Dramatis Personae.

The holiday season is traditionally a time of family and friends, and as we come to the end of 2009, I felt that it was appropriate to introduce the various people to whom I refer in these postings, and thank them for their contributions. The list is in alphabetical order to avoid any complaints of favouritism - although, come to think of it, Chris Plested IS my favourite nephew.

Colin Campbell

I met my good friend Colin on my first day of classes at Ryerson. Ironically, our initial rapport was based on mutual distaste for a raving hard-core comic book fan, if memory serves. Fortunately, over the intervening 26 years we've found other things to talk about.

I think of Colin as being an old-school science fiction and fantasy fan like myself, although his first love is music - come to think of it, he should start a music blog.  He and my sister are the only other people I know who have been members of the Science Fiction Book of the Month Club, and in fact I believe that they're both still current, whereas I'm lapsed. (After you pay to have your book collection moved from Toronto to Vancouver, you too may have second thoughts about purchasing hardcovers, no matter how good the price is.)

Colin has prompted many of these postings, and occupies a unique position by being one of the few people who has managed to consistently give me books that I didn't own and actually wanted to. And just for the record, he's larger than he looks in the above picture.

Dorothy Hatto (née Plested)

My older sister Dorothy could probably have written this entire blog - no, not this posting, I mean the whole thing. I don't think that she would want to, and she'd certainly have some different observations to make, but I'm confident that her level of knowledge is equal to mine. She's the person I call when I can't come up with an obscure piece of genre knowledge on my own - I know the rest of the world uses Google, but you can't go to Google and say, "What was the title of that book that Mother owned, the old fantasy one about the vacationing English children and the Sidhe?"

Like myself, Dorothy is the owner of a substantial stack of science fiction and fantasy books. I have high hopes of eventually putting up something from her on the site - there have been rumours of work on a guest posting about Ace Doubles.

Jody Hatto

Long-time readers have already been introduced to my niece Jody in my Demon Child posting, but you may not have made the connection to her mother being the Dorothy who makes a comment now and then. Jody is my source for what you might call real-world manifestations: zombie walks, vampire pictures, and undead centerfolds. This isn't something we've planned, I just read her Facebook updates and I have all the inspiration I need.

Alan Murrell

I have to be honest, my good friend Alan is sort of an honourable mention on this list - I'm fairly certain that he's never read the blog, and in fact he's not much of a fan of reading generally. However, he gets full credit for continuing to give me the very welcome Amazon.ca gift certificates which have prompted a couple of postings - not to mention the ongoing suspicion that somewhere, there's a well-hidden painting of Alan which is looking older and older every year...

Chris Plested

My nephew Chris, aka Brakard the Warrior, Brakard the Druid, Brakard the Cleric (you get the idea), is not a frequent flyer here, but he's been an excellent source of information for things like MMORPGs*, and we've had a lot of great discussions about how they SHOULD be doing things for all these online gaming worlds. He's also been good enough as to provide me with what you might call walking tours of a number of games, just so that I could get a feeling for how they worked.

Chris first earned his status as my favourite nephew by giving me a copy of Starcraft as a birthday gift. For those of you unfamiliar with Starcraft, it's a real-time story-oriented science fiction strategy game.** I tried to invent something very similar when I was about 13, but was held back by the lack of home computers in 1974. Fortunately, the game developers at Blizzard did a much better job than I ever could have.

Laurie Smith

Laurie Smith - fitness guru, personal trainer, and part-time pyromaniac - is pretty much a complete non-fan, and as such provides a useful yardstick for deciding which topics require further explanation. (Also know as the "Should I Explain This For Laurie?" or SIETFL test.)

However, she does have other credentials in the field. She claimed to be a visiting space alien for a couple of years, as far as I know her spacesuit helmet still has a broken visor, she considers most gatherings of more than two people to strongly resemble the Star Wars cantina scene, and due to a fortuitous typo has once claimed be the owner and operator of Sith Training, thereby answering the question of where Darth Maul picked up his skills.

I myself have the unique honour of having very briefly been Mr. Smith when we were checking into a hotel together, but that's another story. And really, there are far too many stories that start with a couple claiming to be Mr. and Mrs. Smith checking into a hotel, so we'll stop there.

Chris Sumner

It's surprising how many of these posts have started out as conversations with Chris at the Frog and Firkin on Friday night! In addition to being a good Friday night conversation-and-drinks friend, Laurie's brother Chris is also a fan of fantasy and science fiction - maybe more fantasy than SF - and has provided me with useful input on a lot of genre-related topics that I'm not interested in myself, like Harry Potter or World of Warcraft. Now if I could only persuade him to stop ordering drinks with silly names...


And, bringing up the rear - probably for a very good reason - the gentlemen (and I use the term very loosely) who were the inspiration for the whole idea, the Campbell Brothers:

Thanks for your input, everyone, and I hope you all have a happy 2010. Just think, we'll finally be able to send that mission out to Jupiter to find out what happened to Dave and HAL.

One more step into the future...

- Sid

* I'm never sure how far some of these acronyms have penetrated into the real world - does everyone know about Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games? I remember when their name was MUD...Multi-User Dungeons, that is.

** Sorry, but this does not make it a RTSOSFSG, just a RTSG.