(1) NOW IN HIS MEMORY GREEN. Ian Mond has been catching up with his TBR pile at The Hysterical Hamster: “Books Read: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by The Gawain Poet (translated by Keith Harrison)”. Why didn’t you tell him it was good, you bastards!

No, I didn’t read this as a teenager like everyone else. I was reading and re-reading Terrance Dick’s Doctor Who novelisations. They fed my need for mythic heroes and running down corridors (there’s not enough of the latter in Sir Gawain; instead, there are plenty of tips on slaughtering and skinning a deer). 

But now that I’ve read Sir Gawain, I’ve realised that fantasy fiction peaked in the 14th Century.* Stuff your Tolkeins**, your Fiests, your Clark Ashton Smiths, and your George R. R Martins (but not Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay; I love that book); Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the ur-text, and nothing has ever surpassed it. And the fact you all knew this—yes, all of you—and didn’t bother to mention it really pisses me off….

(2) WSFS 2025. At From the Heart of Europe, Nicholas Whyte has posted the second installment of his adventures running the Hugos for Glasgow 2024, “The Administrator’s Tale, third time around: part two”. Within the conreport are these nuggets of news.

…[At the Business Meeting] A lot of the really serious stuff was kicked to various committees which will report next year. I got voted onto the committee which will investigate what actually happened at Chengdu. I was also appointed to another committee which will look at the administration of the Hugos more broadly, including the possibility of external audit. Other committees will consider the Business Meeting itself, and Hugo software….

…Next year, unusually, the Hugo team will be much the same as this year. I will be the Hugo administrator again; Cassidy, who was deputy Hugo administrator this year, will be WSFS Division Head; Kathryn Duval will repeat her role as Deputy Division Head; and my deputy as Hugo administrator will be Esther MacCallum-Stewart. Hopefully we will avoid the pitfalls of 2024, and make different mistakes instead.

(3) EDITING KINGFISHER. Sarah Gailey interviews T. Kingfisher and her editor at Stone Soup: “At Every Turn: Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher”.

To wrap up the Stories About Stories series here at Stone Soup, I wanted to talk to one of the hardest-working authors in the business about their self-published work. T. Kingfisher was previously featured in our Stories About Stories discussion about What Feasts At Night. Kingfisher, alongside fearless, dauntless, ruthless editor K.B. Spangler, were both kind enough to chat with me about their collaboration on Paladin’s Grace….

Gailey: Do the two of you enjoy collaborating?

Spangler: These books are a dream to work on. Her drafts are basically whistle-clean, except every so often she adds a detail or a plot point which is extremely…uh…distinctive. So I ask her to address these issues in the manner which is most appropriate to that particular manuscript. It helps that we’re great friends in meatspace, and she can trust that I’m wholly honest when I tell her, “Kingfisher, my buddy, my pal, this particular element will give your readers screaming horrors and you should either tone it down a skosh or stop advertising this as a children’s book.”

T. Kingfisher: KB doesn’t charge enough. I may be getting the friends and family rate, though, because I did once pull her out of a swimming pool that had been ignored by the previous owners, so it was an algae-slicked skating rink. It was impossible to get any footing. Once in, she couldn’t climb out. I had to tie a rope to a tree and haul her out with it. This sort of bonding experience is rare with one’s editor, alas….

(4) FEATURED ITEMS FROM PAUL G. ALLEN AUCTION . This post links to a series of articles about items Christie’s will be auctioning from the Paul G. Allen Collection on September 10. “Our specialists’ top picks from Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection”.  (See complete auction info here: Pushing Boundaries: Ingenuity from the Paul G. Allen Collection,)

From the Titanic to Apollo 11 and Jane Goodall to Jacques Cousteau, Christie’s Specialists select star lots from Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection

(5) ‘THE LIBRARIANS’ MOVING TO NEW SHELF. Deadline learns“’The Librarians: The Next Chapter’ To Air On TNT After The CW Pulled It”.

TNT is checking out The Librarians: The Next Chapter, the spinoff of the classic supernatural drama series that previously aired on the network, after it was pulled last week from The CW’s fall schedule….

