The Crotchety Old Fan

Following a quick little bit of online research, I am pleased to be able to announce that I have identified the A. Bertram Chandler story that will be appearing in Robert Silverberg’s upcoming anthology Tales of Super Science Fiction:

Chandler fans would have been very happy to get this issue of SSF which featured not one [...]

I’ve just recently finished re-reading the entire series.  I do not need internet pundits to remind me that Sir Richard fucking Francis Burton is not a bad guy; nor that people were resurrected all at once;  nor that….
To say that the upcoming mini-series on syfy is FULL of fail is an understatement of such grand [...]

Here’s the second installament of our journey through the pulp magazines.
Still a couple of glitches in there – a few abrupt transitions on the musical score, a couple of clunky video cuts, but all in all I think the quality level is improved over V1., N1, the pilot episode.
This episode is also fairly brief – [...]

For quite some time now I have known about Raumpatrouille, a German television series, from 1966.
Germany’s own Star Trek.
I think I happened across it while doing a search for Space Patrol things and a Youtube Video purportedly showing free form dance of the future popped up.
Rather than being yet another Youtube mashup, this clip turned [...]

Via TLTSNBN and a fan who will not be named here either unless I get permission to do so (a fan who another unnamed participant in the list recommends for a Greatest For Life Award, and I heartily agree) has found what is perhaps the greatest write up of fifties fandom ever published in a [...]

Captain Video was the first – the very first – science fiction television show. It premiered on June 27th, 1949. Sixty years ago, on the DuMont Television Network.
I recently found the following Public Service Announcement (on www.archive.org) that was aired during a commercial break in the show. Given the current and on-going [...]

Seems I have some folks encouraging me to be crotchety. (And I shall oblige.) They’re sending me links to blogs and other things wherein misguided (read – young) individuals not only misuse SciFi – the epithet – but do so gleefully, deliberately and with intent to CHANGE its common usage.
Repeat after me:  Change is bad [...]

Over on John Ottinger’s place, (the home of the Book Review Blog Linkup Meme), John has posted Part 1 of his Living in the Blogosphere roundup.
Living in the Blogosphere poses a question to SF/F/H bloggers and then posts their answers.
This time around, John asked:  If you could live in an SF/Fantasy/Horror world, in which one [...]

According to IO9, SF didn’t really penetrate our cultural awareness until it hit television.
They mention television of the past in passing in this introductory piece to a week’s worth of SF (and other genres) on the babble box.  As usual, however, the focus is on current day and, as usual, their contentions are woefully historically [...]

Nick Mamatas – also known as the Nihilistic Kid in his Livejournal incarnation – is one of those contemporary renaissance men you hear about but rarely meet; editor, writer, subverter of higher education, multiple award nominee (in multiple genres), multiple translatee and champion of the Creative Commons.
Nick has several well-received novels under his belt (Northern [...]