Hi there, and welcome back to the Hugo's There podcast. And this is another one of the kind of zoomed out episodes that I call sub genre spotlights. And this time we're going to be talking about science fiction, sports, the intersection of science fiction and sports. I called it. SF Sportsball at some point, I think, in our emails back and forth. But my guest for this is Chris Garcia. Hi, Chris. Hello. Great to be here.
Yeah, and I was telling you before we started recording, I couldn't remember how this happened. I think I had put out a plea on Twitter or someplace on social media saying, hey, if you have subgenres of science fiction that you're knowledgeable about, reach out to me.
You reached out. Hey, how about sports? Yeah, well, I'm always looking to talk. And like the biggest truth about sports is if you like sports at all, you love to talk. Yes. So what should people know about you? Where would they know you from? Well, I am primarily known for my fanzine work. In particular, I do... I started off doing one called The Drink Tank, which won a Hugo in 2011. And then one called Journey Planet, which won in 2015 for Best Fanzine. And been doing those now, it's 20 years.
I just did my 20th anniversary issue of the drink tank and I think we're about 17 or 18 for journey planet. And you know, my, my big thing is always, I write about, I write from a fan's point of view. because I am no writer, though I do have a true crime book out. But I really try to make things relatable to my life, even if I'm doing a review.
I'm writing about how my experiences of the world have informed that. And so I always try to do that. And it makes me sort of completely unpublishable in the real world, but makes me perfect for fanzines. Yeah, that is one of the things with with fanzines and fan casts and all that kind of stuff is like you get to know the people behind them. And and so, you know, knowing how, you know.
how this fits into your life, what, you know, why you like it is important to people who kind of develop the parasocial relationship with you. I think maybe that was a panel you were on that I saw you in Worldcon. Yeah, it was actually. And that was a fun, that was a fun panel. Like all good. audio endeavors. It took place in a car.
And it was, yeah, I was looking at how social media can be used as both a tool for the pro. And from my angle was, how could you use it as a fan and build the relationships that sort of make it possible to become a part of this community? that we're all in and you know science fiction fandom is now in so many different arenas and directions that it you know using tools to get that sort of happen is really interesting to see and you know i spent 20 years as a computer historian
And so it was a fascinating time because it was from, you know, just the prior to the rise of live journal and all that. And I made it all the way up through the beginning of. TikTok before they laid me off. So I'm still bitter. Well, so another kind of thing that we were talking about before we got started was the intersection of sports and...
and fandom and nerdery and that, that kind of thing, because like you can geek out about anything. Right. And, and so when, when people get really enthusiastic about sports, right, there's a natural kind of. geeky trend that can evolve there and you end up where like i was trying to study some python and stuff to to get ready for a job interview and a thing came across my social media, learn Python with data analytics with baseball. And it's like, oh, yeah, cool. Because there's so much data.
Yeah, it's fascinating. And what is great is that if you look at sports as literature, each individual sport is its own genre. And you have subgenres within there. So the best example I use is baseball is science fiction. deals with mathematics. It has deep ties to this idea that there is an ideal world in which there is no cheating.
performance enhancing drugs um and it's this you know football is in my eyes football is 100 the war film uh genre um you know hockey is uh I would say hockey is romance, but I don't know if I can back it up because it is about the love of the sport and your place because... hockey is inherently canadian in all of its forms um don't tell the russians that um but you know you have all these genres and we all attach to our favorites like there are people who are just readers
And there are people who are just sports fans. But there are also people who are hardcore baseball fans. And there are people who are hardcore science fiction fans. There are also people who are hardcore... old science fiction, like science fiction peaked in 1938. And there are people who are baseball historical fans who baseball peaked in 1921. So, you know, this idea of fandom.
is universal across all things. And I think you definitely see that in literature and sports put together. I think it's a really interesting combination. Yeah. I mean, that's really well put. And there's something about...
the age at which you encounter something, right. That becomes like the platonic ideal of, of what it is. And so like people who grew up watching baseball in the, in the eighties where half the guys look like they just, you know, came in off a bender or something and, and, you know, they, they weren't. buff, right? There were guys with beer cuts and that kind of stuff looked like a beer league softball game, but with baseball and amphetamines, of course. And
And so then they'll look at the modern game and they're like, oh, it's too, you know, the analytics are ruining everything. And you get into all those religious wars about the nerds ruining sports. But even now, like with football, right, they'll be like, oh, the analytics say to go for it. forth down here right yeah and it's it's interesting i was reading a uh i work at a literary foundation now
dedicated to this author named William Soroyan, and whose peak was in the 30s. So I was reading some magazines from the 30s that one of them was...
an old-time baseball player from like the teens, like 1910, 1920, in that range, who was complaining about how the game had gone so far away from its ideal into the 30s. And, you know, you're always seeing that. And I can think of... a hundred panels I've been on where it's science fiction, people complaining about today's science fiction, how it's not bug-eyed monsters anymore, which is great to see because it means that we are a part of a universal theory.
Okay, so let's – I think normally I might kind of throw out part of the format here because normally we'd like to do like where should people start with sports science fiction. But there's so much of it and so much of it in short form that I'm not – sure I want to do that. I think we're just going to talk through recommendations that you have for where people should start and why they're fun. But first, I want to talk more generally about a science fiction
story or novel. What makes a good one? In many things, I believe there is a three-legged stool that represents how something is held up properly. In sports science fiction, and I guess I should say sports genre because fantasy also plays a large part of it, you have to have three things. And one is you have to have a view of the game. You have to...
experience at least some aspect of the game in a way that engages you as the game is played. If you think of Quidditch, the Quidditch sections of Harry Potter are exceptional. A lot of the short stories will primarily focus on that aspect of giving you a view of the game and tag on the science fictional aspects, which I think is a great way to go. The master of that is my hero. jack haldeman uh but the second aspect is you really need the what i call the jock archetypes um you need the
washed up guy who just needs that one last big score. You need the young buck who is trying to change the system. You need the Bjorn Borg bad boy. who is trying to take over the whole thing. It's like you need those aspects of it. But I think the third one is maybe the one that's most flexible, at least, but it's the one that I see as... The ones that are truly powerful are allegorical. It's they take the sport as a ideal and they place it so it hangs around sort of other bigger.
ideas that we understand. And so you can take even the same concept and put them side by side, but that allegory is slightly different. So one might be really an allegory about how the media... is making out things that we would inherently think are terrible. And they use this false sport as sort of a programming thing. It's really media commentary. But you can tell nearly the same story and make it about income inequality.
