QUIZ SHOW OVERHEARD ON THE TV as I entered the living room:
That’s right, ‘Illuminati’ is the answer! You’ve won $100!”
Tag: Hey Fanboy!
I was 6 when _2001_ premiered; 15 for _Star Wars_. I keep a set of weird-looking dice in my briefcase. Nuf said?
Ol’ Thinkypants Groks
“HEY, MAN, IF YOU WERE in high school when the original Star Wars came out, you know exactly what I mean.”
“Starbase 33 Minyan”
According to the Official Couch Potato Handbook, each official Couch Potato Viewing Lodge must have its own name. Ours is the “Starbase 33 Minyan,” mostly due to a love of science fiction in general (and Star Trek in particular). The photo at left illustrates our motto, an SFnal riff on the Lubavitcher Hasid motto “Bring Moshiach (the Messiah) Now!” (Could I have ‘shopped a combadge, I’d’a done.) Sometimes, a blog is just a good place to download your brain.
The Purist’s Question
HOW MUCH CAN YOU CHANGE something before it no longer resembles the original — yet still call it by the same name?
First Graf: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1
THERE ARE BOOKS, AND THERE are books. This one contains “The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time Chosen by the Members of the Science Fiction Writers of America,” and is standard issue to all geeks and geekettes who want to know the first thing about things SFnal. (It’s subtitled “Volume One, 1929-1964;” Volume Two (which I haven’t read) is itself two 1973 volumes devoted to novellas written and published between 1895 and 1961.)
I first read this (these? it’s an anthology, after all) when I was eight years old, as part of the first package I ever got from the Science Fiction Book Club. Without it for years, I now have a spiffy new trade paperback which seems almost a facsimile of the original contents in terms of fonts, layout, etc. And the memories! Stuck in Fredric Brown’s alien showdown (which became a Star Trek episode)! Trapped with Lewis Padgett’s mad teaching machines! Exploring Tibetan mythology with Arthur C. Clarke!
Continue reading “First Graf: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1”
5 Thoughts: Difficult Cinema
1. ERASERHEAD. THE SECOND TIME I saw David Lynch’s mewling, puking masterpiece, I began to scream as soon as the opening credits rolled. It’s a dark, dark vision into the little world and lonely life of Henry, a printer whose misbegotten mutant child keeps him up at night with its mewling and you get it. But the lady in the radiator sings to him of Heaven, where “everything is fine.” So that’s something.
2. Tideland. Her little-girl-gone-weird’s broken home is peopled by doll heads, visions, and her father’s slowly wasting corpse. But somehow, she survives and even flourishes. The only Terry Gilliam film of which I’ve never seen the ending, and he’s one of my favorite directors, because it was bleak as only Gilliam can be. The man is just too brilliant. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Difficult Cinema”
Pithyism #3 up, 3 down
WOULDN’T YOU RATHER SEE A good game than a great hit?
(Derived from a conversation on a public lament for baseball players on steroids.) (Yes, I said for.)
Who Is This Prosatio Silban, And What Does He Want?
The most addicting D&D element for me has always been “worldbuilding” – establishing an ecology of people, monsters and treasure within a self-consistent storytelling framework. It’s an excellent outlet for structured creativity, and one day, while at my day-job as an offset printer, I grabbed a pad, scrawled a coastline and bay, added some mountains and a river basin, and began describing those who lived there.
Some years later I had compiled several notebooks and folders full of maps and diagrams, charts and lists, races and religions, legends and monsters, mostly written in two-to-60 minute slices during and between offset jobs. It was a lot of fun. But it was also pretty lonely; at that point, I didn’t play D&D anymore, and I felt a bit … unrequited. And, to be honest, somewhat silly.
So in 2005, I decided to tell stories to answer the question, “What would it be like to actually make a living in one of these invented worlds?” After all, somebody has to clean up all those slain dragons (and, probably, buy groceries and pay rent). Thus was born Prosatio Silban, self-defrocked holyman and mercenary cook.
Worldbuilding and its fruits have brought me great joy (and occasional comfort) during the past several decades. I hope you have found some joy in it too.
What I Stand, For
HAVING JUST RECEIVED ORDERS FROM Fearless Leader to define my principles in 106 characters or less and then disperse them yea seedlike to the multitudes, I replied as follows:
Clearer thinking. Don’t litter. Say “please” and “thank you” and mean it. And stop killing the children.
Go ye now and do likewise. It’s what he’d want you to do.
When The Troll Sweats, Bottle It
At the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, I inhabited a world peopled (in part) by a cast-off group of fannish folk who sometimes chant together after consuming a quasi-alchemic formula during their quasi-religious rituals. “Trolle Sweate!” they chant, in inebriated consequence of quant suff. “Trolle Sweate!”
Continue reading “When The Troll Sweats, Bottle It”
Where Have All The Fandoms Gone?
STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING RIGHT now and read this article by Patton Oswalt about how instant access to everything has brought about the Death of the Fannish Underground. Oswalt speaks to and for those whose fannish identity was built up layer by carefully wrought layer, recalling when one person could consume an entire year’s output of fantastic and science fictional media (and still have room for more). It’s all, he says, in the effort:
The Lord of the Rings used to be ours and only ours simply because of the sheer goddamn thickness of the books. Twenty years later, the entire cast and crew would be trooping onstage at the Oscars to collect their statuettes, and replicas of the One Ring would be sold as bling.
The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. In fact, it’s been dug up, thrown into the air, and allowed to rain down and coat everyone in a thin gray-brown mist called the Internet.
More tragic historian than off-my-lawn ranter, Oswalt perfectly captures the sweaty essence of 80s fandom — and makes me wish I’d written it first. I’m not sure I agree with his conclusions, but I do feel a bit sad for kids who’ll never have the fun that we had(1). Something thrilling there is in being part of something secret that yields unexpected connections in unlooked-for places…
See:
– “Wake Up, Geek Culture — Time To Die” by Patton Oswalt
– “Hey Fanboy!” (Fannish posts on Metaphorager.Net)
(1) (On the other hand, they’re probably having some sort of fun that I can’t, so it all works out.)
NextWave SF: “Retropunk”
FIRST CAME CYBERPUNK. THEN STEAMPUNK. And by 2021, … RETROPUNK. 
Shiny robots. Gleaming atom-powered spaceships. Martian canal races. Alien arcologies in the jungles of Venus. Male pronouns. All the glory of a big exploitable universe sans angst or post-apocalypse modernism. AND NO %$#@!ING VAMPIRES.
Remember, you heard it here first. “Retropunk: Yesterday’s Future, Today!”
Illo thanx: public-domain.zorger.com