Carol Kabakjian, long-time member of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, passed away May 15 at the age of 59. She spent the last months of her life in hospice care after a four-and-a-half year battle with cancer.
Carol served as PSFS club Secretary (teamed with her husband Rich) and Archivist for a number of years. She worked on Philcons and ran the Con Suite for the Philadelphia Worldcon, Millennium Philcon, in 2001.
Filksinging was her greatest enthusiasm. She wrote many songs, and published a filk fanzine – The Philly Philk Phlash. And having been inspired by attending the 1988 ConChord, she decided to organize an East Coast filk convention. The first ConCerto was held in 1990 in Cherry Hill, NJ.
By James H. Burns: I’m surprised when some people don’t realize that Field of Dreams is a time travel movie. To me, it’s one of the best (and I suspect there still a great number of genre, and other fans, who simply have never seen it.) Baseball, in fact, is only one of the film’s many remarkable facets, with a particularly strong set of sequences with James Earl Jones (“WHO is Moonlight Grahm?”) I’m pretty sure I mention some of this in a podcast special tribute to Field’s 25th anniversary, put together by Craig Jamison, also featuring commentary by fantasy illustrator Adam Hughes, and the eminent science fiction movie and film music historian/journalist Steve Vertlieb.
Intriguingly, Jamison has been busy shooting a documentary about Vertlieb for well over a year, entitled The Man Who Saved The Movies, previews of which (including footage with Ray Bradbury and Veronica Carlson) can be found all over the web, and on YouTube.
Arlene Martel and Robert Culp in “Demon With a Glass Hand.”
Outer Limits’ fabled power to control the horizontal and vertical on your TV is getting an upgrade – a movie version will give the franchise command of the big screen when it comes to theaters.
Scott Derrickson is reuniting with Sinister co-author C. Robert Cargill to script an Outer Limits feature film based on the 1960s series and focusing in particular on Harlan Ellison’s “Demon With a Glass Hand” episode:
The duo will be tackling time travel, alien invasion and genetic manipulation in adapting the episode, which focused on a man with no memory beyond the last 10 days of his life and a computerized hand who discovers he is from the future. The man is being hunted by an alien race who see him as key to their survival, but he soon discovers a more complex and terrifying truth.
Incidentally, October 17 of this year will mark the 50th anniversary of the TV episode’s first broadcast.
Scott Derrickson is a very busy man these days. He was just signed to direct Marvel’s Doctor Strange movie. Another film he co-wrote and directed, Deliver Us From Evil, opens July 2.
Darwen Arkwright and the School of Shadows by A.J. Hartley (Razorbill)
The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty (Orbit)
Ice Forged by Gail Z. Martin (Orbit)
(There are 6 nominees due to a tie for 5th place.)
The award recognizes outstanding science fiction and fantasy novels written by North Carolina authors. The winner is selected by a vote of members of sf conventions in North Carolina (illogiCon, ConCarolinas, ConTemporal, and ConGregate). This year’s choice will be revealed on July 12 at ConGregate in Winston-Salem.
Members of the 2014 NASFiC are eligible to vote for the Detcon1 Awards for Young Adult and Middle Grade Speculative Fiction. Voting closes June 22 at 11:59 p.m. CDT.
Details are available on the Detcon1 website. The nominees are:
Young Adult
Allegiant by Veronica Roth (Katherine Tegen Books)
The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater (Scholastic Press)
The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Arthur A Levine Books)
Middle Grade
Handbook for Dragon Slayers by Merrie Haskell (HarperCollins)
House of Hades by Rick Riordan (Disney-Hyperion)
Zombie Baseball Beatdown by Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
Today, June 20, at 6:30 p.m. British time (which is to say less than hour after this is posted) Wilsons Auctions will begin a huge online auction of Star Trek, Star Wars and other toys, plus costumes worn by actors in various Trek series.
The items were seized by police from a criminal couple who used some of their loot to build their collection. The wife pleaded guilty last December to stealing £2.3m from her employer, and the husband pleaded guilty to laundering £924,000 of the stolen cash. In addition to sf memorabilia, they bought a £500,000 house, a Mercedes for each of them at £86,000 per, and spent almost £194,000 on vacations.
The auction catalog [PDF file] is an eye-opening revelation about the variety of toys and specialty items created for the Star Wars toy marketplace.
Some are rather amusing. There’s the Star Wars Plush Talking Chewbacca which “speaks Chewie’s trademark Wookie growl when his tummy is pressed.” And the even more loquacious Star Wars Plush Talking Yoda, programmed to utter such wisdom as — “When 900 years you reach, look as good you will not?,” “For 800 years have I trained Jedi,” “Do, or do not There is no try,” “Concentrate, feel the force flow, yes,” and “Judge me by my size do you size matters not!”
