everal years ago, a commencement speech advocating such useful and whimsical advice as "always wear sunscreen" was falsely attributed to famous writer Kurt Vonnegut, best known in the SF community for such classic fabulist novels as The Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse Five. The palpable desire among those who encountered this speech to believe that it constituted actual words of wisdom from their too-silent hero testified to the high regard and affection which Vonnegut's fans have for him. Any words of wisdom, even inauthentic ones, were much in demand.
Well, now there's no need to subsist on spurious Vonnegut. Simply visit Marek Vit's Kurt Vonnegut Corner and you'll have access to all the gleanings of this wonderful writer you can imagine. Here you'll find biographical data, essays about the man and his works, a large compendium of killer quotes, photos of young and old Vonnegut and a trail to other such sites. But perhaps most crucial for the hardcore SF afficionado is the wing of the site devoted to Vonnegut's alter ego, Kilgore Trout. A dreadfully untalented yet warmly humane hack SF writer, Trout was seemingly modeled on the career of Theodore Sturgeon, and actually had a full novel composed in his name by Philip Jose Farmer. In this section, Marek Vit gathers up all the story fragments seeded by Vonnegut throughout his canon and displays them gleefully for our delight. It's like sitting at Kilgore Trout's feet for a boozy gabfest, in which the imaginary dean of so-bad-it's-great SF regales us with his insights into how to cure everything from cancer to war.
And yes, the text of the "sunscreen" speech is available here as well. Read it after you've immersed yourself in the real Vonnegut, and then ask yourself how you were ever fooled.
— Paul Di Filippo
Site of the Week—November 25, 2002
ary Westfahl is a well-known scholar and critic in the science-fiction field. With regular columns in Interzone magazine, among other venues, he has proven that he can lay down the critical law in a scintillating fashion on writers from Robert Heinlein to Harlan Ellison. What might be less advertised about the man is that he's an expert on SF films as well. And as I can personally testify, from hearing him deliver a speech on Japanese monster movies, his sharp wit and clever phrasings make listening to what he has to say sometimes more enjoyable than watching the actual films under discussion.
Now Web surfers can partake of Westfahl's pithy observations and sonorous prose stylings by visiting Gary Westfahl's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Film. This text-only site contains nearly 100 entries, arranged alphabetically by name, on a variety of folks associated with the SF cinema, from writers and actors and directors to fans and critics. (And more are being added all the time, as Westfahl's busy schedule allows.) Westfahl offers an overview of each person's career, as well as salient moments from their on-screen and off-screen lives. And the best part is, like any critic worth his salt, he's determinedly, wonderfully opinionated. Consider this line from the Nick Adams entry: "Once you link together the phrases 'handsome young actor,' 'absolutely no talent' and 'briefly famous,' it is almost inevitable that 'recurring star of bad science-fiction movies' will be added to the string."
But there's more than just clever dissing at play here. Westfahl comes up with tons of valuable insights as well. Take this one into the talent of minor writer Jerry Sohl: "Screenwriter Sohl fully recognized that he was no good, a midget struggling to stay afloat in a big man's game; and he could occasionally exploit that sense of his own inadequacy to produce scenarios that exhibited, if not talent, a gleeful childishness ... " It's these kinds of apercus that will keep you glued to the screen at Westfahl's intriguing encyclopedia.
— Paul Di Filippo
Site of the Week—November 18, 2002
hough it may be difficult for younger fans to imagine, there was a period not terribly long ago when the idea of traveling to the moon, or even into outer space, was considered science fiction. For children growing up at that time, the sparks that frequently ignited an interest in SF—and, more often than not, real-life science, too—were colorful books filled with drawings of complex space stations and futuristic spaceships. Dreams of Space chronicles those inspiring images, focusing not on the juvenile fiction literature of the day, but rather the rosy forecasts of humanity's imminent conquest of the cosmos.
The site is divided into five sections, highlighting both cover art and internal graphics. "Imagination" showcases books published prior to 1949, with "Preflight" looking at works issued from 1949 to 1953 and "Countdown" concentrating on volumes printed between 1954 and 1956. Tomes from the dawn of the Space Age (i.e., 1957 to 1960) are covered in "Liftoff," while publications from 1961 through 1974 are brought to light in "Flight and Touchdown." Seminal titles like The Conquest of Space (1949) and The First Book of Space Travel (1953) are featured, along with dozens of lesser-known yet equally inspired illustrations. Among these relatively uncelebrated images are striking black-and-white drawings from By Rocket to the Moon (1931), the lush designs of Space Flight: The Coming Exploration of the Universe (1959) and a pair of sketches from The Next 50 Years on the Moon (1974) that are optimistically captioned "We're into the 1980s or perhaps the early 1990s. Actual construction of a permanent lunar colony has begun."
Book-jacket text excerpts and a short history of outer-space art are also available, plus two separate indexes, one presenting thumbnail biographies of important artists and illustrators and another offering information on various authors and editors. Maintained by John Sisson, Dreams of Space is a fascinating site that ingeniously documents how imagery that was once kid stuff ultimately became, as Carl Sagan might have said, true "starstuff."
— Jeff Berkwits
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