W-Week

I'm hoping my arrival in Korea won't look exactly like this.

It's W-Week, and as we count down to D-Day, H-Hour—the moment I leave for Korea, in other words—I'm beginning to think I tried to pack too much into it.

What day is it today, Tuesday?

Yeah, okay, here goes:

On Monday Miss H and I just sorta hung out. Oh, and we packed my bags. Two of them. Duffel bags crammed with shirts, pants, shorts, belts, socks, underwear, shoes, and coats. Whatever empty space remains shall be filled by decks of cards, harmonicas, shoeshine cans, grooming kits, and whatnot. They weigh 43 and 35 pounds, respectively. Maybe there's something to what Miss H says when she tells me I have more clothes than she does.

Today was jam-packed. Miss H and I went in and hung out with a friend of hers, Steve, at his apartment. (We found all sorts of interesting ways to kill Lara Croft.) Then we grabbed some fast food: Tom's Burgers, which happen to be massive, succulent, and fantastically tasty. [Insert naughty metaphor here.] We drove to Hesperia Lake Park and ate lunch under the skeletonized trees, listening to the babbling brook and the entitled honks of strident geese vying for pieces of bread from the other park-goers. Then we fed the ducks some crusts and read a chapter of our books (I'm reading Skeletons on the Zahara, and Miss H is digesting Don Quixote).

After a quick stop at the post office, we went to a used bookstore in Victorville and turned in some old volumes my parents didn't want anymore. In exchange for these, I nabbed some serious military nonfiction: The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan, Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did To Us by Peter Goldman and Terry Fuller, and Abandon Ship!: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis by Richard F. Newcomb. (Believe or not, these aren't just for fun: they're valuable research material for future novels.)

Then we went to the mall to try to find a bigger duffel bag. No joy.

Tomorrow I'm riding with Miss H's father as he delivers a load of lime to the airport in Camarillo. This'll be my first time riding in a big rig. I've always wanted to. I have a thing for heavy machinery. I occasionally cheat on airplanes with tanks, ships, bulldozers and excavators.

Thursday I'm running around like a madman trying to make all the arrangements for my dad's birthday (February 12), Miss H's birthday (February 13), and Valentine's Day (you-know-when). All of those dates, as you'll notice, fall after my departure on February 6, so I'd better have my act together.

Friday Miss H is coming over and helping me do the final packing, and we'll finish that blasted thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle we've been beating our heads against for ages.

Saturday is a big day: all my friends are coming over for one last cocktail party. Cheers.

On Sunday (assuming I'm not totally useless) Miss H, the folks and I will be driving down to Medieval Times for dinner (another thing I've never done), and staying in a hotel in Los Angeles (ditto, actually). This way we won't have to leave my house at the crack of dawn and drive two hours to get to the airport on Monday morning.

And on Monday morning, I leave.

I'll try to blog at least once more before I do.

Wish me luck.

let the countdown begin!

Technically it's already begun—you've probably noticed that cute little widget over on the right. However, the gears have finally meshed. Two days ago I received my passport back from the Korean Consulate General in Los Angeles, stamped with a shiny new E-2 work visa classifying me as a "foreign instructor," and guaranteeing me a one-year sojourn. This was the last piece of paperwork that I needed. I can flash this little honey in the faces of the Korean immigration officials, waltz through customs, and enter South Korea as a legal immigrant. All of my ducks are in a row. I could leave tomorrow if they wanted me.

But they want me on February 7. After a little jockeying, some back-and-forth nonsense, a glut of vacillation and a smidgen of misinformation, the date of my departure was finalized. I am, needless to say, tremendously excited. The contents of my room (stuffed into way too many heavy cardboard boxes) are safely tucked away in a storage unit in town. My suitcases are half-packed, and all the equipment I'm bringing with me has been inventoried and set aside. Decks of cards (three normal decks and a pinochle set); my grooming kit; shoeshine supplies; hat brushes; journals and notebooks; battery chargers; plug adapters; packs of gum; medicines and taco seasoning; and, perhaps most important of all, books. I've got all my cocktail recipe books with me, and some stuff about card games, and my Worst Case Scenario: Travel guide.

