(1) SOUL MAN. Fred Bradford profiles “Ray Bradbury: The Man Who Set the Future on Fire” at BookClub.

There are writers who predict the future. And then there are writers who feel it coming.

Ray Bradbury was not a scientist. He wasn’t a technologist. He didn’t write hard equations into his stories or obsess over mechanical accuracy. Instead, he wrote about something far more dangerous and far more human: what happens to the soul when the world changes too fast.

Born in 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, Bradbury grew up devouring books at the local library. He never attended college. The library was his university. He once said, “I graduated from the library.” That devotion to books would later fuel the fiery heartbeat of his most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451.

Published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 imagines a future where books are outlawed and “firemen” burn them. At its center is Guy Montag, a man who begins to question the world around him—a world addicted to screens, noise, and distraction. Sound familiar?

Bradbury wasn’t warning us about government censorship alone. He was warning us about voluntary ignorance. A society so overwhelmed by entertainment that it forgets how to think. Decades before smartphones and social media, he imagined walls that played endless programming and citizens who preferred comfort over curiosity. His genius wasn’t technological prediction—it was psychological insight.

But Bradbury’s imagination stretched far beyond burning books….

(2) TOURETTE’S OUTBURST MARS BAFTAS. “BAFTA Apologizes to Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo Over N-Word” reports Variety.

The British Academy has responded to the controversy surrounding the BAFTA Film Awards on Sunday night, where Tourette’s syndrome campaigner John Davidson made a number of offensive comments during the show. Among his involuntary outbursts — caused by his condition — was the N-word, shouted when Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented the award for best visual effects to “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”

In a statement issued on Monday, BAFTA said that it took “full responsibility” for putting its “guests in a very difficult situation and we apologise to all.” It also said it wanted to “apologise unreservedly” to Jordan and Lindo. “We would like to thank Michael and Delroy for their incredible dignity and professionalism,” it said.

The situation was addressed in the ceremony on the night, where host Alan Cumming made two statements, thanking the crowd for its “understanding” of Davidson’s disability and apologizing should anyone have been offended (a line later criticized on X by “Sinners” production designer Hannah Beachler, who described it as “throwaway”).

Davidson excused himself from the ceremony about halfway through, but the situation only escalated when the BBC kept the racial slur in its tape-delayed broadcast (something it too apologized for, before removing the program from its iPlayer streaming service)….

(3) THUMBS UP FOR WESTEROS. [Item by Steven French.] The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage pronounces on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has saved the Game of Thrones universe”.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I first entered into A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms extremely gingerly. Game of Thrones (as we all know) all but cratered during its final season, to the point that watching it almost felt like a punishment. House of the Dragon was somehow even worse, for reasons we’ll come to shortly.

And so, presented with an opportunity to dip my toes back into Westeros, I hesitated. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me repeatedly due to a capitalist desire to permanently entrench all existing IPin order to minimise subscriber churn, shame on me.

What’s more, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms looked terrible. All available clips looked so grimly lighthearted, with all the comedy coming from big heroic moments being undercut with silliness. Want to see a classic Game of Thrones archetype get lost on the way out of an important meeting? Check. Want to see him suffer through explosive diarrhoea behind a tree? Also check. Intentionally or otherwise, the series seemed to market itself as a low-rent spoof of what came before; the Meet the Spartans of Game of Thrones.

How wrong I was….

(4) UBIK. Camestros Felapton’s robot marathon reaches “Ch54: Willis (Philip K. Dick)”.

…“The door refused to open. It said, ‘Five cents, please.’ He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. ‘I’ll pay you tomorrow,’ he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. ‘What I pay you,’ he informed it, ‘is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you. ‘I think otherwise,’ the door said. ‘Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.’ In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. ‘You discover I’m right,’ the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. ‘I’ll sue you,’ the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, ‘I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.’”

Dick, Philip K.. Ubik: The reality bending science fiction masterpiece (S.F. MASTERWORKS Book 158) (pp. 24-25). (Function). Kindle Edition.

This short sequence from Ubik has become popular on social media in recent years, as people have experienced more cases of modern technology where ‘ownership’ sits strictly with the corporation and the user is relegated to a tenant relationship to a landlord. Wi-Fi-enabled door locks with complex licence agreements have made Joe Chip’s experience suddenly both relatable and prescient.

Based on a broader reading of Dick’s work, the annoying door is less about Dick objecting to capitalism (as we will see) and more about his ambiguous relationship with technology and his deep dislike of bureaucracy. These issues arise from the broader question in Dick’s work about individual identity, particularly in the face of corporations, technology, government, and, above all, God.

