SFL Archives Vol 07 readthrough

 SFL Vol 07 is extremely short. Vol 07 picks up 2  months into 1983(not normal)  with a brand new SF-LOVERS mailing list moderator-maintainer. TCP/IP was a spooky-new technology being tested for SFL Digest distribution versus relying on hardcoded AarpaNet network links on dying 1970's era hardware leading to multiple week long gaps in between SFL Digests being sent out. 

-Dr Robert Forward asked the SFL mailing list for help finding a wizard of CAD to create the illustrations of variable usage robots in Forwards serialized story/upcoming book ROCHEWORLD aka FLIGHT OF THE DRAGONFLY. 

-Yet another scifi genre writer revealed themselves in the SFL archives. (I've done no lookups into any of the self-doxxed authors that have posted in the SFL archives other than Dr Robert Forward/Dr Robert Forward's edgelord son)

-RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983) came out. The shoe-horned in muppets and Ewok's and Lucas being more interested in in cinematography than telling a story are what most of the negative reactions re SFL "Return of the Jedi" posts are about. Very funny reading 37 years later, especially funny given how George Lucas tripled down on those factors for STAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACE.

-Glen Cook and Gene Wolfe and John Brunner got mentioned and discussed multiple times. Added tracking down Brunner's THE SHEEP LOOK UP, and Wolfe's CASTLE OF THE OTTER to my reading list.

-Mack Reynolds obituary notice. Mack Reynolds is still the best hardcore socialist scifi/fantasy writer I've ever come across. China Miéville and Ken Macleod are weak/terrible sellout in comparison. Mack Reynolds walked the hardcore socialist walk back when going to jail for being a socialist or getting black-balled was a real and omnipresent thing.

-An uber Libertarian mil-fiction series all about Texas and Texans kicking names and taking ass of everyone and everything else in the world got mentioned positively first, then not so positively mentioned.
Daniel Da Cruz is the author, THE AYES OF TEXAS is the series starting book, and the book plot is 100% ripped off from SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO only Texas-ified

-People who "crack-ping" on the Jeffrey Epstein threads will be delighted that Donald Barr, father of the current US Attorney General, gets mentioned for the first time ever by a weird Canadian that liked Donald Barr's writing in SPACE RELATIONS/A PLANET IN ARMS

-Stephen R. Donaldson's THOMAS COVENANT series got discussed repeatedly, but I don't give a fuck about Thomas Covenant at all, and hold to a special theory about the books. It was all a meth-fantasy/it was all a shared meth-fantasy when the secondary main character (Linden Avery) showed up.

-WARGAMES (1983) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/ ended up as the bridge-too-far moment/total user-meltdown topic for a SFL user that had been posting in the SFL mailing since the very beginning (September 1979). The technical inaccuracies in Wargames 1983 made this long-time SFL user snap, and angry post multiple times at length about Wargames 1983. Given that the SFL user's IRL job was/is computer security related, most of the anger/frustration appears to be coming from a unspoken "oh shit this movie is going to inspire a never-ending wave of hacking attempts by phone freaks/arpanet people....on all the systems I support/my friends support"

(2020 sidenotes:
For people not really familiar with the 1970s-80s, malicious phone phreaking and malicious computer hacking were becoming major issues in the 1980s. Prior to the malicious turn, motivation for phone-phreaking in the 1970s-80s was more for the lulz and giving a middle finger to the monolithic omnipresent Bell Telephone Company, and computer systems were isolated mainframes or very open non-networked computer systems.

Google Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulsen, both of whom turned legit/as-legit as possible given their history. Poulsen wrote a mostly amusing non-fiction book about another convicted computer hacker titled Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground.)

originally posted between July 22nd -July 24th in the SomethingAwful forums Science Fiction Fantasy Megathread 3