Daily Space

2 Audio programs featuring Conrad Veidt

2012-01-16T20:20:00.001-07:00

1. A doc on Connie put together about April 3, 1993, when the ashes of Connie and his wife Lily were laid to rest in Golders Green

2. Connie has a few lines in the radio play, Return to Berchtesgaden. He speaks at about the 3 minute mark.

Example of the Effects of Prolonged Exposure to Musical Theatre

2012-01-11T21:39:00.000-07:00

Composers Richard and Roger Sherman

2012-01-08T03:00:00.003-07:00

From Wikipedia
The Sherman Brothers are an American songwriting duo that specialize in musical films, made up of Robert B. Sherman (born December 19, 1925) and Richard M. Sherman (born June 12, 1928).

The Sherman Brothers wrote more motion-picture musical song scores than any other songwriting team in film history. Film scores of the Sherman Brothers include Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Jungle Book, and The Aristocats.

Life and work
Sons of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Robert and Richard Sherman began writing songs together in 1951 on a challenge from their father, Tin Pan Alley songwriter Al Sherman. The brothers wrote together and with different songwriting partners throughout the rest of the decade.

In 1958, Robert founded the music publishing company Music World Corporation, which later enjoyed a landmark relationship with Disney's BMI-affiliated publishing arm, Wonderland Music Company. That same year, the Sherman Brothers had their first top-ten hit with "Tall Paul," sung by Mouseketeer Judy Harriet on the Surf Records label and then covered by Mouseketeer Annette Funicello. The success of this song yielded the attention of Walt Disney, who eventually hired the Sherman Brothers as Staff Songwriters for Walt Disney Studios. The first song they wrote on personal assignment by Walt Disney was "Strummin' Song" in 1961. It was used in the Annette Funicello made-for-television movie called The Horsemasters.

While at Disney, the Sherman Brothers wrote more motion-picture musical scores than any other songwriters in the history of film. They also wrote what is perhaps their best-known song, "it's a small world (after all)" for the 1964 New York World's Fair. Since then, some have claimed that this has become the most translated and performed song on Earth, although this is largely due to the fact that it is played continuously at Disney's theme park "it's a small world" attractions of the same name.

In 1965, the Sherman Brothers won two Academy Awards for Mary Poppins, which includes the songs "Feed The Birds," "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," and the Oscar-winning "Chim Chim Cher-ee." Since Mary Poppins' premiere, the Shermans have subsequently earned nine Academy Award nominations, two Grammy Awards, four Grammy Award nominations, and 23 gold- and platinum-certified albums.

Robert and Richard Sherman worked directly for Walt Disney, completing the scores for the live-action musical films The Happiest Millionaire and The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band until Disney's death in 1966. Since leaving the company, the brothers have worked freelance as songwriters on scores of motion pictures, television shows, theme-park exhibits, and stage musicals.

Their first non-Disney assignment came with Albert R. Broccoli's motion picture production Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in 1968, which garnered the brothers their third Academy Award Nomination.

In 1970, the Shermans returned to Disney for a brief stint where they completed work on The Aristocats and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. The latter film garnered the brothers their fourth and fifth Oscar Nominations, respectively. 1972 saw the release of Snoopy Come Home, for which the brothers received a Grammy nomination.

In 1973, the Sherman Brothers also made history by becoming the only Americans ever to win First Prize at the Moscow Film Festival for Tom Sawyer, for which they also authored the screenplay.

In 1976, The Slipper and the Rose was picked to be the Royal Command Performance of the year. The performance was attended by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. A modern musical adaptation of the classic Cinderella story, Slipper, also featured songs, score, and screenplay by the Sherman Brothers. Two further Academy Award nominations were garnered by the brothers for the film. That same year the Sherman Brothers received their star on the Hollywood "Walk of Fame" directly across from Grauman's Chinese Theater.

Outside the motion-picture realm, their Tony Award-nominated smash hit Over Here! (1974) was the biggest-grossing original Broadway musical of that year. The Sherman Brothers have also written numerous top selling songs including "You're Sixteen," which reached Billboard's Hot 100 top 10 twice: first with Johnny Burnette in 1960 and then at #1 with Ringo Starr more than thirteen years later. Other top-ten hits include "Pineapple Princess," "Let's Get Together," and more.

In 2000, the Sherman Brothers wrote the song score for the Disney film The Tigger Movie. This film marked the brothers' first major motion picture for the Disney company in over 28 years.

In 2002, Chitty hit the London stage, receiving rave reviews. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is currently the most successful stage show ever produced at the London Palladium, boasting the longest run in that century-old theater's history. On April 28, 2005, a second Chitty company premiered on Broadway (New York City) at the Foxwoods Theatre. The Sherman Brothers wrote an additional six songs specifically for the new stage productions. A successful third company of Chitty is currently touring throughout the United Kingdom.

In 2003, four Sherman Brothers' musicals ranked in the Top 10 Favorite Children's Films of All Time in a British nationwide poll reported by the BBC. Most notably, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) topped the list at #1.

In recent years, with Robert's move to London, England, United Kingdom, the brothers have written many new songs for the stage musical presentations of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins, produced collaboratively by Disney and Cameron Mackintosh.

For their contributions to the motion picture industry, the Sherman brothers have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6918 Hollywood Blvd. and were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame on June 9, 2005. On November 16, 2006, Mary Poppins premiered at the New Amsterdam Theatre on Broadway.

On November 17, 2008 the Sherman Brothers received the National Medal of Arts which is the highest honor conferred upon artists or patrons of the arts by the United States Government. The award was presented by United States President George W. Bush in an East Room ceremony at The White House.

On May 22, 2009, The Boys: the Sherman Brothers’ Story, a critically acclaimed documentary film about the pair, was theatrically released. The film was directed and produced by their sons, Gregory V. Sherman and Jeff Sherman, and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. Ben Stiller acted as executive producer for the film. The movie’s tag line is “Brothers. Partners. Strangers,” as the film deals with professional growth of the Academy Award-winning composing team who are best known for their up-beat Disney music, and their later estrangement.

It contains interviews with family members and several individuals in the film industry, including actors such as Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke (who worked with the Sherman Brothers on Mary Poppins), producers (Roy E. Disney), fellow film composers (John Williams and Stephen Schwartz), and film critics (Leonard Maltin). The film premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival and the Newport Beach Film Festival in April 2009. The DVD, which contains a full hour of bonus material, was released on November 30, 2010.

In October 2009, Disney released a 59 track, two CD compendium of their work for the studio spanning forty-two years. The CD is titled The Sherman Brothers Songbook.

On March 11, 2010, the Sherman Brothers were presented with a Window on Mainstreet Disneyland in Anaheim, California, in honor of their contribution to Disney theme parks. On May 17, 2010, the Sherman Brothers received the "Career Achievement Award" at The Theatre Museum's 2010 Awards Gala in New York City.

Recent achievements
The Sherman Brothers receive the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor bestowed upon artists from the United States Government. Left to right: Robert B. Sherman, Richard M. Sherman and U.S. President George W. Bush at The White House, November 17, 2008.

* In 2000, the Sherman Brothers wrote the award winning score to The Tigger Movie which achieved number-one status in both theatrical box office and video sales.

* The Sherman Brothers' classic motion picture Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was adapted into a London West End Musical in 2002 and premiered at the London Palladium on April 16, 2002, featuring many new songs and a reworked score by both Sherman Brothers. It was nominated for a 2003 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best New Musical. The Sherman Brothers each received the Musical Theatre Award from the Variety Club of Great Britain that year as well for Chitty, which finished a record breaking three-and-a-half-year run at the Palladium, becoming the longest running show in the theater's century long history. In 2004, the premiere of Mary Poppins arrived on the stage. In 2005, Poppins was nominated for nine Olivier Awards. In 2005, Chitty went to Broadway and was nominated for nine Tonys and also began its nationwide (UK) tour.

* On June 9, 2005, both Shermans were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame alongside Bill Withers, Steve Cropper, John Fogerty, Isaac Hayes, and David Porter.

* On November 16, 2006, the Cameron Mackintosh/Disney production of Mary Poppins made its Broadway premiere at the New Amsterdam Theater featuring the Sherman Brothers’ classic songs.

* In 2007, during the 40th-anniversary DVD re-release of The Jungle Book London press junket, the Sherman Brothers were witnessed by press working on a new song for Inkas in the same Brown's Hotel room where The Jungle Book was originally penned by British writer Rudyard Kipling over a hundred years earlier.

* In February 2008, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang began a second UK tour. In 2008 and 2009, Poppins premiered in numerous cities throughout the world including Stockholm, Copenhagen, Budapest, Toronto, Shanghai, Sydney, Johannesburg, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Helsinki. Full UK and US tours of Poppins also commenced in 2008, 2009 and 2010 respectively.

* On May 21, 2011, the Sherman Brothers were each awarded honorary doctorate degrees in Fine Arts from their alma mater, Bard College. This was Robert's second honorary doctorate. His first was granted by Lincoln College on May 12, 1990.

Collaboration from afarSince 2002, Robert Sherman has lived in London, England. He moved from Beverly Hills, while Richard Sherman remained in California. Surprisingly, however, the separation did not impede the brothers' collaborative process; they have credited this to the technological advents of fax machines, e-mail and low-cost international telephone service. Also, both brothers travel between Los Angeles, New York, and London frequently, which also facilitates their work. Since Robert's move, the brothers have continued to collaborate on various musical plays as well as a feature-length animated film musical that incorporates an original story, song score and screenplay.

Major scores
* The Parent Trap, 1961
* Adventures in Color
* A Symposium on Popular Songs, 1962
* In Search of the Castaways, 1962
* Summer Magic, 1963
* The Sword in the Stone, 1963
* Big Red, 1963
* Mary Poppins, 1964
* "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow", 1964
* The Happiest Millionaire, 1967
* The Jungle Book, 1967
* The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band, 1968
* Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 1968
* The Aristocats, 1970
* Bedknobs and Broomsticks, 1971
* Snoopy, Come Home, 1972 (also performed songs "Me and You" and "Getting It Together" for the soundtrack)
* Charlotte's Web, 1973
* Tom Sawyer, 1973
* Huckleberry Finn, 1974
* The Slipper and the Rose, 1976
* The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, 1977
* The Magic of Lassie, 1978
* Magic Journeys, 1982
* Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore, 1983
* Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, 1992
* The Mighty Kong, 1998
* Seasons of Giving, 1999
* The Tigger Movie, 2000

Motion picture screenplays
* A Symposium on Popular Songs, 1962 (uncredited)
* Mary Poppins, 1964 (*treatment only, uncredited)
* The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1973
* The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1974
* The Slipper and the Rose, 1976
* The Magic of Lassie, 1978
* Ferdinand the Bull, 1986 (*TV screenplay)
* Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (one of the songwriters)
* Inkas the Ramferinkas, 2013 (announced)

Soundtrack: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

2012-01-08T02:49:00.002-07:00

Another soundtrack from Kritzerland. This one is also sold out there, but I expect you can get it from Ebay if nowhere else.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang starred Dick Van Dyke and Sally Ann Howes. (Julie Andrews was asked but didn't want to do the part). It wasn't a success when it first came out.

If I remember correctly I saw it and liked the songs and the last half of the movie - where it goes into the realms of fantasy with kidnapped children and Caractacus Potts and Truly Scrumptious trying to save them - but the beginning part which is just investor Caractacus trying to sell his inventions to an uninterested businessman weren't my cup of tea.

But that triumphant travelling song - who couldn't love it or want to drive to it?

It's a two-disc set. The first disc has the music from the movie, and a few extra songs, the second disc has the music as sung by its composer, Richard Sherman. (Brothers Robert and Richard Sherman are responsible for music and lyrics.)

Another soundtrack that isn't science fiction per se, I admit - but c'mon, a flying car? Back in the 1960s it was science fiction! But I have to admit I just love the music, especially the theme song, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I love driving my car and singing that song!

Here's the list of songs on the first disc. I've bolded theones I listen to - the rest I just skip over!
• Main Title
• You Two
• Toot Sweets
• Hushabye Mountain
• Me Ol’ Bamboo
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Truly Scrumptious
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (reprise)
Entr’Acte
Lovely, Lonely Man
Posh
Hushabye Mountain (reprise)
The Roses Of Success
Chu-Chi Face
Doll On A Music Box & Truly Scrumptious
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Finale
Exit Music
Bonus Tracks (Hushabye Mountain is done again and I love this version)
Main Title (Film Version with sound effects)
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Finale (Film Mix)
Exit Music (Film Mix)

Composer Les Baxter

2012-01-07T14:43:00.002-07:00

From Wikipedia
Les Baxter (March 14, 1922 – January 15, 1996) was an American musician and composer.

Baxter studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory before moving to Los Angeles for further studies at Pepperdine College. Abandoning a concert career as a pianist, he turned to popular music as a singer. At the age of 23 he joined Mel Tormé's Mel-Tones, singing on Artie Shaw records such as "What Is This Thing Called Love?".

Baxter then turned to arranging and conducting for Capitol Records in 1950, and conducted the orchestra of two early Nat King Cole hits, "Mona Lisa" and "Too Young", but both were actually orchestrated by Nelson Riddle. (In later releases of the recordings the credit was corrected to Riddle.). This was not an uncommon practice those days: Baxter himself had arranged Nat King Cole's "Nature Boy" in 1947 for a recording conducted by Frank De Vol. In 1953 he scored his first movie, the sailing travelogue Tanga Tika. With his own orchestra, he released a number of hits including "Ruby" (1953), "Unchained Melody" (1955) and "The Poor People Of Paris" (1956). He also achieved success with concept albums of his own orchestral suites: Le Sacre Du Sauvage, Festival Of The Gnomes, Ports Of Pleasure, and Brazil Now, the first three for Capitol and the fourth on Gene Norman's Crescendo label. The list of musicians on these recordings includes Plas Johnson and Clare Fischer. Baxter also wrote the "Whistle" theme from the TV show Lassie.

Baxter did not restrict his activities to recording. As he once told Soundtrack! magazine, "I never turn anything down".

In the 1960s, he formed the Balladeers, a conservative folk group in suits that at one time featured a young David Crosby. He worked in radio as musical director of The Halls of Ivy (starring Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Hume) and the Bob Hope and Abbott and Costello shows.

Like his counterparts Henry Mancini and Lalo Schifrin, Baxter later worked for the film industry in the 60's and 70's. He worked on movie soundtracks for B-movie studio American International Pictures where he composed and conducted scores for Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe films and other horror stories and teenage musicals, including The Pit and the Pendulum, The Comedy of Terrors, Muscle Beach Party, The Dunwich Horror, and Frogs. Howard W. Koch recalled that Baxter composed, orchestrated and recorded the entire score of The Yellow Tomahawk (1954) in a total of three hours for $5,000.

When soundtrack work fell off in the 1980s, he scored music for theme parks such as SeaWorld. In the 1990's, Baxter was widely celebrated, alongside Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, as one of the progenitors of what had become known as the "exotica" movement.

In his 1996 appreciation for Wired magazine, writer David Toop remembered Baxter thus: "Baxter offered package tours in sound, selling tickets to sedentary tourists who wanted to stroll around some taboo emotions before lunch, view a pagan ceremony, go wild in the sun or conjure a demon, all without leaving home hi-fi comforts in the white suburbs."

Les Baxter has a motion picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6314 Hollywood Blvd.

Discography
Album, Soundtrack & Compilation
* (1947) Music Out of the Moon (composed by Harry Revel)
* (1948) Perfume Set To Music (composed by Harry Revel)
* (1949) Music for Peace of Mind
* (1950) Yma Sumac: Voice Of The Xtabay
* (1951) Arthur Murray Favorites: Tangos
* (1951) Ritual of the Savage (Le sacre du sauvage)
* (1953) Festival of the Gnomes (composed by Prince di Candriano)
* (1954) Thinking of You
* (1954) The Passions: Featuring Bas Sheva
* (1955) Arthur Murray Favorites: Modern Waltzes
* (1955) Kaleidoscope
* (1956) Tamboo!
* (1956) Les Baxter's La Femme
* (1956) Caribbean Moonlight
* (1957) Skins! Bongo Party with Les Baxter
* (1957) Round the World with Les Baxter
* (1957) Midnight on the Cliffs
* (1957) Ports of Pleasure
* (1958) Space Escapade
* (1958) Selections from Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific
* (1958) Confetti
* (1958) Love is a Fabulous Thing
* (1959) African Jazz
* (1959) Les Baxter's Jungle Jazz
* (1959) Les Baxter's Wild Guitars
* (1959) Barbarian (Goliath and the Barbarians) [OST]
* (1960) The Sacred Idol [OST]
* (1960) House Of Usher / The Fall Of The House Of Usher [OST]
* (1960) Les Baxter's Teen Drums
* (1960) Baxter's Best
* (1960) Young Pops
* (1961) Broadway '61
* (1961) Alakazam the Great [OST]
* (1961) Jewels of the Sea
* (1961) Master of the World [OST]
* (1961) Wild Hi-Fi Drums / Wild Stereo Drums
* (1962) Sensational!
* (1962) Exotica Suite
* (1962) Voices in Rhythm
* (1962) The Primitive and the Passionate
* (1962) The Fabulous Sounds of Les Baxter: Strings, Guitars, Voices!
* (1963) Les Baxter's Balladeers
* (1963) The Academy Award Winners
* (1963) The Soul of the Drums
* (1966) Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966) [OST]
* (1966) The Forum: The River is Wide
* (1966) Brazil Now
* (1967) Love is Blue
* (1967) African Blue
* (1968) Moog Rock
* (1968) Hell's Belles [OST]
* (1969) All the Loving Couples [OST]
* (1969) Bora Bora [OST]
* (1969) Bugaloo in Brazil
* (1970) Que Mango!
* (1970) Million Seller Hits
* (1970) Cry of the Banshee [OST]
* (1971) Music of the Devil God Cult: Strange Sounds from Dunwich - The Dunwich Horror [OST]
* (1973) Black Sabbath (1963) [OST]
* (1975) Movie Themes
* (1975) Hit Songs from Spain
* (1978) Born Again
* (1995) The Lost Episode of Les Baxter (1961) [Original Television Soundtrack]
* (1996) By Popular Request
* (1996) The Exotic Moods Of Les Baxter

Singles

* (1952) Blue Tango
* (1953) I Love Paris
* (1953) April In Portugal
* (1955) Unchained Melody
* (1955) Medic
* (1955) Wake The Town And Tell The People
* (1956) Foreign Intrigue
* (1956) The Poor People Of Paris
* (1959) Dance, Everyone Dance
* (1960) Pepe

Soundtrack: The Raven

2012-01-07T13:23:00.005-07:00

I collect soundtracks - of movies that I've seen and liked, or at the very least of movies that I'd've liked to have seen. This separates me from the majority of soundtrack collectors, I think. They seem to collect music just because they like a certain composer -- they have no interest in seeing the film from which the movie came!

My collection is not large, indeed it's extremely small.

One reason it's small is because most of my soundtracks were vinyl records that I purchased in the 70s and 80s, and in the process of many moves these were lost. I used to have the original Star Wars soundtracks, for example, and Star Trek, etc. etc. etc.

I've only recently started adding to that lost collection, and re-acquiring that old collection via CD - purchasing them from Ebay and Amazon's used music service. (I do feel guilty about that. If I were the producer of a new CD or record, and found that my sales were being cut into by Amazon offering used CDs on the same page, I'd be pretty torqued. But as a collector of many, many things, whose discretionary funds do not really include funds for music CDs, I have to go with used copies.)

Anyway, today I received The Raven/An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe - both composed by Les Baxter, from Kritzerland. They are a small label who have done about 100 soundtracks... the vast majority of their stuff is not science fiction related and is of no interest to me.

I shall start this series of articles on soundtracks with the three from Kritzerland that I have, then list the 3 sf-related ones that they've done that I don't want, but offer up as knowledge to other potential SF soundtrack collector) before moving on to my other soundtracks.

Well, The Raven isn't science fiction , but rather fantasy, but it, and An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe, did star Vincent Price, and I'm a fan of Price's. Indeed, I'd like to assemble soundtracks from all his movies - but he made so many and I doubt if more than a handful are available... well, that would make it easy to assemble a collection, anyway!

According to the Kritzerland folks, they could find only one of the two original reels that the music for this movie was on, which is why they fleshed out the CD with music from An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe.

On its own, I don't know that I'd care for this music, but because I've seen both movies (and indeed, have them on DVD), when I hear a certain track I can call to mind the action in the movie that goes with it, and it's that conjunction of memory and music that makes this fun to listen to.

(Vincent Price plays Erasmus Craven, a sorcerer who lives in a castle with his daughter. He is meek and mild - drinks milk and spends his time studying and mourning his dead wife, Lenore. He is visited by a raven who can talk - Peter Lorre. Craven learns that sorcerer Dr. Bedlo (Lorre) was turned into a raven by his arch nemesis - Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff). Bedlo also tells him that he saw his wife, Lenore, in Scarabus' castle! So he and Bedlo, and his daughter and Bedlo's son (played by a young Jack Nicholson) set off for the castle to defeat Scarabus. But all is not as it appears.)

This CD is sold out at Kritzerland (they only made 1000 copies) but is available at other soundtrack websites as Intrada.com

The liner notes, as usual for a Kritzerland release, are disappointing for those who want to be educated about the music, and don't need to be told anything about the film! (The more so since the guy who does these things is very knowledgeable about music. But he prefers to hoard that knowledge, I guess.) For those who are "casual" fans of the movie, the liner notes are of interest to expand their knowledge of it.

The Life of Forry, by Deborah Painter

2011-12-16T17:57:00.004-07:00

I have reviewed Forry: The Life of Forrest J. Ackerman, by Deborah Painter, in the e-pages of The Thunderchild (thethunderchild.com, and now share it here.

When Jefferson Davis became President of the Confederate States of America, one of his admirers said, "The man and the hour have met." The implication being that Davis was the best possible man for the job. This turned out to not be true, however, Davis had plenty of detractors then and now who thought he was totally the wrong person to lead the fledgling country through the Civil War.

The same can not be said for Forrest J. Ackerman. He was born in 1916, and thus, was in on everything from the beginning - the perfection of silent movies, the coming of sound, the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction, the first fan club, founded by Forry himself, and the first fan conventions.

In the 1930s and 40s, from the 60s even up to the 70s and 80s, no one, least of all the movie makers concerned, thought that props, costumes and sets from movies were worth saving. With Forry Ackerman, it was very much the "man and the hour" meeting. Forry corresponded with many film makers, asking for props and posters and so on (beginning with Carl Laemmle.) Many of these film makers obliged, and Forryassembled quite a collection of material that otherwise would have been destroyed.

Forry is perhaps most famous as being the editor of the seminal magazine, The Famous Monsters of Filmland, published by James Warren. The magazine debuted in 1958 and ran until 1983. (Its resurrection, by Ray Ferry, in 1993, would prove not to be a happy one for Forry.)

Forry's success with Famous Monsters of Filmland is actually ironic, as science fiction rather than horror was actually his first and main love. Indeed, Warren put out the magazine Spacemen which attempted to do for sci fi what FM did for horror, but it was not a success and folded after 8 issues.)

Forry is also well known as a friend of the "two Rays" - Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury, meeting each at the very start of their careers, and in Bradbury's case, helping him along. Forry also knew the other great sci fi luminary (well, in this case, SF luminary) as Isaac Asimov.

