SF Concatenation – File 770

**By Jonathan Cowie: **After half a decade I have at long last updated my personal satellite website at Science-Com.Concatenation.

What happened was CoVID-19, which was a little more dramatic for myself as I had no internet access. Obviously when I was working I had office access, and then I had personal access at my local library cybercafé, voluntary work place and learned scientific society Fellows Room cybercafés. All well and good and things worked just fine… Until CoVID and at a stroke all my internet access just closed instantaneously.

So I stopped updating my personal website (well, my life is quite boring) and focussed on…

**By Jonathan Cowie: **After half a decade I have at long last updated my personal satellite website at Science-Com.Concatenation.

So I stopped updating my personal website (well, my life is quite boring) and focussed on keeping SF² Concatenation going which involved mailing memory sticks (I had to mail books for review in any case) and a couple of local fan members downloading online SF news to USBs which I picked up on my permitted, daily lock-down walks. Then between lockdowns it was frantically accessing stuff. Amazingly, it all worked.

Jonathan Cowie with Moon rock.

And friends rallied round. Here a special shout out to the amazing Dave Langford who – off his own bat – snail-mail posted me paper copies of his monthly Ansible. Meanwhile the paper part of my science journal subscriptions came into their own and this kept me up-to-date which meant that I gave the occasional street presentations to locals on things like CoVID-19 vaccine research — BNT162b2, ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 etc (Britain was one of the first countries to have the vaccine rollout).

There were some ingenious workarounds. Digitally savvy fans do not seem to be aware that, in the UK at the time of CoVID, in households whose occupants are all over 65, some 35% do not have internet access! But there is no stopping human creativity.

One of the things that stopped during CoVID was our regular, local pub quizzes. So, during CoVID, the quizmaster would post weekly quiz questions on-line. A friend would access these and I would phone them up and they’d put me on speaker phone. My friends also had a zoom connection with another quiz team member and they also had a land line phone connection with yet another team member that had no internet access. In short four household were connected and so we could do the quizzes. Neat, huh?

Lockdown did give me time to study, which was a plus, and I rotated ‘Google Scholar’ queries around a handful of local friends so I could keep up-to-date. (I rotated the requests so as not to overburden anyone, but surprisingly all welcomed the challenge as lock-down had its boring moments, also, none of my local, non-academic friends were aware of Google Scholar: it was a revelation to them.) Meanwhile, at home I have a physical library of thousands of academic papers garnered over the decades and filed by subject and lining bookshelves, storing carbon and further insulating parts of my home. Not to mention a digital library also of thousands of science papers, so I had good resources to draw upon. All this enabled me to work on my next big project of the decade (more news of which to come in 2026).

With regards to my personal website, I have been updating it off-line but have now, after over half a decade, updated the online version ahead of the aforementioned BIG project launch next summer.

Filers will likely not be bothered with some aspects of this update (the finer points of Earth system science or my personal shenanigans are unlikely to be of interest). However, the science fictional and fan posts might just tickle a few. Some of these have already appeared in my own contributions to File770 (so you may get the occasional sense of déjà vous) but there’s other SFnal stuff there in the mix.

So, if anyone is interested, here are the more SFnal and a few fan highlights of my half decade:

Merry Christmas, Betwixmas and happy New Year to one and all Filers the planet over (and possibly elsewhere knowing some of you).

(1) **THREE BRITISH SHOPPING DAYS ‘TIL CHRISTMAS. ***[Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] *There are still three shopping days till Christmas! So, if you are stuck for a last-minute present for a friend, or even life partner of the moment, then why not check out the current books on the British SF scene. SF² Concatenation’s current seasonal news page has forthcoming science fiction, forthcoming fantasy, and forthcoming Non-Fiction SF & Popular Science Books from a number of British Isles publishing houses, but these are also available in major genre bookshops near you.

Currently, the site’s home page sports an historic picture of some of the team’s staff having a Christmas dinner. Yes, ghosts of Christmas past.

