The Crotchety Old Fan

I have been receiving an enormous number of emails in support of this effort – thank you all very much. I’ll be happy to continue to receive such, but would greatly appreciate you all doing the following: 1. come here and comment/blue sky/suggest/critique/etc. 2. please do not send resumes along with your missives.  If you [...]

Wow!  The press release I sent out yesterday has been picked up in numerous places, most notably by Locus (!), SFSignal, File 770, SFScope.  Also, The Drink Tank – this year’s Hugo winner for Best Fanzine – requested a copy of the PR for future release. Thanks to all for carrying that.  (I’ve also learned [...]

Here’s the press release I sent out to various and sundry – it will be interesting to see how many folks choose to make mention of it. For Immediate Release September 28th, 2011 Experimenter Publishing Corporation* Hillsboro, New Hampshire AMAZING STORIES TRADEMARK REGISTRATION GRANTED Steve Davidson (The Crotchety Old Fan/The Classic Science Fiction Channel) today [...]

Title courtesy of the readers I suspect may be getting tired of these kinds of updates.  Fortunately, I’ll have another entry here today which moves away from this subject, so, at least for today (and into the future, hint hint), the blog will no longer be largely devoted to A. Bertram Chandler. I managed to [...]

The following is a concept/idea/backgrounder/plank in world building I’ve been playing around with for quite some time.  Today, an article in the NY Times brought it to the forefront of consciousness as a perfect example of the concept in action. The article relates an experiment at CERN which appears to have resulted in a sub-atomic [...]

Once again I foist myself upon John Ottinger’s readers over at Grasping for the Wind. I have to say that I really enjoy the challenge of coming up with something “interesting” each month, and I’m terribly grateful for the opportunity.   Anyway.  This month?  Nothing so button-pushing as last month (SF & Religion), but a [...]

a return of the discussion on TLTSNBN (The List That Shall Not Be named) regarding SF vs Sci-Fi vs skiffy vs Damon Knight vs Harlan Ellison vs Forry Ackerman. I offered up my conclusions based on google news alerts for “Science Fiction” and “Sci Fi” (I actually have several for the different forms used but [...]

I just learned via SFSignal that a new publication will feature numerous HE scripts, scanned from the original manuscripts. Two editions are being published, a basic trade and a special edition. The special edition will include B5 material, autographs from Ellison and Straczynski and several scripts that won’t appear in the basic edition. Among the [...]

HuffingtonPost’s ‘Comedy’ tab has become a great time-waster of late. Usually funny, often ironic and every once and a while extremely, ummm, thought-provoking. Like the article from Christwire.com (who knew, but then again, no big surprise, right?) that they lampooned. The one that offers 15 ‘signs’ that your husband is secretly gay. Number 10 states [...]

Space Mercenaries, in all of it’s space operatic glory,. has now been entered into the concordance database. It took 936 individual records, a bit long for one of Chandler’s shorter novels, but containing a wealth of information about such diverse subjects as the Hallicheki Hegemony (the galactic empire of space avians), some very fine descriptions [...]