(1) WALDROP TO THE SCREEN. George R.R. Martin tells us, “The Chickens Are Coming” at Not A Blog.
Howard Waldrop is gone, but his work will live on.
…And here’s the latest one, an adaptation of Howard’s most famous story, THE UGLY CHICKENS. Winner of the Nebula. Winner of the World Fantasy Award. Nominee for the Hugo, but, alas, not a winner. A pity, that. Howard never won a Hugo, but in some more Waldropian world he has ten of them lined up on his mantle.
Felicia Day (SUPERNATURAL, THE GUILD, DR. HORRIBLE’S SING ALONG BLOG) stars in our film of “that dodo story.” Mark Raso (COPENHAGEN, KODACHRONE) directed. Michael Cassutt (TWILIGHT ZONE, MAX HEADROOM, TV101, EERIE INDIANA, and many more) did the screenplay.
Howard saw a rough cut of the film before he died. He liked it, which pleases me no end. I only wish we had been able to screen the final cut for him.
(2) HIGH CALIBER CANON. The Atlantic’s list of“The Great American Novels” includes Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick and a number of other works of genre interest.
(3) INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE LONGLIST. Based on the descriptions of the works at the website, there are no books of genre interest among the 13 that made the International Booker Prize 2024 longlist.
(4) BECOMING THE LIFE ON MARS. Space.com interviews Robert Zubrin about his new book: “’The New World on Mars’ offers a Red Planet settlement guide”.
To say that Dr. Robert Zubrin, the esteemed Colorado-based aerospace engineer, author, lecturer and founding president of the Mars Society, has the Red Planet on his mind is a colossal understatement.
This pioneering educational voice and influential space authority has written many books on the timely topic of Mars and Mars settlement over the years as interest in humankind’s role in its ultimate development has risen exponentially. Now Zubrin adds to his impressive catalog of visionary volumes about our mysterious planetary neighbor with the recent release of “The New World on Mars” (Diversion Books, 2024), a fascinating and infinitely readable peek into Mars’ inestimably rosy future….
Space.com: One of the most interesting chapters deals with the psychological aspects of leaving Earth and establishing an identifiable Martian culture with its own customs, rites and rituals and the importance of that process. Can you elaborate on that subject more?
Zubrin: The Mars Society over the past couple years held two contests asking people to design a 1,000-person Mars colony and a one-million-person Mars city-state. And by design we meant not just the technology or the economy, but the social system, political system, what kind of sports are likely to be played, as well as the aesthetics.
Between the two contests, there were something like 300 entries. The ideas proposed spanned a huge range of political systems from socialist, to democratic and libertarian. Rather than attempt to choose my favorite system for a Martian utopia, I took the point of view that there will be many Martian cities founded by different people with very different ideas on what the ideal state should be, and it’s going to be sorted out by natural selection.
Some of the answers I came up with I like a lot, like human liberty. But this is in contradiction to many visions of science fiction colonies that are totally controlled because no one would immigrate to one. The ones that will outgrow the others will clearly be the ones that are most attractive to immigrants. Freedom is a great attractor. North Korea does not have an illegal immigrant problem. Martian colonies will have to be highly inventive and invention only thrives under freedom. I believe a Mars colony will also require a great deal of social solidarity, so it will not be multi-cultural and will need to have a strong sense of community and common identity….
(5) DOCTOR WHO STARTING TIME. From Variety we learn “’Doctor Who’ Starring Ncuti Gatwa Reveals May Premiere Date”.
…The new season of “Doctor Who,” starring “Sex Education” breakout Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor, will premiere on May 10.
The new installment will be the first-ever to launch on Disney+ and release simultaneously worldwide. The premiere will start on May 10 at 7 p.m. ET in the U.S. and internationally (excluding the U.K.) with Christmas special “The Church on Ruby Road” airing before two brand-new episodes. In the U.K., the season will premiere at midnight GMT on May 11 on BBC iPlayer.
…A new trailer for the season will debut on March 22.
