast’s magazine. Between spreads of canine couture, readers might encounter an interview with the actor Kevin Costner about his English Labrador, Bobby, who enjoys eating carrots. (Ms. Portnaya writes most of the magazine’s articles under the byline Oli Port.)…

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

March 22, 1931 — William Shatner, 95.

By Paul Weimer: William Shatner. The face that launched a hundred soap operas.

I find it interesting that like B5 would find out thirty years later, Star Trek’s first shot at a crew and a leading man, Jeffrey Hunter, wasn’t quite what a viewing public particularly wanted in a leading man of a space opera SF series. Poor Michael O’Hare and Jeffrey Hunter both weren’t quite right to be the full-on leading actors for such a series.

But like Bruce Boxleitner three decades later, William Shatner proved to be. I mean, sure, lots of Spock fans out there, McCoy fans, and other characters. And the whole “trio” of Kirk-Spock-McCoy has been documented to enormous detail. But it is William Shatner’s complex Captain Kirk, who was more cerebral and outwitting of his opponents than you remember, more nuanced, more interesting than the flanderized stereotype that has been parodied to the moon and back ever made him out to be. Sure, his diction and acting were, charitably melodramatic, but that is a feature, not a bug that got him through the series, and seven movies.

Outside of genre space, he did shows like T J Hooker, and Rescue 911, and Boston Legal (although the fourth wall breaking Boston Legal might actually BE a genre show. I leave the comments to decide that). He’s done music (oddly, that doesn’t make him unique among the TOS crew). He was the voice of Priceline.com in its early days on the Internet. He co-wrote the TekWar novels. He breeds horses. (Wonder why he is horse riding in Star Trek Generations? Now you know.)

You might think that “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” would be my favorite non-Star-Trek genre performance Shatner has done. And you would be almost right. It is a classic in paranoia, perception, fear, and it does show that his acting style does have range, and ability and even with his unusual cadence, it can work in a situation like this. The episode itself is a masterpiece and Shatner’s performance is a big part of that.

But I like “Nick of Time” a bit more. It’s a more hopeful and positive story, as we see Shatner as part of a married couple who wind up briefly in thrall to a fortune telling machine that seems to tell the future — but really just makes people dependent on its easy, cryptic answers. The utter triumph of the episode as Shatner and his wife break free of their dependency is enough to make you cheer…until you see the coda, and see a couple who have not been so fortunate, or possessing as much fortitude as Shatner’s Don S. Carter and Patricia Breslin’s Pat Carter finally manage to show.

And Shatner has been to space.

Get a life? William Shatner, in and out of Star Trek, certainly has.

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 22, 1995 – Sliders

Thirty-one years ago on FOX, the Sliders series first aired this evening. Created by Tracy Tormé and Robert K. Weiss, it would air on that network for three years before moving to Sci Fi for another two years. As a consequence of that it was first produced in Vancouver before being finally being so done in Los Angeles.

Befitting a cross-time series, it had an expansive cast led by the brothers of Jerry and Charlie O’Connell along with Cleavant Derricks, Sabrina Lloyd, John Rhys-Davies, Kari Wuhrer, Robert Floyd and Tembi Locke with Derricks being the only cast member to stay with the series throughout its entire run.

There has also been gossip among Martin fans that this series was inspired by George R.R. Martin’s 1992 ABC pilot Doorways but everyone involved said that it was not.

So how was the reception at the time? Not good. The Los Angeles Time was typical when it said “Now comes ‘Sliders,’ a banal bore of a mishmash adventure series starring Jerry O’Connell as a genius grad student named Quinn Mallory, who discovers a way to visit parallel Earths by whooshing himself through a space portal known as a ‘wormhole.’ It beats studying.”

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Brevity tries a different way to wake a beauty.
Crankshaft shares art tips.
Lio becomes an importer.
Mother Goose and Grimm celebrate Ohio.
Reality Check gives fine art a playful turn.
Paul Noth calls the computer repairman.

(9) DOCTOR WHO. [Item by Steven French.] A heart-warming piece on how David Tennant’s Dr Who helped the writer connect with her autistic son: “I was struggling to understand my autistic son – until we watched an episode of Doctor Who” in the Guardian.

