(1) OKORAFOR WINS NCAAP IMAGE. Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Death of the Author won the 2026 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Fiction. See the announcement on the “57th NAACP Image Awards Virtual Pre-Show Night One” at the 18:25 mark.

Nnedi Okorafor receives NCAAP Image Award. Photo by Nollywood director Tchidi Chikere.

(2) NOTES ON LTUE. [Item by David Doering.] John Hertz kindly upbraided me for not keeping File 770 updated on our annual Life, the Universe, & Everything event here in Provo. I definitely need to repent, as we had a fabulous time–all 1300+ of us–with Ron Clements of Disney, Matt Dinniman, and Charlie Holmberg. Already planning for next year under our new non-profit “Light the Fire Foundation” auspices.

Here’s the over 600 teens, YA, and us seasoned folk showing Matt Dinniman how everyone  has a hard-copy of his latest book. Who says reading dead tree editions is over??? 

(3) RECOVERING FROM BURNOUT. Priya Sridhar counsels readers “How to Recover from Volunteer Burnout” at SFWA’s Planetside.

I’ve volunteered with several organizations; at least one has proved disillusioning. Yet many large creative projects and events require unpaid labor of love. Otherwise, nonprofits would go bankrupt in a matter of months. 

A few scandals have plagued popular writing organizations. Who bears the emotional brunt, in addition to any victims? The volunteers. That experience inevitably leads to burnout, that loss of energy and willpower to engage in such creative activities. …

…The scandal that changed my relationship with NaNoWriMo emerged in 2023, and the emotional fallout still wreaks havoc years later….

…Many former volunteers and I have talked about how much we put into NaNoWriMo. Local members in my group have voted on a new Discord server name, but the previous unity has evaporated. We keep missing each other when scheduling write-ins….

Sridhar discusses six helpful steps. Here are the first two:

…Some steps align, however, with treating burnout in general. No solution is one-size-fits-all; recovering requires strategy.

Commiserate. Chances are, you aren’t the only disappointed volunteer. Large organizations have large groups. Due to the law of averages, you can find people in the same boat as you: disappointed and burned out. Knowing you aren’t alone makes a huge difference. 

When the NaNo news broke, so did the official volunteer server. In fact, it had to shut down for legal reasons. If you can meet in person, I’ve found that gathering to commiserate over hot food is therapeutic. I generally go for locally made pizza. Hot food is generally key; if you’re not a pizza person, ramen that accommodates lifestyle choices and allergies is another option. The reason I think this works? Because hot food warms you from head to toe and allows you to relax while feeling catharsis. You can open up about what’s been troubling you. 

Grieve. Accept that you won’t be okay for a while. A cause you believed in failed you. It’s okay to not be okay with that anguish. Feeling frustrated with the subsequent hurt and exhaustion is perfectly normal….

(4) URBAN FANTASY. Marie Lu names “Fantasy Books That Imbue the Real World With Magic” in the New York Times. (Link bypasses the NYT paywall.)

There’s a door in the alley that people only seem to enter but never leave. There’s an old woman stirring her coffee with a spoon that you could have sworn was a fork a second ago. There’s a shadow on the wall that doesn’t seem to match its owner.

Perhaps you’ve experienced a moment like this, where you witnessed something that can’t quite be explained away. Urban fantasy is the genre that invites us to dwell on those everyday moments and ask ourselves: What if that old woman really were a magician? What if that door really were charmed? More grounded than high fantasy, with its swords and dragons, urban fantasy sets speculative stories in the cities of our world (or something closely resembling it), exploring the possibility that the mundane byways of reality can in fact be where magic exists.

Here are 10 novels where the real world is enchanted….

This is one of Lu’s picks:

The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry

by Ransom Riggs

When a story opens with a boy seeing a raccoon with its tail on fire and a man feeding a tooth into a parking meter, you know you’re in for a wild ride. Leopold Berry is a California teen who is “average absolutely to the decimal point.” But when he starts seeing things that seem to come straight out of a 1990s fantasy television show called “Max’s Adventures in Sunderworld,” he learns that Sunder is not only real, but also in grave danger. Riggs’s intimate knowledge of Los Angeles transforms this urban jungle into a place where dark magic whispers from every alley.