And it's a really fascinating thing. You see that a lot in actually in film is one of the places I see it the most. But I also see a lot of short films that deal with sports and science fiction. So a problem of programming film festivals is I see a lot of stuff that. no one ever sees, some of which should never be seen. And, you know, you end up with, you mentioned Quidditch, right? This is a made-up sport that does not exist out well.
Now it exists, right? People play some version of Quidditch in real life. But you do have a mixture of, this is football, but it's on Mars, right? Where it's a real sport, but it's... In a science fiction locale, right? Or in some way like that. And then you have a bunch of things where it's just, here's a new sport that's kind of based on stuff you're familiar with, like playing polo in space, for instance.
um with with ships what there was a art that was an arthur c clerk i think that was clifford simac um yeah it was him yeah And yeah, so it's kind of fun having that mixture. Of course, the hurdle with the I'm making up a brand new sport is you have to explain it in a very kind of hard science fiction way, which can be a bit of a slog sometimes.
Yeah, and I think one of the best examples of an author doing a great job of that is head-on. Helketa is beautifully explained in its simplicity, though you get... less of a view of the game than in a lot of these things but it's you know it's obvious you know you're just trying to rip their head off and get it across the goal and talk about allegory as it plays you know it is clearly supposed to be football
but with truly deep hardcore stakes. And I love that aspect of it. That makes me think of, have you ever seen the movie, the blood of the heroes? I don't think I have. Okay, it's a Rutger Hauer movie. And it has a sport in it. The people are called Juggers. And, you know, it's...
sort of rugby football ish, but with gladiatorial sport mixed in with it, where they're just trying to take a dog's skull and put it on a spike in the other goal, you know, and that's it. Like it's the kind of thing where like. Actually, I really like the movie. And it's, you know, nobody has seen it. And yet, like, the game totally makes sense. Like, the way they kind of explain it and the way it's told through kind of...
you know, the visual medium of a movie. I think it might be easier in a film to do that. It's certainly easier time-wise to do it in a film. Because, you know, even if seeing a... television screen that just gives you a few seconds of it, you can get the idea, oh, they're doing some sort of weird sporty type thing. But in a story, it can take a lot of time. But what's amazing is that a lot of sports stories work in the short form.
which I love. And I've mentioned him briefly. Jack Haldeman sort of specialized in this, having about a dozen. sports short stories published in mostly in Asimov's, a couple in anthologies, but they were brilliantly simple, sometimes in a shared universe. But, you know... And they're also very much written of their time. That's one thing I like about a lot of sports stories is that they really give you an aspect of the time. For example, he did a story about...
They wanted to move a franchise of the sports league team to a new planet, and they found it easier to move the fans from their planet. to just move the team, which is a direct reference to the middle-of-the-night Baltimore Colts moving out of the two. to Indianapolis. It's things like that where you're catching little bits that make sense only if you know the moment. There's a character in his stories who is Howard Cosell, arguably the greatest or worst.
broadcaster of all time um and you know sort of famous for a very large nose and in one of the classic story forms is that you are playing for the fate of your planet the universe whatever And this one was you were playing for the aliens or the humans would get to eat the entirety of the other race. High stakes. And of course the humans lose.
And they start with the Howard Cosell guy, they bite off his nose, decide humans don't taste very good and leave. Again, it does something you shouldn't do as an author, which is making a promise you cannot deliver. But at the same time, it's funny because it's Howard Cosell. What's that story called? I mean, you mentioned Jack Alderman. Do you know the title? I think it's called...
There are two of them. One of them is the thrill of victory and the other one is the agony of defeat. I think that's the agony of defeat. Were those deliberately titled to evoke the wide world of sports? Exactly. Haldeman was a big sports fan. I only got to meet him once, sadly. His brother is slightly more famous, Joe Haldeman.
I think. And they wrote a book together, actually. And Joe Haldeman also wrote a sports story, which became the movie Robot Jocks. Oh, wow. Yeah, but his stories were great. And you can usually find he has things like he writes about a variety of sports. So he wrote a pure allegory about the 1960s election, which was something like. The 1960 presidential election considered as a WWE steel cage match, a WWF steel cage match, which was in one of those Resnick alternate.
I think it was alternate Kennedy's. And his stories are just so great. And they're hard to find now is a shame. One of my goals in life was to make him better known. And I... managed to do a little bit but yeah the thrill of victory the agony of defeat um are sort of the two best known of them and i think the agony of defeat
is on his website, which is still up from 2001, which is a wonderful timeline. Someday archaeologists are going to come across and go, now that's what a website looked like. But yeah. And there are some authors who sort of, I wouldn't say specialize, but do a lot of them. Haldeman's sort of the best known. The late, great Howard Waldrop is another one. A couple of wonderful stories, including the only...
story I can think of that deals with sumo wrestling called Man Mountain Gentian or Gentian. I want to say it's genuine because I work at an Armenian literary thing and I know that that's how they would pronounce it. But it's wonderful about Zen sumo, which is a mental form of sumo, and it's a very good story. Oh, nice. Yeah. And it makes me sad that there's far less professional wrestling in because I'm a wrestling nerd. And wrestling is full of science fiction and fantasy and horror. Yeah.
There's only one story that I can think of wrestling other than that exceptionally allegorical, not very good Kennedy story called The Holy Stomper versus The Alien Barrel of Death. Which is from 1997 by R. Noybe, I think it's out. Wait, I have it right here. Noybe, yes. Which, it made the cover of that one book, that one thing that has the guy on it. Asimov which is one of the greatest covers they've ever done as far as I'm concerned and I am concerned but yeah there's so many
I love the Howard Waldrop stuff in general. He did one called Mary Margaret Road Grader, which is fantastic. He did the Sumo one. In general, I think he's one of those authors who may be in danger of being lost. Because his output wasn't super huge, and he was never the biggest name. But I love that George R. R. Martin is currently... producing short films of his stories.