And then are the works of fiction I've selected. Sapsucker that I am, I neglected to choose these volumes before packing up my personal library, so I had to go back through the boxes and mine these buggers out of the tenebrous depths.

They are:

• The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
• Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King, which I'm reading now.

I've read Heart of Darkness before, but that was years ago, in school, and I didn't pay it much attention because I was too busy trying to avoid having my upper body dunked into a trash can. Like Moby-Dick, I have attempted to read Frankenstein repeatedly, but always petered out near the end of the first chapter. The Great Shark Hunt (also known as The Gonzo Papers, Volume One) is Thompson's true account of his adventures as a drug-addled gonzo journalist in a country turned upside-down by chemicals, counterculture, rock 'n' roll, political corruption, and war. (The Sixties, in other words.) Skeletons on the Zahara is likewise nonfiction: a tale of woe, desperation, suffering and privation regarding the crew of the American brig Commerce, shipwrecked off the coast of West Africa in 1814 and sold into slavery by Saharan nomads.  It's pretty good so far. Should be a good read on the plane, if I don't finish it before that.

Speaking of books, I am so far behind on my book reviews that it ain't even funny. Okay, maybe it is a bit funny. But that's beside the point. I'll spare you a long, dull, wordy series of reviews that you undoubtedly wouldn't have the patience to read. Instead, I'll review each book in one sentence:

• Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein: A breathlessly suspenseful epic and yet also a sinewy and hard-lined analysis of patriotism, military service, war, and human conflict, in the guise of a rollicking good science fiction tale about well-trained space soldiers in powered armor battling hideous alien bugs. 9/10
• Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer: Journalist and inveterate traveler Krakauer details and examines the life, motivations, adventures and ultimate downfall of the ill-fated super-tramp Christopher McCandless. 9/10
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson: An excoriating satire of drug culture, chemically-enhanced ramblings, and late 20th-century vice in the world's most sinful city—sportswriter Raoul Duke and his Samoan lawyer, Dr. Gonzo, speed off to Las Vegas in a giant red convertible and a trunk full of drugs to cover a motorcycle race. 8/10
• Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin: A powerful, gut-wrenching, no-holds-barred peek into the lives of black folks in the American South in 1959...seen through the eyes of white novelist Griffin himself, who darkened his skin artificially and set off to the South to find out the truth about the "Negro Problem." The truth is viscerally shocking. 7/10

There. Now you know what I've been reading. Incidentally, I've never read any of these books before. I don't know what took me so long to get around to Starship Troopers. Perhaps it was the awful movie adaptation. Thankfully I set my prejudice aside and read the book, which, as I understand, is required reading at West Point, and a great favorite among the 75th Ranger Battalion (the guys who fought through hell in Mogadishu in 1993). Now if only Barack Obama and the Democratic Party would read it...[sigh]...

And finally, since I will become an immigrant (emigrant?) in ten days, I'll leave you with a little song. Yes, yes, I know. I should be using "The Final Countdown" or something, but I hate that song. So take it away, Zep.

if I had $300,000,000

I don't like television. As a general rule, I find it flabby, unwholesome, dissatisfying, crude, and pointless.

So when I tell you that my favorite television show is Firefly, you should understand that the show itself is none of those things. It is, in fact, pure awesomeness incarnate.

Tragically, it was canceled after a measly 14 episodes had been filmed, due to Executive Meddling. More's the pity.

In an interview, Firefly's male lead Nathan Fillion stated that, if he had $300 million on hand, he would buy the rights to the show, and probably continue it, free of interference from the powers-that-be.

That got me thinking. What would I do if I had $300 million?

I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd start up my own movie studio.

On-Target Productions, I'd call it. Or maybe Faithful Studios. Something to convey my sententious but entirely truthful belief that Hollywood is incapable of producing a piece of cinema which is in any way faithful to the source material, and that my studio, by virtue of its firm grounding in literary value (and complete disregard for monetary gain), is.

Anyway, the name isn't important. What's important is that I'd outfit this studio with the best equipment my limited budget could buy, hire the most hardworking personnel I could find, write a bunch of screenplays (the way I like 'em), and make some movies that are entirely accurate and complete interpretations of the media upon which they're based.

