34% completion, 135 bookmarks
-Continued LORD OF THE RINGS language chat, with one SFLer going back to the Hobbit and Gandalf being unable to read elfish script correctly.
-The 1985-1986 reviewer-idiotking of the SF-LOVERS mailing list posts a review of the 1958 movie HIDDEN FORTRESS (not being the inspiration for lots of visuals in Star Wars: A New Hope) so brain-dead, everyone starts dunking on him with detailed illuminating reviews of SciFi & Fantasy stories/movies/cartoons/Anime/Manga that they have come across.
-Someone goes next level stalker and posts Harlan Ellison's phone number to the SF-LOVERS mailing list; encouraging other people to call Ellison out-of-the-blue like he did. Most of the SFL has a "WTF, dude..seriously WTF" reaction, while the person who posted Harlan Ellison's phone number to the internet triples-down and says that Ellison likes fan contact/gets off on the adversarial phone calls he makes/made to Ellison.
-Proto-otaku's start to emerge in the SFL Archives with posts like "Congratulations! You have just discovered the world of Japanese Manga (comic books)." and Subject:Japanese Animation: An Introduction for the Uninitiated". Most of the 1986 proto-otaku's/all-things-Japan subject matter experts come from the ARPANET node at the University of Waterloo Canada
-People start complaining about BAEN BOOKS repacking decades old Keith Laumer stories as new content.
-Yet another installment of the "Advice requested for a <1986> new author looking to get published" and the responses.
-SHORT CIRCUIT the movie comes out and someone low-key compares it to John Sladek's story TIK TOK.
-A weird bit of SciFi pulp fiction creeps out. In 1948 or early 1949, a anonymous person sent in a fake review of the upcoming October or November 1949 issue of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION magazine, complete with author & story title listing. John W. Campbell bit, and low-key contacted the authors listed in that fake review ASF review and had them write SciFi stories using those story titles, and then published everything listed in that fake review. JW Campbell then used that gag as a editorial hook-line about how Science Fiction can become a Self-Fulfilling prophecy.
(2020 note: I haven't googled any this so far. Currently hope that it was real and not someone making up a fake story to burnish how amazing JW Campbell was an editor/human being/lover)
-1980's tv series REMINGTON STEEL has been canceled, and it looks like Pierce Brosnan is going to be the next James Bond in "THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS" (2020 note: I know what happened IRL regarding this)
-Another joint Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle book starts getting discussed....this time it is FOOTFALL @1985, and some of the SFLer descriptions of the plot and aliens and actions taken in it sort of has me thinking Footfall is one of canon sources for the ugly-as-fucking-hell scifi Web Comic Shlock mercenary
-THIS ISLAND EARTH, a 1955 movie starts getting mentioned because it appeared as clips in a recent Steven Spielberg movie (The Explorers or the Goonies, or possibly an episode of Amazing Stories)
-Medicare for all, aka the old pulp SciFi story about "a libertarian being unable to pay the grossly inflated hospital bill for his daughters birth, so he lets the hospital raise her and educate her until the daughter grows old enough to pay it off herself" gets mentioned. (2020 note: I read this story a few years ago and slight spoiler the hospital almost bankrupted itself trying to calculate all the interest due when the daughter-raised-by-the-hospital was about graduate college)
-L Neil Smith, founder of the Libertarian Hugo Award and all the bizarre things that 1986 era SFLers were able to dig up on L Neil Smith, like winning the award he founded 3 times, and writing a libertarian novel where the default libertarian heroes had to travel in time to stop Jane Fonda, in full 1980's exercise mode, from destroying the future's beautiful libertarian utopia
-Bruce Sterling's SCHISMATRIX comes up for one of the first times in SFL Archives history. (2020 note: Schismatrix was a ground-defining book for post-humanity stories...and pretty much everything else Bruce Sterling has written can safely be ignored).
-HARD TO BE A GOD, the Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky Noon Universe setting story about a Progessor agent going undercover in a off-planet medieval civilization comes up for the first time in SFL Archives history.
-The DOCTOR WHO series possibly maybe casting a female Doctor Who ends up as another fan-baiting "f**k you" rumor by John Nathan-Turner
-First mention of CJ Cherryh's 1985 novel CUCKOO'S EGG in the SFL Archives
-1986 SFL people continue debating Tolkien lore throughout April 1986 into early June 1986 and gradually come to the conclusion that GANDALF IS ILLITERATE
(2020 take: Thanks to this, 2020 me now thinks of pre-scourging Gandalf the Grey as a Charlie Kelly guy, happy to chill with idiot hobbits because Saruman is Dennis Reynolds. Which would make Sweet Dee Reynolds = Radagast aka the "Bird Wizard". Mac would be the two unknown LotR Blue Wizards, symbolizing Mac before he came out and Mac after he came out. Frank would be Tom Bombadil, with either Gail the Snail or Roxy the whore as Bombadil's bang-buddy Goldberry. The McPoyles are Elrond and his clan. And of course, Rickety Cricket is Gollum)
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