World’s Greatest Megalomaniac T-Shirts: Go Forth, My Robot Minions!

Filed under Works in Progress

Yep, they’re here: the Worlds Greatest Megalomaniac T-Shirts, in both a Girly Edition and a Manly Edition.

I have to admit that I’ve got some reservations about this. I’m still not sure what would happen if TWO World’s Greatest Megalomaniacs were to show up in the same place; like, for example, well, anyplace.

There’s this implicit logical problem with there being two of the World’s Greatest anythings: but if, say, two World’s Greatest Dads show up, it seems mostly harmless.

If two World’s Greatest Teachers show up, well, that’s a little more serious, and some frightening eyebrow arching is likely to happen.

But if two evil geniuses, each bent on world domination, should show up at the same party in these shirts…. I’m just afraid that the fabric of spacetime would distort and rip and something with too many tentacles would arrive from the Dungeon Dimensions.

I can’t wait to find out!

In the 1950s, Little Johnny Could Have His Own Nuclear Test Lab

Filed under Found on the Web

From Gajitz: an article about an early 1950s "Atomic Energy Lab" toy kit with nifty experiments, a Geiger counter, and… wait for it… real uranium.

Thrilling Tales: Lair of the Clockwork Book Draft is Done!

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Pardon me while I dance the happy dance: I know it’s not a pretty sight, but humor me, please.

This morning I finished the first draft for my Thrilling Tales story The Lair of the Clockwork Book.

You can continue to visualize the happy dance going on, here, though I honestly can’t recommend it. Now "finishing" the first draft really means that now I have to go through it and destroy everything that makes it a first draft. With a notable lack of mercy and steely determination, if not thews, for which, I’m afraid, it is too late to hope.

And it’s only once I’ve done those things that I’ll start the main event, which is working on the… um.. roughly 120 illustrations, which I’ll be doing a couple of dozen at a time.

In spite of my worries about my page count it’s come in at pretty much the right length: at two updates a week the story will run for about 60 weeks on the web and come in at just about the right number of pages for the print edition. So it’s all good.

Anyway, the short version (too late!) is: first draft done, lots of work to do, then pictures, which take forever, and, of course, happy dance. I’ve gotta quit doing that.

Zork for the Kindle: Text Adventure Games on an E-Reader

Filed under Found on the Web

You are in a maze of twisty e-readers, all alike:

This is possibly the coolest use I’ve heard of for an e-reader device.

As I said previously I have two strong feelings about e-readers: first, that the devices are inherently neat and desirable; and second, that the licensing restrictions on e-books make them a terribly stupid thing to buy.

This is something else: it’s a Kindle-formatted web interface to several of the old Infocom text adventures (as I write, Zork 1-3). Kindle users can connect to the web site and type their way through the craziness. Of course I used to rely so heavily on my scribbled maps when I played these that the player might also want to pack a notebook along.

It’s truly interactive because it’s communicating with an interpreter on the Internet. It would also be possible to convert a multiple-choice adventure game for the Kindle by starting with one long HTML file with internal anchor links, and converting from there: that end product, though, would be an actual e-book. This is something else, and it’s a great idea!

Via Ars Technica.

Thrilling Tales Begets the WORLDS GREATEST MEGALOMANIAC mug, in both Girly and Manly Editions

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I’ve just committed the opposite of product placement. I can’t swear to it that I’m the first, so I won’t claim to have invented it.

While I was working on the Thrilling Tales script for The Lair of the Clockwork Book, I wrote in a coffee mug with "World’s Greatest Megalomaniac" printed on it. And having written it, I found that it wanted to exist. So now it does: twice over, in fact.

The Girly Edition Megalomaniac mug features a young lady with goggles and a ray gun that may not be approved for use by young ladies. I’m not sure: etiquette confuses me. I’m especially happy to have done this one because lately I’ve been getting requests for Mad Scientists of the female persuasion, especially girls. So I’m doing my bit here to encourage more of our young ladies to build giant robots and death rays. Somebody’s got to do it.

There’s also a Manly Edition Megalomaniac mug for the hidebound traditionalists among you. There’s plenty of world domination to go around, folks: no need to get competitive.

Anyway, these are just the thing for cowing your subordinates at work or down in the bomb shelter. Drink up! Shirts are likely to follow.

Thrilling Tales: an excerpt from The Lair of the Clockwork Book, with Captain Bonnie Scarlet

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

"Excuse me," Bonnie said to a passerby, "Which way to the Experimental Research District?" And then, like all sensible people, she went the other way.

The District represented one successful approach to innovation. If you took every wild-eyed scientist with a lab full of explosively inventive progress and then shoved them into the same small neighborhood, it was argued, they would tend only to hurt themselves, each other, and their assistants. There would always be civilian casualties, of course, but it was so much easier to keep those to a minimum if the threats were all crowded together. The apparent danger of one immense, coordinated incident was considered small because the occupants of the District tended toward self regulation of the kind that starts with "Fenwick’s project may be more remarkable than mine!" and ends with "Good old Fenwick. When shall we see his like again?"

The curious thing is that the District, in spite of its frequent disasters and the resulting unfortunate turnover in its population, had grown steadily in what Retropolitans often referred to as a quite literal explosion of scientific research, or, for short, as "the big boom".

The Air Safety Association had a special squad trained to deal with the District. That training, although Bonnie did not know it, was concentrated on a very large, top secret manual entitled "Things We Have Run From, and How To Run From Them". So the Myrmidon’s advice had been good, in its way: the authorities tried just as hard as anyone else to keep their business out of the District. But Bonnie had no intention of going where the Clockwork Book so clearly wanted her to go.