I mean that quite literally. Entirely accurate and complete. No chopping or dissecting or mulching being done here; if I mean to make a movie out of a book, I'm using the whole goddamn book: every scene, every line of dialogue, every sentence if needs be. There'll be no "lost characters" like Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings or Peeves the Poltergeist from Harry Potter. And there'll be none of this cutting-out-minor-scenes-because-they-don't-advance-the-action-fast-enough-and-we-can-totally-skip-those-scenes-anyway-because-all-they-do-is-reveal-minor-nuances-of-character-that-we-can-gloss-over-in-the-third-act malarkey. These are going to be faithful interpretations, like I said. That means every little scene, no matter how insignificant a two-bit brain-dead Hollywood screenwriter might consider it, will be reproduced in exact facsimile. No exceptions.

Having my own studio (and not giving a fig whether my productions are marketable, or even if they will be marketed) will give me room to breathe. I don't have to worry about length, or mass appeal, or tone, or censorship, or any of that other crap that the Gilded Mulcher has to worry about in order to sell movie tickets. I can reproduce these great source works as I see fit, with complete creative control, and revel in the realness and truthfulness of the results. I can bring my imagination to life for myself and a few other acolytes to enjoy. Everyone else can go spit.

I'm not saying these films will be unwatchably violent, sexy, or disgusting. There's practically no sex in any of the works I have in mind to adapt. And the violence won't be worse than anything you'd see in a typical action flick. As for the darker, scarier stories...well, it all depends on what you think might blast your soul from your body with cosmic horror.

                                                                                         by Pete Amachree

And mind you, I won't object if a few independent-minded cinemas agree to pick up my works and release them at a few small drive-ins and dollar theaters. Those are the kind of folks I'd want watching my films anyway, not the bigwigs from Hollywood and Cannes.

But that's beside the point! Aren't you curious to know which books and stories I will be adapting for the screen? 

I thought you'd be. I have some very specific ideas on that score. They include, but are not limited to...

• Several tales from Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian mythos. If you haven't read any of Howard's original Conan tales, it's time you started. Howard's barbarian makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like a pantywaist choirboy. The stories are gritty, bloody, sweaty, and hard-boiled, bursting with darkness, danger, hideous evil, swashbuckling adventure and testosterone. Some of the stories I have in mind are Beyond the Black River, The Tower of the Elephant, Iron Shadows on the Moon, and Red Nails...as well as a weird Western tale, unrelated to Conan, The Horror from the Mound.
• Selected works of H.P. Lovecraft, including At the Mountains of Madness, The Thing on the Doorstep, The Shunned House, The Haunter of the Dark, The Shadow Out of Time, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Dunwich Horror. It'll be interesting to see if Lovecraft's works translate well onto the screen. A lot of the horror and suspense in his stories is conveyed through description and inarticulate mentality, not through dialogue or action. Many of the horrific implications and disgusting monsters are best left to the realms of the imagination, too, rather than put up on a screen in CG and pixels. Still, I'd be willing to give it a shot.
• Most of H.G. Wells's full-length works, including The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Most have been made into films already, but none of them have been done correctly. That's not my opinion, that's fact. I'll treat 'em right if no one else will.
• Many of Jules Verne's classic tales, like Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days. Can you imagine what giant squids, raft-rides through lava tubes, and thrilling heroics on speeding steam trains would look like on a humongous theater screen? It gives me the chills!
• Dozens of science fiction novels and short stories by writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, A.E. van Vogt, Arthur C. Clarke, C.M. Kornbluth, L. Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, and Fritz Leiber. Here are a few I've got in mind.
• The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood
• The Novel of the Black Seal by Arthur Machen
• The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
• Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (a respectful interpretation); also The Roads Must Roll and Universe
• The Empire of the Atom, The Wizard of Linn, The Weapon Shops of Isher, and Black Destroyer by A.E. van Vogt
• The Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Big Front Yard by Clifford D. Simak
• Baby Is Three by Theodore Sturgeon

