Fantasist's Scroll

A different kind of fun…

Once I remember reading that William Gibson said that he didn’t need to make up science-fiction, he just had to describe down-town Tokyo, or something to that effect. Well, imagine my excitement then, when I found this Tokyo MoBlog! (A moblog, by the way, is a MObile weBLOG, get it?) So, here’s a whole bunch of inspiration for science-ficiton: random pictures of Tokyo.

All joking aside, some of these are really lovely pictures of a city that I may never visit. Tokyo, and Japan, is as close to an alien society as a Westerner like me can get in our lifetime. It’s as alien to me as anything in Star Wars, but it’s right here on Earth.

Anyway, have fun with the pictures….

Today is William Gibson’s Birthday!

For those of you who have been hiding under a rock, or are freshly hatched from the Great Egg, William Gibson is one of the fathers of the cyberpunk movement. He’s generally credited with coining the term “cyberspace” and popularizing a somewhat more realistic, if sometimes bleak, view of the future.
He also ran away to Canada in 1968 to avoid the draft. Which is the only bad thing I can say about him. I otherwise admire his work and thought processes. Certainly his literature is beyond compare.
If you’re interested in science-fiction at all and haven’t read any of his work, you have no idea what science-fiction really is. And not the movies, either, you have to actually read his work.

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Bill.

Happy Birthday H.P. Lovecraft!

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born today in 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the creator of the Necrnomicon, which is a ficticious book which he used as a prop in his writing. It was, however, so believable that there are still people who insist that it is a real book and that they’ve seen a copy. (It’s not and they haven’t. What they saw was a way for someone to make money of their gullability.)
A very nice website on his life and work can be found at HPLovecraft.com, which includes a list of all his writings. The title of this enty is based on one of those titles (The Colour Out of Space.) If you haven’t read his work, you’ve been living under a rock. Get out from under it, get yourself to a bookstore or library and read something he wrote!

Okay, so writing, and writers, can be fun, too.

Here are two examples:
Speculations, for writers who want to be read and
The Bruce Sterling Online Index.

Speculations is a ‘zine about writing and writers. I read a couple of articles there the other day and was suitably impressed. Some good advice on some subjects that aren’t always covered other places. Well worth a look.
And, of course, Chariman Bruce’s site. Well, what else is there to say? He’s not William Gibson, but he’s a close second. In fact, should William Gibson not be able to fulfill his duties, I nominate Bruce Sterling to be the next William Gibson. And you can tell them both I said so, too.

Today is William Gibson’s Birthday!

For those of you who have been hiding under a rock, or are freshly hatched from the Great Egg, William Gibson is the father of the cyberpunk movement. He’s generally credited with coining the term “cyberspace” and popularizing a somewhat more realistic, or bleak, view of the future.
He also ran away to Canada in 1968 to avoid the draft. Which is the only bad thing I can say about him. I otherwise admire his work and thought processes. Certainly his literature is beyond compare.

Today is the birthday of one of the greatest diarists in the English language, Samuel Pepys.

He was, born in London on this day in 1633 to a tailor and a washerwoman. However, thanks to an upper-class cousin who helped him get into good schools and got him government jobs, Pepys managed to work his way up from his humble beginings at a time when it was almost impossible to do so in England.

Pepys began his diary in 1659, a diary he would keep for almost ten years. No one knows what inspired him to start it, though it wasn’t unusual for well-educated men at the time to keep a diary. He was also a well-known collector, collecting such varied things as ship models, scientific instruments, portraits, ballads, money and women.  In fact, some critics see his diary as an attempt to collect his whole experience of the world.

What made him unique, however, was that, as far as we know, Pepys was the first Englishman to fill his diary with descriptions of his most personal and ordinary experiences: his aches and pains, what he liked to eat, going to the bathroom, his marital love life, and his extramarital affairs, graphic details that novelists wouldn’t start incorporating into their work for more than two hundred years.

An on-line version of his diary is available for viewing at PepysDiary.com.