The site’s own latest post is a rather nifty, if we say so ourselves, short story about the end of the world – ‘Customer reviews for Mystery Gadget 1.0, sorted in chronological order‘ from Alex Shvartsman. (This is the second story Alex has had in SF² Concatenation’s run of the Best of the science journal Nature’s ‘Futures’ short stories. SF² Concatenation’s gets to select just four stories a year from the 60 or so published on the Nature journal website.) Purely coincidently, this one may well appeal to fans of a certain, recent SF series that seems to have taken the streaming charts by storm.

An end-of-the-world story should give you some additional Christmas cheer to help you through the festive season…. Ho, ho, ho.

Next year it is back to form. The site plans to post early in January the team’s annual ‘Best Science Fiction books and films. This is just a bit of fun and in no way should be considered a slate for anything. However, past choices do seem to indicate that it has some sort of form (scroll down here).

Turkey and mince pies to the fore. Let’s tread boldly…

(2) **WRITER’S EMERGENCY HOME REPAIR GOFUNDME. **This is from Alma Alexander, a fantasy writer living in Bellingham, WA, who is a friend of the Vanguard group in Seattle (Suzle and Jerry Kauman, John Berry and Eileen Gunn, Astrid Bear, Ulrika & Hal O’Brien, etc,). In a later email, she says she has two quotes for the repair work, $25,000 and $28,000. She’ll be grateful for any help. “Fundraiser by Alma Alexander: emergency repair to keep home safe for me and 2 beloved cats” at GoFundMe.

My house sits on a steep slope, with a retaining wall serving to support a flat surface upon which my house is built. The wall is failing. It needs an emergency repair/replacement to keep my house, myself, and two beloved cats safe. Please help…

Repair quote (with necessary stabilizing work for the deck which rests on the area just above the retaining wall) is MORE than $25000 – but I can scrape together the rest if I can get at least some assistance… insurance has told me that I was covered for lots of things “but not for this” (ain’t that always the case…) and I need to get this work done and I simply don’t have that kind of money lying around. I hate to ask this – but as a writer (whose income can be iffy and random), and as a widow who lives on very limited fixed income I and these two beloved blameless cats whose only mistake in this life might have been to cast their lot in with mine desperately need your help…

(3) **AND HUGO MAKES THREE. ***[Item and photo by Jason Sanford.] *Chris M. Barkley has been spotted out and about in Cincinnati, exposing his much-delayed Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer to life in the big city and trying to make up for lost time together. Chris is pictured with his partner Juli Marr.

(4) **SIGOURNEY WEAVER INTERVIEW. **“Sci-fi classic Galaxy Quest had Alan Rickman scenes cut ‘at the last minute’ before release” at Digital Spy. The article is based on a *Vanity Fair *interview video – Sigourney Weaver’s *Galaxy Quest *comments start just before the 18-minute mark.

Sigourney Weaver has called for the release of a director’s cut of the 1999 science-fiction comedy classic Galaxy Quest, after revealing that a lot of scenes were cut very shortly before its release.

The film features an ensemble cast including Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub and Tim Allen, playing actors of a once-popular cult TV series, who are abducted by aliens that believe their outer-space adventures are real….

…”I wish they would put out a director’s cut of the movie because at the last minute Dreamworks decided to release the movie with some of the more sophisticated scenes cut that Alan was in, because it needed a kids’ movie to go up against Stuart Little,” she said.

Weaver also said that she couldn’t understand “why they don’t put out the movie again with more of his very very good strange and wonderful scenes”.

(5) **HIT WITH AN ‘R’ IN IT. **The *Guardian *analyzes “How Sinners became the most culturally important film of 2025”.

