Good afternoon MonSFFA club members and friends! We hope this post finds you all well and coping through the current quarantine under which the nation finds itself. To those of you who might be deemed “essential workers,” venturing daily from home to fulfill vital tasks, please undertake every safety protocol to keep yourselves as protected from infection as possible!

This is a long post prepared especially for you, the MonSFFA membership. So sit back, scroll down leisurely through our agenda for the afternoon, and enjoy!

IN THIS POST:

1)            DIY, Virtual Meeting

2)            Coronavirus Song Parody

3)            Rainbow Campaign

4)            Another Song Parody

5)            Sci-Fi Trivia Challenge

6)            Toy and Action Figure Photography

7)            A Third Song Parody

8)            Pandemic Reading/Viewing Recommendations

9)            Virtual Presentation by Sylvain St-Pierre

10)          Cartoon Caption Contest

11)          Closing Song Parody

1)            DIY, Virtual Meeting

Today is Saturday, April 4, the date on which we had scheduled our April 2020 club meeting. We had also considered perhaps making our April event a field trip in lieu of a meeting, but neither is going to happen. As you all know, Canada, and indeed, most of the nations of the world, were besieged just weeks ago by COVID-19!

We now find ourselves quarantined in our homes as a measure calculated to fight the rapid spread of this deadly coronavirus. And so we are posting on the club’s Web site, at this our hour—1:00PM, the usual start-time of our meetings—the content below to help you all pass the time. Concurrently, on the club’s Facebook page (www.facebook.com/MonSFFA), you will find a special (and timely!) online presentation on “SF/F’s Plagues and Diseases” courtesy MonSFFA’s own Sylvain St-Pierre. When you’ve finished perusing this post, hop over and check it out!

Think of all of this as a kind of DIY, virtual club meeting. Of course, you’ll have to supply your own snack table, and run your own raffle, the prizes for which you will have to supply! But with only you present to buy tickets, there’s a very good chance you’re going to win something!

2)            Coronavirus Song Parody

We’ll open with one of the many COVID-19 song parodies—or filk songs, if you will—that have recently flooded the Internet. We thought this selection (1:30), from Brent McCollough (www.brentmccmusic.com), accompanied by Alex Kilroy and Adrian Laird, one of the better ones (click play button):

3)            Rainbow Campaign

While in COVID-19 quarantine, you may have noticed representations of rainbows hanging in some of the windows or off balconies around your neighbourhood, sometimes accompanied by the phrase “Ça va bien aller,” or in English, “It’ll get better” or “It’s going to be okay.” The “Rainbow Campaign” is said to have originated in hard-hit Italy, and has been taken up in the U.K., here in Canada, and elsewhere around the globe.

The idea is to join with our fellow citizens in offering a message of hope to anxious young children, the elderly, the infirm, and especially to those among us struggling in particular with the weight of isolation amid these current quarantine conditions. The rainbow image is a way of signalling from a safe social distance to each other that we’re going to get through these difficult days, that better days are coming, and that one day, over the rainbow, as the signature song from one of fantasy cinema’s greatest films evokes, skies will again be metaphorically blue.

So might we propose that MonSFFen put coloured pencil or felt-tipped marker or paintbrush to paper or board and add a generous number of rainbows to the cause! Just to give the image a dash of SF/F, maybe include a dragon or spaceship flying overhead, or Oz’s Emerald City beneath, with Place Ville-Marie inserted and recognizable as part of the skyline!

4)            Another Song Parody

This next musical selection (1:45) is from Five Times August (fivetimesaugust@fivetimesaugust.com):

5)            Sci-Fi Trivia Challenge

We’ve prepared a trivia challenge to occupy your time in the coming days or weeks; we’ve set it up as a contest with points and prizes to be won! The contest will be concluded when all of this coronavirus business is over, the quarantine is lifted, and we gather together once again at a club meeting. Here are the details:

Test your knowledge of the inconsequential, obscure, inane minutiae of the sci-fi universe! Win points and prizes! Just print out this      two-sided quiz sheet and write in your answers to these 19 questions. Bring your completed quiz with you to the next MonSFFA meeting (date to be determined; check the club’s Web site regularly), at which time we’ll have ready for you a final 20th question to wrap up the contest. We’ll tally all the points and award prizes to our three top-scoring entrants! Non-club members are welcome to participate, too!

