Starship Fonzie - Podcast Transcript Aug 10, 2024
I’m going to begin this podcast with a salute to a great man who passed away 23 years ago on the 11th of May, 2001.
Douglas Adams, whose full name was Douglas Noel Adams, meaning his initials were DNA, which was something he was especially proud of, was a gentle giant of a man (he was six feet, five inches tall). And he deserves to stand alone in his own special category in the same way Ray Bradbury and William Gibson do. He was the greatest sci fi humorist of all time, and that’s not hyperbole. When you think of humorous sci fi, what immediately comes to mind? If you Google “humorous science fiction,” Hitchhikers’ Guide is everywhere. If you look at the Goodreads ranking for the greatest humorous science fiction, the first 6 or 7 items on that list are all Douglas Adams. Then you finally get down to some other writers like Jasper Fforde, or John Scalzi, or Kurt Vonnegut.
Douglas was a soft and giddy soul who loved nothing more than a good story, good food, and a good joke. But he is best remembered, of course, for his radio-show-turned-novel, The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, which has become a must-read for anyone who loves comedy, much less science fiction.
He got his start in writing after college doing comedic shows in London. It was there, in the 1970’s that he was discovered by Graham Chapman of Monty Python, and collaborated with him on various works. Adams helped to write at least one Python episode and appeared in a couple of skits as an extra. But his ability to act was hampered in comedy, as he would always start laughing right before the punch-line and spoil the joke. As such, he stayed with the printed page, where his hysterical nature helped rather than hurt.
Adams did some work on various other television and radio programs before becoming a script editor for Doctor Who in 1977, helping to achieve some of the best episodes of all time. Tom Baker is remembered for being one of the funniest Doctors, and that’s in no small part due to Douglas Adams’ input. He wrote The Pirate Planet, which was the second serial in the Key to Time series. He also wrote the episode, Shada, which never aired, but was eventually released to video. He had a hand with at least two episodes using the pseudonym of David Agnew (which was the collective name given to the collaborative writing of Adams, Graham Williams and David Fischer). The interesting detail about female Time Lords being able to choose their own shape? That was a direct result of Douglas Adams collaborating with the other Doctor Who writers.
Douglas began working on The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy radio program while simultaneously working on Doctor Who. The first of six episodes aired on BBC Radio 4 in March of 1978. It was a low-key affair, but received good reviews. A Christmas episode aired in December of that year. Nevertheless, a second series wasn’t forthcoming on the grounds that nobody had been listening, or so the network executives said. Douglas then wrote and released a novel based on the radio show script. When the book was published in 1979, it made #1 on the Sunday Times Best Seller list. The network executives, as they so often are, were dead wrong. Somebody definitely had been listening!
The franchise took off from there. Realizing he had a big hit, Douglas left the Doctor Who television show to concentrate on developing Hitchhikers’ Guide. A second series of radio programs aired in 1980, which was followed by a second book. In all, there would eventually be five books in the Hitchhikers’ Guide “trilogy.” They were: The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy (1979), The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984), and Mostly Harmless (1992). A short story titled, Young Zaphod Plays it Safe (1986), completes the set. All these can usually be found together in one volume, called The Complete Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy (or sometimes, The More Than Complete Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy).
The success of the radio show and books led to a six-episode television series. It aired on BBC Two in January and February of 1981. The ending was slightly different from the radio show. In fact, every incarnation of The Hitchhikers’ Guide has had slight variations from one media format to the next. A second series was conceived, but stalled, and was never made.
The big joke in Hitchhikers’ Guide was of course, when a giant supercomputer calculates the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. And the answer was… 42. So the number 42 has become permanently associated with Douglas Adams and the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.
Aside from Doctor Who and the Hitchhikers’ series, Adams unfortunately wrote little else in the way of science fiction. He was notoriously non-prolific, and often brutally ignored deadlines for scripts and books. (He was once famously sequestered in a hotel room with his editor in order to force him to complete the manuscript for So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.) He was often quoted as saying, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” He wrote the plot of a video game called Starship Titanic, but the book version was written by Terry Jones of Monty Python. Arguably the HBO production ‘Avenue 5’ came about as a memetic descendant of Starship Titanic. Two fantasy adventure novels, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long, Dark, Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), are excellent reading for those who want the complete Douglas Adams experience. A co-written work called The Meaning of Liff (1983) contains funny definitions for made-up words (which later inspired comedian Rich Hall to invent sniglets as a feature of HBO’s television program, Not Necessarily The News. I wonder how many of you out there remember that one). His travels to distant parts of the world in search of endangered animals developed into a book called Last Chance to See (2002). This book featured his account of his journey to Madagascar, which he loved. This, in turn, later inspired a scene in a later movie production of Hitchhikers’ Guide, in which Trillian asks Arthur Dent to go to Madagascar with her. In his travels, he once even dressed up in a rhinoceros costume before climbing Mount Kilimanjaro as a publicity stunt to raise money to save the black rhino. And sure, to be fair, he didn’t make the climb while wearing the costume, he took it off first, but it was still an attention-getting gesture.
