(1) KICKSTARTER FOR TIM KIRK’S LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS ART BOOK. A Kickstarter has been launched to fund the printing of “Nightmares to Come by Flights of Imagination”, a collection of the art created by Tim Kirk for Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions, only some of which was included in the volume that J. Michael Straczynski eventually produced. The funding goal is $1,950, of which $1,374 has been raised as of today.

Jan Strnad provided this summary of the project:

 “…Ellison commissioned Tim Kirk to create illustrations for all the stories in The Last Dangerous Visions. The project turned out to be a long distance run that spanned a dozen years on Kirk’s part, even longer on Ellison’s. Eventually, many stories slated to appear in TLDV were withdrawn, with Ellison’s blessing, and allowed to be printed elsewhere.

“As a result of the shifting contents of TLDV, Kirk created many more illustrations than were used in the final draft of the book, completed after Ellison’s death by J. Michael Straczynski. The drawings were scattered about the interior of Ellison Wonderland in file folders, boxes, even under the bed. The final version of TLDV contained thirty-one stories; Kirk produced more than a hundred illustrations.

“All the known illustrations are included in this volume. Fewer than a third have seen print before.

“This collection of Kirk artwork displays the range of his black-and-white talents. From fanciful cartoons to dramatic tableaux and realistic portraits—even including a keen homage to Aubrey Beardsley—Kirk’s illustrations were tailored to each story solicited by Ellison….”

(2) INDIA SFF DATABASE ANNOUNCED. KalpaDB has launched– “India’s first community-curated database dedicated to speculative fiction across Indian languages.” The database work is now open to volunteers.

(3) WIKIPEDIA DISCIPLINES A FOUNDER. “Larry Sanger, a Wikipedia Founder, Is Barred From Editing on the Site” reports the New York Times.

A founder of Wikipedia who calls himself the “ex-founder of Wikipedia” and has been a critic of the site since he left it over 20 years ago has been barred from editing its articles.

Wikipedia can be edited by nearly anyone, but the changes are then vetted by others. The site’s editors formed a consensus this week to restrict the access of the co-founder, Larry Sanger.

The reason given was not any of Mr. Sanger’s broadsides against Wikipedia, which he has long criticized over what he sees as a left-wing bias, but something procedural. He had been canvassing an outside audience to sway internal policy votes, a Wikimedia Foundation press officer said on Wednesday.

Days before the decision was voted on, Mr. Sanger submitted a proposal called “WikiProject Intellectual Diversity.” His goal, he said, was to have more diversity in viewpoints on the site.

Mr. Sanger publicized his project to his 93,000 followers on X, and this was ruled a violation of canvassing guidelines. He was declared “not here to build an encyclopedia,” another serious violation.

Mr. Sanger went back to X after the punishment, writing, “There was no due process, no prosecutor, no dispassionate judge, no jury, no interpretation of law.”

Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Mr. Sanger and Jimmy Wales, and it has always operated as a nonprofit with a decentralized system of editing by mostly anonymous volunteers from around the world.

Those volunteers develop and enforce policies “through open, transparent discussions and consensus-based decision-making,” a press officer said on Wednesday. “These policies apply uniformly to all contributors, regardless of their affiliation or history with Wikipedia.”

Mr. Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002, and last June he called the website “one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history.” He then returned last fall “with the aim of helping Wikipedia in various ways to reform,” he said….

(4) SUPER THUMB DOWN. Emmet Asher-Perrin makes a good case for why “Supergirl Should Be Ashamed of Itself” at Reactor. Beware spoilers. We won’t quote the spoilers here. The review begins:

On paper, Supergirl should have been an easy sell. It is the second film in the fledgling DCU film reboot, arriving on the heels of 2025’s Superman, which was largely praised by audiences and critics alike. Milly Alcock was introduced to audiences there via a cameo at the center of the film, Clark’s hard-drinking little cousin—she goes to red sun planets so she can get wasted—who is responsible for Krypto’s complete lack of canine training. Her namesake film was based on an excellent and recent run of comics by Tom King and Bilquis Evely (Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow), which provided everything the story needed to be an all-out win with audiences.

The trouble is, Hollywood doesn’t do so well with female-led superhero films…

(5) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to binge on brisket with Mark L. Van Name on Episode 285 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

First up, my lunch with award-winning writer Mark L. Van Name, recorded on the con’s opening day several hours before programming began. Balticon was the perfect place to break bread with Van Name, because 18 years earlier there, he won the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel for his 2007 book One Jump Ahead. That was the first of his Baen Books about Jon and Lobo, which include Slanted Jack (2008), Overthrowing Heaven (2009), Children No More (2010), and No Going Back (2012). His short fiction has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, When the Music’s Over, Full Spectrum 3, Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, and many more.

