Search Results for ""

Having fun preparing for this year’s Boskone Art Show.  Of course it’s crazy to hang my crummy sketches alongside the great artists you will see there, but hey let’s face it, I’m not going to be quitting my day job…so sketching remains a completely fun hobby (thank goodness).  Below are some snapshots taken during the sketching, which I found amusing, especially the one based on a fan cosplay photo related to I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space.

Compiled from several panels at Arisia 2010, here are some excellent online resources for aspiring writers.   If you have others to recommend, send them along!

online zines:

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/
http://www.ideomancer.com/
http://nossamorte.com/
http://www.electricvelocipede.com/
http://www.shimmerzine.com/

writer’s resources:

http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/
http://ralan.com/
http://www.duotrope.com/

One thing that has baffled me for many years is the identity of the artist who painted the original covers of the Illuminatus! paperbacks, which were published by Dell in 1975.   The signature, clear as day, reads:  “Carlos Victor“, but I have never encountered any artist of that name in any reference.  Wikipedia credits all the paintings to this mysterious artist.

So let me say it first here:  the identity of Carlos Victor is almost certainly the wonderful painter Carlos Ochagavia!

[Read more →]

At first glance the dark palettes and almost monochrome scenes painted by Lou Feck seem rather low key.  Compared to the startling palettes of his contemporaries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you’d think that Feck was either taking a lot of downers or painting with deliberate understatement.  Yet the more I look at his cover paintings, the more I am convinced that Feck was using a masterful and subtle style.

[Read more →]

What a curious thread unraveled from reading the scanned issue of Telepath #1 on eFanzines this weekend. The fanzine, originally published by Arthur Haddon in Dec 1951, provided some tidbits of information about Australia’s first (if short-lived) SF pulp, Thrills Incorporated. This pulp was created by Stanley Horowitz’ Transport Publications following the the success of the weird mystery pulp, Scientific Thriller which appeared in 1948. Thrills Incorporated appeared in March 1950 and lasted for a total of 23 issues, ending in June 1952.

In the pages of Telepath, one of the Sydney Futurian Society fans, Vol Molesworth (1924-1964), interviewed the editor of Thrills Inc which helped to “clear up a number of points that fans in Australia and abroad had been debating.” This may have been a reference to a series of plagiarisations that took place in the first year of Thrills issues. As the editor, Alister Innes, confessed to Molesworth, “In the early issues we were hoodwinked by certain unscrupulous writers who plagiarised American SF stories without our knowledge. As soon as this was pointed out by our readers, we sacked those writers. Our present day policy is to give an author a title and an illustration and get him to write a story around them.”

What a curious way to run a magazine!   On the other hand, there might have been no way for the editors to have known that the stories were plagiarized.   According to Garry Dalrymple (via email), foreign science fiction magazines were treated as contraband in Australia between 1940 and 1950.   As prohibited imports,  issues of SF mags were discovered during routine inspection of the mails, and returned to sender.  This quarantine resulted in a market for locally printed SF pulps of questionable quality.    At that time, said Dalrymple, just about the only new stuff getting through to Sydney (and the Sydney Futurians) were gifts from Forry Ackerman!

On the quality of production that went into those opportunistic Australian SF pulps,  one author put it this way:  “Very often, when the editor (Innes) was running to a tight schedule he would have the artwork already done and hand you a picture, saying ‘Three thousand worlds and a title, old boy, and I do need them by Friday.” One picture he gave me didn’t allow a lot of scope as far as the title was concerned, I thought, so I called it ‘Jet-Bees of Planet J’. He took another look at the picture when I brought in the manuscript, then looked at the title again ‘See what you mean, old boy’. He nodded approval. “Sort of self-propelled by their own farts.’

[Read more →]

If, like me, you can’t make it up to Montreal for Worldcon 2009, you can at least graze on the feeds and photostreams.   Enjoy vicariously!

Voyageur, official Anticipation Newsletter

Stross - Krugman dialog [MP3 on Stross blog]  [transcript!]

tweets:

Chris [Drink Tank] Garcia on Twitter

#anticipationsf  #worldcon09 feeds aggregated

some blogs with Worldcon heavy posts:

Irene Gallo [photos]

Lionel Davoust [en francais]

Kate Baker [Sofanaut Podcasts]

Cheryl [Emerald City] Morgan

Amy H. Sturgis [photos on Flickr]

Jenny Rappaport

Kyle Cassidy [photos!]

