ePulps.

 

It's the end of November, which means that the holiday season will be coming up surprisingly soon, as it generally does.  As such, Karli and I are in the early stages of gift negotiations.  Karli is looking at streaming service subscriptions such as Britbox™ for her two sisters (and it's been suggested that an Amazon Prime™ subscription would be suitable for her), but to the best of my knowledge, there isn't a similar service for science fiction fans.*

However, it occurred to me that many years ago I used to subscribe to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which I found to be a great collection of fiction and fact to have show up in my Muskoka mailbox.  I certainly don't need to increase my burden of physical media (I actually still have those vintage copies of F&SF**) but this is the future, there must be a digital equivalent for those monthly mail drops.

Magazines featuring short fiction have been the backbone of science fiction and fantasy writing for close to a hundred years, ever since the 1920s. Weird Tales, which most famously featured the work of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, made its debut in February of 1923, and Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories, the first publication dedicated solely to science fiction, in 1926.

Later publications such as Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Astounding (to be renamed as Analog in 1960) allowed legendary Golden Age editors such as John W. Campbell Jr., Horace Gold, and Anthony Boucher to place their stamp on science fiction, defining and shaping the development of the genre.

The early pulp magazines found an avid readership, a readership which then produced the next generation of authors:  authors who also became editors, reviewers, and, in some cases, publishers. 

Almost all of the classic science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke were primarily short story writers during the early phases of their careers.  (Asimov's award-winning Foundation trilogy is actually a collection of short stories collected as book chapters in three volumes.)  In fact, up until well into the 1960s***, science fiction magazines were still the primary starting point for aspiring science fiction authors, giving New Wave writers like Roger Zelazny and Ursula K. Le Guin their first sales, and allowing Harlan Ellison to build a reputation based almost entirely on his short fiction.

I still see F&SF and Analog for sale on the magazine shelves at Indigo, which demonstrates that they're alive and well - or at least still printing paper editions - but what are the options for virtual subscriptions?

My old friend The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has chosen to do its subscriptions through an e-book distributor called Weightless Books, six issues for $36.97 - presumably in US dollars - MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats are available.

No questions with Analog - six different digital subscription options, including an app-based version with a $35.88 USD 12-issue annual subscription.

Asimov's Science Fiction, which was Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine when I subscribed, now seems to be under the same publishing umbrella as Analog.  Same page format, same subscription outlets - and same price, $35.88 USD for six "double issues", whatever that means.

Interzone, the United Kingdom SF magazine, doesn't seem to have a digital subscription on their site, but I found one, again at Weightless Books. $24.99 for six issues, probably USD.

For some Canadian content, there's On Spec, which charges $14.99 for a quarterly subscription.  This is also through Weightless Books, so I assume it's USD. 

As a wild card, while I was researching the above options, I suddenly remembered Cinefex, which my friend Colin had introduced me to back when we were at Ryerson together.  Cinefex is a serious offering of special effects filmmaking commentary, aimed predominantly at the professional market but still accessible by the casual reader.  It didn't exclusively look at science fiction and fantasy movies - historical films often rely heavily on digital effects as well - but the greater part of the content dealt with SF movie effects.

I initially didn't see a digital subscription option for Cinefex, but then I spotted the Cinefex for iPad link: "Carry the entire history of modern visual effects with you on your iPad."  A six-issue subscription through the app is $27.99 USD.

In conclusion, I feel that I should recognize the TOR Books website, which has excellent articles, free short fiction, and offers a free book download on a monthly basis. It's a pretty impressive offering for free.

- Sid

Postscript:

If anyone is interested in reading any of the classic magazines in their original formats, there's a surprising range of free opportunities available online.

• A selection of classic pulps can be downloaded in HTML, Flipbook, and PDF format at The Pulp Magazine Project, including a handful of vintage issues of Planet Stories and Weird Tales.
• I was surprised to see that 356 back issues of Galaxy Magazine are available for free at archive.org, although the quality of the scans varies. The issues can be read online or downloaded in a variety of formats.
• Close to the full run of long-running British SF magazine New Worlds is available at the Luminist Archive in PDF format, along with quite a wide range of scanned material - some of which, by their own admission, the site's creators did not obtain permission to reproduce.

