A group of children near Cerro Azul saw the creature leave its cave, and suspected it of being an alien. Other observers wondered if it was a yeti — but the creature has been revealed as a shaved sloth. This revelation came too late to save the poor creature, which the children beat with sticks out of unreasoning fear. The kids then threw the corpse into the water and fled. Why must we always destroy what we don't understand?

[Telemetrovia Gawker]

According to CBC News, Gotlieb, the "mother of Canadian science fiction," won an Aurora Award for the best Canadian science fiction and fantasy novel, for 1980's A Judgment Of Dragons. Robert J. Sawyer called her "a poet with a cosmic perspective who elevates space opera to high art."

She told an interviewer that as soon as she started writing science fiction, the inspiration for her poetry came back. CBC says her novels explored topics like telepathy and mutation:

Sunburst was about a community with telepathic powers and the problems it faces, a theme that would frequently resurface in her fiction and short fiction.

O Master Caliban! treats themes of genetic mutation. Flesh and Gold looks at a world with more than one sentient race and an unequal balance of power.

Her Starcats trilogy features two cats as protagonists. Written in the 1980s, it includes A Judgment of Dragons (1980), Emperor, Swords, Pentacles (1982) and The Kingdom of the Cats (1985).

Her final novel, Birthstones, came out in 2007. She died the other day, aged 83, but she left a rich legacy behind.

It's no secret that Jackson always loved fantasy, and he turned to one of the masters of scifi/horror, John Landis, to direct his music video masterpiece Thriller. When the video hit MTV in the mid 1980s, audiences were shocked by how far Jackson went in this horror-parody. The special effects were genuinely scary, and Jackson wasn't afraid to make himself look like a real monster. Though the zombie werewolf boogie seemed like a weird idea at the time, it has become a staple of pop culture and a perennial favorite with the YouTube flash mob generation. Here you can see one of the YouTube memes the song spawned - a group of prisoners reenacted the dance sequence and made internet history.

Later, Jackson made a science fiction movie called Captain EO which aired exclusively at Disneyland. This allowed him to bring together his obsession with Disney-related fantasies and outer space. In fact, it was a perfect match. Disneyland has always been about science fiction, which is why there is an entire area of the park called Tomorrowland filled with rockets and outer space themed roller coasters.

Among the many things about Jackson that caught the public's imagination in the 1990s was the way he turned his body into a kind of science fiction story. He became an enhanced human, using plastic surgery and pharmaceuticals to change his face and seemingly his race as well. He became whiter than most white people, and his pale bandaged skin became his trademark.

Jackson was a post-human celebrity, and nowhere was this more obvious than in his video "Black or White" (also directed by Landis). Once again, Jackson turned to one of the greatest minds in science fiction to help with the video. He used the morphing software used by James Cameron for The Abyss and Terminator 2 to create a memorable and oft-copied scene where dozens of people's faces morph into each other, streaming through different racial identities, ages, and genders with an uncanny ease.

In the years since that time, Jackson went from being a science fictional figure to a scandal-plagued mystery. It seemed that his body was still morphing, and every time he made a public appearance people tried to figure out what new enhancements he'd gotten. He made the scifi-themed video "Scream" with his sister Janet, filled with weird anime characters and hints that Janet was as alien as Michael was.

Recently, he immigrated to Dubai, possibly the most science fictional city in the world right now. There he was apparently helping to design a theme park, which seems fitting for someone whose identity has always been so closely linked with fantasy.

No matter what you think about Michael Jackson the man, Michael Jackson the legend has transformed the way we think about identity. He injected pop culture with the future, and showed us what happens (good and bad) when you have the means to make fantasies real.

The indispensible Free Speculative Fiction Online site just posted links to two Ballard stories: One, "The Dying Fall," is about the Leaning Tower Of Pisa collapsing, and it originally appeared in Interzone in 1996, and was reprinted in the Guardian newspaper. It's savagely solipsistic, one man's self-centered interpretation of a huge disaster, and it has a nice sting at the end.

The other one, "The Autobiography of J.G.B.," is a sly trick, since it's not at all autobiographical as far as I can tell. It's the story of a man who wakes up one day to find that all the other people are gone, along with the dogs and cats. And unlike the protagonists of every other "last man" stories, he actually winds up feeling pretty okay about it. Being the only surviving human (as far as he can tell) turns out to be sort of a cushy gig, except that it leaves him with mysterious work to do — which we never learn the nature of.

