Author Archives: Steven Howell Wilson

Dealing With Some Bad News

Posted on by
2

Ever have that sinking feeling? “I was supposed to do that… two days ago… I did it, right?” I get that feeling a lot. Usually, the answer turns out to be yes, I did it. But in this case, I was sitting, happily, at my friends’ house, cradling a glass of a very nice Balvenie Caribbean Cask in the afterglow of the latest episode of Marvel’s Agents of Shield, when I realized… It’s Tuesday. My blog and my podcast were supposed to be up on Monday.

What the hell happened to Monday? (I actually asked that question out loud.) Continue reading →

Thor: The Dark World – Checking off the Boxes

Posted on by
3

thor__the_dark_world_v_2_by_natetravis23-d5dktesSo I says to my wife this morning, I says, “Hon, is it just me, or are a lotta folks throwin’ a lotta other folks under buses nowadays?”

And she says to me, “Oaaaah, yeah, hon, they’s been throwin’ each other under buses right and left out dere in de alley!”

Okay, so, no we don’t really talk like that. We’re Baltimorons only in the geographical sense.

My actual question concerned my growing perception that people in the workplace are faking it. They take credit for work they didn’t do. They’re desperate to make it look like they’re accomplished big things, and they’re equally desperate to make it look like they never make a mistake. They therefore cast a lot of blame and aspersion on their colleagues. Colloquially, they throw each other under the bus an awful lot.

Continue reading →

Leadership Lessons in Ender’s Game

Posted on by
Reply

enders-game-posterI had a meltdown Friday night. Fairly small thing, but one damn thing on top of many other things had me spending about fifteen minutes screaming at the heavens, demanding to know why I keep getting, um… used for the universe’s gratification without benefit of lubricant… when, day in and day out, I feel like I do nothing but the right things.

Huge self-pity fest. You have those sometimes. Nothing to do but get over it. I consider it the equivalent of the pressure valve on the water-heater kicking off, venting off some steam, and preventing the whole system from exploding. If it happens once, you may not even notice, or you notice and just monitor. If it happens once too often, well, there’s an obvious need for intervention.

Continue reading →

Review – Dark Shadows: Wolf Moon Rising by Lara Parker

Posted on by
2

Wolf-Moon-RisingLara Parker is the (still) lovely lady who played the witch Angelique (and a few other roles) on the 1960s horror soap opera, Dark Shadows. She appears very briefly in Tim Burton’s recent film adaptation of the series, and she’s done a boatload of Dark Shadows audio productions for Big Finish, also usually playing Angelique.

Wolf Moon Rising is her third novel set in the Dark Shadows universe. (Or, more correctly, the Dark Shadows multiverse, which she’s expanded with this volume.) In her first venture, Angelique’s Descent, she gave us a biography of her character. That is, she chronicled one of Angelique’s numerous lives, albeit a short one. Angelique Bouchard was born in the 1770s and lived on the island of Martinique, where she was a servant to Josette DuPres, daughter of a wealthy French merchant. As a very young woman, Angelique fell in love with an American, Barnabas Collins, a young man on his first business trip abroad, representing his family’s company. Sadly, Barnabas had his fun with Angelique, then met her mistress Josette and forgot all about the poor servant girl. Josette, as heir to another fortune, was more fit to be the wife of a rich New Englander.

Continue reading →

I Am All These Things

Posted on by
2

Okay, I’m doing something a little different this week. It’s not going to be a regular occurrence, but it may be something I play with when I’ve got something to say that’s important, either from a publicity perspective, or from a “this is important to me personally” perspective.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog at StevenHWilson.com, then this week you’re also reading the script for my weekly podcast. (And you can hear my reading, as well, here!) If you’re a regular listener to my podcast, that is the Prometheus Radio Theatre podcast, then this week you’re listening to my blog. Again, not a permanent change. Next week my listeners will hear the next chapter of Phil Giunta’s wonderfully scary novel By Your Side, and my readers will hear about Lara Parker’s wonderful expansion of the Dark Shadows mythos, Wolf Moon Rising. But this week, and now and then in the future, both groups will receive the same message. Continue reading →

My name is Steven Howell Wilson, and I do a lot of different things…

Featured

Posted on by
I’m a husband and father of two. I’ve written fan fiction and published fanzines. I’ve assumed the role of custodian for my friends who created a fanzine called Contact. I founded a convention called Farpoint, which has run for almost three decades. I’ve been a comic book writer and a comic reviewer. I ran Prometheus Radio Theatre, and used to put out a (mostly) weekly podcast. I’m publisher for Firebringer Press. Finally, I’m a recovering librarian, a retired IT Director, a part-time politician and a full-time IT contractor. And yes, I do all this because I’m allergic to work. I figure as long as I look busy, I won’t have to perform actual labor. It’s worked for more than half a century so far…