I couldn’t discover what noise the Star Wars Plastic Stormtrooper Helmet with Sound Effects makes. If there’s dialog, perhaps a quote like, “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for. Move along.”
Also up for auction is a Star Wars “Darth Tater” which seems to be a Mr. Potato Head who has turned to the dark side. (Or maybe just been too long in the roaster.)
There are weird and silly toys from other series – like the Star Trek Cloved Toe Klingon Boots, and two styles of Doctor Who Remote Control Dalek.
The several actor-worn costumes are likely to be the most expensive items going under the hammer. These include:
Star Trek Whoopi Goldberg’s Purple Guinan Outfit
Star Trek Geordi La Forge’s Starfleet Uniform
Female Klingon Warrior’s Costume
Star Trek Q’s Starfleet Uniform
Star Trek Scotty’s Uniform Jacket.
Star Trek Keith Carradine’s Flight Suit from “First Flight” in Star Trek: Enterprise
The couple bid US$27,000 for these costumes when auctioned by Christie’s in New York a few years ago.
Here is a video of the toys available in tonight’s auction. There are so many duplicates that watching the preview is like walking through a convention’s dealers room.
The Niels Klim Prize ceremony was held on June 15. Awards were given in three categories for the best science fiction in Danish. The prize is named for a character in Ludvig Holberg’s Nicolai Klimii iter Subterraneum (1741).
The 2014 winners are:
Novel
“År 9 efter Loopet” (Year 9 After the Loop) by Peter Adolphsen
Novella
“Farvel min astronaut” (Farewell, My Astronaut) by Jesper Goll (Lige under overfladen 8/Just Below the Surface 8)
Short story
“Mørkets hastighed” (“Darkness’ Speed”) by Majbrit Høyrup(Lige under overfladen 8/Just Below the Surface 8)
The winners are decided by a vote of Danish science fiction readers.
Renaissance Faire co-founder Phyllis Patterson died May 18 at the age of 82.
The Faire grew out of the “Into the Woods” drama-and-arts program Patterson conducted in the backyard of her Laurel Canyon home in the early Sixties. Her nine-and-ten-year-old students, performing on a commedia wagon built for the occasion, took first place in a children’s theater competition and so enjoyed themselves that they besieged Phyllis with requests to “do that again!”
Phyllis and her husband Ron responded by arranging for Pacifica radio station KPFK to sponsor the first “Plesure Faire and May Market” on May 11-12, 1963. It was held at Oliver Haskell’s Ranch for Girls and Boys in North Hollywood. Finding a location would not always be so easy.
As the event grew into the now-familiar annual Renaissance Pleasure Faire, a 16th-century celebration complete with outsize turkey legs, flagons of ale, handcrafted wares for sale, jousting and swordplay, the Pattersons sometimes struggled to get county officials to authorize the necessary permits.
When her request was initially denied in 1966, she found a way to bypass the decision by asking the American Film Institute to produce a documentary of the event so that she could open the gates with a “film permit” (all of the attendees became “extras”).
Also in 1966, the Pattersons expanded their event to the San Francisco Bay Area, holding the first Northern California Faire in China Camp in Marin County. Similar events are now held all over the country.
Early in their careers, Tony Award-winning actor Bill Irwin, mime Robert Shields, magicians Penn and Teller, The Flying Karamazov Brothers, and the Reduced Shakespeare Company, all performed at Faires.
Phyllis Patterson’s commitment to historical accuracy sometimes led to moments of unintentional comedy. “I remember a young girl running up to me a few years ago, almost crying,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1987, “saying: ‘You’ve got to do something. Someone’s back there playing Bach.’ ”
The Pattersons divorced in 1980, and Ron died in 2011. The Patterson family continued to be involved with the Faire until the late 1990s.
To the end of her life Phyllis Patterson had a preference for the rustic. Until she was hospitalized, she lived in a log cabin in Novato, California.
Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7, a collection of 2012 stories, is available for $1.99 as a Kindle download til midnight tonight (June 19).
The collection of 32 stories includes “Fade to White” by Catherynne Valente, “Mono No Aware” by Ken Liu, “The Easthound” by Nalo Hopkinson, “Two Houses” by Kelly Link and “The Education of a Witch” by Ellen Klages.
Sally Ride on the deck of Challenger during mission STS-7 in 1983.
In 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space, launched from Cape Canaveral aboard the shuttle Challenger as part of the crew of STS-7.
The five-person crew deployed two communications satellites and conducted pharmaceutical experiments. Ride was the first woman to use the robot arm in space and the first to use the arm to retrieve a satellite.
