Thursday, March 28, 2024

The best sci-fi comedies are existential

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Tom Glencerer’s book Interplanetary refrigerator repairmen rarely carry cash Contains 19 humorous science fiction novels. Gerencer selected some from hundreds of stories he wrote in the past two decades.

“If you go to Wal-Mart and enter the Tupperware Tupperware big box where you can put clothes and things, I can only write, write, write, and fill my notebook with short stories — or short story fragments — and then I will put them Put it in the trash can, and then I will fill up another notebook, put it in the trash can, and fill it with another notebook. Now there are five or six trash cans in the basement, and there are a few trash cans that I lost sometime. ,” Gerencer said in episode 473 Geek Galaxy Guide podcast. “Of course this is a lot of words.”

With titles like “Trailer Trash Savior” and “Apocalyptic Nostrils of the Moon”, you might expect these stories to be lighthearted, but Gerencer’s work also contains dark streaks of existential anxiety, often involving such questions: We How can I be happy? Why does the universe exist? Can an ordinary person save the world?

“When I deal with terrible things on paper, the results will be interesting, which is good,” Gerencer said. “It made me take a step back from real life and say,’Come on, relax. Like Bugs Bunny and the others before him said,’Don’t take it seriously. You will never get rid of it alive. ‘”

Gerencer’s existential humor is deeply influenced by writers, such as Robert Shekley with Douglas Adams. “This [Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] The trilogy is one of my favorite novels in the world,” Gerencer said. “I went to find radio dramas and listened to them religiously over and over again. I now have an autographed copy on my desk. I even went to England on a pilgrimage, met Douglas Adams, interviewed him, and talked with him about his work. “

Critics sometimes dismiss Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy It’s just a series of interesting episodes without a larger structure, but Gerencer said that this is done to ignore the character arc and see that the series protagonist Arthur Dent is no longer confused about the meaninglessness of the universe.

“Arthur finally understood that what he had to do-the inevitable conclusion, where he made this big decision in the end-was to decide that he didn’t have to know what happened,” Glenser said. “He finally got to a point where he realized,’I just want to suspend all this feeling and enjoy myself.’ When he did this, he really learned how to fly. It was fantastic. It was so free. .”

Listen to the full interview with Tom Gerencer in episode 473 Geek Galaxy Guide (the above). And check out some of the highlights in the discussion below.

Tom Glencerer Mike Resnick:

“He used to call me’genius’. Whenever he talked to me, he would not call me “Tom”, but called me “genius”. This is very flattering, but also very intimidating… …. It established this unrealistic expectation in my mind and a huge fear in my heart that I can never live up to what he thinks I am because I am not. I told him,’ I’m not a genius. I’ve written so much, 99% of what I’ve written is absolutely rubbish, and then I go back and read it through, and then take out these treasures, I think,’Oh, this is great.’ He was like,’Yes , But 99% of writers don’t know the difference between rubbish and good writing, and you know. I know you write a lot of rubbish, but you write these good things, you can look back and think it’s good things, I believe ,This is do Make you a genius. ‘”

Tom Gerencer (Tom Gerencer) in his story “Electric Spaghetti Example Case”:

“I’m in this Thai restaurant and I’m chatting with the owner. He is a great person-he is from Thailand and he is very interesting. I asked him,’What’s the matter with this bitter gourd? How do you cook it? What do you use to cook it It makes it less bitter? He said,’No, no, no, no. If it’s not bitter, it’s not good. I said,’I don’t understand. He said, “Because we eat yang. With a big smile on his face, I thought,’That’s so cool. They eat yang. He said,’You Americans, for you, everything must be sweet, salty or spicy. Just like your life, you can’t deal with any uneasiness. Everything must be perfect, otherwise it’s not good. He said, “We don’t think so. We eat Congyang. You must be close to food and life, where you also like bad things. . It really hit me.”

Tom Gerencer on the role name:

“My last name is Gerencer, which means “Smith” in Hungarian. I thought, “As my other self, I will only choose Hungarian names. “But when I started to study Hungarian surnames, I thought,’You can’t pronounce any of them.’ I can’t pronounce my surname correctly. When I visited Hungary, they kept correcting my surname, I Incomprehensible. So instead of doing this, no one can figure it out, and I thought,’Well, Poland is next door. Everyone knows what the Polish surname is. I just want to use it appropriately, every time I have to come up with a character Instead of trying to think about it, I just want to add some kind of Polish surname to this person.'”

Tom Gerencer in his stories “The Third Story” and “Pizza Hell”:

“I thought,’Those stories are so cool, I just take it for granted that I still have them, but I lost them, it’s so sad for me.’ They have never been published, but I really like them. I finally found this 3.5-inch floppy disk, and I thought,’I want to know if they can be there? I saw on Amazon that I can buy a floppy drive, so I bought one. I actually have about 8 Floppy disks, I checked every floppy disk, but most of them were unusable. One of them worked, I didn’t find anything, but I copied everything to an ordinary hard disk. I thought,’I can’t even dare I believe this is a floppy disk 30 years ago, it can still be used. I have completed the file search and [the stories] No pop up, then I started browsing and scrolling through all the folders manually, I found them. I was stunned. “


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