While Lem was impressed by P.K.Dick’s work, Dick developed a deep hostility towards Lem. In 1974, Dick wrote to the FBI with a shocking allegation about the Polish writer. According to Dick, Lem was not a real person but rather a committee of writers created by the Polish Communist Party as a means of gaining influence in the USA and by infiltrating the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA)….

(5) SECOND STAR ON THE RIGHT. James Machell discusses “Navigating the SFE by People” at The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Substack.

When I began reading the SFE, many years ago now, it was either by Googling people of interest and finding their entry, or by scrolling through themes for one that caught my attention. I hadn’t thought about moving via the People link until last year when the SFE announced that Poets and Translators and had been introduced as entry tags. Pre-existing categories include Artist, Author, Critic, and Editor.

I started by taking a look at the translators page and was amazed to discover just how many of the authors I enjoy had turned their hand to translation. Of course, there was Ken Liu, whose take on Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2008) makes him one of the most read translators in SF (in addition to one of its much-loved authors), but there was also Ursula K. Le Guin, who in 1997, published her rendition of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. John Brunner translated Gérard Klein’s The Overlords of War (1971) from French and Angela Carter took on The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, also French, in 1977, two years before the publication of her The Bloody Chamber (coll 1979). It is fair to assume that authors are influenced by the works they study most closely and learning of their translations can provide a more intentional pathway through their material….

(6) NEVER SAY YOU CAN’T SURVIVE. Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter a few months ago offered “17 Secrets of Being a Resilient Writer”. Here are three of those secrets.

8. Don’t be afraid to get political
Self-censoring is also going to make you burn out and hate your own work.

I get it. Right now, people are being punished for telling the truth, and the machinery is being put in place to do this on a much larger scale and a much more granular level. We are all going to be facing down the gears of the censorship machine soon enough.

But they cannot silence us all. There are too many of us, and we are too eloquent. So if you find yourself writing something that includes positive representations of trans people, immigrants, Palestinians, or other stigmatized groups, and you realize that this is something you might have written in 2020 that now feels risky — do not back down.

Not just because this is the right thing to do, but because surrendering is a direct rout to your writing being worse and less honest, and an end to your enjoyment of writing.

9. Accept that politics will keep rewriting your book.
You don’t get to control what your book is about, because your book is filtered through the minds and hearts of everyone who consumes it — and as our political situation changes, your book will transform because the lens people bring to it will be different.

This has been the case with every book I’ve ever written — and it’s absolutely the case for Lessons in Magic and Disaster. There’s a lot of stuff in LiMaD about transphobia and right-wing influencers that hits a bit harder when I first came up with it back in 2022.

But also, you might think a particular character is utterly lovable, only to find that a ton of readers hate him. Or, even more likely, readers might adore the character you want them to loathe. (Ask Mr. Lovelace.) Sometimes, I’ll get a sense from beta readers that a character isn’t landing the way I hoped, and I will make tweaks to try and address this.

But in general, of all the things you need to let go of control of, how readers perceive your book — especially its politics — is one of the biggest.

10. Don’t expect your writing to save the world
James Cameron’s Avatar movies contain some of the most blatant environmentalist messaging I’ve ever seen, and it’s ludicrously popular with audiences all over the world. Pretty much everyone has seen the Avatar films and absorbed Cameron’s climate parable. And yet, sadly, Cameron has not yet convinced us to stop trashing our own natural habitat.

I do believe that the world is made of stories, and a good story can help move the world in a more positive direction. It’s also true that nobody can make this happen on purpose. So one form of resilience involves letting go of the expectation that you’re going to be able to tell a powerful enough story to make people want to be less shitty.

This will allow you to have more fun and stress yourself out less — which ironically will increase the likelihood that your story really will make a difference….

(7) LORY PATRICK (1938-2026). Actress Lory Patrick, whose first husband was Harlan Ellison, and later married actor Dean Jones, died January 26: “Lory Patrick dies at 92 as family confirms 1960s film star ‘died peacefully’” reports GBNews.

Lory Patrick, the American actress who appeared in numerous television westerns during the 1960s, has died at the age of 92.

The performer passed away peacefully on January 26 in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, according to her family.

Ms Patrick was the widow of Dean Jones, the beloved Disney star known for his roles in That Darn Cat!, The Love Bug and The Shaggy D.A.

The couple were married for 42 years until Mr Jones’s death from Parkinson’s disease in September 2015, when he was 84.

Her first marriage was to science fiction author Harlan Ellison, with the pair wedding and divorcing in 1966. Ms Patrick was the second of Mr Ellison’s five wives.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

February 23, 1932 — Majel Barrett Roddenberry. (Died 2008.)

