Saturday, September 26, 2020

SFL Archives Vol 11 readthrough update 10

 87% completion, 170 bookmarks

-STAR TREK 4's release date gets moved up to November 1986 thanks to positive test screening results.

-Roger Zelazny Amber series discussion kicks off hard. Readers new to the Amber series have questions regarding BLOOD OF AMBER, long-time Amber series fans respond. Everyone wants to know why Dara needed to walk the Pattern if a Chaos equivalent existed, what's up with Luke, etc. One very special SFLer has a unique take of  "Dworkin f**ked the Unicorn, the Unicorn is secretly Oberon's mother and this is why the Unicorn keeps popping up to fix the Amber Royal families many many f**k-ups".

-Paramount releases an official press release that STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION is real and scheduled for a Fall 1987 premiere. Gene Roddenberry becomes a divisive figure, some SFL Star Trek fans refer to him as the sole source responsible for all things old and new Star Trek related, other SFL Star Trek fans tend to credit the many Star Trek producers, writers, and so on that Gene Roddenberry overshadows/steals credit from.     

-Stephen Donaldson has a new book out (THE MIRROR OF HER DREAMS), David Brin has a new book out (THE POSTMAN), Gene Wolfe has a new book out (SOLDIER OF THE MIST), Kim Stanley Robinson has a new book out (THE PLANET ON THE TABLE).

-A request for for help finding the earliest modern werewolf story brings up lots of examples. WAGNER THE WERE-WOLF by G.W.M. Reynolds. LE MENEUR DE LOUPS by A. Dumas. Chapter 39 in Fredrick Marryat's THE PHANTOM SHIP. Hugues: the Wer-Wolf: A Kentish tale of the Middle Ages. The Severed Arm by Anonymous in TALES OF ALL NATIONS.

-Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's series about a 2000+ year old vampire named Ragoscvy Saint Germaine sounds interesting strictly for the various historic eras the stories take place in.

-BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (original series) discussion with people thinking the Cylon Imperial leader is organic or in-organic or soul-transferred into a cyborg body or something

-BLAKES 7 discussion gears up again, with behind-the-scenes details and series trivia that makes it understandable why Blake's 7 was such a iconic groundbreaking scifi tv series.

-R.A. McAvoy's work comes up again. TWISTING THE ROPE is seen as a major disappoint by SFL readers, because it drops all of the fantasy elements and low key charm of TEA WITH THE BLACK DRAGON and instead goes all in on Celtic touring band drama.

-Tech-trivia about the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY has a legit callback to groundbreaking 1930's digital audio generation that lead to creation of physical vocoder technology.   

-David Hartwell, SciFi editor?, auctions off his clothing at a convention to raise money for ill and temporarily homeless author George Alec Effinger.

-Taboos in STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES have SFLers fixating on homosexual situations, drug use/abuse, and jailbait scenarios "allegedly" in original drafts of Star Trek: TOS shooting scripts.

-The Saga of Fuzzy Pink aka MITSFS's "my roommate Fuzzy Pink".  

-DANGERMOUSE and DANGER MAN /THE PRISONER discussion.

-SFLer's try to describe the art-styles and significance of anime character design, facial tics, eye size, etc. and how the various anime art-styles are not-racist stereotypes of Japanese/Americans/etc like some very vocal SFLer think so.

-Home-improvement projects the SFLer way: someone is converting a garage into a dedicated library room and wants tips on how to manage the humidity level in a non-cooled/non-heated former garage.

-The trope about "infinite monkeys in a room with the goal of typing out Shakespeare's work" and the many SciFi story takes on this trope. Murder, murder-suicide, and mass monkeycide are usually the outcomes in those SciFi story takes.

-The canonical SF Music list of 1986. Mostly lists of bands, artists, albums, songs, song lyrics, song lyric discussion, context to certain lyrics.

-Daniel F Galouye's THE INFINITE MAN may enrage or delight mathematics fans and possibly conspiracy theory nuts obsessed with Pi.

-A question about (cosplay) weapons and (cosplay) weapons policies at conventions brings up lots of anecdotes, peace-bond situations, and eyebrowing raising situations convention security usually deals with. Basically some cosplayers act like idiots 24/7 especially in costume.

-VOLPA, a short story about a mad scientest creating a bunch of intelligent winged creatures complete with fake backstory and invented language, just to f**k with future archeologists or historians who stumble across them.

-The first mention of WORLDS OF IF SciFi magazine in the SFL Archives. (2020 note: If magazine has been fully digitized and is available at the internet archive project.)

-Timothy Zahn's THE BLACKCOLLAR/THE BLACKLASH MISSION stories sound like source material DC Comics used when coming up with the supervillian BANE.

-3rd email announcement about the 1986 TUCKER AWARDS, this time recapping the prizes/need to be physically at the convention to win, with the rigged nomination slate carried over from the 2nd TUCKER AWARD email announcement.



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