Fletcher Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn

Posted on July 7, 2009 by skullsinthestars

Though I’m quite well read these days with respect to pulp fiction of the early 1900s, I’m much less familiar with those genres which followed, namely science fiction and fantasy.  Occasionally, however, my literary wanderings cross my path with something of the later genres, and I take a look.

Last month, I read The Well of the Unicorn (1948), by Fletcher Pratt (1897-1956).  A colorful image of the 3rd Ballantyne edition is pictured below, though I read a more recent edition:

wellofunicorn

The novel is definitely a groundbreaking work: Pratt developed an entire fictional fantasy world and history, and it appeared before Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), though not before The Hobbit (1937).   But is it as memorable?

Continue reading →

Posted in Fantasy fiction | 3 Comments

Hollywood: Now officially out of ideas

Posted on July 6, 2009 by skullsinthestars

Okay, now I think we can make this official:  Hollywood is completely out of novel ideas.  We started to suspect that this was the case when they started remaking very old classics such as King Kong, but at least there was an argument that those older films could use a high-tech facelift.  Then they started remaking classic films which were nearly perfect, such at The Haunting and The Day the Earth Stood Still, and completely botched them.   When Hollywood’s favorite muse became the videogame industry, one might be forgiven for assuming they had run out of ideas then.

But no, July 2009, is the official month the movie industry ran out of ideas.  From IMDB:

Classic 1980s computer game Asteroids is crashing onto the big screen – the arcade hit is set for a Hollywood movie makeover.

Universal Pictures bosses have snapped up the rights to make a film out of Asteroids, and are said to have given G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra director Lorenzo Di Bonaventura the job of breathing life into the project.

If you’d like to see an image of the project they’re “breathing life” into, look no further:

Asteroi1Yeesh… one hopes that this is some sort of surreal joke…

Posted in ... the Hell?, Entertainment | 17 Comments

Some musings on negative refraction

Posted on July 4, 2009 by skullsinthestars

For a part of this past week I was at a workshop in California, and a lot of excellent theoretical and experimental researchers of metamaterials were present.  One of the points stressed by many of them is the difference between the idea of ‘negative refraction’ and a ‘negative refractive index’.  I had been vaguely aware of the issue, but it was really driven home by some of the discussion.  I thought I’d share my musings on the subject in a post.

Continue reading →

Posted in Optics | 8 Comments

12 days until The Giant’s Shoulders #13!

Posted on July 3, 2009 by skullsinthestars

This July 4th, if you’re celebrating the history of the United States, why not celebrate some history of science as well?  There’s 12 days left until the deadline for The Giant’s Shoulders #13, which is the first anniversary edition of the carnival, to be hosted right here.  Let’s make this one extra-special and get a lot of great entries submitted!

Posted in General science, Science news | 2 Comments

“Depression” isn’t just feeling bad

Posted on July 1, 2009 by skullsinthestars

There’s been a healthy amount of discussion on the science blogs over the past few days about clinical depression, spurred on in large part by questions from aspiring academics concerning the best way to address the impact of their illness on their job and, just as important, their advisor’s perception of that job.  Dr. Isis seems to have started the current ball rolling with a question from a postdoc, PalMD posted another reader’s experience as a grad student dealing with depression, and Mark Chu-Carroll updated an old post concerning his own struggles with depression.  (If you search through the comments on the original post, you can read one of my very first blog comments, long before I had a blog of my own.)

I feel I should throw my own personal experiences in here.  I’ve been on antidepressants myself since graduate school.  I make no secret of it to anyone anymore, though I haven’t talked about it that much on the blog, except in one early post about the unjustified stigma that antidepressant drugs have. Continue reading →

Posted in Health | 6 Comments

My interview on “A Blog Around the Clock”

Posted on June 30, 2009 by skullsinthestars

As part of the run-up to ScienceOnline’10, Coturnix of A Blog Around the Clock has been running written interviews with the participants of the ’09 conference… including me!  You can read my interview here.

Posted in General science, Personal | Leave a comment

Happy birthday to Ray Harryhausen!

Posted on June 29, 2009 by skullsinthestars

It’s a good time of year for birthdays: today is Ray Harryhausen’s birthday!  If you don’t know who Ray Harryhausen is, you should be ashamed of yourself — he’s the undisputed master of special effects.

