62% completion, 180 bookmarks
-HOWARD THE DUCK, FLIGHT OF THE EXPLORER, THE FLIGHT OF THE DRAGONS tv-movie, THE FLY, all come out in the summer of 1986.
-Anticipation for the December release of STAR TREK 4 builds, with SFLer's rewatching the earlier ST movies and re-reading the ST movie novelizations. Saavik being a half-Vulcan/half-Romulan as per the ST2/ST3 novelizations and Saavik getting recast in Star Trek 3 comes up a lot.
-The rumored STAR TREK tv-series remains just that, rumors and mostly guesswork. 20th Century drops out of the tv-series project and 1986 SFLer's think the upcoming Fox television-network launch is the reason.
-A weird event from 1836 gets mentioned, and yes 1986 SFLer who posted it, a short story about why rats looted 28 bottles of Uranium Oxide from a Hatton-Garden chemical storage warehouse and what exactly the rats were doing with them for 2 years would be amazing.
(2020 note: Please don't be fake news, "The Magazine of Popular Science and Journal of the Useful Arts" (published by John W. Parker, West Strand, London) Volume the First (1836) page 208: Unaccountable Theft of Chemicals by Rats.)
-Arlan Andrews provides the first instance of "You'll have to wait until my story is published" to fully find out why you are WRONG happens in the SFL Archives.
(2020 note: The Hephaestus Mission, Analog magazine if anyone is interested in finding out more.)
-More 1977 SILENT RUNNING movie discussion brings up that the body-actors for the ultra-cute robots in Silent Running 1977 were disabled people missing major body parts, bringing up a rare case of Hollywood not being total dickbags regarding hiring disabled people.
-Orson Scott Card's 1986 novel SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD has come out and finally gets discussed
-1960's/1970's Science Fiction tv-shows get brought up. LAND OF THE LOST, LOST IN SPACE, MY FAVORITE MARTIAN, LAND OF THE GIANTS, THE TIME TUNNEL, THE WILD WILD WEST, THE VISITORS, VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, the JOHNNY QUESTcartoon, etc.
The Wild Wild West's many SciFi themed plots despite it being a western themed adventure series gets mentioned a few times, however Land of the Lost and it's time looping weirdness comes up for repeated loops of discussion over and over again. :D
-SFLer's start discussing the FLIGHT OF THE DRAGONS TV-movie, and the 1979 book it was based on(THE FLIGHT OF THE DRAGONS) by Peter Dickinson. All this made me retroactively realize where Terry Pratchett got the clever stuff about swamp dragons in Pratchett's 1989 novel GUARDS! GUARDS!
-More SFLer recommendations appear for the "recommend me erotic SF stories" request originally posted back to the SF-LOVERS mailing list in June 1986. Shockingly John Norman's GOR series doesn't get recommended until early August 1986.
-A mention of dolphins sort of visually resembling the Alien movie franchise's iconic Xenomorphs in looks and possible communication methods (ultrasonics and echo-location) fails to bring DolphinF**ker back from their longtime SFL hiatus. DolphinF**ker, MIA 1984 - ???
-The producers of ALIEN 1979 & ALIENS 1986 having to pay A.E. Van Vogt $75,000+ in settlement money for ripping off Vogt's DISCORD IN SCARLET short story comes up a few times.
-A convoluted discussion about spaceships in the Alien/Aliens 1986 universe having FTL drives leads to a few separate ongoing discussion threads about Stephen Hawking's work on black-hole theories, the physics of time travel in SciFi stories; and of course, mentions of SciFi stories with time travel or time dilation in them.
-BAEN BOOKS and Jim Baen gets brought up a few times. Baen Books re-packing older stories with new titles, and Baen Books offerings not having the best proof-readers gets balanced by anecdotes of Baen Books treating authors fairly and not dicking over authors regarding payments/late payments.
And then there is Jim Baen's 1986 experiment with the "Baen Book Club". Buy 10 or more books directly from Baen and you get a 50% discount, with Baen Books paying the postage costs. Specialist bookstores hated this direct-sales offer they couldn't match. SFL writer-author Robert J. Sawyer wonders if Jim Baen's discount book club offer effects the royalty payouts authors get.
(2020 note: No idea how this is going to turn out. Guessing Jim Baen is going to end up closing down that Baen Book Club before 1986 ends. This can be seen as a direct precursor to Baen Books movement into direct ebook sales before 98% of the other book publishing companies took ebooks seriously.)
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