sci-fi by the 8 year old me

sci-fi by the 8 year old me

howdy friends,

well I’m back from Dragon*Con in Atlanta! wow, what a rad event. so many cool panels, interesting people, and amazing costumes…not to mention a boat load of great genre films. extremely happy that CERTIFIED could be a part of it. it was one of our best screenings to date. we were part of a Horror-Comedy block and people were HOWLING with laughter…and not just at our film, the entire program was amazingly funny. I’ll post more on the festival in the coming weeks, but today I want to share something from my past.

recently my Mom came across some drawings and a story that I had done…in 1988. it’s interesting to see not only what interested me thematically then (I’m joking a little) but also to look at them from a more critical “adult” perspective. here was an 8 year old boy that was writing sci-fi about WWIII. obviously I was concerned a bit about the Cold War and the possibilities of a Nuclear Holocaust.

I don’t actually remember writing this story, but I do remember that a year later I listened The Tiananmen Square Massacre happen LIVE on the radio… and then later that year to the the fall of the Berlin Wall. the events of the end of the Cold War are some of the first news items I remember and they shaped my childhood as much as the events of 9/11 shaped my adulthood. I wonder if in another 10 years I’ll look back at the stories I’m writing now and see the reflections of that event?

heh, well I really didn’t mean to get that deep of a tangent – but nonetheless I think it’s an important thing to consider. how will the events & the circumstances of today affect the work we create? is it something that’s only apparent with hindsight, or is it something that doesn’t exist until we apply significance to it later?

in the case of my short story “Space Martian” it’s pretty obvious what the “young Luke” is concerned about. but will something like CERTIFIED reflect the feelings written by a man living in a post 9/11 America? I guess we’ll just have to wait 10 years to find out.

until then…please enjoy some original drawings by myself and my bff Drew Pickard. (ha! I said “bff.”)

Space Martians – Pen on Paper, by Luke Asa Guidici & Andrew M. Pickard 4/10/88
(click image to embiggen)
Space Martians - Art

Space Martian – by Luke 4/10/88
(click image to embiggen)
Space Martian - Story

and here’s the transcript of the story…

Space Martian
by Luke 4/10/88

Once in space there was a Martian he had eight heads, one neck & five feet, twenty two tows, one leg, ten eyes, there fingers. He was very strang. But. He was very important to the Unitied States because he know how to make forsfeilds. The United States needed forsfeilds to beet the U.S.S.R. Not that the U.S.S.R. was ang stronger than the United States but equally machted. So the war could go on forever, so the martian gave the United States the stuff to make the forsfeilds and the United States won the war.
The End.

next week I’ll have a couple of new festival announcements, so stay tuned!

-Luke

4 Comments
  • teal
    Posted at 10:13h, 08 September Reply

    wow, that is kind of a scary story for an 8-yr old to be making up…..though, maybe it’s scarier as an adult today, since we have a little bit more of an idea of what it would mean to have a war going on forever.

    • Luke
      Posted at 12:48h, 08 September Reply

      yeah, it does seem pretty dark in hindsight – but I wonder how scared I really was at the time?

  • Colleen Pinckney
    Posted at 21:19h, 10 September Reply

    All things considered… if I were going to assess your conceptual grasp of the Cold War/MAD/SDI, I’d say you demonstrate proficiency… equally matched players in a never-ending war where the only hope (so to speak) of winning was for someone to figure out how to make a forsfeild. The fors was pretty strong with you, Luke… At that age, my understanding was limited to something along the lines of, “The Cold War is a war without fighting, so it’s not hot.”
    Interestingly, I had a short 9/11 convo with my new students yesterday (I didn’t get too into it because I’d just learned that the local FOX news anchor’s son is my student and I’m not really interested in being the media’s rogue teacher of the week by implying anything less than patriotic– feeling the chilling effect). They were 2 in 2001 and the poor things are simultaneously fascinated and confused by the whole mess. This is my first batch to have no real memory of the day. Like the CW was for us, 9/11 is to them: normal. It’s super strang to think that their *life-long* nemesis, Osama, was killed just last year.

    Cool blog, Luke. 🙂

    • Luke
      Posted at 11:27h, 11 September Reply

      thanks Colleen, glad you enjoyed the blog. and thanks for sharing the story about your students. makes you wonder what will be “normal” to kids in 10 years?

Post A Comment