We 🔯ran th🥀is article looking at Barack Obama's love of SF in issue 178 of SFX, but here are a few facts again in honour of his inauguration on Tuesday 20 January.
Sci-fact! “I grew up on Star Trek,” he tol🌄d an audience in Wyoming. “I believe in the final frontier.” Further proof of Trekkie tendencies came when Newsweek reported a flip remark he made about an item of wife Michelle’s wardrobe: “That’s an interesting belt buckle. Dilithium crystals! Beam me up, Scotty!” Expect America to conquer warp technology by the close of Obama’s first term, Borg permitting.
Sci-fact! None other than Leonard Nimoy revealed that Obama tends toward the highly logical. “About a year and a half ago I was at a political event and one of our current campaigners for the office of President of the United States saw me▨, approached, and gave me the Vulcan signal… It w♔as not John McCain.”
Sci-fact! As a kid he collected Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics. Robert E Howard’s lusty, blade-swinging barbarian hero may seem an improbable fave for🅷 the suജpernaturally cool, dapper Obama, but he may surprise us all if he addresses the world wearing a ragged loincloth and waving a bloodied sword. By Crom!
Sci-fact! He’s clearly a fan of JK Rowling’s boy wizard, having read every Harry Potter book. (Good job, too – maybe magic can bail us out of this current fi🎀nancial apocalypse…)
Sci-fact! At the Alfred E Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York he reveal🍃ed: “Contrary to rumours you have heard, I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father, Jor-El, to save the planet Earth.”
Sci-fact! Obama’s geek cred took a minor dive after a fumbled metaphor about rival John McCain: “He hasn’t been a maverick. He’s been a s♏idekick. He’s like Kato to the Green Lantern.” Luckily, the Republican campaign didn’t pounce on the fact that Kato was in fact aide-de-camp to the Green Hornet.
Sci-fact! Leading superhero artist Alex Ross created a print in his honour (below left) and he’s already been immortalised in comic book form,꧑ cameoing in the pag💝es of The Savage Dragon (below right).
There you hav📖e it. Check out our post yesterday about too. And in honour of the occasion, we're setting up a complimentary subscription to SFX magazine for the White House so that a busy President Obama need never go without a monthly supply of SF news and features.