I read the Riverworld series as a teen and it still sticks with me - I was thinking about it the other day. It represents 1970s science fiction at its trippiest and most random. Everyone who has ever lived on Earth wakes up together on a huge planet with an endless, winding river. They're all naked and bald, and they discover at length that they cannot die - at least not at first. His second series, World Of Tiers, follows a group of humans traveling through a series of stacked artificial parallel universes.

Farmer is also known for his first published short story, 1952's "The Lovers," which broke the taboo on explicit sexuality in science fiction and won a Hugo for Most Promising New Writer. According to Christopher Paul Carey:

[T]ravel back in time to the early 1950s. A young new writer, struggling to support his family by working overtime in a steel mill, submits his first piece of science fiction to Astounding. John W. Campbell doesn't want it. The writer sends the story to H.L. Gold at Galaxy, but the manuscript is again returned. The story is just too mature for a genre marketed toward adolescent males: 'there is no sex in science fiction'. Disgruntled, the writer resigns to try one last time and submits the story to Sam Mines at Startling Stories. This time comes a different response. Mines, sensing he has a winner, albeit a controversial one; buys the story and publishes it in his August 1952 issue. The story is The Lovers and the unknown author bears the strangely exotic sounding name of Philip José Farmer. The response from readers is electric. "Letters poured into Startling Stories praising the story," says Michael Croteau, web-master of The Official Philip José Farmer Home Page, who has extensively researched the history of Farmer's groundbreaking novella. "Several commented on how good the story was for a first time author," Croteau continues, "while others speculated that the story must have been written by an established pro who used a pseudonym because of the story's subject matter."

The Lovers tells the tale of Hal Yarrow, an Earthman sent on assignment to the planet Ozagen, who finds himself daring to rebel against his own planet's religious fundamentalism by engaging in intimate contact with an alien female. The story is tame by today's standards, but the mix of Farmer's raw talent, his ingenious description of photo-kinetic reproduction, and subject matter that was risqué for its day led to an ecstatic reaction among science fiction readers, who suddenly found their misbegotten genre gaining some maturity. "So many letters came in [to Startling Stories] over the next several months," says Croteau, "that six months or so after the story appeared, people started writing letters about the letters." In fact, letters about Farmer's story continued to be printed consistently in the magazine for the next two years. Many came from readers who had missed the August issue in which the novella appeared and desperately wanted to get their hands on a copy so they could join in the excitement. It was not surprising that in the year following the publication of The Lovers, Farmer won the Hugo award for 'most promising new talent'. "Science fiction never had any sexual relationships in it," says the now 88-year-old Farmer. "I felt that that was a part of life and so should be a part of SF." History has proved Farmer unquestionably right.

And then there's Farmer's bizarre pseudonymous novel, Venus On The Half Shell, written under the pseudonym Kilgore Trout - who's the itinerant struggling science fiction author in Kurt Vonnegut's writing. VonnegutWeb quotes Edgar L. Chapman, explaining how this came to happen:

A strong admirer of Vonnegut, Farmer has also confessed to a deep identification with Trout (who was actually suggested by Theodore Sturgeon). The identification was strengthened by many things: Farmer's own years as a struggling science fiction author in the early and middle stages of his career; Farmer's experience as a misunderstood social critic; and Farmer's identification with pornography as an Essex House author, a fate that plagued Trout. Finally, not long after Farmer had returned to Peoria, he was accused in 1970 of having written a letter signed ''Trout'' in the Peoria Journal Star criticizing President Nixon's Vietnam policy-another ironic identification of Farmer and Trout. (The letter is believed to have actually been penned by a college student.)