In Forry: The Life of Forrest J. Ackerman, Deborah Painter shares stories from that life. In the best tradition of biographers, she starts with Forry's grandparents, and moves onward from there.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword: Marching to the Beast of a Different Drummer, by Joe Moe
Preface
1. Forry's Background, Family and Early Years
2. "I Couldn't Sleep with Marlene Dietrich!"
3. Sergeant Ack-Ack
4. The 1950s - Forry's Rise to Fame
5. The 1960s - Forrest J. Ackerman, Movie Actor
6. The 1970s - Colleges, Conventions and Creatures
7. The 1980s - the Best of Times, the Worst of Times
8. The 1990s - Pinnacles of Achievement
9. The 2000s - Documentarian and Octogenarian
Five Personal reminiscences: Martin Powell, Paul Knight, Rick Atkins, David Hawk and Jim Morrow
Chapter Notes
A Brief Bio-bibliography
Bibliography
Index

Author Deborah Painter was a friend of Forry's for 20 years, and her biography is full of warmth and affection. Unfortunately, it could have benefited from a bit of work by an editor. The biography moves along at a fast clip...so that many events are glossed over, and some events are gone into in too much detail.

For example, Forry was married to Wendayne (Wendy) Wahrman. Her real first name was Mathilde, but Forry nicknamed her "Wendayne," and "always referred to her thereafter as Wendy."

Why Wendayne? Where did that name come from? Inquiring minds want to know!

Inserted right after that comment about Wednayne is a single sentence paragraph, quite out of the blue and apropos nothing that had gone before and nothing that went afterward:

"Forry took one alcoholic drink at the age of 30 and never drank again. He also never regretted that."

She then goes on to talk about fandom, and Forry's attempts to arrange conventions.

This kind of thing is prevalent throughout the book.

Having said that, these kinds of undeveloped non-sequiturs are a mere bagatelle. Forry led a fascinating life and Painter gives us a good view of it (including the Ackermansion and later the Ackerminimansion that housed Forry's collection of memorabilia.

In 1993 Ray Ferry brought Famous Monsters of Filmland back to life and invited Forry to be editor. Their relationship was not a happy one, culminating in Forry suing the new publisher for defamation of character. Painter covers this sorry time, then ends the book by sharing reminisces from five of Forry's admirers and friends: Martin Powell, Paul Knight, Rick Atkins, David Hawk and Jim Morrow.

The book is also chock full of photographs, of Forry as a young man, with his wife, members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, Robert Bloch, Basil Gogos, the interior of the Ackermansionat various conventions, and so on.

I recommend this book highly for any genre fan.

3 Jan, 2012, Cleveland, OH - Meet an Astronaut

2011-12-15T14:03:00.000-07:00

Join the International Women's Air and Space Museum (located at Burke Airport in Cleveland, Ohio) in partnership with NASA Glenn Research Center, on Tuesday, January 3, 2012, at 7:00pm, for a special presentation by Astronaut Catherine "Cady" Coleman.

This past May, Coleman returned home after 159 days aboard the International Space Station, as a member of the Expedition 26 crew. In addition, Cady was a mission specialist on STS-73 and was lead mission specialist on STS-93 for the deployment of the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Following the presentation, Cady will be available for a brief autograph session. The event is free and open to the public. A reservation is required to attend the event. Please RSVP at 216-623-1111. Seating is limited.

DATE: 1/3/2012
TIME: 7:00pm-8:30pm
LOCATION: International Women's Air & Space Museum
MORE: Autograph session begins promptly at 8:00pm
RESERVATIONS ARE REQUIRED FOR THIS FREE EVENT
Call 216-623-1111 to reserve your seat today!

Thundercats, Season One, Book One

2011-12-06T04:14:00.000-07:00

Press Release

Spring into action with the first eight episodes of the new hit series as ThunderCats is unleashed on DVD October 18.

Join Lion-O, Panthro, Cheetara and more as Warner Home Video releases ThunderCats: Season 1, Book 1 on DVD October 18, 2011. The two disc set features the first eight action-packed episodes of the new anime-inspired feline fantasy from Warner Brothers Animation, based on the 1980s animated classic. The DVD is priced to own at $19.97.

ThunderCats presents the grand origin story of Prince Lion-O's ascension to the throne - and those who would thwart his destiny at any cost - and takes on epic dimensions in this sharp new telling. As the forces of good and evil battle each other in the quest for the fabled Stones of Power, Lion-O and his champions learn valuable lessons of loyalty, honor, and mortality.

The 21st century re-imagining marks a creative collaboration between Warner Brothers Animation and Studio 4C, one of the most vibrant animation studios in Japan, giving the orginal characters a new cutting-edge look while remaining true to the compelling storylines and mythology of the series.

Starring the voice talents of: Will Friedle, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Madeleine Hall, Satomi Kohrogi, Matthew Mercer, Eamon Pirruccello, Kevin Michael Richardson, Dee Bradley Baker, Clancy Brown, Corey Burton, Robin Atkins Downs, and Larry Kenney.

Executivve producer Sam Register. Produced by Michael Jelenic and Ethan Spalding.

Episodes
1. Omens, Part 1
2. Omens, Part 2
3. Ramlak Rising
4. Song of the Petaliers
5. Old Friends
6. Journey to the Tower of Omens
7. Legacy
8. The Duelist and the Drifter

In English, with Spanish and French subtitles.

Approximate running time for all 8 episodes: 88 minutes!

Pop Culture Books From McFarland. Pg 1

2011-12-04T20:45:00.003-07:00

I received my McFarland catalog the other day... they're the folks who publish very scholarly books on TV series, movies and so on, in hard cover, so that the average cost for one of their books is $50.

Their URL: http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/

Here's the list of their books in this catalog, advertised as "Great Holiday Ideas."

There are a lot of them, so I'll share a page of titles a day.

--The Stewart/Colbert Effect, edited by Amarnath Amarasingham
--Picturing Tolkien: Essays on Peter Jackson The Lord of the Rings Film TRilogy, edited by Janice Bogstad
--Andrew V. McLaglen: The Life and Hollywood Career, by Stephen B. Armstrong
--Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture, edited by Stephanie Boluk
--Robert Altman: Critical Essays. Edited by Rick Armstrong
--The Television World of Pushing Daisies: Critical Essays on the Bryan Fuller series, edited by Alissa Burger
--Welsh Mythology and Folklore in Popular Culture: Essays on Adaptions in Literature, Film, Television and Digital Media. Edited by Audrey Becker
--The Fairy Tale and Anime: Traditional Themes, Images and Symbols at Play on Screen, by Dani Cavallaro
--Jesse James and the Moves, by Johnny D. Boggs
--The Pather Panchali of Satyajit Ray: An Illustrated Study, by Surendar Chawdhary.

Wow! Someone reads my Facebook page!

2011-11-22T10:25:00.002-07:00

A few days ago I ressurected my Facebook page which I'd created a couple years ago. I'd never seen any benefit from it.

I decided I'd try once again to use it to promote my two websites - The Thunder Chld and Winged Victory - as well as to try to promote my writing.

Well, posting links to my Kindle books at Amazon did no good, but yesterday I posted a link to an interview with Cheryl Henderson (wife of Robert Henderson, warbird sculptor), and as of 10.29 am mountain time, 11 people have looked at it, via the Facebook link.

So let's hope this is the beginning of bigger and better things.

I've also got a MySpace page...maybe I'll try to resurrect that... and Twitter.

So we'll see how it goes...

Tardis Keys on Ebay

2011-11-19T12:09:00.003-07:00

I ordered a Tom Baker-era Tardis key from the Intergalactic Trading Co, on Ebay, for only $12.95, got it today, and was disappointed.

Oh, it's a Tardis key, but a cheap imitation. My metallurgic skills are not such that I can tell what it's made of... bright shiny, thick ...aluminum?.

It doesn't have the right feel or look (oh, it's got the raised design on the front and the inset design on the back, but it's too shiny, and too light. Feels like aluminum instead of what it should feel like - pewter? Something).

I have had Tardis keys before - the definite article - that I got over 20 years ago. Unfortunately my mom seemed to have a hatred of Tardis keys, and on the two times that I'd loaned her my car keys - which had the Tardis key attached, she lost the key - and the keys - both times! What's up with that?

Anyway, there are a couple of folks on ebay who sell Tardis keys. I chose these folks because they were only charging $12.95. Another company was charging $30... and I wonder if they were selling "the real deal."

I wont't return the key...it makes a nice hanging display... but if it had been the real thing...it'd be on my keychain right now...

Also available at Ebay is the Tardis key used during the Sylvester McCoy era:

Girl in the Golden Atom, by Ray Cummings, ch 2

2011-11-08T00:05:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER II

INTO THE RING

The cigars were lighted and dinner over before the Doctor broached the subject uppermost in the minds of every member of the party.

"A toast, gentlemen," he said, raising his glass. "To the greatest research chemist in the world. May he be successful in his adventure to-night."

The Chemist bowed his acknowledgment.

"You have not heard me yet," he said smiling.

"But we want to," said the Very Young Man impulsively.

"And you shall." He settled himself more comfortably in his chair. "Gentlemen, I am going to tell you, first, as simply as possible, just what I have done in the past two years. You must draw your own conclusions from the evidence I give you.

"You will remember that I told you last week of my dilemma after the destruction of the microscope. Its loss and the impossibility of replacing it, led me into still bolder plans than merely the visual examination of this minute world. I reasoned, as I have told you, that because of its physical proximity, its similar environment, so to speak, this outer world should be capable of supporting life identical with our own.

"By no process of reasoning can I find adequate refutation of this theory. Then, again, I had the evidence of my own eyes to prove that a being I could not tell from one of my own kind was living there. That this girl, other than in size, differs radically from those of our race, I cannot believe.

"I saw then but one obstacle standing between me and this other world--the discrepancy of size. The distance separating our world from this other is infinitely great or infinitely small, according to the viewpoint. In my present size it is only a few feet from here to the ring on that plate. But to an inhabitant of that other world, we are as remote as the faintest stars of the heavens, diminished a thousand times."

He paused a moment, signing the waiter to leave the room.

"This reduction of bodily size, great as it is, involves no deeper principle than does a light contraction of tissue, except that it must be carried further. The problem, then, was to find a chemical, sufficiently unharmful to life, that would so act upon the body cells as to cause a reduction in bulk, without changing their shape. I had to secure a uniform and also a proportionate rate of contraction of each cell, in order not to have the body shape altered.

"After a comparatively small amount of research work, I encountered an apparently insurmountable obstacle. As you know, gentlemen, our living
human bodies are held together by the power of the central intelligence we call the mind. Every instant during your lifetime your subconscious mind is commanding and directing the individual life of each cell that makes up your body. At death this power is withdrawn; each cell is thrown under its own individual command, and dissolution of the body takes place.

"I found, therefore, that I could not act upon the cells separately, so long as they were under control of the mind. On the other hand, I could not withdraw this power of the subconscious mind without causing death.

"I progressed no further than this for several months. Then came the solution. I reasoned that after death the body does not immediately disintegrate; far more time elapses than I expected to need for the cell-contraction. I devoted my time, then to finding a chemical that would temporarily withhold, during the period of cell-contraction, the power of the subconscious mind, just as the power of the conscious mind is withheld by hypnotism.

"I am not going to weary you by trying to lead you through the maze of chemical experiments into which I plunged. Only one of you," he
indicated the Doctor, "has the technical basis of knowledge to follow me. No one had been before me along the path I traversed. I pursued the method of pure theoretical deduction, drawing my conclusions from the practical results obtained.

"I worked on rabbits almost exclusively. After a few weeks I succeeded in completely suspending animation in one of them for several hours. There was no life apparently existing during that period. It was not a trance or coma, but the complete simulation of death. No harmful results followed the revivifying of the animal. The contraction of the cells was far more difficult to accomplish; I finished my last experiment less than six months ago."

"Then you really have been able to make an animal infinitely small?" asked the Big Business Man.

The Chemist smiled. "I sent four rabbits into the unknown last week," he said.

"What did they look like going?" asked the Very Young Man. The Chemist signed him to be patient.

"The quantity of diminution to be obtained bothered me considerably. Exactly how small that other universe is, I had no means of knowing, except by the computations I made of the magnifying power of my lens. These figures, I know, must necessarily be very inaccurate. Then, again, I have no means of judging by the visual rate of diminution of these rabbits, whether this contraction is at a uniform rate or accelerated. Nor can I tell how long it is prolonged, for the quantity of drug administered, as only a fraction of the diminution has taken place when the animal passes beyond the range of any microscope I now possess.

"These questions were overshadowed, however, by a far more serious problem that encompassed them all.

"As I was planning to project myself into this unknown universe and to reach the exact size proportionate to it, I soon realized such a result could not be obtained were I in an unconscious state. Only by successive doses of the drug, or its retardent about which I will tell you later, could I hope to reach the proper size. Another necessity is that I place myself on the exact spot on that ring where I wish to enter and to climb down among its atoms when I have become sufficiently small to do so. Obviously, this would be impossible to one not possessing all his faculties and physical strength."

"And did you solve that problem, too?" asked the Banker.

"I'd like to see it done," he added, reading his answer in the other's confident smile.

The Chemist produced two small paper packages from his wallet. "These drugs are the result of my research," he said. "One of them causes contraction, and the other expansion, by an exact reversal of the process. Taken together, they produce no effect, and a lesser amount of one retards the action of the other." He opened the papers, showing two small vials. "I have made them as you see, in the form of tiny pills, each containing a minute quantity of the drug. It is by taking them successively in unequal amounts that I expect to reach the desired size."

"There's one point that you do not mention," said the Doctor. "Those vials and their contents will have to change size as you do. How are you going to manage that?"

"By experimentation I have found," answered the Chemist, "that any object held in close physical contact with the living body being contracted is contracted itself at an equal rate. I believe that my clothes will be affected also. These vials I will carry strapped under my armpits."

"Suppose you should die, or be killed, would the contraction cease?" asked the Doctor.

"Yes, almost immediately," replied the Chemist. "Apparently, though I am acting through the subconscious mind while its power is held in abeyance, when this power is permanently withdrawn by death, the drug no longer affects the individual cells. The contraction or expansion ceases almost at once."

The Chemist cleared a space before him on the table. "In a well-managed club like this," he said, "there should be no flies, but I see several around. Do you suppose we can catch one of them?"

"I can," said the Very Young Man, and forthwith he did.

The Chemist moistened a lump of sugar and laid it on the table before him. Then, selecting one of the smallest of the pills, he ground it to powder with the back of a spoon and sprinkled this powder on the sugar.

"Will you give me the fly, please?"

The Very Young Man gingerly did so. The Chemist held the insect by its wings over the sugar. "Will someone lend me one of his shoes?"

The Very Young Man hastily slipped off a dancing pump.

"Thank you," said the Chemist, placing it on the table with a quizzical smile.

The rest of the company rose from their chairs and gathered around, watching with interested faces what was about to happen.

"I hope he is hungry," remarked the Chemist, and placed the fly gently down on the sugar, still holding it by the wings. The insect, after a moment, ate a little.

Silence fell upon the group as each watched intently. For a few moments nothing happened. Then, almost imperceptibly at first, the fly became larger. In another minute it was the size of a large horse-fly, struggling to release its wings from the Chemist's grasp. A minute more and it was the size of a beetle. No one spoke. The Banker moistened his lips, drained his glass hurriedly and moved slightly farther away. Still the insect grew; now it was the size of a small chicken, the multiple lens of its eyes presenting a most terrifying aspect, while its ferocious droning reverberated through the room. Then suddenly the Chemist threw it upon the table, covered it with a napkin, and beat it violently with the slipper. When all movement had ceased he tossed its quivering body into a corner of the room.

"Good God!" ejaculated the Banker, as the white-faced men stared at each other. The quiet voice of the Chemist brought them back to themselves. "That, gentlemen, you must understand, was only a fraction of the very first stage of growth. As you may have noticed, it was constantly accelerated. This acceleration attains a speed of possibly fifty thousand times that you observed. Beyond that, it is my theory, the change is at a uniform rate." He looked at the body of the fly, lying inert on the floor. "You can appreciate now, gentlemen, the importance
of having this growth cease after death."

"Good Lord, I should say so!" murmured the Big Business Man, mopping his forehead. The Chemist took the lump of sugar and threw it into the open fire.

"Gosh!" said the Very Young Man, "suppose when we were not looking, another fly had----"

"Shut up!" growled the Banker.

"Not so skeptical now, eh, George?" said the Big Business Man.

"Can you catch me another fly?" asked the Chemist. The Very Young Man hastened to do so. "The second demonstration, gentlemen," said the Chemist, "is less spectacular, but far more pertinent than the one you have just witnessed." He took the fly by the wings, and prepared another lump of sugar, sprinkling a crushed pill from the other vial upon it.

"When he is small enough I am going to try to put him on the ring, if he will stay still," said the Chemist.

The Doctor pulled the plate containing the ring forward until it was directly under the light, and every one crowded closer to watch; already the fly was almost too small to be held. The Chemist tried to set it on the ring, but could not; so with his other hand he brushed it lightly into the plate, where it lay, a tiny black speck against the gleaming whiteness of the china.

"Watch it carefully, gentlemen," he said, as they bent closer.

"It's gone," said the Big Business Man.

"No, I can still see it," said the Doctor. Then he raised the plate closer to his face. "Now it's gone," he said.

The Chemist sat down in his chair. "It's probably still there, only too small for you to see. In a few minutes, if it took a sufficient amount
of the drug, it will be small enough to fall between the molecules of the plate."

"Do you suppose it will find another inhabited universe down there?" asked the Very Young Man.

"Who knows," smiled the Chemist. "Very possibly it will. But the one we are interested in is here," he added, touching the ring.

"Is it your intention to take this stuff yourself to-night?" asked the
Big Business Man.

"If you will give me your help, I think so, yes. I have made all arrangements. The club has given us this room in absolute privacy for forty-eight hours. Your meals will be served here when you want them, and I am going to ask you, gentlemen, to take turns watching and guarding the ring during that time. Will you do it?"

"I should say we would," cried the Doctor, and the others nodded assent.

"It is because I wanted you to be convinced of my entire sincerity that I have taken you so thoroughly into my confidence. Are those doors locked?" The Very Young Man locked them.

"Thank you," said the Chemist, starting to disrobe. In a moment he stood before them attired in a woolen bathing-suit of pure white. Over his shoulders was strapped tightly a narrow leather harness, supporting two silken pockets, one under each armpit. Into each of these he placed one of the vials, first laying four pills from one of them upon the table.

At this point the Banker rose from his chair and selected another in the further corner of the room. He sank into it a crumpled heap and wiped the beads of perspiration from his face with a shaking hand.

"I have every expectation," said the Chemist, "that this suit and harness will contract in size uniformly with me. If the harness should not, then I shall have to hold the vials in my hand."

On the table, directly under the light, he spread a large silk handkerchief, upon which he placed the ring. He then produced a teaspoon, which he handed to the Doctor.

"Please listen carefully," he said, "for perhaps the whole success of my adventure, and my life itself, may depend upon your actions during the next few minutes. You will realize, of course, that when I am still large enough to be visible to you I shall be so small that my voice may be inaudible. Therefore, I want you to know, now, just what to expect.

"When I am something under a foot high, I shall step upon that handkerchief, where you will see my white suit plainly against its black surface. When I become less than an inch high, I shall run over to the ring and stand beside it. When I have diminished to about a quarter of an inch, I shall climb upon it, and, as I get smaller, will follow its surface until I come to the scratch.

"I want you to watch me very closely. I may miscalculate the time and wait until I am too small to climb upon the ring. Or I may fall off. In either case, you will place that spoon beside me and I will climb into it. You will then do your best to help me get on the ring. Is all this quite clear?"

The Doctor nodded assent.

"Very well, watch me as long as I remain visible. If I have an accident,
I shall take the other drug and endeavor to return to you at once. This you must expect at any moment during the next forty-eight hours. Under all circumstances, if I am alive, I shall return at the expiration of that time.

"And, gentlemen, let me caution you most solemnly, do not allow that ring to be touched until that length of time has expired. Can I depend on you?"

"Yes," they answered breathlessly.

"After I have taken the pills," the Chemist continued, "I shall not speak unless it is absolutely necessary. I do not know what my sensations will be, and I want to follow them as closely as possible." He then turned out all the lights in the room with the exception of the center electrolier, that shone down directly on the handkerchief and ring.

The Chemist looked about him. "Good-by, gentlemen," he said, shaking hands all round. "Wish me luck," and without hesitation he placed the four pills in his mouth and washed them down with a swallow of water.

Silence fell on the group as the Chemist seated himself and covered his face with his hands. For perhaps two minutes the tenseness of the silence was unbroken, save by the heavy breathing of the Banker as he lay huddled in his chair.

"Oh, my God! He _is_ growing smaller!" whispered the Big Business Man in a horrified tone to the Doctor. The Chemist raised his head and smiled at them. Then he stood up, steadying himself against a chair. He was less than four feet high. Steadily he grew smaller before their horrified eyes. Once he made, as if to speak, and the Doctor knelt down beside him. "It's all right, good-by," he said in a tiny voice.

Then he stepped upon the handkerchief. The Doctor knelt on the floor beside it, the wooden spoon ready in his hand, while the others, except the Banker, stood behind him. The figure of the Chemist, standing motionless near the edge of the handkerchief, seemed now like a little white wooden toy, hardly more than an inch in height.

Waving his hand and smiling, he suddenly started to walk and then ran swiftly over to the ring. By the time he reached it, somewhat out of breath, he was little more than twice as high as the width of its band.
Without pausing, he leaped up, and sat astraddle, leaning over and holding to it tightly with his hands. In another moment he was on his feet, on the upper edge of the ring, walking carefully along its circumference towards the scratch.

The Big Business Man touched the Doctor on the shoulder and tried to smile. "He's making it," he whispered. As if in answer the little figure turned and waved its arms. They could just distinguish its white outline against the gold surface underneath.

"I don't see him," said the Very Young Man in a scared voice.

"He's right near the scratch," answered the Doctor, bending closer.
Then, after a moment, "He's gone." He rose to his feet. "Good Lord! Why haven't we a microscope!"

"I never thought of that," said the Big Business Man, "we could have watched him for a long time yet."

"Well, he's gone now," returned the Doctor, "and there is nothing for us to do but wait."

"I hope he finds that girl," sighed the Very Young Man, as he sat chin in hand beside the handkerchief.

What is this love affair with the Lion King?

2011-11-07T13:57:00.002-07:00

I have to admit I have never understood why The Lion King is so popular.

I didn't like it when I first saw it and I really don't care to see it again.

Why.

Well...in one sense it was true to nature. Male lions lie around all day and sleep, female lions are the ones that go out and hunt and kill - then the male lion struts up and eats his fill, then the females and cubs get to eat what's left.

Well, that's nature. Can't blame animals for acting according to instinct.

But in the movie, all the animals were intelligent - anthropomorphized. Humanized. So we get the male lion who gets to be in charge - not just of the pride of lions but also the entire plains of Africa! And when Scar proves to be a total loser, the female lions don't kick him out themselves, the female lion goes in search of "the lion king" her old boyfriend, to rescue the pride and the animals.

Just grated on my nerves!

Fiction:The Girl in the Golden Atom, by Ray Cummings

2011-11-06T09:42:00.002-07:00

public domain, first published in 1922.

THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM
by Ray Cummings
CHAPTER I

A UNIVERSE IN AN ATOM
"Then you mean to say there is no such thing as the smallest particle of matter?" asked the Doctor.

"You can put it that way if you like," the Chemist replied. "In other words, what I believe is that things can be infinitely small just as well as they can be infinitely large. Astronomers tell us of the immensity of space. I have tried to imagine space as finite. It is impossible. How can you conceive the edge of space? Something must be beyond--something or nothing, and even that would be more space, wouldn't it?"

"Gosh," said the Very Young Man, and lighted another cigarette.

The Chemist resumed, smiling a little. "Now, if it seems probable that there is no limit to the immensity of space, why should we make its smallness finite? How can you say that the atom cannot be divided? As a matter of fact, it already has been. The most powerful microscope will show you realms of smallness to which you can penetrate no other way. Multiply that power a thousand times, or ten thousand times, and who shall say what you will see?"

The Chemist paused, and looked at the intent little group around him.