It was the film that was supposed to destroy Hollywood: a vampire horror about life and times in the Jim Crow south peopled by a majority Black cast, and shot on Imax 70mm. Ryan Coogler, the acclaimed director who rose to prominence steering Marvel’s colossal Black Panther franchise, was thought to be out of his depth for trying to midwife a script he himself said he cobbled together in two months. Warner Bros, the studio fronting the film’s near $100m budget, was supposedly out of its mind for not only throwing that much money behind the project, but further agreeing to singularly favorable authorship deal terms that gave him control over the film’ final cut and full rights over the film after 25 years. Hollywood machers were convinced the film would never make money and that Warner Bros’ big gamble “could be the end of the studio system”. But Sinners never let that cynicism in.

Sinners landed in theaters on Easter weekend and delivered its own miracle resurrection, racing to a $368m gate on the way to becoming the highest grossing original film in the past 15 years, and the 10th-highest domestic-grossing R-rated film of all time. (That’s right: higher than Terminator 2 and the Hangovers.)…

(6) **NOTHING OF VALUE WAS LOST. **“Lucasfilm wins bid to throw out UK lawsuit over ‘resurrection’ of ‘Star Wars’ character” at GMA News Online.

Disney unit Lucasfilm on Thursday won its bid to throw out a London lawsuit over the use of the likeness of a long-dead actor in a Star Wars spinoff movie.

Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, was “resurrected” as Death Star commander Grand Moff Tarkin for the 2016 film “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” using visual effects and another actor.

He had appeared in the original 1977 “Star Wars” film, created by George Lucas, which became one of the most successful film franchises of all time.

The movies have collected more than $5 billion in global ticket sales since the release of the first installment in 1977, and spinoffs are still being produced.

Cushing had signed a deal with British company Tyburn Film Productions in 1993 to appear in a television film, an agreement Tyburn’s lawyers said gave it “the right to be the first to ‘resurrect’ Mr Cushing by way of visual effects”.

Tyburn claimed it had lost around 250,000 pounds ($333,725) and sued Lucasfilm and fellow Disney subsidiary Lunak Heavy Industries at London’s High Court for alleged unjust enrichment at its expense.

Lucasfilm and Lunak, however, said the case was hopeless and unsuccessfully tried to have the case thrown out twice. But the Court of Appeal ruled in their favor on Thursday.

Judge Sue Carr said that “it is impossible to identify anything at all that belonged to Tyburn which can be said to have been transferred” to Lucasfilm or Lunak, meaning the case could not continue…

(7) **AN ADAPTATION KING LIKED. **“Stephen King: Why I Hugged Rob Reiner After Watching ‘Stand by Me’” in the *New York Times. *(Behind a paywall.)

…I think I saw “Stand by Me” in the fall of 1985. Back then it was still called “The Body,” which was the name of my novella, on which Rob’s film was based. I think he showed it to me in a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a rock ’n’ roll band thudding away somewhere in the distance. That band was pure ’80s. The movie allowed me entry to another, more innocent, time: 1959.

I’m pretty sure Rob was wearing a checked short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, as if he’d just come from the golf course. (For all I knew, he had.) The only thing I’m absolutely sure of is that he hovered until the movie was going and then left the room. Later he told me he couldn’t bear to see my reaction if I didn’t like it. I was an audience of one, sitting in a high-backed chair filched from one of the hotel’s meeting rooms.

I was surprised by how deeply affected I was by its 89 minutes. I’ve written a lot of fiction, but “The Body” remains the only nakedly autobiographical story I’ve ever done. Those kids were my friends. We never walked down a railroad track to see a dead body, but we got up to other stuff. The story was about my reality as I had lived it on the dirt roads of southern Maine. There really was a junkyard dog, although his name wasn’t Chopper. There really was a kid who went swimming and came out covered with leeches in surprising areas, but it wasn’t Gordie Lachance; it was me.

And there really was a kid who was accused of stealing milk money, although his name wasn’t Chris Chambers. He did* *borrow — we won’t call it stealing — his mom’s Bel Air. With me riding shotgun, he drove it 90 miles per hour down Route 9 in our backcountry hometown. We were 11.

What I’m saying is that in Rob’s hands, it all rang true. The funny parts were really funny (including the barf-o-rama) and the dramatic parts hit me where I lived, or where I did live back in the days when John F. Kennedy was president and gas was a quarter a gallon.