(6) SHATNER WON’T BE ECLIPSED – FOR LONG, ANYWAY. The Los Angeles Times interviewed “William Shatner on his long career, horses and watch design”. Behind a paywall, unfortunately. Here’s the first paragraph:
A documentary on his life, “You Can Call Me Bill,” directed by Alexandre O. Philippe (“Lynch/Oz”), is scheduled to roll out in theaters March 22 to coincide with his 93rd birthday. He continues to host and narrate the puzzling-phenomena History series “The UnXplained With William Shatner.” A 2022 performance at the Kennedy Center, backed by Ben Folds and the National Symphony Orchestra, is about to be released both as an album, “So Fragile, So Blue,” and a concert film. The title song, says Shatner, “encompasses a lot of my thinking about how we’re savaging the world, and [I’d hope] it’d be a song that people would listen to and perhaps be inspired to do something about global warming.”
And on April 8, for 15 minutes before the shadow of an eclipse falls over Bloomington, Ind., Shatner will address “55, 60,000 people” in the Indiana University football stadium. “So what do you say, what do you write, what do you do? I’m going to have to solve those problems.”…
(7) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES CELEBRATES ANNIVERSARY. Space Cowboy Books presents a special six-year anniversary episode of Simultaneous Times in collaboration with Worlds of IF Magazine bringing you works from the pages of Worlds of If Magazine #177. Listen to the podcast at the link. Story and poetry featured in this episode:
- “Contact” by Akua Lezli Hope; with music by Fall Precauxions. Read by the author
- “The Pain Peddlers” by Robert Silverberg; with music by Phog Masheeen. Read by Jean-Paul Garnier
- “Time Junkies” by Pedro Iniguez; with music by Fall Precauxions. Read by the author
Theme music by Dain Luscombe
(8) RELICS OF WONKY PROMOTION TRANSMUTED TO CHARITY GOLD. “Props from botched Willy Wonka event raise more than £2,000 for Palestinian aid charity” reports the Guardian. The charity is Medical Aid for Palestinians.
Props from a botched Willy Wonka event in Glasgow that went viral after frustrated attenders called the police have raised more than £2,000 at auction for a Palestinian aid charity.
Fabric backdrops from the “immersive experience”, which was cancelled midway, were found in a bin outside the warehouse where it took place.
Monorail Music, a record shop in the city, auctioned the remains on eBay after they were passed on by the finder. The listing said: “Don’t miss out on this rare opportunity to own a piece of history.”
The Wonka event gained online notoriety after images of the sparsely decorated warehouse in Glasgow, staffed by actors dressed as Oompa Loompas and other characters, spread worldwide. On Thursday, the listing had a total of 57 bids and the items were sold for £2,250. Michael Kasparis, online manager of Monorail, described the outcome as “amazing”….
(9) RED FLAGS RAISED ABOUT TCG-CON. Outside the Asylum urges “Don’t Go to TCG-Con”. Here’s the synopsis of a long post with many receipts:
Summary: TCG-con frequently does not pay out its advertised prizes and staff compensation. They currently owe upwards of $50,000 to players, cosplayers, judges, and other staff members for previous conventions, and appear to be in the process of collapsing entirely. I would strongly recommend not purchasing a ticket to their future events, trying to get a refund if you already have, and warning anyone you know away from them as well. If you’re owed money yourself, see the end of this page for information on next steps.
(10) GRANT PAGE (1939-2024). Deadline pays tribute in “Grant Page Dead: Australian Stuntman In ‘Mad Max’ Films & 100-Plus Others Was 85”.
Grant Page, the Australian stunt icon who performed in and coordinating stunts for the original Mad Max,sequel Beyond Thunderdome,the upcoming prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Sagaand more than 100 other films and TV series, died Thursday in a car crash. He was 85.
A legend of Aussie cinema, Page worked … on the 1979 action classic Mad Max,which introduced the world to Mel Gibson. He performed and served as stunt coordinator on … its 1985 second sequel Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome… He also worked on … prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which is on the radar to premiere at Cannes in May, and on his 2022 pic Three Thousand Years of Longing.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
The New Yorker cartoon for the Ides of March gives us Dr. Seuss’ interpretation instead of Shakespeare’s.
