Michael C. Goodwin's Blog, page 19

Chance and Change

It is a universe of chance, one little thing can change the world, and that is the way it actually works.

I had the opportunity to spend a little time at a recent science fiction convention with two of my favorite people, Bjo and John Trimble. While they are getting a little older, they are still sharp as can be and still mobile. Over the years, Bjo has lost none of her sass, and I say that with great affection. She pushed me in the right artistic direction with a chance meeting more then 40 years ago. We became good friends with the Trimble family over the years and they have adopted us into their huge, extended assortment of relatives, fannish friends and acquaintances.
 While many of their accomplishments have been properly recorded, I was curious enough to ask Bjo and John about some of their exploits directly. I am sure that they have been asked many times about events in their lives, but they did not hesitate to regale us with stories from their past. What struck me most, was the series of chances that happened on their way to saving the classic science fiction TV series, Star Trek.

It was a very improbable series of chances that Bjo became acquainted with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. It was a chance that they were on the set of the show when they learned that it would be canceled after the second season. On their way home, it was a chance remark by John that launched them into a letter writing campaign that would save the show for a third season and thereby make it a candidate for syndication which increased its popularity in the following years. It was pure chance that they pushed all the right buttons that made the studio executives change their mind about the series. The rest is, of course, history.

After the convention, we invited them to the children’s museum for a tour of the newest exhibits and dinner. Bjo and John have always been great supporters of Lynne and the museum and were excited to see all of the changes there. On our way back from dinner, after more stories and good food, I chanced to say to John, “You know, you really did change the world.” To say that Star Trek has had a massive influence on the world of science fiction and on science itself and all the great number of people involved in them, is a vast understatement. John looked at me and smiled. “Yes we did.” And that was all he said about it.

(Dinner with the Trimble daughters, Bjo and John and Lynne and I.)

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To the Moon

It is, of course, one of those life moments that you do not forget, the day when we landed men on the moon. I had graduated from high school the month before, happily free now to go on to USU and study art. My favorite TV show, Star Trek, had also ended the month before, but that didn’t seem to matter much, we were going out there into space for real. We didn’t have warp drive or talking supercomputers and communicators, but we had advanced from a suborbital flight in May of 1961 to the huge Saturn V rocket to take men to the moon in July of 1969, and that was an incredible thing to accomplish in so short of time.

I had watched nearly every launch of the space program from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo, just as I had watched nearly every episode of Star Trek. The two seemed to be bound together in my mind, and when the Apollo program stumbled, Star Trek kept going and I kept the faith in space exploration. Now I was glued to the TV, anxiously waiting for every update on the moon landing, hardly daring to hope that it was really about to happen. And it did happen, and because of the incredible coolness of those pilots in the lunar lander that had the ‘right stuff,’ to achieve the near impossible.

After heading off to college in September, I tried to keep track of the Apollo program and the subsequent moon landings, but I was focused on other things and trying to survive my emersion in higher education. When the moon landings stopped, I hardly noticed and didn’t realize that we would not be going back to establish colonies or further explore our nearest neighbor. Now 50 years later, I am a little angry at the lack of motivation and nerve. To think what we could have accomplished in all that time, had we continued, is nothing short of heartbreaking. Of course, we explored the solar system and all of the planets with robotic probes, but we should have kept going ourselves. Yes, we had a lot of other problems to solve here on our planet, but we really haven’t done a very good job so far, and that is the sad realization and disappointment that I have. Let’s get going back out there, and this time, let’s not stop.

(Below, my idealized, painted version, of the first moon landing.)

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Luke

I had just left the movie theater and I was not happy. How could they do that to Luke? Turn him into a mean, bitter old man, it was a poke in the eye, a jab in the gut, I was not happy.

Luke and I go way, way back, you understand. I first got to hear about Star Wars at the 1976 Worldcon, it was my first big-time convention and it was all wonderful to me, the writers, artists, editors, and the fans. And there, right in the middle of it all, was a room with displays, props, art and costumes from a new science fiction movie. It looked pretty interesting, so I decided to go to a presentation given by one of the actors in the show, Mark Hamill. It was a slide show with him narrating the story, somewhat. But it still sounded interesting enough, so when the movie came out in the following year that May, I went to see it with my new wife of 6 months. She liked it, and I really liked it.

