(1) JUST THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS. “City fines company $160k over Avengers: Doomsday Comic-Con installation” reports San Diego’s 10News.

The City of San Diego has fined a company $160,000 for displaying an Avengers: Doomsday sign over the Gaslamp Quarter Archway sign during Comic-Con.

Marvel had hired Elevue, a company that describes itself as a “boutique outdoor media company specializing in street-level signage,” to install the piece over the Gaslamp sign.

The company incurred $160,000 in fines between July 21 and 26.

According to the City, it told Elevue weeks before Comic-Con that they were not allowed to install anything on the Gaslamp sign.

When the company began the installation, the City says it informed Elevue once again that it was not allowed, and asked it to be safely removed.

“They continued construction despite several additional reminders. The contractor knowingly created a safety risk and refused to address it, and was cited and fined accordingly,” said the City….

(2) CLASSIC SHORT TIME TRAVEL STORIES. Ellery Lloyd discusses “5 Great Classic and Contemporary Short Stories That Explore Time Travel” at CrimeReads.

From The Time Machine to The Time Traveler’s Wife, the concept of time travel has inspired novels that blow the mind and break the heart. It has also produced some truly wild and wonderful short stories.

As we read our way through the genre while writing Time to Burn, it became apparent just how often these stories are in conversation with one another—borrowing ideas, twisting them into new shapes and reframing them to create compelling what ifs. After all, who hasn’t daydreamed about visiting the past or witnessing some great historical moment? These stories allow their readers to come as close as they possibly can to really visiting the past—whether that is late Victorian London, the steaming late Mesozoic jungle or Medieval India.

Time-travel tales also allow us to reflect on our own lives too: the choices we’ve made, the paths we have taken and the people we might have become. If we could change something we had done, what effect would that have on us and on those around us? These are the questions the protagonists, and readers, of these extraordinary stories are forced to confront.

Here are five of the best short stories we encountered on our (time) travels.

Lloyd’s final selection is –

Max Beerbohm, “Enoch Soames”

First published in 1916, “Enoch Soames” remains the funniest of all time travel stories. In it the eponymous Soames, a minor writer of the 1890s, makes a ‘strange bargain’ with the devil, giving up his soul to visit the Reading Room of the British Museum a century in the future (on the afternoon of June 3rd 1997, to be precise), in order to witness first-hand what posterity will make of his literary achievements–and is horrified by what he learns. There is perhaps a warning there for all writers!

The story is also, on a more serious level, a reflection on how our sense of the past is shaped as much by what is forgotten or misremembered as what is remembered—and how actually being able to journey through time might complicate that process….

(3) ENDURING WEBSPINNER. Gothamist asks pop culture historian Roy Schwartz “Why we still adore NYC’s very own Spider-Man ‘schmuck’ after a bajillion movies”.

Carlson: The handful of folks who don’t know the story, Spider-Man is a kid from Queens who was raised by his single aunt. Most of the stories involve him balancing his superhero responsibilities with his life as a poor, unlucky-in love young adult. Why do you think that continues to resonate with audiences even after all this time?

Schwartz: I mean, the answer is in your question. How can we not resonate when he’s basically a poor schmuck, which we all are at one point or another?. He is not the hero who gets the girl. He’s not the hero who gets that glorious moment of victory at the end. He’s the hero who struggles and endures. Every time he does the right thing, he pays a heavy price for it. You know, every day is the worst day of his life. We all feel that way sometimes, and I think Spider-Man appeals to that part of us.

The other thing is, he’s a really normal guy. He’s a blue-collar, struggling young guy who makes mistakes and tries to find his place in the world and tries to do some good along the way, and that’s a very far cry from the demi-gods that some other superheroes are.

I think we are at a moment in time where we all see ourselves as caught in this endless struggle, in this kind of hopeless, apathetic attitude towards things, and Spidey refuses to give up. Again, he doesn’t win the day gloriously. He just refuses to give up. He gets hit, and he gets back up again and again, and that inspires us.