Van Name is more than his many short stories and novels, for he was also the cofounder of the Sycamore Hill Writer’s Workshop with previous guest of the podcast John Kessel, as well as the editor of the critical magazine of short fiction, Short Form.

We discussed his first short story sale to a 1979 Clarion classmate of mine, why it sometimes takes him decades before he feels a story’s ready to send out, the reason he still has a massive comic book collection (and why I don’t), the comic book which helped save his life, the reason he doesn’t require advances on his novels, his mixed feelings about writing workshops, the 17 minutes Harlan Ellison spent savaging one of his stories, why you have to let go of caring what readers make of your writing, how his John and Lobo series was born, the way he balanced a demanding day job with the writing life, plus much more.

(6) APPLY FOR SLF GRANTS. The Speculative Literature Foundation has announced it will take submissions for the Diverse Writers and Diverse Worlds Grants from July 1-31: “The SLF $500 Diverse Writers and $500 Diverse Worlds Grants”.

The $500 Diverse Writers grant is intended to support speculative fiction writers from underrepresented and underprivileged groups — such as writers of color, women, queer writers, writers with disabilities, etc. — whose marginalized identities may present additional obstacles in the writing and publishing process. The $500 Diverse Worlds grant is intended for work that best presents a diverse world, regardless of the writer’s background.

(7) INGE HEYER OBITUARY. The Shore Leave convention committee announced on Facebook today that their Co-Chair Inge Heyer has passed away. They published a full obituary in the Shore Leave newsletter.

Inge Heyer was born and raised in Berlin, Germany. After completing her secondary education, she accepted a scholarship to attend Tenri University in Japan, where she studied martial arts and the Japanese language. She then pursued her passion for astronomy — sparked by watching too much Star Trek in high school — earning a BA in physics and astronomy from Smith College in Massachusetts, followed by a master’s degree in astronomy from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

From 1992 to 2006, she worked as a senior data analyst at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, analyzing images from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide-Field and Planetary Camera 2. She is also the person behind getting Hubble images into episodes of Babylon 5 and Star Trek. She remained at STSci as a data analyst until 2006, when she began work for the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hilo, Hawaii as its Public Information Officer, sending press releases out world-wide in multiple languages.

Concurrently, she began her PhD online with the University of Wyoming. She moved to Laramie, WY in 2011 to complete her scholastic work and graduated with a PhD in Science Education in 2012. She returned to Baltimore and taught at Loyola University, first as an Senior Lecturer and later as a Full Teaching Professor.

Inge joined the Shore Leave family in 1992 after moving to the Baltimore area. She believed that fandom was a place where people could explore new ideas and think about the future. Through her involvement with Shore Leave, she helped bring people together who enjoyed stories about science, space, and new possibilities. She showed that being a scientist and being a fan could go hand in hand.

Her life showed that curiosity is important both in science and in fandom. Whether she was studying the real world or imagining future worlds, Inge encouraged others to keep asking questions and exploring new ideas. Inge had a special interest in public outreach, science teaching, and public speaking.

Inge Heyer will be remembered as someone who helped make fandom a welcoming place for people who loved science, stories, and creativity. She loved science fiction and the people interested in it, but especially she loved Star Trek. Nothing made her happier than giving science lectures and presentations at Science Fiction conventions and talking to an audience interested in science.

(8) JERRY MORIARTY (1938-2026). [Item by Andrew Porter.] “Jerry Moriarty, Painter Whose Brushstrokes Elevated Comics, Is Dead at 88”. This is an interactive article, and the link bypasses the NYT paywall.

In the late 1970s, the comic artist Art Spiegelman and his wife, the editor Françoise Mouly, began dreaming up a new magazine, one they hoped would elevate cartooning into the realm of high art.

A colleague suggested that they talk to Jerry Moriarty, a painter who lived in Manhattan, a little uptown from their SoHo loft.

Arriving at Mr. Moriarty’s studio, Mr. Spiegelman was stunned by what he encountered: comics that were painted.

“It was totally mind-blowing,” Mr. Spiegelman, whose graphic memoir “Maus” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, said in an interview. “It was exactly what we were groping for, which was a place that wasn’t underground comics anymore, nor was it art underground.”

Raw, their magazine, debuted in 1980 with “Jack Survives,” the first in a series of painted comics by Mr. Moriarty about a stoic Everyman who muddles through the indignities of life in a hat and tie, refusing to capitulate.