During the next couple of movies, I grew up with Luke, as he was fighting the forces of the dark side, I was also fighting my way through things, trying to find my place in the world of work, family and life. And when the last movie with him ended, I had an assurance from George Lucas that we would all get back together again in about 30 years or so and see how it turned out. And that was oddly comforting, it would be like a future class reunion when we get to chuckle over everything that happened to us.

Except for the fact that things didn’t turn out quite well for Luke, he had a few setbacks along the way, and I guess, so did I. But I didn’t give up and go live like a hermit, I kept at it and I thought that Luke should have been played that way too. Of course, I didn’t screw up the galaxy, so I suppose that he had a right to be bitter. And actually, the more I thought about it, the more I could see the point. I guess I will eventually have come to an arrangement with the series, after all, they are just movies, and he did redeem himself at the end. But his legacy is still very much in doubt. Will Rey turn out to be his heir, in more ways then one? We will have to wait until next December, but I am not getting any younger, and like Luke, I cannot come back as a force ghost to check on things. So I am counting on the last film to make things right, and to give it all a proper ending. Luke and I have certainly waited long enough for it.

(Below, a painting I did of the fight between good and evil, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.)

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Born in the Anthropocene

I have recently discovered that I was born in the Anthropocene epoch. In the geological timescale, the 4.5 billion-year series of geologic events on this planet has been broken down into eons, eras and period, from there it goes to epoch, then to ages. The three great eras of life on Earth are the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and the Cenozoic. The Cenozoic is of course, the age of mammals, which began 66 million years ago with the extinction of the dinosaurs. I thought that we have been living in the Holocene epoch of Cenozoic era which began about 11,600 years ago with the retreat of the glaciers from the last Ice Age.

Recently a committee of researchers from around the world have been busy deciding if we have crossed the line into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. This group of scientists would like to put a date on this event when the new epoch began, and that would be 1950. Wait, what?

Most scientists say that humans have been messing up the planet and its climate for the last 7,000 years with ancient clear-cutting, (or slash and burn), of forests for agricultural purposes, domestication of animals, and the beginning of burning wood and coal for heat and primitive manufacturing. All of these land changes, a few researchers maintain, basically stopped the beginning of the next possible ice age in its tracks. But the main contention of the committee is that all of the changes prior to 1950 pale in comparison to what has happened since. CO2, methane pollution and world population has spiked since 1950 to levels never before seen.

I was born in 1951, so if this naming convention gets approved, I will have been born in the Anthropocene epoch, as most of the people now alive on this planet have. In 1950 there were 2.5 billion people living on Earth, by today, 2019, there are 7.7 billion people. By 2050 the population will be 9.8 billion and could be 11.2 billion by 2100. All of these people will need food, shelter, energy and the other necessities of life to live and that creates a great deal of pollution, environmental degradation and resource depletion. Perhaps we have crossed that line, and as passengers on this planet Earth, we are getting a bit overbooked.

(By all the recent scientific research, the dinosaurs died suddenly, as in this old painting of mine. They didn’t have much of a choice in it, unlike us.)

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Reinventing the Wheel

In my last blog I recounted the self-publishing experience of my first cartoon book in 1976. I would now like to jump back to fairly present times, nearly 40 years later to 2014. In January of that year I lost my job along with 20 other people where I was employed. No problem, I thought, I will get another job after I take a small break from it all. I had 4 months severance pay, so things were good. I had been writing some science fiction novels in my spare time since 2008 and figured that this was the time to self-publish one. Now please understand that the last time I had self-published anything was back in 1985, so I figured that things had probably changed a little since then. Yeah, right.

