A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com One of the funniest Easter moments was when I was six and painted an egg to look like the title character of the movie, Phantom of the Paradise (the ‘70s rock version of Phantom of the Opera ). When my family had the Easter egg hunt for us, a cousin of mine, who seemed to always find the most eggs out of all us kids, found the egg I painted. I got mad at her because I wanted to find it first, so I yanked at her basket and shouted, “Give me that! That’s mine! That’s my ‘Phantom’ egg!” My parents stopped me from snagging it, though, thank God! That egg must’ve been my first geeky Easter egg before I even new what a nerd or geek. Unfortunately, no one took a picture of it so I can’t show it to you. But one of the sci fi “Easter Egg” articles in the list I’ve provided below has a photo gallery of some very groovy and geeky eggs! The egg in both Christian and Pagan cultures has traditionally represented new life. But, in a way, it’s beginning to re...

Of course authors have to read their own work in order to revise it. But do they read their own work after it’s been published? To put it another way, do they become one of the ir reader s ? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. However, I’m one that doesn’t. I may have only read one of my published stories once and that was probably the first fiction work I published. It’s entitled “Strange Phenomena” which now appears in my short fiction collection, The Fool’s Illusion . Before that, I published it in an anthology of myth themed stories and poems, called Leafkin , Volume 2, which is unfortunately out of print. If I read it in that anthology, if I’m remembering correctly, that’s because I wanted to see how it read in its published format. Since then, I haven’t had time to read my own work post-publication. In my experience, by the time your story gets published you know it too well to where you don’t want to read it anymore. After the numerous revisions you’ve gone through on ...

The robot, Maria, from the 1927 silent film "Metropolis". Credit: Pixabay.com I apologise for missing a month’s worth of posts. Some unexpected events occurred within the last several weeks. One of these was a cold that put me out for a week. All of this put a hiatus on my writing projects and even on my creative energy. With the exception of journal writing and typing up some manuscripts, I wasn’t writing a lot and just didn’t feel up to it. In fact, there were a couple points where I thought, what use is it? But writing, especially science fiction and horror, is basically an inborn inclination for me and so sooner or later it sparks up again. One of the other things, however, that has made me question my writing is the outdating of science fiction. I’m not just talking about the outdatedness of sci fi from 30 to 70 years ago; I’m not simply talking about stories from the 1930s through ‘50s of tin can robots or rockets traveling to nearby planets. I’m talking...

Credit: Pixabay.com This weekend saw the release of the Black Panther movie which I plan to see Monday (since that’s a holiday). That is, if I can find a copy of the 1970 issue, number 74, of Avengers that co-stars the African super hero and read it by tomorrow. I just finished reading the previous issue that I purchased a couple of weeks ago not knowing it was going to be a two-parter. I don’t like to simultaneously watch a movie and read a book (including comic book) involving the same character since doing so causes me to confuse the storylines. But the movie, Black Panther , is perfect timing—February is Black History Month. It’s great to see more science fiction stories featuring black characters, since the genre has traditionally been very white. There are a lot of great African-American sci fi and fantasy writers and not just in recent times. There are ones going as far back as, believe it or not, the beginning of the 20 th century with W...

Credit: Pixabay.com We finally have the winter weather back, since for the last week here in Sacramento we’ve been getting a pre-mature spring. Extreme sunlight in the winter always seems to throw me off balance. I almost thought I was going to have to start sleeping days for a while there! While most people seem to hate the winter because of the gray skies and the cold weather, I love it. Anything other than those here in Nor Cal is a damned sign of global warming which always scares me. But now that we have the clouds and blustering wind back, I’m in the mood for the Winter Games which I started watching last night. And I’m also in the mood for some Nuclear Winter Names of stories that are set in winter or arctic settings! These settings add to the chills of the plots. So I came up with a list of eight of, what I think are, the best horror and sci fi stories set in those environments. And in no way is it an exhausted list; these are just ones that I’ve read and liked so f...

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...