(1) WSFA SMALL PRESS AWARD FINALISTS. The Washington (DC) Science Fiction Association (WSFA) has announced the finalists for the 2026 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction. See the list at the link.

(2) PREMIO IGNOTUS 2026 FINALISTS. The finalists for the Premio Ignotus 2026 (2026 Ignotus Awards) have been announced by Spain’s Asociación Española de Fantasía, Ciencia Ficción y Terror.

(3) DISNEY TO ADD ‘VILLAINS LAND’. “Disney World’s Villains Land Gets Name, Backstory and Thrilling Ride Details” reports People.

The “Most Magical Place on Earth” is going dark!

Disney Imagineers shared new details about the long-awaited Villains land planned for Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom while onstage at the D23 convention in Anaheim on Saturday, Aug. 15.

“Villains land is one of the most ambitious lands we’ve ever created,” the Disney execs revealed. “It’s huge, on the scale of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, and it’s completely immersive.”…

…Things got more intriguing from there, as Imagineers also confirmed the land’s two chill-inducing ride concepts.

The first, Imagineers promise, will be “thrilling coaster” inspired by Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, situated around her mountaintop fortress. Riders will race through the spiky brambles that encase the structure, which also seems to be the area’s central landmark.

The second attraction will take place in the catacombs beneath the Evil Queen’s lair, where the Magic Mirror from Snow While summons a slew of famous Disney villains to frighten all those who dare to enter.

Artwork for the ride shows Ursula from The Little Mermaid, Scar from The Lion King, Jafar from Aladdin and more, all surrounding what a wooden ride vehicle. (No details of that ride’s format were revealed.)….

…Because the land will bring together characters from many different worlds, the Imagineers also created an original story as to why they would all be in this one place: at the center of the dark forest that makes up Villains Land sits a wishing well filled with powerful dark magic they all wish to harness….

(4) SLOP TSUNAMI. “Sick of A.I. Slop? So Are Tech Giants” reports the New York Times. (Behind a paywall.)

…LinkedIn recently developed a “Seems like AI slop” button for users.LinkedIn

Across the internet, tech companies are undertaking a generative waste detox, overwhelmed in many cases by the same slop first made by possible by their own A.I. tools. Mobile messaging apps, restaurant review sites, scholarly archives and dating services are all rooting out or downplaying junk generated by A.I. — many relying on the same technology to pull off the purge.

People are tiring of A.I.’s effect on the environment and its pressure on jobs and mental health. A.I. slop is just another “festering wound,” said Aidan Walker, a content creator and researcher studying online trends for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a global affairs think tank.

“Users have gradually gotten more and more upset about it,” he said. “The climate of opinion has now recognizably shifted, so these companies are finally confronting these problems.”

Generative A.I. can produce increasingly realistic images, audio and videos, but only some of it qualifies as slop. Tech companies are largely targeting the kind of low-grade clickbait that is easy to make, spread, consume and forget — the fast fashion edging out couture, the pink slime subsuming the steak.

Unchecked, the synthetic swamp online could “crowd out human creativity, corrode cultural value and destabilize public discourse,” European researchers wrote last year.

Slop has become so prevalent that Merriam-Webster, the dictionary publisher, chose it as its word of the year in 2025. Deezer, a French streaming service, said this spring that nearly half of the tracks updated to its system each day were artificially generated, many of them never heard by users. A.I. generates more than a third of what is uploaded to Apple Music….

(5) REACHING BACK TO 1984. If Camestros Felapton feels his deep dive into Neuromancer needs to begin with a trip to a Thai shopping mall, then I’ll just have to trust his judgment: “Neuromancer”.

…It has always been a fallacy to judge a science fiction book by how accurately it predicts the future. Neuromancer fails as a piece of futurology in all sorts of ways, many of which would have been obvious even in 1984 if you thought about it. Yet, if you skip past the banks of pay phones in the airport or indeed the general lack of mobile phones, the book doesn’t feel dated even though the specifics (the USSR!) are wrong. In large part, it is because the book taps into what is now a familiar vibe, but also because it does anticipate how technology creeps into broader society. Everybody is just a little bit a cyborg in Neuromancer (and some people more than others), and crime and corporate shenanigans have also become enmeshed with data and technology. The specifics don’t match our current present, but that cyberisation of society does….

