(1) THERE’LL BE A WHO-SIZED HOLE IN YOUR CHRISTMAS STOCKING. “Doctor Who’ Christmas Special Canceled As Russell T Davies Exits” reports Deadline.

The BBC has canceled the special Christmas episode of Doctor Who, while showrunner Russell T Davies and producer Bad Wolf are exiting the iconic sci-fi series.

In an announcement on Wednesday, the BBC acknowledged that the news would be “disappointing for fans” after the broadcaster promised last year that it would air a “spectacular” special episode in 2026.

The Doctor Who festive special is something of an institution in the UK, with previous favorites including David Tennant making his full debut as the Doctor in 2005’s “The Christmas Invasion.”

The exit of Davies and Bad Wolf, who signed up for Doctor Who as part of a major reboot in 2021, will result in the BBC putting the series out to competitive tender.

It means that BBC Studios, which owns the rights to Doctor Who, or an independent producer will have the opportunity to reinvent the beloved Time Lord….

Here is the BBC’s official announcement: “An update on the future of Doctor Who”.

Today we’re announcing an update on plans for the future of Doctor Who.

As part of securing the next phase of the show for future generations, and in line with the BBC’s Charter and Agreement requirements, the BBC will put Doctor Who out to competitive tender this year. Doctor Who remains an important part of the BBC and this tender underpins the BBC’s continued commitment to Doctor Who ensuring audiences will enjoy the show for years to come.

After careful consideration, the BBC, Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf have collectively decided not to go ahead with the previously announced Doctor Who Christmas episode. This decision was not taken lightly, and we know it will be disappointing for fans, but in order to set the show up for future series, it was decided that rather than bridge the gap with a one off special, we are choosing to push forward to invest in the long-term future of the show which ensures that when the TARDIS lands once more, it does so in all its glory.

The previously announced new Doctor Who animation series for CBeebies is currently in production.

Details of the tender will be announced in due course.

The BBC retains all IP in Doctor Who. BBC Studios will continue to lead the global distribution of Doctor Who as well as licensing, consumer products, digital and immersive experiences on behalf of the BBC. 

(2) DAVIES BOWS OUT. Russell T Davies made his own farewell statement on Instagram.

(3) THE GUARDIAN’S TAKE. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian reflects on Russell T Davies’ departure from the Whoniverse:  “’A poisoned chalice’: will Doctor Who survive Russell T Davies’s exit?”

…At its best, Doctor Who is an irresistible storytelling format: a clever and kind alien can go anywhere in time and space, and put the baddies on the back foot with words and intelligence rather than guns and violence, while holding a mirror up to our own times. The adventures of the Doctor will, of course, continue in many forms even if the show is absent from our screens for quite some time. There are audio dramas featuring former Doctors, graphic novels and the occasional original novel, plus an ongoing comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine which continues – for now – to be published monthly. When it will next be able to preview an upcoming television series, however, remains entirely up in the air….

(4) JRRT ON FAIRY TALES. “J.R.R. Tolkien on Fairy Tales, Language, the Psychology of Fantasy, and Why There’s No Such Thing as Writing ‘For Children’” by Maria Popova in The Marginalian.

On March 8, 1939, J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973), celebrated as one of the greatest fantasy writers in history, gave a lecture titled “Fairy Stories,” eventually adapted into an essay retitled “On Fairy-Stories” and included in the appendix to Tales from the Perilous Realm (public library). At the crux of his argument, which explores the nature of fantasy and the cultural role of fairy tales, is the same profound conviction that there is no such thing as writing “for children.”…

…. Like Sendak and Gaiman, Tolkien insists that fairy tales aren’t inherently “for” children but that we, as adults, simply decide that they are, based on a series of misconceptions about both the nature of this literature and the nature of children:

“… Among those who still have enough wisdom not to think fairy-stories pernicious, the common opinion seems to be that there is a natural connexion between the minds of children and fairy-stories, of the same order as the connexion between children’s bodies and milk. I think this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childlessness), tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large…”

(5) HONORARY OSCAR RECIPIENTS ANNOUNCED. “Glenn Close, Ridley Scott to Receive Honorary Oscars” reports Variety.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present Honorary Oscars to veteran actress Glenn Close, legendary director Ridley Scott and Disney’s first Black animator Floyd Norman, while producers Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler, longtime champions of independent film, will receive the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, following a vote by its Board of Governors.

The statuettes will be presented at the Academy’s 17th Governors Awards on Nov. 15, at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Ovation Hollywood.

(6) DISCLOSURE DAY VERDICTS. There are thumbs pointing in all directions.

