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Best of the Blog:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Mid-Afternoon /
I Appeared as an Extra in the Movie The Itty Bitty Titty Committee /
I Was Mugged in Broad Daylight Right Outside My Apartment /
I Rode My Bicycle at Night Through Skid Row /
I Played Softball With One of the Beastie Boys /
I Hung Out Backstage at Conan O'Brien /
Wil Wheaton Comments on My Blog
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Letters/Comments/Reviews
July 2nd, 2009
Here’s Roger Zelazny telling a few funny anecdotes about Philip K. Dick, from Zelazny’s essay “A Burnt-Out Case?,” which appears in The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Volume 3: This Mortal Mountain:
On collaborating with Philip K. Dick on their novel Deus Irae:
Before I had undertaken this entire collaboration with Phil, I decided I … would learn to write like Phil Dick … I felt that I achieved this; I believe that I can write exactly like Phil Dick if I want to.
But I chose, for my sections of the book, not to use that style. I chose a kind of meta-style, halfway between that and my own style, so my sections would be different enough from Phil’s sections so the book would have a different tone to it.
As I was writing like this over the years, I said to myself, “It’s a shame to be able to write just like Phil Dick … and not do it, at least just once.” So in one scene I plotted it just exactly the way I thought Phil would plot it. I wrote it in Phil’s style exactly, and then the other themes in that section I wrote in the other style. I sent the entire batch of manuscripts off to him, waited a while, and received a letter back, “Roger, that was very good material you sent along, but this one scene you’ve written is sheer genius.”
On missing a Philip K. Dick lecture at a convention in France:
A little later another fellow came in and … said, “Well, in the lecture he said that there are many parallel time tracks and we are on the wrong one, because of the fact that God and the Devil are playing a game of chess, and every time one makes a move it reprograms us to a different time track, and that whenever Phil Dick writes a book it switches us back to the proper track. Could you care to comment on this?”
I begged off. A little later, Phil came into the store to sign some books and sat down beside me at the table. When I had a free moment, I leaned over and said, “Phil, what the hell did you talk about this afternoon?”
Phil said, “I don’t know. It was the strangest thing. You know, I don’t speak French, so I was asked to write out my talk. I provided a copy of my talk and then the fellow translated it into French. I was to read a paragraph and then he was to read a paragraph, and so on. Right before I was to go on, they told me that the talk had to be cut by twenty minutes. So I went through crossing out paragraphs, and so did the translator, but we got mixed up along the way, and he crossed out all the wrong paragraphs. So I don’t know what I said.”
On hanging out with Philip K. Dick at a party:
Phil said, “I have this book, A Scanner Darkly. I have these characters who have been on hard drugs for a long time, and they’re burnt out cases. I wanted to choose a scene which exemplified the extent of their mental deterioration. I had them attempting to figure out the functioning of the gear shift on a ten-speed bicycle.” (Phil always chooses good examples for things.)
So he had written this up and indicated that they were wrong, because this is how the gear shift on a ten-speed bicycle really works. His editor called him: “Phil … A funny thing in this manuscript of yours. I happen to own a ten-speed bicycle. I went out and looked at the gear shift, and — um … you’ve got it wrong yourself.”
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June 21st, 2009
This summer LucasArts is releasing a remake of Ron Gilbert’s The Secret of Monkey Island, the greatest video game of all time (along with its sequel Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge).
Monkey Island was inspired by the Tim Powers novel On Stranger Tides, and the subsequent Pirates of the Caribbean films were so obviously influenced by Monkey Island that Ron Gilbert joked on his blog about being mystified that his royalty check from Disney hadn’t yet arrived. The game also features a brilliant insult swordfighting mini-game with insults written by Orson Scott Card.
Recently a younger relative of mine asked me if I play video games. I told him I used to play a lot, but don’t any more, because they stopped making the kind of games that were my favorite, adventure games, and after a while I just got bored with the other kinds of games I used to like, shooters and rpgs, because really how many hundreds of hours can you spend killing monsters before it just gets old? This young man didn’t even know what an adventure game was. I tried to explain that in adventure games you would have a character and you would explore and pick up items and talk to people and solve puzzles. His friend said, “Like Zelda?” And I said, “Yeah, sort of. Except in Zelda you spend 95% of your time killing things and 5% of your time solving puzzles and talking to people. In an adventure game you would spend 0% of your time killing things and 100% of your time solving puzzles and talking to people.”
I keep hoping that adventure games will make a comeback someday. If you’ve never played Monkey Island before and you own a PC or XBox, definitely keep an eye out for this new version.
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June 20th, 2009
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June 20th, 2009
The Daily Show’s John Hodgman interrogates President Obama on his geek cred at the TV & Radio Correspondents’ Dinner.
