Sic transit gloria mundi.

 

My wife Karli has had glorious pink and purple* hair for the last few months, a look which suits her so well that people frequently comment that it looks like her natural hair colour.

However, all things come with a price, and in the case of glorious hair, it's time spent at the hairdresser.  Because people tend to chat during things like hair colouring, Karli has discovered that Chenoa, her hairdresser at Field Trip Hair,**, is a fantasy fan, and in turn Karli has revealed that I'm a science fiction and fantasy fan (with the emphasis on science fiction.)

When Karli mentioned that she'd discussed my hobby with Chenoa, I casually wondered if she'd read Joe Abercrombie's darkly entertaining First Law trilogy, or any of the other related novels set in the same world.  Karli passed this along via text, and I gather that Mr. Abercrombie's name came as a bit of a surprise as a fantasy option - which in turn surprised me a bit.

The moral of the story is that just because someone like Abercrombie is part of the contemporary fantasy marketplace, that doesn't guarantee that everyone will know about them.  I myself became aware of Abercrombie while browsing in a Waterstones book store in London in 2011, and although his first book had been published in 2006, that was the first time I'd heard of him.

Just out of curiousity, I took at look at Amazon.ca, and to my surprise it wasn't easy to find most of my favourite fantasy novels.  If you sort by Average Customer Review*** Harry Potter shows up first, not a huge surprise, but there's only a token nod to Game of Thrones with an audiobook on the first page of results, and you won't see The Lord of the Rings until page 2.

Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett, arguably two of the best fantasy authors of the last 25 years or so, don't make an appearance until page 5, and the actual Game of Thrones books don't show up until page 8.  The collected Narnia books are on page 10, and Ursula K. Le Guin's critically acclaimed Earthsea series is MIA until page 11.  Even Conan the Barbarian doesn't make the cut until page 15.  I stopped looking after 25 pages of results - and I never did see anything by Joe Abercrombie.

It really does illustrate the fleeting nature of literary fame - in a way, it's very much like the music scene.

Musical acts come and go, and whereas a group might hit big for a period of time, if they stop releasing songs, their fame diminishes.  And even if they're still producing, that doesn't mean that everyone will be familiar with their music.  Some groups - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and so on - leave a large enough mark that their songs survive their era and become classics, whereas other groups have their moment in the sun, and then end up on the Golden Oldies station, unknown to the next generation of listeners.****

I'm still a little surprised, though.  There are a LOT of authors that weren't on the search results that I would have expected to have some kind of ongoing readership.  I'm not talking about the classic authors from the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th - you need a bit of a scholarly outlook to discover Lord Dunsany, A. Merritt or E. R. Eddison, or even authors from the mid-20th century like Mervyn Peake and his flawed but brilliantly written Gormenghast series -  but the writers I was reading when I started buying books in the 1970s.

Where's Michael Moorcock?  He first introduced the character of Elric, his haunted albino kinslayer, in 1961, and his books regarding Elric and the rest of the Eternal Champion characters such as Erekosë, Corum Jhaelen Irsei, and Dorian Hawkmoon are considered to be classics.  The same with Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, which he started writing in the 1930s but I was able to purchase in collected form in the 70s.  I've already mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin and her first Earthsea trilogy from the late 60s and early 70s, which I suspect have won every award there is - and they still didn't show up on Amazon.ca until page 11. 
 
The challenging Thomas Covenant series hit the fantasy industry like a bomb in 1977, but, unlike Star Wars: A New Hope, which also debuted that year, apparently Stephen Donaldson's work hasn't retained its fame. The Thomas Covenant books are described as "demanding" in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, and it's hard to improve on that description, but Donaldson's flawed, bitter protagonist broke completely new ground in the genre.  Patricia McKillip's clever and lyrical Riddlemaster of Hed series from the same era is equally unique, if less deconstructionist, but may actually be out of print at this point.

I feel I could sit here and list authors and books all day - Garth Nix's Sabriel,  K. J. Parker (Tom Holt in disguise), Tad Williams, Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay and his breakout Fionvar Tapestry series from the 80s, Karl Edward Wagner's Kane stories, Charles De Lint (also Canadian), Mary Stewart's historical fantasy, and so on - and no sign of them in terms of public recognition on Amazon, which I think is more than a little sad.  It's a shame there isn't some equivalent of the aforementioned Golden Oldies radio stations to keep the classics in the public eye.

I think it would be fun to sit down and have a conversation with Chenoa about some of these books, but I don't think that's likely to happen - we only know her professionally, and as you can tell from photos of me that that have appeared here, I'm not exactly in need of a lengthy visit to a hairdresser.

- Sid

* Highlights have varied from aqua to caramel.

** Unsolicited endorsement:  Chenoa does great work.  If you live in the greater Vancouver area and you're thinking about getting coloured hair, she is definitely the person you want to see.