Harryhausen pioneered the use of stop-motion animation to bring fantastic creatures to life.  If you’ve seen It Came From Beneath the Sea, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Clash of the Titans, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms or — heaven help me — The Valley of Gwangi, you’ve seen Harryhausen’s mastery of special effects.

My favorite, which I still find awesome to this day, is the animated statue of Kali (via This Distracted Globe):

Goldenvoyage3

The Golden Voyage gives us this nice bit of trivia about the sequence:

In order to rehearse all the six arms with the actors in the sequence three stunt men had to be strapped together with a big belt standing and posing as Kali.

The adventure films of Harryhausen never made a whole lot of sense, but they were fun and filled with creatures more memorable than most of the throw-away CGI beasts produced today.

Most of Harryhausen’s work was done from the 50s through the 80s, but he still has an impact — numerous little “tributes” to him appear in animated films, and in 1992 he won the Gord0n E. Sawyer Academy Award “Given to an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry.”

Happy birthday, and hopefully many more, to the father of modern special effects!

(P.S. I’m honored to share a birthday with him!)

Update:  The Seventh Voyage.com, a site dedicated to Harryhausen, is fascinating!  Particularly intriguing is the section on Lost Projects, imaginative movie ideas that Harryhausen never got a chance to make.  Even more intriguing: one of these lost projects, War Eagles, was originally conceived in 1940 but is going to be released in 2010, with Harryhausen as executive producer!  From IMDB: “A publicly humiliated test pilot and a lost clan of vikings riding giant eagles are America’s only hope against a surprise Nazi attack.”  Awesome!

Posted in Entertainment | 2 Comments

Abramowitz and Stegun online!

Posted on June 29, 2009 by skullsinthestars

Abramowitz and Stegun is a classic reference book which contains all sorts of information about special functions and their integrals.  If you’ve ever needed to reference something on the road and don’t have your copy with you, you will be happy to learn that the book is accessible online.

I happened across this by pure dumb luck while looking for some sort of obscure Bessel function integral some time ago…

Posted in Mathematics | 7 Comments

Francis Stevens’ The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy

Posted on June 29, 2009 by skullsinthestars

In my readings for this blog, I am constantly surprised by how many truly excellent authors and works of weird fiction have been (mostly) lost in the passage of time.  Fortunately, a number of publishers have valiantly taken up the cause of bringing these forgotten works back into the public eye, and I’ve talked a quite a bit about Valancourt Books, Wordsworth Mystery and Supernatural, and Paizo Press.  I should probably add to this list Bison Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, which a few years ago produced an edition of Francis Stevens’ short stories, titled The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy:

thenightmare

Francis Stevens was the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1883-1948), who wrote a number of novels and short stories between 1917 and 1923.  She is credited in the Bison Books edition as being “the woman who invented dark fantasy”, and with good reason: though the tales in the book are uneven in their plot and character development at times, they present a truly dark vision of the world that has obvious influences on such luminaries as H.P. Lovecraft and A. Merritt, as we will see.

Continue reading →

Posted in Horror, Weird fiction | 5 Comments

Happy birthday to Bruce Davison!

Posted on June 28, 2009 by skullsinthestars

I’m out of town for a few days, and likely posting light, but I had to put in a short “happy birthday” to actor Bruce Davison!

Davison, who has a distinguished air about him that screams, “upper echelon”, is often pegged for roles as academics, doctors or politicians — both good and bad.   He played the evil, mutie-hating Senator Kelly in X-Men, and the do-good philanthropist on the remake of Knight Rider.  He did an excellent, though brief, job as the unstable Dr. Silberman on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and has guest-starred on shows as diverse as Seinfeld, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost.  I’ve always been particularly fond of his role as the increasingly deranged Dr. Stegman on the surprisingly good Stephen King miniseries Kingdom Hospital.

One performance of his, however, has been burned into my brain from long before I knew who he was.   One of his earlier roles was in the made-for-TV movie The Wave (1981), in which he plays high-school teacher Ben Ross, who is apparently turning his students into a new wave of Nazi idealogues.

Best wishes to Davison on his birthday for a long and successful career!

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