Why in the hell does anyone need to remake Escape from New York? (Link found at Gamera_Spinning) The movie still works great on DVD, it has a sequel made, what?, 10 years ago. For god sakes, Kurt Russell could still play Snake Plissken if they wanted to make a third one. Just check out the clips from Grindhouse and tell me it's not true. When will Hollywood give up all these remakes? Original ideas are good, use them!
Paul Jessup has started a new wiki, Encyclopedia Fantastica. Here's what he says about it on the homepage:
Inspired, I went over and created an entry on Sword and Sorcery. I've been reading a lot of S&S lately and thinking about what makes it work. I'm sure I've written something in there that will make me groan later, but I'm hoping it can get some people talking about the genre and thinking about what makes it work. I'd love to see a revival of S&S that created more interesting settings and characters.A literary resource for Fantastic Literature in all its guises. This wiki-based Encyclopedia is meant to create discussion and arguments of intellectual merit within the fantasy community. Inside you will see ideas explode, terms implode, and criticisms argued and debated.
The purpose is debate and knowledge. Consider this a community resource, a scholarly adventure.
I'm so excited. I think I've just found something from my childhood that I've been seeking for years. When I was in my early teens (maybe 13), I went to a Polish festival and picked up a book filled with the folk tales of Poland. I remembered they were a little gruesome, but fascinating. I have no idea what happened to the book over the years.
In one of my Google searches for this book, I finally think I've stumbled on one of the tales from it. In fact, I may have found the book. It's called "Legends of Poland: The Legend of Popiel and the Mice." The book is part of a series of "Legends of Poland." The art looks somewhat similar to my memories and the tale was definitely one I read. I remember the book being a collection of stories, but it's quite possible my memories are faulty and it was a series of books instead.
The story is about King Popiel, a Polish king who is incompetent. His own family tries to have him killed. Afterward, Popiel is convinced by his German wife to kill his uncles and dump their bodies in a lake. It was done, but the people revolted and Popiel and his wife escaped to their tower on a lake. But Popiel couldn't escape. Rats and mice rose up from the lake and ate through the tower to devour the royal couple.
You can find out about the legend at the Wikipedia entry. Here's a Czeslaw Milosz poem called "King Popiel." There's a film from Poland called "When the Sun Was God" that features Popiel as a main character.
Apparently, there is an old ruin in Poland that is called the Mouse Tower and is supposed to be the very tower Popiel was killed in (though historians doubt it.) For more on that structure see The World According to Google and here's a Polish flicker photo of the tower.
During my searches I found this other tale of a Mouse Tower. This time it's a Bishop Hatto on the Rhine who is devoured by rats and mice. Here's the horrible climax to this version:
They were in at last, and sprang at him fiercely.... He beat them off by the score; he trampled them under his feet; he tore at them savagely with his hands–all to no purpose; he might just as well have tried to beat back the ocean. The rats surged against him like waves breaking on a cliff, and very soon the Bishop was overwhelmed in the horrid flood. Little was left to tell of the tragedy when his servants plucked up courage to enter the building some days later.
The Groovy Age of Horror is a fun blog I found a while back and have been enjoying immensely ever since. Curt is reading through tons of trashy paperbacks from the late '60s and early '70s that are helping him create his own aesthetic. He's using that knowledge to write a novel (potentially a series of novels in the best trashy paperback tradition) and has blogged a draft of it at Night Falls on a Fairy Tale.
Anyway, this week Curt started his first contest. He wants people to write a Nazisploitation nanofiction. This sounded like a ton of fun, so I submitted a story that has been posted as Entry 9. My little scene isn't nearly as lurid (or NSFW) as some of the entries, but I hope it's fun. It was to write! Give it a try. Curt's also looking for fan art entries. Chip in and do your best nasty, sleazy Nazi fiction (or art) for the Groovy Age.
No Fear of the Future has posted a YouTube video of the Six Million Dollar Man vs. Bigfoot! It's brilliant and everything I remembered from childhood. Sasquatch is a big hairy, fanged monster! Bigfoot pulls a tree out of the ground to fight Steve Austin! Steve pulls Bigfoot's arm off! And, while it's not explained in the video, Bigfoot is controlled by aliens! Go watch it, it's great!
I'm rather astounded. This reviewer at 3AM magazine seems to believe that Jeff Lint was a real person. That's just hilarious. I mean, the cover of the book at the site says "Steve Aylett's newest novel" right on the cover. Even if it didn't, how would anyone believe half this stuff really happened? A series of books about a belly? Later rewritten as about jelly? A man who delivers all his manuscripts in a dress? I mean, yeah, I suppose they could happen. But you might think to question it if you kept getting so implausible no?
