SFL Archives Vol 15a readthrough

SFL Archives Vol 15a

4.3 mb raw text file 

100% completion, 93 bookmarks

-SFLer Chris Siebenmann on the main character in Robert Heinlein's THE CAT WHO WALKS THROUGH WALLS:

Actually, I think it did an excellent job of telling you Col.  Campbell's

race in a very underhanded and easily overlooked fashion.  If you look at

the cover again, you'll see that Campbell is VERY dark for a caucasian; one

can see this either as a very deep suntan (what most people will probably

automatically think it is, especially when combined with the white hair) or

an indication of his race (his last name strong implies he's somewhat of a

crossbreed, after all).

-A recap of Iain (M) Banks published books based on a 1989 interview with JOURNAL WIRED. 

(2020 note: That interview is a nice "slice-in-time" find for seeing how Iain Banks viewed his own work back in 1989)

-Glen Cook porno novel THE SWAP ACADEMY (@1970 published under the pen-name Greg Stevens).

-Chuq Von Rospach continues their streak of listing Chuq Von Rospach's fanzine as the sole mailing address all SF-LOVER reader correspondence to sick/ill/dying SF&F authors should go through.

(2020 note: This is one of the many reasons why I find Von Rospach, aka the SFWA White Knight, so grating doing this SFL Archives readthrough)

-Much discussion of the movie TOTAL RECALL 1990, and exactly what was "real" and what was "fake" in it. Since TOTAL RECALL 1990 contained female nudity, Mark Leeper automatically gave it +2 rating despite hating everything in it.

-SFL Archives technology mentions: GEnie, the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), Citadel BBS Network, SSI cRPGs CURSE OF AZURE BONDS, CHAMPIONS OF KRYNN, COMPUTE GAZETTE, Apple HYPERCARD

-TOR Books never actually gets around to doing the corrected reprint runs of Walter Jon Williams 1989 novel ANGEL STATION that they publicly pledged to do in 1989, leaving people/bookstores with a lot of mutilated useless books they can't resell. 

-Weapons Policies at SF&F conventions & bringing real Weapons to SF&F conventions debate, because Loud Radios (at night?) briefly got added to the banned item lists at certain 1989-1990 conventions.

-SFL Archives pop culture 1st mentions: Steve Jackson Games, Steve Jackson Games Illuminati getting seized by the FBI, GURPS, WILD CARDS GURPS, WHO'S THE BOSS, Kirk Cameron, PALLADIUM RPG, STEAMPUNK fiction, ALIENS VS PREDATOR comic series, Dark Horse Comics, Batman series character JASON TODD getting killed off by reader voting, Clive Cussler self-inserting himself into his DIRK PITT novels, the 1986 movie SPACECAMP.

-1990 Death notices: SF&F author Robert Adams, actor David Rappaport, actress Susan Oliver, Jim Henson (creator of the Muppets), SF&F artist Elizabeth Pearce.

-Naomi Mitchison's MEMOIRS OF A SPACEWOMAN which uh involves lots of emotional/erotic hookups with alien life forms. 

-What are the Most Realistically designed Aliens in Science Fiction stories?

-TOR Books stacking the decks for the 1989 Nebula Award novel category and missing all 5 times being the highlight of the "How do you know who to vote for in Best Professional editor category for the Hugo/Nebula Awards?" discussion thread.

(2020 note: 5 of the 6 nominated novels for the 1989 Nebula were published by TOR). 

-A rare case of non-PERN Anne McCaffrey fiction getting discussed, this time it's about McCaffrey's Crystal Singer stories and the cowriting attempts with Elizabeth Moon and other female authors.

(2020 note: This was a good discussion thread about female SF&F authors, and I bookmarked about every third mention while this thread was going)

-A Japanese SFLer poster gets tired of waiting for Samuel R Delany's work to be translated into Japanese, and requests help finding all of Delany's published work.

-SFLer's ask: Did you catch the DOCTOR WHO reference in Diane Duane's 1990 book HIGH WIZARDRY

(2020 note: I now have the mnemonic "Diane Duane, fan service is her game" etched into my memory.)

