Subtotal Recall

Hi Carolyn,






 We're getting quite settled here in downtown Merida now. Hard to believe its been ten days already. The weather hasn't been quite as warm as before but perhaps part of that can be because we are here two weeks earlier than we've been in the past.








A couple of entries back I mentioned that I was gonna take an extended look at that copy of Starlog magazine from almost exactly three decades ago  ( Feb. 1985 )  that I found in my Christmas stocking.  It'll be one of those perspective things. So lets crack open this bona fide historical document and do some reading about the past in the present tense.

First of all I was wondering if I was going to have to take my own pics of the various pages to include and then I discovered that all issues of Starlog magazine are available online through The Internet Archive. I grabbed all the pages shots from there and it was a snap. It's quite a resource and I must go and delve into it further.











Wikipedia has a wealth of info on the print version of Starlog  including this on founding editor Kerry O'Quinn: 




       


O'Quinn came up the idea of publishing a one-time only magazine on the Star Trek phenomenon. Houston's editorial assistant Kirsten Russell suggested that they include an episode guide to all three seasons of the show, interviews with the cast and previously unpublished photographs. During this brainstorming session many questions were raised, most notably legal issues. Houston contacted Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry with the intention of interviewing him for the magazine. Once they got his approval, O'Quinn and Jacobs proceeded to put together the magazine but Paramount Studios, who owned Star Trek, wanted a minimum royalty that was greater than their projected net receipts and the project was shelved.




O'Quinn realized that they could create a magazine that only featured Star Trek content but without it being the focus and therefore getting around the royalties issue. He also realized that this could be the science fiction magazine he and Houston had talked about. Many titles for it were suggested, including Fantastic Films and Starflight before Starlog was chosen. (Fantastic Films was later used as the title of a competing science fiction magazine published by Blake Publishing.)




The first issue of Starlog, a quarterly, was dated August 1976. While the cover featured Kirk, Spock, and the Enterprise, and the issue contained a "Special Collector's Section" on Star Trek, other science fiction topics were also discussed such as The Bionic Woman and Space: 1999.^[1] The issue sold out and this encouraged O'Quinn and Jacobs to publish a magazine every six weeks instead of quarterly.

 

 

First of all I feel kinda bad about missing out on Starlog when it was still in print. When it first came out I would have been only a few months married and adjusting to a new city and a new school plus still doing the part-time grocery store minion thing too. Methinks there was simply no time to spare.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 In February of 1985, when this particular issue hit the stands I would have been three years into teaching, getting used to a seven month old daughter, and having fun as a new home-owner with a mortgage rate at loan-shark level so it got past me too.





So lets flip some pages here. First stop, the inside front cover. The Prisoner had the same affect on me as it it did on lotsa people. It blew me away.visually and intellectually. To borrow a phrase from The Man in Black  in The Princess Bride

 " I've not seen its equal"


 

Also intriguing to note that the series was available on VHS. In three short decades VHS has been supplanted by DVD which is, in turn, being usurped by streaming online.  

 

  

 

 

 

Kinda cool, also to see an ad for the then newly published fourth part of the " Hitchhikers Trilogy ". Especially since I'm just about to jump into it in my reading regimen down here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've also gotten back into some non-fiction. Just getting to the end of David Halberstams " The Reckoning " which deals with how the American auto industry came to grips with the rise of Japan, the oil crisis and all those other intertwining events in the 60's and 70's.   

 

 Next stop is a most enjoyable column by Dave Gerrold ( Yes, that Dave Gerrold ) to whom the editors pretty well gave carte blanche- with the proviso that he manages to " relate it somehow to science fiction "  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this month's installment he confesses to being a hardcore limerick writer and includes various examples. My favorite is the one he describes as being about how to write limericks and reads as follows:

 

 

When writing these verses of mine

I start with a clever punchline,

Then work backward from there

Toward the opening pair

With the hope it will all work out fine.

 

 

 

The column finishes with a challenge to the reader:

 

Let's see what kind of limericks you can write. It must be a science fiction limerick though. It can be about anything you want it to be as long as it is somehow science fictional.

 

 

He indicates that if there are some really good ones they will be shared in a future column. So I must go back to the Internet Archives just to see if any appeared.

 

 

Plus, I think maybe this idea could be commandeered by us three decades later and  used to augment or diversify the menu here in the blog . There could be limericks as well as riddles perhaps ??!!  Whadya think, Carolyn?

 

 

 

Flipping onward brings us to Part One of a two part item on what is easily my favorite comedy conglomeration, Monty Python. The general gist is that in their forays into sci-fi , Python isn't setting out to make fun of the genre but, as Terry Jones notes, " We just wanted to do funny things within a recognizable context." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of particular interest is the section dealing with Terry Gilliam who is responsible for the Python animation. He's the biggest science fiction fan of the lot and notes at one point that he's " just begun to devour the work of the late SF writer, Phillip K. Dick. "

 

Shall definitely have to get back to the Archives for the second part of that article.

 

 

Okay, I'm realizing that in order to make things manageable this will be a multi-part entry.  There's lots more that I want to go at including the cover story on the Dune movie. As one who " devoured" any and everything about Dune when the novels appeared I was among those folks non-plussed by it's cinematic incarnation. That's for later, though.

 

 

But before we close  Starlog for now, just one last item to include from the pages. I'll let it speak for itself:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have got to get me one of those !!

 

 

Back to 2015 now. Before taking my leave this time around I'll include this weeks words from Mark Twain. This time theres only one but since it's about writing it fits in nicely with the limerick above, topic wise.

 

 

 

 

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

 

 

 

'Til next time ,

 

 

Don

 

As noted above all illustrations are from the Internet Archives online