(12) I BECAME WHAT I BEHELD. “Grant Morrison Responds to Zack Snyder’s Take on Batman Killing, ‘If Batman Killed His Enemies, He’d Be the Joker’” (comicbook.com) – in a quote at Comicbook.com.
Filmmaker Zack Snyder recently stirred up some controversy when he defended his aggressive version of Batman from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice who killed, a choice that for many comic book fans runs counter to basic tenets of the character. Now, comic book writer Grant Morrison is weighing in and they don’t agree with Snyder. According to Morrison, “if Batman killed his enemies, he’d be the Joker.”
In their newsletter Xanaduum (via ScreenRant), Morrison — whose own work has been among some of the more definitive takes on Batman — dug into not only the practical aspect of why Batman doesn’t kill (because he’d end up arrested by Commissioner Gordon, in theory) but also the psychological aspect of the character and how Batman’s “no-kill” rule is something locked into him from the time he was a small child and is a part of his mental state having never fully developed, in some respect, out of the child who saw his parents murdered in Crime Alley.
“That Batman puts himself in danger every night but steadfastly refuses to murder is an essential element of the character’s magnificent, horrendous, childlike psychosis,” Morrison wrote.
There’s also the matter of the line between what Batman does and what the villains do. Villains kill; Batman does not. It makes all the difference, at least to Bruce Wayne who, should he ever cross the line, would then become no better than those who killed his parents….
(13) SNOWPIERCER RESCUED. It won’t be frozen out by streaming services after all says Deadline: “’Snowpiercer’: AMC Picks Up Season 4 After TNT Scrapped Sci-Fi Drama”.
The final season of Snowpiercer has finally found a home.
The fourth season of the sci-fi drama will air on AMC after the company acquired the rights to the Tomorrow Studios-produced series. It comes after TNT scrapped the show last year as part of a wider Warner Bros. Discovery content write-down strategy.
Deadline revealed in January 2023 that the fourth season wouldn’t air on its original home, as part of a slew of content cuts that also included the axing of Batgirl, Abrams’ HBO drama Demimonde, and TBS series such as The Big D, Chad and Kill The Orange Bear….
(14) A YELLOWSTONE UNSTUCK IN TIME. Gizmodo assures us “Josh Brolin’s Sci-Fi Hole Show Will Get Even Sci-Fi-er, Holier in Season 2”.
…The central mysteries of Outer Range surround that giant hole, which materializes on property owned by Brolin’s Wyoming rancher character and is eventually established to be a time portal. Along the way, various characters go missing, are revealed to have been born in different centuries, notice odd happenings that seem anachronistic, or are unmasked as characters we’ve already met who happen to be several years older than they should be. In season two, we’ll all take a time leap; the action begins in 1984 with a younger version of Brolin’s character, and Vanity Fair describes the narrative structure as “gamely hopping between different decades (and centuries) with newfound propulsion.”
An astrophysicist called in to help the time-travel stuff make sense—but according to new showrunner Murray, “The biggest part of what time travel meant to me and the writers was: How can this help us expose something that a character’s going through?” We’re very intrigued to see where this wild trail heads next….
(15) DISHING IT UP. A reporter tells BBC that “’Journalists are feeding the AI hype machine’”.
When Melissa Heikkilä looks back on her past four years writing about artificial intelligence (AI), two key things jump out to her, one good, one bad.
“It’s the best beat… AI is a story about power, and there are so many ways to cover it,” says the senior reporter for magazine MIT Technology Review. “And there are so many interesting, and eccentric people to write about.”
That’s the positive. The negative, she says, is that much of the wider media’s coverage of AI can leave a lot to be desired.
“There is more hype and obfuscation about what the technology can and cannot actually do,” says Ms Heikkilä. “This can lead to embarrassing mistakes, and for journalists to feed into the hype machine, by, for example, anthropomorphizing AI technologies, and mythologizing tech companies.”…
(16) RIGHT TURN, CLYDE. And while we’re on the subject of dud reportage – “Seismic signal that pointed to alien technology was actually a passing truck” says Physics World.
