As discussed in earlier chapters, Japanese animation had a long and fruitful connection to Western media for many decades. However, the substantial portion of that connection from Astro Boy onward was in children's media. The comic book industry in Japan helped underpin the demand for Japanese animation in Japan itself, and while US comic books had gone from a medium that covered diverse genres down to focusing mainly on superheroes or children's comics, Japan retained a much broader range. Both video games and VHS tapes helped extend the range of interest in Japanese media in the US through the 1980s.

Sometime in April, Elon Musk's GenAi encyclopedia stopped updating without explanation. Sometime this week it started up again, and yesterday it got a visual makeover. A bunch of people who died after April are now listed as dead (e.g. Sam Neill), and Andy Burnham is no longer described as Mayor of Greater Manchester and has graduated to PM. However, errors on less notable pages are still many. The typeface of the logo has changed, though.

Hey, all! My name's Aidan — I'm a writer, games journalist, and photographer. For the … Aidan Moher needs your support for Save Aidan's PVM from certain DOOM!

The second novel in Corey's non-Expanse series opens up the universe of the setting. In the first novel, we were introduced to a planet of humans who had deduced that they must have originally evolved elsewhere but who had no cultural history of where they had come from. The ultimate question of their origin becomes a minor issue when they are invaded by the Carryx, an alien empire engaged in an ancient war. Selected humans were transported to the Carryx world palace to become a client species tasked with aiding the war effort against the enemies of the Carryx, in particular the Deathless.

Welcome to Susan's Salon. The salon is an open comment thread for people (or cats) to discuss any topic they would like. Happy, sad, weird or just catching up on events. Yes, you can promote things in the comments if you want. The only rules are: nothing hateful, no cranky disputes/arguments and don't pull the red lever in the pantry. Susan's Salon opens early Monday morning Sydney time, which is typically still Sunday in most places in the world.

The influence of Japanese culture on the US in the 1990s increased not just via the existing commercial connection of toys and TV shows for children. The development of consumer electronics had in the 1970s led to development of video games both as large machines for arcades, home video game consoles and games to be played on home computers. The initial growth in home video games in the 1970s and 80s was limited by the capacity of relatively small machines to produce interesting visual effects. The US video game company Atari had initially been a major commercial success, but a range of economic factors led to a major market crash in video games from 1983 to 1985.

Mecha starts as a shortening in Japanese of the English word mechanism, but with a general meaning of machines in popular culture. The word is applied to giant robots in Japanese but not exclusively. Meanwhile, as is the way with words, the term made its way back into English to be applied mainly to a sub-type of giant robots in Japanese popular culture. We have already touched on the term in the chapter on Transformers, where the one of the original Japanese toy lines that became Transformers in the US where originally robots that contained a pilot.

There is a tendency for deep arguments to rapidly wander into shallow arguments about word definitions. With lots of arguments continuing about the nature of generative Ai, the obvious problemsome1 word is "intelligence". I'd like to say that what are being called "AI" are not intelligent but I don't have a clear meaning for what intelligence is. We all get that though and it is also clear, that whatever Chat-GPT is doing isn't what goes on in people's brains. Of course, there is no good reason why it should be.

It's been about two weeks, but the official Dragon Award website only lists the finalists, not the winners. I'm not surprised, given past experience, but even after 10 years, the odd absent-minded aspect of the Dragon Awards is weird.

Welcome to Susan's Salon. This post has an open comment thread for people (or cats) to discuss any topic they would like. Happy, sad, weird or just catching up on events. Yes, you can promote things in the comments if you want. The only rules are: nothing hateful and no cranky disputes/arguments. Susan's Salon is posted early Monday morning Sydney time, which is usually still Sunday in most places in the world.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm's history of the Twentieth Century is entitled The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century. "Short" is literal as the period the book covers is 1914 to 1991. That's partly because it was published in 1994, so the final decade hadn't finished yet, but there was a deeper reason for it. The "long" nineteenth century makes a lot of sense, bookended by the French Revolution at the start in the 1790's and the beginning of World War I in 1914 at the end. So as a natural chunk of history, the twentieth makes senses as running from 1914 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as a symbolic end to the Cold War.

This is a follow up to a footnote, but also a long time ago I am pretty sure I wrote about what combination of Star Trek/Doctor Who would have worked best for a crossover. I can't find that post (assuming I wrote it) but I think there is a definitive answer. A TNG/Tennant-Donna combination would have worked best because I think pitting Donna Noble and Captain Picard against each other in some situation would have been good TV. So, whatever happens in the plot, the Doctor and Donna get separated in such a way that the Doctor is stuck with the rest of the TNG crew, while Picard & Donna are stuck with each other somewhere else.

In the 1960s, Star Trek made an impression, but not enough for it to last more than three seasons. However, the afterlife of these three seasons in reruns was substantial, and the committed fanbase of the show was still eager for more. Books based on the show have been in steady publication since the mid-1960s, along with various comic book versions of the show. As well as novels, the 1970s saw the publication of quasi-factual works such as technical manuals for the starships, so that by the mid-70s the surrounding material of the show in terms of books and other media was greater than the original.

