(1) LACON V BUSINESS MEETING. The first session of LAcon V’s Business Meeting was held today. The sessions are being publicly streamed to the LAcon V YouTube channel.  The July 17 session is currently available to replay here: WSFS Business Meeting Day 1. The chair’s synopsis of the action will be reported by File 770 when it becomes available.

(2) CASTING MIDDLE-EARTH. “The Hunt for Gollum is being criticised for its all-white cast. Blaming Tolkien is the wrong answer” says the Guardian’s Ben Child.

Casting has come a long way since the early 1980s when it was somehow still acceptable to sign up Max von Sydow to play Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon in 1980, or hire Peter Ustinov as the lead in Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen in 1981 (despite protests at the time). These days, film-makers will have to defend an all-white cast in a medieval fantasy flick, which appears to be what has happened this week to The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum’s Andy Serkis.

Asked by the BBC why every major casting for the new film has been a white actor, Serkis appeared to lay the blame on his literary source material. “Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology, there’s a lot of that feeling,” he said. “The Shire feels very, very much like a very, a very white, you know … They’re not very concerned about what goes on beyond the borders of the Shire, but they know they don’t want people coming in.

“Yes, there have been criticisms,” Serkis added. “This particular film is somewhat acknowledging that. But I don’t think we will be doing a politically correct just-casting-for-the sake-of-casting-and-ticking-boxes version of the film. So, it’s where relevant basically.”

This does, it must be said, feel a bit like dragging Tolkien into the witness box to try to solve a problem that the pipe-smoking Oxford don could never have conceived of in his own time. Britain in the 1940s was less ethnically diverse than it is now, and the idea that anyone might one day debate whether fantasy races from an imagined world should look almost exclusively like white people from northern Europe would not really have occurred to anyone. The author, for his part, was probably far too busy deciding exactly how Elvish verbs should conjugate and mapping the genealogy of every hobbit in the Shire to be looking so far ahead. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth pinning down exactly why Serkis’s defence feels so unconvincing.

For one thing, The Hunt for Gollum is not being adapted in a vacuum. The new film, by dint of its focus on Middle-earth’s least hygienic resident, is firmly tied to Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy from the turn of the century. Its visual grammar was established more than two decades ago when the idea of black elves or Lenny Henry playing a hobbit would have felt considerably more radical than they do now. If Serkis had simply said that he was preserving continuity with those films, which themselves took huge liberties with the source material, that would at least have been a coherent defence. Invoking Tolkien instead makes it sound as though an Oxford philologist who died in 1973 personally signed off the 2026 casting sheet….

(3) ANOTHER PUBLISHING EMPLOYEE UNION. “Hachette Book Group Employees Vote To Unionize” – Portside has the story.

Hundreds of staff members at Hachette Book Group voted to unionize on Tuesday, forming the largest union in American trade book publishing at one of the biggest publishers in the United States.

Employees at Hachette imprints across the United States and Canada, including Little, Brown and Workman, voted 388 to 130 to join the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, under the name Hachette Workers Coalition. Representatives of the group said they established a union to secure salary increases and better benefits and protections, including a cap on working hours.

A spokeswoman for the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, Kathleen Floyd, said that the Hachette union comprises around 600 workers, and added that Hachette employees “have built the largest union in trade publishing history, standing together to demand better benefits, transparency, and equity.”…

(4) BFS CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS. “British Fantasy Society Journal – Call for Submissions – Gender in Fantasy”.

Fantasy has long explored lifeworlds and paradigms outside of societal norms. Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid protagonist, declares, ‘I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.’ World myths, legends, folk tales, and fairy tales are early promoters of gender-fluidity, populated by the likes of Inanna/Ishtar; Hermaphroditus, the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite; androgynous Dionysus; Ardhanarishvara; Ometeotl; Guanyin; cross-dressing thunder and trickster gods; heartsick seafaring maidens disguised as sailors; and the mercurial ontologies of the Fae. In this issue we will explore how gender is portrayed and explored in Fantasy. Fantasy plays an important role in enlarging what is possible, and creating refugia for the marginalised and other modalities. In an increasingly intolerant, xenophobic, and close-minded world, where Far Right governments roll back hard-won freedoms and civil rights legislation, and undermine, mock or openly attack important principles of equality, diversity, and inclusivity, this function of Fantasy is never more vital, for as Orlando states, ‘He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.’

The BFS Journal is seeking original, unpublished, human-authored articles of between 2000-8000 words (including bibliography).

There’s a list of possible approaches at the link.

