It’s always Buck Rogers day here in the Secret Laboratory, but I don’t always have anything to show for it. Therefore, let’s take a moment to admire Teresa N. Fischer’s painting of vintage Buck Rogers toys arranged in a still life, complete with a hanging backdrop of the starriest stars imaginable.

This 20" by 20" oil is currently on display at the Elliott Fouts Gallery in Sacramento, California through May 3rd.

Mister Doortree’s Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog has been giving us day after day of Alphonse Mucha (here, here, and here) including the wonderful, atypical, and seldom seen Slav Epic murals. They’re so very different from his decorative work – not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you, but these come as a big surprise if you’ve never seen anything but his Art Nouveau illustrations and borders.

I was lucky to see this one in Paris; through sheer happenstance there was a Mucha exhibition at the Petit Palais during the week I was there in 1980. As I recall the canvas was edged with great big grommets and the painting was stretched on cords looped through them – it looked like a gigantic, taut sail of mythological wonderment.

That nearly made up for the fact that the Louvre had closed its late nineteenth century collections for some kind of renovations. But I did get two afternoons in the Musee Gustave Moreau, and that was a real pleasure since in those days Moreau was right up my street. I think that his street was the Rue de Rochefoucauld.

The tireless scanner of Mister Doortree now casts its uncanny, glowing beam of awesomeness on a collection of covers from Big Little Books and their countless clones, all featuring the adventures of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, and all at that ever-interesting site called Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Robots! Rockets! Death Rays! Sinister Comets! Forgotten Cities!

There’s a small collection of Michael Kaluta covers from DC’s Strange Adventures and Time Warp comics of the seventies at Diversions of the Groovy Kind; while I loved the layouts at first glance, what I keep looking back at is the wonderful inks – especially on #240. Great stuff!

Deri Air is the preferred vintage lounge-era airline of discriminating travelers, uchronia-wide, and by some unlikely chance it’s also the name of a web site whose navigation is a little less reliable than you’ll find in most airlines (I hope!). So here’s a sort of a map.

Be on the lookout for the musical soundtrack, "Fly Groove" , for samples and downloads.

There are also detailed, sculpted figures of characters from the Deri Air universe. Don’t miss "T.W.I.T." (Thing With Interesting Tentacles).

There will apparently be some papercraft playsets and a board game in the future, too – but my favorites are the paintings we see here. These are available as canvas prints through an inquiry to the artist, and a bunch of them also appear in the video "The Deri Air Story", in which we meet the forgetful founder of the airline, Lew Deri-Marks.
 

via Dark Roasted Blend.

I’d love to comment on this… but somehow, it just leaves me nothing to say.

Via Blastr, via SFSignal, via the utter freaking insanity of days gone by.

To coincide with their upcoming movie, Disney has collected all of Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars books in three volumes of Barsoomian adventure. The whippersnappers of today will have to do without the wonderful old Roy G. Krenkel and Frank Frazetta illustrations that I remember, but these look like handsome editions anyway.

Volume 1: A Princess of Mars; Gods of Mars; Warlord of Mars

Volume 2: Thuvia, Maid of Mars; The Chessmen of Mars; The Master Mind of Mars; A Fighting Man of Mars

Volume 3: Swords of Mars; Synthetic Men of Mars; Llana of Gathol; John Carter of Mars

Now everybody can count the number of times that John Carter refers to himself as "The greatest swordsman on two planets"! Not suitable for drinking games.

They’re out in paperback and for the Kindle.

Of course if you have read The Other, there may still be a bright side: because although they haven’t (yet?) been collected in print you can now download ePub formatted digital versions of seven short stories about the more or less hero of The Other, Luff Imbry from their publisher, Angry Robot Books.

They’re each less than a dollar (if my inner currrency exchange is working) and they will fit just fine on your Nook, Sony Reader, iPad, or anything else that can read an ePub book, including your computer.

Luff Imbry is a bit of a rascal. He’s an antiquities trader who specializes in recently redistributed wealth and, sometimes, in wealth that hasn’t quite yet been redistributed, but could be. He’s a gifted forger, too, and in that (at least) he reminds me of Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy mysteries… though since he’s quite gifted in the girth department, Luff Imbry may be more of a heavyweight.

Angry Robot’s FAQ also suggests the stories may be available in the Amazon Kindle Store, but as you can probably see from that click I couldn’t find them there. Maybe they’ll show up in the near future.

Hughes’ Archonate novels are often compared to the science fiction and fantasies of Jack Vance, and with good reason; in fact we discover along the way that the Archonate’s Earth may even be the Old Earth of Vance’s Dying Earth stories… just a little while before the balance of the Universe shifts back to magic (or "sympathetic association") from its more rational state of science.

They’re fine stories, and wonderfully well told, and you just ought to go and read them if you haven’t. A good place to start might be Majestrum.

HiLoBrow.com has announced the launch of HiLo Books, an imprint dedicated to what they call Radium Age Science Fiction – because, after all, what the genre needs is more labels. By "Radium Age" they mean science fiction written between the years of 1904 and 1933, bounded on the one hand by the scientific romances of Jules Verne, Edgar Alan Poe, and H. G. Wells, and on the other (the upper?) hand by the Golden Age works of writers like Asimov and his contemporaries.

I have a problem with labels. Still, since HiLoBrow is effectively creating a brand I can understand why they’d want to find some label to distinguish it from everything it’s not.

The lineup of releases for 2012 is a pretty promising one – there’s Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt; taken together, these show a united front of mainstream writers from the period who each experimented with speculative fiction.

