by Neil Clarke
Ironically, the current team decided to bring back the Moon Maid in 2012. Whether Staton and Curtis will now abandon the Moon—or how much longer the octogenarian sleuth will survive—remains to be seen.
The SF comic strip wasn’t quite dead, however.
Three new SF strips (and a revived Buck Rogers)—hit the comics page in the wake of Star Wars.
Star Hawks began in 1977. Written by SF humorist (and comics historian) Ron Goulart and drawn by Gil Kane, the strip hearkened back to comics like Flash Gordon. It originally came in an unusual two-tiered format that allowed more room for the artwork, but this proved too radical for most editors to accept. It quickly reverted to standard size, but it was too late to overcome those first impressions. The strip only lasted until 1981.
The others followed in 1979. March brought a Star Wars comic drawn by Magnus Robot Fighter’s Russ Manning. When he retired, the dream team of comics legends Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson took over. Sadly, it died in 1984.
Inspired by the success of the new TV series, Buck Rogers returned in September, in a modernized version that had nothing to do with the show. He survived until 1983—two years longer than his TV incarnation.
In December, Paramount cashed in on Star Trek: The Motion Picture with a strip based on the film but featuring new stories. After The Wrath of Khan came out, they updated the art without comment. It never ran in many papers and even the most diehard Trek fans had no idea it existed. In its four years at least 24 artists worked on it, more than many strips that ran for forty or fifty years. Larry Niven even wrote a 1982 sequence.
But it still wasn’t enough.
Perhaps the problem was that there had been too many SF strips. Or perhaps it was the general decline of the newspaper. Whatever the reason, they all died, leaving only Alley Oop and Flash Gordon.
And Flash went into endless re-runs in 2003.
SF never quite died on the comics page, though.
While SF tropes appear on the comics page almost everyday—after all, most strips are now drawn by the post-Spielberg generation—a select few offer a steady diet of SF humor, whether in the fantasy sequences in Calvin and Hobbes and the brilliant but little noticed Franklin Fibbs or the SF adventures of Jim Meddick’s Monty, and Frank Cho’s Liberty Meadows. Mark Buford’s Scary Gary and Mark Tatulli’s Lio mix it with a little horror and Ink Pen with superheroes.
Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! by Tim Rickard is perhaps the most science fictional strip in the newspapers today. But it never aspires to be more than a broad parody of all things Star Trek.
And then there was the one, last great missed opportunity, the potential classic that died far too young:
In 2005, Universal Press Syndicate launched Captain Murphey on the Comics.com website.
Their web-only strips were a twist on the “development contracts” offered to promising cartoonists. Instead of honing their skills drawing comics that would probably never be seen, their work appeared online, with the promise of syndication should they attract an audience. Pearls Before Swine may have been the only strip to make that leap.
Mark Seydewitz loved the pulpy feel of classic Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and brought it to his story of a Rocket Ranger who shoots first and shoots later. Perhaps more than anyone else, Seydewitz’s work resembled V.T. Hamlin at his peak, combining humor and non-stop adventure. Like Alex Raymond, his artwork changed with each new story, from Steadman-esque ink splatters to Roy Crane duotone landscapes. And then there were the close-ups of Murphey’s incredibly expressive face, inspired by Bill Watterson’s much newer classic.
But after two years Mark had to quit. Murphey never managed to escape from the digital slums, and the strips vanished from the internet overnight. They have never returned.
SF has become one of the staples of the webcomic. Some are even quite good, although few of them attempt to match either the complex artwork or grueling schedules of the classics. Universal’s GoComics continues to run original material, although not much of it even pretends to be formatted for the newspapers.
Most newspapers continue to run strips that have long since outlived their creators’ replacements—and few are willing to risk running anything new. It hardly looks likely that the dearth of SF comics will end any time soon.
Well . . . Mark Seydewitz is trying to syndicate a new—and very different—SF strip. You never know. Some heroic editor out there might take a chance on it.
After all, we know it will be great.
About the Author
Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, “Let’s Start from the Top…” appeared in Daily Science Fiction.
Words with Wings:
A Conversation with Fran Wilde
Chris Urie
I met Fran Wilde years ago through a mutual friend and fantasy author. In the time that I’ve known her, she’s published brilliant short fiction and incisive articles on the art of fiction. Her debut novel Updraft, was released from Tor Books this past September.
Updraft is the story of Kirit Densira and her attempt to save her family and home from the oppressive reign of the Singers. In a world high above the clouds, Wilde weaves a complex tale filled with multi-faceted characters and a setting unlike any other. Towers of living bone jut out from clouds and people fly on hand-crafted wings.
Fran Wilde’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nature, and Tor.com. She also hosts an interview series called Cooking the Books, all about the intersection between food and fiction.
Now that your debut novel is out, how has it changed your writing life?
