(1) BECKY CHAMBERS Q&A. The Planetary Society Book Club’s dialog with Becky Chambers is available on YouTube: “The Planetary Society Book Club: Live with Becky Chambers, Author of TO BE TAUGHT, IF FORTUNATE”.

Becky Chambers’ outstanding novella was our April, 2026 book club selection. Four astronaut/scientists arrive in a star system far from Earth after a 28-year journey. The life they find on four fantastic worlds will astound  and delight them, yet also try the limits of their humanity and well-being. Join host Mat Kaplan and Society members as the Hugo award-winning author explores the meaning of science and exploration itself, and explains why she believes in them so fervently.

(2) THE FINAL FRONTIER. NPR delves into “The real-world influence of Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise”.

…WEITEKAMP: This was a show that imagined an integrated crew of men and women of different races, and even a half-alien, going out and exploring the universe together.

LUDDEN: This science fiction had real-world influence. African American actress Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura, had decided to leave the show for Broadway until a fan, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., told her his family loved watching “Star Trek” for its groundbreaking diversity.

WEITEKAMP: And he said, who knows how long it’ll be before that door opens again if you allow it to close?

LUDDEN: The first African American woman to go into space, Mae Jemison, said the show inspired her. “Star Trek’s” utopian vision of humanity spawned a franchise that has lived long and prospered and global fandom for this piece of the American imagination….

(3) SEAMLESS TRANSITIONS. ComicBook.com names “5 Sci-Fi Characters That Would Cross Over Perfectly in Star Trek”.

…The creative teams behind Star Trek productions have spent decades inserting Easter eggs to other classic sci-fi franchises, with dozens of nods to Star Wars hiding across the franchise. The relationship with Doctor Who runs even deeper, with a 2012 comic series staging a full team-up between the Eleventh Doctor and the Enterprise-D crew. Many other sci-fi franchises could cross over with Star Trek, though, and some characters would perfectly blend in with the Enterprise crew….

First and foremost on their list is —

1) Samantha Carter (Stargate SG-1)

No character in science fiction is more plausibly a Starfleet officer than Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping). The Stargate SG-1 astrophysicist and Air Force officer spent ten seasons applying rigorous scientific methodology to phenomena that should have been impossible, from wormhole stabilization to the reverse-engineering of alien propulsion systems. The story also forced Samantha to make hard decisions when the military needs of the Stargate operation clashed with the genuine scientific wonder of exploration. Because of that, she integrates flawlessly into a Starfleet engineering or science division, yet her experience fighting parasitic empires grounds her scientific optimism in a harsh tactical reality, making her the ultimate operational hybrid for deep-space exploration. 

(4) BOOK REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s latest column for the Guardian, “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup”, covers The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed; The Rainshadow Orphans by Naomi Ishiguro; No Ghosts by Max Lury; Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler; ajd Moon Over Brendle by Jeff Noon.

(5) CHOW CALL. “’10 minutes of nirvana’: 52 writers on the best sandwich of their life” in the Guardian. None of these names jumped out at me as being sff authors, but perhaps you will do better finding one.  In any case the food looks great!

Are you feeling hungry? If not, you will be after reading about the world’s most mouth-watering, life-changing sandwiches of all time …

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

May 10, 1969 — John Scalzi, 57.

By Paul Weimer: I’d read John Scalzi’s blog for years before his fiction. 

I got onto the Scalzi train with his entry in Metatropolis. His story involving a high tech pig farmer had all of the bones of a Scalzi story, from its “I think I know everything” protagonist, to its often snarky sense of humor. While I didn’t fall deeply in love with his work, then or since, I kept reading his work. Redshirts, of course, which still may be my favorite of his novels and stories, helped expand in my mind the metafictional opportunities in science fiction. Lock In is a solid piece of science fictional speculation on how a society might come together and respond to the consequences of a pandemic.  Given that it was written long before Covid…I wonder if Scalzi, aged fifty-seven years, would have reconsidered the novel after the worldwide reaction to the aftermath of the Covid Pandemic. 

Of course the Old Man’s War series is the one that he gets grief for, because it should appeal to the Sad and Rabid Puppies…but it is, in the parlance of today, “too woke”. It’s possible that the existence of such books helped motivate Torgersen and Beale, an irritant to their ideology and worldview (and a counterexample to the idea that Mil-SF must be conservative). Again, I do wonder how Scalzi would write it today, given all that has happened. 

So this is a long way of saying that although it is on my Kindle, I have not yet read When The Moon Hits Your Eye, which seems to have as triggering an idea (the moon turns into cheese. Seriously?) as one can possibly make in the field. But it shows that in the end, Scalzi likes to have fun when writing. He never takes it too seriously, even if he keeps it as rigorous and locked down as the story needs. He’s just telling stories and doing his thing and having the time of his life, and haters can go hang. 

The first time I actually met him in person, he didn’t remember it. He was extremely jet lagged, sitting in a hotel lobby and apparently remembered little from the entire weekend. Due to circumstance (although Scalzi is an excellent DJ, I am told, I am not a dance party goer), I only finally, finally actually got to talk to him at the Glasgow Worldcon. Being part of the photography team did let me meet and photograph everyone who would hold still. But did he know who I was? I’m still convinced that he didn’t, and that’s all right. 

John Scalzi’s fiction, too…that’s all right

John Scalzi

(7) COMICS SECTION.