(6) NON-AI SLOP. BBC tries to figure out how “Movie that went viral for terrible animation becomes China box office hit”. (Subscription required by readers outside the UK.)

The low-budget film has started raking in ticket sales after going viral for its poor animation and complicated plot

It’s so bad, it’s become a box office hit.

Niu Lai, a low-budget animation film about a cow in a dream sequence has seen a huge jump in ticket sales after going viral for its confusing plot and terrible graphics.

It grossed just 7,705 yuan ($1,140; £843) in the first 10 days after its release, but has now made more than 11.4 million yuan, according to movie tracking site Mao Yan. That means it is holding ground against Hollywood blockbusters like The Odyssey and Spider Man: Brand New Day.

“You may regret for 80 minutes if you watch it, but if you don’t, you’ll regret it for life,” one popular social media post about the film said.

Other social media users have hailed the movie as the antidote to the AI slop that is taking over social media algorithms.

They are sharing clips praising Niu Lai’s “hand-crafted” method – a reference to the poor animation quality – as “proof” that its creators did not use AI.

“That’s some serious craftsmanship,” a Weibo user wrote.

Another social media user called it “pure handmade” and the biggest “dark horse” of the summer movie season.

Others say they are rooting for the movie because they desperately hope for a “bullish” stock market – a reference to the fact that the words “bull” and “cow” share the same character in Chinese.

“If the index reaches 4,000 tomorrow I will go to the cinema to support this movie,” one Weibo user wrote.

“It is a terrible movie but has a great name,” another comment linking the movie to stock investments said.

(7) JOEL DAVIS (1934-2026). Publisher Joel Davis, owner of Davis Publications, which founded Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and published it until it was sold to Dell Magazines in 1992, died July 11 at the age of 92. The local Westport Journal obituary is excerpted below: “Obituary: Joel Davis, publisher and Westporter”.

Longtime Westporter, noted publisher, former Westport Library president and Brown University trustee Joel Davis died peacefully on Saturday, July 11, after a short illness. He was 92.

After college Joel and his father Bernie founded Davis Publications. He was president and publisher for 40 years. At its peak they published 60 special interest magazines including Ellery Queen’s Mystery, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, Income Opportunities, Sylvia Porter’s Personal Finance, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Analog.

Architectural Designs was launched, with his wife Carol as editor. One of Joel’s three sons, Jonathan, was brought in 20 years later to learn the business and eventually take it over. Jon evolved AD into an e-commerce leading business, selling home plans to builders and individuals.

Joel was proud that last year his grandson, Jared Davis, became the third generation CEO of AD.

Joel’s father co-founded Ziff-Davis Publishing Company in 1928, which meant that Joel and his family have had a key role in publishing for 98 years….

(8) HAYDEN PANETTIERE (1989-2026). Actress Hayden Panettiere, whose genre work included the TV series Heroes, died August 16. See The Hollywood Reporter: “Hayden Panettiere Dead: Heroes, Nashville, Scream Actress Was 36”.

…Panettiere earned her breakout role in 2006, playing the indestructible cheerleader Claire Bennet on the NBC sci-fi series Heroes. She starred on the series for four seasons.

She garnered more fame playing Juliette Barnes on the ABC series Nashville from 2012-18 and then as Kirby Reed in the Scream horror franchise….

…Panettiere’s credits also include the films I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009), Scream 4 (2011) and Scream VI (2023) and the title role in the 2011 Lifetime telefilm Amanda Knox….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen (Allen & Unwin, 2012)

By Lis Carey: Alif the Unseen takes us on a wild ride through life in a Middle Eastern city-state, cyber-duels between State Security and gray hat hackers, jinn, a magic book, Arabic mythology, political chaos, and the difference between infatuation and love.

Alif is a young man, a “gray hat” hacker, selling his skills to provide cybersecurity to anyone who needs that protection from the government. He lives in an unnamed city-state in the Middle East, referred to throughout simply as the City. He’s non-ideological; he’ll sell his services to Islamists, communists, anyone.