At any rate, Farmer, when afflicted with a temporary writer's block, conceived the idea of writing one of Trout's nonexistent novels and publishing it under Trout's name. He obtained Vonnegut's permission and went to work. When Venus on the Half-Shell was published by Dell, with Farmer wearing a false beard and a Confederate hat as a disguise on the back cover, the book was a ninety-day wonder, until Farmer's authorship, which Farmer made little effort to conceal, became known. Although the novel brought Farmer some unaccustomed notoriety (and made Vonnegut regret giving his permission to the project), the revelation of Farmer's authorship created a tendency to dismiss the work as simply an amusing parody and literary hoax. An additional irony in this episode has been Vonnegut's claim in a recent interview with Charles Platt (recorded in a book published in 1980) that Farmer failed to avow his authorship of Venus for a long period, presumably in the hope that sales would be increased by association with Vonnegut's reputation. This allegation, however, is not borne out by fact: Farmer told numerous friends, colleagues, and fans of his authorship; in fact, he informed the present writer of it when Venus was appearing as a serial in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Vonnegut's reaction is perhaps not surprising, since Trout is his invention. But when Vonnegut professes to feel anxiety that Farmer's book may somehow have harmed his literary reputation, it is hard to take him seriously. Such concern might have been better devoted to the effect of Vonnegut's self-indulgent seventies novels, Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick.

Writing for NPR about the UN Conference on Racism, Butler talks about her own thought experiments in creating a world where people tolerate each other instead of trying to impose hierarchy from above. She tried to create a fictional civilization where everyone could actually feel each other's pain telepathically, but decided that it would make people less compassionate, not more:

The point was to create, in fiction at least, a tolerant, peaceful civilization — a world in which people were inclined either to accept one another's differences or at least to behave as though they accepted them since any act of resentment they commit would be punished immediately, personally, inevitably. Eventually, though, I chose not to write about such an empathic society. I wrote instead about a single empathic woman who suffered from the delusion that she shared other people's pleasure and pain. She was not a particularly peaceful woman, but she did have to consider the consequences of her behavior more than other undeluded people had to. After all, delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?

In my novel, unavoidable empathy worked fine as an affliction, but popular, painful sports like boxing and football convinced me that the threat of shared pain wouldn't necessarily make people behave better toward one another. And it might cause trouble. For instance, it might stop people from entering the health care professions. Nursing would become very unpopular. And who would want to be a dentist in such a society.

So much for fiction.

I love the fact that Butler did the thought experiment, and then rejected it, because the initial utopian impulse resulted in an even worse dystopia. Few writers are that honest and fearless with their thought experiments, I think.

The whole essay is worth reading, and so is the other stuff ZeroAtTheBone linked to. Jo Walton also wrote a great overview of Butler's Pattern series at Tor.com a while back, which I meant to link to at the time.

And, of course, if you haven't read Butler's work, especially the Pattern and Xenogenesis series, you should run out and get them right now.

Talking to E! Online's Kristen Dos Santos, Fuller admitted that low ratings had finally taken their toll on the show (This week's episode showed yet another drop in viewership, and the series' worst-ever rating in the all-important-to-advertisers 18-34 demographic):

[ABC president] Steve McPherson called me, and said 'We gave it the best shot we could'... To be honest, I'm really not feeling very boo hoo about it. I am so proud of the show. We put together 22 really good episodes, and there is a lot to be proud of. I'm sure I'll be working with a lot of these people again, and I would love to do so.

Of course, just because we've seen the last of Pushing Daisies the television show doesn't mean that we've seen the last of Pushing Daisies altogether. Fuller explained:

[W]e are talking to DC Comics about doing comic books that will wrap up our storylines, and I already have a pitch for a movie ready to go.

This wouldn't be Daisies first time as a comic - Before the show premiered, a preview comic was given away at 2007's San Diego Comic-Con; you can read it (and perhaps catch a glimpse of the show's future) here.

Production wrapped this week on the show's thirteenth episode, which will end with a cliffhanger. Fuller didn't comment on whether this meant that he was heading back to Heroes anytime soon.

Sources: Daisies, Eli Stone and Dirty Sexy Canceled [E! Online]

Though he preferred to keep this struggle out of the spotlight, Crichton's recent novel Next did include a subplot about a cancer survivor whose genes are harvested by an evil biotech company.

Many of Crichton's novels were made into movies, though none were as successful as Jurassic Park. One of the trademarks of Crichton's style is clean prose, fast pacing, and impeccably-researched biotech speculation. A former doctor, Crichton's first novel Andromeda Strain actually has several pages of bibliographic notes.

He also delved into politics with some novels, dealing with a sexual harassment case in Disclosure that was so strange that it might as well have been science fiction. And in Airframe, he explored how an airline accident is misinterpreted by scandal-loving media.