Right now, what’s changed is finding time to write while traveling and blogging to promote Updraft.
For better or for worse, I love both traveling and blogging, and that can be distracting.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with the blog posts (see my Questionable Answers post at Chuck Wendig’s Terribleminds, for an example). I wouldn’t do as many blog posts if they weren’t fun, and I think I did forty-six iterations of fun in September, plus the regular Cooking the Books and Book Bites posts I do on my website.
Doing readings and appearances for Updraft has been equally amazing. Getting the opportunity to appear with authors like Seanan McGuire, Greg van Eekhout, and Adam Rakunas on the west coast, meeting booksellers, and then traveling on the east coast with my fellow Tor debuts—Seth Dickinson and Ilana Myers in October has been amazing. Plus local Philadelphia events, especially Doylestown Bookshop, Main Point Books in Bryn Mawr PA, and the incredible launch at Barnes & Noble Rittenhouse Square—all were and are great opportunities to connect with readers and talk with them. I love that.
Which means I have to pry time loose from my schedule to write . . . a very different experience for me. (I get hermit-ish when I write.) I’ve been finding moments, especially on my days off and on the planes and trains (I can’t write very much in cars), and it hasn’t been too big a difference, but it’s still a shift. Who knows? Sometimes changing things up energizes the writing too.
Updraft features a deep and dynamic setting. What were some of the difficulties in worldbuilding such a complex society?
The main fiddly bits weren’t so much a difficulty as a memory game. Remembering which towers produced what items, mapping out what the wind flows were around each tower and around the city itself, and how best to approach and leave towers at what angles. Also counting the tiers and keeping track of what tier my characters were on or near for certain scenes required careful mapping. I found it really fun.
What can readers expect from next book set in the Updraft universe?
Cloudbound is about leadership at its heart. And gravity. A l
ot of gravity. (The title should be a pretty solid clue for Updraft readers). Also monsters. There are familiar characters (yes, fans of a particular character, he’s back) and new ones. More wing fights. And new towers to explore . . .
If you could have a pair of wings from your book, what would they look like?
Mine would be sepia/tea-stained like Ezarit’s but with wind-whorls like Kirit’s. Ezarit’s wings have a stylized kestrel on them, which is perfect for her character. My wings would be light and fleet and furlable, with the fine-tuned controls the singers have. I might have a pair of darker wings too. Hmmmm . . .
You cut your writing teeth in the short fiction realm. What has writing short fiction taught you?
Concision.
I was tempted to leave it at that, but also, short fiction teaches the power that two words, placed side-by-side have over each other, when not crowded by other words. And the power of editing and revising.
Food can be an often-overlooked aspect of fiction. Your podcast Cooking the Books highlights the importance of culinary creations. How does food add depth to a story?
Food isn’t necessarily an overlooked aspect of fiction for many authors—so many people write beautiful food! I think it’s easy to get caught up in the world of a book and miss the careful work writers are doing with food, line-of-supply, economics, and kitchen/dining culture when they talk about food.
What Cooking the Books has allowed us to do is to talk about a lot of craft and worldbuilding techniques that come up when food is involved. As well as other issues including socioeconomics, war, cultures and cultural appropriation, and gross-out humor. To name a few. Plus, apparently, cannibalism, sometimes.
Food gives writers a way to reveal parts of a world, a setting, or a relationship without using exposition. Who eats and who doesn’t, what do they eat, where does that food come from and how does it get to the table, what foods are scarce vs. plentiful. What foods reveal power structures because of their expense, and which reveal different biological leanings due to their edibility vs inedibility. There are so many more questions beyond this, and luckily, we’ve got forty-three episodes and counting at Cooking the Books, some podcasts, some text, to whet your appetite.
(Caveat: we are also known for our *terrible* puns and our recipes.)
Is it true Joe Haldeman once taught you how to make a pizza in a foxhole with plastique?
That is totally true.
Joe and Gay Haldeman were among the first interviews I did for Cooking the Books and I’d done a lot of research on a couple of topics, including food in The Forever War and The Forever Peace, plus a ton on the history of MREs and C-rations.
But when our Skype call began, Joe broke into a mischievous smile and asked whether I would want to know how one cooked pizza in a foxhole with plastique (the short answer: very carefully) and I tossed all my research out the window and said: GO!
You seem to travel far and wide to every convention under the sun. What is it about cons that you love so much?
Aw, I wish I could go to more cons, actually. What I love? The conversations and the community. I like learning new things and meeting new people. Hearing what they have to say. I also like seeing friends I haven’t seen in a long time.
Even when I have a big panel list of my own, I try to go to panels and readings in my down time. Sometimes this is hard because cons are tiring too, but often I find that sitting in a panel, just listening, is a great way to recharge.
What projects are you currently working on? More short stories I hope!