The film Elf is a no-go in our house. My son interprets it as the psychological horror story of a man who is telling the truth but is constantly disbelieved. He loves The Traitors and rewatches entire series of it – knowing who the traitors are gives him an autonomy and comfort watching the game. Any other kind of conflict on screen and he’ll leave the room or wind it forward. I tried to explain that there are no stories without conflict. It made no difference.

My son is autistic and has ADHD – what’s sometimes referred to as AuDHD. We’ve always called him “fizzy”. He’s often the noisiest person in a room but hates too much noise. He’s incredibly sociable and wants so desperately to be part of the fun but finds the fun stressful. I had never seen anyone like him represented on screen.

And then I put on Doctor Who. It was a punt – my son was eight and he liked science. We went in at the David Tennant era – beginning with the episode The Christmas Invasion, where the Doctor doesn’t wake up till a third of the way through the episode. Suddenly there, standing in his pyjamas with a big boyish grin, was Tennant, describing a frightening alien with a weapon as a “big fella”. My son grinned back at the screen. When Tennant’s Doctor arrives properly, he barely stops talking or moving. He’s sword-fighting, then joking, then forgiving – and then he kills the baddy with a satsuma. All while repeating certain phrases to himself. My son laughed in recognition (he often repeats phrases to himself). He turned to me, eyes wide.

“He’s like me!” he said.

“You mean funny? Yes, you are very funny, luv.”

“No,” he insisted. “He’s fizzy. Like me.”…

(10) PROJECT HAIL MARY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Now, there are two reasons I read book reviews (well three, as I also HTML code some for SF² Concatenation). First, I check book reviews out for titles I am considering reading. Secondly, once I have read a book, I like to see how others found it and whether or not I missed something. With old, or even recent, best-selling SF novels, I suspect that most Filers will not check out book reviews for the first reason, but might well do for the second. And so we come to Andy Weir’s 2021 novel Project Hail Mary (my own old review at the link). Arguably, this novel is now worth re-visiting given that the cinematic adaptation directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, staring Ryan Gosling, is now just out on general release across the Cursed Earth, the former US Mega-Cities and over here in Brit Cit and Cal Hab, as well as EuroCit and elsewhere on planet Earth (but not the rest of the Galaxy)…

And so we come to England’s, Midlands-based Moid Moidelhoff who took down the archive of his Media Death Cult YouTube Channel a few years ago, but occasionally he re-visits some of these early episodes. Because the film is just out, he just re-posted from his archive from half a decade ago (how time flies) his own, reasonably spoiler-free, review of the novel.

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The Internet is a, um, magical, um, well, not exactly a place per se. But it turns out, you can try to become magical for real using that, um, let’s just call it a place. Ryan George tells how “I Enrolled in Wizard School (Online)”.

I did not receive an owl. Not a snowy owl, not a budget owl, not even a morally questionable burrowing owl. So instead of attending wizard school the traditional way, I enrolled in an online course that promised to help me reclaim my magic. In this video, I take a real wizarding course on the internet, learn about alchemy, magical staffs, chakras, telepathy, and the importance of keeping your wand clean, and attempt to determine whether I am now legally considered a wizard. If you enjoy watching a grown man take online wizard classes very seriously, welcome.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Lew Wolkoff, Jo Fletcher, 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.]

Christopher Caldwell Wins 2025 IAFA Crawford Award

Posted on March 22, 2026 by Mike Glyer

International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) has announced this year’s winner of the IAFA Crawford Award:

Christopher Caldwell for Call and Response (Neon Hemlock Press)

The IAFA Crawford Award) recognizes an outstanding writer whose first fantasy book was published during the previous calendar year. The award is named after the small-press publisher and editor, William L. Crawford (1911-1984).

The judges are: Joyce Chng, Eddie Clark, Joy Sanchez-Taylor, and Brian Attebery. Kelly Robson is the Crawford Award Director.

Judges’ comment:

Christopher Caldwell’s Call and Response is a powerful collection of queer joy and rage in lyrical, beautiful prose. These stories use the fantastic to reveal things about the real world and to movingly embody significant themes. The collection and organization of the stories is also superb; in mirroring themes and characters from the center outwards they are cast in relief in a way that strengthens both. A stunning first fantasy book.

