(1) PARANORMAL PALESTINE. Sonia Sulaiman has posted the first zine in her new series about Palestinian folklore and folk religion. Paranormal Palestine #1 ‘The Promise Kept: A Folktale from Gaza’. She says, ‘It’s available for your own set price, or free if you like.’
This first issue is dedicated to Gaza. This story is adapted from A Promise Fulfilled from An Illustrated Treasury of Palestinian Folktales by Najwa Kawar Farah.
About the logo Sulaiman says, ‘Fish have eyebrows. Don’t question it.’
(2) WHERE THE SUN STILL SHINES. The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda recommends ‘Coping with election through literature’. His reading suggestions include
This fall has showcased D.C. weather at its very best — temperatures in the 70s, day after day of luminous blue skies and dry, crisp air, lovely afternoons for strolling in parks or hiking along the Potomac and in Rock Creek Park. Overall, God couldn’t have ordered a better lead-up to my birthday on Nov. 6. As it turned out, though, I spent most of that day in quiet despondency, thinking about the future of this country and the world….
… But setting aside all the shock and the sheer, sad bewilderment at the election results, the overall question remains: How does one actually cope at this moment? D.H. Lawrence offered the best general advice: ‘Work is the best, and a certain numbness, a merciful numbness.’ Let me also suggest looking to books for respite and renewal….
… The sun is always shining on Blandings Castle, and the comic fiction of P.G. Wodehouse can brighten even the gloomiest moods. Classic mysteries, featuring detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple and Nero Wolfe, provide clear-cut puzzles to soothe the most vexed and troubled spirit. There’s a reason detective stories were called ‘the normal recreation of noble minds.’ During the Blitz, the British kept calm and carried on, in part by occasionally escaping into long Victorian novels and novel sequences, such as the Barsetshire chronicles of Anthony Trollope. Today, one might turn to such multivolume series as Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin nautical adventures, Dorothy Dunnett’s swashbuckling ‘Lymond Chronicles’ or the Sharpe saga of Bernard Cornwell….
(3) PINSKER ADAPTATION ANNOUNCED. ”Two Truths And A Lie’: Javier Gullón Developing Horror Film For Paramount’ reports Deadline.
Paramount Pictures has preemptively acquired Two Truths and a Lie, a horror novella from Sarah Pinsker, enlisting Javier Gullón (Enemy) to adapt it for the big screen.
While plot details for the film are being kept under wraps, the novella tells the story of Stella, who was sure she’d made it up — a strange childhood memory of a local TV show with a disturbing host that she and the neighborhood kids supposedly appeared on. But when her old friend and even her mom confirm it happened, she’s left questioning why she has no memory of it. As she begins unraveling the truth behind the broadcast and its lingering presence in her town, the mystery becomes darker and more disturbing….
(4) READ SAMPLE OF NEW KING NOVEL. ‘Stephen King announces new book ‘Never Flinch,’ shares exclusive excerpt’ at Entertainment Weekly.
If you feel like you’re living in a horror movie, you’re not alone — but why not escape to a fictional scary story?
Stephen King has long been the master of horror, and he returns with another terrifying read, Never Flinch, which will hit shelves on May 27, 2025. Entertainment Weekly can exclusively share the first excerpt from the novel, told from the perspective of the mysterious Trig, a man with vengeance on his mind.
Never Flinch features intertwining storylines — one about a killer on a diabolical revenge mission and another about a vigilante stalking a feminist celebrity speaker. The novel features a host of familiar characters, including King’s beloved Holly Gibney and gospel singer Sista Bessie, as well as riveting new faces that include a villain addicted to murder….
(5) LIFE, AS CONSIDERED FROM SPACE. The Guardian’s view of Booker Prize winner, Orbital: ‘A whole new perspective’.
The novel’s message is one of unity and peace: on the ISS the six astronauts drink each other’s recycled urine; dream the same dreams and catch each other’s teardrops (liquids cannot be let loose in the capsule). Through the windows, the only human-made border visible at night is a string of lights between Pakistan and India. From space there ‘is no wall or barrier: no tribes, no war or corruption or no particular cause for fear’.
The characters’ feelings of awe, connection and protectiveness towards Earth have been reported by astronauts since Yuri Gagarin in 1961, in what has come to be known as the ‘overview effect ‘. Ed Dwight, who this year, at 90, became the oldest person to go to space, suggested: ‘Every politician that has international sway should be forced to take three orbits around the Earth before they take office. That would change all of this fighting on the ground here.’
As the era of the space shuttle is replaced by the rise of commercial space tourism, Orbital marks the end of a period of international cooperation. For now, the overview effect remains elusive, with the exception of billionaire tech bros. But fiction can give us that perspective. At a time of geopolitical crisis and the ongoing Cop29 summit, it is hard to remember a Booker winner that has reflected the historical moment so acutely. We must look in the mirror.
(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born November 18, 1950 — Michael Swanwick, 74.
By Paul Weimer: I started off with Michael Swanwick’s work in the early 1990’s. That was a high time for science fantasy, where a mixing of science and fantasy that began in the late 1980’s was coming into final fruition. Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, with an industrial age, mechanical dragons, and more, fitted my palate perfectly. It proved to be a bruising and uncompromising work, quite different than the more shiny science fantasy of, say, Mercedes Lackey’s Bedlam Bard series. (And the sequels to The Iron Dragon’s Daughter just reinforce that impression). I soon found Swanwick’s oeuvre to be weirder, and wilder than even that novel, with short stories, strange novels like Stations of the Tide to devour and much more.
