SFL Archives Vol 13
5.9 mb raw text file
100% completion, 198 bookmarks
-A Pacific Bell newsletter reviews William Gibson's NEUROMANCER. The review is ok, however the constant insertions & defensive rebuttal comments by the SFLer reposting the PacBell newsletter review make it a hard read.
-An outright pitch for the San Diego Comic Convention by a SFL convention organizer/convention merchant, which as of 1988 was a strictly non-profit event.
-An SFLer half remembering a Cordwainer Smith aka Paul Linebargers pen-name, and roughly half of the SFL posters chime in to give corrections/clarification/story recommendations on Cordwainer Smith.
(2020 note: Linebarger's work on a Pysops World War 2 manual comes up briefly)
-Fall 1988 twist on matter transportation chat mostly revolves on what happens to the original body, and souls, soul transference in transported entities.
-Lots of discussion about Roger Zelazny's AMBER series, especially the Pattern & the Logrus ability powers.
-1988 being the year of Roddy Piper movies, with HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN and THEY LIVE. Indepth discussion of PHANTASM 2, and behind the scenes leaks on the sets of BATMAN 1989 & STAR TREK 5.
-Science-fiction stories that focused on THE BEATLES the UK Band.
-Lots of buildup for WorldCon 1988 in New Orleans, Louisiana followed up by mostly hushed up talk about how poorly managed everything at WorldCon 1988 was except the Hugo Award.
-Trinary encoding being faster than binary encoding on custom built computer systems....which leaves out the added effort of rewriting code in trinary, then having to support binary & trinary programming, etc etc.
-A new twist on ALIEN 1979 & ALIENS 1986 discussion: Are the various Alien lifeforms/lifestages sentient or intelligent because they do/do not engage in tool usage? A person who keeps referring to the Space Jockey thing it as a (alien) "mother" leads to inevitable thread confusion due to the Nostromo's AI in Alien 1979 being called "MOTHER" too.
-A SFLer hypothesizes how the Galactic Empire in Isaac Asimov's FOUNDATION series would go about creating planets. Weird things like using only comets for planetary construction, then FTL & notFTL used for moving around comet chunks, and other "uhhh what" stuff.
-Two instances of HG Wells WAR OF THE WORLDS in 1988. A reboot/decades later mini-series adaptation of WotW, plus a 50 yr aniversary rebroadcasting of the WotW radio drama, with 1988 vocal talent and improved audio special effects.
-The surprisingly deep back catalogue of SCHOLASTIC PRESS.
-The many many issues with Larry Niven's SMOKE RING setting, mostly focused on how that atmosphere stays in place, especially the vast quantity of O2.
-STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION Season 2: Beverly Crusher is out, and fans start a letter writing campaign to bring her back.
-Ed Greenwood, creator of TSR's THE FORGOTTEN REALMS setting gets mentioned for the impossibility of the main character in Greenwood's FR novel SPELLFIRE.
(2020 note: It's never a good sign when the creator of the setting is compelled to create a brand new PnP character class to explain all the bullshit their lead character got away with, which is exactly what Greenwood did for his Spellfire novel.)
-SFLer's bring up the C.S. Lewis story most C.S .Lewis fans wish never existed: THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH.
-Orson Scott Card starts reverting back to Mormon fundamentalism after coming under repeated Latter Day Saints leadership pressure for his SECULAR HUMANIST REVIVALS a few years ago.
-SFLer Larry Klaes goes through Bjo Trimble's 1969 CONCORDANCE & points out most of the errors in it, like Kirk having two brothers?; which takes up 2.5 dedicated SFL Digests. Bjo Trimble responds positively. Near the end of december 1988, Larry Klaes posts an update with corrections to his original fact-checking review of CONCORDANCE.
-One of the best descriptions of why the YA genre exists, and why it has near universal appeal for readers of all ages.
-Utterly terrible fan behavior at conventions & personal fen-dom gathering f the past 4 years (1984-1988) or recent personal fen-dom gathering, with FANS ARE SLANS being used as a negative meme for bad fen-dom behavior.
-Time machines that only work from the time they were turned on leads to one SFLer throwing out an idea of daisy chaining time machines serially until you find a really really ancient Alien built time machine, then short-cut the entire process.
-Allegations of Hugo Award vote count tampering at WorldCon 1988 happens, with muted silence from people who normally respond immediately to all things Hugo Award related.
-SFLer's start to map the characters, and houses and organizations of Frank Herbert's DUNE series to real life analogues and it is not pretty.
(2020 note: Fascism allegations, Nazi allegations, race sciencing, this entire discussion thread is super skippable for a 2020 reader.)
-Eleven posts about Robert Anton Wilson discussion closes out 1988.
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