But you look at Spider-Man’s arch-enemy – the Green Goblin, Norman Osborn, he’s a sociopathic tech billionaire with government connections. That, to me, seems so relevant. And everything in his world is designed to really reflect what’s in our real world, one step removed. He struggles to balance his relationships. He struggles to do right by the people he cares about. He struggles to find connection, and at the core of it, that’s what Spider-Man’s story is about. It’s about finding connection, about finding love, whether it’s romantic or family or friends, and that’s something we all yearn for and we all struggle with….

(4) SOMETHING WINS, SOMETHING LOSES. Joel Miller reminds readers “Cyberpunk Started as Punk. Then Marketing Won” at Transmissions From Tomorrow.

William Gibson—the “father of cyberpunk” who codified the genre in Neuromancer—was asked in his 1990 interview with Larry McCaffery whether the cyberpunk movement existed at all. His answer challenges the conventional understanding of the movement:

“It’s mainly a marketing category—and one that I’ve come to feel trivializes what I do.”

Cyberpunk is one of the most recognizable subgenres that science fiction ever produced, and it was a marketing ploy.

In 1980, a group of writers formed around a shared frustration with the state of science fiction. The New Wave was beginning to lose steam and the fresh ideas that had fueled science fiction were declining. Except, that is, for that small group of radical, rebellious writers who had new visions for the future.

By 1982, both William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (both leading voices in this group) had stories up for Nebula awards: “Burning Chrome” and “Swarm” respectively. But when both stories lost to Connie Willis’s “Fire Watch”, their propaganda campaign went into overdrive….

(5) MARVEL LOVES STAR WARS. “Star Wars and Marvel Confirm First-Ever Crossover: Here’s What We Know” reports CBR.com. It will be a five-issue miniseries.

The Marvel Universe is officially on track to collide with the Galaxy Far, Far Away, and the crossover of the century is coming soon.

Per Entertainment Weekly, fans got their first look at Star Wars/Marvel: Hope Assembles. This new five-issue limited series is set to begin in January, with Kevin Smith serving as the series’ scribe and David Marquez providing some truly stellar artwork.

“Back in the early ‘80s, I had a subscription to Marvel’s Star Wars comics. And as fun as it was to follow the continuing adventures of Luke, Leia, and Han, I always wished that Spider-Man or Doctor Doom could cross over into their cinematic saga,” Smith said of the upcoming crossover. “So when the opportunity arose to actually tell that story, nobody had to Force my hand! I’m ecstatic to be writing Hope Assembles for the 50th anniversary of Star Wars! Many thanks to Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm for trusting me to fly the Falcon and the Quinjet!”…

(6) THE LAST ZAP. “Josh Holloway Unveils One Second After, an EMP Apocalypse Thriller” at Esquire.

My brother-in-law has one of those fancy smart refrigerators. Among its features is wireless Internet connectivity so that he and my sister can use their phones from the grocery store to look inside and see what they’re running low on. They could do the same thing with just five minutes and a pen and paper, but my brother-in-law insists on living every day like it’s Star Trek. It’s convenient, he told me the day they got the thing. But while I’m not a Luddite, I’m still wary of our rush toward the bleeding edge. What’s the hurry?

Well, actor Josh Holloway feels exactly the same way as I do. “I am born a hundred years too late,” Holloway tells me. He’s using his phone to chat over Zoom, but he’s currently hanging out in his camping trailer in the middle of nowhere….

… In one word, Holloway says the movie is a “warning.” “It can happen,” Holloway tells me. “This is why I like the movie so much: An EMP terrorist attack over America shuts the grid. Anything with a chip is done. Burnt. Not coming back. Very quickly, things turn nasty. The supermarkets clear out, and the hospitals don’t work anymore. All the airplanes fall out of the sky. Any car before 1970 stops working.”

The postapocalypse has been in vogue all throughout the millennium. Movies like 28 Days Later, Children of Men, and I Am Legend; shows like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us. They all shape our collective imagination of what life will be like after it all comes crashing down. But Holloway believes One Second After has something new to offer the genre while also giving audiences a good old-fashioned story about resourcefulness and community when the going gets tough.