Back in those early, heady days of self-publishing, we just did it, no copyrights, ISBN numbers, permissions or worries about making money or anything else, just get the material out in print and move on to the next thing. These days now, everything is about making money off the writers. Here is a little bit of statistics that I looked up for this blog. “The number of self-published books topped the 1 million mark for the first time in 2017, according to Bowker’s annual report on the number of ISBNs that were issued to self-published authors. The total number of ISBNs issued last year rose 28% over 2016, to 1,009,188.” Are you kidding me? Wow. This is a very big business thing now, not just basement copiers printing out fanzines, but everyone and their dog doing books. What was I thinking? You can drown out there in that sea of books if you aren’t careful. There is every service imaginable to writers and self-publishers now, editing, evaluations, formatting, ISBNs, cover designers, printing, e-processing, marketing, bookstore placement and tons of companies that will do it all for you for a small fee. Yeah right.

I settled on Amazon KDP for self-publishing, easy, cheap and mostly do-it-yourself. A quick edit, formatting, and my own cover design, (being an artist is a good thing sometimes). Bang, right there on the great Amazon itself, buy my book, I will retire now. Me and a million other self-publishers. Yeah right.

So, let’s do some more books, make lots of money. The cartoon books were my first experiences in self-publishing and my first love. So I will just re-release my cartoon books in electronic fashion. Yeah, right. Unhappily, times have really, really changed. That space ship, the Enterprise, that I used in my first books, no, no, no. Very copyrighted and jealously guarded against pipsqueaks like me, can’t use that. The monolith itself? movie copyright again. Reminding the people in power that I did several books in times past using their legally protected icons, a very, very bad idea. So what’s a poor artist like me to do now?

(One of the problems with being an artist is that you can design your own book covers. But you can also get carried away if you are not careful. I kept trying to decide on something that would work, but couldn’t decide. But finally, my own art work is always the best way to go.)

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Reinventing the Wheel, part 2

There is an old artist saying, “Well, back to the drawing board.” (I hate that saying). But I needed to redo my work in such a fashion that it would be original again. My old cartoons were based on now copyright iconic images from 40 years in the past and I had to tread carefully. There are a lot of lawyers on the lookout for people trespassing on their clients territory these days. So just forget the old stuff and reinvent it for these modern times. Okay, fine.

My cartoon work was never really about Star Trek, I had just used the ships as an readily identifiable image to speed the comics along. The humor in the books were actually about space travel, from my first interest in the US space program in the 60s and what it would be like out there for us in the universe, though with a bit of a twist. Okay, great, the space shuttle is gone, what is NASA doing for future space travel? Ok, look, something resembling a space vehicle and it is a real thing that is going to be used someday and it is called the Orion. Just the ticket, done. The monolith became a megalith, (you know, those big rock thingies that ancient peoples used to make calendars with 4,000 years ago, before we had printing presses to create the zillions of them every year around Christmas). (And yes, I also got involved long ago in working with some people who self-published Trek calendars).

Update the humor, bring it in to the 21st century, not the 1960s. Create new material and characters, explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new… Okay, we had better not go there, dangerous waters and all that. Just format it and put it up on the great Amazon again and wait for the money to roll in. And wait, and wait. There is something else needed, I know, I got one of my degrees in it a long time ago. Advertising and marketing. But that takes time and money which I don’t have, and no idea of how to go about it in these modern electronic times. My education is 45 years out of date and a century behind in technology. (Sounds like a good subject for another blog).

So I checked Amazon today and Field Trip is 3,216,845 on the best seller list. But is 6,328 on the Kindle hard SF list. My Stars and Galaxies is 3,398,003 on the best seller list. But is 2,887 on the Kindle humorous SF list. So it looks like I have an awful lot of work to do to compete with all of those millions of other self-publishers.

(This book cover was a lot simpler. A photo from NASA for the background. But hey, why did I spend all those years painting astronomical illustrations? Just use one of my own, copyright free of course.)

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The Monolith

In my most recent blog I talked about doing cover illustrations for some of the early self-published Star Trek fanzines and novels across the US. But, I also did a self-published book and fanzines in Utah as part of that early creative rush.