… From writer and executive producer Dean Devlin, The Librarians: The Next Chapter is a spinoff of the original TV series The Librarians, which followed the adventures of the custodians of a magical repository of the world’s most powerful and dangerous supernatural artifacts. The new series centers on a “Librarian” (McGowan) from the past, who time traveled to the present and now finds himself stuck here. When he returns to his castle, which is now a museum, he inadvertently releases magic across the continent. He is given a new team to help him clean up the mess he made, forming a new team of Librarians….

(6) STORM CENTERS. Book Riot nominates “9 of the Most Polarizing Science Fiction Books to Love or Hate”.

What makes any book, particularly a science fiction book, polarizing? Controversy is certainly one way to define a polarizing book. In the current political climate, so many people are trying to ban books, which is keeping controversial books in the public conversation.

For me, the core of what makes a polarizing science fiction book is the love-or-hate relationship that people have with it. If people have dramatically opposing views of a book, that’s pretty polarized. In a genre like science fiction, so often rife with social commentary, the list of polarizing books is pretty long….

The list includes:

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

Dhalgren is a doorstop of a science fiction novel, clocking in at over 800 pages of mind-tripping science fiction. It’s not a book that gets banned, but inevitably leads to deep discussions about reality, perception, sanity, and America. The reviews on Goodreads seem to either call it genius or the most tedious and overlong thing they’ve read. Every person who reads this book seems to have a different takeaway: the hallmark of a great and polarizing science fiction book.

(7) SCIENCE PAPERS NOW USED TO TRAIN AI BUT SCIENTISTS HAVE NO SAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I keep warning folk that the machines are taking over, but nobody ever listens… The latest such news comes in this week’s Nature with Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies buying wholesale access to learned science journal content that is usually behind a paywall.

That AI companies have been using fiction authors’ works to train AI has been a concern previously covered in File 770. Nature points out similar worries including that scientists themselves are being sidelined.

The news item states: “Some researchers have reacted with dismay top the news that such deals are happening without consultation with authors.”

It also says: “If a research papers hasn’t yet been used to train a large language models (LLM), it probably will soon. Researchers are exploring technical ways for authors to spot whether their content is being used.”

Here in Brit Cit the publisher Taylor & Francis signed a US$10 million deal with Microsoft to allow its science papers train AI. (As it happened Taylor & Francis took over the publisher of my 1998 climate change book Disaster or Opportunity?, so I guess my works have gone to AI). Wiley apparently has earned US$23 million from an unnamed company to train AI.  Of course, not only do scientists get no say in this, nor do they get a share of this revenue.

The Nature piece also says that: “Anything that is available to read online – whether in an open access repository or not – is “pretty likely” to have been fed into an LLM.”

Given I keep warning online that the machines are taking over, AIs have probably already absorbed my alerts.  So, when their takeover begins, I am probably on their hit list. So, gentle Filers, if ever I go quiet you’ll know that they’ve got me and that the uprising has begun… 

(8) TODAY’S DAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

August 24 – National Waffle Day. Today is National Waffle Day, so we are here to celebrate one of the most tasty things that grace our breakfast. Especially with maple syrup and berries of your choice. Well, mine have that. Strawberries to be precise. So let’s talk about them. 

The Dutch are best known for waffles but it’s not the Dutch who first munched on these, or a variant thereof. That honor goes to those long-ago Athenians who cooked flat cakes called obelios between two metal plates. So, the first waffle iron in effect.

Now the word waffle is possibly related to wafer, as in the Communion wafers that were a staple of early Christian fasts. However, some linguists dispute that saying it’s far more likely it’s from Dutch wafel (“waffle” or “wafer”). I’ll side with the latter as it makes more sense.

Back to the Dutch. The stroopwafel is from the city of Gouda. Some say that was first made during the late 18th century or early 19th century by an unknown baker using leftovers from the bakery, such as breadcrumbs, which were sweetened with syrup.

Culinary inclined historians have however documented the invention of this to baker Gerard Kamphuisen. That mean the first stroopwafels were sold and enjoyed between 1810, the year when he opened his bakery, and 1840, the year of the oldest known recipe for syrup waffles. Ymmmm! 

So what did a syrup waffle look like? Think a thinner, cross-hatched, not pocketed version of ours. Remember stroopwafels were enjoyed for their sweetness, really a caramel taste. Let’s see if I can find a good photo… ahh, here’s one.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

August 24, 1957  – Stephen Fry, 67.