The judges have chosen the following five Honorable Mentions:

Ibi Zoboi – (S)Kin (HarperCollins Versify)

Judges’ comment: (S)Kin had me hooked from the start! This novel, written in an accessible verse form, employs the soucouyant figure to discuss issues of immigration, colorism, and colonization. From the oral tale at the beginning to the shattered pieces of identity that comprise the end, (S)Kin is a must-read.

Natalia Theodoridou – Sour Cherry (Tin House)

Judges’ comment: Sour Cherry is an exciting and poignantly-written take on the age-old tale of Bluebeard. I love the ways that Theodoridou plays with both fairytale structure and the gendered implications of the tale. A captivating read!

Emily Yu-Xuan Qin – Aunt Tigress (Daw Books)

Judges’ comment: I like this one a LOT. Vivid and lyrical writing, animal people, the trauma of diaspora. It broke my heart a few times.

Caskey Russell – The Door on the Sea (Solaris)

Judges’ comment: A fantasy using indigenous material from the author’s own background to construct a rich, convincing secondary world. The story about an alien invasion suggests colonial history (seen from the viewpoint of the colonized) without actually being historical. Tlingit traditions, including a thoroughly obnoxious trickster Raven, help to turn fantasy tropes into something fresh, engaging, and surprisingly funny.

Martin Cahill – Audition for the Fox (Tachyon)

Judges’ comment: A deliberately disorientating opening thrusts the reader into an expertly crafted juxtaposition of fable and story. Draws on trickster story traditions to artfully explore important themes of violence, resistance, and the power (and limits) of narrative.

This year the Crawford Award received 66 submissions from more than 30 publishers.

[Based on a press release.]

Pixel Scroll 3/21/26 You Better File On Into My Pixel, Cause It’s Going To Be Scrolling Out Doors

Posted on March 21, 2026 by Mike Glyer

(1) OOPS. Smithsonian Magazine assures readers, “Typos Have Plagued Us for Centuries. Just Ask the Publishers Who Printed the Seventh Commandment as ‘Thou Shalt Commit Adultery’ in 1631”.

James Joyce wrote the manuscript of Ulysses with a steel pen over seven years. By his typists’ accounts, the Irish author’s penmanship was atrocious, and his revisions were overwhelming. When the book was published in 1922, it was full of mistakes. In a letter to his wife, he wrote, “The edition you have is full of printer’s errors.”

The following year, Joyce’s editors compiled a massive list of the book’s errors to be fixed in new editions. Joyce rejected some of the corrections, saying, “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.” Even so, some future printings of the book came with a seven-page errata sheet listing more than 200 mistakes.

Errors like those in Ulysses are the subject of a new exhibition at Yale. “‘Beauties of My Style’: Errata and the Printed Mistake,” which opens at the university’s Sterling Memorial Library on March 30, examines the history of typos across five centuries….

… The exhibition features an infamous 1631 edition of the Bible, which lists “Thou shalt commit adultery” as the Seventh Commandment. (The omission of the word “not” earned this edition the nickname “the Wicked Bible.”) By the time the mistake was discovered, 1,000 copies had been printed. The British king Charles I reprimanded the publishers, fined them £300 and stripped them of their printing license. In the centuries that followed, rumors circulated speculating that a rival printer had introduced the error. But as Chris Jones, a medieval studies scholar at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, told the Guardian’s Eva Corlett in 2022, the more likely explanation is that the printers hadn’t wanted to spend money on copy editors.

Nearly all the Wicked Bibles were destroyed, and only about 20 known copies survive. In the copy on view at the Beinecke, someone fixed the error by hand, adding “not” to “Thou shalt commit adultery.”…

(2) “NO GAMES FOR GENOCIDE”. [Item by Steven French.] Keza MacDonald reports on gaming companies’ concerns about Microsoft’s relationship with Israel’s Defence Force in the latest “Pushing Buttons” newsletter: “Why an up-and-coming indie developer is returning Microsoft’s money” in the Guardian.