It got to a point where I thought the reviewer was playing her own metafictional game. Then she says: "The life and times of Lint are communicated, in a round about sort of way, and the book is educational and, in parts, mildly funny." Educational?
Lint is a good book, by the way. I laughed out loud through most of it, though I must admit it does get a little tiresome before the end. The chapters on Star Trek, comics and animation are all classics.
I found the link on Jeffrey Ford's blog. Which reminds me, the Nebula awards have been announced and Ford's "The Girl in the Glass" is among the novel nominees. Now, I love the book, absolutely, and I would like to see it win all the awards it can (it's already won an Edgar Award for best paperback original), however, doesn't it slip past the Nebula awards' reason for being? The rules state: "Works must be in either the Science Fiction or the Fantasy genres. The Nebula Awards® Report (NAR) Editor will decide the eligibility of a questionable work, subject to appeal to the SFWA Awards Rules Committee." I don't think you can really say this book is science fiction or fantasy. Well, maybe a little fantasy, if read in a certain light. But having said that, I love the book, it deserves awards and attention, so go "Girl in the Glass"!
I haven't written about giant squid in a while, so here's a link to a newly caught colossal squid, which is apparently like a giant squid, just heavier. (via Boing Boing)
Chris Roberson and I are having an interesting conversation in the comments here about TV shows and cartoons of the late '70s and early '80s. If you remember shows like Thundarr, Blackstar, Jason of Star Command, Isis and Greatest American Hero, please join in. In the meantime, here's a little inspiration:
Here's the opening to one of my favorite cartoons I watched as a kid. I love the groovy music and oddball cast (Guru!) and I remember the show was very tense because their clock was always counting down.
My other favorite was "Journey to the Center of the Earth," but I can't find anything on YouTube about that.
Jason of Star Command is coming to DVD in May. This is kind of exciting, if a little weird. I watched the show religiously when I was really young. I used to wake up at ungodly hours of the morning on Saturday to see it. Now, I remember almost nothing about it. There were two little robots and there was some kind of rock-covered spaceship, or something. And there was a bad guy. That's about it.
So now, the show will become available again and I'm faced with a dilemma: Do I watch it again and risk losing my good feelings about the show? Anytime I see a show from my childhood that I've completely forgotten, I wonder if it will hold up to the pleasant memories I have for it. For instance, years ago I bought a VCR tape of "Battle of the Planets," an animated show I loved as a child. Even now, I can think of the show I thought I watched when I was a kid and how cool it was. There were superhero-type characters, an evil villain with secrets, and cool science fictiony vehicles, especially the Phoenix. But then I saw it. So much time was spent on an R2-D2 clone with tiny wings that narrated the whole show. And Casey Kasem's voice was all over it (not bad in itself, but it's hard to make a character come alive when it sounds just like that top 40 guy.) The animation was poor. And it was just generally horrible.
I don't expect Jason of Star Command to be very good. It's going to have poor TV special effects. It's not going to take many risks and it's sure to have a moral at the end of every episode. And I'm sure those two little robots I liked so much as a kid will be annoyingly cutesy.
But there's always a chance I will like it anyway. Like Land of the Lost. It's totally cheesy, but it still maintains charm. And its general weirdness keeps it entertaining. But it's got dinosaurs and sleestacks. I don't think Jason of Star Command has anything so cool (and no, James Doohan is not cool enough.)
So, maybe when May rolls around I'll try and rent the DVDs. Give it a chance and see what I was poisoning my mind with at 9 years old.
Now, if only someone would put out Thundarr on DVD. That's a show I would pick up without hesitation.
I was one of 20 lucky people to get advanced reader copies of this book, the first of a new series. Pettersson says the book belongs to the dark urban fantasy genre on her Web site. I didn't know much about that genre by name, but it seems to be linked with writers like Kim Harrison, Laurel Hamilton, Charlaine Harris and others (none of whom have I read or know much about). It's a blending of horror, fantasy and romance elements. "The Scent of Shadows" has a little of all of that, as well as mystery, but I don't think the book would be misplaced if you called it simply fantasy or horror.
The book is the story of Joanna Archer, a young heiress of a casino fortune living in Las Vegas. She has a past marred by extreme violence. The book begins with probably the worst blind date in history. From there, the book moves at a rapid pace, introducing the reader to Joanna's life and then quickly destroying it as Joanna finds out who she really is.