This had been planned for.

Hugo Gernsback’s Rocket Completes its Flight from Australia to Illinois

Filed under Found on the Web

Over at The Way the Future Blogs, Frederik Pohl shows us that his 2010 Hugo award for "Best Fan Writer" has touched down after its continent-spanning flight.

Now if you’re familiar with his decades of professional work as a science fiction writer and editor you might be muttering "Fan Writer…?" to yourself and, believe me, I understand, but Pohl’s earned the award in at least one of two ways: first for his blog – whose name is a play on his retrospective book The Way the Future Was – and second because he was one of the very first science fiction fans in the modern sense. Which, I think , means "in any sense".

If you read the book (which I recommend) you’ll find that fans then were exactly like fans are today; that in itself is interesting. You’ll also find that in spite of his influence as a writer he may have contributed even more to the genre when he was wearing his editor’s hat, or his agent’s hat. Or both. Though I don’t suggest he stacked them in the way your mind’s eye is seeing them right now.

On a related note I’ve recently enjoyed a happily rambling interview with Pohl and Jack Vance at the Starship Sofa site. It’s probably more a conversation than an interview. And that’s probably why I liked it so well.

1950s Space Travel Illustrations by Virgil Finlay… at Golden Age Comic Book Stories

Filed under Found on the Web

Over at Golden Age Comic Book Stories there’s a terrific collection of Virgil Finlay illustrations for The Complete Book of Space Travel by Albro Gaul (1956).

Yes, it might have been a little premature to call it "Complete" – it would still be premature to call it that, after all – but nonetheless it’s a great opportunity for Finlay to explore everything from cross sections of space ships, construction, astronomy, space stations, and even the occasional dinosaur.

I never fail to marvel at that guy’s inks.

Speaking of ink, today’s offerings at the site also include some early 1960’s Frazetta illustrations and a great batch of Edgar Rice Burroughs illustrations by J. Allen St. John. That Mister Doortree. He just can’t be stopped!

The Lair of the Clockwork Book, and Other Stories

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Now if you’re of a cynical bent I know that you’ll look at this picture and tell yourself "That’s it, then: he’s just sitting around in the Secret Laboratory and playing poker with his robots". But that would be so unfair!

This morning I got oh, so close to the halfway mark on my draft for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. And although it is a draft – and has all the problems you expect from such an animal – I’m really pleased with the way it’s shaping up. It all needs polish and there are at least two scenes that need some important rework. But I’m happy so far.

It’s a complicated beast: viewed one way, it’s an anthology of short stories from Retropolis. But all of the stories are tied together by a common thread: so viewed another way, it’s one big, meandering story. Add to that the not-quite-rigid formats for the web version (updates twice a week) and the print version (a frightening relationship between the page count and the cost of the full color books) and the whole thing becomes a sort of ecosystem whose parts need to stay in balance. Which sounds sort of scary, but in fact is kind of neat.

The math for the production schedule is likewise interesting. Once the script is ready I’ll start in on the illustrations. When about two dozen of those are done, the story will go live at the Thrilling Tales web site and I’ll reformat my brain to get back to work on Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS. When I start to run low on Clockwork Book updates I’ll do another reset and work my way through another two dozen Clockwork Book illustrations. And so on.

If everything works out you’ll see twice-weekly Clockwork Book updates at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual while I still manage to complete Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS. And there won’t ever be a hitch or delay. Or so I think.

Starting… when? I still don’t know. I hope to start illustrating The Lair of the Clockwork Book sometime in the next few weeks. How long, though, before the updates start at the web site.. this I can’t yet predict. My best guess is that the story will start before the end of this year, continue to its end in Spring of 2012, and then transmogrify into a book. In fact, at least the second TWO BRAINS book should be out long before the complete Clockwork Book sees print.

We’ll see if that’s how it happens :).

Thrilling Tales: Seven New Characters! Arbitrary Rocket Animation! And… Scripts!

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I hadn’t exactly planned on it, but most of my Thrilling Tales work over the Summer turned out to be making and setting up a new group of characters for the upcoming stories. I finished up the seventh character on Saturday, and on Sunday and Monday morning I celebrated by doing something completely different: this animated shot of one of my open cockpit roadster rockets in flight. It’s just a disconnected shot, of course: I think it wants to be part of a promo for my Retropolis web site. I’ll probably let it have its way, eventually.

But as fun as this was to tinker with… I do have actual work to do on the Thrilling Tales stories. During some re-rendering and compression this morning I did just what I probably should have been doing all along, which is to get back to work on the outlines and scripts for the stories.

What I did over the Summer really was productive, though, and not just because I needed the characters for my illustrations. Because as I worked on them my brain was exploring just how I want the two stories to work. And it was only when I started to know these characters better by working on them that I truly saw what they were about, and what they’d do, and how they’d do it. Al Bowwly and his rocket pack were a major revelation.

So this morning I wrote up a new, more complete outline for Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS. I’m now looking forward to working on the script itself… but the highest priority, as I’ve said before, is the script and the first illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. That non-interactive story is the one I need to get up on the site first, with regular updates every week, as I start to illustrate the new Toaster With TWO BRAINS story. Whatever its name is. I still don’t know.

So anyway it’s on to the Clockwork Book outline next, and then to its script(s). That means there won’t be much work to share just yet… maybe I’ll work up some set pieces with the new characters in the meantime. For now, though, I recommend a quick trip in my rocket. It did wonders for me!