If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know that whenever a comic book appears on screen in a movie or TV show set in the past, I’m immediately thrown out of the plot as I attempt to calculate whether the set decorator managed to get chronologically accurate comics.

That happened again tonight with Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. The comics appear in a scene taking place February 8, 1969, which we know because we’re told that earlier in the day when we see Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio’s characters in Musso & Frank.

Later that same day, we get a quick upside down glimpse of a couple of comic books in the trailer of stuntman Cliff Booth (that’s Brad Pitt’s character). By freezing the frame, I was able to identify them as Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandoes #66 and Kid Colt Outlaw #134.

Kid Colt Outlaw #134 is dated May 1967, and went on sale February 2, 1967, two years earlier. So … possible. But Sgt. Fury #66 is dated May 1969, and went on-sale May 4, 1969, about 3-1/2 weeks after the scene. Probably not possible — but this pedant declares it a good attempt.

I’m not 100% sure the Kid Colt comic would have survived two years in a trailer with that ginormous pit bull — or that Cliff Booth would have hung onto a comic book that long even if it had. But I’ll allow it. (I did say I’m a pedant when it comes to these things, remember?)

Since many of my friends have been amusing themselves asking AI to review their stories, I decided to do the same for a couple of my own stories over at Chat.OpenAI, starting with my recent Lightspeed Magazine story “A Man Walks Into a Bar: In Which More Than Four Decades After My Father’s Reluctant Night of Darts on West 54th Street I Finally Understand What Needs to Be Done.”

Here’s what the AI had to say —

Not only is that not really what the story’s about — the write-up didn’t even mention Donald Trump’s role in it! How could an AI miss that?

I also asked it to review my recent Apex Magazine story “Learning to Accept What’s to Come,” and it thought my protagonists were an elderly couple named Nora and Jerry dealing with their morality, rather than two robots named BR@X15 and CR81321M wandering a post-apocalyptic future.

So that one’s completely off base. Very strange.

I guess AI isn’t yet ready for prime time. At least not when it comes to small fish such as me. (And I suppose “not ready for prime time” isn’t an apt metaphor anymore. Does anyone really care about prime time in our time-shifting world?)

Welcome to the third and final episode of Eating the Fantastic recorded during the 60th incarnation of Boskone, following my lunches with guests Walter Jon Williams and Annalee Newitz. My guest this time around is Theodora Goss, whose latest book, The Collected Enchantments, was released on Valentine’s Day by Mythic Delirium Books only a few days before the con began.

Theodora Goss is a World Fantasy, Locus, and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of the short story and poetry collections In the Forest of Forgetting (2006), Songs for Ophelia (2014), and Snow White Learns Witchcraft (2019), as well as novella The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017), and sequels European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (2018) and The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl (2019). She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Shirley Jackson Awards, and has been on the Tiptree Award Honor List.

Her short fiction has appeared in such magazines as Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and others, and anthologies such as Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense, Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, and Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors. She has a Ph.D. in English literature from Boston University, and currently teaches writing and literature in the Boston University College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program. She also taught in the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing, the Odyssey writing workshop, the Alpha writing workshop for young writers, and in writing workshops at Readercon, Boskone, and Wiscon.

We discussed the ways in which being an immigrant is like living in a fantasy world, how she knows when a poem is a poem and a story is a story, the power of the specificity of prose, what Neil Gaiman once said about writing for theme anthologies which perfectly described her own process, our surprisingly similar  experiences with editorial suggestions, why so many fantasy writers love Middlemarch, her theories about the best way to moderate panels, how she knows when a story is truly done, and much more.

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