NYNY 2019: Choices.

We start out our second day in New York by taking the subway to the redeveloped Hudson Yards area and its controversial centerpiece, the Vessel.  It's a fascinating structure, reminiscent of alien spacecraft and M. C. Escher drawings* - 150 feet in height, and made up of 2,500 steps, 154 staircases, and 80 landings.  In spite of those daunting totals, the short staircases and frequent landings make the climb to the top an easy one, even for people like Karli who suffer from knee problems.  

After our visit to the Vessel, we take advantage of the sunny weather and wander down the High Line, Manhattan's converted rail line/elevated park, toward Chelsea Market.

When we leave the High Line and head down to street level to enter the market, we happen to pass by a book vendor who is just starting to put out his inventory - but it's still enough for me to pick up a couple of unique additions to my library.

The first book is America in Space, a slightly faded black and white NASA publication from 1964, complete with an inspirational introduction by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who couldn't have been president for very long when production began on this book.

It's a fascinating window into the state of the nation for the early days of space exploration, which starts by announcing that America's space program "took a great step forward" with L. Gordon Cooper's 1963 22-orbit mission in the Mercury Faith-7 capsule - perhaps the first time someone at NASA talks about giant steps (but not the last).

The publication comes from a point in time when the planned Apollo missions were in the earliest of planning stages, with work just beginning on the Saturn V rockets, and Neil Armstrong one of nine unproven astronaut trainees brought into the program two years earlier, in 1962. It's an odd little cultural artifact, and I have to wonder what its path has been to this sidewalk tabletop.

My second purchase is, in its way, an equally odd cultural piece: a 1989 Malibu Comics collection of Fu Manchu newspaper comic strips that were originally published in the 1930s.

The character of Fu Manchu, Chinese super villain and master criminal, was created by British author Sax Rohmer in 1913, and is a perfect example of the "Yellow Peril" fears of the late 1800s and early 20th century.  As Nayland Smith, hero of the stories, describes it to his Watson, Dr. Dexter Petrie: "Fu Manchu knows that I alone recognize him as the most evil and formidable personality in the world today, and understand how the yellow hordes of the East plot to destroy Western civilization."   The cartoons also feature the full array of derogatory cliches regarding China:  pidgin English, opium dens, exaggerated physical characteristics, and so on.

At the time of purchase, I was excited to see the collection, but in retrospect, I'm having second thoughts.  In their way, the comics are much a window into a historical state of mind as the NASA publication, but I'm not sure that outweighs the nature of the view through that window.  It may well be that this book will end up in recycling rather than a bookshelf when we get home.

- Sid

* It's also frequently been compared to a shawarma roast - it all depends on your references, I guess.

NYNY 2019: "Thank you for your service."

After a long search, I managed to find some suitable hats for the collection of patches that my friend Chris gave me for my birthday in 2015.  I brought one of the results to New York with me as a backup for my NASA hat, but now I'm afraid to wear it - I'm worried that someone is going to think that I actually served in the armed forces, and I'm not sure how to answer if they ask what my rank was.

- Sid

NYNY 2019: "We'd be toast!"

"Hey, she's tough.  She's a harbour chick!"

Peter Venkman, Ghostbusters 2

On our first real morning in New York, Karli and I make our way down to Battery Park, at the south end of Manhattan Island.  It's a bit of a sentimental spot for us from our first trip, and it's a pleasantly low-key way to start the day - we take some pictures, ride the underwater-themed SeaGlass carousel, stroll along the water's edge, and then take advantage of the city-supplied seats to just sit in the park enjoying the morning.   We've arrived in the middle of a heat wave, so the temperatures are more reminiscent of Miami than Manhattan, but it's still pleasantly cool at this point in the day.

As we sit looking through the trees at the Statue of Liberty, Karli breaks a companionable silence.

"You would NOT want to be in New York in case of an apocalypse." *

​​​​​"I've seen all the movies - even Cloverfield started at Coney Island!   And we’re close to the Statue of Liberty - we’d be toast!"

 

She's not wrong. There is no version of the apocalypse that I want to experience in New York. Just ask Robert Neville.  Or Snake Plissken.  Or Larry Underwood. Or Gerry Lane.  Or the Avengers, come to think of it. 

Second, to quote Jeff Goldblum from the second Independence Day movie, "They like to get the landmarks," and let's face it, New York is full of iconic structures that provide an instant recognition factor when the aliens are looking for something to destroy. (Although film makers may have been pulling back from that kind of destruction in Manhattan since 9-11.)