Adams was a rather famous atheist, and often spoke of his disdain for religion. As such, he was rather close friends with a number of famous people in the atheistic community, particularly biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene. At one of the many house parties Douglas loved to host, he introduced Dawkins to Lala Ward, the actress who played the second Romana in the Doctor Who series. Lala later became Mrs. Dawkins thanks to that introduction.
All in all Douglas Adams was one of those rare souls who was both the life of the party as well as proficient in the bookish world of literature. You don’t find a combination like that very often, and in his particular case, it is sorely missed.
My salute to the great Douglas Adams, everybody. I don’t often Pour A Cold One for the deceased unless they’ve recently passed away, but I’m making an exception in this case. Let’s give Douglas Adams a salute in the finest tradition Milwaukee has to offer. Here’s a cold one to you, sir.
On with the show.
[Starship Fonzie intro music plays]
Greetings, all my fellow Milwookies, homo-sapiens, and all other sentient lifeforms of the Planet Earth. This is Starship Fonzie, the official podcast of the Milwaukee Science Fiction and Fantasy League. I’m your host, Eric J. Hildeman, and we’re going to let you know what’s going on in the SFF world generally, and in Milwaukee particular.
This podcast is being pre-recorded live from a strange, unknown planet where the dark Sith, Qinir, has taken Osha to be his apprentice instead of her twin sister, Mae.
Actually, it’s coming to you from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or as Kamala Harris calls it, the first city I’m visiting after being named the official candidate for president of the Democratic Ticket!
What a great pallet cleanser after the RNC debacle.
Welcome to the episode #42 of Starship Fonzie. Now you know why I did that whole Douglas Adams spiel. This is also Episode #9 in our fourth year of existence. We’ve got a lot to talk about, so let’s get started.
How about some news!
The Cryptkeeper got stolen!
Remember the Cryptkeeper? He was the animatronic host of the HBO series, “Tales From The Crypt” back in the 1980’s. Well, there was a statue reproduction of him on display at the Mystic Museum in Burbank, California, and it got nicked! Video footage shows someone walking in through the back door, putting a bag over the statue, and then walking out with it.
The museum offered up a $500 reward for the statue’s return. But there’s a happy ending to this particular story. A good Samaritan found the statue abandoned on a roadside, later saw the Fox 11 News report regarding the theft, and returned it to the Mystic museum. This kind person then refused the money.
I like stories like that. I mean, from stolen Penny Farthings to stolen Cryptkeepers, what are stupid people even thinking about these days, committing silly crimes that are easy to catch?
Well, NASFiC in Buffalo has concluded and wrapped up. I attended virtually this time around, and found it to be rather interesting.
What I best liked was the guest of honor appearance of a writer I’ve long admired, Mr. Alan Dean Foster. He was the writer who wrote the tie-ins for the animated Star Trek series, titled “Log One,” “Log Two,” and so forth. This led to him writing the novelization for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He then was tapped to write the novelization of a screen play called Star Wars. He read the script and said, “This movie is never getting made, there’s just no way.” But his job wasn’t to critique the script, his job was to write the novel, which he did. The novel was released as Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker. But the book contract was for two books, so Foster found himself having to write a sequel. He asked George Lucas, “What should I write about?” and Lucas replied, “Write whatever you want.” So, he did. That book became Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, which unfortunately was not made into the Star Wars sequel. That honor went to Robert Kasdan who wrote The Empire Strikes Back.
Foster did many other works as well, including the Pip and Flynx series. If you haven’t read any Pip and Flynx books, I highly recommend them. They’re about a boy and his minidrag, which is like a little basilisk-style dragon that sits on his shoulder. It’s awesome.
And in other news, Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland is underway! I’ll be reporting on events that happened there in the next podcast episode. I must say, the online portal, RingCentral, is really impressive so far. Buffalo NASFiC used the same system, and it was extremely easy, I had no issues, and it was very accessible.
I will, of course, give a detailed analysis of everything that happened at the Worldcon Business Meeting. There’s a lot to go over and I want to make sure you all understand the details of it, because it will strongly affect things to come for many years. But for right now, there’s just too much. I need time to review it and craft an analysis that’s useful to you all.
