I just came across this really neat illustration of Queen Moire of Rebma, a character from Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. This piece was painted years ago by artist Stephen Hickman and was intended to be the cover art for a sadly never-released supplement for the Amber role-playing game. I love the way the artist painted the billowing hair and the play of refracted light. See a larger version at the RPGsite forums.
Archives for November 2009
Robert Holdstock, Food Inc.
I just saw the terrible news that highly-respected fantasy author Robert Holdstock has died from E. coli, at just 61 years old.
For a few days now I’ve been meaning to post something about the new documentary Food Inc., which relates in sickening detail how hazardous our food has become. The film profiles a young mother whose toddler was killed by eating an E. coli-contaminated hamburger. This woman subsequently became a consumer protection advocate and has struggled for years to enact common-sense legislation that would restore to the FDA the power to shut down facilities that repeatedly produce deadly food. According to the film, the agro-business industry is so massively rich and powerful that they can stifle any regulation, sue anyone who says anything the industry doesn’t like (even Oprah Winfrey, who lost a million dollars in legal fees defending herself against them), and is even agitating for laws banning journalists from taking pictures of modern factory farms — and it’s easy to understand why, when you watch some of the revolting footage in this movie.
My Profile at deviantART
I just set up a deviantART profile and posted some of my drawings there. Anyone else on the site? If so, friend me.
While there, I came across this cool story: deviantArtist to Work With Simpsons! Basically, an amateur artist posted a really cool manga-style illustration of the cast of The Simpsons. The image became super-popular, and eventually attracted the notice of Bongo Comics (founded by Matt Groening), who hired the artist to do some work for them. She was also contacted by 20th Century Fox about potentially working on a Futurama relaunch.
Yves Rossy Jetpack
The Living Dead Bookstore Photo
So I just popped into Borders bookstore in Palo Alto for the first time since March and this is what I saw. Wow, the zombie virus is spreading exponentially.
Doug Cohen Promoted to Editor of Realms of Fantasy Magazine
Congrats to my buddy Doug Cohen on his recent promotion to Editor of Realms of Fantasy magazine. Shawna McCarthy will be staying on as Fiction Editor, but Doug will be handling most other duties, including the slush reader, art director, and managing editor roles.
Doug Cohen in his new, more powerful form |
Intergalactic Medicine Show Howard Lyon Art
The new issue of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show is out and the cover features just a drop-dead gorgeous illustration by Howard Lyon for Mary Robinette Kowal‘s story “Body Language.” Check it out:
Zombie Panel Graphic Novel
There’s now a (not at all embellished) graphic novel adaptation of the Zombie Encounter panel I moderated back in October for the Science Fiction Society of Northern New Jersey. Thanks to Mike Schneider (lead creator on Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated) and Dorian Bachman for putting this together.
Doomsday Film Festival 2009 Photos
Here are some photos from the Doomsday Film Festival. The first shot is me with my co-panelists John Langan (House of Windows), John Joseph Adams (The Living Dead), and David Wellington (Monster Island).
McNally Jackson Halloween Party 2009 Photos
Here are some photos from my Halloween night appearance at McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan, where I was joined by Kenneth C. Davis (Sigmund Freud below), author of Don’t Know Much About History, who gave a short talk on the origins of Halloween. Other costumes pictured include Humbert Humbert & Lolita and Sylvia Plath & her oven. Thanks to The Desk Set for snapping these pictures.
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Symphony of Science
Symphony of Science is a cool site launched by John Boswell to promote science through music. Listen to the hauntingly beautiful “We Are All Connected,” which uses autotuning software to create a sort of trance/rap tune out of snippets of lectures by luminaries such as Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye.
Manga Contests for Teens
Anyone know of any contests/opportunities for young, aspiring manga artists? I just got this email from someone who came across my Teen Writers site:
Hi Dave,
I have a 13-year-old daughter who has always been a talented artist. She goes through phases of interest and works on perfecting different styles of art.
This year she has been working on something called Manga (sp?). Her pictures are very sci-fi looking combined with the manga style of characters. This weekend she brought me a script she has been writing for her comic she is developing and it blew me away. I have never been interested in this kind of writing or art, but I loved the story! I didn’t even know she could write like that!