As Karli points out, the Statue of Liberty has been a frequent flyer in terms of apocalyptic destruction - if you're going to show that the end times are here, you'll probably feature Liberty's fallen head as part of the scenery.

 

However, there's one small problem with all of this.  Did any of these people look at the actual location of the Statue of Liberty before deciding to stick the poor woman's head in the middle of a New York thoroughfare?  Liberty is located almost three kilometers from Battery Park, the southernmost part of Manhattan, it's not like her head would just fall into the middle of the street during the downfall of civilization.  (Yes, I'm looking at you, Escape From New York poster.) However, let's be fair: it's not impossible that the monster from Cloverfield would be able to toss the statue's head into the city, although lord knows why it would bother.

 

On the other hand, the Cloverfield creature may have gotten off easy.  Remember Ghostbusters II?

- Sid

* These are the moments when you know you're married to the right person.

NYNY 2019: "On the first day of Christmas"

After spending our first night in New York at a hotel near LaGuardia Airport - a useful approach if you're arriving in a foreign city late at night - Karli and I experience an excruciatingly slow airport shuttle trip into Manhattan.  To be fair, it's not really the fault of the shuttle company, LaGuardia is being rebuilt from the ground up, and construction has slowed traffic to a literal crawl around the airport - it actually takes us longer to get from LaGuardia to downtown Manhattan than the flight from Toronto to New York.

Having finally arrived at our destination, and settled into our charmingly decorated Lower East Side Airbnb apartment, we decide to check out the neighbourhood, get some lunch, and perhaps do a little shopping.

Although our street is perhaps a little more, ah, colourful let's say, than we expected, our lower Manhattan pied-à-terre is perfectly located, close to two subway lines and within walking distance of several of our planned activities for the trip, including the Strand Bookstore on Broadway, where we make the first stop of our orientation tour.

Shopping at the Strand is a bit like drinking out of a fire hose, and as such I don’t attempt a scientific approach to perusing the closely-spaced 10-foot tall bookshelves of the Science Fiction section (which, to be honest, don’t lend themselves to casual browsing anyway – I’d be curious to see statistics that correlated shelf placement with sales figures).  However, a few interesting choices catch my eye, and it doesn’t take long for me to reach my self-imposed cutoff of buying only as many books at a time as I can grip in one hand.

First into the stack are Red Seas Under Red Skies and The Republic of Thieves, the second and third books in Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard sequence.  I read and enjoyed The Lies of Locke Lamora, the first in the series, in 2014, but for some odd reason I wasn't able to find the next two books together, so when I spot them here, I instantly add them to my handful of books.

I always try to pick a random book on trips like this –  this time it’s Version Control by Dexter Palmer, which is apparently a novel about causal violation (or, as the rest of the world calls it, time travel).

A used copy of Good Neighbours and Other Strangers, a 1972 hardcover collection of Edgar Pangborn short stories, catches my eye next.  Pangborn, best known for his 1965 post-apocalyptic novel Davy, was an accessible humanist author whose work was driven more by emotion than science. I have another collection of Pangborn short stories at home: Still I Persist in Wondering, published two years after his death in 1976 - I'll have to revisit that after I read this collection.  (Come to think of it, I haven't read Davy for a long time either.  So many books, so little time...)

I finish out my handful of shopping with China Miéville’s fantasy novel Kraken, which won the 2011 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.  I've already read it digitally, but I'm happy to support the publishing industry by purchasing a paper copy.  Kraken is characteristic of Miéville's unique and dark creativity, but with more of a whimsical feel than his other writing - I look forward to a re-read. 

Surprisingly, I don't see the one book that I do look for: Joe Abercrombie’s new book, A Little Hatred, which is the first book in a sequel trilogy to his memorable First Law series.  How strange, I'm positive it's been released - I wonder if it's on a new release display table someplace...no matter, I've already reached my quota.

However, now I face a bit of a moral dilemma – if we happen to pass by the Strand again before we leave nine days from now, is it breaking the rules to buy a second handful of reading?

- Sid

NYNY 2019: Two names twice.

 

“In return I owe you the answer; are you good at riddles?”
“Riddles?”
“Raetseln,” Amalfi translated.
“Oh—conundrums. No, but I can try.”
“What city has two names twice?”
Evidently Specht did not need to be good at riddles to come up with the answer to that one. His jaw dropped. “You’re N—” he began.”

James Blish, Earthman Come Home

Although it's only been a couple of years since our last visit, Karli and I are off to New York once again as of this coming weekend.   And, really, how could a return visit be a bad thing? Our first two-week visit barely scratched the surface of New York's vibrant historical, cultural, culinary and architectural presence - its status as one of the world's great cities is undeniably well deserved.

