Author Archives: Steven Howell Wilson

A Christmas Miscellany

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Just a short entry to share some gems of Christmas 2013.

docsavageDoc Savage – Man of Bronze #1 (Dynamite Comics)
Dynamite continues its trend of bringing classic pulp and adventure heroes to modern comics with modern comic art. The result is a triumph. I’m not a huge Doc Savage fan. I’ve read a couple of the books, and actually watched the entire movie with Ron Ely. On second thought, maybe I am a huge fan. Who else would sit through that movie? For the uninitiated, Doc is a genius and a superb athlete, one of a team of heroic geniuses who’ve pledged themselves to help those in need. All of them are engineers or scientists, all are capable of discovering the solution to a complex technical problem and thus saving the day. They’re idealists, too. Doc believes that criminal behavior is merely a disease and can be cured. It’s a very American concept. They’re both intellectuals and jocks (celebrating the American worship of both sports figures and men and women of science), their headquarters is on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building (celebrating both capitalism and technological advancements) and they have a healthy dislike of involving the legal authorities when solving problems (celebrating the American spirit of independence, even from American government.) The artwork is beautiful, and the writing crisp and entertaining. This is a promising series that I intend to keep following. Continue reading →

Celebrating the Outsider at Christmas – Bell Book and Candle

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51+PNg8JS7LI’ve mentioned the film Bell Book and Candle in my rundown of favorite holiday movies in the past. I revisit it now because it’s such an atypical Christmas film. I recall my mother taping it for my father back in the early days of VCRs, when some of us wanted to capture every film and TV show for posterity. We didn’t know YouTube was coming, or Netflix, or DVD collections of complete runs of TV series. One movie cost at least $40 then, and older films which hadn’t won Oscars or been box office smashes weren’t as quick to be released. Local TV stations were still showing movies then, albeit with large chunks missing to allow space for commercials. My family spent many hours sitting in front of the TV remote in hand, pausing for commercials, trying to get the most pristine copy we could.

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Anti-nationalist sentiment – The Pursuit of Happiness (1934)

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First up, thanks to all of you who sent notes of encouragement after last week’s lengthy discussion of Alzheimer’s. It’s not an easy road to travel, but since when was life ever easy? It’s good to know how many people I have in my corner.

pursuitNow on to the blog I started writing two weeks ago, a group of thoughts about a movie I watched even more weeks ago, almost by accident. It’s old. So old that, if you search it on IMDB, it doesn’t even show up on the initial list of possible films, even if you type its exact title. It was made in 1934, and I discovered it because I was watching some films with Joan Bennett on YouTube. (Not a lot of Joan Bennett’s films are available on NetFlix streaming!) I was watching Joan Bennett films because I was reading a biography of the Bennett family, which was recommended by Lara Parker in her latest book, which I reviewed recently. All this discussion of her early film work got me interested in seeing some movies. That’s the way my mind flows. One thing to the next.

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Dealing With Some Bad News

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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

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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.

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Leadership Lessons in Ender’s Game

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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.

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Review – Dark Shadows: Wolf Moon Rising by Lara Parker

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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.

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I Am All These Things

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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…

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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

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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.

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