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.

Digital Reading Part Two: Virtually Free

I find that there's an odd fragility to the concept of the digital book. Short of a big fire, my physical library is almost immortal. Parts of it are more worn around the edges than others, but there's a good chance that even with wear and tear a lot of those books will be around after I'm dead.

The digital library? Back up often - one drive crash and you're wiped out. Even more of an issue is obsolescence. If you hitch your literary wagon to a particular proprietary format, you may find that it's unreadable in a few years as support for the technology vanishes. As an example, I have graphics files from ten years ago that I would have trouble opening right now due to changes in format, version, and in some cases because the software developer went out of business and their product was never updated to the current operating system. Now imagine the same problems with your ebook version of The Lord of the Rings.

However, many of the same comments would apply to digital music, and it hasn't stopped most of the world from switching over to iPods. And it would seem that ebooks are going to be the next big thing in the marketplace, as demonstrated by the plethora of overly-expensive (in my opinion) digital readers that are popping up in the stores. But high-priced hardware is only part of the problem. After all, buying a reader is just the first step - you'll probably want some books too...

Logic - a sadly flawed device for analyzing these situations - would suggest that ebooks would be cheaper than their physical cousins. To my astonishment, nothing could be further from the truth. Amazon's Kindle bookstore lists digital bestsellers ranging from $7.00 to $12.00 and claims this as a saving because the hardcover editions sell for about $26. Unfortunately, not quite as much of a saving when compared to the paperback that most of us would buy anyway.

Surprisingly, there's actually an acceptable number of options online for those of us in search of less expensive virtual reading, some of which are aimed directly at the science fiction and fantasy audience.

Topping the list is the venerable (by internet standards) institution of Project Gutenberg, which actually dates back to 1971 and got its start on the University of Illinois mainframe. Gutenberg is based on a very simple idea: free text files of books that have passed into the public domain.

For a genre reader with a taste for the classics, Gutenberg is a bonanza: the Oz books; the complete Edgar Rice Burroughs, including the Tarzan and Mars books; the text of Karel Čapek's play Rossum's Universal Robots, which introduced the term "robot" to the world; Skylark and Lensman books by E. E. "Doc" Smith (staples of my early experience with SF); classic fantasy by Lord Dunsany and Robert E. Howard; stories by H. Beam Piper; novels by Andre Norton - the list goes on and on, and it's all free.

For the reader whose preferences are a bit more modern, Baen Books offers a surprising selection of free books at the Baen Free Library, a basic web site that offers over a hundred different novels for download: mostly SF with a leavening of fantasy. Updates are irregular, but the books listed would make up a pretty good foundation for anyone's ebookshelf. There's also a site called The Fifth Imperium that offers downloads of Baen's free promo CDs, which include ancillary material such as cover artwork or interviews as well as the stories.

The Manybooks site falls between Baen and Gutenberg, with its base offering coming from Gutenberg but in a wider selection of formats, and more current additional material. Free Speculative Fiction Online has a reasonable selection as well, although perhaps with a bias toward short stories over novel-length works.

A Google search reveals dozens of other sites, albeit some that may offer texts of dubious provenance. There used to be a thriving newsgroup community dedicated to bootleg books, and although I have to admit to downloading some of these samizdata files, quality tended to be uneven.

The free solutions that I've listed would certainly give you a good starter library, but I think that there's a better answer to the digital reading question than relying on giveaways. In order for the whole ebook concept to really get a foothold in the marketplace, it needs to have a solution like the iTunes store, a solution which will offer a simple method of purchasing and managing digital literature without charging the same prices demanded by the dead tree publishers.

It’s a shame that Apple has already released a product called the iBook, but I have a lot of faith in Steve Jobs. If or when he decides it's time to reform the digital book marketplace, I’m sure he’ll come up with something equally in line with the rest of the iProduct list.

- Sid

Digital Reading Part One: Dead Trees vs. Melted Sand.

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

- Groucho Marx

As readers of this blog will have already figured out, I'm a bit of a fan of books. Those of you who have responded to this by deciding that I must have enough books by now, so no more Chapters gift certificates for me - well, sadly this is not going to stop me from adding to my little library.