I had felt just that torn between the writing life and the lives of my friends, who were living for the moment and not going anywhere in particular, except maybe Vietnam. I chose writing, but it was a near thing.

When the movie was over, I thanked Rob and surprised the hell out of myself by giving him a hug. I’m not ordinarily a hugging man, and I don’t think he was used to getting them. He stiffened, muttered something about being glad I liked it, and we both stepped away….

(8) **HEADED MY WAY. **“’Frankenstein’ Netflix Exhibit Moves To Los Angeles” – *Deadline *tells where to find it.

In another move showing the growing awards momentum of Guillermo del Toro‘s acclaimed movie *Frankenstein, *the stunning exhibition “Frankenstein: Crafting a Tale Eternal” will be coming from its run in London straight to Los Angeles from January 5-11 at the NYA Studios West in Hollywood, and *just *in time for Oscar nomination voting….

… David Fincher, George Lucas and Mellody Hobson are scheduled to host and moderate a screening with the filmmaking team on opening night of the L.A. exhibit, with additional programming to come.

The immersive exhibition will celebrate del Toro’s visionary storytelling and the craftsmanship of the Frankenstein team. Diving into his elaborate filmmaking process, it will showcase a collection of props, artwork, costumes and Tiffany & Co. jewelry featured in the film and rare books curated by the firm Peter Harrington to honor author Mary Shelley’s legacy….

(9) **IS THAT EIGHT REINDEER OR EIGHT TENTACLES? **A holiday greeting from the Edmonton in 2030 Worldcon bid.

(10) **IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK. **We fell for this clickbait so you don’t have to: “Doctor Who locks in date for Alex Kingston’s River Song comeback (winteriscoming.net) at Winter Is Coming.

Alex Kingston’s River Song is officially coming back to Doctor Who in 2026. The franchise icon has penned a book called Doctor Who: Stormcage: A River Song Adventure. Kingston has written the story as a choose-your-own-adventure, giving the reader a chance to read the book more than once and experience it differently. The hardcover edition is set to hit shelves on February 12, 2026. It’ll also be available as an ebook from the same date….

(11) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

December 21 — A Solstice Story

We all tell stories and Jennifer Stevenson tells a great one in “Solstice” which Grey Walker reviews for us: “The reader somehow senses that everything Dawn sees, each action she takes, even her name, has a deeper significance. She’s not just playing for a great party, she’s playing to keep a shrinking, fading man alive on the longest night. And if it’s an over-the-top, splendid bash that keeps the sun alive for another year, well, human beings believed that for a very long time. Maybe this story will help us remember some of what we’ve forgotten.”

You can hear the author splendidly reading “Solstice” here. You can read the story thisaway. If you can find a copy, it was originally published in Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman and Donald G. Keller’s The Horns of Elfland.

(12) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit turns away from the light.
Cornered adds a special feature.
Foxtrot asks an easily answered question.
Loose Parts joins the team.
Tom Gauld embraces the rush.

(13) **STRANGER THINGS ON STAGE. **“Jamie Campbell Bower talks ‘Stranger Things’ Broadway debut, season 5 (exclusive)” at Entertainment Weekly.

“Something very, very special has happened here tonight,” Louis McCartney, who stars as Henry Creel in Broadway’s Stranger Things: The First Shadow, told the audience after his performance Friday night at New York City’s Marquis Theater.

That was because Jamie Campbell Bower, who portrays Henry/Vecna/One on the Netflix streaming hit, surprised the packed house by reprising his TV role in the play’s final scene.

The stage prequel chronicles Henry’s younger years before he became Vecna, but its ending jumps forward in time. On most nights, McCartney plays the character all the way through to that sequence. So when it was Bower who slowly turned toward the audience instead, the crowd erupted in raucous, continuous applause…

(14) **RARE DISCOVERY. **“Unseen Tennessee Williams radio play published in literary magazine” – the *Guardian *has details.

