I have always cherished science fiction. Not just Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Not just Star Trek and Star Wars. But all of it. Buck Rodgers, Flash Gordon, Brick Bradford, Galaxy Quest, Mars Attacks, and E.T.
Space is important to me. I feel like all of mankind will be a failure as a species if they don’t start moving out amongst the stars.
It’s not just that I am ensorcelled by the magical adventures that space-travel stories mixed with a romantic view of facing existential danger with a smile and a ray-gun can provide.
I watched with wide 12-year-old eyes when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon for the very first time.
That was all the way back in 1969!
I am disappointed that my George-Jetson expectations of life in 2023 have not even remotely been met.
Sure, computers are great. But where are the flying cars? The fishbowl helmets for walking on the Moon? Personal jetpacks to get to school and back?
It isn’t the dreamers, it’s the doers that have let me down.
And I know we could well run the risk of meeting something out there that might want to eat us.
But are we truly alive anymore if we are afraid to risk death in the face of Space Exploration and Discovery? We are not immortal. We need to achieve things that outlast us to justify our existence.
So, come on, people! Let’s make the world over again and start building cities on Mars.
Let’s start building what we have dreamt of rather than hiding from what we fear!
There is a certain amount of worry now in Mickeytown. My hands have begun to tremble. I see things that aren’t there. I have become excessively forgetful. Possibly Parkinson’s… but not diagnosed by a doctor yet.
Maybe it’s only paranoia… but that’s a Parkinson’s symptom too.
And it worries me because I need to be able to draw new Paffoonies. But it is definitely becoming harder.
Yesterday, when my computer was breaking down again, the scanner miraculously reconnected itself and began to work.
I scanned this old pen-and-ink drawing.
Do I know why I drew it, or what it is supposed to be about?
I do not.
But I can still swirl colored pencils and color within the lines, at least as well as I did when I was nine.
You may remember this one from yesterday,
Of course, forgetful me, I couldn’t remember where I had stored my best art pencils. I had to crack open the bag of old school pencils that I still have from my last hurrah as a Texas pedagogue (a word that means a teacher of children, not that other thing that the evil-minded ones among you were probably thinking.)
So, now I have a colored picture of a young-girl space traveler. What to do with it?
Like any old mad god who makes a girl come to life like this (old mad god of colored pencils, a little “g” god, not a blasphemous big “G” one,) I needed to name her and give her a story, a purpose in life.
So, I called her Cissy Moonskipper (a suitably satirical and comic sort of name playing off of Luke Skywalker.)
And I stranded her on a family-owned free-trader starship, alone in deep space. Her family is gone permanently. The ship has everything she needs to survive. She is a sole-survivor on a deserted island in deep space in an unexplored star system. And all she has is a starship owner’s manual and a copy of the novel Robinson Crusoe.
So, I added a background and now I have started a new book idea. That is essentially what a Paffooney is. Words and pictures by little ol’ me.
With Gyro driving, a rather unnerving prospect for those riding with him, the first pink Cadillacko swooped down on the planet Cornucopea out of the clouds. They were supposed to be establishing a base camp on the planet.
Besides Gyro, the Nebulon boy who gave the first Cadillacko its air bubble field and its silly Nebulonin nickname, the grav speeder held Billy Iowa, wearing his cowboy sombrero and leather moccasins, Luigi the Onion Guy, for whom they had no workable space suit, and Mai Ling, scantily dressed in form-fitting battle armor and wearing the ring-sleeve device that could amplify her telekinetic throwing arm.
The second Cadillacko carried Hassan Parker, who had to wear a full space suit instead of being nude like usual, Taffy King and Shu Kwai, all suited and combat ready.
The third grav speeder carried Ged Aero-sensei, Junior Aero, his adopted Nebulon nephew, and Sara Smith, the strongest telepath and healer of the group.
The drop zone looked like a field of flowers undulating in a high wind. But as they zoomed closer, you could see the large daisy-heads and thistle-heads were all ripping into and damaging the other plants.
“What do we do, Sensei?” Billy radioed through the comm dot on his neck.
“Clear the landing zone. Weed-killer weapons and mowers! We have to cut the weeds down to size.”
Gyro, being Gyro, nose-dived the pink-and-white Space Cadillac into the soft dirt of the field of fighting flowers. It plowed a deep furrow in a semi-circle in the middle of the large open space. Shu-Kwai landed his gray-and-white Space Cadillac much more gently beside it.