He was a youngish man, with large features and horn-rimmed glasses, his rough English-cut clothes hanging loosely over his broad, spare frame. The Banker drained his glass and rang for the waiter.

"Very interesting," he remarked.

"Don't be an ass, George," said the Big Business Man. "Just because you don't understand, doesn't mean there is no sense to it."

"What I don't get clearly"--began the Doctor.

"None of it's clear to me," said the Very Young Man.

The Doctor crossed under the light and took an easier chair. "You intimated you had discovered something unusual in these realms of the infinitely small," he suggested, sinking back luxuriously. "Will you tell us about it?"

"Yes, if you like," said the Chemist, turning from one to the other. A nod of assent followed his glance, as each settled himself more comfortably.

"Well, gentlemen, when you say I have discovered something unusual in another world--in the world of the infinitely small--you are right in a way. I have seen something and lost it. You won't believe me probably," he glanced at the Banker an instant, "but that is not important. I am going to tell you the facts, just as they happened."

The Big Business Man filled up the glasses all around, and the Chemist resumed:

"It was in 1910, this problem first came to interest me. I had never gone in for microscopic work very much, but now I let it absorb all my attention. I secured larger, more powerful instruments--I spent most of my money," he smiled ruefully, "but never could I come to the end of the space into which I was looking. Something was always hidden beyond--something I could almost, but not quite, distinguish.

"Then I realized that I was on the wrong track. My instrument was not merely of insufficient power, it was not one-thousandth the power I needed.

"So I began to study the laws of optics and lenses. In 1913 I went abroad, and with one of the most famous lens-makers of Europe I produced a lens of an entirely different quality, a lens that I hoped would give me what I wanted. So I returned here and fitted up my microscope that I knew would prove vastly more powerful than any yet constructed.

"It was finally completed and set up in my laboratory, and one night I went in alone to look through it for the first time. It was in the fall of 1914, I remember, just after the first declaration of war.

"I can recall now my feelings at that moment. I was about to see into another world, to behold what no man had ever looked on before. What would I see? What new realms was I, first of all our human race, to enter? With furiously beating heart, I sat down before the huge instrument and adjusted the eyepiece.

"Then I glanced around for some object to examine. On my finger I had a ring, my mother's wedding-ring, and I decided to use that. I have it here." He took a plain gold band from his little finger and laid it on the table.

"You will see a slight mark on the outside. That is the place into which I looked."

His friends crowded around the table and examined a scratch on one side of the band.

"What did you see?" asked the Very Young Man eagerly.

"Gentlemen," resumed the Chemist, "what I saw staggered even my own imagination. With trembling hands I put the ring in place, looking directly down into that scratch. For a moment I saw nothing. I was like a person coming suddenly out of the sunlight into a darkened room. I knew there was something visible in my view, but my eyes did not seem able to receive the impressions. I realize now they were not yet adjusted to the new form of light. Gradually, as I looked, objects of definite shape began to emerge from the blackness.

"Gentlemen, I want to make clear to you now--as clear as I can--the peculiar aspect of everything that I saw under this microscope. I seemed to be inside an immense cave. One side, near at hand, I could now make out quite clearly. The walls were extraordinarily rough and indented, with a peculiar phosphorescent light on the projections and blackness in the hollows. I say phosphorescent light, for that is the nearest word I can find to describe it--a curious radiation, quite different from the reflected light to which we are accustomed.

"I said that the hollows inside of the cave were blackness. But not blackness--the absence of light--as we know it. It was a blackness that seemed also to radiate light, if you can imagine such a condition; a blackness that seemed not empty, but merely withholding its contents just beyond my vision.

"Except for a dim suggestion of roof over the cave, and its floor, I could distinguish nothing. After a moment this floor became clearer. It seemed to be--well, perhaps I might call it black marble--smooth, glossy, yet somewhat translucent. In the foreground the floor was apparently liquid. In no way did it differ in appearance from the solid part, except that its surface seemed to be in motion.

"Another curious thing was the outlines of all the shapes in view. I noticed that no outline held steady when I looked at it directly; it seemed to quiver. You see something like it when looking at an object through water--only, of course, there was no distortion. It was also like looking at something with the radiation of heat between.

"Of the back and other side of the cave, I could see nothing, except in one place, where a narrow effulgence of light drifted out into the immensity of the distance behind.

"I do not know how long I sat looking at this scene; it may have been several hours. Although I was obviously in a cave, I never felt shut in--never got the impression of being in a narrow, confined space.

"On the contrary, after a time I seemed to feel the vast immensity of the blackness before me. I think perhaps it may have been that path of light stretching out into the distance. As I looked it seemed like the reversed tail of a comet, or the dim glow of the Milky Way, and penetrating to equally remote realms of space.

"Perhaps I fell asleep, or at least there was an interval of time during which I was so absorbed in my own thoughts I was hardly conscious of the scene before me.

"Then I became aware of a dim shape in the foreground--a shape merged with the outlines surrounding it. And as I looked, it gradually assumed form, and I saw it was the figure of a young girl, sitting beside the liquid pool. Except for the same waviness of outline and phosphorescent glow, she had quite the normal aspect of a human being of our own world. She was beautiful, according to our own standards of beauty; her long braided hair a glowing black, her face, delicate of feature and winsome in expression. Her lips were a deep red, although I felt rather than saw the colour.

"She was dressed only in a short tunic of a substance I might describe as gray opaque glass, and the pearly whiteness of her skin gleamed with iridescence.

"She seemed to be singing, although I heard no sound. Once she bent over the pool and plunged her hand into it, laughing gaily.

"Gentlemen, I cannot make you appreciate my emotions, when all at once I remembered I was looking through a microscope. I had forgotten entirely my situation, absorbed in the scene before me. And then, abruptly, a great realization came upon me--the realization that everything I saw was inside that ring. I was unnerved for the moment at the importance of my discovery.

"When I looked again, after the few moments my eye took to become accustomed to the new form of light, the scene showed itself as before, except that the girl had gone.

"For over a week, each night at the same time I watched that cave. The girl came always, and sat by the pool as I had first seen her. Once she danced with the wild grace of a wood nymph, whirling in and out the shadows, and falling at last in a little heap beside the pool.

"It was on the tenth night after I had first seen her that the accident happened. I had been watching, I remember, an unusually long time before she appeared, gliding out of the shadows. She seemed in a different mood, pensive and sad, as she bent down over the pool, staring into it intently. Suddenly there was a tremendous cracking sound, sharp as an explosion, and I was thrown backward upon the floor.

"When I recovered consciousness--I must have struck my head on something--I found the microscope in ruins. Upon examination I saw that its larger lens had exploded--flown into fragments scattered around the room. Why I was not killed I do not understand. The ring I picked up from the floor; it was unharmed and unchanged.

"Can I make you understand how I felt at this loss? Because of the war in Europe I knew I could never replace my lens--for many years, at any rate. And then, gentlemen, came the most terrible feeling of all; I knew at last that the scientific achievement I had made and lost counted for little with me. It was the girl. I realized then that the only being I ever could care for was living out her life with her world, and, indeed, her whole universe, in an atom of that ring."

The Chemist stopped talking and looked from one to the other of the tense faces of his companions.

"It's almost too big an idea to grasp," murmured the Doctor.

"What caused the explosion?" asked the Very Young Man.

"I do not know." The Chemist addressed his reply to the Doctor, as the most understanding of the group. "I can appreciate, though, that through that lens I was magnifying tremendously those peculiar light-radiations that I have described. I believe the molecules of the lens were shattered by them--I had exposed it longer to them that evening than any of the others."

The Doctor nodded his comprehension of this theory.

Impressed in spite of himself, the Banker took another drink and leaned forward in his chair. "Then you really think that there is a girl now inside the gold of that ring?" he asked.

"He didn't say that necessarily," interrupted the Big Business Man.

"Yes, he did."

"As a matter of fact, I do believe that to be the case," said the Chemist earnestly. "I believe that every particle of matter in our universe contains within it an equally complex and complete a universe, which to its inhabitants seems as large as ours. I think, also that the whole realm of our interplanetary space, our solar system and all the remote stars of the heavens are contained within the atom of some other universe as gigantic to us as we are to the universe in that ring."

"Gosh!" said the Very Young Man.

"It doesn't make one feel very important in the scheme of things, does it?" remarked the Big Business Man dryly.

The Chemist smiled. "The existence of no individual, no nation, no world, nor any one universe is of the least importance."

"Then it would be possible," said the Doctor, "for this gigantic universe that contains us in one of its atoms, to be itself contained within the atom of another universe, still more gigantic, and so on."

"That is my theory," said the Chemist.

"And in each of the atoms of the rocks of that cave there may be other worlds proportionately minute?"

"I can see no reason to doubt it."

"Well, there is no proof, anyway," said the Banker. "We might as well believe it."

"I intend to get proof," said the Chemist.

"Do you believe all these innumerable universes, both larger and smaller than ours, are inhabited?" asked the Doctor.

"I should think probably most of them are. The existence of life, I believe, is as fundamental as the existence of matter without life."

"How do you suppose that girl got in there?" asked the Very Young Man, coming out of a brown study.

"What puzzled me," resumed the Chemist, ignoring the question, "is why the girl should so resemble our own race. I have thought about it a good deal, and I have reached the conclusion that the inhabitants of any universe in the next smaller or larger plane to ours probably resemble us fairly closely. That ring, you see, is in the same--shall we say--environment as ourselves. The same forces control it that control us. Now, if the ring had been created on Mars, for instance, I believe that the universes within its atoms would be inhabited by beings like the Martians--if Mars has any inhabitants. Of course, in planes beyond those next to ours, either smaller or larger, changes would probably occur, becoming greater as you go in or out from our own universe."

"Good Lord! It makes one dizzy to think of it," said the Big Business Man.

"I wish I knew how that girl got in there," sighed the Very Young Man, looking at the ring.

"She probably didn't," retorted the Doctor. "Very likely she was created there, the same as you were here."

"I think that is probably so," said the Chemist. "And yet, sometimes I am not at all sure. She was very human." The Very Young Man looked at him sympathetically.

"How are you going to prove your theories?" asked the Banker, in his most irritatingly practical way.

The Chemist picked up the ring and put it on his finger. "Gentlemen," he said. "I have tried to tell you facts, not theories. What I saw through that ultramicroscope was not an unproven theory, but a fact. My theories you have brought out by your questions."

"You are quite right," said the Doctor; "but you did mention yourself that you hoped to provide proof."

The Chemist hesitated a moment, then made his decision. "I will tell you the rest," he said.

"After the destruction of the microscope, I was quite at a loss how to proceed. I thought about the problem for many weeks. Finally I decided to work along another altogether different line--a theory about which I am surprised you have not already questioned me."

He paused, but no one spoke.

"I am hardly ready with proof to-night," he resumed after a moment. "Will you all take dinner with me here at the club one week from to-night?" He read affirmation in the glance of each.

"Good. That's settled," he said, rising. "At seven, then."

"But what was the theory you expected us to question you about?" asked the Very Young Man.

The Chemist leaned on the back of his chair.

"The only solution I could see to the problem," he said slowly, "was to find some way of making myself sufficiently small to be able to enter that other universe. I have found such a way and one week from to-night, gentlemen, with your assistance, I am going to enter the surface of that ring at the point where it is scratched!"

The Detonator Is a Huge Science Fiction Motorcycle Brought to Electric Life

2011-11-02T04:03:00.002-07:00

From Gizmodo: The Detonator Is a Huge Science Fiction Motorcycle Brought to Electric Life
Daniel Simon designed the Light Cycles for Tron: Legacy and the vehicles for Captain America, but now one of his craziest concepts yet is coming to life in a street legal version. Let's hope no one kills themselves riding it.

The Detonator is an 11.5 foot electric motorcycle powered by a lithium-ion battery that gets 80-100 miles on a one-hour charge. The bike rips too—it's supposed to go up to 120 mph, but here's the thing: the Detonator probably isn't the easiest bike in the world to handle. The rider sits way in the back from where they have to maneuver a huge, elongated front-end that makes even showy custom choppers with long forks look puny.

The Detonator concept was drawn-up by Simon for his futuristic vehicle design company, Cosmic Motors, and it's being built by Parker Brothers Choppers, which also produced a run of real-life Light Cycles. Simon's website calls the Detonator a "street cruiser bike built for humanoid droids." (Does this guy have the coolest job ever or what?) Admittedly, that sounds more like science fiction than anything your dad is going to be driving around on the weekends, but if you've got $100,000 lying around, you can have a Detonator of your own

The 10 Most Mortifying Seasons of Science Fiction and Fantasy TV Shows

2011-11-01T15:57:00.000-07:00

From I09: The 10 Most Mortifying Seasons of Science Fiction and Fantasy TV Shows

The 10 Most Mortifying Seasons of Science Fiction and Fantasy TV ShowsTelevision shows are like sports teams: Sometimes they just have an off season. (And sometimes they just dive down a terrible hole and get trapped forever.) When a science fiction or fantasy show has a terrible no-good year, it's especially noticeable, because the fantastical plot devices get dumber and the world-building gets sloppier.

Almost every beloved science fiction or fantasy show will have a bad year, if it lasts long enough. But some shows have gone so far off course that "disappointment" doesn't begin to describe the experience of watching them. Here are 10 seasons of science fiction and fantasy TV that left us downright mortified. Spoilers ahead...

10) True Blood season four
Since this just aired, we'll be light on the spoilers. (You can always read our exhaustive recaps for the down and dirty on just where this show went so horribly wrong.) Suffice to say, this season felt like a horrible mockery of the previous years — it lacked a cool villain, and meanwhile Vampire Eric was mistreated in the worst way. Not to mention what happened to Jason.

The 10 Most Mortifying Seasons of Science Fiction and Fantasy TV Shows9) Space: 1999 season two
Some people would probably try to claim that this show was always campy, and the second season was just a continuation of the same ridiculous "Moon traveling through space fast enough to reach new planets every week but somehow the Moonbase inhabitants survive" storyline. But season one was at least creepy and weird, and seemed to be trying to do something a bit different and ambitious. Season two, meanwhile, was retooled into a terrible Star Trek copycat. (Not unlike the second season of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.) The addition of Maya the shapeshifter was sorta fun, but the plots became much less trippy and much more like standard TV space opera stories.

The 10 Most Mortifying Seasons of Science Fiction and Fantasy TV Shows8) Galactica 1980
Sure, the one season of the original Battlestar Galactica wasn't exactly a masterpiece — but Lords of Kobol, the one-season spinoff in which the Galactica finally discovers Earth was a veritable Viper-crash. From the zany flying motorcycles to the child savant, to the weird storyline where the Colonials give a small child a mind-control device to torment his classmates, to the whole "some Colonials want to give the Nazis super-technology" plot arc. And on and on. Not to mention the awful blow-dried Apollo and Starbuck replacements, Dylan and Troy. At least the original BSG is a fun Star Wars knock-off — this sequel is just soul-scarring.

The 10 Most Mortifying Seasons of Science Fiction and Fantasy TV Shows7) Alias season three
This is the "Sydney has amnesia and can't remember the last two years" season. Not to mention the "Vaughn is married to someone else, who's secretly evil but nobody can figure it out" season. The show just started to lurch off the rails, without nearly as much of a coherent mythology and less of an interesting setup than in the first two seasons. Even show creator J.J. Abrams reportedly admitted that the show got out of hand in its third season and had to be reined back in. (Although I can't find the interview where he said that, just people citing it in various articles.)

The 10 Most Mortifying Seasons of Science Fiction and Fantasy TV Shows6) Earth: Final Conflict season five
There should be a separate list for "shows that tried to revamp drastically in their final season, only to run into trouble." Consider that a running theme for the next few entries on this list in any case. (Another candidate: Sliders.) Earth: The Final Conflict had already abandoned a lot of its ideas after its first season (as this message-board poster points out) Basically, by season five, the entire cast of the show was pretty much gone, and so were the original antagonists, the Taelons — instead, they were replaced by some weird vampire aliens, and the show's new hero was a Buffy knock-off named Renee.

The 10 Most Mortifying Seasons of Science Fiction and Fantasy TV Shows5) The X-Files season nine
Annnd... then there's this show, in which they tried to keep it going without Fox Mulder. Instead, the show's creators had the brilliant idea of flipping the traditional Mulder/Scully dynamic, with Scully now being the true believer paired with a skeptical agent. But also, this show just sort of ran out of juice and no longer seemed to have any real stories to tell.

The 10 Most Mortifying Seasons of Science Fiction and Fantasy TV Shows4) Andromeda season five
Andromeda was nearly cancelled at the end of its fourth season, following a couple of years during which the show was limping creatively. (The original developer, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, had been forced out during season two, in the hopes of making the show less complex and more focused on Kevin Sorbo.) But instead of being put out of its misery, Andromeda was renewed for one last season by the Sci Fi Channel, except that the budget was slashed and the whole show was drastically reinvented — now, Dylan Hunt and friends were trapped in the small Seefra star system. All of the characters get drastically revamped, to the point where they're unrecognizeable, and meanwhile Dylan Hunt develops godlike powers over time and space because his father turns out to have been a Paradine. The end result is somewhat baffling and distressing.

The 10 Most Mortifying Seasons of Science Fiction and Fantasy TV Shows3) Heroes season three
This is a tough one to choose — why not Heroes season two, in which nothing much happens until the show is driven off a cliff by the writers' strike? Or season four, with the evil carnies and Sylar brainwashed to be Nathan? Still, season three stands out as the worst of the bunch, and causes the most headaches when you contemplate it, because the show was just trying so damn hard, and so many weird plot developments still feel like an icepick in the skull. The season was divided into two nonsensical "chapters," for maximum insanity, including the "Sylar becomes a good guy and everybody else becomes a bad guy" chapter. And the "mutants are rounded up and sent to Guantanamo, so we can have War on Terror metaphors" chapter. This was the season where we were promised President Worf and then the show gave us Boring Papa Petrelli instead.

The 10 Most Mortifying Seasons of Science Fiction and Fantasy TV Shows2) Doctor Who: Trial of a Time Lord
There are a few contenders for "most face-clawingly awful season of classic Doctor Who," but luckily "Trial of a Time Lord" leaves them all in the dust. Colin Baker's tenure as the Doctor had gotten off to a somewhat rocky start, and the show was skirting the edge of cancellation — so the producers decided the show was on trial, so its hero should be as well. Cue a dozen episodes of the Doctor and a group of Time Lords sitting around watching Doctor Who, while stopping every few minutes to comment on how crap it all is. And then there's the ending — first writer Robert Holmes died in the middle of writing episode 14, then the script editor rewrote the episode and then quit — leaving the show unable to use any of his story ideas for the season finale. The show hastily hired replacement writers, and gave them a weekend to write a new concluding episode from scratch. Resulting in the greatest line of dialogue ever: "You cannot prevent the catharsis of spurious morality!" (If only the season had ended on a cliffhanger as originally intended, they could have resolved it by introducing a new Doctor, instead of putting Sylvester McCoy in a blond wig.)

The 10 Most Mortifying Seasons of Science Fiction and Fantasy TV Shows1) Star Trek: The Next Generation season two
It's really hard to imagine that a show could get this bad in its second season and still come back for a third. Thank goodness for syndication, I guess. TNG's second season was hit by a writer's strike, so that Gene Roddenberry and company were digging around and repurposing old scripts for the nixed 1970s Trek show Phase Two, plus whatever else they could find. Meanwhile, due to behind-the-scenes tensions, Gates McFadden was replaced by Diana Muldaur, who was super-talented but had way less chemistry with the rest of the cast. The result was some of the most dreary storytelling that Star Trek has ever given us, including stories that clearly didn't fit this crew. This was the year of "Data learns stand-up comedy from Joe Piscopo," "Troi has a wacky pregnancy," "Riker gets trapped in a casino," etc. — culminating in the worst clip show ever, the "Riker relives his most emotional memories to get rid of a parasite" episode.

Gearzap - Gear for the Kindle

2011-10-27T13:33:00.000-07:00

There's a company in the UK that offers all kinds of covers for the Kindle, as well as IPads, for tablets and for Macbooks

http://www.gearzap.com/

They've got more stuff than you can shake a stick at.

The only caveat is that the descriptions of the products don't give dimensions - I ordered a Kindle cover for the "latest generation of Kindle" - only to find out it didn't fit (The "latest generation" are those ones without keyboards, mine has a keyboard but its a year or two old). That's my fault - if I'd taken a closer look at the Kindle in the illustration I would have seen that it didn't match my Kindle - it's the newer grey version rather than my older white one - and my doesn't it look clunky!

But since the Kindle isn't backlit, a cover with a light works nice!

They have a variety of clip on lights for the Kindle, for example (my major interest!,) so that if you already have a cover, you can just clip on with the light without having to buy a new cover.

Check 'em out today - you'll be surprised at how much stuff there is to make your Kindle experience more enjoyable! They are located in the UK but in this day and age of computers, you can order from them with no problem if you live in the US.

Moon Wars: International law could let China own the moon

2011-10-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

From Yahoo News: Moon Wars: International law could let China own the moon
With commercial spaceflight (literally) launching soon, the U.S. private sector isn't the only group stepping up its space game. China just sent its 8.5-ton Tiangong-1 space station module skyward, and now the country could be poised to stake out the moon for its own.

At the 2011 International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight, aerospace entrepreneur and commercial space expert Robert Bigelow made the case that the U.S. is just resting on its lunar laurels — and China might make a big move. In the scenario, China will continue to ramp up its space program for the next ten years, a trend the country has already expressed clear interest in pursuing. Then, based on murky international space laws, China could actually take ownership of the moon — especially if it were able to defend its claim with a constant lunar human presence. Of course, the U.S. could do the same, but is limited by a tightening space budget and a much higher level of national debt.

But who does own the moon? Technically, either no one or anyone who says they do. In 1967, the United Nations published a document (Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies) declaring that space is "the province of all mankind" and can't be divvied up, according to international space law. Many space-faring countries signed onto the agreement, but some enterprising commercial groups are still in the business of "selling" parcels of the moon to private entities, claiming that space law only applies to nations.

While the broader Outer Space Treaty found wide international support (China and the U.S. included) when it was drafted, nations have been reluctant to commit to a more recent U.N. document known as the Moon Treaty (or Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies). The treaty stipulates that no state can claim sovereignty over any territory of celestial bodies, but nations like China, the U.S. and Russia are conspicuously absent. To date only 13 nations have been signed on and ratified, none of which have an established space presence.

First photos of Russell Crow as Jor-el

2011-10-04T19:28:00.001-07:00

It's a British newspaper as opposed to an American one which may be why the reporting is a bit harsh...

But a male actor has actually been criticized for being "paunchy!" More than that, the article actually shows two photos of the guy standing sideways, just so we can see how paunchy he is!

I thought this kind of weight-scutiny and mockery only happened to female actors!

The guy is Russell Crowe, by the way, playing Jor-el, Superman's father, in the new "reboot" of the series, which sees Superman wearing some kind of stupid mesh suit - the same material that the reboot Spiderman's suit is made of. Looks stupid.

New book for the Kindle: The Hidden Crystal

2011-09-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

This is the link to the Amazon page to purchase the book via your computer. OR just use your Kindle to go to the Kindle Store and search under the title The Hidden Crystal.

Here's the description of The Hidden Crystal:

Sarac, a young student magician is beaten and cast aside when Alena, a priestess he loves is captured and carried off to sea by marauders who torch his village in search of the Crystal of Fire.

Sarac resolves to rescue Alena, though doesn’t realize that his urgent quest is part of a greater purpose; the Crystal of Fire is one of four Crystals of Power ancient Wizards created to prevent the terrible planetary upheaval their world suffers every one thousand years. Sarac must find the Crystals of Power and unite them before the Fall Equinox when the red planet Nibiru comes into alignment with their planet or all will be lost.

