(1) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to polish off cryptid pizza with Andy Duncan on Episode 272 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Andy’s a multiple award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer, having won three World Fantasy Awards, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, a Nebula Award, and others, plus he’s been been nominated for the Hugo, Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Awards as well. His nonfiction has also received recognition, with his essay “It Is Always Time To Think About These Things,” having received a World Fantasy Award nomination last year. His collections include Beluthahatchie and Other Stories (which came out in 2000), The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories (published in 2011), and, most recently, An Agent of Utopia (in 2018) His most recent work of fiction, “The Hodges Meteorite,” was published November 2025 in the Sunday Morning Transport.

And as for the way Andy was a catalyst for a unique episode —

I first chatted with him on the show way back in 2016 on Episode 6, when we squeezed as much as we could of his secret origin and writing process into the length of a meal.

We narrowed our focus in 2018 on Episode 85 for a discussion of his then newly released short story collection An Agent of Utopia.

But this time around, we got even more granular, doing a deep dive into a single short story — “Criswell Predicts!” — parts of which I first heard Andy read at a con in 2014, and was finally published just a few months ago in Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology. Discussing in detail how his initial idea was across more than a decade written and revised and workshopped until it finally saw print made for a fascinating conversation.

We discussed how his titles are often born decades before the stories to which they’re eventually attached, how his research into Criswell’s predictions “ethically stymied” him, why the way he creates stories isn’t a way he’d encourage anyone else to follow, the epiphany which caused him to realize a perceived bug in his story was actually a feature, what he hoped sending his story through the Sycamore Hill Writing Workshop would unlock, why he’s willing to publicly read aloud sections of stories he hasn’t completed, the essential exclamation point suggested by John Kessel, at what stage in the revision process specific details of setting get added, whether the story would have taken even longer to complete without the eventual pressure of a deadline, what about the story made it fitting for a Tanith Lee tribute anthology, the editorial acumen of Gardner Dozois, and much more.

(2) FAUXMANTASY. Camestros Felapton introduces a new theme: “Timothy’s edgy retelling of Greek myths”.

… As I, Timothy the Talking Cat, the leading author and publisher of fantasy fiction, like to say “I’m just a cat whose intentions are good, oh lord please let me be myth understood”.

My new publishing direction for 2026 will be Greek myths with a romantsy spin reworked from Harry Potter fan-fiction but with the names, plot and locations changed so we don’t get sued. You know who doesn’t sue for copyright? Zeus – a god with many faults but you have to hand it to him, not remotely concerned with protecting Olympian IP….

Here’s one of Timothy’s works to watch out for. (And yes, that means what you think it does.)

…A retelling of the myth of Perseus and Andromeda from the perspective of the robot owl. It follows the owl’s time at Greek Myth Robot school and the bormance between the owl robot and that great big bronze guy who stomped on Jason and the Argonauts. Oh! That’s another film I watched!…

(3) TUTTLE REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle’s latest “The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup” for the Guardian covers Godfall by Van Jensen; The Salt Bind by Rebecca Ferrier; The Poet Empress by Shen Tao; A Hole in the Sky by Peter F Hamilton; and Hello Earth, Are You There? by Brian Aldiss.

(4) SPACE SHUTTLE UPDATE. [Item by Thomas Horman.] There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kids life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about Hobbits. Jalopnik’s Justin Hughes provides the latest info with his comments in “Space Shuttle Discovery To Remain At Smithsonian Where It Rightfully Belongs”.

…Space.com reports that NASA and the Smithsonian have concluded that the cost just to move the shuttle would be at least $120 to $150 million, far more than the $85 million allocated for both the move and the construction of a new facility to house it. Also, since the two Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft are now immobile museum pieces themselves, the only way to move Discovery would be to cut it up into pieces to ship by land and sea, causing irreparable damage to the orbiter itself as well as its historic significance. Naturally, the Texas Senators opened an investigation into the Smithsonian for “obstructing the lawful implementation of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act” by telling them what they didn’t want to hear.

The thing is, NASA and the Smithsonian are right to fight back, and [NASA Administrator] Jared Isaacman has their back. “My job now is to make sure we can undertake such a transportation within the budget dollars we have available and, of course, most importantly, ensuring the safety of the vehicle,” FOX 5 DC reports Isaacman said. That’s a strong indication that he understands the importance of keeping Discovery intact. He’s in a tough position, being required to comply with the law, but also understanding and appreciating the value of Discovery where it is, and in one piece.