I do have to admit that there are problems accompanying the possession of a large number of books. Effectively, I do have a library - I have about 3,000 books lined up on the shelves behind me, and that's probably more than most libraries have in their science fiction and fantasy sections. In addition to having to find space for those shelves, there are obvious issues relating to relocating. When the representative from the moving company* came to my house to give me a quote for the move to Vancouver, his first comment was, "Wow, you've got a lot of books, that's going to be more expensive."

So, just as people like my friend Colin regretfully discovered that it's easier to move around an iPod than 12 crates of vinyl albums, I've given some cautious consideration to the digital library as an alternative.

There are several digital readers on the marketplace: Amazon’s Kindle is now on version 2, Barnes & Noble have just released the Nook, Sony has the Pocket, the Touch, and soon the Daily, and Plastic Logic will be introducing the Que next month. There are minor variations in weight and thickness, but basically they all offer a screen ranging from the size of a paperback to a sheet of paper, with a couple of gigabytes of storage and wireless access to internet bookstores.

At the moment, all of these cleverly named devices share the same problem: they're too bloody expensive. Prices weigh in at about $250-$400+ right across the board, and that's just for the reader, books are extra. However, we're looking at a technology that's in its infancy, and I'm sure that as demand develops prices will drop.

Impressed though I am by the whole futuristic concept of the virtual book as signified by Kindle, Nook, et al., personally, I feel that they're all going to fail in the long run. This won't be caused by any flaw in the product but due to a lack of perception about the nature of the marketplace.

The utility of handheld devices lies in diversity of function and convenience of size. Apple recognizes this, which is why their palm-sized iPhone is also an iPod, gives you internet access for e-mail and browsing, and has a large and growing library of applications - including, of course, applications for reading ebooks. The bottom line is that people don't want to carry around four or five different little boxes: one for music, one for phone calls, one for books, and so on. They also don't want to carry around something the size of a book or larger in lieu of a book.

My personal solution follows this philosophy. I've managed to dodge the cellphone bullet until now, but I’ve owned a succession of little personal organizers since the 90's, and in addition to features such as an address book, calendar, note pad, calculator, etc., you can also download and install the free ebook reader software of your choice. My current device is shown to the left - I purchased it used on Craigslist for about $25, installed PalmReader and Mobipocket, and I was all set.

The thing that amuses me is that when some people realize that I'm reading a book on my slightly battered Palm Tungsten, they frown and say "But the screen is so small, how can you read that?", then excuse themselves so that they can catch up on e-mails or text messages on their iPhone or Blackberry. It seems oddly appropriate to say that there are none so blind as those who will not see...

- Sid

* NEVER EVER EVER EVER hire the Prince Moving Company. Feel free to tell them that I said that.

The Terminal Beach

"Tonight you dance by the light of ancient mistakes!"

Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

A few months ago, with absolutely no fanfare at all, NASA found evidence of an unthinkably ancient death: the expiration of a star, over 13 billion years in the past.

NASA's Swift satellite, in the fifth year of its near-Earth orbit, picked up Gamma Ray Burst 090423 on April 23rd. Analysis of additional data gathered by the satellite and Earth-based observatories revealed that the burst was produced by the explosion of a massive star and its subsequent collapse into a black hole or a neutron star, a mere 630 million years after the birth of the universe.

The image at the top of this posting is a lie, by the way, a digital abstraction created by assigning colours to the data. The explosion itself was not visible, light itself having failed and faded long ago as time and distance stripped it away, photon by photon.

Science fiction has always been characterized by a sense of scale, of the enormity of time and space. In H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, the nameless Time Traveller stands beside a barren ocean 30 million years in the future and describes the following nihilistic vision:

The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of Man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives--all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.

A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me.

We stand on the edge of a different ocean, an ocean of stars and galaxies, with the ripples from events that are unimagineably distant in time and space lapping at our feet. And yet, someone at work recently expressed their surprise that I've never watched an entire episode of Seinfeld - I almost laughed at them. Nothing personal, but by comparison Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine don't even start to capture my interest. (Even if their show was about something.)

- Sid

Oh, is THAT what they mean by "drop dead good looking"!