Also, and I think this is noteworthy, George R.R. Martin has begun re-issuing the Alfie Awards. Alfie Awards were something Martin started doing in response to the Sad & Rabid Puppies fiasco at Sasquon in Spokane in 2025. He gave them to the top vote-earning potential nominees in each category who got crowded out of the nomination process due to the Puppies’ block voting. He gave out similar awards to people he felt were overlooked in 2016. The last time he did this was back in 2019, when he handed out awards to two whom he felt missed out on editing awards because they no longer worked at a particular company.
Anyway, this year, he brought back the Alfie Awards, despite the fact that George R.R. Martin was declined for any panel appearances this year (which probably had something to do with his awful performance as M.C. during the virtual Worldcon of 2020. He’s been in the doghouse ever since). Martin gave out the awards to various people who had wrongly been ruled out of the voting process in Chengdu, China, last year. I’m still working on obtaining a list of who all received the award, but I know of at least one who did, and that’s Paul Weimer. It’s a good bet that R.F. Kuang also received one. I’m not sure if this wonderful gesture is enough to get George R.R. Martin off of fandom’s shitlist, but I’m of the opinion that maybe it should.
Patti Yasutaki, the actor who portrayed Nurse Ogawa on Star Trek: The Next Generation, passed away at age 70 on Tuesday, August 6. What a shame. I always liked her.
And voting is underway right now for the Dragon Awards. I got my ballot in, and I hope you’ll do so as well, if you haven’t done so already.
There’s a bit of a controversy, though, regarding this year’s Dragons. Cedar Sanderson was a finalist for her artistic cover of a book called Goblin Market. But only hours after opening, she was removed as a finalist and replaced with someone else. Naturally, Sanderson noticed right away and that led to her publication manager filing a complaint with the Dragon Awards, demanding an explanation.
Well, she eventually got one. The reason? Apparently Sanderson’s work, at least in part, was created using A.I. technology, which has been a major sore spot for artists everywhere. The Dragon Awards, just like everybody else, have banned the use of AI for award nominees, so the discovery that a certain percentage of Sanderson’s work was AI generated, however large that percentage might be, means that the work is ruled out, and her slot taken by the next runner-up. Pretty interesting stuff.
Let’s check out the interesting stuff happening in Milwaukee:
Big news for Milwaukee as Milwaukee native Alan Lastufka scores again! The Fort, which is the short horror film based on Alan’s short story, has won for both Best Actress and Best Sound at the Imaginarium Convention Film Festival. That took place recently in Louisville, Kentucky, if you’re curious. This is the third and fourth award won by the short film over the course of three film festivals, which is an impressive track record so far. Congratulations Alan Lastufka.
Alan is also the progenitor of Shortwave Publishing, which is doing well.
Egg Con 1 is over and done with! Yours truly was there tabling for The Milwaukee Falcon from July 27th through to July 28th. For those who don’t know, July 27th happens to be the birthday of Gary Gygax, the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons. (And yes, I know, technically he’s only the co-inventor, but Gygax was the man who popularized the game, who spent hours and hours teaching it to people, and was the real driving force behind it. I think he deserves to hold the title as the D&D inventor. After all, he did most of the legwork.)
The table did reasonably well, considering it was a small, two-day con. Some merch got sold, some key people got interested and signed up, and it was nice to meet some members of the Gygax family. Heidi Gygax Garland and her husband Erik (spelled with a k rather than a c) were wonderful hosts for the event. Our table was situated right by the bar, which was ideal for drawing traffic. At one point, my friend and colleague Nick Seidler showed up and spent some time sitting with me at the table. It was a good experience, and interesting to see how a first-year con was done. I’m going to be experiencing something very similar next year.
But I don’t usually attend gaming conventions, so this was the first time I saw how a gaming convention was run. And pretty much, it’s all games all the time. There were games going on right in front of me, and there really weren’t all that many vendors.
Still, it was a good experience. I might do this again.
And speaking of tabling, I’ll be doing a book signing at Studio Moonfall in Kenosha, WI, Friday August 23rd, from 4pm to 7pm. Come say ‘hello!,’ maybe get a copy of my book, ‘The Scotty!’ and I’ll sign it for you.
The Midwest Book Review has recently done a review of The Scotty and I couldn’t be more pleased with it. It’s a stellar review, and I couldn’t be prouder. It’s slated to appear in the September 2024 issue of Midwest Book Review, and will also appear in the September issue of Donovan's Literary Services. That makes for four outstanding reviews and one minor award my book has received so far. If you’re wondering which award, it’s the Regal Summit Book Award. Not a huge award, to be sure, but one where self-published authors can enter their books for free, which means there were dozens of entries for each category, and my book finished in the top five. So, what can I say? I’ll take it.
So be sure to visit Kenosha and get a copy of my book. Or, just go to IngramSpark.com or Amazon.com and buy a copy there.