The non-specific wording in the Big Beautiful Bill works in his favor. The Smithsonian’s Human Spaceflight collection “spans decades of achievements from the first U.S. manned Mercury missions through Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station.” It includes many spacecraft from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs that meet the letter of the law, could be transported to Texas fully intact, and put on display well within the $85 million budget. It just wouldn’t be a Space Shuttle.

What this approach doesn’t address, however, is the dangerous precedent it would set that the government could raid the Smithsonian for artifacts and tell it what to do with them. This could apply not just to the Air and Space Museum, but to anything the Smithsonian owns. This battle may be above Isaacman’s pay grade to fight in his role as NASA administrator, requiring lawmakers rather than bureaucrats to set things straight. Considering this administration’s tendency to rewrite history, I’m not optimistic that this will happen.

(5) NEOLOGISM FARMING. [Item by Chris Barkley.] Remember when Alfred Bester and Robert Heinlein used to make up slang words and phrases for their stories? Here’s the 2025 version of that, made up by social influencers and other malcontents: “From ‘Unc’ to ‘Chopped,’ Explaining the Most Viral Slang Terms of the Year” at Mental Floss.

Every year has its own batch of flash-in-the-pan slang, which often emerges seemingly out of nowhere among younger generations (before, typically, just as often falling out of fashion a year or two later).

These days, though, with social media platforms capable of spreading memes, jokes, and new slang terms faster and more widely than ever before, it doesn’t take much for a new word to emerge and fall into use in people’s vocabularies all over the world—and then to endure online perhaps a little longer than they might once have done…. 

For example:

Aura Points

Performativeness trended on Google in the summer of 2025, as Gen Z-ers began increasingly picking up on people who do things purely to be seen to be doing them—and in particular, so-called performative males who do stereotypically sensitive things in an attempt to appeal to women. No matter who your target audience is, though, if you’re doing anything performatively, you’re “aura farming,” and in the process, attempting to gain more “aura points.”

(6) DGA AWARDS FILM NOMINEES. The Director Guild Awards have followed the announcement of the TV categories with the unveiling of the finalists for “2026 Directors Guild Awards Film, First-Time Director Nominations” at The Hollywood Reporter. Includes Ryan Coogler for Sinners and Guillermo del Toro for Frankenstein.

(7) AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CINEMATOGRAPHERS. And if you haven’t read enough Hollywood awards news, here are the “ASC Awards 2026 Nominations” at Deadline.

…Vying for the marquee the Theatrical Feature Film prize are Autumn Durald Arkapaw (Sinners), Michael Bauman (One Battle After Another), Darius Khondji (Marty Supreme), Dan Laustsen (Frankenstein) and Adolpho Veloso (Train Dreams)….

(8) NETFLIX ADAPTING PKD BOOK. “Philip K. Dick’s The Future is Ours Will be The Netflix Event of the Decade” predicts CBR.com.

Netflix is adapting a thrilling dystopian novel into a miniseries, drawing its inspiration from renowned science fiction author Philip K. Dick’s early work. The miniseries has the potential to be the sci-fi event of the decade, given its timeliness and relevance, and its role in making history as an adaptation of one of Dick’s classic sci-fi stories. Netflix is officially adapting Dick’s science fiction novel from 1956 titled The World Jones Made. The 1950s story follows a mutant named Floyd Jones, who has the rare ability to see the future with absolute certainty. His precognition, roughly one year ahead, makes him unstoppable, and he uses his power to become the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

With his abilities, Jones rules the world, staying in power by predicting all attempts by rivals, assassins, and fellow politicians to overthrow his reign. Becoming almost a religious entity, Jones is treated like a messianic figure. Jones rules supreme until another character, whose differing mutant abilities undermine Jones’ belief in a fixed future, introduces uncertainty into his seemingly invincible fate.

While not regarded as one of Dick’s science fiction masterpieces, The World Jones Made examines themes of determinism versus free will that are essential to Dick’s more surreal works. More than his later books, the 1956 novel is political, reflecting Cold War anxieties that raise questions concerning surveillance and totalitarianism, as the ruler’s precognition dismantles his opposition….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

January 9, 1931 — Algis Budrys. (Died 2008.)