Welcome to Susan's Salon. This post has an open comment thread for people (or cats) to discuss any topic they would like. Happy, sad, weird or just catching up on events. Yes, you can promote things in the comments if you want. The only rules are: nothing hateful and no cranky disputes/arguments. Susan's Salon is posted early Monday morning Sydney time, which is usually still Sunday in most places in the world.

Picking a starting point in this story is difficult, but as transformation is an inherent theme, I'll start in the USA in the mid-1960s. In 1964, US toy company Hasbro released a set of dolls called GI Joe. The dolls were themed around the US military and marketed to boys, and as part of that marketing, the term "action figure" was coined to avoid the girl-coded term "doll". Outside of America, licensed versions of the concept took on new names less overtly American, such as Action Man in the UK. …

As I was warned, bosses are difficult to defeat, but for those of us who struggle to time a dodge-parry-strike-roll timed carefully to match the moves of some giant being, the game is quite generous. You start in one region of a huge fantasy world, and technically to progress further, you have to make your way up a heavily guarded hill, infiltrate a castle, first defeat a very difficult boss just to make it past the castle walls, fight your way through the castle, defeat another boss, and only then get access to the lands north of that castle.

There's a long-standing internet story that RoboCop evolved out of an adaptation of the 2000AD Judge Dredd comics. The known history of the screenplay by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner makes that very unlikely, although Dredd was probably somewhere in the mix of influences. In particular, the specific look of RoboCop, with just a human mouth and chin visible below an impersonal helmet, along with the character's indefatigable enforcement of the law, has an obvious parallel with Dredd. Ironically, where Paul Verhoeven's 1987 film most closely captures the aesthetic of Dredd is in the mix of straight science fiction, along with overt humour and social satire – elements that the two actual Dredd movies did not capture as effectively.

File 770 has the list and DragonCon has a press release: They don't release numbers, but as is traditional, the press release has a vague participation total: "Nearly 6,000 fans cast ballots for this year’s Dragon Award winners" Year Approximate Ballots 2017 More than 8000 2018 More than 11000 2019 More than 10000 2020 More than 8000 2021 More than 7000 2022 More than 7000 2023 More than 7000 2024 Approximately 7000 2025 Nearly 6000 2026 Nearly 6000 Best Science Fiction Novel: Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman.

Welcome to Susan's Salon. This post has an open comment thread for people (or cats) to discuss any topic they would like. Happy, sad, weird or just catching up on events. Yes, you can promote things in the comments if you want. The only rules are: nothing hateful and no cranky disputes/arguments. Susan's Salon is posted early Monday morning Sydney time, which is usually still Sunday in most places in the world. I think the Dragon Award winners will be announced at some point, or perhaps already have been!

An odd side effect of my interests and current historical circumstances is that I've spent a lot of time writing about the overlap of right-wing beliefs and science fiction. This is odd, because I have a strong belief that science fiction has a special relationship with the development of left-wing ideas. I think that relationship is apparent but also often mischaracterised. Science fiction is not inherently left-wing, and the broader genre of science fiction & fantasy even less so. That is, it is more than possible for an author aligned with right-wing values and outlooks to use that perspective to write effective works of science fiction.

The dark, red tongue spreading in the Pacific is growing at a rate not seen in living memory. The uncertainty over what is driving it has alarmed experts.

In the previous post, I said I had another graph. This is more of a case of seeing a different way of showing information we already have, but it requires a bit of a set-up. Every year at the Hugo Awards, people nominate various works. Different categories get more attention than others, and the number of people nominating each year shifts. What we can look at is the proportion of the vote each nominee gets, and we can look at that by their ranking i.e. what proportion of the vote does, say, the most nominated novel get.

Unlike yesterday, there will be some 2023 stuff in this post. None of it is new, but it illustrates a basic issue with stats. If we want to say whether something is unusual, we need lots of additional data for comparison. There are situations where we can work out how numbers should be distributed in a data set based on first principles, but often it is an empirical question that can only be resolved by looking at typical years. I'll start with the classic. The "cliff" phenomenon was identified by Heather Rose Jones very soon after the delayed release of the 2023 stats.

I fought a bad cold all weekend and, despite my best efforts, I fell asleep before the beginning of LACon V’s Hugo Awards ceremony. So imagi

I've created a minor burden for myself by keeping the spreadsheet I created for the 2023 Chengdu analysis updated for subsequent years. So, instead of just looking through the copious statistics document [ ] I was copying and reformatting the data to go into the EPH analysis sheet. At the end of that process, there is nothing interesting to say about 2026 – which is good because "interesting" on that sheet is geared up for "that looks dodgy". So, 2026 stats all look good by that measure, which isn't a surprise but is nice to know.

Note: I've written before about being neurodiverse and on the spectrum. For more about all that check out my downloadable booklet "Tips and