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.