By Paul Weimer: I first encountered the work of Algis Budrys through something he did relatively late in life.  Back in the late 80’s, as an organizer and judge of the (don’t judge) L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award and contest, he was the editor of several of the volumes of finalists and winners.  In my rather catholic and somewhat indiscriminate reading in that period, I wound up picking up a couple. I can’t say that I remembering actually found any authors in those volumes that I subsequently followed as writers, although a check of Google does turn up that Carolyn Ives Gilman was one of the writers. 

Anyway, that’s a very early, oblique and not really that memorable first encounter with Budrys’ work. I subsequently was introduced to his work directly, and that would be his Hugo finalist novella, Rogue Moon. Rogue Moon in some way anticipates work by Avram Davidson’s Masters of the Maze, and even James Patrick Kelly’s Think like a Dinosaur, in having a mysterious alien artifact found on the moon.  Teleoperated duplicates that have been beamed to the moon explore the alien artifact, finding it to be a rather violent and capricious death trap at every turn (yes, years later, I would be reminded of this in the CUBE movies). It also had a violent love triangle, but I was more focused on the weird death traps.

It was only subsequent to reading Rogue Moon that I learned the extent and broadness and his impact on the field, a renaissance man indeed. More short fiction than just Rogue Moon, especially under pseudonyms. “Resurrection on Fifth Avenue”, written as Gordon Jaulyn, for example, is particularly good. The aforementioned editorial position at Writers of the Future was just his latest in a long line of editing and other pursuits. He was a longtime judge at Clarion.  He was a critic at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and reading some old issues of those in the hunt for stories exposed me to his critical work as well. 

And his story “Who?” became a rather interesting movie starring Elliot Gould. A cold war thriller about someone coming back who claims to be a scientist, the problem is, he was in an accident on the other side of the Iron Curtain and was severely injured. Is he actually Martino, or a Soviet plant trying to get information?  This bit of identity switching feels a bit like an episode of The Prisoner, and I do wonder if McGoohan had read the original story from the late 50’s to be inspired by it for The Prisoner, before the movie in the 70’s. 

There is still plenty of Budrys left for me to read, fiction and prose, firmly within my near-infinitely tall Mount TBR, in fact.

(10) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

The Lathe of Heaven (1980) 

Forty-six years ago on this date, New York City public television station WNET’s Experimental TV Lab project premiered their adaptation of The Lathe of Heaven. Based off the Ursula Le Guin novel of the same name, it was directed by David Loxton and Fred Barzyk. It should be noted Le Guin, by her own writings later, was involved in the casting, script planning, script editing, and filming of the production. Thus we’ll give scripting credits to Diane English, Ursula K. Le Guin and Roger Swaybill. Primary cast was Bruce Davison, Kevin Conway (earlier in Slaughterhouse-Five as Roland Weary) and Margaret Avery. It was budgeted at a quarter of a million dollars.

The Lathe of Heaven became one of the two highest-rated shows that season on PBS that year. Michael Moore writing for Ares magazine liked it saying that “The best science fiction, such as Lathe, examines humankind’s place in the universe and the products and problems created by intelligence.” It was nominated for a Hugo at Devention Two which had Ed Bryant as Toastmaster, the year The Empire Strikes Back won. Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give a seventy two percent rating. 

The Lathe of Heaven is the most-requested program in PBS history. It took twelve years to clear up rights to rebroadcast it and that involved replacing the Beatles music with a cover band version. In 2000, The Lathe of Heaven was finally rebroadcast and released to video and DVD. 

I’ve seen this version several times and remember as being rather well crafted but I’ve not the second version made twenty-two years later. Who here has seen that version? 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

• Brewster Rockit illustrates stealth.  
• Loose Parts’ dinner does not have a fairy tale ending.  
• Off the Mark finds a match.  

(12) HERE, READ THIS BOOK I STOLE. “Boffins probe commercial AI models, find Harry Potter” reports The Register. “Dark copyright evasion magic makes light work of developers’ guardrails.”

…For AI models published with open weights, computer scientists have already established that AI models may memorize substantial portions of training data and that they may present that data as output given the right prompt. Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B, it’s claimed, “entirely memorizes” Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – the first book in the series – and George Orwell’s 1984. Findings to this effect date back to at least 2020.

Now, some of those same researchers – Ahmed Ahmed, A. Feder Cooper, Sanmi Koyejo, and Percy Liang, from Stanford and Yale – have found that commercial models used in production, specifically Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 3, memorize and can reproduce copyrighted material, just like open weight models.