Note that out-of-town club members who, of course, cannot attend that post-quarantine MonSFFA meeting and answer our wrap-up question, are asked to return to us by e-mail or standard postal mail their completed quiz sheets; they will be entered in a separate group with other out-of-towners and a winner determined, who will subsequently receive by postal mail his or her prize.

Download the quiz sheet (PDF) here, and good luck:

MonSFFA’s SCI-FI TRIVIA CHALLENGE (April 4, 2020)

6)            Toy and Action Figure Photography

Some of you will recall the club’s field trip to Ottawa a couple of years ago to take in an exhibition of sculptures fashioned using as a medium Lego building blocks, a toy that has been encouraging imaginative play in children for decades. Toys as art! Well, why not? After all, “Everything is awesome, everything is cool!”

Another related area of artistic expression that has quickly grown in popularity is the photography of toys, action figures, and scale models. Some of the artists involved in this movement note that there’s a satisfying feeling of nostalgia in returning to childhood to make art that comments on modern society, or simply yields a good visual joke. No attempt is made to mask the fact that the subjects are toys; their plastic sheen and visible articulated joints are all part of the charm. And there’s quite frequently a sci-fi element to these snapshots in that toy stores are stocked with so many toys tied to a sci-fi film or television franchise. Some expert shutterbugs use photo-editing software to enhance certain aspects of their snaps, or combine elements from several shots to produce a single image. Others prefer to work entirely in-camera, abstaining from any computer-aided tweaking.

Professional photographers/artists have hung their pictures in art galleries and sold prints, and museums have mounted exhibitions of these works. Amateurs, too, have gotten in on the action, posting their material on Instagram, Pinterest, and similar online locales.

Sci-fi toys, miniature vehicles, and action figures have been collected for years within the sci-fi fan community, and most of us can count a few tiny starships, robots, or statuettes among our treasures, displayed on our shelves or in cabinets as a tribute to the films, TV shows, or comic books that we love. And to think that now, such geekery can be employed in the creation of art!

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You needn’t use an expensive photography set-up to achieve good results; get started with as little as a handful of toys and your smartphone! Arrange your subjects on a small, easily-constructed tabletop diorama.

Interiors can be built with construction-toy sets. Alternately, the pages of an architectural or home decorating magazine may provide usable pictures of room interiors; cut these out and paste them to a piece of cardboard to create a backdrop. Add dollhouse furniture and accessories to decorate your “set.” Play around with what you have on hand until you come up with a composition that you like. Light your scene with a desk lamp or two.

Miniature terrain can be crafted with a little bit of fresh cat litter or aquarium gravel, and a few small stones scattered atop. Bits of your Christmas garlands or house plants can serve as foliage. Or, you can set up your shot outside, on your lawn or in your garden, taking advantage of the natural light and available landscape. Just remember to work a safe distance away from any neighbours who might also be outside!

Note that some practitioners of toy/action-figure photography forego surroundings and focus solely on their Lilliputian subjects, with the background neutral, dark, or purposely out of focus. Others simply place their subjects within ordinary household or backyard environments, as if these playthings are interacting with the full-scale world.

MonSFFen eager for a fresh creative outlet are encouraged to give this a try! Your pictures could be featured in Warp as part of an essay on this distinctive art form, or maybe your very best shot will be selected to grace the fanzine’s cover!

7)            A Third Song Parody

And now from Kevin Brandow, we have this coronavirus parody (1:18):

8)            Pandemic Reading/Viewing Recommendations

A quarantine is an excellent opportunity to catch up on our sci-fi reading and viewing! We all have sci-fi titles, whether on page or screen, that we just haven’t gotten around to yet. No better time than this to check a few of them off our lists! In our recently published special COVID-19 issue of Impulse, we suggested a few books, movies, and television series featuring rampant viruses, in the event the daily newscasts aren’t enough for you! Here are those suggestions again, in case you missed them, plus a few more:

The Andromeda Strain (novel or film): Michael Crichton’s story of scientists combatting a deadly, constantly evolving extraterrestrial microorganism.

The Years of Rice and Salt (novel): Kim Stanley Robinson’s alternate history in which a mutated version of bubonic plague wipes out all of Europe, resulting in the emergence of a very different global balance of power than we know historically.

The Stand (novel or TV mini-series): Humanity is devastated by the “Captain Trips” virus, and that’s just the beginning of this Stephen King nightmare!

The Naked Time (TV episode): Classic Star Trek episode in which a madness-inducing infection spread by touch afflicts the crew of the Enterprise.