* There's a channel dedicated to Japanese anime called Crunchyroll, but as far as I know, that's it, with the possible exception of some less-than-mainstream SF offerings.

**And, to my astonishment, when I went to look at them on my bookshelf, I realized that I had that subscription when I was 13 years old.

*** I'm open to argument regarding this timeline, but the 1950s witnessed the demise of many of the pulp magazines, and the 1960s began a shift toward novels over short fiction in the publishing marketplace.  Although, even then, portions of classic novels such as Dune were originally serialized in magazine form.

"See you around, kid."

  

I have to say that Omaze.com, the online fundraising site, has nailed it in terms of their business model:  offer a wide range of donation levels to win a unique prize or experience, generally in association with a celebrity representative.  And it works: as an example, the opportunity to be in The Force Awakens that I contributed to in 2014 raised over 4.26 million dollars for UNICEF.

And, really, it's brilliant.  As opposed to charity ticket draws with large cash prizes, there's almost no serious expenses involved for most of the prizes.  Win a chance to be in a Star Wars movie?  Real costs, flights and a hotel - maybe meals, or a cab to the set.  Value of experience? PRICELESS.

Similarly, breakfast with a bunch of Doctor Whos?  How much would breakfast for eight people cost on top of airline tickets and accommodations?  But to the right person, it's the experience of all time.

I've entered a couple of other opportunities that haven't made it here, including a chance to take selfies with the cast of Schitt's Creek that was really on Karli's behalf, but the most recent charity offering takes the prize, so to speak.

Dinner with Mark Hamill.

Oh, sure, you get to attend the premier of The Rise of Skywalker, too, but really - DINNER WITH MARK HAMILL!

In addition to his unique contributions to the genre, most people are unaware that Mr. Hamill is also a major comic book geek in his own right.  There's also some of his lesser-known work that I'd love to discuss - does anyone else reading this remember his voice-over work from the Jeannie animated series, which was a California surfer dude re-imagining of the I Dream of Jeannie series from the 1960s?  Or how about The Black Pearl, the comic book he created for Dark Horse Comics in the 1990s?  Not to mention his incredible body of voice-over work as the Joker, which has come very close to eclipsing Star Wars in terms of its notoriety.

No offense to Daisy Ridley or Adam Driver, who also have Star Wars charity packages up on Omaze, but even ignoring Mark Hamill's stature as a geek icon, they haven't really offered anything close to the same level of involvement.  It's one thing to take someone to the premier and take a selfie or give them a signed souvenir light saber, or even get them into the afterparty, but I feel that Mark has gone the extra mile in offering up some of his own time in the interests of charity.

I really don't expect to win, I generally don't have any sort of luck at all in draws, but whoever does win?  You're a lucky person in more ways than one, and I very much hope you appreciate it.

- Sid

"Hear that? It's the cosmic rays!"

Okay, let's all just be a little careful here, as soon as you say "cosmic particles" this starts to feel way too close to the Fantastic Four's origin story.

- Sid

It's important to have the strength of your convictions.

Purchased without a moment's hesitation or a second of doubt.

- Sid

 

“Judge me by my size, do you?”

As part of his presentation on creating the Epic Yarns adaptations of the original Star Wars trilogy, children's book creator Holman Wang mentioned being invited to the Sharjah Children's Reading Festival in the United Arab Emirates.  When his carry-on luggage, which contained examples of felted wire-framed Star Wars characters, was scanned, Security immediately took him aside to search his bag.

When Holman reported the results on Twitter™, @yvrairport, which is well known for the quality of its social media game, had the following reply:

- Sid

Epic Yarns.

It’s a pleasant Saturday morning for a walk to Granville Island, where I'm attending a talk by children's book creator Holman Wang as part of the annual Vancouver Writers Fest.  The front of the stage is decorated with samples of his work: fuzzy figures from Star Wars, and felt copies of him, his two children, and their dog.