One of the more epic and well-known examples of New York as a science fiction setting is James Blish's epic Cities in Flight series, although, surprisingly, the series relies very little on the aspects of the Big Apple which have made it so justifiably famous.

The title of the series says it all:  a future in which Earth's cities have abandoned the planet to travel between the stars.

The underlying technology that makes this possible is the spindizzy -  mammoth gravity-controlling mechanisms that power and drive the cities' flight across the stars. The spindizzies allow for faster than light travel, but even then, transit between solar systems can take decades, which makes anti-aging drugs, or anti-agathics, one of the crucial resources of the migrant cities.

The series relies heavily on a varied selection of historical and cultural influences, and finds some of its inspiration in Spengler's Decline of the West and its analysis of the characteristics of different types of cultures - which sounds a bit intimidating, but the books are actually quite readable.

The series is made up of four novels: They Shall Have Stars, A Life For the Stars, Earthman, Come Home and The Triumph of Time (in chronological order).* 

They Shall Have Stars lays the groundwork for the other books: the creation of the first anti-agathics, and a massive research project on Jupiter that provides the data on gravity necessary for the development of the spindizzy, all conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue due to a repressive and totalitarian government, and finally resulting in an opportunity for escape to the freedom of the stars.

The second book, A Life For The Stars, is one of those traditional "teenage boy makes good" stories, which takes place over a thousand years later.  It starts on Earth following a global economic collapse, where relocating to space, "going Okie", in the parlance of the Dustbowl and the American Depression,  will hopefully offer a better alternative than a dead-end existence on an impoverished planet.  The 16-year old hero, Chris deFord**, is press ganged by the city of Scranton, PA as it prepares to leave Earth, but is eventually transferred to New York***, where he is adopted by a conveniently narrative couple, and enrolled in school in hopes of achieving citizenship and access to anti-agathics.

Although he seems to lack any skills that will earn him citizenship, even after endless rounds of education, deFord defuses a dangerous situation involving Scranton by analyzing the cultural analogies involved in the situation, and finally becomes the city's first cultural morphologist at the age of 18, under the job title of City Manager.

Earthman, Come Home, third in the series, is a collection of somewhat picaresque adventures on the part of New York and its immortal mayor, John Amalfi, made up of stand-alone stories that originally appeared in pulp magazines between 1950 and 1953 - a common publishing strategy at the time.

As laid out in A Life For the Stars, the economic model occupied by the travelling cities in Earthman, Come Home is that of depression-era migrant workers - the cities provide technological and industrial solutions to Earth's far-flung colonies for a fee, then move on to the next star system in hopes of finding more work and thereby staving off starvation.  The motto on this New York's City Hall is "Lady, mow your lawn?" and the stories borrow the terminology and mores of depression-era migrant workers:  good cities are hobos, tramp cities steal from their hosts, and bindlestiffs are cities that have gone rogue and prey upon other cities.

Throughout the various episodes that make up the book, Mayor Amalfi and Mark Hazelton, his current city manager, resolve the challenges facing the city by understanding and subverting the socio-political matrix of their opponents, based on analogies from other societies. In the final adventure, Amalfi saves Earth from a remnant of the defeated Vegan empire, then New York leaves the galaxy.

And the fourth book?  Time and space come to an end. And begin again: fiat lux, the end. (Or, presumably, the beginning.)

When I first read the series in my teen years, I was far less critical than I am now - I just took it all in. Re-reading the books now, I'm surprised that Blish chose Manhattan for his setting. Its primary claim to fame is as a port and trade centre, rather than being an industrial hub like Pittsburgh or Detroit - or Scranton, for that matter - and I feel that Manhattan would need to substantially up its game if it wanted to be competitive with other cities as an industrial resource.

I'm also a bit shocked by some of the solutions chosen by Mayor Amalfi, for whom the survival of the city outweighs all other concerns.  Amalfi makes some startlingly amoral decisions, such as using women as expendable bait to lure in a bindlestiff city, casually deploying fusion bombs to eliminate a small garrison, and callously hijacking a dying city without concern for its remaining inhabitants.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the series is that, other than a street name dropped here and there and the reputation attached to the city's name, Blish doesn't look very much at life in New York as such.

Over the course of the three books that deal with New York's voyages in space, there's surprisingly little detail about daily life as Manhattan travels between the stars. In A Life For the Stars, there's a brief reference to the rumble of the subways as they travel through the city's bedrock foundation, and Chris Ford's adoptive parents live in a conventional apartment, but Blish never looks at how everyday life in the city has altered in order to reflect its status as a hobo city-ship - even though "...the ship was a city, a city of jails and playgrounds, alleys and alley cats.”

