(1) I’M BACK. In The New Yorker, Stephanie Burt reviews a new work by “The Sci-Fi Novelist Who Disappeared for Decades”. “In What We Are Seeking, the cult author Cameron Reed returns to show us a strange, totally alien world that somehow feels like our own.”

The best science fiction shows us new ways to see our lives and our times by showing us how both might be otherwise. Characters who seem like us seek out alien worlds whose systems clash, or rhyme, with those we recognize. Characters who seem very unlike us—A.I.-infused cyborgs, plant people who photosynthesize, or humans from made-up societies—act on their feelings, and contemplate moral decisions, and we ask how their stories might inform our own. Critics call these effects cognitive estrangement: the term, coined by the scholar Darko Suvin in the nineteen-seventies, describes how science fiction’s worlds seem strange, yet also make sense, according to knowable rules in a fictional universe, and according to readers in our own.

After “The Fortunate Fall,” Reed published a short story that won the Tiptree Award (now called the Otherwise Award), for the year’s best science fiction about gender. Then nothing, for twenty-seven years. Critics’ and fans’ attempts (including my own) to contact the author failed: nobody seemed to know if she was even alive. Then she reëmerged, posting on Bluesky and Mastodon as @LateOnsetGirl. In 2024, her work’s lasting impact led Tor Books to reissue “The Fortunate Fall” in a series of modern sci-fi and fantasy classics. And now Tor is set to release a new novel from Reed, “What We Are Seeking,” that’s longer, more joyful, more ambitious, and at least as devoted to cognitive estrangement, making new worlds whose structures and societies let us see ours with fresh eyes….

(2) THE PUPPET MASTER. “He Will Rock You: Inside James Ortiz’s ‘Project Hail Mary’ Odyssey”. The Hollywood Reporter says, “The movie hinge’s on Ryan Gosling’s chemistry with a rock-like alien, with puppeteer Ortiz improvising 45-minute takes with the leading man to create a believable friendship.”

… Ortiz spent months on a London set working opposite Ryan Gosling, providing the voice and overseeing the puppetry for the rock-like alien, who is on a mission to save his home planet’s star when he meets Gosling’s Ryland Grace, who is on his own mission to save the Earth’s Sun.

The friendship between the two is the heart of the movie, which has passed $322 million globally, making it the biggest hit of the year to date.

Despite Hail Mary being a $190 million production with action and spectacle, filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller asked Ortiz and Gosling to improvise long takes, almost like it was a theater production.

“Sometimes, it was 45-minute takes of just us playing stuff,” Ortiz says….

…The initial idea was that Rocky’s voice would later be replaced with another, more famous actor. But after principal photography wrapped, Lord and Miller kept sending Ortiz requests to record additional lines of dialogue for test screenings.

“And then finally, I just got a text from Chris who just basically said, ‘We really want to do this with you. Why don’t we formally talk about it? Let’s get you into an ADR booth so we can clean up all of these random clips from both your phone,” recalls Ortiz.

Says Miller: “The idea of hiring an actor to come and imitate what really happened on set and the little nuances that were happening seemed like a crazy proposition. He did such a good job and he really was Rocky. That really became a no-brainer.”

Adds Lord: “In animation, you say ‘you never trace a drawing.’ It’s like it loses its life — that moment when it gets created is the thing you want to capture.”…

(3) “I’M FEELING BETTER!” Esquire knows “Why Darth Maul Will Never Die”.

They say you can’t keep a good man down. But in the Star Wars universe, being exceptionally bad is another path to longevity.

That lack of redemption has been the salvation of the demon-faced Darth Maul, who keeps turning up despite dying a lot over the years. Well, seemingly dying. His latest revival comes in the new animated series Maul: Shadow Lord, a galactic take on the old-school gangster genre, which debuts its first two episodes on Disney+ on Monday, April 6. A second season of the show is already in the works, series creator and newly installed Lucasfilm president Dave Filoni tells Esquire. So consider this just the opening chapter in Maul’s underworld rise and fall. He’ll come back. He always does.