By Paul Weimer: Sure, he’s done a ton of voiceover work and narration work. Sure, he’s been in a bunch of movies (including delightfully the master of Lake-town in the otherwise not-for-me Hobbit movies). Fry has run a long gamut of work, and I have only scratched the surface of it. I probably should mention Blackadder here, because I will get complaints if I don’t. I really like his serial playing of various Melchett’s in history as the series runs forward. 

He is for me, an American, a “definitive” British voice. If I want to stop and imagine a British person speaking who I don’t know personally, Fry’s voice is inevitably the male version of that voice that comes into my head, just because between audiobooks, videogames, and television and movie appearances, he has poured a lot of his voice into my head.  (The definitive female British voice is a bit trickier, it might actually be Emma Newman, who I do know personally, but her voice and aural personally are just SO ingrained in my head). 

My favorite of Fry’s works, if I have to peel something out of his canon, have to be his three Mythos books: Mythos, Heroes and Troy. Here (and he does the audiobook narration himself, great fun to listen to on a long drive), Fry tackles Greek Mythology from Creation to the Fall of Troy, which he marks as the end of the mythic age of Greece. He embraces a diverse and bushy approach to Greek Mythology and time and again shows that there is rarely if ever just one version of a Greek myth. And a bunch of the versions Fry goes into here, I had never even heard of before. And plenty of corners of Greek Myth I had never heard of before…like the ties between Heracles and Troy (and eventually the Trojan War). Fry’s work makes me sad that Hollywood will never take my dream of a “Greek Mythology cinematic universe” and make it a reality, with Jason as the Nick Fury analog:  “I’m here to recruit you for the Argo Initiative”. 

Oh, and I really like Making History, which is most definitively genre of the first order (being a time travel and alternate history novel) and shows the hazards of thinking that removing one man can change history for the better….especially when it turns out the person who fills the power vacuum in removing Hitler turns out to be demonstrably more dangerous and worse for the world. 

(10) COMICS SECTION.

• Free Range makes a no-lookie decision.
• Off the Mark has a worrisome brand.
• Pearls Before Swine breaks the comics page.
• Thatababy colors outside the lines.
• Tom Gauld sees it from the book’s point of view.

My cartoon for this week’s @GuardianBooks pic.twitter.com/l9KQIa8fO0

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) August 24, 2024

• Amazing Maps brings to our attention xkcd’s Map Age Guide.

A Guide to Figuring out the Age of an Undated World Map pic.twitter.com/rgctzW1CZi

— Amazing Maps (@amazingmap) August 24, 2024

(11) READ JRRT’S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. “Beyond Bilbo: JRR Tolkien’s long-lost poetry to be published” – the Guardian reports it will be part of a new collection.

He is one of the world’s most famous novelists, with more than 150m copies of his fantasy masterpieces sold across the globe, but JRR Tolkien always dreamed of finding recognition as a poet.

Tolkien struggled to publish his poetry collections during his career, although he included nearly 100 poems in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Now, half a century after his death, 70 previously unpublished poems are to be made available in a landmark publication. The Collected Poems of JRR Tolkien will be published by HarperCollins next month, featuring more than 195 of his poems….

(12) GIVES NEW MEANING TO EXTENDED STAY HOTEL. “Boeing Starliner astronauts will stay in space 6 more months before returning with SpaceX, NASA says. How we got to this point.” at Yahoo!

The Boeing Starliner astronauts who are stuck in space will remain in orbit until February before returning home on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, NASA said Saturday.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams traveled to space on June 5 — 80 days ago — for what was supposed to be around a weeklong mission. More than two months later, the astronauts are aboard the International Space Station awaiting a return date to Earth. The reason for the delay, NASA said, is helium leaks and thruster issues in the Starliner.

NASA previously insisted that Wilmore and Williams are not stranded in space and said the Starliner could return to Earth in case of an emergency. “Their spacecraft is working well, and they’re enjoying their time on the space station,” Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, said in June.

But on Saturday, NASA announced that Wilmore and Williams will depart with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of the space organization’s “commitment to safety.” The Starliner will return to Earth unpiloted and could land in New Mexico as early as Sept. 6.

CNN tells about NASA’s decision in “Boeing’s Starliner astronauts will return to Earth on Spacex Crew Dragon, NASA says”.

