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Photo: © 1978 Lois Siegel, used by permission; text adapted from Wikipedia.
The Canadian avant-garde director of short experimental films Arthur Lipsett was born on 13 May 1936. His particular passion was sound: he would collect pieces of sound and fit them together to create interesting auditory sensations, and friends suggested that Lipsett put images to them. The result became the seven minute-long 1961 film Very Nice, Very Nice which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1962. Despite not winning the Oscar the film brought Lipsett considerable praise from critics and directors. Stanley Kubrick was one of Lipsett’s fans and asked him to create a trailer for his upcoming movie Dr. Strangelove; Lipsett declined Kubrick’s offer, however Lipsett’s influence on Kubrick is clearly visible when watching the trailer.
Lipsett’s later film 21-87 was a profound influence on director George Lucas who included elements from it in THX-1138, his Star Wars films and also American Graffiti; 21-87 is also said to be the source of the “The Force” in Star Wars. Lucas never met Lipsett but tributes to 21-87 appear throughout Star Wars, for example the holding cell of Princess Leia in Episode IV: A New Hope on the Death Star is cell no. 2187.
Lipsett’s success allowed him some freedom, but as his films became more bizarre this freedom quickly disappeared and he suffered from psychological problems. Lipsett committed suicide in 1986, two weeks shy of his 50th birthday.
Photo: © 2007 Somtow Sucharitkul, used by permission.
Somtow Sucharitkul – better known to SF fans as S.P. Somtow – was born in Bangkok, Thailand, on 30 December 1952. As active in science fiction and horror as he is in composing and conducting classical music in Thailand, he has been described by the Bangkok Post as the “Thai person known by name to the most people in the world.” He was first published in the 1970s in Asimov’s Science Fiction and has since been nominated for many major awards, including the Bram Stoker Award, the John W. Campbell Award, the Hugo Award, and is also winner of the World Fantasy Award. He now holds the post of president of the Horror Writers Association and is currently artistic director of the Bangkok Opera.
Photo: AlfredTNT, 2006. (GFDL); text by Doris Lessing (fair use)
“A visiting American said, did I read science fiction? I offered Olaf Stapledon, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and he said it was a good beginning. Then he gave me an armful of science fiction novels. What I felt then I have felt ever since. I was excited by their scope, the wideness of their horizons, the ideas, and the possibilities for social criticism ... and disappointed by the level of characterization and the lack of subtlety. ... But if what we do get is so wonderfully inventive and astonishing and mind-boggling, then why repine? In science fiction are some of the best stories of our time.” —Walking in the Shade, 1997.
Born on 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), Doris Lessing has won all the major European literary awards. Her first words on hearing that she had also won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature were, “Oh, crap.”
Photo: NASA. (public domain)
Born on 23 March 1912 in Wyrzysk in the German Kingdom of Prussia (now Poland), Wernher von Braun has become known as ‘the father of modern space flight’, and is pictured here standing by the five F-1 engines of a Saturn V launch vehicle. His modest contribution to science fiction was his novel Project Mars: a Technical Tale, set in 1980, and which, according to his biographer Erik Bergaust, was rejected by no less than eighteen publishers. He later published portions of this work in magazines to illustrate and popularize Project Mars, and only in 2006 was the complete manuscript published as a book. The novel was also used as the basis for Byron Haskin’s film Conquest of Space in 1955, though von Braun was not credited.
Image: Odilon Redon, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. (Fair Use)
Odilon Redon was born on 20 April 1840, a French artist inspired particularly by the written works of Gustave Flaubert and Edgar Allan Poe. Believing in the superiority of the imagination over observation of nature he rejected Realism and Impressionism in favour of a more personal artistic vision, and his L'Oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l'infini (‘The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Floats Toward Infinity’), a lithograph from 1882, was directly inspired by Poe. It has graced the cover of Penguin Books’ The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe since 1976, and the original hangs in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.
Photo: © 2007 Pete Young, used by permission.
Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall: born on 16 February 1954, Iain Banks is seen here during an interview for the British Science Fiction Association on 28 November 2007 at Imperial College, London.
Image: the cover for Jules Verne’s Les Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras au Pôle Nord, type “Aux deux Éléphants”, by Pierre-Jules Hetzel. (public domain); text adapted from Wikipedia.
Born 15 January 1814, Pierre-Jules Hetzel was the French editor and publisher best known for his discovery of Jules Verne and his extraordinary illustrated editions of Verne’s novels, such as the collected Voyages Extraordinaires (‘Extraordinary Travels’).
Hetzel was to later reject Verne’s 1863 manuscript for Paris in the Twentieth Century because he thought it presented a vision of the future that was far too negative and unbelievable for contemporary audiences, though to many present-day scholars the story was remarkably accurate in its predictions. Verne locked the manuscript away and no longer wrote any futuristic, dystopian stories. Paris in the Twentieth Century was not rediscovered until over a century later, and was first published in France in 1994.