I love, I love, I love my calendar girl

Yeah, sweet calendar girl
I love, I love, I love my calendar girl
Each and every day of the year
- Neil Sedaka, Calendar Girl

Happy Hallowe'en, everyone. Once again, my niece Jody provides the research for today's quickie seasonal posting: undead calendar pinup girls...and, if this sort of thing is your sort of thing, you may also wish to visit their blog to find out how YOU could be on the 2011 calendar! (I have to admire their dedication to concept: the rules say that vintage lingerie is compulsory for calendar girl submissions.)

And don't forget, trick or treat safely tonight, kids.

- Sid

The Unknown Author.

For this posting, I'd like to discuss an peculiar literary phenomenon: an almost completely unknown author whose work is famous - specifically, Robert E. Howard.

Born in the small Texas town of Peaster on January 22, 1906, Howard wrote primarily in the niche markets of Western stories and "weird" fantasy tales, where he enjoyed a certain degree of success. His literary creations included Bran Mak Morn, the dour ruler of the Picts during the time of the Roman rule over Briton; the equally dour Elizabethan hero Solomon Kane; the villainous Skull-Face; the bumbling, battling Western strongman Breckenridge Elkins, and many others.

Howard's writing career might have transcended his pulp magazine roots, given time. However, this was not to be. On June 11th, 1936, in a fit of depression over the death of his mother earlier the same day, he took his own life with a .380 Colt automatic.

Now, tragic though Howard's short life appears, at this point I can almost hear the non-fans in the audience saying "So?" Ah, but if I'd started the biography by saying "Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian..."

The route by which Howard's raven-haired, grim-faced Cimmerian hero was separated from his creator is an odd one. During his writing career, Howard completed 20 short stories that featured Conan as their protagonist, along with one novel-length piece called The Hour of the Dragon, which originally appeared as a 5-part serial in Weird Tales from December 1935 to April 1936.

Following his death, Howard's work might well have sunk into obscurity. However, the enormously successful United States paperback publication of The Lord of the Rings by Ballantine Books in 1965* created a marketplace for fantasy material, one which publishers were eager to satisfy by releasing fantasy stories from any source available.

Perhaps too eager - the twelve Lancer/Ace** editions of the Conan stories, as "edited" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, represent a bizarre combination of content. In addition to including Howard's original Conan tales, de Camp and Carter completed unfinished pieces, wrote new stories based on outlines found in Howard's papers, and took existing Howard stories with other characters and rewrote them as Conan stories. (To illustrate this, imagine someone rewriting Dickens' Great Expectations with Ebeneezer Scrooge as the main character simply because A Christmas Carol has better sales in bookstores.)

The strange thing is that both de Camp and Carter were relatively successful with their own material, and as such one would expect that professional courtesy would make them reluctant to take such enormous liberties with another author's legacy. What's even worse is that the de Camp/Carter stories don't measure up to Howard's flair for sword and sorcery. I first read the collections in the mid-70's, and even at the age of 14 I was aware that some of the material lacked the same energy and excitement that distinguished the original work.

However odd these blends of original creation and poor imitation may have been, the Lancer/Ace Conans proved to be popular, and made fantasy artist Frank Frazetta famous for the cover paintings that he produced for the series. Based on this success, in 1970 Marvel Comics writer Roy Thomas convinced his reluctant employers to depart from their usual superhero model and try a comic based on the character of Conan. To Marvel's surprise, Conan The Barbarian proved to be a hit, and spawned another title, The Savage Sword of Conan, along with a daily newspaper strip.

The various comic versions helped to make Conan even more a part of popular culture. Finally, Dino di Laurentiis' movie adaptations, Conan the Barbarian in 1982 and Conan the Destroyer in 1984, made Conan the Barbarian a household name - but not Robert E. Howard.

At the current point in time, Robert E. Howard's name has almost ceased to be connected to his creation. There are over 50 Conan novels written by authors other than Howard on bookstore shelves, comic book fans associate the name Conan with Roy Thomas, and the character is almost a joke to most of the world, thanks to Governor Schwarzenegger's portrayal of Conan in the movie versions.

And what do I think Robert E. Howard's reaction would be, faced with a small army of opportunists making a living off his original idea? To quote the man himself:

"I am aware of an almost overpowering desire to spring from my chair and kick someone violently in the pants."