Video games are in a funding crisis. Investor money flowed freely during the pandemic gaming boom, but now the well has run dry. It is increasingly difficult, for indie developers especially, to get the capital to make games. It is extremely unusual, then, to hear of a developer returning an investor’s money. Yet that is what Speculative Agency, developers of All Will Rise, have just done.

Last year, All Will Rise, a deck-building game about a team of activists fighting for the future of their oligarch-run city, received money from Microsoft as part of a developer acceleration programme. In late-2025, however, the team became aware of No Games for Genocide, a collective of developers, journalists, union organisers and others that came together as a result of Israeli assault on Gaza to protest against “material and commercial ties between the games industry and enabling genocide, war crimes, and the military industrial complex”.

No Games for Genocide has urged the games industry and players to boycott Microsoft and Xbox because of the US tech giant’s ties to Israel’s Defence Force and the technology it has provided during Israel’s war on Gaza, which a United Nations commission last year declared a genocide. As the Guardian reported last August, the Israeli spy service had been using Microsoft’s Azure cloud to carry out mass surveillance on Palestinian civilians. (Microsoft responded by terminating the Israeli military’s access to this service, though the IDF remains a client and still uses other Microsoft services.) The company’s continued relationship with the IDF has driven widespread protests, including from its own employees – some of whom were fired – and Microsoft is on the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) list….

(3) TRIPODS EVOLUTION. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The NutBug YouTube channel explores SF’s most iconic universes. It has recently looked at the evolution of the cinematic portrayals of the Martian tripods in H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.

In H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, the Martian fighting machines—often called Martian Tripods—are the main weapons used by the invading Martians. They come from Mars along with the Martians themselves, landing on Earth inside large metal cylinders. Once the Martians emerge, they build and use these machines to move across the countryside and defeat human armies.

You can watch the 11-minute video here or below…

(4) NICHOLAS BRENDON (1971-2026). “Buffy the Vampire Slayer actor Nicholas Brendon dies aged 54” reports BBC. (Subscription required by readers outside UK.)

US actor Nicholas Brendon, renowned for his starring role in the cult TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has died aged 54.

Brendon’s family confirmed in a statement on social media that “he passed in his sleep of natural causes”.

His family added: “He was passionate, sensitive, and endlessly driven to create. Those who truly knew him understood that his art was one of the purest reflections of who he was.

“Most people know Nicky for his work as an actor and for the characters he brought to life over the years. In recent years Nicky has found his passion in painting and art.”

Brendon played Xander Harris in Buffy the Vampire Slayer over seven seasons between 1997 and 2003 – best friend of the titular character played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. A planned reboot of Buffy was cancelled, Gellar announced to fans on Instagram earlier this month.

Following news of her co-star’s death, Gellar, quoting a famous monologue by his character in the series, wrote: “They’ll never know how tough it is to be the one who isn’t chosen. To live so near to the spotlight, and never step in it. But I know. I see more than anybody realizes, because nobody’s watching me.”

“I saw you Nicky,” she added. “I know you are at peace, in that big rocking chair in the sky.”

The Los Angeles-born actor received three Saturn nominations for his role in Buffy, two for best TV actor and one for best TV supporting actor….

(5) PHILIP CASTLE (1942-2026). [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Artist Philip Castle seems to have passed a month ago, but only publicized in the March 20th Guardian’s “Philip Castle obituary”. Per that article, film posters that File 770 readers would recognize include Clockwork Orange and Flash Gordon.

One of the best-known British film posters of the 20th century began life in the Borehamwood house of Stanley Kubrick, in a sketch drawn by the airbrush artist Philip Castle, who has died aged 83. Then a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art, who had advertised his services in the Daily Express, Castle was invited to meet the director at his home, where Kubrick played him a rough cut of his new film, A Clockwork Orange, without sound, and asked him to create a poster for it. “It was just incredible,” Castle told the Times in 2000. “My favourite film was Dr Strangelove, followed by 2001 [A Space Odyssey]. I was just the biggest fan.”

In the director’s home theatre, he drafted images in his notebook of Malcolm McDowell, who played the gang leader Alex DeLarge in Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel. McDowell stares menacingly out of the page, holding a knife, with a floating eyeball nearby. This notebook – shown at two recent exhibitions in London, Daydreaming With Stanley Kubrick at Somerset House (2016) and Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition at the Design Museum (2019) – holds most of the elements of the finished film poster, before Castle filled the final image with paint from an airbrush. This was the tool that allowed him to develop his distinctive style….