“It’s a study about what to do,” Holloway says, “and how to survive.”…

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Ray Bradbury Theatre’s “A Sound of Thunder” (1989)

Yes, I’m a big fan of Bradbury with my favorite works being The Illustrated Man and Something This Way Wicked Comes (now that’s horror done properly), but I really do like much of his short fiction as well. (Yes, I know The Illustrated Man is really short stories.) And that is how we come to Ray Bradbury Theatre’s “A Sound of Thunder” which aired for the first time thirty-sixty years ago on this evening.

It was adapted, of course, from “A Sound of Thunder” which was first published in Collier’s in the June 28, 1952, issue and published again in The Golden Apples of the Sun collection by Doubleday a year later. The Golden Apples of the Sun collection is available from the usual suspects. 

Two time travelers paid a hefty fee to Time Safari Inc. to go hunting dinosaurs who would’ve died in a few minutes. This means they don’t alter history at all. But they make a horrible, time stream altering mistake that they were told never, ever to make: don’t get off the marked path. One does and kills a butterfly and changes the stream forever.

Is Bradbury the origin of the oft told meteorological story about a butterfly flapping its wings in China altering weather conditions around the world?  Is this even possible? 

Unlike the latter film with Ben Kingsley which of course was padded out and critics like Roger Ebert saying that it was really bad and yes it gets a eighteen percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes, and six percent there among critics (!), I thought it did a more than just credible job of presenting Bradbury’s story. Given the low budget nature of the series, it carried off the SFX rather well. But then I thought the entire series was quite excellent.

The major streaming services carrying it right now are Amazon and Peacock. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

• Baldo skips the label.
• Brewster Rockit questions the secrecy.
• Carpe Diem suggests a less force-ful management style.

(9) TED WHITE REMEMBERED. The Comics Journal has published a profile: “Ted White (1938–2026)”. Here’s an excerpt:

… In fact, fate had other plans for White. He served a three-month sentence and was released in December 1986. Shortly before his sentencing, he had gone to Worldcon in Atlanta, where he met Lynda Magee, who would become his third wife. They wrote to each other while he was in jail, and on his release, he met her family. They married in March 1987 and had a son, Aaron, later that year.

Magee’s son by a previous marriage, Spencer Carlin, was eight years old when he and his mother moved across the country to live with White. “Ted and his community of artist/writer/musician friends introduced me to many creative things,” he reminisced on Facebook. “In many ways it was an incredible place to live for a child existing half in this world and half in that of my imagination. I was always treated like an adult amongst Ted and his community when it came to that imagination and inclusion. Ted was respected by so very many and he was incredibly accomplished. I am grateful for the time in my life he was a part of it. Experiences and exposure to this world surely shaped who I became and what I find valuable and important in life.”

White continued to write about comics, science fiction, and music. “He published comics criticism regularly in The Comics Journal in the ‘’70s, ’80s, and ’90s,” Groth said. “He even got us sued for $260,000 in 1983 when he called the comic book artist Rich Buckler a plagiarist, which we won, because he was a plagiarist.” He also contributed historical essays to a number of Fantagraphics collections, and he continued publishing fanzines. Blat, which he co-published with Dan Steffan, from 1993 to 1995, won a FAAn Award (Fan Activity Achievement Award, associated with Corflu) in 1994; he won another for Fan Writer in 1998 and the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. He ran a small press, QWERTYUIOPress, which published a volume of his jailhouse letters, and in 2023, Ansible Editions published two collections of his editorials and book reviews from Amazing Stories and Fantastic. Music continued to be an important part of his life, as well, and starting in 2004 he played saxophone and keyboards in the improvisational band Conduit.

In short, he did it all…

(10) SASQUATCH SEEKERS.  Andrew Bartlett admires “The surprisingly scientific methods of Bigfooters” at Aeon Essays.

How do you go about capturing a monster? The search for Bigfoot, or Sasquatch – often referred to as Bigfooting – may sound like a whimsical endeavour: an activity of tall tales and cartoonish representations. Yet if you spend time listening to what Bigfooters themselves have to say, you discover a different picture.