My favorite line: “The Constitution is perhaps the most geeky document of all time. It is essentially the Frequently Asked Questions list of the United States, that was written by moneyed, sickly, bookish, bifocal-wearing nerds who believed that God was a distant, uncaring Dungeon Master.”
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June 16th, 2009
Rachel Maddow and Richard Engel on MSNBC:
Rachel Maddow: Are we likely to see the amount of video that we’re getting of what’s happening in Iran decline over the next few days as Western sources are kicked out?
Richard Engel: That will to some degree happen, but what the Iranian crackdown is — it’s very old-fashioned — they want to control the media so they’re cutting off phones and they’re kicking out established reporters and harassing reporters. That’s a very, if you will, 1980s, 1990s way of a media crackdown. It has not helped them control the information war. Already online if you look on sites like YouTube there’s more than 3,500 videos that have been posted by demonstrators — that’s videos — plus tens of thousands of pictures, in addition to all the information that they’re exchanging on sites like Twitter … And this is the class of people that are much more savvy. The Revolutionary Guards, and the establishment of the state, it’s not really a very technologically savvy group, versus the students, the intellectuals, the moderates, the … the geeks, if you will.
Rachel Maddow: Yay for the geeks! The revolutionary geeks.
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June 14th, 2009
Tonight I caught a screening of the new sci-fi flick Moon (which featured a Q&A with director Duncan Jones).
Moon stars Sam Rockwell as the lone inhabitant of a lunar station who’s just wrapping up an arduous three-year contract when weird stuff starts happening to him. The movie is well-done and enjoyable, but nothing you haven’t seen a million times before. I also had a lot of scientific/plausibility issues. On the other hand, Sam Rockwell gives a good performance and the visuals are nice, especially considering the budget was only five million.
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June 7th, 2009
Okay, here’s a pretty funny YouTube channel: The Irate Gamer.
I particularly recommend his videos about Ghosts & Goblins (the most outrageously, unfairly difficult game ever made; I think I spent about as much time hurling this cartridge against the wall in fury as I did actually playing it — and wait until you see how preposterously cheap the game becomes in its impossible-to-reach final levels), Super Mario Bros. 2 (turns out the reason this game is so different from other Mario titles is because Nintendo just took an existing Japanese game, changed the hero sprites to Mario & friends, and sold it in the US as a Mario game), and E.T. (legendary as the worst video game ever made — it single-handedly destroyed the company Atari, who was forced to bury five million unsold and returned copies of this game in the New Mexico desert).
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June 6th, 2009
Over on SciFiWire there’s an article 7 ‘Unfilmable’ Sci-Fi Books —- And the Filmmakers Who Could Adapt Them. In the comments thread, several people suggest a film version of Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. I don’t know how many people know this story, but there was a Lord of Light film adaptation in the works at one point. From Wikipedia:
In 1979 it was announced that Lord of Light would be made into a 50 million dollar film. It was planned that the sets for the movie would be made permanent and become the core of a science fiction theme park to be built in Aurora, Colorado. Famed comic-book artist Jack Kirby was even contracted to produce artwork for set design. However, due to legal problems the project was never completed.
Parts of the unmade film project, the script and Kirby’s set designs, were subsequently acquired by the CIA as cover for an exfiltration team posing as Hollywood location scouts in Tehran in order to rescue six US diplomatic staff who escaped the Iranian hostage crisis by virtue of being outside the Embassy building at the time.
There’s an interview on YouTube with one of the CIA men who took part in the operation, and there’s a detailed article about it here.
Jack Kirby’s Concept Art for the Lord of Light Film
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June 5th, 2009
I just saw that Daniel Abraham’s story “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” is now online. This was one of my favorite stories that I read in my contributor’s copy of Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008 (see “Save Me Plz”). “The Cambist and Lord Iron” originally appeared in John Klima’s anthology Logorrhea, which invited contributors to submit stories inspired by winning spelling bee words. For me, one measure of a great story is that it motivates you to recount the entire plot to people who haven’t read it. I’ve retold “The Cambist and Lord Iron” to several lucky people, including my mom. But I hadn’t gotten very far into my telling when she said, “You’ve told me this story before.” I declared that I hadn’t. She insisted that I had. I insisted that I hadn’t. She said, “Well, I’ve definitely heard this story before.” She then realized that my dad had read the story and that he had already retold the whole thing to her. So that’s how good this story is. Check it out.
ETA: There’s a podcast version as well.
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June 2nd, 2009
Here’s the (beautiful) cover of the first issue of the newly-relaunched Realms of Fantasy magazine.
This is the first issue for which my good buddy Doug Cohen is serving as art director.
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