Olympic Linkdump

Here is an interesting article at Ghostwoods, which describes Michael Moorcock’s method for writing a novel in a single weekend and also goes into Lester Dent’s pulp fiction masterplot (which has been linked in the sidebar pretty much since I started this blog). Of course, I never manage to actually adhere to those formulas when writing (I have failed to follow Lester Dent’s pulp masterplot several times), but I nonetheless find them fascinating.

Kathleen Valentine writes about why she loves Jame Lee Burke’s character Dave Robicheaux and about her problems with a certain nihilism in literature. What she said.

Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, died last Monday aged only 61. I must confess that I don’t remember Sally Ride’s flight, even though I was ten years old and fascinated by all things space at the time. I suspect that the German media chose not to stress the fact that Sally Ride was the first female American astronaut to make it into space. Or maybe – knowing courtesy of a book on Soviet spaceflight given to me by my East German aunt that there had been female cosmonauts since the 1960s – I simply assumed that there had always been female astronauts as well. After all, this was America, land of progress and freedom.

Athena Andreadis has a lovely appreciation of Sally Ride and those female American astronauts who never made it into space, no matter how qualified they were.

Mary Tamm, the British actress who played the first incarnation of the timelady Romana in Doctor Who, died last week aged 62. It seems that we’re losing Doctor Who companions from the Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee eras at an alarming rate.

German actress Susanne Lothar died last week aged only 51. Susanne Lothar came from a family of actors (both her parents, her husband and her stepdaughter were or are actors) and was one of Germany’s most distinguished stage and screen actresses. International audiences will probably remember her best for her appearances in various films by Michael Haneke, including the Oscar-winning Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon), as well as in The Reader. Here is a longer obituary in German.