Naga, an evil sorcerer, who led his soldiers in search of the Crystal of Fire, seeks the Crystals of Power as well for a different purpose, to enslave all mankind and gain dominion over their world regardless of the devastation it will cause.

With the help of Joran, a wizard of immense power, Sarac faces increasing threats from the approaching cataclysm which is starting to rain destruction on their planet, and from Naga who is determined to retrieve the Crystals of Power at all costs. The urgency of their quest increases when Sarac learns that Naga is torturing Alena to get her to reveal the location of the remaining Crystals of Power. As the Fall Equinox approaches, Sarac struggles to unravel an ancient prophecy, defeat Naga, rescue Alena, and ultimately save their world from violent destruction.

Chapter One

Chapter 1: Land of the Golden Sun

Sweat ran down Sarac’s cheek as he raced down a narrow forest path, panicking as branches lashed his face. His boots crunched through virgin snow, now stained with drops of blood. He clutched his wounded chest and stopped suddenly, unsure of his surroundings. Nothing looked familiar.

Pale blue eyes stared out at the surroundings from a narrow face of sixteen seasons, framed by thin cheekbones. He ran a hand through his tousled blonde hair and shivered, pulling his coarse white robe tighter around him. This was supposed to be a training exercise and he was wholly unprepared for the climate. He pressed himself against the trunk of a tree as the sound of his pursuers passed close by, trying to remain as still as possible while his ragged breathing sent puffs of fog into the cold air.

Four shadows appeared around a bend in the trail. A thin boy with straw-colored hair and a sour expression on his face, wearing a white robe with a polished buckle of a golden sun stepped forward, followed closely by three other boys. “Which way did Sarac go?” came Braden’s surly voice. “I should have killed him when I had the chance. If he makes it back to the Temple of Inscriptions to tell the Elders what happened…”

Sarac picked up a small rock and threw it hard against a tree on the other side of the trail. It made a loud cracking sound as it struck the trunk.

“This way!” Braden shouted, leading the boys away from Sarac’s hiding place.
Sarac breathed a sigh of relief, and stumbled forward. Female voices drifted on the wind as Sarac’s feet snapped fallen branches. In a grassy clearing ahead, four girls were practicing their dancing. A chestnut-haired girl in a white dress caught his eye; her long, brown tresses flowed as her feet skimmed the ground. Sarac’s eyes widened as he watched, entranced as the girl spun and twirled, seeming to float across the meadow. She looked like an angel as the radiance of the sun cast a golden nimbus behind her, lighting up the edges of her dress. The way her body moves! Sarac felt faint. He looked down at the jagged tear in his soaked shirt, and the underlying wound in his chest and was startled to see how much blood he had lost. His vision wavered and he stumbled forward into the clearing. The girl’s heads spun toward him; three of the girls shrieked and fled the clearing. Sarac clutched the front of the remaining girl’s shawl as he fell forward, his bloodied fingers leaving red marks on her dress.

“What are you doing over here on this side of the river?” the girl asked, one hand on her hip. Her dark eyebrows lowered in concern and she gasped as she saw Sarac’s bloodied chest. She quickly bent down over him, her hanging hair framing her face as she shook him gently.

Sarac moaned and stirred, slowly opening his eyes as he looked at her. “There was a—”
The girl placed a finger against Sarac’s lips and smoothed back his hair. “I’m a healer. Rest now and let me see what I can do for your injuries,” she said, closing her eyes in intense concentration. White light flowed from her fingertips, snaking across Sarac’s body. Sarac gasped and arched his back; he squeezed his eyes tight, pain rippling through his body as his flesh mended and muscles knit. When the power faded, the only sign that Sarac had been injured was a lightening of the skin on his chest. The healer swayed unsteadily on her feet, her face pale.

Sarac opened his eyes and moved his lips, trying to form words as he rose unsteadily to his feet. “I’m Sarac. Thanks for healing me.”

The girl extended her hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Alena. I’m studying to be a Keeper of the Flame.”

Sarac nodded his head. “I know, I saw you practicing―”

Color rose to Alena’s cheeks as she brushed a dark strand of hair out of her eyes. “How embarrassing!” she said. She put a hand to her head and stumbled forward.
“Are you okay?” Sarac asked.

“I just need to rest for a minute. Healing is hard work.”

“Here, let me help you,” Sarac said, offering her his shoulder to lean on.
“Thank you. I must be getting back to the temple as the Sisters will start to wonder what happened to me.”

When the golden dome of the Temple of Fire came into view above the treetops, Alena stopped on the wooded trail. “Well, this is where we part. I can’t risk them seeing us together this close to the temple.”

“Why?”

“I’m studying to be a Sister of the Flame and must remain pure and chaste. For the other Sisters to see us together and think—”

“Say no more,” Sarac said as he raised her warm hand to his lips and kissed it tenderly.

“Alena! Where are you, child?” A stern female voice carried through the forest along with the sound of snapping twigs.

Alena’s eyes widened. “Oh, no! A Sister of the Flame! She cannot see me here with you, Sarac!”

The Sister burst through the underbrush, to find Sarac still holding Alena’s hand. “Out here with a boy, and an apprentice of the Temple of Inscriptions, no less!”

Sarac turned and ran in the other direction as the Sister grabbed Alena by the ear.
“Thought you would have some fun out here, did you?” the teacher sneered as she pulled Alena back down the trail toward the Temple of Fire.

“No, I healed him! You must believe me!” Alena cried in protest.

Sarac watched in dismay from the protection of a thicket of bushes, wondering if he would ever see Alena again.

Want to know what happens next? Order the book for your Kindle!

Harlan Ellison sues yet another science fiction movie for copyright infringement

2011-09-17T15:20:00.000-07:00

From IO9: Harlan Ellison sues yet another science fiction movie for copyright infringement
Harlan Ellison famously sued James Cameron over The Terminator and won — and now he's going after Andrew "Gattaca" Niccol's new film In Time. Ellison claims In Time is too similar to his story "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman." And he's not just seeking a payout — he's trying to stop the October 28 release of the film, and seeking the destruction of all copies of the film. (Of course, I'm sure he's open to a settlement.)

In Time has been in development for ages, and there have been trailers that basically narrated the entire plot for months now, but apparently Ellison only just noticed.

In "Harlequin," being late for anything is a crime, and the Master Timekeeper can shorten your life in punishment for failing to be on time for things — and when your appointed time runs out, the Master Timekeeper can stop your heart using something called a "cardioplate."

In In Time, everyone stops aging at 25, but after a year you die, unless you can earn or inherit more time to live. Rich people have millions of years to live, while poor people (like Justin Timberlake's character) usually only have 24 hours to live and have to keep earning more time.

It seems highly unlikely that Ellison will be able to stop the release of In Time, but you never know. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Source Code Film Being Developed Into A New Science Fiction TV Series

2011-09-17T15:07:00.001-07:00

From Television Blend: Source Code Film Being Developed Into A New Science Fiction TV Series

Source Code, one of the best science-fiction actioners from the summer film season, is already headed for a TV adaptation. The Jake Gyllenhaal starring, Duncan Jones directed film is about a soldier who has only eight minutes to solve a terrorist train bombing. Well, eight minutes every time he's reinserted into the source code. Yeah, you may want to check out the film because describing the plot in full may take a while.

THR first reported the news that the Source Code producer's production unit, "Mark Gordon Company, which is locked into an overall deal at ABC Studios, has sold a TV version of the sci-fi thriller to CBS with a meaningful penalty."

Gordon already dabbles heavily in TV with shows like Grey's Anatomy under his belt (ugh). However, no one apparently consulted with the film's director Duncan Jones, which is odd considering his talent is a large part of what made the project work in the first place. They should at least offer Jones the pilot to direct if he wants it but judging by tweets [in which he says he's never heard of the show], he probably would amiably refuse.

The Hitchcockian thriller was a hit with both critics and audiences alike, so it's easy to see why the people behind the film are pushing for the adaptation. The premise actually lends itself quite nicely to a television series. I just commented yesterday about the intriguing mix of episodic and serialized storytelling that the new Hannibal Lecter TV show can take advantage of and this seems right up the same alley. Each week a new attack or crime needs to be solved by our 'source code' soldier while the overall narrative trajectory can follow him/her finding out what happened to them and why they suddenly woke up as part of this new program.

Either way, Source Code doesn't sound like a bad idea for a new show and maybe this and Hannibal are just the first few in a new trend, bringing features to the small-screen instead of vice versa.

17 Sept: Science fiction-themed radio show at Kenosha museum

2011-09-17T03:22:00.000-07:00

From The Journal Times (Wisconsin): Science fiction-themed radio show at Kenosha museum

KENOSHA - RG Radio Productions will present an old-time radio show with a science fiction theme at 1 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 17, at the Kenosha Public Museum, 5500 First Ave. The show will include episodes from "Flash Gordon" and "Space Patrol" and is free and open to the public.

Flash Gordon, from about 1935, features Gale Gordon as Flash Gordon, an interplanetary traveler who battled the evil Emperor Ming on Planet Mongo. Flash Gordon originated as a comic book series.

Space Cadet ran concurrently on television and radio in the early 1950s with the same performers in key roles. The story concerned the universe-jumping exploits of Commander Buzz Corry, assigned to bring law and order to the interplanetary frontier, and Cadet Happy, whose astonishment at inevitable trouble was expressed in the catchphrase "Smokin' Rockets."

Children are encouraged to come in costume as comic book superheros. Prizes will be awarded.

Free tickets to the production will be available beginning at 9 a.m. Sept. 17 at the museum. Doors to the show open as 12:30 p.m. Seating is unreserved.

Wesley Snipes Could Have Been Geordi LeForge!

2011-09-15T21:33:00.002-07:00

This is a blog entry from the Letters of Note blog.

Star Trek casting
It could have been so different. From the archives of Paramount we have a memo - written in April of 1987 to the studio's Head of Network TV - detailing the acting talent then being considered for various roles in Star Trek: The Next Generation; a programme that would begin to grace the small screen just five months later. A few observations: at this juncture, Patrick Stewart was already a favourite for Picard, alongside Patrick Bauchau; Brent Spiner wasn't even being considered for the role he eventually took, as Data; a young man by the name of Wesley Snipes was in the running for the part of Geordi, a role ultimately filled by LeVar Burton but seemingly close to being taken by Reggie Jackson; Jenny Agutter at least read for the part of Beverly, and there was, as of yet, no sign of a certain Wil Wheaton, the youngster who eventually played her son, Wesley Crusher.

Transcript follows. Memo found at Slice of SciFi.

Recommended reading: Making of Star Trek, by Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry.

TO: JOHN PIKE
DATE: APRIL 13, 1987
FROM: JOHN FERRARO
SUBJECT: STAR TREK/Casting

Per your request, following is a list of actors who are being considered for their respective roles in STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION.

Picard
Patrick Stewart
Mitch Ryan
Roy Thinnes
Yaphet Kotto
Patrick Bauchau

Tasha
Lianne Langland
Julia Nickson
Rosalind Chao
Leah Ayers
Bunty Bailey

Data
Mark Lindsay Chapman
Eric Menyuk
Kevin Peter Hall (also for Geordi)
Kelvin Han Yee

Ryker
Michael O'Gorman
Gregg Marx
Jonathan Frakes
Ben Murphy

Geordi
LeVar Burton
Reggie Jackson
Tim Russ
Wesley Snipes
Victor Love
Chip McCallister
Clarence Gilyard Jr.
Kevin Peter Hall

Beverly
Anne Twomey
Jenny Augutter
Cheryl McFadden

Troi
Denise Crosby

Wesley
J.D. Roth

The above actors will be brought in to read for Gene Roddenberry starting next week. However, Patrick Bauchau did come in to read for Gene today for the role of "Picard." His reading was well received; he and Patrick Stewart seem to be the favorites for the role of "Picard."

For the role of "Ryker," Michael O'Gorman seems to be a favorite. He's sort of an atypical choice for the role, however, a good one.

Denise Crosby seems to be the only possibility for the role of "Troi" at this point; the same for J.D. Roth for the role of "Wesley."

There are several contenders for "Tasha," "Geordi," and "Data." However, Rosalind Chao seems to be a favorite for "Tasha"; Reggie Jackson for "Geordi"; and Mark Lindsay Chapman for "Data."

For the role of "Beverly," Cheryl McFadden is the favorite. However, her schedule may pose a problem. She's currently performing in a play in San Diego.

General reading sessions are continuing; our next one is on April 14.

cc: Jeff Hayes

The War of the Worlds in 30 seconds

2011-09-08T22:13:00.004-07:00

Re-enacted by Bunnies.

There's one for Star trek: Wrath of Kahn, but I wasn't impressed with that one.

This one is a lot of fun.

An alternate Star Trek t heme

2011-09-08T21:09:00.001-07:00

Apparently on the BLue Ray version of Star Trek's second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," there was a different Kirk preamble and different theme music!

and this is supposed to be the original theme (with the vocal by Loulie Jean Norman)

UK: Was postmodernism born with Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

2011-09-05T21:04:00.002-07:00

Francois Truffaut
From Guardian.co.uk: Was postmodernism born with Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

Is Close Encounters of the Third Kind the first and greatest work of postmodern art? As the Victoria and Albert Museum prepares to unveil its exhibition Postmodernism, I have been watching Steven Spielberg's 1977 science-fiction film and it struck me as a work of art, almost a filmed installation, that defines what "postmodernity" is, or was, or will be. I remember seeing a still from the film, a few years ago, in an exhibition in some New York gallery or other. But even without that prompt, the postmodern look of Close Encounters is hard to ignore.

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 Victoria and Albert Museum, London SW7 Starts 24 September Until 15 January 2012 More details
A man sees lights in the sky that move and dance. He is not imagining things. The aliens have arrived, in a glorious nocturnal spectacle of fear and wonder. At home, he starts making models, first of clay then of earth and rock, of a mountain in his mind's eye. That too turns out to be a real place, where he intrudes on a secret scientific gathering and finally enters the blinding light of the alien mothership.

What makes me call this film "postmodernist"? Partly it is the homely suburban world where Spielberg sets his story. American films have a long heritage of adventure. Big films before this tended to be set in big places with big characters – but Richard Dreyfuss plays a nobody who lives in nowhereseville to whom something weird happens.

In high art, postmodernism was the moment when the idea of the avant garde as a radical movement – rejecting conventional society and pushing perception forward into an ever more ambitious vision of the new – collapsed. The lofty idealism of a Rothko was suddenly unconvincing to advanced artists. The idea of artists as prophets or priests was abandoned. Artists were not special and neither was art. This was above all an American moment, for it was in America in the 1950s and 60s that modernism attained its loftiest heights and shaped a national culture, from skyscrapers to the space race.

Close Encounters marks this same moment in popular culture. Science fiction is a form of modernism. It shares modern art's belief in progress and meaningful change: it proposes a history of the future. 2001, the great modernist science fiction film, actually creates a model of history in which we evolve as a species under alien guidance. By contrast, Close Encounters does not offer any sense of history or progress or any theory as to what the alien encounter means. It is rooted in everyday suburbia and the revelation that unfurls is beyond understanding. In fact, it does not feel right to call it "science fiction" at all, for it refuses the genre's rationality.

Instead of reasoning, Dreyfuss builds a mountain in his home, like a work of contemporary art. The new artists of the postmodern age in the 1980s, from Cindy Sherman to Jeff Koons, did not claim a loftier vision or even a higher level of skill than other people. They were suburban artists, like Dreyfuss, using the stuff of everyday life to make images at once ordinary and bizarre.

Postmodernism anticipated the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of communism, and a world with a single superpower: a global, American, suburban culture. But as soon as those things came to pass at the end of the 1980s, art moved on again, imaginations railed at the supposed complacency of postmodernism and turned once more to grand themes of death, history and mourning. Spielberg himself took up the burden of the Holocaust, leaving the unexplained, eerie optimism of Close Encounters – whoever they are, the aliens mean us no harm – far behind.

Spielberg was at his best, and so was postmodernism, in that spookily still and light-filled moment when a suburban man steps into a spaceship, and history ends. (Of course, you may have found this pretentious and baffling. But, as the movement that launched a thousand cultural theories, that, too, was typical of the postmodernist era the V&A is about to celebrate.)

The Picard Song

2011-09-05T15:26:00.001-07:00

I'm not quite sure how this video was made, but it's pretty good.

It goes on about a minute too long, but the first four minutes are great.

QUIRKY CURRICULUM: Professor’s class gets graphic

2011-09-05T10:51:00.001-07:00

From Red and Black (University of Georgia): QUIRKY CURRICULUM: Professor’s class gets graphicChris Pizzino has a cure for American culture — more comics.

University professor Chris Pizzino teaches two classes extolling the virtues of the graphic novel and science fiction. MICHAEL BARONE/Staff
“The anti-comics prejudice is out there,” said Pizzino, assistant professor in the University English department. “You pick it up as you go, even if you were never told it in no uncertain terms. It’s in our cultural DNA and we’re having to do some intellectual gene therapy to change how people think about comics. So that’s what I want the comics class to do.”

Pizzino, who has taught a recurring class on graphic novels in past semesters and is now teaching a class on science fiction, said he developed an interest in studying the subjects when he realized their potential for scholarly inquiry.

“Such choices don’t always arise,” he said. “I’m actually very fortunate, here at the University of Georgia, to be able to teach these classes because they’re not on the books that colleges and universities have been very supportive of making part of the English curriculum. I’ve definitely spoken to colleagues at other universities who have met some form of resistance about this. And for the science fiction, the same.”

Though Pizzino has not received resistance from professors, he said some students have come in with misguided expectations for the comics class.

“Every once in a while, someone will take the comics class out of a kind of whimsical curiosity, thinking that it’s just going to be pure fun,” he said. “And most of those people are happy to discover that they are having fun but they’re also learning to read comics. I haven’t yet had anyone turn bitter when they discover this class is going to be work as well as fun.”

And people’s understanding of comics as a lower literary form, and their urge to hide that interest as they grow older, is something Pizzino said he understands.

“I think I absorbed what was in the air,” Pizzino said. “I’ve always read comics, and then like a lot of people of my generation I kind of quit for a while and then came back to them. I came back to them to find they had been changing and were changing before my eyes in terms of the kinds of comics that were being produced.”

It’s this use of the medium as a literary form, and the cultural attitudes surrounding it, that drives Pizzino’s research — as he is working on a book entitled “Arrested Development: Comics at the Bounderies of Literature.”

“I feel that the barrier is much lower for science fiction as a narrative mode than it is for comics as a medium,” Pizzino said. “Although science fiction is definitely put down, it’s never had to undergo the legacy of censorship that comics have undergone.”

Science fiction also enjoys a higher status in American culture because certain works in that genre, such as “Fahrenheit 451” and “Stranger in a Strange Land” have become cultural touchstones to non-fans of the genre.

“At various points in American history, various science fiction novels have come to be very important to different sectors of Americans,” Pizzino said.

Still, despite the significance that science fiction and graphic novel works have had in American culture, Americans still reject science fiction and comic “nerds.”

That stigma of over-enjoyment, of loving sci-fi and the graphic novel a little too much, is something Pizzino rejects.

“I guess in the eyes of some Americans there’s something uncool about excessive enthusiasm about anything,” he said.

But a secret love of comics and science fiction is something Pizzino believes is starting to be drawn out of people by modern cinema.

“We’re seeing a lot of closeted nerds now decloseted by going to movies,” Pizzino said. “And people around the world went to see ‘Inception,’ which was a very nerdy movie to the tune of $800 million,” Pizzino said.

Using the tools of scholars before him, and the cultural value of both comics and science fiction, has become the main method Pizzino uses to spark a love for both genres in his students.

“Comic scholarship has been going on in a serious way for, depending on how you measure the time, a few years, or a decade, or more,” he said. “The comics class is very much about either
introducing a type of literacy that people may not be very familiar with or reintroducing a type of literacy and getting people to see it anew — [and] that it gives the same pleasures and challenges and rewards as any other kind of literature.”

But though he said he believes comics and science fiction are not as valued as intellectual forms, it’s become more than a topic of conversation.

In a way, it is the conversation.

With the larger advent of sci-fi pop culture, enthusiasts everywhere are “coming out of the closet.”

“Although comics are definitely seen by many in a sort of lesser light, they’re also very much a part of cultural parlance,” Pizzino said. “Even people who say they’re not science fiction nerds probably use some term every day that came from a science fiction text. They go to see science fiction films. We’re all nerds now, to some degree or another.”

Captain America: The First Avenger

2011-09-01T12:37:00.005-07:00

This movie has been out for a while and I just saw it a couple of days ago.

I enjoyed it... it coulda been better.

The movie takes place in the 1940s, but it was made to set up the Avengers movie, which takes place in the present day. So that gave pretty short shrift to Cap's adventures throughout WWII (as told in the contemporary to WWII Captain America comic book), and to Nick Fury (who does not appear at all) and the Howling Commandoes. [Yes, I said Nick Fury doesn't appear at all. There is a character with that name in the movie, at the very end, but that isn't the real Nick Fury, I don't care what anybody says!]

I've been reading the IMDB message boards about the movie, and there are a couple of threads about the multi-racial/ethnic Howling Commandos. The ignorant (aka unknowledgeable, not stupid) posters have been set straight - that wasn't an invention of the movie makers - in the 1960s comic series entitled Nick Fury and the Howling Commandoes, that's who was there - the Free Frenchman, the Englishman, the African-American. Truth to tell I don't remember a Nisei being with the team, but it's possible.

(Japanese immigrants and even first generation citizens were interred during the War, but the US Army actually had the gall to draft the boys of fighting age and send them off to battle - albeit in the Western theater, not the Eastern. And these Nisei troops proved their courage and their patriotism over and over again - I think they were the most wounded, and the most decorated outfit in the Western theater over the course of the war.)

Anyway, the ending was an anti-climactic disappointment.

Spoilers below.

As anyone familiar with the story of Captain America knows, the comic book ran during World War II, and after the war, ceased pubication. The comic featured Steve Rogers and his sidekick, Bucky - who was only 16 or so and the camp mascot - not a grown up soldier.

In the 1960s, the character was resurrected. The Avengers, cruising around the North Atlantic, find an iceblock calved off an iceberg, and inside it is Captain America, who has been frozen since the end of the war. He thaws and wakes up screaming, "Jump, Bucky, jump!"

Turns out, the Red Skull has been defeated and is escaping in a plane. Cap and Bucky jump onto the plane, intending to bring it down. Then Cap realizes its been booby-trapped and the Red Skull isn't aboard. (There's no threat to the US). Cap slips off the plane, Bucky doesn't, and so dies. Cap falls into the North Sea, gets frozen, and wakes up 25 years later.

In the movie, the Red Skull is flying the plane toward the US, where its set to crash into the capitol and will kill thousands of people. So Cap heroically steers the plane straight down into the Arctic icecap.

The problem? Why does he do it? It wasn't clear to me that, once he'd set the plane heading straight downward, he couldn't have just jumped out of the plane with a parachute. (He still could have hit the ground, been knocked unconscious, and been frozen, but I guess the movie makers wanted him found inside the plane.)

Second problem. The anticlimactic part.

While Cap is piloting the plane into the Arctic ice, he and love interest Peggy Carter have a dialog, where they're talking like he's going to meet her at a restaurant at 8 pm in the next week.

Then his voice goes silent, and she starts to cry.

What should have happened was that the movie switches back to present day, where Cap's frozen body has just been found, and while he's still unconscious, somebody says, "that's Captain America. We need him now more than ever."

Instead, what happens is, he wakes up in what looks like 1940s US, with a baseball game going.

We think to ourselves... oh, no, he's just been dreaming all this? We've been tricked?

No. Because the baseball game Cap is listening to is not one that took place after he disappeared, but rather one that took place before he even became Captain America. How stupid is that? THat's his clue that he's being tricked, so he breaks out of the room, out of the building, and runs into high-tech Times Square, where some guy named Nick Fury (portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson) approaches him and explains they'd wanted to acclimate him slowly to the truth, that he's been asleep for 70 years.

