Mini Editorial: File 770 has been featured a near daily Chengdu Worldcon Update (which you should read – and not just the update, but all of File 770 on a daily basis, but I digress): the overall sense I get from these reports and the little bits of news trickling out from here and there is this: attendance, especially by “foreigners” is not what they’d hoped it would be; the venue will probably not be completely finished when the event starts (to what degree we may never know); there seems to be one set of rules, regulations and informations for Chinese fans and another for everyone else; attendance at the highlight events (Opening Ceremonies, Hugo Awards) is being auctioned and is limited (with that huge venue they need to limit?) and there are separate tracks for obtaining access that are not clear to me; There is great confusion over hotel names and locations; Guests of Honor, or at least the kind of guests who were once labeled as Guest of Honor (until pretty recently, Worldcons, with many regional conventions following suit, would promote three or four recognizable individuals as Guests of Honor – “GoH”s. Those titles seem to be waning; more importantly, the WSFS Business Meeting agenda has not yet been distributed (as required by the rules). I’m not as concerned about that as I otherwise might normally be as major changes require ratification at a subsequent Worldcon. In general, the Chinese side of things seems to now have a track record of not following any of the WSFS requirements.
Once the event begins, I will publish an editorial on the reasons why I objected so strenuously to this Worldcon, and why those objections have nothing to do with racism and everything to do with genocide).
A review of friend Kimberly Unger’s novel The Extractionist, by friend David Agranoff
Video – where are SF planets located in the real world?
Francis Hamit’s Kickstarter for Starmen still has a few days to go
Asteroid Sample and return mission gets more asteroid stuff than expected
Generation ships are doomed to fail
DAW’s Fall 2023 & Spring 2024 Preview
Penguin Random House will no longer be distributing D&D
Miskatonic U Faculty list – just in time for the Fall semester!
Exorcist film slammed by fans and RT 26% rating
Black Holes are “burping up” stars
Is Cinema dying and, if so, who killed it? This video follows the investigation
Idiot who moved from NYC to Florida for the “freedom” is a big wheel in book-banning (recommended banning Diary of Anne Frank because of possible “lesbianism”)
Friend Den Valdron unveils the Twilight of Echelon Project
Friend KH Koehler shares a book cover tip for self-publishers
The Barbie Fallout is nowhere near finished: Check out these WarBarbie 48K figures
Help Give Away Banned Books To Combat Censorship
There is a deeply embedded religious subtext in the AI debate
Friend Paul Di Filippo shares The Big Book of Cyberpunk with us
Friend Joe Siclari of FANAC announces the latest FANAC Fan History Zoom – Sunday, October 15, 2023 Time: 4 pm EDT, 1 pm PDT, 9 pm BST (UK) and 7 am (Oct. 16, Melbourne, AU) – Evolution of Fan Art with legendary fan artists Grant Canfield, Tim Kirk, Jim Shull and Dan Steffan. To attend email fanac@fanac.org (Full-sized poster for the event at the end of these posts)
Stupid Aliens – not as stupid as the press, governments, gullible individuals….
We’ll be seeing a lot more of this – artist complains that others are copying and infringing on their AI generated art
Amazon launches its first satellites
Humans arriving in the Americas much earlier than previously thought now confirmed
China to double Tiangong space station size
Our Featured image this week is an edited screen capture of the “Long List of Worldcons”, showing changes in the Guest of Honor tradition.
