Lightning News Flashes: Sci fi, Fantasy & Racism; World-building ‘The Circle’

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get together a bigger story for this week’s post like I had hoped. So here are some more lightning news flashes, or lightning flash non-fiction, with links to the full stories. These stories cover race issues in sci fi and fantasy pop culture, and the world-building behind The Circle. Then comes news of the blogger’s current projects.

Star Trek Licence Plate Removed Due to Racist Connotation

During the week, a man in Canada was forced by policy to turn in his Star Trek- themed license plate due to “politically incorrect” language. The message on the licence plate unintentionally conveyed reference to a racist method of assimilating the indigenous population of Canada to white culture. However, it was actually referring to Star Trek (post-original series) episodes involving the alien and villainous Borgs’ attempts to assimilate other races.

ReplacingLovecraft’s Image in the World Fantasy Award

The World Fantasy Award committee introduced a new trophy that replaces the traditional one that had bore H.P. Lovecraft’s image. The new award depicts a gnarled tree overlapping a full moon. The old award became objectionable due to Lovecraft’s racist beliefs conveyed in many of his writings. While Lovecraft wrote some of the greatest horror and sci fi stories of the 20^th century, his outspoken racism gave him a bad image to many minorities of colour and people of Semitic background.

World-building for The Circle

On this weekend of its release, io9.com talks about how The Circle’s director dealt with the challenges of world-building for the movie, that world being a near future Earth dominated by an internet empire that basically plays Big Brother. It’s not quite Google but it’s definitely a response to Google’s dominance in the internet industry.

“Circa Sixty Years Dead” Update

I just figured out how I’m going to insert the images of ads into the manuscript template so I can meet Amazon’s 24-page minimum for the print edition of “Circa Sixty YearsDead”. Instead of using rich text format, I’ll use HTML format. HTML is a language typically used for making web pages and because of that it can convey images unlike most document file formats. Therefore it is more easily convertible to self-publishing platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing.

So what do you think is the line between sci fi/fantasy fandom and racism? When it comes to those genius speculative lit authors who are also bigots, can we separate the author from their creation in order to admire their work, or is admiring the one admiring the other? Feel free to leave your comments in the box below. And no, these questions do not exempt anybody from the blog’s anti-discrimination/anti-racist policy; anybody leaving racist or other discriminatory remarks will be blocked.

See you next time.

A stairway leading to a door in a dark, cloudy sky.

Credit: Pixabay.com

Book-To-Movie: Stephen King’s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan don’t read a lot of Stephen King’s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally won’t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I don’t read a lot of King’s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King it’s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections I’ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least...

Book-To-Movie: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Black Cat'

Credit: Wikimedia Commons It's another fourth Monday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie (BTM), we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. A few years back, we had a BTM for Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Black Cat" and its movie adaptation. However, the movie we reviewed was actually a segment in Roger Corman’s anthology film, "Tales of Terror", which features three of Poe's short stories, including "Black Cat". And I'll tell you now, I liked that version far more than the version that we're going to review today which is the 1934 Universal adaptation starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. I like Corman's version better mostly because it stays more faithful to the original short story than Universal's does. However, even though Universal's "Black Cat", directed by Edgar Ulmer, strays (excuse the pun) far from Poe's short stor...

Book-To-Movie: ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’

Both the 1959 and the 2008 movies based on Jules Verne's novel, "Journey to the Center of the Earth", feature terrifying monsters such as the ones here in this illustration from an early edition of the book. Credit: Édouard Riou/ Wikimedia Commons Warning: This review may contain spoilers. As I said last post , I’ve postponed the month’s Book-To-Movie review from last week to this week. 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. And this weekend’s review is of Jules Verne’s novel, “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and its movie adaptations. There have been several movies based on this novel that was originally published in Paris in 1864 (as “Voyage au Centre de la Terre”). However, most of them have been either made for TV or video. Because I believe movies are best when made for the big screen, I am going to review the theatrical films in which there have been two: the 195...

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