I guess not many people can say they have read the entire 34 volume history of the SF-LOVERS mailing list. Add me to to that list as of now.
I went into the SF-LOVERS mailing list readthrough attempt knowing little history of the SF&F genres, and considered the Hugo Award to be useless gerrymandered garbage; having finished reading all 34 SF-LOVERS volumes, my knowledge of SF&F history has vastly improved at least.
Worst SF-LOVERS author moment discovery: Isaac Asimov sexually harassing the editor-in-chief that was managing his SFF periodical so hard and relentlessly that they left the field of SFF publishing entirely.
Worst SF-LOVERS fan moment discovery: Three items, two of which involve Harlan Ellison inevitably.
Worst fan moment A: the time one SFLer humblebragged to the SF-LOVERS mailing list about making constant harassing phone-calls to Harlan Ellison, claiming their behavior was OK because Ellison got off on the antagonistic phone conversations. Then that SFLer shared Harlan Ellison's private phone number to the entire mailing list.
Worst fan moment B: the negative SFLer reaction when Harlan Ellison's essay about toxic-fan/professional SFF author encounters, XENOGENESIS, comes out.
Worst fan moment C: Slowly realizing that the ur-SF&F fan Forrest J Ackerman used dozens of pseudonym and aliases when talking to other people in the worldwide SF&F fan communities was because Forrest J. Ackerman was sexually harassing at least one female SF&F fan under each of his pseudonyms.
Best SF-LOVERS meta moment: The time when SFLer's remembered OTHER WORLDS magazine & Eric Frank Russell getting hundreds of 1950's SF&F fans to self-out themselves as racists for the chance at winning a slate of prizes and money.
Book publishing houses with the most quality complaints: Baen Books & TOR Books, no contest. Both Baen & TOR received the most complaints about "this book is filled with typographical errors/this brand new book is falling apart/this book is missing entire pages/this book has mutliple duplicated pages".
What the heck... This site is a hidden gem, that I just discovered. Reading through the whole SFL archives, that's insane and incredible. Thanks for this info. If possible, you should archive your notes and upload them somewhere (like on archive.org), so in the case this site ever disappears, history shall not be forgotten.
ReplyDelete