Tech News

The best science fiction comedy is existential

[ad_1]

Book by Tom Gerencer Intergalactic Refrigerator Repairs Rarely Take Money it has 19 pieces of science fiction humor. Gerencer has selected stories from hundreds of words written over the past two decades.

“If you go to Walmart and you go into the section with big Tupperware containers where you can put clothes and things, I’d just write and write and write, and I’d fill the notebook with short stories – or parts of stories. And then I’d put them in the trash, and then another I would fill a notebook and put it in the trash, and I would fill another notebook, and now I have five or six bowls in the basement, and there are several bowls when I lost them. sometime, “says Gerencer in section 473. Guide to the Geek Galaxy podcast. “It’s definitely an avalanche of words.”

With titles like “Trailer Trash Savior” and “Apocalyptic Nostrils of the Moon,” you might expect the stories to be a bit light, but Gerencer’s work also captures a dark existential anguish, often addressing questions like: be happy? Why does the universe exist? Can an ordinary person save the world?

“When I deal with scary things on paper, it comes out funny, it’s okay,” Gerencer says. “It lets me take a step back from my real life and I say, ‘Come on, relax. Like Bugs Bunny and someone else said before,’ don’t take it so seriously. You’ll never survive.”

Gerencer’s existential humor, such as that of writers, is influential Robert Sheckley and Douglas Adams. “The [Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] the trilogy is one of my favorite works of fiction in the world, “says Gerencer.” I found radio drama and listened to it over and over again. Right now I have an autographed copy sitting on the table. I went on a kind of pilgrimage to the UK and met Douglas Adams, interviewed him and his I talked to him about work. “

Critics sometimes dismiss it Hitchhiker’s Galaxy Guide it’s just as a sequence of funny episodes without much structure, but Gerencer says that to do so is to look at the arc of a character who sees the protagonist of the Arthur Dent series overcome his resentment in the face of the nonsense of the universe.

“Arthur will eventually know that what needs to be done — the inevitable conclusion, when he finally makes that big decision — is to decide that he doesn’t need to know what’s going on,” Gerencer says. “Eventually, the moment comes when he realizes, ‘I’m going to hang out and enjoy the meaning of it all.’ And when he does that he literally learns to fly. He’s fantastic. He’s very free.”

Listen to the full interview with Tom Gerence in section 473 Guide to the Geek Galaxy (above). And see some notable points in the discussion below.

Tom Gerencer on Mike Resnick:

“He called me a‘ genius ’all the time. Every time he talked to me, he would call me ‘genius’ instead of ‘Tom’. It was very flattering, but it was very horrible … It created an unrealistic hope in my head, and it created a huge fear in me that I would never be able to live up to what I thought I was. because I am not. And I said, ‘I’m not a genius. I write so much, and 99% of what I write is absolute rubbish, and then I go back and read it, I take out these gems and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is good’. And he says, ‘Yeah, but 99 percent of the writers out there don’t know the difference between junk and good writing, and you do. I understand that you write a lot of rubbish, but then you write good things, and you are able to go back and identify them as good things, and that’s what I think is he does become a genius. ‘

Tom Gerencer in his story “Electric Fettuccine Sample Case”:

“I was at this Thai restaurant, and I was talking to the owner, this was a great guy, he was from Thailand and he was a lot of fun. I asked him, ‘What’s up with this bitter melon? How do you cook it? What do you cook it with to make it not so bitter?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, no. If it’s not bitter, it’s not good.’ And I said, ‘I don’t understand.’ And he said, ‘Because we eat Yang.’ He had a big smile on his face, and he thought I said, “It’s very pretty. They eat it from Yang.” He said, “Americans, everything has to be sweet or salty or spicy. As with your life, you can’t stand grief. Everything has to be perfect or it’s not good.” He said, “We don’t see things that way. We eat from Yang. You have to get closer to food and life and you also enjoy the bad things there.” And that really hit me. “

In the names of the characters Tom Gerencer:

“My last name is Gerencer, which means ‘smith’ in Hungarian. I was like, ‘As my alter ego, I’ll choose Hungarian names.’ But when I started looking at Hungarian surnames, I said, ‘You can’t say any of them.’ I can’t pronounce my last name correctly.When I went to visit Hungary, I was constantly directed with my last name, and I couldn’t do it right, so no one could do it. rather than do that, I thought, “Well, Poland is next door. Everyone knows what a Polish surname is. I’m going to adapt that, and every time I have to invent a character, instead of trying to think about it, I’ll put a kind of Polish surname on that person.”

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

“Those stories were really nice, and I had to say I still had them, but I missed them, and that’s very sad for me.” They were never published, but I liked them a lot. Eventually, I found this 3.5-inch floppy disk, and I said, ‘I wonder if they might be there?’ I looked it up on Amazon and saw that I could buy a floppy disk, so I bought it. I actually had about eight floppy disks, and I examined each of them, and most of them didn’t even work. One of them worked, and I couldn’t find anything, but I copied everything to the hard drive. I was like, ‘I can’t believe it’s a 30-year-old floppy disk and it works’. I did a file search and [the stories] it didn’t show up, and then I started going through it by hand and going through all the folders, and I found both. I was amazed. “


More great KABEKO stories

[ad_2]

Source link

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button