David Lee Summers's Blog, page 27

El Paso Comic Con 2023

El Paso Comic Con is a community-based pop culture experience for all that reflects today’s fandom. At El Paso Comic Con you’ll get to indulge in all your favorite fantasy, sci-fi, and other pop culture genres, such as comics, games, film, television, and more! You’ll also get to attend panels and workshops hosted by creative pros as well as get autographs and photo ops with your favorite creators and celebrities.

The 2023 El Paso Comic Con dates are April 22-24. It will occur at the El Pa...

The Sci-Fi Exploration StoryBundle

I’m proud to announce that my novel Firebrandt’s Legacy has been selected for the The Sci-Fi Exploration Bundle curated by Adam Gaffen. In the novel, Ellison Firebrandt and his crew of space pirates visit worlds discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission, learn the fate of lost Earth colonies and even explore a wrecked starship which has crashed into an asteroid in our solar system. All the while, they’re learning the capabilities of a new drive that … uh … came into their possession. With that, I’m go...

Revisiting King Arthur

Back in my university days, after watching John Boorman’s film Excalibur, several friends discussed how much the film resembled true Arthurian legend. This set me on a personal quest to discover what true Arthurian legend actually is. One of my early finds in that quest was a used copy of Richard Brengle’s fine compilation Arthur: King of Britain. The book opens with excerpts from early histories that mentioned Arthur or events that would become associated with Arthur. It then went on to present...

The Nemo Trilogy

I first encountered Captain Nemo at my local drugstore when I was a kid. He was in the pages of a reprint edition of the Marvel Classic Comics adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. My mom bought the comic for me. I brought it home, and read it right away. I remember sitting stunned at one of the last panels, which depicted the Nautilus disappearing into a whirlpool. I couldn’t believe that would be the end of Captain Nemo. I was delighted a few years later to catch Ray Harryhausen’s adapta...

Sleepless in Marine City

The first time I flew on an airplane, I was in the third grade. My parents and I flew to Seattle to visit my brother who had moved there for college. My most vivid memory of that trip was visiting the Pacific Science Center and the Space Needle at the Seattle Center. I was especially excited to see a Gemini space capsule at the Pacific Science Center. Not only could you look at it, but you could sit inside and flip the switches and pretend you were on a real space mission. I had already read all...

Against the Day – Part 1

This weekend finds me at Tell-Tale Steampunk in Baltimore, Maryland. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll make time to drop by and say hello! You can get event information at: https://telltalesteampunk.com. In honor of being at Tell-Tale Steampunk, today’s post is about a steampunk novel I recently discovered.

I was first introduced to Thomas Pynchon’s writing during my junior year at New Mexico Tech. I took a course in the philosophy of science and we read Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. ...

Scoob!

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! debuted approximately two months before my third birthday, so it’s fair to say that I’ve been watching the series as long as I can remember. I loved the combination of mystery, scares, and humor that the show presented and I watched through almost every iteration until around 1979 when Scrappy-Doo was introduced. To be fair, it wasn’t just Scrappy. I felt like the show had been emphasizing the humor over the spooky, mysterious aspects. Sure, the mysteries were rarely a...

Tell-Tale Steampunk

The weekend of April 1 and 2, I will be traveling to Baltimore, Maryland for the first ever Tell-Tale Steampunk Festival. Tell-Tale Steampunk is Baltimore’s first Steampunk Convention. It is a weekend long event and will feature workshops, vendors, entertainment, music, and educational panels. This years theme is based on the writings of Baltimore’s own Edgar Allan Poe. I recently discussed my short story “Dreams of Flight” which was written for the anthology A Cast of Crows edited by Danielle A...

The Marco Polo

I’ve posted a few times about Germany’s Perry Rhodan series. This series of space opera stories began in 1961 and has been running continuously ever since. It started as the story of an astronaut named Perry Rhodan who goes to the moon with three other astronauts and discovers a stranded star vessel inhabited by aliens called Arkonides. Rhodan then sees an opportunity to unify the people of the Earth and begin a new era of deep space exploration. Around the same time, certain humans have begun t...

Infernal Devices

Last weekend, I was at Wild Wild West Con in Tucson, Arizona. One of the people I was on a panel with was K.W. Jeter. In 1987, Jeter sent a copy of his novel Morlock Night to Locus Magazine along with a letter that suggested there should be a collective term for “gonzo-historical” speculative fiction like his novel and the works of Tim Powers and James Blaylock. Given the popularity of cyberpunk at the time, he made the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the three of them were “steam-punks.” Since ...