• The Guardian likes it: “Disclosure Day review – close encounters of a deferred kind in Spielberg’s conspiracy spectacular”.

The old school is the new school in this very enjoyable and entirely ridiculous space-alien conspiracy adventure from screenwriter David Koepp and director Steven Spielberg; it is cheerfully mischievous and deadly serious in equal measure. It has something of Hitchcock from North By Northwest, Christopher Nolan from Inception and Spielberg from pretty much every other movie he’s ever made. Spielberg incidentally appears in the trailer for this film, disclosing that, hand-on-heart, he really believes in its contents, in the way I imagine CS Lewis believed in Aslan and the secret Narnian sovereignty of Peter and Susan.

Only Spielberg could get away with taking two of the world’s best-known hoaxes – Roswell and crop circles – and treating them with judicious deadpan respect. With heartfelt idealism, Spielberg also asks us to believe that should the ultimate truth come out, people everywhere would be terribly upset at the way captured aliens have been vivisected. (I suspect that would be very far down the list of our concerns.)…

• The BBC sayeth it doth suck: “Disclosure Day review: Steven Spielberg’s ‘flimsy’ alien drama is like ‘a drab X-Files episode'”. (Subscription required by readers outside the UK.)

…Disclosure Day isn’t the worst film of the year, but it may well be the most disappointing. For a start, it’s directed by Steven Spielberg, one of the US’s greatest living film-makers. And for another thing, it’s about a topic that has obsessed him throughout his career: aliens coming to Earth. 

He first touched on the topic in Firelight, a film he made as a teenager in 1964. He returned to it in 1977 for his definitive UFO drama, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And he’s kept coming back to it ever since. When the spine-tingling trailer for Disclosure Day was released, with a “Story by Steven Spielberg” credit hinting at how close the scenario was to his heart, many of us hoped that the 79-year-old would deliver a career-crowning masterpiece: his profound last word on a question he has been thinking about and researching for most of his life.

And what did he deliver instead? A flimsy, outdated car-chase thriller with no ideas about aliens that we haven’t heard before.

The film’s thesis on alien life is so amazingly uninspired that you’d assume that Spielberg had pondered it for several minutes, not several decades…

(7) ANIME FANS PROTEST PETITION. The BBC reports a “Growing backlash in Japan over Trump’s use of anime characters”. (Subscription required by readers outside the UK.)

A backlash is growing in Japan over US President Donald Trump’s use of popular anime and manga characters in his posts on social media.

Upset has been brewing since March, when fans started noticing the president using images of – and in some cases depicting himself as – iconic Japanese animation characters like Pikachu, Naruto and Yu-Gi-Oh!.

Almost 20,000 people have now signed an online petition, arguing he does not share the values of the characters, and that using them for political reasons could infringe the creators’ rights.

Pokémon Company International has condemned Trump’s use of its imagery. The BBC has contacted other rights holders and the White House for comment.

The petition calling for Trump and the White House to respect Japanese manga was first launched in March, when a couple of posts caught the attention of some fans.

The official White House X account had released videos combining footage of US military strikes on Iran with clips from Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball. A day earlier, the account had published an image with the phrase “Make America Great Again”, on top of what appears to be a screengrab from the Pokémon Pokopia video game.

The petition was revived after Trump shared a video on Truth Social on Saturday depicting himself as Naruto Uzumaki, the protagonist and namesake of a popular anime and manga series about a young ninja’s journey to become the village leader….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

June 10, 1952 — Kage Baker. (Died 2010.)

Kage Baker was one of those writers that I had a close relationship by email and phone for many years until she passed on. I’m still sad that she died early but relieved that she is no longer in constant pain. 

Though most knew her as a genre writer, she was very proud of her other life. As Kathleen noted on the site she keeps about her life with Kage, Kathleen, Kage and the Company: “Kage Baker taught Elizabethan English (also known as Language I when we had time for lots of classes) for the performers at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. She taught it for most of 30 years; we team-taught at workshops, she and I, in a spiel I can still recite. Well, I can recite my half – I get stuck pausing for her lines here and there. We had worked out a class recitation that was half improv and half thesaurus.”

Kage told me how they both dressed up on in their best Elizabethan cosplay finery for the Renaissance Pleasure Faires, surely the social highlight of their year from the way she described it way such obvious delight. I know they even took Harry the Space Pirate with them on occasion.

