Catching Up

Sorry for the missing day:  to be brief – I’m doing promotions and ad selling for the paintball book, which means emailing and calling lots of paintball companies and schmoozing them AND I’m trying to put together a wordpress ‘magazine style’ theme for the paintball website which involves lots of PHP, CSS and other related things that I’m barely familiar with and this take time.  Not to mention that the pre-season for paintball is upon us, which means many more press releases and etc., so the non-science fiction workload has increased by a major percentage.

I’m also currently frustrated by a continuing inability to post images to the blog and still haven’t managed to fix that. 

So, here’s part of what should have posted the other day, and a couple of new piece of info that have come in over the past two days:

Matt Haley, who is an awesome artist, wrote in via email to let me know that he really appreciates The Classic Science Fiction Channel.  (Matt also told me he brought it to his father’s attention.  Makes me feel…old…)

Anyway, Matt is a helluva guy and he even blogs occasionally.  His website is here, his blog is here and as of today he’s over in the blogroll too!

The best part of Matt getting in touch is the fact that he did a project with the SciFi Channel.  And he told me a little bit about the experience.

Now that I know what I know – let’s just say that it’s no surprise that SkiffyTube has become the Land of the Rubber-Monster-Suit show, and it’s very likely to continue that way into the foreseeable future.

Check out Matt’s art – he’s really, really good.

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Damien Walter comments on an article that appeared in The Guardian that discusses the dissing the Science Fiction genre receives at the hands of mundane publishers and (some) mainstream authors.  Damien makes the point that from what he’s seeing, Science Fiction IS the mainstream today.  Good point, but god forbid! 

I found some of the quotes from the Guardian article to be quite interesting:   “I suppose the book does take place in the future, but not the
ray-guns-and-silver-suits future. It’s more like tomorrow if today was
a really, really bad day.” – Nick Harkaway

“Science fiction is rockets, chemicals and talking squids in outer space.” – Margaret Atwood

Hmmm.  Science Fiction is also any advanced technology that’s not quite here yet, extrapolated societies, extrapolated evolution, extrapolated ethics and mores…

I’ll have a bit of statistical insite to offer on this later on in the week.  I’ve been receiving Google Alerts for the terms “Science Fiction” and “SciFi” (two separate alerts for each one) for almost a year now.  Before looking atg the data in the aggregate, I can tell you that it is pretty clear that the definition of SF as portrayed in the quotes almost perfect describes the links found in the SciFi alerts, while what those of us know as ‘true’ SF is found in the Science Fiction alerts.  I don’t know what it means that mainstream authors’ impression of the genre is almost all scifi, but I do think that it’s interesting.

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I’ve been promising the Gnome Press blogger that I’d be adding him to my blogroll for a while now, and I’ve just done it. And here’s an extra mention just to make up for the delay.

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Check this out for another new add to the blogroll – science fiction bookplates! Way cool.

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Galaxy Express recently ran a piece on the worlds of Jerry and Sylvia Anderson that features Fireball XL5.  It’s a bit critical with ‘ye olde datedness critique’.  Yeah. whatever.  A couple of weeks ago a re-watched a few episodes (when they were up on YouTube) and I was shocked! to discover how sophisticated the whold thing was.  For kids in the early 60s no less.

And the Bookslut points us to a very interesting article from Slate about authors as brands – or brands as authors – or something.

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Yes, I AM reading through each and everyone of those genre review blogs each and every day…