We did exactly that. To research our book, Bigfooters and Scientific Inquiry: On the Borderlands of Legitimate Science (2026), we conducted more than 160 interviews, mostly with classical Bigfooters, who spend time in the forests of North America, collecting evidence and, as they see it, acting responsibly, rationally and scientifically.

As sociologists of science, we began with a simple premise: whatever one thinks about whether Bigfoot actually exists as a biological creature, Bigfooting undeniably does. If Bigfooting is a community – or set of communities – that are collecting, analysing, sharing, validating and contesting evidence, then Bigfooting is a suitable object of sociological enquiry. And so, we went on our own hunt to track down Bigfooters and make sense of how they themselves make sense of the world.

Before we began our sociological exploration of Bigfooting, we were cautioned that Bigfooters were anti-science. The truth is much more complex. Yes, Bigfooters work in opposition to mainstream institutional science, making claims about the world that do not accord with the scientific consensus. However, our research revealed that Bigfooters are not dismissive of scientific principles. In fact, many are dedicated empiricists who employ methodologies modelled on those found in professional scientific research. As George Eberhart, a cryptozoologist and Bigfooter, explained to us: ‘It’s not a part of mainstream science, it really isn’t. But you can apply a scientific method, or a journalistic method to it, to get some good science out of it.’…

The article covers efforts to gather footprints, hair, other sources of DNA, etc. – without having yet proven anything.

(11) WIRED. SpaceDaily remembers, “In 1859, a solar storm now called the Carrington Event induced currents so strong in North American telegraph lines that operators disconnected their batteries and kept sending messages on the geomagnetic current alone, while auroras lit up the sky over Cuba and Hawaii”.

On the morning of 2 September 1859, telegraph operators along the Boston-to-Portland line unplugged their batteries, watched the acid-slick terminals go dark, and kept sending messages anyway. The wires were carrying a current the sky was pushing through them. For roughly two hours, the storm itself ran the telegraph.

The event that made this possible had begun the previous day, when English amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, sketching sunspots through a filtered telescope at his private observatory in Redhill, saw two beads of intense white light flare above a complex sunspot group and fade within five minutes. Roughly seventeen and a half hours later, a coronal mass ejection slammed into Earth’s magnetic field. According to the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, that night skies from the Rocky Mountains to Panama glowed brightly enough for people to read newsprint by aurora alone.

Auroras were reported over Cuba, over Jamaica, over Hawaii, over Colombia. Gold miners in the Rockies got up and cooked breakfast, thinking dawn had come early….

… The telegraph network of 1859 was the most sophisticated communications system humans had ever built — tens of thousands of kilometres of copper strung on wooden poles across North America and Europe, powered by wet-cell batteries at every station. It was also, unintentionally, the world’s first planetary-scale antenna for geomagnetic current.

When the coronal mass ejection compressed Earth’s magnetic field, the rapid change induced voltages along any long conductor lying roughly east-west. The longer the wire, the bigger the induced current. Telegraph lines were exactly that: long, conductive, and grounded at both ends.

Contemporary accounts of the storm record what followed. Machines sparked. Paper caught fire. Some keys clacked out garbled text on their own. On the Boston-to-Portland line, the two operators on duty — never named in the surviving transcript, which was printed in the Boston Evening Traveller — realised their batteries were fighting the induced current rather than adding to it. They disconnected the batteries. The line kept working….

(12) TRAILER PARK. “The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn”.

When a group of women are mysteriously abducted, it becomes a case right out of The X-Files™️. Years after walking away from the FBI, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dr. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are pulled back from the shadows when a federal agent vanishes without a trace. In a case you’d never see on TV, their only lead is a disgraced, defrocked priest claiming to have horrific psychic visions of the crime. Forced to confront the ghosts of their past, the partners must navigate a chilling winter landscape and an even darker human monstrosity. The truth of these crimes is out there somewhere… and it will take Mulder and Scully to find it. The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn reimagines creator and director Chris Carter’s original vision in this all-new director’s cut. Streaming on Disney+ and Hulu August 14.

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