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.

No wonder no one wants to buy hardcovers.

My good friend Alan in Toronto was once again kind enough to send me an Amazon.ca gift certificate as a seasonal gift, and as a result I've spent some time on their web site looking at potential purchases. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with Amazon's approach to these things, the site keeps track of what you've purchased or looked at and suggests other things that you might like.

Since my last purchase on the site was a collection of DC's Sandman comics as a gift for my other friend Colin, the suggestions were loaded heavily toward British author Neil Gaiman. Gaiman's brilliant scripts made Sandman a critical success, making it the only comic to both win the World Fantasy Award and appear on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Gaiman may well be the premier fantasy author of our time. His writing defines the modern face of the genre - his legendary work on Sandman, his gritty urban fantasies such as Neverwhere, his lighter, more traditional works like Stardust and less easily categorized pieces such as American Gods or Coraline - everything Gaiman creates seems to be spun from moonbeams and silver.


Now, fond though I am of Mr. Gaiman, when I saw that the "preferred" version of Neverwhere - presumably the equivalent of the director's cut - was selling for a staggering $151.20, I had to wonder if success was starting to go to his head. I mean really - a hundred and fifty bucks? Well, actually two hundred and forty bucks, $151.20 is the reduced price. (How kind of Amazon to reduce the cost so that it's not out of reach to the man or woman on the street.)

I love books, but come on, let's be rational about this, Neil! Could you look me in the eye and convince me that whatever the extra material is in Neverwhere Ltd., it really makes it worth $142.21 more than my $8.99 paperback edition? Really? If so, I expect that book stores will have display copies chained shut - after all, you wouldn't want people like me sneaking in and getting in forty or fifty dollars worth of reading during lunch break.

- Sid

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

If I had the time and a hammer, I would track down every copy of that program and smash it.

- George Lucas

My neighbour across the hall, whose name I still don't know after six years here, has a piano in her apartment. Normally she plays classical pieces, but today, since it is Christmas Day, she is playing Christmas carols - quietly, pensively, almost sadly. Perhaps she too is spending the day on her own.

However, it's important to make the best of these situations - the silver lining in today's cloud is that I have ample time for the research required for this year's seasonally appropriate posting. I spotted my opportunity for this posting several months ago on another blog: a download link for a VHS-to-digital transfer of the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special.

"Infamous" is really the only appropriate adjective. It's generally accepted that this 1978 spinoff program (read "attempt to cash in" for spinoff if you want to be completely accurate) is one of the worst pieces of entertainment in the history of the television, or perhaps just in history, period.

The plot - perhaps "excuse" is the word I'm looking for here - for the show is simple: Chewbacca is attempting to return to his family on Kashyyyk in order to celebrate Life Day with them, Life Day being a celebration of love and family which coincidentally involves a decorated tree. In practice, the plot is only a shaky framework for what's really just a one-hour variety special stretched out to two hours with the addition of clumsily over-dubbed stock footage from the movie, far too much unintelligible roared dialogue between the members of Chewbacca's family, and Art Carney acting as the improbable hero of the hour.

The program features unforgettable* moments such as Harvey Korman in alien drag as the four-armed female host of a cooking program, explaining how to cook bantha rump; Diahann Carroll as a singing interactive holographic soft-core sex symbol; Jefferson Starship as holographic musicians; Bea Arthur as the singing proprietor of the cantina on Tatooine (thankfully without any sexual connotations); and, of course, Princess Leia singing the Life Day hymn, which coincidentally has exactly the same tune as the Star Wars theme music.

(Just for the record, it looks as if Carrie Fisher is actually singing the hymn - I had no idea that she'd inherited her parents' pipes.)


The only part of the show which was well received was the short animated segment, created by Toronto's Nelvana animation studio, which marked the first appearance of bounty hunter Boba Fett. Fans of animation, Star Wars, or both will recognize in this eleven minute piece an early version of the artistic style used for the Droids animated series featuring C-3PO and R2D2, which ran for a single season in 1985.

The most horrifying thing that I discovered in the process of researching the various details of the special is that it was ranked at #3 in "The Five Goofiest Moments Of The Star Wars Mythos" by Star Wars Magazine. #3? I have to admit that I didn't look up the reference - I think that I will sleep better tonight not knowing the two things that were considered to be worse.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

- Sid

* It's generally accepted that all parties involved have tried to forget but failed miserably.