Two of which were submitted to Cinequest. One we didn't take just because we could only really take one from the same group. And another one called The Ugly Chickens is in with Felicia Day in it. And it's amazing. I can now write this whole thing off. So perfect. Nice. Nice. Do you think that sports science fiction, sports, sports SFF, right? Does it suit?
the short story genre better or i mean the the short form better than novel length yeah i think so but only i think as an element in a novel it works better which is why i think the short form because i A sports event has a natural structure to it already. Yes. It has a beginning. It has a middle. It has an end, usually. I'm still waiting for the 2004 World Series to end.
So I think the form lends itself naturally to the short form because you can do that much more economically. I think as an element, it works very, very well in... and in particular film, because it can give you this idea of a more well-rounded world. You would expect a school of teenagers to have sport. You should expect a world in which a number of people are locked in to have a way to express themselves. And, you know, Alketa makes sense.
You can have a world where one of the best little tiny moments in Back to the Future is when they show up. You know, was it the Florida Gators winning the World Series? And, you know, at that point, there was no Florida team. And we're like, well, and that sort of. Yeah, I think it was the Cubs winning. It was the Cubs winning. They were playing Florida. Yeah, that's right.
And, you know, that was like, wow. And I love, yeah. And it still makes no sense that the Cubs won. But yeah, it's that sort of, you know, it's adding, it's a type of world building that, you know. I don't want to say highfalutin, but kind of highfalutin science fiction might ignore. But when you look at some of the stuff that does have sport aspects in it, Surface Detail by Ian Banks comes to mind. There's that great...
uh, piece by Terry Pratchett, which I cannot think of what it's called for the life of me. Um, only you can say mankind. Um, that, you know, it gives you a more well-rounded thing because sports is so integrated into our lives. You'll just have to look at last weekend we had the Superbowl and, you know.
It's obviously going to be there. It's hard to be alive in America, at least, without having it touched by the Super Bowl or the World Series. It's hard to be European and not have soccer be some part of yourself. It's all there, and I think that is the element that it needs to play in novels, more or less, is to give you that well-rounded aspect. Okay, so let's start spinning through some recommendations.
Oh, absolutely. You've already mentioned a couple, but let's keep going. Yeah. Well, I think one of the things that is great is a whole bunch of people have seen that there are – the short story is the – form that sort of has done it the most and some would argue the best and so there are two classic anthologies both of which you can find on ebay fairly regularly and fairly cheaply um and one is called the infinite arena
And the other one is arena colon SF arena apparently is an important part of that. And there's a reason for that. And that is arguably the most famous early. sports science, sports-y, because it's not directly sport, I don't think. But it definitely is a contest, which we could have rolled into there, and a lot of people consider chess to be a sport in all these anthologies. Yeah, yeah.
But those two anthologies alone give you an excellent, excellent early example. And Arena is in, I think it's only in one of them, I think it's in Arena SF. Yes. frederick brown and it's you know it's a short story i hear talked about when people talk about like the cold equations or uh that one about the tiktok man
as one of the classic foundational pieces of science fiction. And I think Arena is... I hadn't read it in a long time, and I read it last week, and I was like, this feels... less dated than it should and that is really key and of course it became one of the most important episodes of star trek Right. I mean, the story of that is interesting because it wasn't deliberately adapted.
It was somebody wrote a story and then somebody on the staff was like, this rings a bell and realized that it was similar enough to the Friedrich Brown story that it was probably actionable. And so they reached out and got approval for it. And then I think they kind of re-sculptured it to make it a little closer to his story. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And it works as both an adaptation and as a standalone, which is really hard to do. It is, yeah.
Because if you read the original story, it feels like a view of a less-topian future. Whereas Star Trek is, of course, utopian at its core. And so it's a really interesting way they went about it. I love, I mean, the Gorn. How could you not? But I think that the story itself is really, to this day, a very powerful piece. And, you know, I say start there and it's anthologized everywhere.
Yeah. One of my favorite stories in that collection, because I picked up that one and The Infinite Arena, just because I found them on ABE Books. And one of the fun ones in there was called Whispers in Bedlam by Irwin Shaw. It's so good. It's one of those, you know, it's a power corrupt kind of thing, analogy or kind of message in it where it's this football player who is starting to go deaf in one of his ears.
And the only reason that he's even staying in the lead is because there's like a cornerback or a safety on his team who's reading the plays and giving him direction. And then he starts to go deaf. Now he can't get that direction. And so he goes and gets Dr. Nick Rivera from The Simpsons to fix it for him. Glad I'm not the only one who shot like that. Yeah. And essentially unlocks super hearing.
And like telepathy. So to where like, he can't just read the play, he can read their minds. And and all that, you know, that that brings him fame, which leads to disillusion and lechery and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, it's an excellent allegory for something that hadn't happened yet. Yeah, it definitely is about performance enhancing drugs without having been at that time.
And, you know, Shaw is not a guy I would have expected to write one of my favorite science fiction stories. But it's a classic. It's, you know, it is that classic sort of. Be careful what you wish for because you might just get it. But you definitely have the jock archetype. Yes. And I love the fact that he wasn't like a superstar at the beginning. He was a guy who was barely hanging on. Yeah, yeah. Not quite a scrub, but like a replacement level player is the way they put it in baseball. Yeah.
He is the guy who is the player to be named later in a trade. Yes. Yeah, and that's a great story. That whole anthology has some great stories. That one's certainly up there with my favorites, too. There was another one whose name I have now forgotten because I'm getting old. All the King's Horses was in that one. No, no, that wasn't. That was a different one. That Dodgers fan was in that one. Yes. Which, as a Giants fan, I was unappreciative of. But really, really interesting take of how...
It's a stranger comes to town story. And those can be fantastic. You know, there are only two major types of story. A stranger comes to town and Godzilla versus Mechagodzilla. And this is a good example of the first. Oh, the other one on that one was Mirror of Ice by Gary Wright. It's very Death Race. It's very Death Race. And more important, and how can I forget Death Race for this?
But what's amazing about it is of all of the ones in here, arguably the hardest one to make engaging should be bobsledding. And yet all the way through, this is an absolute, you know. I hate to use the term. This is a thrill ride that will keep you going until the very last word. It's just, I was literally exhilarated. I read that work on a couch because we have a couch where I do a lot of my reading at slash napping.
It was one of those, like, I was getting up there like, whoa, keep going. I love it. But yeah, that whole anthology was just super solid. There is a weird story in that one. Gladys is Gregory by John Anthony West. Where the sport is husband fattening. And that's one of the things I love is people who invent sports that are weird for the sake of being weird. One of my favorites is a Haldeman story about behemoth racing.
which are big, giant, mammoth-like things. And the sad thing is, it's like horse racers here betting on them. And it is that he loses all of his money betting on this one. behemoth and the behemoth ends up falling in love with him and following him home and eventually crushing him um and it's a funny funny story um in general just great and you know you know people will talk about quidditch people will talk about ender's game endlessly not me um but but you know it's this idea that
You are building not only now, you're not only doing your general world building, but your sports world building. And that can be very tricky because we have a way we think things work. And when it comes to sports, we definitely have a way we think things work. And this makes that so much harder. Yeah.
Interesting one because it's more military science fiction, right? Where the game is part of the training. On the other hand, I feel like in that world building, there should have been adult leagues for this game. And he never really goes there. At the end, I think Anderson or whoever it was who was kind of in charge of that ends up like commissioner of football. And I thought, why isn't he trying to create this? I mean, I would play a zero G laser tag.
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and I think one of the things about Ender's Game is that when it came up in the late 70s, I actually just found my copy of it, the original, the other day. was existing in a world where We were seeing the evolution of sports. And one of the things I think why a lot of the stories, short stories in particular, came out in the 70s was that we were seeing the evolution of sports and we weren't sure if these were positive changes or not. And I think...
I honestly think that this was a reaction to those stories, not necessarily to the original changes. And when you're two levels divorced, you sort of lose the thread, I think. No, pro leagues would have been so great. Yeah. Get someone on that. It's someone else's series. So Brandon Sanderson must finish it. So one, I think it was at the beginning of the infinite arena.
There's a quote from the... anthologizer says our sports are constantly changing with the passage of passage of and advances in technology passage of time and advances of technology astroturf metal tennis rackets powered rifles and instant replay devices and i'm like They thought AstroTurf was a good idea. I guess they did not realize how damaging that was going to be to everybody's knees. Yeah, you can make a very good argument. I mean, Terry Carr, who...
What the anthologist was one of those guys who knew everything about everyone. And, you know, I think after turf was a great thing, but that's only because I love. how AstroTur feels when you run your hand on it. Sort of a strange thing there. But yeah, that anthology is fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Joy in Mudville. Great story. What was the one? the race one. The Great Cladnar Race. Yeah, that was a good one. And again, you're sort of seeing this idea of sort of the...
their equivalent of the board immortal, I guess. And, you know, and it's, it's always when I kind of think that people see sports science fiction as a way of expressing, they want to write the same story again. but they want to do it with a controlled narrative. And so that's why the battle for the survival of the species is so important.
is that you know it's it's majorly important you can write that a hundred ways with war but in sports it's a little bit trickier yeah and you have that in is it the closed sicilian by i think it's very mulchberg did a great job of that yes uh yeah and i love the fact that in many of these sports cheating is a really important aspect and you know one of my favorite haldeman stories actually in one of the few stories about tennis
is uh and i wish i had written it down and i didn't um i actually printed out a list of all the sports stories and i left it at work um along with the infinite arena right in there right in the pages closed um is that he can go back in time five seconds and talk about the ultimate archetypes. He is obviously on his last round, two days till retirement type, and he's playing the young buck who is so good.
And he has to choose whether or not to use his power. And it's really, really interesting. Plus, he's going through a divorce and there's so much other stuff. And it's wonderful. And, you know, these stories are. are great to hang things on. But yeah, it's, it's fascinating that things like, uh, sun jammers, uh, great little story. Yeah. Which.
To me, it didn't read like Clark. And maybe it's just that it's been a long time since I've read any Clark, but I'm thinking this is a little more, dare I say, fun. But yeah, it's interesting how much... excitement you can get from a sports store you know the bobsled one a lot of the i think a lot of the helqueda sections of head-on are the by far the most exciting um i like scalzy a lot but
this is like, for me, this is top-notch Scalzi. I liked it even more than I liked Locked In, which I liked, but I didn't love. But this was like, oh man, I could read this all day. Yeah. There's, you know... One of the perils of writing a science fiction sports story is not getting the sports right. I think most of Deep Space Nine had an episode called Take Me Out to the Holodeck. It drove me crazy as a baseball fan.
Because there's a key plot point where like one of the Vulcans like goes back to the dugout and then Nog has to go tag him out. And I'm like, no, no, he went back to the dugout. He's out. Umpire should rule him out. He, he abandoned the play. Out. He's already out. And anybody who knows baseball knows that. And it can be really frustrating when they don't get it right. Where like Joy and Mudville is much better with the baseball portions.
Yeah. And I think part of that is that Paul Anderson was a gigantic baseball nerd. In fact, I think the last conversation I ever had with him was about baseball. I can say that about a lot. the only conversation I ever had with Jay Haldeman was about baseball because the Giants still needed pitching. And, you know, when you talk to a lot of the, the writers who really love sports, there, there are a lot of them.
They will tell you that every little thing that is wrong with it, just like every other sports nerd. Yeah, this is one of the reasons why I think the 1960 presidential... presidential debate as considered as a steel cage match was so frustrating was that I'm a gigantic wrestling nerd and as a second generation fan and a third-generation wrestling nerd, you know, it got me because it missed out so many things. And I realized that that is 100% a wrestling... Did somebody say wrestling? Yeah, JP.
What's wrestling? I know. It is a massive thing to get wrong and I'm only going to neap on it because that's what I do. And it's a very fan-ish thing to do. I like that we got bonus content from one of your kids. Yeah, it was JP. Massive wrestling fan, incredible reader. Currently, after three days, 10 hours into his read-a-thon. Oh, nice. Nice. Yeah. So a couple of stories that are sort of similar. I need to pick up the book here.
I dropped it. Are Steel by Richard Matheson and the bodybuilders. And I wanted to look up the author of that. Keith Laumer. Yeah. And those ones are thematically kind of similar because you have essentially, you know, robot boxing of various kinds. And, you know, my favorite thing about Steel by Richard Matheson is that real steel, the movie got made and that movie was so fun.
I remember seeing that in the theater. Yeah. And again, along the lines with that is Robot Jocks. Yes. Which is very much a heavy, it's a heavier story than you expect. And yeah, Laumer is a... Interesting author. He wrote a couple of sports adjacent stories. I found actually today, sadly, a excellent list of sports science fiction stories compiled by Jakob Boaz.
which I didn't see until today, and I feel dumb because there are about 150 stories here broken out by decade. But yeah, Laumer did at least... three that i could think of but lammer was best known for uh yeah the bodybuilders 966 and diplomat at arms another one that was crazy good But yeah, there's only those two. But it's incredible that some authors who I don't think of as science fiction, as not science fiction fans, they are science fiction writers.
as sports nerds, would be writing about sports. It's an aspect in Triton by Samuel Delaney. Wouldn't be my first choice. Again, Ian Banks, even Douglas Adams. You know, folks, I wouldn't expect those elements to be in, but hey, they're there. And I'm kind of excited for Octagon. by fred saberhagen may have been a little bit further seeing than anyone else um the octagon becoming a major portion of sports in the 21st century yeah i was blown away when i realized that and like
I was on a really fast reading day that day. One that I hadn't mentioned previously that I really think everyone should try and find, because one, it's got an amazing cover. but two, it is a really interesting combination of things, is Killer Bowl by Gary Wolf and Gary K. Wolf. Sorry, there are two Gary Wolves. Gary K. Wolves. Which is a... It is a story post-apocalyptic about an old football quarterback for the San Francisco Prospectors.
Go Prospies. And it is structured in a way that feels like a sports nerd wrote it. The great thing is basically they close off a portion of the old city of Boston and they play in the actual cities with bombs and bullets and all sorts of fun craziness. That and Rollerball have a lot in common. Both the movie Rollerball, which I think is phenomenal. It's a phenomenal satire. And The Rollerball Murders by William Harrison, which is, it's a little more...
I don't want to say cerebral because it's not quite cerebral, but it is more commentary. And I love when sports films get adapted, sports science fiction films get adapted because you can see that... Each one is taking a different angle at it. And I really like that. That's what I always like to say. I never like to step in the same river twice, even if it's the same water. And, you know, you can do that with a lot of them. Rollerball and the rollerball murders are so.
different in tonal impact and that i love i just love having that sort of aspect and you know arena and uh star trek very very different and wonderful um yeah Just as long as everybody remembers not to watch the Rollerball remake movie, because that was terrible. But it did give a paycheck to professional wrestling manager legend Paul Heyman, so I can't complain too hard.
Like I have a friend of mine did a movie, uh, Carolyn Kumar go to white castle, which, uh, she's in a wonderful technically competition scene. Um, anyone who has seen it may remember it. It takes place in a bathroom. And I often say, you know, you should watch it once just to make sure Kate gets a good paycheck. Nice. That's the only reason why you should watch that movie. But I take that back. Doogie Howser's in it. Yeah.
And I love one of the things actually, and another thing I really recommend is there is short films is part of my life. And there's a current one that is. The way I look at it is it's the same rough story as The Hunger Games, except the conceit is environmental disaster. survival as opposed to income inequality. And it's called No Nation. And the idea is that in this post-apocalyptic world, being exposed to the sun will kill you. So every day...
or I think it might actually be like one day in like a year or something like that. You have two teams that are put in these basic dungeons and when the sun comes up, it will roast one of them. And our main girl, who is 100% Katniss Everdeen, it's insane how perfectly mapped they are, is trying desperately to save everyone.
at the same time as playing this game, which is a ball game where you try to get it over the line on the other side. And it's exhilaratingly awesome. It's going to be in CineQuest this year and in CineJoy, but No Nation is... I cannot recommend it highly enough. In fact, actually, while I was viewing, I went, I'm going to talk about this on this podcast. Oh, awesome. Is it based on anything written or is it original to the film?
I think it's original for the film. And I kind of looked into it and then I realized I had to do the rest of the program. So I stopped. But yeah, film festival programming can be can be very difficult. And this year was.
We had 3,000 submissions, and I watched 2,800 of them. Wow. Yeah, it was fun. But I also wanted to mention a couple of authors who... are big names now um who were kind of big names then who actually wrote sports stories one of which is george r r martin uh return or run to starlight that right
Rent of Starlight and then the last Super Bowl game, which is actually my favorite of the two. Okay. Rent of Starlight is the last story in the Infinite Arena I was trying to finish this morning. I didn't get to that one. It's good. But it's George. And so I can bounce off George real easily. But it's one of the ones that I really liked. But the last Super Bowl game is so good. And I think you can find that...
in a couple of different anthologies. If you get a chance and can find it, Kim Stanley Robinson, Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars is... so not what I expected from a KSR story. It's so good. I love KSR in general, but this one's like, whoa. Here's a smart guy. And Jonathan Lethem. Vanilla Dunk. Slightly of its time. But really good reading. And I like, in general, I like Lethem. So I'm never going to say, you know, oh, he's awful. But this story was like, yeah.
But yeah, you can definitely find a lot. I do love the genre of let's take this sport and play it on Mars. And what I especially love is like the golden age way of doing that, where it's like. We're not, we're not even going to deal with the fact that Mars is 60% earth gravity. We're not even going to mention that. Why does it matter? I imagine Kim Stanley Robinson is going to talk about that. But like Clifford Simak is his story. Rule 18, right. Is about.
an interplanetary football match that's right yeah um and you know the one that i really liked was uh And I didn't reread it for this, but I was really, I read it years and years ago, was the 19th whole second series by Tassel Stetson. I cannot pronounce his name. It's from 1901. And it is a universal golf story, which is so great.
I really wish I had gotten a chance to reread that. But yeah, no, the ones that kind of do deal with the weird physics, you start to really see those in the 60s. And a little bit in the 50s, too. I think that the interesting thing about those is you're taking something that is really easy to... To sort of configure, you know, you're going to have people who are passing for 5,000 yards on a lunar football team, which makes so much sense.
You know, that aspect, when you get those little bits, are great. But I did want to mention one other thing is that... I guess it would be a sub-sub-sub-genre, is the game-playing aspect of it. Because sports is the physicality of game, and humans are human, the game player. But this idea of... you know chess as a sport gets often mingled about and you know i thought that the uh all those sort of chess when you see the 64 square madhouse by fritz library is a good example um
One of my favorite, again, Haldeman stories is about, which I think it's called Playing for Keeps. Yes, it is called Playing for Keeps. And it's about an alien who comes to take over the world and shows the kid a globe that is the Earth. And he's planning on destroying it. And he puts it on the ground and puts all the other planets around to make sure that we're taking over all the planets. And the kid thinks they're playing marbles. And he knocks all the planets out of alignment.
and the alien bugs out. It's such a good story. And even me telling it, the whole plot will not ruin it in any way, shape, or form. Uh, it's really great. Also, I forgot, I can't believe I forgot to mention Auto De Fe, uh, with all of the late, uh, The recent look at Dangerous Visions, Autor de Fe by Roger Zelazny, is a really, really interesting little story. And, you know, that's another one where you have another game player one in there.
story from that guy who I love. The poker game story is also there. And why can't I remember his name for the life of me? I've read all of his stuff. I'll remember it later. Yeah, I mean, like The Player of Games by Enam Banks, right? That's all about games. And it's kind of a remarkable book just because I don't know how it works, but it does. Yeah. And there's a lot in that player of games. Interesting book. We did an issue of the drink tank dedicated to banks probably shortly.
after he passed away. And while I was going through it, I reread that and I'm like, I don't know whether or not I'm smart enough to understand how this works. Because there's a lot going on that I just don't understand. Yeah, there's a lot of... Roll them bones. That's the name of the story. Oh, I've heard of that one. Yeah, it's a classic. Heavy as hell, again, of its time, but problematic, yes. Really, really fascinating, also yes. Another one of those stories that...
I will read occasionally and see listed in the all-time greats and say, yeah, that one probably deserves to be there. I've been recently reading Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop. which was a finalist for Hugo.
I'm still at the point in the book where it's just a baseball book, right? There's no science fiction element to it. And it really, like, I'd heard from people, and this is ringing true, that it, like, you can practically smell the grass, like, the way the baseball is evoked. Now, it is set in the 40s. And so some of the dialogue between the players involves a lot of epithets of various kinds, kind of of its time thing. Although it's not so much of its time, it's of the time that it's written.
about right where that is realistically the way people talk but it you know yeah one of the things is the aspects that actually was reading a really interesting thing god might have been a year ago now about how sports brings out the best and worst in people. And it's this idea that, you know, it amplifies you because you want to be the best. And I get that idea. It just, you don't always have to say everything you think. Right, right. Yeah.
Smack talk in sports, right? You are trying to rattle somebody. And yeah, you can end up with some pretty offensive stuff being said. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think actually, there's a really interesting thing. I didn't get to find it. I should say this. But there are two things that I am very excited for. One, if you ever find Tim Sullivan's The Mickey Mouse Olympics from 1979, buy it because it's brilliantly weird. But there are two stories, actually, I think.
everyone should find. And one is called Prose Bowl. It's by Barry Malzberg and Bill Prozini. And it is, it is what the box tells you it's going to be. It is, it's a lot of fun. And it's hard to find, sadly. But the other one is, and I want to get the name right. Yes, here it is. It's a play, actually, by Nigel Neal. And it's called The Year of the Sex Olympics. And if you want to see how this is like, to me, when I read this back in the way back times.
Exactly. It's a perfect version of a 1970s Playboy story done as a play. And it... I tried to find a good copy of it for a reasonable amount, and I couldn't. I remember reading it, I was probably 16, and being like, this is both salacious and... But yeah, there's a lot of stuff. And, you know, you can go on and on for days and days about sports science fiction. But one of the things is, you know, a lot of us encounter it and don't realize we encounter it. You know, we realize the Hunger Games.
No, that's a post-apocalyptic. No, it's a sports story. You know, she is the one who wants to make everything right. She is Joe Montana. And I will hear no argument on that. I love Joe Montana. You can't not love Joe Montana. You know, it's all of these great concepts. That we see just pieces of. And then suddenly it comes clicks into play. It finally clicked into place for me. Was an issue of a zine called Neakis. By.
A wonderful fan by the name of Ed Meshkes passed away, I think, two years ago. And he put out this issue that was sports science fiction themed. And there's some great stuff from, like... fred lerner and there's actually the listing for an anthology that gardner desois and mike resnick never managed to sell on sports and it actually oddly enough what it looks like is it reads like
What if we took all the good stories from Arena SF and all the really good stories from the Infinite Arena and put them in one package? That sort of served as a reading list for me when I first started down this road to figuring out that sports science fiction is something I really love. But you can find actually that... issue of miakas it's n-i-e-k-a-s issue 46 it's on fanac.org it's really good reading um in general i think it's one of those the better uh zines of the time and i think that
The fact that it's dealing with sports in a very, very high level way just makes it better. Do you want to talk a little bit about movies, sports, science fiction and movies? I mean, we've sprinkled in some of it, right? Yeah, definitely. And I think some of the ones that instantly come to mind for me, yeah, Robot Jocks is one. Real Steel is another. I do need to see that again. Death Race, though.
You have two sort of stories that are basically the same stories taken again from different aspects, which is The Running Man and Death Race. Yes. And The Running Man is arguably the best satire of... reality tv there is um the fact that the producer of the amazing race said what if we made the running man but nobody got killed right as part of his pitch
Brilliant. But, you know, the aspects of satire and allegory are all there in all of these. And, you know, Rollerball, Running Man, very closely related. The Hunger Games is actually an interesting one that... It gets further away from the game the further along you go in the thing. And I like that. It's because you have established the world.
I wonder if gladiatorial games, right? And Hunger Games definitely falls into that, right? Gladiatorial games say something about a society very much. And so it does make sense to extend that into talking more about the politics. Definitely. There are some sports movies that are sports-themed, like the second rollerball, are terrible. And it's odd that we haven't seen things like...
I haven't seen things adapted that really sort of give you the bigger role, like the space opera type things. You really don't have much. There's a great book by, I think, one of the Goldens. Christopher, maybe? No. The older one, it's from the 70s, called Scavenger Hunt. And it is an intergalactic scavenger hunt.
And it's fantastic. It's one of my favorite novels. It was an old laser book. I don't even know if it's ever been reissued. It probably has, because a lot of those sort of books got second releases. And it's really fascinating in that it is... taking this idea of the scavenger hunt, a great game that is theoretically a sport, and making it spacefaring, which makes so much sense.
As a guy who worked at a museum, I've done scavenger hunts for years because we all try to use them. But, you know, the spacefaring aspect of that is great. There's a lot of, like, there's a space jousting story that I... read years ago that i was like okay that's cute they have rocket packs they're in space it's the 1930s great um yeah and i could i could argue that you would see things like the
I tend to watch films with a very weird sort of mindset. So when you have a definite sports film, like say A Knight's Tale, that is not necessarily genre, but it definitely feels in that realm. It does, yeah. Yeah. I mean, can postmodernist be genre? I guess so, he said. But, you know, there's lots of things like that. I love, I absolutely love one of my favorite films of all time.
is rollerball um i say this often when i was doing my 52 weeks to science fiction film literacy it was one of the ones i really focused on because john houseman is a genius um but what we also kind of see is Everything in a film has to be ramped up. You can do something in a story where it is more personal, I think. But in film, and particularly in science fiction when it's dealing with sports, you have to amp it up.
And you have to make the stakes higher, at least to sustain a long-scale film. So, you know, Robot Jocks, you absolutely see that. You definitely see that in The Hunger Games, which is kind of a conceit from the book, too. I think it's the length and the literal cost. But there are a few, you know, technically, Air Bud. Right.
Anytime you have a chimp as a player on a football or baseball team. Or the Flubber movies, right? Oh my god, Flubber! How could I forget Flubber? Yeah, or even to a degree. the legend of Bagger Vance. You know, we have all these where there are elements. And I think that speaks to the role of sports in a society. And I think that ultimately we're always going to have sports stories. in genre, because there are always going to be sports. I think. I hope so. I could live without wrestling.
I will say that anybody who's interested in The Running Man might want to check out The Prize of Peril by Robert Sheckley, which there was a lawsuit with the Arnold film. because it looked so much like the German adaptation. Or maybe it was the French one.
There were two adaptations, one in German and one in French of that story. And some of the sets look identical to the Running Man ones of the movie. But the book is quite different than the Arnold film. I think we're getting a new adaptation of that this year. Are we? oh good yeah oh that's nice yeah the running man is like the whole story of strive to survive you know the most dangerous game all that is fascinating and i love that the most dangerous game is a sports story
that if you map it out, it exactly parallels everything we're talking about here, except it just doesn't happen to have any genre in it. But, you know, when you look at some of the most important concepts in sports, surviving being the last one left of your generation means something in sports uh you know you had your george blanda who lasted from you know the
50s all the way up through I think 1979 80 or something like that you know this huge long career he was the last survivor and he made it through you know you know allegorically when you amp that up to the next level and you make it about survival survival not just you know remaining relevant, it really does make for good storytelling. A couple of my favorite made-up sports in movies and TV, there was Pyramid in Battlestar Galactica, and they sort of...
tried to show how the sport was played. And I thought, I'm not sure how you get a team on the court that size. Maybe they're playing the half court version or something because Starbuck and Anders were playing it at some point. And I always did want to see what Parisi Squares was like in Star Trek The Next Generation. I remember there was a panel discussion at, I think it was TimeCon.
94 or something like that. Maybe it was another convention in the Bay Area. And that was one of the things they brought up. I was like, I'm curious, but not so invested that I'll go out and try to invent it. Right. There's a lot of things like that, but that's one of them. There's one that I was thinking of that was a mysterious stranger. Oh, arguably the best baseball movie.
that falls into the genre section has to be field of dreams. And while I think it time falls into the trap of being manipulative. I do think that it tells an interesting set of stories. And it's, I mean, it's also just beautifully shot. Like that's a gorgeous movie, but I often forget. When I think about that, it is a fantasy, but it definitely is a fantasy. You could say the same thing about the natural, honestly. Yeah.
Yeah. I do think there's something about baseball that people who really love baseball are more romantic about it than other sports fans are about their sports. And I've been trying to convince my Take Me to Your Reader co-hosts to do the Field of Dreams for... baseball season this year. We usually stay to science fiction where, where field of dreams is more magical realism kind of stuff, but you know, it's essentially got, you know, ghosts in it. So it's fantasy.
Yeah, definitely. And there was a story, I don't remember where it was, and I actually think it might have been like a French story translated, where it was ghosts. playing a game and every time you scored a point you became a little bit more physical uh and this i would have read this probably 30 years ago now but it was um
It was definitely, I know it would have been a little bit around that time because it was around the time Ghost came and, you know, they pushed a little thing. And it was this idea that pushing that. one of the things they were trying to do you had to push a round ball over a line which was about an inch away and on two sides and they were both trying to push it and
They said, after 16 years, it had gone four millimeters. Yeah, actually, and one thing I also do want to say is that, and I didn't realize that when I read this the first time. Ib Melchior did the story that Death Race was based on, which I read years ago. But also, one thing about naming for science fiction is that you always come up with great titles. In sports stories, I've noticed more than anything. So I love the agony of defeat and the thrill of victory. But one of them is...
J.G. Ballard's The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, considered as a downhill motor race. Another great one. The 64 Square Madhouse, great one.
