A Far Out Fantastic Site

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 Nevad...

Credit: Pixabay.com To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   We’re already coming to the end of the month and, I’ll admit, I’m behind on distributing Patreon page benefits . And for that reason I may have to reduce the membership prices for November (members are billed on the first of the month). But, because it has not been at the market value for at least a year, I’m also going to have to raise the price on my short fiction collection, “The Fool’s Illusion”, soon. But there’s a way you can get a free copy now and discounted copies after that and I’ll tell you how in a bit. First, I’d like to talk about one of the biggest sci fi news events going right now which is author Alan Dean Foster’s problem with the Disney Co. Alan Dean Foster’s Demand to the Disney Co Alan Dean Foster, the author of numerous books based on the “Star Wars” and “Alien” film franchises, reported to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) that the Disney...

Credit: Pixabay To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   There’s been a lot of big things going on in sci fi and fantasy news this past week! One of the biggest is the announcement of memorialising the late Harlan and Susan Ellison’s  home into a library. But in connection with that is an upcoming volume of an anthology series that features dark and terrifying futuristic fiction that Mr. Ellison had edited, “Dangerous Visions”.  Third and Final Volume In An Anthology Series The new “Dangerous Visions” anthology will be the third and final volume in the series, according to science fiction/fantasy TV writer/producer, J. Michael Straczynski . The first book in the series, “Dangerous Visions”, was published in 1967 and the second, titled “Again, Dangerous Visions”, in 1972, both of which were edited by Harlan Ellison. According to Straczynski, in 1973 a third and final volume, “The Last Dangerous Visions” (LDV), was announced and had a pl...

Credit: Pixabay.com To find out how to read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   Well, Halloween’s come and gone. It was mostly a virtual one for me and so most of my celebrating was online. Except later that evening in my living room when I watched a couple of horror flicks over some oatmeal cream sandwich cookies and diet cola. Still, it was good enough. I hope all of you had a groovy ghoulish Halloween!  NaNoWriMo and My Novella Now we’re into November, and for us writers that is the month of NaNoWriMo ! Although I’m not a novelist and so don’t really participate in the celebration of novel writing, I’m returning to revising my novella, “Invasion of the Avatars”, this month. That’s a novella that I wrote during a NaNoWriMo of several years back . One of the benefits that I offer at my Patreon page are works in progress and, in celebration of NaNoWriMo, I will be offering an excerpt of my novella in progress. So, if you’ve joined or plan to join my Patreon page ...

It’s the first Wednesday of the month 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. The IWSG question for November is: Albert Camus once said, “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” Flannery O’Conner said, “I write to discover what I know.” Authors across time and distance have had many reasons to write. Why do you write what you write? My reasons for writing fiction are to entertain and scare people. As a science fiction and horror writer, I try to write fiction that helps to change the world as well as entertain it. The ancient Greeks used to produce plays to teach morals. Other societies, primitive and ancient, told stories for the same reasons.  Today they say you shouldn’t write fiction to teach anything whether it’s a moral or something else. However, I at least partly d...