Tagged: SF

Legendary Writer/Anthologist Greenberg Passes

  • News
  • June 26, 2011

ALL PULP is saddened to repost the news of the passing of Martin H. Greenberg.  Though the name may not be familiar to many, Greenberg gained fame as being one of the most dedicated anthologists of recent years.  Many fantastic story collections that inspired many ALL PULP readers as well as Pulp creators of all sorts, were thanks either in whole or at least in part to Mr. Greenberg. He will be missed.

reposted from www.fantafiction.com

R.I.P. Martin H. Greenberg (1941-2011)

 
Martin Harry Greenberg (March 1, 1941-June 25, 2011) was an American speculative fiction anthologist and writer.

Greenberg took a doctorate in Political Science in 1969, and has taught at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay since 1975. His first anthology was Political Science Fiction (1974, with Patricia Warrick), intended to be used as a teaching guide, then continuing with a sequence of educational anthology titles under the series name Through Science Fiction. In the late 70s Greenberg began partnering with Joseph D. Olander on more conventional SF anthologies. Early in his career, Greenberg was sometimes confused with Martin Greenberg the publisher of Gnome Press, but the anthologist has stated (at science fiction conventions, and in some of his anthologies) that they are no relation. Asimov suggested that he call himself “Martin H. Greenberg” or “Martin Harry Greenberg” to distinguish him from the other Martin Greenberg.

He shared the 2005 Prometheus Special Award with Mark Tier for the anthologies Give Me Liberty and Visions of Liberty.

Greenberg typically teamed up with another editor, splitting the duties of story selection, editing, copyright searches, and the handling of author royalties. Major partners include Isaac Asimov (127 anthologies), Charles G. Waugh, Jane Yolen, and Robert Silverberg.

In 2009, he was the recipient of one of the first three Solstice Awards presented by the SFWA in recognition of his contributions to the field of science fiction.

F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, 1948-2010

f-gwynplaine-mcintyre-1-9128462“Straight on till mourning!”

That was the end of the last public announcement of science fiction author F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, when he posted a note that said he’d be getting away from it all for a while and might be some time in getting back. At the time, some folks thought it was a typo.

Sadly, it wasn’t. It appears that he was tremendously depressed and killed himself last Friday by setting his Brooklyn apartment on fire.

“Froggy” was a was a Scottish-born journalist, novelist, poet and illustrator, who
lived in Wales and New York City. His writings include the
science-fiction novel The
Woman Between the Worlds
and his anthology of verse and humor pieces MacIntyre’s Improbable Bestiary. As an uncredited “ghost” author, he was known to have written or
co-written several other books.
In the early 1960s, under his previous name, MacIntyre was an
employee of Lew Grade and worked as a trainee technician on the crews of
the television series The
Champions and The
Prisoner— which explained the jacket you often saw him in, the one in the photograph.

I didn’t know him well, and I’d be hard-pressed to say anybody did– Teresa Nielsen Hayden reminded me, “Right after 9/11, every NYC group and community was constantly,
informally checking to see whether anyone was missing. In the New
York-area SF community, MacIntyre was the last person I know of who was
confirmed to be okay, and the confirmation came a month or two after the
attacks.” I remember commenting at the time, when we were all searching– how would we know? Who could we check with?

He was a man who lived his life in a sort of constant pain– he took the name Gwynplaine from the Victor Hugo novel The Man Who Laughs, which comic fans know was made into a film which served as the inspiration for the Joker– a man twisted by devastating events into something horrific. That he chose to reference that gives you an idea about the man.

It will be strange not to see him on the periphery of events anymore. He will be missed.

Charles N. Brown, ‘Locus’ publisher, 1937-2009

  • News
  • July 13, 2009

Sadly, and yet appropriately, from Locus itself:

Locus
publisher, editor, and co-founder Charles N. Brown, 72, died peacefully
in his sleep July 12, 2009 on his way home from Readercon.

Charles
Nikki Brown was born June 24, 1937 in Brooklyn NY, where he grew up. He
attended the City College of New York, taking time off from 1956-59 to
serve in the US Navy, and finished his degree (BS in physics and
engineering) at night on the GI Bill while working as a junior engineer
in the ’60s. He married twice, to Marsha Elkin (1962-69), who helped
him start Locus, and to Dena Benatan (1970-77), who co-edited Locus
for many years while he worked full time. He moved to San Francisco in
1972, working as a nuclear engineer until becoming a full-time SF
editor in 1975. The Locus offices have been in Brown’s home in the Oakland hills since 1973.

