SFL Archives Vol 13 readthrough update 04

 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. 

SFL Archives Vol 12a readthrough update 04

 83% completion, 70 bookmarks

-Ralph Bakshi and his habit of ripping off other artists without credit. Vaughn Bode & NEKRON-99, Holst, Ian Miller, etc. 

-Most of Alan E Nourse's stories being set in a "Hospital Earth" universe, where Earth is one of the few planets that has thought of medicine and medicine is Earth's ticket into the galactic community. (2020 note: Very ironic circa 2020. And yet...given all the various terrible things that 2020 has delivered,...still very possible.)

-DREAM GAMES (the sort of direct sequel to WARGAMES 1983), terrible movie BIOHAZARD, the SF stories of Ian Wallace, THE LEAGUE OF GREY EYED WOMEN, terrible movie SUPERGIRL, George RR Martin WILD CARDS anthology discussion. Raymond Chandler supposedly writing a few fantasy stories before his death, belated A. Bertram Chandler death notice.

-IMAX discussion. What theaters have IMAX circa 1987, the history of IMAX, various IMAX movies regularly shown at various museums/IMAX installations, the limitations of IMAX films, everything IMAX hardware related coming from one Canadian(?) company.

-Robert Heinlein chat pt 95: Comparison's of Heinlein's default viewpoint characters.The lost juevinile stories of RAH. TMIAHM: are earthers or the loonies the real barbarians? Women's equality Heinlein character defense. Heinlein writing on homesexuality. SFLer's dropping way-too-revealing details defending Heinlein such as: "I was a feral kid, Heinlein's work in many ways raised me (instead of my parents)". or "I am in a group marriage, and see no problems with Heinlein".

-EE Smith discussion. For the most part, even the majority of 1987 SFLers found them terrible and beyond sexist and wooden and r=a=c=i=s=t. The skeevy thing about inbreeding in the Lensmen books comes up and up and up, much like the people in 1987 & now reading about Smith's view on race, gender equality, you name it, it all dated super-bad by 1987 and even worse to a 2020 reader of EE Smith's work.

-Orscon Scott Card writing the script for the ANIMATED STORIES FROM THE BOOK OF MORMON....source is a SFLer who read an ad for it in the University of Utah student newsletter.

-C.S. Lewis NARNIA chat. SFLer's reminscing about the series, the hidden or not so hidden Christian analogues in the Narnia stories. Talking animals without sin, no concept of whatever "a neevil" is. Arguing about who died in the Narnia stories, who got too old to return to Narnia, etc. The SFLer who thinks they know LORD OF THE RINGS lore better than J.R.R. Tolkien is pulling the same crap here. 

-First mention of ROADSIDE PICNIC by the Strugastki brothers in the SFL Archives.

-SFLer's briefly start to theory-craft the PERFECT CREATURE that could live in the most environments of the universe, as it exists circa 1987, as possible.  (2020 note: I nominate HP Lovecraft's Shoggoth.)

-STAR TREK 4 nitpicking...why didn't the universial translator work on the alien vs the alien cloud thing in TOS episode Metamorphis, why there is Klingon markings on Romulan ships, etc. plus normal STAR TREK: TOS nitpicking about Khan, the Eugenics war, time travel, etc.

-BOSKONE 25 update. The NEFSA finally releases their "we are burned and shrinking all future Boskone's. Here's what is changing" letter. Anger of SFLer's at being excluded fades, now chat on the subject has morphed into how SFLer's would run SF&F conventions, ignoring many things like licensing fees and state labor laws in the process.

-Harlan Ellison chat pt 37a: Harlan Ellison career trivia. Ellison's continued issues dealing with Hollywood. Harlan Ellison has no money because it all goes to cover lawyer fees. Harlan Ellison is loaded and sues out of righteous fury. Lawsuit Settlement money. Harlan Ellison cleverly cornering the market on audiobooks of Harlan Ellison's stories by cutting out all the middle-men and voicing/producing/selling the cassette tapes(audiobooks) via mail-order or direct phone calls.

-First mention of WHITE DWARF magazine in the SFL Archives. White Dwarf is/was the magazine Games Workshops ran/runs as a loss-leader to promote their line of wargaming products/supplemental materials for wargaming.

