A Far Out Fantastic Site

We’re coming to the close of this first month of the new year and, as we look back, we’ll see that January has been filled with both joy and sadness in sci fi and fantasy culture. Frankenstein 200 th Anniversary The first day of 2018 actually marked the 200 th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein! And the world seems to be celebrating. Universities and other intellectual institutions all over the world are commemorating the event, including the library in my own home area of Sacramento! Even the U. K.’s Royal Mint is making a 2-pound coin that will commemorate the book. However, unlike the U.S. Postal Service with its Frankenstein stamp that it released as part of its Universal Studios Monster collection years ago, the coin won’t bear the image of the Monster as Fortune .com claims. If Fortune is right about this then I suggest that our fellow horror geeks on the British Isles circulate a petition demanding to put the Monster’s image on the coin! ...

Credit: Pixabay.com Yesterday marked the 209 th birthday of the father of American horror, Edgar Allen Poe. So I thought it would be neat to make this post a Poe post to honour him. Although my favorite of Poe’s works are his dark supernatural stories, I thought it was important to emphasise his science fiction which has been historically so underrated. So I’m excerpting from an article I had written several years ago for the online news site, Examiner.com, before it went obsolete. The article was about the Edgar Allen Poe House and Museum in Baltimore which was on the edge of permanently closing down at the time which, fortunately, due to a successful petition (which I sign ed ), ended up not happening. When I wrote the article, I thought it was so important that the Poe House and Museum be preserved because it is both an important landmark to U.S. and pop cultural history. Even though Poe’s imaginative works were often down-criticised and far underrated durin...

Credit: Openclipart.org Well, as you may have noticed, 2018 isn’t getting a good start here at the Far Out Fantastic Site since I missed posting last week. So I apologise for that. It was a busy weekend, and some of us celebrate the holidays as long as six days into the new year and since this isn’t a religious blog I won’t go into details with the exception of a few clues: Magic, Magi and Three Kings. Put them together or do a Google search on all three, which is, by the way, a number that has traditionally been believed by many societies to be magic. Last blog post we looked back at the previous year of 2017. This post let’s look into the very near future of 2018 of a not very well-known author’s life. To be specific, let’s look at this author’s planned resolutions of the new year. My Very Near, Planned Future of 2018 1. Do more live events to promote my books. As I said last post, one of my greatest accomplishments of 2017 was doing my first live ev...