Crichton brought a realism to biotech science fiction that hadn't existed before he began writing in the early 1970s, and his influence lives on in scifi-inflected genome thrillers like Species and medical detective franchises like House.

Michael Crichton Dies [via ET]

Champion writes:

Disch lived in an apartment with scant decor. There were books and a few paintings. But that was pretty much it. He told me that his other home in the country had been overrun with mildew. And he had nowhere else to go, no place to live other than this apartment. In the end, Disch lived entirely for his art and paid the terrible price for daring to stick to his guns . . . I remain extremely saddened that Disch, who merely wanted to be appreciated as a poet and who hoped that he could hold onto his apartment on Union Square West, felt that suicide was the only answer. Perhaps he was a lonely man still trying to come to terms with the death of his partner. Perhaps he had declared himself a deity so that the world would finally notice his literary contributions. I don't know if I'm really in the position to judge.

Champion's reference to Disch declaring himself a deity alludes to the author's latest novel, Word of God, or Holy Writ Rewritten, a strange collection of tales told from God's point of view. It's clear from his work that Disch had become mournful and fascinated with the afterlife (if still in a satirical way). Disch's partner Charles had been very ill before he died, and that sickness wiped out his savings and Disch's. Before he committed suicide, Disch had been struggling with his landlord to remain in his rent-controlled apartment, which the landlord claimed he couldn't keep because it was in his dead partner's name.

Thomas M. Disch, you will be missed. Photo by Houari B.

Thomas M. Disch Found Dead [Edward Champion's Reluctant Habits]

Janet Christine Dietrich loved to fly. Born in San Francisco in 1926, she and her twin sister, Marion, were the only girls in their high school aviation class. At 16, Janet Dietrich had her student pilot certificate; at 20, she earned her license as a private pilot. In 1947, she and Marion won the first-ever Chico-to-San Mateo air race in California—defeating older and more experienced male pilots in the process. They also placed second in the 1951 All-Women’s Transcontinental Air Race (aka the “Powder Puff Derby”). In 1960, Dietrich became the first woman to earn the FAA’s highest license, the Airline Transport Pilot License.

The following year, Dietrich was invited by Dr. William R. Lovelace II and pilot Jerrie Cobb to undergo the physical tests Lovelace had developed for NASA’s astronaut training program. Lovelace was interested how the female body would react to the same, and recruited Cobb. When Cobb passed all three phases of training, Lovelace decided to expand the project. In addition to more traditional physical exams, Dietrich and her Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees or FLATs (the name was coined by Cobb) were electro-shocked, pummeled with ice water, swallowed rubber tubing (to test their stomach acids), and worked to exhaustion on stationary bicycles.

Dietrich and twelve other women (from a group of 25) passed these tests. But only days before they were to arrive for further testing at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Florida, the program was abruptly canceled. Lovelace's experiments were privately funded (by pilot Jacqueline Cochran), and without the official say-so from NASA, the Navy refused to grant permission for use of its facilities.

Janet Dietrich continued flying until the death of her twin, Marion, in 1974. Photo by Albert “Kayo” Harris, 1957. [San Francisco Chronicle]

Barron's soundtrack for Forbidden Planet, co-written with her husband and musical partner Louis, was just one stop on a career that also included being the first artists to put electronic music onto tape (the 1950 piece Heavenly Menagerie, constructed pre-sampler by physically cutting and pasting together pieces of tape), collaborating with artists like John Cage, and having their music described by no less a music critic than Anais Nin as sounding like "a molecule that has stubbed its toes." Following Louis' death in 1989 (the couple divorced in 1970, but continued to work together), Barron continued to create music and was the first Secretary of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music for the US. She was survived by her son, Adam.

Alexander Courage's career started as a composer for radio shows, before moving onto the role of arranger and orchestrator for MGM Studios in the 1950s, working on movies like Showboat and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. As well as his classic theme for Star Trek, Courage also contributed music for Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and co-wrote the theme to The Waltons. So, yes, he's one of the ones to blame when you get that stuck in your head for weeks.

Star Trek Composer Alexander Courage Dies [Digital Spy]
Scorekeeper Says Goodbye to Forbidden Planet Co-Composer Bebe Barron [Aint It Cool]