"I had a date," says Steve.

If they had to do this, why couldn't they just have had Steve go to the restaurant, and find the very aged Peggy Carter sitting there. She sees him, she's happy, she dies. That would have been poignant.

So, flawed, but enjoyable. And a helluva lot better and more worthy to be viewed than My Idiot Brother or Don't Be Afraid of the Dark!

Musing about religion

2011-08-23T21:53:00.005-07:00

Pat Summitt announced today that she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers. She's only 59, she's in relatively good health, physically-wise, she could live for another 40 years with no memory of who or what she is, how to go to the bathroom, how to clean up after herself.

When the announcement was posted on the Summitt message boards, a lot of Summitt fans started posting their horror and dismay. And most of 'em said, "She and her family will be in my prayers."

And I'm thinking, Jee-sus.

It's getting worse now. Now they're saying stuff like:

Don`t b angry [...]. God has plans for all of us. Pat has touched many lives and God will allow her to touch many more with this illness. He knows she can handle this and in a way that His glory will be shown.

AND

God chooses a person like Pat to carry out his work. My thoughts are he has a plan, and Pat has been called upon to lead the charge

Such homilies just want to make me vomit on the ground.

I'm an atheist, and have been since I was 13. I simply don't understand how people can believe in God. But, it's worse than that. Looking at the absolute misery that has infested 90% of this planet for thousands of years, looking at the mistery now - the starvation in Somalia, the starvation in the Sudan, etc. etc. and etc., and there's still millions of people who can say, "Oh, God loves us."

If you believe God exists, and you see what he wroughts, how in the world can you worship such a psycho? And frankly the same thing would hold true for Islam, I would think. You've got a religion that refers to Allah/God as the merciful and the compassionate...would such a God really tell his followers to go out and kill all unbeleivers? Why worship such a God?

Apparently Pat still maintains her faith that God will give her strength to "fight this battle," and I would not for the worlds tell her that there is no god, she's going to have to fight this battle with doctors and money cuz prayer won't accomplish shit - it never has - but when you're in the grip of a deadly disease of course you grasp at all straws (though why anyone would grasp at the straw of religion I simply don't understand), but for those who are admirers of this woman, to talk so blithely of "God's plan" and "God's glory" - Jeez, it's just sickening.

THere is no god, there's just us. We can't depend on prayer to get us to a point where civilization prevails against the monsters at the gate - and within the gates - we've got to do it ourselves.

The Hobbit Production Video Diary 3

2011-08-01T11:26:00.002-07:00

Peter Jackson kept a video diary. This episode has Andy Serkis, the various dwarf actors and Ian McKellen.

It's interesting to see that they're working in front of a green screen - all the scenery is apparently going to be CGI.

Spiderman: Reflections of a Rock Superhero

2011-07-31T21:11:00.001-07:00

Way back in the early 1970s, 2 records were put out. One was Spiderman, and starred Rene Aberjoinnois as Peter Parker/Spiderman and Thayer David as the Kingpin, and the other was Spiderman, Reflections of a Rock Superhero.

A few tracks are up on Youtube. This particular song, Count on Me, is my absolute favorite.

Booklist: The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age

2011-07-23T10:19:00.001-07:00

Began this on July 15, finished it about three days later...but just to be safe I'll say July 20.

The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age, by Edmond Blair Bolles, 1999

Description from Amazon

This is an entertaining, often irreverent, history of the scientific discovery of the Ice Age. Bolles is fascinated by the way in which scientific knowledge advances. He challenges the notion that it proceeds in a rational and orderly manner, always building on previous knowledge. People, he claims, "learn unsuspected things, pulling knowledge, like rabbits, from empty hats," and often, convincing scientists of a new idea is more a matter of politics than of science. As an example of this theory, he weaves together the biographies of three important players in the great Ice Age debate.

Bolles focuses on Louis Agassiz, the naturalist who first theorized the Ice Age in 1837, but was unable to persuade the scientific community to accept his findings for almost 20 years. Second is Elisha Kent Kane, an adventurer and poet whose report on his journey to the north of Greenland in the 1850s provided the popular imagination with the vision of immense seas of ice at the Pole pouring great rivers of ice into the Atlantic and Greenland seas. Finally, Bolles writes of Charles Lyell, the great Scottish geologist whose book The Principles of Geology ignored the possibility that glaciers were capable of changing the earth's surface, and who resisted the notion of the Ice Age for many years after Agassiz had theorized about it. A master politician among his colleagues, once he was convinced of the theory, it became more widely accepted. Bolles claims that it was only the interaction among these three individuals, and many others who are mentioned in passing, that led to a lasting new understanding of the world in which we live.

The Adventures of Casanova (1948) starring John Sutton!

2011-07-22T10:26:00.003-07:00

So okay, it really starred Arturo de Cordova as Casanova, but the only reason why I watched it was because of John Sutton.

Casanova is changed from a lover to a Zorro-type character returning to his home to fight against the invaders, in this case the villainous Comte de Brissac played by John Sutton. Sutton of course steals the films, in his all-too-few scenes.

The actor who plays Bernardo is Fritz Leiber, the father of Fritz Leiber Jr., the science fiction writer. [Leiber Jr, wrote a funny (albeit confessional) story entitled "237 Talking Statues, etc.", inspired by his difficult relationship with his father, in which Francis LeGrand II is confronted by the statues and paintings of the title, all self-portraits of his father in various roles, with which he discusses his relationship with his father.]

(Sorry it's in so many parts but my laptop was behaving very badly while I was doing this).

UK: Musical scores for silent firms unearthed in Birmingham

2011-07-15T19:08:00.000-07:00

From the Guardian, UK: Musical scores for silent firms unearthed in Birmingham
Hundreds of musical scores used to accompany silent films in cinemas more than 80 years ago have been discovered in the collection of Birmingham city council's music library, including a theme tune used in early Charlie Chaplin films.

About 500 scores have been uncovered, many including the full parts for small orchestras of between seven and 11 players, not just a pianist. Judging by the titles, the often-fragmentary pieces were selected thematically to accompany similar plotlines. They are frequently self-explanatory: the mysterious manor house, exciting-dramatic, harrowing, creepy-creeps, wild chase, supreme peril, the poisoned cup and mounted police gallop.

"We don't actually know where they came from as they were in separate collections," explained Ali Joyce, the head of the music library. "They seem to have been in our basement for 30 to 40 years.

"We think groups of musicians would travel round cinemas and match the music to the situations in the films."

The Chaplin theme – Marche Grotesque – appears to be a unique example of a score written for a particular artist. It dates from 1916 at the height of the British-born actor's early fame as a worldwide star and was for use when his tramp character appeared on screen. It was composed by Cyril Thorne, a long-forgotten musician who wrote mood music.

The scores have the names of Louis Benson and HT Saunders stamped on them, the latter thought to have been a musical director at cinemas in Glasgow.

Neil Brand, an early film historian said: "This collection gives us our first proper overview of the music of the silent cinema in the UK from 1914 to the coming of sound. Its enormous size not only gives us insights into what the bands sounded like and how they worked with film [but also] the working methods of musical directors. Above all, it gives the lie to the long-cherished belief that silent films were accompanied on solo piano by little old ladies who only knew one tune. When they are played we will hear the authentic sound the audiences of the time would have heard."

Some of the tunes will be heard for the first time in 80 years next Tuesday – not even the librarians have heard them yet – at the launch of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's film music festival, when they will be performed at a free pre-concert event by Ben Dawson, the CBSO's pianist.

The Green Lantern

2011-07-08T08:38:00.005-07:00

I went to see The Green Lantern yesterday, and didn't really care for it.

It starts out with the same old character tropes - the hero is an irresponsible womanizer who is given great powers, doesn't think he can handle them, his brilliant friend and beautiful girlfriend point out to him what he doesn't realize himself, then he gets an epiphany and goes out to save the world.

There's another trope I didn't care for. Irresponsible handsome character gets to be the hero, irresponsible ugly character gets turned into a deformed monster. Yes, let's teach all children that the good or evil inside someone is represented by their facial features.

Other than that.... the movie was certainly a bit too rushed in some spots, draggy in others.

There seems to be a blooper, Sinestro takes his hand-picked Lanterns flying toward Parallax - who is coming closer to Earth, then in the next scene he's present to scoff at Hal Jordan's training, in the next scene he's watching his Lanterns being destroyed by Parallax, and the next scene he's back talking to the elders (shades of the high chairs in Buckaroo Banzai).

Then there's the trope that only a "maverick" human can save the universe...yet what Hal did to destroy Parallax wasn't really all that original of an idea, you telling me all those other Lanterns couldn't have figured that out? Although they didn't have the advantage of possessing the ring of the Lantern who had imprisoned Parallax in the first place, so they couldn't have gotten him to follow them blindly right into a sun...

But of course, it's the "high noon" trope at the end, only Hal can save Earth, meanwhile the Lanterns don't show up until the very end, where they have to save the unconscious Hal from falling into the sun himself.

I'd give it a 6 out of 10. Definitely not for any kids under 13, I'd think, because the transformation of Hector Hammond into a monster is pretty gross, as is Parallax and the way he kills people.

Remembering Martin H. Greenberg, the Green Bay Packager

2011-06-27T10:18:00.001-07:00

JSOOnline (Milwaukee): Remembering Martin H. Greenberg, the Green Bay Packager

Martin H. Greenberg edited and organized so many collections and anthologies of science fiction, fantasy, mystery and other writing, he was sometimes called the Green Bay Packager.

Greenberg, a retired University of Wisconsin-Green Bay professor, died June 25 at age 70. While still teaching at the university, he began a sideline of editing anthologies and packaging books, working with some of the biggest names in popular fiction, including Isaac Asimov, Tom Clancy, Stephen King and Sue Grafton.

"He helped publish more than 2,500 books, including novels, anthologies, and nonfiction works," according to a statement in the obituary that his family published in the Green Bay Press Gazette.

In a 2001 article, the Journal Sentinel's Dave Tianen described the range of Greenberg's many entertaining fiction collections:

"The books Greenberg has published cover an enormous range of topics and interests. A sampling of titles includes 'Alien Pregnant By Elvis,' 'Election Day 2084: Science Fiction Stories About the Future of Politics,' 'Single White Vampire Seeks Same,' 'Weird Tales from Shakespeare' and 'Sherlock Holmes in Orbit'."

As anthologist and book packager, Greenberg might conceive the concept for a collection, seek stories that fit the concept, negotiate the necessary permissions with the authors and other rights holders, and see the book through to publication. He often worked with co-editors, some of whom were big-name writers in their fields. According to a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America post, Greenberg and Asimov edited more than 120 anthologies together.

In his academic career, Greenberg was a political scientist with a specialty in terrorism and national security.

Surprisingly, for a guy who was involved in so many books it would take a supercomputer to compile his bibliography, Greenberg told Tianen he worried about coming up dry:

"I was always scared I'd run out of ideas. A lot of it is simply reading the news, trying to stay a little bit attuned to pop culture. My youngest daughter, Madeline (14 in 2001), tries to make her old father hip. She's a reader and she loves science fiction conventions."

"The most remarkable thing about Marty," writer and frequent collaborator Mike Resnick posted on Facebook, "is that he sold over 2,000 anthologies and packed some 700 novels without making a single enemy along the way."

David Troughton as Richard III

2011-06-25T23:23:00.003-07:00

David Troughton as Richard III on stage

The audio version, which I have.

I recently acquired a 3-CD set of the RSC's production of Richard III from 1996, starring David Troughton as Richard III. (Unfortunately John Nettles, who played Buckingham in the stage version, is not on this audio version. However, the only reason why I got this version was because Charles Simpson is in it - playing the Earl of Richmond (Henry VII) - who was also a different actor in the stage version.)

David Troughton gives an excellent portrayal of RIII (as I call him) but what's so eerie is that he sounds exactly like his father, Patrick. If you didn't know it was David, you'd swear it was Patrick.

James Cameron Helps Open New Avatar Exhibit in Seattle

2011-06-02T09:41:00.001-07:00

InternationalBusinessTimes: James Cameron Helps Open New Avatar Exhibit in Seattle
A music and popular culture museum in Seattle is hoping to draw fans of the Oscar-winning film "Avatar" to its new exhibit. The showcase at the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame opens on Saturday at noon, after a large opening event on Friday.

Director James Cameron, visual effect artist Richie Baneham, and actors from the movie including Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, and Laz Alonso will appear at Friday's event and host panels during Saturday's opening.

The exhibit, built by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, will explore how James Cameron brought Pandora and its inhabitants to the big screen with props and costumes as well as hands-on exploration of the creative process used to build the world in the science fiction movie.

The museum will be the first of its kind to showcase artwork and props from the blockbuster film. Visitors will be able to use several interactive displays and try a virtual camera to see how the motion capture filming of actors fits in with the virtual world created on computers.

Another interactive exhibit allows visitors to become an actor under the "direction" of Cameron, using motion capture technology. Participants can then post a copy of their video on YouTube.

EMP is open 10:00am to 7:00pm daily and is located in downtown Seattle. There is no extra charge for the Avatar showcase, and the museum's other exhibitions include the recently opened Nirvana: Taking Punk the Masses, Battlestar Galactica, and Jimi Hendrix: An evolution of Sound.

If you can't make it to Seattle, the Avatar exhibit is expected to travel throughout the United States, Canada, and beyond once its run at EMP ends late in 2012.

Leonard Nimoy Says Phoenix Comicon May be Among his Last Public Appearances, Talks Today's Science Fiction Films

2011-05-27T10:27:00.001-07:00

CollegeTimes.com: Leonard Nimoy Says Phoenix Comicon May be Among his Last Public Appearances, Talks Today's Science Fiction Films

Phoenix Comicon may be one of Leonard Nimoy's last public appearances before he goes into retirement, according to Spock himself.

The actor and science-fiction legend says he just doesn't feel the need for it anymore, emotionally or financially, and that he would rather focus more on his photography.

"Several museums now hold my work around the country," he says. "But the most important [reason] is my family. I have a great family life, with wonderful people that I love dearly. I've had a great, great run and I'm a very grateful guy."

College Times caught up with Nimoy in advance of this year's Phoenix Comicon, in which he'll unveil a presentation full of photos and stories of his time working in the industry, including his time on "Star Trek."

College Times: You started as Spock in 1966. What are your thoughts on the evolution science fiction through the years?

Nimoy: Science fiction has replaced the western that we used to do. Western is one of the frontier stories, and science fiction deals with those frontier issues. The way Indians used to be portrayed as the bad people, now we have Vulcans and other aliens as bad people. It has become the new final frontier, because of conflict between the nasty people there. Technology, of course, has evolved exponentially. It's just exploded and that has changed science fiction drastically. The first science fiction work I did was in 1960, I did a project called "Zombies of the Stratosphere." It's really funny to look back on it now, because it is so limited in special effects. The bombast and the gigantic creatures and explosions of today are just extraordinary. It's all about post-production these days.

Is technology one of the elements of a good science fiction story?

Well, the question is what's the story? To me, that's always important, because if you take away all the bombast and the crashes and fires and explosions, I'm interested in the story. Is there something intriguing? Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

Where did the Vulcan gesture come from?

That came from when I was a child, and I would attend holiday services with my family. When the congregation is blessed by members of the priestly tribe of the Hebrew congregation, they say "May the Lord bless you, may the Lord cause his countenance to shine upon you, may the Lord turn his graces upon you and grant you peace." They were doing this in a way where they were shouting, and they held their hands out to the audiences with that gesture; the split fingers. I learned how to do it afterward and learned what it was all about; it is the shape of the letter in Hebrew that begins the word for God. They were evoking God's name as they bless the congregation.

You also introduced Spock's Vulcan Death Grip, the famous pinch on the neck, correct?

I did, because I didn't want to be punching people or have a weapon.

Because you injected some of yourself into Spock, do you find yourself more similar or different to him?

I've been told I take on his stoic characteristic. But on the other hand, my training as an actor was to use my emotions, and to express emotional responses in specific situations. Spock called for the opposite – he called for ultimate control of his emotions. I had to find a way to do that. It was my job in portraying this particular character, so I dug into my tool kit and I went to work. It took a little time to find my footing and make sure I could do that without being boring.

Spock has become a true pop culture icon. Why do you think this is?

I think people can really identify with him. At times, his wit is very clever. He's also very loyal and helpful. It's interesting – over the years, as much as we talk about Spock being a Vulcan and an alien and all that, if you really stop to think about it, he's really a human character. He's dealing with his own personal issues which are very human issues, because there's the conflict of logic and emotion in his life. And people get that and they understand that and relate to it.

Putting South African science fiction on the map

2011-05-26T09:12:00.001-07:00

Guardian.co.uk Books Blog: Putting South African science fiction on the map

Last month, Lauren Beukes scooped one of the science fiction world's major literary awards - and in doing so, heralded something of a coming of age for South African speculative fiction.

Beukes - who describes herself as "an author, scriptwriter and recovering journalist" - won the prestigious Arthur C Clarke award for her second novel, Zoo City. The previous weekend the novel was on the five-strong shortlist for the British Science Fiction Association awards, missing out to Ian McDonald's The Dervish House at the major genre gathering Eastercon in Birmingham. But the Arthur C Clarke award – which saw Beukes beat McDonald – will be more than compensation, as will the news at the weekend that she has been shortlisted in the John W Campbell award for best new writer, to be revealed alongside the Hugo nominations in the US in August.

Beukes's novel is published in the UK by the relatively young imprint Angry Robot, which also published her debut, Moxyland. Both novels are genre-busting, fast-moving affairs that offer something comfortingly familiar yet excitingly exotic – a novel that springs, obviously, from a foreign culture, yet which is written in English, and with British and European reference points as well as home-grown ones.

Zoo City, the novel which has brought Beukes so much attention (godfather of cyberpunk William Gibson is one high-profile fan) is a mash-up of near-future SF and urban paranormal fantasy, a noirish clash of sub-genres that is refreshing for its Johannesburg locales. Zinzi is one of the "animalled" – people with some kind of stain on their conscience who magically acquire an animal familiar which follows them around and amplifies their psychic talents. Think Pinocchio or Philip Pullman written by Raymond Chandler and you're maybe a quarter of the way there.

Of course, if Beukes's success in the awards were isolated, that wouldn't constitute anything like a "scene". But since 2009, when Neill Blomkamp's District 9 shocked Hollywood by being a thoughtful, intelligent, action-filled science fiction movie that came from South Africa, of all places, there seems to have been a growing spec fiction movement.

Around the same time Zoo City landed on my doormat, so did a proof of The Mall by SL Grey, to be published on 1 June by Corvus Books. Despite the fact that this novel is described as a cross between Fight Club and the Saw movies – a marketing move that might well get the torture-porn crowd interested but didn't tempt me – I've been impressed by Corvus's speculative fiction output so far (such as Jeff Vandermeer's Finch and Chris Becket's Holy Machine) so gave it a go.

And when I finished it, pretty much in a couple of sittings, I found myself creeped out to an extent that no horror story had achieved for a long time. I put it down next to Zoo City and realised that there was something very special coming out of South Africa. I contacted Louis Greenberg - one half of the writing team SL Grey, along with Sarah Lotz, who also writes zombie novels as Lily Herne – and he confirmed that what had been a feisty, small-press community scene was now moving determinedly centre stage.

The leading lights among the SA scene seem to include horror writer Joan De La Haye, fantasy author Craig Smith, and Andrew Saloman, who has just made yet another shortlist with his novel Lun – this time, for Terry Pratchett's Between the Lines award, which looks for debut speculative fiction authors.

As you might expect, a lot of South African writing is informed by the country's own recent history – how could it fail to be? Apartheid rears its head in one form or another both in Zoo City, where the animalled are segregated, and in The Mall, where the "browns" find their way from our world to the book's nightmarish mirror-world. And that, perhaps, is part of the attraction: speculative fiction works best when it refracts real life through a fantastical lens, and magnifies, and perhaps tries to make sense of, the mundane. South Africa has had a lot of real life in the past few decades.

Beukes is certainly doing her bit to put South African SF on the map. With SL Grey coming up next and their fellow authors grabbing a lot of attention, it might well be that South African spec fiction is going to be this year's Scandinavian crime novel scene for British readers.

The Coldest Equations, by Caroline Miniscule

2011-05-25T17:24:00.001-07:00

My latest book published for the Kindle is now available for purchase. (And within a couple of days, should be available for Barnes&Nobles Nook as well.)

It's science fiction.

Tracy Karlovassi, actress, is the star of the science fiction TV series The Coldest Equations, in which she plays Miranda Rainbird, security team leader for a corporation that deals in space travel. It is the near future, and these civilian corporations devoted to space travel have become little worlds of their own, with security agents protecting their own engineers and scientists from kidnap or spying, while at the same time spying on other corporations and attempting to kidnap their scientists and engineers.

Whenever a TV series on our earth is committed to celluloid, it is immediately created as an alternate earth, that exists just as much as our own does. And there are watchers -out there- who have devised a way to transport the actors from the TV series to their real life counterparts on the alternate earth, and vice versa.

In the TV series (and on the alternate earth) Miranda Rainbird has been framed for a crime she did not commit, and is on the run from both friend and foe. If it *were* Miranda Rainbird on the run, she could doubtless solve all her problems, skilled agent that she is. But Tracy Karlovassi has been transferred into her body...and what can a mere actress do?

It's fun, it's suspenseful, if you like classic science fiction TV and books, you'll like it. And best of all, it's only $2.99!

Available now. Go to the Kindle store via your kindle and search for The Coldest Equations, or follow this link:

http://www.amazon.com/Coldest-Equations-People-There-ebook/dp/B0052NSRKK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1306369228&sr=1-1

Trips to the moon in classical antiquity? British exhibit finds sci-fi in unexpected places

2011-05-19T09:59:00.002-07:00

Washington Post Entertainment: Trips to the moon in classical antiquity? British exhibit finds sci-fi in unexpected places
( Sang Tan / Associated Press ) - British Library in London: The exhibition explores science fiction through literature, film, illustration and sound and display the Library’s earliest science fiction manuscripts to the latest best-selling novels.

It’s science fiction, but not as we know it.

A genre usually associated with sinister aliens and rampaging robots is getting a makeover at the British Library, which uses 17th-century manuscripts, feminist literature, and even an advertisement for liquid beef to showcase the unexpected ways in which science fiction has influenced our world.

Exhibit organizers said Thursday that one of their goals was to show that sci-fi wasn’t just “The War of the Worlds” or “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”

“It’s much, much wider than that,” said co-curator Katya Rogatchevskaia. “H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, they are fantastic influences, but it’s a very diverse genre.”

It’s in service to that diversity that Soviet, Chinese, and Bangladeshi writers feature prominently, as do female authors, such as “Frankenstein” creator Mary Shelley and Jane Loudon, whose 1827 book, “The Mummy,” is set in a futuristic Britain complete with weather control and steam-powered houses.

There’s a healthy helping of the obligatory pulp — “action-packed” tales featuring busty damsels being pursued by slimy beings — but there’s a host of lesser-known material too, such as 1914 postcards showing a futuristic Moscow dominated by soaring elevated trams, or a British satirical piece from the 1820s that features a massive vacuum tube sucking people and merchandise “direct to Bengal.”

One of the most striking pieces is the second century tale by Lucian of Samosata, whose story has a group of traveling adventurers being whipped into the air by a whirlwind and dropped onto the surface of the moon.

Lucian’s story was meant as a riff on travelers’ tall tales, but the British Library said some considered it one of the world’s first works of science fiction.

___
http://www.bl.uk/sciencefiction

Endeavour crew recreates 'Star Trek' movie poster

2011-05-16T08:44:00.002-07:00

The only problem is the poster is from the "relaunch" of Star Trek, not the original, best series!

