A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com Book-to-Movie adaptation news: actually it’s more of a book-to-live musical-to-movie adaptation. Variety announced during the week that the Broadway musical version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , will be adapted to film. Academy Award winner Alexander Dinelaris will be writing and producing the film that will share the same name as the live musical, Jekyll and Hyde . It will be the first full-length feature film produced through Dinelaris’s New York-based studio, Lexicon. The live musical was first performed on Broadway in 1997 and then went abroad. It is partly based on the novel which was adapted for the stage by Frank Wildhorn and Steve Cuden. But I’m in no hurry for it to come to the big screen. The problem I have with horror musicals whether live or on screen is that they take most of the horror out of the story. Staged musicals often have a fantastical element. I mean, after all,...

Credit: Pixabay.com Yesterday’s world-wide youth protest against climate change in no way occurred too soon. Our institutions needed to be wakened and made aware that the beauty spring brings around this time of year may not be around for too many more years if we don’t do something about the destruction to the environment. I was so impressed by the teens who took this stand that I shared a Washington Post article   about it on Facebook. But the news about the protest also got me to look back on what author Kim Stanley Robinson said about acting against climate change in his talk about his newest book, Red Moon , last month at the Avid Reader in Davis, California. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Robinson’s work, he’s an advocate for environmental solutions which much of his science fiction reflects. Several posts back I talked about the various kinds of punk science fiction which solarpunk and ecopunk are two them. Both deal with environmental issues. Yet, R...

Because the movie adaptation of award-winning author Cixin Liu’s short story, The Wandering Earth , is a disaster sci fi film I would see it on the big screen rather than wait for it to come out on DVD or to streaming video. And, when I say “disaster sci fi film”, I mean as in natural and not box office disaster. It’s far from that. At least it is in it’s native China. In fact, the movie did so well there ever since its February 5 th release that it is considered the country’s first science fiction blockbuster .  Unfortunately, I probably won’t be seeing Wandering Earth o n the big screen because it’s had a limited run in the U.S. It is showing in my home region of Sacramento but it’s at a movie theatre opposite of the part I live in and I take public transportation. If I tried taking a a bus there it would probably take me half a day to get there and then half a day to get back to my house! That’s how complicated the bus system can be here in the Sacramento region. So, why...

This is the first post here at the Fantastic Site that will be part of the monthly series of posts connected with the network, The Insecure Writer's Support Group (IWSG) . These posts occur on the first Wednesday of the month. When we were kids we often referred to the characters in the stories we were read as heroes and villains. Many of these stories--such as fairy tales, folk tales and super hero comics--were simplistic so they could be easily understood by us as children. They were made this way so they could communicate a moral. Because of this, the characters were also simplistic and often classified as “heroes” and “villains” or “good guys” and “bad guys”. As adults, however, we often read fiction that is more complex because we have grown to learn that life is more complicated than fairy tales and super hero comics. The characters don’t as clearly represent good or evil because each has both of these qualities. So, as a writer of fiction, I have...