• A live-action film adaptation of the superb and underrated Hanna-Barbera cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian. A fur-clad warrior with a magic sword wanders the post-apocalyptic Earth in the year 3999, after a rogue planet cast human civilization in ruin. In his ongoing quest to save the scrawny, ragged survivors from evil wizards, mutants and strange monsters (many of which are holdovers from the 20th century), Thundarr is aided by the beautiful Princess Ariel, a sorceress, and a huge, furry Mok named Ookla. I'm thinking some big-budget disaster scenes and a lot of Scenery Gorn. 
• Some of the video and computer games I've played have definite potential, such as Crimson Skies. Maybe if I'm in a really fun-loving and goofy mood I'll do Serious Sam.
• Yes, I know I've railed against remakes on this here blog. But I can't help it. I'd redo a few of the old stop-motion monster flicks, not because I think CG would make them better (certainly not; Ray Harryhausen has no equal and never will), but simply because I'm curious to see what they'd look like with a technological makeover. Just curious, is all. I can't help but wonder what a reboot of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Valley of Gwangi, Them!, Jason and the Argonauts, and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad would be like. Specifically, the monsters. You know how much I like monsters.  

And that's it. I think it'd be a lot of fun. I've always wanted to try my hand at screenwriting. And I'll bet I could hire an assistant until I got good at it. Then I'd just go to town. My studio would crank out these films, and they'd go for limited theatrical release or direct-to-DVD, and whoever was interested in real, faithful, true adaptations of good books and cartoons and movies could buy 'em and watch 'em. That's all I want. That's what I'd do with $300,000,000. Maybe a few bucks to charity here and there, but for the most part I'd launch my vendetta against  Hollywood and revel in unmitigated artistic license.

What would you do with $300,000,000? Buy a monkey?

 

the best sci-fi stories you've (n)ever read

Science fiction is arcane stuff. I get that. Not too many people are into it, except the science professor with the corduroy trousers and the geek down the block with the inch-thick glasses. More people are into fantasy (you know, that weird crap with unicorns and leprechauns and sparkly vampires and swords and magic and sexy witches) than sci-fi.

But I didn't come here to pontificate.

The odds are you're not a sci-fi fan. Two-thirds of you reading this probably aren't. Either that or you're a mere dilettante, someone who claims to love science fiction when the most you've ever done is go see Thor and Spider-man in the theaters, or glanced at Fahrenheit 451 in high school, or taken a shortcut through the sci-fi/fantasy section in Barnes & Noble because it was the quickest way to get to Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama at the mall entrance.

Oh, right. I'm not supposed to pontificate. [ahem]

So I'll help you out a little, because I happen to be a real sci-fi fan.

My collection includes everybody from James Blish to Poul Anderson, C.M. Kornbluth to John W. Campbell, Jr., Fritz Leiber to Gordon R. Dickson, Robert E. Gilbert to Edgar Rice Burroughs, A.E. van Vogt to L. Sprague de Camp...and it may soon extend to Piers Anthony, Robert Heinlein, Jack L. Chalker, and Orson Scott Card.

I know my stuff.

I know who Isaac Asimov is (and therefore I know just how much the Will Smith version of I, Robot sucked).

I have read pretty much every story that H.G. Wells or Jules Verne ever wrote.

I know what happened in the year 802,701 A.D. I can carry a gun for dinosaur. I know why sea monsters love lighthouses. I can (probably) flush out a shape-shifting alien. I've learned what a "gestalt organism" is. I know what lies at the earth's core. I can recite the Three Laws of Robotics. I remember what happened to Thor V. I discovered where Captain Nemo lives.

I think I'm pretty qualified to judge what constitutes "good" sci-fi and "bad" sci-fi.

If you're not a science fiction fan, but have been curious about the genre, the following would be my pick. I have here, for your consideration, a list of what I believe represents the best science fiction written in the last hundred years. Some authors' names you may recognize, some you may not. The stories themselves are, to you, probably unfamiliar. Even if you haven't read them, though, you've probably seen them on the silver screen. A lot of these were made into classic, memorable, or semi-memorable films.

More importantly, though, these works have influenced me on a profound level. Someday I hope to be half as good as the people who wrote them. If you, dear reader, should choose to peruse them, you'll receive a crash-course in the mind-blowing storytelling and incredible writing the world of science fiction has to offer.

And as an added bonus, you just might mutate into a full-blown sci-fi nut. Here's hoping.