Brown co-founded Locus
with Ed Meskys and Dave Vanderwerf as a one-sheet news fanzine in 1968,
originally created to help the Boston Science Fiction Group win its
Worldcon bid. Brown enjoyed editing Locus so much that he continued the magazine far beyond its original planned one-year run. Locus was nominated for its first Hugo Award in 1970, and Brown was a best fan writer nominee the same year. Locus won the first of its 29 Hugos in 1971.

During Brown’s long and illustrious career he was the first book reviewer for Asimov’s;
wrote the Best of the Year summary for Terry Carr’s annual anthologies
(1975-87); wrote numerous magazines and newspapers; edited several SF
anthologies; appeared on countless convention panels; was a frequent
Guest of Honor, speaker, and judge at writers’ seminars; and has been a
jury member for various major SF awards.

As per his wishes, Locus will continue to publish, with executive editor Liza Groen Trombi taking over as editor-in-chief with the August 2009 issue.

A complete obituary with tributes and a photo retrospective will appear in the August issue.

Charlie was a hoot and a half, always around taking an incriminating photo of you. It is nearly impossible to imagine science fiction as we know it without his contributions to the field. He will be missed.

BBC America goes HD July 20 with lots of SF, including ‘Torchwood: Children Of Earth’

BBC Worldwide will launch BBC America HD, the hi-def simulcast of BBC America, on July 20– and they’ll be rolling out a lot of science fiction during their first week:

  • The five part Torchwood: Children of Earth will debut July 20 at 9 PM and air Monday through Friday.
  • That Saturday, July 25, Primeval has its third season finale at 8 PM and Being Human premieres at 9 PM.
  • Then on Sunday, the first of the last four David Tennant Doctor Who specials runs at 8 PM.

So if you can’t make it to San Diego, you get a few things to compensate. And if you are going to San Diego, you better hope your hotel has HD and BBCA HD.

Review: ‘Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!’

 

american-flagg-1794127Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!
By Howard Chaykin
Dynamic Forces, July 2008, $49.99

Science Fiction has never been quite as successful in comics form as it seemed it should have been. Oh, sure, there have been plenty of vaguely SFnal ideas and premises – from [[[Superman]]] to [[[Kamandi]]] to the [[[X-Men]]] to the [[[Ex-Mutants]]] – but they were rarely anything deeper than an end to the sentence “There’s this guy, see? and he’s….” One of the few counterexamples was Howard Chaykin’s [[[American Flagg!]]], starting in 1983 – that series had many of the usual flaws and unlikelihoods of near-future dystopias, but it also had a depth and texture to its world that was rare in comics SF (and never to be expected in even purely prose works, either).

American Flagg! suffered from Chaykin’s waning attention for a while, and then crashed and burned almost immediately after he finally left the series, with a cringe-making overly “sexy” storyline utterly overwritten by Alan Moore. American Flagg! limped from muddled storyline to confused characterization for a couple of years afterward – but the beginning, when Chaykin was fully energized by his new creation and the stories he was telling, is one of the best SF stories in American comics.

The series has never been collected well, though a few slim album-sized reprints were once available, and may be findable through used-book channels. This Dynamic Forces edition, reprinting the first fourteen issues of the series, is quite pricey. (Especially for a book with no page numbers, and one in which the pages are precisely the size of the original comics – not oversized, as those previous album reprints had been.) This book has a strong, thoughtful introduction by Michael Chabon – which has already appeared in his [[[Maps and Legends]]] collection, presumably due to the delay in the American Flagg! book – a gushing afterword by Jim Lee, and a new short story written and drawn by Chaykin.

(more…)

Gattaca Tales, by Ric Meyers

  • News
  • March 16, 2008

southlandtales-7316063Well, it’s SF week at the ol’ DVD Xtra. Not sci-fi week, but SF week, using the “official” contraction sanctified by the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was once a member. Now, if I were considering the likes of I Robot and/or I am Legend – two Will Smith vehicles adapted from far superior books – then maybe it would be sci-fi week. But, no, I’m reviewing two wildly divergent films – one totally out of control and one totally in control – that best exemplify the “genre of ideas.”

As virtually almost always, the studios green-light these projects then never really know what to do with them or how to market them. So, while both these releases should have been (and would have benefited greatly from being) glutted with special features the way Will Smith’s DVDs are, they’re both a tad light in the digital loafers (as it were). The lightest, and the most needy, is Southland Tales, another ready-made cult classic created by writer/director Richard Kelly, who had already given the world Donnie Darko<span style=”font-style:

normal”>.

Anybody involved had to know what they were getting here. It’s not like the whole thing was improvised. In fact, during the thirty minute “making of” doc called “USIDent  TV: Surveilling the Southland,” actors professed to not being able to understand the long script but signing on anyway. If any film needed an audio commentary, this one does, but it doesn’t have one. Instead, the half-hour behind-the-scenes featurette skims over a wide range of approaches – from actor interviews to set decoration to stunt detailing. Richard Kelly is much in evidence, however, vainly trying to defend and detail his base-level Dr. Strangelovian funhouse of a film.

