Starship Fonzie

        Back when pulps first gained popularity, certain characters began to cross over into more popular forms of media. The two most notable characters to do this in the genre of science fiction were Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, both of which began being circulated in newspapers all over the United States as comic strips.        Buck Rogers was first. He made his initial appearance in the August 1928 edition of Amazing Stories . In it, his character was introduced as Anthony Rogers in the story Armageddon 2419 , written by Philip Francis Nowlan. The young Rogers was a veteran of The Great War (World War I), working for the American Radioactive Gas corporation, researching strange phenomenon in the abandoned coal mines of Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania. A cave-in took place, trapping Rogers inside, and exposing him to radioactive gases which slowed his metabolism and put him in a state of suspended animation. (Keep in mind, th...

              The Ultra-Fans are comprised of those X’ers and Millennials who grew up on all the science fiction television shows and video games that made the genre great. They know what the fans love, and so they serve it up – red hot! They go beyond the usual tomes to bring favorite themes new life, and while flirting with esoteric writing styles, keep the story concepts recognizable.              A typical Ultra-Fan book will be a more traditional sci-fi story, such as a space opera, a robot tale, or an interstellar military drama. It will have the kind of raw, unabashed profanity that young people today are accustomed to, use plain language with sharp witticisms and champion put-downs (college humor type stuff), and frequently pay homage to the great science fiction of yesteryear. For example, remote-controlled robots might be named “Threeps,” after the Star Wars cha...

             In 1920, Karel Čapek solidified the robot concept in a play called Rossum’s Universal Robots . It was the first time the word “robot” had ever been used. The Slavic word for “hard labor” is robota , and is likely where the word came from. The play counts as science fiction, because these strange robots, although portrayed by human actors, were not exactly human, seemed all too happy to work, and touched upon very real concerns about ethics, as the debate raged in the play about whether or not they were being exploited.             Čapek’s work would inspire many others. In 1939, BBC television broadcast a five minute segment of his famous play, making the first ever science fiction T.V. broadcast. Other sci-fi greats would give subtle nods to the earlier work, such as the Star Trek episode Requium for Methuselah , where a female android was named Rayna Chapek. In the cartoon series,...

     In 1868, one of the first true robots was invented in a fictional work by Edward Sylvester Ellis (1840 – 1916) titled, The Steam Man of the Prairies . It was also one of the earliest dime-novels, foreshadowing the age of pulp fiction which would surface in the decades to come. As the title suggests, the “steam man” was a large, human-like figure that ran on steam like a locomotive, built by the fictional character of Johnny Brainerd, a boy genius who happened to be also be a dwarf. The work was wildly popular and went through multiple reprints between 1868 and 1904. It’s success spawned imitations, particularly the first of the Frank Reade stories, written by Harold Cohen (1854 – 1927) under the pseudonym of Harry Enton. It was titled, Frank Reade and His Steam Man of the Plains (1876) and was serialized in the juvenile magazine, Boys of New York .   Frank Reade stories popped up again with the character of his son, Frank Reade, Jr., written about by Louis Ph...

  Ernest Cline has done it again. Not content to sit back and reap in the success of his first novel, and subsequent film success, Ready Player One , he has now managed to repeat his achievement with a sequel: Ready Player Two . A film is already rumored to be in the works. Sequels tend to be weak. If nothing else, they tend to be weaker than the initial film. But science fiction seems to be the exception to this rule. The sequel to the 1977 success of Star Wars , namely, The Empire Strikes Back , is arguably the greatest of the entire film series. The same can be said of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan . Other examples abound. Terminator 2: Judgement Day comes to mind. Or Mad Max: The Road Warrior . With Ready Player Two , Ernest Cline keeps the tradition alive, and has at least come close to matching his debut novel. Cline is what I refer to as an Ultrafan - that is, one of those writers who initially appeals to the science fiction fan-base before breaking into traditionally pu...