Holman and his brother Jack collaborate in the creation of early reading primers that are intended for parents to read with their children.  Jack writes the stories, and Holman creates felted figures and settings that he then photographs as illustrations for the books.  The brothers got their start with the Cozy Classics series, featuring literary mainstays such as Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and Huckleberry Finn, followed by Epic Yarns, a three-book retelling of the first Star Wars trilogy.

Obviously I've chosen to attend Wang's talk because of the Star Wars books, but their other creations are equally impressive.

I was initially curious as to how the brothers handled the process of adapting the stories for younger readers - after all, Moby Dick is hardly written for the pre-school crowd, and  the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Luke's hand is cut off by his father must be a bit traumatic for very young readers.

 

As it turns out, Holman and his brother strip the stories to their most essential components:  12 pictures, 12 words.  Rewriting the stories is Jack Wang's most crucial contribution to the process, along with steadfastly maintaining the integrity of the concept. I don't envy him the writing - it may sound easy to write a 12-word book, but I can easily imagine the difficulty of selecting 12 words that are both appropriate to the stories and accessible to small children.* 

 

After the writing is finished, Holman begins work on the elements for the photo illustrations. Each needle-felted figure takes him between 20 and 60 hours to create.  Holman, an entertaining and witty speaker, does a comically quick demo of the felting process, and comments that for felting, "Self harm is an occupational hazard."

"If I had a dollar for every time I’ve stabbed myself, it might be more than the royalties on the books."

 

The craftsmanship is extraordinary - the figures are about ten inches tall, created at about 1:7 scale. It's even more extraordinary considering that, when his brother initially approached him with the idea, Holman had never done felting - as he casually explains, his entire training is based upon "watching some YouTube™ videos".

The figures are constructed around wire armatures to give them some strength and to allow the figures to be posed for different settings.  In the case of the Star Wars books, Wang decided to make interchangeable heads and place them onto differently costumed bodies for different scenes out of the films, so that the faces would be consistent from image to image. In addition, he sometimes includes natural materials to create specific effects, such as uncombed sheep's wool for the Cowardly Lion's mane in their Wizard of Oz adaptation.

 

To simplify the process, he makes some of the clothing using sheets of felt, which he also uses for props such as Luke's X-Wing, constructed from styrene and bits of junk, and then covered in felt.  For larger figures such as Jabba the Hut or Luke's Tauntaun from Hoth, Wang carves rough figures in styrofoam, then works the wool directly into the foam.

For the backdrops to his felted figures, he builds sets that range from the simple to the complicated, "Macgyvering things together" and using elements like real fires in fireplaces, or dry ice for the Dagobah mists, in order to make the environments as realistic as possible.

In addition to creating studio sets, Holman also likes to shoot on location so that the scenes have natural skies and real backgrounds.  He jokes about wanting to shoot the SNOW image for The Empire Strikes Back, which features Luke Skywalker on a Tauntaun, on Seymour Mountain, but being unable to find a setup without trees in the background.  He ended up taking the final photo in front of a grimy snowpile in the parking lot, with the happily accidental result that the dirt and salt in the out of focus snow gave shading and texture to what would otherwise have been basically just a flat white background.

Generally the location photos have been taken locally in Vancouver, where the Lynn Valley stands in for the forest moon of Endor.  The sole exception hs been a desert shoot in Arizona's Yuma Desert, where the original movie scenes set on Tatooine and featuring Jabba's sail barge and the Sarlac were shot for The Return of the Jedi.

 

Wang's photographs are created almost entirely without resorting to Photoshop, relying instead on practical effects to set the scene - although Holman made an exception for the light saber effect for the Star Wars books.  He utilizes a variety of tricks and techniques to achieve the effects he wants, such as forced perspective to add in real background elements, and physically dragging backgrounds to create blur during long exposure times.

