Tom Veal, a reprobate I knew at Yale, has penned an impressive elegy, occasioned by the passing of a chap who sounds like a particularly distinguished representative of Sci-Fi fandom. Well worth reading as a testament to the possibilities of American life in the last century.

The Amazing Screw-On Head is a half-hour animation based on a 2002 comic book by Mike Mignola (author of Hellboy). Screw-On Head, a robot that can screw his head onto a wide variety of bodies, is a secret agent working for Abraham Lincoln, battling Emperor Zombie, an undead supervillain intent on releasing an ancient demon.

A nerd’s delight, the story is a tongue-in-cheek homage to Jules Verne, H.P. Lovecraft, and the tradition of Marvel Comics, executed in the manner of Edward Gorey.

Video on Sci Fi Channel web-site.

RevolutionSF chooses.

Glenn Reynolds has a quiz today determining which SciFi crew you best belong with. My score produced a tie result assigning me to both Serenity and Farscape. The tie breaker question was kind of bogus, so I’m leaving it as a draw.

Sabine Herold

Joel Shepherd, Australian Sci Fi author, profiles France’s most prominent Libertarian organization, and introduces us to its photogenic heroine, Sabine Herold, the ideal nominée for la République’s next Marianne.

Liberté Chérie (liberty most-cherished) is a liberal think tank comprising of 2000 members in cities throughout France. It’s far from the only libertarian organisation in France, but it is perhaps the most prominent… it functions like an information and PR centre for the promotion of the concept and philosophy of libertarianism…

(Its) first brush with fame came two years ago, during one of Paris’s predictable general strikes that paralysed the city. Liberté-Chérie called for a counter-demonstration, against the strikers. A little publicity was expected to draw perhaps a few thousand people — instead, 80,000 exasperated Parisiens arrived.

Hat tip to Paul Belien found via the succinct, but talented, Glenn Reynolds.

Glenn Reynolds is a Sci Fi enthusiast, and commonly mentions titles he has recently read. Last week, he recommended John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War.

Scalzi is a clever author. Old Man’s War is an affectionate homage to Heinlein’s beloved Starship Troopers, updated to meet perfectly the need for wish fulfillment fantasy of aging boomers. Where ST featured teen-agers joining the Space Marines in order to serve a tour of duty as the price of citizenship, OMW features senior citizens signing up for interstellar combat tours as the price of physical rejuvenation.

Enlistment in the Colonial Defense Force provides seniors a one-way ticket to a Darwinist Gallactic frontier, in which Homo sapiens is fiercely engaged in battle for survival in a Universe with limited resources and lebensraum, and apparently unlimited hostile competing alien species, many of whom look upon mankind as a tasty entrée. Fortunately, humanity’s fate is in the hands of the same kind of clear-eyed WWII-style no-nonsense “kill ’em all” kind of leadership we remember from the original Heinlein Å“uvre.

Heinlein would be mad as hell that he can’t be there.