Capclave 2013

Posted on by
Reply

small_dodo_transparentI haven’t been to a con on Farpoint’s old weekend (Columbus Day, politically incorrect as it now is) since, well… Farpoint 2000. People still complain that Farpoint made the choice to move from October to February, but, well, if we moved back now we’d be against Capclave. And that would be a shame, because Capclave is not a con I’d want to miss, or hold a con up against. It’s not a huge con, just as Farpoint isn’t. It is, like Balticon, a literary SF con, sponsored by the Washington Science Fiction Association (WSFA). The program was chock-full, with six tracks running until midnight Friday and Saturday, and I was kept quite busy throughout, which is how I like it.

Continue reading →

Don Jon – Losing it

Posted on by
1

Explicit Language Warning!

Yeah, that’s my second warning in as many weeks, isn’t it? Of course, you only know that if you’re still here after last week, right? Are you still here? I promise, this time out, not to say anything that will offend the sensibilities of my left-wing readers. Oh, except this observation: Miley Cyrus is a lot prettier when she’s trying to look like Michele Bachman than she is the rest of the time these days. There. That’s done. You’re safe now. On with the show. Which may offend the sensibilities of everyone not offended last week.

don-jon-posterJoseph Gordon-Levitt is an actor I admire a lot, ever since I first saw him play David Collins in Dan Curtis’s 1991 primetime remake of Dark Shadows.  He’s one of the most talented performers of his generation, taking on roles that are sometimes provocative, sometimes downright bizarre, but, even when he’s doing a comedy like 3rd Rock from the Sun or a blockbuster like The Dark Knight Rises, never pedestrian.

Recently, he broadened his career horizons by making his debut as a writer-director with Don Jon, a film in which he also starred. This film is laugh-out-loud funny, insightful and daring. I recommend it wholeheartedly… but… It may make you uncomfortable. It is very, very explicit. The opening line, narrated by Gordon-Levitt as Don Jon, contains the f-word and describes the state of his genitalia. It gets more explicit from there. So be warned. It made a lot of viewers in the theater where I saw it uncomfortable, even as they enjoyed it. Continue reading →

Of Robots, Sex and Good Intentions (Warning: Here be libertarianism!)

Posted on by
Reply

robots-of-dawn-isaac-asimovI’m currently re-visiting an old favorite, untouched on my shelf since I received it as a Christmas gift the year it was published, 1983. The Robots of Dawn is a sequel to The Caves of Steel, which I’ve reviewed previously, and The Naked Sun. These are the first three of Isaac Asimov’s “robot novels,” which eventually became precursors to his more famous Foundation series. This particular novel was written some 25 years after the books it sequelizes. Times had become more liberal, allowing Asimov to openly discuss topics in human-robot interactions that he hadn’t been able to visit within the confines of 1950s SF. Specifically, The Robots of Dawn prominently features the complications which result when a human woman marries a robot. Lots of author before had probably speculated on robot sex, and many have since; but this was speculation on robot sex by the master of the robot story. Continue reading →

The Contact eArchive – A Work in Progress

Posted on by
4

Contact was a creature of its time, a Star Trek fanzine which focused specifically on the friendship between two characters: the intrepid Captain James T. Kirk and his First Officer, the alien Spock. Today we have fanfiction archives where stories live forever, where fandoms live forever, and where even the most obscure TV show, film, comic book or novel is immortalized in a very special way: by its fans trying to add to its fictional universe. Add to that that we no have DVD and Blu-Ray, Netflix and Hulu… we can watch just about any show or movie anytime we want to. And there’s now a glut of new shows and movies made to cater to an audience which likes Science Fiction, Fantasy and adventure.

In 1975 it just wasn’t so. Syndicated re-runs, badly edited to fit more commercials, were the best you could hope for if you wanted to see your favorite program. No TV show had come back from the dead or been remade as yet (except for Perry Mason, and that clearly didn’t take.) There was no Internet to distribute the labors of love which resulted from writers and artists being inspired by their favorite shows. And so fans turned to Fanzines, photocopied, mimeographed, (the really high-end ones were offset printed!), hand-lettered with prestype, paid for with checks and money orders and sent through the U.S. Mail. Continue reading →