Someone on a Facebook group started talking about Gary Kurtz and said he was the brother of fantasy author Katherine Kurtz, who I’ve been reading lately. They’re not related, but it did lead me down an interesting rabbit hole of Star Wars history that’s worth reading.
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Forgotten Sci-Fi Legends: Gary Kurtz, the Quiet Man Who Helped Build the Force
Gary Kurtz produced Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, pushed George Lucas toward the religious ideas that became the Force, and walked away from the saga before Return of the Jedi rolled a foot of film. Ask a casual fan today who built Star Wars and the answer comes back as George Lucas, with John Williams and Irvin Kershner collecting whatever cre…
Paramount Passed On Daley And Goldstein’s Finished Dungeons & Dragons 2 Script. Hasbro Is Now Shopping It Elsewhere.
Paramount Skydance turned down financing for John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s completed sequel to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Hasbro still believes in the project and is actively looking for another studio to make it happen. The timing is worth sitting with, because the same week this news broke, Daley and Goldstein were doing pr…
HWA Dissolves Its Executive Director Position as the Organization’s Worst Month Culminates in a Purge
The Horror Writers Association just eliminated the position at the center of nearly every scandal engulfing the organization this year. HWA President Lisa Wood announced in a September 2 Facebook video that the Executive Director role, held by embattled Maxwell Ian Gold, has been dissolved entirely. It’s the biggest single move yet in a collapse Fandom …
Anne McCaffrey And Other Sci-Fi Greats Were Cut From The Last Dangerous Visions, And Straczynski Picked Nearly A Third Of What Replaced Them
The Last Dangerous Visions finally hit shelves on October 1, 2024, fifty years after Harlan Ellison first promised it to readers. Blackstone Publishers released the book as the closing volume of Ellison’s Dangerous Visions trilogy, credited to Ellison with estate executor J. Michael Straczynski listed alongside him. Anne McCaffrey’s story “The Bones Do Lie,” one of roughly 120 pieces Ellison acquired for the anthology over four decades, never made the final cut.
Strange New Worlds’ Soap Opera Episode Buries One Good Scene Under A Pile Of Continuity Errors
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds aired “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass” this week, bringing back Rhys Darby’s Trelane to trap the Enterprise crew inside a soap opera fantasy, and the episode landed as one of the worst hours the show has produced.