SFL Archives
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Movies, television shows referenced: A PRINCESS OF MARS (movie), MAKING OF STAR TREK VOYAGER, SEAQUEST DSV (tv-series), OUTBREAK, GODZILLA VS MOTHRA, GODZILLA VS MECHA-GODZILLA, TANK GIRL, SPECIES 1, BUGS (tv-series), SLIDERS (tv-series), VR5 (tv-series), VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1995), XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS(tv-series), HERCULES THE LEGENDARY JOURNIES(tv-series), WATERWORLD, LANGOLIERS (tv-series), DEADLOCK ESCAPE FROM ZONE 14, WHITE DWARF (tv-series), CASPER (1995), LIFEFORCE (1985), JOHNNY MNEMONIC, BATMAN FOREVER, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, THE THING (1982), DOCTOR WHO (1996)..
SF&F stories referenced: THE SECRET OCEANS, THE SPIRIT RING, A PRINCESS OF MARS, MATTERS END, MIDSHIPMANS HOPE, 20TH CENTURY COMPUTERS AND HOW THEY WORKED, THE SURVIVORS, WIZARDS FIRST RULE, TRIPOINT, THE SWORD, STRANGE DAYS, DARKOVER LANDFALL, GLORY SEASON, INTERFACE, LITTLE BIG, GREENTHIEVES, THE PAPER GRAIL, TOMORROW SUCKS, SUPERHEROES, ALIEN SHORES, FUTURE QUARTET, SHERLOCK HOLMES IN ORBIT, SCIENCE FICTION IN THE 20TH CENTURY, PERMUTATION CITY, THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND, THE DYKE AND THE DYBBUK, TOURISTS, PRIMARY INVERSION, VILLAINS BY NECESSITY, RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE, WHITE QUEEN, WEST OF EDEN, WINTER IN EDEN, THE ORDER WAR, VURT, WAKE IN DARKNESS, PORCELAIN DOVE, THE MOUNTAINS OF MAJIPOOR, FIRES OF EDEN, PICTURES AT 11, NOBODYS SON, PROFITEER, RELUCTANT VOYAGERS, A CASE OF CONSCIENCE, INTERRUPT, FLYING DUTCH, KALEIDOSCOPE CENTURY, BEGGARS AND CHOOSERS, PAWNS DREAM, LES GALAXIALES, ONLY FORWARD, APOLLO 13, THE UNUSUAL LIFE OF TRISTAN SMITH, AMMONITE, THE DIAMOND AGE, HEAVY WEATHER, FICTIONAL SPACE ESSAYS ON CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE FICTION, FLATLANDER, CITY OF BONES, WARLORD OF ANTARES, WALKING ON GLASS, MOONWISE, RAGGED WORLD, METROPOLITAN, WHO GOES THERE?
Pop culture references: "reminds me of George from Seinfeld. Both the reader and the character know that the lie is going to foul up somehow, but the character goes on and tells it anyhow.", Wing Commander 3 CD "acting", "fang dealers" at SFF conventions,
Technology callbacks: Pentium 90 CPU's, "negotiations with CD ROM game maker Legend", putting up a new kernel & tweaking TCP timeouts, installing dosemu, Telecommunications Devices for the Deaf (TDD), "I KNOW IT SAYS FTP, AS THE FILES ARE AT AN FTP SITE. BUT IF YOU ENTER THE LOCATION..", 2 terrible Ringworld PC games, RealAudio software.
1995 Death notices: Ian Ballantine, founder of multiple book publisher companies. Roger Zelazny, SF&F author.
-SFL Archives Vol 20a starts off with the mailing list moderator stating the various hardware and software upgrades planned for the server that runs the SF-LOVERS mailing list. Drastic cutbacks on the frequency of sending out SFL Digests are planned. At the 10% in Vol 20a, the SFL Archives comes back from 2 months of unplanned downtime (massive hardware failures), and experiences another couple of "mini" one-week outages throughout Vol 20a.
-Defenders of Jack Chalker appear, and try to explain away all the involuntary body-transformation/gender swapping/creepy sex scenarios inside Jack Chalker's stories since Well World book 1 back in 1977.
-New management has taken over on the literary estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Disney and the ERB estate are mentioned as working on a movie adaptation of A PRINCESS OF MARS.
(2021 note: It will take until 2012 for the much delayed A PRINCESS OF MARS movie adaptation to come out under the title JOHN CARTER (of Mars).)
-Frank Herbert discussion and the Dune series discussion. SFLers try to figure out what the face-dancers at the end of Chapterhouse Dune were planning, and are confused/not-confused by the Golden Path/The Scattering.
-A SFF convention experience blogger whose gimmick is being French-Canadian, posting half of their reviews of SFF conventions/panels/party rooms in American English, and the other half in Québécois.
-This quote could literally describe 90% of the most popular SF&F series of the 1980's & 1990's, however "seems to be a tendency to substitute torture for character building".
-There was another April Fools/April 1st SFL Archives joke this year. Essentially it was a digital POKEMON GO battle-royale based on various long-time SFLers posting styles. E. Leeper REVIEWS A BOOK. Gharlane of Eddore RANTS about a SFF tv-series, etc.