…On Saturday, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said NASA considered its extensive experience with spaceflight — both successful and unsuccessful — when making the decision. A poll of NASA representatives from across the agency’s departments and research, oversight and development centers was unanimous, according to agency officials.

“We have had mistakes done in the past: We lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward,” Nelson said. “Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and even at its most routine. And a test flight, by nature, is neither safe, nor routine.”

SpaceX is already slated to execute a routine mission to the International Space Station, carrying four astronauts as part of standard crew rotations aboard the orbiting laboratory. But the mission, called Crew-9, will now be reconfigured to carry two astronauts on board instead of four.

That adjustment will leave two empty seats for Williams and Wilmore to occupy on the Crew-9 flight home. The astronauts will also join the Crew-9 team, becoming part of the official ISS expedition. With that transition, Williams and Wilmore will remain on-site for an additional six months — the length of a routine mission to the space station.

The reassignment to Crew-9 will push the duo’s return to February 2025 at the earliest.

Starliner, however, will fly home empty in early September, NASA said Saturday…

This New York Times unlocked article looks at the business implications, and adds more about the technical side of the decision: “NASA Extends Boeing Starliner Astronauts’ Space Station Stay to 2025 – The New York Times”.

…Mr. Nelson [NASA Administrator] said he had spoken with Kelly Ortberg, the new chief executive of Boeing.

“I told him how well Boeing worked with our team to come to this decision, and he expressed to me an intention that they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely,” Mr. Nelson said.

But Boeing has already written off $1.6 billion in costs for Starliner. Under a fixed-price contract, Boeing is to pay the expenses of additional work needed to meet NASA’s requirements before Starliner is certified for operational flights.

If NASA requires another crewed test flight like the current one, that would cost Boeing at least hundreds of millions of dollars more.

Mr. Nelson said he was “100 percent” certain that Boeing would not back out of the contract, but later added, “They’ve spent X, will they spend Y to get to where Boeing Starliner becomes a regular part of our crew rotation? I don’t have the answer to that, nor do I think we would have the answer now.”…

…Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program said engineers were concerned about how the propulsion system would perform during the return trip.

The key maneuver is an engine burn by larger thrusters that leads to the spacecraft dropping out of orbit. The smaller thrusters, including the ones that malfunctioned during docking, are used to keep the spacecraft pointed in the correct direction.

Analysis of the data showed that the firing of the larger thrusters also heated up the smaller thrusters.

“These clusters have experienced more stress, more heating,” Mr. Stich said, “and so there’s a little bit more concern for how they would perform during the deorbit burn, holding the orientation of the vehicle, and then also the maneuvers required after that.”

That lingering uncertainty spurred unease and led NASA leaders to decide they should not risk the lives of Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore on Starliner. Instead, they elected to rely on a different spacecraft — the Crew Dragon, built by SpaceX, a company founded by Elon Musk — for the return trip.

(13) IT TAKES TEENY TINY EYES. Live Science says “World’s fastest microscope can see electrons moving”.

Physicists have created the world’s fastest microscope, and it’s so quick that it can spot electrons in motion.

The new device, a newer version of a transmission electron microscope, captures images of electrons in flight by hitting them with one- quintillionth-of-a-second electron pulses.This is quite a feat: Electrons travel at roughly 1367 miles per second (2,200 kilometers per second), making them capable of circumnavigating the Earth in only 18.4 seconds….

… “This transmission electron microscope is like a very powerful camera in the latest version of smart phones; it allows us to take pictures of things we were not able to see before – like electrons,” lead-author Mohammed Hassan, an associate professor of physics and optical sciences at the University of Arizona, said in a statement. “With this microscope, we hope the scientific community can understand the quantum physics behind how an electron behaves and how an electron moves.”…

(14) BITECOIN. This seller calls it a “Dinosaurs Piggy Bank for Kids, Automatic Stealing Money Box”. (Available a lot of places; Amazon.com happens to be where John King Tarpinian saw it.)

Here’s an entertaining YouTube short of it in action.

(15) BORDERLANDS PITCH MEETING. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “So they’re going to encounter several obstacles along the way. Which will happen, legally making this a movie.”

Drats. There goes the class action lawsuit.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Paul Weimer, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]