MSNBC: Endeavour crew recreates 'Star Trek' movie poster
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The six astronauts flying on NASA's final flight of the space shuttle Endeavour are a serious bunch, but they've got a fun streak too. Case in point: The astronauts apparently like the science fiction franchise "Star Trek" enough to re-enact its most recent movie poster.

Creating custom mission posters based on popular movies has long been a tradition for NASA shuttle and space station crews. [Gallery: NASA's Most Offbeat Mission Posters]

But while past mission posters have recreated the film versions of "Ocean's Eleven" or the Matrix and Harry Potter movies, the six-man STS-134 crew of Endeavour chose something a bit more space-y: the 2009 reboot of "Star Trek," directed by J.J. Abrams.

"That was my idea!" Endeavour mission specialist Drew Feustel told SPACE.com.

Feustel said he had seen the movie during a previous spaceflight, when he launched on Atlantis in May 2009 to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.

"That movie came out basically the day we launched and we were fortunate to have that movie uplinked to us on orbit," Feustel said. "I really liked the movie. I thought it was pretty neat."

Endeavour's STS-134 astronauts are slated to launch aboard shuttle Endeavour from here at Kennedy Space Center on Monday at 8:56 a.m. EDT (1256 GMT). It will be the last voyage for Endeavour before the orbiter is retired. [Photos: Endeavour's Final Mission]

Advertise | AdChoicesAdvertise | AdChoicesAdvertise | AdChoicesSpace, the real final frontier
Feustel said he suggested the latest "Star Trek" film as the theme for the STS-134 poster, and the rest of the crew agreed.

But Feustel's crewmate Greg Chamitoff remembered it differently.

"I kept trying to remember whose idea that was, and I think it might have been mine," Chamitoff said in an interview.

Regardless of the origin of the poster idea, the crew seemed to unite behind the concept.

"A lot of us are ["Star Trek" fans]," Chamitoff said of the Endeavour astronauts.

The poster features the six astronauts looking stoically ahead, their faces each in half shadow, with a dark background and "STS-134" in Star Trek font underneath. Leading the crew, in the James T. Kirk position, is Endeavour commander Mark Kelly.

"It's a pretty close approximation," Feustel said of the finished product. "It looks pretty cool; we like it."

NASA and "Star Trek"
The poster is not the STS-134 crew's only connection to the famous science fiction TV and movie franchise.

In May 2005, mission specialist Mike Fincke appeared as an extra during the final episode of the show "Star Trek: Enterprise." He visited the set during vacation, along with fellow astronaut Terry Virts, who also appeared in the episode. Fincke played an NX-01 engineer on the fictional starship.

The International Space Station's Expedition 21 crew (the current crew is Expedition 27) also donned Star Trek uniforms for their mission poster in 2009.

On Endeavour's last mission before the orbiter is retired, the space shuttle will visit the International Space Station to deliver spare hardware and a new $2 billion astrophysics experiment to search for exotic particles.

In an odd side-note, Kelly and Chamitoff also have another movie-themed poster under their belt. Both astronauts were on the crew of NASA's STS-124 flight to the space station in 2008. That crew's choice of a film to emulate: "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." Kelly commanded that mission on the shuttle Discovery.

The mission's new name, according to the poster? "STS-124 and the Order of Discovery."

Wonderfest Attracts Thousands To Louisville

2011-05-16T08:43:00.001-07:00

WLKY.com: Wonderfest Attracts Thousands To Louisville
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Hundreds of science fiction and horror movie buffs turned out for a blockbuster of an expo this weekend.

The 22nd Annual "Wonderfest" gave movie and TV geeks a plethora of pieces of media history to check out.

The expo feature movie memorabilia and pop culture merchandise that spanned several genres and decades.

"It covers everything. If it's science fiction, fantasy -- it's here. You can find stuff here you wouldn't even believe exists," Sci-Fi fan David Hodge said.

The event had a life-size replica of the "Lost in Space" robot and full size heads from characters from popular horror films.

It even had two former "Bond" girls.

Actors Caroline Munroe and Martine Beswick starred in three James Bond movies between the two of them. They were among the featured guests from Hollywood.

The behind-the-scenes crowd got some exposure, too. Special effects legend Lorne Peterson enthralled the crowds with his work on all the Star Wars films.

"It's pretty amazing to have that effect on the world. To have the things you did, people talk about when they grow up and they're inspired by that type of thing. For a model maker, I don't know if there's any equivalent," Peterson said.

Visitors to the expo came from as far away as New Zealand and Japan.

One of the show's biggest attractions was the model contest. More than 500 entries were on display for visitors to admire.

No, you are not losing your mind.

2011-05-13T10:00:00.001-07:00

If there were posts here yesterday that you read, which are not here today, it's because...they're not here.

Blogger.com, the platform that hosts this blog, was down for much of yesterday afternoon and all night...just coming up now (11 am mountain time.) And all posts made yesterday have disappeared.

Supposedly, those posts will be restored. I'll give them a day to do so, and if not, will re-post them tomorrow.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

It's the 4th Annual Fantastic Plastic "I Can't Go to WonderFest" Sale!

2011-05-12T11:38:00.000-07:00

I received a press release from Fantastic Plastic, and share it here:

It's the 4th Annual Fantastic Plastic "I Can't Go to WonderFest" Sale!
Every year, hundreds of fantastic modeling enthusiasts descend on Louisville, Kentucky for WonderFest, a weekend long extravaganza of science-fiction, movie, TV and fantasy modeling.

http://fantastic-plastic.com/onlinecatalog.htm

And every year, thousands more fantastic modelers bemoan our inability to travel to Louisville to join in the festivities -- and maybe score some great new model kits.

To provide a quantum of solace to those unable to make this annual pilgrimage, Fantastic Plastic presents its 4th Annual "I Can't Go to WonderFest" Sale.

For the next two weeks, you can enjoy deep discounts throughout the Fantastic Plastic Virtual Museum Store On-Line Catalog. Savings are as much as 30% on many of our most popular kits, while supplies last.

NOTE: Discounts apply to Fantastic Plastic Models products only. Unicraft and Masterpiece Models kits are not included.

The 4th Annual Fantastic Plastic "I Can't Go to WonderFest" Sale runs from Monday, May 9 through Sunday, May 22.

This is our one and only sale of the year. Don't miss out on these "fantastic" savings!

And for those attending WonderFest -- have a great time! (Oh, and you can buy at these discount prices, too!)

WATCH THE SKIES!!!

- Allen B. Ury
fantasticplast@aol.com

Why The End Of Stargate Universe Means Bad Things For Syfy

2011-05-09T08:52:00.000-07:00

Sharing a sample post from a website called Spin Off Online:

SpinOffOnline: Why The End Of Stargate Universe Means Bad Things For Syfy

Saturday, May 7th, 2011 at 6:30am
by A moment of silence, please, for Syfy’s SGU: Stargate Universe, which finishes its run with Monday’s episode, “Gauntlet.” Not only am I personally sad about the show’s cancellation, I also think that it’s bad news for Syfy overall. After all: Where are the network’s science fiction shows now?

Sure, I like Being Human, Warehouse 13 and Haven as much as the next man – Well, unless the “next man” happens to be my wife, who really loves Haven – but I’m not sure how much claim to being science fiction either show has, with all three shows (Being Human and Haven especially, Warehouse 13 slightly less so) being more supernatural than science fiction. With the cancellations this year of both SGU and, earlier, Caprica, the network formerly known as SciFi finds itself leaning on Eureka and Sanctuary as its sole science fiction dramas. How did that happen?

(And don’t get me started on the prevalence of the network’s “reality” shows like Ghost Hunters, Destination Truth or Marcel’s Quantum Kitchen. For all the flack that the network gets for its wrestling coverage – and, admittedly, I’m not sure that it gets enough – I feel as if the increasing amount of reality shows goes relatively unchecked. When obvious rip-offs of existing, non-genre-related shows – Hollywood Treasure or Face-Off, say – make it on the network, I feel like something’s gone wrong with the commissioning process.)

It’s all about ratings, of course; SGU gets less bang for its buck than Sanctuary (It doesn’t help that it’s a more costly show to produce), and so the network has to go where the money is. But losing SGU – a show that I’ll admit didn’t really find its footing until the second season, even though I think there’s a lot to like in the first – feels like a mistake that could have been avoided had the network tried to wait out another year, despite ratings. It’s not just the “The show was getting better!” thing (Although it was, he whines, hopelessly), but also… Syfy doesn’t have a space opera show anymore. Is it just me that that feels… wrong to, somehow? Shouldn’t a science fiction network make a point of having a show set in space, just because?

I know, I know, I’m old fashioned: Science fiction doesn’t just mean space, and there’s more to Syfy than sci-fi, anyway (Hence the name change, after all). But even as I look forward to the new shows that Syfy has coming up – particularly Alphas, which I’m hoping will end up being Heroes done right – I feel as if something is missing without that essential outer space element, and Blood and Chrome is still some distance away. Maybe someone can shoot Myka and Pete into orbit in the next season of Warehouse 13 for an episode, just to stave off my hunger for orbital action.

Graeme McMillan

Sam Moskowitz's The Immortal Storm

2011-05-07T23:28:00.000-07:00

Sam Moskowitz's book The Immortal Storm, a history of science fiction fandom, was published in 1954.

Table of Contents
Preface
List of photographs
1. Introduction
2. Gernsback and the first all-science fiction publication
3. The beginning of organized fandom
4. The emergence of the first true fan magazine
5. The Fantasy Fan
6. William H. Crawford aand his contemporaries
7. Secondary fan publications: The TFG and its followers
8. The Science Fiction League
9. The New ISA and The International Observer
10. Other Happenings of 1935
11. The SFL-ISA Showdown
12. The Decline of the SFL and the ISA's Bid for Power
13. The Science Fiction Advancement Association
14. Other local groups of the time
15. The last days of Fantasy Magazine
16. Further clubs and projects of 1936
17. The first convention and the death of the ISA
18. The Dark Ages of Fandom
19. The Rise of British Fandom
20. Renaissance
21. The New Order Progresses
22. The Fantasy Amateur Press Association
23. The Third Convention and Michelism
24. The Aftermath
25. The Wollheim-Moskowitz FEud
26. The Background in Early 1938
27. The Factions Align Themselves
28. The First National Science Fiction Convention
29. The FAPA Elections of 1938
30. The Development of Michelism
31. The Greater New York Science Fiction League
32. Fantasy News and New Fandom
33. New Fandom's Rise to Power
34. The Opposition Crumbles
35. The New Fantasy Magazines and their Influence on Fandom
36. The Role of the Queens SFL
37. Amateur Magazines of the Period
38. Minor Dissensions
39. The Great Drive Toward the Convention
40. The Character of the Opposition
41. The First World Science Fiction Convention
42. Opinion Rallies
43. Breasting the Undertow
44. The Second Philadelphia Conference
45. The Illini Fantasy Fictioneers
46. The Futurian Comeback
Epilogue
Index

A Literary Shape-Shifter

2011-05-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Journal - Life and Culture: A Literary Shape-Shifter

By ALEXANDRA ALTER
Like his genre-bending novels, China Miéville defies easy categorization. With his shaved head, row of earrings and sculpted arms, the 38-year-old British novelist more closely resembles a bodyguard or mixed martial artist than an author who studies linguistic philosophy and holds a Ph.D. in international relations from the London School of Economics.

He leapfrogs between literary categories, playing with the narrative conventions of police procedurals, Westerns, sea adventures, urban fantasy and even romance. His 2000 novel, "Perdido Street Station," won British literary prizes in two separate categories, science fiction and fantasy. "City & the City," his take on classic noir, reads like a mash-up of George Orwell and Raymond Chandler—a murder investigation leads a detective to a secret mirror city that is hidden from ordinary view.

Getty Images

China Miéville leapfrogs between literary genres, from Westerns to science fiction.
"I once said I wanted to write a novel in every genre, and I feel duty bound now to do so," he said.

His latest novel, "Embassytown," marks his first foray into straight science fiction. The novel, due out in the U.S. on May 17, takes place on a distant planet that sits on the edge of the known universe. What starts as an intergalactic space romp turns into a meditation on language. Human colonists have developed tenuous relations with the locals: the Ariekei, a winged, insect-like race with two mouths that speak simultaneously. To communicate with them, humans have bred test-tube clones who can speak the double-layered language. Relations grow complicated when the Ariekei, who are incapable of describing something that does not exist, learn to mimic the human capacity for lying.

Mr. Miéville says he first came up with the idea of an alien race with two mouths when he was 11. He resurrected the concept a few years ago when he decided to write "classic interplanetary science fiction," in the tradition of novelists like Ursula Le Guin. Mr. Miéville invented fragments of the alien language ("suhaish" and "ko," said simultaneously, mean please), and read linguistic theory by philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur and I.A. Richards.

An early draft of "Embassytown" read too much like a doctoral thesis on linguistics, so Mr. Miéville refocused his efforts on what he does best: twisty plots, monsters and "spectacle candy." "Embassytown" is filled with fantastical elements such as "gun-animals" and other creature-machine hybrids, and unappetizing sounding futuristic food, like "nutrient-rich pabulum" and "sheets of meatcloth."

Marketing an author who bounces among genres can be tricky, particularly as Mr. Miéville's publishers seek to promote him as a mainstream writer. "We want an element of whatever genre he's focused on, but more the thinking should be upscale, literary and slick," said Del Rey publisher Scott Shannon of the packaging of Mr. Miéville's books. "There's no big rocket ship on the cover."

Mr. Miéville's U.K. publisher is rereleasing eight of his backlist titles with a "unified" modern look to help rebrand him as an author who might appeal to any reader, not just genre fans. "Now that he's established himself as a name, people recognize that what they're getting is a China Miéville book," says Tor U.K.'s editorial director, Julie Crisp. "It doesn't matter if it's science fiction or fantasy or crime or a Western."

Mr. Miéville says he hopes the more generic look will help his books find a broader audience. "The genre audiences are very, very loyal," he said. "The difficulty is reaching beyond to people who say, 'I never read that sort of thing.' "

Introducing Koldcast Web TV Network

2011-05-03T11:27:00.002-07:00

Here's the URL:
http://www.koldcast.tv/

Some of the shows available:

14 Hours to a Championship
88 Hits
A3 Night Life
After Judgement
American Heart
Anarchy For Breakfast
Animation Block
Anyone But Me
Assisted Living
Beverly Hills Salon
Bewildering Life
Blue Movies
Boxtick America
Brooklyn is for Lovers
Bumps in the Night
Bunny Hug
California Kickin
Celeste Bright
Casanovas
Central Division
Chick
Copy & Pastry

and dozens more in all genres.

BoomCHickBoom

Web TV series Haywire Ep 7 Now Available

2011-05-03T11:22:00.002-07:00

http://www.koldcast.tv/video/the_usual_suspects

About the show:
http://haywireseries.com/
Monroe, NY. A burst of light. Area-wide power outages and the complete failure of all electronic devices. All within line-of-sight of the burst are affected. Their minds short-circuit. Their thought processes scramble and become a never-ending loop. Accomplish what you were doing when you saw the light. Then do it again. And again. And again. ANd if something gets in your way?

Does Trog Really Deserve Its Poor Reputation?

2011-05-03T01:49:00.002-07:00

Trog (1970) was the last movie made by Joan Crawford.

I confess that it's not the type of movie I'd usually watch - but it had Simon Lack in it, an actor whom I've come to like, so I rented it. Like all of Lack's films after WWII, he doesn't have a very big role - about five minutes of screen time and only a few lines. (He plays Colonel Vickers, and shows up at the end of the movie after Trog has kidnapped a girl and hidden in his cave.)

All the reviews of this movie that I've found, trash it. But I think there's a little bit of sexism involved...not to mention hatred of Joan Crawford (who supposedly was not quite all there in the top story when it came to raising her adopted kids was concerned.)

Admittedly Trog is a cliche-fest. Trog is a smaller version of King Kong, or a hairier version of Frankenstein. He lives in a cave, peacefully on his own, until a couple of spelunkers find him. He kills one of them. Then, he is taken from the cave - Joan Crawford's character, Dr. Brockton, stands tall and shoots the charging Trog with her hypo rifle.

Dr. Brockton tries to teach him civilized ways, and is making progress, but evil Michael Gough's character wants him killed. Gough breaks into the lab, trashes it, releases Trog, and then returns to his car, only to be killed by Trog. Trog then kills a few other people - who attack him first - sees a little blond girl whom he takes a liking to (in a strictly non-sexual way, I hasten to add) and takes her to his cave.

Dr. Brockton shows up at the cave with a police officer and the Army. Despite orders not to, she goes into the cave and brings out the little girl, whom Trog gives to her voluntarily. She begs Vickers to let her go back in with her hypo gun, but the military and police will have none of it. They are going to kill Trog.

And they do.

Trog is a sympathetic character, for all that he kills a few people - only those who attacked him first. And Crawford's performance is hardly "stone face". She portrays a woman who is confident in herself and her abilities. She had a nice wardrobe, yes, and she uses it - some critics have slammed her for this. If her character had been played by a male actor one wonders if he would have received quite the same criticism.

So...Trog. Not as bad as we've been led to believe...if you like these types of movies, anyway!

Beware Email Blasts that Request Charity or Provide Warnings

2011-05-02T08:15:00.002-07:00

If you're like me, you have friends and relatives who send you, and everyone else on their list, emails about cancer-afflicted children who have written poems that they want forwarded to everyone you know (I received this one yesterday) or warnings that your cellphone number is about to be sold to a gazillion advertisers and there's nothing you can do about it. (Received this one about three weeks ago.)

And of course, they are all frauds.

When you receive an email like this, the thing to do is go to your favorite search engine - I use www.google.com, and type the topic in and do a search on it. Usually Snopes.com debunks the warning emails - most of those have been floating around for years, and you'll also find these charity requests debunked on a variety of sites.

It's a pity, really, that there are people out there with so much time on their hands that they try to think up these things and then see how long they have an internet shelf life...all too long, apparently.

So just a tip, if you ever receive a request - especially for a charitable donation - do your research on it first - in particular if it comes from Nigeria! They are all frauds.

New Sci Fi Models from Fantastic Plastic

2011-04-30T22:38:00.003-07:00

I get monthly newsletters from Fantastic Planet, sharing news on their new model kits, and I'll start sharing them here.

We close out April with a lot of exciting news and stuff from the Virtual Museum of Flying Wonders. Please read on...!

http://www.fantastic-plastic.com

JUST RELEASED: The C-31 "Dragon" Assault Ship in 1:144

After some delay, we're proud to announce the formal release of the 1:144 C-31 "Dragon" Assault Ship from James Cameron's 2009 blockbuster "AVATAR.". Featuring 105 pressure-cast pieces, this is by far the most complex kit we've ever produced. The kit was created in CAD by Scott Lowther and cast by Masterpiece Models. The model is 11 inches long when completed. The C-21 Dragon is available now in the Virtual Museum Store for $169.95 plus shipping.

NOTE Due to a combination of high demand and long production time on this kit, please allow one to two weeks for delivery.

Click the box art above for photos and details.

JUST RELEASED: The X-71 Super-Shuttle from "Armageddon" in 1:144

Our second April release is the X-71 Super Shuttle from Michael Bay's 1998 megahit "Armageddon" starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck. Most of us still remember our disappointment with Revell's 1998 version of the X-71-- which was little more than a standard Space Shuttle with a bunch of doo-hickies slapped onto it. Well, it's taken more than 13 years, but sci-fi modelers now have a chance to build the real X-71.

Mastered by Alfred Wong based on dozens of photos of the actual SPFX miniature and 1/2 scale mock-up, this 37-piece all-resin kit faithfully reproduces the lines, proportions and details of the X-71 orbiter. Decals by JBOT allow you to build either the "Freedom" or the "Independence." Landing gear are also included.

The X-71 Super Shuttle is available now in the Virtual Museum Store for $90.00 plus shipping. Click the box art above for photos and details.

RE-RELEASED: The BSG Colonial One Presidential Transport in 1:350

Back by popular demand is our Colonial One Presidential Transport kit in 1:350. Originally released in 2006, this kit has been out of the Fantastic Plastic catalog for the three years. Mastered by Alfred Wong and cast by Mana Studios, the kit includes 19 pieces, including a rotocast main body. Decals are my Microscale.

The 1:350 Colonial One Presidential Transport is available now in the Fantastic Plastic Virtual Museum Store for $80.00 plus shipping. Click the box art above for photos and details.

COMING IN MAY: The BSG (TOS) Eastern Alliance Destroyer in 1:288

Our May release is the Eastern Alliance Destroyer from the 1978 "Battlestar Galactica" (TOS) episodes "Greetings from Earth," "Baltar's Escape" and "Experiment in Terra." This 21-piece kit was mastered by Alfred Wong and cast by Millennium Models International (MMI). Decals are again by JBOT.

More than 12 inches long when completed, the Eastern Alliance Destroyer is priced at $75.00 plus shipping. To reserve your copy, email us at FantasticPlast@aol.com. Click the photo above for additional details.

"Private Sale" Continuing - Act Now!

We're continuing to clear out our final inventory of "Private Sale" kits. Remember, these are kits NOT AVAILABLE to the public through the Virtual Museum Store. And when they're gone, they're gone. If you want any of these limited castings, you have to contact us directly at FantasticPlast@aol.com. Here's what's left:
Royal Cruiser (3 remaining) 1:288 - $75.00 plus shipping
Royal Yacht 1:288 - $55 plus shipping
Stand-Up Fighter 1:144 - $55 plus shipping
Two-Man Fighter Bomber (1 remaining) 1:144 - $48.00 plus shipping

Lesbian writer Joanna Russ dies, aged 74

2011-04-30T10:02:00.002-07:00

HayNZ.com: Lesbian writer Joanna Russ dies, aged 74
Writer and critic Joanna Russ has died in Arizona after suffering a series of strokes.

Science fiction publication Locus Magazine has confirmed the 74-year-old died peacefully in hospice care in Tucson. She first suffered a stroke in February and was admitted to care in April after a further series of strokes.

The lesbian writer first came to prominence in the late 60s in a science fiction world largely dominated by men. She is lauded as being one of the most outspoken authors to challenge male dominance in the field, and is generally regarded as one of the leading feminist science fiction scholars and writers.

Russ was best know for The Female Man, which was published in 1975. She suffered from health problems including back pain and chronic fatigue syndrome, which reduced her writing output.

Sci-fi plays eschew the tech, explore the big issues

2011-04-30T09:54:00.000-07:00

STLToday: Sci-fi plays eschew the tech, explore the big issues
Remember that scene in "Alien," when the space creature emerges from someplace inside John Hurt?

Or how about the fight in "The Matrix," when Keanu Reeves is suspended in midair?

For that matter, think back to that incredible scene in "Star Wars" when our heroes blew up the Death Star.

Could any of that happen onstage?

No chance. The special effects that give science fiction its adrenaline jolt in the movies and on television depend on technology.

But in live theater, technology usually means something a lot simpler.

Remember that cocktail table that rolled down the stage by itself in "Titanic" last summer at the Muny? On stage, that constitutes a special effect. Heck, when the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis staged "Dracula" in 2007, audiences were knocked out when a woman seemed to levitate. It was definitely impressive, but that play opened in 1924. You can't exactly call it cutting-edge.

Maybe that's why, even though science fiction is a popular entertainment genre, you don't see a lot of it on stage: Movies and TV can do it better. Nevertheless, two plays with strong sci-fi elements are running here this week: "Intelligent Life" at HotCity Theatre and "Dark Matters," a Stray Dog Theatre Studio Workshop production.

There's no question that they are fiction. Science is another story.

But maybe, says Annamaria Pileggi, they just aren't science fiction the way we usually think of it today. To find more apt comparisons, think of science fiction TV programs from years gone by, like "Star Trek" or "The Twilight Zone."

Those shows used conventions of science fiction as a way to look at other issues: interpersonal relationships, social responsibility, love and loyalty and honor.