-Only 281 ballots being received for 1990 Hugo Award voting at ConFiction 1990. 

-The soap opera ONE LIFE TO LIVE having a extended sequence in a underground city called "Eterna" in 1989.

-"How does everyone in netdom define what Cyberpunk is?" discussion leads to Walter Jon Williams being a hack/visionary chat, precursors of cyberpunk fiction, and the very first requests for Steampunk fiction in the SFL Archives.

-AI Characters in Fiction. Some SFLers go deep referencing TALOS as the first AI character, most people stick with the golden age of scifi - through William Gibson style cyberpunk for their references. 

(2020 note: This discussion chain is worth reading for a SF&F historian or people simply interested in AI Characters featured in Fiction.)

-BATMAN 1992 casting decisions talk (Danny Devito? Michael J Fox?), along with some SFLers believing the Joker never died in BATMAN 1989 with a body-double. And finally will Two Face or Robin the boy wonder show up in Batman 1992/who will play them? discussion 

-Michael Moorcock ETERNAL CHAMPION discussion, 1990 edition: This time it's focused on Jerry Cornelius, and his various powers, storylines, weaknesses, incest fixation, etc.

-The creator and the producer of the 1988 movie WIZARD OF SPEED AND TIME squabble over money, embezzlement and Intellectual Property theft via the Internet and lawsuits.

-The 1990 movie adaptation of Margaret Atwood's HANDMAIDS TALE finally gets the SFL Archive discussing the book/the movie adaptation.Since there was female nudity in the movie adaptation, Mark Leeper automatically gives the movie a +2 rating.

-HIGHLANDER 2 is pre-production during 1990, and people are confused yet excited by Sean Connery being cast in it. Various guesses are made as to the plot, and one person leaks the real plot of Highlander 2 but is ignored because it is total gibberish and makes no goddamn sense.

(2020 note: The reaction to Highlander 2 in 1991 aka SFL Vol 16a/16b should be interesting/)   

-Someone who claims to work in the marketing department of a book publishing house explains why certain books get reprinted, and certain books never seem to get reprinted.

-The book reprint discussion expands into the costs/mechanics of doing "small" press print runs of only 1000 books using 1989 book production cost numbers. The SFWA White Knight barges in to clarify things and hate on small book publishing houses for driving up the cost of books/price gouging while failing to mention anything about big book publishing houses price-gouging and author lockdowns.

-The Larry Niven techno-fetishist from SFL Vol 01 starts a NANOTECHNOLOGY usenet group/internet mailing list in cooperation with the FORESIGHT INSTITUTE 

-How witch-moss in the Christopher Stasheff WARLOCK series makes no sense beyond the initial book.

-First mention of Games Workshop Press aka THE BLACK LIBRARY, and the first mention of dedicated WARHAMMER novels.

-STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION discussion. Why certain keystone writers left TNG after the first season, why Picard is unique, why did Crusher return, why TOS is better/worse, lists of TOS & TNG starship classes, YESTERDAYS ENTERPRISE episode discussion, etc.

-SFLer's scoff at the technological feasibility of ebook readers in Ben Bova's CYBERBOOKS

-One SFLer notes Steven Brust's fixation with the number seventeen(17), noting that every book Brust has had published up to 190 has had 17 chapters, the 17 houses in the Vlad series, etc. Also as of 1989, Steven Brust was well-known for randomly walking into bookstores and signing copies of his work on the racks.

-Larry Niven acknowledging in a 1981 essay that the "Belter Civilization" in his KNOWN SPACE series was lifted almost directly from one of Randall Garrett's short stories.

(2020 note: Making the educated guess it was Niven "borrowing" from Randall Garrett's stories A SPACESHIP NAMED MCGUIRE & ANCHORITE)

-Someone in the 1990 SFL Archives brought up the gimmick behind the Eric Frank Russell TEST PIECE short story. The gimmick in it involved 2 forbidden words which would result in instant death if spoken. Eric Frank Russell & OTHER WORLDS magazine got hundreds of SF fans (& at least one author) to out themselves as hyper-chuds/racists over a slate of 51 prizes ranging from artwork/lump sums of cash/magazine subscriptions/all expenses paid 1 week vacation retreat. The contest was to most accurately guess the missing three two words in Eric Frank Russell's short story TEST PIECE.

