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Illustration: Rowena Morrill. (GFDL)
“What I will be remembered for are the ‘Foundation’ Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.” – 20 September 1973; included in Yours, Isaac Asimov, 1995.
Isaac Asimov was born on 2 January 1920 and died on 6 April 1992. The asteroid 5020 Asimov is also named in his honour.
Photo: Pete Young, 2007 (CC by-nc-sa 3.0).
The distinctively bohemian Chelsea Hotel, at 222 West 23rd Street, New York, was opened in 1884 as one of the city’s earliest cooperative apartment houses. It became a hotel around 1905 and is now on the US National Register of Historic Places. Artists and writers who have lived here over the years include Brendan Behan, William Burroughs, Arthur B. Davies, James T. Farrell, Robert J. Flaherty, O. Henry, Arthur Miller, James Schuyler, John Sloan, Dylan Thomas, Virgil Thomson, Thomas Wolfe... and Arthur C. Clarke, who first stayed here in 1956, and again in 1964 while writing 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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.
Photos: publicity shots, © 2005 Hanson Robotics, all rights reserved.
The PKD-A Android, also known as ‘RoboPhil’ and built by Hanson Robotics, converges numerous machine perception and AI technologies to mimic Philip K. Dick’s conversation style and facial movements. RoboPhil also had his own living environment known as ‘Club VALIS’, and has since attended several conventions, including Comic-Con in July 2005 at which he appeared as a panelist. ‘RoboPhil’ went missing in January 2006: he was packed for a flight to California, was last seen being loaded onto the plane, and has still not been recovered.
Photo: Pat Cadigan, 2006. (CC by-nc-sa 2.0)
A very rare still from the lost (and sadly never-seen) episode from the original series of Star Trek: ‘The Blonde On The Edge of Forever’.
Photo: © 2004 Cheryl Morgan, used by permission.
Jeff VanderMeer and Alien Baby at Concourse, the 55th British National Science Fiction Convention (Eastercon) at Blackpool, Lancashire, April 2004.
Photo: © 2003 Bobbi Lane, used by permission.
‘Dr. Evermor’ is the 19th Century alter ego of former scrap metal dealer Tom Every, who has spent many decades demolishing hundreds of major industrial machines while at the same time turning them into the science fictional landscape known as the Forevertron, the worlds biggest sculpture, situated seven miles south of Baraboo, Wisconsin.
The Forevertron is Every’s improvised monument to late 19th century scientific ingenuity that blends flights of fantasy with reality, and among other things incorporates the Apollo program’s decontamination chamber. As might be expected of a project carried out on such a grand scale the Forevertron also has its own spacecraft known as the ‘Graviton’ – a giant glass ball inside a copper egg – that will take Dr. Evermor to his final face-to-face meeting with God when he “highballs it to heaven”.
Photo: © 1999 University of Warwick, used by permission.
Terry Pratchett may have received an Honorary Degree from the University of Warwick on 14 July 1999, but just before that event began he also held a short ceremony to make University of Warwick researchers Prof. Ian Stewart and Dr. Jack Cohen “honorary Wizards of the Unseen University” following the publication of their book The Science of Discworld, which uses Discworld to explain real science.
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.
Image: © Paramount Pictures. (fair use)
The film that launched the careers of both Steve McQueen and Burt Bacharach, The Blob is now a pop culture artifact, written and produced outside of Hollywood with no distribution deal lined up, by people who wanted to do something different with their portrayal of teen culture by depicting teenagers as good kids instead of out-of-control delinquents, which was more customary at the time. It was directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr, a man more accustomed to making religious films. After it was completed a deal was struck with Paramount, who liked it, and The Blob was meant to ship to theatres paired with I Married a Monster from Outer Space, a movie that Paramount justifiably believed would flop. By mistake the distributors ended up shipping The Blob on its own and, unshackled by any association with an inferior movie, its cult status was born on 12 September 1958.
McQueen received only $3,000 for the film; he’d turned down an offer for a smaller up-front fee with 10% of the profits because he didn’t think the movie would make any money, but it ended up grossing $4 million. According to Irvin Yeaworth and Billy Graham, when McQueen died of lung cancer on 7 November 1980 in Juárez, Mexico, he died in a room in which he had also hung a film poster for The Blob.
Illustration: Rowena Morrill. (GFDL)
