61% completion, 50 bookmarks.
-William Shatner shares his concept pitch for STAR TREK 5 in a 1987 interview with PLAYGIRL magazine. (2020 note: Maybe 1 in 5 of the ideas in William Shatner's concept pitch made it into the 1989 STAR TREK 5 movie.)
-April Fools Day jokes, 1987 edition: The meta-joke is 99% of the April Fools jokes getting sent out on March 30th & 31st 1987, with their original sent dates of a week or two back. One Aprils Fool email manages to successfully troll people into angry responses. Robots are serious business and Isaac Asimov/Fred Saberhagen fans repeatedly throw down challenge gauntlets vs each other and the April Fool's joke emailer.
-More BOSKONE discussion. Sometime in late March 1987, the Boskone management committee (NEFSA) sends out a requirements-for-entry to 1988's upcoming BOSKONE 25, and roughly 90% of the people who attended previous Boskone conventions would be excluded from attending Boskone 25. The SFLers who attended previous Boskone's/planned on attending Boskone 25 are extremely angry about being pre-excluded, which goes against many of the tenets of SF fendom is about. IE being a open, non-judgemental and welcoming lot to everyone who likes SF.
The people for shrinking BOSKONE conventions in scope are mostly NEFSA members, and resort to personal attacks on the most vocal opponents of shrinking Boskone conventions. From a 2020 standpoint, the NEFSA people never flat out say "We are extremely burnt out and could not handle dealing with as many people that attended BOSKONE 24. Therefore the next Boskone convention, Boscone 25, is shrinking massively in scope.", which would have immediately ended the anger postings of the SFLer's against BOSKONE 25 shrinking in scope and may have added dozens of now-eager-to-pitch-in volunteers to the BOSKONE 25 infrastructure.
BTW, The requirements list to attend BOSKONE 25 has a lot of staggering "wait a second, this convention ran 24/7, and they weren't doing basic things like restricting access/requiring convention badges to be displayed at all times/having a no alcohol on convention floor rules before?" things in it.
-Someone posts a 3 part STAR WARS 3 movie draft that is 100% fan-fiction under the guise of stolen draft notes from Skywalker Ranch, and yet this 1987 Star Wars fan-fiction is better plotted and thought out than George Lucas managed to do regarding STAR WARS: REVENGE OF THE SITH.
-Roger Zelazny fans keep comparing his LORD OF LIGHT, and CREATURES OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS together. (2020 note: I had absolutely no recollection of CoLaD even existing before reading about it in the 1987 SFL Archives.)
-Books/Authors SFLers recommend: A VOYAGE TO ACTURUS (David Lindsay), the novella FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (Daniel Keyes), SOAP OPERA (Alan Nelson), THE BIG U (Neal Stephenson), IN THE DRIFT (Michael Swanwick), KITEWORLD (Keith Roberts), THE SILENT TOWER (Barbara Hambly), THE UPLIFT WAR (David Brin), and the works of Doris Lessing.
-Timothy Leary, desperate for attention slash validation as a guru in the 1980's, glooms onto the Cyberpunk movement as his new meal-ticket.
-Racism in the STAR WARS movies and what source's George Lucas ripped off making STAR WARS. Examples given like: Droid's being inferior, Chewbacca slave-subservient to Han Solo, Lando being a traitor, everyone hating Jawa's (even droids). HIDDEN FORTRESS, THE SEARCHERS, HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, THE DAMN BUSTERS, etc.
-More death notices for 1987. SciFi author James Triptree Jr aka Alice Bradley Sheldon. Terry Carr, SciFi editor. Patrick Troughton, most famous for being the 2nd DOCTOR WHO actor. Gardner F Fox, DC Comics writer/SF author.
-Anime discussion intensifies in April 1987. Summer Macross 1984, many anime series I'm not bothering transcribing here, seeking out the hidden "Japantown's" in American cities with large Japanese populations to score manga & non-dubbed Japanimation movies.
-I finally notice that the Leeper Clan (Evelyn & Mark) has started putting copyright notices on their surface-level-at-best "reviews" of all things SciFi & Fantasy they come across.
-Montague Summers, UK priest that also wrote encyclopedic reference books on supernatural entities across the world, allegedly so that if they were real, the Church would know exactly what was needed to kill them. THE VAMPIRE: HIS KITH AND KIN, THE VAMPIRE IN EUROPE, THE WEREWOLF, etc.
-SFLer's wonder why is STAR WARS obsessed with showing only one-biome planets. (2020 note: How quickly people forget Dagobah the Mud (Half-water/Half Forest) planet.)
-SFLer's start discussing THE KING IN YELLOW by Robert W. Chambers, with the tonal shift of the first half of the stories vs the last half reliably confusing the hell out of non-Victorian era readers reading the King in Yellow for the first time.
(2020 note: THE KING IN YELLOW is the one book I am shocked that Philip Jose Farmer DID NOT attempt to vulture in on. I mean, Farmer vultured in on Vonnegut, and HP Lovecraft and many others....wait a sec. Holy crap. I see it now. The RIVERWORLD series. That was Philip Jose Farmer's take on the KING IN YELLOW....and yes, reading all the Riverworld books did drive me insane.)
-SFLer's start bringing their worst SciFi movie of all time? Many extremely terrible SF themed movies get brought up, however I will only bother listing ZARDOZ.
-Initial casting notes for STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION get leaked. Captain Julian Picard, Lt. Tanya Yar, and you can feel the Gene Roddenberry skeeviness level kick in when it gets to Beverly Crusher and "
BEVERLY CRUSHER -- Wesley's 35 year old mother. She serves as the chief medical officer on the Enterprise. If it were not for her intelligence, personality, beauty and the fact that she has a natural walk of a striptease queen, Capt. Picard might not have agreed to her request that Wesley observe bridge activities; therefore letting her son's intelligence carry events further.
-MAX HEADROOM the tv-series discussion. The differences between the BBC pilot episode of MAX HEADROOM vs the American tv-series, what got dumbed down, locations reshoot or totally removed in the American version, and what actors carried over from the BBC pilot episode, and how MAX HEADROOM themselves got less-edgy from when they were doing Coke ads, or interviewing pop-culture celebrities like David Bowie, etc.
(2020 note: The interviewing pop-culture celebrities stuff reminded me of SPACE GHOST: COAST TO COAST. And now I want SPACE GHOST: COAST TO COAST to be revived ASAP, with Space ghost interviewing cans of Fanta or Youtube personalities or TikTok people.)
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