Re-reading the SF-LOVERS digests from the beginning, only I'm taking notes this time.
https://archive.org/details/SFLoversDigestArchive
-If you're disappointed that there isn't more black/non-white/female/alt-gender main characters in modern fantasy + science-fiction stories, that has been an ongoing complaint about the scifi + fantasy genres for at least 40 yrs (source: SF-LOVERS Digest Vol 1, late March 1980)
-Posts coming from @UCLA-Security in the SF-LOVERS mailing list were highly readable: lots of interesting behind the scenes info about the Star Trek franchise, prophetic generic statements, and detailed summaries of then current sci-fi themed tv series/tv-movies you can now find at wikipedia/imdb.
-If you thought Roger Zelazny's original content do-not-steal AMBER series sucked and was derivative....you are correct! AMBER series was apparently a direct ripoff of Philip Jose Farmer's "World of Tiers" series. But since PJF ripped off everyone else constantly, no lawsuits happened.
-Even back in 1980 Andre Norton had a staggering amount of published fiction out in the world.
-You can palpably feel the growth of Star Wars fandom as time goes on. A now forgotten part of the "Empire Strikes Back" marketing was phone banks you could call to listen to special teaser audio clips from the ESB cast, and those phone banks being unavailable keeps cropping up. 40 years later I'm wondering WTF was in those phone-bank ESB audio clips.
-Robert Forward was a "hard-scifi author" of his era, and used the SF-LOVERS mailing list as a sounding board/rebuttal forum to hard scifi "that doesn't make sense" questions and statements.
-the ongoing jokes, taunts and dares about computer viruses and network tapeworms in the SF-LOVERS mailing list give some compelling backstory to Robert Tappan Morris's 1988 "breaking of the Internet".
-Hal Draper's 1961 short story MS Fnd in a Lbry was very prophetic, especially for software developers
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