There’s also the cover for the computer game Elite that is very recognizable to UK nerds of my age, I dunno if it was also on US copies? It’s a rare cover in that it’s accurate to the original designs. IIRC commenter Cliff Ramshaw was a UK computer journalist around the time that came out. Image source is ISFDB, which also has a few book covers, including Andre Norton’s Witch World series and Leiber’s The Wanderer.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is one of my favorite SF works. I knew it had won a well-deserved Hugo at NyCon 3 but I hadn’t realized that it was nominated the previous year at Tricon. Isn’t that a tad unusual?

It had been first published in If magazine in five parts starting in the December 1965 issue. It was then published in hardcover by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1966. The Penguin Publishing Group has it for sale at the usual suspects as does what I suspect is one pirate publisher as it has no copyright information.

Now I really think that everyone here has read this novel but keeping with our very firm policy of absolutely no spoilers, I won’t say anything beyond the fact that I think that this is one of his best novels and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it each and every time I’ve experienced it. Characters, stetting and story — what’s not to really like here?

So now to our most superb Beginning…

I SEE IN Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect—and tax—public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure. I see also is to be mass meeting tonight to organize “Sons of Revolution” talk-talk.

My old man taught me two things: “Mind own business” and “Always cut cards.” Politics never tempted me. But on Monday 13 May 2075 I was in computer room of Lunar Authority Complex, visiting with computer boss Mike while other machines whispered among themselves. Mike was not official name; I had nicknamed him for Mycroft Holmes, in a story written by Dr. Watson before he founded IBM. This story character would just sit and think—and that’s what Mike did. Mike was a fair dinkum thinkum, sharpest computer you’ll ever meet.

Not fastest. At Bell Labs, Buenos Aires, down Earthside, they’ve got a thinkum a tenth his size which can answer almost before you ask. But matters whether you get answer in microsecond rather than millisecond as long as correct?

Not that Mike would necessarily give right answer; he wasn’t completely honest.

When Mike was installed in Luna, he was pure thinkum, a flexible logic—“High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Mod. L”—a HOLMES FOUR. He computed ballistics for pilotless freighters and controlled their catapult. This kept him busy less than one percent of time and Luna Authority never believed in idle hands. They kept hooking hardware into him—decision-action boxes to let him boss other computers, bank on bank of additional memories, more banks of associational neural nets, another tubful of twelve-digit random numbers, a greatly augmented temporary memory. Human brain has around ten-to-the-tenth neurons. By third year Mike had better than one and a half times that number of neuristors.

And woke up.

(7) JIMMY WEBB – AMERICAN SONGWRITER CONNECTED TO GENRE FICTION. [Item by Dann.] Jimmy Webb is a songwriter, composer, and singer with a long and storied history within the music business. The son of a US Marine veteran of the WWII island-hopping campaign against Imperial Japan and Baptist preacher, Jimmy began his career working by crafting songs for various Motown artists.

His work was performed by a wide range of artists including Vikki Carr, The 5th Dimension, and The Supremes. He developed a close relationship with singer Glen Campbell whose performances of “Galveston”, “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”, and “Wichita Lineman” became standards in the American songbook.

Glen Campbell also popularized the Jimmy Webb song “Highwayman” which includes an interstellar reference:

I fly a starship
Across the Universe divide
And when I reach the other side
I’ll find a place to rest my spirit if I can

Jimmy’s relationship with genre figures includes the late Richard Harris who was the first incarnation of Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies. It was Richard Harris’ recording of “MacArthur Park” that first popularized that song. Harris was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1968 for the best pop male vocal performance of “MacArthur Park”. [Also nominated were Glen Campbell for another Jimmy Webb song “Wichita Lineman” and the ultimate winner in the category José Feliciano who covered The Doors’ “Light My Fire“.]

Harris’ version of “MacArthur Park” went to number 2 on the Hot 100 chart. Jimmy Webb’s only number one hit in his career was when Donna Summer’s version went to the top of the chart.