In January 2014 a meteor streaked across the sky above the Western Pacific Ocean. The event was initially linked to a seismic signal that was detected on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. This information was used by Harvard University’s Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb to determine where the object likely fell into the ocean. Loeb then led an expedition that recovered spherical objects called spherules from the ocean bottom, which the team claimed to be from the meteor.
Because of the spherule’s unusual elemental composition, the team has suggested that the objects may have come from outside the solar system. What is more, they hinted that the spherules may have an “extraterrestrial technological origin” – that they may have been created by an alien civilization.
Now, however, a study led by scientists at Johns Hopkins University has cast doubt on the connection between the spherules and the 2014 meteor event. They have proposed a very different source for the seismic signal that led Loeb and colleagues to the spherules.
“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” says Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins who led this latest research.
“It’s really difficult to take a signal and confirm it is not from something,” explains Fernando. “But what we can do is show that there are lots of signals like this, and show they have all the characteristics we’d expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we’d expect from a meteor.”
That’s right, it was a truck driving past the seismometer, not a meteor….
(17) WAR OF THE WORLD. “Air defense for $13 a shot? How lasers could revolutionize the way militaries counter enemy missiles and drones” at Yahoo!
Britain this week showed off a new laser weapon that its military says could deliver lethal missile or aircraft defense at around $13 a shot, potentially saving tens of millions of dollars over the cost of missile interceptors that do the job now.
Newly released video of a test of what the United Kingdom’s Defense Ministry calls the DragonFire, a laser directed energy weapon (LDEW) system, captured what the ministry says was the successful use of the laser against an aerial target during a January demonstration in Scotland.
“It’s a potential game changer for air defense,” the video says as a bright laser beam pierces the night sky over a firing range in the remote Hebrides archipelago, creating a ball of light as it hits its target.
The Defense Ministry says the DragonFire can precisely hit a target as small as a coin “over long ranges,” but it did not offer specifics. The exact range of the weapon is classified, it said.
The laser beam can cut through metal “leading to structural failure or more impactful results if the warhead is targeted,” a UK Defense Ministry statement said….
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Sandra Miesel, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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First up? First on the stepping disc. There had better be chocolate…
13) oh good. I am glad they are going to finish the series.
2) Three of the most surprising unmentioned entires in the Atlantic article have to be Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Jemisin’s Fifth Season, and John Crowley’s Little, Big. There’s at least one more.
16) Love the EWWBL reference. Avi Loeb’s relentless self-promotion finally gets the payoff it deserves.
(1) Yay!
BTW can I lure anyone into adapting Neal Barrett Jr.’s “Perpetuity Blues”? I’ve long thought that would make a great indie SF film.
(9) Another one… 😐 Maybe Gordon Ramsay should start a sweary show called “Con Nightmares” where he visits troubled conventions in disguise, yells at people, fixes stuff, and then hugs the con runner at the end.
(4) So, public schools, everyone attends, none of this home-school nonesense. A shared world-view.
(12) I agree. Same with Superman – he does not kill. NONE of the superheroes, as long as they’ve been around, killed, period.
(15) Yep. I’m now referring to it as Artificial Idiocy. I just heard tonight about a very large team at the NIH working on it… but I suspect it’s more expert system, for which I can see a ton of uses. The generic crap…
(16) But then surely they’ll only be able to use it in Wales, unless the English want to give the Cymry back more of their land. (Clue: look at the Welsh flag.)
(4) I read Zubrin’s Mars novel, First Landing, in 2001 or 2002. Awful book. Only military or ex-military personnel were allowed to be intelligent and competent. And he thought the Mars mission should avoid the problem Spacelab had by doing more of what created that problem.
This looks like an entirely different person being interviewed.
(12) No, you don’t have to be a killer to be tough and strong. Or to be a healthy adult.
(5) The next season of Doctor Who will premiere at midnight on BBC iPlayer? So much for the fabled tradition of families all sitting down to watch it together.
Mark wrote: “NONE of the superheroes, as long as they’ve been around, killed, period.”
Actually, Batman did, back when he carried a pistol, but that version of the character was swiftly replaced as his moral code evolved.
