A Far Out Fantastic Site

I apologise for having to skip the Book-To-Movie review again this month. Having published "Bad Apps" and now preparing it for print has been keeping me busier than I thought. I've also been doing some promotion swag work for "Bad Apps": bookmarks. I spent the previous week creating the bookmark and then getting it printed at a Kinkos in Davis (CA) near where I live. I had to cut the prints myself which wasn't very hard but altogether was time consuming. The promotional bookmark for my new book of short stories, "Bad Apps". I would have left the bookmarks for another time, but I wanted to distribute them at the first Sinister Horror Book Fair which occurred Sunday at a Scottish Rite centre near Sacramento State University. This book fair was put on by the same people who do Sinister Creature Con, a horror movie and TV convention that occurs twice a year. It was the first book fair they did and it seemed to do really well and I hope they'll do ...

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 Cloning has been a theme in a lot of science fiction and horror. However, it became a reality more than ever during the past week with a ferret clone. Also new this week is the announcement of a remake of the ‘80s movie, “The Running Man”. (Yes, another remake. Or is it?) Dead Ferret Cloned Into a Live One This week the ideas of “Frankenstein” and “Jurassic Park” became more science fact than science fiction. Thursday, the US Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS) disclosed to the world that they successfully cloned a black-footed ferret that had been dead for more than 30 years. The ferret’s cells had been frozen through the decades. Then, recently, scientists developed an embryo from them and placed it in a living ferret that, in turn, gave birth to the clone Elizabeth Ann. She is the first clone of an endangered North American species. CNN   says that scientists cloned the dead ferret for reasons of rescuing the black-footed species from going extinct. FWS plans to...

It’s the third weekend of the month and so it’s time for another Book-To-Movie review! [link] In a Book-To-Movie we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. This month’s Book-To-Movie is a review of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars and the Disney movie adaptation. And as I said I would in the previous blog post , I also have a mini movie review for you of Doctor Sleep , the new movie based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name! Book-To-Movie: ‘A Princess of Mars’/’John Carter’ Credit: Wikimedia Commons Warning: Potential spoilers. Even though it didn’t become the pop cultural icon that his Tarzan character did, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter series of books has influenced several of the best-known science fiction writers of all time, including Ray Bradbury . The first of this 11-book series, A Princess of Mars , was published in 1912 as a serial under the title of “The Moon of Mars” in All-Story Magazine . It was one of the ear...

Credit: Universal Studios/Pixabay.com What got me reading classic horror and sci fi novels such as Frankenstein and Dracula was their Universal movie adaptations. I grew up watching these films on television when I was a kid and because of that became interested in reading the books. That’s why I’m excited to hear that Universal is planning to produce several remakes of its classic horror films one of which has already been given a director. Universal Monster Movie Remakes According to Variety , Leigh Whannell has been hired to direct and write the script to the remake of Universal’s The Invisible Man . The movie, based on H.G. Wells’s novel of the same name, is part of a plan to remake several of Universal’s classic monster films, a plan that has moved away from a previous one that was to interconnect Universal monster characters under one story arc called the “Dark Universe”. Even though it has not been said which movies beyond The Invisible Man wi...

Credit: Pixabay.com No doubt that there’s been some big Star Wars news this week! Friday was the 41st anniversary of the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope , and so the birthday of the entire franchise. The day before, Solo: A Star Wars Story released in theatres. I haven’t seen this new Star Wars film yet but plan to tomorrow. But in celebration of the new movie I thought it would be neat to list four of my favourite space opera books that’s central characters share the same swashbuckling, rogue archetype as the Han Solo character does. Han Solo’s archetype, or primal character-type, combines traits of the cowboy, the pirate and the wandering adventurer. Characters who have these traits are often loners of a sort, are daring and don’t let the law stop them from doing what they feel they have to. Often the legal system that they defy is one that is set up by a corrupt establishment and, in the case of space operas, that establishment is often an empire. Even tho...

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com As global warming continues to rise like the very oceans it causes to, today's science fiction reflects the issue more than ever. It attempts to anticipate what could happen if we don't reduce global warming and its causes. One of the authors who are most known for doing this is Kim Stanley Robinson. Best known for his award-winning Mars Trilogy of novels, his latest work that directly addresses the global warming issue is Green Earth  which is a trilogy of earlier novels combined into one. I had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Robinson speak at UC Davis's Whole Earth Festival back in 2013 when he read from his novel,  Shaman . I spoke about it in an article in my "Life, the Earth and the Universe" post back then. He is giving another presentation, this time on his  Green Earth , Sunday the 10th of April from noon to 1 at the Sacramento Central Library, in Sacramento California. If you're in the area and plan to attend, you mu...

I hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving. Mine was groovy. I just spent it with the family, which is good enough for me. I was sure to look out for giant man-eating turkeys and I hope everybody else did too. It was a super day of giving thanks for the many good things we have, which is often a lot more than we think. So many people think too much about what they don’t have. Some think they don’t have enough money, enough friends, enough recognition . . . The list can go on. But you can add to that list that some feel there’s not enough high quality science fiction literature out there. That may be true to some extent. One person who feels that sci fi literature for the past two decades has been poor, in the science part particularly, has a website out that addresses the problem. That website is called Atomic Rockets which you can check out at http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/ . It is a resource for both science fiction writers as well as readers who want accurate science ...

Halloween is one of my all-time favourite holidays and we're more than a week into the month of October. So your ghoulru has decided to conjure up this list of Halloween-related events happening now in the Sacramento area where he is broadcasting this blog from. I know many of you are not from here, but I have a couple links that might be of use to you that may direct you to some special Halloween events near you. A list of Halloween Events   Sacramento Horror Film Festival , Oct. 9 – 11: Yes, that's right. This festival of fearful films by indie directors is going on right now! It was started back in 2007 and has been going since. It shows both feature and short films. Sacramento Area Authors talk about their post-apocalypticnovel , Oct. 16: Authors Louis Grivetti and Sargent Reynolds talk about their latest novel, The Cave , set in a post-apocalyptic future, at The Avid Reader bookstore in Davis. But no zombies in this one (unless they make a surprise appearance; ...

I've been trying to dedicate the weekend to finishing revising my current short story because I plan to include it in my upcoming book of fiction, The Hidden . And can you believe I haven’t even touched the story in all day and it’s already past 10 in the evening? That’s because life in this country is run by an institution that has little concern for the artist as much as he/she is trying to make money off of their work. The institution: the economy. So I’ve been trying to meet that institution’s inevitable demands. And because I’m trying to squeese dedication to my short story into this weekend, I decided to take it a little easy with this week's post and give you some . . . Far Out Fantastic Finds 1)       “ io9 Newsstand: Speculative Fiction Is All AboutKeeping It Real (and Sometimes Surreal) "   2)          Boise Public Library's Comic Con A public library in Boise, Idaho had their annual comic book ...

It’s been a very busy week for me although a neat one. Even though really heavy writing of articles for clients while trying to squeeze in writing a new short story has been wearing me out, I came across some interesting things throughout the week. Two of them I found on Memorial Day Monday at Beer’s Books in Sacramento. Beer’s is one of the biggest used-book stores in the Sacramento area. You can almost find any book you can think of: anything from an early 20 th century hardcover to 1950s pulps to newly printed books. Well, for the last three weeks I had been on a mad hunt for a copy of a book by Philip K. Dick, ideally a collection of his short works but I would have been happy with one of his novels. I’ve read his Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the novel that the movie Blade Runner was based on) and A Penultimate Truth , plus one or two of his short stories from books I checked out at the library years ago. So I wouldn’t say I’ve been well-read in Phillip K. Dick, though...