May 2015 – Page 13

Watch Stan Lee Give Tips on How to Give a Great Cameo Performance, in the Stan Lee Cameo School

Friday, May 1, 2015 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

I was watching movies on YouTube last night when an Audi ad popped up featuring Stan Lee. [I’d like to take a minute to point out that sentence would have been completely nonsensical 15 years ago. Ah, what a world we live in.]

It turned it to be well worth watching. Directed by Kevin Smith, “The Stan Lee Cameo School” is a hilarious two-minute short featuring featuring Lou Ferrigno, Tara Reid, Michael Rooker, Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith. I won’t ruin any more for you — check it out.

Audi has a long tradition of appealing to science fiction fans — check out their Star Trek ads. (And Volkswagen reunited William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy for an ad late last year.) All this talk of Audis does make me miss mine, however… tragically, it was destroyed in a head-on collision in 2011.

Odysseus: An Original Barbarian Badass

Friday, May 1, 2015 mariebilodeau Comments 2 comments

As a performing storyteller (think bard), I’ve had the chance to participate in some epic tellings. And I mean EPIC! Up to three days of multiple tellers from across various countries telling a long and ancient story, one chapter at a time. It’s, well, it’s epic.

"I could string his bow, too, but everyone would just say the Hulk could have done it faster... It's not easy being me." — “I could string his bow, too, but everyone would just say the Hulk could have done it faster… It’s not easy being me.”

I’ve had the chance to tell The Odyssey twice, once in my hometown of Ottawa, the other time on the West Coast in Nanaimo, BC. The last telling was two weekends ago, and it struck me that you could take Odysseus out of his story and plop him into a sword and sorcery adventure and voilà! You have a perfect barbarian hero. Let me, in fact, count the ways:

He Has Super Strength
He’s so badass that he’s the only one who can string his ash bow. The only one! People try, fail and then go drink wine while mumbling.

He Knows How to Keep a Story Going
Okay, so we encounter him in The Iliad (bloody fun stuff). That war lasted ten years. Ten years! Then he takes another nine years to get home, while partaking of multiple adventures. Kind of makes you understand why Epic Fantasy is so, well, Epic.

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Vintage Treasures: Earth’s Last Citadel by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner

Friday, May 1, 2015 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Fantastic Novels Magazine July 1950-small

Last week I talked about The Watcher at the Door, the upcoming second volume in Stephen Haffner’s The Early Kuttner. By coincidence, I found a copy of the 1983 Ace reprint edition of C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner’s early novel Earth’s Last Citadel — a novel that’s been blessed with some really fine cover art over the decades — a few days later in a small collection I’d purchased on eBay, and I thought it would be fun to track down all the various covers it’s had over the years.

Earth’s Last Citadel first appeared as a four-part serial in Argosy magazine, April-July 1943 (above left, cover artist unknown; click for bigger version.) When I talk about great art, I’m not talking about this cover. But I suppose in 1943, you couldn’t go wrong with a square-jawed G.I. clocking a soldier in a Nazi helmet.

The entire thing was reprinted seven years later in Fantastic Novels Magazine, July 1950, with a cover by Lawrence (above, middle). Collecting pulps wasn’t easy even in the 40s, and if you were unfortunate enough to stumble on one installments a few years later, and wanted to read the rest… God help you. Trying to track down all four issues was no easy task. Fantastic Novels Magazine is one of my favorite pulps for that reason — it collected countless novels that were originally scattered across 3-4 magazines and reprinted them whole. It also commissioned new artwork, much of it, as in this case, by the great Virgil Finlay. Finlay’s full-page pieces for Earth’s Last Citadel (below) are gorgeous, and just as famous as the novel is today.

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Blade Runner: Edmond Hamilton’s Tears in the Rain?

Friday, May 1, 2015 Comments 8 comments

HamiltonReturnToTheStars — “I’ve… seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”

Get this:

I heard the sunrise music that the crystal peaks make above Throon when Canopus comes to warm them. I feasted with the star-kings in the Hall of Stars. And at the end, I led the fleets of the Empire against our enemies, the men from the League of Dark Worlds. I saw the ships die like swarming fireflies off the shores of the Hercules Cluster. I’ve shot the Orion Nebula. I’ve been into the Cloud, where the drowned suns burn in a haze of darkness. I’ve killed men, Doctor. And in that last battle, I —

Oddly familiar? Actually, that’s Gordon’s monologue to his shrink in Edmond Hamilton’s Return to the Stars.

How about this one?

I’ve… seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those… moments… will be lost in time, like [small cough] tears… in… rain. Time… to die…

Of course, that’s Roy Batty’s dying monologue in Blade Runner. Hauer is supposed to have improved on the original script, which had…

I have known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I’ve been Offworld and back… frontiers! I’ve stood on the back deck of a blinker bound for the Plutition Camps with sweat in my eyes watching the stars fight on the shoulder of Orion… I’ve felt wind in my hair, riding test boats off the black galaxies and seen an attack fleet burn like a match and disappear. I’ve seen it, felt it…!

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Black Gate

Adventures in Fantasy Literature

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Month: May 2015