Can you tell me if there is any kind of art/writing contest for this style of work? I have always been supportive, but more hands off than anything when it comes to her art and other interests, but this needs to be shared with others who love this kind of stuff. I have no idea which way to point her.
Thanks for any advice you can give!
The Outer Limits Quality of Mercy Robert Patrick
Edited 12/20/11: Unfortunately this episode is no longer online.
Speaking of The Twilight Zone, I just noticed that my favorite episode of The Outer Limits from the ’90s is now online. (With ads, unfortunately.) It’s called “Quality of Mercy,” and stars Robert Patrick (Terminator 2, The X-Files) as a captured star pilot who shares a cell with a female cadet who’s being subjected to genetic experiments that are slowly transforming her into one of the hideous aliens that Earth is at war with.
This was the first episode of The Outer Limits I ever saw, and it blew me away, so much so that for the next year or so I tried to catch the show whenever I could, which wasn’t easy because it was on at some ridiculous time — I think Sunday nights at 1 a.m. This was while I was in college, and I didn’t have a TV, so I’d be sitting there in the lounge at 1 a.m. watching TV and sometimes someone would walk by and look in on me and just be like, “What the hell are you doing?” And I’d be like, “It’s The Outer Limits, man! It’s awesome.” Unfortunately, aside from this one episode, none of the others I saw were really all that good.
Richard Kelly’s The Box, The Twilight Zone, Richard Matheson’s “Button, Button”
Anyone seen The Box? It’s the new film from Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko). I’m trying to decide whether to go see it, and the reviews are pretty mixed.
It’s an adaptation of one of my all-time favorite TV episodes, “Button, Button,” part of the ’80s Twilight Zone revival that I used to watch all the time as a kid. The premise is that a mysterious man appears at the door of a married couple in financial difficulty and offers them a box with a button on it. If they press the button, they get a huge sum of money and a total stranger — they don’t know who — dies. It’s one of the best pure “idea” stories I’ve ever seen, and the ending is perfect.
Years later I read a Richard Matheson collection and came across the short story that inspired the episode, and was very excited … until I got to the end. The ending of the short story is completely different and it’s HORRIBLE — a totally lame cop-out of the worst kind. I just assumed that Matheson had had a brilliant premise for a story but hadn’t been able to come up with a good ending, and that example has always stood for me as a warning against plucking an idea before it’s ripe. Since Matheson has done so much work in Hollywood, I figured he likely wrote the Twilight Zone episode, and, having had a decade to mull it over, had finally come up with the right ending for his story.
So I was just reading about “Button, Button” on Wikipedia, which states that Matheson actually prefers his original ending, and was so upset by the change that he had his name taken off the episode. Wow. I just don’t get that at all. Incidentally, this is the second example I’ve seen of a filmed version greatly improving on Matheson’s original. The film version of Stir of Echoes is a dramatic improvement over the novel. The novel is kind of a mess structurally, and whoever wrote the screenplay did a very clever job of drawing connections between the different events of the story so that they actually tie together. Incidentally, Stir of Echoes is a pretty good movie, and worth watching. It came out around the same time as the very similar and much better known The Sixth Sense, and got completely buried, which is too bad.
And if you don’t know, Richard Matheson also wrote the brilliant, must-read novels I Am Legend (which has most emphatically not been improved on by the filmed versions) and The Shrinking Man. Both are extremely powerful evocations of loss and loneliness in a hostile, strangely-altered world.
Patchwork Monkey
A loyal reader informs me that the terrifying short story I described in my last post was “The Patchwork Monkey” by Beverly Butler, which appeared in the picture book horror anthology Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures, illustrated by Rod Ruth (introduction by Andre Norton!).
Apparently I’m not the only one scarred by this story. Among the Amazon reviews, one person says, “I first read this story when I was in 4th grade, and it scared me so bad that I still remember it to this day, and I am 34 now,” and another says, “I read ‘The Patchwork Monkey’ when I was 7, and slept with my parents for a month. It scared me so bad that my mom had the librarian get rid of the book.”
It looks like there was also a recent film adaptation of the story.