Top 20 Posts of 2016
Happy New Year! Here are the most-viewed posts from the past year with notes explaining what helped make them so. 1. More of Your Comments on MACII While I was laid up in the hospital, Filers rallied around to keep … Continue reading →
Journey Planet 31, Something Good To End 2016
James Bacon invites one and all to download Journey Planet #31, co-edited by James, Christopher J Garcia and Pádraig Ó Méalóid. In December 1966, fifty years ago now, a 15-year-old Irish teenager called Tony Roche did a remarkable thing. He … Continue reading →
Richard Adams (1920-2016) Made Me Want To Write
By Ursula Vernon: There’s an origin story for fandom that goes like this—“I was a precocious reader and I was tired of the kid books and one day I picked up X and that changed my life and I never … Continue reading →
Pixel Scroll 12/31/16 We All Know That The Pixel Never Scrolls Twice
(1) ON ITS WAY TO BEING DEADJOURNAL? LiveJournal was purchased by a Russian company in 2007 but continued to operate on U.S.-based servers until this month. According to Metafilter — As of a few days ago, the IP addresses for … Continue reading →
Sputnik Award Finalists
Did you forget about The Sputnik Award? Jo Lindsay Walton’s new award, covered by File 770 in May, promised a winner would be announced before the year is out. And that’s almost what has happened. Walton reports two finalists have … Continue reading →
Nila Thompson Passes Away
Nila Thompson (1954-2016), St. Louis club and con fan, Anglophile, who came in to fandom via Star Trek and met her husband David K. M. Klaus at a Trek club meeting. Partially fafiated to raise to adulthood two of the … Continue reading →
Queen’s New Year Honours 2017
The Queen’s New Year Honours list for 2017 includes several entertainers with genre connections. Knighthoods: Mark Rylance, the great stage actor, has also played The BFG in The BFG, and is billionaire James Donovan Halliday in the adaptation of Ready … Continue reading →
Pixel Scroll 12/30/16 Use File 770; It Softens Your Pixels While You Read The Books. You’re Scrolling In it!
(1) OUR NEIGHBOR. It’s official — A team of astronomers composed of P. Kervella (CNRS / U. de Chile / Paris Observatory / LESIA), F. Thévenin (Lagrande Laboratory, Côte d’Azur Observatory, France) and Christophe Lovis (Observatory of the University of … Continue reading →
Review of “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas – The Musical”
By Martin Morse Wooster: I saw Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas!—The Musical last night at the National Theatre in Washington. From the musical’s website and Wikipedia, I learned that this musical has been around since 1994 and has … Continue reading →
Pixel Scroll 12/29/16 I Never Scroll Anything Twice
(1) NEAR FUTURE MARINES. The Marine Corps Security Environment Forecast: Futures 2030-2045 (MCSEF) provided “a high level snapshot of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory/Futures Directorate’s continual examination of the deep future.” Chuck Gannon and several other writers traveled to Quantico … Continue reading →
ComicMix Moves For Dismissal of Seuss Lawsuit
File 770 reported in September a crowdsourced appeal for funds to publish Oh, The Places You’ll Boldly Go!, featuring the writing of David Gerrold, the art of Ty Templeton, and the editorial skills of ComicMix’s Glenn Hauman. While the Kickstarter … Continue reading →
Eric Flint Has Cancer Surgery
In two public Facebook posts Eric Flint tells about his cancer diagnosis and the splenectomy that followed. He’d been feeling terrible — EVERYTHING exhausted me. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t edit, I could barely mage to read. I had no … Continue reading →
Ray Bradbury Versus the Idiots
By Carl Slaughter: I put in a lot of mouse time, a lot of chair time, and a lot of headphone time going through YouTube watching talks with Bradbury. His oral storytelling skills are almost as good as his print storytelling … Continue reading →
Pixel Scroll 12/28/16 Scrolling By Words On A Snowy Evening
(1) THEY LOOK ALIKE, THEY CAW ALIKE. …You could lose your mind! In “A Tale of Two Covers: Alan Baxter’s Crow Shine and Sarah Remy’s The Bone Cave”, Black Gate’s John O’Neill comments on the remarkably similar cover art on … Continue reading →
Uncanny Magazine Issue 14 Launches
The fourteenth issue of the 2016 Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine will be available on January 3. The entire contents can be purchased in the eBook version on the day of release from Weightless Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Kobo. Uncanny’s free online … Continue reading →
Pixel Scroll 12/27/16 I Want To Read Books Till I’m Out Of My Mind
(1) THE MORE BEST THE MERRIER. Gregory N. Hullender explains, “Now that three of the four big ‘Best of’ SFF anthologies have released their tables of contents, Rocket Stack Rank has produced a combined list, ranked according to which stories … Continue reading →
Wu You Gonna Call?
By Frank Wu: I knew Brianna was a fighter the weekend we met. It was 2007, at MileHiCon. Even though we had hit it off and even though the con was totally fun (partly because I was AGOH), she totally … Continue reading →
Corflu 34 Rates Rise January 1
Corflu, the convention for fanzine fans, will be held at the Warner Center Marriott in Woodland Hills (a Los Angeles neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley), California, on April 28-30, 2017. The rate for Attending Membership in Corflu 34 goes … Continue reading →
Carrie Fisher (1956-2016)
Actress Carrie Fisher died December 27, four days after going into cardiac arrest on an LA-bound airline flight. In addition to the original Star Wars trilogy, and last year’s The Force Awakens, Fisher starred in such movies as The Blues … Continue reading →
Ray Bradbury and the Power of the Subconscious in Storytelling
By Carl Slaughter: When Ray Bradbury visited his hometown, his barber dropped his scissors on the floor and said, “I’ve been waiting for 50 years for you to walk through that door.” The barber rented a room from Bradbury’s parents … Continue reading →
Pixel Scroll 12/26/16 Yippee Ki-yay, Pixel-Scroller!
(1) ON THE SIDE OF THE HUNTERS. SF author Myke Cole will be taking a celebrity turn in the new CBS series Hunted — “Meet The Command Center Investigators From Hunted”. Myke Cole, Former Military Cyber Expert Command Center Title: Cyber … Continue reading →
Alien: Covenant Official Trailer 1
The crew of the colony ship Covenant discover what they think is an uncharted paradise, but it is actually a dark, dangerous world, whose sole inhabitant is the synthetic David, survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition. Coming in 2017. [Thanks … Continue reading →
Villains and Conflicts
By Ron S. Friedman: How to use evolution, consciousness and behavior science to create a three-dimensional villain that can believably confront the hero. Eliminate the BS factor and the pitfalls of a simplistic moustache-twirling bad guy. This blog post is … Continue reading →
Based on a True Story
by John Hertz: A seasonal poem. Strange that I’ve become A red-suited man with deer; Nothing of Myra; Truth to tell (what else?) I love A time folk rejoice and give. An acrostic (read down the first letters of each … Continue reading →