 -1987 FAKE NEWS or FACT? Secondhand report of a Santa Cruz CA health food restaurant, McDharma's being sued to death by McDonalds over name similarities. The upcoming 1988 movie COMING TO AMERICA will have a similar sideplot going on with McDowells.

Don’t forget that McDonald’s is nothing like McDowell’s. While McDonald’s has the golden arches, McDowell’s has the golden arcs. McDonald’s has the Big Mac, but McDowell’s has the Big Mick. They both have two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions. But McDonald’s buns have sesame seeds. McDowell’s buns have no seeds. 

-CODEX SERAPHINIANUS comes up again. SFLer's who have copies of it relate their efforts to decode it, one SFLer goes deep into the national library system (including microfilm hunts) looking for details on it, and one SFLer starts going conspiracy theory/"what-does this mean??" when finding a cut-out from a magazine "31" in the backcover of their copy.

-The murder-suicide details of Alice Bradley Sheldon aka James Tiptree Jr's get revealed to the SFL Archives.

-Barry Warsaw from the US National Bureau of Standards (aka the NIST) wants to crowd-source the naming convention/names for the next cycle of computer workstations coming into the US National Bureau of Standards, and asks the SF-LOVERS mailing list for suggestions. 

-Joan Vinge and her work discusion pt 3. A looooooong article about Joan Vinge is posted to the SFL Archives, so long that it takes up 4 complete SFL digests, and the beginning of a 5th SFL digest.

-STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION stuff. David Gerrold roles the dice on getting a better contract with Paramount and Gene Roddenberry over his ST:TNG  work. SFLer's start doubting on why WESLEY CRUSHER exists in ST:TNG, and how much a drag Wesley Crusher will be in the ST:TNG episodes. Finally the casting announcements for the ST:TNG cast comes out, and you can see exactly where Gene Roddenberry's skeeviness intervened in the casting decisions.

(2020 note: The May 1987 SFLer's were on the right track regarding Wesley Crusher. ST: TNG casting announcements & Gene Roddenberry skeeviness explained: the 3 previous acting roles/movies attributed to Marina Sirtis in the ST:TNG casting announcement all featured toplessness+ from Marina Sirtis.)

-FIASCO by Stanislaw Lem. 

(2020 note: Buy FIASCO ASAP, read it. FIASCO throws away dozens of plot-points, situations, and technology concepts that SF authors following in his wake have expanded into pentalogies  of content.)

-Banned books discuusion thanks to a few SFLer's noting that Florida Bay County School added a book to their regional banned book list, with other SFLer's responding with what other books have been banned in the USA, previously or right-now circa 1987.

List of banned books follows to close out this readthrough update summary.

Three Comedies of American Life

Shane

The Great Gatsby

A Separate Peace

The Red Badge of Courage

A Farewell to Arms

Intruder in the Dust

Lost Horizon

Oedipus Rex

Watership Down

Deathwatch

Death Be Not Proud

Animal Farm

Tale Blazer Library

Best Short Stories

Twelfth Night

Arrangement in Literature

After the First Death

The Crucible

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Long Day's Journey Into Night

The Outsiders

The Pearl

Fahrenheit 451

Alas, Babylon

The Prince and the Pauper

The Emperor Jones

Winterset

The Man Who Came to Dinner

The Little Foxes

The Glass Menagerie

Mister Roberts

A Separate Peace

Adventures in English Literature

Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies (Casebook Edition)

The Call of the Wild

Great Expectations

The Canterbury Tales

Brave New World

The Mayor of Casterbridge

The Merchant of Venice

Player Piano

In Cold Blood

The Inferno (Ciardi translation)

Promethius Unbound

Oedipus the King

Hippolytus

King Lear

Ghosts

Miss Julie

On Baile's Strand

Desire Under the Elms

Wuthering Heights

Hamlet

Major British Writers

Growing Up

A Raisin in the Sun

The Old Man and the Sea

To Kill a Mockingbird

Exploring Life Through Literature

The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles

McTeague

The Fixer

Of Mice and Men

Never Cry Wolf

About David

I am the Cheese