…Send the Abstract (200 words), including title, keywords, and a 100-word bio to the Editor (Dr Kevan Manwaring) by 31st August. The BFS Journal Winter issue will be published December 2026. Completed articles, if commissioned, will be due in by 30th September when they will undergo peer-review. Send to: [email protected]  

(5) READINGSTARTER. [Item by Steven French.] This is heartening! “Netflix’s ‘Heartstopper’ sparked global book-buying boom, study finds” at Phys.org.

A Netflix adaptation helped transform “Heartstopper” from a popular graphic novel into a global mainstream publishing success, according to new research from The University of Manchester and Princeton University.

The study found that the release of “Heartstopper” on Netflix in April 2022 triggered a dramatic and sustained rise in book sales across 11 countries, introducing the series to new audiences and helping it break out of its original graphic-novel niche. The paper is published on the preprint server SocArXiv.

Researchers analyzed international sales data, online reader and viewer reviews, and UK book-buying trends to understand how the adaptation reshaped the reach and cultural standing of Alice Oseman’s bestselling series.

In the weeks following the first season’s release, weekly sales across the countries studied rose by more than 76,000 copies.

The research suggests the Netflix adaptation did far more than boost sales. It helped move “Heartstopper” into mainstream young-adult fiction and encouraged readers, families and gift buyers who may never previously have encountered the books….

(6) A RECOMMENDED SHORT. From 2024 — Cat Rambo’s “Conversation with a Dragon” at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

“It was dark and cloudy, not many stars out. I didn’t think anyone else was out there, not till I heard the girl talking. I crept up on her, but I couldn’t see who or what she was talking to, because nothing was answering back, as though she was talking to herself. I couldn’t make out the words, which were in some twisty language that sounded like hissing and rocks grinding together.”

(7) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to bite into General Tso’s Bok Choy with Arley Sorg on Episode 287 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Arley Sorg

Arley’s an associate literary agent at kt literary, and long-time listeners will have previously heard me chat with him briefly during my 2017 Nebula Awards weekend lightning-round donut episode.

Arley’s a 2022 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award recipient, a 2021 and 2022 World Fantasy Award finalist, as well as a 2022 Locus Award finalist for his work as co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. He was a 2022 Ignyte Award finalist in two categories: for his work as a critic, and for his essay “What You Might Have Missed” in Uncanny Magazine.

He’s a senior editor at Locus, a reviewer for Lightspeed, a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and an interviewer for Clarkesworld. He was a guest critiquer for the 2023 Odyssey Writing Workshop and the week five instructor for the 2023 Clarion West Workshop. Plus he’s out there across social media promoting the philosophy writers should “never give up, never surrender” as much as I have.

We discussed the difficulty in getting the help you need as a beginning writer when you don’t know what you don’t know, the serendipity that got him a job at Locus, how to inhabit the community that is while envisioning the community that could be, why an agent might prefer in-person pitches over email, the importance of doing things without an agenda, the way we learned to deal with both rejecting and being rejected, how to make sense of the myths and rumors of science fiction publishing, why he feels comfortable in his role as an agent, plus much more.

(8) RAMPING UP TO LACON V. Sarah Gulde, Isabel Shechter and DJ Switch present the new “News Break: July 16, 2026” episode of The Incomplete Worldcon Podcast.

It’s short but sweet – we talk about the Nommo Awards, Tim Kirk’s drawing workshops, and the Star Wars Mostly Original Slideshow. We also mention an upcoming special episode, details TBA 🙂

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

July 17, 1971 — Cory Doctorow, 55.

By Paul Weimer: As many did, I started with Cory Doctorow’s work through his nonfiction. I can’t really remember a time on the internet where his columns, blog posts, microblog posts (e.g. Twitter) were not a part of my weekly, sometimes daily, feed of information and content. Much like John Scalzi, but even more so, he’s been there since the modern iteration of the internet.  While I might not always think he was on the right track, at least his ideas are well thought out enough to actually argue intelligently for, or against them. 

Because there was just so much else out there, even though he won the Campbell award, a couple of Locus awards and more, it wasn’t until Little Brother, that I decided to actually try his fiction? Why Little Brother in particular? This was 2008 when I was really getting going at the whole reviewing and criticism thing, and I managed to get myself an ARC. My review of it at the time is amateurish by today’s standards, but I liked the rather hopeful in a grim near future where young teenagers resist the tightening of the bolts of fascism and authoritarianism in the wake of a massive terrorist attack. 

I read stuff by Doctorow backwards and forwards from that point, ever since. Is Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom his best work? Certainly the aforementioned Little, Brother seems to have had the biggest cultural impact and the biggest impact on his career and in his oeuvre. 