Fans felt Maul never got to live up to his promise. George Lucas, as it turns out, felt that way too. The Star Wars mastermind also wanted more from Maul, which is why he urged Filoni to devise a way to bring him back when they worked together on the 2008–2013 animated series The Clone Wars. George went looking for Maul and brought him back. That’s more concern than the Emperor ever showed for his lost apprentice….

…The notion of Maul’s resurrection, however, was one of the times Filoni admits to doubting the master. “Maul was a character that George wanted to bring back in Clone Wars. And I thought that’d be very difficult—since he cut him in half,” Filoni says. “But he was very confident that I would find a way to make that justifiable.”…

(4) A CLASSIC TURNS SIXTY. At Bradburymedia, Phil Nichols’ new podcast episode celebrates “Fahrenheit 451 film and play”.

Francois Truffaut’s film of Fahrenheit 451 is sixty years old! In this episode I revisit the film and talk about how it came to be made, and then move on to discussing Ray Bradbury’s reactions to the film.

Not only did Ray review the film for the Los Angeles Times, but he also borrowed elements from the film when he later developed his own stage play of F451.

(5) I CAN’T BELIEVE MY EARS. “Killer rabbits, bunny boilers and the holy hand grenade of Antioch: Easter bunny movies – ranked!” in the Guardian.

From Watership Down and Fatal Attraction to Bambi and Python’s Holy Grail, rabbits are an unlikely constant in film – and often with sinister intentions. Here are the 20 best leporine movie moments…

The list includes:

17. Night of the Lepus (1972)

“Attention! There is a herd of killer rabbits headed this way!” Beware of bunnies, especially when their chops are smeared with ketchup and they’re lolloping in slo-mo against miniature sets. Leading actor Janet Leigh later reflected: “How can you make a bunny rabbit menacing?” Quite easily, as it happens; read on for some choice examples.

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

April 2, 1948 –– Joan D. Vinge, 78

One of my favorite writers is Joan D. Vinge. What do I consider her best series? Without question that’d be the Snow Queen series of which the first novel, Snow Queen, won a Hugo at Denvention Two. I’ll admit that my favorite work in this series is Tangled Up In Blue where two police officers must fight corruption within the Tiamat force. It’s more personal I think than the rest of the series. 

Next in line for her would be the Cat trilogy (well it did have a chapbook prequel, “Psiren” which I’ve not read) consisting of Psion, Catspaw and Dreamfall. Cat, the young telepath here, is fascinating as is his story which she tells over the three novels. 

I’m going to give a shout-out to her first novel, The Outcasts of Heaven Belt which was serialized in February-April 1978 in Analog. An egalitarian matriarchal belt-based society is in a conflict against a patriarchal society in the same region of space. If Niven could write sympathetic female characters, this is what he might have written. Only she wrote it much, much better than he ever could. Really, it’s that good.

I don’t read media novelizations so I can’t comment on all of her many such writings like Cowboys & Aliens, Lost in Space, Tarzan, King of the Apes and Willow. 

I’ve not read her short fiction, so I’d like to know who here has. What’s the best collection? 

(7) COMICS SECTION.

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is special.
• Brevity jokes about Xanth.
• Brewster Rockit wonders how they can tell there’s a problem?
• Frank and Ernest laugh at life.
• Free Range sets an elaborate trap.
• Rubes is a Spidey-sense denier.

(8) VIBE PHYSICS. [Item by Peter Tillman.] You’ll get a kick out of this one. And Physics will never be the same again! At Anthropic.com: “Vibe physics: The AI grad student”. Money quote: “I visited the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in January, and soon after they had an emergency meeting about using LLMs. The word is getting out.”

…Instead of one long conversation or document, Claude maintained a tree of markdown files—one summary per stage, one detailed file per task. Given that LLMs work much better with things they can retrieve rather than things they have to hold in context, this allowed Claude to look things up rather than remember them. When I asked Claude to proceed to the next task, it would read its own previous summary, do the work, and write a new summary. I also had it edit the plan as it went, modifying earlier and later sections as it learned.

Claude worked through the stages sequentially: kinematics, NLO structure, SCET factorization, anomalous dimensions, resummation, matching, and documentation. Each stage took 15–35 minutes of wall-clock time and about half that in actual compute. The whole thing took roughly 2.5 hours.