(2020 note: One of the best bits about that Eric Frank Russell/OTHER WORLDS magazine contest is that all this happened back in 1951, so you & I can only guess at the hyper-racist/giga-chud phrases people sent in that OTHER WORLDS magazined refused to publish.)

-SFWA White Knight Chuq Von Rospach continued their trend of being 150% in-the-tank/taking-a-dive for the SFWA & every established SF&F author whenever negative statements about anything comes up, especially SF&F author-editors in existence.....except for Kurt Vonnegut & Piers Anthony.

(2020 note: Kurt Vonnegut refuses to be a SFWA member which Chuq sees as a heresy equaling excommunication, and as for Piers Anthony, well Piers Anthony openly said that Chuq fucking sucks in personal correspondence between the two.)

-The return of juvenile fantasy & science fiction story discussion: only this time it's what SF&F stories would you read to a 4yr old - 9yr to get them interested in the SF&F genres.

(2020 note: Worth checking out for parents who want to share their love of SF&F with their children. Raid the back catalogs of Scholastic Press for hidden juvenile SF&F gems.)

-Orson Scott Card's work continues to be discussed in detail, and a year 2020 reader can visibly see how OSC is retreating back into Mormon fundamentalism with every new story/project OSC works on.

(2020 note: A few 1989/1990 SFLer's claim that Orson Scott Card got threatened with excommunication from the Church of Latter Day Saints after his touring Secular Humanism debate panels, and that is why Mormonism is becoming more and more overt in OSC's work since that excommunication threat.) 

-1990 SFLers start discussing the KNOWN SPACE setting and bring up a interesting point: Why did the Human Protectors never take out the Pierson Puppeteers who were known to fuck around with Earth/Humanity in general. Was the Man-Kzin war incited to wipe out any survivors of the Human Protectors vs the 2nd/3rd/4th/5th waves of the Pak Protector "rescue" fleets?

-Simon Hawke and their TIME WARS series discussion. Simon Hawke is a pen-name, and the author self-doxxed themselves to stop someone else impersonating them at SF&F conventions. Simon Hawke also gets mentions as one of the "authors with bad conduct at conventions" people when Harlan Ellison's XENOGENESIS essay gets discussed/torn apart/defended in June 1989.

-Eric S. Raymond randomly decides to start posting reviews of everything SF&F he runs across to the SFL Archives ala the Leeper clan. Shockingly, from day 1 ESR's reviews are light-years more coherent, detailed and less biased than the Leeper clans reviews of everything S&F they have run across, despite having 6 more years of experience. 

(2020 note: Not saying that ESR's reviews were great, there is a heavy bias in the reviews ESR posts, while the Leepers tend to go with first impression/clickbait style reviews...and have repeated the same review under "different bylines a few times now. Also, if there is female nudity in a movie, Mark Leeper automatically gives the movie a +2 rating, no matter what.) 

-More periodic repeats of people stumbling across the credits thanking Harlan Ellison in THE TERMINATOR 1984, or half-remembering the details of a Outer Limits episode/short story Ellison wrote about a time traveller with amnesia needing to kill robots stalking them to fill out a glass hand.

(2020 note: That last sentence makes sense if you watched the right Outer Limits tv series episode, or read the Harlan Ellison short story adapted into that Outer Limits episode.) 

-Periodic Mike aka Michael Resnick discussion. SANTIAGO, BIRTHRIGHT, etc.

-1990 Robert Silverberg discussion which focused on Silverberg finally paying off a vicious divorce settlement agreement, and now being able to go back to writing deep non-commercial SF&F fiction stories vs what Silverberg had been churning out since the mid 1970s.

-The April 29th 1990 NY Times essay DOLLAR AND DRAGONS: THE TRUTH ABOUT FANTASY gets SFLers mildly riled up.