Here, again, is where DVDs can improve the viewing experience. In theaters, Kelly’s overstuffed confection would, and did, become fairly intolerable. But taken in DVD chunks (or chapters, if you will), the futuristic action mystery musical dramedy can even be enjoyable … if only to marvel at Kelly’s hubris, and the huge cast who agreed to participate. Even as a game of  “spot the cult fave,” the film can be fun. There’s the Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, Christopher Lambert, Miranda Richardson, Wallace Shawn, Kevin Smith, Curtis Armstrong (Booger!), and Janeane Garofalo, as well as a bunch of past and future Saturday Night Livers and Mad–TVers.

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Link-o-Rama

  • News
  • July 28, 2007

fighting-1106608Times Online looks back at the British ‘80s craze for Fighting Fantasy.

The Millions has a looooong post (no, really, it’s long) about Harry Potter from a children’s librarian’s perspective.

Queen guitarist Brian May has gone back to school — to finish his doctorate in astrophysics. That’s a smart move – you always want to have a day-job to fall back on, if the music thing doesn’t work out.

John Scalzi has discovered a typewriter that sends e-mail.

Lou Anders explains patiently that SF is not dead. (Me, I’d have just pointed out that anyone who goes to a Nebula Awards Weekend in New York City – horribly expensive New York City, not to mention nightlife-dead Way the Hell Downtown NYC – and expects the demographic not to be “middle-aged to old” is deluding himself about the interests and finances of young SF-reading people.)

And you’ve heard about NASA’s drunk astronauts by now, yes?

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Be Vewwy Vewwy Quiet. We’re Hunting Fanboys.

  • News
  • July 26, 2007

fanboy-7593577

USA Today stalks the elusive Fanboy.

Locus Online lists new paperback editions of SF/Fantasy books that they saw in June.

Matthew Cheney thinks about the latest eruption of the what-is-SF-and-what-isn’t discussion.

A highly scientific investigation into the age-old struggle between pirates and ninjas. [via Chris Roberson]

tSF Diplomat  thinks hard about online book reviewing and book-blogging.

Biology in Science Fiction rounds up recent interesting news stories about bioscience.

Mundane SF hates astrophysics.

(more…)

Campbell and Sturgeon Award Winners

  • News
  • July 10, 2007

The 2006 John W. Campbell Memorial Award and 2006 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award were presented at the Campbell Conference this past weekend in Kansas City. Each award was voted for by a jury of experts.

The Campbell Award, for best science fiction novel, went to Ben Bova’s Titan.

The Sturgeon Award, for best science fiction short story, was given to Robert Charles Wilson’s "The Cartesian Theater," from the anthology Futureshocks.

Also at the Campbell Conference, the Science Fiction Research Association presented several awards:

  • the Graduate Student Paper award, to Linda Wight for "Magic, Art, Religion, Science: Blurring the Boundaries of Science and Science Fiction in Marge Piercy’s Cyborgian Narrative"
  • the Mary Kay Bray Award, for the "best essay, interview, or extended review to appear in the SFRAReview during the year," to Ed Carmien for  his review of The Space Opera Renaissance edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
  • the Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service, for "outstanding service activities-promotion of SF teaching and study, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership in SF/fantasy organizations,"to Michael Levy
  • the Pioneer Award, for "best critical essay-length work of the year" to Amy J. Ransom for "Oppositional Postcolonialism in Québécois Science Fiction,"  from the July 2006 issue of Science Fiction Studies
  • and the Pilgrim Award, honoring "lifetime contributions to SF and fantasy scholarship," to Algis Budrys.

[via SF Scope]

In Memoriam: Sterling Lanier

lanier-7816285 Jane Jewell, Executive Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, has received word of the death of Sterling Lanier on Thursday, June 28th at the age of 79.

Sterling Edmund Lanier worked as both a writer and editor in the science fiction field beginning in the early 1960s; he was published extensively in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, especially with his "Brigadier Ffellowes" club stories. As an editor, he worked for Chilton for various periods in the ’60s, and, most famously, was responsible for the book publication of Frank Herbert’s Dune in 1965. Starting in the 1970s, he worked mostly on a freelance basis, as a sculptor, jeweler, and writer.

hiero-2302726

His best-known novel is his second, Hiero’s Journey (1973), an adventure story set in a far-future world long after a nuclear war. Its sequel, The Unforsaken Hiero (1983), was nearly as popular with SF readers. Speculation about a possible third Hiero book continued, but Lanier had no new publications, or substantial contact with the SF field, since the mid-80s.

He had spent recent years in Florida with his wife, Ann.

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