Postscript:  I'm adding this on February 25th, 2010 - for no good reason that I can figure out, this post and this post alone has become a magnet for spam comments!  Apparently Blogger is a little draconic when it comes to blogs with a heavy concentration of spam, so I've been trying to delete them as fast as they appear, but I have to wonder:  why this post? Is it because it uses the phrase "Star Wars" four times?

Damn...five, now.

Post-postscript:  okay, I give up, this is becoming disconcerting.  According to my e-mail, someone put a spam comment on here, but it's invisible.  The comment count has gone up by one, but I can't find the comment.  So I've disabled commenting for this post out of self-defense.

Extremely guilty pleasures.

It all started out innocently, honest it did. I was disposing of extra images in the Picasa picture album for the blog, and there they were, the pictures from last year's Major Matt Mason posting. Really, I was just curious to see just how ridiculously expensive the figures were now when I logged onto eBay and did a search.

And trust me, when I put a bid down on one of the figures, I never thought I'd win the damn auction! Good grief, it's for an original 1966 blue stripe version of the Major complete with original helmet and Cat Trac, it's got to be worth more than, oh, let's put a $50 cap on the bid, ha, that should be the top bid for about ten minutes.

Imagine my surprise (and mild embarrassment) when 6 days and $43.02 later, I found myself the proud owner of six ounces of rubber and wire from the 1960's, accessorized with 15 cents worth of molded plastic.

But it seemed that my unexpected opportunity to reclaim childhood memories was doomed - four long weeks went by without a sign of the parcel: no notes from the post office, nothing. The seller reassured me that the items had been shipped within three days, but someone could have walked here with the package in a month for heaven's sake, obviously something had gone amiss.

On Monday night I trotted down to the building laundry room to drop in a load of darks (having missed my usual Saturday morning laundry due to a weekend trip to Toronto) and to my mingled relief, curiousity and anger, there the Major was, dumped on a shelf beside the laundry sorting table. He and his helmet were in a Ziploc™ bag, his Cat Trac was loose but undamaged, and everything was exactly in the condition described in the eBay listing,

What happened, I wonder? Obviously the [expletive deleted] postie just left the package at my door rather than returning it to the post office to wait for my signature, and just as obviously someone nicked the package and opened it. And then...had an attack of conscience? Decided they didn’t really need a 6 inch rubber man? Got caught by their mother? But why leave it in the laundry room instead of returning it to my door?

Regardless, I’m pleased by the positive conclusion to the story, if somewhat baffled by the circumstances that led up to it.

The Major Matt Mason dolls were painted rubber moldings over wire armatures – think Gumby in a spacesuit, if that helps. The down side of this style of construction is that the wire involved has a relatively short life span in the hands of an imaginative and playful child, who will probably subject the joints to the kind of stress and extension normally associated with the Spanish Inquisition.

Once the wire is broken, the rubber expansion joints are left with nothing else for support and can easily tear. As a result, eBay listings for Major Matt Mason figures tend to cite number of broken joints, and in a few cases one-armed or one-legged astronauts are offered for sale.* As you can see in the photos, my Major is a little bit on the grimy side, and his paint has peeled off in a couple of spots. However, all of his limbs are there, his wire joints are good, and he still has his original helmet, which I gather is unusual.

I don’t remember to what extent my original Matt Mason figures had lost their paint – I did see one for sale on eBay with no paint at all on the black rubber, and to be honest I thought that the all-black spacesuit looked somewhat cool, sort of a ninja astronaut look. Not practical, though – NASA's spacesuits are white in order to reflect heat. I think that the multi-coloured space suits of the original line of figures were based around the idea of visibility on the Moon in case of accidents, an idea which shows up semi-regularly in science fiction.

I can see why the various collectors' websites advise soaking the figures in a dilute solution of cleanser for 20 minutes before attempting a gentle cleaning (very gentle - everyone agrees that the paint is a bit fragile). My first attempt at wiping away the stains with a dampened soft cloth was almost pointless: imagine almost 45 years of grimy little juvenile fingers rubbing filth into the rubber and acrylic. (Or don't if you have a weak stomach.)

