The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jack Ruttan:

"I wish there were more cheerful SF films with spectacle, story, characters, and humour...

Me too, Jack. When Serenity came out last year, I had hoped that this would finally show people that the Lucas Way is not the only successful way to do space operas and that it'd lead others to try. (I'd love a modernized take on Edmond Hamilton's Star Kings.) Unfortunately, Wheadon's movie wasn't a success. "

Really, it's kind of a miracle when all the bits come together. I remember showing "The Thief of Baghdad" to a friend, and her wanting to show me some other movies like that. They're hard to find!

Recently, only Star Wars (you know, the first one), The Wrath of Khan, and Galaxy Quest have really done it for me in that genre. Serenity kind of fell short, but I'm not a Joss Whedon fan.

I'd like to see a movie of "The Uplift Wars" by David Brin (the one with the Chimpanzee hero), or perhaps something with Lois M. Bujold's Miles V. character (a cheerier, less bloody version of the "Starship Troopers" movie.)

"Total Recall," despite Ahnold, and violence, also had that serendipity. A guilty pleasure.

I kind of enjoyed the Star Wars prequels the way I enjoy tacky fifties-sixties costume dramas. Are they really so much worse dramatically than The Ten Commandments, or the Harryhausen films?

The last one (Return of the Sith) was a drag, however, with its videogame aesthetics.

I wish there were more cheerful SF films with spectacle, story, characters, and humour, rather than all these endless gothic shoot-em-ups and formulaic superheroes.

Eight Dollars Fifty American? That is a low budget! Must have called in a lot of favours.

And I didn't read Fragano's comment, which essentially said the same thing, before I said it.

It's important to be able to picture it in our minds, so we ground it in things we know. Like outerspace creatures having aspects of crabs or squids (hello, Cthulu!). Then creating a splashy and exciting mindpicture is a combination of this kind of description, and extrapolation.

Maybe that wasn't too clear, but _I_ don't think they're dated, though they probably speak of a certain time and place to lots of readers.

I think the early 70s was a great age for fantasy illustration, what with the Dillons, Frazetta, Vaughan Bode, John Schoenherr - off the top of my head. Of course, that's when I was coming into my teens.

That's really why I left it up in the air. I love the Dillons, (not to mention "Emsh," Frank R. Paul, and scratchy duo-toned magazine illustrations from the 50s and 60s. And painted scenes from the "Gold Key Treasury of Knowledge.") But there's always someone (usually my illustrator friend, who understands most of my references), who gets a big whiff of patchouli from such things.

And slightly pot-bellied barbarians of either gender are a nice switch.

(hair aside: I'm afraid the more authentic bowl cuts and tonsures still aren't cool, though some can pull it off.)

I think the problem is more to do with that airbrushy side-of-van realism you see a lot of in fantasy art. Certainly the Hildebrandts and Boris suffer from that. Frank Frazetta maybe gets a little away from it, but that depends on your taste.

The watercoloury-spidery people who follow Rackham perhaps date less, but you don't find them as much on the covers of paperbacks.

Of course, the challenge for artists is finding a personal style that won't date, either, but stuff does go in and out of fashion. All you can do is just draw what you like.

Re Tolkien:, or at least the Lord of the Rings as described by Graydon. Aren't all stories, if you follow them to the end, tragedies?

Sorry, X. I know a bit of Mandarin, from my corner store, and could say "shiu-shiu". But nothing to do with Ohio.

Wanted to chime in that I investigated the wikipedia site cited above, on football chants, and it talks about "Ole, ole" (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e1/Football_chant_ole_ole_ole.mid), and has it as a bullfighting chant.

Still, we're waiting up here for the decision between Portugal and France. Portugal would mean a better street party.

Me trying to speak French here in Quebec, and not knowing that. Thanks, Lori!

What about the "Ha-way oh way oh way oh way" song? That's the one I associate with Foot-ba. (soccer to us). What's its name, anyhow?

Okay. But the bio made that sound like husbandly indulgence. The blog or whatever was more succinct.

I'd heard ugly rumours that Dick Francis' wife actually did most of the writing.

Visiting the Saint Vincent DePaul prison was an eye opener. They did an 'open house' just before tearing it down (if it is torn down. At least, it was closed. I think it was the backdrop for a few American movies, back when they shot American movies in Montreal). Anyhow, the most amazing things were the elaborate mandalas made on cell walls by prisoners using cigarette-pack tinfoil.

Other cool stuff too. It would have made an interesting museum, and tough-love parents could take their kids to show them, "this is where you'll end up if you don't behave!"

I liked Kelly Link, because she's between fantasy and literary (hate those pigeonholes, also this courier type, which is letting me make typos in this afternoon outdoor light). Also, the fact that she's posted a lot of her stories on the web, for free. She goes where I wish Neil Gaiman would go in his fiction, given the promise of his comic book writing.

My last SF I enjoyed was Neal Stephenson, and also Lois M. Bujold (but that was a little too traditionally "hard," for me in my mad literary phase. I would have loved it to death as a teen.)

Hey, thanks, Lila, Faren, and adamsJ. Made nots of everything, and believe me, it will be searched out.

At the moment, I'm reading "Memoir in Antproof Case" by Mark Helprin, and have on deck "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," (or is that "A Staggering Work of ....??") by David Eggers.

Summer, I'm not working so hard (Demn it. I'm a freelancer), so can devour lots of books!

I feel like I have to add this, because I hate trying to page back to find the reference: It's "Cities in Flight." by James Blish.

Now, since I have the floor, and this is an open thread... has anyone got "must read" suggestions for someone who was a big SF reader in his teens and 20s, now not so much?

I want to know about books from the past 5 years or so.

CHip wrote: "Appealing as it might seem, DC can't be IMT. [...] But it would be fascinating to know whether Blish had any specific place in mind."

I thought that since it was such a bad guy city, he went out of his way not to make it an identifiable city. Though he makes a jab at ugly public art, so it might have been a take off on a Soviet-era "Worker's Paradise."

(long time since reading those books.)

Maybe the super ladies are our Venuses of Willendorf, or Minoan snake women. Few of them had earthly proportions.

I do comics, and don't pretend to understand. I can't fetishise women that way, but my hand moves in certain directions when drawing, in part controlled by background and society. Why does R. Crumb draw women with big feet, or E Gorey with no foreheads?

Remember those Italian masters, and how subjects looked according to whether the artist was Dutch or French.

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