To date, Holman has done 17 books using these techniques: 12 Cozy Classics, three Star Wars, and a pair of books about the multiple jobs performed by parents on a daily basis: Great Job, Mom and Great Job, Dad.  These last two feature him and his family as characters, although he admits to claiming their two children for Great Job, Dad.  He deadpans, "My wife got the dog."  Alert readers will note that the Great Job books feature scale versions of Holman's other books as props.

When asked what his favourite was out of these projects, Holman admits that he enjoyed making the Star Wars books the most, because the movies were so much a part of his childhood.

 

"It was a chance to relive my childhood, and I was super excited to become part of the Star Wars universe in some small way."**

He also points to the Star Wars books as an example of successful self-marketing, or, as Holman puts it, "Sometimes you have to make your own breaks."

While exhibiting at the annual Bologna Children's Book Fair in Italy, the brothers made contact with Chronicle Books, a San Francisco based publishing house.  Chronicle asked if they had any projects they'd like to pursue, and they immediately expressed their desire to adapt the Star Wars movies.  Chronicle approached Lucasfilm on their behalf, and to the surprise of the Wangs, Lucasfilm gave their conditional permission for the project, but requested a sample.  Holman created a felted version of Luke Skywalker, and Lucasfilm gave the go-ahead for the books.

 

Holman was surprised by the degree to which Lucasfilm left the two brothers alone, to the point of not actually providing very much support out in terms of figuring out how to create the iconic figures and scenes from the films.  One of their few edits was to the page featuring Han Solo encased in carbonite: Jack Wang had chosen the word FROZEN for the image, but the Keeper of the Holocron, as the Lucasfilm Star Wars database manager is commonly known, vetoed it - apparently the carbonite process is hot, rather than cold.*** 

 

In conclusion, Wang discussed how his work on the books has allowed him to express his identity through creativity, and helped him with the struggle between wanting to be creative and the need to have a regular job.

For his next project, Wang is writing a middle-grade novel, commenting, "I have no training as a writer, but then, I became famous as a felt artist without training."

"People should pursue their dreams.  If you have an idea and a passion, just run with it - who knows what will happen?"

- Sid

* I take minor exception with one of the single-word story choices as displayed during Wang's talk:  Droids.  Even speaking as a science fiction fan, I think that there would have to be something that was more of a household word to which a youthful reader could be introduced. (Although I guess it would depend on your household.)

** Presumably no pun was intended.

*** If you, like me, think of that as the carbon freeze scene, apparently we're both wrong.

"Aliens."

The Doctor: Where’d you want to start?
Rose: Um. The inside’s bigger than the outside?
The Doctor: Yes.
Rose: It’s alien.
The Doctor: Yeah.
Rose: Are you alien?
The Doctor: Yes. Is that all right?
Rose: Yeah.

Rose, Doctor Who

I was recently killing some time browsing at the Indigo outlet at Broadway and Granville while waiting to meet my friend Chris at the Storm Crow, and idly picked up a Doctor Who novel.  Although I generally don't buy novelizations and adaptations, in this case, I was literally just looking (which can lead to some interesting discoveries).

 

The cover blurb for this 13th Doctor adventure read as follows:

"A ruthless alien threat."  Sigh...

As fond as I am of Doctor Who, I feel that the show has one problem: it always has to be aliens.  Mayor of Cardiff pushing for a nuclear power station?  Turns out to be a Slitheen who wants to use it to power the Cardiff Rift to create a passage home, destroying Earth in the process.  Random visit to the city of Pompeii just before the eruption that destroys the city? It's being caused by alien Pyroviles trying to make a new home for themselves after the destruction of their planet. Superhero origin story?  Accidentally swallows alien technology.  Time travel to 1938 New York - turns out the Statue of Liberty is a giant alien Weeping Angel.

At some point this can become absurd.  Local supermarket runs out of milk?  Plot by bovinate aliens to rescue cows from servitude and slavery.*  Piece of gum stuck to the Doctor's shoe?  Alien hitch-hiker attempting to take over the TARDIS.