Steve Green – I’ve seen some pics from the thirties, but by the fifties, no gun. I will note his utility belt has been getting more and more loaded, though.
1) Howard Waldrop was a treasure not just as a writer, but as a human being. He was Professional Writer Guest of Honor at Loscon 46 (which I chaired) back in 2019, and gave his all for programming and for the fans.
I was delighted when I heard that “Night of the Cooters” was to be made into a short film. In fact, it played in a festival of short films at a theater a short drive from my home. I found out about this screening well in advance and I would have loved to see it–
Only it was shown three days after I had surgery to remove a Stage 1 cancerous growth from my left kidney, and I wasn’t traveling anywhere for a while.
I still haven’t seen it.
Paul Weimer – that was me bothering you on FB, wondering if you’d be willing to look at a review copy (since it’s published, I can’t call it an eARC) of my new novel, Becoming Terran.
Re: To what Liz Carey said, I would add that belligerence and cruelty are not virtues, which I wish all politicians and bullies everywhere would learn.
6) I wish Shatner happiness, far from me. I saw him once at a public appearance, and that was more than enough.
“I don’t go to science fiction conventions, because people who go to science fiction conventions are weird and I’m not.” -Shatner. Now he goes to conventions to sell autographs….ahem.
16) It’s apparent with the latest photo of Prince William’s wife and kids, that the family was unaware they couldn’t submit photos to the press that have any retouch work on them.
If the press had informed the royal family and/or their press agents, there would have been no retouched photo. That the press is trying to vilify the future king and queen only speaks to the press’s internal demons: money and a race to the bottom of decency and proper behavior.
On the eve of Princess Diana’s memorial, this only serves to paint the press as bloodthirsty, money grubbing heathens. Paparazzi only serve to lessen the respect for real photographers who don’t hound celebrities and chase cars.
And yes, I am both an Anglophile AND a photographer!
4) It takes a special kind of fool to think ‘freedom’, whatever that means, can exist in a place where air has to be manufactured.
(An unsolicited birthday. Kudos to Cat for the effort these take, and for doing so many so well.)
Film director David Cronenberg was born on this day in 1943 in Toronto, Canada. He is best known for his movies that were seminal to the “body horror” genre, in which themes of bodily transformation were important.
The first film of his that I saw was Rabid, which was screened by the film society at the university I attended. Marilyn Chambers, normally an actress in pornographic films, starred. Scanners was soon after. Even if you’ve never seen it, you may be familiar with the image of Michael Ironside causing the head of a scanner to explode.
Videodrome was his first Hollywood film, and starred James Woods and Blondie’s Debbie Harry. Its exploration of how society might interact with media and technology seems prescient today. His next two movies, although still horror, were much more accessible — The Dead Zone, in which Martin Sheen plays a presidential candidate that many have compared to Donald Trump, and The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum in a remake of the 1950s Vincent Price film. The tie-in novelization to his 1999 film eXistenZ was co-written by the recently passed Christopher Priest. He did two movies in succession starring Viggo Mortensen — A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007). Both were crime thrillers instead of horror, and both were quite good.
He’s made 20 or so features, several shorts, several TV movies, and directed episodes of television series. He is an occasional actor, making cameos in his own films and playing roles in the works of other directors.
His entry in ISFDB includes a single SF novel, Consumed.
@Dan Reid: Avi Loeb’s relentless self-promotion finally gets the payoff it deserves.
Yeah, that was extremely satisfying.
@bill: The Dead Zone is my favorite Cronenberg film, but I’d rate the excellent A History of Violence as the best-edited film I’ve ever seen. There isn’t a superfluous frame in that movie.
Mark wrote: “NONE of the superheroes, as long as they’ve been around, killed, period.”
Superman would kill people in the early 1940s.
http://i.imgur.com/sqowAKY.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/YAvIYSj.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Ib3XH7C.jpg
Spectre would routinely take vengeance on evildoers in ways that left them dead.