The telekinetics, Shu and Taffy King, leaped out of their vehicle with weapons that were more like chainsaws than the lawnmowers they were supposed to be. Each had two, one controlled by each hand. So, four flying blades whirled through the air, slicing and dicing, turning Throckpods into salad.
Mai-ling leaped out with a razor pistol in her hand. She fired round throwing-star-like objects in groups of five, then whipped the blades through the air sawing thorns neatly off of every violent flower-person she saw.
Hassan manned the spray-gun with the toxic weed-killer in it, spraying withering death upon Throckpods to a range of fifty feet.
Soon an army of violent flowers was reduced to smoking piles of flower-chips and salad-squares.
By the time Ged-sensei and Sara and Junior disembarked from their pink-and-white Cadillac, the battle was already over.
Luigi the Onion Guy came bouncing furiously across the field to confront Ged.
“nO! Oh, nO! You muSt nOt spILl, ChloroPhyll!” he shouted in his weird little Onion-guy accent.
“But you wanted help in driving away to evil Throckpods and their master, did you not?”
Luigi just stank out a lot of foul smells that the translator couldn’t begin to translate. It is well known that bad words are more a matter of disgustingly figurative language that does not translate well to beings who have no reference for flower emotions, flower body parts, flower behavior, or flower-based bad thoughts.
“Luigi is swearing at you, Sensei,” Gyro tried to explain while adjusting the translator’s many translation-equivalents adjustment bars.
“We need to understand him better. Can anyone read his mind?”
Sara looked at Ged with a sorrowful expression on her face. “I am beginning to sense some of the stronger emotions coming from plant-minds. He is upset because to them, all flower-life is sacred, including the Throckpods. That’s what he wants us to cure about the Throckpods. Their leader makes them render and kill other plant-life sacrilegiously.”
“Very well, then. We will set up base-camp in this cleared field and try hard to understand these flower-people better.”
“Yes, we need to study them and do some research,” said Hassan Parker. “I can get out of this space suit and start research immediately as the rest of you set up the camp.”
“I think I have seen enough of your naked body. And you really should join us in the physical labor before doing the mental work.” Shu Kwai was not making suggestions. He was issuing commands. “And while we are here, everybody wears protective body coverings. There are many unknown plant-based dangers here, and we want no one to be at risk.”
So, eight student ninjas, their ninja sensei, and one irate Onion began building a base camp.
I have been drawing these mock-Star-Wars science-fiction-heroes for thirty years. Some of these are that old. Some of them are new this year. All of them illustrate the adventures that started as a science-fiction-role-playing game and became the series of novels called AeroQuest.
One of the things I discovered by relentlessly playing outer-space D & D is the unique setting for fiction presented by the basic interstellar starship. Here you have a cookie-cutter setting with a basic set of requirements that can’t really change. It takes the crew as the primary cast from one possible site of adventure to the next, offering a complete barrier to carry-over conflicts and interactions, and also providing a setting for forced internal conflicts that can have profound story consequences.
Starships are an enclosed environment where you cannot simply run away from your troubles. Especially when you are alone aboard with a hungry flesh-eating alien and surrounded by empty, airless, interstellar space. You have to confront both inner and outer demons face to face. There is no mileage available to put between you.
It has a certain set of requirements for who is on board and available to be hero friends or friends turned adversary. There must be a pilot. Somebody has to know how to drive the thing. There must be an engineer. Somebody needs to be able to fix things and keep things running. Somebody needs to know how to manage food and drinking water and the general odor of this enclosed place. That last is a position that is too often overlooked in movies and science fiction novels. Scotty cannot be expected to clean the toilets on the Enterprise. And somebody needs to be in charge.
Express boats in Traveller are one-man-crew affairs, basically in the service of carrying information between the stars, an interstellar postal truck of sorts. These can be the setting of man-versus-himself sorts of conflicts. If starships are in our future, and it is obvious with global warming we don’t have a future without them, then we are going to have to confront the concept of living with boredom. Boredom can become mindless or it can become raving insanity. This is why, in my Traveller games the X-boats all carried the current favorites among episodes of I Love Lucy reruns. Aliens have been watching that stuff for years now in real life. It will one day be a galaxy favorite.
