Get your June 2022 Calendar of Science Fiction and Fantasy milestones (both real and imagined) here.
A quick round up of some of the events seen on this month’s calendar. First of all, June is a month that saw the passing of several noted authors, including Ray Bradbury (on the 5th, 2012) and Robert E Howard (the 11th, 1936). It also saw the birth (the 16th, 1896) and death (the 8th, 1975) of Murray Leinster. Although not as well known as Bradbury or Howard, Leinster was an incredibly prolific writer and the inventor of the front projection special effects system. He wrote articles, short stories, novels, scripts and novelizations for Men into Space, Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants. If you are not familiar with Leinster, take a half an hour and listen to the X Minus One radio adaptation of A Logic Named Joe. The original story is from ’47, the radio play is from ’50 and it sure sounds to me like Joe is a relative of Alexa and Siri.
In the media world, two Star Trek series ended in June, The Original Series and Deep Space Nine and the month also host Captain Picard Day. Both versions of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (radio and TV) ended in June, although three years apart, and Captain Video and His Video Rangers premiered on television back in June of 1949.
On June 10, 2018 NASA received one of its most famous messages, the last transmission from the Mars Opportunity Rover. Science writer Jacob Margolis cemented the otherwise routine transmission’s place in pop culture and history when he tweeted his interpretation of the final report as “My battery is low and it is getting dark…” It still makes my daughter cry.
To wrap up the month, though, I am celebrating UFO sightings (hence this month’s art work, more on that in a second). With the first Congressional hearing on unidentified aerial phenomenon in decades just a few days behind us it seems appropriate to mark the 75th anniversary of the so-called “modern UFO era,” which did not begin in July of 1947 with Roswell but in June with the Kenneth Arnold sightings and the popularization (of not the coining) of the phrase “flying saucer,” followed quickly by the reporting of the Maury Island incident, which Arnold was hired to investigate by Ray Palmer, then editor of Fate Magazine. Then July saw the Flight 105 incident and with all of this as the backdrop, then came Roswell (but that is for next month).
I am, as you may know, trying to get back into seriously into art after a couple decades of not drawing or painting (mainly due to joint issues which were finally diagnosed as celiac disease a few years ago). Because of my constant traveling, I am trying to use the iPad to draw… back when I went to art school I focused on pen and ink illustration and, honestly, I think my deep rooted issues with color were amplified by the digital format but I swore to myself I would start making and sharing art again, so here it is!
That is all for this month, thanks for reading.