Here's Don!

 

 

First …a bit about myself and how I got into this cozy corner of the blogosphere.

I'm unabashedly an old school sci-fi aficionado ( read - fanboy ) as well as a fellow in his early sixties so maybe this item should be called- “Forward to the Past”.  I got put on to Wormhole Electric back when its working title was still “ a writing project”  by a very good friend  and fellow Canuck who taught school in Sarajevo with the man who brings us Captain Jack. Editors were needed and, once I got the lowdown about all things Wormholish from  the primal force and Mustapha Mond behind it all - Carolyn Varvel ,  I thought that it looked cool ( now there’s a word that has thumbed it's nose at the  god of trendiness, eh ?).  So here I am.

The biggest charge I get from being involved in this is that I have a chance to read stuff from writers a generation removed from my vantage point .They’re  solidly afloat in a gadget ga-ga world that was almost still the stuff of fiction itself when I was in their proverbial shoes. It’s selfish, I know, but I wanted to see if the muse was just as alive now, or had pure keep ’em glued to the page story-telling  been pushed into the backseat by digital flash and techno-glitter. Thankfully, it hasn’t. 

Enough appetizers, on to the main course of the meal I want to serve up in this initial blog. May there be time another day for more gingerbread.

It’s been a bitch of a year so far, for old school sci-fi people, and their icons.  Two figures from my personal pantheon hit the final road this summer . Ray Bradbury left in June and Harry Harrison took his final bow in August .If these names mean squat to you dear blogee but pique your curiosity ,check ‘em out.

 They became part of my personal reading dirty dozen or so demigods as I first discovered, and revelled in the world of speculative fiction. Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat was my ultimate cool guy then and still wears the champion belt. It was a toss-up between Steve McQueen and later a young Bruce Willis ( a la “ Moonlighting “) for who’d portray him on the screen if I were the casting director. I give it to Willis in retrospect. McQueen, while most certainly uber-cool, was too brooding.  Sean Connery, late of “Dr. No” and “Goldfinger”, was also in the running for a bit but he was simply too Vegas for the role.  The Stainless Steel Rat is more loquacious, and less sidetracked by the flesh than Mr. James Bondage, thought I in my mid-pubescent mind.

Bradbury was everyone, everywhere and everything for me for a few months in my 15^th year. He sits at the head table yet. For  reasons that even now I can’t fully articulate, when I find myself at someone’s abode as a guest and they insist upon leaving the TV on or surfing the web whilst there are other flesh and blood people in the room, I think of Fahrenheit  451.

 There are obits aplenty out there for each of these Olympians. I’m not here to add another, only to point out that they were among the chief providers of my sweetest mind candy when I was at my most impressionable - I’ll miss ‘em fer shure.