Starships are also filled with a fascinating complexity. There will be times when there is no gravity so up and down can become irrelevant. If the heat goes out, deep space can freeze you solid. If you go outside, you need a space suit so you don’t blow up from your own internal pressure suddenly released in a pressure-free environment. And you have no air outside the spaceship. James Holden’s favorite coffee maker could malfunction and foul the air with poisons from burned plastic, causing a serious problem-solving situation that could result in you needing to get really, really, a thousand times really good at holding your breath.
And, of course, there is the obvious conflict of meeting another starship with lasers and meson cannons and nuclear missiles all controlled by a captain who is a homicidal maniac and knows your sister and really, really wants to get revenge on her whole family for what she said about his zilfinbarger back on Metebelius III.
So, as a role-playing gamer, and as a creator of science fiction, I really, really love starships. I will probably talk about them a time or too more until it gets really, really annoying… almost as annoying as the whole “really, really” thing.
I am nearing the completion of the rewrite of part two of AeroQuest. Part of that is getting all the illustrations I want to include done. So, here are a few more that I have been working on.
For those who might be wondering, AeroQuest 1 and AeroQuest 2 are comic science fiction, and I have chosen to rewrite them with lots of illustrations since it is a work of fiction that I might’ve done as a graphic novel if only I didn’t have arthritis in my hands.
It began for me in 1977 with this wrap-around cover illustration. I knew there were a lot of this guy’s books on the shelves of the college bookstore along with works by Robert E. Howard, Roger Zelazney, and Theodore Sturgeon. And I knew this guy had also written paperback books under the name “Andrew North”, a name I had seen on the twenty-five cent novels in the drugstore where you could buy the really good pulp fiction novels only slightly used.
I had never before bought one of his books. And the book money I had for the fall quarter at Iowa State was supposed to all go towards the book-list given to me as a Junior-level English major. But the naked kid on the cover had a wired-up collar around his neck. And I had only recently recovered long-suppressed memories of being a victim of a sexual assault. I had to have it. I had to know what that illustration had to do with the story inside.
So, I bought a book that I judged by its cover.
And it was not the wrong thing to do.
The main character was a boy named Jony, the naked boy on the cover of the book. He is taken by alien beings as a study specimen along with his mother, the pregnant woman on the back of the wrap-around illustration. The story starts with Jony in a cage, treated like an animal. His mother, also a study specimen has been mated to a Neanderthal-like humanoid specimen who cannot speak, and she has given birth to twins, a boy, and a girl. They are kept in separate cages by their inhuman captors.
Jony manages a mass escape, taking his mother and his younger siblings with him, and releasing as many of the other study specimens as he can. Luckily they escape onto a very earth-like planet. But unluckily, the mother is in very poor health and dies soon after escaping. Jony is then responsible for his little brother and sister in a wilderness that is not empty of others. Luckily, the others they first run afoul of are the bear-like ursine aliens who share their need to not be recaptured by the zoo-keeper aliens.
It was a perfect novel for me. I identified strongly with the main character, who had been violated in a very personal way by monsters. And then had to build a new life in a world full of potential other-monsters. Andre Norton shared my pain and helped me overcome it.
But she also fooled me big-time. She was not a he.
She was a librarian and editor of pulp fiction who wrote enough sci-fi and fantasy in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s to finally become a full-time author.
She was already on book number 29 when she retired from being a librarian to write full time.
And I would go on to own and read several of her other books, which were good, but never quite lived up to that first one I read. Of course, that may have been because of the timing and circumstance that led me to a book that I actually needed to read. That book set me on the road to recovery from my personal darkness. And it may have sparked in me the need to eventually become a nudist. And more important than that, it may have led me to a lifelong need to teach reading.
Andre Norton was a real writer. And she made me one too. Though I never knew who she really was until after I bought that book because of the picture on the cover. And I never got around to properly thanking her for all of that… Until this very moment.