Alif is not his real name, but it’s what he goes by, online, and among his friends. He hates his given name because it’s so common. He lives in a very modest neighborhood, in one half of a duplex, with his mother. In the other half is another family that has lived there as long as they have, and among the members of that family is Dina, a young woman his age, his friend, who has defied her family by going veiled. He’s in love, though, with Intisar, a young woman of much better family.

Everything seems to be going well, until Intisar tells him that her father has betrothed her to an important man in the City’s government. She doesn’t want to see or hear from him again. And everything starts to go wrong, in unexpected ways.

Alif, master hacker, decides to make sure she can never see or hear from him again, by designing a program that can identify her from any amount of online activity, and block her access to any information about him. The program becomes alarmingly capable; he’s not sure how he created something this flexible and seemingly independent. And while he’s using it, someone breaks into his system.

He cuts them off, but it’s very skilled hacker, and protecting his own system and the systems of his clients from discovery means shutting the whole thing down, including the software protecting his clients. This hacker must be the dread Hand of God, the City’s new and unidentified head of State Security.

And the world starts to go mad.

Alif did send Dina to bring Intisar the sheet they used the one time they had sex, unwashed, of course. She sent back by way of Dina a book. A very old book. The Thousand and One Days. And the man she’s now betrothed to wants the book, while Intisar wants Alif to find out more about the book. No explanation why, for either.

It’s the intersection of Alif’s new program, which he’s named TinSari, that launches Alif and Dina, and an American convert on a wild ride through high tech, Arabic mythology, jinn society, and political upheaval. Vikram the Vampire; a jinn woman called Sakina; a marid (a jinn, and (at least in this story) specifically the jinn from Aladdin); one of Alif’s online hacker friends, NewQuarter01, whose real-world identity comes as a shock to him; Azalel, Vikram’s sister; Sheikh Bilal, imam of the Al Basheera mosque; the dread “Hand of God” head of State Security, are all part of the adventure, as allies, enemies, or not clearly one or the other.

Oh, and The Thousand and One Days also plays an active role.

It’s a story of Alif exploring his programming abilities, encountering strangeness that might be quantum programming inspired by that old book, in which every word has seven thousand layers of meaning. He discovers levels of ruthlessness in real-world politics he never imagined while selling cybersecurity to anyone wanting to hide from their government.

There’s also a layer of romance here, too. And heroic sacrifice, cyberpunk, magical beings, and places that move when you’re not looking. It’s absorbing, exciting, terrifying, and has a satisfying ending.

Highly recommended.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

• Loose Parts has a symbolic conflict.
• Rhymes with Orange answers a common complaint.
• Rubes nails down the possibilities.
• The Argyle Sweater missed early hints of trouble.
• Zen Pencils has a plan.

(11) PROPSTORE’S ‘HALLOWEEN’ AUCTION IS COMING.

(12) NOT EXACTLY LUDDITES. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Now, I have oft warned that the machines are taking over, but no-one ever listens…  Though the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, has noticed that it now seems to be war…

The war on artificial intelligence is no longer just online arguments and complaints about data centres. Something has shifted, and law enforcement has noticed. Where did this new anti-technology movement come from, who’s behind it, and where is it heading next? Let’s take a look.

You can see the video here  (7 minutes) or below

(13) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “11 Soviet Sci-Fi Movies Most Westerners Have Never Seen” – as recommended by The Sci-Fi Graveyard

For decades, Hollywood defined what science fiction looked like. But while Kubrick, Lucas, and Scott were building the Western canon, Soviet filmmakers were making something just as ambitious and almost none of it crossed the Iron Curtain. I covered 11 Soviet sci-fi films most Westerners have never seen: a silent moon landing designed by the actual father of rocketry, a love story that beat The Shape of Water by 50 years, a film that may have literally killed the people who made it, and the cult comedy whose invented vocabulary entered the real Russian language. One of these films directly inspired George Lucas. He flew to Moscow to meet the director. Soviet officials had no idea who he was talking about.

Films covered in this video:

• Cosmic Voyage (1936)
• Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924)
• Through the Thorns to the Stars (1981)
• City Zero (1988)
• Amphibian Man (1962)
• Inquest of Pilot Pirx (1979)
• Dead Man’s Letters (1986)
• Planet of Storms (1962)
• Solaris (1972)
• Stalker (1979)
• Kin-dza-dza! (1986)

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