I’m working on several short stories, a novel or two, revisions, and a secret project to be named later. I’m also preparing for the spring launch of my first Tor.com novella, “The Jewel and Her Lapidary,” which is set in my gem universe, and I’m very excited about that.
About the Author
Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.
Another Word:
Chinese Science Fiction and Chinese Reality
Liu Cixin
China is a society undergoing rapid development and transformation, where crises are present along with hopes, and opportunities coexist with challenges. This is a reality reflected in the science fiction produced there.
Chinese readers often interpret science fiction in unexpected ways. Take my Three Body series as an example. The alien-invasion story takes as its premise a “worst-case” scenario for relationships among members of the cosmic society of civilizations, which is called the “Dark Forest” state. In this state, different starfaring civilizations have no choice but to attempt to annihilate each other at the first opportunity.
After publication, the novels became surprisingly popular among those working in China’s Internet industry. They saw the “Dark Forest” state portrayed in the novels as an accurate reflection of the state of brutal competition among China’s Internet companies.
In particular, they point to a type of warfare described in the novels in which one civilization attempts to destroy another by lowering the dimensionality of space itself. Readers say that this “dimension-reduction” method of attack is prevalent in the Chinese Internet industry, where companies often use techniques such as unsustainably low prices or even free, inferior goods to drag other competitors to a “lower plane” of competition, where they can be eliminated because the attackers are more familiar with survival at this lower level of existence.
Authors (myself included) are often befuddled by such interpretations.
The conflicts and crises present in Chinese society are sometimes reflected in science fiction with metaphors both blunt and subtle. For example, Ma Boyong’s “The City of Silence” describes a dystopian society in which words are gradually forbidden by the authorities for political reasons until people are able to communicate in daily life only with an extremely limited list of approved words. Zhang Ran’s “Ether” similarly portrays a society of ubiquitous surveillance in which people resort to the primitive method of writing on each other’s palms with a finger to communicate freely. These two stories are obviously commenting on China’s Internet censorship regime.
Chen Qiufan’s novel, The Waste Tide, on the other hand, works more subtly by portraying a scene that is both familiar and strange: following the invasion of a foreign capital, a symbolic Chinese island is turned into a dumping ground for electronic waste products from the rest of the world. The inhabitants of the island eke out a living among the mountainous heaps of garbage and evolve into bizarre cyborgs.
On the other hand, contemporary Chinese science fiction also evinces an enterprising spirit and optimism. In science fiction written in my country during the last century, the Chinese of the future were, as a whole, rather vaguely portrayed. For readers during that time, China was at the periphery of the world, and the future of the world and the human race would be determined by superpowers like the United States and the Soviet Union, and China would have little influence on it. Science fiction of the time did not have any Chinese superhero capable of changing the world.
However, as the pace of China’s modernization accelerated, Chinese readers began to feel the growing presence of their country in the future of the world. For example, in the Three Body series, most of the characters responsible for saving and destroying the world were Chinese, and readers did not find this implausible.
A typical example of the optimism that China would have a hand in making the future is my story, “Sun of China.” The protagonist of the story is a migrant laborer from the countryside, a “spider-man” who cleans the windows of skyscrapers in the cities.
He belongs to a unique Chinese social class at the bottom of society, struggling to make low wages through backbreaking labor without even the right to settle in the cities they serve. China, meanwhile
, has constructed a giant mirror in space, called “Sun of China,” that would help stabilize the climate and increase agricultural output. In order to save money, migrant laborers from the countryside are hired to clean this mirror in space.
The protagonist of the story, due to his experience as a spider-man, gets the job and begins to live a new life in space. Finally, this man from one of the poorest villages in Northwestern China manages to transform the giant reflector into a solar sail that he uses to depart the solar system for the limitless space beyond.
The question of the relationship between China’s science fiction and its reality has always been perplexing. What I’ve written so far is still fairly superficial, and I’ve long tried to get a deeper insight into the issue.
Let me try to point to a phenomenon unique to the Chinese science fiction of the last century: the paucity of subject material. Many of the core subjects of Western science fiction—long space journeys, time travel, alien invasions, apocalyptic catastrophes, the origin and end of the universe, etc.—were simply not present in Chinese science fiction at all because they were too far from the reality of China. The science fiction of the time hewed to everyday reality closely, and one might even describe them as practical.
But at present, Chinese science fiction has lifted off from the ground and entered space, even reaching beyond the solar system to the very edge of the universe. What I’ve described above as reflecting the reality of Chinese society is not the mainstream of science fiction. The most popular works have little to do with the day-to-day reality of people’s lives.
Another popular writer, Bao Shu, often sets his fiction in contemporary China, but it is used only as a setting. Even a writer like Wang Jinkang, who believes in a style of science fiction tied to reality, has cast his sight to the end of the universe in his new book, Escape from the Mother Universe.