As one of the 20th century’s most successful playwrights, Tennessee Williams penned popular works at the very pinnacle of US theater, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Years before his almost unparalleled Broadway triumphs, however, the aspiring writer then known simply as Tom wrote a series of short radio plays as he struggled to find a breakthrough. One is The Strangers, a supernatural tale offering glimpses into the accomplished wordsmith that Williams would become, and published for the first time this week in the literary magazine Strand.

It is a “significant find” according to scholars of Williams’s early days and upbringing in Missouri.

“The play incorporates all the theatrical elements of early radio horror,” said Andrew Gulli, the publication’s managing editor.

“A storm, howling wind, shadows, a house perched over the sea, flickering candles, mysterious footsteps on the stairs, spectral beings … as well as early hints of the themes and devices Williams would return to in his most famous later works: isolation, fear, the shades of gray between imagination and reality, and a house haunted by memory and the private terrors of those who inhabit it.”

The Strangers never made it to Broadway, and is believed to have enjoyed only a single performance on a rural radio station in Iowa as part of a short-lived series called Little Theater of the Air in 1938….

(15) **SPACE CITRUS. **“NASA Webb Telescope Discovers Lemon-Shaped Planet, the ‘Stretchiest’ Ever Seen” reports the *New York Times. *(Link bypasses the paywall.) As a bonus, the article quotes Mythopoeic Society member Emily Rauscher.

Earth isn’t a perfect sphere. The rotation of our planet causes it to bulge ever so slightly at the equator, making it about 0.3 percent wider there than from pole to pole.

But that’s nothing compared with PSR J2322-2650b, an object the mass of Jupiter studied recently by the James Webb Space Telescope. This planet’s equatorial diameter is about 38 percent wider than its polar diameter, giving the world the odd appearance of a lemon, and a very strange atmosphere.

“It’s the stretchiest planet that we’ve confirmed the stretchiness of,” said Michael Zhang, an exoplanet scientist at the University of Chicago and the lead author of a paper describing the planet published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters….

… Its carbon atmosphere might give it “clouds made out of graphite,” Dr. Zhang said, and diamonds at its core. Bands of storms would trace the world’s lemon-like exterior in the shape of a W, while it most likely has a red color because of dust and soot-like particles formed by the carbon.

“It’s a wacky, weird thing,” said Emily Rauscher, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the paper. “It’s not formed in a way like any normal planet.”…

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Olav Rokne, Jerry Kaufman, Jason Sanford, Mark Roth-Whitworth, 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 Cat Eldridge.]**

(1) **NEXT MURDERBOT COVER. **“A new ‘Murderbot’ book is coming, author shares release date and cover” at *USA Today. *They say it will be released in May 26.

…”Platform Decay” follows Murderbot on a new volunteer rescue mission, realizing it will have to spend significant time with humans (especially human children) that it doesn’t know.

“Ugh,” the book description says. “This may well call for… eye contact!”

“I had a lot of fun writing Platform Decay; I thought of it as ‘Murderbot goes on the family road trip from hell’ and I hope readers enjoy it,” Wells wrote to USA TODAY. “I’m also excited for readers to see the great cover by Jaime Jones.”…

(2) CRIME, ANCIENT AND MODERN. Julie Berry profiles “True Crime as Myth’s Copycat” at CrimeReads.

Compared to the heroes and heroines of most of Greek mythology, our most shocking modern criminals, though they leave swaths of destruction, are still milquetoast wannabe, practically plagiarists of the gruesomeness of our culture’s foundational stories. For serious cases of messed-up murderous mayhem, especially within families—hot crimes of passion and cold, calculated acts of revenge—look to the classics. For rage raised to an art form, look to myth.

Like true crime, myths make for addictive storytelling. They’ve held us captive for millennia. But they’re more than entertainment. We need myths to give us a vocabulary for our raw emotions, to arm us with metaphors that can encompass the worst things that humans do to one another.