Some playwrights today are doing practically the same thing: not writing hard science fiction, but using science fiction conventions to set the stage for issues they want to explore.

That's how Pileggi sees "Intelligent Life," the comedy she's directing at HotCity. In the play, a band of fringe-of-the-fringe characters who call themselves the Utah Alien Chasers think they have found their grail when they encounter a mud-stained boy dressed in a dinosaur costume. Is he from Earth — or someplace else?

"It's not a wannabe movie," said Pileggi. "It is meant for the stage.

"It's about the interaction among these people and how little it takes to get somebody to believe what he or she wants to believe. I think what Lauren (Dusek Albonico, the playwright) has done is quite smart. This is a play about faith." Two years ago, "Intelligent Life" was a finalist in HotCity's Greenhouse New Play Festival.

Albonico — a Washington University alumna from St. Louis who now lives in Santa Fe — told Pileggi that the idea for the play came from her own experiences. No, she does not chase aliens. As a Catholic, however, she was always aware that she believed things that other people in her classes did not. What does that mean, she wondered? To push the question a little harder, she took it to extremes, giving her characters really strange beliefs to insist on — and making them funny.

There's nothing funny about Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's "Dark Matters" — and nothing very high-tech about it, either. "We do a few things with lighting," said the director, Justin Been. "But the heart of the play lies in the family. Science fiction is just a catalyst to bring up other points."

Set at a remote house in the mountains of Virginia, Aguirre-Sacasa's drama starts with the missing woman. Her husband and their teenage son do all they can to find her, but she's gone. Then, just as suddenly as she vanished, she returns — speaking of strange visitations and other-worldly beings.

"It's more about the thought of aliens than the presence of aliens," Been said. "The people in this family have secrets that test their relationships when they have to deal with them. It isn't humorous but it is suspenseful."

Stories of people who believe things that others dismiss have been told before (Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People," Shaw's "Saint Joan," and, closer to home, Deanna Jent's stage adaptation of C.S. Lewis' novel "Till We Have Faces," closing Sunday at Mustard Seed Theatre). Stories of families confronting secrets are legion (Miller's "Death of a Salesman," Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex"). These aren't just legitimate themes for the stage, they are favorite ones. Science fiction offers just one more way to examine them, through a lens that theatergoers don't often get to look through.

South African author wins Arthur C Clarke award

2011-04-28T08:25:00.001-07:00

Guardian.co.uk: South African author wins Arthur C Clarke award
Lauren Beukes honoured with top science fiction prize for her novel Zoo City, set in an alternate Johannesburg
South African author Lauren Beukes has won the UK's top science fiction prize, the Arthur C Clarke award, seeing off the favourite, Ian McDonald, with a story of the criminal underclass in an alternate Johannesburg.

Published by the tiny UK press Angry Robot, Zoo City beat not only McDonald, but also the US National Book award winner Richard Powers and the Guardian children's fiction prize winner Patrick Ness.

Speaking after the "unexpected" result, Beukes said she felt "like Gwyneth Paltrow – but I promise I won't burst into tears".

"I had a speech prepared and it was curse you McDonald," she said. South Africa, is an "an incredible place to live ... and write about", she added. "It's really where science fiction is. It's in the developing world, it's first world, it's third world – the way we use technology is different to the way it's used elsewhere. This book is about magic and technology and it's very special to be here."

Described as "Jeff Noon crossed with Raymond Chandler", Zoo City tells of the festering Zoo City slum, where psychic criminal guilt takes the form of an animal familiar and where Zinzi December, looking for missing pop starlet Songweza, uncovers secrets that the local crime lord and dark magician wants to stay hidden.

According to judge and author Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Zoo City was the "clear winner".

"Zoo City filters brutal social honesty through a stunning imagination to produce a world recognisably ours and obviously different," he said. "The plotting is tight, the characterisation strong and the writing superb."

Chair of judges Paul Billinger agreed, describing the novel as a book that "realises the enormous potential of SF literature, and as a piece of social commentary it is unsurpassed in the field".

Beukes wins £2011, and becomes the ninth woman to take the Arthur C Clarke prize since Margaret Atwood first won it 25 years ago. She was presented with the award last night (Wednesday 27 April) by China Miéville, who last year won it for a record-breaking third time with his novel The City and the City.

The author later revealed on Twitter – whose users she had earlier thanked for their advice "on good places to dump a body in Johannesburg" – that "those are red wine stains down the front of my dress in the Clarke award photos".

McDonald, meanwhile, might have missed out on the Arthur C Clarke to Beukes, but he can comfort himself with the fact that his tale of a near-future Istanbul, The Dervish House, beat the South African author to the British Science Fiction Association award for best novel on Tuesday – an award he has now won with each of his last three novels. McDonald was also shortlisted for the Hugo best novel prize earlier this week.

"It seems extraordinary to think that Ian McDonald has won [the BSFA award] for each of his last three novels until you read him, and realise he really is that good. The Dervish House may even be his most complete achievement, vigorous and enthralling," said Niall Harrison, editor in chief of Strange Horizons. The BSFA prize is voted for by members of the British Science Fiction Association.

BBC America announces 'The Fades' and explains its science-fiction fixation

2011-04-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Times: BBC America announces 'The Fades' and explains its science-fiction fixation
It may be royal-wedding week in the U.K., but BBC America has its eye on spookier things: The network just announced that it’s co-producing a new supernatural drama called “The Fades,” to premiere January 2012.

Written by Jack Thorne (who wrote for the U.K. versions of “Skins” and “Shameless” as well as co-writing the Shane Meadows movie “This is England ’86”), it stars Lily Loveless and Daniel Kaluuya (who both starred in the original U.K. “Skins”) and features a plotline about a boy who sees spirits.

This comes on the heels of last week’s announcement that the channel would air 80 hours of 2003 sci-fi classic “Battlestar Galactica,” which originally ran on Syfy, starting June 18. Not only that, but the recently announced upcoming slate also includes the new series “Outcasts,” described as a “frontier sci-fi drama” about power struggles and sex in “a new post-Earth era” (premieres June 18) and the spooky fall 2011 drama “Bedlam,” about an apartment building haunted by its former inhabitants -- patients in a lunatic asylum. These new shows will join existing programs such as “Doctor Who” and “Being Human” on BBC America’s “Supernatural Saturday block.”

So is BBC America trying to compete with Syfy to become the geek network of choice?

According to Perry Simon, general manager of BBC America, it’s just a matter of focusing on what they do well. “Science fiction is a staple of British television -- there’s rich history of it, and they do it very well. As a result, BBCA has gotten a steady pipeline of quality British science fiction, and we have over the years wanted to deliver it in coherent fashion, which led us to brand 'Supernatural Saturday.' "

Some fans expressed surprise about the signing of "Battlestar Galactica,” which has no English angle (except for a few of the actors, who artfully disguised their British accents). Simon pointed out that “Galactica” joined “Star Trek: the Next Generation,” which has been in reruns on BBC America for a while. But the bulk of the programming, he promises, will be “British science fiction.”
Even the British shows may be getting a little American action, though: The season opener of “Doctor Who” found the Tardis landing in the U.S. And that may give it a boost here -- the show’s season premiere this weekend nabbed it almost 1.3 million viewers, up from last season’s opener.

Simon says the Doctor’s American setting partly “grew out of conversations about how to grow the franchise in American audience” -- but that more than anything it was creative excitement on the part of “Doctor Who” producer Steven Moffat. As he told EW, “We had an idea, and it seemed cool, so we did it.”

‘Doctor Who’: Longest-running science fiction TV show kicks off new season stateside

2011-04-23T19:01:00.001-07:00

Columbia Spectator: ‘Doctor Who’: Longest-running science fiction TV show kicks off new season stateside
Doctor Who, the world’s longest-running science fiction television show, returns to the small screen on Saturday, April 23, with a bang—literally.

One of the most popular shows in Britain, Doctor Who is a cult favorite in America. The show follows the adventures of the Doctor, a 908-year-old time-travelling alien, known as a “Time Lord,” from the planet Gallifrey. The Doctor has two hearts, and instead of dying, he regenerates into a new form—hence the ability for different actors to play him—with the same memories and similar quirky characteristics.

Matt Smith plays the 11th incarnation. He gives the Doctor an incredible range.

Steven Moffat, the show’s head writer, once remarked that though Smith is the youngest man to ever play the Doctor, it seems like he is the oldest. This simultaneously old and young Doctor is delightful to watch on-screen and appears to be portrayed by Smith with ease.

The Doctor voyages throughout the universe in a TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space) that disguises itself as a blue police call box from 1960s Britain. He is the last of his kind, after he destroyed his home planet and his race in the Time War. The Doctor travels with a human companion, saving the universe—and usually humanity—from sinister aliens such as the Daleks, the Cybermen, and the Weeping Angels.

[Today], the new season begins with the first of a two-part arc entitled “The Impossible Astronaut.” It is the first episode in the 48-year history of “Doctor Who” to film principally in America.

The show opens with Amy (Karen Gillan), the Doctor’s current companion, Rory (Arthur Darvill), her husband, and Dr. River Song (Alex Kingston)—a mysterious woman from the Doctor’s future—receiving envelopes telling them when and where to meet.

They head to Utah, where the Doctor awaits their arrival. There, they meet Canton Everett Delaware III, a former FBI agent. Within the first 10 minutes, a fan-favorite character dies, and it comes as such a surprise that shrieks of anguish were heard at the episode’s screening.

Delaware tells the remaining company to travel to Washington D.C. in 1969, and there the adventure truly begins.

Nixon makes a delightful appearance, and as this is a British show, it is full of American stereotypes. Whenever given the possibility, an American whips out a gun and threatens to shoot something, and the only logic given for this trigger-happiness is that they are Americans. Typical.[And true!]

Consequential Strangers, by Melinda Blau and Karen Fingerman

2011-04-17T15:47:00.001-07:00

This book is off-topic, but it's so interesting that I thought I'd share it.

There's an old saying, "I shall only pass this way but once, so any little good I can do, let me do it now, for I shall only pass this way but once."

We pass strangers every day - each one of them has their own problems and preoccupations. A smile from you might change their life - so might a frown or a casual insult (such as sneering at their weight, or something of that nature.)

It costs nothing to give someone a friendly smile, and you never know what it might accomplish as the stranger at whom you smile goes on to struggle through his or her day.

Consequential Strangers: The Power of People who Don't Seem to Matter, but Really Do, by Melinda Blau and Karen Fingerman
W W Norton and Co, 2009
219 pages, plus Appendices, notes and index. No photos
Library: 155.927 BLA

Description
They punctuate our days, but we take them for granted: our barista, our car mechanic, a coworker, a fellow dog lover. Yet these are the consequential strangers who bring novelty and information into our lives, allow us to exercise different parts of ourselves, and open us up to new opportunities. They keep us healthy and are invaluable when we're sick. They fuel innovation and social movements. And they are vital in times of uncertainty.

In their unprecedented examination of "people who don't seem to matter," psychologist Karen L. Fingerman, who coined the term "consequential strangers" collaborates with journalist Melinda Blau to develop an idea sparked by Fingerman's groundbreaking research. Drawing as well from Blau's more than two hundred interviews with specialists in psychology, sociology, marketing, and communication, this book presents compelling stories of individuals and institiutions, past and present.

A rich portrait of our social landscape-on and off the internet-it presents the science of casual connection and chronicles the surprising impact that consequential strangers have on business, creativity, the work environment, our physical and mental health, and the strength of our communities.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction - The Birth of a Notion
1. The Ascendance of Consequential Strangers
2. The View From Above
3. Beyond the Confines of the Familiar
4. Good for What Ails Us
5. Being Spaces
6. The Downside
7. The Future of Consequential Strangers
Epilogue: The Postscript is Personal
Appendix I: 20 Questions
Appendix II: The Occupation Test
Notes
Index

Terrarium (2003)

2011-04-11T08:58:00.002-07:00

12 astronauts volunteer to pioneer a colony, on a newly discovered planet. They awake from their frozen 15 year sleep to discover that the ship has crashed and that they are trapped in their cryotubes. To make matters worse, a hairy beast breaks in and begins devouring them, one by one...

On a whim, I did an Image search for "science fiction movie" and the first result was for Terrarium - a movie from 2003 that starred Tim Daley (not to be confused wth Tim Daly!) and Jason Hall.

An independent, low budget production.

It has a website: http://www.terrariumthemovie.com/

Doctor Who Theme on Car Horns

2011-03-31T11:26:00.002-07:00

I wonder what would happen if someone caught in a traffic jam tried to start playing this theme on their car horns. Would other drivers pick it up or not realize what was going on.

And could the babies be trusted to cry on cue?

Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Vincent Price's Birth

2011-02-28T18:34:00.001-07:00

St. Louis is getting ready for Vincentennial, the Vincent Price 100th Birthday Celebration this May. Pirate Picture’s Wyatt Weed, writer/director of the St. Louis-lensed vampire opus Shadowland, shot this promo film for the event.

This is a longer version of the promo film that ran before films at the recent St. Louis International Film Festival. Vincentennial is a Film festival celebrating the career of Vincent Price in conjunction with an exhibit of Price artifacts and memorabilia and is being presented by Cinema St. Louis. Legendary director Roger Corman will be in St. Louis to kick off the event. The schedule for the film festival will announced in a couple of more weeks. Details can be found here at We Are Movie Geeks.com, the Vincentennial Facebook page (Here), and at www.vincentennial.com

The Green Hornet - Seth Rogan version

2011-02-12T14:59:00.002-07:00

Last week, the SciFi channel showed a marathon of Green Hornet shows - the ones with Van Williams as Britt Reid and Bruce Lee as Kato. It was fun watching a show I hadn't seen in 30 years, and yes, Lee's Kato was definitely the star of the show - we all watched it for his martial arts prowess.

I went to see Seth Rogan's Green Hornet today, and ... it was okay. I could have done without some of the language, and there were a couple of villains-after-death closeups that I could have done without...but...it was okay. And young people today are so immured to bad language...they probably wouldn't even notice it...which is both good and bad.

Anyway, it opens 20 years earlier, with Britt Reid being brought to his father's office at the Daily Sentinel. He was involved in a fight at school, but his dad won't listen to him when he says that he'd tried to help a little girl who was being bullied by some boys. His father destroys his super hero action figure.

20 years later, Britt Reid has forgotten about helping people, and is more interested in drinking and bedding women. He still lives in his father's house, but in a kind of apartment over the garage. Not quite sure how he gets his coffee, but in the morning when he wakes up there's a coffee cup by his bed with a cool flower in it in foam...

Anyway, his father dies of a bee sting, and Britt inherits the paper. For some reason Mike Axford - a crusading reporter in the actual Green Hornet stories, is here the executive editor of the whole paper, and instead of being played by an Irish actor - Axford = Irish, he's played by Edward James Olmos. That's fine, if you want Reid's second in command at the paper played by Olmos, go for it. But don't call him Mike Axford. Indeed, why not give him a Hispanic or Latino name of some kind?

Anyway, Olmos has very little to do in the movie so it's a moot point.

Reid has fired all his dad's employees from the house, so the next day he doesn't get his coffee. It is Kato, his father's chauffer, who made the coffee, so Reid hires him back. (Why Reid has never met Kato is a mystery that's never broached.) They get to talking about Britt's father, and then don masks and go out to the cemetery to vandalize his statue.

After doing this, Britt sees a couple being mugged and tries to go to the rescue, but fails. Kato intervenes and saves the day, and their dual identities as crime fighters is established.

Cameron Diaz as Lenore comes on board, she has a degree in journalism but is hired as a secretary. However, Reid uses her research skills to plot his plan as the Green Hornet. He pretends to be a villain because if he's a good guy, the bad guys will just say, "Stop messing with us or we'll kill some innocent people," but if he's a bad guy, they can't say that because he won't care about innocent people.

So it goes, and it's all right for the most part except for the ending. Of course it has to be a "spectacular" ending, so the Black Beauty is seen zooming through the halls of the Daily Sentinel. It's here that two graphic deaths take place. The initial deaths are fine, but then the camera stays on the aftermath longer than is necessary.

Cameron Diaz does a good job with what she's given. It's refreshing to see a character who doesn't fall in love with her boss - Britt tries to kiss her and she slaps him. She's the "mastermind" ...or at least she is to grow into the role.

If there's a sequel, hopefully they'll expand on that - she plots the activties of the Green Hornet and Kato, they just carry out her bidding.

Anyway, Kato is "da man" with his martial art skills. Seth Rogan is a comedian, but his acting is all right in this. His character is just an irritating one. I really liked the villain...no one ever thinks he's scary, until he's just about to shoot them. Well played by Christopher Waltz.

18-20 FEb, 2011: Mega Doctor Who Convention

2011-02-08T19:01:00.002-07:00

From the Gallifrey 2011 website
Welcome to the website for the 2011 Gallifrey One convention, Gallifrey One's Catch 22: Islands of Mystery.

Gallifrey One is North America's largest fan-run Doctor Who event, and the longest-running annual Doctor Who convention in the world. We have tons of confirmed guests announced, great programming events, panels and other fun things to take part in at our next convention!

If you've never been with us, check out the About Gallifrey One page and our Photo Gallery from past conventions. Also, feel free join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter! We also feature Online Registration for the event, and you can find out about everything from the program to our dealers room and art show, the masquerade, our autograph & photo sessions and much more here at the website. Feel free to drop us a line via email if you have questions, too!

Gallifrey 2011 Theme Days
February 8, 2011 • Categories: Program
Each of the three days of this year's Gallifrey 2011 convention will feature special themes, and we encourage everyone to be part of the fun by participating in these events:

Friday is Tropical Adventure Day! Wear your Hawaiian shirts, your board shorts, grass skirts - anything to take part in the island celebration. (Anyone visiting the convention on Friday with something tropical will receive a complementary lei to wear, too!) We encourage you to get creative, too!

Saturday is Doctor Who Costume Day. Get out your Doctor Who, Torchwood and Sarah Jane costumes and wear them proudly. Scarves, brainy specs, trainers, fezzes (that's right... after all, fezzes are cool), bow ties (ditto), stalks of celery -- it's all to get into the spirit of things, and we want your Doctor Who costumes shown off all day long.

And finally, Sunday is very special... Sunday, February 20 is in fact an annual holiday in the far distant Islands of Mystery. They call it Island Awareness Day in that far off land. To show your Island Awareness, wear something special related to one of the 22 Islands of Mystery... a costume, a hat, a shirt, anything that relates to the Islands of Mystery. Need a list of the Islands? Check out the Islands page on our website.

We hope you will join us by participating in our theme days!

Here are the guests - subject to travel, weather, health, etc.
Peter Davison
Janet Fielding
Sarah SUtton
Tracie Simpson
Matthew Waterhouse
John Leeson
Frazier Hines
John Levene
Gareth Thomas
Cush Jumbo
Paul Lasey
Meill Gorton and ROb Mayor
Ian McNeice
Gareth Roberts
Philip Olivier
Sarah DOuglas
Jane Espenson
Doris Egan
Phil Ford
Joss Agnew
James Moran
Daniel Logan
Daphne Ashbrook
Virgnia Hey
Rick Sternbach
Gareth Skelding
Gary Russell
Jason-Haigh-Ellery
Clayton Hickman
Barbara Hambly
Tony Lee
Len Wein and Marv Wolfman
Mathew Dow Smith and Blair Shepp
RIchard Starkings
David Gerrold
Denton Tipton
C. Andrew Nelson
Javier Grillo-Markuach
Jose Molina
Wendy Pini
Nancy HOlder
David J. Howe
Lars Pearson and Christa Dickson
Richard Dinnick
David Wise
Lynn Marie Thomas
Robert Smith
Graeme Burk
Darin Henry
Dr. Arnold T. Blumberg
Courtland Lews
Kevin Grazier
Trina Ray
Steve Bartlett
Robert Gounley
Jim Busby
Sarah Milkovich
Bill Ernohaezy
Sam STone
Paul J. Salamoff
Audry Taylor
Aime Major Steinberger
Arne Starr
Craig Miller
Daryll Frazetti
Eric Hoffman

Band
Tanuki Suit Riot

Podcasters:
Dr. Who Podshock
Radio Free Skaro

Her Universe - tees and stuff for fans of Star Wars

2011-02-05T18:00:00.002-07:00

http://heruniverse.com/

Expensive t-shirts - $35! - but with designs to appeal too women,and the t-shirts are fitted.

Seems to be all Star Wars designs right now...

PR: ADMIRALTY: Volume 4 of the Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson

2011-02-05T17:42:00.004-07:00

NESFA Press is proud to announce the publication of ADMIRALTY: Volume 4 of the Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson.

See http://www.nesfa.org/press/index.html for ordering information. Price is $29

Introduction by David G. Hartwell, edited by Rick Katze; cover by John
Picacio; cover design by Alice N. S. Lewis.

Details of the book will be found at
http://www.nesfa.org/press/Books/Anderson-4.html

"Admiralty: The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson" (volume 4) continues the series of presenting the best of his fantasy and science fiction stories published over a writing career of 50 years. It includes "Admiralty", a story in the foreseeable future when man has colonies on other planets and is in conflict with an alien empire, "Goat Song", the Hugo and Nebula award winning story about a man's determination to bring his lost love back to life, "Operation Changeling", a world where magic and demons co-exist, "Delenda Est", a story of the time patrol and the choices that must be made to keep our existence intact, "The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound", co-written with Gordon R. Dickson, where the aliens are living on their own planet, a portion of which is created as Victorian England with Scotland Yard and Sherlock Holmes, "Marius", which shows that the only thing we learn from history is history, and the delightful “Inside Straight”, in which an understanding of poker defeats an invasion.

Table of Contents
Introduction by David G. Hartwell
Admiralty
Among Thieves
Delenda Est
Eutopia
Goat Song
Gypsy
Holmgang
Home
Horse Trader
Inside Straight
Kyrie
Lodestar
Marius
Murphy's Hall
Operation Changeling
Quixote and the Windmill
The Problem of Pain
Sister Planet
The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound
The Barrier Moment
The Bitter Bread
The Pugilist
The Star Beast
Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson won 7 Hugos and 3 Nebulas over his career. He was named "A Grand Master" by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1998.

John Picacio
John Picacio is a World Fantasy Award winner, and has also received three Chesley Awards, and six consecutive Hugo nominations.

PR: HAL LEONARD RELEASES BATTLESTAR GALACTICA SONGBOOK

2011-02-03T10:03:00.001-07:00

Cool New Piano Solo Folio Showcases Noted Composer Bear McCreary

(MILWAUKEE) – Variety called composer Bear McCreary’s score for Battlestar Galactica – the award-winning series on the SyFy channel from 2004-2009 – “the most innovative music on TV today,” and NPR said it “fits the action so perfectly, it’s almost devastating: (it’s) a sci-fi score like no other.” Hal Leonard Corporation is proud to publish the first-ever songbook featuring the music from the series.

McCreary himself was heavily involved in the creation of this special collection, personally translating his acclaimed, world music-infused orchestral score into fantastic piano solo arrangements. The intermediate to advanced-level songbook contains 19 selections in all, and as a bonus, also simplified versions of “Roslin and Adama” and “Wander My Friends.” There is a note from the Emmy-nominated McCreary, as well as a biography.

The music from Battlestar Galactica has a rabid following. No fewer than six soundtrack albums have been released to date, all selling well and enthusiastically praised by critics. There have also been several live concerts featuring the music. In 2008, more than 1,000 fans attended two sold-out shows at The Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles, with some fans flying in from as far as England and Australia. Last summer, McCreary conducted the world premiere performance of the Battlestar Galactica Symphony, as part of the renowned Fimucite Film Music Festival in Tenerife, Spain. A ballet based on McCreary’s scores for the series premiered in 2009, performed by the dancers of the Theaterhagen in Hagen, Germany.

