A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay Often, I try to mark my summers with a big screen movie. Summers are magical and they especially were when we were kids. And they’re still magical for us adult artists, and that includes writers. I remember my summer from when I was 9 because that’s when “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” premiered (1980) and my dad took my kid brother and I to see it.  Even bad movies served as a landmark, or maybe more like a “timemark”, for some of my summers when I was a kid. I won’t forget how unamusing the fourth “Jaws” film, “Jaws: The Revenge”, was when I saw it on the big screen during the summer (1987) just before my junior year of high school. Still, it was an event that I shared with my younger brother that was characteristic of summer. Of course, I thought I would like the movie and so that’s why we went to see it. So even now as an adult, every summer I’ll go see a movie that I think I’ll like and then remember the summer for it regardless of whether I liked it or no...

Credit: Pixabay.com TOR, publisher of science fiction and fantasy books, has been a venue for new and upcoming speculative fiction writers, especially through its website, TOR.com. Not only have unknown writers made a name for themselves when publishing on the website but also when TOR has licensed the electronic version of their books to libraries. However, TOR has been doing less of that lately. They put an embargo on libraries’ lending of newly published e-books back in July and so a library cannot loan them out until four months after their release. The reason for this embargo is, as TOR claims, to test the impact on sales from library e-book lending . Librarians, however, have done their own study of such impact and say it is small and insignificant, according to Publishers Weekly . Publishers Weekly itself says that potential sales impact on an author-by-author basis is small. So not even the authors of these books are financially hurting. So maybe it has m...

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons     I thought I was going to have an article at Examiner.com on the Centennial of Tarzan about a week from this Monday. It’s actually going to be a little earlier than that. Even though the downtown library in Sacramento originally scheduled the centennial event for Labor Day weekend they moved it to this weekend instead. This was apparently due to a recent decision to close the library for the entire Labor Day weekend due to lack of funds and so having to furlough the staff for that weekend.   Well, at least it gives the library staff a weekend off which they definitely deserve (aside from not being paid). Where would this country be without our public librarians and their supporting staff? Literacy would be a much more elitist activity, now wouldn’t it? So maybe library work isn’t laborious work (at least not for the librarians) but it’s still a lot of work with a lot of complications and they don’t get praised or appreciated ...

Last week's post was about the Poe house and museum under threat of closure due to lack of funding. I talk about it a little more in my latest Examiner.com article , but not a whole lot, mind you. However, what I do talk about a whole lot more is Poe's science fiction. What? You didn't know Poe wrote science fiction in addition to his many horror stories of the supernatural? Well then you need to read a lot more of his work! I mention a few of Poe's science fiction titles in the article, but you can find more titles by checking Amazon.com for Harold Beaver's The Science Fiction of Edgar Allen Poe and either purchase this collection of Poe's sci fi stories or look at the table of contents in the book's virtual sample pages and see what those titles are. If you go the first route, you'll have a very informing and insightful introduction and commentary by the editor to read. If you go the second route then you can read the stories in a complete wor...

They say the Recession is dying out, and that may be true in a sense, but most of us would agree that we're still seeing the impact. Many of us would agree that we're still feeling the impact! The sad thing is that what has really been getting cut or at least threatened to be cut are many art and literary programs. Many public libraries have had to reduce their hours which has been definitely the case with the one in my town of the Woodland. In addition to libraries, museums have been closing up and that includes the closing of one of Davis, California's Explorit Science Center locations. Further out from my home area of Sacramento--like way, way out--a museum is in danger of having its doors closed and that is the Edgar Allen Poe museum in Baltimore, Maryland. This includes the Father of American horror's house that he resided in when he was alive and living in Baltimore. This would be really sad to see these literary historical sights shut down for eternity and God ...

Last week’s Sacramento News and Review contains an article about a war protest that occurred a couple weekends ago at the Sacramento Central Library. But it wasn’t so much a protest against a real war than it was a war game. The article states that the activist groups Veterans for Peace and Grandmothers for Peace protested the video gaming event Nerd Fest’s Call of Duty tournament. According to the article, the protesters felt that Call of Duty was encouraging war and violence. But the game has an M (“Mature”) rating and so is limited to the 17 and older crowd in its sales and at its tournaments such as Nerd Fest’s, as the article indicates. That, at least to an extent, solves the problem of influence on minors. However, according to SN&R , what the protesters were really speaking against was the library, a place of educational and intellectual activity, promoting the game and in so doing promoting war and violence. Therefore they were saying that the tournament ...