As Catch a Falling Star was a science-fictiony sort of comedy, one of the questions that I have pursued in internet research is the one I have presented here in the title of this picture-and-Paffooney-filled post. Seriously, the image search of Google’s answer to that question is enough to make you snort milk through the old nostrils as you sort through them while stupidly drinking a glass of milk. The milky nose-snorts are the reason I have not sited picture sources on this post. Cleaning the computer screen took too long. I have merely randomly snatched and pirated pictures. The only picture of a Martian presented here created by me are these two;
I admit to being surprised by my actual research into the whole question of whether or not we have ever been visited by intelligent life from the stars beyond the sky. While I have not found proof that aliens exist, I have discovered there is actual proof that the government, and NASA in particular, have covered something up. And it goes beyond Area 51 defense research. But now that I have got the attention of the NSA and the Men in Black, this post is only filled with a collage of the unreal, made-up, and mostly silly.
Malevolent Martians;
Martians Who Make the Mistake of Liking Us;
Inexplicably Goofy Martians;
Cartoon alien rendered on white background. 3D model licensed from DAZ3D.
There is a major drawback to being so smart that you can perceive the edges of infinity. It makes you bedbug crazy. I love the science fiction that populated the paperback shelves in the 50’s and 60’s when I was a boy. I love the work of Philip K. Dick. But it leads you to contemplate what is real… what is imaginary… and what is the nature of what will be.
the robot Philip K. Dick who appeared at Comic Con and answered questions
There are numerous ways to investigate life. But it is in the nature of imaginary people to try to find ways to make themselves real. When the replicants in Bladerunner try to make themselves into real people, they must try to create memories that didn’t exist. They try to mirror human life to the extent that they can actually fool the bladerunner into letting them live. Of course, it doesn’t work. They are not real. (Bladerunner is the movie name of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).
It is like that for me as well. Being an imaginary person is difficult. You have to constantly invent yourself and re-invent yourself. By the time you finally get to know yourself, you have to change again so that the anti-android factions don’t destroy you. Although, I think I may not actually be an android.
Does that sound a bit crazy? Well Philip K. Dick’s life story may in fact have led him down the path to really crazy. In 1971 he broke up with his wife, Nancy Hackett. She moved out of his life, and an amphetamine-abuse bender moved in. In 1972, ironically the year I began reading Dick’s work, he fell in love at the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention. That was immediately followed by erratic behavior, a break-up, and an attempted suicide overdosing on the sedative potassium bromide. This, of course, led directly to his 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly.
The story is about a police detective who is corrupted by a dangerous addictive drug that takes him down the rabbit hole of paranoia, and being assaulted by the perception of multiple realities simultaneously. His novel Ubik from 1969 is a story of psychics trying to battle groups of other psychics even after they are killed by a bomb. The crazy seems to have been building for a while.
In 1974 he had a transcendental experience when a lady delivering medicine to his door wore a fish-shaped pendant which he said shot a pink beam into his head. He came to believe the beam imparted wisdom and clairvoyance, and also believed it to be intelligent. He would later admit to believing he had been reincarnated as the prophet Elijah.
Imagination has its dangers. It is a powerful thing able to transform reality. Science fiction writers often use their imagination to shape what the future will actually make come into being. But it can also turn your mind inside out. A great science fiction writer like Philip K. Dick can contemplate the nature of reality and turn his own reality inside out. It is a lesson for me, a lesson for all of us. Wait, is that a pink beam of light I see? No, I just imagined it.
I have always cherished science fiction. Not just Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Not just Star Trek and Star Wars. But all of it. Buck Rodgers, Flash Gordon, Brick Bradford, Galaxy Quest, Mars Attacks, and E.T.
Space is important to me. I feel like all of mankind will be a failure as a species if they don’t start moving out amongst the stars.
It’s not just that I am ensorcelled by the magical adventures that space-travel stories mixed with a romantic view of facing existential danger with a smile and a ray-gun can provide.
I watched with wide 12-year-old eyes when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon for the very first time.
That was all the way back in 1969!
I am disappointed that my George-Jetson expectations of life in 2023 have not even remotely been met.
Sure, computers are great. But where are the flying cars? The fishbowl helmets for walking on the Moon? Personal jetpacks to get to school and back?
It isn’t the dreamers, it’s the doers that have let me down.
And I know we could well run the risk of meeting something out there that might want to eat us.
But are we truly alive anymore if we are afraid to risk death in the face of Space Exploration and Discovery? We are not immortal. We need to achieve things that outlast us to justify our existence.
So, come on, people! Let’s make the world over again and start building cities on Mars.
Let’s start building what we have dreamt of rather than hiding from what we fear!
Catch a Falling Star 