It's shameful, I know. This blog started more than five years ago, and didn't get very far. It wasn't much of a blog. ButI in the past few months I have been blogging, or creating posts, at any rate, that have appeared elsewhere—on our agency web site James Frenkel & Associates, on the Writers, etc. facebook page, on my personal facebook page, and also on Cherry Wilder's amazon.com author page.
So I'm now going to blog here as well as those other places. Some of the posts here will end up in one or more of those other places, and vice versa. I expect to blog about a variety of topics: science fiction and fantasy and my experiences in the field and in publishing; sports--mostly baseball; family, mostly about nice things that happen to me and other members of our family--weddings, graduations, other nice things; and sometimes, politics.
There may end up being a podcast at some point, but for now, I'm not going to be nearly that ambitious. I will, however, use a name for this blog that hasn't appeared as the title of the blog before, but which I think fits it: SkiffyNest.
You might well wonder why I—or anyone—would call something SkiffyNest. Glad you asked. As some of you know, way back, when science fiction fandom was young, a brash fan named Forrest J. Ackerman (known in his fanzines as 4SJ Ackerman) had a bright idea, to shorten up the words science fiction to "SciFi." It was a terrific idea. The sound of it was unusual, yet rolled easily off the tongue. And it became very popular. Then Forry Ackerman (any of you who knew him know that he was often known as "Forry")
When he helped found and edited Famous Monsters of Filmland in 1958, he used sci-fi as a convenient tag for science fiction, and that abbreviation started to become known in the mainstream, to the point where for more than a half century it has been very commonly used in popular culture media when someone wants to mention anything related to science fiction, fantasy or horror media in film, television, games or literature. By the late 1960s, those who were writing and publishing SF fiction became somewhat sensitized to the term, because it was so often associated with the horror films of the 1950s, many of which were very low-budget, sometimes to the point of absurdity. This is not to say that there weren't any good sf films in the fifties.
Of course there were, two of which are among my favorites, Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). I can still feel a little shiver when I think of certain scenes from each of those films, the one in the former when an unseen force breaches the defensive perimeter of the space ship and, to the accompaniment of single beats of music, make the stops leading to the ship's entrance depress, suggesting something very heavy or powerful . . . but invisible; the other one is the scene in the latter film in which Patricia Neal's character, Helen Benson, has come to the spaceship of the handsome, British-accented alien Klaatu (played by Michael Rennie), because he asked her to do so if anything happened to him. Facing the giant robot that protects the ship, she says the words Rennie told her to say, "Klaatu Barada Nicto." And Gort, the robot, begins to activate, first melting the block of supposedly unbreakable plastic, then vaporizing the two soldiers guarding it, and then advancing on the terrified Benson. Until it's clear that he's only going to carry her inside the ship so that she'll be safe while he brings the dead body of Klaatu back to the ship so he can bring him back to life, it's really, really scary. And even now, decades later, even though I know the outcome, it's such a well-excuted bit of suspense that I can't help feeling the tension.
But not all sci-fi films in the fifties were nearly so well done. And in the laste 1960s, science fiction was starting to really grow up. there had been a lot of very good science fiction writing, as early as the late 1930s (and even earlier, of course, going back to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells). But modern SF really took hold in the pulp magazines of the 1920s, and was long considered to be every bit as trashy as the trashiest pulp fiction of other genres: two-fisted Westerns, two-fisted detective stories, two-fisted spy stories, etc. etc.--even two-fisted romance, no doubt. And to be sure, there was a lot of rather bad sci-fi written in the early pulps, and even in later SF magazines, after most pulp magazines were long since gone. But by the late 1960s, the number of rather talented writers in the field of SF and fantasy was burgeoning. People who grew up reading pulp magazine SF were writing their own stories and novels, and many of them were writers as good as any writing popular fiction . . . and some were highly literary, writers such as Brian W. Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon and a number of others. So sci-fi, with its strong connection to Famous Monsters of Filmland grated on some writers, especially those with more literary ambitions.
But now, in 2015, it's well-nigh impossible to deny the term "sci-fi:" anymore. Between the tv channel (originally the SciFi Channel and now, strangely, the SyFy Channel) and the massive amount of media involved in hugely successful film and tv franchises such as Star Wars and Star Trek, not to mention enormous comic-book adaptation films like The Avengers, Batman as well as a growing number of others, it's hard to imagine that anyone could make a case for abandoning "sci-fi" when referring to anything with even a sniff of science-fictionality.
So I'm embracing the idiom. I grew up reading comics and science fiction magazines, and have loved sf and fantasy for as long as I can remember. And these days, the world is becoming increasingly like what we thought of as science fiction when we were young. Yeah, the lack of flying cars is a definite disappointment, but in hindsight, that was a fantasy that--unless reality contradicts me in the future--seems like it's just not a very practical idea. Someone not long ago brought up the question of whether one would really want flying cars driven by teenagers? And I have to agree. Even if they were completely automatic flying cars, controlled by a very effective system of computer-controlled traffic management, just the thought of some kid hacker, drunk or with otherwise chemically altered consciousness, managing to subvert a flying car's programming, makes my blood run cold. Mid-air collisions, omni-directional joyriding . . . Ouch!
But as I say, life these days feels so much like skiffy--that's long been my favorite way to pronounce "sci-fi"--that I figure I might as well embrace the popular term. It's where I come from--hey, I grew up in a neighborhood the post office calls "Utopia." I'm not going to argue. So welcome to my blog, SkiffyNest, my home on the web.
For now, I'm not going to make this post a lot longer, but I do want to mention just a little bit about the imminent opening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I still recall quite vividly when the very first Star Wars film, episode 4, opened, over Memorial Day weekend, 1977. It was a revelation to me and to, I suspect, to most of the people who filled theaters and became huge fans of Han, Luke, Leia, Chewie, Artoo and Threepio. There had never been a sci-fi film anything like it before. 1968's impressive Stanley Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was a great technical achievement. The film looked great; the special effects creating the impression of space and spacecraft were hugely convincing. But 2001 was serious, dark, filled with long camera shots and scenes that held very little action. Star Wars was . . . well, hey, it was huge fun! There was nothing cute about 2001, whereas Star Wars had machinery that squeaked, whistled, whined and got messed up. What a contrast to the sleek, mysterious and in the case of HAL 9000, creepily sophisticated technology of 2001.
We've been through six Star Wars films now, and after the unfortunate missteps that made episodes 1-3 so underwhelming, I'm actually excited to see what J. J. Abrams has produced in this new episode. Abrams has done a lot of very entertaining tv and film, including Super 8 and the "new" Star Trek films. So I'm optimistic--still a little cautiously, but mostly really eager--about this new Star Wars film. I saw a trailer just today, which looked really good. Of course, after having been gulled by great trailers into seeing some rather bad films, I realize that a trailer can be wonderful, even when the film it is teasing about could be simply dreadful. But I think J. J. Abrams has too much at stake--he has been charged with carrying the franchise on into the future. He's a fanboy at heart, as are an awful lot of the people involved. I have trouble believing that he won't do his best to make the best Star Wars film he can make.
I know people who have been counting down to the opening on our daughter's birthday next month. I'm not doing that, mostly because the thought of trying to get a ticket for opening night seems like a hopeless quest and an ill advised to boot. The first weekend will be completely sold out--they've sold more than $50 million worth of tickets for the film already, and we still have almost a whole month to go. So we'll wait for at least a week, and go during the week, to avoid the mobs that will surely besiege people working in Star Wars theaters.
Then we'll see how good this new iteration of the sacred franchise actually is.