Mythical adaptations and literary myth retellings are especially hot right now. Here’s a little flight of pairings for you, a wine-and-cheese party of recent literary myth retellings matched with just one of many possible true crime parallels that wish they were as rage-filled or maniacal as the ancient Greeks of lore.

First on Berry’s list of comparisons:

**Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati

A classic tale of revenge: Clytemnestra has achieved her happily ever after in Sparta with her husband Tantalus and their infant child, until Agamemnon arrives on the scene. Refusing to take “no” for an answer, he murders her husband and dashes their infant on the ground, then forces her into an unwanted marriage. Just imagine the pillow talk between that cozy couple. Somehow she bears him children (more on them below) including a daughter, Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon later sacrifices when an oracle tells him doing so will grant him success in the Trojan war. Clytemnestra has more reasons to hate her husband than Medusa has serpents. She bides her time before repaying her husband, with help from her lover, Aegisthus, for her slaughtered first love and her two murdered children.

True crime parallel? Pamela Smart follows Clytemnestra’s footsteps, conspiring with her lover, a teenaged high school student, to murder her husband. But whereas Smart disposes of her husband to avoid the financial ruin of divorce, Casati’s literary Clytemnestra, with her lover, Aegisthus, makes Agamemnon pay for all he stole from her in his fanatical pursuits—first of her, then of glory in battle. Smart’s murder of her husband was unconscionable. Clytemnestra’s has all the weight of poetic justice on her side.

Verdict: Guilty, but find a jury of mothers willing to convict Clytemnestra.

(3) **ELBOW ROOM. **James Davis Nicoll tells *Reactor *readers how to make space for everything in “Five Artificially Layered Planets and World Cities”,

… Wreckers, cynics, and other riffraff may ask “As there is only a finite surface area on Earth, where would we park a hundred trillion cars?” Happily, there is an obvious answer.

Build more Earth.

Humans do this every time we construct a multistory building. A ten-story parking garage with a one-hectare footprint has effectively created nine new hectares. Why not do this for the whole of the planet?

Perhaps some examples are in order. Let’s tackle them in ascending order of scale….

He begins with –

Trantor — Foundation by Isaac Asimov

All 75,000,000 square miles of Trantor’s landmasses are covered in a continuous cityscape. The city reaches a mile under the surface and well above it as well. At ten feet per level, it follows that Trantor probably provides its inhabitants with the equivalent of five or six hundred planets worth of surface area.

Oddly, Trantor does not have five or six hundred planets worth of people. It has something over forty billion people. The effective population density is something like one person per square mile, which is something more than Greenland’s population density, but significantly less than Mongolia’s. What does Trantor do with all those miles and miles of empty corridor2? Fill them with row after row of filing cabinets, each one filled with Hollerith cards?

(4) **MAKING A COVER FOR AN EPIC. **Michael Whelan’s work on Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings is profiled in “Shaping Roshar” by Michael Whelan and Michael Everett. Lots of concept art, alternatives, and final cover images at the link.

When I received the manuscript for The Way of Kings from TOR, I was somewhat dismayed that it was 1400 pages. Given the mood I was in, I felt that it would be tough sledding to work my way through such a massive fantasy epic.

As it turned out, I was soon lost in the world Brandon Sanderson so skillfully realized.

It helped that the writing had a rich cinematic quality that brought images of scenes, characters and creatures to my mind as if I were watching a movie or immersed in a Myst-style virtual reality adventure.

The manuscript was fun to read, but it made my work for the cover art difficult. How can one successfully distill enough of this novel to one picture and possibly do justice to the book? It was a steep challenge.

One thing I found very helpful was to have the manuscript delivered to me in a digital format. It was only the second time that I’ve done that, but it was a godsend. To be able to flag and highlight character and scene references, then to search them out and collate information and details, was an invaluable time saver for me….

(5) **TAKING LEAVE FROM TECHNOLOGY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I keep on telling people that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever listens…. Well, not quite. The BBC has reported on an experiment where youngsters abstain from technology for five days…. “What happened when teens tried out tech-free bedrooms?”.