After I graduated from USU, I came into contact with SF and Trek fans at my first art job at the Hansen Planetarium in Salt Lake City. They immediately involved me in their finish activities, one which was producing a fanzine called Clavius. My art was especially appreciated for helping liven up the publication with interior illustrations, culminating in a cover highlighting a prized interview with noted SF writer, Larry Niven. I even started doing cartoons which grew into a comic strip for the zine. After a few issues with these cartoons, several of the editors and writers of the zine approached me with an idea. why not do a small book, full of cartoons and sell it along with the fanzine at one of the big new Star Trek conventions? One member of the group’s father ran a print shop and could give us a good rate for the book. Not being one to turn down a foolish idea, I readily agreed.

At that period of my life, I was unemployed and living at home, so time and money was not a problem, and I launched into the work, not realizing what I had gotten myself into. Over the next few months, I drew and hand-lettered one hundred ink-drawn strip cartoons, only in a vertical format to cut down on costs. I also used pressed down, hand-cut dot screens to add gray-scale backgrounds which would be easy to photoprint for the book. We hand-assembled the pages and glued them into a fairly thin wrap-around book cover. (After a couple of years the glue would dry completely and the pages began to fall out, and the cover stock was terrible and the ink would readily smear.) But we had our book just days before a major convention, so several members of the group traveled to Los Angeles to Equicon 76 and sold out a lot of the print run to eager Star Trek fans there.

The cartoons were not specifically Star Trek in nature, there were no references to anyone or anything Star Trek. I had just used the space ship as my main character in the cartoon narrative. Other characters included a maniacal asteroid, a ufo, a Klingon ship as the bad guy, of course, and a very hungry space monster along with other strange bits and pieces from science fiction. One of which was, the monolith from 2001, A Space Odyssey, hence the ungainly title of the book, Who Was That Monolith I Saw You With? Most of the money made from the sale of the book went into travel expenses and printing costs, I actually made nothing from that first book. Later I would sell the book to a small press publisher and did 3 books, Who Was That Monolith I Saw You With? Son of Monolith, and My Stars! A cartoon strip, My Stars! ran in a local newspaper for 9 months, and ended up in the books and a little later, I did a personal fanzine, self-published, which used the rest of the cartoons in a book selection titled, Tripping the Light Fantastic. And then I pretty much forgot about them for over 30 years.

(The material below is not to scale. Clavius and the Starry Night fanzines are 8.5 by 11 inches. The original white Monolith is paperback book size, and the rest are trade paperback book size. My Stars is notable as the best of the series and has my rather iconic Jaws/Star Trek illustration as the cover piece and the book also has a rather nice foreword by writer friend, Alan Dean Foster.)

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DIY Trek

Recently, on my way to looking up some things on the internet, I came across some old art of mine. Cover illustrations that I had done for a number of fan-published Star Trek magazines and books. It was done during a time that I had nearly forgotten about.

It all came about, I believe, because we were born to parents who had gone through the Great Depression and WWII, and we lived with their sense of caution and conservatism, and growing up in that fearful Cold War era of looming nuclear annihilation, we eagerly looked for something more positive, and became attracted to the excitement and the optimism of the developing space race of the early sixties. When Star Trek came out in 1966, showing us that we had grown up as a society into a successful future of equality and cooperation and boundless exploration of our universe, we fell in love with the vision and wanted to be part of it in any way we could. When we grew into adults, there was an absolute frenzy of Star Trek conventions and self-publishing that had never been seen before. All of us wanted to be part of it in any way we could. People built sets, props and made costumes. Writers explored relationships and situations never before imagined and artists traveled further and further into future realms, visualized alien creatures and landscapes, distant civilizations and the ships that could take us there. All of this was put together in Star Trek novels and fanzines, self-published by ordinary fans. This was before Trek movies and new TV series had come out and certainly before the mass-market paperback books, which in fact, were a direct response to the vast interest of Trek fans. And some of the early writers and artists of those marketed novels cut their teeth on self-published books.

