science fiction & fantasy – Page 9

fans in film

In weekend, I ended up watching the Ringers: Lord of the Fans film. An interesting blend of pr material for the LoTR film trilogy, Tolkien literary tutorial, and anglo-american fandom history. I think the film is half fandom-produced, and that might explain its a bit uneven quality. But it was fun looking at this layer of history of enthusiasm into modern fantasy.

time for science, fiction?

Touch of feather
Originally uploaded by Frans Mäyrä.

I took two days of holiday this week, starting tomorrow. This is to do some work, as every day that I am at “work”, will be spent on meetings, seminars, teaching or various administrative tasks, which need to be done, but which I do not consider proper work, in that deeper, more qualitative sense of the word. So, I have to get some holidays to focus on the creative aspect of science and scholarship. Perverse? Maybe, yes.

There will be a session on the relationship between science and science fiction in our university’s science fair “Tieteen iltapäivä ja yö” this year that I will be hosting. We have three professors, from different backgrounds, and from different angles, discussing the role of creativity in their work, and how they perceive fictional speculation from their own position. That should be fun enough — there should be interesting examples and discussions coming up. I just spend some wishful minutes in updating my Amazon.com Wish List to include some novels and short story collections from Neal Asher, Charles Stross, Richard K. Morgan and Dan Simmons that I wish I would have some time to immerse with.

GDC 2006 is also coming up. There will be two tutorial days (seminars) where I will be participating as one of the speakers, but happy to be in a minor role in both of them: The Social Dimensions of Gaming (DiGRA & IGDA co-operation) is coordinated by T.L.Taylor, Bart Simon and friends and will “bring together expert social scientists doing research on game design, play and culture to work with designers in generating useful vocabularies for making sense of the social dimensions of digital games”. There. And then there is the Game Curriculum Workshop, coordinated by Katie Salen and Katherine Isbister, which “brings together some of the best and brightest developers, scholars, and students to take an in-depth look at game curricula — now, and in the future”. Welcome to drop in and participate, if your road takes you either to Tampere campus, or to San Jose this year.

portti sf prize

portti sf prize
Originally uploaded by Frans Mäyrä.

Tonight another party (guess it is the season), the evening of Portti SF prize, the best science fiction short story of the year. Jenny Kangasvuo, the winner, celebrates tonight after several years in second or other places. Fantasy story finally convinced us in the jury this year. A fine, ambiguous reworking of the ancient Seal Woman tale. Congratulations!

rpg club, 10 years

Our university’s RPG club, TYR, celebrated its tenth anniversary yesterday. See some of the happy pics in this folder. I was one of the people in the founding meeting in September 1995 (yes, time does fly…)

two kinds of fan films

Looking for a moment wider from the player created game content into the broad fields of “user created content” (in terminology where even culture is a victim to the all-dominant producer/consumer model), there are couple of interesting recent fan films worth comparing. The other one is Star Wars: Revelations by Shane Felux and the (semi-professional) team, and the other Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning by Samuli Torssonen and his team of Finnish fans. I still need to see both in full (only trailers so far for me), but where the first appears as an attempt of “serious” mini-film in the Star Wars universe, the latter is an example of the common burlesque or ironic attitude among fan-fic makers: a parody set in Star Trek aesthetics. Somehow I feel that the latter is more typical to the fandom sensibilities as I know them: the object of love is as often also the target of loving laughter.

See:

SW: Revelations in TheForce.Net
Star Wreck home page.

mirrormask

This is so going to be one of those fantasy films I am going to see – I just hope they’ll put it into a big screen over here. See: the MirrorMask home page. Neil Gaiman. Dave McKean. The Jim Henson co.

books by banks

It was either finishing Half-Life 2, or the Banks novel, and since I was supposed to keep to bed, it ended up being the novel. I am reading Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels out of their publication order, but I suppose it does not matter. Rather than parts of some grand narrative, they appear to be “splintered light”, parts or reflections that are aimed to experiment, play with, and illuminate a larger whole – or universe. As a synthetic vision of aesthetics and a world-view (metaphysical, philosophical, historical, political, and psychological, at least), they remind me of Tolkien.

Now, finished with Use of Weapons, I am again reflecting on tragedy, our endlessly repeated need to find the human nature in the “glorious waste of all that is most beautiful”, to question the obvious – even when you have the supposedly ultimate freedom granted by fantasy. Or, as in this case, of science fiction. This cleverly structured, emotionally gripping and in the end rather puzzling narrative (how do you understand Elethiomel in the conclusion, in relation to all the previously narrated memories, eh?) is after all supposed to be a part of “communist-utopian” space opera. — Reading, looking, feeling and smelling, all the gritty details, the symbolism and execution (a fragment of bone, close to the heart, truly?), I became convinced that this is yet another attempt to come up with a fantasy that goes to great lengths of avoiding being Fantasy, that will use all available means and get rather desperate in the process to convince you it is speaking about something Real.

You can also read Iain’s Guardian interview (and become even more jealous of the lucky bastard).

Provence, day 8

Return. After a rather intensive week in France, it is great to be back in home in a few hours. (And also good still to have a couple of days to recover.) Finished Light by M. John Harrison on the Helsinki flight; one of the greater SF novels, no doubt, even if it is stronger in sense of wonder than in some single insight provided. Great!

d&d returns

After a long break, it was fun to continue today our never-ending D&D campaign. Pekka (the DM) had moved to a new apartment with a nice view over Tampere.