-SFLer's start discussing Harry Harrison's EDEN fantasy book series which features a alternate timeline where dinosaurs not got wiped by a mass extinction event 66 million years ago, and have evolved into humanoid shapes and starting to interact with early homo sapiens. Some like the thought put into the various dinosaur genetic engineering/bio-technologies, others are creeped out by the lizard/human sex in the first EDEN book.
(2021 note: Harry Harrison wrote one of my favorite books ever. However even as a Harry Harrison fan, his EDEN series is a safe series to skip over. Aka DO NOT READ THEM. I WARNED YOU.)
-SFF author Daniel Keys Moran appears to accuse Paramount Studios/STAR TREK VOYAGER producers of ripping off a spec script he pitched directly to Star Trek producers back in 1993.
(2021 note: Looked this up because Daniel Keys Moran has reliably been proved to be full of shit whenever he posts. The spec script DKM pitched to Paramount/Star Trek producers ended up as the basis for STAR TREK: DS9 season 4 episode "Hard Time". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Time_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine) )
-Lists and lists of mailing server lists serving various interests as of March 1995 - May 1995.
-The Franklin Mint ripping off the creator/being involved in lawsuits with the creator of the rulesets for STAR TREK TRI-DIMENSIONAL Chess Sets.
-Someone tries critiquing James Blish's A CASE OF CONSCIENCE, and gets every single detail wrong in it.
(2021 note: Sadly that impressive shit-posting effort does not get any responses posted to the SFL Archives.)
-L Sprague De Camp starts getting discussed and the people making arguments towards De Camp being good/salvaging the legacy of certain titles (CONAN THE BARBARIAN) make good sense.
-David Feintuch starts responding to the SFL Archives about his MIDSHIPMENS HOPE/SEAFORT SAGA series about various questions/concerns/homages to Horatio Hornblower SFLers have been discussing.
-John Barnes KALEIDOSCOPE CENTURY comes out, and nobody really feels or sees anything wrong with it intially. One or two SFLers note the vileness of the main character, the weird obsession with memes/social communication tools, but that's it.)
(2021 note: KALEIDOSCOPE CENTURY pioneered the term "SERBING" into SFF fiction. Do not look up that term unless you wantto read real life horror and war-crimes.)
-One usage for Harry Turtledoves alt-Civil War fiction stories, they redeem certain mega-fuckups of the US Civil War by.
(2021 note: Google US Civil War & the Crater for one of the really terrible mass-death mega-fuckups of the US Civil War.)
-Noted SFL shitposter Gharlane of Eddore makes a series of spectacularly wrong predictions about what upcoming tv-series XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS will be about.
-Something about the dreaded CHTHON AWARD which I'm not going to even bother writing a year 2021 aside about.
-A whole bunch of tv series get cancelled. Space Precinct, Sliders, VR5, Earth 2, Langoliers, and fans of those cancelled tv-shows immediately start sharing mailing addresses of TV network executives in efforts to grass-roots renew those cancelled tv shows.
-A few SFLers try to man-explain the "real story" behind Apollo 13's explosion to the rest of the SFL Archives.
-OMNI magazines switches to a quarterly release schedule.
-Cyberpunk fanzine CHEAP TRUTH gets mentioned again, with various SFLers trying to define what is "cyberpunk", and who wrote/writes cyberpunk stories.
-Heavy Robert Adams discussion, especially the hearsay factor behind the narrator of Adam's HORSECLAN setting trying to describe things to a audience decades and decades later.
-Harlan Ellison on journalists: "I am not a journalist! I do not give blow-jobs to chickens!"
-GOR series discussion. Fans of GOR bring up that many of the most popular 1980s & 1990s SFF stories are deeply more fucked up than John Norman ever got, and that GOR novels are still selling well.
-Alfred Bester discussion. WHO HE, THE COMPUTER CONNECTION, Bester burning out hard, etc.
-BABYLON 5 stuff. Insanely huge amount of Babylon 5 series discussion. I am 110% burnout on Babylon 5 fandom & reading JMS flameout/humblebrag/bus-throw/humblebrag/bitch at 100% accurate fan predictions at this point, and not going to bother writing about Babylon 5 or what JMS posted to the SF-LOVERS mailing list in detail anymore.
(2021 note: My 110% burn-out on BABYLON 5 was something I never expected to happen.)
-Charles Platt is totally not-resentfull that Octavia Butler won a MacArthur Fellows Program grant. Charles Platt is also totally not claiming the only reason Octavia Butler won a MMacArthur Fellows Program grant is because she is female and black. Oh wait, I was wrong. Charles Platt is totally resentful and extremely racist.
(2021 note: Word search SFL Archives Vol 20a for "13 Jun 1995 20:14:58 -0400" cp@panix.com (Charles Platt) to find Charles Platt's hateful email post.)
-Gregory Benford outs himself as a "the (US Confederate States of America) South will rise AGAIN" SFF author in his GALACTIC CENTER SAGA.
-Introduction of the Changling Race aka the Dominion has more than a few 1995 SFLers seeing rip-offs from John W Campbells WHO GOES THERE short story, which of course skews into John Carpenters THE THING (1982).
-First tentative discussions of the DOCTOR WHO (1996) tv-movie. Casting still undecided, plot undecided, it will involve the BBC though.
-The SFLer who melted the fuck down about WARGAMES 1983 returns to the SF-LOVERS mailing list for the first time in 11 years to post about a Forrest J. Ackerman interview with Professor Neon(?) available via RealAudio streaming.
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