“It’s as if Edward Hopper had taken up songwriting,” the comic artist Chris Ware wrote in The Believer magazine in 2009. “For lack of a better word, it’s poetry — I believe the first that comics has ever seen — and poetry as fresh and affecting now as when first drawn.”

Mr. Moriarty died on March 25 at his home in Binghamton, N.Y., where his nephew Kevin Moriarty had been caring for him in his final years. He was 88. His death, which was not widely reported, was confirmed by his brother Fred Moriarty, who survives him….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Eugie Foster

Eugie Foster had a phenomenal life before it was tragically cut short when she died at Emory University Hospital on September 27, 2014 from respiratory failure, a complication of treatments for large B-cell lymphoma, with which she was diagnosed on October 15, 2013. So now I’m depressed, and you should be too. 

She was the managing editor for The Fix and Tangent Online, two online short fiction review magazines. She was also a director for Dragon Con and edited the Daily Dragon, their onsite newsletter.

She won a 2009 Nebula for “The Sinner, Baker, Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast”, which was also a Hugo nominee at Aussiecon 4. 

She has a collection of short stories, Returning My Sister’s Face and Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice. Her story “The Art of Victory When the Game is All the World” would be published posthumously in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She wrote the story while sick with cancer, but died before she could submit it for publication.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

• Carpe Diem, the next generation.
• Ink Pen has an age limit.
• Junk Drawer visits the cartoonist green room.
• Strange Brew tries for better taste.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal tells of an interesting experiment.

(11) GONZO LIVES. [Item by Cat Eldridge.] Ernst Hogan is a SF writer. I think his Smoking Mirror Blues is by far his best science-fiction novel. “Mondo Ernesto: CHICANONAUTICA SHARES A GONZO WRITING DIARY”. See: “Chicanonautica: Gonzo Writing On-The-Run Diary”.

One thing I do when I teach my class for Palabras del Pueblo is write a story. The first day I gather some material, usually from the conversation, get an idea, and by the final day I have a story. What better way to share my writing process than to be doing it?

This time getting an idea was easy. In their opening presentation E.L. and Ronnie Dukes had us all do a writing exercise about getting a text from yourself from the year 2070. I tend to have doubts about such things, and scribbled some unusable gibberish, but the prompt got my diabolical imagination going. 

I’m old and will be 115 in 2070. Maybe it would be better if it was about a younger guy. Ronnie had us do a drawing exercise, so I drew what I would look like. A lot of my characters start out as me, then get off on their own….

(12) THERE ARE FOUR, AND THEY ARE FANTASTIC. MEET THE DEMONS. [Item by Steven French.] A fun & interesting piece by Robert Crease in the latest issue of Physics World: “Meet the demons: four mythical creatures that inhabit science”.

Demons might be mythical, but for hundreds of years these imaginary creatures have been fantastically useful for thinking about science and the humanities. For physicists, the most famous demon was dreamed up by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. His creature appeared to violate the second law of thermodynamics by letting hot molecules in a box of gas go in one direction through a trap door, leaving cold molecules behind.

Inspired by the rich history of demons, my Stony Brook University colleague Elyse Graham and I created what we believe is the first university course that both studies demons and teaches students to code them. We taught the course, entitled “Demons to think with”, for the first time in spring 2025 and again in spring 2026, each time to almost 100 students. The course proved to be a great way of getting students in the humanities and sciences to talk to, work with, and learn from each other.

We surveyed demons from ancient times to the present and discussed their presence throughout art, literature and religion, where they prey on human vulnerabilities to steal souls. We also taught students about what computer engineers call “daemons”, whose malicious members prey on human vulnerabilities via clickbait and other temptations to steal passwords and social-security numbers. But what struck Graham and me most was the sheer number, variety and ambition of scientifically informed demons…

(13) ABSOLUTE BATMAN ANIMATION. [Item by James Bacon.] An Absolute Batman adult animated series is in development – The Hollywood Reporter has the story:.“Absolute Batman, Joker Anime, Krypto Series’ in the Works”.

The news was announced at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival by Peter Safran (DC Studios) and Sam Register (PWarner Bros. Animation).

Absolute Batman writer Scott Snyder is going to be the showrunner and executive producer while artist Nick Dragotta will also be a producer.  

The comic has proved to be a huge hit selling in the millions and currently fueling sales in DC.  

Absolute Batman has seen readers return to comics as well as new readers start and it has inspired fans, a fan video by Alex Babb released last September has had over 700,000 views: “Absolute Batman: Animated”.

Alex also spoke about the process in a “making of” video.  “How I Animated: Absolute Batman”.

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