*** Amazon's Sort By feature has always made me a bit crazy.  Why is there no ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY AUTHOR - how hard would that be?  It's the way brick and mortar stores do it, how bad would it be to be able to do that online?

**** This is an interesting analogy, because it also acknowledges the way in which styles and preferences change over time.  Some people listen to a wide range of music, whereas other people will be stuck in the 80s forever.  Using this approach, J.R.R. Tolkien is Beethoven, and George R.R. Martin is...Metallica, perhaps?  Freddy Mercury?  No, I think that maybe Michael Moorcock is Freddy...hmmm...I'll have to give this some more thought.

"Soon I'm gonna be a Jedi...soon I'm gonna be a Jedi."

 A long long time ago
In a galaxy far away
Naboo was under an attack
And I thought me and Qui-Gon Jinn
Could talk the Federation in
To maybe cutting them a little slack
But their response, it didn't thrill us
They locked the doors and tried to kill us
We escaped from that gas
Then met Jar Jar and Boss Nass
We took a bongo from the scene
And we went to Theed to see the queen
We all wound up on Tatooine
That's where we found this boy...

Oh my my, this here Anakin guy
May be Vader someday later - now he's just a small fry
And he left his home and kissed his mommy goodbye
Sayin' "Soon I'm gonna be a Jedi"
"Soon I'm gonna be a Jedi."

Weird Al Yankovic, The Saga Begins. 

Tonight, Weird Al, live in concert, performing The Saga Begins.

It's the little things that make life worth living...thanks again to Karli for buying the tickets as a Christmas gift!

- Sid

P.S. For those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Yankovic's musical retelling of The Phantom Menace plotline, the official music video can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEcjgJSqSRU

Better late than never?

 

Okay, so here's the story:  in May of 2007, I was working on a blog posting about absurd fictional representations of spacesuits, and I was trying to find a particular image that I remembered from the cover of a science fiction pulp magazine that my mother had owned when I was young, an image that was in many ways the epitome of ridiculous space outfits for women.  As you might imagine, that's not a lot of information, but even so, you'd think that searching for "science fiction magazine green spacesuit" might result in some reference to the artwork in question.  I also used the far more sensible approach of asking my sister Dorothy if she remembered the publication in question.

Sadly, no luck - neither search engine nor sibling produced an answer.

OVER TWELVE YEARS LATER...the original artwork by Kelly Freas pops up on the Heritage Auctions site, with the note that it appeared on the cover of the August 1957 edition of Super Science Fiction.

Well, now we know - but man, talk about the long game...

- Sid

"I am...inevitable."

 

Last night I attended a Langara College-sponsored presentation on the award-winning special effects process behind the character of Thanos in the Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame movies. The event was presented by Jan Philip Cramer, the Head of Animation for Digital Domain, whose resumé includes films such as Ender's Game, Days of Future Past, Spider-Man: Homecoming and Avatar.

It wasn't a terribly technical evening, more of a commercial for Langara's new Centre for Entertainment Arts, mixed in with anecdotes about the production process for Thanos (along with advice for digital animation students regarding how to put together their show reels), but Cramer did provide a fascinating overview of the combination of acting, motion capture and programming that resulted in the menacing on-screen character of Thanos the mad Titan.

Cramer's well-delivered presentation made me aware of two aspects of the latest Avengers movies that I hadn't really thought about while watching them.  First, the degree of ease with which I accepted Thanos as a person, rather than a special effects creation. Thanos is a skilful blending of Josh Brolin's motion-capture performance and the astonishing digital effects work done by Cramer's team, resulting in a nuanced, emotional, physical presence on screen.

 

Their approach to both body and facial motion capture produced a digital character who was then seamlessly integrated with the live-action performances, although, really, in this case it's more a question of integrating the live actors into the digital realm.

 

Second, the breakdown of the digital process was a stark* reminder as to the degree to which Endgame does not exist, or rather exists only in the form of terabytes and terabytes of code stored on a rack mounted server somewhere**, rather than in the form of video recordings of actual sets and performances.

It's a tribute to the art of acting - or perhaps just plain make-believe - that the actual actors were able to create performances where the other characters, the scenery, and even the props and costumes were added later in the process.  As Sir Ian McKellen sadly discovered during the shooting of the first Hobbit film, it's a lonely job when it's just you, thirteen photos of your fellow actors on sticks, and a green screen.

- Sid

* No pun intended.

** And presumably very well backed up, let's not forgot the cautionary tale of how nearly all of the Toy Story 2 files were deleted, and they were only able to complete the film because one of the animators had a copy of the files that they had been using to work from home.

"FRAGILE - that must be Italian!"

 

Hey Sid, I was wondering if you, as a collector of SF stuff, would be interested in my Star Trek mugs? Yours for the asking. Also I have two Dr. Who bobbleheads (Dr's 10 and 11?) who might like to join the migration (can't remember if you got any of those). Let me know. 

