In my recaps of reading the SFL archives, I tend to not mention: outdated science/physics chat, FTL travel vs STL chat, scifi tv series episode listings, topical scifi/fantasy movie reviews or topical scifi/fantasy book reviews, identify-this story for me requests, childrens tv programming of the 50's/60's/70's chat, religion debates, Hugo/Nebula award nominations + award winners chat, "what is the Force" debates?, and the many listings of upcoming global scifi conventions/results of just finished global scifi conventions.
-Vernor Vinge's age of cyberspace TRUE NAMES came out and was reviewed favorably by most SFL members. Douglas Adams 1st & 2nd HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY series books were released in the US, and had less favorable reviews. No one has really discussed Gene Wolfe's 1981 CLAW OF THE CONCILIATOR or 1980 BOOK OF THE NEW SUN so far, but things might change.
-Back in 1981, Lucas Films and NPR collaborated to make a radio drama out of STAR WARS: A New Hope the movie with Mark Hamill (which maybe kickstarted Hamill's prolific voice-acting career) & Anthony Daniels (C3PO), plus a bunch of ringers. As a moderate Star Wars fan, the existence of the 1981 Star Wars radio drama, and spoiler alert the existence of the other original SW trilogy radio dramas got memory-holed harder than David Proust, the body-actor of Darth Vader
-A profile of Ralph Bakshi, 1970s-80s cartoonist I mostly remember for the unsettling-blobby artwork in Bakshi's Lord of the Rings movies. Bakshi promoted his other animation efforts, including a movie about black America called....uh even posting the movie name will end in a probe so just look it up yourself or if that's too much effort, think of the "badly aged Eric Cartman super-hero persona" and uh make it more racist.
e: I was remembering the unsettling and blobbly artwork from Rankin/Bass animatted movie efforts like the HOBBIT 1977, not Bakshi's work.
-Larry Niven's DOWN IN FLAMES, the 1968/1977 unofficial abandoned conclusion to the Known Space/Ringworld series finally got described in detail Everything you know about the Known Space setting is a hoax. Down in Flames discussion was interesting enough that I read it myself, and no bullshit it is better than everything Niven proceeded to write about the Ringworld and Known Space setting for the next 8 books.
If you do choose to see Down in Flames as Known Space/Ringworld canon, you can safely abandon the Ringworld series after the 1st Ringworld book aka Ringworld 1970, while the remaining Known Space stories written after 1978 sort-of fit if you don't think too hard about timedates.
-biology chat becomes the running topic of the fortnight, with DNA encoding, scifi stories about DNA encoding, goats=unicorns (which I will come back to), etc
-MENSA membership gets pimped in the SFL for the first time I can remember. The MENSA membership ad gets a faint sneery tone when mentioning alternate methods of qualifying for MENSA membership (combined SAT results or combined GRE results over certain scores will get you in under limited membership status)
-DolphinF**cker is against proposals for "permanent" assignation of phone numbers to people, for *wink* privacy reasons. *wink*
-the SFL liveposted the first manned Space Shuttle launch attempt on April 10 1981. Keyword being: attempt.
-A reposted article from the Baltimore Sun newspaper brings the 1st mention of space borne telescopes into the SFL archives. These space borne telescopes (due to be launched in 1985) will have sensors/cameras that might be able to detect extrasolar planets.
(2020 sidenote: those extrasolar planet detecting methods mentioned in the article are still being fine-tuned today/2020 time period.)
-SPECIES movie fans will find Fred Hoyle's 1975 novel A FOR ANDROMEDA uses an eerily similar setup, but Hoyle's book series fails to implement H.R. Giger and instead goes with a deep-state conspiracy.
-the goats=unicorns thing.
Someone I didn't bother bookmarking posted about recent studies of medieval documents/myth had lead to scholars thinking that references to unicorn were really references to one-horned goats. Chapman.ES promotes his friend from the Berkeley area named Morning Glory who showed off a unicorn-goat named Lancelot at the February 1981 Berkeley Fantasy Worlds Convention. When asked about Lancelot the goat-unicorn, Chapman.ES said that Morning Glory and her husband mentioned a careful breeding plan that two years ago resulted in Lancelot. Additionally......something akin to Bonsai helped out, but Morning Glory couldn't go into more details because they were trying to patent the process.
(emphasis mine)
People replied back to Chapman.ES mentioning common farm practices of de-horning livestock. And then other people ran with that and suggested maybe two goat horns got fused together in Lancelot's case, or maybe shortly after birth, one horn got removed totally with the other horn bud moved/shifted over. Chapman.ES flipped the fuck out and went full "I take exception to your slur upon Morning Glory and her husband, and your suggestion that they are charlatans. These are sincere people, who are into mysticism, it is true, but just because you don't agree with their world view doesn't mean you have to insult them."....and so on for another 70-90 lines.
-Didn't think I'd find something to top Bakshi's hyper badly aged 'black america in the south' animated movie within less than 24 hrs, however someone in the SFL mentioned that H Beam Piper's LITTLE FUZZY was ripping off a earlier story.....and they weren't making things up.
A semi-famous World War 2 french resistance member slash author wrote "LES ANIMAUX DENATURES" or "YOU SHALL KNOW THEM" in it's english language translation.
story recap: tribes of "missing link" hominids are found in the jungles of new guinea, and exploited as an cheap workforce similar to "war with the newts". Scientist-perverts or just normal perverts discover that the missing link hominids <ugh> can get pregnant with <ugh> human sperm <quadruple ugh>. One of the scientist-perverts impregnates a missing link hominid with his sperm then kills the baby once it is born; under the reasoning that the ensuing trial will determine if the missing link hominids are human (and therefore deserve human rights) or not.
Adding to the weirdness/wtf factor, a Burt Reynolds movie called SKULLDUGGERY is a loose adaption of "les animaux denatures".
originally posted between July 1st- July 3rd in the SomethingAwful forums Science Fiction Fantasy Megathread 3
No comments:
Post a Comment