Even this first stage wasn’t completely hands-off. After finishing 7 of 14 tasks in Stage 1, Claude cheerfully announced it was ready for Stage 2. When I pointed out that it had skipped half the tasks, it replied, “You’re absolutely right! Stage 1 has 14 tasks, not 7.” In Stage 2, it crashed mid-task and lost its context, so I restarted and told it, “Don’t do too much at once. Do them one at a time, write the summary, let me look at it, then continue.” It also attempted to merge two tasks into one until I caught it….

… Claude also didn’t know what to check to verify its results. So I had to walk it step-by-step through things that are standard cross-checks in the field (renormalization group invariance, fixed-order limits, etc.). Each of these checks revealed some bugs in the equations or in the code—just as they would with a student. But while a student not knowing how to do the checks might take two weeks for each, Claude knew exactly what I was talking about even if I was brief and rude, and did each in around five minutes.

It took about a week to get the results right….

… What Claude is good at

• Tireless iteration. 110 paper versions. Hundreds of debug plots. No complaints.
• Basic calculus and algebra. Setting up integrals, changing variables, expanding functions, checking factors.
• Code generation. Python plots, Fortran interfaces, Mathematica notebooks—all working. No more Python version number conflicts, missing libraries, or syntax errors.
• Literature synthesis. Combining results from multiple papers coherently and scouring the literature. Make sure to have Claude double check the authors, titles, and journals one by one in the bibliography.

What Claude is bad at

• Maintaining conventions. When conventions are non-standard, it constantly reverts to textbook defaults even if you force it to write the conventions down and stick with them.
• Honest verification. It says “verified” when it hasn’t actually checked. You have to call it out, insisting, “Did you honestly check everything?” or, “Go line by line and verify every step.” Skills and CLAUDE.md help with this a little, but not enough.
• Knowing when to stop. It finds one error, thinks it’s satisfied the task, and stops looking. You need to repeat “Check again” until it finds nothing new.
• Keeping its eye on the prize. It can only handle small steps and loses direction easily.
• Plot aesthetics. Axis labels, legends, fonts, and colors all need micromanagement to be human-readable.
• Resisting pressure. If I forced it to think deeply about something, after a while it would just give me the answer I seemed to want, even if it wasn’t justified….

(9) YOU ARE THERE. [Item by Steven French.] Quantum entanglement moves even further away from being ‘spooky action at a distance’ as Einstein put it, and closer to becoming the basis for new technology: Science News reports “Quantum physics can confirm where someone is located”.

… Scientists have demonstrated a quantum technique to ensure that someone is in the location they claim to be, physicist Abigail Gookin reported March 18 at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit. Called quantum position verification, the technique is based on the concept of quantum entanglement, in which the fates of two far-flung particles are closely linked….

…Here’s how it works: Two people, called verifiers, each want to confirm that a third person, called a prover, is in a given location. The verifiers, who are on opposite sides of the prover’s purported location, each send a random number to the prover, which the prover will use to determine their next step. Meanwhile, one of the verifiers creates a pair of entangled photons, or particles of light. The verifier holds onto one photon, and sends the other to the prover.

The prover and verifier measure their photons simultaneously. Specifically, they measure polarization, the direction in which the electromagnetic waves of the photons wiggle. The random numbers tell the prover what measurement settings to use to determine their photon’s polarization. The prover sends the result of their measurement back to the verifiers.

Then, the verifiers compare the prover’s result to the result from the measurement of the other photon. Over many repetitions of this photon-measuring protocol, the results should be strongly linked, or correlated. If a sneaky impostor intercepted the photon from another location, the results of the measurements wouldn’t be as strongly correlated as expected, thanks to constraints set by the speed of light and quirks of quantum measurements. The verifiers would know that something was fishy….

(10) WORLDCON WEATHER PREDICTION. Winston Pei, co-chair of the Edmonton in 2030 Worldcon bid, shares “A note on the weather in Edmonton”. And in case you wonder Pei adds, “The temperature definitely wasn’t 243°K when we went out and shot this…”

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Peter Tillman, Olav Rokne, Andrew (not Werdna), Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, and Mark Roth-Whitworth for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]