Link
Link
(1) I wish Howard were around to see it, but oh well. With luck, it’ll be something he would have wanted to have seen. Felicia Day being attached seems promising. She doesn’t have the greatest range as an actor, but she’s good within that range. But more importantly, she’s a big genre fan, so I expect her to treat the material with respect.
(8) Wow. When life hands you lemons, sell them and donate the proceeds to charity? 🙂 An unexpected but pleasing outcome!
(12) “Batman is, though, totally fine with crippling them for life, and leaving them unconscious in the street, miles from the nearest emergency room! What? (laughs) He’s technically still alive! (laughs) If you can call it living! Loophole!” — Andy Farrant in the excellent and funny video, “Five People Batman has Definitely Killed for Sure in the Arkham Games”.
(Ever since I first saw this video, I’ve been unable to hear someone say “Batman doesn’t kill” without hearing “Loophole!” in my head!) 🙂
I would like to give a shout-out to Official Chocolate Review Editor of F770, @Cat Eldridge, who came up with the basic title concept on Sunday over at Cam F’s blog, whereupon us Old Pharts explained it to the young’uns. I even mentioned OGH!
(1) Looking forward to it. Howard never got as many awards or as much success as he deserved, for his talent and for being a generally Fun Guy.
(4) Not only is that guy libertarian, he’s sexist too. I ain’t going to any Mars colony he has anything to do with.
Plus, I’m behind the ideas espoused by Dr. and Mr. Weinersmith, who are much more practical and way funnier to boot. Their simple observation that even a trashed, depleted, no-easy-fuel, overheated Earth is still going to be infinitely more livable than a Mars colony is the clearest way I’ve ever heard it put. We’ll still be able to generally breathe the air, build houses, live with the gravity we’re used to, and do some farming and hunting even without a ton of high-tech materials. There will be a LOT fewer of us, and we might be Neolithic again, but we could keep going till the ecosphere clears up a bit.
(5) You tell the kids today we used to have to wait YEARS to see new Doctor Who episodes and if they believe you, they’ll pity you. Even before Usenet, we were all spoiled between magazines, snail mail, and the rare multi-format VHS. This time-and-date simultaneity is an unambiguously Good Thing. I have put it on both digital and paper calendars.
(8) That is a delightful ending to the sad story. I hope Dejected Oompa Loompa is capitalizing on her 15 minutes of fame, and am hopeful that the medical stuff makes it to Gaza.
(11) I genuinely LOL at that.
(12) I mean, certainly the population of Gotham would be better off if Batman killed Joker et al. But then you don’t have a comic book (and movies and TV shows and toys etc.) So you have someone who doesn’t kill. A hero.
Also, if I’m looking for well-informed discussion of comics, I’m going with Grant. They’re smart and literally wrote many of the books! Plus aren’t an overage teen boy who thinks “ooh, let’s be grimdark and EDGY!!!”
(16) I never bought the premise. I read a magazine article about him a while ago and thought it was another case of “distinguished scientist rises to top of profession, believes own publicity, and then falls off into The Wacky Zone”. So I imagine there is a lot of schadenfreude among those who’ve been rolling their eyes all along, particularly those who think he’s making them look bad. For me, I just thought “LOL”.
Amusing very short archived NYT article here:
https://archive.ph/CLw4u
The last two sentences are worth the price of admission.
@Anne Marble: I would actually watch that show, not with Gordon (because he knows nothing about cons), but I’m sure we could find some equally-sweary middle aged person to fill the role.
@Matthew Tepper: I hope you and your kidney are better now. I also hope all the HW shorts are collected and put on streaming, or (please) shiny disks. I am stating right now I would buy a DVD or BluRay of the collection. Even though I’m sad that the world no longer has Howard in it.
@Patrick Miller: Exactly. The North Koreans might actually be ideal; used to a dictatorship, hard work, mediocre living conditions, and able to deal with a lack of creature comforts.
Coming to you from 2018… I wish, that was a pretty good year for me, got to go to Worldcon, had more money was in better physical shape, and no pandemic.
(1) Great news, a wonderful way of spending the money from the GRRM TV series. Looking forward to it.