Yes Harry, a most unusual bird who’s in the photo below.  Let’s have her explain: “Well, a Household Bench Mark is approaching — my parrot, Harry Redux, is about to reach his first birthday. Or his twenty-first, as he is the reincarnation of my first parrot, Harry Prime. He is the Dalai Parrot. I rescued Harry Prime from an abusive situation 20 years ago, and he was the love of my life; when he died last year, I decided my middle-aged life had enough tragedy and it was time to invoke Mystic Forces. I made sure of a clutch laid shortly after he entered the Higher Plane, and waited anxiously for his return — the system works for Tibetan religious leaders, and I saw no reason why it would not do so for my evolved dinosaur. Sure enough, this brand new little bird exhibits unnerving knowledge of his past life, including where we hide the McVittie’s Digestive Biscuits in the kitchen. When he gazes dulcetly from his pirate-gold-coin eyes, one must believe that here is an ancient and inhuman soul.”

She baked food a lot. Really she did. Quite a bit, much of it Elizabethan. And then there was Barm Brack: “Barm Brack is a soul cake — traditional Scots recipe calls for a bean or silver coin or some other token to be baked into it and the person getting the winning slice gets fame or good luck or sacrificed or whatever, deciding on how much of The Wicker Man you take seriously. I leave the tokens out of mine, personally. Life is enough of a lottery as it is.” Her recipe is here: “Barm Brack”.

No, I’m not talking about novels here though I liked them so much that we were supposed to do a Concordance for them for Golden Gryphon. I was supposed to draft a series of questions for each of the cyborgs for which she was would play out being that cyborg and answer the questions in detail. Each of these would be in turn become a chapter in the Corcordance. Sadly she got too ill before we could do it.

I’ll miss her a lot. She was a great conversationalist, a fantastic SF writer and she wrote a number of really great reviews for Green Man including this one authored with her sister about a series dear to both of them: “The Two Fat Ladies: The Complete 4 Series”.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal knows young beginning writers.
• Free Range explains the missing Musketeer.
• Waynovision appreciates art.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gets creepy.

(10) ARTEMIS III CREW. “NASA names astronaut crew for Artemis III mission” – NPR calls the roll.

NASA introduced the four astronauts scheduled to fly on next year’s Artemis III mission. (From left to right) NASA commander Randy Bresnik, European Space Agency pilot Luca Parmitano, NASA mission specialists Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas at a press conference announcing the crew at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

NASA named the international crew of four that will fly on its next Artemis mission as early as next year. It’s a key test flight ahead of a human landing mission to the lunar surface that the agency calls “one of the most highly complex missions NASA has undertaken.”

The Artemis III mission, while vital to future moon missions, will remain closer to home in low-Earth orbit. There, it will demonstrate the Orion spacecraft’s rendezvous and docking capabilities with two commercially designed and built lunar landers.

NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik will command the mission. A member of the U.S. Marine Corps, Bresnik has flown to space twice and logged 149 days off the planet. European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano, from Italy, will serve as the mission’s pilot. Parmitano has also been to space twice, including one dangerous spacewalk that was cut short when he nearly drowned as his helmet filled up with water.

NASA’s Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas will serve as mission specialists. Rubio served in the U.S. Army and is a board-certified family physician and flight surgeon. He has flown to space once, to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz capsule. After engineers discovered the spacecraft was damaged, Rubio’s stay was extended while awaiting a new ride, and he set the record for longest spaceflight by an American at 371 days.

This will be the first spaceflight for Douglas. The Coast Guard reserve officer was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021. He is a systems engineer with a doctorate from George Washington University. Douglas served as backup crew to Artemis II….

(11) CALL FOR PAPERS. Here is the Call For Papers from The Virtual Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (VICFA) 2026 organized by the IAFA and CoFutures

Speculative Visions of Care and Hope

Guests of Honor: Zoha Kazemi (Iran) and Ahmed Naji (Egypt)

Date: 17-19 September 2026

Visions of care and hope are central to contemporary speculative fiction across media, even in, and perhaps especially in, postapocalyptic and dystopian narratives. Against the fundamental brokenness of the technofascist structures of the contemporary world system, speculative fiction is perhaps the most realistic of our genres that demand the impossible: alternative futures of what can be, and alternative pasts of what might have been: worlds with their own economic, social, and technological structures. 

From the standpoint of speculative fiction, three primary strands of these new speculative visions may be immediately observed: a) Contemporary CoFuturisms, including Indigenous Futurisms, Afrofuturisms, Arab- and Gulf-Futurisms, Latinx Futurisms, Crip Futurisms, and Xenofuturisms offer their own challenges to prior speculative thinking; b) emergent genres of hope, care, and restoration and renewal, for instance solarpunk, hopepunk, healthpunk, and; c) shifts in the generic form itself as it renews itself through new social and political sensibilities. These three strands unite established voices who have always been at the forefront of thinking with the radical potentials for speculative thinking, as well as a new generation of creatives invested in pushing the boundaries of (and even embodying) speculation itself as an act of care of hope. What is fundamental to these new visions is that these speculative worlds not only exist in fiction, they also seek to transform the world itself by building and organizing new communities of practice. 

