Starlog Internet Archive Project: Starlog #8, September 1977: A Taste of Harlan Ellison

Special effects geeks take center stage with Starlog #8. Mix that with science fiction's most outspoken author, and Starlog #8 tries valiantly to keep people's attention one month after the mind-blowing experience of the Star Wars issue.

Starlog #8
68 pages (including covers)

Cover price: $1.50

Actual behind-the-scenes special-effects photos rarely took the cover spot at Starlog, despite the large role played by SFX at the magazine. This cover is probably a good reason why. Despite giving you a neat idea of how the dinosaur scenes were shot on the Saturday morning fantasy series Land of the Lost, it's simply not a cover that jumps off the newsstands.

In From the Bridge, Kerry O'Quinn raves about how inspiring Star Wars is; Communications letters include a Californian who writes in with some background on Star Trek actor George Takei's run for local office in Los Angeles; Log Entries items include a preview of SF TV for the fall season and a report on the SFX controversy regarding claims that a robot was used in the King Kong movie. John Ciofli and John Warner contribute a retrospective of the original The Fly; Howard Zimmerman interviews Harlan Ellison, "Science Fiction's Last Angry Man." Ellison pal David Gerrold fantasizes about the new Star Trek movie; Susan Sackett's Star Trek Report answers the question of whether Trek will return as a feature film or a TV production; in "The First 1,000 Tickets to Space," science writer James Oberg suggests that "many readers of this article may be journeying into space themselves by the end of this century. This is not fantasy. ... This is hard, cold, quantifiable arithmetic." "Welcome Back to the Wars" offers two more pages of Star Wars photos; Jim Burns provides an overview of Saturday morning TV programs, including a complete listing of "kid-vid"; David Hutchison illuminates how model figures are animated in movies; and the Visions column examines solar sailing crafts for chasing comets.

"Harlan is not looking for any new fans. 'Fame is a lot more and a lot less than it's cracked up to be. I get 200 letters a day. People come from all over the world and sleep in my car if they think I'm not home, just so they can say they slept in his car.'"
--Howard Zimmerman, editor, "Harlan Ellison: Science Fiction's Last Angry Man"

To view previous Starlog Archive issues, click on "Starlog Internet Archive Project" in the keywords below.

Wayback Machine: Bad Astonomy on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

Sometimes I get to put a bunch of favorite topics into one blog post. Earlier today, I managed to include in one posting the topics of magazines, gays, Playboy, and anti-discrimination. How many can I put in this one? Well:

Blogger Phil Plait writes in his Bad Astronomy blog on Discover magazine's web site about his experience on the NPR news quiz radio program Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me. This is from the Wayback Machine, because Plait wrote it in 2007. But I still found it interesting (and, as they say, it was news to me, because I hadn't read it before), so if you want to read a cute short article about how Plait was called by the program's host to supply a funny story about NASA, check out his blog posting. He wasn't able to do so, so he called his pal James Oberg (a former contributor to Future Life magazine, BTW) to get the scoop.

So you don't care? Well, then you're not a NASA geek like I am. But anyway, here are the favorite topics of mine that I squeezed into one blog post: Future Life magazine, James Oberg, Bad Astronomy blog, Discover, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, public radio, NASA, radio quiz shows. Sigh.