Aliens Are Soviets

The perfectly square and perfectly unnatural Red Square Nebula. This is the sort of thing that sets a writer's brain buzzing. Sure, it's probably a natural occurance. Probably.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Visit From The Goon Squad: Charting New Territory

Image
 Credit - Tessie Girl I recently finished A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and it's one of the best books I've read in a while.  It flows from one character to another in a kind of narrative relay.  At first it's disorienting and honestly I lost track of who the focus was or was supposed to be - the point, I think - and it required me to stop and start again once or twice.  The book also caroms from one era to another.  This narrative river just flows along and then washes ashore deep in the future, providing a brief, sober glimpse of the fate of the character we follow, before retreating back to the sea of the present.  At some point you almost long for a chart mapping out all these people, these places and times, and then as if on queue, Egan actually depicts an entire sequence of the book in a succession of flow charts.  I wa struck at how effective, and affecting, this was; the PowerPoint slides gradually became thought bubbles...
Read more

Moebius, 1938-2012

Image
Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius to comic book and cinema fans, has died.  Sad news on the heels of Ralph McQuarrie just last week.  The two of them had an incalcuable impact on the look of genre filmmaking and the minds of impressionable young artists over the last generation or two.  I knew of him mainly through Heavy Metal and the magazine-size Epic comics in the early 80's.  I remember seeing reprints of The Airtight Garage and being a little unsure of what to make of the grandiosity of it all - at that point I was very much still planted in the grungy feel of Star Wars.  Actually it wasn't too long ago that Giraud did a piece based on Episode I that recalls Airtight Garage so much that you tend to look at the prequels as closer to him than McQuarrie: That's actually Jerry Cornelious (sorry, Lewis Carnellian ) up there in the corner.  Giraud's influence is most heavy in Tron and Alien, as well as The Fifth Element, which came later. ...
Read more

Things Fall From The Sky All The Time

Image
The future is impossible to see. That's what I think of, when I think of Kit Baldwin. Kit is the main character of my novel NAMELESS, which I won't detail here too much but has to do with superheroes. Kit becomes one, accidentally. The impetus for this story began in 2011, when I read this article about firefighters who refused to put out a house fire because the owner hadn't paid the bill for these services in his rural community. Seven years ago, that was shocking. in 2018, not so much. Kit began much earlier, way back in high school. She morphed and evolved and moved in and out of stories until she finally found her place in this one. Kit was right for Nameless because I wanted someone who didn’t fit into any of the worlds within the story. I wanted someone without power, but with a great sense of justice and decency. She finally manifested in this novel, but she didn't become real until today, when my friend and critique partner Alia Hess realized her in ink:...
Read more