A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay Can you believe we’ve arrived at another holiday season and the end of the year? It seems like each year goes by so fast! There are all kinds of great stuff to look forward to at this time of year: time with family and friends, good holiday food, gifts. But it's more about the giving than the getting. But the giving can really deplete your bank account, especially if you're like me and have a big family. Well, that's when you look towards the holiday sales. One of many of those is Smashwords' End of Year Book Sale in which my books are participating in! Want something chilling to read during this holiday season? You'll find mine and plenty of other authors' books of science fiction and horror at that sale! And if that's not enough, check out the list of links to holiday horror reading and viewing below!  Smashwords End of Year Sale Is the holiday shopping making your money vault go low? Well, from now through January 1, you can find my books ...

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: Wikimedia Commons All this week I’ve been trying to catch up on my writing projects, especially my upcoming short story collection. I had lost a lot of writing time while I was in the hospital for several weeks. So for the past week I’ve been mostly writing the first draft of a story I want to include in the book. I’ll keep you updated on the collection but in this post I want to talk about Rob Zombie’s upcoming movie reboot of the 1960s sitcom, “The Munsters”. And I can tell you right now that I probably won’t be seeing it when it releases.  Some of you, especially if you’re a fan of popular movie monsters of the mid 20th century like me, are probably familiar with “The Munsters”. It was a TV sitcom about a family based on some of Universal’s classic monsters such as Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula. The series ran from 1964 to 66. During that same year that it was canceled, a movie directly based on it called “Munster, Go Home” released in theatres. In later decades, a ...

Credit: Pixabay.com I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and are looking forward to the holidays. Me? I had a great, but very busy Thanksgiving with the family and so had to skip a weekend of posting. As far as the holidays go--I’m getting there. What I’m looking forward to right now, though, is the new science fiction-horror series that premieres this Sunday night on the SyFy channel, Nightflyers ! George R.R. Martin’s Nightflyers Nightflyers is based on a novella by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. According to the LA Times , he novella actually had two versions , the shorter version which was published in 1980 and an expanded version published three years later.   Then in 1987 a movie based on it came out but, because it got so scant of an audience ,   it fell into oblivion. It fell into oblivion to everybody e xcept those who are into B-rated and cult films such as myself although I haven’t seen this one. Neither have I read ei...

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 A...

 Brazilian artist Henrique Avim Correa's  illustration   for a  1906  edition of Wells's War of the Worlds. Photo Credit: Henrique Avim Correa/Wikimedia Commons I said I’ve been wanting to discuss minorities of colour in speculative fiction and what prompted me to do that was this really interesting article entitled “Will It Get Better for Black People In the Horror Genre?” at Blackgirlnerds .com. The author, Valerie Complex, talks about how blacks are often portrayed poorly in horror. She says if they don’t play in stereotypical roles such as maids, janitors and gangbangers in film and television then their characters often get killed off early. I read Complex’s article just after I saw Jurassic World last month, which was a good enough movie considering that it was a popcorn flick. But the article reminded me how annoyed I was with the movie for its treatment of characters of colour because what happens to them is the exact sort of thing C...

Been very busy this week and exhausted so I'm not posting much this time.  I'll be back next week with more, possibly with a movie review. I saw, for the first time, The Avengers today (Saturday)! As you may have known, it re-released on the big screen for the Labor Day weekend. So if you haven't seen it yet and you like super heroes, especially Marvel's, I strongly suggest you see it.  I'm not sure how much longer it's going to play on the big screen (probably not much longer). So if I have a review next week it will most likely be on that. If I don't have a review next week . . . well, I'll have a review some week for sure but will definitely have something really neat for you here at the Fantastic Site next week!  You can follow me at https://twitter.com/Starosep2  if you like.  I get on there at least once or twice a week. Sometimes more. I also put a couple of share buttons in the right-hand column here, so you can't say it's too inconven...

As we all know, the premiere night (early Friday morning) of  The Dark Knight Rises  really was a dark night for an auditorium of movie viewers in Aurora, Colorado. My sympathies go out to the victims, including the wounded, and their families of the attack. Many headlines have been indicating the shootings as movie fantasy having become horrid reality. Sadly, those headlines are true. Along with this, there have been fears of people wanting to blame movies with violence such as "Dark Knight Rises" for these killings. But the majority of media hasn't even been likening the gunman to the star character of Christopher Nolan's third and supposedly final installment of his Batman movie series.The media's been likening the shooter to the Joker of the previous film. Batman has never even used a gun, perhaps save once or twice in all his crime fighting career. He has been known to prefer fighting without fire arms. Batman is a symbol of justice, though in a very grim w...

Photo Credit: Thayne Multimedia Productions/Wikimedia Commons It looks like a lot of you liked my final concept sketch for my book cover. Thanks, all of you who left me those great compliments/Facebook Likes. Now that I've finished the final concept sketch, my next step is to make the final drawing, complete in full colour and detail. I really want to get this book out and available to you. There may even be a contest where you can win a free book cover promotion poster for The Fool's Illusion ! So stay tuned! If you're in the Sacramento area, then I suggest you take a look at my " This Weekend " schedule of sci fi/fantasy events going on in the area this weekend of the 13th to the 15th.  Speaking about the 13th, "Are you superstitious" as Stevie Wonder sings in his famous song? I'm not superstitious, but this past Friday the 13th wasn't a very good day for me. And 13 is my lucky number! (Yeah, right. I just said I'm not superstitiou...

Hi, everybody. Last weekend I said I would have at least an excerpt of my ghost story posted here. Only a couple minutes ago I was going to post an excerpt, but when I looked over the story it was still too much of a mess to show anybody. It's very short so I thought it would be better if I the just post the whole thing next weekend when it's all cleaned up. I've been revising an article of an interview I did with an editor of an online literary magazine called The Horror Zine. That's right, it's entitled exactly what it is. And there's a story behind how the founder and editor, Jeani Rector, named it in the article which I hope to have up at Examiner.com by the middle of next week. So keep checking back at my sci fi news page there and I'll definitely let you know in next weekend's blog post whether I have the article up yet. But It was a real pleasure to interview Miss Rector; she's a very interesting, very hardworking and very nice person. Yo...

Paramount Pictures Sorry for not posting in such a long while, everyone. I've probably said this before but will say it again, I've had several writing projects going on and so haven't had time to post here more frequently. But in those times of waiting please feel free to look at my other stuff at Examiner.com , in which my most recent article was posted there only a few days ago. But here's film review I wrote especially for all of you who like visiting this site particularly. Directors Kenneth Branagh and Joss Whedon's Thor is Marvel Comics’ first big screen movie adaptation of a comic book based on a super hero of ancient myth. Yet while the movie sticks to the root elements of the Norse mythic origins, it also portrays the title character (played by Chris Hemsworth) through the science fiction genre of story telling like most super hero comic books have done. So as with the comic book series it is adapted from, Thor uses the elements of both fantasy and scien...

I just wanted to be sure to make this birthday wish to a TV/movie star who has not only been a favorite science fiction actor of mine, but a favorite actor and performer of mine period. Besides his performance in the Star Trek franchise, there have been countless other movies and television series that his work has been absolutely fantastic in. One of these is the hosting and narrating he did in the 1970s paranormal/strange phenomena documentary TV series In Search of . . . So . . . Happy Birthday, Leonard "Mr. Spock" Nimoy ! and may you continue to live long and prosper.