(4) Better to see the documentary “The Longest Goodbye” about the real obstacles with going into space or Mars. It will not be a picnic. Robert Zubrin’s pipe dreams are nothing but pipe dreams, and uninformed too.
2) Watchmen is a curious entry given that the authors aren’t American but OK, I guess it is very much about America. The entries by Nabokov I guess make sense as Nabokov lived in America and I think both stories are set in America. However, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James is about Jamaica by a Jamaican – it is an amazing novel and deserving of being celebrated but odd to call it American even though Marlon James does live in America.
6) I don’t see a paywall and I definitely don’t subscribe to the Los Angeles Times.
Anyway, I love that the interview also addressed Shatner’s most recent role as the voice of Keldor in Masters of the Universe: Revolution, where he did an amazing job and makes you want to trust him, even though long-term fans know that Keldor is always bad news whenever he shows up.
What is more,Shatner plays one of two voices in the head of a character who is experiencing a psychotic break. The other voice is Mark Hamill’s.
@Mark. Ah, I don’t use FB for that much these days. Emailing me is a better way to connect with me. jvstin at gmail.
(16) I think the lesson is that container lorries are alien vessels.
Lurkertype says I would like to give a shout-out to Official Chocolate Review Editor of F770, @Cat Eldridge, who came up with the basic title concept on Sunday over at Cam F’s blog, whereupon us Old Pharts explained it to the young’uns. I even mentioned OGH!
Thanks,
I must say that I too had forgotten that some of us aren’t as familiar with the works of Niven as we who grew up reading him are. When you can remember clearly his two teleportation different appearances, than you know that you’re getting on in years!
6.) At some point I need to go digging around in Western Horseman archives for the article they did years ago–’80s? ’90s? about Shatner and his horses. As I recall, he helped promote Western-style classes for Saddlebreds in breed shows (much bigger in that era than they are now) and was somewhat of an advocate for a more natural presentation (Saddlebreds used to be one of the most artificial-looking presentations with tails surgically altered and kept in a harness, big shoes with toe weights, and more. Now it’s Tennessee Walkers and Arabians–rather a simplification of what’s going on).
In any case, that article first alerted me to Shatner’s equestrian background…and eh, dang it, the magazine doesn’t have online archives.
Carl, and Princess Kate: Jeezuz H. Christ, wearing a lime green leisure suit. I can’t believe just how many people have no life whatsoever that they have to make it an international issue (not talking about you, but the people online)…
@bill: Among David Cronenberg’s acting credits are 7 episodes of ST:D as an expert in the history of the Mirror Universe.
I left this note on Camestros’ blog after seeing here that Lurkertype had mentioned me (egoboo!):
Without going back to reread [“What Can You Say About Chocolate-Covered Manhole Covers?”], I recall part is set at the Dian and Bruce Pelz divorce party, which preceded my time in LASFS by a couple years. There really was a cake topped by bride and groom figures facing in opposite directions. Jack Harness was the faux cleric. Tom Digby was the inspiration for the alien.
LASFS had an annual gift exchange which included a couple of traditional gag gifts plus a $5 bill (the “anti-crud [call] device”). One was a stolen gas main lid coated in chocolate (small but hefty enough to feel authentic) that was deemed a chocolate covered manhole cover. I ended up with it one time and stored it in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator til I could unload it the following year.
(12) I BECAME WHAT I BEHELD.
Batman’s Code against Killing is a defining trait. Take that away, and what your are left with is a different character.
@Joyce Reynolds-Ward I’ve known about Shatner’s passion for horses for more than thirty years now, because I have family in Lexington, Kentucky, which is a center of horse breeding in the US. And listed among all the famous people who travelled there to buy horses was William Shatner along the late Queen Elizabeth II.
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I found out about Shatner’s horses thanks to the legendary SNL “Get A Life” sketch… which I watched at a giant Xmas party full of fen. You can imagine the uproarious laughter in the den.
@Mike: Thanks for the manhole cover background; I didn’t remember, but your post reminds me that I did hear that story in the 80s — maybe 1984 Worldcon in LA? I knew Tom Digby a bit, and nobody’d have been surprised if he really was an alien.