And also…

The Last Man (novel): Frankenstein author Mary Shelley pretty much invented the modern apocalyptic literature genre with this 1826 work of proto-science fiction. Set in the late-21st century, the book is something of a memorial to her dearly departed Romantic circle, notably, late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and friend Lord Byron. The story follows the exploits across Europe of a group of nobles in a plague-ravaged post-apocalyptic world that concludes with only the titular “last man” surviving to wander a landscape vacant of humankind.

Outbreak (film): Based on Richard Preston’s non-fiction book The Hot Zone, the movie lists an all-star cast and deals with the outbreak of a fictional Ebola-like virus called “Motaba” in Zaire, and the efforts of authorities to contain the virus. But Motaba spreads to the U.S. by way of a black market in exotic animals, a capuchin monkey the carrier. As the situation intensifies, a military commander is prepared to bomb infected towns, incinerating all inhabitants, in order to stave off a pandemic! He has an ulterior motive, too, that of preserving the virus for development as a biological weapon.

Contagion (film): A medical thriller about a novel virus that spreads via fomites, that is, inanimate objects that, when contaminated by infectious agents, can transfer disease to a new host. The attempts of medical researchers and public health officials to identify and contain the virus, and develop a vaccine are chronicled as quarantines are imposed, and violence and looting break out amid public panic.

The White Plague (novel): Best known for his Dune books, Frank Herbert wrote this science-fiction thriller about a grief-maddened molecular biologist whose wife and children were the indiscriminate victims of a terrorist bomb attack, driving him to take revenge upon what he judges a wicked world. He synthesizes and sets loose a plague fatal to women and carried by men, so that all men will soon know the same terrible loss he has suffered. Desperate governments strive to foil his plot, contain the ensuing pandemic, and find a cure before civilization utterly collapses as humanity faces ultimate extinction.

The Death of Grass (novel and film): Famine and social disorder engulf the Old World when a mutated virus strain kills off all grasses in Asia and Europe, including vital staple crops. Australasia and the Americas enact strict quarantines to keep the virus out. Written by British author Sam Youd under the pen name John Christopher, both the book’s U.S. edition and a later British-American film adaptation were retitled No Blade of Grass.

I Am Legend (novel and film): Richard Matheson’s tale of a man who is most likely the last on Earth, evidently the sole survivor of a pandemic that kills much of the world’s human population and turns those remaining into zombie-like vampires. In the months and years following the outbreak, he strives to understand what has happened, researching the disease, and trying to find a cure. At night, he must barricade himself inside his house to protect against the vampires outside attempting to get at him. The book was significant in birthing the modern zombie movie genre begun by writer/director George A. Romero, who was influenced by Matheson’s novel when envisioning his 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead. The book has been adapted for the screen three times, most recently as a 2007 film of the same name, starring Will Smith, preceded by 1971’s The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston, and originally as 1964’s The Last Man on Earth, which cast horror icon Vincent Price in the title role.

Some kind of viral infection often figures in stories set during a zombie apocalypse, such as…

28 Days Later (film): British society breaks down following the accidental release of a highly contagious “rage virus” by animal rights activists, who have broken in to a Cambridge laboratory and freed test chimpanzees infected with the virus and under study. The chimps immediately attack their rescuers, quickly turning them into frenzied, fast-moving zombies. The virus is loosed and the contagion subsequently spreads nationwide, plunging the U.K. into catastrophe. 28 days later, in an abandoned London, a small group of survivors make their way north to the perceived security of a fortified military installation in Manchester which has been broadcasting a radio message offering sanctuary. But the promise of safety proves a ruse to lure survivors to the installation so that the women among them may be forced into sexual servitude! It is the commanding officer’s perverse plan to repopulate the human race after the infected have all starved to death. 28 Weeks Later is a sequel.

Zombieland (film): An entertaining, comedic post-apocalyptic movie about a shy, phobic University of Texas student who has worked out and lives by his rules of survival in a zombie apocalypse that has decimated America, brought about by a mutated form of mad cow disease. Some of these rules are amusingly highlighted throughout the film as events dictate. On the open highway, the student meets a brash good ol’ boy from Florida who desperately craves a Twinkie, his favourite snack cake, now in short supply. A pair of young, resourceful sisters are soon added to the mix and the shy student finds himself attracted to the older sister. The four of them set out cross-country, headed to an L.A. amusement park the younger sister believes is zombie-free. And, Bill Murray makes a memorable appearance as himself! Sequel Zombieland: Double Tap continues the adventures of the central characters.