The authors say that wasn’t a given, thanks to the safety measures commercial models implement and the lack of transparency about training corpora.

“Altogether, we find that [it] is possible to extract large portions of memorized copyrighted material from all four production LLMs, though success varies by experimental settings,” they explain in a preprint paper titled “Extracting books from production language models.”

The recall rates for memorized texts varied among the models evaluated, and for some of the models, jailbreaking – prompts devised to bypass safety mechanisms – was required to make the models more forthcoming.

“We extract nearly all of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet,” the authors said, citing a recall rate of 95.8 percent. With Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3, they were able to coax the models to produce substantial portions of the book, 76.8 percent and 70.3 percent, without any jailbreaking….

(13) THE MEMORY LINGERS ON. “In 1972, Apollo 16 Astronaut Charles Duke Left Multiple Objects On The Moon – Including A Touching Family Photo” at IFL Science.

On April 23, 1972, Apollo 16’s Lunar Module and its crew of two NASA astronauts – John W. Young and Charles M. Duke – left the Moon’s surface to reconnect with the Command Module before returning to Earth. While they were 95 kilograms (209 pounds) of lunar rock heavier due to their scientific activities, Duke left behind a few objects on the Moon’s surface, and a message for whoever might come across them in the future….

… Other than an engine malfunction and nearly dying like a space tortoise, the trip was a resounding success. Before the two [astronauts] returned to the Command Module and then the safety of the Earth’s atmosphere, the Lunar Module pilot left a few belongings on the Moon’s surface.

“Duke left a photo of his family, a piece of beta cloth with ’64-C’ written on it to commemorate his U.S. Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School class, and a medallion commemorating the 25th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Air Force,” NASA explains.

“This is the family of astronaut Charlie Duke from planet Earth who landed on the moon on April 20, 1972,” Duke wrote on the back of the family photograph.

The reason he took it to the Moon is, as you might expect of a family portrait, pretty sweet.

“Just to get the kids excited about what dad was going to do, I said ‘Would y’all like to go to the moon with me?'” Duke told Business Insider in 2015. “We can take a picture of the family and so the whole family can go to the moon.”

“I’d always planned to leave it on the moon,” he added. “So when I dropped it, it was just to show the kids that I really did leave it on the moon.”…

(14) ATLAS SHRUGGED; THEN DID THE WORM. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Boston Dynamics has announced that their humanoid Atlas robot has been developed to the point of commercial application. Parent company Hyundai will reportedly be using them in EV manufacturing plants by sometime in 2028. General pricing and availability has not been announced.

The reviewer for Futurism, though, seems a bit unnerved by the ways in which Atlas goes beyond merely imitating the human form—such as being able to swivel its body, wrists, head, etc. through a full 360° of rotation. As they say in the tagline for the article, “You can’t spell ‘demonstration’ without ‘demon.’“ “Boston Dynamics’ New Robot Demo Will Give You Goose Bumps With Its Skin-Crawlingly Unnatural Movements”.

…Key to the demo is that the robot features clever joints that allow for “continuous rotation.” In effect, its hips, wrists, and neck can swivel a full 360 degrees unimpeded.

After confidently strutting to the front of the stage, Atlas starts twisting its hands like a drill, rotating its head like the girl in “The Exorcist,” and even turning its entire torso around in a dizzying maneuver — a clear indication that Boston Dynamics isn’t planning to be boxed in by the limitations of human anatomy.

“There’s more to it than just copying nature,” Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter said during the announcement. “We can pick the best parts of what nature has to offer and do better in others.”…

(15) TRAILER PARK. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die Official Trailer. Coming to theaters February 13.

A man claiming to be from the future takes the patrons of an iconic Los Angeles diner hostage in search of unlikely recruits in a quest to save the world.

(16) TODAY’S TITLE EXPLANATION. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Leblabbiy, It’s Cold Outside” is from Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers series, which, since I wasn’t sure of the spelling, led me to re-reading ’em (in order) at least until finding the word (which was in #3, not #4 which was my first guess).

Arguably more of a diss than “fraki” in Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy.

My h-copies being either hidden or given to a friend, I e-found and e-borrowed them (conveniently as “2 Borrows”) (and e-read) them: World of Tiers, Volume One (Books #1-3), and World of Tiers, Volume Two (Books #4-7).

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