A group of teenagers from Bradford, the 2025 UK City of Culture, agreed to take all technology out of their bedrooms for five days to see how they would cope….

The findings of the survey, external, carried out by polling company Survation, suggest:

More than a third (38%) of teenagers said they spent five or more hours on their phones on an average day.
39% would consider taking tech and screens out of their bedrooms to reduce time spent on their devices
Other ways to minimise time on their devices include using in-built settings such as screen time caps (59%) or scheduling regular screen time breaks (66%)
25% say their parents set clear limits on how much time they spend on tech, gaming or social media, while 47% say their parents sometimes set limits
However, more than a quarter (27%) say their parents don’t set any limits.

The BBC also has an online quiz to see how addicted you are to tech…. It’s a brave new world.

(6) **PHILIPPE GODDIN (1944-2025). **“Death of Hergéologist Philippe Goddin” – the scholar died September 8, and *Tintin.com *paid tribute.

It is with deep sadness that Fanny and Nick Rodwell, along with the entire teams at Tintinimaginatio and the Hergé Museum, have learned of the death of their colleague Philippe Goddin. They extend their sincere condolences to his family and wish to pay tribute to a man who was, for all of them, a respected and friendly figurehead in the study and analysis of Hergé’s work.

Philippe Goddin, born in Brussels in 1944, was one of the world’s leading experts on Hergé’s work, to the extent that his publisher once described him as a “Hergéologist”. After studying fine arts, he pursued a career in teaching before devoting himself entirely to the study and dissemination of Hergé’s work.

He developed a passion for comic strip books at an early age and came into contact with Hergé. From 1989 to 1999, he served as secretary general of the Hergé Foundation, which holds the archives of the great master, thus playing a central role in the conservation, cataloguing and promotion of the treasures left by the creator of Tintin.

Philippe Goddin is the author of numerous reference works, including Hergé et Tintin, Reporters (1986, Le Lombard), the biography Hergé, lignes de vie (2007, Éditions Moulinsart), and the monumental seven-volume series Hergé – Chronologie d’une œuvre (2000-2011, Éditions Moulinsart), considered the most comprehensive study ever undertaken on Hergé’s creative process. Also noteworthy is Les Tribulations de Tintin au Congo (2018, Éditions Moulinsart), in which he demonstrates that Tintin au Congo (1930) is not a racist book, even though it is steeped in the colonialist environment of its time…

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

September 16, 1918 — Karen Anderson (Died 2016.)

**By Paul Weimer: **Karen Anderson, the formidable wife of Poul Anderson. But it would be unfair and unjust for me to merely label her as the wife of an SF author, no matter how big of an SF writer they are. Karen Anderson was heavily into filking, and at the very least popularized the term, if not outright invented it. Filking is not one of my strengths or area of knowledge, so I don’t know Karen’s work in that field too directly. The first time I saw her name in print is when I was exposed to her collaborations with Poul Anderson, particularly Ys, a personal favorite of mine.

Karen Anderson

Ys is a set of historical fantasy novels set at the end of the Western Roman Empire, is what is now Brittany. Our hero is a Roman Prefect, Gratillonius. He has been sent to Gaul by Rome, and by turns, winds up at the city of Ys, and his story eventually turns from historical fiction to straight up historical fantasy. Ys is a city that never existed, a legend, a myth that in our world was developed in a series of romances and stories in the late middle ages.

The Andersons take that myth and story, mix it in with ideas ranging from Phoenician history to the Golden Bough, and tell the story of how a Roman prefect fights against the final fall of the west to a dark Age (David Perry and Matt Gabriele don’t hate me) in order to preserve the city of Ys, at least for a while. A classic “Fighting against the raging of the light” from Poul Anderson, leavened and softened by his wife’s collaboration.

