I’m late to this, but whoa what humbling news! I am now a XYZZY Award winning co-author. Nnneat! (Bernard Bernoulli smile)
Was the Excalibur wiki really released in 2021? It feels like so long ago I fear I’ve forgotten most of it.
Uh, is this the place for acceptance speeches? Ahem. Here I go anyway…
Obviously first and foremost I must thank my co-authors. Dare I even say the real authors? The Excalibur wiki wouldn’t exist without J.J. Guest and wouldn’t’ve been finished without G.C. Baccaris. Between the two of them I feel like I’m just the bread crust on this sandwich. All other wiki contributors, too, thank you, yes even and especially Ian and the rest. Also to my fellow XYZZY tie-winners and everyone else nominated. It’s a thrill to be in such esteemed company!
Secondly, maybe less obviously but as emphatically, I wish to build on my reticence to say “real authors” and reaffirm my position that the conspiracy theory stating Excalibur is just an “interactive fiction” written by three of us is still just as wrong. This erroneous idea has been around for some time, so long I’m not even sure of its genesis. The show came out before I at least was even born, I dunno how I’d fabricate all that. To clarify: the wiki itself was a recent invention, yes, and J.J. Guest’s brainchild, but pieced together lovingly from of course real sources as anyone can see. Has everybody really forgotten the show? C’mon, I hardly think that’s likely. Not everybody. Lethe is a myth, right? Unless…
I also noted some reviews (I forget which by now, maybe it was just one) referred to J.M. Vaillant as an existentialist, but I’d like to point out that he’s generally considered a nihilist more in line with like Zapffe or Ligotti. His “Hantises” (quotes or italics? I’ve seen them used so interchangeably on the Web that I can hardly remember anymore) takes the stance that Sartre’s “bad faith” is itself a sort of “bad faith,” considering that the freedom it assumes is wholly illusory. Ineluctable, atavistic haunting and all that. If I still had the book I would quote it with a page number or something, but I lost my copy when I moved across country almost a whole decade ago now. Yeesh how time flies! I was pretty sure I’d returned it to the library (pretty sure… that and HPL’s Collected Letters Volume V, which later turned up in another box though Hantises did not), but UC Santa Cruz still charged me for it.
Funny story, one of the things I had almost added to the wiki that got caught and (rightfully!) edited out was something I recalled watching on CBC the night of a comet or meteor shower or some such astronomical event I forget exactly, but it turned out to be the opening from another show, “Die Madchen Aus Dem Weltraum,” (starring Blake’s Seven’s Gareth Thomas) with music by Berry Lipman. Not that it was played clearly in the astronomical event or even clearly remembered by me, being something I saw when I was like maybe eight. We had a laugh over that… what with the pandemic interlude and all that laugh seems about as long ago as the show. Coincidentally, I love Berry Lipman and just rediscovered his happy sounds a couple years ago, about the same time I picked up Disco Elysium and (not necessarily related to that game plot-wise) rediscovered how disco really did connect the entire world for a decade or two. Ah the things we forget, eh?
What was I on about? Oh, right. Excalibur! What a show. Magnificently, daringly weird, even bleak, scary, wonderful. I loved every bit I could catch, even if it was fuzzy or even sometimes too staticky to really interpret with 100% accuracy ever. Such are memories, c’est la vie.
Thanks again to everyone who helped catalog it, to all its fans, to all of the wiki readers who either revisited it with us or discovered it newly, and to anyone or anything else I might be forgetting. Mayhap one day there’ll be a Lodestar One Two? But if there is please… please don’t come wearing a chef’s hat. Surely we will check all lightsabers at the door. Unless we forget (and we’ll probably forget).