Almost all of these fanzines and novels were xeroxed on 8.5 by 11 inch paper and stapled or bound together with generally black and white ink drawn covers and inside illustrations. No computers existed and it was all done on typewriters and copiers. I was attracted to this self-publishing by the promise of two-tone and color printing of my cover work. This was very expensive at the time and a tribute to what some self-publishers thought of my art and ability to generate larger sales of their fanzines and books. I had also hoped, like many other self-publishers, to graduate to more professional, paid work. It was all done in fun and with no desire to infringe on the copyrights of the creative owners of the original product. It was a labor of love paid for with our own money and desire to be part of that larger world, which was what Star Trek was all about.

(Most of my work was done for a group of writers publishing under the fanzine name of Abode of Strife. A lot of the work was short stories and art, but began to include full-length novels. The bottom art is a full, wrap-around cover for a novel titled, No Cold Wind. The Abode of Strife fanzines photo is courtesy of the website Fanlore, a great place for anyone interested in the history of fanzines and such.)

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Saving the Art

When I started out in my artistic career, I decided to keep a record of as much of my illustration work as I could. In this way I could chart my progress as an artist over the years. Back in the last century, this was not an entirely easy thing to do. The one sure way was photography. In this modern day and age everything is digital and you can grab a quick photo with your phone and instantly send it all over the world in moments. Back in the artistic dark ages, it was not quite so simple. Fortunately I had learned quite a bit about photography and was fairly adapt at setting up my art, lighting it and getting some pretty good color slides of almost everything I painted. Many years later when the digital age started I paid a good friend of mine to convert the bulk of my slides into digital format and copy them onto CDs. Now they reside happily in backed-up files on my desktop computer, a fascinating compendium of over 40 years of work.

I didn’t quite have the illustration career that I had hoped for, but I did extremely well as a graphic artist. And now that I have slowed down in formal work, I have a little more time for more unusual jobs. A year and a half ago I volunteered for a position providing marketing, art and promotional work for a major science fiction convention to be held locally. My art library has been a wonderful source for much of the visual art that I have been using for that work. And having my son Rob, who has also gone into graphic arts, has helped out quite a bit with more modern visuals and logos. The amount of art that goes into any promotional campaign, and the necessary publication materials, is pretty large and my art library has been there to supply it. Especially when the campaign keeps growing and changing more then I anticipated. I offer the half-dozen covers for the progress reports that have been used so far, as an example below. We still have 3 more months to go, and many more things to do. But with 40 years or so of old art laying around, I think I am in pretty good shape to complete the task.

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Saving the art

When I started out in my artistic career, I decided to keep a record of as much of my illustration work as I could. In this way I could chart my progress as an artist over the years. Back in the last century, this was not an entirely easy thing to do. The one sure way was photography. In this modern day and age everything is digital and you can grab a quick photo with your phone and instantly send it all over the world in moments. Back in the artistic dark ages, it was not quite so simple. Fortunately I had learned quite a bit about photography and was fairly adapt at setting up my art, lighting it and getting some pretty good color slides of almost everything I painted. Many years later when the digital age started I paid a good friend of mine to convert the bulk of my slides into digital format and copy them onto CDs. Now they reside happily in backed-up files on my desktop computer, a fascinating compendium of over 40 years of work.

I didn’t quite have the illustration career that I had hoped for, but I did extremely well as a graphic artist. And now that I have slowed down in formal work, I have a little more time for more unusual jobs. A year and a half ago I volunteered for a position providing marketing, art and promotional work for a major science fiction convention to be held locally. My art library has been a wonderful source for much of the visual art that I have been using for that work. And having my son Rob, who has also gone into graphic arts, has helped out quite a bit with more modern visuals and logos. The amount of art that goes into any promotional campaign, and the necessary publication materials, is pretty large and my art library has been there to supply it. Especially when the campaign keeps growing and changing more then I anticipated. I offer the half-dozen covers for the progress reports that have been used so far, as an example below. We still have 3 more months to go, and many more things to do. But with 40 years or so of old art laying around, I think I am in pretty good shape to complete the task.

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