Walkaway, his 2017 novel about a near future where a post-scarcity gift economy tries to rise up in the midst of a potent oligarchical regime, is the work I most vividly think about — in terms of his fiction, that is. I’ve gene back and forth in my own mind on whether it is too pollyannaish and not realistic on how such a society should and could work, or if it is the time of utopianism that we need to push our own society in a most balanced direction, or neither. In this day and age, as I write this in July 2025, I find it a message of hope that a new world can be constructed even in the pressure cooker of an old one. 

While I may not agree with many of his opinions, in his nonfiction and fiction alike, I value that he is around to present them.

Cory Doctorow

(10) COMICS SECTION.

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal analyzes consciousness.
• Dustin has a supportive friend.
• Liō’s friends respond to a scene.
• Strange Brew predicts evolution.
• Wondermark knows how to respond to critics.
• Wumo can’t keep up with the demand.

(11) PUNKY DOODLES. [Item by Dann] Found on X.  Punky Doodles. They create micro-animated features that lean heavily on genre tropes.

A 6-year old fortune teller…an oraclet?…with questionable predictions due to her inexperience?

A fae girl and a vampire dude who accidentally get married?

Someone is about to be sentenced to death and gets to choose the method of dying?  The obvious options might not be the best ones.

Professor X asks a girl about her superpower.  She can predict how many pulls it takes to turn off a ceiling fan??

A vampire heist film where they break into the Smithsonian??

Watch out for the Pan Goblin!

(12) LITTLE PIECE OF HISTORY GOES FOR BIG PRICE. “Pen that saved the Apollo 11 astronauts sells for over $800K at auction” reports Popular Science.

Several precious pieces of space history hit the auction block in New York this week. On July 15, Sotheby’s Space Exploration auction features several iconic artifacts, including a life-saving pen from Apollo 11 ($857,600), a Soviet flag flown in the icy vacuum of space ($102,400), and even a piece of the first cloth to wipe a window in space ($5,120). 

On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin collected rock and dust samples from the moon’s surface for about three hours. As the pair were climbing back into the Lunar Module to prepare to fly home to Earth, Aldrin hit the module’s circuit breaker switch with the life support backpack on his spacesuit. 

The switch broke off, and it would have killed all three Apollo 11 astronauts had it not been for Aldrin’s quick thinking. He wedged a pen into the board to create a makeshift switch.  

“He could’ve picked something that was not very important. But he banged into the circuit breaker that controlled the SM engine that got us back into orbit,” Armstrong later told ABC News. “It was just insurance. It’s nice to get a little insurance.”

This item sold for $857,600….

(13) WHO’S YOUR DADDY? “Mark Hamill’s Screen-Used Lightsaber Sells for Record Sum at Auction” – The Hollywood Reporter tells how much.

An iconic piece of Star Wars memorabilia smashed predictions and sold for a record-setting sum.

Heritage Auctions confirmed late Wednesday afternoon that Mark Hamill’s original screen-used Luke Skywalker lightsaber sold for $3.75 million. It’s the one he wielded during a climactic face-off with Darth Vader in 1980’s Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back until the Sith Lord cut off his hand and delivered the infamous “I am your father” line….

… The $3.75 million sum set a new world auction record for a screen-used Star Wars prop, per Dallas-based Heritage. The previous record was held by an original 20-inch model of an X-wing starfighter used in the space battle in 1977’s Star Wars, a piece that sold for $3.135 million in October 2023. Both figures are trumped by the record holder in the artwork category as Tom Jung’s original half-sheet key poster painting for Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope sold for $3.875 million….

(14) ORBITING NUCLEAR WEAPON DETECTION. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] In 2001: A Space Oddity there is an iconic scene where-by an early hominid tosses a bone into the air and segues into an orbiting satellite. In Clarke’s novelisation it is revealed that this satellite is in fact an orbiting nuclear weapon… And so we come to this week’s journal Nature in which there is coverage of a primary research paper in the same issue of how to track such orbiting nuclear weapons…

“The Outer Space Treaty (OST), currently ratified by 118 countries, including Russia and the United States, prohibits weapons of mass destruction in orbit. But the power of such a treaty to deter space-based nuclear detonations, which could sabotage key satellite-reliant infrastructure, is limited if compliance with the treaty cannot be credibly verified. Now, writing in Nature, Danagoulian reports a modelling study showing that satellites carrying nuclear weapons emit a tell-tale neutron signal caused by interactions with high-energy protons trapped in Earth’s magnetic field. The author finds that this signal could be detected by nearby ‘inspector’ satellites.”

Earth’s magnetic field traps high-energy charged particles, such as protons and electrons, creating structures called Van Allen belts. If the uranium were to interact with these protons, it would emit neutrons that could be detected.

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