She's a superhero, of sorts. She belongs to a group known as the Zodiac that participates in a war between Light and Shadow. She falls in with the Light side, but in the process loses much that is important to her. (I'm trying to stay vague here, because there are plenty of plot twists and turns that I would rather not spoil.) The new life she is faced with, after the one she has known for 25 years is destroyed, is a great choice on Pettersson's part. Trapped in another lifestyle outside her own experience causes Joanna to know herself better, and the reader right along with her.
The book is at its best when navigating the twists and turns of the plot. Pettersson writes action scenes that could be transcribed directly into a movie with martial arts choreography by Yuen Wo Ping (though Joanna's fighting style of choice is Krav Maga). She keeps those scenes moving quickly without ever losing the reader.
But Pettersson also takes plenty of time to explore Joanna's psyche. In particular, she explores the nature of violence, how it changed Joanna's life and how Joanna has used it since. In fact, for a book about superheros who can't be hurt, the book delves deeply into the effects of violence. Almost every main character in the book has been traumatized by violence in their past, and each of them reacts in their own way.
Pettersson's prose is typical commercial fiction. It hits high points when Joanna unleashes her sharp tongue:
Ajax's reptilian features had rearranged themselves as I spoke, and he now looked like a glowering python. "Thanks for the psychoanalysis, babe," he spat, "but all I really wanted from this weekend were a couple of easy lays."
This, I assumed was where I was supposed to throw my wine in his face. I didn't, though. I like Chateau Le Pin, and took a long, considering slip of the vintage '82 I'd made him buy. "And what? Your mother wasn't available?"
I stared past him and outside the window, where dawn waited impatiently. "I guess that's how you knew to leave the door open for me."Those low points, though, are few and much of the time I was too caught up in the plot to care.
"Oh, Jo-Jo," he said, sighing sleepily as he gathered me tight to his body. "It was never closed."
Has anyone seen these in stores, repackaged Shadow and Doc Savage novels by Nostalgia Ventures? (Link found at gamera_spinning) I've collected many of the old Bantam reprints of the Doc Savage novels and I have a couple of the Shadow reprint novels (although I've only read "The Romanoff Jewels"), but this is the first time in years that I think they have been in print. (I also have some The Spider reprints, but Nostalgia Ventures doesn't seem to be doing anything with that series.)
What's interesting about these reprints, according to the Web site, is that they include historical information by Anthony Tollin and Will Murray. I know Murray's name as both the writer of many of the Destroyer (Remo Williams!) novels and as a pulp expert. Apparently, Tollin and Murray have also written Doc Savage novels "in collaboration" with original writer Lester Dent. The reprints also have the original illustrations and covers. I'm sorely tempted to pick these up. They are apparently available at Barnes & Noble and Borders.
If all these names (Shadow, Doc Savage, Operator #5) are unknown or confusing to you, get educated at: PulpWiki, The Hero Pulps!, Wikipedia entry, and The Pulp Gallery. For more on The Destroyer see Sinanju.com. Here's more on the movie Remo Williams.
Most of my pulp reprint needs, though, are usually served by Adventure House and High Adventure magazine. That's how I collected almost the entire "Purple Invasion" stories from Operator #5.
Joe Gill, writer of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Charlton Comics died last month, Dec. 17, at his nursing home in Seymour, Conn.
Mark Evanier first reported Gill's death on his blog. The Connecticut Post did Saturday. Evanier's blog talks mostly about his career at Charlton, while the newspaper article gives more information about his life since retirement. I find it touching that the senior center will be mounting his pool cues. The Post had previously done an article on Gill's friendship with Mickey Spillane; unfortunately I can't find it now. Also, I highly recommend Charlton Spotlight's interview with Gill.
Arrested Development's Michael Cera gives you his tips to success.
Chris Roberson points out that Avatar is coming to the screen. I've only seen a couple of episodes, but I share Roberson's worries.
Paul Jessup skips the manifesto and creates a subgenre.
Two interviews with Nick Mamatas: Bookslut and Disinformation
Iwao Takamoto has died. I had never heard of him until I read the Boing Boing post, but now I realize he's the creator behind some of the best cartoons of my childhood.
Professor Hex points out this wonderful eBay sale that includes thousands of pulp magazines. Just check out the gallery of images from the sale of Weird Tales, terrific stuff.
And to round out this linkfest, a meme from a while ago. I found it at Myth Happens.
"Listed below are the fifty most significant science fiction / fantasy novels, 1953—2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club: bold the ones you have read, italicize the ones you started but never finished, underline the ones you own but never started, strike out the ones you hated, and put an asterisk beside the ones you love. "
1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien*
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson*
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury*
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe*
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison*
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson (I assume this is for the whole trilogy, I only read the first book.)
