At the beginning of our MA in Science Fiction Studies program in 2006, Christian, Sunshine, and I boarded the River Mersey Ferry for a trip to Spaceport in Wirral where the Doctor Who Up Close Exhibition was taking place, which I wrote about here. Sadly, Spaceport has been replaced, but these photos–most are mine and a couple were taken by Christian when my camera battery died–recall one of its coolest exhibits there.
Thankfully, LEGO provides digital copies of their set instruction books online. This means that if you have the bricks, you can build anything in the LEGO catalog. Of course, it might take time and energy to hunt down each individual brick and element that you might need to assemble a given set if your collection is as disorganized and binned as mine is. Nevertheless, it’s satisfying being able to build something new with what you have instead of having to go out and buy it.
In this case, I assembled a set that didn’t buy when it came out in 2010: 8099 Midi-Scale Imperial Star Destroyer. It took a considerable amount of time to find all of the bricks that I needed to complete it, and I had to cannibalize some other sets to get all of the parts. Eventually, it came together. However, I did have to make one off-color substitution deep within and hidden from external view.
I picked up this faithful R2 unit from LEGO when I began my position as a Brittain Fellow at Georgia Tech in 2012.
It’s the 10225 R2-D2 set that was released in 2012 (shortly before I moved back to Atlanta).
It features a turning head, a little bit of wobble, arms, saw, data port interface, and a retractable third leg. It’s blockier looking than the 2021 R2-D2 75308 set, but its the blockiness that makes it endearing.
Though, be warned that R2, when left to his own devices, might try to hack your computer . . .
Almost ten years before I went to the Star Wars and the Power of Costume Exhibition in New York City, I attended Star Wars the Exhibition in London, England on 26 June 2007. It was held in County Hall, Westminster, which is across the Thames from Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster and near the London Eye.
I had a half day for sight-seeing, so I made the most of it–riding the Tube, visiting 221B Baker Street, walking through St. James Park, passing Buckingham Palace, paying respects at Westminster Abbey, and ending up at Star Wars the Exhibition.
Star Wars the Exhibition was held in an old building with fine wood detailing and fireplaces throughout the smaller rooms. It was tight in places and open in others. It was dark and the lighting produced shadows and a variety of dramatic colors, which created challenges for my camera. As you’ll see in the photos, it had some amazing life-size artifacts from The Phantom Menace (1999).
For this shot of my younger self with R2-D2, I set my camera with a timer delay and placed it on a fireplace mantle opposite R2.
While doing research for my sabbatical project, I discovered that Patricia Warrick had passed away on 23 Feb. 2023. She was 98 years old.
I never met her, but her work has had a profound influence on my professional development and thinking throughout my academic career.
As an undergraduate at Georgia Tech, her words guided my first research project on artificial intelligence for the Sci Fi Lab in 2004, supported my presentation on robots for the Monstrous Bodies Symposium in early 2005, and provided a model for my senior thesis on networks of SF and technology during the Cold War in late 2005.
When I left to spend a year overseas as the University of Liverpool earning my MA, my annotated copy of Warrick’s The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980) is one of the books that I brought with me. And, I’m glad that I did, because returning to it helped my thinking while writing my MA thesis on Cold War and post-Cold War identities reflected in the original and re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series.
And when I was earning my PhD at Kent State University, I turned to Warrick’s work again. First, her Cybernetic Imagination and Mind in Motion: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick (1987) both proved helpful in my semiotics seminar paper on deconstructing the human/robot dichotomy in the works of Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick in 2007, three iterations of a paper (here, here, and here) on images of women in Dick’s Ubik (1969). And, her ideas helped me through my PhD exam on Philip K. Dick and my dissertation Brains, Minds, and Computers in Literary and Science Fiction Neuronarratives, which includes a chapter on Dick’s work.
When I first read Warrick’s The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction, I thought to myself that I want to write a book like that. Her writing and thinking have been and continue to be a guide for me. The book project that I am currently working on is very much modeled on her work. When it is done, she will certainly be a part of it.
