Went to see Melies Trip to the Moon, and Kubrick’s 2001 at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Sci Fi Movie Night, and was treated to the world premiere of a song about our Solar planets,
This year at Boskone, there were some interesting panels, great painting demos by Bob Eggleton and Omar Rayyan, and a nice gallery of paintings from Boskones past and present alongside works by the Artist GOH, Dean Morrissey. Anthropology, SF, and Chad Oliver The first panel I attended was on the works of Chad Oliver, the great anthropologist / SF author from Texas. Amy Thomson, whose work on the encounters between humans and aliens (and between robot girl and humans) remarked that, in fact, she was not influenced by Oliver before writing the Color of Distance and Through Alien Eyes, and only came to appreciate the anthropological aspects of Oliver’s science fiction in retrospect. George Zebrowski told of his long working relationship with Chad Oliver. When he worked with Crown Books as editor for their Classics of Modern Science Fiction series in the mid-1980s, Zebrowski was asked what the first ten volumes should be, and he told them that the three of those ten should include Chad Oliver’s novels: Shores of Another Sea, Shadows of the Sun, and Unearthly Neighbors. Three out of ten? By the same author! Was Zebrowski out of his mind? But, in fact, Crown ended up supporting the suggestion and those novels did appear as the 3rd, 8th, and 9th volumes in the series.
When I logged on tonight, I planned to announce the release of teKML software package, but now that seems trivial compared to the sad news…that Steve Gerber has passed away. For those who didn’t expe
Okay, it’s not exactly a panel, but it is sort of weird… And it did clue me into the some arcane tidbits of film history. For example, I didn’t even know about the fifteen part-serial Nyoka, the Jungle Girl (1941), which claimed to be based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs 1929 novel, Jungle Girl, even though ERB’s book takes place in Cambodia, and Nyoka (“snake” in Swahili) is clearly set in the Hollywood mythos Africa.
As if the mere thought of an annoying robot fly isn’t enough, we now have the real thing, thanks to Dr. Robert Wood at Harvard’s Microrobotics Laboratory. Check
DBR Podcast 2 - Memoirs of a Revolutionist. An excerpt from Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs describing the ideals of young socialists in Russia during
After lengthy consideration, I finally shelled out for some recording gear, so that I could produce audio content. You can see the complete set up for Diamond Bay Radio in the photo above. The basic
An excerpt from Wiktor Woroszylski’s Life of Mayakovsky (1970), in which Mayakovsky meets Berliuk for the first time and also composes his first poem. The setting is Moscow, 1911, at the School of Pai
Yet another delightful find on my recent trip to Berlin, was a pamphlet I found when I stopped into the Zeughaus Kino to see what movies were showing that night. They happened to be in the middle of