igital art galleries are the ultimate in democratic institutions. Whereas established museums and galleries, with a few exceptions, concentrate on "fine art" and disallow reproductions or borrowings, online collections embrace a multitude of "lowbrow" art that would otherwise never be seen except by collectors, and they allow you to print off hard copies for your offline use. Not only that, but they're often better organized than analog collections, free of admission and searchable to boot. That's a hard package to resist!
One of the more intriguing assortments of eye candy online is VISCO: The Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover Art. Here, after perusing a clearly written statement of purpose and easy navigation guide, you'll find more than 800 magazine cover shots ranging from the sedate and high-toned to the lurid and melodramatic. I was particularly taken by some British 'zines, those of the Spencer Group from the 1950s, which are little seen in the United States. Beautiful, hi-res retro-looking rockets, monsters and spacemen by such unsung artists as Gerald Facey and Ron Turner practically leap off the screen. Or consider the influential small-press 'zine from the late 1960s, Coven 13, with its eldritch images by William Stout, best known nowadays for his dinosaur artwork. You'll not likely encounter these paintings outside of convention dealer rooms in pricey bagged copies.
The site promises indexing by publisher and artist in the future, but for the present, access is via magazine title alone. Some useful links are appended, but you'll probably spend so much time browsing among these treasures that you'll neglect them entirely.
— Paul Di Filippo
Site of the Week—December 30, 2002
t's one thing to be able to know how to speak Klingon—it's another thing entirely to be able to write it. Understanding this, the crew behind Tommy of Escondido's Alien Fonts Page set out to recreate the extraterrestrial alphabets of a half-dozen different science-fiction universes.
The site is divided into sections for Star Trek, Babylon 5 and "Other SF Alien Fonts," the last of which contains fonts from Star Wars, Dune, Stargate SG-1, and even V. Each is available for download as a Windows Truetype font; Mac users will need to follow one of the site's links to a Truetype converter to use the fonts on their machines.
The fonts are easy to download and use, and should provide an excellent resource for those seeking a new look for their fan Web site, or who want to make particularly effective handouts for their SF-themed role-playing game.
The largest of the site's collections is dedicated to Star Trek. It holds four series' worth of fonts—28 fonts in all—and range from popular species like Klingon, Vulcan and Romulan to more obscure ones such as Tkon (seen in TNG's "The Last Outpost" episode) and Nyrian (from Voyager's "Displaced"). Each font is drawn from canon sources, be it an official source book like The Star Trek Encyclopedia or the original source episode. Occasionally the creators had to ad-lib a bit, but even then they tried to keep their modifications as close to the source material as possible.
Equally impressive is the Babylon 5 section, which holds 20 fonts and covers every major language in the B5 universe. There's Narn, Minbari, Vorlon, Shadow and even B5 wingdings! As with the Star Trek fonts, most of it is based on canon sources, and the parts that aren't are clearly identified as such.
— Kenneth Newquist
Site of the Week—December 23, 2002
cience fiction and pop music go together like Lennon and McCartney, like Martians and invasions. Both are 20th-century inventions, upwellings of non-academic creative impulses meant to appeal to a wide range of consumers in a flourishing marketplace of trends and ideas. The practitioners of both forms are often self-taught, and sometimes geniuses. Both modes of expression paradoxically advocate ceaseless change while at the same time endlessly reworking older tropes and styles. And both pop music and SF go through boom-and-bust cycles, golden and silver ages alternating with leaden ones. It's no surprise to find plenty of SF writers who love popular music, and scads of popular musicians who embrace SF.
Documenting this connection has never occupied many scholars. In John Clute's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, you'll find a pretty good section on this linkage, under "Music." But for an even more complete catalog of musical works influenced by SF, why not turn to Rich Kulawiec's SF References in Music list? (The corresponding catalog of musical references in SF awaits its creator.) This is the most bare-bones site you can imagine: simply a long scrollable file of alphabetized band and performer names. Under each entry are listed relevant works of SF-tinged music, along with insightful and often witty commentary by Kulawiec. Of course you'll encounter such well-known items as Jefferson Starship's Blows Against the Empire. But did you ever run across the Swedish band Adolphson & Falk, with their hit "Control is Flashing Blue"? Or what about National Health, whose "Tenemos Roads" is about "a war on Mercury"?
Be warned, however: This site could easily bankrupt you, as you scramble to add hundreds of intriguing CDs to your collection!
— Paul Di Filippo
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