sf – the magnelephant review

Hello, readers.

One late night, while walking through a field near Oxford, Mississippi, a friend turned to me and asked, between the shush-shush of our steps through the tall grass, “Do you ever feel like when you look up at the stars you see more than other people?”

We were walking to a pond near a farmer’s house. We were meant to go skinny dipping. A late-night walk, a late-night swim, a return home, a goodnight, a goodbye. One of our friends was leaving the next day for distant mountains and very well known dangers.

I looked up. I saw more stars than I had ever seen. It was so dark and so clear that you could see the dust between the stars. Galaxies caught in the winds of dark matter.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean because we grew up with Star Trek and Babylon 5 and Star Wars, because we read Foundation and Dune, because we care about the multiverse and so when we look up we see aliens and star destroyers and sliders surfing the dimensions. We see stories.”

I knew what he meant. And I said so.

“I know what you mean,” I said. “Stories in the dust.”

“Yeah.”

Now, thinking about it, I suppose I could have said that people have been dreaming into the dust since forever. I could have mentioned Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune, or Dante’s various planetary paradises, or those Hindu epics of flying machines that flew equally well underwater or in outer space. But, that wasn’t what he meant. And I knew what he meant then and now. He meant that we possessed a shared inheritance and responsibility of wonder that had been passed down from forever and, for us, that wonder happened to be populated with Skywalkers and Baron Harkonnens, as opposed to angels and demons, and it would be our job as writers to keep populating the dust with stories of what was and what still might be.

Happy Wednesday, readers.

ttfn.

p.s. Later this month, EG and I will be seeing 2001. It will be her first time. Hopefully, we’ll catch Interstellar, as well. One must never stop re-wondering the imagination.

Hello, readers.

Star Wars. Two words, inside of which a great deal of my imagination unfolded, through various super, old-bit adventures, space-based dogfights, card games, movie poop shoots*, and fan-fiction**. It also led me to this interview, The Power of Myth, between Bill Moyer and Joseph Campbell, which led me to deeper love and appreciation for the enduring power of stories (especially involving snakes and pretty ladies and not dying), and played a large part in me deciding to travel around India for 6 weeks after teaching in Korea.

Once, in 9th grade, in shop class, someone interrupted a game of Magic: The Gathering, to express their wonder as to whether or not I masturbated to one particular image of a buxom female (possibly a faerie with sharp, blue hair) and they were sure I did, that I probably could only get a cartoon girl to pay attention to me, and I remember the smell of sawdust and being so angry I could cry. I remember later Yoda saying that fear leads to anger, and anger to hate, and hate leads to suffering. I wonder if being so angry you could cry is the suffering he meant.

I don’t remember, as many do, a great deal of bullying or taunting because of Star Wars. I imagine it’s much different now. I wonder what people are taunted for playing at in shop class. I wonder if any of them have a story they will love and hold onto and remember later when life makes them so angry they could cry.

The stories you love become a part of your story.

For the entirety of my life, when I looked up at the stars, some part of me saw a fairy tale of heroes and princesses and the possibility of redemption.

On December 13th, the British Film Insititute, as part of their Science Fiction season, Days of Fear and Wonder, will be holding a STAR WARS day, in which–along with special guests, special cocktails, and special DJs–they will screen all three films of the original trilogy. And I will be there, along with a new friend and my fellow geeks, old and new, collecting a few more stories to squeeze in between the words star and wars.

*

As Jay and Silent Bob so lovingly referenced as a sort of almagamation of movie news websites that sprung up with the web and, perhaps not coincidentally, the pre-production days of The Phantom Menace, the most famous/notorious being Ain’t it Cool News–a site I spent a great deal of time on during my late teens and early twenties, witnessing the evolution of ‘first’ and the supposed power of the internet to crush opening box office results.

**

At one point in my life, I wrote a great deal of Star Wars fan-fiction (not slash) at a site called wattos junkard, which much to my sadness and the inevitability of time, no longer exists. Though, I believe, if one were to search for the words Domus Prime, one might find where Sailor Coruscant transported our imagination, somewhere safe and sound and lit with dark sparkles, I’m sure.

Tag: sf

space

star wars

*

**