Fantasist's Scroll

Today is William Gibson’s Birthday!

For those of you who have been hiding under a rock for the past twenty years, or have been freshly cloned, William Gibson is the primary progenitor of the cyberpunk movement. He’s generally credited with coining the term “cyberspace” and popularizing a somewhat more realistic, if somewhat 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. I admire his work very much and occasionally will reread some of his short stories, just to capture the feel of his prose.

Anyway, celebrate his birthday with a little science-fiction in thanks for what he’s done for the genre.

Today is the birthday of novelist and critic Anthony Burgess

He was born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England on this day in 1917. Though he had written several novels early in his career, none of them were particularly successful. His career took a different turn, however, when, in 1959, he began to suffer from severe headaches and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The doctor told him he only had one year to live. The diagnosis turned out to be incorrect. However, Burgess wrote five novels in that following year, the year he believed to be his last.

Though he wrote and edited a large body of work, including a fair selection of non-fiction, he’s best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, which is perhaps most famous for the slang language he invented specifically for that work, called Nadsat.

Today is the birthday of Kurt Cobain.

The singer-songwriter who essentially founded the “grunge” music movement, was born in Hoquiam, Washington on this day in 1967. He started from humble beginnings, working a job as a school janitor, but he started playing in local rock bands. He spent most of this time living at various friends’ houses and on the street, even occasionally sleeping under a bridge. In 1989, he and his bandmates saved up six hundred dollars to record their first album, Bleach, under the name Nirvana. The boys signed to a major label in 1991 for their next album, Nevermind, and Cobain was shocked when it sold more than 10 million copies.

He became internationally famous almost overnight, but Cobain hated being famous. He developed a heroin addiction that got worse and worse, and on April 5th of 1994 he committed suicide at his home in Seattle.

Today is William S. Burroughs‘ birthday.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri on this day in 1914, he is best known for having written Naked Lunch, which was later turned into a movie that starred Peter Weller. Burroughs started writing while attending Harvard, but when a piece of his was rejected by Esquire magazine, he was so disappointed that he didn’t write again for six years. He tried to enlist in the military, but he was turned down by the Navy,and when he got into the Army infantry, his mother arranged for him to be given a psychiatric discharge.
So, at 30 years old, he moved to New York City and got involved in a bohemian scene. It was there that he was introduced to two younger men, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He also got addicted to heroin, and wrote his first book about it, a memoir called Junky. It came out in 1953.
Burroughs is known for his somewhat random method of writing inspiration, which he called the “cut up technique“, though he was certainly not the only writer at the time to make use of the method.
Burroughs is also famous for having accidentally shot his wife at a party while recreating the infamous “William Tell scene.”

It’s the birthday of the man who brought us Conan the Barbarian, King Kull, and Solomon Kane science fiction author Robert E. Howard, who was born in Peaster, Texas on this day in 1906. If you’re from Texas, or just passing through, you can find out more about him at the Crossplains Robert E. Howard Museum. If you can’t make that, you can read more about him at the Wikipedia.
Sadly, he chose to end his life early via suicide by .38

It’s the birthday of one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century, Isaac Asimov, who was born in Petrovichi, Russia in 1920. He came with his family to the United States when he was three years old and his parents opened a candy shop in Brooklyn. Issac grew up to become a professor of biochemistry at the Boston University School of medicine and in 1950 he published his first novel Pebble in the Sky.

About the same time Asimov took part in writing a textbook for medical students and he found that he loved explaining complicated things in ordinary language, and so he set out to write about science for the general public, in language they would understand. He said, “Little by little my science writing swallowed up the rest of me.”
Asimov developed a regimen of working ten hours a day, seven days a week, producing between two and five thousand words a day. Asimov’s method was to write a book about any subject that interested him but which he didn’t fully understand. He used writing as a way of teaching himself about everything.
By 1970 Asimov had written more than a hundred books and he began branching out into areas other than science. He wrote about nuclear physics and organic chemistry, history, Greek mythology, astronomy, religion, in addition to his collections of limericks, mystery novels, autobiography and science fiction. By the time of his death in 1992 he had published more than 400 books.

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.