Andrew Rilstone remains dedicated to his commitment to review every episode of season four of the new Doctor Who, even on a week when it wasn’t on.
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Category: Science Fiction and Fantasy
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Fritterlog
- Wishing to fritter away a pleasant evening seeing a stirring action film that evokes innocent boyish enthusiasms rather than brooding over the ongoing frittering of the curdled youth of adulthood? Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not the right movie for this, being all about middle age – which, for intrepid adventuring archeologists, happens sometime in their sixties. OK, it’s not all about that, it is also about the third big loopy archeological mcguffin, after previous movies tackled the Ark and the Grail. It’s obviously more self-indulgent than the earlier movies, and not just because special effects are much easier now than they were at the time of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And it’s sort of odd seeing Harrison Ford constantly alternating between being Indiana Jones and just an old guy dressed like him.
- Steve Jackson reports that Robert Lynn Asprin has died. Asprin was responsible for Myth Adventures (a humorous fantasy that I read in Phil Foglio’s wonderful comic adaptation) and Thieves’ World, the first shared-world anthology series – both of these were/are of great interest to roleplayers, I think.
- A Michael Swanwick anecdote about Yeats:
When Marianne and I were in Yeats Country in the West of Ireland, we visited Yeats’s grave and Thoor Ballylee, the renovated medieval tower in which he lived. Afterwards, talking with our landlady (who was a respectable, middle-aged lady), I said something like, “Yeats was deep into mysticism, crucifying cats in the graveyard at midnight and things like that.” And, very bitterly, she replied, “Aye, well, he was one of the fortunate ones. He had money. Some of us had to work for a living!”
- Via Rob MacDougall and the Wikipedia-blog Meine Kleine Fabrik, a Wikipedia article on Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic, apropos Laughter – first the Joker, then his signature weapon!
However, Wikipedia also provides us with caped crusaders to fight the clown prince of crime. If Spring Heeled Jack was a bit too sinister, his Czech analog Pérák, the Spring Man of Prague apparently fought the Nazis! - Dark chocolate can be dipped in Peanut Butter, I have just discovered. I am going to hell for this.
What I told myself is I want to do it, I’ll try do it, the limiting factor is the amount of energy and spirit I have to continuously fail. And writing, not just publishing, writing itself is a process of continous failure. I mean every time I write a sentence, it’s not the pristine sentence I had in my head, it’s a failure. Every time you submit something and it doesn’t come back with, you know, “yes banana, we’ll give you money for this”, it’s failure. So it really is, it’s very easy to quit. But what I kept telling myself is every day I write, every day I don’t quit, I beat the thousand people that did quit that day, and I beat the ten thousand people who didn’t even try that day.
Greg Van Eekhout in Adventures in Scifi Publishing: AISFP 48.
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Carol Berg on ICon
Carol Berg writes about her visit to Israel as ICon’s guest of honor in DeepGenre, a quirky blog by a group of SF&F writers.