John [Whatever] Scalzi

yonmei

Cory Doctorow  [Flickr photos]

Pleasantly surprised to discover Indoctrinaire, the first novel by Christopher Priest, a tale of strange foreboding and paranoia, wrapped up in altered states of consciousness and alternate realities.   The protagonist, Dr. Wentik, finds himself forcibly recruited from his scientific research post beneath the South Pole, and whisked away to the Planalto District of Mato Grosso in Brazil.  Both of these places are so far off the beaten track and outside of the ordinary world of human affairs that the novel begins with an eerie sense of dislocation, which is only accelerated into total disorientation as soon as Wentik begins to trek into the strangely deforested zone of Planalto.  His guide, a tight-lipped man named Musgrove, shows signs of mental illness as the story progresses and Wentik finds himself an occupant of “the jail,” under interrogation by an equally opaque antagonist named Astourde.
[Read more →]

Okay, since you asked, this is a snapshot I found online of Takeshi Ogawa and four Coachella 2008 attendees.   But what I wanted to say is that Ogawa has founded a new website for translators to and from Japanese, 26to50 .   Their mission:

We’re a band of professional translators. Our job is to transcribe 26 alphabetical letters of English into 50 phonetic characters of the Japanese language. Hence our group name was born. This is our venue to promote new writings and new writers, both to our readers and to our publishers. We hope, with the encouragement of our readers, to persuade our publishers to publish our recommendations in Japan. This is our CBGB, or Fillmore in fiction. We sincerely like to introduce new writers and new writings we love to our readers. We’ll do it for free, hoping our publishers like it and decide to publish our recommendations using us as their translators.

It’s been a while since I posted a somewhat sarcastic note about the fine artist, Steele Savage.   Now I feel compelled to follow up those seven images with yet another appreciation, since I really would like to know more about Savage and his career, which as far as I can tell spanned from the 1930s to 1970s.   In this instance, I discovered that what I had assumed to be an amusing bit of fantasy in the cover illustration for John Brunner’s The Long Result, turns out to be the very likeness of the alien who is one of the major characters in the book.   Here is the passage describing the remarkable, Anovel, a Regulan visitor to planet Earth:

“Anovel stood some five feet eight or nine in height, and his resemblance to a horse was remarkable.  He had the same long, rather sad-looking head, and twin nostril-sheaths rose above his eyes to give the effect of a horse’s ears.  His skin was a vivid and beautiful blue, while the mane which ran down the nape of his neck was yellow as a buttercup.”

What a fine rendition of that odd being Savage provided us!  Projecting from the characteristic cloud of faces, in this case a sort of crescent arc that swirls backwards to the left, it is a wonderful picture, indeed.   Without spoiling the story for you, there is also an implication of the “crucial facts,” or kenekito, lurking in the oversized eyes of Anovel.

**Update**  Terrific Photo Spread in Boston Globe - Big Picture

Did SF become irrelevant after the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969?  This panel explored the relationship between the Apollo program and SF, and the ways in which SF did or didn’t live up to its visionary potentials after manned space flight became a reality.  Paul De Fillippo kicked things off by asking to what extent SF inspired the space program?  And to what extent did the eventual breakdown of the manned space program affect SF?

[Read more →]

This panel included Barry Malzberg, Allen Steele, James Morrow, and Rick Wilber.   Rachel Pollack was scheduled to appear, but nobody seemed to know where she was.   By way of introduction, Rick Wilber had prepared some sort of pseudo-clever analogy about the panelists, saying that they were at different places along the timeline.  Wilber said that Allen Steele, having already published 15 novels was someplace near mid-career, and that James Morrow was “settled” into a successful career with a number of major achievements under his belt.  Then Wilber introduced Barry Malzberg, with his long and distinguished career, as “still active in the field…”  Somehow you could sense the fumble on that last note, which provoked Malzberg to pounce into action:

“What a euphemism!” he roared.  “Just say it:  I’m an ancient writer, a washed up writer! Remember when Tom Disch said we’re all just ‘robots wired for sound?’  Well you can just go ahead and say a corpse wired for sound.”

