Author Archives: Steven Howell Wilson

The Winter Blahs… And Frozen Pipes!

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Ordinarily, I do a con summary the weekend following a convention, but I’m not up to it tonight. Farpoint was a great success, a very well-run con this year. Our show, “The Maltese Vulcan” went off without a hitch on Friday night, and Tim Russ was, of course, brilliant in the lead role. But things happened that have left me very drained, and not just the hard work of running a con. I may (or may not) talk about those things in this space down the road.

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My Farpoint Schedule

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Farpoint 2015 is this weekend! Guests include Colin Ferguson, Tim Russ, Timothy Zahn, and, of course, me.

I know I said I’d retired from Farpoint and all, but Renee and I stepped up this year to run the Art Show, so that our friends Cindy Woods and Heather Mikkelsen could take over Programming, where they’ve done a stellar job. So I’ll be in the Art Show room a lot this weekend.

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Review – The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill LePore

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SHoWWI discovered Wonder Woman when I was about nine years old. The very first story I ever read was her first cover appearance in Sensation Comics #1. (Not the original issue, but a repro from the 1970s, when DC Comics cared about its history and took lots of opportunities to introduce new readers to old stories.) I quickly ordered a similar repro of Wonder Woman #1, and so I pretty much knew from the beginning that Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston, who wrote under the name Charles Moulton, was a psychiatrist. I knew he was the inventor of the lie detector test (but, sadly, not the person who wound up with the patent for it), and that he had created his character intentionally to give comics readers an example of a strong female. (Not just, it turns out, as a role model for girls, either.)

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Review – When a Story Is Not a Story – Daniel F. Galouye’s The Infinite Man

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175px-DanielFGalouye-InfiniteManTheThere’s nothing more disheartening for a writer than to read something published by a major house and think, “I can write better than this!” That’s especially true for a writer whose collection of rejection notices exceeds his collection of pay checks for work sold. (Isn’t that most of us, though?)

Oh, yeah, there is something more disheartening… having that work be authored by someone that one of your literary idols thought was a real talent.

I picked up a couple of books by Dan Galouye because he’s mentioned, in Robert A Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century, as a writer whose work the Grandmaster really admired.

RAH must have read something by Galouye other than The Infinite Man.

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Review – Imitation of (a Very Sad) Life – The Imitation Game

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THE IMITATION GAMEThis is the saddest film I’ve watched in a long time. Maybe ever. And, right up front, SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS. Yeah, that’s kinda strange to say, given that the movie chronicles real-life events that happened 70 years ago and more, but, if you want to be “surprised” by events you didn’t know about, stop reading now.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, arguably the inventor of the first electronic computer, and leader of the effort to break the Nazis’ top secret “Enigma” code during World War Two. Turing was a misfit from the word go. He was the smartest kid in his class, suffered, suggests the film, from OCD, and was gay at a time when homosexuality was an offense punishable by jail time or forced “chemical castration.”

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2014 – My Literary Year in Review

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I wrote not one but two essays for the blog this week. Didn’t like either of them when they were done. That’s the kind of mood I’m in. Perhaps I’ll rework them and share them later. Perhaps I’ll file them away as pieces of journal therapy. At any rate, lacking substantive content, I thought it might be useful to review what I produced, and what I took in, literature wise, during this past year.

In addition to 59 blog posts, I shared the short stories “Call Me Sam” on Phil Giunta’s blog, and “Don’t Go in the Barn, Johnny” in the Firebringer anthology Somewhere in the Middle of Eternity. I did also write one radio play (first draft only), five short stories (one sold, yet to be published, two rejected, one pending, one slated for my podcast), a novella (thrice-rejected), a premise for a (non-SF) novel, a premise for a comic series, and a good deal of copy for work-related websites. Kind of a disappointing showing, all things considered. Let’s hope 2015 is better. I’ve already sold two essays sight-unseen to two books from a pretty prestigious publisher, so that’s good.

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Email is the Root of All Evil

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Well, not really. I mean, I don’t believe that. But I hear it all the time:

“Email is the root of all evil.”

“Email is an inefficient method of communication.”

“I hate email! Just call me! Just come see me! It’s easier.”

Email has garnered a great deal of resentment in the workplace these last couple of decades. Someone said to me recently, “Well, when email started, we all thought it was just going to be a way to exchange quick messages. We didn’t expect it to become our principal means of communication.”

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Random Harvest – Sadness as a Story Device

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38aI tend to watch Random Harvest every Christmas. Funny, as I don’t think it actually contains any Christmas scenes. It’s a story that’s probably considered trite today, with a plot device that seems contrived: a World War I Captain (Ronald Colman) gets amnesia after suffering a trauma in the trenches at Arras. He establishes a new identity as “John Smith,” falls in love, gets married, becomes a father… then slips in the mud in front of a taxi cab, gets bonked on the head, recovers his original identity… and forgets that he was John Smith, a man with a family. Now aware that he’s Charles Rainier, a wealthy industrialist, he spends years searching for his lost identity. Continue reading →

Take. Eat… Wait, WHAT?

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So last week I gave a rundown of how four different SF stories used cannibalism in their plots. Most prominent were the first few episodes of this season of The Walking Dead, less obvious was an episode of the almost-forty-year old Space:1999 series called “Mission of the Darians.” Less well-known to those who think science fiction was invented in 1966 by Gene Roddenberry are two of Robert Heinlein’s works, Stranger in a Strange Land and Farnham’s Freehold.

All use cannibalism as a metaphor. In the two TV storylines, it’s a metaphor for denial of the importance of the individual. In Freehold, it’s a metaphor for oppression of one group by another. In Stranger, it’s a metaphor for strangeness, alien-ness, and acceptance of the universe. It’s also used as a gentle poke at Western Christians who consider themselves more civilized than the heathens who go around rubbing blue mud in their bellies.

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