“He’s a Seattle institution—like the Monorail or salmon tossing.”

Love this show.

I assume you also know about his turn as a recurring villain on ALIAS?

In Caitlin’s defense, this is at least the second time Ronnie has “died” on her. She may well have decided that she’s not going to mourn forever like she did last time and is making more of an effort to move on.

Rucka was nice enough to let me pick his brains by phone when I was novelizing “52,” which he was one of the main writers on. He was helpful and sympathetic, possibly because he’d been through the same process on “No Man’s Land.” I ended up grilling him for about 45 minutes on the new Batwoman, who was largely his…

I realized early on that I had to do the Reader’s Digest Condensed version. If I’d tried to include every tie-in issue and sub-series and character, I would still be writing those books! :)

The big difference between novelizing movies and comic-book crossover sagas: with a movie script, you’re constantly looking for…

Yep! And dare I mention there’s a novelization?

Okay, these are gorgeous. Very Bernie-Wrightson-esque.

I wonder, though, if they couldn’t get the rights to Lugosi’s image for the DRACULA poster . ...

Cool. As I recall, in the story, it’s not just a werewolf, but a were-dire-wolf, which I always thought was very cool.

Now we just need a FEVRE DREAM miniseries . . ..

They dealt with it very quickly in the first episode, probably to get it over and done with as fast as possible. Ichabod is momentarily taken aback to discover that Abby—a black woman—is a cop, but quickly decides this is progress he can get behind.

Thanks! If you’re interested, I did a companion volume featuring Anderson’s SF . . . which sorta illustrates my point about Anderson working both sides of the street.

Regarding horror, the Gothic tradition is a bit older than you think. “The Castle of Otranto,” which is generally considered the first Gothic horror novel, dates back to 1700s, and “penny dreadfuls” like “Varney the Vampyre” and Sweeney Todd were already going strong by the 1840s or so. And then there was Poe as well.

…

This is where I brag about actually editing a collection of Anderson’s fantasy stories back in the day. And I remember enjoying novels like A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST, THE MERMAN’S CHILDREN, etc.

I can’t cite a source, but I seem to recall that some effort was made to keep the censors from seeing Uhura’s “Mirror Universe” outfit until it was too late to do anything about it . . . .

As I understand it, belly buttons were more of recurring battle. Sometimes they got away with it, sometimes they didn’t. But it was a persistent bone of contention with the censors.

I suspect that some weeks it was simply a matter of choosing one’s battle with the censors. “Okay, if we cave on the belly-button thing,…

Yep, and even back in the day, you had authors like Anderson or Leiber jumping back and forth between fantasy and SF, and what about Edgar Rice Burroughs, who was writing SF that felt like fantasy before either genre was defined. And then, of course, you had horror authors like Matheson and Bloch, who also wrote for…

Well, SF/fantasy both take place at a remove from mainstream reality and there’s a lot of overlap between the readerships AND the authors. I have, on occasion, stumbled onto bookstores that tried to have separate shelves for “SF” and “Fantasy” and it’s usually a mess and horribly inconsistent. Where do you file…

Perhaps, but I’m sure there are fantasy fans who think there’s too much SF there. I don’t think SF automatically outranks fantasy.

(Me, I like them all, but have a real weakness for horror.)

In Major’s (partial) defense, he balked until the Max Rager dude threatened Liv. Even when Du Clark threatened to turn Major over to the police, he balked. Then Du Clark implied that Liv would be first on the zombie-killing list unless Major took the job . . . .

Not sure that excuses shooting an innocent zombie in the…

I can’t really complain about any list that includes I AM LEGEND, but did Theodore Sturgeon and John Wyndham really not make the list? You’d think MORE THAN HUMAN would be there somewhere, not to mention THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS or DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS . . ..

I would have also lobbied for one of the “People” collections by…

Am I the only one who thought that Liv’s new brain spaghetti recipe looked kinda tasty? That montage actually made me hungry . ...

And, yeah, the bit with the dog got to me, too.