Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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The end of innocence

Forty years ago today, on the 7th of April 1979, the first episode of Mobile Suit Gundam was broadcast, and it changed the face of animation forever. It would hit Italy one year later – apparently an unauthorized dub that was broadcast late in the afternoon. I was twelve going on thirteen, and it left a lasting impression on me.

At twelve I was already an avid reader of science fiction, and I regularly read popular science magazines. And here, in the first minutes of the first episode, I could see the future – Gerard K. O’Neill space colonies, that according to the magazines that I was reading would be up and running in a decade, portrayed in all their glory. There was proper physics, and they mentioned the Lagrangian points in the orbit. I was speechless, and delighted.

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Oh, frell!

Getting old is sometimes a cruel experience. I have just found out one of the TV series I liked the most when I was not-so-much-a-kid-anymore is today considered “obscure” and described as “one of the lesser known science fiction shows”.

It is really a weird sensation because I know that it’s been 17 years since the series was cancelled, but in this age of total recall it should not be a problem – you can get it in streaming, you can get the DVDs.
Is there really so much good new stuff that there is no time or interest for anything older than, say, five years?

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Visions of the Apocalypse

Usually, I joke about the fat that I have a double identity, just like Bruce Wayne but without the money, the cool car and the cloak. I am an environmental scientist and a writer of imaginative fiction. I have enjoyed ample opportunities to tap my academical background for inspiration in my literary pursuits, but the chances to do the opposite are pretty non-existent.

Visioni dell’apocalisse. L’immaginario cinematografico della fine del mondo

I am therefore extremely grateful to doctor Stella Marega of the University of Trieste, that involved me in a nice volume that is just out now: Visioni dell’Apocalisse (Visions of the Apocalypse). As the subtitle reads, this is a book about “the imagination of cinema and the end of the world.”
The essays within range from the urban landscape of future Los Angeles in science fiction movies to the plague of zombies.
And I contributed an essay called No Marigolds in the Promised Land: the Ecology of the Apocalypse, about books and movies that deal with ecological and environmental disasters, from H.G. Wells to Mad Max: Fury Road.

This work was a blast, and I am really sorry the book is only available in Italian. But I am also damn proud.


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Scaring people for fun and (sometimes) profit

Kids these days!
On a roleplaying forum a discussion starts about horror RPGs and how you create fear. And everybody starts talking about game rules and mechanics.
Which is oh, so wonderfully naive, and misses the mark by a half-mile.

In a roleplaying game, we get players playing the roles of characters.
Scaring the characters is easy.
The Game Master says “Your characters are scared.”
Done.
There can be specific rules to simulate fear – the old Ravenloft setting used a Saving Throw vs Death and Paralysis or a Will check. Fail that, your character is scared. Other games used different formulas. Done.

But if one of the the purposes of horror fiction (and horror roleplaying is interactive, shared fiction) is for the end user to experience the frisson of fear, then the fact the characters in the stories are scared witless is not enough. We need to get to the end user – the player.
And here’s something I learned in my long life as a Game Master – nobody’s scared of a roll of dice or a table.

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Burn, baby, burn!

By now you’ve all probably heard about the Catholic parish in Poland in which they decided to have a nice book-burning event, making a bonfire of books that teach sorcery and witchcraft. What made the news is the fact that among the books that went up in smoke were both the volumes of the Harry Potter series and the ones from the Twilight saga.

Now call me weird, but I’ve been trying to learn about the other books that were burned. I can see there’s a book by Osho in the photo above, but the others I can’t recognize (you do? Please let me know in the comments! There might be something worth a read in that pile.)
I even ask myself – had the Harry Potter and Twilight books not been featured, would have we heard about this stupid little act of obscurantist rubbish?

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Thinking

I’m back to my two-books routine: one book downstairs, to read during lunch break and in the pauses I take from writing, and one book upstairs, to read before sleep. I don’t have a TV and my social life is almost exclusively online, and that makes such choices a lot easier.

And this month two books I am reading for very different reasons strangely fit together quite nicely.

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Raiders of the Lost Franchise: Hawk the Slayer (1980)

And we finally come to the true heavyweight among the three “not so bad” early 1980s Conan clones. And Hawk the Slayer is a heavyweight for a number of reasons: because it is a true cult movie, because it was not, in fact, a Conan rip-off at all (it came out two years before the John Milius film), and because it was damn cheap, but it had a heart.
And Jack Palance playing Darth Vader.

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