By Paul Weimer: Majel Barrett Roddenberry. “The First Lady of Star Trek”, and more. So let’s start with Star Trek, shall we?

Her contributions to Star Trek have been broad and varied. Shall we begin with her as the original Number One in the pilot episode (and seen in “The Menagerie”)?  Perhaps having a woman as second in command was too much for 60’s television.  So, she became Nurse Chapel and “the voice of the computer” for most of the Star Trek TV series up to her death in 2008.

 I didn’t twig on until the Next Generation as to who “that voice was”. But when of course she showed up in several episodes as the irrepressible Lwaxana Troi, mother of Counsellor Troi on the Enterprise-D, I realized the truth. What could have been a one note one time joke character developed into someone with real personality, drive, and spirit under her interpretation of the role. Hearing the computer voice and Lwaxana in the same episode, it finally dawned on me that they were both one and the same. I wound up trying to figure out a headcanon that would explain it, and never quite managed it. 

My second favorite small role for her outside of Star Trek has to be as the robotic hard drinking madam of the brothel in the movie Westworld. The movie does have an inconsistency in it thanks to her. We see her heartily swigging drinks from a bottle during the barroom brawl in between the chaos…but later at the end of the movie, when a different robot is offered water, it destroys her. Maybe she was one of the relatively few humans working in the park?  (In which case, she probably died during the robot-virus uprising). It’s never made absolutely clear, and of course, until they turn murderous, not being able to tell the difference between the robots and humans IS part of the point. 

But of course she also appeared in one episode of Babylon 5 as the wife of the now dead Emperor. She has psychic powers, and can foresee the future. And Londo, foolish Londo, spends a lot of resources and pull in order to get into her presence and get a prophecy from her. It’s not a great prophecy, for Londo, and much digital ink was spilled early in the days of the internet trying to interpret just what she meant by her cryptic pronouncements.  Oh, and of course announcing that both Vir and Londo would be Emperor. 

She passed away in 2008.  Requiscat in pace.

Majel Barrett

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Arctic Circle traces an impact of cheap power.
• Carpe Diem adds a feature. 
• Frazz tries to expand a custom.
• Hagar the Horrible tells a tale. 
• Pardon My Planet points out an unwanted side-effect.
• Thatababy concocts an origin story. 
• The Argyle Sweater knows a friendlier wolf.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal finds “never” is too tempting a restriction.

(10) X-FILES REBOOT TO PILOT. “Ryan Coogler’s ‘X-Files’ Reboot Lands Hulu Pilot Order” reports Variety.

The truth is right here: Ryan Coogler‘s reboot of “The X-Files” is officially moving forward with a pilot order at Hulu.

In addition, Danielle Deadwyler is officially set to play one of the lead roles in the pilot, while the other lead role has yet to be cast. The official logline for the pilot states, “Two highly decorated but vastly different FBI agents form an unlikely bond when they are assigned to a long-shuttered division devoted to cases involving unexplained phenomena.”

Coogler will write, direct, and executive produce the pilot under his Proximity Media banner. Jennifer Yale (“The Copenhagen Test,” “Your Friends & Neighbors) will serve as showrunner and executive producer. Sev Ohanian and Zinzi Coogler of Proximity will also executive produce along with original “X-Files” creator Chris Carter. Simone Harris of Proximity will co-executive produce. The pilot hails from Onyx Collective and 20th Television. Coogler and Proximity are currently under a TV overall deal with Disney….

(11) ROLLING, ROLLING, ROLLING. “Lost Soviet Moon Lander May Have Been Found”. Or not. The New York Times says, “Two research teams have identified possible landing sites for Luna 9, the first human-made object to safely reach the lunar surface. ‘One of them is wrong,’ an expert said.”

In 1966, a beach-ball-size robot bounced across the moon. Once it rolled to a stop, its four petal-like covers opened, exposing a camera that sent back the first picture taken on the surface of another world.

This was Luna 9, the Soviet lander that was the earliest spacecraft to safely touchdown on the moon. While it paved the way toward interplanetary exploration, Luna 9’s precise whereabouts have remained a mystery ever since.

That may soon change. Two research teams think they might have tracked down the long-lost remains of Luna 9. But there’s a catch: The teams do not agree on the location….

… Luna 9 launched to the moon on Jan. 31, 1966. While a number of spacecraft had crashed into the lunar surface at that stage of the moon race, it was among the earliest to try what rocket engineers call a soft landing. Its core unit, a spherical suite of scientific instruments, was about two feet across. That size makes it difficult to spot from orbit….

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