- Sid

* I'm going to ignore any possible influence from the unauthorized, no-royalities-paid US publication of The Lord of the Rings by Ace Books earlier in the same year, which Tolkien successfully urged his fans to boycott. The Ace editor responsible for this pirated version was Donald A. Wollheim, who was himself a science fiction author and should have known better.

** Lancer Books went bankrupt before the publication of the 12th collection. Subsequently Prestige took over the series, publishing the 12th collection and reprinting the others, but since Prestige was distributed by Ace Books, they're commonly referred to as the Lancer/Ace editions. Well, perhaps not "commonly", but you get the idea.



UPDATE:  MARCH 2013
I've closed comments for this posting, due to an recent attack of spam comments that's been dumping 40 or 50 garbage e-mails into my account every day for most of this month.

Please pull on the other leg, there's a bell on that one.

And so, an hour later, Sam was the happy possessor of a Philips time machine, as good as new.

"What I can't understand," he said to Deleu, "is that I don't see where your profit is. I mean: what's the use of granting me credit if you only get your money in about nine hundred years?"

Deleu laughed boyishly. "I'm going to get it immediately." He pointed to his private time machine.

"Oh," Sam said stupidly, and "Oh," again a few seconds later, when he understood.

Paul van Herck, Where Were You Last Pluterday?

Sunday night, hopping around on the Internet - why would anyone think this was like surfing? - when what to our wondering eyes did appear, but a banner ad for time travel. Now, you might not have been tempted, but I feel an almost professional interest in things like this.

So, a quick click on the link, and there it is - "VOYAGE IN TIME - ONLY 4 SIMPLE STEPS".

Step 1. Invest $18 in time travel fund and receive official certificate;
Step 2. Your fund grows extensively until the time machine is invented;
Step 3. Your investments finance your ticket on the time machine;
Step 4. Dreams become reality — Travel in Time!

Ah, and it doesn't even matter if you die before the time machine is invented, because they'll just return to before you died to pick you up. Sorry, but this has to be a scam - because logically, if this was legitimate, wouldn't the time travellers already be here, shuttling people around?

But let's try to be fair, you may be one of those people who is okay with travelling back in time and creating new timelines as a result or some such Star Trek silliness, even so, the concept may be flawed financially

Okay, let's say that you bravely fork over $18 for a time travel certificate, and that $18 is invested at 3% compounded annually. In 500 years that money will be worth $47,193,790.22. (Well, $47,193,790.2154417, but I rounded it up.) The bad news? If the inflation rate stayed at a constant 2% annually, that money would be worth $2,364.82 in 2509 dollars, which really doesn't sound like a lot. But then, we're talking 500 years - who knows, maybe you'd be able to pick up a nice used time machine for under a grand if you looked on Craigslist, and going back in time and taking people on sightseeing trips might be like driving cab on the weekend, just something that people do for extra money.

As much as I would love for any of this to be feasible, it's pretty obvious that this web site is based on a different time-related phenomenon: the fact that there's a sucker born every minute...which means that 48 possible buyers of time travel certificates entered the world during the time it took me to put together this posting.

- Sid

The Goblin Market

I know how a novel will end before I begin to write it - and before I write it these days, I sell it. I realize that sounds backwards, but it's true. I make a summary, and my New York literary agent shows it around, and if a publisher offers a contract for it, then I go ahead and write the novel. I have any number of summaries that no editor wanted, so those novels have never been written.

- Piers Anthony

Until you have your following established, you have to meet the expectations of the market, which judges suitability based on how you categorize your book, on how it matches the conventions.

- Annie Wong

Life is full of little coincidences, and that's what provides most of the impetus for the creation of these postings. As a case in point, it turns out that one of my co-workers is planning to write a fantasy novel for the middle school age market, and her approach provides an interesting look at the creative process versus the practical aspects of actually being published.

Annie, who performs a variety of esoteric duties in area of shipping and receiving, has already completed the manuscript for a mainstream novel, but to her disappointment she has been unable to sell it, at least to date. Undaunted, she has found the inspiration for a fantasy series in a short story that she wrote as a gift for her 9-year old niece Emily, and now she is doing research before she starts work on it, or, as she says, "I have the clay, just wanting to have a better look at the mold before I throw the clay on the spinning table, that's all."