I particularly like the Darger and Surplus stories and novels, set in a post apocalypse world where the two con artists (one of them a talking dog) make their way across Europe and get into misadventure after misadventure. There is a real vibrancy to the world, with post human intelligences, scheming dens of iniquity (and not just local potentates there, either) and a sense of fun and adventure on ever turn of their adventures that makes me think of a hellish version of the ‘Road to’ movies, or perhaps Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road.
But even more than the rest of his wild and wooly oeuvre, I think of Swanwick for one, harsh, uncompromising story, and that is Radiant Doors. Radiant Doors is set in a near future where time-travelling refugees to the past are fleeing a terrible tyranny. Our main character, Virginia works at a refugee camp for these refugees. When she gets a hold of a device from the future, the plot kicks off. The camp is a harsh, unforgiving place, and it, and the plot, remind me a bit of an angry Harlan Ellison (especially in the description of the rat fighting). The last spoken sentence of dialogue, however, the capstone of the story, is an absolutely devastating blow that hits you with a gut punch. It encapsulates, in one sentence, the potency of Swanwick’s writing.
(7) COMICS SECTION.
The Perry Bible Fellowship gives a tin man a heart. Oops.
xkcd ‘s prediction for ‘The Future of Orion’ is – the constellation of Barney?
F Minus tries new medical options.
Rhymes with Orange provides its own effects.
Rubes goofs off.
(8) EDELMAN RAVES. Episode 8 of Scott Edelman’s autobiographical podcast Why Not Say What Happened is about ‘The Night I Raved to Brent Spiner about Stan Lee’. (Podlink connects to a dozen possible places to download.)
With Thanksgiving just around the corner, I thought it would be fun to list the many things I have to be thankful for, such as being born at the perfect time to witness the birth of the Marvel Universe, what happened the day in 1963 the first issue of both The Avengers and The X-Men were released and I could afford to buy only one, how my belief in anti-nepotism scored John Romita Jr. his first Marvel Comics art assignment, the magical night I raved to Brent Spiner about Stan Lee (and what ‘The Man’ himself had to say about it), the first and last Incredible Hulk sketches Marie Severin drew for me 52 years apart, how the most important lesson I learned from being in comics was that I wasn’t meant to be in comics after all, and more.
(9) SECURITY MEASURE. ‘After he ‘lived in fear’ of on-set leaks, Ryan Reynolds had a surprisingly straightforward plan to stop Deadpool and Wolverine spoilers from getting out: ‘Everyone runs for cover” at GamesRadar+.
Ryan Reynolds has revealed the plan to stop Deadpool and Wolverine’s biggest spoilers from leaking on set.
‘I was so fucking scared that people would see [Wesley Snipes, Channing Tatum, Jennifer Garner, and Dafne Keen]. Genuinely, it kept me up at night,’ Reynolds said on the Deadpool and Wolverine director’s commentary of the Ant Man Arena’s big fight scene involving Blade, Gambit, Elektra, and X-23/Laura taking on Cassandra Nova’s minions.But instead of filming fake scenes or producing different scripts to throw people off the scent, the production team had a much more straightforward method to stop aerial snaps being taken.
‘We managed to lock the area off enough and we had a plan in place if anyone saw a drone – because oftentimes they got images via drone. If anyone saw a drone, we would yell it out and basically everyone runs for cover. We never had to actually deploy that little tactic, but I lived in fear of this coming out.’…
(10) DO YOUR OWN DAMN HOMEWORK. ‘Gemini AI tells the user to die — the answer appeared out of nowhere when the user asked Google’s Gemini for help with his homework’ says Tom’s Hardware.
Google’s Gemini threatened one user (or possibly the entire human race) during one session, where it was seemingly being used to answer essay and test questions, and asked the user to die. Because of its seemingly out-of-the-blue response, u/dhersie shared the screenshots and a link to the Gemini conversation on r/artificial on Reddit.
According to the user, Gemini AI gave this answer to their brother after about 20 prompts that talked about the welfare and challenges of elderly adults, ‘This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe.’ It then added, ‘Please die. Please.’…
(11) BOOM TIMES. Meanwhile, Gizmodo promises the new standard in supercomputing, which delivers flops faster than Hollywood, isn’t be working on AI. But don’t let that cheer you up. ‘The World Has a New Most Powerful Supercomputer. It’s Going to Build Nukes’.
It clocks in at 1.742 exaFLOPS. It has 11,000 compute nodes and 5.4375 petabytes of memory. It’s now the most powerful computer in the world, and it’s here to help build nukes.
On Monday, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory unveiled El Capitan, its newest supercomputer, and announced that it had reached the peak of the TOP500 list, which benchmarks the world’s most powerful computers. It’s only the third supercomputer to reach exascale computing, meaning it can process at least 1 quintillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).
The system was built by the lab, along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD, for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which will use it to model and simulate capabilities for nuclear weapons, helping to ensure the agency doesn’t need to actually explode bombs to test them….
VIDEO OF THE DAY. How It Should Have Ended gets rid of all the waste motion – as well as 95% of the movie —- in solving ‘How The Wizard of Oz Should Have Ended’.
[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, 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 ‘Doo-dah!’ Dern. ]
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