Jimmy Webb proceeded to write and produce two full albums of music performed by Richard Harris. The first album released in 1968 was the Grammy nominated A Tramp Shining album. The second album “The Yard Went On Forever” was released later the same year.

As evidenced by the starship reference in “Highwayman”, Jimmy has had a long relationship with genre fiction.

A long-time fan of Robert A. Heinlein, Webb proceeded to write “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”. Robert Heinlein offered no opposition to using that name for the song.

The song is more of a love song than a paean to science fiction with the moon representing a woman who is hard to hold in love.

The moon’s a harsh mistress
And the sky is made of stone
The moon’s a harsh mistress
She’s hard to call your own

The song was first performed by Joe Cocker and has been subsequently recorded 30 times by artists including Glen Campbell (natch!), Pat Metheny, Linda Ronstadt, Joan Baez, and Maureen McGovern.

Jimmy Webb talked about his relationship with genre fiction and Robert A. Heinlein specifically in a 2009 interview for Penny Black Music by Lisa Torem.

Penny Black Music: Another beautiful ballad ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ (1977, ‘El Mirage’, Rhino Handmade) was inspired by science- fiction literature. Does literature often inspire you?

Jimmy Webb: Well, it always has. In that particular case, you know, Robert Heinlein, was a kind of early mentor of mine. I started reading his books when I was eight years old. He really wrote juvenile novels – ‘Starship Trooper.’ But, he had a lot of political content and sociological content. I guess I was really getting more of my education out of science-fiction than out of public school. I was reading Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and learning a great deal about the patois of the language itself and how these words were being used to create emotions. I was learning this from writers without even knowing it.

And since science-fiction is my cup of tea and I don’t think I turned out to be wrong – I think it’s dominated the film industry over the past few years and it turned out to be a legitimate form of expression.

When I first started reading sci-fi they were debating whether it as a legitimate art-form. I’m not going to get into that…

This isn’t really art – these are just stories that people make up. People like Arthur C. Clarke invented the communications satellite and Jules Verne – as a visionary – what they were was futurists. And so what I was doing was looking with a glazed look on my face and my father would say, “Where are you now, Jimmy?”

But, I guess I always knew that. ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ was one of the best titles I’ve ever heard in my life. I really am guilty of appropriating something from another writer. In this case I had contact with Robert A. Heinlein’s attornies. I said, “I want to write a song with the title, ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.’ Can you ask Mr. Heinlein if it’s okay with him?” They called me back and he said he had no objection to it.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 21, 1946 – Timothy Dalton, 80

Timothy Dalton made his film debut fifty-eight years ago as Philip II of France in The Lion in Winter. I remember him distinctly in that role. Of course, I’ve watched that film enough times that I think I’ve memorized much of the script.

He would do two Bond films, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill. He made a decent Bond, but then I think the only true Bond was Connery.

Now doing a dive into his genre roles, he was Prince Barin in Flash Gordon, and had a major role as film star Neville Sinclair, one of baddies in The Rocketeer. An absolutely amazing film which is why it got a nomination for a Hugo at MagiCon.

And he was Lord President Rassilon in “The End of Time”, the last Tenth Doctor story. He made a rather impressive Time Lord indeed.

I’ll finish up with his role as the Chief on the DC Universe/Max Doom Patrol series. It was a great role for him, and a most excellent series indeed.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

Strange Brew looks at the late night.
The Argyle Sweater passes along the big news.

(10) ADVANCE ‘STRANGER THINGS’ SCREENINGS. “First 2 Episodes of ‘Stranger Things: Tales from ’85’ Coming to Theaters” reports Animation Magazine. It’s happening on April 18 – see availability below.

Netflix is inviting fans to return to Hawkins via a big screen portal for “Stranger Saturday,” with a special theatrical engagement for the first two episodes of new animated series spin-off Stranger Things: Tales from ’85! Fans can plunge into the new adventure, brought to life by showrunner Eric Robles, in select theaters ahead of the series streaming premiere on April 23.

The screenings will take place on April 18 at 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. local time, in 34 theaters across the U.S. in partnership with AMC Theatres. Screenings will also take place at the Paris Theater in New York (ParisTheaterNYC.com) as well as Netflix House Philadelphia (Netflix.com/House).