My initial assumption was that she was doing research in the same fashion that someone would do research for any project. For example, if you were going to write a novel about gunrunners in 60's Africa, logically you would want to make sure that your knowledge of Lewis guns and Sierra Leone was accurate, but that's not why Annie has lined up a year's worth of fantasy reading.

Her actual reasoning is much more pragmatic than any desire to bring herself up to speed on orcs, dragons, jabberwockies and marshwiggles. Annie feels that her first novel didn't succeed because she failed to write it for a specific market. She is obviously proud of that first effort, but equally obviously doesn't want to tear her creation apart in order to make it more marketable.

My concern would be that after a 12-month regimen of reading fantasy, mixed in with middle grade classics such as Tom Sawyer and Black Beauty, it would be difficult to avoid being influenced, but Annie isn't worried about that. She feels that "it is easier to write your own story than someone else's," and hopefully this will prove to be the case. What she is looking for from her research are the conventions that define any subgenre of literature: darker versus lighter plot elements, the inclusion of romance versus actual sex, and so on.*

I have to admit that my first thought was that Annie's approach would take all the fun out of writing a novel, but I suspect that her previous experience with the system makes her a much better judge of things. After all, Annie has already written a novel for "fun" - which is to say without concern as to a marketplace or an audience - and her current plan does not in any way restrict her creativity, only the mold, as she calls it, into which she needs to pour that creativity.

However, I will be curious to see how her plan to use a fantasy novel as a stepping stone to the successful release of her erotic chick-lit novel works out. If J. K. Rowling released the British version of Sex in the City, would her fame successfully transfer to a new audience?

- Sid

* I haven't read all the Harry Potter books, but my impression is that as the series progresses, the plot elements become progressively darker and more mature. Given the ten year gap between the publication of the first and the last books in the series, this approach would nicely address the changes in a maturing audience. (Of course, this approach fails to address future generations of readers who, with access to the entire series at once, may not be content to read one book every 17.14 months of their young lives...)

...In A Galaxy Far, Far Away.

Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer.

- George Lucas

Let's face it, eventually someone will remake the Star Wars movies. Some latter-day Peter Jackson - sigh, or J. J. Abrams - will take upon themselves the monumental task of applying a different vision to George Lucas' epic but admittedly imperfect magnum opus.

This as yet unborn revisionist will obviously make changes, large and small. They'll rewrite the dialogue (please God), make Jar Jar Binks less of an annoying stereotype, fix the gaffe about parsecs, and lose all of that midi-chlorian nonsense.

Larger decisions will alter the entire direction of the series. The simple choice as to whether Han shoots first is just the first step in establishing a different moral or psychological direction for the saga. Emphasize the incestuous romance between Luke and Leia, and you suddenly have a subplot right out of Greek tragedy à la Oedipus, or a reference to Arthurian legend.

But all of these questions pale beside the really big one: in what order do you tell the story?

The existing IV - V - VI - I - II - III sequence is a matter of circumstances more than planning. However elaborate the existing combination of movies, comics, novels and animation may be, at the time of the release of the first movie George Lucas was completely unaware that he was initiating a franchise.

Our future auteur has an open field, though. Personally, my vote is for starting the series with The Phantom Menace. In fact, in my version, the Anakin Skywalker that Qui-gon Jinn discovers is a dark child more reminiscent of Damian than Beaver Cleaver, an object of fear and suspicion in the slums of Mos Espa, perhaps winning the pod race through an unseen act of cruelty in the wastes of Tatooine.

In this version, we would actually see some of the anger and fear that dissuaded Yoda from wanting to accept Anakin. He would be like a caged demon at the Jedi Academy, wounding or even slaying his fellow padawans in training, but like a demon in power and skill, as well, towering over even the members of the Jedi Council in his abilities with the Force. But of course he would - Anakin is after all the Chosen One - or is he? The Council would be in a constant state of turmoil over the saviour/savage in their midst.

