When my wife and I were married in 1995, one of our wedding gifts – partly as a joke – was a Super Nintendo gaming system. There were a few games we occasionally played but it was more an in-joke for the group than anything else. At that time we were also heavily into Dragonball/DBZ fandom, with my wife specifically a fan of Akira Toriyama's art. So when, some months later, we heard about a new video game, a so-called "RPG", that Toriyama had done the design work on, we decided to get it, mostly for the neat character [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: Saint Seiya
May 18, 2012 By 3 Comments
Back in the primitive days before the World Wide Web, before E-mail was standard and cellphones common, there was also the time in which anime and manga (Japanese animation and their equivalent of comics/comic books) were as fringe an interest as science fiction itself was many years before. It was an American fandom consisting of small groups of true fans, fanatics in many ways, with connections as secretive and torturous as those of drug smugglers to get second or third generation VHS tapes of these peculiar and exotic animated shows – [ Continue reading... ]
Under The Influence: Star Wars
May 16, 2012 By 8 Comments
No, I'm not going to call it "A New Hope". That was added AFTER I saw the movie; at the time, Star Wars was just that, with no implication that it was part of anything else. Of all the singular cultural events in my lifetime (as opposed to political events, like 9/11 or Vietnam), I don’t think any of them has had or will ever have the impact of this single summer movie, made for thirteen million dollars (not a terribly large sum even in 1977). It didn't even have the advertising buzz one would expect; I found out about it more [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: James Schmitz
May 14, 2012 By 5 Comments
Back in the ancient days of the year 2000, it was mentioned that Baen Books was preparing to re-issue the works of James Schmitz. And on Usenet, a (quite out of context) quote from Eric Flint indicated that there would be some… editing. Modernizing. Fixing. And I proceeded to leap to the attack against this monstrous butcher, Eric Flint. The upshot of that was my getting published. But that's a different story, told on the About Ryk E. Spoor page. This is about why I was Very Concerned about the (as it turned out, mostly [ Continue reading... ]
Probably no big updates this weekend…
May 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment
... since it's Mother's Day. :) [ Continue reading... ]
UNDER the INFLUENCE: The Six Million Dollar Man
May 9, 2012 By 3 Comments
Steve Austin. Astronaut. A man barely alive. "Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. We can make him better than he was before. Better… stronger… faster." There is a saying in SF Fandom: "The Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12." The idea – and a fairly strong one – is that the SF that you encounter around that age (from say 10 to 14), when you are forming your own tastes clearly for the first time – will become one of the [ Continue reading... ]
Welcome to My New Website
May 7, 2012 By 3 Comments
Hi! Welcome to the first entry of my blog. I'm Ryk E. Spoor; click the "About Ryk E. Spoor" tab if you want way too much info on me. What's important in regards to this blog is that I'm a science-fiction and fantasy writer with, at present, five published novels and three more under contract. My most prominent works are Grand Central Arena, a space opera novel in the Golden Age tradition (or so I like to think) and the Boundary series with Eric Flint, a hard-sf science-adventure (blame any failure in hardness on me, not on any advisors or [ Continue reading... ]
What You’re Saying