I must have read the John Carter Martian series back when I was in high school, or maybe junior high, and even then they were old. Now Disney is releasing a movie of one of the stories, complete with the four-armed Tars Tarkas and lovely Dejah Thoris. When I first saw the trailer on television a week or so ago, I was taken by the coolness of the special effects, but didn’t make the connection with Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ characters until near the end. I must admit I’m loving the ability of Hollywood to go back to classic science fiction novels, and armed with an array of CGI technologies, bring even the most unusual characters and settings to life. And with a dozen or so titles in the Martian series, if this first one does well, perhaps we’ll see more of the next world out in our solar system from…
Tag: Novels
How Deep the Quantum Well Near-Future Science Fiction
I completed my first science fiction novel this summer and went the self-publishing route. It was great fun writing it, with a lot of help and encouragement from my friends Tim and Tari, not to mention a fair amount of patience from my family as I spent long hours on the back patio typing away on the laptop. I also went to a writer’s workshop in Tucson during the course of the project, which was quite interesting. The highlight of the event for me was sitting with a bunch of strangers, one of whom was an elderly lady with an old Polaroid of herself standing with John Wayne. She had quite a story to tell of sneaking into the Old Tucson studios wearing a badge she had borrowed from a friend who worked there. Her goal, of course, was to meet the Duke, filming “Rio Bravo”, which she eventually managed,…
The Star Kings
I had an urge the other day to read a favorite science fiction novel from my childhood, “The Star Kings,” by Edmond Hamilton. But when I pored over my bookshelves, the tattered old paperback was nowhere to be found. I looked through my older son’s room, empty since he started studying at the University of Arizona in Tucson, to no avail. I then went to Amazon to see if I could find a copy, and they did have one: a more recent edition than mine. But the cost of around $10 seemed steep, especially since the original was only 75₵. I put off placing the order in order to sleep on it, torn between my desire to return to the exciting future world of Zarth Arn, and the order of magnitude increase in cost since I first found the novel buried in a pile of pulp fiction periodicals years ago…