A Far Out Fantastic Site

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Disgusted With Disgust for Disgust’s Sake

It’s the first Wednesday of the month, and year, and so it’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. A new year always presents new opportunities. That includes new opportunities for reading books we’ve never read before. And so many of us make resolutions to read a certain number of books through the new year. Yet, there are some things that would make me deliberately break such a new year’s resolution. And so that’s where the answer to this month’s IWSG question comes in. The question: Being a writer, when you're reading someone else's work, what stops you from finishing a book/throws you out of the story/frustrates you the most about other people's books? I can deal with bad writing as long as the story and pacing of it is good. I don’t prefer poorly written books but I can deal with them as long as they mee

Paperback Sale Now Through 12/27/2020

Credit: Pixabay.com The Technology That Keeps Us Together I hope everyone’s been having a groovy holiday season! While mine was uneventful compared to most years it was actually great considering. Because so many in my family have been ill there were no gatherings Christmas Eve or Day, so most of the gathering was limited to Facebook and our phones. But it was expected. Covid-19 has caused many of us to have to alter our festivities. It’s a lot easier to do that now with the miraculous technology of internet and social media, and the recent trend with facetime apps such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, than it was during the so-called Spanish Flu pandemic of the early 20th century. (I say “so-called” because the flu did not actually start in Spain or any Spanish-speaking country.) Such facetime technology shows you that what science fiction prophesied, if you will, decades ago has come to be! After virtually gathering with family yesterday, I finished reading “The Christmas Tree” that we

The Best Book-To-Movie Reviews of 2020 & One More for the Year

Credit: Pixabay.com To find out how you can read blog posts like this one without ads, visit my Patreon page ! Christmas is this upcoming week and a week after that will already be the end of another year. For a while it had seemed like it was the end of the world. With Covid-19 plaguing the planet, it seemed like we would not make it to the end of 2020. Perhaps a lot of you will be glad when 2020 ends and that’s perfectly understandable considering the circumstances. However, even a bad year has something good in it. And, believe it or not, that includes this year. So, what good things have we had in 2020? One is that we and the world are still here. Another is that genius doctors and scientists have developed a vaccine that is ready for use although it will make its way slowly through the populations, for plenty of good reason I’m sure. And yet another is that here at the li’l ol Far Out Fantastic Site there have been four of the best Book-To-Movie reviews and yours truly has one

Almost Half of the 2020 GoodReads Choice Awards Winners Are SF/F

Credit: Pixabay To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page ! We’re well into the Holiday Season and the end of the year is coming. Although this year has been one of the most uncertain and scariest ever, the Holidays always bring hope of some sort. Besides, there’s never such a thing as a totally bad year. All years and eras have something good in them. And one of those good things are the best of something of the year. In this case, many blogs and publications over the internet will bring you a list of the best movies of the year or the best books of the year. On December 8th the book recommendation website, GoodReads, brought us the latter through its annual Choice Awards . The best books of 2020 were selected across 20 categories which ranged from general fiction to general non-fiction, from science fiction and fantasy to memoir and biography. Nearly half of these 20 books were speculative fiction or at least related to it. So, yours truly has liste

Crowdfunder To Raise Money to Establish a Tolkien Museum

Credit: Pixabay To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page ! I have some Tolkien news this week. But first I want to apologise for missing last Wednesday’s Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. ( Alex , if you’re reading this, I personally apologise for missing.) With the Thanksgiving four-day weekend, I was a little disoriented in my sense of time of the week and forgot that the first Wednesday of the month had arrived. That’s the first time I missed an IWSG post and I’ll do everything I can to make sure it’s the last. One thing you can count on (unless an absolute emergency comes up which I’m not expecting one), I’ll have a post here for the IWSG next year, which is also next month. Tolkien Museum Fundraiser The close of this year has been seeing big plans for commemorating authors with landmarks. I mentioned a few weeks back, that there were plans for a Harlan Ellison library . Only this past week, December 2nd, did a group of fundraisers launch a c

Book-To-Movie: ‘The Andromeda Strain’

Credit: Pixabay.com To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page ! It’s time for our monthly Book-To-Movie ! For those of you who are just tuning into this blog, a Book-To-Movie is when we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. Today we are reviewing another book and film relevant to today’s pandemic: Michael Crichton’s novel, “The Andromeda Strain” and its 1971 movie adaptation. Crichton is the writer of suspenseful science fiction, what would commonly be called today, science fiction thriller. “The Andromeda Strain” is exactly that. However, as good as this novel is, the suspense in the movie adaptation plays out better. The Book In “The Andromeda Strain”, published in 1969, a NASA satellite returns to Earth carrying an alien virus. It lands in a small Arizona town by the name of Piedmont where the virus infects and kills everyone except an old man and an infant. A team of four scientists go to a top secret lab in Nevada called Proje