I find myself wondering as to the exact circumstances that led to the Major ending up in the laundry room. I picture this sort of Toy Story scenario, wherein he finds himself held captive but plans a desperate escape. Choosing his moment, he grimly snaps down his visor and climbs onto his scarlet Cat Trac to make a courageous dash for freedom, but finally succumbs to lack of oxygen and tumbles unconscious from his seat...

You know it's a good toy when it can still inspire your imagination 43 years after it was made.

- Sid

 

* There's a 1949 short story by Ray Bradbury titled Kaleidoscope where an orbiting spaceship blows up and the spacesuited crew survives, but is scattered in all directions by the force of the explosion. Some fall into the atmosphere and burn up, and some are hurled into the depths of space. One unfortunate finds his vector to be opposite that of a meteor cloud, and as jagged hunks of iron amputate his extremities, a rather brutal safety feature in his spacesuit allows him to close an iris that stops the bleeding and seals the joint. First his left hand...SNICK...then his right foot...SNICK... Perhaps this is how damaged Major Matt Mason figures explain their, ah, shortcomings in bar conversations.

Adumbration, solecism, plangent, phthisic.

From: Sid
To: Chris
Subject: MIA
Received: Thursday, December 17, 2009, 7:45 PM
Just in case, I thought I should warn you that I won’t be at the Frog and Firkin tomorrow night, your sister has evinced a desire to purchase Chinese food for two.

From: Chris
To: Sid
Subject: Re: MIA
Received: Thursday, December 17, 2009 9:04 pm
Evinced - a word not commonly used.

How often are you able to cite the exact source from which you learned a word?

In this case, it's Jack Vance's Hugo and Nebula* award-winning 1966 short novel The Last Castle, which contains the following bit of narrative:

"After the council meeting I descended immediately to the storeroom where the Mek was confined. It lacked nutriment; I gave it syrup and a pail of water, which it sipped sparingly, then evinced a desire for minced clams. I summoned kitchen help and sent them for this commodity and the Mek ingested several pints."

I probably read The Last Castle for the first time in the early 70's (my copy certainly looks like I've owned it for that long, and I mentally associate it with about that point in my life) and I have no idea why the picture of a corduroy-faced alien worker expressing his longing for shredded shellfish stuck in my mind. But it did, and thus we increase our word power, as Reader's Digest used to say.

By the way, if you're looking for something a bit different in the fantasy and science fiction reading department, Jack Vance is a fabulous choice. As demonstrated above, his vocabulary is both recondite and pedantic - his writing style is formal and slightly archaic, and his sense of humour can be described in exactly the same terms.

Some science fiction authors invent bizarre and improbable technologies, some create strange and unusual aliens, others are planet builders. Vance's books tend to have a backdrop of convoluted and elaborate social structures: societies based around odd practises, peculiar rituals, and the observation of unique traditions. As an example, here's a description of the tribal group called Khors from Vance's The Dirdir, the third novel of the Tschai, Planet of Adventure series:

"Remember," Anacho warned, "the Khors are a sensitive people. Do not speak to them; pay them no heed except from necessity, in which case you must use the fewest possible words. They consider garrulity a crime against nature. Do not stand upwind of a Khor, nor if possible downwind; such acts are symbolic of antagonism. Never acknowledge the presence of a woman; do not look toward their children – they will suspect you of laying a curse; and above all ignore the sacred grove."

Sadly, sometimes Vance's fascination with the oddities of language and society take precedence over plot, and I have to admit that for me, some of his work falls a bit flat because of that problem. But nothing can diminish the brilliance with which Vance builds his dream palaces, and that brilliance has garnered him respect and praise from fans, critics and fellow authors for over 60 years.

In addition to The Last Castle and the Tschai series, Vance's best known works would be the Dying Earth stories, The Dragon Masters, and the Demon Princes series. I suspect a lot of it is out of print, Vance was born in 1916 and hasn't been very productive recently, but if you're willing to spend a little time in used book stores I have no doubt that you'll be able to find a suitable selection. I'll warn you in advance, though: you may find yourself evincing a desire for a copy of the Oxford Concise Dictionary in order to fully appreciate Jack Vance.

- Sid

* This is the equivalent of winning an Oscar and a Golden Globe in the real world.