• Bizarro depicts a mythological family.
• Crankshaft overlooks his attire – but others don’t.
• F Minus might need more than tech support.
• Speed Bump throws Shakespeare to the dogs.
• Thatababy sure knows a lot about Mr. Potato Head.
• The Argyle Sweater reveals how a superhero died.
• Tom Gauld presents Chaucer as you’ve never read him.

(8) OPEN YOUR WALLET. Heritage Auctions’ Curators’ Picks from the “May 13 The David Aronovitz Collection of Important Science Fiction and Fantasy, Part I Rare Books Signature® Auction” include 31 draft pages for Ray Bradbury’s Futuria Fantasia #4, two of which are reproduced below. The zine was published in 1940. Starting bid $15,000!

• “Ray Bradbury, editor. A working production file of the fanzine | Lot #45039”.

Before he wrote Fahrenheit 451 or any of the incredible stories in Dark Carnival or The Martian Chronicles, an 18-year-old Ray Bradbury was writing and producing his own fanzine, Futuria Fantasia. Some of his friends helped, namely Lyle Monroe (a pseudonym of Robert Heinlein) and Hannes Bok. This production file, with copy-editing and formatting notes, shows Bradbury learning how to build such a magazine, and it features a really wonderful original ink self-portrait by Bok (“Hannes V. Bok artist as seen by Hannes V. Bok the critic”), who also produced the cover. So many parts of this fanzine are absurd and clever and absurdly clever. I particularly enjoy Bradbury’s own story “Gorgono and Slith,” about monsters who chastise the editor about making the fanzine more professional by adding a contents page, page numbers, and margins, which the dutiful Bradbury has indeed done here. The inscription to his co-editor, the great Forrest J Ackerman – also an important figure in science fiction – is appropriately ghoulish and still charming. It really is a wonderful glimpse of Bradbury just getting started.

(9) THERE MAY BE A SIMPLE EXPLANATION FOR MARS’ TWO PRIMORDIAL OCEANS, ONE INSIDE THE OTHER. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Two geological boundaries have previously been interpreted as two northern seas, one inside another, in the northern hemisphere.  The idea is that the two seas existed at different times with one sea being smaller than the other. These seas are known as the Arabia and Deuteronilus.  There have been a number of explanations for these two seas, including Martian polar wander (2007) and also Mars deformation over millions of years.

A new explanation for these two geological boundaries has now been proposed in the latest issue of Nature, “Identifying the topographic signature of early Martian oceans”. The idea is simple, which is one reason why it is attractive.

Two researchers based at the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in the USA, now hypothesise that the two lines – that had been interpreted as the shorelines of two seas (Arabia and Deuteronilus) existing at different times – are in fact the upper and lower boundaries of a Martian continental shelf.

On Earth considerable erosion over hundred of millions of years has seen sediment eroded off the continents to create a shelf of sedimentary rock off of the continent.  On Mars, they propose, things happened slightly differently. Mars’ wet phase was much shorter in time and so less sediment was carried to the shore of the northern hemisphere sea causing a gentler slope rather than the steeper cut-off Earth’s continental shelves have.

Their idea has a certain attraction as it only necessitates just one ocean as opposed to two existing at different times with some (unexplained) transition between one and the other.

Primary research Zaki, A. S. & Lamb, M. P. (2026) Identifying the topographic signature of early Martian oceans. Nature, vol. 652, p878-885. 

(10) IT’S A GAS! “Astronomers detect an atmosphere around a mini Pluto” reports AP News.

A new study suggests that a tiny, icy world beyond Pluto harbors a thin, delicate atmosphere that may have been created by volcanic eruptions or a comet strike.

Just 300 miles (500 kilometers) or so across, this mini Pluto is thought to be the solar system’s smallest object yet with a clearly detected global atmosphere bound by gravity, said lead researcher Ko Arimatsu of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

“This is an amazing development, but it sorely needs independent verification. The implications are profound if verified,” said Southwest Research Institute’s Alan Stern, the lead scientist behind NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond. He was not involved in the study.

The finding offers fresh insight into our solar system’s farthest, coldest objects in a region known as the Kuiper Belt. Researchers used three telescopes in Japan to observe the object in 2024 as it passed in front of a background star, briefly dimming the starlight….

(11) WOO-WOO. “Government Releases UFO Files Containing Photos of ‘Anomalies’ During Apollo 12 and 17” and Futurism studies them up close.

The Department of Defense finally dropped its first batch of UFO, or shall we say UAP, files on Friday. There’s no smoking guns, but there’re definitely a few things in here to turn heads.

Chief among them: photos of “anomalies” spotted during the Apollo missions.

In one Apollo 12 photograph taken by a NASA astronaut on the lunar surface, a strange light can be seen hovering above the horizon in space. Zoomed in, the UFO actually appears to comprise three distinct lights. What this means, of course, is inconclusive. Another image from the 1969 mission shows a blurry smear above the Moon’s horizon. And another taken from the landing site shows two pairs of barely visible, luminous specks….

If Primer rewired your brain, this one will finish the job.

Three Scientists stand on the brink of a quantum-mechanics breakthrough that could redefine reality itself. Tensions build as these men reckon with the discoveries they are making.

Sebastian Baradau’, brings a razor-sharp style of filmmaking to create this raw, electric masterpiece. ‘The Uncertainty Principle’ is hypnotic, fearless, and shot with a gritty intensity you can’t look away from.

Like the science it’s built on, the film offers no easy answers – just a transfixing puzzle that lingers long after the credits roll.

You can see the trailer below

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