If it all sounds a little bit like someone who’s desperate to be taken seriously, I expect that’s fine. A series like this exists in part to draw new readers into the scary, nerdy depths of science fiction in a way that seems comfortable, and even respectable .

What I can’t understand, though, is the books’ covers. They look like something out of the ranks of the worst of Amazon’s self-published novels. It’s especially confusing because the folks at HiLoBrow certainly know what good book covers look like, either for these same works or for their own. Their earlier Wage Slave’s Glossary has a handsome cover by Seth, and they’ve showcased a beautiful gallery of period book covers including this lovely one for With the Night Mail.

So there’s no question that they know that books can be beautiful. I don’t understand why they want to publish ones that are pretty much the opposite.

This led me to wonder whether these books aren’t the slapped together Amazonian things they resemble; and trying to answer that question led me right down the rabbit hole.

First, HiLoBooks has a distributor for its books. So there can’t be much doubt that there will be a warehouse of their books someplace – PGW also handles Archaia Studio Press, Nolo Press, Cricket Books, and plenty of other familiar independent and small press publishers. It sounds like we ought to be safe from some of the self-published horrors at Amazon (full disclosure: I’m also self-published, though I hope not horribly, at Amazon)

Second, HiLoBooks – according to their press release – will be an imprint of ‘Cursor, Richard Nash’s “publishing platform of the future”.’ Since a visit to the Cursor web site was completely uninformative I dug deeper, to find Nash’s talk at BookNet Canada’s Technology Forum. In this talk (""Publishing 3.0: Moving from Gatekeeping to Partnerships") Nash admits more than once that he’s speaking in very abstract terms. Those terms are in fact so abstract that at the end of the presentation I still had no idea what Cursor was supposed to be.

You’ll see in the talk that Publishing 3.0 (more labels!) is supposed to be an upgrade for the role of publishers in which books themselves become just one aspect of the relationship between readers and writers; in which that relationship has now become the focus of publishing, since so many large and small interactions within that community – including the sale of books – can be sources of profit for a publisher.

But if, like me, you’re left scratching your head and wondering first, what that means, and second, why a publisher deserves to monetize every aspect of the relationship between authors and their audience, well, your head is just going to get scraped bare from all the scratching. The answer isn’t in there. The subtitle of the talk is "From Gatekeeping to Partnerships", but it sounds more like "From Gatekeeping to Super-Gatekeeping".

Like the music industry, the book publishing industry probably feels as though it’s besieged by new technologies and the uses we find for them. Nash’s "Publishing 3.0" seems to be a response that’s in direct opposition to the way things are headed. By "the way things are headed", I mean that we seem to be on the verge of a world where there are no gatekeepers; where, for better or worse, artists are left to deal directly with the community. This requires marketing, which is one of the traditional roles of a publisher; but it’s by no means certain that publishers will be the ones doing that marketing. The "Publishing 3.0" of Cursor looks like a plan to establish a whole new level of gatekeeping in which every interaction between writers and their audience is owned by the publisher. That’s why I called it "Super-Gatekeeping".

What would publishers bring to the table, to make that look like a good deal for the writers and their readers?

There is just the glimmer of an answer – to half that question, anyway – in a post at Nash’s own blog.

For writers…

No more life-of-the-copyright contracts.

Instead: three year contracts.

Yup, from a contract that locks you in till seventy years after you’re dead, to a three year contract. Renewable annually thereafter. Which means after three years you can walk. Or stay, but stick it to us for better royalties because there’s gonna be a movie. Or stay with us because with all the additional formats and revenue opportunities we’re creating above and beyond what any publisher has to offer, you’re making more money than ever before.

This seems to translate to "We will own every cell in your body, but only for a little while". It doesn’t take too long a trek down memory lane to recall how many writers and artists were willing to do original work for hire just because they had to and how this sometimes left them excluded from very lucrative extensions to their work (Siegel and Shuster, or Jack Kirby, are the obvious examples in comics publishing). So in a Cursorized world, maybe creators would figure that assigning a publisher complete and total ownership – which might be temporary – is the price of doing business.

Nash’s talk establishes some comfy small press credentials (starting a publishing company during the night shift at Kinko’s) but the end product seems like something out of a dystopian novel. I don’t mean that in a good way, if you were wondering.

And with "dystopian novel", I seem to have come full circle and landed on the back of HiLoBooks. I wish them well, especially if they didn’t really mean for us to believe in those book covers. But I’m not sure about the company they’ve chosen to keep. I suppose that (their authors being dead, after all) one half of my misgivings about Cursor are unfounded in HiLo’s case. That leaves a not inconsiderable amount of discomfort, though.

Badass Digest has dug up the very first appearance of Buck Rogers on the movie screen in a short film produced for the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair that you can now view in all its rough-hewn glory.

Notable is the space battle, featuring bunches of miniatures that could just be the same toy rocket ships that were part of the Buck Rogers merchandising empire.

Here we see Doctor Huer, musing at some (interminable) length about the mystery behind the attack of the Tiger Men of Mars.

I think there may be a couple of mistakes in the accompanying text – for example, the Just Imagine rocket ship was reused in the Flash Gordon serials, and I can’t think of any sets or miniatures from that film that showed up in Buck Rogers. Though admittedly, I might also be wrong. It’s certainly true that all of these serials recycled some of the same sets and costumes that were warehoused and rented out after the collapse of the silent epics of the twenties.

It’s the space battle that really stands out here: I was amused to find the same grinding propeller sound effects for the rockets that we heard a few years later in the serial – or was that Doctor Huer’s cosmic television tuner? – but all in all they didn’t do badly for a low budget effort from 1933.