Psychobilly musician Mojo Nixon died yesterday at 66. “A cardiac event on the Outlaw Country Cruise is about right… & that’s just how he did it, Mojo has left the building.”
I saw him live a couple of times at SXSW, once with Jello Biafra in support of Prairie Home Invasion. “Mojo, why do you play SXSW? Ain’t no major label ever gonna sign you!”
Here’s a few tracks for the memories.
You may have noticed that Joel Hodgson and MST3K gang are having a new kickstarter for the next season (for values of “kickstarter” that include “not on the Kickstarter platform”). There are five days left and they are only 38% of the way to the first goal of $4.8 million, which will be six features and six shorts.
The last two Kickstarters they had blew past their goals.
This one? Not so much. Despite announcing that Plan 9 from Outer Space will be among the riffed films.
Donor fatigue? The Biden Recession? Not doing enough promotion? Not enough boost from a non-Kickstarter platform? Disgruntlement over how long it took people to get their promised rewards from the last campaign?
I think it may be some combination of all the above.
Maybe the usual Turkey Day festivities will kick it into higher gear. But if they don’t, this may be the first MST3K fundraising effort to fail.
The Halloween season is upon us again!
This video features a complete play-through of Isle of Eras, which starts out as a search for a missing brother and quickly morphs into a weird cosmic horror/time travel game with giant monsters and nods to everything from Donnie Darko to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s amazingly elaborate for an indie game put together by a tiny team. The monster design is particularly impressive.
Available for PS4/5 and PC (but not, alas, Mac).
I should point out that this is the new, new, new, new, new incarnation of New Worlds, this time as a hardback anthology series.
Gevers, Nick, and Peter Crowther, editors. New Worlds Issue #1. PS Publishing, 2021 (i.e., 2022). First edition hardback, #49 of 200 copies, a Fine copy in decorated boards and a Fine dust jacket, and a Fine embossed slipcase. Latest resurrection of this venerable UK fiction title, most famous for Michael Moorcock’s New Wave editorship in the 1960s, and Moorcock contributes a story (and signature) here, as do Alan Moore, Michael Swanwick, Ken MacLeod, James Lovegrove, Ian Watson, Ian R. MacLeod, etc. The trade paperback version came out last year, but this hardback edition is already out of print. Bought from the publisher at the usual discount.
I will have two copies of this to sell in the next Lame Excuse Books catalog (currently in progress).
And here’s Part 2 of those London Worldcon pics.
Note that some pictures are labeled “…and company.” This is code for “I’m slightly less embarrassed about not remembering your name a year later than I would be about getting it wrong.”
The lovely and talented Gail Garriger contemplates her next cup of tea.
It’s only a matter of time until leopard-skin gloves are all the rage…
Tobias Buckell, straight from his performance in Hipsters of the Caribbean.
I’m 99% sure this is Martin Hoare with David Langford. After all, it’s Worldcon. How many bearded, gray-haired men with glasses could there be?
Apropos of nothing in particular, here’s Mike Walsh.
John Kessel.
John Kessel in jacket.
John Kessel in jacket and the shoes he stole from Lew Shiner.
Michael Bulmlein.
Jo Walton contemplates the five kilometer hike to her next panel.
Your Humble Narrator and Ian McDonald.
Stephen Baxter, taking a short break from 100,000 words of galaxy smashing.
The ageless Ben Yalow. He stays the same while the original painting for Confessions of a Crap Artist gets older.
Signs of the horrific mental degeneration that comes from being a science fiction bookseller…
Just ask George Locke!
Charlie Stross, caught in the middle of a very geeky plan for world domination.
Ben Bova.
Ben Bova and Your Humble Narrator.
Lawrence Watt-Evans.
Lawrence Watt-Evans and company.
Lawrence and Lawrence, coming this fall to Fox!
Matthew Hughes
Ann VanderMeer
Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.
Stephen Jones.
Joe Haldeman, Gay Haldeman and Jim Burns.
John Douglas.
Michael Swanwick, yet again.
“Come, Mrs. Peel, we’re needed!”
Henry Wessels, rocking the seersucker.
John Clute and company.
Teddy Harvia fooling around with a married woman known only as “Mrs. Thayer.”
Robert Jackson Bennett, who I somehow had to travel 5,000 miles to see.
Andrew Porter.
Scott Edelman.
Jeff Orth, one of the three chairs of the 2016 Kansas City Worldcon. Expect him to look approximately 30 years older 380 days from now.
James Patrick Kelly, of the Gets-photographed-a-lot-at-Worldcons Patrick Kellys.
Has anyone seen Jack Dann and Russell Blackford in the same room at the same time?
Janeen Webb.
Betsy Mitchell.
Here’s the comprehensive roundup of all the books I’ve added to my professional library between July 1, 2014 and December 31, 2014. Some of these I’ve blogged about before, but not all of them. All books are Fine/Fine first edition hardbacks, unless otherwise marked.
Copies of most of the small press books from Subterranean, Hippocampus, etc. listed above will be available through the next Lame Excuse Books catalog.
Three more Ray Bradbury chapbooks from small press publisher Roy A. Squires, all bought from Lloyd Currey for $28 each.
This is one of those cases of coming across something on eBay and going, “Yes, I do want that.”
Yellin, Herb. Lord John Film Festival. Lord John Press, 2006. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket, new and unread. Signed by Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison and Janet Leigh.
Yellin was the owner of Lord John Press, and this book is a miscellanea of remembrances and appreciations of various films interspersed with examples from his large collection of signed movies photos, posters, lobby cards, etc.
I was briefly worried when I realized that Bloch died in 1994, and Janet Leigh in 2004, but the book has evidently been in production for quite a while. A copy up on Amazon is signed by the same five people, but the signatures look slightly different.
Lord John was an interesting, eclectic press, with both genre and mainstream books (along with signed Gerald R. Ford books). I have a significant fraction of their SF/F/H output, but don’t have Stephen King’s Dolan’s Cadillac.
A variety of interesting chapbooks came in, including two books about H. P. Lovecraft’s family and a few Swanwick chapbooks I hadn’t been able to pick up before:
There is no theme, only Zuul interesting stuff that’s come in after I got back from Worldcon.