McCreary comments on the Hal Leonard Battlestar Galactica songbook, “At last, fans can now be a part of the musical process themselves and experience the score as I first did: with fingertips touching the ivories.”

A must for the show’s multitude of fans, the Battlestar Galactica Piano Solo folio (HL00313530, ISBN 978-1-61780-367-3) retails for $16.99 and is available at music stores nationwide, or through Music Dispatch (www.musicdispatch.com, 800-637-2852). www.bearmccreary.com/blog

About Bear McCreary
Bear McCreary holds degrees in composition and recording arts from the prestigious Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. However, he attributes his professional training to his mentor, the late film music legend Elmer Bernstein. By the age of 24, McCreary launched into pop culture with his groundbreaking score for Battlestar Galactica. McCreary’s other composing credits include Disney’s Step Up 3D, and several hit series, including The Walking Dead, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Caprica, The Cape and Eureka. McCreary’s swashbuckling score for Human Target featured the largest orchestra ever assembled for a television series in history, and earned him an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Main Title Theme.

About Hal Leonard Corporation
Founded in 1947, Hal Leonard Corporation (www.halleonard.com) is the world’s largest music print publisher, producing songbooks, sheet music, educational publications, reference books, DVDs, CD-ROMs, children’s music products and more. In its more than 200,000 available publications, the company represents in print some of the world’s best known and most respected publishers, artists, songwriters and arrangers. Hal Leonard is headquartered in Milwaukee, WI and also has domestic offices in Winona, MN; New York; and Nashville; and offices abroad in Australia, Belgium, China, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

College of Sci Fi Knowledge Radiation Theater Quizbook

2011-02-02T16:20:00.003-07:00

The Thunder Child is proud to announce our first book for the Kindle: The COllege of Sci Fi Knowledge, Eye Sci Fi edition (that means movies), with an emphasis on what I like to call "Radition Theater" - science fiction movies from 1950-1962 that featured giant bugs, giant women, shrinking men, and our first explorations of the universe.

The Quiz Book is profusely illustrated with stills and posters and features over 200 questions on a variety of topics

In the Beginning - identify movie from its opening lines
The Secrets of the Krell - trivia
They All Have Families - production people
A Star is Born - actors
That Was Probably Very Clever - quotes
The End? - identify a movie by its last lines.

And many more!

This Quiz Book is on Kindle - but don't despair if you don't have a Kindle. You can download - for free - an emulator for the PC (and read the book on a much larger screen which is very nice!) and on various smart phones.

And the price of this amazingly colossal book is only $1.99.

So - here's the thing to do. Make one night a week a Radiation Theater night, and watch one of these great filims - most of them are available viw Netflix, Amazon or even YouTube. In order to decide who gets to watch what - who has to make the popcorn, who has to clean up, have a contest with this quiz book, choose ten questions at randoms and whoever gets the least questions right - has to do the winner's bidding.

Below is the URL.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004LX0DN6?tag=theeuropeansilen&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B004LX0DN6&adid=10CF8PZWE67PHMNEJDNA

PR: Koldcast ads the web series Haywire to is line up

2011-01-28T20:21:00.002-07:00

Monroe, NY, January 28, 2011 – The horror/sci-fi web series Haywire is set to join the line-up of KoldCast TV, one of the world’s top destinations for original web-based programming. The collaboration will introduce Koldcast’s ever-growing international audience representing over 200 countries to the world of Haywire.

In addition to viewing episodes on the Koldcast website (www.Koldcast.tv), Haywire’s growing fan base will soon be able to enjoy the series in full HD on their televisions through any of Koldcast’s apps offered on the likes of Boxee and Roku. With the expanse of the Koldcast network, more viewers than ever will get a taste of the emerging series.

"Haywire is a twisted, gruesome suburban nightmare” offered Koldcast VP of Network Programming Marti Resteghini. “Not only is it a great horror series but a clever satire as well."

ABOUT HAYWIRE
Haywire is a horror/sci-fi web series produced by Lights Out Film Group (www.lightsoutfilmgroup.com). The series focuses on the effects of a strange light on the suburban town of Monroe, New York.

Jon Pertwee in The Curious Case of Santa Claus, pt 1

2011-01-24T17:36:00.002-07:00

One Step Beyond: Wesley Lau in Mask

2011-01-21T00:04:00.003-07:00

LikeTelevision Watch Movies and TV Shows

From the I Like Television website. A young Wesley Lau (most famous as Andy Andeson on Perry Mason), plays a pilot who parachutes into the desert of Egypt. Then, strange things start to happen.)

The Making of the Creature from the Black Lagoon

2011-01-17T21:25:00.002-07:00

Watch Haywire: an indie sci fi/horror series

2011-01-01T17:48:00.004-07:00

Three episodes are now available at Youtube, with new eps added on a monthly basis. The film company, Lights Out, is located in New York, and is looking for storefronts to film in front of or houses to film in. If you'd like to be a part of filmmaking history, give 'em a call! (And especially do so if you want to try out your acting chops.)

http://haywireseries.com/?page_id=42
Haywire is the saga of the effects of a strange phenomenon on the population of the small Hudson Valley town of Monroe, New York. It's horror and sci-fi with a nice peppering of drama, comedy and action for your viewing pleasure.
"Monroe, New York. A burst of light. Area-wide power outages and the complete failure of all electronic devices. All within line of sight of the burst are affected. Their thought processes scramble and become a never-ending loop. Accomplish what you were doing when you saw the light. Then do it again. And again. And if something gets in your way?"

Haywire episode 1: The Gardener

Hawire episode 2: The Beaten Path

Haywire episode 3: Return to Sender

January Conventions

2010-12-30T19:29:00.003-07:00

The Thunder Child has updated its science fiction convention pages for 2011. We've got two pages, one that lists conventions by date, and the other that lists conventions by location.

Below are the conventiosn for January. (That we know about. If you're holding a convention and its not listed below (or at our pages), email us and give us all the details.

http://thethunderchild.com/Conventions/USCalendarByDate.html

Remember that all the info provided below is for information only. Check the convention's website to verify dates, times and costs. (The Thunder Child isn't responsible for any info in error! Verify!)

January 14-16
RustyCon 30
"A science fiction & fantasy convention"
Seattle Airport Marriott
3201 South 176th Street
Seattle, WA
www.rustycon.com/

January 14-16
MarsCon (Williamsburg, VA)
"Southeastern Virginia's Premiere Relaxi-con"
Holiday Inn Patriot
3032 Richmond Road, Route 60
Williamsburg, VA
www.marscon.net/

January 14-17
Arisia '19
"New England's largest and most diverse science fiction and fantasy convention"
Westin Waterfront Hotel
425 Summer Street
Boston, 02210, MA
2011.arisia.org/

January 21-23
Confusion
"Brought to you by the Stilyagi Air Corps"
Detroit Marriott Troy
200 West Big Beaver Road, Troy, MI
www.stilyagi.org/

George Reeves Adventures of Superman

2010-12-25T13:49:00.003-07:00

Over 10 years ago, TVLand aired an Adventures of Superman marathon, starting with the Phyllis Coates episodes. To my rage, the Haunted Lighthouse episode wasn't among them, and indeed, they'd skip every two or three episodes, so they weren't showing the full set.

Annoyed, I never did watch the tapes I'd made .... so it's not until today, some ten years later, that I'm finally watching all these episodes, one after the other, as I transfer them from VHS to DVD-R.

And what fun they are. I must say that yes, the first season is the best, and it's too bad Phyllis Coates has been succeeded in everyone's minds by Noel Neill...indeed, I don't think Coates was ever invited to any of the Superman reunions...at least not if Noel Neill was going to be there.

Anyway, much as I do like Neill, the Coates episodes were simply superior TV, for the most part.

Now, this is a great website you must visit if you're a fan of George Reeves' Superman shows.

http://www.jimnolt.com/

It has everything. The website owner is the author of a Superman companion book, that I've reviewed at The Thunder Child website. I can't give you the title now as, since I've moved, all my books are packed away, but as soon as I find it, I'll give it another blurb.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-25T12:08:00.001-07:00

A video, which my Kindle readers can't view, unfortunately.

The New Seekers singing "I'd like to teach the world to sing"

(Go to Youtube and do a serch on the song if you'd like to hear it.)

Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming

2010-12-23T18:13:00.002-07:00

Just watched this while recording it from VHS to DVD-R. I do enjoy it, although it would be a lot betterif a few minutes were cut, for example the guy spending 5 minutesto catch his horse, and the two women in the motorcycle...but for most of its length its a great movie and I admit the penultimate ending has me teary-eyed.

It's always something

2010-12-22T12:37:00.002-07:00

My mom has "free" antivirus protection on her Dell...and it's done her no good at all. She's now infected with something that prevents IE and Firefox from being able to get online, even though she's connected to the internet.

I thought I had put Panda Cloud Virus on there, but apparently not. Not that I know if Panda works, either. It was a suggestion of my brother's. On my computer, I pay for Norton, which seems to work just fine.

My mom is in her 70s, and doesn't know enough to not download stuff sent by strangers, or not open emails from people you dont' know. When I looked at her computer today, she had something called Magnetic...something... as her default IE homepage. I got rid of that and put it back to Yahoo mail..and that's when the probem started.

All malware and virus devisers should be shot on sight!

Ah, memories

2010-12-21T19:30:00.002-07:00

For the last 3 or 4 days I've been transferring my VHS tapes to DVD-R. I've got over 200 VHS tapes, so this will probably take me a couple of months at least.

But it's fun, I'm watching a lot of shows I hadn't watched since I taped them, 20 - 1- years ago... Perry Mason, Combat!, Doctor Who (Tom Baker, and Jon Pertwee) the Avengers with Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) and so on.

Fun fun.

Of ocurse what I'm going to do with 200 expendable VHS tapes I do not know. I've tried to give them away on CHeyenne Freecycle, but no one's expressed an interest.

1950s Horror Theatre from Comedy Break

2010-12-17T23:17:00.002-07:00

Uploaded at YouTube. 3 episodes of 1950s Horror Theatre, and then an Easter Egg at the end. Do not touch that dial.

1950s Science Fiction Theater from Comedy Break

2010-12-17T18:57:00.002-07:00

comedy Break was a syndicated comedy skit series from 1985-1986, which starred the Comedy duo of Mack and Jamie (Mack Dryden and Jamie Alcroft). Kevin Pollak was on board for the whole series, the female supporting actor changed, I think it was Marla Frumkin first and then Jan Hooks, with Maggie Roswell subbing for Hooks on one occasion.

One or more of the writers for this showw must have been a fan of science fiction, because there were a few of these 1950s Science Fiction Theater (with Kevin Pollak doing a great William Shatner/Captain Kirk impression), and a few 1950s Horror Movie Theater (which were really science fiction spoofs, filmed in color) and one hilarious sendup of Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Press Release: GET A MOUTHFUL OF MURLOCS FOR THE HOLIDAYS!

2010-12-15T03:39:00.003-07:00

New Stein Showcases Legendary Denizens of the Deep From Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft®

SAN DIEGO, CA (December 13, 2010) – Taverncraft, a subsidiary of 3 Point Entertainment LLC, today announced they have begun shipping the latest addition to their Epic Collection stein series based on Blizzard Entertainment's massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft®. The new stein, entitled RAWGRLRLRLRRLGLRL!!!, features Azeroth’s wildly popular denizens of the deep, the murlocs, illustrated by premier fantasy artist Matt Cavotto. The stoneware stein features numerous murlocs throughout, including Winterfin Oracle, Bluefin Murloc and Murloc Tidehunter, and is topped with an exclusive murloc-themed solid pewter lid.

“Murlocs are among the most popular monsters within World of Warcraft, and we always knew a murloc stein would be a great addition to our line-up,” said 3 Point Entertainment President Jerry Bennington. “They're wily creatures with a fun reputation, and this collectible stein, which is perfect for holiday gift-giving, is a great way to express your love for these unforgettable characters."

RAWGRLRLRLRRLGLRL!!! is the fifth release in the Epic Collection series of World of Warcraft steins. Previous steins in the series include Blood of the Horde, Alliance United, Rise of the Lich King, and Charge of the Great Dragonflights.

Each Epic Collection stein stands over 10” tall, is handcrafted from authentic fine-grain stoneware, and features panoramic bas-relief sculpting and a solid pewter lid. The new RAWGRLRLRLRRLGLRL!!! stein can be purchased at www.taverncraft.com for $99.99 / 81.99 EUR each, with the other World of Warcraft Epic Collection steins currently available for the same price.

Press Release: TAVERNCRAFT LAUNCHES NEW LINE OF PREMIUM MARVEL ETCHED GLASSES

2010-12-15T03:30:00.003-07:00

Glasses Feature Deep-Etched Iconic Images of Legendary Marvel Super-Heroes

SAN DIEGO, CA (December 14, 2010) – You've read about their exploits in your favorite comic books. You've watched them on the silver screen. Now you can also share a drink with the world's greatest super-heroes! Taverncraft, a subsidiary of 3 Point Entertainment LLC, today announced they have entered into an agreement with Marvel Entertainment Group to create steins, tankards and mugs, plus a unique line of deep-etched glassware, all featuring iconic Marvel Comics super-heroes. The initial wave of 16 oz. pint glasses and 25 oz. glass steins are available now from www.taverncraft.com and feature Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk and Captain America.

"Fans who are used to standard silk-screened steins and glasses are going to be in for a pleasant surprise," said 3 Point Entertainment President Jerry Bennington. "The deep etching really brings out the detail in the characters, and offers a dimensionality that you just can't get from simply applying an image onto the surface. Whether buying a set for yourself or as a holiday gift, fans will be able to see and appreciate the high quality and unsurpassed durability of our Marvel deep-etched glasses and steins."

Pint glasses are packaged in two-glass sets and retail for $29.99 plus shipping and handling. Each 25 oz. glass stein is packaged individually and retails for $29.99 plus shipping and handling. Additional information, images and ordering details are available at http://www.taverncraft.com.

TOAST THE HOLIDAYS WITH NEW THE HOBBIT™ STEIN

2010-12-13T10:41:00.002-07:00

Smaug Legend 1

Smaug Legend 2

PR: Taverncraft Introduces Two Versions of the Smaug™ the Magnificent Stein

SAN DIEGO, CA (November 17, 2010) – Taverncraft, a subsidiary of 3 Point Entertainment LLC, today announced that they have begun shipping the first stoneware stein in their ongoing collectible drinkware series based on the literary masterpieces The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Smaug the Magnificent, illustrated by world-famous fantasy artist Matthew Stawicki, is available in both Epic and Legendary editions. Ordering information and detailed photos are available at www.taverncraft.com , with holiday delivery in the contiguous United States guaranteed if ordered prior to December 15, 2010.

"The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy are among the most influential books in literary history, and we're thrilled to be part of that legacy," said 3 Point Entertainment President Jerry Bennington. "From the incredibly detailed, panoramic bas-relief imagery to the pewter lid with its 'One Ring' motif, fans will cherish this hefty stoneware stein. Whether buying one for yourself or as a holiday gift, it's perfect for any Lord of the Rings devotee."

Each Smaug the Magnificent stein stands over 10” (25.4 cm) tall and is handcrafted from authentic fine-grain stoneware. The steins showcase panoramic bas-relief sculpting and a sculpted pewter lid featuring the legendary "One Ring to rule them all." The Smaug the Magnificent Epic Collection Stein is available for $99.99, while the Smaug the Magnificent Legendary Collection Stein is priced at $169.99. The Smaug the Magnificent Legendary Collection Stein is limited to 500 worldwide, features an 18K gold-plated "One Ring" lid and hand-painted gold trimming throughout the image and handle.

The stoneware Smaug the Magnificent stein joins Taverncraft's popular line of deep-etched pint glasses and glass steins featuring iconic artwork of the most popular taverns in Middle-earth. Information about the entire The Hobbit product line-up, including the Smaug the Magnificent stein, is available at http://www.taverncraft.com .

Inn of the Prancing Pony Mug

Hobbit Legend

View The Lady and the Tiger...Moth graphic novelette

2010-12-05T20:53:00.001-07:00

I've put it up at YouTube. Remember to see the whole thing (the rest of the story is told in prose form) you can purchase it for the Kindle from Amazon.com for the extremely low price of $1.99!!!

I hate snow!

2010-11-22T14:58:00.002-07:00

Currently visiting relatives in Rapid City South Dakota. Had 6 inches of snow last night.Not that much actually, considering what I was used to in Minneapolis, MN.... but that was 10 years ago. After 10 years in Yorktown VA where there was no snow and temps rarely got below 30 this is a shock.

The Lady and the TIger..Moth

2010-10-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

Some months ago I blogged here about my comic strip, The Lady and the Tiger...Moth. I'd produced 30 strips that introduce Shannon Scott, freelance journalist, and airplane pilot, who is given the opportunity to fly around the midwest USA for three months, attending airshows in a Tiger Moth.

I've converted this comic strip into an ebook (one panel per Kindle page), supplemented it with a prose story called A Tiger Among Eagles, and offer it for sale on the Kindle, for $4.99.

Amazon purchase page for The Lady and the Tiger...Moth

If you don't have a Kindle, never fear. You can download a Kindle emulator for FREE, for the PC, Mac, and various fancy phones.

So if you're interested in aviation fiction, please check it out.

No paddle, no creek, no canoe

2010-10-19T19:05:00.002-07:00

Once again I've been shafted by the powers that be.

Amazon.com has a program where people can offer their blogs for subscription to the Kindle. I've got quite a few there, most have only a handful of subscriptions. They cost $1.99 a month to subscribe.

Until today, I had two very successful blogs, one with 70 subs, one with 150. Today, with no warning at all, their prices have been reduced to 99 cents from $1.99.

So my income has been halved.

Just like that.

Blogs with 5 subs continue to be priced at $1.99 a month, blogs with 70 and 150 subscriptions are reduced in price by half. Can someone explain the logic of that to me?????????????

Home Sweet Home

2010-10-14T08:06:00.002-07:00

Well, we have arrived at our new home in Cheyenne, WY. We've been here for 3 or 4 days, unpacking and putting together beds, etc.

The major part of our move was books and, for me, VHS tapes. Unpacking those is problematical because all of our bookcases have been left in storage in Virginia. There's a story behind that but I wont go into it.

Anyway, it'll be a while before there's internet at the house, so I'll have to travel to the local library each day to do my blog work. What fun!

But, we're here, it's a nice house, so it's all good.

3 more days

2010-10-08T11:28:00.001-07:00

We will be leaving Burleston, TX tomorrow, Saturday, and expect to fetch up in Cheyenne, WY on Monday.

Will be nice to have a permanent place to stay...not sure how long it will take to get internet service out there, though...

We have arrived

2010-10-01T19:38:00.002-07:00

in Burleson, Texas.

I enjoyed the drive,for the most part. Had to deal with a traffic jam on the highway through Nashville a couple of days ago, and today in trying to skirt Dallas, got involved in a traffic jam too.

Normally these don't bother me, but the traffic jam through Dallas had be worried. The Nashville one didn't bother me, because I was staying on the same highway all the way through. For the one in Dallas, I had to make a *left* hand exit onto another highway.

So we're inching along, and I'm in the left hand lane, and I see up in front of me a "Must exit" sign for some other highway. So I have to get into the middle lane. Fortunately someone in the right lane let me in, for which I will be grateful because I'd gotten the impression that Texan drivers were just as rude as Tennesseean drivers were. (I'll rant about that at a different time.)

Anyway, I was on 30W which normally is a 5 lane highway in both directions but had the left lane cordoned off - with permanent looking cement blocks - and then it finally opened up on the right so I suddenly found myself three lanes over from the left hand lane and the exit I needed to get to.

Fortunately, just as the highway lanes opened up into 5 again, so did the traffic, so I was able to zoom across lanes with no problem.

But it had been a tense time.

Now I've got three days of blog work to catch up on, since I had bad luck with internet connections in two successive Best Westerns.

So, that's the update for today.

The journey has begun...

2010-09-27T18:08:00.002-07:00

Well, the drive from Yorktown to Cheyenne has begun.

We'd been yearning for rain in Yorktown for at least a month...no rain.

Today, it was raining.

And I'd put this Sherpak vinyl thing on top of my car, with three straps holding it down, by going inside the car. And the rain came in on those straps and dripped and dripped.

I had rain dripping down my neck - literally dripping down my neck - for an hour, and my poor mom in the back seat had towels everywhere to try to keep the rain from getting into bags and suitcases.

So here's tip #1 - if you live anywhere where it rains - don't use a Sherpak. You'll regret it!

27 Sep, 2010, Monday, SF on BBC Radio 7

2010-09-26T21:44:00.001-07:00

You can listen to these episodes for 7 days from today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio7/programmes/schedules/2010/09/27

Earthsearch
Series 1, Across the Abyss
6/10. Searching for Earth, the starship Challenger heads towards star cluster Tersus 9.

Charles Chilton - Journey into Space
The Red Planet, Episode 6
6/20. Captain Jet Morgan and his crew receive warnings to turn back - but who from?

26 Sep, 2010, Sunday, SF on BBC Radio 7

2010-09-25T21:40:00.002-07:00

You can listen to these programs for 7 days from now.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio7/programmes/schedules/2010/09/26

The Book of the City of Ladies [Omnibus edition]
10/06/2007
Christine de Pizan's tale of building a fortress for women of valour, virtue and wisdom.
[All 5 episodes one after the other]

Comedy Catch-Up
Married
Robin Lightfoot wakes up to discover he's in a parallel universe, with a wife and kids. [Same episode as earlier this week]

Fear on Four
St Austin Friars
The Man in Black reveals how a new vicar takes on more than he bargained for.

25 Sep, 2010, Saturday, SF on BBC Radio 7

2010-09-24T21:38:00.001-07:00

You can listen to these programs for days from today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio7/programmes/schedules/2010/09/25

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Rappaccini's Daughter
A man gets obsessed with the mysterious girl next door. Stars Joseph Cohen-Cole.

Franza Kafka - Metamorphosis
Episode 4
4/4. Living with his monstrous insect form, Gregor faces the ultimate rejection by his family.

Movie Review: Legend of the Guardians

2010-09-24T13:22:00.003-07:00

It used to be that animated movies (except that done by X-rated animators like Ralph Bakshi) were for kids, or, at best, for kids and adults. With Legend of the Guardians, we've arrived at an animated film that really isn't suitable for young kids. (Well, Jim Carrey's A Christmas Carol might fall into that category as well.)

Of course these days, kids are being exposed at a younger and younger age to "the real world," nevertheless I think kids younger than 5 or so won't be able to sit through this movie, and younger than 10 might find it quite scary at times. [Young American kids might have trouble following the English/Australian accents, too.]

The story opens in a paradise (except for mice!), where owls live in a tree. Two young brothers, Soren and Kludd, are just learning to fly. Kludd is impatient of his brother's love of stories - which Soren shares with their cute-as-a-button younger sister, Eglantine, and jealous of his abilities. They have a fight and fall out of the tree and can't climb back up into it. They are then kidnapped by a pair of large, helmeted owls who bring them to a dark place, where other kidnapped owls are separated into "peckers" and "soldiers." The "peckers" work on the ground, finding something called "Flecks", and are subdued by becoming "Moonblind" - with a very unpleasant after-effect that little kids won't like.

Soren manages to escape, with the help of a young barn owl, and determines to fly to Ga'Hoole to tell the Owl Guardians what is going on. Along the way, he gains three friends to help.

I suppose the story is derivative...but then really, what story isn't? Terry Brooks' Shannara empire, for example, what is that but a take off of the Lord of the Rings?

So, this story has all the "tropes" that you find in this genre. But it's well presented, the animation is fantastic, the actors do an excellent job (truth to tell I didn't recognize the voices of Helen Mirren, Sam Neill, or Georggrey Rush, as their voices are probably "sweetened" a bit, but the emoting is all that you could hope for.

Recommended - for kids over 10 and adults of all ages.