Sentential Links

Let's just keep saving the world, folks, one link at a time....

:: I can believe gullibility, I can believe catfishing, I can believe that some people are really good liars and willing to take advantage of people...but I have been in a long-distance relationship. I met my current wife over the Internet. And I can tell you with 100% certainty, if you care anything at all about your long-distance significant other, you are going to make an effort to see them. (This is where my ability to believe Te'o's story falls apart as well. I just don't buy this, nor do I buy, as some people have said, that he was just a college student who just couldn't fly to LA at a moment's notice. Maybe that's true for a college student like I was, a run-of-the-mill philosophy major, but the star linebacker on one of the country's most notable football teams? Come on.)

:: I almost never reread my own novels, once they are printed and on sale. The small exception is the period when I am choosing reading passages for a new one, and once or twice when I needed to help with a pitch for an older book for Hollywood purposes. (Guy Gavriel Kay only blogs when he is in the final stages of getting a new book published, so it's nice to get a look in, once in a while. While it's pretty meaningless coming from me, Mr. Still Unpublished, I have to admit that I, too, tend to not look at my earlier work all that much. I find that the short fiction stands up better than my aborted attempts at novels past, or even the screenplay that I wrote a few years ago, which will never see the light of day. (Don't ask.) I suppose this is my way of finally, once and for all, declaring The Promised King dead. But even there, you never know...there's no law that says you can't go back to an earlier idea, once your skill improves. But it would have to be very different, given that there are aspects of that earlier book that manifest in Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title).)

:: From those of us who are still living in Buck Rogers' 25th Century, here's wishing our very best to 70's space hero - and intergalactic Romeo - Gil Gerard on his 70th birthday. (Just a one-sentence link, but holy crap -- Gil Gerard is 70?! Quick, somebody freeze that guy for a while! Four hundred years oughta do it.)

(Hey, come to that, how come Buck Rogers hasn't been rebooted yet? I'd be on board with a revisiting of that old property!)

:: There’s a somewhat startling 1978 Betty and Veronica story by Dan DeCarlo, the cartoonist who more than any other was responsible for defining the characters’ appearances and personalities, which attempted to make the point that there really is no choice at all: Betty and Veronica aren’t two different girls as much as they are two halves of the same girl.

:: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is now twenty years old. The first episode aired on 3 January 1993, whilst The Next Generation was still on the air, and it was for 176 episodes over seven seasons, ending in May 1999. (I really need to start re-watching Trek in a big way. Twenty years since DS9 started! I always thought that was the best of the Trek series, in terms of overall quality; at its best, it was utterly great, and it never seemed to get as downright bad as TOS or TNG could be at times.)

:: If, like many fans, you have spent decades wondering what the Red Skull smelled like, this was your lucky week: (Hmmmm...yeah, no. Never wondered that a single time. Weird!)

:: AMAZING STORIES, the world's first science fiction magazine, is now open to the public. (This is actually very cool news! Go to MD's site for details. Note to self: set up an account this week!)

More next week!