- Colin

Recently my friend Colin found himself facing a problem that we've all at some point in our lives:  too many possessions, not enough room.  As part of his solution, he regretfully decided to clean house, figuratively and literally, and divest himself of a few tchotchkes whose day had come and gone.

But what to do with the culled items?  Deciding that donating them to the Salvation Army would be an ignominious conclusion to their years of service, he decided to contact me and ask if I'd be interested in adopting some SF-related pieces, as per the introductory excerpt.

I declined the two Doctor Who bobbleheads, since Colin had actually given me a set of 10 and 11 for my birthday in 2016, but cheerfully (and gratefully) offered to take the other items off his hands. 

 

The Star Trek line of collector's mugs were distributed by now-defunct novelty manufacturer Applause Inc. Their initial 1994 release featured Kirk, Spock, and McCoy from the original Star Trek series; Data, Worf, Crusher, Troi, La Forge and a Borg from The Next Generation, Odo, Quark and a Cardassian from Deep Space Nine, and Neelix from Voyager, which suggests that Colin did his shopping early in the release cycle.  Q and the alien Gorn were added to the lineup in 1996, and in 1997 they were joined by Sisko, Jadzia Dax, Janeway and a Kazon from the Delta Quadrant. (Oddly enough, Jean-Luc Picard does not seem to have made the cut for porcelain immortality.)

Applause, which opened its doors in 1966, was noted for a wide range of licensed pop culture items, but declared bankruptcy in 2004,* thereby making their themed mugs even more collectable. (Sadly, Colin's mugs aren't completely mint, it's hard to own a mug for 25 years without a mark or two, but I am no less pleased to have them.)  I don't know if their choice of products had any bearing on their eventual corporate downfall -  the whole idea of head-shaped mugs seems a bit strange, and, honestly, they're not very practical for morning coffee, they're ridiculously difficult to clean.

The astute observer will have noticed that one of the mugs in the photo is in fact from Doctor Who rather than Star Trek, an unexpected bonus item.

 

Similarly, there was also a Weeping Angel bobblehead from Doctor Who, which my wife apparently does NOT want to unexpectedly find snarling at her from inside the medicine cabinet when she's sleepily getting ready for work in the morning.

Now, ironically, I face the same problem that prompted Colin in the first place - all I have to do is to find room for my new acquisitions in my already overcrowded second bedroom/library/study.  Well, as they say on Star Trek, space IS the final frontier...

- Sid

* Following the death of its CEO, who committed suicide when it became obvious that the company was not going to survive - I have to say that this is unexpectedly dark for research results on a company that made head-shaped mugs. 

Moss piglets in spaaaaaaaace!

(With apologies to The Muppet Show.)

 

It's a little fascinating when something pops up in my current events news feed that actually resolves unanswered questions from Star Trek - life imitating art, as it were.

Apparently back in April, Israel Aerospace Industry's Beresheet* lunar mission crashed-landed on the Moon.  Along with a sample of human blood and a 30-million page archive of human history, the probe contained several thousand microscopic tardigrades, also known as water bears or moss piglets, one of the toughest organisms in existence.**  Tardigrades have already proven that they are capable of surviving exposure to space, and in this case they were dehydrated - which placed them in a state of suspended animation - and then protectively encased in artificial amber.

 

Fast forward 237 years**, and boom, we have a captive giant space tardigrade manipulating space using the mycelial network spore drive on the USS Discovery.  Well, at least now we know why it's a tardigrade - the next question is how it got to be so damned BIG.

 - Sid 

* Hebrew for "In a beginning" - the first word of the Torah.

** If you're wondering why any of this would be on a moon mission , there's a group called the Arch Mission Foundation that wanted to create a backup of Terran lifeforms, history and knowledge. 

*** According to the Memory Alpha Star Trek database, the events of Season One of Discovery take place between 2256-2258 AD.

"Galactica in the library with the lead pipe."

 

Being a science fiction fan means that sometimes when you're reading a book, you wonder if the spaceship is just pretending to be one of the good guys and is secretly the villain.

- Sid

P.S.  In this case I'm reading Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O'Keefe, but come to think of it, it could just as easily be Arthur C. Clarke's 2001:  A Space Odyssey.

P.P.S.  My god, apparently I'm brilliant - the spaceship IS the bad guy!  Sort of.

Well, they're not wrong.

Some time ago I posted a complaint about the moving target of U.S. versus Canadian book pricing, back in 2007 when the Canadian dollar was actually the highest it's ever been in comparison to the US dollar.

Sadly, a return visit to Village Books in Fairhaven, Washington revealed that some bright spark in the publishing industry has found a solution to the whole problem of exchange rates and people like me who might actually do the math to compare the prices.

- Sid