(5) TELL TCHAIKOVSKY THE VIEWS. A Deep Look by Dave Hook opens up “’The Best of Adrian Tchaikovsky’, February 28, 2026 Subterranean”. Here’s the short take. The long commentary is at the link.

The Short: I just read an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of The Best of Adrian Tchaikovsky, scheduled for release on February 28, 2026, Subterranean. It’s noted as available in hardcover and e-book. It’s hefty, 37 stories and over 600 pages of SF, fantasy, and “weird fiction”. Picking favorites is hard, but I especially loved the great short stories “Crossed Gates“, from Breakout, Nick Gevers editor, 2015 PS Publishing (it features trains), and “Difficult Times“, a short story, NewScientist December 2020 (music and a surprise to me). It has strong essay content, featuring both section/story essays by Tchaikovsky and a good introduction by John Scalzi. I like the “Author’s Note: What’s Not Here” by Tchaikovsky, which is great for a “Best of” collection. My overall, average rating for the stories was 3.75/5, or “Very good”. I enjoyed this a lot. Recommended….

(6) COVER STORY. Adafruit Industries points to “The book so dangerous the CIA stole it: Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light”. They start with a synopsis of the novel:

In Lord of Light, published in 1967, Roger Zelazny wrote about a swordfight between the Buddha and the God of Death where both combatants quote ancient scripture at each other while trying to achieve philosophical clarity through mutual annihilation. Reminds me of social media sometimes…

In the book, colonists from a dead Earth use technology to become the Hindu pantheon. They control who gets reborn and as what, using a psych-probe that reads your entire mental history and a karma system that makes modern social credit scores look quaint. They suppress the printing press, gunpowder, indoor plumbing….

Then they remind you the reason why the CIA stole it.

…Agent Tony Mendez grabbed the dead Lord of Light script off a shelf, renamed it “Argo,” and the rest is detailed in Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning movie, which never even mentions Zelazny, but there is a book about all of this too.

A 60’s sci-fi novel about gods who suppress technology to maintain power, whose screenplay was stolen by an intelligence agency and used to rescue people from a theocratic revolution. You couldn’t make it up if ya tried….

(7) AI HYPOCRISY. [Item by Cliff Ramshaw.] I’m sure File 770 readers will appreciate the irony here: “US AI giant accuses Chinese rivals of mass data theft” – the Guardian has the story.

US artificial intelligence company Anthropic said on Monday it had uncovered campaigns by three Chinese AI firms to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, in what it described as industrial-scale intellectual property theft. OpenAI leveled similar charges last month.

Anthropic said DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax used a technique known as “distillation” – using outputs from a more powerful AI system to rapidly boost the performance of a less capable one.

“These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication,” the company said in a statement. “The window to act is narrow.”

Distillation is a common practice within AI development, often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models….

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 24, 1957 — Edward James Olmos, 69.

Where I first experienced the acting of Edward James Olmos was as Detective Gaff in Blade Runner, a role I see he reprised in Blade Runner 2049.

No, I’ve not seen the latter film, nor do I have any intention in doing so as I consider Blade Runner one of the finest SF films ever done and nothing will sully that for me. We gave it a Hugo at ConStellation, so there later films!

It wasn’t his first genre film as that was the Japanese post-apocalyptic science fiction film Virus (1980), but his first important role came in Wolfen (1981), a fascinating horror film about, possibly, the idea that werewolves are real, or maybe not, in which he was Eddie Holt who claims to a shapeshifter. 

He has an almost cameo appearance in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues as a musician at the barbecue.

It was supposed to have a theatrical release but that was not to be, so Ray Bradbury’s The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit was released directly to video. In it Olmos was Vámonos. I’ve not seen it. It sounds, well, intriguing. Who’s seen it? 