Regardless, in my mind it's a sort of perpetual starlit summer night in Manhattan - bright lights, crowds on the streets, Broadway shows, people talking and shouting and eating and drinking, hustle and bustle, Times Square and Central Park, Greenwich Village and Harlem, all the myriad of things that go into the distinctive energy that informs life in the city with two names twice.

It has to be like that - otherwise, it wouldn't be New York.

- Sid

* The actual order of publication is:
Earthman, Come Home - 1955
They Shall Have Stars - 1956
The Triumph of Time - 1959
A Life For the Stars - 1962.

** Given the sequence in which the books are written, the selection of Chris deFord as protagonist is an odd one, given that his eventual execution by firing squad is casually mentioned near the start of Earthman, Come Home.

*** To be completely accurate, it's only Manhattan Island, not New York. We are never told if Brooklyn, Staten Island or Jersey City have also gone Okie.

Like it's 1999.

As a follow-up to last month's discussion of a permanent base on the Moon, today we commemorate the tragic events of September 13, 1999, which saw the Moon permanently leave Earth's orbit following a catastrophic explosion at the nuclear waste disposal site located on the Moon's dark side.  Sadly, the 311 personnel of Moonbase Alpha were lost in the accident.

Of course, this is all in reference to Space 1999, a British-Italian* science fiction collaboration which debuted in 1975 and ran for two seasons.  The series was the culmination of a long series of increasingly sophisticated SF-action programming created by the legendary partnership of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, who were best known for their Supermarionation** children's shows such as Fireball XL-5, Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet.  In 1960, they produced UFO, their first live action series, and wrote and produced a full length film, Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, in 1969.

Space 1999 offers what is probably the most detailed view of a lunar station in television or movies, and, in its way, it's a fairly well thought out view.  I rewatched the first episode as part of my research for this posting, and I have to say that it all seemed very logical in terms of how the base was set up.  I haven't seen any sort of preliminary plans for the permanent base planned as part of the Artemis program, but NASA could do worse than to take a look at Moonbase Alpha for ideas as to how to put together a lunar colony.

Alpha is made up of a combination of surface and underground structures arranged in an open wheel system, and split into four levels, most of which are underground.  The various sections of the base are connected by a network of travel tubes, which are rather like horizontal elevators.

For aerial transportation, they rely upon zero-G lifters – called Eagles** in homage to the Apollo 11 lander – which utilize a modular system to add medical, cargo or living space to the basic Eagle superstructure, a concept that the Andersons introduced in the Thunderbird series. In addition to surface landing stages and docking tunnels, the Eagle fleet is stored and maintained in underground hangars accessed by elevator platforms. Surface travel relies upon six-wheeled moon buggies and a variety of specialized vehicles.

The base, which is powered by four fast breeder fusion reactors and a solar energy plant, includes a hydroponics unit, research labs, recycling centre, two water purification plants, and a life support complex, all controlled from a central command section.  As is common with science fiction programs, Space: 1999 cheats the lunar gravity situation, in this case through artificial gravity generators that somehow create Earth-normal gravity within the base. (To the credit of the Andersons, they do their best to mimic the effects of lower gravity in outside surface shots.)

Personnel arriving on the base are provided with a commlock, a hand-held device that locks and unlocks doors, as well as acting as a communications device.  In addition, the base is equipped with communications posts, which contain internal communicators, clocks, and data displays.

Space: 1999 is also an unlikely cautionary tale regarding the potential use of the Moon as a dump for hazardous materials.  In the first episode, unknown radiation causes a massive nuclear waste disposal area to reach critical mass, resulting in a massive explosion that propels the Moon out of its orbit and out of the solar system. Ignoring the practicalities of shipping huge amounts of nuclear waste to the Moon, it’s certainly a strong argument for a self-sustaining base: you certainly wouldn’t want that sort of thing to happen if you were still relying on weekly food shipments from Earth.

- Sid

* I gather that, to the educated eye, the base's decor is a catalogue of modern Italian furniture design.

** If you're not familiar with the camp appeal of the Supermarionation shows, you really need to see it to believe it.  YouTube™ is full of examples.

*** There’s also a militarized version called the Hawk.

Heroes.

 

The Amazing Spider-Man #36 - one of the most heartfelt tributes to 9-11, from people who knew what heroes were when they saw them.

 

- Sid

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.