I was originally going to make this a ten-item list, but you can't read three science fiction anthologies (and have a used book store in your town bursting with dog-eared arcana) without, you know, winding up with a few more favorites than you'd like to admit. More to the point, however, there is absolutely no way to distill an entire genre down to ten items. I needed enough leeway to clue you in on both the genre's classics and its lesser-known short works in order to give you the full picture of the organ's merit and the writers' genius. Then again, you lot are uninitiated, uncultured swine, and I can't overload your gnat-like attention spans with as much material as I'd prefer.

So here you go, twenty items. I slaved over the list for months. I picked these works because (a) I liked 'em and (b) they will literally blow your mind. I dare you to read even three of them and see if your universe hasn't widened a smidgen.

1. The Fog Horn . . . . Ray Bradbury (short story, 1951; inspired the 1953 film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms)
2. Who Goes There? . . . . John W. Campbell, Jr. (novella, 1938; adapted into 1951's The Thing from Another World and 1982's much more faithful The Thing by John Carpenter)**
3. Black Destroyer . . . . A.E. van Vogt (short story, 1939)*****
4. Nerves . . . . Lester del Rey (novella, 1956)**
5. Code Three . . . . Rick Raphael (novella, 1963)*****
6. The Spectre General . . . . Theodore Cogswell (novella, 1952)***
7. Thy Rocks and Rills . . . . Robert Ernest Gilbert (short story, 1953)*****
8. A Pail of Air . . . . Fritz Leiber (short story, 1951)*****
9. The Time Machine . . . . H.G. Wells (novella, 1895; so much better than the two movie adaptations)**
10. E for Effort . . . . T.L. Sherred (novella, 1947)***
11. The Last Question . . . . Isaac Asimov (short story, 1959)*****
12. A Gun for Dinosaur . . . . L. Sprague de Camp (short story, 1956)*****
13. Heavy Planet . . . . Lee Gregor (short story, 1939)***** 
14. Scanners Live in Vain . . . . Cordwainer Smith (short story, 1948)*
15. Arena . . . . Fredric Brown (short story, 1944; provided the basis for a Star Trek episode of the same name)* 
16. The Machine Stops . . . . E.M. Forster (short story, 1909; adapted for TV in 1966 as part of the U.K. sci-fi series Out of the Unknown)***
17. A Rose for Ecclesiastes . . . . Roger Zelazny (short story, 1963)* 
18. The Big Front Yard . . . . Clifford D. Simak (novelette, 1959)***
19. Microcosmic God . . . . Theodore Sturgeon (novella, 1952)*
20. Call Me Joe . . . . Poul Anderson (novella, 1957)**

A in case that wasn't enough, here a few stories I thought deserved a nod. They may not be as "good" as the ones I've listed above ("good" here having the meaning of deep, profound, insightful, provocative, didactic, romantic, or mind-blowingly awesome)...but they're fun. So there.

• The Escape Orbit . . . . James White (novel, 1983)
• The Island of Doctor Moreau . . . . H.G. Wells (novel, 1896)
• Harrison Bergeron . . . . Kurt Vonnegut (short story, 1961)****
•  At the Earth's Core . . . . Edgar Rice Burroughs (novel, 1914) 
• Tale of a Computer that Fought a Dragon . . . . Stanislaw Lem (short story, 1977)****
• The Gods Themselves . . . . Isaac Asimov (novel, 1972)
• A Clockwork Orange . . . . Anthony Burgess (novel, 1962)
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream . . . . Harlan Ellison (short story, 1967; made into a computer game in 1995)
• The Hammer of God . . . . Arthur C. Clarke (novel, 1993)

And that's the list. Pick a few out and give 'em a whirl.  You won't regret it. All I ask is that you read, think, and above all, enjoy.

That's what sci-fi is all about.

* The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume I, ed. Robert Silverberg, 1970.

** The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume IIA, ed. Ben Bova, 1973.

*** The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume IIB, ed. Ben Bova, 1973.

**** The World Treasury of Science Fiction, ed. David G. Hartwell, 1989.

***** The World Turned Upside Down, ed. David Drake, Eric Flint, & Jim Baen, 2005.