The Walking Dead (comic book series and television show): In the American South, disparate survivors of a global zombie apocalypse band together under the leadership of deputy sheriff Rick Grimes and battle the flesh-eating undead while fighting to endure in a world overrun by hordes of these mindless, shambling “roamers.” As civilization crumbles and the world descends into chaos, Rick’s group must resist assault not only from zombies, but from other pockets of survivors who have resorted to barbarism. While never addressed in the long-running comic book series, writer/co-creator Robert Kirkman has stated that the details of the zombies’ origin were not germane to the storyline. More recently, he has allowed that the plague was caused by an alien “space spore.” The television adaptation, currently in its tenth season, is also vague on the origin of the zombies—here called “walkers”—but implies that the plague was set off by, perhaps, an air- or waterborne virus. An early sequence saw the group make its way to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta in hopes of finding a cure. There it was revealed that no cure had been found, and later in the narrative, we learn that all human beings carry the pathogen responsible for triggering the zombie apocalypse.

World War Z (novel and film): Max Brooks’ novel about a global zombie infestation of indeterminate cause—“some weird strain of jungle rabies” is thought responsible, at one point—is subtitled “An Oral History of the Zombie War.” Framed as the collected first-hand accounts of survivors of this so-called Zombie War, the book outlines the harrowing personal experiences of men and women the world over who came face-to-face with the undead during a decade of hellish cataclysm, finally emerging, terribly traumatized but victorious, into a world very much changed socially, politically, and otherwise. In contrast to the sluggish zombies of the book, those in the movie adaptation are deadly quick.

Moving on from all the zombies, we have…

The Book of M (novel): Peng Shepherd’s recent debut novel is a dark fable that presents readers with a surreal plague-like phenomenon called the “Forgetting,” which has the effect on those afflicted of taking from them first their shadows, then eventually, all of their memories. Couple Ory and Max retreat to an abandoned hotel deep in the forest in an attempt to evade the strange disorder, but when Max’s shadow vanishes, she fears that her developing condition will endanger Ory and runs away. But he refuses to give up on the time they have left together and sets out to find her across an unrecognizable world of roving bandits, warring factions, and other perils.

Station Eleven (novel): Canadian novelist Emily St. John Mandel authored this story of actors, writers, and other artists living in post-Year Zero times in the Great Lakes region, a dreadful pandemic dubbed the “Georgia Flu” having wiped out almost all of mankind more than a decade earlier. The book was praised by critics for its emphasis on the survival of human culture after an apocalypse rather than simply the survival of humanity itself amid the mayhem immediately following, which St. John Mandel finds to be the focus of much of dystopian fiction. “It seemed at least plausible to me that there would eventually be some kind of hope,” she says. “There’s something about art, I think, that can remind us of our humanity…of our civilization.”

Miri (TV episode): Another classic Star Trek episode! A virulent disease that manifests in break-outs of purple-blue skin lesions, and soon ends in violent madness and death, has wiped out the entire adult population of a shattered Earth-like planet. When Captain Kirk and his landing party beam down to investigate a distress call, they become infected and cannot risk a return to the ship. The race to find a cure is on with a ragged gang of fearful and distrusting children—survivors of the planet-wide plague by virtue of their prepubescence—hindering progress, having stolen the crew members’ communicators. Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock develop a cure but require access to the Enterprise’s computers in order to verify its efficacy and determine the correct dose, lest their vaccine prove, as Spock melodramatically puts it, “a beaker of death!”

9)            Virtual Presentation by Sylvain St-Pierre

As previously mentioned and further on the theme of pestilence in SF/F, Sylvain St-Pierre has prepared an online presentation for you! When you’re finished here, check it out on MonSFFA’s Facebook page (www.facebook.com/MonSFFA)!

10)          Cartoon Caption Contest

For those of you who have been enjoying KGB’s series of COVID-19 Star Trek cartoons on this site, here’s another, but with the dialogue balloon intentionally left blank! What words would you put in Mr. Spocks’s mouth?

Send us your submissions for a witty coronavirus-related caption by next Saturday, April 11! We’ll pick and announce a winner, ask KGB to complete the cartoon by inserting that contestant’s winning dialogue, and post the finished cartoon on Easter Sunday for all to see and have a chuckle!

Send your submissions in by e-mail no later than 11:59PM, April 11. Please type “Cartoon Contest” in the subject field. Send to: veep@monsffa.ca

11)          Closing Song Parody

Here’s a final musical number (2:06) from Five Times August to close out this post: