Now Boarding For Hollywood Hyperspace
Welcome aboard, readers! Joe McCabe, your SFX West Coast editor here in sunny Southern California, introducing you to my shiny new blog Hollywood Hyperspace. We'll be taking off in just a few minutes... Where are we headed? Is this ship really safe for space travel? And doesn't the world need another blog like it needs a new Michael Bay Transformers movie?
Good questions. Ones which I'll answer in the weeks ahead. Like almost every other blog out there, this one will find its identity in the course of time. But here's a little background info...
I'm a genre maniac. Always have been. Grew up on a steady diet of Jack Kirby comics, classic Disney animation, James Bond thrillers, Star Trek and Doctor Who reruns, Universal and Hammer monster movies, Star Wars action figures, David Bowie music, and Ray Bradbury stories.I eat, sleep, breathe, floss my teeth, and gargle with science fiction, fantasy and horror. I'm an all-purpose, fully functional, full-time geek. And I've been lucky -- insanely, living-on-borrowed-time lucky -- enough to write professionally about my passions for several years now. I started out as an assistant editor for the venerable dark fantasy magazine Weird Tales (the original publisher of HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard's yarns), then worked as a contributing editor of the multi-Will Eisner Award-winning Comic Book Artist magazine. Most recently I served a five-year term as associate editor of FEARnet (the web's "home of horror"), before deciding to become a completely freelance editor/writer last year. Somewhere along the line I even managed to author a Bram Stoker Award-nominated book on genre Renaissance man and all-around nice guy Neil Gaiman called Hanging Out With The Dream King .
But it's my current job with SFX of which I'm most proud. Not only do I work for the world's greatest science-fiction magazine, I've met a brilliant bunch of folks I'm honoured to call friends, including features editor Nick Setchfield, deputy editor Richard Edwards, columnist Penny Dreadful, special projects editor Dave Golder, reviews editor Ian Berriman, fearless (he has to be, editing my prose) production editor Russell Lewin, advertising manager Adrian Hill, and of course our esteemed editor-in-chief Dave Bradley, who kindly authorised this deep-space mission. In my career, I've travelled the world and met everyone from Stephen King to Steven Spielberg, but it's the people you work with every day who make a good gig great, and I've got a very great gig indeed.
As for what this blog will cover... Its scope, like that of the genre we all love so much, is limitless. But for now it's safe to say I'll be yakking about every film, show, comic, book, and bauble I think is worth your time and interest. The shock-jock approach to blogging, which infests too much of cyberspace these days, doesn't appeal to me all that much. I'm not afraid to call a spade a spade (or, more appropriately, a Sith a Sith) and there are things I'll no doubt rant about, but life is, after all, short. So I prefer to look at what's good in pop culture, rather than spend my days eviscerating what's bad. Of course since I live near Tinseltown (with my long-suffering wife/best friend/photographer/Girl Friday Sophia Quach), I'll make every effort to showcase the places, people, and events that make LA the entertainment capital of the world.
But the future of this blog largely depends on you, my geek brethren. SFX readers have always been a smart, passionate bunch, unafraid to voice their thoughts. So please let me know how I'm doing via Twitter or Facebook , or if there's anything out there that you'd like me to report on.
Alright, our astromech droid just informed me he's finished repairs to the ship's drive. Let's sit back, strap ourselves in, and take a deep breath. We've got a long voyage ahead of us, and the stars are beckoning. Thanks for joining me.
Joe McCabe ( @JMaCabre ) will return next week... If he can remember where he parked the Falcon.
