A Far Out Fantastic Site

We’re coming to the close of this first month of the new year and, as we look back, we’ll see that January has been filled with both joy and sadness in sci fi and fantasy culture. Frankenstein 200 th Anniversary The first day of 2018 actually marked the 200 th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein! And the world seems to be celebrating. Universities and other intellectual institutions all over the world are commemorating the event, including the library in my own home area of Sacramento! Even the U. K.’s Royal Mint is making a 2-pound coin that will commemorate the book. However, unlike the U.S. Postal Service with its Frankenstein stamp that it released as part of its Universal Studios Monster collection years ago, the coin won’t bear the image of the Monster as Fortune .com claims. If Fortune is right about this then I suggest that our fellow horror geeks on the British Isles circulate a petition demanding to put the Monster’s image on the coin! ...

Credit: Pixabay.com Yesterday marked the 209 th birthday of the father of American horror, Edgar Allen Poe. So I thought it would be neat to make this post a Poe post to honour him. Although my favorite of Poe’s works are his dark supernatural stories, I thought it was important to emphasise his science fiction which has been historically so underrated. So I’m excerpting from an article I had written several years ago for the online news site, Examiner.com, before it went obsolete. The article was about the Edgar Allen Poe House and Museum in Baltimore which was on the edge of permanently closing down at the time which, fortunately, due to a successful petition (which I sign ed ), ended up not happening. When I wrote the article, I thought it was so important that the Poe House and Museum be preserved because it is both an important landmark to U.S. and pop cultural history. Even though Poe’s imaginative works were often down-criticised and far underrated durin...

Credit: Openclipart.org Well, as you may have noticed, 2018 isn’t getting a good start here at the Far Out Fantastic Site since I missed posting last week. So I apologise for that. It was a busy weekend, and some of us celebrate the holidays as long as six days into the new year and since this isn’t a religious blog I won’t go into details with the exception of a few clues: Magic, Magi and Three Kings. Put them together or do a Google search on all three, which is, by the way, a number that has traditionally been believed by many societies to be magic. Last blog post we looked back at the previous year of 2017. This post let’s look into the very near future of 2018 of a not very well-known author’s life. To be specific, let’s look at this author’s planned resolutions of the new year. My Very Near, Planned Future of 2018 1. Do more live events to promote my books. As I said last post, one of my greatest accomplishments of 2017 was doing my first live ev...

Credit: Pixabay.com I hope everybody’s been enjoying this Holiday Season! I had a groovy Christmas Eve and Day. I was in Fresno during that time visiting the family there. My brother took me and his son to see Star Wars the Last Jedi which was just awesome! And only last night, did I see The Force Awakens on DVD. That is, I saw it for the second time only yesterday since seeing it in the theatre two Christmases ago, also with my brother and his son. (Hey, I think a new Holiday tradition is forming in my family!) Now you’re probably wondering why I’m watching the two movies out of order? Well, I hadn’t actually planned on watching the latest movie until I returned here to Sacramento, because I wanted to refresh myself on Force Awakens first. But since I only see my brother and his family a few times throughout the year, I couldn’t resist an invitation to see a movie like Star Wars with them. But now that I’m back, I’ m watch ing the two movies in order and so will se...

Credit: Pixabay What does a writer of dark fiction like myself write for a Holiday blog post? I’m not really a fan of black Christmas fiction, but I do love the comical holiday fairy tale flick, The Nightmare Before Christmas , as well as other weird Holiday films such as the cheesy Santa Claus Conquers the Martians . But since this is more of a literary fiction blog, I thought I would do something in the line of that. I decided to do terrifying toys in speculative fiction that doesn’t necessarily take place during Christmas. So below is a list of mostly horror stories about terrible toys. And I don’t mean “terrible” as in cheap or defected like the Misfit Toys in Rankin/Bass’s “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer”. I’m talking about terrible toys that the Krampus might bring to naughty boys and girls. Some of them are so terrible that even Krampus may be too nice to bring. Instead he might bring those to evil grownups. The list is in no particular order. 1. “Don’t Ask Jack”, by...

Last week, the FCC did something that any indie author or artist of any sort would never want to see it do: it repealed the net neutrality regulations. These regulations protected fair access to online content that wouldn’t be hindered by big companies paying for faster service. Indie authors and their readers can’t afford this repeal since it will limit access to certain websites on the internet. Doing so will limit access to niche genres of fiction. In general, the absence of net neutrality will cause internet users to have to pay extra for faster access to websites. It will also cause many website owners to have to pay extra to make their content accessible. This puts many indie authors and their readers at a disadvantage because many indie authors don’t have the funds to pay for the faster internet service when promoting their work and many of their readers are in a similar financial situation.  This class preference of internet access can limit the choices for con...

Credit: Pixabay.com I apologise for posting so late again. The Thanksgiving holiday was extra busy for me and last weekend had too many things that needed catching up on. I also was a little ill some of the week but am much better now. I hope all of you had a great Thanksgiving, though. It seems like the holiday was just yesterday and we’re already hurtling toward Christmas! About a week ago, I came across a really neat article on the website Earther entitled “Rare Manuscript Exhibit Explores How Climate Disasters CreateMonsters” . Well, if climate disaster isn’t doing that, some other natural or technological disaster is. The article shows how climate change has influenced not only science fiction but even certain types of fantasy fiction too, especially horror. The author of this article, Maddie Stone, uses examples from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and, believe it or not, Bram Stoker’s Dracula . A lot of science fiction, needless to say, has been influen...