Fantasist's Scroll

Today is the birthday of two very important science-fiction writers.
The first is science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick, who was born in Chicago in 1928. He began to suffer from visions and hallucinations in the 1950s. He once thought he saw a face in the sky, which he described as “a vast visage of evil with empty slots for eyes, metal and cruel, and worst of all, it was God.” He wasn’t sure if his visions were authentic or if they were symptoms of mental illness, and he was fascinated that he could no longer tell what was real and what wasn’t.
He wrote many novels that pushed the edge of science-fiction a little further out, making room for the cyberpunk movement to follow him. Some of his work includes Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Minority Report (which is a collection of short stories), We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (another short story collection), and A Scanner Darkly. Since his death in 1982, many of his novels and short stories have been made into movies, including Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990) and Minority Report (2002).

It’s also the birthday of the science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke, who was born in Somerset, England in 1917. He’s the author of many science fiction novels, including Childhood’s End, 2001: A Space Odyssey(which was written in the year of my birth!), and Rendevous with Rama. He is also famous for inventing the concept of the communications satellite.

Today is C.S. Lewis’ birthday.
For those of you who don’t know him, C.S. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, which has been made into movies and mini-series several times. Lewis was a contemporary of J.R.R. Tolkien and, in fact, was part of the same writing group, the Inklings. It was there that the two became fast friends, until their falling out. Lewis, or “Jack”, as he preferred his friends call him, was a convert to Catholicism and became a prolific Christian apologist, penning such gems as The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, and Mere Christianity. He was a remarkable author and an interesting man.
You can read more about Clive Staples Lews at the website endorsed by his step-son, Douglas Gresham, called Into the Wardrobe.

According to the Writer’s Almanac, today is Bram Stoker’s birthday.

If you’ve been living under a cultural rock for the past hundred years or so, you might not know that Bram Stoker wrote the now infamous Dracula. He wrote other books as well, and was quite well known in his own time for his work in the theatre, but he’s most famous for that title character, Count Dracula. At the time, this was quite a novel subject, though, since then, vampires have become rather standard fare in literature, as well as movies and TV. But, it was Dracula that made them, and Stoker, famous. It came out in 1897 and got mixed reviews. It only became a minor best-seller in Stoker’s lifetime. When he died in 1912, the obituaries about Stoker focused on his career in theater, and not a single one mentioned his authorship of Dracula. It wasn’t until 1922, when Dracula movies started to appear that Bram Stoker’s novel became widely known, and, of course, has since become considered a classic.

So, remember the Count and his creator this horrific holiday season. Happy Birthday, Bram!

Today is Frank Herbert’s Birthday.

Of course, he passed away in 1986, the year I graduated from high-school, but his work lives on. Mr. Herbert is primarily known for his seminal work, Dune, and the other books in the series that followed. Though, interestingly enough, he never intended to write sequels.
Often refered to as the science-fiction Lord of the Rings, the Dune series of books detail an amazingly rich science-ficiton culture. The novels are some of the first science-fiction to have detailed political and sociological sub-plots, not to mention ecological sub-plots! The way Mr. Herbert used religion in his work is quite interesting as well. In a genre that often avoids discussing religion, he explored the topic in detail and with a depth that was personally inspiring.
Herbert also wrote The Green Brain, which is another ecological-message tied up in great science-fiction, as well as The White Plague, another of my favorite books.
There hasn’t been anyone else quite like Frank Herbert and I am in awe of the ways in which he influenced the genre, which is why I celebrate this every year.

According to Writer’s Almanac there are three birthdays to celebrate today.

First, there’s novelist Herbert George (H.G.) Wells, who was born in Bromley, England in1866. According to the note I got from Writer’s Almanac, Wells had a job writing biology textbooks until he developed a respiratory illness in his late 20s. Since he thought he didn’t have long to live, he left his wife and ran away with another woman, after which he began writing furiously. In roughly three years, he published all the novels for which we know him: The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds.

It’s also the birthday of the novelist Stephen King, born in Portland, Maine in 1947. His father was a merchant seaman who left the family when Stephen was just two. He has no memories of his father, but one day he found a whole box full of his father’s science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, and that box of his father’s books inspired him to start writing horror stories.
He was working as a teacher when he wrote his first novel about a weird high school girl with psychic powers named Carrie White. He gave up on the book at one point and threw it in the trash. His wife rescued it. Carrie was published in 1973. The hard cover didn’t sell well, but then his agent called to say that the paperback rights had sold for $400,000.

Lastly, but, perhaps, most importantly, today is the birthday of the man who first put high quality literature into paperbacks, Sir Allen Lane, born in Bristol, England in 1902. He was the founder of Penguin Books.

Today is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ birthday!
ERB, as he is often known by fans, was born in Chicago in 1875. He is probably most famous as the creator of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, which is a series of stories about an English nobleman who was abandoned in the African jungle during infancy and brought up by apes. His first Tarzan story appeared in 1912, and Burroughs followed it with the novel Tarzan of the Apes in1914. He is also the author of A Princess of Mars, which is the first book in a series about a US Cavalry officer transported “mystically” to Mars, as well as, Pellucidar, about a savage world hidden beneath our own, The Pirates of Venus, about space pirates on Venus. Not to mention his lesser known works, including The Mad King and many others.
For many of us, ERB was our first introduction to science-fiction and fantasy. He was a real writer, by which I mean he churned out novels and stories at a furious rate for one reason onlyL to support his family. He is, in many ways, one of my heroes.
So, Happy Birthday, Mr. Burroughs, wherever you are.

It’s the birthday of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who was born in Waukegan, Illinois on this day in 1920.

Bradbury is one of the most famous and well-known science-fiction writers of all time, having written a number of classics.
The story goes, that one night, Bradbury was out for a walk when a policeman pulled up on the side of the road to ask what he was doing. He said, “I was so irritated the police would bother to ask me what I was doing — when I wasn’t doing anything — that I went home and wrote [a] story.” That story became a novella called “The Fireman” and eventually grew into his first and best-known novel, Fahrenheit 451, about a man named Guy Montag who lives in a future world in which books are outlawed and burned wherever they’re found. Montag is one of the firemen whose job it is to burn the books. One night he takes a book home that he was supposed to destroy and reads it. The act of reading persuades him to join an underground revolutionary group that is keeping literature alive. Ironically, when film-maker Michael Moore used a similar title for his movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, Bradbury, who didn’t agree with Moore’s politics, sued him, trying to stop his use of the title, and squash free speech.

Ray Bradbury said, “I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.”

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

Ah, if only Lovecraft could live on in that eternal life beyond death. But, alas, he cannot and we have only his tremendous body of work to keep us company. Never the less, knowing that it is his birthday, I feel compeled to mention it.

Also, the Vancouver Gaming Guild is celebrating H. P. Lovecraft’s birthday with a convention! So, if you’re in the area, why not check it out?