To be fair, there have been a few episodes, such as Season 11's Arachnids in the UK, that have relied on human malfeasance rather than alien malice, but by and large, yep, it's aliens.

It may be surprising, but I'd actually like to see more stories without the alien factor.  The Rosa episode really didn't require a time-travelling conservative trying to stop Rosa Parks, it could have just dealt with being witnesses to history who become participants in order to ensure that events transpire as they are meant to.  Similarly, The Demons of the Punjab doesn't need any demons, the tragedy of families in conflict was all the story they needed.

So, in the unlikely event that anyone at the BBC is reading this, hey, maybe it would be interesting to invest some time in looking at all the reasons that the Doctor decided to spend so much time on this ridiculous little planet on the edge of nowhere - with only the one alien involved.

- Sid

* The part about servitude and slavery is a Jean-Luc Picard quote, which really has no place in a Doctor Who posting - although there was an eight-issue Star Trek-Doctor Who crossover comic book miniseries published in 2012 by IDW.

Which actually sounds like the concept for a Netflix series.

Photo by KT

Last night we saw British indie pop band Bastille in concert, on tour to support their new Doom Days album.  Obviously I'm going to support a band that decides to do an apocalyptic concept album based around an all-night party that takes place during the end of the world - apparently Pompeii was just a warm-up in terms of disaster music.

- Sid

NYNY 2019: "IF WE DON'T HAVE IT, A SUPERHERO DOESN'T NEED IT."

 

Captain America: You got heart, kid, where are you from?
Spider-Man: [Straining] Queens!
Captain America: Brooklyn!

Captain America: Civil War

With our New York vacation finished, I have to admit to one small regret:  that we didn't have an opportunity to visit the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, located, as you might guess, in the savage heart of Brooklyn itself. (Okay, actually kind of north and to the west of the actual heart, but you get the idea.)

The BSSC is exactly what its name implies, a storefront location that sells the necessities of day-to-day heroic life:  masks, capes, utility belts, tins of Invisibility, cans of Antimatter, and convenient packs containing Intuition, Gumption, X-Ray Vision, Reflexes, Mind Control and Bravery.

 

As with its meta-powered clientele, the Superhero Supply Company has its own secret identity, accessible through a hidden entrance at the back of the store: that of a mild-mannered non-profit arts and literature organization, 826NYC, whose mission statement is more than a little reminiscent of the opening voice-over from Star Trek - or maybe the Superman TV series from the 1950s:

"Our mission is to encourage the exploration of endless possibility through the power of writing. To empower students with the skills to write their own paths forward, undefined by circumstance. To support new and exciting approaches to writing and inspire student engagement. And to foster generations of creative writers and thinkers, who together will define a better future."

826NYC, a branch of 826 National, is dedicated to helping students between the ages of 6 and 18 to become better writers through workshops, tutoring, and by providing publishing opportunities for student work.  All proceeds from the sale of superhero supplies go towards supporting 826NYC, but that's not their sole source of funding:  luminaries such as Jon Stewart, David Byrne, Sam Rockwell, Cynthia Nixon, Bob Balaban and many others have appeared at fundraising events.

I realize that I could easily order from the Company's website, but somehow it doesn't feel the same as strolling up to a counter with an armload of assorted superpowers.  However, it's very likely that Karli and I will visit New York again in the not too distant future, and maybe we'll find the time to take the train over to Brooklyn to stock up on some Inspiration.

Ignoring the admirable real-world purpose of the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, it seems like such a logical idea that there would be an outlet offering supplies to the superhero community* - or, more interestingly, superhero supplies to the rest of the population.  Lord knows there have been lots of times when a quart or two of Invincibility would have been a handy thing to have around.

And, to make the whole joke even funnier, imagine if the superpower supplies actually worked...

- Sid

* By extension, that suggests that there would be an equivalent organization supporting super villains, and I do recall owning an issue of the Avengers that introduced the Taskmaster, who ran a school for evil minions - no, not the little yellow guys, I mean the sort of people who worked for the Joker, you know, the ones that Batman and Robin would punch with an accompanying visual sound effect.