He’s in the debacle that was The Green Hornet in one of the primary roles as Mike Axford, the managing editor of The Daily Sentinel. 

As you most likely know, he was William Adama on the rebooted Battestar Galactica. At seventy-three episodes, it didn’t even come close to his run on Miami Vice as Lt. Martin Castillo which was one hundred and six episodes. Now there was an interesting character! 

Olmos as Adama in Battlestar Galactica

I’ll end this Birthday note by note noting he had a recurring role on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as Robert Gonzales.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Bound and Gagged has a new podcast.
• Dogs of C-Kennel updates a practice.
• Strange Brew redefines mad.
• Wumo has a career complaint.

(10) NEW HOLOCAUST RESEARCH. “How Bookbinders Used Old Records to Help the Nazis Find Their Victims” – in the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.)

Bookbinders and restorers in the 1930s and ’40s used their craft to help the Nazi regime create a database that was used to persecute and kill Jews and others who were deemed racially impure, a British researcher has found.

Key to building this database were church, civil and synagogue records, which were often hundreds of years old and damaged beyond legibility when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

By tasking professionals with cleaning up these documents, which held information about millions of people, the Nazis gained access to generations’ worth of material — which they used to target specific population groups, the new research shows.

The findings are the result of more than two decades of work by Morwenna Blewett, an expert in conservation history.

She was working as a conservation fellow at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts in 2004 when a question came to her: What had happened to the art restorers who did not flee Nazi Germany during World War II?

She pondered the question while sorting through an old filing cabinet in the museum’s basement — where, as she recalled in a book published this month, “Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime: Revelation and Concealment,” the “warm, dark air smelt faintly of cigarettes, coffee and engine oil.”

Soon, she had expanded on her query: “How did the Nazi regime intend to use conservation and restoration to achieve its aims?”

The answer, she discovered, was that paper restorers and bookbinders in Nazi Germany had helped the regime track down people’s Jewish ancestry by conserving and cleaning up old records from churches, as well as from synagogues and civil registers.

Dr. Blewett said that, by publishing her book, she hoped to shed light on this part of the Holocaust, which she called “one of the longest and most insidious of all National Socialism’s projects to exploit the field of conservation and restoration.”

Her focus on bookbinders and restorers reinforces the idea that the Nazis were helped “from the ground up” by many disparate facets of German society.

“It just gives us the cogs of how the regime relied on myriad professions and myriad methods in their move toward genocide,” Dr. Blewett said in a phone interview….

(11) THEY KEPT WATCHING THE SKIES. BBC explains, “Mysterious blue glow traced to Flying Banana”. (Requires a subscription outside the UK.)

The blue hue has been spotted across Lincolnshire over the past few nights

Is it a UFO? Is it the Northern Lights? No, it’s the “Flying Banana”.

A blue glow that has lit up Lincolnshire’s night sky in recent weeks has been traced to an unlikely source: a bright yellow train. 

Network Rail said the mysterious light comes from its new measurement train – nicknamed the Flying Banana – which looks for faults on the line for engineers to repair.

The company said on hazy nights, equipment from the yellow train can create a blue glow “that looks like something from the X-Files” as it tests overhead lines.

“But it’s not flying saucers,” a spokesperson said. “Just our Flying Banana helping to keep trains running reliably.”

The bright blue glow has been spotted across the county, including from stations such as Metheringham….

(12) HORROR MOVIE TIME! “This detached hand robot has a thing for skittering on its fingertips” reports Science News.

If The Addams Family was a science fiction show, “Thing” might look something like this.

Researchers have developed a robotic hand that can not only skitter about on its fingertips, it can also bend its fingers backward, connect and disconnect from a robotic arm and pick up and carry one or more objects at a time, researchers report January 20 in Nature Communications. With its unusual agility, it could navigate and retrieve objects in spaces too confined for human hands….

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George illustrates what happens “When Ancestors Appear In Your Time Of Need”.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, David Doering, Cliff Ramshaw, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]