This edition of the VICFA is open to speculative visions of care and hope from around the world. Our Guests of Honor are Zoha Kazemi and Ahmed Naji, leading contemporary voices who have redefined these visions through experimental speculative fiction with bold social and political critique.

Proposals on speculative visions across media and communities of practice on – but not limited to – the following topics are welcome:

– Speculative ethics and philosophies of care, hope, community building

– Speculative storytelling, worldbuilding, and futuring as methods of care

– Archival practices of care, remembrance/commemoration practices, caring for ruins, historical repair 

– More-than-human communities and forms of care

– Rethinking kinship, connection to past and future ancestors, reproductive care, family, love

– Caring in the end times, post-apocalyptic care: visions of survival, rebuilding community 

We are open to presentations in different languages, as well as more creative approaches to these themes.

Proposals on topics transcending this year’s theme are welcome.

Please submit abstracts of 300-500 words along with a brief bio statement by July 15, 2026 through this portal: https://form.jotform.com/261554977711163. 

Questions about the conference theme can be directed to the CoFutures organizing team at [email protected]. Questions regarding registration can be directed to the IAFA Membership and Registration Coordinator: [email protected] 

(12) PHOTOBOMB IN SPACE. [Item by Steven French.] Well this sucks!  (I knew it was an issue for ground-based telescopes but hadn’t realised it affected the likes of SPHEREx as well). “Space telescopes are now overwhelmed by satellite trails” says Phys.org.

Unfortunately, there’s more bad news to report on the clear skies front. A new paper, available on the arXiv preprint server from researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, reports that 73.3% of images the agency’s new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were contaminated by at least one artificial satellite trail. And it’s only going to get worse from here.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t come as a surprise. The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) was designed to map the entire sky in near-infrared light. Meaning it would have long exposure times and cover a very large chunk of the visible sky at any one time. Both of which are a recipe for interruption from orbiting satellites.

Typically this type of light pollution is primarily associated with ground telescopes. But, SPHEREx is an orbital satellite, traveling along an orbit that is 700 km above Earth’s surface. Apparently even that wasn’t enough to escape from the light trails. On average, there were 2.18 trails per exposure, most of which are concentrated in an “X” pattern that mimics the orbital paths of the satellite megaconstellations.

There appears to be no easy way to handle this interruption, either. SPHEREx uses an automated “sample up-the-ramp” algorithm to protect itself from stray cosmic rays. When a sudden energy blast from one of those rays hits a pixel, the system halts data collection on that pixel to prevent saturation. But commercial satellites are now so bright that they are triggering this system without the help of any stray cosmic rays….

(13) THE HIGH LIFE. “Earth’s stratosphere is a mysterious superhighway for microbes” says Science News.

The stratosphere is both beautiful and hostile — a purgatory between Earth and space, between life and death.

Hover 30 kilometers above the ground, and you are nearly twice as high as any raincloud on Earth. The surface of the planet curves beneath you. A diaphanous film of blue stretches over that horizon, representing the disconcert­ingly thin layer of atmosphere that envelops all life as we know it. Above that, the sky resembles black interplanetary space.

You would quickly die here. The air pressure is one percent what it is at sea level. As you gasped for oxygen, your blood would boil inside you, causing your skin to welt like bubble wrap.

But the stratosphere holds plenty of life — tiny single-celled microbes that somehow navigate extreme dehydration, temperatures as low as −60° Celsius and intense DNA-damaging ultraviolet radiation that would kill most life on Earth’s surface.

“If you took a microbe from those altitudes and you put them on the surface of Mars, they wouldn’t even know the difference,” says microbiologist Brent Christner of the University of Florida in Gainesville.

When Christner and his team started looking for life high in the atmosphere over a decade ago, they intended to find the upper limits of Earth’s habitable zone. They hoped that this, in turn, might show whether life could persist on the cold, radiation-pummeled surface of Mars, where the atmosphere is just as thin. But when Christner’s graduate student Noelle Bryan sent sampling balloons to 38 kilometers above Earth’s surface, she was utterly surprised by what they found: “We did not hit an altitude where we couldn’t find something [alive],” says Bryan, who is now a senior research manager at Mass General Brigham in Boston….

(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. It wasn’t an easy sale! Ryan George takes us inside the “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope Pitch Meeting”.

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, PJ Evans, Christopher Hennessey, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]