Now, I need to report on something that’s deeply disturbing. I kind of don’t want to, but it’s too big to ignore. Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual assault. At least five women have stepped forward so far, and numerous other people are now piling on in social media outlets. The first two women made their allegations in a podcast on July 3, produced by Tortoise Media, called ‘Master: the Allegations Against Neil Gaiman.’ The investigation was led by Rachel Johnson. The first woman, simply called Scarlett in the podcast, worked for Neil Gaiman as a nanny while he was in New Zealand, and the other, simply referred to as ‘K.,’ met him at a book signing and was in a relationship with him for a few years after that. A third woman stepped forward on a podcast called, ‘Am I Broken: Survivor Stories’ Season 4 Episode 2. She identifies herself simply as ‘Claire.’ Not long after this, a fourth and fifth woman stepped forward with similar accusations on a fifth episode of the Tortoise Media production.
I’ve listened very carefully to all six of these podcast episodes. They’re deeply troubling. Neil apparently likes it rough, and I’ll not go into details on that. The women involved were apparently not into having sex that way. The consistent theme throughout all of their testimonies is that these women definitely say they were harmed, they were abused, but Neil was apparently under the impression that they’d wanted it that way. Now, in fairness to Neil, if he didn’t know he’d crossed a line because these women didn’t say anything, that’s a pretty strong defense. But the third woman to step forward, Claire, says she definitely did express that she didn’t like what Neil was doing to her, and he simply didn’t believe her.
Each of the women has stated that she wanted to say something but didn’t because he was Neil-fucking-Gaiman. What were they supposed to do, go back to their ordinary lives? And that begs the question: is it even remotely possible for there to be consensual sex when there is such a huge imbalance of power and income between the people involved. And this gets into a very dicey legal situation. Because where was the line actually crossed? Did Neil not know or did he simply not want to know?
One interesting aspect of all this is that, in the case of Scarlett, the first woman to come forward, Neil Gaiman turned over all his WhatsApp communications to reporters and said, “Here, read it for yourself. What was I supposed to think?” And at first glance, that sounds like a pretty solid defense. But Scarlett gave all her WhatsApp communications as well, and unlike Neil, she also included messages she sent to her friends. And in those messages to friends, she clearly expresses some severe misgivings about what was being done to her. If it was just that, I think Neil would be off the hook. But, of course, it’s not. The testimony of the other women removes the simplicity of the case involving Scarlett.
Now, I am acutely aware that, as a straight, white male, nobody wants to hear my opinion about this. But this is a news story pertaining to a local SF writer. For better or worse, Neil Gaiman is a resident of Wisconsin. Or at least he is most of the time. That means I’m obligated to report on it and at least give some sort of analysis.
And I want to be respectful to all involved, especially the women. Neil vigorously denies the allegations. Some of the women admittedly violated NDA’s to step forward, and certain lawyers are going to have a field day with that one. But then, why were NDA’s even necessary? In Scarlett’s case, the NDA was offered in exchange for a badly needed rent check. How is that not coercion? But whatever one’s analysis is, the fact remains that the number of women to step forward, together with all the ancillary testimony being offered up on social media, indicates that this matter is very serious indeed.
I’m going to be honest here, folks, it really looks to me like Neil Gaiman is in deep, deep trouble. And what’s worse is, he’s been an outspoken advocate for women and oppressed minorities for decades! And believe me, the irony there is lost on nobody! I want to believe that he’s innocent, but there’s just too much to ignore. I think it’s abundantly clear at this point that the man needs to spend some time in the doghouse. I’m not sure for how long a time. I’m not even sure to what extent. But he’s clearly not the hero he was anymore, and certainly not the hero we need right now. He needs to apologize. And right now, he doesn’t seem to be inclined to apologize for anything. He’s putting up a vigorous fight.
I’ve long argued in favor of forgiveness. We all screw up now and then, and if someone shows contrition and worthiness of a second chance, we should be willing to grant it, because you never know, the next person who needs forgiveness might be you. Neil’s accusers, by their own admission, were abused in a way which crosses the line, but in a way that requires a lot of slow motion instant replay! I therefore think that if Neil shows contrition and asks these women for forgiveness, and asks his fans for forgiveness, he can and should eventually recover. But Neil is doing the exact opposite right now. And it reminds me of another man, one who was clearly an abusive prick, named Harlan Ellison. And I can’t help but remember that Neil Gaiman was Harlan’s best friend in the whole world.
I wonder, how much relationship advice did Harlan give Neil over the years?
I’ll leave it there. There’s a lot more I could say, but for now, I think we need a pallet cleanser. So, to wrap things up, I’m going to play all my filk songs for you. I used to do these semi-regularly, and I might do so again, but for now, here are my parody songs to help lighten the mood.
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