Richard Wilber, recovering, said: “Ok, late career…”

“Autumnal!” said Malzberg.

[Read more →]

It was great to attend my first Readercon.  Like entering a stranger’s house and finding yourself among all of your best friends.   Of course some of them I met for the first time…  like the Crochety Old Fan, Alan, and Kit Reed.  By the way, Kit Reed has a terrific autobiographical sketch, “The Story Until Now,” appearing in the latest issue (July 2009 #251) of  New York Revue of Science Fiction.  Get your hands on a copy, if you can!

The panels were interesting and cerebral.  John Shirley never showed up (who could have predicted it?), but other than that the whole program seemed to go according to plan.  Great to see Andy Gelas in the book shop, and to meet Art Vaughan and John Kuenzig, not to mention being able to pick up a big stack of loot for peanuts.   Stayed tuned for more con reports, coming soon.

Reports:

Egocentrism and Creativity

Novels You Write vs. Novels You Talk About in Bars

Apollo 11 and Science Fiction

This panel, moderated (with immoderate gusto) by James Patrick Kelly, featured Scott Edelman, Eileen Gunn, Gene Wolfe, and Catherynne Valente.  John Shirley was scheduled to participate, but got stuck in San Francisco, where I can picture him flailing savagely around in the airport trying to get on any flight to anywhere!  The premise of the panel was based on Michael Swanwick’s contention that “modesty and a reasonable awareness of one’s limitations have no place in a writing career.”  Yes, that’s the same Swanwick who declared at Readercon one: “With the possible exception of Gene Wolfe, I’m the best writer here today.”  Thus egocentrism…

[Read more →]

At first, the survey of political systems in Mack Reynolds‘ interstellar spy novel, Planetary Agent X, seems quite whimisical and superficial.  There are planets full of anarchists, and planets crawling with feudalism, nihilism, socialism, and what have you.   There are some playful jabs at democracy, individualism, and even the tyranny of the uninformed voters (a la John Stuart Mill).  The tone is not as playful as Ron Goulart, but definitely not very serious either.   So it came as a pleasant surprise when the protagonist, Ronny Bronston, is given a sarcastic lecture by his handler, the mysterious Tog Lee Chang Chu, on the disasters brought about by “industrial feudalism.”   How strangely familiar!

[Read more →]

This beautiful illustration for the cover of Daughter of IS (1978), by Mikal D. Huber, is a wonderful example of the science fiction art of Carlos Ochagavia.  The background is rendered in a light, airy tone that fades away, with major features that become transparent (in this case, a moon) .  The main figure is also somewhat soft — a woman rising up in cloud — while the most tangible figure in the painting (a hand on fire!) is disembodied.   In the middle distance are Ochagavia’s characteristic space-vehicles, usually saucers standing on chunky legs, and arcing behind the scene is a jet that leaves a visible trail.   The image, as a whole, is strangely ethereal; is it a realistic painting, softened at the edges?  Or a surrealistic painting, with a few concrete objects for our gaze to anchor upon?   Ochagavia tantalizes us to find out…but often as not, the books being illustrated hold few clues as to what the artist was thinking.

[Read more →]

Reading the excellent articles on the intrepid wanderer, Socialist, ex-pat, Science Fiction writer, Mack Reynolds, in the latest issue of eI by Earl Kemp, and was amused by the anecdotes of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies, which was an organization of professional SF writers during the 1950s. Kemp mentioned that the Proceedings of the aforementioned society were collected and published by Advent, so that the PITFCS are preserved. Looking around on Google to see if a copy is extant anywhere, I discovered that there is also a Center for Twenty-First Century Studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, of all places, but it has nothing to do with Science Fiction, and proclaims as its focus (without irony!) as:
critical reflection in such areas as feminism, media theory, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, cultural and social theory, and lesbian and gay studies.

Well, I hope to dig up a rogue’s gallery of mug shots of the two identically named centers and compare them for my personal edification. I’m also curious to see what the level of discourse is in their proceedings, of course… what do some drunken, cantankerous SF writers look like when stacked up against our post-modern scholars?