The many incarnations of Star Wars

This Sillof site (link >>>) shows how the Star Wars saga can be recreated in many ways: dieselretro, steampunk, western, samurai fantasy, medieval fantasy, and so on. It is well worth a visit.

Bilder till Wolframfästet

Nisse och Kove Lindström kommer att illustrera Wolframfästet. De har tidigare gjort samma sak åt Gondica Abyssos och Gondica Bestiarium.

Framsteg för Wolframfästet

Tomas Arfert och jag diskuterar för närvarande att göra Wolframfästet till en Parallel Worlds-kampanj. Det innebär att jag redigerar om existerande material och skriver ett regelavsnitt. Hyfsat enkelt och snabbt gjort.

Creativity and quality

Anna Davour has put a link in her Swedish blog to an interesting article in Wired on creativity and quality. I think that the article is so good that I suggest that you to take a look at it, too. (I will certainly pay heed to what that author says when working on my science fiction.)

Here is link >>>

The simple things are often hard

Today I was interviewed by a college student writing an academic paper on how people feel and react when they come home from peace-keeping or peace-enforcing operations in faraway lands. Her interviews covered the Congo campaign 50 years ago, the Middle East ceasefire monitoring 40 years ago, the Balkan wars 20 years ago and the ongoing Afghanistan struggles. Quite ambitious.

I was happy to explain my experiences of doing civilian service in Afghanistan, from which I returned three years ago, and how I afterward readjusted to a mundane life in Sweden. When the interview was over and I had put down the phone, I realized that JRR Tolkien had written a sentence in The Fellowship of the Ring that summarized most of my thoughts on the matter:

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

The Maestro of Traveller

A link to an interview with Marc Miller, one of the top veterans of roleplaying-game design och the creator of Traveller >>>>

I was really pleased to read Marc’s description of how the Traveller designers handled the many racisms (“species-isms”?) that permeate the social structures of their Third Imperium game-cosmos. A clever approach — a boomerang hitting the reader in the neck so to speak — and a praiseworthy twist by a team of progressive Americans who grew up during the Civil Rights struggle.

An odd feat

Languages are one of my hobbies and ten years ago I learned Interlingua, a minor constructed language that mostly resembles a mix of simplified Latin and Italian. I did it for the fun of it and never expected the knowledge to be really useful. I also enjoy Arthur Conan Doyle’s science fiction short-stories and ended up translating “The Horror of the Heights” into Interlingua just to test my skill. Since Doyle’s original is public domain and the translation was of no commercial significance, I donated my text to Project Gutenberg. Here is the link >>>

55 svenska fantastikförfattare intervjuade

Litteratursajten Spektakulärt har under 11 veckor intervjuat 55 (!) svenska fantastikförfattare, en per vardag. Oerhört bra initiativ. Här är hela listan >>>

Combat Walker protoype

Combat walkers have been common in science fiction for a long time. The US military is nowadays serious about making some sort of porter-walker to carry the soldiers’ equipment om marches. This is the noisy prototype.

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1950s Moon Flight

To continue on the theme introduced in yesterday’s post — that is serious space flight speculations from the early Cold War — I have found the classic Destination Moon on YouTube. It is the first movie attempt to portray space exploration in a reasonably realistic manner, at least as far as was possible in 1950.