Showing her interest in historical fiction straight up, she also co-wrote *The Last Viking *with her husband, telling the story of Harald Hardrada, from his time as a mercenary in Constantinople until his ultimate destiny and conflict in the wars of the year 1066. Between this series and the historical elements of Ys, Karen Anderson’s knowledge and writing enthusiasm clearly meshed well with her husband’s. In addition, Karen Anderson wrote numerous essays and articles, which pepper the fanzines of the era.

And, apparently, she is the “Karen” that is listed among the people dedicated in Robert Heinlein’s Friday* *(and also appears in a cameo at the end of Number of the Beast as well.)

(8) COMICS SECTION.

Brewster Rockit didn’t check the time.
Close to Home adds an unnecessary feature.
Frank and Ernest left something out of the directions.
Rhymes with Orange needs better glasses.
Wumo confronts an ungrateful planet.

(9) **OUCH OUCH OUCH. **“New Zealand Woman Sets Guinness World Record for Fastest Barefoot 100 Meter Sprint Over LEGO Bricks” reports GeekTyrant.

Gabrielle Wall of Christchurch, New Zealand, has pulled off a feat that sounds like pure childhood torture and turned it into a world record.

She set the Guinness World Record for the fastest 100-meter sprint barefoot over random LEGO bricks, finishing in just 24.75 seconds. Guinness shared when announcing her accomplishment.

“Running 100 m is quite the challenge for anyone, but imagine trying to do that while barefoot and over lego pieces on the ground!”

The record-breaking sprint wasn’t just about endurance and pain tolerance, it was also built on community support. The LEGO track was created with a massive donation of bricks from the New Zealand non-profit Imagination Station.

“The track was made using 300 kg (661 lb) of LEGO that was donated by the charity Imagination Station, a New Zealand organization that uses LEGO in its educational robotics and mechanics classes for kids.”…

(10) **FUSION RECORD. **“France beats the world record for fusion plasma duration” – *Earth.com *has details.

France’s WEST tokamak held a hot plasma for 1,337 seconds, a little over 22 minutes. That performance matters because long, steady plasma operation is a core requirement for future nuclear fusion power plants.

The run also edged past the mark set weeks earlier by China’s EAST, improving the duration by about 25 percent.

It showed that researchers can hold tough operating conditions without the machine’s internal surfaces breaking down.

Anne-Isabelle Etienvre, Director of Fundamental Research at the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, the CEA, reported the result….

(11) **AUTUMN EDITION OF SF2 CONCATENATION. ***[Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] *The autumnal edition of SF² Concatenation has just gone up with the usual large, seasonal news page, a few con reports and around 40 standalone book reviews.

v35(5) 2025.9.15 — New Columns & Articles for the Autumn 2025

Newscast for the Autumn 2025. This includes within it many key sections. See also the master newscast link index that connects to all its SF/F genre and science news sub-sections. In the mix are its Film News; Television News; Publishing News; General Science News and Forthcoming SF Books from major British Isles SF imprints for the season subsections, among much else.
Designing Terry Pratchett’s Discworld – Peter Tyers Peter’s illustrated review of the new Paul Kidby book
Windycon 50 – Sue Burke A report from last year’s Chicago-based convention
Contabile – The 2025 UK Filkcon – Peter Tyers The 35th Annual UK Filk Music Convention
Reconnect – The 2025 British Eastercon – Arthur Chappell For the first time, the British Eastercon was held in Northern Ireland
The Sci-Fi London 2025 Film Fest – Jonathan Cowie This year it is a return to the usual three-and-a-bit day format
Ten Years Ago Exactly. Some from the archives. Science Fiction Club Deutschland – 60th anniversary retrospective – Thomas Recktenwald How Might the World End? 200 years on from penning Frankenstein – Ted Nield Eurocon 1 – The First Eurocon in 1972 – Dave Rowe Archipelacon: A Scandinavian convention through Swedish eyes – Karl-Johan Norén Archipelacon: A Scandinavian convention through British eyes – Peter Tyers
Twenty Years Ago Exactly. One from the archives. The 2006 European SF Convention – Ukraine – Jonathan Cowie

v35(5) 2025.9.15 — Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Reviews

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