And then...love. The possibility of redemption, a time of peace and happiness with Padme. But eventually Anakin succumbs to destiny and turns to the Dark Side - part Jesus, part Judas, he contains the seeds of his own betrayal, but still manages to topple the Jedi knighthood before falling to Obi-Wan in battle.

From that point, Luke's role becomes that of the true Chosen One - the irony being that the Chosen One is in fact a child on a faraway desert planet, but it's Anakin's son, not Anakin himself. The odd thing about Luke as he is portrayed in the original movie is that there's not even a hint of his eventual mastery of the Force. Surely there should be some clue in his childhood, some sign of buried talent other than a knack for being able to bullseye womp rats. Since we already know that Ben Kenobi is on Tatooine to watch over Luke, my version allows him to become involved in Luke's early fumbling attempts to tap into his abilities.

With Anakin's story already established, we see Obi-Wan's lie about the death of Luke's father for exactly that, a lie, and in the attack on the Death Star Luke's initial survival is caused by a moment of hesitation on the part of Darth Vader, unwilling to kill his son. Unlike his father, Luke is able to deny the temptation of the Dark Side, and his time with Yoda allows the agèd master to redeem his failure with Anakin.

And in the final reel, we would see the culmination of the struggle between saviour and betrayer, Christ and Antichrist, as the Emperor watches, gloating and smirking, a figure of Satanic temptation for the younger Skywalker as to his father. And, as with Satan, we see him cast into the abyss at the climax of the battle. Finally, rather than a teddy bear picnic, the closing scenes would show Luke welcoming the first class of younglings to the reborn Jedi Temple, as the greenscreen figures of Yoda, Obi-Wan and his father look on with approval.

Or you could just do it as a comedy. More Jar Jar Binks, more R2-D2 noises, more cute romantic arguments between Leia and Han, and something falls on Chewbacca's head every ten minutes. The elements that allow for my altered view of the plotline are certainly in the existing story but then so are the ones that would allow for something as ridiculous as, oh, having Ewoks win the war.

- Sid

Post 100: blogging - it doesn't look like this.

Several studies indicate that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month, depending on whose figures you choose to believe) and that few are regularly updated.

The 'average blog' thus has the lifespan of a fruitfly. One cruel reader of this page commented that the average blog also has the intelligence of a fly.

The Perseus report noted above indicates that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, "representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned".

Jeffrey Henning of Perseus sniffed that "Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days."

Perseus claimed that the average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days, with some 132,000 blogs being abandoned after a year or more. The oldest abandoned blog surveyed had been maintained for 923 days.

- Caslon Analytics, an Australian research, analysis and strategies consultancy

Wow, 1.09 million blogs that only lasted for one day. And here I am, 33 months and 100 posts in, and I feel guilty if I don't post for a couple of weeks.

Please take a look at the full-size version of the photocomp image that starts off this posting. It was a fun little project - as usual when I do this sort of thing, the result isn't exactly what I hoped for, but it's not too bad. Thanks go out to my friends Alan and Colin for comments on the early drafts, your input was greatly appreciated, gentlemen.

And I'd also like to thank my small but (apparently) dedicated group of followers for actually taking the time to read any of this. Hopefully a few of the posts demonstrate an intelligence level somewhat above that of a fruitfly.

- Sid

P.S. And still waiting for any guest postings...

Well I dreamt I went away on a Steam Powered Aeroplane.
I went and stayed and damn near didn't come back again.
Didn't go very fast on a Steam Powered Aeroplane,
Oh the wheel went around, up and down, and inside and then back again.

Sittin' in a 747 just watching them clouds roll by,
Can't tell if it's sunshine or if it's rain.
Rather be sittin' in a deck chair high above Kansas City,
On a genuine old fashioned Steam Powered Aeroplane.

- John Hartford, Steam Powered Aeroplane*

For those of you unfamiliar with steampunk, it's an interesting phenomenon, a sort of bastard child of history and imagination that is difficult to categorize - is it a movement, a philosophy, an art, a science? Perhaps a bit of each, really.

