Yep, Stan the Man finally has his own personal web site for all the true comic fans: The Real Stan Lee went online a week or two back. It has all the usual; news, forum, social networking interface, multimedia, and so forth. And to get it launched properly, he sat down with the ever delectable Alison Haislip to do a TV style interview. I should warn you, if you had ever assumed that Stan was in any way shy about promoting himself, or perhaps even humble, this video segment should put paid to your illusions.
On Sunday I mentioned John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There because the latest iteration of the story, in movie format, is being released on disc today. But I thought I should also mention that you can read his stories online, or a number of the ones in the public domain at least. He also did a radio program of science fiction stories called Exploring Tomorrow that you can listen to or download for your favorite portable media player. Campbell was best known as an editor, although a lot of folks now know him as the guy the awards were named after. But he wrote some pretty interesting stuff, and you might enjoy checking it out.
I don’t normally do two blog entries on the same day, but I had to say goodby to Anne McCaffery, author of so many quality books, including the Dragonriders series, The Ship Who series, and so much more. This event is hardly a surprise, as she was 85 and had been missing things like Dragoncon this year for health reasons. But every time we loose an author of this caliber we are all the worse for it, for there will be no more tales to stir the blood and stimulate the imagination from them. The post that summed up who she was and what she meant best so far is from Jenna Busch, another geek like me but wearing a body of a different gender. OK, she might also be a bit more eloquent than I am, which probably explains why her posting moved me the way it did. Thank you, Anne, for all the wonderful dreams and adventures; see you on the other side.
Are you a comics or graphics novel fan? Do you have any idea how much work, effort, and talent goes into creating even a single issue of a single title? If you comprehend that, did you notice how many of the best artists and story tellers are women in this male dominated marketplace? 140 of those women got together to work on the Womanthology Project, a massive graphics novel anthology created under the direction of Renae De Liz. I urge you to check out their new project, and contribute whatever you can through their Kickstarter Interface; since 100% of their proceeds will go to charity they need our donations to create this work in the first place. I should probably list the project participants and tell you what all else they have created, which is a big percentage of the comics you are reading today, but why should I when I can let a few of them speak for themselves in the videos below. That should give you a basic idea, and a few of these links should allow you to learn more. Thanks to The Nerdy Bird for the heads up on this one.
According to the official Stanislaw Lem web site, there is a new, better translation into English of his masterpiece Solaris. The original Polish version of the book was translated into French by one team, and the French version was later translated into English. With the double translation came lots of errors, and Lem spoke out against that version, since he also spoke English and could see for himself just how poor a job it was. Unfortunately, both of the English language movies made from it were based on that bad translation. The actual physical print version of the new translation is currently tied up in a copyright dispute, but it will be out as an audiobook and an e-book later this year.
This trailer for Robert J. Sawyer’s book The Terminal Experiment is a little hard for me to follow (since I don’t speak Hungarian), but is quite nicely done. This one appears to be publisher created, although without a translation I am just guessing, but some quite excellent book trailers have been created by fans.