Category: Sci-Fi

The Father of Modern Science Fiction

Ray Bradbury has died. He called himself a writer of Fantasy fiction, but I think of Bradbury the same way as I do Vonnegut, as a writer of “soft” Science Fiction, and he helped to redefine in my mind what the genre was, and could be. “Hard” Sci-Fi is old school, with an emphasis on getting the science right, or at least making it somewhat plausible. Bradbury’s plots include space ships and time travel, but these are merely the trappings of his stories. In contrast to the strength of Bradbury’s ideas, his prose has a delicacy that isn’t found in the work of Asimov or Heinlein.

Denro had these comments:

I recalled that everyone I knew read “Martian Chronicles” in Jr. High… not because we had too, but because we wanted to. That was my intro to Bradbury and still my favorite, I guess. Plenty of comic stories came out of there! Along with a comic book store name.

Being a collection of related short stories, The Martian Chronicles is a particularly accessible book for young readers. Not since reading Rusty’s Space Ship by Evelyn Sibley Lampman in the third grade had I been affected as much by a book as I was by The Martian Chronicles. Later, I was pleased to learn that in the 1950’s some of Bradbury’s stories had been adapted in comic books and in radio shows like X Minus 1.

[audio:http://archive.org/download/XMinus1_A/xminusone_550508_MarsIsHeaven.mp3|titles=X Minus One: Mars is Heaven by Ray Bradbury]

The Million Year Picnic is a comic book store in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. It was named by its founder Jerry Weist after the last story in The Martian Chronicles, and having opened in 1974 it was one of the first shops dedicated to selling comics.

Moebius strip

When I noted the passing of Ralph McQuarrie last week, I also thought of the cartoonist Jean Giraud, and now the man who called himself Moebius is also dead. Giraud came to mind because he was one of the artists who worked on Alien, along with Ron Cobb and H.R. Giger. As influential as Star Wars was, only two years later, while The Empire Strikes Back was in production, Alien redefined the look and feel of Sci-Fi movies.

A close encounter with Douglas Trumbull

Director and legendary special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull lives in Western Massachusetts. Monday on WBUR he spoke with Tom Ashbrook about the future of cinema.

[audio:http://audio.wbur.org/storage/2012/03/onpoint_0305_2.mp3|titles=Tom Ashbrook interviews Douglas Trumbull]

Trumbull talks about 3-D movies, and he brings up the very important point that 3-D is very DIM in movie theaters, and they need to be much brighter. I’d go further and say that in general movies are, like today’s comic books, much too dark and colorless.

A Stellar Artist

Ralph McQuarrie, best known as the production artist on Star Wars, has died. McQuarrie’s work had a clean, open and subdued style, reflecting his background as a technical illustrator, and he greatly influenced the look of first three Star Wars movies. Star Wars, the first film, was unlike anything ever seen before, despite being a throwback to the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials of the 1930’s. StarWars.com has a remembrance from George Lucas, with a gallery of McQuarrie’s work.

From The STAR WARS Portfolio, Ballantine Books, September, 1977

McQuarrie, born June 13, 1929, in Gary, Indiana, was influenced by his grandfather, who did watercolors, and his mother, who drew and painted. It wasn’t long before he settled on a career in art. He took an art major in high school, studied technical illustration, and then went to work for the Boeing Company. There he met people who had studied at and recommended the Art Center School in Los Angeles. After two years in Korea, he enrolled at Art Center as an illustration student.

The ease with which McQuarrie understood the highly technical visuals required for STAR WARS is particularly explained by his earlier work for CBS News Apollo coverage as well as for Boeing, Litton Industries, and Kaiser Graphuics. His work for CBS, doing artist’s renderings of the capsules’ travel through space — making visible what could not otherwise been seen — generated quite an interest in McQuarrie’s work. He was soon approached about doing animation background paintings and movie-poster art.

Some production paintings McQuarrie had done for Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins brought him to the attention of director George Lucas in late 1975. Very soon after, they began discussing production paintings for STAR WARS. Lucas suggested that McQuarrie approach the work from the point of view of “ideal” portrayals rather than feel restricted by what could actually be achieved in filming the situations repesented in the art.

The first four or five paintings had been done when STAR WARS was still in the development stage through Twentieth Century-Fox. George Lucas felt that McQuarrie’s paintings wouuld not only be of interest to Twentieth, but, by helping them to visualize his ideas, would also dissolve any hesitation on their part to go ahead with making the film.

The production paintings were of incalculable value when it came to discussing STAR WARS’ production design and costuming. They reflect various changes in visual concepts as well as the evolving story line. The ideas of not only George Lucas and Ralph McQuarrie are concretized here, but also those of production designer John Barry and model designers Joe Johnston and Colin Cantwell.

McQuarrie’s paintings were done in a combination of opaque gouache and acrylic on illustration board mounted on hardboard.

CAROL WIKARSKA
DIRECTOR OF PUBLICATIONS
STAR WARS

Blog cross-pollutionation

Two huge J.R.R. Tolkien fans are Brian Sibley and Stephen Colbert, and they happen to have provided me with a convenient segue so I can include them both in a single post. (I hope Colbert hasn’t already coined the word “pollutionation!”)

Brian (friend of the blog) Sibley is up for a BBC Audio Drama Award, for his superb radio adaptation, The History of Titus Groan, based on the Gormenghast books by Mervyn Peake. This is a wonderfully engrossing and challenging series of radio dramas, with outstanding performances that are both finely nuanced and, when required, hilarious and over the top. The cast includes one of my favourite ladies of British stage and screen, Miranda Richardson. Winners of the BBC Audio Drama Awards will be announced on Sunday. Good luck, Brian!

A couple of days ago, Brian told the story of the ill-fated attempt by Boston-based American publisher Houghton Mifflin to have artist Maurice Sendak provide illustrations for an edition of The Hobbit. By coincidence, this week The Colbert Report featured an uproarious interview with Sendak.

Nifty gifts

I don’t consider myself to be a particularly good gift giver, but a couple of my sisters can have a knack for finding fun and/or unusual presents. For Christmas my sister Jean gave me a Peanuts wall clock that plays the “Linus and Lucy” theme on the hour, but not when it’s dark. It’s hanging in my office now.

My sister Marianne found some cool things this Christmas. 3D Holiday Specs look like 3D glasses, but when you look at Christmas tree lights with them you see them transformed into Santa’s face, or snowflakes, or stars, etc. It’s fun seeing which patterns give the best effects.

Something else Marianne found, that’s both fun and practical, is a type of wallet I’d never seen before, made of a folded sheet of Tyvek. Mighty Wallets come in all sorts of designs, including some with Star Trek themes. Highly recommended!