Meet Gene Turnbow

We had the good fortune of connecting with Gene Turnbow and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Gene, every day, we know how much execution matters, but we think ideas matter as well. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
A bunch of my friends and I were in an online RPG, and wanted a sci-fi radio station to listen to while gaming, so in 2009, we made one. We had been broadcasting for a few years when we finally figured out that nobody else was functioning in this particular niche, and that we were the only ones doing it. In 2011, we decided to try to make a business out of it. By 2013 we were incorporated, and by 2015 the business was self-sustaining. It took a great deal of volunteer work to get it there, but we eventually did find our footing, and our audience.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
At the heart of things, I’ve always been a storyteller. I make things you can’t get, take you places you could never otherwise go, and bring you other worlds to explore.

I started as a sculptor, helping make Cylons for the Universal Studios Tour in 1979. I did practical and makeup effects for over a decade, and made props for dozens of television shows and movies, some tacky, some wonderful. The gamut goes from Fall Guy and Knight Rider to Star Trek: the Next Generation, to Buckaroo Banzai and more.

I got interested in computers, and learned networking and IT, and did that for several entertainment companies, including two stock footage houses and Technicolor Videocassette. I took a break from that for a year and restored motion pictures for a year, with my noteworthies being the restoration of Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo for the New York Museum of Modern Art, and Orson Welles’ Othello, the film he was working on when he died.

I taught myself programming, then became a game programmer and designer for the likes of such companies as Dreamers Guid, TDK Mediactive and Sony Development. Then I taught myself animation, and got a job at Rhythm and Hues training incoming artists on how to use the pipeline. I had to learn how to do every single production person’s job. I became the studio’s Information Architect, a role held by only five other people in the world at the time. While I was there, I got trained up as a figurative artist, learning from some of the best in the world.

It was during my stay at Rhythm & Hues that I founded SCIFI.radio, and found my community in the geeking world. It’s been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, and now it’s giving me the opportunity to create my own publishing imprint, Helium Beach, and I’m publishing my first novel, Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere.

An amazing number of us are all looking for our big break. I spent a huge chunk of my life watching other people get struck by lightning, so to speak, and having their dreams come true. It turns out, though, that it sometimes does come down to that. You get that lightning strike, and suddenly everything changes. But that’s not how it usually goes. Usually, you find yourself doing something you’ve never done before because you’ve had to, because the universe is leaving you no choice but to succeed.

In my case, throughout most of it, failure was never an option. Stressful and terrifying? You bet. But for most of us, we have to greenlight ourselves, and work with what we have, and throughout my life, that’s what I’ve done.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
The Museum of Jurassic Technology is high on my list. It’s a wonky little place near Exposition Park, and it features displays of all sorts of things people thought was real science.

After that, absolutely the Griffith Park Observatory, which has inspired many a dreamer and scientist.

I’m a huge fan of the California Science Center, which admittedly has seen better days and needs better funding, but it’s still fun, and has an outstanding section devoted to flight and aerospace. And of course there’s an actual Space Shuttle there, and it is stupifyingly awesome.

There’s no getting around the fact that the Scum and Villany Cantina is the place to be for sci-fi geeks, and I hear they’re opening another one in Burbank now. And speaking of Burbank, there’s the Guildhall. It’s a cosy little gamer bar with great tabletop gaming opportunities, good to great food, and great stuff on tap. I’m also a fan of Geeky Teas, in Burbank, which is mainly a table-top gaming establishment with a store in the front where you can buy all sorts of games, gaming supplies, and generally genre stuff.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Success stories are not commonly linear. We love to hear stories about how we set a goal for ourselves, trained ourselves up to meet the challenge, then succeeded against impossible odds and took a victory lap at the end. This is not actually how success stories go. The real success stories are tangled balls of misunderstood limitations, missed opportunities, and creative minds joining forces to amplify their efforts to be greater than the sum of their parts.

We do our best to use our big loud voice to uplift other creators. We feature the creative talents from nearly every medium on our web site and on our talk shows, and in return, they lift us up too. If there are shoutouts to be distributed, it would be to each and every one of the patrons on our Patreon and Ko-Fi campaigns that keep us afloat—but beyond that, I have to acknowledge every single one of those writers, musicians, animators, artists and filmmakers who have come to us over the years who’ve asked us to lend our voice to theirs to lift them up. And of course, you can’t lift others up without being lifted up along with them.

So here’s to the all the creators of the geeky universe. We wouldn’t be here without all of you who came to stand with us.

Website: https://scifi.radio

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scifi4wifi/

Twitter: https://x.com/scifi4wifi

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SCIFI4Wifi

Youtube: https://youtube.com/c/scifiradio

Other: https://bsky.app/profile/scifi.radio

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Studio office photo by Susan L. Fox