Tickets will go on sale on Wednesday, March 18 at 8 a.m. PT. To choose from the full list of theaters and showtimes in your area, and to download tickets, visit AMCTheatres.com.

(11) WHEN CRAFT COLLIDE. [Item by Andrew Porter.] As I commented on Daytonian in Manhattan’s post “The 1914 Municipal Building – 1 Centre Street”:

“The Second Deluge,” a 1912 science fiction novel by Garrett P. Serviss details a catastrophic, world-ending flood caused by the Earth passing through a watery nebula (they were misunderstood at the time, and thought to be within the Milky Way). As the oceans rise, a massive ark to save a remnant of humanity is built. The novel details how the ark floats and destroys the Municipal Building, the highest structure in NYC. It’s a classic of early science fiction, known for its vivid descriptions, exploration of survival themes, and its blend of scientific speculation with adventure.

(12) FELINE LISTENERS. BBC tells how “Guernsey students improve skills by reading to rescue cats”. (Subscription required by readers outside the UK.)

Students from a Guernsey secondary school are practising their literacy skills by reading to cats at the island’s animal shelter.

Les Beaucamps pupils read to the cat Mr B, who was found as a stray with high blood pressure which led to him losing his sight.

Student Neva said: “It’s been wonderful, he’s been very calm and he’s been purring.”

Lisa Harvey, inclusivity manager at Beaucamps, said: “The reading out loud really helps with their fluency, it also really helps with their social communication and interaction skills.”

Anna Paint, head of the cattery at the GSPCA said there are benefits for the cats as well as the students.

“The cats tend to quite enjoy it, they normally all come to the front of the pens and they sit quite quietly,” she said.

“So, Mr B, even though he is blind he can still hear so he enjoys having socials with the children.

“And its the tone of voice as well, so when they’re reading the tone is sort of quite quiet and very relaxing and peaceful.”

Harvey said the idea came from another type of animal therapy the school uses.

“We have a wag therapy dog that comes throughout the week and that was really successful so we’ve kind of expanded on that and then they come and read with the cats which has proven really successful.”

(13) THE SCIENCE OF PROJECT HAIL MARY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The cinematic adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary got its general release in western Europe and N. America 20th March.

Of course Andy Weir is noted for the excellent novel The Martian which is a masterpiece of mundane SF. The cinematic adaptation of which won a Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form Hugo in 2016 (and which [ahem] previously those of us at SF² Concatenation cited as one of the best SF films of 2015). It also subsequently won Germany’s Curt Siodomak Prize.

With Project Hail Mary we enter more speculative SF territory with an existential threat to Earth in the form of a dying Sun… But let’s not get ahead of ourselves as the film has yet to come out in a full general release.

Nonetheless, Oxford-based astrophysicist Becky Smethurst (who specialises in black holes – or ‘frozen stars’ if you are of a Russian, Sov Blok, bent and a certain age) has taken a look at the science of Project Hail Mary over at her Dr Becky YouTube channel. She is joined with the film’s star Ryan Gosling and author Andy Weir. Together they discuss: what makes stars dim; the science behind astrophage; special relativity and time dilation; what we know about the real stars t-ceti and 40 Eridani and their planets; and the science of alien life, but not as we know it. It would have been good if they had had a biologist onboard for this last (I’m firmly with Brit Cit biologist and SF fan Jack Cohen on this one – chosen consultants on alien life are all too often astronomers and not biologists: biology is not, some say, a proper science).

By the way, of SFnal note 40 Eridani is the star around which Star Trek’s Spock’s home planet of Vulcan orbits, and around which it was thought an exoplanet had been detected, but alas in 2023 logic decreed it was a found to be false positive identification. Them’s the breaks.

Becky also sat down with Project Hail Mary’s directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, about how you visually communicate difficult concepts like relativity on screen, whilst keeping the human story at the heart. It’s got alien life, interstellar travel, astrophysics, molecular biology and more, but how much of the science in Project Hail Mary works in the real Universe…?

Becky also says that at a future date there will be additional interview videos with her guests.

There are mild spoilers, but nothing that hasn’t already been revealed in the trailers…

You can see the 21-minute video below…

Time to tread boldly…

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