For a long time, Fantasy was basically a medieval homage, with occasional forays into the Renaissance. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a useful case study for this approach, because so much is taken on faith. In a society containing beer, barrels, boots and bread, there have to be brewers, tanners, cobblers, bakers, farmers, millers, coopers, and a plethora of other trades, but Tolkien rarely touches on the mechanics of Middle-Earth society, that's not what he's interested in. The near-fate of the Shire as a smoke-belching wasteland would seem to clearly demonstrate Tolkien's general position on technology and progress, a position shared by some of his fellow fantasy authors.

The other side of the coin is, of course, Science Fiction, with the emphasis on Science. In its purest form, SF worships at the altar of technology, but technology at a remove, technology inaccessible to the man on the street. Star Trek in its various incarnations is the perfect example of this approach, an almost clinical future without moving parts, grease or grit.

Steampunk stands between these two options. As the name suggests, the steampunk aesthetic dates from the era of the steam engine, but it's really a sort of retro-futurism, in which technological developments like robots, computers, and time machines are created using the technologies of the past: steam, rivets, gears and dials as opposed to electricity or electronics. It is heavily influenced by the work of its patron saints, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and steampunk fiction is often set in an idealized Victorian milieu.

The term "steampunk" was coined by science fiction author K. W. Jeter in a 1987 letter to Locus Magazine. Looking for a term to describe the work being written by himself and his friends Tim Powers and James Blaylock, he jokingly suggested "steampunks", a play on words regarding the cyberpunk genre of science fiction:

Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term... Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like "steampunks," perhaps.

In addition to Jeter, Powers, and Blaylock, authors such as Paul di Filippi and Jay Lake have contributed to the steampunk library, and cyberpunk authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling paid tribute to the genre in their 1990 collaboration The Difference Engine. Jay Lake and S. M. Peters have presented an alternative approach to steampunk in their writing, which they refer to as "clockpunk", revolving (no pun intended) more around clockwork and spring-powered technology than steam.

Another related style is that of the gaslamp romance, which is less involved with technology but which takes a mash-up approach to the Victorian era, combined historical and fictional characters to create alternative histories. A perfect example would be British author Kim Newman's 1992 novel Anno Dracula, wherein Count Dracula marries the widowed Queen Victoria, and Jack the Ripper stalks vampire prostitutes through the foggy streets of Whitechapel.

Surprisingly, steampunk has developed a role beyond that of just a literary sub-genre, and has established itself as both a fashion trend and an artistic movement, and for some people a philosophy and a lifestyle. Followers of steampunk fashion sport top hats, goggles, and muttonchop whiskers, and accessorize their frock coats and corsets with brass ray guns and complicated ocular mechanisms.

Steampunk artists embrace an aesthetic based around copper, glass, wood and leather, and build both fantasy creations and reconstructions or modifications of modern technology such as laptops, iPods, electric guitars, and even vibrators. (N.B. there are certain devices which do not successfully combine extreme heat and metal. Apparently the steam-powered vibrator is one of them.) In addition, a wide variety of characters and stories have been re-imagined into the steampunk milieu: Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel and DC comics characters, and so on.

Steampunk has inspired or influenced a number of movies and television programs, such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or the movie version of Wild Wild West, and is the milieu of Katsuhiro Otomo's 2004 animated film Steamboy. Last year's Doctor Who Christmas special featured a marvellous steampunk robot, a gigantic smoke-belching automaton that stalked across Victorian London, leaving the traditional path of destruction in its wake. However, in spite of these attempts to move steampunk from the fringe into the mainstream, to date steampunk has yet to have its Star Wars, as it were.

But there's still hope - a quick Google search resulted in over 500,000 hits for the phrase "steampunk star wars", so obviously someone is working on it.

- Sid

* With this set of lyrics, we once again pay homage to the infamous Colin Campbell. Colin sometimes bemoans the cleansing process of a few years back when he divested himself of his vinyl collection (records, that is, he didn't collect 60's tablecloths or fetish clothing or anything like that). I seem to have a certain knack for finding what we might charitably describe as "unlicensed" music online, and when he wistfully mentioned John Hartford and his album Steam Powered Aeroplane as among the deceased, I had the great good fortune of finding eleven digitized John Hartford albums online for him within minutes, including the one in question.

(The Star Trek Steampunk wallpapers are from the Rabbittooth web site, credit where credit is due.)