Snapshots 19

Nine developments of interest to fans:

(1) The UK has academic fanzine collections, too. A BBC story “Fanzines enter pages of history” says “The National Library of Scotland is to embark on the laborious task of tracking down and cataloguing the countless thousands of fanzines published in the UK over the past 70 years.” That includes sf and fantasy zines. And the Beeb interviews Professor Chris Atton, whose fascination with music fanzines goes back decades.

(2) YouTube videos about Ray Bradbury’s play Falling Upward are linked here and here.

(3) Canadians, would you rather have Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, TV cop T.J. Hooker or Boston Legal lawyer Denny Crane running your country? Well this is your lucky day – you get all three if you accept William Shatner’s offer:

“The 77-year-old star said: ‘My intention is to be Prime Minister of Canada, not Governor General, which is mainly a ceremonial position.'”

(4) The Marvel Comics version of Stephen King’s The Stand is being sold only through comics stores, not bookstores. Publishers Weekly reports:

Faced with restrictions on the distribution of its much-anticipated comics adaptation of Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic bestseller, The Stand, Marvel Comics is working to turn them into a plus. After releasing the series in periodical form in the fall of last year, Marvel announced plans to release the hardcover graphic novel, The Stand: Captain Trips, on March 10 exclusively through the comics shop market.

(5) Jennifer Schuessler’s New York Times article asks:

These days, America is menaced by zombie banks and zombie computers. What’s next, a zombie Jane Austen?

In fact, yes. Minor pandemonium ensued in the blogosphere this month after Quirk Books announced the publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an edition of Austen’s classic juiced up with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem” by a Los Angeles television writer named Seth Grahame-Smith. (First line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”)

(6) Cheryl Morgan draws an irresistible parallel between the “social grooming” of monkeys and bloggers:

People who study primate behavior apparently recognize a lot of what happens in social networks as “grooming”. And you know, that makes a lot of sense. Link love is essentially a grooming activity. Us low-status monkeys indulge in mutual grooming with people we think of as allies, and we groom high-status monkeys whom we admire and whose troop we wish to belong to. High status monkeys don’t need to groom others, but may do so to reward their followers.

Thanks for pointing that out. A bunch of bananas is on the way…

(7) Your one-stop shop for history and images of Ace Books.

(8) Dave Barnett has written an enoyable and insightful article for the Guardian on the reissue of John Crowley’s Little, Big

Little, Big spans several generations of the Drinkwater family and their relationship with the world of faerie. The concept is rescued from tweeness by author Crowley’s dazzling feats of aerobatics with the English language, which at first – especially in my tightly-typeset Methuen edition – take a bit of getting used to but, ultimately, draw you in and trap you with their beauty, not unlike the fabled world of faery itself.

(9) Artist Joy Alyssa Day, a friend of Diana’s and mine, is hard at work on a solid wood rocket ship:

The fins are finished! They were cut from solid cherry boards with my radial arm saw and trimmed up with my bandsaw. The blade on that could use some replacing…. Cherry is so hard that mostly the bandsaw blade just burns it while it’s trying to cut. Funny, burned cherry wood smells exactly like popcorn. Now I’m hungry!

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster and David Klaus for the links they contributed to this article.]

 

2 thoughts on “Snapshots 19

Comments are closed.