A.C. Wise

If you haven’t already done so, there a still a few days left to donate to ralan’s September fund drive. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, ralan’s is one of the best and most frequently updated market resources out there for speculative fiction. Go check it out, and if you agree, lend your support with a couple of bucks, or euros even.

This week is the American Library Association’s banned book week. Celebrate in style - go read something nasty. Similar to last year, I will be offering up a banned book report on two frequently challenged books sometime soon. This year’s reads are Beloved and The Great Gatsby. Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper book report if I didn’t whine and ask for an extension on the deadline, which is to say I may not actually get around to posting about them during banned book week.

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While catching up on Tor.com’s wonderful Saturday Morning Cartoon feature, I discovered the existence of this - Disney’s Mars and Beyond. Mars and Beyond originally aired in 1957 as part of the Disneyland series. Obviously, this was before my time, but I still felt a strange kind of nostalgia watching it, a longing for a past that isn’t mine. To me, this is Disney as it should be - the sense of wonder, the beautiful hand-drawn animation, and even a touch of the dark and the bizarre.

Though I am not fanatically to devoted to the ‘Future as it Was’ in speculative fiction, and I do love modern speculative fiction too, there is a place in my heart for the past’s view of the future. (I do want to believe in canals on Mars, dammit.) Mars and Beyond satisfies that itch with its (now)-retro space ships and martians, and an unshakable optimism that Mars is firmly within humanity’s reach. Uh, sorry, past-people. Also, we don’t have flying cars yet, either. The last segment of the episode ends with a detailed plan of how we will (not might) get to Mars. Beautiful.

There were a couple of thing I found especially note-worthy. In talking about earth’s history, evolution is presented as an absolute fact, in 1957, when people still throw a fit about it today. There’s also a great segment that lovingly mocks pulp stories in popular magazines. Besides just being fun, the thing that really impressed me about the segment was that it featured a kick-ass, self-rescuing heroine. Go 1950s Disney!

The empire of mouse may be something different now, though I still don’t think it’s all bad, but once upon a time Disney was just a man with a sense of wonder that he wanted to share with the world (head in a jar and nazi conspiracy theories aside). Mars and Beyond provides a glimpse of the Disney that Ray Bradbury loved and it’s definitely worth watching.

Check out these beautiful and eerie pictures of the Sydney Dust Storm.

Okay, this isn’t actually realted to the weather phenomenon, but it’s amusing nonetheless - an ode to slush by Jim C. Hines.

And finally, NASA has officially discovered water on the moon. Is it wrong that my first thought was, oh good, now they’ll have some place to put the whalers?

I’m still catching up - I’m always catching up - on short fiction, movies and life in general. Some recommendations of the speculative fiction variety are Golden Lilies by Aliette de Bodard, a lovely fiction piece on the practice of foot-binding over at Fantasy Magazine, and Mammals Underfoot! An Interview with Emerging Writers by Jeff VanderMeer over at Clarkesworld Magazine.

Also related to speculative fiction, I recommend you support Ralan during his annual September fund raising drive. If you’re even remotely interested in writing and publishing speculative fiction, you should regularly be checking Ralan’s site for new markets, market updates, and other tips. And if you are checking the site regularly, you should also be supporting it - it’s only fair, after all.

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