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams*
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon*
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith*
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester*
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
In the case of some of these books, the line between liking and loving is very thin. It's interesting that I don't hate any of these books. Though I imagine I wouldn't like it today, "Sword of Shannara" was a pleasant reading experience for me in my early teen years. I'm also pleased to see that I've read the great majority (31) of these books. It gives me a few ideas for rereads later.
So, about this time last year, I wrote this:
This year, I resolve to write, send out and see a story published. At least one, but hopefully more.
Any of you who still have me on your news aggregators and RSS feed readers, thank you. And thank you even more for those who haven't deleted this blog from your bookmarks. It's very easy for a blog to drop off the map when it hasn't had a serious update in more than six months. Thanks for sticking with me.
Anyway, I plan on coming back to blogging with the New Year. I'm now newly married with a new house. I still have many things to do around here, but it's about time I rededicated myself to writing (which has faltered badly in the last three months) and blogging will be part of that. I won't make any commitments to the amount of blogging I'll do -- I'd like to blog every day, but it seems like a little much right now. So this blog will probably be best read from a feed, where you won't get annoyed looking back every day to see if I've finally updated.
Well, to make this post worth something, here's a few links:
Jeffery Ford has posted a short story on his blog that I believe is previously unpublished.
A giant squid was captured alive and caught on film; unfortunately, it died soon after.
Movie trailers: Harry Potter, Fantastic Four and the Silver Surfer, Hot Fuzz, and The Host.
Check out Eddie Campbell's blog, well, just because he's good, but also becaues he discusses photo references and how they were used in making From Hell.
I would also like to highly recommend Chris Roberson's blog, he's got loads of good stuff. He's an interesting guy anyway: He's the author of Paragea and Here, There & Everywhere as well as the brains behind Monkeybrain Books.
You can see all of the books I read this year and their publishing information at LibraryThing. But here is the basic list. I've put them in order of enjoyment, though I could easily change around the order of the books in the middle. The list doesn't include short stories unless I read an entire collection (which is unusual for me, I tend to dip in and out of anthologies.)
Fiction
The Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffrey Ford
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Vanitas by Jeffrey Ford
Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
The 37th Mandala by Marc Laidlaw
The Limits of Enchantment by Graham Joyce
Byzantium Endures by Michael Moorcock
Lint by Steve Aylett
Homeland by Sam Lipsyte
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Imaro by Charles Saunders
Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff Vandermeer
The Conqueror Worms by Brian Keene
She by H. Rider Haggard
The Shadow: The Romanoff Jewels by Maxwell Grant
Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara
Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad by Minister Faust
Hammered by Elizabeth Bear
The Rising by Brian Keene
The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt
Cowslip by Kirk Sigurdson
Graphic novels
Black Hole by Charles Burns
Bone: One Volume Edition by Jeff Smith
Y: The Last Man, Volume 1 Unmanned by Brian K. Vaughan
Barefoot Gen: The Day After by Keiji Nakazawa
The Nikopol Trilogy by Enki Bilal
Nonfiction
Sixpence House: Lost in a town of books by Paul Collins
Haiku Handbook by William Higginson
With Respect to the Japanese by John C. Condon
It's about 32 books. While this was a busy year, I thought I usually read more books than that. I'll track this year, as well, and see how many I read.
I've just added a review of the new "Gojira" DVD coming out from Classic Media. Go over to my Giant Monster Blog and check it out.
I haven't written since May? Geez, I've really let this thing go. Unfortunately, that's going to continue. Right now, I face an upcoming wedding, a house sale, a house purchase and general chaos besides. Of course, this is no excuse. If I wanted to, I could squeak in a few minutes every day for the blog, but right now, I'm just not feeling up to it. Sorry. Also, I really want to focus on fiction writing and getting myself away from the Internet can only help that.
Expect me to return sometime after the beginning of 2007, I think. I may pop in occasionally before that, but no promises.
Do you remember the case of the man who had a bomb strapped around his neck who said he was being forced to rob a bank or it would go off? And then it did? It sounds like a movie plot (and has become episodes of Law & Order and other shows), but it actually happened. What really happened, whether the man set up the whole thing himself to go out with a spectacular suicide or whether he was actually kidnapped and bombstrapped, remains an open question.
Of course, the family knows where they stand and they're pissed. They've posted a Web site, www.brianwells.net, offering the details of the case and asking for any help. It's a tragic and amazing story. Also check out the Wikipedia entry on the case and this story from CourtTV's Crime Library.
(Link found via Professor Hex.)
