heinleinblog

Via Nerdage:

An award-winning Oklahoma artist is set to draw a project by a science fiction master.

Steve Erwin, artist of DC Comics including “Deathstroke the Terminator,” is attached to the project “Citizen of the Galaxy,” which would be a graphic novel adaptation of the Robert Heinlein book. A Kickstarter campaign is currently under way for the graphic novel.

Erwin, who was born in Tulsa, was inducted into the Oklahoma Cartoonist Hall of Fame in 2007.

The project seeks to raise $26,400 via Kickstarter. “Citizen of the Galaxy,” the story to be adapted, was one of Heinlein’s last stories he wrote for teens. The story originally appeared in 1957 as a four-part series in Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Eric Gignac is spearheading the project.

While it may be historically accurate to call this book the “original” Buck Rodgers novel, very little of this novel resembles what we think we know of Buck Rodgers. The Buck Rodgers of the comic strip, movie serials and television show featured spaceflight. This book is mostly a post-apocalyptic, former United States stages a rebellion against the commies novel. In a lot of ways, it resembles some of Heinlein’s works. The main character isn’t even named “Buck.”

Yep. I was an intern at the Peoria Journal Star during the summer of 1987. I went out to his home and was there for about two hours. He seemed so … normal. I guess I expected him to be about 10 feet tall.

Anyway, my boss at the PJS refused to even consider running it. They had run a six paragraph story about Farmer less than two years earlier, and every two years was their limit on Phil Farmer stories.

Anyway, I saved the recording I did of the interview, hoping to resurrect it somehow. I went to look for it around the year 2000 and realize it had been lost in a move. I searched for that tape for six months. It is no where to be found.

I love his take on the Wold-Newton universe. I’m sure that fact we lived in the same town (and the fact that the Peoria Public Library was FILLED with his work) had a lot to do with my love of Farmer.

Now, no more Farmer stories. No more Heinlein stories. But at least C.J. Cherryh is still alive and kicking.

Someone cobbled together the first “Buck Rodgers” serial into a movie, called “Planet Outlaws.” Put aside the cheesy special effects and the ham-handed action, and you’ve got a pretty good movie.

Now HERE is some news that Heinlein would like:

Dennis Tito, the millionaire investment whiz who became the first paying passenger to visit the International Space Station in 2001, has worked out a plan to send two astronauts to Mars and back without stopping. However, the privately backed 501-day flight would have to be launched in 2018 — or wait until the 2030s.

Details about the Red Planet flyby are trickling out in advance of a Washington news conference next week.

First word of the venture came out in amedia advisory passed along by the SpaceRef website on Wednesday. The advisory, attributed to the Texas-based Griffin Communications Group, describes a “Mission for America” that would capitalize on a favorable orbital opportunity to launch a round-trip mission to Mars in January 2018.

Shades of The Man Who Sold the Moon.

Some folks will bitch about a millionaire BUYING a chance to walk on another planet and how doggone unfair it is. How is that any less fair that some government monopoly on planet landings?

Hooray!

UPDATE: Alas, no landing. The mission is described as a flyby with NO stops. But still. Wow.

January 1950. Here is the Wikipedia article on Captain Future.

I always wanted to know the relationship between Hazel Stone’s fictional Capt. John Sterling at the pulp fictional Captain Future, who was written occasionally by a fictional writer named Sterling.

From io9:

Tiffany Aching, the teenage witch who stars in Terry Pratchett’s latest novel I Shall Wear Midnight, is in many ways the anti-Harry Potter.

True, she’s a precocious pubescent who gets to ride a broomstick and save the day, but the final installment of her four-novel series of adventures is no jolly tale of boarding school, wand-waving and chocolate frogs. In fact, it is highly likely that a book so savagely bleak as I Shall Wear Midnight has not been marketed to children since the days of Struwwelpeter.

For example, not thirty pages in, Tiffany is called to assist when a pregnant thirteen-year-old miscarries after being assaulted by her violent, alcoholic father. The young witch is able to use hedge-magic to take away the girl’ s pain before burying the foetus; the father later hangs himself. Hogwarts, it ain’t.

Like I said, I’d like to see something like an anti-Twilight novel. I hate sparkly vampires.

Mars may have running water:

PASADENA, Calif. — The ground where NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit became stuck last year holds evidence that water, perhaps as snow melt, trickled into the subsurface fairly recently and on a continuing basis.

Where there is water, there can be life. So, let’s quit screwing around and get to Mars, OK?

Crossposted from Radio-Free-Peoria.

Dimension X: Destination Moon

I might have some other Heinlein material later on.

This is in German, but you don’t need to understand trhe language to grok this commercial.

And the Master was quite fond of Star Trek.