So many. I just love... I think sports lends itself to reference. And, you know, Joy in Mudville is a great example of that. And also a great story. I had forgotten how much I liked... join mudville that was just that was a really impressive there's also a story called casey at the bat so yeah i i love the bit in there where like the the aliens that are playing baseball are kind of like the thermians from galaxy quest where where
If they hear a story, they just assume it's true. That's right. And so their spirit is just crushed by Casey at the bat. Yeah. Forgot about that. That makes so much sense. Yeah, the Thermians. There's a great race. Of all the great alien races that have ever been consumed, Thermians are right up there. Yeah, I think sports science fiction film is slightly rare just because there are...
it does have a gateway to entry. You kind of have to be into both the sport and the genre. And that, you know, while we know we exist, I don't know if studio executives know we exist. I kind of hope they do. But I actually had a tab somewhere that actually had sports science fiction films and I lost it. Well, I do like what you said earlier about adding sports into fiction is a key part of world building, right? Because it's a thing that we do, a thing that creatures do. We like to compete.
Yeah, and we like to compete for a whole bunch of very good reasons. One is that there's a theory that we started inventing games as a way of making sure... we were strong enough to take the resources from the bad guys, which is an interesting theory. Oh, there's my list. Oh, wow. There's a whole bunch I didn't think of. All right, lay them on me. Yeah, Space Jam. Right. Yeah, Space Jam. Actually, Space Jam is some really interesting storytelling, even the new one.
did some very, very interesting things. How you look at familial relations and how you pass on your expectations to your kids. Which I think is a really neat way to do. And it's very easy to do in science fiction. Yeah. Oh, there's Blood of Heroes. I probably oversold Blood of the Heroes. You can't oversell a movie with Rector Howard. You just can't. I've seen so many wonderful ones over the years it's got a very young Vincent D'Onofrio in it as well really oh I guess it would be
contemporary with his finest role as Thor in Adventures in Babysitting. Oh, and I forgot Speed Racer. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, there's just you can go on and on. Death Sport, which I had forgotten about, which is also great. There is a feature film version of Arena, which is very good and even less.
faithful to the original but yeah it was called death sport uh there was death sport and then there's also a movie called arena which is yeah i had forgotten i saw that years and years ago um But yeah, it's crazy. I'm not sure how – because we covered Arena for Take Me to Reader. I'm not sure how we missed the movie. Maybe it's hard to find? Oh, yeah, definitely.
I want to say I literally saw it at one of our Psychotronic Film Festivals. So that makes it difficult to find. But yeah, I think that... Sports science fiction film is an area that really needs to get bigger. Because there are stories I want to see done. Yeah, yeah. I'll definitely recommend The Infinite Arena.
Arena Sports Science Fiction or Sports SF. Yeah, they're excellent entry points. And I know that a couple of the stories in there were read on other podcasts. Escape Pod did, I think, did Arena. And it was an excellent reading because I hadn't read it in so long that hearing it was really nice. And yeah, there's so much stuff I could think of off the top of my head that now is just completely gone.
So much stuff. Like there was that one I've sent and I've now forgotten completely and my head is exploding. Well, do make sure to send me links to, I think you said you had done some, some actual work on, on one of your sites. about science fiction. Oh yeah, definitely. I'll send a whole bunch. And anyone who really likes Quidditch, which is, as far as I know, the only science fiction sport that has actually come an actual sport.
I believe there is a Quidditch World Cup match coming in the next few weeks. So back to the blood of the heroes, people have recreated that game. It's just called The Game. It's called The Game. Interesting. And the people who play it are called Juggers. Juggers. Okay. Now I'm going to have to find... Am I going to have to become a jock? That's not fair.
I think we're starting to wrap up here. And I like that intersection of the kind of things that I'm nerdy about, about sports and science fiction. It's so much fun to think about. Yeah. And we're entering into the most important. time of the sports year for me, which is WrestleMania season, which, you know, I am.
I literally will go around going, it's the most wonderful time of the year. And be thinking about Roman Reigns. Nice. This is a weird pitch, but if you like sports... and you like science fiction, and you particularly can handle professional wrestling, there was a group called Chikara Pro, and one of their entire storylines was one of their wrestlers came unstuck in time.
And at one point, a time loop causes the entire promotion to go back in time a year. Yeah, someday I'm going to write my big... essay on professional wrestling fans who are also science fiction fans. Because you have me, you have the Thomaseses, I'm sorry, Hugo Fonts, the Thomaseses, because they have all of them.
Dick Lupov. There are hundreds of us. Nick Mamatas and wonderful folks. Every time I get to see them, I get to make some wrestling reference, which is hard to do at conventions sometimes. Nice. So, yeah, I will try to put some structure around references to stories and things that we talked about through this kind of unstructured conversation so that people can check it out. Because I feel like we didn't really spoil anything.
these things can still be consumed and enjoyed. Oh, absolutely. And I'll definitely, I'll send some links to some fascinating stuff that no one will have ever heard of, but now will. Okay. Well, Chris, before we sign off, where can people find you? Well, you can find me just about everywhere as Johnny Eponymous, J-O-H-N-N-Y-E-P-O-N-Y-M-O-U-S. It's Johnny named after Johnny.
And that's on all my socials. But you can find me at journeyplanet.org is the zine Journey Planet. And we're putting out issues left and right. Well, okay, about one every month or two. But we've got some really good ones coming up. One on Hellraiser. Hellblazer, sorry. Not Hellblazer. Oh, John Constantine. Yeah, exactly.
That is going to be great. And one coming up on the wonderful city of San Francisco. So yeah, there's going to be some great stuff. And you can check out the drink tank. We just put out an issue last week for our 20th anniversary. And we're doing one deadline is in a week for David Lynch. And I've got some really fascinating things to say about his 54 second version of the Black Dahlia.
Nice. All right. Well, Chris, thank you so much for doing this. I mean, it's been like a year and a half since we first started talking about doing it. And that's the way it always goes on my podcast. But I appreciate your patience and willingness to come on and talk about this. It's been so much fun. Thanks so much for having me. All right. All right. Bye now. The theme music for the Hugo's There podcast was composed and performed by Tim Kuske.