-Stories of Larry Niven visibly getting tired of  dealing with weird fans/weird fan conduct at SF&F conventions, which ties into Harlan Ellison's essay XENOGENESIS.

-Christian Science Fiction story discussion, with SFLer's making their cases for slotting certain authors/certain authors stories into the CSF sub-genre. 

-Dan Simmon's 1st book HYPERION finally starts getting discussed in the SFL Archives, along with slight drama about the sequel to Hyperion. Was it a publisher decision to split up the two books, why is a incompetent book proofing editor that half-asses their job at Doubleday allowed to keep their job when every third book they touch requires errata pages to be published/new print runs made.

-Magic & Technology discussion. It started off as misquotes of Arthur C Clarke on technology/magic, then spun off into a few people having very strong opinions on Aleister Crowley and Magik, and will not allow disinformation about Crowley/cheerleading about Crowley to happen without loud dissent and picking apart (line by line) opposing arguments about Aleister Crowley.

-The original version of Stephen King's THE STAND is released, with some SFLer's enjoying the refresh/pop culture updates in it, while other SFLer's seem it as an abomination that shows how Stephen King's popularity put him beyond the control of editors now, and why that is bad for the horror genre/any new Stephen King stories.

-SFLer's start theory-crafting a nonexistent sequel to the LENSMEN series using everything previously published in the Lensmen series along with some grabs from EE Smith's other series/other novels.

(2020 note: This discussion thread gets weird and of course the incest implication in the final Lensmen book gets mentioned over and over again.)

-Tons of B-movie & B-tv series discussion. Some of the movies and tv series were previously mentioned in my SFL ARCHIVES VOL 11 READTHROUGH UPDATE 08, however lots of new stuff has cropped up, and/or got vastly expanded on for people (like me) who had never heard of or seen any of these amazingly bad/innovative/terrible/low-budget/amusing works.

(2020 note: The sheer amount of stuff I have to recap for 1990 means I won't be doing a listing of shows/movies like back in SFL Vol 11 update 08,.............however that Gene Autry singing cowboy/underground civilization mashup movie is something I want to watch now, as well as the first two QUATERMASS movies/tv-serials along with a mostly forgotten Japanese Kaiju/giant robot tv-series called INFRAMAN....and maybe TIME RIDER too.)

-Marc Steigler's 1987 DAVID'S SLING having very good advice for Information filtering on the Internet circa 1989.

(2020 note: The information filtering advice is still sort of valid, so I'm just going to requote in full below.)

 In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING.

    Filter the information; extract the knowledge.

    Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance.

    These filters protect against advertising.

    Filter third for reliability.

    This filter protects against politicians.

    Filter fourth for completeness.

    This filter protects from the media.

-Harlan Ellison's 1990 essay XENOGENESIS closes out SFL Vol 15a. XENOGENESIS was Ellison describing the bad, toxic and extremely abusive behavior SF&F fans feel free to display with qualms to SF&F authors like constant harassing anonymous phone calls, death threats, theft of author property, charging items under authors names, throwing vomit and worse directly into SF&F authors faces. Harlan Ellison's driving question is Why do SF&F authors have to put up with that kind of behavior while normal mainstream fiction authors do not?

The overall SFLer reaction to XENOGENESIS was extremely mixed (but mostly anti-Ellison). People involved in running conventions seemed angrier about Harlan Ellison airing dirty laundry and how it would impact their conventions vs the bad behavior being openly discussed, while counter-arguments gave evidence for Ellison's claims, and counter-counter arguments gave extenuating circumstances like vicious author abuse of fans at conventions and counter-counter-counter arguments brought up worse stuff (aka sexual assault, date-rape).

(2020 note: One of Harlan Ellison's claims of fan abuse can definitely be backed up. Someone *cough* pyrla!cracraft@caip.rutgers.edu (Stuart Cracraft) *cough* back in SFL Archives Vol 11 posted Ellison's personal phone number to the SF-LOVERS mailing list, and then humble-bragged about making repeated adversarial phone calls to Ellison).